Holistic Trauma Healing Podcast

Episode 7: Emotional & Religious Trauma in Women, Leaving Toxic Wellness Culture & Mormonism, & The Emotion Code with Megan Buer

Posted on by Lindsey Lockett
megan buer of harmonyrestored.com

lindsey lockett playing in the woods. She is holding on to a small pine tree with her leg wrapped around its trunk

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this candid conversation with Megan Buer, founder of Harmony Restored and the Rooted In Health healing system, we connect over similar pasts growing up in fundamentalist, patriarchal religions, expose the emotional trauma in women from the cult of toxic wellness culture, and discuss how emotions get trapped in our bodies. Megan shares her work as an Emotion Code practitioner and shifts the paradigm that symptoms are “bad” and need to be gotten rid of to revealing that symptoms are our bodies’ amazing way of communicating with us that they are healing. We expose the guilt, shame, and inadequacy that women with fundamentalist religious backgrounds experience and how falling prey to toxic wellness culture is akin to being in a narcissistic, abusive relationship or cult. Megan emphasizes, “There is no magic pill. There is no guru. YOU are the guru!” Finally, Megan gives listeners valuable action steps they can take if they’ve forgotten how to listen to and reconnect to Self.

Show Notes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, I have a wonderful conversation with Megan Buer, founder of Harmony Restored. Megan is a certified Emotion Code practitioner, author of 2 books on healing, a Reiki healer, and mom to 3. After sitting on the sidelines of her life for 10 years due to autoimmune disease, anxiety, and chronic stress, Megan discovered that healing the mind and body is much easier than we’ve been led to believe. She shares her healing work privately with 1:1 clients and also empowers women on a global scale through her Rooted in Health healing system. megan buer of harmonyrestored.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, Megan and I…

  • connect over similar experiences growing up in fundamentalist, patriarchal religions
  • discuss toxic wellness culture, health obsession, and how we make ourselves sicker when we’re limited by these beliefs
  • expose the guilt and shame that many victims of toxic wellness culture experience
  • compare wellness culture to gaslighting, narcissistic abuse and religion
  • discuss her work with The Emotion Code and how Megan helps her clients release trapped emotions which results in body-mind healing
  • challenge the current perspective on physical symptoms as “bad” and needing to be gotten rid of or fixed
  • talk about how women who’ve forgotten how to listen to our intuition can reconnect to Self

Links

Transcript

[INTRO MUSIC] This is episode seven.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, I interview Megan Buer. We talk about leaving toxic wellness culture, emotional and religious trauma in women, and how those traumas affect our physical health, The Emotion Code, and more. Before we get into my interview with Megan, I want to introduce her to you. Megan Buer is the founder of Harmony Restored — a company focused on helping individuals heal from the stress that is at the root of their physical and emotional pain. Megan is a certified Emotion Code practitioner, author of two books on healing, a Reiki healer, and mom to three. After suffering for years with anxiety, panic disorder, chronic stress, food intolerances, adrenal fatigue, and an auto-immune disease, she went on a journey to health — spending over 10 years, researching, experimenting, and finally figuring out all the unique tools she needed to naturally heal herself. After sitting on the sidelines of her own life for 10 years, Megan discovered that healing the mind and body is much easier than we’ve been led to believe. She shares her healing work privately with one-on-one clients and also empowers women on a global scale through her proprietary healing system called Rooted In Health. The Rooted In Health healing system empowers holistic minded individuals with the knowledge and simple mind body tools they need to thrive. Make sure you stick around and listen to my addendum at the end of our interview, because I did book two sessions with Megan and, and am really excited to share with you what she uncovered as she was doing The Emotion Code and emotion clearing for me. So now without further ado I hope you enjoy my interview with Megan Buer. LINDSEY: Hello, Megan, welcome to the holistic trauma healing podcast. MEGAN: Hi. LINDSEY: So great to have you. Megan and I have been Instagram friends for a couple of years and we’ve connected back and forth on religious trauma and mental health and emotional health. And we are going to have a fantastic conversation today. MEGAN: Absolutely. LINDSEY: So, Megan, will you just tell us a little bit about yourself please? Who you are and what you do and why it relates to your healing trauma? MEGAN: Yeah. Long story, I grew up Mormon. So I grew up in a really conservative, patriarchal religion, got married very early, had babies I was told my whole life that was what I was good for was getting married and having babies. And then after I got married, my oldest son was diagnosed with autism and I went down this alternative health rabbit hole trying to help him. In the meantime, I got sick and was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and PCOS and went down these crazy rabbit holes of diets and supplements and this modality and that modality. The more and more I was searching for the answer, the sicker and sicker I was getting. And throughout this process, I ended up leaving the Mormon church, and then really diving even more so headfirst into alternative health, to a point where I was suffering so deeply, was so lost and confused, and I kind of had this realization that I switched out my religion for the religion of wellness culture and the religion of health. And, so it’s kind of been this long process of of doing my own work , and removing these huge pieces of indoctrination that I’ve had grown up with and had created. And so, yeah, so I have three kids. I’m a single mom. I am an Emotion Code practitioner. So I do a lot of emotional wellness coaching and mindset coaching and helping women through things like I’ve been through. So leaving religion, leaving wellness culture, you know, recognizing the addiction to health and how that’s negatively affecting them, body image issues, food issues, you know, all sorts of fun stuff. LINDSEY: Oh, I love it. Yeah, I love the way that you paired the wellness culture, a wellness culture too. a religion and how it really is like this fundamentalist thing that people fall into and pretty quickly find themselves sort of like entangled in t his knot of special diets and practitioners and supplement protocols and hopping from the chiropractor to the naturopath to the functional medicine doctor. I agree that it feels like people are just getting sicker. MEGAN: Yes. Absolutely. It’s, it’s not helping anyone. You know, I think again, there’s some really good, basic advice that you can take from things, but it’s when it pushes over into obsession, that, you know, it, you just become sick. I remember for me, I had gone probably at least one full year without eating in a restaurant. This is, you know, years ago at the height of my fear of everything. And I’ve gone like at least a year without eating at a restaurant, because I was terrified of, you know the chlorine in the tap water and the toxins and the MSG and the, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I just realized how miserable I was. Like how much more unhealthy I was than I used to be when I didn’t really care that much about my health. just kind of recognizing how our thoughts and all of that contribute so much more to our health than, you know, the chlorine possibly in our baby carrots. LINDSEY: Right. Yeah. So interestingly, the last episode of the podcast that I released was about toxic wellness culture and how it invalidates trauma, because it keeps people who have experienced trauma and that trauma is manifesting as chronic physical symptoms and mysterious illness. It keeps them stuck on, I call it a carousel where it’s like you get on and you just go around and around and around. And you always seem to end up right back where you started, but you’re out all of this money and time and energy, and you’re still sick. And for me, toxic wellness culture, it’s like a wolf in sheep’s clothing because it looks and sounds really healthy and great, but really it has become like a religion and it’s indoctrinated people and invalidated people with trauma to the point that people are throwing supplements and diet changes out what really are emotional and mental and spiritual and ancestral issues. Would you agree with that? MEGAN: Yeah, I absolutely would. You know, I think what’s interesting is I started down this journey and was having, you know, for me all these symptoms, all these weird random symptoms, and I would go to the doctor and, you know, they’d say, Oh, nothing’s wrong. Your blood work is fine. And, I’d be like, no something is wrong. And so then I would read these books. I would read these diet books and get online and research. And it was like, well, if you just cut out gluten, then all of your symptoms, you know, my mystery symptoms, the fatigue, the anxiety, the heart palpitations, the hormone imbalance, the weight gain, the headaches, the brain fog, you know, all these things I was experiencing. You know, it was like, well, if you just cut out gluten, then you won’t experience any of this anymore. Everything will be fine. Or if you just take the supplement, these huge lists of things that you have, you have no sex drive and you, you know, you feel lethargic and this and that. And it’s like, Oh my gosh, yes, I have all of that. And so, then, you know, I cut out gluten and wow. Surprise. Nothing got better. Well then maybe it’s gluten and dairy. So then I cut out gluten and dairy surprise, nothing happens. So I cut out gluten, dairy, and sugar and then surprise, nothing happens. So then I cut out gluten dairy sugar. I add in, you know, this supplement or that supplement. And, I got into a point where I would say probably nine, 10 years ago, I was eating close to nothing because I thought I was “allergic” to everything. Because I was having anxiety and I was having chest pains and I was having this crazy fatigue where I couldn’t get off the couch. And I was just like, Oh my gosh, it’s my allergies. I have so many allergies. And it’s like, no, I, I actually didn’t have any allergies. I was just starving myself on top of trying to deal with trauma. On top of trying to recognize this was emotional. This was not a physical disease. It manifested in that later down the road. But what I was dealing with was emotional trauma, emotional stress, and that was causing my symptoms, not gluten. And so, as women, we will go out on the internet. And the only information we have about our symptoms is that, you know, it’s. It’s this diet, you know, you need to be keto or you need to be vegan or, you know, you need to do this, whatever. It’s not like, Oh, Hey, that anxiety that you’re feeling and that fatigue you’re feeling, that’s actually all root in emotions. It has nothing to do with what you’re eating, like eat whatever the hell you want. And so I think honestly, just the lack of resources, the lack of education to help people identify that these physical symptoms I’m having are rooted in emotional imbalance and trauma. LINDSEY: Absolutely. you know, I, I used to be a food blogger and so I’ve done all the keto and vegan and paleo and whole 30 and dairy-free. Like I’ve done all of that. And I don’t regret it at all because I know how to nourish my body. You know, like that’s the good thing that I got out of it was that I know now how to nourish my body and not survive on pop tarts and hot pockets. I guess what I’ve sort of been against for like the last year is how that culture really has convinced everyone that the problem is that they need to heal their gut. And if they’ll just heal their gut, then that’s going to fix everything. MEGAN: It, you know, I mean, it’s healing your gut or it’s healing the blood brain barrier or it’s getting rid of the things you’re intolerant to, it’s, it’s all back to something which I think the interesting part is that creates more trauma because what is happening is, you know, I know for me, it was like, Oh, it’s it’s me. I’m the problem. It’s my gut. It’s the gluten, Oh, I shouldn’t have eaten this. And you know, I’ll have a headache one day and then I’d be like, Oh no, what did I eat? Like, and I start blaming myself and I start shaming myself for what I’m eating. Or shaming myself for wanting to go out to dinner with a friend because I shouldn’t do that because I know better. And it’s going to make me feel horrible and, you know, so it, it perpetuates that feeling of like being stuck in your own head and spinning. You know, the things that we actually know are going to help, which are, you know, reaching out to community, seeing a therapist, doing mind-body work , getting out in nature, moving the body, processing, journaling , I didn’t do any of those things. I, I very distinctly remember reading about some of that in my research, but I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll get to that later. I need to heal my gut first. I need to, I need to make sure my diet’s perfect and then I’ll do the emotional stuff. And I kept putting it off because all these books kept promising me that if I just juice celery every morning or whatever, then all of these things are going to go away and I’m going to feel like a million bucks. And when I didn’t, then I just read more books and I just, Oh my gosh, the cycle. LINDSEY: Oh, I think it’s so funny that you brought up the celery juice because in late 2018, early 2019, when I was going through the mental and physical health crisis that I went through, I actually read the Medical Medium and he convinced me that the celery juice was where it was at. And so every day, for six freaking weeks, I juiced that celery and I drank it and it was the most disgusting thing that I’ve ever forced myself to do. And I kept forcing myself to do it because I was convinced that that was what was going to make me well. And it’s like a Stockholm syndrome. Like we, we fall in love with our abuser and the abuser is the culture and what it’s convinced us we need in order to heal ourselves. And it also gaslights us because like you were saying, you feel like you’re the problem. And if you’re not healing, it’s because you’re doing something wrong. Really it’s the culture abusing you and gaslighting you and convincing you that you’re doing something wrong and heaping guilt and shame on you when you don’t have the results that it promised it would give you. And you’re trying to heal the manifestation of an emotional or a spiritual issue because it seems easier to throw a supplement at it than it does to meditate or do mind body work or go outside in nature. MEGAN: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s such a downward spiral and it is so shockingly similar to, you know, narcissistic, gaslighting type of abuse. Something interesting that I’ve observed in my private practices is a lot of the women that are coming to me with the same exact story that you and I are saying right here are women who’ve grown up in religion. And they’ve grown up in a very conservative, very controlling, very patriarchal religion. And so when someone learns as a child to not trust themselves, to not trust their own inner. voice but that someone or something outside of them knows better than them and something, or someone outside of them has the answers. Then it’s very easy to fall prey to reading a diet book and thinking this person must know better than I do. And , that’s a lot of what I do in my practice is helping people — again mostly women are in this place right now, but anybody — to remember that no one outside of you, nothing outside of you is an authority you are, and like it’s, it’s reminding people that you are your own magic pill. You will not find the answers you’re looking for in a book. They will be inside of you. And the more that you can tune out all of the nagging voices — you know, either from religion or from, society in general or the diet books or the, whatever the blogs, everything that you’re consuming — the sooner that you will be able to hear your own inner wisdom. And that’s what we have to get back to. It’s it’s taking off all these layers of all the bullshit and all the indoctrination and all the trauma and all of that, the shame, the guilt, all of it, that we’ve all been taught our whole lives. It’s getting underneath of that. And what’s underneath of that is our true selves. Is recognizing that we are whole. It’s recognizing, you know, that I have all the answers for me. I am my own magic pill. I’m the guru. No one else and nothing else is just me. LINDSEY: Yeah. I love that. So, you mentioned that you’re a practitioner of The Emotion Code at the beginning of our chat. And I’m wondering, I’ve only ever heard one other person talk about The Emotion Code. And ironically, she’s a really good friend of mine and her name is Megan, but she’s not you. So would you mind talking about what The Emotion Code is and the work that you do with your clients? MEGAN: Absolutely. So, I got into The Emotion Code. I’ve been in private practice for almost nine years. I have been in that world for probably 10 to 12 years, and it is a modality of energy work, that, helps to go kind of go into the subconscious and release the excess emotional energy and baggage from our negative experiences. So, it’s a little woo woo. But basically my experience with it was, you know, I was right in the middle of this kind of health crisis for me about 10 years ago, or whenever that was when I came across The Emotion Code and worked with a practitioner and had such amazing results. And that was when I realized, holy shit, this isn’t gluten. This is emotional and this is the stuff I, I can’t quite put my finger on. And I remember saying that to so many doctors, like there’s something going on. I don’t feel right, but I can’t put my finger on what it is. And, and it was this, it was the emotional piece. It was kind of that subconscious piece. And so I worked with a practitioner for a while and she worked on my son and I, and for me, the results were really astounding. And so I wanted to learn how to do it myself and, and I did. And it’s a very simple, non-invasive kind of therapy where you can go in and kind of release a lot of the energy and trauma from these experiences on a subconscious level. It’s very different than talk therapy. I highly, highly, highly recommend talk therapy. I am not a, you know, this is the one thing you have to do and that’s it kind of girl. I have been around the block for long enough to know that’s not how it is. It’s a very holistic approach, but Emotion Code has been a really big game changer for me and for my clients really just helping clear out some of the old baggage so that you can show up and feel more present and not be living your life out of these old subconscious patterns quite as much as you were before. LINDSEY: So in your work with your clients, when they meet with you, are they most often coming to you with a chronic and or mysterious health issue that they just can’t figure out? And they’ve tried throwing bottles of supplements at it and changing their diet, and it’s just not working? Are those the people who finally come to you and they’re like, “What I need, isn’t found in another bottle of supplements. I know I have emotional work to do”? Or do they come to you not even realizing that that’s the problem. MEGAN: Yeah. a hundred percent, yes. To both. So, I work in a doctor’s clinic , so I would say half of my patients are people that are dealing with really chronic health issues — cancer, diabetes, all sorts of stuff. And then the other half of my clients are women just like you and I, who are dealing with kind of the more I say this in quotations “minor” health symptoms, because I know very well that they are not minor, minor kind of mysterious health symptoms that nobody can really figure out. And, they have tried everything. They have tried every diet and every supplement, they have read every book they’ve been to every chiropractor and homeopath and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of times this is like their last ditch effort. And this is how I felt when I was a client of my practitioner was like, this sounds totally crazy but , I’ve tried everything else and nothing’s working. So let me just give this one last thing a whirl and see what happens. And that’s where a lot of my clients are when they come to me. And so through the process of clearing the subconscious stuff, but also reminding people of their own truth, that you are your own guru. You are the magic pill. It’s not in a diet book. It’s not in a supplement. It is you. And it is getting back to what brings you joy and living your life from that place and helping, you know, create that mindset. So yeah, I would say probably at least 50% of my clients are people who are in that boat of like utter exhaustion and realizing nothing is working. Absolutely nothing is working and I don’t know what to do next. LINDSEY: Okay. Wow. So I’m going to throw an example at you from my own life, if that’s okay. Can we discuss that from an emotion code standpoint? MEGAN: Absolutely. LINDSEY: Cool. So I have this hip pain in my right hip. I cannot remember when it started. I want to say it was a couple of years ago. And last spring I was doing some maple syruping and I was post hole digging through snow, which, for people who don’t live in an area with a lot of snow, that’s basically where you’re walking through snow and your legs are sinking really far into the snow. And so it makes it really difficult and exhausting to walk through. So I was carrying maple sap while punching through the snow. And the hip went from like only hurting when I would wake up in the morning and then getting better to just pain shooting down my leg for like three straight days. And so I thought I had injured myself from syruping. So I took a break from it. Had my husband and my kids do it. I went to my physical therapist. I went to my chiropractor and here I am, eight months later, and that hips still isn’t right. And I know that there was something wrong with it before. It’s just like the syruping experience made it worse and intuitively, I feel like it’s an energetic sort of pain. Like there’s really no physical explanation why, at my age, I’m 37 years old. I’m an excellent health. I’m not overweight. I live a really active lifestyle. Like there’s no logical reason why I would have this chronic pain in my hip. And so I’m wondering, is that something that I could have benefits from The Emotion Code for? MEGAN: Oh, absolutely. you know, specifically the hip pain, you know, that’s a lot of times connected to moving forward. And so are you right-handed or left? LINDSEY: I am right-handed. MEGAN: Okay. So, and if it’s on the right hip and right handed, most likely it’s some sort of healing that is going on around moving forward in your most significant relationship, which is usually, a spouse. So that’s a kind of general idea of where I would go first with it but everybody is so personal. Like each session is so personalized that I, for me, I would go and dig deeper and, you know, make sure that’s really what it is. But, most likely it is about support. It is about moving forward and it’s about relationships. And so what I would do is just when I would be doing the session for you, I would just clear out emotional traumas and trapped emotions that are stuck in the hip area. Women, especially hold onto a lot of emotion in our hips. Our hips can get really tight and so we hold also a lot of sexual trauma in our hips and so there could be some sort of emotional connection around your husband and moving forward, possibly around sexuality. you know, holding back or something that feels stagnant there. Hopefully that’s not too personal for me to share, but it’s, again, I’m not, I, I’m not like tuned into where I’m telling you, that’s what it is, but that’s from a general perspective, when you’re looking at hip pain, that’s kind of what you’re looking for. But yeah, I mean our, our pelvis, especially as women, we hold a lot of trauma in that area, we hold a lot of, sexual heaviness. And so that’s kind of probably where we would go first. LINDSEY: Okay. Well maybe we don’t have an established client practitioner relationship, but I want to let everyone know that you and I did not have a conversation about this before we started this interview. You have no idea that I’ve been having this hip pain. You really don’t know that much of what’s happened between my husband and me, and you don’t know what I’ve done in my own journaling and meditation times. So for me, this is just evidence that, you know, your shit and you’re intuitive as hell because a few months ago I was journaling and, are you familiar with Nicole Sachs’ work? She, she works The Cure for Chronic Pain and she has a practice called Journal Speak. Are you familiar with that? MEGAN: Yes, I am. LINDSEY: Okay. So I was doing my Journal Speak one day, about this hip pain. And what started flowing out of me was just, you know, heart vomit about feeling like my masculine side was tired and it was time for me to step into my feminine. And I know that the right side of the body is the masculine side and the left side is the feminine and the other interesting thing was, and I know that you’re a David Deida fan, cause I’ve seen, you mentioned him on your Instagram feed. My husband and I were listening to one of David’s books, The Way of the Superior Man, which talks all about your man embracing his masculine energy and letting you be your wild and free feminine self. And we really loved the book. And if I’m honest, like we’re still figuring out how to put some of those things into practice and we are making progress, but you’re absolutely 100% spot on with moving forward in your most significant relationship, sexual energy, and trauma feeling stuck. And so I’m like, wow, I want to start working with you now. I feel like maybe I could get this hip pain figured out because like I go to physical therapy and I go to the chiropractor and they’re like, “You know, yeah, you’ve got a little misalignment in your spine, but it, you know, it doesn’t explain this sort of pain. Like we haven’t been able to pinpoint it.” And I can’t, I can’t figure out a stretch that targets it. I can’t figure out a movement that targets it. So like you and I did not have a conversation about this at all before we started this. And the fact that just with your very limited knowledge of me sharing that I had this hip pain and you being able to say that tells me how intuitive you are about how the body stores emotions. And I’m wondering if you could just speak more generally to how the body stores emotions. Because as long as people don’t understand that our bodies keep the score, our bodies store emotions and emotions are energy in motion. And if we don’t feel our feelings and acknowledge them, they get stuck and trapped. And, I call it a trauma threshold. I don’t know what you call it, but we reach this sort of trauma threshold. Where our physical bodies are like, “Okay, buddy, I’ve maintained homeostasis for you for as long as I can. I’ve adopted in a million different ways, but you keep suppressing and repressing these emotions and it’s going inside of me. And I can’t deal with this anymore.” Can you speak to that some? MEGAN: Absolutely. One thing I’m gonna tell you about your hip pain. A couple of things you can try is, especially if you’re having a hard time targeting it physically just getting a tennis ball and rolling that around all around your hip on both hips will help. But something I think most people don’t realize is that when the body is in pain so if it’s hip pain or it’s a runny nose or whatever it is, we’re having some sort of symptom. The body is actually in a state of healing, not in a state of breakdown. So our Western brains are kind of used to thinking that illness is bad and pain is bad. when in reality what’s happening is the body is going into healing. So most likely what happened is when you started having these conversations with your husband and you started listening to David — and I love The Way of the Superior Man — it’s a wonderful book, something in you shifted. Something in your psyche was like, yes, and I’ve been holding this pain in my hip for so long. And now that your consciousness has opened up a little bit to have this new understanding and you have the support of your spouse, bam, your hip goes into healing. And it’s okay that it’s taking a long time to heal. A lot of times what happens is that our bodies go into healing and depending on how long we’ve been holding that trauma, it will take awhile to heal. But our minds are like, “Oh no, something’s wrong”. And we go to the chiropractor and it’s like, well, nothing’s really out of line. I mean, I’ll adjust you again, but you know, and they’re like, Oh no, like, no, something’s really wrong, but actually it’s just the body taking a while to heal and that’s totally fine. I think it’s about, again, trusting the body, trusting that your body knows what it’s doing, which is what in religion and wellness culture and all of it, we’ve been taught and indoctrinated and drilled into our minds that we can’t trust ourselves. We can’t trust our bodies. We can’t trust our feelings when the body’s in pain, it’s in a state of healing. So trust it. Do what you can to get through it. If you need to take an ibuprofen, if you need to stretch out, if you need to ice it or put oils on it or whatever, do whatever you can to support the body. But the body knows what it’s doing. The body’s healing itself already. And so the way that we store trauma depends on what the trauma is and how we feel it. So for instance, heart palpitations are connected to the feeling of overwhelm. So when we get heart palpitations, we’re actually in the process of healing from a past emotion of overwhelm. And so that’s why a lot of times, when we are in our late twenties, early thirties, mid thirties, wherever, and we’ve kind of gotten past enough of our childhood trauma that we start to go into some healing. And then all of a sudden, bam, we’ve got symptoms. And we’re like, Oh shit, I’m getting older. Something’s wrong. What’s going on? It’s like, no, your body is actually just finally like, let go of your childhood. And now it’s gone into healing. So we store things based on what the feeling is that we’ve experienced. We store things in our physical body. We store things in our energy field. We store things all over the place. And a lot of times what happens is we become so uncomfortable that we disconnect from the body and we just live in our heads. And then we become anxious and depressed messes. And we are basically just a living head walking around with a body attached to it, and we have no concept of that connection there. And so, you know, things can get stored in our organs, in our fascia, in, everywhere. It’s a physical thing that happens in the body. And, when we start to take better care of ourselves, when we start to give ourselves compassion and love, and we start to connect with people in a community that hold our same values, and when we start doing things that we enjoy, the body might go into some healing and we might have some pain and we might have an episode of heart palpitations or some GI issues or something like that. But it’s not a red flag. It is a reminder that you’re doing something good for yourself and to let your body finish healing. I’m definitely not saying don’t go to the doctor. I’m not saying don’t go to a therapist. I’m not saying any of that. I’m also not saying don’t take meds. Like medication is fabulous. Therapists are fabulous. Doctors are fabulous. But this is just kind of something to help remind us that our bodies do know what they’re doing. And, given the space and given the proper tools that all that stored junk can be released and we can move through it. And we can come out on the other side so much stronger. LINDSEY: I love that. Our symptoms are actually a good thing because they’re our, body’s miraculously amazing way of communicating with us. And so when we have this mindset that they’re bad and we need to get rid of them, we further shut off the communication with our body and that causes even more trauma. MEGAN: Yeah, absolutely. It does. I remember, again, for example, years ago I woke up with a headache. I would be like, Oh my gosh, Megan, like, what did you eat? What do you need? And I’d go down a rabbit hole. I swear it felt like every day, you know, researching down in the Chinese medicine rabbit hole, Oh my gosh, it’s my spleen. I need this supplement. I needed to drink dandelion tea. I need to, or, Oh my gosh, it’s, it’s my hormones. And so like, I need to take maca root and I need to do this. And I would just wake up every day, honors on a research mission, trying to figure out what was, what was causing my headaches so that I could fix it and never have a headache again. In reality, what I needed to do is wake up and say, Oh, okay, Megan, like your body’s doing some healing today. You’ve got a headache. What do you need to support you? This will pass. So what do you need? Maybe it’s an ibuprofen and maybe it’s a cup of tea. Maybe it’s some stretching. Maybe I move some clients around so that I can take some time off, you know? Those symptoms are actually messages rather than just some random thing that happens that you need to suppress. It’s a message. And it’s not necessarily a message saying you’re doing something bad, you’re doing something wrong. It’s a message saying you’re doing some healing. What is your body trying to tell you? And for me, you know, I don’t really get a lot of symptoms at this point in my life. Knock on wood. Thank goodness. But whenever I do, if I wake up and I’m just lethargic or have a headache or whatever, it’s like, I know I’ve just been doing too much and I need to take a day off. That’s it. And then I do, and I, without any guilt, I sit on the couch and I watch trashy television. And, you know, I go for a walk and I do my yoga and like, I feel great. And it’s over and that’s it. And you know, anybody can get to that point again. I think it’s just really, again, recognizing the body is not the enemy. The body is the messenger. And the answers you’re looking for are not in the next diet book that comes out. LINDSEY: Yeah, for sure. We should put that on a billboard or a t-shirt or something. Like that’s a message that, that every person who needs to hear, especially women. I want to circle back around to the religious trauma that you mentioned and the patriarchy and how it specifically affects women and affects women’s wellness. You were raised in the Mormon church. I was raised in the Southern Baptist church. So both of those are fundamentalist religions and very patriarchal, very misogynistic. And, again, just like you shared in the beginning, my story was like, I was raised to believe that my purpose was to be a wife and a mother and to be a keeper of the home and to be a servant for my husband and to constantly be serving in my community. Like my role was to basically be a servant is how I was raised. And, that for a lot of women, even outside of fundamentalist religion, our society’s view of women as a whole is sort of like women are here to serve at the pleasure of everybody else. I think that’s even magnified in religion. And I’m curious if you could talk about, or maybe give some examples from your own life or from your clients that have had these experiences with religion and have awakened to the fact that the thing that they were told would save them, which was God is actually the thing that’s made them sicker. MEGAN: Uh, yes, so spot on. Yeah. grew up much of the same. Same shit different, different name. I was told as well that I was a help meet to my husband. So I had to make a vow and a covenant to my husband that I would obey him when we got married and that he was my connection to God. He was my connection to salvation. He would provide everything for me and I needed to sit down and be quiet and make babies. And I think for me, there was always a spark, a small little spark inside of me that would kind of call bullshit on it a bit, but it was like, Well, like, I don’t know what the alternative is. Like, I didn’t have any examples of anything else. And so that’s really all I knew, but at the same time, there was this underlying feeling of like, this is bullshit. And, when I left home at 18 to go to college, I kind of, I had a year there where I put the church aside and I kind of lived my life the way that I wanted to, and I had a great time. And, and then there was a lot of fear from my family about moving away from the church. And so I was made to go to a Mormon school and that’s where I kind of drank the Kool-Aid again and got married right away and, you know, graduated from college with my husband and my six month old baby on my hip, and spent the next gazillion what it felt like years under that guise and I think I’ve always been a little bit rebellious. I’ve always been a little bit of an ass kicker. I’ve always wanted to shake shit up a little bit and when I started practicing energy work, that’s when things really started to shift and I realized that there was a much bigger world out there than what I was thinking. Specifically in the Mormon church, you have to check several boxes, in order to be deemed worthy enough to be in the presence of God. So in order to go to heaven or to be worthy to go to the Mormon temple, you have to pay 10% of your income. You can’t drink coffee, you can’t drink alcohol. You can’t have premarital sex. You cannot associate with any organization that goes against the teachings of the church. And so you have to check all these boxes in order to be deemed worthy. And I think for me, When I started practicing energy work and seeing that these people can come to me and receive healing, and there are no boxes that have to be checked, it doesn’t matter who these people are, what their history is, what they’re doing. None of it matters. They receive healing no matter what. And something about that opened my eyes. And I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah. So what I’ve thought all along in my heart is a very compassionate and open and tolerant and liberal kind of person and personality like, Oh, maybe that’s actually right. And it’s not just me being bad. And you know, because I’ve always supported LGBTQ and you know, women’s rights and all these things that went against the teachings of the Mormon church, but I always thought that was just, you know, my rebellious soul and, you know, and so, yeah, I, I think there was this awakening in me that, maybe those inklings, those little intuitions as little like inner guru speaking from inside of me, weren’t the devil. They weren’t bad. They were truth. That was my truth speaking to me. And, and so it was that awakening of like, Oh, maybe I can be something more than just a mom. Maybe there is more to me than serving my husband. And, it’s, it’s this long process of unraveling all these beliefs and recognizing that I as a woman have a lot more value than just being a wife and a mother. And, I’m a single mom, so I do not have a husband anymore, but there’s so much more out there and we, as women can follow our passions and we’re not doing something wrong by doing that. LINDSEY: Yeah, for sure. I cannot believe the similarities that are in our stories, even though we were raised in two different religions. Like it’s just, it’s crazy to me how similar they are and, You know, what would you say to a woman who, whether she was raised in a fundamentalist, religion or not, like, what would you say to a woman who is just like, “I literally don’t know how to listen to my body. I don’t know how to listen to my intuition. I’ve been listening and doing what other people and what religion or my husband or my father, or whoever told me to do for my whole life. And I’ve never. Known how to listen to myself or to my intuition”. What would you say to her? MEGAN: So I would say, that even though you think it’s not there, it still is. so reminding her of that first, that it has not gone away. And something that I tell people to do is, I know that it sounds very easy, but sometimes it’s not is finding something that you enjoy doing that you enjoy doing, not something you’re supposed to do, not something that you’re supposed to want to do, something that you actually enjoy, and do that. And so some people actually have a very hard time with this and, I’m not saying like, Oh, well, I should really enjoy exercising because I know I’m supposed to do that and I need to lose weight and blah, blah. No, that’s not. It it’s like, Oh, I’m so passionate about nature. I love taking photographs. I love, walking through old libraries and looking at random books. I love playing the guitar. I love watching funny television. I love going to lunch with a friend. I don’t care what the thing is, but pick something and do that thing. And if you’re having a hard time finding something, you know, sometimes people can’t even make those lists. And I say, “okay, go back further. What did you love in childhood? What’s like something that you loved to do?” Maybe you loved to play roller hockey. Maybe you loved to ice skate. Maybe you loved to draw. Do that. Buy a pair of roller skates. Have at it. And just pick something. And if you really don’t know if there’s like nothing that comes to mind, you can just then pick something anyways. And it’s really about having these moments where you prioritize your own joy for no other benefit, other than just enjoying yourself, that you can start to tune into kind of those deeper pullings of your own soul. because the more especially as women that we stay in that place of, I’m just doing everything for everyone else. I’m not listening to my body. I’m out of my body. I’m just this constant robot, just moving around and helping everyone else. you know, it’s going to be really hard to hear that voice, but when we take time to do something for ourselves that we want to do just for the hell of it, that’s when we start to remember that. “Oh yeah. I’m I’m me. Like I’m Megan, you know, I’m Lindsey. I have an identity outside of this to do list. I have sparks inside of me of things that I want to do and things that I’m passionate about. And, Oh, I’ve totally forgotten that I really love to learn about history” or, you know, whatever. So that is like one of the first things to do. Another thing I would say is get into your body and whatever that means. I really liked doing yoga. I like hiking. I like walking. I also really like to get on the floor and stretch. I like to have tennis balls and I roll them around on my spine and my hips and I open my shoulders up and I literally just get in my body. And that helps to move the energy out of our heads and back into our bodies. Even just small things like, if you’re walking or driving, feel your feet. Where are your toes? Notice your toes, recognize where your toes are in the space and feel them on the ground. It’s these really kind of simple things that help pull us back, but you know, it’s getting into the body and it’s giving you capital Y you the opportunity to speak to yourself. It’s opening the space for you to, to get out of the head, to get out of that, to do list, to get out of the, the normal subconscious stagnant patterns and, and hear a little whispering of some inspiration and a little whispering of some wisdom that comes from within. And, you know, it’s, it’s a simple place to start, but get into the body and do something fun. That’s the best place to start. LINDSEY: Awesome. And I guess I have one more question about The Emotion Code and the work that you do. Is there an average amount of time that it takes for somebody to start seeing some big breakthroughs or does that really vary for each person? MEGAN: It really varies for each person. I would say even after the first session, though, you’re going to feel a shift. You’re going to feel, you know, most people, most of my new clients come back and say, you know, there’s something different. I can’t put my finger on it, but I feel lighter. I feel like I can breathe a little bit easier. And you know, it really depends on the person. I have a lot of clients that are children and , they don’t take very long. They don’t have a ton of stuff built up. I have some adults who have been through some really, really deep stuff and it takes longer, but most people are gonna feel a pretty big shift after a few sessions. And then I would say at least 75% of my clients from then on out and go to just kind of maintenance work where, they will just reach out to me as needed or they will set up a session once a month just as kind of like a tune-up to keep themselves going — a little emotional wellness boost every month. LINDSEY: You know, I just thought of something else. A lot of people who’ve experienced trauma, they don’t remember what they’ve been through because their, their nervous system has blocked their ability to remember, or they’ve repressed it to the point that they can’t recall it. Is it important to be able to remember the trauma in order to access it and heal it in the emotions, or can you still energetically access that even without a specific memory? MEGAN: Yeah, that’s actually the beautiful thing about this work is that it’s not talk therapy. We, you don’t have to remember any of it. I’m able to access all of that on the subconscious level, without having to, to talk about it, to relive it in any way or for the client to remember any of it. I am a hundred percent behind talk therapy, but that is a limit. There is, you’re only working with things you can remember in the context that you remember them. And, you know, emotion code goes just a little bit deeper than that, where we’re just working from a very kind of basic almost computer way of looking at it from the subconscious and saying, you know, this is what’s there let’s delete that. This is like, let’s delete, delete, delete almost like a software program where we’re just finding old files that need to be deleted. And then you can upload new ones, new happy ones. But yeah, you don’t have to remember anything. And we don’t have to talk about any of it either. Most people are sick of talking about their trauma. And so I’m like, good, great. Sit back, relax. I’m gonna do my work and you, you just get the healing. So it’s nice and easy. LINDSEY: That’s such a great point to make about talk therapy, and its limitations. So I love that and yeah, I mean, energetically, we can access anything, right? Like we’re not limited energetically, cause it’s always there. Okay, Megan. Well, this has been amazing and I love, how much on the same wavelength you and I are. I’m curious if you can share what’s the best way for people to find you and follow you and how can people work with you if they want to. MEGAN: Yeah. So I am on social media, as @harmonyrestored, my website is www.harmony-restored.com. I’m there and I have tons of resources on my website. You can see how to become a client of mine. I put out a lot of content on Instagram. Those are kind of the two basic ways to get in contact with me. LINDSEY: And people can do The Emotion Code work with you virtually as well as in person? MEGAN: Absolutely. So, yeah, I see most of my clients virtually, anyways and now, especially with COVID. All my work can be done remotely. We can do emotion code and coaching. There’s lots of different packages. I have like a self-love package and an anxiety and depression package and different things. You know, depending on what somebody is coming to me with, but yeah, I can do everything remote, or if you are in the central Virginia area, we can meet in person. LINDSEY: That’s fantastic. Is there anything else you’d like to say? MEGAN: No, that’s it. You know, we are all whole, and no matter what we’ve been through, there are ways to process it and get through it and to really live from a much more authentic and beautiful place. LINDSEY: I couldn’t have said that better myself. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. MEGAN: You’re so welcome. I’m so happy to chat with you. EPILOGUE: Okay. After Megan and I recorded that episode together, I went ahead and booked 2 Emotion Code sessions with her to clear any trapped emotions that are in my body that are contributing to the pain and discomfort in my right hip. As of October 30th, she has finished both of those sessions. But we’re going to wait to tell you what she discovered and what was cleared from my body and what I’ve experienced since for a couple of weeks. I’m going to re-interview Megan, and we’re going to talk all about those Emotion Code sessions and what was revealed. I will have links to Megan’s website and her Instagram page in the show notes of the podcast as always show notes are lindseylockett.com forward slash podcast. And this is episode seven. When you sign up as a new client of Megan’s, please let her know that Lindsey from the holistic trauma healing podcast referred you, and you can keep up to date with me and everything that’s going on with the podcast on Instagram @iamlindseylockett. [OUTRO MUSIC]