How to Build Confidence and Rewrite Limiting Beliefs

Nikkiey: Real quick, the only ask I could ever have of you guys is to help spread the word so we can help more women lose body fat, build muscle, reach their goals and feel insanely confident. And the only way we can do that is if you rate, review and share this podcast. So the single thing I ask you to do is leave a review. It will take you 10 seconds, and it will mean the absolute world to me and may change the world of someone else.

Jennifer: There's no guarantee. As healthy and young as we appear to be, there really is no guarantee we're going to wake up tomorrow. So what would be the most empowering version of Jennifer? How would I treat myself? How would I feed myself, hydrate myself? Would I move? Would I sit all day in front of my computer and not do my sacred dance practice where I'm full of energy? What would that look like? Some of those questions can really help steer you back on track.

Nikkiey: What is going on, everybody? Welcome to The WarriorBabe Show. Today I am super excited. We have Jennifer Joy Jimenez. Am I saying that last name right?

Jennifer: You can say it with a J. It's actually from Mexico. My husband's from Mexico City. So the J in Latin American culture is pronounced as an H officially, so Jimenez. But you can say whatever you'd love.

Nikkiey: All right, awesome. Well, everybody, I'm super excited to have Jennifer here with us today. She is the founder of the health and well-being division at Brave Thinking Institute. She's also a highly sought-after speaker. She's a consultant, she's a trainer, she's a coach. She's just a badass woman, and I'm excited for her to be here today. She has done transformational retreats, workshops and the cutting-edge Vibrant Healthy Women program that she offers. And she's coached thousands worldwide to become more confident, healthy, joyful, abundant and full of life, so that they can feel empowered to make the difference that they have here in this world, which I love so much about you, Jennifer. And I'm selfishly so excited to get to know you a little bit more. So welcome to the show.

Jennifer: It is an honor. The pleasure is all mine. Thanks for having me.

Nikkiey: As I mentioned in your intro, you've guided so many individuals on their journey to personal transformation and wellness. So I'd love to start by asking you what initially led you on this path of becoming a transformational coach and a wellness expert? And what continues to fuel your passion on a day-to-day basis for helping others achieve their fullest potential?

Jennifer: Oh my gosh, I love that question. It's so juicy. I never thought that I would do exactly what I'm doing today. I always envied people who, when they were young, knew they wanted to be a doctor or had it all figured out, right? Raise your hand in your mind if you envied those people who felt like they had it all together. That was not me. But my first passion was in the wellness space and in dance.

My first dream was to be a professional dancer, and I was really blessed to be raised by a thought leader mother. The founder of the Brave Thinking Institute is my mom. She is a quintessential thought leader. She teaches transformational principles. She's been studying and teaching for over 50 years, which is super rare these days. There are very few people alive on the planet who can say that. So I was raised from a very young age to dream big and to believe that I could be and do and have anything. And I learned a lot of these principles early on.

So I went for it. I did not go the typical route. I fell in love with my husband while I was in high school on a vacation to Mexico, moved to Mexico to be with him and study dance, and then moved to New York and studied dance in New York. We got married and moved to LA, and I danced professionally for a few years. Then we started to have a family, and he's in the arts as well. And I found myself losing myself.

Oftentimes these beautiful opportunities to grow come when life occurs, right? We get really busy. I hung up my dance shoes because that bohemian, gypsy kind of lifestyle did not go very well with raising babies. And I went into sales. I was always really good with people, so I got this corporate sales job. And here I am under fluorescent lights in a cubicle, selling all day as the primary breadwinner, but longing and knowing deep down I was meant for more.

I meet so many people who feel this way. They bite the bullet. They go into a career or into work because they feel like they should, or they have to, or they're doing the responsible thing and bringing home the bacon. And so many women I know, and I'm sure you meet them every day, stop taking care of ourselves. We take care of everybody else around us: my kids, my husband, my team. I was doing well, making good money, but I got super burned out.

I've always been the one in my family to make sure we're eating healthy. So this gives you an example of how far from my truth and my center I had drifted. I wouldn't eat all day, and I would literally go into the break room and grab a handful of peanut M&Ms, because they had these bowls of peanut M&Ms, I don't know why, to keep us all sugared up in sales, and a Diet Coke. That was my breakfast and lunch.

Then I'd get home super fried, and I wasn't sleeping. I got to a real breaking point, and I was so unhappy with myself and with my career that I became cranky mom, the mom who's just barking orders. There was no spice and juice in my marriage. We were really on the rocks. I was actually considering leaving him. And here my mother is doing all this great work in the world, and I just kind of forgot what I knew. I forgot what I had been taught. I fell into the rhythm of regular life.

Then I went on a women's retreat with her. During that retreat, through some very specific coaching questions, processes and sacred ceremony, and we went to a vortex energy center, all of a sudden it was like my soul came back online. The real Jennifer was available to be heard, because I didn't have screaming babies around me all the time and all these responsibilities drowning out the true me. And I heard from my higher self that it was time to go back, quit my job, live my purpose and follow my mission.

I didn't have a business plan. I had no idea how to do any of this. But I listened. I went back to my job on Monday, I quit, and I began a transformational journey. I got back into coaching. I received support. And pretty quickly, because our souls are super resilient, when we make a decision to really follow a new path and put some support structures in place, we can start feeling better very quickly. And I did. Things really turned around.

Today I own a multimillion-dollar business. I speak and teach and coach and travel all over the world. And I'm still married. We'll be celebrating 30 years, which is insane to say out loud. My daughter just turned 25 last week, and I just had a spa day with her on Sunday. It was amazing. The spice is back in the marriage. We're more in love and happy. We have great sex. Even after 30 years, it's possible. I'm healthier than I've ever been. I'll be 50 this next year. And my passion is to help other women who may feel lost, or like they haven't found the true them, that empowered, confident, alive, vibrant, radiant version of them. That version exists. It's just been suppressed by all of life's demands.

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Nikkiey: Okay, that is exactly what we'll want to pull out for the whole podcast today, so women can latch on to all of the advice and insights you have on that specific thing. But wow, holy cow. You go, girl. That's so badass. I also heard my story in your story. I was in nursing first. I was in the healthcare field for nine years. I was a CNA, then I transitioned to a tech and got my BSN degree. And then I was like, screw it, I don't want to do this anymore. I didn't see growth in my potential moving forward, and I knew that God had a bigger passion and mission for me to accomplish in life. And that's where I fell into WarriorBabe.

So I hear you. What you said there is basically that when your higher self comes on board, you have to listen to it, because your soul has already made a decision, and then you have to allow your body to catch up and follow you on that decision. All of that was so powerful. In your years of working as a transformational coach, what do you think are the most common obstacles people face when it comes to approaching personal growth?

Jennifer: I would say, especially in our space, the messaging women are given. Probably one of the most painful pieces for me to really look at, face and repattern was all the messaging I was given as a young woman by culture, and particularly the professional dance world. It's also pervasive in the fitness world, which is that you have to look a certain way. You have to have 0% body fat. You have to be ripped from head to toe, at least in this day and age. At least this was the message I felt like I received, in order to feel good enough, to feel beautiful, to feel fit, to feel confident.

So as I really began to re-engineer who Jennifer is as a woman, as a mother, as an entrepreneur, and what it means to be healthy and successful, one of the first things I did was stare down those paradigms and the messaging that was coming at me, so that I could create a new, loving, accepting, confident version of me, regardless of the number on the scale, regardless of the size of my jeans, and really learn how to love myself healthy in a new way. Because the patterns I had learned as a professional dancer were starvation, no pain no gain, overwork and under-rest, which led to a lot of burnout. Then I took that same paradigm into the business world. I didn't want to live either of those results in this new version of me.

One of the things we really help clients look at is this: if you want a new result, whether you want to feel healthier, have more money, live your dream career or manifest the love of your life, whatever the result is that you're not happy with and want to change, you can't just change the behavior. Because at the end of the day, what drives our behavior and our actions are our thoughts. What drives our thoughts are our beliefs. Our subconscious beliefs are everything.

So if I believe that I'm not beautiful or healthy unless I weigh X amount at X percentage body fat, and therefore every day is either a good or a bad day depending on whether I've gained or lost a pound, that is jail. That is mind and soul jail. I lived it, and I really didn't want to live that reality anymore. What was required was for me to go down into those dark places and ask myself, where did I pick this up? Where did I learn that I had to be a certain size to be a successful, loved, confident woman?

Then pull that weed and begin to plant a new seed of a new belief: that I'm vibrant and healthy at any size and shape, that I can love myself today through healthy food that really nurtures and nourishes my body and soul, that I'm not nitpicking every tiny little calorie, and that I can move my body in ways that lift me up, light me up, and bring me longevity, aliveness and joy.

One of the things I found along the journey is conscious dance, or you could call it mind, body, spirit movement. Going from professional dance, where it was choreographed movement, to this new way of moving felt like I had been a caged bird that got let out for the first time and got to fly free. There are so many health benefits in dance. They're finding that, mental health-wise, it outperforms everything, including antidepressants, weightlifting and all other forms of fitness. And I'm a big fan of all of it. Let me just say, I think there's room for all of it. I'm not saying not to do those things. But when you see the studies on dance, the dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins that get released when, particularly as women, we turn on some music and just let our soul move freely, it's off the charts.

So that's my secret sauce. I bring conscious dance into everything I do: my coaching, my retreats, my training, my programs. But I would say really inspecting where we took on these beliefs, and recognizing the ones that are ours and the ones that aren't, is so key.

Nikkiey: I love that so much. I'm reading Joe Dispenza's book right now, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.

Jennifer: It's so good.

Nikkiey: So relatable in so many aspects. One of the things I find really hard, especially as I'm going on my own personal healing journey, is the ability to not judge yourself for the thoughts you have around the beliefs, the stories or the narrative that's going on. A lot of people will judge the way their body looks, or, like you said, the scale literally dictates their mood depending on whether it goes up or down, instead of getting curious about where those thoughts are coming from.

But in this fast-paced, day-to-day life we all live, actually bringing curiosity and awareness to the beliefs and narratives we hold about ourselves can be really hard for people to do, and so is actually sitting with them. I feel like you need to take the time out of your day to sit with understanding where these thoughts are coming from so that you can rewrite the narrative. So how would you guide people, in a fast-paced, busy day, to get to the core of it so they can truly transform and rewrite it into a different narrative?

Jennifer: First and foremost, the piece that was so helpful for me was guidance. We have a saying that when you're the one in the frame, you can't see yourself. You're so close to it that a lot of these thoughts are just happening on autopilot. So finding books, podcasts like your podcast, and coaching programs really helps give you the right kinds of questions.

One of the questions we ask every client is, what is your longing and discontent? We get two powerful signals from our soul, and they really are longing and discontent. So many people aren't willing to look at that because they're taught, well, you should just be grateful for what you have. You have so much. If we're here in the U.S., we live in this abundant world where we have food and a roof over our heads, so just be grateful and suck it up. Well, longing and discontent around certain behaviors really is a deep signal that some things may be slightly off, that there's an opportunity to grow.

Then we ask the question: if you could wave a magic wand, and time were no issue, money were no issue, age were no issue, education were no issue, and you had all the support in the world, what if you literally had a hundred million dollars in the bank? What would you love? Truly, if you could do anything, what would that look like? If you could change the narrative, if you could create a new relationship with yourself, and particularly with that inner critic?

And I'm sure you do a lot of this as well. First of all, you have to notice what you're noticing. You have to first be able to even hear the voice in your head, then find that internal pause button, interrupting that broken record, and not talk to yourself in a way you wouldn't talk to your best friend. We get to befriend ourselves and ask, would I allow these words out of my mouth if it were my child, or my pet that I love so much, or my best friend?

We all have this fierce defender within ourselves. If somebody were saying something mean to our spouse or our friend or somebody we love, we would defend them with all our might, right? So it's finding that being within ourselves and then becoming that inner coach, becoming that defender, lifting ourselves up instead of cutting ourselves down so much.

Nikkiey: Love that so much. Those are very insightful words for sure. The follow-up to that would be this: let's say we start to rewrite these narratives and we start to get more confident. We're being the teacher we have to be for ourselves. How would you guide somebody when, three months later, those thoughts, those feelings, those narratives and stories come back? How would you guide somebody at that point to recognize that maybe this is the universe testing you, to really question whether this is what you really want, the person you're becoming? How would you coach somebody who may get trapped in those beliefs and remind them of the direction they're going?

Jennifer: That's such a good question. One of the things we teach here at the Brave Thinking Institute is that we live in a spiral universe. We're either moving up the spiral of our becoming or we're falling back down. There is no staying in homeostasis in one place. Our soul self wants to grow. Our soul self is seeking growth.

So if you've worked with these beliefs and they start to revisit, one of two things is typically happening. Either we've stopped doing the things that were working, that helped us stay connected to a mindset of self-love, self-acceptance and expansion, and they got drowned out. Because literally everywhere you turn as a woman, you go to the grocery store and every magazine says lose 10 pounds in 10 days. Every scroll on your Instagram or Facebook is someone trying to sell us some sort of diet fad or new fitness regime, to make us think that if we could have the perfect body, then we'd feel really great about ourselves. The messaging really is about not feeling good, so that we'll buy the products, so that then we'll feel like we're lovable and loved and all of those things. So we've got to drown all of that out and put our attention on the relationship and the new conversation that we know is the empowering one.

So if you've done that and you're starting to hear the old stories come back in, either we've stopped reading, journaling and receiving coaching, and now the world is starting to seep into the subconscious that drives those thoughts, or you are doing the thing, but you've hit what we call your upper limit.

We all have a thermostatic setting for how happy, successful, alive and abundant we're used to feeling. Think about my house today. I'm here in Southern California, and it's been chilly, like 50 degrees, so my thermostat is going to kick in and bring me up to 69. But if it gets really hot, meaning I start getting more happy, more abundant, that internal thermostatic setting will also kick in to try to bring us back down. And oftentimes it'll wire and fire the old thought patterns that are still there, around not-good-enoughness, around needing to look a certain way to feel loved and accepted.

So again, our Brave Thinking tool number one is notice what you're noticing. It's that metacognitive mind. We have a soul self and we have the human self. The human self has those programmings, those old records or MP3s or whatever we want to call them, that run in our minds. So stay awake enough to hear the thought.

For me, I'm more somatic in nature. I'm a kinesthetic learner as a dancer, so I experience a lot of things in the body first. Sometimes I notice the thinking, but oftentimes it'll be an emotion, energy in motion. Any emotion is simply energy moving through us. So I notice: how am I feeling? Am I feeling low energy? Am I feeling judged? Am I feeling triggered? I notice that, and I can ask, what am I really needing right now? Where is this coming from? What would be an empowering action step that's in alignment with the version of Jennifer I want to be?

We can only live in the current moment. We can't live in tomorrow. We can just show up today and ask, what is the version of Jennifer today? What's an ideal day? What am I doing? Because there's no guarantee. As healthy and young as we appear to be, there really is no guarantee we're going to wake up tomorrow. So what would be the most empowering version of Jennifer? How would I treat myself? How would I feed myself, hydrate myself? Would I move? Would I sit all day in front of my computer and not do my sacred dance practice where I'm full of energy? What would that look like? Some of those questions can really help steer you back on track.

Nikkiey: So good. I feel like I'm talking to Joe Dispenza right now. You're so good, Jennifer. I love this. And I know this is going to help the community so much, because there are so many limiting beliefs that women carry. Joe says that 95% of us operate from our subconscious brain on a daily basis. About halfway through our life, we've already embedded all of those beliefs and stories that we carry, and only 5% of the time do we live consciously. So we're operating from our subconscious mind.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Nikkiey: Which is crazy, right? That's a little scary.

Jennifer: I know. When you finally hear that and realize it, it really is a wake-up call for sure.

Nikkiey: Yeah, totally. Quick break. If you're finding this episode helpful so far, it would mean a lot if you could hit pause for just a second, leave a quick rating or review, or share it with someone who could benefit from it. Your support helps more women discover these tools to build muscle, lose fat and feel confident. Thank you so much for being a part of this journey with me.

Nikkiey: So for women in the fitness space, like you mentioned, they have these thoughts and stories around the marketing strategies, or they're being yelled at on social media, or they're being told to look a certain way, or to lose 10 pounds by doing X, Y, Z. And they're taking all of this in at face value. They may not necessarily have the knowledge of what it takes to do things in a healthy and sustainable way. Or they're stuck in the stories they've carried from watching their mom grow up on diet after diet after diet, so they think they have to do the same.

So they're taking it in on the knowledge side, and then the emotional brain, which is in the middle of the brain, has carried those emotions, and that's the state of being they're in right now. What I love about what you're saying is, okay, this is your current self, dealing with these thoughts and patterns, but there's a future you, the future Jennifer, waking up on a daily basis saying, this is how I want to show up.

But there's a learning that has to take place, because the you now doesn't know that yet. The future you that you want to become has that knowledge and understanding, but the you now doesn't. So what would you recommend people do, not only to learn things, read books and listen to podcasts, but then to emotionally take it on and become it and turn it into their identity? What does it look like and mean to you to operate at your fullest potential?

Jennifer: Yeah. That's a really, really good question.

Nikkiey: I wasn't sure it was going to make sense there.

Jennifer: How does transformation occur? Quick, wait a second. How do you change your whole life?

Nikkiey: Yeah, right. How does it become a state of being?

Jennifer: No, I appreciate it. I'm so grateful for my mentors, the Joe Dispenzas and the Mary Morrisseys and the Wayne Dyers, those who are in their seventies or have passed on, who came before us. Because truly, my generation, and I think you're younger than me, your generation and those coming up after us, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. It has truly never been more codified how you can transform from who you are today into an actualized version of yourself than it is today.

I'm so grateful to my mother, because her story is fascinating. I probably wouldn't be here today if she hadn't found these principles. She got pregnant when she was a teenager, had my brother before she was 18, and then got diagnosed with fatal kidney disease, because back in the sixties they didn't have kidney transplants or dialysis or any of that. And I just get chills when I think about this: she had a chaplain who studied universal spiritual principles, all the things that Joe Dispenza and all these teachers have now codified into books and programs.

The chaplain basically sat with her and asked, what's been going on in your life in the last few months or years? My mother told her the story of the pregnancy, and feeling shamed, and literally being kicked out of her high school and her friend group. She was in this shame, this toxic energy, which created toxicity in her body. And the chaplain began to introduce her to these principles. She had the surgery, they removed the kidney, and they'd given her six months to live. She began to work with her mind and her energy in a new way and healed. Then she went on to have three more children, and she took her whole lifetime to study what had happened, all the books and all the training, and then codify it into a tested and proven transformational system.

Because these topics of quantum physics and how thoughts become things, and your question of how do I become my most actualized version of me, weren't easy to train people on for many, many decades. So our entire institute has dedicated decades of our lives to codifying these principles into coaching programs.

You could almost see it as a computer. When we first get a brand-new computer, like my brand-new Mac, there's no operating system installed on it. It's just available. When we come in as human beings, as babies, whether we're born in Asia or Africa or the United States or Canada, we're this open receptacle. Then through our upbringing, we get taught a language, we get taught how to eat, we get taught things by our parents, our society and culture, and our education that create our sense of identity.

Now, the soul self is pure light. It's pure love. It's pure energy. It's pure potentiality. And we've been given human will. I believe it's part of this spiritual life school. I've come into this human birth with preset lessons I'm supposed to learn, to become actualized and really become the highest version of me.

So when we take a look at what my current operating system is, to your point, the beliefs, the habits, the ways of thinking, all the information coming at me, I realize I can draw a line in the sand. I don't have to keep living this way just because this was the operating system that got installed. I can choose to install a new operating system of abundance, of self-love, of confidence. I can literally rewrite who I am. I have the conscious ability, through tested and proven principles, to do this. It literally is like installing a new operating system.

Maybe in the future there will be a way to do this in 24 hours. That's going to be awesome, where it's so fast, like you snap your fingers. That hasn't been my experience or the experience of the clients we work with. The way we do it right now is through repetition of a new operating system, new thoughts and new beliefs that then generate new actions and results, and through immersion.

Think about learning a new language. You can either do it through repetition, taking a once-a-week class in Spanish, or you do it like I did and pull off the Band-Aid. I moved to Mexico and literally didn't speak English for about nine months. My husband wouldn't let anybody speak to me in English. I remember coming back from that, and my parents said, you have an accent in English. So weird. I hadn't spoken English in so long. I swear to God, when Joe talks about how you can wire and fire new neuronal pathways, I felt them. It was painful to unhook and then hook into speaking Spanish. It was a thing. But now, for the rest of my life, I speak this new language. And this is the language of transformation. It really is learning a new language.

So we have 12-week programs, six-month and 12-month programs. I would say on average, if somebody really wants to overhaul their whole way of being, it's a minimum of 12 to 24 months of repetition through coaching. They're learning new curriculum, taking that and operating it in their life. They're learning new beliefs. They're literally installing a new way of thinking and being.

Then immersion is my favorite, because I love to teach and train through immersive experience. I literally just got back eight days ago from my transformational retreat in the Riviera Maya. It's amazing what can happen in seven days of transformational experiences. We do sacred spiritual ceremony. We do guided visualization and meditation. We do mind-body movement and TranscenDance, my codified process. There are these incredible experiences that create a strong emotional impact.

Think about the way we learn. That's why trauma is so hard to repattern, because it's a massive, strong emotional impact that created a response in you. It's not a logical thing. If you were ever in a car accident, every time you turn a curve really fast, your whole system responds, because it was a strong emotional impact. Well, you can create that in positive ways in transformation. So I have processes we do on retreat that create this incredible, strong emotional impact, where these women literally walk away from the retreat new. I feel like in seven days I can do what takes 12 months in a once-a-week coaching experience. It's insane. And then the two go together. Within a year, my clients haven't finished their transformational spiritual journey, but they are very different human beings for sure.

Nikkiey: Yes to all of that. That last bit, what makes the seven-day experience so different from a transformation over 12 months, is probably most likely the environment, right?

Jennifer: Yes.

Nikkiey: So I want to talk about that. I'm going to pin that right there, but yes to everything you're saying in that answer. Because I think about it in my own fitness journey. I was consciously incompetent at the beginning of my journey. I just immersed myself in all of the understanding. I wanted to get to a certain result, but I had no idea how to get there. So I learned nutrition. I learned working out. I learned what it took to be a bodybuilder. I learned those aspects of it.

And what I love that you said, for anybody listening as well, is that if you don't know macronutrients, or you don't know working out, or you don't know how to be a confident person, you have to learn those things. You have to learn what confidence is, you have to learn what compassion is, and you have to learn what macros are. Then you're able to take action and deploy those necessary things on a daily basis, in alignment with the person you want to become. And then doing it over and over and over again, which is the immersion of it, being it, doing it, experiencing it, learning and adjusting and optimizing the way you're handling it, is how you get to the transformation. Because then it becomes a state of being and part of your identity.

Jennifer: Exactly. Yes. Mic drop.

Nikkiey: And to the note of quantum physics, it's energy at that point, right? So the way you could do it in 24 hours, and correct me if I'm wrong, is maybe somebody literally changing their state, which is so hard to do, bringing their energy from suffering to abundance, and then acting like that all of the time.

Jennifer: Yeah. I'll tell you a quick story. I actually have a 24-hour miracle. I have quite a few, actually.

Nikkiey: Yes, please.

Jennifer: When I said you could do it all at once, I was referring more to your entire life, everything. You go from money struggle to millionaire, you go from being unhealthy and addicted to food and soda to all of a sudden being a healthy person who eats really well and has a super-fit body. You know what I mean? If that could happen in one day, awesome. We'd just go into a hologram machine and come out a new person.

But I have a few really incredible stories. When I first started to discover conscious dance and these different modalities, I learned that this is a spiritual practice. This is a mind, body, spirit practice. This is really a practice of what Joe talks about, which is generating a high vibrational frequency state, but through music and dance, which is like, sign me up. Can I just do that all day? And I began to codify my own version, combining what we were teaching in transformational principles and coaching with conscious dance.

That world has a bit of a reputation for being very hippie, and I'm super spiritual, but I'm not hippie. I'm kind of in the middle. I'm a good example of the real world meeting the spiritual, new-agey world. How do you bring it to normal people in the real world, raising a family, making a living, paying taxes? How do you do this? So I began to play with it.

My daughter was very young, maybe 18 months or two years old, and I was the director of the mind, body, spirit workshops for the Association for Global New Thought. My mother was the president of it. So I'm maybe 26, super young, and I'm creating these workshops. This woman comes to one of my TranscenDance workshops, and she had a locked shoulder. She walks up to me with tears in her eyes. She really wants to take the class, but she doesn't think she can, because she can't even lift her hand over her shoulder. She says, I've been to 15 different orthopedic doctors and chiropractors and energy healers, and I've done all the things, and nothing's worked.

So I reminded her of a couple of things. I said, you need to feel it to heal it. Our issues live in our tissues. You have an inner body wisdom. I believe we all have an inner physician within that is guiding us toward our most healthy, well self. And very few environments actually give you permission to go within and move your body from that metacognitive self, moving the human self toward healing, toward expansion, toward aliveness.

I said, you may not consciously know what I'm even saying right now, because that's really out of the box for a lot of people. But just trust. As you go through these 10 stages of TranscenDance, I'll give you some frameworks to work with. Your body will know how to release it if there's any emotion locked in there that has to do with any of this. Is that possible? And she said, yeah, definitely possible. I said, okay, so just move your body toward pleasure. Move your body in ways that feel really good. Whatever wants to wash through, it could be joy, it could be anger, it could be sadness, whatever it is, just let yourself feel as you move.

So we start the class. There are about 100 people in the class, so I lost track of her. She comes over at the end with tears streaming down her face, and I'm thinking, oh no, I hope she didn't hurt herself. I was super young to this. I'm not sure what she's going to say to me. As she gets closer, this huge smile comes across her face, and she raises her hand over her shoulder. She says, I haven't been able to do this in over nine months. The pain is gone. I haven't been able to sleep. I haven't been able to move. I don't know what just happened, but I really hope this sticks. And it did. The pain never came back. It was emotional.

Now, I'm not saying TranscenDance can heal every illness or problem or stuck body part, but it's all interconnected. We are a mind, body, soul system. And I could tell you many, many stories of those kinds of things happening, because we move into a higher vibrational frequency. TranscenDance, or conscious dance in this modality, is about moving from pain to pleasure, from fear to faith, from shame and not feeling good about ourselves to self-love and self-acceptance, through music, through breath, through movement.

Another client of mine, speaking of repatterning limiting beliefs, is, I want to say, somewhere in her mid-sixties to mid-seventies. It's hard to tell, and she didn't tell me her age. To honor her, she says she has about a hundred pounds she'd like to lose. She came in because she knew the regular dieting and exercise path, calories in, calories out, was clearly not working for her. There were deeper emotional issues she knew she wanted to address, which is a lot of the work I do.

So we were getting ready to go on retreat. I do another retreat in Costa Rica. She really wanted to go because there's a mile-long Superman zip line that she just knew was going to bust her fears. But as we got closer to the retreat, she was feeling really nervous and scared, because she had knee pain and hip pain that was super debilitating. She wasn't able to go up or down stairs easily, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to participate in some of the excursions we had planned. I was also thinking, I don't know, there's a minimum mobility requirement on a lot of these things.

But I said, here's the thing. Even if you can't do everything we have planned, there's so much of this retreat you will be able to do. What if we stare down the limiting beliefs and the paradigms that say you shouldn't go at all, and we start where we are with what we have? We just lean in and do the thing you can do.

I take clients to this incredible double labyrinth. One of the things I love to do, which I learned from my mentors, is going to energy vortex centers. It helps you connect even more easily to your own soul self, because the energy is so powerful. It's almost a two-mile labyrinth, and there are two columns of vortex energy, a feminine energy column and a masculine column. We'd already done some powerful work leading up to this, but inside the labyrinth, as she tells it, this energy begins to move through her. She begins to have conversations with her higher self, which she calls God, and she hears these messages and gets clarity about her own voice and sharing her voice.

She walks out of the labyrinth and goes to walk up the stairs to this huge dome, where we do a beautiful sound healing bath and movement. She walks up the stairs with zero pain. The hip pain is completely gone. And I know it's not just that one thing. It's a combination of the experiences we had leading up to it. But bottom line, she came on that retreat with one set of conditions, and she left the retreat different, and it's been seven months and the pain hasn't returned. She calls it a miracle, but it's all energy, when we tap into this energy.

Nikkiey: Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent it is. I got chills with both of those transformations. That's so beautiful. And I personally understand that it's about moving the emotions out of the body. I'm working with an energy coach right now, and what we've done over the last seven weeks is incredible. It's insane. I don't want to take up time, but it's been wild, the experiences I've gone through, which are so freaking cool.

I'm so interested in your work, even selfishly for me, tagging it onto my healing journey and being immersed in the experiences you have to offer. I'm definitely going to drop all of your links and information in the description below for anybody listening who's also interested. One little thing about TranscenDance: what inspired you to create that?

Jennifer: Honestly, it was the thing that healed what I call my body abuser persona: the inner critic, constantly judging myself, constantly not feeling like enough. We don't have time for the whole deeper story. Maybe I'll come back another time to talk about it. But with my daughter's pregnancy and birth, it was the first time I really started to take care of my body.

As a professional dancer, I was abusing my body. I get pregnant, I come back online, and I'm like, oh, I'm tired. I need to sleep. I need to eat. I need to rest. Because I was taking care of her, I could feel my body's signals again. And because of my upbringing, my mother had all these midwives who gave me all these books about natural birth. So I trained for natural birth like I was training to climb Kilimanjaro. Visualizations, my birth plan, ocean waves every night, literally meditating on it.

And I had a 50-hour labor and birth, five-zero, that ended with an epidural, which I desperately didn't want. At that time I was very much attached. Attached energy is a constriction energy. And I approached birth the way I had approached a lot of things, from a controlling, judgmental, attached place. That was still my default mode in my twenties. I intuitively knew something was off. Mind over matter certainly did not work.

So I became very hungry and thirsty to figure out what had just happened and how to fix it, because I knew I wanted more babies and I didn't want that to happen again. That's when I found energy medicine, the mind-body connection and conscious dance. I started to study with some of the best in the field and became certified in these modalities. But none of the other modalities felt quite right. TranscenDance just came to me. It's one of those things where spirit puts the pieces of the puzzle together. It was through my own exploration of healing myself that the pieces came into place.

My next birth was two hours, an all-natural dream birth. My third baby was 90 minutes, all natural. Now, I wasn't going for fast, just for the record. But in my experience, when your body, mind and soul are aligned, and you surrender and trust that your body knows what it's doing, and you've taken good care of yourself, you're in flow. When you're in flow, trust, body wisdom and energy, there is no time and space. It just opens.

And I wanted to learn how to harness that, not just for birth, because I wasn't going to have more babies, but for dream building, for any kind of result I wanted to create in life. I don't have a traditional entrepreneurial background. I dropped out of college to be a professional dancer, and I wanted to go from money struggle to someday maybe owning my own multimillion-dollar business. That meant really installing new operating systems in my mind and in my heart.

So conscious dance, and TranscenDance in particular, is that center point. It's where everything meets. It's kind of like Joe Dispenza's meditation, but for me, because I'm a mover, because I'm a kinesthetic learner. Yes, I sit and meditate, but this is a moving meditation, a transcendental meditative practice with music and movement that supercharges whatever you want to do, whether it's healing your body or manifesting next-level experiences, because we are walking magnets. For me, it's a tuning place.

This is my studio, by the way. I manifested this home. It's a big, beautiful studio so that I can do my TranscenDance, lead clients through TranscenDance and lead TranscenDance facilitator trainings. It's so powerful. So that's how I got inspired.

Nikkiey: That's beautiful. Thank you for being inspired to make it and to share it. Your whole message today has been very resonant for me, and I know it's going to resonate so much with the audience: to become more aware and self-aware and curious about their thoughts, to be open to learning new ways of breaking those patterns, and maybe to incorporate TranscenDance or any of your teachings into their life. If this resonates with any of you, I would highly recommend checking out Jennifer's work. I'll link it in the description below. I can speak to it a hundred percent: this work is so transformative, not only for understanding your higher self, but for following your higher self so that you can live in purpose.

I know we're coming up on time, and I want to be respectful of your time. There are some things I want to pin, like environment and confidence, which I think were huge things I wanted to get through. So you're definitely going to have to come back. I'm just saying that right now. As we wrap up, thank you so much for being here, for your wisdom and your insights, and for your passion for helping others unlock their own potential and live authentically. It's truly inspiring. Thank you for doing your work. More people need to do this work, and I believe this is the future of where we're going. So as we wrap up, what is one piece of advice or key takeaway you hope our listeners will carry with them as they work toward embodying their confident, fulfilled selves?

Jennifer: I feel some emotion rise up, and it's that you are perfect and whole just as you are. Not when you lose the 20, 50 or a hundred pounds, or whatever the number is. You are capable, you are powerful, you are amazing, you are gifted. You have gifts and talents within you.

So when you can hear that message, and then begin to rise above the part of you that wants to tear yourself down for not being enough or not doing all the things you think you should be doing, and begin to be your own friend and celebrate the times when you do choose something healthier over something unhealthy, know that part of you is what led you to this podcast. That part of you is what's leading you to grow and to find solutions like TranscenDance.

By the way, I'm going to give you tons of free gifts and free TranscenDance classes for your whole community. I would love for you to come and dance with us anytime. It's live, it's virtual, it's on Zoom. You can do it in a chair. You can do it in bed. Of course you can do it standing and moving, but it's for all mobility levels.

But the bottom line is, if we can start right where we are and feel whole and feel like we're enough as we are, that part of us is truly what leads us toward healing, transformation and ultimate wholeness. That part of us knows how to help us create homeostasis and happiness, and that is the truth of our being. That is where confidence really lives. Confidence isn't when we hit some dollar amount or weight number, or whatever outside measurements we think we need to feel successful or confident. Confidence is a cultivated energy that starts with loving ourselves right where we are now.

Nikkiey: That's incredible. I love that. Thank you for sharing it. Where can everybody find you? I'm going to link it in the description, but I love having everybody say it, because some people will just remember it and go find you that way. And where can we get the free stuff?

Jennifer: The overarching institute is Brave, B-R-A-V-E, bravethinkinginstitute.com. There are actually five divisions. The health and well-being division is the purple B. You'll see all of my resources there, and there are free gifts there. To get a free TranscenDance class, go to BTI, like the Brave Thinking Institute acronym, so bti.com/dance. Then type in the coupon code freeclass, all lowercase, when you get to the checkout page, and it'll zero out the price and you can come to TranscenDance.

I teach two Saturdays a month at 10 a.m. Pacific time. There are a couple coming up in the next couple of weeks. That coupon will not expire, so whenever you feel ready to come and move, let's do it. I think it would be great.

Nikkiey: Amazing. Thank you for that. And again, everything will be in the description below, guys. Jennifer, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate your time.

Jennifer: My pleasure. It was so great to talk. Thanks again.

Nikkiey: Great. Bye, everyone.

Nikkiey: Hey, really quick before you go, I have one small favor to ask. If this episode brought you value or sparked something in you, take just a moment to hit that review button. Your rating and review make all the difference, helping more women discover the tools they need to transform their fitness and their confidence. It takes less than a minute, but it can change the path of someone else's journey. Thank you so much for leaving that review. I appreciate you so much.