Welcome everyone. I’m your host Kristin Maxwell, and you are listening to Your SuperPowered Mind. In this show we explore the process of transformation and give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life.
Our session today is going to be extra interesting to me. We are talking to Kerri Hummingbird about Stillness Within: Connecting to Something Bigger, and I’m really excited to talk to Kerri because we’re going to be talking about building faith in something other than our mind and in the physical. And this is a path that I myself have been walking and I know that many of us who get stuck in our heads, it is partly because we don’t have this trust that we are so circling in the head. So anyway, I’m excited about this. And Kerri Hummingbird is a soul guide who inspires people to live their lives with authenticity, passion, and purpose. And in her Reinvent Yourself programs, she catalyzes mind shifts that help people to transform their life challenges into gifts of wisdom. She’s the internationally bestselling author of The Second Wave: Transcending The Human Drama, as well as the award winning bestselling book, Awakening to Me: One Woman’s Journey to Self-Love. She is the founder of the Skills, Not Pills movement, and also the host of the podcast, Soul Nectar Show. Kerri, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Thank you so much Kristin for having me on this show. I’m really delighted to be here.
I am delighted about you also too, so fun. So my first question is, what superpower did you discover as the result of mastering your mind?
My biggest superpower, and I speak in terms of earth spirituality, my studying has been, my pathway to something bigger, has been through the earth and spiritual practice there, but has been spider medicine. So spiders are really interesting creatures because they can certainly spin a web, right? They can spin a beautiful web and then they can catch some flies in it and have a nice meal. And I did not realize until I got on my spiritual journey, which was started about eight years ago, and I’m 50, that I had been practicing spider medicine my whole life in psychotherapy offices except that I was spinning a story of my life with my words. And I was trapping myself in a web of my own creation by spinning these stories with powerful emotion week after week. And then I was experiencing more of the same in my life and getting very frustrated that things weren’t changing.
It was when I woke up that I started to realize that I had spider medicine and I needed to first learn how to quiet my mind and connect with something bigger than me to do that, to get quieter and still inside. And then to learn to use my spider medicine to create beautiful things for myself and my family. So that’s been my biggest superpower is spider medicine.
That is beautiful. I love that visual of how we trap ourselves in the web of our stories. And the one thing I know, if you do any cleaning, when you go and you try to take down a spider web, those things are sticky.
They’re very clingy.
They are very clingy.
And they’re hard to see and they’re like the invisible little threads and you’re trying to get them all off of you. And it’s really hard, isn’t it?
They are. Yes. Very true. Well, so there’s one thing that I picked up on that right away. Which is, when you are a person who, you’re stuck in your stories, well maybe you don’t even know this is your reality, that this is what’s going on in your life. This is who you are. This is the way the world is. And you learned how to quiet your mind by connecting to something bigger than me. And what I want to know about, because this very much was my own path, is what happens when you don’t really believe in something bigger than you?
You know, that’s really interesting because I was not raised with religion, so I did not have a concept or training or domestication of my mind to think that there was a God that was really there for me. I didn’t have that. My mother grew up in Midwest, Texas, in the Bible belt, and she did not like some of the things she witnessed in the 60s in that paradigm, and she felt like it was a little bit, I’m talking out of both sides of the mouth, kind of thing. And so she lost her faith and she stopped going to church. And so she raised me explicitly without any, what she would call programming so that I could just find my own way. So what that did for me was it left me a huge opportunity, but it also left me feeling really strange and like, well, I don’t know what to do.
I don’t really have any understanding or belief to fall back on. And so what I noticed is I just really liked being outside, that my natural impulse was to be outside. I like to go outside. I like to hike, I like to be in nature. I like to take a nice long hike and get quiet or take a really long run to the point where you get runner’s high and then all your problems just sort of melt away and you stop thinking for once, like that moment of peace after 10 or 12 miles.
I was a runner too for a good many years.
It’s a good entry point. You know, it really is. That runner’s high is very akin to what you experience when you connect to something bigger in a non-physical way. And so the runner’s high, for me, was that my first introduction to, wow okay, I can get to this really expanded space after I’ve run for about six or 10 miles and my mind quiets down quite a bit and then I’m just too tired to think.
And then something bigger comes in and I feel a greater presence and I feel like things are going to be okay. And when I really had an experience of something bigger was after I met my first teacher in Austin, he has a drum journey circle. So drum journeys are really cool. They use the drum, the way the indigenous people use the drum. All of our ancestors had a drum way back there somewhere. So it’s something in our DNA, so when you pick up a drum or you hear drums, something ancestral gets activated within your body, it’s beyond you. It’s something bigger and that can help quiet your mind as well because they’ve actually done scientific studies on it. And the drum beat that’s used by many of the shamanic drummers, it brings your brain out of Beta state, which is the thinking mind and into Alpha and Theta States, which is the dreaming mind.
And the dreaming mind is this space of something bigger. That’s the space of your something bigger. So a lot of people just say, Oh, that’s just my imagination. Well, okay, you can call it that, but it’s a space of something bigger. So when you tune out your mind, you can start tuning in to visions inside your brain. You can tune into perceptions and feelings and your body, senses. And that’s exactly what happened to me when I began training with this teacher. And then I had a first spiritual healing from him that was just included. Now that experience of spiritual healing was very different than my experiences sitting in psychotherapy as you could imagine, right? So in psychotherapy, I was sitting there in my victim story and telling the story over and over and crying and getting really upset. And I was, essentially in the energy field, in the quantum field, I was creating a whole bunch of mass for myself.
In this case, I was lying on the floor and I thought to myself at the time, Boy, I’ve, I’ve been downgraded. Like I don’t even get a couch, I’m on the floor. But he was drumming and it quieted my mind, and my mind was still chattering. It was like, This is ridiculous. I’m on the floor. This is so stupid. Nothing’s happening. And I reminded myself, Look at Gary, why don’t you just tune in? Because he’d been telling me how to tune into my senses. Why don’t you tune into your senses and just see what happens, become curious. So I did. I said, Okay, I’m going to be curious. And the moment I decided to be curious, I actually felt a blanket of presence, of loving presence come in over my whole body. It was palpable. I could feel it. And the moment I felt that presence, my teacher stopped drumming and I went, Oh my God, there’s something hovering above me, and my teacher just kind of chuckled.
He said, You’re so sensitive. I love that. He could perceive that and he proceeded to do a healing on my heart and he pulled a lot of energy out of my heart and I could feel him doing it. There was like this, I used to have this empty aching hole around my heart and it felt really crappy, like a menstrual cramp. It really hurts when somebody says something mean. And he took that out and I, in that moment that he took it out, I realized, Oh my God, you can just take that stuff out like a splinter. Like that’s really fascinating. So I was learning at multiple levels of understanding during this healing session, and it was awakening in me and knowing probably from my ancestors, potentially from past lives where I remembered that that was possible. And it was powerful. I could feel him take the energy out and I could feel it being flicked into the little sage dish with the burning sage and you know, then he put a little crystal in my hand and, and I started weeping when he put it on my heart.
I had no idea what was in the crystal. Come to find out what was in the crystal was a little piece of my soul that was lost when I was one. So all of this was without words. There were no words, there was just a feeling and like a reaction, like a crying, of grief, and a relief and all of these feelings. I had no explanation until we talked after the session. So that was a really different experience for me than the psychotherapy because it was experiential, it was feeling and it was feeling things change. And the thing is, I’ve never had that feeling again. That aching in my heart is gone, permanently.
And that catalyzed a lot of growth. And it also catalyzed my path to become a healer, to do those kinds of healings for other people because I thought, well that works. And it’s really painful and frustrating to sit in a therapy office for 20 years and not get results. And so this is like a miracle that just happened and I want to share that miracle. So that’s my story of connecting to something bigger.
Wow. Yeah. That is beautiful. We do need to go take a break. I always hate this. Right in the middle of-
The juicy stuff.
Yeah, the juicy stuff. But when we come back, we’ll talk some more about connecting to something bigger, yourselves. And before we go, can you let people know where they can find more about you?
Absolutely. So my website is kerrihummingbird.com and there is a little game you can play called The Love Mastery Game. When you go to kerrihummingbird.com/play.
Great, we’ll be right back.
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