Resilience And Transformation With Christina Medina

 

We can transform our lives for the better. All it takes is imagination, heart, and the resilience to take on your past feelings. In this episode, Rodney Flowers talks with podcaster and coach Christina Medina as she discusses transforming your life. With the right mindset, imagination and support, you can change your life too, transforming to become a better version of yourself. Be inspired by Christina’s resilience and passion in this special episode.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Resilience And Transformation With Christina Medina

I have a very special guest with me by the name of Christina Medina. We are going to talk about understanding the conditioning that you have received back in your childhood and how that could be preventing you from moving forward, preventing you from accomplishing what you want to accomplish. Being the version of yourself that you know is inside.

You are trying to bring it out and it’s like, “How do I get there? How do I fulfill my potential?” Christina is someone who knows all about that. She’s here to share her story with us and share with you some strategies, some tools, and some techniques on how you can breakthrough. She’s going to share that and she’s helping others with their inner exploration. Welcome, Christina Medina, to the show.

I feel so pumped up and motivated after hearing that. I thought I already was but hearing that, I love the energy you put behind your voice. Thank you for having me here and being able to share this message with your audience. We all have things to overcome from our programming and childhood. We have a lot to accomplish in this lifetime and many things that are here for us. Thank you for helping me get it out there.

Thank you for doing the work, being an example of what’s possible, which is my motto. We don’t talk about this much. We don’t talk about things that happened in our childhood or our past that may be preventing us from going forward, stopping us from living the life that we truly want to live because we don’t deal with those things. Those are things that we turn our backs on. It’s like, “It was in the past, but it still affected me. I’m going to push it down. I’m not going to worry about it.” If we don’t get over these things emotionally and mentally, it’s a barrier to becoming our true selves and sometimes we hold on to limiting beliefs.

We hold on to ways of being that don’t serve us because it’s part of our past. We say, “This is who I am. This is part of who I am.” I like to challenge those thoughts, beliefs and ways of being. You know a little bit about that. Could you tell us a little bit of your story about how you’ve got into this work? Why are you so passionate about it? We will then move into how we can break free from these limiting beliefs and some of the techniques that you used that we can put into practice?

I experienced what many call a dark night of the soul. It wasn’t one night. It was more like a few years, to be honest. It felt like the first half of my lifetime up until I started my own spiritual journey. I had my rock bottom point. It was shortly after I moved to New York City and I went through separation, divorce, recession. I worked so hard to change a lot of the programming and the way I valued myself. I put myself through university, I was the first person to graduate from high school in my family, let alone go to university, and then leave my town in Missouri to move to New York City to pursue dreams.

I had this idea of who I then was and what I accomplished. Not going back and thinking about my past at all or seeing the patterns that I was living through all those years but I’ve got a slap in the face from the universe, had this reality that got completely shattered and hit this rock bottom point. From there, I had insight and a voice within me tell me like, “You need to join a yoga studio, start working at a yoga studio.” What I left out was the part when I lost my job a couple of times because of the recession. I moved here to become a gallerist and pursue my dreams of being an artist. That’s what I put myself through school for.

When all that came shattering, I had to go back to bartending, which is one of the jobs I had while I was paying for college. I felt like it was crushing for me because bartending is very difficult work. In my mind, I had worked so hard to get to this place or create this identity for myself, someone who overcame my past, got a degree, and moved to New York City, pursuing my dreams. I’ve got married, had an artist husband. We were going to be an art couple and everything shattered. Going back to bartending, not using my degree in any capacity, and all the other kind of domino effect things that happen, that was my lowest point.

This is a lifelong journey of taking stuff up, out into the light, going through it, unpacking it and just determining what is real. Click To Tweet

While I still worked in the bar to pay my bills, I started working in a yoga studio because I needed some light. I needed something that was in contrast because I was also going through my spiritual journey of becoming a coach, working with the coach, becoming a life coach, becoming a Reiki practitioner but I was living in such contrast. I felt I was always living one foot in and one foot out. In that process, I learned to look at and observe my life so far, and my current behaviors to see where there were patterns that I was continuing to carry out.

It was because of a lot of trauma and pain that I basically shoved down inside of me. I didn’t want to look at it and I didn’t want to face it. I knew it was there. I didn’t like it. It hurt. I had days where I would get very depressed because sometimes things would trigger those memories and I used alcohol to cope with some of that. It was all that shifting and happening that made me start to look at these things.

What did you see? What did you find that made you want to change?

I saw a lot of people-pleasing and a lot of codependency. It was then that I came to terms with the fact that I grew up in an abusive household. My mother was an alcoholic. She’s no longer an alcoholic and there was a lot of fighting, emotional abuse, some physical abuse, and all sorts of things. A family that had PTSD from serving in wars and a lot of alcohol abuse that’s generational.

There was a lot of pain, multiple generations of pain in my family. I was on that same trajectory. I ended up getting a divorce from a very wonderful human being but I was still carrying a lot of pain and anger that I wasn’t willing to look at. All of those things helped me to see. I’m a different person now because I can see how those things helped to propel and serve me, and how it’s a lifelong journey healing from things like that.

It opened me up and I have so much more compassion and understanding for other people now on their own journey as well as for myself, which was very difficult. I was not accustomed to experiencing my feelings. I was so hyper-aware of everyone else’s feelings. I was tuned into them. I’m also an empath and highly sensitive person. I was super tuned to the feelings of those around me, especially my elders.

I learned not to feel and not to be as concerned about my reality but more concerned about, “Are they going to be angry at me? Am I at risk of being hit or yelled at?” Those are the things that were at the front of my mind. Not, “I want to do this and my opinion matters.” I was not in that childhood. That was a pattern that carried over through my adult life. I was in relationships that were exactly the same.

Once you found this awareness about yourself, what was the turning point? What caused you to not look within and identify these things but say, “I need to do something?”

It was a few years into the journey. I’ve got into my last difficult relationship with a narcissistic person. As a people pleaser, I attracted narcissistic friendships, relationships, jobs where I would be under the management of someone narcissistic. I often found myself in those situations. I was like honey to bees. I was so attractive to people that wanted someone to do everything for them and I found value in that. It was my last relationship like that. I was with someone who was an alcoholic and had two children. He’s sober now. This relationship lasted a few years and it took me to very dark places of my childhood because I was trying to shelter the children from knowing this about him.

 

After the kids were in bed, I was experiencing the same feelings I had as a little girl. I was also thinking of them and not thinking of myself. Meanwhile, they had both parents. They were not together but they had a mother and a father and I was this third person who was sacrificing a lot of myself for them, including my own self-value. There was a turning point in there. It started with some inner child work at that time because I started looking at this little girl. I had a picture of myself as a little girl in kindergarten wearing my favorite dress.

I could remember how much inspiration she felt and so much possibility in the world. It was at that moment that I felt like I was trapped in a situation and I didn’t know what to do. I felt responsible for people that were not truly my responsibility. It occurred to me that I was not being responsible for myself. I had a visualization that I had worked on. I have been a coach. I have worked coaching salespeople and doing all these things, so I was aware of this stuff. Through life, I managed to get myself in that last situation that I needed to break the dam and let everything flow through.

I had a vision or a visualization of me with the two children and then me as the child. I could see that I was caring for them. Me, as a child, that little girl in her favorite dress was completely in the dark being neglected, again. This time, it wasn’t the adults around her that were neglecting her. It was me. That was very difficult to see but that was what I needed to see to change. I’ve got myself out of that relationship and plunged back into the healing again.

First of all, I want to say thank you for being so vulnerable now and sharing that with us. I know for sure other people can feel that. We all have that inner child within us that has been hurt before. This child within us plays a big role in our adulthood because a lot of times, the child is the one that’s running the show, believe it or not. It’s running the show because of the pain that it’s felt before. A lot of times, this child wants to completely express itself, but then there are those moments where it remembers it has been hurt. It goes back into that protective mode because it doesn’t want to feel that pain.

It’s like the pain of disappointment. The child wants to speak up and wants to speak their needs but at the same time, there’s the fear of being shamed, hurt or being disappointed, being let down so we don’t go there.

I have to say thank you for this moment. If you want me to take this out, please let me know.

It’s okay.

These are the types of things that I do in my coaching sessions.

There’s always more to uncover. There’s always more to come out. I refer to it as the basement. In my mind, when I speak to people, when we are coaching and talking about it, it’s like things that are in the basement. I imagine when I was a child, I was terrified in the basement. I’m scared of going downstairs in the dark basement. I picture boxes of things, boxes of memories, books and things like that. Some of them are way down in the dark corners and covered with dust and cobwebs. Every time you go down there, there are always more boxes.

If you're more attuned to the world, your mind will actually find evidence to present to you how the world works. Click To Tweet

They don’t seem to disappear because this is a lifelong journey of taking that stuff up out into the light, going through it, unpacking it and determining like, “What is real? What did I make real? What do I want to change about that?” Being a coach, there are different modalities that you can work with to start to unpack all that stuff, bring it all out into the light, gain something from it, find some understanding, find some healing and rewriting of the story.

You bring up a good analogy about the basement and going down into the basement. A lot of times, we don’t go down into the basement. We leave that stuff alone. We don’t want to deal with it. We give our self the excuse that, “I don’t need it now. I have other things that I need to focus on right now.” The basement is not the priority.

I believe that the things that are even in storage, even in the basement, it’s taken up space in our lives. We can go down to the basement and take a look at this stuff. Two things happen. Obviously, those emotions are going to come back up. I remember these pictures, all of this stuff, how that felt, that could be an interesting experience. The second thing that happens is the most powerful thing. We can decide, whether we want to hold onto this or let it go.

We can clean out the basement. Every spring, I clean out my closet and I call it creating space for something new. I look at there and I say, “Is this item serving me? Is this something that I can get rid of?” If it’s something I can get rid of, I get rid of it. I’m okay with letting it go. I don’t have that attachment to it because I realized that it’s creating space for something new. I realized I’m holding onto this thing. It’s sitting there. I don’t use it. There is some sentimental value but it’s not serving me.

There are things that we hold on to that are very painful. We never disattach ourselves from those things. They take up space in our lives. We get the opportunity to clean out the basement. What we do is create space for something new so that the pain that’s there can be replaced. This is part of the healing process.

If we can go there, if we can face it, we can ask ourselves, “Is this serving me? Is this helping me this way of being, seeing, living?” It hurt me then and it shaped me in a way but I have to question, I have to challenge, whether or not the little girl that you were when you were twelve or whatever age that was hurt at that time. The 30, 40, 50 and 60-year-old is like, “Is that still real?”

That way of thinking is based on something that happened when you were twelve. We carry that with us throughout our adult lives. That’s the way we think. We view the world, our relationships, our work environments and everything around that experience. That protective mode or way of thinking when you were 12, 13, 14 maybe that was a way of thinking that was for a 12 or 13-year-old. That’s trying to reach adulthood. This is proper thinking because at that age, maybe you need that level of protection. As we grow and mature, and most importantly evolve, we have to question, whether or not that way of thinking of being is serving us. If it’s not, then it’s time to let that go and replace it with something new.

I love that you say it’s making space. I also work in energy. This is an energetic clearing too, in so many ways. You were talking about cleaning out the closet or the basement. Physically, it is an energetic clearing too because you are removing those things from your life that are no longer there that are taking up space and energy. When you are clearing it out, you are clearing out the energy too. Also, getting back to the analogy of it, in terms of memories and the way you are thinking, we let those situations define us. It shapes how we perceive and value ourselves, as well as how we believe the world works. That belief in how the world works is what starts to shape our reality.

We become more attuned to the world works like this because you are more attuned to that. Your mind will actually find evidence to present to you. That’s like, “You are right. This is the way the world works.” Meanwhile, a person that lives right next door to you could have the exact same home and everything. Their idea, concept or perception of the way the world works is very different from yours, so what is available to them could be entirely different. I have a situation with a very good friend of mine. She and I both had very similar childhoods and similar types of trauma. I also work in real estate in New York City and we work in the same industry. We started at the same place. She had about a five-year-head start ahead of me.

 

This was years ago but our paths have gone in completely different directions, where she’s still in the same place and starting to break out of that same place where I started. I’m in an entirely different place and have accomplished many other things. I love her but we both see the world as very different realities. Through my healing and my own inner work, my perception of what is available to me now is very different than the perception that we both shared when we met and aligned at that same time, several years ago.

Perception, unchallenged, becomes a reality. You mentioned your identity. We can perceive something, but if we don’t challenge it, it becomes a reality. We begin to take it on as part of our identity that this is real for me. This is who I am. It shapes the perception and how we see ourselves. That becomes very real in how we present ourselves.

Our perception of ourselves becomes a presentation of ourselves if we don’t challenge it. It’s how we show up. You are showing up with what you perceive about yourself. It becomes present and becomes real for you. The perception that we have is important. It’s the game-changer. This is the key because whatever you allow in your perception about yourself if you accept that as, “This is me, this is who I am,” that’s how you present yourself to the world.

You look around, everybody is showing up as their perception of themselves.

Given all of the things that one can experience in the past, how do we challenge it? How do we make sure that we are accepting an identity or perception about ourselves that’s powerful, serving, and allows us to show up as our best selves?

This is a lifelong journey. The first way to do it is you can make certain moves that advance you a little bit further along on the journey. To tag onto what you were saying, we are all very into labeling things. Our subconscious mind wants to assign a label to everything so it can make an order and make sense of things, including our own labels of who we think we are. “I experienced trauma. I’m a trauma survivor. I’m this. I’m that.” With those labels, even saying like, “My mother was an alcoholic, I’m an adult child of an alcoholic and because of that, my life is like this.”

In some respects, those are helpful. I went to Al-Anon. If you don’t know what Al-Anon is, it’s for people who are survivors or existing in relationships with people that are alcoholics. It’s like a support group and you can sit around, you can hear everyone’s story, and they could talk about it. At a point, I had to leave that because at first, I was like, “I’m not the only one going through this. There’s some support here,” but then, it’s the same kind of thing. I started feeling like, “I don’t want to continue to be in this energy of feeling a little bit like a disempowered victim.”

I started to want to empower myself. This is where you have to separate from the labels. You have to become more of an observer of how you are existing. The way you start to transcend your past, your vision of what you think your reality is, is you have to separate yourself. The way I like to imagine it, especially when a particularly triggering situation happens, I like to spend some quiet time alone. I like to sit in my mind in a dark movie theater, watching the big screen of what’s happening so I can energetically and emotionally be detached from whatever is happening. I can start to then witness, “This is how I participated in this dance with this other person.”

I was defaulting into my old thinking and I can see that I was doing it. It’s like, you start to separate yourself, start to observe and look at the patterns like, “I’m attracting bad relationships. I seem to have bad relationships over and over again. I seem to get in work situations where I’m unhappy.” You start to go backward and pick out, “What things in common did all of these people I was in a relationship with or the employers that I was working for? What are the commonalities, the common themes running through that? I felt taken advantage of. I didn’t have good boundaries. People were trying to step on me or use me,” things like that.

Everybody has a character because we are living a perception of who we think we are based on situations that we allow to define us. Click To Tweet

Those are some things that could come up. Number one, it’s separating yourself from the labels to witnessing your behavior and your participation in it. I’m not saying that you are at fault but at the same time, we can fall into the victim thing and feel disempowered, and let that pattern continue to go. Those two things help to start moving you along that journey a little faster. Lastly, I would say, working backward. I had a vision in my mind of the kind of person I wanted to become. There must have been a book or something I saw, an acting book or something like that. They were talking about taking on characters.

I created this idea in my mind that everybody has a character because we all are living perceptions of who we think we are based on situations that we are allowed to define us and label us. If that’s true and that’s a belief system, then I can choose to believe whatever I want to believe about myself. That means I could become this completely different person than I was before if I can figure out what this person believes about herself. When that started happening, that’s when the real changes started kicking in. At first, I became aware that these things were happening but you could sit in that awareness for years and not do anything about it. It’s stepping into, “How do I actively start to shift this?”

I love what you said about the labels because we allow the labels to define us. This is one of the biggest things that I have experienced as a coach. I was coaching a recovering alcoholic. This person has been sober now for several years but they still go through groups and do this exercise where you have to say, “I am an alcoholic.” I completely disagree with that.

We all have had experiences in the past. Those experiences don’t define us. If you keep focusing on that experience, maybe it wasn’t life-altering or it defined you for a certain time in your life where you are now. If you keep holding onto that, it will continue to define you. We’ve got to disassociate ourselves from that experience.

If you keep saying, “I’m an alcoholic,” and you feel like you need to do that to move forward but you have been sober now for several years, you are not giving yourself credit. You are not the same person because if you were the same person, you would be doing the same thing that you do. You have not been that person for five years but you keep calling yourself that. To me, you set yourself up to go back and you are disempowering yourself.

You are not even recognizing the progress that you are making to me because you are so far removed from the spot you were in, and yet you keep reminding yourself of that particular spot instead of looking forward to, “Where can I go with this? What’s the possibility here?” You take on the persona, character or the identity of where you want to go and you say, “That’s who I am now.”

The more you take that on, the more you understand that character and you step into that character, you start pulling yourself towards that versus hanging on to the path because when you keep saying something like, “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a recovering alcoholic,” you are still saying that you are alcoholic. That’s not proper programming. You are setting yourself up for failure, disempowering yourself.

Once I became injured, the label was handicapped. I made up my mind that the physical challenge that I have in life is not going to define me. I don’t take on that identity. As a matter of fact, I take on the identity of an athlete. I’m still an athlete. I still feel and take on the characteristics of an athlete. That dictates my behavior dictates my values. I don’t go out there and play sports. I don’t do that physically but in my mind, I’m very competitive. I treat my body a certain way. I have activities that I execute on a daily basis because of this character.

We can be a little more liberal with our definitions of things. For example, you say athlete but what defines an athlete? The mindset defines an athlete. It’s like me. I studied Art. I used to be a lot more active as an artist. I don’t make visual art anymore. However, I am the artist of my life and I see it that way. There’s a definition in a book but can we be a little bit more liberal with that? It comes back to the mindset of that character is what we are taking on.

 

What does it mean for you? That’s the question. That’s somebody else’s definition. It may not completely 100% accurately fit how you see.

In language, some feelings cannot be expressed with words. The definition in a dictionary is never going to truly define because those words don’t exist. There are differences even in languages, things that could be translated from French to English that can never be accurately translated because that word in French does not exist in English. The words are limiting already but there’s a feeling that transcends that. You can be in the energy and in the feeling of being an athlete, though what may not be the athlete that people may be envisioning in their mind because that’s their perception of what they believe it to be.

We are energy. You bring up a good point. The fact that we are energy, we are what we can express at any given moment in time. It’s the feeling that we have is what you are resonating. Perhaps, you have expressed something very painful in the past. You don’t have to keep expressing it and it doesn’t have to keep defining your identity. The identity you are expressing, your energy, is fluid. It can change.

You can transmute the energy. The things that I work with, what myself is transmuting that pain into some other kind of energy. Energy is energy. You can take that feeling or emotion. I imagine it like rolling it into a ball, then stretching it out and projecting it into an entirely different direction to use it for something that I feel is worthwhile and empowering in my life.

What would you recommend to someone who’s reading this who’s totally resonating with it? What would be the next step for them?

There was something that you had said earlier when we were talking about being an alcoholic and saying, “I’m an alcoholic.” This could be the next step as well. I like to remind myself that we are living in a series of lives. We are like a box within a box or like those little dolls that stack within. We are consistently rebirthing ourselves. If we allow that to happen, we can transform or transcend whatever situation we came from and grow into another life.

The next step for someone, if you are wanting to change the game and to transcend where you are now to where you want to be, number one, it’s a simple thing to say and we hear it all the time but it’s not always the simplest thing to do. It’s to visualize what is this next level life that I want to get to. Is it five lives from now? Is it several steps up the ladder from where I am now? Is it right next door? You need to imagine the kind of person you want to become.

That is how I transcended. I could have ended up a very different person based on my life and the trajectory that I was on. When I had that realization that I can create the character that I want to be, here’s how this person feels, thinks and behaves, and behaves in her life, all these other things fell into place. People want to know how I went from living in this old East Village apartment on the 5th and 6th floors. You are walking up 5, 6 flights of stairs to get up to your home. It was an old place I was renting to living in this building that I live in now.

It’s all those things and opportunities filled in the blanks on their own, whether you believe in God, the universe or what higher power you believe in, or maybe you don’t and you strictly believe in energy, all that other stuff filled in as I became this new and evolved person. I allowed myself to envision the person I wanted to be and the person I saw in my mind. I saw her as being confident in herself.

You need to imagine the kind of person you want to become because that is how you transcend yourself. Click To Tweet

What does confidence mean to me? What would confidence feel like to me? Do I even know what authentic confidence feels like or is it fake it until you make it confidence? What does confidence feel like? When I say this, I say feel. I don’t say, “How would you describe confidence? What does it feel like for me? It feels like I trust my inner guide. This is my intuition. I’m intuitive. I would go with my gut instincts and because of that, I honor my intuition. I felt confident in what I’m doing. I take time to think things through and I don’t feel like I have to rush to please somebody else. If I don’t feel comfortable making a decision, I will take time for myself. Assess it as it makes sense for me. This is what this next-level version of me feels like.”

As a result, she then probably dressed as different because she makes the decisions about what she wears differently. When she walks around and interacts with people, she is feeling more confident and more authentic because she feels comfortable being in her body and speaking to people authentically from her heart. It’s all about getting into the feeling and allowing yourself to play with those feelings and try on the feelings. By existing in that, then it was like, “Now that I understand the way this feels, what do I need to do to start getting me in this direction?” It’s like a combination of that, the energy and the feeling.

You’ve got to do the practical stuff, too. Maybe there are some skills you need to learn. Maybe there are some people you need to talk to a network or maybe you could give a little bit more in this direction that you weren’t giving in because you weren’t feeling confident. You were having imposter syndrome. There are a few different ways but it ultimately begins with how do you want to feel when you have reached this particular point. When you do reach that particular point, you are then going to have another feeling. You are going to want to take on too and keep going up. It’s going to always evolve. There’s no end game.

How did self-care play in this process with you?

It’s so much. Being a people pleaser and having terrible boundaries in the past, I know it’s a label but sometimes you have to use these labels to describe things. I have transcended that part of myself. However, I am aware that sometimes I can slip into those behaviors but the important thing is recognizing when you do and making that time lapse in between shorter.

The self-care helps keep me from having that because there are always still more boxes in the basement, still more things that are there that have to come up and get unpacked. While that stuff starts to try to surface every now and again or situations can happen. Maybe you are tired one day so it’s easier to be like, “I don’t want to do this,” or your boundaries for weaker, things like that.

If you are doing self-care, it helps give you strength consistently every day. For example, what that started to look like for me was, I began meditating. When I started meditating, that was a game-changer for me because that helped me learn how to observe the behaviors. I was actually learning how to quiet my mind. I wasn’t always playing music, always around people, watching Netflix or something. I wasn’t allowing myself to be distracted. That’s the other thing. People that are like, “I don’t like to be by myself.” Those are people that are hiding from things.

When I started making myself have more time alone, Sunday was my dedicated day to be alone and it was me and my cat. We were alone in my fifth-floor walk-up in the East Village. It allowed me to meditate. I started getting into Reiki. I was giving myself Reiki every day, doing yoga or going for a walk. Those little things started helping me have that relationship with myself. That’s self-care. Your relationship with yourself goes hand in hand.

There’s self-care and then there’s self-love. Self-care is you being the parent to yourself. The little kid you that you were looking after, how would you care for this child? If you see yourself working, having terrible boundaries and you are doing more than you should, you can feel it in your stomach, “This doesn’t feel good. I’m getting bitter and angry because I’m feeling like I’m being taken for granted.” You can feel it when your boundaries are pushed.

 

“I’m not supposed to stay late tonight but I’m excited. I want to help out.” That’s different. The other feeling is like, “I should be going home because I plan to do this bath ritual, I plan to go to a workout but now I have to stay in. I have to work because I couldn’t say no.” Self-care is taking care of yourself. You are the parent of yourself, basing your decisions on that, caring for yourself. You then have self-love, which is doing nice things for yourself, falling in love with yourself, feeling you are a worthy person who deserves love and to look nice.

You want to look nice. You deserve to do things. I’m speaking from a female perspective. I like to go and do these things for myself. I want to go buy a beautiful, new dress if I feel like it. I want to feel like this feeling of being in love with myself, not in a conceited way but like, “I’m a lovable person, I’m worthy of love because I see the qualities in myself that are lovable and I love those qualities about myself.”

Christina, how can people connect with you if they wanted to learn more about your work?

There are two ways, through the podcast, which is Mindset to Manifestation or through the website, which is MindsetToManifestation.com. On the website, you can sign up for my Sunday Night Emails. I send those out on Sundays and I like to dive into different things. It could be stuff related to things you can do for your own energy or helping yourself through the week, coaching questions, different things like that. It’s like a self-help email with a little bit of my mentorship in that. It typically connects with the podcasts that are released. It’s my way of trying to serve on a bigger scale. There’s information on there for mentorship that I’m going to be starting.

People need to talk about this more often because we don’t address our past. When we are talking about things like alcoholism, PTSD, prevalent diseases that a lot of people are dealing with but not many people are talking about, some of these things that we have discussed here, fundamental practices that can help get beyond these diseases.

These diseases can be very impactful, especially like what you are saying. It’s between like romantic relationships but families have been broken apart because we don’t know how to deal with these things. We don’t talk about it. We don’t go down into the basement. We throw stuff down there, close the door and we don’t deal with it.

It’s very easy to be distracted from that. It’s not fun to go down in the basement. It’s not fun to go and dig up that stuff and feel those feelings again but it is necessary for transformation.

You have given us a lot about how to deal with this. If there’s one thing that you would like for us to take away from this that would help us deal with this, overcome it and win the battle of our past selves, what would that be?

Remember that you are more than any label, image or experience you may have had in the past. That it is possible to transcend all of that and become whomever you decide you want to be. It is absolutely possible. It’s worth putting the time and putting in self-love.

It's not fun to go and dig up the past and feel those feelings again, but it is necessary for transformation. Click To Tweet

Thank you, Christina, for stopping by to share your story. Thank you for being so vulnerable with us and making this even more real than people can feel. I appreciate that.

Thank you, Rodney. I appreciate it being here. I’m honored.

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There you have it. Another successful episode. For those of you out there that may be dealing with some past experience or some label that is making it difficult for you to progress into the person that you want to be, I want to propose a challenge for you, to make a recommendation to you. Forget about what you have been through. Forget about the past and what the label dictates.

Focus more so on who you want to be, the characteristics of that person, the thought patterns, the beliefs and the feeling. What would it feel like to be that person? If you were that person, how would you feel? Where would you go? What would you do? Who would you talk to? What kind of clothes would you have on? How would you take care of yourself? What would your self-care ritual look like? What would you eat? What restaurants would you go to? Who would you go to dinner with? What does that look like?

Whatever thought patterns that you may have from the past about the person that you are or the person that shows up whenever you are triggered, I want you to practice replacing those feelings with the feeling of the person you want to become as much as possible. When you are cleaning up your house, I want you to clean up your house as you would if you were that person.

Go to the bathroom the way you would go and brush your teeth the way you would brush your teeth. If you were that person, how would you take care of your car? How would you talk to your kids or your spouse? Think of that. Spend some time. Turn Netflix and that radio off. Sit quietly and think about what that would look like for you. I want you to start doing it every single day.

Put little reminders of that characteristic, that role like you have an audition to be the leading role in a movie and this is the character that you have to play in that movie. You’ve got to practice so that you can be your best at being that character. Play that game with yourself in this version of the person that you want to be. What would you read daily if you were in this role or if you were that person? Practice being that person. Let it replace all the thoughts of the person that you want to get rid of. I would like to know how that works for you. Email me, reach out to me and tell me how that works.

Reach out to Christina. Get with someone who has been through that process who knows all about it, talk to them, interact with them because I believe that a person that’s trying out for actor’s position, you can believe they talked to other actors about certain things they do. Find someone, if it’s not me, if it’s not Christina, ask someone who’s also trying out for the best version of themselves that’s working to be that star player in the movie of their life. Get with them, talk with them, be with them, work with them, grow with them, that’s Game Changer Mentality. Until next time. Peace and love.

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About Christina Medina