The Power of Energy Healing - Heather

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to the Amjits podcast, the How I Survived series. In these mental health episodes, I'm creating a space for real conversations about the things we often keep to ourselves, our struggles, our healing, and the stories that shape who we are. Hi Heather, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today on another mental health discussion. Um, before we begin, can you give yourself a little introduction?

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Of course. Thank you for having me on. I'm Heather Zimmerman. I'm the founder of Divine Ascension Company and the creator of the self-spirit method. I'm a master certified life coach, a shamanic energy healer, and a channel. I also hold a bachelor's in psychology from Penn State and a master's degree in applied behavior analysis. Um, but before any of all that, I was someone who spent a significant portion of my life really navigating through having autism, ADHD, depression, and anxiety without really fully understanding what was happening in my own system. I spent years trying to manage all of those symptoms, trying to fit into little boxes and frameworks that weren't really built for my brain, and wondering why the standard approaches never really quite landed the way that they were supposed to. What changed everything for me wasn't a medication or a diagnosis or a single breakthrough moment. It was actually energy work, which is why I do what I do now. Learning to actually understand my own system, my nervous system, my energy body, the patterns that I've inherited through ancestral and DNA, including, you know, behavior patterns and thought patterns that I had built myself through my own traumas and things like that. And finding a way to work with it instead of against it. Um, that transformation is what all of my work is really built on because I know firsthand what it looks like to go from surviving your own mind and then to actually living a full, you know, satisfying life while still managing all of those things.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Oh, okay. Wow. Um I'm curious, have you ever met with a therapist? Or is energy work the only method you discovered for feeling better? And also for those like myself who aren't familiar with energy healing, what does it do exactly?

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Yes, I tried therapy for many years. Um I went through many different therapists trying to find one that I clicked with that understood kind of the way my brain works and was able to actually listen, actively listen, which is important, especially when you're doing this kind of stuff with mental health and emotions and trauma, stuff like that. You want to feel comfortable. And the way talk therapy and the psychiatrists and those kind of doctors operate just really didn't work for me. It seemed like I was just talking and talking and nothing was really ever getting resolved. So, yes, it was helpful for getting things off my chest and to putting get things out in the open, but it wasn't really helping me in a way that was giving me any lasting results. I found energy work years later, and this is more along the lines of spirituality and learning about the chakra systems and how energy works going through your body because each energy center that you have relates to a different part of your physical body, a different uh branch of emotions, and a different part of your brain process. So it all kind of works together. So working from that approach actually helped me a lot more than talk therapy. For instance, when I do an inner child healing session with someone, and that includes myself, you go back to a trauma, you don't relive it, but you watch it as a as an observer and you figure out, knowing what you know now, kind of how that landed in your physical body, how it created these limiting beliefs that you have, how it really made these things that you put into place for yourself through your nervous system, through your thoughts, through your behaviors that were put in to survive, that were able to protect you in some way, but are now no longer serving you. And that really has affected how my mental health has changed over the years. More than talk therapy did.

SPEAKER_01 4:54

Yeah, I noticed with talking to different people that everyone has their favorite method for healing. Um, for some talk therapy isn't even an option. Um, but I'm glad that you were able to find your way. Um, do you sometimes still struggle with that inner child imposing on your thoughts?

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Yeah, I mean, sometimes it still comes through. I mean, I'm human, right? We all are, and there's more than just the inner child that you have to work through. There's the ego and the repetitive thought patterns, and like I said, the limiting beliefs and things. But I'm not sure what you believe, but we carry wounds and traumas from our past lives as well, if they still need to be healed and addressed. And so I was buried alive as a witch in a past life, and that has really made a big impact on my life this lifetime. I had, you know, recurring dreams about it when I was a kid, which made me fear death. And I was afraid of the dark, I was, you know, claustrophobic. I wouldn't, my pillow couldn't even touch my nose when I was sleeping. So there's always multiple layers to things. And so even as we go through and we go through this healing process, whatever modality or method that works for you, things are still going to come up because there's so many different layers to things. And the healing journey never really is over, but it does get easier over time. So those things still pop up every now and then. And I feel like even though they do, because I have done so much work on myself, becoming more self-aware, working through, you know, my mental health and becoming a better version of me, that when they do come up, I'm in a better place to receive that and to process through that than I would have been before I started the energy work. Or, you know, back when I was still going through massive depression and anxiety and just confusion about who I was and, you know, why I was affected by so many triggers and things. And growing up, I was an empath and I didn't know that. So I was not only feeling the energy of what I was going through and how I was feeling, but I was also feeling the energy of everyone around me and everything in a room. And so it was very chaotic when I was a teenager trying to figure out how to manage my emotions because I didn't really know what they were because it was just chaotic all the time, which was one of the leading causes of my depression and anxiety, on top of, you know, the autism and the ADHD, but it was very chaotic. And so as I've navigated through these things and kind of peeled back those layers one by one, I've reached a place where I can look at them with more clarity and kind of figure out how to work through anything that might come up.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Do you find that being sensitive to others' energies at the time influenced your emotions and decisions? And how were you able to go from being an empath to not letting people's energy affect you?

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Absolutely, it affected me and my life and the decisions that I made. When I was younger and I was feeling all of these chaotic emotions, I started self-medicating. I was doing drugs, I was drinking at a pretty early age as a teenager. And I probably wouldn't have done those things if I had known what was going on. I would have had a better handle on how to manage that. I also ended up turning all my emotions off completely when I was a young adult because I couldn't take it anymore. And I do not recommend that either. That was very hard to come back from. But when I did in my 30s, I had to go through what we normally go through as a teenager, where I would sit with my emotions. First, I had to figure out whether it was mine or not, because now I knew what was happening. I had to separate that. And when I, when it wasn't mine, I had to release it and let it go. When it was mine, I had to sit with that and really learn what my emotions felt like, which is what we normally go through as a teenager. I didn't know what happiness, sadness, anger, resentment, frustration really felt like because back then I was feeling all of those things at once and couldn't really differentiate them. So I went through that whole process, which took some time, but I think it was a little bit easier as an adult because I wasn't going through all those hormonal changes at the same time. Although, again, don't recommend that. And as far as how that affects me now, I still do feel the energy of other people. But and it does affect me sometimes because I still have to actively get myself to be like, okay, is this mine or is this not mine? And the way I handle that is a lot better now. But it's I still do feel the energy of other people. And I've learned ways to protect myself to kind of hold that energy back at an arm's length, if you will. And there's ways to to go about doing that. But I think the most important part is really learning to differentiate what's yours and what isn't. And to do that, I just simply ask myself, okay, well, why am I feeling this? And if I have a reason, if there is a trigger, if it's legitimately mine, I'll know. But if I'm going about my day and things are great, and then all of a sudden I feel, you know, something that doesn't match my environment or my mental state at that time, then most likely it is not mine. And I can be like, okay, I have no reason to be feeling this. And I go through this exercise of grounding where I can release that energy and go back to feeling my own emotions. So there's kind of a learning process of how to figure out what's yours and what isn't, and to release those things. And even what is yours, as you go through the journey of, you know, healing and that self-awareness and that mindfulness, you can manage your own emotions a little bit better too, because you're like, all right, I can look at this from a practical way and be like, all right, why am I feeling this emotion? What caused this? Is this a repeating pattern in my life? And if so, like what, when did this start? And kind of try to work at it from the actual cause, which is again what inner child healing does, and as well as some of the other things that I do. But it actually gets to the cause, whether it's from a past lifetime or this lifetime, a childhood trauma, you know, a mental um health problem, whatever the case may be, to try to get to the actual root of it, because that is how you find long-lasting healing and change in your life rather than just trying to figure it out at a surface level. Because things keep repeating until you actually work out why it keeps repeating. Because there's something to be learned there. There's something that will help you grow as a person, as a soul, that you have to kind of figure out so that those things don't keep coming back up.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Yeah, um, I agree that working out your why and discovering the deeper cause to how you're feeling is definitely essential. Um, I actually like to question myself a lot, especially when I'm feeling a certain way. I find that that alone can allow me to find the root cause, which is so liberating. Um, do you think that level of self-reflection comes naturally, or is it something that you have to practice?

SPEAKER_00 13:07

It absolutely is liberating and empowering and freeing. And I feel like when I can get to that root cause and really up that level of self-awareness and to fix something, and I'm using that for lack of a better term because we aren't really fixing anything, but we're growing and we're improving and we're being better versions of ourselves. So when you get to that point and reach that next level with something, it really is this aha moment that kind of shifts a lot of things for the better for you. But it's definitely something I had to work at. I've always had some level of self-awareness, but I've been through so many traumas and so many things that have happened to me, you know, throughout my entire life that I didn't want to face. I knew they were there. Some I disassociated and I don't have full memories of. Um, and there's actually a lot of my early years that I don't have memories of because of disassociation. And uh detaching from the emotional part of the experience, it affects your memory. But I had to really sit down and be okay with looking at those things and shifting the perspectives because once you can go back and look at those and take the emotion out of it, but look at it and be like, okay, this happened. It wasn't my fault, but there's something to be learned from this, and it really allows you to have those amazing perspective shifts that really help you look at life from a very different lens, which has helped me tremendously for a lot of things. Because when you go through sexual abuse and bullying and, you know, being the new kid and trauma after trauma after things that have happened, it really has an effect. So when you can get to the point where you shift your perspective and look at them from a very different angle, now I don't regret anything that's happened to me because it's empowered me to help others who have gone through it. It has empowered me to learn compassion and understanding and forgiveness, not only of them, but of myself. But that was a very long journey, a very drawn-out process to get to that point and self-awareness and looking at yourself deep down at who you are, at the things that have happened to you, how you view them, how you react to things, was the catalyst for that journey. That was the first most important step. And I think it might come naturally to some people because they might have started that early on in life. But I think when you have a lot of things that you don't want to really sit with or are afraid to sit with, like trauma, it can make it very difficult to get to that deeper level of self-awareness. And so it's uh different for everyone, but it was definitely a process for me. I went through a period of time where I was changing, I was drinking a lot, and I was becoming someone that I didn't like and that I didn't recognize in the mirror. And that was what changed for me to help me actually start doing all of those things that I wasn't doing before.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Yeah, I think things happen to us for a reason, either good or bad. Um, do you think that that mindset has changed the way you handle challenges?

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Absolutely. I think that knowing that everything that happen that happens is for a specific reason, whether it's good or bad, and shifting that mindset from why is this happening to me to what is this trying to teach me is very important for not only shifting how you work through challenges, but also so many other things in your life. I mean, I truly believe that before we come here and are born on this planet, we go through a life planning process where we actually choose the lessons that we come here to learn throughout the lifetime. And so when things happen, it's easy to be in a victim mentality and be like, oh, why is this happening to me? Why is does this keep happening? Well, it's because it's something you're trying to, you're supposed to be learning something. It's trying to teach you something, which you actually chose to learn while you were here. So when you shift your perspective to okay, what is this trying to teach me? You'll generally find that those things stop happening because you learn the lesson. So you don't need to keep repeating those experiences. And it is also helped me through shifting my perspective that way, to be more appreciative of the things that do happen to me, good or bad, and finding more beauty in the world and the way that things happen, you know, with the divine timing and divine tapestry and how we connect with people and the all the things that happen. It's just it's very beautiful if you can find a different way to look at it.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Yeah, well said, um, is there any advice you can give someone who might be struggling with trauma at the moment? Because when trauma occurs, it's definitely hard to view it as a lesson, like in the moment.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

Absolutely. It is very difficult to look at it that way, especially when you're going through something or have just gone through something that takes time. My advice would be that you are allowed to feel hurt, you are allowed to feel angry, you are allowed to feel the emotions that come along with trauma. Just don't let it become your identity. When you're ready, there are resources out there that can help you work through it so you don't have to do it alone. Every single person I know, I'm gonna say, just to be on a safe side, 99% of the people that I know have been through some sort of trauma. And it doesn't reflect on who you are as a person. It wasn't your fault, and you can work through it. Don't give up. It's a beautiful space when you get through get through this and get to the other side of it. And it is possible no matter what happened, you already went through the hardest part. The trauma is the hardest part, and you've survived. You are still here. So take your time, grieve, go through your process of emotions because that is healthy too. And when you're ready, figure out what will work for you to get you to the other side of that.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

Wow, I like that advice a lot. Well said. Um, listen, Heather, I'll end it here. Um, thank you so much for joining me again to share your story and to and to offer your advice. Um, keep doing what you're doing and take care.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

Thank you for having me. It was an absolute pleasure.