Takeaways After Dr. Shefali's EVOLVE 2018 Conference (ep-81)

Hey Divas!

Today on the show I am talking about some takeaways after the EVOLVE 2018 conference, which is Dr. Shefali’s live event I attended this past weekend in Long Beach, California.

I’m sharing what I’ve learned, including some very powerful examples of exercises we’ve done on the conference and also introduce you to two of my favorite presenters (hint, one of them was a guest on this podcast!!).

The energy of this event was absolutely incredible and the transformation deep and powerful. I could not believe it is possible to have such profound realizations in such a short period of time, so this is only a testament to Dr. Shefali’s level of mastery.

Together we cried, breathed deeply, meditated, hugged without taking, looked in each other’s eyes and surrendered to our humanity. I’m so happy I said yes!

I hope my takeaways will inspire you to shift some of your mindsets around change and healing and maybe (just maybe) you’ll be motivated enough to attend the next Evolve!

Enjoy listening!!

XOXO,

Dorit

Transcript of the episode:

Manifestation is always happening. It is either conscious and deliberate or unconscious and sleep ridden.
Loving our children less may be healthier than loving them so much. Otherwise, how do you live with the fact that the person you love the most causes you the most pain? Release them, don’t be so attached to the need to be loved and acknowledged by your children. Great metaphor – when you love a flower you will pluck it when you truly love that flower, you will let it be and blossom. You don’t have to hold it and make it your own. Just let it be and adore it from the side. Love is freedom, it is liberation. Love is allowing children to be themselves. We are their mothers but we are not their creators. We are a part of the miracle of life which is a part of a symphony and that symphony wasn’t constructed by you or me. This is where I felt tremendous humility and humbleness. Hearing this was the confirmation I needed to keep doing the work that I’m doing to heal myself and not project my own agenda or past wounds on to them.
One of the worst things we can do to ourselves or to our children is to say “you are not living up to your potential” because this is entrenched in the belief that you are not good enough. This is the ego’s way of getting you more into the matrix. Mommy, can you love me “as is?” Just the way I am? Can you mommy? We torture our children and ourselves with this.
Our true self is always wanting to emerge.
Mothering is full of ego, control, rigidness, our own past wounding, and fear.
Each one of us is a spec on the mote of the sunbeam (we live in a bubble and a story. Whatever we feel it is not real, and our job is to find our true self. Our higher-self always wants to emerge, so allow it).
When you are out of the matrix you see people who hurt you and do bad things to you, not as perpetrators of pain, but with kindness and compassion, because you understand, that they too are asleep in the matrix.
When you see life as a comedy and a play, there’s space for playfulness and fun.
We talked about the 4 I’s which are gradual levels of consciousness.
- 1. Material – I am existence. I am my attachments and identity. I am my title, status, name, what I have, what I own, what I want, what I need. I am what’s mine.
- 2. Psychological – this is when you are awake-ish. You start seeking help, you go to therapy, hire a coach, ask for help and mentorship. You are starting to realize that you are just reenacting past conditioning either from your childhood or culture. You live someone else’s script and you don’t really know who you truly are. What am I doing? Where am I going? What legacy am I leaving for my children?
- Spiritual Quest – This is where you go to vipassana retreats, you become a seeker, a meditator, you talk less, you listen more. You leave your body and allow your ego to dissipate. This is when you taste and smell true freedom.
- Transcendent – I am a part of the divine. I don’t exist as a self. I am a part of a whole, we are all one. You move into the 3rd eye and rever creation with every breath.
what is life about? It is about being OK with whatever comes at the moment. Trust that you are going to be ok, no matter what.

Reenie Jain, founder of GoZen – How to raise a successful child?

The goal of every parent is to have a child that is motivated, successful and happy. Right? Well, how do you actually harbor that?
Replace motivation with curiosity. How to raise a curious child? By allowing your child to take reasonable risks.
- school is the place where curiosity comes to die! So help the child to make connections between their intrinsic interests and school work. There’s a great exercise she shared with us which you can find a link to in the show notes. It’s called Building connections exercise which is helpful to show kids how to make connections between what they learn at school and their personal interests. For example, if the child is interested in video games, this could be matched with visual arts activities learned at school. Or if a child loved drawing and making things, maybe this activity could be matched with sketching and architecture lessons learned in school. I think it’s great and I’m excited to do this exercise with my oldest one who seems to not enjoy school lately.
- Also, teach children to learn to be in control of their thoughts and big and scary feelings and take an itty-bitty action towards whatever they want or need to achieve in their lives.
Instead of making your kid successful, help this child strive meaning from their current lives.
- Stop asking them questions like: “who do you want to be when you grow up?” and instead ask them “what can you contribute to the world?”. Get into the habit of getting them to think in terms of problem-solving. What needs to be done in the world? What are the problems you see in society? What can you do to help? You can do something to change that problem which you see.
- When a child has a meaning and a sense of purpose, it allows for the ebb and flow of emotions and eradication of perfectionism. So many children today are afraid of making mistakes and taking risks. I know this to be true with regards to my girls, and so many of my clients’ children.
Instead of happiness, nurture presence.
- This is again going back to helping children process their big and scary emotions. Instead of freaking out and losing your cool, learn it yourself and pass it on to them.
- children have to know that it’s ok to feel things. there’s nothing wrong with them if they feel a certain way.
- emotions are like waves, they come and they go and by knowing that we can help children to breathe through feelings and know that they are and will be safe no matter what.
We also spoke about how to deal with social media, and there wasn’t a clear cut answer to this but what I liked she said was that at the core of it, we can’t control social media, and what’s happening there. What we can do is help our children, especially girls, to have a strong sense of self. expose them to concepts and ideas and problems you see with social media and with society today and teach them how not to get sucked into this. Of course, she talked about delaying the phone as much as possible, and if it is absolutely necessary, give them a flip phone instead of a smartphone. Also, minimize your own exposure to phones as they are watching us.

Next, Dr. Shefali spoke about manifestation (which is a fancy word to say how to make your dreams a reality).

Don’t mess with manifestation.
when you want to create something, wait.
There’s no forcing creativity, motivation, curiosity. It’s either there or not.
Flow is not something you can force.
It will come. Trust.
Don’t keep poking at inspiration.
Decisions are easier to make when they are ripe, otherwise, it will always feel like you’re out of alignment.
We’ve done a powerful exercise called “the arrow exercise” which is all about processing emotions and pain.
Pain is inevitable because life happens, but suffering is optional. Why does this matter? Because often pain will be like a first arrow thrown at us, we don’t really have control over it. Examples of first arrows would be:
- you were fired from work
- your spouse said something nasty about you
- your child is driving you crazy
- you’ve heard a painful comment from someone you love
From that moment on, you have a choice, to either accept the second arrow or to move and allow it to pass by you? When we respond negatively or take things personally we allow the 2nd arrow to penetrate us and hurt us.
- An example of the second arrow would be, let’s say you were laid off from your job. That’s the first arrow. It happened, life happens. Now, do you dwell in it and convince yourself that you are a loser? how did it happen? How could they do this to me? and then be depressed for months about it? OR do you decide that you are not a victim of circumstances and that you hated this job anyway, so this is your opportunity to do something else, to try new things? To play! Remember that life is a show, it’s a theater and in order to enjoy the show, you have to play. Otherwise, everything will feel too serious, hard, unmotivating and uninspiring.
- The first arrow is neutral because it is outside of your locus of control.
- the second arrow, however, is our thoughts about the first arrow. It’s judgment, it’s belief that something shouldn’t be. “It’s not fair!”
- What is common about judgments? The judgmental mind of ours converts something neutral into something that is subjective. You put your own spin on it, and we must understand that this is bound by choice.
- Now, here’s where this is useful to our topic here on the podcast. Judgments are our hurts are signals that something hurts or wounded from our past. This is an opportunity to be aware of it and heal it.
- Healing is necessary so that you learn not to linger and pass through old conditioning and create the life that you want, and not live by generational constraints.
  - for example, for me, one of my wounds were feeling like “poor me”, “why does it happen to me?”. I’ve started noticing that whenever I am faced with a challenge this is the first thing that jumps to mind. But, this felt so yucky to me, because naturally, I am a very action oriented person. So something there wasn’t right. With time, I’ve realized that this kind of thinking wasn’t even mine. I have inherited it from my mother line and was perpetuating it. I’ve done the work to change my story, to rewire my brain, and let me tell you that it took some time. But now, I no longer have this. This is what I mean by healing our mother-daughter lineage. There are so many things we do on a regular basis that we don’t realize how much of it is subconscious and not ours. It’s like we’ve been programmed in a certain way and are moving through life like zombies suffer and don’t enjoy the moment. How many times has this happened in your life? Think about it?
  - What is it is your own life that you are reenacting? Do you have a negative self-image? Do you love or hate your body? Do you have a chatty mind? Are you negative? Do you resist a lot? Do you say “no!” a lot? Ask yourself, is this truly, authentically mine? Or is this something that I could have inherited from the people I was raised by? Or my culture?
  - This is the best way I know of to truly heal to truly see how you are the only one who is in control of your life. No one can save you but you. This is how powerful your mind is.
  - No one can reject or disapprove of you, only you. In the words of Dr. Shefali, “We’ve been conditioned to depend on mortals”.
Consciousness is about waking up and realizing that you were asleep all this time.
When you “wake up” you finally connect to your own being, it feels good, and you are falling in love with yourself.
You may be called selfish, self-centered, and that’s OK!
Taking care of yourself is no one’s job but yours and other people are not going to like this, but this is ok. This is not about neglecting your duties and responsibilities. Rather, it’s about saying “I matter, I won’t do this anymore” and being creative and resourceful in your solution to the problem.
That is about revering your own being. You no longer need anything from anyone, because you are self-giving.
I want to be clear here, this is not about living alone or secluding yourself from society! What I’m talking about here, and this who conference was about not taking life so seriously, allowing playfulness and fun. Laugh at yourself and with yourself and other people. The main thing I am taking away from this and I want you to take away as well as the knowledge that we have control over nothing but our thoughts. How we respond to things, life, behaviors, meanness, words, someone’s looks, etc. All of that is subjective. It is your own shit being reenacted over and over again. If you’re happy with that, great. But if not, it is your duty to set yourself free. Also, this liberation will show you that you are the one standing in your own way.
Next presentation was by Avital Schreiber Levy which was also a guest on this podcast (if you’re interested to hear more about Avital, go back to episode 40 and listen). She is incredible! She has such a beautiful way of saying things and explaining complex concepts and I admire that very much! She was at the conference with her 5-month-old baby and I was so lucky to babysit him while she was on the stage!
5-hour Silent meditation activity was a great way for us to get still and connect to our true being, our true self and practice self-control, and self-soothing. There is nothing more powerful than a human being having control over his/her mind. Our mind is extremely powerful and strong when it comes to manifesting and helping us show up in the world the way we want to, and so many of us are self-sabotaging ourselves all the time, without even knowing it. Silent meditation is one way of starting to unlearn this and finally call in what you want into your life.