I'm with Crazy: A Love Story

Madness To Magic⁠⁠ brings to listeners stories of real world encounters with what we all experience and yet feel shamed to keep silent. Embracing ALL of us is key to tapping into our own power to make all things possible.

This episode of my podcast is with Diane Bell who is probably best known for her work in film as a Sundance award-winning screenwriter + director as well as the author of the bestselling guide to making an indie film, Shoot From the Heart. Diane started out living in Barcelona as a Yoga teacher cultivating practices of her mentor Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Her path has taken her to where she is today -- an entrepreneur mentoring others on breaking free from their own conditioning to create the life of their dreams. You can learn more about Diane here. Here are a few golden nuggets from this episode with Diane Bell.

• “We are surrounded by madness at the moment. It really does seem like these times have challenges that are quite unprecedented, I think, for a lot of us, really. And, you know, to me, this question of how we navigate through that? It always comes back to we've got to reclaim our power. We've got to come home to ourselves."
• "You can't create peace in the world or in your society until you have peace in yourself."

• "What seeds do I wanna water in me. The greatest resistance you can give to the madness is by focusing on the joy and focusing on the peace, focusing on what is working."

• "If we wanna create change to the madness, it can't be from a place of just resistance and anger."

• "It sounds so like, corny. I'm like, 'yoga changed my life', but it changed my life because until I started practicing yoga, I had no real personal power. I had no sense of integrity. If we go back to that thing that peace within in order to create peace around you, you have to have peace inside yourself.”
• “You never control the outcomes, you only control the intentions."
• "Most of life is in the liminal, is in the transition, and in the middle, in between one place and another. It's obviously where we live a lot of the time, but it's how we handle this that determines where we end up arriving. And in a way there's no arriving, it's just we're always in the liminal in a certain sense, right? I feel like our ability to just to decide what stories we want to tell about what is going on in that space is really important."
• "Have your North Star. It's really important to have a sense of where you want to go if you want to go anywhere, right? Like, what do I really desire for my life? Where do I desire to be? That is important. That's a good thing to have. But then to know that the journey, you know, the journey, it is really all about the journey. And the journey is going to be messy. And the journey is gonna feel like at times you're not moving at all. And the journey is going to be hard at times, and the journey is gonna drop you to your knees at certain points. You know, that's, that's the human journey, but that's the journey you're here for."
• "When we can make peace with our journey and start to view it from the place of like, no setback on your journey is the end of the journey. Unless you decide, it's like it's all there for your growth. It's all there as part of your adventure."

• "We're all here to lift each other up and help each other transform and heal and live better lives. And your capacity to do that is largely contingent in your capacity to alchemize and transform those difficult things in your own life...meaning once you can do that in your own life, you're able to help other people to do it."
• "It transformed me to realize like, the things that are the greatest challenges are the greatest gifts...I'm so grateful for every challenge because that's what's giving you that real opportunity to grow."

Madness To Magic⁠ brings to listeners stories of real world encounters with what we all experience and yet feel shamed to keep silent. Embracing ALL of us is key to tapping into our own power to make all things possible.This episode of my podcast is with transformational entrepreneur of The Support System and The Prosper Network Sheri Salata. As the last Executive Producer of The Oprah Show, Sheri’s been on her own journey learning to evolve in mind, body, spirit, business, and more, alongside other like-hearted and like-minded women. You can learn more and join in at SheriSalata.com.

Here are just a few of the gems from this episode with Sheri Salata.

• "I think it’s big and could be a big epiphany for people. ‘You’re living the life of your desires.’ Yes. I’m gonna tell you, a lot of people listen to that and they say, no, I’m not. No I’m not. But you are, you are. Because this is what you’ve created.  This is what you’ve created so far. You’re living your limiting beliefs. You’re living the way you practice your energy. You’re living what you believe is possible. Maybe you don’t take the time to do any dreaming or any real thinking about how my life could really grow and be better. You’re living your desires. And so, the good and the not so great… You’re in charge. When you hear that, you might say, number one, yes. There’s so many things in my life that I desired, that I’m living now, that I manifested. Yay. And there’s so much more for me to dream up and get to work on. Because at any given moment, we are living our desires.”

• “If you are of a certain age in this human life, you have to remember we weren’t trained by people who had access to what we have access to, to any all kinds of spiritual work and all kinds of growth work and therapy up the wazoo and cold plunge and sound baths. And we weren’t raised by people who had access to any of that. We were raised by people of the patriarchy who grew up very fear-based. And you got, you know, that you’re not the center of the universe. Money doesn’t grow on trees, like all that scarcity. So part of our work being of a certain age is we have to re-pattern. We have to retell those stories. We have to really work on that until it becomes automatic. Because that’s how we were trained. And we were trained like that for a long time. And we’ve been practicing those limiting beliefs for a long time. So that’s why…to consciously work on your money story…"

  “We have a capacity for happiness or joy. And I think most of us would be stunned at how low ours is. That we can just only take so much. Because things get flipped. Like, you know, when’s the other shoe gonna drop? When’s the bad stuff gonna happen? When you were a little girl, it was not good to have people jealous of you. It was not good to be a tall poppy, as they say in Australia where all the prettiest or the smartest or the most successful or the luckiest…it was not a good thing. You couldn’t affiliate with a group…that’s what we were raised in. So to be gentle with ourselves and understand that we are re-patterning some things…”

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A storyteller at heart who built a career in writing, media & marketing, Paolina Milana is grateful for the magic AND the madness she's experienced. Her roots are entangled with mental illness and taking on caregiving roles -- something she has come to realize is not unique to her; rather, it seems to be common on several levels among others, especially the high-functioning women who from the outside looking in seem to have it all together.

Special thanks to the creators of the beautiful instrumental you hear during this podcast - Philippa Dowding & Allister Thompson - Original song “Sarah Tiptoes” from their album BIRCHES. Also love to the guy who's the master behind this podcast's production and audio engineering -- Joseph Dean Edwards.