E375: Learning to love, heal your Inner Child, and Find Your Purpose to create a life that is ON FIRE | Trauma Healing Coach

THE IMPACT OF INTERGENERATIONAL AND HISTORICAL RACIAL TRAUMA

Michael: I would love if you would just dive in and talk about, not only the impact of the Intergenerational and historical trauma but also like if you can define those things for us.

Milagros: Sure. Yeah. So, I want to start with, I'd like to go like to the Fourteen hundred in Europe, right? If we're going to talk history and race, right? So, you know, prior to colonization, which is something that we never talked about real and they certainly don't need to school. Prior to colonization the Europeans and the Africans had a long-standing history of trade and diplomacy. So in the Fourteen hundreds when the Vatican and the pope gave permission to the principal chablè to go and Conquer Vanquish colonize, and enslave the African, the West African coast and turned that into law. What happened was that from that moment on the world was changed, the world was changed, and what we also never talked about and talk about trauma right? Was that, if you look back into the 1410 Europe, they had already institutionalized Crime, and Punishment and had been for all over the world. They had been institutionalized the crime and Punishment in Europe was very specific and if you look at the population of Europe, it was really divided into two groups, they were the wealthy and the nobility and then there were the poor people among the poor people, there were enslaved people. Slavery is a perpetual institution, there were people who were indentured – indentured is an institution, you can buy a way out of, and then they were just the general workers and servants, who worked in the homes of these, these people.

When you think about the weather in Europe, right? You have about three months to grow your food. And you look out into the world in nine months out of the year, there isn't even a leaf on the tree. So, your perception, when you look out into the world as one of scarcity, there's not enough, there's never enough. Is there going to be enough food to last us until we can grow some more and harvest and so on and so forth, right?

And now here they are sailing down this Coast in a place where food is plentiful because you have to remember that the place is all the places that were colonized around the world, for the most part, were around the Equator, the band room which is warm weather, there's plenty of gold, silver, lots of food, right? And so all of a sudden you go from not enough to wow! there's plenty and let me siphon it and bring it to the people up here because now I have all these people that can do all this work of those people were doing. So we never talked about that. We never talked about the first people that came to this country and how many of them were white slaves, the first slaves in the Continental USA with white people. Somebody wrote a wonderful book in the 1990s, it was called they were white and they were slaves. So, again, little pieces of History will crumbs, right? That is left for us to figure this stuff out.

So, you have a people with a consciousness of lack that is now going forth and settling the world and siphoning the wealth from all these amazing countries that were wealthy because you don't colonize anyplace, where there's nothing. Don't give me you colonized, because they were poor and they had enough if people colonize for nothing. Okay, people colonize, because there's something there that they want, right? But, let's go back and look at some of the histories of Europe at that time point. So they would hang somebody for stealing a piece of bread. They would hang lots of people week in this country, call it, lynching, but that's what they were doing over there. Okay, they were linking their own people. They were cutting people's heads off because they disagreed with the monarchy of the papacy. They were, I mean Crime and Punishment were horrific. You also had a populist that because they only had three months to grow their food because they lived in lap consciousness. There was a lot of malnutrition, when people are malnutrition, they can't even think straight. Okay, we know that now from research, right? Sanitation was virtually non-existent. So there were a lot of diseases that people were very sick and sickly and they had a very short life span because again, not good nutrition and sanitation and it was pretty horrific. And then to top that off, if you were not Catholic at that point I'm going to be very specific about that because that was very specific at the time, you could just get your head cut off just because they didn't agree with your religion, which meant that the Jews, the Islam's, the Hindus all those people were in danger because you could be killed for not having the right religion. So we're talking about a pretty horrific place to live and so people were desperate to get out of there.

And so when they decreed this attic which changed the world is called the doctrine of discovery. What they did was they opened up the world for Europe to colonize and they were given permission to do so not just colonized but colonize, enslave, or perpetual slavery, to anyone who was not Catholic, it was also for the Europeans to deed themselves the land that these because was considered Terra Nova which means that you know, human beings don't exist on that land even though the natives were their own, native Africans, native died and you know people all over the world who were living in these places, they were not considered human and so they came in and they took over the land, the doctor is very specific, the land, the waterways, and the people and their possessions.

So now you have all these European countries, the French, the Dutch, the all of them, the English, all of them colonizing all over the world and how they did it was the same way that they had controlled their own people for hundreds of years, which was traumatized, to destabilize, to control because you have the papacy, which is, you know, relatively a few people compared to the populace, right? And you have the monarchy relatively few people compared to the populace, and the monarchy and the papacy were always at odds, with each other, trying to decide who actually had the right to rule over the people, right? But here is something that now joins the monarchy and the papacy which is this Doctrine which is quote-unquote God-given permission to go ahead and colonize the world and take it, take over all these places. And consider that the people who are there are not human. So that opened up, what we now know, as the colonization of the world.

Once you colonize a people, you don't just colonize their land and their waterways, but you also colonize their spirit, their emotions, and their ways of being. So, the first thing you do again, all of these things, traumatized people, you take away their language, you take away their possessions, you take away their DNA’s, you take away their ways of worshipping, you just rip them off a lot of the things that are part of their Humanity. And, so what we have is a group of traumatized people, traumatizing the rest of the world and spreading the violence, like butter all over the world.

And so over a hundred years, this has been happening, right? So, from 1400 to the 1500 s, where they have taken over all these various places in Africa, and places in North America and South America but it was slight because this was kind of far, Africa was a little bit closer, and you had people who look different. Their hair texture was different, their skin color was different and obviously, there was ignorance, a lack of understanding that these people have brown skin because nature is a marvel of technology and in that brown skin, which is known as melanin helps to protect them from the harsh sun that shines on them because they live in warm climates.

These people that lived in warm climates saw the world differently from people who saw the world through the eyes of lack. They saw the world as a world of abundance because you figure, there's food everywhere all the time and because the papaya is not growing, the mangoes are growing, some things always growing. So people were well nourished, they also had wariness of ruling through, you notice all their buildings were around because it was, the rule by consensus and the elders were held as those who had the experience to rule the rest of the tribes, right?

So, their perception of the world in the way that they did, the world was completely different but now you have these people who are coming in with their horses and their swords and their guns taking over. These people didn't have those same kinds of weapons to defend themselves. And so, it was violence, which causes trauma to destabilize to control and you have to figure the people who are coming, are traumatized people, traumatized people, traumatized others, we know this now, right? And so they well they did was repeated with had worked for them. They were able to control the European people through violence, you know, I mean, you don't have to hang the whole town, you just hang a couple of people and then you parade their bodies around town and you do well, and then, you figure also that these spectacles, these were public spectacles in Europe, right? These punishment spectacles because you needed to traumatize the entire Village, the entire town, right? And so, you only have to show a few people, right? And now, the whole town is traumatized, they all destabilize, so now you can control them. It's very easy to control people when they're traumatized, right? And so that worked well, so they had a formula and it was a formula they had used throughout Europe, they use that formula of you know, give me your firstborn male, so that I can go get the grain over there from that Village because they got more than we got and we don't have enough because remember conscious is a flag, right? We don't have enough, so let's go get what they got over there and bring it over here so we can survive the winter, right? And so give me your firstborn and then when I come back and I bring you the grain, here's what I need. I need for you to give me five percent, everybody gives me five percent to pay me for going over there, to get the crane, right? So you come back, you bring the grain, people happy they give you 5%. And now you have three things, you have an army because you got all their firstborn that you can now go rape and pillage and kill and do whatever you need to do to bring that grain, back to your people can survive, right? And so you got an army, you got wealth because everybody just gave you some of their grain, right?

So you got grain, you got wealth and you got a formula. And now all you have to do is repeat that formula over and over and over again and you repeat that formula all over the world and you can take whatever they have and you can bring it back home. And when you bring it back home people will hail you as a hero for what you just did. Not keeping a consciousness that what they just did over there, it's going to affect your family over here because trauma gets passed down for generations and you cannot traumatize another human being without you – yourself being compromised and your lineage, that means your children, your grandchildren or great-grandchildren great-great-grandchildren. So now what we're dealing with is a world of traumatized people who ain't never been healed, never been here. Okay, and then you look and then you on top of that, the trauma of slavery in and of itself and what was done there. And now you've got, I mean, this stuff is huge and you know people go and good news with slaves were set free a long time ago. Yeah, but nobody gave a little put pink slip and go get you some counseling for all the trauma you and your lineage have been through, right? And so there's that. There are all the European people who showed up in this country because they were traumatized over there. Ain't nobody come over here just because they would be taking a vacation on the Carnival Cruise. The people came over on the Mayflower, got on that May 12 because it was horrific over there and some of them were completely uneducated and they thought the world was flat, but they were willing to take a chance of falling off the edge of the Earth to find somewhere else because where they left was so horrific.

And we forget that, when we see people coming over to the border, we forget that are, their ancestors I will say, came over here, because it was pretty horrific over there. And they are bearing their trauma, right? And then you took, so it's kind of a mess, but it's not hopeless, it's not hopeless.

When people become conscious, they then start making different choices that allow them to heal and allows them to transform.

Human beings were built to be able to take trauma. We were building because we were built to be resilient but that resilient gets truncated if we don't understand what it is, that we're healing. Does that make sense?

So it isn't just, oh, let's heal the trauma. It is what trauma are you healing? Because you need different things, so, for instance. If you're a black and brown person, the trauma that you carry is different from a European person. So, in other words, Black and brown people living in what was at one point called the new world internalized the violence as Stockholm syndrome, which means that you take on the characteristics of your enslaver, or your kidnapper, right? Colorism, like all of these things, that what we as brown people and black and brown people have to heal, the taking of our lands, which affects our ability to own and like that because this stuff affects different things, right? White people, what they need to heal is they need to heal from the violence that they never even accepted happened to them, or that they are not conscious happened to them or that they built a story over to make them feel like we're the good people of the world, you know what I mean? And yet there's this internalized violence that is not your fault, but you're still responsible for healing.

So this, my work really is about this isn't about shaming, blaming or any of that stuff because at this point, we are all suffering from a similar disease. We have all been caught from cut from the same cloth at this point because it's been handed down from so many generations.

So, I always tell people racism is not your fault, but it is still your responsibility to heal it and let us remember that racism as it is defined by a lot of us who do this work, which is really it's prejudiced plus power to keep it simple. Racism is a problem for people of color, it is not the problem of people of color and we cannot heal racism, what we can do is, we can heal our own Stockholm syndrome and all the stuff that we and all of the survival tactics that allowed us to be able to live in a culture that is not accepting of us and that uses us, as the scapegoat for everything. So, we absorb that and our children absorb that and all of those kinds of things, white people, absorb supremacy, and even the nicest little white lady who is sweet in her heart, still absorb that and the reason they absorb that is that's what's in the environment. It's not about whether you're a good person or a bad person, it's about you absorbed this stuff because we live in the environment where it exists and so, therefore, you absorb it, but once you become conscious, you can make different choices.

MIND-BODY CONNECTION 

Michael: How do you step into this place where you're willing to confront that and say, you know what, my message and my story is worth, whatever comes along the backside of it?

Kelly: Yeah, great question. I anticipated a lot more kind of scrutiny and push back than I received so that was kind of odd. I think that leading up to it, you know, actually this the movie, The Secret was one of my kind of initial seed planters of doing this film because it was a film that not particularly my documentary style, but I took these nuggets away that I applied instantly in my life and within months’ weeks my life changed and I was like – wow! It is all energy and what we put out there we do get back and it just opened my eyes and I applied it and I was very empowered. And so, around the same time, as I watched the secret, I started meditating, I was going to Agape, and I was listening to Michael Beckwith, I'm sure, you know, him, he teaching and he was just empowering me like – we're co-creators with life, and if we get a calling in our heart, within every acorn as an oak tree within every dream, is everything you need to see that dream realized.

If you have a calling to be an actor, if you have a calling to be a poet, if you had a calling to be an astronaut, that means that life, nature, the universe, God, whatever you believe puts that calling, there, you have the ability to see realize.

So I was acting at the time, and I've been acting my whole life, I grew up in Southern, California, and off and on because it's just a tough business. You're getting rejected all the time and I actually initially started seeking out healers to, like – remove the block so, I would be a better actor and just be free unless self-conscious. And so like around the same time, I started listening to Michael's teachings, practicing my gratitude work, and seeing you know, crazy manifestations occur and just my life feeling better and I really got these concepts that we are co-creators. So and then I started meditating at the time so that that really rooted everything down.

So all of that to say, once I was ready to do the film I just had complete trust that this calling in my heart, and the reason I brought up acting was that I started getting more excited talking about manifestation and healing and epigenetics, and we have so much more power than we've been led to believe and is a world of infinite possibility. I started lighting up talking about that and less so talking about acting something that I thought I wanted to pursue my entire life and so I paid attention to that.

And once I was ready to do the film, it took about eight years marinating, this idea and gathering more research, and more experts and once I was finally ready to do it, I was just like, you know God take the wheel, you put this calling in my heart, it is very strong. So I'm just going to trust that, it's all going to unfold and I'm just going to say yes and keep moving forward and let you take care of the hard stuff.

LEARNING TO LOVE YOUR INNER CHILD 

Michael: How do we help people step further into understanding that there is a part of this process involving re-parenting and becoming comfortable with the fact that you do have this inner part of you, these wounds use childhood trauma experiences that need compassion, and care, and hope, and joy and love but also you are an adult, so you have to find that balance? Like, how do you step into that conversation?

Dr. Trish: Right. It is a balance and a lot of times adults have a really hard time because we seemed to hit this threshold where there's now this message that we have to be adults, whatever that means, right? And it's like there's a lot of social messages, there's a lot of family messages, you know, we have to do things and that's true too. We have to do grown-up things, but there's still that wounded child inside there, still, that hurt inside that pain, that gets tapped into from these adult things that we do. So you know, an argument with a partner, something going on at work, you know someone cuts you off on the freeway, all of these little things can be just tapped into and to tell the adult person that, you know, these reactions that you're having are coming from this place inside that now, needs that healing that needs you to turn towards and attend to this child inside, that we can turn to her, and attentive, like you said, there can be a tremendous shame. I work with a lot of people, that's the very same thing but I'm a, I'm an adult, I have my own children, you know, I've been married for 20 years, you know. I'm a CEO of a company. Why would I go ahead and do inner child work? This doesn't make any sense to me, that was so long ago, and what that is, is that's the cutoff, that's the protector part. The adult protector part that is saying cut that off because it's so painful. Let that go, it's so painful. And so, what I like to do and what I hope that the Doodles do is to decrease the shame and to normalize that everybody who was raised by people has something, some kind of no one comes out of childhood unscathed, no one, there's not my own children. There's not a person in the world that comes through childhood unscathed because there's no perfect parent and it would really do us no good if there was because this is how we learn to through the rupture and the repair. And so really, it's normalizing that you know we all have this and when you start to feel it that you know it is okay to turn that compassion back inside that warmth back inside.

HOW TO CREATE A LIFE THAT IS ON FIRE

Michael: How do you understand for yourself? And maybe this will be practical for people listening. How do you really kind of define and understand what it is that you want in your purpose and you're why? What's that process like for you?

Kate: Well, I think what you just said, there is so key and critical, you took a step back and you checked in with yourself, which so many people don't do myself in included when I was working in corporate, I was in such a hamster wheel. I never said, okay, the moments that I did stop and say, I really wish I didn't have to go to my job today. I really don't want to go take the bus and the trolley and all of these things. I don't want to answer the phone and have someone complain to me, because I was working in Human Resources. So, that's all I did was listen to people, complain to me all day. Like, I didn't want to do any of that, but I would chalk it up as like, this is what people do.

This is how I'm going to make money, this is how I'm going to pay my bills and those are excuses, those are excuses that we give ourselves so we can stay in our comfort zone but you have to check in with yourself and be straight up and hold yourself accountable to, this is not the life that I want to be living. I don't want to wake up and do all of that stuff that I would like to do and I think that this is a very practical exercise that anyone tuning in right now can do is actually write out what your perfect day looks like just start with one single day.

If you woke up this morning or if you could wake up tomorrow morning and script your day, who you're with, where you are, what time it is? What time of your like, what everything! What do you eat for breakfast? What happens after breakfast? What's the weather like? All at what surrounds you what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are you feeling? And if you can start scripting out what a perfect day looks like then, guess what? You can start to get what that would look like over a week, a month, a year, and not every single day is going to be perfect, the exercise is not to live in a world where every single thing happens exactly how you want it to because that's not realistic and that will never be the truth. However, if you can start to show yourself what your perfect day would look like, then you'll start to imagine and see for yourself what is important to you? Maybe what's most important to you is that you get to have breakfast and dinner with your family and what happens in between there are; you doing self-care, taking care of your health and wellness, going and doing work in your community, whatever it is might be. If you don't give yourself the time and the space to actually think about these kinds of things, then it will continue to be that hamster wheel of, I don't like this but it's what everyone does. I don't want to do this, but I have to pay my bills. Like you don't need to live your life that way and the way to not live your life that way is to actually take a step back and start thinking about what your life should look like, what you want it to look like and then that creates your WHY and you're BIGGER PURPOSE.

FIND YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE  

Michael: There's so much fear, so much fear and especially for women, because they have expectations way higher than anything a man, and I'm obviously not a woman, so I can't have that conversation but how do you navigate the fear of honoring your truth when society is just always standing here on top of you and saying, but you should be a better mother but you should be a better wife, you should be this?

Jenna: Yeah. It's funny, cuz even when I was in LA, I was in an Uber and the guy was driving a minivan and I was like, oh, do you have children? And then we got in the conversation. I was like, yeah, I have two little ones, and he was like, oh, how did you leave them at home? And I was like, don't ask me how ask me why? Because my why is so much stronger than the how or the what? Like my why is because I want to make an impact, I wanna show them what it looks like to have a mother that I am fully alive and engaged, like that will inspire them more than me being a martyr to my children. And it's so fascinating, when I think about fear, I think that really fear is a lack of confidence, a lack of belief in ourselves that we can actually follow through. And what I mean by this is we live in such an extremist society where it almost gives us that messaging of just drop everything and move in the direction of your dreams and it'll all work out. But I really think that a lot of times we need to leverage the things that we're leaning on right now, leverage where we're at to move us and propel us forward and sometimes forward looks so microscopically small it's like inch by inch and society doesn't love that, they don't recognize it, they don't see it.

Think Michael, if I was like, Hey Michael, you wanna pull up a chair next to me? Let's go sit and watch this tree grow; the growth above the ground would be so boring nobody would watch it. But the growth underneath the ground is what is like spreading and strengthening that tree. I think a lot of times when we have fear, it's mostly fear that we're not actually gonna follow through that, why would this time be any different? Why would I be able to do it? And I believe how we overcome that is by these tiny actions that slowly build the muscle of our confidence. When you are a confident person, you show up entirely different, there's this line, my book that says like how we show up to our battles is directly linked to the type of warrior that we believe we are.

And I think a lot of times we're showing up to lives battles and like looking over each shoulder and being like, not me, I'm not ready. I'm not don't choose me. I can't go. And it's like, when we believe that we are a warrior that can overcome that can be strategic, that can have ideas that can pivot, that can change, that can evolve, that changes how we show up in every area of a life from relationships to parenthood, to entrepreneurship. And so, fear, I really believe is rooted in this lack of confidence and confidence is built slowly over time. I think about the line, slow growth, deep roots. And I think that society doesn't honor that, but that's something that we need to start honoring and having this awareness for in our own lives.