Inner Bonding: The Power to Heal Yourself

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Amazing. Over a million copies which is huge in the book world. She also has written several other books, including “Healing Your Aloneness,” “Inner Bonding,” and the recently released book “Diet for Divine Connection,” which I’m really looking forward to diving into that. She’s been on “Oprah.” She’s part of a group I’m part of called the Transformational Leadership Council. So Barbara, welcome to our summit. We’re really excited to have you here.

Margaret Paul

Oh, thank you so much. I’m looking forward to this.

Tom McCarthy

And so the title, this is the Global Energy Healing Summit, and the title of what we’re gonna be talking about is the power to heal yourself, which I know a lot of people are gonna get huge benefit from. Talk about your journey to discovering this. I heard you talk about that a little bit before, probably about six months ago when I was in a meeting with you. But how did you come to this work that you’ve been doing for so long now?

Margaret Paul

Well, like so many people, I grew up in a very dysfunctional family, and I was kind of a mess as a kid. And when I was five, my parents took me to a psychiatrist. My mother did. She figured all the problems were my fault. And so I remember him saying to me, “Tell your mother not to yell at you.” She was a screamer. She was a narcissistic screamer. And I remember thinking I’m only five years old and she’s not gonna listen to me. You tell her.

Tom McCarthy

Did you do it for me?

Margaret Paul

Yeah. And my next thought was, I could do a better job than you. And that’s when I decided at five to do this work. And I became a traditional psychotherapist, which I practiced for 17 years, but I wasn’t happy with the results at all of my own. I had a ton of my own therapy, and working with others, and that’s when I started to pray for a process that would really work fast and deep with people. That’s when I met the co-creator of Inner Bonding, Dr. Erika Chopich. She had half the process. I had half the process. So we had to meet, and spirit kind of put these six steps together for us, and that was 37 years ago. So I’ve been practicing it since then. It’s completely changed my life and the lives of tens of hundreds of thousands of people around the world have practiced it. And I’m excited to share it.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. That’s amazing. And also very cool how two people came together with, you said you had half, she had half, but you were able to work together, ’cause that’s tough too sometimes where you come together, like my ideas are the right ones, but you’re able to collaborate, and really have a healthy meeting of the minds that created something better than either one of you could have done on your own, which is really cool.

Margaret Paul

Oh, that’s right. Now, we work very well together. We still work very well together.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. So let’s talk about inner bonding. So inner bonding, what exactly does that mean?

Margaret Paul

Well, it means that we need to really learn to connect with ourselves, with our true soul self, and with our higher guidance in order to be able to share love with others. So many people want love. They wanna feel love, and they think that it’s about getting love, but it’s really not. It’s about sharing love. And we don’t have love to share if we’re not inwardly bonded with our own inner self and our own higher source of love. And so I don’t think love is something we generate, it’s something we open to. Love is the universe. And we don’t create that, we open to it, but most people think that their source of love is another person rather than their higher source. And so they’re always trying to have control over getting somebody to love them, and approve of them, and tell ’em they’re okay, rather than learning to fill up on the inside, so they have love to share.

Tom McCarthy

Well, this is gonna be really great for so many people because we’ve heard for many years, you need to love yourself, and need to love yourself, but people don’t know how to do that. I would venture to say like 1% of the population of even that people walking around right now truly love themselves? Probably less than that, right? I mean it’s.

Margaret Paul

Yeah, probably not very many, unfortunately.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. And the result of not loving yourself is what? What shows up when you don’t love yourself or have that interval?

Margaret Paul

Well, first of all, you have feelings like anxiety, depression. You’re afraid of rejection. You feel alone and empty inside. You might feel shame, and guilt, and jealousy. Your relationships are very challenging because we attract at our common level of self love, or our common level of self abandonment. And so if we’re abandoning ourselves, which most people do and they don’t realize it we’re gonna attract somebody who’s also abandoning themselves, they’re gonna expect us to love them. We’re gonna expect them to love us. We don’t have any love to share. And it’s pretty much of a disaster. So relationships don’t work when we’re not loving ourselves.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. And what happens when we do? And we’ll jump into the process a little bit. What happens when we do love ourselves? What does that feel like? What’s that experience? How does it shift our life?

Margaret Paul

When we love ourselves, first of all, we start to get who we really are, which is a unique expression of the divine. We start to value. We start to see our unique gifts and what we’re here to offer world. And we start to feel full inside and that annoying anxiety, or depression, or guilt, or shame goes away. That gets healed when we’re bringing love inside and sharing our love, rather than always trying to control getting it.

Tom McCarthy

I love it. And you said the word unique a couple times. So many people are just trying to fit in, be like everybody else, but we’re not, we are unique. And when we don’t feel like we’re like everybody else, because we don’t prize that uniqueness, we don’t feel good. You’re giving a different message here, which I think is really cool.

Margaret Paul

Yeah. I mean, I had to come to accept that I’m an alien. I mean, you know, I’ve got very different ways of viewing things than many people and I really value that. I don’t see it as, oh, there’s something wrong with me because I’m not like everybody else. In fact, I’m always looking for more, and more of the unique gifts. It’s an ongoing process to discover the unique gifts that we’ve each been given.

Tom McCarthy

What are some of the ways you’re unique? I’m just curious. You describe yourself as an alien. That kind of just like, what do you mean by that?

Margaret Paul

Well, first of all, the whole inner bonding process is very different than what other therapists do, because it’s really about learning to be present in your body, take responsibility for your feeling. It’s not about, we learn so many ways to communicate, to get somebody else to do it for us. And this is completely different. And I think I’m unique in that, one of the gifts that I’ve had is that I’ve always been able to tune in to when somebody is operating out of alignment with themselves. I’ve always known that. Like my parents, they were just clueless. They just didn’t have any idea regarding what love is. And so I think that I came in with a gift to understand love and to be able to teach that to others.

Tom McCarthy

That’s awesome. So you discussed it a little bit earlier, but this is one of the most important things we’re here to do probably is learn to love ourselves, right?

Margaret Paul

Yes, that’s right. Then we uncover these gifts. Then we find the creativity inside. We find the ability to manifest who we are in the world. The world needs each of our gifts. We’re here for a reason. But when we’re ignoring ourselves, abandoning ourselves, we can’t find those.

Tom McCarthy

So when you actually start loving yourself, things show up that you might not have even been aware of?

Margaret Paul

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s been amazing to me. I sometimes I feel like, oh my God, this part of me has been kind of out in the ethos all this time ’cause I just, I couldn’t embrace it early in my life, and all of a sudden it’s showing up, and it’s, wow, this is amazing. And you start to feel fuller and fuller inside. So many people, when I work with them, I say, “What are you feeling? They say, “Nothing. I feel empty.” And that is so sad. They have no idea who they are.

Tom McCarthy

I’m curious when they were, you know, from all the people you’ve helped, when they were younger, were those gifts potentially popping up, but then that’s where the shame, or, hey, this is different, this is weird, we got talked out of it or how does that work?

Margaret Paul

Oh yeah. Very, very often. In fact, so many of the people that I work with, they kind of aliens in their family. In other words, they were the more perceptive ones, the creative ones, the caring ones, the ones able to love, and many of them were in families that were not at all able to love. And so their families were threatened by them and they became the scapegoat in the family as I did. And very often if somebody is a operating just out of their ego, they’re very threatened when a child comes in with a lot of light, a lot of gifts. They just wanna do anything they can to smash those. I mean, I remember my mother telling me when I graduated high school, “Well, honey, you don’t really have to go to college. You know what? You just really need to do is get married and have kids.” I mean, she did not want me to thrive.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. And I think not that she didn’t love you down at the core, but she had abandoned herself, right? That was that the cause of that?

Margaret Paul

Well, yeah. And the thing is that when people abandon themselves, they may think they’re loving, but they have no love to offer.

Tom McCarthy

Oh okay.

Margaret Paul

You see. So they can say, I love you, but to a child like me, I never felt it. I mean, I could tell the energy of love, and it was not there. So if they could say all day long they love me, but there was no experience of love.

Tom McCarthy

Okay. Okay. Talk to us about self abandonment. What does that mean, and how does it affect our relationships, but also even our health?

Margaret Paul

Yeah. So there’s basically four major ways that people abandon themselves. One is, when we were young and there was pain, we had pain, and we couldn’t manage it because our parents didn’t know how to manage their pain. They couldn’t help us with ours. So we learn and to disconnect from our body, to disassociate from our body and be up in our head. So as to not to feel. So most people are operating, you know, they’re talking heads and they’re not in their body, which is where the feelings are. So, of course, we can’t take responsibility for our feelings if we don’t even know that we have them. So being up in our head is one form of self abandonment. Another–

Tom McCarthy

So when you’re in your head, that you’re not feeling, you’re just processing and thinking. To feel really you gotta be in your body?

Margaret Paul

You’ve gotta be in your body to feel, but also you’re mostly thinking from your lower left brain, which is where that ego wounded part of us is. And that’s a program part. And it’s thinking like a program. Oh, I’m not good enough. Oh, I can’t trust this. Oh, I mean, it’s just a program. So those kinds of thoughts have no reality. And yet, so often we’re acting based on those thoughts, which if you look around the planet are causing enormous problems on the planet, acting from these program, fears, and false beliefs that we have. And that’s why it’s so important to learn to access our higher self, our source of love and truth, so that we can act from that rather then from fears and false beliefs. So saying in our head one form. 

Secondly, judging ourselves. Most of us grew up with a lot of judgment, whether from parents, or other caregivers, or siblings, or peers, or teachers, or religious leaders, and we absorb how those people treated us, and how they treated themselves. In this part, this lower left brain, that ego wounded part of us treats us the way that they treated us, or the way they treated themselves, or both. So it’s going on and on. You’re not good enough. What’s the matter with you? You’re such a jerk. You’re never gonna make it. You’re never gonna be as good as that person. You can’t compete. You might as well let it, you know. Just on and on. Well, of course, that’s a form of self abandonment. Now the third way is that many people learn to numb out and look at all the addictions we’ve got. We’ve got substances to sugar, to food, to drugs, to alcohol, to processes, social media, being on their phone, pornography, television, work, I mean, all kinds of ways of just numbing out, and avoiding your feelings. And then the fourth way which really affects relationships, like I said, is we make somebody else responsible. It’s like, if we had a child, instead of saying, “Well, I wanna love this child.” We’re just handing the child away and saying, “No, I don’t wanna take care of this child. You do it. It’s your job. It’s not my job.” Well, of course that makes us feel inwardly rejected. And then it creates a fear of rejection. So those are the four major ways. There’s probably others, but those are the major ways that I see.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, wow, okay. And this is pretty prevalent. I mean, I noticed a couple things you talked about, like yeah, I probably would had that in my childhood too. So the big thing for me was probably living in my head too much, I think, in my childhood. So that’s interesting. So you’ve got this process called inner bonding that allows us to bond back with who we really are, why we came here, and feel that love. What are the steps to doing that, Margaret?

Margaret Paul

Okay, well, inner bonding is a six-step process that really when you practice it, it teaches you how to love yourself in so many different ways. So, step one, of course, is learning to get in your body, because if you’re not learning to love yourself is mostly about taking responsibility for our feelings. It’s also about taking responsibility for our health, our wellbeing, our relationships, our organization, our finances, but a lot of people can do finances or organization, but they can’t take responsibility for their feelings. So, step one is learning to take the journey, the big journey from your head to your heart and your soul. They get in your body.

Tom McCarthy

That is a big journey.

Margaret Paul

Yeah. It’s a big journey.

Tom McCarthy

It’s a huge journey. Not very far but it’s a big journey.

Margaret Paul

It’s a major journey. And to actually want that responsibility. You have to want the responsibility. So that’s step one. Step two in inner bonding. There’s only two intentions to choose from. And intention governs everything. Either our intention is to have control over getting love, and avoiding pain, and being safe, which is where this lower left brain is, and where most of us are, or the intention is to learn to love ourselves and share our love with others. So in step two, we breathe into the heart and we consciously choose the intention to learn about loving ourselves. Starting with loving ourselves, and then with sharing our love. So that’s step two. Part of step–

Tom McCarthy

Do you mind, before you go to step three, how do you get more into your body? Cause I think that’s something that I had to really take some time to learn. I don’t know if it’s a male thing, like living in your head and I had, you know, my father passed away and I was very young. So, I remember just like overly processing everything, but what’s one way that people can get back more into their body?

Margaret Paul

Well, I had the same problem, cause when inner bonding came in, when spirit kind of brought it together for us, and I realize, oh my God, I spent my whole life in my head. I’m very tuned into other people’s feelings. You’re there for them, but I have no idea what I feel about anything. So what we teach people to do is to use their breaths, follow their breath to get inside your body. It’s not that hard to get inside. The hard thing is remembering to do it.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, yeah.

Margaret Paul

And so I couldn’t remember. I was so used to being in my head. I mean, it’s not hard to bring your focus down and see what’s going on physically. Feeling show up physically in your body, like your gut gets tighter, you feel an emptiness, or your chest is heavy. I mean they show up physically. It’s not that hard to breathe in and notice what’s happening, but it’s hard to remember. And so I got this little at that time, it was a long time ago. I got this little gadget called the motivator, that I could set to buzz against me–

Tom McCarthy

I remember that little. It looked like a little page or it would set.

Margaret Paul

Yeah, yeah that’s right.

Tom McCarthy

I remember that, yeah.

Margaret Paul

Yeah, yeah. So it buzzed like every five minutes, and every 10 minutes, every half an hour. And you eventually, I trained myself. I also put sticky notes around to remind me. And I wore a rubber band during my mind all sorts of things to remind me. I mean, now people can set their cell phones on alarm, but it just does take practice. Like anything worth learning it takes practice. I mean, it’s easy. Like I said, like if you take a few deep breaths, and you go inside, and you notice what’s happening physically, you start to notice your feelings, ’cause feelings do show up physically, but to remember to do that when you’ve been in your head your whole life that’s not easy.

Tom McCarthy

When you say feelings show up physically, and sorry for getting stuck here

Margaret Paul

It’s okay.

Tom McCarthy

But chronic pain, like a lot of people come into this summit potentially have chronic illnesses, chronic pain. I’m a huge believer that the pain, the chronic pain is typically not physiological. It’s mental. It’s emotional. It’s spiritual showing up in your body to distract you or maybe to make you focus. I’m not sure, but how do you look at pain in the body?

Margaret Paul

No, I do look at it primarily that way. I mean, sometimes there’s just physical pain. You’ve been in a car accident or something like that.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, acute, from acute

Margaret Paul

Yeah, yeah. But much of the time what I do with people is the same process. I say, “Okay, breathe into the pain.”

Tom McCarthy

Breathe into the pain,

Margaret Paul

And then we go through the process of what is this pain telling you? Very often, our soul, which we can call our inner child, will bring about illness, will bring about pain, when it has no other way of getting our attention. It’s like, okay. And that happened for me because before inner bonding, I was really sick. I was like threateningly sick. And when inner bonding came in, I did this process as an anger process where I let this inner voice yell at me. And one of the things she said was, “How sick do I have to make you before you pay attention to me?” Yeah. So I got it.

Tom McCarthy

So your illness was a gift. It was a gift. It was really saying, “Hey look, pay attention ’cause we’re pretty close to the, you know, I can’t make you much sicker.” Right?

Margaret Paul

That’s right. Get much sicker you’re gonna die. If you don’t wanna die start paying attention to me. Start taking care of me the way you take care of everybody else. I don’t exist for you. You gotta start being present for me. And that was very life changing for me.

Tom McCarthy

That’s awesome

Margaret Paul

got better right away. Soon as I started to pay attention and take care of me I got better.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Your energy changed, exactly.

Margaret Paul

Oh, yeah, completely.

Tom McCarthy

It’s so amazing. And I hope people are listening to that, right? It’s not just Margaret, or I’ve had those situations too, it’s a lot of illnesses based around that inner part of you trying to wake you up.

Margaret Paul

That’s right.

Tom McCarthy

Cause nothing else is working. And so I’d saying, well, you know, like what Margaret said, what else do I have to do? And don’t let it get to the point where your inner child you said, or that part of you saying that like just notice it, thank it, and this process at Margaret’s helping with, I think will be super helpful. So we did the first two steps. What’s the third?

Margaret Paul

The second step, the other part of the second step is not only moving into the intention to learn, but it’s also learning to open to your higher self because we don’t manufacture love and compassion, we open to it. And so in step two, we’re inviting in. I invite in love, and compassion, and wisdom, and strength ’cause that higher self is always there, and really I teach people how to easily access that, so that they can bring that in. So that’s what we call becoming a loving adult, when we’re open to learning, and we’re connecting to their higher self, we’re a loving adult. Now in step three, we’re asking the feelings, the pain, what am I doing? How am I treating you? What am I telling you? What am I not doing? We wanna know how we’re treating ourselves is causing this. And then we go inside and we let the pain, physical pain, emotional pain, we let it answer from inside. So let’s say in step one, I go inside and I’m depressed. I’m just numbed out and depressed. And I do an inner bonding process. And I go in there and say, “Well, what am I telling you? How am I treating you?” So this depressed part of me might say, you don’t even know I exist. You’ve got me in a cage. 

I have no freedom to be who I am. You’re constantly telling me that I better do this right, and I better do that right, I better impress this person, I better perform this way, but meanwhile, you don’t hear me. You don’t pay attention to me. I am locked up in a cage. How do you expect me to feel? How else can I feel but depressed when this is how you’re treating me. So there’s a lot of information here we can get, and then we go a little deeper. We go into this ego wounded part of us because that’s the part that’s put us in a cage. And we say, you know there must be a very good reason that you’re putting this beautiful soul in a cage. What’s the point? And there’s where we start to discover our belief systems, our false beliefs, and that part might say, well, I have to keep you in a cage because otherwise you’re gonna run wild or the only way we can get approval is if I keep you under wraps and in a cage, we have to be a certain way, we have to act a certain way. If we don’t get approval, then we’re not okay. And so it’s a all kinds of beliefs that we uncover. And once we understand that in step three, step four is we again go to our higher guidance and say, what’s the truth about these beliefs and what’s the loving action? Cause this is a process where we need to take action. And when you–

Tom McCarthy

What’s the truth, what’s the truth is just–

Margaret Paul

about the beliefs that we we’re covering.

Tom McCarthy

And then when you say what’s the loving action, that’s the action you take to dispel the belief?

Margaret Paul

No, it’s the action you take that’s loving to yourself because once you take loving action enough, the false beliefs get healed.

Tom McCarthy

Oh, okay.

Margaret Paul

They get healed with loving action towards ourselves.

Tom McCarthy

Nice, wow.

Margaret Paul

Yeah, yeah. And so we can’t just talk ourselves out of these beliefs. We’ve had them for years. But when we’re actually loving ourselves, taking loving action based on higher guidance, the beliefs eventually just fall away. What’s happening with this is that we’re actually developing new neural pathways in the higher brain for the loving adult. Most people don’t have a loving adult. I didn’t have one when I started this process. And so as we actually take the risk, ’cause it feels very risky. The wound itself, the ego is all about survival. Oh no, don’t do that. Oh no, I’ll die. And when we actually take the risk of taking the loving action. That’s when we start to heal these false beliefs that are so limiting to us.

Tom McCarthy

What’s an example, Margaret of a loving action? I mean, I’m sure there’s thousands, but what’s one example–

Margaret Paul

Okay. I’ll tell you from my life, what was so life changing for me at that time that I told you. Well, because I was such a caretaker. I was taking care of everybody. My parents, my kids, my husband, everybody, and I was dying. And so when I asked my higher guidance, what’s the loving action, the loving action was to stop taking responsibility for them and their feelings, and to start just practicing this process, and taking care of my own heart and soul. Now that was extremely challenging because I had been doing this my whole life. I had taken care of everybody. And I was so scared that if I didn’t care taking them, that I would find out that the people who said they loved me really didn’t. That my parents didn’t, that my kids didn’t, that my husband didn’t, they just loved how I was care taking them, but they didn’t actually love me. And that they wouldn’t support me in taking care of myself. So it was really scary. And I had to make two decisions. 

One was, I was willing to be hurt. That was a loving action. I was willing to be hurt. And the other was I’m willing to lose everybody else, but I’m no longer willing to lose me. I’m not willing to die. So I had to make those solid decisions. Then I started really not care taking them. That was a loving action to not take responsibility for them, and to start letting my kid out of the cage. Being me, being my alive self. Well, unfortunately, everything I was afraid of happened, my parents disowned me. My husband left after 30 years, and two of my three kids were furious in me. So it was really hard, but I got my health back, my work started to skyrocket, and I did get support from those. This you find out who really loves you. When you start to love yourself, those people who love you say, “Yay, it’s about time. We just want you to be happy.” And those who just want you to care them will be mad at you. But of course, that was a loving action for me. It was life saving.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. It’s amazing. Very courageous too.

Margaret Paul

Yeah. It was really hard, but boy, so glad I would do it again.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve got two more steps and I have a question about spiritual guidance I wanna ask you too.

Margaret Paul

Yes.

Tom McCarthy

I know that that’s something you believe in. So we’ve done step with the loving action. So this is step four.

Margaret Paul

Yeah, so in step five, then you take the action.

Tom McCarthy

Take the action.

Margaret Paul

You take the action. You do what you’re guided to take. Even though it’s gonna be hard, even though it may, it can be all kinds of things. Go back to school. Quit your job. Speak up for yourself. Change your diet. Start to exercise. Get more sleep. I mean, it can be all kinds of things. Speak your truth to somebody. Do all kinds of things and it’s often not easy. But until we take the loving action, we’re not telling ourselves that we’re worthy. We’re telling ourselves we’re unworthy if we don’t take the loving action. And then once we do, step six is we go back inside and see how we feel. And if we’ve taken a loving action, we feel the deep sense of relief.

Tom McCarthy

Awesome. I love that.

Margaret Paul

We start to feel worthier.

Tom McCarthy

And then life really starts to transform and change.

Margaret Paul

Yeah, that’s right. It does. What happened with me is that I became able to manifest. I could never manifest before that. And then all of a sudden, wow, that was amazing.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Things really took off. You know it’s interesting because this younger generation now seems a little bit more in tune to being who they really are. And you see them like leaving jobs and even my daughter, 28-year old daughter, like had a great job in private equity. She left that just to start her own thing. She wasn’t just gonna like keep doing what she was doing because it’s was paying great and everyone said you should do it. She’s literally building her own new development project and taking risks, but really feeling fulfilled, and do you see that? Do you think this younger generation’s a little bit more in tune than our generations were from, you know.

Margaret Paul

Yeah. I think so, because I think so many of them did not see their parents being happy, no matter how successful they were, they weren’t happy. They weren’t joyful. They weren’t fulfilled. And they’re saying, you know what? The big house, the car, the job, this and that, that didn’t make him happy. I gotta go a different way and I’m really happy to see that.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, yeah, awesome. So you say it’s not hard to connect with your personal source of spiritual guidance, and I know that when you help people, you tap into spiritual guidance. A lot of people that’s, it’s a concept they’d like to be able to believe in. They like to have the ability to talk to their guides or get guidance, but they think it’s something that only a few people can do.

Margaret Paul

No. Everybody can do it. Everybody can do it.

Tom McCarthy

Let’s talk about it a little bit.

Margaret Paul

Okay. First of all, it’s built into us, our right brain is built in to access that. So it’s natural to be able to do that. It’s just that we’ve shut that down. We’re a left brain culture. And so we have to rekindle that ability, but spirit exists at a higher frequency than we operate at. Like a hummingbird’s wings is very fast if we operated at that higher frequency, we wouldn’t see each other. So our bodies operated a lower frequency so we can see each other, spirits at a higher frequency. We have to be able to raise our frequency in order to connect with spirit. It takes two things. One is the intention to learn about loving yourself. 

That’s very powerful. That is essential in raising your frequency. Now the other has to do with the frequency of your body. If you’re eating junk food, you’re eating sugar, you’re eating the factory farm food, all the processed food. That’s very hard on the body. And it lowers the frequency. It’s actually dumbing people out. Is so, so awful for the body. It’s creating so many illnesses. And so, even if you’re open to learning, see, this was so interesting for me, because I was a sickly kid. In my early 20’s, I started to eat all organic. I read “Silence Spring.” And so that was really a long time ago.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. You’re one of the pioneers.

Margaret Paul

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. I mean, at school or college they told me I was a health food freak and all that, but I got a lot better. Except that when I was in my mid 40’s, I started getting sick again, but I got a lot better. So I’ve been eating that way for a very long time now. But then when inner bonding came in and I discovered this thing about the intention to learn about loving yourself, suddenly I could access spirit, so easily, like at will, anytime I wanted. So I thought, oh boy, all people have to do is open to learning and they can access their guidance, except it didn’t work that way. So it took me a while to connect the dots that it takes both the intention to learn and keeping your body clean, organic, natural for the frequency to be high enough.

Tom McCarthy

Nice.

Margaret Paul

And when people do that, that’s when they can attain that at will divine connection.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Talk about what that connection’s like. So I do talk to guides and I used to think it had to be like super literal, it was the left brain working, but it’s almost like just little pops of information for me anyways, but talk to people what that feels like communicating with that spiritual guidance.

Margaret Paul

Yeah. It is like pops. It’s like I can ask a question and then I might not get the answer right away, but if I just let it go, it’ll pop in. It pops in, I think it pops into the third eye or whatever, but it pops in or I can just be like out in a walk, it’s easier for me in nature being out on a walk and all of a sudden these profound ideas pop in, an idea for a book, or an article, or something about a person that I need to know. It’ll just pop in, but they pop in when you’re open. So if you’re open to learning and you’re eating well, then they’ll pop in. But I’m always feeling not alone.

Tom McCarthy

Nice. That’s beautiful. So many people feel alone. So many people are living their entire life literally surrounded by people even but feeling alone.

Margaret Paul

No, no, that’s right. When you have this connection. A really interesting thing has happened in the last couple years. The person that I was connected to most in my life was only for the first 13 months of my life, which was my grandfather, my paternal grandfather. And left New York, came to L.A, and I never saw him again. But I remembered him when I was 10. And I started remembering more and more about the kind of love that we shared, which I never had with my parents. Now a couple of years ago, I started to play word games with my best friend, because it’s supposed to be good for your brain. As you get older to play word games. And she had suggested it and I said, “You know, I’m not good at word games. I can never see words.” She says, “That’s okay. Let’s just do it.” She could see ’em like that. She could see seven, eight-letter words so fast. I could barely see three-letter words, but I started to do it. And over time all of a sudden big words were popping in my mind, and I didn’t even know if the letters were there for the words, but they always were. And as I did it, I realized my grandfather plays word games with me every evening.

Tom McCarthy

Nice.

Margaret Paul

It is–

Tom McCarthy

No extra advantage then, huh?

Margaret Paul

Oh amazing. And I knew that he loved to do crossword puzzles ’cause somebody told me that. So he’s there. He’s always there. He’s playing with me every night, and some times he’ll pop things in, and it’s just so much fun. It’s amazing to me. Words just pop in now.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. That’s awesome. And so, a lot of people though, don’t trust that it’s guidance ’cause that’s just a thought in my head, you’ve gotta really be open, and trusting, and it won’t feel real sometimes, but it’s real, right? This is real communication. It’s the way it works.

Margaret Paul

Oh, it is, it is. And it’s how I write, when I sit down to write an article or a book, I just sit down and say, “Okay, you’re on.” And then it just–

Tom McCarthy

Me too. 

Margaret Paul

Yes isn’t that great?

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. My new book is coming out in February, and literally I’m like, “Hey, I need your help. Let’s go.”

Margaret Paul

Yeah. Yeah.

Tom McCarthy

I’m not doing this on my own, right?

Margaret Paul

That’s right.

Tom McCarthy

It won’t be near as good as if we get the team here.

Margaret Paul

That’s right.

Tom McCarthy

I love it. I love it. So it is just so many answers can be had when we really realize we’re not alone, and we’ve got, you know, we think, well, we have people like you, or in the physical body that can help people. Also we have all these nonphysical sources of love and information that we can access when we love ourselves, right? When we feel worthy of loving ourselves. The interesting thing that you said though, that I’ve never heard before though, was the part about the way you eat also. I mean, I’m a big believer in that, like I eat organic, we had a chain of restaurants that were all organic, gluten free, dairy free. We sold in part of COVID, but I’ve never heard someone say, but it makes total sense, right? Cause food is energy. So if you’ve got low vibration energy you’re ingesting, it’s gotta get processed, right? And a lot of that low vibration gets stuck in the body, but that’s really a good insight for people too.

Margaret Paul

Well, that’s what my book “Diet for Divine Connection” is about.

Tom McCarthy

Oh, okay, good.

Margaret Paul

It’s about really tuning into the kind of food that will help your frequency stay up. It also goes through the bonding process in the second half, but diet is major today. I’m sure you know that.

Tom McCarthy

That’s your new book. That’s your new book, right?

Margaret Paul

No. Then there’s a book after that “The Inner Bonding Workbook” and this came out called “6 Steps to Total Self-Healing.” And I have another book coming out in April called “How to Become Strong Enough to Love.”

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Well, I’m feeling a little inferior with my three books now. Where can people find these books? Where can they find your books, your work, courses?

Margaret Paul

The books are all on Amazon. They can come to innerbonding.com. We have a lot of resources. 

Tom McCarthy

Innerbonding.com. 

Margaret Paul

Yeah innerbonding.com. We have a lot of resources. We have free course. We have many other courses. The books are there. Many ways of learning inner bonding. If they take free course, they’ll get the overview of it. Then they can take a course that I have called Love Yourself, and I have a relationship course. I have a lot of courses that are very, very powerful for people to take. And also we have a facilitator training program. I work with people one-on-one with couples, but we have many trained facilitators who also work with people all over the world. And we have a community Inner Bonding Village where people can get support. So there’s a lot of ways–

Tom McCarthy

I love it.

Margaret Paul

of learning. 

Tom McCarthy

So innerbonding.com is where you can find a lot of, or probably all of Margaret’s work. And also Amazon, her books, Dr. Margaret Paul. You’ve got beautiful energy, a beautiful smile. Thank you so much for being with us. What’s your hope for people that watch this? What is your hope for them? 

Margaret Paul

Well, my hope is that they’re interested enough to learn to practice the process so that they can really manifest who they are. They can have health. They can have wellbeing. One of the things that I do, most people don’t like to give their age, but I don’t mind because it inspires people. I’m 82 years old.

Tom McCarthy

That’s awesome, wow.

Margaret Paul

I have excellent health.

Tom McCarthy

You look so young.

Margaret Paul

Yeah. Excellent health, and I don’t have any of the illnesses that people my age have and high energy. And so, I really wanna, you know, I been eating organic for 60 years, and I just really wanna inspire people to do that because not only for their own health and wellbeing and their connectedness, but for our planet. I mean, what’s happening with the planet, with food and everything. So it’s really important to get inspired.

Tom McCarthy

Well, at 82 years old, you’re a poster child for your work. You really are a great example. Thank you so much. Lots of love to you and thank you so much for being with us.

Margaret Paul

Well, you’re very, very welcome. And I’ve enjoyed this time with you.