Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Living a good life is about so much more than just “being happy”. It’s about having having energy, being confident, feeling joyful, experiencing good health and being emotionally resilient to life’s ups and downs. Yet so many people don’t get to experience this, at least not consistently.

Why is that?

Join my special guest, Shana Ekedal, and I as we discuss why it is imperative to recognize that our emotional, physical, mental and spiritual health is based on our ability to harness the energy of our thoughts and feelings in a constructive way.

Sounds simple, but it’s not always so. Especially when it comes to processing the more difficult feelings that we have like anger, frustration, betrayal, resentment, and feeling hurt. The typical pattern of most women is to hold in their “bad” feelings and suppress or numb them with things like:

  • Eating too much
  • Drinking too much
  • Exercising too much
  • Being overcommitted
  • Focusing on others and ignoring oneself
  • Constant distraction (FB, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.)

These numbing behaviors keep your deepest fears and insecurities circling in your head like sharks waiting to attack. And the attack can be vicious.

Change starts with getting real with yourself – you need to identify what you feel, what you think, what you want, and what you believe and move from that point forward. And, it doesn’t have to be hard!! Come on over and listen to this incredible interview.

Episode Resources: 

Raising Your Vibrational Energy [Full Text]

Jen: Welcome everybody. It is my pleasure to introduce Shana Ekedal to you.

Hi, Shana.

Shana: Hi. How are you?

Jen: I’m doing great today. I am so excited to have you as a guest on this show for so many reasons. For those of you listening or watching, we had a chance to meet about a month ago at Mindshare, and it was a conference with some of the most incredible health experts in the world, leaders in our industry. It’s just so cool because Shana is a complete pioneer in the field of energy and energy work, and of course because this is the Energy to Thrive Podcast I had to have her on.

So, welcome. Shana, I’ve already sort of introduced you and given the formal introduction, but maybe you could share a bit more about who you are and why you’re so passionate about the work that you do before we dive in to really talking about that.

Shana: I’ll give you a brief synopsis of how I came to do this, because it’s kind of an interesting story.

Jen: Awesome.

Shana: When I was born and when I was a small child, I was very sensitive to energy in general. Subtle energy, feeling the feelings of other people, kind of feeling the thoughts of other people and feeling life. So many times in life we think through life – I felt life around me. It was powerful, but nobody really understood that in my family.

After maybe the age of 6 or 7 I kind of shut down that aspect of self. I think we have so many different aspects of self and that was one that was very present for me at the beginning of my life. I kind of shut that down because no one really got it, I was experiencing things that other people weren’t experiencing.

I went throughout my life feeling a little bit disconnected, but not really knowing why. I have a 4-year-old child now, and when I got pregnant with him this sensing energy came back for me. The entire time I was pregnant it was like a remembering, “I remember this,” and it was super powerful.

So I started to heal my own body and work through getting healthier and eating better, raising my own energy vibration, and nourishing my body which then gave me more physical energy, what we typically think about having more energy for the day. I just started to look at energy in all different planes; emotional energy, the energy of thoughts, and our physical energy, and realizing that at a fundamental level we are all energy. Before we’re cells and molecules, we are energy.

I just relate to the world in the sense of energy. I started to bring that to my work, helping women lose weight and transform and shift their lives in a lot of different areas just by using all that I know about energy.

Jen: This is going to be such a great interview, I already know it. This is going to be wonderful because I think what you’re going to share with the listeners is what they can start to do, too. A lot of us, I believe, have a knowing that stuff is not right in our life or doesn’t feel good, but we settle because we try to rationalize or use a logic to adjust the circumstances, and it can often be very damaging on an energetic level and that can be the precursor to disease and a lot of self-sabotaging behaviors that can go along with that.

Shana: Exactly, yes.

Jen: Let’s dive right in. Maybe when you talk about working with the energy system (this is where I felt like this is going to be so fascinating) I get it, we have energy, emotions, our physical self and health, but tell me more about what you’re referring to and how you start to get a sense of working with your clients and what is going on for them.

Shana: If you go back to things like acupuncture, that is moving energy, moving your Qi around your body. It’s based on the ancient understanding that we get energy blockages in the body and that that’s the basis for disease, that’s the starting point.

There’s a lot of talk about getting to the root cause in the health and wellness arena and in functional medicine. To me, getting the fundamental root is energy. When there’s that shift in energy in the body – this can be mental, emotional, physical, to me it’s all aspects of self tied together. I really don’t believe that we can address just the physical without addressing the mental and the emotional, nor can we address the emotional without addressing the mental and the physical. The way I experience life and experience energy it’s all tied together, period.

When I work with someone and I sit with them I start to have them tell me about life and what’s going on for them. It’s very interesting because it’s almost like if you’re reading a book and you highlight certain parts of the book that really stand out to you, when someone is talking to me things they say stand out like a highlight. I don’t visually see a highlight, but they say something and I go, “Right there, that’s where energy is blocked.” I go down and ask questions and I’m able to basically release that blockage for them.

The fascinating part is that when your energy is blocked it’s not just affecting one area of your life. You can have one energy blockage that is affecting a number of mental things, a number of emotional things, it can be causing back pain, it can be causing all kinds of things in the body. When you get to the root of that energy blockage so many different things can be released just from one. That’s where I say everything is tied together.

People go to a doctor or a chiropractor and say, “My back hurts,” and nine times out of ten a lot of mystery physical pain I have found is related to either negative mindset, things from childhood, emotional stuff that we haven’t released from our body, because again that is energy. When we’re holding in anger, frustration, upset, and all these things that we hold in, we’re holding that negative energy, that low vibration energy in our body.

Jen: This is making me think of something. I must have read it when I had very young children. My children are 9 and 7 and past that toddler baby stage, but I hear it all the time in coffee shops. What I recognize is that as adults who perhaps have been taught to not feel their feelings we often try to diminish and mute our children from feeling our feelings.

Shana: That’s exactly right.

Jen: If your toddler is crying, “Oh, shh, you don’t need to cry about that, there’s nothing wrong with you, you’re fine.” From very early childhood we’re getting messages, “Wait a minute, I’m feeling something, but now someone is telling me that I shouldn’t be feeling this way so I guess I’m wrong.” How do you start to unpack that if that’s an early messaging?

Shana: That’s a great question and it happens to everybody. I say we can learn so much from the toddler stage because toddlers are so pure. When it comes to food, toddlers eat when they want to eat and they don’t when they don’t.

When we as adults, sadly enough, try to force them to do things that are in alignment with what their body is telling them, “You have to eat dinner at 6:00 PM,” but maybe their stomach isn’t saying it’s hungry and they’re confused by that. My son will say, “My belly is grumbly,” or, “My belly is not grumbly,” when he’s hungry or not hungry.

We start to sort of socialize children from listening to their own internal compass. It’s the same with emotions, like you said so beautifully. We teach them to cut off their emotions.

When I explain emotions to people it’s like a bell curve, and a toddler is a great example. When they have a temper tantrum they come up and they freak out over the top of the bell curve, they’re throwing themselves on the ground, they’re completely emoting all over the place. Then they’re done and they jump up and they’re like, “Okay, let’s play,” they’ve completed that emotion. They go through the whole thing and then they’re over it. We teach them to cut off before they get to the top, we say, “Stop crying, stop doing that,” and that teaches in the brain that it’s not okay to feel, stop feeling, and so people actually learn to just control their feelings.

I’m sure everybody listening has had a time where they start to tear up and they just go, “No, I can’t cry.” Women are like, “My makeup is going to run, I can’t cry right now,” it’s not convenient or I’m at work, or whatever.

Jen: It’s sparking a memory I have from a call yesterday that I had with a client who was literally on the verge of tears and I could hear the emotion in her voice. I honed in and asked, “What’s that, what’s right there?” She said, “I’m just so sick and tired of having to hold it all together. I’m so tired.”

Then what came out was all of the messaging that she’s telling herself, “I need to be strong. I have to be the supportive one. I don’t have time for this. Who is going to take care of my family? I’m the rock.” It was the belief systems that we cultivate, we’re often creating these “rules” that become our prison.

How do you help your clients start to change that so that feeling their feelings isn’t so scary? A lot of times the messaging is be as happy and as joyful as you want but I don’t want to deal with your sadness or frustrations, the “bad” emotions. I don’t think there’s any such thing, but.

Shana: That’s the thing, we’re taught that and we’re socialized in that way. The first thing is seeing it. A lot of people don’t even realize, they don’t have the awareness that they’re holding back. They don’t even know how much anger is in them or how much sadness is in them because they’ve been doing it for so long that it’s just what they do. They don’t even know that they’re cutting off their emotions.

The first process is showing them that they are. You can see when someone starts to hold back emotions, so it’s saying, “Right there, what’s that right there for you? How are you holding that back?” and guiding them to just start noticing it.

Then giving people a safe space. That’s what I create when I work with people, whether it’s in person in my office or over Skype or Zoom, it’s creating this loving warm space where it is okay to be all of you. That is just not present for so many people out in the world, they feel like they have to put on a mask or put on a certain personality to go to work, or even in their own home.

You just start to create this soft loving environment, which a lot of people didn’t even have in childhood. You say, “I want to know your anger, I want to experience.” It’s a process for them to even tap back into that, but a safe environment where someone is saying it’s okay to be angry, it’s okay to be sad.

Jen: I want to talk about anger. What I’ve found that in many ways women have been taught it’s not acceptable for them to be angry. I realize that’s a blanket statement. What I find is a lot of my clients will take that anger and then they transform it into sadness, so they’ll cry, etcetera, but there’s really something burning and fiery within them and they don’t know what to do with anger.

Say you were coaching me right now and you could hear and see that there was anger in me. I would love if you could help my listeners learn, or give them some tips around that.

Here’s a couple of things that I know, too. Family of origin, if you’ve grown up with a parent who has always been really angry or explosive you’ll often repress your own anger or you’ll model after that.

What do you do for the person, the woman out there who doesn’t know what to do with or how to process or even experience her own anger? Where do you take them first?

Shana: When I’m talking to them I’m guiding them to it. I can feel their anger.

I’ll just use marriage as an example. Sometimes to stay in a marriage we’re so anger at our partner but we can’t acknowledge that because we feel like if we acknowledge that the marriage is over. For whatever reason, maybe it’s kids or financial stuff, it’s not okay with that person to have the marriage be over and so they’re willing to swallow all of their anger and feelings to keep this idea of marriage intact.

When I feel that in somebody – this is just one example, it’s all over different areas of people’s lives – I will say to them, “Why are you angry at your husband?” They’ll say, “I’m not angry at my husband.” I say, “But I feel that you are angry,” and we’ll start to talk about it, “If no one knew – this is a safe place, no one is going to find out, no one is going to know, I don’t know your husband,” and they start to share.

As they start to share, what’s fascinating is if you can verbalize you can start to feel it. Some things we won’t even verbalize to ourselves. If they start saying, “It really makes me mad when he does this…,” then the emotion starts to come with the words too. I’ll say, “Tell me more about that,” and they’ll go deeper into that. “He goes like this and it’s just really frustrating for me.” I’ll ask, “How frustrating is it? Where do you feel that in your body?” They’ll say, “It’s my gut, it just wrenches.”

You start to have them be present to how it’s manifesting in their body. The more you can guide them into opening that up for themselves the more the anger starts to come. It’s like it’s boiling at the top and it just want to lift that lid off so it can come out because it’s dying to do so.

Jen: And it’s so cathartic to actually experience it. You totally pinpointed me, my marriage is over, it ended four years ago, and there had been so much that had been building over kids and disconnection and financial, all of it. When it finally did come out there was nothing left, no desire to put any emotional energy into it.

Shana: I think the hard thing is that if we knew that we could feel our emotions before we get to that place it would be a different picture. We’re so afraid to feel the emotions and we think we can just keep going on and keep going on, but eventually, like you said, there is nothing left. There’s so much water underneath the bridge.

I tell people you think that feeling your emotions is going to have you not have your job anymore, or you’re going to lose your marriage, or whatever, and I think that’s what is going to fix it.

Jen: Yes.

Shana: I think you going home and getting really angry and freaking out and speaking your truth is actually going to make it better, and you’re afraid that’s going to end it. It’s the flip-flop.

Jen: That’s the rules, the rules that we tell ourselves about how we need to live our life and who we need to be that create that little prison and it’s so confining. I can feel it, it’s constricting, it’s like a pressure cooker. I use the metaphor like the champagne bottle inside of us where we’ll take our feelings and shove it all down, and it will be that one thing that causes you to blow, and it’s not pretty. I don’t know if anybody listening has ever been there, but it’s not pretty.

Shana: No, it’s not. Then you deal with your own guilt because you don’t like that part of you. You have this extreme blow off the top from all of these other things that you haven’t communicated and then you’re almost like, “Who is that? That’s not even me. Who is that person that is so angry?” Then people feel more shame and more guilt, and they don’t want to let that happen so then they start to suppress again.

Jen: Let’s connect this back to health and health behaviors a little bit, too. I find emotional eating and all of that stuff is so present. With my world, many of my clients will come with that desire for weight loss and really I say weight is about so much more than just food and exercise. I also don’t think you can change what you’re not aware of. What I think we’re doing right now for women is helping create the awareness and the safety. You have to feel your feelings, because if you can’t feel them you can’t change anything. You just distract yourself by numbing or distracting.

Tell me what you’ve seen in your practice. If somebody is listening to this and they’re wondering, “Do I do that?” what are some of the behaviors that you see clients engage in when they’re not willing to feel their feelings?

Shana: Great question. What I say to people when I work with them is we are going to take the lid off, because we do all kinds of behaviors to keep the lid on. All this stuff we’ve been talking about; the emotions, the mindsets, the fears, the doubts, the insecurities. Nobody wants to show that to anybody, so we’ll build this life and this structure so that we don’t have to feel those things and hope nobody will see the truth of those, that we’re actually fearful, that we’re actually insecure, that we’re all these things. All these normal human feelings that people have, we try to hide from everybody else as if we’re the only one having them.

Food or even over-exercising for some people, even over-working – and the fascinating thing with over-exercising and over-working is that you get praised for that in society, so it’s a bit of a trap because people admire you for it and yet you’re doing it to not feel your feelings and really see your truth. I say to people when we adjust what we take into our body in the form of food or drinks, and when we say, “I’m not going to drink alcohol for awhile, I’m not going to have caffeine for awhile, I’m not going to have certain things,” I do that at the beginning and I tell them it’s only about taking the lid off, taking away the reasons that hold down the things.

When we take the lid off that stuff is going to naturally start to come up to the surface, because we don’t realize we’re doing all these things to keep the lid on.

Jen: To manage it, to cope with it.

Shana: To manage it, to cope, to hold it down. Except it never will stay down. It’s always going to take more and more coping mechanisms to keep it down, because it wants to come out, it wants to rise. Over time it gets worse and worse for people. I say there’s no way out but through.

Jen: I think you should repeat everything you just said, because that’s exactly what I want people to hear and really get. What starts as one little thing, and it might over a year or a few months, all of a sudden you’re sneaking a bit more chocolate, or a bit more sugar, or now you’re drinking a bit more wine. It starts with one glass and then it’s half a bottle, and then it’s a bottle nightly. Whatever it is.

Really let this be a wakeup call. We know, in our heart of hearts we know when we’re doing stuff and it’s not feeling right.

Shana: The fascinating part is going through it, really emoting through it, when I say there is no way out but through I’m meaning just to feel the feelings, just to move through that point. You can only have one feeling for a couple of minutes. If you tried to ball your eyes out where you’re hysterically crying, you could not do that for very long. You will complete that emotion and you won’t have any more cry in you. Yet we have this idea that if we start crying it’s never going to end, we’re going to be lost in this emotional sea of depression and we’ll never be okay again. But going through is so much easier than trying to hold that lid on and keep having to have behaviors to keep those emotions, ideas, and thoughts in.

Jen: Let’s just say that I’m working with you and my partner is not used to me emoting and they’re used to me being very tidy in a nice pretty little package, just being polite and pleasant all of the time. Now all of a sudden I’m going to have some big feelings and I’m going to be releasing them. How do you help your clients create the conversation with their partners, or their family, or their friends to understand what they’re going through?

Shana: That’s a great question. I basically give them a lot of love and support. We talk about it in here, I have them talk to me like they are their husband or family or the person that they’re afraid to emote to so they have that opportunity to say and formulate their thoughts. For some people that’s easier and for other people that’s more challenging to even find the words. For some people that’s a longer process and for some people it happens really quickly. Once you have that first conversation it really opens the door.

I feel like we all live in a box and at the edge of this box is a fear alarm. When we get near that edge that alarm goes off and that alarm is like, “What are you doing? You can’t do this. You’re crazy. Back up. Don’t do this. Don’t move forward.” When we come up against that fear alarm most people think, “What am I thinking? I can’t do this,” and they back up and they get closer to the middle of the box. But, if you step over, if you hear that fear alarm and you just say, “There’s my fear alarm, it’s throwing all this stuff at me,” and you step over that edge, your box widens.

When you have that experience then you realize, “Oh, I didn’t die.” Literally fear is telling you it feels like death, like you’re going to die, your world is going to blow apart, something is going to happen. When you step over it and your box widens then you go, “Okay, this is just how it goes.” Then you become more and more comfortable because you know you’re not going to die and you keep widening that box.

So once that first conversation happens and the world doesn’t end then you get more and more comfortable speaking your truth. I tell people all the time you have to know your truth and be able to speak it. If someone is going to leave you because of that then they don’t belong in your life. How long are we going to stuff things and not be ourselves and for what? When you’re telling your truth you have a chance of being loved more, you have a chance of being connected more to your partner, you have a chance of growing your relationship to a whole new level. If that person is going to shut the door on you,… you know.

Jen: In the book Passionate Marriage there’s a great quote that says something I’ve circled and highlighted, “When I leave this Earth I want to know that I’ve been truly known by at least one person.” It’s talking about love and the container that love can give you to experience the best and the worst of yourself, because it’s all there in us and that acceptance. Because we have so much fear around being accepted for who really are those masks become our go-to thing that we grab.

Shana: I think that the most incredible experience of great love is sharing the things that you hate most about yourself and having someone else accept those in you and love you anyways. That is so affirming and that is where people flourish. When you meet that person and you say, “I have to tell you a few things about myself,” and they just go, “It doesn’t matter, I love you,” and it’s not even a big deal to them, you’re just drawn to them. You’re bonded to them for life because they really see you and they really accept you. To me, that’s what love is all about, that’s how love should be.

Jen: I love the conversation of love because there’s getting love from somebody else, but it’s almost like when somebody else is willing to accept you and to know you for who you are it gives you the ability to start accepting yourself for who you are and that self-love.

Shana: Exactly.

Jen: I know that word gets thrown around a lot, but I do think it’s important.

Shana: It’s so important.

Jen: They help model it and we can do it, and then we start to lessen our vices because we don’t need them as much anymore when we’re willing to face life.

Shana: From an energy standpoint love is a very high vibration energy. When we are in the presence of love,… When I’m thinking about you, I’m actually sending you energy. When I think, “Jen is amazing and she’s so sweet,” I am sending that energy to you no matter how far away you are. If people understood that everything they think and feel is energy that you are sending out into the universe.

When I send that to you, you’re receiving that. When you partner up with someone and they love you so much, that love is going into your body, it’s infusing you, and you do start to experience more love for yourself and you start to experience more love in life. It’s like everything looks more amazing than it used to.

Jen: That is so true. I’m laughing a little bit, because if we had this conversation probably when I was between the ages of 20 and my spiritual wakeup call came when I was late 20s early 30s, if you told me that every thought was basically energy going out into the world I would have looked at you like you were some woo-woo wacko. I honestly just did not know what I did not know because I hadn’t been exposed to it, seen it, felt it, I hadn’t hit hard parts of my life yet. I was just fun and easy, I hadn’t experienced deaths in my family or sickness, any of it, real loss. It has been some of those experiences where I have been in honestly dark places where I’m like, “Can I get out?” I’ve been willing to learn more about energy or healing or whatever, anything that might help me.

I guess what I’m looking at is for listeners who are perhaps in that life rut, love rut, health rut, where they’re feeling like that, “I have to change something,” what are some quick tips that you can give them about what they can do to create some positive change?

Shana: Awareness is the first thing. The fact that you’re listening to this. When somebody gets physically ill or they have relationships that break apart or things like that, I actually look at that as an opportunity. These things are opportunities for us to grow and learn. If we can see it as that and we seek out people to help us on that journey, we all need teachers and coaches and people to say, “This is the way. Let me hold your hand for a little bit and just walk with you on this part of your journey where it might seem so confusing to you.” Different people will show up in your life to hold your hand and say, “Let me show you a new way of being.”

A lot of the people that were at our conference and the people that are in this industry, we got involved in this because we had those dark nights, because we had physical illness, because we had things that maybe we couldn’t figure out and that sent us on a journey of saying, “There has to be another way. Why am I not feeling good?” That’s just an opening.

That’s what happened for me. I look back and that and think what a gift that was because I wouldn’t be where I am today, I wouldn’t be able to share this knowledge with people and really transform people’s lives if I hadn’t gone through what I went through.

While it might be difficult, and it might be sad, and it might be horrible, everything new starts in the dark and grows to the light. When we plant a seed it’s in the dirt and then it grows up and it breaks through the dirt into the sunlight. With a baby it’s in the womb and then it’s birthed into the light. Everything has to start at that point of growth.

Jen: I think that’s such an inspiring message for anybody listening right now who is in that dark place. That’s sometimes where deep faith is cultivated. Even hearing that message, it’s in the darkness that something else is growing and you will reach the other side of it, but you can’t unless you go through it. That little seedling has to push through the earth into the sunlight.

That’s amazing. I know we could keep going, this is super fascinating. There is one place I want to go to quickly before we wrap up.

In terms of the benefits you’ve seen with your clients when they do start to work on their energy system and repairing it, what are some of the shifts and changes that do happen? I think part of being willing to go through the change is believing that you’re capable of the change and that the change is worth it. What I know is that if somebody out there can hear, “This person was in my spot and look where they are now,” it creates hope and that is such a key element.

Shana: So key. What’s really interesting is we have this concept that change has to be difficult, that it has to take a long time and that it might not be successful, or maybe someone has success for a period of time and then they don’t. When you shift energy, when you’re going to that route cause, you can shift very quickly and you can have change happen.

Part of it when I work with people is really just shifting their mindset that it has to be difficult and that it has to take a long time. When you can line up all of your different energy systems together, literally it’s like life opens up for you. You will have new people come into your life, you will have new opportunities come that you couldn’t have even tried to make happen. I call it the land of little miracles, because your life as you walk forward …

For instance, I had a client that was in here yesterday and her story about life is that she is always alone; she felt alone throughout her childhood, she has felt alone throughout her life. We had our first session together a week ago and she came back for her second session and she said, “Right when I left I had two new people that I had met call me and invite me to go out to dinner, to meet and to talk.” She said, “This whole past week people just started reaching out to me that have never reached out to me before. I couldn’t believe it.”

Jen: I have goosebumps.

Shana: But this is how we line up energy. Then we break through these mindsets and patterns and it’s all out there for us. It’s all waiting for you. Energy is a sea of infinite possibilities. We just block things from coming into our life because we don’t believe it’s possible. Just knowing that you can have what you want is the first step in inviting it in.

Jen: Shana, I love that. I couldn’t agree with you more.

I know you have a free gift that you offer on your website. Can you please direct people how to get it and how to find out more about you so that if they want to keep reading your blog and to get in touch they have that opportunity?

Shana: Absolutely. My website is ShanaEkedal.com. On the homepage of my website you can opt-in to get my free gift, which is called The Frequency Cleanse Recipe Book.

I have a 30 day program that I run about raising your energy vibration and working with a lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about today, about how to get your energy into alignment and start manifesting things very quickly in your life. I give away a free gift that is a lot of the recipes and a lot of the practices that you can start doing. There’s also a really cool guided meditation for bringing in all of the goodness and releasing some of those emotions and mindsets that don’t serve us anymore. That really jumps people off on the right foot and gets them moving forward.

Jen: We’re going to have all of the links to everything that Shana offers in the show notes. Make sure to check that out if you want to connect with her more. I highly advise you to get the gift, it’s awesome. I downloaded it and I love what you put into it, and I can see it being so valuable for everybody.

I cannot thank you enough for sharing. If anybody is listening or watching, you can see the passion and you can see that you’re beautiful inside and out. I’m so grateful that I got a chance to meet you and to have you on my show. It has been a pleasure to interview you.

Shana: Thank you, Jen. This has been a wonderful conversation. I’ve enjoyed sharing and spending this time with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Jen: You’re welcome.

Thanks to everybody for tuning in. We are going to be another time with more fabulous guests on Energy to Thrive. Until next time. That’s it for now. Bye everybody.