Speaker 1:     Hey gorgeous. It's Denise here. And before we get into today's episode, I just want to let you know that I have a brand new version of my book, Chill & Prosper coming out. You can get some incredible bonuses at denisedt.com/prosper. This is the updated and expanded version of my book Chillpreneur, with brand new cover brand new name, brand new case studies and tons of incredible bonuses. Some of those bonuses are limited time. So make sure you go to denisedt.com/prosper, grab your new copy of the book and get all of your incredible bonuses as well. All right, enjoy today's episode.

                        (singing)

                        Hey, my gorgeous one. This is Denise Duffield-Thomas, and you're listening to Chill & Prosper, if you couldn't figure it out by the jingle. Today, we are kind of going a bit woo-woo and spiritual. We are talking about some of the things in my new book, Chill & Prosper: The Witch Wound, Past Lives and Vows of Poverty. Oh, so, so juicy. Now I am a Virgo, and I can be a little bit skeptical around woo-woo stuff. Even just say I'm a Virgo shows I'm clearly open minded to a lot of spiritual things, but I just want to say you are not, sometimes we can learn so much from these spiritual concepts that you might dismiss as being woo-woo because they can trigger interesting questions for us. They can pose interesting theoreticals. So you don't have to literally believe in past lives to be able to get a lot out of today's episode.

                        And if you are one of my woo-woo listeners, well, then this is going to be super fun as well. So I came across this concept called the witch wound from Lisa Lister, who has a book called Witch. And I don't necessarily identify as a witch, I don't have a spiritual practice myself, but it made so much sense to me that so many of us have this collective fear around what it means to be outspoken, to be visible and to show up in our lives because of this collective fear we have around being persecuted, around being metaphorically and let truly burnt at the stake. So if that is a triggering conversation to you, then you might want to avoid this episode, or we're not going to go too crazy, crazy deep but I think it's just such a powerful way for us to understand where some of our blocks might come from around money and visibility.

                        And so this witch wound lives within us. And anything, if you have ancestors who have gone through any massive trauma and they have been many, many over a time of history, and there wouldn't be very many families who haven't been untouched by this, but if you have something that's so close to your generation, whether it's a grandparent or great grandparent who's gone through this, then it's going to show up even stronger for you, this fear of getting into trouble, this fear of doing something wrong or of being seen as a troublemaker by the powers that be. And of course we know from a lot of these situations in history where people have been persecuted for their beliefs or whatever, it's often got nothing to do with spirituality. It's about control and the patriarchy and wanting to persecute people who are different.

                        And here in lies is the problem. Right. We live in this world now where theoretically, we can do whatever we want. We can create freedom and abundance for ourselves. We can use tools like the internet and podcasting to be able to broadcast our voices around the world and to be able to help and serve people, but there still lives within us this fear that something bad is going to happen if I use my voice, if I'm honest about who I am, if I openly demonstrate my spirituality or my sexuality or my beliefs, somebody will persecute me for it. And I would even say like there's a lot to be said at the moment, like this cancel culture thing. And most of the time it's the reckoning that needs to happen, right? Is that we should change our views and our words about how we talk about people and you know, language evolves and changes, but there still is this sense that for the cancel culture, it brings up a lot of fear for people and that might stop you from doing some really, really practical things in your business.

                        So today we are going to talk through some of that, help you understand where those fears are coming from and allow you to transmute it a little bit. Okay. To transmute it, so it doesn't have to derail you. It doesn't have to stop you in your business. Okay. So there's a famous quote from Joan of Arc. She was reportedly quoted as saying, I am not afraid. I was born to do this. And I love that quote, and she's such a beacon of strength for so many, but I also think it sets us up sometimes as feeling like that if we are scared, even just a little bit, then maybe that's not our destiny or if we are scared, then we've got to work on that fear before we do anything else.

                        And you know what? I have to tell you, business is scary. Business is scary, doing something different is scary. Creating a life of freedom is scary. Breaking through your social class of your family is scary. Being the breadwinner could be scary. Sending a newsletter is scary. Doing a social post is scary. Writing a book is scary. All of those things feel really freaking scary. So just because you feel like doing those things is your destiny, it doesn't mean it's going to be smooth sailing. And absence of fear is not our goal. That's not what we are looking for. Absence of fear is not going to be the thing that makes you the money. Okay. And things that scare you today, won't scare you tomorrow. The first time you do something, you'll go, oh my God, that's so scary. Like the first time I did a webinar, I was like, oh my God, I'm going to die. This is so scary. And then I was like, oh, I can just go live whenever I want.

                        The first time I spoke on stage, it was very scary. And that doesn't scare me anymore, but TV scares me. Doing a live TV. Whew, that scares me. But maybe one day that won't be a big deal either. Okay. So when I read Lisa Lister's book, Witch, she talked about the witch wound, about how it is a very specific fear to show up and to feel the danger of that. And this goes beyond like, oh no, I'm going to do a post and someone's going to say they don't like my hair. It goes so much deeper than criticism. It goes so much deeper than hate mail or trolls. It goes into this fear that something bad is going to happen. That I am not safe if I speak out. I'm not safe if I'm different.

                        And of course you don't have to be a woman or a witch to understand how that feels. It is such a collective fear. Another spiritual teacher that I quoted in my book, her name is Kimberly Jones, and she says that the witch wound is the psychic scar in the collective consciousness that mostly women start to awaken to and feel deeply in their bodies as soon as they consider stepping into their power. And you think you don't even have to have like a background previous lifetimes or people in your generation, sorry, in your lineage who have been called a witch. It could be anything that you're stepping into your power. Maybe it's not safe for women in your family to earn more than men, and by safe, it could be that you get really criticized for it. Maybe it's not safe for you to consider doing a different profession than your family. It feels like they're going to ostracize you or not feel like you're going to belong.

                        Same with people who want to come out of the closet. That might not be safe for you and your family. So I just want to tell you that if you are blaming yourself and feeling like your fear is irrational in your business or other people are telling you that your fear is irrational in your business and just get over it. Well, I'm sorry, but it's never really been safe to speak up against the status quo, to speak up against the patriarchy. And you have to do so much work to comfort yourself and reassure yourself that nothing bad is going to happen. Okay. It's totally okay. But it runs really, really deep. And you might still see this a lot that politicians... You might see female politicians being called witches and bitches.

                        You might see friends of yours who are successful in business who get trolls and haters. And when it comes to feeling scared to speak up, if your throat closes, if you feel like you don't have any value to your words, well, then that is totally that shared memory of it never being safe. It never being safe for women, or for black people or for queer people to be visible or to be counted or to be valued. So, yeah, there's a lot of inherited trauma that we all have to deal with and it could be just like, oh man, I'm just trying to like publish a blog post, what's going on? Well, your body might be going to fight or flight mode to keep at you safe.

                        Okay. So we've established that there is a witch wound. I really highly recommend that you go and read Lisa Lister's book. But I have some more to talk to you about, about how I use this concept of kind of past lives and connecting with some of those spiritual concepts to connect with that fear and allow myself to step out and be more visible. And I will be right back after this short break.

Speaker 2:     Reading Chill & Prosper is now the third book that I have read of Denise DT's. And it has been such a refreshing reminder because I believe we always need to be reminding ourselves of the same message, and that is that to be successful you can lean back. You don't have to be leaning in and hustling hard. You can be leaning back and everything will begin to flow.

Speaker 1:     Hi, welcome back. We are going really deep and spiritual this week talking about out the witch wound and past lives and giving up vows of poverty. Ah, so much fun. There is a whole chapter about this in my new book called Chill & Prosper. It's the updated version of Chillpreneur. You probably of sick of hearing me talk about this right now, but I just wanted to let you know that there are some limited time bonuses for the new version. So go to denisedt.com/prosper, you can upload your details of where you purchased the new book and get some really, really cool bonuses and some of those are limited time. So make sure you go and do that. So let's talk about this witch wound again. Okay. Because when I started my business as a business coach, I didn't understand why this fear was derailing so many people from doing kind of simple stuff like just publish a blog post.

                        Okay. So how do we uncover and deal with some of those things? Well, the first thing you can do is see if it connects to a memory in your life where you felt like you weren't allowed to speak up, or you felt like you were afraid of authority. Now, for me, this was going to the welfare office as a kid and feeling like this very serious person could choose whether or not we had money. And so it really made me scared about the power that authority had over our family. And like, I didn't grow up in a church and so I didn't have that layer that I know some of you do that you have grown up hearing about these scary rules that you have to follow, or you are going to go to hell or something bad is going to happen to you.

                        But for me it was the welfare office. That was my scary overlord kind of thing. And so when I started my business and I was eligible to pay tax, I was terrified. And I thought I can't earn too much because then the tax man will get me. That was my... Not a conscious thought. It was my unconscious thought of that going, the tax man, I'm going to get in so much trouble with the tax man, and he's scary and stern and something bad's going to happen here. Okay. So you might think, oh, I'm just procrastinating. Oh, I just need to get more organized. And it's like, no. We are breaking cycles here from our own lives and it's huge. It's really, really big. Okay. So definitely think about what has happened in your own life to make you fearful about speaking up.

                        And I can't tell you oh, cool. Just get over it. There could be some stuff that you need to work on around that. Sometimes it's therapy, sometimes it is self love work. Sometimes it's forgiveness work. Sometimes it's just the acknowledgement that happened and the acknowledgement that it's normal and safe and understandable that you are scared. Compassion could be the thing. Right. But you might have to go a little bit deeper, and this is where I love spiritual work. I love going and experimenting with getting Reiki, getting crystal healing, going to see psychics and mediums, doing healing work that doesn't always... Like, your logical brain can't always understand what that might be. And I've had some incredible experiences. I actually went to see a Bowen therapist recently. So Bowen therapy, I can't even explain how it works, but I guess it's a little bit... I thought it was going to be a little bit like getting a chiropractic adjustment.

                        And the lady explained to me. She said, I'll make a little adjustment and then I go out of the room for a couple of minutes and just let it work on you. I was just like, this is so weird. And so I lay on her table and she made a little adjustment and then she went out of the room and while she was out of the room, I could feel other people working on me. I could feel hands on me. I could feel it. And I just went, oh, wow. Okay. Maybe that's how it works. And then Mark and Piper came to pick me up. So Piper was my littlest one by then, she was like two and a half, and we left the house and she took out her dummy, her pacifier, and she said, there's ghosts and I went, oh, excellent, great.

                        And so if you can be open minded to going and working with spiritual practitioners to help you overcome some of these barriers that you might have picked up this lifetime or previous lifetimes, I just think if you can be open minded to that, there's so much beyond what we can see and hear. And sometimes talking therapy works really well and times you need to go things at a different level. I'm not saying instead of, it's just sometimes it's like it's just a different approach to it. And I've learned so much from spiritual practitioners. So one time my friend Melissa Kitto... So you might know her, she has a business about communicating with your angels, Melissa Kitto, and I had a past life reading with her one time and she talked about this past life of mine.

                        And again, I didn't need to believe this as a literal thing. I would never then go, oh, okay, I'm going to go find this past life of mine, because a lot of these things is about story and what meaning we can glean from it and what healing we can glean from it. And so she said, okay, there's a past life that I'm connecting to where you were an artist in Japan a couple of hundred years ago and you really judged wealthy people. And you kept on thinking, I'm an artist I'm above money. I'm above kind of this merc... Not mercenary, but this commercial enterprise. I just want to keep my art pure and just keep it for Japanese people only. And what was fascinating about that is the lesson I got from that. Again, I don't have to believe in this literally, but it was like, yeah, where is some areas in my life where I judge wealthy people? Where am I judging my work and trying to keep it pure and not allowing myself to be paid for my talents?

                        And that's the benefit of doing work like that or working with somebody to give you a different angle and a different perspective. So I really enjoyed that and it's not something that I would necessarily do a lot, but it was just interesting to go. Yeah. Wow. There are pockets of me where I still judge people and I still judge wealthy people. So yeah. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. Now, the last thing I want to tell you is on this same, woo-woo point of view is a ritual that I did, that I really felt like shifted something in my life, shifted something, I don't know, in my consciousness or something like that, and it's this concept of revoking vows of poverty.

                        And it sounds really strange, right. But again, most of us, I would say, have had ancestors who have gone into the church because for a lot of times in history, it was the only thing you could do. If you have Irish relatives, there's always someone who is a priest, like a cousin who is a priest or a great aunt who was a nun. It's just what families did and different points in history in Europe, for sure. It was like, cool, one of your kids goes into that field. Right. And so it lives within us all this vow of poverty, vow of chastity, vow of silence that we may have taken, or we have in our lineage somehow.

                        And so again, you don't need to believe in this, but it was so much fun for me to sit and go, I'm going to revoke any vow of poverty that I've made at any time in my life and just let it go. And I literally said it out loud. It was a really funny. I just was like, okay, I declare that any vows of poverty I've taken in any lifetime, in any incarnation on the planet, in any way that lives in my lineage, that I've inherited, I now declare null and void. I now declare complete. I now declare my vow of poverty is over. It was really powerful. And then I did the same thing with a vow of silence and that connecting to that witch wound thing to say, Hey, I am going to use my voice. I am not going to be silent. I am not going to be quiet. I am going to use my voice and I'm going to allow myself to speak up and then I did the same thing with a vow of chastity.

                        Okay. Now, as like... I don't know if this is a Virgo thing, but one of the... A very famous Virgo that I share my birthday with is Elizabeth I and she was known as the Virgin Queen. And there's something there about chastity that's not just about preserving your virginity, but it's about being modest and about not allowing yourself to experience pleasure. And so for me, that totally resonated where I was like, oh yeah, I can see where there's parts of my life I don't allow myself pleasure and I don't allow myself to feel and to have time off and to relax and to enjoy. And so I did the same thing. I was like, okay, I'm going to release my vow of poverty, chastity, silence. And I'm like, what are the vows could we have taken in each and any lifetime?

                        And again, you don't have to believe in it literally, but it loosened something in me. It made me realize that if you were to look at my family lineage from everyone, who's come before me and everyone who's going to come after there will be a mark, a significant change in my lifetime where I'm breaking cycles. I'm breaking cycles of poverty, breaking cycles of dysfunction. I'm changing what's possible for women who come after me as well as men, even marrying someone who is a beautiful kind version of a new form of masculinity. That is a change in my lineage that will go on forever. That will change my children's lives, their children's lives and on and on and on. And you might not have kids. You might not have desire to have kids, but everyone who comes in contact with you will experience that energy too. It's magnetic to meet someone who accepts and loves themselves and who embodies that.

                        It's so, so powerful. Oh, wow. What a great topic for us to talk about today. And we got a little bit woo-woo, but I want to hear your feedback. I want to hear if you feel like you've got a witch wound. I want to hear if you're going to revoke some vows and if there's any interesting things that got triggered for you today. As always, thank you so much for sharing these episodes and reviewing and rating them and all those things. It really, really helps. And don't go away because I've just got one final little thought to tell you right at the end, after this little last break. See you in a sec.

Mia Pappas:  Hi everyone. This is Mia [Pappas] from Baltimore, Maryland. I first started with Denise, gosh, probably back in 2018 with Get Rich, Lucky Bitch, her very first book that I got. I absolutely positively loved it, so then I signed up for her advanced month manifesting course and I have then gotten Chillpreneur and I have since joined her Money Bootcamp, all things Denise, all things money, money, money mindset, and I am absolutely positively thrilled with... I am also very excited for the rerelease of Chill & Prosper. I absolutely love Chillpreneur, so I cannot wait to dive into Chill & Prosper and learn all the fun and exciting things that Denise has to offer. I absolutely love what Denise and her team do. I feel like she's taken me from a money mindset of I can't do, I most certainly can and not only can I do it, but I can do it the way that I want to. I have permission. I am worthy. It's my time and I'm ready for the next step. Thank you so much, Denise, and to your whole entire team.

Speaker 1:     Okay. Welcome back. And this is a really fun episode, right? I just appreciate your perspective so much. So I really want to hear your feedback on it, but I just have one last quote from Lisa Lister and her book called Witch, and she says, we need to make it safe for each other by not calling each other out and finger pointing, but by calling each other in, and there's so many lessons for that of making it safe for us to make mistakes and also making it okay that if we do make mistakes, we are not burning each other at the stake, but we are calling each other in. And that can be fierce. That can be loving. It can be boundaried. It doesn't mean that we have to let things go. It just means that it's safe for us to have difficult conversations. It's safe for us to speak up. It's safe for us to disagree. It's safe for us to call each other to account without making it dangerous, without making it scary for anybody.

                        Ah, so yeah, we need to make it safe for each other, but not by calling each other out and finger pointing, but calling each other in. That's really powerful and I think it's interesting to find where those distinctions are for each and every one of us. So that's Lisa Lister's book, Witch, which I highly recommend whether you identify as a witch or not, because it will really help each and every one of us to find our voice and to be unapologetic and brave. All right. My lovely, have an amazing week and go forth, chill and prosper and I'll see you on the next episode.