Impact the World: Tracee Stanley

[Music] welcome to impact the world the show for and about creatives change makers and entrepreneurs this is a conversation episode where a special guest shares with me what they are creating and the behind the scenes journey of their experience [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello welcome to impact the world and my wonderful guest today is none other than tracy stanley tracy is someone that i'm new to but her work and her presence are just beautiful and very clear and very pure and her book that she has just released is called radiant rest and i think that that title and that ethos is something that is often so overlooked in our society in our training and even for those of us in the personal growth and spirituality fields it's not always something that we start with it's usually something that can come to us a deep practice of self-nourishment self-care so it was really wonderful to meet tracy and to learn how she's been an advocate for this work for the last 20 plus years and where she's at with her work today we go all over the place we talk about yoga nidra we talk about her work in the movie industry and how her self-care and spirituality practices enhanced and interlocked with that and the fact that she is now a full-time teacher advocate of this work and author so you can check all of tracy's work out at radiant radiantrest.com and as ever we will put links in the show notes and if you are a fan of this show and you enjoy what we do we are a self-funded show so you can support us best by leaving a rating a review or subscribing over on apple podcasts and for now i invite you to enjoy this experience with tracy stanley [Music] so tracy thank you so much for being here at impact the world i'm delighted to have you on the show and to meet you thank you thank you so much lee um i'm honored to be here and to be in your presence so thank you for having me well what i love about the timing of this uh this show that we're taping today is i had not heard of your work prior to about six weeks ago uh maybe it was two months and wendy who produces the show with me said to me oh there's someone you have to look at she's really special and as soon as i looked at you i had the same feeling and it was like yes we absolutely would love to have her on the show but what's funny is of course there's no coincidences your book that has just been released is called radiant rest and you also have a podcast with the same name and of course the timing is in the last 10 days i have been seriously upping my self-care because i got to a point where i was like oh i'm getting a little overstressed a little out of balance and i need to increase what i'm doing and of course that has been a message that has been coming through me in my intuitive work over the recent months so i love that we're here with not only a practitioner of rest and self-care but also you are really standing for that in the world right now so thank you thank you so much i'm glad to hear that you're taking care of yourself so before we get started i'm just curious to ask you an everyday life question how many let's say how much time per day do you find in general at the moment you are able to devote to self-care resetting and nourishing yourself um i love that question and you know for me nourishment and rest is what i am devoted to so i really don't look at it as being separate from my day-to-day life i look at it as being more of a weaving and that i create a foundation of nourishment in the way that i schedule my appointments and who i decide to engage with and collaborate with in the types of projects that i decide to do that it all has at its root and the question the root question is is this nourishing is this something that is healthy is this something that is a thing or a practice or a wisdom tradition that i am devoted to and if it's not the answer is no right it's just because i can do something well or i know a lot about something it doesn't mean that it's my dharma to do it or to talk about it and so i really feel like staying in my lane of my dharma allows me to be nourished and regenerated um by everything that i do that's so beautiful and i think for many of us who weren't necessarily i'll speak for myself but i know i'm sure a lot of people will relate to this our society the way we were raised our cultural conditioning did not usually include that kind of alignment with rest or with our choices and i think for most of us it has been a journey to kind of come to a place of honoring and serving the self in a bigger way and an ongoing journey for most of us i think but i i love hearing you standing so deeply in it and for it so thank you for the rest on behalf of the rest of us yeah i mean it was it like you said it was a journey it wasn't like i woke up uh born with this understanding that i need to create the foundation of nourishing and nourishment for myself i really had to learn hard lessons to be able to get to the point where i'm able to stand really firm in my boundaries of what i will and won't do in order to protect that sacred space for myself so who were you before this so before whatever was the beginning of the journey whether it was a big moment or a series of steps over years who were you before the way that you live your life now and what did that look like well i would say that as a child and as a young as a teenager and young adult i was extremely introverted painfully so and i am still an introvert but the gift of being introverted and having parents that were very basically disciplinarians extremely strict is that i learned to observe and i learned the craft of restful listening even though i didn't have those words um and that was something that really built my intuition and so i had intuition at a very early age didn't learn to listen to it until later right um and then once i got to be a little bit older really started to become a little bit more of a rebel because i felt like i was invisible i felt like my voice wasn't being heard i felt like i didn't belong and i stood out in certain ways and so you know i certainly got into punk rock music and coloring my hair all different colors and shaving my head and having a mohawk and all the things right love it and so from there um it really started to kind of my life started to really change once i started practicing yoga and at the same time that i discovered yoga i was very lucky that that's the very same time that i started interning at an office in uh hollywood as a as a intern in a film production office that would eventually become my career so i was really lucky to be able to kind of have these teachings of yoga blossoming within me at the very same time that my career which eventually became the career of a film producer was also blossoming and i think had i not had those two things happening at once i don't know that i would be here uh right now in the same way that i'm showing up in the world because the ability to care for yourself through the practices was able to offset some of the stress or the you know i'm sure i know a little about the film business but the bit i do know is i know it can be a very stressful high turnaround and not always highly empathic environment 100 so you know what i would say is one of the first projects that i brought in to my company that was something of note um was a project with an a-list movie star and it was a very big project for our company that kind of led to a first look deal with the big studio and so all of a sudden we went from being this tiny kind of independent uh film company that was making movies for a couple of million dollars to making you know movies that were 50 million dollars and i found myself at the head of that company there comes with that especially in hollywood a lot of ego a lot of reveling in the power there's a lot of you know partying a lot of things that are really looking towards the external for validation and i believe that because i had this practice of yoga which was really asking me to look inside for my worth and look inside for the understanding of who i really and truly was as a person and to really remember who that person is as opposed to try to find it or construct it it really kept me from falling into a lot of the perils that i think are wrought in the hollywood business and you know i've been out of that business for quite some time so maybe it's different but i doubt it no i doubt it um and so it allowed me to stay balanced you know not only did i have practices that allowed me to stay rested and clear and to actually tune more into my empathy and more into my intuition so that i would kind of have this understanding of what was going on without it being spoken that that helped me to be more productive it helped me to be a more intuitive creative producer um to be able to say oh no i don't think i want to work with this person just because of the vibration it's not like i need to tell anybody else on my team that but it's basically you know it really helped me to guide um a more productive and easeful way of being in that business beautiful and what was the door opener for you because i i know from reading about your story online 1995 is the year on your website that it says you found tantra and yoga and the study of meditation what what initiated that that door opening and finding this work yeah so in 1994 i found myself living in tombows cloof which is a little town in cape town a little neighborhood in cape town and i was there knew nothing about yoga i had dabbled a little bit when i was like 12 or 13 years old in astral projection because i had found a book on it and then i got scared in the middle of doing it and kind of put the book down and never looked at it again um but i had a moment of spontaneous meditation i was sitting on a balcony watching the sunrise table mountain was in the distance and it was i don't know four o'clock in the morning 4 30 in the morning it was completely silent it was beautiful and it was just a moment of clear presence and clear awareness that was not something i was trying to do but when it happened it was so profound that i knew something significant had shifted within me and i kept asking people that i knew and telling them what had happened and nobody knew like you know people were looking at me like i had 12 heads like i had no idea what you're talking were you taking drugs what was happening it's like i hadn't taken any drugs didn't do drugs so it wasn't anything outside of me i knew that whatever happened was something that was in me it was always there and it was something that i really wanted to get back to and eventually i found a friend who was a little bit older who said oh i know exactly what happened to you and he took me to the spiritual bookstore in johannesburg and he piled up about six or seven books and said read these and i've always been an avid reader and i had a lot of free time on my hands when i was in south africa so i read those books and i i led myself through chakra meditations contract meditations you know that were very uh mind-blowing just having reading the instructions and doing the practice and having an experience reading khalil gibran reading way of the peaceful warrior and literally within a matter of two or three weeks of reading these books it shifted my perspective my perspective and my understanding of reality that's what happened from an intellectual point of view you know reading things like the celestine prophecies and these ideas that had i had never thought of before and when it started to happen to you what did you notice in your personal relationships you know the people closest to you maybe the positive or the challenging or both that's a great question so the first thing that i noticed was that i became more attuned to people's agendas and it felt as though i suddenly could understand oh this relationship is kind of based on this thing and that's not something that's actually serving me and this is not a relationship that's actually serving me so i have to let this relationship go and i think that within the first maybe year or so of practicing yoga there were a lot of relationships that i first like you know went to the person and said i don't think we can be friends anymore and then i was like oh that's a lot of work i have to explain why so i'm just going to allow whatever relationships are not meant to be to dissolve and let go and then i started to notice that once i started to do that and i didn't know this at the time but basically what i was doing is i was creating space for those who were resonant with me and my vibration and my new understanding and evolution to come into my life and that was what happened all of a sudden i i started to have new friends who we could talk about things that were you know on my mind or on my heart and it really changed the depth of the type of relationships and friendships that i had much different than the kinds of relationships that i had had previous to that yeah i don't know if this has been your experience but this is something i was reflecting on just yesterday actually the the people in my life that i either am no longer in contact with who i loved very much at the time and and still love who they are it's interesting to me how they show up in a new form so you know a friend in my life now will have several aspects of personality that remind me of the aspects of personality i so enjoyed from someone when i was 29 that i don't see anymore but they also come with a few more compatible aspects and you know my guides who i channel they always say that for us to have a a good relationship with someone we need at least eight compatibility points in the relationship that it can go more than eight but when there is when there are eight compatibility areas in a relationship it can be a richer uh container of sharing and i've i've really noticed that because in my earlier years not unlike you i used to resist and find very painful the the changing relationships that i had got myself attached to but you know at a certain point would have to either change move on from or they would move on from me yeah i mean i'd love to know more about those eight qualities well you know it really only i and i i'm i'm repeating something from a channel that that came in our soul magic retreat about a year and a half ago but as soon as i heard it it made sense to me so for example it could be areas where your values match or it could be areas where your personality points are compatible so you know how in a often in an intimate relationship there is usually some unity between the two people but there are also enough differences that between the two of you your companionship can make your shared energy field a little richer because one of you is a bit more interested in taking care of this on the left and the other one is a bit more interested in taking care of that on the right and i don't think it's just about jobs we might do in those partnerships because it has to be more than that but it was an interesting framing for me to help me look back at how relationships had had to some of them had had to disappear because i loved those three things that we had together but no longer could i deny the fact that certain things were missing for me to be pouring that much of my emotional and intimacy energy into them so that's that's my um retelling of that message yeah that makes perfect sense and i i think that um the practices of yoga that ask us to inquire within ourselves also can bring us to that awareness even not that like specific but like whoa wait a second this is a one-sided relationship i'm giving so much of myself and not receiving anything i certainly had that awareness with many relationships well i loved what you said too about how your intuition suddenly made you more aware of the agendas and something you also said pinged for me as a learning that i still go through but a key learning for me was just because you can do something or just because someone else might want you to do something does your body actually want to do that or are you just if in my case was i just responding to their want or need and taking some kind of pleasure over fulfilling that need for them without really checking in is this enhancing me which i think many people who identify as empaths healers sensitives that can be a core uh learning i think for many of us yeah i mean that that is the one of the core teachings of of the bhagavad gita which is basically it is better to do your dharma imperfectly than someone else's dharma perfectly i love that i love that so yoga nidra one of the things i loved when i opened your beautiful book radiant rest is i did not know the definition of yoga nidra and the fact that it relates it translates to bring sleep in which was fascinating to me so could you could you share a little about that for us yeah so yoga nidra translates to the yoga of sleep and so we also think about it as the sleep of the yogis and this idea that the yogi's sleep is that they are aware that the wakeful time the daytime is the time of ignorance and misperception and that the time of the wise or the time of the sages is actually the time that we most of us just consider to be a time of sleep where we're just completely unconscious so yoga nidra the the etymology of the word is the knee and that is referring to the void and the drew refers to this idea of something being revealed or drawing from the void and so if we think about this place of sleep we can think about how many different transitions there are within our sleep whether it's the stages of sleep whether it's the stages of uh consciousness whether it's even the brain wave states one of those brain wave states becoming higher than the other and in that transition there's a void and usually we kind of black out during that void right we lose awareness we lose consciousness and yoga nidra is a form of a systematic relaxation that guides you through the stages of consciousness the brainwave states and also the koshas so the the mental body the physical body the energetic body the wisdom body but it asks that part of our awareness which is a part of us that is always awake that we bring our awareness to that and then once we do we can kind of release all of our identification with our mind with our body we can let our physical body fall asleep we can let our mind fall asleep and when we do that our consciousness stays awake and aware and becomes aware of prana which is life force and then we can kind of allow ourselves to be guided by prana about all the way back to source so it is really a practice that we can talk about sleep but it's sleep with a slight trace of awareness [Music] and you've been studying this now and practicing this for 25 years 20 years so i was i was introduced to uh the practice of deep relaxation yoga nidra in 2001 and had a pretty profound experience that threads back to that time on the balcony in south africa where i felt this deep peace illness bliss as who i was and so of course i was going to try to find out as much as i could about this practice there was not a lot available at the time about yoga nidra there were maybe one or two books that you could buy and a few audio practices that you could do but what i realized when i started to share the practice and my yoga classes as well as practicing it myself and thankfully i was also teaching yoga while i was producing movies that i got to see this is really something that is changing people without the kind of effort that is needed to practice yoga asana and postures because it's done in a supine position it's done in the position of shavasana which is corpse pose it makes it so much more accessible to everybody even if you've never heard the word yoga that's interesting because yoga nidra is one i've never tried and now you've got me super intrigued so thank you i have to go and try and i'm guessing you also do you're teaching online these days i'm guessing yeah i am so i trained teachers along with my co co-teacher and friend chanti tacarante perez and we teach teachers how to teach and hold space for yoga nidra [Music] and i'm curious you said you were teaching while you were producing movies i know that with that job you were not on set all of the time but i know that movie sets the the hours are super long especially for a producer you're normally the first there and the last to leave so were you teaching on your one day off at the weekend how did that show up when you were on a three or four month film shoot that's such a great question so first of all it's a fallacy that most uh producers actually stay are there when that call and ending when they're rapping okay that's very different to the stories i've been told by some some producers i know yeah so the the real producers are the ones who you know like the line producers and people who are really invested in their job as producers they will be there from morning until night um and for me it's not it wasn't like a constant filming right we would have shoots for two months or three months and then i would come home or you know maybe i would be lucky enough that we were doing uh film shoots in la but that was very rare at the time so my classes would be on the weekends and then i would have classes in the morning at six a.m so when i was working in the office in between shooting i would teach at six a.m and luckily my office was right down the street so i could just go right to work at you know eight o'clock in nine o'clock um and then i would get subs or people to substitute my classes if i were if i was out and did you have any hesitation about becoming a teacher of yoga so do you remember like your first classes or did you take to it like a duck to water um so you know what happened was is that i actually opened a studio before i was a teacher um i was producing and i felt like this practice had changed me so much that i wanted it to be accessible to everyone and so i had access to this little space that was i don't know less than a thousand square feet and i basically said okay i want to open up this studio on donation and i had a partner who was a boyfriend at the time and we opened up this donation only studio so whether you could afford 15 for the class or you could afford nothing and you wanted to just bring me some apples that's how it would happen and we and i basically hired all of the teachers and friends that i had that were becoming yoga teachers so it was very new yoga teachers that were teaching in the space and there was a weekend where i was at home and somebody called in sick my apartment was where i was living was above the studio and i had to go down and teach and i thought oh this i had not expected this i was not expecting to teach i was expecting to like just be able to take classes whenever i felt like it and practice in the studio so maybe i should do a teacher training just in case this ever happens again because it's irresponsible for me to go down and teach not actually being a teacher so i did a teacher training and within the third day of doing this teacher training the practices that we were being given which were tantric practices um from the himalayan tradition of sri vidya were so powerful and so transformative that first of all my mind was blown and secondly i was like oh wait a second i actually have a responsibility to share these like i can't just hold these practices to myself and not do anything with them i have to share them and i can teach one day a week and that one day a week turned into two days on the weekend and then it turned into three days during the week at six o'clock in the morning because what i was feeling was that the sharing that i was doing of yoga and what i was seeing within the community of people who were practicing was so transformative that it was much more rewarding and necessary than making another steven seagal action movie although they are very necessary tracing i haven't actually seen any of them but i don't know they're alright don't do it hey they can always re-watch them um yeah i it's interesting there are two things you just said that that link for me number one i love that rather than your story being i just loved teaching yoga you're like well it would be irresponsible of of me if i ever did this again and had to do this again to not go and train so i love that it was actually your sense of responsibility that drove you into the door of the teacher training and then it was your sense of again responsibility to transmit this to people i also love that you were in a position to be able to offer the donation basis and somewhat fund this community effort through you know your other work i always think that's the beauty of being able to generate what you might need whether it's money or whether it's resources on the left that can then feed something on the right i think that's fantastic yeah but how long did it take you to go full time um well it lets me how long did it take me let me think about it i should say how long did it take you to finally leave the movie business and go i'm gonna devote my my life to serving this well it in 2004 so this was just a few years after opening the studio um i'll never forget this because i was i was on a yoga retreat really deep in these teachings and i got this is back in the day when we had pagers or like a blackberry or something and so i got this message on the blackberry uh from steven seagal it was and it was like four in the morning and i'm like really like i'm on vacation right now and so i get to the pay phone and i make the phone call i get the call through and it's like some like something that was just so ridiculous and i thought i'm done so my first thing was you know i called up the owner of the company and i said i'm done making movies with this person i'm not don't find another producer to do this i'm not this is not what i'm doing and then i was like i've got to find a way to start to transition out of this and the way that i found was that i actually wound up moving to mount shasta and creating this life with the man that i was in a relationship with to teach yoga full-time and to bring people from l.a and from the surrounding areas to come in for kind of destination retreats and workshops and this and that and my plan at that time was that okay i still love making movies but i really want to make films that are meaningful and that touch people's hearts and i don't want to work for a company that is just trying to get the numbers and have you know 30 movies a year or whatever it is and so i'll just make one movie every 18 months and so that's what i did and it was wonderful unfortunately i was in a relationship much like the one that you described uh where there's something missing and i the more that i would practice and now i was out of the hubbub of l.a and i was really um in nature and quietude and all of the things that were not working in the relationship definitely came to the surface they became they were like enough that we couldn't look away from them i won't go into the long story but we got divorced and in the midst of that divorce there were some wonderful things that happened as far as my awareness of who i was and what my power was um but it also then led me back to la because i was going to go bankrupt essentially because it was 2008 when the crash happened um and i thought i said out loud to myself i need to find something that's really in alignment and the next day i got a call from a friend who said you know what i'm starting a spiritual film company and i would love for you to come and work with us he knew that i was not living in la anymore and he said but you have to do it from l.a you can't do it from there so i wound up coming back into the business in a different way with a different kind of vision about the types of vibrations that i was going to be putting out into the world um and then i stayed there until that vibration started to shift right is that their their mission statement started to shift um and then i left in 2011 i believe yeah 2011 end of 2011 2012 and said that's it i'm doing this full time and i tried to create as many cushions for myself you know like financial cushions as to be able to make it a lot more easeful and so that was i was lucky that i had the luxury to be able to do that um and then of course some of those things got dissolved and i had to jump pull in and here i am so if we could um time machine 2011 tracy to today how would she feel about how everything looks in your world and life right now not the world because that's a whole other bag of potatoes but just your your personal journey and evolution with how you are now expressing yourself and showing up in the world both in your work and in your life you know i would say that it's very um close to how i imagined it you know i imagined being a published author i imagined having my own community that was online not because of the pandemic but because it would be virtual you know i definitely imagined living somewhere where i was really in nature um being in a beautiful relationship with someone that i love and who loves me and who we both honor each other and i loved what you said earlier about how when two people come together the energetic field kind of expands itself that's definitely how i feel in my relationship with my husband and so i don't know that this any you know any of this feels surprising it feels like it's been something that has been guided almost without me being in control but me listening and then following where i'm being guided to yeah and the book so this was in your vision a decade ago what led to the book happening and being published now and i'm guessing you were working on the book in about 2019 based on how long it takes for publishing to happen these days yeah so you know it's funny um in about i think it was 2001 a random man walked up to me rant completely random but i'll remember him because he had a strawberry stain on his face and he walked up to me and he said i'm a psychic and i was like aren't aren't we supposed to wait for me to ask you if i want a reading and he came up and he said i have three things to tell you he said one thing is your relationship is not going to work you're not on the same vibration two is that your father something is wrong with his head and he's going to need you to forgive him and you're going to need to put energy on his head and then it turned out later that my dad had dementia and that he said the third thing is you're going to write a book and i was like what am i going to write a book about but i always had that kind of thread in my mind um and so i had started writing a memoir um practice book slash you could say self-help spiritual book really about my path and the practices that kind of led me to where i am now and while i was doing that i got a call from shambhala publishing and another publisher asking me if i was interested in writing a book about yoga nidra and i had resistance because i'm like no i'm already working on this other book and this is what i'm doing and then i started to think well is this my ego saying this or do i need to listen you know i like to listen and that weekend after i got the call from shambhala i was teaching and there were about i don't know how many people came up and asked me oh so do you have a book and i thought well this is weird because it's the first time anyone's ever asked me if i had a book so i need to kind of answer this call and that was really how it happened is that i sat down after that weekend and i thought about what is my relationship with this practice of yoga nidra that i've had over 20 years what is my understanding of it and how can i help people cultivate the same relationship or their own relationship with the practice based on the tools that i have and that was how i kind of put the book proposal together and talked to shambhala about it and they loved it and here we are and that was in uh i think i delivered the book on february 28th of 2020 and i had five months to write it right and what was the writing process like for you did it just flow or did you feel any pressure you know it's so funny i i almost feel guilty because it was very effortless no that's great we need to hear that because we we've had several authors on who will share oh this was hard to write or i find writing hard even though i am an author so keep that coming please tracy we keep keep bringing that message it's good but but you know why i think it was effortless in in the writing of it is because i was practicing yoga nidra and i was allowing the the work to download and i don't really feel like it was me that was writing the book it was really me getting out of the way and asking the goddess what is it that i need to translate here for this book to come through and then i love researching so the research part was like fun because i'm like okay now i get to like look at all these things that i would be doing anyway right someone's paying me to do this anyway and then what i would say is where it got hard is in the editing process right when the copy editing because when you're in this intuitive flow of i'm downloading this information and i'm writing it and then you get you know the tedious little notes back that was definitely more challenging because that's not my forte and so i was really happy to have editors at shambhala to help with the process of the copy editing and just making suggestions about you know shifting chapters or asking questions because i was sometimes making assumptions that oh yeah everybody knows this right so that that was um the the hardest part of the process which still was really seamless it was really great and how is it now it's out in the world because by the way the book has such a magical and powerful energy so i i can imagine like it correlates with you saying it was a channeling experience of a kind for you but how is it now that the book is out there in the hands the hearts the minds of people um well you know on the on publishing day i burned the book i did a fire ceremony where i burned the book as a way to release the book from me even thinking that it's mine beautiful and so it's a joy to see people with the book people writing me that they're sharing practices from the book that they're doing the practices from the book and you know reading me back the poetry that's in the book it just feels like a joy because i feel like i released this as a prayer into the world and it is being received by people as a healing tool and as something that they can bring into their lives to bring more rest and clarity um and so it's great i feel like i'm getting to enjoy it without being attached to the outcome it's kind of like it's out there and swaha nice that's great and i know that you also have your podcast radium rest and you have some really wonderful themes and and conversations that you're having with your guests there the topics are really pertinent how is stepping into the podcast world been for you you know it's funny um i was very nervous about starting a podcast because the way that i work is very emergent and i have to be passionate about what i'm doing otherwise i'll just lose interest and want to move to something else so you know i set it up to say okay i'm going to do 12 episodes of this podcast and i'm only going to interview people that i'm really interested in interviewing because i know that some friends that i have they have you know three interviews a week and it you know i'm i i'm not sure that you can really be excited about three interviews a week uh at least for me and so stepping into that realm has been great because i love asking questions and i love learning so when i choose guests that i really want to learn something from because i am a forever student it's like having a conversation yeah you know it's it's it feels good beautiful beautiful and i want to ask you about uh something that i noticed on your website when i was having a little look around yesterday um you've taught a lot so not only your classes but you've led workshops retreats uh in in many different places but one thing that piqued my interest in 2019 you were the teacher for oprah and gales i believe it's called girls getaway in the in the caribbean yeah right so as i'm a man in my body is a man this lifetime so sadly i wouldn't have been allowed to go there but i would have loved to because um you know as i shared with you before we started oprah was a key uh enlightenment teacher for me especially around emotional intelligence and sharing at the age of 16 when i desperately needed advocates of that and then i love oprah and gayle's road trip that kind of happened about a decade ago and i love seeing gail out there more in this past five five years or so i i love the fact that she's more out there in the world so what was it like to not only get to do something like that with them but also to work with the people who love them and come for them and be a part of that whole thing yeah it was the most incredible experience um first of all i think any time that you have a group of people especially 2500 women and some of them brought their husbands i wish i'd known it was going on right when you get that many people with a singular focus arriving in a place that is basically a floating container it's pretty powerful yeah and so the the common you know thing that everybody had in common was of course they want to see they want to meet oprah right they understand the power and the vision that she has but the other thing that was maybe even more powerful is that everybody had kind of made this unconscious and end conscious intention to show up as their best self because that was part of the thing that was part like we're all going to show up as our best self so imagine having women from all walks of life all races all cultures arriving on this boat and that was the first thing that i noticed i was like oh this is interesting there's like some people here who are uh you know they've got the wraparound luxury suite with them and one other person and then there are people from the deep south that are here sharing a room with eight people right how is this gonna how is this gonna work when there's so many different people here um especially you know in a on a ship where uh it's like class is definitely something that you notice right um because people are separated by their rooms and by where their rooms are within a day every single person on that ship was mingling they were crying together they were laughing together they were taking selfies together it was absolutely incredible and what i came away with is that this was a microcosm of what is possible in the world this kind of love and sisterhood and seeing people for who they are at their essence as light and love and beauty regardless of anything else and that that was the most um amazing thing that i observed and i have to be honest that i i really thought oh i'm sure oprah doesn't notice this because she's kind of sequestered maybe in her room and maybe she's just coming down for the big talks when the audiences are down but she spoke to it on day three she said i've never seen anything like this in my life and it was really one of the most inspiring things that i've ever seen felt um or been a part of wow i had many emotions listening to that and one that hit me was kind of sadness about because it's funny you know like everybody i think i've just adapted to the 2020 year that we had and we also had several live events that we had to cancel but as you were describing that it took me back to the retreats that we held the last big one was um end of 2019 in costa rica but i've never been on that scale of so the energy you described i know very well both from being a student in a retreat space and then from facilitating them and and wanting to hold a space for that to happen with the team i bring with me but hearing that at that many people two and a half thousand people that's profound and what what it makes me wonder is you know you're you're here two years later holding that energy in you as it's like a crystal of activation that is still in your body that you can immediately recall and transmit through this conversation so two and a half thousand people also had that experience it makes me wish i'm it's hard to talk about this right now because of where we're at in the world but i always had a vision that there would be more more gatherings like that in the future years on a bigger scale and i've certainly seen and experienced that in recent years but i think it's why for example rock concerts i always love the crowd when they're focused on a common uniting theme i don't like crowds at all when there isn't that focus like i either like the really quiet beach or a group who are focused on one thing i i don't like the middle ground so i just love hearing that it sounds it sounds incredible and thank god you all got to do that in 2019 with what was about to happen with 2020. you know it's it's um it is so incredible to think that that may never happen again especially with someone like oprah not in the you know in the near future for sure getting on a cruise ship sounds like not something that i'd want to do um and at the same time what is what i see happening is this space is happening this type of thing is happening this energy is happening online and the more that um facilitators make their uh offerings available and accessible for people in marginalized communities and let people know that they are welcome and also bring in other facilitators from bipart communities and trans communities and lgbt communities though that that will draw and does draw people in to know that they're in a place where they're welcome and i feel like that same energy is being duplicated in space sacred spaces online where there are people coming from many different backgrounds and socio economic backgrounds and cultures and these diverse communities are blossoming yeah i so agree and that that has been an amazing thing to witness there have been many gifts and that has been one of them for sure i'm curious you know one of the things that stephen and i talked about a lot especially the beginning of our relationship we've been together uh five years six years this year and stephen is black and we talked a lot about the lack of diversity in this field and of course being with him has opened my eyes more to things that i wasn't previously sensitive to or or as aware of as i am now we live and love together and so i've really loved seeing that over the especially over the last year or so i think there is uh an enormous rise around inclusion not just of of race but like you said the socio-economic side of it and i love the internet because of how free it can be and how you can fund free work so how has that been for you kind of going through this last couple of years what it what are you noticing perhaps in some of the people who previously weren't able to access this work or weren't accessing this work i'm curious have you noticed or heard any kind of key feedback from them or anything that seems to be happening in those communities who perhaps are just finding it for the first time yeah i mean i think that for me i've always tried to uh offer scholarships and make things as accessible as possible starting back in 2001 with having a donation-based studio but location was always the issue right so if you can't get to los angeles you're you're not going to be able to do it now even if it is you know going to be on scholarship or or funded some way and so the internet what i noticed immediately because i was in i was leaving costa rica in february coming back to la and kind of watching what was happening in wuhan china and thinking to myself this is going to make its way here and i'm at this festival with 10 000 people so maybe i should have a mask on and when i got back to la um somehow i don't know intuitively i was prepared to have a virtual space so i had a virtual 21-day meditation class that i had already taught once and had been recorded and when we got the the notice for the lockdown there was just something that said open a space for free so that people can be in community and people can have a practice that's going to last them for a couple of weeks while this is happening and you know i thought okay there's going to be you know 100 people or something that will join and maybe 50 people if i'm lucky we'll will come and we'll have a nice community a thousand people signed up for this and what i realized when we all gathered together the energy was so potent and there were people that i had met in all different places around the world that had gathered in or friends of friends or people who i didn't even know people from instagram that i had never met and so the accessibility of the internet um [Music] and it to me it's changed it's been a game changer because this last year has allowed people to where you know space was a barrier family and child care and leaving home all those things were a barrier have been able to do teacher trainings and learn and i'm including myself in that because there are teachers in north carolina that i've wanted to study with for a couple of years and suddenly now they're offering online and i was able to complete like three programs with daniel four who's one of my favorite teachers that i never would have been able to meet because i was that just because of how his programs run and where when he does them so we've been able to expand our learning yeah and and our connection as well because it's funny tracy i know that you were in la but i i know you're now in new mexico and uh good choice by the way thank you and um and i remember we used to when we started this show we were always in studio and we actually started taping our shows eight months ahead of when we actually got around to starting the launch so i remember we had this shock moment of oh we can't we can't film in studio anymore because it just won't work now but there was this gift of oh great we can we can now all those people on the list that we were hoping hey if you ever come through la or you know we'd written to them if ever you're teaching suddenly it was like okay well let's just let's just do what everyone else is doing which is go zoom so um you know even this conversation with us today would not necessarily have been able to take place so it's an interesting thing i mean i think talking about the internet as a whole is a massive topic and there are definitely i do understand when people are hard on the internet or i'm questioning certain aspects of it and i can have those conversations but for me as someone who has used and learned from the internet for the last kind of 20 years really but especially over this last decade or so when i've both been learning from it and using it but also working through it it really is an incredible connection tool in that way 100 imagine if this had happened 25 years ago this pandemic without the internet without being able to facetime your family that you haven't seen for a year so yes i definitely can say there's definitely things about the internet that need to be reformed but uh this has been a gift if we use technology in a way that is for expanding consciousness awareness creating connection and community and the upliftment of people and ourselves and and working towards the liberation of all sentient beings it's a gift yeah it just depends on how we use it it's so true and i think for anyone who's a creator or a creative of any kind i love the ability that you can just you know do an instructional video on youtube about how to fix your dishwasher because you know how to do it and you can put it out there and someone probably like me is going to go how do i fix my dishwasher and find the video and it you know it's it's it's right there i remember being super excited about the internet in the early 2000s when at that time i was walking towards music and being a singer songwriter and it was like oh i don't need to wait for the record company who may or may not give me a deal or as some of my friends had experienced could give me a really hard time and keep my work if they don't want to release it so there is something about being an empowered creator in these times that is completely unique in our history um and i think that's amazing so speaking of empowered you have the empowered life circle tell us a little bit about that well the empowered life circle is a community and i really love to create containers because i feel like when we're doing some of these deep transformational practices we need containers of support so empowered life circle is really this container of support where we meet monthly for yoga nidra practices live meditations movement meditation um just you know moon circles and it's really just kind of if i was going to say that i have a virtual studio this is the virtual place i i bring in guests um to come and talk about dreams and herbal tonics and all the things that i use in my own life to create that ritual that is my life and inspiration and um it's a community of love and uh expansion fantastic fantastic so as we're really at the end of our conversation today i'm curious to ask you what are you either curious about or hopeful for or creating in the next 12 months um well i am hopeful to live in a world that is just for everyone [Music] um i'm creating uh a new book and possibly a film so we'll see and what was the last one i i lost the thread curious about hopeful for or creating a curious that's what i lost so curious about dreams um you know there's a teacher by the name of charlie morley who is a lucid dream teacher and i did i was lucky enough to do a couple of workshops with him over the beginning of the pandemic another example of i would never have made it to london to go study with him um and so right now i'm in the midst of a dream sadness a dream practice where i'm recording my dreams for 40 40 days um and so i'm really and i'm at the beginning of that so i'm in this place of really kind of delving into my dreams right now beautiful beautiful and can we know anything about the book in the movie or is that still under wraps um well the book is the original book that i had started with before i went on the path of yoga nidra and so it's more of a memoir practice kind of self-empowerment journey and the movie is you know i've been inspired by what's happened with the indigenous people here and they're reclaiming of the water rights in new mexico and so i'm in the process of just getting information to um see what's there so it's in the very early stages of me considering doing something around that oh that's great and that just intuitively i feel that will get a lot of support thank you definitely a story that needs to rise to the surface in an even bigger way than it has so that's exciting thank you yeah great well tracy this has been even though we've been talking and conversing this has been radiant rest for me your beautiful presence so thank you so much for for what you do in the world and for coming here to share with us about what you're doing and i know many people will be checking out what you're doing uh and also just hopefully inspired through this conversation for their own work in the world thank you thank you thank you so much for having me thank you thank you thanks for tuning in everybody and we will see you on the next episode of impact the world and as ever we will put all links to tracy's work and her website in the show notes but tracy the best website for people to go to is traceyoga.com or tracystanley.com um you can go to actually radiantrest.com radioactive.com okay and we'll put all the links in the show notes so thank you everyone and see you next time on impact the world thank you thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of impact the world and if you want to go deeper and more in depth with my work you should check out my members group the portal you can find it at my website lee harrisenergy.com or visit the portal dot world

Channel: LeeHarrisEnergy

Views: 7,033

Keywords: tracee stanley, deep relaxation with tracee stanley, commune courses

Id: yY6kOjqZGCE

Length: 65min 58sec (3958 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021