Lisa Marie Rankin [00:00:00]:

Imagine for a moment, what if nothing was wrong with you? What if the very things that you are trying to fix, like anxiety, lethargy, attachment styles, attention disorders, are simply signs that you are a human, one that also happens to live in an overstimulated, disconnected world. But what if there was a better way to move through this? Today, I'm revealing what no one in the self help world really wants to admit, the shadow side of coaching and personal development. So if you found yourself on the hamster wheel of healing, this episode is for you because I am going to show you how to get off. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Goddess School podcast, where Eastern wisdom meets Western mysticism. I'm your host, Lisa Marie Rankine, author, teacher, and Ayurvedic wellness coach here to help you reclaim your feminine superpowers, and I am so glad you're here. Listen. Women are magical.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:01:05]:

They are intuitive, creative, wise, and magnetic. However, in today's fast paced world, these gifts often get buried under a more masculine way of life. Together, we'll awaken those powers. In each episode, I'll take you through sacred teachings like Ayurveda, shadow work, and the mysteries of archetypes and rituals so you can live with more clarity, synchronicity, and joy in all realms of life, like relationships, health, money, and more. So let's dive in so you can make the most of your one mythic life. The veil is parting. Let's begin. Hello, beautiful souls, and welcome back to The God of School podcast.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:01:51]:

Okay. I am just going to pose the question. What if what if nothing was actually wrong with you? Let that land for a second. What if the exhaustion, the overwhelm, the anxiety, or maybe you're spiraling over your attachment style or nervous system? What if that was just a seed that has been planted in you, tended to, and grown? Today, I wanna have a real conversation about something that I've been thinking a lot about lately, the shadow side of coaching and self help culture. I know this episode might ruffle a few feathers, but stay with me here because it's also an invitation to reclaim your energy, your time, and your sacred wise resilient self from the endless hailing loop that so many are finding themselves on. Recently, I was prepping for a book club session inside my divine feminine mystery school, enlivened. I had picked up a brand new super popular self help book. One of those that everybody is raving about all over social media.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:03:06]:

It had five star reviews and it was already sold out on Amazon. Now, when I'm preparing for a book club discussion, I often have the physical copy of the book so I can highlight, underline, but I also listen to the audio as well, too. So I get fully immersed in it. So there I am. I was driving to the grocery store, doing my errands, listening to the audio. I'm only about two hours in, and it was a pretty long book, but suddenly I start to have this visceral reaction. My body's tensing, my heart is racing, and I just felt really off. I had this inner voice clear as day that just said, I can't do this.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:03:43]:

I can't talk about this book. It was like a veil had been lifted. And suddenly, I saw it, that we had all been bamboozled by self help culture, coaches, clients, all of us. We've been told this story that we are broken, that there is a better way to do life. One that someone else has the answers to. It's not something that's with inside us. There seems to be a narrative that we have to endlessly dig through our past, tend to our wounds, inhale before we finally can live. But you know what happens when we keep doing that? We stop living.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:04:25]:

We got caught up in this loop of constant self analysis where we hyper focus on what's wrong. Now, I was also recently listening to a talk by Jordan Peterson. So author, thought leader, psychologist. And he said something that stuck with me. He said self obsession is mental illness. That led me to think what if all of this time we spent tending to wounds and you can't see me, but I'm using wounds in quotation marks. We were actually creating a self fulfilling prophecy rather than tending and healing. What if we were almost strengthening them through our constant analysis? You might have heard about neuroplasticity.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:05:10]:

We can alter or strengthen our neuro pathways based on where we put our focus, Where attention goes, energy flows. So if we're constantly looking at ourselves through the lens of what's wrong, what do I need to treat or hail, we're actually deepening the neural pathway that believes something is wrong. This causes us to fuse with labels and diagnosis. So I wanna ask, what if some of your symptoms, I'm not saying that you don't have any symptoms, aren't signs of wounds, but simply a very human response to the situations that you might be dealing with right here, right now. Let me give you a few examples. I have had successful, brilliant women tell me that they discovered they had adult ADHD from TikTok. And listen, I'm not here to say that that's not a real experience. For some, it can be really validating.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:06:09]:

It can give them tools and it helps to put puzzle pieces together. But is it ADHD or is it that we've rewired our brains to only focus for nine seconds at a time? That's actually less than a goldfish and it has been proven in a real study. And then there's a whole attachment style conversation. I feel like I can't go on Instagram without seeing some memes, some threads about attachment styles. So many women think that they are anxiously attached because of their childhood. But is it really your childhood? Is it something that has happened in the first seven years of your life? And yes, it might have been. Or is it that this dating culture really sucks that you can be easily dismissed with a swipe of the finger and hookup culture is expected? Now, if you are looking for a monogamous relationship that is stable, of course, this type of culture is creating anxiety. There's not a wound to heal, but there's maybe a different way to act within the dating culture.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:07:14]:

Social media has really taught us to pathologize every human emotion. Even this is the funny one. Even if we feel that there is nothing wrong, we almost think that means that something is wrong, that maybe we have repressed or suppressed our emotions. I had a friend, amazing woman, successful, kind, grounded, really traumatic rough childhood, but she kept asking herself, why don't I have more symptoms of trauma? I'm seeing all of these trauma symptoms all over social media. None of them are manifesting. This is terrible. I must be repressing something. So she literally went to multiple therapists and trauma doctors trying to uncover some buried wound, but eventually she just gave up and started to enjoy her life.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:08:00]:

Imagine that joy as the destination. I've also had a similar experience. I can be, well, my family calls me annoyingly upbeat. So for a while, I thought maybe I'm repressing emotions. My life wasn't perfect. I was so concerned about this that I even went to a union analyst to figure out why I wasn't sad more often, why I wasn't a little bit moodier. You know what she told me? She said, you don't need to seek out sadness. If it needs to find you, it will.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:08:31]:

That's what I really feel that our culture is asking us to do is to seek out sadness, seek out problems. Now I'm not talking about bypassing problems. Of course, as they arise, we need to feel our feelings. We need to work through them. I'm also a trauma informed coach, and we don't need to stay there. Persephone was only in the underworld for half the year. Inanna, the goddess Inanna, the Sumerian goddess, she was only in the underworld for three days. So there is a time to hail, but then we need to ascent.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:09:07]:

So I wanna talk a little bit more about coaching in the self help industry. At best, you know, coaching and and self help can be really sacred because it helps us reconnect to lost parts of ourselves. It also helps women tune back into their desires, tap into their unlimited potential. Like I believe that we need coaches. I have, I have one, but here's the hard truth. Coaching also has a shadow and I wanna name it here because otherwise we're just going to recycle same patterns that we're supposedly helping people hail from. When coaches are starting their business, they are taught to market to your pain. There's lots of different courses, marketing gurus that are all teach.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:09:52]:

You need to identify the symptoms you need to market to pain, pain sells potential doesn't sell pleasure. Doesn't sell possibility. Doesn't sell it's pain. So we're told to identify pain points and then we can sell the solution. And often it works. Well, you have to think at what cost, because I know that as I scroll through Instagram, I see post after post talking about nervous system dysregulation, microtraumas, hormonal imbalances, anxious attachment styles, inner child that needs healing. And yes, some of these might be true, but more often, they're ways of labeling this very normal human experience and top that off that we are humans living in a very disconnected, chaotic, hyper individualized world. So we spend a lot of time in this what's wrong consciousness rather than the what's possible consciousness.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:10:49]:

So let me share an idea with you. You are not broken. You don't need to be fixed. And the more time you spend focusing on a steady stream of what's wrong with you, the more your brain is going to start believing it. This is also why most countries don't show pharmaceutical commercials on television. I believe it's only The United States and New Zealand that does. And in The United States, they are currently looking to take them off because there's concerns about overdiagnosis, unnecessary treatments, and the undue influence of marketing on prescribing decisions, which can potentially harm patients. But on social media, we don't just market to the illness.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:11:32]:

We also sell the cure too. It's a full ecosystem of you are not enough, but we can fix you. And again, of course, there is a time for healing. We're not looking to bypass wounds or trauma, but we wanna heal. And as I mentioned before, we want to ascend. So let me now offer another possibility. What if it was time to stop your healing journey and begin the real journey? The one where you become an active co creator of the divine drama of your life. No, things are not always going to go smoothly.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:12:09]:

There will be inevitable ups and downs, challenging times and heartbreak, but you are resilient, you are strong, and you are made for it. I believe that the real medicine is turning off your phone, going outside, following beauty, telling your story, gathering with sisters, and making something new. This shift also changed the way I believe I can best serve women. After that realization with the self help book, I emailed my community and said, I'm gonna put a pause on self help. We're picking up fiction instead. So we started to read a court of thorns and roses. And honestly, it has awoken like a fire within the women in my community. I could go on and on about why I now believe that fiction, not self help, is the gateway to individuation, and I definitely will in another episode.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:13:03]:

But for now, I've really come to feel that fiction helps us tap into something underutilized due to social media, infotainment, and the something's wrong with you culture. And that is our imagination. And that is what we need to tap into our potential, to live a meaningful and joyful life. Self help points to what's wrong with you. Fiction reveals what's possible in you. Self help instructs, stories initiate. One gives you tools and the other gives you transformation. Fiction, myth, stories, it will awaken something that self help simply cannot, your imagination.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:13:44]:

And rather than some guru telling you how you need to live your life, you can imagine what is the best way that you wanna live your life for you. So here is my invitation to you. Turn off your phone, go outside, gather with sisters, make art, write a love letter to yourself, pick up a book that reminds you of magic. And most of all, stop trying to fix yourself. You are not a project. You are a portal. All right, beautiful ones. That's what I've got for you today.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:14:16]:

If this landed or stirred something into you, I would love to hear about it. You can message me, share the episode, or come find me in Enlivened. Until next time, love. Be well. Thanks for tuning in to The God of School podcast. I hope today's episode inspired you to reclaim your feminine magic. Now don't forget to subscribe to the show. And if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave us a review on Apple.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:14:46]:

If you wanna dive deeper into divine feminine archetypes and reconnect with your power, check out my book, The Goddess Solution. It's packed with ancient goddess wisdom for the modern woman. You can find the book on Amazon, and the link is in the show notes. And if you are ready to embrace these practices alongside a global sisterhood, I invite you to join my Divine Feminine Mystery School, Enlivened. It's a supportive space to embody these teachings with a fantastic community of like minded women. You'll find the link in the show notes. Remember, the Goddess isn't a deity outside of you. She's an aspect of your highest self, and you are the Goddess.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:15:22]:

Until next time, my friend.