Confidence Classic: How to Reconnect With Your Inner Compass with Saje Dyer & Serena Dyer Pisoni

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26:01Heather Monahan:Serena, for you, you didn't have that comforting. You were going through your own personal struggles and you weren't necessarily seeing the signs at the same time. Is that right? Yes, I was going to say, actually, that's exactly right. And what Sage was saying was like, for her, it was a reminder that her relationship with our dad changed. For me, having, you know, that was in 2015 that he passed away. now that it's 2022 and it's been six and a half years essentially. And I have gone through so much in the last six and a half years that I talk about in the book. But just to touch on briefly, becoming a mother for the first time, my husband being arrested, indicted for his business, losing all of our financial assets, him going to trial, being sentenced to seven years in prison, that getting overturned at the last minute, giving birth to three children in that time, really struggling with body image and depression because of just the weight gain from childbirth.

26:53And then to top it all off, my teenage stepson passed away from an accidental drug overdose. So that's really just like a very brief snapshot of just the highlight reel, really the low light reel, if you will, of everything that I experienced. And so for me, I believe now with the gift of hindsight and having kind of immersed myself more into this spiritual work, like Sage was saying, kind of starting to calibrate on a higher energy level. For me, what that represented, his act of forgiving his father and changing his life, was the knowing that I needed to discover for myself or I needed to return to, which was self-forgiveness, self -love.

27:36Because when you grow up in a spiritual household like we did, one of the greatest benefits is that you are taught from a young age to take responsibility for everything that happens in your life. One of the downsides of growing up in a spiritual household is that you are taught to take responsibility for everything that happens in your life. In other words, you don't get in life what you want, you get what you are. And when all of these things were happening to me in my life, back to back to back, I could not help but feel as though I must be bad. I must have attracted this. I must have done something in a past life or karmically or energetically to align with all of this bad stuff.

28:20And because I had that experience of growing up with, you know, believing that you have to take responsibility for everything that happens. And because all these bad things are happening and I identified myself as attracting them or creating them, I started to carry an enormous amount of shame, of shame and guilt. And so when my dad forgave his father and his life changed, I know that for Sage, that was sort of symbolic of the idea that her relationship with our dad could change and take on a new meeting. And for me, it was symbolic in the sense that I never had to forgive anyone really before, but I especially never had to forgive myself.

29:00I never had to deal with shame and feeling as though I somehow was bad, you know, because I never had anything bad really happen in my life before everything started happening at once. And out of that whole experience of learning sort of like self-forgiveness and self-love, I came to understand that I had a choice in this. I could continue to view these things as bad, or I could choose to view them as experiences that I signed up for before I incarnated in this lifetime in order for my soul to grow. Because what Sage and I were sort of raised on was this idea that you come here and your time in your body as Heather or Serena or Sage is your time in the classroom.

29:53And that when you are done with the lessons, you go home. And we sign up, we sign up for these experiences is what we were raised to believe so that we can grow. And you don't grow by never being challenged or by living comfortably and safely. But in every single situation or experience that happens in your life, you have that choice to view it as a reason to stay stuck, to stay the victim, to stay feeling bad, to stay carrying shame, to stay carrying guilt, to not forgive yourself or others that have harmed you. or you have the choice to view all of those things, all of those experiences as rungs on the ladder that is placed before you at the time of your birth that is your chance to climb your way up toward God consciousness or divine love or Christ consciousness.

30:54But you also don't have to. You also don't have to climb that ladder. And each time something happens and you choose to view it as bad or your fault or somebody else's fault, that's your choice and that's fine and you can stay there. Or you can change the entire way you are looking at everything that has happened to you and say, this is not because I am bad. This is not because I attracted bad things. In fact, these things are not even bad. these things are opportunities for my own personal growth, for my own ability to become closer to God. And that took me a very long time to understand that these were not things that were happening to me because I was bad or I deserved them or karmically I was doomed to have them.

31:47But instead, these were opportunities to grow. And I really believe that in every person's life, we have that ability to make that choice for anything that happens to us.

31:58Heather Monahan:I don't want to minimize or mitigate what Sage has gone through in her life or what I have gone through. Everyone has their own challenges and struggles. However, you losing your stepson to me on that, you know, losing a child seems to be one of the hardest things that someone can go through. And when you wrote about this, or I don't know, Sage, maybe you wrote the chapter about Serena going through I believe is the way it was told in the book, but that whole chapter and that experience and how beautiful it turns out to be was just, it was so emotional to read and so beautiful and loving. And I just, I was so, I'm so proud of you of being able to come through that other side and see the good that is there.

32:46Heather Monahan:Can you tell us a little bit about how you were able to change that experience? Yes, because, you know, when my stepson passed away, so I met him when he was 10, and I was, you know, immediately in a relationship with his dad within two weeks of meeting. We were together and have been ever since. And so I, Mason was a part of my life for the last nine years of his life from the time he was 10 to 19. And I, I did not always have a great relationship with him. He and I were 13 years apart. And so a lot of times we fought more like siblings. And in the process of losing him, the experience I had with his death was so completely different than the experience I had with my dad's death.

33:23Because of my dad's death, it was pure sadness and grief that he wasn't here. But there was no aspect of that grief that was based in regret or guilt. When my stepson passed away, and I think this is the case for like any parent or step parent or grandparent or aunt or uncle that loses a child, essentially, that they love, the guilt is ever present. Because for me, at least, all I could do was think about the times that I was not good to him. And all I could do was think about the times that I could have been better. And I knew I could have been better in those moments. And I still chose not to.

33:59And I was consumed with self-loathing because that's all I could think about when he died was I could have been better. I should have been better. And I wasn't. And I honestly will say that the reason I was able to transform that experience from one of extreme pain to one of love was, A, because my husband, my stepson's father, who raised him as a single father his entire life, he was so encouraging of reminding me that when my dad died, just two years before Mason did, that I was aware that in order to connect with my dad from the other side, I had to become like where he was now. I had to connect with him from a place of love because that's where my dad was now, was only a place of love.

34:55And my husband was so encouraging in wanting me to remember that Mason would not want me to feel anything but love for him, from him, and that I was punishing myself unnecessarily, that I was a good step-mom and that I was focusing on these small things. So my husband offered me such grace in encouraging me to remember that I could connect with Mason even now that he was on the other side from that place of love. And that if I felt I needed to ask for his forgiveness, I could do that. And so I did. And so I ended up having this crazy dream after I wouldn't even allow myself to feel comfortable mourning him because I felt responsible for his death.

35:46Even though it was an accidental drug overdose and I wasn't even in the same state, I still felt as though I had pushed him away so many times that that overdose was somehow partially my fault. And so I didn't even feel worthy of grieving for him because I felt so responsible. And so I couldn't think about Mason in the place of joy or love because I didn't feel like I deserved to think about him in that place. And it wasn't until a week or two or three weeks after he died of really self-punishing that I had one moment as I was falling asleep where I remembered a really funny experience that he and I had.

36:19And as I was falling asleep, I was thinking about him from that place of joy, from this funny memory. And he came to me that night in a dream. And it was definitely a full, real visitation, not just a dream. And I asked him if after he died, if he saw all the mean things I had done as his stepmom in his life. And he said, yes. And I asked him if he could forgive me. And he said, yes. And I asked him, it's going to make me cry, if he loved me. And he said, yes. And I asked him if he knew that I loved him. And he said, yes. And at the end of that, at that exchange that he and I had, he said to me, Serena, I just want you to remember one thing.

37:00New teachers are emerging. Then he just disappeared. and I really thought I woke up I wrote the dream down I woke my husband up I told him all about it and I felt a sense of relief and I really thought that what that meant was that I was going to become a new teacher on some big stage and that I was emerging and I had no idea that what that really meant was I was going to continue to go through a lot of difficult experiences that I could choose to look at as teachers and that those were going to be emerging and emerging in my life. And I will say that Mason needed less time in the classroom than I would have liked.

37:49Then, you know, my dad needed at his, it always makes me cry when I say this, at his 75 years, that anytime a child or a young person dies, it's so painful because we want them to have the full life. But I had to, I had to get to a point of really believing that his soul just needed the 19 years that he was here and that he left when he was meant to go and that I could choose to view my relationship with him as one of perpetual self-loathing and guilt or as one of the greatest, if not the greatest teachers that ever emerged in my own life. Because what I now know that I would not have known had I not been Mason's step-mom, and lost him is that none of the judging, none of the criticizing, none of the hurtful things, none of those things are things I would ever do again.

39:01Instead, if I could have just one day of just loving him from a place of loving really everyone now, from a place of no judgment, That's where I'm living, you know, that's where I essentially I'm living my life from now, or at least I'm trying to, or I'm trying to remember to. And Mason gave me that gift. Mason's role in my life was helping me to get to that next ladder of just wanting to come from a place of love more and more and more to everyone that I meet.

39:36Heather Monahan:Meet a different guest each week.

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44:35Heather Monahan:It's such a powerful and beautiful experience. And this book is so full of so many stories around your personal struggles, both of you, your parents. There's so much realness. That's what I so appreciate. Not only the lessons are incredible and not growing up knowing about these lessons, right? It's hard to even process it at first. So Sage, when we're talking about the 11 lessons to understand the quiet urges of your soul, what are some of the important takeaways that you want readers to bring through their life with them? One that just pops out that just came to me. I mean, I think they're all really important.

45:13And we spent a lot of time like going through our whole lives and digging out things that could not just be relatable for us, but for everyone. But one that I just thought of when you asked me that was, you know, we've all heard the quote a million times. There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way, you know? And I've heard that my whole life. It never really resonated with me until one day I had gone through a struggle, nothing like what Strina is talking about. But when I found out that I was pregnant, I was, I had been married for about a year. I had gotten off the pill. I knew what we were doing, but I did not think I was going to get pregnant.

45:50At least not, you know, like I knew that I could, but I didn't think that I would. You know what I'm saying? I don't know. So I took a pregnancy test one morning because I was feeling off and I was pregnant and I felt immediately really scared and just like, oh my God, what did we do? And then I felt a lot of guilt for having this feeling of being scared and not just being excited and happy that this new life had chosen me to be its mother. And I just felt like I should be being happy that this child is inside of me and somehow feeling what I'm feeling. And so it was just this whole tumbling down this road of feeling scared and then guilty about feeling scared.

46:31and um you know I also during that time I just bought into all these things that motherhood was going to do that were going to be negative uh in my life like that I would could never have a career again uh that was the idea that I thought I was 29 and Serena and I had written most of this book but we hadn't finished it completely and we had kind of fell off the wayside from it ironically when I found out I was pregnant because I bought into this idea that I could never have a career once my child was born, it made me call up Serena and call up our publishers that we had been in contact with and call up our literary agent and say, we got to do this.

47:08And we've got to do it now because I have eight months until my life is just over. And I can only be a mom from that point forward. I just thought that this was true, you know? And so because of that, we got our book out there and we finished it while I was pregnant. And it didn't get released until, you know, last year, but because this was three years ago that I got, that I became pregnant, but, but we did finish it during that time. And we got our publishing deal and all of that. And I just, I bought into this idea that I would never travel again and I would never be able to do anything for myself and just all these things.

47:41That's all I could think about instead of thinking about the opportunities that were before me, that I was going to grow, that, you know, this was a blessing and all of that. I just was only seeing it one-sided at that time. But then fast forward to when my son was born and just it turns out not that none of that was true, because some of the things that I was thinking about are true. I mean, you don't get a lot of time to yourself. I don't travel unencumbered anymore and things like that. But what I realized was that none of it was anything to be afraid of because it has enriched my life in a different way.

48:13And I'm just in a different phase in my life. So when I heard this quote, again, after I had gone through all of this and my son was born and I was like, actually, I feel a sense of happiness, a sense of happiness that I couldn't imagine for myself pre having my son. And I heard the quote, you know, there is no way to happiness. happiness is the way. And it resonated with me in this whole new way that, you know, I had this idea that I really bought into that the only way to happiness for me was going to be to stay without children, traveling, doing whatever I wanted. I live in New York City, just living this life that I thought was so great.

48:50And that that was the way to happiness for me. And now the road that I was on was no longer the way to happiness. And I was no longer going to be happy. But what I actually came to find out was that there is actually no way to happiness. Happiness is the way that happiness is always available to you in your situation that you're in. My dad always used to say to us, do not process life as you assume it should be process life as it is. Because, you know, if life is going as we assume it should be, it's easy to be happy because we're like, oh, this is what's supposed to be happening. So I'm having a good time.

49:26As soon as you know, the wind changes and we're thrown something that we, we do not assume to be good. And it's not the way that we want our life to go. That's when it becomes challenging. And I read this thing recently that said it, well, all it said was dance with life. And I thought about that. I was on the treadmill and I was like, yeah, you don't, as soon as you start resisting, whatever life is bringing you, you're creating more and more resistance. And sometimes you're in situations that you just don't have a choice. So how do you break down that resistance and still find happiness in those ways?

50:02And one of them is by no longer assuming that life should be a certain way. You know, when you find yourself in a situation that goes against the grain of what you believe your life needs to be, challenge yourself then to say, how can this serve me now? Because so much in our lives, we look back and we say, oh, this thing that I thought that was going to be so awful, this breakup, this job loss, you know, whatever. I thought it was going to be the worst thing that ever happened, but it turns out it was a blessing. If you could see that when it's happening, you save yourself, you know, all those years of thinking that this shouldn't be happening when in reality, it might be just a gift packaged in some wrapping that you didn't know at the time.

50:42And so when I heard that quote, to wrap it up, there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way, I also thought, you know, that's the same with my purpose. Like I had this idea that because I was pregnant, my only purpose was going to be to be a mom and that I didn't find my other purpose, my career type purpose, you know, quote unquote. So I never would. But what I realized is that there also is not just one purpose in our lives, you know, that we go through our life and I think our purpose can shift and take on entirely new meanings depending on where we are in our life at that time and that you can find purpose in everything that you're doing and if you're 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 and you still don't feel like you found your purpose to just sort of shift that on its head because I don't think it's one thing that you're going to find I think that you can live a purposeful life every day or most days, same way with happiness.

51:40You know, there is no way to one purpose, find your purpose every day. And so I now find purpose in being a mother while I also find a lot of purpose in, you know, we wrote this book and doing these interviews. And there are other things that I still want to do in my life that I now know that I can do and that I can have a different purpose every day, every year, every decade of my life. It's like, And when you retire, what is your life have no purpose anymore? There's just a new type of purpose that you can dive into.

52:09Heather Monahan:Wow. This book and you too. First of all, I hope you keep writing and I hope that you will write a book for teenagers because it would be wonderful to be able to empower younger generations earlier on. I'm getting this information at 47. I feel like I totally could have used this when I was 14, like my son is. So I hope you guys will consider writing something for younger people out there. they need this information. It's so good. It's such an easy read and it's so powerful. It's so relatable for anyone like me that these are new concepts, you know, that you're, you're not used to growing up with a spiritual guide in your life.

52:47Heather Monahan:This is the book for you. And certainly anyone that's ever dealt with any kind of loss, it's incredibly comforting and, and just really, really powerful. Where can people find you Sage and Serena? We're both on Instagram. I'm sage.dyer. My name is spelled with a J-S-A-J-E because my parents wanted to be complicated for me. And my website is sagedyer.com. Yeah, I'm on Instagram and Facebook and all the social medias and we always respond and reply to everybody. So all the typical social media pages you would be able to find us on like I found you. Well, I'm so glad you did find me. The Knowing, 11 Lessons to Understand, The Quiet Urges of Your Soul.

53:31Heather Monahan:Please get this book. Had a huge impact on me. So grateful for both of you. Thank you. We're so grateful to be here. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. All right, love and all green lights. Until next time.

53:53Heather Monahan:Inevitably something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it. I'm on this journey with me.