PODCAST
The Uncorked Conversation
EPISODE #29
Morning routine. Miracle morning. Soul session. There are many ways to describe the process of getting still and connecting to your soul and guides to receive guidance and live more intentionally.
I love the idea of calling it a spiritual discipline as our guest Steph Lagana describes it. There is no right or wrong way to do it. There is no need to be productive. There is no expected output. It’s embodying a connection and receiving whatever may be nourishing to your soul in any given moment.
Steph Lagana is a national security nerd turned business strategist and spiritual teacher. She helps highly sensitive women get more clients and grow their business in a way that supports their soul. Steph and I explore everything from being an empath in a warzone to using a spiritual discipline to connect to the soul of your business.
In today’s episode we explore:
- What a spiritual discipline is and how to start one
- How a spiritual discipline can work for you in your life + business, and
- Why smaller answers are as good or better than big ones
Listen + Subscribe on iTunes or PodBean.
References & Resources:
- Learn more about Steph at: www.mythicalenterprises.com
- Click HERE to join Steph’s Private FB Group, Your Sacred Craft
- Click HERE to join my private FB Group, The Uncorked Cabal
The Uncorked Conversation Podcast with Allyson Scammell
Ep #29: Using a Spiritual Discipline to Connect to the Soul of Your Practice
Allyson Scammell: You are listening to the uncorked conversation podcast with Allyson Scammell.
Episode number 29.
Allyson: Hello and welcome to the Uncorked Conversation, a podcast for soul-guided, passion-filled women entrepreneurs who want to uncork big magic in life and business without burning out. We’ll get to the truth of how to uncork our core gifts, the ones we keep hidden inside and how to infuse those gifts into our personal and professional life in a way that feels like magic. We’ll also uncover how to truly experience the joy of the journey through smart time management and planning. I’m your host, Allyson Scammell. Let’s uncork.
Allyson: Good day to you Shantipax nation. This is just a great episode, great topic and extraordinary guest. So you are in the right place. Grab yourself a hot drink or if you’re driving, grab yourself a Starbucks, treat yourself and nestle in for this episode. I am speaking to the absolutely enchanting Steph Lagana about creating a spiritual discipline and using it to connect into your soul and the soul of your business and anything else you feel like connecting into. Up until this conversation, I called a spiritual discipline, a morning routine. But I love the idea of the spiritual discipline because sometimes I don’t get to my routine in the morning and I like the idea of a discipline, using it lightly and with love and curiosity to help me carve out time every day for a spiritual discipline.
Allyson: To tell us more about what a spiritual discipline is and how we can use it in our lives, I speak to the lovely Steph Lagana. Steph is a national security nerd, turned business strategist and spiritual teacher. She helps highly sensitive women, get more clients and grow their business in a way that supports their soul. I have felt connected to Steph for some time because we share similar backgrounds in national security and international relations and traveling to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And now we’re doing a coaching work and spiritual woo-woo work and I think we both have very similar niches. So I am so grateful for Steph’s wisdom, her time and I absolutely loved speaking to her about this topic and I hope you learn as much from her as I did.
Allyson: So welcome Steph. Thank you so much for making the time to speak with us today on this podcast.
Steph Lagana: I am delighted to be here. Thanks for hosting me.
Allyson: Yay! So I’m really, really excited to be speaking to you on a number of levels, but I can really identify with the path that you’ve taken. You’ve said that in your previous career you were disconnected or felt disconnected from your spirit. Can you tell us about your personal journey to reconnect?
Steph Lagana: Yeah. I feel like the circumstances are unusual, so I love that there’s so much symmetry between us, but I think that the emotion or the lack of emotion, the disconnect is actually a lot more common than I think we’d like as a collective. That’s my experience of it working in the world. I used to work for the government and I spent about 11 years doing work in support of the military as a civil servant. And I found that when I showed up in that career that there was this intensity of fire inside of me. There was a clarity of purpose and a quest. There was this quest inside of me to make positive meeting and to have a really extraordinary impact, positive impact on the world around me. And I found over time that there was both a dilution of that purpose, a dilution of that clarity and also an intensity of breakage between my mind and my body, and my mind and my body and my spirit.
Steph Lagana: So as I pursued ever deeper service or rather ever deeper activity in supportive intended service, there were more and more ways that I was disconnected from what I needed and who I was and how I was served by myself in the world. And that cleavage profoundly impacted me on a lot of levels and I didn’t know that it was happening. So when I started to get clear that it was taking place, I realized that I had an incredible repair job that needed to happen. I had a lot of healing and maintenance that needed to take place. But for a long time it was absolutely invisible to me. It was just subterranean.
Allyson: Yeah. Wow, that’s so beautiful. I’m like intensely taking notes. I love this intensity of fire, clarity of purpose and this quest. It’s that calling, it’s our soul calling, calling us to waken up. Is that how it felt like to you kind of?
Steph Lagana: Yes. I really do think it was my soul’s calling that wanted to emerge, that was coming up through this, like there had been an earthquake and there was a crevice in the ground that opened up. And through that breakage and through the things that were really intense, which included a great deal of suffering. The things that I was called to do came up from the ethos, to meet me.
Allyson: Wow, so beautiful. And so what happened? What did you do next? So you said you focused on your healing, which is … Oh no, you didn’t say you focused on your healing. You said that you felt like there was healing to be done. And I think for many of us, it’s hard to give ourselves permission to stop in our busy day, to look inward and focus on our own healing. So were you able to give yourself permission to do that, or how did that look like for you?
Steph Lagana: Oh, I love that you pointed that out. I got to the point where there was no other way that I could turn.
Allyson: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Steph Lagana: I’d love for it to have been like entirely of my own volition, and because I had good judgment and quality to [inaudible 00:07:02], actually happened is that, I just felt like it was crumbling inside. So I worked for the government. I volunteered multiple times first to go to Iraq and then to Afghanistan. But they didn’t accept me, I think until like my seventh application. So just know that these things that I’m talking about, they felt aligned. It felt where I was called to go. So I went to Afghanistan for six months. I was there from 2011 to 2012 and when I came back … And while I was there, I was in motion, I was at purpose, I was accelerated and I didn’t have the tools then to understand … I didn’t have the self awareness to realize that I was an empath in a war zone. I didn’t have the tools then to realize that there might be some trauma that comes from that kind of experience.
Steph Lagana: And so I came back and there were hardly any people that understood the experience that I had gone through, and I didn’t have access to people that listened in the way that the coaches can and that acute present way. And I was drinking at the time, and I felt all of the pain without realizing that it was pain that I was feeling. I just knew that something was wrong, and I didn’t know how to fix it. And everything looked right on the outside. I had just a series of career wins, lots of positive things, a very high speed person, lots of significant victories and projects that I worked on. And inside there was this growing anger, that just kept multiplying and multiplying, and I didn’t know what to do with it. And I did know that it was anger in some cases and there was this incredible pain and then a suffering that came from not tending to the pain and not knowing that, that was my responsibility, that, that was what I needed to do.
Steph Lagana: So I very magically found coaching. Gosh, that was in 2013 and never thought that it would be anything of consequence. I just knew that I was called to it. So I took almost nine month part-time coach training program and there wasn’t a strategy to that. I just knew that I felt terrible. I knew that I felt terrible, and I knew that there was something that was like lightening for me, that was activating, that was illuminating, that was charging, that was in the coaching work. And I know a lot of people go, and they explore coaching as a way to help other people, and for me it was a really intense conduit that I knew that I needed to enter, but it was about healing myself. So, I’m in this place now where I help other people, but I really had to put on my own oxygen mask first, and that’s how it happened by going through this wildly intense disconnect coming back from Afghanistan … in Afghanistan, coming back from Afghanistan.
Steph Lagana: And then realizing, understanding that I didn’t have to feel that way, that there was something wrong in feeling that way and that I could address it through a lot of different things I’ve never heard of before. A lot of different hippy-dippy kind of stuff.
Allyson: Yes, yes. I am like, wow. I wrote down that you were an empath in a war zone, that’s extraordinary to me. And one of the reasons I feel so connected to you, I have felt so connected to you since I joined your closed Facebook group, which is super awesome and I’m going to include a link for people who are feeling called to join your tribe to join. One of the reasons was because everything you say, you’ve got such a wonderful way with words and I spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. And I have gifts and spiritual gifts, but I am not an empath. I would not ever call myself an empath. So I can’t imagine being an empath and being there. Was that hard or was that like cool or both? Or what was that like?
Steph Lagana: Yeah, it’s complicated.
Allyson: I bet. Yeah, sorry.
Steph Lagana: No. No, no.
Allyson: And I’m getting us a little off topic, but it’s just fascinating for me.
Steph Lagana: Yeah, no, it’s okay. I’ll share this story with you to illustrate it. So the person that replaced me, there is an attempt to continuity and operations. You train the person that’s to replace you. And I was only there for six months. So the need for passage of information was important from the person I replaced and me to the person that replaced me. I had maybe three or four days with this person and he had a lot of experience with high speed, no fail people. And I knew that he should be fine in a war zone, but he just needed to know the technical details of what was happening in the position or I assumed that he would be fine in a war zone. And when he showed up, he was quickly very agitated and I realized that in watching him … Well, what I realize now looking back is that he had a really significant amount of trauma and that the things that he was doing were his stress response.
Steph Lagana: And at the time, what I made it mean the way that he was reacting, including getting really fidgety and doing some other things that I’ll leave out. I judged him and thought, “Wow, this guy needs to get his stuff together.” And one of the things that happened was we had gone to lunch in the place that I was in Afghanistan was in the south in Kandahar and every part of the war zone had different dangers. And for Kandahar, it was rocket attacks. And while we were at lunch, there was a rocket attack, and when the rocket attack happened, you were supposed to get on the ground. The idea was to prevent shrapnel from broadly splaying out and killing folks, so get on the ground you have less of a chance of being hurt or killed. And when the rocket attack alarm went off, which the alarm was, “Hey, incoming rockets.” Everybody scrambled down to the ground, including him. There was this big collective intake of breath and [inaudible 00:13:53] … I just feel it coming up inside me.
Steph Lagana: I feel connected to that energy of unprocessed emotion. Like here I am, it’s 2019, there’s still stuff that I’m working through. I heard helicopters earlier this week and they were really close overhead and that’s one of my triggers. So everybody gets down on the ground really quick and I don’t, I get on the ground, but I do it in a very methodical way. And I’m looking at him, like out of the side of my eye thinking, “Brother, you need to get it together or you’re not going to last here.” And there was this little tiny voice that showed up in my head and it said, “This is a problem Steph. Like this is a problem, this isn’t the way you’re supposed to react.” There was a part of me that knew there was a problem. Like it’s a war zone, the rockets coming in and can kill you. You don’t just say like, “Well, get your shit together.”
Steph Lagana: And so a lot of my time there, I work seven days a week, it might have been 12 hours or it might’ve been 20 hours, and there were wild variations in between, but I never stopped. I never stopped. And I was the job and I was the mission, and so I’m like still connecting with experiences from there and still feeling things that are like deep in pockets of my body, but I really didn’t have a lot of space for me in that experience. I was, if not secondary, tertiary to what was going on. The job came first, and everybody else’s needs came first. So it’s almost like I was there, but I was the vessel for things that was happening. So all of me wasn’t present or parts of me were boxed up and contained and I’m still working on unpacking it.
Allyson: Wow, wow. What an extraordinary story. Thank you so much for sharing. Well, the topic of discussion that we have on the table is using a spiritual discipline to connect to your soul or to the soul of your business. So in that spirit of healing, let us talk about this spiritual discipline. So tell us what it means. Tell us what it means first of all.
Steph Lagana: Yeah. So, let me preface this by saying I … So I went through coach training in 2013 not thinking that I was going to do some wild, crazy thing with it. Never thinking I was going to leave the government. It was always this vessel to support me. And so when I first started helping other people with coaching, it very quickly became this extremely right brained activity. And I’m using right brain to mean creativity and woo-woo centered. So I had this series of awakenings that were really important, where I started to translate my empathic nature into this porousness that became intuitive abilities, but also the capacity to channel. So if you believe in that kind of thing, I can do it. And I really didn’t understand how much that was only one part of me because I wasn’t focused on building a business that was going to sustain me, it was just something that I was doing for fun.
Steph Lagana: So when I made the decision to leave the government in 2016, I realized once I was ready to work because there was a good period of time where I just needed to convalesce basically, which I highly recommend if any of you are considering making the jump from your 9:00 to 5:00 to your full time business and you’ve been working hard, you’re pretty successful, overachieving type, give yourself a short sabbatical, six weeks, eight weeks, four weeks, give yourself time to relax. I didn’t realize that I was missing this left brained part of me, so now the work that I do combines business plus the woo and all of this creative, juicy, divine connection, intuitive stuff. So all of that said, I started working with people on spirituality in their business in 2017 and immediately upon doing that in a formal way, I got the nudge to get people to establish a spiritual discipline, which my use of the phrase is about a five to 10 minutes, maximum consistent daily practice where you connect.
Steph Lagana: And the connection can really be in the direction that serves you depending on what kind of energy you have and what kind of experience you have with stillness. For some people it helps them to have it be really structured. Like, “Okay, we’re going to take 10 minutes every morning, I’m going to journal, I’m going to meditate, it’s going to be a staff meeting with the soul of my business.” And I say staff meeting, jokingly because there are still sometimes in my current business where I do like slides and I’m really excited and so I’ve retained like little parts of me that are funny from my old career [inaudible 00:19:43]. I don’t know if this sort of thing like makes me really happy, but every once in a while something will happen. And I’d be like, Ooh, like I used to teleprompter [inaudible 00:19:53].
Allyson: I love it.
Steph Lagana: Yeah, so spiritual discipline is really about a consistent daily practice to connect in, to connect up, to meet your future self, to meet the soul of your business. It really is about cultivating a connection with your wiser self and with your guides. And I use guides like big G, I believe that we all have some sort of divine support system. And for some people it might feel more like they hear songs on the radio and they see repeating numbers and people’s tee-shirts seem to carry messages for them. For other people it might be more tangible and they might feel a more specific presence. And I think it’s a muscle that you can strengthen, so if it’s something that you want and you don’t have, you can use a practice like the spiritual discipline to cultivate that relationship. So let me pause there because that’s a lot of talking.
Allyson: No, it’s beautiful. And I just say like, yes, yes. Hallelujah. Yes to all of it. And I love it. And it sounds simple, like five to 10 minutes consistently daily, but it’s so easy for us to just wake up 20 minutes after we wanted to or more and just race to the coffee maker and go. In my experience I had a really pretty consistent, I called it my morning routine, but I love the idea of a spiritual discipline, where I did that and I had my little thing. I started out with meditation and then I did a little [inaudible 00:21:37] work and then I moved to checking in with my guides, my [inaudible 00:21:41] then I did visualization.
Allyson: It was all very nice little well oiled machine. And then I had a baby and it just like … It went out the window. My youngest is two and a half and I still don’t have it back consistently. So, what do you say to people who really buy this idea and have maybe had it in the past and it’s fallen off? Like how can people give their … I think it gets back to giving … In my opinion, giving yourself permission to take that 10 to 15 minutes to do it. What are some tips and tricks or ways that we can get back into that consistency if we’ve never had it or we’ve lost it?
Steph Lagana: Yeah. So first let me say for anyone who isn’t bought in to this concept that you just have to put on your scientist hat and experiment. What I like to say is, “Give me 90 days.” Try it and see what happens, because it’s a part of what I call the sexy problem. Everybody wants everybody, the universe, everybody. I meet a lot of people that want really big answers to really big problems. And the reason why that could be so crazy making is because a lot of the biggest problems have really simple answers. And our thinking brain moves us right by that like, “Oh, that’s not good enough. That’s not good enough. Oh, in order for me to grow my business, I need to consistently show up and talk about the thing that I’m passionate about in places where my clients hang out. No, that’s not good enough. I need something bigger.”
Steph Lagana: And we do it to ourselves. The sexy problem, everybody wants everybody. Everybody wants these big, big answers. And what I found is that smaller answers are what actually work, and when you’re willing to experiment with them, magic and miracles happen. So everybody come with me. Everybody [inaudible 00:23:50] come with me on this journey.
Allyson: I love what you’re saying. Yay.
Steph Lagana: Yeah. This is a soapbox that I can stand on and go for hours. I’ll try and be succinct. So especially for anyone who is a mom, a dad, a caregiver, somebody that’s responsible for other people, I do recommend that you do the spiritual discipline in the morning. Now, my definition of morning, doesn’t have to equate to yours. Your definition of morning could be 11:30 in the morning. You don’t have to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to win your day. That’s bullshit. You don’t have to do that. So whatever your morning is, what I recommend is you do it first before you do anything for anybody else.
Steph Lagana: And the reason why is because the energy that you connect with, when you do the practice frames the rest of your day, you can do it in the evening if that’s what it takes in order for you to make it happen. But what I found this, especially people who are parents or other types of caregivers, they get to the end of the day, and they don’t have anything left for themselves. So planning to do it at the end of the day, doesn’t work, just as an as a tip. What I recommend is people do it at the beginning of the day, and it’s really important to recognize that it doesn’t have to look any way that anybody else tells you.
Steph Lagana: If meditation makes you antsy, you don’t have to meditate. If you used to have a journaling habit and journaling feels really good, you can do it that way. If writing hurts your hands, you can go and look at the window and seeing whatever nature is around you for five minutes or if it’s nice weather, go outside. There’s extraordinary flexibility, and it really helps to stretch yourself, not in the way of meeting other people’s expectations, but in the way of listening to what’s calling you, what I found is when I talk with people about this, there’s something that they’ve been thinking of, that they’re like, “Huh. Yeah, no, I think I could do that. Actually, I was thinking about that recently.” Like in variably [inaudible 00:26:15], “Actually this just came up.”
Steph Lagana: And so I get to be the lightning rod that says, “Yes, that was a message. Now go do that thing.” And also, another tip is start small, an hour isn’t better than five minutes. What is better than five minutes is five minutes a day for 30 days, because it’s cumulative, and you’re strengthening the conduit that’s inside of you to connect with your inner wisdom, your intuition, with your guides, with the divine.
Allyson: That’s so good. I love, love, love it. Yeah, I think where I get tripped up is … and it’s exactly what you’re saying. If I don’t do my spiritual discipline first thing in the morning before my daughter wakes up, I feel like I’ve missed my opportunity. My window is over. So if she wakes me up and I don’t beat her awake, then I kind of like … The day just starts and she wants to eat and off I go. But then, I take her to, to preschool Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So when I get home, I want to dive into work and I don’t give myself permission to start my day really my workday with this connection that you’re talking about and what I don’t do it, I really … I can feel it. It’s just I’m off.
Steph Lagana: Yeah. It can make a huge difference. But, I want to point out too. If you have someone, like if you’re a caregiver, you’re a parent, if you have someone whose schedule shapes yours, then one of the things that you can do super well, but for people who are curious, you can still give it a try and see what happens is you can have a conversation with the energy body of the person whose schedule shapes yours and tell them, “I’m trying to do something new. I would love it if you would support me.”
Steph Lagana: So literally you could have a conversation with your two and a half year old’s energy body. Imagine that like she’s sitting on the sofa, you’re talking to her and just tell her, “I’m going to do this new thing. It’s going to be really supportive. And so what I’d like for you to do is like five days out of seven, I want you to wait for me to wake you up. And if you wake up, that’s totally okay. But this is going to allow me, you staying there and being peaceful until I show up when my alarm is ready, that’s going to help me do this thing.” And you can just ask.
Allyson: Yes.
Steph Lagana: And it is alarmingly effective.
Allyson: Yes, yes.
Steph Lagana: It’s definitely effective.
Allyson: No, it is. And you’re right. For those who aren’t used to these conversations, this may sound very woo, but I know this works because I’ve had other conversations with her. When we were younger and it worked. Steph, you’re so right, it works.
Steph Lagana: It totally works.
Allyson: Yes.
Steph Lagana: And it’s not like a super sexy, huge answer, so sometimes people will say, “Oh yeah, yeah.” But it really does, and you just have to give it a try. And then the other thing is sometimes people who are super productive and really high achievers will want to do 12 things instead of one.
Allyson: Oh yeah.
Steph Lagana: I don’t know if that resonates with you.
Allyson: Yes.
Steph Lagana: But certainly prior versions of stuff like our saluting.
Allyson: Yes.
Steph Lagana: And so, one of the things that can work really well is just to decide the particular way that you want to do it right now. Like decide for today, decide for this month or this quarter, and that way you give yourself permission to grow and you also give yourself permission to start.
Allyson: Yeah, beautiful. So Steph, tell us about two things if you don’t mind. First, tell us about your spiritual discipline as of today, at this point in your journey. And then, what would you tell someone who has never really done it before or hasn’t done it consistently and is looking for ideas and how they could get started in some of the things they can do.
Steph Lagana: Yeah. So I’m glad that you said today because mine shifts and that’s actually one of the things that I recommend, especially for people who like variety or feel a little bit rebellious to structure. Like if they think, “Oh, I don’t really want to be told what to do.” Including by your prior self, your past self like me last Monday, if I try and tell myself stuff to do, I’m like, “You know what? Screw you, I got different plans.” Just so you know, you can also have a collection of things that you know, work to take you to that place. Like write down five ways that you feel peaceful, “Oh, I take a walk by the park. Oh, I read this really juicy book that I’ve got. Oh, I sit and I listen to this song.” Then you just have resources and you can ask yourself, what would I rather do in the moment?
Steph Lagana: So right now mine is, when I wake up I’ll see whether or not I’ve incubated a dream. So a lot of times I will have dreams for clients, or I’ll have dreams that are messages for me. And so there’ll be some sort of interpretation that wants to happen. And I will also check in and see if there’s something that I’m called to do. So for some people when they wake up, they have messages from their guides waiting. It’s almost like their spirit inbox something that they can check right away.
Allyson: Nice. I like that.
Steph Lagana: Yeah, it was funny when it first started happening, I was like, “Okay, all right, well why not?” And so sometimes I’ll feel called to do something. In particular, I’m a writer, I’m a word witch, I just love the power of language. So sometimes I’ll wake up and I’ll know that there’s something that I need to write, if there isn’t a dream because I endeavor to prioritize the dreams. I’ve found that the energy does fade. So if I could do it within the first 15 minutes of my day, it lands and it helps me move forward.
Steph Lagana: And then if I don’t do that, I will … If I don’t have a message waiting or a dream that needs to be analyzed, I’ll pull cards and a really big fan of Oracle cards, I don’t do Tara as much because I’m not really into memorizing things. But I will pull one of the many oracle decks that I have, pull a card and just ask, ask God, the universe, everything. What do I need to know? Infrequently there’ll be something that’s like weighing heavy on me. So I’ll ask for a solution for solace or comfort and get a message back through the cards.
Allyson: Nice.
Steph Lagana: And then what was your second question?
Allyson: So if I came to you and I’m like, “I don’t really know how to get started. I’ve never really done this before.” Could you have any tips or do you have any guidance for me Steph to get going?
Steph Lagana: For anyone who is Facebook friendly, you can come into my group and ask the question, because I have this fancy way that I seem to know what would be helpful for people. So the Facebook group is called Your Sacred Craft. You’re welcome to come in and ask me personally if you are Facebook friendly. The other thing is, just be willing to explore and also … By explore, I mean play. Play with ideas that come up to you. But be willing to try something out that feels like it might be a good idea.
Steph Lagana: The caution that I want to give everybody is don’t try and make this productive. So the voice inside of you that says, “Oh, but I’m not sure if I’m going to get what I need out of that.” That is the voice of the oppressor. That is the voice of the industrial revolution and tried to force your soul into a format that is worker friendly. Don’t engage in trying to be productive when it comes to the spiritual discipline. The productivity is, do you connect with the energy of your higher self, of your deeper wisdom of your guides university? You feel more peaceful and anchored when you do it. So that’s really important because there’s some very sharp, clever, capable people and they’ll come up on an idea. It’ll just jump in their mind like, “Oh, I could try that. And then they’ll talk themselves out of it because it’s, “Well, you know, but it’s not … I mean, I don’t know if that’ll work.”
Steph Lagana: Saying these things because I’ve been there not because I don’t have a whole lot of love for you if this is happening to you right now. I’ve gone from being so in my head to having a better relationship with my body. So I’ve been there. But yeah, like ask yourself … No, ask your guides to give you some ideas and then pay attention. Ask your divine support team. “Hey, what could I do?” I literally have a client who spends five minutes every evening, she’s a full time caregiver, so she has no respite. She spends five minutes every evening on the floor, that is her spiritual discipline and you know what? It works for her. It really works for her, it’s powerful. She’s been able to channel the soul of her business. It feels great.
Steph Lagana: And someone that was saying like it needs to look a certain way would have never gotten there, but she trusted herself and trusted the nudge that came through. So, yeah, you could definitely ask your guides to show you. And it might show up in like a movie that you watch the next day or somebody might tell you about their new thing they’re trying out, and then it’s like, “Wait a minute, that’s for me. I’m supposed to be doing that.” So definitely like feeling into your body if it feels like that’s the thing, that’s important.
Allyson: Yeah. One of the things that I added to mine, I got it … I actually got it from Esther Hicks’ Abraham. And I was reading some old stuff of theirs, that I had just was reading for fun and they said, “Action is basically … The action you take is the visualization of what you want to do.” That is action. And then when you actually in 3D form do that action, that is the experience. The action actually comes from just visualizing what it is your soul wants to experience. That spoke to me as a doer, and at times over-doer. And so, I started using my spiritual discipline just for more visualization generally about my business, about my life, about possibilities.
Allyson: I spent a lot of time and my creative studio, that I visit, and that has been a really enriching way for me to experience my spiritual discipline. That came from something that I was missing or something that was feeling too heavy for me was my overdoing, kind of what you were talking about, like this desire to be productive. So sometimes I think a good way to use a spiritual discipline is just like, “Yeah, like what am I missing now? Or what could nourish my soul better right now? And that could be a good way to stick that into your spiritual discipline or to play around with it as you were saying, being curious about it.
Steph Lagana: Yeah. The curiosity and quest for peace and playfulness, all of those can be so restorative, especially for anyone who identifies with perfectionism. And if you don’t identify with perfectionism, identifying with the constant question of, “Am I doing this right?” Whether it’s about like social cues, social norms, building your business, anything else? If you identify with the question, am I doing this right? Give yourself space to try things out and do things that don’t fit the format that you think they need to be in. You could try Qigong, yoga, stretching. You could try dancing to a song.
Steph Lagana: There’s all different sorts of joyful ways to be in your body and to move. Spiritually oriented people need to be in their bodies because we’re bringing the energy into this world. We are like tapped in upward and we’re acting as the channels. So being that conduit means that we need to be here in our bodies. Especially if you identify with that perfectionism thing, being in your body as a spiritual discipline can be helpful. And just giving yourself permission to explore and land on the answer that’s right for you. Not anybody else. Can be really powerful.
Allyson: Yeah, totally, totally. So last question and then I want to know more about how people can find you. Can you give us an example or speak specifically to how a spiritual discipline can help us when we’re feeling stuck in our business?
Steph Lagana: Oh yeah. Yeah, there’s so many different ways. So, what I found is that most people that I work with encounter support influence, when they think about their business, they’re very externally oriented, “What technology do I need? What systems do I need, what writing or videos do I need to share in order for clients to sign up for whatever it is I’m doing, buy my products, buy my services?” And on my own personal journey to a successful practice, a thriving full practice, what I’ve found is that change is internally driven and externally supported. So most people are trying to do it, outside in when it actually happens inside it out. And that’s really significant and you don’t realize how stupid it is until you’re looking backward, going like, “Oh, I’m trying, to make it happen. Instead of start from the inside.”
Steph Lagana: So spiritual discipline allows you to start from the inside and shift from the inside. So I firmly believe the soul of your business wants to help you heal. If you have things that need to be healed, the spiritual discipline will connect you to those places. You can be in a position where you’re trying to do all the things and your guides might be wanting you to try one thing. That’s the thing that’s going to work for you, but because your life is so full and you don’t have the space to listen, there’s nowhere for the water that they want to pour into your cup to go. The pitcher is full. The water lands on the ground. So the spiritual discipline is also a place where you can receive, receive insights, receive guidance, receive comfort, and all of those things will help you to make better decisions, which produce better results.
Allyson: Love, love, love it so much. Yes, yes, yes. So Steph you really are a word witch, you have a beautiful way with words, a beautiful way to describe things that just makes sense and to invite in possibility, super inspiring. And I’ve been a member of your closed Facebook group for some time and I really think it is a great place to be for people who get excited about these types of conversations. So tell us, and I’m going to leave all the links in the show notes, but tell us how people can find you.
Steph Lagana: Yeah. So I love meeting people in Facebook. I don’t jam on technology and social media a whole bunch, but in the spaces that I create and curate, I adore them. I love the people that I gather. So even if you’re like, “Yeah, she’s okay. She sounds interesting.” The community that I attract as fabulous. So that’s Your Sacred Craft, Magical Tools for the Action Ready Entrepreneur. And I’m also over on instagram@yoursacredcraft and disruptively you can find me over on my website at mythicalenterprises.com, that transitioned to Your Sacred Craft, but that’s coming. So yeah, I would love to connect with more people. I do social media in a very different way than other people and I do that very intentionally because I’m called to wake people up that are ready to be activated and rekindle the fire inside of them. So I hope I get to connect with some of your folks on the socials.
Allyson: Yes, yes, yes. I hope so too. And I have a feeling that you will because those are the types of people, as far as I could tell who listen to this podcast as well. So Steph, thank you so much for making the time to share your wisdom. You are so inspiring and I really am so grateful for your time and for everything that you shared with us.
Steph Lagana: [inaudible 00:44:01]. Thanks for having me here. It’s been such a pleasure.
Allyson: Since I spoke with Steph about this topic. My spiritual discipline has had the most beautiful reboot. It still has all the aspects in it that I really love, which is meditation, thought work, checking in with guides and soul and visualization. Those are the four components that I enjoy in my spiritual discipline, but this was such a great reminder that it need not be all that, it need not be in the morning. It need not be one hour. It can be five minutes at any time regarding anything that wants to be in a super beautiful, nonproductive nature. I love it. So thank you Steph.
Allyson: If you want to find her, there are links to get inside her Facebook group and find her website in the show notes. We challenge you, Steph and I, to develop or reboot or be consistent with your own spiritual discipline and however that feels good and feels aligned and feels called for you. And to throw out any rules if you’re feeling rules and give yourself permission to take five to 10 minutes when you’re feeling like you’re just too busy knowing that the returns you get from this five to 10 minute investment in time will be worth it.
Allyson: And if you loved this interview as much as I did and I really, really loved it, I would be so grateful if you shared it with a few friends, posted it on one of your Facebook groups, subscribed and left a rating and review, and it truly is the way more people can find us. It’s how we appear higher in searches, which is really the best way for people to find a podcast. And as always, until next time, stay uncorked.
Allyson: Looking for a tribe to call your own, then join us at the Uncorked Cabal. We’re a closed Facebook group full of soul guided women entrepreneurs, finding new ways to infuse our core gifts in life and business so that we can take our skills, sales, and satisfaction to the next level. Find the link to join on my website, shantipax.com that’s S-H-A-N-T-I-P-A-X.com.
