Unlocking Real Transformation: Dr. Tanya Lea on Breathwork, Bioenergetics and Belief

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You know, it's a lifetime of learning and experiences condensed into a program so that people will heal quickly. So that's how I kind of created the AWARE. So the first is to assess where we're at and what do we want in life? Because if we ruminate on what went wrong, we're gonna stay stuck in that pattern. So the objective is to set the goal for the life that we desire and then peel back everything that is not serving us so that we can then start with clean rubber bands and flow, right?

So step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. This conversation is one that's always sorely needed, so I'm very appreciative, Dr. Tanya Lee, that you are here today with your company and your brand, Consciously Aware. You have quite a diverse background, everything from military service, corporate work, you have a framework, and your Aware community and all of the work that you're doing on the mind, body, the nervous system, again, is exactly what we need in this world. I hear more and more every conversation I have, whether I'm coaching clients or just talking to people every day, people are talking about what systems they're using to kind of self-regulate, to get back into the zen zone or whatever zone you wanna call it, so that we're good and present as humans, but also in the work that we do. So thank you for being here and giving us some of your wisdom today.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your journey and when you first became aware of the work that when it came into your life and you realized this is something I also wanna help people do as a coach, as a leadership and performance expert.

Excellent. For me, my why is very, very simple. I woke up on a hospital floor in December 2021 screaming about an assault that happened 27 years earlier. And they put in my medical report that I was screaming nonsense about my family being murdered potentially and being raped. And so after I got out and I read it, I said, oh no, no, no, that's not nonsense. That really did happen February 5th, 1993. So in a 27-year gap, and I was in therapy so much so that at one point in my life, I have two aunts that are mental health counselors, and I went back to school and got the degree. I thought, if I'm paying all this money for school, let me go get the degree. But when, after I woke up on the hospital floor, that was very life-changing for me because I knew that there was something more than just talk therapy. I knew it. And I had a lot of energy in my body at the time that I didn't really understand. Some people would say spiritual awakening, kundalini awakening, breakthrough, breakdown. And that's where NLP comes in very handy because we say the same things. We just kind of say them a little bit differently. And when we say them differently, we give them different meanings and different meanings bring different power to us. So if I would have looked at it like on the medical report, that could be very, very detrimental if I truly believe that about myself. So, we really work in the belief system and the root cause. And even before that, how our childhood patterns are formed. I started out in mindset and I had several mindset coaches throughout my life, but it's more than mindset mastery. Mindset got me 8 major surgeries because I pushed through and pushed through. But when we learn to listen to our body and our body's intelligence system, our life really changes because it's not about pushing through, it's about flowing through. And it's, that's a challenging lesson for people to learn. I've had some good coaches along the way and it really changed my life. But after the hospital floor, I just felt very, very called to do this. For me, I, I was angry. I'm like, how did this happen again? Like I keep trying and trying. And it was very, very clear to me that this was a message and a calling. And so now I match Mindset Mastery with Body Intelligence and really work at the communication system within our body. Fascinating.

Yeah, it, it is truly fascinating because this is something that you probably thought you dealt with.

And of course I did. No, but I will tell you, suppressed memories will burst out when you least expect them to. We have so many people sitting in psychosis when really it's just an energetic imbalance. For so many people and people that don't know how to regulate and get overwhelmed. It changed my whole life. And I'm somebody who stayed in therapy and, you know, I always had that I'll show you mentality, like I can do it. You know, clearly I over-credentialed just trying to prove my worth because when you come out of an assault and at the time, this is interesting, I was in the military and, you know, there's no tears in the military. Pain is just weakness leaving your body. So, the different mantras that we tell ourselves keep us going. Very, very hard to heal. Better to push through. But at the time, this is where it got interesting for me, is I got to go on a deployment to Haiti and Cuba. And I had a coworker. We all had to try out for this fly team. It was a big deal back at the time, 1993. And I was the one who was selected, but I was ranked number 2. So I thought, well, did they give it to me out of pity? So in my mind, I never wanted pity. I wanted to work harder and earn it. So it's these patterns and programs that keep us going, some for the good and some for the bad. It's just, is our pattern within our conscious and subconscious serving our greatest good, or is it derailing us?

Absolutely. I mean, I think anybody listening, including myself, can think about those moments, can think about those past repeated patterns where we finally broke the pattern in whether it's relationships because of whatever we had internalized as a child or through generational trauma or angst, even to finally getting us together. We've, we've met, we've talked, but getting you actually recorded live on the show because I was doing the same thing, being stubborn and going, I'm just gonna push through until I finally had to go, oh, I need to go to the doctor and I actually don't have a voice and this is my livelihood. So what does all this mean? And why sometimes as women do we need to push? Do we feel like we just need to accept certain things about whatever age we are or what's supposed to happen? I mean, men, the same thing, right? And exactly. So much of that. Is, yeah, it's, it's partly the physical, but it's so connected to our mind.

Well, our thoughts and our patterns manifest into physical. So case in point, I had worked with this woman. She had had drop foot. I don't know if you know what that is, but it's when your foot doesn't really function. In mind-body medicine, the foot is representative of how we're moving forward in life. So when we get to the root cause of how she's moving forward, walking into the unknown, not knowing how to surrender, constant worry. Once you unravel that ball, 3 months later, she was walking on the beach. You know, so there's great success stories in so many physical diseases can be overturned. I always like to say, let me just reach over here, that our emotions literally are like a rubber band ball. So, when I take on new clients, I always start with this ball. And by the end, I hope that we have just a pile of rubber bands. So that we're not all knotted up and we understand how our body works. And I just feel like that is so important. Another woman that I worked with, major success because she had been trying to get pregnant for years, a lot like myself. I'll get to that in a minute. But once we unraveled that her grandmother was very strict, she didn't really have a good relationship with her mother. She honestly did not believe at her core that she would be a good mother. And all of this was preventing really her from getting pregnant. So when we unraveled all of the subconscious limiting beliefs that were deteriorating for her, she's pregnant. And by now she's had her child, but she got pregnant and we only worked together for 5 months. So it's when you really do the work and target the root cause, I always say it's a deep dive into the ocean and a climb up the mountain.

So when you found yourself on the floor going through that moment of psychosis, realizing it was tied in to 27 years earlier, what was that step? How did you get back out, climb back out, and turn that then into ways that you—

I didn't realize it on that hospital floor. I was just mad, mad, mad, because I knew I didn't belong there. I knew that it was greater than psychosis. I was it was like I was watching myself in psychosis. So I was almost aware. I was aware enough to put myself into a situation where I could get myself out of the hospital. So I was able to ground enough to get out. But once I got out and I got the medical report, that's when it really changed for me because actually they wrote in the medical report that I was screaming nonsense. So for me, I knew it wasn't nonsense and that sent me back to school. School has always been kind of my happy place anyway. Yeah. The place I go when everything else seems to fail me, I just go back and take a class. So that's already been embedded in me. And some, I wish I would know now what I didn't know then, or reversed. Yeah. We, but I struggled to get pregnant. I tried for years. I did in vitro, I did insemination, and I could not get pregnant. And I would bet you now that it was more of a limiting belief and internal fear. Than it was a physical issue.

Interesting.

I ended up adopting, and I have a beautiful daughter from Morocco, so, and I love it. She's taught me more than I could learn in a textbook.

I love that there is a happy ending to the story, even though it didn't present exactly how you wanted it to originally.

Exactly.

So you went back to school and you eventually decided I, I have this other thing I'm supposed to be doing. I'm supposed to be working with high-achieving professionals, supposed to be working with people who are going through some of these same issues.

Well, it's been a journey. I will tell you, honestly speaking, my— what I thought my passion and my calling was to work with sexual survivors, sexual assault survivors, and my first 10 clients turned out to be men. And then I felt really unprepared because I wasn't prepared for that. And it was very interesting to me. I also worked with a lot of females and I work a lot in sex trafficking, but I noticed that doing that daily was really hard on my heart and taxing, and it really wasn't where I wanted to be. So that's when I really sat down and thought, okay, what did I do to get myself out of it? What were the steps? Because, you know, it's a lifetime of learning and experiences. Condensed into a program so that people will heal quickly. So that's how I kind of created the Aware. So the first is to assess where we're at and what do we want in life? Because if we ruminate on what went wrong, we're going to stay stuck in that pattern. So the objective is to set the goal for the life that we desire and then peel back everything that is not serving us so that we can then start with clean rubber bands and flow, right? So that is how I look at it. And the first step is the awareness. The second is we work inward. That's when we really go deep. Those are— that's a hard month. And then we come out of that and align the things that we learned with the patterns of our behavior, rerouting. And then after that, we reframe and then empower.

Nice. And this is typically 5 months?

What month? It's a 5-month program that I run, and I also do one-on-one work. And because healing gets very expensive, as you know, you can talk to coaches, some of them are, are thousands of dollars. I really, my heart wanted to help more people at a lower ticket price. So that is how we started the CAI, which is the Consciously Aware Intelligence Community. We're actually kicking it off. I have 3 other doctors that I'll lead in the community also because nutrition is also huge. Mindset, body intelligent, finance, speaking. So we're going to do coaching program in that community for less than a cup of coffee a day. So this way people can experience what coaches they want to work with before they're locked into $1,000 packages.

Yeah, that's truly amazing. And I love the stories that you've shared with us about others' journeys, about you. You mentioned that you having your daughter has taught you so much, and I'd love to dig into that a little bit about, you know, what kinds of things do you think you've learned from having to make the pivot to adoption?

Patience. She taught me patience, acceptance. Well, she was— she's from Morocco, which is a Muslim country culture. So different religion, different culture, different beliefs. System. And can you imagine? I got her at 13, 14. She was a little mouse. So I'm not a mouse. Her culture, she's very different than her peers. If that's— they didn't really work. Women don't really work and educate in that culture as much as they do in our culture. So she definitely— she graduated. I'm so proud of her. It chokes me up every time because she came here with not one word of it. We played charades.

Forever.

And she graduated with honors in French and national honors and went on to college, did a degree in psychology. So I always say she got, she got the degree, I got the education, because we did homework together for years. I mean, so that was wonderful. And that also led me to do the master's in mental health counseling, because at that point I thought, okay, I'll get out and do mental health counseling because I really didn't like the way that it was going. I just felt like every week I went in and just vomited all my problems. They gave me some advice and I went out the door medicated. And when I went into psychosis, I also blame that on the medication because what that is, is energy trapped in the body. Every single time we repress and repress, it just pushes it down. So then when we go off the medication, boom, you have this explosive amount of energy. That you have to have a strong mindset in order to manage because the energy can take you in any direction if your mind is not strong. So that's why I always say it's, it's a lot more than just mindset mastery. I know that there's a ton of mindset coaches out there and my heart aligns with a portion of it, but without the body intelligence understanding, you could really continue to push yourself to 8 major surgeries. If I would've went to the doctor and there was a naturopath doctor, a mind-body medicine doctor in the hospital, I had 2 rotator cuff surgeries, double. So in mind-body, you learn that if you're taking too much, the weight of the world on your shoulders, things that are not your responsibility, you're people pleasing, taking on extra responsibility, especially in corporate America. You wanna get noticed, you wanna climb the ladder. So you take it all on, but they don't tell you that. They say, oh, you're using the mouse too much, or you're working out too much, which they're right because I'm mad as hell. So I'm working out hard and I have to use the mask because I'm at work. So it, it didn't make sense to me at the time that I was also very resistant, to be honest. And a lot of healing is done in the acknowledgement, awareness, and surrender. It's understanding what we're taking on that we don't have to. Every organ has a meaning. I had double breast cancer. This one, I had a phyllodes. This one was estrogen-based. Two different types of cancer, two different breasts. That whole region denotes self-esteem.

Oh.

You know, do we like ourselves? So many women, I do a lot of mirror therapy, cannot look in the mirror and say, I love you, without, I mean, it's just, instant waterfall. And it's, I was that woman, so I, I understand it.

We're talking about ourselves and what we internalize and how that manifests and how that holds us back from things. Do you think that also has to do with who we surround ourselves with?

Oh, of course. Of course.

So, because I, I know you always hear you need to surround yourself with people who are at or a level above perhaps where you want to be. And I think that can be difficult, more difficult to think about and put yourself into those situations if you haven't done this work of really understanding who you are and feeling like you are bringing your full self to things. Have you seen some of that in your experiences working with the number of people you've worked with?

I saw that in myself, you know, and that's one of the reasons I think I always stayed in school was because I felt most comfortable there. I was surrounded with people that talked about visions on what's our next homework assignment and what are we researching. And it was out of the day-to-day junky stuff that you don't really want to talk about, the small talk. Oh, so I was that person, you know, so I get it. And that's one of the reasons I stay in school. I push people into school. My daughter will tell you I'm a pusher, but I push them into crowds that want to evolve. Yeah, nice.

And I mean, speaking of evolution, you've alluded to going back and getting different certifications, and you are an expert in, right? You have your master's in mental health counseling. You have a doctorate in organizational leadership. You're also an expert in bioenergetics.

Bioenergetics. That's frequency medicine. So I don't know if you remember 100 years ago, Albert Einstein said the future is frequency. And then Dr. Massey and Dr. Fraser did a major study on matching the meridian points of the body to the frequency. It's fascinating and complex, but let me try to give it to you as simple as I can. So in Morse code, because in my background I also at one point did Morse code, so I will tell you that if you're trying to send the word his, which is did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, H-I-S, from the brain to just say the throat, and you only get did it, did it, did it, you just got 3 I's. In your throat and that needed the word his in order to function. Does that make sense in breaking it down that way? So what frequency medicine does is replenish the frequency in the body so that you can get the did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, so that the body gets the information that it needs. The body communicates just like if I was to reach and send you a text message on your cell phone right now, you cannot grab hello out of the air. Correct. So technology has now advanced to the stages where it can read the frequency in the body and tell us where the energetic gaps are. We call it the information highway, which is basically AKA our central nervous system because that's how the information is disseminated throughout the body. And every organ receives information to and from the brain.

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I don't even know where to go because I have so many questions, but you, you are also a master of Reiki, Emotion Code, Body Code, and Beamer therapy. Exactly.

And so, I had a hard time deciding what do I want to do when I grow up. I struggled with that a lot. But for me, I really stick with Mindset Mastery plus Body Intelligence because that is how I feel you can totally transform. So, instead of me, you know, in the beginning, I didn't know how to market. Who am I? So, I'm like, "Yes, I'm so smart." I'd have all these credentials and nobody cared. That put me right back to the beginning, right? Because people didn't understand it. And I get that. So now I really just focus on those two and bridging the gap. And then I utilize each different modality in a different way. So with you, I might do BodyCode. With somebody else, I might do PSYCH-K. So intuitively, we would be able to determine what is the best methodology. That's where I give myself credit because I am certified in multiple modalities. And to be fair, my aunt was the dean of University of Miami Complementary Medicine Department. So, it's been— holistic healing has been in my family my whole life. And it was funny because we really used to— I don't want to say make fun of her, but she would muscle test everything no matter where we went. She literally could diagnose a person. She's incredible. I aspire to get to that level. However, when I was learning, the instructor told me, Tanya, we have to unlearn you. It was very hard for me to learn muscle testing and applied kinesiology because I was too in my head. So for a year I walked around, the table is white. Okay, it's blue. Like I, I just tested everything until I got proficient in it. And it took me a few years. I isolated too during that timeframe because I know that as an empath, I take on a lot of energy. Yeah. And I worked against that my whole life. Like, I really hated being sensitive like that. I didn't understand it. And it's very hard to see it as a superpower when you're completely drained at the end of the day. But once you learn how to manage it, I know if I go to a concert, I better not have a thing on my agenda the next day because that's how long it takes to detox my body. So now I'm careful about where I place my, myself.

Yeah, well, I'm signing up because these, some of the things you're talking about are things I'm going through right now. So, but I also think it is hard being an empath in this world right now, possibly more than ever.

Anika, I will share with you, it is challenging, but once it's managed, you'll be in the best seat in America because with all the information coming at us at warp speed, I can tell you. Empathetically, you can always denote what's a lie and what's the truth. Yeah. The body will never, ever lie. It's the one thing that will always give you the truth. And your truth might be different than me. That is why I believe body intelligence is really the way forward other than, you know, a big course on what we should do. If it's not an individual connection, how do you heal with my methodology if it's not applicable to you? Does that make sense? And your body's intelligence is very different than mine. Hence why we have over 4,000 religions, because people get wisdom and, and what they do with it is either good or bad. That's not for me to say. But if we have 4,200 religions and billions of people, my belief is, you know, Christ consciousness, consciousness, we're all different. What God is gonna give to me, he's not gonna give to Anika Jackson. He's gonna give you a different gift than he's gonna give me. But the goal is to collectively and universally come together and appreciate each other.

100%. And, and I will say, um, I do have a Zen practice with a former Zen monk, and that has helped me because I have done work on where am I right now, sending letters, forgiveness to myself. From the past and to others who I perceive, whether they know or not, have done harm to me, worked on future visions, things like that. But it's a continuous process. And I, I do think there are always more tools that we should have in our toolboxes. And you very eloquently have answered one of my questions, which was, you have a program and you also work one-on-one, but how do you know what works best for each person? And you talked a little bit about that, how just now, but then also I think maybe 5 minutes ago talking about how you might use this for this person and this for me and this, this other aspect. Because even though you're trying to teach the same system, you do have to, I guess, meet people where they are and see what they're actually going to respond to.

That is the beauty of bioenergetics is it's a software. It's amazing. There's 4 people in the, 4 players in the bioenergetics world. There's Quest, there's AYO, which is really for wellness clinic. That's, uh, the elite top of the model, $100,000 system. And then there's Energy for Life, which is the system that I did my training because it was headquartered in Tampa. So it was very easy to get trained. And you know what the beauty of it was, is I got to do my training during COVID So it was even better. So I guess I utilized my time well during COVID I found whatever I could fall into. And that's— I forgot now. I just lost my train of thought. But that is really what helps dive into an individual intelligence because the intelligence in your body is different than mine. And every scan, and I've scanned hundreds of clients, everyone is different. So, you may have childhood issues. Somebody could have teenage issues. Some people could have fear of rejection, fear of being loved, fear of success. It runs the gamut. But how we reverse it and unravel it could be different for each person. Body Code might work for you, whereas PSYCH-K might work for someone else.

Yeah. So how do you, how do you do the scan? Is it something where somebody has to be, go into a facility?

No, they don't. They don't have to be physically here. We can do a hand scan if they're in the office and you can do an energy aura scan using the voice.

Oh, wow.

You're only collecting the information. So it's all in the energy. It's all in the voice. Just the same way I'm going to send you a text, I'm going to talk right to you. Once it's out there, it's out there. It's fascinating. It's fascinating.

It truly is fascinating. And I'm really curious because, again, you talked about how you said you're going to help victims of sexual assault and you ended up getting working with men and that wasn't the audience that you thought would come to you. And then working with trafficking. And I have a lot of friends who work in anti-trafficking and it's definitely not an easy place to be. And then what moved you down the road into figuring out who you do want to work with ideally?

Well, when I worked a lot with sexual assault survivors, I've done that my whole life. I've been called to that. So whether I lived in Houston, whether I lived in Florida, whether I lived in Jersey or Arizona, I've always, always put myself into the rape crisis centers subconsciously. I'll have to tell you, I guess I was just heart drawn. Here in Florida, I worked with Selah Freedom, which is a sex trafficking organization, while I was in corporate America as a volunteer. So for me, it was a natural progression. But once I made it a full-time job and it became a responsibility, it got a lot heavier for me. And I didn't know that that would happen. Interestingly enough, my whole life I've always felt like there was a sexual undercurrent to a lot of things, which is very interesting in where we're at today. Now, men, this was fascinating to me, and it really caused me to study a lot with my first couple clients being men. What I learned is that when— and a lot of them are my age, but when I was growing up, I mean, my father worked for Channel 2 News, CBS. Under Walter Cronkite, Connie Chung, Roland Smith, and even at 5 and 6 years old, I knew the media was not full of truth. And I thought it was very segregating because if you follow the news back then, they always put your nationality, your site, like it was just too much. I, and then as I went through life, I noticed back then we watched Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island, Leave It to Beaver. But it never took away the sexual tone of like alpha males. And these little boys were like humiliated. They were made to pull down their pants and see who's bigger when they're 5, or they were played with by babysitters. And I just was like, it was a whole new world for me. But interestingly, Anika Jackson, I would tell these men, I said, you know, I probably am not the right therapist. Coach, counselor, whatever you wanna call it, because I don't have that experience. But none of them, they all stayed with me. So I, uh, and I, I do believe that it was very, very helpful because at the same point, the biggest difference between counseling and healing is that counseling is a textbook. We go to school and we learn, and this is what we want our career to be. But when you're healing with somebody, it's a coherence. It's an exchange of coherence. It's it's really more from the heart and the heart is our biggest electrical conduit that we have. But a lot of people live from the mind because opening the heart is hard to do. Comes with a little pain. Yeah.

Yeah. I, but I also think you do have a unique perspective because you do have other lived experience, other trauma that you went through. You also have a military background and you've also had to, you know, you've been in the corporate world. And had to play in those sandboxes.

I never did like it. I, I promise you, I'll share this with you because I hated corporate America so much that when they needed somebody to go to Iraq, I was like, yes. Oh my God, please just take my life. I, I'm done. Like, I just literally, I kind of found myself in Iraq because a lot of people struggled there. But I will tell you, the one thing that we had there was unity and collaboration that you'll never see in America. It's incredible how close you can become when you're sitting in bunkers. You know, when your incoming is coming to your base and you are really fearful of your life, you are so close with these people. It's incredible. I learned so much over there. I loved it. I wanted to stay. We won't give up.

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I think, I mean, that's, again, you're bringing such a unique perspective to the work that you're doing. And when did you realize that you could leave corporate completely and just go completely into—

Yeah, I actually got mad at my boss. I, it's, if I'm just being honest, I was just tired of her. And I was tired of it all. And I literally quit in the middle of the night, which I, not my proudest moment, but I sent an email at 2 in the morning. I thought, I, I'm just never going to talk to her again in this lifetime ever. And so I hit send and then all of a sudden, boosh, I had energy for days. I took 8, 8, 8 or 9 sleeping pills. I didn't sleep for 4 days. I was truly manic, which is how I No, when I ended up in psychosis, I wasn't psychotic. Back it up 2 years and that's what happened. And I got in my car and left. This was interesting. I went to— have you heard of Dr. Amen?

Yes.

Oh, he's phenomenal. So I went to his clinic, $6,500 later, I had my brain scanned. Interestingly enough, they— my entire life they told me I was OCD and I would argue with them. I would tell them, no, I don't think I'm OCD. I think I'm situationally aware. Because coming out of the assault, everything in my house is labeled. Everything had a place because for me, I wanted to know if somebody walked on my carpet. So I vacuumed on my way out the house so that as soon as I opened my door, I would see if anybody was in my house. Psychologically, I didn't realize I had built a cage around myself. For me, I was just living safe. So as time went on, when I had my brain scan, you are not gonna believe this. It showed ADHD. I was livid because having ADHD and then having the assault taught me to hyperfocus. So the ADHD, I was able to hyperfocus, and then they labeled that OCD because they love labels. I mean, they, they love them. Every time somebody comes to my office and gives me a label, I tell them, please don't. Please tell me how it feels in your body because anxiety can be this, Or it can be that. So I don't really wanna know what somebody else labeled you as. I just wanna know how you feel and how we can unravel that. Because if you are stuck on a label, you're gonna be stuck in a cycle. Absolutely.

And that, that's the story you keep telling yourself. And like you found out, it's not true.

And I told them for years, I was like, I don't think I'm OCD. But I didn't think I was ADHD either. I just thought I was highly energetic. Everything happens for a reason. And while, you know, I would, I don't want to go back and be assaulted again. However, it really, it changed the trajectory of my life to the point where ADHD could have ruled my life, but because of that assault, I stayed hyper-focused and very vigilant. And then it even got worse because before I went to Iraq, We spent 9 months training in Fort Leavenworth and we studied hyper-awareness, situational awareness, vigilance, attention to detail, like ad nauseam. So when you— and everybody coming from a war zone with PTSD, that's what we're trained to do. So now coming out of it, nobody's teaching anybody how to unravel. You know, they've made everybody like live at this level of intensity. But then brought them back to America and didn't really teach them how to heal somatically, breathwork, grounding. Like, they don't talk about any of that. They'll send you to the VA and they'll give you a pill and they'll send you on your way. Right.

If you can get an appointment.

Oh, the VA. Don't even get me started on the atrocity of a VA. But at the same point, they— there are some good programs out there. And I know that there are people that are really trying to help, but unfortunately they're the individual people like myself that don't fall under the big pharma insurance model.

Right.

So how do you— that's one of the reasons we did the Aware community, so that you would have doctors and people that care, because that's important. Because I will tell you, I— not that I'm proud of it, but I did not care about working in corporate America. I cared about my paycheck and the team that I was working with. But making the CEO an extra million, that never, I don't care.

And as a coach or consultant, I know that people can tell if I care or not, or if I just want their money, or if when I'm in programs as well with other people, it's really easy to tell the difference. And you want, I want to show up the way I want somebody to show up for me. And so I want to put that intentionality. And even if that means we go down other paths sometimes, because that's something that person needs. That's what we do. And I imagine, of course, that's what you are excellent at deciphering as well. So I want to talk about the marketing that you did, the branding you did to shift to working with business leaders, with other communities other than the ones that are in crisis or are, you know, people who are in crisis perhaps in a different way with their bodies.

I still do work at the Rape Crisis Center. It's— it'll always be near and dear to my heart, but I do it more as a volunteer because one, charging that, it just didn't work work for me. And I wanted to expand to be able to help more people. And individually, it got challenging. And everybody told me it would, but I didn't really listen. I just thought I could do it. So I have to learn the hard way. And at one point, I was seeing, like, 14 people a week, and I was exhausted, and my weekends were burned. So that was one of the reasons that I did the Aware program. And I don't allow more than 10 people in it. And sometimes we only get 4 or 5, which is perfect because the framework is the same, but how we dive in is different for each person. Yeah. So that's what makes it unique. And then they, there's shared experiences. So we do that group and keep it very, very small. And then after that, you go right into the Aware Community where you're constantly supported. It's not like Mindvalley where there's 10,000 people, you know, we keep it small so that it's intimate enough to where there's still that connection with the coaches so that people heal because you heal through connection.

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, so you said it wasn't easy. Did you start advertising? Did you just reach out to people that you knew from business communities?

I joined the BNI in town and local networking, and I was, I have to say, I was fortunate in the fact that I, word of mouth was very, very Good to me. Yes, I got very busy by— I saw a few people and then they recommended me to other people and I got busier than I wanted to be or that I could handle. And that's what caused me to revamp using the same Aware Methodology because it works. I mean, I've seen it work for so many people.

So, and what is your next step? Like, what do you see yourself doing next? You have the community.

Publish, publish. I need to finish this book. I've been working on it for 4 years. That's, but I really, it was just too much. My cousin and I wrote a play on mental health at, you know, at one point we were trying to market that. And then the book I started, and then I started seeing clients and I thought, okay, Tanya, you got out of corporate America to stop this rat race. Like, what are you doing? So I had to slow down and my passion is people. So now that we've got the Aware Program and the whole, the booklet for that all complete and up and running, we are revamping the CAI community, which I'm very excited about because that blends my military intelligence and communications background with healing. So now it's like the CAI, Consciously Aware Intelligence community. Unlike the CIA, we are actually going to provide true intelligence. Like, it's crazy concept. The body tells the truth. And take it from there. My book is the next one, and I, I do public speaking now, so a few more public speaking engagements is always a good thing.

Yeah. For the business leader, the entrepreneur who knows that they need help, can you talk about one or two cases of people that you helped and how that changed their perspective, changed their business?

You know, when you're a high achiever, the struggle is delegation. And once they can release and delegate, like one of the things they used to say in the war zone is perfection is the enemy of good enough and good enough wins wars. So at the same point, if you apply that to life, if you're always looking for perfection, you're going to constantly be on a hamster wheel because perfection is different to everybody. I think your hair looks perfect today. You might not, but I do. So perfection is interpersonal, if you will. So the first thing we do is get rid of perfection and then delegation. What can we delegate? Because when we don't have the ability to delegate, we don't have the ability to trust. So where in our life did we lose the ability to trust? And that's the point that we hit in the deep dive, because when we get to that point and we can unravel the trust issue, then we can delegate and then we just bounce along, but we have to get to what drives the overload. So for a lot of business owners, it's delegation and trust.

Yeah.

Some fear of failure, some fear of success, but if you're looking for overall, that's what I've found is, is the lack of trust. And a lot of it is breaking through the ego too. I mean, we all have a heart and the ego is the system built around the, the heart. Joe Dispenza does a phenomenal study on heart wall and how to break through that wall that we build around our hearts.

You've mentioned so many things that I need to put on my to-do list, reading, researching. If you had to give everybody listening one piece of advice, one place to start that they could do on their own, and of course we'll have all of your resources in the show notes for people to click through as well. What would that piece of advice be, or what would that place to start be? Breathwork.

Because the essence of life is in our breath. So, I mean, I took a whole 6-week course on breath. I didn't even know there was that much breathwork. You know, you go there like, "Tonya, just take a few deep breaths," if you go to the hospital. But there's so much power in our breathing, and that's what— that would be the first place. Like, really ground yourself, spend some time outside, and a deep breath in, all the way in, hold for 4 or 6, release for 8, just because that gives the whole body a deep breath cleanse. And if you can put that into practice for a few minutes a day, you will see the change almost within a week because it will slow you down. There's times I take on way too— still, just because I have the education, some days I don't really have all the discipline, right? I'm human. I'm not supernatural. But I take it back to the breath. And that would be the first, the first step. And then listen to the body because it is talking to you. Every little headache, every little crink in our body, every tight muscle, every, what we call ache and pain, inconvenience, is a message from the body. If I teach nothing in this world, that is the one thing that I wanted to teach is how to listen to the body. Because when I first started, I was doing the chakras and how to balance them. My first journey was the shamanic healing. So that's where I learned the chakras and tarot card reading. And I thought, oh, my mother's going to think I'm a nut job if I go home. And, but there's, there's power in learning it because it teaches you intuition. It hones in on intuition. And I live close to Casa Dega, so they have psychic camps and all kinds of stuff up there that really help you dive into your intuition a little further, but that gets out of the science and more into kind of the woo woo. And I really wanna bring it back to the science because it does all merge together. It, it really does. But the science is what we can prove is factual, documented, and people rely on, you know, people rely on it. So I follow the science. Nice.

I definitely wanna have you back on when you have your book, cuz otherwise I'll just sit here and selfishly ask you a whole bunch of questions from, from me and, and, uh, Anika Jackson.

Oh, now you're gonna put pressure on me to finish. No, I like that. I need some accountability cuz it's okay.

Good.

I do. I need to finish it. I keep on saying that and then something comes up and of course I don't sometimes practice what I preach. At some point we all have to put ourselves first.

Yeah. I mean, that's another thing we all need to learn because that can be difficult. I mean, even saying that, thinking about putting myself first, I feel it in my body because I think it's so ingrained to not put yourself first sometimes in that position.

Well, because we're told that it's selfish and Some people take it to the extreme. Like, I see what's out on the internet, like, put yourself first, screw this person, cut them off. I'm like, oh Lord, that's not what it means. It really means having the ability to have the mature conversation. If there's something I didn't like about you, what am I just supposed to block you, cut you off, and then you're left wondering, what did I do? So you're, you're not really creating, you're just transmuting bad energy. But if you really wanted to heal and take ownership, you have that hard conversation. Anika Jackson Jackson, this action that you did hurt my feelings, hurt my, my business, whatever that means. Now you can either acknowledge it or stand your ground and, and then we part ways, but at least we part ways with an understanding. There are so many people I work with these days that, you know, wanna disown their family or have been disowned. And to me, I don't live in that space, and I've been disowned. I have a father that disowned me and an aunt. I have a whole side of the family because I didn't date within my race. So I know what it's like to be disowned, and I would never encourage it. Yeah.

So, oh gosh, that's a whole other, uh, line of conversation you can go down for sure.

My life was unique, but I am here because my life was unique. I felt very, very called to do this. Somebody said to me the other day, one of my clients, "Well, you don't know what it's like to be fired." I said, "Oh yes, I do. I was fired from Central Command after being ranked the number one employee, must retain at all costs. I was fired 4 days later." But in doing the deep dive, you know, I could blame everybody in the world or I can say, "Hey, I was insubordinate." Sometimes my mouth gets the best of me in the past. And sometimes it's really healing is in taking ownership because the more you blame everybody else, you're not really healing, you're just transmuting. Healing is taking the responsibility for, you know, our good and our bad. I always say I'm not perfect like the Popo. They're the perfect ones. I am not.

Do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto?

Oh my God. Believe it to achieve it. I have said that my whole life.

I think that is very appropriate for our conversation today. So Dr. Tanya, thank you so much for being on Your Brand Amplified. You will absolutely have to come back as a guest. I'll be following up with you separately. I'll also, when I, I'm looking through the transcript, be going to all of the links that I know I, that you've shared with us. So I've really enjoyed this conversation. I think it's a good reminder to all of us. It doesn't matter where you are in your journey professionally or personally, we need to take that time to really understand what's going on within. And I'll, how that affects, you know, our physical health, our mental health, who we're surrounding ourselves with, our environment, and how we can take steps to make all of those things work for us instead of against us.

Exactly. I, because we all have it within us, even those that think they don't, I promise you do. If you believe you don't, call me, I'll let you know you do. We will.

For sure.

And thank you to everybody who's watching this episode or listening to it. If you have been watching it, you'll see some of the things that Dr. Tanya was talking about as she's showing them to us. So I do encourage, watch the full video. We'll have all the links in the show notes, and I'll be back again with another amazing guest to share their story as their journey very shortly. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplifier. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.

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