Transcript

Brian
Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast.

Ani
Ani, how are you? I’m good. How are you today, Brian?

Brian
Doing very well.

Ani
It’s almost Fourth of July. I’m really excited.

Brian
I’m super excited. And next week, this week, in just a couple of days, the book comes out.

Ani
Woo! It does. It’s gonna, we’re gonna get it in our hands.

Brian
This has been like a year-long project. It almost exactly, almost exactly signed the contract with Wiley in August, and we started conversation with them in July, actually before July 4th, because we were talking with our, uh, family about it on July 4th. So it was like right around that time. So it’s been a year, basically a year. Wow, what a year process. Which has been really thrilling. Cool. Um, it’s been full, I would say.

Ani
Full year.

Brian
It’s been full. It’s been, um, yeah, learned so much this year about things and super excited about getting this book out into the world. And it’s not just writing the book and editing the book and working with, uh, the publisher and then, um, pre-launching the book, getting it to launch date. And then now, you know, we’re going to be moving into a phase where we are in doing speaking tours and that kind of stuff about the book. So talk about manifesting things.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
And I am really honored, Ani, and not just for this, but, you know, we have really manifested quite a lot together in our lives. You think about it. And at least I think we have. And we definitely have been a fantastically All the things. Inspiring all the things kind of process. But I thought we’d take on the, on the eve of the book coming out, I thought we’d take a little time to talk about—

Ani
pause—

Brian
how we manifest together as a partnership. So we’re partners in our, our personal life and we’re partners in our business lives and we have co- created, co-founded, now co-authored things.

Ani
Can’t get away from each other.

Brian
I know, we just literally kind of can’t get away from each other. So we’ve done a lot of manifesting together, and I know, um, a lot of your clients kind of talk about that, wanting to—

Ani
Brian, everybody wants—

Brian
wanting to bring that.

Ani
Like, how do you— everybody wants to know—

Brian
how do you manifest together as a, as a couple, as a partnership? Like, what’s the process?

Ani
Yeah, and also, how, how do you get your husband on board with this for, um, you know.

Brian
So how do you get your husband on board with—

Ani
talk about that later, ladies.

Brian
Yeah, I need to know the inside scoop so I can talk to the husbands about it and say—

Ani
I mean, we’re talking about like, you know, um, what am I trying to say, cisgender, straight, kind of, uh, all the, all those things, couples. But I, I think with, uh, with any couple there’s, you know, all the dynamics. And usually there’s like one couple who’s— one person in the couple who’s really into it, one person in the couple who’s not so into it, is this story that we hear more often. And people who are into personal development and insight and, um, looking at themselves, self-discovery and things like that, they want to know how to get the other person on board. And I think that that actually is a key part in how we manifested each other, to be perfectly honest, in my perception of the story. Because in my previous relationship, I wished very hard. Like, one of the things with manifestation is there’s— your best manifestations, there’s this like devotion to what it is that you really desire. And I don’t even want to use the word want, I want to use the word desire. There’s like this devotion to what you desire. And I had a very devoted desire to wanting to have a person or people in my life to be able to talk about personal development with, because I was reading books but my partner at the time wasn’t into it.

Ani
It’s funny because he’s more into it now, but, um, wasn’t into it at the time, and I couldn’t share these conversations. I so desperately wanted a person to be able to share personal development conversations with, and that was the real basis of our friendship as we were getting to know each other, as I perceive it. Because we started, we started a wellness center together, but we, we still didn’t know each other all that well. We were still getting to know each other when we started the center. And then we would have these lunch conversations and break conversations between clients where we would talk about the things that we were reading or the classes we were taking or the certifications we were doing or client examples and things like that. And it was really really deeply meaningful to me to have manifested a friendship with a person who we could do that work together. So back to what I was saying, we— that’s a shared value for us. It’s a shared value and a common interest for us. So where, um, you know, some couples, they might share a common interest in wine, or they share a common interest in love of dogs or hiking or whatever.

Ani
You know, maybe it’s a hobby or maybe it’s a thing that you do, um, or have, you know, wealth or whatever it is. Our, uh, one of probably our top 3 common interests is, uh, personal development. So that shared value is part of what works with this whole thing.

Brian
Yeah, I love, uh, how you’re talking about this, Ani, and, um, I just want to kind of bring to the conversation again, reminding everyone that you’re always manifesting something and you’re either— not either, you’re both. You’re both manifesting something personally. And if you’re in any type of committed relationship with someone, whether it’s a personal relationship or a professional relationship or partnership, you are manifesting things together, whether you’re doing it consciously or unconsciously. Because we’re always manifesting something. Yeah. And if you’re manifesting unconsciously, let’s just say, with your partner, like you’re not particularly making plans around it, you’re not particularly trying to figure it out or sort it out along your way or how you’re planning it. What, to your point of shared values, Ani, is that we always manifest according— when you’re in a couple, you always manifest according to your shared values. It’s the values that you’re sharing are the things that will automatically keep manifesting themselves. And so, um, you have to kind of just, again, think about what those shared values are for us. So personal development, personal growth was a shared value and it still is a shared value. So it makes sense that we are constantly kind of manifesting opportunities for more growth.

Ani
Mm-hmm.

Brian
And, and it’s kind of like on an accelerated track because it’s not just like you’re doing it on your own and I’m doing it on my own, we’re doing it together. And in this case, one plus one doesn’t equal two. No. One plus one equals 10 or something like that. When you’re doing it together with someone else, you’ll always exponentiate your shared values. And so for us, personal growth being one of our shared values, we just constantly are getting opportunities for personal growth.

Ani
Yeah. Well, I think as soon as we started recognizing that was a shared value and started energizing it as a shared value, like everything else opened up for us. For us professionally, really, um, professionally, really, to be like, hey, you’re on the track to be teachers of this stuff, you know. It’s just like boom right there.

Brian
Yeah. And even the most difficult parts of our personal relationship became a part of that. Well, there, there’s still opportunities for personal growth.

Ani
Yeah, but it became a part of our process of learning more about ourselves. Exactly. We can teach that stuff. That’s what I’m saying. Yeah. Yep.

Brian
Exactly. But so that’s something that just always happens for us just naturally because that’s a shared value of ours. Where if you’re in a relationship with someone, to your point, I think, Annie, so one partner has a high value in personal development or growth and the other person doesn’t, then you’re not going to exponentiate those things together.

Ani
That doesn’t mean that you can’t have that in your life, by the way, right? Like part of the cool thing about life is having relationships that feed all of our different interests and values. So yeah, you know, go ahead.

Brian
I’m sorry, go ahead.

Ani
No, I was just gonna say, like, if you really crave a relationship like that, one of the things that we do with, uh, um, clients is help them recognize those people are already in your life. You just probably don’t see them. To our point about all the reasons why, listen to the last episode about value tagging and stuff like that.

Brian
Yeah, but yeah, yeah. So there’s some other, um, areas I believe that we have as shared values too. That have shown up in interesting ways. So when I was thinking about this podcast and kind of having some internal kind of thought conversations with myself about it, I came up with some other ideas. And so I really think that, you know, a shared value we also have is contribution, that we both really value contribution, right? Better for worse. For better or for worse. I mean, so we’re both always contributing around the house as much as we can.

Ani
We, you know— Just around the house.

Brian
At work and around the house, and we get a bit irritated with people that don’t seem to value contribution.

Ani
Exactly. Who don’t share that value.

Brian
And, and it’s— and we’re like, what is going on here? Like, we’re contributing and we’re not getting the blah blah blah blah blah blah. And so some ways to determine, like, what is it that you have a shared value with, with your partner, is where do you meet on, on irritation about other people that aren’t in your part? You might be irritated with each other at some point in time, but where do you come together? And because you have a strong shared value around something.

Ani
Exactly, because you might irritate me, but that points to my value that you don’t share, for example. But the things that we both complain about— shared values.

Brian
Yeah, so contribution is a big one. And so when you think about what we’ve created in our life, like even manifesting this book, like it’s really come from both of our values around contribution, like wanting to contribute to the book. And actually kind of like, who’s going to do what chapter? I want to do this one, you want to do that one? Okay, I’m going to edit this one, I’m going to do that one. Very fairly, really, like really trying to figure out how can we always keep contributing and adding value to the process. Oh, you’re writing tonight? I’ll cook, I’ll do the dishes tonight. Okay, I really got to meet this editing deadline. Okay, I’ll do the grocery shopping this week or something like that, or I’ll go to the dump. I mean, we have all these life things that we have to manage too. We’re always contributing to them and trying to like figure out how to support the other person in their contribution by contributing.

Ani
Just laughing because our listeners are like, did he just say take a dump?

Brian
Go— oh, go to the dump.

Ani
Sorry. Okay, so people, we don’t have trash service.

Brian
We live in the woods. We don’t have trash service. I have to go to the dump.

Ani
Cognitive dissonance. You said that.

Brian
People are like, it’s like, what did he just say it’s a regular part of my routine.

Ani
Other people don’t do that.

Brian
That is so— anyway, I could keep going on it, but I won’t. I can make this really uncomfortable for everybody, but I won’t. But that’s good. Okay, what else we got? Um, shared values.

Ani
Like, yeah, well, humor is a shared value of ours. Like, we make a point to— it’s one of the things that we, uh, do regularly is let’s try to laugh together. Yeah, thank God.

Brian
Yeah, we pull up clips of funny things, you know, we watch stand-up comedy and that kind of stuff.

Ani
It’s to see stand-up is what— that’s probably the, the thing we’ve done the most together as a family actually, is see comedians. Um, we watch the news via the comedians.

Brian
Yeah, we watch comedic news, you know, programs and those kinds of things.

Ani
It’s really about lightheartedness and laughing and those kinds of things, which from a standpoint of manifesting together is so important because, well, I mean, even you’re not trying to consciously manifest. I mean, damn, navigating, uh, long-term relationships are hard. They’re challenging. So laughing together is something that is, uh, really, really important, and it’s something that brings us back to each other too. When things are getting too serious or whatever, we gotta like have a laugh. Like, you’re really good at that. You’ll, you’ll know when I’m struggling or whatever and be like, let’s watch some comedy here, you know. Yeah, pick up my favorite one.

Brian
Sometimes you don’t always like my, my punnisms. They don’t, they don’t land right. So it’s like, we better watch someone else tell jokes.

Ani
Did me though a number of weeks ago when you pointed out that I do it on the podcast. Watching myself as they want to come out of my mouth, and I think I am so funny in my head with the retorts that I am making up. And then I’m like, I don’t like it all the time when he does that.

Brian
That’s the only time you do it is on the podcast. I know, isn’t that funny?

Ani
I’m a little ashamed of myself.

Brian
It’s a whole role reversal thing.

Ani
It really is. But like, whereas you will out with like deeply vulnerable shares on the podcast, and I’m like, I’d love that at home, you know, but you’ll do it on the podcast. So you’ll take my puns, I will take your vulnerable shares. And you know, couples listening out there, apparently the way to bliss is having a podcast with your partner. So there you go.

Brian
Yeah, which is— yeah, there you go. And thanks for joining us for that. Well, I just want to note one more, uh, that’s really important for both of us as a shared value, because again, if you’re listening to this, you’re like, Ani and Brian, how do you manifest together around shared values? It’s, uh, for both of us, autonomy and freedom is really important. We both want to have our own sense of autonomy, autonomy, even in partnership with one another. It’s important that we both have the ability to have— be able to be free to make our decisions. And what’s also really important to us is that we instill those values in our kids, in our kids. And we have a blended, blended family. And, you know, for those of you who have a blended family out there, you know, it’s not easy on a day-to-day basis, especially when the kids are, are younger. But as they’ve grown up, you know, what I think has really bonded us together is wanting our kids to be independent, really raising them to be independently functioning human beings in the world.

Ani
When our kids were probably— although I might be getting this wrong— probably about 9, 9, and 7, We sat them around the dining room table to do an activity around finding our family values. And I was so excited because having a blended family, so challenging. And I thought, if we can just nail this one thing where we come together, I can rest and have this, this like peace around where we come together and the kids bless them for their age, bless their hearts, sat there to do the exercise long enough to get to the conclusion. And the conclusion— do you remember?

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
The conclusion that I believe they came to, or maybe we did and said it out loud, and then they were like, yep, is everybody is number one. Each of us is number one. And the moment that they each recognized that that was the family value, that each of us as individuals was number one, And they were like, that works. They, they at that moment got up from the table and left. And I, I don’t know about you were feeling, but like there was this moment, I remember this memory. I was just sitting there like, you gotta be effing kidding me. That’s it. Like that’s what connects us is that each of us is number one. And it did not provide the relief at that moment in time at all that I was looking for. Now that they’re older, they’re 21, 21, almost 21, almost 21 and 18. I— so much easier for me to say that it has really served us so well as a family. And also, I love watching them grow up knowing that they have autonomy, and they have autonomy in our home, but it also has instilled a confidence in them to go out and do the things that they want to do.

Ani
I don’t think any of our kids feel a need to please us, you know, and do things so that, that we approve or things like that, which I think It’s so awesome. The, um, it’s so great. Although in terms of pleasing us, my, my son did bring up yesterday and has brought up a few times, you know, you should be glad I’m not a drug addict. Thanks. So he might be pleasing me in that way. I don’t know.

Brian
But anyway, moving the bar down, moving the bar down so that law of relativity, you actually feel better about things.

Ani
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Brian
Um, I know I leave the car a mess.

Ani
Exactly. But you should be glad I’m not a drug addict. Yeah.

Brian
Okay, so actually, this is the last one I want to share. One of our huge shared values, which obviously our kid is like tapping into for us, is law-based living. Like, we live according to the natural laws as much as we can. When we have decisions to make, or when we are even in a bit of a, you know, some conflict with one another, we really approach things from the natural law base. Really good. That’s, that’s our, our, the value with the way with which we live. That’s the construct within which we live. And our kids apparently are picking up on that because they’re using that for their own advantage, law of relativity, to make themselves like, you know, uh, look better than whatever. I mean, you know, it’s working for them.

Ani
It’s great. We use the laws all the time when it comes to even daily decisions and certainly big things. I think at this point we do it subconsciously because it’s become a program. But there are things that we’ve had to kind of put in place and learn along the way. And, you know, one of the things is we’re able to take leaps or take chances together because we know the laws and because we live the laws. You want to tell everybody about our fun thing that we say?

Brian
Our little mantra?

Ani
We do have a mantra when things are hard.

Brian
Yeah, because of the law of polarity. And I actually shared this a few months ago in our Living the Laws program. It’s our year-long program where we have a container and we take a cohort through, um, actually helping them to embody and live with the natural laws. And the law of polarity states that everything has— everything is created as a whole and everything has its opposite, corresponding opposite. And so the idea is, is that if you see that quote-unquote bad things are happening in your life, then there also must be good things happening in your life, because the bad things can never be separate from the good things. They’re always there at the same time. So the more bad things that seem to be happening means the more good things also must be happening, even if you can’t see them. So when, um, when it seems like life is really hard and there’s a lot of quote-unquote bad things happening, one thing after the next, right? We just, we just just look at each other and we just shout up, like, good things must be happening, good things must be happening. You know, that’s just like a mantra that we have.

Brian
It’s kind of funny, like, uh, that there’s that Seinfeld episode from years and years and years ago where George’s father is stressing out, and so he goes to the therapist, and the therapist tells him that when he gets really stressed, he should just say serenity now.

Ani
Oh yeah, right.

Brian
But instead he screams it. When he gets hit, when he gets— when he gets sort of thing. So we kind of just pull this good things must be happening, uh, out of our, out of our, you know, internal system. And to just start to recognize, say, that must be happening somewhere, it does diffuse the situation for sure.

Ani
Because I am a big drama queen, I love to get wrapped up in something. So it diffuses the situation or makes us laugh. So it— I mean, yes, right then and there we could start listing out and pointing out, well, this is happening and this is happening, but it’s not even that. It’s just a reminder, like, don’t get so wrapped up in it. Don’t focus all your conscious attention on the stuff that’s not going right.

Brian
Yeah, it disrupts the system.

Ani
Disrupts— it’s a pattern interrupt. It’s a really, really good one for us as a couple.

Brian
And I was so, uh, really touched. One of our students a few months ago in the Living the Laws program, we had just shared this technique, this idea, and And just a day or two or a week after that, her young child ended up in the ER. And it was very, obviously very stressful. And she said that even as she was taking her child to the ER, she was saying to herself, “Good things must be happening. Good things must be happening.” And she said it got her through that really difficult period. And she was just so thankful about it. And it was really touching to hear her say that, to know that that was an impact that we were able to make in her life and in her child’s life to help them get through a very stressful experience.

Ani
That’s good.

Brian
Kind of broke the spell, to your point, of being so attached to all the bad stuff that seems to be happening, because something good must be happening also at the same time.

Ani
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So a pro tip, you know, as we’re kind of wrapping up this conversation, um, be respectful of your partners in your life and what they value. And the more that you can recognize and, and allow people to— it’s not even that we’re allowing— allow ourselves really to keep our eyes on our own paper and infuse joy into our own values, the better all of our relationships are going to be. So, you know, it’s not about making people get on board with, with what’s going on. It’s about recognizing the values underneath of it and then energizing the shared values. And you’ll be on a really good road.

Brian
Yeah, yeah, I love that message. Love that message. Thanks so much for the conversation, Ani. You’re welcome.

Ani
I always say something deeply vulnerable.

Brian
No, I’m good, I’m good. As long as you don’t do any puns, I’m not going to share anything vulnerable. And we’ll, uh, we’ll let the listeners off the hook for this episode anyway.

Ani
Catch us next week.

Brian
All right, thanks everybody.

Ani
See you later. Bye-bye.