Jana Wilson: Healing The Inner Child

He's been my teacher for 33 years . I studied Vedic teachings and taught meditation at the Chopra Center in California . I have a healing center here in Santa Fe and I just wrote my first book . It's a prescriptive memoir about my stories of childhood and how I overcame a lot of trauma Adverse childhood experience trauma . I scored 10 out of 10 .

So there's a test . You can take the ACE test and I scored 10 out of 10 . So I share with the reader in the book about my own personal journey to healing and then , of course , supporting people in almost 20 years of healing . I think the trauma when you're really seeking answers and I did from a young age .

In the book I opened up in the prologue where I'm sharing . At 12 years old my dad was beating my mom . It was another domestic violence . When children are subjected to domestic violence in their developmental years , they internalize what they're seeing . These two people brought me into the world and they're internalizing . Well , I could die too .

If they're going to tear each other apart , they're going to tear me apart . Up until that point , at 12 , I'd never been abused physically by my father . I'd been sexually molested , but I had not been abused by my father , only my mother .

At that point , and so that out of body , awakening that night really just woke me up and what essentially happened was my brother . I had one brother and he was always . He was two and a half years older . He was always there to protect me .

This night he wasn't , he was getting older , he was a teenager at that point and he was staying away because he would take the wrath from my father . So much so that when he was about nine years old he was beaten with a belt buckle and later in his adult life had to have a grapefruit sized tumor removed from his leg .

Thank God it was benign , but he really took the lashings . So I didn't . But on this night he wasn't there . I ran out into the front yard . I lived in central Florida , very southern , very Bible Belt . I grew up very poor welfare , food stamps , very underachieving parents and all the stigma that comes with that being called trailer trash or white trash .

And so I ran outside and I was wringing my hands and I was praying to Jesus to save me and all of a sudden I just felt this peace that passes all understanding and I was out of my body and I looked around confused what's going on ? I could still hear my dad screaming and beating my mom .

I could see myself , but I wasn't in my body and I just felt so safe and good and I thought , well , if I'm dead , I'm good with it . And then all of a sudden I heard those aren't your parents , I am . And that isn't your life , this is . And when I looked around , it was like I was in the cosmos .

I could see nebulas and star galaxies and it was just such a surreal experience of connection to spirit , which is really what was my reason . I really developed a strong connection to spirit , to that which is outside of our senses .

Right , it wasn't religion , it was a deep connection to an energy that let me know I was going to be okay and it would happen over and over , but it would happen through trauma . So I always say the gift of my trauma was it developed . I'm a spiritual teacher . It developed a very strong connection to spirit .

If they're too devout and they're not open , I won't work with them Because fundamentally , when we are healing , we have to get to the root cause and the root cause is always , even if you had an experience as an adult , there was things in your childhood .

I've had clients who said I had great parents , had nothing bad happen , but for a child , even really innocent events can wound them . So I had one client who always stands out . She was 42 , in the midlife crisis , had a nice income , husband , kids , still just wasn't happy . Now I know immediately when I hear that it's a spiritual crisis . There's a disconnect .

But we have to get beneath that because if the beliefs were working for her , she wouldn't be feeling the way she did Now . I'm not here to change anyone's beliefs , but I certainly believe the mind's like a parachute . It only works when it's open . So I invite people to really remain open . I'm a reincarnationist . I believe I'm a past life regressionist .

I was trained by Dr Brian Weiss , who wrote many lives , many masters . I take people into hypnotherapy into their childhood to look and see what experience did you have that created what I call a operating system . Think of a computer . When you're little , in those first seven years , events are happening . So this client that I'm sharing goes on vacation .

She's five years old . This is in hypnotherapy . During vacation , david , she sees that her parents , everybody's going in a lake . She's never been in a lake . She doesn't want to go on the lake . She can't see the bottom . She's very scared , she's crying , screaming , don't make me .

They force her in the lake because of course they know she'd be fine , but they could have allowed her to do it on her own timing , which would have been respectful and honoring . In that moment a child doesn't have the rational defenses and structures in the brain . They haven't developed toward 25 , actually , but definitely not under the age of seven .

In that moment she looked at her parents and she made a decision that became her operating system she defaults to , and the operating system was my feelings don't matter . Now , if her operating system or my feelings don't matter and I have to listen to other people they know better Now . That set her up to be a people pleaser , a doormat .

It set her up in life to never advocate and speak up for herself . So it's fascinating how we get developed . But religion is one

Now . I grew up in the Bible belt and I was . I was either boring Baptist church or they would go to a Pentecostal where they're speaking in tongues and getting slain in the spirit . As a child I was very innocent , so I just accepted that without any filter and I would have these mystical experiences .

One time when I was about six , I just passed out and so much ecstasy from the divine and I came to and they're all screaming hallelujah . These experiences were so profound for me to the point where once I was 12 and had the out of body and I started communicating with God and I was asking questions like do I have to be a Christian to go to heaven ?

And I would hear immediately no , I love everyone , I love all my creation . I don't . That's human construct and I'm knowing things at 12 , that . And so I go to church and I go to Sunday school and I write about it in the book and I get kicked out . I get told I'm speaking words of the devil .

But even at 12 , I knew that this felt for me completely off base . I knew that energy , whatever that was , pulled me on my body and told me I was going to be okay , that they were my parents and that wasn't my life and no one could take that from me . That changed my life .

That set me on a path that by the time I was 19 in college I was already a voracious reader and on my spiritual path . So I'm 57 years old . I've been doing this a long time . I feel like my soul and reincarnation .

We say souls contract with other souls and we come in like pods and we come together and in , we contract to correct things , and it's what's called karma . Karma means action in Sanskrit , so it just means the soul has taken actions and they either have debits or credits . You either have to correct them , pay them back , or you start getting good karma .

I had a lot of bad karma as a child , so the way I looked at it , the reason why I adopted reincarnation and more Eastern spirituality as a way of life for me , is because it empowered me . David , I began to look at myself like I was a badass that chose those crazy ass parents that took me through hell .

And then I knew , by the time I was in my early 20s , that my life was destined to do work like this .

I would assume , and please correct me if I'm wrong but when you have these audiences and speaking and just sharing your story and opening up and being vulnerable with people is also therapy for you .

If I can pull a memory and share it for the purpose of giving someone evidence or to share my story , to inspire them to know that it's possible and I'm not crying , it's healed . I'm 57 years old . I've writing . The book was surprising because it did bring up some very sensitive things because I hadn't really went back .

The book a memoir is written like a novel , so when you read it it's first person I'm telling you a story . It's as if you're there in my child home . I had to pull from memory but a lot of had to make up to . I don't remember all those details , so I just had to create the scene and the sets for people to get that .

I've been doing this 19 years and I do group retreat , private retreat . I work with about about 500 people a year . I could not do that if I wasn't healed . I couldn't hold space right . I could not . It took me all through my 30s . Really . I didn't launch my business until 37 .

So it took me a while before I knew I was in a place that I could stand . I don't believe anyone's arrived , and I'm certainly not saying I have and I'm fully healed , but I definitely . I created the emotional healing system . I use that system . It's a part of my everyday perception .

The way I see the world is based on what I teach , so I'm in integrity with that . But , yeah , I think that it is cathartic to share . I don't need to do that , though .

I truly believe once you have the tools and these are the tools I teach and you're using them , you don't need to talk about , you don't need to get in a story about anything from the past , because you've already extracted the wisdom and the lesson .

Again , going from reincarnation perspective , it says essentially , we're in earth school , we're here to learn lessons . Everything that's happening is happening for us , not to us . So even a rape , even a violent crime , even we either look at it through the lenses .

I'm a victim , and certainly we are sometimes , but how long we stay in victimization is up to us , and if we get in a story and we tell the story too much , then we're coming from a place of victimization not empowerment .

I think that I talk about my story a lot . I hear about people's trauma , but I try to come at it as a survivor standpoint and not the victim standpoint . I'm talking about it because I want people to hear from me , as well as my guests , that there's life after trauma . It's not just something traumatic happens and that's all there is .

I think everyone has to find their path . So if I was a client of yours and I just said those things to you , how would you respond to that

?

Thriving means I've healed the lessons and whatever the incident that happened to me , and now I'm thriving because of it . If you can get to the place after any traumatic event where you could look back on it and go I wouldn't change anything Then that's the person you are today . That was an integral

piece of your healing pie and if it wasn't there , it wouldn't make you . Or today I can drop in and speak to anybody . My husband is a physician here . He's very well known . We have dinner with the governor . I've been in positions with very famous people , whether it's my housekeeper or someone at the top of the totem pole .

If you wanted to use an hierarchy or not , when you've been through trauma and you've healed it , no one's above you or beneath you . We're all just walking each other home on this journey of life . Right , talking about therapy , here's what I would say to you if you called me and you'd say so in Western medicine .

It's a broken system and we've really seen that since the pandemic . They push a lot of pharmaceuticals on us . Our agricultural systems are really messed up with glyphosate and a lot of the chemicals that are creating autism in children and uptake huge uptake Parkinson's in men , alzheimer's in women . We're seeing that because of this chemical .

So we've really got to educate ourselves and get smarter about how to take care of ourselves physically , but mentally , emotionally . We go to a therapist . It's a 50 minute session and they are taught and I work with them . I work with PhDs . I have an MD coming next week who's a psychiatrist .

The physicians have one of the highest depression and suicide rates and addiction rate period . Now a therapist is listening to problems of which they've been trained not to coach you or not to teach you how to help yourself . They're just there to run a meter and that meter doesn't mean that they're a bad therapist . There's a lot of great therapists .

Just you can't get through a lot of deep root cause healing in 50 minutes one time a week . It takes more time .

So when I created an emotional healing system , I'd been through therapy all my 20s , all my 30s had been to school to become a psychologist , didn't want to take that route and life coaching was really big at that time in the 90s and it was just starting . And so I took that path of an integral life coach .

I don't call myself a life coach now because my business has morphed into I'm an educator , a hypnotherapist . But root cause so think about it . You go , I'm depressed , they listen and then they say sounds like you might need this and they prescribe you something for anti-anxiety , for depression , something to take the serotonin and raise serotonin in your body .

A holistic model looks at root cause . That's quackery . Actually that means I'm in . Most medicine is quackery . They are only looking at symptoms , not root cause . So you go in , you're depressed , you're anxious , whatever . They don't ask you why . They don't get to the ground and even if they do , it's still take this medicine . We don't have to do that anymore .

You take a pretty functioning person . As long as they don't have personality disorders or anything really major , they can learn how to self heal . And so root cause it's like getting to the root of what's causing you to depress your feelings . All depression is depressing , pushing down your feelings . Your feeling self is the inner child . Why ?

Because in your first seven years of life . That's all you were . David was emotion , since everything through an emotional filter . We grow up physically and most people were arrested . Developed as a psychological term , it means they didn't develop beyond a certain age . If they had an emotional trauma and listen , it doesn't have to be like what I endured .

It could be like the client I told you . Not being seen or heard is an archetypal trauma . Parents living vicariously through a child is a trauma . Not modeling good boundaries , not being able to regulate your emotions , losing your shit on your kids and screaming that's a trauma , whether you hit them or not . There's different types of traumas .

We call it little T and big T , but there's still trauma to the child and that's where those operating systems , those false beliefs get formed I'm not good enough , I'm unlovable . And then now you attract people to mirror that back . You're not good enough , oh , you're not lovable .

They leave you , they reject you , they cheat on you because you're so disconnected from spiritual guidance and from the inner child , which is the emotional self .

But the truth is is this the truth ? But you're attracting it .

So it seems like one might be needy and attached and the other might be avert , avoiding , but they're still having the same core wounding , the core false belief of I'm not good enough , I'm unlovable , I'm something .

So in the case of like , you're saying your friend , okay , if I'm working with someone who calls me and they say I'm in an abusive relationship , I keep attracting these men who abandoned me and abused me . So I say okay , right away .

I know that this person abandons themselves because adults can't be abandoned and if you're a handicap , you could , if you need somebody to help you , if you're elderly , you can't take care of yourself , but an adult can't be abandoned .

So as soon as I hear people talk about , oh , I've got abandonment issues , you're abandoning yourself , you're not advocating for yourself , you're disconnected with your feeling self , aka the inner child . And then , number two , they're abusive . Oh , you're an abusive relationship

with somebody , you're an abuser . And then they go oh no , I would never do what they do . Let me get in your head and listen to how you talk to yourself . You're abusive in your internal dialogue . Here's how I know that , because no woman or man who values themselves would be in a relationship with someone who disvalues them and is disrespectful and abusive .

So you gotta take responsibility . But herein lies the problem . Most people don't wanna take responsibility . They're victims . Oh what was me ? They're so mean to me , come save me . And a nice , caring guy like you probably gets that a lot . And they wanna hook into you and make you a caretaker . And they become the taker .

And now you're in codependent relationship . You didn't mean to hurt their feelings , but you just can't answer the phone , you can't talk to them tonight because you need to take care of yourself . And then they call you selfish . But they're really the selfish one , right Like it's crazy making that's one thing .

And I know exactly what you meant , because I went through that too . My immediate family is amazing . I did not know hate existed until I was a victim of a hate crime .

I grew up in a church and when they started getting , when I was a young child , when they started getting the thoughts of David's little feminine , david's gay , they had a youth group meeting and a speaker come in that tried to put the fear of God in me . God says if you do this , you're going to hell .

If you have kissed a boy , you have AIDS , you're gonna die . God was used as a weapon when , for the longest time , I allowed God to be a weapon and I feared it . And then , after my attack , when I was like you know what , I have begged God to save me , to be in my life . I've begged him to change me and he hasn't .

And I stopped doing certain things and lost out on opportunities of love and acceptance from people that would have loved and accepted me , because I wanted that from God . And then finally , after my attack , I got very bitter . I was like I asked you , I gave you all of me . Where were you ?

And then I realized that if people like me go to hell , it can't be that bad of a place , and that changed things to where I became more spiritual than Southern Baptist . Trauma to me has been to learn to cope with First I would address it .

There might be listeners that are like oh , she's off her rocker , it's creation . It was created in seven days . That's another perspective . It's not mine . It is a mystery . We don't know and I think the wisest of us will agree that we don't know A man outside of me , living in some geographical location called heaven .

When Jesus himself said the kingdom of heaven is within and the things I do , you can do greater , and all he left us with was love your neighbor as yourself . That's a problem , because I've never been to a church where they taught me how to love myself . They teach you to be selfless .

Oh , give yourself up for everybody else , for the church tithes , Do this for everybody . Gandhi said it best I love your Jesus , it's your Christians . I have a problem with talking about homosexuality and my take on it is . We are a soul period . We are not a gender , we are not a human even . We are spiritual beings having this experience .

And this experience is to help us to grow and evolve and to become more Christlike , to love and have compassion and forgive 70 times 7 . These I consider myself a Christian . I'm just not a Christian like most people say they're a Christian . I think that's the problem .

My grandson 7 , and I bought a book front for him and it's called what Is God and I love it . It's all these pages and in some parts of the world and have a zipper , they can't talk about God , and some parts of the world they pray and they show all the different holy books and it says this is a big question what is God ?

God is an elephant running through the forest . God is a bird flying in the sky . God is you , god is me , god is everything that exists because it created everything . So my beliefs definitely shifted .

Most people are coming to me and my husband because they don't have connection to spirit and they don't know how I consider my work , my ministry , and I wanted to be a minister when I was growing up . I fell in love with metaphysics in my early 20s and I raised my daughter in that , through the Unity Church .

And then there's also another New Thought Christian church called Center for Spiritual Living . One of the biggest leaders is Dr Michael Beckwith , out in California at Agape . So that thinking and that teaching is what I'm more in line with . There's one creator I believe on monotheism . There's one creator which is fascinating .

In monotheism it means one , yet they try to bring in a separate , which is a devil . Like how can I believe in two opposing things at once ? I got a collapse on one . So you outgrow a . There's baby souls that have to be told what to believe . You start to go on your path of healing .

Usually it's trauma , calamity , crisis that pushes us on these paths and then we start questioning . But then the church told us not to question , right , and something inside is telling us this just doesn't make sense . We've got to listen to that inner voice . Like you , you got angry at God . Like how could you let this happen ?

Imagine if you looked at it through the lens of . It was a horrible thing that happened . But what if we don't know ? Again , it's a mystery . You reframed it and you looked at it from the lens of and this isn't to spiritual bypass , because there's still healing work that has to be done to get you through all of it .

But it's to look at it and think , okay , what if Janna was right ? What if my soul , deepak , talks about this in the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success , the Law of Karma , what if you did something in a previous life that you got to pay a debt for ? The way I would look at it is oh , it's time to celebrate . I got that over with True .

Won't have that happen again . And I'm not minimizing . Please know I am not minimizing .

It's by Elizabeth Lesser , you've got to read it , and she talks about the Phoenix process and the Phoenix was a bird , a mythical bird in Egyptian times , and this bird , every 500 years , they said he would burn himself and become transformed through the ashes of the old .

So we're always needing to die to our old self , our behavior , our beliefs , our ways of being . If we're not , then what begins to happen is we become very neuro rigid . So we're not using memory . Memory is using us and it's very important to use memory . Don't allow memory to use you . Matter of fact , I put that in the back of my book .

That's a deep quote . Use memory , don't allow memory to use you . So , in order to use it , you've got to look at it , because it all happened in the past . The past is the prison . Why is it the prison ? Because it's over , right , it's gone , it's complete . Yet there's fragments , imagine there's like little pieces of us left in certain experiences that we had .

And so , in order to one of the things I've teach is reparenting to be a loving adult to myself I've got to go back into my memories into the past and rescue little Jana .

Rescue her from things that happen , connect to spirit , find out the truth of what happened , like maybe something happened when I was sexually molested and I made it mean I'm a bad girl , because when a child is molested at a young age they usually act out sexually . So I talk about it in the book I would . My aunt had an in-ground pool with a jet .

I found the jet . The jet felt good . My grandmother had a massager . I found the massager and put it on my private parts . It felt good . And then I got shamed . Bad girl . What's wrong with her ? I didn't know what was wrong with me . I had been molested .

So I had to learn as an adult to go back and create safety for that little girl and let her know that she's innocent and pure and divine . And that happened to her . But that doesn't taint who she is , that there's very difference between the event that happened , the trauma that happened and to the person .

So to me as the child , and so I love doing this work because it's so miraculous to see the effects of when someone connects with their child and sees themself . I tell people I have a picture of yourself from around four or five years old on your wallpaper on your phone , and every time your phone pops on you see that picture .

And here's one of me , and I'm just a little girl and I don't look very happy , I'm at the park and because things weren't good in my life , I had during the . So there's different types of trauma . There's even pre-conscious , pre-cognitive trauma . So when I was in the womb we're being fed by an umbilical cord , moms being beaten and depressed .

Guess what I was feeling ? Depression , it was cortisol was coursing through my little developing fetus , and so once it came time for birth , I wrapped the cord around my neck and flipped and tried to kill myself in the womb . Now how do I know that I had that through hypnotherapy ? Some people may go oh , that's not true , she doesn't know that .

But we know that trauma is happening when you're in the womb , in utero . Then you get born and you have developmental trauma based on how your parents are and all of that . But there's also intergenerational trauma . You mentioned that there was a study done it's fascinating of these rats and the rats were shocked all day .

They would spray just like rose scent and they stopped shocking them . But as soon as they would spray the rose scent they would behave as if they were getting shocked again , just from the scent . Now they had babies and those babies never were shocked . The rose scent was sprayed . They behaved as if they were shocked because they were birthed from .

The Bible says the sins of the father are passed down . I think metaphysically that's what that means .

One thing that people will say what is the one thing you would say to the 12 year old David if

you could talk to him ? In my mind , I'm like I talk to that David every day . I allow that David to be a part of this David every day . There's not just one thing I want to say to him , there's everything I want to say to him . I would like your opinion on that . I would like to take a few minutes to actually focus on the book .

If you don't have self-awareness , then when somebody pushes your buttons or something happens , you get triggered right , you get affected . To have self-mastery and to be able to regulate the emotional self , the inner child , you have to have self-awareness as we're going throughout the day .

If I observe and catch myself thinking thoughts , I call it stinking thinking Of oh , the book's not going to be successful . Or doubt . I'm doubting myself . Say Now that I relate to as a little wounded child in me that got a message she wasn't smart and she doubts herself . She doesn't feel confident . She grew up poor , she got bullied and teased .

That part of me is still alive Now . I don't give her the microphone and let her go with it . I step in as a loving adult and I talk to her and I say listen , you are so smart , I am so proud of you , you are doing so good .

And if this book is going to help people , then everything we shared was the right thing , because I'll have doubts I shared too much . I was too vulnerable . When US book reviews came back they said courageous and stuff , but they called it something else .

See , I can't remember , because it was one of those words that I was like , that I really bared my soul essentially . And so when I catch myself having those thoughts , I just repair it myself . And the reparenting I teach is five steps going in relating with the doubt , like a child , because doubt is the emotion . And what am I saying to you ?

You're telling me the book's not going to be good and that I'm not smart enough . And then I take responsibility , I see what I'm doing to myself and then I make amends and I forgive myself . And then I tell myself the truth that essentially I'm helpless over if the book's successful , if it helps people or not .

All I can do is that I put it out into the world with the highest intention . So we do have . That's what we do . It's a function the ego is a function of our left brain of trying to make everything make sense and control it . The spiritual part of us allows things to just be as they are .

That's why spiritual practice is so imperative to healing true healing . You can't go to a minister usually and they'll just tell Jesus about it or just pray or just that doesn't work and you can't go to a therapist and they give you prescription or just talk about it . All the time it takes both . That's why psychospirituality has taken so much momentum .

It's really the leading edge , any type of healing work . Now Can I just share too with the listeners . You made a good point that we always want to give . There's six ways I came up with that . We love ourselves and self . Love is more than a bubble bath and a day at the spa .

So every day , if you wrote and I would write these down to David is one emotional . How are you loving yourself emotionally ? And emotionally again , is that inner child . Are you communicating with him ?

Are you telling him that he's doing a good job , you're proud of him , that , whatever your love language is if it's words of affirmation or whatever but that you're emotionally meeting , you're not looking to others to do it , you're meeting your own needs . Then , physically , moving your body , eating well , it's a way we love ourselves .

If we don't do that and we're sedentary Right , then the body starts to break down . A body emotion stays emotion . So that's a way we love ourselves . Spiritually .

Prayer meditation taught almost a thousand people to meditate and it is a joy of my life , because if there's one thing I could say to the listener that could radically change your life is Adopting meditation practice every morning as soon as you wake up , doing it , before you do anything .

Then the next would be organizationally children thrive and organized environments . If you're scattered and you're not organized and there's things aren't clean and picked up and it makes you a little deranged . So we love ourselves organizationally , financially . We have to love ourselves financially , not stressing ourselves out over money , overspending .

Make sure that you have savings , things like that . And Lastly , relationships . We talked about it already , but the we're in the mirror of relationship . What are your relationships telling you about you ? Because they're mirroring you to you .

So if they're kind and loving and respectful , then that says a lot about how you're treating yourself , because we teach people how to treat us right .

So those are the six ways to love yourself , and I think that I tell clients to put these on your wall Every day , look at them until you've memorized them and you're asking yourself throughout the day how have I loved myself this way ? And one of those ways do them all every day , if you can .

The book David will be available on Amazon and all online book retailers . July 12th , which is my grandson's birthday , that'll be published and people can find me at Janal Wilson calm . I just had a book trailer done which is like a movie trailer of the book . It's up on the website now .