SAFS 12#: Listen to Yourself: The Importance of Honoring Your Intuition in a Noisy World

When we were young, we leaned on others for support and guidance. It makes sense. If you're a child, you should probably listen to your parental units, as well as mentors on what is okay to do.

And as we grew older, we looked to outside signs of what it means to be successful or what it means to have acceptance. However, there's no instruction book on learning to listen to yourself, so we run the risk of living our lives based on other people's standards.

How do we learn to stand on our own?

In this episode of Spiritual AF Sundays, we bring on kinesiologist and archetypal life coach Amanda Kate to share her own story of healing and the importance of being able to distinguish between your own inner voice’s callings, and that of society.

It's time to sit back in your favorite chair, grab your favorite beverage and get ready for this episode of Spiritual AF Sundays. Listen to Yourself: The Importance of Honoring Your Intuition in a Noisy World, with guest Amanda Kate.

 you're listening to Spiritual AF Sundays, created and hosted by The Mystic Geek.

If you're looking to explore intriguing questions about the meaning of life and our place in the universe, then you're in the right spot.

[Opening Credits]

Jessica: All right, Amanda, thank you for joining us today. How are you doing over there?

Amanda: Yeah, I'm doing really well. Thank you, Jessica, do you prefer Jessica or Jess? I

Jessica: I go by, I go by Jessica. It's like if we're, yeah, I, I do either. I'm cool with Jessica. Uh, so yeah. Where are you from?

Amanda: I'm down in Melbourne, Australia,

Jessica: Awesome.

Amanda: It's nice and warm today.

Jessica: Up here in Minnesota, it's still cold. Cold enough that it bursts pipes, unfortunately,

Amanda: Oh,

Jessica: Yeah. Fortunately, it was not in my house. It was on the streets, but still, it was an inconvenience there. Life happens. Well tell our visitors here, our guests a little bit more about yourself.

Amanda: Yeah, so I am a kinesiologist, archetypal life coach, and mentor, and do all of these different energy healing works with my clients cuz I am the lifelong learner and sage constantly looking at the newest thing to add to my toolbox so that I can bring it into client sessions and also implement it in my own life.

So I'm very much about, gaining knowledge that I'm needing at the time for my own growth, and then being able to, convert that knowledge into the wisdom of living it and then using it to help my clients and come on podcasts and share what I've been doing.

Jessica: For those who are new to the term, what is a, you said Kinestesiologist?

Amanda: Kinesiologist.

Jessica: Kinesiologist, yes. So, what does a kinesiologist do?

Amanda: So kinesiology in the United States is a little bit more just based on the muscle therapy, so it's much more in the occupational therapist or physiotherapist type space.

In Australia, we are talking about, and in many other parts of the world, we're talking about energetic kinesiology.

So we're looking at the movement of everything through the body in terms of energy, prana, chi, whatever you wanna call it, life force. Looking at the way that our emotions and our stresses impact our physical health. We're looking at that mind, body spirit connection, where we look at the fact that quantum physicists have proven that the universe is 4% physical matter.

So we look at this human meat suit as a small part of the picture, and we build that out by understanding more about the energetic self, the emotional self, the mental self, the spiritual self, and on and on, financial, sexual, relational, all of those different aspects of us that all feed in to create the whole of who we are.

So we're really looking at as holistic a picture as we can, because we know that, say, emotional stress impacts physical health and it impacts the energy that we've got in the day and it impacts our ability to connect into our spiritual self. So we know that all of these things are interconnected, and what we are looking to do is create balance and flow through the body so that we can go back to this ideal, I guess, of being able to tap into our internal self and access that innate healing capacity that the body has and access the guidance that our body has for us so that we can express that in the world more easily.

Amanda’s Path to Kinesiology

Jessica: That is definitely a lot there. So what, but what got you down this road? Was this something that you wanted to do ever since you grew up? Or were there life events that led you down this path?

Amanda: I don't think anyone enters any of the healing arts or anything related to healing, whether that be medicine, whether that be, you know, physical therapy, whether that be the allopathic side or the natural therapy side without going through something themselves or seeing something themselves. 

So for me, it was very much my own trauma, patterning my own chronic fatigue and I kept feeling really let down by Western Medicine who kept telling me that I was fine and trying to go, well, “here are some antidepressants that'll fix it.”

And I'm going, “Mm, it doesn't feel right.”

And by the way, for some people, that is a really necessary step for me. It was not the right one, and I really do want to say that because there's no shame in needing medication for anything.

However, for me, It was the band-aid, brush off, “Oh, go see somebody else now cuz we don't know what to do with you.”

Jessica: Oof.

Amanda: Meanwhile, natural therapies started asking me questions about my support systems. They asked me about my relationship. They asked me about my childhood. They asked me about stresses that had happened in my life that I had suppressed or repressed, or pretended didn't happen or was so ashamed I hid them.

And as we started to bring up those patterns of behavior and those reactionary patterns, seeing the emotions and the stories that were stuck around it and being able to reframe it and also do the vibrational work to shift that stress through the body. I was noticing I was getting lighter physically, mentally, emotionally, and literally on all levels.

I was able to connect more to my own body and start reading some of the signs and signals it was giving me. So I was more able to tap into my intuition, and I was more easily able to trust my intuition because I started building this self-trust within myself, and then I also started building the courage to start acting on my intuition which I think was the biggest key I was missing for so, so long because I didn't trust myself.

I didn't act on my intuition, cause I didn't trust that it was true. And yet in hindsight, everything my intuition had ever told me was a hundred on the money. And so it was really moving through that process and to see that was the reason, I think it was six months to the day from my very first session at kinesiology that I was sitting in the classroom learning how to, you know, become a kinesiologist.

Jessica: That is an amazing story and yeah, I definitely agree. , I mean, other than the superficial, like the five-year-old going “I wanna be a doctor when I grow up!”, it's like any one of us who gets into the various healing arts, it's usually from a place of overcoming our own woundedness on that.

Amanda: Yeah, absolutely.

Why We Follow Society’s Expectations

Jessica: Now, you mentioned a lot of it was about focusing on your intuition versus the external factors, including the doctors that were there. Do you see that in the world nowadays? Do you see that same type of pattern people are going through?

Amanda: All over the place. All over the place. And it's funny, my partner will bring home a story from work and I'll go, “Oh, can you see the trauma patterning here, here, and here…” And he's like, “No.”

But you can see the people pleasing. You can see the desire to keep everybody else happy at the expense of yourself, and it happens so often, you know, people call it martyrdom or people pleasing or, there are so many terms that we use, none of which are particularly empowering. But once you start understanding the bodily physiology around it; when we take us back to our first incarnation as humans, we were tribal creatures. If we were not accepted by the tribe, we were cast out into the wilderness to die.

And so everything that we did was looking at the people around us.

What are they saying?

What are they doing?

How are they acting?

And therefore, what do we need to do, say and act to be safe in this world and to be accepted by those people, and to be loved by those people, and to be part of those people's group, because there's that safety in numbers.

Even today, when we're in a very different scenario, we're still effectively going into that live-or-die brain-wave because the brain is so binary. Even though obviously we're not conscious of it, all of our decisions go to, if I'm kicked outta the tribe, I'm gonna die, so I need to be accepted by the tribe.

So depending on how your tribe functions, depends then on the roles, the behaviors, and the thought patterns that you are expressing in the world.

What I think is quite funny is that as children, we are taught to put all that influence outside of ourselves and looked to that external because again, we need that guidance.

We need to go to our parents if we have a problem, we need to go to a doctor if we have a problem, or at school to go to the teacher. We need to go outside ourselves.

But there's no time in our, you know, teenage years where we get sat down and it's like, you know what? You're coming towards adulthood now. Start keying into your intuition and start listening to that, and then come to me and talk about some of the messages you're getting because your intuition often will guide you in the right direction.

That conversation kind of doesn't happen.

Jessica: No, it does not. The teen tries to become independent. They end up going more for what their friends say, and meanwhile, poor parents are like pulling their hair out, trying to figure out, well, how do I relate at this point? How do I provide guidance when they're not listening to me, but they're listening to everyone else?

Amanda: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And that's kind of what we're supposed to do as teens, but then we get thrown out into the world as adults and we're expected to do all this adulting, and there's none of this transition. There's none of this teaching. And so I think it's that bit that's missing.

And so that's what I now try and implement with clients as they're in their twenties and beyond is getting them to tap into their intuition, to clear some of the noise out the way, so that they can start to listen to what their body is telling them. Because the whole way through my body was telling me what was right for me and what wasn't.

I just didn't trust it.

How We Start Listening To Ourselves

Jessica: So basically what you're talking about here is a form of pattern breaking.

Breaking from that pattern of what we were trained to do as children, which is externalizing our voice. So basically listening to other people versus following our own inner guide. And now teaching people to be able to go within in order to be able to figure out what they need to be doing versus asking everyone else and then moving forward from that.

I know you mentioned a bit in your story, in working with clients, have you seen the pattern of how people might unintentionally get to that point of disconnecting from needing that external validation in order to be able to start listening to themselves internally?

Amanda: Oh, absolutely. And I've been that person myself. We do tend to attract people who've been through similar things to us, or even if they're not the same, it's that similar patterning.

We all have to go through it at some point, whether we're consciously aware of it or whether we are not consciously aware of it.

I think some people are very lucky and they just seem to go through the process without actually realizing they're going through the process. They're those people who just seem to have this innate confidence and you're like, holy crap, how did you do that? But for those of us with more complex, upbringings, let's call it, or experiences working out what's ours and what's not.

When I first started on this journey, people said to me a lot, “just be yourself,” and I'm going, “I don't know who I am. I've got no idea who that is,” because I was so busy trying to please everybody else and be who I thought everybody else wanted me to be, that I was like, “Well, aren't I being myself? I think I am being myself.”

Cause I didn't know who that was or what that looked like. And so when I started to break these old patterns, there was this loss of identity and this loss of self because who am I if I'm not pleasing everybody else? Who am I if I'm not prioritizing everybody else? Who am I if I start to look at my own needs and wants,

and who am I being told that I'm becoming because everybody around me is so used to me martyring myself, victimizing myself, pleasing everybody else at the expense of myself, that they lost the person that they knew as well. And so there was grief in that for them. And also I'm trying to find my feet. So it was a really uncomfortable time I think, for everybody involved as I was navigating this and working through it, and I feel like I'm coming through the end of that major process now and into a much more settled state where I'm finding my feet on the floor a little bit more firmly, but there is so much pattern breaking to do sometimes, and I think we spoke about this when we first connected.

We were not aware of our patterns, because they're our patterns, and they're our normal, and so it's not until we start learning through conversations with other people or through sessions with healers or therapists or facilitators or whatever you wanna call them, that we start going, oh, there's different ways than what I've been doing things, huh?

And some light, little light bulbs go on, and then it's going, okay, so we've gotta try these behaviors. Now that doesn't mean that the old behaviors disappear. Those old behaviors are still there. I still fall into old behavior patterns and find myself in them going, oh, you missed all those signs that were showing you [that] you were gonna head down this route.

But there's always a lesson there, and I think one of the things that healing has given me is more self-compassion, more empathy for the fact that I'm human and those muscle memories are still there.

In that humanness, there will be that messiness. There will be those unresourceful behaviors that raise their heads. There will be all of those reactions.

It's just that as we do more and more work, we become more aware of and therefore we're more able to navigate ourselves down another path, or if we go down the same path, navigate a different ending.

Jessica: In your practice, cuz you've been not only talking about unconsciously fixing things but consciously going through the process, how do you go about helping people do that?

Amanda: With kinesiology, we are using muscle tones, so it's looking at the way the electrical signal is going through a muscle. If something is not stressful, that signal travels perfectly well through say the one of the arm muscles that we're testing. If something stresses that signal, say I ask a question and you're like, Ooh, I don't like that answer, your muscle will not be able to hold tone. It's like that electrical signal gets interrupted and so then the muscle will give, I don't like the term weak, but it won't be able to hold that tone and that strength.

In using that, we're able to bypass the conscious mind and get into what's happening in the subconscious. And so the questions that we ask are really, really relevant because I don't know what's going on for somebody else in their subconscious. Muscle testing is the way for me to read what's happening in their subconscious, to find those emotions that are stuck there, the age they got stuck there, then the client tells me what was going on at that age. We find the emotional relevance, and then we can start shifting that vibrational pattern so that they can become aware of that subconscious patterning in the conscious mind.

So a lot of what we're doing is bringing these subconscious programs into the conscious mind so we go, oh, that's why I do that, or that's how I do that, and then consciously we can make a decision to change or to not change, to change those behaviors and to evolve into our next iteration, or we can choose to keep going with those behaviors. That's that free-will choice aspect. However, some of my clients will go, I dunno if the work's working, but I did find myself in this situation and I decided I didn't wanna go down that route anymore, so I did something different.

I'm going, that's exactly what the work is. It's actually that simple that you see yourself heading down this old path that's very well worn, and you go, Ooh, I don't think I want to go down there cause I know how this plays out.

I said that's exactly what you're supposed to be doing. It doesn't mean that the behaviors stop because we're human and it's muscle memory almost.

It means that we can find it and we're building new neural networks to notice these things sooner.

Jessica: People think this is so complicated, but once you start getting into that pattern of self-reflection and understanding that pattern and breaking it, it's very simple in that way.

We overcomplicate things as human beings and what you're doing is, decluttering, all that extra stuff people put on when it comes to their own path of healing. It's basically like choosing differently. There you go.

Amanda: Yeah, we'll do the vibrational work so that you are noticing what you're doing to make it easier for you to choose differently, because until you're aware of something, you are not aware of it, and so it's also simplifying it to, you know, when you know better, you can choose to do better if you're in the right space at that time.

There are times when I am in a back-brain reactionary stress pattern where I can't access all of my creative front-brain tools. I can't look at new ways of approaching this situation because I'm in stress. But those stress patterns become easier for me to pick up as they're creeping on because I'm understanding what's happening in my body with stress so I catch it a little bit sooner. 

But there are times, you know, I've got all the tools, and my tool shed's locked and the keys, you know, somewhere I can't find, so I can't access my tools. But there's still lessons in it, and I think what doing the work for me has given me is more empathy and compassion for myself when I fall into those old unresourceful behaviors to recognize, well, that's part of the human experience and it's how I deal with it after that's really important. 

If I end up in an argument with my partner, the argument is less important than how we resolve it at the end. How we move through it, and how I can then own my part in it of going, “You know what, that was a complete projection on my part. I was being a bitch. Sorry.” You know?

Jessica: We all have those moments.

Amanda: Hell yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Jessica: Thank you for your time here. Is there anything else that you wanna share with our listeners today?

Check Out Amanda Kate Online

Amanda: No, not at all. If you want to find out more about my work, I'm at amandakate.com.au and I have a book out, which is called Divine Messy Human: a Spiritual Guide to Prioritizing Internal Truth Over External Influence and that's on Amazon and Kindle, and I think it's Barnes and Nobles in Noble in the States and a few other places.

So

Jessica: yeah.

Are you anywhere on social media?

Amanda: I am on all the socials, but going to my website (amandakate.com.au) is so much easier cuz then you can just click a link and find your way there.

Jessica: And we'll make sure that we put your stuff in the show notes. And Amanda, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your wisdom and insight with our listeners.

Amanda: A absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Jessica.

Jessica: That was an amazing discussion with Amanda Kate, and I hope that you found a nugget of wisdom in that conversation where we looked at how the external world influences us and our power to retake that focus for ourselves and really listen to our internal truth versus what we are hearing and what we're feeling pressured to do based on the outside world.

So with that, I do want to move forward and share a little bit more about what is coming up episode-wise.

On March 12th, so a week from today, we're going to bring on Jennifer Moore. She is an EFT trainer. She is a good friend of mine. We love to geek out about various things and what we're going to be talking about on that episode is the healing journey and how everything that we've learned about healing is wrong.

And then after that on March 19th, I'm actually going to be at Paganicon in Minneapolis, in the Twin Cities area. That is our annual Pagan, Wiccan, earth-based religion conference. And while I'm there, I will have my podcast prerecorded to talk about Mabon and Ostara. So we're looking again at the wheel of the year and these specific two points which rest on the equinoxes and their importance when it comes to honoring the world and honoring the cycle of the seasons of the year.

So with that. I hope that all is well with you for the coming week.

That you take a little bit of time to focus on why you do the things you do, and whether they're based on your own internal values and drive, or if you are trying to please or work with the world around you, and those actions are how you get there. So at that have a spiritual AF week and I'll talk to you later

[Closing Credits]

Disclosure: If you use the link I provided to find Amanda’s book, I receive compensation for your purchase.