I am delighted to have Elaine Glass joining me on the podcast today.
Elaine has transformed many lives with her healing presence, coaching countless people and helping them unlock their essential selves to find purpose, peace, and self-empowerment. She now travels the world, sharing her methodologies, holistic healing techniques, energy medicine, and spiritual guidance.
In this episode, we explore the notion of getting quiet, examining the impact of social media, texting, and ghosting. We discuss the pervasive issue of busyness, the role of trauma, and the labyrinth as a meditative tool, emphasizing the power of rest. We also look into why many women struggle with receiving, the significance of the great pause, and ways to create harmony in life.
I am confident you will find this conversation with Elaine Glass as insightful and enriching as I did recording it.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
Elaine shares her journey of discovering inner stillness
Why is it essential for women to get quiet?
How social media contributes to dissatisfaction and angst in women
Why Elaine believes that no children should have phones until high school
How technology has disconnected people from their true selves
How busyness can be a reflection of trauma for some
The benefits of using the labyrinth as a meditative tool for personal transformation
How listening without fixing can improve marriages
Why rest is essential for self-love
The importance of pausing, purging, and discovering your purpose in the second half of life
How to find purpose and develop intuition through self-awareness and spiritual practices
Bio:
For over 15 years Elaine Glass has transformed lives with her healing presence and coached countless people to unlock their truest selves, finding purpose, peace, and self-empowerment. At one point she found herself at a personal crossroads. A newly single mother, burned out, fearful, and alone, she lived the next decade in search of her own healing and inner truth. She now travels the world sharing her holistic healing techniques, energy medicine methodologies, and spiritual guidance. Her mission today is to guide people in connecting with their soul's calling to bring lasting love, joy, and vitality.
“As women, we tend to have more need to be accepted, compare, and be perfect.”
-Elaine Glass
Connect with Cynthia Thurlow
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Check out Cynthia’s website
Submit your questions to support@cynthiathurlow.com
Connect with Elaine Glass
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:00:02] Welcome to Everyday Wellness podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
[00:00:29] Today, I had the honor of connecting with Elaine Glass. She has transformed lives with her healing presence and coached countless people to unlock their truest selves, finding purpose, peace, and self-empowerment. She now travels the world sharing her holistic healing techniques, energy medicine methodologies, and spiritual guidance.
[00:00:49] Today, we spoke at length about what getting quiet means to her, the impact of social media, texting and ghosting, why busyness is the greatest curse of our time, the impact of trauma, why the labyrinth is a metaphor and meditative tool, the power of rest, why so many women struggle to receive, what creates harmony and the great pause, which includes purging and finding your life's purpose. I know you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did recording it.
[00:01:26] Welcome, Elaine. It's so good to have you on the podcast.
Elaine Glass: [00:01:29] So great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Cynthia.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:01:32] Yeah. I would love to kind of initiate the conversation around what does getting quiet mean to you and why has this become your life's work to help other women understand why this process is so important?
Elaine Glass: [00:01:48] It was important for me to understand a stillness that I knew I had within me, but was so hard to access in this noisy, very active, sometimes chaotic world. It was not serving me. It was causing stress, disease, poor health, broken relationships. And at the time, I was a single mother just trying to survive, living paycheck to paycheck. And no one came to rescue me. I had to rescue myself and I had to get healthy, mind, body, and soul, quickly for my kids. They deserve that. So, I rescued myself. I saved myself. I wrote Get Quiet to help other women, particularly single moms, because that feels like very close to my heart to be able to get healthy and move on and live their best lives so that they can raise healthy and well children.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:02:44] Was there a defining moment in your journey that catapulted the emotional growth that you clearly talk about in the book? But was there one situation, one circumstance, something you got fed up over? Did something happen that spurned your desire to shift your perspective and as you appropriately stated, focus on what's most important as opposed to. And it's easy to do this as a woman of a certain age, it's very easy to get distracted by bright, shiny objects. A, irrespective of what I’m referring to for some people can be rampant materialism, for some people it can just be getting caught up in gossip. Was there one thing that shifted your perspectives and your mindset around this inner knowing, this intuition that you speak to?
Elaine Glass: [00:03:33] I was living on autopilot, and the moment that I realized something had to change was that life just didn’t feel fulfilling. It didn't feel enriching. I had a great career, I was married, I had two beautiful children. But I felt so empty inside and I didn't know why? And I was being dishonored. And I was also dishonoring myself in that moment that I became unwilling to be treated that way and also treat myself that way. That was the moment that I said, “I'm no longer willing to live this life, this one precious God-given life.” And also, my children were my inspiration. Because sometimes women, we can't make these changes on our own. Something else outside of us has to give us inspiration. And my sons did that for me. And that was the day that I started on this quest to having more fulfillment, more meaning, and really what I call following my soul's calling. That was when I started this whole quest. And that was about 15 years ago.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:04:39] And did you feel like your family and friends were supportive of this shift and this change? Or was it something that was met with some degree of resistance from people that knew you before, maybe knew you as the other Elaine that was more accommodating, that was less likely to prioritize their own needs as many women. I mean, this becomes what a lot of women deal with in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond, is that they've been conditioned socially to prioritize everyone else in their lives instead of themselves. And you have to love yourself first in order to be able to navigate a fulfilling life. As much as I know that I probably will get some flak for saying that. I think that there's so much social conditioning and pressure on women to live a certain way, you know, that quiet, introspective person. And yet, maybe when you're younger you can get by with that. But then I almost feel like the shift occurs, whether it's the hormonal fluctuations as women are navigating perimenopause and menopause. And we lose that desire to be people pleasing and we really have to be inwardly focused on ensuring we're doing what's best for us and advocating for us.
Elaine Glass: [00:05:54] Yes, because you just become unwilling, whether it's a health crisis, a divorce, any type of loss, you understand the importance that every few years you've got to take that journey inward, that you've got to fill your cup up, you've got to put your oxygen mask on first. And this really takes a certain type of state of being to get to. And that's what ‘get quiet’ means to me, is being able to harness that energy of connecting inward instead of thinking that we have to be co-opted into this outward society of rules and regulations and co-opted into this digital reality where there is no play whatsoever. And I believe that one of womankind's greatest achievements is play. And yet we have totally forgotten how to do that.
[00:06:50] We watch everybody else play on social media and going on vacations, but we're just sitting there on this endless scroll. How do we make the change so that we go inward? We connect, we get still, so that we become this very grounded hub of this inner wheel where all the activities and the spokes are all the activities, but we are the center and the stillness, like the calm of the storm, for not only ourselves, but our families and the people that we serve, that we want to help. But right now, in so many of our lives, we're holding so much, we're giving so much, we're nurturing beyond what we have to give that we can't even access anything more to give and not even to ourselves. And this is what I know to believe to be the state of suffering, the state of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and just feeling completely alone and lost. And most of my clients come to me in this state of feeling lost.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:07:57] Do you think that social media plays a large role in women being dissatisfied with their lives.
Elaine Glass: [00:08:05] 100%. In 2010, something interesting happened. If you had gone to sleep before 2010 and woken up after 2010, you would have found that people after 2010 were looking down at these screens and weren't looking up and speaking to anybody. Even when you were in a group in a room of humans, you would still be looking down, and you would wonder what has gone on with society. [chuckles] And for women particularly, because we tend to have more of this caring, this need to be accepted, this need to compare to be perfect. And so, I believe that social media has really created angst, particularly for women.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:08:49] I have all boys, but I have three nieces. And the concerns I have as an adult are just magnified a hundredfold for young women because their brains are still developing, their perceptions of self are still developing, and they've grown up in an environment where we have filters, I don't even know how to do some of the body-- people that will cinch in their waist, they'll edit all their photos. And so, they don't per se, have the same degree of normalcy that perhaps you and I had growing up. You might have seen something in a print ad, you might have seen something on TV or the movies, but we didn't have all this technology. And so, I worry most about younger women's perceptions of themselves and how they navigate, adulthood in an artificial environment. I don't know if you share those concerns. I know you also have boys, but I'll have conversations with my own sons, and they'll talk about how on social media, they can tell when photos have been photoshopped or cropped or they don't understand, but they understand the filters.
[00:09:59] And so, imagine taking grown women who then feel that same degree of pressure, not realizing that there's so much artifice in social media. I think social media was designed to connect people, but I think in many instances, social media plays a really divisive role for many people. I'm not saying that there aren't people out there that maybe they can get into Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or now called X, or they get on and off TikTok, and they can do that and they can moderate their behavior. But I think there is a growing amount of adults that really spend entirely too much time in an artificial environment, interacting with people they don't even know.
Elaine Glass: [00:10:42] And that's why I believe that children should not have phones until high school, period. And the adults need to be the example. You know, we go first. We go first modeling, because children are great imitators. They just need something great to imitate. And we as adults, need to know who we are, and we need to get quiet and go inward and know what our purpose is and know what our soul's calling is. Because when we can be that great example for our children, that we have a life's mission, we have a purpose, we are living healthy. They're going to look at all that stuff online and go, that is ridiculous. Like, my family's living the real life because I can feel it in my bones. And then other kids are like, “Oh, I want what that family has.” And it's a stark difference.
[00:11:29] And so parents, especially mothers, need to be that example of living out their soul's calling so that their kids have a roadmap to what that looks like. And you can inspire your children. And that is one of the greatest gifts that I have found for my own family and my own now grown sons is that I have been the example. It's been hard. It's been difficult. I've had to let go of a lot of fears and overcome a lot. But they have seen me. They've seen me through the good times. They've seen me through the bad times. This is real life. And when we are co-opted into a digital reality, we are no longer humans, disembodied from our humanity. So, this is about embodying this one God-given life. Because what my children know is that we are souls having a human experience. And when you walk through life in that way, all of this stuff online becomes actually silly.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:12:34] Such an interesting perspective. I want to just dovetail this conversation and share with listeners that my children didn't have phones until middle school, and only because they were getting dropped off at practices. And sometimes there was a lot of communication that had to go on behind the scenes. But I remember when my oldest was in fifth grade, we lived in a very affluent part of Northern Virginia, and he came home one day and was upset. And he said, “Mom, are we poor?” And I said, “What?” And he said, “Well, I'm the only kid in my class that doesn't have an iPhone.” And I said, “You don't have an iPhone because you don't need an iPhone. And that was just matter of fact.” I said, “What other families choose to do is their decision. But your dad and I both work from home, and you don't need a phone because we're accessible.”
[00:13:17] And so, I just recall being so humored that the messaging was, if you're not doing what everyone else is doing, then it must because there's an issue with finances, like it's a financial issue. And I said, “No, this is a choice. This is a decision your father and I have made, that you don't need the burden of a phone.” And he actually didn't get a phone until 7th grade. You don't need that burden. And it is a burden. And you speak to that when you say that a lot of what we do is modeling behavior to our kids. And it's so easy to sit in a room with your family and disengage and be on your phone. And I think it's also one of these things, like, we have a rule in our house that we don't bring our phones to the table other than when I take a picture of food, because I do a lot of that on social media, I'll take a picture of the food, and I put the phone away.
[00:14:05] But how many times do I go out to dinner and I'll see very young kids, either on a tablet, they're on their parents’ phone. No one's talking. They're just eating in silence. And so, I think technology can be both good and bad, but it has to be monitored, and we have to determine for ourselves what makes the most sense for our family units. And this is not said pejoratively, each one of us have to decide where those boundaries are. But I agree with you wholeheartedly that we model the behavior for our kids. And ultimately, our greatest responsibility is raising healthy, well-adjusted children into young adulthood. As hard as that is to accept now that I have one going off to college, that's our role, is to raise them to be strong, independent adults ultimately in the end,
Elaine Glass: [00:14:52] Yes and to go out and play and to get scrapes and to have to figure out difficult relationship issues. If there is a disagreement with a friend or a group of friends, like, now it's just so easy to text somebody, like, “I don't want to be a friend anymore.” We have gone from the generation where the brain develops through play. That was our generation. And then, like I said, in 2010, something happened and no longer were those group of kids in high school learning how to grow their brains through play. And this has been the shift. We went from all of a sudden getting a lot of minutes on our cell phone through talking on the phone, to all of a sudden now it's all about all these text minutes that you get.
[00:15:43] And it almost happened overnight. It's because the iPhone 4 came out, and now we’re only texting, and we’re not talking anymore. And this is the shift, and this is the problem, that we’re now not embodied in this human form anymore. We’re totally co-opted into a digital reality, which is not serving us. It's causing kids to kill themselves, to want to kill themselves, to being anxious, to being depressed, and not just kids, but adults. And so, I wrote Get Quiet, so we could get back into this beautiful human body of ours, that we could drop from this overthinking mind and this nonreality and back into this beautiful reality of life. And right now, it's the most rebellious thing that we could be doing, but it's the most rewarding thing at the same time.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:16:42] You speak in the book about busyness and this is kind of adjunct to what we're talking about is the great curse of our time. And you talk about this disconnection from our higher power, higher purpose, trading humanity for business profits. Let's speak to when you're working with your clients to help them become unburdened from the distraction of being busy so that they can determine how they can navigate their life, being more attuned to what they need as an individual.
Elaine Glass: [00:17:18] I have a funny story around this. I had a dream that Anthony Bourdain was in my kitchen, [chuckles] and I loved Anthony Bourdain, the great chef and traveler. And I liked Anthony Bourdain because he was this adventurer. And I love adventure and I love to learn about the world. But I always thought that he seemed a bit sad and burdened, and I didn't know why. And he was someone who was always going and doing. But in that moment in my dream, what we sort of telepathically told each other, and he told me was, “I was enough just being, and you are enough just being. You will be the only you that will ever grace this planet, and you are enough just as you are being. We are human beings, not human doings.” And so that's where I start with my clients, is that you are a being, and you are enough, just as you are right now in this present moment. And I think when we start from that state, everything changes.
[00:18:25] Everything that we now think we need to be doing completely shifts. And now we're more discerning, now we're more loving to ourselves, we don't beat ourselves up, we don't compare ourselves. We don't think, “Well, they're doing that. I need to be doing this.” No, it's this total acceptance that you are so perfect in this being. I love it when I have dreams, and you might also have these dreams where you wake up, you go, “Oh, my gosh, that was a huge life lesson, and that was my lesson in that moment of my life that I needed it the most” when I started my coaching career and all the shiny objects and everything that I was supposed to be doing, I was like, “No, let's just reel this in. I am this beautiful being and just my presence alone is enough.”
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:19:13] What a beautiful story. And I think many listeners that are familiar with Anthony Bourdain's work, a true adventurer, I would agree. I used to love seeing his travel programs, where he would experience-- He would travel to some very exotic and sometimes some really interesting places in the world. And I'm a wander luster by nature. So to me, it was giving me a bird's eye perspective of how people that were indigenous to that country, that environment, and how they would eat, as opposed to going to four or five star Michelin-starred restaurants and actually understanding how they prepared things. And so for me, being a wander luster, I appreciated that about him. But I think in a lot of different ways, when I have patients or clients that are obsessed with being busy, oftentimes it is a reflection of trauma.
[00:20:09] For some of these people, it's easier for them to be busy than address uncomfortable feelings. And I have a family member that really typifies this. And so, I observe them in a very nonpejorative way. I just observe the behavior and try to encourage this individual to enjoy the fruits of their labor, to take a nap, to slow down, and it's very hard for them. And so I'm curious in your work with clients, I would imagine people that are probably coming to you for coaching are probably ready for the message, they're ready to do the work. I find a lot of the people I'm working with, in many instances, they're ready to do a lot of the work. But this, in particular, this busyness, this distraction, individuals that aren't capable or willing or able, because sometimes it is a protective mechanism. If they slow down, they can't silence what's going on in their minds. Do you find that to be the case that when you're working with women, there are definitely some women that are struggling with some bigger issues, whether emotional, physical abuse, trauma, things that they've grown up in that they can't make sense of yet. And this is just a reflection of not being able to deal with those uncomfortable feelings yet. I'll just use that as the ‘yet’ they're going to get there.
Elaine Glass: [00:21:26] Absolutely. And physiologically, this is a dysregulation of the nervous system. And so, when you meet somebody in a dysregulated state, and that could look like the busyness, that could look like just nonstop talking. There's always those two people that meet for lunch, and one is the listener and one is the talker. A lot of that excess energy that needs to come out is because of the dysregulation that we are feeling inside of us and we've all been there. We've all needed that person to talk to when we're feeling out of sorts. But really, physiologically, this is the nervous system needing to regulate. And that's why these seven paths in Get Quiet really is a deep dive into this regulated system. And that's why it's such a beautiful meditative tool to be able to get to a regulated system where you feel that stillness inside of you and you can just feel so good in your body at last. But it is a lot of this like trauma, “I'm not enough. I'm not good enough.” And we, instead of stopping and looking inward to figure out why, we just cover it all up with busyness, totally in an unintentional doing and that's why life feels yucky at times.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:22:45] Absolutely. You speak quite a bit in the book about the labyrinth. And the labyrinth to me is a physical thing, but it's also a metaphor. Talk to us about the labyrinth and why that's so important. I actually went down that rabbit hole and found where there are labyrinths in my area. And so, I may partake in this exercise. I found it really interesting and fascinating.
Elaine Glass: [00:23:08] A labyrinth is a 4000-year-old ancient meditative tool, a tool for personal transformation, a tool that is the metaphor, like you said, “Of going from the outside busyness world to the inside and getting to the center, the center of us, the connection to our souls.” If we are souls having this human experience, why do we suffer? It's because we've disconnected to our soul, to this energy, to this signature energy that is encoded with our soul's calling. So, when we are disconnected to that that's why we feel unease. And that's why we don't feel peace within ourselves is because it's a total disconnection. And so, one day I was rushing to go get my kids in the pickup line at school, and I wanted to stop and get a coffee and some snacks. And this guy and I started talking in this cafe. And we got into a very deep conversation about his addiction recovery. And he said, “You might also like to have this peaceful experience that I've felt at this retreat center.”
[00:24:11] Ended up this retreat center was just a half a mile from my house. I go to the retreat center later that day and the very first thing I see is this labyrinth, which I had no idea what it was or what to do. It's not a maze, it doesn't confuse you, but it does traverse round and round. There's one way in and one way out. I started walking this labyrinth and on the very first day, it was so quiet. I remember being able to hear the birds singing for the first time. I remember feeling the crunch of the gravel under my feet. I was becoming like human again [chuckles] and not on autopilot. It was so refreshing. And the very first time I went and walked that labyrinth, I heard my soul's voice for the first time. It was that quiet and that certain, and I was so pleased with what I heard every single time, because it's always positive, it's always clear guidance. And when we can hear our own clear guidance that's coming from us and not the noise of the world, “Wow, that's when your life changes.”
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:25:25] You talk about this in the book, and it was clearly a very powerful, and I do believe things can be very serendipitous. You were meant to be there at that coffee shop, meeting that individual, then taking it upon yourself to go and investigate the labyrinth. And for me, the one thing that I find when I'm outside, when I don't have earbuds in, I'm not listening to a podcast or a book, which I tend to do quite a bit, but when I'm really connected to my senses. And as an example, I was in Arizona a few months ago, and I decided to walk outside before a series of meetings, and I didn't have earbuds, and I was just observing the sights, the sounds, the birds, the beautiful flowers, because I live in a part of the country where we don't have any desert-like flowers. And so, I was just taking note of the beauty and the simplicity of my surroundings. And I don't think we necessarily have to have or locate a labyrinth around us. Although now I'm very curious to do this.
[00:26:25] I think that in order to intuitively connect to ourselves, we have to simplify. I think it's so easy to overcomplicate our lives and think that we have to do these very complicated regimens, protocols, and really, I always say, “Focus on the macros instead of the micros.” Think big picture before you start getting caught up in the minutia. And do you find that when you're working with women that there's a degree of settling into this building awareness around the simplicity of connecting with yourself? For a lot of people, is it more of a process that they're letting go of preconceived notions, they're shedding the exterior of who they used to be as they're kind of navigating this greater awareness?
Elaine Glass: [00:27:12] That's a great question, and I would say there's both. There's two types of people. The people that are a little bit more skittish about the process, that they're not sure that it's going to work for them. They're a little bit more into the minutiae and the details of is this going to work for me nothing else has. This is just the way I am is what I hear a lot of. This is just my makeup. I am just a busy person. And when they start walking the paths in the particular order that I have them in, they begin to see how simple it is. Like you said, “It's the macros, it's the simplicity of how we can live a life not filling up, but actually taking away and dropping what we no longer need to hold anymore.” And what this looks like is, I remember a client of mine said, “Okay, well, if this is going to work and you want me to let go and surrender as much as you're saying I'm going to go home and the next conversation my husband and I have, I'm just going to listen. I'm not going to try to fix him. I'm not going to tell him exactly the way to do things. I'm just going to listen. Because this is what I have told her that will help her.”
[00:28:26] Because we're holding so much. We're fixing, we're helping everybody, but we're getting ourselves into too much of the muck of life. We're not meant to live this way. We need to trust that other people can help themselves. She came back the next day and said, “Elaine, I listened to him. That's all I did.” And it was so freeing for her not to have to carry and hold the problems for him that day. And that listening is actually all he really wanted. And that shifted her whole entire marriage. It's not to say we can't help and advice those closest to us, but we overly get involved in people's lives. And that's the simplicity of where we can simplify our life just doing that one act of listening.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:29:19] Well, I know now that I have a nearly 19-year-old, sometimes I will say to him, “Do you want me just to listen?” When he was younger, I might be trying to help him troubleshoot. And now I've gotten to the point where I've explained to him, “I'm still your mom, but now I'm moving into a coaching role.” So sometimes if you need me, just say, “Mom, I just need you to listen.” And I listen and I don't offer any unsolicited input like I might have done when he was younger. And I think it's really strengthened our relationship because he knows I'm a safe place to come to and I don't feel burdened that I have to come up with a solution.
[00:29:56] Although thankfully, he's at the stage where issues that he has are still fairly small and contained. But I know for myself, moving into that coaching role with him as much as you know that's a transition for both of us. But I now ask him, “Do you want me just to listen?” And that is very powerful. It's been good for him. It's been good for me. Obviously, this applies to other types of relationships, but that's the one that came up when you were describing that. For women that are struggling with busyness and being busy and having a lot on their social calendar and never having downtime, let's talk about the power of rest. And we're not talking about sleep, we're just talking about rest. What is it about rest that is so important and beneficial?
Elaine Glass: [00:30:41] It's giving yourself just this pure love. And a lot of times we don't even know what that looks like because we've beaten ourselves up our whole entire lives. And when I talk about rest in the book, as you know I have a whole chapter on rest. It's about receiving now, receiving self-love, receiving from others in a way that we've never given ourselves permission to do before. And I know there's a quote in the book, it says, “Leisure is a valid human activity. Leisure is a valid human activity. It's okay to rest. It's okay to do nothing. It's okay to just sit in your own presence and stare out a window. It's okay to be alone and enjoy your own company.” Because in that state of being is where you will access your brilliance. This is the only state in which you can actually tune in and hear the messages that I'm talking about in terms of your soul wanting to contact you. And we have to stop. We have to rest. We have to give our permission to ourselves to rest. And if you are not able to do that, please know I give you permission to rest. You will thank me for that.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:31:56] I think so many women feel so much guilt about not checking things off the to-do list, not being productive. I'm going to use language that I've heard patients say to me, “Oh, but I, if I do that, then I haven't checked off all my to-do list. Or what would my husband think if he sees or my partner or my kids and start-- just I'm going to lay on the couch.” I think it's so helpful for people to understand that it's a practice. You don't per se, if you've going from being someone that is inundated with the to-do list and the calendar and going, going, going 24/7 there's probably going to be some degree of resistance because it's going to make you feel uncomfortable. But that's where real growth happens, is when we are uncomfortable. I don't mean uncomfortable that you can't make it through it, but it just feels foreign. Perhaps it doesn't feel like something that you do often, but I think it's important for us to model behavior for our families, to let them know that it's okay if dad lies on the couch and wants to watch golf one day, or mom wants to sit in the backyard and garden or just look at the flowers or look at something beautiful and not have to be caught up in doing.
Elaine Glass: [00:33:11] That's right, because in the doing, you're not going to be present. And we're talking about being in reality, embodied in this beautiful life of ours. It's all about presence. I tell a story in the book about meeting Don Miguel Ruiz, the author of, The Four Agreements. And at that time in my life, I was completely on autopilot. I was just a mess. My nervous system was completely dysregulated. And the minute his hand shook my hand, I felt a presence like I had never felt before. This stillness, this groundedness, this total presence of he was here and now with me, and I was like, “Wow, I need this. I need this in my life. This is what's been missing in my life.” What's been missing is I'm missing myself. I'm missing my own presence. [chuckles] And we can't be in that state of being, in the busyness of doing. And when we're checking things off our list, that's just this need to soothe our nervous system and have control. But it's really not control at all. It's an illusion of control.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:34:19] So what are the things that you think are most beneficial for creating harmony in our lives? What are your favorite activities or favorite things to recommend to your coaching clients to allow them to slow down and receive.
Elaine Glass: [00:34:35] First. I call this the great pause. And I feel like in menopause, there are physiological things that are pausing, but also, it's a time to pause, literally. And then the next P after that, first there's pause, and then there's purge. And this was when I looked at everything in my life. I looked at the medications I was taking, the supplements I was taking, the food I was ingesting, the media I was ingesting, the people in my life, who was living with me, who was sleeping in my bed, everything. And I purged everything that no longer made me feel healthy, that no longer looked like that was going to help me move my life forward. So, this was the great purge in my life.
[00:35:21] In fact, one of the stories that I tell in the book Get Quiet, is that I went to the labyrinth after being on thyroid medicine for over a decade. And I felt horrible on this medicine. But I take my medicine, that's what my doctor tells me to do. I clearly heard in the labyrinth one day, don't take your medicine. It was so clear. It was my soul's voice. So, I didn't take my medicine that day, and then I didn't take it the next day, and I was feeling like myself again. I was like, “Oh, my God, I remember you. I remember this bright-eyed wonderful person that loved life, but I couldn't access that under this cloud of thyroid medicine.” And it ended up that the medicine I was taking was full of fillers and dyes and things that were toxic to my body, that kept me in this state of physical depression. And I didn't know why. But if I hadn't gotten quiet, if I hadn't tuned in to my body and done a body scan that I have developed for myself and teach others, I would never have been able to make this change in my life and purge that medicine.
[00:36:36] So, this is the state in which we begin to purge everything, because now we have more time. And this is the self-love, because we want now, in the second half of life, to live it much differently than we did the first half, much more intentionally. And every day I wake up and I have a different intention for the day for myself, so that I'm not just cruising on autopilot. The other day, I made the intention; “I want to learn something new,” I said to myself today. And I kind of play around with that, like, “Okay, well, we'll see if I'm going to learn something new.” So, I learned a few new things at the end of that day, just because I made the intention to want to do it. This is the time in our life that we're doing that. The third P, first it's pause, then it's purge, the third P is purpose. That's when you walk into your purpose, your life's purpose, your soul's calling. And you know without a shadow of the doubt that this is what you are here to do for humanity. And then all that stuff online that we we’re talking about before just becomes so silly because you know now why you're here in this beautiful God-given life.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:37:48] What an amazing story. And for the benefit of listeners, because I've read the book, you transitioned to a different type of thyroid medicine. Is that correct? The one that was compounded.
Elaine Glass: [00:38:00] I did. That's right. It was a compounded version that only used the active ingredient, which I knew I would benefit from but took out all the rest of the junk and also minimized the amount that I was even taking. And this just changed everything for me.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:38:15] That's incredible. I wanted to make sure I dovetail that because there are a lot of women that are on thyroid medicine. We are not saying to stop your thyroid medicine, but if you believe that the medication you're taking is not effective for you, please have a conversation, as I'm sure you did with your physician, and he or she made that change for you which I think is wonderful. And tremendous self-awareness about what is working, what is not working. I’d love to round up the conversation. You mentioned the three Ps, pause, purge, and purpose. And if there’s a woman listening who’s struggling to figure out what her purpose is, are there exercises or resources or kind of big picture thoughts that you could provide or some guidance about how to determine what your purpose is? I know my purpose for sure, but there are probably many women that are in that pause timeframe, perimenopause, menopause that might still be trying to figure that out for themselves. What would be some guiding suggestions or recommendations you would be able to provide them with?
Elaine Glass: [00:39:19] The seven simple paths in the book is what will get you into a state of being where you connect to your soul. It's the paths that we take in the book Get Quiet, that create that awareness that you didn't have before. It creates a space. You're an open vessel now. Instead of holding, instead of filling a room full of clutter, now you have the space to breathe. You have let go of so much in your life, and that's what the paths help you do, to be able to tap into your intuition again, to tap into your dreams again. So many clients come to me, they've forgotten what they're dreaming of even. So many women come to me and say, “I don't think I've ever had access to my intuition.” But you have, it's been there all along. It's just that you've lived in a cluttered environment, or you've lived in a cluttered body or you just, there's no access.
[00:40:18] So, there's this tuning that has to happen to have this clear access, but your life has to be clean and clear in order for you to tune in to that purpose. But eventually, as you walk these paths, as you shift your energy, you will be able to tap into knowing what your soul's calling is. The people that are not following their soul's calling that I have experienced in my coaching practice are people who have disease, who are unwell. It's because they are ignoring, they're looking away from their soul's calling. When you embrace this soul's calling that we all have, you will be living in the healthiest version of yourself, mind, body, and soul.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:41:08] I love that message. Thank you so much for your time today. Please let listeners know how to connect with you, how to purchase your book, or learn more about your work.
Elaine Glass: [00:41:15] They can find me at elaineglass.com and they can find the book at getquiet.com, and there are some free gifts there as well or anywhere you buy your books.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:41:27] Awesome. Thank you again for your time, my friend.
Elaine Glass: [00:41:29] Thank you so much.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:41:29] If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review, subscribe and tell a friend.
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