In the ninth episode of our new season of Love Life, Live Well, our host Emma Cartmell is joined by Anna-Louise Haigh, Creator, Guide and Teacher at The Way of Your Soul and author of Light-filled, loving & wise and The Soul Whisperer.
What do you love about your life or life itself?
I love that question. Thank you for asking. What I love about my life is that I’ve created it out of pure self-belief and that I made a rule for myself some time ago that I only do what I love and that means it can be anything between focusing on creating a new project or delivering a workshop or getting out in nature and finding somewhere that’s got rocks, water, trees and stars and just absorbing myself into that or connecting into that and I just love the freedom. That’s what I love, that I’ve created a life that gives me freedom to do what I love and there’s a balance between work and fun.
How do you make sure that you look after yourself and live well?
Pretty much that I keep the balance I love live music and I love being out in nature but also, I love what I do, and I don’t consider myself to have a job or even a career. What I do is who I am, and I’ve been very fortunate to focus on my career of helping people know and grow themselves since I made that decision when I was 27 so yeah, I keep the balance and I keep focused and I keep connected to nature.
What is Face Whispering or Face Reading?
Face reading is the original traditional Chinese way of interpreting the facial features in correlation to what they are or have become known to represent from the body’s functioning, from your mindset and so on. It’s not about expressions and, even though it’s called reading, it’s not about predicting the future in any way. The Chinese see that the face is like a book, and every feature on the face, from your hairline to the hair on your chin, is basically like a chapter in the book of You so when you read each chapter, you’re getting a full understanding of the person. They use face reading pretty much, originally as a social skill, to know and understand people in their community and people in their family, but more deeply to understand in the medical side what’s going on within the body before the illness shows itself and this correlates the mind-body connection that many people have heard about.
How your thoughts create an energy in your body which then your body accumulates and responds to and can show up as symptoms ultimately leading towards perhaps something that needs medical attention. My experience started back at the very beginning of my early trainings and I’ve done what the Chinese did for themselves, and that is take thousands of observations, correlate that with psychology of a person, their illnesses, their wellbeing, their mindset and as my career has grown, and I’ve written my different books and such looking at the soul and how it’s trying to express its wisdom, its gifts, its needs, its healing needs, through the features on the face. With my version of face reading, I’m honouring the ancient traditions, however, taking it further for today’s wisdom seekers who are on their awakening authenticity path. Looking at how the face, through its features, can tell us more about ourselves and about other people as well for the mind, body, heart, and soul expressions and ultimately, I use that to help people gain greater self-awareness, increase their self-confidence and connection with their intuition so they can have a better relationship with themselves, but also build better relationships around themselves, which just makes life more joyful.
Do you find that more people are searching now for some kind of connection with their work?
What I’ve found since the pandemic is that people who have clamoured to get back to their jobs, which perhaps they were on furlough for a while and they had time to reflect and maybe do courses and so on, but I find a lot of people are now having value conflict with the places that they’ve been working for and it’s intensified because they know they need to keep a job going, to keep the money coming in, particularly in our current economy. Yet increasingly they’ve discovered through the couple of years of the pandemic and time to reflect that the person who they are is not actually the person who wants to show up for that particular job anymore, because they have grown or they’ve reevaluated and the whole, aspect of inner conflict is what will dampen your immune system.
What I see with the people I work with face whispering is that they’re almost to have an interpretation that says these are your best qualities, this is where you can build up yourself and regain yourself belief from how life is sucked it out of you basically. These are the things that will bring you more joy when we look at your character interpreted through your facial features and how you can show up for your employer, how you can show up for yourself and your partner, your kids, et cetera. The essence of relief is almost palpable when you see this dark cloud come off people’s shoulders to think that there is another way of going about life that they don’t have to stick with a job that they hate because somewhere in their work ethic, something says to them, they don’t have to enjoy what they do, they just have to get the money, then retire, then they can enjoy life. let’s flip it on its head, let’s enjoy every moment, but face-whisking will give you the stepping stones to reclaim your forgotten or hidden gifts and talents and desires, so that you can let go of that illusion of yourself that you’ve been showing up in, and actually bring to the forefront that authenticity in a really comfortable way, without having to slash and hack through your life. It’s about recalibrating and regaining that sense of self, so that… your self-belief is becoming more rock-solid. You learn to trust your intuition, and that’s a big thing with face whispering. It helps people who can tune into the face whispering skills, helps them learn to trust themselves more, and therefore your intuition grows, and that intuition is not just used for face whispering. It is used in every part of your life to help you make better decisions, and ultimately guide your life in a way that’s more purposeful, more meaningful and fulfilling.
I know this field is massive, but just to give people a bit of an insight, are there some easy things that you can talk to us now about?
One of my favourite things is eyebrows, now this may sound odd and also I will say before I go any further that when I’m looking at eyebrows I know people groom them, I know some people have them tattooed on, so what I’m looking at when I look at an eyebrow is the length and also the upper line of the eyebrow because often the upper line isn’t as groomed as the lower lines. If we look at the eyebrow length, ideally the eyebrow should come down to almost the corner of the eye and so many of us have what I would call short eyebrows and that is where the tail end of the eyebrow, the tail that would normally be down by the outside corner of the eye, has actually started to drop away and the eyebrow from that tail end has got shorter and shorter and when you see that, then that is definitely a sign that somebody has been burning the candle at both ends for far too long, and their whole vitality is starting to pull on whatever resources it can do, just to keep going.
I find that people in that situation often live on stress, and they don’t realise how stressed they are they live on their adrenaline, so they’re in fight or flight all the time. These are the kind of people that when they do get a chance to relax, often they’ll come down with a cold or feel super exhausted because they’ve come off their own personal hamster wheel. When I see what I would call a short eyebrow, then my guidance is about doing a bit of a life audit. How are you balancing your stress and your work demands or your family demands with relaxation time? How are you looking at your diet? Are you supplementing too much with things to keep you going? Or are you, could you make some adjustments to give you a deeper core energy reserve to draw upon? So that’s a really, quick one is the eyebrows. And of course, some people tattoo their eyebrows on and that is a sign that the eyebrows themselves probably have become very faint. And again, faint eyebrows or very thin eyebrows are a sign that the lifestyle is out of balance, and it needs adjusting because it’s not the way the body wants to run for a long time. So yeah, eyebrows are quick and easy to see.