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Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode is how to get quiet and shift your energy to move your life forward and get unstuck. And I’m here with the author of the book, Get Quiet, Elaine Glass, who has transformed lives for decades with her healing presence and coached countless people to unlock their truest selves, find purpose, peace, and self-empowerment. And it stems from her personal story where she once found herself at a personal crossroads as a newly single mother who was burned out, fearful, and alone. And she lived a decade in search of her own healing and inner truth. And now travels and shares her holistic healing techniques, energy medicine methodologies, and spiritual guidance around the world. And she has a book by the same name, Get Quiet. I’ll link to that in the show notes. Let’s join Elaine Glass. Elaine, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Elaine: Katie, it’s so great to be with you in person and talk about how to keep mothers healthy and alive, alert, and aglow.
Katie: I love it. And for context, I recently got to preview and read your book called Get Quiet. And I absolutely loved it, especially in a world where it feels like the world is almost conspiring to constantly give us things to be busy with and excuses to not ever get to experience the things you talk about in that book. And I love how practical and tangible and doable you made everything in your writing. And I think that might be a great jumping in point for today is to kind of start a little bit broad and maybe explore, for one, some of the concepts that led to the writing of that book and why it was so important. And also to the concept of surrender, which I think is a lost art in today’s world and how that can be so transformative.
Elaine: Oh, yes. The very first thing I heard very clearly when I finally got quiet was the message, surrender. And it came to me in a day that I finally found this beautiful retreat center, was able to connect to my voice, my soul’s voice that I had literally lost and couldn’t even hear anymore because of the frenetic and crazy life I’d been living. And I heard surrender. And I thought to myself, are you crazy? How am I going to surrender? If I surrender, my whole life is going to fall apart. I was a single mom with two small children and was just trying to hold everything together and control everything and was clearly not working. And so I heard the message surrender. And when I got back into my car after that time at the retreat center, there was a message on the radio and the announcer was saying surrender. And I was like, okay, this is very synchronistic. This is something I have to look at. So I started practicing surrendering.
Katie: Oh, I love when life gives us this little synchronicity that really highlight perhaps the message that’s there. And I know when I read your book and even what you just said, I can resonate with so much of how you talk because I also a mom of six and I understand so much the busyness of that. And I used to very much operate from the perspective of needing to control all the variables and make sure everything was happening perfectly all the time. And I now can look back and say like, oh, there were parts of that that were sort of unhealthy adaptations, but that helped me survive in the world at the time. And that even if they maybe came from a place of not being in the best place mentally, it still had beautiful fruits. And I was able to help my kids a lot. But I feel like this is maybe a prevalent thing among moms, especially that sort of need to be in control. And this is something you talk about so beautifully. But I know this could also be a struggle for a lot of women, especially of learning how to let go of some of that like you did and relax into it instead. I know one teacher that was helpful to me in that as well was David Hawkins in his book, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender, which like you, I had an initial like, that’s not possible. I can’t do that reaction. But walk us through how that need to be in control can hold us back actually from some of the beautiful things in life.
Elaine: Well, you just said a key word there in terms of control, and that is the word holding. As mothers, we are holding so much. We are holding, trying to keep our own lives going and our own purpose flowing. And we’re holding on to our kids’ emotions. We’re holding on to their disappointments and sadnesses and losses of baseball games and not doing well at the gymnastics meets. I mean, we’re holding so much. We’re holding the energy and emotions around our partners in terms of their successes, their disappointments. So as women, we are holding so much. And this is a problem and what causes so much disease and suffering and just lack of joy and fulfillment in our lives as women. And so when we can surrender and stop holding all of this, and most of it’s not even stop for us to hold in the first place. It’s for others to deal with and trust that they can have moments in their life that are successful that we don’t need to hold and be responsible for. So the less that we hold, the less that we try to control, this is energy that displays as very dense energies in our body when we’re talking in an energetic way. And that density is what’s causing so much suffering, so much anxiety, and really just a lot of an ability to move forward in our life.
Katie: Yeah, and I feel like that word of feeling stuck can probably resonate with a lot of people listening. I know I’ve felt stuck at various times of my life for sure. And I also know firsthand that even once we maybe can accept the concept of surrender and of letting go of more, the practice of that is actually a little bit of a learning curve sometimes, or at least it takes a little bit of intentional cultivation. It’s not often quite so simple as a decision of like, oh, now I have realized this, and I will perfectly surrender from here on out. That there’s a little bit of a learning process. So what are some of the ways to begin that to actually learn how to let go and surrender more?
Elaine: Well, luckily, in my life, I’ve had a wonderful foundation of faith. I have a trust and a knowing that there is something bigger than me that loves me, that supports me, and that is guiding me. And when you can surrender to that, that’s a great first stepping stone. The other things you can do to surrender is to know and trust that everything is in this order that’s supporting you. And when we can really surrender to that, it makes our lives so much lighter because the goal is to be not heavy in energy, but the lightness of being that we possibly can. And that’s what I strive to do every day. I look at my life. What can I surrender? What outcomes do I not need to be attached to? It’s just that concept of non-attachment to the things that we want to be in control and the certain outcomes that we want in the certain ways that we want our lives to play out. But guess what? The thing is, is most of the time we don’t have the things that work out exactly the way that we want them. And that’s the magic that we open up to when we surrender is the magic of the universe really saying like, we don’t want you to go down that path. This is the path that’s right for you.
Katie: Yeah, it’s so beautiful, that idea of non-attachment. And I think of how much suffering probably comes much more from our expectation than from reality, especially our attachment to outcomes and then our kind of discomfort when things don’t go exactly as we expected. And my good friend Tina has this motto of her life that everything works out perfectly for her. And I love that. And I borrow it often because it doesn’t speak to that everything works out the way you want it to. And that’s what she would say is it’s not that everything works out exactly how I want it to, but I know that everything works out perfectly for me, even if it doesn’t go according to my plan. And it seems like that reframe helps her to just be in such a joyful, positive place for so much of her life.
It seems like a lot of this also ties into our inner language that we use with ourselves and what we focus on internally. Like I know firsthand, I used to kind of give myself sort of unhelpful questions or unhelpful statements often. I would ask my subconscious, like, why is it so hard to lose weight? Why? Why is it? Why is why am I still sick or whatever it was? And my subconscious would answer those questions because those were the questions I asked. And it would say, oh, because you have six kids or because you have thyroid issues. And when I very slowly learned how to start paying attention to my language and asking better questions and making a little bit more positive internal statements, it seemed like things started to flow more easily, things started to resolve. And it wasn’t until I addressed that inner part that even the physical thing started to change. And I know you have a beautiful way of explaining this and exercises in your book too, for helping people actually like start to change that inner experience. But can you walk us through a little bit of that?
Elaine: Absolutely. Well, the first step is to really start to tune into your body and nurture your body. Women tend to beat themselves up so much about the way we look. And that’s the measure of who we are as a human being. And that’s the first step to really get good with is nurture your body, begin to tune in, you know, what feels off, what looks different, you know, is my belly bloating? Why is my belly bloating? Really be like a scientist to yourself and begin to go to your doctor, be interested in getting labs done and really understanding the measures of your blood and where you’re at and nurture yourself. We’re always nurturing others. It’s time to nurture yourself.
The other way is getting control of your environment. And I talk about this because this is really such a big thing. We are a product of our environment. And so that means the junk we have or may not have in our refrigerator to the people living there to the person sleeping in our bed with us. So it’s like, how can we get in control of our environment and tune in and clean and clear out everything so that there’s space to actually walk into a room with space, in a quiet and find ourselves again.
The other thing I talk about is tuning in to, like you said, our thoughts. What is it that we’re saying to ourselves? Are we negatively talking to ourselves? Why can’t we just look at ourselves in the mirror? And I do this a lot. I’ll look at myself in the mirror and really look at myself. Have you ever done that? Really look in your eyes in a mirror. And take a moment and be present. And say, hi, I have missed you. It’s a profound experience when you do that.
Katie: Oh, that’s so true. It makes me think of a quote that I found when I was in my healing journey and learning to make peace with myself. And the quote said, I said to my body, I want to be your friend. And it took a deep breath and said, I’ve been waiting our whole life for this. And I realized how much I had not done that in the past. And so I often think like some of these things seem so simple when they can be so incredibly profound. And I feel like often maybe we discount them because they are simple. But I truly believe that the simple can often become the biggest needle mover of change in a lot of areas of life. And I love that you center on some of these practices that we can integrate into our lives that really help to start to shift things there. And another thing you talk about is the experience of feeling heard and how that can be so transformative. Can you explain, I know you talk about this in the book, but explain what you mean by that and how that can be so life-changing for people.
Elaine: Well, I have an experience where I have sat with over 40,000 people one-on-one, and that was in my previous life as a dental hygienist. And what I learned from that experience over 20 years of seeing people’s medical conditions, understanding where they were in their life in terms of mental emotional issues. Who was really happy and why were they happy? What were they doing? And sitting with these people, I learned that the greatest thing and the greatest gift I ever gave them was to listen to them. It’s hard to find somebody who really sits with you and listens. And so somebody is really heard. And when someone is really heard, they feel like they’ve really been heard, like they have expressed in a safe place with someone who truly listens. I have seen dramatic healing in one’s body because of that. It is the biggest, the most transformational thing you can give someone is the gift of listening so that they’re heard.
Katie: And I know many of the people listening are moms, and this is something I think about often. Anytime I learn something new about health or mindset or anything is, how can I help my kids to have a strong foundation in this, even if these are things I learned as an adult? And I would guess for our kids, feeling heard by us as parents, it’s one of the hopefully first experiences they have with that. Do you have any tips? I know you had kids as well for nurturing that with our kids from a young age so that they hopefully get to experience that throughout their life.
Elaine: Well, as mothers, we go first. So we have to be that example. And I know when my kids were young, they would get in the car and it would just be like, you know, tell me about your day and it would all come out. And that energetically is just such a healing sort of release for our kids is to have a safe space for us as the mother to listen to our children, hear what their struggles are, hear what their wins were for the day, and ask the right questions to them so that they know you are so interested in their life. You know, there are so many times where we are, we hear, you know, the emotional, like I was bullied or I lost, I got a bad grade. And we hear all these things from our children. And instead, the first things we want to do is jump right in and fix everything. When I believe the real healing for our children is to sit in this beautiful presence of listening and let them just release all of that out of them. They will feel so much better just by you doing that one thing.
Katie: That’s a great point. And one of my sort of first principles with parenting is the belief that each of my children are their own infinite autonomous being. And it seems like often if we sort of snowplow and solve everything for them, even though that comes from a place of love, inadvertently, we’re sort of minimizing their own agency and their own ability to navigate life. Whereas, like you said, if we can become like a safe place where they can be heard and they can listen, just like us as adults, often all we need is that moment of safe, loving energy and the ability to process it. And I find, at least with my kids, often they will blow me away at their ability to navigate something or the solutions that they think of when I don’t just solve it for them.
Elaine: Absolutely. And you are taking away something that’s so important for them as a life skill. And that is to be able to solve their own problems, take responsibility of their own problems, instead of thinking that mom’s going to fix everything. And that is the greatest gift you can give them is to be able to lead themselves. And that’s very powerful. That’s how you create a very powerful leader, self-leader.
Katie: And I know I mentioned your book already, and I’ll of course make sure it’s linked in the show notes. I definitely recommend reading it because it’s such a beautiful journey through a lot of the things we’re talking about. But I would love to talk specifically about what you call the Get Quiet way and maybe your own personal story of learning this and the absolute change it brought to your whole life. Because I know it sounds like from reading your book, you have also been in the place of the overwhelmed mom. And it wasn’t an overnight or like instant resolution or journey for you either. And I think there’s a lot of hope and a lot of really helpful things that you talk about in the book. But can you walk us through a little bit of your journey?
Elaine: I was, like you said, a very overwhelmed mother. I also was in a very, very difficult marriage. And I felt like my life was hopeless. I needed to regain and discover a new rhythm to my life because what was working, what I thought was working, really wasn’t. I was on the brink of a divorce, and I had one thing that mattered the most to me. And that was me being the healthiest mom I could be to raise healthy children. That was that has been my whole purpose in life. And they deserved that. And I also deserve to be healthy and happy. I went on a journey. I completed the marriage, which was a very, very difficult decision. And I found myself a single mom. Trying to figure out how to recover from the trauma of living in a very difficult marriage all while raising children by myself, coming into a home by yourself, responsible for two young souls.
And so I went on a journey to find out how to heal myself, how to calm my central nervous system. How to get to the root of why my marriage ended, what was the dysfunction, what was my responsibility in it. And I had to do this quickly because our kids need us and they need us fast. And so I went on a journey to discover all those things that I could help myself and get my power back and my strength back and my health back. And the very first thing I did was I found the retreat center. I started walking this labyrinth, which I had no idea what a labyrinth was. Turns out it’s a 4,000-year-old ancient meditative contemplative pathway that circles around in one way in and one way out.
So I started walking this labyrinth. It was the place where I could quiet and finally tune in and listen to what I say is my soul’s voice. And every time I would go there, I would drop my kids off at school, go to work, come home. But on my way from work, I would stop at this labyrinth, and I would walk it. And every single time, Katie, I walked this labyrinth, it was quiet enough to hear these messages that started coming in. And so I began to accumulate all these journal notes because I’ve been writing in my journal since I was 16 years old. So that’s how I process things that I don’t understand myself. I write about it. And so I was writing about all these messages just totally coming in during a time that I needed major guidance. And I wasn’t hearing what I really needed to hear from the external world. I needed to really hear inside of me things like one day I heard, you are not alone. I also heard you were going to be loved like you never thought possible. I was just hearing directions and I was trusting what I heard. And that is what has become the Get Quiet way.
Katie: I love that. And I would guess some people in the modern world never even get to have the experience of getting quiet enough to hear that inner voice. Because like we talked about, there are so many things competing for our attention and constantly just sort of inserting themselves into our lives. Do you have any tips for women who maybe have trouble even hearing or knowing that that inner voice and that inner guidance and that intuition is there?
Elaine: I think that when women leave their kids off at school, they’re back in their car and it’s quiet. They don’t turn on the radio. They don’t turn on a podcast. They just stay super quiet. They’re going to feel something in their bodies the minute their environment gets quiet. They’re going to feel a heaviness somewhere. And that’s the first step because we feel so much in our bodies. And that’s the first sign of like, oh. I mean, when I would do that, the first time I got to this quiet center I was telling you about, there was such a heaviness around my heart. I could actually, I was feeling like I couldn’t even breathe, and I didn’t know why. And so we have to tune into the energy centers of our body. And I talk about this in Get Quiet. We’ve got eight energy centers where we can hold a lot of stuff. And we tune into those areas of our bodies. And we go, oh, my heart feels heavy. I don’t know why. Let’s start getting into those questions and asking ourselves the right questions. Why have I built up these walls around my heart? What have I been doing to do that? And how can I break those walls off and away and live with an open, loving heart? And so every time we just tune in to how our bodies are feeling, it’s a great first step.
Katie: And I’d love to talk a little bit more about the relationship between that getting quiet and especially the physical health side. Because another thing I learned in my journey and that several podcast guests have mentioned here is that we view symptoms as bad. And really the reframe of that is they’re messengers and really they’re gifts because that’s our body speaking to us. And I would say maybe speaking to us loudly if we’re not listening to the quiet messages first.
But this tuning in that you’re talking about seems to be very connected. And you explain this about our ability to maintain good health, even physically. But can you elaborate on that relationship a little bit more? Because I know many people listening are experiencing a health struggle of some sort. And I know I can look back and think of how I used to say things like, oh, my body’s attacking itself because I have thyroid disease or all these things. And I didn’t have that same connection with my body that I do now. But can you elaborate on that relationship and provide any other ways that we can learn to actually be more in tune with our bodies?
Elaine: As women, especially women who have been pregnant, we understand cravings. We understand that our body is craving something. And sometimes we say, well, that’s crazy. Why am I eating like, you know, a whole thing of grapefruit in a sitting? Like, you know, I mean, that’s what I used to do. I was like craving grapefruit, but I didn’t know why. And I, but the thing is, I never took this next step to figure out why. And I think that’s the key. Is we can say, well, we feel tired, we feel fatigued, and we can say, well, just had a long day. Instead of tuning in and saying and asking the right questions. But let’s get to the root of really why.
So it’s not just looking. And the thing is, is we are really addicted as a society to one thing. And you may say, I’m not addicted to anything. I’m perfectly healthy. But there is a personality trait that we all have, and that is the addiction of looking away at the truth of our life. And we do this a lot of times, by looking away at the truth of what our bodies are trying to tell us. They’re screaming sometimes. I mean, as a dental hygienist in my old life, patients would come in with huge masses on their neck. And they wouldn’t even know that it was there, or they would never have even been addressing it for 10, 20 years. We look away because it’s scary to face what it possibly could be. And so if we want to be the healthiest moms for ourselves and our children and our families and the world, we need to stop looking away at the truth of our lives and start addressing those things one by one in a safe place.
Katie: Yeah, I think of the quotes from so many of the great teachers and mystics throughout history that all kind of tie into that same line of all of our problems stem from our inability to sit quietly alone in a room. And I think especially in the modern world, we’ve lost that skill, but it is one we can regain. And so, like I said, I love that you give people steps to actually go through that journey because it can seem like an insurmountable wall maybe if we’ve never gotten to do it before.
And I would love to also talk about the concept of confidence a little bit because you talk about this and you tie the belief, I wrote it down, that confident women can change the world. I also know that’s another thing that’s easier said than done. So can you talk about how you gained confidence in your kind of out-of-the-box approach?
Elaine: Yes, well, as you can imagine, after the trauma of a divorce, I had no confidence at all. I was a shell of my former self, and I had to get quickly realizing what my gifts were, where my confidence was going to be found. So the first year after my divorce, I did something and it just came to me. I was just swimming one day, you know, feeling super light in a pool. And it came to me, Elaine, do something each month this year that feels like it’s out of the box for you, something that you would just never do or you’ve never done? What are you curious about?
And so the very first month I did like the craziest thing in my life. And that would be I signed up for Toastmasters, which, as you might know, is a foundation where they help you speak and do public speaking. And I was just not about that. But I thought, I’m going to go and try to find my voice again. And how can I use my voice for good again? Because it had been so stifled. And so I got through Toastmasters that month. And then I started choosing other things that I was curious about, things that kind of pushed me out of my comfort zone. Not a lot, but enough so that I was gaining confidence along the way. And Katie, after 12 months of doing this, I had a new career. I had to put a website up. I was already seeing coaching clients, all because I did this. I gained so much confidence and re-engaged in life fully.
Katie: I love that approach. And I’ve done something similar, not quite as consistently as you, but I challenge myself every year to something that scares me a lot or that’s entirely out of my comfort zone. And it’s amazing how much just getting a little bit out of our comfort zone can shift so much. And I feel like all the things we’ve talked about are just a tiny touch of all the stuff that you talk about in the book. So I’ll make sure, of course, it’s linked in the show notes or it’s available wherever books are sold, but I believe you also have a website for it and resources online. So can you just let people know where to find you and to keep going on this journey with you?
Elaine: Yes, they can find me at elaineglass.net. And they can find the book at getquiet.com.
Katie: Perfect. And I will link to both of those. But Elaine, thank you so much for your time. This was such a fun conversation and I’m so grateful you’re here.
Elaine: Thanks so much, Katie.
Katie: And thanks for listening. I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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