Brenda Winkle 00:00:01 Welcome to your yes filled life. I'm Brenda Winkle, energetic leadership guide, psychic, medium and somatic coach for ambitious leaders who know their gifts are real and who want to stand fully in them. Here you'll learn how to trust your intuition, embody your vision, and step into the freedom you've been creating, all without chasing more certifications or carrying stuff that does not belong to you. Every week, I'll share powerful practices and conversations with thought leaders and changemakers that help you transform your vision into embodied confidence. Claim your gifts without apology, and lead with both clarity and freedom. Because your gifts aren't cute. They are powerful. They're real, and they're needed. Start today by downloading my free energy audit at Brenda Winkle. Com forward slash audit. It's the exact tool I use to track what's fueling me and what's draining me. It will help you discern between that hit of achievement and true joy, so that you can lead with more clarity and impact. This is your space to stop proving, start embodying and live fully in your gifts.
Brenda Winkle 00:01:16 Welcome to your yes filled life. Hello and welcome to your yes filled life. I'm your host, Brenda Winkle. Today on the podcast, which is a space for intuitive entrepreneurs, conscious creators, empathic and compassionate professionals, and high achievers to move beyond overthinking, trust their inner knowing, and really step into the embodiment of who you are meant to be. Today's episode is going to meet you in the moments when things feel really crunchy and hard, and clarity feels like it's just not coming, and decisions feel heavy and you almost feel like quitting or retreating, going back to bed, hiding under the covers and just staying home. And today's episode is going to meet you in those moments and offer some really practical right now ways that you can feel better fast and get back into motion. And then I'm going to also offer two ways that are going to help you make decisions from your body, not from your head. And I'll share why that's important. And then I'm going to share some practical tools that you can use any time.
Brenda Winkle 00:02:33 And two deeper ways to support you, whether you want self-paced grounding or an embodied transformational experience with others so you know what you want. You have taken the steps. You probably have either researched certifications or you have even earned them. You are good at what you do, You, but fear, uncertainty and overwhelm make decision making feel really heavy. Here's the thing thinking is never, ever going to create clarity. Clarity comes from action. If you're thinking your way to clarity, probably what's actually happening is you're creating more noise. And the reason for this is surprisingly simple. Not easy, but simple. So the nervous system is going to try to keep you where you are because the nervous system has one goal, and that essentially is to keep you alive. And anything that the nervous system perceives to be a threat, whether it is stepping into a new identity, creating a new offer, talking about something different, or for the first time with people that you love, or even changing how you dress, how you wear your hair can feel literally life and death to the nervous system.
Brenda Winkle 00:04:05 And when that happens, the nervous system is going to release a cascade of stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol that are going to put your body into a stress response. Fight, flight, freeze, or fun. Now here's the thing. I've been seeing some things on TikTok around what is your stress response? Are you into flight? Then here's the solution. Are you into freeze? Then here's the solution. And here's the thing I want you to know you don't have a choice of what stress response your body is going to choose. And while you may have a habitual go to where you notice that this specific thing is more prominent for you, maybe you you tend to be more into the fight response where you're over scheduling your calendar and you're trying to control things and you're managing situations that you may not have to. Manager or have to manage. And you come across as a little bit, micromanaging. Yeah, that is a pretty common stress response, but. We're kidding ourselves if we think that our body is going to create the same stress response every single time, it's just not true.
Brenda Winkle 00:05:17 And so if we're not creating some tools that we can use to help us understand better in our body what regulation feels like, it's really easy to miss a different stress response. For example, the freeze response when you just can't seem to get up off of the couch and no matter what you do, you can't remember where you were in your activities. Like even your to do list doesn't seem to make sense. You just look at it over and over and over again and you don't know where to start. And so you think maybe you'll just sit on the couch a little longer and watch Netflix, even though you have a to do list as long as your arm and you keep talking about getting off the couch and you keep talking about the to do list, but for some reason you just can't seem to move. If we are kidding ourselves and thinking that we have so much control over our bodies, our nervous system and our energy that we can always predict which stress response is going to hit, oh, we're setting ourselves up to be controlled by our stress responses.
Brenda Winkle 00:06:20 So when we think about the stress response of freeze, excuse me, flight, that's going to look like avoiding sending the email, avoiding looking at the email or looking at the text that might make you feel away. It can also look like avoiding looking at the data around anything, whether it's your banking, your investments, your clients, your downloads, if you're a podcaster, your social media stats, if you are a business owner. Avoiding those types of things is not a failure. It's actually a nervous system response. It's the flight response. And then if you have ever noticed yourself agreeing to things that you know you don't want to do, but at the time you feel like, oh, this is absolutely what I should agree to do, even though there's a little whisper in the back that says, I don't want to or I shouldn't, or this isn't right, or this feels misaligned, you still find yourself, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do it. Let's make a plan. Well, that's not weakness.
Brenda Winkle 00:07:25 And that's not a moral failure. That's very likely the foreign stress response at work where your people pleasing as though your life depends on it. So the work that I do is a combination of science backed somatic tools, energy work, intuitive guidance and leadership. And what we're going to do right now is I'm going to talk to you about some skills that you can develop over time that are really going to support you to get back to you so you feel more like yourself so you can make those clear headed, aligned decisions. So when we think about body awareness, that's a term that maybe you've heard or maybe you've heard embodiment. And here's what it really means. If we're being very cerebral or intellectual or in the mental field, like up in your, in your mind, you're probably going to say things like, I'm stuck in my head or I'm overthinking or, I feel really heady about it or, you know, just things like that. That is real talk saying you're not in your body. And we know that there's many, many, many reasons that that might happen.
Brenda Winkle 00:08:49 One of them is that we have really prioritized intellect and intelligence and cerebral ness in our society above all else, really, truly, above all else. And the other reason is, if you have any experience with trauma, you might be disassociating as a trauma response. And trauma, according to me, is anything that comes too much, too fast without enough resources or support in a way that overrides your body's capacity to cope. So by that definition, most of us have trauma and some of us have trauma that has either gone on for decades or is severe. And so in those cases, we absolutely have some nervous system things that we want to be really aware of. And disassociating is a very common response to that. So when we begin to come back into the body with somatic practices, it can feel. Unfamiliar at best. And it can even feel unsafe. And I just want you to know, I get it. As someone who has complex PTSD and lived through multiple traumas, I know what this is like, and I know what it's like to disassociate as a coping mechanism and also accidentally disassociate, which honestly, I think is why I am so drawn to the work that I do, the somatic work that I do, the embodiment, because I needed this, I needed this to recover from the decades of abuse that I endured in multiple different situations at the hands of multiple different people.
Brenda Winkle 00:10:31 And so when we think about somatic embodiment, body awareness, this is not fluff. This is not hype. This is actual science backed, which is why it's becoming so, so, so popular. So one of the best things that we can do for ourselves is to be aware when we're having an emotion. And I know you're probably thinking, what do you mean? Be aware. We're having an emotion. Aren't I always aware we are. But we talk ourselves out of it the very same way that we don't have body awareness. So, for example, I would like to create some body awareness for you right now. Will you please wiggle your right big toe? Just wiggle it and then rub it up against the next toe, just feeling into that and then kind of squish your toes together and spread them apart. Squish together, spread them apart on that right foot and then curl and straighten your toes. And now bring some awareness to your left big toe, wiggle it. Maybe noticing anything that is touching.
Brenda Winkle 00:11:55 Is there a texture? Is there a temperature? And then wiggle the toe next to that left big toe and bring all the toes together, squishing them together and spreading them apart, squishing together, spreading apart. And then with both feet, just kind of curl your toes gently and open them. Curl and open. Beautiful. And now, invitation to place one hand if you're driving both hands. If you're not on your thigh, it doesn't matter which hand, doesn't matter which thigh. And just gently pat that thigh. Maybe tapping with the fingers towards the knee. There you go. Good work. And now, what I'd like you to do is to keep the fingers tapping, but move them to either shoulder so your arms will be crossed in front of you. If you're not driving. If you are driving, you'll just have either one hand in front of you crossing and the other hand on the wheel, or you'll just come back to this later and just notice what's happening for you. Notice all of a sudden you're aware of new things in the body.
Brenda Winkle 00:13:16 Maybe you're aware of muscle tension. Invitation to take some deep breaths, slowly inhaling in whatever way feels good. Exhaling. Do that again. Inhaling and exhaling. And now just notice what you notice. All of a sudden you're aware of your body. You're probably feeling things you weren't feeling a moment ago. Things that feel really good and expansive, and maybe things that feel tight. Tense. Constricted. Maybe even painful. And now I'd like you to take your breath to wherever you're noticing any sensation, positive or negative. Doesn't matter. Just take your breath there. And what I mean is, take a deep breath in and imagine the breath pooling at that place, and we'll do five together. So inhaling deeply and exhaling. Inhaling deeply. Exhaling. Inhale. And exhale. And do two more on your own. As slow as you can. Beautiful work making that last breath really yummy and allowing yourself to either yawn, swallow, or sigh. Because I know one of those things has come through for you.
Brenda Winkle 00:15:07 You either need to yawn, swallow, or sigh. So let yourself do it, This is a nervous system shift. We have just down regulated your nervous system and we've created some body awareness. What we just did is a somatic practice. Somatic means connected to the body. Soma is the Greek word for body. And what you just did is you helped your nervous system regulate. You feel calmer. You feel like you can think more clearly. You probably feel more grounded, more centered, more able to make really aligned decisions. This is so profound. It's so simple and so profound, and you have access to it. There's no barrier to entry. You could replay this podcast episode. In fact, save it if you want to and come back to it as much as you want. Because this kind of thing works. So I was thinking about my own journey, and I was thinking about when I was starting my journey, and I felt bad more time than I felt good. It would have been 2006, 2007, and I was in it.
Brenda Winkle 00:16:34 I mean, things were not good. I was in a terrible marriage and I was We're experiencing some success as a Mary Kay sales director. Things were going well in my career right up until I got really successful, and I debuted as a sales director, and everything in my marriage got 100 times worse. So the more successful I became, the worse things got. And it was really, really difficult. And I, I did feel bad more of the time than I felt good. And I started some practices at that time not knowing anything about semantics or somatic work or nervous system. These were just survival for me. And I started those practices. And I want to offer you something similar where you can have some things, some tools to use on your own in the privacy of your own car, your own home, your own room, your own office that are very short. That will take 3 to 6 minutes. That will immediately shift your access to embodiment and a down regulated nervous system where you can come into calm.
Brenda Winkle 00:17:56 And so I created something for you called the elixir. It is 14 short on demand tools designed to help you ground emotional overwhelm, whether those are positive emotions because those can be surprisingly triggering or negative emotions. And in any case, you're going to be able to interrupt spiraling and allow yourself to feel steady enough to make aligned decisions. This is a reset that you can access in real time. You don't have to wait for the next live call. You don't have to reach out to anybody. You just go select the feeling state that you know you're feeling and push play. There's no waiting. There's no coaching feedback required. This is self-guided. This is for people who are somewhat emotionally aware that they might have a dysregulation occasionally. And by the way, we all do. We all are going to feel emotions from time to time that cause us to go into dysregulation. You know, Wednesday, January 8th was a day that I felt very dysregulated with the the killing of a Minneapolis mother. And I imagine many of you, because you're empaths, intuitive, compassionate.
Brenda Winkle 00:19:14 You also felt dysregulated. And I needed to use these tools to come back into a place of empowerment so that I could continue to guide and lead and show up in function while maintaining my compassion and my empathy for what was happening. I could also reclaim my own personal power. So that's what this is designed to do. So if you've ever sat with a decision in your head for days, you still feel Overwhelmed. Maybe even you might even say I'm clueless. I don't know what to do next. The elixir is there, and I'm going to put the link in the show notes for that. But here's the thing I really want to talk to you about. In the last podcast episode I mentioned identity. Identity is a huge driver of everything we do, and the reason is we use identify identity to select what we're going to wear, say, do, drive, spend. It all comes back to identity. So when we talk about intersectionality, a lot of times we use that word in spaces that are referencing diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.
Brenda Winkle 00:20:31 So intersectionality would be you identify as one thing and another thing and another thing. And so, for example, maybe you identify as a black woman. Those would be two sections of intersectionality where you identify as black and you identify as woman. Both are marginalized and underrepresented groups. So when we're talking about intersectionality from the lens of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, Dib, intersectionality means we have two identities that we are dealing with at the same time that are impacting our lived experience. Now we all have identity and we all have intersectionality. I do not want to say, and I want to be really clear here, I am not saying that if you identify as a married Christian white woman, that your experience is going to be the same as somebody who is black woman, who is queer and single, like those two experiences are not the same, and I don't want to leave any misunderstanding about that in what I'm going to say next. But what I'm going to talk about is the role your identity is playing.
Brenda Winkle 00:21:47 On how good you feel about yourself, on your self-concept, on the choices that you're making to support yourself, the choices you're not making to support yourself, and the ways in which you're showing up and in how you allow yourself to be treated. So when I think about identity, I want to bring this really granular into something many of us can relate to. If you have ever gone from being single to being in a relationship where you're depending on your age level, you're going steady, or you're in a committed relationship or you're monogamous, whatever the term you would use, there's an identity shift that happens as you move from single singleton status to partnership. You go through an identity change, right? And then if you've ever been married, you go through an identity change when you agree to get married in the engagement. And a lot of the processes that we have in our culture are designed to support the identity change. So, for example, the reason that people suggest that you have a period of engagement as fiancés is because they're allowing that identity shift to happen over time.
Brenda Winkle 00:23:11 Because think about how jarring it would be on a Friday night for you to be a single person in a committed relationship to next Friday. Now, all of a sudden, you're married in a monogamous, potentially lifetime partnership. That's a massive identity shift, and for many, it would be cataclysmic. Even though the identity is what you want, right? And so many times we have created societal ways to slow down the process in order to allow the identity to catch up. So in this case, you know, we oftentimes hear people talk about a six month or a two year engagement. And in doing so, we're allowing the identity to shift from single to partnered to married. We're letting that identity shift. And I did those things. And still I remember it was a massive identity shift the day that I was like, oh my gosh, I'm a wife. It was huge. And if you've ever been married, you probably can identify with that or relate to it. So when we think about identity and then we think about the work that we do here at your yes filled life where we're allowing the intuition to come forward, we're learning more about how to trust the intuition, how to understand it, how to live with it, how to offer our healing gifts, whether it's Reiki or breathwork or coaching or whatever it is, all of these things are wrapped up in identity, and it's essential that we understand that there's an identity component to everything we do.
Brenda Winkle 00:24:56 So another identity that I had was I was a teacher for many, many years. And as I moved from having the identity of being a teacher into the identity of being an entrepreneur, there was a massive imposter syndrome feeling that I felt for a long time. I don't know exactly when it began to ease, but it it has shifted now. But I remember that shift took some time. Like I couldn't even call myself an entrepreneur for a long time. And one of the reasons was it just didn't match my identity because my identity was like, oh, I'm a teacher, I don't know if I can let this identity go. So maybe you can relate. Our identities can support us, but they can also keep us stuck. So last year, 2025, at the beginning of the year, I did a process where I took my calendar from 2024 and I listed every single thing I had done, every meeting I had logged into, every breathwork session that I held, every in-person meeting I had, every coffee chat, every private client that I joined in a in a session, every group coaching call that I had.
Brenda Winkle 00:26:23 And I wrote it all down with tally marks. And it was shocking to me because I had been telling myself that I was spending my time doing one thing, but when I really analyze what I was doing, it was very clear that I wasn't doing what I thought, that I was over delivering in some areas and not spending any time or energy on other really important areas. So I went into the first quarter of 2025 with this in my mind, knowing that I had held dozens of breathwork sessions and dozens of one on one client calls and all the things in 2024, but not really sure that I had gotten the results. So quarter one, 20, 24 comes and I made the decision not to change anything, but to just be really aware of where I was spending my time. And I decided to use the word impact as my guiding word of the year of 2024. So everything that I was doing was filtered through the lens of what is the impact of this action or decision on my clients, on the community, on the world, on the collective.
Brenda Winkle 00:27:41 And what is the impact on me? And as I was doing that, I was still involved in a mastermind. And part of that was a big a way that my identity shifted. And the reason that the identity shift happened is I was able to tell myself I'm someone who invests in herself. I'm someone who cares enough about my business that I want to get support for this. And so that was a big identity shift. And then in December, I, I had made the decision that I wasn't going to return to the mastermind. Actually, I'd made it earlier. I had made it as early as September, but I was still active in it. And in December things just started to feel different. In January. Things started to feel misaligned in in that way. And by February, I had the very clear, very clear understanding and intuition that the whole thing. Was not what I thought it was, and that my mentor was not who I thought she was. And I realized that I had set aside one of my identities.
Brenda Winkle 00:29:05 One of my identities is a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging speaker and mentor and fierce advocate. And I had set it down somehow thinking, and I'm embarrassed to say this, but I'm just going to tell you how it felt. It felt like maybe I needed to set it down to understand business, and maybe it wasn't as relevant in business as it was in education, and I'm embarrassed to say that out loud. And you're probably thinking, Brenda, how could you think that? But I'm just trying to be transparent. And then in January, I realized, oh my goodness, I have completely left this part of my identity behind, and I must reclaim it for myself. And as I stepped more into my identity as a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging advocate, it became very clear that I was misaligned with that mentor and many people in the group, which was a painful thing to experience. But the other thing that I became aware of for the first time, I had had inklings, I had had wonderings.
Brenda Winkle 00:30:22 But when I asked questions, I was met with either not answering the question fully or a misdirection where, you know, I would get distracted because they would point me in a different way to look. But what I became aware of was the mega pipeline that I was on, the spiritual to mega pipeline, where you're taught and told overtly, don't watch the news. We don't, you know, we don't watch the news here. We protect our energy, we prioritize feeling good and our energy. And if you don't do that, you're not spiritual. And if you don't do that, you're not a spiritual leader. And I was like, you know what? I think you're full of baloney. And I'm saying that because I'm not trying to I don't know if you have littles around. And so I withdrew several months early. And then over the past, like since February of 2024, I have been going through this process of really seeking to get curious about my identity. And in the process, I'm also going through like identity shifts and quantum leaps.
Brenda Winkle 00:31:39 Some of them I have chosen and some of them are just happening because it's part of my divine path, and it's super uncomfortable and very confronting and also wonderful and beautiful, like brutal and beautiful all at the same time. And one of my realizations in the course of doing the work of analyzing my calendar each quarter was my business is completely dependent on me. My business is dependent on me showing up on social media, on the live calls, on the breathwork sessions, on the private client appointments, on the speaking gigs. Like it's 100% dependent on me. And so over the past year, I've gone through a big identity shift because I realized part of my identity was wrapped around in that feeling. Good. I love my clients. I love my groups, I love the work that I do. And also I was scratching an identity itch about I am important and they need me. And this does not feel good to admit. I just want you to know that like I am not bragging about this. This does not feel good to talk about and admit out loud, but I think it's really important because if I would have stuck with that identity, I eventually would have had to close my business because I can't scale it.
Brenda Winkle 00:33:13 If every single thing, every single deliverable social media post email is dependent on me and my energy. And so my identity shift happened, started to happen around February March, where I began to step into the CEO version of Brenda, and I moved further away from the entrepreneur identity or that educator identity. I stepped into that CEO version, and as I begin to make choices around my life, my business, my relationships, my time, my energy, my money, my bandwidth as the CEO of my business, oh my goodness, have things begun to shift in wonderful ways and in ways that were incredibly challenging as well. Your identity has a massive impact. And I'll tell you something. I knew that I needed support to shift my identity in this way into the CEO of my business, and so I worked with only two mentors. Last year, I worked with Marie Forleo and I worked with Tiffany Carter, and I highly recommend both. Highly recommend both and I. That's not entirely true. Hold on.
Brenda Winkle 00:34:28 I also worked with my mentor, Kathy Kearns, who is also one of my very best friends in a mediumship practice circle. So I guess I worked with three mentors, but two business mentors, Tiffany Carter and Marie Forleo. And one of the things I learned from both of these experiences was how costly it is for us to be getting information from 100 different places. So you're getting podcasts, you know, you're downloading every business podcast and you're signing up for summits and free webinars and all the free trainings, and then you're confused and you do nothing, and it's because you're flooding your nervous system. You're flooding your consciousness with all of these different ways to do it. And what you really need is to figure out what is the way you want to do it, what is the way that's going to resonate for you. So one of the things that I created last year was a clarity guide. It's free. Go grab it. It's at Brendan Winkle. Com Clarity and that clarity. And in this clarity guide, not only does it have a way for you to get clear on decisions, but it's got a way that you can discern what kind of mentorship you need now and how to choose your mentor.
Brenda Winkle 00:35:43 So but that's another story. I didn't even realize I was going to talk about that today. So I'm I'm bird walking a little bit. Let me try and let me try and come back in choosing to work with Marie and with Tiffany, I did so because I needed the identity of CEO to be mirrored back to me. I needed to see myself reflected in this level of mentor. And if I wouldn't have done that, I don't think I could have made the shift and I would not have had the confidence to say, you know what, I need to revamp and revisit some of my offerings. And I wouldn't have had the courage to close down my program, and I'm so grateful for their mentorship and for what I've learned in the process. And the identity work is not talked about as often as it maybe needs to be. I know Tiffany talks about it all the time, and Marie does too, to a certain extent. But if you're not willing to take a look at your identity and willing to really be present with the child parts and protector parts and past versions of you who needed that identity to feel safe, valuable, and lovable.
Brenda Winkle 00:36:59 If you're not willing to tend to those parts, you're really working against yourself. And if we would go, let's say let's use the example of getting married again. If you go from being single on a Friday to married the next Tuesday, that is so much of a shift that it shuts people down and the same thing can happen for you as you're growing, as you're in whatever phase of transition you're on, you're in. If you're not being mirrored and met as the new version of you, someone who believes so fully in you and in your capacity to be the leader, the guide, the coach, the healer, the professional, the entrepreneur that you want to be. And. I have an offer for you. It's not for everyone. I just want to be really clear. It's not for everyone. This is a very intimate experience. It's a very small offer, meaning it's for a small number of people. It's called the intuitive Leader retreat. Now, this is a place where we are going to stabilize your nervous system, get you that regulation, and mirror back the identity so you can trust yourself again and move forward with clarity.
Brenda Winkle 00:38:14 That doesn't require pushing harder. We're going to help you step into the identity that you really want. You're the one driving here. My role is going to be to mirror it back to you, and to help you connect with those child parts and protector parts that are stuck in a former version. This is a three day embodied experience for intuitive entrepreneurs and professionals and creative, creative conscious creators. Sorry, couldn't think of what I wanted to say, but yeah. Creatives generally nervous system regulation, self trust, energy work and embodied direction. Yes, there's strategy. For sure there's strategy. But this is really about connecting with you, connecting with the identity of who you want to become today, right now. And you're going to leave knowing what your next move is and feeling steady in your body while you take it. So the two well, there's three things I talked about today. One is the elixir that is a Self-guided tool and that is priced at $77. I don't know if I told you that it's a $77 investment and you'll have lifetime access to it, so you can replay it again and again and again.
Brenda Winkle 00:39:31 And just in full disclosure. Lifetime access means you'll have it for the lifetime of the offer, not for the rest of my lifetime, the lifetime of the offer, which at this point I don't have any plans to do anything with it. The Clarity Guide is a free tool, and that is a digital PDF. And so you can use that tool to, to help you assess next steps. And then if you want a more felt experience over time, not just in the moment, but support and mirroring and nervous system regulation and new identity work, then the retreat will support you in that. So what I have noticed about the people that come to work with me is they step into versions of themselves that they have been talking about. And instead of just talking, they're doing. So one of my clients, I'm also her client. One of my clients is Allie Nowicki. And when we began working together, her goal was to build her business in a way that felt sustainable and really good in her system.
Brenda Winkle 00:40:45 And oh my goodness, that has happened. And what's happening now is it's exponential growth because she's listening to her intuition. She's listening to what feels right in her body, and she's letting her intuitive knowledge guide. And throughout this whole process, she was stepping into the new version of herself, meaning the identity that could hold a company the size that she is building. I have other clients that I've worked to work with who have absolutely transformed their lives. I had one client who came to work with me who had just retired as an educator. Now, again, this is a massive identity shift. If you've been an educator for decades and decades and decades, and then all of a sudden you're a retired educator, that can be really crippling, especially if you're used to being around people all day and all of a sudden in retirement, you're not. And so it can be emotional, it can be scary, it can be even triggering to figure out, like, where do I fit into the world now? And over the course of the last year, she worked with me inside my group coaching program, and her identity is so clear, she knows that she is here to guide people into their fullest versions of themselves.
Brenda Winkle 00:42:10 She has no aspirations to to build a business, at least at this time, but she is out there sharing her light with everyone who will allow her to do so, and some of the things that she's been able to bring into her world are absolutely mind blowing, and I am so inspired by her. So she said that she wanted to spend parts of each year in her favorite places doing her favorite things. Like for example, she loves to ski. She even has done ski patrol work. She's really talented at skiing and very good. And she didn't want to move. She didn't want to give up her home. She didn't want to leave her family, but she really wanted to go do this. And you know what? She is doing it. She found a way and she's doing it at no cost. That's right. You heard it. She has found a way to live in some of the most expensive ski communities in the world for free, for seven weeks over prime ski season, And if she would have been stuck in the identity of retired educator, she wouldn't have been able to do that.
Brenda Winkle 00:43:22 But the identity shifts. That happened because she did the inner work, the inner child work, the protector part work. Really getting clear on what pieces of the identity were kind of stuck or outdated. Oh, wow. She's. It is so rewarding to see her step into this identity. I have another client who's been working with me for almost a year at this point, and in the course of our time together, she came in and she told me that she really wanted to work on her intuition. She wanted to do all of the really woo woo stuff with me. Like, let's talk about intuition and how to tap into the psychic gifts and the mediumship gifts and how to channel different energies, you know, earth energy, air, fire, water. And in the course of the work together we have done that. But also what has emerged Is a new identity, and she has realized that the ways in which she was allowing herself to be loved are below the standard of her new identity, and she is currently in steps right now to shift that so that she can actually be loved the way that she deserves and wants to be loved.
Brenda Winkle 00:44:37 And that kind of thing does not happen without the identity work. So what I love to do is to just give you practical tools, excuse me, practical takeaways and a mini tool that you can take with you on the road. Well, maybe if you're driving. Be safe though. So what I would love for you to do is to take ten breaths and I'll count with you. And we're going to take ten breaths. And our intention is to create a tiny hold at the top and the bottom of each breath. And we are going to be agenda less in this. We're going to just be a generalist and allow us to see what emerges from this experience together. Okay. We're going to take ten breaths. I'm going to breathe with you for the first five, and then I'll let you breathe on your own for the next five. But remember, you are always your highest authority. So if the pace that I'm breathing feels too fast or too slow for you, you do you. Okay, here we go.
Brenda Winkle 00:46:13 I have more on your own. Last one. Make it the deepest one yet. Exhale with a sigh. Ha! I don't even have to be with you to know that you feel a sense of relief. You feel a sense of embodiment. You feel more clear. You feel more you. That's the power of semantics. And then when you combine that with identity work and other tools. Oh my gosh, it's amazing. So both of the offers that I've the paid offers that I've offered today. The retreat and the elixir. The elixir gives you the short reset that you can use with tools like this. Anytime there's 3 to 6 minutes in each video. It's very short, and the retreat helps you embody this state deeply and sustainably, so you get to pick which ones right for you. They're at very different price points. The retreat is not for everybody because, you know, there is a level of expense that goes into hosting retreats. And so, you know, there is these are not inexpensive events, but they are very, very worth it if you can afford it.
Brenda Winkle 00:47:49 And if you can't afford it, there's love for that. I'm not going to try to convince you you can afford something you can't. But I just want to say they're really worth it if you can make it happen. It's game changing. I think retreats are one of the best ways we can collapse time and shift identities, which is why I love to go to 1 or 2 each year. Here's the thing I really want you to hear You don't need more thinking. You need more felt truth, like in your body. And you don't have to force urgency. Like this is not a race. You don't get extra credit or extra points for moving quickly. The clarity that you desire is going to grow from self trust, from listening to the body, from managing your stress responses and your nervous system safety. And you can do this too. So I'll put the links in the show notes for everything we talked about. And I just want to say thank you so much for listening. And you know, people out there, people out there are really coming face to face with the identities of who they are.
Brenda Winkle 00:48:54 You know, to put it really bluntly, we're discovering who we are. As the political landscape emerges even more clearly in the United States, we're discovering if we're the kind of person who would have kept someone like Anne Frank safe, or if we're the kind of person that would have sold her out. And not only are we determining this, but we're watching our neighbors and our friends and our family determine who they are to. And that's a piece of identity that I want you to be really aware of. You can't be complacent right now. It's not okay to say nothing. You don't have to put it on your social media. You don't have to have big, sweeping statements. But if something matters to you, it's important that the people closest to you know that it matters to you. Because if you keep pretending like it's not going to affect all of us. You're deluding yourself. You're deluding yourself, I think. I don't know if I put it on the podcast, but at the beginning of the year, like it was 2025, it was maybe January 2nd.
Brenda Winkle 00:50:13 And I had a dream that was not a dream. It was a memory. And it was a memory of being on one of the trains. It was dark, it was noisy. It was packed and crowded and smelled bad. And I remember going to or I remember being on the train in the train car a long time, and I remember when the doors opened, the smell. I sort of thought there was going to be relief when the doors opened, but the smell was different, but worse. And all this is to say, I have past life memories of being in concentration camps. And it's not okay for you to say nothing right now, and it's not okay for you to protect your energy as a way to keep only yourself safe. If you're not keeping your. Your neighbors, your community members safe too. Like it's just not okay. Again, you don't have to announce it on social media. You get to do this in any way that feels safe to you. And I also want to acknowledge it may not be safe for you, depending on your intersectionality.
Brenda Winkle 00:51:34 Maybe it's not for you to stand up. But if we're not talking about the things that are happening in the world right now. Then we're not really participating in the solutions. I'll just leave it at that. Thank you for listening. And if this makes you not want to listen to the podcast anymore, that's fine. And if this makes you want to listen to the podcast more and share it, that would be lovely. In any case, thank you for being here. Bye for now. Until next time.
