#31 My Year of Soul Warrior Training
Kelly shares about the Shamanic Journey that led her to join Dakota Earth Cloud Walker’s Mentorship programme.
The Project Me Podcast was birthed into the world just one month into the mentorship, leading her to shed her fears over exposing her ‘woo woo’ side and step more fully into the soulful work she’s doing now.
As always, the episode ends with a turn-around:
Do you have a mentor to help you to see the world and life on a deeper level?
Are you living your life with deep intention?
What can you do to nourish your soul?
Dakota Earth Cloud Walker has kindly given listeners of the Project Me Podcast a discount code for 20% off any of her incredible guided meditations. Use code projectme at check-out. Offer expires: 2/22/22 (Feb 2)
You will also find details of her Soul Warrior Training.
Project WE is Kelly's online membership club for women with a growth mindset who want to work on their lives together in a positive we-space. New members are warmly welcomed. Join now to get your 2022 Design My Year Workbook!
Get the free Project Me Life Wheel® to help you find a better balance. Build a firm foundation in your outer world to free up more energy for exploring your inner world.
Read the Transcript for this Episode below:
Episode 31 of the Project Me podcast.
Hi, I'm Kelly Pietrangeli, the creator of myprojectme. com. This podcast is designed to be an entertaining, lighthearted, inspirational, personal growth journey. Each episode goes in a mostly chronological order as I piece together the books, modalities, people, and experiences. The fallen onto my life path exactly when I needed them and how often I resisted the very things I needed the most or didn't see the gifts contained in the challenges until later by sharing my stories.
I hope to inspire you to reflect on your life path. What are the seeming coincidences that have led you to where you are today? What are the hidden gifts within your challenges? And what magic is out there waiting for you as you let go of resistance and follow your own breadcrumb trail. At the end of each short episode, there's an opportunity for you to reflect on how my story relates to your own life.
You'll also find a PDF of journal prompts in the show notes or in the podcast section at myprojectme. com. Hi guys, it's been a whole month since the last episode. I've had an exceptionally brilliant and very full month since then. I ran a fresh round of my High Vibe Journey program that's actually just ended and I'm reading through the feedback and I'm just over the moon again with how much it's helped the wonderful women who did it.
I also ran two Project WE workshops and I'm cooking up some very exciting stuff for year three of Project WE. New members are warmly welcome. So you can get in on all of this. I'll put a link in the show notes to project. We, I also went to London to be reunited with my boys. Max came by train from Bath university and Marco came down by train from Manchester university, and we convened in Camden for a few days.
It was Max's 22nd birthday, and it was also my husband's birthday that week. And we went out with a group of fun friends. So yeah, lots to keep me happily occupied. And today's my very first clear day with nothing on my calendar. So I decided today's the day to record a new episode. This is a huge one in my life, this story.
It's taken me six hours today to piece it all together and still try to keep it short. So let me just get started. Here we go. Episode 31. It was the end of April 2020, and I was several weeks into London's lockdown with my family. Schools and universities were closed. Our eldest son, who was 20, was living at home again.
Our 17 year old son was at home preparing for his final A level exams, exams that never ended up happening. My husband was now working from home off the dining room table. I was working upstairs in the tiny home office. We were allowed one government approved walk a day. I was taking it all in my stride.
Grateful for the ages of my boys, that I wasn't homeschooling them or stuck indoors with a baby or a toddler, my heart went out to all of those in hard situations. Knowing I was soon to become an empty nester meant I cherished this opportunity to have my family all together. Parenting teenagers who aren't allowed to leave the house.
No sleepless nights waiting to hear a key in the door and knowing that all is safe and well. No battles over studying. There was no place else they could be but home. Bliss. But. I am the kind of person who needs my me time. It's called project me for a reason and having everyone at home 24 seven for weeks on end, wasn't giving me that me time.
I needed to be my best self. When my long anticipated EBITDA retreat at the end of April was postponed, I decided to give myself a one week home retreat. Upstairs in our guest bedroom. And if this sounds familiar, I have mentioned this home retreat previously, but I didn't go into the profound story of what actually happened up there that week and all that it led to.
Day one on the Monday, I brought all of my woo woo books, crystals, essential oils, journals, and I set up my retreat space in the spare room. I had a whole page of ideas of things I could happily be doing up there for a week. One of those things was to choose a course in the insight timer meditation app.
I could do one lesson a day So I decided to start with that and amongst all of the courses on offer in that app I ended up choosing a 10 day one called tools for your shamanic journey by Dakota earth cloud Walker I'd heard of shamanism in the context of people traveling to South America to take the plant medicine, ayahuasca, to have spiritual awakenings, but I really didn't know much beyond that.
As soon as I pressed play on day one, I was mesmerized. Dakota's voice sounded like an old friend. There was an immediate connection, and I grabbed my journal and And began to write notes on her lesson. Then, I immediately pressed play on day two. And then on day three. So much for doing one lesson a day. I couldn't stop, and I didn't need to stop.
I was on retreat. I learned that a shamanic journey doesn't need to be about taking plant medicine at all. That guided journeys use shamanic breathwork, drums, rattles, instrumental music combined with binaural beats. A story arch is created with the music, creating a healing environment for personal transformation.
Well, if you've heard my previous stories about the trips I've been on using transformational breathwork alone, I knew the power of the breath for entering an altered state of consciousness. And the messages and guidance that comes through in that state. This course seemed to be a preparation for the guided breath work session that was to come.
So I was very intrigued. Dakota talked about the importance of sacred space, creating an environment conducive to our journey. Journeys need sacred time. You can't just say, okay, I've got 20 minutes. I think I'll do a quick shamanic journey. You need to have a clean vehicle. That means not drinking, not having any alcohol in the system and time afterwards to journal and reflect, not just finish and bounce off to your normal world.
Well, here I was on retreat with nowhere to bounce off to. Honestly, I know there are no coincidences in life. I was called to do this course at that time. By Wednesday, I was already up to day seven on the course, and I was ready to try out a shamanic journey. I had my eye mask to make it dark, pop my earbuds in, I covered myself with a blanket, and I pressed play.
And maybe because I'd already experienced the transformational breath work, my very first shamanic journey was profound. After my usual struggle to let go of the thinking mind and whether I was breathing correctly and these kind of frustrations I get with myself during these things, I finally began to lose awareness of my breath.
and go into a trance state. I slipped back into an old memory. Being a kid in the backseat of the car, on the drive from my house to Minneapolis, to my grandparents farm in rural Minnesota. These were the days before devices, where you literally just looked out of the car window. Miles of cornfields. A cargo train track ran parallel to the road.
Seventies music on the radio. The Eagles. Take it easy. And I can remember now that in my imagination, when I was a kid on those drives, I always felt like I was being featured in a documentary about my life, as if my adult self were narrating over footage of my childhood self there in the backseat. I'd slip into this kind of trance state every time we drove to the farm.
I had this inner knowing that one day I'd be famous. I didn't know for what. And this documentary was to show a snippet of my childhood there in the backseat of this car journey. So, during this Dakota shamanic journey, I was back in the car again, as a kid. And I had this very powerful vision of going back to Minnesota again as an adult, of a gathering of my old friends in the woods, a campfire, singing, a reunion concert with the Center, a band my friends were in in our university days, deep connections and a discovery of why we all came into each other's lives back then, in order to have this experience later in life.
And then I got a flash of meeting my birth father. The Dakota shamanic journey ended, and I felt like something profound and important had happened. I didn't understand what. But I immediately reached out to my old friend, Amy, and I said, I think a Minnesota reunion is needed. She agreed. So I reached out to the band members and to our friend, Scott, who immediately offered up his cabin on a lake in northern Minnesota.
Due to COVID, that reunion still hasn't taken place. But I really do believe it will happen when the time is right. I saw the vision of it so clearly, and it feels like it's going to be something really important. I carried on with the Dakota course and I learned that journeying is for soul growth. We can travel into portals, into other dimensions, with the intention to understand our human experience.
I love what Dakota said about the power of having an intention before you journey. It's the why behind your shamanic guided journey. Like shopping without a list. It's random. If we forget why we're there, we'll come back home without what we really wanted. Having an intention before going into a journey means you can come back with what you're looking for.
I was definitely intrigued to learn more. So, I headed to Dakota Earthcloud Walker's website. And I learned that she had a shamanic mentorship program, learning all of this under Dakota herself. And it was all online. At this point, I've been running my high vibe journey program online over and over. And it felt like it was time for me to have a growth experience for myself.
It was time to balance out all the giving energies with some receiving. It was a big monetary investment, but I believe so much in investing in my growth. I wrote to Dakota with some questions. And she took the time to look me up and wrote back to say, it seemed like we were kindred souls. She'd seen my website and the project me life will framework for living a well balanced life.
And she said that she uses the medicine wheel framework for balancing our energies. The one year mentorship had already begun. The rest of the group were already a few weeks into the East direction on the medicine wheel. I said, I could catch up on the content. And I jumped in and thus began my year with Dakota and her incredible shamanic mentorship.
And this is where I get stuck. Where do I begin to share about all that happened in that year? Which parts are the most important? What was it like? What did I learn? What do I need you to know about this? Oh my God. So I have here my thick four workbooks. There was one for each of the four directions. So East, I started in the East and then we went Southwest and North.
And these books are filled with self reflections. I mean, during that year, I became more intentional than ever, because there's a daily page for writing out intentions and reflecting on myself. I've always been a journaler, but these workbooks gave me a tool for consistently checking in. And I'm sitting here now sifting through these pages and pages of intentions and reflections and I can see my growth.
I see how I was in the East direction and then how I was when I moved into the South and then the West and the North and I see my growth. I can see my progress. Way back in week one of my mentorship, there was some pages and I was meant to write down my goals for the East direction. And I found my pen writing, birth the woo woo is wonderful podcast.
That was the original name I had in mind for this podcast. It had been an idea for ages, but because this workbook had space for creating a timeline and writing down some step by step actions, all stuff, by the way, I support others with, but I don't always follow myself. I just realized by writing this stuff down that I needed to get out of my blocks, I needed to get into my why.
And I'm looking at my why for what I wrote down for why I wanted to start this podcast. And I wrote, I will inspire others to wake up to what else is out there beyond their busy lives and to do list. By sharing my stories, they'll see what's possible for them. Expand horizons, open minds. And I have all that circled in red.
I remember that it really lit a fire under my ass to finally do it. And one month later it was launched. My podcast was out there in the world. I mean, I was going to do a course on how to do a podcast. That was always something I felt I needed to do before I could do it. And it was, when am I going to do this course?
And which course should I do? But I just devoured some free resources and got on with it. And starting this podcast has been one of the best things to happen for me personally and professionally. Thanks to putting a pen to paper and getting behind my why, it is so powerful to do that. If you feel like you're dragging yourself on something and you're not, you know, following through on it, just work out what your why is.
Like, why are you doing it? I didn't read you my whole list. I had like all kinds of reasons why. And then I got to that last part that I read to you and I circled that and I was like, that's my why. So, you know, sometimes it isn't the first thing you write down, like have a brain dump. So what else can I say about the mentorship?
Well, it comes with a login portal and it has each week's audios plus loads of these guided meditations, their journeys. I have pages and pages of awakenings from all of these. This is what kept me going throughout the pandemic. I mean, this was my thing. This was for me. It was amazing. I wrote on the 7th of May, 2020.
So that was my first week in the mentorship. I did a meditation called sacred purpose. And here's what I wrote afterwards. My sacred purpose isn't about what I do. It's about who I am. My fears are around failure. What if I don't feel the next round of my High Vibe Journey program? Then what? And then I wrote.
There will always be that possibility, Kelly. It wouldn't make you a failure, but I still fear I won't promote it in the most effective ways. I fear if I make too many social media posts or send too many emails, I'm going to annoy or bore people, and then they won't stick around and they won't watch or read future things.
Kelly, if you don't do those things, how can people know about it? How can they follow their own breadcrumb trail that their hearts are leading them towards? You need to be visible and share about it or people can't respond. And then there are two whole inspired pages with ideas of how I can share the word about the high vibe journey.
And I believe I actioned most of those ideas. So that came off of just doing one of these journeys. I mean, it was just one meditation and suddenly I'm like inspired into more action. Again, there's a space in the workbook to write a synopsis of the primary message received from each of these meditations.
And for that particular one, I wrote, feel the fear and do it anyway. Let go of fear of failure. Not everyone sees everything. Some may only see the last call email. Go for it, Kelly! And I'm so glad I did. That program sold out, and it continues to sell out each and every time I run it, and it's led me to my next level programs.
See what happens when we allow our higher self some space to be heard? For me, that has to happen on paper. If I'm just thinking about it, I just get kind of this, like this kind of, um, alter ego voice that comes in, you know, my self limiting beliefs and all that. But something magical happens when I put pen to paper.
It's kind of like the, the call and return. I mean, if you, if you kind of saw what I did there, I wrote something down from the next paragraph that came from my higher self. And then I went back to, I know, but, and then my higher self came back. And it's just, it's the way that I write to my, my intuition.
The mentorship included a weekly live group Zoom call and I was there every week. It was on Thursdays at 8 p. m. UK, which was the same time as the clap for carers. So every week I'd go outside at eight o'clock to clap with my neighbors and then I'd race upstairs to the guest bedroom where I'd already be all set up to join the group call.
Dakota led the call and we could unmute and share. I got to know so many incredible men and women from all over the world. Some tuning in from rural farmhouses, others in fancier homes. Most of us were in some state of lockdown and yet we had each other and we really didn't talk about the pandemic. We spoke a little about the U S elections.
I remember that was going on during one of the calls, but we, we saw it all from a higher view, looking at the shadow sides and exploring what we don't like about other people and what that says about us, we looked at our triggers and where they stem from, and I realized. I'm triggered by division, by polarization, in fighting among people who should really be playing for the same team.
This realization helped me grow deep into my belief that we are all one, that love is all there is. I was able to take this kind of division inside of me that felt triggered by this stuff and transmute it into love. It was incredible. And it sparked in me this theme of weaving love into my higher program.
And even now, I am all about diffusing the energies of division, and helping others to see all sides of an issue, and realizing there never really is any true wrong or right. It's always subjective. What else were some of my biggest learnings? Well, I learned more about past lives, soul contracts, spirit and animal guides.
That we are always guided. That everything is symbolic. Everything has meaning. We live in a world abundant of symbols and signs, and we need to learn to see them and interpret them for ourselves. Don't give your power away by asking others what they think the meaning is behind what you see. Make the connections yourself.
Come to see the connections that form the bigger picture. I really learned also to connect with nature on a much deeper level than ever before. And that part, I learned. Was also a bit frustrating because others on the mentorship were posting pictures of these gorgeous woodland or mountain hikes or deserted beaches in solitude.
And I was allowed my one government approved walk per day in the city of London. It did get me over to Hyde Park several times a week. I always thought it was a bit too far from my house in Hammersmith, but. Once I got into the rhythm of going there, I discovered the change of seasons and the transient nature of life itself.
I discovered my special tree, thick in the middle of Hyde Park, with a portal in it, which I used as a visual portal during journeys into the middle world and the upper worlds. I'd sit under that tree a lot, it was my tree, and I would just listen to its wisdom. By connecting deeply with Mother Earth and Father Sky, I got perspective on the grander picture of life.
Rather than getting sucked into the minutiae of 21st century living, politics, the pandemic, conflict, and division, I saw life Above and beyond that, you know, when you see ants on the ground and they're all in a line, carrying things on their back and quickly moving and what they're doing feels so important to them.
And you're there looking down on them with no emotional investment in what they're busying themselves with. You could take your foot at any moment and just, you could sweep their entire organization into utter chaos and devastation. What those busy ants are doing down there is everything to them, but you can see above and beyond what they can from their tiny limited perspective.
And it's all so trivial seeming to you. So imagine a higher force above us. Looking down on earth and seeing all of us as busy ants, thinking that what we're doing every day is so important. Getting things ticked off our busy to do list, scurrying around. Imagine what our streets and packed highways of commuters would look like from that higher perspective.
Just trails of cars all trying to get from one place to the other. And then zooming in on some other area of the planet and seeing tiny bursts of explosives and these human creatures destroying one another. And as the globe turns, zooming in on exquisite beauty in remote areas with very few of these human ants scurrying about, like the scenes you see in David Attenborough's nature documentaries, the colors, the creatures, the magnificence.
And with this higher perspective, they'd be wondering why so many humans cram themselves into some areas in the world and don't spread themselves out more. Anyway, those are the kind of thoughts I'd have sitting under my wise old tree in the very center of London during lockdown. Gaining a higher perspective meant I was able to not get caught up in what was occupying the minds of so many people during 2020 and into 2021.
I caught the news on a need to know basis. I never sat with the TV or radio on ever. I would so much rather be doing a Dakota meditation than sitting there with the TV or radio on if I had some spare time. I knew what was going on with the U S election and I sent him my voter abroad ballot because I definitely had a preference to get Trump out of office.
I always knew what the latest COVID rules were for my area, but I didn't watch the daily updates. I know in a lot of spiritual circles, there is a lot of fear and distrust over the vaccine, but that message was just never a part of the Dakota mentorship. When the vaccine was rolled out, I wrote to my higher self, my guides, and I just asked if it was safe.
And I got You have absolutely nothing to fear. You won't be harmed by COVID or from the vaccine. I put it to the sway test too. If you've ever heard me talking about the sway test, I talk about it in the high vibe journey. So I asked in several different ways, if the vaccine was safe for me. And I got the same answer repeatedly that it was safe, which means I wasn't caught up in the middle of all that fear and anxiety and I just went and got it done.
Thanks to the timing of this mentorship, having a mentor like Dakota, I honestly had a wonderful experience of life throughout the pandemic in a time when I know so many others were finding it really tough. And because my vibration stayed high, I was able to support my community, the women in my Project WE membership, and in my programs.
I'm realizing that I haven't shared the most profound thing to come out of this mentorship. But I'm mindful that my stories are not just my own, and because this involves others, Dakota knows. And I have thanked her. So that's all I'll say about that here. By the time I completed my full journey around the medicine wheel, it was now spring 2021.
I was now living in my second Airbnb in London because we'd had to move out of our house, and we were not yet allowed to travel into Spain from the UK. Many people actually continue on with the mentorship, going around the medicine wheel two, three, four, and even more times. I knew I was going to be moving country soon, and to another city, Madrid, and I'd still not be in true nature the way I was craving.
I'd love to join the mentorship again when I'm living in Ibiza. It would be amazing to do all these exercises and meditations out in nature, proper shamanic natural surroundings where I can do soul tracking and walk barefoot on the earth and really spend quality time connecting with the elements. I reached out to Dakota the other day to tell her that it arrived at this point in my podcast and I hoped I'd do her justice.
I also asked if she was still up for being a guest in a future podcast to answer listeners questions about shamanism, the medicine wheel, spirit guides, spirit animals, any of that stuff, whatever you want to ask. And she said yes, which I'm super honored and excited about. I also asked if she was still up for doing an Ibiza retreat with me.
We've talked about that before and she is. I have had so many visions of this retreat. I feel it in my heart. Ah, and I've got something to tell you. Dakota has kindly given all listeners of the project me podcast, a special discount code to buy any of her guided meditations from her website. Guys, these meditations are incredible.
She layers the music into them and her voice guides you in the most gentle yet powerful way. Scroll through the titles and just choose with your intuition. If you really need a recommendation, I do have some personal all time favorites. Um, let's see, there's the power of your truth. That one is, I think it's 41 minutes.
I always end up dancing to that one. There's one called integration journey. That one's just over a half an hour. You hold an intention from the start and then she moves you through the chakras and I'd like to move and flow through that one too. I oftentimes stand up, like I'm start lying down during these journeys and then I end up standing up.
By the way. Most of these journeys don't use breath work. So I talked in the beginning about her course and that's the free course and the insight timer app. It's a 10 day course and it teaches you about breath work and some of the meditations that I did, the journeys I did during the actual mentorship, those had breath work, but there's a lot of meditations that she's got that you can buy with this discount code that are just these amazing journeys, but they're not necessarily breath work.
Let's see. There was also ignite your inner fire. I remember that one being really powerful for me. I can't remember how long that one is, but anyway, to get 20 percent off of any meditations, just go to her website. It's Dakota earthcloud. com. The code is projectme, all in one word, all in lowercase, and you're going to get that 20 percent off and you can keep going back for more, just use that code and the code will expire.
I love the date she gave me, February 2nd, 2022. Love all those twos. So just if you're trying to remember when it expires, just remember two, two, two, two. And I'll put all this in the show notes too so that you have got the expiry date and the code again. See if you don't have anything to write anything down on right now.
Well, I have honestly spent six full hours reading through my mentorship workbooks and pulling this story together, and I'm realizing there is just simply too much I could possibly say. So I'm just going to call it a day for now. I'm going to end by sharing a phrase. From the North American Lakota people, Metakiosin.
It reflects the worldview of interconnectedness held by the Lakota people. The phrase translates in English as, All of my relatives, we are all related. It is a prayer of oneness and harmony with all forms of life, other people, animals, birds, insects, trees, and plants, even rocks, rivers, mountains, and valleys.
Aho Matakiasin. Aho.
Dear listener, relax your forehead. Take a long, slow, deep breath in and let it out with a sigh. I'm going to ask you some questions to get you to think about how my story relates to your own life. What do you do to remind yourself that all that you busy yourself with. Is not who you are. Do you have any practices or teachers to help you to see the world and life on a deeper level?
Are you living your life with intention or are you always waiting until life feels less busy? What can you do today or this week to nourish your soul?
Thank you for listening to the project me podcast. If you have any questions for my upcoming episode with Dakota earth, cloud Walker, please. Drop me an email. Hello at my project me. com or you can direct message me on Instagram. It's Kelly project me or on Facebook. I'm project me Kelly P new members are warmly welcomed into the project.
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