Ep. #29: How I Was Able to Overcome Family Disapproval Around My Career + Dharma

Hi, I’m Martha Blessing, and you’re about to start transforming your life and creating the freedom that you desire with this podcast.

For over 15 years, I’ve coached and mentored conscious creators on four continents around the world.

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If you’re wanting more from life, to feel better, to heal, to have a peaceful mind, to feel empowered and alive, and to bring more abundance and prosperity into your life than this podcast is for you.

Because you’re going to start learning how to master your mind, expand and grow your consciousness.

And when you do that, you can create the place to be free and anything you want then becomes possible for you.

I’m so glad you’re here.

Welcome back to the podcast.

I am excited to share this episode with you because it is the story, the backstory of really the vulnerability and the pain that I went through and grew through my family’s disapproval in following my Darma, following my intuition and stepping into the path and the purpose that I knew that I was here to create.

I wouldn’t be who I am today had I not overcome the challenges of this.

: The reason that I feel that it’s so important to share is because I see so many people on a weekly and daily basis that are struggling with this.

What happens internally and energetically when we are struggling like this and going against ourselves and in some cases doubting ourselves in most cases is we’re constricting our energy and it causes the anxiety, it causes the disease in the body.

: In so many times, we’re not aware that this is what’s causing the illness.

This is what’s causing the problem.

That’s why I want to share that, to bring some insights and open up and create a space that you can understand and move through.

If this is something that’s happening to you or someone that you know the disapproval.

I talk about this in my book and I was living in daily chronic pain and taking large amounts of narcotics and pain pills, volume, muscle relaxers, things like that.

And the career path that I was in that I was on, that I had chosen as a registered nurse.

The troubles, the illness and the pain started almost within about a year after a year and a half, two years after I was in nursing school and I still moved forward as a nurse and had that career for 25 years.

But in hindsight, I see all along the challenges and the illness were leading me towards who I am truly and what my Darma and my path is now.

However, here I was a nurse, living with all of these health challenges and feeling that I was betrayed right by the system that I was working in and the only thing that I knew.

And at that point, I really wasn’t awake and aware of conscious yet.

But after my second surgery, I started practicing yoga.

My father had emergency bypass surgery a couple of weeks after my back surgery, and he needed to destress, and I wanted to improve my flexibility.

So we took a yoga class together, and that yoga class would lead me to Corpallo Center.

I’ve talked about this before.

What was significant about that was, mind you, this was a very synchronistic event that I would be led to the center.

It opened my eyes to an entirely new way of being and living.

I had no idea this world existed.

That was the first step.

And I felt like I had come home, even though I didn’t know what that even meant.

I can say that now, in hindsight, what the feeling was at the time, I didn’t know it because I was not tapped into my intuition.

I was not doing practices that allowed me to connect with my higher self, to connect with my intuition, to trust my feeling, my intuition, and to trust being in my body, letting my body be the mechanism energetically that I used to gauge my next step.

And that is a key, significant, important piece for anyone who is trying to heal any type of physical, mental, emotional illness is being back in our bodies.

So at the time, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

And that intuition was not honed.

It was not crafted.

However, something lit up inside of me, and that something was enough.

It was strong enough, and it was only a very small little spark.

But it was strong enough for me to listen and to keep putting 1ft in front of the other.

So that when I had this feeling leaving Corpolo, I went there a couple more times for a weekend workshop and a week long program and workshop.

I did that a few times.

And the environment just fed my soul.

It fed me on every level.

I got the insight that I wanted to go live there and do this three month, four month training as a holistic health educator.

I was in the process of realizing and recognizing that I did not want to work as a nurse any longer.

I loved the money.

I made great money.

I was a community health nurse.

I loved my patients.

But there was some sort of a knowing in me that said, this is not what your career is.

This is not what your path is.

: The more I ignored that, the worse I felt, the more my symptoms came back.

At the time, I didn’t connect the two pieces.

: I didn’t have enough wisdom and insight and knowledge to understand that my physical symptoms in my back and my sciatica and my neuropathy and all the things that were happening, all the pain and the fibromyalgia.

They were getting worse and worse and worse because I hated going to my job.

And so what I did was I left nursing.

I made a complete change.

And I just said what would be fun?

What would I like to do?

I left a career in nursing and I went to work for Starbucks.

I went to work as a barista, as a shift manager and a worker at Starbucks.

And I love the coffee.

I love the people.

I just wanted a break well, both my mother and my father really were at their Wits end when I made that choice.

There was a lot of pressure from both of them.

They thought it was absolutely crazy.

But what was happening is as I was making these choices, I’ve talked about this before.

I had a very addictive personality and I had a lot of addictions.

I mean, at the time I was still smoking cigarettes and drinking a fair amount of alcohol, what I would call fair amount of alcohol a couple of times a week, two times a week, three, four times a week maybe, and smoking pot.

But I was doing these things less and less because I was not feeling the need to escape and hide from what was wanting to come out of me and what was wanting to come through me.

And it was very scary to look at my parents and tell them that I was leaving a career in community health nursing to go work as a shift supervisor at Starbucks.

I got a lot of flak, I got a lot of disapproval.

And I see this consistently not only with clients and students that I work with, but also in some mastermind groups that I participate in.

So many people struggle to do what is their Darma and what they are feeling in their heart and their soul and take the next step because we want so desperately to be loved and approved of by our parents.

And culturally, there are some cultures where you just don’t do that.

There are cultures where marriages are arranged and so many things are dictated to who we have to be, to what we are supposed to be according to someone else’s plan for our life.

Speaker B: This creates a tremendous constriction of energy.

It creates heart disease for not being able to follow our heart, for not being able to lead or tap into that intuition that is in our heart, for not allowing the energy from our hearts desire to expand down into our solar plexus, which is our center of selfworth and selfesteem in our personal power.

It is no wonder we have such a prevalence of irritable bowel and all of the digestive issues and the food allergies and things that we do because it’s not necessarily because of gluten or any of these foods that one can eat so many times.

It is the fact that we have shut down our self worth and self esteem because we are following someone else’s guidelines of what they think we should do or be in our life.

Speaker B: It is a recipe for disaster and illness and anxiety.

So back to the path.

I made this announcement and it gave me time to breathe.

: Working at Starbucks, it gave me time to because I had almost ten years at that point, about seven years of daily chronic pain.

That was what fueled my being in my life, the stress of it and being a nursing at the same time, and then recognizing, I don’t want to do this anymore.

Something about this doesn’t feel right.

And once I did, it allowed me the time to do some of the things that I actually really enjoyed.

: And I recognized I wanted to delve into a career as a holistic practitioner because now I was starting to see some of the results.

And again, this was pre Internet.

There was not as much material available.

And I had to physically go to Korpalu.

And they did have a bookstore.

There were books, but it just wasn’t as much available as there is now.

So I relished being able to go there and be with people who were of like mind and heart and spirit.

It fed me, and it allowed me to expand and open up every time I was there.

And I knew that I had to go do this training.

: I had no idea how I was going to pay for it at the time.

It was like three, $4,000, which is a lot of money.

I had no idea how it’s going to pay for it.

And I had no idea how it’s going to get the time off of work, to leave my job at Starbucks for three months, three and a half months.

But I set my intention because I had the inkling and the knowing in my body.

Now that I was starting to open up to my feelings again, I would ask different questions about what would feel good, what would feel right, what do I really want to do?

And it was scary.

It was so scary because I was raised in a family.

My mother pretty much dictated to me where I was going to go to school, what I was going to study, what I was going to do.

I was told.

She told me I couldn’t be a writer because I’d be a starving artist.

All the things that I wanted to do, I was shut down.

No, you can’t do that.

That’s not the right path for you.

And I wanted so desperately to have her approval.

Now my father, all this time was on the sidelines a little bit.

He somewhat understood.

I really had to sit down with him face to face and say, dad, you don’t understand.

If I stay at this job, it will kill me.

It’s sucking the life out of me.

He would always cut out ads, want ads from the paper and show them to me for nursing supervisors.

He had the belief that I should just stay in this career and get my benefits and get my retirement and have that security so, so common.

Our parents want that for us.

But it’s a Dharma killer for sure.

It’s an intuition killer and not being able to follow and trust yourself.

I had no idea how to trust myself because they were pushing me, they thought leading and guiding, but pushing me to do what they thought was going to provide safety and security, which is a complete illusion.

That idea of safety and security ate my mother alive every day of her life.

She was in anxiety and fear, and I knew I didn’t want to follow in those footsteps.

But I also the subconscious mind, also would not allow me to essentially betray them because I wanted their love and approval.

And so my dad would cut out these ads for nursing supervisors.

And I look back now, it’s like $50,000 a year, $60,000 working crazy hours, 65 hours a week, totally stressed out.

And that’s when I looked at him and I finally said, I’m going to Cropolo if I stay in this job.

I had left nursing, going to Starbucks, and I was going to pursue this career of holistic health because I was seeing the benefits in my own healing.

He didn’t give me a lot of slack about it.

He did not give me a lot of resistance about it.

But I could see the worry and the fear on his face.

And he tried to support me as best that he could.

My mother’s response was, what is that going to get you?

What is that going to get you?

And I thought, what do you mean?

I asked her.

I said, what do you mean?

And she said, well, who’s going to want to hire you?

What kind of credential is that going to get you?

Who’s going to want to hire you in the medical field?

You’re a nurse.

And I replied and responded.

I said, I don’t want to work for somebody else.

I want to work for myself.

I want to build a career in holistic health and healing.

And she looked at me like I had grown six heads.

That seemed like the craziest thing to her because her belief system and her reality was, you have to have a job, you have to have a paycheck, you have to work for someone else.

And her real core belief was, you need someone to take care of you.

And her job was a piece of that puzzle.

So she was stymied by the idea that I was going to do this.

And I have to say that both of those responses, my mother’s, more than my father’s, really put a lot of doubt in me.

Even though I was taking the steps forward, I doubted myself.

I did not get the enthusiasm.

I did not get the support that I thought that I deserved and that I wanted.

And that ate at me for quite some time after I returned back from that training.

So I would go back and forth in and out of nursing jobs while I was trying to build this holistic practice.

But the other thing that happened to me while I was at Kropala was I stopped having my menstrual cycle.

And that ultimately led me to learning about Ayurvedic medicine in the same way that I had a knowing about going to Kropala to pursue this certification.

When I learned about Ayurveda and healing with Ayurvedic medicine, I had an instantaneous feeling in my body, in my heart, in my solar plexus that I needed to follow that path and I needed to pay attention.

That’s how it shows up for me.

Pay attention.

This is big.

Pay attention.

So I tuned in and I became hyper focused on that.

And what I had to do was just that become hyper focused in the area where I got an intuitive hit that I felt in my body because it was allowing me to transform the energy in my body.

It was allowing me to transform the pain, the constricted areas that I was holding myself back, the areas that were filled with cellular memories of shame and pain and abuse every time I followed one of those intuitive hits.

And we are not programmed.

We are not trained really by anyone to correlate that when we are not following our intuition and our Dharma and we are doubting ourselves all the time because our family and it could be a spouse, it doesn’t have to be our parents.

It could be a spouse, it could be children.

I have a very dear friend who she and I were nurses together in Hospice, but she is an Earth Angel and a healer.

And her husband is a very black and white mainstream surgeon and physician.

And she has fought to hold her power at her center in the truth of who she knows she is and came here to be not only with him but with her children because they didn’t want her to be the weird Wiki mom.

And when her daughter had rheumatoid arthritis, she would suggest things she would suggest Reiki.

She would suggest TBA, still taking her to the doctor, still doing medicine.

: But she tried fiercely to advocate for not doing the biologic agents and the Humira and the other agents because she knew this path would work.

But her daughter was like, mom, that’s your stuff.

I don’t want it.

My point being is that we do sometimes have to fight for our trust.

We have to fight for our knowing and our intuition to bring it back, because we have been so indoctrinated from a very young, early age to believe what our parents believe in their parents, in churches and schools.

And we want to be loved and approved of.

We want to feel good and we want to feel safe by our immediate family.

And so many times our Dharma involves not following that path that has most of the time not following that path that has been laid out for us.

It is a challenge to deal with and move through that shame that we can feel is being inflicted upon us for not following the road that someone else wants us to follow.

But be very clear, this is your life.

You get to choose what you do with it.

And if you aren’t able to connect with and follow your intuition and your heart and the inklings in your solar

And I talk about that in one of the other podcasts.

I will leave a link in the show notes so that you can listen to that.

Because this is what I said many times.

Illness is not the solution or illness is not the problem, it’s the solution.

And so that has been the path that I have followed, that I have learned that has gotten me out of not only living in a wheelchair and fibromyalgia and daily chronic pain, but also out of healing the rare cancer that I had.

It was following what I knew to be what was right for me at all costs, whether it was a relationship or my parents or whatever it was.

And trust me, I went many rounds with my mother, filled with that shame buried in shame.

And I fully believe that it’s what causes depression because we’re shutting down our life force and not able to love ourselves.

When our family members or someone that we love is in disapproval of us and we become codependent, we just keep trying over and over to get that love and approval, which is not what we came here to do.

We came here to actually love ourselves and return back to our sovereign self, back to trusting in and living as the one mind.

So I came back from my time at Kirpalo and immediately went into self study with Ayurveda and again, at the time, no one was really talking about this.

Now.

We’ve had Dr.Oz and other Deepak Chopra and other influencers in the holistic world and in the medical world who have brought up and brought out into the open and into the public arena about Ayurvedic medicine and yoga and meditation.

But back in eighty s and ninety s it was not as prevalent.

So it was very hard to be me.

I felt like I was always justifying myself and explaining myself.

What came out of that was I became a voice.

I became a teacher and an educator.

It was scary to put myself out there when I was still getting so much Flack from people around me.

I just felt like I did not fit in anywhere I went.

I showed up one time with a boyfriend at a dinner party and the only thing I could eat I was vegetarian at the time.

The only thing I could eat was some roasted Brussels sprouts, and I think they might have had a salad, but it was heavily it was all meat.

And they apologized to me.

But I took on feeling like the weirdo.

I took on feeling the shame of I’m the only one here that’s not eating this beautiful meal that someone took the love to prepare.

And so it was a real struggle.

It was a real struggle for me to own this path and this Dharma when no one else was doing it.

Now it is more easily accepted, but it was accepted out in the mainstream more.

I won’t say mainstream in the poor, free, in the fringes, but not in my family.

My mom had a fit one time.

She’s like, I don’t know what to Cook for anybody anymore.

One’s doing this, one’s doing that.

You’re not eating this, you’re not eating that.

I don’t know what season it is because I was following the Ayurveda, but I knew inside it was the right path.

And at some point, even though it was a challenge and I felt like I had no support, I had no one in my inner circle.

But I knew I was going to open a wellness center.

And I knew it was going to be an iratic wellness center because it was such a game changer.

When I learned about the energetic properties and principles and my unique makeup and how to apply it in my life, in my body, in my mind, it made so much sense to me.

And I knew it was the missing piece at the time for so many people.

It still is.

That’s why I created I’ll leave another link.

There’s a podcast on Ayurvedic medicine for the summer, and I’ll leave a couple of the blog posts as well.

It truly is the Cadillac of coming into alignment with who you really, truly are on a daily basis without having to even think about it.

But again, you will have to connect with your higher self.

You will have to connect with your own energy and learn how to move and manage your energy.

Get out of your head.

: Get into your feeling body so that you can become intuitive.

Intuition is not in our third eye.

It is a hit of energy and knowing in your physical body and being.

And you have to learn to connect with that so that you can trust it and take action from it and trust it and recalibrate and trust again and recalibrate and keep putting 1ft in front of the other, no matter what anyone says or does.

And that was the journey out of my family’s disapproval.

The time that I spent the practice.

You will hear me talk about daily practice.

This does not have to be hours of meditation.

There is a big difference between following going to Insight Timer and following a meditation and connecting to your higher self.

If you don’t know how to do that, I will leave link in the show notes to the Higher Self meditation that I have on the website.

It’s a free audio practice.

It over, over and and over.

You become what you practice.

This is how you step out of the shame, the fear, the family disapproval, and learn to get into your own intuition and trusting what is put in front of you.

Source, Spirit, God, whatever you want to call it is always giving us a message and a pointer in the direction that is perfect and right for us.

We have to be able to, number one, feel it, trust it, take action on it, and then course correct and be vulnerable enough to look at the people we love and say, this is the right path for me.

And I might make a mistake.

I might not know which direction to go next.

But I am going to figure it out.

And I am going to be okay.

Because for most of us, our family’s disapproval comes from their fear, from their indoctrination and their programming and their stories, their identity, their struggles.

It did not make sense to me.

Both of my parents came from families both sides of my grandparents were entrepreneurs and business owners, and they were not failures.

They were successful.

My grandfather, my father’s, my paternal grandfather was very successful.

My maternal grandparents were probably successful, as I would say, middle class during the day, during that era and time.

They did not struggle.

: My mother went to College at a time where a lot of women did not necessarily go to College.

So they were not hurting.

They were not struggling.

But it was so fascinating to me that they did not encourage self employment or going out on my own because their fear was I needed to be taken care of.

I knew that I would be taken care of, just not in the way that they believe it should happen.

And that goes back into our faith and our trust in our sovereign self and our sovereign being that we are here for a purpose and we are the one mind, the one heart in us as us moving through us, and we connect to that.

And that is our safety and security.

Not always easy to have our parents understand that this is a different world now and that we’re going to trust and follow our hearts and follow our Dharma when we don’t, when we stay in that shame, when we cannot trust and follow and we’re not in our bodies and we’re in our heads and worry and fear.

We are cutting ourselves off from our life force, cutting ourselves off from the One Mind.

We are constricting our energy, and that is creating illness in the body.

It’s creating anxiety.

It’s creating heart disease.

It’s creating digestive disorders.

It’s creating problems neurologically radiculopathy.

It’s creating menstrual problems because our sacral energy can’t move down through our root Chakra to help us be grounded in our Dharma in this lifetime.

Leg issues, walking, carrying, moving us forward.

These are all the things that are the result of not having the courage in my methodology.

One of the five C’s in my five steps to Freedom program is about staying in finding and staying in the courage to live this path for yourself so that you can show up healthy, vibrant.

Take your wellbeing to the next level, take your Dharma and your path and your purpose to the next level so that you shine your light and you do it for the next person and the next person.

And the next person.

Which is why I am here on the podcast every week to help bring you the insights of everything that I learned on this path getting to this place of health, wealth, success, self love, self esteem and moving myself and others forward.

Thank you so much for being here.

If you found this episode helpful and you know someone who needs to hear it, please share it with them and I would be so grateful if you enjoyed this podcast please leave a review over at itunes and Apple podcasts.

The more times you share this and write a review, the more people I can reach so that together we can change the trajectory of health and wellbeing in this world and create a better place on the planet for all of us.

Thanks for listening.

I’ll see you in the next episode.

Thanks listening to the place to be free podcast and if you like what you heard and you want to know more, go to marketablasting.com.