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Alt|Life is a podcast for those seeking to experience an alternate reality and break free from the chains of conventional thinking. Hosted by Sadaf Vahedna, this podcast challenges the limitations of mainstream education and knowledge, diving into realms that are both mystical and scientific. Each episode offers mind-blowing insights and discussions that will make you rethink your understanding of the world. Join Sadaf on her exploration as she delves into psychology, physics, philosophy, and spirituality. Through engaging conversations with experts and visionaries, Alt|Life uncovers the hidden truths and extraordinary possibilities that lie beyond the ordinary. Whether you're curious about the unknown or eager to expand your perspective, Alt|Life invites you to journey beyond the familiar and embrace the transformative power of an open mind.
00:00
Sadaf Vahedna
Welcome to Altlife, where we break free from the chains of conventional thinking and explore the limitless possibilities of a redefined reality. In this episode of Alt Life, we talk to Debbie Craig, a personal growth and transformation expert. Debbie has founded and run a highly successful firm specializing in organizational development and change. She's run two of the biggest corporate change initiatives in South Africa and worked with some of the largest local and global corporations. Her full bio is in the description, but to give you the highlights, she's written four books on the topics of talent, leadership and professional development, the latest being Powerup Eight, which explores critical capabilities one needs to navigate an unpredictable world. Debbie is also an NLP practitioner, a Reiki master, a game ranger, and a coach.
00:51
Sadaf Vahedna
At some point in the last few years, Debbie has been through her own shift in perspective and moved away from the conventional industrial psychology approach to effect change, and now takes people on individual spiritual and meditation retreats to help them transform their lives. Debbie was the perfect first guest for our podcast because her life has been all about affecting change and that's really what the essence of this podcast is about. She's a remarkable person who has thought deeply about her work and has constantly evolved her approach when being presented with new information. And it takes courage to change your mind and embrace a new way of doing something despite having done something a certain way. For, in Debbie's case, 20 years.
01:39
Sadaf Vahedna
I invited Debbie to speak on the podcast because she has a deep understanding of what it takes to change which approaches work and what our biggest blockages could be when it comes to personal transformation and being the creators of our own life. I hope you enjoy it. And if you haven't already, please hit subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes. Thanks Debbie, thank you for joining us today. It's really an honor to have you. And you know, Debbie, like, you're a remarkable person. I met you three years ago and at that time I guess I didn't know that I would know you for so long after and that you would be part of my journey. And that was also about the time when I discovered I spirituality and I discovered Doctor Joe. And that really changed my life.
02:27
Sadaf Vahedna
So our relationship kind of in some sense marks a new life for me. And so I'm really happy that you're my first guest. I'm really comfortable with you. So I'm really glad that you're here. So thank you. Okay, so you've spent 20 years in corporate consulting. You've done some really big change and transformation projects, huge culture shifts for large organizations in South Africa, but also internationally. And now you take individuals on personal spiritual journeys all the way to India sometimes. And you're like a certified doctor Joe consultant. So you practice his work in South Africa. I want to know like what led to this shift in approach? Because that feels quite like a radical shift in your approach.
03:20
Debbie Craig
Yeah, well, so first of all, it's so nice to be here and you've always been a very special person and just so much interest in learning and evolving and becoming a better self. So I see you as a sort of close part of my community. So thank you and thank you for the invitation. In terms of my own journey, I think, you know, what's really shifted for me, and I have to be honest, I mean, I've been doing personal transformation for just about all my life. I did my first personal transformation journey when I was in my sort of mid, early to mid twenties. And I did an alpha mind power process and learned all about sort of how to use alpha state and how to sort of create your future and your reality. And from that process I started just finding out how.
04:01
Debbie Craig
Actually it sounds a bit blase, but a bit easier it is to actually create and manifest your goals and the things that you want. But if it's coming from a place of need or from ego or from comparison with others, it doesn't satisfy and it doesn't fulfill. So after many years of going well, I can do this. Suddenly my whole approach became, how can I make a difference? And what's more important in the bigger scheme of things? And looking sort of more globally than locally, just in my own self, but looking at communities and looking at some of the businesses I was in. And then I started running the retreats, doing NLP, learning about process psychology, learning about so many different things.
04:37
Debbie Craig
And I thought that I got to a point where I kind of like, okay, well, this is personal transformation, this is change, this is personal mastery. I've kind of done it all. You know, we all get to that point where we kind of like we're on top of our game. And then I got three friends in one month coming to me to say, okay, here's Doctor Joe's book, Doctor Joe Dispenza. Here's a meditation, try it out, see how it is. And it just knocked my socks off. And here's this retreat happening. I'm going, do you want to come with me with a friend? And I was like, wow, best I listen. And I don't know, it's difficult to explain what happened in the seven day advanced retreat. I went all the way to Malta and went on.
05:13
Debbie Craig
The spring didn't end up coming, so I went on my own. And I decided in that week just to shut everything off. I told my husband at the time, I'm not speaking to you for a week. I told my business, make any decisions you want to make. I'll deal with the consequences when I come back. I told my clients I'm unavailable. And for seven days I just shut myself off and sort of just immersed myself in the seven day advanced retreat meditation. And I think what really shifted for me there was the recognition of how big and beautiful and powerful we are as an energy and as a being, and we coexisting in this sort of physical vehicle that we come to the earth with. Once that sort of becomes more of who you are, your perspective on life shifts.
05:52
Debbie Craig
You start to see what sort of just sort of everyday programming and the story that you tell yourself and the story that society tells you start be able to see a little bit beyond that and start noticing how much choice you have and how much part of your own life's story you actually are and that you're actually the creator of that. So that for me, not sort of in a way, consciously shifted everything that I was doing, but almost unconsciously, as these awarenesses and these like Ahas came through and the energy came through and my whole being sort of lived more comfortably sort of in myself, that was the work I wanted to do. And these are the people I wanted to spend time with. And this is the place, Cape Town, that I wanted to be in the.
06:32
Debbie Craig
And somehow I was able to just sort of start moving into that direction. And that's why I went and did the doctor Joe Dispenza trainer and that has fundamentally shifted how I've seen and done life. And what I believe at the moment is one of the most powerful mechanisms.
06:45
Sadaf Vahedna
To shift you to change, given that you had been affecting change for other people for many years now. And then you found almost like a different way to do it. And Doctor Joe sounds like it was just by chance.
07:01
Debbie Craig
Well, by chance or by Felicity, you can choose. But when I started off doing alpha mind power with Peter Halblom and then I sort of moved into doing transformation work with Terry Cohen. And then I started working different modalities, including NLP and Reiki and flower of life and process psychology and all kinds of other learning modalities. And then I went to Osho india and I sort of worked with his philosophy for many years, for about ten years. And then I discovered Doctor Jo through, as you say, synchronicity and people telling me more about this, and this is important to do. I think it's important to listen to, not to others to influence you so much, but to listen to those breadcrumbs and those moments of intuition or those moments of connection.
07:44
Debbie Craig
That said, yeah, just look deeper into that or go and see more about that, because I still believe your heart will talk to you and your intuition will talk to you around what's best for you, to find your own joy and to find your own expression. And always been about evolving human potential and evolving my potential and experimenting with what's out there. I mean, this is planet adventure, and I love adventuring both internally and externally.
08:07
Sadaf Vahedna
So just like from a, I guess, like a more technical perspective, what were you doing differently in your corporate work to what you do now? And then the follow up to that, I guess, would be, now that you found this path, how would you, I guess, reflect on the way that you were trying to affect change in corporate, like through the very business models, I.
08:33
Debbie Craig
Guess, yeah, that's a very big question. I'll do my best to give a sense of it. Right from very young, I had this instinct in me that change starts from within. And even in all my leadership work, I believed in self mastery as the starting point. Self awareness, the ability to understand how we think, how we act, how we feel, and to sort of become conscious of our choices that we have is the way to leadership, because that's when we understand our impact, when we are open to feedback, we're willing to be less ego and more sort of authentic in the world.
09:02
Debbie Craig
And a lot of my programs have led with that as a base and that as a foundation, whether it's been the individual coaching or the team alignment or the larger organizations, and even the culture transformation work that I did, we worked always with the leadership team first to build self awareness, to start giving each other feedback. And over the years, I built in more mindfulness practices. I built in for people to do visualizations. I built in sort of what I would call sort of the first layer or two of self awareness and going into the brain and going into different brain states because I knew about alpha mind power since I was 22. And then I used that with the other corporate processes and systems, because always people process systems.
09:42
Debbie Craig
In an organization, as much as you can want to change from within, and you're in this department and you're in this company, you need a team to want to change with you and to have a purpose in a meaning to change and a willingness to open up and trust each other. And then you need an organization who puts the policies and the structures and the strategies in place to enable that change. Otherwise you just get blocked. And then it becomes very frustrating in terms of how that's evolved since the doctor, Joe Dispenza, and since I worked with meditation, with Osho, I worked with meditation and power of the mind, John Kehoe and various other people.
10:12
Debbie Craig
I always had to sort of walk that line between understanding my own sense of, in those days, personal mastery, sense of self awareness, even that was my own sort of spiritual meanings. I always had to package it in a way that was palatable and understandable and sort of always had meet people where they're at and use that language, even though I knew I was maybe weaving energetically at the time. Over the last couple of years, I've been probably built my confidence more in being able to stand up to a CEO or a group of executives and go, if we don't shift brainstor and shift hearts, we're not going to shift the company. Those were scary moments where I sort of are bringing this stuff in, because if I don't bring this stuff in, so much of the organizational transformation starts.
10:58
Debbie Craig
And you get a wonderful feel after a team building or after a culture workshop. And you chatted to each other, and we've told stories, and we've got this lovely vision. But then you go back into the organization, or into your families, or into wherever you are, and then you get criticized or you get judged, someone disappoints you, the boss behaves badly, or you suddenly get overloaded with work and all of a sudden everything falls down. You move into stress, and as soon as we move into stress, we go back into old defaults, in old programs, and then we go back into victim and we go back into forgetting we've got the power and back into. It's not worth the effort. I don't have the energy and the resources to fight this fight and move and do different.
11:37
Debbie Craig
I just have to go into protection and safety mode. 70% minimum. I'd say 80 85%. Since COVID are mostly in organizations sitting in stress state and in families and in relationships. A lot of us, we continually have this anxiety, we have this sort of radar and this vigilance that something's about to happen and I better be prepared and I've got too much to do, and how am I going to get through the day, and I'm going to manage my budget, and how am I going to grow my, you know, get my children to grow in a particular way? So there's so much stress and overwhelm and in business at the moment and in families and in people.
12:08
Debbie Craig
So I suppose that's really where my calling, if you want to call it that, or my purpose, my passion is saying, how do we help people navigate this world that feels like it's getting a higher level of change, more crazy, more overwhelming, more things to battle with, less resources and less certain. How do we help people actually navigate that at a personal level and at an organizational level?
12:31
Sadaf Vahedna
So I guess my question then would be, how do we do it now? I'm like, okay, you're right. Okay. Like, it all feels great when I do. Like maybe like I attend a workshop and I'm all like, motivated to change and I journal and I say, like, yeah, you know, like tomorrow I'm gonna like. And I think most of us, we start with actions, right? Like I'm gonna wake up, go to the gym, I'm gonna meditate, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna do all these things and then maybe I do it for a couple of days. Then I start feeling tired. What's happening there and how can we break out of that?
13:03
Debbie Craig
Yeah, another big question. So we are 95%, people will say between 80 and 95% conditioned response. People with automatic programs, behaviors, habits, and our brain and our bodies are wired for survival and for safety. And when that is at threat, we're going to go into a different stress response. And anything that is unknown or unfamiliar becomes a stressor to us. So when you wanted to change yourself, let's say your current self, a lot of stuff working, a couple of things you want to change, big things you want to change. And you've got this future vision, ideal of yourself that you want to move towards. But the in between, this vision I can understand, I can feel, and this place where I am now is a space of unknown and space for unfamiliarity. Sometimes we call it the river of change.
13:51
Debbie Craig
These crocodiles and piranhas and rapids and all that kind of stuff. And as our brain and body moves into this unknown space and we start operating differently, we started doing the habits, getting up earlier, doing our journaling, doing a bit of meditation, speaking with more kindness or authenticity to the people around us and having more patience, the brain and the body goes into a bit of panic and it goes, I don't know what this is. And suddenly all the resources go into stress mode and we start going into, very unconsciously into fight and flight and the body goes into resistance. So in order to move from where I am today to this future state, we've got to become familiar with the unknown. We've got to become comfortable with change, comfortable with the ability to do things differently.
14:34
Debbie Craig
And knowing that we've got to go through this. It's almost what the neuroscience tells us is a chemical detox of the habits and behaviours that we used to have. Because every habit, every behavior is locked into our, the way that we do things through chemical. And as we start shifting and changing that those chemicals get released into our systems. And it's like detoxing from doing things you've always done. And like an addiction, well, exactly like an addiction. I'm busy experiencing that just in my own life. I've been in consulting for 27 years. Made a big change last year. I sold a big piece of my business and not moving out of that sort of heavy operation, consulting and just focusing more on individual coaching and retreats and sort of strategic advisory. And I've been now six weeks clean of consulting.
15:20
Debbie Craig
And I can feel some mornings when I wake up and it's like my body wants to get busy, my body wants to manage, my body wants to check in with people, my body wants to. And I've got to really sort of settle myself down and go, that's the old you. The new you has space, the new you has time. The new you is going through a deep, relaxed, you know, restful period so that I can start the new. And it is tiring, it is frustrating, it is stressful, it is discombobulating. And the only way to get through to the other side is the work that I believe is doing. Your daily practices strongly believe and love and to see the results of myself.
15:57
Debbie Craig
And as it's true, training the brain through active meditation, as opposed to passive meditation where you sort of giving yourself a vision of yourself and then you're working through it and you're training your brain to imagine the future as if it has already happened. And if you do that, the body doesn't know the difference between the imagination and reality. And it starts to operate as if you're already in that state with the thinking, with the beliefs, with the chemistry, with the actions. And in that way we can move to that state until one day sort of, you wake up and you go, I'm doing it.
16:25
Sadaf Vahedna
I have a question about this, actually from my own personal practice. I find that sometimes, okay, like so I very rarely, but I get there. I'm able to now feel the feelings of my future. But now, once I'm there, I'm like, okay, now what? I'm a little bit bored. Like, I have nothing to stress about because I got it. You know, like, I got it. Like, yeah, my podcast is successful. Everything's going well. It's like, that's the feelings I'm feeling, but I'm also a bit bored, and I'm kind of, like, missing the stress and the anxiety. What do you think? Like, what would you feel about that?
16:57
Debbie Craig
I mean, there's two angles to that. Probably many. The two angles that come to mind is once you've reached that state of achievement and now you've set the goal, you created your future vision, and you're actually there, you're believing it, and you're seeing it sort of happening around you. Number one, your body is still getting used to it. So that anxiety or that stress or that, you know, this is not feeling comfortable yet. It's because it's still. Think about how many years you've been in the old and now you're just entering into the new. Your body's still addicted to that chemistry of the stress and the busyness and the striving. So it's almost like we are socially conditioned to strive.
17:29
Sadaf Vahedna
Yeah.
17:29
Debbie Craig
And part of that is because one of the sort of worldviews that I hold is that we choose to come to planet adventure to grow and to learn. And it's all about growing and learning and expressing. So as you get to the next level, you so wired to what's next. So it'll be lucky to sit in that beautiful, joyful satisfaction and appreciation of what we've created. But there's something in our sky, but there's more.
17:52
Sadaf Vahedna
Yeah.
17:53
Debbie Craig
So I think that's we are, part of us is wide that way. And that's because we came here to grow. To grow and to express, you know, to appreciate and enjoy the juiciness of all the different life experiences that we can possibly create. Wow.
18:07
Sadaf Vahedna
You mentioned active and passive meditation. What does that mean?
18:12
Debbie Craig
Well, when I say active, it's more around setting an intention for your meditation or an intention that I'm going into the meditation to create something in my life, whether it's a part of a future self, whether it's more health or whether it's more abundance or whether it's getting more peacefulness in my family or my relationship. And then you set that up as an intention. And then when you go into the meditation, you want to go into a place where you're settling into Alpha state and you're moving your body into relaxation and your heart into coherence and then letting go and allowing that reality to sort of permeate the brain and use the elevated emotions and use that sense of hopefulness and the sense of excitement and a sense of how amazing it would be when I'm there to help to create that.
18:52
Debbie Craig
So it's quite an active creation, intentional sense of meditation. Once you're in the meditation, you can drop and relax. And then in your waking state, you want to also keep on reminding yourself and sort of reinforcing that's you're on the journey and you're getting there and it's happening and feel the feeling as if it's already happened. There is one other. The passive meditation then would be the really sort of quiet silence. Just being a receiver of silence and moving into the void and not actually having a specific intention for that. There is also another part of active meditation, if you follow the work of Osho, where you can get into meditative states through various different modalities and specifically body movement. So dancing or humming or moving, Orlando crying, laughing.
19:37
Debbie Craig
And those are other parts of active meditation which I've spent a lot of time getting into states without having to sit in a chair. And I quite love that because I love being quite active. And just like the walking meditations is also active as opposed to sitting still. So that's ranges of active and passive.
19:53
Sadaf Vahedna
People who have never meditated and aren't familiar with the different states of brainwave states. Could you like just give a little bit of a background of what we're trying to do when we're meditating?
20:05
Debbie Craig
Sure. So when we're in our sort of normal awake state, like you and I are sitting here right now, we're in probably normal. What about beta brainwave state? And that's a certain amount of hertz per second or an awake state. And our bodies are alert, our minds are alert, we're taking in a whole lot of information. We tuned into what's going on around us. If we're very stressed, we go into high better. And suddenly the brain is like really being very highly vigilant and almost in stress state and sort of moving into taking data and overanalyzing that data and getting our body ready to fight and flight. So you get beta, high beta. And then in the meditative state, what you want to do is settle into an alpha state, which is a sort of a slower brainwave rhythm.
20:44
Debbie Craig
It's more harmonious, it's less busy and wanting to sort of close off all your five senses and just focus in on yourself and on your breathing and in your brain, be able to slow down and focuses from within. And then that's the bridge between the conscious and the subconscious mind. And that's where we can actually help ourselves by giving ourselves new ways of thinking, new worldviews, new beliefs. And when we do it in alpha state, or even theta, which is even the lowest state, when the body's asleep but the mind is awake, that's sort of just before you go to sleep. That state when master meditators will go into theta state before they sleep in delta is sort of direct access to the subconscious. And that's the place where change is less effortful, more effortless when we talk indirectly to the subconscious mind.
21:32
Debbie Craig
And obviously the subconscious mind connects us to our souls and our spirits and all that is. So that's sort of the doorway in.
21:39
Sadaf Vahedna
So if I want to like, let's say, break a habit, I would try and get into theta state and from there break that habit. Is that right?
21:47
Debbie Craig
Well, Theta would be probably more an advanced state of meditation. The simplest way in is Alpha State. So you just want to go from taking in all the data and if you imagine on our phones and you've got noise and you've got people and you've got things in your head, is shutting off all your senses. So closing your eyes, getting in a quiet space, setting your body down and then just allowing yourself to go into Alpha state, which is the sort of beginnings of the unconscious mind once we get really good at it and we practice it for a long time. And some beginners can drop straight into the interstate where it's sort of immediate access alphas, the bridge and the doorway, which is absolutely fine.
22:24
Debbie Craig
I mean, we can even go into Alpha State walking in the garden or dancing or washing the dishes or staring out at a beautiful sunset. So, I mean, nature is beautiful for us, so you don't have to be sitting in a chair or to meditate. You can be in a meditative state even with your eyes wide open, driving in the traffic. Don't close your eyes when you're in the traffic. Not recommended. But yes, there's so many different ways of moving our talk on my retreats around sort of the ABC of and, you know, the three big things that we need to do to train ourselves. It's brain alpha brain state or brain coherence, and it's alpha brain state, but it's also sort of merging the left and right hemispheres and getting coherence going in the brain.
23:04
Debbie Craig
You're looking for heart coherence, where your sort of heart rate variance starts becoming harmonious instead of frustration, where it's sort of starting and stopping. Like you've put your accelerator, your foot on the accelerator, the brake at the same time. That's what happens when we're in stress and our heart is kind of very uncoordinated. So you want brain coherence, heart coherence, and then you want your body to be relaxed. You want to be in the parasympathetic nervous system state, where your whole nervous system is relaxed, and you rest and renew and regenerate. So if we can get those three things and train ourselves through breath, through mindfulness, through meditation, through elevated emotions, to get these three things right, then we can start creating in that space, and then we can dropping, start dropping into what I call creation rather than survival.
23:46
Sadaf Vahedna
So I have so many questions now, but let's start with the one, which is that a lot of people, myself included, actually, until I started doing it. But I'd really like to hear your perspective on this. Say that I can't meditate because when I sit down, like, my mind is just going. That still happens to me, like, three years later. I feel like I sat down to meditate, but, like, literally for 30 minutes, my mind has just gone. And when I sit down to meditate, that's when I remember everything I need to do.
24:17
Debbie Craig
Your to do list.
24:19
Sadaf Vahedna
Exactly. Etc.
24:20
Debbie Craig
Etcetera.
24:21
Sadaf Vahedna
Yes. What do we say to people who feel like they can't meditate because of this?
24:26
Debbie Craig
Meditation, like anything, is a practice, and there is no such thing as a bad meditation for those who do yoga. When I started yoga, I felt like a beached whale plopping around on the floor. And after training your body and training your brain recognizing what that position feels like in yoga, eventually you kind of are able to feel more confident and do it more effortlessly. And it's the same with meditation. You just, you start and you get some stuff right, and some days you do well, and other days you don't do so well. And it's slowly but surely training the brain. And what I've said to a lot of people who are starting out is the art of meditation is not getting necessarily the intention, is not getting into that silent, calm, peaceful state.
25:05
Debbie Craig
I say if you go in with the intention to catch yourself and bring yourself back with compassion, you're successful. So let's say you do your 30 minutes and your mind's racing, and, oh, it's racing again. Come back. That to do list, that thing, that person I need to speak to. Oh, I caught myself. Come back. You are successful. Every time you bring yourself back to the present moment, every time you bring yourself back to breath, and that feels for me and for a lot of people that I work with, it feels more doable, and it feels almost kinder to myself. And every time I rush off and I realize I'm analyzing, you know, we're trying to bring a sense of kindness and compassion and awareness, and every time we bring ourselves back, we get better at bringing ourselves back.
25:45
Debbie Craig
And over time, slowly but surely, we'll spend more and more time in that state. I mean, I've been meditating for years now, and I have days where I can't get into nothingness and I can't get into alpha state too easily, or I'm bouncing, you know, I'm in them out. I'm in them out. Depending on how much overwhelm is going on in my life at the time.
26:03
Sadaf Vahedna
Would it be safe to say that the work is bringing yourself back? Yes, that's the work.
26:08
Debbie Craig
The work is being in the present moment, or the intent, should I say? The outcome is the more we're in the present moment, we're in our power, we're in ourselves. We have the ability to create. The only place we can create is from this present moment. And the only place we can feel joy is from this present moment, because from here, we can move out. We can feel, we can believe, we can envision, we can imagine. So, every time we bring ourselves back to the present moment, back to our breath, like we're alive and we're breathing and we're. We're here. We are creators. We are successful.
26:37
Sadaf Vahedna
Can you tell us what's happening in the brain from a neuroscience perspective, when we're, let's say, in a stress state versus, like now, when we're trying to change our thoughts and try to be in a different state of mind. I know you do this really well, so I'd really like you to give, like, a neuroscience explanation of what we're talking about.
27:01
Debbie Craig
Yeah. Let me think about how to do this the best. So, I don't know if you're thinking about the diagram that sometimes I draw where you've got the neural, those two neurons that sort of come together at the simplest way, and I'll try and create an imaginary one. So, every thought has a frequency or a wave, right? And that frequency is going from neuron to neurons through a synapse. If you can imagine. These are two sort of neurons. You've got the synapse in the middle. You've got this frequency of a thought that's running an electrical pulse almost, that's running at 200 meters/second and there's millions of those going on at any one time in our awareness, but we'll just focus on the one for now.
27:37
Debbie Craig
And if we've got a sort of a stress state, that frequency is going to be going through a sort of a lower, more fractured, more incoherent frequency that's going to be moving through your system and then stimulating your stress hormones, your cortisol, your adrenaline. And then that starts flooding the rest of the body into the adrenal system. And then your heart, your vagus nerve, and your heart is picking up this chemistry, and then it's sending signals back to the brain. And then the brain has to sort of match and go, oh, that's the feeling. I better get more thoughts to match the feeling, right? And then the feeling comes in, and then you're feeling these feelings of now, more anxiety or more chaos, and then that goes back to the brain, and the brain's giving you more thoughts.
28:18
Debbie Craig
And the more stressed the hormones we have running through the brain and through the body, the more sort of narrow focused we become. And we start focusing on our environment and what do we need to control or what do we need to manage. We start focusing on how much time we have, and I haven't got enough time. And we start focusing on the body and what I'm feeling, and I can't control these emotions. And we just go into this board of stress. If we wanted to shift and we wanted to create a different reality for ourselves and a different personality and a different way of doing things and shifting the way we think, act and feel, we need to choose consciously now a new thought, a new pulse, a new frequency.
28:51
Debbie Craig
So you can imagine this frequency going billions of times, every single second, right through your brain and your body and all the brains in your body. And we choose an elevated emotion, like gratitude or like appreciation, or even calm, and we just focus on that and we just find things to appreciate. And there's always things to appreciate, find things to be grateful for, find a moment of calmness, or just be with nature, or just look at your things that you love and things that you appreciate about life. And those waves now come more harmoniously, and those waves now move through these synapses and they burst different bcls of chemicals and those more positive chemicals and oxytocin and the serotonin and all those other beautiful hormones flood through the bodies and then start making you feel good and make you feel better.
29:34
Debbie Craig
And then that sends signals back up to your brain, and your brain is going, oh, okay, now look at the beautiful sunset. Oh, look at the possibility. Oh, maybe I can figure it out in my relationship. Oh, you know, my kids aren't so bad. They're just going through a bad moment. So that chemistry between the thinking and the feeling and the body is happening chemically all the time. And I think that was, for me, one of the biggest sort of insights and ahas as I went deeper into this work is that every time we have a thought, we make a chemical, and every time we have a chemical, we have a corresponding body reaction and thought reaction. And that actually forms the new neural paths in our brain.
30:07
Debbie Craig
And those neural paths, we're either firing and wiring the ones towards what we want, or we're firing and wiring the ones, actually, that we don't want.
30:15
Sadaf Vahedna
That we don't want.
30:15
Debbie Craig
So the more conscious it would become of what thoughts and what feelings we are firing and wiring and which loop we're in, the more we move towards the new state.
30:23
Sadaf Vahedna
Wow. So you're saying that our thoughts are driving our feelings, and those feelings are driving more of similar thoughts. And so we're, like, in a thinking and feeling loop, and we can't break out of it, and perhaps eventually, that becomes who we are, like, how we operate. Are there any points in our life that we can reset this life? How do we reset this cycle? Because from the way that you explained it sounds like we've now formed a neural pathway, right? Like, that's the electrical signal. So now we've now found a formed a neural pathway. But how do we break this? How do we break it?
31:06
Debbie Craig
How do we break the habit? How does that cycle? So, yeah, I mean, we have also millions of different neural paths, but particularly neural nets. So the neural nets is something that's very hard ingrained, where we have a belief system about authority, about love, about life, about future, about money, about, you know, all those sort of hard. And those are harder to break. And the more the emotional impact of a particular event in our lives that created this moment of decision or this moment of, well, that's how I need to be, or that's how life is. The stronger the emotion was at the time, almost the hard, more hardwired those emotions so that you always get the glue. The emotion is the glue to keep these patterns and these programs hardwired. In our brains. So whatever fires gets wired.
31:56
Debbie Craig
The more we fire something, the more we wire that in our brainstor. So when we wanted to change, because we are 95% programmed and we keep on firing and wiring and firing wiring, we take repeating and building in pattern of how we think, act and field naturally, depending on different triggers, and we become that personality.
32:14
Debbie Craig
So in order to shift our personality, which most people will say is really hard to do, if we go back right to some of those programs and those events, some people say you've got to go back to those events and spend many years on a psychologist couch or go in and investigate and you know, the NLP practice, you've got to go to the moment and you've got to sort of go recognize what was happening in the moment, and then go before the moment and above and beyond and then before. And those practices and those techniques are useful and I've used them for years and years. However, if we are an alternative way, is focusing on that future. So this neural part, let's say this neural net here, is around how I relate in a relationship.
32:54
Debbie Craig
And that most relationships will end up disappointing me or they'll be something they don't quite love me enough, or I'll never quite be enough. Sort of like a real strong neural net around that.
33:04
Debbie Craig
And I want to create a new self for me that trusts life and trusts love and is able to move into spaces and not be thrown completely off my kilter, or if someone disappoints me once or twice, or is just human in life, and I want to be that person, if I fire and wire that reality and imagine myself in that and feel the feelings of trust and feel the feelings of it's okay if someone's a bit human with me, or it's okay if every now and again someone acts badly, but generally I have enough love in my life, there's enough love around me, there's enough good enough in myself to balance and navigate this relationship. And I continually fire and wire those thoughts, even when I'm seeing life around me, not mirroring that. And you bring the elevated emotion.
33:45
Debbie Craig
And that's one of the biggest tricks, is to feel the feeling as if. So if you're not a naturally trusting person or you sort of have that anxiety and you now want to be a trustee, sort of calm, gracious, open person, it's a big leap to be able to generate and cultivate those emotions. But that's really the art of practising this work. And the more that we do that we're creating a new neural net. And over time, as we fire and wire that there's only so much capacity in our brains to have, you know, 60, 70,000 thoughts a day, if we're replacing those 60, 70,000 thoughts a day of what can go wrong, or what do I need to be aware of?
34:21
Debbie Craig
Or how do I keep my radar up, or what do I need to watch out for to it's okay, and I'll be okay, and I'm okay with as I am, and it's okay to be disappointed. And I'm always loved, and I'm going to be trusting, and I'm in this life for the adventure. And you spend more of those 60 to 70,000 thoughts on that, slowly but surely, these will fade and prune and start pulling apart, and these will get stronger. It's like going from a little path in the bush to a dirt road, to a tarred road, to a superhighway. This becomes the new superhighway, the new south. And all of a sudden, you'll start. Your brain has a beautiful part of it called the reticular activating system that pays attention to things in life and your environment around you.
35:05
Debbie Craig
Depending on almost unconsciously, what are you instructing it to pay attention to? So if you are spending all that time imagining in your meditative state, but also in life, or as you're going in the traffic and as you're moving into a new relationship, keep on reaffirming and keep on building that emotion and keep on doing that emotion. And what yourself, when you fall off and bring yourself back, then that particular activating system starts paying attention to all the things to show you how that is true and how that is a possibility and how that is a reality. So start noticing people that are having amazing relationships. You'll start watching movies or choosing movies that will reaffirm that for you.
35:41
Debbie Craig
You'll start to have people giving you more compliments, and you'll start noticing those things because the brain will pay attention to the things to help you get to where you're going to.
35:50
Sadaf Vahedna
We call that like an energy in colloquial space. Is that really an energy that we're giving off? Is it like an actual physical energy?
36:00
Debbie Craig
It's a physical frequency, right? So, like a radio wave or a microwave is a wave. Those waves are coming out from us all the time. And one of the ways of sort of, for me trying to feel it or imagine it is your heartbeat is beating all the time. It's got a beat. And every time that beat hits your physical reality. I mean, your body, it sends out a wave of frequency. It's a magnetic wave that it sends out. And your brain at the same time has got electrical waves, and those waves are moving through. They've got a wave. What's quite interesting, though, is that if you think about the waves coming out of your brain and the waves coming out of your heart, you wonder what is more bigger or powerful, your brain.
36:39
Debbie Craig
These waves can be measured sort of six inches or so on the average person from their heads. From the heart, the average person is 2 meters.
36:46
Sadaf Vahedna
Wow.
36:47
Debbie Craig
And obviously those people have got more presence and more magnetism, have generated an energy that's bigger than that. And some people are tiny because they're sort of so self contained or so anxious or so shut down so those frequencies can be measured.
37:01
Sadaf Vahedna
That's amazing. That's so fascinating. So if I want to become more magnetic, what would I do? How would I increase this energy in my heart? Like, what would I do?
37:10
Debbie Craig
Open your heart.
37:12
Sadaf Vahedna
Open your heart.
37:14
Debbie Craig
Life, I just call it planet adventure for now, can be absolutely magic. And it can absolutely painful. As we go through so many life events, as we grow up and later on in relationships and letdowns and successes and failures, when we feel pain, our heart wants to close up because we need time to heal. But sometimes we forget to open our hearts again.
37:34
Debbie Craig
And if we really want to be open to life and open to sort of that give and take and that flow and that creation of life, we need to be able to open our hearts and that create that requires us to sometimes sort of acknowledge that we've been through difficult periods, acknowledge the grief of loss that we've had in our lives, acknowledge that we're not always going to be perfect and liked and please everybody, and that we're going to feel okay, not okay, and trusting life and knowing that we sort of surrounded all the time. There's always love around us in some way, shape or form.
38:04
Debbie Craig
And whether that's from the beauty of your sunset or the love of a spouse or a child or a dog or a friend or a stranger that, you know, sometimes just offers you something, a smile or something that you didn't expect. Love is all around us, but sometimes we're so focused and it has to be from that person in that way at this time. And then we end up disappointing ourselves. So the work for me is every day we can wake up in the morning and instead of immediately going into, oh, the to do list or how am I going to get through the day. And what is all that stuff I need to be anxious about? We go straight to the heart first, before anything else, and we just go, it's okay. I'm okay. I'm living in a loving universe.
38:45
Debbie Craig
I'm in this beautiful vehicle of a being to play this adventure of life. And the more open hearted I am and the more open and trusting and aware, obviously not blind trust, of what's going on. And I'm listening and I'm tuning in. The more fun I'm gonna have, the more people I'm gonna meet, the more energy I'm gonna have to play. And that is the magnetism. If you know, if you've met someone with an open heart, you just feel better about yourself. You feel more optimistic. You feel like things are possible, you know?
39:15
Sadaf Vahedna
That's so interesting. This, like, leads me to think about our, like, who are we spending time with? I think the biggest shift for me was finding this community that you created, actually. And we used to do the Sunday morning meditations in Johannesburg. And I remember the first time I went for this walking meditation. I had no idea what I was doing. And, you know, I was still very new to the work. Then afterwards, we all had coffee. And what was amazing was that there were all these people, maybe like 15 or 20. I can't remember. Everybody was so genuinely loving. Like, it wasn't a fake. Hey, how are you? It was like a genuine love almost. There was no gossip. Like, it's almost like. And you know what I found really interesting?
40:00
Sadaf Vahedna
Nobody, or very rarely did somebody ask you what you do for a living. The conversations were so different. And for me, that was like, wow, it's possible to have relationships like this. And then what started happening automatically was that, I guess, like, the people in your life that are not giving out that same frequency start to fall away. Yeah. And you've done that really well. Yeah. So thank you for creating that community in South Africa. I want you to tell us a bit more about community. I'm sure, like, a lot of people that want to do this work now, maybe I'm living with someone or some people that may be in a totally, like, they're trapped in their minds and they're also victims of their own thoughts. How would I navigate this?
40:46
Sadaf Vahedna
Like, very practically, like, how would I navigate, like, staying in this feeling, even though maybe my mom or my spouse is, like, really negative?
40:55
Debbie Craig
That's a very tough one to do. And there's no one easy answer other than continually working every single day, every single morning on how you are the creator of your experience for that day. And regardless of our environment and regardless of what's going on in our emotions and regardless of the time we have here, we choose to be, or we choose to be happy, or we choose to be the source of our reality rather than the victim of our circumstances. And sometimes we come back from workshops or we come back from retreats and we, like all fired up and we want to change everybody around us. I mean, you must be like this and you must think like this and you must meditate. And some people will gravitate to that and then sort of play a little bit of it.
41:38
Debbie Craig
And some, it's just not for them. And they have a different choice and a different path and a different journey here than we do, and it's around. Can you find enough of an acceptance of each other and their own journeys in their own way to be able to coexist and always say, do that first, work on yourself first, and work on possibility first, and work on acceptance and allowing people to be who they are? If, however, it gets to a space after a long time of really practicing, because relationships are such beautiful learning experiences, and you have believe. You believe you've tried everything. You believe you've created a community outside of, let's say, your home space that boosts you and that you can build and that you can, you know, fill yourself up.
42:22
Debbie Craig
And then you go back and you play a role in your family space. And often there's such beautiful things happening there, just not in the way that we see it. But if that doesn't work and it gets to a point where there's so much resistance and so much frustration and so much you just can't anymore, then you need to be able to ask yourself what is right for me and what is the best choice for me and to be able to honestly and with compassion articulate that to the people around you. And then it's about choice for you, choice for them. And how do you find each other in the middle of that bridge? Or how do you find each other apart for a while and figure out how that works? So I've played with all of those.
42:57
Debbie Craig
I've been in very long term relationships, married for ten years and then for 15 years each time been through counselling, tried different things towards the end. And it got to a point where we both decided it was actually better for us to spend some time apart and see how that would go. And both of us finding our own journeys in the next space, the same with you in a career in a job, you've got to do your best to get to a point where you almost master yourself in that difficult environment, perceive challenging environment. And sometimes mastering yourself in that environment actually allows you to see that the environment is perfect for you and that you're playing a role in that. And that's where you need to be and finding different ways to expand and express yourself.
43:38
Sadaf Vahedna
Okay, I want to ask you about, you do these personal transformation retreats, right? What is your process for people? Like, if you could give us a sense of how you go through, how you navigate that, I wonder. I'm not sure, but I wonder if like the people that are coming to you, like are they like experienced, like have been doing this for a while or like, what if they're like newbies, you know, like total newbies never experienced this. A very conventional view of change and transformation. Perhaps. You know, maybe they expect something like almost like a corporate workshop where we have like posters and we like do that whole thing. What? Like, first of all, what are the types of people that you found yourself working with in the personal transformation work and what's your process?
44:25
Debbie Craig
So, I mean, all kinds of people come to the personal transformation workshops. I'm just thinking about even just the last one that we ran a few months ago. We had a guy who had some experience. He came to the workshop and he had a senior person in his team. And she never meditated before. Very bright, very brilliant, very open to learning. And he said to her, I'm gifting you this, you gotta go, it's amazing. And she came and says, I've never meditated before. And she had the most amazing transformational experience just by being open and following the videos, the advice, the experiences that we created for her. And there's many like that. I've had my own kids and guardian children coming on workshops and they also have gone from nothing.
45:05
Debbie Craig
And now, you know, sometimes even young at 16 years or 14, I think was the youngest coming to a workshop and still using the meditation today in her studies that she's in matric at the moment. So all the way to people who've been on the doctor Joe advance retreats or been to India to usher and meditated for years and years. Because, you know, if anyone comes to a transformational space, and I think that's really what I do, is I'll hold space and create a container for people to do the work that they need to do to get from their current self to their future self. Whether that is a novice doctor, search and initiate and you practice a little bit, or you're really a master, and now you wanted to take it to the next level.
45:42
Debbie Craig
That environment and that space and those experiences will give you what you need for you to be able to take that next step or that leap. We call it the quantum leap retreat, because a lot of the work that we're doing is leaping from this self to another self. And in the retreat experiences is to keep it as grounded and sort of simple and doable as possible and really work on what I was saying just now. It's how we think, act, and feel and talk about the formula of those three things. Following the work of Doctor Joe Dispenza and all the work that I've done, how do we get our thinking and our brain alpha brainwaves into alpha state and started practicing that and becoming aware of the thoughts and the frequencies that we are habitually falling into or creating.
46:24
Debbie Craig
You know, where are we in reaction, and where are we in creation? Getting into heart coherence and noticing what's going on at a feeling level, starting to notice how we are creating chemistry in ourselves, how we are forming brainwaves. So it's almost at a energetic level and at a physical, practical level at the same time, which becomes quite powerful, that you know that as you're having a thought, you're creating a neural frequency and you're creating a neural path as well. That way, getting into the heart coherence, learning how to do that, and it's through all different methods. So meditation is one of them. We do nature walks, we do challenges, we do reflection exercises, we do talks, we do videos, we do journal workbook activities. We do all kinds of different things.
47:06
Debbie Craig
And each of these experiences, or stimulants that we use help to bring up your own way of being, your own way of thinking, action, and feeling. So as we have an experience, we look at and we reflect on, okay, what was the thinking? Where was our brain? What was the feeling? Where was our hearts? Where was the body? How stressed or anxious or frustrated or angry or reactive or resistant or excited or energized or full of vitality? Was I in that space? And is that okay? Or do I want to change it? And then how do we do that? We go back to, how do I. How am I thinking? How am I feeling? What are my habits? What are my actions? And slowly but surely train ourselves. And the biggest thing is the body becomes the mind.
47:50
Debbie Craig
Once we've done something so many times that it's one thing making a new mental choice, we have to make the emotional sort of embedded choice that this is absolutely something that I'm going to be doing differently. And then we've got to train the body through habits, daily habits, like going to the gym, like eating differently, like learning how to a new language or a new skill or a new musical instrument. We have to train the body almost like back into that way of being because otherwise the body will run the show because everything's automated in there.
48:24
Sadaf Vahedna
So that's almost like the first step is to like notice your thoughts and then work on the emotions. Right. So the thought, feeling, acting like loop that cycle.
48:36
Debbie Craig
And sometimes, you know, it's, we say, you know, think, act, feel. But sometimes, because we've got, you know, different parts of our bodies, the limbic system is the emotional brain, and that is often picked up or stimulated through the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve will feel sometimes an environment. So if you know, for example, you walk into a room and there's been a fight, well, there's some tension. Your body will feel that tension before your mind will go, oh, there's something going on, right? It's like the 0.5 2nd reaction response. So sometimes the feeling comes from a body's emotional reaction and then will ping the brain and go, what's going on? And then the brain will look and analyze the feeling and then analyze the data and then come up with an interpretation of that.
49:22
Sadaf Vahedna
Is that what we call the gut feel?
49:24
Debbie Craig
Yeah.
49:24
Sadaf Vahedna
Okay.
49:25
Debbie Craig
You can choose that intuition or gut feel, but it's a lot to do. I mean, gut is one way. So the vagus nerve is the one brain, so the heart brain, and then you get the gut brain as well. So all three brains kind of work together to feed data into your system to be able for you to interpret and respond.
49:42
Sadaf Vahedna
Wow, fascinating. Okay, for those who've never heard the term, what is the vagus nerve and what is its purpose in our body and our emotions?
49:52
Debbie Craig
Sure. It's basically a nerve that goes all the way from its tendrils into the brain, all the way through the body, into the heart, and sort of almost into the gut. And it's just a very highly attuned organ or mechanism that picks up information beyond what the five senses can pick up.
50:07
Sadaf Vahedna
Wow.
50:08
Debbie Craig
And also to help us, to keep us safe and to help us to keep us healthy. And really what we're looking for is as much as you want to train the brain, we want to be able to train the vagus nerve as well, to start noticing and picking up the stuff that's going to be more useful to us than the stuff that's going to put us into stress and tend to panic.
50:27
Sadaf Vahedna
Okay, so once we do the think, act, feel thing, or feel, act, think, or feel, think, act, when do we bring in, like, the meditations, or is the meditations part of that?
50:39
Debbie Craig
Yes. So the meditation is to help to train the brain to shift the thinking and to shift the mind from thinking for the one sort of more negative or less constructive thinking to more constructive and more useful and more empowering thoughts.
50:54
Sadaf Vahedna
Right.
50:54
Debbie Craig
So as we set that intent and we go to Alpha State, when we do it in Alpha state, we're programming the subconscious mind to have more of those thoughts as opposed to those thoughts. The same time, we're programming the heart to be able to have more of those feelings than those feelings. And if we have the right thoughts, the right chemistry, the heart will start almost taking care of itself and the body. We teach to relax as opposed to being tense and to being stressed.
51:17
Sadaf Vahedna
Amazing.
51:17
Debbie Craig
And then in retreat. We also bring in the science of the three brains. So we talk about the importance of being able to imagine and to visualize using your prefrontal cortex and your frontal lobe to be able to create that sense of future self. And if you can't imagine something or you can't see what it is that you're actually trying to achieve, it's very difficult for your system to go in that direction. So we want to have the imagination of that, then we want to have an experience of actually doing something. So that's why we have all these different activities where we conversations and reflections and walks and adventure activities and videos to give you an experience. Because as we have an experience, we have an emotional reaction to that experience, and that gives us feedback.
51:58
Debbie Craig
And then we start looking at whether that is, well, what's taking us out of our calm and out of our norm and out of our beautiful space we want to be in. So we can make decisions on that, and then we want to put it into practice. And that's using the cerebellum in the brain. So you go from the prefrontal cortex to the limbic system to the cerebellum in the brain, and we want to automate happiness. We want to automate optimism. We want to automate belief in ourselves. We want to automate feeling that we've always loved. Wouldn't that be amazing?
52:24
Sadaf Vahedna
Yeah.
52:26
Debbie Craig
The more the brain is an amazing instrument around wanting to conserve resources and use its resources. So all the oxygen and sugars and energy that the brain needs to function. Anything that can automate or anything that becomes fairly predictable, it will automate and stick into unconscious, like your breathing, like your blood pressure, like a lot of your programmed thinking, but it's now what are you programming these things? So the more we habitually do things, the better. And using the meditation also just settles the old patterns and programs to be able to find an openness for learning and getting out of the stress state into the relaxation state. And then from there, creating and moving and practicing. And another big thing around, for me, the retreat space is the community we build. And knowing that other people are going through similar stuff.
53:14
Debbie Craig
And we're all human, and we all got our beauty, and we've all got our beasts. And so many of, almost everyone talks about they couldn't have done what they did without the people on the retreat. And then we do a 30 day program after the retreat where we meet every week online, and we connect on WhatsApp, and we share. And a lot of these WhatsApp groups are still going, sometimes months, sometimes years later, where people are still staying connected and supporting each other, and then coming to our walking meditations on the weekends or coming to events that we have. And that's a way of sort of staying plugged into a community where we want to be our best selves and we want to figure it out. And that needs support. We can't do it on our own.
53:51
Sadaf Vahedna
That's beautiful. I want to talk about something that I know a lot of people will be interested in. What do you think about manifestation and how does it work? How do I manifest something into my life?
54:03
Debbie Craig
Short version. And then I'll go back. Yeah. Is if you can resonate your whole heart primarily in your brain, and your body can resonate at the frequency at which that manifestation, let's call it a new job or a relationship or a certain amount of income. Beautiful house that you want to stay in. If you can resonate with that, then you collapse. Then we can go into the quantum theory. You collapse, basically, the energy of the quantum field into the physical when the resonance connects with each other. So maybe taking that back a little bit, in order for, you know, that we've spoken about a frequency coming out of our hearts and a frequency coming out of our brains and our bodies, either being in sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous state, that frequency is sort of moving around us.
54:45
Debbie Craig
And as we have an imagination or an imagined future, let's say I want this beautiful relationship or this job to come through. If we can feel a feeling as if we are already in that relationship, already in that job or in that income stream that we're looking for consistently most of the time. Then that starts becoming something that sort of gets attracted to us. The heart sends out the magnetic wave, the brain sends out the imagination, and the heart has that magnetic wave to pull that back to us. And it works energetically to pull that to us. And at the same time, you've got your obviously reticular activating system in the 3d world, actually looking for opportunities on his phone, that person.
55:26
Debbie Craig
And someone says, I go to that shop and you pick up that book, or someone introduces you to someone who suddenly leads to that job or to that relationship. So you've got to respond in the physical world as well. So you use your imagination, which is once again the mind and the brain. And then you use your heart to be able to feel it and then attract it and follow the hunches and follow your intuition to do that. And then you've got to take the action. You can't sit in your flat and hope. It's just going to sort of, someone's going to knock at your door. You've got to get up and follow those hunches and follow the rabbit holes, go down the rabbit hole and have some fun with the creation process.
55:58
Sadaf Vahedna
Now, it's a bit of a technical question, but how clear do I need to be about my goal? Because I have heard perspectives on this. So some people say, like, oh, you know, you just got to have, like, an idea and like, you can't be like, so attached to it because the more detailed your, like, goal is like, let's say I want to make x amount of money and I want to live in like, this particular house, then you're almost like, getting attached to it and there's like a neediness. So that energy of neediness takes you away from that thing. But at other times I've heard that, oh, you have to be very clear about what you want. So I'd love to hear your. What do you say?
56:31
Debbie Craig
It's a beautiful art to find the sweet spot between intention and surrender. And intention can be broad and it can be very specific. It's very hard to be able to say it's one or the other. So let's take an example of me wanting to come down to Cape Town. I've been wanting to come down to Cape Town for many years and I've spent a lot of time wanting to come down to Cape Town. And my intention was one day when life allowed, when money allowed, I had a big family and I had people and I had businesses and I had staff and I was like, in Johannesburg, I was like, there's no way I can just move myself down here without losing all of those things. So I'd set the intention at a very broad level that I want to come to Cape Town.
57:12
Debbie Craig
But I didn't say how. When I went to Doctor Joe Dispenza in Malta three and a half years ago, we did a mind movie. And in that mind movie was one of the questions, you know, affirmations, like, you know, where do you want to live? What do you want to have around you? And I was looking on Google and just thinking, you know, what picture would represent? Like, real sort of beauty surrounds me and I'm living in this place. And I searched on Google and I saw this picture. I said, yes, that's where I want to. That's where I want to be. And it was actually the twelve apostles in Camp space, sort of looking up at the twelve apostles. And I was like, that just suddenly hit my heart and I went, okay, I'm choosing that.
57:43
Debbie Craig
It wasn't a conscious decision as to I'm going to go and live in camps. But every time I was in Cape Town and I was traveling around, I came over Cliffneck and I looked at this and my heart just went, this is absolutely magnificent. It wasn't as specific as I want to be there, but it was this feeling that I felt of the kind of place that I want. And I put it into my mind movie and meditated on it for that seven days. And then, you know, probably for a year or so afterwards, every now and again, I'd look at my mind movie and then I sort of let it go because life was happening and I was running my business and trying to find a successor. And then Covid happened and then I.
58:17
Debbie Craig
And I wrote a book and then I was trying to survive. But it was such a strong intention at an unconscious level and using the mind moving and using the subconscious mind that a couple of years later, here I am in Kemps Bay with a view of exactly the same almost matched.
58:33
Sadaf Vahedna
View of my goodness. Wow.
58:35
Debbie Craig
So it does help. It helps to have a general sense of that. I want to feel as wow. And I want to feel. I want to walk out of my door and go like, wow. Which I do every day. And I wake up and every evening, whether it's stormy or watching the sunset, it's like a wild feeling. And that helps me keep my frequency high and it also helps me realize the amazingness of manifestation. What I didn't know at the time was the how I was going to get there. So I didn't know that in order for me to get here, I would probably have to, wouldn't have to, but in my case, leave my 15 year marriage, move away from my friends and family in Johannesburg. I didn't know that much succession. My business was going to resign after five years.
59:15
Debbie Craig
He was going to take my. She was running my business, and I was having a bit more freedom at that stage that my head of Ops, who ran my business, died from a brain tumour. All of this sort of happened also at the same time as I was running a project up and down between Jobun and Cape Town. And as a result of sort of all this letting go of a part of myself and a life really go deeply into it, due to a frequency change in all the meditation and all the sort of visualization that I'd been doing, enabled me then to have the freedom, in a sense, even though it was very painful to leave that all behind. To come in the pier and everyone says, you're never going to find places in Cape Town. It's too expensive.
59:54
Debbie Craig
It's two this to this. And just so happened that I just got this instinct, 03:00 on a Saturday afternoon to go and look online, you know, to go and see. And this place suddenly appeared at the price that I could afford. And here I've ended up in this. In this beautiful place or a beautiful community after very difficult grieving. Let go, surrender time. But you have to surrender to what life is bringing you and trust every moment and every day. What do I need to do? What do I need to decide today? Where do I need to move today? What is my heart telling me today? And some days, stay, dig down, have the conversations, figure it out, get a new GM, make this work. And other days it's like, no, no, I can't. I just can't do this.
01:00:34
Debbie Craig
And then you get to a point where you just know that you have to make the choice. The choice was like, I'm just not doing this big corporate consulting anymore. I'm not doing this relationship in this way anymore. And that enabled me to come here.
01:00:45
Sadaf Vahedna
That's amazing. So I would say, like, just listening to you, I would say that as you were changing your frequency, you started noticing things that were not in line with that anymore. Of course, there were other painful things that happened, but I think that was just part of, you know, what was meant to be, perhaps. But, like, I suppose with your relationship or your business. You know, it's like, okay, well, this is not in line with the frequency in which I want to be any longer. You know, not that was bad, just that it's different, too.
01:01:13
Debbie Craig
And the thing is, it's not for me. It wasn't conscious. It wasn't conscious, as this is not aligned with my frequency.
01:01:19
Sadaf Vahedna
Yes.
01:01:19
Debbie Craig
It's an inner resistance.
01:01:21
Sadaf Vahedna
Yes.
01:01:21
Debbie Craig
Or an inner discomfort. Yeah. I used to say to a friend that I'm feeling like there's something missing, like there's something wrong, like there's something I'm not together. I'm not like myself anymore. And I don't know what it is, but I'm antsy. And you know that something has to change, but you don't know yet what.
01:01:38
Sadaf Vahedna
That's like the side effects of shifting your frequency, that you might start feeling antsy around things that aren't resonating with you anymore.
01:01:46
Debbie Craig
And that's really the role that I think I can play, and I'd like to play, is as people are wanting to step into a new version of themselves, is to help them navigate this path, because there's a lot of beautiful moments where you can really step in and expand and find beauty and all around you. And there's many people that go from the one to other with their whole lives, their work, their jobs, their families, their relationships, and they somehow able to navigate that. There's other people that leave one or two or three of those behind and step into a new space. And that can be very frightening. And there's a lot of grief in that. And also to know when do you take something with them? And when he leaves behind is a very talking about big things.
01:02:27
Sadaf Vahedna
Yes, yes.
01:02:27
Debbie Craig
You know, businesses, marriages, kids, the way we relate cities, how we are perceived. And then the financial impact of making big decisions is also massive. And it keeps people often locked into certain realities because of the fear of not knowing what the new will bring.
01:02:45
Sadaf Vahedna
So it takes a lot of courage if you want to go down this path. Like, it just takes courage. And it may not be always painful, it'll just be different, which, in a way, I guess it feels painful to us, right. The way that we are.
01:02:56
Debbie Craig
Well, sometimes we over interpret excitement and difference as pain.
01:03:01
Sadaf Vahedna
Right.
01:03:02
Debbie Craig
We start also learning to see challenges as opportunities and unknowns as exciting and things moving out of our lives as opposed to being painful or, you know, loss as to be sort of shedding and letting go. And as we let go, one thing, something else will always take its place. Nature pours a vacuum that's always something that'll fill its place.
01:03:27
Sadaf Vahedna
What are the major challenges you faced working in personal change and transformation like in your work with other people? What's the thing that you find most challenging?
01:03:36
Debbie Craig
I suppose the most challenging is there's probably two things. One is you can't always help will solve or get shift in people. And, you know, my previous past self was very much around a solver and I wanted to get a result and wanting to be maybe the hero in someone's journey and get there. And some people are not ready or some people, it's not the way. Sometimes you are not the right match for that person. Sometimes they need to be stuck and stay there for longer for their own life's journey. And not getting that sense of result can be quite frustrating. And not being the right match for someone can also be quite painful if you think you're not enough or not good enough or haven't done the right thing.
01:04:18
Debbie Craig
So that's the one aspect of working with individuals that can be a little bit testing and especially when you see the potential and you see the possibility and if you just did these few things, you can imagine what your life might happen and go there. And the other one is holding space for people to move through very deep, difficult, traumatic. I remember when I was very young, I was in my twenties and I was on my first volunteer personal transformation session and I've obviously done the thing myself. And then I was volunteering and I was sitting in a circle as sort of the holder of that little circle space of people sharing some deep stuff. And I was exposed to just such horrific stories of what people had been through, either as perpetrators or victims.
01:05:01
Debbie Craig
And that impacted me very, very deeply to recognize that there's so much of that in life. And people have been through a lot and carry a lot in themselves. And once again, you can't always support and help and hold. All you can be is a space holder for them to do their own work. So, you know, as I've grown and learned and experimented and been exposed to different things more and more, I'm now okay with just being that energetic space holder for all of loving spaceholder for people to help them do their own work, whatever that may lead, is completely in their hands.
01:05:37
Sadaf Vahedna
On that note, do you have any stories that come to your mind about, like, profound transformation that was, like, unexpected, or can you share something with us to perhaps motivate people who might feel like, you know, they can't achieve the change that they're looking for.
01:05:53
Debbie Craig
Sure. There are so many. If I think back, there's been thousands of people through my retreat, never mind all the other hundreds of thousands of people that are in see online and testimonials and all of that. But if I just take a very special guy that I actually met just sort of at the, as I was trying to buy and sell and fix houses, he came to as a builder to renovate to help me fix my one house. And then I ended up renovating another house with him, a young guy. And just, we just sort of had this connection.
01:06:20
Debbie Craig
He helped me almost emotionally through some of my difficult moments because he was there when things were going down with my, because he was fixing things in the house and he was a builder and he had his construction coming and he had big dreams and we sort of stayed friends. And then eventually he came on my first workshop and this is amazing. And he'd done a lot of personal transformation work when he was very young, at 17, and now he's sort of late thirties. And he eventually came on my retreat and he had such an amazing transformative experience that he said that he found a vision that he had in his heart. He wanted to run transformation workshops because he used to support his mum and used to support when he was 17 and he just knew he had it in him.
01:07:00
Debbie Craig
And then I said, well, but he says he's got two, he's a single father, he's got two young kids. He hasn't got the money. The business is sort of just always just doing okay. And I said, well, I'm running this ten month journey with a small bunch of people as a bit of a pilot. Come and join me and we'll, you know, we'll work out the financials now after the ten months. In fact, even before we got to the end of the ten months, after about eight months, he ran his first transformation workshop and now he's run about eight of them already in the last eight months, one a month with him and his mom. And he's transforming people's lives in the most magnificent way. And he's just stepping into his beautiful power.
01:07:34
Debbie Craig
He's still running his building business on the side because he's learning how to let go and how to get managers and just trusting. I mean, that's just one example of.
01:07:43
Sadaf Vahedna
Many that's, yeah, what a story. I mean, and that's like in less than a year you would say, yeah, amazing. And I think that was also very open hearted of you to, I suppose, support him in this journey and help him get there. You know, I think that was wonderful of you, too.
01:08:00
Debbie Craig
And it works both ways because he was such a help to me, you know, during. During the period of when I was feeling very vulnerable as a bashy, a woman trying to figure out houses and maintenance and renovations and just finding a place to live. So helped with that as well. And there's so many examples that people that have been ill for years, just as an example and have come to a retreat and at the retreat itself, actually have been able to transform a health issue from something that they're unable to do to something that they're able to do.
01:08:29
Debbie Craig
It might sound a bit far fetched in a way, but, you know, from people who were struggling to stand because they couldn't balance because of a nerve and a sort of back injury issue, from an accident to on sort of the fourth day of this process, in those days, we did three and a half days, was actually being able to do a mini jog with a blindfold on.
01:08:49
Sadaf Vahedna
Wow.
01:08:49
Debbie Craig
And actually were the first person back on a blindfolded exercise.
01:08:53
Sadaf Vahedna
Wow.
01:08:53
Debbie Craig
After not even being able to stand without holding onto a chair on day one because of, you know, certain beliefs that they had manufactured in themselves and many examples of sort of spontaneous physical and emotional breakthroughs and healings and then going on to have a different type of life and relationships and income, people who started businesses, people who have so many people who have left constrained environments, whether it's work or relationships, and being able to find different ways of expressing themselves.
01:09:25
Sadaf Vahedna
I want to just say something. I mean, you talked about it sounding far fetched, and I think that it might for many people that are not exposed to the emerging science. Right. And just on that note, for, like, people that are listening, I want to say about how the University of California and San Diego is heading up this research on meditation and its profound effects on the body. And they've actually mapped out how, like, well, they are still doing it because I guess it's quite vast. But about how the body produces exosomes or the brain produces exosomes that goes and, like, neutralizes damaged cells in the body, how our gut microbiome changes, I think. Yeah.
01:10:03
Sadaf Vahedna
And just for people that don't know about that to say, like, you know, just go check it out, there's actually quite a bit out there on how it works on a physical level.
01:10:10
Debbie Craig
Doctor Joe Dispenza and Doctor Hamel have done at the University of California, and they have done a large scale research study on advanced meditators versus beginning, meditators versus no meditators. And they've actually found that advanced meditators who meditate on a regular basis, sort of, at least almost every day, have a higher level of a certain protein in their blood called serpent a. And that serpent a has a significant, massively significant impact on immunity, health.
01:10:39
Sadaf Vahedna
Yeah.
01:10:39
Debbie Craig
And actually have done studies with COVID initially and now with other different health aspects and are moving. Moving more into that.
01:10:47
Sadaf Vahedna
So now I guess it's more than just, oh, meditation reduces stress. It's not just stress. It's so much more like they're very, like real physical things that are happening in our body, not just a reduction in cortisol, I guess, which is one of probably the ways in which we can achieve all these other things. Debbie, is there anything else you'd like to share with us today before we end? Any final thoughts?
01:11:11
Debbie Craig
I think maybe just to remind us all that a lot of us are striving to a better version of ourselves. It feels like we've got to move from here to there to get to that better version of ourselves. And there's so much work to be done, and maybe just sometimes we need to shift it around and going, you know, inside of us, we already are beautiful and powerful, and creators have every possible imagined feeling that we'd want to feel from hope and optimism and awe and magic and happiness and joy. It's already here. It's already in us. It's already manifest.
01:11:52
Sadaf Vahedna
Yeah.
01:11:52
Debbie Craig
All that we need to do is remember who we are and remember how powerful and beautiful and gorgeous and loving we are and allow the rest to just fall away and just remove what's in the way of you being that more often every day, because we always tap into that at times in days and weeks and months. And just, that is who we are. That is our birthright. That is our magic. That is our being. And just keep on remembering who we are more often.
01:12:19
Sadaf Vahedna
That's so beautiful. I feel like we need a part two and a part three. And I feel like I can talk to you for so long because there's so much. Thank you for sharing your gems with us, and I'm sure we're going to have you back.
01:12:31
Debbie Craig
Thank you for the opportunity. It's always nice to chat and beautiful questions, and I hope I made some sense in it all and always just love to share and learn together.
01:12:41
Sadaf Vahedna
Yeah, no, it's been wonderful. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning into alt life, where we explore the endless possibilities of personal transformation. I hope you found today's episode insightful. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with a friend. Until next time, don't be a sheep. Keep questioning, stay curious, and never stop exploring the extraordinary.