This week, we dive into a transformative conversation with Jana Wilson, author and emotional healing educator. Jana’s insights offer hope to those seeking to heal from past traumas and embrace a more spiritually fulfilling life.

Jana believes she was born into spirituality. Despite a tumultuous upbringing with a mentally ill mother and an addict father, she had a heightened awareness of the spiritual realm.  A pivotal out-of-body experience at the age of twelve during a violent episode at home marked her spiritual awakening, bringing her a deep sense of divine connection.

Jana’s path to healing is inspiring. Despite initial spiritual awakenings, she faced periods of forgetting and reverting to harmful patterns. Motherhood became her catalyst for change, leading her to explore various healing modalities, from metaphysics to psycho-spirituality—a blend of psychology and spirituality that she now practices and teaches.

A key theme in Jana’s journey is the integration and honor of the inner child. She views the inner child as the emotional self, emphasizing that true emotional mastery comes from respecting and listening to this part. Her dialogues with her inner child have been pivotal in addressing deep-seated beliefs and behaviors.

Jana advises paying attention to our emotional selves as a sign it’s time to heal. Our inner child often communicates distress through emotional reactions. By engaging in self-inquiry without judgment, we can uncover the root causes of our suffering and begin the journey to healing.

Whether you’ve experienced severe trauma or seek to understand your emotional self better, Jana Wilson’s story offers invaluable guidance. Her journey demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of combining spirituality with psychology in healing work.

To learn more about Jana Wilson, visit www.janawilson.com.

Transcript

Jana Wilson:
So in order for us to really have mastery over our emotions and not be a slave to them, not be driven by them, not be controlled by them, the best way is to respect them and honor them.

Announcer: Welcome to Exploring the Mystical Side of Life with your host, Linda Lang.

Linda Lang:
Hi. This is Linda Lang from www.ThoughtChange.com. We are exploring the mystical side of life once again this week. If you enjoy our conversations, remember to subscribe, share with a friend. Today, we have Jana Wilson with us. Jana is an author and an emotional healing educator. Welcome, Jana.

Jana Wilson:
Thank you so much for having me, Linda.

Linda Lang:
It is wonderful to have you. I love that you have brought in spirituality and mysticism into your healing work. Could you share with us how that door opened for you?

Jana Wilson:
Well, I think I was born into it. I think that each of us, you know, really operate from different states of consciousness based on our soul age and, and looking at my life and realizing how aware I was at such a young age of things that I believe most children aren’t aware of really helped me understand what an old soul I am. And that this isn’t my first rodeo. I think that we contract with our parents, our family of origin, and I contracted with, you know, a mentally ill mother, an addict father, alcoholic, And I had a lot of work to do early. Right? So it was really thrust upon me. And it wasn’t until my early twenties that I really read Dr. Brian Weiss’s book, Many Lives, Many Masters that gave me because coming from the Western religion of Christianity, I wasn’t taught about reincarnation. I was taught that that wasn’t true and that wasn’t real.

Jana Wilson:
I didn’t even know about it. And so I became very spiritual. I was born spiritual. I mean, we are spiritual beings, right? We’re having this human experience, but I believe I knew it from a young age.

Linda Lang:
Even in my own life experience, I can remember looking at things so differently as a child and just wondering why people behave this way. And it’s not, you know, typical for a 4 or 5, 6 year old person to be questioning the behavior of the people around them.

Jana Wilson:
Especially adults. Right?

Linda Lang:
Exactly. We do come in with a lot of wisdom, and then that amnesia happens. So it seems, unless it’s cast right upon us on our plate that we can’t ignore. Now you had a mystical experience, and let’s talk a little bit about that.

Jana Wilson]:
Yeah. So I was born in the bible belt and, you know, fundamentalist Christian. And so I vacillated from going my parents would go to, like, a Baptist church where they would teach a lot of fearful concepts. Right? Like, if you don’t do certain things, you’re gonna die, you’re gonna burn in hell. And as a child, it really frightened me. And then sometimes they would take us to like a Pentecostal, more charismatic non-denominational type church where they would sing and praise. And from the time I was around 6, I began to have like these experiences of they would call “being slain in the spirit” where, you know, I would go into an ecstasy really, like divine union with with God. And, and I began to develop a really close relationship with spirit.

Jana Wilson:
I believe looking back all the trauma would push me into communicating with spirit, right? With something I couldn’t see, taste, touch; it was beyond my senses. And it just continued. I really developed this strong inner connection to the divine. The kingdom of heaven is within. Right? So I would be in my inner world a lot, which could have been disassociation because of the trauma, but it certainly was a resource for me to feel safe. And then I went through quite a few traumatic experiences. There’s a test that clinicians give clients that’s called The Adverse Childhood Experience test.

Jana Wilson:
And out of the 10 questions, I scored 10. So I had a lot of trauma, a lot of violence, witnessing it, experiencing it, verbal, physical, sexual, emotional abuse, neglect, and food deprivation. It was definitely complex post traumatic stress disorder I’ve been diagnosed with, but the connection to spirit was a saving grace. And so by the time I was 12, I start my book out wise little one with the story of hearing my father beating my mother and praying to God to save me. And in a moment of grace, I was pulled out of my body. I could see my little body there still ringing her hands and frightened. I could still hear my father’s roar and all the chaos, but I felt that peace that passes all understanding. I felt a knowingness that I was not only gonna be okay, that it was an awakening, a spiritual awakening.

Jana Wilson:
And when that awakening happened, everything changed for me. I was told those are not your parents. That is not your life. And it was as if Linda, I was one with the cosmos. I could see stars and galaxies, and I just felt cradled and I felt safe. And that experience also awakened in me what I share in the book. I call it my inner dragon slayer or my soul slapper.

Jana Wilson:
It opened my voice to stand up and speak up and really be strong and advocate for myself and and speak truth, you know, talk about the elephant in the in the room with the adults around. Because, of course, children were taught, you know, like, you’re to be seen, not heard.

Linda Lang:
If you’re to be seen even. Right?

Jana Wilson:
Right. Yeah. And sometimes not even seen. You’re absolutely right.

Linda Lang:
Yeah. What a life experience you chose this time. Do you have any understanding of why you chose it? What was the purpose? Was there a lesson or was it to help those souls that traveled with you?

Jana Wilson:
Right. I think there’s always an overarching lesson for all of us about really to thine own self be true, to value our self and to love our self. I believe as a reincarnationist, I believe that my soul contract with them, to really correct karma, which the karmic debt that I came in. Maybe, I’m not sure; no one is. It’s a mystery, right? We don’t know, but maybe, you know, I had relationships with both my mother and father in past lives that I had to experience what I experienced with them. You know, this universe has a correct accounting system. No debt, you know, goes unpaid. And so when you look at it from the Law of Karma, you see that the soul’s bringing in credits, you know, and good things are happening. And also debits, and they have to be paid.

Jana Wilson:
It’s not a respecter of the person. It’s not like, “oh, it’s just a child. They shouldn’t have to go through this.” It’s a soul. And I do believe my soul is old, and I was with some baby and young souls in my family of origin. And I certainly believe yes, that I came in to support them, to correct karma as well because I woke up at such a young age. And then I had a whole lifetime of learning that’s not my responsibility, that they’re on their own journey.

Jana Wilson:
And I had to let them go. I remember hearing Oprah Winfrey say once, it’s okay to divorce your parents or divorce your family. And I had to do that, you know, at some point as an adult to, to let them go.

Linda Lang:
And just because you had that beautiful mystical experience, I mean, you still came back into your body and you were in the circumstances, right?

Jana Wilson:
Yeah, and it was hard. It was difficult and you know, at 12 and prepubescent. You know, everything that was going on. I think we’re always spiraling, you know, as a soul, it’s kinda of we’ll reach a level and we’ll have standing and awareness, and then we kind of go back down, but we’re higher than we were before because we’re evolving and evolving. And I certainly am still experiencing that out with the release of the book to share my story so vulnerably and courageously, to expose all the labels that was put on me, white trash, you know, all the false beliefs of feeling like I’m a bad girl. I think the overarching lesson for many of us humans is that we are good enough and we are worthy and we are deserving of happiness and love and joy. But it’s it’s not handed on a silver platter. It’s it takes work.

Linda Lang:
Absolutely. How did you bring healing to that younger you? Because we know that those parts can fragment off and hold that trauma for you because it’s just so painful.

Jana Wilson:
So 12 years old, I have that awakening. And then, of course, you know, I turn into a teenager and I begin to forget the amnesia, you know, of even that experience. By the time I go away to college, I’m still creating a lot of experiences that, that match my operating system, right? Like the software to the hardware, it was a match. It was, you know, I’m a bad girl, bad things happen to me. And, you know, I just continued to create chaos for myself because of course, when we’re brought in that, that’s familiar, right? Like I was familiar with the chaos. Peace and happiness I wasn’t familiar with. But I began, I believe, because I am an old soul, to be aware there was one common denominator and it was me. And so if anything was gonna change, it had to happen with me. So at 21, I get pregnant. I ended up having my daughter at 22 and she was my wake up.

Jana Wilson:
I think once you have a child, as a parent, you definitely wanna do better for them than what was done for you. And so I wanted to break a cycle of a dysfunctional family and I wanted to create something. So I began to be voracious in my appetite to study metaphysics, A Course and Miracles. Marianne Williamson’s book Return to Love really was a big awakening for me. Dr. Brian Weiss, Deepak Chopra. So many of my teachers, in my early twenties, you know, really supported me, Unity Church, learning different ways of viewing spirituality. And then now what I practice is psycho-spirituality. It’s a combination of psychology and spirituality and I lead retreats and I support clients and 1 on one work with both because I think we meet the whole person. Right? We have to have both.

Jana Wilson:
Well, I think once I had Taylor, my daughter, I saw her innocence and I saw her purity. And of course I knew I had that in me because at one time I was a little one and the things that were done to me, you know, I had a choice. Were they gonna define me or was I going to to look at them and view them in a way that I could learn from them? And then if I could learn from them, then I wouldn’t repeat them. I wouldn’t repeat the pattern. And so it was in the nineties, I was watching a PBS special, Dr. John Bradshaw, and he had written books on dysfunctional families and the shame that binds you and all this information that was all new to me. Right? I, I had just begun seeing a therapist at 23, 24 at church for free because I was a single mom. I was struggling.

Jana Wilson:
And, his work really changed my life. I went to one of his retreats and I saw little Jana. I saw the suffering that she went through. And it’s not like a one and done, right? It was just the beginning. I mean, just this week alone, I had another really profound healing layer experience with my young self, where she was showing me how I’ve been pushing myself a lot. And again, it comes from that core belief of I’m not good enough. I’ve got to prove myself. Right? I got to go show the world that, you know, I’m not that little white trash girl.

Jana Wilson:
And here I am 57 still trying to do that. You know?

Linda Lang:
It is a journey, right?

Jana Wilson:
It is. And we don’t arrive. And I think so many spiritual teachers, a lot of people don’t share their underbelly, their wounds. When I was working with Debbie Ford, the New York Times bestselling author who wrote Dark Side of the Light Chaser, I was trained by her and I was on staff with her. She never would talk about anything present that was happening. It was always like a decade earlier. And I thought, you know, she is my teacher, but she could also be teaching me what not to do because I wanted to be authentic. I wanted to hear how she was struggling through a divorce right now, but she didn’t let anyone know that.

Jana Wilson]:
I wanted to hear how she was scared that her next book wasn’t gonna get picked up by the publisher. She was human and she couldn’t show that. And I thought if I’m ever in that place in my life, you know… this was 20 years ago… that I can write my own stories and book, I’m going to expose it all. I’m gonna let people know, you know. Do not put anyone on a pedestal because we’re all wabi sabi. We’re all perfectly imperfect and we truly don’t arrive.

Linda Lang:
It takes a lot of courage to be that vulnerable.

Jana Wilson:
Thank you for saying that. And I went into the studio to do the Audible for the book, reading it, and I had a breakdown. You know, because when you’re reading a story, the listener wants to hear the roles and it’s, like, kinda acting it. Right? And for little Jana, it was a little too much to be her dad raging and cussing and screaming and my mom crying and, you know, it was a lot to relive a lot of that trauma.

Linda Lang:
There is such power to the voice as well that as you are using your energy, you know, your throat chakras open, you are telling the world your story. You know, I it just gives me goosebumps thinking just how much energy is embedded in the story when you are telling it.

Jana Wilson:
You’re so right. I hadn’t thought of that until you just said that; there’s power in the spoken word. And, I sat in a studio, a professional studio, from 10 AM to 4 PM with just little 5 minute breaks here or there, and it was too much.

Linda Lang:
Quite often, we consider these younger aspects of ourselves as being a weakness or detrimental, and yet they’re so, so strong. They carry our traumas, our pains. And if we actually conflict with them quite often, that inner child wins.

Jana Wilson:
Exactly. And, you know, resiliency is a term that often gets applied right to children. Oh, they’re so resilient. They’ll bounce back. It’s really kind of a spiritual bypassing because we have to learn to honor the child’s trauma. Right? As an adult, we have to go back. That’s what I’ve been even doing another layer of healing this week of really letting little Jana show me how difficult it was and how when I push her to do something more, be something more. Right now she’s like, I’m tired.

Jana Wilson:
I want to enjoy my life. I want to enjoy my grandchildren. I want to enjoy, but yet there’s this part of me still trying to prove that’s kind of like, I’ve got a little war going on. So rather than punishing that part of me or trying to silence her, ’cause we know what happens when we do that. They just war with us, as you were saying, you know, is honoring and saying, I can see more of what you went through. I don’t want to minimize it. I honor it. What do you need from me? And what I’m hearing her say right now is I need rest.

Jana Wilson:
I need, I need contentment. I need peace. I need for you to show me that life is good again without always the next thing.

Linda Lang:
How often do you think our emotional reactions are triggered by our inner child?

Jana Wilson:
The way I teach and the way I believe is the child, the inner child is your emotional self period. So when we talk about the intellect, right? Like the left brain, the part of us that’s rational, thinks and analytical and everything. The inner child is the feeling self. It’s the right brain. That’s the part of us, right, that feels and and senses. And so I relate with my emotion, all emotion, as a child. So, like, she’s sitting here with, you know, with me and I’m having a conversation. So if she’s acting out or something, often it’s because I’ve became an adult child.

Jana Wilson:
Now an adult child is I’m 57 and I’m acting 5, you know, you, we see grown men with road rage, That’s the adult child. And so in order for us to really have mastery over our emotions and not be a slave to them, not be driven by them, not be controlled by them, the best way is to respect them and honor them. So that when we’re doing something like we have all these conversations… they guesstimate about 70,000 thoughts a day. We’re having thoughts that often are of an unknown future of a worst case scenario. So in essence, we’re terrorizing the child. We’re showing them some picture and then making them afraid. And then, of course, they just want to sit on the couch and do nothing. And they want to stay in bed all day and they get depressed because we’re not listening. We’re not taking responsibility that it’s us that’s creating that emotion.

Jana Wilson:
Nothing outside of us.

Linda Lang:
Do you think you can actually have true healing without integrating that inner child and looking after those deep, deep, buried needs?

Jana Wilson:
No. Because we are emotional beings. I mean, we are beings. I mean, we are emotion, right? Energy and motion, emotion. Everything is energy. This is not philosophy. This is science. And so we know that now.

Jana Wilson:
Right? It’s been proven that everything looks solid, but it’s really not. It’s atoms and molecules spinning at a speed that we don’t perceive. So it appears solid to us, but it’s really not. So emotion is transient. It’s temporary. It comes, it goes. In one minute, you know, I’m feeling peaceful and happy, and then I see an email and now I’m angry.

Jana Wilson:
Right? It’s it’s very fleeting. I always say happiness takes work. It’s not handed to us on a silver platter. I believe it’s definitely our birthright, but we have to do processes. We have to understand ourselves really the highest form of human intelligence. Krishna Murti said, “This is self inquiry without judgment. It’s looking within yourself and being curious.” You know what? I’m curious, what has me behave that way? You know, why am I feeling this way? What conversation am I having with myself that has me feeling this way? Because just because we’re having a conversation or a thought doesn’t mean it’s real.

Jana Wilson:
And so it requires a lot of these spiritual tools, meditation, being in nature to really quiet the mind to understand ourselves.

Linda Lang:
And just because that fleeting moment of anger has left us, doesn’t mean the anger is gone. I know in my own healing work with people, so much anger, frustration, sorrow, so much sorrow is buried in our unconscious and it just crops up. I think whenever we have a reaction to something that’s over the top, then the situation warrants is a good indication that you’re holding something in your unconscious that needs to be healed.

Jana Wilson:
Right. Because underneath anger, if you peel it back, is like you said, sorrow, it’s sadness, it’s fear. There’s something there. You know, anger is kind of the symptom of the deeper root cause, which is what story am I telling myself? What am I believing about myself, about why that’s having me, you know, feel so angry?

Linda Lang:
And you’re definitely a wonderful model of how you can heal from some pretty traumatic life experiences and actually get both of those feet on the ground.

Jana Wilson:
I think the book, you know, Linda, was kind of like… the 25 years that I talk about it in the book. I’ve been wanting to write this book and, you know, of course, everything’s timing and it just wasn’t time yet. And then I reached this high. the book’s out in the world now, and then there’s kind of this vulnerability hangover, this exposure of it all, this kind of exploitation of some really deep, deep wounding that, you know, I’m being kind of pushed into again. Once again, looking at and doing more healing work. Thankfully, I have tools, so I’m good. And I have some great healers and people around me who I can turn to as resources and my husband being the number 1 and my daughter, but, you know, also professionals in the field. And I think it’s important for those of us, like you and I, to share that we are all wabi sabi.

Jana Wilson:
We’re all perfectly imperfect. That even though, you know, I wrote this book and I’ve, I created this emotional healing system. I’m writing a second book. You know, all the things that I’m still human and I’m still dealing with a lot of those traumas from those first 7 years, you know, having a gun put to my head by my mother, witnessing my mom shoot my dad. I mean, there’s, you know, a lot in the book. You know, the feedback has been remarkably well, but there’s been some, that people are, you know, and I don’t apologize for triggers. I believe that that’s how we heal. We have to be triggered. We have to have, you know, we have to learn as adults to manage those triggers and to get the right skills to move through it.

Jana Wilson]:
I had an intense childhood and I think I’ve minimized in some ways, Linda, and I’m finally realizing even at this stage of the game that I still need to honor myself and acknowledge that I did go through a lot and I have accomplished a lot, and it’s enough, and I’m enough. If I don’t do anything else, it’s good.

Linda Lang:
And even people without super traumatic childhoods quite often have a lot of stuff back there that need healing. How would someone know that it’s either time to heal or that they need help with their healing?

Jana Wilson:
Well, I believe our emotions are gonna talk to us, right? Because the child’s going to start to act out in some way, your shadows come up. Right? You start to observe yourself behaving in ways that maybe you’ve judged in others. And now all of a sudden, it’s showing up. You’ve always abhorred somebody who over drinks and you find yourself coming home every night and drinking a bottle of wine. I mean, that’s definitely a sign you’re starting to check out. You’re not wanting to feel what you’re feeling. That’s always an indicator. The first step, you know, I believe in the beginning you always need support because I know we have all the answers within us, but we need the guide to help extract and bring those questions so we can get the answer.

Jana Wilson:
I heard Tony Robbins say once, the quality of your life depends on the quality of questions you ask yourself. And most people don’t know how to ask a question. They usually ask why questions, which is shaming and condemning. They’re not asking how does that feel, or what did you make that mean about you? Or you know, they’re not asking these clarifying or exploring questions. They’re asking kind of incriminating questions to themselves and then that just further shuts the emotions down, the inner child. And yeah.

Linda Lang:
Jana, your book is called?

Jana Wilson:
Wise Little One ~ Learning to Love and Listen to My Inner Child.

Linda Lang:
I want to thank you for sharing your story with us today. If people want to learn more about your work, where can we send them?

Jana Wilson]:
My website, www.janawilson.com. We lead retreats, and we take people through these processes that certainly help me heal and to help others heal as well.

Linda Lang:
That’s perfect. Perfect. Thank you for being my guest this week.

Jana Wilson:
It was a pleasure. Thank you, Linda, for having me.

Linda Lang:
And thank you for listening to this week’s edition of Exploring the Mystical Side of Life. You will find all of our conversations on YouTube and your favorite podcast platform. Come visit me at www.ThoughtChange.com and bring a little healing energy into your world. That’s it for this week. We’ll see you again next time. Bye for now.