BMP209 Carmen Spagnola ~ How Nature Can Get You The Right Mindset For Business

Today’s Guest

About Carmen

Listen to this episode

  

What You’ll Learn

• Why Carmen ruthlessly pruned her email list down to just 500 people
• Where Spirit is found, and why nature and thresholds are two very important places to connect
• How getting out in nature helps us reconnect to seasonal rhythms
• How to recognize your own rhythm, and what you need
• The different types of rituals and ceremonies you can do out in nature
• Why it’s so important to get away to reconnect to the truth of who you are

Inspiring Women

• Judee Gee 
• Kelly Diels 

Thing We Discussed

• Intuition: Awakening Your Inner Guide, by Judee Gee
• The Numinous Podcast 
• The Numinous School of Intuition

Connect with Carmen

• Website
• Facebook
• Twitter

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required). 

Transcript

Holly:   Hello and welcome to the Business Mindset Podcast episode 209. This is your host Holly Worton and I am here with today’s special guest Carmen Spagnola. Carmen is a professional intuitive who helps conscious entrepreneurs make better decisions, quicker. She shows spiritual seekers how to connect their soul to the work using intuitive readings, past life regression and hypnotherapy. She is an international speaker and trainer and founder of the Numinous School of Intuition and the Numinous Podcast. Welcome Carmen!

Carmen: Hi, thanks for having me.

Holly:   I am super-excited to talk to you today. So, can you tell us a little bit about your background and your business journey and how you got to where you are today with your business and what you do?

Carmen: Yeah sure — I suppose if I look at the last decade that’s really where the journey took me into the underworld descent and [laughing] I have emerged and returned in the last couple of years — I was working as a fairly public figure in a retail space, in the West Coast of Canada where I live – at the time I was living in West Vancouver – and I had a very high-end, eco-friendly, home furnishing store. So this was 2007, there was almost like an early peak of conscious environmentalism kind of movement happening in the mainstream. Vanity Fair had green issues, An Inconvenient Truth was coming out, Domino Magazine — which was so hot then, which I still love now – was doing entire issues devoted to healthy living and green living etc. So, I was kind of riding that wave, and I don’t know what you were doing in 2009, but I was getting sucked under a wave of a global recession…

Holly:   Mmm

Carmen: …in my business. [laughing] So, one of the first things that seems to go, or seems to go onto the optional, or voluntary list, when people are in real financial crisis, is our environmental values; because now we are in actual survival mode. So, people just weren’t spending $7000 on organic mattresses…[laughing]

Holly:   [laughing]

Carmen: …or on things like that. So, it didn’t take long for me to go: “hey wait a second, where did your values go?”, and my business was washed away. And I took it extremely personally, it definitely felt like a very public personal failure; you know, I had been on national television, I was on hot design shows, I was on panels at conferences, consumer shows with very high-up managers for companies like Lemon, and Mountain Equipment Coop, which in Canada is kind of like our big outdoor retailer, outdoor gear outfitter. So, I was always the voice of sort of like radical, small business and I felt like I had failed, I felt like I had failed entrepreneurs. I felt like I had failed “conscious business people”, it was extremely humiliating. And so I went through a bankruptcy; I went through a very long, dark night of the soul – deep depression. I was a single-mother at the time so I was kind of living the double-life of: “okay, I am keeping it together for my daughter, I drop her off at kindergarten and then I sit in my car and cry until I need to pick her up”. It was really, really, humiliating.

                        And so, I had a very strong spiritual practice up until that point, and then I felt quite abandoned by spirit. And then I got really mad about that, because I was like: “fuck you, I followed all of my intuitive guidance, I was so on path, all the signs said yes, what is this?” and so I had to have that complete, like really literally, dark night of the soul where it was kind of like the voice of God saying: “I have been here the whole time, where have you been? You have given up on yourself in a such a horrifying way, and when you speak to yourself with that kind of bile in your tone – and the self-blame and the self-loathing – you are insulting spirit, you insult me with that and I am not here for that shit, [laughing] and so, if you want to be nice we can work together.” And so, I was like: “oh, okay, I have done that, I have been really shitting all over myself. [It is] time to also accept that like this is… I am caught up in a moment as well and now I just need to grow up and face the consequences of that”. And so, I moved away from retail – because part of my epiphany there was “oh wait a second, we can’t actually save the world by selling people more shit, [laughing] even if it’s good shit, you know [laughing] – and I had been telling people that very publicly for a couple the years, and I felt really embarrassed about that. I moved away from that thinking, and that model, and started to look much more critically, not just from an environmental perspective but from a cultural perspective. Just kind of “what is wrong with the culture of hyper-individualism, and the circumdrome of the internet, you know this sort of idea that: “okay, I’m going to be self-employed, so I have to have a presence on social media, and out in the world, and I am perpetuating a kind of veneer and I don’t want to do that, because that doesn’t feel honest. I actually feel like a piece of shit right now…” [laughing] So I had this public-facing persona and a private-facing persona and I started to kind of realise: “oh my God I am setting other people up to feel like a piece of shit because I look like I have got it together all the time, which I totally don’t”. It was a few years of unpacking how conditioned I was towards this idea of: “make it look good” and hustle, and yeah. So, I moved away from retail and this whole time my intuition was getting stronger and stronger for other people. And I was working as a professional intuitive, quietly, you know I had a lot of shame about that…there is a lot of social scorn that comes with being intuitive or kind of a woo, woo person. And so, I have a certain aesthetic Holly…

Holly:   [laughing]

Carmen: …that I like to maintain! It is like: “that does not fit in with my sort of Swedish design aesthetic…”

Holly:   [laughing]

Carmen: But then I actually was getting really good at it. Now… So, I went through a lot of training as a clinical hypnotherapist… It took a lot of training around working with abandonment, trauma and all that and I kept extrapolating personal trauma to the collective and the cultural and reasoning “holy fuck the Internet has been really traumatising…Capitalism is super-traumatising in our culture. Imperialism has been super traumatising… And so, I started to really shift away from the client that I would be working with, as though they were the source, or they were the centre of their issues. I started to go: “have you ever thought about how patriarchy may be driving you insane…?”

Holly:   [laughing]

Carmen: Have you ever thought about that it might not be your fault? But you are caught up in this kind of circumdrome of what we are calling culture which is actually re-traumatising each other. So, yeah, that’s taken a few years for me to kind of try to dismantle a lot of the cultural and social conditioning out of my business, how I do business, like talking about…not trying to trigger people’s trauma responses around lack, or missing out, or any of those things. And changing how I market and changing the kind of work that I do, not always trying to grow every fucking thing and trying to keep my list really small instead of opening up, because I recognise my nervous system can’t take thousands of people on my subscriber list.

Holly:   Can we pause for a second, because I remember that you said on a very recent podcast of yours about how you would totally prune down, in a kind of ruthless way, your email list. And I was telling this story, I was telling this story to a friend of mine, because we were talking about list size and that kind of thing, and that kind of thing, and she was like: “I am really struggling to grow my list” and I was like: “well, I just heard this story the other day…” [laughing] and I repeated it to her and she was like: “my God I would never do that! I have worked so hard to build it up”. So, tell us about what you did, because I think this is really important because it is a totally different perspective on community list building.

Carmen: Well, this is where I wish I were better at math, but I can use three examples here. So, yeah everything is always about growing you list, and engagement, and yadayadayada; but if you look at any industry, the average [email] open rates… an amazing [email] open rate would be 30%, right?

Holly:   Yeah.

Carmen: And so, for most people it is lower and as you grow your list it gets lower and lower, right? So, one of the things as a person who is moving through the world, trying to work with spirit, one of the things I recognise is like I am actually really introverted and I don’t like having so many people kind of in my energetic space. So, I prefer to broadcast and then I don’t have comments [turned] on my website, I put out a podcast, people can hear me, but I am not trying to draw them in, unless there is somebody with whom I feel I have some soul work to do. So, what I started to recognise, as I was growing my list and I got up to a couple of thousand people, I actually found it super irritating, like I didn’t like my writing voice, I didn’t like all these people not opening…this is, it just felt muddy and energetically congested. And so, I really love a good purge, I want things to be like good fengshui everywhere. I was like: “my list is like bad fengshui right now. I went through and it was super arbitrary, I was like: “ok if people have been on my list for more than a year and they haven’t opened eight out of ten of my emails – now also bear in mind that I send like one email a month, it is not like I am in their face…

Holly:   [laughing]

Carmen: So, that’s like eight out of ten emails, it’s not a big ask. And if they are not interested in that I don’t have soul work with this person. And so, I could uncluttered their inbox, and I feel like that would be a good service for them. So, I will unsubscribe them. So I unsubscribed and kind of had this grey area with people who hadn’t been on for quite a year yet, so I was like: “okay, I am going to keep 500 people on my list but going forward I am going to keep looking at: who’s been on for a year and if you haven’t for 80% of the time, and if you are not somebody who I know is like a friend, who actually wants to be on my list, who rates only 60% – some of my best friends – I will keep you on. But what I did I spent about a year almost every month going through and it started to feel so good just to like delete people. I felt very empowered and I felt like I was reclaiming my space. It was just a blessing, no judgement; just release “out you go”. Then after about a year, I put it right in my sign-up: “just so you know, this is how frequently I send and after a year if you are not opening very much then I am going to unsubscribe you. Thanks very much.” And so people knew then: “oh if I get something from Carmen, I better open it, because I want to stay on her list”. So, over time, it took about a year and a half, I started to really recognise the names on my list, obviously a large proportion of them were clients, or people who had come to my retreats and done spiritual work with me. But there are also people, like there is a guy who owns a resort down in Toulouse Mexico, I have never been there, but I have been on the website, and I sent him an email once asking prices for retreats. He has been opening super-consistently or three years; I am like: “wow, Roberto”, I have never met this person but now I feel like I know him. So, this is what I do, I keep my list at 500 and 80% of the people open. I don’t know what the math would be on that but I would imagine you would have to have 1000s of people to get 500 people opening every month and like really being engaged. And so, this keeps it clean, it keeps it joyful, I like seeing the people who open. I either feel like I know then or I do know them and everybody else is not bothering me.   They are not taking up the space, so it is an energetic thing but also an effectiveness thing. I would really rather be writing in a way that feels like I am really speaking to people that I know, it makes my target market super clear. It is just I feel like I am in an intimate relationship with my list now, with a 80% open rate, it feels awesome.

Holly:   I love that, I think that is really terrifying for a lot of people but it makes absolute sense, the way you explain it.

Carmen: Yeah it definitely was what I call a threshold experience, so I was like: “okay, this is an experiment, it might not go right, and I feel really nervous about it”; but actually, it has worked out really well and that’s what the Internet does, right? It tries to trick you and all of the marketing coaches, and all of that stuff, they have to keep you feeling like you are deficient in order for you to buy more shit. So, this is what I am talking about, you get conditioned; we can all do math, look at it… this is actually a way lower risk proposition, than trying to keep 10,0000 people happy.

Holly:   And it is less expensive because you will be charged way less on your software.

Carmen: Absolutely.

Holly:   So, one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is what you call: “nature as therapist” or how nature can help you get the right mindset to run your business, or just be in the right space in business and life and this is a topic that is really close to my heart because I love spending time outdoors. When I first visited your website, the very first thing that I saw, was the page on your wilderness quest and my heart went: “ahhh oh my God!”. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what nature as therapy means, and how getting outdoors can help you with your business?

Carmen: Sure, I started to find after a few years doing clinical hypnotherapy and – I don’t do behavioural hypnotherapy in the sense that it is like behaviour change: like weight reduction or [quitting] smoking –I don’t do that, I do soul work, right. So, it is pretty shamanic etc. So, you know, I would do workshops and retreats and things like that and clients come and they leave feeling really restored and rejuvenated yadayadayada, but I started to feel, as a practitioner, that it was just a little too sanitised, just a little too convenient that you can hop online book a session with me and whether we are doing it on line or doing it in my office, I takes like 90 minutes and then you are like: “ahh I feel so much better” and then you go out into the world, but actually the culture does not change. The context in which their healing is occurring does not change and that’s a huge part of being able to heal and so I wanted to open that up a bit. I had been on a wilderness quest, a decade ago, just before the collapse of my business and you know I learned some skills, thank goodness. And that immersive experience, gave me like a cellular memory of what it felt like to be a member of a collective, or an eco system, in relation to something greater than myself and as an internal being – outside of time – and it just felt so good and like I said I knew it in my bones that I was part of something bigger than just society. And so that had sort of stayed in the back of my mind for years, how can I do that? and so forth – it had stayed with me – and of course study, you take apprenticeships, you take all those things. And eventually I was like: “oh look I have become a wilderness guide who can lead a packhorse trip and I have an apprentice to lead VisionQuest, I kind of feel like this might be part of my path”. And so, I undertook a quest to see if it was my time to lead quests and the answer came back a resounding yes, so I started leading these immersive experiences for 12 days. In the first few days people are just remembering that they are part of a collective, because entrepreneurs especially – I don’t know… I imagine most of your listeners or many of them are entrepreneurs or doing it part time?

Holly:   Yeah, yeah definitely.

Carmen: So, entrepreneurs experience some of cultures most alienating features on an unrelenting day-to-day basis: time-stress; anxiety; unnatural loneliness; that hyper-individualism concern; and again, that looping through the Internet having mediated experiences with the world. And so, if you think about, when in life have you felt closet to the deepest mysteries of life; often people will say: “it is in nature”. Or sometimes it is in thresholds, like my bankruptcy, or for some people it might be childbirth or the death of somebody close. So, nature and thresholds. So, there is this sort of animal instinct that we have, that that is where spirit is found. So, the immersive experience in the natural world helps us remember our primal self but also react tune to what xxx would call: “the indigenous archetype within each of us” and that’s small i indigenous, I fully recognise we don’t want to take from other people’s cultures, and I am also very suspicious of universality and that kind of thing. The indigenous archetype in each of us is the part of us that remembers who we really are, where we belong, what our gifts are and how to be part of a collective or part of a Eco-system without taking from others, or taking more than our fair share. All of this came from somewhere; all of us have ancestors to some land somewhere, and so when we remember that – if you think from a business perspective, if you want to keep this…- in business we need to know: What is our niche? What is our value proposition? How are we going to…What is an authentic expression if that’s for our marketing? So, knowing who we really are and what our gifts are is probably fundamental to being able to have a business that is resonant and in alignment – not just with your own soul, but also then with others. So, yeah, nature as a mirror, nature as a sort of mythic companion, is a way to get to the truth of all of those issues: who you are, where you belong, and what your gifts are and what your values are and how you are going to express them in the world. So, I also recognise though that not everybody can go on a 12-day trip, right?

Holly:   Yeah.

Carmen: And also, it is incredibly privileged to even imagine that nature is available to everyone. I have clients in Saudi Arabia, I can’t be like: “oh, you should just go outside and sit in the park”. She would be like: “with my brother and my dad?”. There are just cultural differences that we have to recognise; there are all kind of impediments to nature. However, that natural, animal self, does have daily, monthly and seasonal rhythms.   A person who is living in middle of Manhattan in an apartment – maybe not Manhattan… Central Park – but you know an urban city, or with not a lot of access because of disability or whatever, can still start to attune to seasons or the moon. When I think about how did I do my business when I wasn’t in relationship with the lunar cycle, because there are times to rest and times to grow and times to watch and times to go through ideation and creation and creativity, just watching the moon and getting a relationship with her. I think everyone should go on a wilderness quest, at some point…

Holly:   Of course!

Carmen: I think it is one of the best investments I have ever made; like dollar for dollar; pound for pound it was the best thing I ever dd. However, whether it is that you make sure that you are getting touched every day from either a partner or an animal; or whether it is that you are growing flowers in your garden, or food. Getting into a really intimate relationship with food – that’s the fundamental way that the human animal has learned about its interdependence with the Eco-system is through trying to sustain itself through agriculture. So, I think there are actually a lot of ways that entrepreneurs can soothe themselves and cope with a lot of the stresses of being a business person through these different forms of access to the natural world. It has been said many times, but nature is a tonic for the nervous system and entrepreneurs really need that.

Holly:   Yeah. So, what would you say are your top tips for how entrepreneurs can get outdoors, if they can’t do a 12-day wilderness quest…you have mentioned some things, but what are the slightly more intense ways that people can do it? So, I know I just got back from like a three-day walk in the middle of nowhere, but yet close to home, and that just completely gets me in touch with myself, and gets me in touch with nature and everything, but what are some other things people could do?

Carmen: It is interesting — I definitely have clients who are like: “I definitely have to get into nature every day” and when I ask them: “what’s your relationship with nature and the landscape?” They are like: “oh yeah I need it every day”. That’s interesting, because I have a dog and I walk her every day, in the park and that sort of thing, but I don’t really…it is funny I don’t really categorise that as nature and I wouldn’t say I was a person who is like: “I need nature every day”. Of course, I do if I really think about it…like I grow flowers and my husband grows tomatoes and things. However, some people, their rhythm is more like seasonal, or once a year even, so they are more immersive. I am like a camel I go for two weeks and that experience can last me two years, so I also want to kind of recognise that not everybody’s rhythm is quite the same, and I think part of it…I do trance work, several times a week, shamanic type journeyings. So, I have a very vivid sense memory when it comes to nature, so I think if you don’t have that, if you aren’t in that kind of mythic relationship where every animal is your ally, or a messenger, that’s something that you could start to cultivate in smaller ways. For some people, there is so much trauma that it is actually really difficult for them to articulate or remember what it is like to feel and have sensory awareness. So, for some clients I actually have them do, kind of like a sensory awareness inventory, so I would take them through a journey – like a hypo-therapeutic or shamanic type journey – and have them just remember a time when they felt really relaxed in nature. And then we start to do this inventory of like: “allow your mind to wander and think about all of the sights that you love” – so it might be your partners face or your child playing outside, it could be art or something – it doesn’t necessarily have to be nature -but you just think about all the things that feed you from a visual perspective. Then you go through sounds, and then taste, and then touch, and smell; and then activities… It is amazing how may of these pleasing, calming, activities actually do occur in nature. So, once they come up with a few in each category, if you look at it afterwards they have a grid now of anywhere from like 30 to a 100 things, which will help them self-soothe when they are in the throes of a lot of…or whatever. They have a list: these are the things that soothe my nervous system. So, often it is nature but sometimes we enter it in a slightly different way, like I mention through beauty or food or art or sound, music etc. So, sometimes that’s a good place to start because I recognise how some people are like: “I could never make it 12 days in the wilderness” because in the middle of it there is a four-day fast and you are doing spiritual work. The other thing I would say is ritual and ceremony. So, if you have ever gone out into nature or if that is something that is part of your regular routine you might incorporate ritual into it. Ritual accomplishes so many things: #1, it keeps up our relationship, and our end of the dialogue with spirit – it is kind of like sprit, moving through my life, received; got it…and so when we do a ritual that’s us affirming that relationship with something greater than ourselves. Also, it is a somatic experience, so it goes beyond words into our body and our body is our subconscious mind. So, there is a ton of communication that we can do about self-love, compassion, connection, without needing to articulate it, your body will know it as you…and it could be something as simple as leaving an offering for a Raven, some shiny piece of thread in a tree…or your own hair for birds, some kind of sacrifice, some kind of gift. Or, maybe you just touch a certain tree every time. Another nice thing to do is to find something that in your perception could be a mythic gateway, like two trees or two shrubs and treat that as a threshold: “I am now going into a sacred space with the natural world”. Nobody needs to know, right? Like, you can just be like: “yeah, I passed these two rose bushes, now I am in sacred space, so everything that happens from here I am going to consider a message from spirit, or some kind of oracle for me and when I return I am out of that”. We can use that as a way to access the subconscious, access spiritual connection, access intuitive downloads etc. So, it doesn’t really need to be like a major undertaking, but when you do that in nature it is like you now have anchored your relationship to something greater than yourself and then you will never look at a rose bush the same. You will never…every time you touch the tree you will have a compound interest in all the memory, the sense-memory your have, all the wisdom, all the care and all the gratitude and all the love and all the grief and everything you have ever felt whenever you have touched that tree becomes an incredibly powerful unity experience and that can really help us stay on path. So, I personally, I am a dive-in-12-days person, but I also think that little altars everywhere are a really good idea.

Holly:   I love that. Thank you so much for sharing those tips because I think that’s…given our listeners a lot of really different things that they maybe wouldn’t have thought about. I spend tons of time out in nature and never thought about the mythic gateway…so I will be playing with that [laughing].

Carmen: Nice.

Holly:   So, changing topics just a little bit Carmen, do you have any women business mentors, are there any women entrepreneurs who inspire you and that could be in the outdoorsy kind of world, in nature, or it could be in the normal world.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah. You know it is interesting as a seeker myself I have had a bit of a tough time finding teachers. So, wilderness quest space is a highly privileged space, it means that it is also a highly appropriated space, culturally appropriated; it really centres [around] like a white-male experience, like the hero’s journey and all that kind of stuff, so I have become quite divergent with my teachers and I actually have had trouble finding a way of presenting this work and sharing it that isn’t appropriated, so I don’t really have mentors in that area. I certainly have had very powerful teachers in the realm of spirit and developing my intuition – I spent quite a bit of time in France one year with my teacher Judy Ge (her last name just Ge) and she wrote a wonderful book called “intuition” – it is very simple you can get it on Amazon – and again, I read this just before my bankruptcy and it was like: “thank goodness” it was like a…there was like a me ahead of me willing me forward, taking me on these very useful, spiritual experiences that I was about to meet.

Holly:   Yes.

Carmen: So, currently when it comes to business, I am really watching people who are dismantling oppressive practices in marketing, specifically Kelly Diels. She talks about the female lifestyle empowerment brand which is a perfect example of the circumdrome of the Internet where things just keep moving, right? Needing to posture that whole hyper-growth, hyper-luxury, extremely compelling version of how to be on the Internet that I just don’t want to have anything to do with anymore. She talks about: [the tactic of] how we approach other women by making them feel less-than so that they work with us…I don’t want to do that. So, how can we stick with our marketing in a way that is good and effective but takes out shame, takes out urgency, takes out social-proof that basically says: “well they are doing it, so it must be good”. It is like helping people to take their time and make really good decisions with their money, and really good decisions as both consumers and marketers and entrepreneurs. So, Kelly Diels – she has a newsletter that she calls the Sunday Love Letter and I have been reading it. My husband… I will read it and then I’ll be making all these weird and exasperated sounds — and this has been going on for like 18 months – and my husband will be like: “what’s going on”, and I will be like: “oh my God she just talked about white supremacy in marketing and it is SO true”. And we have really just been unpacking how so many of our values that we hold so dear, seem to get thrown under the bus as soon as you start to learn how to market, and it has been so many years now,that I just don’t want to do any of that anymore and Kelly is the first person who has articulated to me what’s so icky about it and what’s so dangerous about that. Really, it is not so many steps from conventional, I guess what I would call like white male marketing, to Donald Trump as president…

Holly:   Yeah

Carmen: It just isn’t that many steps. Each of us is a member of the culture and we need to notice that our businesses are making culture…and is it supporting the kind of culture that I want. So, that’s the only person that I would say I follow pretty religiously right now.

Holly:   That is fantastic; and you know the way I first heard about you was a couple of weeks ago – I had been talking to friends all over the place lately about how sick I am of marketing, like everything you just said: I hate it, I’m sick of it, everyone sounds the same and it feels ickyo, I wrote this rant on Facebook, and I was like: “I can’t think of people who are doing it differently, who is doing it differently, because I am sick of everything they are saying and it is shitty.” And a friend of mine, who you also know, Christian Marie Herron, said: “oh you should take a look at Carmen Spagnola” and I was like: “I have never heard of her” and so I went to your website, and I was like: “oh my God love her” [laughing].

Carmen: [laughing] yeah, thanks.

Holly:   That’s why we were talking today, because you are part of a group of online women entrepreneurs who are doing something different and not just doing the same crap of: “I am so fabulous and I have such a good lifestyle, and don’t you want to be like me, just follow my blueprint”.

Carmen: Exactly: “look at my staged thing” and I used to do…it was intuitive business planning, etc. I used to do business mentoring for other healing practitioners etc and then I just had to move away from it because finally I was like: “I don’t fucking know what will work for you, I just did a podcast and then I starting culling my list and those two things super-worked for me, but I don’t know what is going to work for you but I know that you need to undertake the investigation as a piece of your soul work”. And so I had been doing it – kind of muddling through – as a way to stay in integrity with my soul and then I read Kelly, and I am like “oh my God she just named the thing I have been trying to do, now I feel less alone”. And so there are so many of us that are trying to reject conventional marketing norms and that sense that you are the precious commodity, that it’s like instead of you selling a commodity: you are the brand, you are the commodity, and there is only one of you so you must…what you have must be priceless. And now what do you know, we are all marketing that way. Just like: “oh my God, we can’t do this, we can’t do this to each other and also it is Bullshit”. So, having somebody who can be our voice and give voice to what the things are that we are intuitively, inherently, naturally resisting and rejecting has been really a huge relief for me. So, I highly encourage anybody who is resistance to marketing – and you probably have a lot of stories in your mind about why – but if you are feeling resistant it is your soul, but it is also the fucking culture and Kelly does an amazing job of applying critical cultural analysis to marketing, specifically have women doing marketing and sort of marketing in female empowerment spaces.

Holly:   Excellent. So, Carmen how can our listeners learn more about you, how can they work with you – I know you have mentioned intuitive readings, past-life regression, hypnotherapy, of course the wilderness – not retreats – wilderness quests – so tell us a little it about how people can work with you?

Carmen: Ooh that’s an interesting question. Well, as you can hear Holly, I am not a super-easy-to-access person. It is really interesting because I used to say: “these are my offerings: intuitive readings, regression work, or abandonment mood work etc” but now I hold that space where I get a sense of what a person actually needs and not what they think they need. So, people can’t really work with me and sort of request “this is what I want” – sometimes if I do an intuitive reading I will – but absolutely if you go on my website: carmenspagnola.com you will see that I have a New Client Application Form. I have a pretty lengthy wait-list usually, and so what I do is I go through occasionally and I will look through and see: “do I have a sense of resonance?”. This is an excellent thing too, in terms of the next step after culling your list is having people have to fill out a form to work with you because that totally filters tons of people, so that feels great because I am not a vending machine – I don’t want people to be able to go on and just be able to press “buy”, right? So yeah people would fill out a form, they don’t have to put a lot in it, but: “this is why I am interested in working with you”, and then I come back to them later when I have time. So, I want to make sure that I am doing my soul work and one of the things that has been fantastic…I used to always feel embarrassed about – but almost as though I had weak moral fibre – as a practitioner as a healing practitioner, you are often told that as a therapist you shouldn’t have those soul relationships, you need to be neutral with your clients; but I have just never been good at adopting that, because I feel like I have known them for a long time. Or I feel..there is just an instant recognition if the work is meant to be done, so I trust timing and I trust that when they come into my life it is because we have some work to do together. And, so then, it does just become a very soulful kinship that I really enjoy and I can’t get that with just everyone and that’s why I get people fill that out. So the other thing I would say though, is before they do that, it is a really good idea to listen to some podcasts…

Holly:   Yes.

Carmen: Because that is kind of my cosmology and it is important I think, not that we see the world exactly the same way or share the same politics and the same values, but that is me in my soul. So, you would just go on my website, find some topics that interest you and I often think that if the questions that I ask, if you have those same questions in your heart, then we are probably a good fit for working together, you know. And then I will walk the path with you for a while, along your spiritual journey.

Holly:   Excellent so your website, your podcast, people can find you on your website. Now, do you hang out online on social media or do you not?

Carmen: I do, but I don’t have like a business page or…I don’t go for “likes”, let’s put it that way…my Facebook is a public profile, so if you just look up Carmen Spagnola you can follow me there. I would say Instagram is my kind of behind-the-scenes slice of life, so that’s the place where I kind of show don’t tell…”this is what it is kind of like in my world” and so I generally don’t post big long lists on Instagram obviously, but I love Instagram, it is totally my jam.

Holly:   Yeah.

Carmen: I really, really, like it, so yeah and I guess the other thing I should mention, so yes, Wilderness Quest if you are thinking about it your soul is probably speaking to you and we should probably talk about that and my next one is coming up in August. I really just do one a year; so the next one won’t be until July 2018. But the other thing that happens annually is the opening of the Luminar School of Intuition, which is an online year-long programme. I created a textbook – so it only goes out to students – and then we have two classes a month, and one is an enrichment class where I sort of go off the page, outside the textbook, it is the stuff that it is too hard to write about, we have to talk about. Then I have a tutorial and that’s just literally if you want an intuitive reading, or a hit, like it is coaching, we talk about everything from people’s personal things like: “my husband isn’t very spiritual, or isn’t on path” or “I feel like I want to to do some therapeutic work” from people who are like: “is it okay for me to smudge, is that culturally appropriate?” You know, we have major discussions. So, that is going to be opening in either July or August this year and that you will only really know about if you follow me or if you are on my newsletter or if you know somebody who is in the school. But I throw that out because I think that’s a nice , well, I guess what I would say is – I have done a lot of intuitive training and spiritual work and year-long coaching programme – and honestly this is the one place where I am going to claim it and say: this is fucking amazing value.

Holly:   [Laughing]

Carmen: And really takes you through all the seasons and all of the ups-and-downs and it has been I think my best work happens in these monthly video-calls, and in the textbook, which is kind of like an experiential textbook and has all these fun little goodies and envelopes. Anyway it is kind of cool, so if people are interested in that then I would invite them to sign up for my newsletter. [laughing]

Holly:   [laughing] And keep on opening it, every single moment.

Carmen: Exactly, I don’t send very many, so keep opening and let me know. It is like you saying “let me take a roll-call” and me saying: “here”.

Holly:   [laughing] I love it! Thank you so much for joining us today, I love your perspective on things, I loved talking about nature with you, you were fabulous, so thank you so much.

Carmen: Thank you for letting me share and thank you for kind of carving out a little bit of space for other natural beings and the natural world here on the Internet. Sometimes it is good to – not that I give it voice – but just to bring it into the conversation, so thank you for making space for that, I appreciate that.

Holly:   Ah thank you. And thank you and remember to visit hollyworton.com/209 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you.