Self Care through a Worldwide Pandemic, with Marcelletta Miles

SHOW NOTES

Marci’s websites:
MarcellettaMiles.com
MyNursingBag.com

Founder of Authentic Leadership Advisors and Authentic Leadership Advisors Academy, Kathleen O’Grady is a visionary leadership coach and fearless leader. She supports driven individuals and organizations to achieve the impossible. Her ability to act as a catalyst for people to discover, rediscover, and embrace their unique genius is what makes Kathleen one of the most sought-after global executive coaches. She is a two-times past president of the International Coaching Federation Raleigh Chapter, and her work is featured in web articles by the NYTimes.com, Huffingtonpost.com, Forbes.com, and eFinancialCareers.com.

Her real-world stories, practical tools, and actionable insights help clients step out of their comfort zone to create authentic meaning and purpose in their life and work. By embracing change, Kathleen believes everyone can achieve something extraordinary.

Authenticity is Contagious is produced by Earfluence. Intro and outro music provided by Autumn Rose Brand.

Transcript

Marci Miles: I feel like a lot of us, we smile on the outside and we’re crumbling on the inside.

And that was me. And if we’re not careful about how we’re managing this whole situation because we are experiencing not being able to hug our family, hug our friends, being able to visit. And so we are experiencing a loss. And a lot of people are feeling something, but they don’t know what it is

Voiceover: You’re listening to the Authenticity is Contagious Podcast with Kathleen O’Grady, where she and her guests discuss what it means to choose your authentic self –to remove negative energy, to live a calmer life, and to become more – a more heart-centered person, a stronger leader, a better partner, and friend. Come join us on this journey of creating the life you’ve been missing out on, one intention at a time. Here’s your host, authentic leadership coach and founder of Authentic Leadership Advisors and Authentic Leadership Advisors Academy, Kathleen O’Grady.

Kathleen O’Grady:   Welcome everyone to the podcast. This is episode 3, and thanks to all of you who listened in last week to our first two episodes, and I absolutely loved all of the feedback. Everyone who wrote nice things on LinkedIn or Facebook, or wrote a review on Apple Podcasts, that warms my heart and fuels me in this tough time.

That tough time of course is we’re all going through COVID-19, and I wanted to bring someone on who is a healer and can shed some light on self care during this change that we’re all going through. That guest is Marci Miles, my best friend, former nurse, coach at Authentic Leadership Advisors Academy, and all around amazing person. She has blessed my life in so many ways, and so I’m always excited to talk to her.

Kathleen O’Grady:  and so, welcome Marci.

Marci Miles: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Kathleen O’Grady: My, my only concern is that I’ll be able to stay in professional podcast mode cause I feel like all I want to do is just, you know, hang out with my girl.

Marci Miles: I know well we will do our best to stay in podcast mode.

Kathleen O’Grady: Uh, so Marci. If you could just take a minute and, I introduced you, but I’d love for you to introduce yourself a little bit and what you want people who are listening to the Authenticity is Contagious Podcast to know about you as we lead into this discussion today.

Marci Miles: Wow. That is like opening up with a loaded question. So for me, I am. Like I said, I’m excited to be here. I’ve been a nurse for over 27 years, and as I’m saying that, it feels like a really long time. I have known that I have been a healer ever since I was probably 13 or 14 years old, and I always thought that that meant being in some kind of healthcare profession.

And when I came through Raleigh Academy, Authentic Leadership Advisors Academy, I learned something else about myself that I didn’t know. And so not only am I a healer, but I am an authentic healer and authentic coach. And so that has been my journey over the past few, I’d say the past six years or so. It’s really just tapping into my authentic healing journey, which led me into more of a holistic perspective as it relates to health that I really, I think I knew about kind of on and off, but my sister kind of introduced me to naturopathic medicine and I was, you know, raised in Western medicine. And so when I came through Authentic Leadership Advisors Academy, I learned some, some things about stuff I didn’t know whether it was, you know, there’s the power of consciousness and that our mindset and how to heal. But then, and I have to thank my sister for introducing that to me, although she’s not here anymore. She left me a beautiful gift. And so what I want people to know about me is that I am open to the universe now as far as whatever it has to bring, and that’s what I try to teach everybody that I come in contact with.

I’m a preacher’s wife and a lot of things that I do tend to go against some of my husband’s religious beliefs. But what’s interesting is that he’s never closed off to whatever it is I introduce him to. And I found that my pastor’s wife has been very open to me as well. And so, I like helping open people’s eyes.

Kathleen O’Grady: How would you define authentic healer?

 Marci Miles: You know, in order for me to become an authentic healer, I had to get to know who I am on the inside, like deep down within the core of me. And like I said, I’ve known that I’ve always been a healer, but I always thought it was Western medicine. And so what I find is that I listened to my intuition more, my gut feeling, about what it is. I’m feeling, what it is I’m picking up when I am in the presence of other people. I also do Reiki and there are times when I am over certain fields of their bodies that I’m like, there’s nothing here, so I need to move on to the next area. And it’s really just relying on my authentic sense of perception and what I feel is being kind of downloaded into me.

Kathleen O’Grady: When you mentioned Western medicine, obviously there’s important uses for Western medicine, but I feel like what you’ve discovered and what a lot of people have discovered is that it’s not the only answer for how to heal ourselves. And that if we really come to the understanding that our body is just as much who we are as our consciousness and our way of thinking, then it would be irresponsible for us to recognize that our thoughts affect our body.

And so tell me how you’ve made that connection for yourself because I know you’ve struggled with some health issues and you have an auto immune disease and you’ve had to really grapple with a lot of changes to your physical body.

So how have you been managing that in terms of what you’ve learned with this authentic healing perspective?

Marci Miles: Well, when I came through Authentic Leadership Advisors Academy, you introduced us to mindfulness and that was my first taste of mindfulness. And I absolutely fell in love with it. And I did some more researches.

We as Western medicine people do, I always got to do more research and find our proof. And so I ended up going to Duke integrative medicine to learn more about mindfulness. And, in that whole process, I just kind of sat back and tried to figure out exactly what was going on in my life right before I was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease.

And what I realized is that it was a lot of different stressful situations, which I honestly believe led to my auto immune disorder. And from my perspective, what happens in Western medicine is that we tend to have an illness, we go to the doctor, we get diagnosed. We get the pills that we need, and then we’re sent off on our way.

And  we never get to the root of what caused the illness in the first place. And that was what intrigued me the most about just being a conscious healer and an authentic healer is it’s not just about going to the doctor, getting the medicine, taking the medicine, and being a very compliant patient.

It’s about figuring out exactly what’s causing the illness in the first place. Because typically what happens is, it becomes a cycle. You take the medicine for a certain period of time and then it doesn’t work anymore. You go back, you get more medicine, and you try that, and it’s just a vicious cycle, like you’d never get to the root.

So for me, understanding how stress impacts my body was very important. You know, for the past six, seven plus years, because that to me is what has kept me well. And even, even though I don’t have the typical signs and symptoms of sarcoidosis, I believe that if I hadn’t really tapped into. My own energy, understanding how stress impacts the body, that I’d be a lot worse off than I am today.

And I thank God every day that I’m not on any medicines for it.

Kathleen O’Grady: That’s incredible. And it goes back to this whole notion of external versus internal ways of viewing our experience. And if somebody gets wounded in an accident and clearly has a broken bone or a cut, we know how to fix that.

We know how to manage the external wounds, but when we’re wounded internally, that has to manifest somewhere in our body and we have to figure out, okay, well, what brought that on? And you’ve been able to do that. And now that you’ve had that experience authentically for yourself, you have the empathy and the wisdom to be able to help other people dig into well, all right, where might this illness manifest from?

And, and I, I want to caution people who are listening to not necessarily. Blame yourself for manifesting an illness or back pain or migraines or whatever. Just be curious about it because we are learning through our experiences and our body is much more intelligent than we are. Let’s face it. You can control your breathing, but when you’re not thinking about it, it’s still happening.

You don’t have to wake up every day until your heart to beat. It just knows how to do it. And so when you think about how brilliant the human body is and how just omnipotent it is for how it’s able to function without any influence, then question where those body ailments or illnesses are inviting you to draw your attention.

And that’s, that’s where profound healing happens.

Marci Miles: Yes, I agree. And the thing is, is that what I find is right now doing this pandemic, a lot of people are, you know, we’re, we’re stuck at home. So we don’t have anything else to do, but be home, trying to work, manage our kids, manage our family, making sure that we’re, you know, staying safe, staying clean.

And it’s really a wonderful time to really go within and take some time to kind of settle in a nice quiet space and just do some internal reflecting on what you’re feeling in your body, because that is the first signs and symptoms of something going on. So this situation is, could be potentially causing people to be stressed out about being at home.

But during this time it’s a great time to go in and see or become more aware of maybe some of the things that you’re feeling. I’m not going to call them illnesses, but just things that you’re feeling that you haven’t really noticed before because those are the first signs of stress settling into our bodies and those hormones, those stress hormones.

They have to go somewhere, and that’s when we begin to feel whatever we’re feeling. And if we don’t know, if we don’t pay any attention, it just continues to get worse.

Kathleen O’Grady: Yeah. I had a conversation with one of our colleagues in Germany yesterday, Julia, she’ll be a guest on the podcast, pretty soon too, and she was having a realization that, she hadn’t named it yet, but she was grieving her previous way of life. And so grief is yet another emotional turmoil that if we don’t experience those feelings and allow ourselves to feel them one stage to the next, then we’re just, we’re in denial or we’re trying to put a inauthentic positive spin on what’s really happening.

Marci Miles: Well, it’s interesting and I’m very happy that Julia was able to come to the realization and actually give it a name, this grief.

You know, I’ve experienced a lot of loss over the past three years, and what I’ve found, and you know, this about me. I knew all of my great grandmothers, my son, and my, one of my great grandmothers, they were 103 years apart. And so I was used to death because they were older and yet they were going to die.

But when my sister passed away, that put a whole different spin on grief and where I thought I knew the stages of grief. I knew the process, I knew what I was going through, but I still wasn’t handling it well. And it was settling in different parts of my body. And the thing is, is that a lot of people want to, I feel like a lot of us, we smile on the outside and we’re crumbling on the inside.

And that was me. And if we’re not careful about how we’re managing this whole situation because we are experiencing not being able to hug our family hug our friends, being able to visit. And so we are experiencing a loss. And a lot of people are feeling something, but they don’t know what it is.

And so for Julia to discover that, that is grief, she’s very right and a lot of us are, you know, could potentially be experiencing grief right now. So it’s very important to just kind of go within and notice that there’s something different about how I’m feeling.

Kathleen O’Grady: Yeah. And what you just said brought something else to mind.

And that is this whole dichotomy between control and allowing, because for so long we tried to convince ourselves that we were in control of everything, which is why Western medicine alone feels comfortable because we know we can take action. We can go to the doctor, we can get some pills, and we can call it a day.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re allowing yourself to understand energetically who you are and what you’re being called to learn about yourself as a result. And so this whole pandemic has reminded us very just intensely that we are not in control.

Marci Miles: There’s so many of us that we have to feel like we are in control. We have to have control of our day, control of our schedule, control of our children’s schedules, you know, we have to feel like we’re in control. And for some people that works.

And for other people they do learn to allow. But in this particular situation, it’s not that we’ve got the CEOs of companies that are still trying not to work because everybody is under the same order. They’re experiencing the same thing. And so it doesn’t matter what your socioeconomic status is, this is affecting everybody from all walks of life and not just here in the United States, but all over the world.

And so for the world to come to this understanding that we really don’t have control, it’s amazing.

Kathleen O’Grady: Well, and this might be controversial, but, oh well, here we go. There’s been this organization that came about, I’m sure you’re aware, that has been protesting every Tuesday, Reopen NC, and if I understand correctly, one of the main organizers of that movement has Coronavirus.

Marci Miles: I didn’t know. I knew she got arrested.

Kathleen O’Grady: Yup, and she was tested and she tested positive. And so when I see people out there protesting and even being mean to the frontline medical workers, I mean, it makes me like crazy. But then I have to remind myself if I’m really going to practice what I preach in terms of mindfulness and non-judging and beginner’s mind, I want to believe that the protesters are just channeling their anger from the grief that they’re experiencing.

Marci Miles: Well,  I would also say. I would add to it, not just the anger from the grief that they are experiencing, but it’s the fear. It’s the fear of losing everything. It is the fear of, you know, not being able to pay your rent or your mortgage.

The fear of not being able to buy food to put on your family’s table. Fear causes of the hormones in our body. It causes those same stress hormones. And. I’m not surprised. I often said while these protests were going on that they, I didn’t see a lot of, I didn’t see hardly any social distancing going on, so it was going to be interesting to see what our, COVID-19 rates were after at least the protest last week. And so now that you tell me that, you know, she’s tested positive, I’m sure there’s a lot of people in that crowd that has tested positive.

Kathleen O’Grady: And I mean, this whole situation brings about so many moral and spiritual questions in terms of our collective responsibility to make sure that we’re keeping each other safe.

I too have struggled with this. I, I’m an extrovert. So I know I spoke to a lot of introvert friends of mine, like my next door neighbor who says, I’ve been training my whole life for this and I love it. Like, if anything, I’m just going to be afraid for what happens when we have to reenter society.

But I, you know, in this moment with you here, Marci, what advice can you give to the people who are terrified about the future in one way or another?

Marci Miles: You know, in my heart of hearts, in my gut feeling, we talk about this new normal. And I don’t know what this new normal is going to look like. Cause we technically haven’t even gotten through this. But what I can say is that, you know, like, like I said, I was raised in the church. My higher being is God.

But for some people, God may be too strong. So it might be energy, spirit, source, whatever you refer to ensure higher being. But that higher being, that higher power is in control. And you know, I believe that there is a reason for why the entire world, the earth, we think about it is going through this together and it’s not in our control and we have to be able to just allow and release those bands of control that we think we have. And just watch it unfold. Look for the signs, look for the wonders, look for the meaning behind all of this. And you know, not fear it, not being afraid of it. It’s only for our greater good, but we have to look for the greater good. If we’re going to sit behind our closed doors in fear, and, you know, even if we’re experiencing grief. If we’re gonna put on our blinders to the greatness that’s going to come out of this, then we might miss out. We might miss what God has intended for us.

Kathleen O’Grady: Yeah.

Marci Miles: But the thing is that if we don’t get the lesson that we’re supposed to learn, it’s going to repeat itself. And I honestly, as much as an introvert as I am, I don’t want to repeat this one again. I don’t.

Kathleen O’Grady: Well, and you’ve learned more lessons than anybody that I know. So I can believe that. And so what I’m going to take away from what you just said is that what we’re being called to embrace right now is acceptance for what is, gratitude for what we still have, and the ability to create from what’s left.

Marci Miles: Perfectly said.

Kathleen O’Grady: Thank you. Marci, thank you so much for, for just exploring this difficult time with me and I love you to pieces.

Marci Miles: Thank you, dear. I love you back.