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How Reiki And Somatic Healing Unlock Stuck Trauma · Moral Injury Support Network Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hi, welcome to the Moral Injury Support Network podcast.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm Dr.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: Daniel Roberts, President and CEO of Moral Injury Support Network for Service Women Incorporated, a nonprofit organization based in North Carolina that focuses on helping women veterans recover from traumas they experienced while serving in the military.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: Today we have a great guest with us, um, Susan Pease Bannett.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: She has spent 50 years helping people heal in various settings.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: She trained in the Harvard Medical Teaching Hospitals in psychiatric social work.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: Susan specializes in trauma coaching and consulting for PTSD, disassociative disorders, cult abuse, autism spectrum disorders, and spiritual emergence.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: She writes and teaches healing modalities such as psychotherapy, Reiki, yoga, shamanic techniques, spiritual coaching, trauma coaching, and past life regressions in the service of total healing.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: She has retired from individual psychotherapy practice.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: Susan is the author of three books on trauma, with the latest being a best-selling anthology called Women Therapists on Healing: 11 Personal Essays about Overcoming Trauma.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: Her two award-winning books, The Trauma Toolkit and Wisdom, Love, and Attachment in Trauma Therapy Beyond Evidence-Based Practice, inhabit many therapies offices.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Therapist offices.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: She loves improv comedy, gardening, and deep conversation.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the show, Susan.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: How are you?
1:29
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Daniel.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: I'm happy to be here.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: That's a that's a lot of different modalities, a wide variety of experience and work that you're doing.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: Um there uh we don't get a lot of guests that do Reiki.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of people that do Reiki and shamanic techniques and and uh even past life regression, but you're one of the first I've had on the show that that really does that.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: So I'd love to get into some of that, but uh I want to start with your background, how you got into the work that you that you did for so long, and then you know, into the books, writing the books and so on.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: Okay, well that I'll try to I'll try to condense that.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: It's a long story, but I'll try to condense it down.
2:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, originally I wanted to be an astronaut um when I was a kid, very interested in quantum physics and space.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: I grew up in Palo Alto, so there was a lot of that kind of talk happening around me when I was growing up pre-com, but I have terrible motion sickness.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: So that was never that I was never gonna pass square one.
2:31
SPEAKER_01: So um I started looking around, and when I was 16 in high school, we read The Ego and the In by Freud.
2:38
SPEAKER_01: And I kind of was fascinated and fell in love.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: Um, I can get bored easily with certain topics, so I wanted to go into an area of work where I didn't think I would ever be bored.
2:50
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, well, the mind, the mind is a large enough thing.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I changed my um ideas to psychology and therapy.
3:01
SPEAKER_01: And I worked with autistic kids in high school and then worked in a psychiatric institution, state hospital summers in college.
3:11
SPEAKER_01: And I just kind of have stayed on this path.
3:14
SPEAKER_01: So I've been in the field for 50 years, but I've been a therapist for about 35 of those years.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: And when you so you did you start with more traditional psychotherapy and then move into some of the more alternative modalities like Reiki and shamanism, or how did how did that well, yes and no.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: So um in I was training in Boston at the end of the 80s, um, and getting my degree at Simmons School of Social Work, which is right across from Harvard Medical School.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: And um interestingly, at that time, Harvard, the Harvard community was all pretty much on one street, except for Mass General Hospital, which was down the road.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so there was a lot of networking between the hospitals, a lot of shared grand rounds and things like that.
4:04
SPEAKER_01: And Herb Benson's book, The Relaxation Response in the 70s, had made a huge splash in the Harvard community, the medical community.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: And so they were way ahead of the game in terms of thinking about alternatives.
4:20
SPEAKER_01: In fact, before I went to my placement, they'd even brought over an acupuncturist from China to do rounds with the doctors.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: And I was still hearing stories about that.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: So when I landed there and they found about my interests, they put me on the first ever Complementary Therapies Committee with Dr.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: David Eisenberg, who went on to do a landmark study about how much money people were spending out of pocket for alternative therapies, with a study that really rocked the medical world at the time.
4:52
SPEAKER_01: Most doctors had no idea people were doing this until his study.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: But his the idea for a study, I think, came out of our group.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: And when I was doing, I started in residential care before I went into graduate school, and then I did hotline work.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: Um, I would go to the Krapalu ashram at that time for yoga.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: And so I was an early adopter of yogic ideas and therapies and techniques.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: And I started to bring those pretty early in my career, earlier even than Bessel Vanderkook or other people.
5:26
SPEAKER_01: Um, and because I was put in this group of very forward-thinking doctors, they just encouraged me.
5:34
SPEAKER_01: So I it was really started to be a part of my work from the beginning.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't doing Reiki until much later in my career.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: And um that's you know, it's a funny story.
5:45
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes the universe really gives you some big hints about what you're supposed to be doing, right?
5:51
SPEAKER_01: So I had a couple of clients that are like, if you don't start using your hands for healing, we're not coming back to you because we know what you got going on there.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: And um, so I started casting around.
6:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, I had dreams that took me to a psychic that said you need to be doing work with your hands.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: So I started casting around.
6:08
SPEAKER_01: I found Reiki as a modality.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: I found that people, very reputable people in a lot of hospitals, like over 800 hospitals now, use Reiki.
6:18
SPEAKER_01: And um, so I got my Reiki certifications, three of them in a row over an 18-month period.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: And I started doing Reiki because I was working with very, very highly traumatized people at that point in my career.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of times those people would come in um to therapy because they didn't know what else to do.
6:38
SPEAKER_01: But a lot of them weren't really what we call available for therapy or ready, but they would come in just crying and not be able to talk, so overwhelmed.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they were a 10 out of 10 on the ACES score, which is um, you know, a very overwhelming amount of trauma.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: But Reiki, after one, two, or three sessions, I don't think I ever had to go longer than three sessions, would just clear out all that accumulated trauma energy and make them um okay with talking.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: So, pardon me, I started um incorporating Reiki into my work in a very deep way with some really wonderful results.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about Reiki a little bit because a lot of people have heard of the term um, but maybe don't have a good sense of what it is or how it works.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Can you unpack that?
7:35
SPEAKER_01: So there's many Reiki lineages, um, meaning there's many teachers of teachers of teachers.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: My branch is um the International Center for Reiki training.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: That's Reiki.org, if you're interested.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: And the kind of Reiki I practice is called holy fire Reiki.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: And I came to it in 2014.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, Reiki is well, let me explain what it isn't.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: So originally I have a lot of um intuitive abilities and a lot of I've had healing abilities my whole life.
8:07
SPEAKER_01: So uh initially I started working with a Celtic shaman to help kind of like educate me when this these abilities came really strongly forward in my 30s.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, what is happening?
8:17
SPEAKER_01: Like, well, I'm seeing lights coming out of people.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: I feel things in my body I don't understand.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: Like, right.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: And so I worked with him.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: And when you're working in the area of yogic energy or shamanic energy, prana or chi, that is what we call it's a dual, dualistic energy.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: It's for three-dimensional bodies, which means it can help you, but it can also be used to hurt you.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: If you have an unscrupulous shaman, they could attack you, um, make you sick.
8:46
SPEAKER_01: Same with an acupuncturist, same with right.
8:49
SPEAKER_01: Reiki is non-dual, meaning it cannot be used for harm.
8:54
SPEAKER_01: Impossible.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: It just comes from a different vibrational place in the universe, cannot be used for harm.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: It is self-directed, it goes where it needs to go.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, I facilitate it coming in.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: I don't direct it the way when I worked with trained with this shaman, I learned to direct energy with Reiki is more about allowing and creating an opening for Reiki to do what it does.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, there's skillfulness about how you talk to people and letting them, you know, tell you what's going on.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: And then I could see intuitively, because I was shamanically trained, I could also see what was going on in my mind's eye while I would work on people.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: And it became a really important part of my trauma work with people.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: So when you're when you're doing Reiki, are are you touching people?
9:49
SPEAKER_00: Are you are you like um, you can.
9:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you can.
9:54
SPEAKER_01: And you know, there's all this conditioning for therapists, like don't don't ever touch somebody.
9:59
SPEAKER_02: Right?
9:59
SPEAKER_01: Right.
9:59
SPEAKER_01: And so I had to I had to overcome that because I was trained very traditionally about that.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: Um when I started, I thought it's okay, I'll just put my hands over people.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: I don't need to touch them.
10:09
SPEAKER_01: So I did that, and then people were like, What are you doing?
10:12
SPEAKER_01: Like, why am I just touching me already?
10:15
SPEAKER_01: Like, this is dumb.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: Like, put your hands on me.
10:17
SPEAKER_01: So I was like, okay, I'll just do that.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: Um, but there are many techniques that I've learned to use, especially when COVID happened.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, a lot of us started working remotely, and Reiki works very, very effectively remotely.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: And also um, there are these Reiki healing meditation exercises that I particularly have found to be powerful.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: So um these days it's rare that I'm actually doing hands-on work.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: I'm usually working more from the Reiki healing meditations, um, just because I've gotten such great results from them and because um, you know, I still have some immune issues left over from COVID times.
11:01
unknown: Okay.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: So who um who is a good candidate for Reiki?
11:09
SPEAKER_01: Anyone who's open to it.
11:11
SPEAKER_01: Reiki will not go where it's not wanted.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: Um so you know, you can shut Reiki out.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: That's also a difference between Reiki and other forms of energy healing.
11:22
SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, if you're open and you're willing to what we call suspend your disbelief in the theater world, you know, like if you're willing to suspend your disbelief and um enter into a kind of the mystery of it, then I think you're a good candidate for it.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: Reiki literally can work with every level of problem in the human being.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: So it can work at the physical level, it can work to unstick energy or smooth out energy polarities in the body, it can work with your thoughts, it can work with your intuition, and it can work with your ability to just be in the flow of life and enjoy life.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so so uh I I'm thinking some people that maybe have tried talk therapy and are still struggling or don't want to do talk therapy, um, Reiki might be a good tool, right?
12:17
SPEAKER_00: Because in Reiki, is there or are you just sort of like facilitating energy flow so you're not necessarily getting into their whole story or requiring them to do a lot of talking, or how does that every every practitioner is different with Reiki.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: Not all Reiki practitioners are therapists.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: I happen to be both, right?
12:39
SPEAKER_01: So on the the my friends who are Reiki practitioners who aren't therapists, my teacher, they're very clear about where their boundary is, about what they can talk to people about and how they can help them.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: Um, in my case, um nothing's off limits because I am qualified to help them with mental health issues.
12:57
SPEAKER_01: And I've heard a lot of really intense stories of trauma in my life because of the work I do.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: My specialty the last several years of my practice, I don't do individual therapy work anymore, although I do everything else, including Reiki sessions, um, became um ritual abuse, mind control, um, military abuse, um, experimentation, trafficking, elite trafficking, children, think Epstein Island type survivors.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: Um, that became my specialty area.
13:31
SPEAKER_01: So what I have found over the years is that the West a while ago, we used to have this idea of an energetic body, the way other cultures do, but we threw it out around the time of Descartes.
13:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, and we need to take it back because a lot of where people get stuck in their therapy is that the energy doesn't know where to go when it's freed up.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: And because of the way trauma affects the energy centers in the body, also called chakras, we also have them in our hands and feet, not just along the midline.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: When those chakras get clogged or rerouted, there's problems getting rid of the trauma energy itself.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: And I'm really good at that.
14:11
SPEAKER_01: Reiki's really good at that.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: Um, acupuncture is really good at that.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: So initially I discovered that the people who were looping back into their story, it wasn't because we hadn't processed enough.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: It was because the energy hadn't left their body yet from that event.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: And as soon as I referred them to acupuncture, things like one session, things just started clearing out.
14:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, so when I became able to do Reiki myself, I didn't need to refer them out anymore.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: So with Reiki, you're sort of like clearing this trauma energy so that they can be free to be creative, free to to move on with their life, free to experience life in a in a more full way, more joyful way.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: The that sort of thing is that yes, among others.
15:00
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Reiki works on many levels.
15:01
SPEAKER_01: One of the the holy fire Reiki purpose is to heal also spiritual abuses, and it reconnects people to a sense of benevolence in the universe and goodness, because especially now that's harder to maintain.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: And if people have suffered moral injury or been in very violent settings, it's hard to hang on to that idea.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: So Reiki literally offers people a place to stand in that when they're healing, which has been very valuable.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I was thinking about this this morning on my morning walk.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I have a tendency to um like focus on the the challenges in the world, you know, whether it's building my business or trying to find more money for the business or whatever, you know, business stuff that you have to do, all that.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: Right.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: And and I got uh thinking about this, and it's like, well, yeah, sure, there are a lot of challenges, there are a lot of injustices, there are a lot of, you know, you name it, right?
16:13
SPEAKER_00: War, death, pain, suffering, whatever it is, right?
16:15
SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's all around, yeah.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, but there's also lots of beauty and love and just amazing.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: One of the great things about science, especially when you get into like uh like you're talking about quantum energy and quantum fields and physics and all that stuff.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: It's just like wow, the universe is incredibly uh you know complex and amazing, and just you know, it there's so much to that.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: But it but it but it is really hard to like you have to have a process or a system away to really bring that to your awareness in a way that that can cause you to experience that as well as the suffering, right?
17:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you can't like escape the suffering completely and um you don't necessarily want to um just be unaware of it, but it it can't be the dominant thing in your life if you want to have you know a life that doesn't suck still.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: So so yeah, that makes sense.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, finding that balance right now is um a very big challenge.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: And um sometimes, and I think we're in this kind of time right now, sometimes finding the balance doesn't mean going to the cave and meditating until you're happy.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it means going out into the world and taking action.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: And and I think with some of these modalities, you know, you're able this idea of freeing up energy or or energized, however you want to say it, gives you the energy to do action you need to do.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: Um and to to take what I call creative action, creative energy.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: It's like it's one thing to identify problems, but then we need more and more creative solutions to to get after them, especially if traditional approaches um aren't effective.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: Like when you're talking about building a nonprofit, you know, there's a lot of financial resources that just aren't available.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: You can't go to a bank and just get a loan, you know, because they don't loan money to nonprofits typically, right?
18:28
SPEAKER_00: Maybe certain kinds, but but in general, you you there's revenue streams that just aren't available in the same way.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: So so you have to be able to think creative, you have to be able to market creatively, you have to often operate on a shoestring budget, all this kind of stuff.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: And so, so you know, you need creativity, you need like to me, nonprofit work or uh is similar to like therapy and other kinds of work, is that you you you see a problem, you identify them, you know they're there, but how do we how do we help make the world a better place?
19:03
SPEAKER_00: How do we move through those problems?
19:05
SPEAKER_00: How do we make our life better or the lives of others better, etc.?
19:08
SPEAKER_00: You need you need you do you do need an awareness of both, otherwise, you're not going to be very effective.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I would say that not just creativity, but imagination.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: And that's where our culture has been kind of falling down, I feel like, in the last 10 to 20 years, is that we have sort of become very, very materialistic and focused on science, although some of the great scientists were not materialistic at all.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: Um and that I always say that most problems in the world are either a failure of empathy or a failure of imagination or both, because the imagination is the doorway for that creativity to manifest, right?
19:52
SPEAKER_01: So if you can enter into your mind and use it, and not everybody can, you know, some people might need help um developing their imagination skills.
20:06
SPEAKER_01: They are skills, and some kids are raised.
20:08
SPEAKER_01: I was raised in an i very Irish, very imagination-based household because that's part of the Irish culture, right?
20:16
SPEAKER_01: Um, of people are raised, but my ex-husband was raised in a very Swiss northern German, very locked down.
20:24
SPEAKER_01: He's a brilliant doctor, um, but not a brilliant storyteller, you know.
20:30
SPEAKER_01: So, right.
20:31
SPEAKER_01: So we have these like degrees in our brain of how we're able to enter into things.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, and a time when you're calling on creativity, you need to call upon imagination too.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love that.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: And I do think I love that you said it's a skill too, because we tend to think of our personality as being fixed, and it's it's really not.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: It's it's our brains are malleable up until the day we die, and it's just a matter of process of learning, you know.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: Right.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: There may be some inherent traits that that are um there may be some things that I just physically wouldn't be able to do based on my height or something like that, but the the the number of things that I decide to do with my life that I just could never impossibly do that someone else could do, or it's just so minuscule.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: Really, it's about what I decide to learn and what I decide to put my effort to, what how I develop skills, and I think everything is a skill.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: I think um, you know, for a long time, and there's there's still probably certain a certain segment out there that really focuses on belief.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: We tend to do this in religion and stuff, it's just like all you gotta do is believe.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: Well, no, you need belief, but you need skills to succeed in things, and so you need enough belief to get you to take action to learn skills.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Skills and use those skills to do something.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: But you could have a small amount of belief.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: If you have just an amount of belief, enough belief to do those things, you can succeed.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you can have tons of belief, but no skill, you're probably not going to do well, right?
22:19
SPEAKER_00: So so uh well, then I wouldn't even call that belief.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: That's more like fantasy, right?
22:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: Fantasy, yeah.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: Right.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: Belief demands action.
22:28
SPEAKER_01: Like if you really believe in yourself, you're gonna take action to make things happen in the way.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: You know, what we're also talking about is neurological flexibility.
22:39
SPEAKER_01: So one thing that does happen when we age is we tend to get we wear those grooves in our brain pretty deep, our habits, right?
22:47
SPEAKER_01: And so disrupting habits, and I have found nothing better for that than improvisational comedy classes.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, because literally, like one of the games that we play is, you know, you're walking and then they say stop and then they say jump, right?
23:03
SPEAKER_01: But then they reverse the directions so that when they want you to stop, they say jump, and then when they want you to jump, you say stop.
23:10
SPEAKER_01: So you your brain is doing this like you know thing.
23:13
SPEAKER_01: But it's good.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: It's like challenging your brain to work in a different way.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: And um, I've been doing improvisational comedy for the last, I don't know, 12 or 13 years.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: And um, it's wonderful.
23:25
SPEAKER_01: Plus, you get to laugh a lot.
23:26
SPEAKER_01: Laughter is also really good for neurological flexibility.
23:29
SPEAKER_01: People who are not very uh don't have a sense of humor or irony, they can get really stuck.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a good point.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: Uh I was recently reading a book.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: Um, I can't remember the name of the author, but she did did quite a bit of research a few years ago and found that um, you know, she she looked at um the idea of of dreaming, you know, dreaming big.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: Does dreaming result in getting what you want, you know, so to speak?
24:06
SPEAKER_00: And it's sort of along the life of belief, what she found is that just dreaming itself tended to actually cause people to not take action, right?
24:16
SPEAKER_00: Because their subconscious brain, if you really dream vividly about it, it thinks you've accomplished it, so it doesn't engage your energy.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: But what she which she also found is that people who could imagine them having something right and believe they could do it, like it was achievable, were more likely to take action.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: Also, she found that people that could imagine it and then see themselves accomplishing it, and then two also counter that with potential challenges were more likely to take action, right?
24:57
SPEAKER_00: So if they were to say, Well, I want to um and she researched with even simple things like I want to buy a a new pair of high heels that are really sexy looking.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: I I and I imagine myself wearing those, right?
25:13
SPEAKER_00: But then then say, well, but also that might make my feet hurt, they might be uncomfortable.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so having that that um looking at both sides of the coin was more likely to get them to take action to get them if they really wanted them, because they recognized I'm gonna have these things, but there's also gonna be like a little bit of a price to pay, versus people that just imagined them having them were less likely to go out and get them because their brain was like, uh, you already have them, and then if they did get them, they wouldn't appreciate them because they didn't think about the pain involved.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: So, so all that to say, like freeing our mind to think through the whole bit of things, all the aspects of it, actually can can create, you know, a sense of well, I to one, it can help you decide do you really want to do all that, but two, it it if you decide you do, you're more likely to achieve it because you've thought it completely through.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: And I think something completely through is I think a challenging thing for a lot of people because it's an abstract thinking skill.
26:30
SPEAKER_01: Right.
26:31
SPEAKER_01: And not everybody has been taught or knows how to think abstractly, and not everybody values thinking abstractly.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: But what you're really talking about is like not just thinking it through in terms of like consequences, but in terms, it's like putting yourself on the timeline, right?
26:49
SPEAKER_01: If I get I I get the shoes at point A, B, I try them on a point C, I I'm walking around for a few hours at point D or E.
26:58
SPEAKER_01: And then you're like, oh, my feet are gonna be sore.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: You have to allow yourself, some people can run through that immediately, and some people might need to sit down and write it out, you know, or draw it out.
27:10
SPEAKER_01: Like that's a hard skill.
27:12
SPEAKER_01: I was taught very early in life.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: I remember my parents just yelling at, think it through, think it through, think it through, right?
27:19
SPEAKER_01: But not everybody gets that direction from their parents.
27:22
SPEAKER_01: Not everybody's parents know how to think things through or can use their minds that way because they were never trained to.
27:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, and schools increasingly are in a dilemma because education is changing so rapidly right now.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: I don't think anybody knows where that's going.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, the that's something that a good therapist can also help you do is like hold your hand and sort of help you move through the steps of how do you really think a complex problem through?
27:52
SPEAKER_01: Like we can all decide whether we want to salt our food or not, and then take action to salt our food.
27:58
SPEAKER_01: Like, right, that's not the hard to do for most people because it's immediate.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, but doing a longer term project like going to graduate school or getting a new career or um getting into a relationship or getting out of one, those are they required a lot of complex thinking, and healing from trauma is like that too, because one of the things we trauma therapists have to teach people to do is to what we call mentalize their trauma.
28:26
SPEAKER_01: We have to teach them to think about their thinking about their trauma, right?
28:33
SPEAKER_01: And that's again, not necessarily a natural skill for a lot of people.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: Tell me more about that.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: For a lot of people, when they get into therapy, they have this sort of um, they're aware that they have some feelings.
28:49
SPEAKER_01: They know when they're super happy, they know when they're super sad or super mad.
28:54
SPEAKER_01: But that's pretty much it for the average person, what they're aware of, and they're not really aware of the nuances and the grades of those feelings.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, so you know, we have to be given a language and a vocabulary and a way of thinking about our bodies and our feelings and the way we're thinking.
29:17
SPEAKER_01: And part of that involves developing what um Freud called the observing ego, what um yoga calls the witness consciousness, which is learning that you have the ability to actually be the observer of your own thoughts and your own life.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: And again, for some people, this is a completely natural skill that they've always had.
29:40
SPEAKER_01: And for some people, they have to grow it.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: They are um, and a lot of people will resist it unconsciously because they're afraid of what they're gonna see if they really start looking at themselves.
29:54
SPEAKER_01: They might stumble into an area of trauma that they didn't know they had, or they might discover they have something they don't like about themselves that they didn't want to know, right?
30:03
SPEAKER_01: So um it's complicated.
30:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I um I hear that.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: And I I think for a long time, you know, in an in an effort to be positive all the time, I was like denying a whole part of myself that that needed to think through the negatives of things, that needed to accept um the fear, depression, uh, challenges, whatever those, you know, to to let my whole brain have a voice, so to speak.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: Um and and I learned to say, like, I acknowledge that.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: Um, but also, right?
30:44
SPEAKER_00: So I so I would like have let my both sides of my brain, the part that says, uh really, I really think we're gonna fail at this.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: I might say, Well, I acknowledge that fear.
30:55
SPEAKER_00: I certainly, I certainly feel that, but also if we work really hard at it, we do some learning.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: Certainly, there's some things we don't know yet, but if we do some learning and practice, I think we can succeed at this.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: We've succeeded at many things before in our life.
31:09
SPEAKER_00: So, like having that conversation with myself allows all like me to be totally honest with myself and decide um what I want to do instead of just trying to say, uh, don't I don't want to think about that.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: I just want to be positive.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: Well, uh there are some benefits of thinking about the negative side of things or the downside of things.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: You don't even have to say negative side of things, it's just the challenging part of something you're about to do that, hey, this is gonna be really hard.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: Um, or this this might be a really hard day.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: That's okay.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
31:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like um, yeah, like the other night, my dog had severe diarrhea all night long.
31:52
SPEAKER_01: And I uh and my bedroom's on the second floor, and I'm an older lady.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: And so four times in the middle of the night, I'm waking up and you know, and there was, I was thinking to myself, the benefit of getting older is that when I was younger, I would have been a lot more peed off about it, honestly, and I would have resisted it.
32:10
SPEAKER_01: And but instead, I kind of went through this yogic thing of like, okay, this is my night.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: This is what's gonna be happening all night.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: Let's make sure I've got my coat in the right place, and I'm just not I'm just not gonna sleep that well tonight.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: And that's what it is, because my dog needs to be taken care of.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: And it really helped me move through, it was still not a my most pleasant night, obviously, but it the resistance to what is happening often causes it drains our energy for one thing, and then it often causes what's a hard situation to be even harder.
32:45
SPEAKER_01: Like, let's say I was resisting it and mad and got mad at my dog and then took it out on my dog, and like that would have been a much worse night for both of us, right?
32:53
SPEAKER_01: Rather than just being an acceptance of like, okay, my dog has diarrhea.
32:58
SPEAKER_01: I don't really have a whole lot of choice about how I'm gonna handle this, right?
33:02
SPEAKER_00: Right.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's that's well said, and and I think um that's the key, right?
33:09
SPEAKER_00: Is is um been been having some conversations about my daughter.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: She's in theater and um high school theater, not all the kids are as intensely interested in she is as and trying hard.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: And and she they have this competition coming up, and she really wants to go to state.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: This is her last year in high school, and she really and they all the kids agreed they'd do a hard play, but now nobody wants to do the work, right?
33:41
SPEAKER_00: So she's just growing frustration, growing depression, even anger, and just frustration, really focused on the other kids won't try, I won't, you know, and it's like affecting her energy for sure.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: And it's you know, part of my thing with her is like let go of the other kids, let go of what you think the result might be of this, and just focus on your effort doing the best you can.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: And you know, it may not it may not end up very good, you know, but you can't make those kids right.
34:15
SPEAKER_01: Maybe she's outgrown, she's outgrown children's theater.
34:18
SPEAKER_01: Maybe she's ready for a higher level of professionalism in her work, right?
34:22
SPEAKER_01: That might just be the sign of like she's done with that era, you know.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
34:27
SPEAKER_00: I mean, she really is.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: This is what she wants to do for a career.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: She's going to the uh school of arts, and so this is very serious for her, you know.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: She wants to do really well, but I also told her the upside is that if you do really well, you do your part really well, you work hard at it, you'll shine so much more than everybody else.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: Like people might say, Well, well, the kids didn't do a very good job, but right.
34:58
SPEAKER_01: Well, and it's an opportunity you killed it, you know.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: So that's like what you're doing is you're giving her neurological flexibility about how she sees the situation.
35:09
SPEAKER_01: Another way to frame that would be um, you know, actors aren't really great until they can play opposite people that are not and be great, right?
35:17
SPEAKER_01: So these kids are giving you an opportunity to up your game because you got to carry the show, and that's what's real, right?
35:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it's true.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: And I didn't exactly frame it like that, but but in the conversation with her, it was like, hey, I acknowledge that pain and suffering, and and you're right to feel that.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: I I totally get that, but another way to look at it is this way, you know, so that so you're not just being consumed by your frustration and anger over the kids not doing their part, you know, not living up to their potential.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: Um, you can you can recognize that also you can let go a little bit of the expectation of this has to be a good play.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: It it may not because of the other kids, but what you can is your expectation for yourself is I'm gonna do really well because I'm gonna work very hard at it, and I'm gonna, and this is just another chance to hone your craft.
36:12
SPEAKER_00: I said this might not be the last time in your career that you're playing with some uh people that aren't that good.
36:23
SPEAKER_01: Well, professional actors run into that problem too.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: Don't think that doesn't happen in the movie world.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's some actors really don't want to work with each other that have to work with each other, yeah.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: So and that's um, I I find that with women veterans, a lot of times this uh what you're calling uh what do you say, neurological flexibility can be difficult because they spent years in a profession that was very uh you know had it sort of had a way of doing everything.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: Right.
36:59
SPEAKER_00: There was there's not a lot of flexibility in the military.
37:02
SPEAKER_01: It's no oh there is not, yeah.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: Um, and and to be a creative person and a majesty person, you can feel very out of place in military.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: I I I often felt that way.
37:15
SPEAKER_00: Um and there are people that do, like, why are we doing it this way?
37:18
SPEAKER_00: But there's a set, there's a rule for everything, there's a manual for everything, whatever.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: And so some people really embrace that.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, and and it suits them well, and and it can suit them well.
37:31
SPEAKER_00: Like if you come from a household that's sort of chaotic, um, or you had a rough childhood or whatever, it being in the military can give you a place, um, assuming it's not visiting trauma on you, it can it can be a place of of comfort in the sense that there are rules, there are there's a way of doing things, there's uh you know, I don't have to figure things out, I don't even have to figure out what I'm gonna wear the next day.
37:54
SPEAKER_00: I I just there's this, you know, a lot of people derive comfort from that.
37:59
SPEAKER_00: But eventually, when you transition out of the military, uh, like a good friend of mine said, the military will eventually divorce you, no matter how much you love it.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, it's gonna send you on your way and replace you with somebody else, whether you say two years, four years, or like me, 32 years.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: Wow, somebody they're gonna replace you, right?
38:20
SPEAKER_00: And so, so then they're in the civilian world where it doesn't function like that.
38:25
SPEAKER_00: Um even a workplace that has you know fairly fairly set rules or or standards of care, like in a medical setting or something, there's still like lots of behaviors that are not monitored or or the you know determined or set out, and and there are a lot of rules, they don't know how they fun how how the rule rules in the civilian world function.
38:50
SPEAKER_00: So it can be different, difficult for them to transition to a new new way of thinking, a new way of of going.
38:59
SPEAKER_01: Right.
38:59
SPEAKER_01: And so when you have trauma in a in a military mindset or in a very rigid way of thinking, it really stops people often from finding the things that are going to help them or from being able to enact the things that are gonna help them.
39:15
SPEAKER_01: And that's why most of us need help when we are stuck in some kind of traumatic situation.
39:22
SPEAKER_01: Even people who are very flexible thinkers can get lost in the overwhelming sensations and experience of being traumatized, right?
39:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, and again, I come back to things like when I talk about this with therapists, because I talk about therapists need to be flexible, right, with their clients.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: Um, I show a woman playing a Bach Partita where one hand is playing a melody and the other hand is playing a melody.
39:46
SPEAKER_01: And then somehow, by a miracle, these two hands come together and play this.
39:50
SPEAKER_01: And that's a high degree of neural integration.
39:52
SPEAKER_01: That's a high degree of neural flexibility and integration that that pianist has.
39:58
SPEAKER_01: And we can practice things like that, though.
40:01
SPEAKER_01: Even playing piano can help with that, actually.
40:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, but we can practice being flexible and trying new behaviors.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, when I was um felt myself aging, I got to a certain age.
40:15
SPEAKER_01: It was like my late 50s or just before I turned 60.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: And I got to this point where I'm like, I feel like I'm becoming like an old person in my mind.
40:22
SPEAKER_01: I don't want, I don't want that.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, well, what did I do when I was younger?
40:26
SPEAKER_01: What it I was like, oh, what I did when I was younger is I sought out new experiences, right?
40:32
SPEAKER_01: So I'm like, I need to have some new experiences.
40:34
SPEAKER_01: So I started doing some new things, and it really helped because a new just doing something new, something as new as taking a different route to work than you normally take, right?
40:46
SPEAKER_01: Driving a different kind of car.
40:48
SPEAKER_01: Like when you go on vacation, rent something that you would never rent.
40:52
SPEAKER_01: Like get out of your comfort zone and do different things.
40:55
SPEAKER_01: And that's how your brain learns to catch up and be flexible with what you're doing.
41:00
SPEAKER_01: And for some people, that's extraordinarily difficult to do.
41:03
SPEAKER_01: And for some of us, it's easier.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: Some of us like experimentation and sensory experiments, and some of us don't.
41:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, but in terms of healing trauma, um it'll help you be less avoidant because at some point you've got to walk in to the belly of your trauma and feel it and release it.
41:23
SPEAKER_01: And then it's gone.
41:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the the thing that happened still happened, but you will no longer have a traumatic feeling about it.
41:30
SPEAKER_01: And I promise that this is true because I've done it with myself with some very severe childhood memories, and I've done it with my clients.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I find that to be very true.
41:40
SPEAKER_00: When I started allowing my whole brain to have its say, uh, right away I recognize okay, I'm gonna have to feel some things I really don't want to feel.
41:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, it there's gonna be a lot of uncomfortable moments.
41:54
SPEAKER_00: And that's been true, but eventually it gets sorted out, and um I get to a happier place because we we sort of want to get there, but I mean, we we naturally want to be happy, we want to have the you know, we want to thrive and whatever, but if we have all this stuff in the way, you gotta process it somehow.
42:20
SPEAKER_00: Um whether it whether it's stuck energy like you're talking about, uh like with Reiki, that maybe releases this energy, maybe talk therapy, things you need to talk about, your story you need to tell, reframe, whatever it is.
42:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, but if you ignore it, you experience what I did, which is a lot of lack of sleep and a lot of you know discomfort that I couldn't seem to escape, and that kind of thing.
42:46
SPEAKER_00: So it has to have its say in a way.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, and that there are many ways to do that, but yeah, there's no way out but through.
42:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
42:56
SPEAKER_01: You can try to go behind, around, under, beside you have to walk through it.
43:01
SPEAKER_01: And the irony of that is what I have found as a therapist is that the hardest, the longest part of therapy is establishing the trust relationship that allows people to walk through it.
43:12
SPEAKER_01: Once people are ready to walk through it, that part goes by very quickly, actually.
43:19
SPEAKER_01: It's getting through all the resistance and preparation to be able to do that.
43:23
SPEAKER_01: Like doing a firewalk, like setting up the firewalk takes a long time, but doing the firewalk is like just seconds.
43:32
SPEAKER_01: I think trauma can be compared to that in a way.
43:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I like that.
43:36
SPEAKER_00: I love that analogy.
43:38
SPEAKER_00: When when people um come to see you, do they um they norm do they nor know normally know what kind of modality they want to get into?
43:49
SPEAKER_00: Do they know are they coming in because they want to do Reiki or because they wanna, or do you do you sort of like evaluate them uh somehow and suggest?
44:00
SPEAKER_00: This approach or another.
44:02
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes they sometimes they know.
44:04
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes they know they don't want to do Reiki.
44:07
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes they know they do want to do Reiki.
44:08
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes a lot of times they don't know.
44:10
SPEAKER_01: What they know by the time they would reach me is that most of them had already been to other therapists.
44:17
SPEAKER_01: I was like, for a lot of people, the last stop in therapy for them.
44:22
SPEAKER_01: So I knew that they had some trauma from their therapies to also take care of.
44:29
SPEAKER_01: And for me, always my training and my experience, the relationship of the of the therapist to the person is the most important ingredient in the healing.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: And so I take a lot of care to do that phase, which we call stabilization.
44:47
SPEAKER_01: There's the three parts of healing trauma that are widely acknowledged.
44:51
SPEAKER_01: The stabilization, memory work, and then integration.
44:55
SPEAKER_01: And that comes out of Judith Herman's books on trauma back in the day.
45:00
SPEAKER_01: We a lot of us still hold to that.
45:02
SPEAKER_01: But the stabilization for the patient is being in a setting where they know they can, they can start to know they can say difficult things to the therapist, and they won't be ignored, misheard, judged, criticized, or just not understood.
45:20
SPEAKER_01: Right.
45:20
SPEAKER_01: And that process can take longer for some than others.
45:23
SPEAKER_01: For example, I had a client who was non-white and had had a terrible racial-based crime in their past.
45:34
SPEAKER_01: And they had to grill me for about 18 months on my own racism before they were ready to talk to me about that event because the risk of my not understanding that event the right way was so high to them.
45:48
SPEAKER_01: It would have collapsed them had I not understood it or seen it through my own white lady lens.
45:57
SPEAKER_01: You know, I had to show that my client that I was doing the work of understanding the other side of things.
46:05
SPEAKER_01: And it was uncomfortable to the point where they came in and they're like, even my husband thinks I'm giving you too hard of a time.
46:14
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, it's okay.
46:16
SPEAKER_01: It's what you need to do to feel safe.
46:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm here for it.
46:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm not, I'm not fragile.
46:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna fall over.
46:22
SPEAKER_01: You can't kill me with word bullets.
46:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, like I'm I'm gonna be here and listen to you.
46:28
SPEAKER_01: And we did eventually get to that event and work through it.
46:30
SPEAKER_01: And it was good.
46:31
SPEAKER_01: There was resolution to that event.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it requires a lot of sort of deep breathing and recentering yourself for both the patient and the client, and the willingness to go into very difficult, uncomfortable material is important.
46:51
SPEAKER_01: One thing um I just want to mention about this last book that just came out.
46:54
SPEAKER_01: It's an anthology of me and 10 of my therapist expert colleagues, all women, but half of them are BIPOC.
47:03
SPEAKER_01: So a lot of the chapters, so but Black Indigenous people of color.
47:08
SPEAKER_01: Um several of the chapters give some biographic, autobiographical material that um, if anybody is looking to understand the effects of racism and trauma, this book is a good one because it's really um first-person narratives from people who are also very qualified to talk about what trauma is.
47:30
SPEAKER_01: And um, I'm just I just have to put a plug-in for them because these authors are fantastic.
47:36
SPEAKER_01: And I think that as much as we can think we intellectually understand something, it's different to read somebody else's first person account of something.
47:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
47:49
SPEAKER_00: Um I'm looking at the time, we just have a few more minutes.
47:54
SPEAKER_00: Um I did I did want to ask about past life regression though.
48:03
SPEAKER_00: And so what is I guess how do past lives affect people and what is the the regression process, how does the regression process help them?
48:17
SPEAKER_01: Well, I trained with Dr.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: Brian Weiss, who wrote the famous book Many Lives, Many Masters, still considered a class, like it was came out in the 80s.
48:26
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I saw him on Oprah a few years several years ago, and I realized, oh, he's still out there teaching.
48:31
SPEAKER_01: So I went and got certified by him and his wife in a five-day workshop to do regressions, and um, I really like doing that work.
48:40
SPEAKER_01: So um there's a very light um progressive relaxation induction, like something you get at the end of a yoga class or something, just like relax part of your body, relax that part of your body, and then a visualization about going in deep into the unconscious mind, and then um, you know, working with what comes out.
49:03
SPEAKER_01: I think that people can have different ideas about what past lives are, and I'm not sure that it matters which version.
49:13
SPEAKER_01: Like some people think, well, well, maybe it's just ancestral memories that are in our DNA.
49:18
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it is.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you're remembering something your ancestor went through.
49:23
SPEAKER_01: Um, some people are like, well, all time is a layer cake and it's all happening at the same moment.
49:27
SPEAKER_01: And okay, that, you know, if that works for you, that's fine.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: For me, what works, I'm very developmentally oriented by my training and also just by the way I think.
49:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, so I like for me, it works this idea of that we've had this series of lifetimes.
49:44
SPEAKER_01: In between lifetimes, a lot of people report um making decisions about their next lifetime.
49:52
SPEAKER_01: Um, I've had people talk about going to a certain place, working with these certain beings, seeing previews of their coming life, like choosing a lot of what happens to them.
50:02
SPEAKER_01: It seems like the older a soul you are, the more choice that you're able to make about what you want your next lessons.
50:09
SPEAKER_01: But I had uh a 20-year-old come in for her first regression, and she immediately said, Oh, I see where I am because I was in this in-between life place.
50:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm in the, she's like, I'm in the third of five lifetimes learning about healing.
50:23
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, great, good to know.
50:25
SPEAKER_01: Like, we don't we don't always get that much uh knowledge about what we're doing.
50:30
SPEAKER_01: But um I I work with everything as being part of the mind, right?
50:36
SPEAKER_01: So whether you believe it's a fantasy or an ancestral memory or something you actually lived yourself, like we can work with all of that as being having a certain kind of reality because it's happening in the mind.
50:50
SPEAKER_01: And in some ways, everything's happening in the mind.
50:53
SPEAKER_00: Right.
50:54
SPEAKER_00: Right.
50:55
SPEAKER_00: So, what is the benefit of doing that regression when somebody is able to go throughout through that with you?
51:01
SPEAKER_00: How does that benefit them now?
51:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, um, a couple different, I've seen it work a couple different ways.
51:07
SPEAKER_01: One way is like I had a client who was really struggling with leaving their husband.
51:13
SPEAKER_01: Like they really knew they needed to leave their husband.
51:15
SPEAKER_01: It was a not good abusive relationship.
51:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, and they just had a lot of fear about living alone.
51:22
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I was counseling them at some point we decided to do a past life regression.
51:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, this person remembered two lifetimes where they had been a woman living alone.
51:32
SPEAKER_01: One was in New York City and one was in the wilds of Alaska.
51:35
SPEAKER_01: And they were both absolutely beautiful, content, joyful lifetimes.
51:40
SPEAKER_01: And that remembering gave her the courage to leave.
51:45
SPEAKER_01: Like then she's like, oh, okay, I've done this before.
51:48
SPEAKER_01: Like it's gonna be okay.
51:50
SPEAKER_01: Right.
51:50
SPEAKER_01: So this can be like an inspirational lifetime that you remember for a lot of us.
51:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, and for me especially, is like as soon as I finished clearing the trauma in this lifetime, the universe was like, but wait, there's more.
52:02
SPEAKER_01: And then like explaining past lifetimes, like, okay, I gotta go back and clear a whole bunch of stuff.
52:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, before I wrote my book, I was having a lot of anxiety.
52:12
SPEAKER_01: I'd sit down to write my book, my first book, um, and I have this like mini anxiety attack.
52:18
SPEAKER_01: And so I thought, hmm, past life, maybe.
52:22
SPEAKER_01: So I went and did my first past life regression, and I remembered something that really helped me clear that.
52:28
SPEAKER_01: Like I made a vow not to practice publicly in a lifetime because my teacher was hauled off and killed in the Inquisition and I was thrown in jail.
52:38
SPEAKER_01: And I made a promise that I would never, ever, ever practice again publicly.
52:42
SPEAKER_01: So once I remembered that and was able to release it, then the writing just sort of became a lot easier, right?
52:49
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes people have physical issues that clear up.
52:52
SPEAKER_01: Um, really dramatic example is I had a woman call contact me.
52:57
SPEAKER_01: She said, I keep having this recurring obsessive thought that um my five children are going to be beheaded.
53:04
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, wow, that's a really unusual thought.
53:07
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, did you grow up in Saudi Arabia or anything?
53:11
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
53:11
SPEAKER_01: I'm American, Midwestern, whatever.
53:14
SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm she's like, I really think it might be past life memories.
53:17
SPEAKER_01: So I'm like, well, come in, let's find out.
53:18
SPEAKER_01: And if we get into the induction, and she is right away, she's there immediately.
53:22
SPEAKER_01: It's like Game of Thrones in a castle, or kids are being beheaded in the courtyard, she's being stabbed in the hallway.
53:29
SPEAKER_01: It was, it was gory and gruesome, but she and she was she's really happy to remember it because at the end, even though that was sort of brutal to remember, she's like, okay, like it's not gonna happen this lifetime.
53:42
SPEAKER_01: That was then, this is now, right?
53:44
SPEAKER_01: And I didn't hear from her again, so I think it was kind of like a one-session cure, honestly, for really strange phobia.
53:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, interesting.
53:53
SPEAKER_00: Okay, uh, um unfortunately we're out of time, but um where where can how can people get in touch with you either to if they want some sessions with you or to get your books?
54:06
SPEAKER_01: Um sue pb, su e p b like peanut butter.com, www.sue pb.com or soup's ban it.com, but that's impossible to spell.
54:17
SPEAKER_01: So um my books are there, I've got clips from other podcasts.
54:22
SPEAKER_01: Um, I've got information, I've got um all my services that you can do, whether it's a Reiki session or a past life regression, or yeah.
54:32
SPEAKER_01: And um, I really think that for a lot of people, I just encourage them to look for my book, The Trauma Toolkit.
54:38
SPEAKER_01: It's in a lot of libraries in the United States.
54:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's a very good resource for people.
54:44
SPEAKER_00: Sounds great.
54:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, I loved having you on the show, and it was fun to to go through that with you, um, talk about these different ways.
54:53
SPEAKER_00: And I think uh these I I have some friends that do the alternative modalities with people, and they they've seen some amazing results with people.
55:03
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, uh, I'm all for it.
55:05
SPEAKER_00: Whatever, whatever works for a person, that's what they should do.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I agree with you.
55:10
SPEAKER_00: It's about getting our minds right, um, or about changing our minds, and the other stuff follows.
55:16
SPEAKER_00: So uh, but great having with you on the show, Susan, and uh I wish you all the best.
55:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's been great being here.
55:24
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
55:24
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.