Healing Through The Subconscious Mind

[00:00:03] Matt Landsiedel: All right, welcome to the Gay Men Going Deeper podcast, a series by the Gay Men’s Brotherhood where we talk about personal development, mental health and sexuality. I’m your host, Matt Landsiedel. I am a counselor and facilitator specializing in healing and empowerment. My areas of expertise are teaching people how to heal toxic shame and attachment trauma and embody their authentic self so they can enjoy more meaningful connections in their lives. I specialize in working with highly sensitive people, empaths and gay men to develop a stronger sense of self-worth. So today’s topic, we are talking about healing through the subconscious mind. We’re joined by Scott Clover. Welcome, Scott.

[00:00:38] Scott Clover: Hi. Thanks.

[00:00:39] Matt Landsiedel: Good to have you here.

[00:00:41] Scott Clover: Likewise, yeah.

[00:00:43] Matt Landsiedel: So for those of you who don’t know Scott, Scott is an intuitive energy healer. He supports people by assessing their energetic state, identifying root causes of their blockages, and explains how they can create an environment for healthier patterns to form. He works with intuition and somatic energy, which is a body-oriented energy, as a way to connect with their body’s inherent ability to heal.

Good stuff. I. You’d be a great person to have on to talk about the subconscious mind because it seems like you’ve been doing this work for a long time and you have a lot of wisdom to share with the audience. So, yeah, just to give the audience a bit of a heads up of what we’re going to be talking about today. So we’ll be exploring what is the subconscious mind. For those of you who are wondering what that is, we’ll be going through that childhood trauma and the impact that has on the subconscious mind, the stories we tell ourselves, exploring empathy, intuition and hyper vigilance in relationship to childhood trauma.

How do we invoke the childhood imagination? How can this help us heal? I’m excited to learn more about that because that’s.

[00:01:46] Scott Clover: That’s a big one for me. That’s a big one for me.

[00:01:48] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, it sounds enticing. So I like that. We’ll explore some somatic semantics. So what our body is trying to tell us through the subconscious and the somatic, and then how we can start to understand the language of the body and the subconscious mind so we can heal from our past.

I also want to say too that this episode is being released in the Gay Men’s Brotherhood. Theme of the month is self-compassion. So I want us to keep that in mind. Like, how can we bring all of this into this notion of self-compassion? What does that even mean? So we’ll kind of bleed that in throughout this episode and. Yeah, so I’m pretty excited to explore.

[00:02:27] Scott Clover: You keep putting your toe in several places where I often work. And I would say in response to just specifically that, forgive yourself.

Start with forgiving yourself, speaking about the subconscious and the childhood mind. Understand that whatever you tried to solve before the age of seven in your household wasn’t your responsibility. It should have been dealt with by adults that weren’t able to handle it in the sixties, seventies, eighties, whenever you were born and growing up.

So the one thing you can do from an adult perspective is go back in and find your childhood mind and forgive that person.

A lot of us growing up as empaths and as queer people that didn’t have safe childhoods or things happened to us that weren’t safe, we become hypervigilant. You spoke about that in a way to protect ourselves. Well, then the nervous system gets activated, and there’s seven valves in our bodies that sort of are pumps that regulate our nervous system, and some of those get contracted at a young age. It takes a lot of inner work to get those uncontracted from a long-term perspective, meaning you can go into parasympathetic, but part of your body may still be in that unresolved issue. And generally, when we talk about the subconscious, I generally speak of it as before the age of seven. So if you’re 30 and above, it’s about before the age of seven. Now, I don’t know why, but it’s gone to about the age of six. For younger people, it really gets formed around the age of six. But for most people my age and a little younger than me, it’s the age of seven. Okay, what does that mean? That means that if you have a new experience within that time, your body doesn’t know how to place that experience, and it either places it in something that’s palpable and understandable or something that’s not understandable. Right. So if you have a trauma or someone compromises your energy or compromises your body as a child, you can’t place that because it’s never happened before. And that’s essentially where trauma happens. In my work, I call it a kinked hose. My clients call me what? A kinked hose.

[00:04:36] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:04:36] Scott Clover: Like a hose that gets kinked and it stops flowing correctly.

[00:04:40] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:04:40] Scott Clover: And so my. My clients call me the energetic plumber because I find those hoses and figure out ways to sort of release that energy to get it flowing again.

[00:04:48] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:04:48] Scott Clover: And one way to do that specifically is to engage the childhood imagination through permission and allowance. And the other way is to uh, forgive yourself. So we. We really got off on a. On a great start here, talking about these two things. If you can do those two things from your childhood perspective as an adulthood, gleaning into what you were like as a child, either seeing that person. One way to engage the childhood imagination is simply by saying it.

[00:05:15] Matt Landsiedel: Okay, okay.

[00:05:17] Scott Clover: I have my clients say I give my body permission to evoke my childhood imagination, and then I have them say, I allow my body to evoke my childhood imagination. Now, generally, why do I have my clients say that both ways? Because their body will contract differently when they say allow and permit of. Why is that? Well, permission in English. This doesn’t work in all languages, but permission and allowance are two separate things in English language, shall we say?

And these are my examples if you ever saw the movie “Footloose”. The premise of the movie was these young teenagers wanted to have a dance in their small town, and the church and the city council said, no, you don’t have permission to dance. So they didn’t dance. Well, they did after the end of the movie, but the point was they didn’t have permission in their community. So there was a conditioned thinking bubble compressing them down. And their actions were then restricted because it wasn’t permitted by a societal pressure. We felt a lot of that opening up to our sexuality growing up. Right. So that’s a permission thing. I don’t have permission because I might impact the greater society.

Now, the flip side of permission is allowance. And that’s the example is like, little Johnny’s dancing in third grade in music class, and Susie comes over and says, wow, johnny, you dance like a jerk. Can’t believe what a dumb fool you look like. And he’s six years old or seven years old, and he thinks he’s so cross crestfallen and hurt that he doesn’t dance. Again, he doesn’t dance at his homecoming, high school dances. He doesn’t dance at his wedding. He has permission to dance at his wedding. Society actually expects him to dance at his wedding, yet he does not allow himself to dance, meaning that constriction is from inside, pulling his actions downward. So we get repressed two ways. One is by conditioned thinking and our thoughts from that. And the second is the relationship to that, which can be judgment, fear, a whole bunch of other things, which then drags us down and disallows us from acting accordingly to our inner spirit or our inner soul, if you will.

[00:07:26] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, fascinating. Very fascinating.

So, invoking the childhood imagination when it comes to healing, why is this important?

[00:07:37] Scott Clover: Because if you ever spend any time around children?

A bunch of pillows and a blanket can become a fort, right. And in their mind, they are a prince defending that castle. And so it’s creation and imagination is met when we’re under seven.

And we have a lot more intuitive abilities and we’re more connected because we haven’t been sort of compromised by what we’re supposed to think and we think what we are. Right. So if you can evoke that again, then you can use your imagination and that sense of creation where they meet and actually create change and healing in your own body. Why? Because the subconscious doesn’t recognize fantasy and reality differently. So if you create an actual visualization in your mind, your subconscious is going to relate to that very similarly than it would relate to a real occurrence. So having your imagination aligned with that childhood creational aspect can really help unblock some of those hoses and allow that chi or life force or energy into that imagination, which then can create the reality. And we know from, you know, the memes and TikTok that if you observe your reality, it changes. Well, if you close your eyes and visualize something from a childhood creative standpoint, your subconscious will allow that to be more creatable, if you will. It gives it a better chance to become a realization.

[00:09:03] Matt Landsiedel: Okay. Okay. So let’s take a step back to what is the subconscious mind? Because I think some people don’t know what that is. So if we can paint that picture for them, what is it? What is it? The. I’m getting a sense that it’s stories. It’s an accumulation of stories and experiences that we. That get stored somewhere. That’s, that’s kind of from what you’re showing, that’s what I’m picking up.

[00:09:25] Scott Clover: Sure. And I’m not a therapist, to be clear, I, I come at this from an energetic perspective.

[00:09:30] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:09:30] Scott Clover: And that’s why I had. Yeah, exactly. I’m not a therapist. I come at it from an energetic and intuitive, empathic, picking up vibes kind of sense.

[00:09:38] Matt Landsiedel: Totally.

[00:09:39] Scott Clover: So from, from my perspective, the subconscious is created when we’re young to figure things out for us.

And if everything was rosy, your subconscious would form and then you wouldn’t know how to deal with adversarial or compromising positions. Right. So as I said, it forms before the age of seven. Cause and effect rationale is taught then, you know, another thing is if you try to speak to your subconscious, it’s not going to use really flowery words. Think the, the most important words are the shortest way you can speak to it. Like, we learn the pan is hot.

I’ve used this before. We don’t learn. We don’t learn. The caloric value of that alloy is exceeding what is temperature. You know, that’s. That’s too much for us to understand, because when we’re four, the pan is hot or the pan is not hot. That’s how we learn. Right. So the subconscious is. I think it governs a lot of our things. It governs our nervous system to some degree. It governs our endocrine system, a whole bunch of other things. So I think it’s aligned with the body and the body processes that are involuntary.

[00:10:51] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:10:52] Scott Clover: As well as creating what we think is how we relate to the world. In my work, I also deal with the archetypes, which means we all have a certain set of different archetypes, and we come at the world differently because we present that. But the archetypes are only the template. The subconscious is what happens, as I said, to get us to understand how we exist in the world.

And if you take two twins who are genetically equal and put them in different homes, for example, to be raised, we know epigenetically that they’re going to have different experiences, and their mindsets won’t be as similar as they would maybe if they were raised next to one another. Similarly, the subconscious, if you’re raised in a household that is either supportive in one aspect and contractive in another aspect or dangerous in some respect, but has a real sense of family, community, frames your subconscious, and then you look at the world that way going forward until it’s acted upon.

But it’s hard to be acted upon just by telling a story. Yeah, because the stories we tell ourselves as adults for healing are not the originating pattern story that it was created. That’s why people come and see me, because sometimes most people, most my clients don’t remember before the age of seven.

[00:12:09] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:12:10] Scott Clover: So I will bring up to them, hey, can you. If your mom’s still alive, can you call your mom and ask her what happened at four?

Oh, I fell out of my crib, or I hit my head, or, this is a car accident, or I had a dental thing. And so a lot of. A lot of times I’ll say, ooh, something happened to you at five or six. Cause I see the kink in your timeline energetically or with my intuitive sense, and I’ll bring that back and say you had a traumatic event. Which traumatic events are only traumatic to the receiver in the moment if they can’t. But if they can’t, place it in relation to something previous that’s happened.

[00:12:43] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:12:44] Scott Clover: The main example I can give you to this is if you’ve ever seen a baby who’s just starting solid foods and they eat mushy peas and carrots, they have no real sense of taste yet, right. They only know mushy and maybe a very dull taste. And then there’s videos out there that you give that child a lemon, and their face just goes, what the heck?

They have no comparison to what just happened to them. So that, to a baby, is a traumatic event because the acidity of the lemon is way too far from a mushy banana.

So you have to incrementally get the subconscious trained, or else it’s going to experience something that it has to react, and then it holds on to that. This can be anywhere from a child eating a lemon, to a car accident, to a sexual aggression, to a child, to any number of things. A parent who’s a narcissist or a parent who’s an alcoholic or a drug addict.

A lot of my clients, not a lot, but a fair share of my clients come from childhood where they were in some sort of cult environment, where they had an overly dogmatic parenthood situation. So their parents were overly dogmatic, which didn’t give the child’s imagination room to grow, was aligned and pigeonholed into some sort of track. And so that creates frustration. It’s like a car bumping up against the side of a tunnel. It should be expansive, right?

[00:14:13] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:14:13] Scott Clover: So, yeah, if you grew up in a dogmatic environment, it’s definitely creating constricting or inhibiting patterns in your subconscious. That can be sexual shame as an adulthood. That can be self-expression. That can elicit itself as. A lot of people you may know have friends that say, oh, are you mad at me? Oh, I’m sorry. Are you mad at me? I’m sorry. You know, all of those things are formed before the age of seven, generally. Yeah, unless there was. And this is another aspect of teasing or bullying that can have another constricting event after the fact. Meaning, in your adolescent years, teenage years, if you were bullied, things like that, that can also malign the subconscious because it’s so dramatically traumatic to the person experiencing it.

It comes with shame and judgment attached to it, which, when those two combine, that’s, you know, being bullied at school is one thing. If you’re bullied in your household or you’re resented in your household. A lot of queer people are resented because they’re trying to act authentically.

And when you show up in a room and say, wow, I feel this inside, and I’m going to express that. That unfortunately offends people who don’t have that ability. So by a lot of people, a lot of queer people saying, coming out or saying, I am existing as this because I choose this or this is how I feel inside, that offends people who don’t have that capacity.

It’s not on purpose, you know, but if you shine your light and it blinds the person next to you, the person next to you might get Madden. And we have to start dealing with that more and more as people who are out and about in the community. I was saying to you earlier, before the interview, I was out in high school in the eighties. I was the only queer person in the five high schools that I knew of.

I would drive down to the ghettos of Detroit to go to the bars because that was the only socializing, I knew what to do. But for a 16-year-old to be socializing in bars didn’t make much sense for me. I didn’t drink. It wasn’t my people. There were people so much older than me. Right. Well, in this day and age, you’re not lone wolfs anymore.

The queer mentality or mindset has just shaped so much differently than when I was a teenager.

And you can be supportive of that by just being supportive of what people say they are presenting as is. And if that offends you, then it’s rightfully, maybe, something inside of you that you have the issue with.

[00:16:48] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:16:49] Scott Clover: And we see that in our society a lot. You know, the ones that yell the loudest against us are the ones that are doing it in the background with the shame and things like that. Right. So it’s an interesting perspective to look at things like that. And as I was saying earlier, if you tell a story to placate your subconscious or to placate yourself because something bad happened to you when you were a child and you tell that story every day until you’re 35 or 40, the story that you’re telling now to placate yourself does not in any way resemble the originating story. So it’s more difficult for people to get over trauma because they’ve been placating themselves with what originally happened to make themselves feel better. Well, that doesn’t help sort of excise the scar or get rid of the original wound. Right.

[00:17:39] Matt Landsiedel: What does that look like? Can you give us an example of what that would look like just to.

[00:17:44] Scott Clover: Well, the over exaggeration is that game of telephone or telegraph, where you turn to the person next to you in a group of people and you tell them a story and then by the end of the story, it’s totally a different story. Well, we do that into our subconscious. So if you were, I don’t know, sexually traumatized by an adult as a child. Well, maybe I thought this or maybe I. You know, we do a lot of maybes to try and make ourselves feel better. Well, those maybes are not. What happened to you had no control over that situation.

[00:18:16] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:18:17] Scott Clover: So trying to make yourselves feel better. Oh, it wasn’t as bad as it. As it could have been or. Oh, it was a. It was a family member. So they’re a good person.

Right. So we changed the narrative to make it seem okay.

[00:18:30] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:18:31] Scott Clover: Whereas our subconscious is screaming, it’s not okay. I’m scared. A little boy inside of me is not well, or a little girl is hiding. So a lot of times when I do guided visualizations with people or we’re in a psychic connection in the healing milieu, they’ll actually start to experience and see their inner child. And for a lot of them, they present as sort of in a dungeon with grimy clothes and, like, sort of huddling in the corner. And we approach them as, like, a feral animal and let them self present. And then I say, okay, what does your inner child look like? What are they experiencing? Why are they scared, timid, et cetera. And then I have them redress them and say, what do they want to wear? Let’s get them outside in a pasture. Let’s get them outside in the sunlight. Not hiding in this corner because they’re shame ridden. Or there was resentment in their family, et cetera, et cetera.

If you’re considered queer or different.

We were different back in my day.

There was resentment for that in the family. And when resentment happens, then judgment can come, particularly if that person excels at other things, because they can use our queerdom as sort of an Achilles heel. Right. And that’s happened to a lot of us growing up. It certainly happened in my family, and that’s no longer acceptable to most of us. I think growing up, as I said, as a gay kid in the eighties, we felt like we had to accept more than we have to accept now. And one way to do that is to look back and say, what confined me as a kid and ways to help heal yourself is to say, what did I enjoy doing as a child? Did you enjoy painting or reading or going out in nature and playing with a stream?

Try to rekindle that. Try to imagine what you liked to do before you were seven and then implement an aspect of that in your life today. For mine, I stopped reading fiction years ago when I took up my profession because now, I read mostly books about energy and healing and things like that. And a few years back, I started reading fiction and then fantasy. Fantasy. And I haven’t done that since I was a kid. And I really enjoy it because it takes me out of my compulsive mindset to help, whereas I can just relax back into my body and remember reading the Narnia books when I was a kid or remembering the things that I really enjoyed, whether that’s swimming or a certain sort of exercise, try to find the adult version of that and re implement those things. And that really can help your self-awareness and self-esteem. We talked about that earlier.

[00:21:06] Matt Landsiedel: Okay, so I have a question for you. So if we’re, if the. If we’re talking about healing through the subconscious mind, is it fair to say that, you know, part of what you’re talking about, the healing is connecting with this younger, inner child part of us, and that is where we access the healing, where we can access the subconscious mind. Is this true?

[00:21:26] Scott Clover: Correct. Okay, that’s. That’s my take on it.

[00:21:29] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s beautiful. It’s your modality. I love it.

[00:21:33] Scott Clover: Ways to do that is just once again, forgiving yourself. A lot of the blood block or a lot of the lock on that dungeon that we don’t go into is because we still take on the shame that we had something to do with it or that it was our fault.

Those joke books, those joke children’s books. One of the worst ones is daddy drinks because you cry.

And why is that so ripping is because that’s what a young kid might think.

[00:22:01] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:22:02] Scott Clover: You know, oh, I’m sensitive. And that must have been because why my parents got divorced was my sensitivities. And that’s, that story, as you referred to earlier, that’s a story you tell yourself over and over until you find yourself in therapy at the age of 40 and you just want to, you know, be in a healthy relationship, for example.

[00:22:20] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. Okay. So for the listener viewer, how can they start to access their I subconscious mind?

Like, if somebody’s not wanting to come work with you, they’re just wanting, like, what, what would you say? There’s, like, steps that they can, they can start to do to access this part of themselves?

[00:22:38] Scott Clover: What broke it open for me after, you know, being confined to so many years and putting my intuition in a box when I was eleven or twelve and not accessing that, because for me, that was my big contraction. Being gay was easy. Being calling myself an intuitive out in public, that was hard. That was very difficult for me. And one way is to, if you think about yourself from that age, then try to connect and see yourself that way. So start off by, once again, I forgive my inner child, or I give my body permission to forgive myself. I allow my body to forgive myself. Then close your eyes and visualize something you used to do when you were a kid and see yourself doing that and seeing, is that child happy in your mind’s eye, or is that child sad? And why are they sad? And then you trace back that story and you realize, oh, I had a neighbor that moved away when I was five, and I felt like I was being forsaken. I felt like somebody was leaving me on purpose, whereas their parents just got a different job in another town. But when you have a strong relationship at five and that gets torn away from you and you don’t understand why, that can be another reason. So you go by and you say, oh, I had trouble with friendships because that got brutally ripped away from me. And you may see how it works for me. My linchpin was when my mentor asked me, how does my body feel?

So when I was in my thirties, having struggled with talk therapy and not really understanding what I was, I’m seeing the future and I’m seeing all this stuff. Talk therapy didn’t help me with that, right? So my mentor, who does somatic, who was the one of the main practitioner of somatic works back in the eighties and nineties, he asked me, how does my body feel?

As someone who didn’t want to be in his body, I did not like that question at all. What the.

And it took me a couple sessions to just even allow the access to my own somatic or innate intelligence, and that is to be quiet.

Now, most people who go through childhood trauma and have things have issues with meditation. Meditation is not the savior for everyone’s nervous system because some people can’t meditate, they’re so activated. Or one of those valves is stuck in a fight or flight response that for them to meditate is too affronting. And then they feel bad about themselves because they’re not able to meditate. My neighbor’s able to meditate. All my friends are meditating, and I can’t meditate. So it can add more shame to the thing where I say, go for a walk, hug a tree, stare at a candle, do anything you can do to shift your mindset. Learn how to hand sew by hand. Learn how to do something.

And in doing that, your nervous system can calm down a little bit, that you can then say, is it safe for me to approach myself?

And if you get a yes, then go a little deeper.

[00:25:36] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. And are you approaching yourself cognitively through visualization, or are you approaching yourself somatically through moving down into the sensations of your body? Like, let’s maybe discern, like, the difference between those two or both, right?

[00:25:50] Scott Clover: Well, I would say both, but, yes, they are separate. Okay, so ask yourself, how does my body feel? And if you get kicked out, keep asking.

Right. If all of a sudden this hurts, or then you get a tightness here, ask yourself, what shape is it? What color is it? Why is it there? See? Imagine if you can drain it out. Most of my clients have energy coagulations in their bodies that are either sentient or not sentient that need or should be removed. And those energy areas are because they became contracted as a safety mechanism as children, let’s say, or adults, even.

[00:26:28] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. So what happens when you meet that? Because what I’m hearing is like, you know, leading with compassionate curiosity. I love this term because it’s like you’re just taking the flashlight and searching through yourself. You’re not judging it. You’re nothing, you know, trying to change anything. You’re just simply trying to meet yourself, whatever you find.

[00:26:44] Scott Clover: So let’s say we call it the curious observer.

[00:26:46] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. So I’m being the curious observer. I’m going through my system. I’m maybe doing a bit of visualization or. And then all of a sudden, I hit a kink. What do I do when I hit this kink?

[00:26:56] Scott Clover: Observe it. Don’t push.

[00:26:58] Matt Landsiedel: Okay. Just.

[00:26:59] Scott Clover: Just observe. Our normal mindset is. It’s a block of ice. Let’s hit it with a mallet. No, just stare at it. Observe it and see if it melts. Most of these things don’t like being affronted, and most of these issues are festering inside of us because we don’t take the moments to look at them. And as we talked about earlier, in observing something, it can change.

[00:27:20] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:27:21] Scott Clover: So what I say in my work. What I say in my work is observation of a pattern is 55% of the healing.

[00:27:27] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:27:28] Scott Clover: If you go to the doctor and say, what’s wrong with. I’m sick. What’s wrong with you? I don’t know. He can’t really help you, right? They can’t. The doctors can’t help you if you don’t know what’s wrong with you. So if you say, hey, subconscious, what’s up with me? Give it a moment, be curious what happens and what comes up for you, and you’ll be kind of pleasantly surprised. Um, there’s no right or wrong way to do it, but, uh, one thing that is probably prudent is not to force it.

[00:27:56] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, I was going to say most people, it’s funny, when they. When we meet parts of ourselves that are uncomfortable, most people are like, I want to change it. I want to get rid of it. I want to resist it. I want to push it away. So you’re asking people to do the opposite of that. So what would that look like?

[00:28:09] Scott Clover: Well, that creates a constipation, what you just talked about.

[00:28:12] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:28:12] Scott Clover: That creates an energetic constipation.

[00:28:14] Matt Landsiedel: Constipation. Yeah.

[00:28:16] Scott Clover: Yeah.

[00:28:16] Matt Landsiedel: Okay, so what. What. What, uh, like, yeah, what. What could. How could somebody meet that? So they’re going to observe it, and then, like, you know, are you asking people to maybe.

[00:28:24] Scott Clover: So let me. Let me backtrack a little bit more.

[00:28:26] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:28:26] Scott Clover: Okay. So the other tenet of my work is that joy and judgment cannot live in the same moment.

[00:28:32] Matt Landsiedel: Okay?

[00:28:33] Scott Clover: So if you’re in a state of judgment or you feel you’re being judged, then joy can’t be in that same moment. And one way to shift yourself out of that judgment phase, whether it’s you judging yourself or feeling judged by someone else, is to be curious.

[00:28:47] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:28:47] Scott Clover: And that can move the needle, say, to neutral.

So once you’re curious and that needle is moved to neutral, then from that curiosity state, you can start observing and having that observation change things.

[00:29:00] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:29:00] Scott Clover: Does that make sense?

[00:29:01] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. Yeah. So essentially, what. How I’m. How I’m understanding it, is you’re observing and you’re just meeting yourself with pure presence. Presence is a very. Is a transmuter of everything, really. When you’re just able to. To meet yourself in that moment without judgment, just with. With space, you’re just giving yourself space.

[00:29:19] Scott Clover: Yeah. If. If the people out there know the term to hold space, how often do we hold space for ourselves? If you’re holding space for your parent or your friend or your compassionate partner or whatever you hold we as empaths and healers, we hold space for a lot of people. Well, how often do we turn that on ourselves and hold space for ourselves? And that holding space for ourselves can come from that curious observer, and that curious observer actually has a chance, whereas the judgmental observer, it’s very rare that that judgmental observer is going to shift mindsets, because judgment creates a contraction in our central nervous system. So it stayed. Being in a state of judgment, whether, as I said, you judging someone else or them judging you, activates the central nervous system. From that point, you have to decide, do I want to become sympathetic again, meaning activated, or do I want to go back to parasympathetic and be calmer? One way to go back to parasympathetic and be calmer is to say, why am I like this, Matt? Why the hell you like that? Why the hell did that person do this? You know what? In that person’s background created the circumstance that they could treat me like that. And then maybe in that curiosity, you find compassion, or maybe in that curiosity, you find the reason why you were a bleeding heart and you overextended your boundaries.

For a lot of us, we want to blame everything on the narcissist and we want to blame everything on the people out there, whereas a lot of times we unfortunately don’t have proper boundaries.

[00:30:44] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[00:30:46] Scott Clover: And if you weren’t raised in a family that had proper boundaries or that they overextended your boundaries repeatedly, you’re not going to have that ability growing up. You’re not going to have that ability as an adult at your work, in your relationships and your personal relationships, your sexual relationships, whatever you decide, you have to understand where your boundaries lie. Now, creating boundaries as an adult with your family is off putting and affronting to them. They take that as an offensive act.

What I say is, if you stand up for yourself and you hit somebody on the head, it means they’re looming over you.

[00:31:18] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:31:18] Scott Clover: So if you stand up for yourself and you hit them, they’re standing too close. That’s not an offensive act. It’s not even.

It’s not even defensive. It’s just existing.

[00:31:29] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:31:30] Scott Clover: But for a lot of us, when we do that later in life, it creates issues with our interpersonal relationships because they’re used to overextending your boundaries because you let them.

[00:31:40] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, exactly.

[00:31:41] Scott Clover: So a lot of healing comes with a lot of loss.

[00:31:45] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:31:45] Scott Clover: And that loss creates grief, and grief lands in the lungs. So another way you can get to yourself without having to meditate if you’re not able is certain breath works.

[00:31:58] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:31:59] Scott Clover: Different yoga breath works. There’s a whole bunch of breath works online. Just breathe. Breath is life. Right. And if you can move your chi through breath in that process, it might take the shifting, the way you can access your subconscious in a new and different way. So all of these things are not for everybody. This is not a cookie cutter healing template, right? Because we all grew up differently. But if you can’t do this, try that. If you can’t try this, try that. And breath work is a great way to embody yourself and create more connection without it being off putting or trying to meditate.

[00:32:35] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, yeah, I like this. I like this concept of holding space for yourself. And I think for those of you who are listening and maybe feel, like, overwhelmed, like, oh, my God, there’s so many things to focus on for myself. I know just holding space for myself, giving myself space to be as I find myself, has been so transformative for me because I come from more of a shame, perfectionistic, highly critical of myself, you know, background. And so when I find myself in these states that feel uncomfortable, it’s been hard for me to lean into that discomfort. It’s been hard for me to be with myself when I’m like that. So learning how to just move towards that place and be with myself in whatever state I find myself, that, for me, has actually been the embodiment of self-compassion. Like, just being like, okay, I’m just going to be with myself in my messiness right now instead of trying to constantly change myself.

And then I find when I do that, I’m giving myself space, then I can move maybe a bit more towards the changing myself mentality. But if I meet myself with, I need to change in this moment, I find I just end up falling deeper into a hole. Right.

[00:33:39] Scott Clover: Need and want are four letter words in the healing milieu. If you need to do something or you want to do something, the universe just goes, no, it’s not going to meet you halfway, then it’s much more challenging. If you say, I will align with this, or I allow my body to align with an intention, that the universe is going to meet you a lot easier than if you say, I need and want this. Needing and wanting creates more needing and wanting.

[00:34:05] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. So why is. Why is allowing different and aligning and welcoming? Like, why are those things different? I’m just curious.

[00:34:12] Scott Clover: From your perspective, I would say it’s receptivity.

[00:34:15] Matt Landsiedel: Okay?

[00:34:16] Scott Clover: It’s Yin Yang, it’s Lingam yoni, it’s masculine feminine. It’s allowing, receiving, or sending out.

[00:34:24] Matt Landsiedel: Okay, right.

[00:34:25] Scott Clover: And a lot of us send out things because we are hyper vigilant and we forget to receive, and then we’re off balance. Okay, so reciprocity is where it’s at.

[00:34:37] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. So what is it about wanting and needing that. That tells the universe that it’s not going to meet you halfway.

[00:34:45] Scott Clover: Well, wanting just, if I want this, it’s always out of arm’s reach. Want creates more want because you’re in a vibration of want. Whereas if you are in a vibration of is ness or Amnes, I am stating or you set an intention and you verbalize it correctly, then the universe perks up a little bit and says, hey, we can work with you on that. But just the basic sensing of wanting creates that need, and that creates a sense of lack.

[00:35:15] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:35:16] Scott Clover: Yeah, that’s more quantum physics.

[00:35:18] Matt Landsiedel: And yeah, I love this stuff. I could talk about traditional settings.

[00:35:22] Scott Clover: I do a little bit of that in my work, but for me it comes naturally because a lot of times I channel with the client. And so the words that I’m speaking generally come from their perspective, if you will. And I’m just informing them of what their subconscious is saying.

But generally, when they start saying need and want, I know that’s the ego. And then we stop there and we go, whoa, wait a minute.

[00:35:41] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:35:41] Scott Clover: Let’s get back on track.

[00:35:43] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:35:43] Scott Clover: Yeah.

[00:35:44] Matt Landsiedel: So to give the audience, like, a little script, would it be good to say, I permit, I allow, I align? Are those, are those good?

[00:35:55] Scott Clover: Those are all good for need.

[00:35:56] Matt Landsiedel: Okay. Yeah.

[00:35:57] Scott Clover: Well, no, need and want more is just set an intention. That’s clear.

[00:36:03] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:36:04] Scott Clover: To eradicate the need and want issue. The other we’ve talked about earlier is to align with yourself, to let things in. Yeah. To allow things is say, I permit this, I give it permission to happen, and I allow it to happen.

[00:36:16] Matt Landsiedel: Okay. Yeah.

[00:36:17] Scott Clover: And that will hopefully erase some of the contraction of contractive energy that comes from. Is that a conditioned thinking position that changed my psyche, or did I change my psyche to protect myself?

[00:36:29] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. Okay.

[00:36:30] Scott Clover: Yeah.

[00:36:30] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:36:31] Scott Clover: Yeah. Those are two ways to start speaking to yourself. And if you do, if you were talking about this, please say it out loud. Please say it out loud to the universe. Don’t think it. Thinking is great, but it’s just a thought. Whereas if you vibrate, then the curtains hear it, and the room hears it, and the atoms in the air hear it. And so when you state it verbally, then it has more of an effect. And then your body actually feels and hears and vibrates you saying it. Thoughts are great, but intending and speaking in intention and sending a sense of will.

[00:37:05] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:37:06] Scott Clover: Without a sense of need, then that’s really beneficial.

[00:37:12] Matt Landsiedel: Okay. Yeah.

There’s something else that came up around meaning. I keep hearing this in my own thoughts around, like, making meaning of our suffering, making meaning of our childhood, making meaning of why our inner child is in this dungeon wearing grubby clothes. Like, you know, how important is making meaning when it. When we’re talking about working with the subconscious mind or healing, working with childhood imagination, these sorts of things, like.

Yeah, and I guess that ties into stories as well. Stories and meaning, they’re kind of similar. So do you encourage people to make meaning of their experiences, or do you encourage. Not, like, what would you say?

[00:37:50] Scott Clover: Well, not to be too indelicate, but a lot of times, you know, you just flush down what you don’t. You don’t look at what you’re putting in the bowl. You flush it down. So for a lot of times, people to overthink what happened to them just recreates that. That groove and just recreates it over and over again. That’s why talking about a trauma over and over again just recreates that trauma in your mind and then changes the story and you have to placate it. So the meaning behind a lot of things, I think that’s giving too much of an adult mindset to it.

[00:38:21] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:38:21] Scott Clover: I think it’s giving it too much power.

[00:38:23] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:38:24] Scott Clover: And so I think if you can unfurl the meaning and destabilize the meaning, then the true essence of what happened comes out.

[00:38:33] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:38:33] Scott Clover: I think we apply meaning to protect ourselves.

[00:38:36] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, I think so too. Yeah.

[00:38:37] Scott Clover: And that worked really well in the, you know, mad men era when you. They were in psychotherapy and you laid on the couch, you know, but it’s all changed. I prefer my clients sitting up with their feet on the ground and their eyes closed. Right. So they can ground their body energies. It’s not about the story. So for me, if a client comes to me, I’ll let them speak just minimally. I’ll ask them a couple basic questions, and then they’ll say, let’s get, you know, just speak about something. That’s 10 seconds, 15 minutes, 1015 seconds. From that point, I see where and how their body reacts, and then I can trail that back into where their story is. But if I let my client spend ten minutes of our hour together rehashing the same story they’ve told their therapist for 40 years, it’s not. It’s not going to do any good. We’re spending ten minutes we don’t need. Because I don’t need to hear that story. Because you’re not telling me something that’s true. You’re not lying to me, but you’re telling me a story that can no longer resemble the originating pattern.

[00:39:37] Matt Landsiedel: How would you know that? It, whether it’s true for somebody else.

[00:39:40] Scott Clover: Or not, I can sense it in the body. I actually can say, I have my clients say statements out loud and their body tells me whether they’re telling me the truth or not. And the way they react energetically, it’s like a little blip on that screen.

[00:39:55] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:39:56] Scott Clover: When somebody, when I have a client say something, they’ll blip and they’ll either blimp that they’re congruent with what they’re saying, or they’ll blip that they want to be congruent with what they’re saying. And that’s when I have to stop them and say, you’re not congruent with that.

You’re intending what you’re saying, but you don’t. It’s not true.

[00:40:13] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:40:16] Scott Clover: And so that can have a, that can have a real untangling effect for people when you call them out. No, no, no. I want to be like this. Well, you have to accept the existing reality.

Right. If you accept the existing reality, then want gets eradicated.

And if you accept the existing reality, then you can change it. But if you come out of situation and say, I want to be different.

Well, you’re not different. I want to be in a relationship. Well, you’re not. So accept the existing reality and find what about you is contractive, that isn’t allowing you to be in that relationship or get that job or move across country or break away from your family or tell your uncle to f off or, you know, whatever comes up.

You have to accept the existing reality. If you don’t do that, healing gets blocked.

[00:41:07] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. How can somebody practice that? How can somebody practice accepting their current reality?

[00:41:14] Scott Clover: Maybe write stuff down.

[00:41:16] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:41:17] Scott Clover: Write it with a pen and paper. Don’t type it on a computer. Write it on pen and paper and see it and say, do I really align with that? Or do I want to mean that?

[00:41:25] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:41:27] Scott Clover: And this can be going to the gym twice a week. Like, I want to go to the gym twice a week. Well, you don’t. That’s the existing reality. Right. It can be anything. I want to eat healthier. I want to have a healthier relationship with my family. Whatever it is, wanting it is not going to create it, seeing it for what it is, and then you can change it. I was referring to that earlier. When you go to the doctor, if they know what’s wrong with you, they have a better chance of healing you. Right. If you accept your existing reality, then you can change it. If you want it to change, then it’s out of arm’s length and you’re just observing it.

[00:42:04] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. So I’m curious, though, because if we’re accepting our current reality and seeing it for what it is, do we not have to make meaning, though? So if something. Let’s say something’s happening, and I’m like, I don’t want to go to the gym, and I’ve got to accept that, you know, that I am struggling with fear of going to the gym and people seeing me and my body, whatever body is me making meaning of something, that. Some sort of pattern that is keeping me stuck. I have to make meaning of it to understand it, do I not? Or to see it for what it is?

[00:42:34] Scott Clover: Well, you can until that meaning is a victimization energy.

I talked about the archetypes earlier. The victimhood is the shadow form of self-esteem.

So if you can find the self-esteem in an act, then you’re able to heal it or change it or shift it. But if you’re stuck in your victim mentality, then the self-esteem is sort of not in that situation. Okay, so what makes you more esteemable?

[00:43:00] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:43:01] Scott Clover: Whether that means going for a walk around the block three times a week as opposed to going to the gym, what incremental changes can you make that are esteemable?

Because applying meaning to some people in the way we were conditioned in our society can be a victimhood.

[00:43:17] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, I can see that. And it’s going through the filter. It’s going through the old filters that are keeping them stuck. Yeah, but where I’m. Where I’m kind of having a hard time with this is how can somebody get to that point where they see their situation as it is in that moment if they have this? Well, technically, in my opinion, it’d be like a subconscious comfort zone. It’s like we get stuck in these parameters. We can’t actually go outside those. Those walls.

[00:43:43] Scott Clover: Make a pledge, you know, I allow myself to see my originating patterns and just speak to your subconscious. Speak to yourself. Be kind. First of all, be kind.

[00:43:53] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, I was going to say it’s almost like asking our ego to step down, because I think our ego is the part of us that is creating meaning or. Or keeping us stuck in how we want things to be, as opposed to maybe how they actually are. So it’s like, is this maybe a play on, like, actually befriending your ego and starting to understand that it’s playing these little tricks on you to try and keep you seeing things a certain way to keep you from having to, like, see that maybe. Yeah, you do have low self-esteem. The ego is going to want to try and go grandiose or overcompensate and be like, I don’t have low self-esteem. So from my, from my schooling and.

[00:44:27] Scott Clover: My frogging is difficult in healing. Leapfrogging is difficult in here.

[00:44:31] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, exactly. Well, and also to. Denial becomes a big problem in the healing journey because we don’t want to see things for as they are. We want to see them as we want them to be, which is, I think what you’re saying, like, want, is that energy of like, you know, keeping us stuck.

[00:44:46] Scott Clover: So, yeah, it creates a sense of lack or it creates a sense of distance, the wanting.

[00:44:52] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I’m curious. I have a couple more things I want to pick your brain on. So this notion of forgiveness, um, I think this is just, it seems to be a part of the human condition. Like, so many people really struggle with forgiveness and the true meaning of forgiveness. Uh, not like convincing ourselves we’ve forgiven right in one moment, but like, true forgiveness. What does this look like? How can. What are some tips you can help people? Um, you know, to embody this. To embody what forgiveness actually means.

[00:45:22] Scott Clover: I’m going to go back to the originating statement, except the existing reality.

[00:45:26] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:45:27] Scott Clover: If you have a family member that maligned you or screwed you over, they had something that caused them to be that way. They had some sort of contractive event that caused their maligning narcissism or their egregiousness or their wonderfulness. Depends. People can be over giving. We have a lot of parents that over protected us. That’s not good for us either. So accept the existing reality. I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, but it really does. It opens up so many new pathways for you to see yourself realistically and observe yourself with maybe not yet self-esteem, but enough lack of judgment that, as I said, joy can start encroaching.

[00:46:20] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, I like that. And I think too, like, if you look at the shadow side of self-esteem as victimhood, when we start to accept our reality for as it. As it is or as it was if I was sexually assaulted when I was younger. Right. It’s. I think, and this has been my experience too. Part of going through the healing journey is like getting away from dissociation or for me, I was like, nothing has impacted me. I didn’t want to be hurt. Right. I didn’t want to know that somebody had that power over me. So I didn’t go there. And my way through healing was actually through victimhood. I had to go consciously into victimhood and actually be with the energy of victimization. I was victimized. Right, correct. Like, move through that. So I know for some people it’s like it can be really uncomfortable going back into that. That energy of an accepting things for as they are, because it means we actually have to feel that we were victimized. Right. That can be really uncomfortable for a lot of people. Yeah.

[00:47:15] Scott Clover: Well, and one thing I talk about in my practice is I don’t meet my clients in the pity well.

[00:47:20] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:47:21] Scott Clover: I stay up above. I’m not going to go down in the pity well in a ladder and try and carry you up. I will extend a ladder down and you climb out of your pity well, or your victimhood and meet me where self-esteem lives. Self-esteem to me and healing are congruent or very similar, if not the same energies.

[00:47:37] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:47:37] Scott Clover: So if you feel a sense of self-esteem, then your victimhood is. Is on the, you know, on the outs.

[00:47:43] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:47:44] Scott Clover: And your body says, I’m worthy of healing. Whereas a lot of our physical ailments come from contractive energies from when we were children.

[00:47:52] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:47:52] Scott Clover: It’s just energy gets contracted and coagulated, and then physical matter maligns itself after that. So a sore this or a painful that or a sore knee. And, you know, if you read a Louise hay book, it all has something to do with the body for people who are sexually molested as children or, uh, the second and third l, uh, lumbar spine vertebrae are very often triggered and very sensitized.

[00:48:17] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:48:17] Scott Clover: And so when somebody. When my, when I sense that, when I sense a part of the spine is weak, then I can go and I can say, oh, that’s. That vertebrae relates to this aspect, or it relates to your spleen, which is an empath issue, that you’re too empathic and you’re picking up too much empathy. But if it’s generally the lower lumbar spine and it’s l two or l three, that generally leads to some sort of sexual compromise as children.

[00:48:42] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:48:45] Scott Clover: That’s not always true, but it’s very often true.

[00:48:48] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:48:49] Scott Clover: Often enough that I could, I could state it out loud. Yeah.

[00:48:53] Matt Landsiedel: Okay.

[00:48:54] Scott Clover: So the body does tell a story for people like me, and certain ailments in the body tell a story. Like I talked about teasing or bullying to me a lot of times with my clients that ends up in the kidneys.

[00:49:06] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:49:08] Scott Clover: Grief, for whatever reason, ends up in the lungs.

[00:49:12] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anger is usually in the liver as well.

[00:49:17] Scott Clover: Yeah, anger can be in the liver.

[00:49:18] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:49:19] Scott Clover: And there are certain processes and exercises I do with my clients. And like, I’ll say to them, oh, which one of your parents was a drinker? And no, how do you know that? Because I can tell from their liver that their parent, one of their parents was an alcoholic.

[00:49:32] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. Interesting.

[00:49:33] Scott Clover: And so we do exercises specifically to sort of clarify and re infuse their energy and displace whatever familial energy might be stuck in that organ or that part of the body.

[00:49:47] Matt Landsiedel: Cool.

[00:49:47] Scott Clover: And we can do an exercise right now if you’d like to exemplify what I’m talking about.

[00:49:51] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, let’s do it.

[00:49:52] Scott Clover: So unless you’re driving, having machinery, you can just close your eyes and take a couple deep breaths.

And I’m just going to simply ask you to divide your energy between the right side of your body and the left side of your body.

And why are they different? Be curious and observe. The left side is this, the right side is that.

And then we’re going to just say out loud, I give my body permission to align my energies.

[00:50:52] Matt Landsiedel: Give my body permission to align its energies.

[00:50:57] Scott Clover: And I allow my body to align my energies.

[00:51:01] Matt Landsiedel: And I allow my body to align its energies.

[00:51:06] Scott Clover: And now just let them touch and dissolve the barrier between the two and see what happens. Like a lava lamp coming between each other there.

Put your hand on your sternum or your chest.

When you’re ready, just come back into the room.

[00:52:11] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, that was nice.

[00:52:12] Scott Clover: So that’s opposing opposite energies. That’s a somatic technology that we use in focalizing, which is one of the practices that I’ve been teaching for years.

You can do that with the front and the back of your body, which is very interesting because the back of our body’s energy is where other people clamor to us, generally the front side of our energy or our stuff. And I’ve noticed today you’ve been gesticulating a lot and you’re really referring to your front energy, whereas other people clamor on our back energies, and we’re less likely to notice, and that’s more likely to affect us because we don’t notice.

[00:52:48] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. Interesting.

[00:52:49] Scott Clover: You know, generally, my clients, they change what they can see with their actual eyes, and I’m like, oh, you forgot behind you. How did you know? Because I can see that it’s still darker, denser than the illuminating exercise. Right. So try it on your own between the front and the back energies. And it can be very telling.

[00:53:06] Matt Landsiedel: Cool.

[00:53:07] Scott Clover: And this is where I get into semantics. If you’re having an argument with somebody face to face with them, you say, get off my back. Well, what does that mean? It means that other people’s energies come at us from behind. I got stabbed in the back. There’s a monkey on my back. It means something’s more elusive, and that’s more of a sensitive part. And they know that. Not instinctively or instinctively. They know that. Maybe nothing purposely, but other people’s energies get stuck to us on our backs like mud flaps.

[00:53:34] Matt Landsiedel: How do we get them off being.

[00:53:36] Scott Clover: Aware of it, observing it, displace it. Say, I’m moving. I’m moving myself into my back energies. I’m displacing whatever’s there, and I’m moving myself into my back energies. And when you’re ready, then move into your orc field, but only move into your body until you’re ready, and then move out into your orc field after that. Okay, but I want to get to something. You mentioned somatic semantics earlier, and that’s one of my trademarks, one of my classes that I teach.

[00:54:00] Matt Landsiedel: Cool.

[00:54:00] Scott Clover: I teach coming out intuitive, and I teach somatic semantics. Coming out intuitive is about self acceptance, about intuition. It’s not so much. There’s. There’s many people out there that’ll tell, tell you how to be a better psychic. What I want to help you with is accepting that you are. And once you accept that you are, then it can flourish. But if you resent it or keep it at bay, so that’s coming out into it. The other thing I do is semantic semantics, and that’s speaking, using correct words to speak to your body. Right. And I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but when we were doing that exercise, you changed what I said to you. You didn’t do it on purpose. You did it instinctively, because you were talking about your past and that you, you have to come into your body specifically on your own terms. Whereas I said my energies, you said its energies. So you chose a distancing word to from your own perspective. Because I said I give my body permission to align with my energies. I said I used allow in my. And you both times said it, so say it again.

[00:55:07] Matt Landsiedel: I give my.

[00:55:09] Scott Clover: I give my body permission to align with my energies.

[00:55:12] Matt Landsiedel: Okay, I’m gonna do it again after.

[00:55:15] Scott Clover: So my point is that that’s possessing your sense of self, whereas you used semantics or word choice as a distancing mechanism. You didn’t do it on purpose, but your subconscious was probably saying, this is a different, you know, this is a different stage, or this is public. So maybe, I don’t know what you. Why you chose it. You didn’t do it on purpose, but it exemplifies how we, you know, mess ourselves up just by the simple words we choose.

[00:55:42] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. Interesting.

[00:55:45] Scott Clover: Yeah. Yeah. And just notice the difference. You my as a possessive. You used it as a. Like I’m observing it as opposed to possessing it.

[00:55:54] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. I. It’s good for me to know that. Yeah.

[00:55:59] Scott Clover: So I do it.

[00:56:01] Matt Landsiedel: I give my body permission to align to my energies.

[00:56:05] Scott Clover: No, keep it simple.

You added an extra word. I give my body permission to align my energies, okay?

[00:56:13] Matt Landsiedel: To align my energies, okay?

[00:56:14] Scott Clover: Like, keep it as simple as possible. The subconscious and the universe want simplicity, okay? And they also don’t like extreme words.

[00:56:23] Matt Landsiedel: Okay?

[00:56:23] Scott Clover: All or nothing. Yeah, those drive me crazy. I see, you know, people selling million copies of books about how to set intentions, and they keep using the word all. Yeah, and the universe doesn’t really relate to that. The universe doesn’t relate to perfection. Right. The universe abhorbs. Abhors a vacuum.

[00:56:44] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:56:44] Scott Clover: So if you’re setting an intention and you’re speaking it, try to find some sort of middle of the road word or some word that means almost always, but not always, because if you say always or never or all, the universe doesn’t really comprehend that. Because even ivory soap is 99.44% pure or whatever, there’s a fraction that’s not pure, so they can’t say 100% pure. Right. And so when you say, I want all the love to enter me, well, if I had all the love in the world enter me, I would explode.

Right? Or I want to forget all of my traumas. Well, then I wouldn’t have a subconscious and I would become a boneless chicken. Like saying these things, you’re really well intended, everybody. But the universe doesn’t understand those things. The universe then goes, I’m confused.

So.

[00:57:37] Matt Landsiedel: Okay, cool.

[00:57:38] Scott Clover: Sorry. That’s just one of my little pet peeves with people that hopefully people can understand. A really simplistic word choice, somatic semantics. How we speak to our body can be so relieving and so compassionate.

If we allow ourselves that compassion and we forgive what happened to us, or we even forgive the people that did it, it doesn’t mean you have to like them.

Doesn’t mean you ever have to speak to them again. It doesn’t mean anything. Cut them out of the will. Cut yourself out of the will. Whatever it takes, but forgive the circumstance so you can move on.

Easier said than done.

[00:58:16] Matt Landsiedel: Takes years. Yeah, I like it.

[00:58:17] Scott Clover: Years to get to that. And gratitude.

I grew up in a household where that didn’t exist, so I had to be taught that in my thirties. And now in my fifties, I’m finally getting the, you know, gratitude is the attitude. But if it’s not around you in your household, then you don’t know how to do it. And just beating yourself up as an adult because you weren’t taught to do something as a child in your household, partly is mostly because your parents didn’t have that right. If you grew up in a household that didn’t have self esteem, then you don’t know how to have self esteem. And you have to teach yourself that you have to forgive yourself, that you don’t know how to do something. And then say, I’m allowed to train myself or teach myself how to embolden that energy inside of me.

[00:59:02] Matt Landsiedel: I like that. Yeah.

[00:59:03] Scott Clover: But a lot of us just assume that our parents were perfect or our families were normal and none of them. I deal with hundreds of clients a year. No one’s family was perfect.

[00:59:15] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:59:16] Scott Clover: What you can do is accept that existing reality and then say, I’m allowed to change that. I don’t have to be hindered or confined by that belief system anymore. Or my grandparents didn’t teach my dad self-worth, so I’m going to teach my self-worth. But don’t judge yourself for not having it. That’s only going to keep you from having it.

[00:59:37] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[00:59:38] Scott Clover: Be curious why you don’t. And then climb out of that pity well yourself.

[00:59:42] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. Yeah. Good advice. I like that.

[00:59:46] Scott Clover: Yeah.

[00:59:46] Matt Landsiedel: One last thing before we wrap up, because we got to be mindful of time here. I want to. The seven valves. Can you just share a little bit about that and then we’ll wrap up these valves?

[00:59:56] Scott Clover: Sure. So the nervous system is based. A lot of our body has seven valves. One are here around the mask. Some are in the feet of somewhere in the pelvis area. You heard of spinal fluid maybe flowing? Well, it’s similar to that, and it’s a compression or contraction energy. I have a podcast about it on my intuitive energy podcast called body mapping in the nervous system. Okay, so you can listen to my podcast about it, but the valve system is really about where the body contracts. And there’s a book from the eighties called energy anatomy. I believe I can send it to you and you can put it in the. In the notes, but it really explains the valve system. A lot better than I definitely can. Okay. And I can get you the name of that book. But the valve system is what holds our tension or not, in our bodies. And sometimes if we’re in parasympathetic or sympathetic states, meaning relaxed or not relaxed, fight or flight or not, it. It can be corporeal in that the whole system goes one way or the other. Yeah, but the valves then regulate different qualities of that terror feeling. And so your feet valve can be compressed and then the. It’s not flowing, whereas others can.

[01:01:11] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah.

[01:01:11] Scott Clover: A lot of times for, we talk about children who are c sections, and the valve in the cranial bone doesn’t get reset the way it normally does for people who have a vaginal birth. So if you have a C section, then you’re pretty much equating to your mother’s nervous system because yours never got a reset.

That’s another example. So the valve system is very important in relating to our nervous system. As I said, there’s seven of them. Some of them ascribe to the chakra system, which I find very interesting. We all have chakras in our feet and hands, by the way, if you didn’t know that.

But the valve system is just a way. It’s a self regulating system inside the nervous system, and it’s governed by the nervous system and the self conscious. And the nervous system actually is what holds our bones in the place that they hold them.

Meaning you can change by changing your fight or flight response, your bones will actually shift in position. It’s really interesting stuff. And for people with a trauma background, it can really create some sense of body relief or release that then can be complemented by either a somatic or a therapy session. So incorporating the body and the somatics, as well as the energetics and the therapy, I think are a great way to create a healing balance.

[01:02:30] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, yeah.

[01:02:31] Scott Clover: And that can be exercising, pilates, anything. But if you balance out and have a complementary effect to the physical body, as well as either, you know, the mental or what I consider the energetic, you’re going to have a better chance of getting a leg up on your healing.

[01:02:46] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah. Okay.

[01:02:47] Scott Clover: Yeah.

[01:02:48] Matt Landsiedel: Awesome. This is great, honestly. You’ve showered us with all your wisdom, and I’m inspired. I wanted to do a podcast on intentional living or, like, law of attraction type stuff. So. Sure, I’ll keep you in mind.

[01:03:01] Scott Clover: I don’t call it that, but yeah, I call it more being congruent.

But, yeah, there’s a lot of manifestation words that I’m not so hip to for myriad reasons, but, yeah, yeah.

[01:03:13] Matt Landsiedel: Explore that then.

[01:03:14] Scott Clover: Yeah, sure. I’m happy to come back anytime.

[01:03:17] Matt Landsiedel: Cool. Okay. And for those of you who want to learn more about Scott, you can go to scottclover.com. that’s. Everything will be on your website, I’m assuming.

[01:03:26] Scott Clover: So there’s links to my website, and also the podcast is called the Intuitive Energy podcast. And I talk a lot about what I needed to learn in my journey about being a professional intuitive. I put it all there so people don’t have to go looking in other places. And it’s not for professionals. It’s for anyone interested in their intuition, in boundaries, in family relationships. I talk a lot about that in the first season.

It’s just about aligning with who you are better.

[01:03:52] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, I’m going to check it out. The body mapping one. Yeah, I’m going to look into that.

Awesome.

[01:03:58] Scott Clover: Cool.

[01:03:59] Matt Landsiedel: Well, thanks for coming on, and like I said, showering us with your wisdom. And I look forward to having another conversation with you at some point, so.

[01:04:05] Scott Clover: Well, thank you for having me on. I all of a sudden realized I’m a gay elder. So I have to say I relied on my gay elders growing up for a lot of different things, and my mentor was a gay elder. He helped start the lgbt center in New York.

So I’ve always considered myself part of the community, and now I am a gay elder, so I’m happy to espouse what I’ve learned with the community. So thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

[01:04:32] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, yeah. It makes me think I just did an episode on mentorship, and it’s just so important, I think, to have that and to. To pass down the wisdom and, yeah, I wish I would have known you 20 years ago when I was navigating my own intuition, and it’s not an easy journey, so it’s nice that you’re sharing your medicine with people, and, yeah, hopefully this.

[01:04:53] Scott Clover: I appreciate you saying so. It was, in my life, it was one of the more difficult challenges I had was to accept my intuition and then speak about it publicly. But now, once I do, I like to help people do that. So thanks for having me on.

[01:05:06] Matt Landsiedel: Yeah, you bet. And, uh, for those of you who have questions, if you have questions for Scott, um, feel free on YouTube, drop them into the comments, and, uh, and Scott can hopefully answer them on there. So, um. But, yeah, yeah.

[01:05:18] Scott Clover: Or there’s a comment section on my website. You can send me an email.

[01:05:22] Matt Landsiedel: Perfect. Okay.

[01:05:22] Scott Clover: Yeah.

[01:05:23] Matt Landsiedel: All right. Much love, everybody. Until next time.

[01:05:26] Scott Clover: Thank you.