"I'm so excited to be able to share this interview with the amazing & inspiring Emma Mildon with you! Emma is truly a powerhouse of wisdom on all sorts of spiritual topics, and is a well-known crystal expert." Ashley: Hi and welcome to the Love and Light live podcast. I'm so excited today to be interviewing the amazing Emma Mildon. You may be familiar with Emma, she's the author of The Soul Searcher's Handbook and the soon-to-be-released Evolution of Goddess. She's also been featured by The Huffington Post and by Mindbodygreen. She is just an amazing powerhouse of information on different spiritual topics. I am so excited to be interviewing her because The Soul Searcher's Handbook is one that's been on my shelf for a long time. I really love it. I've already pre-ordered my copy of Evolution of Goddess and I'm just really excited to talk with her a little bit today about this upcoming book. So Emma, thank you so much for being here with me. Emma Mildon: Hi. How are you? Calling in from New Zealand. Ashley: Lovely. That's the other thing I love. Many people listening, our students, they know my amazing team member Lucy is from New Zealand. So we have big New Zealand love over here. Emma: I’d love Lucy. We’d probably love each other. Ashley: For those of you who are maybe not familiar with you or your books yet... Would you mind just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about yourself and your spiritual journey, and how you got started with all of this? Emma: Of course. Yes. I pride myself on being kind of the girl-next-door spiritualist. I began writing after kind of a world odyssey of soul searching. Firstly, I traveled the world and did everything I physically, possibly could in terms of learning and digesting spiritual wisdom. I read every book I could try to get through normally, just the first two chapters until they told me what I should do and think and believe in. And I did courses and learned from masters and healers and authors and shaman. At that time, I had no idea that actually I was researching my own book. But really, I think in that process of traveling, trying to read books about topics, I mean, coming out the other end and realizing that actually we needed a spiritual book without all the rules. A reference guide that meant that you could take what you like and leave what doesn't resonate with you. So yeah, that's kind of how I started out. I definitely didn't start out as a writer. Speaking and things like this make me incredibly nervous. I love to hide behind my pages of my book. Writing is definitely dear to my heart. I've really just felt passionate about people who need to have this information. Because when I started looking to explore spirituality, there wasn't really enough to help guide me that didn't boss me around. I think being a mystic millennial, I wanted to have a book that gave me the freedom to explore spirituality on my terms. Ashley: You know, I do think that that is such a true thing for many of us who are a little bit on the younger side who are in that millennial generation. It is about this personal freedom. I think that's why many of us choose the paths that we do and the careers that we do and things like that. So I definitely relate to that. But I think for really truly anyone listening, we've probably all felt this from one time or another when we're learning about something new. We feel like there's a specific way things have to be done because that's what we're being told and it really impedes on our own spiritual development and spiritual growth. We were talking a little bit about this before we started recording the podcast. About this idea of feeling like what you should be doing and beating yourself up when you don't do that. So I think that's so wonderful that you've incorporated more freedom into that original book. And I'm just wondering, did that play a role at all when you started to write Evolution of Goddess?