 Hi, my name is Jackie Weirock and we are back again with another episode of You and Your Health and today my guest is Lisa Schirmerhorn. Lisa, welcome. Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for coming to Orca Media. I see you've just opened an office not too far from here over on School Street. Yes. And this is where you practice hypnotherapy. Yes. It's at Portals Center for Healing and I'm there part-time and then I'm also in Waitsfield. I have an office there as well. So tell me how you got involved with doing hypnotherapy. I went through a very difficult time a number of years ago and I was struggling and I was going to conventional therapists a couple times a week and I wasn't getting better and someone had recommended going to a hypnotherapist and I found myself feeling better and I was really amazed at how much better I was feeling and this woman that I met was a hypnotherapist. She was a Reiki master and she did all kinds of really cool stuff so I decided that I'm just going to learn everything that she does because I wanted to be like her and after I did that I realized I couldn't be like her. I had to figure out what I wanted to do. Well, what's a Reiki master? Reiki is an energy that actually you channel. It comes through you and comes out your hands and it's this beautiful healing modality that's a hands-on healing that helps the body heal itself. Wow. So how long does it take for one to become a Reiki master? There's different levels. So you do your Reiki one and then there's Reiki two which is distance Reiki and then I became a Reiki master actually I studied with William Lee Rand in Glastonbury, England. Wow. And then we did what's called our attunement so that we could have the ability what they put these Japanese symbols into our chakras for people who are energy centers and we did that at Stonehenge. Wow. That was really cool. Yeah, it was really cool. So you mentioned distance. Yes. So tell me about that. So with distance Reiki there's actually symbols that you learn and you focus on the person you want to heal and you send healing to someone that they can just be laying down on the couch at home hanging out. And are they aware that this is happening? You like to tell them in advance. Have they invited you in and get to this ahead of time? Okay, that's great. Now the hypnotherapy, I seem to recall hearing that it was also very much tied into shamanism. Well, I actually do integrate some shamanic things into my hypnosis. So hypnotherapy is working with the subconscious mind. So from birth until you're about 19 years old, your brain frequency is different than it is as an adult. So as a newborn, it's in Delta which is a really deep long wave. If you think about all the things that babies and toddlers have to learn and absorb around sound and shadow and languaging, emotion. So we're being programmed through those brain frequencies and we're absorbing at a very deep level. And so as we go through our childhood, that wave speeds up. And by the time we get to high school, we're in what's called alpha which is that daydreamy state. Okay. And then once we hit about 19, everything that you've experienced as a child gets programmed very deep. It's very deep. So everything you know about money, everything that you know about love and relationship, any trauma, if you've been bullied, any accidents, anything that's occurred, any belief system. So your religion, all those things, that's why as adults it gets locked in and then we go to beta which is what we're at now hopefully. So then we go through our life and then we have this undercurrent of these belief systems that we struggle with. And these belief systems that run us as adults and we have trouble accessing it. Because when you're in talk therapy, you're actually talking to someone at beta. You're not generally accessing where the information is. So all hypnotherapy is going into this state between being asleep and awake. And you're in that state seven to ten times a day naturally. And I can't make anyone do anything they don't want to do. People are like, are you going to make me quack like a duck? That's a different form of hypnosis that I'm not trained in. I don't even know how to make people do that. But the stage hypnotists tend to scare people. I don't do anything like that. If someone comes to me for smoking cessation or weight loss, they have to want to do it and they have to partner with me in it. I'm helping them eliminate the belief systems around it or why. For instance, with smoking cessation. I had a client who came in at twelve years old. His father died. His uncle brought him to the funeral and to make him feel better. Forty years ago, he offered his nephew a cigarette to help him feel better. Well, that cigarette, what it did was it numbed him and never allowed him to fully feel his grief over the loss of his father and continued to smoke. So when we did the work, we went back to the origin of where that smoking came from. And we released it and he no longer had the desire. So hypnosis can be a very powerful tool to unearth these belief systems that are running us. Because especially with food, food can be love. Food is a comfort. And so, and it's the most difficult addiction in my opinion, well, other than heroin because that's actually rewiring the brain. But when you have something like food addiction, you have to eat every day. It's not like someone who's drinking and they have to change their life and not just be around alcohol. They have to really get to the root cause of why they're eating. Otherwise, they'll find another addiction or it doesn't work. They just keep eating. They eat through the gastric band surgery. They'll eat through it and actually their esophagus will expand if they don't do their work. There was a study done by University of Pennsylvania Medical School on the gastric band. It's not the gastric band, it's the other surgery, it escapes me. But what they found was the people who went through the surgery and didn't deal with their issue went on to become alcoholics or drug addicts. Yeah, I've actually, I'm in recovery. I've been recovered from drug and alcohol for almost 16 years now. And what I've been hearing a lot about recently is people who have this surgery that the alcohol is going directly to their brain and they're becoming alcoholics like that. And it's kind of frightening that doctors aren't aware to inform their patients that this is something that's likely to happen. A lot of the new people that have shown up in 12-step recovery have talked about they don't even get to enjoy the alcohol as it's coursing through their body, they go immediately into blackout. Wow. So doctors aren't aware of that and I think that needs to be communicated. I had no idea. So I wonder if that's the, there's the gastric band and then there's the other surgery where they remove part of the stomach. I wonder if that might be it? I don't know. I've heard it from a number of people though and I've never gone into questioning them. Another thing I think is interesting when I first got into recovery, I was involved with a group that, over readers anonymous, the woman who started that, she would come to that same group and I never heard her talking about whether it was getting underneath those embedded ideas that occurred at such an early age. Well, a lot of times it's unconscious. For most people it's unconscious. And so they don't even know why they're eating and they're just feeling it's a compulsion. And often times people who have eating addiction, they're eating at night, they're bored. During the day they can generally eat and what they'll do is they'll eat very little and then at night they'll binge eat. When they start to deal with their emotion when they come down from the day. So it's a fascinating journey to watch someone and where those beliefs come from, what happened in their life. Now the other thing I wanted to ask you, you were talking about the ages from birth through 19, what about pre-birth? Yeah, I've actually hypnotized people into the womb because you can actually feel what your mother is experiencing. You take that on energetically. So I've had people where that their mother was frightened or didn't want to have them or if they were going through whatever trauma they were having. So I mentioned chakras. So chakras are, we have seven energy centers and the first one to form is at the base of the spine and that's all about the fundamentals of what we need as a baby, the nurturing love being cared for and our physical body. So as that's being formed those are being, that belief system is being planted in at an emotional level into the first chakra. So you come in feeling unwanted. Oh yeah, yeah. So I've actually brought people back to the womb and done some healing where we balance the heart beats together and have compassion for the mother and have a better understanding of what they were experiencing and release any of those fears. I bring this up from personal experience. My mother was told that her husband, my father was killed in a car accident while I was in the womb at five months and she didn't even know she was pregnant. Wow. So she went through a lot of trauma and I've always believed that had to have been passed along to me. Absolutely. You take on the grief. I have a friend of mine who went through the same thing. Her mother was pregnant and she's had tremendous amount of grief issues throughout her life and she could never understand why it was so embedded in her. Yeah, something to work on. Yeah. Another layer. Yeah, we say peeling the onion. Yeah, it is. Just talking about that. It is. So the hypnotherapy is the one area that, is that your prime focus? Well, you did mention it. So I do, I've studied different forms of shamanism over the past 18 years and one of the things that I do is in shamanism they do something called a journey and they do soul retrieval. So they believe that parts of you, when you go through a traumatic experience, parts of your soul leave and a shaman will lay shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip on the floor and someone will drum or rattle and that creates this trance state and then the shaman will go to what's called the lower world. There's upper world where spirit beings are, the middle world where we are and the lower world where they believe the animal totems, power animals, it's not, they don't believe in heaven and hell and where the soul parts have gone. So a shaman will go and retrieve those parts and breathe them back into your chakras, into your heart and your crown chakra. What I do is I actually hypnotize someone and have them go on their own journey and experience bringing those parts back themselves. How do they know which parts are theirs? Well, this is the thing, it's usually a younger version of yourself. So a one year old, your five month old could be, actually your five month gestational part of you could be there. And so if you think about, if you were a thousand piece puzzle and twenty pieces were missing, you're not whole. So the whole concept of it is bringing back those pieces and when those pieces are ready and when those pieces feel that it's safe to return, now they don't always come back. So this is an opportunity for you to journey down and retrieve that three year old and hold that part and bring it back and integrate it. Or sometimes it's shown up as physical body parts, like heart, eyes, legs. I actually had one person actually, you know, was literally energetically putting their legs back on, put back their heart and then they said, I'm guided, there's this water I need to wash my eyes with. It's this holy water. So he went over and washed his eyes. When he came out, when he came back, I was staring at his eyes and he's like, what's wrong? I said, your eyes, your eye colors changed. He's like, what? He said, I've never been able to see my eyes. I never knew what color they were. And he went over and looked in the mirror before they were like a gray blue and then they had turned like this aqua blue. And he said, I can see my eyes now. Chills. I know. Isn't that cool? Wow. So everyone's experience is different and I mean, I can't even, those are just two of hundreds of different scenarios that happen. Everyone's different. But everyone has a profound, you know, experience with it. And also with hypnosis, I do past life regressions. I do life between lives work. Yeah, I was reading about that. Tell me about that. So the life between lives work is actually where you have a past life regression. Then you come back a week later and you do two past life regressions in a row because what you're doing is establishing like your soul has a thumbprint and there's a personality. There's a uniqueness. That's just you. So you're getting to see a thread. And then from there, at the end of the last past life regression, you're at the death scene and the soul leaves the body. And instead of coming back, we ask it to go to the heavens consciousness to experience what it was like to be in the heavens realm. So you always come up. There's always a gate and then there's your spirit guide is generally there and the spirit guides will come and take you and you get to meet your soul group, which is the group that you incarnate with every different lifetimes with. So this is my belief is that each lifetime is like a movie and we just play different roles in the movie and that we pre we decide before we come in what lessons are here for our soul and there's a council that oversees you and your decision of how you want to incarnate in this life. And then the different people in your soul group choose to behave a certain way so that that healing will occur. So when you think about a soul mate, a soul mate isn't that pitter-patter, I love you. The soul mate can come in as someone to do some really dark, you know, painful things to you so that your soul can overcome that adversity for your soul's growth. So it's very different between a soul mate and then a twin flame which is, you know, someone who comes in that's the love, that true love, that bond that you have. But a soul mate, you know, so it helped me become grateful for the people who harmed me in any way or that I gave my power away to because it made me who I am and it's part of my soul's growth. So it shifted the way I started to see the world and see my life. And is this when the divorce happened? Well, the divorce is a year ago. Okay. So this has been going, the other work that I've done was from some childhood. Okay. But the divorce has happened a year ago, New Year's Day. My husband of 30 years asked me for a divorce and our marriage had been coming undone for a long time so it wasn't that it wasn't expected. But it took me this past year of just learning to be on my own. Both my children had just graduated from high school and I'm in a high school college. They both graduated UNH and suddenly I was an empty nester and I was, you know, on my own and I'd never been by myself. I met my, I call my husband my soon-to-be ex because he's not my ex yet. I never knew what to call him. So my husband, you know, we're slowly working through things but I look at him as my gift. I met him when I was 19 years old and so he was the perfect person for me when I was 19 and he was 21. Right. And our contract, our sole contract was up and it's time for both of us to just have different lives. Interesting. I have one of those. I call him my practice husband. I learned everything not to do in a relationship. Well, 30 years is a long time for me to be practicing. Doctors practice medicine every day. That's true. And actually that's why I wanted to do this show is because our medical system has become so much about immediate gratification and is highly influencing our subconscious with television advertising about pharmaceutical drugs and my personal experience of going to doctors and various ailments and rather than looking at holistically what's going on with this person, body, mind and spirit, take a pill. And it doesn't really seem effective. No, and it's fascinating because when you mentioned before about the body-mind connection, one of the things that I studied, there's a woman, Louise Hay, with Hay House and she talks about a lot of that. Sure. And there's another book that I use, there's a lot of books on this where they talk about when you've experienced something that's happened in your life, it can manifest in your body. And so when you suppress an emotion and you don't deal with it, it will happen. Oftentimes people who have lower back issues, that's either feeling unsupported or financial issues. Shoulders, those are people who feel the weight of the world. Oftentimes there's a lot of metaphor around it. If your neck hurts, who's being a pain in the neck? It really does work on our knees, fear of moving forward, joint issues. Arthritis can be someone who's very rigid in their life. So what I do is I work with people on when someone will fill out a form, I'll ask them about their physical issues. Because that's often to me, because I do a lot of detective work on finding the root cause and I will look up in my books and find out what are some of the emotional issues around that particular part of the body. High blood pressure is like a volcano ready to erupt. What about low blood pressure? You know what, I have really low blood pressure and I'm trying to remember what that one was about. Something about having difficulty in life, like low energy or in life. I have to look that up for you. It's been a while since I looked at that one. I went to one of my best friends, she was my best friend from high school and I was asked to speak at her funeral. I found out a lot of things that were going on that she hid from everyone and on my way home, on the plane, my eyes were bright bright red. To the point where the fellow next to me was like, do you know that your eye, your right eye is really really red and I looked it up and it's what is it that you don't want to see, what is it you don't want to know. So it took me three days, I didn't go to the doctor, I just released the emotions around the pain and then the redness went away. And that's not to say that everything is emotionally related but there are a lot of things that go on in our bodies that we often create and suppress. I think it's fascinating to me that there are cycles for different illnesses that will pop up in the body. I remember when I was growing up, a big thing that you heard about was ulcers and we don't hear much about ulcers today but we hear about fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia, yes. Fibromyalgia I find is people losing will to live. Like it's the loss of purpose. They don't have a purpose and that's not to say everyone does that but we get so wrapped up and programmed and live our lives through other people. We have these, you know, people have certain expectations, oh you should take this job because you'll get paid more and people listen and I always call them the dream killers. So when people over and over again talk you into doing things that really aren't things that you want to do because if you listen to your heart and you do what you're here to do, most of the time it doesn't make sense and people think you're crazy. How many times do you go, I can't believe they're doing that and they'll try because they think they're saving you. Right. Yeah, I had that with my mom the first time I left a high paying, safe job that had insurance to go work in the music industry. Why would you give that up? Well, that whole safety thing, it's an illusion. It absolutely is. People looked at me. I lived in New Hampshire for eight years. I had a support system there and here I went to Vermont not knowing anyone, living by myself and people were like, why would you do that? You're 54 years old, why would you be doing that? I said, I'm just called to do it, I can't explain it. I'm just supposed to be there and I don't know why. I live my life a lot by that when I feel called to that and a lot of people have trouble with that. I don't understand. It's their problem. Yes. Well, thank you so much. The time has gone by so quickly but we'll have you back again to continue the conversation. I have some workshops and some events coming up. Oh, you do? Well, we'll make sure we add that to the end of the program so people can look you up, find out about the workshops and reach out to find out more about the many offerings that you have in helping people to become more well with all of the tools that are available outside of just your normal medical community, pharmaceuticals, there's a plethora of options and Lisa has many gifts to share with you so at the end of this program and throughout the show we'll make sure that that is popping up on the screen so that they can contact you. So thank you again very much and until next time, namaste.