Body Imag{ination}: Demystifying the disconnect between women and their bodies

The following is the transcript of our "Conversations That Create Change" episode with Ramona Galey.  We discussed body image issues that are common to women and especially lesbians and queer women.  

Ramona is a body image coach who works with women within the Law of Attraction framework.  She figured out how to align and lose 60 pounds at the age of 59, healed a back injury at 60, and is now releasing her Hashimoto's condition.  As you will see in the video, Ramona is a remarkable person!

You can find our other Conversations That Create Change here.  

- Now we're recording. So, we will have questions at the end and please feel free. Like, you guys are giving up time to be here tonight, so you don't have to rely on the replay. Everyone else will. So, any question you have, like, please put it out there. If anything we say doesn't quite make sense, or if it just inspires a question within you, this is the time. Let's talk about it. So I met Ramona, I think, through a podcast group. It's really not easy to find LGBTQ guests, and when she mentioned that she is LGBTQ, I was like, "Okay, we need you!" So we started chatting and especially because her focus is on body connection, and I am really personally working on that hardcore right now. Like, I really want to get to a point where I am just so overjoyed and happy with my body in whatever state that it's in. I think a lot of you know, if you watched my TED Talk, I got to a point in my mental health slide that I was using fitness and control over food as a way to run away from my life, and now I'm very aware of not getting back to that point, but damn, I looked good. I really liked how I looked then, and I want to have that same feeling, but have it be regardless of what my body shape is in. So I signed up for Ramona's BodShift class, which is happening and she is amazing. I have a feeling there's gonna be a discount code for anyone who's here, if they are interested in that class. So I've been in it for a little bit now, and it's been incredible. It's been such a good experience for me and exactly what I need, and I feel like that's just completely appropriate that exactly what I needed fell right into my lap when I needed it. So it's awesome. So if you have any questions about that as well, please feel free to ask. You have the teacher here as well as a student, so you'll be able to get both perspectives. Ramona, welcome! I am all done talking. Now it's you.

- Thank you, Elena. I am so glad to be here, and you know, I was just remembering as you were recounting that usually in that group that we're in together, if somebody posts and says, "I'd like a guest for such and such," they get 40, 50 responses. I think you got two, if I remember correctly, or maybe only one.

- You were the only one that followed through. I don't remember any others.

- Yeah. So maybe somebody else just said a comment. So yeah, and I've had that same experience too in other groups. Like, "Hey, I'm looking for such and such." Cricket, cricket. Like, the LGBT thing, it's scary. It's scary for those of us who've been out since we were in our twenties, and we're now in our, you know. So yeah, anyway, I'm very glad to be here, and I'm looking forward to this conversation, and I love the idea that we're gonna talk about anything we darn well please. That's very cool.

- Absolutely, and I see that we have four attendees and I actually think I only know one. I know Elena, because she has the best name on the planet. She just spells it wrong. So, and I know that Elena is LGBTQ, and I'm not sure about any of the others, so for now, I think we should assume that everyone is, 'cause I think it's really valuable to talk about what are some of the common body image issues that queer women deal with? Go for it.

- Okay. I was being distracted by a friend. That's my friend Vanessa signing in right now. I can see her. She's a good friend. She's in China, so this is nine o'clock in the morning for her right now. So that's very cool.

- Oh my gosh.

- So, okay, so body images. Body image for lesbians or body image for women. Where do you want to start?

- Let's start with women and then let's move into lesbians or queer women, however they identify.

- Okay, great. So if you think about it, all of us women get a very similar message from day one, and you know, I got to relive this again just recently. A good, good friend of mine is visiting with her grandson right now. He's about a year and a half old, and she sent me a video and everybody was playing and interacting with him and going, "Gr, gr, show us your muscles!" They were trying to get him to do this, right? And I was thinking, does any little girl ever get that interaction? She's supposed to be pretty and she's supposed to be sweet, and she's complimented a lot on that, whether she is that way or not. "Oh, you're so sweet. You're so pretty." And then what do we get to be when we're a little bit later in life? We get to be sweet and we get to be pretty. We grow up and what do we get to be? We get to be sweet and we get to be pretty. So, you know, it's just kind of amazing that it's all about our bodies. Our bodies are supposed to look good and please others at all times. Only, we're not supposed to enjoy our bodies ourselves, and so there's a massive disconnect that can happen. It doesn't have to, but it does. It did for me. Let's put it that way. It did for me. And I see the message over and over all the time in every single ad, every single television show, every single everything. So, that's where I start. That's where I start. So, body image for me is about reclaiming my body. It's not anybody else's body, it's my body, and nobody else gets to tell me what it should look like, what it should feel like, what it should be doing, what it shouldn't be doing, and so getting back in touch with that, that's reclaiming my power and that's getting back in touch with a power that is endemic to everybody, but if you've cut yourself off from it, you can't feel it. It's there, it's not like it disappears, but you can't feel it, and you can't tap into it. So, for me, it's a matter of getting, you know, we all talk so much about mindset. You know, we meditate, we journal. If you're into the Law of Attraction, you might do rampages of appreciation. You might do vortex stories, all kinds of stuff, and I talk to so many clients who say, "I've been doing that stuff for years. I rampage. It doesn't help." And so we might say, "Give us an example." And the example that I hear, every time. I was gonna say so many times. Every time, if somebody is having trouble with getting into their body and they're starting to do a rampage, and by the way, just for anybody who doesn't know, a rampage of appreciation just means you start wherever you are and you look for something to appreciate and you talk about it until you build some momentum and you just look to feel better and better, find more and more to appreciate. It's a way of changing your emotional state and getting appreciation in your life. So, if you're out of your body, you might say, "Yeah, I really appreciate the fact that I have, you know, a good life and I have a roof over my head, and you know, everything is going well and everything is always working out for me."

- That's not right?

- No.

- Am I supposed to be doing something other than that?

- Yeah. Let me show you what a real rampage. I shouldn't say real. What an effective, what an aligned rampage is. I'm gonna try to remember the exact same things I just said. I love my life. I love the fact that I have a roof over my head. I feel so blessed because, I mean, there are people who don't have a roof over their head. It can rain outside. Do you see how I automatically, I couldn't even stay with the same words, because a true rampage takes me, whoosh, right away. I love my pillow. I love my skin. I love the idea of being able to eat anything I want. I love the idea of not being afraid to do some public speaking. Wouldn't that be cool? I can't really say I can public speak with no fear, but I like the idea of thinking about it, so there's all different ways of saying it in a way that's true, so the alignment, the integrity of being always in congruence with the truth of what you're saying. You have to believe what you're saying. Just sitting there, saying, "Yep, all is well. All is working out. I'm wealthy. I'm healthy." No! That's not aligned. You're not actually in your body. You're not perceiving your body. You're not aligned with your body. Actually, you're obviously in your body. I'm not suggesting that people are off in the ether somewhere. I'm saying you're not in perception and alignment with your body. You're not in touch with it.

- Just recently, have I realized the difference between being embodied and not.

- Yes.

- Like, truly being in my body and not, and I have spent decades not being embodied.

- Yeah, well, you know, I think a lot of teachers were kind of afraid to emphasize the body because the body, bodies are scary in our culture. Oh my gosh, if you talk about bodies, then you might be a pervert, you know? Or you might be queer. Oh dear. Oh dear, lions and tigers and bears, oh my. I mean, you might be inappropriate. You might offend someone. You might make somebody feel bad about their body. You might inadvertently say something horrible. I mean, there's a lot of pressure on bodies. You could show 'em naked and you can show them as young as five years old, dressed up like a little baby doll that's supposed to be very seductive, but don't you dare talk about it in a powerful way about a woman. Don't do it.

- Wow.

- So this is when everything changed for me, when I started really getting, all the mindset work that I'd been doing for years, with the Law of Attraction stuff. When I started really getting into my body, everything changed, everything changed. I can't even tell you. There was nothing that didn't change. Let's put it that way. Everything.

- You said something during one of our classes that I wrote down and I'm going to post it at some point. You said, "Once I started loving my body, my entire life changed." That really hit me, and I think it was more about what you said around that. You know, I think you said, "It all starts in the body." So whether you're trying to fit your love life or your financial life or your professional life, you've got to get your body aligned first.

- Yes, yes, because mindset work that doesn't find a place in your body, if you can't feel it resonating in your body, then you really haven't done the mindset work. It's what it boils down to, and this is one of the reasons why, you know, I think the bodies are kind of late to the party because it really is mindset work. You're changing your belief systems. You know, there's nothing particularly physical about that. You're changing the language you use to talk to yourself. There's nothing particularly physical about that. You know, mindset changes don't seem physical. So, it's kind of maybe even like mystical or something. Like, wow, why would that be in your body? But I'm just telling you, if you can't feel it, you're not doing it. That's the bottom line. If you're not feeling it, you're not doing it. You've got to feel it. Find any way you can to feel it.

- So I could be doing affirmations about my body every single day. I could be using essential oils on my body. I could be doing special chakra cleansing on my body, but if I'm not feeling that, it's not doing a damn thing.

- And when we say feeling, I mean emotionally feeling.

- Oh, okay.

- I would even go so far as to sensually feeling.

- Why? Why do you go there?

- Because if you say, "Oh, I'm so angry." And actually, I can feel it like tightness in my throat. Okay, that's pretty good. That's pretty good alignment. You know, if you can identify where you can feel it and describe it even in any way, shape or form. I've got tingles on the back of my neck or whatever it is. If you can feel it in your body and identify it, that's really good. You're doing great. If you can't, what do I mean exactly? When you really align with it, in other words, I can feel the tightness in my throat and resist it, I can say, "It's there. I don't like it. It's not appropriate. I don't want to be angry right now." Let's say I'm angry at my dead partner, right? Ooh.

- Shame. That's a lot of shame.

- Shame. Oh my goodness, how dare you? That's awful. Or it's hopeless because she's not here to, like, you know, fix it or whatever. Or just because it reminds me of something that happened from my past. You know, there could be all kinds of reasons to resist the feeling. So when I say sensual, I almost mean resonant. When you resonate with a feeling, that means you've fully accepted it. You've allowed it to fully embody, and I don't mean milking it. I don't mean holding onto it or attaching it, stretching it out for a million years, bringing it up again tomorrow. None of those things. Just when you resonate with it, when I resonate with a feeling, whether it's a wanted feeling or an unwanted feeling, a delightful feeling or a horrible icky feeling, when I resonate with it, I go, "I hear you. I feel you. I understand you. I love you." Now, I can use my redirect skills that I've learned, whether it's a pattern interrupt or rampage, or you know, all the various skills that you're learning in the class. Now I can choose to focus on something that I feel better about, and I can just, it's not that I'm pushing away that feeling. I've just told it I love it, and you don't have to say it verbally. It's the resonance that I'm talking about. That sensuality that says, "I fully accept this feeling." I don't reject it. Then it can go away. It can resolve into something, and it will because the goodness is always pulling us. The goodness is always pulling us, and it just happens like that. Whether you believe the goodness is pulling, that gets a little spiritual, a little woo-woo, but the fact is it will. It doesn't want to stay. It doesn't want to stay because it's not comfortable. It's not good. It's not really aimed towards what you want. What you want is always gonna be pulling you. So there's a little bit of a trust of faith in there. The first time you do it, you go, "Whoa, that actually worked, and I feel so much better." I mean, it's almost like a, "What?" But it really works. It's really cool.

- That has really made me... So, first, I connected that thought with, one of the concepts that I teach in my classes is radically acknowledging reality. That's one of the first steps of transformation. We need to radically acknowledge reality. And then that thought made me think about Elena, actually. And I chatted the other day and we were talking about this concept of fighting for our emotions. Like, defending our emotions and trying to explain them to someone else, but now I'm realizing that that can really be a part of this. Like, fighting to feel my emotions. Like, fighting to get that resonance with my emotions in my body, that it's worth that instead of shoving it down or shoving it away.

- I would want to hear more about the word fighting. So that's not something we would ever say in Law of Attraction, because we're always allowing. There's never any conflict. There's never any resistance. So, fighting kind of implies like two sides or something, but I suspect that's not how you're really using, and it's the vibration that matters. Not the word, right? So, as you're receiving, as you're acknowledging a feeling, and it feels icky or it's not constructive, it's what we would call low vibration. Really, the only trick in there is to not attach. Not to grab onto and try to hold it, and you actually don't want to attach to a great feeling either. You don't want to attach to anything. So if you say, "Oh, I'm really angry, I'm gonna go." You know, and this is typical therapy. I've been through this. You know, you take a bat and beat on that and doing all that stuff. So, which is great if you're having trouble getting it out. If you're having trouble even getting in touch with it, if you're having trouble finding it in your body, there's all kinds of stuff you can do, but there's a point there where if it turns into attachment, where you're holding onto it, you're milking it, and defending it is a great way of milking it and attaching to it, I'm sorry to say.

- Yeah, I can see that.

- So we might wanna talk a little bit about this defense thing. In fact, one of favorite, favorite quotes of all time is from Abraham Hicks, who was my teacher with the Law of Attraction, is, "I will never again defend where I am as if where I am is not perfect." So if you're talking about your feelings as if they're perfect in a way that lets them go if you don't like them, then that's great, but if you're defending, describing why you have them and going into the past and bringing up all kinds of ammunition, then you're attaching to them and they're sticking around, and if they're low vibration, they're in the active act of drawing more negative to you. So I wouldn't necessarily phrase it that way. I dare say that's probably not what you've been teaching, but the verbiage is just a little bit different. Our semantics are a little bit different.

- Sure, yeah. Interesting. Okay, We do have a question that I think ties into what we're talking about right now. She says, "How do you make sure those feelings are not just in the moment and superficial? What methods are there to make them concrete?" I think that what she's referring to is the feelings that you get to feel during a rampage of appreciation or something like that, or those feelings of feeling really connected, really resonant. How do we make sure that they're not just in the moment, superficial, but what can we do to make them concrete? And if I messed up that question, please feel free to reword it and ask again.

- So I would say that all feelings are impermanent. Superficial, I'm not really sure what that means exactly, except that, I mean, one of my first lessons that really resonated with me about feelings, thoughts and feelings, is that, pretend I'm the ocean and the thoughts and the feelings are like waves. So they're part of me. They're taking specific formats, but they're just kind of coming through, and it's a way of kind of separating. Like, in other words, I am not my thoughts. I am not, "I hate so-and-so." I'm not the hate. I'm just the person that happens to be experiencing that thought, and if that's just a wave and I don't like it, I can just kind of watch it come on through. There's no way to grab onto it. There's no way to make it stay. You know, it's just all part of me, and really, it would be the same thing with a positive thought. You know, there's no way to hang on to it. There's no way to continue feeling. You know, to force yourself to feel anything that you want to feel. So really, they're all impermanent, and if I let go of any concept that some are more permanent than others, and if I let go of any judgment that some are better than others, and I just simply say, this feels good or it doesn't feel good, and if it feels good, I can even feel better. and if it doesn't feel good, I know how to feel better. So, if my goal is always, and this is pretty much what I teach, do whatever it takes to feel good and not best, just better, better than what I feel right now, then I'm always headed in the direction I want to go, and I'm not judging anything that's happening. It's all just like these waves that are coming through. So I would call all feelings impermanent, and what was the other one? Superficial. I'd call them all superficial and impermanent. And that's good.

- Okay, but...

- [Ramona] Yes?

- Ramona knows that I do this. Our feelings are the guide, the compass of where our vibration is.

- Yes, yes.

- So we want our vibration to be high, however you define that, right? And that's the point of doing things like rampages of appreciation, right? So that we can get that vibration up as high as we can.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- I want that permanently. Like, I want that to stay. I want that wave to stay.

- So I'm gonna play devil's advocate and argue with you and tell you that you actually don't want that permanent one. You get bored. You get bored. As soon as you have what you want, you want more. You want a challenge. You've started your own business. You've learned lots of new things when nobody made you. We are learning machines. We are achieving machines. We are allowing machines. We love a challenge. We love a little bit of drama. We actually love contrast because that's how we know, you know, when you know what you don't want is really the only way you know what you do want. If you've never not had something, you don't really appreciate it. So I would argue with you that you don't actually want to stay pegged at the top of the line all the time. You like this.

- That might be true.

- The variety. Just call it variety. Variety is the spice of life. As soon as you've got exactly what you want, I would even pause it before you actually get it. When you see that, wow, I'm actually gonna get this, you're already onto what you want now, something different, whether you're totally aware of it or not. We get bored. We humans, we silly humans.

- So I'm gonna interrupt this train of thought for a little bit, just because I remembered something that I didn't bring up in your intro, and I feel like it's really important, and maybe that's only personally, but I think it is. When I first met Ramona and I got to read her bio, she had only picked up Law of Attraction stuff in your fifties, if I've done the timeline right?

- Yup.

- And was doing it for a while before she saw any results, and so I was like, "Okay, she shifted something." Like, she figured something out, and that's where I'm at. Like, I'm at the point where I really want to figure something out. And when she did, she was 59 years old and she lost 50 pounds.

- Yeah.

- Yeah. Her before pictures, and like literally, every time I see you on the screen now, I'm like, holy crap, and then she had a serious back problem, which she was able to heal. And now she's 61, and healing her Hashimoto's, which I think we're all like, we either have it or know someone who does, and it's a huge auto-immune problem in your life, and every doctor will tell you, it's not healable. It's something you have to just deal with for the rest of your life, and Ramona was like, screw that. I'm gonna heal it.

- Yeah. That's not what it is for me. I mean, you know, it's fine to describe it that way. And I've certainly had it described to me, you know, that way since I was about 34 years old, but yeah, that's not what it is for me now.

- That's awesome. So if anyone has questions about that, I felt like you should know that backstory, but I would like to dive into, okay. So we understand that women have been fed a story about what we're supposed to look and be like, so now let's take it to queer women. Where are our disconnect common problems?

- Oh my goodness. So, as queer, we grow up knowing we're different. Sometimes we know why, and sometimes we don't, but that's not really the point. Some would argue that there's a pretty big vibrational difference between those two, but I would say knowing you're different and not really feeling comfortable talking about it. And you know, it just brings up fear depending on your culture and your family, and you know, and whatnot, it can bring up fear. It can bring up shame. It can bring up guilt, embarrassment. All kinds of stuff. When we don't know what to do with that, and then we head into puberty and it turns out, wow, it really is in our body. Again, that scary subject, body, and especially for a pubescent teenager, right? Nobody wants to talk. I don't have a body. You don't have a body. Let's just not go there, right? Just, oh my gosh. You know, talk to a young man about his voice changing? Oh, no, forget it. Talk to a woman about menstruation? No, no, no, no, no, no. So, that, to me, it starts from the second you recognize that you're different, and I've talked to an awful lot of lesbians about this, queer women of all sorts, and it can be as early as age two. I remember, you know, my parents or somebody in my life would say, "Well, Ramona, when you grow up and you have children, you'll blah, blah, blah." I couldn't tell you what the rest of that sentence was because I couldn't listen. I couldn't hear it. I couldn't absorb it. I couldn't accept it, and it didn't apply to me. and that made me weird and I didn't know why. I didn't know I was lesbian until I was 22, 23 years old. So that's the beginning. And you know, a very, very small percentage of very fortunate women, you know, they don't internalize that, they're totally accepted, or they're actuated or they resolve it or whatever, but most of us are dealing with that sense that there's something wrong with us, and it's got to do with our bodies and it's got to do with our sexuality. Oh no, not only are we not gonna talk about our bodies, God forbid we should talk about sexuality. It's such a vulnerable, such intimate, such, you know, mysterious. You know, we're not hardly taught anything about, you know, I mean, sex ed was how big does a tampon get if you put it in water? You know what I mean? Like, I'm serious. I don't know what it is now, but that's what it was.

- Pretty much, yup.

- So that's the first part, and then when you have confusion about your sexuality, you don't have any role models. Now, the kids today do have some role models, but I would argue that they're still not normal role models. You know, there are exceptions to the rule, or you know, they're celebrities, but just normal role models are, you know, like the trouble we have getting people to respond in a business group, right? Any kind of a social media group, even a gay group. It's hard to get people to respond the way they do in other groups. Everybody's kind of covered. You know, circle the wagons and cover. And so when you've got that, what I would call, I call that split vibration, right? So we're accomplished, we're fantastically creative, we're talented, we're smart, we're strong, we're persistent. We're all these fantastic things, and we're also this really scared, ashamed, guilty thing deep down inside on some level. That's split vibrations. You've got high vibrations and low vibrations at the same time, alternating at the same time.

- Yes, yes.

- Split vibration is really confusing. This is like, you know, when you can't decide. You've got a major decision. Yes, no, yes, but, you know. This is also a split vibration. This is a by-choice split vibration that we do all the time because we don't know any better. Pros and cons lists, split vibration. Yes, but no, but, oh, but on the other hand, oh, but here. This could be like this circular, like, oh my God. Am I ever gonna figure out what to do? But this split vibration, that's very high and very low, and the very low, we still don't know how to talk about, and the very high, we're very accomplished, and everybody, you know, recognizes us and we get trophies and things, but it's there. This thing down here is, like, eating, You know, it's split vibration. It can be very debilitating and very disempowering, and I think that it happens throughout the LGBT community on a very consistent basis. And it's in our bodies, and actually any resistance, not just LGBT and it's not just sexual. If I have any resistance, if I am afraid of heights, you know, that's in my body. If I think I can not do public speaking, if I think I'm afraid of it, that's in my body. All resistance is in our bodies. So it still always comes back to get alignment between what we believe and what we want to believe and what we want to do and how we feel about ourselves and get that resonating into our bodies, and then we have all the power we need and it's no longer split vibration. In other words, it becomes a unified vibration, and that's really the goal that I'm always looking for with every single client, every single student. A unified vibration that's got nothing to do with what her specific goal is, what her specific body image is, what her sexuality is, what her romantic situation is or what she wants it to be, or how many children she has or how much money she makes or how old she is or what color she is It's got nothing to do with any of that. It's aligned vibration, mindset is what I call heartset, and it's in our body and that's it, that's it.

- So you have an incredible way, 'cause I'm at the point where if I was listening to this conversation, I'd be like, yeah, that's what I want. How do I get it? That's why I'm here. Tell me how to get that. So, you have this amazing, like, one habit, one rule, one skill, that when you master that, you get that, you get that aligned vibration.

- Yup, yup, I've broken it down to very, very simple.

- Teach us. Okay. So one rule. Do whatever it takes to feel good. I get pushback on this. People say, "Well, that means you want me to do drugs? Are we supposed to go rob banks? What does that mean?" You know, you can't do that. Society would fall apart. I just can't help but laugh at that. So do whatever it takes to feel good as a rule means, another word for it would be bliss-ipline. So the commitment--

- Wait, say that word again. Say that word again. Bliss-ipline. As in bliss, you know, I'm in bliss, because I feel good. Bliss-ipline, so the commitment to focus only on that which feels good. So when you make that commitment, when you accept this as your one rule in life, it's only one rule. It's easy to remember. Once you've made a commitment, it's pretty easy to do and that's it. Do whatever it takes to feel good. Now the tricky part is most people try to feel too much better than they're feeling right now. They try to skip over. I feel awful. I want to feel wonderful. Well, no, if you feel awful right now, you can feel just a little bit better. You can feel just a little bit better and then you can feel just a little bit better and then just a little bit better and then a little bit better and then a little bit better. And pretty soon you feel wonderful. You can't skip straight from awful to wonderful. So that's the only tricky part of it other than the agreement, which takes some trust. It takes some faith. Like, well, Ramona's telling me I'm not gonna be doing orgies or robbing banks or anything. So I'm going to trust her for just a little bit, and I'm gonna try this. That's all it takes, a little bit of faith, a little bit of trust and a commitment to bliss-ipline, and then don't try to jump too far and that's it. That's it. That's your one rule. Then the one skill, learn to discern what actually feels better. This one always cracks me up because people are like, what in the heck are you talking about? So, let's take sugar cravings. If I have sugar cravings and I think I'm supposed to do whatever feels good, then I think you're telling me go eat more sugar.

- Yeah.

- That's not it. When I discern that eating sugar actually doesn't make me feel better and see, when I'm already following the one rule, I've committed to the rule and now I'm learning the one skill, and I tend to want everyone to practice this skill away from their body because the body is the trigger point. So I'm going to teach you how to discern what feels good, let's say with money, or let's say with your children, or let's say with your boss, or let's say with making a video You're trying to, you know, like, practice this where it's easy, wherever it's easy for you. How to train your dog. What kind of flowers to pick for your centerpiece. Like pick really easy things. Do I like this glass? You see, I love this glass. You've seen this, right? So I love this glass because every single one of them, I have matching sets and everything, but they're obviously hand-done and they're beautiful. So I could pick this and focus on it rather than some big, heavy thing, right? So as I learned to discern what actually feels good, and then I come back to the sugar cravings, now I can let in the information that I've always been receiving, and if I'm honest, I can actually say, you know, I recognize now that I'm, like, you know what, I'm hungry again right away. I feel kind of irritable. I don't feel satisfied. You know, I feel bad because I'm beasting on myself for just having eaten a candy bar or whatever. There's all kinds of ways that I'm not feeling good. I thought I was gonna feel good when I had the sugar craving and then I ate the sugar, but it didn't feel good, and when I can discern that, honestly and easily, I tell you what, it is easy. Once you start applying the one rule, the skill gets a lot easier to implement and practice and apply, and once you really know what feels good, now you can choose everything in your life that actually does feel good. You don't need discipline because you've got bliss-ipline, and you can say, you know, that kind of food, popcorn, for example, right? I feel awful when I eat popcorn. I used to love popcorn. I mean, I still love the smell of it. You know, I kind of like sometimes the idea of eating it, but I don't eat popcorn now because I realized I hadn't really noticed that about popcorn. I knew about sugar, but I didn't know about popcorn. I didn't know that it made me feel really hungry and empty inside. So, learn to discern what actually feels good, and it's hardly ever what you've been taught feels good. You've been taught to follow rules implemented by others' feels good. You've been taught that to walk down the school hallway in a straight line feels good because you're not gonna get slapped or yelled at. I mean, we absorb a lot of information about what feels good that's not true. So, learn to discern. It takes some practice. And for most of us, many of us, anyway, it takes some retraining. That's probably the trickiest part of the whole thing. Learn to discern for you. Not for me, for you. Not for her, not for him, for you. Come back to you again. For you, what feels good? And this can be, what idea feels good, what thought feels good, what food feels good, what exercise feels good, what job feels good, what lover feels good? Like, what feels good to you? Learn to discern. Okay, so that's number two. That's the one skill.

- Okay. Pause real quick.

- Okay.

- Because someone wants to know. All popcorn or just microwave popcorn?

- All popcorn.

- [Elena] All popcorn.

- I don't do microwave popcorn at all. I have a popcorn popper that I've loved and carried around every move I've ever made, and I used to just love popcorn, until the day that I realized that, you know, and the only way to know is to experiment. You know, to read somebody else's book and follow their rules, uh-uh. You've got to discern for you. You've got to discern for you.

- I love that.

- It may sound a little overwhelming, but it's really not. It's really not. It's pretty easy. So anyway, so then there's the one habit. Allow things to unfold naturally, to just develop in a relaxed way. We spend so much time, we're trained, in our culture especially, drive, push, A-type, earn, try, push, push, push, push, push. I gotta be doing all the time. I gotta be striving. I gotta be proving it, and I gotta be, go back to school and get another certification. I gotta try harder. I gotta schedule. I gotta have deadlines. No. Just let all that go. You let everything go except for the one rule and the one skill. So that's the habit. You have to develop that habit, and I posit to you that anybody, everybody can learn one new habit, one rule, one skill, one habit, and that's all it takes.

- Wait, wait, did I miss something? What was the last one?

- Allow things to unfold naturally.

- [Elena] Allow things.

- That's the habit, and I call that a habit as opposed to a rule or a skill because it really is habit. You know, somebody says, you know, shouldn't you be fill in the blank? It doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter what the end of that sentence is. The habit is to go, "Oh, I should be." And so when the new habit is to allow things to unfold naturally, when your practiced response is, "No, I'm not feeling it yet. I couldn't possibly need to be because it doesn't feel right to do it." Whatever that is. I'm allowing things to, well, shouldn't you be applying for a job? You're out of work right now. Well, I'm waiting. I'm allowing things to unfold naturally. You know, I'm focusing on what feels good. I'm doing what feels right to me. You know, everybody's gonna have an opinion about this. They're gonna tell you what you should be doing, and they're generally gonna tell you what you should be doing so that they feel better. They want you to feel better, but really they want to feel better. They're gonna tell you they want you to feel better, but they're really doing it because they wanna feel better, and that's okay, but we've got a new habit. We're allowing things to unfold naturally. Just develop in their own time. No pushing, no striving, no deadlines, nothing.

- What if my natural tendency is to see what's not working and to see what could go wrong and to see, right? Like, there's so many of us that our security and our safety live within working out the worst case scenarios, preventing the worst case scenarios from happening.

- When you were two years old, were you doing that, do you think?

- Maybe not. I don't know.

- So what makes you think it's your natural tendency or what makes you think that's not a learned habit that you were taught early on?

- Because it feels like very much a part of who I am.

- Okay. So you're describing a habit.

- Okay.

- When you learn to discern what actually feels good, if pushing in one particular area of your life feels good, then you'll do it. Allowing things to unfold naturally. In other words, I'm in my mountain chalet right now, and I knew, after Betty died, my late partner died, and I knew I'd always wanted to live in the mountains, and the mountains that I could think of were Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I have a timeshare. We used to go in the fall, and New Hampshire, where we'd been on vacation a couple of times, and I kept thinking of mountains out west and way north and out west. And I was living in Florida and I just really wanted the mountains for the summer. I wanted someplace close enough to Florida, that I could easily kind of go back and forth. 'Cause I didn't want to leave Florida in the winter, and I had lots of friends, and you know, it's my legal residence, lots of reasons. So I went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I finally said, "Google, where are the closest mountains to Florida?" And Google said the mountains of Northeast Georgia are the bottom of the Appalachian chain and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, get outta town, Georgia? So I came up here and I looked at the eight things that fit my criteria. They were all in one county, like a little glowing blob of dots in the middle of nowhere on the map in realtor.com, and I came up here and I looked and this chalet was one of them, and I said, "This is it." And I moved here and that was, I even made a video, which I'm pretty sure is actually in the BodShift course, where I talk about, it's right as I'm getting ready to close on my chalet, and I talk about the fact that wild horses could not stop me from buying my new chalet. If somebody came up and said, "Did you know that such and such and such?" In other words, what if? What if they don't like gay people in Georgia?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- How many times have I heard that? What if somebody you're gonna get killed? You know, what if the mosquitoes are big enough to carry you away? What if, what if, what if, what if, you know? I mean, I could give you a big, long list. I wouldn't, but I could give you a list of all the reasons why not to buy a chalet in the mountains of Georgia, for my life at the time, or my life now or whatever, but the feeling, the feeling was so resonant. It was like pulling. It's like, when it's right, it pulls you through anything. It just parts the waters, you know? I don't even know how to describe it. It's just so palpable. When you learn to discern what actually feels good and you allow it to unfold naturally, then when you get the impulse, you act on it and you could very well look like the typical classic A-type personality. In fact, I would posit that all of the successful A-type personalities are doing what they love and they look like a A-type personalities to the outside because they love it so much and they're hugely successful and I would say that they are in complete resonance between their heartset and their mindset and they're drawing on unlimited power that we all have access to. It's not genius. It's not metabolism. It's alignment, and we all have access to it.

- Okay, last topic, because we've already gone 50 minutes.

- Oh my God, really?

- Yeah, for real. Okay, and this is where I want to get very real. Not that we haven't been real. We've been real. So I'm extending the invitation to keep being real.

- Okay.

- So many of us struggle with mental health issues.

- [Ramona] Okay.

- I personally, it developed when I was 37. Intense anxiety and depression. How do I discern what feels good when the chemistry in my head and my body is off? How do I trust that what feels good is what is needed for alignment when there's something going on in my head?

- The same way you do it with any difficult subject. You practice on an easy subject. As you are learning, as you're practicing, you're learning to discern what feels good. You practice on easy things and that could be anything. Butterflies are a big one for me. I love butterflies. I like thinking about butterflies. If I'm sitting here thinking about some god awful thing, let's say the death of my partner. Let's say that I used to believe that Betty was my only source of unconditional love and she had just died. She was gone. There was no reason for me to stay. The idea of staying was a ludicrous, forlorn desolate landscape of nothingness. Now, that's not real pleasant to think about. If I have a practice, if I have a skill that tells me, I can think about butterflies right now, and that feels better, and if I can actually focus on butterflies, since I can practice and think about butterflies, pretty soon, I'm thinking about birds and bald eagles, and then I'm thinking about horses and lions, and I'm thinking about all my favorite kinds of wildlife, and then I'm thinking about a hike I took once. So the hike I'd like to take next, the wild alligators in Florida, and I can work myself up into feeling much more centered, much more aligned, much more in my body. And if I can do that often enough, I start to find everything else falling away. I do not mean to minimize the impact of anything that we would call a mental illness, but at the same time, we can choose our focus. We are capable of focusing in ways that are never discussed in mainstream society. One that's not taught to children. There's some schools in Baltimore now experimenting with meditation. That's just the tip of the iceberg of teaching a child how to choose its own focus, but as we learn to choose our focus, we find the skills and the habits and the beauty and the power and the resonance of alignment, diminishing all of those other things to the point where they go away. I mean, some of the people actually in the BodShift course have released, and I'm not saying heal because I'm not talking about healing a medical condition. Even with my own condition, I'm not healing Hashimoto's. I'm feeling better and better and better. and all of my symptoms are disappearing. Now, what's the difference? You might say it's just semantics or just, you know, funny use of words, but vibrationally, it's very different. When you heal an illness, you're focusing on an illness. When you're allowing unwanted symptoms to fall away, that's just like saying, well, now I no longer want to, you know, live in the city where it's really loud. I want to live in the country, you know? And I'm used to running to the store at the drop of the hat, and in the country, I've got to plan my grocery store trips a little bit more. So I'm changing my habits. That's really all it is. When you're changing your focus, you're choosing a new focus, and then you're saying, this is what I want, and I have the right to choose that for myself.

- Okay, but... When I'm in an intense depressive state, what feels good is to stay in bed all day. Like, what feels good is to sleep, and sometimes I'm so numb that I don't even know what feels good. So I might as well stay in bed. Like, where do we go from there? When depression has taken us to a point where what feels good is being stagnant. So, you just described two very different vibrations with a similar appearance. Staying in bed, the outward appearance is staying in bed. One is it feels better to stand bed, and the other one was I'm so numb. I don't really have it. You know, I've just kind of given up. Two completely different vibrations with the same outcome. So it's really important to focus on the vibration and not the outcome, and it's really important not to judge either the vibration or the outcome, and that's part of learning to discern what actually feels good. Once you get good at this, you could actually say, and I've actually lived through this in the last year, myself personally, with three ruptured discs and horrible nerve pain radiating down my leg. The only time the pain disappeared is when I was either receiving opioids or meditating. The rest of the time, I was practically screaming and crying in pain. So I hear you, okay? So there's a lot of what is in that, and there's a lot of what is in depression too. Like, I feel awful. I feel awful. It's challenging with no skills to focus away from how you feel, but with a little bit of skill, and I'm talking just a little bit, a little ray of hope, a little bit of skill that says, "Wait a minute, I can focus on butterflies." Now that may sound stupid, but if I can actually focus on, since I can actually focus on butterflies right now, what I find is as I focus on the butterflies long enough, I get some momentum going and I start finding myself focus changing and I get far enough and I go, wait a minute, my pain stopped. Wait a minute, my depression has eased. Wait a minute, all of a sudden, I feel like getting out of bed and I feel better and now I'm phoning a friend and now I'm laughing. How do I reconcile laughing with being horribly depressed? What's the difference? The only difference is your focus. That's the only difference.

- Okay, all right. We have another question and I'm not going to read it word-for-word because I want to put it in how my brain works. Okay, so I don't know if you know, but I used to be Mormon, and there's a Broadway musical called "The Book of Mormon" and it's totally making fun of the religion. It's hysterical. And there is a very popular song in there that so summarized the entire Mormon culture. It's ridiculous, and it's called "Turn It Off." And so it's like, when something happens, like you're attracted to your missionary companion, who's also a man, turn it off. And so it's this whole song and dance, right? And so we started really joking about that, about how there's so many religions and so many family cultures that are like, "Oh, we don't talk about that. We don't address that. Just turn it off, dry your eyes, turn it off and move on." And it can be even with traumatic things. Like, I went through a massive trauma as a teenager and never dealt with it until my late thirties, because it doesn't feel good to deal with it. It hurts to deal with it.

- Right.

- So am I supposed to not address traumas and not deal with traumas because they don't feel good to deal with? So here's the difference, and again, it's one of those things that from the outside, two different vibrations can look exactly the same.

- Okay.

- Let's say talking about an old trauma. So this happened and I'm remembering it and I'm crying right now and I'm gonna talk about it. So I can do that from a position of not wanting to suppress or repress or resist what I'm feeling right now. In other words, honoring my feeling, or I can do it from this place of holding onto this old thing and milking it, which are two completely different vibrations. One will lead you to feeling better, because when you're not attached to something, when you're not grabbing onto it or resisting it by pushing it away, which turn it off. Was that what it was, "Turn It Off"?

- Yeah.

- Turn it off means suppress it, push it away. Do I have that right? Okay, so when I do that, I give energy to it. When you repress and suppress and resist something, you know, we shout no at things and we expect them to go away and we are giving them energy because basic Law of Attraction, there's no such thing as no. There's either focus and attention or not focus and no attention. So when you focus on something and say, "I hate you. Go away. No!" You are saying, "Yes, come to me." That's exactly what you're saying to the universe, and this is a sticking point for a lot of people about Law of Attraction, because the vibrational essence of it is everything. You can't define this perfectly for anybody in any kind of words or any kind of examples of actions, because it's got nothing to do with those things. It's got to do with the vibration. So again, like going back to that example I gave early on about I'm angry and I feel something in my chest or my throat, and if I resist it and suppress it, then it's still there. If I love it and embrace it, not milk it, not attached to it, not talk about it ad nauseum, as they say, but simply allow it and embrace it and love it and allow it to dissipate, it will dissipate. Do not take my word for it. Test it and prove it for yourself, but make sure you're doing it vibrationally accurately. Don't do it from just what it looks like or what it sounds like or what the words are.

- That is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from the class so far. We've only been in it two weeks was when you said, "When we suppress an emotion, we are pouring energy into it."

- [Ramona] Yep.

- That was a big a-ha moment for me. Okay, we are gonna wrap this up with the last topic, and it's gonna be a little lighter than trauma.

- Okay.

- We're gonna talk about sex.

- Oh, yay. I love it.

- It's time.

- [Ramona] Let's do it.

- And I'm just gonna use myself as an example and I'll be totally out there and vulnerable, and then you guys can feel like you got your questions answered without having to be vulnerable. Often, a lot of us who are lesbians or queer, we thought by default that we were straight, and so we were intimate with men, and oftentimes that did not work out very well.

- Often times.

- Okay, I was in a 17-year marriage. We both went into it as virgins, and so I convinced myself for a very long time that the reason I'm not enjoying this is because we don't know how to, and bodies are not important, and so I'm just gonna suppress that. We all know how that turned out for me. Needless to say, I'm not married anymore, but I'm in this interesting place where I know I must have some internalized homophobia because I was in that religion for such a long time. So I know that that must be there somewhere, and what my total reality is, radically acknowledging my reality, is that I can receive blissful satisfaction only in my dreams, only in my head. I can't get there by myself or with someone else in my body, conscious and awake.

- Fix me.

- Okay. Fix you. I love that. Great question. Fix me. Okay. Okay, so let's start with self-limiting beliefs and labels and judgments. So one of the first things that I would suggest is you let go of all of that gently, be gentle with yourself. You have a long habitual momentum of some of those beliefs. Obviously they're well-developed, and so, you know, if they come up again, that's fine, but as they come up, if you just say, "Aha, that's funny. That's from the past." You know, and that doesn't really apply. That was then, and this is now, and if you use some of your pattern interrupts that you've been learning in the course and simply let those things fall away, and as soon as you've used a pattern interrupt, of course, then you find a better feeling thought, which is, I'm a different person now. You know, all of my cells have completely changed since all that stuff happened. I'm actually a completely different person, and, you know, I like thinking about choosing my own responses now, my own beliefs, my own thoughts, my own feelings, my own sexual responses, my own desires, and I love the idea that I can be as responsive and receptive of pleasure in my body as I want. I love thinking about that. I like thinking about actually experimenting with that a little bit, and I love knowing that as I change my mindset, which I'm doing when I change those self-limiting beliefs. That's mindset work, right? And when I start to resonate that mindset down into my body, by practicing on things that are easy, and I get that skill going, and then I start to apply that to my body. Pretty soon, I notice that when I stroke my skin, I actually feel it. I'm actually experiencing it differently than I used to. It actually feels different. When I start to feel different on my skin, and I start to feel different in the alignment between my mindset and my heartset, I start to think the sky's the limit. I started to realize my body can be, do, or have anything I want, just as I can. I can start a business. I can have children. I can do anything I want. I can be anything I want, I can have anything I want, and that includes my body, and now I'm willing, I have a little bit of confidence built up and I'm willing to just test it, typically by myself, and just test it, and I start testing, what do I actually like? What do I actually like? What kind of touch do I like? What kind of fantasies actually turn me on? What does it feel like to actually be turned on? And as I start to experiment and I start to gain some momentum, because I'm giving myself permission and I'm loving myself no matter what feeling comes up and no matter what thought comes up, and I have the skill that I've practiced on easy things. I have the skill to focus on the things that feel good. and to let anything else go. I'm here to tell you from personal experience, pretty soon, you're feeling a lot, and you're feeling really great after being numb your entire life. No joke.

- Got it. I love it.

- It's different for every person. It's unique to you and you choose in every moment of your life and you can choose habitually based on everything that's happened in the past, or you can choose based on right now. Right now, I choose a completely different direction and that feels good. I'm gonna choose it based on how it feels. Not based on something Ramona told me to do. How it feels.

- I love it. So it is now an hour. We have one or two more questions, and I know, especially 'cause one is from Vanessa and she's in China, and I'm not gonna ignore a question from her, so we are going to get to that.

- [Ramona] We're not gonna ignore a question from China.

- Right?

- It just wouldn't be right.

- But for anyone who needs to get going, I do want to share just a little bit about your class and what the code might be, and I'll put it in the chat so that the link is there, and then we'll wrap up by answering these last few questions.

- Okay, great.

- [Elena] What's BodShift? Tell us about it.

- Okay, so BodShift is a course and a membership combined. So it's a training set of modules that you don't need to have anything ahead of time. It does use Law of Attraction's basic principles. If you've never heard of Law of Attraction before, or if you've been practicing it diligently for 20 years, there's still a lot there for you and you don't need to have any previous experience, and then it also is an entire training system on how to get into alignment with your body, what I call heartset. In fact, that's the name of my company. Heartset, LLC. So, combining mindset and heartset and the power, and I teach you how to do that by practicing on easy things, and then we do get into the body and tremendous transformation, and then two free months included with the course purchase of weekly meetings. The meetings that you've referred to several times, where there is a group coaching session. Wonderful, phenomenal, like, synergy sessions between all women. It's only women and totally private, very confidential. We talk about anything. No subject's off limits. And so, two months of that included, and then we have the bonus, the 911 call and all that, and your coupon, which I promised to you, because we scheduled this date before I launched. So it's the only place you can get the launch bonus, which is $300 off. That coupon code is PODCAST8. That's all uppercase, all capital letters in other words, with no spaces, PODCAST8.

- So the number eight or eight written out?

- The number eight, podcast and the number eight, yup.

- Got it. And then what's your website?

- It's www.ramonagaley.com/bodshift-program, and you can also just go to ramonagaley.com and click on the tab that says BodShift. That's probably the easiest way to get there.

- Got it. Okay. I just put that in the chat. So that is permanently there, if anyone needs that. Excellent. I'm gonna read these last two questions. Okay. Oh, it's just one. Awesome. So I find that even though I have made a lot of progress releasing unwanted feelings in my mind of consciousness, that I am aware that they still reside in my body at the same level. How do we achieve a deeper level of release in our bodies? I love this question. Yes.

- Yes. I mean, that's it, and that's exactly what the course is designed to do. There's no one thing I can just tell you right off the top of my head that'll just change that, but the one rule, the one skill, and the one habit and the couple of very body-centered processes. You know, Abraham Hicks teaches 22 processes and they've introduced a lot more since then, and you know, everybody out there has got processes, I've chosen just the 12 or so that are very body centric. I'm very kinesthetic, and what I'm starting to really find is the women who have felt this limit the most are also very kinesthetic. For whatever reason, if we're kinesthetic processing. In other words, you know, in the traditional children's education setting, a kinesthetic child is the one that can't sit still. The one that's, you know, bouncing off the walls. You know, they call him ADHD now, but that's not the way it presents in girls. That's typically the way it presents in boys. So if you're a girl and you're kinesthetic and all of the processing and education and stuff is geared towards audio processors and visual processors, then you're missing the boat on a couple of different levels. Throw in a little sexual abuse, throw in some advertising and constant barrage about our bodies and what it should be and what it shouldn't be and what you can do, what you can't do, and what's expected, and what's not expected, and pretty soon, you're a big, hot mess. So when you get back into your body, which is what I teach, all it takes is one rule, one skill, and one habit. And it doesn't take long. It may sound like a lot, but it does not take long, and that's how you get back into your body, and that's when you find all your mindset work that you've been doing actually starting to pay off. All of a sudden, everything makes sense. All of a sudden, you have the confidence to do everything you've been kind of, you know, frankly, in self-development, self-help, personal development, we're kind of berating ourselves for being the way we are. I have imposter complex. I have low self esteem. You know, I have whatever. You know, there's all these labels. That's not what it is. Our mindset is not in alignment with our heartset. That's all it is and it's so simple. Once you can feel it, you feel it. Nobody can ever take it away from you again, and now, when you want to change your mindset about something, you just go, "Oh yeah. Okay. Yes. That feels so much better. I'm gonna do that from now on." You know, that's my answer. Get into your heart and get into your heartset. Get into alignment with your heart set and it's easy to do. I've got exercises and training and coaching for how to do it. You can do it by yourself just by following, you know, the training I gave you tonight. So I give a lot of encouragement and support and reinforcement and fine tuning for each person, but anybody can do this. I did this without what I'm offering. I did it. You can too. Everybody can.

- I love that. I love that, and so how I translated what you said in my head was, because I think about that as well, that I've got stuff in my body that I process out of my head, even though it's still in my body.

- Exactly, what good does that do, right?

- And so I think about, so how I interpreted what you said was I went back to that thought that you taught of embrace the emotion, resonate with it in your body. Don't ignore it, but also don't milk it. Don't beat the drum. Don't attach to that.

- Right, don't attach.

- And I think that's often what I've done is I have attached to the identity of someone who had that experience or had that struggle or whatever, and then it's part of my identity. So it's really hard to let it go.

- Well, sure. You know, I did it naturally because everything was so painful, and then when I got in therapy, they taught me to do it even more. Attach to these feelings, see yourself as a victim, right? So, remember all of this, process it. Get to the bottom of it, you know? I can't even come up with any typical phrases from therapy, but there's a lot of that. You know, we have to go back and delve into it. We have to unpack this, you know? There's all these phrases and it's all about focus, focus, focus, focus, focus, instead of just letting it go, because there's all kinds of things, if you think about it, there's all kinds of things in our past that never come back to us. They're gone. The only thing that's bothering us in the moment is something we think is from the past, but it's only bothering us because we're thinking about it right now. We're giving it power right now by thinking about it, and when we allow it to be whatever it is, and especially the ramifications, every thought creates a feeling and that feeling when we go, "Okay, I got it. I hear you. I love you. It's okay. All right, good. Now I'm gonna think about butterflies." I know butterflies is kind of a superficial sounding thing, but I mean, it really works. Pick something easy. It could be ice cream cones. It could be anything. I love these blue glasses. They make me grin every time I look at them, It doesn't have to make sense for anybody else, just for us, and it's really that easy. Allow the feeling for the first time in your life, because if it's still there and you don't like it, it's only because you've resisted it. You've held onto it by resisting it. When you finally love it and allow it, it can go and it will. Don't take my word for it. Practice. Try it out for yourself, experiment with it.

- Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ramona.

- Thank you, Elena. This has been fantastic.

- This has been really good.

- I can't believe we've been talking for an hour and 15 minutes. People are going to be like, "Oh my God, Ramona is the longest winded guest you've ever had."

- No.

- But it's been fun. It's been fun. I hope somebody's gotten something good out of it.

- Thank you everyone who's here live. Thank you everyone who's watching the replay. Thank you everyone who is investing their energy and time into creating a connection with their own body, because as Ramona is showing us, once we have figured it out for ourselves, we're able to teach others, especially our kids and the people that we care about in our lives. Everyone deserves to feel really embodied, really connected.

- And thank you, Elena, for providing this venue for these kinds of conversations. The world could really benefit from a lot more of this, so thank you for your work.

- Yes, yes. My pleasure. Thank you so much, everyone.