Hello, I’m Angela, and I’m going live. I am doing my Living Well today show like this today because Murphy decided to show up and I’m having some technical difficulties with Zoom. So here I am, and I decided to actually go on my page as opposed to the Living Well today page because for folks who know me, more people are on my personal page than know about the new page yet. So here we are. So welcome. So every week I do a live show and sometimes I’ll interview someone, have a wonderful creative guest, an entrepreneur, an innovator, a leader of some kind. And I’ve been doing this for a few months now, sometimes I will actually invite people on to simply share their story and do a little q and a with me about where they’re at in their journey. And then sometimes I’ll do what I’m doing today, which is some helpful insights about living well and living well today, living in the present moment, staying in our own trust, our own truth, fortifying our own voice in the world and in the finding purpose in the work that we do and in the communities that we serve.

(01:37)
So today is about head and heart alignment. What does that mean? It sounds all fluffy, right? But what does it really mean? Sometimes business owners call it trusting their gut. Sometimes people will say, yeah, it was intuition. I just had a gut feeling. Well. So the idea behind that is what you’re doing in that very moment is you’re trusting your heart really is. What it comes down to is you’re trusting your heart and your heart will never lie. The head is what gets in the way. The head is where your ego rests in terms of your protection, your self survival, your survival skills. But if you want to shift, you want to shift out of that survival mode, surviving into thriving, into a thriving mode where life feels easier, work gets easier and flows more easily. Blessings, good fortune, good luck, money, all of the love, all of those things flow more readily in your direction.

(03:00)
Then learning to find that trust within your heart is vitally essential. So when we say align your head with your heart so that all good things can flow to you, does that mean that there won’t be ups and downs? No, that’s not what that means is welcome to planet Earth. What it means is that when there is a down curve, that you have the trust and the resilience that you’ve worked over time to cultivate in yourself, you’ve had that muscle built up so that when those down slopes happen, and invariably they will welcome to planet Earth when that happens, that you have the fortitude to not only see your way through it, but see your way through it in a really good way as best as possible. So if someone said to me, well, gee, does that mean I’m going to be perfect every time there’s a misstep?

(04:10)
Does that mean that I’m not going to hurt or that I’m not going to get hurt by someone else? No, it doesn’t make you bulletproof, but what it does is helps you move through those difficult times more easily and faster. So if a doctor said to me, would you like, that’s why we go get a Z-Pak or whatever. Would you like to move through this rough time faster and with greater ease? Yeah, sign me up. So that’s what it means when we talk about head and heart, aligning your head with your heart, letting life work for you and in your favor and getting your thoughts out of the way.

(04:55)
It doesn’t mean that your thoughts don’t mean anything. Your thoughts create things. They absolutely are essential. So are the words that you use to tell your story, but it does mean that you are walking in a faith in a sense that you trust your heart, you trust your own heart, you trust your emotion center. This is where all the emotion sits, all the feels. This is where the love sits. This is where the compassion sits. So I know for me, people say, oh yeah, I have done, I’ve worked hard with music for the mission and some different things through the years, but I’ve even shared with my own coach. Compassion is sometimes hard for me, and I know that may seem anyone who watches this now or in the future may seem like a disconnect, but it does. It’s almost as though I had a pretty rough growing up who didn’t right in one way or another.

(06:03)
And so you learn self survival. You learn those survival skills. You learn to toughen up to thicken your skin. I also was in sales for a very long time. So again, thicken your skin, toughen up, get tough, stiff upper lip, all those things, put your armor on. And I think through that, which was absolutely necessary at the time for my own survival, really, I think through that somehow, some someway that toughness, that fortitude and that strength and that, I don’t want to hear it, just pick yourself up, get up, move on. That kind of attitude, it has served me well at times. And then just like two sides of the coin, like everything else in life, sometimes the other side of the coin is that it can get in your way. It can slow you down. And for me, compassion, that’s something I’m really working on, cultivating more and more of, more and more empathy through that patience.

(07:10)
I think that’s kind of part and parcel with it, right? So to do that, you’ve got to focus on your heart. That’s where compassion sits. That is where patience sits. It’s not up here, it’s not up here. So when I say aligning the head with the heart, it’s simply making your thoughts more conscious, understanding that the thoughts that you think and the words that you speak, tell a story and design your life. It is not outside forces that are creating your life. They have effect on your life. They’re not creating it. Let’s think about it for a second. Do you really want to give all of your power over to the rest of the world? No. You want that seed, that seed of control, that seed of power, your own dominion to rest with you. So the other side of that coin is I have to take responsibility for my own heart and my own thoughts and the words that I speak, and we can all get in that place of we’re so focused, we know we need to get something done.

(08:31)
Maybe we’re up against a deadline. Maybe money is not flowing in. Seems like more money’s flowing out maybe right than is coming in and we’ve all been there. So when that happens, hi David. Hi Dave. I just saw you come in. Hi, a merry Christmas. So when you feel literally you feel your chest, you feel like, okay, I got to bear down and I got to get tough, and I got to put my shoulder into it, and I go, that’s actually the opposite of what’s effective. What is really, well, I shouldn’t say that can be effective. Putting your shoulder into something can be effective. I’ve done enough of it. I know anyone who’s had some kind of level of success financially or otherwise in this life on planet Earth has put their shoulder into it at one point or another, or maybe all the time, but it comes at a price.

(09:30)
And what I’m here to say is, aligning your head with your heart is about maybe it’s time to stop paying the price. Just a thought. Maybe you can have the things that you want by actually easing up and easing into it. Does that make sense? And what, in order to do that, you got to get out of your head space. You absolutely got to get out of your head space because your head will get in the way. All that old muscle memory, all those old thoughts, the old stories, the things that have worked before are actually they help you in that moment, but over time, they can build a pattern that you never learn how to do it a different way, maybe an easier way. So I’m here to say that I talk about often meditation and I talk about getting quiet, and I have clients who say, oh, I’m too busy.

(10:33)
I can’t meditate. Are you crazy? I can’t sit still that long. And that’s my mom. My mom says the same thing. Oh my goodness, I couldn’t sit that long to meditate. Are you kidding me? Meanwhile, there are a lot of health issues. There are a lot of things that she’s fighting against a lot of the time, and it’s about rowing your boat downstream, that old song, row, row, row your boat, gently down, gently, gently, gently downstream. So that’s aligning your head and your heart. It’s saying maybe instead of swimming upstream to try and be a hero and prove something to myself and others, prove my worthiness, prove my value, prove that I’m right. Whatever story you might be telling yourself, then maybe I’ll go the easier route. Maybe I’ll just kind of sink into my heart and trust it. Trust my gut, trust my heart. It’s the same thing. And how many business owners have trusted their gut, trusted their heart. They’ll call it their gut, but it’s really their heart. Have trusted that intuition, have trusted that instinct and said, oh my God. I mean, yeah, that’s what I was riding on. I was riding on instinct. Hi, Kyle, welcome, Merry Christmas. Kyle is a brilliant chef in St. Augustine, so it’s lovely to see you here. Hi.

(12:08)
So trusting your head with your heart is about sinking into that heart space. And if you want to cultivate more trust in yourself in the decisions that you make, the choices that you make in life, if you want to learn to deepen your trust and your compassion and empathy for others and in others, the secret is that the more you trust yourself, the more you’re able to trust others. If you have a mistrust of others, it’s because somewhere within you, there’s some kind of hookup hang up that the trust is not there. So within yourself, maybe you made some bad moves, bad choices, bad relationship decisions, whatever the case may be. And somewhere along there, enough of those things have added up to a lack of trust in yourself. And what I’m here to tell you is that if you can work through that, it’s like pickup sticks.

(13:15)
One stick at a time. If you can work through that and deepen your trust in yourself, the trust that you have another’s deepens, and the people who tend to start showing up in your life more and more are trustworthy people. It’s on. I know it sounds super simple. And for those of us who’ve lived in our heads all our lives, I’ll figure this out. If I think long and hard enough about it, I’ll figure it out for those, I’ll put my hand up to that one. For those of us who have, it seems counterintuitive to say, put your thoughts aside, put your head aside for a bit and sink down lower, sink down into your heart. But as you do, and it’s just a matter of getting quiet and being present. Kyle, I remember Kyle telling me at one point that he is very into foraging and going out into the forest.

(14:16)
And I mean, there’s not a quieter time, a more reflective time than forest bathing. I call it forest bathing. When you’re just walking through the forest and soaking all of that up, all that incredible energy, thousands and thousands of years of energy, you’re soaking it up and that quiet time, that reflection is the perfect time to, and that’s a meditation. It’s a walking meditation. Folks say, I can’t sit still long enough to meditate. Go walking somewhere quiet in nature. That’s a walking meditation. Leave the AirPods out of your ears, turn the phone off, et cetera, and walk and think about feel. I should say, ah. See, feel what it means to you to feel aligned. Your head and your heart feel aligned, and it really means that you agree, you agree with yourself. There’s no incongruence. There’s no hiccup, there’s no like, oh yeah, but there’s no hesitation.

(15:30)
It’s that feeling in the zone. If you hit a great shot on the golf course, if you make a long shot with a basketball and just swish that beautiful sound of swish in the hoop, if you present the nearly most or most perfect meal, it’s that feeling of in the zone where all is going, right. You are in total alignment in that moment. And so when I say align your head with your heart, get yourself quiet, slow it down, use your breath and literally affirm for yourself. Create an intention for yourself. I am balanced. I am in agreement. I am in alignment. My head and my heart want to work together. They don’t want to resist each other. It’s not natural to resist. It’s in the resistance that we create stress and it has impact on our health and wellbeing and our friendships and where we just feel things are out of sync. When you can let the resistance go and you can sink down into your heart and get out of your head, and you can only do that by being present, by getting quiet and realizing that it’s okay to row your boat down the stream down gently, gently, gently, row row, row your boat, gently down the stream, think about all the resistance that’s created when you row in the other direction.

(17:25)
Now, not saying it can’t be effective on some levels, certainly can. We can muscle our way through lots of things, and I’ve learned that better than anybody. But I think there comes a time, as I said, I also dealt a lot with some health stuff, which I’m like, nothing too, too scary. But through acid reflux and things like that, and the impact that all that acid in your system has on you has for my singing voice, it affected my singing. Voice affected what I could eat. It affected. I would have to be super mindful of not laying down after I’d eaten, not eating after a certain time, et cetera. Well, all those things are still good regardless. My voice is all healed now. And there was a period of time where I actually lost my voice, my speaking voice, not due to laryngitis, not due to his sickness or anything else, simply due to the continuous, that acid coming up your esophagus on your vocal cords. I mean, they sit right there.

(18:40)
And that was the point where I was like, okay, something’s got to give of. And I started learning more and more about meditation and getting quiet, learning how to be present. There’s so much power when you’re here, when you’re out in the future somewhere, in some construct, there’s no power there. Future doesn’t exist. It’s literally a construct that we create in our minds. Only the present moment exists, and the past is in the past. That’s gone too. That’s an old story. So living in the present, being here present, how do you do that? You get quiet. You get quiet. It’s as simple as that. And you breathe and you learn to begin to consciously shape your thoughts and the choices that you make around the story that you tell.

(19:41)
And learning through that. My promise to you through that is understanding that you can trust your heart. It will not fail you. The stories you tell yourself about it and people that have maybe come in and out of your lives that hurt your heart, et cetera. Can you have a hurt heart? Of course you can. Of course you can. But it’s making the choice of saying, I trust my heart to guide me. It is the finest guidance system, your feelings and emotions. If you’re feeling angst, anger, fear, frustration, not feeling at all, it is because you are absolutely disconnected from the very thing that helps you get there. So you, I’m going to give you a quick exercise to wrap up. We have just a couple more minutes, but I want to encourage you to go and take a look at my other shows on angela moonen.com.

(20:57)
Maybe grab some of the words of the week. I do a weekly video. I’ll do another one after this about a word of the week. And again, it’s all to do with the stories that you tell have impact, and they shape your life. And you got to take the wheel. You got to be willing to take the wheel of your own brain and be more mindful and be more heartful of the words that you choose and the stories that you tell. Are you going to be a hero or are you going to be a victim?

(21:37)
I have played the victim before. There’s no doubt about it. We all have. But if you’re staying in that place, is that really the quality of life that you want to have while you’re here? So deciding that you’re, use some of those words of the week to help you with, hi Jay. I just saw Jacob in Merry Christmas. Use some of those words of the week. Become more mindful about the words that you choose. If you want more wealth in your life, but you don’t want to pay a heavy price for it because who does? I am away from that 80, 90 hour a week that I did for, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years. I said, that’s too much of a price, the impact that it had on me. Too much of a price to pay. So if you can say, look, life can be easier.

(22:40)
Wealth. I want more wealth than you. The stories that you tell and the words that you choose. You can’t say money is tight and have money, not be it. Just don’t work that way. So it’s not sticking your head in the sand and pretending something isn’t what it is. What it is is reshaping the narrative and saying, I trust that in time, if I can get myself balanced again, that money will start to flow to me again. And this is what I talked about earlier in this segment, was that what it means is that you get through that down slope more easily with less anxiety, and you get through it faster. We’re all going to have the down slopes. Money is going to outflow more than it’s going to inflow.

(23:36)
The learning curve we’re all on is how do we create a more balanced flow in all things, in love, in money, for sure, which essentially, they’re the same things. They’re all rooted in this giving and receiving. This yin and this yang, the flow of life. It’s like the water that comes in and out at the shoreline. Water goes with the flow. It doesn’t mean it never meets any kind of resistance, the rocks in the river, et cetera, et cetera, but it finds a way around it. And what I’m offering you is that aligning your head with your heart and sinking, getting out of your head and trusting your heart, letting your heart lead the way, getting present, making a mindful choice about your money and the story you tell yourself about your money, the people that you surround yourself with. Are you choosing good people? Are you choosing people who tend to tell the bad story all the time? Or are you slowly consciously shifting those people out of your life?

(24:57)
How do you feel? And we’ve all been there. You’re 10 feet tall, you’re walking on sunshine and your partner or a business client or whoever, and or you go to lunch with someone and they’re, they’re way down here. They’re vibrating way down here, and you’re up here 10 feet tall. You have to mindfully fight to pull yourself back up again, right? Because their energy and their words, and that whole posturing is so self-defeating. It SAPs you of all your resource, all your wherewithal, your energy, your light source. It just sucks the life out of you. Well, if you continue to be around that person, if you make a conscious choice of, okay, I know that person is a Debbie Downer. I know they’re going to pull me down, and you still go, well, you’re just setting yourself up to make it that much harder to climb out of it again, right? So don’t do that to yourself. Give yourself the love. Love yourself first enough not to do that to yourself. Right? So my wish for you for this Christmas weekend coming up, and I’m heading to New York, I’m very excited. I make the drive. People think I’m crazy, but I’ve been stranded in far too many an airport, so particularly at the holidays, and I’d like to see my kid this weekend, so I’m going to be hopping in the car tomorrow. It’s about a 20 hour drive, and I’ll be doing my energy exercises before

And during and all of that stuff. I try to go straight on through, but sometimes I’ll pull over in a rest area or something, but I may this time just not make it so hard on myself and row my boat down the stream and stop, maybe see my friend in Winston-Salem or something like that on my way up. But my wish for you is that you are surrounded with resourceful, loving people who lift you up and give you energy. My wish for you is that you open up to the idea that trusting your heart changes your life. My wish for you is that you open up to the new idea that words matter, the words you choose and the story you tell yourself first, and then those around you shapes the quality of your life and your day-to-day experience, and that through meditation, maybe it’s out fishing on the water by yourself. Again, no music, no distractions, just you in nature. Maybe it’s walking in a forest.

(27:50)
Maybe it is kind of the more traditional meditation where you sit and get quiet and maybe have some music. I have got some free guided meditations on my YouTube channel and on my website, you can listen to those. Sometimes guided meditations are a little easier because the monkey brain does get super active while you’re sitting there quiet. And the guiding my voice can kind of keep you centered and let you know it’s okay when the thoughts come through, just kind of let ’em float on by clouds. But meditation allows you to live more present and get out of your head about the future. Get out of your head about the past and, oh, I lost money here. Or, oh, I screwed that relationship up. Or, oh, I lost my home, or I shouldn’t have changed that job. Or, why did I scream at my kid like that?

(28:44)
Whatever it is, whatever all those deflating, defeating stories are, mindfulness and meditation allows you to let go of those realizing they no longer serve you, that the future doesn’t exist, and that the only place you have power to change the experience of how you feel today is right here, right now. That is my wish for you. I wish you a blessed and beautiful Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever you’re celebrating. I get to see my beautiful friend Wendy, who’s celebrating Hanukkah. She celebrates both. I made sure to wrap all her gifts in blue, her Christmas gifts in blue, check both boxes.

(29:33)
So maybe I’ll see some of you when I’m up in New York over the next couple of weeks. I hope I do, and I hope I bring some sunshine warmth with me from Florida. And if I don’t see you, God bless to you, and I’ll see you next week. I’ll do this again. I think I’m just going to do it streaming live every week now instead of recording everything, because Facebook archives, this stuff. Anyway, much love to you. Thanks to those of you, and thanks, Jay. Yeah. Good words to live by. Yeah. Yeah, they are. They are. And that’s their intention. Much love to all of you and your families. Be safe. Count your blessings. Appreciate all that you have.

So Much Love For You,