Embracing Imperfections for a Fulfilling Life

Discover the transformative power of authentic, unconditional love in our latest episode featuring the insightful Manal El-Ramly. We promise you'll walk away with a deeper understanding of self-love, compassion, and how to untangle misconceptions of love shaped by manipulation, control, and shame. Learn how to transform negative experiences into a pure form of acceptance and joy, and appreciate the imperfections in our past as part of a journey toward freedom and worthiness. Our conversation with Manal is filled with wisdom on aligning your life towards a more loving and fulfilling existence.

In addition, we explore the concept of the four interconnected bodies—physical, emotional, mental, and egoic—that shape our beliefs and reality. This episode sheds light on setting personal boundaries, overcoming the struggles of perfectionism, and embracing your authentic self. Manal also introduces valuable resources from her company "Metainme," offering practical steps and inspirational content to enhance your personal growth journey. Tune in and get inspired by Manal's genuine approach to self-discovery and the wealth of resources available on her website and social media platforms.

Chapters

• 0:00 Life of Love
• 11:23 The Four Bodies of Self
• 24:46 Journey to Authentic Self

Transcript

Julie Hilsen: 0:11

Hello, dear friends, and welcome to another episode of Life of Love. We gather each week to explore our lives of love. However it looks this week, whether it's immaculate and inspiring or if it's just trying to pick your head up off the pillow, we're here in a life of love in any state, and we just cherish our guests. We cherish this time and I cherish your ears. Thank you for tuning in each week and sharing these episodes. It definitely makes a difference and everybody's collective caring can change things, and so that's what we're all about here at Life of Love. If you're a new listener, welcome. If you're a seasoned guest, thanks again for being here this week. It's very exciting.

Julie Hilsen: 0:56

I have a friend. We're both on the East Coast. She's in North Carolina, in the Raleigh area, and everybody knows I'm in Cumming, Georgia, but Manal is well. Her last name is Manal El-Ramly and she's an accomplished author and just an inspirational light to people trying to find their authentic selves and aligning their lives toward freedom, worthiness and love, and she's just a great inspiration. I've loved getting to know her through our little connection and just preparing for this show, so I'm just really excited to just have a loving conversation and we have some things we want to bring forward, and please stick around to the end.

Julie Hilsen: 1:40

She's offered a special gift. It's a free offering on her website where you can go and get some inspiration and take this a step further if you'd like to, and so I always encourage people to follow their breadcrumbs, and so when something crosses your path that piques your curiosity, that's your breadcrumbs. And so when something crosses your path that piques your curiosity, that's your breadcrumbs. So I'm honored to share any breadcrumbs that Manal wants to throw down for us. Thank you so much for being a guest today.

Manal El-Ramly: 2:06

Thank you, julie. It's my pleasure and excitement to be here today to discuss my favorite topic love, love, love. Whatever comes out, whatever it is, but I like a life of love because I believe that we are truly the vibration of love In our essence. We are all love, so I love. I love the name of your, your book.

Julie Hilsen: 2:29

Thank you. It's dear to me too, and you know I I always want to remind people I'm not talking about romantic love. It's love that is inside you, it's your creative power, it's that juiciness of your being that sparks you up, that makes you care, that helps you show up. It's every driving force. So I'm in a total alignment with you. Everything comes down to that, and you know, when you're having the worst day, love for yourself is the biggest gift that you can give, and it's free.

Manal El-Ramly: 3:02

Beautiful, it's true, it's truth, love is truth and love again using that word, love that our journey is to shift. Distorted love, because a lot of us have love that's distorted. Sometimes I avoid using the word love because of the distortions that are in that word and that people, many people, many humans, have a misunderstanding of what authentic, unconditional love is, because the love that they received was not truly unconditional and it was distorted. So it's fun to play with the flavor of love and to remove the distortions from it and find for yourself, like you alluded to, the authentic, unconditional love for self. And when you find it for self, which we authentically are, that's when you can give it to others, your friends, your family and the rest of the world.

Julie Hilsen: 4:03

So much wisdom there, girl. It's like that transmuting, transmuting what no longer serves you, and it would be those forms of love that weren't authentic to you, that weren't serving your highest good. That might have been manipulation, it might have been control, it might have been shame, it might have been competition. And that's what we're transmuting all those things that were linked to that word, that were false, that we get to untie. It's like when you have a bowl full of necklaces and bracelets and they all get intertwined and you spend hours trying to get them unraveled, and that's sort of what sometimes you have to do to find out what it truly means to you. And that was a big calling when I wrote my book. Life of Love was getting to your joy. Like what the heck does your joy look like? It's yours. It's yours to define. That's a little scary, because you're turning over the cart right. You're flipping the cart and seeing what you're going to put back in and what you're going to let roll down the hill. Let someone else pick.

Manal El-Ramly: 5:13

And what I love about, just like you said, the necklaces or their cart the way to detangle through love, which can also be called compassion at that time. And so even that distorted love it wasn't on purpose, because I call it you are conditioned and your conditioners were conditioned and their conditioners were conditioned. So it's the tangling entanglement that's not just for you, it's for those that gave you the love, that had their best intention, the best intention for you mostly and they also received a distorted love, but they had the best intentions from theirs. Out is actually through love, and rather having judgment or anger or sadness for what wasn't, is finding a profound acceptance, appreciation and compassion for what was or was not.

Julie Hilsen: 6:12

It's so powerful and to me, that brings up up.

Julie Hilsen: 6:18

It brings up looking at things in your life and saying it was perfect, even though it wasn't something I'd choose, and being okay with those bumps and scrapes, because you know that that led you to where you are right now and you're like, and the big, the big one that hits me really hard each time is judgment.

Julie Hilsen: 6:39

And if you're judging other people, if you're judging your past, if you're upset about something from the past, you're still holding some kind of judgment toward it because you're putting it outside yourself.

Julie Hilsen: 6:54

And once you embrace it and say, you see why this happened and you wouldn't choose it again, you know, if it was painful, not all of it's bad, but most of the time we remember the bad things with that kind of lens. And, yeah, that's what makes it sticky is, even though it wasn't ideal to send it love and compassion, you know, because it still can hurt. So, yeah, and so I guess finding out what's authentic to you because that was our common thing today was being authentic and finding the fortune of being here in this moment. The fortune of being here in this moment, so like when you're, when you're working with somebody, even personally, maybe a personal story would be fun here how you found the fortune in in this now moment when all signs could have said should be a victim, or you should be blaming or shaming, or you know? Does anything come to your mind that you'd like to share?

Manal El-Ramly: 7:59

That's a really big question and yes, there could be. I have a million questions or things that pop up in my mind, but I will say it's more sort of building on what we were talking about. It's every time in my life something brings me. I'm going to use it in quotes pain, struggle or suffering. All those are in quotes because they're not words that I tend to use, and I'll explain why shortly. It makes me step back and ask me why, like why? Why are we here?

Manal El-Ramly: 8:39

Who am I? Why my life the way it is, while other people might seemingly have an easier life or a harder life or whatever it might be? You could look at stories might be. You could look at stories. Everybody, no matter where we come from, whether even we're twins or triplets or quadruplets, have a very unique storyline. So it makes me say why? Why are we hurting? And so I realized and I've always asked the question, so it's not.

Manal El-Ramly: 9:09

I can't say that there was a particular moment. There could be certain moments that help me define, but I realize the problem isn't the suffering and the struggle and the pain. It's that we think it's suffering and struggle and pain, that everything that happens to us in life has a reason, there's a purpose, there's a mystery. And I believe that the purpose is to discover that we are a purpose and that we're here to grow and expand and evolve. And all of these life experiences not suffering and pain and struggles, I said to you, I'm going to tell you how I reframe it, they're all life experiences are to guide us to our authentic truth.

Manal El-Ramly: 9:49

They guide us to, like you said, how do I define what brings me joy and happiness and love. It's by knowing what I don't want, and knowing what doesn't serve me, and knowing what causes me pain, that helps me evolve into the. I'll use this, as for symbolism the butterfly to be free to discover who I am and what brings me joy. So I don't think I gave you a specific story, but my life journey guided me to recognize that there is a meaning for everything that happens to us, and I have the opportunity to reframe it and to recognize that there is something, there's a mystery that's greater than me, that this is meant to help me grow and expand.

Julie Hilsen: 10:35

And I love how you flavored it with the mystery and curiosity, because that's how you can take your position and transmute it when you look for the mystery or you're curious, well, what is this really coming from? And to me, it's this constant alignment to be like am I in love and compassion? Because I know that if I fall out of love and compassion, I'm going to hit a wall, and sometimes I still do it. I'll still hit the wall, knowing that I'm going to hit a wall because I chose to show up in this way. Like we live in this world of relativity and that's what we're here for. Like you said, you can't know what you want unless you know what you don't want. You have this free will.

Julie Hilsen: 11:24

So I love the idea of being curious and reframing, like why am I suffering and what's really going on here? And I think that it gives a person a chance to see with more clarity the options, instead of fumbling around in the ditch you know, mud on your face like you got to pick your head up at some point and say, well, I want to be somewhere else. Like this is where I'm staying right and I think we've all hit that. We've all been like that's enough. Enough is enough. Like boundaries you have. You know, you raise kids and they're two and you may. No, this is a boundary, this is a limit. You can't go beyond this and you know, sometimes we need to give ourselves limits like no, you've suffered enough. It's time to pick your head up and see the beauty, the chances, the opportunities all around you and not to minimize the suffering, because it does serve a purpose, you know. And how long do you want to stay there? Because it's completely up to you to look for those resources, those lifelines, that inspiration that can get you there.

Julie Hilsen: 12:32

And nobody said becoming a butterfly was easy, right, like, if you've ever watched that process that is, it's heart-wrenching. You want to peel, you want to peel it away and help them, but if you do that, they're going to be weak and they'll never fly right. So you know, compassion, compassion for that whole process. My goodness, I love, I love your message and I can. You know, I read some of your book and, and you do, you have steps and it's it's very laid out. So I can see how you've spent a lot of time thinking and reflecting and serving in this way. So it's really fun. It's really fun to pick your brain.

Manal El-Ramly: 13:11

Thank you, julie. I'm an engineer by training, so I have a very analytical mind and I'm very process oriented, and one plus one equals two. But I also have a very strong spiritual self that is intrigued by the mystery and the beauty and the greater meaning, and I also want to have everybody be right. There's so many theories, so many religions, so many spirituality, and so a lot of things that I do is I step back and say what's the commonality in here? What are these singular truths? What can I see as synonyms? Because I want everybody to be right.

Manal El-Ramly: 13:53

The truth, because your truth is your truth, your truth can only be right. So I've taken it. I've created so many different models. So one of the things is I see us as we're physical beings this is not the first time that this has been said but we're spiritual beings living a physical experience, living in our human being. But I created a model of seeing us as having four bodies our physical body, where we have our physical sensations, and this is where our life journey, sort of part of our physical body. Our emotional body is where we feel and we emit in this love that we're talking about, and the heart is the command center. So, ultimately, when you're operating from a place of truth, it's the heart that's guiding you, and happiness and joy and inner peace and love all reside in here, and so does anger and sadness and frustration. But what we want to do is we want to allow these expressions, because they're normal human expressions and it's the resistance to them that hurt us. Then we have the third body, which is our mental body, which is where our logic exists, in our process, in our brain, and we're all goal-oriented, and this world that we live in is very mindy, so none of us struggle when I talk about what the mind does.

Manal El-Ramly: 15:08

Then there's another body that I introduce, and sometimes in some work it's called the spiritual body, but I like to call it the egoic body, because we all have an ego, we all know we have an ego, but we've all made the ego an evil entity. But I believe that, no, our ego is beautiful and our ego is here to help us connect higher and greater being. And our ego is where we hold our beliefs. Our beliefs form our thoughts and our thoughts impact how we feel, and how we feel forms our reality, our physical reality, or we can work it this way down downward, we could say our physical reality make us feel a certain way.

Manal El-Ramly: 15:55

When we feel a certain way, we think a certain way, and we think a certain way forms our beliefs. We're more empowered when we work our way downwards. So so I feel, when we can start to understand the expressions of our human self and break it down into the models of the four bodies, I have a greater honor accepting of my emotional body. When it feels sad or it feels angry, when I have a thought that feels like a victim, I can see that there's an emotion that's attached to it and that might come to something that happened when I was much younger. But now I have a model that allows me to connect my beliefs with my thoughts, with my emotions, with my physical reality, so I can detangle again those necklaces and come back to the ultimate truth we are worthy, we are free and we are loved.

Julie Hilsen: 16:47

I love that the we are worthy, we are free and we are loved. I love that the first one is worthy. It's our birthright to be happy and be creating loving beings.

Manal El-Ramly: 16:55

Yes, yes, yes. And too many people think that they're not good enough. Perfection is a symptom of a lack of worthiness. How many perfectionists? I call myself sometimes a recovering perfectionist, and that desire to make everything perfect is have to do to be good enough. But we are good enough by just being.

Julie Hilsen: 17:20

Right. Being true to yourself. You don't have to prove anything. Showing up in your authentic signature is what you were placed here for. Yeah, it's hard, because we've gone through so much and you go through school and you get grades and your parents tell you good job or good girl or bad boy, and you know you have all these things. Like you said, the idea that going through your emotions and seeing how it's tied to your thoughts and then your beliefs I always thought like the ego would be in your head. But I cherish the idea that the ego is up out of your mind. It affects your mind, but it's not part of your physical body. Physical body, it's like maybe a bridge between your physical and your spiritual to come together. That is so, so beautiful. I love that lens.

Manal El-Ramly: 18:17

And it's empowering to me too. And sometimes they call it spiritual body, but the spiritual spirit doesn't have resistance, but it's in this body where the resistance, where it wants to say I am a woman, I am a man, I am a mother, I am a professional, I am an engineer, I am a daughter, I am a mother, and all of these I am's have a certain image to it, a certain identity to it, a certain depending on who you is, there's a judgment to it and ultimately we want to get to I am.

Julie Hilsen: 18:49

There's no expectation, it's just presence, it's just being. I hear you. I hear you so clearly.

Julie Hilsen: 18:55

I am, I am Everyone. If you can say I am to yourself and don't put anything after it, just I am, breathe into that. I'm filling that space for everybody. And we're sitting here and I have my headphones on. I can hear my heart beating through my headphones and it's just so powerful. And when you can sink into that and let that like sort of melt into your being, that I am with the, with the love and the resonance that that Manal has said, if you can let that sink in and it just takes pressure off, it takes expectation, and when you can show up in that pure I am. Look at all the people around you who can show up in their I ams.

Manal El-Ramly: 19:40

Julie, what's beautiful is that it's not about knowing. Knowing might be in your egoic body Sometimes I call it trusting, sometimes I go with knowing and it's not about knowing in your mind. Again, they're worth synonymous, like sometimes it's like I know God exists, for example, I know there are angels and you might know it in your mind or you might know it in your belief system, so I use those words interchangeably. It could be I trust you know God and I trust in the angels, but then I know in your mind I know. But it's not enough, this intellectual knowledge or this egoic. It's about feeling it.

Manal El-Ramly: 20:19

And when we took this moment right now, we allowed our bodies and I hope all the listeners did too to embody the essence of the truth of our unique existence, the beauty and the truth of who we are, regardless of identity or belief. We allowed our physical being to connect with the spiritual being and allowed the heart, which is like intuition or knowing, to be the conduit for that. And so it's not enough to know, it's about feeling and the alignment. You use the word alignment earlier and I'm like I love that Julie used the word alignment because I talk about the alignment of the four bodies, so the egoic body and the mental body and the emotional body and the physical body all being in alignment the truth of who we are and when you're feeling off kilter, you can address that body and say, hey, come back.

Julie Hilsen: 21:18

You know what can I do to bring you back? Yes, I care, I know that I'm suffering with this headache and I, you know, I sat and I was like, well, me, I'm dehydrated. So I had some electrolytes and I was like, well, maybe I didn't have enough caffeine, maybe I had too much. So, like I was doing that today, I was trying to bring my physical body back in alignment with what my purpose is for this day. And you know, sometimes it's turning off and just knowing your purpose is to recharge and it's okay.

Julie Hilsen: 21:48

But I'm so happy to hear you talk about these bodies and and maybe this will give someone some resource to you know when they're feeling off kilter, which body is it? And maybe explore that a little bit. Maybe my spiritual body wants me to meditate some more. You know, like, maybe I haven't made enough space for that it's. I don't know about anyone else, but the summer's just been nuts. It it's just been nonstop, and I usually have a quiet time for a section of the day to get some spiritual things done, and sometimes you have to carve it out right. Was there anything else that you wanted to bring forth in this magical conversation? I feel like we could go on and on, but I don't want to take your whole day.

Manal El-Ramly: 22:34

This has been beautiful, I believe, the time I'm like well, we just started. Well, when you said purpose, now you did trigger a response because I did do a TED Talk with Sandy. That's where I met Sandy. We did a TEDx Apex, and the subject is why you don't need to search for your purpose. And I believe, and I teach that we are our purpose, part of that egoic body that it's not who I am, it's I am. And when we recognize that we don't need to search and I know you weren't talking about your purpose but you're talking about the intention of the day, but that word purpose just sort of like.

Manal El-Ramly: 23:07

I'd love to say that the listeners that we are our purpose, and one of the things I love to say is we don't need to search, we don't need to look for it, we don't need to spend our life saying I'm not aligned with, we are purpose. And, julie, what you said earlier, it's aligning with what makes us happy and aligning with our love, which brings us in connection to this truth of this purpose. So that's the only thing that you just sort of woke up within me. Is that I just want to, yeah, share that message, I know.

Julie Hilsen: 23:39

And I know we all face when we we have a day, we have appointments, we have things. We want to show up in our best self and it's like finding what that looks like on that day, because I don't think there's any accidents. When there's, when there's something on the agenda and you're looking forward to it, you want to be there as your best self, right? So that's when I go back to well, I I sort of interchange purpose with my values, like what's important for me. So when I lay my head down, I can, I can say I move toward that or away from it. But I see what you're saying. It's perfect just to show up as your authentic self. However that is on that day you know I do and I know a lot of other people do this too it's like you want to consistently strive to be your best self and that can be. It can wear you down sometimes. So I hear what you're saying. Take that.

Manal El-Ramly: 24:39

Perfection that we were talking about. Yeah, we just need to serve ourselves.

Julie Hilsen: 24:44

It's so good. I learn so much every single time. So good, yeah, so would you like to share your website so people can go and take that? It's a free, it's an offering for their people to explore a little bit about your offering, what you have on your website. I'd be happy for you to share that so people can go. It's a beautiful site and I enjoyed poking around on there doing my research.

Manal El-Ramly: 25:11

Fabulous Sure, it's wwwmetainme. Sure, it's wwwmataneme, and matane is my name. Manal actually means attainment in Egyptian, in Arabic, and so I put an M in front of matane for the company, and it's about attaining your authentic self, and so I do love and invite your listeners to join the tribe and also on Insight Timer, youtube as well, and Instagram and instagram and facebook. Yeah, I'd love for you to join, and I do have a free chapter of the book and 10 steps to be happy and different things on the website, so I'd love for you to come visit and pop in on there well, I do appreciate, I appreciate everything you shared with us today and and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try not to put so much pressure on myself well, I, the energy that we created in this space has shifted so much from the beginning.

Manal El-Ramly: 26:04

I always love during our lot, my lives and podcasts and everything to observe how the energy shifts from the beginning to the end and just, and even we had that moment in there and it's just an expansion Like there's just an expansion. We grounded in the beginning before we went live, but you could just feel that the energy is growing and growing and growing. So I appreciate you creating the space for us to discuss and for your listeners as well.

Julie Hilsen: 26:31

Hey, well, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Manal El-Ramly: 26:35

Thank you so much, Julie.