SHIFT Final episode (for now)

The Greatest Hits: Key Insights from Three Years of Transformative Episodes

In this special episode of 'Shift is Happening,'  Sheila Wenger reflects on the last few years  of podcasting and summarizes the most impactful episodes. Sheila distills essential concepts and shares practical applications to help listeners benefit from her previous content. This podcast encourages you to dedicate a week to applying each concept, aiming to create noticeable life improvements. Sheila shares her personal journey, insights into therapeutic practices, and emphasizes the importance of facing vulnerabilities, understanding subconscious beliefs, and practicing self-love. The episode serves as a guide to making transformative changes in various aspects of life.

Transcript

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 Hey everybody. Welcome back. A Shift is happening. I'm Sheila Winger, your host, and I am thrilled to be back with you. This episode is going to be a summation of the most important and impactful episodes I've done before. And what I wanna do for you is distill them into the most potent content and the most practical applications of that content so that you have something to not just listen to, but take with you and apply it.

And my suggestion would be that you apply each one of these for about a week. So I'm gonna summarize the important points of each of the most impactful episodes, and I want you to focus on one of those concepts for one week. All of them if applied, should impact your life in a noticeable way, and they all take effort.

So. I was reflecting on, you know, the time that I've been doing this podcast, it's been about three years now, if I, something like that. And when I first started, I was just waking up in the middle of the night. With content pouring out of me running to my office to record it, because I just had to share what was transforming my life so dramatically.

That has never stopped. But what has changed is my life has filled up with, um, a full thriving practice now, which is so deeply fulfilling that this, I still love doing it, but it, it doesn't wake me up in the same way my, my clients wake me up. I'm thinking about the, the transformations that they've made and that has filled such a vast part of the space and time and passion in my life that it's been a little harder to find time, uh, to do this.

But I still care about it and I want to, I want it to impact. I think what I've been noticing in, in my own process is I'm very clear on my purpose and I can see what it's doing and I can see what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. It's very clear. I need to see and know the transformational impact.

And in my practice, I see that every single day When I come here, one of the challenges is I don't see what happens as a result, and so I want to increase the impact by framing it in this way. I'm gonna recap the super important concepts, make them practical and distill them into how to use this now, so that you will use that for a week.

And then the next one, take that on next week. They'll all compound and compliment each other, but unless and until you apply them, it won't be worth listening to. If you're only listening to it. It's just like. What happens in therapy if it only happens as an intellectual understanding, it doesn't do you much good at all.

A tiny bit of good 'cause Then you can say, okay, I know that I'm triggered and I have to do what I do and I'm triggered. It just doesn't deeply change the entire self because it didn't get into the subconscious level. And so with this, unless and until you apply it into action and choices that only then and only then will it change your consciousness pattern.

So here I go. Let's just jump right in. I'm gonna start with episode four actually, because the first three are a lot of background and explaining what the podcast is about. But episode, episode four, I give you your first assignment. That episode and that assignment is about a twofold skillset that we all need to develop.

And they seem contradictory because most things in life that are true are paradoxical. So the assignment was to. Train us all. We, we need this skill to no matter how we are feeling, be able to get to good. Now, this is not avoidance or denial or distraction, and I'm gonna talk about that, but there are times in life where we only have 20 minutes before we have to be somewhere and functioning.

So we have to have the skill of, if I'm not good, I've gotta set the tone of my day to get to good before I start that day, because it changes everything if I do that. So that's the first skill. So the assignment that I gave you back then was to have a ritual that you do every single day, preferably in the morning, that gives you joy, that raises your energy, that raises your frequency and increases your aliveness.

It's such an important episode because most of us walking around, if we are influenced by the world at all, which we all are, most people are in a joy deficit. We are finding, if we're identifying with things out in the world, diminishing returns, all of us are feeling that. And so if that's where our focus is, it's only going to diminish further.

That's not gonna work. And also we have to have a ritual that returns us to our power that we do have. And so I recommended the shower with, um, a playlist that you make for yourself that of songs that light you up. And this is a living playlist that you'll find if you do this, that you outgrow songs and then they just don't resonate anymore.

Because why? Because you're evolving and changing now you need new songs. So it's a living, growing playlist, but. The filter is songs that light you up, whether musically, lyrically, or whatever. And listen to them in your shower every morning before you get ready for work and then dance. And the other O option or the other, um, point was to feel the music and let it affect you because a lot of people start thinking in their shower.

They think about their day. I don't want you to do that. You're gonna do that all day long. And most people are addicted to thinking and actually thinking has taken over their whole self. Just ask RJ Spina about that. Thinking is not our highest level of consciousness. It thinking is our servant. But if it's using you when you don't want it to, it's another powerful reason for this ritual.

Don't think, feel. And let that music move you and then turn the shower cold at the end. So more rejuvenation, more aliveness, more tingly skin. Get out, keep that music going. Lotion yourself dance while you're putting your underwear on and have some beauty and joy and aliveness and power before you start your day.

There is literally a difference in frequency to where if you start your day down here not feeling particularly good, it's a low level of frequency. If you don't find a way to rise out of it, you'll believe things that come out of your mouth that are kind of ugly and actually not true, but you will believe them.

And we have the ability in us to raise up and all of a sudden when we do after that shower, we're like, oh, no big deal. The whole situation looks different because you're not on the same wavelength anymore. So it's a very powerful ritual. Now, the thing that I said that it's really close to is another truth.

We have to be able to. When we know that we need to shift, find a way we can shift, but that is not denial, avoidance or distraction from how we really feel. Because the other complimentary skill we must have is when we are not good, do inner inventory and let those feelings move through us when we can.

We can't always do that when we have to get going, but when we can, we need to pay attention to what is going on. If we're having a negative feeling, there's nothing wrong with negative feelings. They're doing something to us that needs to happen to us. So we need the complimentary skill of letting those transform us.

I'll give you just a couple of examples. If you feel a negative feeling of anger, you have to look for what feels not right or not fair. Something. When you feel anger, it's telling you something's not fair. The way someone treated you did not make you feel good, and you must address it. Okay? So to make it fair, you either.

Say to the person, wow, I, I had some feelings about what you asked of me, and I just wanna make sure you know, is there something going on? Are you frustrated with me? Either clarify it or just make it fair. If someone has violated you and you can't control them, you can make it fair to yourself by treating yourself the way you should be treated.

That's what the gift of anger is. If you make it fair, then you're teaching yourself how to be treated and you're stating to the world, that's how I need to be treated. And then you feel all better because you make it fair. I'll give you another one. Shame is a very terrible negative feeling that we need to feel when we feel it.

Okay? So shame is, oh my gosh, I did something. I don't know how I could have been the person who did that. I don't know how I did the thing that hurt this other person or created this mess. And the reason we do things like that, there are always one reason we are unconscious. When we go unconscious, when we become our conditioning, we do things that later we realize, oh my gosh, that had an impact I never intended to make.

How could this have happened? It happened because you went unconscious. That's okay. But the shame is there for two reasons. One, to make you realize the impact of going unconscious and to make you realize, oh, I'm capable under certain circumstances to be a real jerk and to do real damage that makes us be more conscious, which it's, it's evolving us.

The second thing about it is it makes us repair. If we do something shameful because we went unconscious, it causes us to do some work to find out why and how that happens. A tone for what we did. Repair the damage, apologize and tell that person or situation that you have learned from this, you know what to watch for now and you know how to try to prevent yourself from ever doing it again.

That repairs, okay, that's, those are just two examples, but these two complimentary skills are one, how do we raise our frequency when we need to, and second, when we've got time and we need to make it a priority that if we have negative feelings, we have to let them move through us and do what they're supposed to do for us.

Okay, so that was your first assignment, episode four. Okay. So episode five was the power our of our beliefs, and how to eradicate a limiting belief. This is an incredibly impactful episode and point. It might be the most important one you take from today, and that is our beliefs control 95% of our behavior.

And those beliefs live in our subconscious. I can prove it to you. Ev every single human being has had the experience of knowing what they wanna do, why they wanna do it, and how to do it. And they do not do it. They cannot get themselves even when all of them want to, to do it. That's the subconscious protecting them from something they're afraid of inside.

So it won't let us do it. It is not our fault. We are not inadequate. We don't suck. We all have this, our subconscious runs us until and unless we do something directly powerfully about it. Okay? Whew. I get too fired up about this. So if it's running 95% of your behavior, it's doing it to protect you because something you experienced in your past was too painful and it decided it's not gonna let you feel that way anymore.

So it's gonna protect you, but then decades pass with this belief running. There are some good things that happen with this protective belief. It does build some survival skills that you need when you're young, but once those survival skills are built now, it becomes a hindrance. Now it's preventing you from falling in love and giving, being vulnerable enough to create a good relationship, or it's preventing you from doing the work you know you need to do because you're afraid inside that it won't go well and you'll find out you're a failure because of that old belief that made you feel like you are a failure when you were four years old and now you're not doing the work and it's going to self-fulfilling, prophecy you into failing.

It is not that you are a failure, it's that this belief is running 95% of your behavior. We all need to know this because there is a paradigm shift that needs to happen because when we know this and we find ways to go directly into the subconscious and heal it. We all evolve faster and this can actually be quite fast.

My entire practice is built upon it. So one of my resounding points in this ongoing podcast has been the power of hypnosis is an untapped well of dramatically faster healing. And I've proven that over and over in my office to myself, which is why I can't stop talking about it. Ask my family everywhere I go.

I just can't stop talking about it. Because I was in talk therapy for 14 years with a very good therapist, really, like she's probably, she's out, she's the best. But still, there were moments of upgrade for sure, but it didn't take the feeling away that had been with me for so long. And so hypnosis. Is what gets directly into where it lives in your subconscious and heals that belief.

And if you have been hearing me say this over and over and have not tried it, it is time you can, you can observe that there's something running you. Why does the same thing keep happening? It doesn't happen because of circumstances outside of you. It just feels like the same thing keeps happening. It's living inside of you.

It needs healing. It is trying to protect you, but it's run out of protection now. It's just doing harm. It's preventing you from being a full fledged, full power, alive, courageous human being. So this needs to start to become common language. A belief in our subconscious runs 95% of our behavior. Until we eradicate that belief, we're gonna go round and round the merry-go-round in a repetitive, exhausting way that makes us feel powerless and eventually depressed, if not worse.

Okay. Pretty quick summary of that one. Um, actually for practical applications of that, look for your pattern and then look for what in my upbringing made me feel like this. Okay. Um, common ones that I find in people are, I'm not good enough. That comes from not getting our nurturing and love enough. And, you know, empowerment when we're little, we like we're supposed to be something else other than what we are.

We don't believe we're enough. That's a big one. Another is I have to do all the things that comes from households where there was a lot of chaos and your only job became, how do I make this better? Now you're the person that everywhere you go, you're the most competent and you just keep finding that, dammit, nobody else quite gets it done like I do.

And you are contributing to that unconsciously. Um, those are two big ones there. There are many more, but, alright, let's move on. Episode six. Shout out to my client Bethany, who had a big impact on the audience because her story was dramatic and she exemplifies how eradicating a limiting belief completely changes your life.

She lived life feeling like she had a mom wound. She had to cut off her parents in order to have a healthy life. But going through life from a young age without parents who exist out there somewhere creates a big hole. And she overcame that hole by doing age regression. And she speaks her story on that.

And I, I love Bethany. She is still flying high. She's writing her book, she's doing speaking engagements. She hasn't stopped. Um, love her. And you guys loved her too. Okay. Oh, episode seven, A new way to think about unconditional love. There was one. Very important point for parents, especially here, and it's a painful one to look at.

I had to look at it and it, it hurt badly. If we don't have something, we can't give it away. I use the example of an EpiPen. If I've got someone in Phylaxis and I don't have an EpiPen, all I want is to have an EpiPen and I wonder, why don't I have one? And if I don't have one, I cannot help them. It's the same thing with unconditional love.

We can't give what we don't have, so we can't give it to our children if we don't have it for ourselves, within ourselves. The point on this is we can sacrifice, we can do all the things. We can make the meals we can, but if we don't unconditionally love ourselves or have, if we've not been unconditionally loved ourselves, we've got an edge that they are feeling.

We can't give. It's a law of physics. We cannot give something that is not in our own hand to give all that. To say that the most important job of parenting is to do your own inner work, our own inner work. If you don't feel yet that your children are raising you, that's your next level of awareness, because that's what they're all doing.

They're changing us into being the people that are worthy of being their parents. It's brutal, but it's true. So, um, if your children are triggering you like-minded, um, look for the ways that you are missing things you had. We resent our kids when they. Have things we didn't and take 'em for granted, but it's not their fault we gave them to, we gave them those things.

So we tend, parents tend to swing the pendulum and be everything we didn't want our parents to do, and then we swing the pendulum too far. Our kids take that for granted and then we feel like they're all entitled and how can they even not appreciate that when I have this and they don't know anything different.

So we have to heal what we didn't get in order to not resent them and to balance it out and not maybe give them so much. So parenting is the number one thing. And this I'm speaking with my parent coach hat here is the number one thing for parents to do to, to better their relationship with their kids is their own inner work first.

Everything else will come secondarily because once we feel healed and well and worthy and. Deserving of good things, then we feel that they are too. I'm skipping to episode 10, the paradigm shift that will Change your life. This, in episode 15 are two of my top three episodes, and this one's a doozy, but if you wanna start back over listening to these or if you're just now coming to my podcast, episode 10 is one of my favorites.

The paradigm shift is that we are all in an inner journey. We're on an interior journey of transformation. That's the number one thing we're doing here. It's the point of being here and the hard part about being a human is there's all this stuff on the outside that we have no choice but to deal with.

Like, how do we maintain a home? How do we even. Get ourselves a home. How do we maintain a home? How do we have enough income to survive? All of those things on the outside, how do we gather people that we love and wanna be surrounded by? We can't just pretend that's not happening. It's definitely happening.

It requires a whole bunch of your attention and time and energy. I understand that. But all of it is for the inner journey. The inner transformational journey. So if you think about the outside as a mirror reflecting, what you need to look at it is doing that. So when life is difficult, you have to go inside and find out, why is this, why is this so difficult?

How is it making me feel? What do I do with that feeling? That is what needs your attention more than anything. And then once that's. Work is done, the outside starts to change because you don't keep repeating the same pattern and then getting the same experiences on the outside, over and over again. You change the pattern inside, you get a different reflection back.

So the most important thing about this concept is that our feelings are our inner guidance system. They are telling us what we need to know and what we need to work on and what we need to learn and figure out and heal. But most people distract and distract themselves from and avoid difficult emotions.

So they don't even get to do the inner journey. And if we deny what we're here for, we get the downward spiral of, since that's what we're here for, life has to wake us up in some way to our whole point of being here. And that's never pretty. It's always. We go unconscious because we're denying, and when we do unconscious things, bad things happen.

Oh gosh, how did I send that email that made everybody mad at me? Oh gosh. I guess I had this feeling I wasn't dealing with and it came through my email. It always comes through sideways. If we don't deal with it head on, because life is saying it's not going away, it doesn't go away. This is an inner journey.

This is what you're here for, and if you don't look at it and work on it, I'm going to make you and it won't be as good as if you do it yourself. So it a, a way that I'd love to think about this is that when, that, since that's true, you're going to do the things, you're going to go to work, you're going to decide to have children if you want to, and you're gonna raise those children if you want to.

All of those are going to challenge you. But when they do, if you look at that as, okay, here's my moment, here's the moment where I'm supposed to do the inner work because I'm really upset. What do I need to learn? What do I need to, why is it making me upset? I have to do the inner work. When we think about it that way, everything really becomes an opportunity.

It truly does become an opportunity unless you choose not to see it that way. But if we choose not to see it that way, we're going on the downward spiral. It's gonna show us that way, one way or the other by hurting us or someone else. So it makes it very simple. This inside out concept, you do the inner work, the outside changes.

Um, it kind of gives you a vision that, you know, wherever I go, no matter who I encounter, no matter what I'm doing, I really always only ever have one job, get myself optimal for whatever the situation needs me to serve. When it's simple, like I love simplicity, I love profound truth. That becomes simple.

It's, it's my favorite thing. It is very simple. All right. When I'm going to the high school reunion, how do I walk in there and get myself to good so that I can be, what makes things flow? What makes the situation better? No matter who I encounter, no matter who I remember or forget, no matter how I feel in my dress, whatever it is, that's always only ever our job going to my first day of work.

Alright? How do I get myself as good as I can be for that first day of work so I can optimal only perform? It's always internal. So even when you encounter a difficult person, that's an opportunity to go to honor your own feelings, say what you feel, speak your truth, and move the the, um. Encounter forward in a positive way.

And that's, that's making you hone the skills of creating the best encounters everywhere you go. And if it, when it doesn't go well, then you got more, more awareness work to do. But it's always the same thing. I really believe that making that paradigm shift when you take your, when we take our, um, thought and our attention off of the outcome, off of the results, and onto what can I gain?

What can I learn? What can I become from this? Um, A, we grow faster. B, we accept difficulty without resisting it, which takes longer. Um, so we learn faster, we grow faster, and our life beautifies faster. Just a reminder that what I'm going through today is a summary of my audio episodes of my podcast Shift is happening, and I'm going through the most impactful episodes and distilling them down to the most important truth and practical applications for your life.

Um, just an update on episode 11, Ryan Reber, who lost 75 pounds, uh, about a year and a half or two years ago, uh, he is still down, hasn't put a pound of that back. And the paradigm shifted for him when we did age regression to the childhood issue that put the need to become big in his subconscious. That's what happened.

We got to it there. That is what unlocked him. And he just, just started losing and never stopped losing and never gained a pound back. All of you who's who've ever had an issue with weight loss and trying to do that knows how hard it can be and how up and down it can go, but when you get to the limiting belief, that started the whole thing, uh, and you eradicate that.

That is a very effective way to go about it, that is long-term and permanent and lasting. Next episode, episode 12 was about how to change a relationship dynamic all by yourself. This is one of my favorite things to do if I have a client and they came to me with a relationship issue, but I'm not gonna see their partner.

Sometimes they bring them, we work together, but sometimes they don't. And that's just one aspect that they wanna change. And what is true is that, and it's, it's been said before in psychology, but if you are in a dance with a partner and you change the dance step, the partner has to change their dance step.

And so when you are in a feeling stuck in a relationship, we all get there at sometimes because, because our partner is one way, we become a little bit more this. Way rather than our whole self, because we're with them. So they feed these parts of ourselves and the others atrophy a little bit until we feel a little bit locked up.

And then I don't wanna do that anymore. I don't, that's feeling too small. I wanna branch out. That's a good instinct to follow and feel. Um, and when you feel trapped because of what they're doing, just remember, no one can trap you. You always have a choice to what you decide to do. Yes, that will make them upset.

Yes, that will make them uncomfortable. That's what needs to happen. So when, when we're in that situation and we decide we do not have to be trapped, I can choose my own actions and this feels right for me, I'm going to do this. When you have done that without anger and attack, when you have done it without insult or sarcasm, when you've simply stated your truth in a neutral way, nobody can blame you for that.

So if your partner blames you for that, the spotlight is now on them. They are elevating and escalating and doing something when nothing initiated, nothing caused it. You didn't do anything wrong. What we tend to do is we relieve each other's issues by becoming less than ourselves. So then we're doing 80% US because that'll make them feel better, and now we're smoothly going along, but it's not really that smooth because you're not really all that happy.

When you finally just go, you know that's not me, and you just speak your truth or do something different. They don't get the relief for their own issue and then they escalate. But when you've done nothing wrong and there's an escalation, you can simply say, what's going on? What happened? Because all I said was I'm not able to do that today because of what else is on my plate.

So what about that made this happen? It now puts the spotlight of the, where the issue lies on the issue itself rather than getting the relief so it just never goes all the way away because it feels better and it'll come back again tomorrow. So we all do have the power to change a relationship dynamic there aren't guarantees that it'll make it better, but I would tell you that out of all the clients that I see, it almost always does make it better.

Um, because it's becomes obvious that there's an undealt with issue and then they can either keep escalating and that that's going to cause them to do something they're going to regret and have shame about and have to face. Or they'll see it more, you know, more readily, more easily sooner and go, I, I don't know why that made me so mad.

Uh, but it sure did. And I guess I've gotta do some work on that. Okay. So quick summary there, but it is an important concept. Episode 15 is my second favorite episode after episode 10. And that is the truth shall set you free. I will try to be brief and concise on this, but it's true that truth is what heals everything.

It's not time, it is truth. So when we, for example, have an have, um, a limiting belief that belief is not true, and that is why when we eradicate that belief, there is immense healing. When I do an age regression session to get directly to a limiting belief and heal it, the transformation that happens in front of me in that office is always remarkable.

It's astonishing to the client and I never get tired of watching it happen. Because the belief they've been living under for decades isn't actually true of them. What happens in that session is they now know unequivocally, once that is healed at the source. That wasn't true. It's not true that I didn't deserve love.

I just didn't get love because of other people. It was never my fault. And they know it unequivocally. They completely transform. I call it a year of therapy in one session because now through that process, they now know, oh my gosh, I deserve, I deserve good things. I deserve love. I deserve care, I deserve, and that young 2-year-old, or baby, or 6-year-old is now healed and, uh, relieved of that fear ever again.

And they're contained within the grownup. And they know they're loved there, safe there. They've grown up. Is gonna watch out for them because now grownup too knows they've always deserved love. It's a massive transformation. And the reason it's so powerful is because the truth of you is bigger than the belief that you were forced to believe by circumstances, by imperfect people.

The original person, the baby that you were born, was born just the way you are, just so you could live the life you came here to live. And if you had perfect n nurturing and kindness and all those wonderful things, you'd grow into a powerful, beautiful version of you. All of us took on layers. It's built into the system that we all come to, imperfect circumstances.

We all do, but we all have to do the work of eradicating those beliefs or they will run the whole life for us and it'll only get as good as our, as our smallest belief. So the truth is the most powerful force in the universe, and that is how it plays out to heal what is stopping you. The other thing I said about truth in this episode is that truth is everywhere.

Everything's made of truth. And then human beings live sometimes in illusions, separated from truth, operating away from truth, but the truth is still there underneath them, waiting for them to bathe in it and heal back into it. The truth itself is love. It's love. It is what is It is what's real. And our job as human beings is to face truth, accept truth on every single level.

Let me define a few levels. One is whatever I am experiencing and feeling. I shall admit it, accept it, look directly at it, and be it until it heals. So let's say I'm feeling nervous and insecure as a seventh grader going into the lunchroom. Oh yeah, everyone had that. Now seventh graders aren't particularly adept at this, but if they were, they would go, I'm really struggling with this.

I don't know if I feel safe going into that lunchroom yet. What do I need to feel safe? Hmm. Well, I'd like to have a friend, but I don't have one right now. So I think, um, I'm gonna. C, do I feel strong enough to go in? No. Okay. What do I need? Well, there was that nice person that I met and I can look for that person and then try to sit by them.

Okay, now, do you feel safe? Well, what if I don't see them? Okay, I need a plan B. I don't feel safe because I might not see them. Alright, what else could I do? Well, I'll walk in. I'll see if I see them. If I do, I'll ask. If I can sit by them, go get my lunch and sit with them. If they're not there, I will do one of two things.

Either go to the bathroom and wait it out until tomorrow, or I will go up to a teacher and tell 'em I'm struggling. Now, seventh graders don't do this. But if they could, it would be great. They would know that they could keep themselves safe and they can take the risk that they're ready to take. Okay? So when we deny where we are, we are not in truth and we're not getting any power.

We're pretending we're something we're not, and it's gonna follow us around, making us feel inadequate over and over and over again. When we finally just say, I'm inadequate. I suck at this and I don't know why. Nobody ever taught me and I need to learn it as if I'm back in fourth grade. Now we're on the ground level of truth.

We've admitted it to ourselves. We might've said it to a loved one. They're like, okay, I need to start at fourth grade on this. And now you can start on fourth grade there. Are there any rules? Are you, because you're 58, are you supposed to not be a fourth grader when it comes to something? No, no rules. But if we don't accept it because other 58 year olds don't look like that, then it's going to cause a problem.

'cause you're gonna pretend you're something you're not, and it's gonna come out sideways and it's gonna be weird. So life and truth are trying to teach us to accept everything we are because that's the ground level from which we can move forward. So the three. Deadly practices are avoidance, denial, and distraction from what's actually going on.

So we first admit it to ourselves and then even better, we admit it to a safe person who will show us with their eyes that they love us anyway and they're, and then we prove to ourselves like, okay, it, it can be okay that I am really underdeveloped on this thing. I have been there myself in, I, when I was in my, I think thirties, up to up to even my 40, early forties, I'd be reading a book and instead of really diving into the book, I'd be comparing myself with the main characters who, who are in their forties too.

And I'd be like, why are they able to do that and talk about that? And I don't ever got, and I'm sitting there instead of reading, I'm self-soothing because I have an undealt with issue and. I can't even enjoy reading a book 'cause it's following me around trying to make me pay attention to it. And it's true.

I was underdeveloped in a way and I had to go see a therapist to find out why. Okay? Um, one example I did in that episode is if, if you are meeting someone new, rather than trying to impress to see if we can make a connection, the connection, you either will be there or it will not. The more authentic you are in the engagement, the more quickly life will show you.

If the truth of you is that it's a good connection, that you will mutually serve each other. But if we go pretending, then we're, it might seem like it's going along. It's been built on a farce. So after over a time, it's not going to work because it was never built in truth. And you either have to get more true and see if they stay or get more true and then it won't work.

And you have to apologize that I'm sorry, but I thought this would work, but it won't because I was kind of pretending that I was this one thing, but I'm actually not. And that's super uncomfortable. So speaking our truth all the time, and the book that I recommend about this is The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck.

It's the book that I recommend more than any other book to people. And she starts with the simple notion of speaking the truth, and it is true. Speaking the truth shall set you free. Episode 17 was called How Facing Spirituality Brings Breeds power and Peace. This is a complicated concept, but at certain times, life is asking us to ask the existential existential questions.

When we lose a loved one, that forces us to wonder what happens when they're gone. Um, what's the point of all this? If we have to lose everything we love? What's the point of all this? This is a great question to ask. Life makes us ask these questions, but it's also so distracting. You can go a whole lifetime without asking any of them if you want to.

And then at the very end, you have to ask them anyway. And you'll wonder, how did I go a whole life without facing any of this and now I'm gonna die? And that is not fun. So facing our spirituality is incredibly important. And spirituality, when I say it, does not mean religion. They're not the same thing.

When I'm using the word spirituality, I'm meaning you are a spirit, I'm a spirit. There's a spirit to you. There's an essence to you. What is it and what is its point and why is it here? And what does it care about? Those are essential questions for all of us to ask that our, our spirituality, some people are super driven to find out the answers to those questions because they are a spiritual spirit.

Other people are a curious, intellectual spirit. They must solve mechanical problems and they must advance technology. That's a part of their spirit. It's their spirituality to do that. But. No matter what we're doing, that is our passion, our drive, our love, our gift to give. We all have to face, we're gonna die and we're gonna lose loved ones.

And we all have to wonder how, what's this all about? So if it breeds power to ask ourselves these questions, because when we do, we get answers In reality, if we are walking around with a question and then we're seeking answers through people who have had, you know, near death experiences or spiritual experiences, or outof body experiences, or religious texts or ancient texts or modern spiritualist texts, we get these answers from people and then we apply them to our lives and they prove themselves true or false.

But that's the piece that's really important. If, if it's truth, then it'll show up in life and prove itself. If not, it'll contradict life and that won't be truth. But we all have to do this. At some point, I mean, we don't have to, we can distract ourselves and avoid it as far as we want to, but it's going to hit us at some point.

So when we, when we're doing it to some degree, whenever those questions come up naturally for us and we're pursuing that, um, those clarifying results that we get by living life and putting those curious questions out there and seeing what life does with them, it makes it easier because we can make sense.

We can tune into our, our purpose, our point what, what seems like a yes for us, and then we can live more in alignment with that. Yes. So I also talked about what you identify with. Um, it might have been a different episode, but it's related to this. So you're a human being. You're walking around on earth.

You are given a certain body that's a certain way and a certain family with a certain socioeconomic status, and you can identify with any of those things. If you have a beautiful body, it's easy to identify with your body. Like, oh, I, I have such a great one. Look at me. I it's so wonderful. It'd be beautiful because the world reflects that back to you.

And that can take you on a nice long trip. Like if you got one of those bodies, enjoy it. As long as it is that way, enjoy it. Great. Um, but if you identify as it who, what do you do when it changes? 'cause it's all gonna change. So can your identify identity shift away from being about your body once it's not as beautiful and not getting the same kind of rewards anymore so that one doesn't last?

Um, and so then what do we identify with, um, our career? Great. If you're successful in your career and you've done it and you've done something really well and you're very competent, that's great. You get to own that. Um, but is it your identity? Is that what you are for? And then what happens when that falls away and you get tired of it and you grow into something else?

We have to ask ourselves what do we identify as and what we identify with and what are the costs if that's where we identify. Um, so what I find to be the most powerful place to identify is your spirit, because that's the essence of you that's gonna be there as your body ages. The essence of you is part of what makes that career successful, but the essence of you makes you struggle in other ways.

And those are also valuable to look at. Why are those a struggle for you? Because maybe you don't care about those things and that's an important thing to let go of because you didn't come here for that. There's just so much to learn. When we, when we identify as our essence, our essence is eternal. It goes on after we die.

Not everybody believes that, but I can't say anything other than that. Um, so then if, if we do go on after we die. Then we have to ask, what was the purpose of the whole point of what was the purpose of being here? Um, and when you start to ask those questions and get the truth as you see it showing you truth, um, then you form your life in congruence with that and it becomes more powerful, in my opinion.

So food for thought, take it, put it through your own filter. Decide where you are with that. Episode 18 is reprogram your mind by becoming your ally. Just the idea of becoming your own ally is a big shift for a lot of people. But when you think about it, have you ever had a teacher that you hated, utterly hated, or a coach, you probably did not get the most growth from that person.

It's pretty well known what good, great teachers, parents, and coaches do, and the, and what it is, is high responsiveness. They see you, they value you. They show that they care about you and they invest in you. That's the responsiveness is high, and also the requirement is equally high. So they, they encourage you, they love you.

They see you, they value you. They show you they value you, and they also nudge you to know you got this. You can, you're capable of this. Um, if you need help with it, let me know, but I'm pretty sure you've got this. When we treat ourselves that way, we're gonna get the most growth out of ourselves. Um, when we're, when our parts are not integrated, they are in conflict with each other.

So we have a fight going on, and so like, I want to, uh, get healthy, but all of a sudden next morning I'm eating donuts again. Like, what's going on? These parts aren't integrated. So we have an, we have one part of us that's our ally and the other, that's our enemy, and they aren't working well together. So when we just become our ally, we accept any part of us that's in there and know that it's there for a reason.

So, alright, this part of me that keeps taking me to donuts every morning, what's going on when I'm wanting the donuts? There's nothing wrong with it. There's, we assume because we're now our ally, that it's there for a reason. There's nothing inherently bad or evil going on. It has a need to be met. What does it need?

Well, let's see. Alright, so I wake up in the morning and I was thinking about, oh, I have this huge presentation and I procrastinated on that. And yeah, those donuts just gave me a distraction and they made me feel better temporarily. That was why I ate them. So what I really needed was relief from anxiety.

All right, so I've gotta deal with my anxiety or this pattern's gonna keep going on. So because I was my ally and I didn't decide, I was just a total loser because I have donuts in the morning. I found out what I was doing, why I was doing it, and now I can solve the problem. Like a teacher who says, I know you can figure this out, but there's one place you're getting stuck.

Which part is it? Oh, that part. Alright, let me re-explain that. Let me try it another way and see if it clicks for you that says There's something wrong with you. This part's just not, not clicking. Let me help it click. Okay. Same way we treat ourselves when we are our ally. It also goes back to what I said earlier about acceptance of the truth of you.

If the truth of you is, I don't know why I keep doing this thing in the mourning when it's not what I wanna do, accepting it helps you look at why. Helps you examine it rather than just judge yourself and then pile up negative thinking on top of it. Okay, I'm skipping up a ways to episode 27 now, and that one was how do I get through?

How do I get the courage to go through a vulnerability tunnel? I wanna define a vulnerability tunnel. That's a term that I coined. I use it all the time with my clients. And to be clear, if you are doing any kind of therapy, you are going through vulnerability tunnels. If you are growing at all, you are going through vulnerability tunnels.

There's only one way to grow. That's to go through a vulnerability tunnel. Otherwise, we just stay where we are. So a vulnerability tunnel is where you face something uncomfortable that you, that doesn't feel good to do. It's either a negative feeling you have to face or you have to try something that's hard that you've never done before, or you have to share with a trusted person like your therapist or a loved one that I have a problem and.

It's vulnerable because you don't wanna reveal the problem because you know that they accept you now, but they, you don't know if they will once they know this thing about you. These are happening all through our lives, and the people who go through them, just like Brene Brown taught us, their lives become fulfilling and satisfying.

If we don't go through them, we're on the distraction avoidance and, um, denial track, which is a downward spiral. So I want, I use this analogy because I want everyone to know these are tunnels. That means they have an opening on both ends and they're dark and scary in the middle. The dark and scary doesn't go away even after you've been through 10, 15 tunnels.

It's just that you're more familiar with the feeling, but it's still a tunnel, so it's automatically dark and scary. I want you to know when you face a negative feeling or you admit something embarrassing or you face something that you hate about yourself. That is the work and that you're, it is always a tunnel, and that tunnel ends in light, and that light is A relief.

B, understanding, C, more consciousness and D more awareness about what to do about it. It's worth it. Always worth it. And I've been through some dark, dark tunnels. Some of 'em are really short. Most of them aren't that long, but some are long. Some are very long, but they're all tunnels. So how do you get the courage to go through one?

This is the way that I, I help people to know, um, that they have to, that it's really the only choice because life is about growth and that growth is wonderful. When we get it, we reach a higher level of awareness that then lives inside of us. It's like. Every time we do it, we know we can handle that. And so we grow in self-confidence, self-assurance, and self-love, because a, we know we're not a coward.

We know we're not avoiding, we know we're not running away. So automatically, just that alone makes us proud of ourselves. Um, second to avoid it is the downward spiral. If we're not gonna walk through the tunnels, life is gonna hit us across the head to make us wake up. And we're gonna have to go through it anyway.

Only now it's gonna have more damage. Um, another thing is that we don't have to do it alone. It's always dark and scary, but you don't have to do it alone. So if you're facing in a vulnerability tunnel and you're like, oh, this is too much. There are too many layers that I have not told people, oh, it's gonna, I'm afraid it's all gonna come crashing down.

Go get a therapist to help you with that so you have someone holding your hand through them. Um, and the second thing I recommend is putting pillows in place. If you know you're facing a tunnel, you have to admit something to someone that you have hidden from them. That's kind of the worst kind. Maybe not the worst, but it's a bad one.

Um, you put the pillows in place to make it so that you'll walk through it. Okay? So for example, um, if you, uh, this is just a great example. I use it a lot, but if you have been cheating on your spouse and now you can't stand it anymore and you have to come clean, you have to walk through that tunnel and you're scared to death to do it.

Put every pillow in place that you need to make it safe enough to do it. So take the next day of work off so that you and your spouse can deal with this new reality and figure out what do we do and how do we recover and how do we not kill each other and die, and all this. You can also talk with every one of your friends first and go, how do I, how do I do this?

How do I, how do I come clean? And they will supportively tell you that, you know, it's the thing to do. You gotta do it. Your life won't go forward if you don't, um, throw away any notions of eating healthy that day. If you, if the one hard thing you have to do is tell your spouse something like that. Eat whatever you want that day.

Make yourself as comfortable as you can. 'cause that is gonna be uncomfortable as hell. So just do that anyway. And all the other rules can go out the window if they need to because doing the hard thing is the most important thing. Walking through the tunnel is the thing that matters. So everything else that really can just take a backseat, let it take a backseat so that you will do it.

'cause once you are through that tunnel, you'll be so glad you did. The other thing about it is you get to do it on your own readiness scale. Any good therapist knows what you're ready for, what you're not ready for, and can be gentle when you need it and nudging when you need it. Um, but it's always on your timeline.

You always get to assess what you're ready for Now and every size step into a tunnel matters. It does not have, you don't have to run through that tunnel. You can tiptoe as long as you're going. I'm going in different order, but I'm gonna talk about the upward spiral. Downward spiral next 'cause it relates to what I just spoke about.

And then the hero's journey of trauma. So the upward spiral and downward spiral. This is the most black and white thing I've discovered through all the work I've been doing. And I tell people there are a few things in life that are black and white, but my life has proven to me that this one is. So take it.

When something's that clear, take it. Never forget it. Put it as a mantra or a sign on your wall. Don't forget this. The vulnerability tunnels are the upward spiral. They take you to a life that gets better and richer and deeper and more satisfying and more free and more courageous and more peaceful and calm.

Everything they build a you that is wide open, spacious, quiet, peaceful, and free. And what I mean by that is that inside your empty and clear and just walking through life ready for what life asking of you to serve and show up for, and your thinking comes when you want it to. And it's a tremendous way, it's a tremendous thing to grow into, to where you use this tool of thinking when you need it, but you don't wake up and have it just running you.

You don't wake up in the middle of the night and have it running, you. So it grows you into something that you fall in love with, and the outside then reflects that. So all of your relationships get better. The ones that don't work don't, don't last your work. Fine tunes to be more attuned to your essence.

What you truly are good at, what you truly love. Um, every aspect of life gets better on the upward spiral, but that one has the tunnels. You've got to go through those vulnerability tunnels of accepting what you are, finding out why, how did it get that way? What does it need on an ongoing basis? And that beautiful, joyful, alive, rich, satisfying life flows from that practice, that ongoing practice.

The more tunnels you go through, they don't stop being dark and scary in the middle. It's just that, you know, oh, I did this before and it resulted well, and so you teach yourself to walk through it and so you keep walking through it. The opposite is denial, avoidance, dis and uh, distraction. If you watch people, you will find all sorts of people are avoiding the difficult feelings, and they're covering it up with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with porn, with any kind of dopamine inducing thing that will make them feel better than the thing they wanna face, the tunnel they don't wanna walk through.

And then that becomes another secondary problem, which then creates a relationship, tertiary problem, which then is going to end up in a fourth level problem, and on and on and on. There's only, it's a one way street and it's through the tunnel. And the longer you wait, there's more to clean up and more to admit, and more to want to avoid.

So that's the way it works, and that's probably the most important message out of everything I've said. Is to go through those vulnerability tunnels of the truth of you, whatever it is in the moment. Okay, and the last one I wanna talk about is the hero's journey of trauma. I encounter a lot of trauma in my practice.

I love my clients who have endured deep trauma. I love all my clients because all of them are coming here to do the vulnerability tunnel walk. Um, they're making the life, they're making this world better. They're making themselves better. They're making their, everyone they know better, their work better.

Everything in their life is beautifying because they're deciding to go through these tunnels. And my commitment to them is that I'm gonna take you through these as fast as anyone I've ever met. I love my therapist, but 14 years was too long and I don't do. I with my technique, I learned this so that I could take you through it so much faster so that your life will start proving it to you after session one.

And I tell my clients this, if you don't notice an undeniable difference after session one, it's only gonna cost you one session because I have to prove it to you. You don't have to do anything other than follow my lead. And they do come back because it, they, in the second session, they say something was undeniable and then we do even more.

So it does not have to take that long. It is a vulnerability tunnel, but we go through it together and in hypnosis, it's pretty darn relaxing. So it's not the same as having to face this stuff while someone's staring at you, which is incredibly difficult. Um, so deep trauma created beliefs. It just created beliefs and it created many of them that are protecting you from believing anything's good.

It's if you've had deep trauma, it is too scary to believe anything's good. So you ward off good things and it's not your fault. You only feel safe when you don't have good things 'cause it's too scary to trust them. So then you don't get good things and that's terrible because it's not your fault. You didn't put the belief there.

Someone who was unhealthy, who didn't do their work, put the belief there and now you're running around with it and your life sucks 'cause you're not getting good things. 'cause good things are too scary. I am sorry that is my life's work is to take that effect away from you. And that's what I do because it's only a belief and is not, it is not as powerful as the truth of you.

And the truth of you is beautiful. And it is perfect, and you didn't do anything wrong. And I'm sorry that you're on a hero's journey because it's super painful, but a hero, the hero's journey should you choose to accept it by doing real effective hypnotherapy, in my opinion, it will eradicate those beliefs one by one, little by little, and remove these layers and gently usher you closer to good things.

And when it gets scarier, because you get closer, you will gently be ushered as slowly as you need to go. And when we find another belief, we remove that belief and then you feel different and then you are ready for more goodness. What is possible if you are a trauma survivor, is a hero's journey that alchemizes your deep, horrifying, unbearable pain into the equal and opposite joy, satisfaction, love, you know, beauty that makes it almost worth it, maybe even worth it.

Not that we condone anything that happened to you or would never we would prevent that we are against. It is no love for it, except that if we had it and we can't make it go away, then our best option is to love the hate into something far more exquisitely beautiful than anyone ever showed you for yourself.

And you don't have to do it alone. That is possible if you have deep trauma and I'll spend the rest of my life proving it. By making, helping you make your life so beautiful, becoming something so gorgeous that nobody taught you how to be that you'll be your own hero. You'll be your children's hero.

They're a cycle breaker. You'll know you are so fucking lovable because no one taught you how to do it, and you did it your damn self, and now you're living in a beautiful world reflecting it back to you. That is possible. It does take support, but it is absolutely possible, and it is my favorite thing to help happen.

To help usher forward, to prove to you that it's possible, and then watch you freaking shine and beautify this world tenfold, 100 fold more beautiful than what anyone else taught you. Thank you for tuning into this episode. Thank you for all of all of you who have been listening from the beginning. Thank you for who, those of you who have come later and something that I said resonated and for sticking around, um, it has been a joy to deliver this content.

I genuinely hope that it makes an impact and I know that it will make an impact if you put it into practice. I'm taking a little break from podcasting and, uh, YouTube because my practice is, is very full and I am. Loving seeing the impact as I work through it, it's a little hard to be here and hope that it's making an impact, but not see the transformation in front of my eyes.

So I'm taking a little time just to immerse more in that. And if you want more powerful, true fast transformation, reach out to me for the one-on-one care. It's affordable, it's fast, and it's incredibly effective. I'm sure that I will be back on. I don't know exactly when, but in the meantime I'm going to be building a course that will be coming out.

I'm not sure exactly when. So I can continue to serve those who aren't in my office, but also prioritize those who want to do the really intense, um, empowering work of amplifying the beauty of their lives one-on-one and in small groups. Alright. Thank you again everybody. I appreciate you. I love you and I will be back another time.