Lisa Greinert: My Wild and Mysterious Journey after Vomiting

This is a continuation of the previous episode. In this episode my goal is two-fold, share ways to get rid of the leftovers from secrets or unresolved trauma  still inside you and ensure you know, Who the Hell You Are.

Transcript

Lisa 0:00

Hello and welcome to the How to Write a Book from A to Z podcast. This is my second episode about why I started writing and going on this healing journey. So please make sure that you listened to the previous episode before to kind of give you some context about this. This isn't about what happened to me. It's about what I did in order to heal from some things that had happened in my past that I had still been holding onto inside my body for so long. I started writing, and then things methodically just started happening in my life. Like one thing at a time as if I was given time to process each of these before God, the universe opened up something else that I never expected, but has been just like wild and mysterious. If you know anything about Cajuns, Lagniappe is that little something extra, that little thing that you wanna give to others, share with others. Being from Louisiana, I thought I would actually name these things. I'm calling them Lisa's Lagniappe. Why am I sharing my Lagniappe? Because I know there are a lot of you out there that still are holding on to stuff. I have been spending time looking at what I have done to myself, not what anybody else has done to me, but what I have done to myself. One thing I know about my brain is once I am interested in something, it goes deep. Your brain, the way you think, what it goes through, you know, unresolved trauma, dysfunction, it's all in your body if you haven't gotten rid of it, it's stuck somewhere. It's hiding somewhere. That feeling of tenseness and stress that you have in your neck and your back, or the headaches, it's unresolved crap that you haven't dealt with. I love that there's so much more research going into the fact that what you're thinking, where you spend your thoughts, affects everything in your body and if you don't vomit it out, then it buries itself somewhere to just become this sticky hardness or this stress that keeps your body in this pattern of tightness. So there you go. That's why I'm doing this, because that's what happened to me. I see it. I feel it. I know it. So maybe one of these things might help you to vomit it out like I'm doing. My number one, Lisa's Lagniappe is called the Power of Ceremony. Okay. The idea of needing a ceremony hit me one day and I had read about this ayahuasca therapy, it seemed perfect for me. I would be able to physically throw up what it was that was still stuck inside my body. The whole concept of ceremony is doing something physical in order to deal with something mental. So to me, it made a lot of sense as to why I felt like ceremony would do something for me. It would take that mental stuff that I had turned into physical stuff inside my body and just pull up all that junk. And with Ayahuasca therapy, you're just throwing it all out your mouth and every other part of your body. And the beauty of it is that holding on to something for 50 years I could release in a quick weekend. Easy peasy. Why wouldn't I wanna do that? So I contact a gentleman, in Costa Rica I'm not sure what they're called, the guys that are over this therapy and he asked about my medical history and when I mentioned that I had had brain surgery, he was like, yeah, probably not a good idea. Just a little bit too much stress, you know, in a short period of time on the body. So that did not come to fruition. So I had to think about other types of ceremony, and I knew that they would come to me when the time was right. This obviously wasn't it. Part of what had been causing so much stress inside of me was that I had still not even shared some things with my husband, Randy, and we'd been together over 30 years. It was time for me to talk to him and tell him things, the stuff that was stuck inside, he handled it beautifully. But that's really kind of it, right? We don't tell people our secrets because we don't know what they're going to do, how they're going to react to us. I tell him that I need ceremony, but I don't know when. I just know that I'll know when it's time. We're in Michigan. In the summer, absolutely amazing. We were in the upper peninsula with the Yoopers. I don't know how to say it, but a beautiful area. We'd gotten a cabin on a small lake. One day we were sitting out there and I told Randy, I'm going to have a ceremony right now. I need you to go away again. Gotta do it by myself. But you know, be close. And I want you to tape this. So I spent some time releasing what needed to be released, and there was a dock, one of those metal docks that when you walk on, you know, you're hearing it across the little lake. So I decide that I'm going to run down this short dock and I'm going to jump in this lake as my ceremony. It's nice day, sunny, it's warm. So I know it's not gonna be too cold. As I'm running, I jump, go under, and I open my eyes. I'm just kind of floating underneath the water and just giving it to God. I'm under the water and I'm saying I can't carry this any longer. It's a few seconds, can't hold my breath very long. I don't know how long I was under and my head pops up and it's raining. It's raining within seconds. It is raining. I look at Randy, and you can see on my video, I'm like looking stunned. I mean these things. Someone was telling me there's a book called Signs that I need to read, sounds like it's about what happened to me. All I've done honestly is open up and released. Connected to God, and these things just are happening to me that are wild and mysterious. I felt this spirit inside of me. That was now telling me what I needed to do. Although as I look back, that spirit had been talking to me my entire life. I just wasn't listening. A while later I do a ceremony for my parents because I'm sure we all have stuff from them, you know, from us. I'm sure our kids have stuff from us. It's the way of the world, right? You try to do the, the least harm. When you think you're doing good, sometimes that's the harmful thing. We do the best we can for the love of our kids, but it was years of resentment and anger that I needed to get over that. I just, I was very critical. I've been a very critical person throughout my life. Something I'm not proud of, but I, had a ceremony with our sons and my husband, and I said goodbye to my parents. My parents had passed away several years before and my whole family had had a ceremony, which is another story. I still had these small urns that we had each been given, and I felt like I was meant to keep those for years for the appropriate time. To be able to bury those and just stop the ugliness because it's unfair to parents to just see the ugly, there was a lot of good, but I think it's easy as humans to focus on the negative or it was for me. And that was not helping my soul. I'm good. I don't have those feelings. Not to say that I'm perfect and I never do, but not to the extent and the Intenseness of the anger and resentment that I had, it's gone. I love them. My brothers and sister, we've all turned out great. The beautiful thing is what our parents gave us is a sense of humor. There is no way that you can make it through this world without laughing at yourself and laughing at the things that happen. God brought us that there's so much joy in this world. That's the way I've always chosen to live. I still saw the goodness in people. The goodness of the world. There's, you look around, you walk out every day. Look at what God has blessed us with every tree, every piece of grass, and it's all providing us the air that we need to breathe. I mean, if that's not a miracle, I can't imagine it's just science that did it. Lisa's Lagniappe Number two, the Power of Strangers. Randy has called me the Welcome Wagon because I always talk to people because it's so fascinating. People are interesting. I don't know if I did it for them, did it for me, all I know is that for years, there are times where it's like I know that I'm supposed to speak to that person. I trust my gut and it's always an incredible story. Never once has anyone ever been anything but kind to me, and we're talking hundreds, maybe thousands of people throughout my life. I am trusting that feeling inside of me. That feeling that somehow connects us. It means something. My first story about meeting strangers is i'm driving down the street. I just saw a guy walking down the sidewalk on a busy street, and I turned around and I went straight to a store by where he was, went inside and got him some food and walked out and he was hanging out in that area. And when I got closer to him, I realized that he had been burned over his entire body. I couldn't see this while I was driving, so we talked and he told me his story. He shared that he had been heavily addicted to drugs and was partying around a campfire with some friends when he decided to jump in the middle of the fire. I don't know if I was there for encouragement? I just really don't know. All I know was that he was so appreciative and I, I don't know what it meant. I just know that I was meant to be there at that moment and we said a little prayer and he went his way and I went mine. Another incident along the same vein was several years ago. Randy and I were driving down a, a road there's a median in the middle of the road. It's four lane, I see a car parked on the side of the road facing the opposite direction of us. And immediately I just said, Randy, we need to go help them. There was no reason. There was nothing that I can think of that I saw that made me feel that way. I didn't even know if there was anybody in the car you couldn't see it. So, you know, Randy's like, okay. So we turn around and he pulls up behind the car and I walk up to the passenger seat, and there's a woman passed out at the steering wheel and I knock on the window and she is very heavily medicated. She rolls down the window, struggling to do this, and I look inside and I look down and there's a purse and I see a bottle of prescription pills in there and it's obvious that she's under the influence. And to make a long story short, I end up driving her home in her car she's pretty lucid by now because she lives a lot farther than she originally told us. and she is like, you are an angel. What can I do? And well, I don't know. I'm like, I don't even know why I am doing this. All I say to her is, do it for someone else one day. And I get out of the car and and I don't know what ever happened to her. I don't know what happened. All I know is I was supposed to be there for that moment, and I guess that's why those feelings that we have, you know, we should trust them and follow them because if it feels right, maybe that's the spirit telling us that's what we need to do. All I know is it's weird. The next two strangers that come into my life come within pretty much the same time period, but two totally separate situations. The first one is Randy and I are walking down the street one day, beautiful day, we round a corner and there is a gentleman standing in the middle of the road and. Again, being someone who can't not say anything, I say something to him. We start talking and then this woman gets out of a car and comes up to us and the four of us talked for probably 45 minutes in the middle of the road and we form this instant bond. And then on another occasion I am with my wonderful daughter-in-law. We're taking a calligraphy class, and this woman walks in the door. She signs in, looks up, looks right at our table, comes straight to us and sits down with us and. We became wonderful friends, but what happens with the two of them is what's really interesting, again, they have never met two different women. I end up within the second meeting telling them my life story, honest. I'm open with both of them. I hadn't been open with anybody in my life before about the things that I'd gone through, and at the same time, both of them do the same with me. It's almost like this beautiful ability to get things out without fear of judgment because. I didn't know them that well. I knew I had this strange instant bond with both of them, and they obviously had the same thing with me. But telling strangers, it's like you don't have to worry about what they think because it isn't like you have to see'em ever again. They don't have to see you again. So it, it was just like they were just there at the right moment. I could have met either one of them at any point in my life, but it was very specific and that's what gets me is the specificity of some of the things that happen, like they're meant to happen right at that moment. So there's no doubt in my mind that each of them were placed in my life. Interestingly enough, they're both professors. One cultural anthropology and one counseling. So I'd say the fact that I'm a huge believer in the role that culture plays in our lives and obviously I need some kind of counseling. I don't see her professionally, but we do have some very fascinating true conversations. i'm really unsure why I have never sought professional counseling. I feel this is a journey that i'm being led through, and it just hasn't been something that I've felt a desire to do. I feel like being open, I'm just finding a variety of ways and being healed in different areas in those different ways. And one last stranger's story that I feel like I need to share is kind of humorous, because I've heard plenty of times that I need to be a little bit more discerning with what I do, and this might be one of them. I am in downtown Austin and if you've ever been there, like in many big cities, finding parking is a nightmare. I'm meeting a friend at this wonderful bar called the Roosevelt Room, and I find a parking lot right across the street, but I have a very strong disability, and that disability is directional impairment. I have no concept of direction. It's, it's ludicrous, honestly. So, you know, I, I'm in the parking lot. I have to take a picture of what level I'm on because yes, I've been lost and not able to find even my parking lot in the past. So I'm learning tricks. I come down the stairs and I'm totally discombobulated and there are these young teenagers kind of off to the side of the stairs from where I am, maybe five feet away. Every color, size, shape, there's five of them. Most people would probably be a little concerned if you saw them. But being the fact that that's what I've done all my life is work with teens and adults making silly, stupid decisions instead of continuing to be lost, I walk to them and they all look at me like stunned. Like, why is this white lady coming up to us and you could kind of tell that they're like more dumbfounded, just kind of wanting to know what the heck. So I walk up to'em. I pretty much stand in the middle of'em and I look at them. I'm like, guys, I don't know where I'm at. And I'm trying to find the Roosevelt room and these, probably what we would describe as hoodlums are like, oh, yes ma'am. Did you hear me? Yes ma'am. We know where it is. So they're like talking, all happy. There is a smell of weed in the air and they're like, it's actually, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I am like, guys, thank you so much again, yes ma'am. And I'm like, have a great day. I should have said something I typically say make good choices, but I didn't throw that one in and they just, it was, it was just a great experience. As I thought about it, their response to me is exactly what I feel like I'm talking about. They were trusting their gut. They didn't feel like they needed to be defensive. They felt goodness, honesty from me. Hey, and if that's how I go is by kindness talking to strangers. I, I, I think I'm okay with that. Lisa's LANAP number three, use your eyes and ears and all the other senses when you need'em. Instead of scrolling, how about a podcast or read? Because these two things have been life changing for me. I cannot begin to tell you how excruciatingly painful it is to learn new technology, but something told me that I needed to start this podcast, and it's been more about learning people's journey while also going through my own healing journey. But I did it. The advertising that Nike did for Just Do It is probably the most brilliant advertising ever because that's all I can say about me. I wanted to invest in me, so I, that's part of why I am doing this. So do something for yourself. And through listening to podcasts about people's stories or reading all the amazing literature out there, you're growing. When you're just scrolling. You're not growing. We're not meant to be stagnant. We're meant to grow and creating this in my sixties, although excruciatingly horribly painful, i'm just proud of myself. So you too can do what you feel like you need to, to get your story out. Writing, telling, or just going through the healing journey. One of my very favorite podcasts is Diary of a CEO with Steve Bartlett. I just finished the one with Tony Robbins, and I would suggest to anyone who knows who Tony Robbins is to listen because you are not going to believe his story. I also am a Joe Rogan fan. Not as much now, but a lot of his previous seasons. When I learned how to do a podcast, I went back to Joe Rogan's very first episodes and it's really enjoyable to see how far he's come. It gave me hope that mine will get better and better as time goes on. Two interesting books that I learned a lot about myself by reading is The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel VanDerKolk. Some of you may have heard of him. He actually worked with Oprah on this book, and the second was the popular Mel Robbins Let Them. Last year we had a amazing trip to Amsterdam with a group of friends, about 30 of us, and on the way back, we had this long wait in the airport, and I love airport bookstores. The moment I walked in, I saw this book and it was like, I'm meant to read this. It's a book called Cured The Power of Our Immune System In the Mind Body Connection by Dr. Jeff Rediger. I pretty much didn't sleep on that plane because I read 300 pages of this book because it was incredible how it opened up my mind to what I'd been doing. At one point he talks about fight or flight and how it's meant to be used in certain situations, typically dangerous situations. I saw the words, I realized that it was me. He talks about people living in fight or flight. I was excellent at both of them. If I stayed and fought. It wasn't pretty because I didn't know how to, but usually I just chose the flight just to run. That was all I knew how to do, and that's what I did. While most people use it for certain situations, I lived my entire life in that mode. That's what was causing so much of my stress I was in that constant state of thinking I needed to fight or flight. What is interesting is I knew I had something like it I called it my on and off switch. I could just turn on and off everything very easily, it was protecting myself from situations. It makes sense that I have arthritis in my neck from constantly being in stress mode. My on and off switch was my inability to work through hard stuff. I just buried it, so much easier. My switch was one of my most valuable assets because I knew when I needed to run, when I needed to leave. I left just about every single relationship I'd ever been in when it got hard because I had never been taught. I didn't know how to handle tough times. You just leave, you disappear. Whether it's inward or outward. Either way, I could do either one, but typically I just left. Maybe it was good. I mean, I guess in the end I am with the one person who I won't leave, not that I didn't threaten at the beginning when it got hard. The final Lisa's Lagniappe, who the hell are you? I'm saving the best for last because one of my favorite sayings, again, I worked with people all my life. It's that saying, if you think you're crazy, you're not. You know, if you have the ability to know you're not crazy, then you're not crazy. So I would question myself every once in a while. I meant, so obviously I'm not crazy because I'm questioning myself. So I'm at the library with two friends that we had formed a critique group as we were writing our stories. And at our small Georgetown public library, we had little booths that you sat in, like old cafes. Lovely, vinyl booths. These two women also went through my journey with me. We met on a regular basis talking about our stories, and we were open and honest. Even though we look at the political scene in totally opposite ways, that stuff doesn't matter. Stop it. We were able to talk about truth and honesty, and that's all we all need is to accept each other despite differences, because in the end. We all bleed red. So back to sitting in the shiny booth in the library, we were talking about our books when a, a lady around our age pops her head over and looks at us and says, are y'all writers? And we're like, yes. And she said, well, I wrote a book. So the next thing you know, we're all talking and we get her contact information and I find out that she is teaching these water classes in this 55 and over community that I live in. So the next week I show up for her class and we're talking. I have no idea why she tells me this in one of her very first sentences to me, but she looks at me and she's like, I have ADD. And I'm like, oh, okay. All right. Not sure why you felt like you tell everybody this the first thing. I need to make sure you know this. I was a special education teacher in middle school. I headed our special education department for a while as an administrator. I was over a very large special education department in a high school. I loved it. I love working with people. Challenges in every way, physical and mental. So something tells me to take a test on A DHD. So I'm, again, I know what this is. I worked with students for years with it. Never once in my life did I ever believe that had anything to do with me. You know, it's that whole, if you think you're crazy your not, well, if you don't even think about a DHD, maybe you have it. So same concept. So I come home, I find the first test online, there's 18 questions. So I take the test and it's like, you've won the golden Prize out of 18 questions, 17 of them were me, I was like, what the heck? So I go to Randy and I'm like, Hey, I need you to take this test, but I want you to take it as if you are me through my eyes, how you see me? So he's like, sure, I'll play. 15 minutes to later, whatever, he comes back and he's like, well, 17. 18 are you And I'm like about to faint. I'm like, oh my gosh, how is this even possible? How can I be in my sixties, have been a specialist on A DHD, but never ever thought that that was me, it was crazy. It was, it was wild. And I've been on this rollercoaster since she told me probably six months ago, but wow. It answers so many questions. So many questions. Why didn't I know this? Why are we not teaching our young people about being self-aware? I don't understand. It's not about taking all these hard courses. It's about knowing ourselves and teaching the life skills. We probably all have a DHD at this point with social media. I think that there's definitely something there. What sets mine apart is I see it in childhood. And boy, here we go. Early signs. I made a list. Bored easily, creative, always doing, always curious. Ferocious appetite for new and different experiences. Talks too much, always want to improve or change something. I can be easily distracted. I can forget to eat. Jump in and outta relationships with friends boyfriends. I'm constantly seeking. I'm curious. I just have a ferocious appetite for different experiences. So there you go. That was all the signs that had been there from the beginning. I didn't know how my mind or why my mind. Did it the way it did it. I never thought about it. It just did. Of course I would love to have known it. Maybe I could have handled it and, and toned it down a little bit for the people around me and for the mind that never stops going. I think that's the biggest piece that people with A DHD probably struggle with is a mind that never stops. I have created and invented more things than you will ever imagine. But do I remember it? No, because it's like your mind is like this. It's like it's flipping through, learning, seeking, gathering the knowledge, and then it's like, okay, something else gets my attention and I'm going that way. I know I'm only at the tip of the iceberg and learning about A DHD and the role it plays in my life, but hey, at least now I know and I can do something about it. And that's what this is about self-awareness and getting it out. What I want for you, is what I found out about myself, that your life will be so much easier and calmer. Do what you need to do. Find what you need. It's just start healing. If you don't know where to start, start, like I did, just start writing or that spirit inside of you, when it talks, listen, it will tell you what you need and when you need it. If you have any interest in contacting me about this episode to share anything, I would love to hear from you. If you go into the description part of this podcast, right below it, it says, send us a text and I will get your information. I would love to hear whatever you'd like to share. Thank you once again for listening. Go take care of yourself.