SENDY MOM PODCAST — EPISODE #046 & #047
CHERIE BURTON: 
#046 - Part 1: The Dark Night of the Soul: A Guide to Spiritual Awakening and Transformation | Cherie Burton (Pt. 1 of 2)
#47 - Part 2: Bridge Souls: One Woman's Miraculous Adoption Journey | Cherie Burton (Pt. 2 of 2)
Recorded: May 15, 2026 | Published: May 30, 2026 (Pt. 2: June 7, 2026)
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BECKY BROUWER [00:13]:
Welcome to the Sendy Mom podcast. I am so excited to be here with my friend, Cherie Burton. We have been friends for probably eight or nine years or something like that. Yeah, since we've been back from Australia. I was totally drawn to Cherie from the very beginning. She has this deep wisdom and this personality that is loving, very accepting of all types of people, which totally fits with what I feel as well. So I'm excited to have this conversation. This is going to be amazing.

CHERIE BURTON [00:54]:
Thank you, Becky. I'm excited to be here.

BECKY [00:57]:
Yeah, so I'll just give a really brief bio of Cherie. She's the mother of six and has been a female empowerment coach for over 20 years. Her work is with mind-body, holistic emotional healing, philosophy, spirituality, and depth psychology. She has a psychology degree and has worked in mental health facilities and is a certified holistic practitioner and emotional breakthrough trainer. And since 2008, she's specialized in aroma alchemy, and the ancient feminine art of mind, heart, and soul coherence through breathwork, anointing, and essential oils. So right now she runs an international wellness business, and she travels the world teaching, and she has a podcast that is on pause right now, but programs, circles, retreats that she does for women to teach them about their authentic essence and speaking from their heart and experience real emotional liberation.

BECKY [02:22]:
So yeah, I'm so excited to talk to you, Cherie. This is going to be so good. So can we start out with: what do you think makes you a Sendy mom and why would you want to be on this podcast?

CHERIE [02:31]:
Well, I had to look it up. And I did ask one of my teenagers, but I'm very "moved to action." Like once I get the gut go-ahead, I just do it. I just kind of go for it. I'm just kind of adventurous that way.

BECKY [03:01]:
Yes you do. For sure. And okay, so tell me a little bit about what got you to this point — where you grew up and the type of family that you grew up with.

CHERIE [03:24]:
My dad was a policeman for my whole life and my mom was a stay-at-home mom and I'm the second of seven children. A thread in my family that I noticed very early was depression. My mom was in bed with depression a lot after having some of my younger siblings. And we lived in a really small town in Wyoming at that time, and there was just not the awareness about mental health that there is now. Both my parents have a lot of mental illness in their family lines. My dad's sister was bipolar, and she actually took her life when she was 32. And in her letter that she left behind, she asked my parents to raise her three-year-old son. And so that happened — I was getting ready to serve an LDS mission when that happened. I was about 22 when that happened.

CHERIE [04:22]:
So I have six siblings — three brothers and three sisters — and I'm right in the middle of two sisters, one a year older, one two years younger. Both of those sisters were diagnosed bipolar. It's one of the reasons I went into psychology. And then the only one that wasn't diagnosed bipolar of the seven kids, including the cousin that my parents adopted, was me and another sister. This mental illness theme is kind of like... I just kind of joke that I collect bipolar people. Even the two children that my husband and I adopted both have bipolar birth moms.

BECKY [05:40]:
Yeah.

CHERIE [05:45]:
That's why I got into the holistic emotional healing part of it. As a child — I was a very highly sensitive child, I still am — I remember writing in my journal when I was in high school: "Something needs to change in our family. And I am going to figure this out. And I'm going to help people." I just knew that growing up.

BECKY [05:52]:
Wow.

CHERIE [05:59]:
I don't know why my constitution was different, why I had a better resiliency to mental health. It's not that I haven't had my struggles, but nothing to the degree — I was visiting my sisters in psychiatric facilities in my 20s. And in 2005 — I'm 57 now, so this would have been when I was 35 — my sister that's two years younger than me took her life and left behind five children. And that was absolutely devastating.

CHERIE [07:18]:
This sister had a lot of mental health and addiction struggles. She had a painkiller addiction because she had a full spinal fusion when she was a teenager. She was a very gregarious, larger than life artist, musician, beautiful, talented, amazing singer. She had scholarships. With bipolar and that family pattern, they're usually high creatives. And then they have these gifts but also that melancholy.

CHERIE [07:48]:
We've got to break this family pattern. I was Mrs. Utah in 2004, and it was three weeks before I was passing on my title that she took her life. I was working with the Utah Attorney General at the time, Mark Shurtleff, and he put me on the State Suicide Prevention Council. I had a megaphone at a rally one time and I was like: "The cycle of suicide stops here. I don't know how. But I know." This was 2005. I remember I self-published a book on depression the year after that. And one of the things I wrote about my sister is that I literally stood over her grave and said, "I promise I will be your voice." Speaking and using words and writing, that's kind of my art. And there are still things coming through that I know she wants me to say.

BECKY [09:49]:
I love that thought so much — "We're the cleanup crew and it ends here." This cycle ends here. We have agency. We get to pick what we're going to hold onto and what we're going to pass down to next generations. That takes an awful lot of courage to take hold of it — because that's deliberate. That is like being deliberate about your life and about changing the trajectory of your family. That's amazing.

CHERIE [10:33]:
My older sister, she has her permission to share this — at the time of Shawna's death, my sister we lost, she was on over 12 different medications to manage her bipolar symptoms. And she lost a lot of her creativity and it just felt like numb. But then my older sister — literally as we were gathered at my house when we got the news — she turned to my mom and I and she goes: "She beat me to it." So my older sister had a suicide plan and was on just as many medications.

CHERIE [11:26]:
That just literally — I've never been the same since. It changed me at a cellular level. But we knew as a family — once we get it, we're off to the races. So once that happened, it just set the tone for my career and my path as a mom. And even as I got older, I used to say it was all about that — about who I'm here to fix and heal and save and activate and bless and nurture. But now I know this was about ME. This was about this temple and this body.

--- CHAPTER: PIVOTING FROM TRADITIONAL METHODS [12:32] ---

BECKY [12:32]:
That's amazing. So 12 medications and it still didn't fix anything. Tell me how you can have hope when you're in that situation.

CHERIE [13:12]:
Shawna's husband would not allow her to do anything natural or alternative, even though that's my mom's world, that's my other sister's world. All the pharmaceuticals, all the talk therapy — it just wasn't moving the needle and it was actually kind of making things worse, exacerbating. So that's why I pivoted to looking outside of the traditional western remedial treatment box. I worked at an addiction recovery center just around the corner from where she was staying — I was a family education director — while my sister was losing her battle to mental health.

CHERIE [14:45]:
We found her journals afterward and she just — for two years she stopped praying. She was a super spiritual person but she stopped praying, she felt so much shame, she felt unworthy of being a mom. Her kids were 12 and under when she died, from ages two to twelve. There's something that happens when you lose someone really close to you that way — this survivor guilt. But it actually was an engine that propelled me to learn more and do more. Outside the box — which was "mainstreamy" now but 20 years ago, you would have thought I was a freak for talking about holding emotions in your liver or epigenetics.

CHERIE [15:55]:
Everything we need for our healing is already here on the earth. Each one of us has our own encoded health plan or alchemy to be able to come in. We're so diverse that way. Finding that has been my fascination. I broadened it first and then I found my own — which is a whole other story. I was conditioned to fix everyone else, and inside I'm carrying so much ancestral heaviness with mothering and depression in my family lines. I have felt it a lot.

--- CHAPTER: EPIGENETICS AND ALCHEMY EXPLAINED [15:11] ---

BECKY [17:06]:
Can you process that for your ancestors?

CHERIE [17:09]:
I do it constantly.

BECKY [17:11]:
How does that happen? How does that work? Because we are all connected — we've got these little threads. We're all part of the same organism really. And particularly when it's passed down from generation to generation — I think it's very important to understand where you came from and then to help to heal some of that. So how do you go about that?

CHERIE [17:43]:
I started this path right around the time I became a coach because I was so fascinated with the mind-body stuff but also generational healing. I went into some weird arenas and I didn't care — I'm like, I'm just going to explore. With the generational healing piece, I've come to understand that our closest guides on the other side are often the ancestors that held something in their bodies that they could not alchemize while they were here. And that they come through for us — not to clean the lineage, but first to help us in our bodies, just our bodies. It's like one at a time. In family lineages, I believe we chose exactly who we'd be born to. And I want this inheritance because it's going to be really cool — it's going to be like Disneyland. I'm going to come down and I'm going to figure it out. But ultimately it's not Disneyland. But when I dip into — the only way that you can actually shift or activate a healing response for your generational lineages is to feel it. Feel it, to heal it.

BECKY [19:34]:
That's so simple!

CHERIE [19:40]:
It's actually not simple, because your body and your ego is not equipped or built to take you there. If something's arising, it's always an invitation to feel it. But our body's intelligence will naturally wait until we're safe. I'm a really deep feeler and I love that about myself. And it can be an Achilles heel. But I know that when I am in my depths and really feeling things that I'm being invited to feel through my body — I have support. I have ancestral support. I even have my grandchildren that haven't been born yet saying, "Thank you, grandma. We won't have to alchemize this piece because you did."

BECKY [20:59]:
Tell me a little bit about alchemy and how you cleanse it from your own body.

--- CHAPTER: SHADOW WORK THROUGH ALCHEMY [21:06] ---

CHERIE [21:06]:
So I think the old way is just "release it, get it out of me." I don't want it in there. It's really uncomfortable. But there's this thing called shadow work, which is a Jungian term from psychology, where you're diving into the shadow — which is not evil. It's just a part of you that is not integrated, or seen, or witnessed. And we all have them. The work with alchemy is taking something from one form and putting it into another form. It's transmuting something versus just getting it out. Because wisdom is being able to hold polarity — hold shadow and hold the light at the same time, which is what God does. And because God is holding everything and we are part of that. So if you believe in past lives or the pre-existence, we wanted to come and experience what it's like to not be in heaven. We wanted to experience separation. And the work with alchemy is: you can generate all this wisdom when you integrate the shadow and the light together.

CHERIE [22:23]:
If you can embrace your shadow rather than judge it, condemn it, be afraid of it — then it will inform you. There's something called the Gene Keys, which is based on your astrology — a very beautiful program on consciousness and how we have these core wounds. The Gene Keys understanding is that in order to access your genius, your gifts, you have to go into the corresponding shadow for gift. So if I wanted the gift of wisdom, I have to be in this state of ignorance or not knowing or feeling inadequate.

BECKY [23:09]:
Like the weakness — the opposite side. Okay.

CHERIE [23:20]:
Yes. We all have weaknesses, we all have shadows, blind spots, little demons inside of us. But when you embrace them, feel them, shine a flashlight on them and say, "I see you and I still love you and accept you" — that's when everything alchemizes, when everything breaks open and changes. I wish I had that mastered. I've been studying this for a long time. It's really not work for the faint of heart. It's easier to bypass these things and just pray, fast, worship, go out in nature. And those things are beautiful and work, but the real work of alchemizing the shadow is to embrace the shadow, feel it, notice it, love it. Instead of: "This is evil. This is bad. I shouldn't feel this way. This is so uncomfortable." And the shadow just keeps building and building and building underneath you. It's like, "Hey — little me. I've been in here a while and you won't notice me. So I'm going to get louder."

BECKY [24:39]:
Okay, so I think — I mean, that's big, right? And this is kind of some different kinds of thinking for people to experience. But I think that we all have a bit of an understanding of this — a feeling that actually, yeah, there is something else in there. There's like some other type of spirit or something. I was just talking to a friend yesterday about this and she's like, "It's almost like there's something else in me that just needs to say something." And so what I kind of am hearing from you is that's what you call the shadow or part of the soul.

BECKY [25:10]:
When we like part of our purpose here on earth — what you're saying is that we are experiencing this earth life, including the opposition, including the light and the dark together, and they're all important. It's important to be able to feel all of them. We hold onto them, and that's what makes us sick — because anytime you think about tensing up, if you tense up for too long, you're going to start hurting. Your muscles are going to start hurting. And so if you're doing that inside your body, it's going to go to different organs. A lot of people are going to feel it in their heart — heart disease. I feel it in my gut — everybody has gut issues and liver and kidney. Not to say that's always the case because sometimes physiology causes the emotions too. But very often it's the emotions that cause the physiological state.

CHERIE [26:43]:
Emotions are — and it's really important that we don't judge this process. This is truly, truly universal human experience. We feel every emotion. And if we're not feeling every emotion, then we're not human. Why even be here? Part of that work is compassion, compassion, compassion. It's a process of slowing down, feeling your feelings, feeling where you're holding tension in your body. Because that constriction creates tension in the body and it can create a myriad of health conditions. By the time something manifests physically on the surface, it's had an emotional root and energetic frequency root cause for a long time. And it's not our fault. It's how we interpret our environment. There's all of us have trauma. Being born is traumatic. Absolutely traumatic. And the research supports that if our mother was experiencing different emotions, we picked that up in the womb too. And our grandmother was pregnant with us — the egg that became our mother. So we also picked up our grandmothers' experience. So all this trauma, all this pushing down and suppression creates depression. When you suppress, or you are oppressed in your culture or environment, you then repress and you get depressed. So there's all this pressing down — "I'll feel this when it's more convenient, I'll come back to this." That's an act of pushing it down. I have learned to trust my body's intelligence for timing. It will only let it come out when I can be in a place to process it.

--- CHAPTER: REAL EXPERIENCE WITH AYAHUASCA [29:33] ---

BECKY [29:00]:
And so you do breathwork, some of the aromatherapy...

CHERIE [29:04]:
I've done family systems therapy, somatic work, breathwork ceremonies. I've even done plant medicine ceremonies — ayahuasca — in the jungle in Costa Rica in 2021. I don't recommend it for everyone. But it was calling to me.

BECKY [29:33]:
Wait, wait, yes — tell me about this. What the heck?

CHERIE [29:34]:
Yeah, yeah — this is me being too Sendy. When people started mentioning the latest research, I'm on the forefront of mind-body holistic stuff and everyone's talking about plant medicine. I watched a documentary and then I could not stop thinking about it. Everyone's like, "Well, that's the medicine calling you." It's a very feminine, grandmother plant. So I started researching safe places. I found this place in Costa Rica that has a medical facility and a doctor. I was supposed to go in 2020, had the trip booked, but COVID happened. So I went in February 2021 — four nights in a row. I actually did a plant diet to prepare for three months. I came in really prepared. I went to energy workers to get me grounded. I did all this research. So I did it four nights in a row with indigenous shamans and there were about 50 of us.

BECKY [30:51]:
And is it like mushrooms or something?

CHERIE [30:53]:
No, ayahuasca — A-Y-A-H-U-A-S-C-A — it's a more powerful psychedelic than mushrooms. It's a vine medicine. There's a whole tradition with it.

CHERIE [31:22]:
All I can say about it is that I'm still integrating what happened. I had fairly benign experiences the first three nights, but the fourth night... I didn't purge, and most people do. So I held the medicine in me and I was alchemizing a lot of things. I was the one person — there's always one person in the group that completely freaks out — and I'm a very private person, I do my sacred work alone. So this was me freaking out. They had to take me outside. All I can say about that experience is that it unplugged me from some matrix of what I was trying to already heal in my family. It allowed me to get a reboot.

CHERIE [32:44]:
It was horrific at first, and then it became very spiritual. And then it became: "My goodness" — I was seeing things and how things connected in my life. They actually had a statue of Christ on the property — "I am the way, the truth and the life." And I felt very comforted. But it was experiential and direct contact — not only with my psyche and my subconscious and my spirit, but the earth. I felt that I was one. And I had never felt love like that before. But I had to go through initiations to get there and release a lot of things I didn't need to be believing about my life.

BECKY [33:09]:
Yeah. Okay. It's like taking a 32,000-foot look at yourself, right? And being able to look at yourself outside of your body, which is really difficult to do — which is why we search for therapists or coaches to help us see ourselves.

CHERIE [33:30]:
I believe I had something like a near-death experience. That's the best way I can put it. But I had a team around me. A gentleman shaman on this side, a female on this side — they were just so kind and loving. They were indigenous shamans and they knew exactly what I was going through. They were comforting me and saying, "You're doing the most work of anyone here. You're in it. Keep going. You're safe."

CHERIE [34:28]:
Because all of my safeguards and strongholds with my ego — just started to crumble. "You thought this? Nope. You thought that about yourself? Nope. You're not more special than anyone else. You're not more special than anyone else."

--- CHAPTER: THE JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY [35:09] ---

BECKY [34:40]:
Have you read "The Courage to be Disliked"? It's a lot about Adler's work. Adler was a contemporary to Freud but believed completely opposite. Freud was very much into: let's research the trauma, let's go through this again and talk it over. And Adler was more about: there's no such thing as trauma in the way Freud meant it. He was much more about: let's look at what you're choosing to make your life from here on out. Because we can't change what the past was. In that book, they explain that you're not special. And that was like a revelation to me — and it was actually a huge relief. It didn't depress me. It opened me up. Like: that means I don't have to be special. I can just be who I am. I can be totally imperfect and messy and all of that. And I don't have to live up to anybody's standard. I don't even have to have an expectation of myself.

CHERIE [36:26]:
Yes, I love that. And I've read different teachers talk about this. When you heal, this why this whole work you can do is right here, period. Everything else comes completely second. And when you shift something, or you transmute or heal or alchemize something in yourself, you're doing it for everyone because we're all connected. So that's a very Christed way to look at this kind of work.

CHERIE [37:14]:
When you're suffering and your tools aren't working and you just have to sit and feel this — in those moments, I feel closer to Christ now. This is not martyr energy. I recognize that the work I'm doing has already been held — and we're continuing the work that got started in the garden through this alchemization.

CHERIE [37:59]:
I was raised with all this programming: you're the Lord's special chosen, you're so good at that. And I had all this pressure on myself. It was very performative. My works were performance-based worth type. I've always been a high achiever. And Mrs. Utah — that's where those kinds of things lead you. But there's nothing wrong with it. You can do a lot of good with those things because you have a face to share the experiences.

CHERIE [38:45]:
The older I get, the less desire I have to be in front of a microphone. Like I just want people to learn, if they're interested. The book I'm writing is not a how-to book — it's my story, what's happening in my body. My human woman self. And if anyone can relate to my story, I think that's where we're moving. I think the age of the gurus and the special motivational speaker people... I've been in that realm and it's very egoic. It can be. I noticed that when I lifted the curtain in that world, there's a lot of imposter energy — they're not doing the work, they're saying it. But they're not embodied in the actual work. So I took a step back for lots of years just to make sure I was lining up with exactly what I want to say — being my sister's voice — and what my soul wants to say.

BECKY [40:09]:
And you don't have to fix anything, right? It's not up to you to heal the world.

CHERIE [40:12]:
Right. Now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good. It takes all the pressure off of performance and productivity. And it's just: here's my heart. Here's love.

--- CHAPTER: PRACTICAL WAYS TO PROCESS EMOTION [40:33] ---

BECKY [40:33]:
I just want to go really quick back to healing emotions. I have heard that those chemicals that get released when you have an emotion have a half-life of 90 seconds. That was really helpful for me to realize. So if I'm feeling anger or irritation or some negative feeling, if I can take that 90 seconds out — go sit in my bathroom, take some breath, feel it in my body, recognizing where it's moving to, talking to it, like you said: "Hello, fear. I see you there. Yes, I know. You're really scared and it's okay." Because you gotta get that out, right? Then after 90 seconds, I actually have kind of moved on to a new emotion. It really doesn't take that long.

CHERIE [42:02]:
And there's another piece to this that some people who are listening might be experiencing — so I just have to speak to it. There will probably come a time in your life where you do those things, and you're still feeling heaviness, you're still plunging the depths. And they call that the dark night of the soul — where you didn't do anything. It just shows up.

--- CHAPTER: THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL [42:03] ---

CHERIE [42:31]:
Are you ready to release all? Are you ready to die — to let your identity and your persona die — in the sense of: you are so much bigger than this. You think this is what you need to portray to others, but you're actually so much bigger. We all are. And so part of this process is dying — dying after dying after dying — to what I think I knew, and just being open to what life is going to present to me. Because I trust that whatever shows up on my path is meant to be experienced in some way.

CHERIE [43:43]:
Sometimes a dark night of the soul — I was starting that when I first met you. It's been on and off for seven years now: me surrendering, learning, opening. I've had really blissful, incredible experiences and learning and wisdom and calm. But then there's also been this tension underneath that sometimes builds. And when I'm down and I'm feeling it — Dark Night of the Soul is going into the unknown. That's the whole point of it. If you know everything and it's all laid out for you, there's no openness. And that was horrifyingly terrifying for me because I love predictability, I love certainty, I love to know.

CHERIE [44:36]:
Just being open to the mystery — which I believe is very much like Heavenly Mother and Divine Feminine Energy. That's sort of the mystery schools I dove into. It's like: this is supposed to be a mystery. And when you come to accept that on a really deep level, everything starts to align. I don't have to know. I just have to love and trust.

BECKY [45:04]:
Well, that's faith, right? When you just...

CHERIE [45:04]:
Absolutely. Faith is not knowing.

CHERIE [46:02]:
We didn't really understand fear before coming here, I don't think. That's why you have to come in this form — all these emotions have to be experienced. That IS the whole purpose. If you keep pushing them away, you're not going to get the full experience you need to have.

CHERIE [46:42]:
The dark night of the soul is a term used by St. John of the Cross. It's become kind of a buzz phrase. Some people think it happens when someone dies or something really bad happens, but that's not what it is. It's a spiritual crisis. You could call it a faith crisis. An existential dilemma. But it's something where all of your strongholds and all the things you knew start to dissolve and crumble. I liken it to: I was tethered to a mothership of a certain belief system, and then the universe took that tether and untethered me and I went careening into outer space. I had no strongholds, no tethers. Everything I knew, everything came undone. And that is pretty close to what a true dark night of the soul is.

CHERIE [48:03]:
When you stay with it — and I did a lot of things wrong, I judged myself, I did a lot of fear — but I had a lot of people midwifing me through this who had been through it before. That's one of the reasons I started my podcast. You can tell when there's been an initiation in someone. There's a different depth.

CHERIE [49:31]:
A spiritual awakening does mimic a mental illness. I thought I was literally following the family pattern of hysteria and mental illness. But a mentor said: "You're shedding. Stop. This is what's happening. Here's what you're going to go through next. And after that, this." She literally kind of gave me like a loose template. It was so validating. Like, I thought I was going crazy.

CHERIE [50:47]:
When you surrender to the unknown — we create safety by predictability and certainty and knowledge. But the acquisition of knowledge does not actually create safety. It's a false sense of safety. Surrender could be meditation or prayer — for me, it was deep prayer, guttural, in nature, in fetal position kind of prayer. Just letting Mother Earth hold me. Surrender just means letting go of what you know and allowing yourself to be taught in your body.

BECKY [51:15]:
I love the way you explain it as a death. It's like letting that part of you die so you can grow something new. Almost like a purging — forests get burned so you can have new life. It's a very natural thing. It happens in the earth all the time. If we use the earth as our teacher, we can learn those processes. It's all part of the evolution and the recycling program of God.

CHERIE [51:50]:
That's what alchemy and transmutation are — it's not completely purging it out. You purge the toxicity, but you retain the lesson. You retool the learning. That is the opposite of attaining through knowledge, through reading or having a guru or mentor. It's knowing through your body.

CHERIE [52:18]:
Your inner authority gets activated when you say, "I don't know." A lot of people go into prayer saying, "Please confirm this for me." Instead of: "Please open me to receive whatever is right for me." And so that was a shift.

BECKY [52:38]:
Okay, have you read Dan Brown at all? Have you read "The Origin"? He talks about the halo that we see in these paintings — and actually what he reveals is that it's not the light going out. It's actually coming in from the universe, from God. It's indicating that transformation and that light that is coming in. I thought that was really beautiful.

CHERIE [53:03]:
We are transmitters of that light. We are also receiving signals of it. And I think for women, where we get tripped up is that we open ourselves too much. This shows up in our relationships — we open ourselves to over-serving, over-giving, over-delivering, over-explaining, over, over, over, over, over. We are receiving it, not just sending it. And only when we stop, and I was a busy bee the first 50 years of my life — literally did not stop — and it was until I stopped to reflect on the depth of my own heart and what was happening, and really got clear and took a time out, that I was like: "My goodness, I've been ignoring my body for decades."

BECKY [54:18]:
So do you feel like you've been able to change the cycle in your family?

CHERIE [54:31]:
Absolutely. It's not that we're not perfect and we still have struggles, but that's a done deal. Shawna's death was such a landmark moment — like she was kind of a sacrificial lamb, and I'm not glorifying suicide whatsoever. But it wasn't until that happened that we really looked at the depths of what was creating the pattern. And I've had her come through a lot. I've had her put words in my mouth when I'm speaking. I'm really close to her oldest son who was 12 when she died. I feel her come through me to mother him in a way.

BECKY [55:45]:
Yeah, that's Julian of Norwich — "All shall be well and every little thing shall be well." And I love that because if we can get to that point, yes, that is hope. So I repeat that to myself in those depths of despair sorts of moments.

CHERIE [56:32]:
If they're not talking about it, their body will start talking.

BECKY [56:39]:
Yep, and I see that all the time.

CHERIE [56:40]:
When I said "we're the crew," it wasn't just my family. Everyone with a body right now is the living benefactor of generations that have gone before them. And that's why everything is in commotion right now — because we're the ones who are like: I'll come down here at this time and I'll feel these things and I'll experience these things and I'll help be part of the solution instead of the problem. I really believe that.

CHERIE [57:07]:
What you were talking about — once you feel something for 90 seconds, whatever is coming is going. If we can remember: "This too shall pass, this is only temporary" — even if you're in this long extended dark night like I was, I had moments of sheer spiritual illumination and incredible connections with other humans. It wasn't all dark. I was in a percolating lesson underneath, even while going through my life and doing all the mom things.

BECKY [57:43]:
Yeah. Well, the 90-second rule — I will set my watch and time it sometimes. I'll go sit in my bathroom and I'll be like, "I'm so irritated right now." I decided: okay, I'm just gonna go ahead and feel this. And I put my stopwatch on. I started thinking about all the reasons why I was irritated. And I noticed: it's kind of in my stomach now, it's coming up a little bit. I feel it in my heart. And then after a little bit, I got distracted and I started thinking about something else, and I was like: I'm kind of done. I'm not really irritated anymore. Then I got up and got on with my day.

CHERIE [59:03]:
It will pass you. And also, there's this thing called sacred rage. It's okay to be enraged by some of the things that are happening and that have happened. Collective rage is in us too, especially from our foremothers. But at the same time, the highest state of spirituality is happening right here, holding polarity and tension. We're very divine and we're very human. So holding that — that's why I love studying about Mary Magdalene and the Gnostic Gospels, because it's all about Christ affirming that we are divinely human.

CHERIE [59:57]:
One of my biggest Achilles heels and shadows is that I go straight to judgment. Not typically with others, although that happens because I'm judging myself. And I know if I'm judging someone else, I'm really judging myself. That's my biggest work. There's discernment and then there's judgment. I probably took in a message that I needed to judge to keep me safe and protect myself. And I don't need to do that anymore.

BECKY [1:00:31]:
And it's well — we're probably related, Cherie, just saying. That first step to overcoming something is awareness of it. Because I don't want to be a judgmental person of myself or of others. And so I'm working on that myself — to be a little bit more open, not just to show everybody, but I'm trying to do it for insight too. Recognizing when the unkind thought comes up for myself or for others, and being like: "That's really interesting. My brain's feeding me that right now." And don't judge that thought — being open to it: "Okay, that's coming up. What else can I believe?" And moving on. That's where coaching with Jodie Moore has been really transformative for me — I do have some control over my thoughts. I can recognize them and then I can change them.

CHERIE [1:01:50]:
The term I've heard for that is "the merciful witness." Your higher self is resting back, watching your thoughts. But a lot of us have internal critics so loud that they override that merciful witness. I'm trying to integrate that too. It can be fun. It can be adventurous. We can't take this all so seriously.

BECKY [1:01:58]:
Right, I know. My goodness, this is so fun. Okay, I kind of want to ask you about your adoption story because that is also a really fascinating story.

--- CHAPTER: CHERIE'S ADOPTION JOURNEY [01:02:34] ---
[*** NATURAL BREAK POINT FOR EPISODE SPLIT ***]

CHERIE [1:02:34]:
It's a very long story, but I'll give you the short version. Before I met and married my husband, I was at BYU, home from mission, and ended up getting pregnant. I was 24, and at my bishop's behest — this was 1994 — there was a lot of pressure for unwed mothers to place their babies for adoption in the church. I knew that my daughter belonged in another home. So I placed my daughter, which was a very open adoption. They named her middle name Cherie. She and I are super close now. She has three little boys that are my grandchildren and she's like a mini me.

CHERIE [1:03:45]:
I met my husband when she was only three months old and we got married in Salt Lake Temple and quickly started having children. Three kids, boom, boom, boom. I always count her — I have six children and I play a role for her that's really beautiful now. I know that before this life, we made this contract that we would have this experience together. And I am glad I had that shameful experience because it taught me a lot about sacred grieving and motherhood and tender mercies.

CHERIE [1:04:38]:
My husband had a sacred spiritual experience when we were engaged where he knew that we were going to have five kids of different genders. And so... I had a waking vision in 2007 where I saw a very strong male with blue eyes — big muscular guy — with a cute blonde, long blonde hair, blue-eyed girl. And they were kind of like young adults and they looked like my children, my bio kids. So I kept trying to have them. I had four miscarriages in a row. And my last miscarriage I was 42 and my doctor was like, "Nope. I'm doing another D&C. This is your last one." He's like — I was like, "But you don't understand. I have these two kids coming."

CHERIE [1:05:46]:
So there's a lot of spiritual things that happen in between. I went through a dark night because it was so disorienting. Why did I see that? Maybe they're my grandkids. So I just let it go. And then I had a very powerful dream. When I was in Japan actually for business. In the dream, I saw I was in a field of white with people dressed in white and there was this blue-eyed dark-haired girl who just looked at me with such love and I just loved her so much. And then I woke up. I get home from Japan and a girl that I had been coaching named Jessica texted me that she was pregnant and that she wanted to do what I did. Long story short, she said: "This child I'm carrying is your child. I know that now."

CHERIE [1:06:43]:
So she moved in with us when she was almost four months pregnant and stayed with us the whole time and had our son Eli. He's 13 now. He's big and great muscles already. He needed a different body — the birth father is almost full Italian and a huge bodybuilder guy. So Eli, he needed a different body, but the blue eyes, everything that I thought.

CHERIE [1:07:44]:
And then after he came, I was like: where's the girl? So I actually looked into surrogacy. And then I was like: well, if it's meant to be, it's going to come. I'm not going to try to chase it down and figure it out. And then a long series of events — my friend's daughter sent me a Facebook message: "I know you don't know me. I don't even really believe in God, but something is happening. I've had this dream two nights in a row — my friend who's pregnant and kind of homeless wanted me to adopt her baby, but my husband and I can't have kids. But I'm not ready to adopt yet. And I have this dream — she's handing me this baby wrapped in a pink blanket. So it's probably a girl. And the nurse, instead of handing it to me, handed it to you." She had never seen my face before. Never seen my face.

CHERIE [1:08:42]:
She literally passed me over to this girl who was pregnant — Madison — California, homeless, lots of trauma, abusive boyfriend. I track her down. I go out to California and I get on her good side. This is very Sendy — it was not safe. I had to go into a world of addiction, trafficking, gangs. I just felt to just love her. She was 19. She didn't have anyone to love her. She didn't have a mom really.

CHERIE [1:09:45]:
I kept flying out there. And this whole time I just felt like: this is my baby she's carrying, but she doesn't know it yet. She didn't want to do adoption. She just liked me. So fast forward — she goes into labor. Right before she went into labor, I was writing a letter to my daughter that she was carrying. And I was like: "You can come now. I don't know how we're going to make it to each other, but let's go." So I fly out. They asked me to come out for the birth because they didn't have anything — they didn't have a crib, they didn't have diapers. It was really bad.

CHERIE [1:10:45]:
I wasn't there when she was born, but I came to the hospital and drove them back to their apartment when she was discharged. Here's this beautiful, healthy nine-pound baby who was just an angel. And I was like... I knew I was throwing her to the wolves when we got back. They were throwing her up in the air, everyone in the neighborhood over. I sat them down. I said: "This is not safe. You have to do this. You have to do that." The boyfriend was not the baby's father, but he was extremely dangerous. So I had the talk with them and they asked me to leave. So I booked my next flight home and I cried and cried for days. And I was like, "God, what was that? Why did you do that?"

CHERIE [1:11:42]:
Three weeks later, I got a call that the baby had been taken into foster custody. CPS came. There were hundreds of complaints from different people. She had been severely abused by the time she was three weeks old. And an attorney told us we had no case because we were in Utah and this was in California. But six court hearings later, when she was four months old, something came over Madison. It had to be prayer. At that sixth court hearing, Madison stood up and quieted her attorney and said: "I want the Burtons to adopt my baby. I don't want to reunify. I want them to adopt my baby." And Jeff and I were like: WHAT?

CHERIE [1:13:02]:
So that's how we got Emma. We had to be foster parents first, so I had to get a one-bedroom apartment in Stockton and stay with her for almost five months before we could get clearance to come back to Utah. I had to leave my other four kids at home, including Eli, who was two years old and couldn't leave the state. It was so hard. But yep — Emma has long blonde hair, blue eyes, full of joy. Exactly as I saw her in spirit form. That's how we got them.

CHERIE [1:13:31]:
For me, it was a really beautiful, full-circle moment because I've been a birth mom. I know how that feels. I know the shame. I know the grief. I know all of the things. And I feel like we've had a really powerful experience with the birth moms. We even just flew out to California to meet Eli's birth father for the first time over spring break. We have good relationships with both sets of birth parents.

CHERIE [1:14:28]:
Why did you dangle that carrot? Why did you bring her to me and then pull her away? I don't trust you anymore. [on the dark moment after being asked to leave]

BECKY [1:14:31]:
Yeah, well, because we don't see the whole picture, right? And so then you do have to just trust: okay, you said, so I'm just going to wait until you work this out. I'm here for you, I'll do whatever I need to do. But I'm not going to suffer because of it.

CHERIE [1:15:06]:
Both birth mothers were diagnosed bipolar. Not only are we helping to alchemize that in our literal family lineage, but now with these adoptive kids I think adoptees are bridge souls — they come to heal lineages through different ways. They choose the family. And Emma's energy is 10 times bigger than my other kids. I'm going to be 62 when Emma graduates high school. It's just the universe's plan for my life. And it's been layered with so many lessons.

--- CHAPTER: THE IMPORTANCE OF CONNECTION [01:17:32] ---

BECKY [1:17:28]:
So Cherie has been all over the world talking to women about empowering them in their own lives, sharing a lot of this stuff. She's been to lots of different holy sites where there's a lot of divine wisdom from feminine wisdom traditions. And even just getting up on stage and presenting yourself — those are things that are super Sendy. And you've had to be very courageous to do some of these things. But some of the most courageous work that we do is on our own side, in our own bodies, as well as in our families. And you have portrayed that so well in this conversation. I have learned so much. The main point I want to take away is that we are all one, and as we heal ourselves, we can heal others as well.

CHERIE [1:19:23]:
We're never fully healed. We will be healing until we die. But I think it's just the acceptance part. That's what I think the key is. Just accepting where we're at, exactly what is here right now. Loving what is — Byron Katie. Loving exactly where we're at.

--- CHAPTER: RAPID FIRE QUESTIONS [01:19:38] ---

BECKY [1:19:38]:
Okay. I do have a few rapid fire questions! What has brought you joy in the last 24 hours?

CHERIE [1:19:41]:
This morning I had to drive Emma to an orthodontist appointment and she played this song that I have not heard since I was like 14 and she liked the song. So we turned it up, put the sunroof down, and we just belted out the song as we drove to the orthodontist.

BECKY [1:20:15]:
I love it. Music can do that to you — takes you right back. Okay, what about the last TV show or documentary that you watched that you liked?

CHERIE [1:20:27]:
I loved — hated it, but — the False Prophet documentary with the guy that took over after Warren Jeffs. Something like "Trust Me: The False Prophet." It's like four to six episodes. It just shows you how people can disassociate and leave their bodies and not follow their own inner authority. Everything we've been talking about is represented in that series.

BECKY [1:20:59]:
Okay, I have to look for that one. So what about a great book that you've read recently?

CHERIE [1:21:10]:
I'm really reading a lot of memoirs right now because I'm writing one. But I really loved David Archuleta's memoir — "Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself." I listened to it on Audible. He's so brave and very, very vulnerable.

BECKY [1:21:37]:
Memoirs are very Sendy, right? Because it's such a vulnerable state when you're putting all of your mess out there for everyone. But so helpful for so many people. So I'm so glad you're doing that.

BECKY [1:22:02]:
What about a charity that you support?

CHERIE [1:22:08]:
doTERRA Healing Hands. doTERRA is my international wellness business and we've raised money to go to African villages to support women. I know exactly where the funds are going because they match our funds that we raise. It's a really cool project.

BECKY [1:22:28]:
Really cool. Okay, what about a favorite vacation spot?

CHERIE [1:22:34]:
It's a toss up between Scotland and France, but if I had to choose one, it would be France. There's a specific area in the south of France that's very Magdalen-related — it's actually been recognized by the Vatican as her resting place. I went last June for a retreat and the woman holding space is a scholar who taught me a lot about the Cathars and the Magdalen lineage. There's something about that land where I feel like my essence comes out — there's roses everywhere and 17th-century buildings. Nostradamus was raised there. It's just so vibey. I'm actually trying to get an apartment there with my group — we're getting a timeshare and buying this huge old library with all these different rooms. I want to go there and write.

BECKY [1:23:49]:
That would be a great vibe to write in for sure. It gets you that inspiration. Okay, what about something you try to do every day?

CHERIE [1:23:49]:
I have this altar right here in my office. It's got little reminders of where I've been — a little Mary Magdalene statue, a Cathar cross, a gem, an essential oil, and my journal. So I light the candle and I honor my ancestors, I honor God, I honor Mother, I honor Father, I honor Mary and Jesus who brought me to this. But if I'm being honest, I probably only do this like 30% of the time. My intention is to make that a daily practice. But anchoring myself to the earth in some way — that is something I try to do every day.

BECKY [1:24:55]:
I love that. Anchoring yourself to your creation, to all the generations before and after. Okay, what about a woman from history that you really admire?

CHERIE [1:25:30]:
Joan of Arc. She's from France and I've traced her lineage and her steps and read her biography. She is so badass. She is so Sendy. I love her courage. Everything about her smacks of courage.

BECKY [1:25:43]:
Super Sendy! Super super Sendy! That's awesome. Okay. What do you think I should try next?

CHERIE [1:26:12]:
You should try cold plunging if you haven't done it yet. But — for women, we heat is better for us. Men are better with cold plunges than women are. But if you have something that you're really wanting to get clarity on, or you're wanting something to move through your body, do a cold plunge, but then bring the heat in afterward. I wouldn't do it as a regular practice if you're a woman. The research is showing that it's better for men than it is for women.

BECKY [1:27:37]:
That's really fascinating. Okay, I'm going to look into that. So yes, thank you. Thank you for sharing so much with us today. This has been wow, a feast. I've wanted to sit down and talk to you about all of these things for a long time. You really clarified a lot of things for me — about what's inside our bodies and how to help heal our bodies and along with that, to heal the world. Not that we're any more special than anybody else, but that we have the power.

CHERIE [1:28:07]:
What makes you special is your desire to do that. Recognizing how important that is.

BECKY [1:28:11]:
Yes. Right. And that it's not about us. That's really what it comes down to. I've never felt like this podcast is about me. It's just kind of a vehicle I'm able to use to bring stories like yours into where everybody else can benefit from it. And that makes me really happy to be a part of it.

BECKY [1:28:41]:
Okay, so thank you very much for being with us today. Cherie, where can people find you?

CHERIE [1:28:41]:
My Instagram is cherie.burton and my website is cherieburton.com. I'm hoping that my manuscript will be sent to the publisher by the end of this year and available early next year. That's the plan — watch for that.

BECKY [1:29:11]:
Yes, be sure and let me know. I will be very interested. Okay, thank you so much and we will see you next time on the Sendy Mom podcast. Thank you for being with us today. See you!

CHERIE [1:29:13]:
I will.

=======================================================================
END OF TRANSCRIPT — Episode #046 | Cherie Burton
Total Runtime: ~1:29:13
Episode Break Point: 01:02:34 (Cherie's Adoption Journey)
=======================================================================

Mentioned in the Show:

cherieburton.com

Utah Suicide Prevention

Jungian Psychology

Family Systems Therapy

Ayahuasca

33. The Recipe for Resilience: Illness, Influence, and Inspiration

The Courage to be Disliked

Origin by Dan Brown

Revelations of Divine Love Julian of Norwich

38. Digital Detox and Upload Humanity with Amy Antonelli of HXP

Trust Me: The False Prophet

Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself by David Archuleta

DoTerra Healing Hands