In this Episode
- [02:27]Marie-Elizabeth recounts her journey into underwater photography, including the memorable experience of capturing a whale in Tonga in 2016.
- [08:43]Marie-Elizabeth reflects on her life in Los Cabos, Mexico, and the decision to relocate, drawn by its abundant wildlife and proximity to the ocean.
- [15:42]Stephan explains the importance of managing energy around the dying and the role of death doulas, while Marie-Elizabeth shares her father’s meditation challenges during his final weeks and the comfort that helped him stay focused.
- [18:43]Marie-Elizabeth discusses how she developed her intuitive abilities, such as clairaudience and clairsentience, through years of work as a massage therapist and acupuncturist.
- [25:27]Marie-Elizabeth highlights how angel numbers, especially 1111, serve as a meaningful connection between her and her best friend, Angel. Stephan introduces the concept of the Full Court of Atonement
- [32:58]An overview of Marie-Elizabeth’s integrated health approach, blending physical, chemical, and energetic methods, including a hyperbaric chamber, IV vitamin drips, and ozone therapy.
- [38:39]Marie-Elizabeth demonstrates her go-to breathing exercise, which she practiced with Stephan.
- [49:00]A discussion on using shadow work for self-dialogue and employing non-dominant handwriting to access subconscious thoughts.
- [55:03]Stephan introduces a visualization technique from The Tools by Phil Stutz, designed to confront and move through fear to overcome obstacles.
Marie-Elizabeth, it’s so great to have you on the show.
Thank you, Stephan. It’s so great to be here.
Awesome. Well, I would love to start by noticing your awesome picture in the background. For our listeners who can’t see it because they’re listening and not watching it on YouTube, it’s this beautiful photo of a whale. And Marie-Elizabeth, you told me that you took that picture.
Yes, one of my passions is underwater photography. In 2016, my now husband and I traveled to Tonga, and that’s where I took this shot. For those who are listening and not watching the video, it’s a mama rising to the surface, and her baby is just up at the surface above her. It was really an incredible moment to be able to catch her mid-turn like this with her arms, and her pectoral fins open.
I love it because it’s a different shot than you typically see of a whale. Typically, you see them horizontally, kind of mama and baby together. I call this one ‘Mother Song.’ And to see her with her fins open like this, I love that I got to have this unique view.
That is beautiful. I thought it was a painting, and then you said it was a photo that you took. So cool. How did you get started with that passion for underwater photography?
My very first dive was in the year 2000. From that first dive, I fell completely in love with the underwater world. There was a kind of freedom in visiting a world that doesn’t have to do with humans, that has its own relationships, its own laws, in a way that I can visit, but I can’t be there 100% of the time. Obviously, we affect the ocean a lot, often in not ideal ways, but it is really its own world.
It began to shake loose some of the heavy identification with the stuff that we focus on as human beings, realizing, “Oh, there’s such a bigger world out there that has nothing to do with our typical mental chatter,” and the beauty, the colors, and to discover that there are things like brain coral that look like our brains underwater. There are these huge tube corals—purple, and there are these corals that look like elephant ears, but they’re orange.
It was like this psychedelic at that point. I had never done psychedelics, but I imagined it was as if I was entering this psychedelic world. From then on, I just wanted to photograph that somehow and bring it back to the surface so that people could see what I got to see. Over the years, I got more and more serious. It took till 2008 to buy my first DSLR system. Until then, I shot with a point-and-shoot and was very dissatisfied with the results. So, I finally got a DSLR in 2008 and have never looked back.
That’s so cool. Do you scuba dive as well while you’re doing the photography, or is it snorkeling or something?
It’s primarily scuba diving. With the whales, it’s snorkeling because they don’t really like the sound of the scuba; it tends to drive them away. Anywhere in the world, you can swim with humpbacks, which is primarily near the Dominican Republic, between the Dominican Republic and Turks and Caicos or Tonga. Those are the two really most famous places where you can actually get in the water with the whales. Those are snorkel trips. But the rest of my underwater photography is really primarily scuba diving.
You’re in Los Cabos, and I don’t know where that is exactly in Mexico, but isn’t that on the water as well?
It is. I’m looking at the ocean right now outside my window. We are down at the tip of Baja. Just below California, there’s this long peninsula. We’re down at the tip of that peninsula. On the west side of the peninsula is the Pacific, and on the east side of the peninsula is the Sea of Cortez. Our house actually faces the Sea of Cortez, and we have humpbacks here all winter.
Parts work allows us to engage with hidden aspects of ourselves, making the subconscious conscious. It's a journey of integrating and transforming those patterns that block our progress. Share on XIn the winter, I send out my drone from the house, and I shoot them from above. You’re not allowed to get in the water here, so I don’t go out as often to be with them, just from a boat. But I love to send out the drone and get these images of the mamas and the babies because here is really where they are calving. They’re here with their babies and also mating again, typically, because there are very few predators here. There’s some orca that sometimes takes down a calf, even a mom, but most often it’s a calf. But mostly, there aren’t a ton of predators. They tend to do their child-rearing here, and then they migrate north to feed in the summer, like by Alaska.
Wow. Is that why you’re not allowed to get in the water? Is it because it would disturb the mating and the rearing of the babies?
That’s a good question. I’m not sure why Mexico is pretty good about protecting its waters. As far as I understand, it’s really a protection thing. It’s also very famous just to the north of us, about four or five hours away; there are several bays where these gray whales come and hang out. They actually come right up to the boat, and you can pet them. They love to be touched. But even up there where the whales are coming up, they’re actually pushing their calves up to the side of the boat as if to say, “Here, meet my baby.”
They’re letting people actually touch them. Even there, you can’t get in the water. It’s pretty well-regulated around here, I think, for their protection and to not disturb them as much as possible. There are also blue whales here. There are quite a few amazing species, like the orca, the blue whales, the humpbacks, and then the gray whales, a little further north. This is part of why we moved down here; the wildlife is so incredible here.
Sounds magical. When did you move there, and how did you pull that together?
Well, after the pandemic, I didn’t really scuba dive all that year, and I had a snorkel trip booked for 2021 to photograph this aggregation. There are also Mobula rays, which are the smallest of the rays, so that’s a prey animal. They tend to travel in these aggregations of big pods. Actually, my husband came with me on that trip, and we came down so I could photograph these Mobula rays that aggregate here. They’re just beautiful.
They’re just like these flapping pancakes underwater, really beautiful formations of huge groups of them. When we got down here, we both felt this sense of ease that we hadn’t felt in a while, because Los Angeles—it just was very tense through. And after the pandemic, there was a lot of racial tension. My husband is black. Both of us got down here and we just both relaxed and we thought, “What if we actually got a place here?”
Shadow work and parts work isn't about banishing the darkness but understanding and integrating it to reduce triggers and cultivate wholeness. Share on XI came back a month later to look for a house. And when I saw this house, I thought, “Oh, this is the perfect place to hold small retreats.” Because we overlook the ocean and the house itself is beautiful, we just gradually, by 2022—it’s really been almost two and a half years—we decided to primarily be based here. And then, in the summer, we go back to Santa Monica because it gets a bit too hot. It’s hurricane season. It’s very humid here. So we get ourselves out of that. But it’s just been incredible to live here nine months out of the year.
How cool. It’s a great example of living your dream, not just seeing it as a pie in the sky. But anything and everything is possible. You can manifest all that with collaboration with the creator.
Absolutely. It felt so divinely guided. Here’s my favorite part of looking at this house. I had one day to go out with the realtor. First of all, the realtor is also a magical person. She’s worked a bunch with Joe Dispenza, so she comes from this kind of cosmic, quantum realm, kind of possible frame. We came to this house first because it was the one that was most stylistically aligned with my style, but it was a bit out of our budget.
I walked through the house with my husband on FaceTime. We both fell in love with it, and then we went on to look at other houses. While I was walking through another house that I didn’t like at all with her, I got an email from the estate team handling the sale of my mother’s apartment. My mother had died about six months before, and her apartment was in New York, where I’m from. Just at that moment, they said the buyers accepted my counteroffer.
The more we cultivate our ability to be present, the more it opens up.
So I did this quick calculation in my head and realized my mother’s apartment would pay for 73% of this house. So I just turned to the realtor and said, “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. I have something to tell you in the car.” We got in the car, and I said, “Let’s put an offer in on my favorite house because suddenly two-thirds of it is paid for, so we can do it.” I just sent a big thank you to my mother on the other side because we got to have our dream house through that divine timing.
Everything is orchestrated. It’s really beautiful. Speaking of which, maybe you could share some of the other really pivotal synchronicities and magic moments and insights into kind of the other side of the veil and how everything is so divinely orchestrated for us. Do you have some examples that pop into your head?
Well, I’ve always had this kind of intuitive finger on the pulse, especially around my business, around when things need to shift. I have more clairaudience than clairsentience, and I don’t particularly have direct communication with my ancestors on the other side. Sometimes I can feel my father around. For example, when my mother was dying, I went to New York. It wasn’t smacking the pandemic, but I flew, and I was by her side in her final days, and I could tell she was about to go, and it was really funny.
Her caretaker said, “Oh, yes, she’s a really amazing woman from Jamaica.” And she said, “I saw your father standing at the foot of the bed two days ago, and I told him, “Go away, go away. Marie-Elizabeth’s not here yet. She has to wait. You can’t take her yet.”’ I thought, “Wow, that’s amazing.” I could feel his presence in the room as my mother was getting ready to go. But she was hanging on, and she was scared. Even though she was nonverbal and not conscious, I could feel all that. Just at that moment, a couple of things happened.
Number one, this chant. It’s a Sanskrit mantra called the Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra, a mantra to Shiva. It’s called the ‘Great Death Defying Mantra.’ I had to actually look it up because the mantra spontaneously came to me. I began to chant it, and then I thought, “Which mantra am I chanting?” I couldn’t even remember which one it was because it’s been quite a few years since Mantra was my main practice. So I look up on the Internet. Turns out it’s this mantra that’s typically chanted when people are dying and for 40 days after people die to help their souls cross over.
It was going on in the background. Just at that moment, a healer that I work with texted me and said, “How’s your mom? How are you doing? What’s happening?” I said, “She’s hanging on. She won’t go. She’s not going.” She actually talked me through helping my mother to let go. What I found was speaking to her in her native tongue. My mother was from Sweden, so I began spontaneously speaking to her in Swedish, soothing her, saying thank you, and all of this.
There were so many synchronicities between the mantra arriving in my mind at just the right time, and then my healer texting me out of the blue at just the right moment, and then me getting this hit to switch to Swedish. Her death was incredible. It was beautiful. I was telling her, like, “Hey, Papi’s here. He’s waiting for you. It’s okay to go. You’ll be received.” And she finally was able to let go.
Wow, that’s beautiful. And it is very important that you do those things. You listened to your intuition, and you took powerful, positive action. I hope that inspires our listeners to do the same for anybody they know who is going through the death process or when the time comes when they can make a recommendation. There are death doulas. I didn’t know that that was a thing until recent years. I really understand a lot more about death now than I had before.
It’s a beautiful unfolding. It’s not the end; it’s another beginning. It’s a door we go through. For people who feel so scared and final about it, that rubs off on the person that you’re trying to encourage and soothe and assist. You have to manage your own energy and your own stinking thinking if you’re at somebody’s bedside.
When you're present and focused outward, nervousness fades, allowing intuition to flow freely. Share on XI love that you bring that up because my father died in 2000, and he also was afraid of dying. My father had cancer, and very well-meaning people told him he should meditate, and he should do this, and he should do that. He tried. But if you’ve never been a meditator and all of a sudden you’re in the weeks before death, and you’re trying to meditate, you feel like a failure because you can’t quiet your mind. You have this idea that your mind’s supposed to be empty when you’re meditating.
Of course, if you don’t have a lifetime of practice, it’s hard to do so. But he was a pilot, and he flew in formation. On our last flight, before he could no longer fly, I noticed that when he was trying to explain to me what formation flying was. Now, for your listeners who don’t know what that is, it means you’re flying about four feet off your leader’s wing. A bunch of planes are flying very close to each other, like in an air show or something.
I noticed somebody was trying to explain the process to me. He was wavering, and our position wasn’t great. I just said, “Hey, just don’t bother explaining it to me, just fly,” and immediately, he steadied out. Our plane steadied out, and we locked in. I described meditation to him like that. I was like, “You already know how to meditate. Notice the difference when you were trying to do two things at once, you were trying to talk to me and fly the plane.
I have focused on presence, listening, and attunement for over thirty years, which is why I have access.
How much easier it was when you just flew the plane. You just locked into position.” That enabled him to recognize, “Oh, I know how to do that.” He relaxed, and we were able to work through his fear of death together. By the time he actually did pass, he was at peace. And again, it was beautiful. I had the good fortune that both my parents’ deaths were magical and beautiful. Hard, but had a lot of synchronicity and magic around that.
Nice. You mentioned earlier some of your abilities, such as clairaudience, clairsentience, and so forth. Could you go into a bit more detail on that? How did you develop that, or how did you end up knowing that that was an ability, and how did you tune into it?
The clairaudience began shortly before my father died. I’ve been working in the wellness space since 1990—over 30 years I’ve been in this world. I started as a massage therapist, became an acupuncturist, and kept on getting more and more subtle from there. A sound healing, color healing, all the healings. I left my practice in California, moved back to New York for his last six months, and spent about eight hours a day meditating as a way to have space and presence to be able to be with him and support him in his process. That was our agreement. “I move back to New York, I’m going to be 100% there for you.”
What I found in meditating for so many hours a day was that my listening got very clear. By the time he got close to death, I was basically taking dictation on what to say. It just was something that I devoted. It wasn’t that I went in with the idea that I was going to start hearing guidance, but it was a byproduct of my commitment to presence. I think that’s true. The more we cultivate our ability to be present, the more these abilities open up. I already had a lot of intuitive sense feeling the clairsentience from being a healer for 10 years. I was already used to feeling people’s bodies, sensing where I needed to touch, where the opening would happen, etc. But the auditory piece happened really around his death when I committed to being present.
Beautiful.
The way I tune in now is not that active a practice. It’s something that I mean when I’m coaching. Now, I primarily mentor people and no longer do hands-on work. It’s all over Zoom. I’ve been on Zoom since 2015, and I’ll just hear what to say. I don’t have to do any fancy stuff to set it up. I just have to get present. After 30-plus years of working with people, there is a kind of transition that happens when I move into my office space or when I click open the Zoom window.
There’s a kind of automatic arrival. All I have to do really is to be present. When I’m present, I can hear. If it’s noisy in my head, then it’s harder to hear because there’s competing noise. That’s my main suggestion and my main practice—just to do as much as possible to be present. These abilities are innate to us, and I think they just need to be uncovered. It’s not something special or magical that some people have. It’s just a question of where you’ve placed your attention in your life. I happen to have placed my attention on presence, listening, and attunement for over 30 years. That’s why I have access.
If you are, let’s say, not on a Zoom call with a client, but you are on a podcast like this, or you’re giving a talk at a conference or something, do you get the same level of knowingness and guidance through the clairaudience and clairsentience?
I do. It depends a little bit on how nervous I am. Nervousness is like a static. It’s kind of like noise in the way. I love this image of a flashlight. The flashlight has a beam. If the beam of my flashlight—of my attention—is on myself, if I’m self conscious, if I’m concerned about how I look, if I’m worried about saying the right thing, that tends to block a channel. But if my flashlight is pointed outward and the light of my attention is flowing onto who I’m with or the surroundings or the room, I’ll feel things, and a story will come that I didn’t plan to share. I’ll know to look at a certain person at a certain moment, and afterward, they’ll say, “Oh, my God, that thing you said when you were looking at me, that was for me, that kind of thing, it just kind of happens. Do you find that too? What do you find?”
Well, I just relax, trust and know that whatever I’m meant to ask in a podcast interview is going to come. I don’t do a lot of prep ahead of time. I just get into a state of knowingness and being of service.
Yeah, I love that.
Do questions and things just pop into your head as you’re talking, or do you get stuff come to you ahead of time that, “Oh, I need to bring this up,” or things like that, or is it a combination of things?
That’s a great question. It’s usually more in the moment. I don’t get a lot of precognitive stuff, except yesterday I was writing in my journal. Another way that I access guidance is through journaling.
Yeah, me too.
Ask specific questions. I’ll literally write the question, put a quotation mark around it, and then wait and write down what I hear word by word.
I’ll ask specific questions. I’ll literally write the question, put a quotation mark around it, and then wait and write down what I hear word by word. Yesterday, I did get a message about the future, but most often, I get a message about the present, something that needs to be said or a certain way to approach a person. I believe a lot in calibrating how we show up to the level of the listener.
So you and I are able to have this conversation, but I could go on somebody else’s podcast, and we’re not going to talk about any of this stuff because I calibrate to the level of the listener; it’s going to be more effective. You might as well speak to what people can hear. Thankfully, your audience can hear a huge range of fascinating things, so we can go all over the place together, which is great.
I find that I get guided like that, “Oh, maybe don’t use the word clairaudience with this person. Maybe just say intuition with this person.” I calibrate to the listener because I want to be understood.
Do you get a lot of angel numbers?
It’s funny. My best friend and I text each other whenever we see 11-11. That’s the primary one I get. With my ex-husband, I don’t want to go into the whole backstory, but there was a number that was significant in his relationship with his first wife. I was the second wife, and to this day, that number will still show up, and I’ll be like, “Girl, get out of my space.” It’s as if the first wife is visiting me, and I’m like, “I’m not married anymore to him. You can leave now.”
That’s funny. Do you know what pops me up when I hear that? It’s something I learned called the ‘full court of atonement.’ Do you know what this is?
I do not.
I had Amy Jo Ellis on this podcast, and what an amazing episode. It wasn’t then that I learned about the Full Court of Atonement. It was actually by getting some coaching or mentoring from Tina Zion, who was also a guest on this podcast. She told me about the Court of Atonement. It’s basically calling in the heavenly court. And because of your higher self and the other higher self, you can have multiple people show up in court.
You just have to invoke this through a prayer. You just read it off, and you can get a sense if you’re tuned in, if the souls that you’ve requested be part of the full court of atonement, if they show up and everything settles out of court because it’s your higher self and their higher selves, it’s like, “Oh, I totally get where you’re coming from. I can see it through your eyes and your perspective.” Because, of course, we can all do that on the other side.
“Let’s resolve all this.” Everything just kind of ameliorates or dissipates by calling in a court of atonement. So there’s a website, courtofatonement.com. You can buy one of her ebooks for $5 and just read about it. Or you can just simply listen to my episode and use one of the sample prayers that are part of the episode and try this out. It really does work. It’s amazing.
Wow. So you can use it with anyone you feel unsettled with, that kind of thing?
Or if they feel unsettled or unresolved or some open loops might be the case with the soul keeps tapping on your window. Right?
Yeah. 1234, she shows up.
And also 1234 doesn’t just mean that it’s that person or soul that’s showing up. If you look at Kyle Gray’s book, Angel Numbers, what he channeled was 1234 is, “You are moving up the spiritual ladder. Your angels are acknowledging your intentions and your steps toward growth. Know that you’re being encouraged and supported.”
Wow, great. That’s good to know. I’m going to adopt that whenever I see 1234. I’m going to think of that now. Thank you.
That’s a good point, too, that these different angel numbers that we get have different meanings, and it’s our job to unpack them and decode them. So I get 1111 a lot. I know that it doesn’t just mean one thing. So, I’m asking for guidance on where I can look it up. Is it in the Kyle Gray Angel Numbers book? Is it in Doreen Virtue’s Angel Numbers 101 book? Am I supposed to search for it on Google? On Google Images? Do I look at the featured snippet in Google? Or do I start digging into the search results, and I know that I’m being guided to exactly the right interpretation because there’s no time on the other side? They already see which one I chose.
Oh, that’s fascinating. I love that. I will start doing that now with the 1111 because it’s really been this way up until now. It’s funny because my best friend’s name is Angel. No coincidences. It’s been this way that Angel and I connect. We have this format, so whoever gets there first, if we’re in the same time zone, texts 1111 with a heart, and then the other one texts back, heart, heart, heart. We always do it the same way.
Sometimes, it’s like, “Oh, you beat me to it. I almost got in there.” It’s just fun because it’s a touch point. We don’t get to see each other in person that often. We don’t live in the same place. It’s a way for us to affirm that we’re always connected. I love it for that. But I haven’t explored its other aspects. I’m excited to now kind of expand my range of what 1111 could be saying to me.
And you know what’s funny? This is so cool. I love how the universe works and how God just orchestrates all this. As you were talking, I was searching for 1111 because I know one of the meanings was about a deceased loved one trying to get ahold of you. Sometimes, that’s exactly what is happening. And then I’m tuning into who is trying to get a hold of me, what’s the message, and so forth because I don’t normally allow any deceased person to use me as a medium. I’m not interested in that; it is only divine and sacred.
Me neither.
Somebody who’s not at that level is tapping on my window metaphorically. Then they’re going to have to get the angels to use angel numbers to get my attention. They’re going to have to ask for some help. And then I’ll ask for some mediation, like, “Hey, Archangel Gabriel, can you help get this message through? Because I don’t want to just be open to any kind of frequencies.”
I want to be present in this world, and I want to serve people in it.
Same. I think that’s partly why I haven’t historically seen dead people like friends of mine do, because I just am not available to that. I want to be present in this world, and I want to serve people in it. I have my guides that I connect with and help me, but I’m not available to be a medium for anybody who’s a living person who has passed on.
Bubble of protection. It doesn’t serve you to allow just anything. What I was gonna share about this fun synchronicity that just happened is I was trying to Google for 1111 to find that message. I’m on a Mac, so I was using Safari. I was putting it into the location bar 1111. It didn’t take me to Google to search. It actually took me to another webpage I had already pulled up before. Safari does that. It says, no, I’ve got the exact result because you went there several times.
So it took me to theangelwriter.com, and I wonder if this is where that image is. And scroll, scroll, scroll. There it is. Of course, there it is. Amazing because the deceased loved one may be reaching out to you. And then there’s a picture of some grass and flowers and part of a tree. I’m like, “Yep. I’ve gotten that one a number of times when loved ones are trying to reach out and help me out.” So yeah, that’s one of the meetings.
Wow, I love that.
Yeah, it’s fun stuff. Let’s go to a much more physical-based topic and go into biohacking because I know that’s a passion, an interest of yours and mine. It’s such a dichotomy from flying high in the ethereal realms and connecting to God to actually trying to figure out how to biohack your HRV or your body fat percentage or whatever. How do you balance those? What percentage of your focus and attention is on biohacking—the physical body versus all the woo-woo stuff?
Well, I’ve been humbled a great deal by my body. In my younger days, I was very much a mind-over-matter person. I was much more kind of woo spiritual. I practiced yoga for many years. I meditated, I chanted. It was all about transcendence in a certain way. And then, in my 40s, as I was getting divorced before it happened, I developed chronic pain. I had a decade of hip pain.
Because I’m a stubborn person, it took me a decade to get an X-ray because I was trying to heal my hips with acupuncture and hypnosis and all the subtle things. This massage therapist was like, “My work typically holds with people, and it’s not holding with you. I wonder if there’s something going on with your bones. I really think you should get an X-ray.” I finally went and got an X-ray. It turns out my hips had developed bone spurs, and they were sticking out from the head of the femur, scraping the acetabulum. There was nothing to be done but replace.
When I was around 50, I had to replace both my hips. It was a huge learning experience, and all this energy stuff is great. When things manifest at the physical level, they need a physical remedy and a physical response. All the hypnosis and all of that was useful. I worked through a bunch of emotional stuff, and I had to confront my body.
There are moments when we really do have to deal with the chemistry of the body.
The same thing happened when my thyroid tanked in my early 40s. My thyroid failed, and I had to go on thyroid medication. I tried for six months with vitamins and supplements and diet, and I was miserable. I finally started taking bioidentical. I take compounded thyroid medication, not Synthroid. And practically overnight, I was back. I felt great. I’m like, “Oh, some things are chemical.” You really do have to deal with chemistry. We are in a body, and so there are things, there are moments where we really do have to deal with the chemistry of the body.
So since then, I’ve been much more approaching things from a more integrated perspective. I bought a hyperbaric chamber. When I was going through my surgeries, I was going to rent it, but then I thought, “Oh, I’m going to want to keep using this because hyperbaric oxygen is amazing.” Ever since 2016, I’ve had a hyperbaric chamber in my house. It’s one of those Canvas Homes that gets up to 4 PSI.
When I’m in California, I get in there a few times a week for 90 minutes at a time. I watch movies, I read whatever, or listen to podcasts, but I just really believe. And now I finally found a hyperbaric chamber here in Cabo. So now I can do it here, too, not at my home, but at a clinic 10 minutes from the house. They also do IV vitamin drips, ozone, and all this great stuff. I recently just did a week of longevity treatments, including stem cells and exosomes.
And because I want to support my physical body, I channel a lot of energy when I work. I have a nervous system that tends to fritz if it’s not properly supported. And I can tend toward anxiety and get overly revved up because I run so much energy. I’ve just learned I need to do these things to downregulate my breath.
I don’t do yoga anymore because my hip flexibility isn’t all that. But I do qigong and strength training because I’m a woman in my late 50s, and you gotta keep your muscle on. I have this hyperbaric and IV drip resource. So when I got back from three weeks of travel this past week, boom, I went in for Myers’ cocktail, which is a fantastic IV drip for rejuvenation.
A mega dose of vitamin C, as well as some other stuff, right?
When things manifest at the physical level, they need a physical remedy and a physical response.
It was a Myers combined with ozone. Ozone is really great for reducing inflammation and helping your immune system to function better. I did a combination thing because I was on eight planes in three weeks. When I come home after a push like that, I make sure that I sleep extra time. I barely ever have alcohol anymore anyway because it just doesn’t feel good. But if I have had alcohol, I was in Italy, so I did have some Prosecco. But I typically will do a clean diet for a while, and I’ll sleep extra hours if the jet lag allows, and then do some kind of direct support to my system as well as breath, qigong exercise, and we walk every morning with the dogs. It’s just gotten more and more important to do that.
Yeah. When you say breath, what kind of breathing exercises are you doing?
Well, if I find myself anxious, my go-to is the box breathing. That’s just the simplest. For the listeners who are not watching on video, you inhale, hold, exhale, and hold for the same number of counts. So you’re creating, in essence, a box with your breath. Within three to five rounds of that, your system will start to downregulate. That one’s great to do before bed or any time that you feel stressed out or anxious.
Oh, let’s do it right now.
You have a bit more time.
Let’s do three rounds.
Okay. Let’s do a round. Inhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold 2, 3, 4. Exhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold 2, 3, 4. As you practice, the amount of time that the number of counts that you do is really determined by how long you can hold your breath out because that is usually the scariest for most bodies to be without breath at all. As you get to know your own system, you can extend it and try five or six, but it all depends.
You don’t want to hold your breath out for so long that your system goes into panic because that defeats the purpose of the whole thing. I like to start with four because most people can really do four, but you can go longer.
Yeah. You can even do a surprising amount of breath hold if you do Wim Hof. I love that there’s a video of Wim talking people through it. You can hold for first after. It’s almost like hyperventilating. You’re breathing a lot. Then, you do the hold for maybe a minute and a half, and then another one after another round of hyperventilating breathing. Two minutes, and then another round of breathing, and then hold for two and a half minutes.
I was blown away by how easy it is to hold your breath for two and a half minutes. Just by practicing this every day for not even a week, you could potentially be in that state, so that’s pretty cool.
I love that technique. It’s an incredible technique. My husband and I went to a reset retreat over New Year’s. The retreat is called Reset Retreat. It’s in Sayulita, Mexico. But I think they’re closing that location. They’re actually opening a location in Portugal. So, if you Google Reset Retreat Portugal, it’s in the Azores.
We used that technique before we did a cold plunge before we sat in the ice bath. It was so powerful because I found the system goes into like, “Oh, my God, it’s so cold.” But then after about 30 seconds of that, I was able to come back to a normal breath and stay in for 3-5 minutes, somewhere around there. It was so powerful to relax in that kind of intensity. I think that’s what these practices are really all about. Whether it’s meditation, breathwork, qigong, or any of these practices, it’s about staying steady in the face of intensity in life.
Or, put another way, to get comfortable in the uncomfortable.
If we can expand our range and stay comfortable in greater levels of discomfort, we can be much more effective in our lives.
Exactly. Because if we can expand our range and stay comfortable in greater levels of discomfort, we can be much more effective in our lives. We can impact each other in a more positive way. So we’re less reactive with each other and can be more proactive and more responsive. I feel like as a culture, especially in the West, we’re very attuned to comfort. We want to be comfortable, and we’ve acclimatized our houses.
It’s not that I’m complaining. Thank God for air conditioning. Living in Mexico, I am a fan. And there’s something to be said for being able to stay steady in the face of discomfort. It just makes everything in life more accessible and attainable.
I think it’s important that you attune with the body so that you don’t seem to be overpowering your body with, “Hey, we’re going to do this whether you like it or not.” If you talk to your body and say, “Look, this is not going to be that comfortable, but it’s for your highest and best good, too. We’re going to get through this together.” Do you ever talk to your body like that?
I do. I’m so glad you brought up that point. The first half of my life was about pushing through and forcing my body into things. I was a dancer and then a yogini, and by age 50, I had had two hip replacements. So the body wins. The body’s going to win, so you might as well befriend it. I had to learn the hard way. And now I’m much kinder. There are times when I’m like, “Hey, let’s do this thing that’s gonna be uncomfortable.”
In Chinese medicine, cysts, lumps, and other conditions occur when liver energy is constrained.
There are other times when I say, “Okay, I’m gonna back off. Let’s not do that,” because it’s not about forcing and creating harm. So I think that’s really important for our listeners to consider. When are you pushing in a way that expands your range? And when are you pushing in a way that creates harm and that’s actually doing violence to yourself? It’s very important to get to know each flavor so that you can catch when you’re doing harm and back off.
Also, I think to see your body as something that’s not necessarily just a part of you, but as its own entity talking to your body, recognizing it’s a she for you and that you can get her to cooperate by getting on a similar wavelength and communicating. You can even get your individual cells to all get on board with a certain program for a cell in your body. It’s like the voice of God. You tell your cells and your liver or something like, “Hey, I just had this amazing, delicious glass of wine. Can you please process this in the way that brings about the highest and best good?” And this stuff works. It’s not just nonsense. It’s real.
It’s real. What flashed to my mind as we were talking was an experience I had in the mid-90s. I felt a lump. Now, I have cystic breasts. I always have. But I felt this lump seemingly appeared overnight and didn’t know what it was. I was in my 20s, and I sat down and I meditated. I had a conversation with my breast, which then pointed me actually to my liver because of my liver energy.
In Chinese medicine, we tend to get cysts, lumps, and other conditions when our liver energy is constrained. The breast was like, “Okay, I’ll do what I can, but you need to talk to the liver.” So I went over, and I talked to the liver, and I was like, “Hey, you know, this thing in my breast, it’s making me nervous. Do you think you could smooth that out, please?” We had this whole conversation, and it was gone the next day.
If you have trouble conversing with yourself, try writing your question with your dominant hand, then switch to your non-dominant hand to see if you can access an answer.
That gives me goosebumps, you know, the angel bumps. Wow.
Yeah, it’s amazing. I’ve touched a lot of bodies, I’ve worked with a lot of people, and I don’t want to set up a situation where if someone tries that and it doesn’t work, they’ve failed because some things do show up on the physical level that does need to be addressed with medication or surgery. Like, I couldn’t dissolve my bone spurs with a meditation like that. It just wasn’t going to happen. The conversation is really, to my mind, about being open, getting curious, and asking your body what it wants and needs.
Because your body, if you will, listen, it might say, “Go to the doctor,” or it might say, “Go buy this nutrient.” Or it might say, “Do this yoga pose.” But it’s it’s the difference. It’s a bottom-up approach versus a top-down approach. And I think we tend to think we can fix everything from the top down. I want to say that that’s not true.
It’s all important stuff. I know we’re running out of time, but I want to bring up this last point before we close the interview. And that is regarding shadow work. This relates actually to what we were just talking about. You were talking to your liver and integrating or negotiating something. Whatever happened, your liver said, “Okay, I’ll take care of it.”
Now, there are aspects of ourselves that are shadow-disowned, disassociated, and not accepted. “Nope, that’s not me. Whenever I see that in somebody else, I get triggered like crazy. I hate that in other people. I don’t have that issue.” And it’s part of our shadow. Absolutely, we do have it as part of our shadow side. We just won’t look at it.
I read the book by Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, and I went through and did the exercises that were so powerful—integrating, speaking to those disowned aspects, giving them a name or listening for a name, and then speaking to that part of me, using the name that I was given and saying like, “What do you have to teach me? What do you need that I’m not providing you?”
Then you address that, and suddenly, you feel so much better, and you’re no longer triggered by that behavior or that aspect in another person. All those opportunities to get triggered just kind of dissipate or disappear. It’s just a beautiful thing. So I’m just curious. What pops up for you when I bring this up about shadow work?
I am delighted when you bring this up because I do a lot of part-time work with my clients. This is something I’ve done for years. I’ve been trained in parts work through about four different traditions, and that is exactly what you’re talking about in a client session. I do it with myself as well, often in a journal.
And what I will say to our listeners. If you have trouble accessing or having a conversation with yourself, you might want to try writing your question with your dominant hand, then switching your pen or pencil over to your non-dominant hand and seeing if you can access an answer that way. If it’s hard for you to just hear, sometimes using your non-dominant hand is a doorway.
It’s so amazing that you mentioned that. One of my earliest episodes on this podcast is with Bill Donius. He’s got a whole book on non-dominant handwriting. He teaches about this. And coincidentally, no coincidences, of course, when I did this exercise, hearing him talk about non-dominant handwriting, he had us write down a totem animal. And I wrote down with my regular dominant hand, my right hand, zebra or something like that because I want to show off and be memorable and cool and all this sort of stuff. Then, I used my left hand to do the same exercise, but this time, I wrote down a humpback whale.
Wow. Full circle. Here we are, back to whales. That’s amazing.
So cool.
That feels so resonant for you, too, because they are so wise, ancient, conscious, and sentient. That makes a lot of sense. So anyway, I’m a huge fan of parts work. I love doing shadow work because I come from the frame. So we tend to fear what’s in the shadow. We tend to dislike the parts of ourselves that are inconvenient or don’t fit our pretty image of who we want to be. But the truth is that every single part of us wants the best for us. Every part of us loves us and wants the best for us, even if the way it expresses itself is harmful.
For example, if I start sliding into adrenal fatigue, my self-hatred gets very loud. So if I start to hear a lot of self-hatred, I know to get my adrenals checked, first of all. Second, I have learned to turn toward my critic, self-hatred, fear, judgment, or any of those things and ask, “What do you want for me? What attention are you seeking for me? What do you want me to do?” And invariably, it wants me to be better in some way or show up differently. One thing that I love to do with people is change the job description. If there’s a voice like the inner critic, that’s paralyzing. When I was in graduate school, I had an MFA in Poetry. In my MFA program, my inner critic got so loud I couldn’t write.
We tend to dislike the parts of ourselves that are inconvenient or don’t fit our pretty image of who we want to be. But the truth is that every single part of us wants the best for us.
I had to bring a poem to class every week, and I was really struggling. I thought I was going to fail my program, so I finally started talking to my critic. Like, “Dude, my critic feels masculine to me. I need to turn in a poem. Would you please just back off so I can write a poem and bring it to class?” And we ended up having this whole conversation. “Oh, I’m trying to help you write better, and I want you to be better, etc.”
And I said, “Okay, would you make a deal with me? Let me get a first draft. Just sit back and let me get a first draft out, and then I will invite you in to help me edit the poem because you have the kind of dispassionate, clear, critical eye that I need in an editor. But when you bring it in, when I’m trying to create, you stifle me. It shuts me up. I can’t write anything. Would you be willing to change your job description?”
Since 2008, my inner critic has functioned more as an editor rather than coming in at the beginning of a process and making me stuck and unable to move forward.
I love that.
With my clients, I will help them negotiate a job change if they have a voice that’s particularly getting in the way. I do a two-week intensive with people where we go to town on a particular pattern that is biting them and getting in their way. And very often, part work is part of what we do. Then, we also do some brain retraining that aligns the subconscious with the conscious and stuff like that. It’s one of my favorite things for some reason. That’s another place where my clairaudience really manifests. I can hold conversations with people’s voices, and somehow they’re able to do it too. It transmits to them.
That is really cool. What a gift. I want to share one last resource relevant to what you were just talking about. Whatever it is—the fear, the criticism or whatever is coming in that maybe gets you stuck—is an incredible tool or technique. I learned it from Phil Stutz’s book The Tools. It involves running towards the fear and actually through it, imagining through a visualization exercise where you just imagine that fear keeping you stuck or avoiding some issue.
Imagine that as some sort of dust or cloud of something that is not particularly hard. So when you run towards it, you can actually run through it. When you run through it, well, of course, you get to the other side where the fear is no longer there. It’s just such a really cool exercise. The way Phil came about inventing this tool was by learning as a kid and as a teenager the secret to his best buddy’s ability at football. He was all-state and a real champion. He confided in Phil that the first thing he would do is run towards the biggest guy on the opposing team to get tackled the most brutal way and then be fearless the entire rest of the game.
That’s great. Cool. Thank you for sharing that.
I know we’re way over time now, so let’s share your website and whatever next step our listeners should take if they want to work with you, if they want to learn from you, your socials, and all that sort of stuff.
My website is marieelizabethmali.com, and on the website you’ll find a quiz for women, Wise Woman Power Quiz. So if you’re a woman listening to this, take the quiz. I have a 7-day Revive Your Radiance series with podcast episodes and all sorts of information to help you access the juice again. Very often, by the time we get to midlife, we’re tired and tapped out because we’ve given so much to everyone else. This is a way to revive yourself and really get clear on what you want in this next phase of life.
For men, I offer private work, which could be a two-week intensive or an ongoing coaching package. My coaching page has information on all of this. While much of my marketing is directed at women, I’m open to working with men. I love the men I’ve worked with, and we’ve had great success together.
I’m very active on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Awesome. Thank you, Marie-Elizabeth. This was fabulous and inspiring.
Oh, what a fun conversation.
So now our listeners hopefully will feel empowered to go out there and do something amazing and spread the light even further. Thank you again, Marie-Elizabeth, and thank you, listener. This is your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off and wishing you a fantastic, blessed week and life. Take care. See you next week.
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