Bonita Hodgson ~ Reclaiming Your Energy

Ross Tayler (00:55)

Today on Sacred Sundays, our guest is Bonita Hodgson. As a psychic life and business coach for over 45 years, with a background as a Therapeutic Touch practitioner and a PSYCH-K advanced facilitator, Bonita has worked with countless individuals and organizations, teaching spiritual development, wellbeing and mindset practices, inner child work, and relationship healing for the home and the workplace, among other offerings. Based in Nanaimo, BC, Bonita works worldwide with her clients virtually, as well as in her office in the Old City Quarter of Nanaimo. Welcome, Bonita.

Bonita Hodgson (01:31)

Thank you very much, Ross. It's good to be here.

Ross Tayler (01:33)

Yeah, it's good to have you. I'm excited for this conversation, to see what we can dive into.

Bonita Hodgson (01:38)

You too.

Ross Tayler (01:39)

And I believe you're going to begin by sharing an energy exercise with us. So I'll hand it over to you.

Bonita Hodgson (01:44)

Thank you. One of the things I commonly see in my practice is people struggling with their relationships on an energetic level. One of the things I teach in my workshops, one in particular called The Energy Experience, is for people to start to understand what they're doing energetically. What is the hidden language of energy that's going back and forth? Say, for example, you call somebody up and afterwards you just feel drained. Quite often, that's not somebody you had the energy to call. Maybe you called them because, I should, if I'm a good friend, I'll call that person, or, it's Sunday, I should call Mom. You're shoulding yourself, and you're going against what your energy really has in store for you, what your path has in store for you that day. So you feel drained afterwards. What this exercise does is help you to understand the energy signature, the energy relationship you have with other people, and then what you can do with that.

So anybody that's listening right now can close your eyes, unless you're driving. If you're in a quiet space, just find a way to be comfortable. Sit, close your eyes. Take a few deep, slow breaths. And with each exhalation, let your shoulders drop a little bit more. Get a little more comfortable. Drop deeper into your body.

And now imagine that you are a cloud of tiny golden light particles, the shape of an egg. And at the very bottom of that egg is a little golden cord of light particles that anchors you to the earth, so you're not floating away. That is your energy anchor that keeps you in your physical form in this lifetime.

Now imagine in front of you the person in your life, living or past, with whom you have the most easy, most comfortable relationship.

And now you are looking at the energy that's flowing out of your egg to the other person. What is leaving? What is coming back your way? What does that flow look like? How does it feel physically and emotionally? Get a sense of the way that energy passes back and forth between you and the other person.

And now imagine in front of you, living or past, the person in your life with whom you have the most difficult relationship. What does that look like? What energy is leaving you? What energy, if any, is coming back to you? What does that look like? What does that feel like physically and emotionally?

If you see an imbalance, the important thing to realize here is that you have a say over how you use your energy. And what that means is that it's okay for you to take that energy that you've been giving out, pull it back into your egg and reclaim it for yourself. And know that after this exercise, whenever you encounter that person, should you choose to, you still have a say. And one of the things you can learn is how to say no. And if you struggle with that, that's what I'm here for. I can help you with that.

Now, if you feel done, you can open your eyes and come out of the exercise, knowing that you have this ability to use in your life to reclaim your energy, because you are supposed to be a good banker. You don't invest where nothing comes back. That is the cycle of abundance: energy leaves, energy returns, and it's balanced. This is a way to find out if your relationships are balanced or not.

Now, that being said, when I was given this exercise many, many years ago, way before I met my wonderful husband, I was dating somebody, and I tried this exercise and learned something very interesting. I was giving tons of energy to this person, and they were giving me just little snippets of energy, and it was all lower chakra. There was no heart energy coming from them, even though they were saying the right words. And it made me realize, wow, this person's giving very little energy, disguised as heart energy, to get a lot of mine, and it's not balanced. That was the beginning of the end of that relationship, when I saw the energy signature.

Ross Tayler (06:37)

I love that, Bonita. Thanks so much for sharing this exercise, because it certainly stirred a lot of thoughts within myself around my own relationships, and I'm sure that the listeners are having that same experience.

Bonita Hodgson (06:50)

Thank you. And you can use it with different things. You can use it with money. You can use it with situations. Say you're in a workplace: what does that energy signature look like with that work environment?

Ross Tayler (07:02)

One of the things that came to mind was, my relationship with my dad was actually pretty good. But one of the things I would notice was, when I would go to his house, my energy would just drop. It was like this heavy cloud that I walked into. I would start yawning. There was nothing to create from energetically. So it was very much a reflection of where he was at, and how lonely he was, and all those things. And to step into that was always so hard, because I was his primary caregiver.

Bonita Hodgson (07:30)

And yawning is the body's way of releasing tension. So you might have been experiencing tension around the situation, even if it's, I don't want that to be my future, or, I don't know how to hold space for this. It's a hard thing when people are at a point in their life where they're needing energy. And quite honestly, we're a society of vampires. Not intentionally, but you'll have a hard time in a situation, and what do we do? Pick up the phone and complain to somebody, and we borrow their energy. One of the hardest things to do is to learn, how do I find within myself the energy I just lost to that situation, so I don't take it from somebody else?

Ross Tayler (08:11)

You're speaking to something that I think comes up time and time again. It's that outer orientation, where we're so focused outwards, and we've been trained to focus outwards, because we believe that that's where we get our needs met. And yet truly we can access all that we need inside, which is quite the switch to realize. So part of the dynamic that you're addressing with this exercise is that we have a right to conserve our energy and use it wisely, and to expect that we can have it returned as well in relationships, instead of just giving it out.

Bonita Hodgson (08:48)

And you make a really good point, because I think the biggest thing is our conditioning. A lot of us have been conditioned to be people's emotional caretakers, to take care of everybody but ourselves. And it's not even just a right. How do I put this? When your contract with other people is to keep everything copacetic, keep everybody happy and calm, it's a lot like doing a beer run for an alcoholic. You're helping them stay asleep. They don't have to wake up. They don't have to be uncomfortable.

In a lot of my work with people, I really do believe all real change is from the inside out. You work on the internal patterns. In the 45 years I've been doing this, I've actually developed techniques for accessing the parts of your psyche still trapped in early childhood, and parenting them to become conscious, integrated, and part of the whole self. When you make those internal shifts, it's a law of nature that the external shifts to match. If you try to make the change externally and you haven't done the inner work, you're going to keep duplicating the same situations. So when we look at those relationships and we start to more and more align ourselves with the path our soul chose coming into this lifetime, not the one we were conditioned to operate from, it really ticks people off. Hold on a sec, you were supposed to give me all this energy. Why are you not giving me this energy now? And we can either say, oops, my bad, I'll climb back in that little box we had me in so you're not uncomfortable. Or we can say, you know, I see you struggling with the choices I'm making. Is there a way I can support you in working through what this is bringing up for you? In other words, we stop wearing their stuff.

Ross Tayler (10:29)

Exactly.

Bonita Hodgson (10:29)

They have an opportunity to awaken. They may not take it. They may not thank you for it. But at least you're no longer helping them stay asleep.

Ross Tayler (10:40)

And it's a bold act to take that stand for yourself, because I think most of us who are sensitive to our environments and our relationships don't want to feel what comes next, because what comes next is the emotional wave of reality playing out, right?

Bonita Hodgson (10:57)

Yeah, the fallout.

Ross Tayler (10:59)

Yeah, exactly, the fallout. When I set a boundary and say, I'm not okay with this anymore, the other person's like, well, what's wrong with you? You've been okay with it for the last 20 years. But when you take a stand for yourself, then you have to be okay with what comes next, and realize that that's not yours, that it's always been their stuff.

Bonita Hodgson (11:17)

Yeah, and it's always been your stuff too, because you participated, right? But now you're evolving. And this is often an exercise I will take people through. I'll say, okay, what is the worst possible thing that could happen if you made that change? When we make that change, when we say to somebody, I'm doing this differently, and they get all upset, if we know, I can handle the fallout, whatever the worst thing is that they can possibly do in reaction, I can move through that, we no longer need to be afraid of that fallout. We can go, yeah, that could happen.

But as you and I both know, if you're going to do the spiritual work, you have to let go of outcome. You can't say, I'll do this work as long as I get to keep that job, that relationship, that circumstance. You can't do that. We have to get out of our small-mindedness. I've often said to people, when you say yes to yourself, the universe says yes right back. Which means that if you're walking the path that's in alignment with what your soul chose, the universe is going to give you the energy and the circumstances and the people you need in your life to stay in that alignment. If you're out of alignment, it's not going to reward you for that. It's not going to support that. So if you're willing to risk fallout and be true to your path, things are going to unfold, I've always found, way better than our limited ego consciousness could have imagined from where we were then. If somebody had knocked on my door 30 years ago and told me about the life I was going to have now, I would never have believed that it could be this good. We'd never have been able to conceive it, right?

And I often say there are a lot of people who won't do this work. There are a lot of people leading lives of quiet desperation, because the ego goes, this is prison, but at least I know this prison. Because the freedom, the beauty, the amazing life you could have is on the other side of your comfort zone. You've got to be willing to be uncomfortable. And when you say no, like you were talking about, when you say, this doesn't work for me anymore, you don't have to defend and you don't have to explain. It should be enough for people who care about you that you say, I'm clear that this is the right decision for me. And if their reaction is to belittle or to manipulate, to try to make you feel bad about your decision, you now have some very clear answers about the dynamic of that relationship. And now you get to explore whether you want to continue in it. That's why a lot of people don't do this work, because they're going to have to make the difficult decision sometimes of ending situations and relationships that are not conducive to their wellbeing.

Ross Tayler (13:59)

And yet, when I think about the nervous system, and I think about two dysregulated nervous systems trying to figure this stuff out, there's a lot going on, because that person is reacting to the boundary that you just set, but they're really just playing out their own pain. So it's an interesting dance, right? Depending on the nature of the connection, we might be able to work through that. But with some people, we wouldn't be able to work through it, because that dysregulation is what's driving the bus. And yet we're all navigating that experience. The one person who's able to set that boundary is saying, my nervous system will no longer tolerate this interaction or the energy that is going on. And that can be a reflection for the other person to do the same, or it can be a reflection for them to stay the same.

Bonita Hodgson (14:49)

Yeah. If you've chosen to wake up, it's not really respectful to expect the other person to join you. They didn't make that choice. So where we can, where there's an opening, we do want to hold space for that person to make some adjustments and continue to walk in parallel with our journey. In reality, though, there are times when some people and situations will drop away. But since nature abhors a vacuum, new people and situations will come in that are a reflection of the person you're becoming.

And sometimes we will try to hang on to people because, they've always been in my life, they've always been part of me. One of the hardest things is the letting go. I'll see this a lot when I'm working with people who say, well, I'm so worried about my children. How old are your children? Well, they're 30 and 35. And I'll actually say, one of the things we have to do as parents at some point is grieve the loss of parenthood, actually grieve the loss of the role. Otherwise, we keep trying to play it out with these adults who don't need us to do that anymore. And when we finally grieve it, it frees up our energy to walk the path that's now available to us, and meant to be walked, now that the kids are grown and gone, right?

Ross Tayler (16:04)

That's a big one. I feel blessed that I was able to figure that out quite early. My youngest was always such a great teacher for that. I just realized at some point, well, these are not my lives, these are my children's lives. I'm not meant to live their lives with them. They've literally jumped out of the nest. I've done my work, I've done my job, and we will still maintain connection, but I'm not responsible. That was such a liberating realization. It felt radical, even.

Bonita Hodgson (16:31)

There's such wisdom in that, because you have to let them fall on their faces. They'll let you know if they want your advice. If mine were to say, well, I'm struggling with this or that, my reaction is, may I offer a perspective? Because if they don't say yes, there's no opening for you to insert your point of view. In other words, you're pushing your point of view into something that's not there, and they're going to put up a wall.

Ross Tayler (16:56)

Sure. We didn't really get a handbook as parents, at least I didn't. We're just doing what we think is right, and often we're just doing the opposite of what our experience was. So it's like, I know I don't want to be like what I received, so I'm going to go to the other side. But then we're missing everything in between. So we're all just trying to do our best and fumbling through it, really.

Bonita Hodgson (17:19)

Yeah, I kind of had the attitude that I was going to try and do better than my parents did, and I hoped my kids would do better than I did, and than their father did. That there's an evolution out of the dysfunction that we grew up in, you know?

Ross Tayler (17:33)

Yeah. So when you think about what shows up in your practice, what's the part of your work that you love doing the most?

Bonita Hodgson (17:42)

I have to say, helping people fall back in love with themselves. For me, it's helping people to see their own power, their own courage. It takes courage to sit with somebody who's going to help you take a deep look at yourself. And then it takes even more courage to act on what you're given, to act on what comes out of the session. So I have a deep respect for the people who work with me. And to see somebody who comes in, maybe even in despair... I have a background as a crisis worker, so I've seen people at all levels of crisis. I'm a crisis worker and suicide interventionist. I've worked with people at the very depths of their despair. To have the opportunity to help a person flip their perspective, look at what they're going through in a different way, look at the purpose behind it, find the light at the end of the tunnel, it is so humbling, really, to see people step into their power and their awareness.

People will often come to me and say, I'm lost. And I say, well, that's great, and I explain why that's great. Because the ego wants to go from a known to a known. It doesn't like the gray areas. But this is the problem: the ego, which is our conditioned mind, only knows how to look for patterns. It can't see anything new. It can only take you where you've already been before. So the purpose of what, in Buddhism, we call falling into the void, that what seems like emptiness, and it's not emptiness, by the way, it's the fullness of pure potential, is that if you surrender, I don't know who I am, I don't know where I'm going, I don't know what's next, I surrender, something new can emerge from that and take you on the path you came here to walk. So when people say I'm lost, I say that's a perfect place to be, because from here, anything is possible. And then we start to explore those possibilities.

Ross Tayler (19:34)

And do you experience people really resisting the word surrender?

Bonita Hodgson (19:40)

I will often meet people in resistance. And bless my mentor, who worked with me for several decades, because he had to deal with me going through some grinding resistance. What I try to help people understand is, we can work with the part of you that's in resistance to find out why it is. Is it trying to protect you? Is the protection pattern based on something that happened as a kid that's no longer relevant? If we can work with that part to help it understand, I'm in an adult body now, I have agency now, it's a different scenario, that same part can then become discernment. Or is the resistance just a reaction? Because on the other side of resistance is usually some sort of transformation or awakening. And because the ego doesn't know what's there, it just knows there's a big change coming, it thinks it's going to die, so it puts up resistance as well, right? That's the whole ego death and rebirth thing.

So whenever I see resistance, I try to be very patient with it, because God knows my mentor was very patient with me, and just keep working through it. I had a client many, many years ago who, to every single thing I said to her in the session, said, nope, you're wrong, you're wrong. And her husband was with her. Meanwhile, he's nodding his head and vigorously rolling his eyes. Now, I didn't say to her, your husband agrees with me. That would just be ego, right? I just said to her, well, this may make more sense to you later on. Here's how I look at it: she didn't get up and walk away. She sat through the whole thing. Some part of her was ready for that information, even if the rest of her wasn't. So even when there's resistance, there's a whole lot of other stuff that's listening in. And those seeds you planted will awaken when that person's ready to do that work.

Ross Tayler (21:25)

And back to falling in love with yourself again. On my journey, and as I reflect on other people going through the journey, it feels like sand falling through the hands. What does that actually look like? What does it mean to re-fall in love with yourself? How would you simplify that? How would you help someone understand what that practically means? And maybe it's an incremental change.

Bonita Hodgson (21:49)

That's such a great question. So here's how I look at it. It's funny, when we talk about surrender, people think it's letting go of control. We have the illusion of control. We don't have control. We have intention, and once you place intention, the universe is going to put things together for you to fulfill that intention. It's also going to push you up against anything you need to shift internally for that intention to come to fruition.

So what I'll often hear people say is, how do I get rid of my anger, or my shame, or my grief, or my fear? And I say, why would you want to get rid of these things? These are all aspects of your subconscious that aren't conscious yet, that are part of the journey. And every part of you stuck in anger, fear, shame or grief also has some of your wisdom. So it's about awakening and integration. Through the techniques I offer, you start to actually meet these parts of your psyche trapped at, say, the age of three or five, or as a teenager, and you start to actually interact with them. People think of inner child work as patting them on the head and telling them they're safe. That's not listening to them. That's not interacting with them. It's actually having a dialogue, where you listen to what they have to say, and they start to build some trust in you when you follow through on meeting their needs. Then those parts that seem, in shadow work, dark or ugly or scary, that we've been taught to fear or loathe, we start to see the beauty of them. We start to see that that's where our real power is. That's the treasure underneath all the muck of the illusion. And when we really meet them, when they start to surface and show up in our life, it's so beautiful, it's so powerful. You love them. And then you start to realize, I'm loving that part of myself I was told was unacceptable.

Just to give you an example, say you were born into a very quiet family, where nobody argued, nobody really talked, and you were this flamboyant, loud, playful energy, and you were taught that that was unacceptable. You would take your flamboyance and put it on a shelf, and you would develop a persona, a quieter persona. You'd say, hey, I've got you back there. You stay back there. I've got you. I'll protect you. The problem is, over time, you forgot about her. She became shadow, or he became shadow, right? And so over time you see yourself as this quiet person, because we all want to belong. We want to fit in with our families. So any time that flamboyance sneaks out, you shame yourself. Oh my God, I was too loud. Oh my God, I was looking for attention. Shame on me, right? So when you start to realize, that is actually my original self, that's my true self, and it deserves to have a place in the world, and there's nothing wrong with that flamboyance, and you reclaim that part, that's falling back in love with yourself.

Ross Tayler (24:48)

You're speaking about a body of work that I am very passionate about as well. I love shadow work. I really think that in some ways it's the number one elixir to change things, because it's almost mechanical in how we operate in it, right? Like you said, we take this thing, we put it behind us, we hide it in the shadow, and then we call it shadow work, which I think people have resistance to. But really it's about bringing these parts back into the light, letting them breathe, letting them be free to express themselves. There are so many areas of our life where we have these behaviors that have been hidden. These parts are like our gold that is wanting to be seen and to be alive. And when we're trying to push those things down, that's depression, right? We're fighting with this force. This creative life force wants to emerge and rise up, and yet we're keeping it underwater. There's that analogy of trying to hold the basketball underwater. So that's a lot of the dynamic that's playing out in our lives of anxiety, depression and fear. It's that energy that we're trying to suppress, but it's actually our power trying to emerge.

Bonita Hodgson (25:55)

You're absolutely right. It actually takes a lot of energy to hold those parts down. Hence depression, where you've lost energy. And I think part of it is realizing, what is the purpose of this life? Isn't it to awaken? And how do we awaken if we're not embracing all aspects of our being? We are part of a unified field of energy that is everything and everyone. So if you start to say that aspect is not acceptable, whether it's internally or externally, you create separation. You create the fractioning that is an illusion anyway, because there's no place where I end and you begin. It's just one energy, right? One loving energy.

So when you start to do that work and you reclaim those parts of yourself, for one thing, you're operating better in the world. You have more awareness. There's more of you sitting around the table, weighing in on your decisions. And how do you get the fullness of an ecstatic, beautiful relationship if you're not bringing all of yourself to it? How do you get the fullest, deepest satisfaction from your work if you're only partially operating in the world?

I have an analogy for shadows. I call them the children under the stairs. They're the ones that you shut in the closet under the stairs and say, I'll take care of you, I've got this. And then you forget they're there. Well, when you go and open that door, you can't say, hey guys, come on out into the light. They don't know what that world is. You have to go and sit under the stairs with them. You have to join them in the shadows and befriend them where they're at. Which means, when they come up with all these feelings, here's the shame I've held for you for 40 years, here's the anger, here's the fear, what do we do? We tend to go, oh my God, can you just leave the room so I can put a smile on my face? We don't say, come sit with me. Tell me how you're feeling. What do you need from me? What do you need me to know? We can't win their trust if we're not willing to accept what they're feeling.

I've been in situations where somebody asked me to tune in on her, and I said, well, you have a lot of rage. And she said, I'm not angry, I'm a nice person. I said, what does your being angry have to do with whether or not you're a nice person? But we've been taught to put a value judgment on emotions. I see anger as the energy of action. It's saying there's something here you need to address, right? If you see it as a negative, you're going to suppress it, and that part never gets to become conscious. It just becomes this demon that sneaks out every now and then, and you whack it on the head with shame until it comes back up. And depression is often anger turned inward.

Ross Tayler (28:25)

Totally. At one of the treatment centers I worked at, there was a module that I would have to teach, and it was called Negative Emotions. And I would always start by saying, wait a second, we need to reframe this before we have this conversation, because I don't believe that emotions are negative. I believe that we can express our emotions in a negative way that has a negative impact, but our emotions are not inherently negative. They're all there to help us, and they're a part of us. So if we don't allow anger, then we're just denying that emotion the ability to move. Those of us who know what conscious anger looks like know that conscious anger can create tremendous change in the world. And yet we're not used to that. We're used to repressed anger or aggressive anger, which again can be expressed negatively, but it's not a bad thing inherently. And I think that's part of what you're saying. We need to come back into right relationship with these emotions that aren't bad. They're just trying to move through us.

Bonita Hodgson (29:30)

One of the things I think of when I think of emotions is that emotions are energy in motion. When I'm teaching my workshop, one of the first questions I'll get is, how do I protect myself from negative energy? And I say, energy's neutral. It isn't good or bad, it's neutral. If somebody says or does something that triggers a core pattern in us and we have a negative reaction, that's something that was already in us before we met them. But we'll say, that person's negative. No, you had a reaction to them from your core. So instead of going, can they stop doing that so I don't have to feel this, you can see it as, the universe placed a catalyst in front of you to trigger something in you. So yay, you got to see it, and now you can work with it.

That's something I'm working with with couples. What I often say is, you can either try to get the other person not to trigger you, or you can say, they do this, I have this reaction, so what is that inside of me that I can work on? Because we can only work on ourselves. And how can I support my partner when they're triggered? When you're both doing that work, the relationship becomes one of spiritual growth. Because frankly, we can do a lot of work on our own, but there are certain things we can only learn about ourselves in concert with somebody else, because we need the triggers.

Ross Tayler (30:47)

Absolutely. I started calling it the reflection instead of the projection, because I think it's easier to take responsibility for the reflection, because that's what we're seeing. So when you talk about that reaction, it's being reflected to us.

Bonita Hodgson (31:05)

That's a great way of looking at it too. Because if you think of the universe as the quantum universe, and that everything around us is just a reflection of our own consciousness, then the next thing is to say, whatever this person is doing that is irritating the heck out of me, how is that my reflection? How is the universe putting up a mirror to a shadow part of me that I either can't see or don't want to see, so it had to externalize it? It changes everything when you go, how am I that?

And people will go, well, I'm not Hitler [?]. And yet when Mother Teresa was asked about going in to do the work she did in Calcutta, how could you go into the slums and do this, she said, I do this work because Hitler lives inside me. She knew she was just as capable of using her notoriety in a negative way. So she brought that shadow up and out to do positive things in the world. She harnessed that power.

Ross Tayler (31:58)

Sure, yeah. I remember, it was probably 20 years ago when I was first working with the shadow, one of my teachers said, okay, you're working at Starbucks. Can you love every customer that comes before you? And I was just like, no, I can't, right? And yet I would play that little game: how can I love this person? How can I be more accepting? If I had a judgment, I would just flip it right away in my head and be like, I'm that. And this is a lifelong journey of clearing out these layers and layers and layers. I think shadow work is like we're buffing the car of our life, and there's another layer below it, and there's another layer below that. But it's such powerful work when you can take that responsibility and do something with it, rather than trying to hold it down and suppress it.

Bonita Hodgson (32:49)

Absolutely. I was born with past life recall, so I can recall half a dozen past lives in which I was working on the patterns I'm working on now. I know I've had lives where I had power and abused it. I've had lives where I've been abused by people in power. And this lifetime is about using my power to empower others. But I needed to experience both ends of the spectrum. So if we accept that the most heinous things we see, we've probably done in previous lives, it humbles us, and it gets us to look at, so what is this life for? What am I here to do? What am I here to learn?

And harkening back to the concept of how we view emotion, there's how we talk to our children about emotion. I remember being pregnant with my fourth, and my second born comes up to me one day. He's about four years old at the time. And he goes, Mom, I don't want you to have this baby. And I said, well, why not? He goes, I want it to be a normal baby. I said, well, what's that? I want it to be a girl. He had two brothers. He didn't want to share his toys with one more boy, but a four-year-old doesn't quite know how to word that. Now, when I was a little girl, if I had said to my mother, I don't want you to have this baby, I would have been told, that's a terrible thing to say, of course you want me to have this baby. And a child who is shamed for expressing a feeling doesn't just stop expressing it. They try not to have the feeling, because now it has a negative value attached to it. And that's where the shadow begins.

Ross Tayler (34:17)

Yeah, we come by all this so honestly, right? Even the way that we talk to ourselves, we didn't just create that, we experienced it. So we're just repeating the things that were said to us, like you just described. This must be the way, so I'm going to just continue on that path.

Bonita Hodgson (34:36)

It's not conscious. And this is where the consciousness comes in, right? Being willing to question an experience. I've loved to dance all my life. So I would go out dancing, and I'd come home, and I'd have a part of me that would beat me up for it. It's like, you're such a show off. What do you think you're doing? Because I grew up with a mother who said, you're always looking for attention, right? So I started going out dancing more, so I would bring up the shame pattern. And when she would come up, I would say to her, okay, so let's examine this. What actually happened tonight? Did anybody look upset? No, people came up and said, oh, you're a lovely dancer, oh, it's really nice to see you. So what actually happened that you're here having this conversation with me? So over time, that pattern started to see, there isn't anything negative happening, this is a different reality now. And that part, again, just became part of discernment, instead of a reactive pattern reacting as though I was still that little kid.

Ross Tayler (35:32)

Right, because we're closing the loop. We're actually closing the loop on the false story that was created, and creating a new loop.

Bonita Hodgson (35:42)

Yeah, based on reality, not based on something we were taught to see ourselves as. Because our parents will unwittingly pass on their biases and their fears and whatever their parents gave them, because those generations didn't have all the self-help and the introspection and the counseling we have now. The things we're benefiting from, we pass on, hopefully, to our children, and do better by them. But then we have to turn inward to our inner children, who got the old upbringing.

Ross Tayler (36:10)

And that's exactly what we're doing. And that's evolution, right? We're evolving our humanity. We're evolving our connection to each other. And that's really the beautiful part of what's going on right now. There's a lot shifting and changing, and I think we need to lean on each other in a different way than perhaps we have. It's this interesting piece, because we've been guided to be isolated, and yet we are wired for connection, and we're wired to be in community. It's always been fascinating to me that we live in buildings where we're in each other's energy field, where our auras are intermingling with the people who live above us, probably sleeping right under them in some cases. And yet we feel alone, right? Because we're living in this separate box. I remember when I lived in an apartment building, I was surprised people were less willing to connect and say hello. We're just doing what we can to survive, and yet we need each other. We need connection, we need community, and there are so many cultures that have that inherently, and we don't.

Bonita Hodgson (37:16)

I think we've become, a lot of times, walking heads, and we've become intolerant of our emotions. So if you make a connection with somebody and it jogs you out of your routine, which tends to be up in your head, you might have an emotion and therefore feel vulnerable. And a lot of people avoid vulnerability. I love what Brené Brown said in her TED talk, The Power of Vulnerability. We often think of vulnerability as being open to attack, and she says it's really about being open to connection.

So a lot of my work with people, as I take them through these processes, is to help them to feel all of their feelings with equanimity, which is a very Vipassana approach: not attaching to what feels good, not rejecting what's uncomfortable, but just being able to feel everything, because that's freedom. We stop suffering when we can just have all of our feelings. We no longer need to protect ourselves from people and situations that bring up our feelings. We're able to go, okay, in this scenario, it's bringing this up for me, and I now get to look at it. Which doesn't mean we don't need to exit situations that are destructive or abusive. But we now do it with awareness. It's not just a reaction, like, I passed somebody in the hall and I felt something shut down, right?

Ross Tayler (38:31)

Yeah. Yesterday I was listening to an excerpt from a podcast, and it was a practicing monk. Four years into this experience of being in this monastery, he had this inner conflict come up, and he literally jumped the wall and left the monastery because of what was coming up in him. And he realized exactly what you just said, which is that he needed to be with the pain. Instead of trying to get rid of it, and instead of trying to have it leave, he needed to befriend it, and he needed to love it, and he needed to hold it. And that was what helped him to return and to actually move this energy that had been, in his words, haunting him all along, and he couldn't see it. And I think we're all trying to do that.

Bonita Hodgson (39:17)

Yeah, and the thing I think we miss in trying to be comfortable is that pain is transformative. I live with a chronic condition. It's a rare one called sarcoidosis. I was diagnosed in 2021. Sarcoidosis will form growths in your body, and it's something people can live long lives with, but it has to be managed, right? I had these growths in the lymph nodes around my heart. And I do a lot of work with people who are dealing with illness and pain, to help them understand body as metaphor: do all the stuff the doctors tell you to do, but learn also what the spiritual purpose of it is. I've done all this work internally for decades, but sometimes we need the body to express things for us. I had this wall around my heart. So I did a lot of work on that, and that work led to me meeting the love of my life. So I'm grateful for my condition, because of what it taught me and what it continues to teach me.

So I'll work a lot with people on their mindset. We can either go, why me, why this thing, this situation that's been visited upon me? Or, what is it? What is the universe, in its benevolence, trying to teach me? If we don't go into victim mode... and it doesn't mean you won't have days where you go, well, this just sucks. We all get into the pity party occasionally. But to just be able to go, okay, what's the purpose of this? What is the teaching here?

Then, even when there's physical pain, and I've gone through some very painful procedures, it's like, what is the purpose in this? I had to go through a biopsy at one point, and I was in so much pain, the doctor almost quit on me twice. And I said, do this, because I'm not leaving empty-handed. I'm going to scream, but just keep going. And coming out of that was this feeling of, I just did something that required a lot of courage of me. And there was a lot of satisfaction in having followed through, and discovering on the other side of that, pain's not going to kill me. It's a deeply uncomfortable experience, super, super painful. But it's like, I can do that.

And what is life but a roller coaster? Imagine the best movie you ever saw, right? There are parts where you're laughing or you're crying, you're really angry at that one antagonist, and there are other parts that are scary, and you come out just feeling really satisfied. You felt everything. That's what a good life is like. So you can't say, I just want the stuff that feels good. That's a Prozac life. That's not a life where there's the roller coaster ride, the adventure of it. I want it all.

Ross Tayler (42:00)

And that reminds me of a quote that one of my teachers shared with me. A lot of people don't like it when they hear it, but I like it, and it's: the future creates the present. And I think you described this so well just now. It's only down the road that we realize, I needed to go through all of that in order to experience what I'm experiencing today. And that's the deepest learning. There's grace in that. There's so much power that comes from, I get it now. But when we're in it, we don't get the answers. We don't understand it. And so that's where a lot of the resistance comes from.

Bonita Hodgson (42:40)

And to get back to the topic of pain, when you say, this is unfair, I shouldn't be having this experience, you're adding pain to your pain. But when you say, absolutely everything that happens to me is part of my path, it's all here to help me wake up, thank you, now you're not only not adding pain to your pain, you're opening yourself to move out of resistance, to flow into what you're being offered.

When I first got my diagnosis, a friend said to me, you've got to fight this. And I said, that rings wrong. I need to befriend this. This is a teacher. Even when the doctor came in and gave me the diagnosis, and he was very somber, I was just like, okay, new teacher. I had learned over many years of going through loss and pain in my own life not to resist, but just to go, there is a reason for this. Thank you. I accept. I might not understand it. As you said, I might only see the purpose down the road, but I'm already welcoming it. I'm already accepting it. And that frees up so much of the energy that gets stuck in resistance and slows us down.

If you think of resistance, it's like you're flowing down a river and you can't see what's around the bend, so you think, I'm going to hang on to this rock. Well, now you're not going anywhere, and you're just creating turbulence. At some point you've got to let go of the rock, keep flowing, and see where the river's going to take you. Maybe it's going to take you to a lush forest. You don't know, and you're not going to find out otherwise. But the more we let go of resistance and surrender, the more the universe can give us a life beyond anything we could have imagined. The life of love and adventure and spiritual work in a beautiful environment that I have now, every single thing I've been through in my life to get here has made this worthwhile. I wouldn't turn the clock back and change a thing.

Ross Tayler (44:31)

Totally. You're making me think of all the times that I didn't even think to grab onto the rock. I was just swimming upstream, going against the current, trying to get back up that river. And yeah, there were a lot of times I did that, for sure.

Bonita Hodgson (44:47)

A lot of people do. And I think part of that is we resist ego death. I had a friend who had a brain injury, and I knew right away, because I could see he was partly out of his body. And I said to him, you have now walked through a doorway and there's no going back. You are now a different person, and you're going to live your life differently. Two years after that, he said to me, you were right. He spent two years resisting that. And the resistance is, we don't want to see ourselves differently. We don't want to change our idea of ourselves.

And that can even happen in relationship. You meet this amazing person, and then there's that realization: I'm going to have to fully show up. If they're offering all of who they are to me, I can't hold anything back. So I'll see people go, I really want love, I really want intimacy, I really want someone who really knows me. And then that person shows up, and they go, wow, this person really knows me. Oh crap, I don't even want to know me. And they start to put up a wall, because they're afraid to have somebody see the parts of themselves they haven't learned to love and accept yet. So the more we fall into love and acceptance, even if we're not fully there yet, but we're working on it, we can let somebody into our life who loves us just the way we are, and continue to work on it. So we do have to, every now and then, let go of our ideas about ourselves so we can keep expanding.

And I do think we as a species are going through an accelerated evolutionary process of realizing fully, truly, that we're just energy that takes the form of our thoughts and intentions. So the more we let go of rigid ones, the more we expand, until eventually we realize we're just energy interacting with energy, connected to everything in the universe, and therefore we are literally one. And when you stop seeing others as other, then all the friction is gone, and you're just looking in the mirror.

Ross Tayler (46:51)

I love that. It really simplifies it all, and it's true, isn't it? We are just energy expressing ourselves in bodies.

Bonita Hodgson (46:59)

Yeah, the body's just the slowest moving part of the field.

Ross Tayler (47:02)

And so it's all... I've used psilocybin as a teacher throughout the years, only in my adult life. And consistently through my early experiences, there was this awareness of this cosmic joke, that really it's all kind of a joke. We make it all so serious, we're trying to make sense of it all, and yet at the core, we're taking it all way too seriously, right?

Bonita Hodgson (47:31)

Yes. I still remember, I was fussing about something one day, and my mentor said to me, don't worry, Bonita, because eventually you're going to die. And that's the thing, right? We're all these divine beings having many human experiences, and I have the privilege of knowing some of the other ones I've had. So yeah, it's like, don't take it all so seriously. Play the role you came to play, learn the lessons you came to learn. You're going to have other opportunities. Get as awakened as you can get in this life, if for no other reason than that you don't want to come back with more karma.

When I talk to people who are suicidal, I say, if you leave your body and you're looking down at that vehicle that was supposed to be what you worked through these things with in life, you're going to feel really dumb knowing, well, now I still have the same issues. I just have to come back and do it all over again, only with more karma. Stick around, right? Wake up as much as you can in this life. But you have millennia to do this work. Just work with what's in front of you. Don't overwhelm yourself with all the stuff that's to come after. Because if you do the work that's in front of you today, it's going to shift what comes next. Even if it's hard right now, even if it's grinding, it's going to get easier. Because the more you're willing to look at the chaos inside of you, the less chaos you have to encounter in the outer world.

Ross Tayler (48:56)

So this feels like a good place to hit pause.

Bonita Hodgson (49:00)

This has been great. Thank you so much, Ross. It's been such a pleasure.

Ross Tayler (49:01)

Yeah, I love all the places that we went, and I'm just imagining all the places we could continue to go. But as I always say, it's always nice to leave people wanting more. And I think what you just finished with is a great little wisdom nugget to pause with. I always close by asking my guests one simple question, and that question is: what's one simple way that someone could connect with the sacred today?

Bonita Hodgson (49:30)

So this is a little game I like to play. You close your eyes, and when you open them, you imagine that you are an alien who's dropped from outer space into your body and is seeing what is around you for the first time. Because then you're seeing the things that your mind has filtered out. You're seeing them in that moment as though you're seeing them for the first time. And notice, if you're walking down the street, how long can you just stay in awareness before your mind starts making up stories about what you see? Being completely present in awareness is sacred. Each moment of our lives is sacred in which we are simply awareness, observing without adding a story to what we see.

Ross Tayler (50:22)

I love that. Thank you.

Bonita Hodgson (50:24)

Thank you.

Ross Tayler (50:26)

So Bonita, thank you so much for making the time to have this conversation today. I really appreciate all that you shared, and the wisdom that you've shared through your life experiences and the way that you teach. I trust that the listeners will benefit from this conversation. And I'll make sure that your website and everything is in the show notes, so people have access to all of that.

Bonita Hodgson (50:47)

Thank you. This has been my pleasure, enjoying our time together today, Ross. And thank you to your listeners.