Ep #355: Thoughts on the Woo

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 355.

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it’s all about real clients, real problems and real coaching. And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Well, hello there, my friends. Today, we’re talking about the woo; the woo-woo, the nonphysical, the energy, the magic. We’re talking about the law of attraction. We’re talking about all the crazy woo-woo stuff.

I get asked this question a lot because I cover a lot of ground in terms of what I teach in my curriculum and I have a lot of associates and colleagues from extreme sides of the life coaching world.

There are a lot of very – what I call – woo-woo people that are involved in the life coaching industry. They’re very into astrology and very into numerology and very into nonphysical spiritual guides and channeling and multiple dimensions and all of that stuff that I love to talk about and love to hear about and love to study and just very interested in.

And then, there’s this other side of that which is very practical, real earth-touching stuff you can prove, evidence-based, practical life coaching approach, which I love talking about too.

And so, many times, people will talk to me about, “Well, what do you think creates the results you have in your life?” And sometimes, I will talk about all the woo-woo stuff and all of the law of attraction stuff and how I feel like I have the energies and the spiritual connections and all of those things that help me to create what I want in my life.

But I’m also really interested in talking about action and goals and practical things. And I feel like right in the middle of both of those is the wonderful world of emotions. And that, I think, is my favorite topic. We were actually just having a conversation about this the other day and we were talking about the difference between emotions and intuition and sensations and how do you know which is which? How do you interpret them in a way that serves you?

And so, I kind of wanted to explain my theory on this to all of my podcast listeners because I think that, sometimes, we question things. But we don’t backup enough before we start questioning. And we start criticizing things that we don’t understand.

And so, I just wanted to share my approach with the woo, with the nonphysical things in the world and intuition and gut feelings and all of the kind of law of attraction stuff that I talk about in a way that’s really practical.

So, if you listen to what I teach about emotions, I teach it in a very practical way. I teach that our emotions are vibrations in our body caused by thoughts in our mind. And I put it in a Model that is very practical and easy to use and is very straightforward.

I have a lot of very conservative minded non-woo-woo believing people that use the Model all the time because it’s very practical to them. And they’re not interested in what I have to say about my study of the law of attraction and my study of energy and what I think about intuition and what I think about what happens when we die and all that. They just want to study the Model. And I love that. That’s great.

And the other friends that I have that are on the other extreme want to question why we’re even looking into the mind, “Why are we studying cognition? We should just stay in the present moment and create presence and allow the universe to take us where it will. And we just need to accept the present moment and stop trying to manipulate or create anything.”

And my theory on this, my approach on this, lands me right in the middle of both of these theories. And here is what I want to say. I believe that we have come to the planet, we have been born here on the planet on purpose.

I believe that the way the world is, is on purpose. I do not think that we should be living in heaven right now on Earth. I do not believe that the world is meant to have no contrast and that everyone should be kind and peaceful and loving all of the time. I do not believe that.

And I do not believe the goal is for us to personally find our way to love, peace, kindness all the time. When I have friends that have discovered a sense of enlightenment or they’ve discovered a sense of peace and presence that pulls them out of the world as we know it and takes them into a world of peace and acceptance, I think they’re missing half of the experience of being alive.

And when I have friends that are only focused on the practicalities of life and the tactical things in life and aren’t interested in the emotional or the spiritual part of life, I feel like they’re missing half of it.

My personal belief system is that the point of my life, the point of being on this planet is to play with both of them and to incorporate them and let them do the dance together. So, for example, to study spirituality and energy and attraction and vibration and understand how I can utilize that in a practical way to be able to create what I want in this world.

And that is one of the reasons why I think I’ve had such extraordinary success so quickly and doing exactly what I want to do. I’m not locked into either one of them. I haven’t gotten lost in the spiritual, meditative, attraction world. But I also haven’t gotten lost in the hustle-bustle creation world.

I’ve been able to balance them in my life in a way that has served, I think, my highest good. And that middle lane, that lane that I ride in is the emotional lane. It’s where it’s incorporating both of the sides of the, I think, the spectrum, and being open to all of it.

One of my superpowers as a coach is I am open to all belief systems. I am open to whatever anyone wants to believe in their life. And I’m open to understanding it and receiving it and even believing it myself.

So, when someone comes to me with a theory about the world or a theory about their life or a theory about spirituality or a theory about religion, I’m very open to it. I want to hear about it. I want to try it on. I want to see if it resonates with me.

I was talking to a friend of mine who doesn’t believe in any kind of afterlife. He just thinks, when you die, that’s just it and you’re just dead. And I’m open to this idea, of course. And one of the things that I wanted to talk to him about was why do we choose to believe different theories? Why do we choose to believe different stories about what happens when we die?

Is it because we’ve been taught that when we were younger? Is it because it gives us a sense of comfort? Is it because it asks us to live our life in a different way so we can then show up for the afterlife differently?

I just think that questioning why we choose to believe what we believe and asking, does that serve us in our life? Do you feel as if the religion – and I’m not talking about organized religion. I’m talking about the set of beliefs you’ve chosen to believe – does the religion you’ve adopted serve you in the life you want to create? Does it hold you to the highest standard of what you want?

And the way that I think about my life, especially within the past 10 years, has served my life at the highest level. It’s required me to become more of the person that I want to be. And it’s given me access to all of the spiritual woo-woo crazy awesome juicy stuff of that world and also the practical, down to earth, step by step hustle world too.

It’s given me access to all of the positive, peaceful, kind, wonderful emotions, but hasn’t rejected any of the negative contrasting emotions that make the other emotions possible. And by having this balance between the woo and the non-woo things, I have had and am having a pretty spectacular life.

And so, when people ask me, do you believe in the law of attraction? My answer is absolutely yes. I love listening to Abraham. I loved the movie The Secret. I am all about the law of attracting and attracting like to like.

I’m all about the idea of deliberate intent with your thinking. I’m all about vibrational energy and its ability to attract like to like. But I use it in a very practical way that makes more sense to me than just creating a vision board, so to speak. I actually integrate it into my worldly understanding of how to get things done. And by utilizing both of those things, I’m able to create at a much faster rate than if I were to do one individually.

I’m going to give you an example. I used to listen a lot to Abraham. I used to listen to a lot of their tapes, Esther and Jerry Hicks Channeling Abraham. And I used to listen to it all the time. And they would talk about how important it is to access the emotion that you want to feel in the achieving of the thing that you’re going to achieve.

And this is something that I teach regularly now and it’s something that I live. And so one of the things that I used to do during this time was I would imagine people winning the lottery and winning, you know, tens of millions of dollars, and what they felt like and what it was like for them to experience receiving that much money. And I would practice being in their shoes. I would practice the experience of that much money coming into my space.

Now, from a very practical perspective, if I was on the other side of my brain in the practical sense, that would seem like a waste of time. Thinking about other people winning the lottery is not going to produce anything good in my life. It’s just daydreaming. It’s not useful. You’re not producing anything. You’re not making offers. You’re not creating value. What is the point?

But from my woo perspective, from the law of attraction perspective, from the vibrational perspective, it created a feeling of wellbeing, a feeling of abundance, a feeling of richness that I was practicing and feeling and aligning myself to.

From a practical standpoint, what that did for me was generate enough positive emotion to take action from. It gave me motivation. It gave me positive energy that I was then able to take and transfer into my life as action and as productivity.

So, yes, I was aligned vibrationally to tens of millions of dollars. And do I think that that helped me create tens of millions of dollars? Yes. But it also had a very practical application in that the way that I felt, the motivation that came from doing that exercise was also very practical in that I started taking action and building my business and putting myself out there and being willing to fail.

I’ve had experiences where I’ve seen colors in my mind’s eye. I’ve had energetic experience where I’ve felt certain types of energy and actually seen certain types of energy. I’ve had meditative experiences where I’ve felt like I was crossing over into different dimensions. I’ve had what people have told me are spirit guides communicating to me. I’ve experienced what I believe to be God communicating to me.

And so many times, my spiritual experiences have crossed over into different religions and into different spiritual experiences. And I have just been open to all of them in knowing that my human brain probably isn’t able to process or understand them at the level that they exist. And so, it likes to label them with certain names that feel familiar and practical, like God, like spirit guide, like vibrational energy, like intuition, like future insight, all of these experiences.

And even if it comes down to, like, identifying with my zodiac sign and my experience of my horoscope and all of those things, I think sometimes people like to disregard them as not useful or even damaging or even negative. But here’s how I’ve approached all of it in my own life, is that I love the feeling of being open and I love the feeling and thought, the thought and feeling of anything that seems to help me create positive emotion and positive action in my life.

And so, when I stay open to all of the possibilities of creation and how things are created and the mind and the vibrational aspects of that and being able to utilize what was taught to me through the law of attraction in order to create and attract to myself the things that I most want, I have an amazing life. I enjoy it so much.

So, questioning and criticizing and evaluating and testing and trying to prove things wrong doesn’t seem like a good use of my time. The best use of my time is trying things. And if they work, utilizing them. Not trying to convince other people of them. Not trying to prove that the spiritual world exists or doesn’t exist. But just trying on different ways of looking at the world, experiencing the world, vibrating through the world, taking action in the world, new ideas and approaches, whether they be practical or woo-woo doesn’t matter.

You don’t have to make it mean something about your identity because you believe in numerology or because you believe in psychics. I have a really good friend who has a numerologist who has completely changed her life. She has helped her see her life in a way that has made it more effective, has made her feel better, has made her life make sense to her.

Now, if you don’t believe in numerology, you may say, “Well, that’s not real.” But is her emotional success, is her emotional experience real? Yes. And if we say, “Well there is this truth out there in the world, there is this reality out there in the world, and if you’re not living within that reality, you’re doing it wrong, then you have to step back and question who decides what reality is? Who decides what is real? Who decides what is true?

And when we start getting into conflict or we start getting into arguments about those sorts of things, I don’t think it serves us. Is your experience with God, is your experience with the spiritual? Is your experience with this form of education or spirituality, is it serving you in your life to become who you want to be? Is it helping you evolve? Is it helping you create the results that you want? I think those are the only important questions.

For me, it’s very important to have the philosophy that we are human beings and we are spiritual beings. The point isn’t to become more human. And the point isn’t to become more spiritual. The point is to be what we are.

We’re not supposed to take hallucinogenic drugs, in my opinion, and be more aligned with the spiritual world more of the time. That is not a more altruistic life. I don’t believe that we should meditate all day every day and not go out there and live our lives. I also don’t believe that we should get lost in the human world and miss out on the opportunity to question magic and mysticism and intuition and spirituality. I think it’s all so rich and deep and fantastic.

And when you put them together and you have that dance with them, you see them play together, you see how the law of attraction and changing your vibration actually creates cash in your bank account and you’re able to practically create that in a very practical way, that’s when magic, quote unquote, becomes real.

And someone can come in and offer you a very practical explanation for ho you created that. And that’s fine. But I personally love believing in the magic of being alive. I love seeing coincidences happen. I love attracting people into my life and seeing their light and understanding their messages and learning about what their spiritual experience is and how that has affected them.

I want to know all about the woo. I want to know all about the crazy experiences that people have had that are unexplainable, the miracles that have happened in people’s lives. I want to know all of them. And then, I also want to know what people have done in a practical way to create the lives that they want.

So, what are my thoughts on the woo? My thoughts are, the woo is spectacular. I love the woo-woo. I love the energy, the spirituality, all of it. I don’t want to get lost in it. I don’t want to give up my humanness for it. I don’t want to overidentify with it.

And it’s the same with the huma practicality. I don’t want to be too tactical, too practical, too human. I want to be both. I want to be her on this planet as a spiritual being having a human experience. I want to experience the negative that life has to offer, the contrast that life has to offer, because I believe that’s part of the way we evolve.

And I do think the purpose of my life is to help evolve our humanness, our human race, to help evolve us by evolving myself personally. And that includes both aspects, the spiritual, the woo, and the practical and the human.

I want to invite you to be open to both. Don’t reject our human ways. Don’t reject the conflict that is the world. Don’t reject the negativity that is part of being alive. And also, don’t reject the gorgeous, magic, miraculous spiritual life that’s available to each and every one of us.

Let’s integrate them. Let’s bring them together. Let’s be open to all of them and see how much that opens up and expands our hearts and our lives, and maybe most importantly the results that we get to create on this planet because we understand both sides of the coin.

Those are my thoughts on the woo, my friends. I’ll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

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