Coming Back to Love: the podcast

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:00:01] If this is your first time to Coming Back To Love the podcast, welcome. We're so glad you found us. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. Either way, you're not here by accident. I'm your host, Karen Walker Cohn, a wife, a mom, entrepreneur, friend and dreamer who is ready to step into more of who I am created to be. I am committed to personal transformation for global impact. Now, this podcast may be very different from others. Our guests don't come with a topic or agenda. They come open and ready to receive and deliver the message that's meant for you. You will also notice our podcast is not overly produced. This is on purpose. Our hope is we will inspire you to step into who you're created to be, regardless of how it may look. Take inspired action on that book, business, relationship, and yes, podcast or whatever it is on your heart. In my experience, my mess usually ends up being my message. I encourage you to approach our time today with a beginner's mindset and with openness to receive what is meant for you. In this episode, I'm speaking with Jody Lemieux, wife, mom of three, and business owner. Jody is transforming brand cultures by integrating spiritual perspectives. In November 2022, Jody launched the Spiritually Aligned CEO podcast with the vision of having conversations with entrepreneurs, helping them recognize their businesses actually having a deeper impact on a global level so they can reconnect with their purpose and vision of their lives and business. Coming Back To Love the podcast is in part here today because of Jody's work. I am so thankful to her, and I was not going to miss out on the opportunity for her to speak to you. Let's get into it.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:02:02] Hi, Jody. I'm so glad you're here.

Jody Lemieux: [00:02:06] Hi, Karen. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:02:09] Absolutely, absolutely. You just you had to be on our first season. And I'm so glad that you're here. Even with technical difficulties, we made it through, and we got it onto this podcast, so I'm glad you're here. So the way I love to start this is I'll have a question for you. So I'll ask you to center or, you know, whatever that is for you, if that's a couple deep breaths. I'll ask you a question and I just want to hear what's on your mind. You open to that?

Jody Lemieux: [00:02:44] All right, I'm ready.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:02:45] All right, so just take a couple of deep breaths. Jody, when you hear the title of this podcast, Coming Back To Love: Inspiring Stories on Shifting Perspectives, what experience from your life comes to mind?

Jody Lemieux: [00:03:03] Such a beautiful question. And the reason it's a beautiful question is because we're made from love. We are love. And from my personal experience, I have recognized patterns in my life where I have covered my love. I've covered my love to hide, to protect. And those forms of protection and patterns of hiding kept me small. Kept me in a place of not only not receiving love, but also not giving love. So coming back to love for me is really coming back home. It's coming to a place of recognizing who I am and celebrating the love that comes through me so I can express it and also receive it.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:04:05] Wow. You started talking and it was everything for me not to just start crying. Like I get, I feel so emotional just hearing you share that. I can relate to that so deeply. And I'm still in the process, as I think we all are, of discovering those patterns. And some of those patterns that, I mean discovering, I think maybe some new ones that okay, I haven't, I didn't realize that that was showing up. And for me, patterns that consistently show up. Even as I'm in this healing journey, and that seems to be a theme with my podcast recording so far. That's really interesting. I would love to hear your take, Jody, on on those patterns that keep resurfacing even, even though we're in the work.

Jody Lemieux: [00:05:16] That's a beautiful awareness of patterns that come back. Or let me say it this way, patterns that repeat. And when they first appeared for me, in my awareness at the time that I first recognized the patterns, I experienced what I knew at the time as pain. And the more I experienced those patterns, I was able to step into a place of witnessing those patterns rather than holding those patterns. So if I can say it this way, there are times when my emotions, I allow my emotions to hold on to me rather than me holding them. And what I mean by that is that I've allowed my emotions to take place of who I am rather than who I am witnessing those emotions. Because if I can place them in a place of witnessing them then I have the ability and the willingness to be their leader rather than their follower. And when I made that shift in perception of having them on me, in me, and claiming that I am pain. That for me was a false belief, a falseness about myself. Because if I truly believe that I'm a soul having a human experience, pain is a human construct. And so if I were to come from the perception and perspective of being a soul, witnessing these emotions and feelings, there's no right or wrong way to do this. There's no right or wrong way to have an emotion or to feel emotion. This is just in the way that I've understood patterns in my life. When I first started experiencing them, I followed the patterns that I was taught to either explode into my emotion and let them go wild and take over, and I would follow them for hours and sometimes days. And I wasn't being my true authentic self in those times. I was allowing the identity of those feelings to be me in that moment. And so coming from the perspective of the witness or of these, allowing them to come up, observe them, and look at them, and I'm the leader of them, and I can direct them in a healthy, loving way.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:08:04] Yeah. Oh, I love that. Do you remember the moment when you had that click, when that perspective, like, what were you doing? You know, I know it can be a weird question, but there's times in my life where like, oh, that light bulb came on and I remember exactly what I was doing. I'm hoping that this is one of those times for you.

Jody Lemieux: [00:08:29] Yes, absolutely. And it was a pattern in conversation, first with my spouse that I recognized it. There was a pattern in the way we were talking, and in that pattern, I had a wave of what I call a wave of recognition. Like I said, I was witnessing this, witnessing it from a neutral position rather than a place of judgment. That was my perception before.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:08:58] Wow.

Jody Lemieux: [00:08:59] I would judge myself. I would be judging these feelings and saying, okay, why are you crying? Why are you doing this? Like, hold yourself together, like don't cry. Crying is a sense of relief that there's growth on the other side of crying. It's a release. And so instead of placing those judgments on myself for experiencing it, I witnessed this feeling come up, I felt it come up in my body because I, you know, when you're in the experience, that's what it is. You're in an experience. Your body has a response as well. So I felt either the flush of tears come up or my heart start racing and I'm like, okay, what is this? Oh, this is that pattern again. And so it was almost as if I was talking to myself.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:09:51] Wow.

Jody Lemieux: [00:09:51] As this pattern came up and saying, you are not that feeling. You're the one witnessing this feeling. Do you choose in this moment to continue to identify that? Or do you choose to say, okay, I choose something else. I choose a different response to this because if I continue to identify as that feeling and emotion, I'm going to continue to get the same response of that feeling of not being heard, because that's what came through for me, a feeling of not being heard.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:10:29] Right.

Jody Lemieux: [00:10:30] And so why is this pattern of not being heard coming up again? Like we said, the repeating patterns. And this level of awareness that now I'm witnessing this not feeling heard, okay, Jody. Yes, you are heard. And so I was placing it in a place of acceptance. Full acceptance and ownership of that feeling.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:10:56] Yeah, you are hitting some powerful words for me right now. The first one, the first thing that came to my mind is those spouses. Our spouses have the ability to challenge us. You know, I'm not going to use the word challenge. Give us so many opportunities. And I love that, I love that with my spouse I have opportunities to reflect, change, grow, or I don't even know if change is one of them. I feel it's like become more of who I am. And then the next word that popped up for me that you said is choice. What a powerful word. And I don't know that we give it its rightful place. But just speaking about choice. Oh, how powerful. There was a time in my life where I felt like life just happened to me. Like it just, I didn't realize that I had the choice, which is the power - I kind of use those two interchangeably - I had choice and I could shift my life. I had power over my life. And so thank you for that. It's like a constant reminder. The choice is the power. And how did you, well, like I heard you said, okay, like, do I continue to choose this pattern which didn't seem to be serving you any longer? And I want to get,for our listeners, I want you to be very aware that we make choices only because they serve us. In some way, shape, or form. And then it gets to a point where this choice was no longer serving you in that moment, and maybe onwards too, but it definitely wasn't serving you in the moment. And how did you make a different choice? And it's like, okay, this is what I want to see and this is what's going to serve me. How did that like, and it happened like that it seems like.

Jody Lemieux: [00:13:24] In an instant. Yes, it was in an instant because I recognized and I love that word that you said, recognizing is a key word. Choice is a key word. And choosing something different in that choice moment, because I could have chosen to stay the same. I chose differently because I want different in my life. And if I want different in my life, I'm the one to make that change. No one else.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:13:59] Oh, that's so powerful. So powerful.

Jody Lemieux: [00:14:04] And I'll tell you this type of living and lifestyle that I've chosen is so freeing. It's liberating. Because, like I said, I no longer identify as these feelings, as this pain. I now identify as love, the highest form of expression in love. And I'm really understanding what it means to love. And a healthy growth mindset, it's really not even a mindset, it's a being. It's a state.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:14:39] Yes, yes. Isn't that true? Like you're not human doings. We're human beings.

Jody Lemieux: [00:14:46] That's right.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:14:46] Beingness is everything. And even when you were saying that, Jody, I feel like I'm hearing every single, like I'm hearing so many of my listeners going, but how do you do that, Jody? How do you do that? And I don't know if you all heard it multiple times, the word choice. You made a choice to do that. You made a choice, actually, to be that. You know, and you chose differently based on the beingness, that's what I'm hearing, based on the beingness that you wanted.

Jody Lemieux: [00:15:25] Yes.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:15:26] Yeah I love that so much. Oh my gosh. This, like, I feel like, I think are we done this podcast? Oh my gosh this is so good. Um. Jody, what would you love to leave our listeners with?

Jody Lemieux: [00:15:44] I would love to leave the listeners with a word of love. Love yourself deeply enough to know that you are enough in all that you are. See yourself from the perception, the perspective of love. And it's the love that comes from within.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:16:14] I love that. Thank you so, so much. What hit me in that last statement is that it is from within. I don't know how many years, I don't know if you're in the same boat, Jody, but how many years that I was looking for everything outside of me to fulfill that thing inside of me. And I realize now that I've been on this journey for about ten years, that everything I wanted was already in me.

Jody Lemieux: [00:16:51] Yes. And what's even more, what resonates with me so much, what you're saying here is I believe that to be true for myself in that state, in that state of victimhood helplessness, someone please come rescue me. That place of life's happening to me. And when I shifted the perception of life's happening for me, that I'm making these choices, wow, that in itself was a life changer for me. Taking responsibility for the life that I had created and forgiving myself. Forgiving myself for not knowing in that moment what I was being, doing, experiencing until there was this glimmer, this voice, this subtlety that came through that said you are enough. You are more than enough. And the other subtlety voice that came through for me was knowing that, just the knowingness of that I am enough, that I'm more than enough. It gave me a sense of ownership of my life. That if I dig deep in, if I go in and really listen to that soul, what I call soul voice, that soul vibration voice, the answers, as you said, are already there. It's quieting my thoughts and emotions in order to hear. Really listen.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:18:50] Thank you so much, Jody. I appreciate our conversations on and off screen. I really appreciate you being here, and I'm so looking forward to just talking with you even more. Outside of this, I just, I love how we connect and I love your podcast. I, you know, for those of you that don't know, Jody has connected me. She's definitely one of the resources that I was able to tap into and able to leverage to start the Coming Back To Love podcast, a podcast that has been on my heart for the last four years. And speaking with this beautiful soul, it was like, you know what? I can do this, I can do this. It doesn't have to be hard, right? It doesn't have to be hard, and it doesn't have to look a certain way. It can look the way it looks. And if you receive something from this podcast today, I invite you to subscribe. I invite you to check out Jody's podcast, The Spiritually Aligned CEO. And I just, I'm so grateful for you.

Jody Lemieux: [00:20:01] Thank you so much.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:20:02] Thank you for everything that you've been to me and this Coming Back To Love, the podcast.

Jody Lemieux: [00:20:09] You're welcome.

Karen Walker Cohn: [00:20:11] Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Coming Back To Love, the podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard, please make sure to click the link in the description to take you to the full video episode on our YouTube channel. If you absolutely love what we're about, please follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review. For more inspiration and resources, visit my website at TheKLWProjectGroup.com, where you'll find all the ways you can connect with me. I would love to hear your suggestions for topics, questions, and future guests you'd like to hear from to support your coming back to love journey. In the meantime, have a inspiring rest of your day.