Always Shine Brightly

Jennifer O’Neill is a graduate of The Institute for Integrative Nutrition and is on a mission to help women free their bodies from the pain of dieting and negative body image, and lead them to a life of freedom, balance, and joy around eating and fitness. She put herself through diet hell for nearly 30 years of her life and knows that it’s simply not worth it. She guides her clients to take action around food, fitness, and body image from an aligned place of love instead of hate. It is only by changing our minds about ourselves that we can then begin to learn that the love we are so desperately seeking is already inside of us. She is also the host of the newly launched podcast, Free Yourself From Body Prison, where she’s created a safe space to discuss body image, binge/emotional eating, weight loss, exercise ad finding the balanced middle ground between diet culture and anti-diet culture. Her primary focus is helping women create a more loving (or accepting) relationship with their body image, food and exercise.

In this episode, Jennifer shares her personal journey to create a healthy relationship with her body, food and exercise. A huge turning point in her journey occurred when she read and studied A Course in Miracles (which also plays a foundational role in everything I teach!) as this is what shifted her relationship to her body, food and exercise from coming from self-hate and judgment to loving and accepting herself. It’s what helped her realize her worthiness did NOT come from how she did or didn’t look. This is a HUGE lesson that so many have yet to learn…mainly because our society does not teach us this. In fact, it teaches the opposite. I’m happy to have Jennifer on the podcast so this message of worthiness reaches more and more people.

We also discuss what diet and anti-diet culture is (I had no idea this was such a polarizing issue, but, with the times we’re in, I’m also not surprised), what body neutrality is (I love anything that helps us see from a more neutral perspective!), how NOT to give away our power to “the scale” and how to dig deep into understanding why we self-sabotage, binge and emotionally eat (truly understanding the root of our emotions so our core beliefs about ourself can be healed).

Ultimately, this is a message of empowering others to find what works for them without being swayed by all the noise that comes from the various camps of what one should or shouldn’t do when it comes to diet, exercise and healthily relating to our bodies.

Jordan Simmons is a shining example of being a light in the world despite personal tragedy. I don’t think this choice between following the expression of light or falling into darkness can be more challenging than when we’re faced with life’s injustices. For Jordan, this has come in three different forms of loss all within a very short timeframe. Some people lose the rest of their own lives over the loss of another. Fortunately, Jordan found the inner strength (aided by her father’s advice and a simultaneous promise she made to him) to move forward in a way that has allowed a greater vibrancy and vitality to be lived and expressed through her being. Today, she knows she’s not only here to survive, but to thrive. She knows she’s here to make a huge impact on the planet and has dedicated her life to being an agent of change in the ways she feels led.

I want to thank Jordan for being willing to graciously share her story with all of us. It’s not easy to talk about the traumas we’ve been through but she has courageously chosen to do so as a way of helping others process pain and inspire them to live from light.

Benita Conde is the founder of Create Radical Love, LLC a life coaching and consulting approach for people who want to radically love their whole life experience, not just compartmentalized parts of it. Benita is a former professional ballet dancer, a former personal trainer and an advertising industry expert with 20 years of experience supporting and guiding the careers of creative people. She has been on a spiritual journey her whole life and has been sober for 13 years. She now works with individuals globally as a holistic coach guiding each client to lead with intuition, to define a calling and take action from that aligned, excited and Infinite place across all aspects of their life experience. She has designed a unique and radically loved life with her husband and son and is thrilled to share the approach with others.

In this episode, we talk about how intuition has played a significant role in guiding her in and out of each phase of her life starting with moving to NYC at 17 to pursue ballet. She also shares her journey to sobriety and how it doesn’t always look like a traditional rock bottom moment as each person’s threshold for change depends on their desire for it, which, in fact, applies to anyone’s desire to create change on any level in their life. Overall, we talk about the various phases of her spiritual journey and how it’s deepened over time to create her full alignment with a life lived in service to others. This is a beautiful story-based conversation chock full of spiritual lessons and insights meant to help others normalize similar lessons in their own journey.

In this episode, Shanna speaks with long time friend and partner on the personal growth path, Ricardo Flores-Clar. Ricardo grew up in El Salvador, and in the 11th grade, decided to learn English so he could pursue his higher education stateside (specifically at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, TX). He has spent his career in business, often working in leadership roles for companies like Sony and The Scooter Store. No matter where he has worked, he’s always connected his role to a higher purpose, whether through the company’s mission or his personal mission to lift others up. He is the embodiment of a heart-centered, servant leader always recognizing his role in connecting his team to a mission greater than themselves, while simultaneously developing and revealing an individual’s highest potential.

Even though faith, family and community have always played a dominant role in his life, a 10 day spiritual immersion retreat in Bali, in 2010, revealed another layer of his personal purpose: creating a movement called Profoundly Free. In witnessing a prevalence of “not enoughness” in our culture, Profoundly Free aims to heal this sense of lack.

Join Ricardo and Shanna as Ricardo shares the various elements of what must be moved through and shed in order to step into the personal freedom of truly feeling “Profoundly Free”.

From burned out to self-sustained, Anna Earth, shares how she went from being fully depleted (and having panic attacks that left her in dark rooms for weeks on end) to tapping into an energy source within that can never be depleted….an infinite source of energy that’s available to each of us.

A long time advocate for environmental sustainability, she shares how understanding our personal sustainability is step one in creating sustainability on a macro scale.

She’s on a mission “for humanity to LIVE fully, in a fully SUSTAINABLE world”.

She’s here to “support visionaries make their dreams come true, build their life and business upon a solid foundation of sustainable energy and income by training SUPERHEROES to bring their superpowers to a more sustainable world”.

She does this through her coaching business, digital course offerings, speaking engagements and social media platforms. 

We have an inspiring episode this week with Crystal Harris, one of my oldest and dearest friends! Who can't use an extra dose of inspiration during these unusual times?!

Crystal and I met when we were 15. I really don’t remember a ramp up time to our friendship. I have a vague memory of meeting and then I have consistent memories over the past 25 years that include her.

Memories ranging from hanging out at each others house in high school to being her “fourth roommate in college” to actually living together in our early 20s to spending most of our 20s and early 30s single and carefree to sharing a recent FaceTime cocktail hour during this pandemic!

But one memory I’ll never forget is receiving a call from a friend of hers on December 21, 2012 saying she’d been in an accident. My heart dropped and my mind raced as I waited to hear what had happened. “She’s going to be okay. She’s at the hospital” her friend said. Well that quelled the worst of my fears but she was in no way out of the woods. She spent the next three weeks in a burn care unit at SAMC (San Antonio Medical Center) recovering from third degree burns and skin graft surgery after falling backwards into a fire pit (she shares the full story in our interview).

What most impressed me about her recovery was her ability to move through the emotional journey with grace. When things of this magnitude occur, some people emotionally crumble never to come out of that negative space. Others temporarily crumble before finding the strength to move through. Crystal never crumbled. She never fell into despair or depression over what occurred and the scars it left. She’s not once let this stop her from living her best life (and two of the best things in her life were yet to come when this accident occurred).

Crystal has always been a bright light in the world but the fact she moved through her accident with such grace puts her in another category of shining lights…those who continue to shine, despite what life throws at them.

Her story inspires us to minimize the trivial and to focus on the good in our life.

It reminds us of the choice to move through our challenges with grace and gratitude, instead of resistance and frustration.

It reminds us of our deeper soul nature, the place where qualities like grace, acceptance and love lives in us.

All of which is extremely relevant to the current pandemic we're collectively experiencing.

Join us in this powerful episode on moving through the unexpected with grace.

In this episode, Shanna sits down with Meagan Smith, owner of Sookie Sookie Jewelry, to chat about her journey as a creative entrepreneur. Like many of us, Meagan grew up with two competing life philosophies in her head…one advising to follow the safe, secure route and another advising to “follow the gravitational pull of your inner passion”, which is how she found herself unhappily living the first philosophy, questioning her discontent. Knowing there must be more, she declared a new path for herself and DECIDED to “put herself in the energy of what she desired to create her life around”. For her, this meant showcasing her creative wares at a trade show, where customers (like my mom!) took an active interest in what she’d created. This single decision to show up at Fredricksburg Trade Days, began to create a ripple effect that has led to the reality she’s currently living.

Today Meagan is well known for expressing her bohemian soul through her art. She creates wearable pieces through her Sookie Sookie hand painted jewelry line and home decor pieces she lovingly refers to as “painting junk”. She’s painted murals including one covering the side of a two story historic building, kitchen cabinets, front doors, storefronts (like Rustic Charm in Sabinal!), guitars, pianos, interior walls, canvases…and many more unique pieces in between. Her soulful art elicits feelings of free-spirited wanderlust with a combination of boho and western roots, making it easily recognizable by those who know her work.

Meagan shares her journey along with the outlook on life that’s kept her moving forward, no matter what bumps in the road appeared. She’s the embodiment of “let your passion be bigger than your fears”. So many of us are stopped in our tracks before ever beginning because the fear of failure feels too big. Meagan shrugs and says “What’s the worst that can happen? You get your lights turned off? Who cares? It’s not like you’re going to die.” The bedrock of her belief system is “there’s a way through”, and because of this, she’s always found a way through.

So much can be learned from the energy with which Meagan lives her life and makes her decisions from.

Join us in this inspiring conversation: Let Your Passion Be Bigger Than Your Fears w/ Meagan Smith.

This conversation feels very relevant to share, since this week’s guest, Jessicka Herman, is from Milan, Italy and has been living what we are just beginning to experience in the States, regarding the impact of the coronavirus. As with the intention of the podcast, our conversation centers on Jessicka’s spiritual journey, it’s origin with early childhood extra-sensory visitations, spiritual study and lessons learned regarding the ongoing balancing of love and wisdom and her most recent role as a channeler for the entities known as Vagrein (we go into what this is, how it came about and how you can tune into public sessions, etc.). We also cover her ongoing experience with being in quarantine, ideas for handling the emotions that inevitably arise as well as thoughts on the situation from a spiritual perspective.

Tracey Keller and I have a shared mission of teaching and encouraging people to come from love instead of fear. Where mine tends to take a general approach to its application, she primarily focuses on women’s relationship with their body, food and movement. She’s an eating psychology coach and a personal trainer who has been in the health, wellness and fitness industry her entire career, but, a few years ago, a deep dive course on eating psychology changed her entire approach to her work.

She’s on a mission to help eradicate what she calls “The Barbie Illusion” in the minds of women. The Barbie Illusion points to the idea that all will be well when I look a certain way. It stems from the idea that something is missing. In dispelling The Barbie Illusion she’s helping women heal ideas of lack, come into more self-love and consume and move their bodies from a place of love and gratitude. Join us in this conversation about work that is so relevant and needed in the world.

Tracey Keller's Bio:

She's an Eating Psychology Coach, Life Coach and personal trainer, who works passionately with clients on navigating their relationship with food and movement, helping them set up practices that will lead to success in their highest calling. As an Eating Psychology Coach, Tracey shares an exciting and cutting edge approach to food and eating. This approach effectively addresses weight concerns, binge eating, overeating, body image challenges, and various nutrition-related health concerns. Her approach is positive and empowering. She doesn’t see eating challenges merely as a sign that “something is wrong with you” – but as a place where one can more fully explore some of the personal dimensions of life that impact food, weight, athletic performance and health.

Coaching sessions include:

• Learning mindful, intuitive eating
• Letting go of negative body image
• Living life fully & vibrantly

Today Sean Patrick lives a beautiful life in Kalispell, MT combining his love for fishing and martial arts with his professional background in counseling and therapy under what he calls “Adventure Therapy”. But the road to beauty wasn’t handed to him on a silver platter. He had to work for it, where much of this work was transforming his inner world from being addicted to negative self-talk, not fully believing in himself as well as a physiological addiction to alcohol. Even once Sean was well established in living a positively oriented life, he encountered a neurological injury that tested all the healthy habits and mindset shifts he’d worked so hard to put in place. Sean is the embodiment of “change is possible”. And I’m so excited to share his story with you!

Danielle de Leon is a powerful soul. At 15, she was diagnosed with cancer. As she so aptly says in our interview, “cancer will either make you or break you”. With the wisdom of knowing this choice existed, she made sure it did NOT break her. Instead, she used the diagnosis and ensuing journey to turn inward and began an inner journey that has outwardly led to becoming a yoga instructor, high performance drone pilot (and instructor), and teacher of consciousness and emotional intelligence. She uses her passion, positivity, curiosity and creativity to contribute to the world. She's a beautiful embodiment of shining bright in the world!

I love Keilan McNeil’s energy. It’s the exact opposite of mine. Where I tend to be soft and gentle, he’s bold and fierce. But we’re coming from the same place in our expression and what we’re pointing to regarding the spiritual journey of awakening; it’s just two different ways of expressing it. His bold, edginess makes a much bigger splash than mine, meaning it can be triggering for some. But teaching through triggering can be highly effective because it cuts through the BS that gentleness never stirs up. What Keilan and I both understand is we need to be able to do both, depending on what the situation is calling for. For him, that meant learning from a few “Kanye West Moments”.

Keilan is a powerful manifestor. In the (almost) two years I’ve known him, he’s lived in Florida, Toronto, went nomadic for a time and now lives in Irvine, CA, where we recorded our interview. Most of his choices occurred with little money and a lot of faith in himself and his co-creative power. He’s said yes to a $3000 trip with $30 dollars in his account and three weeks to come up with the rest. He moved to California with a job secured but no place to live or car to drive. Both of which worked out. In following his inner guidance, he’s had to leave people and jobs he loved to continually prioritize his own inner alignment. (Most are too scared to do this, but following your unique blueprint requires the willingness to do this).

In this conversation, we talk about learning from his Kanye West Moments, his tips on manifestation and staying energetically and vibrationally aligned, his new love and passion for making conscious music, and utilizing a 9-5 job to prioritize his art (as opposed to expending creative energy free lancing when that same energy could be poured into his own art). 

Keilan embodies and shines his light in the world through a deep belief and confidence in himself and he powerfully expresses it through his spiritual writing, making conscious music and creating and editing purpose-driven videos, as well as though the love and care he gives to others.

I met Lindsey nearly 10 years ago in a bagel shop in Guatemala (we were both volunteering as teachers in a nearby indigenous community through the same organization). During this year, we were inseparable, working in classrooms next to each other with only a four foot bamboo wall between us, working out nearly every morning together and adventuring together on weekends. It was a year of bliss where a lifelong friendship blossomed.

Grace Barbettini is a sweet soul. She has a calm, gentleness about her energy that I love. I essentially asked her to be on the podcast because I wanted to know the person behind the energy. What I love about our conversation is we immediately got to the heart of what this podcast is about: understanding why we do the things we do by asking where we’re coming from in our behavior (is it a compensation of some sort? If so, what healing is available in understanding the roots of our behavior?). And in doing this process of inquiry, we deepen in our own light, which allows us to shine brighter. For some people, it takes some sort of major catalyst to begin a process of inquiry, but, what I love about Grace, is she’s mining her everyday experiences for the treasures that lie in understanding where she’s coming from in her desire to do or not to do something. And that’s really what this journey of healing and awakening is about…being mindful of where we’re coming from in the most ordinary, everyday stuff so we begin to shift any sense of lack or fear to greater sense of inner abundance and love.

Grace does this in ways we can all benefit from. She’s 24 (at the time of recording)...apart of a generation where there’s a compulsion to share everything on social media, yet she has a valuable process of asking herself why she’s posting what’s she’s posting. Is it to gain something? Or is it to purely share something without desiring or needing anything from it.

In this episode we talk about going analog in a digital age, Grace's love for all things vintage 1970s (where it comes from), embracing curls, social media, being a dominant Type 2 on the Enneagram (and it's specific lessons), her new love for rollerskating and my weird obsession with skateboarding documentaries.

Small note: We recorded this episode in beautiful Hotel Emma in one of the seating areas in the silos. I thought the circular nature of the silo and padding on the walls would be enough to create a quiet environment but there was a bit more background noise than we anticipated.

BIG NEWS...!

Leah Guerrero is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. She’s from a small town in South Texas but she’s lived in New York City (where she volunteered through AmeriCorps and later got her masters degree at a prestigious art school), spent extensive time in Botswana working with her best friend to lay the ground work for building the first pediatric hospital there (she also got married in Botswana!), lived in Sydney Australia (before dropping out of Bible College), moved back to her hometown (to teach art at the local school), then followed her husband to California where he found work but she didn’t (or at least not in the way she anticipated) to currently living in the Texas Hill Country where her and her husband currently own and operate The Inn Between, a Bed & Breakfast…and she’s only 32 years old (we think).

I’ve titled this episode “Disappearing (INN) Service” because that’s exactly how I see Leah shining her light in the world. Sometimes we think it’s about being front and center (and it totally can be but it just doesn’t have to be), regarding the service role(s) we play in the world. For Leah that was initially through her art (showing it in galleries, driving an old school bus on a two month journey with the intention of creating an equalizing space for people of all demographics to come together) and do good endeavors with AmeriCorps and her work in Botswana. But today it’s through her role as an innkeeper, hence the title “Disappearing (Inn) Service”, where she provides a loving space for families to make memories together, solo travelers to rest and renew and everything in between (see what I did there? ;)).

In this conversation, Leah shares her outer and inner journey. She shares the major lessons learned (like coming face-to-face with a dominant Type 3 Enneagram’s biggest fear), staying aligned with her inner voice/intuition (something’s she’s known and listened to since she was a little girl), what it means to fit in or have a sense of belonging wherever you are, and we also challenge the myth of selfishness (which, spoiler alert, is what it took for her to see that being an innkeeper was the right next step in her journey).

I’ve shared amazing conversations with her my whole life! And I’m so excited to bring one of those conversations to YOU! Today’s guest is Phyllis Kruciak…a bestie…a lifer…a member of my soul tribe. We’ve known each other since elementary school. Growing up, she was a light for me, in many ways. She helped me navigate emotional situations. She broadened my mind just by sharing topics that were on her mind…things I wasn’t thinking about, but, because she brought them up, I got interested in them (and learned a lot). Since then, we’ve navigated our 20s and 30s together (and now the very beginning of our 40s!), often getting together for “catch up sessions” that involve a minimum of three hour nonstop chats.

In this episode, we share the abrupt wall we each hit when we entered our first career type job and what it taught us, the challenges and blessings our unique gifts (in her case, intelligence) offer us in terms of inner growth and connecting with and understanding others, googling the meaning of life (the roots of that inquiry and the journey it leads us on), panning out into a more soulful perspective in order to shift from comparison to compassion, shifting from fear to love and from lack to greater inner abundance, dropping from our head to our heart (and back into our spiritual mind) in order to better balance love and wisdom, consciously connecting to service in our day-to-day and the power the law of allowance offers us in our personal growth journey.

We fit a lot in our one hour conversation! It’s a soulful conversation that’s chock full of wisdom…one you won’t want to miss!

Bios...

Phyllis Kruciak is bright…like really bright. She once wrote an essay for a $25,000 scholarship the night before it was due and won the scholarship (none of us were surprised). She’s a system’s thinker meaning she can pull from multiple disciplines, like psychology, philosophy, spirituality, political science, etc., to draw observations, insights and solutions, which also makes her a great strategist and problem solver. When it comes to intelligence she has the best of both worlds…IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence). For the past 20 years, she’s held some sort of leadership position where she’s often simultaneously managing employees and strategizing on behalf of the business. I see her as a bright light in this world because she uses her gifts to help others. Whether she’s acting as a friend, boss, business partner, daughter, sister, aunt, etc., she uses her gift of insight with care and compassion for the person she’s helping.

If we got everything we wanted, when we wanted it, there would be little room for true inner growth and awakening. So along the journey of life, we bump into catalysts meant to turn us inward in order to gain the gift(s) that lie inside them. By all (non-soul growth oriented) accounts, today’s guest, my sister-in-law, Emily Covey, had every right to be upset, frustrated and disappointed. She longed to be a mother…to have the maternal experience of carrying a child and bringing life into this world. But after YEARS AND EVEN MORE YEARS of trying to conceive she was no closer to the thing she longed for. This was the biggest frustration in her life...the thing she felt was missing. All would be okay if…

Whether you relate to this exact catalyst or not, the idea that something is missing or should or shouldn’t have happened is common to all of us. It’s the source of our frustration, pain and suffering. It’s ALSO the thing leading us to a deeper awakening around the constricted perceptions we’re carrying…if we choose to use them to that end. Emily did. It wasn’t easy to see friends get pregnant…and then pregnant again. It wasn’t easy having friends skirt around telling her when they were pregnant for fear it would hurt her feelings. It wasn’t easy riding the cycle of hope and frustration month after month…year after year. Fortunately, she got her happy ending but it wasn’t until she faced and healed the pain around the idea of not having the thing she desired. It wasn’t until she learned she could be at peace without clinging and gripping onto the one thing she thought could offer her peace. And that’s the key lesson every catalyst is teachings us.

I chose Emily as a guest on Always Shine Brightly because, despite all the ways she naturally shines bright, she did the work around the biggest thing that was causing her pain and dimming her light in those moments of deep frustration, which is exactly what I look for in a guest. Join Emily and I as she walks us through her journey to motherhood and shares the lessons she learned along the way.