How to Reconnect with Your True Self and Embrace Joyful Living with Heather Ash

Floating down a river serves as a beautiful metaphor for life. There are times when you need to be 'wild' and playful, willing to paddle when necessary, and wise when the river is calm, taking the time to listen to the messages that come your way. 

So, how do you learn to go with the flow of life when it feels uncertain and scary?

In this episode, I’m joined by a beloved-guide Heather Ash, best-selling author. We talk about her new book, Wild, Willing, and Wise: An Interactive Guide for When to Paddle, When to Rest, and When to Jump Naked into the River of Life. We have an insightful and heartfelt conversation about how to find balance in an often chaotic world and reconnect with your true self.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:

• How to reframe failure, so it doesn’t keep you stuck. 
• How to cultivate more self-compassion on your journey.
• What HeatherAsh learned on her three week river trip down the Grand Canyon.
• Why 90% of people are deficient in ‘Wild’.
• How connecting to your wild, willing, and wise energy can help you tap into your inner wisdom.
• How to tune into your intuition and wise self.
• The importance of finding balance with your wild, willing, and wise. 

Stay with me until the end to hear Heather’s confession about how she navigates between her wild, willing, and wise self, which has given her the freedom to be true to herself!

Love,

Laurie

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Transcript

Laurie James  
Welcome back, everybody. It's Laurie and I just have a couple of quick announcements before we dive into this week's episode. First, if you are a coach or healer and interested in learning how you can incorporate elements of somatic experiencing into your practice. There'll be a link in the show notes to learn about my Somatic Experiencing master class for coaches and healers that I will be putting on February 27 It's a Thursday at 9am I'd love for anybody that is in the healing space to join me. Second, I will have a new offering for the rest of you and or also coaches and healers. It is going to be a monthly membership for anyone who's interested in learning more about somatic experiencing and easy ways that you can incorporate simple practices in your life to develop and maintain a healthy and regulated nervous system. This membership class will be virtual over zoom so you can download my free beginner's guide to somatic healing, so that way you'll be the first to learn about it, or any of my freebies that are available, that are in the show notes or on my website at Www dot Laurie, l, a, u, r, i, e, middle initial, E, james.com that will be starting in March, hopefully at the latest in April. And I hope you enjoy my rich conversation with Heather Ashe, who is a multiple time over author and healer as we explore ways to find balance in an unbalanced world, and we will be also discussing her latest book, Wild, willing and wise.

Laurie James  
Welcome to Confessions of a free bird podcast. I'm your host. Laurie James, a mother, divorcee, a recovering caregiver, the author of Sandwiched A Memoir of Holding on and Letting go, a therapy junkie, relationship coach, somatic healer and now podcaster, I'm a free spirit, and here to lift you up on this podcast, I'll share soulful confessions and empowering conversations with influential experts so you can learn to spread your wings and make the most of your second half. So pop in those earbuds, turn up the volume, and let's get inspired, because my mission is to help you create your most joyful, purpose driven life, one confession at a time. 

Laurie James  
Welcome back, free birds. Today, I am so excited to have this conversation with my guest, Heather Ash or Ash. She is a best selling author, much beloved guide, philanthropist and Land Steward, Ash has spent the last three decades weaving together earth based teachings and practical wisdom for creative, courageous, pragmatic and compassionate change. She is the author of nine books, including the best selling Warrior Goddess Training series and The Seven Secrets of Happy, Healthy Relationships with Dawn Miguel Ruiz Jr. And she also has a recent book that has come out called Wild, Willing and Wise. So thank you, Ash for being here. It's so wonderful to be in your presence and to share this conversation with you. 

Heather Ash  
Thanks so much. Laurie, I'm so glad to be here with you and excited about our conversation. 

Laurie James  
Yeah, can you start by telling our listeners a little bit more about your story and how you fell into the work that you're doing today? 

Heather Ash  
Absolutely, I grew up in Southeast Asia, so it's really deeply seeped in Buddhist around me and in the places that I lived, people were deeply spiritual and deeply connected to family. So there was a sense of connection and belonging that I was immersed in that I didn't realize until I'm United States and in college, I just had this sense of like something's not right here. I don't know what it is, but I felt disconnected. And I felt like the people around me were disconnected, but I didn't have the language for that. I just felt this sense of like something's I don't know it's wrong,

Laurie James  
Yeah, this unease in your body, right? 

Heather Ash  
Exactly. And I got into politics, really big. So I became a social activist, and did a lot of work in that realm of marching and writing letters and educating people, and recognized a certain point, okay, I'm angry. All my friends were angry. Nothing's really changing, and so what am I missing? And that was when I started studying different spiritual traditions. So I was 19, and I went to Nepal, and just went for three weeks by myself. And I just remember I would wake up early in the morning and I would just follow my body, and I was being drawn towards and I ended up at the temple, the old, old temple in Kathmandu. I get there around 5am and I would watch people arrive and go into prayer. And I remember sitting outside being like, oh, I want to be with them, but I can't. I don't know the language. I don't even know what they're doing. There's just learning. And then at around seven people would leave, and then all the tourists would show up. And so I'd watched that transition over and over again. So there was something really profound about recognizing I wanted to be in, I wanted to be immersed in. That was when I discovered Earth based spirituality, and started reading a lot about goddess spirituality, European shamanism, more about Buddhism and different traditions. And-

Laurie James  
We were talking a little bit beforehand, but 10 years ago, when I was still in my marriage and trying to make sense of what was going on in my life, the turmoil that was going on in my life, I worked with an energy healer and took an energy class from a shaman, and we did this for three years, and it was a real, beautiful way to just better understand who I was and just connect with who we are. Because you talk about nature, we are nature, right? We are animals. We just happen to be domesticated.

Heather Ash  
Yeah, and usually domesticated out of punishment. So- 

Laurie James  
And then there's that, right? So you published a new book recently this summer, called Wild, Willing and Wise, and I really love the subtitle, an interactive guide for when to paddle, when to rest and when to jump naked into the river of life. Can you tell us a little bit more about, like, where you got the idea? And I love the idea of a river being metaphor of life, because it is so true, like we're just floating down the river if we don't really have control. But how did you come up with this idea of the book and using this river as a metaphor.

Heather Ash  
It's a funny story, because I was actually writing a very serious memoir about the end of my marriage, which was 11 years ago, and I was in this deep dive, and like looking at ending. So I'm writing about the most challenging time of my life, and we're coming out of the pandemic. We're still kind of in the middle of the pandemic. And I was talking to my business coach, and she's like, Heather ash, do you really want to write this book at this time? Like, is this the book the world needs at this time? And I was like, probably not. And so I put that aside. I will write that one day. But I put it aside, and I started thinking, like, what do we need now? What does it feel like? And I had a remembrance of being on the Grand Canyon, and I was with two river raft guides who were experts. I was with, actually a lot of experts. I was the newbie on the trip, and it was a two or three week trip, but we flipped five days in to the trip on a tiny, tiny, tiny river. Imean, sorry, tiny, tiny rapid so Grand Canyon, huge, and we just got flipped all of a sudden. I had this experience of hearing somebody like panicking, and thinking, person's really panicking, God, they sound really scared. That must be so hard. And then I slammed into my body and realized that was me. I was so disassociated because it was so scary. And then got on that body and I was like, that's what this time feels like right now, we're all in this river, and we're like, we don't know which way is up or down, and so that was the seed for the book. And then I recognized we need simplicity right now when we're scared or when the world is really chaotic, and when we feel like we don't know what we're doing, and with all the things that were happening in the world at that time, it's like we need really simple skills get ourselves back into the boat and pointing down the river again. And we need community. We need guides. And so I started looking at these three qualities that I'd studied when I was young, of maiden mother and crone. And I love those three energies, and I recognized they tend to be linear, of like around age, and they're also gender specific. So I challenge myself, I'm like, I want to write a book that's gender neutral with these archetypes that are very powerful, but to bring them out of age and into more of a circle. So that's where wild, willing and wise, and that on the river of life. If there's times we need to be wild, we need to play, we need to explore, we need to be curious, like it's helpful. Joy of wild, we also get to learn how to be more willing. And willing doesn't mean we know what it's going to look like, but I'm willing to paddle and get more skillful at paddling. I'm willing to rest and let go. And that also the whys that we start connecting more to our intuition. There's always going to be calm in the river, and we can tap into our intuition and know more clearly how to be in the flow.

Laurie James  
And navigate those rapids when they come along, if we take the time to rest while the river is calm, maybe do some reflection. Tell me if I'm wrong, so that way we can then prepare for that next rapid because, you know, so many people, I think, in our world, in our society, because there's so much chaos, I feel like and tell me if you disagree, like everybody is just looking to be calm. I want to be centered. I want to be grounded all the time. I want to be calm all the time. And I hear this in the somatic world too, in the work that I do and the people that I'm coaching, but that's not reality. 

Heather Ash  
Yeah.

Laurie James  
Right. So how do we do? Can you touch on each one of these things? You know? How can we become better at being a little bit more wild, at being a little bit more willing and being a little bit more wise?

Heather Ash  
Yeah, and it really is about letting go that. Like you said, often we do things we think linearly, like, Oh, I'm just supposed to be wise all the time and calm, but that's a frozen place. Life is really fluid, and that in relationship, there's times that we want it, like chaos is important, like having things totally dismantled and and wild in our life sometimes is exactly what's needed for us to re format and find a new way of being in relationship. The Wild is so important. It's like this feral animal place where animals learn through play. They learn through exploration. There's a willingness when we're connected to our wild, of making mistakes and of trying it again and learning as we go along. That's like, ooh, that didn't work. Okay, let me try something else.

Laurie James  
Yeah, but what about if you equate a mistake with failure, right? Because a lot of us do. A lot of us have been taught that through our childhood or just even in our society.

Heather Ash  
Yes, and we have to keep reminding ourselves that we learn through mistakes. Mistake doesn't equal failure. Mistake equals learning something new and making new decisions. And I think about is that one of the things that we're working now to pull out is that so often we are guiding ourselves through judgment and fear. I have to be perfect. I can't fail. I'm not allowed to make a mistake, beating ourselves up for things we did in the past, or worrying about what might happen in the future. So there's this fear that we're using to guide ourselves, and that's what part of what wild, willing and wise is, is it's a reframing of we could guide ourselves with joy. We could guide ourselves with a lot of courage and know that we're going to be afraid, but keep doing the hard things. Guide ourselves with compassion that we don't have to use punishment, judgment, force. There's many other options that we get to explore in practice. 

Laurie James  
Yeah, and what I want to just add to that, as beautifully said is, you know, I know for me personally, as I've reinvented myself, you know, from a stay at home mom to an author and podcaster and coach, is I used to beat myself up so much of like, why am I not further along? Why am I not more fill in the blank, right? And so that self compassion, but also, you know, when we're dealing with that fear, and from a nervous system standpoint, our nervous system equates new with unsafe, right? So if we can just keep moving towards what our soul wants or desires, but do it in small steps. And sometimes you need a break. You need to rest through the rapids. And maybe one week you take a lot of steps, and then the next week, maybe you only take one step or no steps, right? And that's okay, and that goes back to that compassion piece. Can we be compassionate with ourselves and curious, right? And that is a learned skill. Tell me if I'm wrong.

Laurie James  
Totally. No. It's definitely a learned skill, yeah. And it's something that we get to ripen inside of ourselves. He's modeling for it, so to be around other people that are modeling how to be in relationship with ourselves in a different way.

Laurie James  
Yes, that's so important, because it becomes habit, and we need to change that for sure. So what did the river teach when you went on this Grand Canyon river trip, what was one of the biggest lessons that maybe you took away from that trip that you write about in your book? 

Heather Ash  
One of them was learning to read the river and understanding that learning to read the river didn't mean that we wouldn't capsize. It meant that I could build skill and be in relationship to the river, and understand the river is just doing its thing. And I really brought that into my relationship with life, where there's ways that we can learn to read life, when we're more honest with ourselves, that we can understand, oh, there's loss, there's grief, there's big, sudden change, there's also times of quiet, and that we can learn to build our skills in relationship to life, just as I learned how to build my skill with riding the river, because then I was all right, teach me how to read the river, because I can't see it. And so then I learned how to paddle, how to rest, and so bringing that into relationship with life, then was really powerful. I can be more skillful, and there's still going to be surprises, and that doesn't mean I'm doing something wrong. Life is chaos.

Laurie James  
Or that you're bad or that you're dumb or whatever it is that our minds make up in our heads. As we do go to the negative, our minds go to the negative, our nervous system is trying to keep us safe, so it can be challenging. And one of the things you talk about is the subtitle, and you said, interactive guide for when to paddle, when to rest and when to jump naked into the river of life. So how do we know when to jump through the river of life, naked? How do we do that? Because that feels a little scary to me. I'm 60. I don't know that anybody wants to see my body make funny. It will be okay maybe if it's dark.

Heather Ash  
Yes, exactly, if it's dark and it's actually in my pool and it's in my paper. And that's really the thing is that I just went on book tour for two months. So I was on the road for two months. We did 11,000 miles in 25 cities, almost. Most people that I talk to, I say were deficient and wild. I'd say 90% that they had adulted and, like, had careers and had children or done and had forgotten to have fun. 

Laurie James  
Yes, yes. How to, like, go through, right? Like, you know, while we're having, you know, raising our kids, and, you know, trying to get them, you know, launched, and taking care of elderly parents and family, and you know, all our responsibilities that we have, yes. So how do we do that? How do we allow ourselves? How do we give ourselves permission? 

Heather Ash  
Permission. Exactly, it's permission, and it's little baby steps. And so first we have to acknowledge I'm deficient and wild. In the book I talk about this, that we have deficiency in these qualities and excess. So most of us tend towards deficient of wild. And when we name that, okay, I could use more curiosity and play and joy that then we start doing little baby steps. And I've lists in the book of you know, try these different things, but for example, going to a grocery store and being in the fruit section and being like, what color do I like? Can I just go into my animal senses of like, what's the smell that I like? That's a way of opening up our wild and the present that we can really connect to the beauty in little ways that it doesn't-

Laurie James  
In season. Yeah, what's about we ate something that was in season, versus getting something shipped from another country, just because we like apples every day, which I'm guilty of that, but I do try and eat like seasonally too, because that's important for us, right?

Heather Ash  
Yeah, and being like, going out in really cold weather, for example, of like, I live off grid. Much of the time I'm not traveling. I way off grid. And one of my favorite things is to get up in the middle of night and put on a whole bunch of clothing and just walk around in the dark snow. And there's just places where we can do little things of reconnecting to that wild, reconnecting to nature, and letting everything go. And it is. It's that permission of so often we're like, I have to hold and take care of it and carry everything, and maybe carrying a lot. A lot of us are caring a lot, but that doesn't mean that you can't put it down. In fact, in order to be sustainable, we have to put things down and go back into doing things that are joyful every day. 

Laurie James  
Absolutely, I'm with you and I love I want to go back to what you said. Is, these are my words, and you didn't say exactly this, but asking your body, what does it want to smell? What does it want? Right? And that's, I think what we've lost is, and I talk a lot about this in my coaching and on my podcast, is 20% of our sensory information travels from our brain to our body. 80% travels from our body to our brain. You know, it's like tapping in more to what our body wants and checking in. What does my body need today to to feel a little bit more wild? Do I need to go for a walk out in nature? Do I need to go out side in the middle of the night and just hear the sound of my feet crunching in that snow? I love that sound, too. I'm a big skier, so I go up skiing, and I love being in nature, and so I totally get that. I'm getting chills, just like us talking about that. But, and that's one of the things that I think we can all benefit from. It's not what do I need up here? And I'm putting a box around my head for those who can't see me because this is an audio but what does my body need right now? What does my body need to feel wild, to feel wise, to be willing? I think that's beautiful. So you also talk about bringing these three energies in. You talked about the maiden, the mother and the Crone, right? Is that, did I have that, right? Can you tell us a little bit more about how you bring those energies into your book, and what we can learn from those three different energies, or, you said, archetypes? What can we learn from those three different archetypes?

Heather Ash  
Yeah, so I think of them as circular, and that the maiden energy is our wild and that maiden is about youth and exploration. So if you think about like somebody when they're young and they're first learning about what their body can do and how to be in relationship to the world, and there's this newness and this excitement and this naivete, which can be really beautiful, and so that's that wild energy. And it's not just about youth. We really need to stay tapped into that wild energy, because that's our spark. I think about these energies in relationship to also, I'm very elemental based. So Spark is the curiosity and the wonder and that awe that the willing is connected to the mother energy. So who's more willing than a mother than a parent? Like you think about parenting, you get up in the middle of the night with a barfing kid, and you're willing like you don't want to, but you're like, that's this is my kid. So that's where I came up with, the quality of Willy is that we want to be when we get to that place of willingness. We're willing to show up even when it's hard. We're willing to be courageous. We're willing to do hard whatever it takes, whether that's we're growing our business or our spiritual path or a family or writing a book that we're willing, and we don't need to know what. When you're willing, you don't know what it's going to look like or what the outcome is, just willing to show up and do the next

Laurie James  
Doing what needs to get done. 

Heather Ash  
What needs to get done by growing something, giving birth and growing something and becoming sustainable, so that we're feeding it. So I think of that as the fire. So the willingness is, we're building a fire, and we're in relationship with that fire. And that the relationship is, sometimes we need to put little kindling and blow really gently, and sometimes we need to put a big log and back off and like, let it go.

Laurie James  
Yeah, yeah. Let it burn. 

Heather Ash  
Let it burn. So to be in relationship with, what am I birthing? What am I nurturing? What am I growing and that, how do I stay sustainable over time? So we're in relationality with life and also with we're included in that, because often people get out of balance and go into excess, willing, which is, I'm going to take care of everybody else and not myself.

Laurie James  
And I want to come back to that, because that is so true. And I just recently, we're taping this during the holidays. It's going to drop at the beginning of the year, but this time of the year, everybody is so out of balance when it comes to that. But before we jump into that, and since this podcast will be dropping in the new year, it'll be great way to think about getting back into balance in the new year. But can we go into the wise and the Crone?

Heather Ash  
Yes, so funny. When I was writing the book on made mother Crone, because that's where it started, my agent calls me and she. Like, Ash, can we not use the word Crone? I really hate that word.

Laurie James  
And I'm with you. I hate that word too. 

Heather Ash  
So funny. I love that word. I was like, but great. It's so great. She's like, you're the only person on the planet that loves that word. Please don't use book. And I'm like, All right. So that was actually where I started to change out of maiden mother, crone and into wild, willing and wise. Uh huh. Started with, okay, what is that crone energy? I was like, it's wisdom. It's lived experience. Yes, the the archetype behind it. And so, so I think of these three energies as wild as our animal self, healing is our human self and our relations with other humans and projects and growing things and expression, right? And then wise is our connection to divinity. Wise is our connection to our intuition, to spirit, to something larger. It's our connection

Laurie James  
Higher Self, God, whatever anybody believes in. Yeah.

Heather Ash  
Exactly. And so when we're connected to our wise. We have this level of faith and trust and big picture, we know it's going to be okay. It might not be okay right now, but over time, it will be okay. We're not dramatic. We don't buy into other people's drama as much. We have a lot of compassion, which is different. Somebody can be suffering and we feel it, and we're like, Yes, I feel because I've suffered that way, that's a human, beautiful thing, and there's something larger that we're all moving towards. 

Laurie James  
Yeah, and maybe you don't completely take that energy on somebody else's energy. You're able to, you know, have that energetic boundary, or, you know, a healthy boundary to not take it, or if you do know how to get rid of that energy and recognize when it's yours and when it's somebody else's. 

Heather Ash  
Exactly, yeah, and that's deeply connected to our wisdom and our intuition and knowing. What do we need to stay connected to the divine. How do we stay connected to our intuition? And a lot of that is, you know, many of us need more stillness, more time where we're not thinking or figuring things out, where we're just resting into

Laurie James  
or Doom scrolling on our phones. 

Heather Ash  
Yes, which is so tempting, right? 

Laurie James  
Oh, yeah, it's the first thing, you know, people grab first thing in the morning, and that's why I typically, I charge my phone in another room. I don't want to wake up first thing and look at my phone and I'm sorry if something happens to my kids. I'm kind of screwed in the middle of the night, but that's not what I want to wake up to first thing in the morning. 

Heather Ash  
Exactly. 

Laurie James  
You know, we do enough of the zooming and the emailing and and all of that anyway. So how do we know when we're out of balance? Are there easy steps to kind of check in with ourselves to know when we're out of balance? And maybe one or two things that we can do to get back into balance. 

Heather Ash  
Yeah, great question 

Laurie James  
Because, you know, I feel like the amount of chaos in our world continues to increase, and it feels like it's going to continue to increase before it gets better.

Heather Ash  
There's not an end in sight right now, for sure, great. Anything can change anytime, and it look it's looking pretty rocky up ahead. 

Laurie James  
So those rapids are getting pretty big. 

Heather Ash  
Those rapids are getting big Exactly. So we need to get more skillful and have more connections with each other. One of the things that I do in the book that's really simple is that there's qualities of balanced wise. When we're deficient in wise, it shows up in a particular way more excess, and why? Same with wild? So let's look at Wild really quickly. So when something happens and we get curious about it, when we are kind of open hearted and exploratory, we know we're balanced with our wild. When we're deficient in wild, we can start getting brittle, like holding ourselves back fear based that can be deficient wild, excess wild, and there's just particular qualities that we can feel in if you just think what would be excess, wild, reckless, not caring about consequences. So that's a way to check of, how is my wild feeling right now? Oh, I'm feeling kind of okay. How do I turn that down? Or how do I turn that up? And there's a sweetness of that, because it's not you're doing it wrong. There's just like, I need a little less wild. I'll give a great example. I just went on a vacation, and I didn't tell anybody where I was going, and I called it my little Heidi hole, because I'm so public that I was like, I need to go off like everybody's and I went to Scotland, and the first day that I was there, I realized my phone wasn't connected. I forgot to tell my business manager, and we didn't set it up. And I was like, Oh, well, I'm off grid. Anyway, I'll figure this out. Well, the problem with not having your cell phone is, if something happens, you don't have a way to get help. On my way back to the airport, I hit a curb and a flat tire 5am middle of suburbia Scotland, on my way to Edinburgh airport, and

Laurie James  
Which is in the middle of nowhere when you're in Scotland. 

Heather Ash  
And I have no cell service. And so I got quiet, and the first thing I said to myself, I was like, okay, sweetheart, that was a little excess wild, like not turning your cell phone on, note to self, don't do that again. And it wasn't like, you're bad, you're wrong. It was just like, Yep, that was excess wild. I'll I'll adjust that later, like I won't myself again, note to itself. And then I went into my willing, and I'm like, All right, I need to be on the plane, and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get myself on that plane. And I got out of the car, and I stood up, and I opened to my wise and I was I just said left or right, left, turned left, started walking, and passed a man. And my brain was like, Oh, my God, he might have a cell phone. You should go ask him. And I just got this, nope, keep walking. And it was so funny. I'm like, but what if he nope, keep walking. I'm like, All right, so I keep walking, and I'm just willing. Like, I don't know how this is going to work, but I'm willing. And there was a woman working on her car, like scraping ice off of her car. And I passed her, and I stopped, and I went back and said, I need help. Can I borrow your cell phone? She's like, yes. How can I help you? And it was so beautiful, because I couldn't get through her phone didn't work, and I just got again. I got quiet, and this is where that adjusting can happen. Of, I just got quiet again. And I was like, All right, I don't know what to do next. And I think that honesty, too is really helpful. Of, I'm willing, but I don't know when we just looked at each other for because I said that. I said, I don't know to do next. We just looked at each other for a while, and she goes, you just need to get to the airport. And I was like, right? I just need to get to the airport. So I ditched the car. I got all my stuff. She told me where the tram was. I got in the tram, and it all worked out. 

Laurie James  
And you made it to the airport, and the car got back to the- 

Heather Ash  
Exactly the car got back. So all the pieces that was like in motion of in the moment, I recognized, okay, excess wild. And there wasn't a punishment or a story, it was just adjust. There was willingness. And then there was a point where I was like, I don't know what to do. Ask for help. I don't have to figure this out myself. I'm at a loss that. Then there was this.

Laurie James  
The wise part of you came in and said, ask for help. Ask for help. 

Heather Ash  
Yeah.

Laurie James  
And you got it? Wow, that's beautiful. I love that's a great, great story to really bring it all together. So as we come to a close, what's one confession that you'd like to share, that maybe we haven't touched on yet, that our listeners can benefit from.

Heather Ash  
I love this. The confession is around. Let's see which piece do I want to share. I love this, that there's a joy of like really being in the world and engaging with people, and then this deep need to be completely alone, and that I still find the like, where's the balance of that? Of like, how much alone time am I then turning inward and not relating and going, like, having the relational quality, and where's the place that I'm relational? I'm like, Oh, but I need to pull back. So that's something that I dance with, is that that place between willing and wise, like the wise, in a way, is like, I just want to be quiet and just be still and just be by myself. And the willing is like, I want to engage with humans. I love them,

Laurie James  
Right? And the wild says, and I want to dance with them. 

Heather Ash  
Exactly. I want to play. 

Laurie James  
Let's go play. Yes.

Heather Ash  
Being in the tension is the dance for me, is how to just stay in the tension and listen for what's needed now. 

Laurie James  
Yes. And being in tune with that intuition and not letting the fear drive your decisions, right, the fear of, if I go here, I'm going to feel obligated, or if I don't go, I'm going to feel alone, great, right? You know, what does my body need? What do I need in this particular moment? Yeah, when we tune into ourselves, we are all of these things. We are wild, we're willing, and we're wise. We just have to tune in.

Heather Ash  
Absolutely, absolutely over and over and over and over again. 

Laurie James  
Daily sometimes, you know, hour by hour. So ash, how can people find you? And how can people find your book?

Heather Ash  
The website's warriorgoddess.com and the book is available everywhere pretty much. So it just came out. It's still a new book July. So on online, I always recommend people go into their local bookstore. So put your local store 

Laurie James  
and start the indie bookstores, absolutely. 

Heather Ash  
Yeah, highly recommended. 

Laurie James  
But it's also on that other you know, big it's everywhere. Door exactly, and I will have all the links in the show notes too. So thank you again, so much for your very wild and willing and wise information. I so appreciate it, and I look forward to staying connected with you. 

Heather Ash  
Thanks, Laurie.

Laurie James  
Thank you for listening to this episode of Confessions of a Freebird. I'm grateful to be in your ears and hearts. If you're interested in becoming a freebird, I'd love to support you. Please check out my website at Laurieejames.com to learn how we can work together, or to sign up for my newsletter so you can receive tips on how to date and relationship differently and ultimately find more freedom and joy in your life. If you found this podcast helpful, please follow or subscribe, rate and review and share it with friends so they can find more freedom in their second or third act also. Until next time.