86. Death Cycles: Submitting to Change and Renewal with Brionna Ned
Death, Life, and Change
Change is inevitable, whether in you, your brand, or the humans who are a part of it.
How we meet change is up to us. How do you honor the life and death cycles that come with change? How do you grieve, let go, and grow while continuing to show up?
Brionna Ned joins India for a conversation about death, rebirth, growth, and change within life and business.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
How Brionna helps people navigate death cycles and change
Why Brionna believes it’s vital for people to gain fluency in legalese
How to tease out the difference between comfort and safety when approaching a growth edge
How Brionna breaks down overwhelm
How capitalism and entrepreneurial culture teach us to create boxes and isolate ourselves
A Multi-Dimensional Misfit
Brionna Ned is a self-described multi-dimensional misfit who is a student, practitioner, and facilitator of collective liberation. She uses her legal background to teach legalese to everyday people who want to feel more confident making decisions in their work and business. She's also a well-being educator teaching people how to submit to and align with change.
Submitting to Death and Change
On the Flaunt Your Fire® podcast, Brionna Ned (she/her) says that her work as a “death dominatrix” is centered on teaching people how to submit to change and submit to death cycles.
“In my philosophy of life, every time we experience a change, we experience a death. So what was, no longer is, and so we have to align with what our new reality is.”
For her that work is connected to her “superpower” of connecting disparate parts and being able to visualize intersections.
“Our society is set up and people are taught to think of focusing on one thing at a time…but look at where these six things intersect, that’s where the meat is. We can’t just pull one string. We have to look at where they intersect and pull strings at that intersection point.”
She says that this work can be laborious and that one of the things she had to be very clear on from the outset of her business was that “my work is not for beginners.”
She doesn’t advertise her one-on-one work, and her clients generally come by word of mouth and are people who approach her. Brionna requires her clients to have participated in some kind of processing work before, with a coach, a therapist, or the like.
By being very clear that her work is for “people at a very specific place in their journey,” she has been able to cut down the amount of labor required of her.
“By the time someone makes it to me…they’re ready to hear the truths. They’re ready for someone to kind of cut through their bullshit.”
Maintaining her boundaries on the front end of her business has made it so that the vast majority of her clients have been dream clients for her.
Navigating the Legal Field
The other major piece of Brionna’s work is as The Everyday Lawyer, where she teaches people how to navigate legal situations and legalese.
Upon her graduation from law school, Brionna worked in a variety of traditional law environments from large and mid-size firms to in-house counsel, and “got to see up close and personal what oppressive systems look like.”
She quickly realized that she needed to find an alternative path, which is how she entered the wellbeing and entrepreneurship space, but “the reason I came back to this is because I’ve always felt like the legal industry is so colonized and it’s so gatekept and it’s deeply lacking any sort of moral character or scaffolding…The Everyday Lawyer is really about calling that out and educating people.”
She says that the reason the average person doesn’t understand the legal field isn’t because they lack intelligence, it’s because the systems and the profession have been designed to make you believe that you always have to hire a lawyer anytime you interact with the law.
Her work also includes teaching people how to navigate their nervous systems’ responses to legal situations and the ways in which the legal system triggers trauma responses in many people.
“Part of having the knowledge and being able to do for yourself in the legal world is being able to access your executive function. And when you’re in a trauma or stress response, your executive function is significantly limited, which is why you can’t see or think straight and you’re panicking and crying and on google.”
She connects the work she does as The Everyday Lawyer to her work as a death dominatrix in that, “this whole industry, I think, needs to die and needs to be reshaped…I am working slowly at helping it die and talking about possibilities for what it could look like that are more ethical. My personal mission is to create universal legalese fluency because the first step is knowledge.”
Developing fluency is key because so much of the legal world works on an assumption of what a “reasonable person” would understand about a situation.
But “the reasonable person doesn’t understand legalese, so we can’t judge or make judgments or make decisions about what a reasonable person would or would not be doing or would not understand without actually teaching them first.”
Cracks, Fissures, and Death Cycles
India comments that there are likely parallels between how people respond to the legal field and its jargon and “the way some people’s nervous systems may respond to the financial system.”
Brionna agrees that there probably are a lot of parallels there in the way that people can shut down. She says she experienced that when she was working in big law and making more money than what she grew up with.
“I didn’t know anything about stocks or investing or anything like that. And I was really, really lost and it really, really triggered the crap out of me that I didn’t know and didn’t have that education.”
India adds that she thinks about “how that expands even to bookkeeping for business owners and accounting and taxes, and there’s so many systems that as you begin to think about how you’re approaching things from, like, a death cycle, could benefit from some revamping.”
Brionna says, “that’s what happens when we’re in societal collapse. The things that were cracks maybe fifteen, twenty, even thirty years about, are now irreparable fissures. And what I encounter now…is that people wish the fissures were cracks. They’re willing the fissures to be cracks. And for me, and what I teach in death cycles, that’s the first stage of a death cycle. It’s like the first stage of grief is denial.”
Comfort Vs. Safety
Brionna says that she considers death as an initiator, in the sense that it initiates a beginning.
“I always think so much of the issue that people have with death and change and the unknown is they’re like, I don’t wanna let this thing go, I don’t know who I am without it. I don’t know who we are without it…They try to close themselves off to what I see as an opportunity to become…to evolve and to mold and to shape into someone, maybe not better, but certainly newer, potentially freer.”
She wants people to start to think about death as something that brings opportunity instead of just something that signifies an ending.
One of the other issues people face with death cycles,she says, is that they conflate comfort with safety. People get comfortable with their nervous systems feeling unsafe and “you stay there because you know that and you know how to navigate it and you’re comfortable there, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are safe.”
Part of her work is helping people recognize what their nervous systems are communicating to them.
And if “this change that you’re experiencing, and this death that you’re experiencing, is initiating a version of your life where your nervous system is communicating to you more regularly that you’re actually safe? And if that’s the case, should we not explore that because that’s a healthier way of living for you, mind, body, soul, anyway you wanna slice it.”
Breaking Down Overwhelm
India asks how people can tease out the difference between a lack of safety in their nervous system versus being on a growth edge that may be uncomfortable but isn’t unsafe.
Brionna says that she’s been working on mapping out that process, but one of the ways she likes to investigate it is by breaking down the feeling of overwhelm into component parts, emotions, and themes.
“When you’re overwhelmed, the generic advice is like, meditate, go take a break, go outside, take a nap…[but] let’s get into the weeds of the overwhelm. Let’s write down all the things that you find overwhelming and then let’s ask questions about them. Why? Why are they overwhelming? Is there anything exciting about it? Is there any hesitation around it and why?”
In her own experience working with overwhelm, Brionna says that themes of emotional hang ups or emotional charges, time management, and lack of information cropped up around the aspects of her life and business that she felt overwhelmed by.
Once she had that breakdown and those categories, she could begin to address those pieces.
“There's so much rich stuff in overwhelm that will tell you exactly where you are and exactly what's going on and where you need to make shifts…So often with overwhelm, we wanna dissociate, or the way we deal with it doesn’t really dig deep into the problem, maybe it soothes it for a little bit, but we miss out on the information and the wisdom that’s really there to help us choose something different and more nourishing for ourselves.”\
India says that she went through a period of overwhelm last year related to the ways she was showing up, and when she started investigating it why she was feeling dissociated or nervous or sweaty in webinars or workshops, she was able to identify some relatively simple shifts that she could make to better care for her nervous system, like monitoring how much time she was spending with her ring light on her face.
“Sometimes it can be complex, but also sometimes making some shifts to not feel as overwhelmed can be as simple as turning a light off.”
Brionna says that striking a balance of not over or under-complicating the process is why she works on breaking down overwhelm with different-colored construction paper and markers for different categories.
“If I can make it more about play, suddenly it was more interactive and it was easier for me to stay there…[You] make more fun of yourself and it makes it easier to be with the reality.”
Getting clear on the truth and the reality of your situation is key and we have to separate the story from the truth, though the story may be part of the truth.
“We have to put the different truths down in front of us and see which ones are resonating, which ones are helping, which ones are harming, so then we know how to take appropriate action…Really getting to the truth of things is not a practice that we have because capitalism runs on lies and illusions. And so when people are starting their self-discovery journey or their liberation journey, a lot of what they’re starting with is how to stop lying.”
India adds that the system is also structured in a way to “cause people to blame themselves for what’s happening and not zoom out and say, what is the system that got me here? What are the things that contributed as well?”
Death Hygiene
India asks Brionna about the connection between teaching people how to better navigate the legal system and what Brionna calls “death hygiene.”
Brionna defines death hygiene as how you metabolize change through your physicality, which is comprised of your spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical health.
“What I tend to find is people have a strong connection to one, maybe two, of those things, but they don’t have a clear connection to all four. And part of your death hygiene is to be able to cultivate a clear connection and relationship to all four parts of your physicality.”
Brionna says that in her own life, she used to be only connected to her physical body, so when something needed to change, the only way she could recognize it is if it was causing physical symptoms like injury or illness. Even a period of severe insomnia and night terrors didn’t prompt her to consider that she might need to make changes in her life until a friend pointed it out to her.
“When I think about death hygiene, I think about, what’s your weakest connection and how can you cultivate it? If it feels nonexistent, how can you create it? If it feels really weak, how can you strengthen it so that at any time you’re always able to check in on your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health at any given time, and you can identify what’s going on with those things without a whole lot of effort.”
Entrepreneurial Boxes
India says that as she’s witnessed people taking their businesses through a rebranding process, she’s noticed that a lot of feelings can come up with that and it can be its own death cycle.
Brionna agrees and she says that she recently completed a group program, Rebirth Your Business, where she was helping people work through expanding or pivoting their businesses and that a lot of grief came up for participants in the process.
India adds that the practicalities of branding or rebranding–colors, fonts, website design, etc.–are a normal part of the conversation, but that we don’t discuss the mental and emotional support that people may need while they’re “releasing what was and your ideas of what it needed to be or should be.”
Brionna says that she created the Rebirth Your Business program as much for herself, as she was pivoting in her business, as she did for those who participated.
She says a common theme for herself and participants was “feeling backed into a corner by their existing brand…and constricted and like they couldn’t expand and be their full self.”
Common advice in entrepreneurship is to niche and specialize but Brionna says that, “you can get so lost in trying to be unique in a sea of so many people talking, that you can really box yourself in.”
And there is fear of losing what you’ve built if you expand out of or leave that box, which she says is the biggest lie she and the group were confronting, that, “if I go pursue that dream that seems to have nothing to do with this box that I put myself in…am I gonna destroy everything that I’ve been working for?”
India adds that there also has to be a moment to release blame and shame, and also to acknowledge that, though it was influenced by the culture, “when you create a business, you’re creating. So you made the box.”
For Brionna, that meant confronting that she made the box of the death dominatrix and that she used that kind of confrontational language around her work, and realizing that she didn’t want to be in that box anymore. “I’ve created this box and now it feels more like a cage, and so what do I do?”
She continues, “What I’ve started to see is how much it closes you off to opportunities,” and that following the standard advice about niching and ideal clients, etc. can be really isolating.
India agrees and says that there are mental health implications to “ignoring our own intuition in order to get into these boxes and follow this advice. Something about the isolation and making ourselves very unilateral and one-dimensional feels totally against human nature.”
Brionna agrees and gives the example of when she was doing alumni interviews of applicants to her college, she would always ask the students what their hobbies were, and almost every single one of them couldn’t name something they did purely for pleasure or enjoyment.
“That’s how far we had taken [specialization]. They were so bought into being that one-dimensional and specialized or whatever they were told to be, that they literally could not answer the question...And they were seventeen.”
India adds that “humans need play and creativity and pleasure in order to be innovative. That’s not necessarily the only reason we should be doing that, but what are we missing when we don’t?”
Connections and Shifts
In the spirit of accepting that death also allows us to explore life and life-affirming decisions, India asks Brionna what she’s currently excited about and looking forward to.
Brionna says that she is currently most excited about business collaborations. She says that getting back into the legal world has been tough and brought up some workplace trauma, but she’s also been connecting with like-minded people in the field.
“I’ve been meeting people who are trying to have the same conversation I’m having and what it feels like we’re doing is starting a movement…It feels really affirming and exciting to be meeting people who are also excited about these things and outraged by our reality.”
She’s also shifting her work as a death dominatrix to be an archetype that she embodies and lives every day.
“This is a part of me that’s for me and guides me and not necessarily a part that I put out into the world as a thing for people to consume…I had to correct that for myself and understand that it’s a thing that’s guiding me, it’s not a thing that other people get to pay for access to.”
Examine Your Overwhelm
Brionna encourages people to examine their overwhelm.
“I really think that if you write down a list of all the things that you’re overwhelmed about and just say why, there is so much information in that exercise.”
She says that there is real terror in people right now as we are collectively “in a free fall where you can’t see the ground.”
“The more we can dig into overwhelm, the more we’re gonna start to acknowledge there’s terror. The more we’re gonna be able to have a conversation of how do we find the ground and what should that ground be.”
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