No. 31 — Death of the Familiar
Some major life changes came my way this season — and I’m always surprised (and charmed!) by just how much can change as soon as you change your environment. And while new growth opportunities keep finding me in unexpected ways, so far this season has been one of balancing high-highs, and low-lows.
Despite these peaks and valleys, I’ve felt very held and neutral through regulating in my environment. One of my most effective practices is now sitting outside in the sunlight and listening to the birds chirp around me when I find myself in challenging moments.
When my 15-year-old wiener-pug Rogue entered stage 4 kidney failure, the cadence at home and in my life had to immediately shift into end-of-life-care. Here’s a glimpse into what’s been going on behind the scenes as I melt through the season’s changes.
Kidney problems: criticism, disappointment, failure, shame, reacting like a little kid.
— Louise Hay
In this InSight, I share:
How shifting friendship circles reveal patterns of taking too much responsibility for others
Am I taken advantage of emotionally? Undefined Solar Plexus musings
Moving to a new environment naturally brings changes to all aspects of life
Entering a new chapter also meant ending another chapter
Integrating shamanic studies with Human Design work is gaining attention
The 27 Things Challenge!
My business evolution and creating a more structured approach to Variable Integration
Great income potential example for ego-manifestors specifically
Vaness Henry:
0:03
It's Vaness Henry, you're listening to InSights, my private podcast exclusively for community members like you. Here's my latest insight. Well, I fell off the map a little bit here, all of a sudden waking up and I'll be paying my third rent living in this new place that I lived in. I don't know how time has gone by so quickly, but it has 2025 experience.
Vaness Henry:
0:47
There were things being removed and removed and removed from my life that didn't seem to align with wherever my life was heading now. And just by putting myself in this different space, it's wild to me how much in the life always shifts around me whenever I do that. And one of the big explosions that I had to move through initially, when all this new season energy was kicking off, was a shakeup in my friend circle. Now I want to confess I'm of an age now where I kind of thought I was beyond really intense changes in my friendship circles. I'm pretty comfortable in my relationships there. I'm a parent. Many of my friends are parents, you know. You just kind of enter a different place of understanding in those chapters. So I was a little surprised, I'm going to say, when I had a little shifting in my friendship circles and kind of hit me hard and felt like an emotional blow because I felt a little bit surprised and blindsided by just how things unfolded and how kind of like the breaking up or the breaking of the bond went down. But then, also because we were moving through these really potent eclipses, there was no resistance from me. It was like yeah, bye, go, you know like I'm not doing any of this dramatic stuff, bye, you know. Um, which was kind of surprising to me but did lead me into having to do a deeper evaluation on who I am in relationships and as somebody who has a Libra sun, I have to say this is always a very large theme in my life.
Vaness Henry:
2:21
I find that a lot of our stories places emphasis on romantic relationships and for me in my life I have been very fortunate and blessed in that area. I haven't even had very many relationships romantically because I've kind of bonded with someone and I've been with that person for a long time Six line shit, you know. But for me the learning has really been in relationships. I can be quite gutted and devastated when I have like a friend breakup or, you know, when I was a little kid in school, you know, when you're like evolving and you're figuring out your friendship dynamics. I had a really hard time if any of my friends were fighting and you know I always reflect on. You know, was I a bully? Did I have bullying tendencies and and cause? You never want to be that way.
Vaness Henry:
3:09
But I think it's just, you know, necessary to self-evaluate when you're looking back to see. You know, did I ever mistreat someone? You know things like that. And because I definitely got into fistfights as a kid and I was the kid who was like summoned on the playground. If kids were fighting, I was the kid who came and break it to break it up. Except I would sometimes fight to break it up. I know it still sets. I was figuring it out, I was learning.
Vaness Henry:
3:32
But my little Aries moon side of me I do want to say I get can get very passionate and emotional and in my feelings and I'm also very quick to recover and forgive and move on. You know I'm very I don't stay upset for very long, I kind of get over things rather quickly and I always kind of liken that to that Aries moon part of me. So, as I was kind of going through these deep changes and shifts in my friendship circles and reevaluating, how am I in relationships? I had this pretty profound moment happened to me where all of a sudden this is the best way of describing the energy a choir of angels, a choir of projectors all appeared around me. I have a large network circle of projector friendships and I'm very lucky to be seen by projectors and feel in good, harmonious relationship with them where they are brave enough to let me initiate. Sometimes, you know, and we have that understanding of um guidance and I like how aware projectors guide me, you know, because they never tell me what to do but they're very ready to point out things in my nature that, um, I maybe could be more aware of.
Vaness Henry:
4:44
And then I am the one who could decide well, how do I want to move now? Or what do I want to do now with that new awareness and this choir of projectors around me was were all showing me these patterns I have of being taken advantage of in my relationships. And I think, because I have a defined heart, I it's kind of like a bulldozer energy sometimes and I kind of move about life in this way where I just don't think anyone could take advantage of me. I'm self-assured, I know what I'm doing. Stay out of my way. I don't have time for that, I'm not looking at that. You know, I can kind of be like head down doing my own thing and I think, for whatever reason, I've just interpreted that as I can't be taken advantage of. You know, I will recognize that before you're doing that to me and that's just my own egotistical like way of having a blind spot.
Vaness Henry:
5:37
You know, because then when this choir projectors are around me saying to me you know I've never felt good about this kind of thing that happened, or I noticed this was going on with you, or you behave this way or that way. You know, I don't even know if I'm explaining it right, cause that's that's totally not what they were saying to me, but through their feedback and guidance emotional projectors, self-projected projectors, mental projectors, splenic projectors were all showing me this pattern I have of being taken advantage of emotionally and that I can get very emotionally compromised in a relationship and not always create the space for anyone to say a negative thing about that person. You know. So, for example, if I love someone and I'm for them, I'm the biggest champion for them and I won't tolerate anyone saying any disrespectful thing about you. You know I will like, and sometimes I'm in situations where I'm being disrespected but I'm not really realizing it or I'm turning a blind eye to it because of the history or love I have for this person. It's like I'll put up with a lot.
Vaness Henry:
6:51
You know, if I, if I've decided I care for them, you know, and I don't always create the environment that welcomes and invites people to say, hey, that person's kind of you know, that was kind of shitty, are you OK? Because it's like I'm not even going to hear that what, no, what are you talking about? So, as that was all kind of coming up, I had to really reevaluate Well, I want to make the environment where my projector friends feel like they can come to me and say to me, hey, that person doesn't have your back or you know what I mean Like whatever it is, or hey, that's going on. That's not cool. And you know, if there's ever like someone saying shit about me which doesn't really happen too much anymore, but it definitely did.
Vaness Henry:
7:32
When I was like newer in my human design experiment and kind of realizing there was a community attached to human design, I definitely heard through the grapevine from my projector friends like, oh, so-and-so, saying shit about you. You know, I would never go engage with things directly that way, cause that's just not safe for me. But they would come and, like, gently, inform me, you know. So I was aware of what was going on, but then I kind of I did kind of get into a place of like, I don't care about that, I don't want to be informed about that, I'm not watching those people. If people want to say shit about me, I could care, so I could give two shits about that. That is interference and noise for what it is that I'm trying to do over here, and it started to just create this environment of like I'm not open to you coming to me with any kind of thing like that, but through that really strict boundary, what happened was sometimes, you know, within the safe circle, something not safe is going on and no one can tell me about it. Oh well, I don't like that, you know. So, yeah, I've had to be really reflecting on like, well, what adjustments do I need to make in order to create the environment where people feel safe and welcome to come to me with things like this, so we could all have each other's back better, you know.
Vaness Henry:
8:45
So, even in the way that I've just explained that one of my projector friends revealed to me this pattern that I have, which is taking on an excess amount of responsibility for something in a situation. Um, for example, if there is a breakdown or a confrontation, I kind of will go into the place of well, clearly I'm the problem. Like I'm the bad guy, I'm the manifestor, I'm the one who probably fucked up here. So I should really evaluate what I did, apologize, like kind of almost roll over, show your belly. I'm the bad guy, it's my fault. Energy.
Vaness Henry:
9:29
And when that first was reflected to me I was like well, that can't be true. Like I'm the asshole, you know. Like it should be me who reflects. But like am I the one doing that? And I was like doing it as I was trying to realize it. So then I was laughing at myself and couldn't help but like notice as I continued through life with that new awareness that I did that now, every time there was a little bristle or confrontation in my life, I immediately took the blame. Like I immediately like and that's egotistical, right Like I immediately was like my bad, I'll remedy this, and it's just, it was just taking on an excess amount of responsibility that I'm going to be honest with you, I felt fucking pathetic about that. That doesn't sound good. That doesn't sound good Like I'm oh, I'm sorry.
Vaness Henry:
10:15
And and it really got my husband and I into a dialogue about Canadian culture and this whole um, part of our, the way we exist, is apologizing for existing. Like we use sorry almost as like an excuse me, you know, like if we're trying, if there's a crowd of people and we want to get something at the grocery store, we'll go sorry, can I just get in there? I'm so sorry, like that's the most Canadian thing ever. And like what are we saying there? Oh, my bad for existing. You know what I mean. And it just started to really rub me the wrong way.
Vaness Henry:
10:51
And this is often a way that I move through change where there'll be a new illumination, new realization about something about myself that maybe has been in the peripheral or maybe it's brand new information. And it's a bit surprising to me. And when I, when I let myself feel how I feel about that new information, I'm often either like not proud, or embarrassed, or not really ashamed. But you know, but just sometimes there's just low emotions that you know come with that lack. Oh, I didn't realize I was that way and to me, when I hear that, that doesn't sound good, and I'm a sound, sensitive person. So if you're telling me I sound like that, my gosh may I reflect, you know. But even the tendency to go, my gosh may I reflect, kind of says I'm the problem I need to fix myself.
Vaness Henry:
11:39
Anyway, after I, after I, learned something new about myself and I'm aware of it and I keep noticing it, keep noticing it, keep noticing it, mostly I started to get super annoyed with myself, like I'm super annoyed with myself, and then that is usually what leads me to change. So, as I was, as I was seeing this pop up everywhere and my choir of projectors were so lovingly guiding me to like, realize this about myself, the guidance really was it's not always your fault. And if you're ever living in a reality where, time and time and time and time again, it's seeming to be your fault, it's not. That's never true. And if you're also in a reality where it's never your fault, it's always the other people. That's the same thing. It's just the other side of the same coin. There are going to be times where, yes, I fucked up and I need to evaluate and look at that, and there's also going to be times where, hey, you know, I'm in my zone here and I'm in my element and I stand by this.
Vaness Henry:
12:38
And the one on the other side is actually the one quote, unquote, fucking up. But even see, I have a hard time saying like I have a really hard time, like casting a blame or pointing the finger at the other because it's so pointless to me and not worth it. What a fucking waste of energy. Like I hate when something has gone down with someone and I have to go confront them and be like you know what? This went down and this isn't cool.
Vaness Henry:
12:59
And there's an excuse that's given on the other side, like there's like the awareness of oh my gosh, yes, I'm so sorry, whatever. And then there's the other foot that drops, that's like, but I just you know it was this, and blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't need all that. Actually, I don't need the butt, I don't that whole other excuse piece as to why you did what you did or why this course of events happened. No-transcript, zero capacity and patience anymore.
Vaness Henry:
13:48
And there's this, this part of me that's like you can't be that way, because you know you want to be respectful and loving of the ones around you, and I think what I want to say to that is that's true, and I am that way, but it's when it comes to me there's a strictness. You know, if there's something that's happened and now you've done something that I don't like or has crossed my boundary, that's when I come on kind of strong like that, where it's like no, I don't need any of these excuses because you knew what my boundary was and I don't like reminding, I don't like repeating. So if that boundary was crossed, you crossed it and whether you knew you crossed it or not, I'm going to let you know and it's not going to happen again. And if there's any excuse that comes out of that, this is where that domineering ego energy can come in. It's like I don't have the capacity to hear it. I don't want to hear it. That's not the point of what this is, and I don't respect when you come to me with that energy of I'm not taking accountability for my side in this. That's what I want to see. I want to see people taking accountability for their part in the story, and I, time and time again, see people who don't do that. They just blame the other. So I think in my world there's an overreaction to always just swallowing it. That's the move Right and being like that's my bad cape.
Vaness Henry:
14:58
Moving on, because because, honestly, there is so much of the like, confrontation, the confrontation back and forth, that really just isn't worth it for me. I just don't care enough and I'm seeing now that I kind of navigate in a way in the past that has put up with a lot for the sake of keeping everybody happy, like within the group. If there's people who are friends with so-and-so, I can be really bad for that. Like I want everyone to get along, and so I can be really bad for that. Like I want everyone to get along. If there's ever like disturbance between the group, oh my gosh. Well, I like go bend over backwards to just make sure everybody's fucking comfortable, you know, oh my God.
Vaness Henry:
15:34
So while all this is going on, someone from my past reaches out in the Venus retrograde. Sometimes that can happen, a past love can reach out, and I'm always like that never really happens to me because there's been so much time that I've had between romantic relationships, but sometimes I'm the person who reaches back out to someone I love, you know, and it's not always romantically but loved in a different way and this time that's what happened. A past love, a past friend who's now on the roof, a fellow six two, reached out to me and I had been a part of a friend circle in um when I had just had a new little baby and was in a group with all these moms and there was this huge breakdown that happened in this friend circle. I won't go into too many details just because there are people who could probably potentially figure out who this is through and and you know, the details don't actually matter. But what happened was was there were scandals going on behind the scene and not everybody knew about it. So when I found out about it I was not going to stand for like secrets happening. That makes me feel sick. So I'm the one who revealed these are the scandals going on and I felt it kind of blew up the friend group because none of us hung out after that Right, because there is these awful things going on secretly and people's lives were totally destroyed and people were really, really hurt in that and I kind of lost my core group through that and ultimately, after that happened, I was free to move to the Okanagan. That's when I was like I don't have anything here now, I'm done, goodbye, let's go, and I love my life here now, which is wild.
Vaness Henry:
17:10
So seven years had passed and gone by since this whole kind of eruption had happened and this person who was, I felt, the most impacted by this, had reached out to me to connect and I was like, oh, this is weird. And it ended up being such a loving conversation I didn't even know I needed and got so much peace out of, of hearing you know just her side and the time that had passed. And she gave me this grace of saying you know, I noticed a couple of times you were like taking the blame or something Like you were the one responsible for breaking up that friend group. And I just want you to know like, of course, that wasn't you, the people who are doing the scandals are the one who broke it, who broke it up. You were the one who brought it to light so that we could actually become aware of what was going on and actually move toward healing.
Vaness Henry:
17:55
And she sent me that in a voice note after our little like meeting, and the way I've played it a few times, you know what I mean, because I was like I didn't know that I needed to hear that because I wasn't fully aware, once again, that I was somewhere holding in me like it was my fault for breaking that up. And you know, when I hear it back from her it's like, of course, of course that's not my fault, but I felt like I was the one who initiated the change that ultimately happened. Yeah, like, just change, that chapter ended. Then, you know, and she said no, thank you to me, because I thought I was going crazy and by you coming and saying, hey, this is going on, I could finally move toward peace. And so I felt a new kind of peace in my old past friendships from a past life, you know and then going through the changes in this current um, um, current version and current chapter of my story and having those change-ups again, it was like, oh, wow, I have come so far. Now I'm not as emotionally immature as I tell myself I am. I have been through challenging emotional experiences and have developed a sort of skin now that equips me to move through them with a little bit more grace than I had in an earlier version of myself. So, while I had this falling out with a friend, while I had this rekindling with a former friend after I had moved and put myself in this new location, after I had started working on this book deal and these new opportunities coming for a human design at home book.
Vaness Henry:
19:34
My dog goes into kidney failure. Oof, this happens fast. It's a very big blow. I have been warning my family for about three years because my dog is 15. This is coming. This is coming. I'm going to be a wreck when this comes. I'm going to need to be taken care of when this comes and I think anyone who has a really deep bond with their pet and has a senior pet feels this kind of grief in their aging pet.
Vaness Henry:
20:04
You know, and for me, my dog Rogue she's a wiener pug. She's a little dash and mixed with a pug. Dog Rogue she's a wiener pug, she's a little dash and mixed with a pug. She's been there with me from before I started my family. She was with me before I had my child, before I got with my husband, and there was this really holy time when it was just us. And so I think people who are in energetics and love the study of it have an understanding of the deep bond with the familiar.
Vaness Henry:
20:37
And when we look at animal energetics. I love to run animal charts in Genetic Matrix. It's so neat to see the way we plug in and connect to animals. Or I have a reflector dog and I had a friend who had a projector dog and you can see the difference. It's just so entertaining to me. I just think it's so magnificent and I've been trying to kind of think about, you know, how am I going to move through this, this loss of my dog, because I know I have a senior dog and how am I also going to be a parent in the process?
Vaness Henry:
21:06
Because for my child this has been his pet for his entire life process, because for my child this has been his pet for his entire life. She's been with me for a third of my life but it's been his entire life and so that's going to be his first real kind of death to experience. You know, and my dog has been on medication for the last couple of years and we knew she was kind of in this decline with her kidneys. But of course, like you know, I'm reading the kidney in my books and I'm translating things. You know what I mean. But it did happen fast and she was given a couple days to live and she just started kind of eroding really quickly, losing a dramatic amount of weight. She lost a third of her body weight and just kind of stopped eating, got this mouth infection. So we kind of took her to the vet to be like whoa, like you know, and they kind of knew these were all signs of, you know, stage four kidney failure. But she did have an infection. So we're just going to give her antibiotics to get that infection out. So she's not in pain, because it was really important for me. My dog is quite afraid. When she goes to the vet she always releases her anal glands because she's terrified. She just fucking hates it there.
Vaness Henry:
22:11
I was never going to euthanize my dog. You know somebody who kind of works in death work. Um, it doesn't really match my philosophies and I always knew is going to go into like a, an end-of-life care with her and have her die peaceful at home with her favorite things, but just don't want her to be in pain and suffering, of course. And so what can we do to make her as comfortable as possible? So once I we kind of got her infection kind of treated, I had to give her fluids under the skin at home, which I'm very equipped at. That was something I was doing 20 years ago to myself. You know what I mean. I was like, wow, the timing of this journey here with her and when she's exiting. You know, she's really been with me my whole adult life while I've been processing you know some of the grief I've had. And now I come to my 20 year anniversary of this experience and time of healing and you know, now it's she's exiting her chapter with me and I'm moving into end of life care with her.
Vaness Henry:
23:04
Well, the first thing I had to do was get her to eat, because she wasn't eating. If her teeth are all sore, you know this poor little thing, she doesn't want to eat these like dry, fucking croutons, like dog food. So I started making this dog rotisserie chicken, sweet potatoes, uh, carrots while she was loving her life and that says something because it was ending right. Like was maybe not the nicest phrase. She was loving her life because she was at the end of life, but but she was so excited to eat and so then she quickly put on weight and I was like what the hell is going on? And then, you know, a few more days go by and she's. You know she's really weak, but she's still here, and I'm so tearful at this point that I'm just like I can't do anything. You know I was having to cancel everything and so. So that's what I did. I just cleared my schedule, I canceled all my appointments and, you know, it was kind of humbling and encouraging to know like my business didn't shut down. Everything could still run and function as it needed to.
Vaness Henry:
24:03
And, um, I finally, just when I was home alone with her one moment, had my moment of surrender, where I fell to my knees and kind of wept on her and told her what she meant to me and how much I loved her, and recounted special times we had together. And I cried so hard, it was so guttural, I nearly vomited and as I was like gagging on my own tears, ugly and graphic, sorry, but that is what was happening as I was kneeling at my bed with my dog laying on my bed and I'm just sobbing with my face laying on her fur, I realized, oh my God, I've never had the opportunity to say goodbye. When my dad passed away, when I was little, I had left and I died. When he, I died. Oh my gosh. Subliminal misspeak here. He passed away when I had left and wasn't there and I was so devastated by that. I had such FOMO that my whole family was together but I wasn't there, you know.
Vaness Henry:
25:01
And then when my childhood dog died my other familiar it happened on my first day of chemo and I wasn't there and oh it was. It was just so devastating on an already devastating time and it was just I couldn't believe the grief of like missing out on these chances. And I haven't really been brushed with close, close, close death in many years. Um, it's always been slightly on the peripheral and I'm better equipped to kind of handle that. So now that death, my old friend that I know very well is hanging out in the halls again and I'm getting acquainted with them again. And now I have a child here, also meeting death.
Vaness Henry:
25:41
For the first time I realized the opportunity and beauty in what was happening as well, even though it was devastating, and through her I got to have this huge, huge release of this grief. I didn't even know I was holding that. I was wound so tight inside of feeling like FOMO, honestly, and of course I'm going to stack all my friends around me and make sure nobody's fighting. I'm so scared somebody's going to leave and I'm never going to get the chance and, oh my God, of course, poor thing. You know, I just think of like that confused little kid inside.
Vaness Henry:
26:13
And as soon as I had that beautiful moment with my dog brr, I dropped into this peace frequency and just went into caregiver mode and I was no longer tearful. I was the emotionally sound person in the house. I was the one everybody then was kind of coming to because I had moved through this territory. I knew what was moved through this territory. I knew what was needed at this time. I found I was guiding my son on certain things in peculiar angles and I'm so proud of how well he's kind of processing and handling everything because he did get upset and now he's understanding death by watching her lose energy and lose capacity and how he's caring for her. He's just he's doing so great Instead of just like sending her away to die and he comes home one day and she's not there. You know, I just it doesn't feel right for my family. So I'm just really proud of how he's handling everything and it it allows me to, yeah, move. I'm feeling into that six line energy more. You know, it's my first experience with death in more of a six line way, and I'm kind of surprised how comfortable I am in the territory because of how familiar death is to me and I do think, you know, at some chapter in my life, perhaps in my later years, I could do end of life care for people I think I would be very good at that in sitting with someone in their final moment so they're not alone, because being alone in those final moments would be devastatingly frightening unless, of course, that's what somebody desires. But I think that that is a very important role and I can see myself kind of doing that.
Vaness Henry:
27:44
Um, simultaneously there's some death happening in my extended family because I have um a grandparent who's not well. That I've talked about on this show with my mom before and how my mom is caring for her mom with dementia. And when my mom was out with me to visit and launch me into this new season and this new place, we did have the chat of me saying to her you know when the time comes, if I'm needed to come home and um, mc that's not the word but lead the funeral proceedings and be the speaker um ensuring everything kind of happens. I will be the one to do that. And my mom was like, oh God, thank you, cause my I cover a family on that side, notoriously fearful of public speaking Anytime there's a death. It's like, eh, everybody's so upset and I'm like you guys, this is so not a big deal, like, give me the microphone, what needs to be done?
Vaness Henry:
28:33
But I'm very comfortable in talking around themes of death and making the moments meaningful for the families, and so I had just said to my mom you know, when that time comes here, and like, I know that I'm far away, but I will come home when that's needed and I will do that and please know that I'm available for that, um, whenever I needed. You know, and and it was nice to see how much she kind of appreciated that, because it's something that's psyching her out, you know thinking of of how to handle that. I know my husband on their side they're not speakers either and they too are uncomfortable with things like that, you know. So, um, I think, because not everybody likes to do that when there is a family member who who can kind of self nominate, it can be unburdening to people. And I think, just because you know navigating life and existing when death is living in the home with you and is an inhabitant, walking the halls and going to the bathroom at night and wearing his cloak in the corner and, you know, interrupting your dreams. It is a figure that comes and inhabits the house and the domain with you. When you know that character, you can quickly kind of click into a pattern of, yeah, how to exist and anyways, things with my son that I noticed I was talking about was when you're moving through these times you need hearty food, you need food with heart medicine. And he asked what that is and I kind of he's a touch person, so a nervous eater and I'd asked him well, what are your go-to meals that make you feel really good, like what's some comfort food for you, you know? And he named a few meals and so I said to him you know, all these meals you're naming have a common ingredient they all have tomatoes in them. You know, some of them have marinara tomato sauce, you know. Or some of them have cherry tomatoes diced up, or one of them has salsa in it. And when you're going through a hard time and you need hearty food and heart medicine, that's the tomato energy and consuming tomatoes can give you a medicinal requirement. That's the tomato energy and consuming tomatoes can give you a medicinal requirement that's operating on a different plane. And so just say to him you know, have some tomatoes, have some tomatoes when you're sad or have some tomatoes somehow when you're, you know, in suffering. And it was a moment to like build awareness of all the things that do use tomatoes, which was kind of fun. And I didn't know I had a little prescription in me like that, which was kind of funny.
Vaness Henry:
30:53
In a past life I used to work with like greenhouses and gardens and do like botanical education for people who are coming and shopping. Like they would put on events and I would be in like the greenhouse and you're buying all these, you're buying your sage or you're buying your whatever you're buying, you know you're buying your dracena, you're buying your pe, you're buying. You know you're buying your dracena, you're buying your peonies. I would translate kind of the metaphysical meaning of that botanical so that you knew what you were um bringing home on another level kind of thing. It was so much fun, people loved it.
Vaness Henry:
31:23
Um, I don't know if you heard that little sigh, but I am holding my dog in my arms because at the time of recording this she is still here. So I was told she had a couple of days to live and now I'm learning it could be weeks and months where I have to be in this frequency of care and, interestingly, that is cooking her better food, feeding her more regularly, having her go to the bathroom more regularly and just making her comfortable and keeping her clean and and happy. You know, and as I'm doing these things for my dog, I am definitely reflecting on, you know, how do I do these for myself in my life? Am I doing these for myself in my life? Like there can be big stretches of time where I don't eat at all during the day and I'm like dead at the end of the day. You know, and I have an active brain, so that is not the move for me. I need to be regularly nourishing myself in order to get the best out of my brain's capacity. And speaking of a hungry brain, something new that has come up for me I've had some kind of activations going on in my ninth house of my natal chart and I started to re well continue some of my studies with the Foundation of Shamanic Studies, reconnected with the shaman I was working with in the prairies and had her send me all my past designations and things that I had been working toward and I kind of fell away with a lot of my formal education around that once I became a parent and I think that's probably really natural.
Vaness Henry:
32:59
And then I did definitely go in hard with my kind of human design studies. And then I did definitely go in hard with my kind of human design studies which in the world of shamanism, when you're learning about upper world, lower world, there is an aspect of your studies where you start to explore middle world and that's kind of the world that we are in is more ordinary reality. It's not when we're journeying in an alternative plane, an alternative dimension, and you do want to go find your area in middle world where you can see things in a special way and you kind of find your healing tools. And a lot of the you know shamanic practitioners I've been connected with through the foundation are all kind of more scholarly, like a lot of them are university or college instructors who've devoted their life to a particular area of study, whether it's like anthropology or do you know what I mean like they're very kind of scholarly. And then there are some who are more um culture focused, so specifically teachings and practices that have come from like, passed on through a culture or specifically through one family line. So you can kind of have like cultural shamanism, um, traditional shamanism, non-traditional shamanism, core shamanism, cross cultural, non-denominational, you know they're like. There's so many avenues and approaches.
Vaness Henry:
34:21
Anyway, I had wanted to pursue certain designations around healing but I needed to find my middle world area and I feel now that with the way that I'm comfortable in variable integration I have, I have felt some kind of like graduating energy or something around there, graduating energy or something around there, or like an accepting of like. Here's how I use it and how I teach it and this is not a classic way of doing it, it's my way of doing it because it works for me and it works for me with what I do in the shamanic arts and that's why I do it this way. And through that accepting of me being that way, there's been more of an attraction to my work recently, especially around like, the signs and symptoms, which I do get pushed back up. You know, initially, when I first started saying hey, look at these weird patterns in the body's tones, people were like this isn't classic human design and they were kind of at me like that. I'm like I know that's what I'm saying. This isn't classic human design, but aren't these patterns strange? This is how I'm perceiving this, as somebody who comes from the shamanic arts, with the background over there, who is looking for illness in the formless plane. And when I'm looking at my clients, this is what I'm seeing, and now people, for whatever reason, have started to become a little bit more interested in that. It's been you know more time since I've talked about that. Maybe it's not so repelling or scary, or maybe something has just shifted in the world and people are kind of ready to explore that. I don't know. But I have finally felt okay, it's time to now return to my studies, to complete and finish out some of those designations, so that I can be the person in this part of the world who can do shamanic in-person things that are kind of part of the classic teachings, to keep some of those, to keep some of those um healing tools alive.
Vaness Henry:
36:07
Um, because when I was wanting to pursue my training, there's nobody out here available to me because I'm a little bit. It's a, it's it's global. Um, the foundation for shamanic studies. Um, however, you can't find someone necessarily everywhere you know and where I'm located. I could kind of travel to people in Canada or the U? S, but there isn't really anyone located where I am and I'm in such a holy site. So I was like, oh well, this is fun, I could pursue this um over my next few decades, because this is my original area of study and now I have found my Avenue in middle world where I can be of service. Um, perhaps it's now finally time to kind of circle back. So I connected with a guy um through the foundation Juan Carlo I love that. What a name, juan Carlo. Ugh, fun. So I'm pretty excited about that.
Vaness Henry:
36:57
And the kind of shamanism that I do explore is called is cross-cultural. So you're looking at the patterns that humans have around the globe, no matter where they live. Why do they all do these kinds of spiritual practices? That's cool, okay. So it doesn't matter where you find the human and what their culture is or what they look like or what their gender is or how far back we go. They all have these certain practices that have common parallels. So, for example, they have meditative, trance-like rituals, they work with plant material in some way whether that's burning, ingesting, growing, brewing, steeping, eating and they have relationship to non-ordinary reality, where spirit forms, ancestors, spirit guides are. And so I think the anthropological perspective on that, and why that kind of journalistic mind pursues shamanism in that way, is because, well, is there a common ancestor that gifted this knowledge? And then you know, the creatures of earth spread across the globe, or is this just the teaching of the earth and this is what the creatures will do when you put them on this plane's energy field? You know, it's a fascinating area of study to me.
Vaness Henry:
38:16
How did I get here? Okay, um, some of the big changes behind the scenes has been in how I structure my business, and over the season I've been kind of saying I've been wanting to go through more of a change, um, structurally, because I've used some language. Wellness club that comes with this perception that it's a cancelable membership that you can get out of at any time. That's so not what I wanted to do. I wanted to create like a meta space that felt like you were going to into this, like health club that was packed with all these resources. So you could kind of have this four season experience and I create so many things that I start to like overstuff and overdo it, and then I need to have a trimming process.
Vaness Henry:
38:59
So I've been doing experimenting with my wellness club for about three years where I do these set amount of things in these different ways and I see what works with people and I see what has a better result to move toward radical spontaneous healing in the other across multiple dimensions. That is, not just in the physical body but in the spiritual body as well, because my thesis kind of explores that illness begins in the spiritual body and then seeps into the physical form and can manifest as terminal illnesses. So I have kind of created these key pieces I've been working toward over the last few years, one being my human design color palette. I needed to create the custom generated report. That was all my translations but from the angle that I thought was important. So I did just color like I'm not translating your whole human design design type and authority. I don't need to do that. That's not necessary from me. Right Need motivation things. A lot of people do that really well. My area is right here. I want us to look right here and I wanted to do the color palette in a way that exposed transference in a more less intimidating way, that showed you the full spectrum of the depths that you have inside of you, because this is a huge theme within my work and how I translate variable. And once I created that it's like okay, so some people will never need to go deep and study and they just want to know the information and that's for them.
Vaness Henry:
40:31
And I completed my variable training, which is kind of like the signature training, this, this thing that I've taught over and over and over again in various capacities. I wanted to kind of like perfect it and do my video version of it, you know um, and no longer kind of teach it live, because I had have done that too much now and so I liked that piece, and then it was like my wellness club had too many things in it. So what I have decided to do I'm now working towards doing is I've closed down the wellness club. No more people can kind of join that. So if you're here listening to this um in real time when this is coming out, you're part of the OG um crew of people that I gave all that kind of like um experimental material to, and now I'm going to be opening up a deconditioning journey that is a scheduled preset flow through variable integration that's going to include variable training because people really need to have that.
Vaness Henry:
41:28
I was having people who would join my wellness club but had never had a variable training, so they kind of didn't know what they the tools were. And I was like, well, why would you come over here if you didn't know what the tools were? But they were like I just wanted to work with you and I was like, but this isn't like, don't buy it if it's not, you know, and that kind of I started to be like, okay, well, maybe that's an issue with my messaging and okay, but I want to say sometimes we could just have silly buyers, right, who just buy things. It's not always my fault, but but it is an opportunity and my craft, right, and so I want to always improve um on how I'm putting my messaging out there and what I'm creating. So when I heard I was having people just buy things for the sake of buying things, I was like, okay, well, that's a great position. They want to work with me. At least they like my work, they're attracted to my work, but I want to make sure I'm creating things that really fit for what the need is, you know. And I liked, I liked to create a space that was like didn't tell you what to do in it, cause I don't want to be told what to do, I just want to have my resources and use it how I want. So I always like design spaces for me.
Vaness Henry:
42:39
But after X amount of years of just doing the rhythm it was in and tracking the rhythm, it kind of became like oh, this is what I do all the time at this. I can automate this. You know, I can predict I'm going to do this. I can start to work ahead, I can start to make this easier on myself. I can start to predict what I'm going to want to do. And then all of a sudden, you know you have a whole year seasons planned out rolling out automated, systemized going. Have a whole year seasons planned out rolling out automated systemized going flowing easy, money's coming in. It's like wow, um, this is an amazing machine, um. And then I always go tend to like break my machines. After, you know, after I build the robot, I'm like let's now undo it, make it better, and like. People are always like you're crazy, um.
Vaness Henry:
43:19
But but no, I wanted to. I wanted to create kind of like an expanded variable training that was about variable integration based on everything I learned in my radical experiments with with small groups of people and then in my wellness club with larger groups of people. I wanted to set something out that got them trained and then gave them like an embodiment map, a way to play with this in real life. So I started to introduce that to my wellness club. That got great feedback. People really liked that. So that was really exciting for me because that was one of the big new features that I was introducing.
Vaness Henry:
43:56
And then, of course, these at-home experiments, like the fun things to do at home, um, to really see that you've got it right. Like when I used to teach in universities and colleges. When you're teaching adults, you want to present them with information, this new idea, and then you kind of want to give them a little task to do to see if they got it. Then we all kind of go over it together and, oh, we learned a little bit more. Or oh, we make some corrections. Okay, we're getting it. Now we're gonna have an assignment. Now you're gonna do a project on it so you can go take it home and see that you really got the teaching. Then you're gonna present it to me and I'm gonna grade it.
Vaness Henry:
44:34
I hated grading, by the way. I hated grading and I told them that I'm like look, because these are people who are like professionals for all over the world, who had all these different kinds of like designations, and then they just needed, like, certain marketing courses or certain digital courses and I was happened to be the expert in that, you know. So it was like wanting to treat these people with respect and then also it's like no, you can't put that on your about page, you know. No, you can't, that's not how you want to do email marketing, you know you can't say that they're going to be offended. Anyways, it was fun, but doing these kinds of projects, um show, give you an opportunity to work with the material you know and have fun with it, and so that's kind of my philosophy on teaching, right, you want to kind of give it, give information, integrate it in some kind of playful, fun way, because if it's fun and if it's playful, it's going to go down smoother and you're going to retain the information better. You always want to make learning as fun and fun, fun as possible so that it seeps in right and is fun to experiment with. So that's why we need at-home experiments and challenges and, um, this season there's, um, and this season there's.
Vaness Henry:
45:43
I've released the 27 things challenge and this is one of the teachings I said to my son when we were moving into caretaker role end of life care with the family dog yeah, the boys. Just it just got so heavy in here, I don't know, everybody was just so sad, nothing was getting done. And that's what I mean. I needed to like click into another energy and initiate something. And I did the 27 things challenge because, um, it's kind of like a go to sacred move and it's an old Chinese philosophy that you want to move 27 things in the localized environment, because that's going to dramatically switch up the energy in that space and force energy to move about that space differently and therefore you will move about the space differently and therefore you're transformed within that space. And 27 is, you know, a pretty high number. You kind of got to pay attention, you know, to actually move that many things. And so I got into the ritual.
Vaness Henry:
46:38
I went into my kitchen I have this big, amazing kitchen with this massive island and I kind of just like empty things, put it on the island and cleaned out drawers and rearranged things. Because when you want to move 27 things. You know you could toss it or recycle it, or you could rearrange it, or you could just dust it and replace it, but you're just moving the energy about it. I always like to rearrange furniture when I'm doing that kind of challenge. The 27 things as well. Um, you want to change up the space as much as possible, but in the kitchen everything's kind of set, you know. So my move was to like, bring it all in onto the island and then switch it all out. And so I just like, I had a little sativa, I had a little glass of wine, I put my urge flow playlist in my ears and I just cleaned that kitchen, let me tell you. And then it leaked out. I cleaned the whole main floor and I was arranging.
Vaness Henry:
47:29
I moved way more than 27 things. I baked muffins, I put it on the counter for when the boys woke up and, let me tell you, the next morning every one of the inhabitants in the house was in a completely different energy because there was a spell cast in that motherfucking kitchen. I'm telling you, it's powerful, um, and I've done this before and in in equally powerful ways, where I've, like, totally rearranged my bedroom and I always have. I always start to lose track of the 27 things, and so part of the practice is to like keep track of that, you know. But I always, and beyond that, um, I always move way more than 27 things because once I get going I love it and maybe you know, maybe it's good that you know, this is my secret little experiment. I do because I'm always promoting people to like rearrange your space, set up your space, switch up the energy.
Vaness Henry:
48:14
This is something to know, no matter where you live, no matter what your home is, and this is why it's an old it. It's an old, ancient Chinese philosophy. From my research on it, it has to do with the power of nine and 27 connecting to nine, although I'm sure there's even more deep lore around that ritual that is privy to people who actually are from that culture and have it passed on and know the deep stories that kind of come from some of these teachings. But I've only kind of read about it passing in a journalistic um perspective, and I got that from Lillian too, who I always talk about. She's one of my favorite Feng Shui practitioners. Many people call her a Feng Shui master, although you know I hear she doesn't actually have that title um formally, but she's so recognized in the space that the people give her that title. So I love that. She's an example of that and she's very, very respected. I highly recommend any of her books. I get her her new book every year to tell me how to be in my dragon energy. She is getting older. Now, though. She is getting older and she started working with her daughter, and so a daughter her daughter is taking over a lot of her, a lot of her teachings.
Vaness Henry:
49:25
But the 27 things challenge, um, you can find it in your account right now, um, when you log in and I put a little beginner and advanced, uh, difficulty level. There's some little different features in that challenge, which I highly recommend doing it, having it in your toolkit, in your back pocket, um, and that's just one of the one of the features in the at-home experiments right now. So everybody who is kind of in my original wellness club is going to get all their original features that they want. But people who are going into my new deconditioning journey are going to get this more kind of customized seasonal flow and, um, a big change, a big big change, is that I want to make inner expeditions, my shamanic journeying um available, that it's not exclusively locked away in my wellness club. So that's the big, big change. That's going to be somebody that comes out and is available.
Vaness Henry:
50:19
My plan right now is to make that a low monthly subscription, like something like $9.99 a month. Cancel it whenever you know, like no pressure to stay in that. Because when people come and have these sort of experiences with me and then they want to maintain some of the kind of practices that I've exposed them to, like shamanic journeying, you know they can have access to my whole library, all the omens, the new seasonal things, but if they're not using it it doesn't fit in their life. They can kind of cancel at any time and it's not so tied to my like human design work. I'm trying to create some differentiation between my areas of study so that people have a better they can, people can better see how I braid them in together.
Vaness Henry:
51:05
Then you know, I don't know, it's just feeling like maybe it's my ninth house shit higher learning, just um. Last summer I um did a lot of my. I did a lot of new Feng Shui studies. This summer it's feeling like it's going to be a lot more of my shamanic studies. But I do like to kind of go into a season of yeah, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, feed yourself, learn something new.
Vaness Henry:
51:21
But I felt like I needed to do some trimming and some paring down and I'm still in the process of unfolding how these changes will come out. So that's been kind of tricky, you know. So I think I'll have to do it in stages and I've probably said too much here in my teams and be like why would you reveal all this? But it is what I'm working on and it has come from, you know, having this deep change in environment. Then the friend circle shifted. Then the past friend circles from the past shifted so cool how that happens. And then my familiar is exiting and needing to go an end of life care and I'm now being called into a deeper role that I have to fulfill at this time, and it has affected the capacity of what I'm able to do in my work, and so things have needed to kind of hone and get simpler for me in order for me to maintain a certain level of work. And I'm at this place where my methodology can now be like honed again and then packaged and presented in an impactful way. So I'm feeling excited about that, but I'm still working through all the details because things are active and live.
Vaness Henry:
52:28
So how do you do it, you know? How do you do it in a way that like doesn't fuck up anybody's experience, you know, and they maintain all their original features, you know. So how? So I I? How do I, how do I honor all the original features and let them fulfill their contracts but don't let anybody else come into that new to set up new contracts there and then initiate something new for new people. It's like, oh, closing down, initiating, like the things have to happen in kind of like stages.
Vaness Henry:
52:57
And then I think I can't do everything at once, so like I think I'm only going to pull inner expeditions out to the public in a future season. So it'll be cool to listen back to this to see when that actually happens. But I can't do everything at once because then it's overwhelming, you know, and then it's like not as effective. So it's like you can make all the changes behind the scenes quietly, but then you actually go and inform and like create excitement about these things strategically at different times or at least that's how my brain's going to approach it. But you get to hear all the behind the scenes of what I'm working on before I actually go and do it and you can later see how it does unfold, you know. So I think what I would like to do is have inner expeditions come out on its own, but I want to give it a special moment because it's my art form right. I don't want to just like have it like like come out in in skirt around some of the human design stuff that I'm releasing, that I'm excited about, you know.
Vaness Henry:
53:52
And, of course, um, I'm doing this book behind the scenes and have been working with this book agent and customizing this book proposal based on the feedback of some of these publishers who are interested in it and like what's going to happen there. You know I've never published a nonfiction book and what's that process going to be like and when is that going to come out and what am I going to have to do to market that? You know? Um, oh, my God, something I want to tell you that I'm I'm feeling very proud about Um, I wanted to add a little personality in my book proposal because all these people have been looking at it, and so I wanted to put my story in it and, like by my story.
Vaness Henry:
54:29
I wanted to like give my message and my why and why this is important. And I kind of pushed a little bit and wrote this fucking three page thing and I was so nervous for my markets manifestor agent to read it and then be like, girl, this is way too much. You just sit down, we're like doing a human design at home book where the rooms are important and how are we going to set them up. So I was like already and she came back and she was like, oh, this was so great. This is what was missing. Like this is your passion, this is your why this is so important. And I was like fuck, yeah, okay, she's with me. Like, if I can't go for broke like that in my book, what am I doing, right? So I'm so excited for that project to come out and I have no expectation about what's going to happen. That's just going to be.
Vaness Henry:
55:09
Whatever it's going to be, I've been fucking patient about it, you know, um, but I I do want to just keep you looped in on the process, cause it is very fun. I do want to talk about too, like the numbers that I get and like what happens behind the scenes and what's realistic? How much money do you make on that? Because what I'm really interested in about okay, let me be real with you what I'm interested in in regards to writing books, because they're not super. It's not a super like profitable thing unless you like happen to explode, which is not likely, but they have potential to give you royalties, you know, like they have potential to create an alternative kind of retirement plan. And there's been so much that has been changing in our world and and um you know, unstable investments or investments that worked for previous generations maybe aren't working for future generations. And um, ego manifestors are really, really aligned and attuned to earning royalties. It's a great way for them to earn money because they do the thing once and then they continue to get paid for it forever. They just got to be clever about marketing it and keeping awareness up about it, kind of thing, you know.
Vaness Henry:
56:21
And um, I, I, in my past, as a young person, I was a recording artist and had been in SoCan, which is um like, um, uh, a company where Canadian artists, if they stream or play your music on the radio, like you, get compensated for it. It's like it's, that's like the company that does your royalties. So I had been exposed to that before, but I just I'm obviously don't do that now, although I always think about doing like an original shamanic album, set it here first might happen in the future, something that I would love to do, but I need way more time. Um, cause wouldn't it be fun to do like an album where the muses are the environments, the game, the market? Yeah, anyway, ideas, ideas. I think that'd be so fun, but I'm, but I'm not in sound in that way. But I could be ooh, he goes, he goes, he goes him, and high over this right now. But that's something that I do want to do.
Vaness Henry:
57:13
But because of my exposure to books and writing fiction books, I knew what that process was like. But when you go into nonfiction, there's just potential for people to want the knowledge that you're sharing, and so you could potentially have better royalties. And if this is an area of study that becomes more popular in the future, I could potentially set myself up where um a book could do really well in the future. When I come off the roof, let's say, and it's giving me like a retirement stream of income, well, if that's possible with one book, you could in theory do that with multiple books, and then all of a sudden you've set yourself up like a modern retirement plan that isn't just RRSPs, you know anyway, money things, ego things, just things I'm thinking about. So I thought that would be like a cool thing to try, right, and like see how it goes and and I'll only know once I'm older, if it was, you know, if it was the move.
Vaness Henry:
58:03
But, um, as somebody who's, you know, a journalist, um, you got to get creative on the ways that you make money, and I'm just not a freelance writer like that's just, that was not going to be the way I made. I make money in my life because I wrote the article for that one shitty fucking magazine that never paid me and I saw my words printed and I was so annoyed I was like, oh no, never again. You will not take advantage of me financially. You could take advantage of me emotionally, apparently, but not in my pocket. Not in my pocket. Anyway, thank you for listening to this insight.
Vaness Henry:
58:36
I know I gave you a lot of information, but I wanted to come in with a solo episode because I've really been going through it emotionally with some of the changes again in my friendship circles, but specifically the death of the familiar, the death of what I know, the death of my pet companion who's with me and I want to be transparent that I'm in the end of life care phase with her and it's been longer than I thought it was going to be, so I actually don't know how long it will be, but life does have to continue on. I was unfortunately not able to just stay in that phase of carrying her pacing throughout the house, day in and day out. I had to keep getting back to my work, which is teaching me a lot about some things in my past that I've then also been kind of going through and by pursuing some continuing studies, whether it's in human design, feng shui or shamanism. That feels nourishing to me and like high quality nourishment that I'm really hungry for at this time, while I'm really reflecting on who I am as a person and a friend and a friend to others, and that, of course, has affected my work and what I want to present as a methodology for people to be introduced to their variable and a way to move through variable integration in a playful, easy, expansive way that still leads to super impactful, radical transformation, and I guess I'm just in my process of perfecting that um and how that's going to go. But, um, we're going to have still a few more interviews that happened this season before I take my break for the summer, um, and start going into my studies.
Vaness Henry:
1:00:14
I take summers off when my child is home and then kind of start gathering up my interviews again when I move back into fall, into that, back to school energy, and I want to make sure I have a bunch of episodes that are fun for you to listen to. Um, because we have like over 30 now, which is crazy. I've had a lot of my besties have come back multiple times. I've started to introduce you to some of my go-to practitioners that I like. Oh, and I have been liking that, by the way, I definitely want to have my tarot gal, tarot Teresa, on the show, cause I love when people fuse things like human design and tarot, or like Karen Scholey, who fuses the nine centers, human design with Reiki. Love that, love stuff like that.
Vaness Henry:
1:00:55
Um, and I do love to seasonally invest in my practitioners and I just thought those would be fun people to like have on, you know, because I just like I'd like you to know what I'm doing, who's in my ear, but also, I like to look at some of my fave people through the lens of their color palette, because it's fun for me and it's a great way to watch human design in action or hear human design in action.
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