Episode 316 - Dr. Christy Bauman, "Insights on Intuition, Legacy, and Healing"

Welcome to another episode of "Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick." Today, we dive into the profound and transformative realms of intuition, legacy, and rites of passage with our guest, Dr. Christy Bauman, a therapist, scholar, and author of the newly released "Her Rites: A Sacred Journey for the Mind, Body, and Soul."

Join us as Christy emphasizes the importance of women trusting their intuition in a culture that often encourages them to second-guess themselves and how trauma can influence this inner knowing. Michael shares his personal experiences, highlighting the intersection of neuroscience and intuition. Together, they explore the concept of legacy and its impact on future generations, drawing from Christy's poignant personal stories.

We will also venture into the fascinating rites of initiation and exile, uncovering how facing one's deepest fears and engaging with God’s voice can lead to profound self-discovery and growth. Christy touches upon her empowering program, Womaneering, and the significance of using the body for sustenance and blessing.

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Transcript

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Well, welcome to the Restoring the Soul podcast, everybody. It's another episode. I'm delighted to be back on the recording studio with doctor Christy Bauman. Hi, Christy. Hi, Michael. So glad to be here again. We talked previously about your book Theology of the womb, and you have been a busy therapist, scholar and researcher. You have a brand new book out called her rights, r I t e S. A sacred journey for the mind, body and soul. And again, it's her rights, r I t e s. This is not a book on why women should have the suffrage or vote or something like that. When I first 1st heard about it. Can we start with the fact that in our culture, rites and ritual and rites of passage are really something that we don't talk a lot about and I don't think a lot of people understand. So define terms, but also talk about why this is important in your work with women. Sure. So, as you said, I've been 15 years sitting across a couch with a woman hour after hour, week after week. Sometimes my husband and I will be sitting with a couple, couple hours at a time. And what I'm realizing is we can do the story work that happens with trauma, but then they go home and it doesn't get all the way down into the body. And in the christian world I grew up in, that the body was, was not explored or talked about. And even in psychology, you stayed in the heart and kind of that soul level. But the embodiment of the work that I was doing with clients wasn't translating when they were going home. And so I started to dig deeper. What is it? And since my work is particular to the female, what is it that women are missing out in that's keeping them from embodying what they're knowing? So they were getting a knowing, but then something was stopping in the actual embodiment piece. And so maybe they could find freedom in something in their mind, but then when they actually went to act on it in relationship, they couldn't feel it. And that was where we were running into an issue. And so I started doing research again, like you were saying, a lot of research around what is keeping women from being in their bodies. Now, when our bodies are traumatized or our bodies are harmed, we can tell our mind something, and we can accept that as truth, but actually believing it and then making our body believe that wasn't translating. And then I found out that it's because we're not doing rites of passage, we're not actually doing something intentional with our body to then move into our belief system. And you started in the introduction of the book in the very first sentence, and I love sentences of first chapters, you said that our best self is our integrated self. And I think that what you're talking about is actually the idea of integration. Can you talk about integration? Yes. And so if you look into mostly whether it's Dan Siegel or Casalino's work around neurobiology and what he's talking about in psychology is that if we don't get it into our body, it's then set apart and compartmentalized, and. And what we have to do to do that is regulate. To integrate, we have to regulate, and we have to let it saturate, in a sense. And I could talk to someone, and our minds could connect, and even our hearts could connect. We could find that we had a heartfelt moment. We both believed something. And then they'd walk out the office, and their bodies wouldn't follow through. And so I started to bring the body into the story, and that was. That was that rite of passage was integrating by doing some intentional act and, you know, ritual rite of passage. Those sound a bit archaic. They're more of the myth. We don't have that in our everyday linguistic conversations in the church, for sure, or I didn't. And this was this sense of, how do we take something that is so old and talked about in such a way and then understand what God was trying to do in our bodies in the Amago day, in the image of God that I bear, how do I integrate my story and my body to come into the fruition of burying the image of God in myself, that's such. A deep and comprehensive kind of work. It seems to not leave anything out. And I always want to take moments on this podcast for people that have been beat up by their religious background or their faith, that when we speak of integration, and especially the embodied reality that you're talking about, that there's something in our neural pathways, there's something in our system that can't saturate and take in, that it allows for such compassion that people start to understand, I'm not a horrible sinner. I'm not fundamentally flawed. I'm not weak, undisciplined, etcetera. It's this physical reality that life has shaped so that we can't be receptacles to love and to actually embrace ourselves. Yes, completely. And what I'm noticing, too, is that our bodies don't trust our minds anymore. And that fracture then leaves us left with a body that says, I don't know I've been in a place where I've been harmed and you didn't know how to get out of it or you didn't do anything about it. And there actually, there's a bit of. A lot of times I run into this part of the body that kind of has a beef with us, like my body saying, oh, you want me to go do that? Well, last time I did that, it went this way. And, you know, I had a client an hour ago say, christy, I can't listen to an audiobook because I've been verbally abused. And to actually put something in my ears will trigger my body. And so even if we have to listen to what our bodies are saying, but we've also, I have felt that I was taught to villainize this body, that the body was bad and I needed to cut it off. And in doing so, I then left the parts of God that was speaking through my body and didn't actually build that alliance within myself. And just a shout out to the previous podcast topic. I think you've actually written another book since then. But your book, Theology of the Womb, it's just a remarkable book and set of essays that incorporates your own story with deep theology and science and obstetrics and history to especially exclusively for women to understand God and to understand themselves through the body. And I have to say, my wife and I on Saturday celebrate 33 years of marriage, which our story is a miracle. And every time I read your work, and this was not an exception, I feel like I understand my wife more deeply and more holistically. And your work certainly affects my heart and my ability to just be present to women. So thank you for that. Yes, thanks for saying that. I think that is true when we're talking about couples and relationships where maybe a husband is saying, I I have said this so many times, or I've done this action and my wife's body is still not responding, or my wife's heart is still not responding. There is a complexity to the female that I've really dug into, which is why I go through these rites of passage, and it does feel comprehensive. And I tell women, you can find yourself in any part of this. And men have, you know, this is the thing about both of these books, her rites and theology of the womb. Men have just sent me the longest emails saying, you know, my wife had this book and then she asked me to read it and then I read it and it really is changing me. I am understanding some of the female or, and, you know, you don't get as triggered by me, because I'm not your wife. So it's easier for me to say something and for you to hear it and then hear your wife or hear your sister or daughter in a way that maybe you couldn't before. And I think that's where I have to start. Advocate to men like this is actually helpful for all. And the way I start the book is I start with birthright. And the reason I start with birthright is because biblically, birthright is known to the firstborn male. And so in that process, when a female would pick up the Bible, she is not going to understand or learn anything about birthright. It's not going to be in those pages clearly for her. And yet what we watch over the story of salvation is that we're all given a birthright and that we all belong. And even the orphaned is brought in by God. And that is the story of adoption. And so that's the story of birthright. So what I'm working with is then women who don't even know why they were born, and they have to go back to the story of what's your birthright? And that's what I start with. And a lot of men, even if you weren't the firstborn male, you also weren't taught how to look for a birthright or understand a birthright. And so I have a lot of men telling me that's so interesting for me to write out my birthright. I have never done that before. My parents didn't know how to do that, or I didn't know how to do that, and maybe I didn't know how to do it for my own children. So I walk you through that process of the rite of birth is understanding birthright for you and how to write that and understand what God was doing whenever you were born. And then you go through different, what I call developmental stages because it feels like each of the six categories of rights, I won't say they correspond to development like Erickson or anything, but their right of birth, right of initiation, right of exile, right of creation, right of intuition, and then the right of legacy. And as soon as I started to read that and saw that, it was like, it does go from birth to death, if you will. Was that intentional? Very intentional. It's. I mean, a lot of my background is in lifespan psychology and even story work. There is something about telling the whole story. And God is a God who tells a story from, from beginning to end. Right in the beginning was the word, and then there's an ending in revelation. And so I'm looking at that comprehensive piece, and I'm saying, tell me the whole story, life to death. And what is God telling through that story? What is God asking you to know about your calling and how you are on this life and end with that rite of legacy? How will you be known after you're gone? What is the story that's going to be told with your life? And so that was very intentional and very much a part of it. So there's another quote I want to ask you about, because it feels like it's foundational to the whole book. And I recently watched a tv show called the Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, which is on Netflix, and it's two seasons long. And it's about what was Palestine before the Israel state in 1948. And it's about a child that was born, exceptionally beautiful, into this very dysfunctional, multiethnic family in the midst of Great Britain occupying. And she goes through a very abusive relationship. And at the end, near the end, as she finally becomes liberated and you see her kind of become whole in certain ways, she says, I will never belong to anyone. And in her context, that felt really healthy. And yet I could also hear that as a kind of independence and refusal to be intimate, but it was really a healthy statement there. And then you started or wrote in a chapter, you said that women often feel as if they don't belong to themselves. Can you talk about that? And this is one of those insights that clinically, I kind of get it. And then I think that just existentially and as a husband and a dad, I probably don't have a clue, because what I think I heard you talk about with the birthright is if you don't have that, you're not going to actually belong to yourself. You won't have that, that core sense of identity or sense of self. Right. It's a foundational piece, for sure. And I do think the belonging to yourself, I was taught where I'm looking, where do I belong to God? I belong to my husband. I belong to my house. Like, in a sense, the way I was raised, I was looking to belong to something else other than myself. It was selfish. It was prideful. It was not good to belong to myself. Right. And yet I think all of us where codependency is everywhere in relationship, I think that interdependency is what I'm going for. But if I'm not independent outside of my husband, then I can't be interdependent with him because I am not bringing myself, he's bringing his self and I'm bringing myself to the table. And then we're making a marriage soul together. But we're individual beings. And I think for women, when you grow up either, whether it's a patriarchal culture, an objectifying culture, you're taught you're an object, not a soul. And so you, you swallow that belief system and then you are looking to the other to belong somewhere. You're looking to the other to have worth. And because of that, then there's this costly thing that's happening in your body. You're separating from yourself, and you're asking the other to say you're enough. And you're asking the other to say that you're a beautiful enough object, that you are a smart enough object, that you can make your own money and provide for yourself, whatever it is. And I think it's costing intimacy because we don't belong to ourselves first. We can't be intimate with another. What I'm wondering, and I cannot wait to watch that now that you've talked about it, is I'm wondering if she never belonged to herself and she was forced to be given to everything else other than here. And because of that, she lost herself. So then she could never be with another or offer herself to another because she had never offered herself to inside to her. She had never belonged inside to herself. So I think that's, you know, in some ways it might feel selfish, what I'm saying, but I'm like, nope. We're going back to what should have always been our birthright. When we breathe and our heart beats, it's that God put that in our chest and put our lungs. No one else carries those lungs. No one else carries this heart that I carry. No one else carries this story. And it's that story that I bring to another to offer intimacy and to offer relationship to. Right. It's because I know myself and what I need that I can ask my husband to help me or meet me. And because I know what he needs and who he is and how his story has impacted him. And even when aging comes in marriage, how are both our bodies will age, how what we've inherited from our own parents physically. We have to talk. You know, and this sounds like it's a little off topic. My husband and I had a conversation the other day. If what your parents ailments were are going to affect you as early as your sixties, then we need to be talking about what? How you want to live the rest of your life? How do you want this next ten years to look. What do you need? What do we need to do now? Because we. We aren't promised that later and. Right. That's the intimacy, is he can ask me for what he needs and I can ask him for what I need. But if I don't know my story and I don't know my body, I can't ask to then connect and build something there with him. Such good words. And I'm so struck by how it feels like there's a wave moving across people that identify as christians, where there's more and more being taught and woven together, like your work and Dan Allander and some of what I do and Kirk Thompson and Ondy Culver. I could go down a list of other people. Alison Cook. Where there's actually a way of. People are beginning to understand their life of faith and their spirituality in this integrated way. And it feels like something really cool is happening. Do you sense that as a therapist and as somebody that sits so much with people? I do, and I feel really excited about it in some ways. I almost have these moments where I feel like God's getting excited. He's like, okay, okay, guys, you're getting it. You're opening yourselves up to more of what I'm trying to say. And, I mean, that's maybe feels pompous or even dangerous to say, but I feel God's excitement of, like, I am making something new and I have a plan. I'm not afraid. And I do think in a place where this world is latent with more anxiety, with more depression, with more war, with more loss, with more grief, it's odd to feel so much hope, but I feel like the way of God has so much hope, and yet all I listen to every day is stories of trauma and harm and heartache, and they gut me. And yet something in my spirit rises up and says, there's a deeper story here. There's a deeper hope. And I feel that more than ever, more than ever in this day and age, I am not afraid of someone bringing me a story that's too scary, that's too broken, that's a body that's been too harmed. I'm not afraid because I do honestly believe that I know the one who knows resurrection, and I'm not in charge of resurrection, but I know the way to that journey. And so for me, it does feel so hopeful, and I do think we're all kind of catching wind of something and we're moving towards it. Yeah, it's a very exciting time. And I started my mental health training in 1988 when I started working professionally and been licensed for 30 years. And I'm stunned by what's happened even in the last five years with the transformation of the field I want to just come back to again, this is such an important idea. And then if we can walk through the different rights this discussion we were having about women belonging to themselves, what I heard was, if you don't belong to yourself, if you don't own your sense of self, connect to this sense of self that you're not going to be able to connect to others and to be in an intimate, mutual kind of relationship because otherwise you're going to be shaped or diminish or compromise your sense of self. And it makes me think of a quote from CS Lewis, his novel, one of the few non, you know, fiction novels that he wrote. I guess it was fiction till we have faces, the. The retelling of Cupid and psyche. And in the very last line, the heroine says, how can we look into the face of God until we have faces? And that's the idea of, unless I belong to myself, unless I have this sense of glory shining from me, I can't look into the face of God. And then as we look into the face of God, that glory is then reflected to us. And that's what the oneness is. It's just such a beautiful idea. So thank you for, gosh, in your work and in this book, as expected, there's so much practicality in each of the subsections that here's the specific rite that you can do, but also woven into that are all these big, rich theological ideas. And, you know, let me pause for station identification for a commercial. And that is, I'll just say again, your book, her rights. And by the way, I can see that it's on the shelf behind you. Her writes a sacred journey for the mind, body and soul. If people are listening to this and going, this is interesting, or even if you're going, I like how Christy's talking, make sure to get this book. You can find it on Amazon and everywhere else that quality books are sold. That's so, Chrissy, you talked a little bit about the right of birth. Can you give an example as if a reader is reading one of the sub chapters that, that looks like what you might assign to a person. Sure. So actually, what I love about this book was my desire to make it accessible. Right. Therapy, particularly the therapy I'm in, it's very expensive, it's very selective, and it's not to the masses. And I had such a conviction of that is, how can I make this accessible? And so with the book, I put in templates where basically, if you sat with me for a year of therapy, which is not even an option in this moment, but that you would get it through having these exercises, this homework, so to speak, it's all there with each rite of passage. And then co wrote an album of music that is free to download anywhere you listen to music. It's called her rights. Sarah Siskin is the artist who sings it. But basically you could listen to the music and go through each rite of passage and you could experience it. And this idea was, how do we make therapy? How do we make well being for women? How do we make health available to everyone? So in a rite of passage for birth, I would say, have you write your birthright. And what I would walk you through in the book is going through the story of your in utero story. And I tell people, you may say, my mother is not alive to tell me that story. No one has told that story. You could even tell me I was orphaned and I don't know who my biological parents are. And I can tell you, I can still help you do your in utero work prior to birth, and that sets you up for knowing how evil and how good marked you on the day you were born. So that's one of the exercises that I take you through in the rite of birth. You talk about the waters of the womb and that even asking some of those questions about birthright, that it's so important to get into attachment. And that's one of the big themes of this podcast. I have a new book coming out about attachment in January. Can you talk about specifically, what are some of those questions that you ask and probe as you're talking with a woman about the in utero experience? Sure. I would ask you the question of what birth order are you in? What do you believe your parents were in love when they conceived you? What is your sense of what their marriage was like before and after your birth? And we have a lot of those details, whether it's a client telling me something like, well, I actually never met my father, or my parents got married because they were pregnant with me, or whatever the story is, or my mother miscarried three times before she had me, or they actually adopted a child and then got pregnant for me, there is a lot of data in the story. But because you're in utero, and because we don't have memory of that, our story keepers are the people who hold those stories. For us. And so it does depend on your attachment style with your parent. It does depend on who your caregivers were and how attentive they were. Did anyone write hour by hour, the birth story? If not, could that be collected or recounted? Do you know if you were a c section? Do you know if you were breastfed? All these questions we can ask. Do you know if your mother had postpartum after? Do you know if she came home to children who and what ages those children were? Do you know if the marriage lasted long after you were born? I mean, there are just so many questions that come into play. A lot of people was, was I delight, delighted in, or was I disdained? And at that moment of birth, did your parents delight in you? Did one of them delight in you? Did one of them not? Did one disdain you? Did both of them disdain you? Just that information, your body will wake up and it will either give you a resounding yes or no. And that's where I take people into actually listening to your body's response to these questions. So thank you for that. And as a therapist and as a former academic, I get that there's going to be people that are listening, that are going really in utero. Like that makes a difference. Sometimes we have a hard enough time helping people understand that their story from before adulthood matters at all. And there's still some unfortunate bad teaching about that. It's not christian to look at your past. So can you give a little bit, maybe, of the science or the developmental data about why those questions about, you know, were your parents in love and those kinds of things, why that would matter, why that's important to mind. Sure. And so even as your brain is being formed while you're in utero, it's washed over with different hormones, with different chemicals. Right. And so if your parents are feeling connection or feeling in love, then your brain is actually getting doused with oxytocin the size of your amygdala. We can research this stuff. Now, we know your prefrontal cortex will not be fully grown until you're 26, 27, but what we see is that foundation of size, of brain and body in those moments. And the brain is built, the entire body is built on the hormonal structure and the blood flow and the genetics that are happening between the parents and from the parents, what you actually inherit from those parents. So you could do 21 and me, or you could do some genetic testing and get some information physiologically, biologically of what you've inherited. Why do we not believe that that's not happening in our emotional or our psyche. We're also inheriting psyche and whether that is mental illnesses. When someone asks you, is there a history of this mental illness in your family storyline, we now justify that as that's important to know. If you had a mother who is bipolar, is there a propensity for you to be bipolar or schizophrenia? We can see that being passed down. All I'm trying to take it is to even a layman's level of be an investigator of your story and be curious about that. But you're right, it might not be the place to start if you feel like that is something that you're not getting something from. And that's what I would say is that's why there's all the rights. You go to the right that you feel connection to. So many women will say, I skipped right to rite of exile because I have known exile and I have known what it's been like to be betrayed or be left or be alone. And so they will sink themselves into the rite of exile because that's where they align. So I wouldn't get caught up. If you don't feel like in utero works, not for me. I'd say that's totally fine. This is 15 years of me researching. You go where your body wants to go because my heart is that God's leading you into the place that you feel like healings available for you again. For people that are listening and they're going, oh, this sounds so great. But I can't put another book on my bookshelf or nightstand, which is so often the case for me. One of the things I loved about the book is that it has almost a devotional quality. So you really can just crack the book open and read a particular section. You can start halfway through or at the end or wherever things fit. And it's a. It's a very user friendly book. Can you go to that second lifespan, stage the rite of initiation and describe that? Sure. And I would also plug the audiobook. I got to record the audiobook, and so it's my voice reading the book. And that was very important to me because of the therapist in me that doesn't want it translated in a different way. So the audiobook I have found is most helpful for me other than a book that I'm not always going to be able to pick up. But it does feel user friendly for initiation. It's exactly that. It's the first time we know something now for a person, me being 44, I would say that I can know something of initiation, that maybe when I was 14, it happened to me for the first time. But there's a psychological initiation where we do something for the first time, and we think, I have never done that before. Right? I don't tell the story in the book, but I was. It's probably two years ago, so it's probably 42. And I was jumping off of a cliff, and all the kids in our friend group were jumping off this cliff into the water. And I thought to myself, I've done this before. I've done this when I was younger, when I was in a younger body. And now these kids are just scampering past me in 2 seconds to get ahead and jump off this really high cliff. And I'm feeling like this is not well with me. I'm scared to death. And then I have a couple of my other friends or dads who are like, you can do it, Christy. We'll help you. And I'm like, no, this is, you know, I can't do this. And it was sweet little Cora Jane, who in her nine year old body turned around to me and said, miss Christy, please be a woman who jumps off of rocks at your age. And I thought to myself, that was enough. I will do it. I will do it for you. And I was scared, Michael. I was scared I was going to break something that wasn't going to heal for a long time, or I don't know what was going to happen, but I jumped off that cliff, and it felt like initiation. At 42 years old. I felt like our bodies let us try things anew, that we didn't know what it would feel like. And even though I had jumped off cliffs in my twenties, this felt new. And so the rite of initiation is just that. It's a moment when our body feels something and we think to ourselves, I didn't know what that was going to feel like, and now I do. And we get that right. And that, to me, is part of that part of God that's everbearing, where it's something's new. Even as we are aging, something is new, and it feels new. And in that there's a belonging to self through that initiation experience, there's something that rises up, something that's already there within. But the right. And the jumping off the cliff is somehow the mechanism to let that rise up, right? Exactly. Yes. And so that's right. Of initiation. There's a lot more to that. But that's the gist of it, understanding that sense of we go from unknowing to knowing, from naivety to knowing. And then the rite of exile. Would you unpack that? Oh, the rite of exile is my least favorite, is also the one that most women bring to me and say, I feel most known. When I've read the exile, I felt most known. It's almost, it feels like the right that jump starts the heart if it stopped. And I would say the part of you that maybe has died off, the part of you that slowly, either during motherhood, during marriage, has silently started to schleff off and die. When you hear the rite of exile, it's like our only hope to come back. And it's because we know a loneliness that is not usually described. And part of that loneliness is getting to the place where we engage the inner voices, the inner critics, those who have cursed us. And, right, we are always blessing or we're cursing. And a lot of times for the female, she's internally cursing, and it gets really quiet. Right. She's internally thinking a lot of things that she's not verbalizing either, because it's not safe to verbalize. It's not desired to be heard. But she's quieted. And in that quiet, she just stays stuck when really she's supposed to actually go into exile. And so the right of exile is that you have the right to go into the desert. Our mother, our desert mothers, our desert fathers, they choose, right. People in spiritually choose desert places to go and hear from goddess. They go into a quiet place. And in our day and age and in our Christianity, we don't have this choice where we go to a silent retreat or a desert place. And so exile is intentional. It's something that we have to have so that we can actually contend with those inner voices and we can actually hear God's voice through us louder than all of those other voices. So it sounds like it's you inviting women to give, to own and to name the exiled parts and parts of their story, and then to create space and practice to be able to engage with the right cause. Everybody has that exile, but there's a sense in which the needing to own it and engage in it as this is actually a rite of passage that's built into our humanity, that if we don't quote, to use your story, jump off the cliff, that we won't experience that gain. Right. And it'll eat away at us. Right. Even if you could be committed to, like, a quiet time every once in a while. Sorry, my son. My son just walked in. That was perfectly okay. My five year old asked if I was working. I love it. But what I would say is that in the rite of exile, you're right, if we don't engage it and we just maybe have a quiet time every morning where it's a small amount of time, but we feel our anxiety or our depression increasing, but we actually don't go in head on with it. We maybe even go to therapy once a week and we talk to someone about it, or we even get on medication and we sort of tend to it from some angle, but we actually don't go head on with that voice that is increasingly getting louder. And that's what the desert is for. It is for us to contend with those places that are trying to actually obliterate us. That's powerful, that it's trying to obliterate us. And going back to your idea, that part of marking the birthright is that evil is there set against us wanting to obliterate and wanting to prevent the belonging and the showing up the next one is rite of creation. And this reminded me a lot of the theology of the womb, your previous book, because. Not completely, but the big theme here is birthing children, but also birthing a lot more than that. Yes. And I think I intentionally, because theology of the womb is so much around birthing children, I intentionally try to give an understanding of that right of creation to women who maybe don't birth children or can't or don't want to. And this understanding that God is co creating with the female in a way that he doesn't with the male. And there's something about what's happening in that, even spiritual co creation of keeping the generations going, of keeping things ever bearing. The woman is always thinking about how to keep relationships alive, how to keep things alive, how to feed you, how to set a table, how to create clothes for you to wear or clothes like that, that is part of what is in the maternal, is that creating part. And so we're trying to create life, and life on that big scale of taking care of a community or a village or a church. The relationships that are in there, that's what our minds are thinking about. And that's what I think God communes with us about often, is how do we clothe that person who is unhoused? How do we, you know, I don't pass a person that I don't think to myself that's someone's child. And because that's my first default thought, I would ask my husband, I'm like, do you think that like. And he'd say, like, I can get there, but that's not my first default of a thought. And so I started to follow, what are my defaults thoughts? And I go to wanting to keep things alive. Oh, do my kids have enough water? Have they drank enough water today? What are we, what's our next meal that we're eating? Have we invited those friends over in a while to keep that relationship going? I am thinking about how to create something that sustains, and I do think when we get caught up in busyness, it starts to drain from us. But I think in the core of the female, the right of creating is that she wants to create sustenance for generations upon generations. That's just beautiful. That awakens something in my heart to want to, you know, on Mother's Day, it's like we stop and we thank mothers, but it just wants me to. I want to stand up on the roof and shout, you know, thank you, women of the world. Because far beyond babies, as you talked about, it's like, that's so touching. And I don't want to speak for all men, but I don't think that way. And it's so life giving, generative and christlike. Yeah. And it's okay that men don't think that way again. I think that's part of what makes us such good teams. But that's the individuation. If I don't belong to myself and what I feel God calling me to do, and I'm not co creating with God the way I feel him asking me to co create, then that's going to leave. Yeah. That task, my husband, to do that when that's not the way he's bent, is the wrong question to be asking him. I have to ask him what he's co creating with God, and then what are we co creating together? And I think that's all of mankind should be doing that. Yes. Yeah. Next one is right of intuition. And I was particularly interested in this one. It reminded me a little bit, I think, you know, Chris Bruno here in Colorado, up in Fort Collins, and he wrote a book about being a sage. And so this kind of reminds me of the sage stage. And that's not simply something for men, of course. Yes. So, again, that's why a lot of these rites, they go, rites of passage are for both male and female. They are not separate. But as Chris did his research on and does his research with men, that's why it fit that stage. But the sage femme is french for the wise woman, and it's also the term given to the doula, usually. And so it's the woman who knows how to birth life. And then it's also been translated in the way of the cross, where the women who buried Jesus were death doulas, or they were women who knew how to prepare a body to be buried. And so there's this coming back that I want women to understand. The right of intuition is that they have a sense of knowing what the body needs. They have a sense of watching a woman birth a child, and their intuition is telling them, okay, this baby's coming this way, or we need to do this because this mother is stressed out, or they can command a room because they know their own body well. It's also the same with how we bleed cyclically, how we go through menopause, and we start to slow down. And a part of our uterus even says, it goes to sleep. It dies. We know something about nurturing life and death spaces, and we know something about nurturing the body in places, of preparing for life or preparing for death. And it's just not a common practice that we talk about, but it's something that we inherently know inside of ourselves. And if we can listen to our bodies, which we are also taught not to do, but when we start to listen to our bodies, we start to know that intuitive self that says, hey, did you. You just saw what was going on there? Okay. Like, you know, even I saw my father just two weeks ago, and when I saw my dad, he was not doing well. And I told my brother, I don't think he's well. I think something's happening. And my brother's like, he's fine. He's always. He always looks like that. And it was very interesting that my brother spends more time with him and sees him in the physical more. But my body was like, no, something's shifting. I don't have a medical background as far as it comes as a doctor, but my father was actually having a small stroke, and it was multiple days, and it was happening, and my brother was like, didn't notice it again. If either of us had been trained, we would be able to notice something like that. But what I'm going back to is I had an intuitive sense in my body that his body wasn't well. And I am not saying men don't have intuition also. I'm just saying there's a wisdom that my body knows that I've silenced because I've learned to not trust it. Or it's that moment when you feel something like, I'm in the car drive, or I'm in the car and I'm in the passenger seat and my husband drives a certain way and my body tenses up and I think to myself, I'm not going to say anything, but I'm uncomfortable. And I quiet my intuitive self. So she might say, hey, I don't feel safe. We're not safe. And instead of me voicing to my husband, hey, I want you to. Whatever, well, it's not even my husband's fault. Yesterday I was driving on a long road trip and I was looking at my phone to write a note down. I was listening to an audiobook and he said, babe, I do not feel comfortable right now. That's his intuition speaking. His body is saying, I'm not comfortable right now. And what I can do is either listen to his voiced intuition or not. The female doesn't voice her intuition often in our culture, she goes to a second guessing. And so she will say, though, like the most common three words we hear, I don't know. And it's setting her up to disclaim what she does know. So the rite of intuition is about naming what you do know. When there's trauma and abuse, it's not always safe to name what you know. But you're, you're at least acknowledging to your intuition that you hear her and that what she, she does know something, she may not be safe enough to say it, but she has a sense and that that's the right of intuition. Yeah, for many, and I think this was the case for me with a lot of my trauma, is that intuition became a kind of curse that I carried until I could heal in my body. And this was implicit in what you said, that it's the body that knows the body that's reading it. But isn't it fascinating that when I started out in the field, intuition wasn't talked about, and then it's been talked about maybe more in the last ten to 20 years. But now there's a robust neuroscience around intuition, that it's not just a woo woo, you know, eSp, extra sensory perception kind of thing, but it's, it's neuroception, it's one nervous system reading the other. It's invisible and yet it's material. It's just fascinating to me that that's how God designed us. And I will often now read through the stories in the gospels and look at, you know, how Jesus knew certain things about people. And I've always thought, well, that's his omniscience, you know, because he's goddesse. But what if it was just the fact that he was so attuned to both his own body and his own presence, but also to others? I always think of the story when a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years and Jesus says, wait, someone touched me and the power went out of his body. So there's something about intuition that I think is also powerful for the church to embrace and to resurrect. So thank you for writing so deeply about that, Christy. The last right category is the right of legacy. So talk a little bit about this before we wrap up. The right of legacy. I thought, there's no way I can write this. I'm not old enough to write this, but I have buried enough people in my life. I have engaged with death enough that I do have a sense of it. And I looked to those before me and how I've been taught. I looked to those before me at how they've died. And I've wondered then, should we be doing some prerequisite work? Should all of us be doing some work of what's my legacy? And I don't know that we're thinking about that as much as we should be. What legacy? How will my name be spoken after I'm gone? And what will. Yes, what will my children say? Because they are in my presence. But what will anyone say? And a lot of times it's, well, will they experience me and they'll have a felt experience? Okay, maybe. But what is our legacy? And Confucius says, you know, it's the last time our name is spoken on this earth. So we die first, when we're put into the ground, but then we die our last time, when our name is last spoken. When will Michael Cusack be last spoken on this earth? And are we thinking about, while we have no say over, what will people will say about us? What legacy are we leaving? What are we saying right now that is going to impact further? And I don't know that I was taught to think about it that way. You know, it was almost like you get saved and then you die and then you go to heaven. But I wasn't really thinking about what work would be continued on earth after my death and how that would impact it. Maybe in the writing of my books, sure. But even just in my everyday experience with people, what will people feel when they leave me? And will that felt experience one day when I die? And they think, oh, Christy. And then they have a body memory of what it felt like to be in my presence? Is that. Is that what I'm going for in life, you know, just. Just thinking about legacy in a different way and just thinking about how am I investing in a legacy that outlives me? And I'm going to just put up this one image. But we made images with each rite of passage, and this image was just for the book. And it's called seeding the skyd. And it makes me always think of Abraham, where God said, your generations will be as many in multitude as the stars. And I thought, okay, what is then the promise for the female in that? Because she's got all the seeds in her womb. And so what does that look like to seed the sky, to spread it out and also leave legacy collectively, together and individually. And so I love that imagery because I want each individual, each listener to be thinking, what legacy am I leaving? How am I living today that seeds the sky for the next generation? I want to respond with two things. First of all, I got the chills when you said, just as a matter of fact, what will the legacy be when my name is mentioned the last time, I was like, I turned 60 in two months. And I'm thinking a lot about decade by decade, with limited amount of time, Lord willing, that I don't just keel over right now. But the second thing is that as we do here at restoring the soul, intensive counseling, and we often, over a short period of time, like a week or two, we'll go very, very deep with people. I always remind people that whenever you engage in the inner work and the therapeutic work to change yourself, that you're changing generations, potentially, and that most people who've grown up in conservative churches hear, or it's used against them, that the sins of our forefathers continue out for generations, depending on which passage. But the opposite is true, isn't it? And we get to see this, where we're seeing that the blessing and the healing work and the striving and the losing your life to find your life, that that stretches out for generations as well. And this will probably be even more so in ten or 20 years if I am given the gift to live that long. But I've just started to see families who I've worked with 30 years ago whose children are now having children. And you're getting to see that legacy where a couple might have unnecessarily broken up or infidelity or trauma or something like that, might have had the last word. And getting to see how, you know, we become doulas, we become, through our work we're generating and seeding and that's just really remarkable. And that's. That's how the kingdom comes, right? Is as people get healthy and we are here to plant seeds. So, yes, it's so true. And I will even say my, my family, my story is one from divorce. My parents divorced when I was in third or 4th, 3rd grade. And I tell a lot of that story in this book. I give a lot of examples of how it marked me and what story I don't tell. But that changed me was when my grandparents sat me down and they, when my grandfather died two years ago, they had been married 78 years, I think. And when it was their 50th wedding anniversary, my grandparents sat down to me and they said, christy, you are not a child that comes from divorce gifting you this anniversary with a lineage, a heritage of a marriage that has lasted 50 years. Wow. And that's what you come from. And there was something of that inheritance from them. They were very poor. They did not have financially, much to give me, but they gave me an inheritance of their 50 years become 78 years of marriage. And it changed my life. It changed my life and it changed my trajectory of thinking of the legacy I'm leaving my own kids and how I'm looking at marriage and the next generation and how we can overcome the sins of our forefathers. Yeah. And talk about them giving a legacy and passing that on so that you could do that. And I know you're in agreement with this, so I'm not saying this in contrast to what you're saying, but for any listener who might have heard in what I said, that if you are divorced, that that's a sin and that's going to carry on for generations, I want to say very clearly that sometimes in order to spread the seed in the sky and in order to have a godly legacy and to not live in abuse or in distance and a lack of intimacy, that divorce actually needs to happen. So the question is, what does it mean to move into the fullness of ourselves? And the goal is always to deepen intimacy and relationship. But thank you for that. That's just another blessing we need to come to a close. But I just want to thank you for. You're always so delightful and engaging, but also for the work that you do. It is really, really hard to do the kind of work that you're doing where on the one hand, you're sitting with people on their stories, but that you're also researching, you're writing, you and your husband Andrew are so prolific and you're really a gift. I want to just tell people you can learn more about christy@christiebauman.com. christyboBauman and it's Bauman, right? Not Bauman, Bauman. Christybaughman.com. and then womaneering.com. will you talk a bit about womaneering? Because I have followed you on instagram and seeing some of these trips of initiation that you're doing. And you were in Belize recently. Just give a quick shout out to that. Yeah, so I love the womaneering side gig, in a sense. So my husband and I, through the christian counseling center, we do see couples for marriage and senses. We work in that same realm. But I have just pioneered this work of mothers and daughters. I'm actually doing a mothers and son sun trip, but basically women stepping into places that they are taking back their own story and their own life. And so in the last two months, I've done two of these trips where I've taken both were mother and daughter. It doesn't always have to be that way. But I've taken women and I've taught them how to spearfish. So I teach you how to snorkel in the barrier reef there in Belize, which is the second largest barrier reef that we have. And I grew up on that reef learning how to hunt it. And so I take you in there. We start with someone who maybe has never done any kind of snorkeling, and we teach you that. And then I teach you how to hunt for conch shells and lobster season, if it's in season, we can hunt lobster. We can hunt fish. And then I take you to this. I have land out there that we take you out on the boat for the last day of the rite of passage. And we machete coconuts and we clean the conch. And you make food, you make sustenance for yourself. And we take that as communion then. And we go out into the water and we bless, and we share, in a sense, the breaking of both food and drink together. And we bless. And then we show the mothers, show their daughters how to do this within their own bodies. And it is just, it's such a life. It's obviously a very privileged place to be able to do this stuff, and not everyone can do this, which is why I bring you the book and I say, you can do this in your backyard. If you're intentional, you can do anything. You can go to a stream and we can figure this out. But, yes, I've had the beautiful luxury of being able to take women into the ocean and teaching them how to become huntresses in the ocean and how to use their bodies. Right. So many of women were taught it matters what I look like in my bathing suit or that I'm covered up in my bathing suit suit, right. We have all these messages being infiltrated to our bodies, but we're not taught actually how to use our bodies to bring food and drink to each other and then to bring words of blessing and not of curse or of envy or of hate or of jealousy. So I just do that in the ocean, and the ocean is big enough to hold me and hold that. I just worked with a girl who actually, she had a panic attack in the ocean as we're going into the reef, and she and I just held eyes, and we're able to breathe through it. And it's this high school girl who has struggled with anxiety. And, you know, it's. This is the. This is the work, right? This is the work is getting our bodies and our minds and our hearts aligned, is actually rooting ourselves into our entire body. And it feels like a really fun playground for integration as far as therapy goes. Because sometimes talk therapy isn't enough. Sometimes our bodies have to feel ourselves do something and know that we can do it and that we can survive on our own and we can create something. And so that has been a really fun part of womaneering. Wow. I can tell you're so passionate about that. And sometime I'll have you back on the podcast just to talk about that, and probably a separate podcast just to talk about growing up and spear fishing in the ocean in Belize. That would be awesome. Well, thank you so much. Blessings to you for all you do. Thank you so much, too. I appreciate it.