001. How Finding My Inner Voice Freed Me From the Prison of My Mind

# 001. Return to Rhythm – How finding my inner voice freed me from the prison of my mind

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Welcome to Return to Rhythm, A sacred space for the woman who's been holding it all, but somewhere along the way stopped hearing herself. This is your invitation back into the quiet, back into your breath, back into the parts of you that never needed to prove, perform, or hold it all together. I'm Farrah Channel Inner Voice facilitator and emotional liberation guide.

I hold space for high functioning heart led women who've lost themselves in the giving to soften, to unravel, and to remember the truth buried beneath the busyness. Here we slow down, we ask better questions, we listen inward, and we begin again, not from pressure, but from presence. Each week you'll receive channeled meditations, truth transmissions, or sacred reflections designed to help you return [00:01:00] to your rhythm and rise in your own divine timing.

There's no rush here. There's just your truth waiting to be heard. Let's begin.

Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Return to Rhythm, and today I want to talk to you about how finding my inner voice freed me from the prison of my mind. I'm gonna talk to you about what led me to go down this path and what was happening in my life, and how things have shifted as I have been working with my inner voice over the last few years.

So let's begin back where it all started. [00:02:00] I would say at the end of 2022, I had reached peak burnout. I was going through some serious heaviness, overwhelm, burnout, and I really felt like something had to give. I was a senior art director for a. Marketing agency that worked with home builders and it was a great job.

I had taken it like a year before and it was really, really this beautiful opportunity that presented itself and it was what I thought was this dream job I had been hoping to get at some point in my career. I have been a freelance designer since 2004. Off and on and worked in a couple of agencies, but mostly freelance design.

And I had this opportunity and I was like, [00:03:00] I have to take this. They created really, really beautiful work and I was so excited to take this job, but towards the end of my time there, I. Pretty much burnt myself out. I was really, really efficient and what I did, so I took on too much work.

I couldn't slow down, and it was just. Too much. I also have two teenagers and they take a lot of my energy because I want the best and highest for them. So I'm very dedicated to making sure that they have everything they need. And I'm also a wife, so really. Showing up for my partner is really important for me as well.

So there was just all of these layers that really felt like there was some place that I had to let go because it was all. Too much. And I got to the point where I was like, there has [00:04:00] to be a better way. This can't be all that there is to life. Like I was making the most money I'd ever made in my life. We had just built a brand new house.

There was so many quote unquote great things going on in our life. Everything that they tell you is the American dream. We were technically. Living it. But I was completely miserable. I was so miserable and I could not really figure out what the solution was. This like there, I know there's a better way, but there has to be a solution.

This is not how we're meant to live. We're not meant to be walking around miserable.

I knew that going to someone and talking about my problems and how I was feeling really wasn't going to fix it. I could talk to my friends until I was blue in the face [00:05:00] about whatever was going on, but I never actually felt better, and I just knew that there has to be something else that I could do, a different path, that I could go down that would give me what I was actually looking for.

And I have been listening to Bella Lively's podcast, the Lively Show. For years I had tried meditation off and on for years and really felt like there was never any real progress with it.

But at some point when all of this was going on, I decided to turn back to these things that. Really brought me some comfort at different points earlier on in my life. And I started listening to Bella's podcast again and she was talking about inner voice, and I hadn't really heard her talk about this a whole heck of a lot because I'd been out of the realm with the podcast for a while.

So something about it really resonated with me. I was like, what? What is this inner [00:06:00] voice thing? There's gotta be something to this, right? And at some point she started offering inner voice facilitation training and she says, if you get a yes from your inner voice, you should do it. And I had heard a voice while I was meditating back in like 2021.

I had started to sit longer, so I was able to drop in deeper. And I wasn't really certain if that was really my inner voice or what I was hearing. And when she asked this question, I dropped into mine and it said yes, yes, yes. And I was like, okay, well maybe this is what I should be doing. She had offered a lot of free classes for the year before I started.

Down this path for her foundation. A lot of her past inner voice facilitators that had gone through the [00:07:00] certification had put out all of these classes, and I started doing those kind of on the side after I decided to quit this job I opted to take it part-time for a little while till they found a replacement.

And in my time where I wasn't doing it, I started to dive into these classes. And I opted to try some of these ones that they called emotional beanbags. Emotional beanbag release, and I had never understood that we can actually store emotions in our bodies. I thought it was just something that we experience, we feel we move on.

I had no idea. That they were deeply connected to our body, and if we don't fully express them, as we're moving through life, our body stores them and it tucks them away until [00:08:00] we're ready to feel them. But over time, with the way our society is, the way everyone is so stressed, so distracted, so consumed with the life that we live, that never happens.

So it actually affects our nervous system and it keeps our nervous system in this fight or flight state where we are not able to know that we are operating from survival mode. And one of the very first beanbag release classes that I did was people pleasing. And when I tell you I was a chronic people pleaser, if you looked it up in the dictionary, you would probably see my face.

I had always said yes to things that never felt good in my body, or even when I left that job, my creative director asked me, would you be willing to stay part-time [00:09:00] till we find someone? And my body was basically telling me, no, you shouldn't do that. And I said, yes. So I kind of used that instance of people pleasing to target the area in my body in this meditative state to release it.

And when I tell you finding that first one, everything just clicked. I was like, oh, this is why I feel so burnt out, so overwhelmed. Everything had built up in my body over the last 40 years that never fully got purged. It never got released, and you don't realize that these things are being stored, that they're actually affecting our mental [00:10:00] health.

They're affecting the paths that our brain is walking every single day. My body was giving me significant signs and signals that I needed to realign my life. And I didn't understand that the hip pain that I was feeling, that the tension in my neck and shoulders that I could not shake this super tight muscle in my arm that would never, ever relax was tension from these stored emotions that were just begging me to listen to them and all of this tension that was in my body.

Made my mind a minefield. There was so much self doubt, so much hatred of my body, [00:11:00] feeling like I'm not good enough. Just so many things. were creating these pathways that my. Brain was walking every single day. Everything was worst case scenario. I always had the what ifs.

What if something bad happens? It was just going to the catastrophe state rather than what if something good happens? I was a huge worrier. I just stressed about everything. Even when I had money sitting in my bank account, I was always feeling like there wasn't enough, it was just this minefield that wouldn't quiet.

It was so bad that I had to sleep with the TV on for years to really disassociate myself enough to where I could fall asleep. I could not sit in the stillness. I could not be because my mind was [00:12:00] so intense. I felt like I had so much to prove that I was worthy of love, to prove that I was good enough.

I was so hard on myself, such a perfectionist. No wonder my mind felt like a minefield. But over the next few months, as I started to release some of these emotions from my body,

everything in my mind slowly started to relax. I felt the tension in my shoulders ease. I felt my mind soften. I felt it go quiet and stop worrying for the first times I've ever felt in a very long time. [00:13:00] And it was like every emotion that I uncovered was a weed that was creating the walls of the prison of my mind.

The more I released, the more the weeds untangled, and the more they allowed me to pull them out one by one. Some weeds were entangled with each other, some were really large, deeply rooted ones, they had to be pulled up once the others were removed around it. But as I am weeding this prison that my mind was creating, I realized I was clearing the bed so that new growth could occur.

I was creating new neural pathways, so that I wasn't always going to the worst case scenario. [00:14:00] I was open to, what if something good happens? What if something new unfolds and I started to switch to how much better can it get?

There's only so much talking and intellectualizing you can do around your emotions. You have to actually connect to them in your body to see real change in your life so that you can let go of that self-doubt, that feeling of not good enough, that feeling like you have to prove just to exist. You are worthy just by being, and that's something that we as a society do not understand.

Or connect to it has been conditioned out of us that there's so much we have to do to prove that we're worthy of love, of money, [00:15:00] of friendship, whatever. But when you can actually connect with your inner voice and allow it to guide you to those places and spaces in your body. That are begging you to pay attention to them, to listen to them, to allow them to come up to speak to you, to show you what you've been holding onto.

There's so much potential when you can go into that, when you can go into the feeling that is a portal to your greatest expansion.

And the biggest softening into life that you could ever ask for. We all want to live this rich, beautiful life, and we have to do that through connecting to our inner [00:16:00] voice, to our inner wisdom that lives within us. Because looking outside of ourselves, we're never going to find it. That job title, the big house, the car.

The wonderful relationship, all of those things are still going to feel unfulfilling.

There is part of us that wants to come online, the part of us that is always there, and we don't even realize a lot of the time that it's available to us. And we don't realize that we are keeping ourselves trapped in this cage of our mind. We believe that the mind is us, but the mind is not us. It's a tool that we use.

The mind is the ego that wants to hold on and keep [00:17:00] us safe and help us survive. But we are so much more than that. And when you tap into the inner voice, you can find that within yourself.

We don't realize that we've put ourself in this cage, in this prison, and there is a door that is available to us. We just have to be willing to walk through it. And a lot of times people just avoid emotions so, so strongly because we've been conditioned to believe that emotions are bad and they shouldn't be shown and they shouldn't be exhibited.

And just think about toddlers having tantrums in the middle of target. You know, how hard is everybody trying to make sure that that kid stops screaming the parents are like, please stop. This is embarrassing. We're [00:18:00] so embarrassed by feeling, but it's the most natural human thing that we can do.

We came here to feel, we came here to feel all of it. All of it.

And when I realized how powerful my emotions were, I could not stop. I could not stop. I could not stop going down this path of following my inner voice, of processing the emotions that were ready to come up, to be felt, to be seen, to be heard. Because every single time I allowed something to come up and I felt it all the way through, I felt so much freer on the other side.

So much wisdom came through on the other side. So much softening happened and I felt so much more presence [00:19:00] in my life. I wasn't constantly distracted by those feelings of not feeling good enough and feeling like I have to prove or just questioning everything that I was doing. All of that ceased to exist.

And I'm not saying that stuff doesn't come up. Every now and then when I'm moving through something or I'm taking these risks of moving forward with where I'm being called it's uncomfortable and it brings up these old identities, these old neuropathways. It will tap into them every once in a while, but we just have to recognize that it's just trying to keep us safe.

It doesn't want us to go down that road because it doesn't know what's coming. The brain, the mind does not like not being able to know what's coming. [00:20:00] And through this process of freeing my mind from this prison, I had to get so much more comfortable with the unknown. I have to let the unknown surprise and delight me rather than terrify me and make me think it's going to be the worst case scenario, and I had to teach my body that it was safe to do so.

We have practices that we can turn to. We have rituals that we can turn to where we can create this safety within the body because safety will never be found outside of ourselves. That's another big truth to uncover within yourself as you go down this path of trusting your inner voice.

But we just have to feel safe enough. In each moment to [00:21:00] allow the emotions to come up. The more we clear our emotions, the more the inner voice comes through, the more guidance we receive on which way to go in this life, we can release ourselves from strict routines. And create rhythms we can lean into trusting how our body wants to move, the timing, the rhythm of our own personal energy, versus societal driven timeline.

We do not have to adhere to. What everyone else is doing. We can lean into this rhythm. We can lean into the inner voice. We can lean into trusting ourselves [00:22:00] deeply and let everything else just be noise that we can decide to tune into or not.

I recognize not everybody has this freedom and space that I do with this freelance work and having my own business and being in this situation, but you can create pockets of safety and stillness and quiet where you can actively work. On freeing yourself from the prison of your mind.

This journey is for the people that are already on the path, but they just cannot understand why it's not having the result that they're looking for. Just like I got all of the things that [00:23:00] I thought I quote unquote wanted. It wasn't giving me the feeling that I wanted, and the more I went into the feeling and followed the feelings that I wanted to have experience every day, the more my life opened up for me.

It's about the feeling. And not what you think is the path for you.

This path has led me to I places and spaces and into abilities. I didn't know I had. It's led me to so much expansion and I'm so eternally grateful that I decided back when I was burnt out to try another [00:24:00] way to do something different. To go into the shadow, to go into the darkness, to go into everything that felt like pain and suffering within my body, because all of it turned into love.

It turned into opportunity. It turned into possibility. It turned into so much more than I could ever dream of. And this is all I want for you. This is all I want for anyone that comes into my space, is to find this truth within themselves. Because doing this with your own personal sovereignty is so powerful.

Finding your own personal truth is so powerful.

And that's all I want for anyone. I want people to. [00:25:00] Deepen their self trust and find that internal well of love that lives within them.

Thank you all so much for being here on my very first episode, and this podcast was completely driven by my inner voice. I've been guided to do this for a while, and I finally feel free enough to do it. My throat chakra finally feels clear enough to speak it, and I am so glad you're here.

Thank you for returning to Rhythm with Me. If you're ready to keep going, you'll find Sessions, spaces, and more sacred support at the Aurreal. Come home to what's always been yours. I'll see you in the next one.

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