Podcast: Play in new window | Download

There can be many things that you don’t want to see, feel, pay attention to or deal with in your life. They hurt. There’s pain. It feels like too much. Yet those very things – those challenges – can pave the way to a better life IF you’re able to heal and move on.

For many people this is where they get stuck- the heartbreak, the trauma, the frustration feels so permanent. When you’re emotionally and physically exhausted, when you feel like you’ve just got nothing left in you, how do you find the energy to keep going and transcend your current circumstances?  

It’s powerful questions like these that Dr. Shiroko Sokitch and I discuss as she shares her wisdom and insights on what true healing really requires (and why it is so necessary).

    [Tweet ““There’s always hope. As long as you’re alive there’s hope” ~ Dr. Shiroko Sokitch”]

In this episode you will….

  • Understand the exact steps you need to take in your life, when the world seems bleak, in order to cultivate hope, recover and heal
  • Learn the 2 absolutely essential components of healing and how to move confidently forward in your life … no matter what you’ve had to overcome
  • Discover the power of love, unconditional self-love and how it relates to healing
  • Realize why relying on some coping mechanisms can do far more harm than good – I’m not talking cigarettes or alcohol here, I’m talking about the stuff we all do: being over committed, doing vs. being, relying on intellect instead of emotion

Episode Resources

  • Download her mp3 on How to Easily Manage Stress and Emotions here

  • Connect with Dr. Shiroko Sokitch on Twitter

How to Heal When You’re Ready To Give Up [Full Text]

Jen: Welcome back to another episode of Energy to Thrive. I’m so glad you’re here and I’m so excited to introduce my guest for you today. Dr. Shiroko Sokitch, hello. How are you?

Shiroko: Hi. I’m great. How are you?

Jen: Really good. I think we’re going to have an absolutely amazing conversation today. I’ve been really looking forward to this interview for so many reasons. Just to share with you as you’re listening in right now, Shiroko is a medical doctor who genuinely cares. I felt that from her the first time we got to meet at a conference a couple years ago.

She’s working to help people regain their health and the vitality that they deserve. What’s really going to be fascinating is that she blends this awesome Western and Chinese medicine perspective to really help you tune into your body and to figure out what works for you. I love that.

I think it’s so cool that you’re trained as a general surgeon and worked in the ER for 10 years. My mom recently had a fall and was at the emergency, and I was just in awe of what was going on in that place.  

Shiroko, you’ve done so much. You’ve had a show, you’ve been in integrative medicine, you’re a speaker. It’s going to be such a pleasure to get to know you and to learn from you today.

Shiroko: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

Jen: Maybe share a bit about you so our listeners can get a feel for what brings your passion. Where did you even begin to get awareness that Eastern medicine or Chinese medicine was something that you were interested in, and how did you start to create that blend?

Shiroko: It’s a long story. The original reason that I wanted to become a doctor was that when I was 5 my great-grandmother was my very best friend in the world. My parents had split when I was 3 and I never saw my father again as a child, so I had already had a pretty big loss.

We were living with my grandmother and my great-grandmother was living next door. She was that person who took care of me while my mom was busy trying to take care of us, she was working as a single mom and my grandparents had jobs, so I was with my great-grandmother.

One day I was visiting her and she collapsed in front of me and I couldn’t wake her up. I didn’t know what to do, so I went and got my mom and my grandma, it was at nighttime. They got an ambulance and they took her to the hospital. I never got to see her alive again. About a week later my mom came and told me that she had died and that I would never see her again.

Jen: How old were you then?

Shiroko: I was 5.

Jen: Oh my gosh.

Shiroko: She told me that her heart stopped beating. Of course I’m confused, because I’m 5, I don’t know anything, but at the same time I’m thinking, “I have to solve this. I have to fix this. I have to make her come back. What’s going to make her come back?” I started trying to imagine some way to make her heart start beating again. In that moment is when I decided that I was going to be a doctor.

Jen: That’s a very powerful story.

Shiroko: I didn’t know anything else, but I knew that I wanted to solve that problem. I was in pain and I knew that she must have been in pain, so I wanted to fix that.

I think it woke something up in me, in hindsight. I feel like there was something in me at that time that said, “I’m never giving up.” Then I went to medical school.

The first time I got to save a life was in the emergency room with an operation where a patient came in who had a gunshot wound, he was dying right before us. I got to go to the operating room with the surgeons and help save his life. It was so thrilling. I thought, “I’m going to be a surgeon.” One thing led to another and I went into surgery residency.

In surgery residency I started having experiences where I began to see that saving a life wasn’t all there was to it. You could take someone from death’s door, but then what? Then I began to have my own emotional pain, because I had a difficult childhood and I had some physical issues that probably started in childhood.

There’s all this stuff that came together – my personal life, my emotional life, and my work as a healer – and I was thinking, “This isn’t right. It’s not working for me. I can’t help people the way that I want to. I want to do something different,” but I didn’t know what.

I had taken a month off from my residency and during that month I had a dream. It was telling me “if you stay in surgery, you will die.”

Jen: I have head-to-toe goose-bumps here.

Shiroko: I didn’t know what to do, but decided I’m not going to continue in my residency.

Right around that time somebody gave me a book called The Web That Has No Weaver and it was about Chinese medicine. It was this amazing book. Chinese medicine is incredible. When I read the book, the first two chapters I fell in love with the idea of Chinese medicine.

This was the thing that was going to fill in all of the gaps in the way that I understood the body. Western medicine has all of this beautiful science and all of this knowledge that you can get, and it’s good, but the Chinese medicine made sense to my soul, it made sense in my heart.

So I left my residency at the end of my second year and I went to work in the emergency room as my “until I figure out what else I’m going to.” Then I went to Acupuncture school. That’s kind of how I got to where I am today.

Jen: What an amazing heartfelt story. Oh my goodness. Wow. That was sort of the theme of our discussion today, about how to heal even when you’re ready to give up. You said you weren’t willing to do that, this is something that you learned from a really early point in your life.

I think that I want to go there right now, because sometimes when you’re in crisis, whether it’s the culmination of life storms, whether it’s career or personal life, parenting, or sick parents, or all of it happening at once, it can very much feel like, “I can’t take one more thing. I can’t do this.”

If you have your own personal chronic health struggles or emotional struggles and you just can’t see the light, I think it’s very real for people to feel like they want to give up sometimes. They just give up on trying, or they’ve knocked on so many doors, or they’ve taken so many pills, or they’ve tried so many things.

What you’re here to share is that you can heal even when you’re ready to give up. Let’s dive into that.

Shiroko: Okay. It’s my passion.

Jen: What do you say to people? What’s the typical person that comes to you now and how do you start the process for them? What is the healing process when you are ready to give up?

Shiroko: A lot of people come to me and say that I am their last hope. “If I can’t do it with you, then I don’t know where to go,” because they’ve been to many other places. Of course the first thing I say is there is hope, there is always hope. As long as you’re alive, as long as you have living cells, as long as there is something breathing inside of you, there is hope. It’s a matter of 1) beginning to believe that there is hope, and 2) starting to have faith in your own ability to heal.

The way I look at it is that it’s a hero’s journey. Everybody has some kind of hero’s journey that they have to go through in their life. It’s a part of how we grow spiritually. It may be physical, it may be a life challenge. For me, I’ve had many hero journeys. Getting to medical school was one. Surviving my childhood was another.

Jen: Can we just pause there for a second?

Shiroko: Yes.

Jen: I know I was at a writing workshop and we dove into the whole concept of the hero’s journey, but I’m not sure if everyone is going to be familiar with the phases of that. Can you touch on those for listeners who might be wondering what’s the hero’s journey? I know I would have been one of those people a few years ago.

Shiroko: The way I look at it is that you’re given a challenge. The first thing is that there is some kind of challenge. Really most of the movies that we love have some kind of hero’s journey. One of my favorite is The Matrix, but there are lot of hero’s journey movies, Star Wars, and they go on and on. They’re the hottest movies. The Hobbit was a great one.

You’re given a challenge and the challenge always looks insurmountable, or maybe it looks not so completely insurmountable at the beginning, you think, “I can do that,” and then you start on the journey and you gather your team. This fits very well with healthcare and health challenges.

The challenge happens, some kind of health issue. A lot of times the people who come to me have symptoms that nobody understands, especially in Western medicine if they’ve gone to conventional doctors. They may have a ton of tests and the tests look normal.

I just saw someone yesterday who had seen like 17 doctors. She is 18-years-old and she has been sick since she was 13 and nobody has any answers. Everybody is telling her, “There’s nothing wrong with you enough.”

Jen: She probably feels crazy.

Shiroko: Yes. She knows there is something wrong, because she can’t do anything and she’s only 18. So there’s the physical challenge.

Then there is the gathering your team. The Hobbit, let’s say, he was told he had to go get this ring, or I can’t even remember what he was supposed to do, but he had to do something. He got these guys together and then they all go together on this mission.

Then there are things that happen on the way. There may be big stumbling blocks and fall down points and moments where it’s difficult. Those moments are the test – the test of your perseverance, the test of your strength, and the test of your yes, your willingness to say, “I am not giving up. I’m going to keep going.”

Sometimes, especially with a health challenge, when your heart is broken and your mood is down and your energy is down, that’s the hardest thing to do.

Jen: I agree. I’ve been there. I think so many people could be nodding their head in agreement right now. Or they’re in that place and they’re thinking, “That’s exactly the place I’m in.”

So you have these tests. How do you find the strength or fortitude  in yourself to keep going? That’s the hope.

Shiroko: You have hope. The way that I see it is those moments are like stretching, like when you’re in yoga and you have to stretch into a position that doesn’t really feel good. I was in yoga yesterday and I was shaking with some of those positions.

Jen: Oh yeah, they’re hard. The thing that’s cool about this is I think sometimes we often don’t understand the process of change or what comes when we choose to create change in our life. I sometimes call it fear, having fear, being tested, being forced to face something you’re not ready to face. So often the desire is to shut down or to believe that we can’t do it.

Really the freedom, or the healing, or the next thing that you want is right through that, but you don’t know. “If I’m supposed to get this, this should be easier,” can often be a belief that people are operating from. I like to share and shed light on the fact that just because you want it does not mean that it will be an easy journey.

Shiroko: Right. It almost never is. What I provide in those moments is that I say, “I’m here. I’m with you. I’m not giving up. Stay in touch with me. Stay connected to me. Let me help you.”

Sometimes I don’t know the answers, but I know a few things. I know how to keep a person balanced. I know how to get a person into balance. In balance is where you get to heal.

Jen: What does that mean? From a physiological perspective or an emotional perspective? I think that word gets thrown around a lot, especially for moms or busy career women, “I just need to balance my life.” You’ll hear some people say, “That’s not possible. That’s a myth,” or you’ll hear, “It’s elusive. You can never have it all. Balance is impossible.”

What does it mean from a healing or health perspective to be in balance?

Shiroko: For me it is some very specific things. It’s very physical. There are certain things that I do. One is that I believe the physical, emotional, spiritual, all are connected. If you get your physical body physically balanced that other things fall into place and become easier, so I start with that. I’ve been a doctor for 30 years now, so it’s where I started is to find physical balance and how to help people heal physically.

Using Chinese and Western medicine the way that I have for so long, I take it sort of as a triangle; your hormones, your nervous system, and your immune system form a triangle. They cannot exist without each other and your body can’t function without any one of those things. When a person starts to fall apart, those things fall apart. The digestion is in the middle, because the digestion is affected by all of them, it’s connected to all of them.

What I do with people who are having a difficult problem, even if I don’t know what the problem is, I approach it from this. How do I get these things balanced? We work with food, we work with supplements, we work with getting your hormones, your immune system, and your nervous system all balanced.

Then from that place, as those things get into balance, then the body has no choice but to heal. Then, of course, I work with people using acupuncture. I use the acupuncture to help remove the emotional traumas, to remove the things that are in their way.

Sometimes things happen that I don’t understand myself. I remember years ago I had this doctor who came to see me, he was a pain specialist. His whole life was falling apart. His business was having problems, he was having problems in his marriage, he was having problems everywhere and he didn’t quite know how to organize anything. He was also having some physical challenges, so he came for acupuncture.

I did five treatments and I did some other stuff to help him get more physically balance. He came back to me and he said some miracles had happened in his office. Suddenly his business started working again and he had a conversation with his wife. He didn’t credit me with that, he didn’t say, “You helped me with this,” but I felt like me helping heal his body helped get his emotions in balance, which helped him be able to function so that all of those other things could happen.

Jen: 100%. I was sharing on an earlier episode about how sometimes it’s only when life throws you such big challenges that you become more open to the alternative therapies that are out there for you.

I went to school at University of Alberta, I did my master’s at University of Victoria, very Western influence in my physiology degrees. I had heard about acupuncture, but I thought of it more of a way you heal from a sports injury, not this sort of deeper emotional Qi coursing through me and that there could be blocks somewhere. I had no idea until I had life storm happen and a girlfriend of mine, who happened to be married to an acupuncturist, said, “You should really see him.”

I went and I can’t even explain. I try to describe my experience and I say I just go onto the table and I cry. I’m not even sure what needles or what meridians are being accessed, but I just simply cry and he lets me. He asks me a few questions and I cry more. I had no idea how much emotionally energy I had trapped in my body, because I was using my intellect and my busyness and my Type A personality to supersede over that.

Do you see that often as a way of coping, for instance?

Shiroko: Of course. I’m one of those. I coped with my whole life being busy and trying to do things in that way, so yes, of course. About nine years ago I split up with my husband and I was heartbroken, but I didn’t let myself feel the heartbreak, I just kept going and going.

In that year, which is very interesting, I banged my car into something about six times. I blamed the car, because it had no backup camera and it was high and the windows were small, so I thought I couldn’t see when I backed up, because I kept backing up into things.

Jen: Interesting.

Shiroko: When you think about it, I didn’t want to see, I didn’t want to feel what was happening, so I just kept backing up into things. Until finally I thought, “I can’t keep functioning like this.” Definitely.

Jen: That’s amazing. You mentioned a few key words, and that is the power of never giving up. I guess I’m thinking about my own life and the lives of my clients, I do get to hear very intimate stories, as I imagine you do too. I often say that the best change we can make in our life is by learning to change what’s going on up here in our thought system, the belief system that we hold, as opposed to all of these external symptoms that we’re trying to manage and treat, so to speak, without really looking at the root cause of where some of this disease is coming from.

How do you work with your clients? For anybody listening who is trying to cultivate that hope or that faith, what do they do if they’re in a real life rut? I’ve been there and the world can just seem bleak sometimes.  

Shiroko: It sure can, yes. I’ve been there, too. Several things. You have to have your support. So many people don’t really have enough support. Even if that support is a cat or a dog, if that’s all that you have, those animals love you unconditionally. Your children love you; when they’re young they love you unconditionally, then they grow up.

Jen: Then they’re like, “You messed me up as a child.” I think I just take it for granted that all children need to be in therapy at some point in their lives, well intentioned parents will still make mistakes.

Shiroko: Most likely, yes.

Jen: Let’s talk about support for a second. I found my own self in a place of feeling very isolated at one point in my life, with no family in town, alone with little children, had moved to a new community. It seems so silly, but I did not know how, I could recognize that I didn’t have support but I didn’t know how to create it.

I was also in a place where I felt like that would take a lot of energy to go on a coffee date with a new friend or to go to a community group of some sort, when I kind of felt like crap inside. Often when I’ve been in a low place, it’s not really when I want to put myself out there because I’m worried – I’m worried about judgment, I’m worried about what people are going to think about me.

How do you manage and how do you push through that?

Shiroko: Well, maybe you don’t. That’s why a lot of people end up with me, they’re looking for somebody to heal them. The first support people you might find, especially if you’re new someplace, is a healer; a massage person, an acupuncturist, a doctor, a counselor, a coach, something like that.

A lot of people that’s how we start. You go to somebody who helps you and they become a support person for you. Because they are marketing themselves, they’re available to be found. I think that’s in every community.

Jen: I did exactly that. I was a coach, I was a trainer, and I went and hired people to help me. I’ve also met other people who sometimes don’t have the self-worth to believe that it’s okay to pay for that support sometimes, that it’s okay to even bring a babysitter in to look after your kids so that you can step out for an hour and regain some sanity. Sometimes there can be a block to that.

Shiroko: Yes. And now what we have is the internet, so there are people like you on the internet providing this sort of thing. A lot of people who have been coming to me are watching summits and learning from these sorts of online events that are at no cost. That can become a source of support. So there are all kinds of ways of getting support, more now than there were before.

Jen: What I think is nice about things like this is that if you hear somebody share their story, the vulnerability in that, and if it’s similar to what you’re going through, it makes you feel like you’re not so fricking crazy, that you’re not the only one. For me to listen to you and I’ve already got some ideas or assumptions, and to hear you that you’ve been in these dark places, everybody has their stuff, it’s just we all experience it and go through our journey on a different thing.

Shiroko: Exactly.

Jen: I’m going to love to talk about this, because you talk about, and I know it’s near and dear to your heart, the power of love in healing. I have a feeling that’s going to be not just love from relationships, but self-love. You share, what is that? I think we all know love is important, I think we underestimate how important love is.

Shiroko: It might make me cry, so pardon me if I get emotional. When I split up with my husband that was probably the biggest transformation of my life, and I’ve had many, as I’ve already told you. It broke my heart. He was that person for me. I had this belief that you had a soul mate and that you had to be with one person. That was how I was raised, that was what I thought would make me whole. When it ended it was devastating.

What happened was that even in early in the process I began to realize that I was healer and that I had dedicated my life to being a healer, so this was a necessary lesson for me, that I had to learn how to not be focused on just one person. When you’re in love with one person then all your focus is on them. It may be that you do other things, you live your life, but your whole love focuses on that person. That’s what was true for me.

Even early, I realized that couldn’t be how I was. I had to be bigger. I had to open my heart more. It was a journey. It was going through the devastation, losing my faith, losing my belief in everything that was true for me. Not sure that I was a healer anymore. So many things happening.

Jen: I think when you go through these major soul storms you start to question everything that you think to be true and what you believed about yourself. It can be very disconcerting. You just wonder, “Who am I? Do I know who I am anymore?”

So then what happened? You go through this incredibly transformative thing.

Shiroko: I have some very beautiful friends and they were there and they put up with me, which wasn’t always easy. The love that they had finally got me to say, “Wait a minute. They’re loving me, but I have to love. I have to find that inside of me.”

It was because I work with people every day, I was constantly challenged. In my business people would respond to me. When I was loving, it was great. If I wasn’t loving, it was clear that I wasn’t getting the results that were helping people.

So I just started to actually work at it. “I am love. I am committed to being a loving human being. This is my mission on Earth, I am committed to doing this in a loving amazing way.” I just kept bringing love forth.

What happened is every time I felt like shrinking, every time I felt like giving up, this voice inside me said, “No. You’re a loving human being. Make it bigger.” Every time I’d feel this contraction, I would force myself to open up more instead of contracting more.

Jen: That is so beautiful. I love that. Whenever I’m in a hard spot, or talking to clients, there is kind of polarities, there’s love and light or there is fear and darkness. You’re going to be choosing to go towards one of them. One is tight, constricted, hard, painful, and lonely. The other one is open, expansive, and airy.

I literally have to keep my own self on track sometimes, “Which way do you want to go, Jen?” I ask myself, “Love and light or fear and darkness? Right, I have to go that way. I’m heading down the wrong direction.”

Shiroko: Sometimes it’s a conversation every 10 minutes with yourself.

Jen: Yes, it is.

Shiroko: Kung-Fu Panda, did you ever see that movie?

Jen: I have kids, so yes.

Shiroko: The little red panda, Shi-Fu, what did he say, “Peace. I am peaceful. Inner peace.” Sometimes it’s like that. I’m not sure I care as much about inner peace as I care about love, but love is bringing me inner peace.

Jen: Often in our space, the healing or energetic space, the coaching space, you can look to all of these people and think, “Oh my gosh, they are gurus. They’ve got this dialed.” I find it very humanizing for me, or very humbling, when they don’t, they’re working at it just as much as I am.

For people listening right now, just remember that. It’s very easy to look at somebody and imagine their highlight reel. To be aware that the inner transformation or tapping into these concepts of hope and unconditional love for self and being loving, it can be daily work sometimes, especially when you’re coping with emotional storms in life.

    [Tweet “““Inner transformation requires hope, unconditional self-love, and faith that you can get through the storm” ~ Jen Powter”]

Shiroko: Yes.

Jen: How do you teach your clients to do that? You have the skill set where you went through that journey, but now I know that you also impact your patients and your clients this way with a message around love and how important it is for healing. How do you do that?

Shiroko: First of all, I love them. I put my heart and soul into them getting well. Because that is what helped me, people loved me and put their heart and soul into me, so I put my heart and soul into my patients. “I’m here for you.” That means I answer phone calls, I answer emails, I give them love and caring. I think it’s not that often in medical practice that people experience that with their doctor.

Jen: I would highly agree with you on that. It’s not the typical experience, you’re right.

Shiroko: Having the acupuncture is a way of directly transmitting love. I put needles in people and that is an actual experience. Then I have conversations. I have some people who are across the world, so they can’t have acupuncture with me, but I look at them with my eyes and say, “I’m here for you.”

That helps them know that somebody cares. Then that becomes a seed. As we get to work together more and we build more and they start to feel physically better, because you need that physical substrate in order to be able to start to build something inside of yourself, that begins to build up more and more energy. Then that love can begin to grow inside of them. It’s kind of like lighting a candle, you light a little flame and then that grows.

Jen: I think what I want to just reiterate and just highlight in what you’re saying, for anybody who is tuning in to this right now, you can also be this person or become this person for other people in your life by simply choosing to care, choosing to connect, choosing to be there for somebody.

I was sharing with you that there have been lots of hard things for me and it’s felt like it has been years worth, and I feel like my friends are tired of me, to be honest. “How are things going, Jen?” Oh, well, you know. I do search for the good and there is some very real hard stuff, too.

It’s to remind yourself that no matter where you’re at, your friends will love and support you – and you can be that loving supportive friend for other people. And also look to other resources to get more support if you know that you need it, and to give yourself permission to do it. I think that’s another thing. Somehow we think that we’re weak or that we need to be so strong all of the time. We think, “I’ve got this,” but plates are crashing everywhere and we don’t have it. It’s okay. It’s okay to reach out and get the help that you need.

Shiroko: Absolutely.

Jen: Is that an ego thing, do you think? Why do we feel such resistance towards asking for help or even admitting that we need it?

Shiroko: Who knows? Ultimately it boils down to ego. Even I’ve had some ego moments, realizing that when I think that I can do it all on my own that’s an ego thing, or when “I don’t want to bother somebody.” All of my women patients are like this. How many times have you said, “I don’t want to bother you.” You feel like you’re being considerate, but you’re actually not because you’re not taking care of yourself, so you’re not being considerate to yourself.

Jen: I have clients who have hired me to help them and they’re still like, “I just didn’t want to bug you.” You hired me. A five minute conversation could have changed a ton of stuff that you let happen because you were worried about bothering me. So that’s a really good point.

If anybody who has been down the Western medical path and now in light of this conversation or maybe some other messages that are coming in around Chinese medicine, where does somebody start to get more information? That was what happened for me, I read a book called Between Heaven and Earth, you probably know it.

Shiroko: I love that book, yes.

Jen: That was the first one that I read. I was like, “How does somebody look at my tongue and feel my pulse and know anything?” I think they say, “How does a doctor use a stethoscope and listen to your heart rate and know anything?” It’s just a different tool and they’ve been trained to use these different tools. That made sense to me. That’s logical.

For anybody who wants to start to get maybe more open to looking at these paths, alternative or blended pathways for healing, what would you suggest?

Shiroko: There are lots of websites. If you have friends that’s your best bet, to talk to your friends and say, “Who is helping you? Who is doing stuff for you?” especially if you relate to someone a lot then going to the people that your friends relate to will help you.

I always think that if you’re going to talk to a practitioner, I always give a free 15 minute consultation because I feel like this connection – my business is called Heart to Heart Medical Center, and that’s because of my heart to your heart. That connection is important. Anybody who you want to work with that they let you talk to them for a few minutes before you go to have an appointment with them, so that you know you have that connection.

Some people know they have the connection just watching a video or just looking at a person’s website, so whatever it takes. How you get there doesn’t matter, but find someone that you have a connection with who has skills and knowledge.

If you don’t have that, I’m a member of several organizations. I’m on the Institute of Functional Medicine and they have a website where you can search for practitioners. There’s the Academy of Medical Acupuncture, that’s really only MDs who do acupuncture but there are thousands of other kinds of acupuncturists. Then there are acupuncture schools in almost every community. If you’re on a budget, you can go to the acupuncture school and have acupuncture at a really low cost.

Jen: Those are great ideas.

Shiroko: These are all possibilities. My personal favorite is talking to your friends.

Jen: Me too. That’s how I learned. That was the turning point for me. I trusted her, she suggested him, and over the last 15 years I’m sure he’s brought me back from the brink of breakdown numerous times and it has been life changing for me.

Let’s say somebody is watching this or listening to this and they do feel that connection, how can people learn more about you and find you? Can you share that with our listeners? We’ll also have it in the show notes.

Shiroko: Of course. My website is HearttoHeartMedicalCenter.com.

Jen: And you do see patients like this? That’s really cool.

Shiroko: On Skype, yes. Everything is on my website.

Jen: Awesome. I know you have a book coming out, it’s called 7 Keys to Accelerated Healing, coming out in the new year. I know I’ll be on the lookout for that.

For final words, I feel like this interview will provide hope to people who are in a place where they’re wondering if they’re going to get through a hard spot, they’re in that goo phase of life where they’ve been asked to take a journey and maybe they’re tired of the journey, hopefully this will inspire them to keep going. Any final advice or pieces of wisdom you can offer?

Shiroko: Don’t give up. Never give up.

Jen: Never give up and tap into that love. Being loving can just be giving yourself permission to go bed earlier than you normally do, slowing down sometimes, breathing outside. Sometimes I think we Hollywood-ize love a little bit and it’s not necessarily like that.

Shiroko: Yes. It’s not like that at all, actually. It is because there are layers of love, of course. There is that falling in love with one person and it is a beautiful thing to have that, but there’s also the love in your life and then there’s the love of the divine, so there are all these layers of having love and they’re all available and they’re all vitally important.

Jen: I think that’s a great place to end.

Thanks everybody for tuning into this episode of Energy to Thrive. We’ve just had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Shiroko Sokitch speak with us on how to heal even when you’re ready to give up.

One of the things that I would appreciate is if you liked this, please share it. I do believe this is a message that more women need to hear and be reminded of. Also, feel free to pop back over to iTunes and give this a podcast a little love, it does make a difference and I want to keep bringing amazing experts to you.

Thank you so much for being with me today and for letting me dig in and mine you for some wisdom around what you’re so good at doing.

Shiroko: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you. You’re wonderful.

Jen: Thanks everybody. Talk to you again soon. Bye for now.