Love Heals: A Journey From Chronic Pain To Inner Peace

In this heartfelt conversation, filmmaker Krisanna Sexton and producer Dana Croschere delve into the transformative power of self-love and compassion in healing chronic pain. Dana shares her personal journey from enduring persistent pain to discovering relief through ancient mind-body practices and emotional release techniques. Their award-winning documentary, Love Heals, serves as a testament to the profound impact of embracing love as a healing force.

Join us as we explore how vulnerability, emotional expression, and self-compassion can lead to profound physical and emotional healing.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Giselle.

We believe love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world.

Don't forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content.

On today's podcast we'll be talking about the power of love in helping us heal our bodies.

Today I'm speaking with the filmmaker as well as the producer of the incredible film Love Heals,

An award-winning documentary following the journey of Dana,

A chronic pain sufferer in search of healing.

Today I'm here with Kristana Sexton who is the filmmaker who has been passionately producing content since she was 16 years old.

As an independent filmmaker she's able to craft stories in a way that reflect her heart of love and compassion for the person on the other side of the lens.

And I'm also here with Dana Crochier who is not only the producer of Love Heals but is featured as a main character in the film.

Dana's journey is an inspirational one,

Full of obstacles including two unsuccessful spine surgeries in 2020.

While still experiencing some pain Dana has been able to harness the power of her mind to accomplish things she once thought impossible by practicing the ancient mind-body techniques featured in the film.

She now greets every day with a smile as she works hard to spread the message of Love Heals.

Welcome to the podcast Kristana and Dana.

Thank you,

Thanks for having us.

Oh no,

I'm so excited that you're here.

I was so so moved by your film and hopefully I will not get teary-eyed during our conversation.

I actually saw a preview of it in Anita Mourjani's Instagram and I was instantly drawn and I saw a little clip of it and I'm like okay I gotta watch this film and I'm so glad that I did.

Before I start with my questions I just want to tell you that I was so moved.

There were some moments that it just touched my heart so much and I just want to share one in particular.

The scream therapy that you did Dana,

If you remember that.

I was screaming with you and I was crying my eyes out and I never thought that I actually would have been that moved but I don't know it was like something shifted or something happened for me and so I immediately thought okay I want to talk to these ladies.

I think this film is phenomenal and so I just wanted to say thank you,

Thank you,

Thank you for helping me find Water Up Fire Down and also for sharing your story.

Yeah,

Thanks a lot.

Yeah,

Thank you so much.

I haven't heard anybody say that yet like they actually did it with me and I just find that oh I just it was very unexpected because when you started to actually do it I'm like okay what's happening here and then I don't know what happened but I kind of got sucked into the event and I remember kind of screaming with you and I was really I was crying and I was like okay what's happening here then I thought oh I should do this scream therapy.

For those of my listeners who haven't seen the film,

I was wondering if you could start sharing a little bit Dana about your story and a little bit about your experiences with chronic pain that actually led to the development of this film.

Yes,

Thank you for asking.

It was back in 2017 when I first started experiencing pain.

I was just exercising,

I was running on a treadmill and I pulled a muscle in my calf and it was like you know oh great I pulled a muscle I can rest and figure this out it's no big deal and after a period of time my other calf and legs started to hurt and it was it just wasn't getting any better it's like this injury opened up a can of worms in my body ultimately I started seeing you know practitioners I went to physical therapy ultimately they thought well maybe the pain is coming from your back so I started to do some chiropractic care and all of that was leading me nowhere fast my pain wasn't getting any better it was just kind of spreading in the lower extremities of my body and my lower back sciatica and you know I felt really lost because I had spent an enormous amount of money and time trying to figure out how to heal from this pain and what was actually causing it so eventually one of the practitioners said well you need to go get an MRI on your back because there are a lot of nerves that run through the legs that come from the lower back so I did and they said oh my gosh you have a herniated disc and there's nerve compression and spinal stenosis and you know all of these terms that are very scary when you get them back on an MRI and I thought oh my gosh okay well there's the answer you know at least I understand what's happening and you know the very last thing I wanted to do was surgery so they sent me for an injection saying that you know this should really help you and I thought okay and it actually made things much much worse I think they hit a nerve I actually had worse pain after the injection and my ankles and feet I mean it was getting really really bad so one thing led to another and during COVID it was March of 2020 when you know all of this was coming to a head and they said we need to get you in surgery before your body starts to like shift and my foot was acting weird and they just made it sound very urgent and I thought okay so meanwhile Chrisanna is and I won't steal her thunder but she started getting interested in my journey in a way of like maybe I should start filming this and I'll let her speak more to it but there was something in her that just thought she should start documenting my journey because it was so crazy I mean it went on for years and you know I won't ruin the punchline of the film but I did go through those surgeries obviously and they made me worse than than before so and so began the journey.

Yeah thank you for sharing that that must have been a terrifying time you know and so it's so interesting so thank you for mentioning Chrisanna's documentation because I remember in the film one of the things that really struck me was that Chrisanna had sent that she was ready to witness a miracle and I was going to ask her what made you think there would be one because the circumstances weren't that you know like things were not great things were scary and so I was just wondering Chrisanna if you could share what made you think oh I should document this because something good's gonna happen.

That is a great question first I think I just started filming because I felt compelled it's like my intuition said I said I had to or something like I just and it wasn't like I was filming all the time I mean there's plenty of really really hard painful moments that I would have never picked up a camera but I think because even as we got into some of the recovery journey Dana was like a full-time student of her healing and trying to recover and we actually started to hear stories of people who miraculously were out of pain or you know achieved some some sort of like incredible healing after trying different modalities and alternative modalities so then I thought well she's doing a lot of different things so wouldn't it be really cool if we find the one thing and I know for a long time we were on this journey of finding like the silver bullet or the the one thing that was going to help her achieve a pain-free life because in our mind at the time that was healing healing was not not having any pain so of course as we embarked on that journey and what you see documented in the film is we started to realize it's changing our relationship to what is healing changing our relationship to what is pain or maybe I should say redefining what is healing changing our relationship to pain that's actually the most important piece there is no such thing as now plenty of people do have like in one moment they go pain-free but throughout their life they're going to have other issues like that's the human experience so yeah I think that's my long answer to to why I don't know that it was like a specific moment or anything it's just I felt compelled and then I started to think at the end of the day I thought this would consider my hard drive and just be like a marker maybe in a year or two years we'll look back on it and we'll actually see progress because it felt like nothing was changing so I held on to this hope that things are changing maybe it's just so slow that if I have these little markers in time we can look back and say oh my god like there was a point where Dana couldn't even sit for more than 15 minutes she like she couldn't sit and I thought oh she'll never be able to really work again and I can now we can look back and say oh my god she's doesn't have that sciatica pain she doesn't have that so even though there's still lingering stuff it's always changing it's always evolving and anyway so yeah it's been a really amazing journey and opportunity well what you said was so powerful there were so many layers the first one that I wanted to talk about was really the the concept of you saying you know people think that the goal was really to be live pain-free and so we are so sometimes body focused that unless everything is perfect it just kind of makes us upset right like because oh everything should be perfect but really your journey was way deeper than that there's so many aspects to it I want to talk about the power of belief because you had to believe despite what was being shown out there what the reality was telling you about what was happening for Dana and what you were witnessing you had to believe that it could get better and so in in the power of belief is so strong what what role has the power of belief for having that kind of inner guidance played in your life?

I'll answer first and then I'll let Dana because of course she was the one experiencing it but there was some seed that was planted in my mind at some point I can't pinpoint it I just think it was divine where someone said to me and and then I've heard it since change is the only constant we have so when Dana was laying like could barely move walking a little bit trying to recover it felt so long and I literally would say it was like my mantra and I would say to Dana like change is the only constant we have and even if it feels like it's changing for the worse that's still change it's still something is shifting there's no such thing as being stuck it's just not even so our brain tells us this is forever but I just held on to that hope of like if it can change for the worse whatever that even means then it can change for the better and what if I just redefine what good and bad looks like like maybe at some point we're actually look I'm gonna look on this with gratitude and I would journal about that like something about this I can't see it now and I'm angry and I basically hate everything but at some point I'm gonna have so much gratitude because on the other side it will make sense why we had to experience this dark season where we I mean really a lot of our friends or just people in our life couldn't even hang with us it was too heavy it was too much you know like they were they were going through COVID stuff but they were like going on road trips and doing all these things meanwhile we're holed up in our house trying to have Dana recover from surgery so yeah we felt like victims and there was a lot of steps in working that out but I think that I had to hold on to something and I like re even developed a new form of faith I had walked away from my spirituality that I was raised with like the Christian faith and I just I was rejected in that way but I found a new faith that was similar but my own and that was also an anchor like okay there's something greater outside of me that's guiding us and leading us and this is not the end maybe it's just the beginning so if I write if I frame it that way in my brain what would that mean if it was just the beginning what kind of story would I write with this chapter and I wanted to write the chapter of being a really amazing partner and being someone who showed up with love and care and you know didn't judge Dana regardless of where she was at in her healing process and that you know that was just an intention that I said so okay I feel like I rambled a little bit there but I'll let Dana share too that was great wow you were the best partner I actually can't believe that I got so fortunate to be cared for by such an incredibly kind loving human like Krisanna to be honest with you I don't know how I would have navigated that season without her so you didn't set the intention you did it you gave me the love and support that I needed to get through the most difficult time in my life so but the question was about belief and I will tell you that I really had to dig deep on this one because the truth of the matter is when I went into surgery I had a deep belief that that was going to help me heal that actually it was going to take care of all the pain that I was experiencing so I thought if that was my belief and I believed it with my whole heart and it went the complete opposite direction you know I went through the first surgery and something felt wrong I wasn't healing I was still in I mean way worse pain than before the surgery not just because of the surgical site it was something more and I didn't know that they you know nicked my spinal column and I had a spinal fluid leak for six weeks until they put me back into emergency surgery to repair it and then the repair didn't go the way they had planned and I was laying in ICU at some point going how did I end up here yeah how how did this happen because my belief that I was going to heal through all of that was so strong and here I am not knowing if I'm going to leave the hospital because I could not they couldn't get the pain under control the leak you know it was just it was a bad situation and I thought I may never walk again I may not live so after a period of time I was I was a victim right so I felt very victimized I couldn't believe I felt like my life was over I made the biggest mistake of my life by going through this surgery and then I started to find out how many surgeries especially spine surgeries are actually unsuccessful and make people worse and I thought what in the world is happening but what happened during that time was that I got connected to a community so I was doing research and I found an app actually called curable which is for people with chronic pain and it just came to me as an ad and I started to listen to some of the content on there and there was a spine surgeon who does appear in our film and this man was talking about the damage that is being caused by people with these procedures and I was like oh my gosh this is real I'm not and I'm not alone and it just so happened at the time he had a community like he did live q a sessions over zoom twice a week for people like me and I got plugged into a community and why that is related to belief is because then I started to hear stories of people who who came back from these situations and started to find ways that they whatever it was like chrisanna said there's no silver bullet but he taught a lot about calming the nervous system you know doing expressive writing to release suppressed anger or other emotions that we have have not expressed in our lives and I thought oh my gosh what is all of this I've had so much trauma in my life what am I what am I hanging on to so I started to believe that it was possible for me to overcome all of this when I would hear stories of hope of other people that have experienced severe chronic pain thought their life was over and through these practices were able to turn it around through their belief system and knowing that they can heal in this way knowing that they can start to get their life back in ways that they thought they never could again so I think the community aspect of it was really huge for me to start hearing other people's stories which I felt very isolated and alone percent and I both really did for a long time so getting plugged into that was huge for me and then in the film you'll see that we met with Dr.

Bruce Lipton who actually wrote the book Biology of Belief and then we started to really understand how our thoughts literally become things and how we can craft our future and start to believe in ways that these things actually can come to fruition and you know obviously that's probably a whole different podcast but I will say that just visualizing the future that I wanted and believing that I could get back on a mountain to hike or on a bicycle to ride or taking a walk with my beloved Chrisanna around the park again all of those things as I believed it and would take small steps towards getting the life back that I wanted it started to unfold that way so belief is so powerful yeah yeah absolutely and as you said it takes an enormous amount of courage when you don't see it right and it is about taking those baby steps to go forward and so I think this is why the story is so powerful because you know we're always wanting to get to the end well why don't I see it why isn't it here why isn't it you know why isn't it manifested why I have a line to it and that just only reinforces that it's not there but taking baby steps in order for us and having the courage to take those baby steps are so it's so so profound and powerful you guys mentioned the connection between our emotions and our body and I'm a big believer that you know illness and disease it's just kind of that stuck energy that hasn't had anywhere to go can you tell me a little bit about how this experience helped you understand the connection between emotions and the physical body wow yeah I I mean I realized through this experience that there is a direct correlation and I think the first eye-opening experience that I had with that is it was actually Chrisanna's mom sent me a book I don't know it was maybe a couple days out of surgery and the book was called the body keeps the score and I was like what is this yeah and I started reading it and I'm like oh my gosh this is me this is me and then kind of around the same time as I started seeking information about chronic pain and chronic illness and what is causing it why do we get stuck in this loop why didn't I just heal after I had that first injury instead of it progressing into what it is and then I started to realize that there are tools out there there are books out there you know the mind body prescription by Dr.

John Sarno that John Sarno is one of the the physicians that actually understood this connection to be true and then you know his colleagues are like you know you're crazy what do you mean but that work ended up becoming really important in my life and I got connected with there's a woman that had a chronic pain she didn't go through surgery but she healed herself and she launched a platform called the you know my TMS journey and TMS stands for something that basically explains that the emotions and all of the suppressed anger and different things that we don't release throughout our lives start to cause a physiological response in our bodies it gets trapped and I and so I just was eating that information up I was like I had not heard of it that way before and so it made so much sense to me and then I thought okay if that's the case then I am willing to take the journey within to figure out how to release these emotions and things that I have just piled up throughout my life with trauma and that's what brought up you know the first thing you talked about right I went to this incredible wise practitioner who was going through like the chakra system I didn't even know what that was back then what do you mean we have all these energy centers well we're made up of almost all energy as humans and so I began to peel back the layers and you know my throat was something you know us holding back and not speaking our truth or not living authentically it it all makes a difference as we go through life and you know Chrisanna briefly mentioned it but our sexuality was something we both had to suppress because of our upbringing for many many many years right so that played a role so when you have an experienced practitioner that can take you through something like releasing I had never screamed like that in my entire life and it broke wide open something in me that I had been suppressing it was like the scream of the little girl who was raped it was the scream of the person the little girl inside of me who was just for help to be seen to be myself to not be harmed or abused in whatever way it was like all of that just built up over time emotions being stuck in the body was something I it was kind of a new concept to me but it made so much sense and nowadays you can just I mean find so much information on this out there I just wish people understood how important it is to take that journey to start to process their traumas because they can live such a different more whole beautiful life you know when they're willing to to do that work yeah thank you Chrisanna oh I feel like Dana shared so powerfully I will say that it this the the darkness of this journey was kind of the initiation into looking at everything and so even though Dana was the one experiencing so much pain like feeling so helpless in that season brought up a lot of stuff for me and so we both on our own just were like okay I called it the dredging all right let's look at everything and we were in therapy and we're seeing an intuitive and just like let's do all the work we can do all the journaling all that and it was like our own separate journeys but parallel because I thought we're being given space and time and an opportunity and let's let's just do this inner inner dark work that we're finally we finally have that the space for so yeah it was really really painful and I felt like a lot of times it got worse before it got better like I I couldn't meditate for more than 10 minutes without hearing a screaming girl inside my head like screaming so we were doing Joe Dispenza's training at the time like virtually and we're actually going to his in person in March in Australia yeah so we're doing seven days intensive so excited for that but this was all virtual and at the time I could barely get through it or I would get through it barely and then I would scream like into a pillow literally because I had this little girl that was starting to surface so I had to actually do that work in order just to calm my mind enough to be able to meditate and that felt like baseline you know people would sit for 20 minutes and I couldn't do it because I had so much unrest so yeah I think the emotion piece is really powerful I think it's something that we're ever learning and I'm trying to better understand I will say something I observed that I just like to provide as maybe an disclaimer is I saw that Dana also put a lot of pressure on herself to like fix it like something's broken because I have all this pain so there must be something emotionally broken in me so I need to go and fix and it was like a job almost and we've been doing some work with Anita Moorjani and she talks about this thing of like even in her journey well and that's how you know you know Anita obviously even in her journey she said she does believe that there are these components that lead to illness and disease but she had to she was basically saying it's unconscious yes it was my fault but it was unconscious so I just feel like I need to say that because I think we can just almost like be frustrated with ourselves how dare we hold on to this well it's safety it's like all we know to do when our parents are you know it's toxic at home and then we shove things down so that we don't express to keep ourselves safe what a gift that we have that part of us and then as adults we can start to release it and I think it's just like having grace and love and compassion through every step of that journey that there's nothing broken with us there's nothing wrong we were always doing the best we could and now that we now that we are conscious and we can say oh this is a this is a piece I can work on beautiful what a gift but yeah thanks for letting me share so I wanted to ask a question around what you just said because I think what you said is so pivotal and I've observed this too in my own life and in the people that I've been with which is you know we have this understanding that we create our own reality we have this or at least some of us have this understanding that our thoughts are created and then we get really mad at ourselves because most of the time we're created subconsciously so we wouldn't want to hurt ourselves on purpose we would never do that but we do it because of all of these beliefs and thoughts and in in just kind of emotions that we have pent up and so this is why I think love and compassion are so important having love and compassion for ourselves throughout this aspect of the journey as we get to kind of unpack as we get to kind of have the courage to face that fear what role did self-love and self-compassion have in your journey towards healing literally everything it was everything I mean but it's true and I will get a little bit more succinct in this because at at the very beginning of this journey when I would start to hear how much love and compassion for yourself was the key component to I I don't want to even say healing but the acceptance of where I was at I just I couldn't even fathom in that moment but as I started to do the work I would do things like write a letter to my body or write I was like learning these skill sets of things I'd never done before in expressive writing and then what started to happen was I would read it back because I would have I would write it in third person and I would go that poor human oh my gosh what they have been through so much and thinking of it as I would a friend or a loved one or family member and I was like wait a minute so if I can feel that way when reading back something that's not you know about me but it is why is it that I'm not able to find that compassion love for myself I'm treating myself like a machine okay I've checked all the boxes today why don't I feel any better or you know I've done all this work I've done you know my meditation and this and that and the other and nothing was changing but I realized very quickly that the more that I was not loving and accepting and compassionate to myself or where I was in that moment all that does when you hope and wish to be somewhere other than you are is it just ramps up your nervous system and teaches your body and mind that you're not okay and it just has this perpetual cycle of pain emotional pain too especially because you get so defeated so something at some point clicked in me going wait a minute my body deserves to be loved and accepted for where it is right now everything that I've been through who I am today is a result of what I've gone through and so I it took me on a I will say a forgiveness journey as well not just of everybody who hurt me but of myself I put a lot of pressure on myself to be perfect and what I found through this journey as well is that a lot of perfectionists struggle with chronic pain and chronic illness it's like one of the types the the human types that tend to get into these cycles because we're just so darn hard on ourselves so the role that self-compassion and self-love played was absolutely instrumental it was pivotal it was the it was the paradigm shift that I needed in my journey to start to change my mindset about who I am about why I deserve love and about what was possible for my future with that and then people will see if they watch the film we visited again when we were with Bruce Lipton he was doing what's called muscle testing on me and I'm like what is what is this about you know do I do I really love myself and how can we start to cultivate more love for ourselves because I think it's one thing to say it oh sure I love myself of course I do but do we like really at our core do we so I think I needed that awareness I just the fact of the matter is a lot of this was just my lack of awareness so if there's anything that my journey can do for people or our film is create a level of awareness and self-reflection that people may not have had before that can start to put them one step closer in that direction of more love for themselves more recognition that they can take an active role in their healing journey and more hope that's that a shift and a change is possible for their lives mm-hmm Chrisanna did you want to say something I mean I just love everything Dana's sharing but I find the word love very interesting and I thought a lot about even as I created the film I would have like post-it notes on my wall and like all the different and I thought about even trying to dig into like what is our definition of love but it's so big it's like too much to try to embark on and you know 80-minute film but that being said I really love we were just at this event with Anita and she talked about she doesn't even like using the term unconditional love because if it's not unconditional what is it it's not love and I think that we think we love ourselves I thought I loved myself but it had a lot of conditions only if I perform this way only if I act this way then you're good it's like you know I was a mean abusive parent to myself and it was only in the film really that I started to unpack what does it mean to truly love yourself it's like as I was editing I realized oh I actually don't even know that I have this for myself and that I think is a journey but I don't know that we can even experience it from others because I think we have moments of unconditional love for each other but I found even for myself and just kind of being in this world for a while I'm theorizing this maybe but I feel like the truest most pure unconditional love is in our in our inner self in our inner world and our true self and meditation is such a pathway towards that like once I could finally meditate then I could experience the state they actually call in Korea it's called muah and it's where it's nothingness it's where the and they say that's the state where you can experience unconditional love and so I think everyone has like different terms for that but when I got there I was like oh this is so peaceful there's no judgment there's no shame there's no fear it's just pure it's like pure essence like where we came from so I think my journey now is like how do I regularly reconnect to that and then as I give that to myself it's only then that I give to others because I thought it was unconditionally loving even towards Dana I was like oh yeah I think but then in the back of my mind there would be these other like you know strings attached or this person didn't do enough for me or I give so much and that well then it's not love it's not pure so I'm still unpacking that and that's still work in progress but I think I'm just recognizing it just starts within I can't give to anyone else what I'm not giving to myself and that is the most healing form of love and then of course what it does to our nervous system is creates the perfect conditions for healing we can do all these other things but in that state of pure love and pure essence healing just happens it's just and I think it's not just physical right it's like layers of trauma and emotional stuff healed too so yeah I love love I completely agree with what you both had said you can't really love someone until you fully love yourself because then you don't need them to be different you don't need to them to give you anything it really comes from within and I know in my own journey it's been it's it's been challenging right I remember that I had a hard time even doing I don't know if you guys I'm sure you guys have heard of Louise Hay she used to have this mirror exercise where you tell yourself how much you love yourself and it was so hard to get through and I didn't realize how hard it was to get through but you know like when you commit and over time the more that you show up for yourself and the more you face those challenging emotions the easier it does get easier sometimes it does like I find chrysanthemum is the same thing or sometimes it gets a little bit worse and you're like oh man is it time to eject and you're like okay no I'm just gonna even if I just show up for myself for five minutes and over time it does get easier and easier and in being able to tap into that that well of love that we naturally have and I feel we're born with but then we've learned all of these things that kind of get us away from ourselves and so for me the path of going back to myself is also about unlearning unlearning all of that stuff that we've learned I wanted to go back to the the process that you guys share in the in the film I think it's a water a fire down and I gotta say like when I heard about it I thought it was so so interesting I only started doing it a couple weeks ago I think and then I found that my breathing is like from my belly which I was always a shallow breather I was always like right and I'm like in I would try different exercises to try to get the to move down and he just didn't and so naturally and then I also sit straighter now so that's great I was wondering how you found water a fire down in sort of what and how it helped you kind of in your journey do you want me to go first yeah this is a bigger answer I think both of our perspectives are very different in how we found all this and how it helped us so go ahead Kristina yeah I was just gonna say you know water a fire down is is kind of the terminology that Ilchi Lee put around this energy balance which is based in in ancient Korea Korean practices but of course you see very similar practices throughout the world interestingly something I wasn't able to fit into the film but one of the women who was in our retreat that we filmed was taught the same principle in Hopi tradition but it was not called water up fire down but it was all about babies need to have their bellies warm their heads cool and and they taught like this is the way of natural balance your belly needs to be warm and your head is cool and so she's like I never really understood it until I came to so I say all that because you know this is terminology that's around something that's so much bigger than you know energy balance it's talked about in many different traditions and many different practices but that's the term that Ilchi Lee used and so he was the one who really wanted to create a film in light of COVID and what everyone was going through with the pandemic he wanted people to understand that you have the power to heal yourself and that self-love is the way that you know that there's a power in self-love and so that's really what we were presented at the beginning was he was sharing about this idea for a film and wanted us to work on it and I was like well any yeah something that doesn't put the onus on an individual but puts it on yourself like you know it doesn't give your power away to a guru but it says you have the power inside of you I was very interested in that and then even as we did the filming initially at the very beginning it wasn't even supposed to be about Dana or our journey at all we were just going to tell this people's stories and really try to unpack like what that looks like and then it turned into Dana's journey and it was like I had this downloaded meditation and then Ilchi Lee had that the same day and we we agreed oh my god we're supposed to be following Dana's journey and see and just see how it helps her so we had been exposed to some of these things before but we hadn't like really dug into it we had gone to the retreat center in Sedona but this was our our time to say what does it look like when you really dig in and like do this daily and then what does it look like for people trying it for the first time how quickly can they heal or transform or whatever so yeah I mean it is it's a really powerful concept but I wanted to share the Hopi bit because that was something that was really enlightening to know it's not just one person's deal but yeah I'm curious Dana's perspective too well I think for me I lived my entire life with a hot head like I literally was feverish throughout my entire life and I never understood why and my energy balance was so far upside down because it was just so imbalanced yeah so for me to start to learn these concepts when we started the film I was like oh I've done yoga before I've tried meditation all these things but I did not know the power of bringing that energy and that fire down into your core I actually that concept really never occurred to me until we started doing the film and learning the concept of water up fire down and then it all made sense so all of the practices that we were taught you know we'd gone to retreat but when we filmed for the documentary it was very it was so helpful to learn like in my brain and in my body simultaneously what this means and how it shows up in our lives in everyday life and what we can do to get that balance back so it was pivotal for me to understand that that is a is a environment it's an environment that your body can be in harmony and can create that healing effect in our bodies because the mind is I mean it's it's amazing to learn when you learn about the mind body connection and how it's just truly one entity and how we the pathway to all of this was through the body I was like okay this is this is a big concept for me so what I found was that there were certain modalities that resonated with me more than others so when I would tap like tap on my not just the EFT tapping that you hear that you see that is also very very helpful but I needed to get out of my brain and into my body I needed to stop thinking about all of these things and start just being in my body where that started to become my safe space that should be the safe space so just tapping and then we learned a lot of qigong and tai chi techniques and for me meditation is is really great I can do that but there was something about connecting movement with breathing was very meditative for me it was like a moving meditation so part of my healing I think really comes in the form of like qigong movements and stuff like that now of course we're going to immerse ourselves in meditation for a week in the very near future with an expert but I think there are many many ways to get that energy balance once you have an understanding and can be given tools the point is not that we don't have the information accessible is it's more like are we going to use it are we going to practice it regularly and I will be the first to admit there are times I get so busy that I'm like oh my gosh I didn't get into my body at all today and guess what my body will tell me or chrysanthemum chrysanthemum will also tell me so yeah energy your body tells chrysanthemum chrysanthemum I think yeah they're in cahoots with each other to help me so yeah and also I'll just add about you know the gut brain is really powerful and there's so much science around that and and we hold our stress and a lot of our trauma in our stomach so it gets cold and so when we put attention towards it it is interesting you know I've experienced my own kind of releasing and then we hear people telling us like they start doing work on their abdomen area and like the body will start shaking it's like releasing years of trauma and that can be kind of scary because we're taught also that like that kind of shaking is not good and of course it's amazing how science is like proving all of these things that have been around for thousands of years that this is very healthy for us so I think it's amazing that just having the attention on the stomach and the gut brain and then of course there's now a lot of science around the heart and heart coherence and so it's all connected our whole body is just trying to send us all these messages but yeah for myself it was incredibly transformative to do the work in my core which I know released a lot of stuck trauma that I didn't even have memories of and I just can feel myself getting more and more access to energy like my body didn't have to protect me from whatever that was I didn't even have to know what it was but it's like oh I'm having more energy and I have more joy and it's just amazing how it all goes together it is yeah and then you have more energy to focus on what you want to create right it's such an incredible thing to witness unless you're doing it I have had experiences with Dr.

Joe stuff Dr.

Joe Dispenza and I was having those weird body shakings and energetic releases but I wasn't connecting the two I was just like oh you know googling the YouTube and people be like oh that's very normal I'm like okay that's that's that's fine I did want to comment on something you both had said that I think it's important for us to stress which is the allowance and so often in our lives we're in so much under so much resistance we don't want to be where we are we hate what's happening to us but it's that resistance that prevents it from really going so being in harmony it's part of that is being an allowance what role has allowance really helped you in getting to the to where you are I think allowance is almost as important as self-love and compassion because I had to let go allowance to me means letting go and just allowing whatever the outcome to be without forcing without pressure without I mean just so much angst over what the outcome was going to be and I'll be honest with you when it was realized that I was going to be part of the film and the protagonist and my journey was going to be followed can you imagine the amount of I put on myself oh my gosh I have to heal during this filming like what am I going to do if I don't get any better and I at some point something clicked in me and it was like oh my gosh the amount of pressure that we put on ourselves as humans to make sure everything goes exactly as we want it to is just it's so I think detrimental to the human spirit in a way because it just it just makes things really heavy and that's how I felt for the longest time until I allowed myself to be where I was and not try to push and force so allowance is really important and I think it in the letting go and accept so actually it's really as important and it is combined with self-compassion and whatever you know loving yourself looks like it's certainly not putting pressure on yourself to be something different than you are in that moment the more I could accept myself even even accepting the anger even accepting feeling defeated feeling like a victim I actually had to process those feelings first because usually that's what I would suppress like I wore as a badge of honor like I I am so strong and I get through everything and I forgive everybody and I'm not I'm never angry I thought that was such a good quality you know but it wasn't healthy for me it's very normal and important for us to express when we're sad or angry or frustrated and then let it pass when we're afraid I had so much fear you know there's a reason why animals in the wild they get chased and then after they shake literally physically shake shake it off and go back to their life they're grazing whatever I know we hear that term but it wasn't until I started to understand that I needed to process those things and allow allow the anger allow the pain allow allow it all to pass and then I could move into you know a more authentic state of being which was everything so yeah allowance is is huge I love these questions so much by the way really beautiful I love this conversation oh same same yeah it's just refreshing I think I just intermix I interchange the word allowance with acceptance so to me that there's actually a moment in the film where this beautiful master oh talks about healing is the like the pathway of accepting or I don't know I'm like blanking how she says it but essentially it's accepting it's accepting everything and I really had to sit with that that that sentence has has stayed with me for a long time and I find if if we align with the message I've heard this a few times in the last few weeks from a few different people I really respect I think some of it was in our Joe Dispenza training so I'm like oh this is something coming to mind for me right now that I need to absorb which is everything is either motivated by love or fear and so if we look at those two well acceptance is love and then fear is the opposite anything that comes out of fear so when I'm afraid I control I judge I think things should be different I don't understand why it's not happening sooner like all of that is in this fear emotion that I think it's important for me to just love and accept so I it's interesting the dance of love and fear but I think acceptance just says it's okay that you're afraid and we don't have to change anything and I've been even asking myself this as it relates to my like people in my life or even close family what would it look like if I just accepted them exactly as they were and I didn't ever expect them to change and I didn't ever expect them to do anything different than what they're doing what if that's like their divine right to exist as they are it feels so hard but that's so loving and isn't that what I would want for myself from them and isn't that what I how I would want to even treat myself okay so that's my work is to accept myself and accept and even this was a journey as Dana was on her on her journey I realized I was not well I needed to learn to be accepting of her choices for her own healing that's her divine right she got to decide if she wanted to take pain meds or not it was not up to me to tell her you need to take pain meds because you know so man I just that's like the secret of everything if we could just sit in acceptance of all that comes up and then observe it and be like well it's really interesting how mad I'm getting about this right now okay I'm just gonna accept myself and love myself through it oh do we have access to it's like goes back to the other question we'd have access to so much more energy because our brain is so like I have to control and I need to be safe and it all comes from fear so even the work I feel like I'm doing right now is how do I send that inner child who's so programmed to fear how do I just send her so much love that she's like let's let's down that angst or their angst reduces I guess even if it's never gone it's like oh you don't have to be in the driver's seat the fear is a guide I want to move towards the things I'm afraid of because the other side of that is really great but that's only through love and acceptance yeah absolutely one of the things that I in my own journey of learning to love myself I had to ask myself the very difficult question of even if I accomplish nothing in life even if I don't do anything or help anyone or do anything can I still love and accept myself can I still see myself as worthy of my own love and attention and that was hard it was hard for me to look at because I was always I always had the need to accomplish I also had that perfectionism in terms of like oh I gotta contribute and it has to be a huge contribution and raw and it's like no no if I can look at myself and say I don't need me to change I don't need to be a specific way things don't need to be in a particular way I can still see myself as worthy just because I exist just because of that like that that's powerful and what you said is so powerful if I can allow myself I don't need people to be different I can just allow their divinity to be in as long as by first starting to see the divinity in myself and it's like that's it's like wow I want to get there I'm gonna have to sit with that I'm gonna I want to do some journaling around that because yeah I think I'm still like no but I'm here to do a lot of things so yeah exactly and it's so we're caught in this accomplishing in this doing instead of the beingness instead of just being I am magnificent you are both magnificent just as you are and I think sitting with that and how the more love you inject in there the more stuff comes up to you don't even have to go looking for like you don't have to dig for gold in there you just as soon as you inject a little bit of love in there that stuff comes out goes no you're all the reasons why I don't think that would work right and so it can feel very very challenging but but worth it and the other thing that I also want to stress that you pointed out which I think is so phenomenal is you know and I know in my journey I was the perpetual student I was always looking for experts tell me what to do tell me how to fix it and then I had to realize oh no like all these people are my guides but if I don't do the work if I'm not there to be my own hero it just goes nowhere and so my relationship with my teachers has sort of changed my relationship with other people has sort of changed because really no one's coming to save me right how has your relationship with experts changed oh man that's a great question I feel like I don't put so much weight on the opinion and idea of others anymore because those are things that they believe and may have worked for them and I found myself in the beginning of my healing journey when I started to unravel all of this looking for like well what who had my condition who had spine surgery and then what did they do and I'm gonna do that I'm gonna do the same thing and it was like that's not how it works but I really had I was so I just felt so desperate for healing and you know people experience that physically emotionally like well what are you doing what works for you and I think for me just recognizing that I wasn't looking inward for decades of my life so it's really hard to expect somebody to recognize that they're their own best healers that sounds outlandish to them you know my dad is a great example he's had chronic pain as long as I can remember back pain leg pain it was like so similar and he his hip and he's getting injections and he's just always putting the power in the hands of these surgeons and doctors and at some point you know we got the film done and I was like waiting for him to watch the film and I thought this was gonna like completely change his life and he would take a different route and start to take the journey inward and do the work and you know maybe it planted a seed but he's still doing this outward approach like who can help me who can fix me and I honor his journey you know my dad is in his late 60s and and it hasn't been easy for him and it's asking a lot of us as humans to crack ourselves wide open and I recognize the amount of courage that that takes but once you do that and can start to listen to those inner callings and things that our intuition is is deep down telling us waking up every day and realizing I need to ask myself what do I need today to feel most whole and have the most amount of wellness mental physical emotional spiritual that I can have today what does that mean does that mean I give myself a break and I sleep extra does that mean I do something for somebody else because that's gonna make me feel most alive today does that mean I do my you know meditation and my qigong maybe maybe I go to the gym maybe I take a walk whatever that is I think it changes for each of us and recognizing that those answers lie within and not in somebody else is life-changing I'm so grateful to have that now yes amen I think experts are very important and I think also realizing that we're all one is very important because if we're all one then we have access to the same information and knowledge and counsel and similarly especially man I just feel like Dana and I's whole relationship has like the same month we got serious in our relationship is the same month that her pain journey started so this is and I you know there's no negative feelings about that but it's just interesting that that's also been our journey so in the beginning for several years and especially the more desperate we got we did a lot of what I call giving our power away and I now look back at some of those decisions and I think you know there are no accidents but I have regrets because it caused a lot of pain even in giving our power away because I think there's people that are really incredible and do a lot of good in their expertise and then I think there's people who can like the ego likes to do who can take advantage and it can be for their own gain and even our entire medical system there's a lot of beautiful things about it but then there's also parts of our medical system that take advantage of people that look at the amount of procedures versus the outcomes you know so in giving our power away I just found that you know we weren't any better off we just like basically had less money and more pain and more suffering so now really what I feel like we gained in this journey and something that I like to share about is just sovereignty maintaining your sovereignty and it doesn't matter how much you feel like you're suffering it's not ever worth it to put your healing in the hands of someone else but like you said to see them as guides and I also think that our intuitive ones told us there's as many healing paths as there are people because everyone's healing path is so unique right so we all need a different access point so even when people now people you know people from all over the world email Dana and are looking for answers and she just encourages them like yeah here's a set of resources but you have to go inside and and maybe start somewhere but very quickly you're going to feel like ah this isn't for me there's something about it or oh maybe there's something here that I should pursue because I'm curious about it and I feel compelled to learn more and then that leads me to someone else and then that leads me to someone else and so yeah I just think we're over the idea of gurus I think there are plenty of people that still need to give their power away for a period of time and I honor that journey even in religion we see that sometimes we need to look to someone else but my hope and what I know is true for my own journey is that eventually I realized oh that was just a mirror pointing back to me what's possible so when I see someone like Joe Dispenza or someone like this incredible level of influence that's what's possible that's the limitless potential inside of me that I also have access to and what if I just looked at that within myself instead of saying I need him or I need them I look at that within myself there's some well there that maybe I won't be on stages but for me maybe it looks like creating films maybe for someone else it looks like raising their kids in a beautiful way that they become humans who help other people you know like there's all of these ways in which we can access that limitless potential but you know I just I really honor those who have that influence and keep pointing us back home because that's ultimately where all of it resides and like I said if we're all one if we're all the same consciousness then it's all within us anyway yeah yeah wow what you both said is so so powerful yeah I'm kind of like I got nothing I got nothing left to ask it just might drop in here well thank you for such thoughtful questions I mean it sounds like you've been on quite a journey yourself I have I have definitely been on quite quite a journey no Dana you mentioned leaving your work I left my work that was very you know very similar to the medical system I used to work in a child welfare system very fear-based very constricting very focused on separation isolation not on purpose it's just how we designed it because that's where conscious consciously we were right I find these systems are just a mirror of where we are as as as human beings what what our level of conscious awareness is and so when I look at my life how I dealt with was separation isolation get away from me I don't want you or punishment and so what do we see in our world jails medical systems that are all about cutting stuff off taking stuff out separating isolating and how do you deal how did we used to deal with people with mental health issues we used to separate and isolate anything that is aberrant one of my the degrees I did was in statistics right and they have this bell curve thing where it's like but do you know that the belt like the majority of medications and all that stuff is done for the 80 percenters right like for the majority of people that you know and there's outliers people that don't fit into this curve and we're all so desperately trying to fit into that curve because we have this need to belong but miracles are outside the curve magic is outside of that curve it's outside of that norm or we've deemed norm and so that's what I am really playing with now right like you know like like this film like not not the norm right and so and this is why all of these point to magic and miracle which you think it's our birthright it's our birthright to live this experiences and live with joy and abundance and all of these things that we want to experience because like you said we're consciousness and consciousness wants to expand whereas fear makes us contract and so so yeah so it's been an interesting journey of really getting to know myself and facing my own fears and this your film resonated so deeply with me in a way that I didn't expect I thought oh that's cool I you know I've had seen and I've done Dr.

Joe's work for a long time as well and I love Dr.

Joe's work and can't wait to see him and when he comes but but there was something about your film that was so deep and so it just resonated with me in a way that I hadn't a film hadn't in a long time and so I went all in I'm like okay let me see it and and then when I did I was like I said I was crying with Dana I was like you know and I thought wow wow just you know like to be able to express that connection with someone that I don't know that I'm seeing in a film to me it was wow that's powerful that as she's healing and she's screaming I'm doing it with her I'm I'm connecting in that way so so thank you thank you for that thank you for that that makes such an impact on me because in those moments I felt so vulnerable and so just oh gosh I can't even explain how a lot of the things that things we show in the film and things that we didn't just felt so vulnerable and I felt alone for a long time and then after the film was released and we started hearing from people just like you that expressed how even in watching the film they felt parts of them start to heal or open up in ways that hadn't before and I think yes you know Chrisanne and I have been put I think together as a couple and also placed on this planet to help spread awareness raise consciousness and spread a lot of hope and healing through our films and it just blows my mind we did it like it's actually happening the film's been out a year and we still get messages from people that blow my mind and I'm just so honored that it impacted you in such a way that took you another step on your journey and maybe opened up something different for you and that you allowed us the opportunity to have this beautiful conversation to share with others I'm just really honored thank you and well it's really amazing because in creating Love Heals and the response that we've gotten which by the way is not all glamorous like releasing a film is a lot of hard work and Dana is kind of the main force behind that now because I also have my own business and I have other client work so anyway it's this call I will say is very refreshing to like remember back because sometimes the days are just long and hard it feels like and that's okay because this is the chapter that we're writing and trying to help a lot of people and all that to say this really sparked in us something like like a new calling I guess where we just decided man together we are a force and we can create content that really helps spread hope and healing throughout the planet so Dana just she was compelled after she saw this article from HeartMath about heart coherence and the studies and the research that have been done between horses and humans and she also had an experience where she saw an autistic child speak for the first time at seven years old in working with a horse and that just sparked in us something like what is going on here there's some magic to this horse human connection connection but it's not just about the horse the horse is its own powerful energetic being and there's science around that but then the research of heart coherence which is where you know Joe Dispenza teaches and others teach in that way like how to achieve that yourself and and we're making a film about that and we're just going on a journey of discovery and I think it's about connecting to ourselves which also helps us connect to nature and mother earth around us and horses are really like a beautiful access point to that and they also have their own sovereignty and even the caretaking of these animals is a reflection of how we care for ourselves as we're in production of this film we have other people reaching out to us saying wait I'd actually like for you to do a documentary on this and then I'd like to hire you for this and so we're being very selective but we feel how we want to spend our time and energy is in creating content that just encourages people to do the journey of going with and and the remembering the remembering of our of the power and and this well of like wisdom that exists inside of us and sometimes we just need to be bridged in that way we plan to have the film done by the end of the year and which is a very exciting and in the world of documentary it normally takes two to three years so it's a very tight deadline but we did love heals in nine months so we feel like it's possible we feel like the world needs this message now and we like to put deadlines on it so that it doesn't drag out like we have to so we're doing a lot of production anyway thanks for asking but we're really excited this is so great because I think you point to something really pivotal in your film which is we become so disconnected with ourselves that we're so disconnected with nature right and I think this is why we're seeing things as they are the weather is weird how do we reconnect back in a way that is harmonious and in balance right yeah beautiful thank you thank you so so much for being on the podcast I so appreciate this I would love for you to come back with thank you so so much see you soon