Episode 147 transcript: When the Voice Says Go to Sedona: Lynnda Pollio, A Corporate Exec’s Awakening
[00:00:00] Lynnda: I heard a voice say, Go to Sedona. And I had heard of Sedona, but I'd never been here before. So I got on a plane. I had nowhere to stay, didn't know where I was going, and ended up staying five months and had all these opening mystical experiences that sort of reawoken all of my childhood spirituality, and I knew that I couldn't go back to a conventional life. I knew that I had passed through some veil, and I was in a different state of mind.
[00:00:27] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma, and join me weekly as I interview guests who have made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
[00:01:02] Welcome back to Live the Width of Your Life Podcast. My guest this week is Lynnda Pollio, and she's a consciousness doula and the author of Trusting the Currents, a winner of 13 literary awards and the number one Amazon bestseller in inspirational fiction. Lynnda's been on a lifelong spiritual path. She's committed to helping others awaken to their powers in the inner universe so that they can begin to create and live from an expanded space of awareness. And through her unique life experience, wisdom, and gift for engaging energetic frequencies and deep soul work, she guides spiritual awakening, connecting others to their inner resonance signature, the gateway to the soul.
[00:01:40] And as a consciousness doula, she's also an energy healer working with various vibrational wellness and shamanic practices. She's there for those rare sensitive beings who are in their hearts and doing their best to navigate life in a world that isn't. I loved our conversation. We talked a lot about her mission to help others awaken to their inner universe so they can create this life that they love.
[00:02:02] We talked a lot about energetic frequencies and just really enjoyed getting to know her, and I think you'll enjoy our conversation. Take a listen.
[00:02:09] Lynnda, welcome to the Live The Width Of Your Life podcast. I'm so excited for our conversation today.
[00:02:15] Lynnda: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. I've been looking at some of your previous podcasts, and I love the way you communicate and the people that you bring on. So thanks for including me.
[00:02:25] Aneta: Thank you so much. You and I started talking, and this happens so often before we hit record. And then I always tell clients, I'm like, no, wait, I want to make sure we hit record and because there's so much goodness there. And I want to share a little bit about your background, whatever you think would be most appropriate, because you shared with me that you had a more conventional career and background.
[00:02:52] And now, of course, you are a consciousness doula and you're an author and an amazing artist and you have such an important mission. Maybe start us off and just tell us a little bit more about you and growing up, and how you find yourself to become a conscious doula today.
[00:03:09] Lynnda: It wasn't something I planned on being. It chose me over the years. I was raised in New Jersey in a small town. Very conventional family. I was the odd child. I was seeing things and hearing things and experiencing things that no one else was. I wanted to be an artist, as we were speaking before, when I was a kid, but no one in my family understood creativity or art.
[00:03:34] So I got ignored out of me, and I eventually went on and had a fairly conventional career. I went from advertising I was for about 15 years, and I ran new business for ad agencies. I became a top executive in that industry. But that whole sort of spiritual side of me that was started when I was a kid never really left me.
[00:03:56] So I was always interested in astrology and tarot and different kinds of energy, but I didn't get into it very much until I was in my early forties when it came roaring back to me and I took care of my father for a year. My father had been an alcoholic his entire life.
[00:04:15] He had a tough life, but I took care of him the last year of his life. And that was a very inspirational experience for me, and really redeemed him and brought our family back together again. And three days after, I buried him. I heard a voice say, Go to Sedona. And I had heard of Sedona, but I'd never been here before.
[00:04:36] So I got on a plane. I had nowhere to stay, didn't know where I was going, and ended up staying five months and had all these opening mystical experiences that sort of reawoken all of my childhood spirituality and experiences, and connecting with insects and art and all that kind of came roaring back to me.
[00:04:56] What happened was when I went back to New York, I spent five months, and I had been in advertising. I knew that I couldn't go back to a conventional life. I knew that I had passed through some veil and I was in a different state of mind, but I still had to make a living. So I started getting involved in conscious business practices.
[00:05:15] And these were companies at the time that were just beginning to come into organic and solar energy, and all these little small businesses that had this focus on this new world that was coming, that was way better than the world that we had been living in. And they wanted to participate through whatever technologies, whatever products they had.
[00:05:34] So I began getting involved with them and started working with the marketing and branding, and communications of these small companies, because that was my background. But along the way, I also really started getting involved in a deeper study of spiritual disciplines and shamanism and energy work, and working with frequencies.
[00:05:50] And so these kinds of worlds just converged for a while. And I was a bridge between the corporate world and the spiritual world, and that went on for quite a while until my mother fell, and she had her femur, and I went into 9 years of 24/7 care.
[00:06:09] That began a whole other journey. And at the time, I didn't see any benefit to what I was going through, and I thought that I was ready to do something. meaningful in the world. And I had started channeling my book, Trusting the Currents.
[00:06:23] I had started hearing the voice of an old Black Southern woman, and I never expected to be a writer, but I started writing down her words, and over two years, she channeled her story to me.
[00:06:34] And then I put it away for a year because I thought I was crazy, this can't be happening. And then she came back and said, It's time to start editing. So during the time I was taking care of my mother, I was also editing my book but completely lost my ability to work because between my mother and the book and everything else going on, it was a whole different journey that I went down and I went into a time of a night of the soul.
[00:06:59] Many people who go through a spiritual awakening will go through a deep night of the soul, and I didn't have any understanding of what I was experiencing. So it was very difficult. But now I look back and I see what it gave me. But at the time, I didn't see where it was, and that's why I'm so committed to helping people awaken their consciousness, because most people who go into these next kind of subtle realms of consciousness.
[00:07:26] They will lose things. They will lose jobs. They will lose relationships They will go into a night of the soul and they think it's them and they think there's a problem but it is just a you're just passing through a new phase of your life, and you have to learn to go into yourself deeper to understand yourself in ways you've never done that before. And you also have to start letting go of things that are no longer serving the direction that you're going in your life.
[00:07:50] Once I got through that, which took a while, the book came out, and I did not have any time to market it, but it kept winning a lot of literary awards. So that kind of kept it going on its own.
[00:08:02] It seemed to have a little life force. And Addie Mae Aubrey, who is the narrator of the book, really set my life in a whole new direction. I never thought I'd be an author. I never thought I'd be a writer. So that was something that was a gift that was given to me, I think, for the work I had done with my mother. And there's always a gift when you get through Night of the Soul.
[00:08:21] It's just hard to see when you're going through it. And at that point, it was time for me to leave New York. I'd spent my entire adult life in New York. I'd had a great life there. I love New York City, but I had been coming to Sedona for 25 years because I would work in New York, make money, go back to Sedona, and really go into deep spiritual study, and then go back to New York.
[00:08:40] And I did that for about 25 years. So when I finally decided to leave. I gave away 90 percent I owned in New York, and it just happened that it was the beginning of the pandemic. Got here in the middle, as the pandemic started, left New York, the portal closed behind me. We almost did not get out because they were canceling flights.
[00:08:58] We had nothing left in the house. It was a very interesting experience. We get here, everything's in lockdown. There's nothing on the shelves, and that began the journey here. And that's been about a little over four years now. And that was my transformation into a consciousness doula.
[00:09:13] And I call myself a consciousness doula one, because I want that energy to exist on the planet. When I was doing conscious business practices, I created the title of chief consciousness officer. I became the world's first chief consciousness officer for a large global marketing organization, working with the CEOs and CMOs of Fortune 100 companies, teaching them about wisdom, intuition, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, and gratitude, which I consider human technologies. We have a lot of digital technologies out there now, but we need to start integrating these human technologies because we need to run the show, not technology.
[00:09:50] So, as I got here and I started thinking about what I wanted to do with myself now, I was in a completely different space. Everything I thought I was going to become, I didn't. And now I had all this experience and all this knowledge, and I had certain tools and gifts that I had. And my passion was all about helping people wake up.
[00:10:09] So I called myself a consciousness doula because I'm all about birth and consciousness. You probably know doulas historically have birthed babies, and now we have death doulas, which help people birth into death, and they're wonderful human beings. So yeah, so I'm in a process of transforming into something new, which I think a lot of people are, and I'm now in Sedona.
[00:10:32] I just launched a new website called wisdomkeeping.com, which will eventually develop into a portal, which is all about helping people who are going through big changes in their lives, understand what's happening to them on a very profound, deep level. And that's where I sit now.
[00:10:46] Aneta: Wow. There's so much there that I want to unpack too.
[00:10:50] So when you were a child and you said that you wanted to be an artist, and I think before we hit record, you said you were also very interested in spirituality, even as a young child.
[00:11:01] Lynnda: Yes. I wanted to be a nun because I was raised Catholic. I was Irish, Italian, and Polish. So I was the Catholic trifecta.
[00:11:07] Aneta: Very Catholic.
[00:11:08] Lynnda: So I was very Catholic.
[00:11:10] Aneta: Yeah. And like most children, I think, are discouraged, right? By well-meaning parents and adults who say, Do something practical. But you noticed that you had that intuition. Did you feel like you had some of those gifts when you were younger? The channeling and sensing. Yeah. You did. Okay.
[00:11:28] Lynnda: I was having experiences all the time that I learned not to tell people because when I would tell my parents or friends, they would tell me it was my imagination, or they would make fun of me. So I learned just to keep it quiet. But I was always the one that everyone came to with a problem.
[00:11:46] I was always the caregiver. I was always the wisdom keeper. Even when I was a child, I took care of my entire family, and I took care of friends, and I was just someone that people went to. And I was very creative. I did a lot of drawing, and I was bringing in all kinds of different energies. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, and it went deep into submersion for quite a while. I was going into the corporate world and trying to make a living and trying to fit in, but I was always the freak in the room as a kid. And I still am.
[00:12:16] Aneta: We love all of our freaks, right? The folks who see the world a little bit differently.
[00:12:21] So you started to suppress some of these gifts, and they do go dormant. I've heard others say the same thing that they can go dormant, and you start to tune that out. Take me to the moment where you said that you had this urge, this knowing, or something that told you that you needed to go to Sedona, because I felt that way too, and I've never been, and also I'm like, okay, I'm super curious about it. It looks like maybe I want to do a retreat there. I've never been there. Tell me about what Sedona is like and what drew you in. And once you got there, what happened? Did you feel anything different?
[00:12:56] Lynnda: I think if you're called here, you have a very different experience than if you just come here to visit, to hike, and see the beautiful nature here. But if you're called here, you probably have some kind of deep, profound connection to the earth here.
[00:13:11] I had heard of Sedona because I had been playing in the spiritual realms for quite a while. And when I was in New York, I was part of a whole spiritual group of people there that were doing all kinds of things. And I would go in and out of it. So I heard of Sedona,
[00:13:25] My father, I took care of him the last year of his life. And three days after he died, I was getting up in the morning, and I just heard a very clear voice.
[00:13:36] It wasn't my father's, but it was a clear voice, and it said, Go to Sedona. And so I got out of the bathroom and I said to my husband, I'm going to Sedona. And he said, Where's that? He said, it's in Arizona. And I didn't know why I was going. It was such a pull that I knew I had to go. So about three weeks later, I got on a plane.
[00:13:58] I didn't have any idea why I was going. I didn't know how long I was staying for. I didn't know anything. I just got on a plane. It was really interesting because when my father died, he was in a hospice. And when I walked out of the hospice, there was an old book on a bench, and I picked it up, and it was The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey.
[00:14:18] And I didn't know what it was at the time, but it was a story written in the early 1900s about a woman from New York who goes to Sedona, and for very different reasons that I was going, but I didn't know what it was. So I put it in my back seat, and I cried all the way home from the hospice.
[00:14:37] And then when I went to Sedona, I took the book with me. And when I got off the plane, I rented a car, and about 10 minutes outside of the airport, my car got a flat, and I pulled up, and there was a fence, and then there was a whole little hotel. And some guy pulled up behind me, and I climbed over the fence.
[00:14:56] He threw my bag over the fence, and I checked into the hotel, and they told me they'd have a car for me the next day. And I started reading The Call Of The Canyon. And that's when I found out it was all about Sedona, and it was about her going to Sedona, and it was about her having taken a leap of faith, and it was again, for very different reasons, but I read the book that night.
[00:15:16] And the next morning, when I got the car, I drove into Sedona, and I just remember driving into 89A and seeing those red rock mountains and feeling them embrace me and say, Welcome home. And it was such a profound experience. So I got the local paper and I started looking for a place to stay, and everything I looked at was, I didn't want to be there.
[00:15:41] It was awful. And I ended up checking into this little bed and breakfast. And just started crying and said, What am I doing here? This is crazy that I came here and there was one more place to check out. So I called, and it just happened to be down the road from where I was. I checked it out. It was exactly what I was looking for.
[00:15:59] And I stayed for five months. And during those five months, all of my childhood experiences and beliefs and love of these frequencies came back to me and I didn't know it was happening, but the best I can explain it was like I was an onion and I call it inner residence signature, which is this one frequency that is you alone that you're born with.
[00:16:25] It's like your soul frequency. And when you get born through like family and religion and school and nation, and whatever, you get all these social conditionings that are like an onion peel, and they just keep going so that you get lost. That person who is truly you, who knows where you're going and knows what you need, gets lost in culture.
[00:16:46] And gets lost in social conditioning. So as I stayed there for five months, all these layers just began to unwind. And I went on raw foods. And I found out later that the Buddhists call it plunging. And it's when you take yourself out of your environment and you go somewhere where you don't know anyone, it's a different landscape.
[00:17:04] You change everything about you. So there is no you for anyone to attach to who knows you. So you begin to lose all this social conditioning, and that essence starts coming back up again. And that's what happened to me. And so as that essence came back up again and I felt, and it's not something you think you feel, it's a very visceral experience.
[00:17:26] You feel, this is me. This is who I am. I'm not the person that I was told I had to be. And I learned to be. It's not like you don't value that because I learned incredible experiences and tools, and skills during that time that I've used to this day. But the person that I wanted to be had nothing to do with what I had done.
[00:17:47] So I started immersing myself more into spiritual practices and creative practices, and that was who I was. And it doesn't mean it's what's to be who everyone else is, but that's who I was. So by the time I came back to New York, and after five months, I knew I couldn't just stay there. I knew.
[00:18:05] Sedona has never let me stay until this time. I have been here for 25 years. I tried to stay every time. And she always threw me back into New York.
[00:18:12] Aneta: Why do you think that is?
[00:18:14] Lynnda: Because I wasn't ready, because I had a lot more to do in the world, because I had things to clear up, I had a mother to take care of, which I didn't know at the time
[00:18:24] I think Sedona is very wise, and she will give you what you need, and some people get here and have really difficult experiences.
[00:18:32] A lot of stuff comes up. You will have a lot of old traumas, things that you're not dealing with, that will come up when you come to Sedona. So it's not all rainbows and fairies. It's very much about this deep inner work that you will begin.
[00:18:45] She may give you some beautiful things to take, as she sees these nice sparkly, beautiful things that happen to you, but she'll also take you down deep into parts of yourself.
[00:18:54] That you may not have traveled to without her guidance. So that was the big part of it, too. And it's an ongoing thing. There's no one aha moment. And all of a sudden, you're this enlightened being. I look at consciousness as a series of Russian dolls, and you're in this one state of consciousness, and you think it's all that is, and you're positive there's nothing else.
[00:19:16] Then something happens. And a lot of times it's suffering. Suffering is a big cracker of current consciousness. So you'll have something happen, and all of a sudden you'll go into another consciousness, and that can be an awakening process. And then you think that's true. But life, as far as I can tell, is that as soon as you get to someplace that you know is you, all of a sudden, you go somewhere else.
[00:19:39] But again, everyone's got different experiences.
[00:19:42] Aneta: And so when you came back, I found this role that you created, the chief consciousness officer, I find this fascinating. What year was this when you were able to?
[00:19:51] Lynnda: Well, I had tried to get that position when I was in advertising, and I was still running new business for advertising agencies. I had just come back from Sedona, and that's when I came up with the idea. So that had to be in the late 90s. It's like a long time ago.
[00:20:08] Aneta: That's amazing to me. I love this idea, and I've been thinking so much about the energetics of organizations and the need for a role like this. How did you sell these companies, that this was important?
[00:20:21] Lynnda: Well, mostly I didn't, I worked for years. I probably tried for six years to get an advertising agency to create the position, my philosophy about it, and the strategy behind it, because like I said, I'm right-brained as much as I am left-brained. I just like living in my left brain a lot better.
[00:20:38] So my strategy behind it was just as when digital technologies came onto the planet, and all these weird people. That we're sitting in garages and building this new technology and talking about this new energy coming in and how it’s going to change the world. And mostly people did not believe them.
[00:20:55] Mostly, they were cast aside. I was in advertising when that began. But eventually, what happened was these people started coming together and building their own companies and creating a language, because once you create a language for something, then more people come into the idea.
[00:21:11] All this language got developed around digital technologies and technology. And what happened was that companies at that point had to deal with the fact that these technologies were not going anywhere. And they needed someone within their organizations who understood these technologies and could bring them into their consumers and their partnerships, and their employees, and all that.
[00:21:31] So they created the position of a chief technology officer, which still exists today. And my thinking was that we are now coming into a time, even back then, of the human technologies coming in, which are more feminine.
[00:21:48] Digital technologies are very masculine. They're external human technologies are very feminine. They're internal. They're subtle. You have to be quiet and still to listen to them. So the digital tech, the human technologies are wisdom, intuition, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, and gratitude. And just the ability to tap into different things to come into your heart to have heart consciousness be a big part of the way that you create anything.
[00:22:13] So I thought that we were going to be coming into what we're experiencing now. I always saw this global transformation coming. I didn't know how it was going to appear. I didn't know when, I thought it was going to be a long time ago, but I knew it was coming, and I knew that these technologies were going to be important for the transformation that we were going to have to go through for us to survive as a species.
[00:22:36] So my thinking was just as you create a chief technology officer, let's create a chief consciousness officer, someone who understands these technologies and who can bring them in and create these more meaningful relationships with all your different constituents.
[00:22:50] And I worked for years, probably six or seven years within the advertising industry, trying to convince them to do this, and they just could not see it. And then I met the woman who ran a global futurist marketing organization, and she wanted me to do some business development for her. And I said, okay, but I said, I have this idea for chief conscience officer.
[00:23:16] And she was a futurist. So I gave her the idea, and she asked me who else was doing it. And I said, no one. And she said, okay, I want to do it, so I worked for a year and a half. And that's when I started bringing the idea of what this could be. And still, people were not understanding it.
[00:23:35] It was a very different world from what it is right now. And so I worked for about a year and a half. And I became known as a thought leader in the conscious business practices world, and had some amazing relationships. And I learned a lot from so many people, and I'm grateful for that organization for giving me the chance to just create that position, because you have to have the words for something to exist.
[00:24:00] And that's why I'm always choosing titles that don't exist, but I want their energy to exist. So I just hold the space for it in a title. And I decided to leave the company and start my consultancy. And four hours later, my mother fell and shattered her femur. And that's when I went into nine years of 24/7 care while I was writing the book. So it was a BCAD experience for me.
[00:24:22] Aneta: Yeah. It's so interesting when things like that happen because you can look at it and say, I've got this idea. I'm going to go do it. Like we're very, okay, I know the actions I'm going to move forward. And when your mom fell, it changed everything. And who knew that it would be such an extended period of full care?
[00:24:42] Lynnda: No one, including her doctors, thought she was getting ready to die.
[00:24:47] Aneta: And yet that's when you started channeling the book, trusting the current. So first of all, what did it feel like? What did it sound like for those who maybe have never channeled anything?
[00:24:58] What did that sound like? And then, who is the person that you were channeling, and whose story is this?
[00:25:04] Lynnda: The funny thing is, I think I have been channeling what I call high knowledge my entire life, because I've always gotten downloads of Information for people, I'm sitting in front of someone. I get information. I understand what's happening in the world. I've always been prescient that way.
[00:25:20] And I've always gotten a lot of wisdom and knowledge that channeled into me, even when I was a child. But I never really heard a voice before, except for the go to Sedona, which was an animal, and it was like a bird flying by, and then it was, "what? What was that?" But this is before my mother. I was working in the conscious business practices world, and I was working on a project, and I was sitting in my apartment in New York. I started it in New York, although she had made contact with me before that, but I hadn't paid attention because it was something I'd never experienced before.
[00:25:54] But I was working on a project and I was typing something and all of a sudden I heard an old black Southern woman say, it's not what happened to me that matters. And it was like she was standing right next to me and it was clear and it was powerful and I got freaked out because that was something that's never happened before.
[00:26:13] But I wrote down the sentence and that happens to be the first line of her book of her story. And then I just sat there and then she wrote like a paragraph or two. And then I felt her leave and I was like, okay, that's a little weird. But, and I went back to my work and left it, on a desktop.
[00:26:31] And then about three or four days later, I felt her move in again. And I used to explain it like I always saw this indigo color. It was like jumping into an indigo abyss and it was a very uncomfortable in the beginning. It felt cold and weird, but I would just allow myself to settle in.
[00:26:47] And as I settled in, I would hit this warm current. And then she would speak and she always picked up where she left off. So I never knew where I was going until I was writing the story because I wasn't given a treatment or an outline. I just wrote and she gave me everyone's name.
[00:27:08] She gave me her last name, but I couldn't get her first name. I kept changing the first name for the first year. I knew it wasn't right. And then at the end of the first year, it took me two years to channel the book. And that was just all her. And I wrote it in heavy Southern black dialect because I wrote it the way I heard her voice.
[00:27:24] I never thought I'd be publishing it. I never thought anybody would read it, but it was important to me that I write it. I could feel that I needed to do this and, I had to sacrifice a lot to be able, because when I felt her, if I was driving, I'd have to pull over the side of the road and write something down, because if I didn't write it right when she was telling me, I might remember the content, the context, but I wouldn't remember the words.
[00:27:48] And the way the words lay on the page were very important to her. They had to have a certain frequency in the way that they were arranged. That's why it took me ten years to write the book. But it took me two years to channel it and eight years to edit it. About a year into it I am watching television. And it's the anniversary of the Birmingham church bombings that killed the four little girls.
[00:28:09] And I see the photographs of the four little girls and one of them was Addie Mae Collins. And as soon as I saw her photograph, it was like my heart exploded. And I knew it was, no, I don't think she was Addie Mae Collins, but there was something about that energy that wanted to be heard.
[00:28:27] And I felt that was her name. So I named the character Addie Mae. And for the rest of the time that I wrote the book, I had a photograph of Addie Mae Collins taped to my computer. And I always wrote to her. And all the characters are African American. They're all from the south.
[00:28:41] She's a young girl in the story. I'm a middle aged white woman from New York. There was nothing that would say I should do this. And I did get a lot of flack about that, but I couldn't help it that cause that was just what happened. And then she told me to go back to Sedona and I started right.
[00:29:00] And then I finished channeling the book in Sedona and all the nature in the book. And there's a lot of it because nature is a big character in the book comes from my experiences in Sedona.
[00:29:09] Aneta: I was going to ask if you had any trepidation writing the book as a white woman and also saying, okay, I channeled this. I'm not making it up. I'm not trying to take on anyone else's story, but you said it won awards like even without marketing and even though you weren't actively promoting it. So tell me a little bit about what that was like.
[00:29:31] Lynnda: This has been a long journey. This has been the most profound experience of my life was writing this book. As far as the direction my life took, my mother was another one, but this was, someone who expanded my consciousness. This woman probably had more influence on me than any other person because she was also my mentor in a lot of ways, my wisdom mentor, she was very wise.
[00:29:55] So when I first started, I wrote it for two years. I put it away because I thought I'm never going to publish this thing. And then about a year later, she said it's time. And that's when I was taking care of my mother. And then I did eight years of editing it. It is a ton of backstory to this, which I won't go into, but what happened was, by the time I was ready to publish it I didn't really know what to do with it.
[00:30:18] And I knew that it was going to be challenge, and I didn't blame anyone for that, because I could see, and particularly if you don't read it, once someone reads it, I never have any problem again. It's just getting them to read it, to see how the book is put together and the way it's worked. And I have a prologue and an epilogue.
[00:30:39] The prologue talks about how the book came to me and the epilogue talks about what the book did for me.
[00:30:46] She was so influential. I had to do with it, do I find an agent? And I found agents. People didn't want to carry me because I was a white woman writing about a black family.
[00:30:56] And that went on for quite a while. And then I had an experience with Addie Mae Collins's sister, who was, it's another weird story about when I came back from channeling the book, and before I started really editing it, they had just caught the guy that did the bombing like 30 years later, and they were doing a series of articles in the New York Times about the families of those girls.
[00:31:21] And one of the stories they did was on Sarah Randolph, who was her sister and was in the church and lost her eye when the bomb hit. And when I saw that article, I just had such a profound sense of wanting her to know the influence that her sister had on me, even though, who knows what that really was, but Addie Mae Collins was part of this in some way, shape or form at least for me.
[00:31:49] So I called the reporter for the New York times and told them my crazy story and said, I want to send her a copy of the draft copy of the book. And he gave me her address. It was totally bizarre.
[00:32:02] I know, it was totally bizarre. Now this is many years ago now because I said this book has taken me decades.
[00:32:09] It's been a decade long journey. So I put the book together and did a little manuscript and sent it off to her and then basically forgot about it. I have a tendency to when I do something, I put my intention into it and I put my heart into it and then I don't have any expectations and I just leave it.
[00:32:26] So a year goes by and this is when I'm trying to find an agent and I'm trying to decide, do I self publish it? Do I publish it? What do we do with it? And I just moved from one apartment to another and I plugged in my phone and within 30 seconds, the phone rings and I pick it up and it's just old black southern woman.
[00:32:43] And asking for me and I say, it's Linda and it's Sarah and she had finally gotten around to reading the book and she wanted to tell me a real good book. And she went on to tell me that Addie May would have been proud. And she asked me if she could keep the book. And I said I don't know when it's going to be published, but yeah, you keep that.
[00:32:59] And I asked her, I said, I'm a white woman, from New York. I said, you have a problem with that. And she said, no, because I see the love that's in the book. And that to this day, I'm telling you.
[00:33:13] Aneta: That's so beautiful.
[00:33:14] Lynnda: It meant so much to me because I had so much doubt and I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm getting so emotional. And after that, I just didn't care anymore because part of the message of the book, because I asked Addie Mae all the time, why me? And she said, two things to show what two women who share the same compassion spirit can accomplish when they come together.
[00:33:36] And the second one was to celebrate our differences that wherever we come from, we come onto this planet to celebrate our differences. And we go back to this, my members were telling me it's just, we come from the same white light of God and we go back to the same white light of God and we come here to become all the different colors of the rainbow so that we can see ourselves through each others eyes.
[00:33:57] It's such a gift. And yet we don't realize what a gift it is. So yeah, so there was a lot of problem around that, but I have less problem now I guess maybe because it has won a bunch of awards and, the first award I entered when I was in the middle of taking care of my mother was the Nautilus book awards and they were words that were books that did something good for the planet.
[00:34:22] And they, at the time they only had one fiction award. And so I entered the award and I was deeply taken care of my mother and I didn't do anything else for marketing. And months went by and I knew that they were announcing and I was in such a difficult place and I really needed some sign.
[00:34:42] So I called them when they were supposed to be announcing and they said, did you get an email? And I said, no. And they said if you didn't get an email, you didn't win anything. And so I hang up the phone and I start crying because I just needed something. And about five minutes later, the phone rings and it's the Nautilus awards.
[00:35:01] And she goes, and I'm still crying and I'm listening to her, but not quite, and all I hear is the word winner and I stopped and I went, what did I win? She said, you won the gold medal in fiction and Barbara Kingsolver had won it the year before for flight behavior. And the year after me T. Geronimo Johnson had won it.
[00:35:22] So for, I think, welcome to Braggsville. And so I was at the time, the only indie author that had won the gold medal. So I said to her, I can't be, I said, I just spoke to someone that they told me didn't win anything. So she said, really? I said, yeah. She said let me call you back.
[00:35:37] I'm sitting there for another five minutes and she calls me back and she said, Lynnda, you won the gold medal. The email got caught in our server. It never went out. So that was the first award. That was the first one I entered. And then the next year I entered a bunch of others and it won often, and it did well.
[00:35:58] And that really helped me and I think, all of us that have a passion for something and feel a drive to do something in life, and we don't really know why we're doing it. And we don't get a lot of support. I didn't get hardly any support for writing the book because, when you're doing something that your friends don't know you for, they don't.
[00:36:17] See you for that. And they don't usually give you enormous amount of support. It was really difficult, but finally I started getting more support, and then after a while I didn't need it anymore, and I realized that the book was going to have its own track. Every time I tried to lead it somewhere, it didn't work.
[00:36:33] So I found I just had to stand behind it and let it take me where it wanted to go, and that's how I feel to this day, and I'm grateful for people who read it, I'm grateful for people who review it, I'm grateful for people that share it, it gets shared a lot, I have mothers and teenage daughters reading it together, I've had husbands and wives reading it before they go to bed at night.
[00:36:52] My first review was from an Anglican priest in England, Who somehow found the book three days after it came out on Twitter and downloaded onto iTunes and ended up writing me this amazing email about how it's about everything he teaches in his parish.
[00:37:06] And he became my first Amazon review. So the book, yeah that's just this much of the crazy stuff that's happening with this book. So I just sit with it now and it will do what it wants to do.
[00:37:19] Aneta: Well, I can't wait to get a copy. I didn't get a chance to get it before this interview, but I'm so excited because it just sounds like it's such an amazing story and I just love having the backdrop of this labor of love for 10 years.
[00:37:33] Lynnda: It was a calling.
[00:37:35] Aneta: It's a calling and I want to make sure we talk a little bit about how you work with clients and how you help them.
[00:37:41] I know your mission is to help others awaken to their inner universe. They can begin to create and live from an expanded state of awareness and consciousness. How do you do that? And how do people most frequently work with you?
[00:37:54] Lynnda: In the past, I've done a lot of just one on ones. I work with people that are going through a difficult time. A lot of times I don't even, I'm just meeting people in restaurants and, in different places, and I just feel that I can feel someone going through something. So I work with them in ways that I don't get paid.
[00:38:12] I just help people that are going through things. But I've worked with them as a consciousness doula working with people one on one who are going through awakenings, and it's just a matter of setting something up and making phone calls. I'm very much about creating a community now.
[00:38:28] And so I've just started creating a new website called wisdomkeeping.com. And I have my first course, which I not ready yet, but I'm working on it. It's called wisdom keeping, and it's an eight week course about the awakening process, and it will explain everything that you're going to go through and how to navigate it.
[00:38:45] And then connecting people with each other because what happens is when you start waking up, you very often have to disconnect from people and jobs and places. You just go in a different direction and it's very scary if you don't have anything else. And there is part of the process that you have to do in solitude.
[00:39:04] So if you're going through it and you feel like you're totally alone and you're lonely and you've lost everything, it's normal. And it's allowing you to go into a deeper place within yourself so you can start going in and finding some of the trauma and allowing some of the emotions to come out and getting to know who you are on a deeper level.
[00:39:24] And then eventually you will start meeting other people who are resonating with your experience. And then you could start building these phenomenal new relationships, because when you come out of it, you begin to develop more relationships that are have more meeting to them. I've been doing that for years.
[00:39:39] And my Relationships now are very deep and we have total trust in each other and we're honest with each other and we can be vulnerable. And I think right now we really need that in the world. So eventually I want to build a community all around that. And there's a place on my beginning little baby website where you can put your name and your email.
[00:39:59] And when I launched the portal, because it's going to be a big portal and I want other people that are doing this work, because for me, this is not about me. This is about, I have one frequency and my frequency is for people that resonate with my frequency. But there are people that are doing the same thing all over the world, and they're just communicating it differently.
[00:40:19] They're using a different language. And for me, it's all about, are they coming from their heart? They're coming from their heart. They're coming from the right place. If they're coming from their mind, they're coming from the ego. They're coming from the need to have money as a primary factor, because this is not something you go into for money.
[00:40:35] Aneta: Right.
[00:40:35] Lynnda: This is not something that you go into for money. This is something you go into because you have a calling to be this person and you're here to be of service. And you want to bring everything that you have because they become tools, like my art and the wishing bowl and the book, they become tools for where I'm going, but I also want to work with other people.
[00:40:54] I look at myself and my website as I'm the mushroom and I'm bringing people into the mycelium of all these other teachers and channels and coaches and counselors and people that are committed to doing good in the world. And you just have to find your right tribe and your right people because there is no right or wrong.
[00:41:15] Truth is a, really is a prism and we don't really know anything. We have a lot of belief systems, but our only true moment of knowing is death. Because we're either going somewhere after that or not. Everything else is just belief systems that we built up based on what we want to believe, what we believe in other people saying to us and what we've been programmed to understand.
[00:41:38] And that's fine because if you don't have those, I call them reality nests, they're like reality nests that we create so that we don't go insane. Because when you start moving out of a reality nest into an expanded level of consciousness, It's a little mind altering, so you have to be grounded, and you have to have support, and you have to stay in that reality to a certain degree, because you'll float away off the planet, and a lot of people do that too, as they go through the awakening process, they get caught up in the glamour and everything And it becomes difficult, but yeah, so that's I work with many different ways and I don't really have an exact process.
[00:42:17] And I want to work more with groups and with intimates. I call them intimates. I want to work with 4 to 8 people that know each other. And we focus on one topic because it's not about me, it's about them working with each other to get to where they want to go together. And those are things I'll be doing with my new website.
[00:42:34] Aneta: That's wonderful. We'll definitely include the links. Lynnda, I ask everyone a final question, which is tied to the title of the podcast, which is what does it mean for you to live the width of your life?
[00:42:44] Lynnda: I think taking risk because you can't have width or depth without taking risks because you have to go into the unknown. We're all on this road that we're programmed to be on, but when you start going off the road, then you make the road wider, but that road in the beginning is full of weeds and rocks and all these things you stumble over.
[00:43:11] I think it's about, taking risks and having faith that there's something else beyond where you are. And I like going as far as I can go and I don't think there's ever an ending in this life. I think you just decide. I like it here. I'm going to stay here for the rest of my life and that's perfectly fine.
[00:43:27] Or some of us, particularly the artists out there, they realize that they're always going to be pushing outside the corral. They're always kicking at the stall to see what's beyond. They want more width, want more height, they want more depth. I think taking risk.
[00:43:42] Aneta: I love that. Thank you, Lynnda, so much, and thank you for the beautiful work that you are doing in this world. We'll be sure to include all the links and yeah, continued success to you.
[00:43:52] Lynnda: Thanks. You too. Thank you for inviting me.
[00:43:55] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.
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