JOIN MY COMMUNITY

Episode Transcription

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  00:00

It’s Marisa Lee here, and I’m so excited to be sharing today’s interview round episode with you. In these episodes, our brilliant lineup of guests will include health care practitioners, voice educators, and other professionals who will share their stories, knowledge and experiences within their specialized fields to empower you to live your best life. Whether you’re a member of the voice, community, or beyond your voice is your unique gift. It’s time now to share your gift with others, develop a positive mindset and become the best and most authentic version of yourself to create greater impact. Ultimately, you can take charge, it’s time for you to live your best life. It’s time now for A Voice and Beyond. So without further ado, let’s go to today’s episode.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  01:15

This week, on A Voice and Beyond, I share a most inspiring interview with our special guest, Joyce Anastasia. Joyce is a transformational leadership consultant with over 20 years of experience in multidisciplinary psychology, creative arts, business and leadership. In this episode, Joyce discusses some of her other roles as an educator, writer, and a visionary activist with a lifelong passion to inspire new ways to lead by wisdom and congruence. Joyce travels internationally, alongside contemporary western businesses and their leaders, indigenous cultures and their wisdom keepers working with them to bridge the gap between western and indigenous cultures encouraging new ways to manifest the critical shifts needed to create a more thriving planet. Recently, Joyce published her book Extraordinary Leadership During Extraordinary Times. The primary focus of this book is to motivate all of us to discover personal ways to positively impact who we are, and transform the systems that define our world. Joyce also shares her views on the importance of exploring creativity, the positive impact of good teamwork skills in the workplace. How a harmonious home life can set you up for a more positive business life and the implications of operating out of fear in our day to day lives. This is a truly fascinating and profound interview with Joyce Anastasia, it’s one not to be missed. So without further ado, let’s go to today’s episode.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  03:28

Welcome to A Voice and Beyond Joyce Anastasia. How are you?

Joyce Anastasia  03:34

I’m doing great. And it’s an honor to be here. It’s great to see you and to be connecting again.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  03:41

Yes, I know because we connected a few weeks ago and I was totally fascinated by your work. I love what you’re doing. And by the way, I’ll say this now, I’m definitely going to be having some sessions with you in the coming weeks. But obviously for our audience, they don’t know what to do unless we have some listeners who are aware of your work. First up, where are you based?

Joyce Anastasia  04:07

In Mill Valley, California. It’s just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  04:12

Oh, beautiful, beautiful. So Joyce, you serve as a transformational leadership consultant. With over 20 years of experience in multidisciplinary psychology, creative arts, business and leadership. You’re an educator, a writer, a visionary activist and your lifelong passion is to inspire new ways to lead by wisdom, co-creating a more peaceful, resilient and loving world. You’ve traveled extensively breaching Western and indigenous cultures. Wow, that is a lot. So many different hats and I’m not even sure where to begin, other than, let’s start breaking all of this down. And I don’t even know where you sleep, and how you get to sleep at night with all this work. So let’s start with your background. Where does your journey begin? What came first?

Joyce Anastasia  05:19

Well, I would have to go all the way back to my childhood Marisa. Yes. I really feel like I was kind of primed to be following the path of being in service of humanity, not not just people in my family, or just securing my own life path. But for other people. And the reason I say that is I came from a family of five children. My parents are each from families of 13 and 11. Children, very, very large family. And I, when I was growing up, it was there was this sense of being self reliant and connecting with source at a very, very young age. So I was felt gifted with intuitive understanding messages from beyond when I needed help. Oftentimes, my parents were so busy, that they couldn’t really give me the help. It was, it wasn’t that they didn’t want to, it’s that they had many, many plates that they were juggling. So I, I developed at a very young age, a really deep connection with, I would say, Great Spirit, God’s source all that is this deep, deep spiritual connection. And from that place, I made decisions, even though sometimes they were hard, even so even though sometimes, I was criticized, for example, using intuition at a very young age often gets described as having a fantastical mindset, and making fantasy of what you’re experiencing. Well, that was not the truth of how I experienced it. I was hearing and seeing spirits who had already passed on, I was receiving messages to help people that I was around even even at as early an age as five years old. So when I got older and was making decisions about what to do it, I knew it would need to involve helping others. I also knew it needed to involve non-prejudice. So opening up my heart to all other cultures and all other beings, as I had been prejudiced quite a bit. As a child, I had scoliosis, so I had to wear a back brace for a long period of time, ostracized that school because of that, and many other things. But I was fortunate that not that it was easy, it wasn’t easy. But I knew that that being prejudiced against was not the most important thing, like a thing to fight against, but actually something to help to fuel where I placed my attention. And how was I going to lead my life was I going to lead it out of finding things, or embracing the gifts that I had, and embracing others with gifts moving through those oppositions. So, that’s what led me to study at the masters level counseling, psychology, fine arts, I wanted to study parasitology I chose not to because of fear of it being used in a way that I feel might be positive in our world. So I do it on my own. I use it in everything I do. The use of oncology, and my work with people now involves their uniqueness. It is a customized way to to work either individually in their groups or teams or families. I travel to do that during COVID that had to be curtailed, and then it was online. But there’s a lot of gifts that can be exchanged online relative to the how-tos and bridging the intuition and logical have tools to walk this planet in the most beautiful ways possible contributing to oneself and others. And really, truly, my heart is to help to create a better place to live on a planet that is kind of ravaged right now there’s a lot going on.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  10:21

I often say, I feel as though the world’s going mad at the moment. It feels that way. There’s terrible wars, there’s so much grief, we’ve just lost the queen of our Commonwealth. There’s just a lot of us suffered a lot of personal loss, but a story that you shared with me that I’ve shared with many other people about you. And that was one, and I’d like you to share it with other people here on the show about what happened to you when you were five? Yes. With the boy in the playground.

Joyce Anastasia  10:59

Yeah, so I’d be happy to share that. So as I was mentioning before, my gift of tuition was something that I just felt was a natural thing was just part of who people are. And occasionally, I would share it with others, just thinking it was normal. So at five years old, I was on the playground, and a little classmate of mine was on the uneven parallel bars. And he was playing in a way that was not, he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. And as I was looking at him, everything blurred out. And suddenly, I saw a vision of him falling off the uneven parallel bars, and dying. And it’s so stunning to me, that I felt in my heart that I needed to tell him and warn him, because I felt like I was being gifted with this to warn him. That if, if he paid more attention, he wouldn’t get hurt. So I went up to him and shared this with him. And as I was doing it, the teacher on the playground overheard me and started yelling at me for having shared this story. And she just said, “Don’t ever do that again.” Well, two weeks later, we’re on the same playground. I’m watching this little boy and I can feel in my body attention, like pay attention, pay attention. And literally, I was yelling out to the boy because he was doing exactly what was in my vision. He fell off the uneven parallel bars in the same way and and passed away that day. Oh, my gosh. And it was, if you can imagine in my little heart and being, how how disturbing it was, in so many ways that I, of course, cried. And rather than the playground teacher comforting or anything like that. It was a literal screaming and the stairway and course, she had to handle this little boy having fallen off. The terror I felt inside was unbelievable and literally, I was kind of swept up in this spiritual support from the unseen round saying, “Joyce come down. It’s okay. We are here to support you,” even when those in physical form cannot for whatever reason it is. Adults or children or whatever.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  13:55

Yes, yes. So as a child, then you are having visions and and you’re having these most intuitive moments. Did they frighten you? Or did you? Did you understand that? What fear was as suppose we all know fear even at that young age. What kind of emotion or feelings did you have when these more disturbing visions came to you?

Joyce Anastasia  14:21

Well, initially, like when that happened, of course, I was I had a multitude of emotions first, I wanted to have a. Second, so there was this desire to to run out and do whatever I can, but I was five years old, then it’s hard to catch someone and make something not happen. The second was a tremendous amount of fear of fear of why am I able to see this and why if I’m able to see this and share it. Could I not stop it from happening? And then the last thing was then on top of that being accused by this playground teacher of having caused the event that just added another layer. So it took me quite a bit of time, in dialogue and unseen realms and with my parents and other teachers to sort it out and stay, you know. Is this gift or curse? For a while, as a kid, I just asked God’s source, all that is, stop, I don’t want this anymore, whatever this is, because this does not feel good for me. But that changed almost immediately, because there were so many gifts to it, the gifts of that gift, the gifts of having an intuitive understanding, it just bridge so many things in my life helped things to make more sense, even though that wasn’t the total goal of having a gift. And so I never ended up suppressing it more than a couple of days. Until many years later, when I was around 21 years old, I started my first business called Sec ond Sight. And I had been seen quite a few clients during that time. And one client, what was that intuitive consulting business where I strictly using readings, to work with people and receiving messages from the other side, to share with people to help them in their lives with questions they had. So this one person who I knew well, she came to me to ask me these questions, and I delivered a message that she did not want to hear. And it was very, very challenging for her to hear the answers or the messages. And she just basically said, “This can’t be possible. It’s not true.” And that’s when I it was so it was a blessing of emotions. So much so that I ask that this gift be re- be removed. It was just I felt like that was an example of doing harm. And I did not like physicians, I felt like my work as an intuitive consulting consultant or any counseling whatsoever, was on a similar path. Do no harm. Yes, yes. And so I forced myself for about a year. Yeah, I think it was about a year, maybe even two years to suppress that gift for a period of time. And I kept being asked by spirit, “No, you’ve got to use this gift. You got to.” And I did this interesting thing of is if I could do a deal with, you know, the unseen realms, but I said, I said, if you can demonstrate to me that that did not do harm, then I am not going to continue to use this gift. And what happened about a year later, it was literally about a year later. And I had and the person refused to talk to me for that time. She called me up. And I had moved several times. So we were out of touch. And she didn’t know where I lived. She found me. And she told me what had happened over that year, and it was related to a death and why a death had occurred. And she called me up and she said that she found out that everything that was delivered through me was accurate. Apologize, not that I needed her to apologize. But I, I was so grateful to hear that it did no harm that it was intended to prepare her for learning all of these things about the person who had died. And, and after that, I vowed that I would never give up my gift again. Because I felt it was a very powerful message. Just before she contacted me. Spirit had come to me three times to help three different people. And I refused for the same reason I just described a minute ago. And I said, well, well here’s where if you can demonstrate that it did no harm. I’m not going to do it. And that’s when she called me she she literally called me like, that night or the day after. And it literally brought me to tears. Because I felt like, I just needed to know that. I just

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  20:13

Yes, of course, of course. Now, people may say, this is a lot of woo-woo. Right? And this woman, you know, she talks to spirits, she’s talking about all these things. Now, I know that you are very highly qualified. You’re an academic, you have a PhD,

Joyce Anastasia  20:34

Not a PhD yet.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  20:38

Okay. Really close. Okay, so you’re close to being awarded a PhD. So researching everything that you do, has been backed by science. Has that academic journey hampered? Your work? We you start to doubt what you’re doing? Or does it give you faith that no, this is right? No, no, I’m okay. Here. I’m not woo-woo. I’m not crazy person. I did. How has that fit into the world that you had come from as a child?

Joyce Anastasia  21:15

Okay, so this is really a great question. I never felt like I had to prove myself, even though people wanted me to prove myself. What I would say to your question is, not only did my academic pursuits help, in supporting foundationally, what was going on? But I have researched so much about parasitology, and about psychology and the workings of the human mind. And being that it delights me to say things to you and your audience, like, were you aware that almost every single president in the United States sought assistance privately from someone who did does intuitive consulting? Did you know that? And, of course, that’s not going to be in mainstream news, you’re not going to read on front of the Washington Post, that our presidents have done this, right? In this, this makes me this makes reminds me of when I first started to do this professionally. And I was at a Chamber of Commerce. There were primarily men in the group, because that was the nature of the Chamber of Commerce. And I did a presentation on Bridging Between Concrete Ways of Leading in Business With Intuition, and how can that be done in a way that would minimize this notion of the “woo-woo factor” and, and allow for what it actually creates if the manifestation of our creative sparks as human beings, both men and women. So I was doing this presentation, and it was a workshop so it was interactive and all of these men were participating in these processes of evoking their intuitive responses. It was fascinating and beautiful to witness all of them. And they were, you could tell they were getting all excited, because it would bring solutions to problems that they had been carrying for weeks, either at work or at home to the forefront. And they were actually developing solutions in the moment as we were doing the workshop and I can see their sparks. So at the end, I asked them if any one would like to sign up for a free consultation, because that’s what I was offering as a result of their participation in this group. About I think, like seven men raise their hands and all of them said, my girlfriend, my wife, my this my that would love to have a session with you. Can we sign up and you make a session with them and I said of couse but what ended up happening is that they were so afraid of demonstrating to their colleagues that they were interested in coming that not a single one of those seven people said their wives or girlfriends but it was them who wanted to. And I share that with you and your audience because there is no shame and blame in doing this. This is in recent research on business practices are those who hire they’re not looking for big name schools anymore. They’re not looking for or they’re getting the best qualified person with numbers and tracking. The number one qualification that they’re looking for in so many arenas is, are they creative? Creativity? Really? Yes. Because what creativity demonstrates is that they are open to learning new things. They are likely diverse, people who can troubleshoot when things go wrong, and not only have one way to do something that has proven to work, but they’re exploring new ways that things may or may not work based upon whether they can try it or not. And the whole notion of being very observational, and able to get along with the team, learning, yeah, you know, we’d be discerning about matching personalities on the team, so that it becomes a dream team instead of people who are fighting over who’s better than one another.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  26:10

So this work that you’re doing, is that part of your transformational leadership coaching?

Joyce Anastasia  26:16

It is. Yes. 

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  26:17

And where are these clients coming from? And how do they find you?

Joyce Anastasia  26:23

they’re coming from all areas of the globe. But how I find that people come to me most or they’re referred to me, is by word of mouth, actually. So they’ll come to me typically be open door, the crack in the door is that they come in for a personal issue first, and then they find out the way that I work is very unique, and allows them to be transparent and authentic about their whole life, and their work life. And then they’ll invite me to their company, to work with their team, or work internationally. Before COVID, where I was, I would fly to different areas, and in some cases, even certain, yeah, I’m gonna say, certain people who are part of indigenous tribes, or people who are heads of companies, CEOs, vice presidents might call me in to actually work with their families, on a personal level as well. So they might call me in to their families, I had several, you know. First of all, I want to say, how courageous it is for someone to do that, number one, number two, to trust me enough to come and be with their family, knowing that it’s like looking in to the back end of something that’s extremely personal, and might be extremely embarrassing for people to reveal. But the truth is that every human being in every human family experiences, problems, every single one. And so to be called and be courageous enough to call in someone who is willing to look at the whole family, as a dynamic process makes me feel very hopeful about our world. Because what it says is, I am not going to spend my time separating that I’m one way work as a CEO or vice president. And I’m another way at home, and I’m going to treat my family horribly or beautifully. And then at work, trading work people horribly or beautifully. It needs to be integrated. And when it is, they support each other. When things are going well and home, then it allows for energetic and product and food for the senses to come into a person and the person becomes vitalized by it, and then can go into work with more energy, more vitality, more care, more concern about what is happening in the work life so that things don’t get totally out of kilter.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  29:22

So many questions come to mind. So what I’m getting from you is that usually people are either wanting a problem solved, or they’re looking to transform their lives. Do you do that through spirits coming into the room? Or do you do it by asking questions? Is there a process that you usually use or is it case by case? 

Joyce Anastasia  29:48

Normally case by case but I’ll tell you the general gist that happens? When a person gets referred to me they’ll come to me and I’ll ask them to bring five questions they don’t know the answer to related to challenge. And no matter what it is, if it’s a personal challenge, if they’re having relationship issues, if they’re having addiction problems, if they’re having problems with grieving, if they miss, they’re in now, if actually thinking about my, my family, my sister in particular who lost a son to suicide, and it was so challenging. So she had such a tough time finding someone who can help her to process through it. So I was so hoping that she could find someone who might be able to support her in the way that I would want to, as a professional support someone, I could not serve that role, because I’m her sister, but I could support her as a sister in other ways. So she finally did find someone who could. So that might be an issue someone comes with. So five questions, they come in, they bring that in, we’ll chat for maybe 10 to 15 minutes to kind of flesh out what that problem is, then I will go into what I call a semi-trance for probably 40, 45 minutes. And spirit guides, master teachers, sometimes people who have passed who want to come through to help them they could be, you know, the lost son, or daughter or mother or father, that doesn’t always happen that way. But sometimes it does. And those messages are delivered. And it is to help to discern and answer those questions that were brought in. Now, oftentimes, what happens after that is a fleshing out of that in the concrete realm, like, how could you take steps to make that choice? 

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  32:17

Right. Yes, because it’s one thing to be delivered the information, but then it’s hard, we then process and live our lives, according to what’s just been told to us and make changes or those transformations or go into that problem solving mode.

Joyce Anastasia  32:37

Here’s another way that I discern how I do my sessions with people it is if someone comes to me who is really concrete, logical, they’re not going to necessarily want to open up to what they might describe as woo-woo. So I work with them very concretely. But use my intuition to help inform answers to their questions and working with them. Then after they get to know me for a while, and trust me, then they typically open up to this other portion, that’s a deeper dive into the intuitive way to access responses and answers, where when I go into deep trance, I’m setting aside my personality, I’m setting aside my filters that might influence for, for example, if that’s right, if I were to give a session, to my sister, I’m going to have all of those personality biases, my whole life with my sister. And it’ll be a lot harder for me to be able to share the experiences of listening. Well, I’ve also had to learn how to deliver the messages as they are intended to be delivered, and not hold back. So that what spirit wants to emerge and the person needs the matches made. So I don’t ever tell people, what their futures are going to be. What I share with them, is what spirit guides gift me with to see the best pathways where it’s like, there’s a green light to this pathway versus 10 other possibilities you can walk down and why? The whys. You know, if you walk down this pathway that doesn’t get green light. These are some of the things that I see might happen. Just like with that little boy, I know who if he was able to be more conscious about the way he played on that uneven parallel bars, he may have taken a pathway of life. Or it may have been, it’s time to leave.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  35:12

Exactly, I was going to say that it’s like the movie sliding doors somewhat. And so what I’m hearing from you now is that there’s people that come to you, and you see that they’re not living incongruency, that they’re not on the right path. Do we all have the ability to transform our lives? And how do we know whether or not we’re being congruent? How can we become more congruent?

Joyce Anastasia  35:43

I absolutely believe that every single human being can transform their lives. Absolutely. I also believe that we could come into congruence with ourselves. And there are, I would say, I could tell you 100 different tools to do that. Like, let me just give an example. This is actually related to my book called Extraordinary Leadership During Extraordinary Times. And it’s in my first chapter about consciously choosing power with versus power over, what a lot of people do, who are congruence with themselves is the power over themselves. For example, if someone were to, let’s say, lose their job during the pandemic, and they move into a place of fear, really fast, and they’re desperate to get a job, and they apply to some, and they know that there’s one that may come through, but it’s really not what they want, and they could feel it inside their gut, like they have this feeling like, oh, no, if I take that I’m gonna be overworked and underpaid, and this and that. But they go ahead and power over themselves, because they’re in huge fear of survival, which is na-, right, it’s natural. But if they can learn the difference between fear that becomes irrational and pushes them mentally into that space taking anything, versus okay, am I really going to not have food in another two weeks, if I say no to this job? You know, there’s this very strange thing that our mind does to us. But if we can kind of take a breath, calm down, move into a place where you said, coherence. For me, when I work with people, it is about having a calmness and a faith that when it is bright, whatever the right is, like right choice, let’s just say right choice, right decision, we will feel it in our bodies, if we’re trained to feel it in our bodies, we will know. And when we don’t. And when we make decisions that we know are out of fear and not out of love and coherent calmness, we’re going to be mad at ourselves. We’re going to be I’m going to dissonance. We’re going to say, we’re not going to say it out loud. We’re going to say to ourselves, this is what some of my clients before they come to see me do. And I’m just using phrases that clients have told me when they were meeting me, “You idiot! Why did you choose to do make that choice? You knew in your heart wasn’t the right choice, and now you’re in it and you’re stuck!” Well, and I say to them, you can always make a different choice. Never stopped here. It’s easy to imagine you’re stuck, but you’re not. And here are all the other choices you can make to support you in making a healthier choice for yourself and your family.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  39:16

Yeah, I 100% agree with what you’re saying. In my lifetime, I have learned to listen to my intuition. I have figured out that my intuition is way smarter than my brain, and I do feel it in my body. However, sometimes it’s not the right thing that I feel assault feel in my body. Sometimes it could be the wrong thing. Something within a situation or being with a person or a particular decision. And you have two choices and one choice may just feel really, I feel uneasy within my own body or I can be around people. And I feel really uneasy, and I feel that I have to get away from them. So I sometimes have that as well. Or maybe more so than I hear this feels really good. Either I don’t I’m not sure. So people make decisions out of a place of fear. We all come into this earth, I believe the same. We’re all babies, we’re all pure, we’re unaffected. How do we develop this fear? Why do we become so fearful during our lifetimes?

Joyce Anastasia  40:38

Well, it could be our environment and how we’re brought up, like, if if we’re brought up in an abusive environment, it’s very easy to accumulate a ton of fear. But it’s also a means by which to develop resilience, it’s kind of a crazy contradiction. So those people who brought were brought up in a more abusive environment, sometimes could actually become very well versed in tuning into their intuition and make choices much more easily than those who might not have, because life is gonna say, air quotes, “easier” right? But also, our world is pretty filled, filled with a lot of fear based media, we’re constantly seeing things on television movies, that are based upon fear, and aggression, and warring and violence. And who wouldn’t be afraid of that, right? So it’s almost as if our society has been set up to create more negative stimulation instead of positive stimulation. So we have to relearn, unlearn what we’ve learned, and then relearn that operating out of fear actually brings us into rather poor decision making, because it’s knee jerking, versus let’s take a moment to quiet ourselves and interior rise and listen in to that still small voice within us, because likely it is going to guide us, even in micro decisions to to make healthier choices, healthier outcomes, and to bring about what we hope to manifest on this planet, as much as we are experiencing on a very global level. really horrific things on this planet. Just think about how many times we’re pummeled with this information. 

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  43:01

Constantly, constantly. Yes, yes. social media, news. It’s all doom and gloom.

Joyce Anastasia  43:08

To focus only on that, which is how creative and positive like literally, like, how do we do that? First thing, one of the things I have been telling every single client I have this week, because there were so many people who were actually negatively affected by the Queen’s passing, like really depressed and now feeling like the rudder is removed, guidepost of a direction even even with criticisms of the monarchy, etcetera. But it’s a loss to huge loss, just like yes, kind Yes, political figure who represents a country would feel this way. Right. So what I have been encouraging people to do a simple practice is, as soon as they wake up in the morning, before they even open their eyes, but they know they’re waking up to spend two minutes speaking out loud, what they’re grateful for. What are you grateful for? And it people have told me, it is so hard to initiate that. How crazy is that? Right? Why is it so hard to initiate? Right? The other thing, I was listening to your amazing podcasts and your amazing interviews, and I was listening. I was listening to the one on Longevity in Good Health. And one of the things that I noticed was, you know, what do we put into our bodies were nourishment do we take in and a lot of times we can’t control that, right? We’re having a rushed day we have to go out and get food whatever. The second practice that is, for me an absolute standard is, no matter what you are putting into your mouth for sustenance, whether it be water, or food, or otherwise, that it be blessed that you take 30 seconds to a minute, and be grateful for the hands that went into creating it, the soil that nourished it, or the creature that you might be eating, and research, scientific research over the last decade has shown that doing that totally changes its chemistry before you even put it in your mouth.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  45:41

That’s incredible. And to me that my thought right then was, “Haven’t we become an entitled society?” That’s the problem. People aren’t grateful they, people have become so entitled, that they’ve forgotten how to be grateful. It’s almost like our planet has lost its way. And we’re coming from a place of fear instead of love. And instead of gratitude, what do we need to do to make transformational changes to the planet? Do we obviously we need to change as human beings? What can we do better to thrive as humans so that our planet can thrive?

Joyce Anastasia  46:30

I’m gonna give a third suggestion to the question. Yeah. And the third is to ask ourselves, do we love ourselves as much as we love others that we really care about? And I don’t mean in a narcissistic way.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  46:48

No, I hearing you because this week, I released a podcast, and one of the on exactly about self-care. And it’s learning to be kinder to ourselves, so we can be kinder to others and to love ourselves in the way that we love others, one of the things we need to look at is the way that we speak to ourselves, because we’re the person we speak to the most during the day.

Joyce Anastasia  47:15

That’s exactly right. And not only that, but to truly ask ourselves each day, do we truly want to live? Do we truly want to know who lives and we do truly want to live our lives? Then, what would we like to leave as a soul print? That that was my second business name, Soul Print. What does that mean? Like our fingerprints, our soul prints are unique. So what parts of our gifts that we have do we want to contribute on this planet? And that could be a guidepost to our purpose in life, to how we treat ourselves to how we treat others. And we can’t fulfill that contribution without taking fully complete care of ourselves, so that we and our crops are full, so that we could then in turn, impact and help others on this planet, even whether other people describe it as miniscule or gargantuan, because limitless things can mean so much. And as a as a teacher, in the past and a professor at universities sometimes don’t get to hear people’s transformation. And sometimes you do. And there are times when I will receive a message from someone who I worked with 20 years ago, saying your one sentence and they won’t tell me what it is. And I will have long since forgotten that sentence, they don’t. And they’ll say to me, that changed my life. Well, if I didn’t even know that I was doing that by one sentence, I said, if we are in awareness consciously of what we’re, we’re saying, thinking and doing without getting obnoxious about it, you know, like, you know, micromanaging our expression, but with fluidity and care and consciousness have no harm. It’s amazing the impact every human being has on one another, every day.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  49:40

 Yes, that really stirred something within me. It made me think about legacy that soul print, some people may like to define it as legacy. Yes. And comes back to congruency. If this is your legacy you have to, I suppose you almost have to think about what are the is that you want to leave behind your soul print, your legacy, whatever you want to call it, that’s okay. And then checking to make sure that you are living in congruence with that, as you move forward through your days, as you live your days as you live, every decision that you make, is it congruent with how I want to live my life and what I want to leave behind on this planet. And I think we are so busy, and we get so caught up. And we are so much in fear that we don’t take that time. And there’s that entitlement to there’s so many things if you’ve already touched upon, that you’ve wrapped them up together. And it makes sense everything that you’re saying makes sense to me. And I think I just want to share just for a moment that it just made me think that my parents came to this country to Australia is postwar migrants with nothing. They were uneducated, they sacrificed and they sacrificed for their children. It was me and my brother. And it’s so important to me to make the most of every opportunity, and to live my life to the best that I can live my life based on the sacrifices that my parents made. And to show my children what is possible. I have two daughters. And to see that and to show them that you can be a strong, independent woman, but still be loving and caring and make something of your life.

Joyce Anastasia  51:37

Yes, and making something of your life doesn’t have to look like what other people want it to.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  51:45

No, no, you have to be authentic, you have to live your life in authenticity. And you can’t live your life to the standards of others mean do no harm. As you said, live your life, do no harm, but still be authentic in every aspect of your day in how you show up in your day.

Joyce Anastasia  52:07

And it takes a lot of courage in a society that tends to push down and push down the gifts and exaggerate the notion of competition. And you know, I speak about this too. Did you know that the word competition originates from the word to compete, which originally meant to strive together for something.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  52:41

It’s togetherness not tearing apart? 

Joyce Anastasia  52:43

That’s right. So how we have interpreted and, and rewrote a beautiful expression of what our world could be like. And I still witness even though in our world, we have all this naysaying, negativity, when you get to the heart of things. And I’ve worked with a lot of people. So when I speak to them, I speak about really challenging issues with them. But the core of every human being I’ve ever worked with, is like that infant that you were talking about. It is. And I mean that in the most honoring of ways, it is what people most want is to love, to be loved, to be able to have a roof over their heads and food on the table to support their family and to feel as if they’re contributing something in our world. Those, I did a whole project around this where I traveled, I was going to travel to every state in the United States. And ask, what are the five most important things in your life from poor people to extremely rich people from young and old? Everyone said those five things I just mentioned. That was what was most important to them, no matter what.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  54:09

Basic necessities? Yeah, yes. And to feel valued. Yeah, is yeah. But doesn’t it comes back to though we have to value ourselves first?

Joyce Anastasia  54:21

You’re absolutely right. When we do, and we really do. It’s not just a fake thing. Because people get to the point that they’re filled with competence, Well, confidence is different than loving yourself, and and truly caring about yourself, and, and more bring into the world. When people move into that space of coherence, then they are able to handle the things that happen in the world. They’re able to see it as a neutrally positive witness and say, this is part of life and I’m not going to let it tsunami me, I am going to navigate in the best way possible, I’m not going to contribute to that tsunami, for other people, I am going to take a piece of my life and help to make it a better place. Maybe even by just a smile to someone who may be downtrodden, or a helping hand to walk someone across the street, or volunteering at a food kitchen, or by creating a new business. Because my family business cause loss, making a new business that really reflects who I am, right? All these things are very, you’ll begin to see miracles come into your life when that coherent starts to occur. You know, when there’s this, I don’t know you really well. But I have to say, Marisa, I love and care about you, I feel you is if I’ve known you for a really long time, I know that you’re at a place in your life, where you really do care about yourself. And that it’s okay that you express yourself as beautifully as you did a moment ago, just saying, I want to honor my parents, I want to honor my heritage. I want to teach my children that they can do this human it’s not all by doing doing doing but it’s by being awesome.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  56:36

Exactly. I’d like to move along. This is we could talk about this forever. You and I. I want to talk about the work that you’ve done with indigenous cultures. So you’ve been working, traveling extensively bridging the gap between western and indigenous cultures. So you want to share what that work is and who some of the people some of the cultures are that you’ve worked with?

Joyce Anastasia  57:04

No, I worked for an amazing company called the Foundation for Global Humanity. The mission of that company was to record document and preserve indigenous and contemporary ways of healing, knowing and leading in the world. And my role was as Creative Director, so I would help to select where we would go, who we would interview, and speak to them about their ways that they find most beneficial for our world. So we’ve been to Australia, we’ve been in New Zealand, we we went to Peru, and Colombia and many other places. And every single location, every single tribe, every single tradition, we learned so much. And we did our best to capture that in documentary filming, that is on the foundation for global humanity site. They’re not as active now. But it is available there to discover. But one of the places that we went that I’d like to share us one or two examples of give you it went to Colombia. And there are many different tribes in Colombia that are indigenous. And they were called by spirit, all at the same time, but they live far away. So this the first thing that’s amazing is they value concrete being on this planet as much as they do intuition. So here they are getting messages in their visions and in their dreams simultaneously, those people who are called mammoths, who are the leaders of those tribes, simultaneously getting a message saying you must gather peoples from all over the globe, because we have to do something about the destruction, the destructive aspects that are occurring on this planet. And please do it as soon as possible. So this was many years ago now. But they started connecting with one another. And the team that I was on the Foundation for Global Humanity heard about this, and we created an intro, little film, to invite people from all over the globe to go to this event. We didn’t know exactly what was happen-, would happen. But when we arrived, several things happen. The first thing they taught us was about being registered. What does that mean? Well, because they value so much intuitive practices and psychically being able to discover what There’s someone who is genuine or not, whether someone is willing to be honestly who they are, from the inside out, they do this process called registering where our team, four of us at the time had to stand in front of, I think it was 8-12 of these, I’m going to say, quote unquote, leaders, because they call them more facilitators, your spiritual guides. And they stood in silence with straight poker faces, looking at us, looking through us to our souls, deciding is this a person who could, who could identify all the beautiful things they brought into the world, but all the ways in which they might have harmed someone too. And if they are willing to do that, then they will be able to handle a ceremony and an event like this, because no one is all positive. Part of our reason for being on this planet, is to learn how to shine light in the darkness, and to bring up that those things which might most beneficially support our world, this bridges also, many different traditions, like the whole notion of karma, what we bring by, by consciously doing bad things, things that harm in the world. So if we could become conscious of bringing positive, beneficial things shining light on those negative things, then we can make a difference on this planet. So they were registering everyone that came in, and we have this ceremony. And they allowed for all different cultures to share their ways to integrate most beautifully practices that they could bring back home with them, like integrating the masculine and feminine, the whole idea of what it means for the eagle and the Condor in some indigenous traditions to come together, that our natural enemies to come together, and to have peace feathers laying on top of each other. So just imagine that as one practice that I shared with you, and the follow up practice was to take time to sit down and ask ourselves in our whole lives, what are ways in which we have harmed other people, consciously, and ways that we have helped to help people consciously or unconsciously? What a gifting lesson that is, that’s just one lesson from one tribe. I mean from one culture imagine.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  1:03:00

Sorry, did you find similarities between the indigenous cultures? Was there anything that you thought? Well, this is one concept that all of them believe in or live their lives by? 

Joyce Anastasia  1:03:15

Yeah, pretty much the notion of no harm and the notion of all our relations, we are all connected, absolutely all connected, what we do think, say or believe impacts, even if we don’t know it, way we treat a plant, the way we treat trees, the way we treat creatures impacts here.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  1:03:40

Yeah. Incredible what an opportunity.

Joyce Anastasia  1:03:43

Yes, it was a deep honor, a deep honor.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  1:03:47

You have published the book Extraordinary Leadership During Extraordinary Times. So what’s the message you’re wanting to share with that through the book?

Joyce Anastasia  1:03:59

There are core, what I call Seven Vital Keys, that if looked at within our own lives, and and with the people that we work with, we have an opportunity to make different choices about the way we are in our lives, how we lead, how we express ourselves, and they include miraculous, our miraculous nature, how we dynamically balance, how we express power, truth, transparency, how we bring integrity into all that we do. And getting back to nature. The other piece that is really critical in this relates to my dear friend, Sequoia Trueblood, who was also one of the people who we interviewed from that Foundation for Global Humanity. He was a super soldier, and he did a whole We’ll project on reconciliation, this notion of when you make choices and when you end up harming people, how can we reconcile with ourselves with our family with our nation, and it relies on faith and belief that we are all connected, and not one, religion, or one type of spirituality, but that we have faith, that there is a great spirit or all that is unifying sense of, we really all come from the same space, you spoke about your parents, when you think of a universal appearance, that is what I think of when I think of honoring. How do we were we honoring the source from whence we came?

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  1:05:59

That’s so meaningful, and you’ve shared so many powerful messages with us today. What do you believe is your mission or your legacy?

Joyce Anastasia  1:06:10

I believe that relational spaces are so important. And one of the things that I think sets the work that I do apart from, from some others, and not that I want to set it apart necessarily, but that I truly honor each person that I work with, I don’t see them as lesser than or better than ever. I see them as an incredibly vital, attentional human being that has every chance to live the most amazing life they choose to live, that is really important for the work that I do.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  1:06:53

Well, we’re going to finish this up now. It’s been such an honor, and such a pleasure and and I do appreciate your openness, and your willingness to speak about so many topics that probably you know, could challenge some of our listeners and their their belief systems. But I think we all need to be open in life, we need to all be open because we may find a different way, or may challenge us to think and to check in with our own selves. And how we can do better as as a race, as a planet. We’re going to share your links by the show notes. So if anyone wants to reach out to you and have a session with you and find out more, see what they can do better how they can improve their lives or have some of their questions answered. What have they have, like their bring their five questions to you. But thank you, it’s been such an honor having you on the show wish you all the very best. And this is not going to be our last goodbye. Were going to meet up in the future. I’m very keen to speak with you myself. So thank you again for your time. Good luck and talk to you soon. Joyce.

Joyce Anastasia  1:08:12

Thank you so much for your incredible vision and for your courage to do what you’re doing, and many blessings in taking in what’s happening with your own processes and your family and many blessings to you.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  1:08:30

Thank you. Bye.

Dr Marisa Lee Naismith  1:08:36

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of A Voice and Beyond. I hope you enjoyed it as now is an important time for you to invest in your own self-care, personal growth and education. Use every day as an opportunity to learn and to grow so you can show up feeling empowered and ready to live your best life. If you know someone who will also be inspired by this episode, please be sure to copy and paste the link and share it with them. Or share it on social media and use the hashtag #AVoiceAndBeyond. I promise you I am committed to bringing you more inspiration and conversations just like this one every week. And if you would like to help me please rate and review this podcast and cheer me on by clicking the subscribe button on Apple Podcast right now. But I would also love to know what it is that you most enjoyed about this episode and what was your biggest takeaway. Please take care and I look forward to your company next time on the next episode of A Voice and Beyond.