What if the universe is trying to tell you something? How to trust your intuition

Do you ever feel like the universe is trying to tell you something? Call it spirituality, intuition, or science... we’ve all had moments that feel like a bit of a sign – a gentle nudge in a certain direction. In this episode, Fearne looks at the Happy Place moments that have explored the things we can't always explain… This is a curious dive into what happens when we leave a little room for mystery, wonder, and the possibility that there might be more to life than meets the eye. In this episode – -Poet and actor Lucas Jones’ take on why whether we call it religion, spirituality, or science, we’re all ultimately searching for meaning -Spiritual leader Gabby Bernstein is clear that the best thing you can do to change the world is tend to your inner world first -Musician Charlotte Church reflects on why she turned to nature to heal from trauma -Moon mentor Kirsty Gallagher explains how to live in tandem with the moon’s cycles -Holistic therapist Estelle Bingham explores the magic and the science behind the energy in your heart -Intuitive guide Sonia Choquette chats about how to trust your own gut instinct more -Entrepreneur Poppy Jamie shares a beautiful story that explains why she puts her faith in the universe CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains a number of conversations about trying to conceive and baby loss. A FESTIVAL ANNOUNCEMENT! Early Bird tickets for our London and Tatton Happy Place Festivals 2027 are out now. Head to happyplaceofficial.co.uk to get your Early Bird tickets. Listen to the full Happy Place episodes – Lucas Jones https://pod.fo/e/54fe22 Gabby Bernstein https://pod.fo/e/316023 Charlotte Church https://pod.fo/e/174b71 Kirsty Gallagher https://pod.fo/e/185156 Estelle Bingham https://pod.fo/e/2c3bf2 Sonia Choquette https://pod.fo/e/376871 Poppy Jamie https://pod.fo/e/43646b Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Fearne Cotton?

  Before we start, this episode contains some chat you might find difficult to hear, so do check the show notes for more details. Hello and welcome to Happy Place with me, Fern Cotton. Today, what if the universe is trying to tell you something?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  The energetic frequency of this planet at this time is at an all time crisis.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  This world is chaos and madness and it's beautiful and wonderful and it's terrible and it's terrifying and scary and we're all gonna die. But I still believe in miracles.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  The only way to balance these chaotic times is by individuals transforming their vibrational frequency.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  I kind of feel like, over the years, humanity's poisoned the word god. So now people don't want to be near it. They'll happily talk about the universe, that's fine, that's a clean word. We're all describing the exact same thing.

• 0:45Speaker 03

  And so there's almost like an arrogance as humans that we're like, oh, I'm not affected by the moon, I'm not affected by the planets, I'm not affected by nature.

• 0:52Speaker 04

  I really allowed myself to be intuitive. I felt very wild and very feral and there was things that I just had to do.

• 1:01Speaker 05

  So the new moon, we set our intentions, we go, this is what I want, this is what I want to work on for the next lunar cycle. And my mum has a crystal that she asks questions to. And she wrote down all the answers the crystal said and she sent it to me. So we've been under a huge massive gaslight that our inner sensory awareness is legitimate receiving of energy that gives you information. And that's why I truly believe in, truly believe in this because I just wouldn't have got through it had I not known it's gonna be okay.

• 1:36Fearne Cotton?

  I find this subject so interesting because in those moments where I sort of stop believing in stuff, like I think, oh, the universe isn't telling me anything, there are no signs. That's when I feel at my absolute worst. But when I'm noticing little things, it could be as simple and cliched as, oh, look, there's a little white feather on the pavement. That for me is a little sign that, oh, I'm being protected. Like, maybe it's my nan or one of my, you know, ancestors who's looking out for me. Whether that is true or not, that gives me so much warmth and just like a good feeling in the moment. I love it. And then genuinely, I've been through some properly weird things, like inexplicable things,

• 2:20Fearne Cotton?

  as I'm sure you will have. Whether it's having insane intuition, like knowing something's about to happen and it happens, or things aligning and pointing you in the right direction. Or, like we've probably all been through, when you go through something really horrendous and then down the line you go, oh my god, I get it, I get why I had to go through that. I had to learn that particular lesson and make a change. Or if I hadn't been through that, I wouldn't be doing this now. Or if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have met this person. I could tell you 100 stories where that is true for me. I guess what I'm trying to say is, and this is the most overused, cliched, annoying phrase,

• 3:02Fearne Cotton?

  but I will say it with like the truest sentiment. Everything happens for a reason. Like, I've, like you, been through some absolute shit shows. Things that I wish had never happened, things that actually, you know, I've still got like the scars to sort of show for it, metaphorically speaking. But I can still see the silver linings, I can still see the lessons learned, I can still see the resilience there, all of it. And I can still see how like the universe, whatever you want to call it, whether you're spiritual, not religious, not whatever, but I'll use the word universe. Like, the universe was sort of guiding me in a direction to learn these lessons and to grow, essentially, and to try new things and to meet brilliant people.

• 3:47Fearne Cotton?

  So I love this subject matter. So we're gonna talk to some interesting people here, right? So first up, we've got Lucas Jones and his take on why, whether we call it religion, spirituality or science, we're all ultimately searching for meaning. Then you've got my pal Gabby Bernstein and Charlotte Church, who both believe that trusting in nature is what our world needs right now. There are some brilliant practical tools to help you tap into ritual and your intuition with the incredible Kirsty Gallagher. Then you've got Astel Bingham, who I bloody love, and Sonia Shaket, oh, these wonderful women. And to end, an utterly beautiful story about putting faith in the universe from Poppy Jamie.

• 4:35Speaker 06

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• 6:38Fearne Cotton?

  All right, let's do it, here's the show.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  I think people have been put off the idea of spirituality because a lot of religions have abused it over the years. So when people hear the word god, me included actually, I remember going to church and like then talking about god when I was a little kid and like then talking about gay people being sinners and like tugging my mum, being like, that bit's not right, isn't it? Because I was raised to believe the obvious truth that that's not the case. And my mum going, yeah, that bit's not true. You know what I mean? And like being like, if that bit's not true, then someone's just taken the sort of vague...

• 7:25Fearne Cotton?

  Make this stuff up.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I think, you know, like the argument for there being a god or there being, whatever you want to call that thing that we're describing, that we're talking about the prayer, whatever the prayer is to, whatever it's in honour of, which I think is just existence itself, goodness itself, if you will. Like, whatever that thing is, is no more supernatural than describing the formulation of the universe in the most scientific terms. That's, that's what we're talking about. I mean, if people talk about like how the heart beats or how blood flows or how thoughts occur, we're talking about magic, we're talking about like, you know, and there's this really, if you've ever seen that illustration of, there's like a child standing on a pile of books and they can see through a small crack in the wall and in the distance they can see the sunrise. It's really fascinating. So that's the first child, there's three children.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  There's the next child or the sort of middle teenager, whoever. They stand on a slightly higher stack of books and the wall has no crack in it there. So they're just looking at a blank wall. And the final person is standing on so many books, they can see over the whole wall and they can see the whole sunrise. And it's kind of the implication being like, in childhood, there's something you can kind of vaguely feel, remember, have a sense memory of. In your like middle life, you sort of lose that and things become very cynical and cold, black and white concrete reality is just boring, fucking chaos and doesn't matter. And then as you sort of go further into that exploration or adventure of meaning, you go, oh, it was kind of like the first time and now I see it more vividly.

• 8:44Fearne Cotton?

  I love it.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, I kind of, I kind of, I'll come where it's from. If anyone can find that, I'd be really grateful to do that again because I lost it a long time ago. But I kind of feel like that and it's like, I feel like science is sort of starting to, you know, the religion and spirituality was originally a sort of scientific exploration. It's become a very sort of, I don't want to say cynical, because I guess a lot of people still feel a lot of magic in that. But the sort of explaining the way of any mysticism of it is, and spirituality of it, I find kind of silly almost. Because now we're looking, we get to a stage where we look at like quantum mechanics and it sort of becomes magic again. It's sort of, all right, it's just magic, it's just, it's just pure, like unexplainable, you know?

• 9:17Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  So I do, I don't think it's like this, I think it's a shame that there's a sort of implication that you're not that intelligent if you think there's more to this. I think that's really silly. And actually, I think that's a very middle, middle child in that diagram way of thinking.

• 9:34Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, I agree. Like, how can we think that we know how this works? This is all too huge for us to get our heads around.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  What's happening?

• 9:41Fearne Cotton?

  It's all too huge, it's mad. I mean, I was fascinated when first stumbling across your poetry that you use the word god freely. You know, some of your biggest poems that have got millions of hits, you know, millions of people are sharing these poems. They are reaching people at the right time and they're cracking their hearts open in the best possible way. And some people will go, well, what, why are we using the word God? Like, what does that mean to you? There's, you know, like you say, when you met God at the supermarket, this beautiful poem about, well, people just need to go and watch it because it's this amazing, I get such an amazing feeling from listening to you speak those words about how short and quick this life is and how we're not present and we take it for granted and we're not looking at what's real. But you do use the word God. So what does that mean to you?

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Well, I kind of want to reclaim the word God because I think when you say God to some people, they see this sort of, it's immediately blocked by this sort of church asking you to donate money or this, you know, irresponsibly behaving, biased, prejudiced belief system that's been like manipulated, the kind of like our experience of, you know, someone saying something about your sexuality being important as if God would care about that. You know what I mean? Like, I think there's been this human, this, I kind of feel like over the years, humanity's poisoned the word God. So now people don't want to be near it. They'll happily talk about the universe. That's fine. That word's, that's like a clean word. That's like the new sort of, like, you can say the universe, you can talk about your star sign, you can do your horoscope, you can, you know, you can like do tarot cards and you can, all these other things that we're all describing the exact

• 11:08Speaker 02

  same thing. And I think people who really love God, whatever that is, and love life and love reality, I think they, they understand that. They understand that their religion is just a housing thing. You know, it's definitely wrong. That's why, this is why, this is what I think comes down to. If, if you can't look at your belief system and know that of course it's nothing like, that the reality can't be anything like what I believe it to be, and yet I will love anyway. Yeah, I will choose to go to church because that's the closest I can get. I'll, I'll, you know, pray five times a day if that's your thing, because that's the closest I can get. I will, whatever your religion might be, or your belief system, I think it's all pointing towards the same thing. And it's this fundamental attempt to acknowledge the beauty, to acknowledge the wonder, to share

• 11:51Speaker 02

  the goodness, to fucking try, just to try, actually. That, that's kind of enough, to just try. And this world is chaos and madness and it's beautiful and wonderful and it's terrible and it's terrifying and scary and we're all going to die. But I still believe in miracles, you know what I mean? Like, I still-

• 12:07Fearne Cotton?

  It's hope.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  It's hope. Yeah, exactly. I think, I think God is just hope.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  We are in a really humongous global crisis. Not just the horrific things that we're seeing, but the energetic frequency of this planet at this time is at an all-time crisis. It's an all-time crisis. And so the way that, and I know this sounds, it's going to sound doomsday and a little bit existential, but I have to go there because I've been channeling this a lot lately. And so I'm using any platform I have to speak about it. That those of us who were in this work of what I would might call light work here, that we're doing in our own unique ways of bringing forth messages of healing and messages of spirit and messages of hope and faith and optimism, we're, we're, we're first responders right now. Okay. And anyone out there that's in any form doing this

• 12:57Speaker 01

  kind of work. And so it is our responsibility to not only, to number one, do it for ourselves. Because when our vibration is clear, and that's why I'm going to say, you know, you have to, as your sister, as your friend, you have to check in every day.

• 13:11Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, I'm doing-

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Because you are a beacon of light, not just for your family, but for many, many people. And I'm sorry, but it's a big responsibility and you signed up for it. Okay. Your soul said, I'm coming here to do this. And so you signed up, you signed the contract, you came here and you're doing it. And so the responsibility is on us to, to do the inner work, to commit to the inner work, to be the presence, then to carry the message. The only way to balance these, these chaotic times is by individuals transforming their vibrational frequency. It's, it's, it's absolutely imperative. And it has to happen one person at a time and a time and a time and a time. It's just light turns on, light turns on, light turns on, light turns on, light turns on. And it's not like our burdened parts of us disappear overnight, is that we just have more and more access to self. And for

• 13:57Speaker 01

  anyone that's in a leadership role or has an actual platform, and really that's everybody these days, we all have a platform, we have to be at a better frequency. The only, it's the only way to, to, to support humanity right now.

• 14:11Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah. And that, you've got to have self-compassion to do that because you, you need to want to help yourself.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  You have to put your own oxygen mask on first.

• 14:21Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  You can't, we can't be walking around wounded healers. We can't be, be angry activists. We have to, we have to alchemize the anger and bring it into power. We have to, to heal the wounds, to actually step into the energetic frequency that we can offer. We can't, we can't, we don't have time to carry around the baggage and expect to be of service. We have to heal ourselves and then we have to show up. That's it.

• 14:45Fearne Cotton?

  You said something that really stood out to me. I'm just trying, I've underlined so many parts, but you say, using these principles, you, you'll no longer be a victim to your past or the future. And I think, again, there, and I put this, I can only speak from my own personal experience, but for a while, when I was in a bad place mentally, I didn't realise I had a choice whether I was a victim to things that had happened or not. I just thought, they've happened and my life's shit and nothing makes sense and I don't know what to do. And actually now, this bit further down the line, I can see not only the positives that I've taken from a really big road bump, but, well, it's way worse than that, but

• 15:28Fearne Cotton?

  like a big black hole. But also that I've got the choice whether I linger in that and I keep obsessing over it, or whether it's, you know, looking at whatever, or stepping out of it and going, right, that happened, this is what I've learned, but I will not be victim to that anymore. We do have a choi, and it's hard, but we do have a choice.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yes. Do you choose to be the victim of the world you see? Or do you choose to learn from these experiences and do whatever it takes to get closer to consciousness? Because the difficult, most difficult moments in our life are oftentimes the easiest to choose the other choice because we have hit such a bottom that we have no more coping mechanisms to work with us. So we have to just make the choice. Oftentimes the choice is to survive.

• 16:15Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  And, and that would be find ourselves in that 12-step room, or find ourselves that therapist, or get back on that, that, that, that self-help healing path, whatever that might be. But I think that, I think that the message that's coming through for me so clearly is that, is that those coping mechanisms that once worked for us won't work anymore because so many of our comforts are being taken away and so much, and we're being assaulted on a daily basis with horrific visions because of, not that there wasn't always horrible things happening in the world, though things are quite amplified right now, but we can see it all. It's all in our face. It's just all day, every day in our fingertips. And so we're being assaulted. And so we have to have tools to withstand

• 17:01Speaker 01

  the shaky times. And I believe one of the greatest tools is having unshakable faith.

• 17:07Fearne Cotton?

  It's really exciting to hear you talk about the fact that you're, you know, you're up for this, not only a new challenge in, in terms of creating this, this whole place, this retreat, but also taking yourself on a whole new path career-wise to become a practitioner. And I think when you go through something traumatic or very deep, you often are then spurred on to walk down a completely different path. And I'm so sorry to, to hear about the loss of your baby. I didn't know about that. And having had, you know, a lot of friends who have experienced the same, that grief is also, of course, teamed with your body having been through so much. And like you say, nature is so important. I think

• 17:48Fearne Cotton?

  we underestimate it in those times where we're emotionally, mentally and physically going through stuff. It is, on a cellular level, it's doing something. You know, how, how did that impact your healing from, from such a tricky time?

• 18:03Speaker 04

  I feel like I, I just, I really allowed myself to be intuitive. I felt very wild and very feral. And there was things that were, that I just had to do. And I think in grief, you, you allow yourself all sorts. Do you know what I mean? Like, you really, you get a bit feral. And I think just to help, help us move, move into those spaces and move through those spaces, to, to be able to create ceremony was a huge part of it for me. So again, I'd never, I'd never done anything ceremonial before. I'd never, I, I didn't know about any indigenous practices. I didn't know about any Celtic or witchy

• 18:47Speaker 04

  practices. Or again, there's loads of things to choose from. But I was just going completely off of this just sort of intuitive drive. But, you know, we created this, this funeral for her in, in our garden, outside in nature. We had our friends and family there. We wrote all of the words ourselves. We sang, we, and, you know, I, I made the space for the, the couple of days before I had sort of, you know, decorated all the space, which ended up being this circle. And, and honestly, I had, I was, I was so far away from any of that sort of stuff of, of ritual or ceremony or understanding it, or even it being, you

• 19:30Speaker 04

  know, for me at all. I was just like, oh gosh, no. I mean, I used to be a Catholic, but I've got no idea about that sort of stuff. And I think from that experience, it was just like, oh, oh my gosh, that, what we, what we did there, that, that was magic. It was almost like we imbued the ground, the earth with such intention and power that now when we go to that place, which is Billy's garden, it's like, it's, it feel, it's got an energy. Like, it really feels different to how it did before when it was just a bit of field.

• 20:04Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  And so it's been so, it's been such a powerful thing for me in my own healing journey. And I suppose, you know, you, you must feel the same, Fern, to be doing what you're doing as well.

• 20:18Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  You, you've got the happy place, you know, which is a, a huge help for people, really starting to educate and help people a lot of the time who maybe don't think that wellbeing stuff or anything esoteric is for them, just making it much more accessible.

• 20:35Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  So that we can all have more tools. Because I think that- For a long time now, like getting on to hundreds, thousands of years, we've been living with systems that systematically oppress. Um, you know, whether that's patriarchal systems, whether it's, you know, how we're oppressing nature, whether it's our food production systems, whether it's educational systems, whether it's health systems even to a certain degree. Like we are, we're quite far down the road of it being very, very difficult and very difficult situation for parents to raise children in, parents to traumatise themselves.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  And so we, we've got these compounded sort of generational traumas that have just built up. And again, like I feel so hopeful. That sounds like I don't. That sounds like it's, oh my gosh, that sounds really complicated and difficult to get through. I don't think it is that difficult. I just think that it needs, almost like in the way that we need to shift our gaze to nature and noticing and then therefore the more that we, that we are connected with nature, the better decisions that we'll make for the planet. Um, the less we'll be interested in overusing the resources and stuff. It's much the same as

• 22:04Speaker 04

  with each other and healing this sort of intergenerational and generational trauma. It just takes a bit of awareness and a bit of a, a tension. And that's going to go a long way because as soon as you've got people who are really calmly able to deeply listen, really, really start to notice what it is that other people are saying when they're speaking. Where, where it's not, and all is not lost. I really am supremely optimistic for the future, which is why I'm, I, I'm doing this. Like, I really believe in humanity. I really want to do something

• 22:46Speaker 04

  as an activist, but that feels that's like grassroots. I went and I went, you know, on question time and I was part of campaigns and I went and I banged my drum about stuff, but and that has its place in activism, but I think I just, I wanted something more, something deeper. And yeah, and that's what this is. Much the same as, much the same as you Fern. So hats off to you as well.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  I think if I go quite far back, even in childhood, I was always very different. I always wanted to know why. I was always searching for more answers or deeper meaning. And I found astrology about, I remember getting my first astrology book at about thirteen years old. I'm poring over this book and astrology just giving deeper meaning to life and wanting to know what people's star signs were and moon signs were. So astrology kind of came first. And then in two thousand and nine, I went to India to become a yoga teacher. I wanted to go to the, the kind of the deep roots and really learn and immerse myself in study. And it's traditional in Ashtanga yoga that I was practising at the time, not to practise on new and full moon days because of the energetic pull of the moon.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  So everybody on new and full moon days would hang out together. We'd all be in coffee shops and cafes and people would have a rest day. And I started to notice on moon days that people's energy would differ. Like people would just be different. And then I started to really notice that everyone would start to have similar issues. So either everyone would be feeling really emotional, everyone would be having relationship issues, everyone would be really anxious. And it got me really fascinated and hooked. And so in traditional kind of yoga, when you're practising so much, you do what's called Abhyanga massage. Because you're practising like five, six hours a day, your body's sore. So you rub oil into your body and then you lay and let it soak in for twenty minutes. So on these new and full moon days, when I did that, I'd been hanging out with people. I, I'd got a bit of the vibe of what's going on. And then I'd go into meditation

• 24:38Speaker 03

  in this Abhyanga when I got the oil on and just really feel into the moon and almost talk to them and it'd be like, what have you got to share? Like what's going on? What's the energy? And really feel into that energy. And I've been doing it ever since. I've been, I've been hooked ever since. That was in two thousand and nine when I really then started living by the lunar cycles and it honestly changed my life.

• 25:00Fearne Cotton?

  I mean, you can absolutely hear it with what you're saying and having read all of your books, but your first book specifically, which really delves into this. You say that even as a, a very sort of simplistic, basic model, we can look at the lunar cycles and twice a month, there are two natural check-ins for all of us. So how do we use the two check-ins being the full moon and the new moon, the full moon when it's big and glorious and bright in the sky, the new moon being when we cannot see it at all? How do we use those two markers in the cycle to, I guess, check in with, with how we're doing?

• 25:36Speaker 03

  I mean, that's what I do love about lunar work because first of all, when we look at it, the moon turns the tides on the earth. If we didn't have the moon, we wouldn't have seasons because it's a gravitational pull of the moon that keeps the earth on its axis. It's said that without the moon, a day on earth would be six hours long rather than twenty-four hours long. And so there's almost like an arrogance as humans that we're like, oh, I'm not affected by the moon. I'm not affected by the planets. I'm not affected by nature.

• 26:01Fearne Cotton?

  The fact that actually I've just remembered, I've written it down because it blew my mind so much from your first book, for any moon naysayers out there. Not that you can be a moon naysayer because it's in the bloody sky. But people that think, oh, whatever, it doesn't do anything. But once a year, between October and December, there is a mass spawning of the corals, the Great Barrier Reef influenced and triggered by a full moon. That's, if the moon's doing that to coral, what the hell is it doing to us?

• 26:27Speaker 03

  It blows my mind in a way that we are, I mean, we're made of stardust. That's not me making up some kind of a woo woo fact.

• 26:33Fearne Cotton?

  David Bowie's song or something.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're literally made of stardust. Like we're, we're stars. And the same, I believe the same life force energy that makes our nails grow and our hair grow is the same life force energy that causes the leaves and the flowers and the trees. And so we, we are part of nature. And when we tune back into that, our lives change. But even for the naysayers, I love skeptics. I, I love working with skeptics in this work because I'm like, even if you don't want to believe in the moon, but you sit down with yourself twice a month, even the act of doing that will change your life over the course of a few months in ways you can't even imagine.

• 27:09Fearne Cotton?

  So how might you do that? Say we've got a new moon approaching. What might you do on that new moon day?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  So we want to start with the new moon because that's the very beginning of the lunar cycle. So a new moon gives us a blank slate. It's where we begin. It's where the moon's at the very beginning of a journey. So if I can just take you back a tiny step, in the days before a new moon, we get what's called a dark moon. And I always talk about this first because it's the, it's the time that most people will start to believe a bit more in lunar work. Because it's the lowest energetic and emotional point of the lunar cycle. So if you start to notice those days where you do feel like your emotions are out of control or your boss starts irritating you or your relationship feels like it's not going the way you want it to, I almost guarantee you it will be the dark moon. Because what the dark moon does is pull us into our emotions to show us where we're out of alignment.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  So the dark moon shows us what we don't want. So that then when the new moon comes, the moon goes, okay, you don't like your relationship the way that it's going right now. You don't perhaps like the job you're doing. This isn't working. And you're like, what do you want?

• 28:14Fearne Cotton?

  Hmm. So it's like putting it all out on the table and having a good look at it.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:19Fearne Cotton?

  Which we all do. I think all of us tend to, because the world moves so quickly and we're all so busy and we're also quite proud about that busyness culturally and talking at a societal level, like, oh my God, I haven't, I do it all the time and annoy myself. I haven't a day off in, you know, however many weeks. And it's like, oh my God, we are packing our lives to the max. And sometimes we feel we have very little control over that, but we push through stuff rather than going, right, this dynamic isn't working. I am deeply unhappy in this job, whatever it might be that is irking us. The new moon is an opportunity for us to sit with it and have a proper look at it, which is scary.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  It, it is. And I think that's, that's one of the problems in life, that we feel the depth of the emotion when we're in it. And then as soon as it passes, we forget about it. But it's going to keep coming. And that's why so many people are always saying, why does the same thing always happen to me? Why do I always end up in the same relationships? Why do we always end up with the same horrible boss? And it's because we're not paying attention to the signs when they're there. So when we notice the dark moon and we go, who and what am I feeling the most emotional about? That's your signpost that those things need your attention. So then you sit down with the new moon and you go, okay, my commute's really irritated me the past four days. Maybe I want a job where I don't have to commute as much, or maybe I need to find a new commute, or

• 29:39Speaker 03

  maybe I need to sit down with my partner and have a conversation about these things that aren't really working for me right now. So the new moon, we set our intentions. We go, this is what I want. This is what I want to work on for the next lunar cycle.

• 29:54Speaker 06

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• 32:12Fearne Cotton?

  Let's get back to the show. Here's Estelle Bingham, Sonia Chiket and Poppy Jamie.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  What happens often is we're not really in touch with the feelings. So we understand the story so we can look back at our four year old self or our six year old self. And we're like, well, this is what happened at that time. And we can get in touch with the memories and a certain amount of the feelings. It's not that it doesn't work, but Peter Levine, who, you know, he developed the somatic experiencing technique, which some people out there may have heard of already. But that's just experiencing the feelings in the body. And that's really where I start. I start in that place, but bringing in the heart is like, it's basically our superpower. It's like in, we already have it. And that's really my big, you know, that's my mantra. Like you are already whole.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  So we're not, we're not, there's not the big healing story. I mean, we do do the healing work. We do do the inner work, but you've already got this. We're just returning to wholeness. And what happens with the heart? It's like, it's like, you know, you, you go into the dark room and often what happens? People turn up and I always say this, it's like, you know, we're in this dark room and we keep bumping into the same sofa and falling over the same, you know, the same sofa and then having the same outcomes. Or experiencing the same things, being in the same types of relationships, calling in all of these, you know, similar experiences. And I just say, let's just switch the light on.

• 33:35Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  So that's all it is. It's like we're activating the heart, just switching the light on. It's not a big fandango. It's actually really simple. You know, the, the heart technique coming into the heart is just, we take some really nice, deep heart and body breaths. Those really settle the parasympathetic nervous system. We know that from breath work these days and what that does, you know, those really breathing in and then taking deep exhales from deep in the body. So not up here, because a lot of us breathe just up here at the top from the neck and nothing's really, we're just not, not doing anything. And we just come in with a certain amount of awareness into the heart. So it's actually really simple.

• 34:16Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah. And I think, I mean, I want to get into manifesting and this relates to it to a degree because like you say, we repeat the same mistakes. I can look back at certain things. I'm like, why am I having to learn this lesson again? I've done this one, but I've made the same choices. I've ended up because it's comfortable, it's familiar. I understand it. You know, you think you know what you need and you don't. And I think it's, it's so interesting that so much of that is connected to a lack of self-love, a lack of self-compassion that we have. I think most people have a sort of a low level self-loathing. We're so used to berating ourselves for every flaw, every mistake, every fault. We isolate ourselves in it. I mean, I, I do this all the time.

• 35:00Fearne Cotton?

  I was, you know, in therapy yesterday, talking about this, saying, oh my God, I'm so flawed. There's something wrong with me and nobody else. And I know all this stuff and I still have that underlying feeling that I'm getting it more wrong than anybody. And I'm way more flawed than anybody. I think we all have the propensity to do that. And I guess when you're doing this work that focuses on the heart, it's just reminding us that we've all got that going on. But actually we can still love ourselves, we can forgive ourselves. And, and that is, I guess, one of the biggest blocks when it comes to manifesting a life that you actually want is the fact that you fucking hate yourself.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, there are two things there that are really important, right? So imagine heart energy. Imagine that you've got a tap and most of the time either that tap is just, it's not on at all, or there's a little drip, drip, drip, okay? Every three minutes, like, you know, a bit of a torture, torture situation. When we get into just thinking about the heart every day for a few minutes a day, we start to turn that tap and it's a flow. And what I will say, it's quite, it's, you know, it's, it's a, it's a thing to think about. But when we twist that, that, that tap and the, there is heart energy flow. You are bringing us a different energy into your life. So I always say to people, just stay curious. Stay curious and see what happens.

• 36:24Speaker 04

  And with the manifesting, you know, there's so much out there about manifesting at the moment. And I've been manifesting, that has been part of my practice for years and years. And we know about it from, you know, manifest, from law of attraction. It's out there in the, in the world, but there is a ceiling to manifesting. If you're unconscious, if underneath all of this, manifesting, manifesting, manifesting is a sense of self-loathing, shame, you know, we're not accepting ourselves, we're beating ourselves up. But it up here, we're thinking, I want, I want this relationship. I want this job opportunity. I want to move here. I want to do this. I want to be seen. I want, I want people to know me, to hear me.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  But actually what happens is, because remember the mind is made up of sort of 87% or even 92%, it was between there, is unconscious and the rest is conscious. So remember that tiny little bit of mind, the way we're saying, I want, you know, I'm manifesting, I'm making vision balls. I'm doing this, manifest, manifest, manifest. But the unconscious.

• 37:25Fearne Cotton?

  Is huge.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Is huge. So remember that, that big iceberg, okay? We can just see the top of the iceberg, but underneath is all of the truth of who, of who we are, of what we really believe about ourselves. And so what we need to do is we need to come in and to, and be with this unconscious. But when we activate the heart, we're coming in immediately with a gentleness, with a softness. We are activating that flow of compassion. Again, when we say, when we use these words, they get bandied around. We see them on Instagram, we see them here, there and everywhere. Love, compassion, bring more compassion in, radical self-acceptance. What does it really feel like? People know what it sounds like, but do they know what it feels like? And so that's what we, we really work with.

• 38:11Fearne Cotton?

  There's always going to be that general curiosity about mediumship and psychic ability. But I think when we, but sometimes we can think, well, that's for other people. There's experts that do this. But you're so encouraging for all of us to think we've all got the ability to have intuition and therefore we need to start listening to it. If that's a really new idea to anybody listening, that they've, they've not recognized their own intuition. They haven't had, I mean, most of us have had a spooky moment where it's been like, you're thinking of someone and they call, like all the obvious ones. You think of a song and it comes on the radio. But when we're talking about like true guidance in life that can be life-changing, how do you start to tap into that?

• 38:56Speaker 03

  I think the very most important first thing is to quit projecting it as something unnatural. What is absolutely unnatural is every living creature alive has an inner guidance system. You know, all the animals left in India before the tsunami hit, you know, the migration of butterflies and the whales and the ecolation of bats. Why wouldn't we? So we've been under a huge massive gaslight that our inner sensory awareness is legitimate receiving of energy that gives you information. So we, we woo-woo it.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  We put it out there and I'm not out there because that would then make me vulnerable to being rejected. So I will reject my actual experience over risk being rejected by others. Fortunately, after COVID, that doesn't fly anymore because there's nothing, the promise of what others do for you has completely collapsed. Everybody's kind of each man for himself in a way, because we're learning that I'm the captain of my ship. I live with my choices and if I abandon myself because I felt something that I couldn't logically explain, then it's weird. But here's the truth. Neuroscience has, explains it now.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  The, the science that we're working with or the understanding of our inner senses that we're working with is so last century.

• 40:30Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Science is now every day saying, finally, thank God, we have conscious bodies. Our guts are conscious, our hearts are conscious, our skin is conscious. We can internalize and receive energy and with it information.

• 40:47Fearne Cotton?

  Yes.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  If it's congruent, then that's a good vibe.

• 40:51Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  If it's incongruent, wait.

• 40:53Fearne Cotton?

  And hey, we've all experienced that, you know, we've all walked into a room and gone, oh God, I don't, I'm getting a bad vibe from that person.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  It's so real. And that is something that if we start validating, I'm telling you, and I am not exaggerating. If you validated this for 21 days, your life will level up so quickly and you will fly so fast. You'll have to buckle up. I'm serious. I am not exaggerating. If you simply said, yes, okay. Instead of what I hear daily, I don't know why I feel that way. And I say, hold on, you do know why. You are, you are experiencing this energy that is informing you. You just don't have a logical backup for it.

• 41:36Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah. And you've got to take it seriously rather than go.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  Every time.

• 41:39Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah. Quit 21 days.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  I'm not overpromising. Come back and tell me.

• 41:44Fearne Cotton?

  I'm doing it.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  But here's the thing, a couple of things you have to set up. First, you won't even pick it up if you're in your head.

• 41:51Fearne Cotton?

  Oh God, that's a hard one for me.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Well, you can have a brain surgery without having anesthesia. I mean, your head isn't sensitive. It is a, it is a processing machine. It's easy to get in your body. You just take it, just open your jaw until you hear a click in your ear and sigh.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  And smile. Can you feel how it shifted? Now you're in your body.

• 42:14Fearne Cotton?

  Yeah.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  This, from here to the hips, is where you pick up most energy.

• 42:20Fearne Cotton?

  Yes, and also, like, we know, your body keeps the score. There's that famous book, obviously, but it tells the truth. And we've all had ailments or physical situations that are manifestations of all of that energy that we're picking up and the feelings we're having.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  It's so real that this energy, if it is incongruent with your core frequency, which is always seeking peace, grounded, balanced connection. If you are hosting or engaging or entertaining excessively with vibrations that go against that, it's going to have a very debilitating effect on you. It will give you your migraines, your belly aches. It will give you your anxiety attacks. It will wake you up at three o'clock in the morning because it's trying to... What it is, is information from the field, from your higher self, from your guides,

• 43:17Speaker 03

  from the earth, communicating to you how to be aligned and actually be congruent with your highest good.

• 43:26Speaker 05

  So I remember when I was nineteen, I was told by this incredible wise mentor I have called Ruth Namiass, and she said, "Poppy, there's no such thing as a coincidence. Everything is a coordinated instance." And I feel that that was one of the best things she could have ever told me because in these moments, I've been kind of taught to pause and say, "This isn't the end of the world. You've just got to see this story through." And so I started writing this book, and I had been diagnosed with extremely low fertility. At thirty years old, I went for a check randomly, woke up in the middle of the night, and I just had this feeling, "I think you need to go look at your ovaries." And, you know, five years ago, there's a lot more talk about fertility now, but five years ago, nobody was speaking about it.

• 44:10Speaker 05

  Anyway, so I'd go online, find the closest clinic, go along, and I really assumed I was very healthy and very fertile. And they sat me down and they asked me all these kind of weird questions that started making me think, "Oh, things don't seem quite right here." And she said, "Poppy, I'm really sorry to tell you, but your markers are as if you're in your late forties. You're on the verge of infertility." And at thirty years old, I'm single, and I'm thinking to myself, "My whole life is kind of crashing down because I'm thinking, oh, maybe I can never be a mother." And so I had to do the egg freezing process, do that multiple times, because I had very few follicles as a consequence of eggs.

• 44:52Speaker 05

  And so I assumed that this maybe just not on the cards for me. And my partner also had had a history of cancer. So I always, when I found a partner, absolutely in love with him, and, you know, even, you know, when I thought, "Wow, I'd love to have children with him," I also knew his history of cancer, so I knew that also might not be a possibility. So I just thought, "Okay, this might not be our future." And I went, I have an amazing tarot reader who's a bit like a mentor, and she's a union psychologist called Diakobeg. And she said, she was pulling my cards, and she said, "Poppy, you're going to be pregnant." And I laughed. I said, "Hilarious, like, love the cards are saying this. It's actually biologically kind of impossible, but whatever." And she said, "Just call me in five months. You're going to be pregnant."

• 45:35Speaker 05

  And I just put it to the back of my mind because I knew it's impossible. Maybe they think pregnant with a new book or pregnant with a business. So, you know, tarot is a, is a, is a form of kind of storytelling. And anyway, so five months later, I, I suddenly started to notice, you know, my period's missed, but I thought, "I'm stressed," you know, obviously that. And I find out I'm pregnant, and I cannot believe it. And I call up Diakon, the second person I call up, after my mother. I said, "I cannot believe I'm pregnant," and she laughs, and she said, "Okay, you know, enjoy." And it was, felt like a real miracle pregnancy, and I loved being pregnant. It felt like I was evolving this life, and it was amazing.

• 46:17Speaker 05

  And told my mother, and anyway, every time I was coming up to a scan, she would say, "I mean, look, you know, sometimes scans can go wrong." And I thought, "Why are you being so negative? You know, my scan is going to be fine. I'm positive thinking it's going to be fine." And the scan was fine. So I thought, honestly, she's being such a worry wart. It's fine. Anyway, I get to five months, and we go for a scan, and basically, very critical bones are missing. And so the baby wouldn't be able to live after it was born. And so we have to go through a termination. And when you're so late along, so many plans have been made.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  So the loss is just, you're, you know, you're grieving so many, so many things, and the shock, and then the trauma of an abortion that late is the most painful, horrendous thing in the entire world. You know, I, I was halfway through an abortion, I'm on the, I'm on the street floor fainting because the medicine had hit me too soon, had me out to get to the hospital at the time. It was one of the most physically horrendous experiences I've ever been through. Anyway, I called my mom, and she said, "Poppy, I don't know whether you want to know this, but I knew you weren't going to have this baby." I, I said, "What?" And my mom has a crystal pendulum that she asks questions to.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  And the crystal will either swing right or left, depending on yes or no. So when I had told her in October, "I'm pregnant," she'd asked the crystal but hadn't told me, and she said, "Is Poppy going to have a baby next year?" And the crystal had said, "No." And she wrote down all the answers the crystal said, and she sent it to me. And in that moment, it's so strange, but for me, that was the most healing thing I could have received because I thought, "Oh, my gosh, Poppy, it was never, this is, I don't know why I was pregnant, but I was never supposed to have this baby." Like, the fact that my mother wrote down I wasn't going to have a baby next year, knowing her daughter was pregnant, and she thought, "I'm being crazy. Ignore this crystal. What am I doing? Of course I want my daughter to have a baby. This is crazy town."

• 48:25Speaker 05

  But she wrote it down anyway, just in case. So I had the abortion, and then six weeks later, a total shocker, I'm pregnant again. And at this point, I really cannot believe it. I think I'm basically on the verge of infertility. How else can I get pregnant again? But it was obviously a total miracle. It was, you know, super healing. I was still kind of traumatized, but I was like, "Wow, this is so amazing." And my mom had, the crystal had said, "Poppy is going to have a baby girl in 2026." So me and my partner kind of assumed like, "Oh, okay, well, the crystal's slightly wrong. We're going to have a baby in 2025 because it's going to be the end of the year now." And so we get to the three-month scan, and they're like, "Do you want to know the gender?" And we said, "Yes." And they said, "Oh, what do you think it is?"

• 49:08Speaker 05

  And we go, "It's obviously going to be a girl." And she said, "Oh, sorry, guys. Definitely a boy," you know, from the scan. And then we had the test, and it was a boy. And I thought, "Oh, that's weird. Okay, my mom just was so wrong." You know, these are things that, whatever, this magical crystal stuff, whatever, fun things, but don't take it seriously. And I get to five months again, and the same thing happens. There is a huge problem with the baby that would mean that it wouldn't be able to breathe on, on birth, and I have to have another abortion at nineteen weeks. And, you know, even, and the doctor who saw us just said, "I don't, I haven't, in my whole thirty years, I haven't seen this. I've not seen a woman having to have two abortions at five months." And it was weird because the crystal had said I wasn't going to have a baby in 2025.

• 49:53Speaker 05

  So I kept kind of going back to this prophecy, thinking, "How is it that I'm pregnant again?" But, you know, this crystal was giving me kind of so much hope that everything was unfolding, even though it was desperately painful and the most traumatic thing I've ever been through. It was kind of unfolding as it should. And so what I can tell you is I'm pregnant with a baby girl.

• 50:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. Seventeen weeks.

• 50:21Fearne Cotton?

  Oh.

• 50:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it will come in 2026. Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 05

  I know, and it's just like, if, if, and that's why I truly believe in, truly believe in this, because I just wouldn't have got through it had I not known it's going to be okay.

• 50:38Fearne Cotton?

  Do you know what? That moment with Poppy, I still get goosebumps hearing that back. It was so, so special. And I think my take from all of these conversations, and what I hope you take from them too, is that we've got to trust in life. And again, that can sound so wanky, but I do believe it. We've got to trust in whatever we're going through now, whether it's something really, really tricky, painful, challenging, something that's pushing you, something that's deeply saddened you. There is some wealth in it. And I say that, having been through some shit things that I really didn't want to go through, that I can see the lessons learned, I can see what I needed to get from it now,

• 51:22Fearne Cotton?

  and I can see that I've become the person I am today, who's still deeply flawed and has all sorts of issues. But I can see I'm at where I'm at today because of those things. And, and I can see the interesting path that those moments have taken me on. So I think my takeaway is, remember to trust in life. Look, we're going to be back in a couple of days with all the stuff that's putting you lot and Team Happy Place in a gorgeous mood this week, and what's making us feel a little bit crap. There's space for it all. In the meantime, a massive thanks again to everyone who's got me, and hopefully you, thinking about the stuff that is bigger than us. And to you, you're the best.

• 52:33Speaker 07

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