740: The Simple and Surprising Power of Being a Witness With Corban David Jenai

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode is about the simple and surprising power of being a witness and of having a witness when we need one. And I’m back with my friend, Corban David Jenai, who is a speaker, a writer, a storyteller, and a six-time entrepreneur with four exits. But more importantly, after cancer, multiple TBIs, treatment-resistant depression, and a subsequent CPTSD diagnosis, he made it his life’s purpose to find hope and healing in his own life or die trying. And after spending $300,000 in that pursuit, it became clear to him that our approach in the Western world to healing and mental health is broken, but that it’s also a fixable problem and that does not require as much as he spent fixing it. He established the trauma healing organization, hopeguide.com to do just that. And he’s the host of the How We Heal podcast, where he explores the many ways that we can find healing in our own lives and being our own healer.

And I really enjoyed this conversation because I’ve gotten so many follow-up questions since sharing how profoundly my own trauma recovery impacted my health and my life in so many ways. And I feel like I haven’t had a good framework or blueprint to share that can help others find their own path because all of us are going to walk a little bit different of a journey. And I feel like his story and his resources and HopeGuide are a wonderful answer and a wonderful bridge to finding those solutions. So let’s join Corban. Corban, welcome back. Thanks for being here again.

Corban: Thanks for having me, Katie. It’s good to be here again.

Katie: I loved our first conversation. I’ll make sure it’s linked in the show notes for you guys listening. If you haven’t heard it, it’s phenomenal. We got to talk about the concept of being your own healer and how that can be so transformational and also more effective often when we take that responsibility into our own hands. And in our conversation today, I’m super excited to get to jump into another topic that you and I have discussed in person several times, which is the simple and surprising power of being a witness and in some cases of having a witness when you need it. And I think this is another certainly not enough talked about concept and one that can be absolutely transformational. So to start broad, will you sort of introduce us to that concept and what you mean by it?

Corban: Yeah. So, okay, so what I mean by being a witness, it’s a term that is you know, used in a lot of ways. This can be used in religious ways, sort of bringing people into your faith. And that’s how I grew up with it. It’s used sometimes in some therapeutic context, which is a lot closer to how I’m using it. To talk about being a much, having much closer observation of a client. But how I mean it is in three specific ways. Number 1. I mean it in, so it has to do with being an intentional presence for another person. And so in our last episode, we talked about how we’ve exchanged breadth, we’ve exchanged or replaced depth of connection with breadth of connection. Right, we’ve had less deep connection, we have more of it. And what that means is we have trained ourselves in the habit of not really being present with people. I mean, think of the number of times when you go for coffee with people and they’re on their phone. Or if I go out to coffee and I see other people and they’re there together, but they’re on their phones or they’re glancing around. We have this decrease of attention with each other. And so, but there’s something really, really fundamentally healing about somebody who sits there with you and is present. In fact, my daughter, one of my daughters said to me yesterday, she was talking about a local gal. And she said, you know, there’s just something about the way that she talks to me that I really like, and I said what is that she’s like while she looks at me in the eyes. And she like leans in to me when she’s talking and she asks me questions and she’s really interested.

And so, to go back to your actual question, Katie, about how I would define it. It’s three things. Number 1, It’s being it’s being intentional with the way that we’re looking at other people. It’s the way that we’re seeing people. So I’m talking about if we’re being a witness for other people. So. If I’m looking at you, Katie, I know that a lot of the information of our conversation is being held in the way that you’re nodding as I’m speaking. You’re telling me I hear you, I see you. I’m acknowledging that what you’re saying is of value to me. And maybe even then I agree with you. Well, that’s valuable information. I’m looking at the way that your eyes are moving. I’m looking at the way that your body is. If we’re having a conversation in person and you lean in towards me as happened the other day when we were speaking together in person. Well, very, very likely I’m going to lean into you without even noticing because it’s an invitation for connection. So but so the first thing is to see. I’m just watching what you’re communicating with your face and with your body.

And the first step to that, just like in all of these, is actually just awareness. It’s not having to do anything. It doesn’t matter if you miss, there’s not like a subtle cute clue you’re looking for. Oh, okay, she did that with the right cheek, that must mean, you know, it’s not about that. It’s actually just becoming aware of what I’m seeing. Our body actually picks up these, we’ve got this stuff well memorized in our system. So it’s just the awareness is enough most of the time.

So seeing is Number 1, hearing is number two. Again, a lot of the information is contained within the tone of our voice. So if I say something like to my kids, I love you. You know? They might be confused by that because the words and the tone are completely different, right? And so, so it’s listening to the tone of somebody’s voice. And again, it’s really just noticing. You don’t have to have the answer. You don’t have to have an explanation. But we’re putting a little bit more of our attention and focus into the way that they’re communicating with the voice.

And the third thing, and this is the most powerful and transformative for me, the first two are kind of a buildup to this one. Because I think if you get this one, the other two come naturally. And that’s, that is, leaning into the experience you have of the other person. Now what I mean by that is, everything that I am processing about our conversation right now, Katie, I am experiencing through my own body. And that blew my mind when I first realized. Because I thought I didn’t realize that what I was seeing, I thought what I was seeing was you. I’m actually seeing myself when I’m speaking to you. I’m seeing a reflection of you. And I’m seeing my responses to you. Certain things you say might elevate my heart rate. Maybe you get me mad or something, you know? Not that that’s ever happened, Katie, but you know, theoretically. But there’s also, you might just bring up something that has nothing to do with you. But it triggers something in me.

But more interestingly, sometimes there’s something that I will feel in my body that has no context in the words that you said. And and I can give you an example, which I’ve shared with you privately. It’s a little bit weird. It’s going to put me in an entirely different, strange category. You know, I was speaking with somebody one time, and I had, I had an experience of a pain in my chest. And on the left side of my chest, underneath my ribs. I never get pain there. And I had this feeling as I was being a witness for her in this conversation, I had this feeling that I should put my hand on top of this part of my body. I was like, oh, well, but what do I have to lose? So I put my hand on top of this body. On the top of my body. And I felt a little bit of heat under my hand. This is getting too weird. I got a little bit of heat under my head. Little bit of heat under my, under my ribs. And then it went away. But I had an intuition in that moment that I should put my hand there. So I just did it. I’ve learned with dissociation, which I had before, I ignored everything, including my intuition. So part of my healing process has been to lean into and listen to my intuition and not be afraid to be wrong. It’s not really much of a consequence.

Well, after that experience, I asked her. She didn’t actually see that I was doing that. I’m going to put my hand on my chest, just from the context of our conversation. Because we were over Zoom actually, so. But anyways, I talked to her about it later, and I said, you know, when we were having a conversation, I felt a little bit of a pain. And she finished my sentence and said, oh, under your, under your ribs on the left-hand side. I said, yeah, how did you know that? She’s like. Funny because during our conversation, I had pain in that spot, and I felt the heat and then the pain went away. Now I know this just got really weird. And Katie, you know me enough to know, goodness, a year ago, I never would have said anything like this. I’m just reporting the facts of the experience, okay?

But what I’m telling you, what I’m trying, how I interpret that is kind of an extreme example that our bodies are always giving us information about the people that we’re with. So if we can tune into our own experience of somebody else, we can serve them in ways that we can’t even imagine that we would have been able to serve them. And, and that means we get to be a part of their healing process. Now to our last episode, I don’t think we ever heal anybody, but we can be part of their healing process. We can be a resource for them to find their own healing. And, and, and so it might not always be that extreme. In fact, it probably isn’t. I’ve never had that particular thing happen any other time. But I will notice as I’m talking to somebody if my heart starts to go a little bit faster, I, I just noticed it with curiosity. And it brings up questions in my head to ask them about like, I’ll say things sometimes like, what are you experiencing right now? Because I, I’ll notice that I’m experiencing something. Nothing visually has happened. Nothing in their voice has happened as far as I can tell. But I’ve noticed something changed in me that doesn’t feel like my own experience. And so I’ll ask them about that. And very, very often, as you learn to tune into this, they’ll say, oh, what did you, how did you know? I was experiencing this or this memory came to me and it made me feel a certain way.

And so when I talk about being a witness, it’s about tapping into those three different things. It’s really the intention is to be of service to other people. But also, when we do that with other people, we are also teaching them how to be for us, so it actually creates community and connection. I have noticed that when I spend time with people and I’m intentional about being a witness for them, that means like seeing them, hearing them, experiencing them in that moment exactly as they are with curiosity and no judgment, that’s the recipe right there. When I do that, I started to notice that my friends do that with me as well, without even knowing that’s the process.

And so, and I’m sorry, Katie, I’ve kind of gone on for a minute, but I’ll make one sort of small other point to wrap this up, which is just to say that so much of the wounds that we’ve experienced in our lives, I’m not talking about the car accidents, those kind of things are different and difficult. But most of the wounds that many of us receive in our lives are relational. They’re wounds that we have in relationship to other people. Oftentimes it’s our caregivers because they’re imperfect. Sometimes it’s just our friends because they’re imperfect. But there is a central idea, which I 100% believe, that everything that is harmed in a relationship is healed in relationship. And the fastest way to find herself to relational healing is in the intentional presence of one another. And that’s what witnessing is, being a witness.

Katie: I love that. And I think this has compounding important effects in actually so many areas of our life. But I love that you said curiosity, not judgment, because that is a Walt Whitman quote as well. And it’s in one of the only TV shows I’ve watched and that I love, which is Ted Lasso, people who haven’t watched it, but he has a whole speech about approaching things with curiosity, not judgment. And I think in the rule of 80-20, this is what gets us 80% of the way there is just simply approaching things with curiosity. And like we talked about in our first conversation, of finding the beauty in everything and being overwhelmed with the beauty in life. I’ve noticed when I can approach things with true curiosity, especially a childlike curiosity, like a conversation with someone, those tend to be the moments when I am almost overwhelmed to the point of tears in the beauty of the other person or the beauty of the experience or whatever it may be. I think it really highlights our ability to tune into that.

You also mentioned intuition. And this was something and is something that I’ve been also learning to tune back into in my own life. And I know both of us would probably say that our tolerance for the woo has increased in the last few years. But what were some of the ways that you learned to begin to tune back into your intuition after perhaps not tuning into it for a long time?

Corban: Well, definitely not, not even perhaps, I was definitely not tuning it. In fact, if it was my intuition, I knew it was wrong. I assumed it was wrong. And the reason for that is actually because, so in my particular story, there was some childhood abuse, which the way to deal with that is very often for the child to say that the parents are right. Or the caregiver’s right, or whoever did the thing is right, because your survival depends on your, on your sort of getting along in that system. And, and therefore, the thing I’m feeling or experiencing must be wrong. So that becomes under a pathway that we tread over and over and over again in interest of our own safety. So it makes perfect sense. Is what I would call a miracle of adaptation. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to do.

But it also means that as you get older, you just, you develop the sense of my intuition is not trustworthy. Because it told me that that thing was wrong, and yet here I am. I was able to maintain food in my table, on my table and like I was able to like, that was the thing that was necessary for my survival. So obviously it was wrong. So to answer your question about how did I start stepping into that? We touched on this in our last episode, but, and actually, I had no intention of being connected to my intuition. I just thought I didn’t have a good intuition. That’s what I believed. It actually came from just listening to my body. Starting with the things like, oh, when am I hungry? When am I tired? But also listening to, listening to my emotions and giving them room to be expressed, but also noticing where those emotions, this was like kind of a, the path, you know, starting with those things, the physical sensations, but then looking at where are the emotions in my body. And what do those actually feel like? And starting to trust. I think this is a really, really big part of this. Starting to trust that everything my body was communicating to me was actually in my best interest rather than being, and I know it sounds weird, but I kind of figured my body was just being I probably can’t swear, but a jerk. I wanna say a jerk. My body was just being a jerk, you know?

And, but as I started to accept that my body, everything my body was doing was just information, and it was information provided for my benefit. And started to be able to listen to it. And again, especially the emotions. And where it was happening in my body. I started to get these little senses about things, Katie. And I didn’t know what to do with them at first. In the very beginning, they were actually about, they were about me. They were about my story. They were about what was necessary for my own healing because it was a critical time for me. When I, after I was diagnosed with PTSD and I was suicidal all the day, all the time, I have a family and kids and I needed to figure that stuff out. And so, the intuition started to come in as information about the things that were necessary for my own healing. Now to go back again to our last topic, we talked about your own healer. You are your own healer. Being able to access your intuition to listen to you what are the things that are actually right for your own healing.

This is probably true in a physical sense too. You would probably have a better idea than this than me. But like, but like, oh, why do I feel like I need more carrots? That’s weird. Maybe I should have more carrots and see what that does. I’m just making that up. I don’t know if anybody has a craving for carrots ever. But when it comes to mental health, for me, it was like I actually feel like I need to let something out of my body. Like there’s a sense that I need to like shake something out of my body. And so instead of holding that back, as I always had before, I’m like, what do I have to lose? Maybe I’m just going to I’m going to feel the sensation and let whatever’s going to happen, happen. And things would shake out of my body. Which is a common thing in the mammalian, with mammals is to shake stress out, you know. In our case, we’re calling it trauma. The trauma is just a form of extenuated stress that stays in the system for a long period of time. And so it was stuff like that, where it was like, I’d go to my therapist and say, I don’t know why, but I feel like this particular thing is an important thing that I need to work through. And it sounds really strange. Can we try this? And, and I learned there was an immediate shame response to those, by the way, because that’s what happens when you lose access to your intuition.

When you start to listen to it, it was associated with a shameful thing. So whenever I started to access my intuition, I felt shame. So I go to my therapist and say, there’s this thing that I think would be helpful. I don’t know. It feels really stupid, though. And she started saying to me, Corban, every time you say that I know that you’re onto something because you, you make really big movements in your healing whenever you listen to your intuition. So that was kind of like the starting place. And now, Katie, it’s more like, it’s turned into this thing where I mean, I don’t know. It’s not something, you used to talk about woo. Like, I mean, it gets weird. I’ll have intuitions about, about friends that are a long ways away from me, not even physically in proximity. And I’ll reach out to them and say, hey, just wanted to check in with you. I had a thought about something for you. And then I’d be like, oh my goodness, that’s exactly what I’m experiencing right now. And I’m really glad that you reached out. I can’t explain that. I don’t have an explanation for that. I don’t know what that is, but, but it’s accurate very often.

And oftentimes when I’m sitting in connection with other people, my intuition will say something about perhaps the thought process behind what they’re saying. Now, maybe there’s something woo about that, or maybe it’s just really super fast processing in the brain. I don’t know. But, but I do know the more that I’ve listened to it, the more that my life has improved. It’s made my life richer, my relationships richer. Perhaps most importantly, my relationship with myself richer. That’s been the thing. I’ve learned that I can trust my intuition. It doesn’t mean everything that I intuit is always exactly correct. Sometimes we’re fishing around, you know, sticking our hand in a barrel with our eyes closed, hoping to grab onto a fish. Like maybe, maybe not. But more often than not, there’s a fish there and I can pull it out to make a weird analogy.

Katie: Yeah, I love that. I think just a tie-in to the physical health side, like you mentioned. The body does, I have always thought of, or at least since healing thought of, you know, symptoms are great messengers. And in a sense, they’re also huge gifts because it’s our body loudly talking to us. Sometimes we have to tune in and listen very carefully, but a lot of times symptoms are our body giving us a very clear signal about something. Even if it’s something as simple as if we’re having cravings for something, it may be our body signaling to us that we are maybe getting enough calories, but not enough nutrients, not of a certain nutrients, and it needs them. And the best it knows how to do is to signal us to crave things in hope of getting those nutrients. And so I think you’re right. The more we can tune in to those little subtle cues from our body and the more we can listen earlier, we get so much good data.

I also think this is a really important conversation for parents listening because you’re one of the few podcast guests, I think, that also has six kids. I don’t usually get to talk to someone with as many kids as I have. But I think a lot from the physical healing side and now from the mental healing side as well, so much about all these things that I took until my 30s to learn. And how can I help my children have a better framework for this from an earlier age so that perhaps they don’t have as steep of a journey as I had in adulthood? And I know you think about this as well, and we’ve talked about it. But I would love to hear how some of your journey in the past few years has influenced the way that you interact with your kids and perhaps try to help them build a framework here. I would guess the concept we’re already talking about of being a witness, that the degree that we can show up to our children, present and curious and open, it probably helps them, because we’re modeling it, have the ability to learn that as well. But I would guess also the way you talk to your children has probably shifted in the last few years, and I would love to hear about that journey.

Corban: Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, there’s a couple of things here. And I know it’s not useful to dwell on this, but one of the things that brought up for me is the realization of, of the place that I’ve been living in for my entire life was not the place I wanted to live in anymore. I realized I was in a state of hypervigilance. I was easily irritated. I was easily, I mean, I love my kids and they love me. There’s, you know, we have a good connection but, but there was a sense of grief at first of realizing like, oh my goodness. If I knew it was possible to not always feel like somebody was about to physically stab you in the back. You know, like you’re always thinking, then I wouldn’t be alerted by the sounds, I wouldn’t find you know, all of these things that would have been, you know, I guess not hard for other people were stressful for me. So there was at first a little bit of that. And just but, but my way of addressing that is to say, you know, as Brene Brown says, we’re all doing the best that we can. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but we’re all doing the best that we can. I go to my kids and say, you know what? I mean, I wish I had, I wish I had been able to regulate myself better so that I could have, and I have great relationships with my kids, so it’s not like terrible or something. It’s wonderful. But, you know, there’s, I never want to communicate to my kids that something is, something that’s wrong is right and something that’s right is wrong. So if I notice that something I’ve, a way that I’ve been, it’s not quite the way I want to be anymore, which for me is a stuck in hypervigilance. Then I want to say to my kids, hey, so to answer your question, it’s part of the thing, saying, hey, guys, you know what? I realized that I was stuck in a place of hypervigilance and that meant I was very easily sort of frighten, startled. You know, that meant that loud noises were hard for me, and you’re children. That’s like your job description is to make loud noises frequently. And so I just want to say that must have been hard for you. I’m sorry for that. And that’s it. I wish that I could have felt differently. So I would have noticed that there was a different way of being. But now that I know there’s a different way of being, I’m going to do that to the best of my ability. So that’s the first thing.

But also, I found it a lot more, a lot easier to be present with my kids. Whereas before I found it harder. I found it, I was more distractable, in every way, not just with my kids. That was my entire life, but I found it easier to be present with them. But one of the main things that I’ve noticed in intentionally choosing to be a witness with my kids. Now, I always do better one-on-one. I don’t typically like big groups. And by definition, my family is a big group. I mean, I love being with my family. I didn’t mean to say it like that, but I just mean like, for me, it’s always better when I’m sitting with one kid or two kids. I just enjoy the depth of the connection that I can have with them in a moment.

But since I have started to move into my healing and made a practice of being a witness for my kids in particular, I have a conversation and I’m noticing the way that their body language is. I’m listening to their voice but more importantly I’m listening to my body as my experience of them. And I just start asking them questions. They don’t even know I’m doing this. I’ll just start asking them questions based on what I’m experiencing of them in that conversation. And Katie, the number of times when I’ve sat on the edge of one of my kids’ beds or beside them or sitting outside by a fire or something like that and they’ve just started crying about something, which I, by the way, don’t see as a bad thing. I see it as a release. I said, thank God you know how to cry. Like you were holding on to that and now you have the opportunity to let it go. This is a gift. So we’ll sit there, have a conversation and they’ll be telling me about something hard in their life. And this has happened with everybody, including my wife, by the way. I’ll just notice this opportunity. I’ll sit there and just be present.

And I would say, the release of emotion, whether it’s crying, sometimes it’s anger. Sometimes anger about something, but they need to have permission to express that. Like I’m done with the idea that there are bad emotions like anger. Anger can be expressed in a way that’s harmful to other people or to ourselves. That’s not okay, we need to put boundaries around that. But anger itself, nothing wrong with that. I want to create a container for my kids to be able to express anger. I want to be able to create a container for my kids to express sadness, even if it’s about me. And the ways that I have, if I have, I’ve been less than ideal as a parent. I think we have to acknowledge that we all are. Like I say to my kids, listen, your therapy’s on me. Any therapy you need. It’s on me. I said that to them at the beginning because I, listen. I’m doing the best I can, and I love you with all of my heart. But also, you’re probably going to have some, some things that I wasn’t aware of, you know, when I was raising you. So you can go ahead and have on me. But hopefully less of that will be necessary based on just giving them the opportunity to express themselves and to be seen. I have seen a little bit of this in some of their interactions with each other. I’ve seen this particularly with my oldest and the way that she interacts with the other kids. The way that she interacts with me even. She actually said something to me that’s kind of part of my playbook. And I was like, oh, she’s picking up some of this stuff. And so, yeah, so I, it’s been really lovely to see that expressed in them and, but even more so to create a container for them to like feel and express their emotions. That’s probably the biggest thing.

Katie: Yeah, I think to your point, the best gift we can give them truly is our own healing and our own self-regulation because we’re modeling it and giving them permission as well. I also love that you talked about not labeling emotions as bad. I think when we resist emotions, they stick around a lot longer. And as parents, if we can give our kids a safe place to experience their emotions, it makes them much less daunting and much less sticky. And also in how you shared the value of, I think, vulnerability and apology to our kids, that those moments when we can show up. I’ve done this as a mom too, and said, I really don’t like how I handled that earlier today. And I wish I had done XYZ different. I’m really sorry about that. Please forgive me. That also gives them permission to do the same. I think…

Corban: Can I add something to that, Katie?

Katie: Yeah, please.

Corban: I think a really important thing for us when we do this process, you’re welcome to disagree but you’re not going to. I think a really important thing for us is to be able to demonstrate making a correction in our behavior. Or labeling something as like, like not ideal without shame. Because I think if we come to them communicating with shame, we’re communicating that if they do that thing then they should be ashamed. And the thing is, we’re all just trying to figure out how to make, you know, how to live well. And so, I just wanted to add to that I think that communicating without shame is a really, really important part of that.

Katie: I agree. And even when you talked about crying, I think it can be an instinctive parental response when a child’s crying to be like, oh, don’t cry. It’s okay. And I know that the intention there, of course, is to comfort them. But like you, I’m like, this is awesome. You’re feeling your emotion. You’re expressing it. You’re being vulnerable. And so even in like little ways of language, I think if we can help them instead label the emotion and help them instead be able to lean into feeling it in a safe way, or even little ways like asking them to learn to tune into their intuition, when they ask a question, if it’s about what they should eat or what they should do, turning it back on them and saying, well, what do you think? What is your body telling you? Or when they’re having an emotion, like you mentioned in the first episode, where are you feeling that in your body? What does it feel like? Can you tell me about it? Is it sticky? Is it hot? Is it red? Is it, because I think that also helps them to have clarity and to stay in tune. My theory is that, like you said, babies are very nervous system regulated by their parents. And I think as they develop their own nervous system, they’re very in tune with it. So it’s not that we have to teach them that per se, it’s just help them not lose it. And so I think any little way we can show up for our kids like that can have a tremendous, hopefully, is my theory, and hopefully it plays out, positive effect on their ability to stay attuned as they get older.

Corban: I love that you do that with food. That’s something I’ve never done before, but that’s, gosh, that’s really good. Because I should be doing that with food. I mean, I’m learning to do that with food. Why wouldn’t I expect my, with my kids, it’s more like, hey, this is what’s for dinner. But I can see there being some value for teaching them to listen to their body, kind of what they need. Unless it always ends up being ice cream, then maybe we need to have a conversation.

Katie: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, education, but also letting them in, or if they say at a particular meal, I’m not hungry, even if that actually means I don’t like that food, let them honor that and choose not to eat rather than force the food down them and make them have the idea. Like I know people in my own life who had to get past as adults, the idea, almost compulsive idea, that I must finish everything on my plate because that’s what I was told. And there’s probably shame around wasting food. So instead, like, are you hungry? What does your body need? And with my kids, if it’s particularly, if it’s a protein or an extra vegetable or something, I will try to make them that thing. Even if it’s an addition to what I already made because if they’re listening to their bodies, I want them to be able to communicate well with their bodies.

Corban: That’s beautiful. Thank you, Katie, for that example.

Katie: Well, and in our last couple of minutes, I want to talk again about HopeGuide. And I know that in HopeGuide, you have such a strong mission to help people heal, to help people show up in relationships more authentically, to connect deeper, and that you even build that into HopeGuide. So just give us a little bit of info about where people can find that and how they can learn.

Corban: Thank you, Katie. I appreciate that. Yeah. So then go to hopeguide.com. That’s H-O-P-E-G-U-I-D-E. My Canadian accent is coming up. And yes, so. First of all, we said earlier on in this episode that that that all what’s harmed in a relationship is, is healed in relationship. And so, having the ability to connect with, for example, a guide or a therapist, we have both of those.

And so we have like a number of different ways that people can, I mean, our mission really is to reduce the barrier of entry to healing. And so we constantly looking at new ways to do that. Like, how can we, how can we make information more available and less and there’d be less of a boundary there. But you know, information is helpful sometimes. And sometimes that’s all we need. We have the power to do that ourselves. And do something with it, but sometimes we just feel so stressed and so alone and like so unable to deal with it ourselves that we actually need somebody to hold their hand and help us along the way. And so that’s what we do with our guides and with our therapists.

Katie: Well, I have so much enjoyed this conversation. I think we will hopefully have many more follow-up conversations in the future because, as I’ve said before, I think this piece, the mental and emotional health aspect, is at least, if not more important than a lot of the things we do for physical health and also so intertwined. And so I love that you’re bringing a voice to this conversation and bringing guides to this conversation. It’s always such a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here.

Corban: Thank you, Katie. I appreciate you.

Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.