#47 Why I'm Saying Goodbye to Woo-Woo
For many years Kelly used the expression “woo woo” to describe all things mystical and mysterious, spiritual and soulful. Here she shares how and why it served her for many years, and why she is now letting it go.
The world is ready for us to normalise what was previously considered “woo woo”.
She also talks about discernment vs scepticism and the importance of refining your own intuitive ‘knowing’.
Books mentioned in this episode:
An End to Upsidedown Thinking by Mark Gober
Why Woo Woo Works by Dr David R Hamilton
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Read the Transcript for this Episode below:
Episode 47 of the project me podcast. Hello and happy 23. I hope your new year is starting off on a positive note. Mine absolutely is. I am so happy that I had the epiphany in October to take my business fully into my soulful work in the new year, because it means that I'm starting this year with this huge fresh start feeling that is so good.
So exciting. If you haven't heard my previous episode, do have a listen to hear about the epiphany I had last October. That's moving me away from focusing on the project, me outer world life wheels stuff I've been teaching for over 10 years. So I can fully step into the work I'm now meant to be doing, which is to activate soul awakening and transformation to help open minds and hearts to what else is out there beyond paying the bills and managing our to do list.
To create community where everyone feels safe to explore the intangibles in fun and curious ways. This month, my Project WE members are doing the High Vibe Journey program. Both the alumni who've been on this four week journey previously, as well as a new group who are doing it for the first time. And then, in February, Project WE membership transforms into Soul Explorers, which people are so freaking excited about.
Again, listen to the last episode to hear about this new direction that I'm heading. My current plan is to make the High Vibe Journey program into the entry point for Soul Explorers membership. It puts everyone into such a higher vibration for what's to come in the membership. If you've been on the High Vibe Journey, but you're not in the current Project WE membership, do reach out to me about Soul Explorers.
And if you haven't been on the high vibe journey, I will be running another fresh round. So get onto my interested list. You can email me hello at my project, me. com, or just get onto the general email, the general newsletter list at my project, me. com. And I always keep everybody in the loop there. So today.
I am here to publicly declare my intention to drop the words woo woo from my vocabulary when referring to all things mystical and mysterious and spiritual and soulful. In episode zero of this podcast, I did a prequel to give a short backstory on how this podcast came to light. I nearly called this podcast the woo woo is wonderful podcast and I'm so glad I didn't now that I'm dropping the words woo woo from my vocabulary.
If you missed that very first episode or you don't mind a little refresher. In the summer of 2019 I was speaking to emotion code practitioner Jackie Patton and I remember I said the words woo woo when I was referring to something esoteric and she called me out on it. And asked me if I didn't think calling all this stuff woo woo was diminishing it, making it all feel like nonsense and even potentially derogatory to those who work in these fields.
I told her, I love the word woo woo, I use it as an affectionate term, and it just, it means all things wild and wonderful beyond the physical world. But I heard what she was saying, and I decided right there and then to give myself a 30 day ban on saying woo woo, to challenge myself to find different words instead.
But the very next morning, I was shuffling, uh, a deck of Oracle cards I have. It's a deck called Trust Your Vibes by Sonia Choquet. And the card that I drew, it was a pack of 52 cards. And the card I drew that very next day after having this conversation said, Woo Woo is wonderful. And I was like, okay, okay.
So, you know, maybe it is okay to say wonderful, uh, woo woo. So reflecting back from that conversation with Jackie in 2019, I continued to use the term woo woo a lot, but over the past, I'd say the past year, year and a half, it's tapered off gradually until I've reached a new relationship with it. I can see how and why it served me for so long.
and why it's not needed anymore for myself and why maybe it's not such a good term for the world at large. So starting with myself on a personal level, I used to hide a big part of myself out of fear of having to explain myself when I didn't really have the words yet to explain it. I wasn't prepared to defend myself.
Or explain my choice of reading materials, or if I'm going to see a clairvoyant, or I'm having an EFT tapping session, or a Reiki healing, or using my crystals. I didn't want to have to, like, explain myself to a skeptic, so I could just smile and say, Oh, it's my woo woo book I'm reading, or my woo woo stuff, and they'd pretty much just leave me to it.
By calling it woo woo, I was playing safe, keeping it light and fun, nothing to worry about here, I'm just playing around with the woo woo. Much easier to say than, I'm expanding into higher levels of consciousness, right? But here's the thing, back then, I wasn't working in this field. Now that I am two years into being a soul plan practitioner and I'm running programs and retreats and now a new membership to raise consciousness, I now see what Jackie meant back in 2019 when she said that using the word woo woo felt diminishing to the important and powerful work she was doing.
I am now owning the work I'm doing and owning my spirituality. I feel like I need to do another episode on the word spirituality and how loaded that word was for me for ages. I no longer feel the need to hide behind the expression woo woo. It feels apologetic. Like, I'm sorry if what I'm saying sounds a bit out there, don't mind me, I'm no threat.
I think the more of us who just own our interest in all this and stop labeling it as woo woo, the more mainstream and accepted it will be, and that in turn will lower resistances and open more people to it. Just like yoga is no longer reserved for ashrams in India. Or meditation from monks on a mountaintop.
Both yoga and meditation were considered woo woo by a lot of people until it was normalized. And that's happened with acupuncture, with hypnobirthing, I remember how bonkers that sounded to people in 2002 when my son was one of the first UK hypnobirth babies. Now, it's super understood and accepted. This will happen with more and more of these things when we talk about it without calling it weird or woo woo.
A few episodes back, I recorded a conversation with Helen Joy Butler called Stepping Out of the Woo Woo Closet, where we both shared the fears we had of showing this side of ourselves to people who may not get it, including our own husbands. Man, I now have tarot cards spread out. Like I, I just did the other day, my 2023.
What, what year are we in 2023? I did my 2023, um, tarot readout for the year ahead. And it is still openly laid out there on the coffee table. I haven't moved it because I want to take a nice picture of it. And like, it would have been the kind of thing where like, Oh, I've got to clear this up before my husband gets home from work.
And now like I'm just myself, there's crystals in every room. There are even, and this is quite recent, there are even crystals on his bedside table, both here in our Madrid apartment and in our Ibiza house. So So, maybe he doesn't fully get the work I do, but he respects it. Imagine if I continued to hide all of this from him, I would not be being my true self at all.
But as I said, using the expression woo woo served me at the time. So, here is a dictionary definition of woo woo. Adjective, concerned with emotions. mysticism or spiritualism other than rational. There's more, but let me break this down to look first at this part. Concerned with emotions is emotional. Woo woo because that's not rational.
I'm like Emotional literacy is so freaking important. It ought to be taught as a primary subject in all schools The more we understand our emotions and the emotions of others the better. This world would be Imagine a world where someone's emotions take over like anger And another can simply hold space for them, rather than meeting those emotions with more anger.
Imagine if someone feels sad or lonely and they have the inner tools to call upon to raise themselves out of it. And people around them can read their sadness and help them to feel seen and understood. I don't know if you've seen Avatar 2 yet, but wow, a world like that. with so much more peace within their communities and a natural affinity to nature and all of nature's creatures and that deep emotional literacy.
I keep thinking of how amazing it would be if humans hissed like a cat when they're feeling pissed off like they do in Avatar. A simple reaction that warned the other without words and then the other simply backed off. No more shouting matches. I have two cats, and this is what they do. When my girl cat is resting, and my boy cat comes along and he wants to play, she just lifts her head and gives him a quick hiss, and he's like, Ah, okay, okay, and he leaves her alone for a while.
Wouldn't it be amazing if we could do this with our family members? Just a little hiss, and it's like, alright, alright. I loved the first Avatar film, and this second one was just incredible too, on so many levels. And still, on this subject of emotional literacy, last night was the alumni call from my High Vibe Journey program, where everyone came and shared their favorite tools that they learned the first time around on the journey, and the flowchart of emotions from my program hangs on some of their fridges even now.
Two, three years after they've done the program. So their kids can name their emotions, their family members. They can kind of go, Oh, you know how you feeling? And they use it as a tool in their household for their families. And we talked about how we all wish we'd been taught this stuff as kids instead of waiting until now.
So to put emotions under the dictionary definition for woo woo. That needs to be changed. But if we don't think emotions deserve to be called woo woo, other things don't deserve it either. This next part of the dictionary definition of woo woo says Mysterious New Agey other than scientific. Hang on there.
Everything was mysterious before science figured it out. It's not one or the other. I took my husband a few years ago now to a really insightful talk by Mark Gober when his first book came out. His book was an end to upside down thinking. In this talk, he shared compelling scientific evidence to back up psychic phenomenon and near death experiences and all this kind of stuff.
He talked about how scientists have always been ridiculed and underfunded for doing research on things considered mystical or woo woo. But science is beginning to catch up. Dr. David R. Hamilton wrote a very popular book recently called, Why Woo Woo Works. It's a great book for skeptics and those who need that kind of proof before they can buy into these things.
It takes science time to catch up. These things exist way before scientific validation proves it. There are all these websites always just claiming things as not being scientifically proven, therefore declaring them as phony. Yes, of course, there are phony things mixed in there, but we need to keep an open mind and practice discernment rather than so much skepticism and this belief that science must prove it before it can be real.
If you are prone to skepticism, recognize that in yourself. Stop labeling yourself as a skeptic. Some people seem to wear skepticism like a badge of honor and I see it as cutting yourself off. Being small and close minded. I think it's much better to be discerning. Practice discernment. It means you don't fall for everything, but you also don't wait for science to prove it.
Or you read these books like I've mentioned, like, you know, the books I mentioned by Mark Gober or the Woo Woo, uh, Why Woo Woo Works, like read those kind of books if you need that kind of validation or some kind of, you know, proof on that sort of thing. But begin, I think, to just build your own sense of intuition, your own inner knowing.
We're going to be exploring this so much more in Soul Explorers. I just think that we need to feel into our own truth. Your truth for whatever is for your highest good at any point in your life, because what's good for one person, what's right for them, isn't always going to be right for another. It doesn't make anyone wrong or right.
I've had miraculous successes with some healing modalities and not so much with others, but I'd never go around saying, Oh, that doesn't work about something that clearly works for others. Okay. I'm going back to this dictionary term of woo. It continues with. But also a noun, a person who has mystical or new age beliefs.
New age, I don't hear that term so much these days. I think it went along with new age hippies, which was a derogatory term used by skeptics who wanted to laugh and feel superior at those who believed in new concepts that went against the norm. But times, they are a changing in the sixties and seventies when people were shedding so much conditioning and opening up to new ways of thinking and feeling and doing and being, they were tapping into a new form of energy, a new age.
I remember they sang about the, the dawning of the age of Aquarius. I remember that song from the musical hair when I was a kid. Well, guess what? Yeah. We are in the age of Aquarius now. Aquarius is known as the sign of progressive thinking, creativity, being free spirited, not following the norm. They don't participate in social interactions unless they truly want to.
And when they do come together with others, they are here to serve humanity. So, the age of Aquarius is known as a time for us to come together as community, breaking away from the norm and old ways of doing that no longer work or make sense. This is about we rather than I, being more accepting of others while not compromising your individuality.
It's about knowledge, curiosity, learning new things, and exposing yourself to different ideas and possibilities. The Age of Aquarius is very much considered to be a time of expanded consciousness. It's a time of more collaboration and more connections with like minded people to make positive change for all of humanity.
Some people might even feel a call to guiding others towards awakening or enlightenment. And also there will be more emphasis on freedom and independence, and that may lead to revolutions against computer technology and science controlling our lives. So it's funny to consider this word new age. Yes, we are definitely in a new age.
And as I said before, it wasn't that long ago that yoga was only in India. The Beatles helped to popularize it in the Western world. And meditation, it's just become so mainstream now. And this huge rise in healing modalities and books that would have not so long ago been considered really weird by 90 percent of the population.
So I, for one, I'm going to play my part in normalizing talking about the mystical, the magical, spiritual, soulful, higher consciousness by not calling it woo woo. I'd love to hear ideas for alternative words and terms and expressions that you'd feel more comfortable about using when speaking to someone who's not into this kind of thing.
You can email me hello at my project me. com or I'll create a post on Instagram. Um, my handle is Kelly Project Me and on Facebook I am Project Me Kelly P. And I'll share any suggestions you've got in a future episode. I really would love to like come up with more words we can use that don't just say woo woo, um, but don't have to necessarily say things like higher consciousness.
Like we just need to kind of come up with some more words that will help to normalize things or maybe we don't need to label it. We just need to talk about this stuff and just throw it in the conversation and not worry about what people think. So get on to my email newsletter list if you're not on it already to be kept in the loop about soul explorers, the high vibe journey, and workshops I'll be running and retreats.
Until next time, open your mind, open your heart, and stay curious. We all need some space in our lives for the magical and unknown.