Welcome back to the podcast where we ask the question, what makes you happy? Our guest today is an alignment coach and soul therapist supporting women and men going through an identity crisis to find themselves and their happiness again, please welcome the host of the Embody Your Flow podcast, Monika Martin from Europe. It is a pleasure to have you.

How are you? Hi, thank you for having me. I am really excited to be here today.

That is awesome. I could see it on your face. You're oozing happiness. It is just infectious. You're making me want to smile.

Really?

So, Monika, would you mind starting with what makes you happy in life?

Well, the first thing is actually because I have three dogs and just seeing them happy and healthy is what makes me the happiest. But also making choices that get me to leave a life that is aligned with who I truly am. It's about asking myself every day, do I really want this? Am I okay with that? And just standing up for what I believe in and working towards that.

It's a cliche way to say, but you live in alignment, right? In alignment with what your soul pretty much screams out for you.

Monika, I just want to ask you for our listeners today who are struggling with their happiness, what's your advice for them? Where, from your perspective, should they start to find themselves again?

The first thing that I would advise anyone to do is to create a relationship with themselves. Because even for me, I was born very intuitive, but until I had burnout in 2021, I realized that I didn't really have a relationship with myself. We so crave to have relationships with others, whether it's friendships or romantic relationships, that we never really think about developing a real relationship with ourselves and really get to know who we are, but also what we want.

I truly believe that we cannot be truly happy if we don't know who we are.

There's no guide for this life that we have. We've just got to figure it out one day at a time.

So if you do find yourself waking up, let's say 40, 56 and going, who am I? That's okay. Like you've got 2030, 40 more years. Yeah.

We live in a society where early on we are taught to disconnect from ourselves. Therefore we'll live a life mostly on autopilot. And one day, if we are lucky too, we wake up and we're like, okay, I don't know who I am, I don't know who I want, I don't know what I want. I don't want to acknowledge this life that I've created for myself. This was not what I wanted.

You know what I think we are very fortunate to wake up to ourselves one day and actually be able to ask those questions because it's very empowering because then you realize you sort of break those chains, right? And you're like, Well, I'm thinking for myself right now.

I wouldn't say that I had an awakening because I feel that I was always very kind of awake from a very young age. I was always asking questions like, why am I what am I doing here? What is going on with this world? I didn't really feel like I fit it in this world. So I always had those questions that I wanted to understand different kind of things.

But when I had my burnout, that's when I realized that I didn't have a relationship with myself and I wasn't embodying. Like I wasn't in my body, and I had to create a relationship with my body, and I had to create a relationship with myself and really go for the things that I wanted instead of doing things that I thought I had. Wonderful.

Monika, thank you so much for sharing all things that make you happy. It's an absolute pleasure to hear your story and your beautiful, beautiful piece of advice for our listeners on how they could sort of start to live a bit more in alignment and find themselves and what makes them happy. So we really appreciate your time today.