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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode is all about healing negative mindsets and transformation through our DNA. And my guest today is Lisa Thomas, who is an
Epigenetics expert, a speaker and author and a leader who contributes by facilitating accelerated healing, especially within this area of DNA and Emotional Intelligence. Through the expansion of self-awareness, she says that people
are empowered to embrace collaboration and contribute to transforming the future of society.
And she’s helped thousands of people around the world achieve their life goals and heal trauma by releasing inherited emotional DNA, such as fear of success, fear of failure, anxiety, procrastination, fear of public speaking, limiting beliefs to relationship drama and business stagnation. When we go into all of that in this episode, we start by talking about her incredible near-death experience that changed her life, the difference between DNA and Epigenetics, how things like emotions and trauma can be passed on in our DNA, what informational tags are and how they’re passed on, how to identify our inherited patterns and how to separate those from our learned behavior, as well as how to release both of those.
And then we talk a lot about parenting tips and how to help our kids build confidence in a healthy way, how releasing our own inherited patterns can benefit our children as well, and so much more. Very far-ranging episode with Lisa and gets into a lot of the emotional side that I’ve talked about some in relation to my own experience. So without any further ado, let’s join Lisa Thomas. Lisa, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Lisa: Absolutely.
Katie: Well, I cannot wait to dive into our topic today. I think we’re going to touch on so many things that are going to be so valuable and relevant to moms. And before we get into the meat of all that, I would love to also hear, I have a note from your bio that you also had a near-death experience. And having been through that myself, I would love to hear what that led to for you, what it was like. And I would guess maybe it was quite transformational.
Lisa: It changed my life. And I think that anybody that goes through it, Katie, it’s going to impact their life in one way or another, right? And I find that it happens more for the positive than the negative. Yeah, that’s a great question. I have three children, so a little backstory. I have three children and with each child, I experienced depression. But I was not educated in depression. I was not educated in the term postpartum depression. Now, how can that be? I don’t know, but I’m one of those that must have been under a rock. And I didn’t have anywhere to go, anywhere to turn to. And I ended up living on caffeine, meaning three super big gulps a day, Katie. In order to hopefully get that rise, in order to have enough umph. to go pick up my kids, to be able to sit them down at the table to do homework. But it was hard for me to function.
And I actually started to pray, right, that God would take me in some way. Not that I was really, I wasn’t ready to kill myself, but if I got hit by a car or in an accident, that would be the best thing for my children because I had three little toe heads. and with all big brown eyes and they were beautiful. And I have a husband who’s adorable, and I knew he would have no problem finding an amazing wife. That’s where I was. To the point that if there had been a magic pill or a magic potion across in my bay window sitting on this pretty table that I have in front of the bay window, because I lived on the sofa or in bed, I wouldn’t have had the internal energy to go and get it. That’s how bad off I was. The three Super Big Gulps did not work anymore. We both know how toxic that is, but I had tried for years to get off the caffeine and I couldn’t function. It was worse.
My husband took me to Cabo for a birthday. And there is a competitive side to me, Katie. That is just is instilled in me. And I, he and I went riding on some doom buggies, sand Four Wheelers, ATVs. The night before this adventure. My mother had died about five years previously. My mother died when I was just right after my third child was born. She was my best friend. She was my advocate. She came to me in a dream. And she was wearing this bright red lipstick, to put it mildly, and she was fairly fair-skinned. And I said, Mom, that is the worst lipstick I have ever seen. Why are you wearing it? And she said, ah, because you are never going to forget I was here. I never have. And she said, I want you to know that I am with you. Now that’s a beautiful message, but I didn’t realize the revelance it had. I didn’t realize there was any importance to it except, don’t despair, I can do more for you on the other side. And she actually said that, I can do more for you on this side than I could there.
So the next morning when we got up to go ride ATVs, it wasn’t really present in my thought process, nor was it present. We’re at the end of this ATV excursion. I said to my husband at the end of the day, I’ll race you to the top of that hill. Katie, I was gone before I finished my sentence, because of course I was going to win, right? I never looked at the sand dune. It’s not a sand dune you would ever think about coming up or down, nor would you go up it. If a sand dunes like this, I hit about here. That’s how steep it was. And the whole thing came back on top of me. Planted the handlebar up through my jaw, up through my teeth. Knocked me out.
And I had this moment. I had a decision. It was like God’s source saying, your prayer’s been answered. What do you want to do? Well, I chose life. I wake up to the most intense amount of pain I have ever experienced in my life. They told me I was paralyzed. They told me I would never walk again, and I declared within me, my mother is with me. I will walk again. I spent six weeks in bed. And it was during that time. I said, you gave me a choice and it had really been my time to go. there would have been no choice. And so if there’s a reason I’m here, it’s my children because I want to be a good mother. Motherhood is everything when you’re raising children because they do become adults, right? And it was so important to me. And I had so much guilt around me not living up to what my expectation was at motherhood. And that was my priority. But I also had an innate sense that I had to operate life different.
And so I said to God’s source, universe, I’m alive and I’m going to change my life. I have never been in so much pain, so I’m not going to know if it’s a caffeine headache or not. And I’m not ever going to touch it again. And I am going to start saying yes to things that I’m afraid of. I’m going to say yes to learning more. I’m going to say yes to education. I’m going to say yes to whatever you bring my way that I get this sense serves my highest good, no matter how much fear I have. If you were with me and angels were with me in a moment that I could have had my prayer answered, then I know you’re with me. And I’ve changed my life ever since, Katie.
And at the same time, if in that near-death experience, I’d had this massive clairvoyant vision of who I was going to become. Honestly, it would not have changed my life because I would have not believed in myself enough to go from where I was, which was just the ultimate gut-wrenching despair to where I am now. I would have never had the belief in myself to think that I could go from here to here. I had to live one day at a time, make one decision at a time, be a good mom first, show up for my kids, and then it’s like respond to the call of moving through uncomfortability.
Katie: Well, that’s an incredible story and sounds like one that has now led to a journey that’s benefited many people first, I’m sure your children, but many beyond that as well. And even for people listening who maybe haven’t had a near death experience, I would guess many people listening can really resonate with that feeling of guilt around motherhood and not living up to what we hope we will be as mothers. And also I love that you said saying yes to what you’re afraid of. That’s been a little bit of my lesson the last few years as well. And so I love that those became little springboards to the rest of our conversation.
Lisa: Perfect.
Katie: And I know from researching you and from reading and listening to some of your work before, you have done a tremendous amount in the area of like Epigenetics and understanding how things are passed on even through DNA. And I love this topic. I feel like it’s not talked about nearly enough. I did get to interview Mark Wolynn who talks about generational trauma. But I think this is so important to moms. And I feel like we have a generation of moms who are wanting to step in and be the cycle breakers. And I’m so excited to see that. I feel like we’re on the precipice of incredible things. So for background, can you walk us through some of the baseline understanding about what you mean when you talk about DNA and Epigenetics and things being passed on?
Lisa: Yeah, that’s a great question too. We have our DNA helix that makes us 5’2 or 6’5. It gives us brown, green, and blue eyes. Those are fixed DNA. But within our DNA, we have our Epigenetics, and that is how our DNA is expressed. And that, Katie, is based on our life experiences of our ancestors. We get many good things from our ancestors. We get our gifts and our talents. We get some of our personality, right?
But with that, we also get our fears, our phobias, even our belief systems. And a perfect example around a phobia is the fear of spiders. You can, has anybody had a fear of spiders, right? From, I did, from the moment I probably, I was born, I was born with it, but the only moment I remember is the first time I saw a spider, and I was for sure going to die. And everybody around knew it, right? And yet I had never encountered a spider before. But that generational fear gets handed down. And it could be that my great-great-grandfather was bitten by a spider. Those are the types of details in our life we really don’t know.
Past a couple of generations, rarely do we know the life experiences of them unless there’s been great genealogy records kept and journals. But an example would be someone in your family bloodline was bitten by a venomous spider, almost died. The family was told he was going to die overnight. Maybe you’ve been chopping wood. He doesn’t die, but that fear of the spider would get passed in the cellular memory, right?
And there’s actually a name for it. They’re called informational tags. And informational tags can get turned on at any time in our life, and they can also be released. If a mom has, moms can, we can have one too many children, right? And it doesn’t mean that they all inherit the same informational tag, but let’s say it does. Maybe everybody gets the inherited pattern of addiction. Well, it doesn’t mean that addiction is going to show up the same way. And it doesn’t mean the informational tag will get turned on at any point in their life. So with addiction, we can have addiction to drugs, alcohol, hardcore drugs. We can have an addiction to fear. We can have an addiction to procrastination, addiction to the assurance that, or the addiction to the scarcity that we’re never going to have our needs met, or that we can never believe that we can be loved, can show up in a lot of different ways. Does that help?
Katie: It does. And it blew my mind to understand that there’s even like, they’ve studied a physical component to this and that they can identify it. Like to your point, it could have been a distant relative, but when they did this in mice, mice who, I think the grandparents were exposed to a scent and then shocked. And then they skipped a whole generation and then grandchildren of those mice having never been shocked were still had that fear response from the scent.
Lisa: Which was Emory University that did it. Yeah.
Katie: Yeah, and I think that opens a whole conversation beyond. even just the baseline understanding, which brings me to the question of how do we, how can we identify some of those things that might have been passed down that we might have just assumed were our own patterns our whole life?
Lisa: Right. It takes really being aware, first of all, because inherited patterns are typically what hide within the subconscious. Our subconscious knows everything. And so the inherited things lie within the subconscious. Now, we might have had a family that shared a lot of family stories, so that awareness will be brought to our attention through conversation as we grow up.
The other way that you can think about it is what are similarities that you have with siblings or parents? Now where it gets a little bit confusing, Katie, is our inherited patterns are not the only thing that create who we are. It’s what we begin with. But we also have the learned behaviors. and the interaction our parents had that we absorbed, right, what a modeled relationship is. We have, we just have life experiences. We have the learned behaviors of being in the home, and then we have our life experiences that create the stories of who we are.
Katie: That makes sense. And I know many of the people listening are parents. And I think often of that, how like our early childhood experiences can so drastically impact our adult experience of life and how even those of us, the best intention of parents will still inadvertently do things that our kids will internalize in certain ways and that can have such a lasting effect with them.
So I guess the two-part follow-up question to that would be, as parents, are there any tools to be aware of that to hopefully give our kids as few as possible of the negative side of those inherited patterns? And I would guess also there’s this element of we certainly can inherit traumas and fears from our past generations, but then it would also seem we can inherit great things as well, like resilience or perseverance or whatever it may be. So is there a way as parents to nurture the good parts of that and help our kids also make sure they get those strong points as well?
Lisa: First, we want to be aware of our words. Our words have a big impact on our children. and that are we empowering them or disempowering them? Are we giving them the freedom to fall, so that they can learn who they are? Or are we trying to control them because of our fear of not wanting them to fall is a metaphor that I like to use.
Of course, you can work with, you can learn how to clear inherited patterns yourself. I teach that. I call it a tender mercy from the universe. Because when a informational tag gets released from you, the mother, it will release from your children as well. It releases from everyone on both sides of the veil.
I was tutored in this, I would say, through experience before I feel like science even caught up. So just imagine me trying to talk about this before we had the science from Emory University with the mice, right? But my experience with working with people from the Holocaust, their children and grandchildren, and me seeing the patterns of fear. So I’m so grateful to be in a time period right now where moms, parents can be educated and go, I’m choosing because I really agree with you that those born right now really did come with the desire to, not in anger by any way. Let me just preface this. There’s no blaming on ancestral stuff. Bad things happen and it’s part of our life experiences, right? And our ideas and what we hope for might come to fruition the way we thought, but there’s no blaming here.
And our bloodline is very important to us, whether we had a close relationship or great parents or not, because there’s a myriad of people coming after our parents and grandparents. And they are often our guardian angels. They are very much advocates in our life. So when we clear it, not only are we breaking a pattern, but we’re helping the generations before us and after us heal. So that those that come after don’t have to repeat it. It’s beautiful, and it’s beautiful to see it happen in families. So, long answer on that, mothers, fathers, people can learn to clear it themselves and just know that you’re helping your children and you’re helping those that have come before.
Katie: I love the way you said that and I feel like that gives even more depth to that statement. We know statistically, for instance, how important it is to take care of ourselves or at least we hear that. It’s easier said than done, but we know, for instance, a mother’s fitness level has a direct impact on the health of her children. It makes complete sense by that logic that, of course, a mother’s emotional experience would have a direct impact on her children and all those who come beyond it. That definitely leads to the question. I know this is the bulk of your work, but how do we begin to clear and unpack some of those inherited emotional things?
Lisa: Well, I teach a class on how to do this, and or if somebody wants to be a practitioner and they want it, they have a vision to help people on a bigger way, but also, or you just, yeah, you learn it to do it for yourself, which will help your family in return. And of course there’s private work, I have practitioners. I mean, there’s lots of different ways. It is hard. What I want to say is to begin with, you want to become aware and choose your words that you speak to your children differently than how they were spoken to you. Because those DNA patterns come back really hot, really quickly. We can know better, but being different is a whole other game. We can have said I’m doing it differently and then we find ourselves repeating the same thing. And it’s because it’s so part of that cellular memory.
And an example I like to use is, we move two steps forward, three steps back and then we get hard on ourselves. Like, why in the heck am I still doing this? I promise, change does not come by calling ourselves out in any bully way. And so I’m going to give you a couple of examples.
Our mindset is important. I don’t talk about brain and mind probably the same way most people do. I talk about it on a subconscious level. Our subconscious really wants to help us. The ego mind gets a really bad rap in society. When we can teach the subconscious and change that relationship to where we’re really, we’re advocates with each other, the conscious and the subconscious mind, it is a dynamic change for positivity. And so one thing that I give my clients that I want to give all your moms is that when you find yourself in the negative chatter, I should have, could have done better, when you want to get angry, when you start thinking and looping. I mean, I looped a lot. I still will get into looping. What I do is I say this. Cancel, cancel, only love is spoken here. Cancel, cancel, only love is spoken here. Every time you think a negative thought, if you will say that, you don’t have to say it out loud, but you can. Cancel, cancel. Only love is spoken here. There are times you might say that fifty times because there are negative patterns that get passed down in our genealogy. It is within our Epigenetics. If you have a negative mindset, don’t be too hard on yourself. You might be thinking, it’s better for me to be critical of myself than having somebody else catch me off guard with a negative statement. There’s a lot of reasons that perfectionism kicks in, but to really accept it and go, oh, subconscious, because if you say, stop talking to myself that way, it doesn’t work. We make two steps forward, three steps back. Cancel, cancel, only love is spoken here, is a great way to teach the subconscious what is a positive thought and what is negative. And if it’s not love, it’s all negative. Make sense?
Katie: It does make sense. Yeah. I noticed that firsthand in my own experience over the last, well, I guess decade and a half now of un-patterning some of my own things was that everything outwardly changed so much when I changed how I spoke to myself inwardly. And I realized as my kids got older too and paying attention to them, that even if I spoke kindly always to them, they were also, kids are so perceptive and they were picking up on the way I was talking to myself, even if I was never doing it outwardly.
Lisa: They will. They absolutely learn it as well as they’ve inherited it anyway.
Katie: That’s so fascinating. So basically to make sure I understand where we are and then we’ll build from here, we have the physical aspects of our DNA that determine our physical characteristics like eye color and hair color. But then we also have these emotional tags that are passed on. But those certain epigenetic switches that relate to our physicality can be turned on or off. So we’re actually seeing a change in the body. Years ago, I read that book, The Body Keeps the Score, and it opened my eyes to… We know there’s a mind-body connection, but that really helped me understand just how drastically those things are connected and how, at least in my experience, I saw this, my physical body was storing the different traumas. And that as I started that process, my physical body changed without me really trying to change it.
Lisa: It’s a miracle. I mean, it really is. And our pain energy, it takes a long time for pain energy to build up to where it’s nonstop. And that’s when you think about a whole life of that being stored in the body. And we really look at what this is, is their frequencies. And this is where sometimes the conversation gets hard, but they really are. Every word in the dictionary has a frequency, a megahertz attached to it. And so if we were to be able to see in the body in 3D on that type of dimension, we would see these clumps of masses, just like energy masses, like a swirling sphere. And they get located in different parts of the body. And the subconscious does that. It traps these experiences in our life. And what it does is it goes and puts it in a weak, what it views as a weak area. It might be a shoulder because maybe somebody playing softball, it reeked in their shoulder, there was an injury. Because it’s trying to support it. But over time what happens is we start getting this awful pain energy. Right? And so the body is really just screaming that it needs support. Diseases can come about. And just, you’re spot on, Katie.
Katie: Yeah, and I had another guest recently who talked about this as well. He was very involved in a lot of research in science and listed on many publications I had seen in PubMed. And he talked about that like heart coherence and the emotional aspect of things and how often that this is maybe what we hear of these spontaneous healings from these really advanced diseases. Often that’s what’s going on is that the person is doing that inner work and it’s releasing in the physical body responds in the same way.
Lisa: When you combine both, really transformation happens on a lasting level. Yeah. And I’m somebody who believes in modern medicine. I think it’s a gift that we have in the 20th century. And when you combine both aspects and you see them both for the gift they are, really our life can change, both spiritually, the emotional aspect as well as physically.
Katie: Yeah, I think 100% agree. I think that’s one of the best outcomes happen. And I’ve seen examples that seem to support that as well with people I’ve worked with and talked to where they would have some physical thing going on and they would work on that particular thing and get that resolved. And then another physical thing would pop up. And it seems like if we don’t deal with the underlying stuff, the body will just keep showing up other places, other symptoms, other things going on. And that often that missing piece is that inner side that is harder to do often.
I know you also talk a lot about tips for healing or reversing a negative mindset. And it seems like this lines up a little bit with your story as well. But I would love any tips you have in that area as well, because I think moms especially can sometimes get in that negative mindset.
Lisa: It would be first to count call it out and teach the brain when you think about when you’re in that negative mindset, cancel, cancel, only love is spoken here. It can be if the child’s running late and you’re irritated because you need to get out the door to get to an appointment and the kid hasn’t even come out of the house and you’re in the car waiting for him to come out. Or if they forgot their lunchbox and you have to go back, cancel, cancel, only love is spoken here. It’ll help stop the looping pattern.
There’s another one that I like to give is in this, when we’re in that negative emotional pattern, there’s an emotion that we’re feeling. If you will say to yourself, I accept myself in this feeling of anger. So this is what it would look like if I’m in it, okay? I would say, and I’m waiting for a child to get out the house so that we can all leave waiting in the van, right? Because we’re all in the van, ready to go. I, Lisa, accept myself in this feeling of frustration. That’s all I have to do. I, Lisa, accept myself in this feeling of frustration and say that you don’t have to say it out loud. If you’re by yourself, words connect with the conscious brain. So if you’re by yourself and you get in these feelings, or I Lisa accept myself that I’m feeling despair right now. I Lisa accept myself that I’m looping in this all once again. What it does is it tells the body, instead of it calling out in a negative way, it’s like, oh, you’re okay with this. And it builds confidence.
I accept myself and name what it is. Call your name out, you have to say your name. What you’re doing is you’re working with both the front and the back of the brain. You’re working within the hippocampus on our cellular, on our memories, as well as the subconscious. It also helps the amygdala get out of fight and flight. Because when the amygdala is always living in fight and flight, it’s really hard to lean through fear. It’s really hard to make a decision. And moms, we need to make decisions. And if we’re stuck in the amygdala of making the fear of making the wrong decision or making sure that everything is perfect, right? That need to control doesn’t ever work long term.
Katie: That’s so true. It reminds me of something I did in therapy years ago. The therapist had me doing a version of tapping while saying something similar to that. And at first she had me said, even though I’m experiencing whatever the negative thing was at this point, I love and accept myself and I love and accept myself when I now choose and then whatever I was working toward. And the first time she said it, I was supposed to repeat after her and I literally could not make the words come out. It was so difficult, which was wild to me. And then when I finally was able to say it, it was just like complete waterworks and it was like an emotional release. And I have found that this is actually a tool that seems helpful with little kids, especially once they aren’t in the biggest part of their emotions, if you can sit with them through that. I feel like if you can give them a tool that helps them repattern young too, it also helps them break that intensity of emotion.
And it also reminds me of that saying I’ve heard before that what you resist persists. And they often, with emotions, the more we try to fight them, the stronger they get, it seems like. Whereas if we can just accept them, love all the parts of ourselves, thank them for what they’re trying to do, which is probably keep us safe, then they don’t have a need to persist as much.
Lisa: And they won’t. They won’t. And I taught my children, cancel, cancel, only love is spoken here when they were young. When I’m saying young, like around, it would have been when they were like around ten years old. My oldest was ten. So it is definitely something that they can do. In fact, I accept myself in this feeling of sadness because children often experience sadness and loneliness. And… a lot in school. I would say that’s almost, besides the pattern of being bullied, right? It’s hard to accept yourself and being bullied, but you can accept yourself that they shouldn’t, right? But they can accept themselves that they’re lonely, that maybe they’re eating lunch by themselves. And teach them in that that it’s okay to be by yourself.
Because sometimes when we’re older and when we thought we were going to get married and have four or six kids, it didn’t happen that way. And so we can feel like we didn’t live up to our measure of expectation, our life purpose. So it helps him for a lot of reasons.
Katie: Yeah, and it makes complete sense to me that working on ourselves is actually the most impactful thing we can do for our kids as well. I love that idea of making that even part of the family culture. The only love is spoken here. I think that’s, I love that. I’m going to implement that with my kids also.
Lisa: I have a sign with it that says that.
Katie: Oh, I love that. That’s a great idea. Have it up on the wall or somewhere.
Lisa: Have it up on the wall.
Katie: I love that. Are there any other tips that are maybe relevant at certain ages of parenting? Like I know the toddler years can sometimes be big emotions and a little tumultuous. The teenage years is often one that’s talked about as well. Are there any strategies for our kids? Obviously, with the caveat that we’re working on ourselves, it’s the most impactful piece.
Lisa: Well, it’s, for us to be mindful of what’s happening because if we don’t let them have a tantra tantrum. The awareness is they’re going to throw tension tantrums as an adult. in their relationships. So like allowing them to process through these without a judgment that they’re having one because they’re age appropriate. But if we always are squashing it, right? It will come, that’s what we do when we get upset as adults is we’re throwing tantrums. And oftentimes it’s because we weren’t heard as a child. And so as adults, we just get like more aggressive. We get angry, we have little, we have little patience for when our airlines get, our airline ticket gets canceled or rescheduled. And so we throw this tantrum in hopes that we’re going to get the intention.
So it’s really being mindful that you’re really helping them as a child process who they are at these different stages because all these age times that they go through, their grades and the age appropriate things are just, it’s part of the life cycle. We can’t skip them. It’s being aware of that as a parent and not judging it in a negative way. I will say that the hard part is when we have neighbors that appear to be raising their kids perfectly or the play group we’re in, it’s really just owning it that these children picked you to be their mom. I 110%, with all my heart know that we pick our parents and we pick them for different reasons. We’re not all going to have the same reason. And we might’ve been raising our hand before we came here and said, I want that experience. It’s going to help me. It’s going to help me be a better person.
So we might have picked parents that on the outside now, we like, why would we have done that? But your children picked you and you have everything you need to be the best parent to them, whether you’re perfect or not. We aren’t supposed to be perfect. We’re not supposed to be perfect as humans. And if you love your children and they feel loved in these different stages of life and accepted, you’re being an amazing parent. Yeah.
Katie: I love that advice to let them have tantrums. That was actually a thing I had to learn and pattern as an adult is that it’s okay to have the big emotions and now I encourage it in a safe way with my kids. I’m like, you can’t have a tantrum on another person. You can’t violate someone else’s… their own autonomy and their space. But if you’re feeling big emotions, go hit your pillow, go flail on your mattress, let the emotions go through you instead of having to fight them.
And I also learned just through my kids who are I think my greatest teachers in this life to not say it’s okay, because I realized as a kid, I had internalized that that meant like the emotions you’re having are actually not okay, suppress them, everything is fine, why are you having these big emotions? And so I try not to ever tell them it’s okay or stop crying or shh, and to like help them put names to what the emotions are that they’re having and talk about them. Or if they need a little space and peace to give them that and then we can talk about it. But to not have them hopefully like anyway, I can help them not lock those emotions down. Or think it’s not ok to feel them.
Lisa: That’s exactly how you do it. That’s amazing, Katie, that you have that awareness. And I suspect your audience does too, because of the great content you put out and your ability to teach back what you’ve learned. That’s cool.
Katie: Like I said at the beginning, it’s an incredible community of moms and I’m so excited by what seems to be the ethos of motherhood these days and that moms are really paying attention to these things. And I think also in the same vein, kids become our best teachers. They might choose us, but they also are great teachers as well.
And I know certainly every mother can probably relate to different times feeling triggered by interactions with their own children, by big emotions. And I think those, at least for me, have been super helpful in identifying things that came from early childhood or probably things that I haven’t even realized are from past generations yet, but bringing them to my awareness so that I could work on them and realizing, A, that those are mine to work on. They’re not responsible for my emotions and that, B, the only variable I have control over in that relationship with my children actually is myself. So the best thing I can do is work on myself and model it and that if anything, that’s what they’re going to pick up on.
Lisa: I love that. It’s so true. And often our children are our mirrors. The most difficult child we have might really be a reflection of who we are. And an example that I find myself is with friendships. Have you ever, Katie, like been in a group of people and you’re like, yeah, I don’t resonate with her at all. She wouldn’t be my friend. Then time goes on and things you keep like having you interact with each other. And you realize at some moment there’s this aha, where you’re like, Oh my gosh, we are like two peas in a pod. And you get along so well, it’s the same with children. right?
And those that we struggle with our children, because there’s usually one that at some point in their life needs us an extra amount, is because we have the ability to support them. We have the ability to help them transform. And like you said, they are our teachers as well, because I believe that transformation happens with both, with the mom, the parent, and the child.
Katie: That’s so beautiful. And I’d love to now get into a little bit more of the specifics on, and I wonder actually for baseline, is it actually important to be able to like really dial down and identify everything that could be a generational trauma or is just simply the awareness of this often enough to release them, even if we never get to know the specifics about where they came from?
Lisa: Yeah, there is an actual process that I trademarked back in 2020 on how to identify it and to release it. And that’s what people work with me. And I teach parents how to do it. So yes, if somebody really wants to define what it is, you can learn where it came from. You can be able to identify the mother or the father and how many generations it goes back. So you can get really specific. You can be able to identify at what time period it trapped in your life and release it. So you can get really specific if that’s the need, but really becoming aware, Katie, is the very first step. And us as mothers really taking and embracing this change for ourselves will in turn automatically help the children.
Katie: That makes sense. And we’ve talked a lot about us as parents and our relationship with our children. I feel like the other big life relationship that seems like it maybe carries a lot of weight in this work is our relationship with our parents and how, I know at least for me, and I’ve spoken to many other adults who as adults are still working through aspects of their relationship with their parents. And those seem like those can be very tough relationships as well. Does this work also somewhat go backwards? So if we heal it in ourselves, does that help the relationship with our parents as well?
Lisa: Absolutely it will. It will literally transform it. Family drama is an inherited pattern often. Plus we have our wounds of how our parents treated us or didn’t treat us, didn’t see us, didn’t believe in us, tried to control us, didn’t want to hear us. There’s a whole generation, multiple generations were raised, children were raised to be seen and not heard.
Well, it’s really hard as an adult then, if you feel passionate about something, to be able to use your voice, or you might have so many wounds in that parent relationship that you feel like you’re not a good parent. right? Or and every time something goes wrong that you’re modeling what you were raised with, then everything is bad. So by doing that, by doing the work on yourself, the parent relationship will heal.
Katie: I love that you said that. And I also want to also highlight what you said earlier on about that this comes from a place, at least our generation, I’m excited to see this, from not anger or blame. And it’s not that we have to go blame our parents. It’s not that we have to tell them it was their fault because truly it’s actually not. I very much believe like we are responsible. The responsibility lies within each of us, but that it can come from a place of love, which automatically, of course, sounds like it would be so much more healing.
But as an example, I’ll call myself out. I know I struggled with feeling like I was going to disappoint my parents. That was a big childhood thing for me and one that took me a long time and I’m still in the process of as an adult. You also mentioned finding our voice. That was a really big one for me. And I love, I actually had a listener call me out recently on this because I had mentioned I’ve been working on this. And she’s like, I do feel like your voice has changed and that you’ve talked about finding your voice, but she’s like, I also feel like there’s still a layer you’re holding back and I hear it in your voice on the Podcast. And I thought that was so fascinating. I really appreciated her calling me out on that because it brought it to my awareness.
Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And we reach different levels in our life. It isn’t one and done, right? We’re like an onion and you peel off something. So we might have inherited shame, which would be for like, An example would be, did you ever get blamed for something you didn’t do? Right? Well, of course we did as kids. Well, that’s a shameful feeling. We get embarrassed or embarrassed in front of the school when you couldn’t remember your lines.
Okay, well. There isn’t ever one inherited pattern that’s now going to be a domino effect of changing life forever. Oftentimes the subconscious traps similar vibrations because it’s like confirming who you are. Yes, you’re not safe going out and talking. Yes, Katie, you can only talk at a certain bandwidth here. And then it’s not in your comfort zone or nor are you safe anymore. And so subconsciously, you just go with what you feel safe going with and you might hold back a little bit.
Another tip for parents that I found over the years is we as parents, when we have a child that we want to build their confidence, this is going to sound counterintuitive, but you can just process it, okay? What we do as parents is we over-compensate, we over-complement them. So if they don’t believe they can play soccer, right? We give all soccer awards now to everybody on every team. That’s okay, so everybody feels, but when we as parents are like, you were amazing. And everything is, they are amazing. They can do anything. There’s a fine line there. Because they will grow up to be adult humans. They will have not believed this or experienced being amazing. And we’ve taken the gift of tenacity away from them.
And there was a study done by Stanford Katie with, they did a test with Fifth Graders. Same test. It was like a bean tossing throwing test. Okay. It was one and then an academic. And they identified those that did well and didn’t do well. They re-did it on now written like scored tests three years later when they were in high school. The group that didn’t believe, the group that was told they were very smart and bright, did worse on the test this time. They did it again, graduating. And they did worse again.
And what they learned and those that did okay, okay, that they didn’t share that they were amazing. They developed this efforting. Now efforting can be used in a negative way. I want you to think of efforting as tenacity. They put forth the tenacity to figure it out. They weren’t taught they have to be the best. They were taught to figure it out. Those were the ones that did the best in life.
And so as parents, what do we do? We over-compliment oh so very often in order to build their self-confidence. And because we think they’re amazing, because we see who they can be. Just to be really mindful to allow them to develop the effort to try hard things, that they don’t always have to be amazing at everything, would be one of the best things that I would give to parents. And that’s mindfulness of how you’re using your words.
Katie: That’s such a valuable tip. I think that I resonate with that in my own experience and I’m thinking through that in my relationship with my kids as well.
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I know for me also, I had this fear of disappointing my parents because often my achievements got complimented and I was told I was smart in all of those things. And that fear, I think I’m only now probably finally working through as an adult, in even middle age with them and very vulnerable like in the past couple of years having gone through a divorce, which in their mind is like the worst thing I could have ever possibly done and the worst failure ever, which the most disappointing thing I could possibly have done in this life with them, was actually super healing because it taught me the lesson that boundaries and kindness not only can exist together, they must exist together.
And I got to find my voice a little bit with my parents. And in a lot of ways, it actually was very healing for our relationship. I had this expectation that it was going to blow everything up and ruin everything with them. And it actually led to a lot of healing and love. And I got to find some of my voice in the process.
Lisa: That’s beautiful. And that’s a great example. So what a parent could say is in a soccer game. Instead of like, you were amazing, say, wow, I noticed that you never stopped running. You are on that ball as much as you could be. And what a great team player. I loved how you volley the ball back and forth. Those are the types of things we want to put out to our children. Yeah, it teaches them to keep trying and that the way they’re problem solving and playing with the team is important.
Katie: Yeah. I think that awareness is going to help a lot of people. And I know you have, like you already mentioned, the masterclass that goes deep on a lot, like a lot more than we can cover in an hour-long Podcast. I’ll make sure for you guys listening, that’ll be linked at wellnessmama.fm along with, I know you have many resources online. I’ll make sure those are all compiled in the show notes. Are there any other maybe daily practices or inner questions we can ask ourselves or things to be aware of that are first step practices to become more aware?
Lisa: If you will pay attention to your mind, words do you use and then go into like making it okay that you’re feeling angry, making it okay you failed, making it okay I accept myself I didn’t say that correctly to my child, right? I’m okay I accept myself, I’m disappointed in myself. If you’ll start doing those things, if when you’re thinking negative you can also say cancel, cancel, only love is spoken here. It will become so automatic in your brain that your subconscious will say it before you even realize what you were thinking about. You’ll have to pause to realize what you were thinking about.
Katie: Yeah, I think if everybody even just pays attention to that, I think that is so life-changing. In my own life, I learned that very much the slow and hard way. I was not a fast learner, but I realized our subconscious is such an ally and it will give us answers to whatever we ask it. But if we ask it questions that aren’t getting us the answers we want, it’s going to keep giving us the answers we don’t want.
So as an example, when I used to in my own head say things like, why is it so hard to lose weight? Why can’t I get healthy? My subconscious would give me great answers. It would be like, oh, because you’ve had six kids. Oh, because you have Hashimoto’s. Oh, because this. But when I could shift to that more of that place of love like you’re talking about and ask better questions, even like how can I best love my body? How can I best love myself toward healing? It would start giving me a lot better answer. How can I have fun with this? How can I make this process beautiful? It started giving me much better answers because I started asking much better questions.
Lisa: I love asking questions to the body. And that’s a great example.
Katie: And then, are there any other practices specific to the emotional DNA passing on that can help with that first step of awareness and get people ready to do if they want to a master class and really start to untangle that?
Lisa: Just show up with the intention that you really always… This is what I would say is, Katie, we always, no matter how old we are, no matter how many things have happened in our life, no matter how many mistakes we deem real, we always can change. We can always have a more peaceful internal constitution, more confidence in who we are. We as women can feel empowered to really love and impact the world in a positive way, the environment around us. We can always change family dynamics to have better and deeper connections with our spouse, as well as with our children. That change is always possible. Nothing is cut in stone. And even how we feel about it. It starts with how we feel about it.
Katie: And it seems like the theme is certainly awareness is the very first step in that for sure. And that just paying attention will probably give us a lot more insight that we haven’t had before. I also am curious about, I have a couple of people who are very dear to me who are in the cycle of feeling very stuck, I think they would describe it. And that there’s all these negative things happening and similarly like one physical thing we’ll get taken care of, more things will pop up and it’s just that constant state of overwhelm and maybe even a little bit of depression. With the awareness key, is there anything else that can help for someone who’s maybe feeling really, really stuck and feeling like this change isn’t even possible?
Lisa: They can call me and talk to me at any time. Because there’s lots of different ways to work with someone, Katie. Right. that is based on where they are. Yeah. And also how they talk to themselves. You just really help them understand that how you talk to yourself and the subconscious oftentimes when it comes to health and how our body responds. It’s really a… I call it a high level sabotaging pattern. Right. If our body talks to us, and different parts of the body means different things, even the foods we eat, like bread is procrastination. If you’re addicted to bread, you’re addicted to procrastination, those types of things. If you have low back pain or knee pain, there’s really a subconscious, whether you’re aware of it or not, fear of moving forward, fear of changing life, a fear of change. You’re fine where you are, so to speak.
And becoming educated on those things can help people as well. And then you talk to your body in that pain energy, cancel, cancel, only love is spoken here when you feel that pain. You tell the body to quit telling you there’s pain because a lot of it is, there it’s real on all levels, but there is a psychological component, not like a doctor tells us women that we’re psychologically making something up. But if the brain doesn’t feel attached to it, oftentimes it will let it go. And to know that there is hope with health. And sometimes the process is long, and oftentimes there’s lessons in that process. You might have signed up for that before you came here, that you would learn your life lessons during the time period on your timeline of having health challenges, but not to despair. Because healing can take place, it will take place.
Katie: Yeah, that reframes and gives you a whole different way to think of the answers as well. And I feel like a lot more insight and very beautiful journey. Like I said, I’ll make sure all the resources are linked in the show notes so that people can continue learning because it seems like there’s also a theme of this is very, of course, specific to each of us, to our generational patterns, to our own life experiences. And so it makes sense that each person would interact differently with that process. But I’ll make sure those are all links so people can find them and go on that journey for themselves.
And a few questions I love to ask toward the end of interviews. The first being if there is a book or number of books that have had a profound impact on you and if so, what they are and why.
Lisa: The yeah, that’s a great question. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz is a great book. The Four Agreements is about who we are, what we agree, and how we show up in life. It is a great beginning book for empowerment, I think. And another book I love, in fact, I’m reading it for like the fifth time is The Big Leap. The Big Leap is a great book by Gay Hendricks. And it’s really about our limiting beliefs about what we can accomplish, who we are. I just think it’s a great book.
And I think by reading empowering books, it helps us see the empowerment we have within ourselves and who we really are. And in all this, Katie, the other thing that I wanted to say is really about forgiveness. It’s like a tool that I think along with gratitude really gets overlooked. And we can say, oh, we forgive so and so. But forgiveness is something that happens all the time. We can say we forgive our spouse hypothetically, or our ex, but our internal dialogue around it is very different than I forgive. And it’s really, I’m trying to think of an example. The only one that’s coming to my mind is scripture, which is not, I’m not a quota of scripture, okay? I’m not that girl. But it’s where it is like Christ telling his apostles, you forgive seventy times seven. It’s so random, I’m thinking, I’ve been sharing this, okay? But I’ll tell you what comes to my mind in this. It’s not that they keep repeatedly hurting us or that we need to do that, go through that. That isn’t it to me.
It’s about how my mind loops back to it. And I think I’ve forgiven him. I think I’ve let it go, but here I am ruminating in it. Here I am looping in it. And it’s that process of continuing to let go of the past and to really honor and see where we’ve been and how far we’ve come is so vital to us as women, as humans on planet earth and transforming, not just ourselves, but our environment. And then to really give gratitude, I think these two components are often so given, so many times repeated that, oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, once again.
But when you’ll pause to say, I give gratitude for where I am now in my life. I give gratitude that I’m becoming a better mom every day. I give gratitude that I went the whole day, right? Without having an emotional meltdown, like really pulling out the things that we do normal every day that we often take for granted. Those are the two things that I would love to bring back to the awareness of just life.
Katie: I think I echo what you just said. I think those things are both so important. And I realized that I had a similar experience where I had certainly not forgiven things in the past. I thought I had, I had said that I had, but it kept coming up and just nagging in my mind. And I realized, I read the quote, I loved it so much. It said, forgiveness is setting the prisoner free and realizing the prisoner was yourself. And that really stuck with me because I’m like, it has actually nothing at all to do with the other person. That to me is making amends and that’s its own separate category. But forgiveness never depends on the other person. And it’s a gift of freedom you can give yourself anytime.
And I love your point. Often you have to give it over and over. It might not be a one step process, but I think there’s so much freedom and forgiveness. And then the step beyond that, which is I think gratitude and that if we can get to a place of being grateful for the things that we previously had defined as being tough or difficult or hard, that there’s just so much peace in that.
You also mentioned the words letting go. So I’ll say one book that’s profoundly impacted me was the book called Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. And that just helped me like to understand and have awareness of some of those inner emotions and where they might be getting stuck. So that’s one I like to recommend as well. And I’m sure you could probably write many books with the answer to this next question. But I also love to ask for any other parting advice that you’d like to leave with the listeners that could be related to things we’ve talked about or unrelated helpful life advice.
Lisa: It would be a ditto on the things we’ve talked about, the last two especially, and to really know that there’s more to you than you believe. I promise. And in the Johari Window, which is in what communications there’s one quadrant in the Johari Window. And that quadrant is what we don’t know about ourselves, but others see in us. The good, the amazing, the transformational possibilities of who you really are, and to really know that there’s always more available to you. There’s more within you than what you actually believe. That’s what I would want your people to know, your followers.
Katie: I love that. It’s a perfect place to wrap up for today. Like I said, I’ll put the links in the show notes, but where can people find you online and keep learning from you?
Lisa: They can find me at lisathomasenergyhealing.com.
Katie: Well, that will be linked as well. This has been such a fun and far ranging conversation. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing.
Lisa: Katie, thank you. Man, we just talked back and forth. I loved being on here. I love everything you’re doing, the change that you’re bringing about and the positive impact you have for other people.
Katie: Thank you. As always to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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