061 Finding Joy Through Adversity: Ali Mortimer’s Inspiring Journey of Resilience and Transformation

Hello everyone, I'm Dimple Thakrar, and welcome back to Beyond the Words. Today, I'm incredibly excited to introduce Ali Mortimer. We met by chance at a lunch in London, and the instant connection we felt was undeniable. Ali's story is one of resilience, joy, and profound transformation, and I can't wait for you to hear it.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Ali Mortimer shares her remarkable journey from corporate burnout and personal loss to finding joy and purpose in life. Her story is filled with challenges, including her mother's battle with Alzheimer's and a marital crisis, but through it all, Ali found a way to cultivate happiness and resilience. This conversation is a testament to the power of inner strength and the importance of following one's intuition.

Key Takeaways

1. The Power of Intuition: Ali emphasises listening to your inner voice and trusting your instincts, even when life gets challenging.
2. Resilience in the Face of Adversity: Despite numerous setbacks, Ali demonstrates how resilience and a positive mindset can lead to personal growth and healing.
3. Importance of Health: Ali discusses the significance of holistic health and how early self-care can prevent long-term health issues.
4. Finding Joy in Small Moments: Ali shares how she cultivated joy daily, even during her darkest times, through simple, mindful practices.
5. Rebuilding Relationships: Ali's journey includes reconciling with her husband and the importance of open communication and forgiveness in rebuilding trust.

Connect with Ali: 

• Website: https://www.xoalimortimer.com 
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/xoalimortimer/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ali.mortimer.7/

Thank you for joining us in this heartfelt conversation. If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, share it with your friends, and leave us a review. Your support helps us reach more people who might benefit from these powerful stories.

Have a wonderful day, and remember to embrace joy and follow your intuition.

Dimple Thakrar Resource Links:

Website: https://dimpleglobal.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dimple.thakrar
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dimplethakrar/

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Welcome
• 0:00 Marital Crisis and Personal Loss
• 1:46 Meeting Ali Mortimer
• 4:53 Early Life and Family Background
• 8:23 Challenges and Corporate Burnout
• 11:53 Mother's Alzheimer's Battle
• 16:23 Marital Crisis and Personal Loss
• 20:53 Discovering Holistic Health
• 24:53 Cultivating Daily Joy
• 28:53 Rebuilding Relationships
• 34:53 Final Reflections and Advice

Transcript

Beyond the Words EP61

[00:00:00] Dimple Thakrar: Hello and welcome back to Beyond the Words with me Dimple Thakrar, your host. This woman that I have for you today, as I think of her I get chills in my body because we met by sheer coincidence at random lunch in London. Neither of us live in London, we are both based in the north of England and we happen to sit next to each other.

[00:00:28] Dimple Thakrar: Of course, there are no coincidences and I know from my point of view, I felt a deep connection, instant connection. And I understand why, because as I've got to know this incredible woman the way she moves in the world, the way she navigates the world is so aligned with the way with my values, with my beliefs.

[00:00:57] Dimple Thakrar: And it's almost like I was called to sit next to a solar sister. We have traveled many lifetimes before, we both know this. And what I love about this beautiful guest is she just, through all the diversity, she brings and chooses to bring joy. So without further ado, I would love to introduce you all to Ali Mortimer.

[00:01:22] Dimple Thakrar: Welcome to Beyond the Words. 

[00:01:24] Ali Mortimer: so much for the incredible introduction. I'm blushing, but I will take it. Thank you. And I hope you know that everything you've just said is completely reciprocated with love. And I went on a quest at the beginning of this year to, to feel more joy, to feel more abundance, and it was no.

[00:01:46] Ali Mortimer: It was no coincidence, as you said, that the minute I declared that on the 1st of January, by the 21st of January, I was sat next to you in London and I hadn't been going. It was just like, it was just this call, I'm going to go. And from that moment, I felt more joy in my life because you're in it. So It's been a wonderful six months and I know that our lives are going to completely twist and turn and continue in whatever way the universe has planned for us.

[00:02:13] Ali Mortimer: And I'm a deep believer in that. And as you said, we have so many values, we are completely serious about our work. But yet there's so much fun, there's a giggle and it's just we're so serious, but lighthearted with it as well. And I love that, one minute we can be really deep and then the next minute we'll be giggling about something completely different.

[00:02:36] Ali Mortimer: And I love that. Yeah, 

[00:02:39] Dimple Thakrar: absolutely. And I love the way that. We are so committed to our work, both of us. It's not even work, it's actually a way of life for us. And yet, we can get distracted with the daisies in the garden and have a giggle about, at the same, in the same moment, right? Yes, we keep it real.

[00:03:03] Dimple Thakrar: I would love, Ali, for you to or I'm inviting you to share your story because it hasn't always been that simple. It hasn't always been that easy to find joy. I 

[00:03:19] Ali Mortimer: would love to share my story, and I think it's really auspicious that we're talking today because seven years ago we had a phone call. We had a phone call, oh I've just got goosebumps then, from the old man we were buying a house from.

[00:03:36] Ali Mortimer: And this house that I'm sat in today meant so much. It was the starting of a new life, a new marriage, a new journey, a new way of living, a new way of thinking, feeling and believing. And we had exchanged on the house. And we got a phone call and he said, Someone has just crashed through the front window of your house.

[00:03:58] Ali Mortimer: Do you still want to buy it? And a whole kind of beautiful bay window of this beautiful listed building had been completely caved in and we were going to inherit it with all of that. And It was almost like, does the universe test us? I don't know, but it was just asking us, are you sure? And it was like, yes, we're sure this is what we want to do.

[00:04:19] Ali Mortimer: This is the way, this is the path. And before that, so seven years ago, if we go back and to explain this part of the story was we were six months on from a separation period. My husband and I. And it was a culmination of 12 months where so much had happened in my life, where I had lost every single thing that I thought that had brought me joy had fallen by the wayside.

[00:04:48] Ali Mortimer: I had decided to move on from my very corporate career. Not because I didn't love it, but because it was just no longer right for us as a family. It was causing me terrible health, the burnout, the stress, having two small children, a big global team, running a big team, my husband away living in London, me in Yorkshire with my two small boys, my mum at the end stage of Alzheimer's.

[00:05:14] Ali Mortimer: It was just too much for me to cope. So I'd lost, I'd walked away from a job that I'd loved. I didn't know who I was. I'd always been brought up to believe that I could have it all, that I could have this top, top job having had, like you Dimple, done everything, got all the scholarships, got all the top grades, I was the high achiever, I was at the top of my game, I was there, I was having it all, but it didn't feel like it.

[00:05:36] Ali Mortimer: It felt I don't want this. I've achieved it, but I don't want it. And it doesn't feel like success. It's not right in my body. This isn't it. And I didn't know what I wanted to do. And through that period of gardening leave, I started to educate myself on holistic health. My mom was MSA, Alzheimer's. And I wanted to understand a lot more about brain.

[00:06:00] Ali Mortimer: I wanted to understand what was going on in my brain, how I could look after myself in terms of how could I prevent this in my 30s. Because it's our, our longevity. And I know you have a serious background in health as well. Is we are, our longevity and our health in our later life actually begins 40s.

[00:06:18] Ali Mortimer: So for me, it was so important for me to understand that. Start to look after myself in such a critical, facial part of my life when it felt like my health came at the bottom of the list to everybody else's well being. 

[00:06:29] Dimple Thakrar: Can I just pause you there for one second? Because I want this piece to land for people, particularly our younger viewers.

[00:06:36] Dimple Thakrar: Yeah. I want this to land. Because I'm in my 50s now, right? And I wish I had taken this on board in my 30s, right? I thought I would be invincible and my health would be there forever. Fortunately, I had focused on my health in my 30s, so my 50s is much more comfortable. However, those of you who are thinking, I can do it later.

[00:07:10] Dimple Thakrar: No, you have to sow the seeds that early, right? I just want that golden nugget to really like land because it's usually the time when you are at your busiest. You are bringing children up. You just hit the nail on the head there, what you said. Usually when you are bottom of the list, you put your, some I'm paraphrasing, but when you are at the bottom, you put yourself at the bottom of the list and actually that is the time to put yourself at the top.

[00:07:41] Dimple Thakrar: Do you know what? That 

[00:07:41] Ali Mortimer: makes me feel so emotional because it's like, if I do hope our younger listeners are taking this on, because I wish I knew. Now, Ben, what I want now, and as we side tangent off here, and I know we'll probably do this an awful lot through our conversation, but you and I are both line three sixes, generators with central authorities.

[00:08:03] Ali Mortimer: So you have two people here who are the role models. Our line six is our role model. And we're here to talk about what we know from Arvon's vantage point in our fifties. So that. everybody else can understand what's happening and this is what we want you to know. And I love the fact that we also have line threes because I know you and I are going to be carrying on for the rest of our lives going on trying loads of different things so that we keep on learning.

[00:08:26] Ali Mortimer: We're already going to keep on pivoting, twisting, turning, trialing, making mistakes, going, oh we're just here for that. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:08:33] Dimple Thakrar: So even saying I believe this in my 30s and now I don't in my 50s. 

[00:08:39] Ali Mortimer: Yeah. So that was, that's what I was doing. About seven years ago, I was beginning to understand the importance and the criticality of my health if I did not want to be part of the generational Alzheimer's.

[00:08:52] Ali Mortimer: My, my granny had been diagnosed in her 70s and died in her 80s of Alzheimer's. My mom had been diagnosed in her 60s just as I was getting married and died in her 70s. So if history was to repeat itself, it was getting earlier and there was no effing way that I was going to get diagnosed in my 50s and die in my 60s.

[00:09:11] Ali Mortimer: I have too much to live for, too much to do, too much love to give, too much joy to experience. So I was learning all about this holistic health and there was so much coming out. In terms of Alzheimer's and the importance of the core fundamental basics of health, how you eat, what you eat, how you move, how you sleep, how you rest, all of it, the basics is so important.

[00:09:31] Ali Mortimer: So I was learning all of that, but unfortunately my mum was at an end stage and she was taken away by the police. She was coming at people with knives and she was put in a mental institute. And unfortunately for her, that was almost like the beginning of the end. And very sadly, she died six months later.

[00:09:49] Ali Mortimer: And then some part of that was some level of relief for all of us. Cause she would have hated who she had become, she was glamorous. If you can imagine Twiggy, that was my mom and she, she had become nothing like that and it was devastating to watch. And I used to get very sick every time I'd see her cause of the grief.

[00:10:06] Ali Mortimer: And. She died in the February three days before. There's so much I can say about that, but it was just beautiful. She died on my parents 43rd wedding anniversary. She held on for seven days so that she could say she'd been with that man. And my dad said that he saw on the Wednesday that was the last time she looked at him.

[00:10:22] Ali Mortimer: And he said he knew that she wouldn't look at her again because she knew that if they had eye contact she would stay alive and she knew she had to go. So it was a very emotional seven days for my dad, my sister and I, but it was also very beautiful, very cathartic. And it was in that moment I remember, and I was writing a very public blog at the time that was talking about my experience with Alzheimer's and death.

[00:10:44] Ali Mortimer: And, I remember that I'd never been that close to death. I'd never experienced it in someone so close. And it was, I remembered that in her dying, she taught me how to live. Because I never really truly believed that our lives would end. I don't think you do. And when she was gone, it was like, Oh my gosh, she's gone.

[00:11:01] Ali Mortimer: So that also means my life is going to end at some point. And I owe it to myself and I owe it to her to live the F out of life for as long as I've got this life. And it was like, I came out of the gate, despite being so full of grief. I was like. I'm not going back to how I was working and I'm going back to reclaiming myself and who I am and my real true love and what I want to do and I'm so impassioned about all of this.

[00:11:25] Ali Mortimer: And I continued through that six months and once again, the universe came along and it gave me a really big test. And I found out, or I was told that my husband, while he'd been living in London, hadn't been thinking of us and he'd been with somebody else. And it was a crushing blow, something that I didn't see coming at all.

[00:11:48] Ali Mortimer: And in that moment, it was like everything As I introduced at the beginning, it was like everything that I had loved and everything that I thought had brought me happiness, my parents, my job, where I lived, my family, my friends, everything felt like it had been taken from me in that moment. It was like, I couldn't understand the past.

[00:12:10] Ali Mortimer: I, I couldn't see the future anymore. I, we'd had big dreams together and it was suddenly like it had all been cut off and I just didn't know what to do and I was left with just being in the moment. And one of my favorite books during the whole process of learning about the Alzheimer's was The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle.

[00:12:27] Ali Mortimer: And I just kept thinking, I'm going to sit in the now, I'm going to sit in the now. And I asked myself, will I ever be happy again? Will I ever be happy again when I haven't got anything that gave me happiness? But it actually taught me a very important lesson that we don't attach happiness and joy to things or people or situations.

[00:12:43] Ali Mortimer: It's about how do we create it inside me? And through that period of time, when I'd just been diagnosed with PTSD, clinical depression, eating disorders, and insomnia, the doctor had offered me loads of drugs and I said, I do not want to take drugs to numb me. I know I have to feel my way through this. It's the only way I'm going to get through this.

[00:13:04] Dimple Thakrar: Courage. Yeah. Can we just let that land? What courage that takes. Like people say that when you go on the personal development train, it's easy and it's fun and it is, and it's not because it requires courage to actually feel the pain and the insight and the awareness that you had at what age were you then?

[00:13:30] Ali Mortimer: I've just turned 40. 

[00:13:31] Dimple Thakrar: Yeah, so at 40, at your 40 young years, you have the awareness to go, I don't want to be numbed. I don't want to be numbed. I have to go through this and feel it. Otherwise, it will be the end of you. Quite frankly, it will create disease in your body. at some point, 

[00:13:53] Ali Mortimer: right? And I think it's really interesting, Dimple, because I hadn't even started my personal development journey at that point.

[00:13:59] Ali Mortimer: It was an instinctive, 

[00:14:01] Dimple Thakrar: intuitive journey. 

[00:14:03] Ali Mortimer: deeper knowing of not that way. It was like, there is a better way. It's, you've just got to land into yourself. And I remember just, I hadn't even really learned meditation properly. No one had taught me it. I just remembered when my mom was dying, I was lying under trees, watching leaves.

[00:14:21] Ali Mortimer: And to me, that was almost like my meditation, just anchoring into my moment, into this moment, not thinking about when my mom was going to die or how I would feel, but just being at peace and at one with that moment. So what had happened when my mom dying, I brought forward into this space and I knew that I just had to sit with myself and sit with my feelings and allow myself to feel all of those.

[00:14:42] Ali Mortimer: Hurt and grief and you say the courage to change and the courage to do that. And we talked a little bit before we came on about this life and death situation. It was like the death of my past self. It was like the dying of the person who I had been, the dying of, the big professional corporate woman the dying of the married me, the dying of my youth.

[00:15:04] Ali Mortimer: Because I was so innocent, I just trusted and believed and it was like this huge grieving process all wrapped up with the grieving of my mum being brought back up again. But also just knowing that, you know what, I have hope and I have hope that there is going to be something better and I trust that there'll be something better.

[00:15:21] Ali Mortimer: And I wrote in my diary and I go back to it every time I wrote in there and I've highlighted it in it and said, one day I will know why. One day I will know why this has happened and I will be grateful for the experience so that I can help others. Maybe. Maybe that's something and I've become a self fulfilling prophecy because everything that I learned in that moment that had come through me and for me from my soul, from my spirit, that taught me you can feel joy and happiness without things.

[00:15:46] Ali Mortimer: You can sit here and you can just feel it. You can close your eyes and you can feel it. You can lie under the trees and feel it. You can cuddle your boys. You can walk in nature and feel joy. You can lie in a memory of some time when you felt happiness and you can lie in a memory of what is to come. And I say that as a memory of what is to come, that's how it felt.

[00:16:04] Ali Mortimer: It showed me this beautiful vision of sitting in a garden where some days I was sat there deeply at peace and some days I was dancing. And I could feel it in my body without anything changing. Nothing had changed. My husband had still moved out. I still didn't have a job. I still didn't have my mum, but I could feel joy.

[00:16:22] Ali Mortimer: And I knew that's all I needed to do every single day. Cultivate those moments and those pockets of joy. Even without anything changing, if I could do that was my glimmer of hope. Joy was my path, the stepping stones of every day that was going to lead me out. It wasn't a drive that I'd been brought up to believe, this masculine drive of, plan your way out of this alley.

[00:16:42] Ali Mortimer: It was a, I'm going to feel my way through this, and I'm going to follow that joy every single day, and I'm going to keep creating it. And the science behind it only came to me, a year ago and I presented it at Abundant New. It was I didn't know, but intuitively I was being guided to give myself a daily dose of happy hormones for dopamine from achieving it.

[00:17:01] Ali Mortimer: The oxytocin from the feel good factor, the serotonin, the endorphins, the pain factor, it was just like, I was giving myself that every day, that daily injection without medication. It was me giving it to me. And at the end of it, within 12 months, I'd healed myself happy. And I sat down in front of my dad.

[00:17:19] Ali Mortimer: And I'd reconciled our marriage, by the way. I want 

[00:17:22] Dimple Thakrar: to pull you on one thing and a couple of things I want to pull out because I love to do this when our guests are speaking. I really want some key things, some gold being dropped and I want it to land. The first one is, how many times in your life, audience, do you intuitively know what your body needs?

[00:17:42] Dimple Thakrar: and you don't do it. There's the courage. What Ali did was she did it. She intuitively knew that she didn't need drugs, that she needed to heal herself with happiness, right? And she didn't know the science. She didn't know any of that. She just trusted her intuition. The intuition that we're talking about, I sometimes call it the whispers, because they are like whispers.

[00:18:09] Dimple Thakrar: The other noise is a lot louder. But can you quieten yourself and even find your own methods, like you did Ali, sitting under a tree, right? In the silence, quietening, connecting with nature. These are all profound, scientifically based methodologies. That as humans have been shown to bring us back home and you did it intuitively.

[00:18:37] Dimple Thakrar: That's the courageous piece that you didn't follow the noise. You followed the inner calling. So I want to honor you for that, right? And really highlight that to the viewers that amongst your whole world collapsing, you were able to find joy because you realized the secret sauce. Happiness is from loving.

[00:19:02] Dimple Thakrar: It's not sourced anywhere else.

[00:19:04] Ali Mortimer: I think that's interesting, isn't it? I hadn't read any of the personal development books and obviously subsequently they all say that happiness is an inside job. And I'm like, Oh, I intuitively knew that. It was fascinating for me to read that. Something just that you said there, it was like, I took myself off to be in silence and stillness.

[00:19:20] Ali Mortimer: And it did take courage to do that. And I know I was speaking to a client yesterday. She was like, I am being, I'm distracting myself so much with all the things I have to do and this and that and the other, because I don't want to be still, because I don't want to feel, because it's too scary to feel. And, in doing that, you and I both know that's so dangerous.

[00:19:37] Ali Mortimer: To suppress those feelings or to ignore those feelings, that's when you can start to create real trauma in your body and that's what causes us that long term damage. So it is scary and it's frightening and I think, I know we're speaking to our listeners, it's, Is if you are frightened in that level of space and, terrified of doing that's when you reach out and you ask for the help, whether that's from therapists or healers or coaches or energy workers.

[00:20:01] Ali Mortimer: I was very fortunate that I did reach out. I did it intuitively, but then I knew that there was sometimes I needed some help for someone to help me to do that. So you don't have to do it alone. I suppose there's a really important message. There are people who can guide you and facilitate that kind of feeling.

[00:20:18] Ali Mortimer: So at the end of that, when I realized 12 months later, and my husband and I, we were in the tentative stages of recommitting our wonderful. Marriage counselor had said, your first marriage is over. Do you want to, do you want to choose each other again? And we got to the point where, yes, we did.

[00:20:33] Ali Mortimer: So it was like, we started again. We started dating at 19 and we were now in our forties, 20 years on. And it was a rare gift for us to say, yes, we choose each other again. And we're going to know each other and learn about each other in our forties. And let's continue. And let's, start from us.

[00:20:49] Ali Mortimer: Put us front and center and cut out all of the noise because you can only imagine the judgment and the criticism and the shame that was being put on both of us. But it was like, no, this is for us. We do it for us and we do it for ourselves. And my dad said to me, he said, this is where a bit of fun will come in.

[00:21:04] Ali Mortimer: So on a very serious topic, my dad said to me, Ali, I'm so proud of you. My dad is a legend, by the way. He he said to me, I'm so proud of everything you've done. What are you going to do next? And I said, daddy, do you know what I'm going to do? Not many people go through what I've just been through in the last 18 months.

[00:21:18] Ali Mortimer: Not many people lose that amount or go through that amount of grief and loss. And I'm coming out and I'm feeling really good. I want to go and help others and do what I've just done with the tools and the techniques that I've learned. And I'm going to retrain so that I can get the qualifications and the confidence, but I know.

[00:21:34] Ali Mortimer: The stuff that I've done is right and can help. So I went off and retrained and he said, you know what, Ali, all Brookses, my maiden name, he said, Brookses, he said, always get a lot of crap. And he used a rude word. He didn't use crap, but I used crap because it's a bit softer. He said, we always get a ton of crap land on us.

[00:21:50] Ali Mortimer: And he said, you know what? Do you know what happens? In the crap, the most fertile seeds are put. You plant the seeds in the crap. And he said, do you know what grows out of fertile soil? He said, the most beautiful roses. And he said, you will be the most beautiful rose that has ever lived because of every piece of crap that has landed upon you.

[00:22:12] Ali Mortimer: Oh, I know. You make me emotional because I know how much you love your roses. I know. And so I have roses everywhere just to remind me and to remind everyone that No matter how much crap that lands on top of you, it is the courage that we've talked about and the resilience to know that there is light above the crap.

[00:22:31] Ali Mortimer: And all you need to do is find your way through it. Whether you get help or whether you find the strength within you, you can come up and you will push up and you will. be able to see the light and you will grow tall and you will be able to soften like those beautiful petals of a rose. You will be able to soften because I think on the back of that was one of the hardest things was I could have come up with a hardened heart.

[00:22:51] Ali Mortimer: I'm not going to love again. I'm not going to trust again. I'm not going to let anybody in. But actually it was the unfolding of the vulnerability of my heart. That allowed me to love freely again. And yes, I'm going to cry and, we're going to lose love again, that's the beauty of life.

[00:23:06] Ali Mortimer: We're human. We're here to have all of those feelings and have all of those experiences. I saw Inside Out this week and Joy said to Sadness, she said, where I go, you go. And I love that. It's if we want to feel the extent of joy and love, there's also going to be this equal and opposite depth of despair and sadness because, that is the price that we're going to pay, right?

[00:23:27] Ali Mortimer: It's just we need to allow ourselves. 

[00:23:29] Dimple Thakrar: It teaches you what joy really is, because if you didn't have sadness, you wouldn't know what joy was. So true. It'll be flat. It would be flat. There's no energy behind bold. You need, but it's, and I always say the contrast is so important.

[00:23:44] Dimple Thakrar: People forget that if you didn't have night, you couldn't appreciate the sunrise or the sunset, right? If you didn't have daytime, you couldn't appreciate the moonlight. It's so true. You wouldn't, it would always be the same. Yeah. 

[00:24:01] Ali Mortimer: There's no contrast. There's no contrast. It's a pleasure in the contrast.

[00:24:05] Ali Mortimer: And I remember one of the blog posts that I wrote through this period, I think it was on the back of reading one of Liz Gilbert's books. I can't remember, but I remember saying, gosh, in this dark time, in this darkness that I have been through, I have found the jewels. I found the diamonds and the rubies and the emeralds that have given me.

[00:24:22] Ali Mortimer: The light to create this magnificent life. As I said, we're sat here seven years on, we have an incredible relationship between the two of us. It's stronger than ever. Our sons are growing up. They're incredible men. We're so proud of them. We live in the most. Wonderful home.

[00:24:38] Ali Mortimer: We've completely renovated it where we've re recrafted our lives and it feels like magic. And I remember just thinking if someone, I said it would take a miracle, when everything happened and I lost everything, I said, it will take a miracle for me to love again and be happy again.

[00:24:55] Ali Mortimer: And a miracle happened very quickly, really. And they continue to happen because I trust and believe now having gone through all of this, the worst case scenario is that actually sometimes when unpleasant things happen, and when you go through the darkness, as sure as day, after the darkness comes the light, after a storm comes, the calm it's inevitable, but you've just have to find your way through the storm and through the darkness and you choose joy to help guide you.

[00:25:19] Ali Mortimer: Joy is the way, the truth and the light. That's my belief. 

[00:25:22] Dimple Thakrar: The miracle I believe came so quickly because you chose a high frequency, loveable. Loveable. You chose a high frequency, right? Yeah. Without knowing it. Without knowing intuitive calling. Let's put it this way. It what it, without your human knowing it, your spirit has always known the path.

[00:25:42] Dimple Thakrar: Yeah. And you allowed your human to step aside, for your spirit to guide the way. To show you. And that's the courageous piece right there. So there's a question that came up as you were speaking and that was, a lot of people, it takes a lot of courage to allow spirit to guide and you act on that.

[00:26:06] Dimple Thakrar: And the reason for the courage is because it often goes against the grain. So there's a, you mentioned it briefly that there was a lot of people that were like, Judging you and commenting on you going back to the marriage, and I'm sure there were things like you're worth more than that, Alia, and don't you realize that you shouldn't be treated like that, and all the.

[00:26:34] Dimple Thakrar: All of it. All the things that one would naturally expect others to respond and react. In love. They're trying to protect you. In love. 

[00:26:43] Ali Mortimer: So how did you navigate all of that?

[00:26:47] Ali Mortimer: Brutally, honestly, I just shut them out. Even if it was family? Even if it was friends? Yeah. Everyone. I just, I intuitively knew that I couldn't listen to the noise. Also like the noise in my head. I was just like, no, this is my life. Do you know that wonderful piece in the movie in the holiday and says, you are the leading lady of your life.

[00:27:11] Ali Mortimer: It's time for you to put her back in. Go back. Let's go right back to the beginning of where we were talking at the beginning of our conversation. It was like, at the point in this life, I was the last person on my list. I had been probably for about a decade. Maybe longer, I did, I followed, I did the A levels because my parents wanted me to do the A levels.

[00:27:28] Ali Mortimer: I went to the university because that's what I was meant to do. We moved to Yorkshire because that's what James's family thought we should do. We had the children, we did all of the things, and then I looked after the children and I put myself last. It was like, no, it's my turn. It's my turn and I'm not going to listen to any one of you because you are not going to be there on my deathbed.

[00:27:46] Ali Mortimer: And I, I was clearly shown in, in, in that period of my darkness when I was meditating, it was like, you are going to die as a 93 year old woman surrounded by your family. And they are the most important thing to you, and you are the most important person to you, and you are the only person who's going to be with you when you die.

[00:28:04] Ali Mortimer: You are your only person when you arrive you come into this world alone, but with you, and you die on this earth alone and with you. So it's I am going to make sure that I'm happy when I die, and that means I've got to do what's right for me. And I thought, you know what? It was a bold and a strong move because I could feel very alone in that period of time, but I was like, I've got me.

[00:28:28] Ali Mortimer: I've got my soul and I've got my spirit and to me they're very two different people. My soul was showing me what was going to happen when my spirit was guiding me. It was like the soul projected the vision of what was going to happen and my spirit said, and now you do this, and now you do this, and now you meditate, and now this.

[00:28:40] Ali Mortimer: And it was like I trusted them. I just really anchored back into me and that's how I did it. And I thought, do you know what, anybody who loves me for who I am will stay with me. And some people who don't agree with me or what I'm doing or how I'm doing it, then they are not meant to be for me or with me for the next part of my life.

[00:28:59] Ali Mortimer: They were for that last chapter and that last season and that's okay and I'm at peace with that. 

[00:29:04] Dimple Thakrar: Nice. 

[00:29:05] Ali Mortimer: Peace with that. 

[00:29:06] Dimple Thakrar: Nice. This is so helpful for people who are at this transition where things are difficult and they're choosing an option that may not be the most popular. option for others, right? And then, so the other question I have for you is a lot of my viewers are married and struggling their marriages.

[00:29:27] Dimple Thakrar: And so I want to ask you this question. At that point when you found out that he had a different life in London and you had the conversation that you were going to separate. Is that right? You weren't divorcing then, you were separate. Yeah, I went 

[00:29:43] Ali Mortimer: to the solicitors, everything. It was just like, my initial reaction was like, done.

[00:29:47] Ali Mortimer: So 

[00:29:49] Dimple Thakrar: what brought you round and what was the conversation like to say that you were separating? How did you know that, the process from you finding out that is having an affair, to you actually ending that marriage and restarting your new one. What was that process? Initially I 

[00:30:10] Ali Mortimer: was in 

[00:30:12] Dimple Thakrar: shock.

[00:30:12] Dimple Thakrar: What the conversation was like? 

[00:30:13] Ali Mortimer: What, how do you bring that up, it's interesting you ask that because I think for that very first few days, I don't actually have any memory. 

[00:30:20] Dimple Thakrar: Interesting. 

[00:30:21] Ali Mortimer: I don't really remember what happened. I just knew that it was, I went into myself, I gathered my boys and I shut everybody else out.

[00:30:29] Ali Mortimer: And I said, that's it. It's done. I did go to solicitors. I did go to go and find out what, how we could start the ball rolling. But my deepest thought was there is still going to be a relationship between the two of us because we have two sons and our sons love their dad. And it was, we are going to have, our lives are going to be together at some point.

[00:30:55] Ali Mortimer: So we need to be able to be in a room together and we need someone to help us do that. And we had the support and the help of an incredible marriage counselor who helped facilitate these conversations and she helped us speak. She helped us talk and she helped us through it. And what it helped me realize was very much that he was not a, he was not a villain.

[00:31:18] Ali Mortimer: He wasn't a bad person at all. He'd just done a very stupid, rebellious thing. We've been together since we were 19. He did something very hurtful, but he never meant to hurt me. He never really thought about it. He wasn't a villain. And also during that time, and I remember writing a blog post about it again, as well, was, I just saw myself as going back to this, I am the leading lady of my life.

[00:31:43] Ali Mortimer: And I am putting myself back up on my horse and I am not a victim of this situation. I'm going to ride myself out of here with my head held high and I'm going to do this. So everything was really about, we didn't stay together because of the children, but we stayed. communicating because we had two children who we wanted to grow into men.

[00:32:02] Ali Mortimer: And it was through those conversations with our marriage counselor and continued discussions outside of that, that it was like, our wellbeing and our emotions, both of us, we love each other. We've loved each other for very long time. The love never stopped. It was just a lot of hurt. So it was being able to work through a lot of those more uncomfortable feelings like anger, and grief, and pain, and sadness, and to be able to talk openly about that to each other and with someone so that we could find the love for our family, for our boys, whether that meant we were together or not.

[00:32:35] Ali Mortimer: At the time, initially, it was, we weren't going to be. But through that six months of those conversations, there was a recognition that we still loved each other. And he said to me, the first thing he said to me after it all came out was that he said,

[00:32:49] Ali Mortimer: I know you will never believe a word I say again, but I want to show you for the rest of my life that you mean more to me than anything. You and the boys are my life and I will spend the rest of my life making up to you, whether that's with we're together or whether we're apart. I hope you will honor me that.

[00:33:05] Ali Mortimer: And I honored him the opportunity to do that. And six months later, we went on a first date and I said yes.

[00:33:11] Ali Mortimer: It's, I think people are very quick just to respond in the anger. And I remember at the Abundant New Dimple, you put the Hawkins scale up. It's they make the decisions when they're at the bottom of the scale. And, oh, you'll make me cry. You have to allow yourself to work through and clear some of those emotions until you get to that kind of like neutrality point, and still you don't make the decision there.

[00:33:31] Ali Mortimer: You've got to get back up into that state of love, joy, peace, enlightenment. And when you're there, you ask, what's your truth here? And the truth was that I'd loved this man from the moment I saw him and he loved me. And something had happened. And I look back now and it gave us an incredible opportunity to make something even better.

[00:33:49] Ali Mortimer: But it had to break down. I pulled the Tower Tarot card today. And what does the Tower Tarot card mean? It means that you have to break it all down in order to build it back up. And that's how I chose to see it. Making me very emotional.

[00:34:03] Dimple Thakrar: And, as these tears rolled down my face, I realized how many times Many of us have had to break down in order to build. And then you reach a point you don't have to anymore. 

[00:34:17] Ali Mortimer: You don't make it mean anything, Dimple. That's one part I've, in understanding our line three, six, it's yes, we're here to break it down and build it back up.

[00:34:24] Ali Mortimer: But it's not always breaking it all back down, but it's in the taking down. We find something new that we want to keep in. It's just a reshaping of who we are already. It's it's all there. Breaking it down to build it back better, but in a slightly different way. And that's okay. It doesn't mean anything was wrong or anything was bad.

[00:34:41] Ali Mortimer: It was just that it wasn't, that's what, it wasn't, we're shifting and we're changing. We're humans. We're here to evolve. We're here to change. And it's okay. 

[00:34:50] Dimple Thakrar: It's when you're building a muscle. Like when you're literally building a muscle, you have to tear the muscle for it to build, right?

[00:35:00] Dimple Thakrar: And the heart muscle is no different. 

[00:35:02] Ali Mortimer: Yeah, I've got a very strong heart from all of the times it's been broken. 

[00:35:07] Dimple Thakrar: Yeah, and to build. I 

[00:35:10] Ali Mortimer: didn't want it to be my story, Dimple. I didn't want that to be my story. And you know what, whatever I chose, whether we chose to stay together or whether we chose to separate, I would have chosen an amazing story to write because it was my time.

[00:35:25] Dimple Thakrar: Oh, you've got me on, I've no tissues here today. Now I'm going to have a tissue box. Sorry. It's all right. I am happily crying tears. Tears 

[00:35:36] Ali Mortimer: of joy. 

[00:35:37] Dimple Thakrar: Joy, absolute joy and

[00:35:40] Dimple Thakrar: Deep knowingness that somebody out there is hearing this and they're meant to hear it in this moment. Yeah. And it will allow them to have the freedom to choose. It will allow them to have the freedom to decide either way. Yeah. We're just having that freedom, right? 

[00:35:58] Ali Mortimer: The quieter the mind, what do they say?

[00:36:00] Ali Mortimer: I can't remember who said it. Is it Tichenak Khan who said the quieter the mind, the more you will hear?

[00:36:06] Ali Mortimer: Yeah. 

[00:36:07] Dimple Thakrar: Wow, on that note, Ali, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a moving interview joyous and emotional as well, tearful as well. Yeah, as I knew it would be. Where can people find you, Ali Mortimer? Where can they find you? 

[00:36:26] Ali Mortimer: My favourite place to hang out is on Instagram. I'm on there every day talking about life, talking about joy, talking about my mission.

[00:36:36] Ali Mortimer: My mission is to ensure that no woman feels alone, or man. I don't want anyone to feel like they're alone when they are on their own sat under a tree. That there's always someone that you can reach out to. And speak to so that you don't feel like you're burdening your family or your friends or having to listen to what they think is right, but to have someone let you, what does someone to guide them to find and connect with their soul and their spirit, like we're in tune with that.

[00:37:03] Ali Mortimer: We can do that, but it's creating those spaces so that, the person that I was, did not have a clue about any of this. But having that space to explore it. So that's where they can find me. That's where I would love to meet people. Come and find me there. Come and say hi. What is your handle? I am at XO Alli Mortimer.

[00:37:25] Ali Mortimer: So A L I M O R T I M E R. But I think you'll put that in the show notes, won't you? 

[00:37:29] Dimple Thakrar: I will. I will for sure. So the final question that I ask all my guests, and I would love to ask you to Alli, is. If you could give somebody one piece of advice that goes beyond the words, what would that be?

[00:37:47] Ali Mortimer: It was something that I said this morning to someone. You don't have to see with your eyes, you feel it, you sense it, you close your eyes, you sit under a tree, and you allow yourself to see, to feel, to sense. You don't need to have it written in a book, you don't have to hear it from somebody else. It comes from in here.

[00:38:07] Ali Mortimer: I think it's everything that we've spoken about today. It's knowing your inner truth that goes beyond the words.

[00:38:13] Ali Mortimer: Go 

[00:38:13] Dimple Thakrar: inwards. That's profound advice. Go inwards. You don't need a book. You don't need somebody to tell you. And I say under a tree. Go inwards. Go inwards. Thank you. Oh, ladies and gentlemen. What an incredible interview today with Ali. Oh my word. She has made me laugh, cry, all the things and I'm sure she has for you as well.

[00:38:39] Dimple Thakrar: This incredible woman, please look in the show notes, check out her Instagram. If nothing else, you will get joy, a little sprinkle of joy every day from her stories. I love to follow the stories. Thank you. I want to actually say to everybody, Thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:38:56] Dimple Thakrar: Thank you so much for the time. Thank you. I hear back from so many of you how this podcast has really touched your hearts at the exact right moment and I really believe that. I believe you will hear this transmission, this message, through Ali, through myself. at the exact moment you're meant to hear it.

[00:39:18] Dimple Thakrar: And if that's the case for you, I want you to do a few things. I want you to subscribe. I want you to share. Why? Because if this is hitting your heart, it's likely to hit your people around you. And what an incredible gift that would be for them, because when it hits their heart, guess who we're going to remember?

[00:39:38] Ali Mortimer: You. 

[00:39:39] Dimple Thakrar: It's been a privilege and honour to serve you all. Thank you, Ali. From me, Dimple Thakra, God bless. Take care.