Celebrate Every Step

Matt Cundill  0:01  
You may also like a show about the things you may also like things like celebrate every step. What happens when pain and grief alchemize, sometimes you get purpose. Elena Gourley took the pain and grief in her life and developed her purpose of helping others to do the same, whether it's hypnotherapy, human design, meditation or past life regressions. Elena has a way of carrying you through, and this is the point where I say, I've got some questions. Would you be described as an old soul,

Alena Gourley  0:42  
I could see that I feel like I've been a grown up since I was born, so probably, but I'm not the like wise. I'm not a six two in human design. Those are the old souls. I'm a five one, so I'm still pretty like of how to work through my ego and all that kind of stuff.

Matt Cundill  0:59  
At what age did you know you were different than everyone else? I

Alena Gourley  1:03  
feel like I felt that from a very early age. I always felt different than everybody. I never felt like I belonged. I was always kind of the third wheel. I never had my own best friend. I was always the extra, and it seemed like everybody else had that best friend or that group, and I kind of went between groups. I have lots of people that I talked to and spent time with, but it was never that one person and that always felt different than everybody else. I also noticed that I felt things a lot more than others, and seemed very stressed out, even at a very young age. Now, looking back at the time, I didn't know the word stress, but now looking back, I felt like I was always worried about the world and other people that didn't seem like what the other kids were doing.

Matt Cundill  1:54  
What did you learn from human design and learning about yourself through human design?

Alena Gourley  1:59  
Yeah, great question. So learning human design in my almost 40s changed everything for me, because I'm a quad split, which means that I am meant to have four different groups of friends and four aspects of my personality, and the five one profile that I mentioned at the beginning is meant to be more of the leader, which means that you aren't really part of the the herd or the group. You are meant to be thinking differently, seeing things differently than others, and advancing either people's souls, advancing evolution, advancing the tribe in some sort of way.

Matt Cundill  2:43  
Tell me about being shaped by pain and grief, because we're all shaped in different ways through that, but you have been shaped in a particular way. And how was that? Yeah,

Alena Gourley  2:54  
I just released my grief memoir. So in writing that I looked back over all of the people that I had loved and lost. So the book starts with my son, who died in 2021 at birth, and when that happened, I had already been writing a different book, and realized that I needed to focus on grief, because I have a different perspective on it. I have went through many losses and some very traumatic losses, so looking back over my lifetime, I realized that each person I loved and lost brought me a different lesson, or multiple lessons for my soul's journey. It taught me the different blessings in my life and how either through the way that they live their life or their death, or a combination of the two, it really shaped how I view the world, how I viewed myself, how I viewed my purpose in all of that. So yeah, I think that most of what makes me who I am has been shaped through those different losses and the aftermath of that, because it's not just the loss. You know, my son didn't die in December of 2021 and then that was it. It's been years of figuring out how to embrace it, work with it, and hopefully come out a better person on the other side and help others through that too. And going back 17 years, when my brother died the same thing. It was a traumatic loss, and that he died by suicide. And so it wasn't just his death at age 20, but it was the aftermath of that, and what that looked like for my family, for the community, his friends, and just myself as a mental health professional, having first hand experience of somebody who died by suicide, it gave me a very different perspective on how to talk to people about their own suicidal ideation, their own wishes to not be here, and then also helping people who have lost others in that particular death.

Matt Cundill  4:56  
So one of the things I never really noticed about grief. Life is how it shapes just about everything definitely shapes you. For instance, losing your son, you've described that as a near death experience. Personally, as a part of you lose this world, which I thought, Oh, yes, okay, now I get that. We don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. Yeah,

Alena Gourley  5:18  
I feel like when he died. So it was a very ended up at the end, being a very traumatic birth, and then his ultimate death. And I feel like that could have been an exit point for myself as well. And so in my study and belief, I think that we have different options for exit points, meaning our deaths. And I feel like that could have been one for me. And there's been others now looking back and examining my life where, oh, I could have exited at this point or and I kept going, and then with that feeling like one of those times when I could have died as well, it really did feel like a near death experience for me, because I went so deep and dark, and then coming back out of them.

Matt Cundill  6:04  
One of the things I love about you and your show is how you sort of put me onto, okay, there's that, but also the people that you're living with and spending your day with every day bring you this sort of like joy and sort of like the other side, and they teach you things, right? So tell me about, like, the parts of your family and what and what they bring you,

Alena Gourley  6:24  
yeah. So I really do move through life. I was actually just kind of thinking about this and thinking, oh, I need to update my podcast description, because what I think my life boils down to is a genuine curiosity about everyone. So I just flew to Arizona, spent a couple days with some really good friends, went to the Tucson gem show. But what I noticed is that the way that I move through the world is I look people in the eyes. I genuinely connect with them, whether they're the person in the seat beside me on the plane or they're the person selling me the Moroccan gemstones that I just love. I want to know about them. I want to know what brought them to that moment, what lights them up, what makes them happy, what are their struggles? And I realized that I do that in my day to day life, with my family, with my friends, but also the larger, my colleagues, my clients, and then just these quote, unquote, random strangers that happened across my path. So I love the inner workings of people's minds and emotions, and really want to help them feel and function their best. But I think that comes from that curiosity. Okay, so here's where we are today. What got you to this point? And then where do you want to be heading? Moving forward.

Matt Cundill  7:43  
I know it's really sort of cliche to say, just breathe, but breathing and meditation is something that you sort of brought into yourself, like you don't just say, okay, human design, this is who I am. And you know, blah, blah, blah, you actually practice this in just about everything that you do. So you've got many different portions to your life where you're practicing different things and just keeping it on the straight and narrow, which I just, I just love about you, but tell me about the breathing and meditation portion.

Alena Gourley  8:07  
Yeah, breath is so vital, and it seems like, of course, we breathe, but most of us are breathing with the top third of our lungs, which leads to more anxiety, less oxygen intake. And we really need to be taking those nice deep breaths, which I'm actually going to get tattooed. I decided finally what I want my hand tattoo to be, and it's going to be breathe. And my son used to say beep breaths, because he had a little bit of a speech issue, and so I'm going to use his handwriting, because when we're moving through life, we tend to get into that shallow breathing, that rushed, harried and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. But taking that moment to take a nice deep breath, whether it's in the midst of the chaos or in the midst of meditation, does bring everything down a notch. It slows our mind. It slows our spiraling thoughts. It allows our body to settle into a place of peace and presence, instead of just moving, rushing and all of those kinds of things that have become our norm, but really are not very healthy for us.

Matt Cundill  9:22  
What can someone learn about journaling?

Alena Gourley  9:26  
Ah, journaling. So I have a love hate relationship with journaling. I actually do a lot of talk to text journaling, because I don't like to sit still. So as I'm walking, as I'm driving, I will do talking it out, because I do think that there is a real value in saying things out loud. There is a value in writing things down. So with journaling, it kind of clears out the noise. So I always say we kind of get in our own ways, and when we write it out, we can kind of see on paper where. For being irrational, so to say and really start to be able to lay it out in a way that makes it more logical, makes more sense. Also, journaling can get us into our subconscious, which is a favorite place of mine, when we go into hypnosis, when we're in that dream state, when we're kind of in the in between states, between waking and sleeping, that's the subconscious, and journaling can also get us to that place if we do it in a more meditative way. So it's very powerful for shifting and transforming our thoughts into what we actually want to be thinking, because our thoughts aren't the truth, they're just what we're thinking in that moment.

Matt Cundill  10:37  
Well, they could be worse than that. They could be conspiracy theories about ourselves? Yes,

Alena Gourley  10:42  
absolutely, they could be the stories that somebody else convinced us about ourselves. They can be the stories that we've convinced ourselves of that are our faults and our misgivings, but they're really just outside forces our conditioning that have made us believe those things to be true, and they're just not.

Matt Cundill  11:00  
What do you know about past lives? Well, past lives. So some people are like, Nah, it's not a thing. And then some people like myself go, I was somewhere, or I'll meet someone. And I think I believe that we were somewhere. And you know, sometimes it can be delivered in dreams, when our minds are running on no filters.

Alena Gourley  11:22  
Yeah, past lives are interesting because there is a I still feel like there's a stigma around it, even though I live it every day, I forget that there are people that I go, Oh no, no, I don't believe that, but what I've come to believe so 17 years ago was when I first heard about them and found a training to go and learn about past life regression. So over those 17 years, I've been able to witness so many other people's past lives and my own. And at this point to me, of course, this is we have one soul, but we have many journeys of that soul. It would just be like in this lifetime, if I said, Okay, this was it. Oh, boy, did I mess up along the way. And so thinking about the fact that, okay, we get to try again, and we get to try again and learn and evolve and be all of these different multi faceted aspects of ourselves, then I just believe that that happens over many lifetimes instead of one single lifetime. And I what I get to witness when people go back to other lifetimes is how that lifetime informed this one. So whether they are continuing a life lesson, such as loss of a child, so I write about that in the book, where I had a past life where I lost two children, my husband in this lifetime was my same husband, but we kind of, I won't say we failed, but we definitely pulled away from each other, pulled away from the community, withered away and didn't live our life after our children's death. In that lifetime, this lifetime, we've had another opportunity to learn more about it, to go deeper. And instead of pulling away from each other, we really turned towards each other, really embraced the community and allowed them to support us through this loss in this lifetime. But there's just so many abandonment relationship issues, believing in yourself. Those can all be reasons that people come to me to work on, and it can be current life things, but it can be also be past life things that they've carried over.

Mary Anne Ivison (Voiceover)  13:36  
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Matt Cundill  13:51  
Is it possible that in a past life, I went to war, left a great love behind and didn't return,

Alena Gourley  14:00  
and then I think what happens is, in this lifetime, you meet that person or that soul again, and it doesn't have to just be romantic, it could be as a friend, it could be as a sibling, but you have that soul knowing and feeling, and if it is romantic, then you're getting that, quote, unquote, another shot at it to see if it could really be something in this lifetime. Did that happen for you?

Matt Cundill  14:22  
Oh, yeah, yeah, and you're a Clinical Hypnotherapist. So I've got questions, because I grew up in the 70s where I thought hypnotherapy was casting a spell on somebody. I also thought that, you know, quicksand would be something that we would need to worry about a little bit more, and whirlpools, you know, just taking your boat out and encountering a whirlpool. But with hypnotherapy, and this is, I've seen a little bit of this come up on some true crime shows that I've been watching, where it does get used, I feel like, is it really about accessing parts of the brain that we're refusing to access? In our waking life?

Alena Gourley  15:02  
Yeah, so I was a, I'm a mental health therapist by degree in training, and realized that so much of our psyche lives below the surface. So consciously, we can be saying something, thinking, something, living a certain way, but it is really informed by the subconscious, by those old stories, by those old beliefs, the things that people said to us when we were little, the things we felt about ourselves when we were little. I mean using that, the friends as an example, where I always feel like people are going to leave me so I feel like I don't ever get too attached to anybody, because it's going all the way back to my childhood friendship seems very fleeting. So be for a period of time, but then they wouldn't be my friend anymore, and that has carried over. I'm 43 years old, and still I'm like, Oh, I met this person, but I'm sure they'll be leaving me soon. So it's a wound that happened way back, because obviously it doesn't feel good to lose a friend, and it carries over. And so with the clinical hypnotherapy, we're going below the surface. We're getting into that subconscious to heal that wound. Okay, so these friends didn't leave, they were for a period of time in your life, or maybe they come in and out of your lifetime. But it doesn't mean anything about me and who I am as a person. It's just the role that they played and my life and the role that I played in their lifetime. And it doesn't mean that I'm not worthy or not good enough to have friends. And so the hypnotherapy is controversial with crime and things like that, because the clinician has to be very careful about not planting information. So for instance, the way that I do the past life regression is it's very open ended. So I'm not saying, Okay, tell me. I can't even think of an example off the top of

Matt Cundill  16:56  
my head. But why you think you were a soldier in a past life? Yes,

Alena Gourley  16:59  
exactly. I say, Okay, step through that doorway and you tell me about what you're experiencing. Are you in nature? Are there structures? Are you male or female or something else, and just moving through that as open ended questions, and not feeding that information to people? And there's definitely been instances where it's come that information has probably been fed to the the subject, but I I'm not doing it for that. It is really to heal. It's really to gain clarity and insight and expand our awareness and bring the subconscious to the conscious so that it is no longer in the shadows and can harm us by being hidden away.

Matt Cundill  17:45  
Okay, so how does most of your work? How can it help shape behavioral changes that people need to make?

Alena Gourley  17:53  
Yeah, great question. So most of us are functioning in a very conscious Well, this is what's right in front of me. This is what I'm thinking. This is truth. This is reality. And when we go below the surface, we see the root of it. So if somebody presents with anxiety, it's usually because there are things that have happened in their life that have brought them anxiety, and then they didn't know what to do with it. So if they were a child and their parent dies, and then they always have this fear that they are going to die or that the people around them are going to die, but they don't consciously put that together. So when we bring that to the surface, we give them the chance to really express, feel, acknowledge their grief and actually move through it, instead of pushing it back down or tucking it away in the body. Then it gives them the chance to move through life, being more accepting and aware of the things that have happened, but not hiding from it, not pushing it away, and really moving through it. Does that make sense?

Matt Cundill  18:54  
It does. What did you learn by writing a book? Woof? I

Alena Gourley  18:58  
learned so much about myself. I learned about the deeper layers of the wounds that I carry, because to put out a very raw and heartfelt book talking about people leaving you or coming in and out of your life, I'm like, oh, okay, so am I gonna lose all of the friends that I do have? Is my community going to be like, we don't know about her anymore, even clients, because I talk about some very emotional things in there. I'm very real and honest. And you know, can they trust me as an authority on mental health when I've had my own mental health struggles? So, you know, as I moved through it over the last three years, it allowed me to really look at my grief for what it was, what I needed to do for myself, what I needed to do for my family, what I needed to do to move into living my very best life. So I talk about death of self in the book where I look at the old stories that I held on to and what I wanted to let go of, what I wanted to hold on to, what I wanted to let go of, what I. Wanted my life to look like, how I wanted to feel about myself, and so the book gave me the opportunity to really explore that in depth and go back. I go all the way back to my sister's death. My mother also had a stillbirth when I was four. I was four. She was born in 85 so going all the way back to that young age, and then working forward again. And so it really gave me a chance to examine how all of those pieces and parts of my life shaped me throughout the years, and kind of how I want to move forward for the next part of my life.

Matt Cundill  20:37  
You talked about community. I know you got a newsletter, I know you've got a podcast, and now you're thinking about writing a book. How's that going to affect the community? Tell me about the community. Yeah.

Alena Gourley  20:49  
So I have, oh my gosh, I have an amazing group of colleagues. I put on an expo every year, and I bring in the best of the best. So in my metaphysical life, so I have my clinical life. I'm a metaphysical life, and there's a lot of overlap, but there are some separate parts. And so put on this expo where it's taro readers and Reiki and shamans and rune readers and palm readers and past life and plant medicines and herbs and all kinds of things like that. And so I just realize that I know the absolute best people who are trying to perfect their crafts, whatever those might be, and really support each other through that. And I feel so lucky that I know so many amazing people. That's kind of how the podcast started. Because I was like, I know all these cool people, I want to share them with the world. And then my clients are so amazing. They bring me such joy. I love walking with them on their journey, whether it's through their intuitive development or whether it's through them building their own business or their own mental health struggles, anxiety, depression, grief, whatever that might be. But I get to be at the center of, and I won't even say the center. I get to be a part of these amazing groups of people who really are trying to live life in a way that serves them, serves their family and serves their community. And I just feel so lucky that I get to know so many incredible people in all these different capacities. So

Matt Cundill  22:27  
all the parts that people need to connect with you are going to be in the show notes of this episode. So that's a newsletter. That's the podcast that you're doing, which comes out every two weeks. We'll give a connection link to the book. Is there anything else you would like to put in there to let people know how to connect with you.

Alena Gourley  22:43  
You know, I'm on Instagram, Facebook as well, and I share a lot of content, but also just fun life things too. I need to go share some things from my trips. I love to travel. So sharing these different places with people, I think, is something that brings me joy, because I think not everybody gets to travel like I do, but showing them that there's a wider world out there is so important sometimes, because it is different for people to see it through my eyes versus just you know somebody that they don't know. But yeah, I love to connect with people. I'd love to hear what's going on with them in their life. And yep, there's ever anything I can help them with too.

Matt Cundill  23:23  
Thanks so much for doing this. Yeah, thanks for having me on my thanks to Elena for joining me on the show. She can be reached through her website. Celebrate every step.com all the connection points are also on our episode page at You may also like.net including a link to buy a copy of her book. This episode was produced by Evan serminsky and edited by Taylor MacLean, and it's built with love by everyone at the sound off media company you.