Ester Nicholson: From Addiction to Awakening Through Soul Recovery

In this week’s episode of the Recover Your Soul Podcast, I’m joined by a true spiritual sister — Ester Nicholson, coach, teacher, and author of Soul Recovery: The 12 Keys to Healing Dependence. From the moment we met, I knew our paths were divinely aligned. We both use the language of Soul Recovery to describe the journey of returning to our authentic selves — the place of peace, power, and divine wholeness that lives within us all.

In this heartfelt and deeply inspiring conversation, Ester shares her powerful story of transformation — from addiction and trauma to awakening and spiritual purpose. With honesty and grace, she reminds us that recovery isn’t just about overcoming substances or behaviors — it’s about healing the deeper wounds that separate us from our soul. Together, we explore how compassion, surrender, and spiritual practice can free us from the illusion of brokenness and guide us back to the light of who we really are.

Ester also shares her 21-Day Journey to the Authentic Self — a beautifully designed self-paced program that includes 21 days of teachings, meditations, and somatic healing practices to help you reconnect with your true essence. It’s a wonderful complement to the Soul Recovery process and an invitation to step more fully into your wholeness. You can learn more

Join us on the 1st Monday of every month for the FREE Soul Recovery Support Group on Zoom from 6-7PM Mountain Time.  Register on the website, and if you have registered in the past, look for your reminder email in your promotions folder. 

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening: Souls Already Speak
• 1:51 Meet Esther Nicholson
• 5:48 Early Trauma and Fragmentation
• 11:28 First Addictions: Fear and Belonging
• 17:43 Taxi Choice: Live or Leave
• 22:53 Powerlessness and the Steps
• 30:03 When the Steps Stopped Working
• 36:43 Blending Steps, Somatics, and Mysticism

Transcript

RevRachelHarrison: 0:33

Have you ever met somebody and instantly felt like you were speaking the same language, like your souls knew each other already? That's exactly how I felt when I connected with Esther Nicholson earlier this year. Today I'm beyond excited to introduce this beautiful spiritual sister whose work that she also called Soul Recovery mirrors much of what we talk about here. Esther's story is transformational from addiction and trauma to awakening and becoming a spiritual teacher, author, and coach. It's powerful, authentic, and deeply inspiring. Together we explore how our individual paths to soul recovery may look a little different, but they led us both to the same truth that we were never broken. We were only remembering our light. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and soul recovery to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recovery Soul Podcast. I'm Rev Rachel, and I am super excited about today's episode because I'm sitting across on Zoom from Esther Nicholson, who is another practitioner, spiritual teacher, incredible woman sharing soul recovery. And I'm so honored to have her here today because we are so aligned. And I think we're the only two people that talk about soul recovery in the way that we do. And I really am excited to have you here to talk about what you're doing, how you're using it, and how our community can access your take on soul recovery. So welcome, Esther. Thank you so much.

EsterNicholson: 2:39

It's my honor to be here.

RevRachelHarrison: 2:45

A couple times you came into the Denver area and spoke at a couple unity churches. And I'd had your book in my bookshelf. And I can't remember if I found it before or after, because I'd never when I came up with recover your soul, that's what Spirit gave to me. Rachel, recover your soul. And then I started talking about soul recovery. And then when I had you sign the book at our meeting, I was like, she signed it before. I've actually met her before. And then I remembered long ago, years and years ago, you had come to Columbine and given a talk. And it was like as if it flooded in. I remember that talk was so empowering and so beautiful to me. So you've been this whisper all along the way around recovery and spirituality and seeing the 12 steps in a different way. And so I just am, I'm just elated to talk to you today. So much.

EsterNicholson: 3:41

I get excited. So trust me, I'll get passionate up in here because this is my jam.

RevRachelHarrison: 3:47

This is this is why I'm here. So give people who don't know just a quick story. I'd always rather talk about the solution, the growth, the expansion that's happening than the hard story. But you like me went through your own addiction, and that's what's brought you to where you are today.

EsterNicholson: 4:06

And I think that without that story, that soul recovery to a lot of people wouldn't make sense. And I think without that story, I wouldn't be in this place of continuously rediscovering and being restored to my soul. So I've been sober, recovering uh from drugs and alcohol and those other typically known addictions for 40 years. I'll be 40 years in recovery on November 1st. I know it's right. I can't believe it.

RevRachelHarrison: 4:42

That seems impossible, by the way, because that would make you have gotten sober when you were about five years old, because you are so beautiful and look so young. So anyway, go ahead.

EsterNicholson: 4:53

Thank you so much. That's what soul recovery does, because the soul is ageless, birthless and deathless. And when we connect to it uh energetically, then that human construct, that human concept of aging is diminished, it dissolves, it it does is doesn't hold weight, it's not reality, right? I remember uh before I was five years old, that I thought I was the center of the universe because I was so in conscious contact with my soul, and I believe that children are, because they haven't been conditioned yet, they haven't been quite trained yet in the belief that they're not worthy or that something's wrong with them, or that they're not enough, or maybe they haven't experienced I hadn't experienced enough trauma by that time, but I was still purely connected to my beingness. And I thought I was the light of the world, and I was, and I was free, and I was happy, and I was spoiled, and I wanted what I wanted, and I didn't care, and you know, just and I danced and I laughed and I trusted everybody and I loved everybody and I felt good. I was like I was my authentic self. And then my first day of kindergarten, I'm so excited to be around other little kids, and I'm bullied immediately on the playground, where some little kid drags me by my ponytail around the playground, and I was fragmented and shocked and betrayed by life and abused and sad and confused. And and I think when I went home and told my parents about it, that no one stood for me. Like it wasn't like a big deal. It's like, oh, kind of get over it, you know, you're a big girl now, you're in school. And then I had a mother that when you reached a certain age where you could actually talk back and have your own opinion, but she wasn't spiritually mature or emotionally or emotionally mature mature enough to handle that. Her growth was stunted because of her own abuse at 12 years old. And so she was a 12-year-old, 40-something year old mother, and she was very abusive to me. And um, so then more fragmentation, more scatteredness, more nervous, uh, nervous center scatteredness and trauma and all of that. And and then I was bullied in in school. And I like to tell people that trauma is creative if it's not healed. And that's where the 12 steps in the law of attraction comes in, right? That it is done unto you as you believe. So the first time I was traumatized when there was no one there to heal, help me heal and process through that trauma in a way that that trauma didn't become a part of my identity and my belief system. So I continued to create it unconsciously in other areas of my life. So little by little I lost contact with my soul. Right. Little by little I became disconnected from my soul, my freedom, my peace, my joy, my grace, my greatness, right? And so in my being disconnected from my soul, I share with people that my first addiction, which is when you are so attached to a belief system, a thought pattern or behavior pattern that you become enslaved or in bondage to that pattern energetically, that no matter how deeply you want to heal it, you're powerless. You just can't. And my first addiction was to anxiety and fear. Remember a time after five years old that I I was not afraid. I can't remember a time when I was not afraid. When I was not internally walking on eggshells, even if I looked cool, calm, and collected. And untreated fear an untreated trauma. It has to be comforted in some kind of way. You're all you know, I was always looking to get back home, but I didn't know to get back home through a a a healthier avenue. Right. So, you know, I started uh getting high. And and and I the first time I got high off of marijuana, first of all, I I always hated marijuana because it made me so paranoid. It took me an hour to cross the street one day. I was trying to cross the street and the car looked like it was right here when it was like 20 blocks away. Um, but the first time I smoked marijuana, I didn't do it because I wanted to get high. I did it because I I was addicted to needing to belong, right? From being bullied and uh excluded from the cool kids and all of that. It's like so one of the cool kids said, Hey, you want to hit this joint? And I'm like, Absolutely, I'll jump off of a bridge if you tell me that you like me and that I belong. So those are the addictions for me that really uh created those other symptoms of becoming addicted to crack cocaine, becoming addicted to unhealthy relationships, all of that, and then finally hitting that bottom that I needed to hit, where I was either going to leave this incarnation and die out of this incarnation or choose to live. Right. And I was clearly given that choice in the backseat of a taxi of this is the moment, and it wasn't threatening or scary. It's like you're gonna either continue to go to the drug dealer's house or you're gonna get out of this taxi and you're going to fight for your life. And I decided, my soul decided, because cognitively I wasn't deciding anything. Cognitively, I wasn't in control of anything. But my soul is like, it's not, you know, there's something here for you to do, there's something here for you to be. It's not time for you to do that yet. And so I got out of that taxi and I started to diligently and faithfully and devotedly started practicing the 12 steps of recovery. And of course, the rooms of recovery were um uh an integral part of my recovery because I needed love, I needed fellowship, I needed community, all of that was great. But for me, without practicing the principles of admitting that I was truly powerless, like that step, the first step, I remember the first time it came alive for me. That I I really got that of myself, I could not not ever get high again, that it could not not be in unhealthy relationships again, that I could not not overeat on sugar and do all of those things, that I was that I had no power, that I was completely powerless. And it was the most powerful moment in my life to give up trying to control my addictions and trying to make recovery and sobriety happen from my limited, disconnected self from my soul. So that's how I started practicing the steps and doing inventory and becoming just really um aware of the resentments and the fears and the belief systems and the parts that I have unknowingly and unconsciously played in my own tragic tragedy, you know. And it set me free.

RevRachelHarrison: 13:11

Yeah.

EsterNicholson: 13:12

It awakened me to God in a way that I never knew was possible to know God. I was having actually a spiritual experience. It wasn't my daddy's God, who was a Baptist minister, or Michael Beckwith's God, you know, who was my minister for a little while. And it wasn't anybody else's God. I had this spiritual experience just by cleaning, I call it getting your windows clean. You know, just cleaning all the dust off of my soul that had been buried. But I still didn't know about soul recovery because after about 10 years of that, what happened was the steps stopped working for me. But I want to be really clear, the steps never stop working, those principles are immutable. But they they were designed at that particular time for me to get me to a baseline of living so that I could go deeper. And because by 10, 15 years of recovery, I was losing my mind. And not one step was working for me anymore because I was working the steps or trying to practice the steps now from my trauma base. You know, if we look at vibrational frequencies, if I'm if I'm trying to heal from the frequency of the problem, I stay in the problem. Right. You know, and I wasn't able to make that connection to the power greater than myself. Um, so the 12 steps stopped working for me. I got into metaphysics and um new thought teachings, and that was magic for a while because it's like, whoa, I can manifest and speak my word and visualize about what I want. And you know, then I became a manifest junkie. And that stopped working. My trait pre my my prayer treatments, they call it prayer treatment in new thought and maybe at also in Unity, stopped working, became ineffective, became a dead experience. And I was dying. And I didn't want to commit suicide, but I would like my anxiety and my um emotional roller coasters were they were just killing me. And I didn't want to live that way anymore. I couldn't live that way. I hit another bottom. And this bottom introduced me to the word trauma that I had never even known before. I didn't know that that's what was going on with me. I thought I knew horrible things had happened to me, but I literally thought it was because of those people or I was unlucky or something. I don't know what I thought, but I didn't know that oh wow, your nervous system has is is constantly living 24-7 in fight, flight of freeze. Right. Your little girl is on the fetal position 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you're trying to function. And but I knew that the 12 steps worked, I knew that metaphysics worked, and then I went deeper into mysticism, which is a step up from a huge step up from metaphysics, even and uh and then I started doing some somatic healing to like really get in there about what had happened to me, and started clearing that out, and it was like, oh, so one aspect of this process on its own doesn't work, but if I blend them together, the structure of the steps, the somatic healing that gets into your nervous system, rewires and resets your brain, um, uh resets your unconscious memories of trauma and all of that, and blend those together with mysticism, the oneness and the allness of God that I am. I'm not recovering from these things in life or these addictions or these patterns. I'm actually recovering and rediscovering that little girl before she was five years old, before she even came into this incarnation. My true and authentic self. Oh, that's what recovery is.

RevRachelHarrison: 17:45

Yeah.

EsterNicholson: 17:46

Recovery is the recovery, rediscovery of me, the I am that I am as me. And it became my life's work.

RevRachelHarrison: 17:59

Are you ready to step into your soul recovery? Visit the website recoveryoursoul.net to learn more about the nine-step soul recovery process. I hope that you'll join us the first Monday of every month for the free soul recovery support group on Zoom, where we learn more about soul recovery and connect with each other. If you'd like to work directly with me to move through the nine-step soul recovery process, I'm here for you. But you can also choose to work the steps on your own with individual modules intended to support you to work at your own pace and on your own time. And if you want even more soul recovery, join us for the Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast for Patreon members and Apple Podcast subscribers, where I interview amazing people sharing soul recovery tips for us and also do spiritual book studies. You can also find daily inspiration on Facebook and Instagram and join our private Facebook community. Visit the website for more information, links, and registration for everything. I love that journey. It's so aligned, I think, you know, in my journey and in so many other people's journeys, about you find the next step and then you think, oh, this is it. This is going to be the thing that solves it. I'm good, you know. And then as they say in 12 step, you're back, you know, you're sitting on your laurels. You there's always more to be revealed. There's new layers. There's our souls are so rich and so um, so much more beautiful and complex than we give us credit for. And so it's always giving us those next steps. And it's not about getting to some utopian, everything's perfect. It's about discovering ourselves even more fully, the metaphysics, the mysticism, the awarenesses that come. Your, I love how you talked about like your connection with your higher power, not your daddy's, not somebody else's, yours, right?

EsterNicholson: 19:50

Because that concept, that's their experience. Right. But when I had my own spiritual experience, it was no longer debatable. I knew what I knew. I knew what I was experiencing. It wasn't something I was reading out of a book. I cleaned house and God revealed itself as me.

RevRachelHarrison: 20:12

Soul recovery. I love that we feel the same way about it, which is the more and more clarity that we're we're recovering the aspects of ourselves that are our wholeness, our fullness of our nature, the truth of who we are. There's nothing to fix, right? We're shedding the limiting beliefs and opening more fully to our divine innate greatness. Absolutely.

EsterNicholson: 20:36

And I would just like to speak to um uh that the soul is complex. I think that the soul is complete. That is the ego that is complex, right? And that and that there's so many layers to our and the ego has gotten a bad rap. I love the ego. The ego is just the part of us that that has been traumatized into out of the garden of Eden, you know. So Adam and Eve, they were once in the Garden of Eden, and then they took the bite of the illusion and started tripping out, right? So the the ego has so many layers of not feeling safe that creates resistance, that this particular time that you're practicing particular processes that can get to that, then that layer of resistance can relax and you can have the transformation, uh, the contact with the soul that is already complete. And then the ego is like, okay, we're here. Now here's another reason to have fear. Here's another reason to hold on. And then, you know, and what you did last time for that last thing isn't gonna work for this one. Right. So it's time to go, it's time to go deeper.

RevRachelHarrison: 22:01

I was gonna respond to in the ego part. I love that you say that because that's how I feel about the ego too. I think I think the ego gets a bad rap and that we do this thing where we're we're against ourselves as if there's a piece, as if we're battling ourselves versus opening up fully to all aspects of ourselves and understanding the roles that each of them plays so that we can integrate more to our wholeness and use what the concepts of the ego to to our benefit versus something that we're trying to get rid of.

EsterNicholson: 22:33

I think if we look at the ego as something separate from ourselves, then we're still in duality.

RevRachelHarrison: 22:40

Right.

EsterNicholson: 22:41

You know, um, if God is everything or nothing, if God is omnipotence, all power, then there can't be anything other than it. So the ego is still God expressing through you at your stage of development. So if your stage of development, your frequency is very low, then you're still one with God. You may not be able to enjoy the grace of God because you're so blocked from it, right? Right. This is the level that you are manifesting God.

RevRachelHarrison: 23:19

That's what I believe. The levels I think are interesting because we do this competition comparison thing versus being curious about where we are. You know, if you look at your life as what you think and feel and believe it is, you said that earlier, you get the reflection of, you know, what you get on the outside is a reflection of how you feel on the inside. It's not a judgment, it's actually freedom and power to be able to say, ah, if I don't like how this is feeling, there's something I can do about it.

EsterNicholson: 23:48

Yeah, and it's information. It's information for you to go deeper into the perceptions that you've taken on about yourself. Right. And what happened. You know, you've heard me share in my talk that when people are disconnected from their souls, they create patterns that they recycle and loops over and over and over again that are destructive, that might have you saying to yourself, What's wrong with me? I'm hopeless. Why can't I get it right? But I've invited us to reframe that question from what's wrong with me to what happened to me. Right. Something happened to split you off from your conscious contact with your soul, and not to say what happened to me from a place of being pulling over and victim consciousness, but from a place of such deep self-compassion that we very rarely give ourselves. And it was a huge revelation for me when I could come out of practitioner mode, and you know, I have what it was 15 years of recovery at that time, and you know, I should be over this by now, and all of that stuff, and really look at that little girl who was so emotionally tortured and scared, and really see myself for the first time from such a place of compassion, even sadness, like really allowing myself to feel sadness for myself. That's not feeling sorry for yourself, right? That's feeling sadness for yourself. And now we can, whatever process, whether it's the steps, whether it's somatic healing, uh, whether it's tapping, whether it's brain rewiring, that we can laser in on those particular experiences and the perceptions that you've taken on about yourself and start to expose them to the light so they can be dissolved instead of trying to do these spiritual bypasses and just never like you completely, you know. I don't even know what the analogy of that would be. Like uh, I don't know, trying to get to the store and you go to the gas station instead. I don't know. I don't know.

RevRachelHarrison: 26:06

I'm trying to be clever here, but yeah, I think what I love about what I think you and I both embody is we took the 12 steps and there was such greatness in them. And when I really had clarity that the 12 steps had similar growth that came from what also new thought was from, it was as if everything, all the puzzle pieces started coming in. And I read the big book from a metaphysical standpoint, and it was as if it was an entirely new book. And then I took the 12 steps and I looked at it from the spiritual lens, and that's how I created the nine-step soul recovery process, which the foundational piece is exactly what you're talking about, which is not looking at the inventory from a condemnation of yourself space, but from this incredible deep compassion of what were the experiences that you had? How did that form what your patterns and beliefs and stories are? How can you come to yourself with love and compassion? What are you learning from that? What are the gifts that you take from that? And then how are you going to choose? What decision will you make in your life around how you're going to take this information and what perception do you want to see through? Absolutely.

EsterNicholson: 27:21

So it's the so the steps unified with metaphysics and mysticism are awareness, uh, awareness, acceptance, no, awareness, acknowledgement, acceptance, admitting personal powerlessness over everything that you've just become aware of, acknowledged, and have accepted. And then that brings you to accountability. So recovery is compassion. When I take people through inventory, I'm like, this is compassionate accountability. Yes, we're going to take responsibility for our side of the street where our woundedness has caused harm, but we're also doing it from a place of compassion of why did you cause harm? Right. Who did you think you were? Or what did you think you were going to lose? Or what were you protecting when you were in that fourth column when you were being selfish, self-centered, dishonest, and afraid? Because that's a wounded child acting out, trying to survive, you know? Yeah, girls on the same page. I know.

RevRachelHarrison: 28:22

I love it. I mean, I love that you still use the 12 steps in the way that you have created them. I mean, that's what your whole book is about is like, here's the 12 steps, here's here's how you can use them. It's the 12 steps for the rest of us, the path to wholeness, serenity, and success, right? 12 keys to healing, dependence. It's around this idea that that we can continue to grow the energy, the space that is spirit speaking to us through us as us to remember who we are, to recover our souls. And that there isn't anyone, there's so much, you know, right now that's being dislike disassembled in terms of religion and thought structures and even politics. And we're breaking apart, I think, to come back in to recover as in wholeness.

EsterNicholson: 29:13

Well, just like in um in any addiction, and you know, I teach this that addiction isn't just about those external addictions, but the addiction to the belief that you're unworthy. That's an addictive belief. Addiction to being hyper-vigilant and and and being anxious, addiction to the belief that you're not deserving, right? Addiction to the belief um uh that you're not enough, that that what we're seeing the world what ha what's happening in the world right now is the world is hitting a bottom. And what do you do with that bottom? You know, there are some people in addiction that have hit a bottom and it's like I can't do anything else in this lifetime and I have to leave because I can't get it here. Right. And then there are some people that hit a bottom, it's like I'm supposed to be here at this time, at this incarnation. So now I'm you know, there's nothing like repeated pain that can bring you to a place of humility. Yes, there's something like hitting a bottom that can bring you into a place of being willing to do something that you were not willing to do before.

RevRachelHarrison: 30:25

And it's required on some level to whatever that is for each person. I don't know a single person who is not. On a really strong personal path that didn't hit their own version of whatever that bottom is. For some person, it's homelessness on the street. For another person, it's just having one person look at them and say, I don't like who you are.

EsterNicholson: 30:50

It's all relative. So we don't need to compare traumas. Right. It's a very individual thing. Whatever has you feeling fractured and disconnected and scared and self-doubting yourself constantly. That's it it could be something that wouldn't mean anything to me. But if it affected you, it's because there's something there that hasn't been addressed. Right. It's information. Not a place for you to judge yourself of, oh, this isn't a big deal. I shouldn't be feeling this way. Stop shooting on yourself and like look at, okay, I am really bothered by this. Something's going on with me. My nervous system, my my soul is giving me information.

RevRachelHarrison: 31:44

Our feelings are teaching us so much at each moment. When did you make the leap from working the steps and doing and doing this work to this place where you're you're guiding people, where you're leading people, where you're you're you're really, you know, in the forefront of holding space and healing others? When did that come in for you?

EsterNicholson: 32:09

That was not a conscious choice. It chose me. I wanted to be with the Houston.

RevRachelHarrison: 32:16

Which, by the way, if you've heard her sing, she is.

EsterNicholson: 32:20

I had, you know, it's like I I was a licensed practitioner, spiritual practitioner, um for 10 years. And so I was holding consciousness for people and praying, but I had no idea that I was going to be um a healer, an influencer, an author, or all of that. That just was not my plan until I had to hit a bottom and got fired from Rod Stewart. Right. Which which forced me. And I tried to get on tour with so many people after that in my desperation, tried to get on tour with Sting and Paul McCartney. Doors closed.

RevRachelHarrison: 33:01

Interesting.

EsterNicholson: 33:03

And I'm on the floor, and my manager said, Your soul recovery. You need to write a book. I yelled and I screamed and I resisted and I was scared and all of that. It's like, I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to, and my soul was saying, You're a healer, you're a teacher. Hold consciousness or the planet. People come to you for help. And I'm like, I don't know how to do that. So I usually tell people who are looking for their purpose, and when they tap into what their highest vision is, but they think that that's no way is that possible for them. I share with them that the very thing that I was terrified of doing and so resistant to doing is what I do now, you know. So there's a power within you that can support you in stepping into that transformational journey for you to live your divine destiny. It was at that time, you know, after I wrote the book, and then I started speaking. And then I started, it's like, well, I need to put this workshop together on you know, the healing code of forgiveness, because I just did a whole healing code of forgiveness in my own life. So everything that I started teaching was because I I was walking through that process. And it's like, oh, this is a workshop, right? And um, and then just from those talks and from the workshops and the healings and the transformations that people were experiencing, they were like, Can we see you one-on-one? Can can you help us? And so that's when my uh when I started seeing people um as clients and being their recovery and rediscovery coach and trauma healer. So my test has truly become my testimony.

RevRachelHarrison: 34:51

I think that one of the truths is when you are recovering from addiction, you need somebody who gets it. You know, you can't have somebody who's never been in the clutches of addiction try to tell you how to get sober. But once you have somebody that has what you want and you see them that they've come out the other side, it gives you hope to go one day at a time. And I think the same is for us, you know, that here you are in these abilities to touch people who want what you have and and the peace that I've always, I mean, now I've you know been in your your presence. You also had an online 12-step church for a while that didn't end up um shaking out, unfortunately. But your presence is so beautiful and so open and so kind and so wise. And and I often think it's interesting. We we who sit here today are not the ones who were in those despondent places because we're our souls are aligned to who we are in our truth today. It's called transformation.

EsterNicholson: 35:52

Yeah. People read my book, or when I just tell my story, and they're like, you were not a crack addict, or you are not a 16-year-old mother, or you are not, you know, addicted to these unhealthy relationships. And I'm like, you shouldn't be able to look at me and tell that. Transformation is real. Transformation means turned inside out, it means completely changed. That's what that means. So thank you, because you shouldn't be able to tell that. Then I would then that wouldn't then I wouldn't have a testimony if you could look at me and tell that I've had those experiences. The hope is is that you can look at me and see where I am today and say that if she went through what she went through and she is where she is today, then there's hope for me. Yes.

RevRachelHarrison: 36:41

Yeah, absolutely. So tell us how to find Esther. Tell us what's what's going on in your world, and you've got some really great programs available too.

EsterNicholson: 36:50

Absolutely. So you can find Esther at EstherNicholson.com and it's Esther without the H E S T E R. And you know, I used to hate that name Esther. You know, it was a name that I was teased about when I was a kid because it wasn't one of those cool names, you know, and I always wanted to be cool when I was a kid because I was excluded from the cool kid. And so it took me a long time, like through the steps, to like really start acknowledging that Esther is a really powerful name and that my journey has supported me in stepping into that name with such pride. So EstherNicholson.com is where you can find me and find out about everything that I'm doing. I also have a digital program called the 21-day journey to the authentic self that has 21 days of daily teachings, prayers, meditations, you get audio meditations for 21 days, you get eight days of tapping, doing some somatic healing, and it's a self-paced program. You'll you'll own the program for life. It's only $97. You'll own the program for life. And so it's like if I can't start the program now, then I can start it next month, or I can, you know, I can create uh a space when I can actually focus on this. Um, so that's the 21-day, and I'm in the process of creating some really amazing um programs for executives who are crushing it in the boardroom but are dying on the inside. And I know of three executives in the behavioral health care industry on the past two years who've committed suicide because they carry so much and they have to be on all the time and they think they have to look good with while they are so disconnected from their souls. So I've created a program just for executives called Executive Soul Coherence and also a clinician, a clinician soul coherence for um clinicians and therapists who are just showing up every day, like with barely anything to give, because they've become so depleted and burned out and disconnected. So all of those are on the horizon.

RevRachelHarrison: 39:06

I love it. I love it. And I think that we were before we started recording, we're talking about the value and the importance of us filling ourselves up and making sure that that depletion doesn't happen. And it and it takes conscious effort and spiritual awareness, whether you're an executive or a out there in the world taking care of people, or whether you're just in your family feeling like you're holding the space for everyone. That's what soul recovery is all about on both of our both of our fields, is that coming back to yourself and holding your own resonance.

EsterNicholson: 39:41

Absolutely. And I do my work because when I don't do my spiritual practice, as Maya Angela said, when I'm not connected, I'm danger and in danger. I'm I'm in I'm in danger and I'm dangerous. And I don't hold this down perfectly. I hold it down perfectly imperfectly. And I'm so tapped in, I know when I'm off, and I get off, I get scared, I get triggered. I'm just so grateful that I have a comprehensive path to get back home. Just get back home to know how to allow God to take care of me.

RevRachelHarrison: 40:25

Beautiful. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your soul recovery with my soul recovery community and recover your soul. And it's just, I love that we've connected and I feel like you're such a heart sister, and I'm just grateful for your time.

EsterNicholson: 40:43

I'm just so grateful to find a sister.

RevRachelHarrison: 40:46

Yeah.

EsterNicholson: 40:47

Not many people are speaking our language. And yeah, but the world needs us.

RevRachelHarrison: 40:53

Thank you. Until next time, Namaste. Thank you for listening, and I hope that that helps support your soul recovery process. Just a reminder that every Friday is the Recover Your Soul Bonus podcast. This podcast is for Patreon members and Apple Podcast subscribers. And not only do you get an incredible interview or book study that comes with being part of that community, but your subscribing helps support this podcast and the Recover Your Soul community. If you want to listen to those bonus episodes but can't subscribe right now, do know that you can be a free Patreon member and have access for limited time to new episodes. Visit the website recoveryoursoul.net or check out the show links below for coupons and information for upcoming events. I thank you for sharing this podcast with your friends and family. I thank you for giving it five stars, and the reviews that are left bring tears to my eyes. I am honored to be part of your life. Together, we can do the work that will recover your soul.