20. Journey of Souls: What I’ve Learned Since Leaving the LDS Church

Hi, I’m Natalie Ottosen and you are listening to The Mindset School for Soulful Entrepreneurs, episode number 20.

Welcome to The Mindset School podcast, a show for spiritual entrepreneurs who are ready to stop feeling stuck, reconnect to their soul’s purpose, and create a deeply fulfilling life and business. I’m Natalie Ottosen, transformational life coach, and reconnection healing foundational practitioner, and I can help you scale and grow a six-figure business from a place of inner authority, wisdom, knowledge, and truth.

If you are a spiritual entrepreneur and you are looking to take that first step towards your dream of running your own business, this is the show for you. Ready to step into your power and move forward with clarity and purpose? Let’s go.

Wow, you guys, I feel free as a bird. I had no idea what would happen when I released this episode about leaving the Mormon religion. I had no idea, number one, how it would make me feel and what it would release inside of me. So last Thursday, when the podcast released I opened up my email and immediately I had a message on YouTube. And somebody was basically telling me that I was wrong and that I shouldn't be helping people who are leaving the church, that I should be helping people who are in the church.

And I just want to tell you that number one, we are not here to tell people what they're here to do. Even as a coach, I don't tell people what to do. I can share my experience and I can show you a path that I have been on, but you get to take whatever it is that I have learned, and you get to make it your own. And you get to do what's right for you.

And I just found it so ironic that here I am sharing about my experience of leaving a religion where people are telling me what to do and what to think and how to be and what to wear. And then the very first comment I get is somebody telling me that I'm doing it wrong and that I should be helping a specific group of people. And the truth is that this is my path and I get to follow that path according to me and what I feel is right for me, not for anyone else, even if it goes against or if it doesn't align with what somebody else believes is true.

So I get to stand in that truth, and I get to show up and be exactly who I am in that truth. So I am excited for all the feedback I've been getting so far. I had no idea how much love and support and outreach I would already receive by having this episode go live. So I just want to thank you all for allowing me to share my journey with you. And to allow this process to unfold for myself, as I am defining my niche even narrower to truly be a spiritual and business coach that helps women who have left the Mormon LDS church.

So with all that of being said, I am really excited to announce that I'm going to be creating a mastermind that is going to bring a group of women together who want to tap into their spirituality, who ultimately want to find their purpose and start creating a career that is aligned with who they are, their purpose, their passion and create profit in 90 days. So I am putting that together right now. I am revamping a mastermind that I've already created, so I will have more information on this, and you can click the link in the show notes and get more information about this.

And then I will be sharing more over the next couple of weeks as I'm getting ready to launch this beautiful mastermind with amazing souls like you who want to come together, who want to collaborate, who want to connect, who want to go dive deeper into their spirituality, who want to uncover deeper layers of themself. So today I wanted to talk about a book that I love. I know I did this on episode 10, so I thought for episode 20 it would be fun to do this again. And I'm actually going to kind of tie it into leaving the Mormon church. The book that I talked about in episode 10, If Life Is A Game: These are the Rules. And how that book truly impacted me.

And then once I ended up leaving the religion, so if you haven't listened to episode 10, I encourage you to go do that because I talk all about If Life Is A Game: These are the Rules. And we kind of have these lessons for life that we're here to learn and number one is we get a body and number two is we're here to learn lessons. And then we can learn from those lessons, or we repeat them so on and so forth. In the Mormon religion, we believe, I believed that this was a one and done.

We come here one time and we have one shot to get it right and we either make it to the celestial kingdom or we don't. And it's based on how righteous and how good we are in this life. And so things like reincarnation were absolutely taboo. That was not even considered remotely feasible and that was just not even an option, there was no reincarnation. But when I ended up leaving the Mormon religion again, I started to explore all sorts of different ideas and possibilities. And I really started looking into anything and everything that I possibly could and that include different religions, that include different modalities that included all of the things.

And I remember again If Life Is A Game: These are the Rules, this kind of became a guidance post for me. It was a game changer for me. It literally was, I remember the moment in time of my life is forever changed for reading this book because of the principles that were in it. And then again when I left the religion, I started dabbling in different things. Mediumship started looking to reincarnation. I started looking into past life regression, which ties into reincarnation where we've lived multiple lifetimes.

And we can actually do a form of hypnosis which regresses us back to another lifetime, and there's whatever lifetime ends up coming forward for us is information for us in that regression. So I was recommended a lot of different books and I'm excited to share a lot of them with you because they really helped me to find my own spiritual path and helped me move forward for myself. And one of the books that was recommended to me was Journey of Souls by Michael Newton. At this point in time when I read this book, I had already gone and had a past life regression.

So this was something that I was very interested in, I was very fascinated in. And I would love to share that story with you at a later point in time. So if you're interested in that, message me @soulsistercoaching on Instagram and let me know. This was a really interesting experience for me. And then I started reading Journey of Souls. And as I was reading the book I found it fascinating because he's actually a psychologist who ended up doing some work with his patients and ended up regressing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of his patients and was taking them through the life after death experience.

And I remember reading the book, it was fascinating, and I was enthralled in the entire thing. But remember thinking that this was absolutely not my experience in my past life regression, but still found it so fascinating and was loving every single minute of it. I would read it again and again. And I've actually ended up recommending this book to so many different people.

But I was reading it thinking this was just really not my experience with my past life regression at all until I got towards the end of the book where he got into the later stages of soul ages and how we are different soul ages basically in this life. And when we die, we have all sorts of different experiences in the death process. And we're either greeted by a bunch of people or we're not greeted by many people at all. And based on our soul age, we have different experiences.

And once I got to the end of the book, as I'm reading the account of this Journey of Souls and the later stage soul age, my jaw dropped to the floor. And I couldn't believe I was literally recounting the entire experience of my past life regression and I couldn't believe it. I knew nothing about really past life regressions prior to having my own experience. I knew nothing about journey of souls. I knew nothing about the book and how it would go and how the experience of people as they pass on and all of that. And I'm literally reading basically my account of my past life regression in Journey of Souls.

And so it was so fascinating because number one, it was so reaffirming as to the experience that I had just had, that is very easy to discount when you have something like that happen. Because you go into hypnosis and you're having this experience and it's really easy, that once you get out of an experience. And this is why I say when you are dealing with intuitive experiences or when you have something very magical happen or very profound I always encourage my clients to write down their experiences.

Because they're the very pieces that you're going to build your spirituality on, that you're going to build your intuition on, that you're going to build your spiritual gifts on because you can go back and reference those points in time when those experiences happen. Just like my experience where I connected with God, that was a very profound experience for me. And I wrote it down as soon as it happened. And I've had many of those over the last 15/17 years, well, 40 years, I’m 40. So I've had all sorts of experiences like that over the last 40 years, but specifically the last 15.

And writing down those experiences so that I have them and I can go back and. I can reference them. Those are some of the most beautiful and spiritual building activities that you can do. Also at the same time I ended up being introduced to a series on YouTube called Soul Ages and this was also very profound for me because it finally gave me a definition to what I saw around me. And I could see the different soul ages, the different ages of the souls of the people in my life. And also recognized the groupings that we come here together with, our soul groups, our soul family.

And it was a really interesting experience to be able to read this Journey of Souls and to also listen to these Soul Ages and also have this experience of If Life Is A Game: These are the Rules. And it all kind of hit me like a ton of bricks one day, where I was looking at all of this. And I went, “Oh my gosh, this life, leaving this religion, experiencing this life, doing all of this past life regression and living all of these different multiple lifetimes”, because now I was a believer in reincarnation. I said, “this is If Life Is A Game: These are the Rules, but it's on such a larger scale.”

This religion thing, it's just a blip on the map, literally, if you took a little thumb tack or a thumb pin and put it in a map and blew it out. The religion piece, the LDS Mormon religion, it's just a blip on this map. This is so much bigger. And we have been doing this for so much longer, for so many different lifetimes, and there is truth in all of it. That's what I ended up understanding and learning is that there is truth in everything.

And what I've even come to understand even further is that not only is there truth in everything, but it's all the same verbiage, it's just different words. I started to understand, in the Mormon religion, when you turn 14 years old you get what's called a patriarchal blessing, which is basically a psychic blessing. And everyone's is different, and it's given from the patriarch. So it's somebody who's specifically ordained to give you that blessing.

And you receive that blessing at 14 years old, and basically it maps out your life. It tells you what it is that you need to know for this lifetime. And it was so interesting for me because some of the key points in my patriarchal blessing had to do with being a mother, being a mother of Israel, interestingly enough. That I was going to go through some serious hardships and if I chose the light, the darkness would have no power over me. And that I would be sustained my whole life, so financially taken care of, which so many of these points have been my life and my purpose and my path.

What was so interesting is when I ended up going over to the astrology side and really diving deep into my birth chart because that's how we started it through the Debra Silverman program was we dove into our chart first and foremost to really understand ourselves on a deeper level. And it was number one, the first thing that jumped out of my chart is that my north node is in the 11^th house in cancer. So I am a mother to the collective. I am here to help lead social groups and friendships and communities, but I'm here to be a mother, basically to the collective.

So here I was, here I had this patriarchal blessing that was telling me aspects about my life and also my astrology chart. And there was multiple things that ended up linking and lining up between the two. But I thought again, here we have this religion aspect, where this is the only truth. And then I have got my astrology piece where my LDS religion told me that astrology was incorrect. Here I've got this astrology chart that is saying the exact same thing that my patriarchal blessing is telling me. And I also had psychic blessings tell me the same thing as well.

So what I really came to understand is that all of it's true. It's just different words and If Life Is A Game: These are the Rules, but it’s on such a bigger, larger scale. That we come to learn lessons and then we repeat those lessons, but we do it in lifetimes. We do it over and over again and that's why for a long time I really struggled to be here. I really struggled to live this life. I had a lot of suicidal ideation and just didn't understand how much more I had to experience and go through before my life lessons were done, especially as I mentioned in the last podcast episode when I lost two very close people to me.

I didn't understand why they got to go and why I had to stay here and keep doing this thing called life. And I see it so much bigger now. I see it as we are here to learn and grow and evolve as souls because that's the process. We're here to experience all of it. We're here to experience all of the emotions. And in fact, I was talking to a client about this just today where there was some shame coming up for her. And I am no stranger to shame. You're going to hear a lot about shame moving forward in the podcast episodes because shame was such a big part of my life, and it was such a big part of the process for me.

A big part of the process for me of undoing all of the religious programming and things like that. So, we were talking about shame, and we recognized shame in her story, and she very quickly wanted to move on from the shame. And I just first of all offered if we just could sit with it and just allow it to be there. And then I also talked a little bit further about it was like let's kick it out the door.

And I just said, “I just want to offer you that maybe this was such a beautiful thing that shame was present there for you because it was your body's way of keeping you safe from the experiences, from the trauma that you were experiencing as a child.” And so offering the opportunity for that to be such a beautiful gift, and how normal it is to experience that and how normal it was to have that present. So again, seeing life as the bigger picture of we're here to learn all these lessons, we're here to experience. And truly the only way out is through. So we can't dismiss it. We can't put it aside.

We are here to experience the good and the bad because life is 50/50. We can't just have good all the time, because without the bad we wouldn't even know what good is. So again, I saw this all as a bigger picture and I was so grateful for the opportunity to read Journey of Souls. Because it was such a beautiful confirmation of my own past life regression, my own experience in understanding a deeper level as to what gifts and abilities I had in previous lives and how those gifts and abilities are helping me show up here and now.

And I actually just even realized right as I was saying that, another level of this past life regression that I had probably 14 years ago about me having all of my gifts and my ability and being able to speak and stand and share my truth as I'm doing with you guys right now. I just realized that this is just another unfolding, another layer of this beautiful regression that I am understanding on a deeper level right here, right now with you guys.

Because sharing my story about leaving the Mormon church was probably one of the scariest things I've ever done. The same with talking about my sexual assault and giving my son up for adoption, where I talk about in episode seven and eight. So I just want to share that we're on this journey. We're here to learn. We're here to grow. We're here to evolve. Our journey doesn't look like anybody else’s, and it is truly personal to our own experiences.

And I just want to offer you some tips, some tools, some processes that I have gone through personally that have helped me through my path of this unfolding. And I hope that they're able to help you the way that they helped me. So again, I am going to be launching a mastermind here very shortly where I am going to take individuals who want to come together, who want to truly find their purpose and their passion and start creating profit with that.

Specifically, women who have left the LDS church, who have maybe stepped away from their spirituality, are unsure about their spirituality, don't really know where it is they're going and what it is they're doing. They know that there's something out there. They know that they have these experiences that are unexplainable. And they want to dive deeper into that, and they truly want to know themselves on a deeper level and truly take that purpose and that passion and help other people through the same process, just as I am doing for you.

So look for the information, look for all the details coming forward on that episode. And I know that I didn't share a ton about the Journey of Souls, but I wanted to kind of leave it open and leave you curious because it is such a beautiful book, and it is such an interesting read. And he has done hundreds and hundreds of past life regressions and talks about the accounts of all of his different patients, all of his different clients that he has regressed. If you're interested at all, check it out. It is an amazing book, but I don't want to spoil any of it for you because it's so good.

So I hope that you enjoyed this. I hope that this was informational for you. And if you have any questions, always reach out to me @soulsistercoaching on Instagram. And I will see you all next week. All my love.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Mindset School. Ready to dive deeper into finding your purpose and create a deeply fulfilling life? Visit soulsistercoaching.com for more guidance and resources. See you next week.