Wake Up With Marci

Welcome to Wake Up with Marcy, a deep dive into self-discovery. I’m your host, Marcy Hopkins, and this is the space where we get real about life, transformation, and finding our true selves. Hello all, and welcome back to Wake Up with Marcy. I’m your host, Marcy Hopkins, and I’m so grateful that you are here today. Whether you are listening or watching, you being here means so much to me. You are taking the time to create change in your life. If you are a woman seeking self-discovery, mental wellness, personal healing, then you are in the right place. Every week I sit down with experts, change makers, and everyday heroes, and they remind us of one simple truth. We are not stuck. We are becoming. And today’s guest is a beautiful example of that. And I’m so honored to welcome Krishna Avalon, a subconscious and sematic therapist, internal family systems practitioner, psych facilitator, and licensed acupuncturist. Krishna has worked with over 30,000 patients over the last 22 years to help them heal from trauma, rewire limiting beliefs, and finally feel safe within themselves. She specializes in subconscious transformation and nervous system healing. Because as you’ll hear today, true change does not come from willpower. It comes from within. So if you’ve ever felt stuck in a cycle of self-doubt, trauma, people pleasing or exhaustion, this is the conversation for you. Krishna, thank you so much for being a part of Wake Up with Marcy. Yes, thank you so much for being here.

So let’s talk about you. We’re going to we’re going to go back your personal story where your journey began. So, you dealt with rejection from your mother, which I feel that from you because I did too. Toxic control from your father. And how did that affect you as a young person and shape your identity? Yeah, that’s so helpful that you even know that before coming in and talking to you because I feel like it shaped everything. In uterero, we are receiving information from our mothers, okay? And so we learn about the world through her nervous system, through our connection, through that umbilical cord. And so my mom was kicked out of her very white, huge Catholic family when she got pregnant with me. I was a one night stand conception. She was 20 years old. And I love my grandparents dearly, but they didn’t know what to do at that time. And so they kicked her out of town and told her not to come back until she had a husband. And so my mom who has 1616 brothers and sisters was kicked out of her tribe. So you can imagine what that was like for her at 20 years old. Her safety, the betrayal, the abandonment. And those are the lessons that I came into this world navigating for myself as a soul, but also from my lineage and through my mother. And so the man that she married was not a healthy man. He was very toxic in anger, you know, from his own trauma, which I understand now, but he was not healthy. He was not a good father figure. He was not um you know, a person that I would ever want in my daughter’s life. And so the lessons that I had to come into this world learning were those very things of um how to belong, how to trust myself, how to learn how to say no to things that I didn’t want to do. And I was never taught any of that growing up in a Catholic white family. I was taught like always say yes, try to fit in, which I did not do. And so it was a story of me like having to act out because I was wounded and I was hurting and I didn’t know. And so this was the way that it was was coming out. And I mean I I love my aunts and uncles. I love my grand my grandpa. I love my grandma. Just they didn’t know any better. Yeah. And it took me a long time to be able to come to that, you know, forgiveness and understanding.

So when your mother your mother left the home and obviously she struggled and was in a lot of stress and she found your father your stepfather. Um what happened after that? Did you go back and and move back in with your grandparents? No. I mean my parents got married and they were together until I was 11 and then they got a divorce and that was great. But then my mom was like sewing her oats so to speak and she was out all the time with her best friend and there were different guys coming into the house and I had a bunch of freedom with that best friend’s daughter and so, you know, it was a lot of like fun times. It was middle school times for me, you know, the best and the worst of times. And also, I didn’t I wasn’t guided. I didn’t have any good guidance. I didn’t have people in my life that I felt safe telling things to that were happening to me and in my life. So were did you feel that you because of this were you being taken advantage of? Were you doing things that were you were seeking attention in negative ways? Oh, definitely. because the father who raised me and it’s it’s so beautiful to be able to just tell the story and not have any like big charge or trigger in I’m not projecting anymore because of all the healing work I’ve done but he was a toxic man like a kind of these days would like definitely be in the toxic masculinity category of like a bunch of unhealed trauma as well like the protector being like the person that you’re actually very afraid of but you give your power away to to protect to and so yeah, I was attracted to that kind of boy, you know what I mean? The kind of boy that was maybe sort of the leader but also mean and like a bully, right? So, he wasn’t treating you well and you didn’t know what that even looked like. Exactly. Now, so you you didn’t have selfworth and you felt small and and it sounds to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that you you were willing to do whatever you needed to do or or be that million uh to get someone to accept you. Would you say that’s true? Yeah, but it was also really confusing, Marcy, because I had all this swagger and I was really pretty and I was popular and so I had that and all this like confidence. But yes, eventually, not right away, but like underneath eventually, probably more towards like senior and high school. That’s when the stuff started getting like really kind of funky because it was I had all this unhealed trauma that hadn’t been processed. And then I had this sort of like outward presentation, but they weren’t meshing. And so my broadcast right to the universe was very confusing. And then things just kind of started going haywire. Like I started losing friends. I gained a bunch of weight. Um I was dealing with a lot of betrayal in my life from people. I wasn’t getting along with, you know, I was never close with my mom until recent years, but yeah. Yeah, it was definitely coming out.

Yeah. And so, would you say that you were using food in a negative way? Because you said that you were gaining a lot of weight. Like for me, I used alcohol to cope with my trauma. Um, but you know, there’s other ways that we cope. Yeah. We’re pushing it down. Yep. Exactly. That’s what I had. That’s what the the women in my family do as well. They definitely eat uh their feelings and eat for comfort and eat for just, you know, for distraction really from like the pain and the loneliness. But I Yeah, I remember senior year having like chocolate bars and being in my bed with like Danielle Steel novels like a great way to skate love stories, right? It wasn’t bad, but it it is definitely good for gaining weight, but it was it wasn’t bad as a otherwise coping strategy. Yeah, I know. I know. So, how did you when did you find that you started to create a shift and you knew that you needed to face this pain from your past? I mean, that’s such a great question. I really didn’t know until I like acupuncture school was my first love in this life. It was the first thing that I found and trusted 100% and followed and never doubted. And I think that really put me on my path to healing. I eventually, you know, found my meditation practice. I eventually, you know, discovered the subconscious mind and started to understand that the subconscious creates 97% of our lives and it’s where our beliefs and our habits and our patterns are stored. And it’s why I couldn’t make all these changes in my life that other people were so easily making. And it’s just like you said, my self-worth and deservingness was so small because I was never shown that I was worthy or deserving of, you know, healthy relationships, love, connection, being accepted for exactly who I was, right? And and maybe you didn’t know who that was because I know I had to find who that was. Yeah. Yeah. Ding ding ding. So, right. Exactly.

So for those that are like new to this world, I mean we’ve all heard of, you know, conscious mind, our subconscious, but what exactly does that mean? I mean, if if that’s like, you know, creating or kind of that it’s running in the background, right? And that our decisions are being made by the our subconscious, but we don’t even really understand that, right? So for those that are new to this, what does that mean exactly? Yeah, exactly. Well, a lot of people have now heard of the subconscious mind, but they don’t really know how to work with it. And um while I don’t love to compare us to technology, one of my main teachers, Bruce Lipton, who wrote the biology of beliefs, he describes the subconscious mind as being like the hard drive. We’re all programmed. All of us have programs from which we create our lives. It’s just a matter of what programs are running your life. Most of us are creating life from very limited self-sabotaging programs that could be expanded like actually pretty easily. And what I love about working with the subconscious is it doesn’t have to take 15 or 20 years of talk therapy where you’re just working with conscious mind which is 3 to 5% of how we create life. Right? So is that how like the seatic work and the meditation all of the things that you do is that how we can reach that subconscious mind? I mean a lot of us may not even know what sematic work is. I mean it’s newer to me. Can you share with us about that? Seatic just means what’s happening in your body. Yeah. And how that relates to what you’re thinking and what you’re believing. That’s how I describe it. And often the process that I take people with to guide you through the subconscious very somatic meaning your body is always telling you it’s always holding your stories. It’s telling you everything that you need to know. And so when the shifts happen, we call them shifts in this work. They are often felt physically through the body. Same thing with the other modality I practice called internal family systems. Both of those were created by psychologists who weren’t getting where they wanted to go or supporting their patients the way they wanted to. And both of those modalities can be very somatic, meaning as we’re getting in touch with these parts of us that need our intention or the places where we’re stuck and we’re wounded, we’ll feel them in the body.

And when you said like our bodies will will tell us, right? Do you mean like we’ll get sick, we have rashes, like what does that mean? Exactly. Like if you have a back pain, if you get a sore throat, if you’re throwing up, if you’re nauseous, I work with a lot of nausea lately. And the way that I read it and and just in how people present and tell me their stories. I mean, it’s it’s straight up nervous system overload. You know, the belly digests more than life. It digests I mean more than food. It digests life. And so that nausea is an indicator of like too much, too much. They’ve got too much to process, right? Less stimulation, like less to take in. Yeah. It and that’s the thing about the nervous system. I mean, a lot of people I’m so overwhelmed. I’m so anxious. I have so much stress. But that all comes back to the nervous system and right calming the nervous system and how we can do it. And that’s the work that you’re doing. Yeah. I would say that when we do expansive work with the subconscious, we definitely want to know how to regulate and ground our nervous systems because our nervous systems have to know how to hold capacity when we’re growing. And the nervous system takes in information all day long through sight, sound, touch, smell, right, and intuition. And so it gets overloaded. And so it’s often not about doing more stuff, it’s about doing less stuff. And that’s usually what the body is trying to tell you. It’s trying to tell you to slow down. It’s trying to get your attention to be with your wounded parts or your pain so that you can hear what that has to say to you, and that’s what’s going to allow you to heal. It’s not usually a prescription or a another this that or the other. It’s like actually that’s the band-aid, right? Yeah. a lot of times the the medications that we’re giving.

So, you mentioned talk therapy and I think that that’s the the main type of therapy people would go to and and it is helpful, but to get down to the root of the problem that you’re talking about in our subconscious uh and this work is is so much more transformative especially like with PTSD or chronic stress like how do we know if this is a type of work that we should be seeking and if so how do we go about doing that? Yeah, great question. Again, you will know because you can look at your life and where you feel stuck, where you haven’t been able to grow, where you keep repeating patterns, where you feel triggered. And a lot of times talk therapy though it does save lives people will often be in it for 15 or 20 years and still be stuck avoidant triggered on pharmaceuticals. Right. Right. And so when I work with somebody I usually start there because we all have stress. We all have triggers and we do actually all have trauma. Trauma doesn’t have to be just one or two or however many big huge events. it’s can be long-term stress like just like COVID traumatic for everyone in some way. Um, and so I’ll start there. And the work that I was trained in, it’s not hypnotherapy, it’s not EMDR. It’s a process called psych. It’s kind of a dumb name. I don’t love it, but it stands for psychology and kinesiology. And it’s really simple and it’s very quick. And unlike other ways of working with the subconscious, you actually get to create new subconscious programs which I feel is very special because then after we transform some stress and some triggers and help your brain go in a new direction to have a new experience and that’s called neuroplasticity, we can then talk about what you want like what do you want to be experiencing? Do you want to be more present? Do you want to be more connected? Do you need to trust yourself? Do you need to feel safe being seen who you are? I mean, those are some of the big ones. Um, do you need to feel worthy of healthy love or the relationship that you’ve always wanted?

But how do we like how how do we get to our subconscious and like reprogram it? Yeah. I mean you can do deep excavating work quickly with stuff like psyche and then you can use like self-hypnosis or mantras or journaling or meditation to reinforce the new pathway in your mind that we just created with psyche. You can do stuff on your own for sure. Those things I just said are free and you could do this. It’ll take longer. Just the subconscious needs repetition and the subconscious likes images. So, if there’s something that you’d like to do yourself on your own right now, make a vision board. Make something on your phone you can see every day. Make something that you look at when you first get out of bed and you don’t put words on it. You just put images of like the way you’d want to feel or where you’d want to be. And that in like a very relaxed state. So maybe before you even get out of bed or when you’re sleepy, before you know you fall asleep. Those are actually the most influential times for your brain, right, to receive that kind of information to make change. It’ll take longer, you know, repetition, repetition, repetition. But it does help, right? Well, it it sounds to me like we talk a lot of people talk about law of attraction. um you know creating these images and beliefs of of like Joe Despensza speak speaks about the science behind that and and like for me too gratitude is so huge and and these feel-good chemicals that we’re releasing in our brains and in our bodies and and the rewiring that you’re talking about. What I’m hearing is that the work that you’re doing makes it happen in a a faster way. Is that correct? That’s so correct, Marcy. And I think like literally I was led by God or something higher than me to this and into internal family systems because I really believe with my entire heart that this is the healing the world is asking for. We don’t have to suffer and go through 20 years of arduous hard deep excavating to earn and deserve feeling healthy and healed. No, I had to outgrow that program as well. You don’t need to do that to prove that you’re worthy. The reason I think I was led into this and why I’m so attracted to it is because it’s simple and it’s quick and simple is very elegant. Things don’t need to be complicated to be powerful. Mhm. And that’s so true. I think that we think that we have to do these big major transformative types of things or or work, but the reality is it it it is those those smaller more consistent things that make the real change for us.

Entire one of the biggest things and and you’re you’re doing it and you’ve had to do it and I’ve had to do it and I think it’s very hard for people is to be vulnerable and they feel like it’s a a a weakness but in actuality it is showing so much strength. You’re not only helping yourself but you’re helping the ones you love around you, right? Like you’re becoming the best version of yourself for others that you love. and building on those relationships. So, how can you help someone to realize that being vulnerable and and starting this work is allowing them to write the next chapter and and showing this incredible strength for themselves. If you can find somebody that you feel comfortable with and you feel safe with that’s a big part of the process and then finding the right tools for me I think K and IFS are revolutionary and again simple and powerful and direct certainly having those modalities that do help you get to the parts of yourself that need your attention because a lot of times people will kind of front these other parts of themselves because they’re trying to protect Oh, yeah. those vulnerable parts that are hiding. Yeah. But when you get to be with those parts of you that need your attention and you get to let them know they’re not alone and you ask them what they need from you, it’s lifechanging. I mean, it’s beautiful work. Yeah. Yeah. those walls that we put up around ourselves um to to protect ourselves, but it can be really lonely behind those walls and a lot of pain and anger uh just continues. And well, it sounds like you’re doing incredible work. Where can we find more about you? You know, I’m pretty old-fashioned in the way that I love to connect, but I’m just not always online. So, you can just find me at my website. You can definitely find me on Instagram. I will post in stories when I feel like it, but a lot of people do reach out to me through there and read my stories. People tend to reach out on LinkedIn who want to work with me as well. So, it’s just my name on all the places, Krishna Avalon. Krishna Avalon.com. And you probably have all of your other ways to reach out to you at your website. So, that that’s probably a great way to to find you. And again, I just wanted to thank you so much for being here uh for your truth, your expertise and and the healing uh that you have provided just even if someone takes one thing away today uh the audience of wake up with Marcy and I just you’re helping so many people and I feel that a lot of times we have to go through this to create the change and have the calling for our mission and I was very guided by God also. So I completely feel you and I get you. Um so for everyone out there remember you are not your past, you are not your pain, you are not broken, you are becoming and thank you again for being a part of today, for tuning in, for listening. And you are so worthy. You are loved and it’s never too late to become the best version of yourself. So I’ll see you next week and have an amazing one and remember to wake up to all of the possibilities in your life. All right guys, goodbye. Goodbye Krishna. Bye Marcy.