If no matter where you’re at on the journey right now, you’re feeling a little tired, depleted, worn out, and wishing you could just hit pause—then good news. This is the episode for you.

We’ve been talking about some pretty heavy stuff over the last eight episodes. We’ve spent time in the head doing a lot of analyzing of patterns and becoming more aware of how we operate. And that is all wonderful. But sometimes we also just need to take a break.

Because here’s what happens when we get so caught up in the doing and the achieving and even the inner work: we forget the whole point. We forget that the point of life is really about being here now. About tapping into your body and your spirit’s natural resource—which is energy—and appreciating it for all it is, and giving it the outlet that it deserves.

Welcome to the elixir. Your unique source of sustenance. The magical ingredients that will revive you and sustain you for the entire journey ahead.

Prefer to listen? Catch the full conversation here:

The Cliff’s Notes

Core Themes:

• The elixir represents learning how to look after yourself and what your body, mind, and spirit require to be vital
• We often override our body’s signals and cut ourselves off from what we truly need, leading to depletion
• Your “wants” are actually needs—joy, rest, play, and beauty are as essential as food and water
• The shadow of your radiance sphere reveals where you’re choking yourself of life force
• One of the biggest ways to serve others is to fill yourself up first and lead by example

Key Takeaways:

1. Your body is all you’ve got: As important as everything in the outside world might seem, your number one responsibility is to look after yourself. You cannot pour from an empty cup.
2. Wants are needs: Every time you have the urge to stop and take a nap, read a book, or do something fun, your body and spirit are saying “I need this right now.”
3. What’s missing outside mirrors what’s missing inside: Whatever is not coming your way is just a reflection of what you are depleting yourself of or cutting yourself off from.
4. Depletion affects your decision-making: When you’re hanging on by a thread, you look for Band-Aid fixes. When you’re overflowing with energy, you solve problems at the root.
5. Service doesn’t require self-sacrifice: There is always a way to love and serve others while still loving and honoring yourself. Personal cost is not a prerequisite for being of service.

---

Want a personalized Mythic Map of your own hero’s journey? That’s why I created Mythic Journey.

Your Gene Keys profile reimagined as a literal map that will reveal your most challenging internal obstacles to overcome, protective patterns to disrupt, and the gifts that are waiting for you on the other side. Over the course of 75+ minutes (in a pre-recorded video you can watch over and over again), I’ll operate as your very own guide as we weave the new narrative for what you’re being called to and how to step into your full potential.

Intrigued and want to know more? Click here for all the deets!

---

A Pause in the Journey

Welcome back to what is going to be a little bit of a pause episode.

This episode happens to coincide with the next placement on the mythic map—the map that’s been operating as the big picture guide for this entire podcast. And this next destination isn’t so much a physical destination, but it’s what’s been called the elixir.

On your Gene Keys profile, this is known as your Radiance Sphere. You’ll find it on the far left. And there is so much we can learn from this particular placement.

But the main thing is, the reason it’s called the elixir is this is all about learning about how to look after ourselves and what our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our hearts—all of it—require to be vital, to experience that radiance, that life force, that spark.

The thing that gives someone a sparkle in their eye and a skip in their step.

Why This Matters Now

And it’s believed it’s really important that we address this early on in the journey, because, believe it or not, we’ve barely left. We’ve spent so long in the dark forest.

But what we are going to do here is really understand what it is going to take to be able to sustain ourselves throughout this entire journey.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the doing and the achieving. And even when we’re doing so much of the inner work, we can get very fixated on all the things that seem to be wrong with us, all of the shadows that we need to face and the parts that need integrating, and all of this supposed healing that we need to do.

But what can happen sometimes is that we get so caught up in that that we forget the whole point.

We forget the point of life, which is really about being here now, which is about tapping into your body and your spirit’s natural resource—which is energy—and appreciating it for all it is, and giving it the outlet that it deserves.

How We Override Our Natural Needs

When working with clients, regardless of their backgrounds, regardless of what they’re trying to achieve, so often they are operating from this place of overriding their natural needs and instincts.

Now, this can come at a level that is overriding your natural instinct of how you believe is the best way for you to market yourself or express yourself. It’s overriding our natural, intuitive abilities to be able to navigate any situation or to do anything in life. There’s that.

But then there’s also how much we override our body’s signals that are trying to communicate with us and tell us what we really need.

And when we do this for long enough, keep overriding those signals and cutting ourselves off from that communication, we deplete ourselves. We wear ourselves out.

This is how we end up feeling so tired and weary and even just impatient for the journey to be over. We keep thinking, “I’m just hanging on by a thread until I reach this destination.”

But then we kind of forget that, well, the real point of this is there is no specific destination.

The true destination, really, for any human being—well, the final destination is the end of our lives. It’s when we’re ready to leave this planet, or at least when our spirit is ready to leave this planet.

And up until that point, it’s all just journey.

The Problem with Destination Focus

So when we are living from this place of really destination and outcome focus, where it feels like we need to get somewhere in order to be able to live a certain way and feel a certain way—a little bit of a throwback to that whole have-do-be—we are really missing the point of life.

So this particular episode is we’re taking a little bit of an in-breath to take stock and to put things back in perspective and remember that your body, this vehicle that you are traveling the world in, going about your daily business—in all that it’s doing and carrying for you—it is all you have got.

And as important as everything in the outside world might seem right now—the to-do lists, the mouths to feed, the clients to look after, the tasks to get through, all of those things, meals to cook, houses to clean, blah blah blah—yeah, sure, they all have a certain level of importance. They have a place in your life. We’ve got commitments and responsibilities.

But the number one responsibility you have is to look after yourself.

Why Self-Care Isn’t Optional

And if we do not learn how to do this, firstly we cannot look after others to our highest ability. It’s impossible to look after others when you’re pouring from an empty cup, obviously.

But also you’re not going to have nearly as pleasant a journey. And you also will likely cut the journey short.

The Tough Love Piece

Now, this is the tough love piece of the episode.

We assume that our bodies will just keep going and going and going because, I mean, they are incredibly resilient. The number of things that we’ve put our bodies through at this point in our lives, and the fact that they’re still going, they’re still running, they’re still breathing for us, the blood is still pumping—I mean, you might not feel in great shape, but you’re here listening to this right now, which means your body is doing a really incredible job.

But our bodies cannot go forever. We know this. But they can’t go for nearly as long as they could if we don’t fill them back up.

And the thing about this entire journey that we’re going on—the point of it, really, being that you’re on this journey of expansion, of self-discovery, of becoming the most authentic version of yourself, and unlocking mythic magnetism where you attract everything that you desire and more into your life—it will all fall apart if you are not first just looking after yourself, providing base level care and nourishment to your body.

The Elixir: Your Unique Ingredients

The elixir as a symbol, as an archetype, is all about having these unique ingredients that are going to be able to give you healing and life force. It’s like this magical thing, source of some sort of sustenance. It has magical abilities to revive you in some way.

And in your Gene Keys profile, this is known as the Radiance Sphere. If you are playing at home and you want to go to your profile, the interactive profiler that’s been linked in the show notes, know that it’s on the far left of your chart, and you can click on it and you’ll find all sorts of information about your specific placement.

But to keep this really simple, there’s wanting to really just bring you back to this concept:

Wherever you’re lacking life force, vitality, radiance, wherever it seems like you’re struggling to attract anything, like your magnetism is turned right down—what if you were to contemplate the idea that whatever is not coming your way is just a reflection of what you are depleting yourself of or cutting yourself off from?

It’s all it is, is mirroring something that you will not be giving yourself.

Wants Are Actually Needs

We so often want abundance, and we want energy, and we want life to flow our way. And yet, we are so quick to cut ourselves off from what we need and what we want.

And often those two things are so similar.

We think that what we need is, “Oh well, I just need three meals a day and I need to get some sleep and I need to keep hydrated.” We see that as needs and then everything else is an optional extra.

Having time to listen to music and sing and dance, to go hang out on the beach, to go for a beautiful walk in nature, to play with a puppy, to color in, to take a nap, to read a book—all of those things, we’re like, “Oh well, those are just wants. I’ve got my basic needs met, so therefore I can now just go and spend my life looking after other people.”

But those wants that you have, what if they were actual needs?

What if every time you had the urge to stop and take a nap, or to read a book, or to do something fun, what if your body was saying, “Hey, I need this right now”?

Not just your body, but your spirit. And spirit and body, really, they’re in collaboration. They’re working together. It’s not easy to draw the line between them because we wouldn’t really have one without the other.

What if all of these urges are actually needs?

A Thought Experiment

How would you approach your day differently if, when you had the urge to do something fun, you saw that as just as important as you needing to drink enough water in a day?

Now that could seem like something very foreign and like, “Oh yeah, how quaint. What an idea.”

But when we see people walking around and we’ve got one person who is glowing and they have this sparkle in their eye and they almost seem to be skipping through life, and then you’ve got this other person who just looks like they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders—they just look tired and drawn and flat—you can bet that the difference is not just how much sleep they got.

It’s not just what their diet involves. It’s not about their ability to afford a personal trainer or anything like that.

The person who has a skip in their step is allowing themselves some joy in their lives. And the person who is carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders is lacking that right now.

Even in Grief

Now, there are obviously times when it can be really hard to access joy—times we’re in seasons of grief and mourning and loss.

And yet that doesn’t mean that that season is supposed to only be about grief and loss. If we do not allow ourselves any joy during that time, we are cutting ourselves off from something we truly need.

Understanding Your Radiance Sphere

So this particular episode is really just to draw your attention to what you might not be allowing yourself to have right now.

It’s interesting when looking at someone’s map through the lens of the mythic journey, and looking at this particular placement—their elixir sphere—there’s finding that there is a lot more to be learned from the shadow and the line, the wound of that line, than the gift.

Because while we can look at the gift and go, “Oh, this is something that you could be doing more of, or this is how you get more joy in your life and more radiance or whatever,” often that part writes itself when we identify the place that we’ve cut ourselves off.

The Six Wounds

And so the shadow is often where we are choking ourselves of life force and the wound underneath it.

The wound depending on your line could be:

• Repression
• Denial
• Shame
• Rejection
• Guilt
• Separation

And obviously there’s way too much for us to dive into in this particular episode. But you can definitely learn more with your interactive profile, or that’s something that gets dived into if doing a mythic journey together.

But those core wounds often speak to why we might feel like we need to cut ourselves off. And then the shadow of your radiance sphere can give us some clues of how it shows up.

We can look to that shadow and go, “Oh yes, I am currently cutting myself off from something that I actually truly need. But I’ve written it off as an optional extra.”

The Service Provider’s Trap

There’s working with a lot of people who are very giving, generous, service-oriented. A lot of people who work in some sort of field that might be considered healing or coaching or education, but also just service providers who live for trying to make their industry a better place.

And they all want to represent some sort of positive change. They want to make their clients’ lives better in some way. And so they’re often bending over backwards to do so in whatever way they do—whether you’re a real estate agent or a graphic designer or a coach or a teacher or a consultant, it doesn’t matter.

You’ve got your way that you think, “I’m just gonna bend over backwards to help my clients, to serve my clients.”

And we forget that one of the biggest ways we can be of service is to be someone who leads by example, is to do for ourselves what we wish our clients would do for themselves, is to fill ourselves up first.

So that we are in such overflow that when we go and serve our clients, they can tell that we can just be generous of spirit, and they don’t have to feel guilty for zapping us of our life force.

Your Clients Can Tell

Which—don’t know if you realize this, but often, clients can tell even if it’s subconsciously. They know if you’re depleted, and then they start to feel guilty for asking for anything if you are depleted.

But then also think about what happens when you’re depleted. Your decision-making is going to be very different.

If a problem or an obstacle comes up, you’re going to tackle it in a very different way. If you are at minimal energy levels and you are really hanging on by a thread, you’re more likely to look for a Band-Aid fix to just be done with this problem or challenge as quickly as possible, which could end up then being a lot more expensive and also a shorter-term fix.

Than if you are overflowing with energy and you’re like, “You know what? Let’s nip this challenge in the bud. Let’s really get to the root of this. And let’s also really consider how we could be of the highest service to all, including ourselves.”

The Shadow of Dishonor

There is a Gene Key—it has a very important placement in the chart, but it’s also one of the really big Gene Keys. If you actually read the book, you’ll see it’s got one of the longest chapters. It’s Gene Key 22.

It talks about the shadow being dishonor. And it has so much to do with relationship.

This shadow often comes up in any of us who identify as people pleasers. For so many of us who are in service-based industries, what tends to happen is that we think that in order for us to be of service to others, to be the highest good, our service is going to have to come at a cost to ourselves.

There’s going to be some level of personal cost involved.

It’s like, “You know what? I’m just gonna have to skip the sleep and do this thing, or I’m going to have to do something that feels yuck for me, because it’s the only way I believe my client is going to be happy.”

There are infinite ways that this can play out.

The Core Realization

And there’s had to be a lot of grappling with this because at the core, it’s about realizing that there is always a way that we can love others, serve others while still loving and honoring ourselves.

But this is one of the most challenging things as a human being, because we have been taught—even down to, “Oh, well, you know, whatever job you find, it’s just work and it’s going to make you miserable. You just have to accept that.”

If you want to earn money, it has to come at a cost. You’re going to have to dishonor yourself in some way if you want to be safe.

There are so many ways this message plays out in the world, and the belief is this shadow underlies so much of what goes on in this particular placement, this radiance sphere, this elixir.

It’s looking at: Where are you cutting yourself off from sustenance and from what you need because you think you have to in order to be this upstanding citizen, service provider, family member, friend, whatever it is?

Your Question

How many times in a week do you deny yourself your own wants and needs, even down to when you say yes but you wish it was a no, or you say no and you wish it was a yes?

---

Bonus Resource: The Elixir Meditation

To accompany this episode, there’s a free twenty-minute guided meditation designed to help you pause, set aside the overworkings of your mind, and tune back into your body.

This meditation invites two-way communication with your body, which already holds the wisdom about what you need. It’s very gentle, somatically driven, and designed simply to give you permission to rest and listen. You can use it daily or as a tune-up whenever you need it—there’s no right or wrong way to do it.

---

Want a personalized Mythic Map of your own hero’s journey? That’s why I created Mythic Journey.

Your Gene Keys profile reimagined as a literal map that will reveal your most challenging internal obstacles to overcome, protective patterns to disrupt, and the gifts that are waiting for you on the other side. Over the course of 75+ minutes (in a pre-recorded video you can watch over and over again), I’ll operate as your very own guide as we weave the new narrative for what you’re being called to and how to step into your full potential.

Intrigued and want to know more? Click here for all the deets!