Hello, and welcome to the Free Your Heart podcast. I'm your host and heart healer, Ashley Mondor. And I am here to serve as your guide while bringing you nourishing conversations, wisdom, and channeled messages that support your healing journey to wholeness and unconditional love. It's my hope that this podcast and the story shared with you inspire you, expand you, and align you to the profound understanding of not only who you are, but for what's possible for you as you heal and open your heart. And with that said, I invite you to get comfortable, unclench your jaw and release any tension you're holding in your body. Now take a deep breath in with love for yourself and for this heart-to-heart connection. And when you're ready, let's dive in.
I had a heart to heart session yesterday. That was incredible. I shared space with a very powerful bad-ass of a man, and he dropped some wisdom that I wanted to bring to this channel. For context, Heart to Heart sessions with me are basically 60-minute one-on-one session focused on you sharing what pain is in your heart, what you're navigating, while I listen with love, openness, and without judgment.
Then, I transmute that energy that your heart is holding so you shift back into love, balance, and coherence. A lot of people don't know what coherence is. It's basically the state where your parasympathetic nervous system is in rest. You're focused. You're calm. You're able to respond instead of being in the sympathetic state where it's reactive: it's anger, it's fight, flight, fawn, freeze.
That is your nervous system basically in a nutshell. When we're in coherence, Our heartbeats, basically as a smooth sine wave, instead of sharp, jagged, rapid beats. I just wanted to give you that background. So, this session with this man, truly the stories he had to share were incredible. Part of the reason why he is working with me is because he’s navigating, finding out who he really is because he had lost himself in his marriage.
They're in the process of divorce and he's been married to basically a narcissist. And I can say that because when he took himself to therapy, the therapist within the first 12-minutes said, “Oh yeah, the behavior you're talking about, how you feel, how she's reacting? She's a narcissist. It helped him have a label, even though it took him months and months to actually wrap his head around, like, that's this woman and this is her mental state.
But, once he got there, he felt relieved, and like he had some answers around her behavior. So, I wonder if you've ever been in this situation? He had to be walking on eggshells. He was told he was never doing anything. Like, even parking a car or driving correctly! He totally lost his voice and his power.
It was completely stripped away from him. He lost his sense of identity and who he truly is. He also always was changing his behaviors to appease his wife out of fear for her reactions. He also navigated a lot of confusion because he was being gaslit. I wanted to give you this from Robin Stern, a licensed psychoanalyst and the associate director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Robin shares, “Gaslighting refers to the act of undermining another person's reality by denying facts, the environment around them, or their feelings. Targets of gaslighting are manipulated into turning against their cognitive emotions, and who they fundamentally are as people.
This is a use of control. It's a cognitive strategy for self-regulation and co-regulation, it's a way to have power.” Outside of this therapist that's been supporting him, he found himself to me. Which, I'm so grateful for any time people find me and allow me to serve and support them, to help their hearts, and to help them heal - it's the gift of my lifetime. I eat, sleep, and breathe this. I love this! People ask me, “How can you go to the depths with people? Like, how can you actually love this work? All you're doing is hearing about pain, wounding, and trauma.” Oh my God, I live for this. I want everyone to find work that sets their soul on fire.
For me, that's this work. So that aside, last night after our session, him and his wife were going to have a discussion and walk through the joys of splitting their businesses, their assets, and their life apart. And, he shared this one piece of wisdom with me that moved me. He said, “I just have to remember she's not the version of the woman I have in my head. She'll never be her.”
Can we sit with that for a moment? I just have to remember she's not the version of the woman I have in my head. She'll never be her. I don't know about you, but for me, I have completely fallen for the potential of someone, the possibility, or the hope for who they could become.
Rather than who they were with me in the present moment. I clutched, I grasped, I sunk my claws into a version who wasn't real, he didn't exist. The question for you, if you're navigating something similar, who is the real person you wake up next to? Who are they flaws and all? Who are they really? And, how do you feel about that true version of them?
Can you love and respect them for who they are today? Knowing they may never change. Because, truly, they deserve that don't they? To be loved for who they really are? And, not for the version you hold in your head. If you're holding hope for possibility, truly, I ask you to be honest with yourself. What is different about them that maybe you had hoped? Can you actually love who they are?
And, this is also the invitation for you to really reflect on yourself. Are you in this relationship being the true, real, honest version of who you really are, or are you wearing masks? Where do you shrink in your relationship? Where do you withhold your truth or your opinion? Do you let other people's emotions and their needs take precedence over yours?
How is your communication with your partner or your spouse? Where are your needs not being met? And, how can you share that with an open heart?
Do you and your partner have the same vision for your relationship? Do you have goals, hopes, and dreams together? Do you feel safe with them? Do you feel loved and cherished by them? If not, again, how can you communicate this? If you do have things that you'd like to work on, or you'd like to surface with your partner?
What I teach in Devotion is that we ask for consent. We always ask for consent before we bring things up that could potentially be triggering before we have harder, deeper conversations that may make someone feel uncomfortable or “called out”. And we also don't want to emotionally dump on people when they're not ready.
So when we ask for consent in a certain way, we give them the opportunity to process, and to ask themselves, “Am I ready to have this conversation with an open and grounded heart?” As an example, you can ask your partner, “Hey, ___ (their name). Would you have the energy, space, and time to connect with me today on ___?
If not, would you have time this week?” If they say no, then you ask them when would be a good time. If they give you a yes, then you honor that and you honor when they have the spaciousness and the energy to sit with you in a grounded space in order to communicate about your love and your relationship.
If they say no and they are unwilling to sit with you ever, how does that actually support your relationship and the growth of you moving forward? I would assume that because you have this partner and they love you, they're going to want to communicate with you. If they don't want to communicate, you have to ask yourself, is this relationship right for me?
I say this knowing that I've watched and held a lot of people's hands through divorce from marriages that were 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 plus years long. There comes a point where if your partner doesn't want to grow with you, and you ask them, and you ask them for what you want and need, and you create the space from an open heart and they don't want that…
You have to ask yourself, “Is this what I deserve? Is this what I actually want?” Sometimes, the answer is hard, but when you give yourself the opportunity to navigate it, to choose you and to speak up for what you want and need, to no longer shrink in your relationship, to share your opinions, to take care of yourself, to really love yourself and you have a partner wants to walk with you.
That's what I want for everyone! I want everyone to be so madly, profoundly, deeply in love with themselves. And, having a partner who celebrates the true version of you as you do with them, this is how we thrive. This is how we change the world, especially in relationships, especially when we model what's possible for other people, but it starts with us.
It starts with us de-conditioning what we've seen from our parents or lack thereof. It starts with us doing things that stretch us or expand us, or ask us to grow to. It starts with you. So, I thought that this episode would be helpful in making you an even better lover. Like how sexy is that? Oh my God, how sexy it is to be an even better lover because you choose to love you?!
I hope this episode supports your heart, my friend, and I hope that you have a beautiful day. Thank you for being with me.
If you loved this episode, would you do me a favor and leave me a quick rating? Or could you share this episode with someone you love? This is super, super helpful for me on my mission to opening more hearts across the world and connecting people back to the truth of their souls.
Thank you so much for being with me.
