
"If you’re self-denigrating, it’s worse than self-criticism because it leads to rapid and severe erosion of your self-confidence and your self-esteem."
Patricia Moreno
Patricia Moreno has been training, mentoring, and educating people all over the world for over 30 years. Her struggles with weight (she weighed in at 212 pound in 8th grade), eating disorders, and body image led her to create IntenSati – a multidisciplinary study of fitness, martial arts, nutrition, dance, and spiritual practice, which is now taught by thousands of instructors all over the world.
I met Patricia at a speaking event and quickly discovered that she views fitness as a “spiritual” practice beyond just the physical. In other words, you’ve got to be fit both inside and out. And since beating cancer, I’ve realized that our HEALTH is not merely important, it needs to be our #1 priority, otherwise, we won’t have the energy to optimize and enjoy our other priorities.
Patricia’s work has been acclaimed by international experts and featured in publications such as Shape, Vogue, and O: The Oprah Magazine, and I’m thrilled to have her on the podcast to share her story and introduce you to the power of “Spiritual Fitness.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Why Patricia sees her marriage as her greatest achievement – and how writing letters to her ideal partner helped her open her heart and find them.
- Patricia’s journey from struggling with weight and body image as a child and a fitness professional – and the moments that ultimately led her to the concepts behind IntenSati and spiritual fitness.
- How to use incantations and affirmations to rewrite the self-concepts holding you back, interrupt your neural pathways, and create the personality traits to allow you to live the life you’ve always wanted.
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
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[INTRODUCTION]
Hal: Goal achievers, what’s going on? Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast. This is your friend and your host, Hal Elrod, and today’s episode is brought to you by the Best Year Ever Blueprint. That is the Best Year Ever Blueprint Live Experience, two to three days in San Diego, sunny San Diego, California this December 7th through 9th, 2018. This will be our fourth annual. I think that’s our fourth. It’s our fourth or our fifth. I think it’s our fourth. Anyway, but it’s going to be great. So, the Best Year Ever Blueprint if you go to BestYearEverLive.com, tickets are on sale and it really is unlike any other event that I’ve ever been to, probably that you’ve ever been to either and the large part of that is my good friend and business partner, John Berghoff, who’s one of the best facilitators of events in the world and what he does is all around the science of experiential learning. So, unlike most events where you show up, you take notes for a few days and you listen to great speakers and get great information which by the way you could google and get for free or buy a book on Amazon for $20 and get the same information, the speakers share from stage, and you go home with five, ten pages of notes and you’re supposed to figure out how to fit that into your life and actually implement those notes.
And if you’re like me, I’m looking at my shelf where I’ve got binders and binders full of notes from events that I’ve gone to that I don’t know – most of them I probably haven’t had time or made time to go back and read. And so, the difference between the Best Year Ever Live Experience is that anything that you learn, we implement it real-time. So, for example, when we teach you the value of masterminding and then we teach you how to mastermind then we actually have you break into groups and mastermind. A few years ago we talked about the value of adding value to the lives of other people and how we can do it in little ways from just making people feel good and adding value in that way or bigger ways and then we actually sent our entire 300, 400-person event, our attendees into the city in groups and teams with their smartphones to add value to the lives of people in the community real-time captured on video then they brought back the stories of what happened. It was amazing.
So, anyway there’s a lot that we do but the whole premise of it, of course, is planning your best year ever. That’s one thing we all have in common is that one year ends, another begins, and most of us have never been taught a process of how do you close out one year and extract the lessons and the maximum value and the growth that you’ve experienced and really internalize that so that you can apply it and then plan and approach to your new year and literally make it the best year of your life financially, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, you name it, and that is not only just teaching you the process but actually guiding you through it so that when you at the last day of the event you leave with a blueprint, you leave with your year planned out, with your accountability team, your support team, you name it, you’re set and ready to go.
So, anyway, that’s enough about that. Go to BestYearEverLive.com and I want to get to our guest today who actually I was at a live event. I was speaking at a live event a few months ago and I met our guest for the first time and I first watched her on stage. I watched her do what she does and speaking of experiential learning, she’s a master at that. She’s a master. In fact, we’re trying to figure out how to get her to Best Year Ever Blueprint this year so hopefully, you’ll meet her in person. But Patricia Moreno has been training, mentoring, and educating people all over the world for over 30 years and it started out as an effort to end of her own struggles with her weight, eating disorders, and body image issues and she created the IntenSati method and hopefully, I’m pronouncing that’s right. She can correct me if I said it wrong but it’s a life-transforming workout which combines her expertise in many disciplines. It’s fitness, dance, martial arts, yoga, nutrition, meditation, and spiritual practices. However, as she rose up the ranks as a star, star status in the fitness industry, Patricia found herself trapped in a vicious cycle of body consciousness resorting to extreme exercise and dieting, doing these things behind the scenes to maintain her appearance and she thought, “Here I am, preaching exercise and diet and it’s not working for me.”
And so, now thousands of instructors have been trained with Patricia to learn and teach the IntenSati method and her revolutionary approach has elevated her to the realm of internationally renowned fitness and wellness experts, earning a claim from celebrities in the media, attention from O, the Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Shape, The Today Show, Good Morning America, you name it, and I can tell you on a personal note that the last year of my life battling cancer has really taught me that health must be our number one priority and because whatever you might think is your number one priority, for me, family is what rises to the top but what I realized is that without health, we don’t get to enjoy any of our other priorities and I’ve realized that my number one priority is to stay cancer-free for the rest of my life so that I can be there for my children and be with my wife and be there as a leader and so on and so forth. So, today’s topic we’re going to dive into what Patricia calls spiritual fitness. It’s a topic that is new to me. I’m excited to share it with you and to learn more about it myself and I’m ready to bring her on.
[INTERVIEW]
Hal: Patricia, welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast.
Patricia: Wow. I am so excited to be here and I just want to say congratulations, first off the top of the bat, of being cancer free now. I can’t even imagine the challenge and the inspiration that you’ve been to so many of us and it’s really, really an honor to be here.
Hal: Awesome. Thank you. I receive that. I appreciate that. So, Patricia, you’ve accomplished a lot and as I mentioned, I saw you on stage and you do experiential learning. We’re not just listening to you talk. We’re up, we’re moving, we’re sweating, we’re dancing. It was awesome. It was just a great experience. But I want to know, you’ve accomplished all these amazing goals. You’re a world-renowned fitness expert. You’ve been on all these media publications. What has been your most significant goal in your life and how did you accomplish it? And we can start big picture and then we can kind of drill down if needed.
Patricia: Yeah. Definitely. You sent over that question yesterday so I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I have to say that the number one goal that I’ve achieved that I’m like so proud of and if I didn’t achieve it in this lifetime would feel like a big regret to me is my marriage and I say that as an accomplished goal because I really struggled and I was at a point, it was later in my – I was already nearing 40 when I decided that I really wanted to have a child and it felt like to me that this was one of the things that I wasn’t going to leave this earth without experiencing and then I thought to myself, “Well, would I do it alone or is marriage a must?” Because the clock is ticking and all of these things you have to start taking into account and I just said to myself, “You know, I’m just going to put the stake in the ground. The dream is not alone. The dream is not just with anybody. The dream is with really the person that I believe will be my partner for the rest of my life,” and I had been someone who had been like a serial dater, not only just dating but dating that overlap. Obviously, I’m not proud of that.
Hal: You know, I feel connected to you now because in my 20s I was a serial dater too.
Patricia: Yeah. Like I would get out of one by starting another one and it was and it really was a difficult time because I was in a relationship for seven years and then it took five years for me to basically get a date and so, by the time this five years was coming around, let’s say year four, I was freaking out. The whole conversation,” I’m too old. Nobody loves me anymore. what am I going to do? This is never going to work,” like the real, real fear was setting in. I had a life coach. I was trying to – I teach classes where I was teaching classes on a regular basis then and I even announced in my class, “Anybody who sets me up with a partner, I will give you coaching for the rest of my life.” Do you know that not one person ventured to set me up which made me feel even worse? I was like, “Not even my trusted students believe I’m worthy of this,” and I’m telling you I was going down. I went on this on a website to go and get a date basically. It was like Match.com and turned out I started dating somebody for a while and it turned out that not only was this guy a serial dater. He was dating 20 other people at the same time which was not even a joke.
I mean, that was heartbreaking but I couldn’t have been lower and I teach how to achieve your goals, I teach about spirituality, I teach about all these things and I’m like I finally had the wherewithal to sit down with myself and say, “Okay. This is not working,” and the one thing that I tried which I think was really the key to having me turn things around was instead of going out and trying to achieve this goal like, “Okay. Somebody, please set me up. Tell your friends I’m single,” going on Match.com or any of these other things was I changed the narrative in my mind and I started to sit down every day. I go to Starbucks before my class and I would sit down and I started to write a letter to this person and instead of saying, “I hope this person finds me or why am I not being picked and does anybody love me?” any of those kinds of versions which were very strong in my mind at the time I started to say, “I know you’re looking for me. I know you’re looking for me. Don’t worry. I promise you we will find each other. There’s nothing that can keep us apart. I’m looking for you. I just want you to know I’m looking for you,” and then I would write, “We’re going to have kids. We’re going to have an amazing. We’ll laugh together,” and I just started to write all of the things that I really wanted to do with this person but also kind of in a way that had me think I was calming this person down because there was someone on the other side who felt is desperate and is sad that it wasn’t going to work out as I was.
And what’s really interesting is I was doing this, and I’m married to a woman, and she started taking my class and what’s super interesting is the date that she came to take my class, a lot of people have been telling her, “Go take this class. You’ll really love it. It will be really good for you.” She was breaking up with her person and she lives, she had a home in New Jersey which overlooks New York City and she took a photo of that day of the skyline and literally set an intention, “May I please fall in love. I have everything.” She’s a dentist. “I have a good career.” She just bought a beautiful apartment. “I have everything. I just want love. Please help me achieve this love,” and then she read every night a book kind of a prayer or mantra from The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. You know that book?
Hal: Yeah. I do.
Patricia: So, very old-time book.
Hal: Yeah. Old. Yeah sure.
Patricia: Like old-school but every night she would read this prayer. It was exactly similar to what I was doing. I love you. I lead where you follow. I know we’ll find each other. And she came to my class that day and we have never met and as she was waiting in class and I was about to come in, I came into class and I took a big red marker and I wrote on the mirror because I always start a class with a theme, with a message and I wrote a big red heart and I said, “If you’re looking for love, don’t give up. Don’t get discouraged.” This is what I always hear from a personal place and I drew a big red heart and I said, “Today is really about opening yourself up to miracles like this happening, blah blah blah blah blah,” but what I didn’t know was the photo that she had taken from her terrace at the skyline of New York City when she looked at the photo there was this, and I wish I could give you guys for the show notes for you to see, but there is this like it looks like a Photoshopped red heart on the building and it’s so stunning that it was our wedding invitation because it was so powerful. It really looked like it had been added graphically on there and so when I do the heart, she said, “Oh my gosh. She’s the one. She’s the one.”
So, she had the instantaneous knowing she was like she didn’t even – she showed me the photo afterwards but then she went home and like cleaned up her life and then came back and started asking me out but I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say yes over and over and over and I said no, forget it and no, no, no. And in my mind, I kept saying, “You know, XYZ, she’s good, check, check, check, check,” but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel it. There was nothing. It was like a cold feeling like on paper this woman’s amazing. She’s beautiful. She has everything. If I was going to date her, she’d be great. So, then we sat down. She asked me out. We were sitting down in Central Park and we’re just talking and she said, “Would you go out with me?” And I actually said no. And then we started talking about our past relationships and as I’m telling her the story of my past relationship I can feel this like avalanche of tears coming behind me and I’m biting the inside of my cheeks trying not to cry and I never experienced anything quite so intense. I left her. I went home and barely got into my apartment on the upper west side when I just like went to the floor and cried for two hours, two hours of not tears, like heaving like expelling grief that was so intense and so deep that when I got through it, I actually ended up calling my ex and I realized that what the problem was, was I had been so heartbroken from my ex because she had cheated on me and I closed down.
And so, it was absolutely closed-hearted. I was scared to be hurt again. And when I saw when Callen who’s my wife now asked me that and I said no, I went home and cried, the next day I called her and I was driving to the Hamptons, go teach in the Hamptons and I invited her to come with me. By the time we got to the Hamptons, we were up on a deck and drinking a glass of champagne, it wasn’t three seconds that I looked over to her and I literally gasped like there was a physical gasp and I looked at her and I said, “Oh my God, it’s you?” And she said, “Yes. I’ve been trying to get your attention all this time.”
Hal: No way.
Patricia: I am not joking.
Hal: Patricia, this is like the greatest love story ever. This is amazing.
Patricia: Hal, it was such a lesson to me as to when your heart is closed, it’s right in front of you. You can’t see it and the world can be one way. When you’re stuck in fear or self-doubt or worry, the lens is different and you just can’t see what would be in alignment with what you love unless you’re in a state of love and if anybody would know me, the last thing I would ever say to anybody that I wanted to date was something like, “Oh my God, it’s you?” I am such a chicken. They have to like bang down my door. It has to be a totally safe situation for me to date somebody but it was so overwhelming and so shocking and so beautiful that it just to me is the greatest evidence of what’s possible in our lives and the importance of opening your heart and having the courage to live an open-hearted life.
Hal: Yeah. I’m writing a book right now called The Miracle Equation and that’s one of the things we talk about is like what blocks us from miracles? It’s like that you can describe that as a miracle. I define a miracle not as like some religious act or walking on water or whatever. I define it as that we set an intention, we actually put forth effort. We maintain faith that it’s possible and as we do that, we start to move in the direction or start just attract the things into our lives. I’ve heard like Darren Hardy said the same thing that he wrote a letter and like you described his ideal woman, the woman he wanted to marry, and his wife is exactly the same height, same hair, same everything. There’s so much merit to it I think that we often like I’m skeptical, the law for extraction, I don’t know, vision, I don’t know but then I’ve experienced it in my life and you see it in your life and I think it’s hard to deny that. So, that’s beautiful. That’s really cool.
Patricia: It is. Yeah. It is and we went on to go try having kids and there were just so many miracles around that because there were so many, many struggles that was not an easy road for us whatsoever and we have three girls and there is like we have twins and one of the things that was the biggest miracle and this is by the time we decided to have children, I was no longer, it was passed. I had passed my time. I just wasn’t able to, but my wife is a little bit younger so I carried her egg and then she had twins and my wife is from Brazil but she’s blonde and very light-skinned and I’m darker skinned and darker hair and Mexican descent and when we originally, we’re going to have our first baby we were going to use a donor that looked like me with her egg. She would look like a little biracial kind of child. But we forgot to change the sperm when we actually decided that it was going to be her egg, very funny, and then it turned out that the child, the children that she birthed actually look like me and it’s mind-blowing. It’s mind-blowing and I just think of that all the time and I just think the way that life can turn out when you’re kind of going with the flow of life as opposed to trying to control it or force it is much better than you could ever imagine.
Hal: Yeah. I completely agree. Your story, I was reading your story earlier today and it’s fascinating. You weighed, if I’m correct, it’s 130 pounds in third grade. I think you got even bigger than that as you got older. It was up 212 pounds. Is that right as a child?
Patricia: Yeah.
Hal: So, yeah, so share a little bit about your story of how you got fit, when you got fit, and then I’d love to get into spiritual fitness and what that’s all about, what it means to be spiritually fit.
Patricia: Awesome. Awesome. So, I grew up in Northern California, one of 11 kids. I’m the 9th child of 11 kids and when I was growing up, my mom came from the culture that how you look it matters and especially coming from Mexico. This is very much patriarchal society as you can imagine and women are supposed to look a certain way and blah, blah, blah. So, that was her fear. If you don’t look a certain way, you’ll have a hard time in life and so she saw me get chubbier and I had older sisters to that really, really struggled with their weight. I got put on a diet. I remember this moment so vividly and both my parents were in the bathroom and they put me on the scale and when they saw the number, I could see the fear in them like there was a real fear and I always say that was when I was indoctrinated into diet culture and that’s when I got the spell of unworthiness cast upon me because to me, that meant something is terribly wrong with me and it’s obviously my body and if my body doesn’t look right, there’s something wrong with me. And so, my mom put me on diet, sent to diet centers. I was taken to diet doctors where they injected cow’s urine into my bloodstream.
Hal: Oh my gosh. And that was in third grade is when that started?
Patricia: Yeah. In third grade. Eight years old. You got to get in the picture.
Hal: Wow. That’s my daughter’s age. I can’t even imagine.
Patricia: And it’s just crazy so I went to some of the diet centers. I went to Weight Watchers, everything, and no matter what, I continue to get heavier and heavier until I was about 212 pounds. This was before I was even in high school that I got to that weight. And a lot of shame about my body. A lot of guilt around food and I shouldn’t even be eating like I can think of it and awaken that so quickly. And then I found exercise. My sister took me to an exercise class and it was a euphoric moment for me because I love to move. I always wanted to be a dancer. I could express myself. I knew in that moment I literally was like, “That’s it. This is what I’m doing the rest of my life,” to my parents’ dismay and my sisters who were like, “I think you could have a bigger dream than that.” I was like, “No, this is it. This is it. This is it.”
Hal: What age was that that you got introduced to the exercise?
Patricia: That was like 16 and I’m like working out and I’m loving it and my body is changing and people are saying I look fantastic and I just like, “I got this. I got this like I cracked the code,” but what started happening is my career started to take off. I started teaching packed classes because I’m strong. I’m strong and I love to dance and I could create choreographies and all of it. It just was in my wheelhouse in so many ways and as I got more and more popular, I got more and more scared that I didn’t look good enough and that I couldn’t control my food and so I was binging and I was purging and I was using diet pills and I went into national aerobics competitions and I was an aerobics champion and cover of magazines. I was really at what you would say a great successful career in the fitness industry but I was depressed. I was isolating. I felt like a big, big fraud because my weight still fluctuated. I’m 5’10 so I’m tall but it would still fluctuate like 20 pounds and to me that just was horrifying.
And I got this TV show and it was a dream job. It was a daily morning light workout show and I’ve never done TV before. I thought, “This is it. This is my chance. This is like can’t get better than this,” and about, I don’t know, maybe a few months a year into it, the executive producer called me into his office and when I got the call to go in his office which has never happened before, my heart I literally wanted to run out of the building and never be seen again because I knew what was coming and I kind of felt like I was just going to my execution and I sat down in the chair. I think I was so overwhelmed with stress. I really don’t remember the exact words of what he said but the final outcome of the conversation was, “Why are you gaining so much weight?” And I was absolutely mortified. So, if you think of someone’s rock-bottom, I wanted to crawl out there. I might have well been naked because here I did this on live TV and I’m being called out for it. I can’t even pretend that nobody’s noticing like the curtain went up. I’m naked. You don’t get worse than this. Like it was the lowest I could be and I went home.
That next thing I found myself in a taxi driving down to a kind of shady part of New York City late at night and buying crystal meth. And it wasn’t because I was a drug addict but because I was a shame addict and that was my diet aid. That was my diet aid. That’s what I wanted to use to obliterate any hunger, any cravings, and I sat in my room. I remember that night. It wasn’t the first time I had been using crystal meth but for some reason, I sat in my room that night and I was just I was praying, I was crying, I literally was looking at my life and going, “This is not who I am. I am not a drug addict and if I continue this way, there is no way I’m avoiding it.”
Hal: And what age was this, Patricia?
Patricia: This was in my early 30s.
Hal: Okay. Got it.
Patricia: And I was just like, “This, is this the choice that I’m making?” Seriously, here I am. I’m saying exercise and diet and be healthy and this is what I’m doing? I’m deceiving myself. I’m deceiving my community. I’m deceiving the industry. This is not okay and I feel like and I always call it this moment of grace, this moment where I had clarity where I finally said, “Oh my gosh, it’s not just me. There are millions of people.” If you look at the statistics in the weight loss industry, one-tenth of 1%, got to think of that percentage, one-tenth of 1% actually succeed. That’s like if you go into Apple and you say, “Hey, I want to buy the next iPhone 10,” and they go, “Yeah, here it is. $1,000. It works one-tenth of 1% of the time.” You go, “Yeah, sure. I’ll take my chances.” Or that people start and stop to diet five times in one year. That’s like enrolling in a college, getting out, re-enrolling, getting out, re-enrolling five times a year. If that was happening in our world, there will be front page news. But because the weight loss and the beauty industry really feeds on us feeling like to be fatphobic and to really prey on our fears, we don’t think it’s the problem of the actual diet or the industry. We think it’s a problem with me.
And in that moment when I thought about all the other people that are having the same problem as me, it broke the spell because shame can’t live alone and when you think it’s only you, you perpetuate this self-loathing and this fear but when I have the moment to say, “Oh my gosh, it’s not just me. It’s what I’m selling. It’s what the industry is selling. It’s what the stories that have perpetuated,” and diet and exercise are not the only solution. It’s actually not the solution. There is a missing piece and I just decided. I was just going to devote the rest of my life to figuring out what that was and how to create ways that people could really take care of themselves without so much shame or so much guilt or body self-objectification. And what I did was I traveled around the world for about two years and I studied with gurus and teachers and life coaches and there was a magic moment where I was actually and I know you’re a big fan of Tony Robbins, I was at the Tony Robbins seminar and he was talking about peak states. How do you create a peak state?
If you want to lose weight, you create a peak state. You get into a state where then you choose better, make better choices or you get yourself on a peak state. You don’t actually just do the action but you put yourself in a state first. I thought that was really groundbreaking for me too and he called them incantations. Incantations are when you not just do affirmations but you embody the affirmations, you put your physiology shoulders back, heart open, walk with energy, speak with energy, put a smile on your face, focus physiology and language. And as we were chanting on the beach doing incantations at the end of that seminar, we’re all marching on the beach, all I need is within me now. All I need is within me. All I need is within me now. I swear at one moment I stopped on the beach and it literally felt like lightning struck and I started laughing and I started crying and I’m like, “Oh my god, this is it. I’m going to teach people how to activate peak states of being in an exercise class.”
Because then I can teach about how you change not just your state but how you rewire your neuro pathways because if you’re someone who’s always down on yourself, who’s always criticizing yourself, is hard on yourself, and you use guilt to try to motivate yourself, you’re actually blocking everything that you ever want to happen in your life. You need powerful energy. You need the love, the courage, the confidence, these powerful positive energies spiritually strong energy to be able to overcome challenges that are an inevitable part of your journey. And I just thought, “Wow, this is how I can shift what I’m doing into being something that is actually helpful in a way that I can stand behind.” And to teach people how to become spiritually fit means one become more present and mindful which is what Sati means and to be really connected to your intentions always, your values, your goals, what is it that really matters to you, and then move yourself in a way that you can actually experience that you’re that person now, not sometime in the future.
Hal: Yeah. Because it’s true. If you’re exercising and dieting but you don’t fix yourself on the inside, if your mindset is still scarcity-based or fear-based or if you’re unhappy then it’s never enough.
Patricia: Right. And while one of the breakthroughs that I had was it was actually with a Deepak Chopra lecture. He was saying, “You always will live true to your self-concept like you can’t live any other life except for a life that reflects your own self-concept and your self-concept is everything you say after the words I am.” Everything that you believe about yourself is your self-concept and your life must absolutely reflect it. And I remember I was in Fiji and listening to him and I went into the shower to kind of just like end the day and contemplate and again, it was one of those same moments where I had this visual of myself going to the gym every day, “I’m so fat. I have to lose weight. I’m so fat I have to run. I’m so fat I have to diet it.” I’m so fat with the self-concept of I’m so fat so if I as my self-concept believe I’m so fat or whatever, I’m broke, I’m weak, I’m not a good person, any of these negative reinforcements that so many of us carry in whatever area that we are challenged in then no matter how hard I work, no matter how fit I get, I’ll always be drawn back to have to live true to my self-concept. So, I had to rewrite my self-concept. I had to use these kinds of incantations and affirmations and really start to question my limiting beliefs in a really honest and powerful way.
Hal: Wow. So, I’m getting the idea that what you’re speaking of is spiritual fitness so I’d love to know what does it mean to be spiritually fit. What is this concept?
Patricia: Well, spiritually fit means you’re focusing more on your spirit, who you are, not just the body. So, in the fitness industry, we’re very tuned into self-objectification. What does my body look like? What do you think my body looks like? And do you think I look good enough, kind of a thing? So, we limit ourselves to our body. We identify with our body. Spiritual fitness is using the body as a vehicle to see yourself as more than a body but as a spirit and it really is with the intention to live open-heartedly. And I call anyone who is on this journey as my community as spiritual warrior because a warrior is brave and tenderhearted, able to be with difficult situations without totally denigrating yourself and being able to be brave enough to self-reflect honestly but without keeping on the guilt. So, it’s really about tapping into your heart and evolving as a person, not just as a body part.
Hal: So, what’s the easiest way for someone that’s listening to embark on the journey of becoming spiritually fit?
Patricia: Well, mindfulness is your number one tool. Being aware, being able to see when you are self-denigrating. Self-denigrating is anytime you’re speaking badly about yourself. Anytime you verbalize your own failures or faults or your characters, what you’re doing is you are saying, “I’m not worthy. I’m unworthy of respect,” and if you’re self-denigrating, it’s worse than self-criticism because it leads to rapid and severe erosion of your self-confidence and your self-esteem. So, the number one thing that I always say is pay attention when you are self-denigrating and really start to question it and ask yourself is that true? Is that 100% true? You say, “I’m such an idiot or it can’t do it or this is too hard.” Any version, light or harsh, if you are doing this which most people do then the goal is to catch it and actually either turn it around or do this exercise that I learned from a great teacher of mine, his name is Tera Brock. It’s called RAIN and so it’s an acronym and it’s a mindfulness technique that helps you tune in instead of tune out which is how you heal.
So, R, you recognize it. I’m caught. I’m hooked. I am beating myself up. I feel terrible, whatever that is. A, you allow it to be there. You don’t go and eat it away or drink it away or shop it away. You actually just let it have it spaced. And then I, you investigate where is in your body, what does this energy feel like when it’s living in your body, my jaw tightens, my fist tightens, my body crouches. Just no story but an investigation which synchronizes body and mind and puts you into present moment awareness and then N, which is super, super important, you nourish yourself. What do you say, what do I need right now? I need a cup of coffee. I need a nap. I need a shower. I need a friend. I need a therapist, whatever that is but this level of self-reflection what happens is it gets you out of ego identification, body identification, pulls you into spirit identification and then it teaches you to interrupt the neuropathways, the old patterns of self-criticism or self-denigration and every time you interrupt that pattern it weakens it and then every time you do a practice like RAIN, you’re reinforcing self-loving neuro pathways and when you activate a trait, when you do this, when you activate a state and you actually do it on purpose, over time that state becomes a new trait and this is how you can actually rewire your nervous system and actually create new personality traits that will help you actually live the life that you really want to live.
[CLOSING]
Hal: Wow. Patricia, I love this which really means I love you.
Patricia: Oh, yay.
Hal: Yeah. No, I’ve studied various fitness experts and your approach is it’s beautiful, it’s revolutionary, it’s what’s needed. I love the acronym RAIN. I love your approach to spiritual fitness. Yeah and, hopefully, we can make that work to get you to Best Year Ever.
Patricia: Definitely.
Hal: We chatted about that so we’ll keep figuring out if that works so but anyway, what is the best way for our listeners to connect with you, to continue learning from you and that sort of thing?
Patricia: Yeah. Awesome. I have a couple of new programs that are actually about to come out so if somebody is like super interested and wants to get on the waitlist for that, PatriciaMoreno.com/365. Also, of the usual channels, I do a live stream every day at 1 PM Eastern Standard Time on my Facebook community page which is every day I give a challenge or I give an exercise because I’m not about inspiration. I’m about action. And so, it’s a great way to get little tiny nuggets and just kind of just re-anchor yourself in the conversation one day at a time. And those are going to be your best ways.
Hal: That is dedication. You do that live stream every day. I’m impressed. That’s amazing.
Patricia: Five days. During the week.
Hal: Five days a week. Of course. That counts.
Patricia: That counts as every day. Yeah, and it’s great.
Hal: And that’s on your Facebook page?
Patricia: Patricia Moreno Live. It’s my community page.
Hal: Got it. Okay. Cool. So, PatriciaMoreno.com/365 and then Patricia Moreno Live on Facebook.
Patricia: Yeah.
Hal: You’re fantastic.
Patricia: Aww.
Hal: I really appreciate you. I felt that way when I was in the audience watching you do what you do so brilliantly. I really, really connected, just resonated with you, and loved you and I’m so grateful we got to chat today and I get to introduce you to our listeners.
Patricia: Me too. I really am and I really hope that I can come and be at your event.
Hal: Yes. I actually I went over the phone. I sent a text to Jon Berghoff, my partner in crime. I said, “Hey, buddy, we need to reconnect on Patricia Moreno,” and we did…
Patricia: Awesome.
Hal: Yeah. So, we’ll figure it out. Cool. I appreciate you. And, goal achievers, I hope you enjoyed hearing a little bit about her story as much as I did and her wisdom and, yeah, I really enjoyed this conversation and I enjoyed Patricia and I enjoy you. So, goal achievers, thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Achieve Your Goals Podcast. I love you, I appreciate you, and, yeah, if not sooner, I will catch you on next week’s podcast episode. Take care!
[END]
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Check out Patricia’s Live Stream (every weekday at 1PM EST)
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