Today my guests are Christine Arylo and Kris Carlson. 

Christine Arylo is a transformational teacher, internationally recognized speaker and best-selling author of the official self-love guidebook, Madly in Love with ME: the Daring Adventure to Becoming Your Own Best Friend. After earning her MBA from Kellogg and climbing the corporate ladder for fifteen years, she chose to devote her life to creating a new reality for women and girls, one based on self-love, freedom and feminine power instead of the relentless pursuit of having to do, be and have it all.

Kris Carlson is an international bestselling author and a leading expert on love, success, grief, happiness, and parenting. She’s the NY Times bestselling author and co-author of Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, Heartbroken Open and An Hour to Live, An Hour to Love. Kris has sold over 25 million copies of her books, and has been featured on national radio and television broadcasts, including The Today Show, Empowered Living Radio, The View, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

In today’s episode, Christine, Kris and I spoke about:

• Cultivating the feminine superpower of receiving
• How to come from a place of openness, rather than a place of knowing and drive
• Flexing your trust muscles and how to build trust over time
• The importance of strengthening the nervous system
• and finally, both Christine and Kris offer key practices for becoming more embodied

 

Tune in and listen to “The Power of Receiving” with the Superwomen of Receiving: Christine Arylo and Kris Carlson.

Subscribe to the Emerging Women podcast on iTunes.

 

Transcript:

Hello, welcome Kris and Christine!

Christine Arylo: Hello!

Kris Carlson: How’s it going?

CP: It’s going well! I want to clarify to the audience here, because we do technically have two Christines, so we’re talking here with Kris Carlson and Christine Arylo. So welcome, ladies!

KC: Well, thanks, Chantal!

CA: Yes, glad to be here.

CP: So we are talking today—we’ll probably hit a couple of different subjects here, but primarily, [we’re] talking about what, Christine, you call the “feminine superpower of receiving.” So maybe we could start with you and you could give us a little background on that terminology and why you think it’s actually a superpower.

CA: Yes, indeed. Well, I am imaging that many of [the people] out there listening, like me—and Chantal, I know like you, and also like Kris—we’ve been taught over the last several centuries to really value our ability to do over our capacity for being, to do more, to make stuff happen, really just a kind of like [growls], a kind of power. When we think about power, we think about things that are very forceful or you have to make it happen. It’s this very, “Go out and kill the meat” kind of mentality. “Go out there and get what you want!”

And that is one kind of power. But there’s this other kind of power, which I never really knew about until right about when I met with Kris Carlson, after I finished MBA school, after I finished that whole superpowered woman, Wonder Woman kind of thing. Because Kris, as it turns out, had been living from the feminine superpowers her whole entire life. She literally is the embodiment of feminine superpower.

And I remember when I met Kris, we had gone to this event together that she had invited me to. And we were in a big tent with all these people, and these people would come up to her and make invitations to her, and she was just very open and not having to make anything happen or figure out who she would have to go speak to or looking at the agenda. She was just very present and things would just come to here. And I’d be like, “How do you do that, Kris?” And she’d be like, “How do I do what?” I’m like, “That! That thing that you do when people just come to you and opportunities just come to you. You’re just invited in.” She’s like, “That’s just how I’ve always been.” And at the time I was studying the divine feminine pretty intensely, and I was like, “That’s all receiving, and it’s a feminine superpower!” And she’s like, “I didn’t know what that was.”

KC: [Laughs]

CA: Because you were born that way! I was born from living out of the masculine power. So we’re like the yin and the yang. I call it a feminine superpower because it’s a different power that’s just as powerful as achieving or making it happen. Receiving is allowing things to come to you, really allowing things to happen instead of feeling like you have to achieve and make it happen. And that’s why the feminine superpower piece—because it’s fun. I mean, who doesn’t want a superpower, right? It’s way more fun to talk about it that way.

CP: Yes. I definitely am just learning about the power of receiving. And I’m excited to hear from Kris as well, since it seems to be more innate in her, according to your description. So maybe we will all learn from the pro over here. But I do agree with you that when I experience it, it does feel like magic. “How is this happening? I didn’t even do anything!” But it’s a little hard to trust that as well. That’s the key.

CA: It’s super hard to trust it. And to underline what you just said, I didn’t have to do anything. It feels foreign to us. Receiving is a huge idea, and there’s some sort of call today to break it down for us. Because I think we all agree receiving, allowing things to come, and having to do less work, having to do less to do more impact would be the way we’d all want to live. But how do you actually “do” that? And how do we break it down so you can actually see where you’re at on the spectrum of your capacity to receive.

So when I think about feminine superpowers, I really think about it like a level of mastery. Kris is a master of receiving because, like you said, it’s innate in her. I’ve had to learn or relearn—I think it’s actually innate in all of us, but we have to activate it inside of us. So over the last seven, ten years since I’ve been studying this, I’ve increased my level of mastery to where I had to start at a very simple level of being able to just receive a hug in a way that I allowed my body—my stomach, my tummy, my heart—to touch another human, or receive a compliment, which is the beginning stages of receiving.

[And] the place where I live now—I’m living nomadically, and so I don’t often know where I’m going to live. I’ve been living without a home for a year and a half, and I have to trust that I’m going to be able to receive my home. I don’t always know where that’s going to be three or four weeks down the line. That’s a full-level spectrum—there’s all kinds of things in between of what the power of receiving can give us. But it really is about knowing where you’re at and that mastery.

CP: Right. Well, Kris, tell us about how you connect to this concept of receiving and how it’s played out. Give us a little background on how that’s played out and transformed in your life to get to the point where you’re actually creating some work around it.

KC: Yes, well, as Christine said, when we spent that time together, one of the beautiful things about Christine is that she’s so reflective with the people that she’s around. That’s what makes her such a wonderful coach and such a high priestess. She really sees things about other people, and she reflects that back to you about what she sees. So quite honestly, as she was telling me this, I was sort of, “Yes, but it’s taken me a lot longer than it’s taken her how to practice.” [Laughs] She actually knows how to figure out how to practice how to receive, whereas for me it’s an innate ability.

What I’ve identified is that there’s an openness that you have to have in order to receive. You literally have to think of yourself as the feminine receiver. So you’re the conduit of the divine, really. I have always begun every single day with the same prayer, or every single podcast, or every speech I do, and that is the prayer “Divine love, play me as an instrument in your finely tuned orchestra of life.” I think when you see yourself as a conduit and an instrument of love and light—really, the biggest part of receiving is getting out of your own way, and doing that is really what I like to call a mindset practice, really opening up your mind, opening up your heart, living presently, being more of a cup to be filled as opposed to a cup that is too much.

There’s this way in which openness and being available and open, and then being able to look at, when something comes along—how it plays out in my work life is I really feel into things. So when I get an invitation or an opportunity, like when Christine asked me to be a part of her 40-day receive program this summer, the biggest gauge that I have is, “How does my heart feel?” Because so much of becoming a receiver is about allowance, and it’s about feeling. And that is the feminine way. It’s more feeling-oriented. It’s more flow-oriented. It’s more allowing to be in the current of life and in the flow of life, as opposed to being like a salmon swimming upstream. I would say, “Save the swimming upstream for salmon to do. They do it really well. They have to do it to procreate. We don’t.” [Laughs]

Believe me, there’s times, with all this internet stuff and everything, I get muddled up into the whole “push” thing, as opposed to sitting back and allowing. I always have to remind myself, the way that that happens for me is—I know when I’m out of alignment, I feel like I’m getting too busy. There’s a certain amount of “receive” that requires you to slow down from the inside. And that just means that I need to pull back a little bit, become more present, [do] less multitasking and [be] more [present], do one thing at a time, more focus. And then in that focus, there’s a sort of empty presence that happens, too. It’s a way in which you come to everything very present, but not filled with expectation. Does that make sense?

CP: Yes, I think your metaphor of the empty cup is spot-on, so I’m getting a feel for what you’re talking about. There’s a curiosity—

KC: Yes, so if your cup is full of expectation, for example—to me, expectation is nothing but disappointment and resentment waiting to happen. So if you have your cup filled already with expectation—and I’m not saying you shouldn’t have goals. Everyone needs goals. But for me, like when I put 100 percent of myself into something, I know that my 100 percent is like 110 percent. And that is all that I can expect of myself.

So if I put all of my energy into something, I let go of the rest. And then it’s time to let God to the rest. Let go, let God. Just let it be. Let things happen as they are, as they’re going to unfold, not how I want them to be. And when you think of success—we saw it at your Emerging Women event in San Francisco, right, Chantal? You said you had higher expectations, but what a lovely evening it turned out to be with what it was.

It’s perfect as it is. I think that letting go of perfection is probably the biggest overworking, overachieving thing that we as women are all sort of driven in our society to be that. And that’s probably underlying all of it. It’s that thread of really still trying to do it all, be it all, and be it all perfectly. Do you think so too, Christine?

CA: I do, I do. And I think if I could share a comparison to give to all the ladies and any awesome men that are out there listening that might help everyone even just bring this in a little bit more. Would that be good, Chantal, just to give you a comparative piece between what is receiving and what is not receiving?

So what happened, back when Kris and I met, we went to this event of 500 women down in Los Angeles. It was actually the Marianne Williamson Sister Giant event several years ago. And I remember there was a whole group of us, and we were like, “Well, what are we going to be doing for dinner?” We wanted to connect with all of our friends, all of the other teachers that were there. And I was watching Kris, and I was watching another one of our friends who is just as accomplished as Kris—big New York Times bestselling author, fabulous teacher, wonderful woman. And I’m watching the two of them and how they’re operating around what’s going to happen. It’s a very simple example that plays out in every place in our lives. I was watched how the two of them are actually approaching what’s going to happen for dinner, knowing that we would all love to be able to have dinner together.

And so Kris is just going about being present at the event and we’re just there, not thinking about dinner, not thinking about the future, not thinking about anything. And the other woman is basically running around talking to everybody about what they’re doing for dinner, while we’re still in the event. She’s already in the future and not actually totally in the present. She’s in both places at the same time. And Kris is just absolutely like, “I’m just looking to lunch. I’m not thinking about dinner, I’m just thinking about lunch.” She’s in the present moment or just what the next step is.

So the event ends, it’s like five or six o’clock, and Kris and I wanted to know where everyone was meeting, if they’re meeting, if we’re even invited. And all of a sudden, the other woman, she comes running out of the conference room and she’s like, “OK, here’s the plan, da-da-da-da. We’re all eating dinner here’s where we’re having dinner.” And she’s just amped up, you can tell her energy is just so—she’s just in crazy overwhelmed doing mode. So we’re like, “OK, great.”

So we go back and we get dressed, and we’re just very calm. And then we just happen to walk into the dinner and there’s two seats that are available. Kris is at one end and I sit at one end in this other chair, and I end up meeting someone who becomes a tremendous teacher and partner for me, [who] I never would have met before. It never would have happened, but I just ended up sitting, at dinner, next to her. And she’s like, “Christine?” And I’m like, “Hey, I know you! And she’s like, “I know you!” And then we ended up working together.

So that’s the power of receiving, where Kris and I—I was following Kris and not this other woman, even though my nature, my second nature was to be more like, “Got to make it happen, got to connect, got to do all that.” And it’s not even that it’s about the connection that makes the over-piece, but it was just about how she was going about it all. There’s a lack of trust that happens. We get freaked out about just trusting. “Will I be invited? Will I know where to go? Will I be invited to where everybody else is going to be?”

So we have to, in order to really receive, learn how to surrender and trust. I think that’s that scares us the most, Chantal. It scares us to actually just really be that open, to allow it, because, what if? What if I don’t get invited? What if it doesn’t happen? What if the money doesn’t come in? And that’s the real test of faith. That’s the real difference between a person who talks about the feminine and a person who actually lives the feminine through her, as her, as a living embodiment of how it operates.

CP: Right. How do you build the trust? Because I feel like, in my own life, I’m doing this dance where—especially since I’m leading something. I’m the person who organizes the dinner. That’s what I do. I don’t know why I end up being in that position a lot. And right now, I know in my business, I’m trying to bring in more of the receptivity and ask for more guidance and allow that space to happen so I’m not driving 24/7. But that issue of trust that you bring in is so critical, and I’m wondering if that can be built up, or do you just jump off the cliff and just trust? Because that’s hard for me.

CA: Do not just jump off the cliff.

[All laugh]

CA: That’s the other kind of power, that, “I should just be strong enough to jump off the cliff because I’m powerful!” No, no, no. It’s just like if you were to learn how to hang glide. You wouldn’t just get on a hang glide in your first time out. “I’m just going to fly right off a cliff!” You’ve just got to learn lessons—there’s a building up.

KC: You have to exercise your trust muscle, just like you’d exercise your biceps. You really have to exercise and life itself teaches you. Because the results that you have when you surrender and you’re in the flow, that’s when life is magical, right? We’ve all had that experience when things just come to us. And that’s a space within you. It’s not without you, that’s actually within you.

CA: And this is where, as achievers, we get confused. It’s not that you might not be the person who ends up calling the people together to have the beautiful dinner, but the energy from which you come from will be very different. And it’s not always going to be you. So I know for me, part of my receiving journey [is] to learn to trust that someone else will take care of it. And that if I’m the one that’s supposed to take care of it—and this is where Kris was saying, the feminine, you can feel it. You cannot live in the feminine and not be in your body. You have to be in relationship to your intuition.

So it’s about tapping into, “Is this mine to do? Am I the one to be the spark to bring the people together? Or am I, right now, supposed to be the one in space and hold the space and allow it to form around me?” You don’t start that trust—you start that with little things, things like a dinner, or things like, when I became [nomadic], I didn’t just sell my house and go nomadic. It took a tremendous amount of faith that I would be able to receive my home no matter what.

I started this probably seven years ago when my friends dared me to go to Big Sur and not book a hotel room. And I was like, “What are you talking about, go to Big Sur and not book a hotel room? It’s high season, I would have to sleep in my car!” One of my biggest fears is physical uncomfortability. I do not like to be physically uncomfortable. But I took the challenge. I’m like, “All right, I’ll trust. I surrender, I trust.”

And we drove down there, and all these things were “sold out, sold out, sold out.” And then I had a hit. I was driving along, and I’m like, “No, I’ll pull into this place over here.” And he just pulls in, and I’m like, “Let’s just go in!” And of course they have one room available. It was a little bit over our budget, not a lot, and we’re standing in the room and we’re like, “What do you think? Should we take it? Should we not take it?” Because I wasn’t in full trust yet. “I don’t know, I don’t know.” And Noah’s like, “We’ll take it.” And we walked downstairs and as soon as we were signing the documents, another couple walks in and they would have taken the room, because there were no more rooms left. We got the last one.

So in that moment, I built my bicep, my trust muscle, so I can do it again and do it again and do it again. Like Kris said, you build, you don’t bench press 200 pounds to start. You start with 20, then you go to 40. It’s the same thing with trust and receiving.

KC: And I think, Chantal, you said an important thing. When you’re the person [who] is the gatherer, the person that’s setting the container, there’s a way in which you can do that, like what Christine was saying, in a very receptive place, very open place, that takes less energy than to do it from a push-hard, controlling place that will really, in the end, overwhelm you and make you feel overworked.

Again, it’s more than the energy, because I know I certainly have done many things where I was also the person who created it or set the container for it. But there’s a way in which even—like, I remember at my wedding, long again, I did everything I needed to do the summer before, and I never stressed about it. I just truly wasn’t stressed about it, because at the end of the day, it’s just going to be a big party. I knew it was going to be beautiful and I knew there would be things that would happen, and I remember just feeling very open to allowing it to be the party it was meant to be, not the party that—I didn’t just create this big summation of the way I thought things were supposed to be.

I think a lot of what we’re talking about is, sometimes things turn out better than we think. Sometimes our plans actually create a limitation as opposed to allowing it to be bigger than it might have been, too. And that’s not to say that you don’t take care of the details. You still take care of all the details, but there’s just this different openness that you bring to the table.

CP: Right. It’s interesting—when I hear you talk, I feel how embodied you are, Kris. There’s just something in your energy that just feels very much in your body. And I know—not that this is going to become an Enneagram discussion, but I know that you—

KC: [Laughs] Oh!

CP: It’s tempting! It’s tempting! But I know that you’re a 9, and then Christine is, like myself, a 7, which is the mental point. I wonder if we can explain more of that embodiment and as it relates to receptivity a little bit. Because I know that for myself, when I’m in the mental spin—let’s just take that issue of the dinner. It’s either, “I’m not going to get invited,” or, “I’m going to invite people and no one’s going to come.” Either side of that, you’re still in this mental spin and it’s really hard to be receptive. And yet you just feel so embodied. I wonder if you could say more about the connection between being receptive and being in your body.

KC: Well, I am a very physical person. I do a lot of—my personal health regime is really about [meditating]. I’ve meditated for years. I don’t do long meditations, I do mantra meditations or very short two- to three-minute meditations, maybe 10 minutes in the morning. But I don’t know, maybe that comes from [the fact that] I have a lot going on in my life, like we all do. But I’ve got a lot of other stuff going on. Christine’s watched me go through everything from a 19-year-old pregnancy to stalkers to [laughs] all sorts of different things since Richard died.

Richard’s death, I have to say, the loss of going through that, it was really something that brought me into my body in a totally different way. My body was really what led me through all of that and taught me to surrender to a totally different degree. I think I’ve always been this very feminine woman because I had a man who really held that masculine place, but in a very divine way. It wasn’t like I was a submissive feminine. I was a feminine energy that was able to emerge in the way that women—like fluid water. And he really held that ground for me.

So I went through a lot of surrender-trust-and-accept in grief. And when you emerge from something like that, it’s so big, that life change and that life transformation that happens, that there’s almost nothing else that’s bigger than that. There’s maybe one other thing that would be bigger for me, and I don’t like to think about that. [Laughs] But there’s nothing else that’s bigger than that that I’ve been through, and I think that’s maybe what Christine really has seen in me.

To me, being invited to the party doesn’t have the same kind of sting that maybe it would have had a long time ago. Do you know what I mean? I think that’s just because I’ve practiced being present. I’ve practiced really being in my body and being grounded, because I had to. I was at risk for not really staying on the earth if I didn’t.

CA: And I think, too—and this even related to the Enneagram, I will reflect this back to you, Kris. Because you know how I love how the reflective things work. She doesn’t know that she’s just this way. It’s like, “Blah blah blah blah blah!” And when you deal with the Enneagram or a spiritual caste, it’s our path back to the faith of trust, to the faith of trust that no matter what, everything’s going to be OK. But it’s our ego that creates—and our ego’s helpful, but all the things that we do, as a plan or as to achieve or to whatever, that’s all because we’re actually not trusting.

And when I think about trust, I think about those trust falls, where you’re standing on a tree and you fall backwards and you fall into people’s arms. And it’s like that with receiving. We’re falling into the arms of spirit. We’re falling into the arms of God. We’re falling into the arms of the divine. Whatever that is for you. And I think what we’re hearing Kris say is when Richard died, that broke open her entire internal structure. Because our nervous system is part of it, right?

So that’s why Kundalini yoga—every day, every morning, if I do not do my Kundalini yoga every morning, I’m not a receiver. I’m a planner, I’m an overachiever, and it’s really hard for me to trust and slow down and bow. Because my nervous system, your nervous system, all of our nervous systems are programmed to respond to—we’re in fight-or-flight more than we’re in, “Oh, I’m in the hands of God.” And we can talk about that, we can say that, and a lot of us do, but there’s a big difference between that and embodying it.

And embodying it only comes through practice, and sometimes it happens like big mama jamas, like Kris got, the initiations she got like Richard dying and her daughter being pregnant at 19 and having a stalker. We could go on about this—she wrote Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff? She’s like, don’t sweat the big stuff!

KC: [Laughs]

CA: Where is that book? And so all that training that she did over the years, the last 30 years, to strengthen her nervous system so that when shit did happen, that she could still come from that place of grace. And that’s what we’re all doing. As we find our way back to the feminine, we trust in and we learn these feminine superpowers and embody and feel that, “Oh, if I allow, things are still going to be OK. I’m still going to safe.” Or, “If I receive, if I trust, if I surrender, all the things that are hard, that require faith,” they start to restructure that nervous system so that instead of feeling like you have to be the one to do and be and figure it out, you can actually have that deeper level of faith, and actually that is the one, that spirit is the one, that the divine in the one holding you.

But you have to actually have to experience it, sometimes for the big stuff, but if you can practice it daily so that if you do—it’s not like the law of attraction. It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes we’re all going to get big stuff. But then even just the stuff that’s like—Kris and I are developing this program together for the 40-day receiving practice, and we almost got triggered by each other. Because it happens in partnerships, especially around women.

KC: [Laughs]

CA: So we’re both having this experience—we can feel like we’re having our own experience, but then we’re in this other experience of seeing, “Oh, now it’s all OK.” We both know that we can trust [that] this is all part of the bigger, “Throw a receiving practice, look at all the ways in which you don’t trust.” So it comes up, but because we do that daily practice, we build our muscles, just like, Chantal, you’re out there with the CrossFit and doing your thing so if you had to move something heavy, you could do that. You’d have the physical strength. So we do the same thing with our emotional and our spiritual strengths so that we can actually trust at deeper levels

CP: Yes, I think what you said was, “Strengthening the nervous system.” That’s kind of what I zeroed in on as something concrete that we could do, that I could do to flex the muscles, so to speak. And I know you’re launching a couple courses around receiving and there’s going to be practices. Can you two give me an idea of—maybe at least one practice that you could summarize that could help us on that path to really building back our nervous system? Because that’s something I think we can all relate to.

KC: For sure. One of the things I’ve always taught in my work is, “How you start your day is how you live your day.” If you jump out of bed in the morning at the alarm clock and you’re already starting your day out frazzled, then chances are that’s how the rest of your day is going to unfold. So what I’ve always taught moms and women to do is get off to a peaceful start. Really create your own space in your home, in your life. It only takes 10-20 minutes.

It starts right when you wake up in the morning. Instead of getting up quickly, put your feet over the edge of your bed. Christine will tell you what she does in a minute. Put your feet on the side of your bed. Get up slowly. Put a warm, cozy robe on. Go get some tea or lemon water or coffee, whatever you need, and then meditate for 10 minutes, do some inspiration reading. Whatever that ritual is for you, that’s one of the ways that you can practice immediately receiving and nourishing your spirit.

Because that’s so much of this for women. We give so much to everyone around us, we take of so many people, we take care of everyone, but oftentimes, at the end of the day, we kind of ask the question, “Gee, where do I fit into my own life? I don’t even know where I exist anymore, where I’m coming and going.” And when you’re feeling like that, it’s really because you’re not taking any time for yourself. So I find, for women to do that first thing in the morning, it’s imperative to beginning a receive practice.

CA: I love that teaching and I strive to it. Like I was saying, if I don’t start my day with tuning my nervous system to expansiveness and openness, I will literally go through my day and I will feel contracted, or I’ll try to be controlling, or it will just be more stressful. So we think we have to meditate for 60 minutes on a cushion, but it’s actually not that at all. It goes back to the mantra that Kris said, and I think it’s an example of one of the best prayers.

I have several receiving practices I do every morning, right from my bed. [They] take me less than five minutes. I’m going to give you one that I actually do on my mat every morning, or my furry rug: I do Kundalini yoga. And so those of you who really do want to want to experience repatterning the nervous system, that yoga—specifically that kind of yoga, Kundalini yoga—is built for repatterning the nervous system. It was specifically brought here in order for us to be able to deal with the kind of pressure that we are under in a society. The yogis knew that, and that’s why they came here in the ’70s to teach it in the Americas.

Just little practices I do make such a difference. One that I want to share with you is actually more of a self-love practice that I do every morning. Self-love is a big part of my teaching, and it really has been part of what saved my life, because I think from a receiving perspective, one of the things that I’ve had to really give myself is that love. As Kris said, when you’re giving, it’s out of lack. When you’re giving too much, you’re not receiving enough. That’s when your chalice is empty or it’s not full enough, so you’re trying to fill from your reserves.

So every morning, this is a very simple super-duper practice to make sure that you’re not [taking] from your reserves is to just imagine that you have an energy dipstick in your body, and you’re going to dip the dipstick in, and you’re going to get a reading on a scale of 0 to 100. And I invite you to go ahead and close your eyes right now and just ask yourself what your number is. If you were to give yourself a reading of 0 to 100, with 100 being totally full, and 50 being at half-tank, and 0 being empty, where is your number? All right, Chantal, where is your number?

CP: I got a 45.

CA: All right, Kris, your number?

KC: I’m probably a 60.

CA: And I’m 67. So here’s the scale. Are you all ready? If you are below 50, you don’t really have anything to give. You’re giving from a place in your body that is beyond your reserves. There’s a big self-care, self-love lesson about receiving, which is, “Never serve from your reserves.”

So you really want to be at 75 or above. I’m not usually above 75. I’m usually somewhere between, like 65 and 73. I aspire to be above 75. But if you’re above 50, you actually have energy in your chalice to give. But if you’re below 50, you really don’t. That’s why you feel depleted, that’s why your nervous system starts to freak out, and that’s why you start to go into fight-or-flight, because you’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to give! I don’t have any more to give!” But you don’t know how to stop, right?

And so what I do in that situation is to just notice that. Don’t judge it, but just notice it. And check in every day and ask yourself the question, “Well, what do I need to receive? What do I need to receive?” So, Chantal, Kris, just close your eyes again, and take a breath, and just ask yourself, ask your body, ask your soul, what do you need to receive today? All right, Kris, what did you get?

KC: I got a little bit of space.

CA: Good. Chantal?

CP: This is hard for me! [Laughs] This is the part that’s hard for me!

CA: It’s OK if you don’t get—

KC: What would be your language of love to receive? Is it somebody appreciating you?

CP: Well, I mean, let’s not get too deep here on the podcast.

CA: What I’ll say is this: If you don’t get anything [right away], which happens to people, it just means that you haven’t been tuning in to what you need to receive. And that’s normal, that’s a normal place to start with a practice. Of course your inner wisdom is like, “What, she just asked me that question? She hasn’t asked me that question in years!” And so your wisdom is taken aback, just like, “What? Me? I get to receive?” Especially for you, Chantal, and for all of us, we give so much.

I’ve been doing this practice for over five years. Actually, seven? No, five years, it was five years ago, after I met Kris and I realized that if I didn’t learn how to receive, I wasn’t going to make it. I wasn’t going to be able to have the impact in the world that I wanted without depleting myself, my resources, my time, my money, and eventually, at the age of 40, my body. Because what you can do in your 20s and 30s and what you can give, once you get over the age of 40, your body starts to revolt. And I’ve seen some of the most powerful women just go down. I mean, look at Arianna Huffington. She tells the story about how she fell. She’s one of the most powerful women there is, and her body revolting. So it’s totally normal.

It’s OK, Chantal. Just make something up. You can just choose. What I got was, “I just need a really good heart-to-heart with a girlfriend tonight. That’s what I need to receive.” And so if you don’t get something, you can just make something up. Like, “What would I want to receive?”

CP: Well, you know, ironically enough, I think, for me—and that’s why I was kind of more on the embodied side of things and admiring Kris so much. Not that I’m not admiring you, Christine, of course I am. But something I yearn to tap into more is being more connected to the messages within the body. And I’m not saying, “Do I feel well? Do I feel OK?” but actual guidance and receiving even the present moment or another or my work in a way that is more deeply rooted in my body, and not just living up in my brain, which is what it feels like.

So when you asked me that question, I was just trying desperately to bring the whole experience down into the body so that I could get the message. So, ironically, I think what I want to receive is more receptivity from an embodied place.

CA: And that is where we want to ask the question from. So it’s a great noticing for you, and for any of us—if we try to make it in our mental mind, it’s like, “Here’s what I think I should want. Here’s what I think I do need.” But sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll just scan. If I can’t get an answer from my body, I’ll just scan my body. I imagine myself just scanning my body, or I’ll put my hands on my belly. Your belly is where the feminine lives in your body. It’s your center of receptivity. And just [breathe] into that place in your body until you get a word, until you get an image, until you get something that your intuition can get to you through your body.

KC: Or a feeling. A lot of times, I think what happens, Chantal, is that we get into such [an] overdoing mode that we forget that we need permission to feel our feelings, and we need to take the time. Because a lot of times all you really need to do is just have a really good cry. Just sit down for no good reason—you don’t even have to have a reason to cry. But just to sort of clear all the energy out of your body. That’s why walking or hiking or time in nature or yoga—it all clears the energy channels in the body.

So when you want to feel your message, or you want to feel your heart and have that natural flow of communication—which is what it sounds like you’re asking for—then really being able to express emotions sometimes is the easiest. That’s another path, another way to receive that information and to clear it. Because it’s usually because you just got some—you know, you’ve been doing, doing, doing, and what you really need to do is just sit with it and be for a while. And if you sat down and you just sort of let your body shake, maybe lay on the floor in a spread eagle and just breathe, you might be surprised what might come up.

CA: That’s actually one of our super practices. We actually both did it, and we know we both did it. In order to receive, you have to surrender first. So you can put yourself into the nervous system in the body. Just pull yourself down on the floor in like a cross position, an ultimate surrender position, and you just say to yourself, “I surrender, I surrender, I surrender,” until you can feel the tension release from your body.

There are all these different practices that she and I do so that when the stress shows up, we can release, so that we can surrender, so that we can get into it. Sometimes I’ll even just fall back on my bed, like, “I surrender! I surrender!” Sometimes it’s me on my mat in the morning, just bowing down, like I did this morning. I was just bowing down on my mat and just saying to the divine, “I surrender. Allow me to be an instrument. I surrender, I surrender.” Praying is another way to really open to receive. Because as Kris was saying, if you don’t have faith, it can’t come in. It can’t come in, there’s no faith.

KC: Yes, I always say, if you express it out, and you let it out through any kind of expression, sometimes it could sound almost like an animal. I could just be, [growls] like a real loud noise. You sound like a lion. It’s kind of an odd thing, but at least my own body releases endorphins and all sorts of stuff that makes me feel better. And then the channel is more clear. Then your receptivity goes up when the channels are clear.

CP: Right. Well, I so appreciate the practice that we did just now. I think that’s really what I wanted to get at, because we hear a lot of this principle of receiving, and I know that a lot of us are in the middle of learning this. It’s really good to get concrete and almost physical with it, because it is a concept that can easily stay conceptual and in the ethers as an idea, which is the exact opposite of what it’s trying to achieve.

CA: Yes. The feminine is not an idea. She is living and breathing through us. The thing for all of us to really get [is] that we are the ones—the way that we live our lives, the way that we structure our value systems, the way that we make our choices, we are literally bringing her into being through our own bodies and through how we live. And that’s why we need these kinds of practices. There’s nobody out there coming to say, “Here’s the feminine!” We’re all learning it, and that’s what Kris and I have dedicated our practice to, of how we actually practice this on a day-to-day level.

And what I’ve found—and this is why I do things like the 40-day practices—is [that] there [are] these underlying things. Every one of us, everyone listening to this right now, you all want to—who would rather not be the person who gets to receive and who gets invited, [and be] the person who runs around like a chicken with her head cut off? Of course we’d all love to be able to live in that place of grace, to really live our lives as queens—not from a place of entitlement, but from a place of service and being served and [living] from grace.

And to do that, we have to find all those places inside of our nervous system—all those beliefs, all those patterns, all those habits—that have gotten stuck in there that are to the contrary, that are the opposite of the trusting and the surrendering and the receiving. So I do a 40-day practice. The yogis, the physicians, the brain scientists, they all agree that if you do one thing for 40 days and focus on it, you can find a pattern and you can shift it. You can bring awareness to it and you can break it.

And so that’s what happens. We all have to look at where are the ways in which we’re blocking receiving based on patterns and beliefs that we have that are inside of us that are actually not our first nature, they’ve just been learned because we live on a planet that is so full of fear and has devalued the feminine for so long. So that’s really the task that we’re all under from a spiritual an emotional perspective: Locating those inside of our emotional body, our spiritual body, our physical body, our mental mind, and them breaking them so the flow can come in and we can truly be the receptors that hold for the divine that we are all meant to be.

KC: And I think keeping in mind, too, that the divine feminine energy is really a spiral. It’s not linear. The masculine way has presented a very linear way to live, and the divine feminine is very, very spiral. It’s like being the eye of the storm. It’s all right to have chaos around you when you’re in your body and you’re receiving the feminine. You’re not going to stop giving, but you’re going to learn how to give with more grace and ease. And you’re going to learn how to receive so that you can give more with grace and ease. That’s the beauty of the feminine, that it’s a spiral, it isn’t linear.

CP: Yes. Well, thank you both so much! It seems that you’re very complementary, and I think this is great work. I want to make a mention of your upcoming live stream, which will be an evergreen offering on both of your websites called “Grace Under Pressure.” Is that correct, that we can access this on either website?

CA: Yes. You’ll be able to do it from either of our websites. Or there will be a direct URL to femininesuperpowers.com.

CP: OK. Cool. Well, more on that coming down the pike. When is that?

CA: It will be livestreamed for solstice, but it will be open and available. It’s really about helping you find those places in your life where you’re putting pressure on your emotional, physical, mental, spiritual bodies, and then releasing at least one of those pressure points. Because a lot of the pressure that we feel—whether we like to admit it or not, ladies, this is the truth—we put it on ourselves. And so we’re the ones that are holding our finger for perfection, and those expectations. We’re the ones creating the pressure.

And I will never forget something that, Kris, you told me. I don’t know if you even remember this. I was on my way to the jungle for about a week, and you had said to me, “Richard used to say,” and this is a direct quote, that, “‘Stress is just an acceptable form of mental illness in our society.’” And when you said that to me, I took that with me in my suitcase to Costa Rica. I remember I was in the jungle for about four days, sitting there, and I made a list of all the things that I did to create stress for myself and all of the things that I couldn’t change. And I realized, “Shit, that’s a lot of pressure on myself! I’m creating stress for myself! Why am I doing that?” So that’s what “Grace Under Pressure” is really about—helping people find those place where you are doing it so you can lift that finger off that pressure point, and that’s what allows the divine flow to come in.

KC: Yes. Taking responsibility for your own happiness is really the ultimate empowered place to live from, for sure.

CA: And it ain’t always easy! [Laughs]

KC: I know! You put those quotes on Facebook and everybody always says, “That’s not easy to do.” [Laughs] No, it’s not! It takes a lot of practice.

CP: Right, right. OK, ladies.

CA: Well, thanks, Chantal!

KU: Thanks, Chantal! That was lovely!

CP: Thank you so much! Take care!

 

 

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