Are you ready to break free from pain that you didn’t even know you were carrying? Many of us unknowingly bear the emotional and energetic burdens of generational trauma, fear, and unresolved wounds.
In this revealing conversation, we talk with creative educator and self-healing practitioner Jeanette Shaw, the author of the powerful new book, Healing Generations: One Breath at a Time. Drawing on over 30 years of teaching experience and her own journey, Jeanette shares her personal story of healing from profound abuse and the deep-seated thought distortions it created about her self-worth.
Discover the essential tools—including the “Forgiveness process” and breathwork—that allowed her to move from denial and physical pain to clarity and self-love. Jeanette’s book offers a pathway to hope and transformation, demonstrating that you are not defined by what happened to you. It’s time to stop pushing down the past and start clearing your energy for the generations forward and backwards. Start your healing, one breath at a time.
For more information or to request a workshop or an individual session go to www.healingthewholewoman.org.
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Watch the episode here
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Jeanette Shaw, Author of Healing Generations: One Breath At A Time
Jeanette M. Shaw has a Bachelor’s in Psychology and is a Creative Educator and Guide with over 30 years of teaching experience. She’s a knowledgeable practitioner in the fields of creative spiritual direction and self-healing. Her primary focus is the physical, mental and emotional connection as she understands that all of these areas must be addressed to heal the whole being. She facilitates residential intensives titled Healing the Whole Woman and does individual workshops as well as one-on-one support services. For more information or to request a workshop or to schedule a session, go to HealingTheWholeWoman.org.
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Jeanie Rice, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me. It’s delight to see you again.
You too. It’s my honor to be here.
We’re here because you’ve done some fabulous work over a long series of years and you’ve published Healing Generations: One Breath at a Time. This is the new book, and this is what we’re here hoping to talk about, a beautiful cover and really powerful, valuable content. Tell us what prompted you to write a book like this and what you’re hoping people will get from it.
The Catalyst For Writing The Book
Back in, I believe it was 2010, we did an intensive in Florida and during a still point session, I had a very clear visual of a small Native American girl. It felt like it was me and she had been captured by a White man and was abused physically, mentally, sexually. This vision, I describe it in the book in the chapter titled A Life Remembered or Imagined. If you ask me if I believed in past lives, I would say no, but it really felt like it was me. Perhaps it was an ancestral memory, something that happened to a past relative and up to me now to face it.
After that still point session, I had such physical pain in my hips and I just kept living with it and not paying a lot of attention to it. I kept telling myself, “If you focus on it, you’re going to create it if there’s not something already there.” After a while I went and I had X-rays done because this was so intense. They told me there was nothing physically wrong that should generate that pain. I knew that the vision I had during the still point session was actually a mirror of what happened to me in this current lifetime.
The Denial And Body Memory Of Abuse
I got married when I was sixteen years old and nobody knew what was happening in that experience. They knew that I was married but I told no one. I didn’t tell my parents, my brothers, friends, I just kept inside what had happened during those three years. After I finally got out of the abusive situation, it was like, “I don’t ever have to look at it again, I don’t have to remember it,” but my body remembered it. I think it was a reflection then of the still point session I had and the young girl being abused.
It’s like, “Okay, I have to deal with this.” My book shares that part of my story. Some of it is graphic in description. Maybe in a way, it’s my finally holding my former accountable because I never held him accountable for what he did. It doesn’t excuse what he did, but trying to forget it and stuffing it down it was like still going to come up. This book shares that part of my story.
More importantly, it shares what I learned about healing and how to come out of that because I created some distorted thoughts about myself that I was unworthy or that I deserved to be treated that way. After all, he was my husband so he could do what he wanted to do with me. It took a while to start working with it and working through and processing what was coming up. I actually got a book and it was titled Courage to Heal and it was by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis.
It was more like a workbook. They walked you through of acknowledging what actually happened and facing it and admitting you’re not at fault for what happened and it’s like this was the beginning of my journaling to actually acknowledge the three years of abuse and realizing I can’t ignore it anymore. Learning the forgiveness work and the breathing and letting go. At the end of the book, actually do a worksheet on every one of the thought distortions that I mention in Chapter 2 of who was I, who did I think I was.
The first part of the book describes my story and the thought distortions I had about myself. Those actually were drawing other experiences into my life. Holding them down didn’t make them go away. I think it was 2016 when I very first started writing. Now here we are, 2026 and I’m getting it published so it’s finally out there but it was all those years of processing.
Ten years to write a book this powerful is not that long, especially when you consider all that’s gone on in your life over those ten years. It’s not like you just had the luxury to just sit back and just write every day for a long stretch of time. The thing that strikes me about what you’ve said so far is this very tender age of sixteen that you were when you got married. There are two things that jumped into my mind as you’re talking, one is that really the tenderness of a sixteen-year-old and the lack of sophistication and experience and wisdom for how to deal with people who were being abusive or whatever.
The other thing is your mentioning the forgiveness process, while you and I might have great familiarity with that, lots of people who are going to encounter your book and read this interview don’t know anything about it. Would you like to say something like about that or would you like me to offer a quick summary of that?
Go for it.
I’ve been working with the tools that you call the forgiveness or the worksheet process for 22 years or more and studying with that work and with Michael Rice and the way I talk to people about it these days is you have the capacity to choose the focus of your conscious awareness. You get to choose what you think of. Guy Finley says, “As goes my attention so comes my experience.” Whatever I attend to creates what I’m experiencing inside. The ancient wisdom says you’re whole and complete just as you are.
You have this creative force that we call thought, mind energy, and whatever you focus it on you’re going to get more of. You were mentioning that earlier with your hip situation. You didn’t want to focus on pain in your hip and then manifest an injury or a wound. What we recognize is that if I focus on something and I hold it to be true in my mind, I experience it as though it’s true and yet the fact of the matter is we don’t really know that much. Most of what we think we know is just our belief system and we get lucky a few times that our belief system leads to a better life or comforting thought.
Most of the time, it’s our beliefs that keep us stuck. In this case you’re talking about a belief that you weren’t worthy or that you deserved to be abused etc. You have these thoughts about it and you have certain goals running in your mind. The forgiveness process is about canceling the goals and opening the space in my mind where something other than my old negative thoughts can come into my awareness.
Real simple, I just cancel what I think I want, put away everything that my mind is telling me I need and ask to be shown something else and that’s the essence of that worksheet process. As you’ve done that and presented these, can you talk to us a little bit about what you’ve experienced in shifts? What happened with the hip pain, what’s been happening with your self-esteem, etc. As you’ve done all this work.
Learning The Forgiveness And Worksheet Process
It’s funny because the hip pain had dissipated. I wouldn’t say that it had totally gone away, but when I really got into writing the book, it’s like it came back again. I was touching into the things that I had never spoken of. Bringing it to the surface, bringing it to the light is releasing from the tissues. For those who may not understand that, it’s what we call a healing crisis. That is when an event happens and energy goes into the system and gets locked into tissue, as you’re healing the energies will come back out and it might manifest symptomatically looking the exact same as it did when it went in.
A healing crisis is when an event occurs and energy enters the system and becomes locked in the tissue. As you heal, that energy is released and may manifest with the same symptoms as when it first entered. Share on XAs I’m healing the issues of self-worth and all of that, then where my body was holding those, which most of the physical damage was in the hip area, so that’s where it was holding onto that energy. As I was releasing all the thought distortions and all of the beliefs and letting go of all the goals and so then my body was releasing the pain as well. That actually came back again as I was writing the book. Especially the last few months as I was getting really close to publishing and we were going through doing the edits every day and things like that, that came back forward again but it’s better.
Today, I’m totally well, totally good. Some of the things that I found and I explain it in pretty much detail when I’m doing the worksheets in the book and a lot of them I do on my former husband, which I call him Cain in the book because I change the name to protect the guilty. A lot of the worksheets are on him and what I wanted from him, wanting him to honor me and I wanted him to value me. What I found after I canceled those goals was I didn’t honor myself.
I could have gotten out of that situation a whole lot sooner but I didn’t think I could. I thought I was trapped and that it was inescapable. It took a while for me to get brave enough to step out of that. It actually took a miscarriage of a baby to give me that push to get out. I realized that I didn’t honor myself, I didn’t think myself worthy so what I was expecting from him I wasn’t giving myself. Letting go of that and then in each of the worksheets, there would be I called them afterthoughts but it’s what we call the hydra. You cut off 1 head and 10 more come out.
I would be doing a worksheet and it’d be like, “Now I need to do a worksheet on this and this,” and it just brought out more issues around that same event. A lot of the worksheets I did on my carbon-based memory self, which is not our true self who we are, it’s the false self that we’ve come to believe we are. I did a lot of the worksheets like there was one worksheet that where I thought that there was a possibility that he had given me sexually transmitted disease. It was like I told him bluntly what was going on and I said, “If you’ve given me something, I’ll kill you.”
At that moment, I was so angry and full of rage that I honestly think I could have killed him then. It took a lot of work to get to the point where if I ran into him on the street now, doesn’t mean that I let him off the hook or pardon him for what he did, but I could run into him without feeling like I needed to murder him. I’ve cleared that layer. The reason I did it on my carbon-based memory and not on him and yes, one of the afterthoughts was I needed to do worksheets on him and infidelity and sexually transmitted diseases and all of that, those were other issues.
The main issue in that worksheet was I wanted to do that I held the capacity to commit murder. They say in the scriptures and some people may not be religious or believe in this, but the scripture said that if you’ve done it in your heart you’ve done it. I did this worksheet that I committed murder. They led in different directions and there’s fifteen different worksheets in there in the book and a lot of them are on myself, on the carbon-based memory self, not the true self.
I’d like to just back up to the one thing you said earlier where you said, “I could have gotten out earlier.” I would just ask you to loan me your time machine if that’s true because if you really could have and you can go back and change that, when you get that one fixed, I’d like to borrow your time machine so I can go back and change a couple things that I could have done differently. I’m joking around about a time machine but the essence of the message is we beat ourselves up mentally and emotionally when we pretend we could have done things differently.
The fact of the matter is the flow of life is just the flow of life and we don’t get to determine exactly all these things, especially from the outside energies, and yet we do get to choose how we interpret and respond to them. One of the best filters for life that I have found is to put on the filter that says everybody, every human being is doing the best they can in each moment with whatever resources they have at hand in that moment. Which means you did the best you could from being 15 to getting into 16 to moving into 19 to getting into 28 whatever it is.
There’s a lot of intelligence and perseverance and strength and tenacity that you can look back and see that you have been exhibiting in your life. We would encourage you, in this work, anybody who’s good at this work would encourage you to focus on that rather than what could have or should have. From the one perspective, you’re seeing somebody who’s doing the best they can with their resources and moving their life forward, even when it doesn’t look that way. They’re accumulating experiences that they will learn lessons from.
On the other hand, you’re just painting a picture of somebody who’s a screw-up. What are you doing staying in that abusive marriage? Why don’t you just get out? Somebody from the outside might say that but that doesn’t mean the person who’s in that situation has the resources to get out. Maybe in some of the ways that you talk about this, you’re saying maybe this was a past life thing or maybe this was a cross-generational thing in my own family, there’s work to be done. There’s energies to be processed and seen as false.
I can’t do that if I’m avoiding it if I’m looking the other way or if I’m just taking time on a sunny beach with cocktails. To get the work done, I have to be focusing on what’s happening in my life in the moment. One of the next things that you’ve mentioned the worksheets a lot and of course you’re steeped in that work and but I think it’s good for us to say here that what you present in the book is your story and the tools that you’ve been using to do lots of healing.
Those tools are available through the website that you maintain WhyAgain.org. Thought I’d forgotten it, didn’t you? The wealth of free materials that’s available on that website are too much to talk about in a three-hour interview, let alone what we’re doing here. Just so people know, when you’re mentioning the healing work and the tools and the worksheet, you give wonderful examples in the book and tremendous amount of support and audio files of people being stepped through the worksheets are available at WhyAgain.org.
I should also mention that you’ve created a fabulous app that people can have on their phone and wherever they are, they don’t need to go searching for paper or pen. They can open up their phone and type in responses to the prompts of what’s now the current seven step worksheet and they can get access to that same powerful tool.
The Book’s Purpose: Offering Hope And Tools
You had asked what I hoped the end result of getting the book. I realize that there are so many in the same position that I was in and they don’t know there’s way out. I’m hoping that through this book that it offers hope and shares with them anyone the tools of how they can let go of the self-deprecation and feeling like they’re stuck in this and this is their fate. That they can move through that we are not defined by what happened to us.
We are not defined by what has happened to us. Share on XWe do a monthly brunch with people we graduated with and they had asked me to bring the books and to explain it and it’s like all of them knew me because I got married between my junior and senior year but none of them knew what was going on. I told them, I paraphrased, they wanted me to read from one of the chapters and I didn’t even get to that. I got lost in our conversations but it’s like I shared my stories and told you about my demons in the book. It was everything that I believed actually true. The events happened, the pain was real, the abuse was real, but the judgments and the things I told myself about the experience and that I was unworthy and I was ruined and the sense of who I thought I was. I lived from those beliefs for a long time.
Hidden but living from them. I’ve known you for 22 years or so and you didn’t present outwardly to anybody who would watch you walking down the street as though you hate yourself or you don’t care for yourself. You always presented well on the outside and yet the healing wasn’t happening because you were in denial on the inside.
They were even shocked because on the outside in school, I was on honor roll. I’m was involved in certain things, not a lot, I didn’t do a lot of extracurricular sports or anything like that, but nobody knew. They couldn’t have guessed based on my sharing with the class, one of my classmates came up to me afterwards and privately shared that her father beat on her constantly when she was growing up. She said, “You never met my father because whenever you came to the house, he wasn’t home.”
She wasn’t allowed to have friends over if her father was there. She opened up and shared what she was going through even while we were in school together. Nobody knew what she was facing either. I’m hoping that this book coming out will allow other men and women to be able to let go of what they’re holding inside, because like I said before, stuffing it down doesn’t make it go away. I’ve always attempted to be collected on the outside.
Even one time, my brothers, they were 6 and 8 years younger than me, and when I was still in that abusive marriage, they had come to visit for a weekend. They talked later, mentioned about, “I remember when we went to your house and we played in the creek and we had such fun.” I don’t even remember them being there because I was in survival mode. Even though on the outside, my brothers thought, “Big sister’s taking care of us, she’s feeding us, she’s keeping us the weekend, we’re having fun,” and I didn’t even remember that they had come.
Stuffing things down doesn't make it go away. Share on XIt happens because you use the phrase you push it down, meaning the energy or the memories or the effects of what you’ve downloaded as a belief about yourself. One of the things that we observe in this work is that pushing it down takes energy. I’m adding energy to the thing that I don’t want to feel and coincidentally hiding it in the only place in the universe I’m guaranteed to run into it again and again until I finally deal with it, which is my own body’s energy system. Can you talk a little bit about what would you say are the most powerful transformations that you’ve been through in the process of writing the book and doing the healing work? What’s changed the most for you?
Major Life Transformations Through Self-Acceptance
The way I think about myself. I’ve learned that no is an answer, that I am worthy and that I am love. It’s challenging still, and that’s why the subtitle on the book One Breath at a Time. I was in a conference back probably when I was in my twenties and the guy was a Jewish speaker at the conference and he said the name of God in their original language was not pronounceable and it was like the breath and it was like, “Yahweh, Yahweh.”
The breath of God saying speaking his name Yahweh. He said, “Are we alive because we took our first breath or because we first began speaking God’s name? If we choose to die is it because we take our last breath or because we quit speaking God’s name?” Every breath we take, One Breath at a Time, and we’re speaking the creator as our support and he put within us ruka, which is translated as the breath or some people translate as the Holy Spirit, and that is within us to guide us if we ask it to.
We’re not puppets and we’re not going to be like, “Okay, you’re going to do this, you’re going to do that.” That power is within us to do what we can’t do on our own if we ask it to. It’s like in the worksheet, if you’re going through the steps and you identify the goal, you cancel the goal, you have to let go first then you ask ruka to assist you. If you’re going to hang onto it and say, “Ruka, take this from me but I’m not going to let it go,” she’s not going to take it.
We have to be willing to let go and then ask and that power within us can take over. I think one of the big things is learning to believe. We’ve been taught a lot of things and it’s head knowledge but to really believe it in our heart and to accept that there is a source greater than us, whether you want to call it God or creation or whatever, but it is greater than we are and it can handle what we can’t handle.
Being able to believe and trust in that power even when I feel like my faith is gone that it’s still holding onto me. That was a big one for me because trust was a big issue, especially going through that can I trust? He was supposed to take care of me and so how can I trust anybody. That actually led to even after I got out of that situation and got back out into society or whatever, being able to trust anybody, male or female.
I would imagine that would take years. The strength it takes to leave a situation like that is the thing that only people who go through it actually know. When you’ve worked with people like that for years you realize they’ve got a strength in them that far outstrips the average person. Yet they’re thinking of themselves as weak and broken and defective. The big part of the healing for me in this work is just seeing the false nature of my negative thoughts.
You’re talking about believing rather than the head knowledge, it’s the heart knowledge thing and instead of using the word belief there, I just use a phrase like feeling the truth of it. I can say it and know it’s true up here but if it doesn’t feel right up haven’t lived through it myself or I haven’t tested it and seen that it works for me. I don’t have to operate from belief, I’m operating from observation. When I do this this happens. When I do that I get these results that I don’t prefer.
When you think negative thoughts about yourself, how does it feel? Do you want to do more of that or do you want to do less? If you’re stuck believing your negative thoughts, that’s a self-imposed prison. I asked what things that you had seen or felt shifted in yourself and you can come back to that question. I just thought I would point out that what I have noticed for you over the years is that you still say self-deprecating things. Yet it’s far less than it used to be and more often than not, you catch it yourself. You’ll make a course correction in the middle of a conversation that you didn’t use to make years ago.
Yeah, it’s growth.
If you would get centered, just take a breath and get centered and think about what have we talked about for the last half hour and another whole aspect of the book we haven’t even touched on yet or something we just skimmed over that you want to go back and highlight.
I’ll point out one thing. I think I told you but I don’t know if you caught it. I don’t mention you by name but a great tool that I used when you say get calm and get centered there’s was an incident where we were at an intensive. We were actually doing a breath session and I was facilitating this woman. She just went nuts. She was like pulling her hair out and she was kicking and thrashing and I couldn’t calm her down. I was trying to speak to her and get her to breathe and slow down and get back to actuality instead of the reality she was experiencing.
Michael came over and he took over with her and I ran upstairs and called you. You walked me through an exercise because you could tell on the phone that I was in a panic. You told me, “You can’t change anything except your situation right now. It has nothing to do with that woman.” You had me take a breath and you told me, “Name three things that you can see. Name three things that you hear. Three things you can smell, three things you can touch.”
You walked me through this exercise. I don’t know, we went through it probably three times before you were convinced that I was present and calm. I use that exercise a lot too when I feel like something’s out of control to get back to the present. What came out of that as we continued to talk that day was it didn’t really have anything to do with her. It was that what she triggered was that when I was in this marriage before that when he got so wrapped up in his reality instead of actuality, that he just went mad and I got hurt.
That’s what it triggered. She was actually the perfect mirror what was going on inside me because inside I was screaming and thrashing and going insane too, so her outward madness was reflecting my inward madness. Being able to deal with that and say, “This isn’t about her. She’s showing me something that I need to work through here.” I thank you for your part in that. As I said, I don’t mention you by name but I talk about that incident in the book.
You’re most welcome and deserving and I remember. A lot of times, people say, “Dr. Hayes, you’ve helped me so much.” I say, “If you understood how many people I’ve said those very things to that they think I’m crazy or they walk away or they never come back for a session, then you’d have the ability to understand how you’re the one that made that change. It was your willingness to turn inside even though you were in a panic and actually let me talk about silly things like what do you hear in the room and what can you see, name three objects etc. You had the willingness to go there rather than hold onto your absolute terrified belief that you weren’t safe. It was your willingness to question your own false belief and those well-rehearsed thoughts has become beliefs. That’s what was transformative for you.”
Yeah, for sure. Returning to the place of calm and connection and love is like that’s where we see things more clearly. That’s a really important part. I mention it several times in the book of being aware in that not mixing up our past experience with our present experience. It may trigger, it’s like something in the present is similar to what happened in the past and so our brain goes, “This is what happens. This is the result of that. This is how I acted before and it didn’t work so I need to do something different this time.” We always are going back into our filing cabinet and seeing what we can pull out.
Returning to a place of calm, connection, and love is where we see things more clearly. Share on XWithout realizing that what we’re doing is living from the past. We’re just we’re just looking for what have I done in the past that has worked or didn’t work and then if it didn’t work can I avoid it and if it did work. In that process, we’re missing is what trial attorneys know from the get-go. If you interview a trial attorney and you ask her, “What state of mind do you want the witness for the opposing side to be in when you’re cross-examining them?” She will tell you.
She doesn’t want them feeling calm and secure and safe, she wants them in hostility or fear or hurt or confusion. If you ask why, she’ll tell you, “Because we know that’s when people make mistakes.” Now I say to people you could pretend that that’s a special case that only happens when you’re in a courtroom being cross-examined by the opposing attorney, but I think it’s probably more realistic to think whenever I go into hostility or fear, upset of any kind, it distorts my perception as much as my fingers right now are blocking my view of the screen.
If I’m willing to just recognize that and make the top priority not me proving my thoughts are right but me diffusing or changing my relationship with those thoughts so I laugh at them rather than treat them as though they’re true, then my vision clears. Whatever I decide or whatever actions I take are probably going to be far more preferable in their consequences.
Can we can we remind ourselves that every negative thought I have about myself or somebody else is false? In the bottom line observations that I hand people in a session, one of them says, “If I have a negative thought about myself or somebody else or a negative emotion active in my mind, I can instantly know three things.”
Number one, if this isn’t a bold-faced lie, it’s got falseness as its foundation. There’ll be some false premises woven in there. The second thing I can know instantly is this is an old tape. All these great spiritual teachings tell us I’m never upset about what’s going on in the moment in front of me because if I’m awake and aware in this moment, I’m interacting with that. I’m either helping people or expressing love or building others from abuse or helping resolve a difficult situation and there’s no emotion involved. There’s just the truth of life acting on me and me responding.
The third thing I can know is if I act from that if I sit spinning and thoughts, negative thoughts, or I speak or act from that negative position. I’m just going to make my situation worse, not better. It’s akin to throwing garbage on the buffet table right before dinner. It doesn’t enhance the dining experience. One of the things that comes to me is as I listened, as I read and it felt almost like listening, if you went through the different worksheets in here, that you’ve done a tremendous amount of unloading of the negative energies you carried about yourself. I’m curious about how many people, if they know you from the past and they’re talking to you now that this book is out if they’re commenting on what they feel and see in your energy.
The Goal Of Clearing Generational Patterns
I actually ran into a lady in the grocery store and as we were passing, I said, “How are you doing?” She grabbed me and hugged me and she said, “I’m reading your book. Oh my God.” It was just an immediate compassionate embrace. She didn’t really have to say any other words about it. The reviews online have all been awesome. I think it’s touching people.
One of the things we didn’t talk a whole lot about, I talked about the whether the Native American Girl was a past life or whether it was a generational in the past. Energies, like the fears, the hostilities, abandonment, those things are passed through the generations. Not just from that Native American Girl and her fear and the abuse and everything. As I was working with writing the book and I did a women’s intensive, my mom came to it. She actually shared some things how she had felt abandoned.
It wasn’t his choice, her father died, but that she felt abandoned by the man in her life. Her mother had to struggle to keep three kids. When Mom grew up and got married, and had me and my brother, my dad got drafted to the army. That wasn’t his choice, but she felt abandoned and left raising the kids. Those emotions and fears get passed on. She shared about hiding in the bathroom in a movie theater to get away. She had experienced some things that she had never talked about to anybody.
Going to my father’s side, my grandparents on my father’s side, they had 12 kids and lived in a 3-room house and didn’t have running water or anything. I’m sure they were constantly wondering how they were going to survive. I can remember my grandmother telling how the babies always wore gowns whether they were a boy or a girl. They would lift the foot of the bed up and set it down on the tail end of the gown to hold the baby in one place while they had to go out and work in the field.
That’s the way that they could feel that the baby would be safe. There was there’s fears and survival issues on both sides, just in three generations of my generation. Another push for me was to clear this up so that the generations below me start with my son and his children that they don’t have to deal with this, to clean it up for the generation or forward.
It’s easier for them to deal with it. The other aspect of that to my eye and ear gets missed off is that we inherit all kinds of stuff. Good neutral, bad, horrible, lovely, fabulous, divine, we inherit all that stuff down through the bloodline. If you interview people with an eye towards that, he’ll uncover patterns. Michael your husband, has a story about how he did this fabulous thing between grad school and medical or whatever his Doctorate of Naturopathic Medicine.
Come to find out, when he talked to his mother about it years later, she goes, “That’s not amazing. It was either your dad or your grandfather did that all the time.” We’ve got these stories if we’ll look for them. My dad did things at age 18 and 19 that were not the norm, but it was drafting for the war and getting out there and he had enough intelligence that he just went for it and did a good job with it.
Not everybody who’s 18 and 19 years old was put in charge of the sonar room on a submarine or on a destroyer. My brother grew up and did the it was in his 19- and 20-year-olds, he’s managing the Notre Dame football team and, in the ROTC, and in the same thing happened. He was a probation officer at nineteen years old. Contributing to life and death decisions for people at nineteen.
The good stuff comes down with the not so good stuff. It’s just stuff. It’s just energy and its resources, if we’ll look at them honestly, and work with them, we can use to make our lives better. If we shove them away and pretend they’re not there, they become the festering wounds that the infection that keeps us from realizing the benefits we could be accumulating in Life or the lessons we could be learning in life.
Just like people think, “I’ve got my dad’s eyes, my mom’s skin,” or whatever, but you get the other stuff too, that’s for sure.
At least tendencies towards it.
I’ve heard some people say, “Everybody in my family’s had cancer.” Cancel that thought. I said it’s like the light in the room here. There’s wires going to it and it goes to a switch on the wall. The potential for the light to turn on is there but I have to flip the switch for the light to come on. We might have the potential for anything within us. Even to the fact of in one of mine, I was going to commit murder. The potential is there, but it’s up to us whether we flip the switch or not and we can choose to change our DNA.
We all have the potential for anything within us—even destructive impulses. But it’s up to us whether we act on them. We can choose differently and even influence how our DNA is expressed. Share on XFinding Healing, Self-Worth, And Connection Through Forgiveness And Personal Transformation
I just want to thank you for being willing to be changing your DNA because as we know, we’re not in this world independently. We’re connected energetically and emotionally and through the ripple effects of our actions. Thank you for being willing to do this work and write this book. It was really hard for me to imagine as I was reading this that this is the first book you’ve written.
Thank you.
I want to say that because it’s not a real easy read for some people, especially if abuse issues get triggered and there’s some repetition as you’re presenting the worksheets in here and yet the value of that repetition goes beyond words. The gift you’re giving people by being this honest about these difficult issues and then presenting how you’re handling it and healing from it is fabulous.
Thank you. It has been a life changer for me just to go through the process of the book and so when we finally got it published, it was like I can’t believe. It’s out there now. I can’t take it back.
How do you prefer people reach out to you or find the book? You’ve already mentioned the places that they can go to. If people want to reach out to you, what do you prefer?
They can write me directly and they can do that at the shortest email is Jeanie@WhyAgain.org. They can write to me there, buy a signed copy directly from me. It’s $19.99 plus $8 shipping and handling directly from me. Amazon, Kindle and I’m working on a workbook. I’ve sent it to three ladies who are planning to do a support group and it’s a workbook that is a companion to this book for them to do a go by and do a group study.
It’s not page by page through the book. I’ve sent it to them and I said, “Give me a beta test here, what needs to be changed or whatever before it comes out.” Amazon is holding the book until April 24th. They want to see how much interest there is in the Kindle book. There’s been a lot of reviews for the Kindle and the paperback. They are now showing the paperback on Amazon but it’ll say on there that it’s not available until April the 24th or something like that. I’ve got a stock of books here so I can send them out. We did it as a test. It popped up on Walmart’s site so we ordered one and had it sent here. They’re doing a print on demand and it’s not the exact same quality like it’s not as glossy and things like that but it got here in two days.
That’s quick.
Yeah, I was surprised. They use more of a white paper where I used a cream when I had these done because they say it’s easier on the eye. It’s on any independent bookstore now, just about. You can order from their sites. You can go to Goodreads. As far as commission goes of course, I make more if you order it direct from me. If you do get one, no matter how you get it, if people would go out and give a review that would be awesome. They can give a review not just on Amazon they can go to Goodreads and give a review or they can go to IngramSpark or Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble. They can go to any of those and give a review on it. That would help give it a push out there.
Excellent. We would like to have that because the more people who are exposed to powerful tools like this and moving stories like this, the better. Thank you so much. I want to offer you a chance to put in some closing comments before we completely run out of time here. What do you want to leave us with? What blessing you want to grace us with as we wrap this up?
There is a way through and we are not defined by the experiences that we’ve had. Yes, they happened but it’s not who we are. We are love. We always do this in our workshops. How many has held a newborn baby? What’s its essence? People always describe it as awesome, wonderful, miraculous, pure, sweet, innocent. I offer that’s who you are, that’s who I am, that’s who everybody is, regardless of then the experiences they may do crazy things.
There’s actually one worksheet that I do on Cain in the workbook and I get down to the point where I say what happened to him that influenced him to behave this way? I think that’s probably the first time I actually could say I had maybe compassion for him. As I said, that doesn’t mean that I pardon him, there’s a big difference between pardoning and forgiving. You can let a person or yourself off the hook for whatever happened or you can go inside and remove the energies that don’t belong and return to love which is who you are your very essence.
There’s a big difference between pardoning and forgiving. You can let a person—or yourself—off the hook for what happened, or you can go within, release the energy that doesn’t belong, and return to love, which is who you are at your very essence. Share on XWonderful. Thank you so much for your time and if that workbook comes out is a success, please let me know.
Absolutely.
In the meantime, congratulations and thank you for the work you’re doing.
Thank you, Dr. Tim.
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Jeanette M. Shaw has a Bachelor’s in Psychology and is a Creative Educator and Guide with over 30 years of teaching experience. She’s a knowledgeable practitioner in the fields of creative spiritual direction and self-healing. Her primary focus is the physical, mental and emotional connection as she understands that all of these areas must be addressed to heal the whole being. She facilitates residential intensives titled Healing the Whole Woman and does individual workshops as well as one-on-one support services. For more information or to request a workshop or to schedule a session, go to HealingTheWholeWoman.org.
Important Links
- Jeanette M. Shaw
- Healing Generations: One Breath at a Time on Barnes & Noble
- Courage to Heal
- Why is this Happening to Me…Again?
- Jeanette Shaw Email
- Healing Generations: One Breath at a Time on Books-A-Million
About Jeanette Shaw
Jeanette Shaw has a B.A. in psychology and is a creative educator with over 30 years of experience teaching. She is a knowledgeable practitioner in the fields of Creative Spiritual Direction and Self-Healing. She understands what it takes to heal the whole being, and as such, focuses on the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of each person with whom she works.
She is a skilled facilitator and offers Healing The Whole Woman residential intensives and individual workshops, as well as one-on-one support services.
For more information or to request a workshop or an individual session go to www.healingthewholewoman.org
