Over the past 10 years I have morphed through many different online identities. It has been a long journey that has included award-winning fiction author, online marketing coach, analytical hypnotherapist, magnetic mind coach and spiritual healer. But through all of that I had a definite lack of purpose. I wasn't sure exactly who it was that I wanted to help, and what I wanted to help them with. Recently that all changed, and this podcast was part of what was birthed. Listen to this first episode of Living Through Heart as I share where I am at right now, and the ripple that I am wanting to create.
Over the past 10 years I have morphed through many different online identities. It has been a long journey that has included award-winning fiction author, online marketing coach, analytical hypnotherapist, magnetic mind coach and spiritual healer.
But through all of that I had a definite lack of purpose. I wasn't sure exactly who it was that I wanted to help, and what I wanted to help them with.
Recently that all changed, and this podcast was part of what was birthed. Listen to this first episode of Living Through Heart as I share where I am at right now, and the ripple that I am wanting to create.
In the episode I mentioned several of my mentors. You can find out more about them here:
Charlotte Chalkley: https://charlottechalkey.com, https://theultimatehypnocoach.com, https://ultimateeffectivetherapies.com
Keith Hodge: https://intuityinternational.com
Chris Duncan: https://christophermduncan.com
Chantelle Raven: https://embodiedawakeningacademy.com
You can connect with me on:
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/livingthroughheart)
Instagram (@livingthroughheart)
Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/@livingthroughheart/)
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnajoyusher)
Welcome to the Living Through Heart Podcast.
I'm Donna Joy Usher. And I'm an analytical hypnotherapist, psychotherapist, a spiritual healer, a magnetic mind coach and a multi award winning best selling author. I believe that everybody is capable of creating whatever they want, if they can just get out of the beliefs and stories in their head.
This podcast is an audio blog of my thoughts as I go on a journey to heal my soul, surrender into my feminine power, and to live from the present moment in heart. I hope you find it amusing, interesting, thought provoking, touching, raw and inspiring.
Hi, welcome to this very first episode of my podcast, Living Through Heart. I'm Donna joy, Usher.
And in this episode, I just want to spend a little bit of time just sharing a bit about myself, my story, why I've created this podcast, what I've been up to and what I'm planning in the future.
So I'm recording this, it's the 16th of April 2023, that I'm recording this episode.
And at this point, there are already episodes that have been published in this podcast because this is actually my, I think it's my fourth rebranding of my podcast, it might be my third, I've lost track.
And so at this point in time, episode up to 25 is from my old podcasts, but it's still relevant information for what I'm creating.
So I left them there, I went through my entire podcast when I when I changed, basically rediscovering myself and my purpose and what it is that I'm doing in life.
And there was a lot of really good stuff that was there that was still really relevant for what I'm doing right now.
And so I wanted to just explain my journey so you can understand why this has happened.
So I, I started out probably in the online space about 13 years ago now, maybe probably about 11, 12 years ago now, when I published my first book.
I'm a fiction author, and I've got quite a few fiction books published.
And the reason I started writing was because I was trying to create financial freedom for myself.
I was a dentist until very, very recently, about a year ago, I stopped working as dentist.
So I spent the first 27 years of my working life as a dentist.
But even though I loved the actual dental work, and the profession, I loved working with people, and I love my, I mean, a lot of my very best closest friends have come from being with a dental nurse all day for up to 12 hours and sharing our lives together.
And, you know, I'm very blessed to have so many good friends from having been a dentist and having these amazing women working with me.
But I felt very trapped within dentistry, and my body was suffering, my back and my neck was suffering.
And I just, even though I enjoyed the art of it, the skill of it, and I enjoyed the people side of it, I just didn't feel like it was what I was meant to be doing in life.
And I wanted to create freedom for myself.
And so I had a couple of different businesses, I had a dental practice, which was not a good way to create freedom for yourself.
And then I had a bathroom renovation, retail business, also not a good way to create freedom for myself, especially when I bought it about a year before GFC hit.
And that was a pretty a pretty traumatic, very painful and very financially stressful point of my life.
But every everything I've done obviously has led to where I am now.
So I don't regret any of it.
And I learned a lot of really valuable lessons from going through these things.
And what I had learned by the end of when I had to shut the bathroom business down and walk away with a massive debt from it was that I needed to be creating something that was able to give me freedom.
And at that point in time, I realized that something with no overheads was going to give me freedom.
So I had always been passionate about reading, I figured I was pretty clever. I figured out with someone after write a book.
So I signed up with the Queensland writer center for a one year writing course with Kim Wilkins and I wrote my first book.
Now I'd actually written, I'd started it a few years before it, it was terrible.
So I rewrote it.
And that's The Seven Steps to Closure. And I published it.
And I was so excited when I published that first book and I sat back and waited for my financial freedom to come in and nothing happened.
Nobody bought it.
I think I sold the first year of having that book published, I might have sold 70 something copies.
May not have even been that much I don't think.
And I realized that just publishing a book wasn't enough and it was in the kind of missed the peak the wave of the online publishing, the start of self publishing.
And there was a lot of people already jumping on board with it.
So I realized that if I was going to stand out, number one, I had to be writing more books and two, I had to be actually learning to market myself online.
And so hence began my online marketing journey.
And over the next decade, I dived in and I did every course I possibly could on learning how to online mock up myself.
And I did social media and I created funnels and I created landing pages and I gave my books for free and I learned how to do many, many different things.
And for a while it actually was working and and not just the marketing, but the fact that people liked my work.
And I was getting really good reviews on Amazon and I was selling, you know, selling books.
And I was getting a lot of organic reach within Amazon.
And you know, I'm making not enough money to better quit my job, but a good amount of money to help with the financial stress that had been created from the bathroom business.
And then Amazon changed their algorithm.
And they brought in Amazon ads, and instead of rewarding people who had good reviews and had people who were buying their books and showing people organically, they started to show ads.
And I had done a lot of study in Facebook ads.
And in fact, it's all this study has been stuff that I've been used with clients when I when I morphed, which we'll get into in a minute, but I never managed to master Amazon ads.
And even now, even though we're running, my VA is now trained in this and even though we're running hundreds of Amazon ads at a time, some months I don't even cut my ad cost is what I spent.
So I went from making quite a few $1,000 a month from what I had 10,11 books published down to about $100 a month.
And it was really very painful to watch this dream that I created, all the hard work of writing books and publishing books and paying for editors and paying for artwork and all this stuff.
Just watching it just like sand through my fingers.
And nothing that I did, was able to make it stick or work.
And so I gave up on the idea and oh man even wow, I didn't actually realize how painful that was until talking about it now.
I gave up on my idea of that of that freedom from being a writer and I loved it and I am still writing.
But you know, it's it's hard at the moment, to incentivise myself to write when the amount of money I make from a book doesn't cover the cost of actually publishing it.
So it's really got to be a passion project really now.
And I have started a new trilogy a little while ago called, it's the Demon Bounty Hunter series.
I know it's gonna be amazing when I get back to it, and I am heading back towards it.
But that's another part of my story, which I get to.
Anyway, so cue stopping tears, and I had to give up on this dream of being able to be an author.
And, you know, I had won a lot of awards for my books at this point, and I had to realize that that's not where my freedom was going to come from.
And I was back to the drawing board.
But I had learned so much in the journey of learning to market myself that I and I had, you know, branched into different things like network marketing, affiliate marketing, and I was spending large sums of money on my online education.
And eventually, the fruition that came from that was that it connected with me with Charlotte Chalkley, who's one of my, one of my best friends and mentors, even though we've never actually physically met.
We've been friends in the online space and you know, on Zoom for years now.
Five years, and it is amazing to me how it is possible to create a truly deep and meaningful friendship with someone that you've actually never met face to face.
So I'm hoping to actually meet up with later on this year, which is going to be very emotional.
But one affiliate program that I went into, she was my coach, and we started doing work with each other.
She started doing therapy on me, hypnotherapy.
She's an analytical hypnotherapist, and I started working for her, paying off my therapy by basically doing website stuff and creating lead magnets, and hence began our journey together in the online space.
Fast forward five years, and she has since got checked out to actually train hypnotherapist and I went through her first course.
So now I'm an analytical hypnotherapist and a psychotherapist.
I've also done a spiritual healing practitioners training with Keith Hodge, who was also amazing, and I'm hoping to get him on at some stage as well onto the podcast to talk about stuff because training with him and working into the spiritual healing and energy healing space has really been changing my life as well.
I've also, with Chris Duncan, who's another amazing mentor of mine, he's a New Zealander slash Australia and lives in Australia, and he's created a conscious recode, so basically the magnetic mind.
And I have done his coaching course as well.
So that's another another thing that I have learned.
So over the last five years apart from learning how to become a video editor and a copywriter and create sales funnels for people and landing pages and how to create websites and all this stuff that I do for clients now as well as for myself and for Charlotte.
I've been growing myself as a healer, and my confidence as a healer.
And so it is that when I woke up one morning and came up with the business, Living Through Heart, I really stepped into that space of like realizing that that's actually where I'm meant to be.
I'm meant to be helping people helping women, and men, really step into themselves, really come home to themselves and remember who they are.
To be able to shed all of this conditioning and all of these lessons that we have, and all these beliefs that these things, and the structure, is in our mind that we think is real and our reality and be able to break through this.
So that we can actually just come back to our essential nature and really live a life of joy and happiness.
That's not to say that we don't also, you know, feel sadness, sometimes a grief sometimes and things like that, but to be able to navigate this with flow moving through and having these things move through us rather than being defined by them.
So, sorry I got a bit distracted.
So, I met Charlotte.
That's right back to Charlotte. So I met Charlotte.
And in the next five years, we got to the point where now at this point, we are building an academy, the Ultimate Hypno Coach, where we put people through a diploma of analytical hypnotherapy and psychotherapy.
So that's very exciting.
That's one that project that we've got going on.
The other project that we have is we, for these people that are coming through this therapy, and learning to be these therapists, we teach them business, we teach them sales, because one of the one of the things that we had to do recently was the Sales Academy.
And that was Charlotte's, where we we taught sales coaches, how to have a really amazing sales conversation, because that's something that she had gotten really good at.
And she taught me how to do it.
And we ran, we managed and ran sales teams for online entrepreneurs.
And some months, we were turning over a quarter of a million dollars with these sales, these sales teams that were trained, and that Charlotte had trained in her Academy within that, and then we manage these teams.
But it got to a point where it was just sucking our soul, running these sales teams.
And it was taking away from our ability to concentrate on what we wanted to build.
And we had to choose to step away from the sales coaching and from the sales teams and to give them up basically, and to give up that income, so that we could go back to what we were both passionate about, which was helping people to heal and to live their passion, their purpose in life.
So now we're building out the Academy.
And I am continuing my own journey with Living Through Heart and my passion is really helping people come home to themselves.
So I've recently started, so it's now April.
So the beginning of March, I started another training practitioner, training with the amazing, Chantal Raven, she's Australian based, and she's a tantric, I guess you could call her a master.
And she's an embodiment practitioner using Tantra. And that's where I'm at right now.
So I'm just starting to study Tantra.
And I had no idea what Tantra was when I actually... well I mean, I knew about the whole like connection with sex and stuff like that.
But I had no idea really beyond that what it was.
And it turns out that it's much, much bigger than that, much deeper than that.
And for me, it really is the making sense to me of the coming home to ourselves.
So during the course of my podcast, kind of from Episode 27 is the importance of boundaries, which is is a very important thing, but also a very big tantric principle.
So moving on from here, what I'm going to be doing is sharing with you the things that I'm learning within this space, the things that I've learned already, the things that I find to be true for me now, bearing in mind that things that are true for me may not be true for you.
Things that resonate for me may not resonate for you.
So take everything that I say, with a pinch of salt, and see if it works for you.
And you might find that things that I say don't resonate with you now, but in a few years time, it might come back and you might remember it, and you might start to move in to like an area where it does work for you.
We're all at different points in our life. We're all at different points of our journey. But you know, the beautiful part about that, that is we're all exactly where we're meant to be. And we're all who we are meant to be.
And, you know, we're all doing the best job that we possibly can at any given time. So don't be hard on yourself. And just, this is all about loving yourself for who you are and where you're at.
But also letting go of the the outer layer, the false self of who we are, the self that we've built up from needing to validate ourselves and people's eyes and from our trauma and our wounding and coming back to our true self, thinking back through those lies and coming back to our true self.
So I've distracted myself again, I'm very sorry, this is a very rambling podcast episode and I decided not to plan it out.
That may have been a mistake, but I hope you're enjoying it anyway.
So where I'm at right now is basically during the course of the last five years, I've gone through all of this healing, really intense, just trauma diving into discomfort, diving into emotion over and over again.
Going into process and unraveling all of these like emotional and energetic knots inside me that were controlling me through triggers and through release of hormones and through being caught in sympathetic nervous system dystrophy.
And through this until recently, I didn't realize I had an underlying anxiety there all the time.
No one would have said I was anxious, I definitely wouldn't have said I'm anxious, until I actually moved through a stage where I was able to release it, then I could feel the difference.
So, last five years has been massive for me, in the last two years, especially two years ago, I finally walked away from a very long term relationship.
Basically, you know, a very good man that I've been with, since I was 24 or 25, we've been together for 26 years or something like that.
And, you know, I love him, I love him as a person, but who we had become, it's just not what each other needed or wanted anymore. And we were unhappy, deeply unhappy, but because we were both good people, and because we were both nice people, it felt like we were meant to stay together, and, you know, make it work.
And I finally got to a point where I was able to think I don't want to look back on my life, when I'm 80, 90, 100 years old, and to have stayed in a relationship where I wasn't passionate about that person, and I wasn't truly happy.
And I got to a point where I realized I couldn't touch joy anymore.
And I felt like, I was continuously living in a cloudy day, and I couldn't get beyond the clouds to the Sun anymore.
And, you know, I had to work through a process where I had to allow myself to be the bad person, and I had to allow that people were going to probably think bad things about me.
And, you know, having been a people pleaser, my whole life that was so painful. And I had to get to a point where I was comfortable with that, unable to allow others to think what they wanted to about myself so that I could actually do what I needed to do, which was to leave.
And, you know, the last two years have been a journey of that, of the leaving, and also of maintaining a friendship with you know, my husband, slash ex husband.
We're still in the process of unwinding everything but and learning that, you know, it doesn't have to be a war, that there can still be love present during a breakup, and navigating my way through that and helping, we're hoping I'm helping him navigate through that as well through you know, love and kindness and support for each other.
And getting to a point where we're coming out the other side, both happier, and both healthier because of it.
So I left my husband, and then a year later, I was able to finally leave dentistry, basically, because of things that I had learned, and but also because of a letting go, a letting go of the need to have an identity that was based around what people thought about me, and to think into just like not needing to be validated anymore.
So where I'm at right now is just expanding, and having fun learning new things about the reality of life, which is that there is no reality, right?
That everybody's idea of life, and everybody's reality is totally different. And we're all walking around thinking that our life and what we think is real is actually real, when it's not.
And that for me, I'm at the point now where that's so exciting.
It used to scare the holy crap out of me, right?
That, that, that need to control everything.
And I'm getting much better at that letting go of control, letting go of controlling the outcome. Instead, moving into the freedom, which I wanted, and the flow, which I wanted. And being able to be more curious and excited about how it's going to work out. And living life from the present moment.
You know, most of the time I realized that all I was ever doing was either planning for the future or living in the past. And my joy would come from from imagining what the future was going to be like, rather than actually being in the present.
To now, a large majority of the time and able to be in the present moment and to feel the bliss of being in the present moment and just to sink into myself.
So that's kind of where I'm at right now.
Just enjoying that, moving into the tantric space really, and moving into community, the love of the feeler community, and breaking through, you know, what we're culturally taught about relationships, you know.
Being able to unconditionally love people in general, and people for who they are and recognizing that everybody is just here, having their journey, and everybody is here, doing the best job they possibly can.
And, sure, I don't have to accept things that I don't want, and I don't have to people please anymore. And I don't have to put up with things that I don't want. I'm allowed to have boundaries. But within those boundaries, I can still love people. I can say no to people and still doing it in a loving way. And that's a really powerful lesson to learn that we are able to be in our power to love people but and still say no, at the same time.
So I hope that you have got something from this, that you kind of know where I'm at right now.
Moving forward, I'm going to be talking about things that I'm learning, sharing them with you.
I am going to be really concentrating on just giving you guys value and giving you good content and giving you thought provoking stuff, sharing books that I'm reading, showing things from books that I'm reading and bringing in, you know, other people as well, hopefully, my mentors and other people that I know that I'm meeting in this space over here in Perth, and where I want to go in life now, I'm starting to see from a freedom point of view are wanting to work more in live events and more in community and more in healing groups and things like that.
More in ceremony, which is really exciting for me, and not needing to be the hero, not needing to be the person that's, you know, heading out, but I'm moving more into a support role, which is huge for me, because, you know, the whole like journey all along here is up to this point has been me needing to be the hero.
And I'm starting to realize that that's not actually what I want, I actually would prefer to be a free agent and to support others in their journey in their space.
And at the moment, just to be able to come and go and do what I want to do.
So watch this space over the next year, things are going to be dramatically changing with me, I feel with my living space, and where I'm living and what I'm doing.
And I can feel real change coming. And it's very, very exciting.
So I hope you enjoy the content in Living Through Heart podcast, and that you are able to start to move into a space where you can live through heart, where you can be in joy, where you can experience real peace.
And you can actually, you know, allow and process emotion and allow it to move through the good and the bad, right.
Life is not meant to be all good. Life is not meant to be all bad. Life is just is. And how we experience that is up to us.
If we resist things, like emotions that were taught about shadow, which I will go into, in later episodes, what we actually do is we trap it in our body.
And the same goes for positive stuff.
You know, I didn't realize until recently.
You know, it's one thing to resist and trap like grief and anger and things in our body that we're taught through being observing stuff and being told stuff and how people respond to us when we're in these, these emotions that aren't so much fun, right?
And we're kind of like taught that we're not meant to feel and we shouldn't feel them, we shouldn't share them if we're feeling them.
And we actually trapped the energy of that body.
But the same thing goes from positive emotions like love, happiness, joy. When we experience something that brings that and we want to cling on to that and we want to hold on to that.
And that can be a real trap in relationships, you know?
Your experience. You know, if you've come from a relationship where maybe you were neglected and then you hook up with somebody who was showing you affection and love, and you grasp onto that because you don't want let it to go it's that's just as bad as holding on to the sorrow and the grief and the anger and things like that.
You know, we're meant to be like a bridge that is over the river. The tide comes in and the tide comes out and you know, sadness and grief and anger and you know, emotions like that can flow through. It's in one direction. But then also so can happiness and joy and love, flowing through us just allowing it's continual thing rather than like, gripping it and holding on to it and ultimately strangling it right?
Our need to control it, our need to have it just to open our heart and to allow things to move through us and to be present within it.
Okay, I hope that that is... I really, really wish that for you.
I'm not, I mean, I'm not It's not like I'm there 100%.
But I'm there a hell of a lot more than I used to be.
And it is something that I'm really concentrating on doing.
Anyway, I think that's enough for this first episode.
I've touched on many different things.
Just gently and lightly that I will be going into in more detail in future episodes that are coming soon.
So thank you for listening to this very first episode of Living Through Heart.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Living Through Heart podcast. To find out more about me and living through heart check out donnajoyusher.com and livingthroughheart.com. There you'll find links to everything you need, including some free tools to help you and ways you can work with me on your own soul healing journey.