What happens when success becomes a performance of survival instead of a reflection of alignment? Gina Cavalier joins Amy for a deeply vulnerable conversation about workplace burnout, emotional masking, suicidal ideation, nervous system overwhelm, and the hidden cost of carrying unresolved trauma into high-pressure professional environments. After years working inside demanding entertainment industry spaces with Warner Brothers, Disney, Fox, and Netflix, Gina began recognizing how achievement, perfectionism, and emotional suppression were disconnecting her from herself. Together they explore executive presence, energetic awareness, self-love, grounding practices, leadership identity, and the emotional exhaustion that comes from constantly “holding it together.” The conversation moves through healing, regulation, creativity, self-worth, and the possibility of creating a life rooted less in survival and more in freedom. By the end, what emerges is a powerful reminder: healing changes not only how we feel, but how we lead, connect, and move through the world.

Moments That Create Momentum:

1. The Hidden Cost of Holding It Together – Explore how emotional masking and unresolved trauma silently shape burnout, leadership, and workplace performance.
2. Executive Presence Starts With Nervous System Safety – Gina reframes confidence and leadership presence through grounding, regulation, and energetic awareness instead of performance.
3. Why High Achievers Feel Emotionally Exhausted – Discover how perfectionism, pressure, and hyper-independence disconnect people from joy, creativity, and self-worth.
4. Healing Beyond Traditional Recovery Models – Learn how movement, meditation, grounding practices, music, and energetic tools became part of Gina’s personal healing process.
5. The Workplace Energy Shift Leaders Often Miss – Hear how emotional presence, listening, and energetic awareness change the way teams collaborate and communicate.
6. Self-Love as a Leadership Practice – Gina shares the internal shift that helped her stop speaking to herself through shame, fear, and emotional survival.
7. Why Caregivers Need Support Too – The conversation explores burnout, emotional depletion, and the importance of allowing others to show up for you.
8. Freedom Beyond Achievement – Reflect on what it means to build a life rooted not in pressure and survival, but in emotional freedom and self-trust.

About the Guest:

Gina Cavalier is an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and former executive at Warner Bros.. She is the author of Planet Walking: A Handbook for the Living and co-author of Surviving Suicidal Ideation: From Therapy to Spirituality and the Lived Experience. Gina combines her entertainment industry background with transformational work, speaking on stages and platforms dedicated to healing, resilience, and purpose.

https://www.theliberatedhealer.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ginacavalier/

https://www.instagram.com/gina_cavalier/

Planet Walking: A Handbook for the Living - https://a.co/d/03QSzWoy

Surviving Suicidal Ideation: From Therapy to Spirituality and the Lived Experience - https://a.co/d/04PlA2QR

About Amy:

Amy Lynn Durham, known by her clients as the Corporate Mystic, is the founder of the Executive Coaching Firm, Create Magic At Work®, where they help leaders build workplaces rooted in creativity, collaboration, and fulfillment. A former corporate executive turned Executive Coach, Amy blends practical leadership strategies with spiritual intelligence to unlock human potential at work.

She’s a certified Executive Coach through UC Berkeley & the International Coaching Federation (ICF) In addition, Amy holds coaching certifications in Spiritual Intelligence (SQ21), the Edgewalker Profile, and the Archetypes of Change . In addition to being the host of the Create Magic At Work® podcast, Amy is the author of Create Magic At Work®, Creating Career Magic: A Daily Prompt Journal and the founder of Magic Thread Media™. Through her work, she inspires intentional leadership for thriving workplaces and lives where “magic” becomes reality.

Connect with Amy:

https://createmagicatwork.net/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/create-magic-at-work

https://www.facebook.com/112951637095427

https://www.instagram.com/createmagicatwork

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnEm4h3fUgaq8qgvZpz6dGg

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Mentioned in this episode:

This show was brought to you in part by the Magic Thread Media Network. To learn more visit: https://magicthreadmedia.com/

You need to learn how to self love, and you have to ask, do you really love yourself? Do you actually really love yourself, like you do your cat, your dog, your kids, your partner, whatever, you know. And then a lot for me, I was like, no, because the way that I was speaking to myself, that's not love, that's not love at all, would you do that to anybody you love? Of course, you wouldn't. So, why are you doing it yourself? And so I had to kind of reverse engineer all that stuff, and go, holy moly, no wonder I feel like this. I, anybody living in this space would not feel good, would not want to be here, and I'm doing it to myself, and I'm doing it because I don't love myself,

Amy Lynn Durham: hey, it's Amy. Welcome to Create Magic at Work, where we cast visions for a future of work where business decisions ripple outward to our teams, our communities, the planet, and humanity as a whole. If you're ready to edge walk instead of sleepwalk through your leadership, you're in the right place, so let's start making magic at work.

Hi everyone, welcome to Create Magic at Work today. I have Gina Cavalier with us. Gina is an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and former executive at Warner Brothers. She is the author of Planet Walking, I love that name, Planet Walking, a handbook for the living, and co-author of Surviving Suicidal Ideation: From Therapy to Spirituality and the Lived Experience. Gina combines her entertainment industry background with transformational work, speaking on stages and platforms dedicated to healing, resilience, and purpose. Gina, welcome to Create Magic at Work.

Thank you, and thank you for having me. And I love the Creating Magic at Work, so let's do it. I mean, I've been working diligently since I was very young. I love being in the office. I love having a job. I'm just one of those people that you know always love that space. So, ready to dive in.

Amy Lynn Durham: Thank you. Before we dive in, because I know we have some really cool things we're going to talk about today, especially surrounding - we're in mental health awareness month for May. We'll get into that in a little bit, but before we do, tell everyone a little bit about your background, and then what you do today.

So the majority of my career was in entertainment and various different levels of entertainment, but working with Warner Brothers, Disney, Fox, Netflix, all these different companies, and in very high demanding jobs, and I was sort of an unhealed person at that point, and didn't really know or acknowledged or that I was an unhealed person, so the stress and the the competition energy would just overwhelm me because I'm very sensitive and hard working, and kind of felt, why do certain things happen to me that maybe don't happen to other people? Why do they seem to have a better path than I did, or easier path, and you can fall into victimhood or self-pitying easily, and it caused a lot of suicidal ideation for me, and that was not a really fun way to live my life. It was actually very painful. Even people that don't exit the world in that way, living years and years and years with the thought of it, is actually just as much suffering, it's just not the way to live a quality life. And when I finally decided that I'm either going to pick a path and go down one road or the other, I decided to try my best, try everything possible to heal it, and that I was in the driver's seat, and that I, you know, why couldn't I fix this? Why couldn't this be something that was out of my life? I did have to leave the entertainment business to kind of find that out at the at the moment, and you know, through learning all these different pathways, though, I have just become so strong and been able to use my tools to make my work-life balance just so much better, and my projects go better, my relationships and my workspace go are so much more streamlined and grounded and happy, joyful and rewarding. So I put this into that book that you mentioned, a couple of the books, but this is my latest one, the planet walking a hamburger for the living, and I put all the tools that I learned and curated that helped me handle whatever was coming my way, because conflict

never ends, you know, there's always something on that anticipate going to be coming through. I was an unhealed child, and I became an unhealed. Adult, and then I'm bringing that into my workspace. I'm kind of trying to hide it or try to perform away from it. Eventually, you could just break, and it's, you know, really devastating. So, taking the tools and time now to kind of redirect your work-life balance, but with the tools that you have available to 24/7 is quite amazing to know that you have that power and control, and it doesn't matter what you do, and in what industry or your spiritual beliefs, that's what also what I love about it. It's not a, you know, you have to go down this doctor and you have to sign this contract, you have to, you know, none of that stuff. It's really just stuff that you can quietly do on your own. Nobody even notices it or sees it, and you are shifting your mentality, and you're reprogramming your brain, and calming your nervous system, and you're doing so many wonderful things for yourself.

Amy Lynn Durham: And so, a lot of those tips are in planet walking,

correct? The whole, it's well, I put it as a six week program, but you can kind of just pick and choose what you like and don't like, and kind of move around as you want, but yeah, I perfected everything, and I just was like, well, I got to write this down and put this in, and then my publisher asked me for another book, so we were able to do that, so it was pretty exciting.

Amy Lynn Durham: Awesome, yeah, let's go back to your corporate days at Warner Brothers, Netflix, Disney, wherever. One of the things that you talked to me about is the slow death of success, and I want.. I'm wondering if you could share with the listeners what you meant by that, so it's a quiet pain that's inside that you're especially when you're in a competitive industry you're putting on this like outside shell

but inside is all gooey and and going through a lot of turmoils right and so like not living an authentic life or being able to share with people a little bit of what's going on, or fear of losing your job, and all that stuff that just becomes almost a layer cake of pain and different things that happen. So it's just really important. Say, for example, I started using these practices from my own body, my own mind, right, and I found that they were helping and assisting me in meetings and making me more focused in the meetings, more present in the meetings, and that I could retain the information a lot better, that I was taking the emotion out of the context, because we're just emotional beings, we, you know, we weren't meant to sit in an office in a conference room table for hours and hours, you know, in the beginning of time, but now we have to mentally adjust all these feelings and emotions into working, and so now we have those tools to do that, but then I extended it out beyond that, and I started to actually use the same tools to my colleagues on my projects and in my conference rooms, and just grounding it, and and calling in new energy for the entire space, so it started with me and myself healing, but it kind of billowed out to the rest of us, and I really started seeing a noticeable difference of people being kinder, more connected, filled with more joy in what we were creating, and not so challenged or resistant, about you know, walking in, especially in any kind of high-pressured industry, you know, you walk in like everybody's on their pins and needles, you know, and things like that, and they're just constantly like, can I talk, can I not talk, who's trying to, is it there was no flow, and for me as a business or a business owner, you want everything to flow as best as it can. You know, when things are in resistance or people in fear, you're not getting the best work out of them. So, and you also have to be

careful about people's religious practices and things like that. So, these kind of practices are just something that can apply very easily to anybody, and it's just very helpful, and it gets you in right away. And let's get to work, but let's be, let's go in a kinder, funner way, no matter what your subject matter

Amy Lynn Durham: is. If someone listening feels that way, that they have to show up to work and have everything put together when inside they're silently suffering, what's one thing that you can say to them that might help shift that a little bit.

Well, first off, pad your time a little bit, get there like 10 minutes early if possible, and just be quiet in your space, and you know, maybe putting on some music, or just, you know, that it's the rushing thing that is so bad, to rushing to the phone, rushing to the computer, rushing to log in, rushing to get coffee, you know, creating that

little

10 minute space of just kind of like I'm here now, you know, present, so we do grow. Grounding exercises, but you can ground, and then you know there's a lot of different kinds on the internet, or in my book, you ground, and you just kind of take some deep breaths, get inside your body, you know, and just be a here, be present, flush some energy. I do, I imagine like golden suns, like that sunlight coming back into my space, you know, I try to get into my seniority, and I - this is a word that people always get, like, what do you mean by that? It's such a weird word, for some reason, for people, but this is really important in the workspace too, because I believe that, yes, we have different titles and jobs and companies, right, but we are all pretty much on the same equal level of on a soul level or vibration level, right. So holding that seniority, that yeah, you might be the coordinator or the manager, and that person might be the president or the senior vice president. You still have the same amount of seniority, so carry that, and I use that by like lifting up my body, putting my shoulders back, running my energy, you know, and connecting, and knowing that I hold just as much personal power in that, and when you do that, people start noticing a difference, you know, you, when you know, when you start with seeing somebody walking down the hall and their head is always down, and they're always like, are they starting to sludge over, and you could just see the tiredness in their eyes and stuff, and you know it's not like just getting older or something, can feel it, and that's the energy that that running your energy, being present helps you, just now you can walk into any situation and meeting, even if it's going to be a conflicting meeting, or something that might scare you, or nervous, you say something with HR, or something, you can still walk in with your head held up, and then know that you, you are that individual holding

your own title, confidence, and seniority in your own space, and people notice that, and those are the people that honestly get promoted pretty fast because they bring an energy with them, and you'll see it walking down the hall, like I would just the difference of when I started doing this work, and the confidence in my stride, you know, and in my swagger, and the way that I wore my clothes, and I just, the way that I communicate, and I brought in the joy and the light into the meetings, versus just that, like I'm exhausted, head down, don't look at me, go into the back of the room, you know that kind of energy just spills out all around you and to the team as well. So, if you want to progress in your career, run your energy, if you want to better your life, run your energy, if you want to be successful at your project or job, run your energy. I just say everything is answers, run your energy.

Amy Lynn Durham: That to me is a deep definition of executive presence, or a deep example of executive presence, or leadership presence. How to embody leadership presence, executive presence, instead of the fake it till you make it. This is more shifting into that energy and making a choice intentionally on how you're going to show up in this place, space, wherever you are.

Yeah, Nick, at Warner Brothers, we would have these, what I would call, like, the war room. Imagine 80 people in a room on a Monday morning, and we talk about all the movies. I was in the feature film division, and we're talking about billion dollar marketing budgets, so some very high pressure. The middle seats were all for the VPs, and the people in the back were, you know, coordinators and managers, and things like that. And I would always sit in the same position, and I started work doing this work, and then grounding myself before, and kind of running my energy, and holding myself up, like with taller, and just kind of being present, and what, listening to every single, instead of fading out, and not what, listening to people, just really listen to words that the people were saying, what they were trying to communicate. People could feel that I was just trying to listen to them, and the president would sit in the very front, and you know, president of the whole studio, you know, and she would only talk to the VPs normally, and she started turning around and saying, and didn't even know me. I wasn't even like anywhere in her vicinity of a person she should have known me at all, and she just started turning to me and saying, "Hey, what do you think about that, Gina? And people are just there, they were just in shock. Why are you asking her? She's a manager, you know. And, and finally, my boss asked her, "Why are you asking Gina that? So she goes, isn't she that executive that we hired for you? So you know, I really literally my energy just kind of made her look to me, and I didn't say a word. So that's powerful.

Amy Lynn Durham: I would, I would say she was probably sensing your. Level of presence in the space, and then you know, having a response to that, which a positive response to that. So that's a great story to share. Where I used to work, many places I've seen this, you know, how you mentioned there was a war room, that is so funny to me. I just have to call that out in our conversation, because that was the name of a meeting room we would go into, to the war room, or you know, and I was like, what a joke, like this is not war, we should not be calling it things like this, you and I both understand the magic around language, and if we want people to feel innovative and playful, and actually have enhanced decision making, and solve problems at work, something like a room that we're in, called the war room, doesn't necessarily feel like that's going to get us to that point, we might get some solutions, we might get some ideas, but we might not get the amazing one that could have come from setting that intentional environment in a different way. So I just have to call that out, because when you brought that up, I sort of laughed inside a little bit, because I was like, oh my gosh, these people are taking this way too seriously, and it's enough already, calling like a work meeting room a war room.

Yeah, we were talking about like movies, you know, I worked on mostly face and Harry Potter, and you know all those wonderful creative things, you know, we're talking about social media and different things too. So, I just, yeah, it was like I went into the entertainment business because I wanted to work at Disneyland, you know what I mean? I wanted to work in a creative spot where every.. I just had this vision as a, as a young, and you know, like we're gonna be working at Disney, it's gonna be this, like, you know, real peaceful, silly, fun, like little joyful place to work, but it kind of, it didn't really wasn't like that all the time,

Amy Lynn Durham: I bet. So, let's pivot to your work today. Tell everyone what you do, and where you've sort of landed today, because this leads to this next part of our conversation.

Well, I'm kind of in transition right now. I was working at a place here in Sedona, but I'm transitioning out, leaning into my books. No, I wanted to, I became an author, and because I do all this work with energy work, I had the Liberated healer.com where I did a lot of my online classes to try to teach people this. I do a lot of one on one healings. I speak around the nation about suicidal ideation and how to heal that, and about running your energy and healing and things like that. So, I will always continue to do that, and you know it's from all levels of supporting just every different category, I'm finding when I get into people that are suffering with suicidal thoughts, in your, you're talking about workplace, I mean, is first responders, it's healthcare workers, some of the highest professions of suicidal ideation are dentists, doctors, lawyers, honestly, so the people that have obviously these high-pressure jobs that when they come home they don't know how to decompress, so it's it's really important to learn how in any of these jobs to continue to work that, so my passion really is to help someone as much as possible in their communities or their groups. I can, you know, I teach sometimes in 20s, 30s, 40s amount of people at a time, and it's fun when we do it together, versus, you know, we have one on one healings, which are very deep and profound, but I love doing the group healings, you know, and group energy. It just is like 10 times the impact when you're doing it in a group, and then you just really feel the love from the other people in the room, and recognizing again that we're kind of all in the same boat at some level, and we just have to be more sensitive to anything you know, walking in the street, driving road rage, all that stuff, like being more cognizant that everybody could be going through something, and we talk about that a lot, but it still needs to be talked about, because we're, it's still daily life,

Amy Lynn Durham: yeah, just the understanding that everyone is trying to experience joy. Everyone is trying to avoid pain. You know, just, just like me, this person is. And then finish the sentence, right? You mentioned that the energetic tools that you use, you feel by. Pass the long road of traditional recovery. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, I feel like somebody has to curate their own healing, and it literally.. I do the visualization of, like, you have a toolbox next to you, and you have to put the tools in that work for you, and that could be therapy, that could be all different kinds of techniques, you know, EMDR, and all that stuff. Therapists are coming up with amazing

ways to help you through talk therapy, but also, like EMDR, where the eyes, and those are especially, we have people with trauma, like veterans, and things like that, and even ketamine, there's all kinds of different things, but I was not good at taking anything extra, because if you've ever had a suicidal thought, your therapist or your doctor will ask you, and that really automatically negates you from any antidepressants or anything like that, so I was never on anything, and my body was too sensitive for it, anyways. But even for me, I'm not a person that enjoys feeling outside of my body, so I don't personally use like psilocybins or ayahuasca and all that other stuff, because I do know that I have trauma. I do know I could slip down and maybe have a really bad experience, because that chemical reaction could be not good for me. So, I don't want to ever put myself in that position. So, my tools are meditating, running my energy, I say grounding. I connect to the earth, I bring in energy from the cosmos. I kind of imagine it cycling through my whole body and my whole energetic system, that and calling back my energy, and then like earthing, like putting your feet in water, like in a lake, or in, you know, being in nature, I'm listening to music, I almost have to now even still listen to music, you like all through the time when I'm sleeping, I have a low hum on just to calm my nervous system, I run in the morning, usually two miles in the morning, just just to get out. That physical exercise is the one of the best thing, even if it's a little bit walking to regulate your system, and because it actually shushes specials off all that low vibrational energy that's like helping you stay low and tired, so I just have curated my own toolkit, and you have to seek it out, and that's why you have to go right. Having these podcasts are great, and going to other, you know, like, oh, that resonated with me. Oh, that type of meditation

resonated with me. You know, you have to kind of like, I love the energy work, because it wasn't - it was non-denominational, and it was based on science about that we have energy, we are energy is running through our body, we are like an electrical system, and no wonder we're like being short-circuited all the time, you know, our mind is a super computer, and it's been fed so much information from, you know, our past experiences, but also things that we see online, the fear mongering that is constantly being pushed to us through social media. We might even subconsciously not know we're being triggered, because it's in the background a new story happening, and then all of a sudden we feel this rush of panic through our body, ungroundedness, like we have to have tools to every single one of us to combat those moments, no matter what's kind of happened. So I just think it's almost like a universal, it helped, it can help anybody. I'm working with teenagers a lot, I'm working with teenagers, parents as a group, because we have actually suicides in our area and everywhere with 10 year olds, and they don't know how to deal with conflict, and then they see that there, there's like a 50% chance if they see their other friend pass away that way, that they will do it themselves, so the parents are terrified, and they don't want to put them on a bunch of medication that's going to be a lifelong thing at 10 years old, and and re-change their chemical balances. So these processes are worth giving you a try, obviously, to see if it helps, and it has for me.

Amy Lynn Durham: I just am like thinking of what I really would like to hear after that is what is it like if somebody does try that in an experience with you in a one on one session. What are some of your clients' experience? To be

honest, they usually - the first one, they usually have a release, they cry, they ball, because also what I've realized is almost in our work, you get permission just to fall apart for a minute, and then that release, you like, it's a self-permission, it's like a permission, hey, I'm writing out a permission. And slip that I'm going to fall apart right now, I'm just going to cry, I'm going to let it go, and it just, it starts to come out, and it just feels like you just took that pressure off that Coke bottle, say, and this is Gina, this is the energy clearing you're talking about, right? Okay, so I prescribe to, I'd rather there's a lot of different healing practitioners, and they go in and they do healing, so for me, based on healing work that helps, and it works for you, could work for weeks, but the problem is, is that it's always going to come back unless that person learns how to do it, so when I'm doing any of my healing work, I'm teaching them what I'm doing, so they can do it to themselves, so it's like almost like a one on one master class, instead of me just going and doing the healing work, because I want them to be able to just learn it a couple times, or do the take the book, and then be able to have that access to them anytime they need it, and they don't have to keep coming back to

Amy Lynn Durham: me like many, many times, but I prefer to teach people how to do it, even if it seems really far left and weird, or right, or whatever, but, like, it out of your.. I'm kind of communicating it to the higher, your higher self as well, and you'll, you'll, you'll start to lock into the energy of it, and you'll still learn something, so yeah, just more about teaching about it. I think that's a really good sign of a healer and a practitioner is the statement, or the energy, or the stance that you make that I want you to not need me anymore. I think there's a lot of insidious things in the mental health system that's designed to keep people coming back over and over, just so it can, you can be billed. I think that's a green flag that if you're working with somebody and they tell you, hey, my ultimate goal is for you to not need me anymore, and you can do this yourself, like I'm not any more special than you are. I'm just here to give you these tools that might work, that I've seen work.

I had a somebody I really admire when I was first doing this, and I was like, how about if I hurt someone and they were like, because you asked that question, you never will. I thought,

Amy Lynn Durham: right.

Okay, that's a good.. I'm just getting chills. Why I said that is true, because somebody who is a narcissist are trying to like just take advantage of people, they're not even going to ask that question.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, no point. What about those of us that might be operating in a space where we're wearing our past trauma or our burnout in a way that we might not realize is limit is limiting us from our future potential. I think you call it the Scarlet Letter. Tell us about that.

Yeah, well, that's really just self put on there, you, we carry it ourselves. So the process for me is you need to learn how to self love, and it doesn't, and you have to ask, and that's what's in this, or in the book, it's like, do you really love yourself, do you actually really love yourself, like you do your cat, your dog, your kids, your, your partner, or whatever, you know, and then a lot for me, I was like, no, because the way that I was speaking to myself, that's not love, that's not love at all. Would you do that to anybody you love? Of course, you wouldn't. So, why are you doing it yourself? And so I had to kind of reverse engineer all that stuff, and go, holy moly, no wonder I feel like this. I, anybody living in this space would not feel good, would not want to be here, and I'm doing it to myself, and I'm doing it because I don't love myself. I really, I just, I was overwhelmed with trauma. I never thought it would go away. I also, there's a point in my thing that, so it's really different than a lot of people, especially when they talk about suicidal ideation. I did not know that this was something that could be healed, or you know, it's like a cancer gets cured, you know, they mean, and or can get cured, or you don't mean like I didn't know there was a cure, or it could be healed, and so a part of me thought, oh, this is who I am, and I'll be like this until I die, and it could be I'm going to live an entire life, decades and decades and decades, feeling like this, and it's just who I am, like my height or my eye color is never going to change. And when I realized that I healed that in myself, that's why I created the books. I was like, I had to tell everybody, first off, this doesn't have to be a part of your life, I know it seems, especially if you've, if you've had those dark thoughts, and you're like, really, it doesn't have to. No, I'm just telling you, I'm one person I can tell you I've healed that in myself, not saying I

don't have bad days, and also trauma, and you know, I work on it daily, but I don't do that any. More to myself, because I don't, I don't deserve it. I'm not gonna talk to myself like that anymore. So, the self love is when you can really work on that, is a beautiful thing, because I'm going to age out into old lady or something now, and I'm going to just love myself into whatever experience takes me to the end of my days, and I know that I'm not the one that's going to take me out, that's huge difference than my first half of my life, and I get to live a different way now, because that does stop lots of growth and things happening for you, and then what happens is you love yourself so much that it just fills into all the other people around you, the people that love you, that love you, and that you love, so they start to feel the difference, because you're in a different space. You don't realize that you're harming you. Are actually people can feel that energy, think you're masking it really well. Nobody knows this about me, and it's like, but they can feel it, you know. So the process for me is heal yourself, it ripples around, then share your experience with others to help others, and then it just kind of billows out, and then, like, I'm kind of leaning more in recently into solutions to help the planet, I have a patent pending on a plastic bottle that replaces plastic bottles and single-use plastics and stuff, and I do think that's a part of my evolution of healing, because I couldn't even think about the planet and the animals, the water systems, when I was in that space. I was in a constant circular about going down in my own stuff. So, what happens is you just fall in love with everything, and, but you do it from a really strong self point. Yeah, what is one piece of advice you would give for all of us during this mental health awareness month? For the,

Amy Lynn Durham: I guess I would, I don't know if there's a different name, but for the caretakers, for people that are feeling burnt out from care taking their loved ones or their partners that are experiencing some mental health issues, I think it's important to acknowledge those of us that are dealing with that as well.

Yeah, well, it goes back to really self care. What I've seen is a lot of people who are helping an individual going through something. I have a friend right now, her daughter is very sick with needs a liver and a kidney transplant, and very young and beautiful, and there she's suffering really bad, and yeah, she's burnt out and sad, and like very scared, you know, it's very scary, and it's there's that like you have to take your own mental health, you know, you have to actually step away sometimes and find ways that ground you as well, like this kind of work, just it is hard sometimes, because you just want to try to fix, fix, fix, fix, fix, you still have to maybe go on that run, which is so hard, right, to take that 10, that 30 minutes to go run around the block, but do it for them, you know, to keeping yourself, you're also like in the, they're in the fight for their life, but you're also to be there, you have to be their coach, just like the Olympics. It's like, or you know, you still have to do your stuff, so don't do that. And then look to resources, and also continue letting people know you're not in this alone. Say, "Hey, just can you check on me every couple days? I just might need a friend. When I also learned this, I was always like, I'm gonna do everything on my own, like I don't need the world, like I can handle it. Like, I was so like prideful and all alone in my healing, and things like that. And then what I've learned kind of after all of this is that I wasn't giving enough people the opportunity to love me and to help me. If you take away their opportunity to be there for someone, because you're like, oh, I don't want to ask anybody for help, oh, I don't want to bother anybody. I hear that all the time, and they think that that is like a strong statement, and actually you're taking away opportunity for people that love you to be there for you, because if someone says, hey, can you be there for me, we say yes. Oh, of course. Now

we have awareness that you need a little extra text. Hey, are you sending you love today? A little extra support, and it does help, honestly. So give the people that wanna the opportunity to love you back, like, let them be there for you, and you don't have to be so strong yourself and all by yourself. Oh,

Amy Lynn Durham: such great advice. Yeah, such great advice. I would be remiss if I didn't mention your art that I love, and we're gonna put, you know, links on how. To connect with you in our, in our show notes, but tell us just a little bit about your art, and then we'll pull a card for everyone today.

Okay, so well, I was taking just pen, you know, and drawing when I was really anxious, and I had that anxiety, and people be like, "Oh, can I have that? or "That looks like you know that's really cool, and I said, "No, this is just my anxiety, and I didn't realize that this whole process of me doing all that was actually releasing that energy, that pain and anxiety through my fingers onto the page, and I was.. it was actually like that was my Coke bottle, I didn't realize it right, and so it became for me to get rid of the anxiety in my body, and then people just liked it, and so now I'm, I think, I have like over 80, you know, images posted in publishing magazines and books and things like that, and I never thought that would happen, I just thought they were doodles, and they are still to me doodles, I laugh when they're like, oh my god, it's a great piece of art, and I'm like, it's a doodle, but okay,

Amy Lynn Durham: yeah, they're a great example of energy clearing, right, just through coming out of your body onto the paper,

yeah,

Amy Lynn Durham: love it, love

it. Thank you.

Amy Lynn Durham: Okay, let's pull a card for everyone listening from the Create Magic at Work journal prompt card deck, it's a deck of 33 cards, and we'll get an affirmation, a theme, an affirmation, and then Gina, you'll get a question on the fly to answer for everyone.

Oh, feeling

Amy Lynn Durham: today, so let's see, what do we got here? Oh, we got passion. So the affirmation is I have great power within, and I recognize when inspiration strikes me. I have great power within, and I recognize when inspiration strikes me. Hmm. you know what's so interesting is when you were talking about how you're at peace with who you are and who you will be as you age. One of the prompts on this card is Who am I in 10 years, and then it's kind of like.dot.to give that that visioning to tap into that visioning. So, I think what I'll ask you, Gina, is if somebody's thinking about your example and who we are going to be in 10 years, what would your advice be for them

free. I want to be free, you know. We have to work, we have to do things that we want to do, but and that's what I've been working on lately, is what does free and freedom mean to me, as in freedom of my time, whatever that is, freedom of conflict, freedom of listening to conversations that don't help me, that divide us further from debt and a lot of bills than things that actually I thought, you know, fulfilled me, but actually just create more anxiety and chaos in my life. It was another part of my journey, is with my finances, because I wind up giving away. I sold my house because I was suicidal, and I gave away almost all my money, which was a lot of money in California, and, like, you know, I had the house for 25 years, and the freedom of, like, I'm still working on this, because it's so ingrained in this, but that financial pressure to deliver, so whatever that means for you, freedom of worrying about your looks or your weight, you know, I'm still working on that, you know, growing up in California, and having a mom who was like a dancer and things like that, I struggle with, you know, aging, and that's why I say aging, and being okay with falling into the lines around you, having that freedom to be like, yeah, I earn those lines, like I'm not there yet, still, but like I want to get it's like a personal thing, is like I just want to be able to be free, and whatever that means from my heart, and I just, I hope that people can work on that, because realizing what's holding you down, and that doesn't create freedom for you, but you have more power than you than you know, and so just finding what does freedom look like for you. Beautiful,

Amy Lynn Durham: I have great power within. And that was the first sentence. Thank you, Gina. Thank you so much for being a guest on Create Magic at Work, and for just sharing your vulnerable story and inspiration for everyone listening, and thank you for sending some magic to everyone today.

Love you guys. And this is my book. If anybody does have a friend who's suffering with suicidal ideation, it's like a workbook, so they don't have to tell any. Buddy or talk to anybody, and then this is my Planet Walking Handbook for the Living, and I did mock it from Tim Burton's The Handbook for the Recently Deceased. I just went the other way.

Amy Lynn Durham: Love it. He

said I was in entertainment forever, and I like, I want to make a handbook for the living.

Amy Lynn Durham: Oh my gosh, so good, so good. Well, thank you so much. We'll put the links to the books in the show notes, so everyone has a resource that they can lean on as well. So, thank you, Gina.

Thanks, Amy, for all your hard work.

Amy Lynn Durham: Thank you. Take care.