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Hi friends, welcome to the Joanna's Journeys Podcast. Explorations in Body Mind and Spirit. I've been thinking about this podcast for a long time and what it is that I want to say and why it is that I'm doing this. Many years ago, I heard in a beautiful sermon at Glide Church, amazing place of spirit and uplift, the pastor was talking about the difference between celebrity and Leadership.

And he said that celebrity is about look at me. Look at me. Look at me. And leadership has a similar quality look at me so I can hold up a mirror that you can see yourself. And I feel like this podcast straddles the line between celebrity and leadership. I want people to see themselves in the stories that I tell I want people to perhaps be Inspired or get a sense that somebody understands a little bit of a “me too” for your experiences.

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So that's my goal in telling my stories. So these are Joanna's Journeys because they're things that have happened to me ways in which my life has twisted and turned the highs the lows, the challenges, the utter failures, but the overcoming so today I wanted to tell you about how I got into doing what it is that I do. So currently, I work in the field of holistic health, I do bodywork of different kinds, energy work.

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I read Akashic records. I teach yoga. I really tried to find ways to help people feel embodied and safe. I lead Journey dances and Retreats. How did I get into doing all of this? So we'll go back a little bit to when I was a teenager. I found theater and that was the place that I felt most alive. It was the place that I felt I belonged. I found my people. And I loved acting, I loved performing and so I went to school for it the school of theater at the University of Arizona— and I was a bit of a mess.

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When I started college like a lot of students, I went a little bit wild. I was hanging out with older students and there was a lot of drinking and there was a lot of late night parties and I got really into going to a coffee house and staying up super late with lots of people and it was a lot of fun but my body and mind didn't survive very well with all that intensity. I never wanted to sleep. I always wanted to be engaged and have interesting conversations and be part of group activities and sing alongs and my poor tender empathic body,

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gave out a lot faster than others. So I burned myself out during those first couple of years of college. I was also dealing with an awful lot of unresolved childhood trauma, sexual trauma abuse drama. When I say I was dealing with that too trauma, really. What I was doing was hiding from it and using all of the late nights and drinking and partying and all of those ways to cover up my wounds, I also had undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia. So I was struggling some with the college coursework. And I didn't really get a lot of support at that time. I finally got diagnosed with dyslexia, my freshman year of college.

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But the only thing that was really available to me at that point was a reader that would take audiobooks. This was before audiobooks were really common and I could listen to my textbooks, but that didn't really help me very much. And I had this teacher who was in his 40s, I believe and was a very accomplished actor and a really great instructor and he planted a really strong seed in me at that point. He was talking about how he noticed that a lot of us who were 18 19 years old. We're not taking our studies very seriously and it was right, but he said,

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That in his 20s, he had done a lot of different jobs. He had done construction and driven vehicle and didn't worked in a grocery store and it wasn't until he was 28 years old that he knew exactly what he wanted to do. And he said “I didn't step foot inside a college classroom till I was 28 and when I got there, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and I was focused,” and it was an amazing experience, And that kind of planted this very strong seed inside me that I didn't maybe have to figure it out till I was 28, that seemed like a very important year for me. So

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I ended up dropping out of the theater department for various reasons. I tried doing community theatre for a while, and that was amazing, but also the schedule of it and the lack of sleep and trying to also work several part-time jobs to support myself really burnt me out and I decided need to try and get a day job. And I became a sign language interpreter, which, as it turned out I was an all encompassing type of had to be, you know, completely focused on that. And I did that for several years and turned out that I hated it. And I was miserable. And it was getting closer to that twenty eight years, and I quit sign language and teaching that. And I floundered for a few years. And I took more part-time jobs and and struggled and I tried to be a creative. I worked for some jewelers, and eventually a friend of mine moved to San Francisco.

And he said,

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“I want you to move here with me.” And I was getting close to 28. And I thought this is my year. This is what I need to do. I need to start over in a new place figure out what it is. I'm supposed to be doing so I got to San Francisco. And again, it was very difficult. I didn't want to be a sign language interpreter. That was the best paying job, so I took a lot of part-time jobs. I did a lot of temping and a friend of mine that I met there said she knew this guy who had a he had a temp job that he needed someone to do and it was my kind of nightmare job. He said he needed me to make phone calls for him.

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It was cold calling of to hospitals because he wanted to sell them medical equipment. So I had to call the hospitals and ask who bought their medical equipment. Now, if you know me at all, you know that I hate cold calling. It is my nightmare to call someone out of the blue and ask them questions, but I was broke and I took the job and I was sitting in this guy's basement and I was making these phone calls and it was just tearing me up and the radio was on. And I heard this woman's voice. She said, “Do you know that you've got a gift inside of you?“

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“And if you could just figure out what that gift is, you could live the life of your dreams.”

And I started to cry, sitting there eliminating guys. I was like “Yes. Yes. I know that there's a gift inside me if I could only find it.”

And she said, “Do you know that once you find that that you can live a life of purpose with passion.”

Yes. Yes.

“And she said, my name is Barbara Sher, and I teach people how to live the life they love. I teach them to find what they're gifts are and live those gifts.”

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I grabbed the phone and I called the number and the guy said “Okay, the program is $500.”

And I was like “Oh, I don’t have 500 dollars!”

And he said “Well, okay. Let me see, well, you know, we had one that got returned to us. I can give it to you for 200.”

And I looked in my checkbook. I had like 201 dollars and I said, “Okay, send it to me.” And I got this program and I started like I've never started a program in my life. It was tapes. This tells you the, you know a little bit about the time, cassette tapes. And I listened to every word and I did everything that she said and I wrote all of the, you know, the instructions and she had all of these exercises on—

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Finding what it is that you are gifted at. And I did them with total commitment every single one. They were really fun actually and at the end of a few weeks of doing this, I realized that Hands-On healing that massage and body work of different kinds was very natural to me, it was something that I was gifted at. And one of the things she says is “Once you find out what it is that you love you'll find that there are almost always people doing what you love successfully and then you just have to find those people.”

So at the end of this not the end, but in the middle of this exploration that I did I started reaching out to massage schools. And of course, I was in San Francisco at the time and there were lots of them and I found one.

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I called them up and I said, I'd like your catalog.

And the woman I talked to said, “We have an open house next Tuesday. Would you like to come to that? So I said, sure. And I signed up for it. And at the open house, there were several of us as potential students. And one of the teachers was describing the school and did a demonstration of vibrational healing massage therapy. Which was this kind of signature type of massage at that particular school. And as soon as I watched this woman Hyla, give a little demonstration of this. I felt so strongly that this was what I was supposed to do with my life. I could just feel it was like everything aligned.

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And I signed up for their program that night it started the next day. That was how much I was committed to this immediately and it was a very intensive program emotionally, spiritually, physically, it challenged every thought process that I had about life in general and it was not an easy experience. I ended up spending about a year and a half at that school and it was profoundly transformational and extremely challenging but it started me on this path of self-care of —

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Being more present than I'd ever been or wanted to be about communication and connection, and open-heartedness. What it didn't really teach me was a lot about boundaries, which I am still learning to this day and getting slightly better at but it did open my eyes to so many different ways of being present with challenging emotions, with deep conversations with truth for myself, discovering my truth honoring other people's truths and it was just the —

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The opening to now. What has become a twenty five year career in bodywork, energy work, dance, yoga. And I won't say that this path has been easy or always fun, but I will say, extraordinarily powerful and valuable.

And I have met some of the most beautiful and incredible people along this path who walk hand in hand with me down these roads of self-inquiry and compassion.

And I am forever. Grateful to Barbara share and her work at helping people—

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really discovering what their gifts are because when you know what your gifts are and you live a life that has those gifts involved— it's so much richer. It's so much more profound. And she really opened that door for me. So I am forever grateful Barbara Sher. Rest in power sweet one.

So that's the story for today story of the start how I went from confused frustrated lost to slightly less confused and frustrated and lost. And there's so much more to that story, but that's the beginning.