- Hello everybody, and welcome
to the Lit Up Lightworker Podcast,
bringing you fun and soulful interviews
with spiritual teachers.
With the aim of tuning you in and lighting you up.
You can access all episodes of the podcast
at georgelizos.com/podcast.
Or by searching for it on iTunes,
Spotify, Stitcher, and Tunein.
Also, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel
for more videos and interviews
on finding and following your life purpose.
My name is George Lizos,
I'm a spiritual teacher, intuitive,
the co-creator of Elemental Healing,
and the author of "Be The Guru".
And today it is my honor to have here with me
the super fabulous Gala Darling.
Gala Darling is a speaker and the best-selling author
of "Radical Self-Love:
"A Guide to Loving Yourself and Living Your Dreams".
She has been teaching radical self-love,
a selection of powerful techniques and tools
which help women transform their lives
for close to a decade.
Her site, galadarling.com,
helps a million women a month find their voice,
live without fear, and fall in love with life.
Gala, welcome to the Lit Up Lightworker Podcast.
- Hello!
It's so good to be reunited with you,
even if it's just digitally.
- Indeed, and I'm so excited to be chatting all about
raising our vibration, manifesting our best life,
through the amazing techniques you teach.
I see you on Instagram stories,
and I see the results people get,
especially with your tapping techniques,
and I'm just so in awe, and so grateful
for the light you're shining into the world.
But before we get into all the good stuff,
I wanna start from the beginning.
What has been your story
to teaching about self-love and manifestation?
- I think anyone who is a powerful teacher
is a powerful teacher because they came
from the opposite of that place.
So, I was always a creative child,
and wanted to do creative things,
and as I got older I received the message
that I had to do something that would
make me plenty of money,
something that was safe, be a lawyer,
be a journalist, you know, take these safe paths.
And it really resulted in me shutting down my creativity,
and becoming very depressed.
I developed an eating disorder, and I was
in a really dark place for probably about 10 years.
Then when I was 22 years old,
I discovered this technique called tapping,
which is also known as EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique,
which literally you just go like this,
you tap on your face while you talk about
what's difficult, what's stressing you out,
and it releases the energetic blocks.
And you can see with a whole new perspective,
and you're rewiring your brain.
And that's basically it.
And once I discovered that technique
I was obsessed with telling people about it,
and telling people that life could be different.
Because so many people believe that depression,
and eating disorder, whatever,
is a life sentence,
and it is something you will never recover from.
It's something you will always suffer with.
And I wanna dispel that rumor, it's not true.
- 100%, and I love how you teach tapping.
I can see personally as well,
when I discovered it it's completely transformed my life.
I was in my third year of university in Bristol, in the UK,
and I discovered tapping, I'm like "Okay, great.
"I'm just gonna sit here on the bed every single day for one
"to two hours, and tap out all my life's issues."
And that's what I did! - One out!
- I'm just, and just to hit myself,
cry and let it all out,
and I would feel so good afterwards.
However, I want to touch on a point,
because many teachers teaching about the love attraction,
and manifestation, don't think
that tapping or embracing, or expressing negative emotion,
is a good thing.
They feel that as we express the negative emotion,
we recreate it into our lives.
So I feel there is this fear,
in the spiritual community in general,
where people feel like oh, I'm supposed to be 100% positive,
and therefore they over-spiritualize their problems,
suppress their emotions, and create a fake positivity
that doesn't really help them.
So where do you stand on this?
And how can we use Emotional Freedom Technique,
or any other technique to release our negative emotions
without manifesting them.
- Well, I love that you brought that up,
because it's such a fear that people have,
and they feel like if they say what they're afraid of,
or they say what's not working,
then they're going to create more of it.
But you have to look at what's going on in your life,
and accept it in order to move forward.
Because covering it up with fake positivity,
it's like having old garbage in your apartment,
and instead of taking the garbage out
you just spray air-freshener.
You can spray air freshener all day,
your garbage is still gonna stink.
So with tapping, I think of it as removing
an emotional thorn from your body.
And the great thing with tapping
is it's not like talk therapy where you talk about it,
and you reiterate it, and you relive it,
you talk about it and you literally remove
the belief from your body.
And when I think back about how my life
used to be before I tapped,
I can't even connect with that story anymore.
It's like watching a movie of somebody else.
It's that far removed from my consciousness.
It's like an old story that doesn't connect in any way.
And so that's why tapping is so important.
And I think it is such an essential piece of manifesting,
because if you want some thing,
like say you want to be in a relationship,
but your underlying beliefs are I'm not lovable,
I always get left, it's not safe,
you can't trust men, whatever.
As long as you're holding those beliefs
you're going to be calling in love with one hand
and pushing it away with the other.
Though with tapping you can literally remove those beliefs,
and put new beliefs in, beliefs like I'm really lovable,
people look after me.
When you believe those things you can create relationships,
manifestations, things that you really want,
because you got rid of the old stuff
that was holding you back.
And I really think tapping
and manifestation go together so beautifully,
I actually can't think of a better combination.
- Indeed, it's like mental
and emotional decluttering in other words.
You feel it once, you let it go,
and then you don't revisit it again.
I think what most people fear
is just reiterating, as you said,
the same thing over and over again.
But with tapping, the best thing about it,
you don't need to just keep talking it
with different friends all the time,
you talk it with your tapping and then it's gone. (laughing)
- Yeah, which is amazing.
And it sounds so crazy,
but I always tell people the proof is in the pudding.
When you try it, you will understand
what is really going on, and your mind will be blown.
- 100%, now, I know you recently launched
your membership site, The Vortex,
with the aim of providing tools and research sets
to help people raise their vibration.
You include tapping and so many other teachings as well,
and I know my friend Colin Bedell is in as well.
- Oh, I was just thinking!
I was like "I wonder if Colin and George know each other,
"because they are both so cute."
- Oh my God, I interviewed him last week actually,
on the podcast, I love Colin.
He has such fabulous energy.
Like fabulous is the word I would use to describe Colin.
- [Gala] Absolutely.
- So tell us more about The Vortex,
and what your hope for it is.
- Well, about two years ago, I discovered Abraham Hicks,
and I started to live by the philosophy
that feeling good was my job.
And I decided to do this because nothing else was working.
I was listening to Tony Robbins,
and I was making to do lists,
and I was doing all these things,
and nothing was really making me feel any better.
And I was so desperate that I was like okay, fine,
I'll try feeling good as my job.
Which basically means every time you have a thought
that's out of alignment,
or that doesn't feel good,
you stop yourself and you think about something else.
You basically distract yourself from your pain.
And it was so powerful,
and my life transformed so quickly,
within about four months my life was totally different.
And so that's what The Vortex is.
So it's me doing tapping videos.
And I have advice shows, I have an advice shows with Colin,
I have an advice show with my dad.
Colin does the astrology,
my friend Grace Smith does the hypnosis,
Jessica Snow does the meditations.
Like these are the most powerful magicians
I know that I've brought in to bolster the community,
and we're over a thousand people strong,
it's been so amazing. - Wow.
- And it's like my dream job!
Every week I get to be like what do I wanna make for people?
And just create something really cool.
Like the last thing I filmed for them was,
there's this woman in Silverlake, in LA,
who's built a greenhouse in her backyard,
but every panel of the greenhouse is a different color.
And it's called the Chromacabana,
it's this beautiful, multi-colored thing in her backyard.
So we filmed a tapping routine for anxiety
in this Chromacabana.
And it's just so beautiful to really serve my community,
really give them what they need,
and do it in a beautiful way, with high production value,
and gorgeous editing,
and it's just the thrill of a lifetime.
It's so good.
- It's one of the main things I love about you,
you put attention to creating
high production quality content,
and you make everything beautiful,
and who doesn't love seeing something beautiful?
And what I also love about your work
is you're very practical.
I remember when I worked for Hay House,
and we had you over in London for the book launch,
you guided us through a very practical self-love ritual
by burning our fears, and manifesting our desires
with some really sparkling paper.
And it just puts more magic into your life
when you do something in a very practical way.
So, what would be your number one practical tool
to raising our vibration, if you only had to choose one,
and it wasn't tapping, because we covered that one?
(laughing) Which one would it be?
- So, if not tapping, my second tip would be
having a magical morning practice, and this is something
that I developed a couple of years ago.
You open the Voice Memo app,
and you start to make a recording in three parts.
The first thing you talk about is what you're grateful for,
and you get really deep on it.
You talk about gratitude for at least a minute,
hopefully more.
The second thing you do is you state your desire for the day
but you say it in the past tense.
So you would say "I'm so happy and grateful,
"I had such a beautiful day, I did this amazing interview,
"I had this great lunch with my friend,
"I had an amazing workout, I went on a hot date,
"I felt so good, I had a make out session,
"it was fantastic."
And then the third thing that you do
is you state your future desire, so a bigger thing.
Maybe it's like you want your next book
to be a New York Times bestseller.
But again, you state it in the past tense.
"I'm so happy and grateful
"that my book was such a huge success,
"we sold so many copies, my book tour was really fun."
And then you finish the recording.
And then you send that recording to a friend of yours.
And a friend who is like ride or die for you.
And they listen to it at their leisure
and they record the same member memo for you,
and they send it back.
And you do this every morning.
You send one, they send one back.
Now, this is so powerful for so many reasons.
Firstly, you're getting in touch with what you truly desire,
not just your to do list.
What do you really want?
What would feel really good for you?
Secondly, you're putting it into your subconscious
as if it's already happened.
So when you do that your subconscious immediately starts
working on ways to make this happen for you.
And thirdly, it's so powerful to
firstly, have the courage to speak your desire out loud,
and secondly, to have it heard by somebody else,
someone who deeply supports you and loves you,
and who can mirror it back to you.
And often when I'm listening to my friends
magical morning practice,
I'm listening while I'm doing my makeup
or something like that, and I'm listening,
but not listening that closely.
So, I can't really tell the difference
between what they're grateful for,
and what their desires are.
To me it's all the same.
To me I'm seeing it as if it's already done.
And the results people have had from doing this practice
are unbelievable.
I have a woman who got matched with someone else,
you know like we'd match up in our community,
and one of them was diagnosed with cancer
a few months into them doing this practice.
And every day they talked about her being healthy,
and feeling good, and being reunited,
and she was cleared, she's totally in remission,
she's feeling so good.
And they are so convinced that really making her health
a huge focus and talking about it as if it was already done
is really a huge part of her getting into remission,
and getting healthy.
And I believe that, the power of the mind is so vital,
and we down play it all the time.
- Wow, and it's such a powerful way
to co-create with people as well,
other than just being solitary in a room,
and just doing these work, and feeling lonely about it,
it's so much helpful when we bring someone else
so that they can reflect back to us
the value of our desires.
Now, what happens when our manifestation processes
don't work?
In my experience with guiding people
through different manifestations,
and usually they get the book "The Secret", usually,
that's where people start, they get excited,
they create a bunch of vision boards,
they visualize, they do positive affirmations,
and then when it doesn't work,
they feel dissatisfied, disappointed, and they give up.
In your experience, with guiding people
through different manifestation processes,
what are some pitfalls that people fall in
that prevent them from making those processes work?
What is people's number one block to manifestation?
- Well, there's a few things.
I think the first is that people are impatient,
they expect results immediately.
And you don't generally get the fruit
the same day that you plant the seed.
So patience is really important.
The second thing is that people put too much weight
on the manifestation.
'Cause I often find the satisfaction isn't always
in the manifestation, it's in the journey towards it.
So it's like who you'll become,
and what you'll experience as you're on your way
to getting that thing.
And we have to remember that we don't choose
the fastest path to a manifestation,
we choose the most satisfying one.
So, for some people,
meeting the love of your life immediately
is the most satisfying thing.
And for some people we want a date,
we wanna have weird experiences,
we wanna see what else is out there,
and that is more satisfying to us.
And we're all on this different path,
so that's really important to keep in mind.
And then I think the final thing is that
we have a lot of resistance to what we want.
You may have a million vision boards,
but if deep down you don't believe you deserve it,
if deep down you think it could never be that good,
if you don't want to do better than your parents,
or your friends, like this is all resistance,
and it's all gonna hold you away from your manifestation.
So tapping out those resistances is very important.
- Wow, so powerful.
I believe you have,
it is such a good point with regards
to all the fears that hold us back
from manifesting our desires.
Now, I wanna move into the negative manifestation.
What happens when shit happens in our lives basically?
Because we can try to work through tapping,
to raise our vibrations,
to do all our manifestation techniques,
but what happens when we end up
manifesting something negative?
What are some practical steps we can take
to shift things around, to turn lemons into pink lemonade?
(both laughing)
- Well, even when something doesn't work out
the way you want it to,
you probably still have a roof over your head,
you probably still have people that love you,
you probably still have at least some of your health,
and it's important to really step into gratitude
for what you have.
So many of us live this life of scarcity where,
even if our life is beautiful, it's never enough,
it's never good enough, we're still frustrated,
we're still not satisfied.
And as long as you're in that place
nothing will ever be good enough.
So really shifting into gratitude for what you have
right now is always the best place to start, yes.
- Wow, Gala, where can people get in touch with you
and learn more about The Vortex,
and about all the projects you have coming up?
- The best place to follow me is on Instagram,
I'm @galadarling.
I have a blog, which is a little bit neglected,
galadarling.com.
Although I have been writing there for 15 years,
so there's a lot of material if you wanna investigate it.
And then you can buy my first book,
"Radical Self Love" online, on Amazon,
Barnes & Noble, or wherever books are sold.
- Amazing, thank you so much for joining us
in the Lit Up Lightworker Podcast,
and teaching us so many practical processes
we can start implementing right now
to really transform our lives and manifest our best life.
Thank you so much, Gala.
- [Gala] Thank you.