Listeners, welcome to the Conscious Connection Podcast. I’m your host, Carol Hasbrouck, author of the book 10,000 Miles of Miracles, which you can find on Amazon.com we help you learn how to follow your inner guidance system so you can live your most authentic and fantastic life and finally live the life you desire and the life you deserve. Our mission is to help you learn how to differentiate between your ego thoughts and and your true authentic higher self, which can lead you to your
life purpose on new adventures and even to new callings.

We are recording the Sunleaders podcast live from Naiman Creative Studios in sunny St. Pete, Florida with Jordan Rosenberg as the sound director. My guest today is super close to me. In fact, it goes everywhere I go.

Sometimes I ignore it, but the truth is that never turns out well for me. Often it can be a real nag and may even whisper in my ear over and over until I pay attention to it. Rarely does it shout, so when that happens I know I better perk up and listen.

Not once has it ever lied to me, steered me in the wrong direction, or suggested anything harmful to others or myself. Certainly it entertains some very wild and crazy ideas, or at least it seems that way at the time. But always, and I mean always, those wild and crazy ideas turn out to be exactly what I need at the time.

One sure way to get it to disappear, if only briefly, is to decide that I’m in charge. I’m the general manager of the universe and I don’t need to ask or heed its advice. Have you figured out who my guest is? You got it.

It’s my inner guidance system, my inner voice, the Holy Spirit, the universe, my higher power intuition that just that knowing or whatever else you wish to call it. The fact is it doesn’t care what you call it because its whole purpose in life is to help you live the life you desire and the life you deserve in accordance with your higher self and guiding light. Now don’t get all freaked out here.

This isn’t too woo woo. It’s not going to be religious, it’s just a fact. This is a conversation with myself and I’m hoping that you learn how to have these conversations with your inner guidance system so you can truly live a life beyond your wildest dreams.

So people ask me, well, how can I tell the difference between my inner guidance system and my ego? And that’s a really good question because the fact of the matter is we all get messages. Some of us are not aware of the messages. Some of us have never tapped in or paid attention to them.

But we all get messages. There’s no doubt about it. And how I know that it’s my inner guidance system and not my ego is that it’s always doing something that’s for the greater good of all.

It’s never just about me. Now, it may sound like it’s about me at the moment, but then when it’s played out, I can tell that it’s not just for me. It’s for everyone.

The other way I can tell it’s my inner guidance system is it’s often something I don’t want to do. And that kind of sounds contradictory. It’s like, well, why would you listen to a voice that’s me telling.

Telling you something you don’t want to do? Well, because I’ve learned when I listen to that voice, my life turns out amazing. It turns out to be so much better than I could have ever dreamed of. So people think, oh, you’re crazy.

You hear voices? No, I don’t hear voices. I get messages. They come in the form of thought for the most part.

Often they come from another person to confirm what my inner guidance system has already told me or expressed as something I should pay attention to. Sometimes it’s in a song, sometimes it’s in a billboard. Often it’s in a book or an article that I’m reading, and it can even be on Facebook.

So it’s really great how it comes through in all these different forms, and now I know to look for it. So I’m hypersensitive to when I’m getting a message that I need to pay attention to. What just came up for me is, if you remember as a little kid, you knew the difference between right and wrong, right? So you had these.

They talk about these two beings on our shoulders, you know, the angel and the devil. But we knew the difference. We knew when we were supposed to do something and when we weren’t supposed to do something.

Well, that’s your inner guidance system. It’s that simple. So I’m not crazy.

I don’t hear voices. But I’ve been getting messages my whole life, and I finally am tuning into them in the last couple of decades, and it’s changed my whole life. So one of the things that people might say is, you know, well, how come you’re an ex? You consider yourself an expert on an inner guidance system.

And I’m going to tell you a little story now. The whole story is in the book I wrote called 10,000 miles of miracles. And again, you can Find that on Amazon under the same name.

But today, I’m just going to give you an overview of how my inner guidance system changed my life in ways I could have never imagined. So. And I’m also going to tell you about some of the lessons that I learned along the way.

And then my favorite story in the book about a 101-year-old man named Manny, who was our favorite miracle. I’ll bring it home with the miracle that God gave to me when I was 16 years old. And then the very last person I helped on this journey and how they tied together.

So 12 years ago, I got laid off from my job. I was in the mortgage business. I had been a real estate agent, and then I went into the mortgage business, and I had been doing that for 23 years.

So it was really all I knew. And as we all know, the Great recession happened in 080-708-09, and it went until 14. So in 2012, I got laid off from my mortgage job, and it was devastating for me.

It wasn’t anything I had done or not done, but it was still devastating. And so I went home and I cried and I cried and I cried. And then when I got done crying, I surrendered.

I just said, you know, this is too big for me. I don’t have the answer. I don’t know what to do.

All I know how to do is mortgages and real estate, and there’s no income in that right now. So I raised my arms up in the air and I turned it over, and I call my higher power God. I turned it over to God.

Instantly, a calm came over me. And mind you, I had been crying my eyeballs out for a while, and instantly I felt very calm. And the next thing, the next message I received was, carol, if time and money didn’t matter, what would you do for a living? And I actually used to teach this in a course called the Passion Test that I had become certified coach in.

And so now I got to use it on my myself. So if time and money didn’t matter, what would I do for a living? And the answer came instantly. Oh, well, that’s easy.

I’d travel and I’d help others. And then I stopped and I thought, but I’ve never seen a job description like that other than the Peace Corps. And at the time, I was in my 50s, late 50s, and I was too old to join the Peace Corps, at least in my mind.

So I just got this again, another calm. I went to sleep that night. I woke up the next morning and it was a Sunday, and I went and bought a newspaper, which is really odd because I didn’t read newspapers.

I hadn’t read them for years. I didn’t watch the news. It’s too depressing for me.

But I went and got a newspaper. And the only section I cared about was the parade, because that was the section that had the good news. And on the COVID of the Parade magazine was a picture of J.

D. lewis and his two sons and a story about how they had qu their jobs and were traveling the world helping others. Now, you talk about a sign.

That was a sign. So I read the article and I thought to myself, well, if they can do it, I can do it. I don’t want to travel the world.

I want to stay in the US But I want to do this. This sounds like a great idea. Now, I had no idea how that was all going to come about, but again, I just surrendered and I listened to what messages I got.

I decided, actually, my roommate Joyce and I went on this trip, and we were talking about, okay, so how are we going to help people? What charities are we going to serve? And we couldn’t think of a particular charity that we liked over the other, so we said, well, let’s help people, Pets and Planets. And that pretty much covers everything. And that became our motto, that we were the Dames Gone Wild, doing good work helping people, Pets and Planets.

Now, the name Dames Gone Wild came to me as a question I had sent out to the universe. And I said, well, what should we call ourselves? And I hear, oh, call yourself Dames Gone Wild because they’ll remember you. And funny little story, about three weeks into the trip, I had googled Dames Gone Wild and up came Girls Gone Wild.

And I didn’t know anything about Girls Gone Wild at the time, and they actually take their tops off to get attention. And of course, we were in our late 50s and early 60s. We weren’t taking our tops off, but the name alone got lots of media attention.

And we were. We ended up in the newspaper and on TV and NPR blog and all kinds of wonderful things just because of that name. And I didn’t come up with it.

My inner guidance system did. So we mapped out where we wanted to go. I had an aunt that was elderly in Minnesota, so that was my first destination, but we had to get there.

And so we had a threefold mission. Joyfully provide services and financial resources to organizations that help people, Pets and Planets. Number two, spread happiness, connection, and love to all we meet.

And three, repurpose people, especially women, who have felt that life is over because of a loss. Because that’s what we had created was a new life because of a loss. One of the craziest things that my inner guidance system said to me was that I was going to write a rap song.

And I laughed and I said, that’s just crazy. I am not writing a rap song. I have these little arguments or heated discussions, I should say, with my inner guidance system still to this day.

And I never win. So I don’t know why I even bother. But it said, you’re going to write a rap song.

I said, I’m not writing a rap song. So another way I know that it’s my inner guidance system speaking is it doesn’t go away. It gets repeated over and over and over in my ear.

And a couple days later, you’re writing a rap. No, I’m not writing a rap song. So finally I just said, you know, if I’m supposed to write a rap song, just have me write the rap song, because this is just a stupid idea.

So I was outside with my dog and all of a sudden I thought, I gotta go write this rap song. I picked up my journal and my pen and I said to Joyce, I’m going in to write a rap song now. And she just looked at me like I was crazy.

Cause neither of us like rap. And I went into my room with my journal and I started writing. Actually, I was just putting the pen to the paper.

I did not write this song. And I’m still waiting to get it to music. But I did write, it’s called the Free Freddie the Freedom Bus Bus.

And Freddie was the name that we called our car that took us 10,000 miles. So I wrote the rap song, I put it in my book. We would say the rap song to people and they loved it.

And it just. I never would have in a million years thought I was going to write a rap song. So we decided we’re going to travel six hours a day at the most.

And for the most part we were able to do that. And we routed out a map and we found people along the way. Now we left with $500 in our pocket.

That was it. And we said, we’re going to ask for donations. And whatever donations we get, then that’s what we’ll live on.

And when we stop getting donations, we will go home. And so we left with $500. We ended up going three and a half months of travel.

We served the charities of the host families that put us up. So if they had a favorite charity, that’s who we would serve. We stayed with 26 host families.

And the beautiful part about that is that we only knew 12 of them before we left home. So we had the faith that that was all going to work out because both Joyce and I continually received messages that this was the path we were supposed to be on. We served 30 organizations, and they were included.

Homeless, special needs children, people with brain impairments, hospice puppets and education, Special Olympics cancer centers. We served lots of dogs and cats in shelters for the animals. And it was just an amazing experience.

So back to the host families or back to the organization. So I would call the organization and I would say to them, we’re coming to your town next week, and we’d like to help. How can we help? And they would almost always say, well, could you clean? And Joyce and I would laugh because one of the things we said was when we left the house was that, oh, good, we don’t have to clean for the whole summer because we’ll be traveling.

And we ended up cleaning for many, many charities. I had mentioned that I want to talk about my greatest, our greatest miracle, Manny. I had mentioned that, you know, we got signs along the way that we were on the right path.

So when we got to Chicago, it was 106 degrees in Chicago, and it was the 4th of July weekend. So we were originally going to work outdoors for a charity. And of course, that couldn’t happen because it was just too hot.

And we found a senior center that wanted us to come in and play games with the seniors during their happy hour. And so we went to the senior center. And Joyce is a very curious person.

And because she’s curious and asks a lot of questions, I got to learn a lot more about people in life as I traveled. But so she’s talking to the volunteer coordinator, and she says to Gabby, she says, who’s your oldest resident? And Gabby said, oh, that would be Manny. He’s 101 years old, and at 96, he took up woodworking.

We thought, wow, that’s pretty good in 96. And then she says, and he did an engraving of a wooden plaque that was 4ft by 8ft wide, and it had the Gettysburg Address on it. And he did it from memory.

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And we introduce ourselves. He invites us into his little apartment there and we go in and we see a picture of the Gettysburg Address plaque that he had engraved at 96 years old. And he’s showing us pictures of his family and we’re just getting to know him.

And I look over at a chest of drawers and I saw all these wooden plaques on the top of this chest of drawers and I’m going to read some of the book to you now to tell you the rest of this story. As we were getting ready to leave, I noticed some small wooden plaques on a chest of drawers. One of them had the name Carol on it.

I said, manny, that’s my name. Oh, it is. He replied.

Would you like to have it? I stared at him, somewhat dumbfounded, and at first said, no, I couldn’t do that. To which he looked back at me, equally confused. Why wouldn’t I accept his gift? He must have been thinking.

I quickly agreed to take it. At this point, Joyce was feeling a bit left out and started looking at the plaques for her name. She noticed they all had words on them, but no names.

She kept looking and in the very back was the one with Joyce on it. Unbelievable. Joyce exclaimed.

It looked different from the others because Manny had not even had a chance to stain it yet. Manny. That’s my name.

Joyce said. It is? He calmly queried. Then please take it.

I made it just last night. Manny, who told you we were coming? She asked incredulously. He looked at us as if that were an odd question and replied very matter of factly, well, God told me and I always do everything God tells me to do.

We thought he was joking, and after we picked up our jaws off the floor, we looked at Gabby and who had goosebumps and asked if she had told him our names. No, she said. No one knew your names.

I simply put special guests on the calendar. To be honest, I didn’t even remember your names. Of all the names in the world, Carol and Joyce were the only two names on plaques Manny had made because God told him to.

Being in shock and total amazement, we asked how we could thank him. He looked at us with a smile and said that he would like us to recite the Gettysburg Address. But we don’t know the words, I said.

He politely handed us a paper with the complete address on it. With a bewildered smile on our face, we read it as he recited it from memory at 101 years old. Now, that story in itself is a miracle.

Is amazing. But the really amazing part is when we got in the car, I said to Joyce, you know, we’ve been on this for three weeks now. We don’t have hardly any money left.

I gotta be honest with you, Joyce. This morning, I asked God if we were on the right path, if we were really supposed to be doing this, because it is kind of crazy leaving home with $500. We’re in our 50s and 60s, sleeping on couches and sharing a bed sometimes.

So I asked for a sign, and I got a sign. I got the plaque and the sign, the proverbial sign and the plaque. And I started crying, and she started crying, and she said, so did I very thing this morning.

I asked for a sign. And that’s what we got. So if that isn’t our inner guidance system, I don’t know what is.

So I told you I would talk to you about the. How God tied this all together. When I was 16 years old, I decided I wanted to give back to my community.

And I went to work at a center here that’s still around town. It’s called parc, and they serve children and adults with mental disabilities. And I met a young man named Tommy who had down syndrome.

And I helped Tommy learn how to put on his clothes and his shoes. Now, he couldn’t tie a shoe, but just to get his shoe on his foot, he had to learn how to do that. And it was repetitive over and over.

So that was my whole job was I would spend an hour with Tommy once a week, and I would help him learn how to put his clothes on. And Tommy stole my heart. He just stole my heart.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved with children with down syndrome. They’re some of the happiest people in the world. And he certainly made me happy.

Now I don’t know what’s happened to Tommy after all these years. I never did keep up, but that never left my heart, that impression that he made on me. So here we are.

So 41 years later on this journey of service work. And the very last place we served was told to me by a friend in Jacksonville, and it was called the North Florida School of Special Education. And we went in and we helped with some art projects, some gardening, that kind of thing.

And the very last child that I sat down with and got to help had down syndrome. And I thought to myself, I could have never orchestrated this. I could never have planned that the person that started me on my journey of volunteering and serving and helping others with down syndrome, I could never have planned that the last person would be a young man, young child with down syndrome.

So I knew that it was exactly what we were supposed to do. And Joyce’s life has been changed by it as well. When we got back, we talked about the lessons that we had learned.

And maybe a better word is that we had remembered, because most of us already know these lessons. But we need that reminder. So the first lesson was the essential goodness of people.

People are good. We deal with a lot of duality and conflict in this world and disagreement, differing of opinions. And so we went looking for goodness.

And that was exactly what we found. And that is the essential nature of people. The second lesson that we learned was the importance of taking time to play.

It is so vital to my growth, my success, my happiness to take time out to play. And this journey, we would make sure that after a week or so of serving, we would have a couple of days off and play and do things that we enjoyed doing. And that was really important.

The third is that we are always receiving messages from our inner voice. Always. And Joyce and I made a pat that when we got those messages, as long as they were not fear based, because that means it’s ego, if it’s fear based, that we would follow them even if we thought they were crazy.

And let me tell you, there were some crazy things that we did, not to mention just this journey in itself. The fourth thing is our expectations create suffering and resentment. So when we expect something to turn out a certain way, when we expect people to behave a certain way, then I suffer.

And sometimes it creates a resentment for me. Number five is we are powerful beings creating our own realities. And I want to read to you something that a story that I’d learned long ago.

Creation said, I want to hide something from the humans until they are ready for is the realization that they create their own reality. The eagle said, give it to me, I will take it to the moon. The Creator said, no, one day they will go there and find it.

The salmon said, I will bury it on the bottom of the ocean. The Creator said, no, they will go there too. The buffalo said, I will bury it on the Great Plains.

The Creator said, they will cut into the skin of the earth and find it even there. Grandmother, who lives in the breast of Mother Earth and who has no physical eyes but sees with spiritual eyes, said, put it inside of them. And the Creator said, it is done.

And that’s the creation story from the Hoppy Nation in Arizona. And it’s called Walking the Red Road. And what I know for sure is that all of the answers are inside of me and inside of you.

All of the answers to all of the seeming problems. And I say seeming problems because the story we tell ourselves is what creates the problem. They’re all inside of me.

And if I will take the time to get quiet and listen, I will be able to discover those answers, and you will, too. Now, people often ask me, well, do you meditate? Well, I have meditated, for sure, but I am not a regular meditator. It doesn’t take Spirit very much time to tell you what you need to hear.

In fact, like I said, it can come in a song, it can come from a book, it can come from another person. You’re not even expecting it, but you hear it, and you hear it over and you hear it again, and it’s like, whoa, I think something’s trying to tell me something. Maybe it’s a book you’re supposed to read.

Maybe it’s a story. Maybe it’s something you’re supposed to write. I wrote and published this book.

I’d always wanted to write and publish this book. And as I was doing that, I didn’t want to be vulnerable. I didn’t want to have to worry about whether people liked it or didn’t like it.

And that’s just human, right? That’s just human nature. But Spirit kept telling me, you’re not writing that book for you, Carol. You’re writing that book for me.

It’s my book, not your book. And so I wrote the book and I published the book. And now it’s part of book clubs.

And I have people that I haven’t talked to in ages that hear about it on Facebook, and they call me and they say, I loved your book. And so I would have never. If I had just done this on my own, I would have never published the book.

I may have written it because I wrote another book that I never published. I may have written it, but I wouldn’t have published it. So what I want to.

I’m going to end with this quote from Mother Teresa. And what I want to say to you is just take the time, a couple minutes a day, three to Five minutes a day. And it doesn’t have to even be every day to sit down and connect with your breath and listen to what? Ask.

So spirit universe guides whoever you hear your messages from. Ask, what is it you’d like me to know today? And some days you’ll get an answer, and some days you won’t. Or you’ll get it in another form at another time.

And then when you get that, write it down. I’m going to tell you a quick story before I tell you the quote. So I was taking a class on intuition, developing my intuition.

Actually, it was psychic abilities. I find it more. More socially appealing, I guess, to say intuition.

So anyway, I was taking this class, and the homework was that every morning we were supposed to sit down for 30 minutes and light a candle and meditate. And again, I’m not a big meditator, but I was in a class, so I did what I was told to do and keep a journal next to us. And in that journal, we were supposed to write down anything that came to mind, no matter how crazy it was.

So I’d been doing it for a couple of weeks, and, you know, I’d write down some things that really didn’t mean it make any sense to me, but I wrote them down. And one day I said, okay, what is it you want me to know today? And I hear butter pickles. I’m like, butter pickles? What in the world? I’m not writing that down again.

I’m having a little dialogue with my inner guidance system. And. And it’s very emphatic.

Write down butter pickles. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. But okay, I’ll write it down.

So I write down butter pickles. A couple of weeks go by, and we’re on a conference call with our teacher for this class on intuition, psychic abilities. And she is having us tap into her mother, who none of us have ever met, is not the mother, is not in the same room with her.

She’s in a different state. But she’s having us tap into her energy. And so I do that, and I write down as many things that come to mind about her mother as possible.

And I actually got about 60% of them correct, which is a pretty high amount for intuition. And I was feeling pretty good about it. And then when she’s getting ready to go on to the next person, and I hear in my head, butter pickles.

And I’m like, I am not saying butter pickles. That’s just ridiculous. And it’s loud I mean, now it’s shouting at me, butter pickles.

So I said, okay. Her name was Sparky. I said, sparky, I gotta ask you a question.

Does your mom like butter pickles? And she said, oh, my God. She has eight jars of butter pickles in her refrigerator at this very moment. She buys all.

All different brands because she wants to find the best butter pickles there are. So I knew that I can trust the messages that I get. I mean, that’s a pretty off the wall couple of words.

I don’t even like butter pickles. But her mom did. And that was spirit, showing me that I can trust the wisdom.

And I just want to leave us with one of my favorite teachers who is Mother Teresa. And Mother Teresa said, let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. The money will come.

If we seek first the kingdom of God, the rest will be given. So whatever your word for God is, if you just replace that word if you need to, some people are comfortable with the word God. And if not, whatever your word is that if you’re looking for money or health or harmonious relationships, those are the three major things.

Optimal health, harmonious relationships, and overflowing wealth. So whatever it is you’re looking for, if you’ll seek first the kingdom of God, spirit, the universe, the guides, the rest will be given. And I sure have found that to be the truth in my life.

And I hope this has helped you understand that you too have an inner guidance system. And it is just waiting for you to get quiet enough to hear it. Thank you so much for joining me again.

If you want to check out my book, it’s called 10,000 Miles of Miracles on Amazon. And I have to say, I really love my guest today. Sa.