Breaking Free - My Story Episode 1
I am thrilled to be wrapping up my first podcast episode!!
Officially launching on January 1st, 2025, the episode "Breaking Free - My Story," is my journey of rediscovery, reconnecting to my heart, breaking free from limiting beliefs and embracing and expressing myself authentically.
I have explored the depths of self-discovery through neuroscience, quantum physics, philosophy, psychology, yoga, and meditation and I am excited to share my story and insights with you!'
In this episode I share about my childhood, struggles with depression, and the pivotal 'breaking free' moments that led me to question what I 'knew to be true'.
I also share how I have embraced tools like yoga, breathwork and meditation to break free from depression; and utilised these and other spiritual frameworks (such as Human Design, Astrology, and Gene Keys) to come into knowing and alignment with my Soul's Unique Purpose and living authentically.
This episode is not just my story—but an open invitation for listeners to explore their own paths to self-discovery and intentional living. I also give a glimpse of what’s to come on the podcast, including inspiring guest interviews and insights into spiritual and personal growth.
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome to Breaking Free, Coming Back to Me
01:14 Exploring Self-Discovery and Spiritual Tools
02:43 The Journey to Creating This Podcast
04:35 My Upbringing and Early Life
06:18 Struggles with Depression and Self-Discovery
09:14 The Turning Point and Embracing Yoga
09:25 Launching the Podcast and Its Purpose
22:15 The Hoffman Process and Breaking Free
31:46 Astrology, Human Design, and Personal Growth
44:41 Final Thoughts and Takeaways
The Journey Begins
My path has been a winding road, filled with explorations and self-discovery. Throughout my life, I have been driven by a desire to understand what makes me, me, and what makes you, you. This curiosity led me to delve into various frameworks such as Myers Briggs, astrology, and human design. In the episode, I take you along my journey with the invitation for you to explore self-discovery, spiritual tools, and creative expression for yourself (and to grab Your Soul’s Unique Blueprint on this site)
My Story: A Life of Exploration
Raised in a quintessential nuclear family in a conservative Christian home, my story may initially seem 'normal.' But underneath the surface, I was grappling with depression and anhedonia from the age of 16. Growing up, I often felt small and different, struggling to connect with those around me emotionally. My journey through the art and business worlds taught me valuable life lessons about the importance of following one’s heart.
Discovering the Path to Transformation
Depression was a significant part of my life story. Gratefully, my introduction to yoga and meditation in my 30s reshaped my life's direction, providing tools and hope for change. Launching this podcast is a monumental step in sharing this transformation with the world. I want others to know that we can change our paths and reshape our realities through intentionality and self-exploration.
Pivotal Moments
A turning point came on January 2nd, 2024, during a moment of nostalgia and grief upon discovering my old art. This experience prompted a reevaluation of my life choices and reignited my commitment towards my creativity. Such pivotal moments challenge us to rebuild and redefine our narratives - leading us closer to our true selves.
Embracing Change and Authenticity
My journey involved releasing old patterns and conditioning. The Hoffman Process, an intensive psychotherapy retreat, played a crucial role in breaking free from these constraints. Understanding that our beliefs deeply shape our lives has empowered me to live more authentically and inspired the mission of this podcast – to help others do the same.
Expanding Beliefs & Continuing to Learn and Evolve
A shift happened once I was living in Australia, where I discovered the diversity in Christian belief systems, opening my mind to broader possibilities. Stepping away from the rigidly held beliefs of my upbrining, I explored Eastern Wisdom traditions and more recently have gone deeper in modalities like astrology, human design and gene keys - further expanded my understanding, leading to profound self-discovery and inner wisdom. My mission is ongoing learning and growth. I am excited to share the wisdom of my soul's unique blueprint with you. This journey is not just about finding answers but also about exploring the questions that lead us to deeper understanding.
Choosing to Live Authentically
My journey is about embracing authenticity and the courage to follow your heart. Every day, we have the opportunity to choose a life that reflects our true selves. If you are ready for transformation and connection to your soul’s purpose, join me as we explore these topics together.
Remember, at your core, you are love—and you are worthy of living a radiant, aligned life, unique to your own soul's purpose.
Thank you for joining me on this journey!
Listen to the full podcast:
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Here’s the full transcript:
Hello, beautiful people. This is Ann Marie Grace. I'm so excited to welcome you to Breaking Free, Coming Back to Me.
This is a space where we are going to explore the journey or rediscovering of who we truly are and stepping fully into the lives we are meant to live. As your host, I will be bringing to this conversation, a range of topics, everything from neuroscience to quantum physics, from philosophy to psychology, to the esoteric frameworks, as well as yoga and meditation and mind body connection.
I have been studying and training in this space for some 15 plus years, over a thousand hours of personal training as a yoga and meditation teacher, and I also have an artistic background and I have an entrepreneurial background, and I have an innate interest in understanding what makes me, me and what makes you, you.
And that interest has expanded from looking at things like the Myers Briggs and Clifton Strengths and my Enneagram to more recently diving deeper into astrology and human design and gene keys. So in this podcast, I am going to be interviewing guests who I will invite in to explore everything from self discovery to spiritual tools, creative expression, and the incredible potential for transformation within each of us.
I've personally had quite the winding, yet interesting path, but it turns out that that's all in my design. I am actually meant to have quite a winding road. We will talk about it more in later episodes, but. My human design body graph informs that I am a 6'2 Now the 6 gets to have quite an interesting life experience. It's certainly not a straight line. The 6 spends the first 30 years experimenting, failing, trying new things, and learning.
They then spend the next roughly 20 years going into introspection. And deepening in their wisdom. And then from the age of roughly 50 onwards, they step out in the world as a role model to share the wisdom that they have earned. So as a six, I am not meant to have a straight path. I didn't know this at the time. Maybe it would have made it easier as I traversed a landscape of trialing different jobs, looking for my place in life.
So true to the six in me, I have explored a wide range of careers and trajectories in my life, but underlying, All of it has been a driver to have my heart in my business, to feel connected to the work that I'm doing. And that brings me closer to today and how I have ended up creating this podcast.
I am going to be sharing with you each week, either a solo episode where I share a bit about my own experience or I will be interviewing a guest who I have been inspired by for the way that they show up in the world and the wisdom that they have to share.
My goal is for us to all show up authentically and connected to our soul's unique purpose.
In this first episode, I am going to share with you a little bit about my why. Why have I started this podcast? What brought me to where I am today?
And You are going to hear me get a little bit teary, and I'm just going to put the caveat out that, I do get teary from time to time and I know that some people are not comfortable with emotions, and thought about cutting it out and I thought, no, that would actually be inauthentic of me and I want you to know that it is okay to show up authentically, 100 percent as yourself. We are okay to be vulnerable. We are okay to be ourselves. And you will hear in several of my guest episodes that they too get a little bit teary because when you hit on a truth, when you hit on a past pain point... most of these tears have come from a place of healing.
We all have. Little bits of trauma, big T or little T trauma. We have all had experiences that have shaped ourselves, that have hurt ourselves, that have wounded ourselves, that we've had to grow through and learn to love ourselves through. And my hope for you is that you will be inspired by the conversations in this podcast that you will learn new ideas to connect in. That you will be encouraged to live more authentically and connectedly for yourself.
If you want more formal support in connecting to yourself, you can learn more about me and the work that I do at AnnMarieGrace. com. I welcome you within my membership or community. Hope you enjoy. Thanks for being here and let's dig in.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Breaking Free, Coming Back to Me. This is your host, Ann Marie Grace.
I'm just a southern girl next door. Nothing special here. Raised in a conservative Christian home. My mother was a homemaker, my father a successful business leader. I have one brother who is 18 months older than me. There was nothing remarkable about my upbringing. We were the quintessential nuclear family.
We grew up In a middle class suburb on a cul de sac street, where all the kids played ghosts in the graveyard and kicked the can after dinner and before bedtime, and we gathered for 4th of July street parties with the neighbors. We went to church every Sunday and youth group every Sunday night.
I went to the local school. I played tennis and swam for the neighborhood's teens. I played clarinet and was an avid artist and creator. I was on the, quote, gifted stream at my local high school and went on to study at a liberal arts university that my parents had attended and that my brother went to as well.
I babysat the neighborhood kids, sold lemonade and slushies. for 50 cents on the street corners and Girl Scout cookies by the dozen. I also made earrings with a friend, my first entrepreneurial venture other than the lemonade stands, and sold them through the local nail technician. My parents are still married. My grandparents lived until old age. My dad was always employed. Other than bearing witness to my dog getting run over when I was in 8th grade, my life was about as all American normal as you can get.
Gratefully devoid of big T trauma, or even much strife outside your normal trials and tribulations of puberty and high school bullying. Abnormally normal, I used to think, and yet, when I was 16, I started suffering from depression and anhedonia. Now, while I did consume a lot of sugar in my youth, and I suspect there's some links there, as I've grown older and wiser, I can also see how some of the negative patterns that were playing out in my life made me feel small, unaccepted, unseen, and different to those around me.
Emotional intelligence wasn't coined until 1990. And let's just say that my parents and brother were more connected with their cerebral and logical selves than their emotional selves. I, on the other hand, wore my heart on my sleeves a bit, and with my moon and cancer in my fourth house of home and family, I have really direct access to my emotions.
Certainly, I was more fiery and tearful than the rest of the family, And I can see how the emotional disconnect and repression I felt within my family played a part in my depression. And as I stepped further from my heart and followed the unspoken expectations of how my life was expected to look in the world, my depression compounded. As a young adult trying to find my way in a conservative, cerebral world, I didn't have the wherewithal to question my experience.
I knew that from all intents and purposes, I had a good life. But I also knew a small seed of questioning had emerged, which I couldn't seem to shake. I would often think to myself. What if I no longer existed? Now, I never seriously contemplated taking my life. I didn't even get as far as how I would do it.
I was really too much of a good girl. I was able to empathize with how much harm I would create for those I loved if I were to take my life. And as a self coined dutiful daughter, the family role that I took on from my earliest of years, never truly seemed an option. So I carried on. And I did what was expected of me, or what I thought was expected of me.
I allowed myself to do what I loved in college, which was to study fine arts. I spent long days and nights ensconced in my creations, painting and drawing until all hours of the night, much to the chagrin of my beautiful college roommate. Yet when I graduated from college, I decided it was time to put on my big girl pants.
It was time to figure out what I was really going to do with my life. I told myself it was time to get a real job. I convinced myself that my drawings and painting talents weren't nearly good enough to formally pursue, and that following this path wasn't a valid career choice I could consider. Though I had fallen my heart in love with into studying fine art, I shut it down and let my logical mind determine the path I should take.
Depression plays a big part of my life story, but I did have the great fortune to find connection to my breath and learn about yoga and meditation when I was in my 30s. And that reshaped the direction of my life. So this is a big part of why I'm launching this podcast, because life changes and absolutely everything in your life that has brought you to this moment becomes part of your story. And then it becomes what you can now bring to the table to share teachings and wisdom from. And also, We are allowed to change our paths. We do not have to stay the same person that we were, and from one day to the next, we can choose to make new choices and we can choose to live our life differently. So, if you are in a place of general malaise or anhedonia, that's the lack of joy, the choice is yours. And there are tools out there that can support you. In this podcast, we'll certainly be working with guests who can share these different tools and also to know that our thoughts create our reality and that we can intentionally choose the thoughts that we have.
These are the biggest life lessons for me that were a little bit slow to come by.
And more Recently, I've heard my 17 year old stepdaughter talking about what she aspires for and her hopes and her dreams, and then just as quickly, shuts herself down. This is a big part of the impetus for this podcast. I do not want my children or my stepchildren to follow in the footsteps of leaving their own dreams behind.
I also do not want you to leave your dreams behind. So my hope is that this podcast as part of my legacy, will help both them and perhaps I will also help you to understand where we have potentially put limits on what we can do with our life, who we can be, the choices that we can make, and you can choose to live your life differently to be more connected to what your soul is asking of you.
So my personal turning point really came about on January 2nd of 2024. And that's why I felt like it was poignant to launch my podcast at the cusp of the new year.
I am originally from Atlanta, Georgia, but I have called Melbourne, Australia, my home for the past 20 years. So I was back in the U. S. and we had traveled up to Highlands, North Carolina, where my parents have a mountain house, and we were spending our New Year's celebrations there.
It's a beautiful time with my family. I painted with the children. It was lovely and relaxing. And then on the last day, as I was packing up and getting ready to head back to Atlanta, I noticed one of my drawings in a frame on the wall of my parents guest room. And I looked at it and I was feeling proud of myself. And then in the same moment, I kind of felt, Hmm, I have actually never framed any of my own artwork. So I was feeling a bit chuffed or happy that my mother had framed my artwork, but also recognizing, I haven't ever valued my art enough to frame it.
And then it dawned on me that My parents had taken some of my stuff from our childhood home and that they had stored it here at the mountain house. And I had not been at this mountain house for some 13 years. And so I excitedly ran to the storage area underneath the stairs and was pulling out boxes.
They had yearbooks and some old stuffed animals. Then I saw in the corner of the area. my old drawing portfolio. I grabbed it with so much excitement. I pulled it out and I ripped it open and started flipping through everything. And I was in one moment feeling nostalgic and damn, like I was pretty good.
And then in the next moment, I had this absolute wave of grief, consume me. It came out of nowhere. I was not expecting it. And, It nearly took my breath away, and the grief that I felt was for my 21 year old self, the young woman who, when she was graduating from college, having just finished her studies in fine art, having done her senior year exhibition with paintings about a woman finding herself Huh.
As it would be, and I just felt such intense grief for that young woman who felt that she could not follow her heart. That she did not actually have the option of pursuing her art. I can recall being that young woman and thinking to myself, now it's time for me to put on my big girl pants and go out into the world and get a job. Fun is over. Now it's time to be serious.
So in my mind, my art was not serious, and in my mind, I had to do something serious with my life. I had to do something important and meaningful, and art was not meaningful. At least that was the story I told myself. So I'm even getting a little bit emotional sharing this story now, and I will say that This is me. My goal in this podcast is to show up authentically, to be 100 percent me.
So if that means that I get a little bit of a tear here and there, then that is perfect, because that's me. Now I can look at my astrological charts and tell you that my moon is in Cancer, and that, that makes me much more closely in touch with my emotions. My moon is also in my fourth house, which is around family and I just have some very strong emotions there and it's okay for me to be me.
So there I was, holding all of my drawings, feeling this flood of emotion, both positive and difficult. I took a few photos. I knew that I was going to write a blog about what I had just experienced. I didn't know up until that point that your heart could expand so much in one moment and also shatter in that same moment.
And it was an absolute breaking for me.
We traveled back to Atlanta and very shortly thereafter came back to Melbourne. And I found myself. Just really at a bit of a loss, not. not knowing where to take my life next. I have always wanted to make a significant impact in the world. It's been a deep and burning desire within me that I need to make the world a better place. I've never wanted to be a cog in a wheel. I've never fit into business structures that are rigid. I need that creativity.
So in reflection about that 21 year old self who believed that she couldn't do what she loved, my next step was to find a new way to be creative in the world.
Because I couldn't lose my creativity. So, as I graduated, I was trying to figure out what my next steps were. And I looked at
what I thought was serious with creativity. I considered medical illustration. Until I realized how limiting that form of creativity was going to feel to me. I then explored advertising arts because that was bringing creativity into business.
And ultimately that's what it always came back to me. I felt like I had to be in business.
Now This is not uncommon to me. Many, many people look at what their parents do and then do something similar, or believe that this is the right or normal path because it's what has been role modeled to them. So my father was a successful businessman. So therefore in my mind, I needed to be doing something in business.
And that was part of my challenge was how can I be creative and use my skills, my artistic skills, you know, in business.
And I thought, okay, that's business is advertising and it's art. And I looked at the program and I was like, yep, I want to be a creative director. Well, you can't just start being the creative director. You have to come up through the ropes. Anyway, I was looking for the creativity within the business structure. I got about a year and a half into this two year program and realized that I didn't have the passion for it. I didn't live and breathe the fonts and the colors. Commercials and, you know, people would get so excited about the Super Bowl commercials and it just didn't do it for me.
And I really wanted to feel passionate about the way I was spending my time and my life.
So I parked that and I knew that it was just time to get, quote, a real job. And I started looking at what was out there. I found myself having a couple offers to choose from. And I recall asking my father how I could make a decision and he told me to make a chart of the pros and cons of each job. It's a very logical way of making a decision and I've come from a very logical family. So I did what I was told to do. I made a list of the pros and cons.
Allowed my logical brain to tell me where to go with my life.
I looked at the pay. I looked at the holidays included. I looked at the 401k contributions. I looked at what kind of insurance it was going to cover , I looked at the reputation of the business and how that was going to look on my resume in the future.
And only after that did I probably consider what the actual job was going to entail. And long story short, I made the total wrong decision based off of just my brain. My brain told me that working with this management consulting firm was going to look good at my resume and was going to pay me the best and it was going to allow me the most time off because I had an extra week of vacation.
Right. And so I didn't think about how I was going to actually be enjoying my day today. I only looked at what the quote unquote benefits. of the role were. I knew immediately this was not the job for me. Now I stuck it out. Because that's what you do. And I have seen that in my life, when I look back in reflection, that there were lots of decisions that I made that weren't right, and that I stuck out because I felt that that was what I had to do.
And again, I'm here to repeat that we do not have to do anything. Our life doesn't have to look any way. We get to choose. Every day, every single morning when we wake up, we get to choose what our life is going to look like that day. We get to choose. What our work looks like, we get to choose who we interact with. When we wake up in the morning, we get to choose, we can choose The thoughts we have, we can choose with intention to be grateful for all that we have. We can choose to start our day with positive affirmations. We can choose to start our day in a way that is going to set it up to have positive interactions flowing from it.
Now, I could sit here and tell you my whole life story, but I'm not going to do that in this first episode. But let's just say what I have learned about myself since my breakdown slash breakthrough last January has been meaningful and something that I feel is important for everyone to know. And that is, we must. follow our heart. And I know so many of us have not followed our heart. And the most of us who have not followed our heart have not followed it because we have been conditioned from the youngest of age to believe that there is a structure and expectation and rules in a way that life is meant to be.
That we're supposed to do A plus B plus C, you know, to get to the tics to do the right thing, and it's just not true. The actual truth is no one but you gets to choose how you live your life. No one but you gets to determine if your life is meeting your needs or not. And if it is not, only you get to make the decision to change.
So in this podcast, I am going to be speaking with Individuals who have broken free from their own life in a way that I find inspiring.
I will be weaving in some human design, some astrology, some gene keys, along with neuroscience and quantum physics and philosophy and psychology and yoga and meditation and business.
All of the things that interest me. Because those are the things that interest me. And I assume that you are here because you are intrigued, or maybe you want to learn a little bit more about some of these things. So here we are, and this is what we're going to do.
I'm going to bring you back to where we were Jan 2nd. After I found my drawings at my parents mountain house, I was already in a questioning phase of life in November of 23.
I had stepped away from an entrepreneurial pursuit that I knew my heart was not aligned with. And I was in a phase of trying to figure things out. So when I had this heart shattering moment with my art, it kind of put me into a bit of a tailspin of really beginning to question a lot about myself, the decisions I had made, and I was at a networking event when I heard someone say the words Hoffman process.
Now you have to understand, the person who said this was not talking to me. They were at the end of the table speaking to someone else. But the words came through into my awareness and I thought to myself, Why does that sound familiar? And I wrote down the word Hoffman Process in my notebook and went home later that day and pulled up on a website and thought to myself, yeah, this is the program that a friend had told me about eight years previously. Now the Hoffman process has absolutely been instrumental in my further breaking free from all of the conditioning and constraints that I've built my life around.
I will be interviewing my Hoffman process facilitator and I would absolutely encourage you to check it out if you are feeling like there are some elements in your life that are either missing or Or if you are feeling constrained with some beliefs that are holding you back.
The Hoffman process is an intensive residential psychotherapy experience and retreat hosted by facilitators in a group setting. And it's really looking at the patterns that you learned in childhood. And how those patterns play out in your life. And we all learn from the moment we're born.
Right. You know, we, we arrive, we're pure love and light. We arrive into the world and then we begin to learn how to be in the world from the moment we arrive. So as a young Bubba, we don't have the prefrontal cortex kicked on and that is filtering and making decisions and executive functioning, telling us this is true.
And that's not true. All we're doing is absorbing. We're absorbing information. And for the first. Four, five, six years of life. There is no filter. We're just taking things on board. We're learning. This is how mom acts when she's happy. This is how mom acts when she's sad. This is how dad acts when he's angry. This is how dad acts when he's stressed. Right? And we learn to mimic and be similar to our parents. And some of those things are really brilliant, and some of them are less so. And so I went off to the Hoffman process after realizing that this could be part of what helps me because realizing that I had made Decisions in my life to not pursue my art purely based on what I felt was expected of me because I believed that art was not serious, because I believed that maybe my art wasn't good enough and that I couldn't be successful in the world as an artist.
You know, I think so much comes from what your family teaches you and they teach you things verbally and they teach you things indirectly. For instance, I had a belief that I had to be the best. I had a really deep belief that I had to be the best. And that competitive drive has taken me out of joy and out of fun, in board games, and things that don't matter.
Oh my god, I used to be just a I'm not the worst person to play golf with because I would get so down and hard on myself about how much I sucked at golf until I realized one day, Ann Marie, you don't play this sport very often. You can't actually expect to be good at this and it somehow freed me up to just enjoying a little bit more.
That's not to say that I've gotten rid of all of my competitive drive because I certainly have not. I try to be, I try to be gentler and softer on myself now than I ever was growing up. Anyway, coming back from Hoffman, it was clear to me that I needed to live my life more authentically, that I need to just be me. And that is my goal for you.
My goal with this podcast is to help you be curious, to help you question what you know, to help you
consider possibilities. There are infinite possibilities for our lives, and we get to choose in any moment what that possibility looks like. Just us. No one else gets to choose. Only us.
While I was at Hoffman, I came to terms with the knowledge that I had a book sitting within Needed to come out. Now, up until that point, I was very hesitant to talk about it with anyone. And most certainly didn't think it was something I could write until after my parents had passed away. And I say that because as a dutiful daughter, I didn't want to do something that was going to be upsetting to them.
And as a child who was raised in a I grew up in quite a conservative Christian household. It is clear to me that some of my beliefs are not aligned with the belief of my parents. And while I was at Hoffman, I was able to process that it would actually be negligent of me to not share my wisdom. I've learned things that my parents don't know. I have learned things that a lot of people don't know. I've spent a lot of time working in yoga therapy and therapeutic yoga.
I have spent an absolute huge amount of time, some 15 plus years, in meditation. And I am Very connected to the wisdom that is within. I am connected to the greater conscious. I get information. I use modalities to get information. I do things differently than a lot of people and having come from quite a conservative background, sometimes that is hard to speak about and share because I'm aware that not everyone believes these things.
But it's so important for me to be able to speak about my beliefs. I can only be myself. I can only be authentically me, and being authentically me means being able to talk about the things that are important to me, the things that I believe.
One of my biggest breaking free moments came after I'd been living in Australia for a few years.
I grew up in a staunchly conservative Christian household. I had a very narrow concept of what is quote true and what is not and let's just say it was definitely on the more conservative side of the belief system.
I ended up going to A church here in Australia and at that church, they were running a program called living the questions.
Now, during this evening program, the minister made a comment about how the resurrection is a metaphor. And I opened my eyes quite wide. I looked around and thought, Oh, my gosh, is he talking about and I looked and I saw that many of the people in the audience were nodding their heads in agreement.
And my mind was just absolutely blown open to this realization that hang on. All of these people call themselves Christians, believe in Christianity, are followers of Jesus Christ, and yet they don't believe that the resurrection was an actual event. They believe it's a metaphor. And it was like the foundations of my whole understanding about life.
was shaken. I had gone from this, I like to think of like a pie wedge, like this tiniest, tiniest wedge of pie of belief. And in just a moment of having other people share their beliefs, it blew wide open. And then I thought to myself, so if Christianity is not just this tiny pie wedge, Christians actually believe all of these things.
What's that to say for the rest of the world, all the other world religions? And then I couldn't, I couldn't wrap my head around how can I have such a narrow belief system when there is so much more out in the world to believe? And that was my first Breaking free moment where I realized that not everything I've been taught in life is true.
And I know that sounds kind of silly and naive to say, but up until that point, I was happily going along with what I had been taught. And I think so many of us do that. We just, you know, we, we learn something and until it is challenged or until we want to make ourselves open to learning more. It just is what it is, right?
And so I could have lived my entire life believing in that very narrow understanding of, quote, the truth. And I think this is part of the challenge is for people to begin to open their eyes to what they believe, what they know, and what is out there to explore.
So I'm not going to try to cover everything in this first podcast, but let's say after having the foundations of my, of religious underpinning shaken, I became much more open to understanding and exploring and wanting to know more and to go deeper.
And that's really what this podcast is about. It's continuing to learn, it's continuing to explore, it's continuing to go deeper. I want my children to know that I don't have all the answers, they don't have all the answers, and actually the more you learn, the more you realize what you don't know. The more you realize you don't know, the more you realize there is to know.
And I think my, my life is on a never ending journey of knowledge and learning and understanding. I started off with learning about myself through modalities like the Myers Briggs and the DISC profile and CliftonStrengths Enneagram. I find it all so fascinating. And then more recently, I have learned more about myself through astrology and human design and gene keys.
Now, I had my first astrological reading in 2012. And at the time I was a total skeptic, did not believe it. I was at a health retreat and it was one of the offerings there. And I thought, you know, what the heck, I might as well give it a try. Like it's now or never I'm having this certain kind of massage I've never had.
I was trying different things that I'd never done. I thought I might as well give it a go. And I went and I had this consultation with this woman, and she knew nothing about me other than my birth date, my location of birth, and my time of birth.
And the information that was on the chart, she had a chart in front of her. It was my natal chart, I now know, because she had the natal chart in front of her. And it had all these lines, it had all these symbols, it had all of this complexity to it. It didn't make any sense to me. But what came out of her mouth absolutely made sense to me.
And I was sitting there kind of scratching my head going, how does she know this about me? Very much the skeptic that, you know, that there's anything to this. Like you read the Sunday horoscopes and you often can apply what some say to you, even though it's not your sign. And I had come from a family who didn't have any belief in this.
And so It wasn't in my world. It wasn't in my understanding. And then all of a sudden, I was being exposed to something that made me feel like there's actually something to this. Now, I'd had a similar experience three or four years beforehand when I went skydiving. So I went skydiving for my 30th birthday and I had a friend up in the plane with me and she was having a hard moment.
She was coming close to a panic attack, was really not loving it, was contemplating whether she was going to jump. She was asking me to write letters to her family in case she didn't make it. Anyway, she started doing this. Movement with her arms and closed her eyes and was breathing differently. And she managed to calm herself down.
And when we got to the ground, I asked her about what she had done there in the plane. And she told me about this breath work that she had learned. And that intrigued me. It intrigued me that she had been able to manage her emotions purely through her breath. And I ended up going and doing the program that she had done. I had been experiencing depression for over 14 years when I learned that I could control my breath and that the breath could then help me experience life differently. that moment has led me now into 17 plus years of meditation and breath and well being a totally different direction. And it's interesting to think. That when I had my first astrological natal chart reading, the only thing, in fact, that she said to me that did not resonate was that my work and a really important area of my life was in the well being space, the health and well being space.
And I remember thinking to her, no. Um, I don't, you know, don't have that one. That one doesn't land for me so much because at the time I was working in the wine industry and it was very much not the health space, but what the woman didn't know was that I was starting my yoga teacher training about 10 days after that astrological reading. I had already had significant changes in my health and well being through my yoga practice. And I want to clarify that the word yoga encapsulates so much, it's not just the physical practice that most people think of when they hear the word yoga. It includes a philosophical practice, it includes breath practice, it includes meditation, it also includes the asana or the physical practice. Through my yoga practice, I had gone from suffering through depression for 16 years.
I had irritable bowel syndrome. I had constant headaches. I had an irregular menstrual cycle. Like my general state of being was just not optimal. And when I went to my yoga teacher training, I had zero intention to teach. I had zero intention of making it a professional choice for me. I just wanted to know and understand for myself.
I wanted to know because I saw such tremendous changes in my health and well being, mental, physical, Well being physical well being emotional well being spiritual well being and I wanted to know and understand how and why yoga had made such a profound difference. And when I was halfway through that program, it was a year long program when I was halfway through it.
I realized this information is too important and too powerful for me not to share it with everyone I can. I had zero intention of making yoga a professional career choice. But halfway through that program, I felt it was my responsibility to do so. So I ended up working in that space for a very long time.
so there are pivotal moments that happen for us in our life. That was a pivotal moment that changed the trajectory of my life.
So I have all of these moments in my life, and I'm sure you do too, where, whether it's a sliding door moment, or it is a true, absolute about face moment that have changed. your life entirely.
I would encourage you maybe go away and have some thoughts about what your pivotal moments are in your life and what you learned from those moments.
Each week, my goal is to share something new with you that might make you pause, that might make you consider possibility, that might teach you something about yourself, might make you question something you have believed. might make you open your mind that little bit more. I believe there's so much wisdom within ourselves and love to teach people how to connect into that wisdom.
When I have my podcast guest, my intention is to start each of those podcasts with the grounding meditation. And I might even include some of those at the end of the podcast. So if you feel like having a moment of connecting in for yourself, that that will be there for you.
I will be sharing my understanding of Astrology. human design and gene keys and how they overlap and the inherent wisdom within. I feel that understanding what your soul has been called here to do is almost as important as the knowledge I learned about meditation.
So on my website, I have created what I've called your soul's unique blueprint. It pulls together the knowledge of your astrological natal chart, your human design's body graph, and your gene key's hologenetic profile.
And it creates a really vivid picture of what your soul has been called here to do, you can go and get your own free report and with each of my podcast guests, I am gifting them my comprehensive report, and we will spend a few moments at the beginning reflecting on that. I think one of the things that's really powerful about these reports is seeing in black and white, What your soul is here to do, the gifts that you've brought into this world, your strengths, your challenges, sometimes having that reinforced back to you helps provide confidence in your direction, confidence in decisions that you make for yourself.
And I have found that having knowledge of those modalities has made a big difference in the way that I live in this world. And just like finding my breath through the skydiving, and how that has shaped my life,
now, I know that that feels very woo, very out there, very esoteric for a lot of people. And I also know that the family I have come from, This is not their jam, right? This is not something that they've been exposed to. You know, I was chatting with my brother the other day and he made it More than clear that he does not believe in any of this hogwash is not the word he used but it's the term that's coming to me to my mind at the moment and I also know that I have had the experience and knowledge, and I know that there is profound wisdom and truth in this.
And so it's a really interesting space to be in. It's like this continuous breaking free for me, because my goal is to be my most authentic, aligned self and for me to be authentic and aligned, I have to be able to talk about the things that mean something to me, the things that matter to me.
I recently had a friendship of 20 plus years dissolve almost overnight because this doesn't land for her. Okay, so be it. Reason season Lifetime for Friends. And while it created a lot of sadness for me, and if I'm honest, it also created a little bit of discomfort and questioning and making me question who I am and what I'm doing and is it the right thing and I have to keep coming back to I will teach what I know and what I believe to be true, right?
And just in the same way that I have spent a huge amount of my life teaching about the, the wisdom and the power of yoga and the breath and meditation. And I know firsthand how much that can change someone's life for the better. I know that it impacts so much more than just the physical. It's the mental, it's the spiritual, it's the energetic.
Everything, right? It can have profound, profound impact on someone's life. But I also know understanding what makes you uniquely you can also have profound understanding on your life. It's different. Some people are plagued with health challenges. Some people are plagued with soul challenge. Some people are plagued with not knowing or lacking purpose or, you know, feeling meh, feeling Is this all there is to life?
And those are the people I want to help everyone who is feeling Suffering in their life because I've suffered I've experienced so much depression in my life. I have, I have experienced so much melancholy and so much uncertainty and so much not knowing and feeling confused and feeling unclear and I'm not saying that this just wipes that all away.
Because it doesn't. I wish it did. I wish that learning this stuff one time was all that was required. But it's actually something you have to revisit, and sit with, and contemplate, and sit with, and revisit, and reread. And you, you read things, and you pick up something sometimes, and you read things, and you pick up other things other times.
Like, I remember the first time I picked up an Eckhart Tolle book, and I was reading it and I thought, Mmm, this isn't, this is not for me now, right? And I had to set it aside. And the same thing, the first time I was reading a Joe Dispenza book, I felt like, Mmm, okay, this is very dense, and it's really not landing for me.
And I'll be honest, the very first time I picked up the Gene Keys book, the same thing. We are only ready for what we are ready for. And if some of the things that I'm saying here to you feel valuable, feel interesting, make you feel curious, make you want to go deeper, then I would love for you to come and spend time with me each week and go deeper into your own soul, into your own life.
Your own questioning into breaking free from your own lies. And, if this doesn't resonate for you, then I love you, and I wish you well in the world, and I know that you will find what's right for you. But what I will not do is I will not silence my voice.
I will not keep myself quiet to make other people feel comfortable. I will not keep myself quiet when I believe I have knowledge that can help you. I know that I experienced suffering throughout most of my life. I know that I did not have to do it.
Suffer. I did not have to have depression, but I did, and I did because I didn't know how not to. I didn't have that knowledge
these are things everyone deserves to know. Everyone deserves to know that you can use your breath to calm down, that you can use your breath to move your body from sympathetic, which is our fight or flight, into the parasympathetic, which is our rest and digest. Everyone deserves to know that! How is that not known?
But it's not too late to learn new things. If you are living and breathing and you can hear this, and you can respond, then it's never too late. I printed on the back of some of my shirts when I was in the yoga space, If you can breathe, you can practice yoga.
Right. If you can hear my message and you can control your breath, you can practice yoga.
There are pivotal moments that we all make in life. Certainly finding my art at my parents house last year was one of them, and perhaps starting this podcast is one of them too. Maybe even listening to this podcast and some new things that drop in for you might be one for you.
Certainly, my desire for this podcast has been born from wanting to leave a meaningful legacy for my children, and also for a community of individuals who are open and wanting to learn and lead a better life.
So throughout this journey together, I will be sharing all kinds of different things on this podcast. My goal is that the conversations I have will help you to open and expand your mind, to learn new things, to be inspired, to try new directions for yourself, and to know that any small action towards a new direction will take you where you want to go.
There's a saying that if you plant tomato seeds, you will get tomatoes, right? So we have to be intentional about the seeds that we plant and know that whatever we plant today is what we will reap tomorrow.
My final takeaway for you today is to remember that you and solely you get to choose what your life is going to look like.
So choose wisely. Thanks for joining me today.
In my next episode, I am going to share with you a letter I wrote to my 17 year old self. Maybe partly I wrote it to my 17 year old stepdaughter as well.
There are a lot of things I wish that I had known when I was younger. I wish I had had a woman who cared for me, who loved me, who had put her arms around me, and shared these things with me.
Maybe there's someone in your life who you can share a similar letter with. The things that you've learned, the things that you don't want them to misunderstand. I think it can be very powerful. So I look forward to sharing that with you in our next episode.
Thanks so much for joining me today. If you enjoyed this episode, you can help me by sharing it with your friends and loved ones. And of course, don't forget to hit subscribe, so you never miss an episode. And if you'd like more clarity about your own unique purpose, all you need is your birth date, time, and location of birth, and you, too, can get your soul's unique blueprint on my website at annmariegrace. com/unique/ forward slash unique.
We'll see you again next time. And just remember, at your core, you are love -- and you are ever so worthy of living a radiant, aligned life, unique to your own soul's purpose.
PS - Anyone who leaves a review for the podcast and tags us #BreakingFreeComingBacktoMe in a social share in the first week of our first episode launching (send us an email with your screenshots, along with your birth date, place of birth and time of birth) and we’ll send you Your Soul’s Unique Blueprint Comprehensive Report - Value $197