[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. . Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. Thank you so much for being here today. I would like to remind my listeners that I offer a free eight-week email course titled Highly Sensitive People. My email course provides weekly tools that help you feel more whole in a world isn’t exactly made for us and I show you how your sensitivity can be seen as a unique gift and how many others are just like you. To find out more about my email course, please go to my website, amiokpodcast.com. So, we are in the month of June and just celebrated the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. This year, Summer Solstice, the spiritual meaning behind it is about finding balance in your life and mustering up the courage to be the boldest version of yourself. Like, woohoo, I know I’m doing that for me. So today’s guest is going to help us do just that. My guest on the show today is Lisann Valentin. From Wall Street to Red Carpets. Lisann is an actor, author, and amplifier, a fifth-generation shaman, LisaAnn Blends a rational with the mystical to amplify peace and clarity for the empathetic leaders and healers of the world. Welcome to the podcast Lisann. [LISANN VALENTIN] Thank you for having me, Lisa. [LISA] You’re very welcome. I’m so excited to have you here. [LISANN] Me too, I’m excited to be here. Just to let my listeners know that I was feeling Lisann’s energy very powerful probably about 10 minutes before we actually got on to do this interview. So I was like, Whoa, this is going to be a powerful one. [LISANN] I hope it is. I don’t want to let you down now. [LISA] Aw, no, you’re not going to let me down at all. So I like to ask all my guests that come on this show if you consider yourself a highly sensitive person or not, and if you are or not could you share a little story about that? [LISANN] Absolutely. I do consider myself a highly sensitive person. Thinking back to being just a small child, I was able to feel the energy around me. What I mean by that was that my perspective of the world was very much attuned to the frequency or the vibration or just the energy of love at different levels, which is to say, I looked at the sky, the birds, the trees, and I could feel the energy of it and it would excite me. It took very little to get me very excited because I would tune into that. But at that same token, if there was a denser energy around, discord, strife, grief, pain around me, I would deeply feel that as well. Not only that, if there was too much, like say on the TV, like in terms of news or something visual that was a denser energy, meaning perhaps it was like some type of crime movie on and there were showing acts that perhaps were little challenging to watch, I would feel the energy of that and it would shift my mood. I didn’t necessarily have the tools to know how to transmute it or change that energy when I was little but for me, I definitely believe that that’s part of being a highly sensitive person, like you are the antenna that receives all the radio stations. But I also am very comfortable interchanging HSP with empath because for me it’s an intuitive gift and I don’t differentiate one over the other. For me they’re both one and the same just for me personally but I am aware that that’s not true for everyone. I hope that’s helpful. [LISA] Yes, that’s really helpful. Thank you for sharing that story. How would you define or how would you look at, because I know, and I can use the terms interchangeable myself. I can identify with either one, and I know that not everyone does that, especially researchers that have researched HSP, I feel really strongly about, there is a dividing point between empath and HSP even though HSPs are very empathetic. I’m wondering how do you see that line defined, or how do you see if you’re to separate the two to define each one? [LISANN] I think for me, if there’s a delineation between the two would be the acceptance of one’s intuition at play. When I say accepting intuition, my personal belief is that we all have intuitive gifts. We all come into the space with that part of ourselves open and available to the world and then through this human experience, we slowly start turning the volume down for myriad circumstances. The primary one that comes to mind is survival. The more sensitive one is the more challenging it can be to thrive if you don’t have tools to learn how to navigate and even amplify your gifts instead of turning them down. So I think intuition is that point that divides one over the other if there is a division. [LISA] I love that about the intuition part about it and how an empath, HSPs can really feel other people’s energy and take on other people’s energy and not knowing that they are doing that and then feeling such a sense of overwhelm or over stimulation. I’m wondering how do you work with maybe yourself or with people around that? [LISANN] Sense of overstimulation, that to me, relates to the anchoring or grounding. So there’s so many different ways, but the way that I enjoy doing it the most is with nature. When I teach people around me or my clients, and primarily myself, which is a practice that I employ multiple times a day, is to find ways to ground with nature, whether I’m actually outside in it or bring it into the house with me, remembering that I am also nature. So what I mean by that is I love to incorporate the four elements in everything. The first thing I get my friends or clients to do is to recognize that the elements are typically within their home and they can access them within the home or just go out, which is way more fun because I think that grounding and anchoring can be fun. I try to take this seriousness out of it as much as possible and incorporate more creativity and play, because your imaginations have everything to do with anchoring. So if I say, okay, like the typical grounding is your feet are the roots of a tree, and imagine yourself getting grounded into the center of the earth, your imagination has to be willing to play. You have to want to see this visual or embody this visual on some level, however that works for you because some people aren’t that visual. They may just need to affirm that they are this tree or see an external picture so they can correlate that image into themselves and they can say, okay, yes, I’m a tree, I’m grounded and just breathing into that space. So I love to do, my cousin called it Darth Vader breathing because you breathe so intense. So I just take deep breaths in an audibly exhale, and that grounds me almost immediately. But it can take people, if you try just breathing through your nose and exhale, each time keeping the visual of the tree, relaxing one’s shoulders relaxing, one’s jaw just getting into a relaxed state and the breathing and the focusing on that image is already getting you into an anchored place. Once you’re anchored, then you can decipher or discern energy that’s external to you or energy that’s bubbling up from within you. I think the anchoring is key. I do things a little bit backwards as well, Lisa, because I want to make sure I’m releasing energy before I anchor into the ground. So I release of the elements. I release with water, I release with fire, I release with air, which is the breath, or literally being outside in the wind and feeling that wind. It’s all different ways to access mindfulness and discern what’s yours, what’s not yours, what you can immediately release that’s not yours and what perhaps you need to work through that is yours. So anchoring is a part of it, but so is release and once you can get those two down, alchemy immediately follows, immediately follows. I can expand on that, but I’m feeling like you have questions, [LISA] Yes, what I was going to say when you did that deep breath, I just automatically exhaled myself and it felt really good, so thank you. [LISANN] I’m so glad. [LISA] Yes. I want to, I’d like to hear about alchemy and what that looks like. [LISANN] It feels like such a fancy way to say just shifting from one energetic state to another but the process is as magical as the word itself, alchemy means. It’s as simple and as complex as embodying love. Once we are able to embody unconditional love within ourselves and emanate that energy out, that’s not only a shield of protective energy around us, but what also happens is that any other energy that comes in contact with us transforms. If someone is willing to receive love, they will receive it at whatever level or capacity that they’re able at that moment. Now, there’s also more intentional ways to put love out into the world. You can do that and act as a vessel of love in that way if you feel called to do that but you’re not responsible for anyone else’s emotions or energy. So just by embodying love, letting that emanate out is creating alchemy all around you. Now, when I ask myself, my family or my clients if they’re ready to engage in the alchemical process, setting, using your words to shift energy, something tangibly shifts and changes. So this is where a lot of the principles of like, well, of attraction come in. It’s your belief system. It’s your ability to believe that the words you say have power. So this also happens during release. Let’s say I need to release energy that’s not mine. I just went through a session and now I need to release. So I’ll turn on the faucet of the water, run my hands in the water, and I’ll know that that water is already a life force in and of itself, and I’m allowing it to engage with me in a way that can help me release energy that doesn’t belong to me. I set that intention, I believe that my words have power to transform, and I witness the release of energy through my hands. What I mean by that is using my creative mind to witness the color of the energy leaving my body and being transformed by its contact with water. So, it sounds like, it may sound a little out there to some people, but we wash our hands every day. When we move dirt from, let’s say grit, from gardening from our fingers, and we know that the water took it away. So in that same practical way, if I believe that washing my hands will rid me of anything that is, that doesn’t serve my highest good, the words and the belief creates alchemy. Just like if I look at someone I love and I feel the feeling of incredible love, whether it’s a child or a partner, and just say, I love you and really mean it, and allow that energy to move outward. There is a process of transformation in the exchange of those words and that energy, something has shifted when we affirm love. I try to take these practical acts that we do every day and couple them with our level of belief using our words is like, not like spell casting if you really want to get into like, Hogwarts, these affirmations of like, I create my reality. This for me is true because, I mean, I’ve witnessed this my whole life as a shaman and witnessing my mom, my grandfather, how they use language to transform and honestly the things that we believe truly create our reality. So if we believe that we are alchemists running around not knowing how to use our power, but we’re willing to learn in an instant, everything can change. [LISA] Wow. That sounds so powerful. [LISANN] But we are powerful. We’re powerful beings and I feel like I get excited when people awaken to that understanding of just how powerful they are. [LISA] I was thinking about unconditional love, something that you said at the beginning of this. If you’re not, maybe some people don’t know what that is maybe they’ve only experienced conditional love. How would you know it’s there, if you think you haven’t ever experienced it or wouldn’t even know what that feels like or looks like, sounds like? [LISANN] I’ve actually encountered people that had challenges understanding, I mean, specifically I’m talking about religious people who’ve worked with me and while they had a belief system in their faith. They were challenged in believing that their faith allowed for unconditional love because their experience of parenthood didn’t allow for that. I have so much compassion in that regard, because then it becomes asity of self. I believe that there’s love out there no matter what one’s faith system is. But I haven’t seen it play out in my life, so I don’t know how to look for that. So for me, the process in that is twofold. One, I always encourage anyone I meet to find a modality of therapy or counseling that can help one work through those, that healing, to find that in one’s self instead of external to one’s self. Then the other process is I try to, because I’m not a therapist, but what I do is I try to help them find the unconditional love within by looking at things that truly bring them joy. So if I’m working with someone one on one, their state of genius may be, I’m thinking of a friend of mine, she’s an artist, and like she lights up a room when she’s in her zone when she’s painting and it’s like magic incarnate. In that state there is unconditional love at play there. She loves everything that she’s doing, she feels totally invited in herself, she feels so powerful. I mean, these are her words because I’ve asked her process. That is a state of unconditional love. So there’s another, when we look at, if we look at the world through the eyes of a child, let’s say, if I’m talking about myself, I can stop and look at a cloud and just be in awe of it. There’s a purity in that. There is a state of unconditional love in that, me looking at a cloud, witnessing it, observing it, because I’m not judging it with human eyes. I’m looking at it through eyes of my highest self. There is nothing flawed in nature. For me I can look at it and just be like, wow, that’s just a miracle. Not everyone is attuned to that. It’s not lost on me, but I love helping people find the thing that gets into that space whether you’re looking at a flower or looking at the sunset, looking at an ocean or a waterfall. Looking at a child, for many can immediately bring them to a state of unconditional love. Sometimes it’s just looking at something that they created that’s an inanimate object, but it has their consciousness all over it. In that space, they are embodying love. I think so many times we walk around not realizing that we are these vessels of unconditional love and we vibrate. As I say this, I keep hearing like the boom, boom, boom, like pulsing from the heart, but external to the heart. There are moments in our lives, I want to say, if we’re lucky that we can remember feeling this infinite piece at the center of us. It is that same infinite piece, that immaculate grace that is unconditional love. So finding tools to help you find that within will help you see that without, will help you see that external to one’s self. But first we look inward. First, we look inward, always, always, always. Ooh, that was a lot. That [LISA] Was a lot and that was so beautiful. I don’t have, I just want to just not say anything, kind of let that just resonate with anyone and really just took that in. I was like, wow, I feel so much different just by what you just said. [LISANN] Oh my gosh, thank you. I’m going to take a sip of water because there’s a lot of energy moving right now. [LISA] Just to talk about your own gift that, I mean, I see that, I hear it. We just heard it. This is the gift that you bring to other people just to help them light up inside themselves and let them shine and experience and walk in the world, live the life that they came to live. [LISANN] There’s no greater honor getting emotional, just listening to you say that. [LISA] I want to back up just a little bit because we may have some people that may not know what a shaman is. Can you explain what a shaman is? [LISANN] Yes sure. The way it’s typically defined outside of culture the one who knows. That just may mean that I see things from a different perspective. In my family culturally, I’m Puerto Rican and the Puerto Rican culture is a mix of Taino, the indigenous Taino who are related to the Arrowwhack, Spaniard and African, a lot of peppering of other Europeans that were on the island, but primarily these are the three. In my family, my two times great grandmother was a healer. She was renowned all over the island and Taino culture, shaman is called the boyview. My grandfather apprenticed with her, his mother was very intuitive, but she didn’t do any medicinal plant work the way her mother did. My grandfather did, though. He took up the plant medicine. He taught my mom a lot about it. There was a lot of laying on the hands at home but none of this was defined or, and there were no titles given. So while in our culture, I understand the boyview is what she was. There was never a title given other than that. She worked with plants and she loved helping people. Her daughter, Divine for a lot of people, but didn’t do more than that. My grandfather did everything his grandmother did and my mom primarily focused on the plants and laying of the hands just with the family, never external to the family. Then came me. So while I have a big family, there’s a call involved. I got the call as a shaman and I said yes without even necessarily knowing that I was saying yes to, because I grew up without definitions for these things that were just like our basic weekend experience at my grandparents’ house. You know what I mean. So yes, I got the call and then from there I started digging into what that would look like and what that meant for me, which had nothing to do with me picking up my life and moving to a rainforest somewhere, which I wasn’t sure about for a little while. But yes, that’s a longwinded way of saying I’m a boyview five generations in. [LISA] What was the call? Did you hear words? Was it like a tap on the shoulder? [LISANN] No. It was visual and auditory. So two of my clears were going. I was in like a state between sleep and dream. I had just laid down and a shaman appeared and the words that were spoken were, “Are you ready to take up your role as a shaman?” My spirit gave the biggest yes of my life. It was like a roar out of my heart. Then I shot up awake going, what did I just say yes to? What does that mean? But it definitely was like a, it was a visual and auditory call. And honestly, I’d been waiting for a call my whole life. I just didn’t know what it was supposed to look like. I remember being in eighth grade asking a nun, how did she know she was supposed to be a nun and what did the call look like because she told me there was a call. I was like, “Who calls you? Why? How do you know?” She was like, “You just know.” I looked at her and I go, “No, I don’t think I’m supposed to be a nun.” I walked away. But I’d always been, I had this knowing that a call would come, I just didn’t know what that would look like. When that shaman word came around, it was so foreign to me. So it was such a journey to find the connection between my lineage and what that word could mean for me. [LISA] How old were you when you got the call? [LISANN] That call, oh my gosh, old. This was like two years ago the call came, only two years ago. Yes, I spent my life walking around with these gifts, but I just never defined them. They were sort of like the undercurrent of everything that I did. So the way I affirmed and manifested, the way I used the energy of my hands to activate healing in someone else because I’m just a straw, like a really cool straw. I’m not doing anything. I’m just a great space holder for people to activate what’s already within them. I just wasn’t aware that I was doing these things. Then when I answered the call, it was like, everything, how do I explain this, everything flipped on its head and my gifts ramped up tenfold. it was astounding. I mean, I’m still, I mean obviously I can look at a cloud and marvel, but everything is sort of like this magical experience in my day to day. Even the mundane things, it’s like, oh wow, okay. That’s phenomenal. [LISA] So on that note, I want to just look at nurturing our sixth sense and usually HSPs and empaths know that okay, yes, we have this sixth sense. Maybe from the experience that you just had two years ago, maybe you could share about what that is and how to nurture that sixth sense. [LISANN] Yes. I love doing this because I often find people aren’t aware because they didn’t have the definition of what they’d been experiencing their whole lives, like how I was a shaman but didn’t know it. So, for me, I divide empathy into three categories of the clear senses, which is our psychic sense. People have different takes on this, but this is what resonates for me. So for me, empathy is like a form of clear sentience. It is clear feeling. It’s just I can walk into a room and I can feel into the energy of a room of people and just know what’s going on. Safe, not safe. Where’s the happy energy? Where’s the dancer energy? Or like, this is the most exciting thing I’ve ever been to. I’m ready to go. Then there’s levels to it. Then there’s clear tendency, which I find many HSPs and empaths have this one. They walk into a space, let’s say a really cluttered space, let’s say there’s an exhibit at a museum that has a lot of antiquities and the room is really full and they walk in and they immediately are overwhelmed with the things. Now there’s no people, there are just things, the feeling of being overwhelmed by objects is clear tendency at one level because the objects themselves hold energy, especially historical objects. Then if you touch them and you get an impression, I like this, I don’t like this, this feels good, this feels weird. Even at that basic level that’s clear tendency. When you get a stronger impression of like, who belonged to and things of that nature, that’s like another level of clear tendency. So if people are more drawn to light and airy rooms or a certain vibe that makes them feel calm, there are levels to one’s clear tendency. Again, this is all under the umbrella of what I believe is empathy, the psychic sense is related to empathy. Then there’s clear empathy. For me that takes clear sensing to another level. With the clear sensing, the clear feeling, we can feel the energy, let’s say, of someone that’s in front of us without any logical explanation or any indications to give us information, just the knowing, which would be clear cognizance. Now let’s take that to the clear empathy level. You might know that person that I’m visualizing, I’m visualizing my partner, but now he’s not in the room, he’s at work and I get a hit, something’s off, he’s upset about something and I have no information to know this. But now I’ll take that person, my partner, let’s say he’s in Europe and I’m in the states. I know something’s off. I decide to call and he goes, “Oh, I was thinking about you. God, I’ve had such a crappy day.” That’s clear empathy. Being able to feel thoughts, feelings, emotions of another person who is not in the same space as you, again, without ideological information to give you that hit, that psychic hit. So clear tendency and clear empathy for me are the three dominant clears for empaths. Some people skew one way or the other. The other clears are usually involved within this. I like to say we all have them. Some of them are stronger than others and some of them are just really dialed down or we’re just not paying attention enough to them and that they’re just there. So like clear voyance, clear audience, the clear seeing and the clear hearing. That shows up for empaths too but it’s not always the way it’s depicted on TV. When it comes to like clairvoyant, sometimes our eyes are drawn to something in a room with a word or a symbol, and that gives us information for the next choice decision or next thing we say in a conversation. If we’re not paying attention, we’re not realizing, hey, that’s your clear voyance at work. Or you have a memory pop up in your mind and that reminds you of something that allows you to take another step forward and it’s like a nudge. That visual memory in your mind is your clear voyance or your clear audience. You hear a song either internally you start humming one and you start thinking about a song or it comes on the radio and you’re like, oh, that gave you a hit about something. Oh, I should do this. It’s reminding me to do that. In our day to days, our clears might be functioning, but if we’re unaware as again, it’s like walking around with a wand and you’re not knowing that you’re like. You’re super magical, you can do all these things. I mean, and it goes on. I mean, I don’t want to talk forever on this, but there’s the other clears, taste, smell, and then the one we talked about, clear cognizance, just that total knowing, which some parents like to call maternal paternal instinct. But that’s definitely a form of clear cognizance, you just know it in your bones. Your gut is telling you absolutely this is the truth. So all of those are usually at play with many people but I think empaths are particularly gifted, HSPs are a particularly gifted group of people if they’re in a space where they’re willing and they’re really curious about embracing their intuition. [LISA] Yes. I hear, called their superpowers and sometimes they don’t feel like superpowers. Sometimes they can feel like a burden, I guess, especially if you’re not knowing how to work with it or what to do with it. Maybe men may feel more of that if being more sensitive and not being accepted, being sensitive and trying to identify with themselves and with friend groups and things like that. How do I be more masculine when I have this really innate trait in me to be more sensitive? Do you ever come across that? [LISANN] A lot. It’s funny because I remember, I used to think I only wanted to work with women because I was like, I’m a woman, I understand people that identify as women and I’m ready to roll. Then the first few clients I had were men. So what I noticed is that the way they wield their intuitive gifts might shift, depending on their experience. If we take the language and change it, there’s a comfort level there. So if I don’t say we’re talking about your psychic gifts, if I just say you have really good instincts, can we talk about how your instincts come to play then they’ll share. I’m very lucky because the ones I’m talking about have had clairvoyance. They didn’t know it. I was able to find tools to connect with them without using mystical language. I think that in my experience with the men I’ve worked with, getting them to find a comfort level with the mystical terms, finding more practical terms to help them understand their very just human gifts and giving them space to express it in a safe container, help them accept themselves more. And realizing sensitivity, this word, if we take it out of the context of being like there’s something to do with weakness, at some level, this idea that being sensitive means you’re weak, it means that, and then if we associate that with cultural terminology, then for many, many years the idea of being a woman was something considered weak. So if we can dig out these, what are our biases, we can cut through them and say, okay, what’s the truth here? Being a woman is not weak. Being sensitive is actually not weak. It is having a fine keen understanding of the human condition. That has a level of mastery to it that has nothing to do with being weak at all and has nothing to do with being a man or a woman. It truly is just having a keen sense of how the world and energy functions around you. That can mean that you are the chessboard in a world where everyone else is just a player or a pawn. So when I’m able to talk to them at a level that has their mind and their sense is going at a, Oh, this is a powerful thing to be, this thing that I am is quite powerful, now I can embody this and wield my gifts in a different way that serves me personally, then their perspective can change a little bit. Because I think for a long time, and I came from, being an empath is such a blessing and a burden for many years. it was this idea that I was a sponge, this one way street of energy that I had to just like ring out every now and again and that’s not true. The way that I can best describe it is love is sensitive, love is tender, love is also powerful and ferocious. When you look at a lion, we see ferocity. The lions roar, but love feels like a roar. True unconditional love can be tender and gentle and it can be fierce. You think about people using terms like mama bears and thinking about animals in the wild and how they’re protective of their young. These very like visceral images, there’s love in that. A purely unconditional love. My child, my cub will stay alive. There is love in that. So if we can take that and remember, we too are nature. The way we experience and express love at multiple levels and when I use the word love, I’m using it about every emanation of love, love that exists. When you walk in your genius, you are operating from that space of unconditional love, doing what you do best. Whether you’re just cooking a meal, you’re fixing a car, you’re working on a piece of art, or you’re out there making public speeches, writing a book, or just tending to your family, cleaning the floor, whatever you’re doing from that space of pure oneness and self, that is from the space of love, joy, peace, grace, all comes from love. Again, it’s not a tender flower that can blow away with the wind if we don’t want it to be. It can be made of grit and steal and that is just as worthy because our gifts are a two-way street of energy. They’re not a one-way street that’s a spongey ring out. We receive love and we emanate love. When we receive more than love, we alchemize that energy into love within us that will immediately be expanded beyond us. And how do we do that? Using our words, our language, and our beliefs. It’s as simple as that. Using our words, using our beliefs, use your imagination, have fun with it. Find ways to honor you. Here’s a typical one. I get a lot. I walk into a a big box store and I don’t know what to do. There’s so many emotions around me. It’s challenging for me to be in a big group of people because there’s a lot of waves of energy. This tool helped me a lot when I learned it. Taking a breath, not being afraid to stop exactly where you are, even with a shopping cart in your hand. Just fill your feet on the ground, fill your hands where they are and focus on your breath. Audible exhales are great for this. If you can tune into the frequency of your heart, does your heart beating even better? That may be challenging if the store is really loud. Just breathe. And honoring who you are, knowing who you are, speak to yourself. Give this human body a command on how to operate in this plane of existence. So giving yourself an affirmation, you can ask yourself, take me above this energy of human suffering. Take me higher than it. So imagine what the energy of human suffering around you might look like. What color it is. Give it a color, give it an appearance. Use your imagination and then imagine yourself elevating above it. Not so that you don’t feel it, but so that you’re not swallowed by it. That is the difference. Learning how to hone your language, how you perceive the world around you, and breathing into a command you gave yourself, or an affirmation or a truth that you set out there will immediately allow you to rise above energy that isn’t serving your highest good at this moment. So you can operate at a highly functional level and be love and emanate love out, which will trickle down like rain. That was a lot. [LISA] That was amazing. I mean, I have, I don’t have anything to say. I’m just, you like, woo, I’m just want to take that all in. Wow, did you just channel all of that? [LISANN] Yes, a lot of it was channeled, but the tool of take me above the energy, I did not. That sentence I learned and it helped me function as an empowered empath. It helped me truly use my gift. The visuals around it, I had to cultivate to say, how can this phrase work for me? So all of the rest is how I operate. When I see energy, I have to give it a visual because how can I overcome something I can’t see. So all of that, yes, you just channel it now because I allowed myself to be in a big box store. [LISA] Wow, that’s so beautiful. That visualization, the words to be above it. Last week I was in a meditation and I was noticing like being in a forest of trees and the message was not to be on the floor, the forest or all the muck is, it’s just to rise above the tree line and just see out and see the view up there. This is where I want to be. It was so clear. Then when you said these words, I’m like, wow, look at that. [LISANN] It’s another way of saying be the observer of the experience. [LISA] I love that. [LISANN] You release your attachment to it and you can observe it. From a space of observer, then you can be love. In that space, there’s no, you’re not thinking in the future of the past, you’re not trying to control energy or take responsibility for other people’s emotions. You’re just trying to be that all that you are, which is love. When you can really embody that without standing in the middle of emotional traffic, just like above it, then you can, you’re emanating that and it comes down, it all trickles down. [LISA] How would you work with, I guess, what’s happening in our world today, it just seems like there’s so much anger, if I were to choose one word, so much anger and just looking out in the world. How do you work with clients, maybe yourself when you’re just, all this stuff is going on in our world and it can be hard to just take it in and like, we want to help and not sure how to help but I guess being more in control of yourself? [LISANN] A lot of energy is moving as you’re talking, like in my throat, I can feel it going up and down. Compassion. So for me, the answer that came to mind is compassion for self and compassion for others. I don’t say that that’s an easy thing for everyone to accomplish, but understanding that underneath the layers of anger is pain and hurt. When we can acknowledge our own pain and find the core why behind the pain, then we can address the issue instead of trying to push anger away because I think sometimes if we want to just get rid of a feeling and I speak for myself, sometimes I’m like, I get angry, then I’m annoyed that I’m angry and it’s like, oh my God, all these levels of dense energy wanting to like attract to me. I’m like, okay, let me breathe. For me, it’s all about my breath. But let’s say I’m so angry that me sitting down breathing is not going to work. I need to move my body. So walking meditations, meaning just like being mindful, I go boxing. I try to move my body in a way. Swimming really helps, again, getting grounded in the different elements. So if I’m boxing, then the element of breath and fire or at play because I’m really building up the heat in my body and that helps me to release just on a physical level. As I’m doing this, I’m waving my hand, waving away anger and using physical actions to release the energy and see it releasing from my body also helps me. But getting to the core issue is really important. So I ask myself, and I speak to myself with compassion, what am I angry about? What am I really angry about? Is it really about this situation that happened or is there something underneath this? I’ll give you like a practical example. I had sent my partner a bunch of pictures on how I wanted to redecorate the guest room, and he didn’t respond to the text messages, but I know him and I know that when he came home, we’d talk about it. But because I spent so much time cultivating these pictures, I started to get irritated. Then I started to get angry when we hadn’t spoken about it but I wasn’t aware that that’s what I was angry about. I was just biting throughout the day. He’d ask me what do you want to eat and I was, I don’t know. You pick whatever. I was being dismissive and I was aware that I was being dismissive. I was aware that I wasn’t wanting to engage, but I still wasn’t aware of the why, which was interesting because I do my best to walk in mindfulness, but I’m a human being. So I stopped, I had some water, I started breathing. I’m like, Lisa, why are you acting like this? I answered the question, I’m annoyed at him. Well, why are you annoyed at him? Because he didn’t respond to my text messages. Okay, why are you annoyed that he didn’t respond to your text message messages? Because I spent a lot of time in making these pictures. Okay, did you ask him what he thought about them? No, but I text him and he didn’t respond. Okay, so you didn’t communicate. Are you annoyed that you didn’t communicate with him? Well, yes, I’m annoyed that he didn’t communicate. Why else are you annoyed that he didn’t respond about these pictures that you so much time making? Because I feel like he doesn’t value my time. Oh, okay. So is it true that he doesn’t value your time? No, it’s not true. Okay, what does this feel like? Does this feel like something else? Yes, it feels like so many times when I’ve tried to do something for someone else and I wasn’t acknowledged. Oh, okay, so you feel like you’re not being acknowledged? Yes, I don’t feel seen. I don’t feel heard, and that makes me feel really small or insert expletive word, another s-word and I don’t like feeling like that. Okay, so now this is the core feeling. Let’s get to that feeling. Is it true that you are a small? No. Is it true that you are unappreciated? No, it’s not true. Breathe. Just keep breathing. Say the opposite of what you’re feeling. I am valued. I am worthy. I know how to communicate and I am loved. So the little seed of pain I have here that made me so angry, I can tend to it. I can tend to it and know that none of these dense feelings are true. They just magnified something that had been lying dormant within me for a very long time and I needed to heal it. I needed to attend that wound. It does take a great deal of awareness to be able to ask your core why for anything. It takes patience and compassion with one self to work through those energies and to say, okay, now I know where the seed is from, and now I can walk into a space where I’m calm and talk to my partner about something that seems so a name, like, it’s just redecorating. But really it was about me feeling worthy and valued and how I can tend to myself before I walked into a conversation with my partner and expressed to him how he could show up for me and help me feel seen without biting at him when he asked me what I want for dinner. [LISA] Wow, thank you for walking through that process with us. I hear like the dialogue between, it sounds like two people that you’re talking to. [LISANN] Yes, I think so. That started really young when I was given a journal when I was about eight and I didn’t know what to do with it. I asked my mom, “Well, who do I write to? What am I supposed to write?” My mom said, “Well write to God.” I said, okay, so that’s where automatic writing began for me. I would write how I felt and I would write a question and then I would just keep writing until it felt like the part of me that’s most connected to love was writing back. It was like an ongoing dialogue with my highest self, with the divine, with whatever language anyone feels comfortable with. But for me, I’m comfortable with anything pretty much. So I would write until love wrote back. That’s how I think compassion was able to be fostered within me from very young, because I can talk to myself in a way that can help me get to the root of something through eyes of compassion, allowing my highest self to speak through me, which is how I’m able to do that for others, but also to allow myself to receive that from others, which is really important. I really want to emphasize that I’m getting tingles on my legs. We all need each other. We really do. We didn’t come near to be isolated beings on this planet. It’s our interconnectedness that makes us beautiful, beautiful pieces of nature, works of art. When we can lean on each other, that actually enhances our level of compassion for self and for others. We’re not islands on this space alone. We’re not made to be that way even if that story has served us for a very long time, I know it did for me at some points in my life. But knowing that I can ask for help, which is one of the bravest things that we can do, and we can walk in that bravery and reach out a hand knowing that someone will hold it and walk us through a certain part of our journey or through all of our journeys or just for a season that is a great gift that we can give to ourselves. So, while I know I can do this, the biggest gift is knowing that I can reach out to others who can walk me through it when I need it. [LISA] Ooh, that was beautiful. Such a beautiful message. You’ve had so many beautiful messages on the show today, Lisann. [LISANN] Thank you, Lisa. You hold such a beautiful container that allows all of this stuff flowed through, I have to say. [LISA] Thank you. Oh, thank you so much. So what would you like listeners to take away from this show today? I know you’ve said so much and there’s so much to take away, if you were to narrow it down. [LISANN] I think the biggest thing, which is different than what I thought I would say, is not to be afraid of your gifts and do everything you can to work on letting go of the hand of fear when it comes to your beautiful gifts, because they are beautiful and there’s nothing to fear. That powerful gift you have, that powerful ability you have to feel at that sensitivity, that level of pure understanding is nothing to fear. Being powerful is nothing to fear. Just love on it as much as you can [LISA] Well, I feel so much different now than when we started. I just feel like this pouring of love just coming from my heart just by what you’ve shared today. [LISANN] Thank you. Excited too. [LISA] Do you have a free gift for my audience that you’d like to share? [LISANN] Yes. I have a shamanic journey for empaths and I’m so excited to share it with your audience. What should I say about that, Lisa? [LISA] Well, it’ll be in the show notes so you can just look on the show notes to receive that free gift. [LISANN] It’s a journey walking you to releasing energy that isn’t, that doesn’t belong to you, that no longer serve your highest good. So while it’s on the mystical side of things, it’s a beautiful journey and quite powerful as well. So I’m happy to share it with anyone who’s willing to receive it. [LISA] Oh, thank you so much for sharing that. [LISANN] You’re welcome. [LISA] Where can listeners get in touch with you? [LISANN] On my website at lgvalentine.com. [LISA] Okay. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Lisa. [LISANN] Thank you, Lisa, for having me. I’m excited to be here and to share this with your beautiful HSP listeners. [LISA] Thank you, my listeners, for tuning in today. Please let me know what you thought of the episode. Send me an email to lisa@amiokpodcast.com. Remember to subscribe, rate and review wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about Highly Sensitive Persons, please visit my website at amiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and just show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s problems or issues. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are okay. Until next time, be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. 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