Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon, I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources, such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion. If you’d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge. My guest is Vanessa Loder. Vanessa received her MBA from Stanford University and is a certified executive coach. She’s trained in neurolinguistic programming, past life regression, and vipassana meditation. Vanessa transitioned from a corporate career in finance and private equity through following the voice of her soul. And now, she helps other people make such transitions, redefining success so that we’re achieving it in the ways that are intrinsically meaningful to us. With Sounds True, Vanessa Loder is the author of a new book called The Soul Solution: A Guide for Brilliant, Overwhelmed Women to Quiet the Noise, Find Their Superpower, and (Finally) Feel Satisfied. When we live according to our own inner guidance, everything starts to change. Here, take a listen to my conversation with Vanessa Loder.
In the introduction of your new book, Vanessa, you write, “If you had told me 15 years ago I’d be writing a book with ‘soul’ in the title, I’d have thought you were crazy.” So what was happening in your life 15 years ago and then what changed such that now you have released a new book called The Soul Solution?
Vanessa Loder: Well, 15 years ago I was working in private equity. Actually, I have to do the math on that. Was I in business school at Stanford or in private equity? One or the other. 2009? OK. I’m doing the math on that. So I was in grad school and then working in finance, and I was kind of climbing the corporate ladder in some sense, I would say. And didn’t really think about the word soul—whether I had one, what it meant. I wasn’t spending a lot of time thinking about that. I was very ambitious and driven and looking for work that I found intellectually challenging, kind of wanting to make my mark in the world in some way, have an impact, and that’s what I was focused on.
TS: And then what shifted for you?
VL: Well, for me, actually, Tami, part of it was that my whole life, I felt like I had followed this prescription for success, which was get good grades, go to a good school, get a good job, get a promotion, get into a good grad school. I got to the top of that ladder and realized, crap, I think this is the wrong ladder for me. It wasn’t leading to the lasting satisfaction and happiness and joy that I expected, or fulfillment. I just had this feeling in my bones that I was meant for more meaning and more purpose.
So I started asking bigger questions about life, as one does when you have these moments: Why am I here? What’s it all for? And actually, a girlfriend of mine recommended Brian Weiss’s book, Many Lives, Many Masters, and I read that book. It’s all about reincarnation and past lives for people who aren’t familiar with it. And something in me jumped out of my body when I read that book and just said, I believe in this so intrinsically in my body and my soul. And I didn’t even know I cared about reincarnation and past lives.
And at the time, I had looked at my trajectory in my career. I was a vice president at this private equity firm, sitting on the board of a company—I loved making plenty of money. Everything on paper looked great, but inside there was this feeling that something was missing. And I would look at the partners at my firm and think, I don’t really want that job, and that’s literally the trajectory that I’m on.
I had started exploring and I had decided I was going to quit my job. And at first I was very MBA about it. I was researching this baby products business idea and I was going to start another company. And then I woke up one day and realized, what am I doing? I don’t even care about baby products. I’m just starting this business because I think it’s a good business idea, but not because I’m passionate about it. And if I start this company, I’m just going to be an unfulfilled entrepreneur instead of an unfulfilled private equity investor.
So that was another moment where I went for a long walk on the beach and I had this thought of, oh my gosh, my whole life I’ve been following my ego and my mind and my wallet and not my heart and my intuition, and maybe that’s why I’m so unfulfilled. So I was starting to look for these signs from the universe, and it was right around then when I read Brian Weiss’s book and I was so fascinated by the concept of reincarnation.
I remember Googling his name—this was in September of 2009—thinking, what has this guy been doing since then? This book was written in 1980-something. And the first search result that came up said, Brian Weiss coming to San Francisco in October—the next month. And I just felt like, OK, I’m going. I have to be there. So I bought a ticket and then found myself in this ballroom in a downtown Holiday Inn hotel in San Francisco with 200 other strangers about to be hypnotized and taken to past lives.
And I remember thinking, have I lost my mind? What am I doing? But yet I stayed, and I had a very profound and healing experience. Then I ended up the next summer training with him, becoming certified in hypnosis and past-life regression healing, and things just continued from there.
TS: Was there something that was revealed about your past lives that told you about what you’re supposed to be doing in this life?
VL: Well, that’s a great question. That was my next iteration of past-life work with another man named Ainslie MacLeod that gave me that piece. With Brian Weiss, what happened for me was my husband and I were just starting to talk about having children, and I had this feeling… I was very adamant that I didn’t want a boy, and I didn’t know why. It had no rational explanation. But I would say things like, “Can we do that thing where you spin your sperm to increase your odds of having a gender?”
And in the Brian Weiss training, I went to a past life where I was lying on this—I just knew intuitively it was before cars. I could just tell there were these dirt roads with wheels, wagons with wheels, and I was lying on this bed, very low to the ground, and there was a little boy, it still makes me emotional to talk about it. I don’t know, two, three years old, he was a blonde haired, towheaded boy.
And I knew I was dying and that he was my son. And I had this feeling of, oh my gosh, I’m leaving my baby. And I was overcome by this very deep sadness, so much so that during a little break afterwards, I had to go to the restroom and lock myself in and I just sobbed. It felt like I had gone through the experience of a mother losing a child. And I walked out of that training that day and I said to my husband, “I actually am fine having a boy or a girl.”
It completely changed how I felt. And lo and behold, our second child is a little boy who has towhead blonde hair. So it’s just one of those moments that changed something inside of me.
TS: It sounds like the journey that you went on, starting with the past-life regression with Brian Weiss, it continued to be a journey where you listen to what you call “the whispers of your soul.” And I know in your work, you help people trust the whispers that they hear. And right at the beginning, I want to talk about that because I think we all hear—sometimes it can be loud cries, they’re not whispers anymore—but we hear this thing and we don’t quite know what it is, but we know it’s our soul talking to us, even if we don’t even know what our soul is.
We know we’re hearing something that’s really important about our life, but we don’t quite have the confidence to trust it, the courage to follow it. So how do you connect that for the people that you work with?
VL: I found one of the reasons why I call it “soul whispers” is because sometimes it’s very loud, but other times it can be so subtle that we have to get really still and quiet to hear it. And one of the things I’ve learned in my own experience and through coaching lots of women is, the ego and the rational mind, when it is a soul whisper, the ego and the rational mind will often come in and judge and label it as crazy or weird or random or insignificant.
So that’s actually a sign that you’re hearing a soul whisper—if your mind is judging it as any of those things or impossible or it doesn’t make any sense. So it’s good to start to recognize the way that our mind will dismiss and minimize and shut out the soul whispers and to get familiar with that language, because then you can notice it.
For me, OK, I’m a private equity investor. What am I doing sitting in a ballroom with 200 people about to be hypnotized? It makes no sense. And yet there’s some part of me that felt like I needed to do that. So yeah, recognizing how the mind will judge it is a great way to start doing that.
I also have some practices I share in the book about connecting with nature, because we are fundamentally one with nature, and that’s a really great way to start tuning in to the whispers of your soul.
TS: Now, in terms of recognizing how our mind judges these, they could be irrational or mysterious messages that we get. Well, what I’ve noticed is that whenever we try to filter things through, and this is my language, the left-brain leaning, the left-leaning views of our culture—so we’re having the views of other people we imagine coming at us, and then we look at these things, we dismiss them.
So how, here you are, trained in a very traditional MBA, private equity, finance, that whole world. How have you learned to hold those critiques and not be subject to them?
VL: Well, I don’t know if anyone’s fully learned how to do that, being human. But for me, part of it is when you start to listen to the impulses and trust them and then you get all the goodies, the good feelings, the magic, the amazing things that happen in your life as a result, it builds a sense of confidence in trusting that voice more and more. So even if you take action in a very small way, you get a sense of, oh, and that turned into that and that turned into that. And then I got that. And so you build a sense of rapport with yourself, really, over time by listening and trusting.
The other thing that’s been fun that surprised me is when I first started, I quit my job in finance to do this work, and I remember my newsletter in the beginning was a lot of my contacts from business school and the finance world. And so then I would run the filter of what are they going to think when they read this thing that I’m writing, which is never a good filter to run. But the beauty of it was when I actually forced myself to hit send—and I had such perfectionism, I couldn’t even write my first blog post. Because you know what I decided, Tami?
I decided that the first blog I ever wrote had to go viral because I had to be that good. So guess what? I didn’t write anything for several months. So then I finally wrote a blog about being—what did I call it? —Paralyzed by Perfectionism. That was my first blog. Just let me talk about what I’m struggling with. And when I finally did start to hit send, I was shocked and amazed that some people came out of the woodwork from my Stanford network, from finance, to tell me how much an email touched their hearts or how they had a heart attack or someone in their family was struggling with depression, and this email really helped them.
And so that also helped me to see how much we’re all longing for these deeper senses of connection and truth and wisdom and belonging. And that sometimes helps me as well. I’ll think of those people when I feel the doubt coming in.
TS: Now you break down this notion of soul whispers even into a smaller little atomic piece by talking about following what you call “energetic breadcrumbs.” So what are energetic breadcrumbs and how do we sense them? How do we know, oh, this is an energetic breadcrumb, not just like an impulse or something.
VL: Well, energetic breadcrumbs and impulses can be kind of similar things, but the energetic breadcrumbs, those are those moments when you just feel a sense of aliveness and you feel energized inside of your body. You feel curious about something. I joke that this inner spidey sense perks up. Someone mentions the name of a book or you have a conversation and something in you jolts awake, that’s an energetic breadcrumb.
And what I love about energetic breadcrumbs is they lead you back towards your most fulfilling and satisfying life. And they’re very micro-manageable, as you mentioned. Sometimes the word “soul” can feel very daunting. Like, oh listen to my soul. What does that mean? I’m going to have to change my whole life. Versus following your energetic breadcrumbs. It can be a daily choice, a daily moment that you feel into.
One of my friends and clients said, “Oh, Vanessa, once I started paying attention, I was amazed; they’re everywhere. I was walking by an art gallery and I just wanted to go in. And there was a mom from my kids’ class who actually works at the art gallery and I started talking to her because I’ve been wanting to quit my job. And I used to run an art gallery in New York.”
So that was an energetic breadcrumb. She had this moment where something in her perked up, she walked inside, she had this serendipitous encounter, this lovely conversation. And she said, “I also get energetic breadcrumbs when I’m planning my son’s birthday party or looking at a spreadsheet in Excel sometimes.” That actually is a moment for me. And she said tracking that has helped her feel more joy and satisfaction throughout her day. And it’s also pointed her more and more towards her purpose and what she wants next in life.
TS: As a metaphor, one of the things you write is how enough energetic breadcrumbs accumulate into a cake. And I liked that because these things can seem so small, what you’re describing, walking into an art gallery. But if we do it enough of the time, it takes us somewhere.
VL: Yes, definitely. And I think the reason I also call them breadcrumbs is because we tend to dismiss them because they seem insignificant and yet they really do add up. And the other thing is the left brain, the logical, rational, the culture we’ve been raised in, you always are taught to know, well, where is this going? A needs to lead to B, which needs to lead to C, which needs to lead to D. But that’s not how it works if you’re trying to live a soul-aligned life. It’s A goes to Z and then you skip over to K and you don’t even know why. And then you go to L and all of a sudden you’ve realize you love L. It’s very different.
And I love the Steve Jobs commencement speech he gave where he said, you can’t really connect all the dots. It’s only in hindsight that it all makes sense. And that’s happened countless times in my own life, where I couldn’t predict where these breadcrumbs were going to lead me, but they always lead me somewhere really magical and joyful and fulfilling.
TS: In terms of your own journey, one thing that got my attention was the process that you had to go through to really look at a limiting belief that I think a lot of us have when we’re in transition. And I know you now work with lots of people in transition from a conventional paradigm into a soul-based life, a soul-led life.
And the belief that you had to look at was that financial success and creative fulfillment are an opposition to each other, or can be in opposition to each other. And I think a lot of us have this idea, this is all great, but I don’t want to be someone without any financial resource following the breadcrumbs into art galleries. I would like to be successful with plenty of financial success. I want traditional financial success, but I want to do it in this creative, interesting, soul-led life. Can I actually do both?
So tell me how you’ve sorted this out for yourself.
VL: Oh my goodness. Layers and layers of unpacking over many years is the quick answer. And for me, some of it was looking at my childhood, and where did I source my beliefs from? One of the tools I have in the book is sourcing your beliefs, where you write out some of the beliefs and then, well, whose voice is that? What did my mom say about creativity and making money? What did my dad say?
In my family, my sister was the creative one, she’s a professional photographer, and I was always good at math. And so we kind of got put in these lanes early on and they were very separate lanes and it was like you weren’t allowed to go into the other person’s lane. And so I did a lot of unpacking around that, around my childhood. Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, I really loved that book. That was very helpful.
And then one of the things, honestly, Tami, I feel like a lot of the book, some of it seems so simple and obvious—the solutions and tools I give—but they’re really life changing. And so for me, one of the things was finding role models out there. Because I realized I had this belief, OK, now I’m going to go be an executive coach and I guess I’ll make way less money doing work I love. Or, I can choose to work in finance and be unfulfilled.
And then I found role models of people who were making three, $4 million a year because they were running these large trainings, they had published several books, they did keynote speaking, and all of a sudden my whole world opened up like, oh, there’s all these other income streams that I could have access to.
I will say in the beginning, I think I attracted teachers who weren’t always in the most alignment with what their messaging was. And over time, I’ve learned more and more discernment with, how do you find the right role models? And you can also take something from one role model and say, oh, I don’t like how they did that, but I’m going to really emulate this piece. So finding role models and surrounding yourself with them can be really game changing.
TS: Now, one of the things you write in The Soul Solution is, the challenge is to commit without guarantees about how it will work out. And so of course, none of us have any guarantees when we follow the energetic breadcrumbs and the voice of our soul. How can you help that person who says, look, I get all this, but I’m just going to tell you the truth. I’m afraid. I’m just going to tell you the truth. I’m afraid. Everybody says, fear is opposite of love. But the truth is, I’m afraid.
VL: Yeah, yeah. Well, I take a deep breath when I feel all the fear. Learning to breathe and work with fear and befriend your fear is a great step. And I have tools for how to do that in the book. There’s a lot of different modalities to work with your fear.
I would probably start, though, by telling them a story about a client of mine who was the breadwinner in her family and she wanted to quit her job and do more fulfilling work and had a ton of fear. I’m the breadwinner. How is this going to work? This whole thing we’re talking about, how can I make money doing something I love?
She ended up having this great healing experience through a healing breathwork thing that she did at one of my retreats and realized, OK, I’ve been a round peg trying to go in a square hole and I’m going to take a different approach to my job.
She went to her boss and actually—she’d been working there for 13 years—and said, “I’m not fulfilled, I’m ready for the next chapter, but I’m the breadwinner and I need the stability. How can we work this out?” And her boss actually said, “I’ll give you a payout bonus. You can quit and have 12 months salary.”
So just from having asked and having that conversation, she manifested that. Then she ended up following her energetic breadcrumbs, going to a conference to see Chip Conley talk about modern elders, and she sat next to a woman at the conference who said, “Oh, what do you do?” She said, “Oh, I worked in finance, but I’m in this transition, da da da.” And the woman’s wife was next to her and said, “You just described exactly who my wife is trying to hire for her nonprofit right now.” And she ended up getting this other job.
Now it paid less money. But she said, “Vanessa, when I came to you, I had so much fear. And the thing is, when I leaped everything came up to meet me.” And she’s like, “Now we rent our house on Airbnb to generate extra income to cover the gap in my salary. All of these things, I never would’ve thought there were all these other avenues available to me until I started to explore and take that first step.” So it really is amazing how things can come up to meet you when you do take that chance.
TS: Specifically you, Vanessa, what do you do when you feel afraid?
VL: Oh, let me think about when I feel… Lately I’ve been feeling a lot of anger and sadness more than fear. So all my current examples have more to do with that.
TS: Well, I’d like to hear about that too because it’s always, it’s actually for real, all three, let’s go through anger, sadness, and fear. Because how people actually have learned to work with the challenging emotions that throw them off, of listening to the soul whispers they’re hearing, it’s really important.
VL: So some of the things that have been helping me, well, I go into a lot of meditation and ceremony and work with these light beings and talk to them and get their advice.
TS: Let’s slow down on that one. Slow down on that one. Ceremony and talking to light beings and getting their advice? That’s very unusual. I’m sure you did not learn that in any kind of traditional business school environment. So tell me what you’re doing?
VL: Sure. I call on the Council of Light and this blue council and some other councils and I invite them in. I get into a quiet space and I effectively start, I guess you could call it, some people might call it channeling, but I will. I might ask for a healing on my physical, emotional, and mental bodies. I might ask a question and listen for the answer.
Often for me, I see images, I’m very visual, so I’ll get a metaphor through an image. That’s one of the things that’s worked well for me. I’ve also been doing a lot of re parenting of my little girl. Mark Wolynn’s book, It Didn’t Start with You, was very helpful to me. I’ve enjoyed that one.
TS: Tell me how you engage in re-parenting of your own inner child? What do you do?
VL: So let’s say I’m feeling a lot of sadness, which I was yesterday, two days ago, I think it was just yesterday, I was sobbing and very upset about something. And first of all, you have to get a quiet space alone, which I think for a lot of women is not something that they are used to accessing. So I make sure I carve that out because it’s really hard to do some of this deeper healing work when you have people demanding things of you.
But anyway, I go into my sacred space, which I have set up in my office with altar and a blanket and some candles, and I go there. Or I’ve done this driving in the car, actually, I’ve done it outside my kids’ music practice. So if you’re in these little moments throughout the day, and I typically put a hand on my heart, a hand on my belly, I put my tongue on the roof of my mouth where it meets my teeth because that helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
And I’ll say these key phrases, “I’ve got you. I’m going to sit here and breathe with you until you feel held, until you feel safe, until you know that you’re adorable, and that I cherish you.” Whatever the phrases are. And I’ll just breathe with my tongue still on the roof of my mouth, behind my teeth with the hand on the heart and the hand on the belly for several minutes until that little girl calms down.
And I have to say it’s actually been the best parenting hack as well. Because when my daughter gets upset, I say those phrases to her and she calms down like that. It’s insane how effective it is. I’m going to sit here with you until you feel safe, until you feel heard, until you feel seen, until you know that you are loved.
TS: It’s beautiful. I feel the goodness and the resetting and recalibration of what you just described. Now because I am aware to a painful degree of this left brain, I don’t know how else to put it—left-leaning lens of the cultural waters we all swim in. I notice when you talk about the Blue Council of Light and everything, I think to myself, how has Vanessa worked that out? Here she’s an ambitious, hard-driving, achieving person, but she’s listening to a council to help give her direction and stuff. How have you worked that out for yourself? You don’t seem to have any concern.
You write for Forbes magazine, and I notice sometimes when I’m in a business space and I want to share what’s truly alive in my devotional nature as a person, I kind of hold back a bit because I’m aware that I could be judged for this. It’s not accepted in our culture as a whole. How do you work that out?
VL: Well, one thing I want to say is there’s more and more light workers infiltrating the boardroom, which really gets me excited. And I have a client who’s on the board of a very big bank that you would recognize the name of who says things like, “My intuition is just saying this, Bob.” And then afterwards Bob came up and said, “Your intuition was spot on.” So just know people are doing that in those worlds and it gives me so much happiness to know that that’s happening.
I also meet people where they’re at and respond to their curiosity. So if I’m giving a keynote at a large tech conference or a women’s leadership summit, I’m not necessarily talking about going into ceremony with Council of Light beings, but if I’m chatting with Tami Simon from Sounds True, knowing this audience is maybe more interested and open to some of these concepts, I’m going full woo-woo.
So sometimes I open the door just a crack to see if people will step through, and other times I go full throttle. For me, I’ve always been very open-minded about trying a lot of things, but then I’m very discerning about what I will continue, if that makes sense. So I’ll give anything a whirl. I’m like a kid in a candy store when it comes to all of the personal development stuff. Like, oh, I’ll do that training, I’ll try that. And then whatever really works for me is what I keep doing.
And for me, I think it’s just the way it makes me feel and the wisdom I’ve gotten from it. Whether you believe I’m tapping into my own unconscious or some actual light beings, whatever the source of the information, it feels really true to me and it’s gotten me to feel a lot better. And it came to me in a really magical and pivotal way after my mom’s death that felt really aligned.
TS: I’d like to hear more about that—after your mom’s death—before I ask the next thing. But tell me more about that.
VL: Yeah, so my mom got sick, her cancer came back at the very beginning of COVID, and she died within a month. It was very quick in our home because she wanted aid in dying; and aid in dying, it was a very intense experience. And the night that she transitioned to the spirit world, as some people say, my sister—who’s such an old soul is getting her PhD in death psychology and is amazing—she said this line to me that really struck me. She said she’d learned in her studies somewhere that when people are grieving, what they’re really grieving is their connection to source. And they thought they could connect to source through that person who transitioned. So really they’re just grieving their connection to source.
Then I found myself in my office at my altar looking at these old photo albums of my mom, just crying at midnight, the night that she transitioned. And I thought about what my sister had said about how the grief is just longing for our connection to source. And I did this really fervent, intense prayer where I just said, God, help me feel closer to source. That’s what I want in this moment. That’s what I want. And it was one of those prayers that I just felt in my whole being as I made it. And it was a very profound moment.
And then as one does, I went to bed and I forgot about the prayer, and then I was opening up my Kindle, looking for something to distract me to read. And you know how sometimes they’ll say books that are suggested for you? And I have never trusted that or clicked on that in my life, but that night it had something called The Council of Light. And it was this book I happen to have on my desk right now by this woman, Danielle Rama Hoffman.
And I read the free excerpt and I was like, ah, I’m hooked by this. It’s a channel book. She works with this Council of Light. And I bought it that night and started reading it. And in the last two years, I’ve now started working with this Council of Light and I can call them in and I get visuals of what they look like and they’ll give me messages. And it’s been really interesting and it’s sometimes—I’ve gotten it validated by outside people, which can kind of help when you’re doubting it in the beginning, where I saw something for my cousin where she painted the word “crazy” on the wall and I was like, They want you to get in touch with your wild woman. “This seems so weird, but I’m seeing an image of you naked painting the word crazy on a wall.”
And then she goes, “Vanessa, let me show you this picture.” And she had just repainted her daughter’s bedroom and she had gotten naked and painted the word crazy on the wall. So things like that, where it’s so specific and I get a little bit of feedback of, OK, maybe I’m not totally crazy making this stuff up.
TS: Seems like you do value symbols and images that appear in your meditations. Tell us more about that: listening and watching for symbols.
VL: So the book that I just wrote, it started with a dream three or four years ago with this very white book cover with an Egyptian Goddess head on the front. And I just woke up from that dream with this feeling of, OK, it’s time to write the book. And I felt called to go to Kauai and meditate. And I would get up at 2:00 in the morning to go meditate and talk to Isis. And one of the things I heard—and then I also, I love shaved ice when I’m in Hawaii, who doesn’t? I went to this little shaved ice stand, and this woman had these cool yoga clothes with these symbols on them that were from Ghana and they really struck me.
And then the next night in my meditation, I kind of got this message of, “You’re going to get these symbols for the book you’re going to write and you’re going to put one on maybe each chapter and it’s going to change the vibrational signature, the energy of the book itself.” And it was one of those messages that felt very profound, but also very like, well, OK, what do I do with this right now? I don’t know. I’m going to keep my eye out for some symbols.
And I kind of Googled Greek alphabet and different symbols and nothing really resonated. And then I wrote the whole book and I forgot about that whole message. And then the week that I was sending the final manuscript to my editor as Sounds True, I got this book in the mail for the Mind Oracle, and I saw the symbol on the cover and my whole body just went, those are the symbols.
And so it’s just one of those things again where, I joke in the book for people to use the symbols as a drishti and a point of focus, but if you want, you could get a tattoo of it and tell everybody your soul made you do it. It’s just another example of following these breadcrumbs. We don’t know when or where they’re going to pop up, but they all end up making sense in the end.
TS: Now, along this whole line, circling back for a moment about presenting our inner right-brained visionary nature publicly in the business world, you actually interviewed me for Forbes Online and used a headline about how prayer helped this entrepreneur, which is absolutely true. It’s an absolutely true headline, but I noticed when I saw it, my immediate response was, I felt embarrassed. I felt embarrassed. And that’s OK, but that’s just—I thought, oh, that’s my own kind of internalized judgment from a patriarchal culture. Wouldn’t it have been better if a strategy helped this entrepreneur? But no, it was prayer.
And so I’m asking you this, Vanessa, because there’s a part of me that’s still trying to work it out. I still feel a sense of, it’s a strong word, but kind of embarrassment about some of my deep inner knowings and how they are actually what’s operating through my business life. But it’s scary for me to come out with that.
VL: Yeah. Well first of all, I think it’s important to acknowledge the truth that there are some people who will dismiss something with that kind of headline. So you’re feeling into a real current, and that can be true.
Where my mind goes intuitively on this one is, since you’re asking me, that you probably had some sort of a past life where you were severely punished for sharing your wisdom or maybe embarrassed, if embarrassed is the real driving sentiment.
TS: I think the first is correct, probably punished. Yeah.
VL: And so if that happened, you could imagine how your whole being would cringe at the echoes, the reverberations, of that in this lifetime.
TS: And I’m bringing it up now, in this junction in our conversation, because I think a lot of us, as we move to come into our full soul force in our work, we have to break through, you call it the “old rules” —the old rules of a patriarchal culture in which, when we start to claim our voice and our unique way of doing things, it looks different. It sounds different.
And I know you work with a lot of people, primarily women, in your coaching practice. Tell us about some of the breakthroughs that have happened through your work with people coming into their soul force?
VL: All kinds of things. Everything from a very dramatic career transition—I was on the traditional path and now I’m on a completely different path, to a woman at a tech startup who negotiated working four days a week and getting paid the same salary. A lot of this is about us believing, I deserve more, I deserve better, and I have the power to create that for myself.
How do we instill that feeling and embodied sense in people so they can go out into the world and write their own rules? And for me at least, recognizing that perhaps the playbook itself is flawed. And I used to, I think a lot of women, I like many, kind of blamed myself, maybe there’s something wrong with me that I don’t love this system, that I feel like a caged animal when I have to stay at my computer for eight hours a day. Or maybe I’m lazy, maybe I’m not motivated, maybe I need more productivity hacks.
And so recognizing the water that we’re swimming in and how insane it is, is often the first step. And then just making a decision of, OK, I’m going to take a stand for myself and for what I truly desire. And I recently heard a quote from, oh gosh, I’m going to forget the name of a doctor who’s working on some products for women’s sexuality where she said, women are ambitious in every category of their lives except for their own pleasure. I thought that was really interesting.
So as women, only we know what we really long for, desire. And so we’re the ones who can get clarity on that and take a stand for it in the world. But the transformations are all over the place. One of the practices—I think this is a great concrete one that I share in the book, that’s based on Bill Plotkin’s book, Soulcraft—has to do with dialoguing with nature. And for some people who’ve never done this kind of thing, it can be radically awakening and transformative.
What you do is you go out into nature, you cross some sort of a threshold. So maybe there’s a tree that fell down or a stream that you step across or you walk between two boulders. And as you do that, you remind yourself, you’re stepping from the ordinary into the sacred. So you enter this sacred space and then you kind of just meander in nature until something catches your eye. Maybe it’s a tree or a squirrel, and then you pause and you commune with it.
It sounds silly, it sounds really funny if you’ve never done anything like this, but you might talk to it about your problems and see how it responds. Maybe a tree drops a pine cone. And the women in my program are always like, oh, Vanessa, this sounds so weird. You want me to go talk to a rock? And that one of them said, “I thought it was so weird. And I tried and the rock didn’t talk back, I didn’t know what to do.”
She goes, “And then three days later I was on a hike, sitting up on this cliff, and there was this gorgeous sunset and I had the most profound exchange with the sunset. And I got all this information.” Another client of mine, she said, “OK, well Vanessa I went,” she went to the local reservoir with her journal and a pen, and she goes, “I’m really self-conscious that people are going to be like, ‘Who’s that crazy lady talking to a tree?’” But she found a spot, she chose a tree and she sat there and then right when she did this flock of birds landed on the water nearby. And all of a sudden it made her think of her mother and her grandmother back in India.
And then she thought about her son and how she wanted to bring him to India. And then she realized that she wanted to maybe have his class be pen pals with a class in India. And then she realized she wanted to do a service trip and take kids from America to India and all of this from going to talk to a tree.
So the guidance is always there. And I also think people often will be like, well, what’s my soul’s calling? As if it’s this big, momentous, singular thing. But the thing I like to say in the book is, your soul is always calling you every day. And so that guidance, that calling is always there just beneath the surface of the ego. And if we learn to pay attention, we can hear it and really change the trajectory of our lives in ways big and small.
TS: Now, I know you specialize in working with people in transition and also people who find themselves overwhelmed and burned out. And one of the things I wanted to ask you about, and it’s kind of similar to the “can I really make good money and do my creative work?”—the work of my soul. This is a similar kind of question. Can I really honor my well-being, what it takes for me to be healthy and have all the pleasure that I want and feel rested? Can I really do that and realize my career ambitions, which are substantial? I don’t want try to minimize how truly ambitious—in a good way—how much I want to contribute and also be recognized. How do I bring it together?
VL: Well, I think this has a lot to do with the old paradigm of success compared to the new paradigm that people are currently in the midst of, making that transition. And so the old paradigm was a lot of effort, sacrifice, no pain, no gain. This is a lot of the messaging we’ve gotten about what it means to be successful and how you have to work. And we really are entering a new paradigm where you can create with so much greater joy and ease.
And I will say in my own journey, this has been a process of unlearning and discovering. So from the beginning, when I quit my job in finance, I was at a place where suddenly I could get lunch with a friend in the middle of the day or I could go to a yoga class. But I didn’t let myself for many months, because I was like, I’m not working unless I’m sitting at a computer for this many hours a day.
Work was defined only as sitting at a computer. But then over time I realized, oh wow, I get really good ideas when I’m on a hike or when I’m doing these other things. And so there are more effective ways to work. And now there’s a lot of research on the brain that backs this up. I’m always a big fan of research to help calm my fears. When you look at how the brain works, it’s naturally in these ebbs and flows, these 90-minute cycles. We really can’t focus on our most great impact, our highest impact tasks for more than a few hours a day. So the best way to work is to work in these very focused chunks and increments, and then disengage and do something completely unrelated to work.
So when you work in that way and you actually get as much or more done when you work in cycles and pulses, it helps you start to trust, OK, maybe there is a different way to go about this.
TS: One of my favorite sections of The Soul Solution are these success myths that we are invited to unwind. And one of them is, as you’re describing, moving from this always-on mode to cycles. You also talk about the need to break up with busyness as our badge of honor.
And I wonder if you can talk some about that, because of course, many times I say to people, “How are you doing?” And we’re all busy, but it’s getting to be that that’s no longer considered, I’ve watched people go, I’m not going to say that it’s true, but I’m not going to say it. But anyway, how do we break up with busyness as a badge of honor?
VL: Well first of all, with anything with transformation and growth, it starts with awareness. So you have to have the awareness of, OK, I’m using busy as a badge of honor. Our culture values busyness as if it equates with worthiness. So you have to be able to name that truth first and go, well wait a minute, is that something that I want to intentionally believe going forward? How does that make me feel if I believe that my busyness is how I prove my worthiness?
It feels pretty bad to most people, but also it’s a fundamentally unwinnable game, because if the bar is being busy to win or to prove, you never get to slow down. There’s no end goal. How do you ever attain that? So it’s a state of being that doesn’t feel good, and yet our hustle culture will have us believe that that’s what we need to do.
So naming that truth, deciding you want to opt out of that old paradigm. One of the reasons why I run all my programs as group coaching programs is it’s really helpful to find other people, like-minded people, who want to create this new paradigm with you. You need the validation and the support so you don’t feel so alone. So I would say find other people who want to live and breathe and move in the world in this other way.
And I wrote a funny little script in the book about how to break up with busy, but I noticed a lot of things when I tried to break up with busy. Number one, how my busyness was a distraction to keep me from feeling my own pain and the way that I would often be busy so I didn’t have to slow down enough to feel some of the real uncomfortable truths that were going on in my life. I think we often use busyness as a mask to avoid things. That was hard to face, but there’s a lot more happiness and joy on the other side of it, so it’s worth facing.
I also noticed that I was, and my clients have had similar experiences, using busyness to mask, almost, an existential crisis of when you actually slow down and you’re with yourself. There’s almost like this terror of being alone with yourself and really dropping in that a lot of people in our modern culture experience and they’d rather do almost anything else. And noticing how I would create unnecessary errands and chores on the weekend to feel important or to feel like my day was productive and having to pull myself back from that. Do I really need to go return these items at Target right now? I could sit in the backyard and have some present time with my children and be really there with them.
So it’s a lot of just noticing these patterns and then making different choices.
TS: Vanessa, what if someone listening says, look, that all sounds really great, but you’re not in touch with my job. And in my job I have a stack of XYZ sitting at my desk, I have a stack of these deadlines, incoming things that I need to respond to. If I’m not busy, I will lose my job. It’s all great to hear about this ease and hikes and things like that, but nature experiences, that’s not my experience. What would you say to that person?
VL: That’s a good question. I’ve worked with teams, very senior teams at companies like Salesforce, who, and especially sales folks who are—it’s a client service business. And they’re like, I’m not going to do your power hour where you want me to do these 90-minute increments. I’m not going to do that all day long. For those people though, even doing one power hour in the beginning of their day.
TS: Can you explain the power hour to me?
VL: Yes, sure. It’s a lot like the Pomodoro method, but basically it’s harnessing this concept that the brain always works in pulses. So just like at night you go through a 90-minute REM cycle, your brain is also pulsing during the day. And so what you do is you set a time block of 75, 80 minutes and you take the number one most important task on your to-do list. You close out of all your web browsers, you shut down your phone if you don’t need it. No more distractions, no social media. And for 20 minutes, you just do the number one thing on your to-do list that’s the most important thing. Then you take a two minute break, maybe you go get a glass of water, walk to the bathroom, then you do another 20-minute interval, another two-minute break, and then a third 20-minute interval and then a 10- to 15-minute break where you do something completely unrelated to work.
You walk outside, call a friend. And if you do just one power hour, you’ll notice you get so much more done in that 75, 80 minutes than you normally do in two or three hours. Most people these days are very familiar with the research on how multitasking is so ineffective. And if you’re doing something and you stop to look at an email, it takes 20 times the amount of the interruption to get back and get focused.
So what I would say is, even if you’re in a very demanding job, something like a power hour, doing that first thing in the morning, most people can manage doing one of those and that’s allowing you to start to work in a slightly different way.
TS: Now, one of these other success myths that you help us unwind is the call to reclaim leisure, and that it’s OK to pursue pleasure as part of our success. So tell me how that became so important to you as something to emphasize in your work?
VL: Well, I noticed a lot of overwhelmed, exhausted, burned-out women had a really hard time allowing themselves leisure and pleasure, a very hard time. One of my clients, I said to her, “Well, can you take just 10 minutes, maybe six minutes to lie on the couch in the middle of the day and do nothing?” And she said, “Well, Vanessa, I tried.” She came back and reported, “I tried. You know what happened during the six minutes? I was thinking of all the things I was going to do when I got off the couch. So it wasn’t relaxing at all.”
And as we peeled back the layers on, well, why is it so hard to just let yourself rest? She goes, “Well, my mom—you just don’t do that. My mom never did that.” And if you think of trying to shift out of a patriarchal model in society and you have generations and generations of women who’ve been go, go, go—really pushing themselves and not resting, not having a lot of leisure, a lot of pleasure as their focus, it’s not surprising that we have a whole ancestral lineage that we’re trying to unpack with this.
And I noticed in my own life, they say you teach what you most need to learn, and look, I haven’t mastered any of this, I’m just wanting to master it. This is why I write about it. But for me, it was not scratching an itch to sit down and enjoy a cup of tea with my kids while they’re maybe having breakfast rather than doing all the dishes in that moment. It really is not scratching an itch to make yourself sit down and not do all the things.
So I just noticed how little space women are given in our culture and how little space women take for ourselves in big and small ways. Even things like not speaking up in a meeting or you’re on an airplane and you’ll always sit next to the woman because she’s not going to take up as much space. So it’s literal and metaphorical. We need to take more space.
TS: And given that unwinding the old playbook, if you will, is what we need to do and we need to redefine success in our time, how do you now define success for yourself?
VL: For me, success is how good I feel. And that’s it.
TS: So what about when you’re angry and sad and those other emotions that we talked about? Is that OK? Is that an OK part of the day when that’s what’s really happening?
VL: Yes, it is an OK part of the day, but it’s more, so to broaden it. That’s the very simplistic one. For me, success to me is time with my children, time in nature, time to do creative pursuits, time to have the impact I want with my business and creating an intimacy and connection with my husband. It’s like all the things that I want. And so for example, in the middle of this book launch, when I should be really busy, I go on a run, I spend time with my… I’m not minimizing the things that matter. I’m still kind of prioritizing according to my values.
TS: One of the techniques you offer in the book—I think it’s a beautiful technique—is a future-self visualization practice that people can do. Can you describe that? How do we do that?
VL: There’s lots of ways to do it. I find it can be very helpful to have it guided in the beginning. So you’re listening to someone’s voice give you instructions, and there’s all kinds of different versions, but some visualization where you imagine yourself.
You could even do it right now, where you’re walking in nature and you feel the sun warming your skin and you feel a cool breeze and you perhaps hear the birds. So you’re using all five senses. And then you walk over to a bench and you see that it’s your future self, 10 years from now. And you notice how they greet you and you sit down next to them. Maybe they put their arm around you lovingly, and you just take in their presence, which is one of wisdom and love and a peaceful heart. And then you ask them some questions like, “What do I need to know, future self, to get from where I am to where you are?”
Or any question you like. I actually, I haven’t even recorded it yet, but I just got this new visualization that’s going to be helping people jump to a different timeline. If you think about—quantum physics suggests that there’s a multiverse and there’s all these timelines happening simultaneously. And so in this one, I’m going to take people down a staircase into their subconscious mind and into a library full of books that’s their life to date. And you go through it page by page, here’s your birth, here’s zero to one month, one to two months, your first year, all the way to your present time. And then they’re going to put that book down and they’re going to pick up a different book, that’s the story they want to live from here forward. And it has a different cover.
They’re going to just notice the cover that they’re really drawn to and pick that up. And then this one, the old book, they knew how it ended. It was kind of predictable. This new book, they don’t know how it’s going to end, but they can see all those pages in the back and they don’t know how it’s going to end, but they feel really good about it. And whether you want to believe my Council of Light or not, they basically told me that this is going to help people jump timelines and access a new timeline for their life going forward. So the Council of Light approves, Tami.
TS: Well, very, very interesting. And as I was reading your book, here’s a little confession. I always read the acknowledgements in books. I learn more about the author, often, from their acknowledgements, and I’m secretly looking to see if they say something about me and hoping it’s something nice too. But anyway, you said something very nice, thank you. But then you also said in your acknowledgements, you said, “May I continue to be a clear channel for ancient wisdom and new off-planet consciousness.” And that phrase, “off-planet consciousness,” got my attention and I was like, “What is Vanessa talking about?”
VL: Just the star seed awakening that’s happening on the planet, Tami. Geez. Aliens, also something I didn’t think I would ever talk about.
TS: Are we going there? If we are, let’s go there.
VL: We can.
TS: Well just tell me what you meant by that, off-planet consciousness, and that your function partially is to continue to be a clear channel for this off-planet consciousness? I wasn’t sure I was going to bring it up, but when you started talking about different timelines, I thought, I am going to mention this.
VL: Yeah. It’s been very confusing and fascinating and mystical and wonderful for me to explore these things the last several years. I’ve tuned into beings and I would even say aspects of my consciousness living parallel lives on other planets. And I’m just coming out with it, Tami.
TS: Thank you. I appreciate it. Because actually, I think, you talked about people seeking role models for different things that we aspire to. And it was in the context in our conversation about people who can role model being very financially successful and being soul-led in their work at the same time. And here you are role modeling that you can have a very successful analytical mind, critical mind, business school, private equity success, and have those kinds of inner experiences and be forthright about it. So you’re modeling something, Vanessa, that I think is really important. And so you’re giving us a gift. So thank you for doing it.
VL: Yeah. Well thank you for receiving it and acknowledging it and I’m glad, actually, I’m really glad you brought this up because I think it might be really appropriate for the Sounds True community in particular, where you have a lot of old souls who’ve been on this path for a while.
Over the last couple years, I’ve developed an awareness of aspects of my consciousness that I would call off-planet. The term alien doesn’t feel like a good word. I think it has a lot of baggage with it, but use whatever you want to use. And it’s been really confusing at times, because the timelines have overlapped or I’ve had experiences of simultaneously over there and here and not knowing how to navigate. And then they were the same totally different experience in human form on the earth plane in 3D as something over there. But echoing the same theme or very similar.
And one of the messages I got is that a lot of star seeds who are waking up at this time are going to have these types of experiences and are going to need guidance to navigate it, because it’s going to be a little bit overwhelming for their systems. And I’ve done a ton of work in past-life regression healing, where at the beginning I was like, how many past lives have I had? I want to know them all.
So I’ve gone to 20 or more of my past lives. The off-planet stuff for me feels very different. It never felt past tense. And that was interesting to me to notice that the quality of it felt different and not past tense. And so then I asked in meditation one day, well, why is it that this other stuff doesn’t feel like a past life?
And they were like, well, silly, time and space is an Earth construct. And so when you tap into these lives, or these experiences, there is no time and space in those dimensions. So it doesn’t feel past life because it’s not.
TS: Hey Vanessa, just one final question. The Soul Solution comes out at a critical time in human history. Tell me what you see, what your hopes are, for the book and its impact in the world?
VL: Well, Joanna Macy calls it the Great Turning. Eckhart Tolle talks about a New Earth. I do feel like we’re at a pivotal moment in human consciousness and human development, where there are massive shifts that are happening. And so that’s how I consider the context that we’re in. And there are a lot of signs that we’re in crisis, whether you want to look at the environment or the war, we don’t need to go into all of that. I think we’re aware of it.
In terms of my role or the role of the book. For me, so much of my work fundamentally comes down to kind of the archetype of the feminine and the masculine coming together in harmony, in self and in the world. And that’s really what I feel like this book is about.
And it’s also about how can women reclaim their power in a world that negates it, and in a world that tells them that power should look a certain way that’s really not what our soul would suggest power is?
How do we tap into our true power, which is always inside of us and always available. And then how do we embody that and then live, create, and lead from that place? Because I fundamentally believe as a feminist, spiritual teacher that when we each do that, that is how we’re going to create the structural change, the cultural change, the world change that many of us are longing for.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Vanessa Loder, she’s the author of the new book The Soul Solution: A Guide for Brilliant, Overwhelmed Women to Quiet the Noise, Find Their Superpower, and (Finally) Feel Satisfied. Vanessa, thanks so much for your honesty, for being so forthright and for being so helpful. Thank you so much.
VL: Thank you for having me. It’s been a joy.
TS: Thanks for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at resources.SoundsTrue.com/podcast. That’s resources.SoundsTrue.com/podcast. If you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected. Sounds True: waking up the world.
