[00:00:00] You're listening to Expand With Gabrielle, where you will learn how to use ancient wisdom and new age science to create your dream life here. I ground the woo and demystify powerful spiritual concepts to support your spiritual entrepreneur journey. We are talking out with the old toxic, masculine boss, babe, culture of hustle, burnout and anxiety, and with the creative energy of creating through ease, magnetism and flow.
Let's get into it.
Gabrielle: Hello, hello. When I bring up the subject of success, do you immediately think of hard work, push, burnout? When you're thinking of being super, super wealthy, do you associate that with pain, fatigue, stress? That's what I used to associate it with. So I'm going to tell you a little story [00:01:00] about how I went from being a burnt out boss, babe on the hustle grind to being a magnetic, successful, financially free woman in her wild, wealthy feminine.
Gabrielle: Now this story starts way back from actually where and when I was born. I was born in Western society by a man who is an entrepreneur and a woman who is a stay at home mom. And then also throughout my life have a stepdad who is an entrepreneur. So I was surrounded by this. entrepreneurial spirit.
Gabrielle: However, they were very, very much anchored into the toxic masculine, which is what all of Western society is anchored into when it comes to success, that it is hard work, that you need to log the hours. I even worked for a woman once who basically believed if your butt wasn't in the chair, for at least 10 hours a day in your cubicle or in your office that you weren't trying hard [00:02:00] enough.
Gabrielle: So all of these belief systems were hammered into me that that's how you behave successfully. That's how you made a lot of money. Also what I was taught to believe is that if you wanted to sit at the table, if you wanted to be respected, then you needed to make a lot of money and you needed to be successful.
Gabrielle: Otherwise, what were you bringing to the table? What was your worth? What was your value? And so with all these aspects of my paradigm layered on top of each other, I grew up wanting to be a classic CEO. I thought that I wanted to go live in a big city with a pencil skirt and high heels. And that's exactly what I did.
Gabrielle: When I graduated university, I went and worked for a fancy hotel and their sales department up in San Francisco. And I wore a pencil skirt and high heels and I was utterly miserable. I remember being so depressed at one point that I forgot how long it had been until I had showered. Just to give you an understanding of the level of depression that I fell into.[00:03:00]
Gabrielle: And this was for a number of reasons, but one of them was I just felt like a cog in a wheel. I felt like a number. I felt like my life and my contribution was pointless. I didn't see the sun. I woke up and left my apartment before the sun rose, and I didn't leave the building and get back to my apartment until after it had set again.
Gabrielle: And I distinctly remember actually a point where I was going to buy a parking pass or something in the middle of the day, and my boss let me leave to go to one of the government buildings so I could buy this parking pass. And I drove past a cafe. I was actually on public transportation in this trolley where I was.
Gabrielle: Slammed up against all these other people where their armpits were in my face and just smelling all these smells and it was very uncomfortable. And I looked out the window and I saw all these people my age, not all these people, but a few people my age, sitting at a cafe. Casually reading or journaling or having lunch with their [00:04:00] friends.
Gabrielle: And I thought, what are they doing that I'm not doing? Like, what am I missing here? You know, how are they sitting there enjoying this sun? This San Francisco sun, which never happens. And I'm sitting on this dirty, nasty bus on my way to go buy a parking pass because I'm allowed two hours to leave work to get this done.
Gabrielle: What am I missing here? And it was at that moment that I was really questioning all my life choices. And I decided that I needed to do something different, that I didn't want to be that quintessential big city, uh, business woman and that I wanted something else. But when I let go of that dream, that dream that I had held onto for a long time, I had read like the romance books in high school of the big city life and, you know, shows like sex in the city and stuff like that.
Gabrielle: And I thought that's what I wanted. And so when I decided that it wasn't, I just felt really lost because I didn't know what else [00:05:00] was out there. And I just knew what I didn't want, which in hindsight is It's very powerful to at least know what you don't want. I tell this to my younger siblings all the time.
Gabrielle: Every time you figure out something you don't want, that's guiding you a little bit more in the right direction, but it's still very overwhelming when you just have all of these people telling you that you should be hitting these mile markers and to have no idea what the heck you want. So what did I do?
Gabrielle: I packed up my stuff like the classic daughter moved back home with my parents and I started working for my dad, just not knowing. Anything. And so I did that for a little while and I decided I wanted to go work in corporate events. Maybe I would try that. Worked for other big corporations, moved up the ladder, tried different careers.
Gabrielle: I got settled in marketing and none of it was very fulfilling. It was all that crab in a barrel mentality where if you were trying to elevate yourself too much too quickly There were lots of [00:06:00] people around that were pulling me back there was very much That vibe of you need to put in your time before you're allowed to have too much success before you're allowed to make so much money.
Gabrielle: And I remember even one of my employers telling me that they had to fight for me to get paid the 50k. And I really took that to heart. I really let that settle into one of my core beliefs for a long time that I was only worth 50k. In fact, I wasn't worth 50k because she had to fight for me to get it.
Gabrielle: And that was something that really sunk in hard for me because I really respected and valued that person's opinion. And so I took that as utter truth. So I actually held a glass ceiling, a money glass ceiling of only making 50k for a while because of that. But luckily, I took a trip to Bali, Indonesia with Andres, and I heard about the concept of being a digital nomad.
Gabrielle: And I just became utterly obsessed with the idea when I heard about it, because I had always loved traveling and I had always wanted freedom. And so, once I heard about that, I became [00:07:00] so intrigued that all I wanted to do was research and learn about how I can make that my life. I didn't know anybody who was doing it.
Gabrielle: I didn't know anybody who even believed it was possible, let alone doing it themselves. But luckily for social media, I was able to be exposed to other people who are living that life and recognize that it was possible. So I embarked on my journey. I became a digital nomad, and I started working for myself.
Gabrielle: I was running a marketing agency that I had started, and I was making pretty good money. However, I still had not changed my belief systems around digital. Success and prosperity. So what did I do? I traveled around the world and I took all my belief systems with me And so therefore I was creating income.
Gabrielle: I was creating a decent amount of Income and revenue in my business, but I still have those same glass ceilings and I was creating out of stress And I was creating out of force and I was creating always thinking that I was going to lose it or always [00:08:00] thinking that it was going to slip away, always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Gabrielle: I knew it was bad when I would start getting on the different websites looking for marketing positions. Like when I would get on Indeed and start looking up marketing director or marketing manager positions as just in case. Then I knew that my fears had started to get the best of me because clients come and go, you know, you work on projects or whatever. They decide to reallocate their funds or what have you and I would take that as like a personal Slight so like as an example of that I'm not good enough that my marketing is not good enough that this isn't gonna work.
Gabrielle: This isn't gonna last This isn't real like all the fears were coming up. And so I was in this chronic state of stress And it was all I had ever known. I even had anxiety attacks when I was in university. I was a straight A student, but because I put in the force and the pressure and the, what came with it was the chronic fatigue, the anxiety, the acne, the health problems, all [00:09:00] that came with it too.
Gabrielle: And at that time, a lot of drinking actually, when I was in university, I numbed out on alcohol a lot. And so I'm traveling the world. I'm doing these things, but I'm not fully enjoying it because I'm not even fully present because I'm so stressed out. I'm so wrapped up in all of these fear thoughts.
Gabrielle: I'm truly creating out of the toxic masculine. I'm not connecting with my partner because I'm heavily in my masculine. He's heavily in his masculine. So we're butting heads. We don't have that zingy, zesty, hot, sexy connection, that polarity in our relationship. I was actually so heavily in my masculine, it's kind of hilarious to tell this now, that at one point when we were living in Bali, I would not even let him drive me on his scooter.
Gabrielle: I'm serious. I drove my own scooter because I didn't want him to drive me on the scooter because I couldn't release control. I could not release control and relax enough to trust him to drive us correctly. And I [00:10:00] would drive my own scooter. And it's hilarious too, because even when we were in the car, I would catch myself, critiquing him if he didn't take the fastest route or didn't go the way I would go and And that's just a small example to show you of how deeply I felt unsafe and how I was trying to create the illusion of control in my environment by like clutching and gripping onto everything.
Gabrielle: If you can imagine both of your hands in front of you on your steering wheel, like gripping it and you know when you grip like so hard that you kind of even grip your teeth, all those muscles that are tense right now when you do that were all the muscles that were tense in my body. so much so that I had extreme chronic neck pain.
Gabrielle: Like it was so bad that it would seize up and I wouldn't be able to walk for days. Like just the movement of walking would send severe pain up my spine, up my neck, into my [00:11:00] head. There were times when it would seize up for like weeks at a time where I couldn't ride a scooter because the jostling of the scooter would kill me, where I couldn't work for a few days because the pain was just so severe.
Gabrielle: That's how much tension and pressure I was putting on myself. And the funny thing was I had absolutely zero idea that those were connected. I thought that I was just struggling from neck pain because I worked on the computer too much or because I didn't go to yoga enough or maybe I was just like anatomically I was made to where I would have neck pain because my mom had neck pain.
Gabrielle: These were all the things that I believed and I went to docs. x rays and they're like, there's nothing wrong with your neck. And I was like, well, there's obviously something wrong with my neck. Cause I'm having like level nine pain. There was even another time when I was at an airport and my neck was seizing up and it was seizing up so bad Around my collarbone that I thought it was gonna break my collarbone.
Gabrielle: Like I remember sitting there thinking imagining having a knife and like [00:12:00] Stabbing it through my trap just to release the tension and the pressure was putting on my collarbone That's how intense the pain was also I do think it was exacerbated because I was up in that compressed tube in the sky I think it was It's somehow making the pressure points in my neck and in my back worse.
Gabrielle: But wow, words can't even express the level of pain and also the level of frustration when I would have the pain go away, like I would get a massage or go to a chiropractor or whatever, do all these different things to try to relieve the pain and it would finally ebb a bit and then it would come back.
Gabrielle: And it was just like the emotional rollercoaster of having it come back again was terrible. And this was just one aspect I was dealing with, but I had compartmentalized my life to where I did not understand that my inability to have intimacy and connection with my partner. I had no idea that that was related to my business, or I had no [00:13:00] idea that the chronic pain I was feeling was related to my need for safety and that that was affecting my income.
Gabrielle: And I had no idea that all of these were related. But I was always traveling. I started getting exposed to more and more healers. I started learning more about energetics, and it kind of started with yoga, and then it kind of went to Reiki, and then I went to Bali. And I was looking to work with a Reiki lady and I booked an appointment and I thought it was Reiki, but I showed up and it was absolutely not Reiki.
Gabrielle: But it was the best thing that I ever did because what it was, was emotional releasing through pressure points in the physical body because we store emotions in our physical tissue. And so when I started releasing these, all these emotions I had suppressed, because another limiting belief that I had grown up in, in Western society was that people aren't going to respect you if you cry or that you're showing weakness if you cry or that you as a [00:14:00] business owner cannot fly off the handle or can't get too angry or anything like that because then you're a bitch basically.
Gabrielle: And that's just the way it is. I had bottled up all this anger, all this shame, all this frustration, all this sadness and suppressed it so deeply inside of my body. That's also where the drinking came in was helping suppress all these emotions that when I started releasing them in Bali and over the next few years, it was like an avalanche that came out.
Gabrielle: Very, very much needed, but an avalanche. And so I worked with these curanderas and these mystics. I traveled to Guatemala and studied under a Mayan shaman. Started my love affair with Mama Cacao because I was really numb. Um, when I was at that point where I was having all the chronic pain and I wasn't able to be very intimate and I was very disconnected from my body, I felt like I didn't have a lot of feeling in my body.
Gabrielle: Like I would try to be intimate with my [00:15:00] partner and it was very rarely that I would actually like to feel any sort of pleasure. And I went to a cacao ceremony, and I drank Mama Cacao, and for the first time in a very, very long time, I began to feel the taste. Again, I began to feel on a much deeper level and Mama Cacao actually is a tool that carried me through some of the deepest, deepest parts of my healing journey to date.
Gabrielle: So I have a very deep, passionate relationship with Mama Cacao and so I traveled to Guatemala to study her origin story and to study her under the Mayan lineage. because she was just so profound in her way of holding me through the depths of this experience. Because as I started to learn more and more about myself, as I started to explore more and more of the traumas and the storylines that I had been carrying, I was peeling back layers, and I was working through childhood [00:16:00] trauma, sexual trauma, I was working through things of my mother's and my grandmother's of my father's and my grandfather's And there was a lot to hold and a lot to carry all the while Running my marketing agency and traveling and things like this so there was a lot that I was bearing on my shoulders a lot of balls in the air that I felt I needed to Keep in the air to be able to live my life and take care of myself and pay for myself You And it was along this journey too that I started to understand on a deeper level the impact of energy and of thoughts and of quantum physics and how this all relates to spiritual concepts of the Mayan lineage, of the Kurundera lineage, of the ancient practices in Bali and the more cultures that I study around the world, the more I see.
Gabrielle: see these truths when they're boiled down, there's these deep levels of truth that are available in every culture and in every lineage. [00:17:00] And when we weave these truths together with, what is emerging in science and specifically in the quantum and the study of epigenetics and DNA and at the atomic level and the energetic you can see how there's these profound parallels.
Gabrielle: And it's in this work that all the healing, all the times I sat with plant medicine all came into focus because I had felt like I'd piecemealed my healing journey. It felt like I was walking around the forest and just stumbling around in the dark and just trying to address these different pains and sufferings, and I didn't know where to start or where to end.
Gabrielle: I was just going after the biggest, most brutal thing that was staring me in the face, you know, started maybe with the chronic pain and then moved around from there. And then I started to see that that actually is one of the slowest ways to move through your healing journey, not to mention one of the most confusing.
Gabrielle: And I also kind of got wrapped up in the [00:18:00] spiritual kind of toxic, idea that you have to just keep pursuing all of these traumas and wounding, and you have to just keep finding the shadow and working on the shadow, and I got so caught up in working on the shadow that I forgot to live. That I forgot to enjoy and have pleasure, and it felt very imbalanced.
Gabrielle: It's like I had gone from one side of the pendulum to completely ignoring everything to the other side of the pendulum of being hyper obsessed and hyper focused on all of the wounding and suffering and trauma. And so when I found my way back to the center point, when I found my way back to balance, When I started implementing these concepts that I had learned from all these different healers and all these different medicine men and women and then interwoven this scientific research and this psychology that my income just 3x'd.
Gabrielle: It completely tripled. It had tripled when I first left my job [00:19:00] to become a digital nomad, but then it tripled again. But this time was different because the first time I did it, I hit burnout. Hardcore burnout. There's a point in this healing journey where I literally could not work anymore. It was like I had brain fog.
Gabrielle: I hated what I was doing. I could not focus. I procrastinated. I just felt like my soul was being sucked out of my body. I was angry all the time, super frustrated, super in my masculine, like I did not want to be touched at all. Just like very disconnected and questioning my life again of what I was doing, what my purpose was.
Gabrielle: And so this next time after I went through that huge death and reverse cycle and I started making really good money again, it was through a place of ease and through a place of magnetism because the first time I was working like 60 plus hours a week and the second time I was making. even more money and I was working barely 15 hours a week.
Gabrielle: It was [00:20:00] insane. It was mind blowing. It was so mind blowing that I was just absolutely floored by how I was even doing that. Because it's one thing to conceptualize creating wealth through ease and magnetism, and it's a completely other thing to do it and create it and see it in your real life. I am telling you nothing makes you feel more like this world is a matrix and we're living in like a video game than learning how to create and manipulate your reality.
Gabrielle: To learn that our external reality is a reflection of our internal reality and we create everything. Sometimes it can be a little, I don't know, like making you feel a little lonely. It can make you feel a little isolated. To recognize the fact that this is all made up.
Gabrielle: I guess. And
Gabrielle: When I came back out of that death process and I tripled my income but from a completely different state, from a state of being in my divine feminine as well [00:21:00] as my divine masculine, I was at a Taino festival in the Dominican Republic. And I was sitting there and a woman asked me, you know, where are you from?
Gabrielle: What do you do? Why are you here? Because it was a very small festival. The Tainos are the natives in the Dominican Republic. And I was learning about some of their native practices and how they work with sacred tobacco and some of their other beautiful shamanic wisdom. And so this woman asked me, you know, how did you find out about this?
Gabrielle: Kind of, why are you here? And I told her my story and my journey. And she looked at me and she goes, what are you going to do with all of that knowledge that you've been gathering for the last five, six years? And I was like, I don't know. Because as I went on this journey, I never had the intention of sharing this with anyone.
Gabrielle: I was just doing it for myself. I was doing it because I needed to know. I needed to understand why I was suffering the way I was suffering. I needed to [00:22:00] understand why some people were so wealthy and so magnetic and so prosperous and so excited and in love with their careers and what they were creating and why some people were not.
Gabrielle: Why some people were stuck. Why are so many people in my family stuck. And I was trying to figure out how to heal and how to get what I want. And what I want is wealth and freedom and to feel alive and to travel and to rest and relax and be at peace and have Epic sex with my partner. Like that's what I want.
Gabrielle: And I went on this journey and I found it and now I feel like it is my, My pleasure, my mission, my honor to share these stories and to share my story. And I would love more than anything to share these very vulnerable, very raw, very real stories of my journey and of my [00:23:00] close friend's journeys along the way because that's where the truth is.
Gabrielle: That's where the nuggets are. That's where you can find the pieces of information that are going to help you on your journey. It's not in the tests or the statistics or the studies that are pushed out in western medicine and by western run universities. Because those are all backed and paid for by people with specific agendas.
Gabrielle: I believe the truth in healing, in creation, in building wealth, in connecting with yourself, and having just an amazing epic life are found in stories like this. In stories of real people who have done it, who have lived it, who take responsibility for their lives, who look at themselves, who are brave enough to look at themselves, to look at their shadow, to look at their wounding, to honor it all, and still love [00:24:00] themselves, and still love themselves.
Gabrielle: move through this world with grace and share these vulnerable aspects because that is the truth. That is being a true human. And that is what we're all doing here, whether we'd like to admit it or not. And that is what I want to bring to you in this podcast. And so as we go deeper into these stories, I would love to share with you the experiences I had unearthing all these limiting beliefs around money, around intimacy, around sex, around success, around partnerships, around friendships, because that's the nitty gritty juicy stuff that makes this life worth living.
Gabrielle: And what I found was that connection and divinity can all be felt in nature, can all be felt in our bodies, can all be felt in that human to human contact. And that is where I found spirit or God or the universe or whatever you want to call it is when I went out into [00:25:00] nature and started connecting with myself on a deeper level.
Gabrielle: and sitting with myself and honoring my emotions and learning to process working with somatic therapy. It's when I understood how to work on the physical plane, the emotional and mental, the energetic and the soul levels that I created huge shifts in my health. I healed that chronic pain finally in my neck, truly healed it because they went to the root cause.
Gabrielle: I healed the issues with intimacy from the sexual trauma and from. Trauma's in my lineage because I went to the root. And I healed the issues around money and success and the glass ceiling because I went to the root. And that is what we are going to talk about here and that is what I share with you and that is what I believe in.
Gabrielle: is going to the root and it does. It takes bravery. It takes honesty. It takes willpower and dedication to do the processes, to the practices, to do the rituals and the ceremonies. But the tools are [00:26:00] here. The wisdom is here. The knowledge is here and we're going through a global awakening and you're listening to this for a reason.
Gabrielle: And I'm so excited that you are here today. And this has been my journey thus far. And now I run the school of expansion where I teach female spiritual entrepreneurs how to do exactly this in a 12 month container. And then I also share it in this podcast here with you. And I travel the world living in Bali and exploring and continuing to learn from all these different lineages and these, different ancient practices because there's so much wisdom still to unearth.
Gabrielle: If this story resonates with you, if you can see yourself in any pieces of this journey, then I am so glad that you're here and I would love to hear from you. If you want to send me a message in my DMs, I'm @expandwithgabrielle on Instagram and TikTok, and I would love to know that you are listening to this podcast and that this story spoke to you.
Gabrielle: And if you are [00:27:00] dying to learn more about these concepts that I'm talking about, check out the next episode where I discuss manifesting and is it real and does it really work? Because there's some really, really profound information that you need to know around this topic if you want to create the life of your dreams.