Tina 00:00:00 Hey, guys. Today I have a special guest on the podcast. Her name is Holly Copeland and she is a former conservation scientist turned certified human potential coach. So you would probably guess that we're going to be talking a lot about our connection to nature. She's also a neuro meditation teacher, a sound healer, and a Reiki master. I'm so excited about this conversation. I had so much fun talking to Holly, so let's get into it. You are listening to the Soul Aligned Self-care podcast. I'm your host, Tina Stenson, and I had a stroke at the age of 39 from stress and burnout that shook my world. Now I'm laying it all out. The deep level self-care practices and mindset shifts that I needed that kept me healthy, balanced, and thriving. Join me in this intimate space as we explore healing, resilience, and a soul's journey to alignment. This is where real conversations about deep level self-care happen. Let's get into it. Hello and welcome to the Soul Aligned Self-care podcast. Welcome, Holly.
Tina 00:01:19 How are you doing today? I'm so.
Holly 00:01:21 Great. Tina, thank you for having me on.
Tina 00:01:23 Yeah, I'm excited about our conversation today, and I kind of want to go right into it because we talked a little bit before we hopped on here. And you're writing a book called Inner Rewilding, and I am very excited to hear about this because it sounds very interesting. If you could tell us a little bit about it. Sure. Well.
Holly 00:01:43 I feel like in order to set the stage for the book, I just have to explain a little bit of where that comes from. And so it comes from my background as a conservation scientist. so I'm in my mid 50s and I used to work at the Nature Conservancy and was in ecology. So I thought that I would be an ecologist for my whole life because I care so deeply about the planet. And I have such, you know, close connections with nature. And I hit my mid 40s and about six years ago. And in that a bunch of things shifted for me.
Holly 00:02:22 But one was a sense of burnout, a sense of feeling like, God darn it, it's never going to be okay. Like there's never going to be enough money, time, resources on this planet to fix all of the problems. And that sense of hopelessness had really set in to my being. and I just recognized that there was a lot of sadness around humanity. What we're doing for the planet. Yeah, right. Feeling like. Yeah. Like, how is how are we ever going to come into a place of true well-being. And in that process, I ended up, I ended up actually steering towards meditation and the spiritual path. And the while I had been spiritual my whole life and read a lot of books, I had never really taken meditation seriously or really done that deep personal dive into the meditative path. And I met a meditation teacher, and I did a course, and I started meditating a couple hours a day. And in that work, I also started working with some plant medicines as well.
Holly 00:03:32 So the two are actually happening side by side. And in, in that work, what I came to see and understand was that in order to see the beauty in the outside world, it's really an inner job of seeing the beauty inside. And that I had to alchemiya this sadness and pain that I felt for the world. And it wasn't about trying to fix the world. It wasn't me needing to do more. A better Holli doing a better job at being an environmentalist, or convincing others to be a better do a better job that my mission actually became. That this is actually an inner work issue for humanity, and that I'm best served by helping humans, you know, awaken to who we are inside, to awaken to our own nature as peace, as love, as joy. And that when we do that for ourselves, we will actually create the world that we long to see because we see the world as it's been said, we see the world as we are, not as it is right that everything is subjective.
Holly 00:04:40 And.
Tina 00:04:43 let me just stop you there because I want to ask you a question. So do you mean that if you bring this inner peace into yourself, that then the then everything resonates into that inner peace together because everything's all connected. Is that sort of like what you're saying?
Holly 00:04:58 That is sort of what I'm saying.
Tina 00:04:59 Okay, yes.
Holly 00:05:00 And actually what I discovered, what what happened for me was that the world became more beautiful, literally like like the world. I would describe it as prior to this work. It was like I would be walking around in my daily life, and it was as though there was like film on the window that made everything kind of look cloudy. There was an inner unsettled, you know, sense of hopelessness and that colored the whole world and the beauty. When I did this work, all of a sudden I recognized that the world itself looked much more beautiful than it ever had before. And what I now, what I My work in the world now is to help others.
Holly 00:05:55 Our eyes, our their pain, their despair, their sadness, to add or shift or transform that, because we create everything as a mirror of what we're experiencing or feeling. Right.
Tina 00:06:11 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what we focus on always expands too. So just changing the focus and looking at the beauty and the love. And then you automatically will start to. That's what you'll start to see. That's what will be in front of you. So that that's such a beautiful, such a beautiful thing to be doing. I love that.
Holly 00:06:36 Thank you. Thank you. And and what I also discovered was that it when our when when we become full with this sense of beauty and we heal our own inner pain. We also fill our cup, and so we feel that we can actually go into the world. And as a you know, it's like we spread the beauty and the love that we feel and we create more beauty and love wherever we go. So we become the solution that we're seeking.
Holly 00:07:09 we don't ask. We don't ask others to, to do it. You know, before we've done it ourselves. I really believe this is the way that we change the world. And so we don't look further than our own pain. I mean, my whole life as an environmentalist was like being really furious.
Tina 00:07:32 I yeah, I can imagine all.
Holly 00:07:35 Of the problems, you know, all the people who are cutting down trees or whatever. Of course they're you know, we're all part of the quote unquote problem. We're all using these resources. and it's not that I believe we will shift. You know how we care for the earth and how we act and are in the world will transform into practices that are more aligned, that are more supportive of the Earth as an outcome of doing this work. I really believe that this shift is an inner process more than anything.
Tina 00:08:09 Yeah, I never thought about it that way. That but that makes total sense. It really does. So so going from that position, it's it's a very big change for you.
Tina 00:08:24 It's huge. Yeah, absolutely.
Holly 00:08:26 It's like yeah. It was like I was I mean it's like I was trying to rewild the world as the, you know, as the external. And that's why it's called inner rewilding, because I realized that it's about the inner. It's really we are so conditioned. We are so burdened by, you know, all of the traumas that have happened were just, I think, saddled with all of this conditioning. And it's an untamed thing, you know, of all of that, where we free ourselves from all of our burdens. And in doing so, we actually, like I said, we get to be the solution and we get to live in a space of joy and, and celebration of how beautiful this incredible planet is. That's what I that's what I wanted, and that's what I believe. Everybody in our hearts, that's what we want to be able to celebrate. What an absolutely spectacular planet we live on.
Tina 00:09:25 Yeah. So that is a hard thing to, teach people to do.
Tina 00:09:33 Like, there's certain people who are very open to it, I believe, like myself, you know, and I but there are some people who are like, you know, probably don't believe that's something they could ever do. Like, how could we possibly, you know, get rid of all the pain. Get rid of all the the fear. There's a lot of fear, right? That's involved in that. So how does, How would you explain that you went through this yourself or. I I'm I'm assuming I probably shouldn't assume that you talk about your own experience in the book and or why. Yeah. So how do how how do you how would you talk about that the process for yourself. So I.
Holly 00:10:16 A number of different tools came into play. And a large portion of the work I do now revolves around resonance and frequency, because sound healing has played such a important part of my work. I studied as a tuning fork biofuel tuning fork practitioner and do that work and breathwork, and it keeps coming in my path.
Holly 00:10:39 It has kept coming back to frequency and vibration, and how we use frequency and vibration to transmute transform pain that it's a and the way I see it now, and my understanding is that anything we're feeling is pain. I, I'm a somatic therapist. I work with, you know, somatic. So it's about tension in the body. It's about tension in our bio energetic field or a dissonance of frequency, which is really a dissonance. And it's so we don't talk ourselves out of out of this pain. We actually will. We love ourselves out, but we love it through, through, embodied awareness and bringing frequency. We can bring the frequencies of love. We can bring understanding. There's very different techniques that I, that I use. but ultimately it's a. It's coming back into resonance with our true nature, which is already whole, perfect and complete as we are. Every single one of us is like we came in with a like a symphony playing yeah, of our like our soul song is one way I describe it, and the pain that we feel is like an out of tune note in the symphony of of your being.
Holly 00:12:08 And we can tune out of tune notes. That's something we know how to do. And now I work with Frequency Technology as another tool to help people, you know, use frequencies to clear, clear issues. Clear beliefs. I yeah, starting to use, like, oils and plants, just different. You know, it's kind of a menagerie based on what resonates with the person. But but I would say it's a resonance based approach.
Tina 00:12:41 I do, I do think frequency healing is basically the future. I when I say that to somebody who's very like scientifically, if that's a word, I might get an eye roll or something like that. But, everything that I mean, everything is vibrating, right? Everything is vibrating all the time. So how could frequencies not affect us? And they're already using frequency healing in different areas. And so I find the tuning forks so interesting. I was watching some of your videos on YouTube and tell me a little bit about the tuning forks. Like, so there's different, different I don't know what that you would call it.
Tina 00:13:25 There's different types of different sounds or different frequencies, I guess. Right.
Holly 00:13:29 Different frequencies.
Tina 00:13:30 Yeah. Different frequencies. And so how do you know what frequency is what you need. And how do you how do you know what to use and what's going to help somebody? Yeah, that's a really.
Holly 00:13:41 Really beautiful question. and I just want to I'm in part because you said you think frequencies are the medicine of the future. And I want to just impart my very favorite quote from Albert Einstein. He said, future medicine will be the medicine of frequencies.
Tina 00:13:57 Oh, really?
Holly 00:13:58 Yeah, he really did.
Tina 00:13:59 Like he really said that. So that's really cool.
Holly 00:14:02 I find it so fascinating that, like, basically the most famous scientist in all of Western history said that. And respected scientists said that. So he must have known something. You know, he I think we we don't need to argue that he was a smart guy. Yeah. he must have known something pretty interesting about frequencies to have said that.
Holly 00:14:24 So I am 100% agree with you on that. I think that's the Watson of the future as well. And to answer your question, there are different ways. So I'm working with frequencies in different ways. And sometimes when I work with tuning forks, there are I work with about 12 different forks that do different things, but I bring them into the field and I can feel where there's a dissonance in somebody's field in biofuel tuning, and we can release it. We don't need to match an exact frequency with that work. We can bring a fork like a 174. That's, a Schumann resonance. And it, it will or sorry, esophageal frequency and it will it has the ability to transmute or transform dissonant energies. And we have a, you know, some different forks do different things, different frequencies and sub one, you know, one fork might be more supportive at releasing trauma, and another fork is more, able to bring coherence.
Tina 00:15:33 For Okay. Okay. So.
Holly 00:15:37 with that work, it's intuitive of, like, what feels like will work in this.
Holly 00:15:43 It's a it's a deeply intuitive kind of knowing and experiential knowing.
Tina 00:15:47 Yeah. And I assume you also take into consideration what the person is going through and what they come to you for. So that's, it's very interesting. I really do. I do. put on frequency music when I want my dog to just. Well, I used to have two dogs. One of them passed away, so, like, they would get, like, amped up. And if I needed to do work, I would put, like, something on the on the television and put it, you know, at a comfortable level. And I swear my dogs would just be like out, just like out. And I'm just like, this works. This totally works. So. Yeah. I, I, I, I've been definitely more interested in it, but I haven't, like, I haven't taken the, you know, haven't gone down the rabbit hole yet. And so tell me a little bit more. Going back to the inner rewilding.
Tina 00:16:38 So go back into your, you know, your experiencing moving through that yourself.
Holly 00:16:45 Yeah. So my ex so there are I mean, I just need to explain what came to me. It was a bit of a, I guess a download, people might call it that. Yeah. was these kind of for these arcs of these four paths of, that I, I explain in the book or like mandalas, like the first one awakened to peace. which is, which is in the, it's in the direction of the East. And that's really that first recognition that we're not our thoughts, we're not we're awareness itself. I don't know how much non-dual practices and meditation you've done, but that fundamental recognition that our nature is peace. Right. And that understanding from that understanding opens up a space. But what I felt in my journey was that that was incredibly, I mean, awakening to awareness or to peace and to recognize that I wasn't my thoughts and to really practice that was absolutely life changing for like 100%, because it detached me from the small self that was felt like it always had to struggle to control life.
Holly 00:17:54 Right.
Tina 00:17:54 I think that's very hard to do. It may be like simple, but I think it's hard to do to actually.
Holly 00:18:00 Yeah, yeah, I mean, it it, it, you know, I think it is and it isn't. I don't think we can make it happen, but we can keep setting up the conditions for it. We can keep practicing. Yeah. Yeah. and what I felt was that there was a bit of a that that awareness based practice where we recognize that, like, I am the space in which everything occurs. Can feel a little vacant or empty. I mean, Tibetans actually call it emptiness. And I really was aching to feel the fullness. And that then when I started to. The next phase of inner rewilding is a tuning, a tuning to like this cosmic dance that's happening here and, and really make space for the prana, for the energetic flow. And consciously attuning to that. And when I did that more a lot. It's like more aliveness came through.
Holly 00:19:03 So there that became like a really important element that I started to understand. That for me, wasn't just about awakening to the empty space of awareness, but it was about attuning to this, these frequencies of nature that are playing, that we're we're literally bathed in every single day.
Tina 00:19:25 So it was like bringing your awareness to that. Is is that what you mean?
Holly 00:19:29 It is by bringing awareness that. So, it's like starting to be very conscious about tuning into both, you know, the ground, the trees, the birds, the bees that like, just the different frequencies that are here supporting us in every moment, you know?
Tina 00:19:53 Yeah. All you have to do, like, I watch my dog all the time when I walk her outside, and there's so much more tuned in to that kind of stuff. And my dog in particular is very, very sensitive to the wind. And so where I live, there's like a lot of trees and before the wind actually, like, hits me, you could hear it coming like, so like you could, you could hear like this swishy noise coming.
Tina 00:20:17 It sounds like something's coming towards you. And then you could see the tops of the trees moving and you could see her energy. I don't know why she's so sensitive to the wind, but she's crazy with the wind. And she. Her energy is building as the wind is coming towards her. And then it reaches. It reaches us, and she just. She just explode. She's so excited. So like, I can I, I try, I definitely when I go on walks with her, I'm definitely she makes me more aware of those energies for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Holly 00:20:49 Because they're so attuned to it as you're, as you're pointing out, you know, or going and hugging a tree or touching a tree, like really actually spending more time, allowing the frequencies of nature to support us.
Tina 00:21:03 You know? Oh, yeah. Grounding. Yeah.
Holly 00:21:05 Grounding, for example, would be, you know, a really important practice. and, you know, you can you could even talk about it in something as simple as the food we eat, too, like tuning in right to the frequencies of the food we eat and even Human beings starting to think about food energetically, vibrationally and less like the kind of way we do it, you know, with proteins and carbohydrates and fats, but like the color and the texture and the, the vibrational nature of food.
Holly 00:21:40 How alive is it? I mean, we're we eat so much dead food.
Tina 00:21:45 We really do. If you are a gardener and you grow your own food, you could definitely like I grow my own food. And so in the summer, I'm eating all my food from the garden. And then in the winter, when I have to go to, you know, the grocery store and it's it's, it's horrible. I can't I can't think of a better word. Yeah. It's horrible. Oh my God. So yeah, I'm definitely tuned into that also. Yeah. And and also there's a it's very rewarding growing your own food. So there's, there's not just the, the energy from the food and how fresh it is. And but there's also just like, how cool is it that, you know, I planted the seed and it's made, you know, 20 tomatoes from one seed. How cool is that? You know. Exactly.
Holly 00:22:33 And it really also tunes us into the abundance of the planet, like.
Holly 00:22:37 This was something else that I just want to pause and talk about scarcity, because one of the things I recognized as that was that I was caught in when I was in this environmental space, was that all I saw was the lack. All I saw was the scarcity, the the not enough syndrome. And this work really asked me to focus on the abundance and see the abundance that's here. And like nature refuses you know, the ocean refuses. No rivers. The earth in every moment is actually giving back to us no matter what we do to her. She's like, you know, I'm thinking of like a seed going through the pavement. You know, she's always regenerating naturally, and we really don't focus on that. We tend to focus on the lack side or the chaos side of the equation. You know where I believe like this fact that we were taught that it's like a dead, inert universe and with randomness like that's the, that's the story of Western science view of nature as opposed to this.
Holly 00:23:46 You know, if you talk about the alive, animate ordered universe, you know, they think you're sort of like a pagan freak.
Tina 00:23:52 Yeah. Well who cares? Right. Okay. What they think?
Holly 00:23:59 Well, I care what they think. And, you know, I mean, I just, I know from the work that I do and from also we could talk about the emerging quantum physics and quantum field that, that that's just nonsense making that that there is plenty of evidence that actually we live you know, David Bohm Boehm. For people who don't know David Baum and his incredible quantum physics work, you know about the implicate order and that we live in this beautiful, ordered, intelligent universe. And so that story fundamentally changes everything from scarcity into lack, into order, into wholeness. So it's merging into wholeness, right?
Tina 00:24:39 I feel like the easiest way to look for abundance is to look at nature. I think that's for me, that's the easiest way to to get out of scarcity mode and into an abundance mode, because nature and that's and I'm very spoiled that way because of where I live.
Tina 00:24:55 I live in, you know, in the middle of nature. Really. I, you know, it's very it's not very populated where I live. And I would imagine it would be harder to see that if you were in a city and not really seeing the abundance of nature every day, but just, you know, just me watching the birds and, you know, growing the garden, doing the garden work and constantly walking in nature. You see how abundant nature is. It's absolutely amazing. And so that's always I feel like that's one of the easiest ways for me to get back into abundance.
Holly 00:25:28 Exactly. Yes yes, yes. It's so agree. So this harmonizing back with nature, you know, through through attuning. And then we could even talk about the ancient tools like drumming and dancing and these things that, attune us to the rhythm, you know, the heartbeat of the earth. You know, she actually has a frequency 7.83Hz. And what we know, if you look at, like, ancient drumming practices, is they actually bring humans into resonance with the 7.83Hz with the heartbeat of the Earth.
Tina 00:26:02 That's interesting.
Holly 00:26:03 Right? Like, we're designed to actually be in resonance with the Earth's frequency.
Tina 00:26:11 And so many of us aren't because we're inside all day. They were wearing rubber shoes where, you know, we're just we're staring at screens all day and we're not spending that much time in, in nature. So we're so disconnected with it.
Holly 00:26:24 Exactly. And then we wonder why we feel crappy.
Tina 00:26:27 Yeah. Yeah.
Holly 00:26:30 You know, and it is that I think that that disconnection, that that is so key is really to me rewilding is like a reconnection. and, but I want to emphasize that it's, it's inner work. It's not just outer work because if we, if we continue the outer work supports the inner work, they go together. But we still have to look inside at whatever energetically we're holding in terms of scarcity, lack that is creating the outer. and that's where the third step allowing. So we have awaken attune. And then the third step is allow. And allow is really allowing the flow of life to happen, which is releasing our bound up energy and.
Tina 00:27:20 And.
Holly 00:27:21 Coming into kind of acceptance. It's really the surrender in the spiritual text.
Tina 00:27:26 And not controlling. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I have trouble with that stuff I think I definitely do. Yeah I definitely like and I, and I definitely, I actually have, I had did a podcast I don't know I think it was like two weeks ago and it was about allowing yourself to just be. And what happens when you do that. And I, I shared a story of how I was just I was just having a day and it wasn't going well. And when I'm having a day like that and I'm not feeling great, it's just not good for me to do what my work because I'm working with people who are stressed out and anxious, and so I have to be in the right energy. Right? So I was like, oh, I'm just going to go out in the garden and I'm just going to leave my phone inside and I'm going to just go in the garden, just get dirty.
Tina 00:28:13 Right. And so I did that. And then I came in and I sold, like I came in to an email of someone who just bought one of my programs. And like, all this, like, all these good things happen and I'm just like, see, when you just allow yourself to be and you're just and stop holding on so tight to things and and trying to control the outcome all the time. Things just kind of flow. You create that space for things to happen. But when you're trying to control, like the things that are supposed to flow in, it's almost like you're blocking it, you know, 100%.
Holly 00:28:45 I think we are what control is like a a tension. And yeah, energy doesn't move through, you know, flow where there's tension that's the opposite. So we the practice has to be to really allow release let go. And the word here that is coming up for me is trust.
Tina 00:29:06 Yes. Yeah.
Holly 00:29:07 Because I think it's really trust that is the barrier to not needing to control.
Holly 00:29:15 If I said to you like, you know, if I could wave my magic wand and say, you don't have to worry about money or where your food will come from, or time and everything, you could completely trust that the universe would take care of you. You know, my guess is you would feel much. We control because we feel like we can't trust that those things are coming.
Tina 00:29:36 Exactly. Yeah. And I think it's a, it can be with many people. I think it could be a little bit of like a trauma response, you know, like almost like they're this need to protect themselves or something they've experienced in the past that made them feel like they weren't secure and safe or whatever. And so that's their way of trying to keep themselves safe by controlling a little bit. And it's hard to get back that trust. And that probably goes back to the first step where you have to really allow yourself to kind of move through that.
Holly 00:30:11 Yes it does. They they support each other.
Holly 00:30:14 Right. So there's some there's definitely yeah, they definitely work in a, in a in a supportive framework as it were. because when you can really awaken to peace, when you really can come into that place of the eye dissolves and there's just consciousness, it's just this then, you know, in that sense, you know, everything is and will be okay. It's all, it's all okay.
Tina 00:30:44 Well I, I, I really I love, I love the steps, I love the whole I can't wait to read it. I'm very excited. Thank you. I told you how much I love to read. So you know I'll be reading that book. I can't wait to get into that. Now I have it was so funny at the beginning of the podcast, I like to come up with a question for People when they come on that just something different off topic. But then I was like, oh, you know what a good question would be? What would be something that everybody could do that would support the environment? And now I see that that question has already been answered, because that's what the whole this whole conversation was about.
Tina 00:31:25 So my question that I thought I so cleverly came up with is not there anymore. So another question that I ask people that I love to just ask them if you could share something about yourself that you don't normally share, something different that most people don't know, just something. It could be something fun. Whatever you want.
Holly 00:31:47 Something different that most people don't know. I'm a real goofball.
Tina 00:31:56 I was the.
Holly 00:31:56 Weird kid in school. I tried being in the popular group, but I was rejected.
Tina 00:32:02 Me, too. Okay. Popular rejects here. All right, start a club. I know.
Holly 00:32:10 I like I yeah, I was in their group for for a very short period of time until they figured out that I was just a little bit off kilter. Yeah.
Tina 00:32:18 Well, the weird ones are the good ones, as far as I'm concerned. being normal isn't any fun whatsoever.
Holly 00:32:23 No, no. And, yeah. And I and I really embraced that now. You know, I feel like, Yeah, I, I really embrace authenticity, I guess, is what, what's coming to me right now.
Holly 00:32:40 I'm here for people who to be their fully authentic selves and be weird and wild and free, whatever that looks like. Like, I don't want to be in a milquetoast world where we're all just, like, walking around.
Tina 00:32:53 Yeah. It's so boring.
Holly 00:32:54 It's so boring. You know.
Tina 00:32:56 I love to quote I love to quote the or talk about the song from Shrek called Let Your Freak Flag fly. So there you go. Let your freak flag fly.
Holly 00:33:11 Well, now we've used the word freak twice on this podcast. Okay, that's. That's interesting. Oh, pagan freaks. And now this.
Tina 00:33:18 Oh, yes. Pagan freaks. I love pagan freaks. Those are my favorite. So.
Holly 00:33:22 Yeah. Yeah. Let me freak flag.
Tina 00:33:25 Let your freak flag fly. I think I did, I think I wrote a blog, or maybe I even titled a podcast that at one time and I thought it was going to be just, like, so popular. And it wasn't. I was just like, all right, whatever, you know? But, yeah, that my one of my children, I think it was my son watched Shrek so many times that.
Tina 00:33:47 Yeah, I know all the words to every song. So that's that's a that's a fun fact about me that nobody knows. That's a good.
Holly 00:33:54 One. Yeah.
Tina 00:33:56 Oh my goodness. it's been really fun talking to you. And I'm. I can't wait to read your book, and you'll have to let us all know when it comes out. Such a pleasure. Cool conversation. And you're a very cool lady. It was great meeting you.
Holly 00:34:11 Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. And I will just say, like, if you don't have to wait for the book to come out, I have a sub subset Substack channel and a newsletter I publish every week. And a lot of my ideas that I'm in, I talk about in the book are in my newsletter and Subtext channel. So, you know, I invite you to follow me and you can get a lot of the juice there.
Tina 00:34:35 Yes, I believe I signed up for your newsletter earlier today, and we'll definitely put a link to those in the show notes, if that's cool with you.
Tina 00:34:46 That's way cool. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Cool. So thank you again. It's been great meeting you. I appreciate you coming on. It's been a fun conversation.
Holly 00:34:56 Super fun. I really appreciate you having me on. Thanks so much, Tina.
