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Meet Kari Bandle, a professional psychic, medium, empath, healer and owner of Sacred Whispers Studio. This podcast dives into the messy, magical and meaningful parts of being human. Each episode blends science with spirituality to explore real life topics along with techniques for empowerment and healing. Sign up for your weekly energy forecast along with the podcast topic in Kari's emails on the main page at: sacredwhispers1111.com
You can also learn more about Kari or book a reading.
These empowering podcasts help you navigate life with more clarity, knowledge, and solution-based compassion for your life's journey.
If your here, you were led here and are reading this for a reason so click the button! (they told me to say that😉)
Hey, you. Welcome back to Medium with a Mic. I'm Carrie, and today, I'm gonna talk about something a little more tender, a little raw, honestly, a little overdue. Have you ever dreaded that question? So tell me about yourself.
Kari Bandle:I always think I'm a mother, a grandmother, a wife, a business owner, all the titles, all things you do in service of others. And don't get me wrong. There is honor in that. But what lights you up? What gets you excited?
Kari Bandle:What makes you individually, uniquely, beautifully you? I wanna ask you something that might feel simple, but is actually one of the most profound things you could ever sit with. Do you even know yourself? And before you go, well, yeah, of course, I know myself, Carrie. Just hang in there with me because knowing your name, your job, your role in the family, what you're supposed to be doing at any given moment, that's not knowing yourself.
Kari Bandle:That's knowing your resume. I'm talking about the deeper stuff, the real stuff. What actually makes you happy? Not what should make you happy, not what makes your family proud or your partner comfortable, but what lights you up from the inside? What excites you?
Kari Bandle:What inspires you? Who do you genuinely admire and and why? And the big one, the one that gets caught in people's throats, do you deeply love yourself? And what does that even mean? These aren't trick trick questions.
Kari Bandle:They're soul questions, and most of us have never had a safe space to answer them honestly. So today, that's what I wanna do. You, me, and some questions that might just change the way you see yourself. Most of us were never encouraged to know ourselves. I mean that in the most loving, nonblaming possible way.
Kari Bandle:But think about it. From the time we were little, the question pointed outward. What do you wanna be when you grow up? What grades did you get? Are you being good?
Kari Bandle:Are you making people happy? Nobody sat us down and said, okay, sweetheart. What makes you feel alive? What's the thing that when you do it, time disappears? What brings you joy just for the sake of joy?
Kari Bandle:Instead, we learn to shape ourselves around other people's needs, around what was expected, around what was safe, and we got really, really good at it. We became experts at knowing what other people need, what other people feel, what other people want from us. And in the process, quietly, without even noticing, we lost the thread back to ourselves. Now for my empaths in the room, and I know you're here because you always find your way to shows like this, This is your whole story, isn't it? You've been so tuned in to everyone else's frequency that your own signal got buried under all that noise.
Kari Bandle:And I wanna say something to you specifically. The fact that you don't know yourself well right now is not a character flaw. It is the result of surviving in environments where you weren't the priority. You adapted. You were brilliant at it actually, but now now it's time to come home.
Kari Bandle:Okay first question and I want you to really think about this. What makes you truly happy? I'll wait. Do you know? Not what should make you happy, not what makes you look happy on social media, not what you're supposed to say when someone asks, but what actually does it.
Kari Bandle:Here's what I've noticed both in my own life and in the thousands conversations I've had over the years as a human who's been around the block many times. When people try to answer this question, they often freeze, or they go straight to the acceptable answers. My kids, my family, travel, success, and those things can be genuinely true. I'm not dismissing any of that, but I want you to go smaller and quieter and more specific because happiness isn't always this huge dramatic fireworks experience. Sometimes it's the cup of coffee on a Tuesday morning when the house is still quiet and nobody needs anything from you yet.
Kari Bandle:Sometimes it's getting lost in a creative project and suddenly realizing two hours have passed. Now that's a passion. Sometimes it's a conversation that goes so deep. It feels like you've touched something sacred. The specific stuff tells you who you actually are.
Kari Bandle:The big vague stuff tells you who you were raised to wanna be. So here's an exercise I want you to try this week. Keep a little happiness journal. Doesn't have to be anything fancy. Notes...
Kari Bandle:A notes app on your phone is fine. And every time you feel genuinely authentically happy, even for thirty seconds, write it down. Not the reasons you think you should be happy, the reasons you actually are. After a week, look at that list. It will tell you more about yourself than any personality test ever could.
Kari Bandle:One more thing before we move on, and this one's important. If you've been in survival mode for a long time, if you've been the caretaker, the fixer, the one holding everything together, you might do this exercise and find your list is really really short, and that's not failure. That's information. It it it means you've you've been running on empty, and your capacity for joy has been compressed by necessity. It doesn't mean joy is gone.
Kari Bandle:It means it's been waiting patiently and it'll come back as soon as you make room for it. I promise you that. Okay. Next question. What excites you?
Kari Bandle:And I wanna distinguish this from happiness for a second because they're cousins, but they're not really the same thing. Happiness is warm. It's the feeling of being at ease in your own skin, of things feeling right and good. It's a steady glow. Excitement is more like a spark.
Kari Bandle:It's the thing that makes you sit up straighter, the thing that makes your brain start firing, the idea that the idea that keeps keeps coming back no matter how many times you try to be practical and and tell it to go away. A lot of people, especially as we get older, especially after we've been burned by hope a time or two, start to shut down excitement before it has a chance to breathe. We preemptively protect ourselves. Well, that's not realistic. That's not practical.
Kari Bandle:That ship has sailed, and here's what I wanna say to that. The things that excite you are not random. They are not accidents. They are pointing at something real, something that belongs to you, something that your soul is genuinely oriented toward. When something consistently excites you, when you try to talk yourself out of it, That's your inner compass doing its job.
Kari Bandle:That's your higher self waving at you going, hey. This way. This is part of why you came here. I've said before that I believe souls don't come to human form to learn a lesson. They come to have an experience, to answer a question, to explore something, and your excitement is a clue.
Kari Bandle:It's a bread crumb trail. So what excites you? Not what excited you twenty years ago before life happened, though that's worth revisiting too. What excites you now? Maybe it's a creative pursuit, maybe a cause for a mission, Maybe it's a type of conversation, a kind of connection, an idea to keep circling back to.
Kari Bandle:Maybe it's a place you've never been but feel inexplicably drawn to. Write it down and don't edit it. Don't make it make any sense yet. Just let yourself be excited without permission for once. Okay, question three: What inspires you?
Kari Bandle:Now this one is interesting because a lot of people think of inspiration as something that comes from outside, a great book, motivational speech, a beautiful piece of art. And, yes, all of that counts, but I want you to go one layer deeper. When you feel inspired, what is actually activating in you? Because inspiration, when it really lands, when it gives you that full body yes that chills up the spine, tears in your eyes, I feel like I can do anything feeling. That's not just an external experience.
Kari Bandle:That's a recognition. You are recognizing yourself in what you're witnessing. Think about it. If you see someone living boldly and it inspires you, it's not because boldness is foreign to you. It's because boldness lives in you, and it's trying to wake up.
Kari Bandle:If beautiful music moves you to tears, it's not because music is magic to you alone. It's because something in that music resonates with a frequency inside of you that is aching to be expressed. Inspiration is your soul pointing at itself in a mirror and going, there, that, that's real. That's mine. So when you feel inspired, pay attention to what exactly is being activated.
Kari Bandle:That information is gold. And on a a more practical level, what kinds of things reliably inspire you? Nature, art, music, stories of resilience, scientific discoveries, spiritual experiences, other people's courage, ancient wisdom, new ideas. There's a pattern there. That pattern is telling you something about your values, your orientation, your reason for being here.
Kari Bandle:Alright. So this one is my favorite because it feels like a simple little question, but it's absolutely not. Who do you admire? And take a moment. Think of someone, a person in your life, a public figure, a historical figure, even a fictional character who you genuinely deeply admire.
Kari Bandle:Got someone? Now here's the sneaky part. The thing you admire most about them, that quality, that trait, that way of moving through the world, it lives in you. I mean that. I am not being metaphorical.
Kari Bandle:In spiritual and psychological understanding alike, there's this principle that resonance reveals what's already present. We don't get moved by things that are completely alien to us. We get moved by things that reflect back something we contain, something we may not have developed or claimed or allowed ourselves to be, but something that is genuinely part of our makeup. So when you would deeply admire someone's courage, it's because courage is in you. When you admire someone's creativity, their tenderness, their wisdom, their wild aliveness, that is you recognizing you.
Kari Bandle:The psychologist Carl Jung called this projection. We project our own unclaimed qualities outward onto other people, and then we admire them for it because we don't yet feel safe claiming those qualities as our own, which means your admiration list is essentially a list of your own potential, your own gifts, your own unclaimed self waiting to be welcomed home. So ask yourself, who do I admire? What specific quality draws me? And where is that quality living in me?
Kari Bandle:Even if it's small, even if it's underdeveloped, even if it's been buried under years of playing small. Start there. That is the beginning of knowing yourself. Okay. We've arrived.
Kari Bandle:This is the big one. Do you really deeply love yourself? And I know, I know some of you just physically reacted to that question. Some of you maybe rolled your eyes a little because you've heard the love yourself message so many times that it's lost all its meaning. And some of you felt a pang of something sadness, shame, longing.
Kari Bandle:Some of you might have been have even like just said yes automatically because that's the right answer and then wondered if you actually mean it or said what does that even mean because I said that once a long time ago. What does that even mean? I wanna start by busting open the phrase itself because love yourself, as it gets tossed around, has become almost meaningless. People say it like it's a switch that you flip. Like, one day, you just decide and then you're done.
Kari Bandle:But self love is not a feeling or rather it's not only a feeling. It's a practice. It is an ongoing act of choosing yourself again and again, often in the smallest and most unglamorous ways. Here's what I've come to understand self love to actually look like in real life. Self love is saying no when your gut says no, even when someone else is disappointed.
Kari Bandle:Self love is giving yourself rest when you're exhausted instead of pushing through because you feel guilty for resting. Self love is being honest with yourself about what you actually feel, what you actually want, what actually hurt, instead of bypassing it, all in the name of being positive or spiritual. Self love is not abandoning yourself in the presence of other people's pain. You can have compassion and still hold your own center. You can be there for others and still be there for you.
Kari Bandle:Self love is the quiet, radical act of deciding that your experience of this life matters, not more than other people's, but equally also included. And here's the spiritual layer I want to add because this is Medium with a Mic, and we go there. Your soul chose to be here in this body, in this life, at this exact time. That soul, whatever its reasoning for coming, whatever question it came here to answer, that soul is you. The real, eternal, unbroken you.
Kari Bandle:The you that existed before anyone told you who you should be and loving yourself at the deepest level is loving that. It's recognizing that beneath the roles and the wounds and the things you've been told about yourself There is something intact, something whole, something that has always been worthy of love including your own. Okay. I don't want to leave you with just beautiful concepts. I want I want to give you some actual things you can do starting today.
Kari Bandle:The first one is the inner interview. Set aside fifteen minutes ideally in the morning before the world starts asking things of you and sit down with a journal or your notes app and interview yourself. Not a therapy session, not a productivity review, an actual curious kind nonjudgmental interview. Ask your yourself things like what have I been feeling lately that I haven't given myself permission to feel? What have I been wanting that I haven't said out loud?
Kari Bandle:What am I proud of that nobody has acknowledged? That's a huge one. What do I need right now? And then this is important. Answer honestly.
Kari Bandle:Don't filter. Don't make it pretty. Just let yourself be witnessed by yourself. Practice two is body check ins. Your body knows things your mind hasn't admitted yet.
Kari Bandle:Several times a day, pause and ask yourself, where am I holding tension right now? What is my body trying to tell me? Tight chest, clenched jaw, heavy shoulders. Your body is tracking your emotional reality even when your brain is too busy or too defended to. Over time, learning to read your own body is one of the most powerful self knowledge tools you have.
Kari Bandle:And as an empath, it's also how you start to distinguish your energy from everyone else's, but that's a whole other episode. Practice three, the admiration reverse. Take your admiration list from earlier. For each quality you identified, write down one small specific way you could express that quality today. Admire someone's honesty.
Kari Bandle:Be honest about something small. Admire someone's creativity. Make something, anything, even if it's bad, but it probably won't be. It'll probably be great. Admire someone's peace.
Kari Bandle:Give yourself five minutes of actual quiet. You're not performing the quality. You're practicing welcoming at home. Now, practice number four is love notes to yourself. I want you to write yourself a love note, not a gratitude list, not an affirmation you copy from someone else.
Kari Bandle:A love note from you to you. What would you say to someone you adored who was going through exactly what you're going through right now? Say that to yourself and mean it. I keep a reminder on my desk that says, I love you. When I see it, I use sign language to tell myself ending with my hand on my heart.
Kari Bandle:I throw in I'm proud of you sometimes because I never heard it and it deserves to be said. Now this one is this one's a little heavy but practice five is write your own obituary. I got this from a friend who teaches intuitive skills and out of every exercise I have done in my life this was by far the toughest. It took me two years of revisiting and a lot of tears to finish, but it really sparked something in me. What do I want to leave as a memory for those who miss me?
Kari Bandle:What will I be known for? It forced me to stop skating through life and start living it, start contributing to it, and start loving it. Try it and see what happens. Hey. I know some of this hit different today, and that's okay.
Kari Bandle:That's actually good. When something lands in a tender place that's not you being broken, that's you being alive and you being present. Self knowledge is not a destination. It's not a quiz you take when you're done. It's a lifelong conversation between you and the person you're becoming.
Kari Bandle:On the pathway to self, If you find tears rolling down your cheek know that they are cleansing tears tears of release. And this simple courageous act of starting of asking yourself who am I really? What do I actually want? Do I love myself? That act alone begins to shift something.
Kari Bandle:So I'm asking you start the conversation this week with yourself because the most important relationship in your life, the one that everything else flows from, is the one you have with you. I love you and I mean that. I hope you tell yourself that. Don't forget to subscribe, give me a thumbs up, leave a comment. If this moved you just share it with someone.
Kari Bandle:Those reviews genuinely help. More people find this show and if you want to support this weekly labor of love, I don't make anything from putting this information out every week. You can buy me a coffee on my website sacredwhispers1111.com on the podcast page. It keeps the show ad free and keeps me in the studio. Please take care of yourself really I mean that.
Kari Bandle:This is Medium with a Mic until next week keep listening to those whispers of wisdom.