Christina Woods – Empowering Women

 

Getting rid of your limiting beliefs is quite a challenge, especially with all the unnecessary noise in the world. For clinical hypnotherapist Christina Woods, the answer is found deep within yourself – all you have to do is dig deep. Sitting down with Timothy J. Hayes, Psy.D, she shares how she guides clients in connecting with their intuition and experiencing life on a different level. They discuss the concept of emotional hygiene, the importance of having a consistent morning practice, and the power of meditation. Christina also talks about the different methods she uses and how she started studying hypnotherapy at 50 years old.

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Christina Woods – Empowering Women

Christina Woods is a licensed Rapid Transformational Therapist, a Clinical Hypnotherapist, an Empowerment Coach, and a Reiki Master. She combines her background in corporate leadership with her life experiences in dealing with trauma and abandonment to empower other women to trust their intuition and set themselves free of self-doubt.

As the CEO and Founder of Wise Woods Hypnotherapy and Coaching, Christina has extensive experience working on complex challenges and pulling potential out of others so that they can become self-reliant individuals. Through this deep hypnotherapy and coaching work, she empowers women to shed old programming so they can live the life they deserve. She has been honing her intuition and spiritual energy practice throughout her entire life.

It is this experience, knowledge, and wisdom that she brings to every client during each session. Christina wants everyone to stop looking outside for what they need and instead look inside of themselves. She helps her clients step into their true authentic selves, free of self-sabotaging behavior, so they can live a life full of deep meaning and potential.

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Christina, thank you so much for joining us here. It’s delightful to see you face-to-face.

Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.

I’m hoping you could start us off by telling us a little bit about how you got into the work you do, and what drives your passion for it.

This is my second career. I had a 30-year corporate career in the higher education space before this. The fact that I’m a hypnotherapist now wasn’t anything that I ever expected in my life, but I’m excited and grateful that my life has evolved and here I am. How I got here was my own journey of healing. I grew up not feeling good enough. My way out of that was to be a good girl, get lots of good grades, and be successful. I got married. I did all kinds of good things. What that led me to was making sure everybody else was good but I had a lot of stress. My self-worth was always coming from the outside and everything else that I did, except from the inside.

I got to a point in my life where I had a lot of anxiety and a lot of health issues. My marriage of twenty-plus years was dissolving. Kids were starting to leave the house. I found that I had to start looking inside. My own discovery and self-development started, journey, therapy, and so on. That’s how I found hypnotherapy. I also found that when I had a health crisis, it was one of the only things that helped me feel better. I knew I wanted to leave my career. I knew I wanted to help people. I knew I wanted to do something that felt better inside. I had no idea what that would be.

The more and more I started on this journey of, “This is amazing. I’m not a bad person. I’m actually this great person. I just didn’t understand how that thing in my childhood affected me and made me feel these things about myself that weren’t even true. This is incredible.” Now, I’m feeling empowered and can take charge of my life and the self-sabotage, anxiety, and these things that were starting to take over my life. That’s how I started this journey. As I was knocking on the door of my 50th birthday, I went back to school and started doing hypnotherapy. I’m a reiki master. Now, this is what I do every day. It’s incredible.

The first question that comes to my mind is how long after you said, “I have to change something. I got this health crisis or this emotional crisis,” how long before you started feeling good about what was inside? What was the length of that process before you started saying, “This is good. I have to keep doing this.”

I had quite a bit of trauma that I had put in a vault and buried. It was a very deep year of at least 2 to 3 times a week of doing EMDR, doing hypnotherapy, doing different types of therapy, doing a lot of massages, sound baths, and retreats, and going inside. I was spending a lot of time alone, a lot of tears, and a lot of journaling. It was between six months and a year.

Thank you because so many people get the idea that it’s 1, 2, 6 sessions or “I can fix that patient in 7 sessions.” That’s delightful that you would share that. You didn’t have to, but you did all of those things to get to the point where you realized there’s a good solid core in there. All the negative stuff was mislabeled and negative thought programming that’s not true.

I knew things. I grew up with a single mother. I was the oldest of four, so I had a lot of responsibilities and a lot of things other people have experienced. There was domestic abuse and some sexual abuse and things that were pretty big. Growing up, I thought, “I’m okay. That’s okay. I’m going to move on and put that somewhere in a corner,” until I couldn’t do it anymore. You’re right. It came to the point where I had anxiety. I then started to have vertigo, autoimmune issues, and other issues. I had noticed such patterns of self-sabotage, whether it was with food, money, and relationships. Many times, I look back at my marriage and say, “Who knows what would’ve happened had I done that sooner?” Those things had to fall apart for me to start to put things back together.

As you were talking about that, it brings up the ACE study, the Adverse Childhood Effects, that happened in the ‘90s, having such a high correlation with the physical. You said autoimmune stuff and physical illnesses. Prior to that study, people were having their eyes forced open. There were a lot of people in the profession, whether it was a medical profession and/or the psychological profession, who said, “It’s not relevant. If you’re functioning this way as an adult, let’s start you from here and grow, and give you some things” A lot of the early psychotherapy things had to do with, “Here’s a tool or a technique to cover up and to cope with that stuff that’s in there,” rather than finding these approaches to help you excavate, find out what’s in there, and the see it as false as you did.

That hypervigilance I was always in, I certainly didn’t understand fight, flight, freeze at ten years old and older. My jaw is always tense and my body is always tense. It’s all these things that I had to unravel. That is something that I have explored with hypnotherapy and the type that I do. One of the reasons I added reiki and some of the other tools was I found that the energy work in that component is a nice supplement to the other work, the subconscious work, the clearing, and the healing. It’s to allow people to have an opportunity to explore some other ways they can relax and connect with their bodies. I definitely was not connecting with my body.

 

As you say, you went into the sound baths and the energy work. At a very deep level, it’s all just an energy system. When I say connect with my body, what I’m saying is, I want to figure out how I’m pretending that I’m not connected to my body. I want to see the artificial separation that’s been created. You might call it compartmentalization or stuffing it in a box, as you mentioned earlier. Once I see that, I see that that’s all layers of falseness on top of the truth that this is an energy system. If I can relax into it and let it talk to me about what’s needed, it’s going to start healing itself.

Just allow it to trust, breathe, have some space, and release. We hold so many things and it is stored there. I had no idea. I don’t think a lot of clients I work with understand it. I get it. I was there as well. We don’t understand. We think, “If I talk through it, it’s okay. What about this back pain? What about these other things that I still have?” We need to do things to help you release and move through it and move your energy.

My belief is this physical being is an energetic being as well. If you marry the two and own both, you become even more empowered within yourself and take control of your health. I’m thinking of a session I had with someone who has struggled with suicidal thoughts since the age of five and was in disconnection with herself and her body. We got to the bottom of it finally and how empowering it was for her. She had it all along. She just had some trauma covering it up.

By marrying the physical and energetic selves, you can become more empowered within yourself and take control of your health. Click To Tweet

I thank you earlier. It’s so nice to be able to say you had a long year of diving deep into all of these things and doing something 2 or 3 times a week to explore and learn. That’s so important for people to understand. It is not a magic pill that you take. Yet, there is a tremendous potential to experience life at an entirely different level if we’re willing to explore.

Honestly, there were so many times I would get in the car and start driving over there and say, “I think I’m going to turn the car around and tell her I don’t want to go today.” It’s not easy. I remember saying, “I don’t want to feel this way anymore. I deserve more. I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to feel this way anymore. I don’t want to feel like I’m this bad person anymore. I don’t believe I’m bad. Why do I always feel bad? Why do I have so much shame? What have I done? I couldn’t see anything I’d done, but I had such deep shame.” Now, I understand why, but then I didn’t understand why. It was a mystery to me. It’s so clear now why I felt that, but I had to go dig deep. Once I could see it and understand it, then I could have so much more compassion for myself, but I didn’t have a clue why I felt that way.

What are some of the things that you use? You mentioned reiki and this hypnotherapy that you’re trained in rapid transformational. What’s the other T for?

RTT, Rapid Transformational Therapy. It’s a method of hypnotherapy.

I’m assuming there are other things, You mentioned all kinds of different things that you went through with sound baths and things like that. If someone is coming to work with you, how do you begin? Are you working these days strictly in person? Do you do any online stuff? Give us an overview of what it’s like to work with you.

I do mostly virtual with people all over the world. I do some in-person, but hypnotherapy and the other techniques I mentioned are as effective virtually. This is the world that we live in and it has opened up a big world. I have clients in other countries. If they are local, it’s nice to see them in person as well. I do work with the RTT hypnotherapy. I’m a reiki master. I also do theta healing, which is an energy healing as well with more of a spiritual component to it. Also, a medical intuitive technique, which is a hypnotherapy technique as well. I use all of those combined. I’ll do retreats where we add sound healing, maybe chanting, music, and those things to move the energy.

With sessions with me, I will typically work with someone for 3 to 6 months, meeting with them every week or every other week, depending on what’s going on in their life. We start to unpack what is going on in their subconscious, what they are unaware of, and what patterns are going on in their lives, mixing and supporting them with energy healing and clearing. If that’s not their thing and they’re not interested in that or they’re uncomfortable with it, some people are not interested in that part of it or don’t want that part. It’s typically something that everyone is open to and feels good about, and they find that it’s very helpful and useful to them.

That’s typically how I work with people virtually. With hypnotherapy, I know there are a lot of people who don’t understand hypnotherapy. I know when my kids first heard that I was doing it, they said, “Mom, you’re the guy at the fair on stage, but we know so much more now.” It’s becoming a little bit more common and familiar for people to at least get curious about it, which is great.

 

You mentioned retreats. Are you doing the retreats virtually as well?

I have done some virtually and some locally. I’ll combine them with maybe people who have other areas of expertise. I did one with a friend who does kundalini yoga. We did some past life regression and supported that with Kundalini chanting and going very deep, which was very healing. Past life progression is a whole other area where we can go if people are open. It can be very healing if that is the journey people want to go on. It can reveal things for people who are open to that. It can take them on a journey where you can explore and learn things on your soul’s journey. That can be very healing in this life if that’s something you’re open to.

If we can shift back a little bit to the physical and this energy system stuff. Are you familiar with the work of Dr. John Sarno?

No, I’m not.

You might want to look into that.

I am familiar. I read a book a long time ago by him, now that I think about it. It was a profound book for me.

He had a passion for finding out the best part of what he was doing. He found a way to look at it from a scientific perspective. He looked at a whole bunch of scans of people that have all the stuff you see on an elderly person or a person of a certain age on their spine, curvature of the spine, arthritis, bone spurs, bulging, herniated, and ruptured discs, and all that stuff. He then interviewed the people for the x-rays and scans that he was reading. Only 35% of those people had any pain or restriction of motion. Sixty-five percent of the people who had all the same stuff as the other people had no restriction of motion and no pain.

He said, “Something has got to be going on here other than what’s on the scans that’s causing this.” His research led him to develop the term “tension myoneural syndrome.” When tension held in the muscles and the nerves is activated, it causes constriction of blood vessels. If you have even a 10% constriction of blood flow to the tissue, that oxygen that’s in that blood flow is needed for functioning.

Even a 10% disruption for a brief period of time is enough to initiate excruciating pain. Anybody who has had a muscle cramp knows that. What he ended up doing was his research led him to talk with people, educate them, and find that they got better without surgery than with. That’s what he would do. He would give these educational seminars. Of course, it was very controversial because a surgeon is supposed to do surgery.

If anybody’s interested in that, you can find out about it on the website, AllTheRageDoc.com. A young documentary film team was able to complete a documentary of his work prior to his passing. He has several books out that are all the good information about what he’s learned over the years. You can view that for $5 or $6, or you can buy it for a little bit more off of that website. I know a number of people who have found relief from actual physical pain and restriction of motion just from watching the documentary and doing a little bit of introspection as they’re watching.

I originally said I didn’t know the name. Now, when you mentioned that, I do remember reading the book and helping me with my back. It was twenty years ago when I read that book. I’m looking over at my bookshelf for it. I can picture what it looks like. I remember on my own journey being interested in the mind and body connection, thinking, “What is this? This is so fascinating.” Even with hypnotherapy, I see a lot of clients with physical issues. They don’t come to me first. They’ll go to many other places. Oftentimes, they’re very desperate, but I have helped people relieve migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, and other physical issues because they’re holding emotional tension and trauma.

It’s incredible to know there are other techniques and methods to help. I’m thinking of a young woman who I helped with her ocular migraines. She was debilitated in college. She couldn’t go out and do anything. In her case, it only took a couple of sessions. She has never had an ocular migraine since. She can go out, she can have a job, she can socialize, and she can do things. She was stuck in her dorm room for the first two years of college because she couldn’t do anything. She could barely go to school.

That’s a wonderful case of somebody who probably didn’t have a childhood lifetime of trauma but had some discreet events. When you get at them and make a shift, there are 2 or 3 sessions.

It certainly can be more sometimes.

I like to point that out to people, and that’s why I thanked you for being so honest about that journey in those long intense years. It’s the more stuff I have from an earlier time that I’ve been pushing away, developing systems within myself to cope, manage, and be successful in life without looking at that. The longer I’ve practiced those thoughts, the longer it might take for me to unravel them or be willing to turn and look at what I need to see. On the other hand, if I have somebody who’s been a high-functioning adult and all of a sudden, there are 1 or 2 serious traumas in their life, and we’re working with some of these energy techniques and/or the kind of therapy that you do, you can get a resolution full return to high-functioning with 2, 3, 5, 8 sessions. It’s because you’re dealing with a very prescribed circumscribed set of issues.

I will admit and say that because I had a decent amount of trauma, I still do it weekly. I either do hypnotherapy with colleagues. I have a therapist. I do cranial sacral therapy. I do physical things to support myself. It’s because I do have triggers and issues that I want to continually maintain. This is important to me to maintain my mental health and be free of these things. It’s what I do to care for myself. I look at it as going on my walk every morning and doing my meditation every morning. I maintain and I do these things that are important to me. I didn’t just do a year and say goodbye.

A regular morning practice is important to maintain your mental health and be free of negative things. Click To Tweet

It’s like showering, eating, and sleeping. We’re going to need to do that to maintain the body as long as we’re alive, at some level or another. Doesn’t it make sense that I have to do something to pay attention to this much more complex emotional life and all of those energies and thoughts? I clean the house on a regular basis if I’m aware. I forgot the gentleman’s name, but he did a YouTube special and he was a psychologist. He has a twin. He did a YouTube special or I guess it was a TED Talk on emotional hygiene and the concept of emotional hygiene. Like physical hygiene, we teach kids 4 to 5 years old how to wash their hands, brush their teeth, and wash their face before bed. They have no sense of how to manage their mental and emotional life.

Now, we have these tools. They’re teachable. They’re learnable. They’re techniques that people can do on their own after they’ve gotten their core strength back in their balance. The Journey’s Dream is trying to help people wake up and realize. The On Your Mind show is about waking people up to the fact that there are tools. There are techniques. There are things you can practice on a regular basis after you’ve gotten rid of some of that trauma energy and after you’ve gotten your footing, where you can maintain your mental and emotional hygiene.

That is one thing that I’ll work with clients to continue to support them. Let’s create a morning routine that sets you up for a day where you feel centered and grounded. We’ve dug some things up, helped, and processed some trauma or whatever the issue needed to be revealed, healed, exposed, and discussed. It’s morning routines, maintenance, and what is it that needs to be implemented because so many times there’s nothing going on. They go to the gym, but that’s not going to be the same.

 

When we look at how our culture and our language set us up to think that we’re separate and we need to judge things when we look at how that system is set up, within any given day or certainly within a week, there are going to be things that don’t go the way we think we should. We butt heads with them or we bristle inside. If we don’t have a way to release that stuff and see the falseness of it and if we don’t have a practice for that mental and emotional hygiene, it accumulates.

One of the morning practices I have is writing, “I Christina feel,” and then I start writing, “because.” If it’s a gooey or yucky feeling, I’ll write when so I can recall.

Leading yourself into the recollection.

They’ll even ask, “How old does this feeling feel? How do you think I am? Do you think I’m ten? Let me go back and remind myself or my inner child, ‘You are not 10, you’re 54.’” We had this conversation, but I had to learn how to do that, and I teach that to other people. It helps me pivot quickly back to a place. I have a skill and I have the ability to pivot myself out of a reaction that helps me function and feel good about myself.

What I tell people is that I can talk about how I want to learn this. I want to know what’s this upset feeling, etc. If I don’t do an action that lines up with those words, there’s this part of me that’s been there for 10 years, 20 years, and 50 years that I’ve pushed away and not wanted to look at. Every time it comes up, I go, “That’s too much.” Now here I am, and I meet somebody like Christina, and she gives me these exercises, “I can do that.” I think about it.

That part of that fearful part of my mind says, “Nevermind. I’ve got 30 years of you telling me that it’s too much.” You turn around and you say, “I want to know what that feeling is.” “Yeah, good luck.” If I take the time to do an exercise, like the journaling you’re talking about, and I do it over time, that behavior speaks louder than the words. Eventually, that fearful part of my mind recognizes, “Tim is serious. He wants to hear this.” It will offer it up.

In hypnotherapy, we upgrade and reframe limiting beliefs. What is the limiting belief that is pushing it away that says, “You don’t want to change. You don’t want to reframe anything. You want to keep feeling this way.” We literally will bring that to the conscious mind, reframe it, and upgrade it. We upgrade our phones. We upgrade our laptops. We need to upgrade these limiting beliefs.

In hypnotherapy, the inner self is upgraded and limiting beliefs are reframed. Click To Tweet

When I go to a hypnotherapist or another therapist who does similar energy work, that’s a behavior that speaks to that fearful part of my mind. Now, I’m enlisting the energy, the support, and the expertise of another person. It’s like building comfort for that fearful part of my mind, which facilitates and shortens the time it might take for it to reveal what I need to see.

Literally, the bell went off. I remember saying, “My triggers might not go away. I still feel once in a while, “No one is going to be there for me. I’m on my own.” That quote was way back when I always felt like I was always going to be on my own. No one is ever going to be here for me. I see it now. I recognize it. Hold on. That was then, this is now. I have tools. I have research. I can get right back on track in a matter of minutes now. That took me a long time to learn and recognize. That’s an incredible tool. That changed my life. It helps other people change their lives, and my relationships with my children. This is big. This has a ripple effect on everything.

It’s life-changing when you have a good set of tools that resonates with you and you’re willing to start using them. I wonder if you’d take a breath, get centered with me, and think about what we’ve talked about so far. Is there some part of it that you want to go back and highlight, or something we haven’t even mentioned yet that you want to make sure that we put out here for people?

I want people to believe and know that their intuition is worth learning to trust and listen to. Everyone has it. I meet so many people who say, “I don’t have that inner voice. I don’t know what that is. I don’t trust my intuition.” That’s this limiting beliefs and stuff that’s covering it up. The answers are inside. They’re not outside. Do the work so that you can get in touch and in tune with your intuition because there is a lot of noise outside, especially right now. There will only be more noise. If you can listen, get in touch with your intuition and knowing inside. That is so important. You do have it. We all have it. It’s unique to us. We’re all here for a reason. Just trust that you do have an inner voice and an inner compass. If you don’t feel like it’s there, just do a little digging. It’s there.

One of the main tools that is in the body of work that gave rise to Journey’s Dream and the Optimal Being program and all of that stuff that gave rise to the On Your Mind show that we’re doing here is a tool. Every time I use it, it asks to be shown the hidden part of my mind, whatever’s going on in here that is not sitting up here in the frontal lobes, helping me navigate the road on the way home. The more I practice the use of that tool, the more I get that muscle memory and that strengthened experience of tapping into that intuition that you’re talking about.

As you said, you’ve already given another example of a tool. If you do your morning page writing and you’ve got a little bit of structure for it and some targeted journaling, you start to build that. You start to get that familiarity with what it’s like to catch that little fleeting thought that was on the edge of your awareness and bring it back, put it on the paper, and see what happens.

I love morning pages.

How do people get in touch with you? What’s the best way you want people to access you if anybody sparks an interest?

My website has a couple of spots. My name is Christina Woods, so WiseWoods.com. On Instagram, I’m pretty busy, so @WiseWoodsHypnotherapy. I have a free hypno-meditation on there for people to download. I offer a free hour consultation for people if they want to chat and learn more about what I do and if it might help them.

Any closing comments for our audience as we wrap this up?

Don’t be afraid to do the work. The answers are inside. Get support. There’s support available. For years, I would go to retreats and dance around self-development or self-help. I was so afraid to even read a book about self-help because I was afraid of what I’d find out. I get it, but once you do, it’s so empowering. There’s support. We all need support.

 

It reminds me of one of my favorite teachers, Guy Finley. He says, “There is no such thing as bad self-knowledge. You’re never going to uncover a bad fact about yourself.”

I love that. Thank you.

It’s all to the good when you bring it up to that conscious level where you can deal with it. Thank you so much for joining us here. It’s a pleasure. I look forward to hearing back from you if you get some response from this show. If you put a book together about the work you’re doing, let me know and we’ll do another interview.

Thank you so much.

Blessings.

Blessings. Bye-bye.

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Christina Woods is a licensed Rapid Transformational Therapist, a Clinical Hypnotherapist, an Empowerment Coach, and a Reiki Master. She combines her background in corporate leadership with her life experiences in dealing with trauma and abandonment to empower other women to trust their intuition and set themselves free of self-doubt.

As the CEO and Founder of Wise Woods Hypnotherapy and Coaching, Christina has extensive experience working on complex challenges and pulling potential out of others so that they can become self-reliant individuals. Through this deep hypnotherapy and coaching work, she empowers women to shed old programming so they can live the life they deserve. She has been honing her intuition and spiritual energy practice throughout her entire life.

It is this experience, knowledge, and wisdom that she brings to every client during each session. Christina wants everyone to stop looking outside for what they need and instead look inside of themselves. She helps her clients step into their true authentic selves, free of self-sabotaging behavior, so they can live a life full of deep meaning and potential.

 

Important Links

• Wise Woods Hypnotherapy and Coaching
• AllTheRageDoc.com
• @WiseWoodsHypnotherapy – Instagram

 

About Christina Woods

Christina is a licensed Rapid Transformational Therapist®, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Empowerment Coach, and Reiki Master. She combines her background in corporate leadership along with her life experiences in dealing with trauma and abandonment to empower other women to trust their intuition and set themselves free of self-doubt. As the CEO and Founder of Wise Woods Hypnotherapy and Coaching, Christina has extensive experience working on complex challenges and pulling potential out of others so that they can become self-reliant individuals. Through this deep hypnotherapy and coaching work, she empowers women to shed old programming, so they can live the life they deserve.

She has been honing her intuition and spiritual energy practice throughout her entire life, and it is this experience, knowledge, and wisdom that she brings to every client during each session. Christina wants everyone to stop looking outside for what they need and instead look inside themselves. She helps her clients step into their true authentic self, free of self-sabotaging behavior, so they can live a life full of deep meaning, and potential.

 

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