Judith Hancox is a trauma recovery specialist and a licensed clinical social worker with a body, mind, and spirit approach to emotional recovery. She has a Master’s in Social Work, she is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and she is also a Board Certified Expert in Trauma Stress. Furthermore, she is the author of three books and she is currently working on her fourth titled Transitioning Trauma – Grief and PTSD.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- If it is PTSD, the shock gets locked in.
- A lot of people feel they have to stay sad to honor their child.
- We take our trauma with us wherever we go. The best way to release it is from our earthly body.
- An amazing story about George Anderson, a world-famous medium, and the spirit of a little girl who was pestering him.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS JUDITH:
- What is the link between complicated grief and PTSD?
- How does Shiome Therapy, which you created, accelerate trauma recovery by using both traditional and non-traditional modalities?
- What is a feeder memory that is usually a childhood memory that feeds into a present trauma?
SHOW LINKS:
shiome.com (trauma) judithhancox.com (grief & complicated bereavement)
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Listen to the podcast here
Judith A Hancox: MSW, LCSW, BCETS (Board Certified Expert In Trauma Stress), Author
I have an extraordinary guest for you. Her name is Judith Hancox. She is coming to us from Vermont. According to Judith, trauma is healable, joy is possible, and peace of mind is readily attainable with the right tools and daily practice. Judith is a Trauma Recovery Specialist and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a body, mind, and spirit approach to emotional recovery. She is also affiliated with Helping Parents Heal, the remarkable nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting bereaved parents by providing support and resources that aid in the healing process.
I was very much looking forward to my interview with Judith at the Helping Parents Heal Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, but the conference was canceled due to the pandemic. Her role at the conference was to support parents with evidential healing modalities for trauma recovery and to help them understand the relationship between complicated grief and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, also known as PTSD, which Judith says can be healed.
Judith has a Master’s in Social Work. She’s a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. She is also a Board Certified Expert in Trauma Stress. In addition, she’s the author of three books. She’s working on her fourth, titled Transitioning Trauma, Grief, and PTSD. Judith, welcome to the show. I’ve been looking forward to our interview because I know that we all have so much to learn from you about healing grief, trauma, and more.
It’s so great to see you here. Let’s start by having you tell us about your spiritual journey, which began when you were eight years old, your work with children, and what inspired you to pursue a career that focuses on healing methods to accelerate trauma recovery. Also, I know you have an amazing story about your niece that you can also share with us. Go for the goal. Tell us all about it.
Thank you, Irene. I’m so happy to be here finally after all these months. This is great. Here I am in Vermont, and you’re in New Jersey where I grew up. My journey started in New Jersey. I have to say, most likely, it was guided and pre-planned. When I was eight, I talked about remembering laying in bed, looking at the ceiling, and questioning over and over, “Who am I?” Nobody could answer that.
I was a little embarrassed to ask in that way to anyone. I knew at a young age that I felt like a stranger on a strange planet and didn’t learn until many years later that I was connected to this big spiritual community. Over the course of my childhood, I was raised Catholic. I left the church when I was about eighteen because of the dogma and the things that were not resonating with me.
I love to be in church. I love to go and look at the stained glass and feel the energy of the church. I love to go alone, and I would. I’ve always questioned, “Who am I? Why am I here?” I had an aside about ten years of abuse that happened to me in my childhood that took me into a place of rebellion. It’s a little bit of a rebel as a teenager. My parents thought I was a rebel kid. Someone handed me a book when I was a freshman year in college called Autobiography of a Yogi.
Before that, I was dabbling in reincarnation books in high school. I read a book called The Search for Bridey Murphy. It’s a story of a woman who was hypnotized and under hypnosis. She talked about this life she had in Ireland of Bridey Murphy and the street she lived on, the church she went to, the names of people in the neighborhood, and her children. After her hypnotic session, she went and explored, “What is this?” It was so clear to her.
It turns out she went to Ireland or explored and did the research. Sure enough, there was a Bridey Murphy with all those details that were real from another century. That piqued my curiosity and I was always interested in rebirth and the afterlife. As a teenager and getting into other things, I met my husband in 1970 as a freshman in college. That’s when someone handed me that book, Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda.
I lit up like a Christmas tree because his whole story is he’s a saint from India, one of the first yogis who came to teach yoga to the United States. He came over on a ship. His teacher sent him as a young student who was learning on the ship over to the United States to California. He was praying because he found a Gideon Bible in the drawer. He couldn’t speak a word of English. He was praying to Jesus to please help him resonate with the people of this country, of the United States, because he was very afraid and didn’t know and couldn’t speak the language.
By the time he got to the United States, he could speak perfect English. That’s just one of the miracles. He talks about miracles from the time he was an infant in the crib and knew who he was and was frustrated that he couldn’t talk or walk yet. Chapter after chapter and miracle after miracle, and I’m a miracle fan.
Miracles are fun. I’ve had a few of them myself.
That turned me onto yoga and my search for meditation and studying. It wasn’t until the late ‘70s, when we were living in Vermont for the first time and raising my child here, that we had a series of bankruptcy and financial problems. I swore I’d never go back to New Jersey. Don’t swear ever because my heart is in New Jersey because it did so much for me and us.
Were you living in New Jersey, Judith?
We lived in Bergen County, Morris County, mostly Morris County, and Sussex County.
You would have been my neighbor. I live in Essex County.
I lived in Sussex County when we moved back from Vermont to Stillwater, New Jersey, where I met my guru when we came back. If we say I was guided, the real crux of the situation happened when we went bankrupt and had to leave. I had sworn I’d never moved back, and now I had to eat my words. I cried all the way from Vermont to New Jersey. I had my ‘62 Willys Jeep, my son in the back, all my plants, and my cat. My husband had the dogs and other stuff with the van. I got down on my knees. We were on Lake Champlain at Mile Point. I hugged the tree and was crying. I said, “Why do I have to go back? I didn’t want to go back.” Finally, I collapsed.
You finally let it go.
I just said, “Please guide me. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m too messed up. I’ll take it.” I accepted that. We went to Sussex County, which was more like Vermont, very hilly, and had Stokes Forest to go in and hide, take my son, go to the lake, be in the woods, and feel like I was in Vermont.
It was beautiful. I’ve been to Vermont also.
I would go from Stillwater, New Jersey to Manhattan to see Hilda, who was a guru there and had in St. John, the Divine Church had hundreds of people who would be swooning. I would go every week with somebody in a group. My husband finally said, “Can’t you find somebody around here? You’ve got to go to New York, two hours away.” I put it out there, “Please help me find a teacher here.” Within a week, at the local health food store, there was somebody putting up a poster about a yoga class in Stillwater, New Jersey, at the library where I went. It was an 1800s place with very old and creaky wood floors. I went upstairs to the first class. There was this swami in orange and a little group, about seven people around a candle. I went, “I’m home.”
That was 1980, so by 1984, my teacher said, “If you really want to learn about spirituality and you want to be a teacher, a devotee, or a yogi, you have to give up everything. You have to get rid of all material possessions. Come live in the ashram.” I’m like, “Okay.” I thought about it, but I have a son. Jesse was in fifth grade, fourth grade, or third grade at the time. I decided to go, so then my husband decided he was going to come with me because he wanted to see if this was not some stuff.
Here’s the thing I’ve got to say. What an open-minded man your husband was. I think more are opening, but how few men stubbornly cling to whatever it is they need to cling to for their egos and their pride. Your husband was like, “Okay, honey.”
He’s a keeper. It wasn’t really, “Okay, honey, let’s go.” It was months of thinking about it.
He was receptive.
Because I studied four years with my teacher and the group for over three years, little by little, I was changing. I was stopping my thoughts of pressuring him to do what I was doing. I would ask, “Why doesn’t he come to class? I want him to come to class.” He said, “Just shut up. Stop it. Do your thing. Let him do his thing. If it works, it will work.” I did that, and he still wasn’t coming. My teacher said, “Stop it, your thoughts and your mind. You’re pressuring him with your mind. You may not be saying anything anymore, but you’re still doing it.”
He was right, so I did. I put it into practice. I tried very hard in meditation to go into myself, do my thing, and be more open-minded and loving. That did work because we resonated. We met as soulmates as kids. I was 18 years old, and he was 19. We’ve made changes because, at the core, we have a deep spiritual connection. We probably had this planned. He did come to classes and agreed, “We’ll do this as an experiment.” I put the house on the market, got rid of all my clothes and possessions. Everything, I did it. He was more practical. He’s a Virgo. I went cold turkey.
It is because I felt I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. My life wasn’t working as much as I was okay or satisfied. I wasn’t really satisfied with my work as a health inspector. I had been an early childhood teacher. Now, through this twist of fate, I got a job because I needed a job and became an environmental health specialist for ten years.
You are going to be visiting companies, restaurants, and all kinds of things like that.
I was inspecting restaurants, checking septic systems, water, houses for resale, and all that. Being a woman in that position also was very challenging because I wasn’t taken seriously as the Director of the Health Department in Long Valley when I was there in the ‘80s. Because I was a health inspector and a director, I wanted to get the pay that it should give me as a health officer. The town said, “If you want to be a health officer, you have to get your Master’s degree and we’ll pay for it.” I said, “All right.” I looked at the syllabus to see what would fit.
Social Work is a Master’s that you can receive and be a health officer. When I told the town council, they said, “That’s very nice, but you’re not going for Social Work.” We want you to go for Environmental Science.” Being not a real left-brain science mathematician, I said, “That’s all right. I will not go for a Master’s and be putting in that much time, work, and attention for something I don’t even want. I’ll pay for it myself.” I did and went for my Master’s in Social Work, which took me on this other journey of Helping Parents with Parents Anonymous in Sussex County. I established Parents Anonymous of Sussex County as part of my training in school and research.
Parents Anonymous came much later. This was in the ‘80s. In 1990, I graduated with my Master’s and set up Parents Anonymous to help parents stop abusing their children. They were either mandated by the court or came voluntarily. We would teach skills. We had a childcare center there. It was something that was needed and was not there. That was established before I left. I did it for five years.
Later on, through the course of time and my Master’s, I was working with special needs children in another school in New Jersey, in Morris County, which still exists nowadays. That gave me a lot of training that I didn’t have for special needs. My mentor, teacher, and supervisor sent me to school for EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy.
To desensitize a trauma and reprocess it into something positive was the beginning of an amazing journey of realizing that people could heal from trauma really and truly, and clear the trauma from their body, mind, and spirit. I didn’t know that then because it was all a mental, emotional, and psychological technique. Before that, when I graduated with my Master’s in Administration of Social Work, I learned I had to go back for another Master’s in Clinical Training because I was on the wrong track. Remember, I was going to be a health officer.
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I decided early on that I loved too much what I was doing with people, groups, and children in that way. I was given advice from a mentor at my college, Rutgers University, to go to an institute that would train me in techniques and pick a technique I like because I’d learn a lot more there about therapy, psychological training, and working with people than I would going back to school in the books.
That’s what I did. I enrolled in the Gestalt Institute of New Jersey with Dr. Art Frankel. He was just so great. I wound up three years studying, learning, growing with him, and then teaching with him. It was a wonderful experience. I gravitated to gestalt therapy because gestalt means whole and putting the pieces back together again that are shattered. Also, yoga. I’m a yogi. That means union with your higher self.
In 1986 when I left the ashram, and not because I wanted to, but because the ashram disbanded and we were told we had to leave. My husband, the practical one who’d never put the house on the market and wanted it to sell, never sold. In the two years we were there, the house we rented never sold. We were able to move right back into our home and collect some belongings again.
Your road was guided and protected.
I feel that way. It was totally protected and guided practically from my husband and spiritually from the great source of all there is. I was guided to gestalt therapy along with social work. That’s very dynamic. It’s creative. It’s doing role play and double chairs. You’re in your right hemisphere. I learned that the trauma that we need to release is in the right hemisphere, not in the logical reasoning, left brain words, or language that we use. Although, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is so important to understand and to get techniques to be practical and change our lives. If our trauma is there, and mine still was also from those ten years, so as much as I aspired to be spiritual and as best as I could be the yogi and connected to my higher self, I was falling flat on my face a lot of times with my emotions.
Trauma Stress: The trauma that we need to release is in the right hemisphere, not in the logical reasoning left brain.
As they say, heal or it heals thyself.
When I went to EMDR training, you were in groups of three. In many trainings, you’re in these triads where one person acts as a therapist, one is a client, and one is an observer. You switch roles. Everyone takes the role. In this little experiment, in my first EMDR training, they asked you to pick something that is about a 5 of the level of disturbance on a 0 to 10, and 10 being the worst you could possibly feel on the Likert scale and 0 being peace, no disturbance at all. On that 0 to 10, they ask you for about a 5 because they don’t want you with your 10s to practice. In my first EMDR practicum, I figured little bullying in junior high.
What could that do? That’s over. During the period of doing the eye movement with the bilateral brain stimulation, as you’re thinking about the negative disturbance, you start with a bilateral brain stimulation. Mine went up to ten plus. I broke down. I’m crying and I’m like a little baby over a little bullying. It is not so little. It also has feeder memories, which I didn’t realize then that I know now with many years of experience that tapping into the underlying childhood experience was a feeder into that, which blew it up. I didn’t process that until much later.
A feeder memory exactly is what now? How would you define that?
It’s a memory that feeds into a present trauma or a trauma that you’re thinking about that you think is more present or more related to your life now, even if it’s 5 or 10 years ago. Something from your childhood is usually a feeder memory. When you go to a feeder memory, it can happen from three years old or before. In fact, if there is trauma when you’re an infant, preverbal trauma is by far the hardest for therapists to help someone heal from because there are no words.
Trauma Stress: A feeder memory is a memory that feeds into a present trauma or a trauma that you’re thinking about that you think is more present, more related to your life right now.
As we go into Helping Parents Heal, that shock and trauma of having no words that could describe the depth of traumatic loss and the feelings that are so ingrained in the suffering of feeling you’ve lost your child. It’s a physical loss. What we learned spiritually, and the reason I was probably trained that early on is because I was there for my sister when my godchild, Carly, transitioned at 24 years old. There are no words.
You have an amazing story about Carly. Do you want to share that with us?
Before I go into Carly and what happened, I want people to understand the Gestalt piece of creativity coupled with the EMDR, the practical psychological method of a protocol to desensitize a trauma, and then being led to energy psychology and thought field therapy. Many people do the Emotional Freedom Technique or EFT. There’s TFT or Thought Field Therapy. I was guided to probably the most beautiful way of assessing a person’s trauma through evolving thought field therapy because it taught me how to muscle test George Goodheart’s technique and how to assess where exactly is the trauma stored in the body, mind, and spirit, and the energy system, the emotional system, the mental system, and the physical system.
Being very accurate in that assessment helps you target in your treatment so your treatment is accurate and you’re not wasting a lot of time looking at other things that don’t need to be looked at at the moment when you’re targeting the trauma. When my niece transitioned, my sister hadn’t explored spirituality in her life like I did. I was the rebel.
She thinks you are crazy.
I was crazy. I was brainwashed. I was in a cult and many things. I was steadfast, and thank God I did have my husband who supported me. My parents were happy that he was there watching out so that I wasn’t doing anything too crazy. It all prepared me for that moment because, through Carly’s short cancer treatment, my sister, my husband, and I all had a sense that this was not going to end well, yet we were in denial because Carly was so vibrant and special.
She had so much energy. We could never conceive that she could leave this earth because she can’t. If she decides to stay, she’s going to stay. My husband and my sister had an experience before mine. They both had a vision of a beautiful sunny day with lots of kids around and everything wonderful. It was Carly’s celebration of life ceremony. They both compared stories later because when they both had that vision a few months before at the same time, it was very interesting.
It was like a premonition type of thing.
I remember praying before bed, reading, and I just got to download that she’s going to go. I still fought and denied it. It wouldn’t believe in my rational, logical mind that this kid cannot go and we’re going to make it not happen. I even said to my sister, “I know what to do. I know every holistic method.” Carly said, “Aunt Judith, maybe after the chemo and radiation, I’ll do that.” My heart would sink, and I had to accept that this was the way. Many people recover from chemoradiation, but in my heart and soul, I knew that that was not the treatment.
It was actually not her path.
It wasn’t her path, or she would’ve been living with me or whatever. I was still traumatized by the look on my sister’s face when we both got the news. It’s beyond words. I did everything I could from the beginning to let her know Carly was not dead. Carly is not by any means. That energy has not gone into the ground and disappeared with the dirt. I knew she was alive. I told my sister, “Please think of her as in the jungles of Australia or the depths of Africa, somewhere where she couldn’t communicate with us yet. She doesn’t have a cell phone with her or a computer. It’s off the grid. Just know that she’s okay, and she’s going to get in touch with us.”
That was very comforting to my sister because she could resonate with that. She knew Carly could not be gone. In that week, I spent a week with her and then I had to go home to New Jersey to get my clothes, see my animals, and refresh a little bit before I went back. I went home. The first night home, I sat on the couch after my husband went to bed. I’m in a state of, “How do I help my sister with this one?” There are no words. She doesn’t have the confidence I have to know. I asked Carly. I took my cell phone out. I texted her on my phone and said, “Carly, I know you’re okay. I know you’re fine. I love you so much. I just need help now. Please help me. How do I help your mother? What am I going to do? Please help me, help your mother.”
In that exhaustion and crying, I fell asleep. At about midnight, I heard my phone go off. I woke up on the couch and said, “Who’s texting me at this hour of early morning?” I look at my phone. Even though I had texted her, it wasn’t, “What was up?” What was up was a Google search bar that said, “Heaven looks a lot like the mall.” That could only be my goddaughter. That could only be Carly, who was a shopper. She loved to shop. In fact, she went to Boston College because it was close to one of the shopping malls she loved to shop in. I knew it was her. I got goosebumps all over.
I drove down to my sister’s the next day with my phone and said, “This is Carly.” I think my sister believed me. I called her first and told her. What she did was, as she does very well, google all night long because she had PTSD and couldn’t sleep. She googled Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall. Me, I just took it that it was Carly saying she’s having fun in heaven. My sister wanted to be practical, “What is this?”
It turns out it was a book written by a woman and a story about a child who had a near-death experience by getting hit in the head on the basketball court, something like that. My sister got the book, and all she told me was that there was a message in that book from Carly. When she read it at the very end, there was something very poignant that she knew was a message from Carly. You never know. If you’re open-minded and live in both worlds, you keep your feet on the ground and your head in the sky.
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I can relate.
She visited me in a dream twice now. It was such a clear dream visit where I could touch and feel her. In the first one, she told me, “Aunt Judith, leaving here is like an old shoe. It gets smelly, you take it off. Your body’s like an old shoe. It gets smelly, and you take it off.” The shoe piece was interesting too because we wear the same size. I inherited a lot of her shoes and boots that I’ve worn out and just to feel close to her and wear them. She made that comment about the old shoe. Mine had just worn out, her boots. I’m getting that now as I’m telling you.
I’ve heard a lot of people refer to our bodies as our Earth’s shoes. How do we wear them out? My mother’s 95 years old, and she’s in assisted living. Things are giving out. I go, “Mom, your tooth got tired. It was chewing for how many years.”
I’ve heard in yoga that it’s like an old coat where you take it off, but I never heard about the shoe. She enlightened me on that one. It is very much real and in charge on the other side with the other children. My sister is now very involved with Helping Parents Heal and the board of directors. She organized the very first conference of Helping Parents Heal in Arizona in 2018.
Because I was going to be interviewing all of you at the conference, I could see how amazing, involved, and confident your sister is. I was admiring that from the background. I was going to be doing my thing. Your sister said you’re more than welcome with the podcast, come in, and interview everyone. I was in the threads as things were being done. I said, “She’s great. She’s doing a great job.” It must have been very hard for her to dismantle it all when we suddenly had to call it a day with the conference last April.
Interestingly enough, because we couldn’t meet in person, in Helping Parents Heal, there were over 11,000 to 12,000 people, and it could not be, at that conference. Every single one can see every single presenter because they’ve all been presenting on Zoom. It’s been a wonderful experience.
They all also are presenting on the show because we’ve interviewed quite a few of them. In fact, even Alexander and Karen Doell will be interviewed in October. We’re getting it out there too from our end.
Do you want to know about the George Anderson story?
Yes, I do. I want everyone to know that George Anderson is considered one of the greatest living mediums nowadays.
He’s the most highly tested.
He’s world-renowned.
He is world-renowned as an evidential. My sister and I went to see him a year or less after Carly left. She had other local mediums.
Going to get an experience from George Anderson was going to be quite an experience.
We sat in a diner before waiting to go to the hotel next door and have a little something to eat. She said, “Let’s write down every single person in our family.” We have a big Italian family on both sides. We wrote down two pages of people who had transitioned in case they popped up. When we went to see George, Carly came through almost first. First was her grandfather on her father’s side brought her through. George gave so much evidence, first of all, that my sister and I were sitting next to each other at the end of a 12-foot table. He was on the other side, so he couldn’t see us that well. He said his glasses were getting old. He couldn’t see so well.
You were private. You were not in a group at all.
It was private. When Carly came through, he said to two of us, “One of you has a child on the other side.” She talked about how she went, her illness, and so many evidential statements that it couldn’t be denied. The funniest and the coolest one was someone not on our list. By the way, my sister called from another phone to make the appointment. He had a different name. He doesn’t want to know anything, or he won’t see you.
You have to go in the cold at which we were. I hadn’t contacted him at all. This spirit came through who happened to be our stepgrandmother. He said, “There’s Emma.” We looked at each other, “Emma?” It is because there were no good feelings about Emma. Emma was my grandfather’s second wife, who did some not-so-nice things to my mom. We didn’t want anything to do with it. This is funny. My sister’s like, “She’s taken up time. This is a very expensive session.” George is saying she’s come with a flower of forgiveness.
She was apologizing.
George actually gets down and goes to us like, “Just say you’re sorry. She won’t leave us alone. Forgive her. She’s saying she’s sorry.” I’m like, “Emma, it’s okay. We forgive you. You can go now.” We got her to leave. We did forgive her.
That was quite a validation. I tell people also that the greatest, most unusual validation I ever got was I was at a gallery once with Suzanne Northrop and Thomas John. Suzanne Northrop said, “I have someone here. His name is Howard.” That was my ex-husband, who was very much alive. I was like, “What? Howard’s alive?” It turned out that it was Howard’s father, my ex-father-in-law, who had been deceased for 40 years, who came through. Talk about a validation for me or anyone because you could say, “I wanted to hear from my husband.” I would want to hear from this one, but my ex-father-in-law? That, to me, sometimes is more of a validation.
It is. Also, we had said there were four Nicholases. We said, “If he gets any of these Nicholases.” Every single one came through, even the cat. It was quite amazing. That was the first time I could feel my sister let go of that validation from the other side. She only wanted to go to know that Carly was all right and that she didn’t suffer when she left. That was the first thing the evidence she gave my sister. She was fine. It was like walking through a door. Grandparents were there. No problem. Don’t think about the bad stuff, only think about the present. That’s about the trauma recovery. Staying in the here and now is one of the most important things we can do to keep our peace and our peace of mind.
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It is important because, in trauma, when you have these experiences, you keep going back.
It forces you to go back because you’re having recall and flashbacks. There’s avoidance. You don’t want to go there, but it comes in, and there are sleep disturbances. There are nightmares sometimes, power dreams, or a whole range of anxiety and depression. What I explain to parents and other people who are traumatized when they see me is that, in the normal grieving process, if you lose a parent or a grandparent, it’s sad. You’re upset. Yoga taught me that the more attached you are, the more pain there is. Attachment brings pain. There is suffering that comes with that pain. Leonardo da Vinci said, and others have quoted it, that pain is inevitable on this planet, but suffering is optional.
We do not have to suffer. PTSD causes suffering. If I can explain a little, in the course of grief and normal, when I’m saying normal, I’m saying when an elder has left, and it’s the course of a life that we’re used to and more accepting of. We go through this period of transition. When any traumatic event happens, like a car accident or anything, the first 30 days we call acute traumatic stress. In that acute traumatic stress time period, the 30 days, our brain is broken into pieces of the traumas shattered into all little incidents. Like with 911, people who have been shattered in the first 30 days I worked with them. We had to work on each piece of the trauma, the smell, sight, and the sound of it.
You’re amazing to do that. People are reliving this, and it has to affect you also as you’re hearing some of these experiences.
I’ve learned how to keep a boundary. It gets into my heart, and sometimes I cry too, but I keep my knowledge and my boundaries to help guide them through the process. The first 30 days are acute. It’s sharp, and it stings. After 30 days, the brain starts to process and integrate it. If you think of the worst part of the moment that the traumatic event happened, it brings it all together, and you can clear it. The whole scene, the worst part. That’s what EMDR does. You think about the worst part of the disturbance, and it will collect all the pieces and help clear it. That’s the 30 days in normal. If the trauma stays with us, I call it shock and lock because our adrenaline runs.
Physically, we’ve got adrenaline shooting through our system. Energetically, we have all this energy shooting up into the brain and our nervous system. It bypasses the left brain because the frontal lobe with the neurons connects right and left. It’s connecting language to the picture and the feeling. There’s no language in the right hemisphere where we’re talking. There are no words. It’s pre-verbal. There are no words, but the feeling and the picture is clear.
In the left hemisphere, there’s the language and the picture that goes with the picture. They’re on two parts of the brain and two parts of our system, and we have to integrate it in the frontal lobe. After 30 days, we integrate it and say, “It was not so bad. In that accident, nobody got hurt. The car can be fixed. They have insurance.”
You start processing it. It’s like spilling milk, “Grab the paper towels, no big deal. It’s only milk.” You process, integrate, digest it, and it’s gone. You forget it happens. That’s what happens after 30 days. If it’s PTSD, that shock locks it into the body, the mind, and the spirit. The energy system, the mental system, and the physical system are all impacted, get locked in, and tightened in these knots, “I’m not going to ever be the same again. I’m not going to have a good life ever again.” Don’t mean to discount it.
That’s what we say. Unconsciously and consciously, we’ve got a lot of knots tied up. PTSD, after the 30 days, if we’re still carrying it, that’s what it’s called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. What I’ve learned with Helping Parents Heal from a devastating loss of their child, the perceived loss, the loss of their physical being, is that this acute phase can last for years, not just 30 days. It could last a year or two or more where you’re chopped in pieces, disintegrated, discombobulated, or whatever you want to call it. You’re not your whole self.
It’s like a domino board. Instead of the dominoes being an order, it’s like throwing them up in the air. All the pieces of your life are scattered everywhere.
The umbilical cord never leaves. We think we cut it physically, but emotionally, we’re always tied to them. That same umbilical cord of energy is what can bring them to us also because they haven’t gone anywhere that is not physical. They’re still here. They’re in our spiritual realm, and they’re in their emotional realm. Until we are healed, they’re going to be very close. A lot of people feel they have to stay sad to honor their child because if they’re not sad, they’re not really caring much about their child. It gets twisted. Also, our energy systems get twisted. Our energy and energy system from every system, the 400-plus billion cells in our body, all have their own energy system.
Trauma Stress: Our attachment to our child is seen in how the umbilical cord never leaves. We may have cut it physically, but we’re always tied to them emotionally. That same umbilical cord of energy is what can bring them to us.
I’m moving this way, and it goes in a clockwise direction, the neurons and protons over the nucleus of the cell, whatever’s circling. It is in a positive direction. Around our body, we have an ethereal layer that lets the energy in and out. The next layer is the emotional layer, the emotional body. The next is the mental body, and then the astral. It gets higher to the divine. It is higher and higher frequencies, but all this energy gets twisted. Some of the seven chakras from the base chakra, the sacral, the solar plexus, the heart, the throat, the brain, the brow, the ajna chakra, and the crown chakra can get twisted and move backward. You don’t feel yourself, and you’re not yourself. It’s switching us into the past.
If you think about a tornado or hurricane, the counterclockwise spin is where we’re going. It always leads us into the past or worrying about the future, but mostly the past. To stay centered in the present is very difficult if you don’t know how to at least clear your energy system and get your chakra. Whether it’s reiki or the energy correction meditation that I invented or developed from the brief energy correction from evolving thought field therapy, I learned that there are pressure points on the body.
To stay centered in the present is very difficult if you don't know how to at least clear your energy system and get your chakra. Share on X
In my book, there are 6 that tap into 6 different major energy systems that clear the whole thing within seconds. About twenty seconds on each pressure point will adjust that system. Will it move backwards again? Yes. Every time we think of a negative thought, our energy can reverse. The challenge is to stay peaceful. PTSD is healable. A lot of parents would change positions in a second that would rather it be them. That’s always going to be there of why they had to go first. If a child leaves first spiritually, there’s a reason. My sister and I learned that there was a contract that she and Carly had and I had in it.
It makes sense because of what’s happened. You have many people you’re helping through Carly.
Carly has done all of this because we would want her to be here, live happily ever after, get married, have kids, and whatever. Her life on this earth is profoundly important and significant to me. I never stop honoring that because it’s so amazing. I’ve learned through the techniques of energy work, spirituality, EMDR, the practical, and Gestalt therapy. I put together a system I call Shiome therapy that addresses it all.
Shiome therapy is a combination. You probably take from 1 person 1, 2, or 3 modalities work for another person. Do you need all of them, or do you use them all together?
Every person is different. My protocol is to first test them for their energy system. Before we do any treatment, I make sure that energy is going in the right direction and clear that first. If you think about it, you go in to see a talking therapist, and your energy’s all switched. It’s like you don’t even hear what they’re saying. It goes in one ear and out the other because you’re traumatized.
First, I am creating a sacred space, learning how to find peace, and staying in the center of the tornado in the eye of the hurricane. I’ve experienced that. I was in a hurricane, and I stayed in the eye four times during Hurricane Lenny in St. Martin. It’s like the universe was teaching me because I used to say to everyone, and I still do to clients, that we have to get in the middle of that tornado where it’s still and powerful and not get whipped up in the counterclockwise winds that are going to take us, kill us, and destroy us.
In the center, it’s a very important place to stay. We learn that through meditation and other ways of joyful experiences to stay in our center. For everyone, that is the first step. It’s an EMDR method, too, to create a safe space to heal. I call it a safe, sacred space, a heavenly place where it is bringing heaven to earth. You are bringing heaven to earth because your vibration is so high. I use great therapeutic essential oils along with it. That came later. That probably was in 2005 when I learned that.
I use essential oils, also.
That raises your vibration and helps you stay more peaceful. There are peace and calming and other ones that keep you lavender, whatever, to keep you peaceful. There are high frequencies like northern lights or black spruce that aren’t the 300 units of where we resonate into 60 cycles per second. These oils resonate 300 or more cycles per second. They’re just incredible. That came later. I was guided to these different methods, Gestalt, EMDR, energy psychology, oils, and yoga. Shiome with each person is different in the treatment because everyone’s system is shocked and locked in a different place and space.
Do you do privately with people? Do you do online?
We learned through the pandemic, which I never realized, that EMDR can be done on Zoom. We tap. Personally, I’m not doing a lot of individual. I like groups. I am doing group healings with Helping Parents Heal. On the first Friday of every month, I volunteer for whoever wants to come. You get the link through Helping Parents Heal and join us because we do a Shiome healing session. In a group, it’s a little different than an individual because I can’t work on each person individually.
In a group session, the whole group connects. There’s a surrogate. We test for the group and then do the treatments through that surrogate. What’s basically Shiome is what I call the healing circle. There’s this container over the ocean because Shiome is a dolphin. That’s the name of a dolphin I met. It means rip current. It goes fast. We each put our disturbance in the container. In the end, when it goes from a 10 down to a 1, it has to be a one or less to shift the circle.
Everyone in the group lowers their disturbance level to one or less. We then shift the negative. I don’t want to get into it much now, but just want to say that it’s an American-Indian ritual. It uses Chinese medicine, Japanese medicine, and all different techniques. When we shift the circle, we take it through four corners. We take it into the earth and up to the sky. We give it to God, the source, whatever you conceive that higher being to be. We ask for an image that will replace the negative. Every single person in the group will get an image that’s different from their source and will able to lock it in with pressure points and eye movement and install and feel grounded with it. It’s an amazing process.
These group healings you have, are they only for people who lost children, Judith? If someone else has had a different kind of trauma, can they join in?
This particular group healing I’m doing is for Helping Parents Heal. It is 12,000 people. There are a lot of people who can come. I’m so thrilled and honored that 40 to 50 people can do it at once. I always knew this, but it took the pandemic to prove it because I did it in smaller groups of 12 or 7 during times I taught at Skidmore College with the International Women’s Writing Group. We would do it to get rid of writer’s block or whatever. I knew it could work, and I always had this insight or intuition that it could work in a big way. It’s being led there now.
There’s a link between complicated grief, PTSD, and trauma recovery. Can you explain that to those of us who are laypeople about this?
I would believe and know at this point that most, most parents who have lost a child have complex grief. Complicated or complex grief, that alone is complicated because it shatters you in so many pieces. Like I said earlier, putting those pieces back together again takes time. I’ve seen people with ritualistic abuse, which is, by far, one of the worst of group horrible things done to a child and a baby, which is sexual abuse. If you’ve had any abuses and traumatic incidences in your past, that will feed into the issue that you’re dealing with. There’s mad, sad, glad, hurt, and scared, the five main emotions in gestalt therapy we’re taught. Think about it.
Most parents who have lost a child have complicated or complex grief because it shatters you in so many pieces. Putting those pieces back together again takes time. Share on X
You can go from a little frustration to rage. Sad, the same. Glad, meaning the charge of the excitement. That’s a negative charge, not a positive, joyful, uplifting, peaceful joy. It’s an excitable, nervous reaction. It is similar to psychosis, or you’d see in a mental institution. Mad, sad, glad, hurt, and scared. There is fear, from terror to a little bit of anxiety. All those emotions come into play with your feeder memory. If you have something that made you angry or if you’re angry now, there’s something feeding it.
It’s the prior abuse or the prior situation. Half of our planet or more probably is walking around with issues like crazy that they don’t realize came from trauma that they had early on.
Belief can be a lie. Beliefs change. There’s a lie in there because people have different beliefs, but then you learn something new, science changes it, and you change your beliefs. Knowledge is truth. This insight, intuition, and the voices we hear are true spiritual knowledge that is strong and powerful. The truth is we can bring in trauma from other places into this lifetime. I’m not here to say where we’ve been before, but all we know is we are eternal souls.
We’re here for a snap. Just a short amount of time. We think 20 years is short, but 90 years is short. It’s just a blink of an eye in the scheme of the universe and eternal time. Wherever we’ve been before since our first birth in the universe, we’ve experienced things that electromagnetically stick to us. We’re a magnet. We’re an electromagnetic spirit.
These traumas, I call them holograms, as a picture to see this event that is a movie is a real movie. The smell, taste, sound, sight, and visceral feeling of it are stuck in that shock. It sticks to us, and then it runs through our energy systems. Some people have it in the heart meridian and the heart chakra. Some people have it in the liver or the gallbladder.
Some people have it in the throat. They can’t speak. They have thyroid. Wherever our weaknesses are, we tend to gravitate there. Mine for a long time was the throat. I couldn’t speak. Sometimes still people say, “Speak up.” I’m so used to going within and not talking about things as a child. I had to learn how to speak up. I never thought I would be doing something like this in my life. If it wasn’t for guidance and being guided to it, I’d probably be hanging out by the lake now in my book.
Also, when you’re helping people, you’re instantly relatable because you’ve experienced it yourself. You’re not just lecturing. You’ve experienced what you’re trying to help them with and you’ve done a lot of your own healing.
I still am. I was talking before about the meeting here that a few years ago at the conference, in that, I was presenting for the first time grief, PTSD, and trauma recovery. I had an accident the afternoon before I was going to speak. I had surgery and it was traumatic, but I sat in the wheelchair and said to everyone in the audience, “We don’t sweat the small stuff.” I truly meant it because even though half my leg was taken off, it’s the small stuff. Compared to your child leaving, who am I to suffer about this? This can heal, but it did take me afterward after the shock wore off.
You had a similar story. People said to me they were amazed. They couldn’t believe I was even hurt because I dissociated. I just leave my body. I don’t want to feel it. I wasn’t on drugs. In order to maintain it on the way to the hospital, they asked me, “How bad is it on a 1 to 10?” “About a 4 or 5.” They knew that was not a 4 or 5. I felt that way because I detached from it. Maybe disassociation is a strange word, but it’s disassociating from your body. You leave your body. You learn to do that when you’ve had trauma in the past. You learn to dissociate so you don’t sweat the small stuff. Over this two-year period, I have gone into a deep well of healing more than I ever did before. That’s the only reason I’m not seeing people one-on-one too much. I will again, hopefully, one day.
If someone’s reading this and would like to work with someone who does Shiome therapy or whatever, do you have people you recommend?
No one does Shiome because I have to teach it. With EMDR and energy psychology, there’s EMDR.org, and you can find therapists in your area, like evolving thought field therapy. I’ll do 2 or 3 sessions with people to get them over the hump.
That’s great because that’s what we want people to know if they want to reach out to you after reading this so we can guide them on to more. How about telling us about the books you’ve written? I know you have an amazing story about George Anderson from the first Helping Parents Heal.
I’ve written one manual for my clients, the Energy Correction Meditation. I have two CDs that have bilateral brain stimulation and guided meditation that are beautiful. The music is incredible. In fact, the musician who made that music and put bilateral sounds to it said he got it directly from the angels. He was downloaded from the angels. It’s a very powerful piece that Rochelle Wright uses on her website. You can go to her website for repair and reattachment grief therapy. That’s another use of EMDR for a full day of healing for repair and reattachment grief therapy.
I know you’ve got another story with that about the long-lost loved one.
That one too.
We need two stories, one with George Anderson and one with this reattachment. Stories are so great, Judith.
What I’m talking about is going into my new book, Transitioning Trauma, Grief, and PTSD. I have most of it written. I have to put it together and get it out there. If anyone wants to help me who’s a techie, I’ll take you.
Hopefully, you’ll get some responses.
In the story about George Anderson, Irene invited him to speak, and he accepted to the first conference ever for Helping Parents Heal. That was in Arizona in 2018 in Phoenix. He told a story that was very interesting. He lives in Long Island. Months before the conference, he’d be shopping. This pesky kid was after him, this spirit, telling him, “You got to talk to my mother.” She was badgering him to buy a present for her mother to bring to the conference. He was like, “All right.” He bought this present for this spirit child. On the way to the airport, there she is, this pesky kid.
“Do you have the present?” “Yes, I got it. Leave me alone.” In the meantime, there was a woman from Long Island whose child had transitioned only a couple of months before. She heard about the conference through someone else, got in touch with my sister, who was organizing my sister and Elizabeth Boisson, and begged my sister because the conference was closed. It was all 500 people. She said, “Please put me on the waiting list. If anyone leaves, I really want to go. I have this urge. I feel this urge. I have to be there.” She didn’t know why, but she was driven to want to be there. She had no connection to her childhood transition because she was in such deep grief and trauma.
What happened was last minute, someone opened up a slot for her. She’s able to get the ticket. George Anderson is giving his keynote address, opening up the conference, and then he starts talking about this pesky kid that’s bothering him. He’s very funny if you’ve ever seen him. He starts telling the story about how he has this present and for this woman, “Did anyone know this?” Now he has the name of the girl and the name of the mother. This woman stands up, and it’s that woman from Long Island who got that last ticket. That present was from her daughter. It was a present of something that she had wanted that her daughter picked out for her. It was jewelry or something. It was so beautiful. I missed it. I was having surgery.
It is that validation that people can’t make that up. That’s unbelievable. You’ve got another one about a long-lost loved one who transmitted an amazing message.
I did past life regression therapy with Dr. Brian Weiss in 2014. My sister found this. I didn’t know about it and discovered that Rochelle Wright had formulated a protocol of a full-day repair and reattachment grief therapy. It was called Guided Afterlife Connections at the time. She changed the name. I went for Guided Afterlife Connections to learn, and my sister went for therapy. My sister had a healing with Rochelle, and I stayed for the weekend to take the course. We’re in dyads, two people. We couple up with two people. I sat with someone I never met before, a wonderful lady. I was going to be the therapist, and she was the client.
Remember, it’s a full-day process, but we had to do it in half a day and then switch. During that time, I worked with her. We did Rochelle’s protocol, but I added my own. I brought oils. We used a tapper and eye movement. We used two bilateral brain stimulation techniques. I used essential oils. We set a prayer that the highest good comes from this session, which I always do, that we’re protected and that only the truth comes through. I do one set of eye movements with her. She said she got nothing. I said, “That’s okay. Let’s do it again. Go with nothing.” All of a sudden, she said, “My Lord.” I’m saying, “What?”
She said, “He’s here.” She proceeds to tell me the story that 30 years before or more, during the Vietnam War, her older sister had lost her fiancé. I don’t want to get deep into the story, but she’s given me permission to tell this story, and I wrote about it. The fiancé was a Native American boy, and she was a White woman family. Her parents didn’t want her to see this kid. She became pregnant with his child. He went off to Vietnam and was supposed to come home. His leave in that transition where you come home, and they keep you for a while, he volunteered to go back. She didn’t know it, and he was killed. She was making a dress for him to see him. She was so excited to have him.
She didn’t even find out. She found out through the tribe because she wasn’t allowed. She would go to see his mother and speak to him. She was a medicine woman. This is the fellow who shows up in the session that I’m doing, her older sister’s fiancé from many years ago in Vietnam. He proceeds to tell her that he’s hanging out now with her father who hated him in the Earthly life that they’ve made up. He’s sorry for how he treated him and that he saw his sister making the dress. One of the things he said to her was, “Ma, you’ve grown up.”
She was the little sister that the older sister took around, not because the older sister wanted her little sister. He loved her. He said, “Take your little sister.” He had a fondness for this little sister, and she cracked up. Later on, she said, “I love it.” He didn’t say ‘You look so old.’ He said, ‘Ma, you’ve grown up.’” It was beautiful. He gave her all this information about how he saw her making the dress and that he still loved her. He’s so happy she’s married and gave messages to her.
You’ve got them right there while she was with you, just like that.
It was after two sets of eye movements. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.
I want to ask you. I would love for you to share with our readers the importance of healing in this lifetime. Since your books are healing modalities themselves, tell our people about the books and why you believe it’s important to do it now while you’re in your body and don’t wait until you come back or until you have to go to the other side. Why should you motivate yourself? Why go online to a show like this to look at all of these healers and say, “I got work I got to do. Let me do this before I cross over.”
Remember how I said that wherever we go, we take our trauma with us? If we have traumatized energy, that means that we have energy that’s stuck. With that energy that’s stuck are not only the negative images, and sometimes we don’t have the images. We have the feeling. Sometimes we don’t have the feeling. We have the thought like, “I’m not good enough. I can’t go on.” These sabotaging thoughts attract other negative thoughts. We collect these negative thoughts, and they seem to blossom, enhance, and amplify. We then take this with us. The body may go like an old shoe or an old coat, but our spirit carries the negative, disturbing energies with it that have to be reprocessed afterward.
Trauma Stress: We take our trauma with us wherever we go. If we have traumatized energy, that means that we have energy that’s stuck.
I’m told by others in the afterlife that there are hospitals, angels, and helpers that help clear us, but the main issues and the negative energy have to be worked out by ourselves. This is the best way to do it in an earthly body. We can release it from our body, mind, and spirit here. It makes sense to not take it with us and to heal it. Most people don’t realize that post-traumatic stress disorder is healable. You hear these things from veterans like, “It’s never going to end. It’s a life sentence.” It is not a life sentence. Emotions are a life sentence like mad, sad, glad, hurt, and scared. We’re going to have oodles of them. They’re going to come and they’ll go. Our technique as a yogi is to step back and watch them more than get into it to hesitate before we say something, hopefully. I’m just as bad as anyone else with that one. Sometimes I have to stuff it. We learn to step back.
It’s hard sometimes to put it into practice. It’s easier in an ashram. You have a whole community working. That’s like a spiritual community where everyone’s working on it, observing each other, journaling, talking, meditating, and having a spiritual life reinforced by everybody there. Having left that experience, it’s much harder in regular life, but it can be done. It’s a life practice. It is finding peace, staying centered in a sacred space, and being able to intuit where this trauma is. People gestalt it. That’s where the gestalt comes in. They gestalt the energy. They can smell it, taste it, and see it.
When you’re really in that space, you can see that energy, and it has a voice. The voice is not usually a good one. We can take that, put it in a container, and shift it. There’s a flash technique I learned that I do on Zoom with people. I do it at the beginning of the healing group because, in the flash, you’re tapping only on a positive thought, only on a happy memory, something that helps you light up like the Christmas tree. You want to light up. You blink a few times after a series of tapping. The blinking helps you process what’s in the container without looking and without thinking about it. It’s marvelous. It’s a wonderful technique that Dr. Philip Manfield discovered in his EMDR work.
All of us EMDR people are dabbling in it now. It’s wonderful because sometimes things just release without even thinking about it. There are all these techniques to use, but it’s important to heal it and clear it, not only for not taking it with us but to have a peaceful experience and stay present on this earth while we’re here. We’re all going to leave at some point, and then we’ll say, “It seems like I just saw you yesterday,” the spirit will say to us even though it’s 100 years, maybe. It’s a snap.
If we can clear it for ourselves physically so we don’t get any illness or dis-ease from these negative feelings and this constant barrage of negative energy that we’re collecting, which impacts our heart, liver, and everything else, we need to clear it physically for our physical health, emotionally for our emotional health, mentally for our mind to be still, and spiritually to uplift our spirit and to take that with us.
I so agree with you. It enhances your quality of life. If the theory is that we’re here to learn this is school, and that’s home, why not learn what you need to so that your next time around is better?
Plus, the trauma blocks you from connections that you could have, whether it’s afterlife or here. It blocks us. It puts up an invisible energy barrier that pushes away goodness and only attracts the negative. When the negative leaves, I can’t tell you how many people in thousands and thousands of session hours have cleared their stuff and changed their life by getting rid of, “I’m not good enough,” or, “I can’t do this.” Once that thought is clear, it sets in that, “I’m divine. I can do what I want to do and need to do.” When these things uplift us, we can live in peace. We can live in the present, and we can have connections that are important, including connections with those in the afterlife.
That’s beautiful. Judith, briefly tell us about each of your books for people who might want to buy them.
I have two PDFs. One is the energy-centering meditation, and then the energy-centering meditation with essential oils. I use a feelings kit that has six amazing blends that go with the six pressure points, like a marriage made in heaven. It’s amazing for the governing vessel where you want to stay present, this present time, for the conception vessel where you want to conceive of yourself as divine. There’s an inner child. There’s a release from the small intestine meridian, harmony for the brain, the ajna chakra, and forgiveness for the base chakra. Each one has a purpose and valor for the mental body to have the courage and strength to be yourself. They add to it. They enhance it. That’s that piece. Transitioning Trauma, Grief, and PTSD is a book in progress. I’m hoping it will be out by Christmas time, I’m hoping. So
When you are done with it, you have to come back and tell us all about it. We’ll definitely want to hear all about it.
I have the energy-centering meditation CD that has bilateral bliss, a six-minute meditation to do it quickly for those who don’t have time. Those are for my clients who say, “I don’t have time to meditate.” I made a six-minute meditation that you have time to do before work, a sixteen-minute meditation that’s a lot longer, and then a couple of beautiful music.
When they’re done listening to it, no matter what they’ve been going through, their energy is going to be cleared and centered.
They’ll learn how to do it at home and do it because you can switch anytime you get into a funk. You learn what point to use for what purpose. For instance, if you’re always thinking about the past and your mind keeps going to the past, you hit the governing vessel treatment point and stay present. It helps you stay present. It gets you back to the present. You learn which points you need. If you’re not feeling happy, healthy, or peaceful, you’re going to rub on the mental body. It’s very specific to what you need for life. There’s bilateral bliss on that. It’s a beautiful musical piece with auditory tones that stimulate along with creating healthy boundaries. My first CD has my guided meditation to create a sacred, safe space that is angelic. That’s beautiful.
Everybody wants to buy your books. They want to get ahold of you. They want to get to know you. I’m so glad to have gotten to be able to get to know you. Tell us all the wonderful ways they can connect with you.
If you go to Shiome.com, that’s my main website that talks about Shiome therapy. You can get the energy correction meditation and the CDs on that. I gift you the Creating Healthy Boundaries CD when you purchase that one. You get two CDs with it. JudithHancox.com talks about mainly bereavement, repair and reattachment grief therapy, past life regression, and progression therapy. They’re linked, so you can go from one to the other.
The best one now is Judith.Appointments@Gmail.com or JudithHancox@Gmail.com. As you know, when you have an email address, and people start inundating you and advertisers too, JudithHancox@Gmail.com is getting overloaded, so Judith.Appointments@Gmail.com, I’ll see more quickly.
This is an understatement for you, but what is your tip for finding joy in life?
After all this, just to stay peaceful, to create a sacred space, to stay in the center, but walking in nature. What helped me most through this healing of my PTSD over the last few years has been to go by the lake. I can go out in the canoe or my neighbor’s motorboat and jump in the water and swim. It is something you love to do. Pick something you love to do. I’ve been watching funny movies. Inundate yourself with humor and funny things. At nighttime, Seth Myers is my favorite. These are things we have at our access now.
We can choose what thoughts we’re going to think. We can choose what things we’re going to watch on TV or see movies. Even if you live in the city, you could probably go up on a roof somewhere and get to see the stars and the moon. I am blessed to be in a place with ten acres on Lake Champlain. We are going to have a healing center here where people are going to come and have healing circles by the lake when this pandemic is over. In the meantime, we can do it on Zoom. You can join the healing circle. If you want to create another one that’s not Helping Parents Heal, then email me. We’ll start another circle.
That’s wonderful, Judith.
One more thing, which is very important. If you read, watch what you read before you go to sleep, whether it’s Pam Grout. She’s so funny with her E-Squared or the Course in Miracles Experiment that she has her own version of. Read spiritual books like Autobiography of a Yogi, just any spiritual book that you can take you into yourself.
It’s funny you said that because I wrote a piece that there are no stop signs in heaven.
This is a delight. I agree with you that many of us are here to bring heaven to earth and you are doing everything in your power to make this a possibility for so many people. You are so special and you’re such a blessing. I am blessed to have met you like this. I know that our many readers are going to enjoy you and can’t wait to have you back.
Can I say one last thing about trauma and healing? This is important. I don’t want to gloss over it. We’re healing for the needs of our souls. We’re healing for ourselves and others. We need to honor our emotions. I’ve been praying and asking for guidance to help people heal as quickly as possible and to accelerate what needs to be done so we don’t have to spend a lifetime suffering. One guru of Paramahansa Yogananda told him, “If you’re going to be in a bad mood, go to your room. It’s okay to be in a bad mood. Just don’t put it on anybody else.”
Don’t displace it.
It’s true, but it’s also true to honor these feelings. When I see someone and deal with people, I use the example of going into a cocoon because it’s like we’re a caterpillar filled with all these crazy things that we don’t like. What do caterpillars do? They go up a tree so they don’t get stepped on. They form a chrysalis around them and make all these changes.
When we’re grieving, be in our room, grieve, cry, and release. That’s very important. Tears are salt water that can dissolve some of the pain that we’re feeling and release it. It needs to be honored as a life experience. Whatever we put in the circle in the container to shift, we always honor it because it’s a teacher. We’ve come here to experience pain and learn that we don’t have to suffer from it. We can evolve from it. We can learn and grow from it. It’s supposed to teach us something.
I love this. You’re saying we’re healing for the needs of our souls, and we’re healing for others.
We’re healing for ourselves and for others, not just to be an example that it could be done, but to be a positive influence on the vibration of the world. We don’t have to be happy. It’s good to be happy. It’s different than joy. Joy is a peaceful, blissful expression of our soul. Happiness comes and goes. It’s effervescent. It bubbles around and might have and might not. We may never be happy that our child left, our loved one is lost, or whatever the situation is. We might not be happy, but we need to stay peaceful because peace is a positive energy.
Staying peaceful keeps all of our energy centers moving in a positive direction. It’s not a weakness to be peaceful. It’s a real powerhouse to be peaceful. When we’re peaceful in our own space, we’re influencing the vibration of the world. Yes, I get a little crazy sometimes with the politics, I have to admit. That’s one of the things where I got to shut the TV or the news, pray, meditate, and put the peace out there because that’s what’s going to influence other people silently.
That’s wonderful. I don’t think there’s a single person who’s going to read this who’s going to be not fascinated and wanting to read every word. This has been a stellar, wonderful interview. Thank you.
I’m honored to be here. I always am honored by every person I meet. There’s a saying, “Namaste in people.” That’s the soul in us honoring each other as equals.
The light in me honors the light in you. We are one as they say. Here’s a reminder, everyone, to make sure to follow us and like us, and we know you do, on social, @IreneSWeinberg on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. As I like to say, to be continued, many blessings. Bye for now.
Guest’s Links:
- Judith Hancox’s Website
- Helping Parents Heal
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
- Judith Hancox’s Shiome Therapy™
- Judith.Appointments@Gmail.com
- JudithHancox@Gmail.com
- Pam Grout’s E-Squared referenced in this episode
- Pam Grout’s Course in Miracles Experiment referenced in this episode
- Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi referenced in this episode
- Morey Bernstein’s The Search for Bridey Murphy referenced in this episode
Host’s Links:
- Irene Weinberg’s book: They Serve Bagels in Heaven
- @IreneSWeinberg on Instagram
- Irene Weinberg on Facebook
- Irene Weinberg on Twitter
