So Ashley, you’ve talked about HeartMath Institute a couple of times, and I really love HeartMath Institute. How did you find out about them and did you do any training with them or like how did you use their knowledge?

HeartMath and Its Impact

So I looked into Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work for the longest time. And at first, you know, I was like super enthusiastic about it, but I didn’t, for some reason, some of the terms he was using were not very clear to me. And so I started looking into, cause it says HeartMath on his website. So I started looking into HeartMath to find if there’s an easier way to do something rather than sitting in meditation for one to four hours.

And they explained what was happening inside the heart and the body in such a clear way that I finally got it. Like all these things started to click into place for me. And I actually was so interested in them that I signed up for a training course at a time where I was trying to overcome a new trauma.

So I’d overcome all this other stuff of like 20 some years of garbage going on only to have something new crop up and feel like I’m starting over from scratch. And I was just like, I cannot start over from zero because that sucked. And so I started doing the HeartMath and I found within like one and a half to two weeks, it was doing something for me and to me that nothing else in my 40 some years ever had.

And it was rewriting my brain to this point of like, most of my clients will say they have a life review within one half to two weeks. Because they will start to see their past differently. Not only will they get clear on the role that they played in it, but also they will look at the people and things in their life from a place of neutral or better. So they’re no longer like super angry or super sad or in longing or grief or something like that.

And that’s just from practicing the heart, heart breathing.

Yeah, it’s basically heart-focused breathing, where you put your attention or awareness in the area of your heart or your chest, and you breathe a little more deeply, a little more slowly, basically like five seconds in five seconds out. And when you’re just neutrally observing the air going in and out of your body, you’re not like trying to make a super happy, deeper, you know, like picture in your mind or do anything particular.

You’re just the neutral observer, neutral observer of the air going in and out. That’s going to put you in a place of neutrality and being a place of neutrality can be a huge difference from somebody who’s down here. It could be a huge leap. And if you, it’s almost like clearing out debt. If you clear out your emotional debt, you clear out your emotional programs, you will start to see the world differently.

And a lot of times people will say they try to drum up a negative emotion for this person that they’ve held in such a negative light for so long. They feel nothing. And it isn’t apathy, it’s just indifference. And so when you start to clear out these patterns, one of the things they’re finding is that we can have six to eight generations deep of patterns that are not even ours.

And it doesn’t matter the origin of the pattern. It will clear it all, whether it’s from you, your parents, your ancestors, or the collective, because we are always emitting fields. We could be picking up on somebody else’s field, like super sad because of somebody in our field, because of mirror neurons. So that’s when they talk about empaths, you know, a lot of empaths will say, well, I’m picking up all this information and I feel drained by it.

I feel drained by this person’s emotions or whatever they’re emitting. Well, when they get to this place of self-sustaining of neutral or better, they’re no longer being drained by these other people’s energies, and they start to inform the field, which raises the vibration of everyone around them, rather than just being informed by it.

And they actually become better interpreters of the energy because being an empath doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re spot on in what you’re feeling. You may interpret it incorrectly.

Sure.

Because some empaths will pick up that somebody has a low vibration, but they may interpret that to mean they’re a bad person rather than that person has a history of trauma or they’re in a bad relationship or something like that.

So when you get into this place of HeartMath, not only do you recognize patterns, you start to change them. You start to change your beliefs, start changing to what you think of as reality really starts to shift for you from a lens of neutral or better because every emotion that you are feeling is a filter through which you see, hear, feel, or experience life.

And so when we talk about different states of consciousness, every emotion is a state.

Yeah.

Every belief system is a state, but you have to change how you feel and what you’re saying and what you’re thinking about on a regular basis to have a positive state be more dominant than anything else. It just takes repetition, basically.

Yeah, yeah. As someone who’s gone through that very same thing, like that, it takes work, takes retraining, and it’s not as hard as you might think, but it does take some time to get there.

Yeah. And like I said, when people say stuff to themselves or like, “I’m sick” or “I’m sick of this,” or “I’m sick and tired of blah, blah, blah,” they’re programming themselves.

Yeah.

Like their little cells are listening, you know what I mean? And they’re listening and they’re responding and it sounds kind of funny, but there’s truth to that. And that’s one of the things that shamans, they knew about, they would say, don’t speak of ill things. Don’t speak negatively, but we get in this thing where we almost generate this field of either constructive interference or destructive interference, where we are amplifying either positive results or amplifying negativity through our speech and our emotions.

And so people don’t realize that when they’re getting together and they’re gossiping or they’re getting together to complain, they are generating a magnified field, like a mastermind, but for the opposite of what they seek. And they wonder why they don’t get it. And so when you’re trying to create masterminds with either businesses or whatever, they’re goal-oriented, they’re solution-oriented, they’re positive-oriented. And they’re like, how do we make this work rather than why is nothing working?

Yeah. So as you have been working with people as a shaman and with all these different tools, what do you find, like, what are the kind of misconceptions that people come into this with?

Misconceptions About Shamanism and Energy Work

Well, there’s a lot. First of all, you know, people think of shamanism as a North American, Native American thing, and it’s not. The term shaman is actually culturally specific to Siberia and only Siberia, but there were people worldwide that, again, believed in animism. That’s where there’s a consciousness within everything, whether that be a tree, a rock, a blade of grass, or what have you, that you can tap into again for information, power, protection, and healing.

And so a lot of people think of shamanism as you’re going to curse somebody, hex them. You’re working with dark spirits, blah, blah, blah. And there are people that do, and they have a reason for that, but that’s not what I’m trying to teach anybody. It really is about consciousness, basically, consciousness, energy, power, and really getting people to shift that within themselves.

So a lot of times, too, people will think of entities attached to somebody as something bad, like a demon. That’s another thing that I’ve seen some scary things in my life. I’ve had people try to bite me, punch me, kick me, but oftentimes when there’s an energy attached to somebody, it may not be like these really super dark things.

It could be a suffering being that passed like a ghost and it’s lost and it’s stuck to that person influencing them. Or it could be somebody who is alive that is stuck to them through a cord and their consciousness, their energy, their programming, their belief systems are influencing ours.

So a lot of times people think that they’ve been cursed or that there’s again, some bad thing attached to them. It could just be their own speech. It could be the people that are alive in their life. They’re influencing their thoughts and their habits and their beliefs. Cause you know, they say, you are who you hang with.

The top five people you spend time with have control and authority over your life because they influence what you think.

And so a lot of times people think of shamanism as going to be some woo-woo thing. When in fact, we’re just tapping into the energy in your field and going, again, what’s happening in your ordinary and non-ordinary reality to make you this way. And so most times the shaman’s going to look to see if there’s an energy that needs to be cleared or restored to put somebody in alignment with a better state of self, or if it’s their own personality or identity that needs to change.

And so again, people think of shamanism as being super magical, super woo-woo, but it’s not, you know what I mean? If you think about it, like Eastern medicines, like whether it be Ayurvedic medicine or acupuncture, it’s all about balancing energy. Same thing with shamanism. Put something in, take something out. It’s all about finding that balance, that frequency, that vibration for people. So it doesn’t have to be some spiritual woo-woo weird thing. It’s almost basically like quantum physics.

If you think about it, it’s again, wherever you put your attention in focus is wherever you’re going to experience reality.

And so we’re just trying to shift people’s focus. We’re trying to shift people’s energies. So I look at shamanism more from a quantum physics point of view, rather than just a straight up woo-woo thing.

Yeah, so and that’s, I like your approach in that. And it’s also interesting because you’ve had these experiences since you were a baby, literally a baby of being able to experience this something else that’s kind of unexplainable, even in the quantum physics sort of way. And I really appreciate your description of shamanism is, and of course, you know, animism is, I don’t know what the correct terminology is, but medicine person maybe kind of is a better term for it, but how, what you’re really doing is you’re tapping into the consciousness. Whatever this is, and that might be the sickness that might be the person that might be different parts of them might be a trauma, right? There’s these different parts that have this consciousness and then you’re… I’m going to make an assumption here because I don’t know for sure if this is true but now then you’re helping to communicate with that part to find out what it needs what it needs the person to know what you need to know. You’re coming to some kind of way of harmony through that communication. Is that… am I accurate in that?

Yeah, and so oftentimes, like I’ll be having a silent conversation with that person’s soul or their consciousness while I’m working with them, either whether they’re in another state or country or where they’re directly in front of me. I will be doing my rattling, my singing and whatever different doctoring songs in different languages. And most people just feel very floaty. They have no idea what the heck’s happening. They’re just in sort of like some very floaty, relaxed place. They may see pictures, they may see images, but I’m tapped into what needs to be cleared or restored.

And I’m having a silent conversation inside my head with that piece. And I’ve heard some of those pieces say that they don’t want to be here or that they didn’t want to be here under certain circumstances. And I’ve had to convince them that it’s okay to be in their own body or ask what they needed to be fully embodied, because if a person has like a history of sexual abuse, oftentimes my clients are not, their consciousness is not in the lower half of their body.

They do not want to be present for anything from the waist down.

Because of the energetic imprint or the memory, even if it’s just cellular memory of something happening. So in some extreme cases, my clients don’t know when they have to go to the bathroom. They don’t know when they have to eat. They don’t even, they stumble a lot because they’re not aware of their legs. You know, a lot of times people are like way up here. They’re stuck in rumination and they don’t know anything about the rest of their body.

So getting them to be fully grounded, fully embodied is when they’re going to have the most power, not when they’re always trying to check out. So I’m trying to get people through the silent conversation with their soul, ask them, what do you need to feel safe inside your own body? Because so many people are having such a difficulty with the energies going on out there, either political or the wars going on, or just all the strife that people are checking out a lot and wondering why they’re getting sicker or more depressed or more anxious is because they are not inside themselves.

The further they get away from themselves to escape this reality, the less control they have over it.

Yeah.

And so I’m having this silent conversation of going, what needs to happen in order for you to feel safe inside there? And some part of their consciousness may tell me inside my head, “Oh, you need to remove this energy from this part of my body so that I don’t feel threatened by it.”

And it could just be a memory or an imprint. Or it could be some sort of thought forms that they’ve had been looping over and over again, that needs to be removed, or maybe negativity directed at them, because when we say bad things about people or we curse them and tell them to go to hell or whatever we say, we are sending energy barbs to people.

And oftentimes I will find these throughout a person’s energetic field. Sometimes like a verbal abuse will look like almost like bullet holes in the energetic field that need to be removed. And so this person no longer feels like they’re constantly leaking energy from all the stuff that’s been directed at them in the past, because if it’s not cleared, it will continue to repeat whatever’s unresolved within a person will either be repeated within themselves or perpetrated oftentimes unconsciously onto somebody else.

And so I’m really like tapping into that field to try to see what they need to feel, to come back to themselves basically to be as fully whole and embodied as possible.

Yeah. I think that, and that’s key, right? That embodied piece is the key. That’s kind of what we came here for. So we may as well enjoy it while we’re here.

Yeah. And a lot of people who identify as star seeds or from some other planet or dimension, they’re like, I don’t want to be here. It’s too hard. But if you think about it, just, I’m 46. When I was a kid, we had TV antennas on every rooftop. We had no cell phones, no computers. The energies that are coming at us from cell towers and satellites and stuff just in the last 30 years alone are so exquisitely uncomfortable to people.

So it’s not just you being screwed up in the head or whatever. It’s not just personal trauma. We may have a lot of energies coming at us that are actually affecting our own electromagnetic field in a way that our DNA has not caught up with evolution wise.

Right. And probably won’t for quite some time. That makes a lot of sense as to why there might be a little bit more anxiety and stress and all that kind of stuff that seems to be more at least known of now, at the very least, if not just more happening.

Yeah, well, so there’s that. And then there’s whatever goes on with our diet, there’s a lot of things or even the introduction of tons of antibiotics. A lot of people don’t realize that like 95 percent of the neurotransmitters for your brain are produced by the healthy bacteria in your gut.

And if your gut biome, which they’re little intelligences, if you think about that, they’re things that are affecting what you think and how you feel.

And so if they’re not giving you the right neurotransmitters to make your brain function, you can have depression, anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD-like symptoms just from the bacteria. And so we have like, yeah, it’s crazy. That’s why I’m like, I got so heavy duty into looking into neuroscience and everything else to try to find solutions, not only for myself, but also for my clients, because I have clients from all walks of life and I have to be able to say the same thing to an atheist as a Muslim, to a Jewish person, Catholic, Christian, whatever, and say in terms that makes sense to them.

Based on your experience of using all these different modalities and ideas, what is a practical way that someone can use this to improve their life?

Practical Applications for Improving Life

Well, getting yourself out of a survival state. You know, cause we were not designed to be in survival mode all the time. If you think about like National Geographic, the zebra escapes the lion, it shakes, it takes a deep breath. It goes back to grazing. It wasn’t like that lion chased me 20 years ago. I’m screwed for life. You know, I can’t graze again. You know, just leave me here, you know, it doesn’t do that, but we do.

And so getting yourself out of a survival state will allow you to see that the world is not as bad as it seems. Yes, there’s a lot going on, but you have a lot more access to your internal resources that will help you find solutions, help you be creative when you’re not in that constant fight, flight or freeze.

So in a practical way, changing your state out of survival into creativity and intuition is extremely useful. But also you start to manifest synchronicities. You start to manifest opportunities that are more in alignment with what you want rather than a repetition of what you don’t want. So your quality of life, your quality of health is way better. And if you have enough cells in neutral or better, they will start to recruit the rest.

That’s where you can, again, have spontaneous healing from things that are considered terminal diseases. They’re finding out right now that like 97 percent of Western medical conditions are the result of dysregulation and inflammation. When you can get a handle on your own body, especially the dysregulation piece, your body can fight off inflammation and things that are considered, you know, a lost cause and that don’t require medications or surgeries at some point.

But if you’ve gone past that point of no return, then of course, you do need those things, but if you can control yourself, your state of consciousness and vibration sufficiently enough, the world opens up to you in a multitude of ways. And that’s what like the top 1%, they knew, they still know how to do that. They influence the field, they influence the collective rather than being influenced by it.

So when you start to go, okay, regardless of what’s going on out here, I’m going to control what I think, feel and act. Your life is different rather than just going, “Oh God, I have to do this because somebody told me to.”

Right.

You learn to respond rather than react.

Yes.

A person who has emotional control has a hell of a lot better life than a person who’s constantly reacting to their environment and then having to correct for the reaction.

Yeah. Love that. I love that. That’s so in line with what I noticed too, with my clients too, with like so many people are emotional because that’s what they’re supposed to do. React from their emotions and it causes a lot of problems in their lives a lot of times.

Well, if you ask a person what their emotional home is, that’s the thing is that people, when you go through a stress or trauma and you don’t reset yourself to neutral or better. Your default mode becomes dysfunctional.

And so you start to look at the world as a terrible God-awful place. And then you make decisions and choices from that belief system that then gets you back what you believe. Or you don’t do something that you should do because you’re afraid of somebody else. If you have the courage to be disliked and you don’t make meaning of it, you don’t take it personally. You just go, “Oh, whatever.” You know what I mean? You have a totally different quality of life rather than somebody who’s constantly trying to avoid conflict. Or striving for something in particular.

And so when a person’s emotional home is often negative, their default mode is often again, less than neutral. It could be doubtful, skeptical, depressed, anxious, what have you. If you can get a person just to be a neutral observer of themselves, their environment, oh my gosh, life is different. So yeah, changing a person’s emotional home is a big deal. Their default mode.

And you can do that with heart breath.

Yes. HeartMath. Yes. Yes.

What’s making you excited about the future of altered states?

The Future of Altered States

Well, I think a lot of people are starting to realize that they can do it themselves. The more they put the power back on themselves, they have a certain level of ownership and responsibility. The more the rest of the world will wake up because when we are in our neutral or better state, we are these little transmission devices and the people around us are being influenced by our energy.

And so when enough people decide to do this simultaneously, that’s when again, critical mass, you get enough doing this at the same time, the world changes very quickly. And so you start having quantum shifts in consciousness and reality and practices that may be beneficial for the planet.

You know, that’s what, like, when I went to Dr. Joe Dispenza’s events, he was talking about his goal is to change consciousness, change culture, you know, how we react to certain things. Instead of just believing this is the way it has to be, because somebody told me, go make a decision for yourself and start to create newer solutions that the rest of the world will buy into. That is beneficial for the joy of all.

And so that sounds kind of like a woo-woo unity consciousness thing, but we as a planet need to shift our practices. I don’t care if it’s plastics or whatever it is. There’s so many different things, we have the technology already to do so many things. We just have to have enough people on board that it becomes a new norm.

So I’m excited for enough people being in this higher state of consciousness. They will no longer put up with toxic behavior and complacency.

Ashley, how can people learn more about you?

Well, they can go to my website. It’s www.bonesoftheearth.org.

Great. I will make sure that that is in the show notes. And what is the one piece of wisdom that you want the audience to leave with today?

Final Words of Wisdom

How we experience the world is only a reflection of the state that we are currently in. So if you want to have a different experience of the world, change your state. So that’s where I’m like, use HeartMath, go into neutral or better before making any decision, before taking any actions. If you do it a couple times a day, maybe 5-10 minutes a day, you will start to create new reference patterns that have nothing to do with the past.

So these states will last longer, they’ll be more clear, they will be more easy. Make yourself a priority. Make going into these places of neutral or better a priority so that the rest of your life can change a lot more quickly and a lot more easily.

Love that. Thanks for your time today, Ashley. That’s been a really fascinating conversation.

Thank you. My pleasure.