When the Body Holds Grief: Secret Language of Pain — with Inna Segal | EP 490

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Close your eyes and imagine. What if the things in life that cause us the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, are challenges. Challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried, but what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth, and I am your host, Brian Smith. Hi there, welcome to Grief to Growth. I'm Brian Smith, and if you're new here, thank you for finding your way to the space. And if you've been here before, welcome back. This show exists because life breaks all of us open eventually, through loss, through illness, through the things we never saw coming. And in that brokenness, some of us discover something that we never expected, that there's more going on beneath the surface than we were ever taught. More wisdom in our bodies, more connection across the veil, more possibility for healing, the conventional medicine, or conventional thinking ever told us. And that's what we explore here. Today, our guest is Anna Sagal, and Anna is a pioneer in energy medicine and human consciousness. Her learned to heal herself when nothing else could. And her story didn't begin in a lecture hall or a clinic. It began in a body that was suffering, with chronic back pain and a skin disorder that conventional medicine couldn't touch. And then the devastating loss of a stillborn child. From that depth of pain, she discovered something extraordinary. She could see the energetic blocks and disease in her own body, and she could learn to heal them. And that discovery changed everything. For over 25 years, Anna has worked with people worldwide, from trauma survivors to doctors, psychologists to elite athletes. Teaching them that the body isn't the enemy, it's the messenger. Her best-selling book is The Secret Language of Your Body, and it's been translated into 27 languages and is sold over a million copies because it speaks to something that people feel on their bones but have never had words for. That is, the pain is trying to tell us something. In this conversation, we're going to go somewhere that most people are afraid to look into the roots of suffering. Not just what hurts, but why it hurts. What the body is holding that the mind has never been able to process. How ancestral wounds passed out through generations and live in our nervous systems. And how it's possible, genuinely possible, to transform that pain into freedom. So if you've been living with chronic pain, illness, or grief, it just won't shift. If you've done the work, tried the things, and something feels stuck, this one's for you. And it has something to say to the part of you that's been waiting for a different kind of answer. And if you want to continue this conversation after the episode, head over to grief2growth.substack.com. It's grief2growth.substack.com. And you'll find an article there about today's discussion where you can comment and connect with me and with other listeners. So let's get started and welcome Anna Segal. Thank you so much. Hi, and I'm glad to have you here. I know your story. Well, you tell me where your story started, but I know you had chronic back pain and a skin disease that just wouldn't be touched by conventional medicine. So maybe you can start with that. Yeah, so I had psoriasis all over my skin, and I had really bad digestive issues where even when I was very young, I remember ending up in a hospital with no explanation for it. I had really bad back pain, and that was the thing that actually changed everything because whilst psoriasis was very uncomfortable, and I know people who have it would say the same thing because I had it all over my elbows, all over my knees. It definitely runs in my family. My grandfather's had it. My dad still has it. His sister is covered with it from head to toe. So it was definitely something that people said, oh, you know, it's genetic. It runs in the family, you know, just keep putting creams on it. And I think the more I went to doctors and the more medicine I took, the worse I got because it really deeply affected my digestive system. My skin, which is actually connected to the liver, was doing way worse the more I took. And my back pain, I mean, I could only take so many painkillers, you know, without thinking that this is not okay. Like, there's got to be some other way. And so my mum, she was very much into just medicine and she did put doctors on a pedestal. So she eventually took me to a physiotherapist, which didn't help much at that time. And then when I turned 18, I actually ended up, or not when I turned, but at 18, I ended up meeting my, I guess my first husband in an acting class. And he was very open to alternative medicine and had explored it and researched it. And he decided that the way he would help me while we were dating and so on, it was by taking me to different people. And I went to everyone from kinesiologists to chiropractors to rolfing to just literally anything that he could think of. Definitely naturopath, homeopath. You know, we were trying to look at all the different issues that I was having and, you know, seeing who can help me. And eventually what kept happening essentially, Brian, was that I just, I would get a little bit better. And then I would have a crash. And then when I had the child that died, it was kind of like the biggest crash, like everything that was being held together kind of started falling apart, falling into pieces. And I felt like I was the victim. Like, how could this happen to me? I was so young. I was completely and utterly unprepared for it. So in my mind, I literally thought, there's something really wrong with me because this doesn't happen at 20. And it was literally, I turned 20, maybe two days after the baby died, but I didn't know. So the whole thing happened around my birthday. And I remember saying to my mom, I'm never going to celebrate my birthday again. It's over for me. I just can't understand how this can happen to somebody in Australia. This happens in third world countries. And obviously I'm not okay. Obviously something's happening inside of me that has been happening for a while, but this is showing that, yeah, that there's something completely wrong with me in my body. And so at that point, I had been seeing a chiropractor for a while and my back got really bad. It seized up. I could not turn. It was definitely very, very inflamed. And sitting, lying, sounding, everything felt like agony. And like, what's the point of this? Like, what's the point of my life now? And so I went to see this chiropractor and he essentially, he had been trying to help me. I mean, I was seeing him every two days. So I was seeing him three times a week, sometimes longer, sometimes more so. And this particular day when I wake up and I was just at that point in my life where I was thinking to myself, you know what? How does this happen to somebody at 20? And if I'm like this at 20, what am I going to be like a 25 or a 30? I'm going to be in a wheelchair. And so when I showed up at his office, I was really depressed. I was angry. I was confused. I was sad. I had all of these feelings happening. And he, I think that he felt like he needed to shake me. He needed to get me to do something that was different to what we'd been doing for over a year by that stage. And he actually came out of his office and he looked at me and he said, well, your body's stuck. And I said, yeah, I know that part. What are you going to do to help me? And he was very quiet for a moment and he was really thinking about what to say. And I think how to help me to wake me up from, you know, from the state that I was in. And he basically said, well, there's nothing I can do for you at the moment. You know, your body actually wants to be stuck. And when I heard that, I definitely felt enraged in terms of how dare he says this and what do you mean? You can't help me and what am I meant to do? And so when I left on the way back home, I was reflecting on what he was saying, unless your body's stuck. You know, so what does it mean? Does it mean my body has a language? What is this language? What is it speaking to me in? And at that point, I had been studying professional writing and editing at university. And I was doing a subject on linguistics. And so in my mind, it was easy to think in language in terms of, you know, how do we break language down? How does it work? And I was thinking to myself, it's almost like my body is speaking to me in Japanese and I don't know Japanese. I don't even know the letters. I can't even recognize them. And it's speaking to me in this language that is giving me an opportunity here to learn and to discover, but I know zero, nothing about it. However, at the same time, I made a decision and it was something I'd never done. I felt like I tried everything. I was one of those people who would say, I've tried it all and nothing works for me. And I remember thinking, the only thing I haven't really tried is self-healing because I don't actually know how to do it. But I'm going to, I'm just going to improvise when I get home. And so I actually just started from breathing into my back. And as I was doing that, it occurred to me that I was always breathing shallowly. I never, ever allowed myself to breathe deeply, except if I was in an acting class. So that occurred to me and I was feeling inspired. I was feeling kind of open to it, but otherwise I would shut down and breathe very shallowly. And I was really afraid of feeling that pain that was inside my body. And I was afraid of discovering anything that was really going on. And so I gave myself permission to do that. And I was then counting backwards from 30 because my mind was quite negative. And as I was doing that, there was this moment of clarity in space. And in that moment, I remember thinking, why don't I ask for divine help? And internally there was a conflict inside of me around this because in my mind, I went, well, how can I ask for divine help really and truly if God made me have this experience? So either I'm being punished for something that I've done that I don't know about, and thus I'm not going to get help, or just things that I don't understand because after I had the baby that died, I had this very profound experience. And as I was lying in bed and staring at the ceiling contemplating, how could this happen? And just in a complete state of numbness and shock, I saw an angelic being and the being was feminine. And she said to me, it's okay. You're going to have two children soon. And she showed me a boy and a girl. And I just felt like this energy of calm poured inside of me. And for three hours, I was calm. And I was saying all sorts of things about how I will use this experience to help others. And there's a reason for it. But once that three hours and that calm wore off, I went into fear and anxiety and stress. And so I felt like maybe I made it up, but I was not really in a state at the time to make things up, but I had not had my children yet. So I didn't know to believe or not to believe. But at that point I went, okay, I have had this experience. So there is something spiritual out there. I might as well ask. And so when I asked, I felt this warmth again coming into my body similar to the warmth that I felt when I had the experience with the angel. And there was an unwinding that was happening. And since I had my eyes closed, I could see this yellowy golden light, like the sunlight shining onto you. And another thought came at that point. I thought I'd never had. And the thought was, I wonder what my body actually looks like. I wonder what my back looks like. And at that point, again, within moments, it felt like this switch was turned on and I could see my back. And as I was seeing it and the inflammation, I could see all the vertebrae. It was literally in that moment, it looked like having an x-ray. And I remember thinking, okay, so if I could discover why I have all this and not from the victim perspective that I've been exploring this from, but from a place of I actually want to know, I want to understand how did I get here? What is this language? What is this about? Why do I have pain? Everywhere in my body, why do I have all these issues at this young age? What would it be? And what happened next was kind of like memory connected to a vision, connected to wisdom. And so I started seeing what happened when I came to Australia. So I didn't know one word of English and I went to school and I was from the wrong part of the world. I was bullied, I was attacked, I cried every day for years going to school. And it became very clear that this is when I started getting psoriasis all over my skin. And psoriasis and obviously skin conditions are connected to how comfortable we feel within ourselves or this is something I found out later on. But it made sense to me that I did not feel comfortable in any way or form to be myself. And so psoriasis appeared. And then as I was feeling through all the things that I was seeing as much as I was capable of doing in that time, the images started to change and I started to become aware of when my back pain appeared and the tinges of it appeared at 14 and then at around 16 it became really bad. So as I was asking these questions, I was shown that at around 14 I changed schools and I ended up going to, and I had turned schools prior to that as well. So I had to end up, this was my I think fourth school at that point in terms of in Australia. And as I went to this particular school, it was a private school and the children or the majority of children who were there, about 90% of them came from insane wealth, like wealth that I'd never seen in my life. And then there was me and my friends who all came from Eastern Europe who came from the kind of poverty that the people in that school had never even dreamed of existed or considered existed. And so there was this massive conflict between them and us and most of my friends, including myself, started to kind of compensate by self-protecting. And so a lot of my friends ended up with scoliosis. And for me, it was more about the lower back pain and sciatica, which later on again, as I was discerning and trying to understand the body, I found out it was very much connected to struggle and finance. And my parents and their relationship, they were in constant conflict with each other. They had moved to a new country, and with a completely different way of living and seeing things. And, you know, they were always fighting about money. They had the opposite of use of money and, you know, how to, I guess, work with it or deal with it. And I, as a child, who was very sensitive, absorbed it all inside of myself. And so all of that struggle was within me. And again, as this became very clear to me, I started to feel a deeper unwinding inside my lower back. And the last thing that became very clear was the ancestral aspect, not just of the fact that I had skinny shoes, but also that I had digestive issues. And the digestive issues exploded and became really painful once I had the child that died to a degree where I found very hard to eat anything. And I had a conversation with my grandmother at one point, and she said to me, I wish that it was me. So she that she wished that it was her who had died instead of this baby. And my grandmother actually grew up in a family where her mother was clairvoyant. And her mother had eight children. And just before the war started, my grandmother was the oldest. She was 12. And her mother said to her, the war is coming, and we're all going to die except you and your father. And I'm going to have to hide you and protect you so that when the time comes, you're going to hide and you're going to run. And when the time came, essentially, her mother, who had a three-month-old baby at the time, had asked somebody to hold the baby and protected my grandmother with her own body. And so my grandmother, she said to my grandmother, you run, they're going to shoot, do not look back. And so my grandmother, that's what she did. And she essentially lost everybody in her family except her father. Her father came back from the war four years later. He didn't leave for long, like mother predicted. And my grandmother essentially had this enormous enormous trauma that she never talked about until she came to Australia. So she, well, I should say the way she talked about it prior to that was just giving very, kind of very small details and only to the main person she shared it with was my grandfather. So when she was in Australia, when she came here, it was like she felt the freedom to talk about it. And in that moment, I realized why I had all the digestive issues that I had, because how do you digest experiences like that? And essentially, I realized that everyone in the family had digestive issues. And yeah, after that, I had an inkling that I was this sponge as well. I was one of those people who sponged off other, so whenever they had issues, I would then have issues as well. And I fell asleep after this massive kind of day of realizations. And then when I woke up the next day, there was about 70% of the pain that was gone in terms of back pain. And I felt different. I felt like it was the first time that I was the person who transformed the pain, because I've had this experience before where the pain would go to 30% or 20%, but it was never me who did it. It was always the chiropractor or rolfing practitioner, whoever I was seeing. And so I remember thinking, hey, well, don't get too excited because it may not last, but because I have a skeptical nature, but keep exploring and see what happens. And so for the next three weeks, I spent a lot of time in bed. I spent a lot of time asking questions, journaling, writing things down, just kind of trying to listen to my body and what it was really saying and what it was about and putting the deformities of the puzzle together. And by the end of this three weeks, all the psoriasis disappeared and all the back pain disappeared. The anxiety that I had went right down and I kind of went, okay, wow, something feels much more real that has happened. My digestive system improved so I could eat, but it took years and years for that part to get better. And I always say, I still have to be aware of certain things like milk. I can't just drink milk or eat a lot of cheese without having some effect inside my body, nothing like it used to be. But all of this kind of led me to go, oh my God, wow, my body is actually intelligent. And then I realized that the same way that I had that experience of seeing into my own body, I started seeing into other people's bodies. Hmm. Wow. Wow. That's amazing. So you had this revelation and you saw that I guess some of your stuff was your stuff from your personal experience with someone's also ancestral. And was it just the seeing and the awareness that you think started clearing things up? Because it sounds like you weren't doing any like, you know, really involved techniques or anything. Was it just the awareness? I think there was awareness. There was a lot of emotional release that was happening for me at the time. There was a lot of self-reflection and starting to see things from new perspectives at the time. So there wasn't a real technique as much as there was more of a letting go and a recognition and a shift in perception at that time for me. And so you saw this in yourself and then you said, then you began to see it in other people. How did that manifest? There were two things that happened at the time. One was my partner at the time had a friend that had come over and she was very good at writing. So I was doing an assignment that I needed to hand in. And I asked her if she could come and sit next to me next to the computer and read it with me and give me some suggestions. So she did. And as I was reading and typing and I kept kind of looking back and forth, at one point as I was looking at her, I saw this cartoon looking liver above her head. And I kept opening and closing my eyes because I thought, oh my God, now I'm going insane. And she said to me, do you have something in your eye? And I said, well, no, but can I ask you a really strange question? And she said, sure. And I said, do you have liver problems? And she said, yeah, I do actually. How do you know? And when she said that the image changed, I actually saw an old amount. I just knew it was her grandfather. And I said, well, did your grandfather have the same issue? And she said, yes, he did. And I had a sense that her grandfather had been in a concentration camp. And she acknowledged that. And then I said, do you get nightmares? And she said, yeah, I do. And then I said to her something that I thought, oh my God, I paid zero attention in science, in biology. I wish I was at school. I wish that I had, because I cannot believe I'm saying this because I actually don't know what I'm saying. And I said to her, well, the issues that you're dealing with in terms of your health are connected to your DNA. And she's like, OK, thanks for sharing. And then I said a lot of things to do with her family that she didn't know. And she called her mum, and she spoke to her for about half an hour. And her mum acknowledged everything I had said. And so when she spoke to me afterwards, she was like, oh my God. She was 25 at the time. She said, I've learned more in the last hour or so than I knew in the last 25 years of my life about myself and my family. What was really interesting was that she ended up doing these specific tests two years later. And all this stuff that I said, including the DNA, came like, that's what they said. It was her issues. But yeah, that was one experience. And then my mum called me up, and my mum's like, I think the only thing she wasn't supportive of was acting. She's like, I just don't see it for you. But yeah, she was very supportive in my healing journey. And she called me, and she said, your dad was at work, and he hurt his knee really loudly. Can you do something to help him? And I said to her, well, no, I can't, because I don't know what I'm doing. And she said, well, whatever you did for yourself, Surely you can, you know, you can connect to your dad and I was like, he's not even here. He's at home. I don't know what you're like, why you're saying this and you're like, look, just try. Just try it. So I thought, yeah, fine. I'm just going to focus on his knee and if anything shows up, it shows up. And so he, um, so yeah, so I was focusing on his knee and I kept seeing this image of boats and I could not kind of go past that. So just like one boat after another, after another. And I called him, sorry, I called her back and I said to her, well, I'm, I'm just needing to clarify, did he hurt his leg at work or was it on a boat? And she said, no, it was definitely at work. He's not been on a boat and I said, okay, fine. So I must be wrong. I can't help you or him. And so two minutes later when I hung up, I get a phone call and it was my dad and he said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I don't know if mom told you, but I healed myself and I have this new special ability that came, you know, I think came about and I just need to know was, were you on a boat? And he was like, well, yes, I was, but I don't need you telling your mom these types of things. So he had been on a boat. Oh, wow. Um, and I remember thinking, Hey, well, I, a hundred percent didn't know this and my mom didn't know this. Um, so, Hey, I'm starting to, to reflect on what to do with this ability. And so, um, it was really interesting because after that it felt like it kind of became wide open because up until that conversation with my dad, I had not really gone out, so I'd been at home for weeks trying to just heal and deal with this stuff. And so then I went outside and I realized that I could cross the road and see all this stuff about whatever, whatever was going on with somebody, or I could go to yoga class and see it with whoever I was standing next to or focused on. So I was a little bit taken aback with what to do because I had no clue. And so I made a decision to, to start doing what you're doing, to interview people who had some kind of nobility or wrote books about it or go to classes around it and yeah, and see how, what I'd learn and how I can work with it so that I can adjust it and not just, yeah, not just be constantly bombarded by information that I could do nothing that I couldn't do anything with. Yeah. So with you, with your dad, you saw he was on a boat. Were you able to do anything with his knee? Well, I, again, I didn't know what I was doing. So I was just focused on, um, seeing energy and just pulling it out of his knee, um, he said that it was better, but it was really interesting was that my dad's actually extremely intuitive, but he pretends not to be. So I think, um, maybe a couple of years later, I said to him, please, can you just, can I just do a healing session on you? And, um, I was scanning, I remember I was scanning him and I was writing things down and then I was doing processes and he didn't know what they were or anything about them. Um, cause everybody in my family had to come and be my guinea pig. And, um, I remember when I finished the session, um, and I wrote everything down and I said to him, okay, I'm going to tell you everything that I felt or saw after you tell me what you experienced. And I was literally expecting him to say, oh, I didn't really feel anything but thanks, I appreciate it. And he told me word for word, everything that I wrote down for, you know, like about him, what I saw, what I felt, what I did. And I remember just staring at him and going, okay, do you want to tell me it's something? And he said, well, I'm just as intuitive as you. I just don't advertise it. And then I think he, he said, the only time we've really had these types of conversations have been more recently where, you know, he's acknowledged that he's very intuitive and sensitive. And he shared that one of the things that he, um, he does to feel his feelings is least is to listen to music on repeat. And I was like, I never knew that because that's one of the things that I've done and he said, well, if you remember when, you know, when you had that experience with the baby dying, I, you know, I spoke to your husband then, and I, um, I gave him a song to give to you to play. And I actually never knew that he did that. And I was like, oh, okay. Wow. You know, and it was a song that I listened to on repeat at that time. And I was like, okay, that's really interesting. Yeah. You know, it's the different things you find out. You, you mentioned earlier, and I know in some other material, you mentioned the secret language of the body and you, you mentioned earlier, you had this intuition that your body was speaking Japanese and it's interesting. Like you said, not only do I not speak Japanese, I can't even read the characters. So when we're going through these things, is, is it our body trying to tell us something that the pain and the disease that we go through? Well, it's a combination of the body and what embodies the body, which is the soul. You know, and I know we can talk about this on your podcast. Um, so the soul is the part of you that makes you who you are, makes you individual, makes you unique. And it's also inside of it, it has something called the astral body. And the astral body is the body of sensations. So it's the body of pleasure and it's the body of pain. So, and it's also connected to all your emotions. So the astral body is what's actually constantly showing you whether you have pain inside and what it's really about in terms of your experiences. But the astral body is actually also connected to the etheric body, which is the body of memory. And also the body of vitality and also connected to ancestry. And so what it does is it presses into the etheric and then the etheric body, which is the copy of the physical and looks the same as the physical or almost the same, will press into the physical body in terms of showing us what's really going on in terms of our experience. So essentially it's a lot of pain. I'm not going to say all pain, but a lot of pain is connected to emotional experiences that have been pushed away and suppressed for often long periods of time, intertwined with the memory and the perception of it. And so part of the language of the body is actually identifying the fact that wherever it's stored inside your body, there is a connection to certain wisdom and certain experiences based on what the body actually does in terms of its function. And so when we're starting to break it down, and I probably, I've probably confused you and everyone else around it, but what actually occurs is that when we're looking at the body and we start to break it down and we say, okay, what are my eyes doing? You know, what are they for? And we start to go, well, my eyes are for seeing, for seeing something and then interpreting that perception and, you know, explaining potentially to somebody, oh, this is what I see, right? This is, this is how I'm seeing things. This is what it is. And obviously all of us see things slightly differently. So the eyes in themselves are about our vision, but as they deteriorate, we start to look at, well, what is it that I'm seeing in my life that is painful, that my eyes are saying this is, you know, this is something that is very difficult for me to see. And this in combination with the fact that we stare at the screen all the time and we don't do any eye exercises and all sorts of things like that, that we used to do before we had screens, creates all sorts of problems inside, you know, inside your eyes. And, you know, I've looked at this from many perspectives because I've had people in my family had issues with their eyes, where, you know, what, what happens when somebody's a child, as opposed to when they're an adult? And obviously there are different eye conditions and eye issues that we can break down. And I wrote about them in my book, The Secret Language of Your Body. But essentially, you know, when it's a child, the child is often absorbing what's in the environment. And when there's things that are hidden or unresolved, or pushed away, and, you know, things that are painful to see and to watch, even if the child doesn't know this consciously, they'll usually absorb this and start and their vision will start to deteriorate. Now, which is also different to somebody being born with, with the with an eye condition, in which case, we need to look at the idea of multiple Earth lives, and that there is a high possibility that they brought it with them for a reason, you know, and there's the womb stage of what was happening in the womb, and how that affected the child. And then we also have, as we get older, you know, we start to see more pain in the world, we start to see people in our family and getting sick or dying and loss and grief that we have. If we don't allow ourselves to really feel those things, then there is a high possibility that the eyes will be affected, and they will actually become hardened, because tears and, you know, are very cleansing in that sense. So, you know, so each part of the body is also storing things in terms of the language, you know, so when we break things down, and we go, okay, so eyes are out seeing ears about hearing, what am I hearing? That it's not working. And I actually did a podcast recently, and the lady had an issue with her ears, and we break it down. And she went, Oh, my God, wow, that is that makes complete sense, because she was overwhelmed and hearing so many things from so many people that her body just went, I don't even know what I believe, I'm gonna block it all out. Yeah, yeah. So what you're saying, and you said you may have confused me and other people, it is a little bit complicated, because from my understanding, we do have multiple bodies, and they're kind of like Russian nesting dolls. So you've got, you know, and I don't know the different levels, but they're like different levels of the body. And so what happens in the spiritual or in the astral can affect us in the physical. And so, you know, it's interesting, because I find that if you were talking about some of the elements that you were going through that started breaking your body down, but then you had that when when you lost the child, that pushed you to the point where you actually made a transformation. So these things are trying to tell us something, I think sometimes, the illness, the elements that we're going through are saying, this is something you need to look at, this is something you need to look at. And it'll keep kind of nudging us until we kind of wake up and actually look at these things. Well, 100%. And I think that when we are willing to see things in a much more spiritual way, we start to go, I'm, I'm just I'm not just a physical body, right? And the pain that comes into my life experience is there to teach me something to help me to become a deeper person to help me to grow. And it's kind of I think when you have a massive loss in your life, especially early on, it really creates, I guess, it makes you who you are afterwards, and either makes you explore and opens up your perception of what is possible, or it shuts you down completely. Yeah. So for me, I think for me, it was the opening and the realization that there is a spiritual world and I wanted to really explore and understand what happens to us when we pass over, it felt like it was a need more than just a desire for many, many years where I was like, I need to know to be okay. And so, you know, the spiritual kind of became very, very important. And I guess, you know, coming back to that experience with the angel, it started with that for me. And then when I had my children, it was like, okay, well, this, this angel was there and supported me and shared this with me. I'm more open to seeing how the spiritual world works. And, and also how I can, I guess how can work with loss, loss and grief. And I know this is what the Park Podcast is about. How do I, how do I work with this when it shows up? And I think for me, it was really interesting because I started when I was, I think, 27, 26 or 27, I started meeting people from what I believe is my soul family. And the first time I met somebody, again, it was just this crazy experience that happened within a short period of time of meeting this person, this immense fear of loss came up for me, like to point to where I was like, I can't breathe. And there was a realization that because this was where I really started to open my heart in a different way. And it wasn't like it wasn't a romantic way. It was a soulful way. It was on a level that I could not understand at the time. And, you know, I really actually had to face loss at that point, way more than when, when this child died, because I just, you know, for a while there, I shut down. And it was, you know, so much it kind of, I channeled it into the pain in my body and what it was about and so on. But the actual depth of like, when you lose someone, and then you open your heart again, that, that was something new to me. Because, and I had a realization at that time, my children were very small still, that I was in that constant protection mode, even with them, but it was hard for me. And I'm gonna say more with my son than with my daughter the time to get close to him. Because there was always this fear, what if I lose him? What if I, you know, what if he is not here, I'm not going to be able to cope with this. And so yeah, when I connected with this person, without any expectation, where there was this soul love that came, came forth. I remember the first few years, it was so overwhelming. And I had such an intense fear of losing him and not being able to function in my life again. And I think that's where the deeper healing happened. And I remember, at one point, he, he leaves in Europe, he came to Australia. And, um, you know, and I said to him, look, I didn't know I need you to hold space for me. And it was like, I don't think I've ever shared this actually, it was like, I was being held by this person that I trusted by that stage and knew that he would be there for me. And I would be there for him for the rest of our lives. Like this was this incredible friendship. And that no matter what happened, he would like he would be that spec that that person that would hold me. And in that there was an allowance to go to the depth of loss. And it went on, I think, like we sat in in this hotel room for about 10 hours, where I just cried and grieved and he held me and I remember going to places in that grief and loss that I'd never allowed myself to even touch prior to that. Wow. It was like, at times it felt like falling like just falling and there was no, you didn't know where where you would fall to. And yeah, it was just the most profound experience of, you know, where I finally felt like I could really trust someone where, yeah, that level of grief and transformation of it could occur and it was it was very profound. Yeah, wow. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, you know, I think that that grief and loss are here to teach us as painful as painful as they are. And that's what you know, it's what my podcast is about. I talk to people who have gone through these profound losses and those are the things that really transform us, you know, and so as you share your story and we hear about the things you went through that the loss of a child is one of the worst things that anybody can go through. And that and we can we can choose, right, we can choose to try to stuff that inside and it can make it sick, or we can choose to process it, and it can transform us. And that's what you've done. Well, yeah, absolutely. And I think that it makes you a much deeper, more compassionate person and someone who, you know, who's able to hold that space for somebody else to experience whatever they need to experience. And I think that's been, yeah, a huge journey for me and a learning because I really feel like, you know, from the deep losses that we have through, you know, death, but it's also through breakup of relationships. Yeah, exactly. You know, I feel like, you know, in some ways, the hardest experience is when you're unprepared, because it literally kind of breaks you open in a way and it makes you feel like you don't know how you're going to put yourself back together. And afterwards, I think, a lot of people go into protective mode. And so they're always on guard in some way or another. And so it's, again, very difficult to trust. And I think, you know, this is where in some ways preparing yourself for possible loss can be very helpful. In a way, I know that one of the deepest losses I had was when my grandmother died. And, you know, I have five years before she died, I was just imagining her dying was it would give me so much anxiety. And internally, you know, I felt like in preparation for it, it actually became one of the most beautiful, memorable, transformational experiences for me in terms of what transition can look like. And it felt like when she died, actually, you asked me when we first started having conversation if I've ever been to the US. And it was literally she died. And the next month, I was going on tour for the first time to all across America, including Ohio. And, you know, and I remember thinking to myself, I'm feeling so vulnerable, my grandmother, who I loved and connected to deeply has just passed over. How am I going to go on this journey? Like, I need to feel and see her during this experience. And while I was touring, there were constantly people that were showing up that had the qualities that my grandmother had. And I remember recognizing them and going. So rather than grieving, I would celebrate so because at that point, I was like, you know what, she actually had a long life considering where she came from. And I'm going to yeah, I'm going to acknowledge and celebrate, you know, everyone that reminds me of her, because so I actually sat down and wrote down all the qualities before I left on this trip that she had that I love that I would miss. And then as I was on this, yeah, on this tour, I would constantly go, oh my God, that that person just showed me this beautiful, loving quality that my grandmother had. And I'm going to receive it both from them and from my mom, from my grandmother, from the perspective of even though she's not here with me physically, she is here with me expressing herself through other people and throughout the experiences. And that was very healing. Yeah, absolutely. Well, your, your book, obviously great success sold over a million copies translated into over two dozen languages. And that's hard to do in today's fragmented book world. I mean, as someone who's written a couple of books, I know that, you know, to break through like that is not something he's so first congratulations on that. But what do you think it is about your book that touches people? Well, I think that the accuracy, because there were other books before I wrote this one that were out there. But I feel like the people who wrote them, there weren't many, there's way more now. They did not necessarily have the ability to see into people's bodies. So they found this information through others. Yeah, but the actual author, the authors themselves didn't, as far as I know. I think that I took time not to just write one line about each body part of condition, I actually sat with each one tuned into it had, I had a lot of clients by the time I wrote the book. So I had had a lot of experiences and I could see the connections and I also only wrote about the conditions in the section for diseases. Sometimes people say, well, you know, not all the conditions are in there, which, you know, it would be three books if I wrote about every condition is there. Right. But I actually wrote about the ones that I had some experience with at the time rather than just, you know, writing about any condition. Right. And so I feel like there is a depth and an accuracy to the book. And then I also wrote, you know, layered processes for people, because, you know, as we were talking about, and you were asking the questions, Brian, around when I started, I had no idea, I had no concept of what to do. And so it was just made up. And then when I was writing the book, I was looking at, you know, everything from how do you work with your mind? And I thought everybody can work with their mind. So I'm going to put something about that in every process, how to let go or change your mind or release things. Everyone can work with their emotions. So I'm going to talk about emotions. I started learning about energy and the easiest way that I felt that I could teach people about energy was through color. And so I thought I'm going to I'm going to put information about color and how to work with it into the book. And I'm also going to look at the systems of the body and how they are giving you messages, in which case I'm going to ask a lot of questions in every process so that the person can get to know themselves. And the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get people to breathe, to move, to touch, to work with pressure points, because I started learning about that. I'm going to I did years and years of yoga training. So I was like, hmm, there's ways of moving or kind of opening your mouth and doing certain exercises with, you know, with sound or with your tongue that can help you to cleanse things from the body. And so I looked at everything from Chinese medicine to pressure point reflexology to, you know, to essentially anything that was really simple and easy to teach people where they could take charge of their own body. And so I think that from feedback, my book is used by a lot like a lot of practitioners of alternative healing, whatever the modality is. And it's also used by by anyone because I've read it in layman's terms because I wasn't, I wasn't coming from that perspective of being, you know, a scientist in that way. I wanted people like me to understand it. And I actually originally wrote the book that I would have wanted to have to help me heal. Right. Right. That was kind of my, you know, my perspective, what would I have needed? What would I have wanted to have? And I also think that people actually have experiences of healing through doing the exercises in the book, then they share and they buy it and they give it to their friends and they give it to their clients. And that's the feedback that I received. Awesome. Awesome. And I know, in addition to your book, you offer some master classes. So tell me about those. So I've been teaching people how to heal themselves since I was 22. So I healed my own self at 20, at 20. And then I spent two years practicing and learning and doing things and everyone that I could find lots of family. And I started to recognize that it is vital that people know how to, how to do healing on themselves, even if they do see other people for help. And I still, you know, I still go and get acupuncture or massage or whatever, you know, I feel I need done, but I do a lot of healing on myself when I need it. Right. And so I started, yeah, so I started teaching people how to tune into their own bodies, how to understand what the body's saying, how to realize that a lot of the health conditions that people have that have been there for a while, did not start where they are. Right. And that we can learn about the wisdom of the body from the feminine, the masculine sides, meaning the left and the right side of the body, the front and the back, the center of the body. And we can start to work with pain and diseases from the perspective of what is my body really sharing with me? And where is it now? Where did it start? How can I transform the thought patterns, the beliefs, the emotions, the energies, the stuckness, the and recognize that pain is a sensation that comes from the actual body. And so I started teaching people, I've been doing this for many, many years all over the world. And then when COVID hit, I was like, oh, how do I do this now? And I was given an opportunity to do it online. And I didn't realize that actually doing it online was going to create way better results than even live. Because people could, you know, could do workshops with me in processes and then repeat them. Because you actually have to repeat this, right? You cannot just do it once. And sometimes we will say, Oh, but you did it once. And you healed. No, I did not do it once. I spent, you know, weeks originally working on the conditions that I had without really knowing what I was doing. And then years working on my digestive system. So, you know, so it wasn't an instant in that sense. And the more I understood all the different parts, and how they come together, all the, you know, stages of healing that we're going through, and how all of this is so important to know in order to recognize where am I suck, and how can I heal, and how can I sensitize my body so that it can become my friend as opposed to my enemy. And so I started doing these masterclasses and mini workshops to introduce people to that information. And then if they wanted to go deeper, then they could do actual workshops with me. And we have some masterclasses that we're offering for free at the moment, but that's only for a very short period of time. Because, you know, I wanted to take away all the excuses from people and go, Hey, come to my website nsegal.com, look up masterclasses and jump in there and do it while it's free. Because there's going to be information that you, that might be very helpful to you. And also there's several processes. And so I've done them on many different topics from, you know, the secret language of your body and how to start to heal yourself to understanding deeper aspects of yourself. And I have a program called Awaken the Healer Within, which is a 10 day program that creates a life changing transformation in terms of all the different aspects of yourself and your health. Yeah, all of this is on my website. So you offer a lot, you got the masterclasses, the other classes, you've got got the book. So for someone listening right now, if you were to say where would I start, would it would it be to go to your website and jump on one of the masterclasses? Yeah, I would go if you're new to this, I would go to my website and start with the secret language of your body masterclass. And if you can order or get the book, then that works really well in combination. Yeah. Or if you've gone, I already know a lot of this stuff. I'm really familiar, but I want to go deeper. There's just deeper stuff inside of me, that I want to work on. Then I really encourage you to watch Awaken the Healer Within masterclass because that goes into a kind of a new dimension of understanding yourself and your life and who you are as a spiritual being. Well, Anna, thank you for being here today. You're been a wealth of information. Thank you for being so open with your journey. I know that's going to help other people to give them hope that wherever whatever we're going through, there's always a way through it. And there and a lot of this is within us. I love I love that message. So for people that are listening, just so everybody knows, your website is nsegal.com. It's I-N-N-A-S-E-G-A-L.com. That'll be in the show notes also. And the name of your book is Awaken No, with the name of your book. I'm sorry. The secret language of your body. But there's a few there's a few books there, but start with that one. The secret language of your body. Yes. So, yeah, again, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for getting up early. And as in Australia, I'm in Ohio. So it's late for me and it's early for her. So appreciate you doing this and have a good have a good rest of your day. Thank you so much, Brian. You too. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, grief doesn't follow stages, timelines or rules. If you've ever wondered, am I doing this right? You're not alone. That's why I created the grief check in. It's not a test. There are no right or wrong answers. It's simply a gentle way to understand how grief may be showing up for you right now. In just a few minutes, you'll gain clarity and language for your experience without judgment, labels or pressure to move on. If you're wondering where you are in grief, this is a safe place to find out. Go to grief to growth dot com slash check in. That's grief, the numeral to growth dot com slash check in.