Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
The truth is, human beings have been doing this for 1000 of years instinctually. When we gather in ceremony, when we sing, when we pray together, when we dance, when we sit around in a circle of women shelling beans or knitting or whatever it is, those are all trauma healing practices. I don't need to go get a stamp of approval from some ivory tower in order to pass along the information that your body knows how to heal itself. Welcome to Plenty. I'm your host, Kate Northrup, and together, we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level.
Kate Northrup:Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty. Let's go fill our cups.
[voiceover]:Please note that the opinions and perspectives of the guests on the Plenty podcast are not necessarily reflective of the opinions and perspectives of Kate Northrop or anyone who works within the Kate Northrop brand.
Kate Northrup:A while back, I was told that I was not allowed to be a voice for the nervous system and anything related to trauma for a prominent platform because I do not have the right, quote, unquote, credentials because I'm not you know, I don't have my master's in psychology. I don't I don't have a PhD. And the response back smarted a little bit. I I and I thought it was just because I maybe was like taking it personally and having a feeling of personal rejection, which usually I really don't care that much about. You know, I've been out here for a while.
Kate Northrup:And in conversation with our director of operations in our company, I realized because it really, like, got stuck in her craw. I realized that there was actually a much deeper story here. And I wanna share that story with you today because I know I am not the only one. And we're at a turning point in our society where the more people who get what I'm about to share with you, the more power we have to create the kind of world we actually want to live in, the kind of world where it is safe for everyone to thrive. And so I have been out here studying the mind body connection and researching and practicing since I was a child.
Kate Northrup:My mom's best friend growing up actually was one of the foremost neuropsychiatrists in in women's health. And I grew up listening and learning from a massive pioneer in women's health. My mom was one of the key people who put the mind body connection and psychoneuroimmunology on the map. And so by osmosis, through my own multiple certifications in eastern philosophy practices, mind, body, spirit, movement forms, all kinds of things, I have been out here doing this work, learning, and I am I am self taught. And what's really important to understand and I actually told somebody, this fancy guy who makes so much money and, like, travels on private planes and is a who'sy what'sy trading and selling companies on yachts.
Kate Northrup:He asked me the other day when I was telling him what I do, he asked me what my training was. And I could feel in that moment this, like, old younger self bubble up of feeling like I wanted to prove or, like, oh, he's judging me. I and I said, I'm self taught. And it was a moment of just landing that sentence, and here's what's important about that. The whole idea that there is an organization or some kind of institution that could determine what is the right information that we should know out of all the infinite amount of information that's available.
Kate Northrup:The idea that there is this narrow collection of information and thinkers and ways of doing things that is quote unquote, the right way and the good way. And that we have to continue to churn out people who have studied only those things and only those thinkers. Like, I think about it even in terms of English literature and studying the quote unquote classics, like WTF. Who decided who decided that these are the quote, unquote, important books? Even to say this is an important book and this is not an important book, it is so steeped in deeply held false hierarchy of this is good, and this is bad, and only the special people get to decide.
Kate Northrup:So this response that because I don't have this traditional education in this way, automatically, my ideas and my contribution and my voice around the nervous system and healing trauma in the body, especially as it's related to money and the way we work, the idea that my voice and my ideas are not as valuable because I haven't gone into this narrow band of higher education in the way for decades decades decades that this one small tiny elitist group of people who have self determined themselves as special, and they have decided this is the only good and true information that then perpetuates students who are out there then joining that tiny small group of elitist thinkers who then further Xerox the reality that only this information is good and this information is not good or it's less valuable, especially the information that is rooted in our inner knowing, especially the information that is rooted in our intuition, in our body's wisdom, gets swept out. Some of the most potent and powerful information available to us, which is the information that we receive from our own lived experience, as opposed to learning from someone in an ivory tower, that information can be some of the most potent and powerful and yet, because it doesn't follow the completely pretend invented hierarchical system of higher education, it's discounted.
Kate Northrup:And so for generations and generations, we've been kept from our own ability to know things for ourselves. And then because of the way that the ivory tower, that media, that higher education, that publications and that the medical system perpetuate the idea that there's only this small, tiny collection of good and valuable and also even good valuable and even right information. And that everything else that doesn't fall in that tiny little hole that anything else is false or stupid or doesn't count, it keeps the vast majority of the population stuck, sick, and in trauma cycles. And in this particular case, the the piece of work I wanted to share was around the way that high achieving can actually keep us like the the focus on high achieving can actually prevent us from accessing our full potential. Because being focused on being a high performer and a high achiever can often be a trauma response, which I talked about in a former episode.
Kate Northrup:We'll link it in the show notes. You can go listen to that if you missed it. When we are working as a trauma response, when underneath it, we are being fueled by a a wounded part of us, by a wounded nervous system, we are automatically cutting off massive sources of our power, massive sources of creativity, massive access to our full capacity that when we're in a essentially, a dysregulated nervous system and when we're working from that place, we are not able to show up in our full power. It's just physiologically actually not possible because of the way the brain and body are connected and because of the way that our thoughts, beliefs, and awareness are severely limited by being in a trauma response. And so I wanted to share that in this wider platform.
Kate Northrup:Of course, I have my own platform, so I can do what I want over here. And just being being told that I couldn't because I didn't follow the guidelines, like, I didn't follow the rules, so therefore, I don't get to I don't get to do it over there. It once I got into conversation about it, I realized how asinine it is that we should tell people that the only voices that matter and count in terms of healing the body and healing the soul are those voices who have been trained by the very institutions that are the core cause of the wounding in the first place. So here's the deal. We all have a body.
Kate Northrup:Right? We all have a body and and and this episode is coming out on my mom's birthday. And one of the things that I gained from her and that millions of people around the world gained from her work is the idea and the truth. It's not even an idea. This is not a theory.
Kate Northrup:This is true. We all know what's best for our bodies. She made waves in the eighties because she had the audacity to actually listen to her patients. They would come into her office and instead of just taking out her prescription pad and giving them a pill or a procedure for a symptom, she actually would ask them about their lives. She would ask them what was going on with them emotionally, what was stressing them out, because she knew that disease does not exist in a silo.
Kate Northrup:There's no there's really no such thing as a physical ailment that exists separate from the lived experience of the human who is living inside the very body that's having the illness or the ailment. It doesn't exist. It's not possible. And so she understood early, early, early, that the patient was the expert on the patient. Whoever is in the body is the expert on that body.
Kate Northrup:And this this summer, I had this really interesting experience. I've been having some, like, hormonal stuff and some immune system stuff, digestive stuff, metabolic stuff, mitochondrial stuff. It's just, like, had was getting sick a lot over the last year. And I started going to all these different health practitioners thinking, like, okay. I'm gonna find the one person who's gonna be able to fix all the things for me, which is hilarious because I know that it doesn't exist, but I was in this paradigm that I could just find this one stop shop that would, like, give me all the things to fix my body until I realized after seeing about 4 different amazing world renowned practitioners, that there was nobody who was going to tell me all the things because I am the expert on my own body.
Kate Northrup:Obviously, I am the only one who lives in it. I am the only one who's here all the time in this body. You are the expert on your body. So I ended up going and taking a course that's designed for practitioners and very enthusiastic regular people like myself to learn all the things, and I ended up sitting on the beach with my friend Sarah Jenks' husband, Jonathan Breitvoort. He's a urologist.
Kate Northrup:And I was making a joke that now after going through this course, I feel like everyone should refer to me as doctor Watts because I feel so incredibly informed about my body, and I'm so excited about that, and I'm so grateful for the Internet that made it available to me to go learn that information. And Jonathan was like, actually, Kate, the truth is based on what you've told me that you now understand, you now know more than 99% of the doctors on this particular collection of knowledge around metabolic health, mitochondria, longevity, and and neuroregeneration for this collection of information. And it was a moment of integration for me because I realized having grown up with 2 parents who are doctors, the question constantly in my childhood to me and my sister was, so are you girls gonna be doctors like your like your parents? And both of us were like, hell no. Like, we see how they work.
Kate Northrup:We see we didn't say this verbally, but this is like what was underneath our no. We see how effed up the medical system is. We see how unhealthy doctors have to be in order to participate in the system that is supposed to be health care, but it's actually just disease care. And the even the way that doctors work is a complete recipe for disastrous health. And these are supposed to be the people who are taking care of the bodies.
Kate Northrup:The whole thing is, like, so screwed up. So to have had that moment where, you know, a medically trained professional, he's a Jonathan is an amazing doctor, said to me, like, you actually, because you took your education into your own hands, because you decided to be the creator of your own experience, because you realize that all knowledge we wanna know is actually out there and available, you now know more than 99% of doctors about this particular body of work was such a moment of of strength for me. And I and I pass that along to you to remind us all that we all have direct access to the divine, to our intuition, and to all the information that is out there. Pretty much everything you wanna learn is available on the Internet. I'm so grateful to live at a time where I can create my own platform.
Kate Northrup:Women like my mother, you know, in the eighties, nineties, they didn't have the ability to just choose themselves and amplify their own voices when they thought something was important. The Internet didn't exist. Social media didn't exist. Podcasting wasn't a thing. Like, my mom had to wait for Oprah to call.
Kate Northrup:My mom had to wait for Random House to publish her books. She had to wait for someone else to say, oh, this is valid. We wanna feature this important information. She had to become a doctor. Like, there was no way that anyone at that time would have listened to her ideas without an MD.
Kate Northrup:We live in a different time now. Now is it our responsibility as leaders, as coaches, as teachers to actually become trained, to be trauma informed, to do our research, to get certified, I absolutely think it is. I think we have a responsibility to bring forth responsible, safe, evidence based work. And, also, it is our responsibility to continue to build wider platforms and feature a wide variety of voices whose background comes from different places other than the ivory tower. Because if we keep only listening to the experts who have the stamp of approval from the same old, like, cobwebby, you know, old ideas that keep the status quo going with the ivory tower, and if we allow the gatekeepers to tell us you matter or you don't matter or you get to participate or you don't get to participate, the world will miss out on critical ideas that are needed more now than ever.
Kate Northrup:The larger movement of trauma resolution and nervous system healing is a relatively new conversation, at least in the mainstream. It's been within the last 5 years maximum that I started hearing about this. And and and quite frankly, it's still a very small percentage of the population who understands it. You know who's not in that small percentage of the population? Most traditional psychology, like, most traditional psychology does not understand the way that our memories and our traumas are held in the body and the way that that impacts all of our behavior.
Kate Northrup:Case in point, I was reading 2 books the other night. I started one and realized it was a little too dense to start at bedtime, but I read about 10 to 15 pages of it. And it's a great book. I'll still finish it, but I will tell you it is about psychology, and it doesn't once bring up the body. It is all just about the mind.
Kate Northrup:So, like, okay. That's interesting. This book has sold millions of copies, and people are holding it as the gold standard in this one particular genre data point. The other book, memoir, beautiful, love this writer. However, within the first few pages, he talked about the importance of transcending the body.
Kate Northrup:It's infuriating because revolutionary thought, information that changes industries, that changes culture comes from radical thought that often does not originate in the same institutions that are churning out the same old research, same old clinical practice, same old understanding that is not always accurate. And in this particular case, the idea that mental health lies exclusively exclusively in the mind is actually just inaccurate. So I just wanna say that I do not need letters after my name from the institutions that are holding up the same old inaccurate ideas in order to revolutionize the conversation, and neither do you. In fact, it's really important that those of us who approach things in a new way because we were not conditioned by the same old ways of thinking, it's important that we step into the conversation. Otherwise, the conversation, the understanding will never evolve because it's just a repetition of the same old, same old, same old, which largely depends on one group of people being the arbiters of truth.
Kate Northrup:And as long as we allow a small group of people to hold all the power and be the arbiters of truth, we are consciously or unconsciously allowing ourselves to be controlled, and that is not the game. So as an example, in our program, relax money, there's theory, there's, you know, there's there's teaching. I teach 13 live modules, but in combination with that, we have separate nervous system healing calls, which are a somatic embodied experience. Plus, I bring in somatic practices into all of the content, every single session. That is a revolutionary model that includes the body, that breaks the myth that transformation happens in the mind.
Kate Northrup:True transformation must happen in the body. Now, traditional psychology, right, like talk therapy, the whole premise is that we can heal just by talking. But anyone who's been in talk therapy for decades decades and are still talking about the same freaking thing knows, and I only say that from from experience, knows that if it works, it takes a lot longer. And for many people, if the wounding lives in the body, the healing must happen in the body as well. When it comes to healing modalities, when it comes to the practices that actually repattern our nervous system and allow us to put down ancestral traumas so we don't pass it on to the next generation, the truth is human beings have been doing this for 1000 of years instinctually.
Kate Northrup:When we gather in ceremony, when we sing, when we pray together, when we dance, when we sit around in a circle of women, shelling beams or knitting or whatever it is, those are all trauma healing practices. I don't need to go get a stamp of approval from some ivory tower in order to pass along the information that your body knows how to heal itself. We have forgotten how to listen. But every one of us has a body. And so we get to be the arbiters, we get to be the gatekeepers of the information that works for us and what will not work for us.
Kate Northrup:So my invitation for you is to take a look at your life right now and ask yourself, where, if anywhere, am I waiting for someone else's permission or approval in order to learn what I want to learn, or share what I want to share or have access to what I want to have access to, or heal what I want to heal. You do not need anyone else's permission to do anything. You have access right now to everything you need, either from inside you, or for free on the Internet. And so go grab it. And if somebody tells you you don't get to play, just tell them f you.
Kate Northrup:You don't make the rules. You don't have to wait for somebody to give you a seat at the table. Just build your own freaking table. So So thanks for being at my table. Thank you for listening to this episode.
Kate Northrup:If it was helpful to you, let me know. I would love to know that this one landed. Text it to a friend and just get out there and share your voice in responsible, loving ways. We need your wisdom too. I'm teaching a brand new productivity training called plenty of time, and in it, we're gonna uncover the 3 mainstream productivity hacks that are keeping you overwhelmed, distracted, stressed, and busy unnecessarily, and what to do instead.
Kate Northrup:To get yourself signed up for this free live event that is only happening one time this year, head over to kate northrup.comforward/time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Plenty. If you enjoyed it, make sure you subscribe, leave a rating, leave a review. That's one of the best ways that you can ensure to spread the abundance of plenty with others. You can even text it to a friend and tell them to listen in.
Kate Northrup:And if you want even more support to expand your abundance, head over to katenorthrup.comforward/breakthroughs, where you can grab my free money breakthrough guide that details the biggest money breakthroughs from some of the top earning women I know, plus a mini lesson accompanying it with my own biggest money breakthroughs and a nervous system healing tool for you to expand your abundance. Again, that's over at kate northrup.com forward slash breakthroughs. See you next time.