Put Your Inner Critic on a Vacation and Take Charge of Your Life

Welcome to The Satiated Podcast where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation, and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host Stephanie Mara Fox your Somatic Nutritional Counselor. I’m excited for my chat today with Sacred Walker. Sacred is a mental health coach, mind body health expert, executive confidence coach, Founder of Limitless Leaders Mastermind, and Self Love for Everyday Superheroes Academy. Since 2008, she has been training and empowering visionary leaders, particularly women of color, LGBTQIA+ leaders, and everyday superheroes historically excluded from achieving their full potential. She believes that when you say yes to yourself, you'll show up with more energy and a renewed sense of purpose. Welcome Sacred!

Sacred Walker 00:59

Oh my gosh, Stephanie, thank you so much for having me. And thank you all, you know, everyone who is joining and tuning in, I'm so glad to be here.

Stephanie Mara 01:08

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to our chat today. And I love to first start out with how did you get into this work? Because individuals ebb and flow of journeys are just so interesting.

Sacred Walker 01:19

Yeah, absolutely. So I was actually working at the time in LGBTQ adolescent medicine, I was having a phenomenal time, impacting young people, and really seeing the ways that a lot of the stress that they were having, and showing up just trying to be who they are more impacted how they move, how they ate, how they were able to interact with other people how they were able to feel loved and cared for. And I was invited out to do this amazing presentation on Capitol Hill. And on the way there, I got into a huge car accident. And I narrowly lost the ability to be able to touch my toes, I nearly lost the ability to be able to dance, and all of that, but still somehow managed to make it to the presentation, make it back home in time to heal. And that's when I knew that there was something that was opening there. And in that time of rehabilitation, I began to put together and carve out space for limitless leaders. Because what I was realizing was that I, like many others, was showing up as a health and human service impact or taking care of the lives of young adults making pathways for their own well being, and oftentimes playing a big fish out in the world, but then had to kind of play small in my job, if you can relate to that. In addition to that, after the accident, all these stressors in my body started coming up. And I had to lean on my homeopathic and holistic approaches just to healing again. And so today, I'm able to touch my toes, I'm able to dance, you know, eating in healthier ways. And I realized that sometimes burnout, you know, can hit us just like a car accident. And I just set out to make sure that no one else would feel like life had sideswipe them. And they would never have to, you know, play small again.

Stephanie Mara 03:04

Wow, oh, I had no idea you had such a powerful background of having this situation occur that I'm really hearing, you know, I've totally been there you have those kind of moments where whether you want to call them life or death moments are just situations that occur that just change your entire view of your life of am I living the way that I am meant to be living? Or am I living the way that I feel like I'm supposed to?

Sacred Walker 03:35

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think what stuck out to me the most was when I returned, even though I had the most dynamic, sweet, supportive team, because I kept being told that you were doing too much or you were pouring into people too much. You were spending too much time. I found that I didn't even tell people that I did this huge presentation. I didn't tell people that I was healing from this accident because I was used to being the superhero. And I certainly didn't tell people that somehow I discovered my voice on the other side of what I call a life quake and I'm sure you can relate. It can be a car accident, it can be a breakup, it can be a divorce. But sometimes when we're flying out in the world, we find that there's a little voice inside that says I'm built for more and we need to know how to navigate that and also make sure that we can be healthy to be able to sustain that vision that's in our soul. And so I help people to bring it out.

Stephanie Mara 04:31

Yeah, I find with those that I work with that it's their relationship with food that is their wake up call that they see the patterns of chronic dieting, binge eating, emotional eating happening over and over and over again as that wake up of hmm am I really living in the way that I want to be living right now and these patterns actually are kind of the you know, I think of them more as the answer. They're the doorway of they're speaking to you that it's like there's a deeper want and a need here for your life.

Sacred Walker 05:04

Absolutely. And I love the fact that you're speaking into this, you know, in the limitless leaders mastermind, we talk about this in session six, around carving out sacred space in your home. And I love what you're speaking to about, what if we looked into the way that our home is our body, right? The home, in our guts, the home in our stomach and our digestive system, right, when our stomach begins to tense up. And we notice that these things trigger things, you know, the people I work with, sometimes they see things in their gut, they also see things in their heart, right? People don't oftentimes talk about the way that the heart, and the stomach can be connected, right. And so I remember when I was younger, and I was going through all kinds of challenging life big moments, I would stop eating because my system was, you know, feeling overwhelmed. But also I call it my anxiety spot, I just had a burning sensation in my heart, there was a heaviness there that I knew something wasn't quite right. And it's going to pull on you until you set something straight, right? So sometimes as visionaries we have to pay attention to when our stomach is telling us something, and our heart is meeting balm. And we need to navigate how to do that. And so that's what we do a lot in our in our mastermind is talk about one of the things is how do you do create a prayer space in your home? How do you carve out space, you know, in your heart after you felt let down so you can keep your commitment to yourself and trust yourself? Again, these things are so key, you know, when we talk about how to take care of our digestive health, because our stomach will tell all.

Stephanie Mara 06:35

Yeah, you pointed out something so important just now of the experience, or what you're defining as home, has to first start within your own body. Because if we don't feel safe to land here in this skin suit, like this is the only body that we are going to get in this lifetime, and so if we don't feel safe here, it's really hard to activate our dreams to move towards the life that we want to create for ourselves. And so yeah, it starts with how do I feel safe and grounded and at home in this body, in this system, and learn the way that it works. So then we can kind of expand our view out to the life that we want to be creating.

Sacred Walker 07:21

Absolutely, absolutely, I'm going to be a little vulnerable with y'all on the show today. Because I'm going to tell you in the last two weeks, my body has been going through it, and it was one of those reminders of we need to have those tools in our toolbox to take care of. So you will never guess that I got adult pinkeye, I got symptoms that were similar to covid, I had dysmenorrhea, which means that that's when your womb is really experiencing extreme pain, right? And all kinds of other things that were kind of very flu like, right, were landing in my body. And I was just at the tail end of being able to birth this limitless leaders and I said, okay universe, I know that this means that this is going to be one bold, badass course if everything in my body is trying to block it from birthing, right? Because that's sometimes how things come. And you know, one of the biggest gifts that I gave myself was the ability to center myself. Because every voice my head was telling me, excuse my French and I grew up seventh day adventist so sometimes I feel like I need to filter myself even though today I'm also an integrated minister and have liberated that, but excuse my French, all the voices in my head was saying, holy shit, get it together. Why aren't you done yet? What is wrong? And the more I spoke into that, and the more that I listened to that, I felt my stomach getting tighter, and tighter and tighter. And my felt my heart getting more and more closed off. Right. And that's so key. And then once I began to center myself and use some of the centering practices that we use to help people feel limitless in our guided meditations, etc, I found that I felt so much more intentional. I began to hear the voice of Spirit in a way that I had been missing for so long, right. I began to look at what foods I was putting into my body so that I can actually be able to feel healthier, I began to pull on my echinacea and I began to pull on the ways that I can pull into my celery and my apple and the way that I can bring in some, you know, cleansing artifacts so that I can really reduce inflammation in the body because the body was responding to a foreign agent. Right? And that's like heartbreak. It's like wait a minute, I'm naturally love what's happening here and it's trying to push all this toxicity out, you know, and then you're coming along saying to it, no, you don't deserve love. You don't deserve that. Right. And so I had to center myself and say I deserve to be well, I deserve to slow on all the way down, right. When I'm usually moving at 150 miles an hour and I have the tools right I have to center myself. And so I just want to bring that as a reminder, because on the other side of that, when I tell you, I got the most clarity about how to build up my team, about who it is that I need to have in my executive inner circle, and who I belong to, and in my ancestral circle, like, I got so much clarity, because I centered myself, and on the other side, feel not only physically healthier, but also feel healthier in my insight and my intuition.

Stephanie Mara 10:28

Yeah, what I really hear you referring to, is bringing in your resources, and whether you're someone who's listening to this, whether you're an entrepreneur or have your own business or not, I think that this also relates to sometimes when we're really going through it, and like, oh, my heart goes out to you with everything that you just went through. Yeah, that it's like, what are my resources and reminding yourself of that to bring the people, the foods, the environments, the sounds, the smells, everything that supports you in feeling safe and secure and regulated in this world. And I really hear that that was something that you started to bring in more that helped you. Even maybe heal on a deeper level, because you were able to lean on your resources that were available to you.

Sacred Walker 11:20

Absolutely. And anyone who's listening right now, you know, if you're willing to do this on your own, or we can do this in relationship together, because this is something we did touch in on in our in our mastermind experience, I want to encourage you right now that if there's someone who from your childhood that made you feel like you needed to always be that super ace, a driven, go get it, no matter how much you did it was never going to be enough, and makes your stomach go into knots, I want you to put, first step I want you to put their name on a paper, put their name on a paper, just like acknowledge it, put it out there. Because now you know, it's not you. You just put the name on the paper first thing. Okay. Second step is I want you to write the filthiest word that you feel like your inner child could never have said, because it wasn't saying, it wasn't comfortable, it would have put you at risk or would have made you feel a sense of lack of security, right. And we do a lot of inner child play in our limitless leaders, but I just want to give a taste, right. So just write a little like a couple of words, right? Those words that you know, children are would have not been seen and not heard was my generation, right? Something that would not have been okay, just put it on paper right now. And just for right now, for a moment, I want you to give yourself permission to say, I let go, just I let go. Which doesn't mean that you're not holding them accountable. It doesn't mean that you're not going to get to the place of forgiving yourself, right, and things that you believe that weren't true. It just means I let go. And just for a moment, I want you to breathe into your stomach and exhale. Because there's something in that belly, that source of power, that power chakra area, there's something in that belly that's holding on to that name. And I wrote my dad a letter this week, coming from a very traumatized story history. Somehow, in the midst of the clearing the pink guy opened up everything and I was like, let's write a letter. And when I tell you, I applied what we now have, which is called our love medicine letter to remind you, I apply the steps that I went through. And when I tell you that there were things that I was feeling in my heart that will making it hard for me to see clearly because now we build our team, sometimes the way we build our families, we're not careful, we may hire people that remind us of or don't remind us of and push people away, pull people close. So writing this letter, just take a moment now to say I let go and just see what comes in and message me and let me know how it goes. Because those moments in time where you write the person's letter, name down, a couple of things that really pissed you off, right? It's safe to be angry here. And then the last step is just taking a moment to be able to share the I let go. And it doesn't mean I let go of this experience or the story that was real. It just means that I'm letting go of what's in my stomach that's connected to not anything that's not of me so that the body can heal.

Stephanie Mara 14:13

Yeah, I know in your work a lot. You talk about putting your inner critic on vacation. And I'm wondering if you could speak more to that and what that means and what that looks like.

Sacred Walker 14:24

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Now I'm a Caribbean woman, okay. So you know, we have this thing that it's like this misnomer that you just dip your toes into the sand and you put a little conch shell next your ear and life is irie, everything is good, right? The catch 22 is when we are the CEOs, the executives, the everyday superheroes of our lives, whether we are showing up as women, women of color, whether we're showing up as LGBT or whether we're just showing up as someone who has been through some shit, excuse my French, right, when life has hit us, if we're constantly used to flying, even when we're away, we don't always turn our brain off. And so I remember going on this amazing cruise, we went to multiple islands, St. Thomas and St. Kitts and Virgin Islands. And here's the catch 22, visions are gonna come because guess what my belief is that spirit is constantly speaking. So now the inner critic comes along, and it's like, well, what are you going to do with that? Well, you've been sitting on that book this whole time. You have this whole time. How dare you. How dare you take a moment. How dare you. And so we oftentimes, we come back from vacation needing a vacation, because just all of a sudden, we gave ourselves a window, and we feel like oh, my gosh, we're going to come back to a catapult of emails, I'm going to come back to a catapult of overwhelm, I'm going to come back to a catapult of to do's. So I might as well work while I'm away. Or maybe finally, spirit has had a moment to get a word in because you haven't been doing your centering practices. Or maybe you have and the busy mind comes in and fills it. And now it's like, oh, shoot, I have all these wonderful flurry of ideas, why should I not jump on it. So what I want to invite is that when you go on vacation, that you take one of our tools with you, and you can recreate it on your own first is that you go ahead and on a sheet of paper, and because I'm a storyteller, writer, and I have a background in theater, but way before going into psychology, so a lot of my tools are creative for the creative arts, you know, the closet creatives and creatives that are out there. So I will take a moment, and literally just bring up, bring a journal with you, you can bring one of our journals, or you can bring a journal with you. And I want you to give absolutely give yourself space to dream. Let's not let the inner critic win. Let's turn inner criticism to infinite potential. Like, let's do it. Like, take a moment every morning and write down what visions are coming. Let them pour out, you know, jot them down, right? Put them out there. The next day, you're away, maybe with family, oh, my gosh, how dare I write them down. Give yourself a window of time, carve out that time, and put a pin in it. And take a moment to just be with that's your journal. Right? Now, here's the catch 22. The catch 22 is that when you return, you're going to have two things that I'm going to ask you to do. First thing I'm going to ask you to do is I want you to redefine success. What is your marker for success? Is your marker for success that you need to accomplish all the things in your now very full journal as soon as you return? Or maybe it just has a couple lines. And you're like, oh my gosh, I didn't write anything, now I'm a terrible person. Like what is your marker of success? And I want you to just take one step. I'm going to mark one step for success. I'm going to choose that one thing that today will make it successful. Be very intentional. And if you come back to a flurry, second step, if you come back to a flurry of things, people have oh my gosh, and now need three coffees, and now your stomach is full. And now you miss lunch because you're rushing, right, which is a real place and ask me how I know. I apply the tools because I'm an expert in having to constantly re-polish them. Second step is, I want you to think about how you can begin to carve out an additional person in your support circle, whether it's an assistant, whether it's a coach, whether it's a dynamic power partner, such as Stephanie, who can come in and support you in the powerful ways she has in the amazing somatic nutritional approaches that she has. And I'm so excited to learn more and more about in our conversations, right? How you can be matched with a limitless leader mastermind who can really support you and following up to pace yourself. Have you created a life of isolation? A lot of us as visionary leaders feel like because we have the vision, we need to roll it out. The power of a vision is that who's bought into the vision. And who do I have that has my back? Right? So step one, take that create one list one thing of success, what is one thing that will make today successful, take one action. One. The rest is gravy one. Step two, identify who is an additional person that can help me move through some of these emails, who was an additional person that while I was away, I could have assigned to take on some of this responsibility. Because I want to really build up my team. I really want to build up my wellness entourage, if you will, whatever that might be. Identify who is the next person. And if you're having any trouble with that we can support you with the limitless leaders accountability coach to kind of take that next step.

Stephanie Mara 19:37

Yeah, I love how you're breaking this down into bite sized baby steps. I'm a huge proponent of that. I think it's so important because oftentimes, especially if you're trying to build something new for yourself, like you think that you have to take this huge step to move something forward. And actually, that can feel so overwhelming that you're going to shut down that the forward movement that you want to make just comes to a complete halt. You know, whether that is building a business, whether that is okay, I have to get rid of my eating coping mechanism altogether. You know, these are huge steps that you're maybe thinking about and even asking yourself the question, what's a smaller baby step that maybe I can take to kind of break it down even more, so it feels manageable. So I love that you're, you're breaking this down into just like, okay, do this. And then try this and play with that, because that's how we actually help ourselves move forward, like, quote unquote, faster.

Sacred Walker 20:35

Absolutely, absolutely. And throughout the process, pay attention to your heart. The same way we're talking about paying attention to our digestive system, and what we put into the body. Pay attention. When I take the small step, does my heart open? When I take a small step does my heart clamp up, pay attention, because maybe there's something there, maybe there's a connection there that you feel, oh, goodness, I've actually been holding on to this, but I actually, I need to really look at is that aligned still, or Oh, my gosh, I came back and realize I've been missing bestie time, like I had, you know, this amazing time I've been missing, you know, missing bestie time I call that becoming your own best friend. You know, I think that's something that here, you know, we do something now we're going to be launching in the spring, where we take a day where we just carve it out just for you, and we take you out and you get your hair done, you get headshots and you get a nice lunch and you get this whole like glow up day and you get loved on with a massage. It's like a whole like VIP day just for you in becoming your own best friend and call it your glow up day, right. And so in the glow up day, interestingly enough, we also touch in on how do you first give yourself spaciousness to know it's okay. And when something comes up, and if your intuition and your heart is saying, oh, shoot, I return and I actually, not only do I want to become my own best friend, but I actually miss my best friend or as an adult, I want closer best friends or I'm so busy, I haven't had enough time for best friends or whatever it is, because adulting is hard. Adulting can be hard, right? And it can also be beautiful. So when we listen to our heart, our heart when it closes and opens, right? The same way that the way that it's automatically beating, you want to pay attention. And see from there, what is it telling you so that when you check in with your coach or your support system, you can give them some insight and they can help you pull out okay, then what's the next step as a result of you listening to your intuition. And we talk about this a lot, you know.

Stephanie Mara 22:40

Yeah, I so agree with what you're talking about. It's paying attention to your body's feedback, because it's constantly talking to you about what resonates with you, about what doesn't resonate with you, whether that be food or people or the environments that you're in, or the next steps that you want to take in your life, that just even paying attention to, yeah, that expansion or contraction. And even sometimes, I'd like to also add into that, to sit with that a little bit longer. Because sometimes we interpret contraction as a no, where sometimes it can be a contraction is I'm stepping outside of my comfort zone and it's a yes, but it feels scary. So sometimes, you know, we have to hang out in that space of okay, there's something that my body is trying to tell me and I don't actually even need to understand it or know why it's telling me like it's feeling the way that it's feeling. Sometimes it actually takes a little bit of time to interpret what our body is trying to relay to us. Have you found that?

Sacred Walker 23:37

I have found that to be so true. That is so, I love the fact that you said that and you hit it ao on the head. Y'all who are tuning in, I hope y'all caught that gem because that right there, I was like that, that I was I felt like putting my finger on my nose because that is it. You know, it's interesting, as someone who moves in the world and looks at things from like, a perspective of how does this lead back to healing and how do we take care of our mental and emotional health? And that how does that tie back into the body? It makes me think of actually something that we talked about in lesson three around healthy communication. How do we talk to ourselves and other people? There's something called the paradox of friendship, the paradox of relationships, right? And the paradox of it means that you both need people and it's people can also hurt us, right? You need people and people can also hurt us. And that can create, you know, what we call samskara. You know, when I studied in South India, samskara, like these imprints in our spirit and our being, these like memories, right? People can hurt us. People can help us people who care for us. People can do us harm, right? You know, that's the dance. And so the catch 22 about that, is that sometimes our trust can misfire, our trust in our intuition can misfire, so our heart can clamp on up because it's remembering that imprints that like wait the last time I trusted someone who did that, that's what happened. And, or our heart can open and it can misfire. Oh my goodness, I better keep my heart open because if I don't, then this will happen. That's a misfire, right? I call those brokenhearted anxiety driven decisions. It doesn't mean you're bad. It just means it, it might create a bad decision. Brokenhearted anxiety driven decisions. Okay, so how do we transform those into good? We do what Stephanie was just mentioning, we be with it some more. Sometimes it'll be with it some more alone in our meditative practice or centering ourselves. Sometimes we bring an approach to really unpack what is the past trigger around that will really look at what is our eating speaking to, you know, when we look at the body. But this is so important, because trust means that we're learning to trust ourselves. If we are saying to ourselves that someone who actually is hurting us, we want to take more time to convince ourselves that we did something wrong. So I want to pull you closer to me, oh, no, what did I do to make you pull away, right? I might spend a lot of time pushing to get you closer to me, when in fact, maybe that person is not meant to be close to your heart. But your heart is telling you, you have to remain open because you're afraid you might lose them, you might this, you might that, or the opposite. Your mind, your heart might shut down because it's feeling like wait a minute, I'm not used to someone caring for me this way, or what's your ulterior motive. Or, I know, for me, I was a flower child when I was younger, like I had an innocence to me, even though I had a very hard and abusive experience in childhood, I felt very loved by my mom, you know. And so for me, I always saw the good in people, right? So my heart would remain open. And I was like, but if you only saw that you were doing XY and Z, maybe you would turn around. And so I got lost in coaching people who were not looking to be coached. And so my heart would sometimes open when it needed to feel protected, it needed to feel protected. And so I just invited the possibility that may be possibly when we listen to our heart, and we stay true to what's coming up inside, we can say, okay, I'm not, it's not that I'm not trusting myself, I'm trusting an old message that doesn't serve me anymore that's no longer true. So I actually do deserve to be loved. I do deserve to be cared for. I do deserve to be protected. And I do deserve people who are going to be consistent with me. And so then that's what I can learn to communicate in more confident ways. And we talk about that in limitless leaders. How do I communicate more competently? When I know what my heart is really needing and I move from there.

Stephanie Mara 27:44

Yeah, yeah, you know, something that this makes me think of just because I love to make correlations back with our relationship with food, is that when you are even on that process of healing your relationship with food, that sometimes when things actually start feeling more regulated and calm, and at ease, that's when the largest activation of wanting to binge or emotionally eat may come back in because the past memory that you have the last time that you felt safe to eat and have fun with food and be calm around it, something caught you off guard and something maybe overwhelming and traumatic happened. And so to go back to that place actually can sometimes feel more activating, at first, that then the food impulse comes back in to try to protect you. You know, that kind of reminds me of everything you were talking about friendship of like, we want to be close, but we also understand this can hurt me, you know, you want to heal your relationship with food, but there can also be this edge that you feel like when you do that means that you're opening yourself up to something maybe unexpected happening. And food was the thing that you drew upon to like protect you in the world and if you don't have that anymore, then what?

Sacred Walker 29:00

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think this is where it's really important to begin to look at our relationship to food, and the body, and our relationship to the heart and the body, and how they hold emotion and process through things. You know, there's a really powerful tool that I was recently looking into about willpower. And it talked about like, right to your point, like, right when you're feeling like, okay, I'm about to do this last thing of last push, I'm doing either exercising and I'm like going through a program and I'm on my last push or I'm going through something where I'm withdrawing from an impulse, like I'm withdrawing from like shopping a lot to the point where it feels extreme or I'm binge eating and it feels like I'm kind of but I'm gonna say that I'm doing it just this one last time, the time that our brain says I'm going to do this just one more time, because I know that I'm not going to do it forever. And because I'm not going to do it forever, I need to take as much in right now as possible, because I'm not going to do it forever, right. And then that's what happened, you know, as someone who has recovered from deep anxieties, where they translated into many things, including shopping a lot, and other, you know, substances, etc, I have found that that is one of the biggest tricks that our brain tells us that like one more time, I'm going to just, I'm just going to take this all in one more time, because then what that creates is a shift towards shame, versus a shift towards self love. Because I feel the space inside of like, oh, shoot, I let myself down, right, which reinforces the message that somehow I'm whatever that message is that you have tied into what it means to do too much of something, or whatever that is, right. And so when we begin to look at how we can heal what's underneath, when we begin to do that shift towards self love and self forgiveness, we can begin to tap back into that place of how do we what I call transform our vices to our victories, you know, and so when we talk about love, and our limitless mastermind, the V in love is turning vice to victory is looking at one of the vices, what is the message, you're telling yourself around this thing that you're doing just one more time? And what do you really want underneath it? I know, for me when I eat oxtails, they're like my achilles heel. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm a pescatarian, but I'm like, oh, my gosh, these oxtails, oh, they take the sauce, fried fish, because they remind me of home. And when I got clued into that, I was able to say, oh, right, I haven't reached out, I need to reach out to spend some time with family, I'm missing time, I've been moving so quickly, I need to reach out, you know, I need to reach out to an ancestor who, you know, may, in my tradition, wanting a plate of food because they might be moving through me. Maybe they're walking with me, and they might need something. So I will cook a little plate of food and put it aside in honor of them. Because maybe it's just a way that I get to honor them. So maybe that food, that culturally connected thing might be speaking into something. But right now our shame trigger gets tricked up. And then it reinforces whatever early trauma memory we have that's telling us that this thing is only who we are. And trust me as someone in recovery its a lifelong thing. Recovery is a lifelong thing. And I used to work in New York Presbyterian and I worked in the eating disorder unit and one of the things that we saw often was that that came up but we would draw and create and write and tell new stories, even amidst feeling like the body was betraying us. And so we get to love ourselves like, that much more. Do you know about how everybody tuning in to how badass we are? How badass are we that we have had so many experiences that could have limited us and that yet we still show up limitless every day? Just right there means that you need to put your inner critic on vacation. It's like, wait a minute, did you not see how much I did in a day that the average person doesn't do in a year? When you really sit with how much we accomplished because we always think we're doing less than we actually are. So when the body tells us, oh my gosh, I betrayed you again. You get to say, okay, I'm gonna get back on the horse one more time, and you get back on that horse as many times as you need to. And then we try again, to give ourselves space for grace.

Stephanie Mara 33:35

Yeah, what have you found be a baby step that you've seen be supportive when someone's trying to turn that vise into a victory?

Sacred Walker 33:45

Absolutely, absolutely. So I would say a baby step in our tool that we have called vise to victory in step four is we have them write down one moment where they can think of the opposite of what they told themselves to be true. So we're gathering evidence. If I'm telling myself the message that I have no control over my spending. I'm telling myself the message that my heart doesn't deserve to be close to anyone, even though I have an amazing partner who loves on me and is wonderful and all of the things or I'm telling myself that I have no control over my impulses. I write down one moment, I gather evidence, one moment that that was not true. A moment where I actually did have the urge to have oxtails and maybe that wasn't a cultural thing. Maybe it was that I actually was just reinforcing that shame message and I decided, you know what, actually I want to make a smoothie because I wasn't eating oxtails every day. But I only remember that one time that I messed up because that's how the mind works. Right? It gravitates towards the thing we do poorly versus the million other things we did well, or okay, you know what, maybe I got that extra power suit and I didn't need it. But I'm not buying power suits all day. So I think about the other times where I said, you know what, right now I don't need that. I'm going to refocus my energy towards my vision. And my vision is I'm going to make the limitless leaders mastermind the best possible. Or maybe I was like, oh my gosh, your thisthisthisthis and guess what, I took time to heal my body, I no longer have the pink eye, I no longer have flu like symptoms, I might have a message that oh my gosh, you don't know how to slow down. But guess what, life slowed me down and I listened. So you write down one moment, and you gather evidence, because it's really important that you look outside of yourself, you gotta have a little bit what we call aesthetic distance outside of yourself, is what I'm telling myself true? And adjust for a moment, you can kind of put put a little bit of fire under the firecracker under that critic, you know, just to be like, get up, put a little fire under your ass a little bit to see is this true? Then I can say, oh, well, if that was not true in that moment, then maybe just maybe it's not being true in other moments, too. Right? And we got to be truthful with ourselves that just as many years it took for the critic to form is sometimes it's a pathway to getting it to unlock itself. But it's worth the journey of trying again and again.

Stephanie Mara 36:19

So well said. And I hear so much compassion in that, that it's even naming when maybe you engaged in whatever vice that you have, and then taking a step back. And something that I like to add is just even asking yourself the question in that moment, how was that something that I needed? Instead of seeing it as something to judge and, ugh, why did I fall into that again? It's like, okay, in that particular moment, how was that the best decision I could make? How was that something I needed? And then I love that you even broadened it out of then expand your vision a little bit and realize how many times you didn't choose that, because you're so right on that. We often focus on all the many times that we chose it and there are so many times that actually you didn't.

Sacred Walker 37:11

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I think that's well said is the word compassion. You know, it's having that compassion for ourselves for all those times that we didn't choose that. Absolutely. And speaking into that, you know, yeah. Agreed. Agreed.

Stephanie Mara 37:27

Yeah. Oh, my gosh, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today. I feel like I could just talk to you forever, you have just a wealth of depth and knowledge and yeah, I definitely would love to have you back sometime. But I want to leave some time in how can people keep in touch with you, if individuals are interested in learning more about your work in the world and this empowerment leadership that you're trying to support people in stepping into more?

Sacred Walker 37:54

Yeah, absolutely. So because I am 100% that is my mission, I am all about helping people to deepen self love, transforming their relationships with their mind body health, so that they can launch their vision as an act of self love. That's super important to me, as someone who's experienced a lot of limits, I want people to understand that they also are limitless, you can go to selfloveforsuperheroes.com That is probably the most direct route. And you can from there, join our waitlist for when we announce our next either becoming your own best friend BYOB day, or when we have our next opening for our limitless leaders mastermind, I really look forward to being able to connect with you. And in the meantime, just know that you showing up and listening and tuning in here means that you're already taking a step in the right direction, right, you're already investing in yourself. And so that right there, for me is the biggest gift, right? It's the biggest gift that you can give the universe. But, I just feel so honored Stephanie to have talked with you. And for those who are tuning in to, you know, really be able to find, hopefully some gems from what we've talked about today. But definitely selfloveforsuperheroes.com, and if you want to connect on Instagram or Facebook, I'm @asksacred or Sacred Walker on LinkedIn.

Stephanie Mara 37:59

Amazing, and your work is so important and needed in this world. I love that you are even providing a day to role model and show like, hey, this is what it can feel like to put yourself first and that that can actually feel good. Because so often when we start to put ourselves first, it maybe initially feels a little bad, like you're doing something wrong. And that's not something that you like, quote unquote, should be doing. So I love your offerings and that you've created this in a world that needs it.

Sacred Walker 39:42

Thank you so much. And thank you so much for having me and definitely you're not doing anything wrong. You're just you're just setting things right in a wild world. Thank you so much for having me on this amazing show. It really has been an honor and I can definitely talk to you all day. You are an amazing person and beautiful spirit.

Stephanie Mara 40:00

Hmm, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And I will put all of those links in the show notes so individuals can connect with you and your amazingness. And if anyone has any questions about anything that we explored today, you know, I will also put our contact information in the show notes as well so please reach out anytime. And I hope you all have a beautiful rest of your day and I'll connect with you all again soon. Bye!

Keep in touch with Sacred here:

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Contact: sacred@sacredwalker.net