December 2, 2021
We are THRILLED to be bringing you a powerhouse of a guest for an overwhelmingly good conversation. Today, we have the privilege of talking with Ashley LeMieux.
If you’ve ever experienced heartache or grief in your life, YOU NEED THIS EPISODE. Ashley shares her story of walking through unfathomable loss, grief, and heartache. With unbelievable candor and vulnerability, Ashley walks us through her thoughts on walking through healing amid grief, the guilt of experiencing joy during that process, and the difference between a healthy healing mindset and toxic positivity. She then goes step by step through her Clarity Mapping Tool that she developed to help herself heal and walk into freedom, the power of spoken affirmations and a handful of her own that she uses daily, as well as a list of 5 daily questions that she asks herself every morning to propel her into growth and healing.
If you (or someone you know) are walking through loss or grief, or you want to know how to understand or come alongside someone who is you need this episode. Also please share this with anyone you know who is walking through grief and looking for resources to help them navigate loss, healing, and finding hope again.
Ashley is the founder and CEO of The Shine Project and bestselling author of her debut memoir “Born to Shine” and her most recent book “I AM HERE” where she guides readers out of fear and into freedom. Ashley has been through the searing pain of contested adoption, the death of a child, and the struggle of infertility that many women experience. However, she also knows the healing power of sharing your story. She has empowered hundreds of thousands of women to find purpose in their pain and is the host of the top-rated podcast, The I Am Podcast. Her online community has inspired her to share the triumphs and tragedies life has
handed her and to help others find the courage to keep going.
Everything in my journey up until this point has motivated me to create a community for women to help them get through the darkest times in their life. I know what it feels like to be in the darkest moment in your life and not know what to do next. And get out of bed let alone figure out how you’re going to show up for your day.
Trying to figure out how to keep moving forward in your life when you feel powerless, when you feel stuck, and when you feel the freedom of having joy has been taken away. What does life look like now? That is what Ashley has dedicated herself to figuring out and creating tools to help other women figure out these past several years.
There’s a huge difference between this toxic positivity we see and then trying to have a positive outlook on life. For Ashley, her outlook is based on the fact that she now allows herself to sit in the pain and learn from it without trying to escape it. She started living her life in a way where she stopped trying to run away from the painful things and it has allowed the pain to become a teacher. That in turn has allowed her to view the world, life, and the people around her completely differently. When you have a positive outlook on life it’s because you know your stories aren’t over yet and that pain and joy can be felt at the same time. Even if you have been in darkness in the past or right now, light can still come.
Darkness and light can both co-exist.
Ashley wrote I Am Here because after they lost their first two kids, she wrote her first book Born to Shine and it is how to keep living and find light in the darkest moments of your life.
After she released that, then she started her next journey of how do you heal. She was just surviving and didn’t want to do that anymore, she wanted to heal, find peace, uncover her purpose, and didn’t know-how. She took everything that she did in trying to heal and rebuild their lives and put it into a book called I Am Here.
Clarity mapping started because Ashley didn’t know how to get out of bed in the morning. Then once she figured out how to get out of bed, she didn’t know what to focus her time on anymore. Then once she figured out what to focus her time on she didn’t know how to rebuild what she wanted to do in her life. Clarity Mapping came to her in a six-month process of helping her figure out what her next steps in life were.
It first starts with really sitting with “what is your intention today?”. An intention can be a prayer or a thought, a guidepost that lets you know where you are going. You know what to say yes to or no to on your path moving forward. Ashley started meditating and praying every morning and would answer the question “what is my intention today?”. From there over the next six months, new questions started coming so that throughout her day she was very clearly focused on what it was she wanted and needed to be doing to feel how she wanted to feel in her life. After answering those set of questions every day for a month, she took it a step further to build a map that will break down the exact things you need to bring intention to your life in its entirety.
Ashley split up things into three parts: reframing your thoughts, reimagining your future (clarity mapping), and reclaiming your power.
If we start reimagining and rebuilding our future and start moving from fear to freedom, we’re going to keep getting stuck if we keep giving our power away to old lies or habits or people that aren’t serving this new future that we want to be building.
As Ashley was rebuilding her life she was still getting caught in these thought cycles that were trying to keep her rooted in the past. She would start every day looking at herself in the mirror and start speaking about what it was that she wanted to believe about herself and life. One example was after her miscarriage last year, “I am the rainbow” instead of waiting for her rainbow to come with a new baby. It doesn’t have to wait for the new baby to come, she is the rainbow in her life and can do things to create that right now.
Speak out loud affirmations to ourselves that will disrupt the old negative patterns, to then create new truer ones.
This is the first part of clarity mapping and the first question to ask yourself is “What is my intention?”. When we go through grief being able to figure out what life looks like now that the old life that we were used to living cannot exist anymore. Because there has been a loss or change outside of your control, how do you find purpose in that? The clarity in what you do next?
Healing is not one big moment it is constant movement every day. These questions will help you keep that movement.
Why am I worthy?
Who can I serve, who can I serve today?
What can I set down? What are you carrying with you (a thought, opinion, stress, or unrealistic expectation) that you can you set down today that is adding an extra burden or weight to your life?
Who is the truest version of myself today?
Your story is not over yet. This moment right now, even though it feels like nothing else will exist right now, this feeling won’t last forever.
When you’re in the middle of a painful moment and feel afraid ask yourself: “what if it’s not fear?”. What if it’s love? In our deepest negative emotions, is a positive emotion, if we can get to that that can help sustain us to the future.
Get very real and vulnerable with yourself and identify what emotions you have and go deeper into what is contributing to those. Then you can focus on feelings and emotions to propel you forward instead of chaining you there.
You are braver than you think. The pain was never supposed to be the ending of our life. The pain was never supposed to take away all the good stuff. When we allow ourselves to go through it we can uncover so much more about who we are, our power, bravery, our purpose, and our capabilities. When we give ourselves that opportunity we can learn more than we ever would have.
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WASSUP FRIENDS. We’re Evie + Lindsey, co-founders of this wild partayyy called The Heart University. Our goal is to empower entrepreneurs to kick freaking BUTT in their businesses, dive down into the heart of their why and how, and serve you with all possible tools you’ll need to up-level your business game and CRUSH those goals of yours.
Whether you’re coming to an in-person workshop, joining our online course, or soaking up all the strategies via this blog or our podcast, we’re STOKED you’re here + can’t wait to see you out there kicking butt.
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