Spicy Psychology: Where Woo Meets Mental Health with Michele Lefler

Michele Lefler joins us to explore shadow work, revealing how this misunderstood practice combines psychology with spiritual elements to help us embrace all parts of ourselves.

• Shadow work addresses aspects of our personality society conditions us to suppress or hide
• Michele describes her approach as "spicy psychology" – blending traditional psychology with spiritual elements
• Emotions like anger aren't negative – they're signals that boundaries are being crossed
• Repressing parts of ourselves creates anxiety, depression, and disconnection from our authentic selves
• The things that irritate us about others often reflect unacknowledged aspects of ourselves
• Simple practices like journaling, voice recording, or oracle cards can be entry points to shadow work
• Shamanic healing and soul retrieval can help recover aspects of ourselves we've disconnected from
• Reconnecting with nature helps us become more attuned to our own bodies and minds
• Toxic positivity prevents us from processing difficult emotions authentically
• Balance is key – "You can't have all light, you can't have all dark. You need to be a panda"

For Michele's free "Breaking Up With Toxic Positivity" email series check it out here. To learn more about shadow work, shamanism and much more, visit michelelefler.com or email michele@michelelefler.com.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meeting Michelle Leffler
• 1:40 Shadow Work & Spicy Psychology
• 5:35 What Shadow Work Really Is
• 9:35 Oracle Cards & Practical Applications
• 15:50 Shamanic Healing & Soul Retrieval
• 21:55 Finding Balance in Light & Shadow
• 28:45 Breaking Up With Toxic Positivity
• 38:22 Final Thoughts & Resources

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey there, welcome back to Advancing with Amy, mental Health Warrior and NeuroSpicyMama. Today I've got a treat for you. My guest is Michelle Leffler, aka your personal librarian, who's part bookworm, part woo goddess, and 100% real. She's here to spill the tea on shadow work what it actually is, why it's not the creepy dark thing people think, and how mixing a little psychology with a little woo or, as she calls it, spicy psychology, can change the way you see yourself. Get comfy, because we're about to dive into the light, the shadow and everything in between. Dive into the light, the shadow and everything in between.

Speaker 2: 0:53

All right, so, michelle, tell us about your business and how it plays into the whole Woo world, definitely. So my business is just me and my name. I have a tagline for myself where I bill myself as being your personal librarian, because I am a librarian in my day job and I love books and I love all things libraries and libraries and librarians are about, and a lot of woo people are about that kind of thing too. So, yeah, kind of blends in for me and it's great. So my business is me bringing you not you specifically, but you, as in the people that are following my business information of all types and I don't niche down into any one thing because I don't like any one thing.

Speaker 2: 1:39

I think that's part of my neuro spiciness. I can't focus on one thing. I think that's part of my neuro spiciness. I can't focus on one thing. I know some people can, some neuro spicy people do hyper focus on one thing, but I don't, and when I do that I end up hating that one thing. So I focus on a lot of different things at one time, which works for me in my business. And I know that a lot of neurotypical business owners try to focus on one niche and kind of push down into one thing and that's fine if that works for them. But I would go stark, red and mad if I could. I would never be able to decide on one thing that I wanted to do, because then I would end up hating it.

Speaker 1: 2:23

Right. Well, just so you don't feel so alone in the neurodivergent world, there's a lot of neurodivergent people that switch back and forth, like my daughter currently has a hyper focus of like anime and manga, but she's had many over the years, so, and like with food, she'll eat the same thing for like six months straight. All she wants is chicken nuggets and then suddenly she can't stand them. And you've stocked up on them and she doesn't want them anymore. That would be me. That's funny so good to know. Yeah, it's not just you.

Speaker 2: 3:02

And I do definitely bring the woo into everything I do because I am very woo. I consider myself to be witchy. I bring that into my business. I'm very holistic, health-minded, very woo-based in the way I approach things and it's just all of who I am. So I couldn't imagine doing business without bringing that in. I actually tried at one point and I was like no, and that's probably why my business was not successful, being taking so long to really take off and start growing, because I tried to force myself to do business without woo and to do business in a neurotypical way and it just did not work for me.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Right, and also what I noticed, because I'm a customer of yours and I love your business. I just recently took one of your courses on shadow work and that falls into a mental health category as well. Do you want to talk about shadow work real quick for us?

Speaker 2: 4:06

sure, um, and you'll probably know from taking that course, I focused a lot on the actual non-woo side and brought in a lot of the psychology of it with carl and everything, because I wanted to show people that woo is not some weird scary thing and it's not like what society portrays it to be.

Speaker 2: 4:35

I like to call all my woo stuff psychological spiciness or something. I like that, um, yeah, like spicy psychology. That's what I tend to refer to it as, because I like psychology, I like mental, thought-based processes, but I don't want to be clinical and dry in my approach to anything, so I want to bring my Wu into it. So for me that's how it blends together. But that course specifically was designed to talk a lot about the psychology of it, and I'm a very big Carl Jung fan and went into all that and his portrayal of the self and the anima and animus and everything, and so it was very heavily psychology. But I did bring woo into it with astrology as well, and then the chakra healing and all that too, because all of that makes us who we are, not just a clinical diagnosis of whatever or a clinical view of anything. We are whole people.

Speaker 1: 5:45

We are more than just one thing.

Speaker 2: 5:48

So if I'm going to bring all of the things into my business, I want to bring all of the things into my approach. And so shadow work for me originally, when I first heard about it was very psychological when I was in high school taking intro to psychology course. But then, as I started embracing more woo as I was older, it was very heavily into the new age witchy community where I lived. Everybody was like shadow work, shadow work, shadow work, and it was all woo and no psychology to it and I'm like if you force it from either aspect then it's not real shadow work. So I thought this course that I made could be something that brought all of it.

Speaker 2: 6:39

And I think I said in that course that if you hate, like, the shadow aspect of who you are, then you're trying to operate completely in the light, and that's not normal, that's not right. You can't operate all in the shadow, but you can't operate all in the light either. You need to be a panda. And so our psychology, our shadow itself, we can't have all all clinical, we can't have all woo. We have to have a balanced panda of of that view of it as well. So, yeah, yeah, my favorite courses that I've ever created and I have a lot of digital products and courses well, I really liked it.

Speaker 1: 7:22

one of the things I found about when you even mentioned shadow work people think it's like spooky or dark or just like not something that you can do and still be spiritual and or religious or whatever and you can. It's totally not all about that.

Speaker 2: 7:41

No, it's all about just the way that we've been conditioned to see ourselves and like little girls are conditioned to be beautiful and to be sweet and to be kind and to be good and to only portray those kinds of things. And so a lot of times when girls experience what society deems a negative emotion for a girl, like bossiness which doesn't necessarily equate to bossiness that's just what people label it. That can be an assertive, but it's labeled as bossy or anger and all that which are normal human emotions that we all feel. But if a girl expresses that, then she's not sweet, she's not kind, she's not demure, and so a lot of times girls grow up to hate that aspect of themselves and they try to shove it down and try to make it go away.

Speaker 2: 8:40

And you can't make part of yourself go away, you can't track. The only thing that that leads to is needing more of what is woo in my terms, and that would be like shamanistic healing, where you do like um, I cannot think of the word right now. I keep saying past life regression in my mind, and that's not right. I'll think of it later, I'll come back to that. But yeah, this is where my mind gets on one thing and then I forget that I know, but when you try to divorce yourself from aspects of your personality that are normal human reaction to something, then it causes more cracks in who you are and then you have to bring that back in.

Speaker 1: 9:32

Yeah, and I would think that could lead to anxiety and depression. It does.

Speaker 2: 9:37

It does. I will tell you that I'm a highly anxious person and a lot of that is because of unhealed things that I've had to deal with in my childhood A lot of traumatic experiences that I experienced at an early age that led me to perfectionistic tendencies and people pleasing behavior kind of thing and trying to live up to the ideal of what the people around me wanted me to be, and that wasn't who I was, and it just creates a lot of chaos and a lot of struggle. That doesn't have to be there. But with shadow work we can look at these aspects of ourself that we deem as bad. That aren't bad. They're just the way society sees them and we can find ways to bring them in.

Speaker 2: 10:31

Like an emotion that we're experiencing is just our body telling us that something is off in some way or something is great in some way, depending on what the emotion is. And happy emotion is our body telling us that things are good, things are great. Anger is our body telling us that some boundary is being crossed. It's how we deal with that anger that becomes the problem. Anger itself is an issue. It's what we do with the knowledge that something is off in our life. But if we don't acknowledge that something is off, and we take that anger and we push it down. We push it away, we try to bury it because society says we shouldn't be angry, because then we're not feminine. That is us trying to be who we're not and it causes problems. One because it's pushing away who we are, but two, because we're not resolving the issue, the boundary that's being crossed in the first place, that's leading to anger or whatever the emotion is.

Speaker 1: 11:47

Exactly, and one of the things that kind of popped up in my mind when you were saying we're just taught to push things down and down and down, and I thought you know that's another fear I have heard about shadow work is that people are afraid to get into shadow work and then find out stuff about themselves that they've pushed down and is it going to open up you know, a big can of worms. What would you say about that.

Speaker 2: 12:11

It might, it might not, but one you're not going to know unless you try to do it. But two even if it does, it's already. The fact that you're not dealing with it is already causing harm to your body and your mind and your spirit. You may not be aware of it, but there are issues going on, like if you are anxious, if you are dealing with anxiety, if you are dealing with fear, that probably stems from some unresolved thing that you're not even aware of. So if you do this shadow work and it opens that up and brings it to the light, then you can actually deal with it. It might hurt more, but it's like grief. If you don't deal with it it's not going to go away, it's just going to get repressed and then it's going to make things uglier to deal with than if you just deal with it in the first place.

Speaker 1: 13:03

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:03

So if you, do the work and these ugly things come up. These can of worms open up. Then deal with it and then you can actually move past it.

Speaker 1: 13:12

That sounds much better, so what about?

Speaker 2: 13:15

shadow work. Soul retrieval that's what I was trying to think of. Soul retrieval I was like I won't think about it.

Speaker 1: 13:24

So, going back to shadow work when you are doing shadow work, what does that mean? Like, what are you actually doing? What do people have to do to open up that door?

Speaker 2: 13:34

Oh that could be a whole slew of things and it really depends on the person and what they want to do. But one of the easiest ways is to do some kind of journaling about something if you know that you're dealing with anger, because and I keep coming back to that, because it's an easy thing that a lot of people deal with either themselves or somebody else. So I just need an example and that one's just easy to talk about. So if you're dealing with anger and you're like I wish I wasn't such an angry person, why am I so angry if you journal about it or explore things? I hate journaling myself and I don't. I love it. People either love it or hate it.

Speaker 2: 14:20

I don't know, who's either, meh, whatever. But I would much rather open up, like the, the voice memo recorder thing on my phone and just talk. I'll do that before. I'll sit there and write something down, because there's just a block in my mind about writing things down. With school when they made us write and I hated it and now I just so. But I can talk, obviously, but journal or word vomit into your voice recorder on your phone, if nothing else, just the things that come up when you think about anger or if you might not be dealing with anger and this is one thing I know I mentioned in that course but a lot of times the things that bother us about somebody else are really something that is in us that we just don't see, but we see it mirrored in another person. So even if you're not dealing with anger or you don't think you have anything that you're dealing with that's a thought of to be negative, emotion or whatever, what are some things that other people do that really get your goat, that really needle at you. That's needling at you because it's something in you and you might not want to explore that. But that's a beautiful thing to explore and you can do that with journaling One of my favorite things.

Speaker 2: 15:41

Obviously woo, because I'm a woo person pull an oracle card or a tarot card, and all tarot is. It's not fortune telling, it's just another spicy psychology thing. It's just a card that's going to represent something. So it's like you pull a card and what does that card mean to you? It's just your psyche trying to tell you what you already know, but you're not listening. So you pull a card and there it is, and that's just another way to get the message across to you. It's not some big old witchcraft thing although there's nothing wrong with that because I'm in but it's really just spicy psychology, right, it's really a lot of intuition.

Speaker 1: 16:24

It is yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:27

But that's one thing I tell my husband all the time is like witchcraft is just spicy psychology. What are you talking about Exactly? I love that, Whatever, it's just spicy psychology.

Speaker 1: 16:39

So I don't suppose you have any Oracle cards handy.

Speaker 2: 16:43

No, I don't have any with me right now. I do oh yay.

Speaker 1: 16:51

I have Colette Barron-Reed's Guides of the Hidden Realms. Have you ever seen that one?

Speaker 2: 16:57

No, but I love her cards, so I haven't seen that one, but they're beautiful.

Speaker 1: 17:03

And these are ones. I don't know if she did this with all her cards, but these are ones that she painted, each one on a huge canvas, and then made them into cards.

Speaker 2: 17:12

Oh, that's gorgeous, I'm sure.

Speaker 1: 17:15

Oh they are. They're beautiful. So If you want, I can pull one for you, If you have something you'd like to know.

Speaker 2: 17:25

I always have something I want to know.

Speaker 1: 17:30

I'm shuffling them now for you, let's see a specific question.

Speaker 2: 17:36

Let me think so this situation I'm dealing with I'm not going to go into what the situation is, but it's somebody in my life has some issues that they're dealing with that they will not acknowledge that they're dealing with issues, and it impacting my life wouldn't need to do, because it's impacting my life in a negative way and I can't just keep not dealing with it.

Speaker 1: 18:05

I need to do something I hear you, so let's talk about this. What I pulled was letting go of stories, but it's upside down, which I know seems to be negative in some tarot cards. But I like that. Colette Barron-Reed doesn't look at it that way. I don't look at it that way either. Right, and I love that. I forget what she calls it.

Speaker 2: 18:31

I don't remember what she calls it, but for me a reverse card is just. It can either be the opposite of what the card would normally say if it was normal facing, or it could just be a hidden aspect of it, like the first thing you would normally think of with that card. Take it a bit deeper and what could a deeper reading behind it be? Exactly Not anything negative, I just think in terms of what's the opposite of that or what's something that that could point to.

Speaker 1: 19:08

That's a little deeper than that Right exactly. Let me read you this and see if it resonates at all. It says the nature of attachment is sticky and innately sabotaging. The stronger and more prolonged the emotional obsession, the less likely you are to experience your desired outcome. Too much wanting turns one into a hungry ghost destined to be unfulfilled, always longing for something out of reach In a continuum of scarcity.

Speaker 1: 19:40

You're being invited to look closely at the desires you're feeding, how attached you are to something going exactly your way and your fear of never being fulfilled Release whatever it is that you're holding on to too tightly. Let go and let God decide what is best. You took your one step and claimed your intention. Now surrender it fully, with no strings attached. Just stay loosely curious and keep walking. Remember that every inspiration contains its built-in blueprint for success. But the tightly clenched acorn can't become an oak tree. Well, that is fascinating because, with what you told me, that leads me to think that kind of what you were saying earlier about shadow work when you see somebody else, that really things get under your skin. It's you that needs to do the work, and this is kind of what this is saying.

Speaker 2: 20:37

Kind of yeah, first initial reaction to what the card says, but given what this situation is with this person, it's not necessarily some aspect that is needling on me that I mean it is, but it isn't right. I I can't really go into explanation, that's's okay.

Speaker 1: 21:03

What do you get from the card? Because?

Speaker 2: 21:04

of the person's, like the privacy of the person.

Speaker 1: 21:08

Right and that's fair. I don't want you to do that Right. Did you get anything from that card, Did it?

Speaker 2: 21:13

resonate with you. I did get something from the card, but because it was reversed, I want to think about it some more. Ah yeah, more yeah. I try not to take reverse cards at the first initial thing that comes to me, because of that deeper aspect. So I do get something out of it for sure, but I want to do a little more mulling it over before it's like. Is that exactly what it means, since it was reversed?

Speaker 1: 21:41

Right, I think that's smart. I think you know what's funny is if you really need to hear that again anyway, if you don't get it the first time, you'll get that card again in the reverse position again, Exactly. It's going to keep coming up.

Speaker 1: 21:57

It's going to keep coming up. Right, I was using a different deck one time and I kept pulling one every day, and for two weeks straight, I kid you not, I kept pulling the high priestess and couldn't figure out what it meant for my life, and so I kept pulling it until I finally figured it out. Now I don't remember what it meant, but it just every day it would come up, no matter how I shuffled them. That's hilarious, I know. It's like a very funny universe. That's happened to me before, yeah, so what else do you think you teach in your business that has to do with, maybe, mental health or neurodivergence, other than the shadow work?

Speaker 2: 22:37

A lot of the shamanic healing type things the services I do and the courses that I have on that are very mental health fitting in I mentioned when I thought about soul retrieval being what I was trying to think of when I was talking about shadow work, because those go hand in hand.

Speaker 2: 22:57

A lot of times if you do try to to do some kind of shadow work, if something does come up or if you're not getting anywhere, then I found a lot of times if you try to get into a more shamanic state or get shamanic work done with a soul retrieval, then it helps to bring back things. Because when when people hear soul retrieval, they tend to think oh my, my God, I'm broken, whatever. But it's not that at all and it's not saying that you don't have a soul, because that's something else. I've heard people say Everybody has a soul and they're not broken. It's just that when society has conditioned us to do something and we haven't done shadow work and we try to repress those things, or if something very traumatic has happened to us, a lot of times we repress that because we don't want the memory, we don't want to deal with the way it makes us feel so pieces of who we are break off. They're not like broken off and gone, but they're repressed and soul retrieval is a way to bring those back that someone else does for you, like I would never do a soul retrieval for myself, because somebody else should be taking that journey for me, because I won't necessarily recognize what I need to bring back and someone who's not attached to me, going on a journey on my behalf, would be able to bring back something and give it back to me that I can then explore and integrate.

Speaker 2: 24:35

And so I often find that shadow work and soul retrieval work hand in hand in that aspect, especially if you start off with basic things in shadow work like journaling, pulling cards, exploring that Sometimes it's not deep enough and you want something deeper and you're not feeling like you're getting anywhere and then you can get into deeper things. But I like to tell people start with those kinds of things, because you don't want to just jump in headfirst Like you wouldn't not know how to swim and go dive off the diving board into the deep end of the swimming pool and expect to float. You got to go in the wading pool and learn how to swim first before you would do that. So don't go jumping in if you've never done this kind of work. Don't go diving off into the deep end of the pool. Start with the basics but then move forward into that.

Speaker 2: 25:29

And there's all kinds of different ways to do shadow work and shamanic healing type things, and soul retrieval is just one. It's just a lot of times when I mention shamanic healing, that's the first thing people bring up because they've heard about it and there's such've heard about it and there's such a misunderstanding about it. People want to know. So when I, I thought it was hilarious when I couldn't think of what it was called, it's right there, I'm worried. Talking about you can't think of what it's called it's like. Now I know why my parents called me by my sister's name when I was a kid but it Like now.

Speaker 1: 26:05

I know why my parents called me by my sister's names when I was a kid, but it was just that moment. Now I have a question for those of us that are still in the kiddie pool and we haven't taken that deep dive, and maybe we don't even know what shamanism is, let alone a soul retrieval journey.

Speaker 2: 26:21

Tell us more about what that actually is. So shamanic healing is energy healing on steroids, I like to say, but not really on steroids. If you think about a shaman, what is the first image that pops into?

Speaker 1: 26:35

your mind Someone in a long like robe and maybe a teepee, or someone out in the wilderness.

Speaker 2: 26:45

That's exactly what most people think. They're like Native American tribes, this, that and the others and I've heard it all because I've taken a lot of shamanic studies and I've actually apprenticed with shamanic healing. But a lot of people think it's cultural appropriation because they're like you're not Native American, you can't do this.

Speaker 2: 27:09

and then they are surprised when I tell them that the word shaman is not even a Native American word it is a Siberian language, the Tungusic language, I think off the top of my head, from Siberia and it came from their word Saman, s-a-m-a-n. And most cultures throughout the world, if you trace them back enough, go back to a more Earth-centric, animistic religion type system and shamanism is kind of that. But has also gotten other energy healing brought into with it, like obviously, in siberia they wouldn't have had like the chakra system that we get from like India and they wouldn't have had like other aspects that we get from like Japan and China energy healing techniques, things. But all of that has been swirling around and amalgamated into what most shamanic practitioners today would be doing. And the training I took was very South American based and very based out of the Andes, mountains and things. So it's definitely got a lot of different vibes going on. But it's very earth based and getting in touch with nature.

Speaker 2: 28:47

And if we take ourselves back to a more reverent of the earth and I'm not talking about worshiping the earth, I'm not talking about any religious thing Like shamanism is not a religion, it's a practice. So you can be religious, you cannot be religious, you can whatever and you can. You can practice this. But if you take yourself back to a place where you're in tune with the earth and what nature has to tell us. Then it's easier to transcend the monkey mind that we have that society today has us inundated with so much information.

Speaker 2: 29:30

Now, I'm not saying that you have to get rid of all your technology or whatever I mean hello, my whole business is based on technology. But technology is designed to keep us hyper fixated and hyper stimulated, and not in our own bodies. But if we purposely put that down and step outside and sit on the ground, put our feet on the ground, notice what's going on in nature around us, and you can do this whether you're in the city or wherever you are. And you can do this whether you're in the city or wherever you are. You can look out of a window and see sky and see ground, whatever. Even if you live in a very urban, concrete jungle, you can find a patch of earth somewhere.

Speaker 1: 30:15

And that's grounding, what everybody's been calling grounding lately, right? Yes, yes.

Speaker 2: 30:20

Yes. So if you do that, if you ground with the earth, and if you take it beyond that and just notice the earth and try to get your life back in touch with the more earth centric things, you'll notice how animals and plants start to communicate with you.

Speaker 2: 30:43

And I'm not sitting here talking about an animal literally opening their mouth, like your dog, literally having a conversation with you, right? But if you have a houseplant, you can start to tune into the energy of that plant and if you have a cat, you might start noticing your cat's feelings more Obviously, your cat is not sitting there having a conversation with you, but you can tell these things and it's easier then to start noticing things within your own body. The more in touch you become with nature and the natural world, the more in tune you're going to become with your own mind and body.

Speaker 1: 31:26

And I can see that because I've seen research where they do experiments with plants and they have one plant they're talking to and telling very good, supportive things and one they're putting down and being negative with, and the negative one dies and positive one survives. And that's just how it is for us too, in our mind. If we are talking negatively to ourselves, we start to feel negatively and be negative, and if we talk positively to ourselves, then it's different. I mean, you have to watch out for toxic positivity, which is another course I took from you. Yes, I hate toxic positivity, right, but I do toxic positivity, right, but I do think positivity is important. I just think it's not the end, all be all.

Speaker 2: 32:15

Exactly, and that was I created that resource, and that's a free one, which is a good one for people to get and get an introduction to what I do and get an introduction to what I do.

Speaker 2: 32:31

But I created that because I was so tired of the witchy community being all love and light, love and light, love and light. And it's like F you. Sometimes love and light isn't going to help me feel better. And yes, when bad things happen to us, we have to try to see the positive in it to get over it. But sometimes life just sucks right.

Speaker 2: 32:50

And to acknowledge the fact that sometimes life just sucks is not you being a bad person or not dwelling on the negative. Sometimes you need to just think about this. Experience sucks and I'm gonna wallow in how much this sucks for a short amount of time now. Don't want to stop wallowing it forever. But it'll know, then I'm back into the shadow work thing. You can't have all light, you can't have all dark. You need to be a panda, a penis.

Speaker 2: 33:21

So when bad things happen, yes, let yourself notice the suckiness of it and let yourself dwell in that for a time being and then pull yourself up by the bootstraps, get some help, whatever you need to turn that negative into a positive. So, yes, I will sit here and say I've gone through some pretty horrible, horrible things in my life, pretty Horrible, horrible things in my life. I experienced neglect from caregivers as a young child Dealt with the loss of all my close relatives. Well, not all of my close relatives, but all of my grandparents died before I was 20 years old. My mom died when I was 40. My dad is still living.

Speaker 2: 34:08

I became a widow at the age of 31 when my husband, who was 24 at the time, died in divorce prior to that. I had been engaged prior to that and found out that my fiance at that time was gay, which is fine. I have no problem with him being gay, but I mean that was a loss for me so all of that, all of that swirling around in my life and it's like I've been through some crap.

Speaker 2: 34:36

yeah, sometimes I just need to sit down and think, man, I've experienced some crap in my life exactly not to dwell on it forever and and never try to look for some good things in my life just because of all the crap I've been dealt. Yeah, I've dealt with some crap, but you know what? I've had a lot of good things happen in my life, oh yeah.

Speaker 1: 35:01

I mean, just like a week or so ago, I had some minor happen that just really ticked me off and I text my mom and I said something to her and she came back with all this oh, but your life is going so well and you have your family and you have. And I just thought, oh, my god, I'm done, okay bye.

Speaker 2: 35:23

It's like yes, I know all the good things I have, but I just need to vent for a little bit right and then I can be positive later.

Speaker 1: 35:32

Yeah, yeah. Well, michelle, I have really enjoyed talking to you. Tell me, do you have like a freebie or anything that people could access, or where did they find you?

Speaker 2: 35:43

on my website, michellelefflercom, and I have one l in my name, michelle, so I think you're gonna link to it anyway. Oh yeah, it's like, but I would say, the breaking up with toxic positivity email sequence. That is a free resource and you can find that on my website. That would be a good place for people to start. Literally, you'll find all my stuff on my website. So you know, go explore. But if I had to name just one thing to start with after this conversation, it would be that yeah, and I got to second you that that is a really great resource.

Speaker 1: 36:24

I have been through the whole course and I thought it was enlightening resource.

Speaker 2: 36:29

I have been through the whole course and I thought it was enlightening and it'll. It's not something you have to remember a password to log into a platform or anything. You literally sign up and it's delivered to your email every day for however many days I can't remember now how many days that one is but it just comes every day into your email box and you get it and you read it and you can save the emails or you can delete them when you're done.

Speaker 1: 36:51

Whatever, and it's not an overwhelming email, like you know, takes you 15 minutes to read. It's a quick, little two minute read.

Speaker 2: 36:58

Yeah, nobody wants to be stuck in their inbox reading one thing that long. No Right, and tell me one other thing.

Speaker 1: 37:07

Sorry, I have a question Do you actually do some of this shamanism healing and do you do shadow work with?

Speaker 2: 37:14

people I do. I don't have those yet on my website. They're coming back. I did on an old website. I had to do a lot of business changes because of some legal things that were happening in Pennsylvania at the time and with my business. So I had to, at the start of this year, the end of last year, start of this year completely change my brand name and everything. My website domain, everything got an overhaul and I'm still on the tail ends of that. Everything has migrated over yet they're coming.

Speaker 2: 37:52

But if anyone is interested in that kind of work and it's not on my website, please just shoot me an email. And what is your email address? It is michelle at, michelle leftlercom. You go to my website, michelle at before that, and you'll find it and you can actually put that in the show notes or whatever you need to do for that as well. Please just contact me, send me an email, sign up for something and respond to any email. I love getting responses to emails. You can respond and say, hey, I, I'm interested in this, whatever, and I will hook you up with that. We can talk through it if it's something for you. I don't recommend it for everybody, but I am very happy to talk to anybody about what's the best recommended course for them, and I know it's not necessarily all on there yet, but it's coming back because, yes, I do it. I love that kind of work. You know, one thing that we talk about all the time, amy, is we're only one person and we're trying to run these businesses by ourselves.

Speaker 1: 38:59

Amen. Sometimes they take longer than we want them to. Yes, they do. I've been there. So just to give you a chance at the very end of this interview here, can you tell us, is there anything you want to leave our listeners with, something you want to tell them?

Speaker 2: 39:16

I would say to be who you are, no matter who that is. Live your life gloriously and happily and loudly, despite what anybody else says, and don't let somebody else's version of who you need to be affect who you really are, and you'll be much happier for it.

Speaker 1: 39:39

I love that. Yeah, that's beautiful. All right, thanks, michelle. Thank you for having me, wasn't that good? Michelle totally nailed it. Your shadow isn't something to fear. It's a part of you that deserves a seat at the table. If you're ready to start exploring yours, go grab her free, breaking up with toxic positivity email series at michelle. That's M-I-C-H-E-L-E-L-E-F-L-E-Rcom. Seriously, it's quick, it's smart and it won't clog up your inbox. And if you want to talk shadow work or shamanic healing with her, just shoot her an email at Michelle at MichelleLefflercom. Remember light shadow messy, magical. All of it makes you. You Own it and keep advancing lawyer.