[00:00:55] Luke Storey: All right, Nicole, great to have you on the show again.

[00:00:58] Nicole Lepera: I'm honored to be here.

[00:00:59] Luke Storey: I [00:01:00] feel like the last time we talked, it was such a life upgrade for me, and when you left I remember having the thought, "This could just be the show every week," because I felt like there was, there's just so much grist for the mill in the kind of topics you teach and, um, help people understand, and they've been so many of the things throughout the course of my about 30-year now journey through healing self-realization and all the things I'm working toward and on.

[00:01:30] Luke Storey: Everything that you teach and write about is, like, just so spot on. I, you know, there's very few authors, spiritual teachers, um, thought leaders in mental health and all this that, um, that I feel aligned with on, like, every single thing. It's like I was listening to one of your podcasts this morning, I'm like, "I, I can't find a hole in any of this."

[00:01:54] Luke Storey: It's just, it's so spot on, and I think what's great about it is that obviously you have the [00:02:00] credentials and education, so you can approach these things with academic certainty. But I love the way that you deliver your information with openness and vulnerability, and you relate it to your own life. And I think that's a really kind of exciting step forward in the realm of emotional, mental health, relational awakening, whatever you wanna call it, all the things that we're all working on.

[00:02:26] Luke Storey: I think that's a really important part of it, is not only having the, kind of the data and the clinical experience, but also being able to personalize it in a way that is relatable. So first and foremost, just kudos to your work, and I'm so happy to have you back.

[00:02:41] Nicole Lepera: Well, thank you so much, and I think I saw very clearly when I went online how universal so much of the things that I'm talking about are, and obviously informed by my own journey.

[00:02:50] Nicole Lepera: I am never, um, without of something to speak about because as we both know, I think healing does continue, um, well throughout life, and I live it and I speak it and I now [00:03:00] teach it on the daily.

[00:03:01] Luke Storey: There's something I've been aware of over the years, um, in terms of wanting to expand spiritually and grow and, um, just get a greater understanding of myself, and that is there's kind of a fine line between, you know, self-exploration, personal growth, and self-obsession, you know, to the point that it can kind of be isolating if you dig too deeply into it and you, you sort of don't come up for air sometimes and remember that the reason you're doing all this work is to integrate it into your life and actually live your life.

[00:03:36] Luke Storey: So in your own personal life, how do you manage doing your own personal work without sort of being shut inside it?

[00:03:43] Nicole Lepera: I really appreciate that question 'cause I even think that there, for some of us, right, all of this now focus on the endless information about healing, the gadgets, right, all of the different things that we can do.

[00:03:54] Nicole Lepera: I think for a lot of us it can become a, a distraction point, a very confusing one, 'cause on the surface, right, it [00:04:00] feels like, oh, we're exploring ourself. We're getting healthier, right? We're creating a lifestyle that is maybe more aligned with the outcomes that we want. But in reality, I think what most of us might come to realize that we're doing is we're still staying disconnected, um, from what's going on on a, on a deeper level.

[00:04:16] Nicole Lepera: So for me, it's just that continuing reminder that all of the habits that have protected me, um, even to some extent, right, focusing on concepts, right, being outside of my body, thinking about these topics from a very distanced standpoint as opposed to living, uh, the reality, the trauma, the repeated patterns that I still also carry from my childhood.

[00:04:37] Nicole Lepera: And so those habits, like all of us, are just, just beneath the surface, and it's in moments where I'm feeling overly stressed, whether it's difficult, stressful things or even exciting stressful things, the more my body is challenged, so to speak, are the more moments that I become likely to rely on those older patterns.

[00:04:57] Nicole Lepera: So for me, it's a daily conversation of personal [00:05:00] accountability, of allowing myself imperfect moments where maybe I'm not doing the things that I know exactly are the things that help me stay regulated, but giving myself a new opportunity in each moment to make a different choice.

[00:05:11] Luke Storey: I love it. Uh, you know, I've been spending the past, well, many years, but especially the past two years writing about loneliness and connection and so on, and, uh, so, you know, I'm trying to approach it from every possible angle so I don't miss anything, right?

[00:05:25] Luke Storey: Uh, but something that sort of shadowed me throughout my life to varying degrees, and one of the things that I found interesting in that exploration is that the unhealed parts of us that we carry on from childhood are the things that oftentimes motivate us to kind of go within in a way of, like, withdraw and avoidance And those things are also the very things that keep us from connecting, right?

[00:05:56] Luke Storey: So it's like we're, we're using all, you know, social media, drugs, whatever, [00:06:00] sex, like anything we can do to kind of avoid facing ourselves. But the facing ourselves seems to be really necessary if we want to be able to have healthy, intimate relationships. Can you speak to that sort of, um, paradox?

[00:06:14] Nicole Lepera: Yeah. I think, you know, to some extent, we learn who we are, really to every extent, we learn who we are within relation to another person.

[00:06:23] Nicole Lepera: Of course, this began in early childhood when the people that were entrusted to care for us, whatever degree that they were capable or able to do that, we needed them, not only to physiologically meet our needs, but to emotionally meet our needs. So a lot of us have these early adaptive patterns, quite literally, where we've had to take on certain roles or disconnect from certain aspects of just who we inherently are because that didn't secure us the relationship.

[00:06:51] Nicole Lepera: That didn't allow someone to show up in care of us in the moments that we needed it. So a lot of us, I think we do wake up and we're [00:07:00] confused at who we are. We maybe spent not much, not much time kind of in that inner self-focus, or when we do turn inward, what we're met with are all of those emotions that we've been carrying with us.

[00:07:11] Nicole Lepera: So without the resources, and when I'm speaking of resources, I'm literally talking about in our body, our nervous system's capacity to be with increasing amounts of discomfort. Until we do that, no amount of shifting inward, even if no-- if logically we understand, as I will often teach, change happens with two steps.

[00:07:31] Nicole Lepera: The first step is becoming really honest about the current habits or patterns that we're repeating often outside of our awareness, so that we can then take that second step, which is make those new choices. So without, I think, that first step of inner reflection, though, without the capacity to turn inward right now, we get ourselves stuck kind of spinning wheels and repeating patterns that increasingly don't serve us, but maybe we continue to then feel more and more shameful about.

[00:07:59] Luke Storey: What about the [00:08:00] feeling element of Working through trauma, you know, um, many of us spend so much of our lives avoiding uncomfortable feelings and, um, you know, sometimes the things, in my case at least, the things that I did early in life to escape those feelings caused even more suffering, right? It's kind of a compounding negative feedback loop.

[00:08:24] Luke Storey: But I've found over the years that it's, you know, early in my teen years and things, being in talk therapy and sort of getting a general understanding of the architecture of my mind and emotions and things that I'd been through as a kid was helpful, but it still didn't bring me into the embodied experience of it.

[00:08:41] Luke Storey: Um, the way I kind of look at it now is almost like there's a necessary component of exposure therapy, you know, in really being able to go in and deeply feel those things, but that can be tricky depending on the context and set and setting and the amount of support that you have, right? There's, there needs to be [00:09:00] some sort of framework and container for that in order for it to be felt and worked through without causing additional harm or kind of reinforcing some of those imprints.

[00:09:10] Luke Storey: Um, in my own experience, I mean, there's been many things over the years I think that have really helped me, but walking into, you know, the first couple years of intentional plant medicine work, I was kind of already armed with the psychological understanding and, you know, first principles of a spirituality that I'd been living by for 20 years at that point.

[00:09:30] Luke Storey: So going into those experiences was really productive for me because it was the only way, at least for me at that time, that I could go back into those memories and kind of have a roadmap of where I wanted to look and what was still kind of lingering beneath the surface and what wounds were festering that I had been trying to avoid.

[00:09:49] Luke Storey: And in that kind of space for me, it enabled me to go back into some of those early traumatic experiences and actually relive them in, in a, in a healthy, [00:10:00] positive sense and walk out being different you know, in a way that probably wouldn't have happened if I had just journaled about it or, you know, spoken to a, a trusted confidant and revealed some secrets and kind of diminished some of the shame around them and things like that.

[00:10:16] Luke Storey: But, you know, just going into the eye of the sto- the storm into just the depth of those core wounds was absolutely life-changing for me. But I know that that particular modality is not necessarily appropriate for anyone for safety reasons, and also just culturally it might not be something that people are, um, you know, able to do safely or without some sense of guilt, or their moral framework might not allow for that and so on.

[00:10:43] Luke Storey: So outside of, you know, working with psychedelics in an intentional way, what are some other ways that people can actually get into the body and get into the subconscious and really start to excavate some of those things that are stuck?

[00:10:57] Nicole Lepera: Well, what you're, you know, really beautifully describing, [00:11:00] and thank you for sharing so much of your own journey to illustrate this, is The function of our nervous system, which is, right, the second we become stressed or threatened in any way, and again, this begins from very early learning, very early environment, very early relationships, right?

[00:11:14] Nicole Lepera: We begin to kind of s- set up, um, hypotheticals, right, in our mind. When this happens, this happens, and our goal for our body is always moving as quickly past the discomfort as quickly as possible. And so that's where these really savvy kind of adaptations that you're beautifully describing begin early in life, where moving away from the overwhelming, say, emotional discomfort, we create adapted ways of being, some of which I think are very much celebrated with-- from society.

[00:11:45] Nicole Lepera: I mean, I very much went into a very overachieving, performance-based, things that were very much celebrated beyond even my family system to, of course, other habits that aren't necessarily as celebrated. But the important takeaway here, right, and to answer your question then, is [00:12:00] our nervous system will com- continue to make those predictions and react in those patterned ways until we use a much more powerful, less instincti- instinctually driven

[00:12:11] Nicole Lepera: part of our mind and make new choices, 'cause that's quite literally what healing is, right? When something in the past would've caused my body to be stressed or overwhelmed, instead of maybe exploding outwardly and saying or doing things that I don't mean or disconnecting and avoiding the conversation altogether or shutting down and becoming silent, I'm going to give my body a new experience in that moment.

[00:12:36] Nicole Lepera: Physiologically, the same things are gonna happen. My body's gonna indicate signs of stress and the instinct to go into those older, kind of nervous system-driven reactive patterns. My heart is gonna race. My muscles are gonna become tense. My breath is probably gonna shorten and quicken. And then on the heels of those physiological reactions, more often than not, what happens are those old [00:13:00] habitual behaviors.

[00:13:01] Nicole Lepera: But if we can now, in real time, insert at first just a pause, right, where we're noticing our body beginning to activate in all of its energy, our muscles beginning to tense, our breath beginning to short and quicken, learning how to hit pause within that instinctual reaction, so not do the thing that we're maybe feeling compelled to do in that moment, and now we can physiologically help our body to regulate, beginning to slow our movements- Right?

[00:13:32] Nicole Lepera: Slow our breath, release the tension in our muscles, and then give us the opportunity to make a new choice to complete now that same experience in a different way. And the more we repeat that practice, again, emphasizing how grounded in the body this is, because if I don't learn how to decelerate my body's instinctual reactions, I'm going to get to that point of no return.

[00:13:59] Nicole Lepera: I'm gonna [00:14:00] feel shameful on the other end of it. I'm gonna have to wait till my body comes down until I can reengage or repair or reconnect with the experience or the person. But the better we get in real time of noticing those cues that our body is signaling, and the more practice we get in helping our body quite literally calm down, now we're giving ourself the opportunity in an embodied way to show up newly

[00:14:30] Luke Storey: If your meditation practice feels like work instead of peace, listen up. A lot of us sit with the best of intentions. We're trying to quiet the mind, experience inner stillness, maybe even connect with something deeper within. But the fact is that if your body can't let go of background stress, it makes all of that more difficult, sometimes even impossible.

[00:14:49] Luke Storey: And that's why I use the Apollo Neuro. It's a wearable that sends gentle rhythmic pulses through your body, and that signal communicates safety through your sense of touch. [00:15:00] And when your nervous system feels safe, everything changes. Your breath slows down, you settle in faster, and you can actually drop into a meditative state without all the struggle.

[00:15:09] Luke Storey: I've noticed when I use the Apollo, I just go deeper and faster, like my body finally decided to cooperate with my mind, and it doesn't stop there. Apollo comes with an app called Smart Vibes AI that learns your patterns and automatically adjusts the support you need when you need it. Here's where you wanna go to get your nervous system dialed in.

[00:15:29] Luke Storey: It's called apolloneuro.com/luke. And if you use the code Luke, you get $99 off the Apollo wearable and Smart Vibes AI bundle. Apollo takes the friction out of my meditation practice, but the real win is how it helps my system stay calm, present, and way less reactive throughout the day. So you definitely wanna check out apolloneuro.com/luke, and that code is Luke to save $99

[00:15:58] Nicole Lepera: Love

[00:15:59] Luke Storey: it. [00:16:00] It reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago. It was, it was such a great lesson. Uh, I was, uh, I was riding passenger in-- riding shotgun in a car, and, uh, the person driving-- the, the road veered to the left, and the person driving just forgot to turn the steering wheel and just ran off the side of the road, and the car flipped over.

[00:16:19] Luke Storey: And, uh, no, no one was really hurt. I w- I wasn't hurt at all. It was a little bit alarming. We're kind of laying there upside down trying to crawl out of the car. But what was interesting about the nervous system and the subconscious mind is it logs events like that. I mean, I was already aware of that, but this was such a simplistic example.

[00:16:39] Luke Storey: When I got back home, this was in Costa Rica a number of years ago, and, uh, when I got back home, I mean, it's rare that I ride passenger, but every once in a while my wife will be driving, and she's a, she drives like granny, you know? So it's like not someone I'd ever be nervous to ride with at all. Uh, more so, you know, her with me driving, uh, which we've worked on, uh, through open and honest communication.[00:17:00]

[00:17:00] Luke Storey: Uh, but I noticed anytime she would be driving, if she curved to the left, I would find my body bracing, and it was such a cool experience to just have that self-awareness and, and rather than, r- rather than being bothered by it, I really went into it with curiosity and also gratitude for my nervous system, and gratitude that the subconscious mind is designed the way it is, so that when one of those potential injuries happens, there's a warning system, and the body, you know, goes into activation mode to prevent harm, right?

[00:17:32] Luke Storey: But what was really telling about it is my conscious mind knows that she's not running off the road, but it doesn't matter what my conscious mind is or, or how deeply I believe that to be reality. There's, there's these recesses of my being that don't listen to the conscious mind when I say, "Calm down.

[00:17:50] Luke Storey: She's a safe driver. You're not going off the road," right? So it was a really interesting experience in that, say I would've refused to ride shotgun for the rest of my [00:18:00] life, I never would've healed that. So the only way I was able to heal it, and may- I might even feel it a little bit even still, which is funny, but the way I was able to heal it was just riding passenger when it was necessary or appropriate, and just really breathing through that and reminding those deeper parts of myself that you're safe, that the objective reality indicates that you're not running off the road, and thank you very much, amygdala or whatever it is that's telling me we're going to, right?

[00:18:28] Luke Storey: And that's a, you know, it's a really superficial example, but I know throughout my journey, I mean, I've gone into, you know, much more painful prior experiences with the same sort of intentionality. And over time, from kind of exposing myself, as you described, with that really acute self-awareness, that so many things that used to be triggering just have no impact anymore.

[00:18:49] Luke Storey: It's like there's no voltage left in that memory or in that charge. So in terms of you know, the deeper the wound, the [00:19:00] exposure is going to be different, right? So when it comes to, I don't know, somatic experiencing or, or different types of talk therapy, EMDR, psychedelics, whatever it is, what are some of the things that you found in terms of actual practice where there's some I don't know, framework or support specifically to be able to go into those things.

[00:19:22] Luke Storey: I'm thinking of, like, MDMA therapy or ketamine therapy, right, where, you know, you can put the, the body and the mind in a sense of safety where it can revisit some of those things without having to be re-traumatized. You know, have, have you found anything personally or just observing culturally things that are really good at that particular reprogramming?

[00:19:42] Nicole Lepera: Well, thank you for giving us that example 'cause, you know, now we just multiply those moments, not just right in a car where something physiological, physical could happen. Think about all of the emotionally unsafe moments and beginning in childhood when we didn't even have logic or language to [00:20:00] narrate what is happening.

[00:20:01] Nicole Lepera: You're really illustrating how instinctual, where our body is quite literally reacting before our mind can catch up, which is what really inspired me to evolve my practice so many years ago now because I kept hearing from very insightful people who had so much awareness and so much intention to, right, change these patterns for themselves, yet they weren't able to build that bridge.

[00:20:23] Nicole Lepera: So I think whatever it is or whomever it is that feels kind of capacity building, um, because again, and therapists has been, therapy has been researched because there's thankfully a lot of different ways to work, from standard talk therapy to EMDR kind of alternating sides of the brain, kind of trauma-based therapy.

[00:20:44] Nicole Lepera: And typically, right, we wanna know which one is the best, which one can heal body trauma, to apply it to this conversation. And I think pretty categorically, we haven't been able to necessarily, but I have my opinions, and I'll get to the helpful ones in a second. But what is most [00:21:00] helpful is the relationship, the safety, right?

[00:21:03] Nicole Lepera: Having somewhere to begin to be with, whether it's just ourselves and our underlying emotions or wounds, or be in the presence of another person, whatever. It's a supportive therapist or coach or whomever it is. I run a community for that reason because community relationships, most of our healing or our wounding has happened within relationships, so finding safety somewhere is so very important.

[00:21:26] Nicole Lepera: Um, I do think that there's a lot of different ways to work with the body now that people are gaining a lot of benefit from. Um, while I can't necessarily land on this is the gold standard, I think it's really the bilateral stimulation type EMDR, even just general kind of bilateral movement-based stimulation type therapies I think are incredibly important, um, helping to reorganize simply, right, the different ways the different hemispheres of our brain are functioning.

[00:21:55] Nicole Lepera: Um, we now have come to realize that when trauma happens, I'm gonna really simplify this, kind of the [00:22:00] bridge between the right and left hemisphere kind of disintegrates a bit- Meaning we feel things that we don't have language for, right? Yeah. Yeah. Or we're having a lot of language and we're not feeling much of the experiences that we're living in our body.

[00:22:13] Nicole Lepera: So any type of that kind of bilaterally stimulating can be very helpful, not only to integrate our whole system, but to help heal the more acute, um, PTSD, C-PTSD, where we have, like, the triggers, right? And we're really activated, um, in a, in a trauma or a wounding mo- moment. But again, the important takeaway from m- me at least is capacity building, right?

[00:22:35] Nicole Lepera: Safe space to begin to turn inward, not necessarily about telling the accurate story of what happened. What we're most important about is allowing our body to feel and process what happened, again, in whatever safe container we have to be able to do that. Perhaps exploring a little bit of that bilateral stimulation type work, because again, that is one of the major areas that [00:23:00] we know breaks down, again, so to speak, when we are suffering from trauma, whether it's in the past or in the present.

[00:23:05] Luke Storey: I've gotten a lot of benef- benefit from, uh, neurofeedback over the years in that capacity. I think, I mean, unfortunately, it's kind of expensive. It's not attainable to a lot of people. Right. Um, but I found outside of doing some, you know, more intense work that might not be appropriate for most people, that, that for me has been the most gentle, um, way to kind of get in and, you know, move some of the broken parts around in the brain.

[00:23:32] Luke Storey: Um, but y- you, you made me think of something interesting in terms of that bridge, the corpus callosum, I believe it's called- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm ... between the left and right hemisphere, right? So, uh, over the years, as I've studied how to better relate with and communicate with the female race on the planet You know, I've just been studying what makes us different, right?

[00:23:51] Luke Storey: So that I can have- Mm-hmm ... more empathy and be able to, um, you know, just have healthier intimate relationships with women. Um, and now that I'm with my wife [00:24:00] for a number of years, six years I think now, I've had a lot of opportunity to really observe in real time on a day-to-day basis how we're different and reframe that as complementary rather than opposition.

[00:24:14] Luke Storey: Um, but when it comes to that bridge, what I've heard, and maybe you could confirm or deny this, is that females, uh, just through evolution, h- have a higher capacity to be able to jump from emotion creative side to logical analytical side, and that m- you know, males typically are a little slower on the uptake of that.

[00:24:35] Luke Storey: Um, for example, if I'm really focused on something and my wife talks to me, I'm literally deaf. Like, I, I don't even know she's in the room, right? Like, the, the capacity for multitasking is very limited in myself and most of the males I know, wherein, um, most women that I know and have known are able to kind of do four things at once and stay engaged in all of them.

[00:24:58] Luke Storey: So it seems like there [00:25:00] is a physiological difference. And of course, you know, I'm, I'm generalizing. There are variations, but in terms of the thread that we're on of being able to, you know, work with some of those stuck issues that are brain-centric, have you noticed any difference in the way males or females approach this kind of work?

[00:25:18] Nicole Lepera: It's funny, I just read a similar type of study, piece of scientific information that was saying the similar. And I mean, I think, I think a lot about our ancestors and evolution, and I can make a case of why, to me at least, that would make sense, right? If we wanna go down a very traditional division of labor, right, it was typically the women, so to speak, who nurtured the children, who, right, stayed at home, who tended the garden and the home, versus the man- men who went out and protected, um, the village or the group.

[00:25:48] Nicole Lepera: So understanding, right, that to nurture, we have to be attuned to non-verbals, emotional cues, then I think we begin to understand how kind of a [00:26:00] female-type brain, so to speak, might have been operationalized to, to function in the environment in which they most consistently found themselves. And what this is getting me thinking is all of the thinking that I had been doing over the past, God, three-plus years of writing this book, about how general this is outside of even genders, how early environments, not even just our own in our own childhoods, but our ancestors', how epigenetic changes.

[00:26:28] Nicole Lepera: We now understand science once wasn't what we once thought. We don't just have DNA that kind of control every outcome in our life. We now understand that lifestyle and environment plays an incredibly foundational and interactive role, right? It's kind of like the genes load the gun and the environment pulls the trigger type saying.

[00:26:49] Nicole Lepera: Well, the environments that have been shaping us have predated our even physical existence on this planet. And because, right, our, we are adapting [00:27:00] and attuned to the world around us, I think really generally, a lot of us are living with brains that have been Taken on, um, a functioning that was appropriate for different environments than we're finding ourself operating in.

[00:27:15] Nicole Lepera: And so, you know, I kind of spin my wheels a lot because I know that, right, if we did brain scans, we would see that, say, the male and female brain operas- operates a little differently, like you offered, right? If we did brain scans, we can understand that an individual who suffers with, whether it's PTSD or CPTSD-type trauma, right, their brains operate a little differently.

[00:27:35] Nicole Lepera: Their amygdas- amygdala is gonna light up a little bit more versus their prefrontal cortex. And so for a while it was like, oh, well, that makes a really interesting, compelling case, right, for this idea that this is all genetic, right? The genes that just contributed to your brain growing and functioning in that way, but now we have a different component entirely.

[00:27:54] Nicole Lepera: What if what has caused these very real observable changes in our brain that, of course, have impact [00:28:00] in our mood, our reactivity, our embodiment in the world, but what if they are more changeable than we once thought? What if they are just priming us, right, to function in an environment that is not the case anymore?

[00:28:13] Nicole Lepera: And what if then the goal for all of us to be a true cycle breaker is to be more present in our current environment, right? To understand without shame, with grace and compassion, all of these beautiful adaptations that once served someone else. And what if I start to show up newly, create some habits and patterns that actually shift not only how I function, but how my genes function?

[00:28:36] Nicole Lepera: So if I do choose to procreate and have my own offspring, now we're talking about cycle breaking down to the physiological layer.

[00:28:43] Luke Storey: Oh, that's super cool. I love that. I, I think I'm inadvertently, um, unconsciously done a lot of that, you know, just because I like to feel comfortable in life and in my relationships.

[00:28:54] Luke Storey: One thing I've noticed, too, and I think, you know, any males listening and my, my guy friends at [00:29:00] least relate to this, is when When w- I'll just say we're, because I can, I can speak for quite a few men, uh, in my life, when we're emotionally triggered or heightened and upset, it's like the logical brain and the part of the brain that is able to communicate in a compassionate and clear way completely goes offline.

[00:29:23] Luke Storey: It's l- And then what, what I find is if there's, you know, like an emotionally tense moment in a relationship or something, is two hours later, once the emotional part has sort of diminished, then I start to see their point of view or I start to see how I could have better articulated my perspective or what I was feeling at the time.

[00:29:41] Luke Storey: But in real time it's just like a whiteout, you know? So, so to your point, you know, there might be an evolutionary reason for that, um, which kind of makes sense if, if I was the male, you know, a couple thousand years ago and my job was to like have a single point of focus to catch that [00:30:00] antelope, you know, and not get eaten by the lion, et cetera, it would make sense that there's no room for anything else.

[00:30:05] Luke Storey: I just have to focus on this one thing and anything else is going to be an interference. In other words, getting into that primal sort of instinctive fight or flight was actually useful, but it's rarely useful in one's life in, in this day and age. So for me it's been a process of kind of building self-awareness around that and making different choices that are more appropriate for how we live and relate today, which I, I would agree with you is very much possible because I've made those changes myself just with a bit of self-awareness and a bit of discipline, and it's been extremely useful in all of my relationships.

[00:30:42] Luke Storey: You know, just that ability to kind of step outside of oneself have that witness perspective so that there's a, a part of oneself that is observing the phenomenon of your nervous system and your mind and all those things, but you're not so much at the s- you know, subjected to it [00:31:00] because there's a, there's sort of a, a pause in between your awareness and the thing your body and your mind and your mouth is about to do

[00:31:07] Luke Storey: You know what I mean? It's like back in the day, I used to flip people off and have road rage, uh, driving all the time, you know? And I, I couldn't stop it. I would feel bad afterward, but it's like I just was so reactive, and now it's really funny if something like that happens after all these years, it's like I rarely even get, like, irritated enough to even think about doing it.

[00:31:28] Luke Storey: But in the rare case where I felt really threatened, I might be pissed for a second and even have the idea, but it's like way before my hand ever goes out the window, it's just I've already gotten over it. You know what I mean? And so I'm living proof that one can actually, with some commitment, change the way we respond to our environment, and, um, it's just, it's, it's very hopeful.

[00:31:51] Luke Storey: I love that we're not kind of stuck with the hardware and software that we, you know, we're either born with or that was kind of the [00:32:00] model that was trained throughout our childhood. Um, but it won't undo itself, right, unless we're willing to do the work.

[00:32:11] Nicole Lepera: All right, you

[00:32:11] Luke Storey: guys, I don't love the term biohacker, but let's say I've been in the health optimization game for a minute. I'm basically obsessed with solutions to what ails us, so supplements, cold plunges, red light, all the things, right? But if you're not managing the energetic field in which you live, even the best inputs like those don't land the way you think they do.

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[00:33:16] Luke Storey: And when the exposure peaks, times like air travel, traffic, and so on, they've got EMF-blocking clothing that blocks against 99% of measurable wireless radiation. This line of clothing is clutch when you're walking into a high-EMF environment. To get yourself dialed in with all that stuff, here's what you do.

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[00:34:03] Nicole Lepera: And I think there's something also to speak about just the quick evolution and advancements of society in general, right? In addition to, I, I truly, you know, have-- there is a limited number of adults, put it that way, who have been raised by truly capable, attuned caregivers who were resourced not only financially, you know, physically themselves, knew how to calm themselves down.

[00:34:27] Nicole Lepera: And again, this is because we were raised by generations of individuals who had not even accurate information. That's only been the past decade or so where we are beginning, beginning even, just to truly understand the body and the nervous system and the needs that exist from infancy and beyond. So parenting advice has drastically changed.

[00:34:47] Nicole Lepera: Most of us, again, were raised from generations that lived their own trauma, whether they were displaced because of financial reasons, war. You know, a lot of us kind of are the, uh, children, the offspring of [00:35:00] immigrants to a different country. There is just so much stress that not only are we carrying through our lineages, that even those of us who had the very well-intentioned parents who were maybe physically present, very few of them had the ability in their own body to be calm, to be grounded, to parent us in the ways that we need it.

[00:35:19] Nicole Lepera: And then we compound that by how quickly the world is changing, of course, in ways that I think are of great benefit. I benefit greatly. I mean, you and I are in completely different states, and here we are having a conversation that's hopefully going to, you know, create value and impact for those of you listening.

[00:35:35] Nicole Lepera: Yet here you and I are in different states, right? Here all of us walk around with a phone attached to us with endless amounts of information, positive or negative or neutral. It's still much more stress than we as a collective are able to tolerate. But I will always look on the empowering side of this, the hopeful side of this.

[00:35:56] Nicole Lepera: We do know that change is possible in any moment, but I [00:36:00] mean, we really are kind of-- we have a lot stacked up against us as individuals and as a society at large, though with small choices that I think so many of us are beginning to live into. Um, my hope, at least for the future, is greater than, uh, the discomfort that I think all of the changes have brought along with it.

[00:36:18] Luke Storey: It's the best of times and it's the worst of times right now. This is, this is the inner dialogue I'm having every morning when I sit down to meditate. You know, I'm just-- one side of me is like, "Oh my God, the darkness in the world is just gonna overtake us, and we're gonna, you know, explode into a void of evil."

[00:36:36] Luke Storey: And the other side of me, because I'm around so many people like you, um, and sharing this kind of information, the other side of me is, "Wow, we are in an unprecedented awakening at this time." And interestingly enough, a lot of that awakening is because of digital media, right? It's like you were talking about how, you know, our parents and the parents before them and so on had no-- there was no neuroscience to lean on.

[00:36:58] Luke Storey: I mean, we didn't-- they didn't have any of this [00:37:00] information. If they had any at all, it was probably wrong, right? And so, you know, it's like part of our challenge now is we're inundated with so much data that is unnatural that we've not yet evolved to be able to handle in a healthy way. Yet that influx of data is also what allows for the sharing of information like this, and it spreads exponentially.

[00:37:24] Luke Storey: It spreads so quickly. I mean, I've been sitting back just going, it's-- I think about sometimes like, oh, you know, maybe I'll do a course and, I don't know, teach people some stuff I've learned, and I just go... My wife and I always joke about this. We go, "Eh, everyone knows everything." Shit that was revolutionary to me 20 years ago and very few people were talking about and I had to really dig to find it or go to India to an ashram or whatever, it's like now I see, you know, 19-year-olds on TikTok like have the whole thing dialed, you know?

[00:37:50] Luke Storey: I know that's, I'm in a kind of a bubble, right? If you go out into the real world, a lot of people don't have it dialed, but, uh, part of me is very positive about some of the things that are happening now. There, [00:38:00] there's such a-- There's always kind of a balanced polarity, right? It's like there's this great awakening and people like you and so many others are helping us to become empowered and healed and all of that, and at the same time, there just like seems to be more darkness at the, at the same time.

[00:38:16] Luke Storey: It's like the scales kind of stay even, but they both tend to get heavier, right? It's a, it's a really crazy time to be alive. Just thinking about, I don't know your age, but I'm 55, right? And it's like I mean, a couple generations before me, they didn't have the car. They didn't have electricity. They didn't have the, uh, television, telephone, right?

[00:38:38] Luke Storey: And since I was born, we had computers entered the equation, internet, and now AI. It's just like, whoa . Like, we are on, like, a, a, a speeding train into who, who knows where, but I like to think like you and just remain optimistic about it. On that note, I wanna get your take on this. Um, as I've been over the past [00:39:00] couple years, and I, I can't wait to talk about your book in a moment, by the way, 'cause now I know what that takes, and it's, uh, much harder than I ever could have imagined.

[00:39:08] Luke Storey: But when I was looking, you know, at my lineage going back as far as I could, I, I noticed obviously a lot of the patterns that you talk about and that we're talking about here today, things that were handed down kind of unknowingly. Yet at the same time, there's this upward trajectory, sort of this consciousness evolution that at least in my lineage, uh, is, is definitely quantifiable and true.

[00:39:35] Luke Storey: In other words, my great-grandparents were more damaged than my grandparents, and my parents were less damaged than theirs, and so on to where now, you know, my generation of me and my two brothers, uh, we're both, we're all much healthier than either of our parents were, right? Even though both of our, our parents did a lot of work.

[00:39:53] Luke Storey: And now my younger brother has two kids. Like, he's obsessed with your work, all the... He and his wife just constantly [00:40:00] study conscious parenting and all the things, right? So I imagine, oh my God, his two kids are gonna go on maybe to have kids of their own, and they're gonna look back at us like Neanderthals

[00:40:10] Luke Storey: You know, right? I, I think I'm, I'm pretty, pretty a- awake and enlightened, but, you know, only in comparison to the people that came before me maybe, you know? And it seems like as brutal as things seem at times that there is this conscious evolution that's happening, but it's difficult to see depending on the kind of people you have around you and, you know, your, your sort of culture and lifestyle.

[00:40:34] Luke Storey: It might seem the opposite for many people who are still stuck in the throes of addiction and those kind of family cycles. H- would you say that there's a positive momentum forward in terms of that um, inherited pain and inherited dysfunction overall?

[00:40:51] Nicole Lepera: Yeah, I think that there's definitely, uh, over generations an increasing amount of awareness of the dysfunction, the [00:41:00] pain.

[00:41:00] Nicole Lepera: With that, I think comes the ability to talk about it, right? We've even just seen, I think a lot of us, at least I know my parents came from a generation of right there were certain things that were appropriate to talk about inside and outside of the house, and now we have people that are living out loud on social media.

[00:41:14] Nicole Lepera: So I think a lot of shifts are happening that are allowing different, deeper, you know, more difficult conversations to be had both inside and outside of the family that's creating what you're beautifully kind of des- describing as like a synergy, a, a kind of shifting a wave, uh, in a new direction in terms of not only awareness and ability to look at things but, you know, a commitment to doing things differently, again, starting from a very, very young age.

[00:41:43] Nicole Lepera: I think it's very interesting, too, 'cause I think often of I believe children are so wise, so attuned, right? So it's so cool, I think, often about young generations of children now being born to parents who aren't just going to take the, right, do as I say parenting [00:42:00] mentality, who are actually, because of this awakening, looking to their children to learn from them, whether it's to learn what they exactly need, right, to attune to the developing human that they are or just looking for their wisdom.

[00:42:15] Nicole Lepera: I mean, children have so much. They are a gift of, you know, a- an energy in motion without the oftentimes the, the, the stop valve, you know, which is so wise. We have so much to learn, and so I'm very inspired in another level when I think about humans that are coming that maybe are, you know, not carrying as much of the wounding and are starting to get some of the resilience wired into them epigenetically and then our children and our sharing and talking and I'm envisioning them in these homes with, you know, adults who are into a more synergistic, collaborative experience of pa- parenting as opposed to, I think, again, an older generation of I'm the parent, I know what is, you know, what is best for you, and I'm just so hopeful for everything.

[00:42:59] Nicole Lepera: I think that [00:43:00] you and I are both kind of nodding our heads along, too, because while, again, we will not ever fully know what it's gonna be like to now, right, live and breathe with AI and perhaps robots into a future. There's still so much unknown that we're all walking into, yet again, I think we're doing it with a little bit of momentum and resilience that a lot of us have been building and will continue to be building beneath the surface.

[00:43:24] Luke Storey: Are your parents still living?

[00:43:26] Nicole Lepera: Uh, my father is. He is 88 years old. I think he'll be 89 in June. And my mom in, from, on May 23rd, it will have been five years since she passed.

[00:43:37] Luke Storey: Ah, okay. Okay. Condolences. I, I had that experience last year. It's a, it's a big one. I ask that question because I'm curious how your parent or parents when your mom was alive respond to your work when things that you're sharing are related to your upbringing with them.

[00:43:58] Luke Storey: How have you [00:44:00] sort of managed the way you talk about things publicly, and maybe they never even pay attention to your books or content and they don't even know. Um, I'm just, I'm curious about that 'cause I think sometimes it's, it's a fine line between sharing one's story in a public way that's your story, and you have every right to share your story and your life experience, your childhood and so on, but there are certain, um, junctures at which your story interfaces with other people's stories.

[00:44:30] Luke Storey: You know, in this case, speaking to, to one's parents, right? And it's like, hmm, what is the line of, uh, responsibility, accountability, compassion there? Uh, that's sometimes difficult for me because I'm just such a transparent person. I just sort of take for granted that, oh, everyone's like that. It's like, well, no, some people are actually much more private and they prefer to be that way for whatever reason.

[00:44:50] Luke Storey: How have you navigated that, not only with your parents, but just maybe other interpersonal relationships where they're, they're really good sort of, um, I don't wanna say content in [00:45:00] terms of social media content, but content to do the work and to teach the work? How, how do you navigate that from a place of ethics and preservation of those relationships?

[00:45:10] Nicole Lepera: So it's, it's continues to be an evolving, you know, journey and conversation with me. Uh, very early on when I started sharing publicly and my, both of my parents, my mom, who was alive at the time, were very aware. I was very open. They saw my page. They knew when the books came out. Uh, I th- the, my mom's last couple years before she did pass, she was cognitively, um, on a bit of a decline, so admittedly, I don't know or I did not come to hear too much of any difficulty that she was having, though understanding kind of how she was born, when the mentality of what was, you know, private to be inside the home, I can imagine that there was probably ver- many challenging moments.

[00:45:51] Nicole Lepera: I did have the gift of hearing more directly from my father, who, um, you know, a- a- as the years evolved and it was clear that this is what I was [00:46:00] doing and, you know, one book became two books and he was much more connected with the daily Instagram and online presence and what I was sharing, and there was a lot of conversations actually that he and I had had, very honest ones, where he would just wonder aloud to me, "Well, why Nicole?

[00:46:14] Nicole Lepera: Why is it that you have to talk about us?" Or, "Why do you have to use us as the example?" He comes from a big Italian family, so he has siblings who have children themselves, and the whole family has caught wind of what I'm doing and are now hearing essentially aired family business. So I'm very sensitive to, you know, my dad's curiosity, you know, in wondering that he did approach me with curiosity as opposed to with anger or, you know, resentment or even a demand that I stop doing it.

[00:46:42] Nicole Lepera: He was always, and continues to be, very open, um, to me sharing. My reason usually is some version of, well, you know, I thank him always for, you know, his support and explain to him that of course not only is this my journey, the one that I'm most intimately familiar with, but I assure him That there are so [00:47:00] many other people who are struggling with the exact same things that we are struggling with.

[00:47:04] Nicole Lepera: And now several years in, him not only seeing, you know, the continued social media presence, him being with me publicly when people will come and, you know, people-- there's enough people out there that follow along that every now and again, someone will approach me when I'm outside, you know, in a personal time and say hi to me.

[00:47:20] Nicole Lepera: And so my dad gets moved and is very proud, um, of the work that I'm doing. So while he isn't maybe fully, fully understanding exactly why, I think he's been able to see the value, not only patterns that we've changed within our own family, where we're able to be similarly more honest with each other and therefore have closer, deeper relationships, um, he sees, uh, the impact that it's having on the collective.

[00:47:45] Nicole Lepera: So for me, it's just been, as is the case whether I'm talking about my own personal struggles or information from the start of this until now, over time, I've just been able to get more and more comfortable with what I'm sharing, less hesitant, [00:48:00] less trying to always word things, whether it's a piece of content I'm teaching or a personal, you know, um, experience I'm sharing.

[00:48:07] Nicole Lepera: I'm, I'm trying to get rid of the impossible, right? Say something in the most perfect way so that it lands for everyone expectation. I'm very clear that, you know, there are some things, some topics personally or professionally that I might share on that might challenge people, that people might just disagree with me speaking about in general, or my thoughts on the particular thing that I'm speaking about.

[00:48:29] Nicole Lepera: So all of this is still kind of behind the scenes, the worry, the concern, right? The unrealistic desire just to be everything for everyone. But yet I have infinite amount of moments now to use my discretion, right? Being able to share something 'cause it's what's authentic to me or important for me to share, and continuing to contain the discomfort that I feel if and when I hear, right, someone's feedback, whether, again, it's personal or professional that I'm sharing.[00:49:00]

[00:49:01] Luke Storey: Now, I don't know about you guys, but I spent a lot of my life stuck in survival mode. Years of trauma, addiction, and general chaos left my nervous system never truly feeling safe. And even after I got my act together, there was still part of me that always felt on guard and bracing for impact, and that's why I connected so deeply with Lotus Way.

[00:49:22] Luke Storey: Lotus Way makes these solar infusions that carry the energetic imprint of specific flowers, all designed to support your nervous system in a subtle but really powerful way. I started using their flower essences during a big life transition, and they've definitely helped me stay grounded, open, and less reactive.

[00:49:40] Luke Storey: And now Lotus Way has created something special called Warriors of the Unseen Truth. It's a program for veterans, first responders, and anyone still carrying the invisible burden of trauma. Now, even if that's not you, you probably know someone who's still trying to find their way back to themselves. To help them or yourself out, visit [00:50:00] lukestory.com/warriors to learn more, and use the code Luke to save 10% off your first order.

[00:50:04] Luke Storey: So whether it came from combat, childhood, or just the drama of modern life, a lot of us are carrying a weight our bodies never learned to put down, and Lotus Way offers beautiful tools to help you find your way back to center. Check it out at lukestory.com/warriors. Code Luke will save you that 10%. Yeah. Um, it's helpful to think about And not, you know, interpersonal relationships and unintentionally hurting someone you love, but I think in, as far as having a public persona that is public-facing, something that's been helpful to me is just remembering whatever people think about me is none of my business

[00:50:45] Luke Storey: You know? It's like, literally has nothing to do with who I really am, right? It's like people have an idea about who someone like you is 'cause they see s- one little Instagram Reel that's, you know, one minute long, you know, that is just one, you know, [00:51:00] minute part of you and your expression and the life you've lived, right?

[00:51:04] Luke Storey: So it's like no one could ever really have an understanding unless they dove deeply into that or personally knew you, right? I think as far as how I learn from teachers and people that inspire me, um, I find people much more trustworthy when they do share some degree of their personal experience, that the authenticity, the vulnerability allows me to lean in a bit more than someone who...

[00:51:32] Luke Storey: It's like the difference between someone sharing from a place and about a place. Right. I'm much more compelled to engage with someone who's speaking from a place, and to do that requires some level of subjectivity and, and openness, right? Otherwise, I mean, you could just sit here and theorize all day long and, and do it in a more academic, detached way, and it might be helpful to some people.

[00:51:53] Luke Storey: But I think teachers like you and others that are really able to kind of put themselves out there with some [00:52:00] humility and vulnerability has a greater capacity to draw people in and give them permission to have that same level of vulnerability and authenticity themselves. In other words, it's like if a teacher's telling me to be open about my inner experience and they're not, there's no model, right?

[00:52:16] Luke Storey: It's like, well, you're, you're telling me to do something that I don't see you doing. It's, it's difficult to, to trust, I think, in that kind of situation. And y- me personally, I'm just, I'm always looking for realness, and I'm probably too real some of the time, to be honest. You know? You know, you're speaking about that filter, right, where you're like, "Okay, let me have some discernment."

[00:52:36] Luke Storey: That's something I'm working on a bit 'cause I just kinda shoot from the hip. But, um, I, I encourage you and applaud you for bringing your own personal experience into your work because, um, to me, it makes it much more accessible.

[00:52:48] Nicole Lepera: Well, thank you. And I, you know, I do think what unites us is the struggles we're having.

[00:52:54] Nicole Lepera: Equally, what unites us is, I think, the inner fear that we're the only ones having those [00:53:00] struggles, right? So I think that- Yeah ... there's, and this is why I, you know, the, the kind of my business now, right, has become a membership, a community-driven focus. Because whether it's, again, on the social media platforms, which the community is so open and willing to share their own journeys in the comment sections across all really of the social media platforms at this point, or in the SelfHealers Circle community, it's so many of us, again, even a theme throughout this conversation, right, this, this loneliness, this disconnection, right, the feel- feeling, whether it's in our social relationships or the greatest sense of the lack of belonging that many of us are currently embodying, I think it really does drive us to relieve that fear that we are deeply alone, and I think it is what joins us.

[00:53:45] Nicole Lepera: So as soon as I began to be more honest and share, whether it was past or current things that I'm struggling with, I am giving myself a gift really in those moments. Because by sharing my journey, right, I'm now able to not only maybe touch someone out there that's [00:54:00] resonating, um, I know I have, you know, through so many books, things that I didn't even really have the logical awareness that I've experienced, just being moved by someone else's words helped me tap into these unspoken experiences that were wired in and driving my daily habits.

[00:54:17] Nicole Lepera: And so if I can gift that to someone else, and then obviously the value comes right back to me when I see people, you know, nodding along or hitting the like button, and I then to- can feel, oh wow, you know, this thing that I thought I was the only one, I'm not the only one. And I think that's what's a beautiful thing of this now very visual, you know, public way that some of us are choosing to lo- to live.

[00:54:40] Nicole Lepera: I think it's having that benefit, uh, for a lot of us, where we can just feel a little less alone in whatever it is that we're struggling with.

[00:54:46] Luke Storey: It's been shocking over the years too, uh, specifically in social media, you know, including podcasts and YouTube videos and things like that, but it's been shocking to me to see the, the, um, [00:55:00] evolution of people's ability and willingness to be very publicly vulnerable.

[00:55:05] Luke Storey: You know, to the point where sometimes I'm even like, "Damn, girl, you just said that on the internet," you know? I catch myself like, "Dude, you can't unsay that now. The internet is forever," right? Or writing a book, putting something in a book is maybe even more forever than the internet, right? Um, I, and I think it's largely positive.

[00:55:22] Luke Storey: What about the shadow side of that in terms of just spewing your, you know, all of your issues everywhere y- you can find a place to spew it? You know, sort of the, where's the line between the, the authentic expression, the healthy expression, unifying people that have, you know, shared struggles, and maybe doing yourself or other people at large a disservice by having zero boundaries and just giving zero fucks?

[00:55:52] Nicole Lepera: Yeah. Yeah, I think about that a lot too because, right, what, what is this- What is the intention or motive or [00:56:00] even s- regulative space that some of these statements are coming from? What I mean when I say that is, right, what we feel to be true in an emotional moment, just like we even talked about earlier, right?

[00:56:10] Nicole Lepera: Time goes by, I calm down, right? This one argument that I knew I was right about and only saw this one perspective now doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Like, I shouldn't have argued at all, or I see multiple perspectives. And so I think what is happening, right, for some of us, and I actually knew someone very close to me who would always talk about, right, this idea of being authentic, authentic in any moment.

[00:56:31] Nicole Lepera: And I come to understand what that person meant was an emotional moment, right? A feeling that feels very true, right? I am mad now, right? That was, in that angry moment, right, became that person's intention was to embody that truth, right? To spiral and spit it and, and tell everyone who wants to listen how angry I am because that was, right, this truth in a moment, right?

[00:56:56] Nicole Lepera: But what happens when that moment passes, when your body calms [00:57:00] down, when there's a different emotional expression? And so I think a- about, right, this just whole world now of living so visually public, but also in moments where we're perhaps reliving an older reaction, a trauma, right, where the emotion feels like it's what's true, and anyone looking will see how true it is.

[00:57:24] Nicole Lepera: But really, it's only become true for us, right? Because we are so blinded by the rest of the moment, by someone else's perspective, by the whole context that maybe we're strategically or we're not even conscious of the fact that we've left it out, right, when we're sharing this truth of a moment with someone else.

[00:57:43] Nicole Lepera: And now again, that we can do this at our fingertips, we can go live, we can, you know, start the smear campaign. We can say the things that in a moment, right, are so true for us. But does that truth change over time, right? Can I develop my own process, my pause, my own internal [00:58:00] discretion? Can I sit on a truth before I determine perhaps that it's the truth that, right, has value for the public that I wanna share it with, or my friends that I wanna tell it to, or whomever.

[00:58:11] Nicole Lepera: But I think, again, in this world of immediate urgency, where very few of us have our own boundaries or ability to kind of calm ourself down and shift out of our own moment to allow someone else to be in our moment, I think it's really interesting to consider the way, right, publicly living and truth-telling and authenticity is going to be living, uh, until again, we develop these capacities in our body to get really clear on what is our truth.

[00:58:38] Nicole Lepera: What is my intention for sharing this? And to then share it in a calm, regulated, grounded moment, not just sharing it, right, because each moment my truth changes in whatever direction it is that I'm feeling.

[00:58:49] Luke Storey: Totally. That's great. That's great insight. I was having a conversation with Allison about this the other day in terms of E- especially I think this, you know, having the [00:59:00] patience and, uh, discretion, as you said, for people that have powerful innate gifts, right?

[00:59:07] Luke Storey: Like my wife being one of them. I mean, she can just meet someone for two seconds and basically read their entire story, you know? Um, but she's very skilled at withholding what she sees unless there's consent and an invitation, right? She might come home and talk to me about it, you know, and I, I'm, I can hold space for that, right?

[00:59:28] Luke Storey: But she's not going to, like, go into someone's field without permission and start coaching them or giving them feedback or giving her opinion, right? She's really re- has really good discernment and timing and patience and again, waiting for consent. And I think something, well, something that's very prevalent here in Austin in particular, 'cause there are so many wonderful coaches and coaches that teach coaches to coach coaches who coach coaches and so on.

[00:59:54] Luke Storey: God bless them, you know. Uh, you know, a lot of people doing great work, but there's, there's a kind of cultural tendency [01:00:00] here I've noticed where if I'm out in a public setting and I, you know, someone says, "How's it going on?" Because I don't like small talk, it's very boring to me, I'm gonna be real. I'll be like, "Oh, my dad just died.

[01:00:10] Luke Storey: I'm working with grief and doing this and that," right? I'm just gonna be real, depending on how well I know that person. But it's like I, I, I tend to do that less because many people who do have innate gifts that are able to see and understand people in a powerful way, um, or have experience with coaching people and so on, um, it's like they're sometimes stuck in this default where they start advising or giving feedback when I haven't opened up the dialogue for that, right?

[01:00:36] Luke Storey: I'm just, just kinda going, "Oh, you asked how I am. Here's how I am." So I've kind of had to learn like, "Hey, I'd like to share something with you, and just right now I'm not looking for your feedback You know, and just set the table that way. And, and if you're open to just listening for a minute, that would be great, and if not, that's great too, right?

[01:00:53] Luke Storey: But it's, it-- I think this is something that would serve us to become more aware of, is what you're speaking to around just timing, [01:01:00] discernment, knowing how to finesse so that we can, we can be authentic and vulnerable and really communicate in ways that are in service of the highest good without causing harm.

[01:01:11] Luke Storey: You know, I think sometimes this tendency of truth-telling, which is largely positive, can land the wrong way if it's not done thoughtfully and intentionally. So this is something, you know, I'm always kind of trying, trying to work on myself, but it seems to be a bit of a double-edged sword in the era that we're in now, as you said, you know, living out loud, where people are sitting on the toilet, you know, live streaming their, their life story or giving people advice that they haven't asked for, and so on.

[01:01:36] Luke Storey: So it's, it's a funny sort of intersection in time, uh, that we find ourselves in right now.

[01:01:41] Nicole Lepera: Absolutely. And I know I've even seen over the kind of trajectory of now some quite long-term friendships especially that I've carried, um, we, we can, kind of the other side of this, become, and we are as humans, very self-focused when we are stressed out, overwhelmed, right?

[01:01:59] Nicole Lepera: When we're [01:02:00] either going through something for a season, when we're carrying trauma with us from our childhood. And what I'm sharing about is I remember throughout my 20s, I was a very selfish friend to the extent where, especially if I just had an argument with a partner usually was the stress or something was happening with my family, it was so hard for me to went out, you know, for dinner or drinks with whomever I was out with To care or to ask them about themselves because all I could think about, right, and I was so overwhelmed by what I was going through, right?

[01:02:32] Nicole Lepera: And now in a world way where some of us are always, you know, sharing what it is that we're thinking about. And so I do think that there can be a self-focus again that happens not only with our own stress, trauma, the season that we're on. You know, if we are used to always being the one sharing about ourselves, you know, giving helpful information, coaching others, then I think sometimes we can forget, right?

[01:02:56] Nicole Lepera: Another theme that you and I have been kind of talking about dancing around is like forget that someone [01:03:00] else is here, has needs, has a different perspective, right? Might benefit from you asking or being curious about them in their life. So the biggest thing that I've seen shift in my, all of my relationships is, as I've got more grounded and regulated in my body, I've been able to be a more collaborative, interested, curious friend to other people.

[01:03:20] Nicole Lepera: I have had very, you know, emotional conversations of repair with some long-term friendships where I essentially apologized, "Hey, thanks for sticking around, still being here with me in this season because I know that I didn't have much to give to you, you know, at certain periods of my life." And so again, I think that the more resourced we become, the more then we can actually truly serve, whether it's the people in our personal relationships or again, the more publicly faced business that we're, we're interested in.

[01:03:48] Luke Storey: That's such a good point to bring up. It reminds me of a, uh, a passage in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. There's a, a point at which it says, to paraphrase, um, you know, it's talking about the, the [01:04:00] process of the 12 steps and what we stand to benefit from applying them in our lives and so on. At one point it says, "We lose interest in selfish things, and we become interested in other people."

[01:04:09] Luke Storey: And I remember years ago reading that and like, "Oh my God, I, I don't-- I'm totally disinterested in anyone other than myself and my own drama," right? It was like, "Whoa, that sounds really cool. How do you do that?" And so it, it's something that, uh, you know, has, I think, come to fruition just on its own from, from, you know, a, a lot of years of practice.

[01:04:28] Luke Storey: But it, it also, if you're someone who is working toward a more collaborative joint effort of any kind of relationship, it becomes much more tedious when someone is really wrapped up in their, in themselves, right? It's just, it's just not interesting because both parties, there's like, it's like playing tennis and only one person has the racket.

[01:04:50] Luke Storey: You know, it's just like, it's, it's not that much fun, uh, to be in those kind of social dynamics, you know? So I, I think it's, it's really, [01:05:00] um, it's a good goal to set to learn how to relate to people in a way in which they have space to express and you're kind of training each other how to give a bit of back and forth so you don't get stuck in, in a monologue sort of situation I find that the, the less interested I am in myself and my own drama, I am genuinely curious what makes other people tick.

[01:05:23] Luke Storey: I mean, that's why I've been doing this podcast for 10 years. I'm really interested in learning about other people because I find that's how I learn, right? Is I sit and talk to you, I get your life experience, your expertise, all the things that you've studied and taught. It's like, wow, now I can add that to my arsenal of wisdom and life experience, and that wouldn't be possible if I didn't give you space, and I probably talk way too much on my podcast.

[01:05:46] Luke Storey: I've just... I've tried to fix it, and I just can't. So it just is what it is. So sorry to people listening. There are millions of other great podcasts out there that the host asks real questions like an actual interview. But also, I feel like i- in the case of podcasts like this, [01:06:00] my expression is a really important part of my process because I, I'm trying to dance with you.

[01:06:05] Luke Storey: You know what I mean?

[01:06:06] Nicole Lepera: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:06] Luke Storey: Yes. It's like I'm not putting you up as a marionette. Like, "Go, Nicole. Show us what you can do." I'm like, "Hey, what can we do here- Yes ... that is really Deep and fun and provides a lot of value for the people listening. So I love that. It's a great way to actually kind of build social momentum in terms of, um, the way we communicate ideas.

[01:06:27] Luke Storey: Someone listening might, like, not relate with anything I say, and they're 100% on board with you 'cause we have different life experience even though we're kind of pointing toward the same direction, right? Right.

[01:06:36] Nicole Lepera: I couldn't agree more. And so when asked, so when I was preparing, right, the very small book tour that I did for this last book, um, you know, I got asked like, "Well, what do you want your events to look like?"

[01:06:46] Nicole Lepera: And so you will always hear me wanting a moderator, wanting a conversation, wanting to be in a living experience with someone else. For a couple reasons. Um, one, very selfishly, is because I'm still very scared of [01:07:00] public speaking. Um, especially if there's human eyes in front of me, sitting in what looks like a very big stadium or, you know, area, arena, I will be scared.

[01:07:08] Nicole Lepera: I will blank out. Even if I know exactly what I'm talking about, 'cause I talk about, I write about it all day long every day, the stress of, right, being in this new experience without a co-regulator next to me will make my mind go blank. I won't be necessarily- ... any good. But equally as important is the synergy that you're very beautifully talking about, Luke.

[01:07:28] Nicole Lepera: I think it's such a beautiful thing. I would probably get bored if I just memorized a speech and got really good at, you know, delivering it, then what aliveness is there, right? It can be such a beautiful synergy and co-creation experience when you, with your energy, your perspective, your mind, in this dance now creates...

[01:07:47] Nicole Lepera: Maybe I anticipated what we would talk about or I had an expectation, but it created something new entirely, and I think that is such a beautiful aspect of the work I do. I'm so grateful that I can have [01:08:00] conversations with other people, whether it was for book events or podcasts, because I think that there's such value in hearing someone else's perspective.

[01:08:08] Nicole Lepera: Even my circle, the membership, we have workshops every month, and not every month is it me. I invite outside presenters in because I'll give you my take on the, I'll put out a workbook and I'll have a teaching of that workbook workshop, but I want to some, have someone else come in. I don't wanna be a echo chamber of just my thoughts on all of these different topics.

[01:08:28] Nicole Lepera: I think there's so much value in letting in other people's thoughts. So the final thing I'm gonna end on is if you're listening and you struggle, as I once did, to be curious, to let someone else in, to be this collaborative, right, human, person, creator, whatever it is, again, there's usually something deeper going on in your body.

[01:08:46] Nicole Lepera: There's a sense of being threatened, right? Whether, as it was once for me, someone else's opinion or feedback, land it like it was me being told I'm unworthy, and so therefore, right, to, I try to explain, try to get you to see my perspective. I [01:09:00] would s- consume essentially the conversation because in that moment, feedback felt like, felt like a threat, right?

[01:09:08] Nicole Lepera: For others, it might be disagreement, but usually again, when we take the focus of a conversation or of an interaction away, or we become self-focused, usually it's because something's happening in our body similar again to what once happened that is communicating that lack of safety, whether it's physically I'm unsafe because the volume is getting louder of this person and they're starting to yell at me in a way that's making me feel physically unsafe or emotionally unsafe

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[01:11:06] Luke Storey: So you're not just enhancing your appearance, you're investing in your future self. piquetea.com/luke Beautiful. Tell me about your book you've got behind you for those watching the video, Reparenting the Inner Child. And, um, I'll preface it by saying I think I've mentioned to you before we were recording that I covered that concept a little bit in, in, uh, my recent book here.

[01:11:31] Luke Storey: And it's funny because when I first heard that term, it was when I was in, uh, therapy in the '80s when I was a teenager. And since then, I don't, you know, and I don't know if it really had any value at the time 'cause I was too young to probably grasp what it meant. But since then, I've always kind of looked at that model as kind of an outdated boomer '80s kind of pop psychology thing until I had direct experiences over the past few years where I actually met and made [01:12:00] contact with the inner child within me, and I was, I was proven very wrong.

[01:12:04] Luke Storey: It's a v- it's, in my experience, a very real thing and a very, very useful-- I mean, I don't know how someone could go through their life without some understanding and, of that relationship. And one of the keys for me has been, I think one of the big kind of aha moments was the realization that this is gonna get kind of heady, so I'll try to ground it so that it's, you know, makes sense to you and everyone listening.

[01:12:30] Luke Storey: But the way we think about time is kind of based on being in a physical body, right? We-- 'Cause there would be no time if there was no sun. If there was no light, there'd be no time. There's this eternal presence, I guess you could say, or an eternal now. So I think where I lacked the value in that concept in doing any work in terms of the inner child was that I was locked into this paradigm of linear time wherein five-year-old me is gone, doesn't exist anymore, so how can I possibly get back [01:13:00] there to 1975?

[01:13:01] Luke Storey: Like, it's gone. We're in this year, right? And through various experiences I've had, I've come to understand, um, in a very embodied and real way that every single version of me that's ever been, probably before I was even this person in this lifetime, but let's just leave reincarnation out, that from the moment, you know, that spark happened in the womb, um, I started life and, and every iteration of me is still part of my experience in my body, my mind, my emotional body, my aura, spirit, higher self.

[01:13:35] Luke Storey: The whole thing is one thing, and it's not limited by time, and approaching this kind of concept or model from that angle has made it so completely revolutionary to me and just opened it up to, uh, infinite possibilities in terms of what I can do there. So it's not like I'm walking around every day going, "Okay, little Luke, you're okay," but just really embracing and honoring those [01:14:00] different versions of me that were, were injured at different times in life, even into, you know, adolescence, teens, and every moment until now, basically.

[01:14:10] Luke Storey: And so it's, it's been extremely useful for me once I was able to kind of take the time element out of it and just acknowledge the fact that the way we experience time is very limited because it's based on perception and the senses of our body. So that's my little, you know, um, setup for the inner child.

[01:14:31] Luke Storey: Um, I'm excited to hear kind of how you approach this book, what meaning the inner child, what value it's had in your own life, people that you work with, people that you teach. Give me the whole rundown.

[01:14:43] Nicole Lepera: So for me, similar to, to the way you kind of have evolved with your understanding of what inner child is, when I really started to understand how our earliest environments quite literally shape our body, our nervous- our sensations, our survival-driven responses, the way our nervous [01:15:00] system encodes and experiences life around us, I too, you know, heard of inner child.

[01:15:05] Nicole Lepera: It's been talked about through the ages in different ways, but couldn't really grasp, like, how it was that we were carrying that impact until, again, I began to understand of the foundational ways that our nervous system is still forming well throughout our 20s, and as we were talking about earlier, all of the different spheres of influence from not only our relationships, but our earliest environments, not only in our lifetime, but of course, in past lifetimes.

[01:15:31] Nicole Lepera: And now I have a much more kind of biologically driven understanding of what the inner child is for all of us. It's, again, the part of us that learned to cope earliest in life, how to manage stress, unpredictability, conflict, how to get our needs met to the best of our ability. And again, in childhood, before we had language, like I was sharing earlier, before we had logic, all we had were the sensations and again, this very survival-driven area of our brain, which is the first [01:16:00] to form, which is why so many of us, even if we have an idea of what happened in our childhood and we don't think we should need to look back or we don't wanna look back, or maybe you're like me, I struggle to recall a lot of the narrative or the story of what happened to me, yet our inner child, like you were beautifully describing wisely, right, it's in us.

[01:16:19] Nicole Lepera: It's in us in those moments where, like we've been talking about throughout, our body seemingly takes over. We feel a sense of urgency, right? We're overwhelmed by a feeling, and it's not until later that we calm down and we have a different perspective or experience of that moment. And for a lot of us, it becomes wrapped in even the identities that we repeat, that we come to associate with just who we are, right?

[01:16:44] Nicole Lepera: We're the overachiever and that's just who I have always been. But for a lot of us, we take on these roles. If in childhood, right, we weren't given the sense that we were enough by just being who we are, and if you were given, like me, very c- direct and indirect cues [01:17:00] of, right, the areas where I had to be enough, academically and athletically, and then Right?

[01:17:04] Nicole Lepera: That became even an identity driven coping mechanism for, again, an unmet need of not feeling worthy in childhood, right? Others become the caregiver and that's just who I am in the world. I don't know m- myself outside of this role. But again, when we had to maintain connections early in life, often a lot of us are repeating roles and patterns, especially in our relationship, that were based in those earliest needs for comfort and connection.

[01:17:32] Nicole Lepera: So when we understand this, I think now we have a new language for some of these reactive moments or maybe just the general, right, identities and patterns that are carrying us through our day to day. But then, of course, we can begin a journey of re-parenting, right, creating some more adaptive habits in some of those areas so that we can actually create the change that we kind of began talking about.

[01:17:54] Nicole Lepera: Showing up differently in moments that will better serve me.

[01:17:58] Luke Storey: Beautiful. Uh, [01:18:00] I remember for, uh, long periods of my life, if I looked at photos of myself at different ages, it would cause me a lot of pain. You know, because so many of those things were still kind of left just, you know, rotting in the, in the recesses of my mind and so on.

[01:18:17] Luke Storey: Um, I have a much different experience today looking at pictures, right? It's like I s-- I, I could see the wound and I know the ages at which things happened, right, in life, 'cause m- when my mom sends me, like, childhood photos, there's always the age on the back. And I go, "Oh, eight? Oh, shit, eight was a doozy," or whatever, right?

[01:18:35] Luke Storey: You know, and feel a sense of sadness. But I, I think that the inner child, um, idea has become much more... I don't know. It's a safer place for me to explore knowing the framework that I kind of have for it now. When I look at those photos, it's like I can acknowledge the pain, but I also know that The, the real, uh, the essence of who that person is in the picture is the same essence that I carry [01:19:00] now, and there was, there was always innocence, there was always love.

[01:19:04] Luke Storey: Um, there were always all of these beautiful qualities within that little guy, and the only difference between me and the pure part of that is that there are still some things in the way of, of, of accessing that and operating in my life from that. So rather than being, like, triggering because of memories, it's more aspirational and inspirational because I go, "Ah, he actually had it down before he got programmed by all the experiences in life."

[01:19:32] Luke Storey: So it's like there's nothing to go back there and fix. It's actually that was the original template, and it just, it got some dings and bumps and scrapes along the way, some of them pretty substantial, and that's what I've been spending my time for the past many years, um, working on, right? Is cleaning those things up and healing those things.

[01:19:48] Luke Storey: But that little guy is, like, still there, and that's, that's the gold, man. That's where the real value is, is contacting that part of ourselves and, and embracing that and giving it what it [01:20:00] needs, right? I think in the work you do around communication, I mean, thinking in romantic partnership, just speaking from a place of self-awareness.

[01:20:10] Luke Storey: When you have two self-aware embodied adults that might be emotionally triggered, but they have enough distance from their past and enough understanding where conflict can be resolved relatively easy 'cause you both realize you're just two wounded little kids going to battle. Uh, that's, like, all that's happening.

[01:20:28] Luke Storey: You know? So, like, what if I could just... We're having an argument. What if I can just see past the persona and all the shit that you're carrying and all the shit I'm carrying, just go whoosh, zoom right down into the core essence of who you are? It's like all of a sudden our problems, whatever we're discussing, it's silly.

[01:20:42] Luke Storey: It's like, "What? This is so dumb You didn't make me feel any way when you said X, Y, and Z. When you said X, Y, and Z, wow, interesting. I noticed this feeling of rage enter my body and I started getting sweaty. You know what I mean? It's like that kind of perspective I think is [01:21:00] really important and much easier to attain when we identify that there are these different iterations of ourself that are, that are still with us.

[01:21:07] Luke Storey: It's like they're not gone in time. They're, they're just waiting to be kind of acknowledged and embraced.

[01:21:13] Nicole Lepera: And I think the reality for a lot of us is even those of us well into our adulthood, the reality I think is, is we don't fully maybe know how to be with our emotions, how to process our emotions, especially when I hear you say a word like rage, right?

[01:21:28] Nicole Lepera: I think that we're very ill-equipped as a society, right? While we come wired to have emotional experiences of the world around us, right? We don't necessarily have the handbook, and as I was saying earlier, very few of us were raised with emotionally attuned, aware parents who could understand, navigate their own emotions in a healthy, adaptive way.

[01:21:49] Nicole Lepera: So I think, you know, a lot of us are kind of waking up, learning new relationships with our bodies and our emotional systems, and yet we now have to figure out healthier ways to [01:22:00] be with a very natural emotion like anger A very difficult, heavy emotion like grief, right? These are things that again, I don't think we're very practiced.

[01:22:09] Nicole Lepera: I don't think we had the models or the safe spaces to help us figure out, okay, well, if this emotion's supposed to be good, what do I do with it, right? How do I sit in the discomfort of what it is? How do I channel the mobilization of energy that comes with anger, not in a way that can be aggressive or hurting of someone else outside of me, but in a way that will inspire me to create the boundary or the action that anger, right, is usually stimulated in service of.

[01:22:38] Nicole Lepera: Same thing with grief, right? As we get older and we begin to lose loved ones and parents and, right, talk about a core wound being opened again at the loss of a parent, right? And all of this inner child wounding now comes up in general, and for the grief of the relationship that you'll never now have the opportunity to rebuild with this parent, right?

[01:22:56] Nicole Lepera: And grief is another one of those emotions that I think some [01:23:00] cultures do a way better job than I think we do here in the West. We don't know how to be with our sadness and our grief, and for a lot of us, right, it's those emotions that we're still trying to figure out more adaptive relationships for that usually then become the reactive point, right?

[01:23:17] Nicole Lepera: I do the thing that I don't mean to do when I'm angry, and I end up hurting someone that is very meaningful to me, or I disconnect myself from connection when I'm suffering loss or grief when those are the moments where I need to allow my grief to be observed or held by someone else.

[01:23:32] Luke Storey: Oh, that's so true.

[01:23:34] Luke Storey: So many of our adaptations, uh, make things so much worse. It's like, it's crazy to me to think about, like, the way that we typically deal with uncomfortable emotions, uh, many of us at least, um, only reinforce what we're trying to escape and not feel. It's, it's a funny sort of catch-22 in the human design that we're wired that way.

[01:23:57] Luke Storey: Um, another thing that came up for [01:24:00] me was, you know, when you're talking about how we're culturally ill-equipped, at least in the West, I'm assuming you're speaking to, um, with grief. It's like we've, we've shrouded and compartmentalized birth and death. Right, birth trauma, I mean, that's when this whole story starts for many of us.

[01:24:20] Luke Storey: Don't have time to get into all its permutations, but I know for me and many other people, when you start to dig into your past, it leads you all the way back to the first day, and then death, you know, is put away in the morgue, in the funeral home, and, you know, the, the whole thing, the bookends of human life today, at least in this culture, are just so unwilling and unable to embrace those deeply valuable, meaningful, um, transitions.

[01:24:48] Luke Storey: It's, it's wild to me, and it was really apparent to me when my dad died last year. I realized I've never really felt grief like that, at least. Like, what do you even do with this? You [01:25:00] know what I mean? And one thing I've found, and I'm curious what your experience is, and I know we're almost out of time here, um, grief to me is so interesting as an emotion because it's like the muse almost, you know, for creatives listening.

[01:25:14] Luke Storey: It's like there's this thing you tap into, and it sort of exists in the ethers, and it comes in when it wants, and you can invite it in, but it doesn't always come when you wanna dance, and it's there though, right? And grief to me is, is a very similar experience. It's, it's something that just seems to be on its own schedule, its own rhythm.

[01:25:33] Luke Storey: I mean, I could sit down-- When my dad died, I did kind of that exposure therapy thing I was referring to, for lack of a better term. You know, I watched videos of him. I sat in the hospital till the moment he died. You know, look, I have pictures of him all over my wall. I didn't wanna stuff those feelings. I really wanted to embrace the richness of that experience and figured, oh, after the first, you know, couple months of really feeling it a lot and having that very present, I thought, "Eh, the well's empty.

[01:25:58] Luke Storey: I guess I'm good." You know? It's like, [01:26:00] oh man, it'll just be random Tuesday. I'm driving down the road, and I just start bawling, you know? It's really, really interesting. It, it seems like grief, it's just one of those things that needs to sort of, I don't know, it needs to sort of be just given space and allowed to express when it feels it's appropriate because it seems something we have very little control of.

[01:26:22] Luke Storey: What, what is your take on grief, you know, whether from your work or your own subjective experience?

[01:26:28] Nicole Lepera: I think grief, like m- all emotions, right, they We attach, we associate, let me put this this way, with lived experiences, right, with the emotion that was, you know, activated at the time of. So all emotions, right, will come back up.

[01:26:44] Nicole Lepera: This is kind of what we've been talking about when we're talking about the inner child, right? Seemingly I'm going about my day and, oh, someone doesn't text me back, and in that silence, right, I have anger, right, fear, worry. Where is this person? Right? So that's how emotions work, right? An event happens. We [01:27:00] have the kind of physiological experience beneath the surface.

[01:27:02] Nicole Lepera: The more consistently those events are paired together, the more now a similar thing in the future activates the emotion beneath it. And so with that said, right, grief, you know, especially something like loss, right, and all the different ways that... Because now it's not just the loss of the person necessarily, right?

[01:27:20] Nicole Lepera: You don't necessarily be thinking about death in a moment, like, "Oh, right, I lost my mom. Let me, you know, be sad." It could be anything that associates, that's been associated with Mom for me, right? It could be the dinner that I wanna make that I remember is my mom's favorite meal, right? So now I'm thinking about Mom, and therefore, if Mom's not here, now I'm in a spiral of loss.

[01:27:41] Nicole Lepera: Or a song comes on, right? This is why music can be very healing in terms of allowing us to embody certain emotions, right? We hear a song from a particular period or that reminds me of a person and right now I'm awash with grief or anger or whatever it is that's associated, right, with that relationship or that person or [01:28:00] whatever is coming to mind.

[01:28:01] Nicole Lepera: So again, grief is similar, you know, to an emotion in that we will be going about life, and that's why it seems so inexplicable, right? We had a couple good days, good weeks. We didn't think about the person we lost, and now here it is, right? 'Cause it's their birthday, an anniversary. That commercial came on.

[01:28:16] Nicole Lepera: Really, it could be anything that happens in our life where when the association becomes When it's grief, the person, right, that is not here, the loss, the relationship, even if they're not dead, it's a relationship maybe that we're just not in anymore. Now, right, we can be in the throes of the emotion. So again, it's equipping ourselves with the ability to understand, right, when it is coming to the surface for us, to give ourself the nurturing, the care, the comfort, the support, to learning how to vulnerably maybe ask for help when we're in a moment of grief and we don't wanna be in that moment a- alone.

[01:28:53] Nicole Lepera: And again, understanding that, bringing it full circle, if we didn't have the attunement, if there wa- weren't emotions modeled in our childhood home, [01:29:00] if no one just sat down next to us and told us that it's okay that we're feeling sad about whatever it was that we're sad about, instead of telling us not to feel sad, right, then even allowing someone into our grief that we desperately know we want someone to be there for us might be the most unfamiliar and uncomfortable thing, right?

[01:29:17] Nicole Lepera: Then compounding grief, 'cause now we feel lonely and are alone in our grief, thinking about more loss, and then so the snowball continues.

[01:29:25] Luke Storey: Yeah. Asking for help is, uh, is a challenging one for some of us. Right. Me

[01:29:30] Nicole Lepera: included. I

[01:29:31] Luke Storey: know, right? When you, when you grow up kind of self-directed and independent for whatever reason, it's, it's a difficult one to break, you know?

[01:29:38] Luke Storey: Forgetting, uh, forgetting I think for me sometimes that we're doing someone else such a great service by allowing them the opportunity to be of service, right? It's like, by allowing ourselves to receive, we're giving someone else the ability to exercise their muscle of giving and getting out of themselves.

[01:29:52] Luke Storey: It's such a, a beautiful, you know, sort of trade-off with that. But it's, it's, it's hard to do if you're not really conditioned that way. [01:30:00] Uh, okay. Before we jam, uh, the show notes for those listening and watching today will be lukestory.com/holistic2. We're gonna put a link to your book, Reparenting Your Inner Child, there.

[01:30:09] Luke Storey: Uh, we'll also put links to any of your ongoing, uh, membership programs, all the things. So for people that want more of Nicole's work and life and wisdom, uh, we'll make sure that you're able to find it. Um, is the book gonna be available... Is it available already to purchase?

[01:30:25] Nicole Lepera: It's available. It's available for purchase all the ways that you would like to consume a book, whether it's Kindle, Audible, all of the major book retailers, and hopefully your favorite local retailer as well.

[01:30:35] Luke Storey: Okay. Awesome. I can't wait to read it. Your stuff is so amazing. Oh my God, such an inspiration. And kudos to you again for just the consistency with which you put out books is astonishing to me. Uh, I don't know how people do it. Uh, this one was three years for you, you said?

[01:30:49] Nicole Lepera: This one took about three years from, from start to finish.

[01:30:52] Luke Storey: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Cool. I can't wait to read it. Well, thanks again for joining me today. It's always a pleasure, always inspiring and [01:31:00] enlightening, and, uh, I'm just huge super fan over here and can't wait for people to hear this conversation.

[01:31:05] Nicole Lepera: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me back, and congratulations on your book as well.

[01:31:09] Nicole Lepera: And thank you for continuing to do what you do so many years later. I will look forward to a future opportunity, hopefully, to collaborate again.

[01:31:19] Luke Storey: What's up, friends? Glad you could hang out with me for this week's episode of The Lifestylist. If you wanna make sure you never miss a single damn thing, hit that subscribe or follow button right now, 'cause new episodes drop every Tuesday, plus the last Friday of every month, we do a raw ask-me-anything session based on your questions.

[01:31:37] Luke Storey: And here's something a lot of listeners don't know. At lukestray.com/podcast, you can search the entire back catalog. I'm talking over 600 episodes of biohacking, spirituality, healing, and straight up truth bombs. You can punch in any topic or guest you're curious about, and you'll pull up exactly what you want in seconds.

[01:31:55] Luke Storey: And hey, if today's episode moved you, share it with a friend. Text it, post it, slide [01:32:00] it into a DM, whatever. Word of mouth is how this community grows. And I've got one request for you. If you've gotten value from this show, one simple way to give back is to leave a quick rating and review. It really helps me reach new people and lets me know which episodes hit the hardest, and I can't emphasize enough how much your rating and review matters.

[01:32:19] Luke Storey: There's a reason why almost every host begs their audiences to do it, but unfortunately, most listeners don't take action. So be the one who does. Now, once you do, go back and hit up lukestray.com/podcast where you can dive into all the archives, the audio, video, show notes, and of course, transcripts. Thanks in advance for supporting the show, and until next time, be well, my friends

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