Why Success Still Feels Empty After Achievement
Harmony Slater
(YouTube Transcript)
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (00:03): Harmony, welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast.
Harmony Slater (00:07)
Thank you, it's so nice to be here with you.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (00:10)
It's so good to be here with you. And it was interesting, of course, as I was preparing for our conversation, I thought we have so much to talk about because there's so many ways that our lives and our stories, I think, have overlapped. So I'm very excited to get a little bit deeper into your story, but maybe we could start at the beginning and you could talk to me a little bit about the version of you
who was just starting off on this journey, the person that you were before you started doing the work that you do, helping other people overcome perfectionism and anxiety and not feeling safe in their body.
Harmony Slater (00:50)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's interesting because I feel like so much of my life has really been focused on my body and like how to transform it, what it looks like. I grew up as a ballet dancer, so there's a lot of intense discipline around, exercise and food and you're always looking in the mirror and you're always like judging yourself and
a lot of criticism and a lot of negative self-talk. And so the first part of my life was really colored by that lens of like not being good enough, not looking the right way, not being perfect. And I eventually ended up quitting dance. I was really struggling a lot with anorexia and bulimia and realized that
it wasn't gonna heal unless I stopped kind of putting myself in an environment that was perpetuating that cycle. so I ended up going to university and studying philosophy and religious studies, which was also something that was very close to my heart. I'd always had a deep spiritual kind of connection and thread through my life as well. so studying religious studies was really interesting to me. And I always thought I would
be interesting in the Christian studies, because that was primarily the tradition I was raised in, but I ended up falling in love with Buddhism and Hinduism, and that led me to India and China. deep, deep, deep into a yoga practice. The kind of irony is the type of yoga that I got very immersed in is called a Shtanga yoga,
which is sort of like the ballet of yoga. It's quite advanced and very contortionistic. And it's also very disciplined. You're practicing six days a week, taking only one day off. And the practices are like an hour to two hours minimum of like very intense physical asana. And so I kind of took a similar path
that I had taken in early in my early life and brought it into the yoga. Although the yoga was a little bit more connected with spiritual practice as well. So it wasn't just asana. I was also very much into Buddhist meditation and had a meditation practice, a daily practice that I was doing and pranayama, breathing and breath work, a daily practice of that and mantra, japa, recitation. I mean, it was like the whole thing. At one point I was
having sort of my own personal spiritual self-care practice that was over four hours a day. So it was like a part-time job. And it's interesting because I think after all of that sort of intensity, bringing that intensity and discipline to my life, it helped in some ways, especially the yoga part with the breathing and the meditation.
helped to relieve some of those patterns of perfectionism and the critical mind and the critical self-talk. It really helped me to kind of feel the breath in the body and feel more embodied. But it wasn't until, kind of reaching midlife where I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, I was really struggling with deep, deep burnout, and it just felt like I couldn't do this
routine, this spiritual practice, this self-care practice, my self-care practice was stressing me out, right? And so it became like, how do I maintain, I Also, I'm an entrepreneur. I've worked for myself since I was 20, like teaching yoga and philosophy and spiritual kind of classes and practices. How do I maintain this
business where I'm leading and guiding others when I'm in a space feeling deeply like I have no reserve left, where you're just feeling totally depleted within yourself. And so that point was really a breaking point in a way. in a good way, where it forced me to do some deeper work
where it wasn't just about doing more to feel good about myself or feel like I did the things so now I can be regulated. And I work with a lot of people who kind of have this feeling. If I don't exercise for an hour every day, then I'm not good enough or I'm gonna lose it. or there's like
a sense of self-worth tied to what we're doing. And I think it's very human and very normal for us. But uncoupling that sense of self-worth and being good enough with my achievements or what I was doing was really doing some of that deeper, deeper healing work of going within and really starting to understand what embodiment too is
not just doing a practice and moving your body in different ways or working out or doing breathwork, but really being able to feel where you're holding emotion in the body and listening to it and being with it and connecting all these different layers of ourselves. So I got much more into sort of the energetic aspect of spiritual practice and being human and having a body.
And bringing that slightly different lens into the work that I was doing to rebuild myself kind of from the ground up at that point.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (06:29)
It's so interesting, how old were you when you started dancing?
Harmony Slater (06:32)
Like three? Yeah.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (06:35)
Okay. And then you
stop like before university, like a couple of years before.
Harmony Slater (06:41)
it was either, was going to go to university. I'd graduated and it was sort of a choice of I was either going to go to New York and really go fully into the dancing or I actually worked at a bank. I know that you worked in banking too. So I had this part-time job at a bank. I was hired as a 17 year old. And so I was like, I'm just going to quit everything and work at a bank for,
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (06:54)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Harmony Slater (07:04)
Well,
at that point, I didn't know how long, but it ended up being about five years.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (07:10)
thinking about these parallels that you were talking about with the dance, which requires the discipline. It's very body focused. It's very choreographed, all these, passionate. And of course you picked Ashtanga because also same sequences, so intense, so focused on pushing your body to be able to do more, to get deeper into the poses, all these things.
Harmony Slater (07:17)
Mm-hmm.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (07:34)
Did you do any healing from dance whatever it brought up in you? As you said, were eating disorders and there were other feelings of maybe not feeling less than before you immersed in yoga asana.
Harmony Slater (07:44)
⁓ Yeah.
You know, Not really. And that was an interesting thing is the Asana kind of healed me in many ways and like being in India, because I lived in India for probably a total of five years over a 15 to 17 year span. So I'd go and stay there for three months or four months at a time, just really like being in the practices and being in that culture. And so there was a little bit of, I mean, it healed me in many ways in that I
wasn't as identified with my body and incorporating the ideas of yoga philosophy and Buddhist philosophy and the meditation. I really feel helped to regulate my nervous system more, but I didn't really sit with the emotions. And that was, I think a big, sort of like unlocking a door for me was learning to be with the emotions of what was going on under
all of that discipline and practice and yeah, work.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (08:45)
Yeah, and I remember when I was doing about 90 minutes of yoga day also, work raising young kids and stuff, there's like this, it's a slippery slope almost of starting a spiritual practice. And then suddenly, I felt very much like my ego was front and center, who is driving a lot of these decisions to keep going to work faster to master this pose, all these things.
Did you experience that as well as you were focusing, you said, four hours a different practices?
Harmony Slater (09:16)
Yeah, I mean, it is kind of the paradox, I of spiritual discipline in we need to have some discipline in order to grow, in order to learn, in order to develop, in order to go deep into something. Not just to be on the surface, but to be able to really feel immersed in it. So there needs to be some repetition. But
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (09:29)
Mm-hmm.
Harmony Slater (09:39)
also, or and also, our ego is so slippery, this identification that we have to achievement, to even a way of feeling in our body. Like I want to feel light and I want to feel flexible or I want to feel strong or whatever that thing is that we're kind of doing all of these different things for
get identified with it and now we're stuck with it. And when we're not feeling that way, there's a rub, there's a friction, there's a feeling of not wanting to the conditions that we're feeling, and so for sure, the ego, I think is very slippery and it's always trying to put us in a hierarchy of like better than or worse than, and it's always comparing us to other people
or even to ourselves, why I used to be able to do this last year, why can't I do it this year? Or I'm so much better than I was last year. Like it's always placing us in this hierarchy to create identity, to create validation, to sort of it's trying to help us ultimately to safety, to let us know sit. And yet it
also kind of is subtly dismantling us as well because we never do feel safe when we're in the hierarchy because we're not whole. We're kind of in pieces still.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (10:59)
Yeah, and Ashtanga is very much like more masculine energy, compared to maybe some of the other practices. I think I read here that you're one of just a few women in the world that have the Ashtanga certification. Is that correct?
Harmony Slater (11:03)
Mmm.
Yes,
yes. So to like officially to be certified in the Ashtanga yoga tradition, you had to go to India and study in Mysore, South India. And there was only one person Sri K. Pattabhi Joyce when he was alive who could grant you the authorization to teach or the certification, eventually to teach sort of the highest levels of that practice.
And after he died, his grandson took over the lineage. And so then it was just his grandson who was able to kind of give you that authority or that certification. And so I received authorization from him. And then there's sort of this second level, which is the most advanced asana practices you can do. And that's called certification. And there's only about 20 of us certified and he's since passed on. So I don't even know what they're going to do now.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (11:59)
Wow. Isn't it interesting too? mostly men? I mean, obviously yoga teachers, especially in India, are typically men. Did you ever have any female teachers over there or were they all male?
Harmony Slater (12:07)
Yes.
In India, they were all male. Yeah.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (12:13)
Yeah, interesting.
What do they think of these Western women that keep coming there to get certified?
Harmony Slater (12:20)
Yeah, it's interesting. There's a lot going on, I think, with sort of the looking at in a deeper way the abuses that have gone on in different spiritual communities. And it happens everywhere in the world. And India is no exception all. And so, yeah, I mean, on one level, I think there's sort of a sense of
appreciation, that Westerners are coming to India to learn and to really immerse themselves in the lineage, tradition, to be authentic in their studies. And I think there's great value in that for anything, if you want to study Tai Chi, maybe go to the country where it originated from and learn. Because
the culture is so different, especially in India. We're very linear here. We think in terms of degrees and certifications and everything has, if you do A and B and C, then you're gonna get to D. And India's not like that. It's not linear. It's very circular and it's quite a little bit even abstract. And it's like, you could do A and get to D the next day.
And that's gonna work for one person, but it's not gonna work for everyone. Everyone has their own individual road. So it's a different way of understanding the world. ⁓ And so to be immersed in the culture, you understand something about yoga and yoga philosophy and a perspective that you don't get exposed to here in the West, because we just don't have it. We have a very different culture that's based on very different principles.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (13:35)
Mm-hmm.
Harmony Slater (13:52)
And so I think there's real value in traveling to other places and other cultures, especially ones that are quite different from ours, to feel what it's like to live in that place and be with the people and understand how they think and live and experience the world because it opens up your mind
other ways of being with things. And I think that in itself is quite healing, like realizing that there's not just one way to be in the world. There's not one way to look at things. There isn't actually a right and a wrong kind of black and white situation happening. And again, our ego likes to do that. Our ego wants to put things in a box because it makes it easy to identify.
So we lose nuance, and we see that it creates a lot of problems. I mean, we're seeing them now, the results of all those problems and yeah.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (14:38)
I'm.
I imagine it was difficult, as you said, you were in and out, moving to India, spending maybe three, four months at a time, coming back to the States, experiencing that linear circular or more abstract way of being. Being more immersed in a culture that's different than ours and then kind of coming back. Was it jarring? What do you remember of that the entry and reentry as you were doing that?
Harmony Slater (15:12)
Yeah, especially the first, the very first trip that I did. I was there for almost five months and India is very noisy. Everyone's honking. There's so many people everywhere. There's like music and there's horns and just there's noise constantly. And yet inside I felt so quiet. Like there was just a sense of
quietness inside, even though there's a lot of noise outside. it's also very dirty. When I came back after that first time, and I was 20, I turned 25 there, so I was 25 at the time. I remember it was so quiet here and yet everything felt so loud.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (15:43)
you
Harmony Slater (15:59)
And everything was so clean and yet it felt kind of like fake and not real. And so I had a lot of reverse culture shock coming back the first time. When you start to do it every year and you kind of understand, you sort of learn to like, ⁓ this is how it is here, this is how it is here. it's like, we have these little switches, these little places in our mind where
we think, this is the right way to do it, or this is the wrong way to do it. You start to just learn like, I'm like this here, and this is the way they do it. It's easier to make that transition. And when I'm here, this is how these people do it, and this is what this culture is like. So you tend to just like accept where you are a bit more. You create a little bit of that, I guess, neural flexibility in your brain.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (16:48)
Yeah. and of course, it's still hard, even though I think it's that you were talking, I was thinking about just for listeners, maybe they haven't experienced this with the foreign culture, but even going away to college and then coming home the first time home is not quite the same, even if you just went a couple hours away, and you still stayed in your same home country, because you're different.
Harmony Slater (17:01)
Yeah.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (17:09)
And now imagine what that is like when you go to a completely different place, you're learning new things, you're living and experiencing. And five months is a long time. And it helps to maybe dismantle some beliefs and some things you're experiencing. And then when you come home, home is not the same. Like you might've noticed things I'm assuming that you just didn't really notice before. So what did that do to your like ability to be present or
Harmony Slater (17:09)
Yes.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (17:35)
to be more mindful of whether you were in Canada or you were in India. What did that do for your ability to just kind of really tune in?
Harmony Slater (17:45)
Yeah, I feel kind of blessed to have had that experience and to live in different places because I did live in Thailand also for three years. I lived in India back and forth for and sometimes I was there for full year. And then also to be in North America. I feel like I'm quite good. I learned to be quite good at adapting to
things and to not expect things to be any specific way. And I think that's a real strength, especially in a world that's changing so fast is you really, I think, experientially understand that nothing is ever the same and you're not the same. So change is really the only constant that we have. And so there
is within all of that change. I mean, there's one thing maybe that stays the same, which is just that presence or that awareness. And so I think it helped me kind of create a very strong connection within myself to like, that place of presence or that space where the seer resides or the Ottoman or the soul or the self, whatever you want to call
the witness who sees all the change. And that's the teaching of Sri Shankaracharya, who's a sage in India is everything is changing, which is both Buddhism and India say the same thing that in their philosophies, nothing's staying the same, but India says one thing is always the same and that's the seer, the one who sees. And that seer is also the same in everyone. There's not like
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (19:26)
Mm-hmm.
Harmony Slater (19:27)
many. and the seer is also connected to ultimate reality, which is truth or love or being existence, life force, that is sort of the matrix of all the change behind all the change, but it's just sort of holding it or seeing it or observing it. And so I think it gave me definitely a very unique
early sort of adult life experience of being able to have many varieties of experience from also a lens of studying and learning to sit in the self and to be with myself and to be with what is despite all of the chaos and change or whatever's going on. And also a lot of grace in understanding that other people are not the same too
that as much as I don't feel like I'm the same person, other people are also not the same. And so it allows me to sort of let people change and be different. And I really believe that not just from a mental level, but intrinsically that personalities are just personalities and they're just like a character people put on. You can change your personality at any time, actually.
you know, if you want to. Most of us kind of like our personality to a certain extent or are at least attached or identified with it. So we're not changing it so much, but we're, sort of like, this is who I am.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (20:54)
And
our sense of identity changes too. I mean, as you take new experiences on and you can claim of your identity. Because I'm sure that who you were, as you said before, you were after all these travels and the experiences you've had was probably different and shifted. really curious how you got to where you are today working with high achievers as I work with as well.
Harmony Slater (20:56)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (21:19)
And really at this bridge, I think it was interesting when I read that, that you are at this bridge of between the spiritual and the business world, which I also experience in my practice. So how did you start working with high achieving women and really helping them with sometimes the limiting beliefs and the doubts and the nervous system regulation?
Harmony Slater (21:25)
Yeah.
Yeah. So, I mean, as I said, I worked for myself my whole life, basically since my early twenties, I started teaching yoga and worked in different capacities, like contracting to yoga retreat centers. I owned my own yoga school at one point in Canada. And then for the last almost decade now, actually it has been a decade, I've been traveling and teaching international workshops and retreats and also running an online program.
And so through all of these sort of different iterations of myself and my business, I started to see like, at one point, I was like, okay, I really want to learn more about business. I want to really understand how to run a successful business because I didn't go to business school and I just run my own business for like 25 years.
So I was like, okay, I'm gonna get a business coach and I'm gonna take these business courses online and really start to learn about this. And what I kind of came to and understood was there's a lot of different systems or strategies you can use to build a business and they probably will work, but if they're not aligned with your soul or your sense of safety, they won't work for you.
And so I started to really bring more of this understanding of our nervous system, our sense of feeling safe in ourselves, the work that we've done as individuals on limiting beliefs or on our identity. And that running a successful business or growing your business, and it doesn't have to be business, business just one of the games that we
can use to start to understand ourselves more deeply, start to see ourselves more deeply, that's gonna bring up a lot of deep stuff. Because we have to stretch outside of our comfort zone. So whenever we're stretching outside of our comfort zone, all of the patterns, all of the limiting beliefs or the insecurities or feelings of not being safe, whatever it is, is gonna come up to the surface. And then that gets to be fuel
for us to use to work with, to transform ourselves, to kind of get to that next level or layer within ourselves. And so I realized that come first and identity had to come first before strategy. Because if you're trying to apply a strategy work, maybe it's like reaching out to 10 people
every day and booking clarity calls or breakthrough calls some kind of alignment call with a client. Or if you're making you have to reach out to people in order to sell the thing that you want to sell. That's really hard to do if you're feeling like, I don't want to do this. I feel insecure. What are they going to think about me? And you're projecting all of your own
patterns onto the conversation or onto the potential people, you'll find other things to do. It's going to be a big block for you to do that strategy. And so it's not just like there's one strategy, that's just an example. But so once you sort of start to clear those blocks and some of those blocks are we don't really understand our purpose or what we're here to do, right? We're kind of disconnected from ourselves.
And so now we're trying to what we think other people want us to do or do the thing that we think will make us feel successful. Whether that's like, want to make a million dollars a year or something. Why? Like, what is that? That's just a number. What do you really want? Do you really want freedom? Do you really want
to be able to travel whenever you want, like you don't need a million dollars for that actually. And so that I think our brains attach to as the way that we have to do something or like a status symbol, like I'll be successful when. And we're disconnected from our true alignment and our true sort of soul path or our hearts of like,
what we really want in life. And I think getting more connected to that, to our bodies, to our energy, to feeling aligned within ourselves, from there, everything happens. Strategy happens automatically. You don't need to force yourself into some kind of a model of success or force yourself to do things to be successful. You just need to
Yeah, find that alignment and it feels easy. I kind of blend the two is like, rather than just focusing on the external, I think you have to really do that inner work first and the external will start to happen automatically.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (26:29)
And it's so hard because I didn't learn this until much later in life. I didn't start doing this work and figuring it out until I was in my forties. And by that point, my kids were already older and I could give them the benefit of some of this. I remember thinking, I wish I'd known this when they were younger. I wish I'd known this when they were going through high school thinking about what do they want to study? Where do they want to go to school? Like really getting into the deep internal work first.
and not saying there's only a few playbooks and here's what you get to pick from. Like I just think we do ourselves such a disservice and we then perpetuate it with our kids and then schools perpetuate it and then they get into their jobs and then suddenly there's the carrot that's always in front of them. And I think that somehow we have to figure out a way to start this communication and a new way of being at a very young age.
and to really like break some of this indoctrination because then what happened when I was in my forties, I was like, wait a second, this isn't what I want. I never asked like, why do you think you want this? What are you giving up? Because there's always a consequence. Like sometimes when we choose something, it's like, okay, well, what does that mean? Where's the Something we'll give instead and are you ready to make that exchange? Is that a good exchange or not?
Harmony Slater (27:34)
Yeah.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (27:51)
And so I love that you're doing this work and I love that both you and I are doing it with women, but what is your, average age of the woman that you're working with?
Harmony Slater (28:02)
The oldest woman I'm working with, I think is in her late sixties. And she's also has her own business. She's a weaver. And so she sells like yarn and wool and also teaches people different weaving patterns and teaches courses, both online and in person. And the youngest probably in their like thirties, early thirties, mid thirties.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (28:06)
Mm-hmm.
knew it.
Mm.
Yeah. Yeah.
Harmony Slater (28:27)
Yeah, it's kind of like women in their like middle ages typically.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (28:31)
In the middle,
they suddenly, they have enough life experience to say, wait a second. You have to have sometimes the experience to be able to go, I'm not so sure or I thought that I would feel this way, or I thought that by wanting this or going for this, it would mean this, but then it doesn't. But the impact is so incredible when you see someone
make that shift, identify what they really want for themselves, whether it's purpose with a big P or purpose with a little P, because sometimes people get tripped up on the definition. I think you can have a lot of different purposes in life to be a mom and to be a great partner and be a great friend and to be a traveler and to be a yogi and to have your own business, all of these things. It doesn't have to be one big purpose that is so difficult to identify or to define.
Harmony Slater (29:12)
Yeah.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (29:19)
But tell me how you bring in energetics and some of these other practices because nothing is wasted in our life. So all of your experiences, everything you've done for yourself, I am sure you incorporate with your clients today. So what does that look like, especially for people that maybe don't have a background in some of these different modalities.
Harmony Slater (29:29)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I love that you're bringing this up because that's something that I coach on a lot. Something I also get coached on a lot, which is like, how do you balance all of these demands, these responsibilities, these roles, these priorities and like, how do you do all of these things? And it's
like the ultimate question, I think, especially for women of a certain age, you got the kids, you got the aging parents, you got the job, you got yourself, you got a partner, maybe probably a dog. And so it's really the question of how can you be present and maintain that connection?
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (30:09)
Yeah.
Harmony Slater (30:18)
to balance because when we're relaxed, everything feels easy. And relaxed doesn't just mean like, binge watching traders or something, It's like when you're relaxed inside and like you feeling trust and you're feeling like, it's okay, it's gonna work out. I got this, you're feeling at ease within yourself
things go smoothly. When you're feeling conflict and war and resistance to reality, to life, to what life is asking you to do within yourself, that creates the dis-ease. It conflict or the disorder of our lives. And so I guess
to your questions, so much of the work I do is really about bringing ease back into our nervous system into our body, through breath through hands on the body. So typically like a session would be we would look at what do want to work on? What are you working on? Are you building clients? Are you creating a course? Are you trying to balance all these different things? Like, what's the struggle? What do you want to kind of focus on?
I do coaching. So we do some coaching around that. Like what's coming up, where's the issue. And then usually there's some embodiment practices, which are very easy, very like feeling into your body, using breath, asking your body certain questions. Cause our body has a language of its own and our body is just the densest form of our energetic field.
Like we are just frequency machines. I mean, actually we're not machines, frequency beings, our body is just like emitting frequency and it's also absorbing frequency. And so everything we do, even just listening to this podcast as a listener, you're absorbing the frequency of sound. Your brain is now making sense of the words because you understand English. If you didn't understand English, it would just be sound.
Same with light. If you're watching or looking around while you're doing this, again, you're just absorbing light frequency. That's it. It's not, your brain is making up what it's seeing. You're not actually seeing any of these things. It's just telling you what you're seeing because it's light frequency. Same with touch, touch is frequency. We think, that's a hand on a hand, but what is it really?
There's a little bit of warmth or pressure, or it feels inviting or it feels not inviting. We're having a reaction to the frequency. Everything in our entire existence is really just us absorbing frequency and also admitting frequencies. And so when we start to ask our body what it needs, what it wants, and like breathe into areas of our body, because our body and our energetic field as well, which is
all around us is holding memories and emotions and beliefs and ideas. And so as we start to really drop in and listen to the body through breath, through awareness, through presence, the body is going to reveal where it's holding that tension or that belief or that emotion or that resistance. And as you presence it and be with it, it starts to
move, shift, change, dissolve, do whatever, or it's just a scene and it doesn't change at all, but I mean, anytime you see something, anytime you bring presence, something will happen. It's going to open in some way to reveal itself because you're welcoming it, because you're being with it. And so as you do that, all of the struggle starts to kind of shift or move or you see it in a different way. You come into relationship with it in a different way.
And then from that space, from that place, strategy or your next steps become really clear. And that then moves you forward in whatever direction you're meant to go. And so, yeah, it's just like combining all of these tools that I have in my back pocket and bringing them into a session to really like bring our body and our energy,
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (34:21)
it's so good.
Harmony Slater (34:34)
and our mind and our emotions into the session. So we're like really addressing the whole person as it relates to whatever it is that you want to create in your life.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (34:47)
Harmony, it's so good. And ⁓ if people want to work with you, if they're like, you know what, I really feel like this would align to what I'm going through, what is the best way that they can find you?
Harmony Slater (34:48)
you
Yeah.
Yeah, I would love to be in conversation. If you have any questions, you can find me on Instagram at Harmony Slater Official, or you can reach out to me on my website, HarmonySlater.com. Yeah, just drop me a message. I'm like really in all the places, but those are probably the easiest ones to remember and to come find me and say hello. And I'd love to just hear if something resonated with you in this conversation, because yeah, I love chatting.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (35:24)
And then you also have your own podcast.
Harmony Slater (35:26)
Yeah, thank you. I always forget about that part. I have my own podcast called Finding Harmony. And yeah, would love, we have these conversations about how to integrate, incorporate spiritual practice or self-care practices into your life to enrich wherever you're at. So we have all kinds of very interesting guests on from coaches, healers, yoga teachers, anyone,
anyone who's interested in really understanding what it means to be human and to have a spiritual, I guess, to have a human experience as a spiritual being and how to, yeah, incorporate different things, different tools, different practices into your life to really have an enriching experience while you're here on the planet.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (36:01)
And.
Absolutely. So good. And I ask all my guests the final question, which is what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
Harmony Slater (36:13)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
I love this question. thought about it a lot. And I think for me, I was thinking like width, like the width of your life. I feel like for me is actually about the depth. And like my brain took the width and it turned it the other way. And so I was like thinking, yeah, to live
the width and the depth of my life is to just go to the core of what it means to be here as an embodied being and to connect to that cord of love and presence and to really try to be with and just to like abide with reality as it is, whatever is there.
And I think it's so easy for us to get distracted and for our minds to take us on all kinds of little journeys and adventures when we don't even have to leave our house. But to really like when you're with your kids to just be with them. When you're doing your work to be with your work. If you're going for a run
be in it, like what does it mean to just feel your breath, feel your muscles, feel your body like connection, Just be in that experience as it is. And of course, none of us are perfect. So it's a constant remembering to be present.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (37:44)
That's right. That's why it's called a practice. Harmony, it's just been such a pleasure speaking with you. Just wish you so much continued success for all the amazing work that you are doing in the world.
Harmony Slater (37:46)
That's right.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was so nice to connect with you today. Yeah.
Aneta Ardelian Kuzma (38:00): Until next time.