The Power of Forgiveness & Healing After Trauma with Dr Tanya English

Hello, heroines, and welcome back for another interview with an awesome expert. Today I bring you Dr. Tanya English, who has just rebranded herself as the Soul Chiropractor, and I can't wait to hear more about that. Dr. Tanya, how are you?

I'm good, I'm having a great day.

Good. Yeah, so let's get started with the basics. Tell us who Dr. Tanya is.

Okay, so I'm a, a chiropractor. I started as a massage therapist, and then I became a chiropractor, and then I started doing energy healing over 10 years ago now, um, online, back when we had to use Skype. And was always interested in what was the root cause of people's problems and their suffering. And in chiropractic college I was, um, I asked that question. I was told we'll get to that. We'd probably get to that, that what they talk about in chiropractic college is toxins, trauma, and thoughts. Those are the reasons, but there's also timing. And so what I work on really is helping people come to present time because our physiology is constantly doing stuff from the past and keeps us stuck. I have also been the lead singer in my band, the Tanya English Band, for the past 15 years. I'm a blues singer, and I like to help people heal through music as well. So when I'm performing, people have healing happen too. I, I know I do, and it's so helpful. And blues is a great way to do healing because people want to listen to a sad song when they've gone through a breakup, and they want to have that experience of their emotions being known and being able to let them out. So there's all kinds of blues, and it's not just all sad music, but it really helps people. The vibration anyway is what we're doing when in healing, so doing that through music is really wonderful. And, um, my husband's a bassist and has been in several bands, and he's my bassist now. I said, do you want to have a band with me? I can find another bass player if you don't want to do it. He's like, no, no, I'll be your bass player.

That's awesome. You know, you're the second person— yesterday I was talking to somebody who also is a singer and whose husband also plays music with her.

Yeah, it's a fun way to, to have something fun that you do together, and you can make money at it. So it's a good hobby.

That's always nice.

Come home with money in your pocket. That's always—

yeah, exactly. And you know, it's funny that you talk about music because I know I had a hard time when I first moved to the US because I felt very out of sorts. Like, everything was very unfamiliar. Even though we had moved before, there was something very different about living here in the US. And I remember when I— Where are you from? Oh, I'm originally French.

Okay.

That's interesting. And what, the accent?

Yeah.

So when I found myself living alone after I graduated college and everything else, every once in a while, I I would put music on that I knew was going to make me cry because I needed to evacuate and let all of those emotions, whatever they were— I don't even know what the heck was going on, but you're homesick, probably. Yeah, it was, it was more than that because I left France when I was 11 and I was in my 20s when I was living on my own, so there was a lot of But you, before that, you were living with your family, probably. Yeah.

So it happens.

So, and then it, you know, totally okay.

But you wanted something familiar.

Yeah.

And have that. That's good. Yeah.

So anyway, sorry to get us sidetracked.

No, that's okay. You're a self-cleaning oven. You put that on. I mean, we all are, right? We're all self-healing and we do things that we don't even realize we're doing that help us heal. So that's a good one.

So when did you make that jump from the physical, physical, to expanding beyond just the physical? Did something specific happen, or was it kind of like—

A couple of things happened. Yeah, it was, it was a— there's something that happened when I was a youngster where I, I realized suddenly that, uh, nobody was really in charge. When I was about 11. I had been sexually assaulted and nobody really knew that that happened, and I was not really calling it that. I didn't really know what it was. I just knew it wasn't right. And, um, after that, things kind of shifted for me and I started to see the world in the sense that, well, my parents aren't really in charge, they don't know what's going on, so who's in charge? So that kind of started my spiritual seeking. And when I was about 12 or 13, I was converted to Christianity, had an emotional experience, um, and then Tried a lot of different things, searched and searched, and was let down by some groups. And really, um, that was sad because I was told that I was being selfish because I wanted some attention. I was leaving the community and no one bothered to say goodbye to me. So I wrote back and I got a letter from a different person. So my letter was passed from one person to another. And this was the youth group of the church that I was involved in. And I had gone to— the reason why I left was I was going to a Quaker boarding school. Now, before you get any images in your mind about what that was, it's not Amish, okay? It's a college prep. I mean, people always say, oh, did you have to wear a uniform? No, my uniform was overalls, a rugby shirt, and clogs. I mean, just like every other kid in the '70s, it was It was very much about thinking for yourself, having critical thinking, and being able to do that in a place where you can sit in silence and allow spirit to inform you. And that's Quaker meeting. So, um, I had that experience and I was like, okay, this is really fitting me. I really like this, that I get to be creative and find what I'm doing. So fast forward, I went through college, I got my degree in theater production, had been doing theater for years, and then decided to take a break. And a friend of mine said, you're really good at massage, why don't you go to massage school? And it turned out there was one a couple blocks from my apartment in Boston. And I went, oh, okay. So I took two of the hardest courses, nutrition and Anatomy and Physiology, and I really liked it. And I thought, okay, this is opening horizons for me. Instead of people looking at my resume deciding whether they're going to hire me or not, I feel like I could do more with this. And it's the same experience. If one person in the theater can see from a different point of view, then you've done your job. This way they can't get away from you because they're on a table and you're massaging them. So It was really about like helping people heal, and I was gravitating to it because I was doing the healing too. So then later on, um, as I was doing massage therapy, I was like, why don't I just go be a chiropractor? There's nothing stopping me. I had a boyfriend that was on and off for 7 years. It was just ridiculous. You know how you work out all your parental issues with their partner? Well, luckily we did that and then separated instead of staying together, so that was a good thing. And I had an epiphany one day. I'm like, I don't think it's supposed to be this hard. I think it's supposed to be fun. This is not fun. So, uh, I left the East Coast where I grew up in New York and New Jersey and school in Boston and moved to Iowa to go to chiropractic college. So completely different locale, completely different mindset here than on the East Coast. And as I was going through chiropractic college, I was like, okay, so I just want to get to the root of the problem. So we talk about subluxation in chiropractic. It's a partial dislocation where we're putting bones back where they belong so they're not interfering with the nervous system, which is your communication. And I said, okay, but what makes the bone move out of place? Well, toxins, trauma, and thought. Okay. But then I added timing because I studied with a chiropractor who developed a technique that had to do with what your emotional self was doing. And I was like, okay, now this is, this is what I'm talking about. Because your emotions are creating your physiology all the time. So I started studying that. In the meantime, I got married, I got pregnant, and about a month before I was supposed to graduate from Palmer, I went into labor and our baby was stillborn. And, uh, this is the thing that happened. I laid there in the hospital bed. We were trying to have the baby at home. We went to the hospital. They put me in an ultrasound. We could see the baby's heart wasn't moving, and they had to somehow, you know, have me deliver this baby. So they put me on all the things I didn't want— epidural, Pitocin— just horrendous experience that way. And while I'm lying in the bed, a thought comes to me: do you really believe everything happens to the highest good, or are you just saying that because it sounds good? And I went down the road for about 10 minutes of like, well, I could just drop out of school and I could, you know, be a massage therapist, and then I would have wasted all this time and effort and energy, and I'm not doing that. And so I said, okay, well, I'm going to believe that everything happens to the highest good, so bring it on, show me the good, I want to see it. I don't care where you put me for healing. I want to, I want to have healing happen. I, I know that this was important. I mean, it's, it's an important episode in my life because it's life or death happening within me, and I'm supposed to be healing people, and this is happening to me. So how can I resolve this to some degree of finding joy in it? So I started kind of looking for that and just let things unfold and grieved. And we had some pretty, um, interesting experiences while we were doing that. And then I ended at the Mississippi Valley Blues Fest. I ended up there in July. So the baby was born in April, May, June, July was at the Mississippi Valley Blues Fest. And I went into the tent stage where the Blind Boys of Alabama were playing. And I thought, I really want to see them, I want to hear them, I want to be in that space. I was just drawn to it, and I had a healing experience in that performance that was waves and waves of love flowing through me, and just feeling that, how big that is, how huge that love is for us, and how I can't really describe it because it's too big. You know, it's kind of like when you think about the universe and space and you just end up coming back to where you are because it's too big to think about. That's what it was. And I walked out of there different than I went in. And I had a similar experience in Sedona when I was, um, years later, back in 2017. I had this experience of being in the Chalice, which is between Courthouse Rock and Bell Rock. And a thought came to me, or a voice, can't tell which. Now do you get it? Like, the rock doesn't move. The rock stays there. It doesn't move. It doesn't change. It gets rained on. It gets snowed on. It gets dark. It gets light. But the rock doesn't move. And that's like the love that's there for us. It's always there. It never changes. It's always available to us. And so having those two experiences really led me more— like, every time something like that happens, it leads me more to, let's go to the emotional part, because that's how we're experiencing the world, and that's what's creating our physiology. So let's start there. What are you feeling? And then we go from there and do different modalities to help people release their feelings, to acknowledge, own, and honor them so they can release them. That's what I'm up to.

I just, I love listening to your story, and I want, I just want to, you know, say I'm sorry for the loss of your, of your child.

Well, you know, it's really funny because people say they're sorry about it, and I don't feel sorry about it most of the time. I feel really privileged to have been through that because it's a club nobody wants to join. But it's also— it can be a very deep well of blessings. So I always say the darkest tragedy is also a deep well of blessings because if you look, you're going to find things that will bring you joy. And I think about him and I don't feel bad because We're all going to do that. We're all going to go eventually. And, um, not in a sarcastic way, but it really does happen. And we can choose how we want to look at that. If it's a terrible thing, then why does everybody do it, right? We're all going to pass, so let's make— let's make it mean something. Let's make his life mean something. Eddie, Edward Oliver, English. Let's make his life mean something. And so every person that I work on, everybody that I come into contact with, is getting that love that was there for him too.

That's beautiful. And I actually, I really love what you said before about show me the good, because when something really crappy happens to us, it's easy to go down the why me kind of path.

Oh yeah, what did I do? What did I do to deserve this? I'm a nice person, I'm a good person, I was getting really great care, and how did this happen? So then people wanted to go into blame, and we were having midwives help us, and when we got to the hospital, the doctor started to blame the midwives, and I said, no, no, we're not doing that. They delivered over 300 babies. There's a reason why this is happening, in other words, and it's bigger than it's not fair. Somebody said to my husband, it's not fair what happened. He goes, no, not fair is a $10 hamburger. That's not fair, right? It's not about fairness. It's about what are you going to do with this information? What are you going to do with this? Yeah. You going to let it break you, or you going to find the good?

And, and I love that because it's easy to go down the rabbit hole of letting things break us, right? And if you know, the women in the group are here because they've either are coming out of a divorce or they have in their life some kind of a heartbreak story. So if one of our heroines is at that point where they're you know, they're grieving their relationship and thinking, why is this happening to me? How would you guide them into a more supportive and, let's say, positive experience for them?

Well, if you think about the fact that we're responsible for everything that happens in our lives, I mean, you're not responsible for what's happening in my life. I am. I'm responsible. Responsible doesn't mean fault or blame. It means you're able to respond to what's happening in your life. So how are you going to be responsible? How are you going to respond to what's happening? You can dig a hole and put yourself in it. And I've done it. I mean, there's periods of my life where I've like, I'm in that hole and I'm sitting there and you can't get me out. And there's other times where I'm like, no, pull me out. I need help. And then there's other times when I just jump up out of it because I don't— I'm done with that. So it's the ebb and flow of life. So to not make it, um, like the end-all be-all, because I believe that we have relationships with people and when we've learned what we need to learn from them directly, the relationship ends. And then we go on and we assimilate that information that we got from that experience. So remember I talked about the guy who I was seeing and it was off and on for 7 years. What I learned from that experience was that we were working out all this stuff that we had seen our parents do, and we were working that out on each other. Luckily we didn't get married and have kids, thank God. But what we did was learned, oh, I don't like that when that happens. I'm not going to put up with that. Here's another thing that I like, and I'm going to find somebody, or there's somebody out there who likes that too, because like attracts like. It's not opposites attract. I know that's a really romantic idea, but there's something alike in each person that brings them together because you can't have a totally opposite relationship. It doesn't work. There has to be something that brings them together that's the same, that's attracting them to each other. So the way that I would do this is I have people do an assessment that tells which of the saboteurs that runs the back of the mind, which one's in charge, which ones are highest on the list. And then we identify those so we know that when we're working together, Avoider is going to show up and avoider is going to want to stop this because avoider doesn't want anybody to see what's going on. So I just had that happen recently. And what happens is when you're aware of it, then you can say, oh, that's exactly what they say in the back of my mind. And it's always the same script. So we identify that first. And then I also do intuitive energy scanning. So I'm scanning the person's chakra energy intuitively and coming up with the story, a holistic story of who they are and what the chakras are doing and where there needs to be help and how much can I intuit from this person. So that becomes like a— sometimes it's like a novel, um, and other times it's like these things are— need to be fixed immediately. So we go with whatever's showing up every time we work together. What's here? What do you want to work on? I might say to the person, what do you want to work on today? Or they might say, what's happened in the last week? And they'll come up with something, or something that's on their mind. They'll just start talking, and we'll use that to get to where we need to go. But we don't— there's no path that's like, okay, this first session we're going to do this, second session we're going to do that may turn out like that, but everybody's different. So I don't know what tools they're going to use because I teach all my clients tools to use to help them keep recentering, recentering, recentering. So, um, if you have never experienced unconditional love, and many people haven't, we have you keep recentering because eventually you will experience it. Every time you go to center, every time you listen to something that's uplifting, every time you listen to a piece of music, anytime you do a tapping routine, that doing Emotional Freedom Technique, I do that a lot with clients. When I'm doing Bioenergetic Synchronization Technique, then we're asking the person to think of something and I'm finding the feeling that's gonna interrupt that pattern when they think of that thing. Because the body will start doing a physiology. Oh, you know, sky— the sky is blue is a thought. It doesn't have an emotional charge to it. But if somebody like Dr. Mortar, M.T. Mortar Jr., who developed the technique, used to tell people, think of the ocean— well, that's not a great thing to think of because if you've almost drowned in the ocean, every time you think of it, you're going to have this response, this fight or flight response. So it's always about bringing people out of fight or flight response so they can think clearly, have— make good decisions, be creative. You can't do that. And those are layers of physiology that people are doing lots of fight or flight.

And it's funny because I keep going back to what you said before about we work our parent stuff with our first relationship, right? And the image that came to my mind was training wheels, right? We have— it's like a starter relationship that we kind of work all this stuff out. Yeah, we learn, and then from there we can go on to have healthier relationships.

Oh, absolutely.

And supportive relationships. But you got to get— you got to get that out. Somehow before.

Absolutely do beforehand. You can't do what we call spiritual bypass. I'm just going to think positive. Because if you don't acknowledge those negative feelings, they stay there and they keep running your body. And that's how we get dis-ease, which left alone turns into disease. So we really want to make sure that we're— and this stuff doesn't end. I can still go back and dig up negativity about what happened with the baby, with our baby. I can do that, but I've done it enough so that I don't have to keep going back there. It's not like running on my mind. You know how we have those loops that just won't stop? Sometimes it's really annoying and you want to just like stop doing that. So that's why the tapping works, because you're tapping on acupuncture points That's why bioenergetic synchronization technique works, because we're having you put your eyes in a certain location. We're using your neurology to heal you. So you're not adding anything or taking anything away, you're just shifting it. So what I like to say is that I'm addicted to epiphanies. I love it when people go, oh, I love that. It's the most awesome to have someone shift the way they think because they understand something in a different way. And that's quantum healing in a nutshell. One small change changes everything.

And I've experienced that with my clients as well. When you see, like, you almost can see the light bulb go off, right? And I get goosebumps because that's like, that's When people ask me what I do, I almost want to say I'm a goosebump chaser because I know that when that happens, that I've done my job.

Yeah, it's when I'm working on somebody in the office, and often when I'm working with them online, it feels like a breeze goes through the room, but there is no air movement. It's very interesting. I'll be working on somebody and I'll know something's coming up. I can feel it coming up.. And I think that's after, you know, so many decades of doing healing, you get used to feeling those things. And it's hard to describe. I'm like, oh, it's the next vertebrae. It's not that one. It's the next one. And sure enough, they do the test for the next vertebrae and boy, their leg length changes drastically. We can feel this stuff. And that's part of what I would tell people is like, listen and listen to those feelings that you're getting, 'cause your feelings are sharing everything with you. Not in the way that you think. So if you're feeling really sad and you can't really get out of it, you need to do something to shift that so that you can be clear about what you're feeling. That's where the intuition stuff comes in. That's why I have the word Soul Chiropractor, because I'm trying to help you, trying, I'm attempting to help you come in, in touch with your soul, the part of you that is always there, that never goes away, that just changes shape when you pass, right? Matter can't be created or destroyed, it can only change shape. So that's why it's quantum physics. It's the physics of living systems. It's not the physics of billiard balls on a pool table. Right? It's, it's living systems, and we're sentient beings, and we have power that we haven't even used yet. So when we're— there's an experiment that was done where they took cheek cells out of somebody, put it in another room, and then caused something to happen to the person, and the cheek cells in the other room responded to what happened. This is quantum. The observer changes what's observed. What are you looking at? What are you looking for? What are you seeking? Knock and the door will be open. Seek and you'll find. What are you seeking? Are you seeking all the ways that things can go wrong? The what-ifs? What if this happens? What if— I used to think after the baby passed, what if Ed dies, my husband? What if, what if, what if everybody died? You know, like, stop. Doesn't matter. Right, just be here now. And actually we had another baby after that and he's 29 right now. Nice. Yeah, we have two girls, um, from Ed's previous marriage. My— I call them my bonus daughters. And, uh, we had a son together and the girls have had given us 10 grandchildren. It's just crazy.

Wow.

No, and like the last— we went from 3 to 10 in about 2 years. It was crazy.

That is crazy. That's awesome.

Yeah.

So anything that you think is worth sharing with our heroines that we haven't touched on yet?

Um, I just want to reiterate, I guess, that you're in a learning place. The Earth is a learning place. So if you can look at things not that they're happening to you, but they're happening for you so you can learn. That is a great way to be because it keeps you curious, it keeps you learning, it keeps you moving forward. And one of the things that I did after that boyfriend was pretty much out of my life was I made a list of what I wanted, and it was me on that list. I want somebody I can play with. I want somebody who doesn't take themselves too seriously. I want— this is all me. And then I have to be what's on the list. And 9 months after I moved to Iowa, there he was. And he checked off about the first 3 boxes on that immediately. So that's awesome. There's somebody for everyone. I truly believe that. But there's people who also want to be on their own, and that's okay too. It's perfectly okay. But you— I really do believe that my parents were divorced. Ed's parents stayed together for until they both passed. You know, it's really amazing what can happen. And I want to just mention too that forgiveness is a huge healer. I'm doing a class on true forgiveness, um, August 9th. Saturday. I don't know if this will be up before that, but contact me because we're doing them every month. And if I can just say, forgiveness is the universal solvent. If you can forgive those who have hurt you, then you are free. I mean, really free. But if you hold on to that it's going to hurt you. Just like we were talking before, unforgiveness and holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. No, you're drinking the poison. Stop. Just put it down. And that's why we talk about forgiveness and how to do it, because people think it's saying that the thing that happened was okay, and it's not. Forgiveness is detaching the emotion from what happened so you don't rewound yourself every time you think of it. There's 4 levels of forgiveness, and the first level is, oh yeah, that happened a long time ago, I've forgiven that. And that's pretty surface. But if you have a twinge when you think of it— yeah, what did Dr. Mortar say? He had somebody on the table once and they were supposed to repeat after him, I thank them for— I think I thank them for the lesson. That bitch. That's what somebody said. He's like, no, that's not gonna do it. So if that's the way you want to end that, then you need to do some more forgiveness so you can really let it go. And it's hard. We have lots of terrible things happen in our lives and we don't want to forgive, but it's really the way to freedom for sure.

Yeah, no, fully, fully agree. Dr. Tanya, thank you so much for being here with us and sharing your story and your wisdom.

Thank you, Alexandra Niel.

Oh, it's, it's been my pleasure.