[00:01] Valerie Beck: Rise, Renew, reconnect.
[00:04] Welcome to from the Ashes, a podcast where every episode ignites hope and healing.
[00:09] I'm your host, Valerie Huang Beck, and I'm on a mission to help you embrace your unique potential and become the vibrant visionary you knew you were meant to be.
[00:24] Kirsten Lane: Shadows may come try to tear you apart but you're the flame that ignites.
[00:30] Valerie Beck: All right, everyone, I'm your host, Valerie Huang Beck, tuning in from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with my friend Kirsten.
[00:39] Kirsten Lane: Hello.
[00:40] Valerie Beck: And she is here to tell her from the Ashes story. And we've actually gotten the chance to know each other in the past week.
[00:47] We're no longer strangers, so that's really exciting.
[00:51] And we've been spending some really great time here together. But I actually approached Kristen when I didn't know her,
[00:57] and she has quite an extraordinary story to tell on her journey. So if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, and then I want you to dive into a time where you have had to go through considerable personal difficulty, where you've really had to reconsider,
[01:14] you know, what's going on in your life, who you are and how you were able to navigate that and find your true voice.
[01:22] Kirsten Lane: I. Okay. Hi, my name's Kirsten. I'm from the uk.
[01:25] I met Valerie at the Mindvalley conference over in Amsterdam, as she said. And I've just had the most amazing week, but we can talk about that a little bit later.
[01:36] My journey,
[01:37] really, I'm in my 50s. I'm just postmenopausal,
[01:42] and the last few years have been particularly difficult for me. But my journey,
[01:47] I suppose,
[01:49] like everybody, starts as a child.
[01:51] So long, long way back, I found life to be quite difficult, growing up in a family where perhaps my energy was different to the rest of the family's energy.
[02:03] I found myself as a youngish adult marrying a very lovely man who sadly suffers with mental illness.
[02:12] And so after the birth of my daughter, who is now 16,
[02:18] I also have a son who's 18.
[02:20] We separated and I was a single mum for about four years.
[02:26] And navigating that dynamic with their dad has been quite difficult over the years, to the extent that now they haven't seen their dad for the last four years, which is a shame, but it is what it is.
[02:39] So being a single mom, the one who's earned all the money raised, done all the raising of the children, it's all very much been on my shoulders. It's not been a co parenting situation at all.
[02:50] And so all my energy has really gone into earning the money and raising the children trying to do that as consciously as possible.
[02:59] And then after four years, the children were sort of like four and six. I guess they spotted from starting school that there is possibly something missing.
[03:11] The family, there was no dad in our home, so they encouraged me to find new relationship.
[03:17] So I did,
[03:18] which was great for a while,
[03:20] and we even got married and I had a stepdaughter, Millie,
[03:25] but sadly, that didn't work out either.
[03:29] Valerie Beck: He.
[03:31] Kirsten Lane: He became, in my mind, very controlling after we got married. And I found myself in what I felt was a very coercively controlling relationship,
[03:41] which was very difficult for my son as well.
[03:44] And it took me about 18 months eventually to find the courage to leave. That was really a difficult period for me. Maybe half a dozen times I tried to leave the relationship,
[03:56] but he pulled me back and finally my whole world was just falling apart. And I spoke to my GP and I said, you know, my hair's falling out, I'm not eating, I'm not sleeping, sleeping, I'm losing weight, I'm in such a state.
[04:10] And could this be the menopause?
[04:12] And I think a lot of those symptoms were menopausal, but I think they were very much heightened by the stress that I was under.
[04:20] And so we separated and then sadly, two,
[04:26] three months later, he took his own life.
[04:29] So that was incredibly stressful and that was literally just as we went into lockdown for Covid.
[04:37] So having to go through that journey then on my own with my kids,
[04:42] nearly. Nearly broke me. But going through that, processing that grief that I then became really quite ill. I've had Lyme disease when I was in my 20s, I had glandular fever when I was in my teenage years,
[04:56] so a lot of systemic inflammation and difficulties.
[05:01] In fact, after I had Lyme disease, I trained as an acupuncturist, because it was acupuncture that helped me out. The other side of that, I found the Western model of medicine didn't really understand how they could help me.
[05:15] And so I found.
[05:17] I found Chinese medicine. And it was amazing to me that someone actually heard me and saw me and could see what was going on. And she told me all about energy, work, and I.
[05:28] That's why I then trained as an acupuncturist.
[05:31] But going forwards,
[05:34] even though I have this knowledge of Eastern medicine, I still found myself, particularly then, having had Covid.
[05:41] Covid then just made everything ten times worse. I've been struggling with pain, particularly in my hips, my pelvis, which I. I struggled with during my pregnancies and since going through menopause that just got worse and worse and worse.
[05:54] I guess the,
[05:56] the inflammation in my body, the decrease in the estrogen.
[06:00] So the only things that the doctors could suggest was HRT because that's their go to solution for anything for the menopause. But I just couldn't tolerate the progesterone.
[06:11] My pain levels went through the roof. I was just,
[06:15] oh, it was so bad. Some days I literally couldn't get out of bed. I was in so much pain. It was one day my daughter thought I was dying because I couldn't even breathe.
[06:24] I was having such a bad panic attack, something. I simply couldn't move. I was paralyzed almost.
[06:30] Anyway, this Christmas I got to the stage where I was just on the floor, no energy. I just sat on the sofa, watched a few films and I didn't move really for two weeks.
[06:40] And I just had a moment where I felt, okay, this was a rest because I work in the film industry and the film industry doesn't stop.
[06:49] So Christmas time is a time for two weeks when the whole industry does go on hiatus. So I did manage to have a break and I just had a light bulb moment, as you said.
[07:00] That the next time I would actually have the space in my diary to have a rest was going to be July when I was going to take my daughter on holiday.
[07:09] And the thought that how on earth was I going to get from December to July with the no energy and no motivation and no drive, Even though as a single mom, I know I can't stop,
[07:21] I can't let it all disappear. I can't drop the ball.
[07:25] So I realized, okay, I can't spend my whole life wishing for a holiday.
[07:29] So I need to make sure I have a holiday every day. It needs to be the way that I live my life on a daily basis, not just a once a year or twice a year basis.
[07:40] You can't go from one stepping stone to another that's that far away.
[07:44] And that's not living, that's barely surviving, that's just clinging on.
[07:49] So I turned my day around from not being able to find five minutes even for myself. I'm very much a giver. I give my energy out. I give my energy away all the time.
[08:00] And this is my problem. This is what's making me so ill.
[08:03] So now, instead of trying to find five or ten minutes for myself at the end of the day, maybe to do some qigong practice, which I never did because I was always so tired, by the end of the day,
[08:13] I start my day,
[08:15] I meditate I do breath work.
[08:18] I consciously walk my dogs. Instead of thinking, oh, it's another chore, I've got to get the dog's walks. I consciously take my dogs out for a walk and take in the rain or the wind or the sunshine or whatever the weather's doing that day.
[08:32] And rather than going, oh, it's a rubbish day, it's raining,
[08:36] I just feel alive that I'm here experiencing the weather,
[08:41] the changing seasons, the new growth on the trees,
[08:45] you know, and really taking it all in, drinking it all in, like it's medicine. Because it is medicine and it's a beautiful medicine. It doesn't taste bitter, it's just amazing.
[08:57] And learning to master my body again, I found out a couple of years ago, I've figured out a lot of the pains in my hips is because I suffer from a syndrome called Ehlers Danlos syndrome,
[09:10] which is a connective tissue disorder where your fascia, your tendons and your ligaments don't hold you together properly. Okay?
[09:19] So it can be incredibly painful. And I've learned that Fascia actually has 20 times more pain receptors than muscle.
[09:28] So. Which is amazing to me. And this is why I'm in so much pain, because I couldn't understand. It's not my muscles that are hurting, it's not my joints that are hurting.
[09:36] It feels like connective tissue, and that's because it is.
[09:40] But when I had that diagnosis a couple of years ago, I.
[09:44] There isn't much understanding the condition. There isn't much support the Western model unless you're in a city like London. And I'm not. I live in the countryside.
[09:53] There are no experts around to be able to help you navigate your way. The only piece of advice really was to pace myself,
[10:00] and. Which is a good piece of advice because I'm not great at pacing myself. I rush, rush, rush all the time.
[10:06] So I felt like my body was against me and I.
[10:10] It was inevitable that I'm just going to decline.
[10:14] And I could see joining the dots, I could see that's obviously what my mum had with her and her mum as well. So it's a. It's a congenital condition.
[10:25] But instead of feeling betrayed by my body,
[10:27] since I've started working with Moves method, which is a mobility training, I do it online with a coach every week and she sets me a program every week.
[10:38] I'm learning to be in touch with my body again and challenging myself, learning how to do things that I haven't done since I was a child. So learning how to handstand with My chest up against the wall,
[10:50] learning how to do dead hangs, learning how to do ring holds, learning how to do deep squats.
[10:56] All of this kind of movement has finally put me back in my body and grow my body to be in a position of power and strength.
[11:06] I. My initial goal when I first started doing it was, okay, if my fascia can't hold me together, then I need to train my muscles to hold me together.
[11:15] And I'm 52, so I also need to work to do strength training for my bones as well.
[11:23] So I skip every day now I've learned. I started skipping. I hadn't skipped since I was a child.
[11:29] So in between my skipping, I'm doing qigong. So I skip for a minute and then I do qigong for a minute, then I skip for a minute. So it's kind of my own version of HIIT training, I suppose.
[11:39] Yeah. Getting my heart rate up,
[11:42] doing the loading for the bone density and also doing the breath work and the energy work. It's.
[11:48] I'm slowly, slowly, bit by bit, every day, adding something else to my personal protocol that's working for me. And so instead of feeling betrayed by my body and now understand the messages from my body are exactly that.
[12:03] They're messages.
[12:04] And if I can listen to them and listen to how my body is talking to me, I'm slowly collaborating instead of feeling like we're against each other.
[12:14] It's like an early warning system. I feel like I. I'm like the canary in the coal mine.
[12:19] Most people don't have those signals. They don't have that.
[12:23] They just push, push, push all the time until maybe they have a heart attack or a stroke or cancer.
[12:28] So, touchwood.
[12:30] I'm hopefully not going down that route. My mum did. She had a heart attack at 61, and then she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and then she had a stroke and then she finally passed with pancreatic cancer.
[12:43] And this is, in my mind, the journey. I could see that I'm heading down that same path,
[12:48] which is not an option. That's not the journey I want to be doing. So I feel.
[12:53] I feel so grateful and so blessed that I'm finding other people around me as well who are supporting me in that journey.
[13:01] Sorry, I've spoken way too much, but.
[13:03] Valerie Beck: That was so succinct and I love the message behind it. I just want to give people some context. Because when you say that you're a single mom and you were going, going, going, and we're.
[13:14] And all of that, and then you said, like, you know, you felt like you were doing nothing because, like you couldn't.
[13:21] But you were like a Grammy winning musician, aren't you?
[13:25] Kirsten Lane: Not quite. Okay. I'm a music supervisor. I work in the film industry. Okay. So I work with directors and producers to get the music that they want in their films. So sometimes a director will have a very clear idea of what music they want in their films.
[13:39] Like I work with Edgar Wright and lot. I'm working on the Running man with him at the moment. I worked with him on Baby Driver. It's probably the biggest film with like 60 pieces of music in that we worked on together.
[13:52] And sometimes the directors don't know what music they want, so I find music for them. Or if we, if a piece of music is too expensive, like maybe they wanted a Michael Jackson track, for example, and it costs too much, I'll find them other music that says the same thing in the lyrics,
[14:08] is the same vibe,
[14:10] the same genre of music.
[14:12] I worked on the film Saltburn,
[14:15] okay, With Emerald Fennell, the director,
[14:17] and together we worked all the music. Most of the music choices were hers, some of them were mine, but I'm the one who find out the copyright and negotiate the deals with the record labels and the publishers.
[14:29] And Saltburn reignited Sophie Ellis Bexter's career with Murder on the Dance Floor, being in the last scene with Barry Kagan dancing naked through the house.
[14:40] And the song got re released. It went back up in the charts, up to number two.
[14:45] So I was nominated for the best soundtrack album for that. Yes, yes.
[14:49] Valerie Beck: See, like, I mean, the point is that you're doing big things and all of that. There's a lot going on in your life at once.
[14:56] Kirsten Lane: And so, you know, the.
[14:59] Valerie Beck: A lot of people think that when we get burnt out, it's because we're lazy. And it's absolutely not that. Right.
[15:05] Kirsten Lane: Like, it's absolutely not lazy. Right.
[15:07] Valerie Beck: No. And I'm saying that because I think there's a misconception a lot of the time that like, you know, people burn out and they just do nothing and they're not trying hard enough or whatever.
[15:16] And it's, it's such a, such a myth that needs to be dispelled.
[15:21] And yeah, it's,
[15:24] you know, your story and what you've done and all that. It's an incredible story of resilience, actually,
[15:29] and of.
[15:30] Kirsten Lane: Thank you.
[15:31] Valerie Beck: Being very intentional with picking up the pieces.
[15:34] Kirsten Lane: Right.
[15:34] Valerie Beck: And I, I love what you said about you have a kind of like a canary coal mine now where you pick up signals in your body because you've learned how to listen to them.
[15:45] Kirsten Lane: Yes.
[15:45] Valerie Beck: And this is a lot of what I do in Ayurveda is what I seek to do for people is I help them recognize those signals because they're always there, whether they be in your digestion or in your mind.
[15:56] Like, if, you know, if I notice I'm getting anxious, I always also pay attention to if my hair is falling out now and all that I can see. So that's an incredible skill to have and incredibly important.
[16:07] And the fact that you've, you've been able to see, like, oh, you are on the path to chronic illness and disease,
[16:14] and, and then navigating that so that you can, you have power over it is something that I really want people to, to get. So thank you for sharing.
[16:22] Kirsten Lane: Yeah. One word that's come up for me in this.
[16:25] This is literally only in the last six months,
[16:28] is sovereignty. Yeah. I never really understood what that word meant.
[16:32] You know, being from the uk, we talk very much about the Queen Elizabeth that we had being a sovereign nation. And obviously now it's her son Charles.
[16:40] And that didn't. I didn't really understand what that meant. But now I feel like I'm having sovereignty over my own existence and I'm not accepting, I suppose, what other people are expecting of me.
[16:54] I'm actually understanding that I'm.
[16:57] I'm whole in myself and there's no one coming to rescue me. Right. I've got to figure that out for myself.
[17:05] And I felt so let down, I suppose, by the medical system for not a. Not recognizing what the problem was, because I've been saying for 12 years, I'm in pain, there's something wrong.
[17:16] And I've had so many MRI scans and physiotherapy and chiropractics and goodness knows what. And no one understood what was. What was the problem. And I figured it out for myself and finally had it confirmed by a doctor in Harley street in London.
[17:29] Yes, this is exactly what you have.
[17:31] But unless you're in London, you can pay privately.
[17:35] There's not much I can do to help you. Go back to. I live in the countryside, I don't live in the city.
[17:40] And where I live there, there really wasn't that support.
[17:44] And I just want to give for anybody, but particularly for people who are suffering with these type of conditions,
[17:52] that if you.
[17:54] There is. There is a way out.
[17:56] You don't have to accept that you're going to end up in a wheelchair,
[17:59] that you can't work. Lots of people who have eds, they don't work because they just, they're in so much pain. They, they have flare ups. I have flare ups now all the time.
[18:09] But when I would have a flare up of the symptoms before where,
[18:13] I don't know. It feels like you're itching on the inside. It's almost not like pain. It's like an ins. It's like ants crawling all over you.
[18:23] It drives you insane. It's a horrible feeling. I can't even describe it, but I can see. I noticed I was sitting on the train yesterday with a lady and she was constantly rubbing her knuckles, her hands, and my mum used to do that all the time and I'm sure she was suffering with the same thing.
[18:41] For my mum, it was in her hands. This feeling for me, it's in my pelvis.
[18:46] But if you listen to those signs rather than try and resist them,
[18:51] you can build that strength to come out the other side. I'm doing incredible things now that I would not imagine.
[18:57] You know, I feel like I've been reborn.
[19:00] Valerie Beck: Yeah.
[19:01] Kirsten Lane: Yeah. Amazing.
[19:02] Valerie Beck: I saw you do that handstand. It was so you're. Yeah, it was. It was really fun to watch you do that because you have so much strength.
[19:08] Kirsten Lane: Yes.
[19:09] Valerie Beck: In that.
[19:09] Kirsten Lane: Which I hadn't done a hand. The first handstand I did back in March when I started this program,
[19:15] I almost threw up. I felt so sick, I felt so dizzy. I thought I was going to pass out. I literally, I had to go and sit outside on the, on the doorstep,
[19:26] get some fresh air.
[19:27] But that's another thing that I've learned as well is that instead of pushing away from that and going, oh my gosh, I can't do that. That makes me feel so terrible.
[19:36] I've learned to reset my vagus nerves with a really simple exercise of cradling the back of my head and looking,
[19:44] without moving, looking with your eyes to the right until you yawn or sigh or something and then do the same to the left until you yawn or side.
[19:54] And just that resetting of the neck vagus nerve then gave me the ability to try again.
[20:01] And I think,
[20:02] as we've been hearing this week, like babies when they first learning to walk,
[20:07] they don't try it once and go, oh, that was too hard. I don't think I'll bother. They try again and they try again and they try again until they. Till they've got it.
[20:16] And I think this ethos really of do hard stuff,
[20:21] push yourself just 1%. You don't have to climb a Mountain in a day. Just 1% every day. Push yourself a little bit further every day. The cumulative effect of that over the space of a week, a month, a year, 10 years.
[20:35] Enormous.
[20:36] Absolutely enormous.
[20:37] Valerie Beck: Yeah. And it's like pushing your edge towards something that's healthy, right?
[20:41] Kirsten Lane: Yes. So completely.
[20:43] Valerie Beck: Okay, so I want to use the remaining time that we have to talk about our experience at mindvalley.
[20:51] And I know you've had an incredibly transformative one, so I'll let you share what you want to share about it.
[20:57] Kirsten Lane: Okay. I arrived at Mind Valley. This is the first time I've traveled on my own for myself,
[21:05] ever. I've traveled on my own for work a couple of times over to L. A.
[21:10] I've left my teenage children at home by themselves for the first time. I mean, they're 16 and 18, so they're okay. But I felt a big pull. I've been a mum first before anything else, so I came.
[21:23] I was nervous. I don't feel that I'm great at meeting new people,
[21:28] so. So I want to make those connections. But I started off quite timid, I think,
[21:33] and by the end of this week,
[21:35] at the end of yesterday's session, I literally skipped out of the room because I went on stage with Vishen and a whole load of other mindvalley people who have been transformed by one of the quests.
[21:49] And I spoke in front of 34,000 people online about my transformation. And I was so elated with joy, I skipped out of the room. And halfway down the room, little voice in my head said, don't be ridiculous.
[22:03] Everybody must be staring at you. And another voice said, I don't care.
[22:07] I'm so happy. I just want to Skip like a 4 year old. And I did. I'm just.
[22:11] I've been reborn this week, absolutely reborn. I have let go of a lot of old programming that doesn't serve me other people's expectations. And I finally think I found the little me, the inner girl who I've always been, who was really curious, wants to know everything, asking questions all the time.
[22:31] That was all shut down.
[22:33] And I. I purposefully shut that down as well. I was bullied as a child at school because I was so curious. I was always asking, always wanting to know things.
[22:43] And my peers at school used to bully me for it because I don't. I don't know why they teased me. And my teacher,
[22:53] he. I was. I must have been 10, I guess. For a Little School production, he did his own version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
[23:01] And the character he wanted me to play was called he. So his. He had his own different versions of what the dwarfs were.
[23:08] And he called me swat, which is swatting. You're swatting. Studying all the time. Oh.
[23:14] And everyone just laughed at me for that.
[23:18] So when I went to high school,
[23:20] I reinvented myself because I learned incorrectly that wanting to learn was not going to make me friends because I was teased. So when I went to high school, I purposefully dumbed myself down so that I, I wasn't curious.
[23:37] And my love of learning, I, I,
[23:40] I didn't want that to stand out. And so I put my light out.
[23:44] And this week has really given me that space to shed all of that and to reconnect to who I always was and who I always should have been.
[23:56] I mean, I was explaining to Paul yesterday, the DJ who organized the Kakao Estatico dance yesterday, that aside from having a home birth and giving birth to my daughter, which was the most empowering experience,
[24:11] the Cacao dance for me felt like a rebirth. It was so powerful. I started at the ceremony. I had no idea what to expect. My heart was beating so fast.
[24:25] I felt like I was going to be sick, that I was going to pass out. I felt dreadful. At the beginning, I was trying really hard to settle my shen, my nerves.
[24:36] And after taking the cacao,
[24:39] the lady who was leading the breathwork session just, I don't know, took me to another place where I could go into myself, go into my spirit.
[24:49] And I saw a vision of three beautiful women.
[24:55] And I didn't know who they were. I didn't know if they were my angel guides, if they were spirits. I have no idea. And I asked them,
[25:06] who are you?
[25:07] Telepathically, in my head. And they. They told me, they're me.
[25:11] They're other versions of me.
[25:13] And none of them look anything like me. I'm. I'm white. I have dark, curly hair and blue eyes. This is the body that I'm in this time.
[25:24] But one lady, she had blonde hair down past her,
[25:28] down to her, almost to her knees,
[25:31] like a Viking maiden.
[25:34] There was one lady with a shock of red hair and beautiful big smile. And another African lady, quite a buxom lady with braids.
[25:44] And none of these are images that I would ever imagine were the.
[25:49] But they told me they're all me. We're all me.
[25:53] And it really reframed how I see myself in my body now. I also my.
[26:01] My dad, I don't. He didn't mean anything by it. But inadvertently, when I was a Child. He put a message in my head that was not particularly helpful. He would say,
[26:11] you know, you go through phases as you're growing where sometimes you're very plain and other phases where you're very pretty. I really hope that when you stop growing, you stop when you're in a pretty phase and not in a plain phase.
[26:25] And for a young woman, this was quite hard to hear. Yeah. And I remember when I had my first period when I was, I don't know, 12, 13, something like this.
[26:36] My dad burst into tears because I was in a plane phase in his eyes,
[26:43] not necessarily in my eyes.
[26:45] And he was so sad because he thought that I had my first period that meant I would stop growing and that I was stuck in a plane phase.
[26:53] And this image to me of not appreciating how I look and how I feel about myself was really quite negative. Yeah.
[27:03] I don't think he meant to plant that seed in there, but it was there and has always been there. So this version, this vision of seeing me in other expressions of beauty and these women all look so powerful in themselves and settled and.
[27:20] And comfortable in their appearances.
[27:23] It made me. It completely reframed how I see myself now. I don't think I'm photogenic. I hate seeing myself in photos.
[27:31] But yesterday I didn't care. I was just being me. It was. I had to buy a new outfit for last night's party so I could be sparkly. I came with beautiful dress to wear for last night's party,
[27:43] but it was very understated and very contained. I suppose I just wanted to shine last night and I had sparkles around my heart and. Yeah, it's just been. It's opened me up to all sorts of things.
[28:00] This, this. This week has been crazy. Incredible.
[28:03] Valerie Beck: Yes.
[28:04] So I hope to see you at the next Mind Valley and see where you like how far you've come after that. But like, even looking at when you arrived until now, it's been incredible transformation and you are absolutely glowing.
[28:20] Kirsten Lane: Thank you.
[28:21] Valerie Beck: So thank you for allowing us to witness and yes, good luck with whatever is coming next. I'm really excited for you and thank you for being on the podcast with me.
[28:33] Kirsten Lane: Thank you. I appreciate it. I would really love to share with others how I've managed to make this transformation, because probably, like many of your listeners,
[28:42] I've been up, I've been down, I've been up, I've been down. But now this feels very. I'm sure there will still be downs. Life always has downs. But I'm very much on an upward trajectory, and now that I on this path, I don't think I'll be going back.
[28:58] I can't ever imagine myself going back. I'm very much going forwards, and I would love to be able to share with others how I've done that and how they can take that into their own lives as well.
[29:08] Valerie Beck: Thank you.
[29:09] Kirsten Lane: Thank you.
[29:14] Valerie Beck: Thanks for tuning in to from the Ashes. If this episode sparks something in you, I want you to know your evolution matters and we're rooting for you all the way.
[29:22] For coaching, community and resources to help you rise into your full potential potential. Visit intrepidwellness Life and check out what we have to offer.
[29:30] If you love the episode, please leave a comment, share it with a friend, or tag me on Instagram ntrepidwellness Val,
[29:38] because I'd love to hear what resonated for you.
[29:40] Until next time, keep rising.
