About Psychic Matters Podcasts

Ann Théato, CSNUt, Psychic, Medium and Spiritual Tutor, investigates psychic development, mediumship techniques, and paranormal science, so that you can come to understand your own innate psychic ability and expand your knowledge, whilst learning to develop a curious mind.

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TRANSCRIPT

VO: Psychic Matters with Ann Théato. The top ranked spirituality podcast. 

TeriLeigh: I was just thinking about this the other day, that so many people equate mindfulness with meditation  as almost as if they’re synonymous, and that’s not it at all. Meditation is actually the one of the most difficult ways to practice mindfulness  because most people have a difficult time sitting still for 10, 20, 30 minutes at a time and clearing their brain. It takes extreme discipline and extreme practice to get to the point where you can sit silent in meditation and get into that quiet state of mind that is in mindfulness.  Rather, I believe mindfulness is being present and fully aware and fully vibrant to the experiences that are happening to you in the moment of any moment of life.

 Ann: In your work, you speak about eldership. Can you say a little bit more about the importance of eldership?

TeriLeigh: In modern society, we’ve kind of lost the value of eldership, and there’s another word that goes hand in hand with the word elder, and that’s mentor. And it’s like a ten-year process  of learning to not take care of other people  in the mothering, fathering, matron, patron role, and not do for other people, but to be the wise one who guides and advises when asked. And this is very common in indigenous cultures. They looked at their elders as okay, the elder lives in this place and they have this special sacred tent or tepee or yurt or whatever. And when we need wisdom, we go to the elder. We go to the person who’s got the wiser cache of a lot more wisdom in their brains.  But in order to reach that elder stage, we have to let go of the control  of doing for other people and doing  enabling and caring for others. Let them do themselves.

TeriLeigh: Rather than going up to the clerk at the checkout and just saying, here’s my stuff, check me out.  Thank you. Have a nice day by rote,  automatic. Just do this.  But again, I learned that from my father, he takes a moment to look the clerk in the eye and say, really, are you having a good day? I want to make it better for you in this moment.  And then he will find things to talk to about that with that person that is a more human connection than just, here’s my stuff, here’s my money. Get me out of here. Give me my receipt. Which is where, and then it become, it becomes a human interaction that is precious and beautiful. And when you have moments like that all day long, every day long, your experience of life is vibrant. It’s vivid. It’s alive.

Hello everyone, my name is Ann Théato and welcome to episode 105 of the Psychic Matters podcast. It’s been a busy week in the studio, catching up with a lot of things, as I’ve been over in Ireland for the past week, dealing with some very, very challenging family matters. My mother continues to decline and her health is rapidly going downhill and it’s absolutely heartbreaking.  So,  I’ve been very upset and very down in the dumps.  But since I’ve returned home, my partner The Beard, has been amazing and now I’m back for a few days and it’s great to be sleeping in my own bed again!  And you know, no matter how difficult things are for me personally at the moment, there’s always good news to be had and this week’s amazing new is: I’ve become the proud owner of a magnificent camper van!  I’ve called him Horatio!  And I’ll be taking Horatio and Psychic Matters out on the road, recording episodes, investigating paranoramal locations and of course, giving readings to anyone who wants one.  So do look out for me in your local area.  If you are interested in knowing where I am heading each month, join the mailing list on my website and perhaps I’ll be visiting a location close to you, in which case you simply must come and have a cup of tea with me.  This first half of the year, I’m sticking to travel within England but then dear listeners, I shall be heading to Ireland to drive the Wild Atlantic Way; my trusty companion Faelyn at my side.  Well, at my ankles really, because she’s so tiny – a little tiny Yorkshire terrier.  And actually her name Faeyln is actually Gaelic – taken from the old Gaelic name Faolan which means Little Wolf.  So happy days, I’ll break out the tarot cards and the teapot if you come and knock on my door and say hello.  My website is anntheato.com so sign up for mailing list to find out where I’m heading and whether I’m heading your way.

Meanwhile, I’m really excited to bring you this week’s wonderful episode. I hope you enjoy it.

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Ann: Today we have a truly exceptional guest who has been making waves in the fields of yoga, meditation, and personal growth. She is a mindfulness and stress management coach, a chakra expert with over 25 years of experience, and the author of several truly insightful books. Her work aims to make spirituality and self-improvement accessible to everyone. It’s my pleasure to introduce TeriLeigh, a wisdom weaver, happiness amplifier, and negativity crusher. TeriLeigh, welcome to Psychic Matters.

TeriLeigh: Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Ann: Oh, bless you. Thank you for making time for us today, TeriLeigh. It’s just great that you’re here. And, you know, the work that you do fascinates me because there’s so many different, facets to it, I think, but if we just start with the fact that most of us have heard the word mindfulness bandied around all over the place, but I wonder if we really appreciate what it truly, truly means. And I wonder if you could begin by sharing with us what mindfulness means to you.

TeriLeigh: Definitely. I was just thinking about this the other day, that so many people equate mindfulness with meditation as almost as if they’re synonymous, and that’s not it at all. Meditation is actually one of the most difficult ways to practice mindfulness because most people have a difficult time sitting still for 10, 20, 30 minutes at a time and clearing their brain. It takes extreme discipline and extreme practice to get to the point where you can sit silent in meditation and get into that quiet state of mind that is in mindfulness. Rather, I believe mindfulness is being present and fully aware and fully vibrant to the experiences that are happening to you in the moment of any moment of life. So, for example, my first experience with mindfulness was when I was a child and my dad was taking, psychic development and personal achievement and self-improvement classes. And his teachers taught him to be mindful while he did the dishes. And so, he’s, he started like, doing the dishes every night after, after dinner when it was our kids’ job. He’s like, no, I want to do the dishes because he was so mindful about feeling the soap in his fingers and enjoying the pleasure of scraping off the plates and making them squeaky clean and just being present with the water and what water does, which is clean, and he used that time not just to clean the dishes, not just to do the chore, but to think of it as a spiritual and a full experience of life, where he engaged with the water to clean himself. And he thought about things in his life that he wanted to let go, and things he wanted to wash away, and things that he wanted to purify himself of, and he used the dishes as a as a conduit for that, as a surrogate for that, and he would actually cleanse himself while washing the dishes.  That is mindfulness. Being aware of what you’re doing in the moment you’re doing it, elevating it to a deeper experience of that. So, you can be mindful in anything and everything you do. Now, he took it to an extreme, based on what his teacher has taught him, but another way to be mindful, a very simple way to be mindful is you brush your teeth every day, right, people brush their teeth every day. And it’s something that you do automatically without thinking but often there’s other things going on while we’re scraping away at our teeth. What if you brush your teeth with your non dominant hand? And it puts you into paying attention to how your hand works and how your body works and how your teeth engage with the bristles on the toothbrush. And then you really start to think about what’s happening with the toothpaste and the toothbrush and how that is changing your structure and changing who you are. And what if you brought that same mindfulness to how you engage with people. Rather than going up to the clerk at the checkout and just saying, here’s my stuff, check me out. Thank you. Have a nice day by rote, automatic. Just do this. But again, I learned that from my father, he takes a moment to look the clerk in the eye and say, really, are you having a good day? I want to make it better for you in this moment. And then he will find things to talk to about that with that person that is a more human connection than just, here’s my stuff, here’s my money. Get me out of here. Give me my receipt.  It becomes a human interaction that is precious and beautiful. And when you have moments like that all day long, every day long, your experience of life is vibrant. It’s vivid. It’s alive.

Ann: You have a very different experience of life. I’m sure it’s a very different experience of life as well, but we’re always trying, I think, as human beings to be somewhere else other than where we are. We think we get this done and, or I want to be there and not here. And so, it’s actually quite difficult for us to be mindful and I think what you’ve just said there is really beautiful and something to bear in mind, but I listened to it and I know, I know myself so well at this age, I know I’m not going to be mindful. I know I’ll do it once or twice and then I’ll just skip back to, you know, revert to factory settings. So, I’m interested in you talking about your father, there doing psychic development. Then there’s you and you mentioned children. So how do you pass that onto your children to be mindful? How are you educating them in that line?

TeriLeigh: Well, the coolest thing about children is they’re so curious and they are so aware and they, just by nature of who they are and that they don’t have a whole lot of preconditioning in their brains already, they’re open to learning new things and they learn by mimic, they learn by asking questions, they learn by doing. So, the best way to teach and model for your children to be mindful, is to be mindful yourself and to show them the value of it all. And they’re so wide open and wide awake to it. For example, I, I don’t have children of my own. So, I play, I have a play date every week with my eight-year-old nephew. And I’ve done this for four years since he moved close to me. So, every week I go play with my nephew. And there’s two things that happen in that relationship. A, he teaches me to be mindful because he’s so curious and he’s interested in things that are automatic to me.  So, yesterday we were driving to his karate class and he’s sitting in the front seat next to me, and he’s asking me all the questions about all the buttons on the car, on the console. And the questions he’s asking are forcing me to think about, oh, not just, oh, that’s that, but to have a deeper conversation with him about driving and about paying attention and about the music that we choose to listen to and what the buttons do.  And it turned into this, the drive went, it’s usually a 20 minute drive, and it is 20 minutes in time, clock time, but it felt like it was five minutes because we were so engaged with each other in these mundane things of, what’s this radio station about and what happens to the seat when I push this button and it’s a seat heater warms up and well, why does that work?  That curiosity is about being mindful and being in the moment. So, he’s teaching me to be curious. Or his curiosity is teaching me to look at these things from a different perspective and be more aware of them. And at the same time, I get to, like, infinity symbol it back to him and teach him about being mindful about which radio stations we choose.  And what music we listen to and how that music impacts our mood. Because he’d push a button, what’s this? And I’d say, oh, that’s the rock station. What’s this? Oh, that’s the soft rock station. What’s this? Well, that’s the classical music station. And then I could talk to him about how I choose those stations based on what energies and what moods I want going on in my life.  So, children are awesome opportunities. If we listen to them, and we guide them at the same time.

Ann: Sounds like you have infinite patience as well. What a lovely thing you’ve described there. Cause it’s very, very inspiring. I’m just thinking about the amount of times I’ve done the school run in my lifetime and the kids are pressing buttons. I’m like, for God’s sakes. Um, but I think that’s really beautiful that you’ve described that play date there with your nephew. That’s really gorgeous. Tell me, TeriLeigh, where did this all come from in your life? Did it come passed down from your father, this kind of way of looking at the world or has that evolved? Where, where did it evolve with you? Cause you can’t always have been a mindful person.

TeriLeigh: I think part of it is genetics. And not just passed down from my father, but all my ancestors on some level. My grandfather was very, very curious about psychic development and intuitive awareness. And he was reading Edgar Cayce when I was a little, little kid.  So, I know it was in his, and that’s on my mother’s side. And then my father went through all those personal development classes in his forties, which was when I was 10.  And so, he was learning mindfulness and teaching it to me when I was a child. So, it was part of my childhood development. But then I also became in my 20s, I became very curious about yoga in my early 20s, actually teens and 20s. And I practiced and studied yoga. And that’s when I studied meditation. And I also then from that, got involved with an African shaman and started studying indigenous wisdoms, all of those things. The readings of the teachers of yore from my grandparents and my parents when I was a child, the teachings of Wayne Dyer and Louise Hay and those kinds of names What flowed into the yoga practice and the actual being mindful of my body and my breath, flowed into the indigenous practices of being mindful in nature and working with fire and water ,and trees and animals and plants, floated into my study of herbalism and all of those things work together, and it’s finally culminated in my own curiosity from a scientific perspective. Well, what is this doing in the nervous system? What is this doing in the chemistry and the biochemistry of my body? And my own reading of scientists and neuroscience and what’s happening in the chemicals of the brain and what’s happening in the oxygen pathways in my body and in the blood flow and so forth. And so, all of that just, I’m just a very, very curious person who likes to study. And I think it is genetics and it is my own curiosity that’s developed over the years. And I can’t say I’m completely mindful in every single moment of my life. But I do take the time to pause myself and say, let’s be with this moment right now and just enjoy this moment because I know the value of it so much from all these things that have worked together in my entire history.

Ann: You’re very lucky to have come from such a family line of acceptance and curiosity themselves and being already part of this, uh, world of, you know, exploring consciousness and things like that. Not everyone’s had that. Um, many of the listeners of this podcast certainly haven’t, I haven’t, and, I would love to have had that. I wonder if I’d had that background, how far I might be along my own spiritual path by now. But you speak about, TeriLeigh, about the brain and your curiosity and how it affects the body. Can you say more about your findings there?

TeriLeigh: Yes. That sort of sparked from, you’re right, I’m blessed. I was so blessed to come from this ancestry and this upbringing and be exposed to so many amazing teachers that to me, this kind of work is easy. But I also recognize I have a master’s degree in teaching and my main passion in serving the community is in teaching. And I recognise as a teacher that most people do not have the benefits that I come with. And as I was teaching yoga, as I was teaching meditation, as I was teaching shamanism, I was realizing people can’t grasp this at the deeper levels. Going back to your first question, what is mindfulness? And I said, it’s not meditation. And that meditation is really, really a hard way to practice mindfulness. I recognize that most people can’t sit their tush to the cush for 30 minutes and really quiet their minds. Most people can’t dedicate 30, 60, 90 minutes to a yoga practice every single day. It’s just not sustainable. It’s not practical It’s not realistic in modern day world. So, when I was recognising that I could teach to the choir of the yoga students who did make the time, or I could teach to the choir of the meditation students who did have the discipline in the practice, and I could teach to the shaman students who were curious about exploring nature.  I wanted to reach a different population that was the average everyday person out there. And in order to do that, I had to take what I knew and understood about all those practices and make them short. And make them simple and make them very, very practical and realistic that they could be infused into these people’s everyday lives in tiny ways, because we live in a very fast and dynamic and busy society.  So, we needed to take that wisdom and call it down to 10 or 30 seconds. And as I was figuring out how to do that, that’s when I stumbled across neuroscience and how the brain works. And really the brain works best in terms of repetition of things you do over and over and over again. And in order to make it something that you can do over and over and over again, it has to be short and it has to be simple and it has to be precise because that’s really what the brain needs. I like to think of the brain and the nervous system as a Information highway that goes through our whole body. And if you think of it like a roadway, in the roadway of nerves, the messages are going from our brain through our body through all these nerves, which are roads. And every message is a car on that road. And if we have too many messages flooding those roads, it’s going to overwhelm us. And if we have to take those messages a long pathway for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, it’s going to be too difficult to process. So, we want to make it very simple and very practical that we can shoot that message to its direct destination in a very simple way.  So rather than being a lot of car that’s got a whole bunch of trailers attached to it, we need to make it simple. And the way to make it simple is what I call the MOZI Method. And the MOZI Method is a very simple, practical integration of your body, your physical body, which is how we live our engagement of life, our vehicle that we experience life in with your mind, your thoughts that are in those information that is being processed on those nerves with your breath.  And the breath is the oxygen that pushes those messages from neuron to neuron through the nerves. So, if you put your body into a position where the roadways, the nerves, are the most clear, direct pathway. By posture, by action, by movement, and you clear, make a very precise intention thought in your mind that you want to process through your body. So that’s your mind connecting with your body. And then you breathe a very clear, precise breath that matches that intention that matches that body action. You can create an entire cycle through your system. That then will trigger not just your nerves, but your hormones, which then changes your moods, which then also changes how your body functions in terms of digestion, reproduction, all the functions and functionings of your body are managed by your hormones.  So, just by being clear in your thoughts, being clear in your body actions and being clear in your breath, you can change the way your body functions. And have the effects of what you could get in a 90-minute yoga practice or a 30-minute meditation session in 30 seconds, but then you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it many, many, many times through the day until your brain understands, oh, this is the new normal.  And it’s so easy to just, like you said, you’re in the car and you’re trying to get there and you’ve got a zillion thoughts going on through your head and then your kids are asking questions about the buttons on the dial. And it’s so easy to say, shut up, do your own thing while I do this and think about this and do this 16 other things. But if you take that 30 seconds to take a breath and adjust your body and set your intention. It will give you that patience and that awareness to be in this moment and just do this one thing, which for me was talking to my nephew about the different radio stations that he was pushing the buttons to. And this MOZI Method is I have a set series of seven base exercises that get your whole nervous system and your whole hormonal system into a new way of functioning. So, you learn each of these seven exercises and you practice them systematically, one building off the other to reboot your system into a new normal.  And then once you get through those seven base series exercises, you can start working on very specific things in your life that you do want to adjust to be more mindful about.

Ann: Why seven?

TeriLeigh: There are seven because there are seven major chakras in your system and your podcast is called Psychic Matters. So, chakras is very much a psychic phenomenon that people discuss. And we think of chakras as this psychic energetic thing. I think of chakras as nervous system. So, your nerves are these wires going between your brain and your body, and a chakra is every time there’s an intersection of a nerve to another nerve. And so, there’s 72 million chakras in your system where nerves are intersecting with other nerves. And that’s a place where a message can come into that intersection and collide with other messages and move out in a different direction. So, in order to really have your nervous system functioning at its optimal, you want those intersections to also be functioning at their optimal. Think of them as a turnabout or a roundabout or a traffic circle in the highways or in the roadways.  And if there’s too many cars and too much going on in that traffic circle, things aren’t going to flow well, the traffic isn’t going to flow well. So, the chakras are those traffic circles, but they’re three-dimensional with all kinds of things coming into them that have to rearrange inside them. And you have seven major Intersections of nerves along your spine, starting at the base of your spine and going all the way up to the crown of your head and each of those seven nerve intersections, those chakras governs a different aspect of your body, as well as a different aspect of your human experience in your human being, based on what part of the body that it’s managing, for example, just to take one, your root chakra, It’s at the base of your spine and it governs everything going down to your legs and feet.  Well, your legs and feet, what do they do for you? What is their purpose in your life but to have you stay grounded, have you had a foundation and a stability and they are your roots to Earth. And so, everything in your life that is connected to those concepts of stability. Having a leg to stand on, feeling safe, feeling solid, feeling grounded, feeling like you are held and supported is all governed in the nervous system intersection of your root chakra.  And if you’ve got too much going on or not enough going on about those concepts of safety, stability, structure, foundation, it’s going to show a disrupt. In how the functioning of the root chakra works and that will manifest in issues within your legs and feet. It’s also going to manifest in issues in your life in terms of feeling safe, feeling supported, feeling stable, feeling financially grounded, feeling like you have your basic needs met.  So, to be mindful is to be aware of how your root chakra functions and doing a simple MOZI Method exercise. That simplifies that concept of stability, by connecting your body action of how you’re moving in your legs and feet, how you’re aligning and how you’re posturing your legs and feet with a simple intention, message of being feeling safe and affirmation, with a very simple breath to send that oxygen, moving that message of stability and foundation and structure into your feet, which are already grounded in the stable way. So that’s the MOZI Method.

Ann: And what does MOZI stand for? Does it stand for something? M O Z I?

TeriLeigh: The letters itself don’t stand for anything, although the, the word itself is beautiful. Because the word MOZI kind of gives you that concept of just moseying along in life. And when we mosey along, we’re just enjoying all the things that happen. We’re just moseying through life, and this happens, and that happens, and we see this, and we notice that very much. Like going on a walk and being completely mindful of what’s happening. So that’s one concept of Mozi. Another concept of Mozi is I understand there is a Chinese philosopher from way, way back who, whose name was Mozi. And he taught this same stuff like thousands of years ago. But really where the word MOZI came from is, after I’d been teaching this methodology for quite a while and I was trying to figure out what to call it, I went to a dog park and I sat at a tree and I said, I’m not leaving this tree until I have a name for my system. And I just thought I’ll sit here with nature and nature and spirit will show me the name. Five minutes later, a dog came bounding out of the woods and stepped up to me and touched his nose to my cheek. This giant Great Dane, and we had this beautiful, pleasant moment. And a few moments later, his owners came out and called him and his name was MOZI.

Ann: That’s amazing. What a beautiful story. That’s so nice. That’s really great. So, for those of us who like to practice affirmations, what is it that we can do with our affirmations that can make them a little bit more powerful? Because sometimes you just like affirming stuff and nothing really happens. Why, TeriLeigh, do some affirmations fail to produce desired results?

TeriLeigh: They’re producing some results, but you have to be careful about how you phrase them. And then you can amplify them by adding breath and body action to them. So, for example, many people come up with affirmations that are two, three, four sentences long. And affirmations that are too long are like taking a car and putting 16 words of trailers onto that car and moving them through your nervous system. It’s just too much. So, you want to be very mindful of keeping them short. But then if you’re going to be short, you have to be very precise and you have to choose your words very wisely and very carefully. And choosing those words based on both what they mean and how they sound, because the sounds, the letters within the words are going to trigger different emotions within us. So, for example, M’s and N’s are softer sounds, whereas D’s and K’s are harder sounds. So, if you want to have a harder, impactful affirmation, you would use letters like D, K, T. And if you’re going to want something that’s soft and lingering, use L M N. If you want something more lingering, you use a sound that can last, like mmm. If you want something that’s sharp, you use a sound that stops, like P. So, choosing your letters carefully. Because those letters are going to perpetuate the sound, and that sound is going to have an impact in our nervous system. But you also then have to choose a word that means something, and that meaning has to be what it triggers in your emotions, not just your cognitive. Because we could say, I am abundant all the time. But if abundant gets stuck in your head, and it’s just a bunch of concepts of money, and it really doesn’t make you feel like you’re abundant. Then it’s not going to work. So, you want to choose a word that, or a bunch of words or a couple of words that give you that real feeling. So, for me, I, for years, I tried the phrase, I am abundant and it got nowhere. So, I shifted to, I live a luscious life. And the word luscious really changed things for me because I could see things in my life where things are luscious. You know, squeezing my dog’s head and putting my face right into her face.  That’s a luscious moment.  Eating a piece of chocolate that melts on the tongue and really just oozes into all parts of my mouth. That’s luscious. And then repeating that L sound. Luscious. L can very much linger but repeating it as I live a luscious life. It has more endurance for me than it, than abundant. And abundant has those sounds that stop, B, D, and T. So, it almost felt like for me, abundant was a more finite sound, whereas luscious life had a more lingering and a more growing sound. So, choosing your letters and choosing your words where they feel different. And so, when I work with clients, we will play with all different types of words to get to the synonym that is the precise word that activates the right feelings within the nervous system. And that’s just a, it’s a curiosity game of how about this word or how about that word? And you say them until you feel something happen within you. And that’s often why affirmations aren’t working is because they’re stuck in your head and they’re just cognitive and they’re not creating that emotion. And then when you get that affirmation that creates that emotion, then you have to use that sound to actually amplify that emotion. So why not apply that affirmation to a very physical action that matches what it is you’re thinking. So, I live a luscious life. Well, then every time, which I love chocolate, so I have a piece of chocolate and I nibble on it all day long, every time I put a piece of chocolate on my tongue, I think I live a luscious life. And I think about the, the burst of flavour and the lingering and how it melts into every part of my being and that act of tasting the luscious life actually becomes the feeling of being abundant, but in a very different way that then lasts and lingers longer.  And what happens is, even though it’s just a piece of chocolate in just a moment, but if I’m doing that moment four or five times a day to get through a tiny piece of chocolate, but I take a little tiny piece of that tiny piece of chocolate five, six, seven times a day, that’s five, six, seven times a day I’m affirming to myself that I live a luscious life. I start to, after a few days of that, I started to recognise other things in my life that were luscious. Not just the chocolate, but other moments that were similar to the chocolate, and that would amplify the places in my life that I already had the luscious abundance. And then I would start to notice other places in my life. And then the gratitude just gushes from there. Because really, it’s not about trying to go outside ourselves and bring things to us, it’s about trying to activate what’s already inside us and amplify it more.

Ann: It’s beautiful. I love that. I absolutely love, I love the idea of nibbling on a piece of chocolate five times a day and saying those beautiful words. It’s obviously having great, great results. Um, what about manifestation itself? If we want to manifest things in our life, have you got any advice for listeners here on manifestation?

TeriLeigh: The concept of manifestation is, again, it’s like mindfulness is misunderstood. When people think mindfulness is meditation, they’re not, they’re missing the boat a little bit.  Manifestation is not  about getting things to materialise in our life, getting things in our external world to come to us. Manifest, the actual word manifest comes from Latin, mani is hand, it’s about us. The word mani is about our hands. It’s like, what can we do with what we have? And I think of the word fest is like a festival within us. So manifest isn’t about. It’s a mindset shift. If you think manifesting is about going outside ourselves and making things attract to us, you’re missing the boat. What manifesting is about is recognizing what you have in yourself and amplifying it, making it out of your own self, making it out of your own hands. And so, once you make that mindset shift and then you start to recognize, well, it’s something I already have. So, if you, you choose what to manifest in something you already have, yeah, I have this little bit. I have this little bit of chocolate and I have a luscious life with this little moment of chocolate. Let’s amplify that by really focusing and being mindful about that. And the more you’re focusing and mindful about that moment, then you start to recognize that other things are just as luscious, and you’re making them out of your own experience. And they’re things that you already have. But there’s this thing in our brain, going back to the nervous system, there’s this thing in our brain called the RAS. The RAS is the Reticular Activating System. Have you heard of this before?

Ann: No, I haven’t, TeriLeigh.

TeriLeigh: Basically, our world is full of too much stimuli. Like right now, you’re taking in the sound of my voice, the words I’m saying, the clothes I’m wearing because you’re looking at me on Zoom. You’re also taking in the air that you’re breathing and the sounds in your own room. There’s way too much stimuli for you to consciously process it all. It’s just too much for us to understand on a cognitive, conscious, mindful level. So, the RAS is a filter in our brain. That says, there’s all this information coming in and I can’t process it all cognitively. So, I’m going to filter. This is important stuff that I want to be mindful and conscious of. And this is stuff that’s not important, so I’m going to put it away in the filing cabinets of our nervous system. And the stuff that you choose to be mindful about is what the RAS makes you pay attention to in your world. This is important. So, my greatest example of how the RAS works is the game of the yellow cars. Another game I play with my nephew. When you’re out driving in your car, and every time you see a yellow car, you say, score, I got a point. The first time you play the game with the yellow cars, you don’t see a whole lot of yellow cars cause you’re not, your RAS is not trained to look for them. There’s tonnes of yellow cars out on the road, but your RAS is not trained to pay attention to them. So, as you play the game more and more and more, you start to see more and more cars. So, the first time I played the game, I’d see one or two yellow cars in a 30-minute drive. But now as I’ve played it more and more, I can see 5, 10, 15 yellow cars in a 30-minute drive. And it’s not because the cars aren’t there or there’s more of them. It’s that my RAS has said, oh, it’s important that you see all the yellow cars that are out there because you’ve decided it’s important. So, the RAS changed its filters based on the decision to play this game. So, mindfulness is really about training your RAS, your Reticular Activating System, or that filter in your brain to say, this is important, I want more of this. So, manifestation isn’t about bringing more things into your life, it’s about training your brain to recognize what’s already there because we all have ability to have and live in an abundant life. There is tonnes of abundance in the world. But if we’re not training our brain to pay attention to it and to see it and to believe that it’s possible, then your brain’s just going to put it away in a filing cabinet that you’ll never go into again. In the same way that you’re not going to see yellow cars unless you’re looking for them.

Ann: It’s so civilized of you to just simply say score when you see a yellow car. In our car, you thump each other hard. It’s terrible. I’ve had to say, don’t hit the driver. I just get a tap on the shoulder now, but that’s beautiful. That’s a lovely, lovely explanation is so interesting. I’m just mindful of time between the two of us, there’s a couple of other things I wanted to cover with you, just slightly changing the topic a little bit, but you, in your work, you speak about eldership. Can you say a little bit more about the importance of eldership?

TeriLeigh: In modern society, we’ve kind of lost the value of eldership, and there’s another word that goes hand in hand with the word elder, and that’s mentor. And those words are not used as often as they could be, because in modern culture, when people age, they tend to be put away in nursing homes. Let’s, let’s just put them away. But really the people who are older, the elders of our culture, have trained their RAS, they’ve had much more experience, so they’ve got a lot more vital information in their nervous systems and in their wisdom and the way things function really well is going back to that conversation about how we learn from our youth and our youth learn from us. The mentorship and the eldership of people who have been there done that, with the children who are curious about how do I get there to be there do that, is a necessary part of aging and growing up and having a fuller experience of life and as an elder, rather than putting our elders away and saying, you’ve done your job, it’s my turn now, looking at them more as a mentor to guide and nurture and support and influence, but not control the process of the child or the youth or those who are even younger. Our culture doesn’t have set mentorships anymore. I mean, we do in sort of professional capacities, but we really don’t in terms of how to grow up and how to live life and how to be human, except in the concept of grandparents and grandchildren, which is a very beautiful relationship because the grandparent and the grandchild are coming to and going from the same place of spirit. Grandparents closer in the way of dying and the grandchild is closer in the way of being born. And what happens in at least modern culture is when we hit an elder stage, say menopause, or say, that later stage of life where our children are growing, grown up and they don’t need us anymore, there’s a whole transition process that happens to our nervous system and our whole bodies. And it’s like a ten-year process of learning to not take care of other people in the mothering, fathering, matron, patron role, and not do for other people, but to be the wise one who guides and advises when asked. And this is very common in indigenous cultures. They looked at their elders as okay, the elder lives in this place and they have this special sacred tent or tepee or yurt or whatever. And when we need wisdom, we go to the elder. We go to the person who’s got the wiser cache of a lot more wisdom in their brains. But in order to reach that elder stage, we have to let go of the control of doing for other people and doing enabling and caring for others. Let them do themselves. And be more of the advisor and the guide, which is what I do with my nephew, in the sense that he says, what does this button do? I say, try it, see what happens. And then he says, oh, what is that kind of music? And I tell him the kind of music. I’m advising him, but I’m not controlling him. I’m not telling him, don’t do that. Or you do it this way. I’m advising him to figure it out for himself. And I think in our culture, we need more of that. We need more elders. We need more mentors to guide someone, to figure things out for themselves, rather than to do for them to the point where they don’t know how to do for themselves eventually.

Ann: Yeah, I love that. And not impose your opinion on them either. Let them come up with their own interpretation of the world around them.

TeriLeigh: So, with my nephew as another example, he would push a button and be the hard rock music. And I’d say, what do you think of this music? How does it make you feel? And then I’d tell him how it makes me feel. And then we would, I would ask him, when would you want to use, listen to this kind of music? So asking a lot of questions rather than telling him, oh, that’s heavy metal and it Started I started it in the 80s or people started playing it a lot in the 70s and the 80s and this is what it’s for, rather than telling him about it, I asked him to experience it and then I tell him what my experience it is with it and we figure out together why we might use it or work with it. And then the same thing with classical music, but we don’t have as much elders in our society anymore. And really being an elder is about being mindful, being mindful to not take over someone else’s experience and not tell them what it is, but to let them have their own. And then in that you have this beautiful engagement in this beautiful connection and collaboration of this moment of life.

Ann: Yeah, I really love that, that you can really see someone as their own individual soul, with their own individual experience through that eldership you’ve just described. I think that’s really, really interesting. I’m really mindful of the time because I know we’ve only got a couple of minutes left, but I just want to mention that you, Or, or just maybe ask you to mention the books that you’ve written because you’ve got six or seven out there. I’m sure you’re probably even working on another one. Um, but tell us very briefly about your books that you’ve written, TeriLeigh.

TeriLeigh: So, if you go on Amazon, I have several books on Amazon and they’re both available in the UK and in America. the first one I wrote is called the Goldilocks Principle, and that’s probably my most popular and most famous book. And that’s a practical guide to the chakras. So that talks you through the nervous system and how the chakras are functioning within the nervous system. And it works you through all seven major chakras and how to work balance and align them, using many different tools and technologies and skills and then the other ones that I’ve written all kind of branch out of that, where there’s a very short one, very simple, practical one called the MOZI method or MOZI Your Way to Mindfulness, which is the MOZI method, and it’s only 100 pages and it walks you through those base seven exercises of the chakras for each of the seven MOZI exercises. There’s another one that’s 30 days of muchness, which is 30 days of mindfulness exercises in terms of meditation and exercise and breath work. And it just takes you through a 30-day process. I also have a memoir, which is my experience of my divorce and being a mindful person through going through a very tumultuous divorce. I have a novel that I wrote. It’s a young adult novel about a girl who experiences a traumatic death in her, in her world and how she processes that death and how she develops a relationship with grief and how she uses mindfulness exercises. Without calling them that, but how she engages with nature and how she processes her grief by being more mindful in her life.

Ann: Yeah. I mean, it’s an incredible achievement that you’ve written all of those books. All of them look so fascinating. And I suggest that listeners do what I did, which is go over to Amazon and follow you as an author on there. So, I can be notified of your new books as they come out. Um, you also do coaching one on one groups, masterclasses, things like this. So, if somebody wanted to come and, um, online and book something with you, where would they find you TeriLeigh?

TeriLeigh: My website is TeriLeigh. com T E R I L E I G H. com. And it’s easy there to book an initial consultation with me for a one-on-one session to get to know who I am and what we’re about. And if we are a good fit for private one on one consultation, I also do interviews for people who might be interested in my nine-month programme. So, I have a nine-month group mastermind programme that runs every year, January through September, where 10 to 15 people work together monthly on Zoom. So, I have people in all parts of the world coming together. And we meet once a month to work through those seven base chakra system exercises and see what happens in our lives together. It’s a very mindful and present mastermind group that gets to be very good friends by the end of the nine months. And then I also have all of these, all of these systems are put into self-study online courses. So, it’s all based out by price points. If you want the personalized experience, it’s going to cost a lot more.

The middle range is the group system. And then you can take yourself through the programme online at two in the morning if you want to go through it sleepy.  

Ann: Yeah, it’s great. It’s so great. It’s downloadable, uh, TeriLeigh. That’s absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of your wisdom and some of your experiences here for, for the listeners of Psychic Matters. It’s been absolutely wonderful talking to you. Thank you so much.

TeriLeigh: It’s been my pleasure and I really appreciate you inviting me to your podcast.

Well, do look up the work of TeriLeigh, everybody and head over to Amazon to purchase one of her fabulous books. I’ve been so inspired by our conversation around mindfulness and her fabulous tips and techniques and I hope you’ve found them super, super helpful.

As with every episode of my podcast, it is deaf friendly and there is a complete transcription in the show notes for this episode which you can find on my website anntheato.com. And I also have some fabulous courses coming up later this year, so do sign up to my mailing list to receive information about those –  I’m starting with a Friday Development Circle, so if   you want to learn how to use the psychic mind – please do join us – everyone is welcome.  Check out the courses page on www.anntheato.com

Thank you for being an amazing listener.  I will be back with you in a couple of weeks’ time, and until then,  my name is Ann Theato and thank you for listening to Psychic Matters.

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