Welcome to the Delicious Dignity Podcast. Let's settle in securely and ever so nicely into the brilliance of our own dignity. I'm already laughing as I start this episode just because this episode was originally written as an article for online magazines because I used to, back in the day when I first started my business, the way I used to talk about my business and share word about my business is by writing articles for online magazines. And I ended up getting published in a lot of different places. But when I wrote this article, I never ended up getting it published because it would get rejected from all of the different online magazines that I had pitched it to. So now that I have my own podcast show, I can finally say what I want to say without having to edit or make it palatable to a wide audience. And I can actually say it in this format and with perfect authenticity to you. So I'm just really excited to share this episode. The whole point of this story that I'm going to share and some of the insights that I've give you an idea of what spiritual sovereignty looks like. Or if you don't identify with the word spiritual, that's fine. Nobody's trying to convert you into anything. You can think of it as sovereignty, but for the spiritual side. So it's still the concept of being a sovereign human being at one with yourself, at one with the world. Only in this case, I'm showing you a different side of how sovereignty is applied in the spiritual world. So far, I've talked to you about sovereignty through the eyes of being single, through the eyes of starting this podcast. And now I'm showing you sovereignty from the side of what it means to be a spiritual person and still sovereign. And so let me tell you the story. And it's a funny story. You know, this is a really funny episode, but it's funny because it's true. So about 12 years ago, is when I first started training to be a psychic or what they call the psychic. Now I just call myself a professional intuitive because the word psychic, usually to some people when they hear that, they usually think of charlatans or fake people, people just trying to get your money or people trying to predict your future, which is not what psychic work is about. So now I call myself a professional intuitive. But anyways, that was a side note. 12 years ago, I was training to be a psychic. One of the many trainings that I took is a shamanic training workshop. It was taught by Okurandera. Okurandera is, I believe you would explain it as a Mexican shaman woman or a Mexican medicine woman. She was from Mexico and I was training with her to do shamanic work. And shamanic work, for those people who don't know, it's a very intense, deep connection to spirit. And it usually uses elements of nature. to connect with spirit. So anyway, 12 years ago, I go to the shamanic training workshop. And in one of the very first shamanic journeys we did, our Kurandera guided us to receive some gifts from spirit. They're energetic gifts, gifts of energy. And every other woman in the circle talked about how she received her energetic gifts and what those gifts are. And they were very pleasant gifts from spirit. Things like a flower, a pretty crystal, a seed, a pen, a book. These very sweet, and again, they're energetic gifts. They're not physical things. So it could be something that they heard, could be something they saw in their mind's eye. So those were the gifts they got. Guess what my gift was? What? My gift was a human-sized, so it must be like five or six feet, a human-sized double-edged axe. And it was swinging right at my head. And that was my gift. All these other women were getting these pretty things and flowery things and lovely things. And I got a huge double-edged axe. And so throughout the workshop, I kept comparing my spiritual gifts and expressions to their expressions. Their intuition sounded like, in the United States, the South, the South of the United States is very like Southern sweetness. Like they talk almost like they have honey in their mouth, you know? And that's what their intuition sounded like. They sounded like a sweet Southern belle. Combined with a gentle wind chime and a cool summer breeze. And they would say things like, I hear the word trust. I see Archangel Michael and he says all is well. I see a beautiful rose and it tells me I'm beautiful. I see a book and I think I need to write a book. These were the expressions of their spirituality and what they got from their guides. My intuition... So their intuition sounds like the sweet Southern woman. And my intuition sounds like the rolling thunderous thighs of a warrior woman. You know, just imagine a warrior sumo wrestler woman and she's stomping on the ground sumo style. And that's what my intuition sounded like to me. It would say things like, no, or what the F is that? Here's an ax, chop it down. Dilshad, no. Lay it all out with me. And it just had this very, which to other people sounds aggressive, but to me, it sounded very passionate, very like fierce, very forceful almost, but like force of nature. And it would talk to me in long paragraphs, never in one sentence, sweet things. It would be long paragraphs of really intense wisdom and energy that would be thrown at me. And here I am, I'm like, why does... Their intuition sounds so sweet, but my intuition sounds like a fierce warrior woman. I couldn't understand what was going on. And so the three questions I would always ask myself in all of these trainings and workshops I did was, what in God's name is wrong with me? What's wrong with me? And then I would ask, am I a bad person? Because why do I get this like fierce sort of energy, but they get all the sweet, gooey, ooey stuff. And the third question I would ask is, why can't I be more compassionate sounding? So three questions, what in God's name is wrong with me? Am I a bad person? Why can't I be more compassionate sounding? These were the three questions I always ask myself at every intuition training and every psychic training, every spiritual training workshop I ever attended, because this would be the difference in energy between me versus them kind of thing. So let me just pause there. I want to talk about this compassionate sounding thing, because maybe some of you relate, maybe you don't. But I feel like especially as women, we're taught to be nice, the nice girl. the good girl. And because their intuition sounded like nice girl or good girl, and my intuition sounded like a raging B-I-T-C-H, I thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn't compassionate enough where I couldn't access intuition that sounded compassionate. And I want to do a whole episode on the word compassionate and being a doormat and women in general. But I just wanted to seed that idea for you now that that was one of the questions I used to ask myself. And I asked this at every single workshop training or course and event that I ever had, including my life coach training. Even when it wasn't related to spiritual work and I was just doing, let's say, normal work, like publicly normal work, publicly acceptable work like life coach work, it was still the same question. And so let's zoom into another event. This is another funny story. There was a teacher who was teaching us how to channel. And channeling just means you are having a conversation with a divine being or a divine entity, whatever you want to call it. Now, you've seen some movie versions of that where the spirit possesses you and all that nonsense. That is not what I'm talking about. Because even back then, I wanted to remain sovereign and I never wanted anything to come and take over. We were doing this channeling workshop where we were basically talking to a being or entity. And I tried my hand at channeling what they called Christ consciousness, which basically means the Christ family, like Mother Mary, Jesus Christ, etc. And that's what they told me to channel. They told me to channel Christ consciousness. What was I expecting? I was expecting that I would come out with some glorious, ageless, timeless wisdom that Did I channel that? Nope. I channeled dad jokes that even made me, the queen of dad jokes, shake my head. I was so offended by how corny they were. And I was like, excuse me, I'm supposed to be channeling this ageless wisdom. How am I channeling dad jokes? And I would sit there and think, why can't my Jesus be just as serious and say far out things like their Jesus does? I'm pretty sure I went to a bookstore and flipped through the pages of the Bible to find evidence of Jesus and his sense of humor. And I do know that I Googled, and back then I Googled the phrase, does Jesus tell dad jokes? This was my level because I was always comparing. I was always comparing myself to how other people were sounding because I still had that sense thing in my head that there was only one way to do something and there was only one type of information to access. And I truly believed that what I was getting was not as great as what other people were getting through their intuition. I was sort of desperate and I was trying to find evidence of this in a very nonsensical way. But I can't describe to you what that is like to enter into this area of spirituality, which has so many different connections to it and so many different cultures that influence it. And none of what you are experiencing or what I was experiencing was being reflected in any of the literature or in any of the teachings or in any of the trainings that I was undertaking. When they told me to sit still and be silent as part of a meditation, I wanted to laugh and dance. I would feel like this urge to laugh and dance. And I wasn't trying to be contrarian. I wasn't purposely trying to attract attention by not doing what they wanted me to do. I would try to be still. I would try to meditate. But I only wanted to dance and laugh every time I accessed that energy. And sometimes when I would meditate, I would feel a very odd but very pleasant sensation down there. So now, not only am I completely different from other people, I am feeling this sensual, sexual energy while I'm trying to be spiritual, which back then, those two things, they don't match. It's like, oh, if you're spiritual, you're somehow this... monk in a monastery, fully pure and God knows what else. And it has nothing to do with sensuality or sexuality. So for me, I'm like, oh my God, what is wrong with me? I'm trying to meditate and here I'm feeling sensual sexual energy as I'm trying to meditate. This doesn't make any sense. I would ask myself, why does my enlightenment feel like I'm about to have an orgasm? But why does their enlightenment look so contained, dignified and unbothered as they sit there very prettily, perfectly quietly on their meditation cushion? You know, why does my truth sound like an atomic bomb, but their truth sounds like at most a cute little fart? Why is there such a big difference in what I'm accessing and what they're accessing? And I even remember one time connecting to Archangel Michael. And if you're wondering why there's so much Christ consciousness, I'm talking about archangels and angels. It was just the people I was learning from, apart from this Kurandera person, they were all coming from a particular Western background. So that's why it was very Christianity focused in some ways. One of them introduced me to the being Archangel Michael and And I would try to work with Archangel Michael and all this being wanted to do with me is help me find the best parking spots. And why parking? Why is parking something an archangel would be interested in helping me with? That's so ridiculous to me. It's still ridiculous to me. Now, of course, I know better. But if you've ever been in a car with me and we're driving, you will see that I always get a parking spot everywhere I go. And if I don't get it immediately, it always takes me to a place where there's free parking and I don't have to pay for the parking and it's close by. I always get a parking spot. And I honestly couldn't tell you why or how. Now it happens automatically. But back then, what a weird thing to connect with the divine about, parking. So I would think, okay, maybe I have ADHD. Maybe I have a sampling of inner child issues, a smattering of shadow work that I needed to do. Like I have to really go deep. There's something really wrong with me. Am I just making all of these things up? And I found infinite reasons, both spiritually and psychologically, to explain to myself why I acted the way I did. If this sounds familiar, it sounds very familiar to episode two, right? Where I asked myself the same question. What is wrong with me? Why am I still single? Why can't I find a partner? Blah, blah, blah, right? It's the same thing now applied to spirituality. As I was training and doing all of this work. I committed myself to analyzing every nook and corner of my mind, my emotions, and my spirit, almost like committing psychic surgery. I went into every nook and cranny to try to explain why I was the way I was until one day I arrived at the most obvious explanation. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with me. What a thought. And that is how I arrived at this concept and this understanding of And this absolute beautiful truth, it is an absolute truth. And that is the truth of spiritual sovereignty. And so based on that, I have three insights that I would like to give you about spiritual sovereignty so that you can start thinking about, if you are someone who has thought that spiritual life or spirituality is just BS, you're likely actually talking about religion. You're not talking about spirituality. Because real spirituality is about sovereignty. So just open your mind a little bit, whether you're new or old to this concept, and just listen to what I have to say. Just see how this sits with you, okay? The first insight is what I would like to call spiritual love language. You see, spirit, God, teacup, whatever you want to call it. Sometimes I just call it all there is. All there is... knows my love language. You see, I've always greeted my favorite humans and even now my dog in a particular way. You ask my friends how I greet them. I am aggressively affectionate. I do a little excited song, a happy dance. I smile a lot. I laugh a lot. I'm very passionate when I love someone. If my dog could talk, he would tell you this too. And I'm also extremely protective. So if They need protecting, or I perceive they need protecting. There will be a swift sword or an axe coming down to protect them. Does this sound familiar? I fuss over all the beings I love. I fuss over them. I even fuss over my plants. You know, and sometimes like I... I've told my friends this, and they will attest to this. Sometimes I have an urge to part their hair and groom them like a baboon, you know, like monkeys, because I have a rather animalistic, wild way of loving on people. And I realized that my guides, my spirit, my connection to the divine speaks to me the same way, because it knows that that's how I know love is there. You see what I'm saying? It speaks my love language. So the axe, the fierce warrior woman, the dad jokes, the laughter, like this is how I love. That is how I am loved. Do you see? Sorry, I didn't mean to break down there. But it knows my love language and spirit knows your love language. So it will speak to you that way. If you are a very logical, method-driven engineer, It will speak to you in binary numbers if it has to. It's not precious about the language it uses to talk to you. It will speak to you the way you need to be spoken to. It'll speak to you in the way you most understand it. It is the path of least resistance to speak your love language. And spirituality and spirit in general does not waste energy. The most defining quality that I have experienced with spirituality is that it is efficient. It is the most efficient thing on this planet. It does not waste energy. It does not waste time. And the best way to speak to somebody to help them understand anything, go about your day and just do this, right? Notice somebody's love language and speak to them in that way and you will be understood almost immediately. And that's how spirit speaks to you as well. Here are a couple of things I used to do just to show you what I mean by it speaking my love language. So when I would access my intuition and my intuition would say something to me, I would argue, I would get angry, I would throw tantrums. And not once did I feel abandoned by that. So like spirit would sort of work with me. My intuition would work with me. It was like having a conversation. And that's what I appreciate in people too, like work with me, fight me, help me understand what I need to understand. And I never saw that. This is like 12 years ago, right? I never saw people getting angry and throwing tantrums and still feeling like they can talk to spirit. It was always, I needed to be this pure, high on the mountaintop being in order to access spirit. I couldn't bring my humanness, my anger, my temper, my pain to spirit. But that's what you do when you really love someone. You love all of them. That's my first insight to you that spirit speaks your love language to you. It loves you the way you most understand how to be loved. The second insight I have for you is a concept that I have invented called potato spirituality. It's a waterfall effect from what I just told you about, which is potato spirituality is my term that I coined to explain that there is such a thing as a style. of enlightenment, a style, a brand of enlightenment. A potato can be made a thousand different ways. You can bake it, fry it, chop it, put it in soup, put it in a vegetable medley, put it in a taco, put it in a burrito. You can do so much with a potato. There are infinite permutations and combinations that you can do with a potato. And the same is true for enlightenment. And the same is true for spirituality. All roads lead home. No one way is greater than the other. But... Your way has to be fully acknowledged and loved and owned in order to reach whatever goal you're seeking. So for example, I have a lot of passion, in case you couldn't tell. I have a lot of passion and my passion, especially to people who have very delicate nervous systems, my passion sounds like anger to a lot of people. In a world gone numb, someone who is full of it, full of life, full of themselves can sound arrogant. In a world where females are taught to be good little girls, being a woman who is all the things and none of the things can seem crazy to people. I realized I had bought into a patriarchal, religious, and colonizer mentality into my spirituality. And this mentality taught me that there is a thing called God that people say exists, and this God person or being looks a certain way, talks a certain way. So who am I to have my own unique personality albeit wacky and quirky, and direct connection to God. The best advice I can give you, dear gentle reader, excuse my Bridgerton reference, is to not copy how someone else defines spirit. Your brand of enlightenment is your own. Your style of enlightenment is your own. Don't bring your chronic shame story into it. Be like the mighty potato. Make yourself into your own mold and settle in comfortably. And maybe your potato today is chopped, but tomorrow it's fried. We really don't know. It can change day to day within the same person. So if your brand of spirituality is anything like mine or anything close to mine, which is quirky, wacky, full of humor, full of respectful irreverence, full of warrior-like energy, then that's how it appears to you. That's your brand of enlightenment. That's your potato of enlightenment. And the third insight is, again, something that derives from the first two, is that what I didn't know I was doing was that I was subconsciously devaluing the divine feminine or the feminine face of God. A lot of spiritual work, real spiritual work, will be about reclaiming the divine feminine. So your spirituality could look funny, wacky, coarse, clumsy, especially in the beginning, but it must look like that. That's how you know you're on the path to spiritual sovereignty. And that is something the feminine values more than her life. She values spiritual sovereignty. The divine feminine, you know, that feeling that I said I had down there, experiencing sexual, sensual energy while doing spiritual work is is the sign of the sacred or the divine feminine because the feminine is based on a sacred sensuality. It's a sacred intimacy with life. I didn't realize that the divine feminine or the sacred feminine made experience the teacher and not the preached intellectualisms. It's not about teaching in a classroom. It's about guiding into an experience and that experience becomes your teacher. And that's what the divine feminine or the sacred feminine prioritizes over anything and everything. Experience over preached intellectualisms. I didn't realize that my urge to dance was an innate knowing that moving energy is the way the feminine loves to ground. The feminine loves to dance. The feminine loves to... That's why you've seen... The lord of the dance, Shiva, or Shiva. I can't believe I said that with an American accent. Shiva, what is wrong with me? Shiva. I'm so sorry, guys. Shiva, the lord of the dance. That's how he creates. That's how he destroys. That's how he brings everything. He brings all the creation together in this sacred cosmic dance. And if you see a lot of dance forms, they're extremely grounding. like belly dancing or the Indian classical styles of dancing. It's very grounding and that you don't need to be still in order to ground, in order to be present. Now, a lot of my background is from the Indian spiritual teaching. So that's why I'm drawing a lot from that. But if you look at the energy of the Kundalini rising, it's two snakes, right? It's about movement. These snakes are moving up your spine. It's about moving energy. It's not about remaining stagnant. I mean, of course, there's a place for stillness. I'm not saying stillness is wrong, but I'm just saying that if that's how you experience it, there's nothing wrong with you. I was actually experiencing sacred feminine energy and didn't know that. I didn't realize that my spirituality was frustratingly practical. I would get practical advice like parking spots, like I told you before, because the feminine adores the earth. She really does. She's not trying to escape the earth or think that the earth is a bad place. And because she adores the earth, witnessing the proof of her spirituality and not just belief of her own magic on this earth is something that she absolutely adores. It's all about, I don't know why or when this started to happen, where she Somehow, even in the New Age community, proof of your spirituality is something that we're going to ignore or just put aside. And that's not true. Obviously, we work with spirit to impact our earthly form. It's about heaven on earth. It's about earth informing heaven, heaven informing earth. So why would we not want proof of our magic in the world? Because we're taught to believe. and trust and have faith. And those things are lovely, but that's really hard to do when you don't have proof of your magic. And the sacred feminine is all about proof. She's all about earthy, practical magic. And that's what I was experiencing. And I was thinking I was wrong for it. And the feminine is kind of wild too. And that wildness I was experiencing was actually the feminine. And I didn't realize that my passion and my anger and that fierceness is a very much protective aspect of the feminine. You will see a lot of goddesses and a lot of iconography, especially in the Indian traditions, where there are these really strong feminine beings who are extremely protective, especially of women and children. And this is a concept that I just want to cede to you now, and it's the concept of wrathful divinity. or W-R-A-T-H-F-U-L. I'm spelling these out because I don't know if my accent makes it hard to understand the words I'm saying. So wrathful divinity. And I want to seed that idea now. So in a later podcast, I can explain it. But that fierce protective aspect of the feminine is very much a part of the divine. The divine is not all about frou-frou nonsense. There is a practicality to it. There is a protectiveness to it. It doesn't just ignore problems. It deals with it. It addresses them. And that's what I was experiencing. And I thought I was wrong for it. All the things I thought were wrong about me, my intuition, my spirituality, they were expressions of the feminine. And not only that, but I realized that all the things I valued in other beings, humans, whether they were humans, plants, or animals, was actually the feminine face of God. I was subconsciously searching for the feminine in every encounter with every being I'd ever met. And what an innocent, sweet person I was. And I thought I was wrong. I didn't realize when I thought that, oh, I'm not sounding compassionate enough. I didn't realize that protectiveness and fierceness is a form of compassion. But because I had been fed this patriarchal, anti-feminine model of the world, I didn't realize that that was actually true. true, that fierceness and protectiveness and warriorhood is a form of beautiful, deep compassion for other beings. Okay. What a ride that has been. So I just want to conclude with, I'm not going to give you any rituals for this episode because the ritual I want to give you is a pretty long one. I wanted to end this episode here with and save the ritual for another episode. But before I let you go, I just want to say, spirit honors you just the way you are. Don't be afraid to have a potato as a spirit guide and uphold the feminine or whatever label. If you don't like feminine because it's gendered or whatever, that's totally fine. I use that because I think it's really important for me as a woman to acknowledge womanhood from a woman's perspective and not from a systemic patriarchal perspective. So use whatever word you want to do, whatever word you want to use, but uphold the feminine wherever you go. And when you look back, you look upon your journey with lots of humor and lots of compassion for yourself. You know, now that I say that, I won't do a ritual for this episode, but I will put some journaling questions based on this episode in the ritual guide. And there's a ritual guide for every episode. You'll find that in one of the links in the description, the episode description. So yeah, I'll put together just some clarifying questions you can ask yourself to really sink into spiritual sovereignty. Okay. Until next time, my friends, my lovelies, may the dignity of spiritual sovereignty surround you like the warmest blanket you've ever known. Be well. Bye.