Episode 46 transcript: Release Trauma and Create More Freedom with Gunjani Patel Oza

Podcast Introduction:

[00:00:00] Gunjani: If you have an event, any event, any memory, any situation in your life that you were to make an inventory, that's what people call triggers. If you were to make an inventory and you feel even like a three or four to seven-level distress, I think is multi-trauma because if you remember it, there is an emotional charge attached to it.

[00:00:20] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath, depth, and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.

[00:00:55] Aneta: Welcome back to Live the Width of your life podcast. Thank you so much for joining me again this week. I am so excited for today's episode. I had the pleasure and honor of talking to Gunjani Patel Oza, and she's a transformation and holistic anxiety coach, and a licensed mental health therapist. Trauma-informed breathwork expert.

[00:01:17] Aneta: And she empowers high achieving women leaders with high functioning anxiety, navigate change and uncertainty with ease and confidence, so they can design a life in business they love showing up to every day.

[00:01:31] Aneta: Her mission is to impact millions of women, living with high-functioning anxiety to live a life of ease, confidence, and freedom by teaching them to tap into their own body's wisdom. She has 15 years of experience as a licensed mental health therapist and breathwork facilitator, and she's helped thousands of people already reset their nervous systems using her unleash and embody your peace, power, and potential framework.

[00:01:56] Aneta: She's a CEO and founder of consciously living and holds multiple certifications and trauma-informed and subconscious reprogramming modalities and specialties such as EMDR, hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming, EFT, Reiki healing, and the long list of others. And we spent so much of our time actually talking about it.

[00:02:17] Aneta: The wisdom of our own bodies, how to tap into that wisdom, how to reset our nervous system, and I also just loved hearing from her the different modalities in this toolbox that she's created so that she can customize programming for people based on what they need and meet them where they are. I learned so much during our discussion and I'm really excited for you to do the same. So check it out.

[00:02:43] Aneta: Gunjani, I'm so excited to have you here with me. Thank you for joining me.

[00:02:48] Gunjani: You are very welcome. Thank you so much for having me here. And you absolutely said my name fantastically. So thank you so much for doing that.

[00:02:55] Aneta: I love that. Well, names are so important and I think we're going to talk a little bit about that because it's one of the things that both you and I think have in common is just choosing to honor who we are and the name and asking people to pronounce it correctly. So, thank you for being here, and for those that aren't familiar with you or your story, tell us a little bit about your journey.

[00:03:21] Gunjani: Thank you so much for asking that question and I am super honored to be here. So thank you so much for this platform and for having me here and having me talk to you, the community, and your audience. Hi everyone. My name is Gunjani and I grew up in India for half of my life, and I now live in the US for the other half. I am a licensed mental health therapist. I am an EMDR specialist. I am a mom of a five-year-old sometimes.

[00:03:51] Gunjani: That gets really wild in our household, and I am a transformation and holistic anxiety coach. I'm also a certified trauma-informed worker, so if you can hear the pattern, trauma has been a big part of my own personal life and my professional life. I've been doing this for 15-plus years at this point.

[00:04:10] Gunjani: And it was just one of those things where in our household, we didn't grow up talking about trauma. We didn't grow up talking about emotions. We didn't grow up talking about a lot of things, and as a result, we experienced it. And now as a practitioner and just a science geek nerd, I know that 50% of trauma, anxiety, depression, we're.

[00:04:31] Gunjani: Genetically predisposed to 40%. It is our perception of the event and the stories that we tell ourselves. And most of the time, 95% of our subconscious, which is the first six years of life when our prefrontal cortex, which is like our conscious brain the human mind, language, and reasoning part of our mind is so limited.

[00:04:53] Gunjani: And it just comes on at three years old, so it doesn't completely develop till 25. And as a result, 27 actually now according to studies. So as a result, the stories that I told myself were not the best. My mom had me when she was 20 years old. So I guess the perception of the events that I grew up with and my perception of the events, especially with us not talking about a lot of things, life in the twenties and in the teens was not the most ideal.

[00:05:20] Gunjani: But I went to grad school for counseling psychology, and one of the things that my advisor mentioned was, if you're going to become a therapist, you need to be in therapy to know what it's like for people to be on that couch with you. And I was like, there is nothing wrong with me.

[00:05:36] Gunjani: What do you mean by therapy? And in our household in India, at the time, in the nineties, we didn't believe in mental health therapy as a way of prevention, as a way of self-introspection, as a way of becoming a better human, which I now know. But back then my misconception of therapy was, there's nothing wrong with me.

[00:05:55] Gunjani: I'm not crazy. Everything is fine, and life is great. In the meantime, I had untreated depression, ADHD, anxiety, and PTSD. So fast forward, I have been serving my people for the longest time. I'm also an EMDR therapist, so a lot of my work has been around subconscious reprogramming and treating trauma, and one of my zone of genius is post-traumatic growth, which is not just treating trauma but then helping thousands of my patients and clients live the best life that they're capable of.

[00:06:26] Gunjani: Because that was what happened to me in therapy. I had one of the best psychologists that I got tuned in with, and she was an EMDR therapist, and it absolutely changed my life and the trajectory of my life in my late twenties, which is when my brain was finally ready to be completely developed.

[00:06:44] Gunjani: Since then, my passion is to help people. At this point, I help high-achieving women with high-functioning anxiety, embrace change and uncertainty with ease and confidence in their life, because I want more than anything for us to have a regulated nervous system. For us to have tools that can help us with emotional regulation and emotional intelligence so we can navigate through no matter what hits us.

[00:07:12] Gunjani: My specialty used to be depression, anxiety, grief, loss, addiction. And lots and lots of it over the years and sexual trauma. I know that the fight or flight part of our brain is designed for, why is this happening to me? And there were a lot of years of my life that I was stuck in that and then I learned a few things.

[00:07:30] Gunjani: I tapped into my body's wisdom and learned that I had all the answers that I needed in life, that I didn't have to not feel good enough. I didn't have to not feel powerless. I didn't have to feel unlovable, inadequate, always on the go, on the next thing. So I learned a few things along the way, and now I can't wait to teach hundreds and thousands and millions of women to do the same thing.

[00:07:56] Gunjani: Because I really believe, like one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes is live life every day like it's your last day today. And how can we do that? And how can we show up to life fully alive? So thank you for this show.

[00:08:10] Aneta: Wow, you just shared so much. And I love that quote because I know, as you and I were just talking before we started recording, I lost a dear friend this week. She passed away young, 56 years old on Monday, and the last couple of days have been so challenging with the funeral, and the viewing, but seeing the legacy that she left and the way she lived is so amazing to think that in a short amount of time, in a very short life, one person, one life can make such a deep impact for others.

[00:08:39] Aneta: And so, I love that, that's your mission, because knowing who you are in your heart, I can see that it is just coming through you. But for those that aren't familiar, maybe with some of these things that you talked about.

[00:08:53] Aneta: Give us a little bit of a description of EMDR for example. Maybe we can start there because people are probably familiar maybe with therapy and maybe have experienced it themselves, but maybe some of these other things that you've talked about as EMDR and neurolinguistic programming, E F T. Tell us a little bit about what those are, how they are different and. Who do they help? How do they actually help people who've gone through maybe some of those different conditions that you mentioned before?

[00:09:22] Gunjani: A hundred percent. So thank you for that. So EMDR is modality. Is it a treatment modality? It was started by a clinical psychologist in the eighties for people who actually came back from combat.

[00:09:34] Gunjani: So it's spelled EMDR meaning eye movement desensitization reprocessing. Basically what that means is that by bilaterally stimulating your eyes left and right. So when you're in an EMDR session, you move your eyes left and right.

[00:09:49] Gunjani: It's a way to connect your left brain, which is, I'm going to give it very simply so that I don't go into the whole jargon thing. But basically, the idea is you connect your left brain, which is your language, your story, your narrative, your moral reasoning part of your brain to your right brain, which is your limbic reptilian 200 million years ago brain.

[00:10:10] Gunjani: Which is your emotional, creative, judgment, intuitive part of your brain, right? Because one of the problems with talk therapy and we call it the talk down approach, and it's not a problem, but in the mainstream therapy world, when you have endured trauma, which is either big T trauma or small T trauma, small T trauma still leaves big scars in people.

[00:10:30] Gunjani: When I say that, it's like if your system or your nervous system is used to being dysregulated or always being on high stress or hypervigilant. Which is what happens when you endure trauma.

[00:10:42] Gunjani: And I truly believe that emotions are energy in motion. It's energy in movement. If we don't release that energy when we experience it, even if it's like shock, we hold that energy in our body till we mindfully, consciously, intentionally, release that from our system. So there's the whole thing called Bondly. I love Dr. Beal's work. It's like our body absolutely keeps the course of the trauma that we've been through, even if it's multi-trauma.

[00:11:09] Gunjani: So what EMDR does is when you come in the session, the beauty of this process is you don't have to talk about anything because imagine having gone through rape or held at a gunpoint or losing your child or something really major and having to talk about it.

[00:11:23] Gunjani: Sometimes it shocks your system and it freezes you are in the fight or flight, or freeze mode. So there's a lot of stabilization, there's a lot of safety tools. It's a very gentle healing modality where you pick an event. So we process an event or a situation and we figure out core beliefs about that. So there is a whole bunch of shame, guilt, vulnerability, control, all these cluster core beliefs that are present.

[00:11:47] Gunjani: So it's like I am alone. I am abandoned, I am defective, I'm unimportant, I'm not good enough. I am unlovable. I am overwhelmed. All those beliefs that we hold in our body because our cellular memory holds like our brain is just a part of our nervous system, but most of our nervous system is in our body, right?

[00:12:06] Gunjani: So we hold all of that in our body. All those beliefs, and thoughts repeated over and over are held in our body. So when we do that session the client that goes through the process literally moves their eyes left and right, and that's their way of connecting their left brain to the right brain. So their story brain of their emotions, the brain to who they are today as opposed to when that event first happened.

[00:12:28] Gunjani: And we go back and deal with all the other beliefs because our beliefs that are not processed keep piling up, right? And my son too, sometimes he'll do that. He's five and he's like, Mommy you're not getting me something so you don't love me. And I'm like, now I know how some things that I grew up.

[00:12:42] Aneta: Let's clear that out.

[00:12:42] Gunjani: Like what? And literally right then and there I'm like, deal with it. But a lot of us didn't. In my parents' generation, unfortunately. They didn't have that available to them. So we grew up with whatever we grew up in and believed that about ourselves to be true.

[00:12:55] Gunjani: Even at 40, 50, 30, 20, and it doesn't serve us. And then there's all this other, I do a lot of inner child work, so I help people connect them to their higher self and who they are today, or even archetypes.

[00:13:07] Gunjani: So like my archetypes or my team of people. When you are stuck in that fight or flight, you need a worthy reason. Normally we have wisdom within us, but we can't access that when it's like, there's a whole thing in neuroscience where if you're caught in your emotions or if you're caught in your right brain, your left brain is supposed to go a little turned down.

[00:13:24] Gunjani: Because it's like if you're in front of the lion, you don't sit there and say, should I run? Should I stand? Should I be right? What? Like, your blood-brain is designed to shut off. So sometimes when you're in that process of feeling and releasing some of that stuff, you need your posse of people that are going to have your back.

[00:13:42] Gunjani: So my pastor people used to be Oprah, Beyonce, Michelle Obama, Dalai Lama, Princess Diana, and Mother Teresa. And I'm like, there is my team of people, like when I'm in places where I can't think for myself, they're going to think for me. And then I would come up with answers like, this is not what Oprah would do, or This is not what Dalai Lama would do. I'm being really mean to myself.

[00:14:01] Gunjani: So really teaching yourself things based on the people that you admire and you look up to. So then you do all of that, and then eventually you remember the events like it happened yesterday, but all the emotional discharge happens and you don't feel anything that the distress that you felt related to the events, you don't feel anymore.

[00:14:21] Gunjani: So you absolutely remember it, but you also change your narrative about it from your higher sales perspective, as opposed to from when it happened to you. So that's EMDR.

[00:14:32] Aneta: Can I just say something? That seems so interesting. So do you find, because you know this now, this modality, like with your son, for example, you said? Do you just clear things out all the time?

[00:14:43] Gunjani: Hundred percent, And I also tell people, like before I found breath work, I also used to do that, anytime you used to have a major event and happen, I would just go in for an EMDR session. Because what happens is the longer you wait after the event when the crisis or when distress happens in your life you start creating stories around you.

[00:15:00] Gunjani: Based on the emotion that is present at that moment. So yes, with my son, literally as soon as he'll be like, Mommy, you don't love me. So we literally have like a five-minute teaching moment.

[00:15:10] Gunjani: Where it's like, baby you are love. Like every night before he goes to bed, I'll ask him, do you feel love today? Because we love people based on the way we know love. But not necessarily people receive love the way they want to receive love, like the whole love language thing. So I will go and make sure that he understands that love and his worthiness are not attached to things or other things that come up.

[00:15:31] Gunjani: Like there are certain things that he will say. And he'll be like it was my fault. Now he's five years old, so he starts to internalize that and I'm like, depression is not a lineage and I don't want that for him. So I will tell him, Baby, it's not your fault. And sometimes we can make mistakes.

[00:15:44] Gunjani: So he will repeat that back to me. He's like, Mommy, it's okay to make mistakes. And I'm like a perfectionist and recovery. So I teach him those things in an effort to be like, it's okay to make mistakes, fail. All so many times, but I think it's important to interject that in the early years of life so that it doesn't become their story.

[00:16:03] Aneta: Right. So the other thing you said that was really interesting, was to explain the difference between trauma with a big T or a little T.

[00:16:11] Gunjani: Okay, so big T trauma according to the psychiatry diagnosis, basically we consider that as sexual trauma, natural disasters, death of a loved one, accidents, or combat or murder.

[00:16:27] Gunjani: Whereas small T trauma can be everyday life events, the way we perceive an emotional reaction that we have towards it. I'm just going to give you an example of what small T trauma would look like for me and my life. In the early years of my dad's life, they were very busy.

[00:16:40] Gunjani: He was busy raising a company and growing a company and I perceived that as him never being around him emotionally neglecting me and abandoning me. I mean, it wasn't his intention, but that helped to provide the finances that we had later. But at the time, as a child, I just never saw him around.

[00:16:59] Gunjani: Is that a big T trauma? No, not really, but it's a small T trauma because it left an impact on how I felt so abundant and neglected. Or small T trauma can be, you leave your child at school or you lose them somewhere and then they find you again. And they perceive that as you left me right.

[00:17:16] Gunjani: And it's like I was just five steps ahead. You just didn't see me because you were five and the whole thing. And to him, he feels that as you left me and I'm like, we leave you. And then we had to, so anything that has an emotional distress. So one of the things I tell my clients on a scale of zero to ten, we call it subjective unit tests.

[00:17:34] Gunjani: So on a scale of zero to 10, 10 being the worst distress you've ever felt, zero being none. If you have an event, any event, any memory, any situation in your life that you were to make an inventory of, that's what people call triggers. If you were to make an inventory and you feel even like a three or four to seven-level distress, I think is multi-trauma because if you remember it, there is an emotional charge attached to it. And it doesn't have to be.

[00:18:01] Aneta: Yeah. No, and I think it's important to know that if people, it's validating to understand that, you can use the word trauma because to you this was something that was really impactful. We don't need to compare it to somebody else's. So I think that that's important because it's almost like, in my perception that for a while we didn't know what trauma was or not used very often by sort of in the mainstream, by everyday people.

[00:18:27] Aneta: And then now it's used everywhere. Like I hear the word trauma for just about everything. So I wanted the clarification because I think it's important. And so having all of these different modalities, as part of your toolkit, because you've got so many, what does it look like when you're meeting with a new client?

[00:18:46] Aneta: And do they typically come to you because they might have something that they know is troubling them and then you decide what to use when or how does that work? Because there are so many different modalities that I know that you are certified and skilled in. You've collected along the way. I love that.

[00:19:03] Gunjani: I was a speaker. I say that because I didn't believe that my body had all the wisdom then. And that I was always seeking and learning. And intellectualization was one of my protectors, like, the more I know, the more I'll feel better. And actually, it was quite the opposite. It didn't do the trick, but in the meantime, I collected all these tools.

[00:19:22] Gunjani: And I use at this point, there are two major modalities that I use is E M D R E F T. I do a lot of energy work and there was a reason and how I fell into that because again, knowing all this stuff, it's like knowing peace was not about finding peace or feeling peace.

[00:19:39] Gunjani: We can know and think peace all day long, but we can't feel it unless we actually allow ourselves to feel all the range of emotions that we are going to read. So as a result of me being a seeker, I sought all these certificates, but it does help. So at the time when I was working with people, I still do part-time. I mostly work with groups.

[00:20:00] Gunjani: At this point but one of my biggest things is, I don't think one size fits all approach works because I really believe that we are all different and there's individuation and the depth that we each have and where we are on our journey. So, I believe in meeting people where they're at and using the tools based on what they need.

[00:20:20] Gunjani: I truly believe that my job is just to hold space. And then you have the power, you have the wisdom within you. Because one of the biggest things that happen in therapy is when you provide a safe and compassionate and completely non-judgmental space, unconsciously, the people in front of you start eventually believing and feeling their nervous system starts recognizing that safety is a good thing.

[00:20:44] Gunjani: Because sometimes what happens is, what we didn't receive in childhood, we don't believe as adults. So it's like, even though we know love is a good thing, we know that safety is a good thing. If we didn't receive that as children, that seems very foreign to our brain and our body, so we reject it. We self-sabotage it. We don't like it. It's unfamiliar territory.

[00:21:02] Gunjani: So I think it's really important to meet people where they're at on their journey. And give them the tools. I give them a whole bunch of tools. And then I also give them the autonomy and the discernment that at the end of the day, my job is to give you the tools.

[00:21:17] Gunjani: But the work that we do here in therapy, one hour or in my sessions, in my coaching sessions, the work that you do outside is just as important because for the sake of neuroplasticity, which is, your brain continues, like every thought we think is a neural connection. Every feeling we feel is a neural connection.

[00:21:35] Gunjani: So outside, it's not just the, all those changes happen in therapy. It happens a hundred percent outside of therapy. So I want to give you tools that you didn't have before that you can use instead of when I'm triggered, I do the same pattern, same behaviors. You're here for a change, but I want to make change fun, easy, and empowering and you feel capable of doing that?

[00:21:59] Gunjani: So if I give you tools that feel nice, gentle, you use those tools as opposed to doing the same things you were doing differently because nothing changes. If nothing changes, right? So it's important that you have all the tools and then you use them when you want them outside of the sessions. So then you start coping with it. In a way that suits and serves you as opposed to in a way that didn't serve you and you were stuck and frustrated and in the same patterns over and over.

[00:22:28] Aneta: Absolutely. I love that and I love giving people, sort of as you said, giving them the tools and then allowing for their own discernment and choice to help them figure out what works best.

[00:22:38] Aneta: And that leads me to the next thought I had, which you've talked a little bit about. Our body that the wisdom is within our own bodies, within ourselves. But I know a lot of people don't necessarily feel that they keep seeking, as you said, even if you were seeking information. We think that it's outside that somebody else is going to have these answers.

[00:22:56] Aneta: So I'd love for us to just spend a little bit of time saying, what does it feel to really be able to tap into the body's wisdom and to go inward versus seeking the answers externally?

[00:23:08] Gunjani: For me, that journey started three, four years ago, when I was going through my own postpartum anxiety and secondary trauma world. My mother-in-law has a disability and it was a very new experience because I got married, then I had her come in from Tanzania, literally the next year. And then I had my son the following year. So big changes in terms of my life just happened back to back to back.

[00:23:33] Gunjani: And even though those were the things that I wanted, as and when they were happening, they felt very overwhelming to my nervous system because, like, I would go to therapy and I would take care of things, but I didn't think that, I just got married and I'm going through some changes. Let me go seek therapy. I didn't do that because I was like, I can do it on my own.

[00:23:50] Gunjani: And one of the things about how high functioning anxiety is, like you just think you can all do it on your own and it's a trauma response, does not seek support. And I was like, I did that. And in hindsight, I realized that.

[00:24:01] Gunjani: So as I was going through that experience of just being so disconnected and I was feeling numb. Now looking back, I can say I was feeling numb. I was having all these body image issues. I was just literally surviving. So I was doing my day-to-day activity, but I was literally pouring out of an empty cup.

[00:24:19] Gunjani: My son became my entire universe and it's like generationally we passed down what we learn. My mom did the exact same thing and I was becoming my mother and one day I just stopped in my tracks and I literally told my husband, I think I'm becoming my mother.

[00:24:31] Gunjani: I'm literally pouring. Out of an empty cup doing everything. For everybody else and just, I don't even have time for myself or I am not even thinking about myself. And around that time, I turned 40 and I was like, this year I made it an intention that this decade is going to be the best decade of my life.

[00:24:48] Gunjani: Because in my thirties I had some stuff. In my twenties, I had some stuff in my teenage and I was like, every time I wasn't in the, why is this happening to me phase anymore. And because I recognized that I didn't want that victim consciousness, but I wanted to work through it and I needed some tool that would help me connect my mind, body. Help me better understand my emotions and learn about emotions.

[00:25:14] Gunjani: And that took me on a whole rabbit hole of, teaching emotional intelligence at this point. But my mind and body were not connected and I didn't even know it because I was literally so numb or I was overwhelmed and I would be ruminating in my head all the time. I had all this resentment for people around me and I was just disconnected from my husband.

[00:25:34] Gunjani: I would go in this total fear fight or flight mode when I would be around some of my family members. It was just very, very difficult. And I was like, this has got to stop, and it actually started to really, I started to look into it because I really used to have major postpartum rage and I would get so aggressive.

[00:25:53] Gunjani: Like when Avic turned, that's my son, he turned two he had obviously major temper tantrums and I didn't really understand all of these things because I was so in my fight or flight mode. And I was like, given all my years of trauma, knowledge, and history and all this stuff, I'm about to traumatize my kid.

[00:26:11] Gunjani: And I can't live with that. So it was one of those, I sat down and I'm like, all right. In my meditation, I needed a tool that would help me, that would be trauma involved, and that I can help a lot of women. And that's how trauma-informed breathwork came to me.

[00:26:25] Gunjani: And I went on this journey of I wanted a self-healing modality. I wanted to be able to connect to my body because that's when you know all this knowledge about. We hold the trauma in our bodies. I knew it. Yeah. But I was like, every time I don't want to go to someone, I wanted to be able to use a tool that would just help me.

[00:26:45] Gunjani: So I used to do EFT. EFT is an emotional freedom technique. So basically you just release all this energy, you keep tapping on all these emergences in your body and you release all this stuck emotionality in your system. So that led me into more energy work, energy medicine, and energy healing, and I was just like my body.

[00:27:05] Gunjani: I need to start respecting my body. I need to go in and all this resentment, all this frustration, all this overwhelm that I'm holding in my body. And I need to go in and rewire and teach my nervous system to just become grounded, peaceful, and harmonious. And one of the things that happens with trauma was, You have to titrate it.

[00:27:25] Gunjani: A lot of times, even in the breath work or the meditation world, sometimes there are things that people will do. A lot of times people with high functioning anxiety, women, they'll tell me, I don't like meditation. I don't like being still, and it's not about being still, it's like when you are being still.

[00:27:39] Gunjani: And it's like people have this misconception of meditation that you should be still and not think anything. And it's actually quite the opposite. If you're thinking, you're releasing stress from your body, you're releasing stress from your mind. So think, but just bring your attention to awareness on a point of focus.

[00:27:56] Gunjani: You're teaching your body and your brain to focus. You're releasing all the emotions. What do you gather throughout the day that you're taking into the next day? Let's say you start the week with three points of trauma, on a scale of zero to ten, when you sleep, let's say you take off seven levels of stress out of your body. But then there are still things that you accumulate throughout the day and you have like three stress.

[00:28:20] Gunjani: So if you don't release that three, that three becomes six, next day. That six becomes nine, the next day. Then nine becomes twelve, the next day. By Friday you're at 15 and you're either doing retail therapy, drinking, smoking, doing C, B, D, or whatever it is that we do to really escape and suppress our emotions because it is so overwhelming.

[00:28:38] Gunjani: Eventually our bar keeps scores and it shows up as discomfort. It shows up as a disease. It shows up as muscle pain. It shows up as different things in our bodies.

[00:28:49] Aneta: Thank you for walking us through actually describing what happens to our nervous system, because I feel like for a while we talked a lot about meditation and mindfulness, and it really was, as you said quieting our mind or trying to, or the misperceived that we need to quiet everything and empty our thoughts, but really, I love with breath work and some of the other modalities that you talked about it's understanding what's happening to our bodies instead.

[00:29:19] Aneta: Into our nervous systems and being able to actually move the energy through in order to release and probably because you and I are in the community with the trauma-informed breath work, we hear about this a lot, but I do feel, do you feel like people coming to you, clients are more familiar with different energy work now than they were maybe even just a couple of years ago?

[00:29:46] Gunjani: A hundred percent. And I really see that there are certain communities I'm in that people are more inclined to be in this energy world. Because it's like the mental work is great, it is needed, it is introspective. It helps our brain understand. And make meaning of things, which is just as important.

[00:30:02] Gunjani: But I think, I was mentioning earlier, that we can't sink ourselves out of stress. We have to un-feel the way we felt it. So we basically have to release everything intentionally that we are calling in. We endured and release physically what is not serving us anymore.

[00:30:20] Gunjani: Otherwise, we keep playing the same patterns and cycles over and over and over again. And most people now, like the EFT community is a huge community because those are the tools that you can actually use by yourself. Once you know that you don't actually have to go to a practitioner or make an appointment and do all the things you can do and use these tools absolutely self-healing modalities on your own as and when you wanted and needed, and on the daily, if not.

[00:30:49] Gunjani: There are times that if I'm going through something major, I literally sit there and tap. Or meditation and breath work is a part of my daily practice. It's non-negotiable. And not just like daily practice as in once a day practice like every three, four hours a day practice. Because as someone who had ADHD. Emotional dysregulation is a huge part of my life, so I want to not just model emotional regulation to my son but also live a life that feels harmonious.

[00:31:17] Gunjani: Not always on fight or flight, it's like these days I have a rule where if I tell you things five times, I've made huge progress from when I used to be completely in the patient world. After that, I just happen to ask you if I can snap and then I'll really snap.

[00:31:29] Gunjani: So it takes a lot to really get frustrated, but it's like there used to be times, I always tell my clients when they're first new breath work, I'm like, there'll be times that your body will be so peaceful that you will want to get upset, but upset won't come out because you've emptied it all out. And that absolutely used to happen to me. And I'm like what? So that's fascinating to me.

[00:31:53] Aneta: Well, and also, nobody wants to go through hardships or challenging times. But for me, I'm curious about how you feel about this. I feel like all of those things that have happened to me brought upon the curiosity and the seeking of things to be able to do to help myself and then, I say, how can I help someone else with this information?

[00:32:16] Aneta: Who else could benefit from using this? And so it is using what could have been something that was really challenging and not staying stuck, but then saying, I've gotten past this or, I'm in the process. I'm on the journey of coping myself. So how can I share this with someone else? Do you feel like that was how you evolved into all of these different modalities yourself as part of your healing journey?

[00:32:39] Gunjani: Hundred percent. Because when I was in it and I didn't have these tools or didn't have the wisdom, my body's wisdom, I truly used to believe that things are happening to me.

[00:32:48] Gunjani: And now I toggle between, things are happening through an as me and sometimes for me. This is what I truly think at this point. This is just my perspective of life and where I'm at based on the knowledge and wisdom that I've gathered. I truly feel that we come into this experience in this human plane, in this 3D, just as this loving, most worthy, most powerful, most awesome beings ever, right?

[00:33:12] Gunjani: And then life happens and we gather our karma. We gather our stuff, we gather all this stuff along the way. And if we're given the right tools, I think we pivot. There is strength, there is resilience that we learn with each fall. I think pain is inevitable in this human experience.

[00:33:30] Gunjani: No matter what and when and how. It just happens, right? But the suffering is optional. When you get stuck in that pain is when you suffer, when you keep going over and doing the same things over and over, over and over, and get attached and married to that pain instead of just observing it with loving awareness and releasing it and knowing, and it's like easy for you to say no.

[00:33:52] Gunjani: It's not easy for me to say I've endured a lot of pain in my life, but a lot of times I was just, stuck in that pain and then it's like addiction to emotional suffering. And I really believe that when we have these tools, when we learn, because it's like at the end of the day, our soul is here to learn a lesson.

[00:34:09] Gunjani: If we learn something from that pain, from that test. It's like I used to always ask myself, why is this happening to me? Because that was my brain's way of seeking what was my story. And then when I switch the narrative and flip the switch and is in, what am I learning through this?

[00:34:25] Gunjani: I get through it so much faster and the wisdom comes and the pain leaves, and that lesson never, that test never happens again. And I did that over and over to now realize this, but I say this because I truly believe that when we learn from these things, when we get the lesson, then it gets easier and easier, because we're getting the lesson and we're not keep repeating the same things over and over.

[00:34:50] Gunjani: It's like, fear is inevitable. That's the pattern we learn. So if that's the pattern that we've learned, then how can we teach ourselves through, see the fear and meet it with love? Meet it with safety, because the antidote to fear is safety change and uncertainty brings a lot of fear. But how can we get through it by learning and applying these tools and being more graceful and being more compassionate, and being more kind, seeking support, asking for help so that we can get through it, feeling more connected, feeling more loved, feeling like connecting to our highest self and not seeking from answers outside? Because all that we need is within us. We have, we know, we just don't allow that because we're in our minds so much.

[00:35:36] Aneta: Right. It's so interesting. I just have this thought that. Typically parents are young when we have our kids, and I know I had my kids in my twenties and I know so much more now than I did back then and think, I would've parented so differently if I had them later in life. But, part of me is like, I think that's part of their lesson.

[00:35:58] Aneta: It's like there really aren't shortcuts. And so we are all going to go through, as you said, the soul's lessons. We're going to hopefully learn from it, and do something better with it. And as Maya Angelou says, when we know better, we do better. And so we find ourselves here continuing to grow and to learn and to do better.

[00:36:18] Aneta: And so I wanted to talk a little bit about what it means to pronounce your name correctly because you and I talked a little bit about this. So you immigrated from India? I immigrated as well from Serbia. So we both have names that are not traditionally American names. And so what was your experience like?

[00:36:43] Aneta: Starting school and having, your name as Gunjani and so what was it like, and did anyone try to change it to something American or mispronounce it or shorten it for you?

[00:36:58] Gunjani: That is quite a story. So Gunjan was a very common name in India and my dad wanted it to be unique, so he named it Gunjani, Gunjan, meaning humming.

[00:37:06] Gunjani: It means humming. In India, most of the names mean something most of the time, either in Sanskrit or Hindi. Those are some of the languages that we use in India. So when I came here, it was one of the hardest things in terms of my name. I migrated here when I was 18. So I came here for undergrad and since then I've been here on and off.

[00:37:25] Gunjani: My parents still live there, my sister still lives there. So my family still is very much based in India. So when I came here, one of the hardest things was my name because people would be like, one of my cousins at the time, she was like, everybody here, like most Indian people here tend to have, not everybody, but most Indian people tend to have an Americanized version of their name so that it's easier for everybody around them to say it.

[00:37:47] Gunjani: And my name ended up being Jane. I'm nothing like Jane. Maybe the Tarzan Wild Jane. But Jane is not my jam. So I was like, okay, well I went with the flow because I was really new. I grew up in a culture where don't say anything. You don't speak back to your adults. You're just listening, like very people-pleasing.

[00:38:09] Gunjani: So I was like, okay, Jane, it is. I did that. And then a couple of years later, I moved out to live in the dorms by myself. I used to live with my aunt when I first came here, and that's how I acquired that name. And then I started living on my own. And my friends are like, you're not a Jane. You're we're going to keep it Gunjani.

[00:38:25] Gunjani: And I'm like, okay. So then there was a period of my life when I used to work in a psychiatric hospital when I was training to become a therapist. And we used to have like a juvenile unit, an adult unit, and adolescents in that. And I was in North Dakota, believe it or not.

[00:38:44] Gunjani: And it was this very stoic Norwegian, part of my life. And it was interesting, people absolutely couldn't say my name there. They were like, can we call you G? Can we call you G unit, G money, G this, that? And around that time I was in my mid-twenties and I really started to reflect and realize that my name is such a big part of my identity.

[00:39:06] Gunjani: I love my name. I absolutely love it and there's nothing wrong with it. And if people are having a hard time, it is not my responsibility to change my name because people around me are having a hard time with it. If I didn't like it, I would change it, but I love my name.

[00:39:21] Gunjani: So I always make an attempt to teach people my name, but because of my name, one of the things I've noticed when I'm in big circles or in networking events or something, people won't call on me or people won't say my name or won't ask for my attention because they have a hard time saying my name. So I always go with lunch, Geo, and Jay, which is easier.

[00:39:42] Gunjani: I understand. That it's hard for people. But I would like to be recognized or even asked, how do you say my name? Because I think it's a big part of like today you clarify. Normally I would be like, Aneta, and I'm like, that's not how your name is. Aneta, that's how your name is. It makes a difference. I don't know so, yeah.

[00:40:01] Aneta: I love that you shared that because it's interesting and everybody shared sort of my name story and just kind of reclaiming it, but it does matter and it is interesting and for me, especially when people are English speakers when they do say the name correctly, doesn't it feel like amazing. It's like a recognition

[00:40:23] Gunjani: I've totally heard, seen, and recognized at that moment. Not that I needed it from the outside, but sometimes I like external validation.

[00:40:32] Aneta: Yes. No, it's so true. So thank you for sharing that, because I do think that there are probably other people out there who maybe immigrated even at a younger age who have been calling themselves Jane or Lucy or something that is not even close to their name and maybe it's time and it's permission.

[00:40:55] Aneta: So Gunjani, what are some of the biggest lessons on this journey of your healing journey? And also as you're working with so many other people, help them with theirs.

[00:41:04] Aneta: What are some things that maybe you want to share with the community? Maybe people are just starting their journey, or they're starting to ask themselves some questions and maybe they're seeking. What are some things that they should keep in mind or things that you want to impart?

[00:41:19] Gunjani: I actually wrote a Medium article on that some time ago. And one of the things that I wrote on there was, and I truly believe this to be true at this point, just given the number of changes I've been in my life and how I see change. I truly believe that change is the only constant we experience. So if we have a growth mindset and if we allow ourselves to be in a muck, like an emotional muck.

[00:41:43] Gunjani: And process through that, we really experience this notice and learn the strength and the resilience that has always been within us. But I think it's really important to be psychologically and emotionally flexible through that. If you have a growth mindset and you're flexible through that change and know that nothing lasts forever. Everything is temporary.

[00:42:07] Gunjani: Including the happiness or the joy and I'm not saying happiness is a temporary experience. It should be our way of life. But I really think that if we attach ourselves to external materialistic things or if it comes from the outside, then it's much harder to sustain that.

[00:42:27] Gunjani: So I really think that it has to come from within. Joy has to be an experience that we have to find within and not seek or wait on it from the outside. But also realize that whatever we might be going through, whatever painful situation, whatever hardships, whatever darkness and shadows that we are experiencing will not last forever.

[00:42:47] Gunjani: And asking for help through that. Because again, when we try to do it on our own, it's so much longer than if we do it with the support of someone that could literally cut the time in half or even lesser. Because there is so much you can tap into your wisdom when you borrow the safety and the attunement from the other.

[00:43:07] Gunjani: So that has really been monumental for me because I was like, I can do it on my own. I am a therapist. And it's like, no, we need help too. Sometimes it's hard to ask for help. So that's second. And I really think that the third thing is literally the more we trust that life is happening for us and we allow life to happen through us and as us.

[00:43:29] Gunjani: And that took me a while to learn and understand because I literally was so disconnected with myself or my higher self, or my spirit guides or that spiritual world or that part of me. When I started the breathwork journey, I truly found that I was able to trust life and I was able to trust myself and my intuition and there is a force outside of me that was always here to help support and love me through it.

[00:43:54] Gunjani: And when I allowed that and surrendered all of my worries, all of my overwhelm, all my skeptic, all of the mind stuff, life was really happening for me. like, one of the things that I asked through that process was I really am into the world of manifesting, and I really was like, I want a group of women that are very impacting and leaders in their communities.

[00:44:14] Gunjani: And I can have these like-minded conversations because I didn't have this available to me back two, three years ago. And I was like, I want to be connected to those women. And when I just let it go without any attachment, I now am so fortunate to have met some amazing, awesome women across the globe that I now call friends.

[00:44:34] Gunjani: And I'm just like, wow. So when we un-attach from the outcome that we want so badly when we are so holding tightly too. It's like my mom always used to say this analogy when you hold sand too tightly, it slips. So let it go. Open your hand and just enjoy what is here now, the present. The satisfaction.

[00:44:53] Gunjani: Because one of the things that happen in terms of the success and the high functioning anxiety world is no matter how hard we've worked, we are always measuring ourselves back forward as in what has not happened, what did I not do enough? What is this? What is that? And the negativity and our critique and the self-doubt that we don't allow ourselves to be present with how much we have acquired, what we've done.

[00:45:13] Gunjani: The good, the abundance, the gratitude, and the appreciation of life that is here and now, and literally, it's like in my head, I always like, whenever my mind goes into places that it's not supposed to go, I always bring it back and center myself by doing these modalities. So often, I'm catching myself now much quicker because I have these tools, but literally, things are always working out for me.

[00:45:35] Gunjani: Things are always working out for me. I'm so blessed. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And just feeling that gratitude and that appreciation literally feels just so calming, so peaceful, and it allows me to serve myself first and then show up for others just with that capacity and pour into others.

[00:45:53] Aneta: Beautiful lessons. And the final question I always ask everyone is, what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?

[00:46:02] Gunjani: What I started with, it's like literally there's an exercise that I do every morning as a part of my journaling, and it really helps me stay focused with my why. And it's like a journal exercise that you can write a letter to yourself. As if it's your last day. So let's say your last day was one year old and you write a letter to yourself that I have accomplished so much. I've met so many amazing people. I've made an impact on so many women's lives. I have shown up for so many people.

[00:46:32] Gunjani: For my family, I have shown up as the best mother I could be. It's almost like you're writing a legacy letter to yourself every day. As if it's already done. And from this place of all the things you want to accomplish, so that you come from this place of, these are the things I want to do. I'm appreciative of all the things that I've achieved, and accomplished, and I'm so thankful for, it because we have two things, imagination, and memory.

[00:46:56] Gunjani: We can either stay stuck in our past with our memory, or we can just imagine and be wild and think of all the possibilities that we can create for ourselves, now that we never know what doors we open as a result of doing that.

[00:47:11] Aneta: I love that. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful for our conversation and grateful to introduce you to my community and to consider you my friend, which you are.

[00:47:22] How can we find you? Where can folks follow you and how can we best support you? Do you have anything that you're working on that you'd like to share right now?

[00:47:31] Gunjani: Yes. Thank you for asking that. So I am on Instagram as a Holistic Anxiety Coach, and I literally post all this content related to emotional regulation, nervous system regulation, how to manage your anxiety or that fear of what's next or fear of failure, or fear of success, fear of change, fear of all the things that we get ourselves strapped into. And I just literally want women to embrace and love life and design and create a life they love. So that's where you can find me. You can send me an email, or you can send me a dm.

[00:48:04] Gunjani: One of the things I just brought it back from I'd stopped that in a little bit, but I brought back is my breathwork sessions. If you've never experienced breathwork before it's absolutely complimentary, and or donation based. If you wanted to leave a donation, great. If not, no worries.

[00:48:20] Gunjani: But just literally attend and experience in one session, in one meditative session. It's like there's, in the breathwork world, we say it's like if you breathe more than 20 minutes, you literally unlock so much relaxation, so much deep peace, so much data, alpha waves, while you are awake. Most of those things happen when we're deeply sleeping and resting, but while we're awake.

[00:48:43] Gunjani: So it's one of the best experiences that has happened to me and all the people that are in my community, I want them to experience that. So I have breath work workshops. I'm actually also doing a masterclass that's called unleash and embody power, your peace, power, and potential because I really think we have all the power within us to feel what we want to feel to design the life that we want to design and live our full potential.

[00:49:10] Gunjani: So that is also available and free. So reach out to me if you'd like. The next one is coming up really shortly, in the next two weeks. And I would love to have you there, experience that. And really if you've done a lot of mindset work and you want to go deeper and you want to experience really the depth of life, you literally can do that in less than 30 minutes.

[00:49:33] Gunjani: It really can be that quick. It comes from the masterclass, one of the things I teach is the science of stress and fear. And we go into a lot of embodiment and somatic exercises and tools. I want you to have as many tools as you can so that you can show up to life feeling confident and not what am I going to do. And in fear and powerlessness.

[00:49:58] Aneta: Beautiful. Well, I am so excited for everyone to experience that. So we will include all the details in the show notes, and just thank you for showing up as yourself for our time together and I hope you have continued success.

[00:50:14] Gunjani: Thank you and thank you so much for having, and likewise sending you all that love back and just so honored and fortunate to call you my friend. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me on the show, your audience, your community, and just how you show up. So really thank this was an amazing conversation.

[00:50:30] Aneta: Take care.

[00:50:30] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals created more joy and are living the life that they've dreamt of living.

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