From Stuck to Unstoppable: How Mythology Transformed Allison Stieger's Life

Allison Stieger
00:00:34

She was coming to me a lot in dreams and in my writing and in my meditations. I mean, she was just showing up over and over again. And I knew that I needed to do something to get my life started again.

I was completely stuck in the land of the dead. So I decided to go to India and meet Kali in person. And the reason for that, I didn't feel like I could significantly move on.

What I needed to do, I couldn't confront her and see her just going to a temple in the United States or reading books about her, looking at art of her image or whatever. I had been doing that and it was helping, but I really needed a shock. So I went to India in November of 2019.

I planned to spend several weeks traveling around the country, visiting her shrines, visiting her temples. And the end of that trip culminated with a visit to her large temple.

That's in Varanasi, which is the sacred city in India where they put the dead into the Ganges. It's one of the most holy cities of India. And I. The whole time I was there, I would visit these temples. And it was.

Such an entity itself can be very shocking for a Westerner, right? It's very crowded. It's a very different energy than the United States, right.

I'm a little bit crowd phobic and there are always lots of people around. Cows, dogs, you know, just. It's just a chaotic in a way that I'm not used to living in Seattle. But that was exactly what I needed, right?

I needed to be woken up. It's almost like India itself just like shook me and said, wake up, you're not dead. Right?

Matt Gilhooly
00:02:00

Today's guest is Allison Stieger. She is a mythologist, she's a writer, she's a speaker, and she has a really fascinating story, especially for someone like me.

I am definitely not someone that has really considered the things that we talked about. And so I'm so grateful to have had this conversation and to have been connected with Allison.

But she shares her profound, really connection with mythology and how it not only guided her own path to healing and self discovery, but also how she can help others see their stories or how to get through some of their stories based on this mythology that she's deeply, deeply connected to. She shares one real pivotal moment in India where she confronted her fears and embraced transformation through the goddess Kali.

And this was really in a time period where she felt like she was stuck kind of in the land of the dead. And you'll hear more about this in the episode. But this moment in her really broke her open in a way that allowed her move forward.

That kind of serves her in. In a beautiful way and helps her live her life in a new way, I guess.

And so now she's helping others through mythology and helping them figure out certain paths that they're on. So I think you'll find this episode really interesting and something different than what we normally might talk about on the Life Shift podcast.

And I don't know why I said normally, because everyone's story is a little bit different, but this one is definitely one that will pique your interest in so many ways, and hopefully you leave this conversation wanting to connect with Allison. So, without further ado, here is my conversation with Allison Stieger.

I'm Matt Gilhooly, and this is the Life Shift candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever. Hello, my friends. Welcome to the Life Shift podcast. I am sitting here with Allison. Hello, Allison.

Allison Stieger
00:04:03

Hello. It's lovely to meet you.

Matt Gilhooly
00:04:04

Well, lovely to meet you as well. And I said sitting here, but we're on opposite sides of the country. Yes, we are in Seattle.

Allison Stieger
00:04:11

Yes, yes. I'm sitting in Seattle right now, so.

Matt Gilhooly
00:04:13

And I'm sitting in Orlando, so we're pretty much almost as.

Allison Stieger
00:04:17

Oh, yeah, almost exactly. Yes.

Matt Gilhooly
00:04:20

Well, thank you for wanting to be a part of the Life Shift podcast.

It's just such an honor to be able to meet strangers in this way and have really deep conversations about things that, in my opinion, everyone should be talking about. They're, you know, vulnerable and deep moments.

Because in my opinion, I think that's where we connect with people the most versus, you know, like, here's my latest promotion. Here's the coolest car that I just bought. Those aren't as relatable to someone like myself. So thank you for just wanting to be a part of this.

Allison Stieger
00:04:51

I'm so thrilled to be here. And I. I just. I can't wait to get started. We've got so many interesting things to talk about, so.

Matt Gilhooly
00:04:56

We sure do. And for anyone new that is listening to Life Shift podc, just a little bit of where it comes from. This show actually started as a class assignment.

I did a bonus master's degree during the pandemic and took an elective about podcasting. And so I had to create a podcast. It was just two episodes at the time, and here we are 163 episodes into this podcast.

And the Life Shift podcast idea comes from my own personal experience. When I was 8, my mom was killed in a motorcycle accident, and I was visiting My dad. My parents lived states apart. My dad lived in Georgia.

My mom lived in Massachusetts. I was visiting my dad. My mom was doing her thing with her boyfriend.

And when my dad sat me down and told me that my mom had died in this accident, my life that we had all, you know, kind of planned out and thought about moving forward stopped at that moment, and everything changed. Moved states, lived with a different parent. Like, all these things changed in my life.

And this was the late 80s, early 90s, so people weren't really talking about mental health or helping a child grieve. Child. A child will bounce back. They'll be happy. You know, just make them happy.

But behind the scenes, after, I know I was pretending everything was fine, but behind the scenes, I always wonder, do other people have these lines in the sand moments in which everything changes for them? And turns out after 163 episodes, they do. They have many of them. And it's just been such an honor to kind of go on this journey.

It's kind of a healing journey for myself as well. So thank you for being a part of my healing journey as well, Allison.

Allison Stieger
00:06:34

Oh, thank you. Well, I think that examining those moments and finding our allies and people that we can talk to is.

Is one of the most healing things we can do for all of us, because we're talking about my story today.

You've talked about your story, so we're sharing that vulnerability with each other, and we're both going to walk away from this conversation feeling strong and support it, more supportive than we have been before. So thank you for making this podcast and putting it out into the world, because there's a lot of folks that need to hear it.

Matt Gilhooly
00:06:59

So I appreciate it. I agree.

I think there are a lot of people that are going through things that they feel very alone in those circumstances, and maybe logically, they know they're not alone, but they feel alone.

And by hearing stories like what you're going to share or what other guests share on the show, you're kind of building a community without, like, actually being in each other's space. Right. Like, you. You feel less alone, and it's a nice thing to do. So I. I just love it. So before we get into your.

Your pivotal moment story, maybe you can tell us a little bit about who Allison is at this point in your. In your journey here.

Allison Stieger
00:07:37

Well, I am. You know, it's. It's so funny when you're asked to define who you are in a few words.

I, you know, I will say that I am a professional Mythologist, which is a word that a lot of people haven't heard before. But what that means is mythology is my passion.

These that we have that have come down to us from the people that were on the planet before us, and I realized fairly young how much power they had, and I started studying them, and I started working with them professionally, and I talk about them and I write about them, and I think about them an awful lot, and I'm delighted by them on a daily basis.

And what has now become my work is the opportunity to look at some of these old stories, fit them into the context of how we live today for folks in a lot of different contexts, and share what it was that our ancestors were trying to tell us by telling a really cool story that's full of romance and thrills and battles and gods and heroes and all these things.

It's really entertaining, but it's got so many deep and powerful lessons for us about how to live more effectively and how to deal with some of these life shifts that you like to talk about, because myths often do talk about the way that we die to an old version of ourselves, and we're reborn into a new version. And that's a very common, common pattern in mythology. So when we think about myths, we can think about how our ancestors might have handled it.

And sometimes they handle it really well, and sometimes they didn't handle it so well, and maybe we can have a cautionary tale. I do think about the goddess Demeter from Greek mythology.

Like, maybe she's not the best model for how to let your kids grow up and move out because she struggled really, really hard and almost destroyed the world because she really didn't want her daughter to go away. So maybe we can learn from that a little bit. It. But, yeah, so. So that's. That's my passion. I.

I love to think about them and talk about them and share what I've learned from them, and they've really helped me profoundly manage some of the challenges of my own life and moments that I felt like I was stuck and I needed to move forward. So. So that's. That's really it. It's.

It's working with mythology in a way that will teach other people how to get the lessons out of them that they need to hear at whatever moment in their life that they're in.

Matt Gilhooly
00:09:40

So before we get into your specific story, I think one thing that really stood out to me in what you just said is this passion that you've kind of always had or developed for mythology, and the Fact that you have created a life around it, like, professionally, which to me, someone like, my experiences pushed me to be more checkbox like, fear of abandonment, need to succeed, need to be perfect. Wasn't able to identify a passion to chase. It was more of, like, society. What are you telling me to do now? I need to do that kind of moment.

And so that's really stands out for me.

And, like, I get this little ping of jealousy of, like, wow, how awesome is it that you've always had this draw towards something and then you were able to create something out of it.

It wasn't, you know, someone handing it to you, but you have created something for yourself where you can live in your passion and do the things you want to do with that. Like, is that something that you think back and you're like, damn, this is cool?

Allison Stieger
00:10:41

Well, you know, and I did have, by time that I was kind of lost and feeling stuck and didn't know what to do. I knew I love stories. I knew that I understood that they were powerful, but I didn't quite find my way into it for a few years.

I mean, I think that that's fairly common for people in their 20s. Maybe you don't really know. And I actually help people with that now. Right. Like. Like, this is. This is the great thing about myth.

It wasn't just that I found my passion to, you know, run an NGO or become a lawyer or, you know, go to medical school at 50 or whatever it was. It was okay. This is a thing that can actually not only help me figure, but help other people, too.

And it's been such a blessing for me to be able to say, I've got an answer for that. And it's not that I had the answer. It's that we've always had the answers. These stories have been with us for millennia. They're sitting right here.

Nobody studies them like this. And what can we learn from them? Because if you think about it, one of the coolest things that we get to do as humans is to.

If you have an answer to something and somebody else has a real deep problem that they're trying to solve, it is the best feeling in the world to be able to say, oh, I know what you need to do. Like, oh, my God, there's water squirting out of the pipes in my kitchen. What do I do? And you say, oh, my God, I just met the best plumber.

Their prices are reasonable. They're so good. Here's their number. And now you've helped them solve a problem.

And you've had this sense of community between you, you were able to help. It feels amazing. And this is what we get to do, right? We get to say this stuff is here.

Our ancestors had that same urge that we have, and they built a story around it that lasted for millennia. So here's this great solution. And let me tell you what I did that worked. Oh, I built this Trojan horse and it was amazing. And we solved the war.

You know, we won the war. This was so cool. Or like, don't do this, don't do it.

I mean, these are, I think, really common human impulses for people to want to be able to warn or give a solution. If someone's really in a tough place, you want to be able to help. And that impulse, I think, is what's behind many of our myths. Right.

And what is so much fun is that I'm going to learn from the ancestors, I'm going to learn from these stories that are left behind for us.

I'm going to go through all of this stuff and I'm going to come out the other side and now I'm going to be prepared through everything that I went through and learned to be that for somebody else. So I needed help. I got the help I needed from all these wonderful allies that have gathered around me, and now I get to do that for somebody else.

It's the best feeling in the world for me to have created an amazing life for myself.

I had a really shaky start in life and now I have an amazingly happy 20 year marriage, two great kids, a life that I love, work that I love, and I created that out of nothing. And what an amazing thing to be able to teach people how to do.

Like, if you are looking for that love of your life or you're looking for how to find the work that you're passionate about, let me help you do that. I did it in my own life and I can help you do that too. So, yeah, how amazing is that, that I get to do that? So, yeah.

Matt Gilhooly
00:13:30

And almost in every episode I'm like, the power of story. And like yours is like on many layers, the power of story and how you can and use that. So it's just fascinating. And I had to point it out because I.

I'd love to say that a lot of people are able to do what you've done with something that you're super passionate about, but I don't think it's a lot of people. I mean, I think an okay amount of people, but imagine if we all could feel Empowered enough to do that.

I talked to a lot of people that agree, like, my life was so checkbox. Like, it was just like. And I think it was trauma based. I think it was. It was built out of that.

But at the same time, like, I just love hearing people, like, I love this, and I do it, you know.

Allison Stieger
00:14:14

And I do it. Exactly. So, yeah, and it's.

And it is cool because when you start to look at your life as if it was a myth itself, it gives you some of those tools that you need to figure that out. And you don't. People don't really like taking on the mantle of hero. Right.

That can feel really scary and challenging, and it's kind of a hard thing to do.

But once you put your life into kind of the mythic space, it separates you enough from it, from your own story that you can start to look at it from different sides and different angles and start to see things and allow the collective unconscious to kind of come up and suggest things to you that maybe you couldn't get at before.

So this is the power of this tool, actually, is to be able to show you ways of looking at your own life and your own story that weren't accessible to you before. So it really does have a lot of power in that sense.

Matt Gilhooly
00:14:58

So. Awesome. Well, let's. Let's talk more about your specific.

Allison Stieger
00:15:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Gilhooly
00:15:02

And your. Your hero's journey, if you will.

If you could, like, paint the picture of what your life was like leading up to maybe the main pivotal moment that we're going to center the conversation around, that'd be great.

Allison Stieger
00:15:13

Yeah. So. So, you know, these.

There have been many pivotal moments in my life, but the one we're going to talk about today happened to me about eight years ago, and I was at that time pretty significantly overweight. And there were a lot of reasons for that. That's maybe a whole other podcast episode, but it was something that I didn't really like.

I felt a fair amount of body dysmorphia. I didn't feel like I was truly myself in this body that was quite large. And it's a struggle for a lot of people. Right.

It's something that's really difficult to overcome, especially if you get into kind of serious obesity. Very difficult for the body to let go of that.

And I started to read some studies that were suggesting that the only really permanent solution for significant weight loss at that weight was to have surgery. So I decided to go ahead with weight loss surgery, and it became a kind of a case of Be careful what you wish for.

Because I really wanted to lose weight. I wanted to be healthier.

I loved exercising, but I kept hurting myself because I was moving so much weight around when I moved my body that I was pulling muscles all the time.

Matt Gilhooly
00:16:12

Oh, wow.

Allison Stieger
00:16:13

I was trying everything and it was just, you know, I lose a little bit of weight and then it would come back. I mean, it's a very common story, right? You've heard this, right?

So I went ahead and I met with a surgeon, scheduled it, and he said, great, we're going to go ahead. And they do a lot of scans and tests on you to make sure everything's good. It's a fairly significant surgery. Right.

They altered a lot in my abdominal cavity. And I got that call that you never want to get, which is a message saying, your doctor needs to speak to you urgently. Nobody wants to hear that.

Nobody wants to hear that. So I speak to my doctor. And when they did the abdominal scan, they found a giant cyst in my abdominal cavity.

And they didn't know what it was, they didn't know where it was growing from. And the immediate thought was, pancreatic cancer. It's growing out of my pancreas. I'm dead already.

Matt Gilhooly
00:16:59

Yeah, you don't want to hear that.

Allison Stieger
00:17:01

Pancreatic cancer is incredibly dangerous. And anyway, so I spoke to my bariatric surgeon, the weight loss surgeon, and he said, you know what, you will figure this out.

So I go in and they did all the tests and everything and they drained a liter and a half of fluid out of this thing. It was non cancerous, but I was, wait, now it's shrunken down.

And he said, well, let's go ahead and do the bariatric surgery, the weight loss surgery. So went ahead and did that in the summer of 2016, and then a few months later went back and did an exploratory surgery and removed the cyst.

And it was actually attached to one of my adrenal glands. So remove that as well. Okay. So now I'm in a situation where I am losing weight very quickly.

And they had told me that my remaining adrenal gland would kind of play catch up and I would not notice any difference. But that was not what happened. I developed a condition called adrenal insufficiency.

My remaining adrenal gland could not keep up with the needs of my body. And adrenaline is a really serious and very important thing that you need. And what ended up happening was I lost 220 pounds in less than 18 months.

Matt Gilhooly
00:18:11

Wow.

Allison Stieger
00:18:11

Now I don't recommend this to anyone. Okay. I was going into organ failure. My liver was failing. I could not keep food down.

Not only was I compromised in the way that I was absorbing food already from the weight loss surgery, but I was throwing up four or five times a day. I couldn't keep down any of the food that I was able to eat. So I was starving to death, basically.

Matt Gilhooly
00:18:34

And lack of trying.

Allison Stieger
00:18:35

Well, right. I mean, I. Yeah, yeah. So. So I, you know, I had good medical care. I had people helping me. And eventually my weight started to stabilize.

Like, I hit this kind of weird inflection point where I figured out the right medication and I stopped being so nauseated all the time. I learned how to not throw everything up, and my weight started to stabilize. But I had been in such a free fall for so long that I felt dead already.

And I felt like I was living in. You know, because I'm a mythologist, I think about this. I felt like I was already living in the land of the dead. I felt like I was.

I had one foot in the grave and I just could not seem to bring myself out of it. Even as my physical body was stabilizing in my mind, I was dead and gone. And I was terrified of that. I felt dead all the time.

I felt completely non present in my life. I couldn't work, I couldn't do much of anything. I had took no joy from my friends and family, any of that.

And because of the way that I worked with God and continue to work with God's archetypes and myths, religion, lots of different things, I felt that that was. That the answer to this problem lie in mythology and approaching it through that path.

So I had had a very long fascination with the goddess Kali from the Hindu tradition in India. Now, Hinduism is a living religion. It's. It's both mythological and a current religion.

So I want to be very careful to separate talking about a living religion for billions of people in India and a myth of a dead system like the Greeks have or whatever. But I felt very drawn to this particular goddess. She is terrifying to look at.

I don't know if you're familiar with any images of her, but she's got black skin, she's got this red tongue hanging out, she's got a necklace of skulls, she's got, you know, a skirt made of arms. She's standing on her dead husband's body. And she was absolutely terrifying. But I found her really, really compelling.

Matt Gilhooly
00:20:29

And this dark moment or always?

Allison Stieger
00:20:31

Yeah, well, I mean, always, but. But she she was coming to me a lot in dreams and in my writing and in. In my meditations. I mean, she was just showing up over and over again and.

And I knew that I needed to do something to get my life started again. I was completely stuck in the land of the dead. So I decided to go to India and meet Kali in person.

And the reason for that, I didn't feel like I could significantly move on.

What I needed to do, I couldn't kind of confront her and see her just going to a temple in the United States or reading books about her, looking at art of her image or whatever. I had been doing that and it was helping, but I really needed a shock. So I went to India in November of 2019.

I planned to spend several weeks traveling around the country, visiting her shrines, visiting her temples. And the end of that trip culminated with a visit to her large temple.

That's in Varanasi, which is the sacred city in India, where they put the dead into the Ganges. It's one of the most holy cities of India. And I. The whole time I was there, I would visit these temples. And it was such an.

In India itself can be very shocking for a Westerner, right? It's very crowded. It's a very different energy than the United States, right?

I'm a little bit crowd phobic, and there are always lots of people around. Cows, dogs, you know, just. It's just a chaotic in a way that I'm not used to living in Seattle. But that was exactly what I needed, right?

I needed to be woken up. It's almost like India itself just like shook me and said, wake up, you're not dead, right?

And I spent weeks of this, and it was incredibly, incredibly difficult. But I get to the temple in Varanasi, I had this wonderful Indian woman helping me.

I wanted to make sure I was very respectful and honoring the traditions of the countries. I had bought a beautiful black and red sari, which are the colors of Kali.

And I felt very prepared walking in, but I didn't know what I was going to experience. And I kneeled down in front of this goddess and I was completely blasted through into the space and time of the gods.

And I don't even know how long that happened. We have this word from ancient Greek that I use a lot called kairos. It's the idea of sacred time.

And the time that you spend in the temple or the time that you spent in nature or playing with your child, or that time that feels like no time at all has passed. We consider that to be very sacred, different from regular clock time, regular running errands time. And I completely slipped into that place. It's.

This is a place that's very sacred. And it just sort of burned away all of my fear, all of my doubt, all of my sense of being dead. And I lost my ego for a little while.

And when I stood up and walked out of the temple, I was completely weeping. I was completely finding the threads of myself and my ego to put back together.

And so I could just like walk in through, you know, a path out, then just be a human being again.

Matt Gilhooly
00:23:15

Right.

Allison Stieger
00:23:15

And it took some putting back together for that to happen. But that place that I had been in, where I felt dead and where I felt like everything was over. She's the destroyer and the Creator.

Those two things live together in this one goddess. And both of those things happened to me in the same exact moment. I was destroyed and I was created again anew.

And for me, that was the power of what this particular archetype had to offer.

The, the Indians, the, the Indian people, they in or the Hindu people, I suppose they recognize that this is something that goes together and this is part of this goddess and they present her image as kind of terrifying because this is a terrifying thing to be completely unknit and re knit back together again.

So you should be feeling scared because you're going to go through something really, really profound and meaningful and moving and terrifying, and all of those things are going to happen to you in one instant. And that's exactly what happened to me.

And I, I felt like I had to do it this way because I needed to be shaken up outside of the familiar for myself.

So going to India, praying to this goddess that I never worshiped before or really knew that much about was not part of my tradition to be able to find that that very strangeness was what part of what helped me to be able to break through. Because Carl Jung talks about this.

The idea that if you do the thing that's familiar to you all the time, you're never going to have those breakthroughs that come through from your unconscious mind because you're just kind of in a habit and you're not opening yourself up to the possibility. So often when I teach creativity workshops, I will encourage my folks to try a new form of art that they're not used to get uncomfortably.

Yeah, exactly. That sense of discomfort is something that you're looking for.

So, okay, if you love to write well, I'm going to give you some sculpting clay and you're going to figure that out, or you're gonna dance, or you're gonna do whatever it is that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable, because that's where the breakthroughs can happen. And I was really seeking that in a profound way by going to India. And that's exactly what I found. And it broke me open. It put me back together again.

It changed my life completely, and it shifted my life absolutely back onto the path toward the living.

And I was able to bring with me the experience, the wisdom of that so that I could share that with other people that might be feeling that same kind of death, that same kind of stuckness. And I'm not suggesting that everybody go to India and go to a temple. That's not what I'm saying at all. But find that thing that you need.

Find that thing that's going to terrify you and break you open. You're seeking that. And we tend to want to stay safe. And staying safe is not the way to get through to the other side.

Matt Gilhooly
00:25:47

Yeah.

Allison Stieger
00:25:48

And this is what mythology shows us over and over again in our stories.

Matt Gilhooly
00:25:51

So do you think back to when you decided to go. Was there, like, a trigger that you were like, okay, I'm booking the ticket.

I'm doing this because, like you just said, we like to be safe and sometimes. And I'm not saying that you were in a depressed state, although you described it as being in the land of the dead, essentially.

Allison Stieger
00:26:13

Right.

Matt Gilhooly
00:26:13

Having been in depressed moments in my life, I find it's far easier to stay depressed than it is to make a big move. So what, was there, like, a trigger that you were like, I'm booking this trip? I'm.

Allison Stieger
00:26:24

Well, I. I would say that the work that I had done with Myth showed me the way. Right.

Because I know that what happens is we have a moment in the monomyth that we call the refusal of return. Right. You have gone down into the world of the dead, but you kind of gotten comfortable down there.

I mean, your life may suck, but at least it's a familiar kind of suck. Right? You know how to live like that. Right. So in rereading all of these myths, I saw that I was stuck at the refusal of the return.

I had something to offer, but I wasn't quite there yet. I had a path that I had to do to reascend back into the world of everybody else.

And even though I was really, really scared, I've always been scared to go to India. India. India is. Is.

Can be really challenging, you know, for someone that has the kind of fears that I do, you know, just having a slight crowd phobia and all of this. And. And. And I. I wanted to go. I'd wanted to go since I was a kid, but I was also really, really afraid. So I. I don't know what it was.

I think that just in rereading some of, you know, I was drawn to Kali, and I was reading about Kali, and I was meditating on Kali, and as I said, you know, dreaming and all this, she was appearing to me, and eventually I felt that I had to take that step and go and do the scary thing. And I. I wanted to just share one more little interesting detail with you. All of this was happening in November of 2019.

The day that I was standing in front of Kali in that temple was the day that Covid came into the world. The ex. Now, I don't know what that means on, like, a global scale, but to me, like, this thing broke open. So I came home and.

And all of a sudden, we're in lockdown. And, you know, it. It. It gave me the tools that I needed at least to manage all of that. And it was, you know, it was a scary time when you have.

When you have adrenal insufficiency, you have to take a lot of steroids to. To manage that. And that put me into an immunocompromised state in which I remain.

So having this disease come for which there was no vaccine at the time or anything, you. You know, I was terrified of getting Covid and what that can mean for me.

Matt Gilhooly
00:28:26

Right.

Allison Stieger
00:28:27

My father ended up dying of COVID a few months later. So it's. I mean, it was. It was. Yeah, it was a. You know, something that was scary.

But I had this new set of skills that I had just acquired on the very day, as in a case of perfect timing, it really helped me figure out that next thing that was coming that none of us knew was coming in November of 2019.

Matt Gilhooly
00:28:47

So, yeah, there's a couple angles that I'm. That are bouncing back and forth in my head, and it's like something about the fact that you have such a draw to mythology.

You've studied these stories your entire life. You've. You've seen people do what you did, like, in these stories, right? You've. You've seen that there's another side.

It's kind of like my thought in. In the Life Shift podcast is these other people are hearing these stories.

They're like, oh, Allison went through this, and then she was, okay, maybe I, too can do that. And so I'm thinking, you know, having such a. A strong bond with those stories was probably also another trigger, like.

Allison Stieger
00:29:28

Oh, absolutely.

Matt Gilhooly
00:29:29

Well, it's possible.

Allison Stieger
00:29:31

Well, you know, the truth is, though, is that these things are never over for us. Like, you survived the death of your mother. I survived this illness. I survived my own parents divorce when I was five.

It was another life shift moment for me. But the truth is that you can see this in a couple ways. We go through these over and over again throughout our lives.

We never stay the same person the very first time that we do. This is the moment of our birth. We had a contained environment that was safe and warm, and we're fed and all the things are happening.

And then all of a sudden, we're in this new, bright new world that's cold and everything's different, and we have to find our way into this new path. You die to an old version of yourself, and you're reborn into a new version. And these things are happening constantly, right?

I mean, every time you leave a job or a relationship or you get diagnosed with an illness, or you recover from an illness, or you get divorced or you get remarried, I mean, these are all deaths and rebirths. So learning how to manage those moments is an incredibly powerful thing to be able to do. So you may have.

You may have resolved whatever life shift you're going through right now, but you have another one coming, I promise you, because that's the way human life is.

Matt Gilhooly
00:30:34

I think you're so right about the. I mean, I know you're so right about the start and stop of, or like, the death and rebirth pieces.

I do think, though, from my own experience, I think we. I logically knew that many times, but I don't think I had the tools or.

Or the understanding or whatever it might be that allowed me to kind of move through. I mean, in my own personal story, lost my mom at 8.

I'd say that I close the door, and people don't like that, but I closed the door on the grief part of that after two decades of running away from it. And I think logically, I probably knew what I was supposed to do, but I wasn't ready for it. And so I think it's.

It's kind of where that question came from. When I asked if there was, like, a trigger that made you want to, like, move forward. It really comes from that.

It's because, like, I feel like for so long I wasn't able to do anything until, like, truly I was ready in a way. And so I'm sure part of that journey was just you being like, I know I don't want to live in this space forever, and there's probably a way out.

And that's why you took that trip. And then, then you had this profound experience.

That experience that you described on the stairs or when you were kneeling and you felt like you were at another time and space and time was different. Was that the first time you had ever experienced that, like, type of feeling?

Allison Stieger
00:32:05

Well, I would say, I mean, no, I knew that there was something special about certain times and places. You know, we talk about this a lot in mythology, actually. We have thin places and thin times.

There's times of the year that are considered, you know, like certain holidays or certain places in the world that are especially sacred. So, you know, you do get a lot of that in this realm of study.

But I, I will say that I do think that there's something to be said, as hard as it is to go through something like it like this, that you and I both did as small children when you have this experience. Like, my parents divorced. It was a very dramatic and mythic divorce when I was five.

Now that taught me at a younger age than I should have had to, what it means to lose everything and have to rebuild your life from there. And I didn't have the language for that, and I didn't even have the way to think about it at all as a five year old.

You didn't have it as an eight year old. And sometimes we need to just put it away until we have the tools that we need later in life. Right?

And there is something to be said about, you know, sometimes, you know, that you're stuck and that you need to move out of the place that you're in. And I had the tools to deal with it, and I did deal with it and when I was doing this a few years ago.

But sometimes we have to recognize the difference between when we need to stop and rest and just be in that place for a while and when it's time to move forward. And that's a big part of the work that I do, is help people figure all that out, right? Like, what do I need to do? How do I need to move forward?

What stories do I need to learn from? What can I do with what I've learned? All of that is a big part of how I work with myth and the people that I work with.

So it's not necessarily an intuitive thing. It's not an easy thing to do.

And most people are out There casting around, trying to find something that's going to help because we're in pain, we know that we don't want to stay where we are, and we try to find things and people tune to all kinds of crazy things to try to set their lives to. Right. You know, and, and I, you know, I've seen, at least for myself, that using these stories as a tool that they can be.

Has proved to be a quite healthy way to figure out next steps and what to do when we don't know what to do.

Matt Gilhooly
00:34:04

Yeah, right. Do you find that the stories that you are passionate about, you're. You're drawn to. Do you feel that any of them kind of.

I don't know if the right word, it's not dictate, but like, you almost follow that path because you know that story or like, I don't know if that makes sense. Like, almost like.

Allison Stieger
00:34:23

No. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly
00:34:25

Kind of thing.

Allison Stieger
00:34:25

Yeah, yeah. No. So that, that's what's so fascinating about him is, you know, there I.

I tend to be drawn to stories about women, goddesses, heroines, whatever, because I. That sometimes speaks a little bit more truly to my own experience as a woman. But sometimes that's not the case. Right.

Like, I have found that these stories are. You have to. The only real, real way to look at a myth in the context of your own life is to understand how deeply metaphorical they are.

They are not meant to be taken literally. That's the danger of them, is that sometimes people say, well, I'm not going to have to build a Trojan horse, so what does this have to do with me?

Or whatever? I'm not rolling a rock up a hill every day. What does this have to do with me?

Well, once you strip away those layers, then you can start to really look at what's underneath.

And what I have seen happen over and over again throughout the course of my career is that you can look at just a few lines of text, or you can look at one line of text or even one word, and it will open up to you in the way that you need it to. And using those things, because these myths come to us from that place of sacred time. They open you up to that time itself. So if you like.

There's a particular myth that I like to work with. It's called the Descent of Inanna. It comes from Mesopotamia, and it's about a goddess who decides to go down into the underworld to visit her sister.

And she, as she descends, is stripped away of everything that she considers to be true about herself.

She's eventually hung on it, killed and hung on a meat hook for three days by her sister, brought back to life, and then returns up into the upper world. And the very first opening lines of that myth say, inanna turned her ear to the grape below.

Now, having studied this myth, I know that ear, the word for ear, the cuneiform symbol. Excuse me, the cuneiform symbol for ear and the word for wisdom are the same thing.

So she is, in fact, turning her ear to this place that is not familiar to her, but also she's finding this new place of wisdom and finding her way down into that.

So I don't have to be a goddess from Mesopotamia to understand that sometimes we as women go down, men and women, we have to go down into these places and be changed by this dark thing that we're going through, like Inanna did.

And I can look at the ways in which we sometimes have all the pieces that we consider to be ourselves stripped away before we finally get to the bottom. Them.

Matt Gilhooly
00:36:36

Yeah, right. Yeah, I. It's funny because I think, you know, when I.

When I said that sometimes those of us that are not as connected to story or metaphor or all these pieces, we look for the answer, right? Like, we. It's a lot harder to, like, determine that on our own.

And so that's why I was like, I wonder, like, do people see these stories and, like, like, oh, this is the path I should take, even though I'm drawn to this other path.

Allison Stieger
00:37:06

Right.

Matt Gilhooly
00:37:06

You know, I feel like that could be a messy situation.

Allison Stieger
00:37:09

Well, and this is, you know, this is a big part of how I help people is to say, because, you know, if you pick up a copy of the Odyssey, say, or the Iliad or the Ettas, you know, it's going to feel like reading homework, Right. Sometimes the language is really archaic. It's hard to kind of get into it. Like, you know, what am I doing? Am I back in school? What is this?

I'm not 11 anymore. Like, whatever. But sometimes you need a kind of a guide to help you find your way into it.

And then once we start to work together with it, you have me as an ally and I'm able to teach you and say, okay, maybe. Maybe this particular myth is not the right one for you. Maybe we need to go to another culture. What is it that's speaking to you?

And because I have this kind of vast repository of myths in my head, I'm able to say, okay, Matt, I hear what you're telling me, and this suggests this particular myth. So let's go read this together. And you read it and you're like, well, that was stupid.

And I'm like, well, no, wait a minute, let's look at this a little bit differently. And that's how we work.

Like we start to say, okay, then things start to crack open for you and all of a sudden all of this wisdom is pouring into you from the other world.

And now we've got, really got some, we're cooking with gas, as they say, and we have a way to move forward and it breaks through from that stuck place that we were in and we are able to, in fact, go on to the next thing.

Matt Gilhooly
00:38:17

Yeah, I mean, that's the power of it. Yeah.

I mean, dare I say that it sounds very therapeutic in a therapy type way of like you're kind of approaching this and people are hearing your story and then connecting these things and helping you.

I mean, you're, I guess you're guiding people to figure it out on their own with a little bit of, you know, dropping some hints here and there based on these other stories and, and what can we pull from them?

Allison Stieger
00:38:42

Well, you know, this is certainly a very deep part of the work of Carl Jung, Adler, James Tillman, who created the school of archetypal psychology, came after Jung. So there's a very rich tradition in psychology and in psychotherapy around using myths as guides in this exact way.

Now, the way I'm not a therapist, I'm a mythologist, I do this differently, my focus is a little bit different, but the end result remains the same.

We understand that there's an enormous amount of power to be found in looking at archetypes and looking at myths and looking at ritual and looking at symbology. These things are powerful tools that have to be handled carefully.

You know, if I wasn't a trade mythologist, I would not want to try to do what I did in India. Right. Like, you have to kind of know what you're doing because getting your ego dissolved is a scary thing.

I mean, sometimes I hear about people, they'll go off and do ayahuasca or something and they get their ego completely dissolved and they, it breaks them because they're not prepared for it. You have to be careful. You really do need somebody to help you.

So it's something that needs to be treated with a lot of respect and recognize that it's not just some silly story that has people doing strange things, but it's really psychologically resonant. And that's why these stories have survived for so long. Right. The Stories that didn't matter got forgotten.

Matt Gilhooly
00:39:56

Right.

Allison Stieger
00:39:57

The stories that actually meant something to people are the ones that lasted for 10,000 years.

Matt Gilhooly
00:40:01

Yeah. Could you. Is there a way to put into words what an ego dissolving is like and why it would be so dangerous if you didn't have the tools?

Allison Stieger
00:40:12

Well, I mean, you have to. The ego serves as kind of a container for who we are in our identity. Right. Okay. And that's. It's something that we need. I mean, we need that.

We need boundaries around the edges of who. Who we imagine ourselves to be and who we. How we think of ourselves. And.

And this is, you know, when you look at the use of psychedelics, which is a whole other topic, I mean, this is what psychedelics often do. Right. They dissolve the ego.

Matt Gilhooly
00:40:36

Got it.

Allison Stieger
00:40:37

And. And when people have. Have what they call bad trips or whatever, it's because they don't have enough of a strong cage around who their.

What their identity is. And when you dissolve that away for a while, like, I had been working on this for decades before I went to India.

So when my ego dissolved for those few seconds or hours or whatever it was, I had enough work that I had done in what the unions call my individuation process to be strong enough to manage that Right. Now.

You do hear about people having really difficult experiences, because sometimes, especially when you use psychedelics, like, we don't need to get off on psychedelics, but it. It can be a little bit of a shortcut to doing this kind of work.

Matt Gilhooly
00:41:18

Yeah.

Allison Stieger
00:41:19

And. And I would say that, I mean, anybody can read a myth.

Anybody can pick up whatever myth you want and start to try to work with it the way that I'm describing. And I'm not saying you only have to do it through me there.

You know, you can go into Jungian analysis or find Alice to help you and mentors to help you. Not saying that I'm the only person to do that. I'm just super excited about it. So I want to help people as much as I can. Right.

So, you know, if you're looking to do that and you want to, like, have a kind of structure around you as you build up the muscles that you need, like the cage around yourself that you need to have, that would be the way to do it. If you need to find people that actually know.

You know, back in the day, we had pastors and we had priests and we had imams and rabbis and people that have lost their. Their religious tradition, we don't have those people in our lives anymore. Like we used to.

It was a very common thing for most people to have someone that they could go to for spiritual guidance. And we, you know, so many of us. I mean, I'm. I'm one of the nuns myself. Right.

There's a lot of folks out there that lost or were driven away from the religion of their origins and are trying to find their way back into the numinous and into the sacred. And they choose paths that sometimes are. They don't recognize that you need somebody to help you sometimes. So.

And whether that's a therapist or a priest or a. Or a coach or whatever, you need to be very careful because it can be really damaging as well.

Matt Gilhooly
00:42:37

So, yeah, I'm just thinking, like, I'm trying, like I. I like sometimes like, have these weird pictures in my head when people are telling stories. And I was kind of trying to draw that picture in my.

As it relates to the ego dissolving. And. And this is maybe wrong, but it kind of seems like I have my box of crayons, which is my life, and then there's suddenly like a blank slate.

And now I can kind of like still have all my box of crayons that are my life, but now I can use them as appropriate. Yeah, kinda.

Allison Stieger
00:43:09

Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly
00:43:10

Okay.

Allison Stieger
00:43:10

Well, I would. I would. So let me just give you this. And I. And this is for your listeners as well. It's.

It's a little exercise that I'd like to recommend to people if they. They feel intrigued by what I'm saying. Want to try playing around with it a little bit. This is very safe.

You don't need to worry about ego dissolving or anything like that.

So, you know, if you have something in a place in your life that is shifting or that you feel stuck or whatever it is that you feel like you need a little bit of help with, and you maybe want to try to turn to miss to do that, I would encourage you to write the story of your divorce or, you know, whatever it is your thing. Write the story out as if you were telling the story to your best friend or to your mom or, you know, whoever feels like a safe person for you.

And then after you've done that, come back and try to tell the story as if it was a myth itself. So what that does is it creates a level of separation between you and the story.

If you say there once was a queen in a faraway kingdom or, you know, a goddess on a mountaintop or whatever, and you start to tell the story it creates by doing that, it creates Distance between yourself and your story. Right. Because we're so close to our stories. Right. It's in our bodies. It's who we are.

And sometimes that makes it really hard for us to see them because there are things about them that we don't know yet.

Matt Gilhooly
00:44:22

That's a. That's a good.

Allison Stieger
00:44:23

We can't see them because we're too close. So by putting it over here, it gives it a chance to work with that in a new way.

Matt Gilhooly
00:44:29

In my own journey, just even reflecting on all the things that I did between, like, 8 and 30 were. It took a long time to be able to look back on that and tell the story in. In maybe a different way because I was living.

Allison Stieger
00:44:45

If you can hear me at all.

Matt Gilhooly
00:44:46

I kind of separate it. It's. It's just really interesting, kind of like thinking through this. And I did not expect this conversation to go in this way. And I think it's so.

It's so interesting how the light bulbs are kind of, like, bouncing off now for me. So thank you for that. So I have a question for you and how you look at certain parts of your life.

And so you described this period of time in which you were overweight, and. And there were things that you didn't like and you didn't want to be that way, and you decided to choose to go down the route of surgery.

Do you look back at that moment when you decided to do that and wonder, like, what if you didn't do that? Do you. Are you someone that.

Allison Stieger
00:45:30

Yeah, I. I actually. I think about that all the time, honestly. And, you know, what would it have meant for me? Would it have been worth it to not have done it?

And I don't actually regret having done it because I do believe that I'm considerably healthier despite everything that I'm dealing with. And I don't believe that. I mean, honestly, if I hadn't made that choice, I don't know if the adrenal cyst would have even been found. Right.

It's because I chose to do the surgery that they scanned my abdomen and actually found the thing in the first place. Right. So what I do regret a little bit is my. My weight loss surgeon had said, oh, no, it's fine. Let's just go ahead and keep the schedule.

Which I believe was probably the wrong choice. I probably should have just dealt with the adrenal thing once I learned about it and then gone back and considered it.

I probably wouldn't have lost weight so fast if I didn't have those two things. Going on at the same time.

Matt Gilhooly
00:46:14

Right.

Allison Stieger
00:46:15

But my, my weight is stable now. I feel very healthy. I feel like myself. I feel comfortable in my body, which has not been true for me ever really, that I can remember.

And, and having let go, I mean, that that weight was there for a reason. It was a kind of armor to keep the world away. Things about the world and being a woman that frightened me, pushed at a distance as much as possible.

So I was, as a, as a young woman, I was a six foot blonde. I was getting a lot of attention for the way that I looked, that I didn't really like that at all.

And the best way for me to push away the attention of the world was to gain weight.

Matt Gilhooly
00:46:51

Yeah.

Allison Stieger
00:46:51

And eventually I didn't need that anymore. And I also got married and was really happy and my husband accepted me and loved me the way that I was.

And I didn't feel like I had to prove anything or protect myself from anything. I felt very safe in a way that I never had before. And it's took good 10 years of marriage for me to get there.

And then I was able to put that armor down, let it go, release it, release everything that came with it. It took a lot of safety. I needed to feel a lot of safety before I was able to put that down because I saw it as a kind of armor.

Matt Gilhooly
00:47:22

Yeah.

Allison Stieger
00:47:22

And I needed to let that go. So.

Matt Gilhooly
00:47:24

And I think that is probably very common for a lot of people that have weight struggles. I mean, even as a teen, I struggled with food and disordered eating and those things and all of that was a control thing for me and a safety. Yeah.

Well, and, and part of me, and like, I, I'm curious, like, if you didn't have that surgery, I, I like to do this. Like, would you have had this moment? Would you have sought out that, you know, ego?

Allison Stieger
00:47:58

I don't, I don't know that I would have. I mean, I mean, if I was, I would have been in a different headspace if I had been.

Remained obese or if I had just lost, say, half of the weight, you know, it would have been different for me. So I don't know. I mean, it's hard to predict. We choose, we make choices. And that path in front of us is now the path that's in front of us.

And what would it mean if I was still 100 pounds overweight, say, or whatever?

Matt Gilhooly
00:48:22

I felt like you were in the land of the dead. Maybe you would have just been in some other space and then, and then like this experience that you had.

As devastating as the lead up was to it, it sounds like it was a. I don't know if I. Blissful is the right word, but it sounds like it was a.

Looking back on it, a more positive kind of feeling because you've, like, come into this new version of yourself.

Allison Stieger
00:48:47

Right, right. And. And I certainly feel more truly myself. And it.

The other thing that it did was it freed up a lot of headspace for me because I was thinking about this so much and worrying about it so much. I'm a little bit of an anxious person anyway.

And I was just kind of constantly thinking about food and exercise and my body and my perception and all of this stuff. And I had a similar experience when I met my husband. Like, I wasn't thinking about who was I going to date, who might I marry, what's. You know, who.

Who's going to be the next Internet person that comes along to date or whatever. Like, it free up so much headspace for me. And this was a similar kind of experience.

Like, okay, what can I do with all of that energy that I now have that I am not spending on this? You know, we have only a certain amount. We have to budget where our attention goes. Right. And.

And if we're not careful, we can slip our whole lives away by not being prudent in the way that we spend our energy and our attention.

And I was certainly letting that suck up way too much of mine, and it allowed me to start writing and coming up with new ideas, and it really opened up a lot of work that I could do in the world. I mean, my mythology work really started taking off after that happened.

I had been working with it and playing with it when I was a little bit younger, but I was just sucked up in that. And to let that go allowed new things to come pouring in that I'm very grateful are in the world.

Matt Gilhooly
00:50:06

Yeah.

Allison Stieger
00:50:06

Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly
00:50:07

Were you. So you said you were playing like you were in that space. Were you professionally in that space?

Allison Stieger
00:50:13

Well, I had been. So there were two things going on at the time. As I said, my kids were on the young side, and I had been caring for them, but also teaching.

And, you know, I wasn't working full time. I was. I was teaching workshops, I was leading retreats. I was doing some things, but I wasn't writing a lot.

And once I got healthy enough, then all of that kind of backed up work, as it were, started pouring out at me and I started writing a tremendous amount.

And all of this new work and new ideas and everything that I Learned just started pouring out of me, and I couldn't do that until I had moved past that moment.

Matt Gilhooly
00:50:47

Yeah, well, and now you have this transformative moment that can shape so many things and help so many people in other ways that you didn't have before.

Allison Stieger
00:50:55

Yeah.

And if I had not lost that weight, then maybe I would still be holding on to everything that I had learned, and I wouldn't be able to help other people with it. So what a blessing that is. And this is really the power of learning how to move past the refusal of the return.

Now, if you had not started your podcast, all of the people that have listened to your episodes would not have gained the wisdom. They would not have heard these new voices and had this opportunity to examine their own lives.

But that took a real moment of courage for you to do that. Right. You could still be sitting with your own grief, managing it in the best way that you could.

But by taking it out into the world, you're sharing that treasure that you gained through this painful experience that you went through.

And this is what I'm encouraging everyone to do, is to say you can survive the difficult moments in your life, the life shifts, the deaths and rebirths, but if you allow yourself to be transformed by them, then you become that ancestor that can help other people.

And if you stay stuck in your moment, in your grief and in your sorrow and in your pain, you do not get that thing which is sharing what you've learned with the rest of the community and helping somebody else. And that is a really profoundly satisfying and blessing to everybody else that all of us seem to be striving to do.

Matt Gilhooly
00:52:02

Yeah, I agree with that. Do you. Do you feel like a different person, or do you still feel like the same person, just a different part of your journey?

Allison Stieger
00:52:09

Well, I mean, I. I feel like both the same and a different person.

And that's one of the great things about myth, is we can have contradictory ideas in our minds at the same time, because myth are full of this.

You know, I used to teach kids, and they really wanted me to, like, tell them the one right version of the myth so they can move on and learn something else. I'm like, no, no. What if. What if these two myths that are the same myth are directly contradictory of each other?

What are we going to do with that little piece of information? But it's fantastic because it really teaches people how to hold contradictory ideas in their minds.

Matt Gilhooly
00:52:35

Right.

Allison Stieger
00:52:36

It's great for critical thinking skills. It's great for all of this because sometimes life tells us the Exact opposite things, and they're both true at the same time.

You know, my, my father in law or my mother in law is a good person and I know that this is true, but they vote opposite of me politically.

Matt Gilhooly
00:52:51

Right.

Allison Stieger
00:52:52

What are you going to do with that? So what do you do with that?

There are people that you love and we get more and more entrenched into our silos now and if we can learn better how to work in the way that myths work, which is to say how can I have this contradictory idea in my mind with this other thing, then, okay, now I know how to kind of manipulate that and figure out what the right path is.

Matt Gilhooly
00:53:13

But yeah, there's so much awareness and, or self awareness and reflection that have to come with these moments to get people to that space. Because like when you said I kind of got a little triggered when you. And I know you didn't mean it in this way.

I think when like people's kind of stay.

You don't want to stay in the grief or you don't want to stay in your sadness, but sometimes like you pointed out in your journey, like you have to be there for a little bit. You have to settle. You have to.

Allison Stieger
00:53:40

Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly
00:53:40

And I think so many people want to go to this solve. They want to. Because we want to help other people.

Allison Stieger
00:53:46

Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly
00:53:47

But sometimes we can't help them right away or.

Allison Stieger
00:53:50

Right.

Matt Gilhooly
00:53:51

They have to be ready to be helped or they have to be ready to hear those particular words because like I, you know, having dealt, lost my mom and then lost my grandmother later in life and people will come to me and they're like, like, this is the first person I've ever lost. What do I do?

And I'm like, well, I don't have the answer for you, but so my answer now is really allow yourself to feel however you're feeling and permit yourself to be sad for how long. You need to.

Allison Stieger
00:54:24

Sometimes the answer is stay put. Yeah, you need to be in the underworld for a while. Right. I mean, this is part of the journey.

And I think that the thing that maybe had gotten lost there for a moment was the idea that I had mentioned this earlier. But sometimes we need to stay in that moment and we need to finish the work that we're doing in that moment. We can't rush through that.

You know, And I see this all the time with people, like they'll, they, they really, really want to tell the story of what happened with their mother in their memoir, but the memoir is not ready to share because they haven't Fully gone through everything. Because what we're trying to do is make it about more than just us. Right? Right.

We have to stay in that moment until we have done the healing that we need to do and we've gained the wisdom that we need to gain. And that part cannot be rushed. It has to happen in its own time. And then when you're ready, you can take it out and share it with others.

But you have to recognize that it's not something that you can rush through. And sometimes we do want to rush through it. We're not stuck at the refusal of the return.

We're just really wanting to get rid of the pain and push our way out of that. And that's the trickiest, most nuanced bit of all.

This is recognizing when you're in that place where you need to stay for a while, even though it's painful versus, okay, I processed through this long enough. I'm ready to move past it. I'm ready to bring it back out into the world. And. And that is a tricky thing to navigate. So.

Matt Gilhooly
00:55:44

Yeah, it sure is.

And also, like, for some experiences, like, getting out makes it even harder for a little bit because there's so much to unpack or move around or whatever it may be, because it brings everything out. Whereas, like, oh, man, I gotta push through now, this harder part. I was already hard in a hard part, and now it's harder.

But that's going to be better after. But you have to go through that to know that the next one you encounter.

This is the process that will work for you or however you kind of move through things. It's fascinating. I'm wondering if. If this version of Allison right now could. Would be able to bump into the Allison, kind of like walking up to that.

That last temple that you went to in India, if there's anything you'd want to say to her or whisper in her ear or anything that you could do.

Allison Stieger
00:56:33

Well, what I would say to her is the same thing I would say to anyone that might come to me with this. With this issue or might want to talk to me. And. And this is my favorite thing to say to anyone, which is, it's going to be okay. I'm here to help you.

Take my hand, and we'll do it together. You are not alone.

Matt Gilhooly
00:56:50

You know, that response is probably 90% of what people would say to their earlier self. So I think there's some. It resonates. You know, I think that. Yeah, I think it.

I was on a podcast the other day, and I Was like I said that, I said most people say that they would go back to that younger version of themselves and say it's going to be okay.

And I think what that tells me is that like we're very resilient and powerful human beings that can overcome and move through and we already know that.

Allison Stieger
00:57:21

Right.

Matt Gilhooly
00:57:22

And sometimes we forget. And so like it's that little reminder that like you can, you can kick ass and take names.

Allison Stieger
00:57:29

So the truth is, is that we are all the versions of ourselves that ever have been. So when I think back on that moment in the temple, I know that I, my future self was there for me.

The same way that when I look back at the five year old that I was that didn't have a mother, I can be the mother to that five year old version of myself that I need.

And I, I really did have to kind of come to terms with that because I, I was left behind by my mother as a five year old and I find a way to support that earlier version of myself. So that's what I can do now.

And I know that any struggles that I might, I may have coming forward in the future, I've got both past and, and current and future versions of myself all working together as a team. So it's kind of like a, there's a lot of versions of myself and we're all here to help, help support whatever is live in the actual moment. So yeah.

Knowing that I could have been there for myself and that I can frame it that the future version, like if I, you know, have more health problems in the future, that not only do I have the people around me like my husband and my friends and you know, my family or whatever, but I know that that younger version of myself that was healthier can kind of be there and be an emotional support for myself. So when I think about it that way, I don't feel alone because I know that I've got the thing in me that I need.

Matt Gilhooly
00:58:46

Yeah.

Allison Stieger
00:58:47

And I've got the thing in all of the books and all of the stories that I can turn to and the people that are around me and the pieces of art that inspire me and that I can look at or the beautiful vistas that I can look at on that are going to inspire me and make me feel connected to the divine again. All of those are paths that I have to create the support around myself that I need.

So knowing that helps me survive getting through my life every single day.

Matt Gilhooly
00:59:10

Yeah. It's fascinating to me that your passion for mythology has been such Like a blessing and a guide for you in your own journey and now helping other.

You know, like, I don't think I came into this conversation thinking that. Yeah, I don't. You know, and so thank you for sharing that and sharing you in this way, because, like, I think you just.

I don't know, like, someone like myself sees stories as just that. Right. Like, just stories. Right. And they. They don't. Maybe they serve a purpose, maybe they don't. But now I.

I truly believe that because the way that your passion for this has, like, shaped your life in, like, multiple layers and levels, like your own personal journey, but also how you're able to help other people and how you're able to make sense of the world and all these things. So, like, thank you for just. Just sharing you in this way and allowing me to. To ask the questions and.

And understand it and, you know, have a little bit more enlightenment, I guess, from how this could. Could be beneficial.

Allison Stieger
01:00:22

Well, you're very welcome. And I.

I certainly hope that if you ever want to look at your own life through a myth and you want my help, I just call me and we can work on it together. And that's true for any one of your listeners. I'm here for you. I am your ally. I know what to do. And believe me when I tell you this. These.

Using these stories has transformed my own life and made everything about my life better. And it's available to anyone.

Matt Gilhooly
01:00:42

Yeah.

Allison Stieger
01:00:42

And does not really cost any money. These books are available. They are for free on the Internet. You can read these stories, and they can. They are the gift from our ancestors.

And I hope that everyone will learn how to use them and get everything out of them that I've gotten out of. Out of them over the years. So.

Matt Gilhooly
01:00:57

Yeah. Well, speaking of, if people want to connect with you, get in your circle, figure out how they can work with you, whatever it is.

How do people find you?

Allison Stieger
01:01:06

Well, my name is Allison Steger. I think that you'll have that on. On the. The podcast and my country, my company is called Mythic Stories.

So if you search for the phrase mythic stories or for my name, Allison Steger, I'm very easy to find. My website's called Mythic Stories. I'm available on social media as Mythic Stories.

And I love nothing more than to have somebody new show up and say, please help me. Let me know what to do. I'm trying to figure this out. And then I say, okay, we've got what? Let's get to work together. Let me talk to you.

Let me take you by the hand and we'll do this together. Let me be your ally.

Matt Gilhooly
01:01:37

Awesome. Yeah, I will. I will share those links specifically in the show notes, just so people can easily access you.

If you're listening and you and you think that something that Allison said, like, resonates with you based on her own experience, or you think the work that she's doing is something that interests you, please reach out. I know she definitely want to hear from you.

Allison Stieger
01:01:55

Oh, yes, I would.

Matt Gilhooly
01:01:57

And I also like to to think about if you know someone in your life that might need to hear this story or hear Alison's journey or be introduced to the work that Allison does, please share this episode with them. We'd be so grateful. So thank you again, Allison, for being a part of the Life Shift.

Allison Stieger
01:02:16

You're very welcome.

Matt Gilhooly
01:02:17

And if you're listening and you like what you're hearing, please take a moment, go to Apple Podcast, do a little rating and review. That would be awesome. And that's all I'm going to ask for this time. So I will be back next week with a new episode of the Life Shift Podcast.

Thanks again, Allison.

Allison Stieger
01:02:32

Thanks.

Matt Gilhooly
01:02:45

For more information, please visit www.thelife shift podcast.com.