Dr. Sonya Jensen Interview

Greg Voisen
Welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen and the host of Inside Personal Growth and joining me from Vancouver, British Columbia is Dr. Sonya Jensen. And we're going to be speaking about her book woman unleashed, release your story, revive your hormones and reclaim your freedom. Well, good day to you. Thanks for being on inside personal growth. And for all the women out there listening today. Please listen carefully, because Sonia has a really not only great message, but prescription to help you with a relation to releasing your story to revive your hormones. How are you doing?

Dr. Sonya Jensen
I'm great. Thank you for having me on the show. It's such an honor. And thank you for that introduction.

Greg Voisen
Well, you're quite welcome. And I'm going to let my listeners know a tad bit about you, because I'm going to direct them to your website. And for all of you who are interested, just go to Dr. Sonya. S-O-N-J-A-J-E-N-S-E-N.com

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Y-A

Greg Voisen
Y-A, you know what dyslexic, you know, I can't be the only one that makes that

Dr. Sonya Jensen
You’re not….you're not the only one.

Greg Voisen
S-O-N-Y-A-J-E-N-S-E-N. She's a neuropathic physician with a mission to change the way women understand their bodies in themselves. I believe that women, she says, are the center of the families and communities. And by supporting them, we are creating a ripple effect that will support the whole. She is definitely somebody who has the background and the ability to speak to this, we will put a link to her website up there for all of you who are listening so that you can go there. And definitely a link to the Amazon book website so that you can pick up a copy of woman unleashed. So you know, if you would tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, and why your personal focus on wanting more women to tap into their innate wisdom. And I think that's important, and declare their brilliance to the world?

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Yeah, that's a great question. I've many layers to my story. And really the deepest layer out of all of it is this understanding or belief that I had, that as a woman growing up, especially in an indo Canadian community, we're not really thought of as being important if anything were thought of as being a burden. So there isn't a lot of emphasis on our self-growth, or hearing our voices or us being able to really express or expand ourselves in this world. And I really witnessed that throughout my childhood, and also in my teens, just going through my own story. And then when I started working with women, after being a naturopathic school, and really living a life that wasn't one that I truly wanted, but thought I should have. So I was married to a man that my parents thought I should be married to, even though it wasn't an arranged marriage, because that's a big conception in our culture. It was somebody I chose, but it was somebody I chose because I knew he would fit into the mold that was given to me. And I was making many, many decisions based on cultural conditioning and all the various things. And as I started studying naturopathic medicine and understanding the body and understanding our minds and our emotional bodies, now, everything is so intertwined. I started working with the women during that time that would mirror for me what my life will look like in 20 to 30 years, with cancer with autoimmune with all the various things if I didn't start to change the trajectory in which my life was going in. And so it was at age 28, I decided to get a divorce, travel the world and started to really go down this path of self-discovery, and then came back. And I'm now married to my love of my life. We have two boys, we have our clinic and I continuously see the story playing out over and over again, where women really aren't living out the lives they truly want, but one that they were given, and really not making that connection between their bodies whispering to them in the beginning, when there's discomfort that, you know, we're making decisions or playing out stories, or we're living out our past traumas in the present moment that is then indicative of our actions and then also our personality, which then shows up in how our body is presenting itself. So I see women with hot flashes or cancer or with fibroids, or just not feeling like themselves and just anxiety and not knowing that a lot of that has been shaped from birth. So I do feel it's so important for us to understand our whole selves so that we can actually step into true healing and then start manifesting the life that we really desire for ourselves.

Greg Voisen
Love this story. You know what's interesting, I'm going to give you this, it isn't a question, it is a comment. Last night, I actually watched a Canadian documentary about a Native American, called Grief Walker. And he goes to people who are literally dying of cancer dying from something, but bringing the Native American approach to that, that to be whole, you have to accept a death with life. And it was a fascinating thing, it's something somebody like you would like to walk. So it's called grief Walker, it was all filmed in Canada. And it's on Netflix. So for a plug for my audience as well. I was fascinated by the by the whole thing. You know, in the introduction of your book, you tell a story about how you were confused when you were 13 years old, not knowing where you belong, feeling trapped physically, emotionally, and mentally, and even the end even thought of taking your life? You know, suicide is a big question. I think a lot of people during their lives, have a thought of it. They don't complete it. But I used to be on a teenage Suicide Prevention Board. So I see that our biggest incidence of suicide in the United States is among young adults, young children, even high school aged kids. Would you mind sharing a bit of that story with our listeners? And what connection? Does that trauma that you had? Or what was going on with you, reflecting you becoming a neuropathic Doctor of Medicine? I think that's really important.

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Yeah, you know, that time when we look back to those years, everything in our outside world seems really, really big. And our whole world crumbles, when we're not feeling heard when we're not feeling seen. And often, we don't even know why we're having the emotions that we are, I have a 10 year old son now. And I can kind of see those changes happening in him as his brain is developing, and his body is changing. And I don't think the generation before or even before that really had tools to help young people navigate the changes. But instead, were told maybe they're not good enough, or maybe what they feel and hear and see is an actual reality. And we're not really validating young people in their experience of life and seeing it through their lens. And for me, again, tiptoeing between two different cultures, I felt like I was always living two different identities, one at home, and one outside in the world, and really wanting to be anchored in my culture and do the right things in quotation marks. And, you know, be that daughter that makes her parents proud and our cultural path, because when it comes to an Indian community, especially, it's not just about your immediate family, it's like your extended family in the whole village. That is, you're surrounded by which is really beautiful. But at the same time, you're trying to figure out who you are and how to express yourself, and there was just so much constriction and tightness, and because they were trying to hold on to this old way of being, and what I, at that time, subconsciously did not know, I was dealing with a trauma that happened to me when I was eight years old, and being sexually molested at that time by a distant uncle. So I had all these feelings and questions and insights really, up until that point, knowing that something was wrong with me, but just not being able to pinpoint what that was. And then throw in all the changes in my body and my hormones and really wanting to figure out what my path is. I just there was this moment in this one day where I think probably was after an argument with my mother at that time, and just staying in my room where I lived most of the time making up dance routines, and trying to just pass the time as I could. And I remember this one day where I was like, I just can't anymore, like it just felt like life wasn't worth living. And I share in this in the book that I you know, imprint in my body, I started cutting at that time, which is something that is unfortunately so common with young people and it was such a moment of not being in control, that in that moment of such darkness. There was also this other voice that was so clear inside of me that told me that you are important and you have something to say in this world. This is not your time. It really just kind of woke me up out of the haze that I was in, or the fog that that I was in in that moment. And it was in that moment that I really realized that I'm harming myself, and nobody else. And even with my history with anorexia at that time, I was harming myself and using food almost as a weapon, to get attention to get my point across to get some sort of connection, really, because that's what I felt was so disconnected with myself and my family that that moment was such a beautiful realization for me that it totally changed the way I looked at my body and myself, I then started going down this path of health, I started eating differently, I started moving my body movement has always been my medicine. So dance was always my medicine. But I started incorporating different kinds of movement and started to see that my body was starting to speak to me and give me this energy that I now had to kind of think a little bit differently about life. And then from there, just this fascination of the human body kept showing up. And that human body in connection with our emotions, and our mental health, was really what drew me to wanting to be some form of steward of medicine, I just didn't know what that was going to look like, right away. I've initially actually thought it was going to be massage therapy, but I accidentally called the naturopathic school one day. And again, I think that was also divine intervention, and I started speaking to them on Well, what is it that you actually do and realizing that, wow, this was a, this was the medicine I was brought up with in my home, just with how we ate and how we lived life. And if I could use that incorporate that in helping other people heal, like I knew this was the path for me.

Greg Voisen
Well, you know, Native American traditions, story is so important, I don't think from generation to generation, and I hope you had the opportunity to tell your mother about what happened with your uncle. You know, I am because you needed that. That you needed that to heal, you needed somebody to hear that story. And I think there's so many people that carry around this baggage that don't have the opportunity to tell the story. And as you said earlier, it manifests in dis ease. There in in some way. There's a disease with something in their life, which is then manifest with inside the body because the body speaks so loudly to that. And, you know, if you would speak with the listeners about the Duchess, and the diva, and the polarity and the roles and unmasking, as you discussed in Chapter Two, um, you know, it's fascinating, and I think the stories actually tell the truth. Mm hmm.

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Yeah, there's so much power in the stories and there's so much power in the narrator of the story, right? So I often we'll see people that's question of like, who is your narrator, like, who is actually dictating a story that you're carrying with you. And these stories really do embed themselves and imprint themselves in our psyche and our energy body, in our emotional body, and especially in our brain. So when we move through a trauma when we move through an experience, and this could be a big T trauma like I had, or a micro trauma of just everyday life, and not feeling accepted or not feeling like you fit in, or there's so many moments in our childhood, where we begin to question ourselves. So those are also micro T traumas that tell your brain to look at your environment and the signals that are in that environment, the smells, the sights, the feeling that you're feeling in that moment. So it has memory of that. So in the future, if that same experience shows up, the brain knows what to do and knows to increase your stress hormones to help you run away from that danger because it feels like you're in danger. But as we age, and we're just living life, we often put on these masks and we take on these roles that will validate that experience that need to either hide or that need to freeze, fight, flight or freeze all of those things that we had to do we start creating these identities according to that. So in chapter two, I talked about the triangle of disconnect, because I believe every disease is because of disconnection either from ourselves or others or just how our body functions. And the first part of that is the role of the Duchess. So this is a woman that she's like the CEO she's got all her schedules that she's very much in control of what's going to happen next and needs to be in control in order to feel steady. She's on the go all the time. Probably doesn't have a lot of time to cook so isn't really sitting down to eat her meals. So she may have some digestive issues in the beginning, maybe some insomnia because she's a little bit more type A And she had to bring that role into her life because there was one moment in her life where she didn't feel safe or in control, that there was so much chaos in her world. In order for her to feel okay, she had to step into this space to control her environment so that she could feel just a little bit of safety. And so when that's happening over time, the body again will start to whisper and then start to scream. And often this woman may have irregular periods. She's usually the one that will have a challenge when it comes to menopause, and perimenopause. And then the other polarity of that, though, there's so many gifts to being in that space. So maybe we tap into the gift of the digests, when we're in business with somebody, maybe we step into that space when we have young kids, and we got to be on schedule and get things going. But what we get lost in is that role so much that is so tight, Lee constricting us that we can't see beyond it, and now it's depleting. So if we can find a way to use its powers, and then find a way to step into softness, when we don't have to be that douches, then we can balance the equation. And now we're using the gifts and we're using the power that our role can actually give us because we have received a gift from the challenge. And then the second one is the damsel. So this is the woman that often sees things as half empty. And she's also the one that has a really challenging time saying no, because she just wants some form of acceptance in a group or she wants to feel like she belongs, she wants some significance that she gets by helping everybody and saying yes to all, but then she's depleting her own energy and our own stores. And because she's unable to speak her truth, she can often sit in resentment, because she doesn't know how to put up those healthy boundaries. So this is the woman that might have some challenges in her thyroid, she might be growing some cyst on her ovaries. Because when we look at Chinese medicine, too, we can see that we actually carry these emotions in different parts of our body. But her polarity her gift is that she's the one that brings the community together, she is the one that you can lean on at two in the morning, because she's going to comfort you, she's going to support you, she's going to be that soft cushion that we need to land on when we feel like the world is against us. And again, if she doesn't fill her cup up first, she's going to continuously get more and more depleted and really, really sick because of it. And then the last one is the diva. She's all about perfection. Everything on the upside looks perfect. But our inner world is very chaotic. And when our inner world is really chaotic, she often has to put up this face of everything being positive, right, so she can't actually look at the shadow aspects because there's no time because if she does that, everything gets unraveled. However, her polarity is that she can elevate every single person around her. She's the one that steps in the room. And you know, she's in the room because she's just exuding this brilliance. And yet, as she's doing that she's depleting all of her stores and her energy. And it isn't until something really bad happens often it could be cancer or like really heavy periods where she can't even leave her house, that she actually pauses and understands that okay, how I'm operating actually isn't working for me.

Greg Voisen
I say I think those stories give an opportunity. And the personas that you utilize there to talk about the three different cases are really, really a quite a good way for people to relate about what might be going on with inside of themselves, and what they need to work on. I know if you know you turn on the TV in the United States, you know, you're going to get another drug company telling you, you have IBS or you have this or you have that and always trying to find a prescription for it, when the last place they look would be the prescription to look inside yourself and see what's going on emotionally that's really causing these maladies. It's causing these diseases. And I think with the way you work with medicine as a naturopath, it's a wonderful way for people to look at that versus going out and getting another pill for whatever it might be. You know, in the chapter about the core of creation, you state that there's a disconnect that you see between women and their bodies and the very thing that creates the comfort and disease process in the first place. If you would speak with the audience, about the disconnect between women and their bodies and what are the contributing factors to women not having information about how their bodies work. I think that look we all are not all fuzzy We understand the basics about how our body works. I liked what you said that exercise, you know, doing dancing was really something that your body needed. It needed to move it needed to sweat it needed to, you know, you go to sweat lodges. Obviously, you've been in plenty of those. It's so true. But today, we live in such a sedentary place. You see so many people ignoring that one basic thing, which I think just getting outdoors is so important to spend time with nature. So speak with us, if you would.

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Yeah, so that core of creation, so I'm kind of speaking to that navel center in our body. And I think a lot of it has to do with cultural conditioning. So like you said, when you turn on the TV, you're seeing a drug commercial, or you're seeing a tampon commercial, that's telling you that your period is inconvenient. So let's do something about it. Are you seeing a commercial for birth control? This is inconvenient, let's do something about it. So the conditioning that a lot of young women get is that this period that we're getting every single month isn't a gift, but a curse. So the conversation really begins there. And that's where the curiosity usually starts, if you look at or listen to young women, or even young men speak like they are very curious about their bodies of what's happening. But we're not talking about it enough in our households. And we're kind of leaving it to maybe the schools or teachers or other people to kind of take that on. But I think the conversation needs to start in the family, so that we can start to relate to ourselves in a different way, and not from a place of shame. And so when a woman starts to ask questions about her period, instead of saying, Oh, no, you know, this is something you're going to have to deal with every single month, a good friend of mine, her daughter just got her period at age nine. And I found her and I'm like, this is your superpower. This is the power that allows you if you choose to create life, like imagine that that's what your body can do. So when you start to reframe the body, then there's different curiosities, that shows up show up in different inquiries for that individual instead of seeing it as something that's hurting them. And right away, if there's discount or dis ease processes happening, for example, if a woman has cramps right away, or if she's got irregular cycles, the only solution at that time is birth control. So as numb everything that's happening instead of educating the woman and while you know, if you're having cramps, maybe your digestive system isn't working, let's work on that. Maybe you're really low in magnesium, let's work on that. How are you moving your body? How can we support movement, so there's actually oxygen and energy going to all these centers so that you can feel okay, without that simple solution that just numbs everything or distracts everything? So, yeah, I think it's really is more about education. We don't have to go down to the nitty gritty science of anything. But I think if we just allow questions and curiosity and allow for there to be several solutions, instead of just that one cookie cutter solution, I think that's where we can create a whole different relationship with this part of us.

Greg Voisen
Well, you you're reframing that creation part, for a woman and for a man, for a young man as well, is not something to be ashamed of, as you were saying, it's something to say look at the power that's with inside of that, and learn to work with it in a beautiful way, not in a an nasty way that you might think of it of it, but that it is something of beauty, it's something to create, you're going to be able to create another being as a result of that, which will be another generation and then those kids and move on and on. And I love that. In your chapter five, you speak about stress, trauma and hormones and state that hormones tell a woman's story, the imprints the traumas, and the victories. And I love this one because, you know, so many people in today's society no matter what age, you hear women in particular, speaking about hormonal imbalances. But what you also see is life imbalances. At the same time, that they're speaking about hormonal imbalances, obviously, women that are on a track to be a CEO of a company or be way up their stress, they've got kids, they're doing five or six different things, and that's affecting that hormonal imbalance, right. So now it's go off to the OBGYN and get yourself another pill. Because you can fix that. What is it? Why is it important to relate the hormones and the woman's story?

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Yeah, so you know, depending on the story and the triggers, and how much of that has imprinted into your brain and into your physiology it will dictate How much energy you have, it's going to dictate your relationship with yourself, it's going to dictate your relationship with your family, and how successful you actually will be because at some point, it's going to get louder and louder if you don't start listening to it in the beginning. And so in the beginning of our talk here, I was talking a little bit about stress and how that will affect the brain and the essence that when we're in a stressful experience, it creates this hormonal aspect in the brain where it tells the pituitary gland which is the master gland of our hormones to increase our cortisol and our adrenaline. So adrenaline will go up when it's short term stress, but cortisol will stay up when it's more chronic stress. Cortisol comes from a hormone called progesterone, which is the hormone that regulates everything. For women, it's the one that's anti-anxiety. It's like the comfort hormone that helps us feel at ease. It works with GABA, which is a neurotransmitter that also helps us feel calm. So when we are constantly depleting progesterone, turning it into cortisol, these sex hormones, the progesterone, even estrogen and testosterone, they don't get an opportunity to do their job. Well. So often, what happens is, when we're you know, just doing life that we could just be making lunches for our kids, we could, like you said, we could be going to work and we have this career path. And we're just doing all the things in our on our to do list, the brain can't tell the difference between that moment and a really dangerous moment, the physiological response is exactly the same. So we have to retrain that system so that it understands that when I'm at work, I can still be in a parasympathetic state and still be really effective, I can be in that state of being and then step into action when I need it, because then that's going to feed those thriving hormones. So you don't get stuck in a state of just surviving. Because we're not working. When those thriving hormones aren't working. That's where there's challenges with infertility, that's where there's challenges with sleep. That's where all of a sudden you stop taking the pill. And now your hormones are really not working for you, because it's been masked for so many years with that pill or that shot. So it really does impact our story. And all that we've been holding on to is going to impact our physiology because of that imprint that was created originally from that story.

Greg Voisen
Really interesting. And it shows you how all the chemicals that are released in the body Interplay along with that, and I think it's important, you know, a lot of women will voice their complaints around sex drive. Things change, they have a couple of kids. They can't seem to regulate the hormones properly. I had an OBGYN on the show, not that long ago, that wrote about that just the drive itself wrote a whole book. What would you comment about that with relation to women, because all the women listening to this show, no matter what their age, at some point, can or probably will experience that?

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Yeah, yeah, there's so many factors that can affect that. So for libido to be optimal, our testosterone needs to be optimal. So there's a few different things that are going to affect that testosterone. So looking at it just purely from a physiological perspective, if you have high insulin in your body, so if you're eating a diet of processed foods, and maybe not really taking care of your digestive system, it's going to influence how much testosterone you have. The other thing that will influence testosterone is if you're on the birth control pill, depending on what kind you're on, it actually blocks the receptor on your cells. So your body can't actually use a testosterone, which will lead to low libido. If you're menstruating woman and have just a normal cycle, it's important to understand you only get one surge of testosterone during ovulation. So the first half of your cycle, after you bleed, you're going to feel a little bit more sensual, you're going to feel more expensive, you're going to have more energy, because that's leading up to that time of ovulation when we release an egg. As soon as we release an egg, all of that stimulus goes away. And that's normal. So it's normal to have higher libido before ovulation and lower libido after, but what we tend to misunderstand is that many women will think that they need to have high libido all the time. So again, more self-discovery and understanding tells you that well no actually I don't have doesn't have to be Hi intimacy can look different. In that second half of my cycle, it looks more like self-care, or finding different ways of being intimate with our partners. And also when we give birth we lose 15% of our testosterone every single time. It's like nature's birth control. So if we know we're kind of moving into these different stages of our lives with maybe lower testosterone because of other lifestyle or toxicity or just general stress, or the birth control, we can then have a little bit more grace towards ourselves when it comes to libido, and then we can seek help to help improve it. There's different herbs that we can take that to help support it. There's different things that we can do with diet to help support that reduction in the insulin and glucose to help support your testosterone, you can work out on an empty stomach in the morning, and up until eight o'clock AM your growth hormone and testosterone will thrive. So there's lots of different things that you can investigate once you identify the reason for that low testosterone.

Greg Voisen
Well, in our listeners who are out there now going, Wow, you're giving a lot of information, number one can get the book but number two, we'll put a link to the website you can connect with you. And do you actually do? Do you do coaching over the internet? Is that correct? Yes, they do. So we'll make sure that the people can sign up for that and understand where to go. You know, in chapter six in this section, the Goddess within you state that all women have an inner and how do you say it at Lakshmi, la Lakshmi, a supreme goddess, the divine power within that is tapped into the space in between the moments, and unknowing that can keep us free from the states of contraction and dis ease. If you would speak about the ability and the power to transform our dreams into reality, as you refer to it, the gaps in between?

Yeah, that space in between, I think it's so important. It's that space in between the stimulus and the response. So when there's a stimulus, and this could be a conversation, this could be a thought that we're having this could be a trigger, that triggers an emotion inside of ourselves, we have a microsecond to decide how we're going to respond to it. And often, we react with emotion, because right away our emotional body, and our brain is going to be activated. But if we learn to pause, that's why create those pause moments in the book, when we learn to pause, we're creating a longer bridge between the stimulus and response. And that's really where that freedom is. That's where we can bring in some more softness. That's where we can bring in more inquiry and questioning and ask ourselves, is this really about me? Is this does this belong to me? Is this going to nourish me, the moment we do that we become the observer of the experience, we are no longer caught up in it, we are no longer out of control, or being controlled by it. But instead, we are observing. So this is also something that a lot of indigenous shamans will teach. We're hovering, like the eagle, where we are now in Eagle perspective, and looking at all the different angles, and then we can respond. So if we do that, just imagine what life could look like, imagine what our relationships could feel like even towards ourselves, we have 60 to 80,000 thoughts a day, if not even more, and often we attach too many of them. But what if we just observe them, and understood that many of those thoughts are not ours mean, the stories are not ours, it would just create so much freedom, not only in our minds, but just in our life in itself that you could just experience more joy from that because there's just more space now.

Greg Voisen
It's, it's so fascinating, as you were speaking about that, I was reflecting on a conversation I had with an with an older woman who was looking at the traumas in her life over her life, and decided to go and try the experience. What is it? Not peyote, but I Alaska, Ayahuasca. So four days of ayahuasca, and releasing and releasing and releasing, where do you kind of stand as a naturopathic doctor, with relation to people utilizing? Because of, you know, when you look at shamans, that's who's pretty much guiding most of these to actually use that to help release some of these traumas that are held within the body?

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Yeah, I think when she calls you when the medicine calls you, you know you're ready for it. Okay. So if you're choosing it from the heart space, rather than Oh, somebody told you that this worked for them, and maybe it'll work for me, I don't think then the calling is there. But I think often we know when we're ready for that space to open and it needs to be in a very nurturing environment. So you receive the rewards from it. Yeah. So I think it can really help open things but then you also need to be really supported for weeks and weeks beyond that, because it does open up gates that maybe have been closed for a very long time and on purpose to protect you. And if you don't have the tools after like once that unleash to deal with it, we can take many steps backwards. So I think if we have the right support, and the right build up towards it, if you've been doing the work, if you've been doing the practices, if you've been doing things that help you know, where your anchor and center is in moments of not feeling, maybe in control, then you can always come back to that when you do such medicine. It is when I feel people don't have that practice, they're the ones that suffer a little bit more during that time.

Greg Voisen
And I've also been told that finding the right showman to do it with is extremely important. And that there are a few here in the United States, she didn't happen to go to the United States and just went to South America. But, you know, in chapter 12, you state that all emotions are there to inform us and that if the emotion results in inner commotion, we have allowed it to command control of our world. How do you recommend that people move beyond the inner commotion that they create for themselves? Because we do we all do that? You know, it's, we sometimes don't realize it. But what we're attracting to ourselves is that, and we don't even realize we attracted it to ourselves.

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that can be a really hard pill to swallow too, taking that responsibility that we have manifested the life we have, and that life is happening for us and not to us. Because there's some hard things that happen and our emotions, really, a yogi calls them the senses of our soul. So it's our souls way of whispering and telling us about ourselves, and how we experience and the lens through which we experience life. So if we are feeling an emotion, of guilt, it's giving us we can ask it to give us information about the why behind that. What's my story behind this guilt? If we're feeling angry, we can ask anger that question and how can I create action in my life to re or utilize that emotion in a productive way to create action in my life, and change that and transform that into happiness? So we do have this capacity to transform our emotions when we're maybe living more in those shadow emotions, because they all over all of them are gifts to give us information on what is possible. So if we start to reflect on our emotions in that way, again, then we pause more, we ask more questions. And then we respond because now we're understanding where it's coming from. It's like that animated film inside out, which is beautifully done, you know, sadness can happiness can't be there without sadness. But I think we live in a culture of like, everything needs to be positive, and everything is shown as positive in order for us to feel successful. But what if we honor the shadow aspects of us? What if we honored the winter months where everything has to die before to be born? So if we honor these shadow parts of ourselves, we won't feel the shame that comes with that we will feel honored that we have so many different angles to ourselves, and we can now transform that into joy.

Greg Voisen
Great, well said and you know, you can't have light without darkness. You know, it's the duality concept of, of where we live in the world. And as you said, we get inculcated by the Western society, about that's the way it is, is, hey, you've, it's always got to be pretty, you've always got to be this way, you've always got to be a certain way. And I think that eats away at the fabric of an individual of the true person, kind of emoting themselves, because they're always covering up something that needs to be expressed. Right? They're hiding it, they're hiding it somewhere, you know, and then your chapter on fabulous, 40s and 50s. With a quote that states your ability to heal, to have joy and create change doesn't come from manipulating the outside world. It comes from shifting the inside, and then waiting for the outside to bend to your command. I love how you said that. What advice can you give the women listening right now? To achieve this, have fabulous 40s and 50s and my case? 60s, how about

love and you look fabulous? Yeah, so my advice would be to stay present with yourself and choose one thing in your day that gives you tremendous joy. And this doesn't have to be something big. This could be a walk in nature. This could be a cup of tea that allows you to get more intimate with yourself. And then from that space, you can reflect on the life that you do want to create and then give yourself permission to dream because we've forgotten how to dream we've been told what dreams should look like. So really go inwards. Start asking the question start inquiring start incorporating self-love so that then life will respond With that same vibration, I think the most important part is self-compassion and self-love. Because that's where healing comes from. If you can, can you leave the listeners with three key points from the book that they can take away right now that can they can put some action to actually put it in their life and move towards more freedom, more peace, more compassion, more love, more understanding, whatever, however you want to say it. But what are some of the things that you've written about in the book that you three, they could take away three great ideas, apply them today, and make it super meaningful?

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Yeah, so one is grab a journal, and start writing out your timeline. All the things that have happened, all the great things that challenging things and really start to see and honor your story. So that's number one. Number two is starting a gratitude practice. So the moment you wake up, people, your left hand over your heart, your right hand over your belly and your womb, whether you still have your uterus or not, you still honor it. And you just say thank you for another day, honoring that breath, that is giving you oxygen and feeling all yourselves. So that's number two. Number three is what I mentioned before finding something in your day that gives you joy, finding joys moments that will then get bigger and bigger as you go. Because now you have shown yourself that one you are enough, one you are important, or sorry, to you are important. And three that you are worth being seen and heard.

Greg Voisen
Those are three great bits of advice that I believe any woman of any age doesn't matter if they're in their 40s or 50s or not. Anybody can use that. And for my listeners, you're going to want to pick up a copy, get this off of Amazon. Women unleashed. Dr. Sonia Jensen, the other thing you can connect with her on our website, and I'll make sure I get it right this time is Dr. Sonia S O in YAJE and scn.com. There, you can learn more about her about women's health, her blog. And you can connect with her if you'd like to go have an online session. She does that. Sonia, just a pleasure having you on the show today speaking with all of my listeners, I think there was so much a richness in that obviously directed more toward women. But obviously, for all the men who picked up the show and listen to it. You also could take away from this. And if there's one thing you take away, it's what you hold inside and don't release. This is what I take away, helps to create the disease and the anger that actually keeps you trapped from you reaching your own freedom. And if you're really looking for freedom, the way to do that would be not to hold that inside. Release that so that you can be free again and express yourself the way you'd like to.

Dr. Sonya Jensen
Yeah, beautifully said. Yes. Thank you.

Greg Voisen
Thank you, Sonia for being on the show. And thanks for spending some time with my listeners on Inside Personal Growth. You have a great day.