04 – Evolution of Insight: Embracing the Uniqueness of Our Journeys

0:02Shailia StephensHello and welcome back to a new episode of Time for You, where we're looking together in the same direction of the 3 principles. And my name is Shellya Stephens, and I live near Frankfurt am Main in Germany. This is my lovely colleague, Leah Van Lee, from Zurich, Switzerland. Say hello, Leah.

0:29Lea WernliHi.

0:31Shailia StephensAnd in today's episode, we want to talk about which insights and what seeing have gotten bigger or gone deeper since coming to this understanding. And it's personal sharing, so we're just going to be speaking for ourselves, and we hope that— it will spark something in you, or you'll find some sort of good feeling in you that leads to a deeper insight for yourself. So, Leah, I think you can probably remember one of my very first insights in the Three Principles understanding very much was around the principle of thought.

1:26Lea WernliHmm.

1:28Shailia StephensSeeing for the first time how much on a daily basis I was thinking about myself and how I'm doing in the world. And anyone who thinks about themselves all the time knows it's just one of the, one of the most stressful things you can do innocently.

1:54Lea WernliYeah.

1:54Shailia StephensAnd It was a big weight off of my shoulders to, to see that. And I think we talked about it on the My Secret Life Summit, how we just start noticing more and more when I was doing that and being able more and more to just let that, those thoughts be those thoughts and pass on through and not put so much focus on them. that brought up already a tremendous freedom and lightness in my life. And what I though started to see more and more was more about the principle of mind. That's kind of the area I think where life has been really leading me in the last 2 years.

2:56Lea WernliYeah.

2:57Shailia StephensI think we talked about it a little bit on the first episode. Like, I have a very busy mind sometimes, and the last 2 years I got caught up a lot in my personal thinking, not even noticing it a lot of the time. And sometimes by getting lost in it or not noticing it as much, um, I would get into a lot of trouble.

3:26Lea WernliMm-hmm.

3:29Shailia StephensUm, you know, if it was just having like a lot of panic attacks or stressful, stressful feelings in my body and things of that nature, And I wasn't as awake to it as I had been the many, many years before. Like something for years after my first insight, I was just awake to thought. I was awake to it. I was on it. I was awake to it.

3:53Lea WernliI was on it. Mm-hmm.

3:54Shailia StephensIt was like there's no way I wasn't going to see it. And then I kind of fell back asleep to it, you know. But what kind of saved me in quotation marks was by falling asleep to the principle of thought a bit, I woke up more to the universal principle of mind. Because sometimes when I was— this is just a metaphor— when I was just on my knees under the weight of, you know, whatever consequences like some heavy thinking had had, I would be in a sort of a a place of surrender.

4:34Lea WernliMm-hmm.

4:35Shailia StephensAnd I would come to a place where I just knew I can't figure this out by myself. I can't. I don't know. I don't know the way forward on my own, like the little personal Shellya. And what would— what began to happen would be that I would just like, I'm You can't see me right now on the podcast, but I was just like, open my arms and be like, you know, I need some help.

5:07Lea WernliMm-hmm.

5:09Shailia StephensAnd who I was asking for help was mind in an essence. You know, you could say it's a prayer to God. It's an appeal to my whole self, to my deeper self. It doesn't matter what you call it. But something beyond our personal self that knows more than I do, has the big picture and the answers and the guidance. And oftentimes in those moments of surrender, I would get the most impactful, surprising answers.

5:50Lea WernliHmm.

5:53Shailia StephensI would literally hear them in my ear. Like, you know, some people would say how we, how we hear mind or feel mind or see mind, like it's different for everybody. You know, you talk about sometimes like a nudge or—

6:05Lea WernliMm-hmm.

6:07Shailia StephensIt will come to you how it comes to you. I literally hear it. I hear words. And, and I would, I would get that information and Things would begin to shift and change and get better.

6:24Lea WernliMm-hmm.

6:27Shailia StephensAnd I started to get interested more and more to the bigger mind and less and less interested in my personal mind that was anyway asleep and running in circles. And yeah, that's what's, that's what's been deeper for me. And it's, um, it's a journey that I continue to be on really intentionally also.

6:59Lea WernliMm-hmm.

7:00Shailia StephensUm, maybe for the first time in a, in my life, you know, just sitting down, like almost in, in a way they would talk about meditation, um, sitting down intentionally to be still, letting my thoughts calm, and just seeing what wisdom is coming up, arising up from within me.

7:23Lea WernliMm.

7:24Shailia StephensAnd, um, that's just been a really beautiful thing. And it's been so— it feels like just a warm hug and a, and a, and just a big help for, for me in my life. So, yeah. What about you?

7:43Lea WernliFalling into the hands of God. Yeah.

7:47Shailia StephensYeah.

7:50Lea WernliIt's not free fall. It's, yeah, being held. Yeah, that's so beautiful. I love that. I, I just, a poem or a sentence came to me and I really, I have to look it up. I just heard it somewhere. I think it's a Zen saying and it kind of reminds me How I, how I see it at the moment, and it goes like, a house is a house, and the mountain is a mountain, and a river is a river, and then you see something deeply, and then the house is not a house anymore. And the mountain is not a mountain, and the river is not a river.

9:03And that's how it felt. Everything changed. Everything was different. And what I see now is a house is a house, and the mountain is a mountain, and the river is a river. And it's— I'm in awe still every day, deeply touched by life and totally into The normal everyday stuff, like family life and friends and work and whatever shows up, but it's not out there, it's here. Right now, and it's not big, it's little and small and, and big, of course. And what's also really interesting, I, I had a lot of— I had a journey before the 3 principles, like I've searched and I was also really into strange things, magical things, energy psychology, and whatever was out there, I for sure did a workshop or had a certification or whatever.

11:07Shailia StephensMm-hmm.

11:09Lea WernliAnd in a very gentle way, a lot of those modalities came back to me.

11:16Shailia StephensMm-hmm.

11:17Lea WernliAnd it's not a neediness. It's just seeing, oh, they've seen something too. They're built on insights.

11:35Shailia StephensMm-hmm.

11:35Lea WernliAnd they can be helpful for people or a moment, always through the lens of how we really work and who we are, like the 3 principles as my standing grounding. being in life. So it's, it settled the insight I had.

12:11Shailia StephensMm-hmm.

12:12Lea WernliAnd still my first 2 insights are the ones that carry me. Through everything. And they, they have fruit or they did grow fruit. So it did spread in every area of my life somehow.

12:46Shailia StephensMm-hmm.

12:47Lea WernliBut I I'm back on Earth. I was up in the sky with one part of me, and it, it feels like coming back together, being present in this life, in this lifetime.

13:10Shailia StephensMm-hmm.

13:11Lea WernliThe way I'm in life as a mother, as a, as a lover, as a friend, as a teacher, as a coach. Very down to earth and having a lot of space for, oh, what's next? What shows up? Where do we go? But simple. Mm-hmm.

13:47Shailia StephensYeah.

13:47Lea WernliDoes that make sense?

13:49Shailia StephensIt totally makes sense, and it's so funny because, you know, I told you I wanted to have a conversation with you this week, and I was—

13:58Lea WernliYeah, it's true.

13:59Shailia StephensYeah, and I was like, oh, there's some things I've been seeing, like I feel like I noticed when we do our German podcasts, and I think really for me you just put words to something that I really noticed coming through you also when you were speaking, but we never really talked about it concretely. Um, and I can really feel that shift, you know, because I remember back in 2020, like, you were really up in the clouds, like up here, like, woo, like that first insight that, that put your butt on the bench and had you like looking at trees for days on end or weeks on end where you, you couldn't function in the physical world for a while.

14:42Lea WernliI know.

14:44Shailia StephensAnd, um, and really that, uh, ethereal kind of thing. And, and yeah, and, and the last couple of months I've really kind of felt the— you coming back down, your feet like on the ground, like falling back in love. I mean, not that you were always in love with, with life.

15:05Lea WernliYeah.

15:05Shailia StephensIt's not like you fell out of love with life or anything. It's just I felt the The gravity, um, like pulling you back down to be here.

15:15Lea WernliYes.

15:16Shailia StephensIn this, in this, this game of life.

15:20Lea WernliYeah, totally. And like, I mean, yeah, you're in, you're all in.

15:27Shailia StephensYeah, yeah, that's so cool. Yeah, I'm so glad we had this conversation. Sorry, I didn't want to interrupt you.

15:37Lea WernliNo, I just wanted to tell You, the listener, like, it never, it always unfolds in your way.

15:50Shailia StephensYeah.

15:50Lea WernliIn your way. And it's always perfect, even when it doesn't feel like it. There is an unfolding.

16:02Shailia StephensYeah. I'm glad you said that, Lea, because I can tell you the last 2 years did not feel like it was unfolding in a great way. for me at all. It's just kind of now where I'm a little more kind of back. Like, I was having a conversation with Michael Neal the other day, and I was like— he was like, welcome back. I'm like, thanks, I'm glad to be back. You know, like—

16:22Lea WernliYeah, me too.

16:24Shailia StephensOnline instead of totally offline. And it was a, it was a long period. It wasn't just a couple weeks or a couple months. It was a couple years. And, um, it was painful in a lot of ways. And that was the beauty of this conversation today, you know, seeing that even that brought me to the next depth of insight into mind.

16:51Lea WernliYeah.

16:52Shailia StephensYou know, and I hadn't talked about that in any way, even though I also felt it for myself. So yeah, wherever you are, Listener, you're, you're good, even if it doesn't look that way or feel that way at the moment. Something good is unfolding.

17:11Lea WernliYeah.

17:12Shailia StephensYeah. So thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this time for you, and we'll listen in again, hear each other again on the next episode. We look forward to that.

17:26Lea WernliBye.

17:28Shailia StephensBye.