Metaphysical Encounters and Other Mysteries with Monica Ortiz

Transcript

Monica, it’s great to have you on the show.

Thank you, Stephan. It’s great to be here.

Let’s start by talking about mindfulness because I know you’ve got an app called Masters of Mindfulness. What is it about mindfulness that you want our audience to understand?

The concept of mindfulness, because right now, the way mindfulness is being spoken about is it’s all about meditation. While I practice meditation and believe in it for what it can do, mindfulness is a bigger topic in that mindfulness is about being aware of your thoughts and how your thoughts dictate your words and your actions and how those words and actions affect not only you, but they affect everybody around you. Those thoughts turn into actions, which affect your life, being the present moment and the future. If you’re aware of your present moment and what’s going on, you can be fully aware of your future and how to maneuver that future into a place of success, true love, and whatever it is that you’re looking for. That’s my take on mindfulness.

That’s important for our audience to understand that these are not interchangeable terms, mindfulness, and meditation. Oftentimes they are grouped together as a phrase like mindfulness meditation, but you can be mindful and never actually “meditate.”

I’ve developed my own meditation system. It’s on the app. What I tell people is one of the things to start practicing mindfulness is the stopping. Stopping yourself because we’re so busy. Life is so busy. There’s so much stuff going on all of the time, but it’s important to stop, take a breath, and evaluate what’s going on with yourself, evaluate your life. Get out of what I call the emotional brain for a moment because the emotional brain doesn’t help us make our best choices and move into the logical brain a little bit. That takes stopping and being aware of everything that’s going on. Your words, your thoughts, your actions, what’s happening, and what you’re about to do and what you want to do as opposed to how your emotional brain is going to push you into something.

I’ve often heard that we make decisions emotionally and back that up with logic that we don’t make decisions rationally or logically.

We’re really busy. The world I feel is so stressed out, so I teach them to stop. I teach them to take a breath. I teach them to understand what our emotional brain is. Let’s understand what logical brain is, what your decision-making process is, how that has affected your past, your present and now how it’s going to affect your future. Things change. You should see the changes that start happening in the people that I work with.

What changes? Give us some examples.

There is an old saying, “Go to bed, don’t make a rash decision. Sleep on it.” I love that because when you actually sleep on something, if you’re emotional, you have all this cortisol, you’ve got the adrenaline pumping through you and you’ve got sometimes this fight or flight process happening. If you sleep on it, all of those chemicals dissipate. They go down, they lessen. When you wake up in the morning, you wake up refreshed and you’re in a different headspace, and so the decision that you would have made when you’re heavy into all this emotion, you’re not going to make now because you’re going, “I don’t need to do this or I can do this instead.” I see people changing their relationships, changing the mood of their relationships, meaning not being as hot-tempered, learning more about themselves instead of just pointing the finger at somebody else. You’re going, “I can actually own that.”

That’s part of my process. It’s not part of their process and therefore I can move forward in this way. I see my clients coming to me and saying, “Monica, I want a better career. My career is failing. I’m not getting the promotions I want. There are a number of different reasons that come to me.” I say, “Let’s work on that.” As I teach them this process, they start not only succeeding in their career, their relationships get better. Their health starts getting better because they’re not as stressed out and they can make more logical decisions about what workouts they want to do as opposed to what other people are feeding them like the pressures of society. That starts falling away.

Is there a specific example of somebody who had a major breakthrough?

Let me think because there are lots of them and I want to give kudos to so many people. I have a client, let’s call him Martin. Martin and his wife were having a lot of difficulties. They’d been married for about eleven years and a lot of arguments on a lot of different subjects. They loved each other, and they had children, but they couldn’t quite meet in the middle of understanding each other. They started coming to me. We started doing sessions and when you’re having arguments, there’s a lot of finger-pointing and so what I taught them to do is first, “Stop. Let’s look at what’s going on with you first. Let’s not keep pointing the finger. Let’s not focus on the other person. Let’s figure out what’s going on with you. Let’s do somewhat I call root digging. Let’s get to the very root of it, the bottom of what started, how it started, and what’s driving your actions.” They started doing a lot of inner reflection, a lot of inner work, figuring out their inner dialogue. That’s mindfulness.

That’s, “Let me look at me. Let me figure out how I’m interacting with the world, what I think about things, and how I feel about things.” Men are very guarded with their feelings. That’s the truth. Women love to talk about their feelings and what’s going on with them. It’s a little different for men and he had a breakdown. He remembered some things that happened to him. When he was about eleven years old, his mother was leaving him at home by himself and she would take his brother and sister out and they would have a good day together, but he would be left at home by himself because he was a little more introverted.

He started remembering this abandonment that he had and that was one of the things that was driving a wedge in his relationship because he had never addressed those feelings. He had never addressed that because he blocked them out. He put them to the side, but they were still there. Once we address that, he broke down and started crying. We addressed it and worked through the feelings. I never teach clients to hate anybody, so it’s never like, “You stop talking to your mother right now.” It’s never that. It’s, “Let’s come to a really deep understanding of the situation, and let’s have some good dialogue with those people.” It changed their marriage a lot. It’s the same with her. She had to understand something about herself and her past and how that was a driving force in her present. The past was. They’re married still four years later and much happier than they were before. These things change.

The past can impact how we are in the world just on an unconscious level unless we address that. There’s a great quote from Mark Twain that goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.” You end up repeating in a similar way your traumas and things being stuck in your past if you don’t make proactive changes to address them.

Sometimes you have to acknowledge what that is. He had buried it in and a lot of us do. A lot of us have trauma in our life and we bury it because we need to get through the next moment, we need to get through the next year, we need to succeed in our career, and we need whatever that need is. Therefore, we ignore, but we’re not ignoring because whatever that trauma is, we’re bringing it with us until we work it out. I don’t like the term ‘get over it’ because we don’t get over it. We need to work through it.

It’s a resolution. It’s not conquering. It’s not through. It’s coming maybe at peace with it or learning how to dance with it.

That’s why I say I have a lot of people that come to me with a lot of trauma and about 60% of trauma has to do with their upbringing, parents that had trauma and therefore brought that trauma into the child’s life. Whatever that is. Sometimes it’s not physical abuse, sometimes it’s verbal abuse, sometimes it’s emotional abuse. The child learns to cope in certain ways and coping doesn’t necessarily mean healthy. We can become abusive in ourselves verbally. Even if we are physically abused and decide that we don’t want to be a physical abuser, we can become an abuser emotionally or verbally. It’s my job to get a person to get a client to that place of understanding, what is it that you’re doing, what happened to you. Let’s discuss that. Let’s deal with it. Let’s figure it out. Deal with it. Get rid of it in a very healthy way, so that you can move forward in your life. I always say to everybody, “Everybody deserves to be happy.” Everybody does, whether you can reach it or not. That blissful life that belongs to you, that’s up to you.

Our past can influence our present and also our future if we don’t resolve it. What about past lives? Do you believe in that and if so, how can past lives potentially impact our present and future?

I believe in past lives. I wrote a book called Universe 101: Learn Grow Evolve and that’s in my book. It’s called spiritual baggage and I do believe that you’re reincarnated in whatever way that is. I also tell people to live their best life right now because this is all you get and what I mean by this is all you get is this is what you get, and you can be reborn, but more times than not, we don’t fully carry those memories of a past life with us. With the spiritual baggage, you can have something that happened in a past life come into this life right here. It’s in my book and you cannot remember it, but what happens is the universe is trying to teach you that lesson again. “You didn’t work this out in the past life. This is something that happened. This is something that you did. This is something that you need to work out.”

Because we don’t remember it, that situation keeps happening over and over again and we think it’s circumstance. If we stop, take a moment, look at the pattern and see it for what it is. We can say to ourselves, “Let me learn from this. I see this pattern happening over and over again. Let me sit on it. Maybe meditate and learn from it, so that I can work it out and move forward.” It can be a real kicker, spiritual baggage and it’s not fun. I see that pattern with a lot of my clients where they’re going, “This keeps happening to me over and over again. I want it to stop and I don’t know how to deal with it.” That’s when we sit down and say, “Let’s find the pattern, so you can work it out so that you can learn whatever lesson it is that the universe is trying to show you and teach you, so that you can move forward and again, your blissful life.”

Would you consider yourself a medium or a clairvoyant or any ESP where you can access memories of their past lives and help them to discover what that spiritual baggage might be?

Yes, I was born with certain gifts. It’s in my book. I don’t shy away from it. I don’t hide from it. It’s a bit woo-woo. I’ve been judged a lot in my life for having certain abilities. I’m grateful for them. I used to think they were a curse. Growing up with it can be very strange, but I’ve embraced it. Yes, I am able to help my clients in that way of being able to look in their past and help them. Because I’ve embraced it, now I don’t do what I used to do. In the past, I used to blurt things out because I have such a big compassionship and I see so much suffering in the world. I just wanted to help. For me, it was very much, “I see this going on with you. Let me tell you what it is so that you logically acknowledge it and move into your best life with this understanding.” It doesn’t work because people shy away from it. A lot of people do, and they go, “Who are you? You’re a freak. This is weird. Don’t talk to me. How do you know this?” Now, I’ve learned to be very gentle and really slowly get people to a place of understanding what that is.

That reminds me of a mutual friend of ours who is also on this show, Cristo D’Arcy. Cristo had experiences as a child of being able to talk to his grandfather, who had passed away, and yet he was able to communicate with him and being able to talk to ghosts. It doesn’t make you really popular on the playground apparently. He had some challenges growing up with that gift. He sometimes wished he didn’t have that gift and yet he has done so much to take care of people and help them breakthrough different issues. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what he can do in terms of moving energy and things like that. He’s quite gifted.

I remember, Monica, from what you’re describing of how it’s beside as a curse, now you appreciate it being a gift and you also are gentler or more deliberate in how you share different things that you have perceived through this gift. I remember you telling me once years ago that I had a past partner, lover, wife from a past life who was still following me or with me. A little lady with long, dark hair. That definitely was memorable. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. She seemed very interested in my well-being and thought that her sticking around would help with my well-being if I recall correctly. To me, that seems unfortunate that she would be bound up with my well-being and that she couldn’t move on and be about her evolution. I would like for her to move on if she hasn’t already. You said that it’s something that you can perceive through Skype or is it really just in person?

It was six years ago. Time has flown by so fast. It’s crazy. I was speaking with somebody else the other day and we realized again, the same thing. We were like, “This was six years ago.” We’ve known each other for a bit. I wanted to clarify something quickly. You were saying you feel like it’s a bit sad that she was bound to your happiness. I don’t know if you want to speak about it a little bit here, but you did a show that I watched where you were talking about foster children and how you were raised in the foster system. That might be why she came back to or stuck around. It was because you did have some of that growing up. It’s hard not having your biological parents with you or not understanding why they are not with you and whatnot.

My grandpa’s still around and I’m grateful. He’s not around all the time. The dark-haired lady that was near you, your past, she’s not around all the time, but she definitely checks in and worries. Worries in a sense of she’s concerned. She’s like, “Is he happy? Is he this? Is he that?” Because you had a beautiful past life together. I explained that to you, when you have that beauty, you just want to make sure that the person is okay and that person is safe and that person is happy. Helpful spirits really want to make sure that you’re good and that if they can guide you in any way that is going to make you happier or keep you happier or keep you from harm or whatnot, then that’s what they’re going to do. It’s not a bad thing. If you’ve got the impression that it was a bad thing, it’s not a bad thing.

I didn’t get the impression that that was a bad thing, but I want every being, spirits, soul to be able to evolve, elevate and not have to be bound to somebody on this plane.

Everyone does, be it person or spirit, they do evolve but they evolve in their own time, in their own space. Being a spirit, you can be a spirit that wants to stick around for whatever reasons or years because of that evolution. You can be a spirit that says, “I lived that life and I’m ready to go live another life so I’m not going to stick around. I’m going to go ahead and process through the university again so that I can be reborn.” There are several ways of it and I think that those are choices that we make here as living, breathing beings as well. “I can go through this or I can go ahead and evolve. I can stay stuck in this or I can go ahead and evolve.” For the living, breathing beings and for spirits, it’s the same process. You can make your decisions and those are what dictate your future. If I can get people to understand that, “This decision right now that you’re making is going to affect your future. How do you want it to affect your future?”

Not just your future in this incarnation, potentially your future in future incarnations as well.

When my grandfather passed away, and I was very attached to him, he was the only peace I had in my childhood and I was in mourning. My mom would tell me, “Everybody’s calling on him right now so he’s really busy. He may come to you often or he may not.” My grandpa had thirteen children and then several grandchildren after that. It was just something that I had to understand that he couldn’t pay attention to me all the time, but it was grateful when he did.

How often does he visit you?

When he first passed away, there were some very important messages that I needed from him, so it was a bit frequent, but now because I do understand the evolution of the spirit and what it is, I don’t call on him that much. When I’m trying to process something within the universe and I needed a little bit of guidance, then I’ll call on him. I also know because he was Native American and French, he had a lot of the native American ways about him. I don’t know if you know a lot about native Americans, but they’re very cryptic people because they want you to figure out your stuff. They’ll give you guidance but it’s a bit cryptic because you’re supposed to go and figure out what that means, what it means for your life. As much as I love him, and he was such a big part of forming me, sometimes I know if I call him it’s going to be a bit cryptic so I just sit down and try to figure it out myself.

When he first passed, and he showed up multiple times, was that you calling on him or was he calling on you?

When he passed away, it was about [4:00] in the morning, LA time. I was born and raised in Houston, Texas, so everybody was in Houston with him. He passed away and came to me then and said, “I’ve gone and don’t be sad, just understand it was my time.” He was almost 90 or I think he was a few days from 90, “Just try to do the best job that you can and if you need me, I’m here.” It was that message and I think an hour and a half later my mom called me up and said, “Your grandpa passed away.” I said, “Yes, I know. He told me.”

What was her response when you said that?

She knew from a very young age with me and it was very discouraged when I was a child with her. He’s the one that told me, “It’s okay. Just learn the difference between a good spirit and a bad spirit.” She was very much like, “Don’t talk to spirits. Don’t look at them. Ignore them. Make them go away.” She has known for very long time that I had this gift.

I used to be very skeptical in my past and in this incarnation. I didn’t believe in reincarnation. I didn’t believe in really anything, the higher power or anything. I had this spiritual awakening in 2012 in India when this monk touched me. He did a Deeksha, an oneness blessing on me. I had an awakening. What an amazing gift that was. One thing I’m recalling now is that my wife at the time, so this is my ex-wife now, telling me that she had experienced her grandmother passing even though she was in a different location.

Her grandmother touched her with an icy, cold, bony hand on her shoulder. This was at the same time roughly that her grandmother passed away and she didn’t “know” that her grandmother had passed but she felt that, and she figured that must be what happened and indeed it had. When my wife at the time had explained this to me, I had trouble believing it.

It’s hard. It’s not easy because we are here, we’re physical beings, and it’s hard to believe there’s something else. That’s why so many people are afraid of death because we see it as the end of us. There’s nothing else. We won’t be here there. We won’t be able to talk or speak to anybody. There’s no interaction. It’s finite. It’s not. Death is infinite. There’s a whole universe that you can explore, and it opens up the world and it opens up so much of your consciousness. That’s what I try to guide people right now here now because I see so many spirits with regret. I’ve spoken to so many with regret. If I can get people to understand what their life is and what their life can be and get them to move forward into the place that it can be, how amazing is that? I see it. I see people change with the work that I do.

The work I do, a lot of it is because a lot of people brand me as spiritual and while I do have a very deep spirituality, 90% of the work that I do is logical. It’s logical work. I’ve written three courses, one book, I have another book coming out. One of the courses that’s going to be online is called Relationships Evolved: Forging Bonds That Last. It’s logical work. It’s for me to get you to understand logically how to maneuver your life in the best way possible. How to work out all of your hurts and all your boo-boos and whether you inflicted them upon yourself or whether somebody else inflicted them upon you.

When you say logical, I think to myself a better label for what you do is pragmatic.

I’ll take it. If I can get somebody to that place of understanding themselves, understanding how they’re interacting with the world, understanding how to make a better decision moving forward, I’ve seen amazing changes happen within a person and within their life when they’re not dealing with things the same way anymore. They’ve come to this big understanding of themselves, of how they interact with their partner, with their friends, with their parents, with their boss, with their coworkers, and how they’re making different life decisions. The word that’s overused that I’m now going to use is empowered within themselves.

These interactions with our bosses, with our family members, with our significant other, these aren’t limited to people who are physically with us. We can also influence the relationships we have with people who have passed.

We talked about my grandfather coming to me and I’ll tell you a story. It’s a very personal story and I know this is going to be out to the world. I always tell everybody I’m an open book and you can ask me anything, so I’ll share a story with you. One night and this happened in 2011, I was working hard. I was head of distribution for Bigfoot Entertainment at the time. I went to sleep, not even thinking about my grandpa, but I went to sleep, and I had a dream about him that he came to me. In the dream, I’m at his old house and I’m speaking to a bunch of people that are in the house and he walked straight by me and he goes to his bedroom. I looked at him and I’m like, “Let me follow my grandpa.” I was like, “I haven’t seen you in a while,” which I hadn’t at that point. I follow him and he lays on the bed and he pulls the sheet up and I said, “Grandpa, are you feeling okay?” He just looked at me and he’s like, “Uh-huh.” I just burst into tears.

I started crying. I sat on the edge of the bed and I just started crying and I started apologizing to him. I’m like, “I’m sorry, grandpa. I think I’m failing you. I don’t know if I’m the best person I can be. I work really hard,” which I do, I’m a workaholic, proclaimed and/or acknowledged workaholic. “I work hard but I don’t know if I’m doing the right things all the time and I try to be a moral person.” He pulled the sheets over like he didn’t want to listen to me and so I sunk to the floor and I’m just a heap of tears saying the same thing over and over. “I don’t know if I’m the best person I can be and I am trying to live a moral life and I’m trying to help other people and but I don’t know if I’m great yet. I don’t know if I’m okay.” Again, very cryptic he said, “You worry too much. You need to stop beating yourself up. You worry too much.” That was literally it. That was all I got from him.

That morning, I woke up and I was short of breath and traumatized by the whole dream because seeing him and because I want him to be proud of me, I do. Because I feel like he was such a great man and he was my peace of mind in my childhood because I had a tumultuous childhood. I called my friend up and told him about my dream and I was short of breath and whatnot, and he just said to me, “Your grandpa’s right. You’re so hard on yourself and you do so much for everybody around you, sometimes you don’t take care of yourself. Maybe that dream the crypticness of it is him telling you just chill out and take care of yourself sometimes.”

Thank you for sharing that, first of all. It was very generous of you to be open and vulnerable in that way in a public setting like a podcast. One thought that I will share with you from the story, I don’t know if it will serve you or not, but this I learned from my wife, Orion, is that, “Worry is praying for what you don’t want.” If you’re worrying too much, you’re praying for what you don’t want. I don’t know if that helps or not.

I took a big message from that dream and then from my friends saying, “Sometimes you need to take care of yourself.” All the work that I teach people I do myself and I sat down and I said, “Grandpa is telling me I worry too much.” I’ve got to mellow out and just know that I am doing a good job and just stop judging myself so much. I tell people I’m not judgmental, I’m not judgmental towards others, but I had a tendency to judge myself because that’s what my parental units taught me, it was to judge myself very harshly and so I had to drop all that. I had to let all of that fall away in that understanding. I was like, “I do my best job and I do help the world, so you know what? I’m okay.” That was my lesson and that was the lesson that he was trying to teach me. Spirits do try to teach us even when it’s subtle and even sometimes when we don’t want to get it, they are trying to teach us something that’s going to better us.

Another thing that you mentioned from that story was that you were telling him you don’t think you’re measuring up or that you’re moral enough. I think that’s the word you used. Was it moral?

Yes.

I re-listen to one of my podcast interviews. I do that. I was listening to the David Ghiyam episode, which is all about Kabbalah. He’s one of my Kabbalah teachers at the Kabbalah Center. This stuck for me, he said that, “It’s not about morality. It’s not about morals. God doesn’t care about morals, the creator. It’s the law of cause and effect. That’s how your life and the universe is governed. If you are doing something that is going to yield negative repercussions, negative angels, or whatever, whatever that thing is, if it’s evil speech, not restricting bad behaviors or just your own reactivity or if you have an addiction or something like that. It’s not about morals, it’s about the law of cause and effect.” I thought that was l important. People get so caught up on this thing of morality, “Is this moral or not?” That message really resonated for me, so that was from the David Ghiyam episode.

There was a lot I took from that dream and worked out because like, I was taught to judge myself. That’s what I help my clients understand, “Where is it coming from really? How can you fix it?” It is about the fix, even if that fix is a massive understanding, a very deep, powerful understanding so that you can move forward.

Even if the person has passed away, you can still get that fix, that resolution with that person that you had a conflict with or had some rift with. For example, my grandfather, I had a rough, tumultuous childhood too. He raised me for a time before calling children’s services up and putting me into foster care. At the time, I was very angry at him and thought that he was abandoning me. He was getting sick at the time. Logically, that makes sense. He didn’t have the means to care of me as his health was deteriorating, but yet I felt like nobody loved me, my family, and including him. He also was very violent and horribly abusive, so it was a gift in many ways. It was a gift that I ended up going into foster care and leaving his care. I held a lot of resentment for him for decades. I let that go in a session with Cristo D’Arcy. He’s been a big impact. He’s a good friend of mine.

I had this amazing forgiveness breakthrough with my grandfather that was facilitated by Cristo and this was after my grandfather passed away. This is within the last six or seven years. That was the shift for me when I had that session with him and I forgave my grandfather. That facilitated some change in me and it changed the field, that it changed him, but it also changed the field. The energetic field that we affect.

Everything we do, the law of cause and effect, Kabbalistic principle isn’t just from Kabbalah, it’s a universal principle and so is the field. If you’re a diehard skeptic, you have to admit that we are energy and that the energetic portion of us versus the matter in us is what drives everything, our thoughts, our actions, life. If there’s an energetic field that we can influence, because we are energy and because we are emitting energy and life is energy then it’s a useful paradigm for even the diehard skeptic to think of the field and what we do either plants positive seeds or negative seeds.

Speaking about energy, because I love Einstein and I love when I was growing up learning that, “In order for a star to be born, there’s a lot of energy happening.” Understanding that we, as humans, we can transfer that energy to other people. If you want to put it in simplistic terms, let’s say you’re super happy. Something happened to you and you’re over the moon. You walk down the street and you’ve got a little pep in your step and you’ve got this huge smile happening on your face and every person that you make eye contact with you smile at.

Some people are going to look at you like you’re strange because it’s happened to me. I smile a lot and I walk down in Los Angeles and some people look at me like, “What’s wrong with her?” There are people who are going to smile back because you smiled at them, so they smile back. Maybe even if they weren’t in a great mood, now they’re in a little bit of a better mood because you smiled at them. It’s bit of an energetic transference. Then they’re going to be in a bit of a better mood and now they’re going to pass that on. They’re going to pay it forward.

It’s the same thing if you’re in a bad mood. If you’re in a bad mood and you walk around and you scowl at somebody, they’re not going to know why you’re scowling at them, but it’s going to affect them in some way and they’re going to carry that possibly because some people let it roll off of them. Just like the people who when you’re smiling and then you look at them and they just go, “What’s wrong with her?” It’s going to affect some people, but the same thing, they’re going to possibly go from you scowling and they’re going to carry that and they’re going to transfer it to somebody else. You need to think about what is it, what energetically are you doing and really carry that through your day with you. Are you speaking to your coworkers kindly? Are you helping them? Do they help you? Do you transfer it back to that? What are your interactions? What are your words doing?

That reminds me of the episode where I interviewed Robert Allen and I learned this from him earlier from one of his events that he describes how if you’re in a public situation where you’re speaking, you’re a public speaker, some public speakers focus on getting everybody to like them, everybody in the audience interacts and engages and to smile and all that. He said, “That’s a mistake that you’re not there for the frowny faces. You’re there for the smiley faces and the smiley faces are there for you. Just focus on the smiley faces. Let those people that are the frowny faces do their thing, even walk out, leave the room, because you’re not there for them.” That is such an important concept. If you can just focus on the smiley faces and add value for them and not worry about the frowny faces, that’s a good way to be in the world.

The bottom line is you’re not going to make everybody happy. If you believe in what you’re doing, I believe in what I’m doing. We talked about the medium stuff and it was a curse. I felt like that because I was judged so harshly. You’re not the favorite kid on the playground. People don’t want to play with you. People will judge you. People talk about you trying to make you into something bad or evil. Because I have certain abilities, I was able to help people in certain ways because I have the brain that I have, I was able to study human behavior, psychology, physiology, how it ties all in together, some meditation practices and put that together and help people.

I believe in what I’m doing, and I believe it fully because I see it helped, I see it changed people. I don’t make everybody happy. There are still people who come to me and go, “I am going to poo-poo it because you’re a spiritual person and I don’t believe in spirituality.” “I get it 100%.” Hopefully, you’ll also understand that you called it pragmatic, you being Stephan Spencer, what I also do is pragmatic and it’s logical. It’s going to help you in a logical way. Stop thinking about me as a spiritual being, if that doesn’t serve you, and start thinking of me as this person who’s come to a large understanding of the human psyche and how I can help you because you found me because you were looking for something.

If you change that mindset a tiny bit, get out of judgment brain, then you can get into a place where you fix whatever it is. Whatever the reason it is, you found me, and it can be a beautiful thing. As long as you believe in what you’re doing, keep doing it. I was telling you earlier when we were speaking before the show about the fact that I did a speech and that’s one of the things that I am imparted to the kids was to believe in yourself and if you’re passionate about something, keep doing it. I started my speech with, “Does anybody here think they’re not good at something?” Even if you think you’re not good at something, find the way that you are good at it because there’s a way.

When you were talking about if somebody doesn’t connect with you or doesn’t feel a resonance with you because you’re too spiritual or whatever, I find that concept boggling to me that somebody would consider themselves nonspiritual. It was Wayne Dyer who said, “We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience, we’re spiritual beings having a human experience.” I love that quote. It’s so deep. We experience the table, for example, as solid. We can knock our knuckle on it and yet, in reality, it’s 99% space or whatever the percentage is. It’s mostly air. The gaps between the atoms are significantly much more than the amount of space taken up by those atoms themselves. When you take that into account and you say, “It’s hard to remember that.”

It’s you need awareness, not just of the physical reality, but awareness of your awareness and awareness of your predisposition towards thinking in that 1% reality of what’s the Kabballahs referred to as the 1%, which is the physical, and the 99% of the real reality is what we don’t normally perceive or have any access to as humans. That’s what’s happening outside of us in our experience. It’s so important to keep remembering that we’re not just physical humans, that there is more than this little slice of reality that we’re experiencing. We’re like ants in that regard.

Also, if you can look from that perspective and see that experiences that you saw as traumatic before are actually gifts. Like that tumultuous childhood that you had was actually a gift. I had a similarly difficult childhood. I pretty recently started doing TV appearances and that’s one of my topics on TV, is having grown up as a foster child for most of my high school years. That was a gift. A lot of people see these things as not gifts, but as a horrible, traumatic, destructive scene that they have to try and forget but is actually a gift because it helps you to grow. My wife, Orion, would call it a gift but with a bow at the bottom. You don’t necessarily see that that’s a gift yet, but it is.

It is and I’m glad that you said that because again, you and I are talking about our childhoods and mine was tumultuous and it was scarring. It becomes scarring because we don’t understand it. We don’t understand why somebody is being cruel to us. We don’t understand why your parents don’t love us. We don’t understand why our parents interact with one child one way and then with you, in a completely different way. I was taught to judge myself very harshly and you’re talking about the gifts, it made me. If I go back and I look at it and I say to myself, “That sucked.” I never wanted to feel sorry for myself because I had the understanding that there’s a great big life in front of me. I didn’t go into a place of, “I feel totally sorry for myself.”

There were some decisions that I made that I regret absolutely. If I could do it again, knowing what I know now, I would do it differently just like most of us would with epiphanies and/or understandings. You’re 100% right. I look at my upbringing and I wouldn’t be the person I am now without it. I wouldn’t be the person I am now. It took a lot of working out and I wish I had done some of it sooner. My interaction with my grandfather was very minimal. I was only allowed to go to his house and spend the weekends sometimes because my life was very controlled. It needed to be controlled by my parental.

When I was seventeen and a half to eighteen and a half is when I would go over to his house every single weekend, sit on his front porch, chat with him, and have more experience with him, but mine was very minimal. He’s still impacted my life. I said to somebody the other day, if the creator came down and said, “Monica, I can give you the best family on the planet who’s going to love you, protect you, nurture you and encourage you in everything that you wanted when you were a child but you won’t have your grandfather or you can keep going as you are now.” I would keep going as I am now. I wouldn’t trade him and those slices of knowledge for anything because they really have affected my life in a lot of positive ways.

What if I’d asked you instead if you could change your past so that you had every weekend throughout your childhood with your grandfather, would you take it? That’s going to impact how your whole life unfolds. Would you prefer that or would you stay with what you have now?

You would have to explain to me a little bit more how it would impact my life moving forward, what the impact would be, and then I would need to make that decision?

What if you couldn’t get that insight? You have to choose.

I would say I love and adore my grandpa and there were so many moments where I asked my parentals if I could live with him. The answer was always no because it was the only peace I’ve got. If I even had a question or a doubt that I would be a different person being worse or better than I am now, I would still choose what I have. If you could not tell me I would be a better person now or if I would be a worse person now, I would stick with what I have.

My grandfather gave me this incredible gift in that I became very resilient and I became very mature for my age. I was able to get married at nineteen years old and I have three beautiful grown children now who I would not have if I had an easy childhood. If I could go back and do it again with more nurturing growing up, I would say, “No, I don’t want that because my kids and what I’ve created in my life from those hardships is too important to me.”

If you couldn’t guarantee me better, I would still stay with what I have. Even though the contact was minimal, it was impactful. He was the person I respected and I respected him because, at times, I would go over to his house, he had the same job I have, I would watch people come over to his house so he could counsel them. He was a native American gentleman. His schooling is third-grade education but he was so intelligent, he was so smart, but he was raised on a ranch. They went to the third grade and that was it but he made his way and he invested in real estate. He didn’t let that affect his life and that’s what he taught me. “This is all I could do when I was growing up because this is what was offered to me, but I didn’t stop learning, I didn’t stop growing and I didn’t stop evolving.” That’s what I took moving forward. I was like, “I’ve got to break down the obstacles. I can’t have barriers in my life.” It was huge teaching.

Do you think that we can influence the past like we can influence the future?

That’s a huge question and it’s something that I ponder quite often. You can influence the past within yourself.

How is that?

Because it’s what I do in working with people. I’m going to use you as an example. You have a childhood that was tumultuous when you were in foster care and you felt abandoned by your grandfather and you held resentment to that. I believe you worked with Cristo and you had an experience where you forgave your grandfather. That was you influencing your past and now your present and your future are going to be so much different.

I forgave my grandfather in that session. It wasn’t the abandonment so much as the abuse.

Which is scarring. It’s hard to understand that happen to you.

Do you think that I influenced my grandfather and his life as it happened by my forgiveness?

Absolutely. Now he gets to go because when we spoke about the evolution of the spirit and you were talking about how your wife from your past life is here. She watches over you. Because that’s what spirits sometimes do, they do ask for forgiveness. They do want forgiveness. They do need to know that you’re going to be that you’re okay from whatever it is that they did to you, even sometimes they didn’t do anything to you and now they get to evolve and move forward. Now he gets to go back through the universe, back through another womb, and be born as something more evolved. Maybe in his next life, he’s not going to be abusive because he just came upon probably death understood that he was too abusive and how it did affect you and others and now he gets to take all of that and move forward with it. You did a good job with that.

Thank you. How do folks work with you? How do they consume your courses and get your Mindfulness app? Where do they go?

The Mindfulness app is available on Android and iOS and it’s called Masters of Mindfulness. We’re going through a huge evolution right now, so I believe next month the app is going to have a dashboard and a couple of other really exciting features were so happy about. It’s called Masters of Mindfulness. My organization is called Exceptional Life Institute and you can go to www.ExceptionalLifeInstitute.com. The course Relationships Evolved is going to be online. We’re super excited for everybody because now it’s going to be global. Anybody in the world can grab it. I have clients all over the world. I’m really excited that they’re going to be able to tell their friends now more about it.

You have an online course.

We have three courses. We have the Relationships Evolved: Forging Bonds That Last, we have The Career Guide, which we teach to individuals and we go into corporate settings and teach it to people in corporations, which is exciting for us, and then we have The Exceptional You. Our first online course is Relationships Evolved: Forging Bonds That Last. We’re going through all of the editing now and it will be available end of August. I feel super excited because it is part of our evolution to have them available online.

Congratulations on that. To the audience, I hope that you take some action from this episode, and whether it’s going through the course or just following Monica online and what she’s up to, I think you’re going to benefit. Thank you, Monica, for being on the show

Thank you for having me, Stephan.

It was a real pleasure.

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