On this episode of Supernormalized, CeeJay Barnaby sits down with Martha Wright, a shamanic medicine woman, healer, teacher, and keeper of the Irish Keen. Martha brings a rich blend of breathwork, Reiki, cacao, Akashic records, Celtic practice, and ancestral healing into a deeply grounded conversation about spiritual awakening and self-healing. She shares her profound insights into connecting with spirit, developing intuition, and finding personal growth through her unique energy work and psychic development.
Martha describes her life soul calling as a shamanic medicine woman, explaining that a shaman acts as a bridge between this reality and non-ordinary realities, or the unseen worlds. Her journey to this path was marked by significant personal experiences, including surviving sexual trauma and a period of chronic illness that led to a powerful spiritual calling. She recounts moments where spirit was trying to reach her, eventually leading her to embrace her role. Martha emphasizes that healing involves remembering what is already within us, helping individuals find their joy, purpose, and presence. She guides people to release attachments to wounding, find calmness, and embrace their inner wildness, leading to a more embodied and present existence where colors are brighter and tastes are stronger. The work helps people unplug from what she calls “the matrix,” reconnecting with the earth and natural life to become free and hear messages that guide them through their intuition. Martha also discusses the importance of setting boundaries and ensuring a genuine exchange with clients, focusing on deep, transformative work rather than superficial requests. Her approach is about helping individuals return to their wholeness and authentic self.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction to the Irish Keen and Shamanic Healing
1:28 Martha Wright’s Practice and the Irish Keen
3:28 Core Shamanism and Ancestral Lineage
9:12 The Shamanic Medicine Woman as a Conduit
14:04 Navigating Trauma and Spiritual Calling
20:00 The Power of Breath, Sound, and Movement
33:16 Somatic Healing: Beyond Story and Identity
42:16 Trusting Inner Wisdom and Divine Connection
49:35 Ready to Do the Work: Authenticity in Healing
57:09 Conclusion: Embracing Grief and Reclaiming Agency
Transcript
0:00 CeeJay Barnaby on this episode of supernomalized we meet martha a shamanic medicine woman healer teacher keeper of the irish keen martha brings a rich blend of breath work reiki cacao akashic records celtic practice and ancestral healing into a deeply grounded conversation about grief
0:18 CeeJay Barnaby rage embodiment and reclaiming personal agency at the heart of this chat is the irish keen an ancient sacred practice that uses breath sound and movement to help the body release what has been held for too long martha speaks about it as a powerful medicine for our times one that can help people remember their inner child in a wild self and reconnect to divinity from within she also shares how it works of course healing that is personal practical and rooted in self-trust
0:47 CeeJay Barnaby rather than dependence.
0:49 CeeJay Barnaby Stay with us as we talk about what keening really is.
0:54 CeeJay Barnaby Stay with us as we talk about what keening really is, how it meets the body where words cannot, and why returning to our own voice can be a radical act of healing.
1:06 CeeJay Barnaby If you’ve ever felt the weight of unspoken grief, wondered what embodied spiritual work can look like, or felt the need to reclaim your own power, this conversation is for you.
1:16 CeeJay Barnaby Keep listening for Martha’s perspective on sacred grief, ancestral patterns, and the beauty of remembering who you are beneath it all.
1:24 CeeJay Barnaby Welcome to Supernormalized, Martha Wright.
1:28 CeeJay Barnaby Martha, you use the Irish Keen as a part of your practice to help people to heal.
1:34 CeeJay Barnaby I’m eager to hear how that works and what that means for you and how you came to this method to help people.
1:43 Martha Wright: Well, thank you so much for having me, first of all, and for inviting me with that question.
1:46 Martha Wright: Because, of course, as a true Leo, I love talking about myself.
1:49 Martha Wright: So, perfect.
1:51 Nice.
1:52 Martha Wright: So, the Irish cane is…
1:58 Martha Wright: Well, maybe I should introduce myself a bit more first.
2:01 Martha Wright: I know you’ve done that.
2:03 Martha Wright: So I am a shamanic medicine woman.
2:05 Martha Wright: And what that means is I have a life soul calling to be of service to the community.
2:13 Martha Wright: And what I mean of service is it means to be a shaman is to be the bridge between this reality and non-ordinary realities or the unseen worlds.
2:23 Martha Wright: And to traverse, to journey into those non-ordinary realities, to find information, to retrieve soul pieces, to help healing, to figure out what do the spirits of the land need to be happy so that the rain will come and the harvest will be good.
2:40 Martha Wright: historically speaking.
2:41 Martha Wright: And so, you know, without going into much of a history lesson, a shaman, a modern shaman still very much does those things, but it tends to be a lot of the work gets outsourced to like lawyers and priests and therapists and counselors, right?
2:57 Martha Wright: I’m a healer in that way, but also a seer and a conduit for the divine to work through me to connect with the individual, my client or whoever I’m working with.
3:07 Martha Wright: to help them feel that divine connection in themselves.
3:11 Martha Wright: So I am not above or better than anybody.
3:15 Martha Wright: I just have a different access point that through me becomes their individual access point as well.
3:22 Martha Wright: Unique to them, different, right?
3:24 Martha Wright: But I am a conduit for helping that to become activated.
3:28 Martha Wright: As a medicine woman, I learned core shamanism.
3:33 Martha Wright: I learned shamanism through Egyptian mystery schools, but core shamanism predominantly.
3:38 Martha Wright: And then as a medicine woman really came out of me when I started studying through my ancestral lineage with Scottish and Irish Celtic heritage.
3:47 Martha Wright: And a medicine woman is going to be someone who is less structured, more in tune with the allies of plants, of the elements, of the seasons, of animal messengers and animal medicine as well, and really letting spirit work through.
4:02 Martha Wright: And so if you think of shamanism as kind of this like core practice, very not hierarchical, but absolutely passed down, you know, from elder to novice and
4:14 Martha Wright: trained throughout a lifetime you know the medicine woman is it’s in the soul it’s in the body and it just comes up and out and so that it’s a very feminine energy to the structural masculine so the two balance me out but the medicine woman work like I said came about when I started studying the Celtic spirituality and Celtic practice as a part of mine and it was in there that I had the soul awakening it was one part really important to connect with my ancestors
4:44 Martha Wright: But another part of me has this innate connection to death, the death process, to helping people when they feel like nothing can help them.
4:58 Martha Wright: Where they’ve tried doctors, therapists, friends, counselors, priests, and they just are feeling like something’s missing.
5:06 Martha Wright: And they’re like, you’re kind of my last hope, which, you know, I don’t take offense to at all.
5:11 Martha Wright: I think that’s lovely.
5:11 Martha Wright: Thank you for thinking of me.
5:12 Martha Wright: And I’m honored.
5:13 Martha Wright: But they show up to me because they don’t know what else to do.
5:21 Martha Wright: And when I say that, not everyone is at that point, but there’s this point in the death process where we realize nothing is going to be the way it was.
5:33 Martha Wright: Everything is changing.
5:35 Martha Wright: What do I do about that?
5:36 Martha Wright: Who does that make me?
5:37 Martha Wright: What does that mean about my life?
5:39 Martha Wright: And how do I navigate this?
5:41 Martha Wright: And in a hypermodern world where we are so, quote, connected, but we’re really vastly alone, how do we navigate this wild unknown without the elders of the community training and teaching us, without the myths and the stories teaching us and holding us, without connection to the seasons and the land, to our ancestors?
6:00 Martha Wright: How do we do that?
6:02 Martha Wright: And it’s terrifying.
6:03 Martha Wright: But that’s really an innate calling for me is to say, I am here and I will stand alongside of you and I will, to the best of my ability, guide you through this dark unknown to find the answers you’re seeking to help adjust to the change that is happening.
6:20 Martha Wright: And the Irish King, and I’ll talk a bit about it specifically in a second, but the way that comes through me is it is about helping people navigate the death process, to grieve that which never happened or to grieve that which did happen but is no longer continuing, to release frustration about the dreams that were so desperately wanted but were not meant to be.
6:47 Martha Wright: And so the keen is this ancient Irish tradition, or it’s also Scottish, to be quite fair.
6:54 Martha Wright: But it’s this ancient practice of grief tending, where historically, if someone died in the community, you would have a woman, typically three women, but
7:05 Martha Wright: They’d be known as the manakinsha, the women keeners.
7:07 Martha Wright: The manakinsha, the keening women, would come to the wake, the three-day wake, and they would wear all black, have black veils, and they would start to sing, and they would cry, and they would sing these laments, these songs, and they would evoke the grief from the community, whether through the song or through kind of a performative action of like,
7:31 Martha Wright: you know, really getting into it, pulling their hair.
7:33 Martha Wright: Oh, Sean O’Malley, why did you have to go?
7:36 Martha Wright: You know, again, my accent’s awful and I’m sorry, but you know, they just would really throw themselves into it because they were feeling the, the energy of spirit, um,
7:48 Martha Wright: That is the undertaker, if you will, the aspect of spirit that is saying, I’m here to collect the soul and bring them to the other side.
7:56 Martha Wright: They were working in tandem with this to say, this person is ready.
8:03 Martha Wright: And in order for this person to truly go, we as a community have to let them go.
8:09 Martha Wright: So let me call up that mourning, that sadness, that anger and frustration, resentment, whatever.
8:15 Martha Wright: Let me call that up out of the body through my song, through my motions and words to let
8:22 Martha Wright: cleanse you, for lack of a better word, but to help you liberate your body from those heavy emotions so that way when the wake is done, we all can move on and life can continue as it needs to do.
8:34 Martha Wright: And so keening is honoring the death process.
8:38 Martha Wright: And the way I practice it is quite shamanic in that it’s not formal singing that I would perform at a funeral.
8:45 Martha Wright: I don’t think anyone would wish that on anybody.
8:47 Martha Wright: To be honest, my singing voice isn’t that great.
8:49 Martha Wright: But it is much more shamanic in that I let the aspect of the Morrigan, the goddess of death, her name is Bhive.
8:56 Martha Wright: She is associated with the Banshee or the Banshee.
9:00 Martha Wright: And she’s associated with grief.
9:02 Martha Wright: And she’s associated with keening.
9:04 Martha Wright: And she moves through me and guides me and sings through me so that my client, whether it’s in person or virtual…
9:12 Martha Wright: whether they’re on the table or we’re in a group circle, no matter the situation, she guides me with the sound.
9:20 Martha Wright: And then that sound works with the individuals as they need, because it’s not for me to tell them, oh, you’ve got this and you need to do this.
9:27 Martha Wright: That’s not right.
9:28 Martha Wright: As a healer, as a shamanic medicine woman, I am a conduit for spirit and I hold space for people so that they can connect with spirit and then they get what they need at that time in their life.
9:41 CeeJay Barnaby That is a huge and comprehensive summary with so many threads in it that we’ll now dive into.
9:50 CeeJay Barnaby What drew you to all of this in the first place?
9:52 CeeJay Barnaby I mean, did anything happen in your life?
9:54 CeeJay Barnaby Would you have like a normal life?
9:55 CeeJay Barnaby Because a lot of people I speak to say, well, I was going along, everything was normal.
9:59 CeeJay Barnaby I was a normal person.
10:00 CeeJay Barnaby And then boom, you know, spirit turned up and changed everything.
10:05 Martha Wright: Well, I thought I was a normal person.
10:07 Martha Wright: We’ll just say that.
10:08 Martha Wright: I think we’re all a little abnormal.
10:13 Martha Wright: So my favorite story to share was that when I was about seven years old, my dad worked for the U.S. State Department.
10:19 Martha Wright: So we moved a lot growing up.
10:21 Martha Wright: And we didn’t move until I was just about seven.
10:25 Martha Wright: And when I was seven, we went to visit Kathmandu.
10:27 Martha Wright: We lived in Southeast Asia.
10:29 Martha Wright: We went to Kathmandu.
10:30 Martha Wright: in Nepal and we walked into this Buddhist temple and you know it’s 1992 I think 91 and you know it’s just filled with tourists and loud loud loud and clicking up the cameras back in the day and I like blinked and it was so slow and I opened my eyes and everyone was gone
10:50 Martha Wright: And it was me and like 50 to 70 monks sitting in rows, chanting and, you know, in front of this giant gilded statue of the Buddha and candles.
11:03 Martha Wright: And I said, oh, I’m home.
11:05 Martha Wright: Like, I felt like, oh, thank God I made it back.
11:08 Martha Wright: Whew.
11:09 Martha Wright: You know, that’s how I felt.
11:10 Martha Wright: And then I blinked again and all of a sudden the tourists were back and my mom was there and she said, what did you say?
11:16 Martha Wright: And I said, I’m home.
11:18 Martha Wright: She goes, come on, we got to go find your father.
11:21 Martha Wright: And off we went.
11:22 Martha Wright: And I just thought nothing of it because I was seven.
11:25 Martha Wright: You know, what do we do with that information?
11:28 Martha Wright: And then, you know, more travels and kind of various energetic experiences without really knowing what they were.
11:34 Martha Wright: And around 15, I’ve had enough of these energetic experiences where things just felt weird or things that weren’t there were there and I didn’t know how to explain it.
11:43 Martha Wright: And I come from a long line of seers and healers.
11:46 Martha Wright: So my mom line, nurse, hairdresser, which I don’t care what anyone says, those people are absolute healers in their own way, people who hold space, right?
11:56 Martha Wright: And then my father’s line comes from a long line of seers and pastors and priests.
12:02 Martha Wright: And so it’s in the blood whether or not anyone wanted to acknowledge it in my ancestry.
12:08 Martha Wright: So at 15-ish, I Google… Or sorry, Google wasn’t around yet.
12:12 Martha Wright: It was Ask Jeeves, if you remember that.
12:14 Martha Wright: And I said… And you had to do like the word plus word, but keep it concise.
12:18 Martha Wright: So I said…
12:20 Martha Wright: earth plus spirituality question mark and they’re like hey you’re a witch congratulations here’s some books enjoy and so i i remember i got the books from the library and i was like this just doesn’t feel right like it just
12:37 Martha Wright: it wasn’t right for me.
12:38 Martha Wright: It’s not something that wasn’t right, but it’s not right for me.
12:41 Martha Wright: So I’ve got kind of freaked out by that.
12:44 Martha Wright: And then I prayed to Jesus and I was like, all right, look, it’s been a while since I’ve been to church.
12:49 Martha Wright: Really sorry, but could you like help me out?
12:51 Martha Wright: And, and he, he introduced me to a woman who then later in my quarter life crisis, her mother, I was super depressed.
12:58 Martha Wright: I didn’t know what I was doing with my life, you know, classic 20, you know, mental crisis, emotional crisis.
13:02 Martha Wright: And,
13:03 Martha Wright: Her mom did Reiki on me.
13:04 Martha Wright: And it was in that session that this inner wild woman came bursting out of my solar plexus.
13:11 Martha Wright: Like she looked like an angry cave woman.
13:14 Martha Wright: And my friend’s mom said, I saw a lion jump out of your stomach.
13:19 Martha Wright: And I said, well, I saw this murderous cave woman come out and we need to call the cops.
13:24 Martha Wright: What is happening?
13:25 Martha Wright: You know, and she was like, I think that’s important for you.
13:29 Martha Wright: And I was like, okay.
13:31 Martha Wright: And so I sat with that and I tried diving into some new ageisms to understand all the energy work.
13:37 Martha Wright: I became a Reiki master myself.
13:39 Martha Wright: The new ageisms didn’t fit either.
13:41 Martha Wright: But to answer your question, I had a very average life.
13:47 Martha Wright: You know, I had a happy, loving family, but we had our troubles and we had our complications that caused, you know, some semblances of teenage trauma angst, right?
13:58 Martha Wright: We had an abnormal life where we moved all over the world and that had its beauty and its challenges.
14:04 Martha Wright: I also, as a young woman, experienced surviving sexual trauma.
14:09 Martha Wright: And unfortunately, that is far more common than it absolutely should be.
14:14 Martha Wright: So it’s like, yeah, I had a totally average life, but not at all.
14:19 Martha Wright: And throughout is dotted these experiences that were so not, quote, normal, but I didn’t know.
14:28 Martha Wright: I didn’t know it wasn’t normal to think that I should do anything with it.
14:32 Martha Wright: And then now I realized those were the moments that spirit was trying to call me to work, to say, hey, remember, because we got you got things to do.
14:43 Martha Wright: And I just didn’t get the I didn’t answer the phone quick enough, you know.
14:47 Martha Wright: And then it took me getting chronically sick in my early 30s.
14:53 Martha Wright: And it was all around my throat chakra, which is honesty and truth.
14:57 Martha Wright: Right.
14:58 Martha Wright: And
14:58 Martha Wright: And the doctors were talking surgery and no more antibiotics because you’re becoming resistant.
15:05 Martha Wright: And I just, I panicked.
15:07 Martha Wright: And I, again, sat at my desk and I just prayed.
15:09 Martha Wright: And I was like, what?
15:11 Martha Wright: What is it?
15:12 Martha Wright: What am I missing?
15:13 Martha Wright: And I heard what I thought was my coworker say, you need to become a shaman.
15:18 Martha Wright: And I turned around at the office and there was no one in the office.
15:21 Martha Wright: And I was like, oh, my gosh.
15:22 Martha Wright: Like, I literally just heard someone talk in my ear.
15:26 Martha Wright: And that’s when I was like, oh, no, that’s not.
15:29 Martha Wright: that’s not normal.
15:30 Martha Wright: Okay.
15:32 Martha Wright: So then I, Google was around and I said, Hey Google, what’s a shaman?
15:36 Martha Wright: And Google was like, Oh queen, it’s this.
15:39 Martha Wright: And I was like, and all of those moments made sense.
15:43 Martha Wright: And I didn’t look back.
15:46 CeeJay Barnaby Wow.
15:47 CeeJay Barnaby So you had a spirit come to you to wake you up then.
15:51 Martha Wright: Yeah.
15:52 Martha Wright: Yeah.
15:53 Martha Wright: I mean, they really were knocking on the door many times and I was just like eating my snacks like I don’t really know what you want.
16:04 Martha Wright: I was a bit of a bit of a dull, dull sounding board.
16:07 Martha Wright: But now I hear them loud and clear.
16:10 CeeJay Barnaby yeah i think that um that happens for a lot of people where you just don’t want to actually like you said pick up the phone because you don’t know what’s going to be on the other end right you know what i mean it’s it’s yeah yeah it can change absolutely everything uh sorry go ahead no i was gonna say and to your point like when it
16:32 Martha Wright: When it does start to change, what else does it change, you know?
16:36 Martha Wright: I think that’s one of the biggest fears around people opening up to the concept of shamanism as something not bad or something acceptable, as actually the most ancient way of understanding God or spirituality.
16:51 Martha Wright: Because if we start to move out of the structural disciplines in place in our modern world that tells us how you access spirit, how you experience the earth, how the earth can experience you.
17:05 Martha Wright: You know, when we start to break out of those systems that are in place, it makes us say, oh, shit, if I had it.
17:12 Martha Wright: misgivings or misinformation or misguidance around this one thing what else what else is going to break open for me and i think that’s that’s something that keeps a lot of people from truly receiving and answering the call would you say then that this calling that happened to you that you use keening with others is a path to right relation with the self and your own life
17:39 Martha Wright: Absolutely.
17:40 Martha Wright: The Keen is one of the most amazing medicines because it is breath, it is movement and a little bit of sound.
17:50 Martha Wright: It is a guided journey into the body.
17:52 Martha Wright: So it is completely present in the body through breath and movement and sound and permission.
18:00 Martha Wright: Because we believe we need to get permission from the outside in order to be our authentic selves.
18:07 Martha Wright: permission granted.
18:09 Martha Wright: Because in truth, when we breathe and we go in the body and the goddess, that energy of the key and that frequency is in the room with us, holding us, it is like a psychedelic experience without taking any plant medicine.
18:24 Martha Wright: So it can be incredibly intense because what we’re doing is we are
18:30 Martha Wright: Finding our inner wildness underneath all the layers of conditioning and fear or doubt or whatever it is.
18:39 Martha Wright: We’re finding that inner wild self and saying, I see you and I can’t unsee you and you’re going to come home with me now.
18:48 Martha Wright: And what needs to get released from the body in order to do that?
18:53 Martha Wright: And it is so not a mental experience.
18:56 Martha Wright: It is incredibly somatic and embodied.
18:59 Martha Wright: And so to release all of that and to make space for the wildness to be remembered in the body, it is incredibly empowering and wild, and not to use wild too many times, it’s incredibly empowering and kind of ground-shaking.
19:18 Martha Wright: And it’s life-affirming because it’s allowing that wild self to come back online just a little bit every time or a big step in one time.
19:27 Martha Wright: And what I mean by wildness is it’s not about like,
19:32 Martha Wright: middle finger to the man and burn a grocery store.
19:36 Martha Wright: That’s just reckless.
19:37 Martha Wright: Wildness is recognizing the ways in which our authentic self wants to be expressed.
19:46 Martha Wright: Wildness can also be
19:48 Martha Wright: taking a weekend at home, turning off your phone and reading by the fire.
19:52 Martha Wright: Wildness is honoring the self as the self needs without letting expectations of the world and of others stop us from honoring the truth within ourselves.
20:06 CeeJay Barnaby Yeah, it made me think there where you were talking about all of that wildness that parts of ourselves that get shuffled off into the bag of shadows that we all hold from social conditioning and from traumatic events, that wildness is a way of actually accessing those and saying, look, it’s okay.
20:27 CeeJay Barnaby That was actually a part of your experience, but it’s okay to be you and who you are.
20:33 CeeJay Barnaby Yeah.
20:35 Martha Wright: It is.
20:35 Martha Wright: And in that shadow, that shadow realm within ourselves is just, it’s where so much woundedness is held.
20:42 Martha Wright: And I think we tend to associate it as bad because no one wants to feel sadness.
20:47 Martha Wright: No one wants to feel rage.
20:48 Martha Wright: No one wants to feel regret unless they’re using it to get themselves something and manipulating a situation.
20:54 Martha Wright: Well, I’m going to use this rage to tell people what I feel and they’re going to do what I want, right?
20:58 Martha Wright: Like that’s no.
20:59 Martha Wright: Yeah.
21:00 Martha Wright: But so rarely are we like, yeah, I want to wake up pissed off today and spend the whole day really rageful.
21:05 Martha Wright: Like no one does that.
21:07 Martha Wright: So we shove it in our little bag of shadows, like you said, and we avoid it.
21:12 Martha Wright: But what else is in there are all those little beautiful pieces of our younger selves.
21:17 Martha Wright: that are stuck in there with that rage or that sadness or that resentment or shame or repressed joy and pleasure those little bits and pieces of ourselves that from those original wounding moments are stuck in there too so it’s worth opening the bag it’s worth keening it’s worth exploring and somatically releasing and healing energetically
21:41 Martha Wright: through the shadow to get those pieces of ourselves that need to come home so we can be more embodied in our wholeness yeah this is a path to the pure authentic self and self-expression yeah exactly
21:56 CeeJay Barnaby How do your many trainings and traditions come together in your…
22:01 Martha Wright: I’m kind of a hodgepodge.
22:04 Martha Wright: I’m like the hamburger that had the ketchup and the mustard and the pickled sauce just shoved together.
22:11 Martha Wright: It’s just like there’s really, you know.
22:14 Martha Wright: So anyway, that was a weird metaphor, but tasty.
22:18 Martha Wright: But so I think the Egyptian mysteries, I think, was a way in which I rediscovered journeying and rediscovered the other realms and my spirit guides.
22:32 Martha Wright: But I really don’t do too much with the Egyptian mysteries anymore.
22:36 Martha Wright: The core shamanism is what took that which was remembered from past lives and in my body, in my soul, and gave it foundation and gave it roots with the earth, into earth practice and earth presence.
22:54 Martha Wright: And then from there, the Celtic stuff kind of
22:58 Martha Wright: brought all that was rooted in with the earth and brought it into a flower.
23:04 Martha Wright: So it was like the Egyptian mystery showed me, hey, here is land.
23:08 Martha Wright: Core shamanism gave me seeds to put in and start to grow.
23:11 Martha Wright: And the Celtic work kind of gives it bright light.
23:14 Martha Wright: And how that physically looks is like in a session.
23:18 Martha Wright: it starts very classically like a Reiki session.
23:22 Martha Wright: You’re on a table or you’re in your own space, and I begin by channeling this energy.
23:27 Martha Wright: And I channel energy through me and into your body.
23:30 Martha Wright: And then it becomes a little bit more shamanic.
23:31 Martha Wright: Spirit starts talking, my spirit guides.
23:33 Martha Wright: And then oftentimes, in case anyone’s curious, Kuan Yin, who is the source of Reiki as I teach it, who’s the bodhisattva of compassion in the Buddhist lineage, she comes through.
23:44 Martha Wright: christ consciousness and archangel metatron are awesome they come through sometimes the morrigan who is my celtic uh the goddess ally and sometimes bridget who also works with me with breathwork as i’m a rough work teacher as well and so these in and sometimes other deities will come in or animals and plants right elemental allies like water and fire so these different um
24:10 Martha Wright: expressions of god of spirit come through and that’s really shamanic right and i’m journeying into the body and getting little pieces moving things etc and then
24:21 Martha Wright: the medicine woman work with the Celtic stuff kind of manifests like moving body parts.
24:26 Martha Wright: Now, whether if it’s in person, it’s always, always consented, always consented upon and constantly asked for consent.
24:34 Martha Wright: And it’s always gentle touch, but it’s very gentle touches like maybe moving an ankle or maybe bringing the wrist to the side.
24:42 Martha Wright: And just, it’s always very subtle kind of myofascial movements.
24:46 Martha Wright: And,
24:47 Martha Wright: And that is all the goddess because she is saying, hey, the body is holding this here and we need to move it.
24:56 Martha Wright: And when I’m doing that virtually, I will feel myself manipulating the body.
25:00 Martha Wright: And I’ll also say like, hey, I’m moving your shoulder.
25:02 Martha Wright: If you could please just reach forward or if you could bring your arms back.
25:06 Martha Wright: And I will tell them, okay, now breathe through the chest.
25:09 Martha Wright: And so they’re doing it themselves.
25:10 Martha Wright: And then they’re like, whoa, what is that?
25:12 Martha Wright: And I’m like, okay, well, this is what’s happening.
25:14 Martha Wright: But it is fascinating.
25:15 Martha Wright: So I think…
25:17 Martha Wright: All these tools in my toolbox just kind of wove together into just practice.
25:25 Martha Wright: And some modalities will come in for some people and activations will come in for others.
25:29 Martha Wright: It’s just based on what the person needs.
25:31 CeeJay Barnaby I’ve seen you describe that some of your sessions can be a little psychedelic in experience for people.
25:37 CeeJay Barnaby Is that because of the deep breath work that you put into it?
25:42 Martha Wright: Well, so the breathwork is not constant throughout.
25:44 Martha Wright: No, the psychedelic nature of it is, yes, the breathwork kind of weaves in and out as is needed.
25:49 Martha Wright: But the psychedelic aspect of it tends to be when there is a significant soul retrieval.
25:54 Martha Wright: Because when we have, so for those who may not be familiar, in modern psychology, you can kind of associate soul retrieval with disassociation.
26:04 Martha Wright: When we experience trauma and we disassociate from our body and act as like a third person viewer of our own situation as a way to survive the trauma, physically survive it.
26:16 Martha Wright: And so, shamanically speaking, that aspect of disassociated self becomes a soul piece that is then lost.
26:23 Martha Wright: It has been torn away from the fabric that is your whole soul.
26:26 Martha Wright: And it is stuck in that memory.
26:28 Martha Wright: So as I’ve already kind of explained, we move through whatever blocks are coming up.
26:33 Martha Wright: We work through gaining trust.
26:37 Martha Wright: And we listen to the body and spirit guides.
26:39 Martha Wright: And, you know, a lot of times people’s power animals will show up.
26:42 Martha Wright: And we go back to the memory and we witness it.
26:45 Martha Wright: Now, whether or not the client needs to know I’m witnessing, I always ask.
26:49 Martha Wright: And sometimes I’m like, okay, this is what I’m seeing.
26:52 Martha Wright: But there are some people, and not often, but there are some who I, the spirit’s like, you can’t tell.
26:58 Martha Wright: You cannot tell them that you’ve seen this because it will break them.
27:02 Martha Wright: Because they are so convinced for whatever reason that their past past,
27:08 Martha Wright: either is completely blacked out or that their secret is so safe with them that they don’t ever want anyone to know, fine.
27:15 Martha Wright: It’s not about me, right?
27:16 Martha Wright: My sessions aren’t about me.
27:17 Martha Wright: It’s about the individual.
27:19 Martha Wright: So I listen to spirit.
27:21 Martha Wright: But we go back and we witness the story and we acknowledge and we help to ask that soul piece, what do you need to break free?
27:29 Martha Wright: What do you need to come back home to the present here and now?
27:32 Martha Wright: And so we work with that soul piece and energetically untangle it and neutralize through alchemy the memory and let that go and bring the soul piece back to the modern time, back to here and now in the session.
27:48 Martha Wright: And then we say, okay, like, you know, what do you need to trust this now version to come home?
27:53 Martha Wright: And we address that.
27:54 Martha Wright: We make it happen.
27:56 Martha Wright: Sometimes it’s ice cream, you know, and just like a little sit and rest on by a poolside.
28:00 Martha Wright: I know it sounds silly, but after holding some pretty heavy stuff for decades, it’s kind of nice to sit by the pool with an ice cream, you know, just to have no worries.
28:10 Martha Wright: So, you know, energetically speaking, we help them receive that till they feel like
28:17 Martha Wright: I’m ready.
28:17 Martha Wright: And then they have a new job.
28:19 Martha Wright: What’s your new job?
28:19 Martha Wright: Well, I was carrying fear.
28:21 Martha Wright: Now I want to carry curiosity.
28:24 Martha Wright: I want to be curious.
28:25 Martha Wright: Or I held abuse and the fear of abuse for so long.
28:29 Martha Wright: I just want to enjoy play.
28:31 Martha Wright: Or maybe I’m just so tired.
28:33 Martha Wright: I don’t want a job.
28:34 Martha Wright: I just want to sleep.
28:35 Martha Wright: Okay.
28:36 Martha Wright: You got it.
28:38 Martha Wright: And then we bring them back in the heart, we reweave them back into the soul.
28:42 Martha Wright: And when that happens for someone to have lived years, decades with a part of their, the light in their eyes is their soul, right?
28:53 Martha Wright: A piece of that light has been missing for a long time and all of a sudden comes back, but we are more in our body.
29:00 Martha Wright: And so colors are brighter, tastes are stronger, sounds are louder.
29:05 Martha Wright: And it’s exciting and also a little overwhelming.
29:08 Martha Wright: And so when I say things can be psychedelic, that’s really what I mean is it’s like it changes us.
29:12 Martha Wright: It completely changes us.
29:14 Martha Wright: But for the absolute better, because we’re able to be more embodied, be more present, hear our soul’s truth more when we have to ask ourselves, what do I want?
29:25 Martha Wright: What do I need?
29:26 Martha Wright: How should I respond to this?
29:27 Martha Wright: We are more genuinely connected to do that.
29:31 Martha Wright: in a way with agency.
29:33 Martha Wright: So it changes us forever, but it changes us for the best.
29:40 CeeJay Barnaby What changes do people often notice after working?
29:43 Martha Wright: Some people are just like, I just don’t feel bothered by the same things anymore because they’ve released that attachment to whatever that wounding was or that frustration that’s gone.
29:56 Martha Wright: Other people, I hear a lot of,
30:00 Martha Wright: I just feel calmer or I, I want to go, I need to go explore.
30:05 Martha Wright: I want to do these things because that wildness within them, that, that self is more present.
30:10 Martha Wright: They’re like, let’s go live.
30:12 Martha Wright: Let’s go be in a new fun way that, that activates and excites us and helps us grow.
30:19 Martha Wright: Um, other people, um, the keen actually kicks off a complete, a complete overhaul, meaning a complete death process.
30:28 Martha Wright: Um,
30:29 Martha Wright: Marriages crumble and jobs are left and a whole new life becomes possible because they realize subconsciously or otherwise that what they were doing was patching together something that was ready to break.
30:46 Martha Wright: And once they keen and they let that wild self come back in here, they finally have the courage to put down the plaster and say, I can’t keep this together.
30:57 Martha Wright: I can’t do this all by myself.
30:59 Martha Wright: Now, some marriages recover, right?
31:01 Martha Wright: Because it’s about equity and building that equality and sharing.
31:06 Martha Wright: But others, yeah, others don’t.
31:08 Martha Wright: And I’m not saying all marriages do, right?
31:10 Martha Wright: I have a perfectly intact marriage, but
31:14 Martha Wright: But these are just examples.
31:15 Martha Wright: I mean, it just depends on how have you been living your life?
31:17 Martha Wright: What have you been engaging?
31:19 Martha Wright: What have you been avoiding?
31:20 Martha Wright: What needs to be witnessed?
31:22 Martha Wright: What needs to be embodied?
31:24 Martha Wright: And more often than not, more often than not, what people report is a sense of clarity, that they don’t feel burdened by the emotions of
31:34 Martha Wright: that they had been feeling and holding.
31:37 Martha Wright: They don’t have the attachment to other people’s acceptance or validation.
31:43 Martha Wright: And so they just feel clear and calm.
31:46 Martha Wright: And they’re like, oh, I just, it’s like a good thunderstorm.
31:49 Martha Wright: It just feels clear and calm after.
31:51 CeeJay Barnaby How is the cane different from talk-based healing processes?
31:59 Martha Wright: Well, first of all, there’s no talking in the keen.
32:01 Martha Wright: So that’s already a big difference.
32:05 Martha Wright: There is absolutely no talking.
32:07 Martha Wright: We get out of our mind and we get into the body.
32:11 Martha Wright: And so it is different because, well, one, there’s no talking, but two…
32:16 Martha Wright: it’s about feeling not thinking it’s about expressing and not and not conceptualizing or trying to understand what we’re what we’re feeling it’s just feeling it to let it out and so it is somatic it is physical you know some people will be completely still wrapped in a blanket
32:39 Martha Wright: Other people will be thrashing on the floor.
32:43 Martha Wright: Some people will be doing cat-cow kind of yoga moves, whereas other people will be up, you know, not everyone stands.
32:49 Martha Wright: And when they do, I tend to help hold space so that they don’t fall.
32:53 Martha Wright: But they’ll be up jumping and expressing themselves.
32:56 Martha Wright: Some people may cry.
32:58 Martha Wright: Some people may sing.
32:59 Martha Wright: Some people may chant or speak.
33:02 Martha Wright: whereas others are completely silent.
33:04 Martha Wright: It is absolutely 100% different for each individual.
33:10 Martha Wright: And it is always a little bit different between different keens.
33:14 Martha Wright: No two keens are the same.
33:16 Martha Wright: And so it’s what is good about it.
33:21 Martha Wright: Obviously, it’s good.
33:21 Martha Wright: But what’s different, especially from talk therapy, is that because it is entirely from the body, and it is entirely from the soul’s energy in the body,
33:32 Martha Wright: It has nothing to do with story.
33:34 Martha Wright: It has nothing to do with identity or labels and everything to do with just being.
33:40 Martha Wright: And so it frees us up to eventually understand some sort of narrative that we can put around it for our brain to make sense of what happened.
33:49 Martha Wright: But a lot of the times the experience itself isn’t something that we can totally make sense about.
34:00 CeeJay Barnaby In your experience, why do you think so many people struggle to access their own feelings safely?
34:08 Martha Wright: There’s quite a few reasons, right?
34:09 Martha Wright: So if we break it down to ancestral and familial conditioning, how were your parents’ own emotions?
34:17 Martha Wright: How were your caretakers if you didn’t have direct parents or grandparents or teachers?
34:21 Martha Wright: Were you allowed to have feelings?
34:24 Martha Wright: Were those feelings given names and attention to understand them, why they came up or where they come from?
34:30 Martha Wright: And if you don’t know why or where, was it okay?
34:34 Martha Wright: And then so you think about that already, layer one.
34:38 Martha Wright: Layer two, what is your community, what is your society, your culture saying about emotions?
34:46 Martha Wright: Are you allowed to have them?
34:48 Martha Wright: Are you allowed to feel them?
34:48 Martha Wright: And if you are, which ones are allowed to be felt and which ones are not?
34:53 Martha Wright: You know, in our modern American culture, rage is like the new currency.
35:00 Martha Wright: The angrier you are, the more important your voice.
35:04 Martha Wright: No, that’s not true.
35:05 Martha Wright: But that seems to be where we’ve come to culturally with social media and trolling and canceling and yelling and just…
35:15 Martha Wright: it’s absurd because rage and anger is just the surface if we don’t ask where is this coming from we never get to the real thing we just stay angry so culturally what are you allowed to feel when are you allowed to feel it how are you allowed to feel it these are all very important questions that are going to be different based on one’s upbringing and where they’re from
35:36 Martha Wright: And then is there a religious aspect is too.
35:41 Martha Wright: Are you a religious person?
35:42 Martha Wright: Did you grow up with a dogma or an institutionalized practice that has its own code of conduct for emotion or expectation of what a man or a woman or a queer person is or isn’t allowed to be or do?
35:58 Martha Wright: And so when we think about all of these layers of expectation and of conditioning or rather teaching on how we’re supposed to feel in our own body, it’s no wonder then when we do have a feeling that we respond to it with judgment, with shame, with embarrassment, with aversion or avoidance.
36:21 Martha Wright: That we say, oh, I’m not going to cry.
36:23 Martha Wright: I was in a car accident.
36:24 Martha Wright: I’m fine.
36:25 Martha Wright: I’m fine.
36:25 Martha Wright: It’s fine.
36:25 Martha Wright: I’m not going to let anyone see me cry.
36:28 Martha Wright: Your body experienced a trauma.
36:30 Martha Wright: You can cry or you can shake out, right?
36:33 Martha Wright: But we tend to absorb and then bury.
36:37 Martha Wright: And so when you ask the question really well, because you asked to safely express these emotions.
36:44 Martha Wright: We can all tap in and say, I can label this emotion with my mind.
36:48 Martha Wright: I can label this.
36:49 Martha Wright: I can make sense of it.
36:50 Martha Wright: Of course, this was it.
36:50 Martha Wright: And this is what it is.
36:51 Martha Wright: And that bup bup.
36:53 Martha Wright: But to safely feel those emotions and let it out means we have to feel safe in our body.
36:59 Martha Wright: And so many of us, because we packed so much crap in there, we don’t feel safe in our bodies.
37:06 Martha Wright: So we externalize a lot of our comfort.
37:09 Martha Wright: We externalize a lot of our validation, a lot of our praise, et cetera.
37:14 Martha Wright: How can I create comforts out here so I feel safe in my body, quote, quote?
37:21 Martha Wright: When really, I don’t feel safe in my body.
37:23 Martha Wright: And a lot of the times that comes down to like, you know, ways in which we can, you know, retail therapy, right?
37:31 Martha Wright: Or medication or whatever.
37:32 Martha Wright: And I’m not judging these things, but they are band-aids.
37:35 Martha Wright: They aren’t addressing the core problem.
37:37 Martha Wright: So to feel safely, feel in the body, we have to start with acknowledging that we don’t.
37:42 Martha Wright: And then we have to sit there and say, what do you need to feel safe?
37:46 Martha Wright: Because I can hold space for someone non-judgmentally, open and radical acceptance with complete compassion and the wisdom to say, I don’t have your answers, but I’ll sit here and walk with you, help you find them within yourselves.
38:02 Martha Wright: That’s a part of that permission to take agency back in oneself from externalizing and saying, okay, I must, if I have the answers in here, then I get to be an active participant in
38:16 Martha Wright: In my own journey, rather than a recipient of what my journey is supposed to be, as I’m told it is, right?
38:24 Martha Wright: We get to be an active protagonist in our own story.
38:28 Martha Wright: And that gaining that agency back is incredibly crucial because that’s the beginning of being able to say, what do I need to feel safe in here?
38:36 Martha Wright: What do I need to trust myself to let these things go?
38:40 Martha Wright: And not just to know what I need, but to do it and to give it to myself.
38:45 CeeJay Barnaby Yeah, really wise shaman, which that I know of brings that all back to a greater understanding of what is mine to do.
38:57 Martha Wright: Exactly.
38:58 Martha Wright: Because we are all connected.
38:59 Martha Wright: And the more we do the work in ourselves, the more we make space for other people do the work in themselves.
39:07 CeeJay Barnaby Yeah.
39:07 CeeJay Barnaby What changes when someone stops looking outside themselves for healing?
39:11 CeeJay Barnaby Yeah.
39:13 Martha Wright: Oh, everything, everything.
39:17 Martha Wright: We begin to remember that we are an embodiment of the divine, not because that makes us a goddess in a body.
39:23 Martha Wright: Oh, look at me like I’m going to lay on the rocks like like, you know, Venus or Aphrodite on the half shell naked.
39:30 Martha Wright: Like, no, that’s not.
39:31 Martha Wright: No, just I mean, do whatever you want, but like also now.
39:35 Martha Wright: And so but we begin to remember that we are a part of the divine and
39:41 Martha Wright: And if we are a part of this divine thing that is in all life, the trees are divine, the rocks, the water, the animals, the plants, this is all life.
39:49 Martha Wright: Life does not exist without some sense of animation.
39:52 Martha Wright: That animation is spirit.
39:54 Martha Wright: We are all little droplets, little threads of a giant woven fabric that is spirit, that is energy.
40:02 Martha Wright: And the divine, if it is in us, then we are born worthy.
40:06 Martha Wright: We’re not born sinners.
40:07 Martha Wright: We’re not born needing to prove ourselves.
40:10 Martha Wright: We’re not born trying to achieve and earn and outgrow this or that to say I’d made it.
40:17 Martha Wright: We already are enough.
40:19 Martha Wright: We already are worthy.
40:21 Martha Wright: of laughter, of play, of pleasure, of life.
40:27 Martha Wright: And part of that is feeling sadness and grief, but that’s also part of being alive.
40:33 Martha Wright: And so if we start being alive and we start realizing that we are worthy of love and acceptance and compassion, we stop looking to unhealthy relationships.
40:43 Martha Wright: for approval or connection.
40:47 Martha Wright: We stop consuming ravenously and we start remembering that we can be connected to the seasons, to the elements, and to nature.
40:56 Martha Wright: And that there is an aspect of reciprocity in life and being alive that we have been disconnected from.
41:04 Martha Wright: When we stop looking outside and we start doing the work in here, we open up space for the God, for the divine, for spirit, for the universe, whatever your faith is, to take space in our heart.
41:16 Martha Wright: So we are not alone.
41:17 Martha Wright: And we do hear spirit.
41:18 Martha Wright: We do hear the messages that help us navigate space.
41:22 Martha Wright: Through our intuition, that which is in our highest and best moving forward.
41:27 Martha Wright: And sometimes our highest and best is going through a shit cloud of chaos, but something needed to be cleaned up and dealt with, right?
41:35 Martha Wright: Like sometimes it is.
41:36 Martha Wright: Yeah.
41:37 Martha Wright: but it’s going to be worth it.
41:39 Martha Wright: And there’s a reason.
41:40 Martha Wright: I just feel like there’s a sense of liberation.
41:42 Martha Wright: So when people do the work in themselves and they reconnect to spirit and they reconnect with the earth and natural life and find that inner wise and wild self, this is going to make people realize I’m from the early thousands.
41:58 Martha Wright: It unplugs us from the matrix.
42:00 Martha Wright: We no longer become
42:04 Martha Wright: cogs in a wheel that operates around us that we feed.
42:08 Martha Wright: And we start to feed ourselves and we start to feed the land that we live on and we become free.
42:14 Martha Wright: That’s what happens.
42:16 CeeJay Barnaby How do you help people trust their own inner wisdom within that?
42:20 Martha Wright: So helping people find trust in their intuition and in their connection to the divine has a lot to do with healing, right?
42:29 Martha Wright: Healing the beliefs, healing the blocks, healing the fear, but also helping them to remember
42:41 Martha Wright: that which is already in them.
42:45 Martha Wright: And so I realize that sounds very like kind of poetic, but it’s helping them realize what is something that brings them joy?
42:54 Martha Wright: What is their purpose?
42:55 Martha Wright: What is their presence?
42:56 Martha Wright: Because we all have a purpose.
42:58 Martha Wright: It’s not as glitzy, glammy as Hollywood makes us sound.
43:02 Martha Wright: Like we’re not, you know, meant to be superheroes.
43:06 Martha Wright: But we are meant to bring joy in this life or we may maybe are meant to bring questions, you know.
43:12 Martha Wright: So what is something that really animates this individual in this life that can feel like an anchor point within themselves as like, oh, yeah, that’s my point zero.
43:21 Martha Wright: That’s where I start from.
43:23 Martha Wright: And then as we kind of work through those layers and build that within themselves, then we can also build that intuitive knowing.
43:32 Martha Wright: So oftentimes throughout sessions, I’ll say, you know, okay, this is coming up.
43:35 Martha Wright: They’re like, I remember that.
43:37 Martha Wright: Okay, did you hear this voice?
43:38 Martha Wright: Or do you remember having something here?
43:41 Martha Wright: And they’re like, oh my gosh, or that sounds like I’m feeding people info.
43:44 Martha Wright: That’s not normally how it comes out.
43:46 Martha Wright: They usually say like, I didn’t
43:49 Martha Wright: I didn’t know what to do with that information.
43:51 Martha Wright: I had this information come up.
43:53 Martha Wright: Okay, well, let’s talk about that.
43:55 Martha Wright: What did it feel like in the body?
43:57 Martha Wright: What did it sound like?
43:57 Martha Wright: What did it look like?
43:58 Martha Wright: What did it taste like, smell like?
44:01 Martha Wright: And I help them to hone their psychic gifts, whatever melee of styles, because they’re not siloed off.
44:11 Martha Wright: They are very much interwoven as most things are.
44:13 Martha Wright: But I kind of help them play with and think about and reflect on how their intuition connects with them.
44:22 Martha Wright: And then after sessions, in between sessions, I will give them the homework of when you feel that voice, write it down.
44:28 Martha Wright: Send me a text.
44:30 Martha Wright: What did it look like, feel like, et cetera?
44:32 Martha Wright: Then did you listen to it and what happened?
44:34 Martha Wright: How did it feel in your body to respond?
44:36 Martha Wright: And then if it wasn’t so important or it didn’t feel like it was really necessary and you could play with it and say, I’m not going to listen and see what happens.
44:44 Martha Wright: Let me know what happens.
44:46 Martha Wright: And so we begin to kind of build it that way.
44:50 CeeJay Barnaby What does it mean to you to be a mirror rather than the fixer?
44:55 Martha Wright: So I used to be a wounded healer because I didn’t know I was a healer, which meant that I attracted people who didn’t want to do their work.
45:02 Martha Wright: And I would hold space for them.
45:04 Martha Wright: I would hold their shit for them and I would help them through their things.
45:07 Martha Wright: And they would say, oh, my God, Martha, what would I do without you?
45:10 Martha Wright: I love you so much.
45:11 Martha Wright: You’re so great.
45:12 Martha Wright: And I’d be like, I feel like shit, but you tell me I’m amazing.
45:16 Martha Wright: So that must mean I’m good.
45:17 Martha Wright: OK, great.
45:18 Martha Wright: Because I didn’t believe in myself.
45:19 Martha Wright: And so it was this awful codependent loop.
45:22 Martha Wright: When I broke out of that and began doing the work through my apprenticeships and doing the work within myself, I started to understand that no one can ever really fix anyone else.
45:34 Martha Wright: All we can do is our work in ourselves.
45:36 Martha Wright: And when we hold, when we do the work in ourselves, then we have the capacity to hold space for someone no matter what their thing is and say, I see you.
45:47 Martha Wright: I love you because you’re worthy of love.
45:49 Martha Wright: I believe in you and I know you can get through this.
45:52 Martha Wright: Now, when it’s a healing session, I also have spirit being like, okay, offer this as an idea, move this energy here.
45:59 Martha Wright: Cool, because I’m working as an agent of spirit, right?
46:01 Martha Wright: So I’m working in co-creative flow with spirit and I’m helping them and this is the situation.
46:05 Martha Wright: But when it comes to normal life, just having that capacity to say, I see you, I hear you.
46:12 Martha Wright: Thank you for sharing with me.
46:15 Martha Wright: I’m not going to respond because you probably don’t need more to hold yourself.
46:19 Martha Wright: You just needed someone to witness you.
46:21 Martha Wright: And in Hinduism and in Buddhism, you know, they speak about compassion as…
46:27 Martha Wright: Doing just that, witnessing someone else, not fixing, just witnessing.
46:32 Martha Wright: And that in itself is love in action.
46:36 Martha Wright: And then having the wisdom that understanding everything is connected and to not take things personally, but to be responsible with one’s responses and actions.
46:47 Martha Wright: to be wise in one’s beingness in how we’re showing up.
46:53 Martha Wright: So for me, being a mirror is an elevation of where I was in that wounded place into a place of wisdom and wellness where I say, I hear you.
47:04 Martha Wright: I see you.
47:04 Martha Wright: This is what I’m hearing from you.
47:06 Martha Wright: That must have been hard, scary, beautiful, awful, whatever the right words are.
47:14 Martha Wright: And then saying, you know,
47:17 Martha Wright: If it’s a session, here are the options that I’m hearing.
47:20 Martha Wright: What do you want to do?
47:21 Martha Wright: Or if it’s not a session and I’m just talking with someone and they just need to be witnessed, then I say, I hear you.
47:26 Martha Wright: I see you.
47:28 Martha Wright: That must have been awful.
47:29 Martha Wright: And I’m so sorry that happened.
47:31 Martha Wright: I love you.
47:31 Martha Wright: Um,
47:33 Martha Wright: What do you need right now?
47:35 Martha Wright: And just allowing them to say, like, I just needed someone to listen or I need such and such.
47:40 Martha Wright: OK, cool.
47:42 Martha Wright: How can I help you with that?
47:43 Martha Wright: Because and then I can say, OK, well, I can’t.
47:46 Martha Wright: I don’t have the capacity to do this or I can and I’m willing to consent to being in this open exchange because there has to be.
47:55 Martha Wright: We have to express our expectations of ourselves and each other.
47:58 Martha Wright: Otherwise, we’re going to set ourselves up for more failure and disappointment.
48:02 Martha Wright: So it’s just about letting the person know I see them, reflecting back what I hear, and then in the best of my capacity at that time or ability at that time, being of service, you know, as is appropriate.
48:18 CeeJay Barnaby Terence McKenna used to say that from all of his understanding of working with shamans and shamanic practices, that one of the tricks that he learned about being a great shaman is that the great shamans know how to pick great patients.
48:36 CeeJay Barnaby And do you refuse anyone?
48:38 Martha Wright: Sorry, I’m laughing about a specific situation that I’m remembering.
48:43 Martha Wright: I used to not.
48:45 Martha Wright: And then I found myself receiving sessions with people who didn’t really want to change, but really loved the look and the sound of having a so, you know, I went to a healing session and, or like everything was fine.
48:59 Martha Wright: Everything was great.
49:00 Martha Wright: And then all of a sudden it happened again.
49:01 Martha Wright: We, it must not have worked.
49:03 Martha Wright: And I finally was just, I used to think it was me.
49:06 Martha Wright: And then I sat back and I was like, wait a second.
49:09 Martha Wright: I did everything right.
49:10 Martha Wright: They’re like, no, you didn’t do everything right.
49:11 Martha Wright: I’m like, okay, so what?
49:12 Martha Wright: And they’re like, do they really want to change?
49:15 Martha Wright: And I found myself flooding my calendar with more often than not these situations.
49:20 Martha Wright: And I said, you know what?
49:22 Martha Wright: I don’t need to waste my time.
49:24 Martha Wright: I don’t need to waste their time.
49:25 Martha Wright: I don’t need to waste y’all’s time, even though time doesn’t exist for them.
49:28 Martha Wright: I said, let’s not do this.
49:29 Martha Wright: Let’s not make this about me making money off of someone who’s willing to throw it away, but not really ready to do the work.
49:35 Martha Wright: Bring me people who are ready to do the work.
49:38 Martha Wright: I will do the work with them.
49:39 Martha Wright: And I think that’s what really, and I think when that happened, when I was genuine in that spirit was like, okay, we’re going to up level.
49:46 Martha Wright: So you need to do some more deep work in yourself.
49:48 Martha Wright: And so I have gone so deep.
49:50 Martha Wright: deep within myself i don’t i i’m sure there’s something because we always have something but i don’t know what else is left in there for me to deal with and i say that because it allows me to say then bring me those people no matter their situation if they’re ready i will be here and i won’t back down because i trust you spirit i trust you
50:14 Martha Wright: And I have been given some pretty intense clients, but they have also been the most rewarding because to see them in some in specific, I’m thinking of a few who look at me and say, if this doesn’t work, I’m not going to stay on earth.
50:33 Martha Wright: I can’t do this anymore.
50:35 Martha Wright: That’s a lot of, I don’t want to say pressure because it’s just them being honest about where they were.
50:41 Martha Wright: But to sit there and take a breath and say, all right, spirit, tell me what to do.
50:45 Martha Wright: And they say, get them on the table.
50:46 Martha Wright: Let’s start working.
50:48 Martha Wright: Okay.
50:48 Martha Wright: And then I tell them, I can’t make any promises.
50:51 Martha Wright: As a human to human, I can’t promise anything.
50:54 Martha Wright: But I can tell you I will do everything in my ability to do exactly what is able to work through me to be the best I can be for you for whatever that means for you.
51:05 Martha Wright: And I’m not here to tell you how to receive this or what to do with this when it happens.
51:10 Martha Wright: I respect that you have sovereign choice in your own life.
51:15 Martha Wright: And I know that’s not a very popular thing to say to someone.
51:18 Martha Wright: but it is what I feel and believe.
51:20 Martha Wright: And so, yeah, I have, in a sense, I’ve put up some blocks to only have serious people and we go deep and it’s intense and it’s beautiful and it’s rewarding.
51:32 Martha Wright: And then every so often I get tested with a client here and there who are like,
51:37 Martha Wright: I just want you to read my Akashic records and how do I make more money?
51:42 Martha Wright: And tell me when am I going to meet so-and-so?
51:45 Martha Wright: And I’m like, I mean, these are all important questions.
51:47 Martha Wright: I’m not downplaying it, but it’s like every so often I get one of these sessions, I’m like, oh yeah, that’s right.
51:52 Martha Wright: I used to be here all the time.
51:54 Martha Wright: And every so often it’s nice.
51:56 Martha Wright: It’s nice to have a break, but yeah.
51:59 CeeJay Barnaby Yeah.
52:01 CeeJay Barnaby What might someone notice in their daily life after doing this kind of work?
52:06 Martha Wright: Well, I know I said clarity and ease before, and that’s absolutely true.
52:12 Martha Wright: Clarity, ease.
52:14 Martha Wright: Something I hear a lot is that people feel calmer when they’re confronted with a situation that used to make them fold or fawn or acquiesce.
52:26 Martha Wright: They find themselves much calmer and
52:30 Martha Wright: And non-reactive.
52:31 Martha Wright: They’re like, oh, no, this isn’t what I want.
52:35 Martha Wright: And let me advocate for myself now.
52:38 Martha Wright: So there’s, yeah, it’s strengthening in themselves for sure.
52:42 CeeJay Barnaby How can a person begin to listen more closely to their body at home?
52:48 Martha Wright: Oh, well, okay.
52:50 Martha Wright: So let’s say all of this sounds grand, but it’s absolutely impossible for whatever the situation or circumstances are.
52:57 Martha Wright: How do we begin, right?
52:59 Martha Wright: I’m huge, huge advocate of the breath, of breath work.
53:03 Martha Wright: We all breathe.
53:04 Martha Wright: It is free to breathe.
53:06 Martha Wright: It is not illegal to breathe.
53:07 Martha Wright: So no matter who you are, where you are, you can breathe.
53:11 Martha Wright: Take five seconds to breathe in, calm, slow, steady, and as full as you can go, not forcing it, but just as full as you go within five seconds, calm, and then immediately exhale, same rhythm and speed, exhale, five seconds out, five seconds in, five seconds out.
53:29 Martha Wright: No pause, no breaks, calm and steady in, calm and steady out.
53:34 Martha Wright: And this is called coherence breath.
53:36 Martha Wright: It is one of the, it’s a connected breath.
53:39 Martha Wright: So it has the ability to really decompress and regulate our nervous system.
53:46 Martha Wright: It has the ability to slowly and gently open up stress and bring it up out through the body, which manifests as like yawning and stretching and, you know, moving or moaning or whatever.
53:59 Martha Wright: But it’s not activating as some other kind of cyclical activating connected breaths can be.
54:06 Martha Wright: So you don’t have to worry about it if you do have any sort of medical or mental or physical conditions that would preclude you doing an activating breath work.
54:16 Martha Wright: So coherence breath five seconds in, five seconds out is a great way to come back into the heart, come back into the body and get re-centered and calm.
54:26 Martha Wright: And at that point, after, say, three to five minutes of just that breath, which flies by, believe it or not, you can sit there and say, where am I feeling tense still?
54:37 Martha Wright: Where am I feeling angst?
54:39 Martha Wright: Where am I feeling relaxation?
54:42 Martha Wright: And we just begin to feel the body.
54:45 Martha Wright: What am I feeling in my hands and my arms and my back and my belly, etc.?
54:49 Martha Wright: ?
54:50 Martha Wright: And as we start to feel and name those things, we can start to recognize patterns over time.
54:55 Martha Wright: We can start to ask the self, when is this worse?
54:59 Martha Wright: When do I need to come back to this breath?
55:01 Martha Wright: If you could do it three times a day, you’d be marveled at the mass reduction of stress.
55:06 Martha Wright: and the mass reduction of cortisol because of that.
55:09 Martha Wright: And then the more presence you have in your body, and you’ll start to pick up when certain people, situations, times of day, foods, et cetera, activate stress or reactions in the body.
55:21 Martha Wright: So that’s where anyone can begin.
55:23 Martha Wright: Start with the breath and start to feel and listen within.
55:27 CeeJay Barnaby What would you say to someone who’s ready to meet their own grief with compassion?
55:31 Martha Wright: I would say thank you.
55:32 Martha Wright: Thank you for showing up for yourself.
55:34 Martha Wright: Thank you for listening to your bodies, being ready to release.
55:41 Martha Wright: Thank you for loving yourself enough to do this work.
55:45 Martha Wright: because it matters it matters to you it matters to your soul and it matters to everyone in your life you engage with because loving yourself like this can only lead to more love martha we’ve come towards the end of the podcast how can people find you and tackle their grief in a compassionate way
56:07 Martha Wright: Yeah.
56:09 Martha Wright: Well, sure.
56:10 Martha Wright: So my website is MarthaMW.com.
56:14 Martha Wright: So Martha, M-A-R-T-H-A, M as in Martha, right?
56:18 Martha Wright: Sorry, W as in right, or Medicine Woman, because my initials are the same as Medicine Woman.
56:24 Martha Wright: Also, I realized I flipped my fingers.
56:26 Martha Wright: Sorry about that.
56:27 Martha Wright: Was not meant to be offensive.
56:28 Martha Wright: MarthaMW.com.
56:32 Martha Wright: And my Instagram is at MarthaMedicineWoman spelled out.
56:36 Martha Wright: And just if you feel any sort of resonance or curiosity or ping or whatever, just reach out to me.
56:43 Martha Wright: I am…
56:44 Martha Wright: Just because I’m on here doesn’t make me stand out.
56:47 Martha Wright: I am so real.
56:48 Martha Wright: I’m so genuine.
56:48 Martha Wright: And if I’m not your person, I have a great collection of friends who I highly recommend for different things.
56:55 Martha Wright: So if I’m not your person, I can help you at least lily pad in a direction that is right for you.
57:02 Martha Wright: And it’s always an honor to be of service for anybody.
57:06 Martha Wright: So yeah, please reach out.
57:08 CeeJay Barnaby Excellent.
57:09 CeeJay Barnaby Thank you for your sharing and understanding of the keen and dealing with grief in conscious ways.
57:16 Martha Wright: Thank you, CJ.
57:16 Martha Wright: Thanks for having me.
57:20 CeeJay Barnaby What a great talk with Martha.
57:21 CeeJay Barnaby She’s truly a gem with her understanding and her wisdom and the way she shares it.
57:28 CeeJay Barnaby Thank you so much, Martha, for coming on the show.
57:29 CeeJay Barnaby I really appreciate all that you shared there.
57:32 CeeJay Barnaby And if you’ve enjoyed today’s show, reach out to Martha and say thank you.
57:36 CeeJay Barnaby That’d be really nice.
57:38 CeeJay Barnaby And if you’re on YouTube, remember to like and subscribe.
57:41 CeeJay Barnaby And if you’re on a podcast app, five stars, please, and say something nice.
57:45 CeeJay Barnaby And if you’re on YouTube, say something nice too.
57:47 CeeJay Barnaby That’d be really nice too.
57:48 CeeJay Barnaby All right.
57:49 CeeJay Barnaby Thank you so much for listening until next episode.
57:52 CeeJay Barnaby We’ll see you then.
57:53 CeeJay Barnaby And if you’d like this one, you’d like these ones too if you’re on YouTube.
