TRANSCRIPT

Hi everyone this is Artemiss from ArtemissK.com

I want to share a little story with you, a story of how I’ve come to be particularly passionate about connecting to our inner wisdom, trusting our own instinct above what the ‘authorities’ tell us – whoever those authorities might be: parents, teachers, friends, mentors, government, whatever… these are stories that have informed who I am and how I work, and in my business coaching I’m very passionate about empowering people to connect to their own wisdom rather than them taking what I say as fact.

Now of course, all this has come to the fore again, because during the Covid19 situation there’s a lot of conflicting ideas and I am personally very vocal about my ideas on my personal Facebook page but all of that aside there’s a certain gift in learning to connect to our own instinct and learning to trust that instinct.

Now, I’m going to share these two stories with you without filtering anything – I’m not going to bypass how I felt at the time that this happened just because now I have different perspective from an, you know, empowered adult situation so, I’m going to share with you how I experienced it in the time because that was what was real for me.

So, in the first instance – I grew up in America, I was there from age 7 to 15, and the schools I went to none of them had drawing class or art classes as part of the school program but I’ve always loved art so my parents used to put me into drawing classes over the summer holidays etc.

When we moved to Australia and we eventually settled on a school I was really really excited because our school had art as a subject that you could do in high school and so I went in full faith, full excitement… but unfortunately what I learned really quickly was that our art teacher had a very particular way of viewing art and how her students should do art. And she had a couple of her favourite students who did art the way she thought art should be done and the rest of us were basically shite.

She never outwardly – you know straight-out – told me that I sucked or I was terrible but there was this level of percolating judgment… it was never good enough, it was never… I just didn’t do it enough her way to warrant the encouragement that I would have wanted from a teacher to the point, that after year 10 finished, even though I knew I wanted to do something in the arts for university, I decided – I thought “I don’t have any artistic skills, like I can’t do art” because this teacher made me feel that I can’t do art. So for years 11 and 12 I did not do art and I literally did not pick up a pencil and draw for most of those two years because of what importance I had given this teacher’s effect on me and something that I had loved all of my life doing.

I was very fortunate that I happened to be with people in the area that my mom worked with, that even towards the end of that two years, even though I hadn’t done art for high school I said “you know I still think I want to do something in the arts” and she introduced me to some people so I ended up doing a year of Fine Arts and from there I had a portfolio and I went on to study graphic design and photography and then I worked in that industry for 20 years, which was brilliant… but that was the effect of one teacher in an area that had a lot of meaning to me.

Another experience happened about maybe 10-11 years ago. I had met this beautiful woman who was very spiritually gifted, very psychic, and just a good-hearted divine friend, and I went to her for healings and for learnings and she had a monthly gathering which just filled my cup to no end and I looked forward to it so much and for days after I’d be buzzing from the energy of the experiences I had. And she was, you know, as she just became a good friend as well and she also kind of mentored me unofficially, you know when she did a clearing for my house she talked about what she was doing and how to feel into the energies and that’s how I learned some of this stuff that I do.

But after a little while, after couple years you know I’d been with her and learned a lot of things and did things through her directly she met and aligned with a woman who had a particular way of working with certain energies, let’s call it that. And straight off, I just automatically thought that this friend of mine who is so spiritual, so gifted, so psychic, so very much more experienced than I am, if she trusts this other woman then obviously I should trust her because that’s just what I was doing, and even though sometimes there were little niggles that something didn’t feel right, I would talk myself out of it and I’d say “no no you don’t know you just don’t know enough because you know your friend trusts her”.

I can tell you the funniest thing was that my husband, who for those of you who’ve met him, he’s an incredibly practical pragmatic man, he’s also incredibly spiritual and psychic – when he met this other woman for the first time they clashed big time – that should have been a bit of a warning sign but again, the people-pleaser that I was, giving all of my power to the fact that my friend had trusted this woman meant that I was trying to soothe everything and make it pretty, get along… anyway I introduced a bunch of other friends to this lady and the work she did and we did have some amazing experiences with her work. And we also had huge moments of “wait there’s something not okay here” but each time that would happen I would backpedal and I would just go “you just don’t know enough, stop making a big deal out of this – you know your friend trusts her and this woman seems to know what she’s doing so just go with it.”

So I kept pushing back the doubts, I kept second-guessing myself, but then it sort of started getting to the point where it was really getting uncomfortable and my husband and I kind of pulled back for a couple of weeks, and then there was another event happening and we both just said “let’s drop the stories, let’s drop whatever we think is happening or not happening and let’s just go with no agenda and just see what happens at this event.”

We went and we both walked out going “oh my god what the f– was that?” It just felt so dark, it just felt so wrong on so many levels, and we just looked at each other and went okay there’s something we’re picking up on, it doesn’t matter if it’s okay for other people, it wasn’t okay for us and we kind of got to the point where we couldn’t ignore it anymore so what I actually did then – because I was finally taking our own feelings about this seriously – is I spoke to another four friends who are very into energy work, and I didn’t share with them our concerns I just said “can you feel into what’s going on in this particular circle and tell me what you think?” and they all came back that the woman who was offering the work was doing it from a good place but the energy she’s connected to was not.

I’m not going to get into that story but what it showed me was that we were picking up on the right things but we were logicing ourselves out of it because somebody I had put into a higher position of authority I was giving my power to her to make those decisions for me.

So we then respectfully pulled away from the group, did everything we needed to do to bring our own energy back into harmony and the only people that I specifically spoke to about this were my friends that, because of their trust in me, I had brought into that circle. I said “this is our experience, you stay or go based on whatever is right for you.”

Now, here’s an interesting thing – a couple of months later, my friend called and said “that lady had come back to town and she’d like to finish up the work, she realises that you know you guys had a clash of personalities or so but she doesn’t want to leave the work unfinished.”

And I went “actually it wasn’t a clash of personalities, we believe that the energy she was connected to was very malevolent and we don’t want to be part of that” and my friend said “oh well that’s interesting I didn’t know that.”

And then she made a comment, I can’t remember her exact words, but her comments were around the idea that my friend was not actually taking everything this woman was saying verbatim – she was picking and choosing the bits that made sense to her and applying that in a way that felt right to her.

It never occurred to me to do that – I’ve been so conditioned by family, society, education, wherever you want to put it – I had been so conditioned that I look to the authority and I had to swallow it whole and that’s what I done with this person.

So again, because of that experience, my spirituality, the way it runs in my mind was the way my blood runs into my body, it just affects everything but because of that particular experience and how it really shook me to the core that I hadn’t respected my own intuition about things but then that I had been so energetically affected by this darkness I literally didn’t do anything spiritual for over a year because I just lost that trust in myself.

I lost the trust in my ability to know what was right for me, and so from the fear of getting involved in anything that wasn’t good for me anymore I just didn’t get involved in anything, and that to me was like literally cutting off a limb but then slowly slowly slowly I started looking at “but you have to respect the fact that you have that instinct in the first place so let’s nurture that, let’s figure out how to make that instinct stronger, let’s figure out how to pay respect to that the next time something comes up” and then I started looking at where did these beliefs of mine come from? Where was I taught to give up so much of my power… and you know, and again and again, this has happened in my life – these are two big examples that stick out, but if anybody ever talks loudly and with confidence I tend to kind of go “oh they must be the expert.”

Because I’m a very heart centered person I do not like confrontation, I do not like the idea of upsetting people; I’m a peacekeeper people-pleaser through and through but while that can serve me in that I seek beautiful community and I want to connect heart to heart, the shadow of that is that I too readily give away my power as the price for keeping the peace or price of staying within the community, because my gosh if I question what’s going on and then I’m put on the outside, how does that work for me?!

So those are a couple of experiences that have repeatedly brought me to the brink of having to learn to connect in and to listen to my body – that hunch of the shoulders and the wrench in the gut, all the tightness of how am I responding to this situation, what am I believing or not believing, what am I just putting up with for the sake of keeping the peace? And again finding my voice without attacking the other person, finding my truth from a place of respecting myself while giving others the space to, you know, believe what they believe and that’s okay.

So when I’m working with my business clients, when I’m speaking to clients about their life positions or their parenting processes there are so many ideas of how things ‘should be’ done and they’re given to us and very – you know – voices of authority and people standing in positions of power, you know and sometimes a lot of what they say might make sense and readily apply to us but sometimes it doesn’t and for us to start giving ourselves permission to look at the message not just the messenger, to say that this and this feels good, sounds good, makes sense in my life but this and this doesn’t, instead of feeling like we have to swallow everything or take that person’s interpretation of the situation or our abilities, like with the art teacher, as the gospel truth.

So for me it’s all about internal guidance and I can lean into that because I really do believe that humans, left to their own divinity when they’re not connected to the darkness, we are beautiful people, we are capable of living heart centred lives that make us feel good about what we do and how we do it and the people we serve, and the beauty we put out into the world and how we parent our kids, I really do believe that.

So that’s just some story time for you about my particular passion about connecting to our own inner wisdom, to our instincts and how to bring more of that into our lives.

Thank you.

© Artemiss Keyhani, 2020