Science, Spirituality, and the Subconscious Self | Maria Micha, ep 214

Jennifer Norman:
Today's conversation may completely change the way you think about healing trauma and the hidden forces shaping your life. We're going to learn how patterns of anxiety, burnout, people pleasing, relationship swings, and that persistent feeling of being stuck aren't random at all, but signals from your subconscious asking to be understood. My guest today is Maria Micha, a spiritual psychotherapist, clinical mental health counselor and hypnotherapist, shamanic practitioner, and transformational healer who has spent nearly three decades helping people heal emotional wounds, reconnect with their intuition, and rediscover their soul's purpose. Maria's work blends psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, subconscious healing, and shamanic wisdom into a deeply holistic approach to transformation. Her path has taken her from London to Singapore, Bali, Phuket, and now Los Angeles, where she continues helping people release trauma, reclaim authenticity, and awaken to a more aligned life. In this episode, we're going to explore the subconscious mind, inherited emotional patterns, spiritual awakening, trauma healing, soul purpose, and why true transformation often begins beneath consciousness awareness. If you've ever felt disconnected from yourself, exhausted from carrying invisible emotional weight, or curious whether there's a deeper purpose guiding your life, you'll want to keep listening. Let's welcome Maria Micha to the show.

Jennifer Norman:
Welcome, Maria. I am so happy to have you today and have this ecstatic conversation.

Maria Micha:
Oh, me too. I've been looking forward to our conversation.

Jennifer Norman:
I really appreciate it. Now your work lives at such a fascinating intersection: psychology, spirituality, subconscious healing, and soul work. I would love to start with your realization regarding traditional psychotherapy. You believed that something deeper was missing. What was that realization for you?

Maria Micha:
Actually, I been working for 29 and a half years in October 2026. It's 30 years since I started working.

Jennifer Norman:
Congrats.

Maria Micha:
Thank you. So back in the late 90s when I started working, I could feel that psychotherapy was addressing people's thoughts and it was helping them change the way they think, which is very important. Everything starts with a thought, and then it would change their behavior. But after a lot of psychotherapy, people would still wake up in the middle of the night and they would be dreading a relationship or something their mother had said when they were five. So I could feel that they were changing externally. They were changing their thoughts, their behaviors would be altered and would be leading them to better outcomes. But their subconscious mind, who they truly were, their inner child, was still struggling. What was available to me at that point was hypnotherapy.

Maria Micha:
So I became fascinated with hypnotherapy. I started hypnotherapy and that gave me a very profound, a deep tool to. To access both their minds and their behavior. Through traditional psychotherapy, I was using Adlerian therapy and systems therapy. And then with hypnotherapy, I was able to go deeper down, hypnotize them so they could access their subconscious mind. And that was for my approach, a revolution. People would have a hypnotherapy session where they would meet their younger self at 5, at 10, at 15, they would cry their heart out.

Maria Micha:
That was the difficult part, both for them and for me. But when they would come out of it, they would say, I'm a different person. I know, I know I'm different. As a result, I started going deeper into the subconscious mind. And as a child, I always had this voice that is still with me, that is telling me which direction to go. This voice told me to become a therapist at nine. It also told me to go to the UK and study at a time in the 80s where there was no Internet TV. I grew up in Athens, Greece, so was very local.

Maria Micha:
We didn't have a lot of foreign channels. But I knew that I wanted to go to the UK and I followed all that. And then when the voice said get married, I did have a child, I did. And when the voice said it's time for a divorce, I did. And then I went to Singapore and Bali and Phuket and here I am. And that was all me. I'm calling it the Voice, but it's really my intuitive wisdom. And you need to be quiet in order to listen to your intuitive wisdom.

Maria Micha:
And what I want to tell your audience is that when are all born with it, we all have it, but we lose it later in life.

Jennifer Norman:
Mmm, you said so many intriguing things. I think that hypnotherapy is just so fascinating. Why do you think this works? What is the modality and the process by which hypnotherapy is able to get underneath the conscious mind and get into those underlying aspects that we might not even be aware of?

Maria Micha:
That is the problem. We're not aware of it. So something is not feeling a hundred percent aligned, but we cannot put our finger in it. Hypnotherapy is an old practice and was also a practice by Sigmund Freud and what he does through I use words, I don't use a pendulum and I don't use any other objects as some other therapists are asking you to look into and use. You slowly get hypnotized because I Want it to be very natural so that people can recreate this in their lives. Because you can get hypnotized lightly. You go in a light trance by looking at the clouds, as you're looking at the clouds that are passing by, your cognitive mind, which is what we're using now to talk to each other, what we're using to do math or to do our work or to have an intense conversation with a partner, is going down, is shutting down, is going to sleep in a way. So you are putting to sleep your cognitive mind, your cerebral mind, and then you turn inwards and as you turn inwards, you can listen to your subconscious mind.

Maria Micha:
So as a hypnotherapist, I will ask particular questions that will help you go deeper. And I use deepeners, as we call them in hypnotherapy, where I might say, now you're stepping into a train and this train is taking you backwards. And now you're 37, you're going to 35, going to 32. And I take you back to the age that I know there is some trauma and something to be released. And now you're five and the doors are opening. Look around you, you're outside, who's there? They're five years old, who's waiting for you, what has happened in your life? And it is amazing how people go back to that age and they see their grandmother that is no longer alive, the person that hurt them, the person who empowered them. And you tend to have a conversation with your inner child at 5 and you tend, you can tell your 5 year old you don't have to be worried about that anymore. You know why? Because they're 38 and you don't depend on that person.

Maria Micha:
And that conversation feels so real and so soothing and always in the end, I ask the 38 year old, 50 year old, 60 year old to hug their inner child and create a new home for them in their heart. And always go back at the end of the day and check how their inner child is doing. And that creates such a beautiful relationship with our subconscious mind, but also with the young one in us that we have forgotten about. And we can start remembering what did we want to do when we're five. We had so much wisdom when we were younger, before all this noise from the world that is telling us who we need to be and what we should do came over. We reconnect with that part. We reconnect with our true desires of where we want to be and who want to show up in the world. And and that makes a tremendous difference in people's lives.

Jennifer Norman:
I find it so extraordinary. As I get older, I speak to so many people. They could be in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and they'll always talk about that thing that happened to them when they were a kid or that thing that somebody said along the way. And it shapes their whole entire world. It shapes the way that they make decisions, it shapes the way that they see themselves. And they may consciously know certain of those things that are impacting them. And then they'll look and say, well, this is why I am the way that I am, because my mother did this, my father did that, my teacher said this about me. And they carry that with them.

Jennifer Norman:
And it's so hard to let go. I heard this amazing quote which it just struck me to the core, which was inside every one of us as we are growing to be adults. There is this little child who's scared and just wants to feel safe. There's a teen that's angry who just wants justice, and there's an adult who's tired and just wants peace. And so no wonder we're all walking around with all of this mayhem going on, anxiousness, depression, etc, in our lives because we haven't come to terms and given those people hugs along the way. I love how you take people back through their lives and are able to just so viscerally and tangibly reconnect them to that part of them that needs to feel the love that they might not have necessarily felt at that time. Giving back, whether it's forgiving, whether it's saying it's okay, I got you, whether it's just making peace with it, because then you can go on, you don't have this baggage just holding you back. Wow, that is so cool.

Maria Micha:
So what I tell people and how I help people make peace internally, but also ignite that through passion, is I help them understand that pain is part of human existence. Unfortunately or fortunately, human life has pain because we grow through pain. So I help them see that all those painful, horrific experiences, in some cases, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, there are people who are having the most atrocious, painful, inhumane experiences that no one should ever have to face. However, there is pain and we need to acknowledge it and we need to accept what has happened because the past is unchangeable, the facts are unchangeable, but the way I feel about it is changeable. And I need to process that pain with the intention to turn it into my gold. And once we process the pain and once we take the bird's eye view and we understand why certain experiences happen in our lives, then we can really find our power. We turn our pain into our power. And this is at the core of my therapy with people.

Maria Micha:
And once they understand that those events happened, they didn't happen for them to grow, but they happened, they took place. And once I have them, it can be my toolkit, my arsenal. I can use it to reignite my life. I will give an example that I think a lot of people who understand social media, who are creators of social media, will understand.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay.

Maria Micha:
The most compelling way to influence others is to use your own personal story. Whether it's a personal story of success, whether it's a personal story of pain that led to success. But it took you from extreme pain to desperation, to feeling lonely, to feeling there is no hope. To start seeing some rays of light in the distance to now saying, I think I have a path to walk on and I can see the vision of my future. This pain can become what actually helps you evolve and what brings you into your true power. I think that no one would ever choose the pain. But once it has happened, can we shift the way we see it? Instead of going down to depression, anxiety, and we say it happened? I want to release the pain and I want to see what tools has given me to reignite the life that will help me have the experience, that will bring me joy and will bring me contentment.

Jennifer Norman:
That's incredible. I think also as adults, we tend to feel like, okay, now I'm mature, I need to, I guess, dampen that sense of immaturity, that inner child, that little annoying voice that might be so needy because I've got real shit to do. And so there might be some sort of a disconnection that they feel that they have to show up in a... In the world in a certain way, looking polished, looking like the CEO, looking like the leader, feeling like that. But I guess if you don't address all of these things, they're still there. And they may necessarily come up and create that disconnection that if that's not integrated, could cause problems down the road.

Maria Micha:
It does. And that's why through my method, the Anagenesis method, I help people integrate all these parts of them, and then they become one. So instead of having a bowl of pain in your stomach, that's usually where we hold on to our pain. Yeah, yeah. And if you feel that, let's say, in the center, is your grandmother telling you're a bad kid because you did not finish your dinner. And then on top of that, there is another layer of your teacher second grade telling you're stupid. And then when you are fourth grade, someone bullied you and told you that teeth are crooked and you keep accumulating pain. So it started with a tiny little ball, and now it is a huge ball of pain that you're carrying.

Maria Micha:
So through the energenesis method, which is psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, shamanic practices, and energy healing and energy reading, I help people discard all these layers and also understand what each layer means and how they can release it and see what tools it has given them to make them more powerful in their current moment in life. But I feel that if you talk with my clients, the one thing that they're going to tell you is that what I'm really good at is helping them recreate their lives. I also help them identify where they truly want to go. A lot of us have jumped on a train that we're told is good. Take the train takes you to Oregon. It's really good. Oregon is beautiful. It is by the water, the air is fresh.

Maria Micha:
But maybe I don't want to go to Oregon. Maybe I want to go to New York. But if I don't know which train I want to jump on, and the person who told me, get that train, it's a really good one, was powerful in my life at that point or was successful, but could not really be aligned with what I wanted. That means that I'm living a life in Oregon that could appear very nice on the outside, but internally I'm not expressing my soul's purpose and I'm unhappy. Identifying why we came to this life, why we're reincarnated in this moment is so important because when we do, all the challenges, all the difficulties, they become meaningful and they're just a carrier that will deliver us to the life that we truly want to experience.

Jennifer Norman:
Now, you just mentioned reincarnation and your soul's purpose, which are quite different terms versus what you might hear from a traditional psychotherapist. And so, yeah, let's about talk, talk about this part of it, because the spiritual aspect of it, which is so fundamental to what you're doing, is unique. I mean, certainly there are practitioners, but I find that it might be a growing area because before it was very much more Western problem-solution, even perhaps medicate, just go through these steps, etc. But talking about the soul and the spirit and things like past life regression, I'm just curious how you started to learn more about this and why you think that it helps so much from a psychotherapeutic perspective for people to heal.

Maria Micha:
I want to say, first of all, that's something that a lot of us are not aware of, is that the definition of psychology, psychology 101, the first lesson, the first module that you take when you go to a bachelor's of science, is that psychology is the study of the mind, the brain, the spirit, and the soul. But who have only been studying the mind and the brain for very good reasons. It's because it's replicable. Replicable means that once I do an experiment on 1000 people and I am studying the brain or the mind, I can recreate the same results. My results are statistically correct. And I'm not getting a person who says, oh, in the previous life, I think I was Jesus, or in this life, I think that my soul's purpose is to save Los Angeles from the Malibu fires in the future. So you can replicate it. So science, the science of psychology.

Maria Micha:
Science become science. Exactly. It wouldn't have randomized results that they could not present as scientific. And the first psychologist, at the end of the 19th century, very, very scared about how they would come across, because they were called pseudoscientists. Pseudoscientists means that they are fake scientists. As a result, psychology, in order to have power and in order to be recognized, focused on only half of us, only on mind and brain. But we left out the spirit and the soul. And this is what our subconscious mind is screaming at us to listen to our subconscious mind say, hey, you are thinking, you are feeling.

Maria Micha:
You're using your brain to create new thoughts. Wonderful. And you're using your brain to give me new behaviors. Amazing. But there is more in me, and you're not listening to me. As a result, we get sad, we get depressed, we get anxious. We don't know why our life does not go the way we want. So what I'm helping people do is address all of them holistically through hypnotherapy.

Maria Micha:
They understand their psyche, they understand their soul. And through the shamanic practices, we connect with our spirit. We all have spirit. We are all spirit. That's what makes us different. That's why we look at an event. We both read about the Holocaust, but we're all going to have a completely different experience.

Maria Micha:
Some people will start crying. Some people will feel, oh, my God, I think I need to do something about the world today so that something like that does not happen again. And some of us, we'll start having a vision we don't understand where it's coming from. As if we're in Auschwitz and we are there. And we don't know why it's our spirit, whether we had a life in Auschwitz. Or whether we are very intuitive. So we can connect with the people who are there. And we get.

Maria Micha:
Some people have the smell of how it was there. Or they have very clear vision of colors, of people crying. This is our spirit that is unique to us. And when we don't understand it, when we don't investigate it. We are very, very much likely to live a smaller life than what we would experience.

Jennifer Norman:
You said some things that I really just want to put an exclamation point on. And that is that the way that this sort of medicine or practice evolved was based on evidence. And so in the physical, we're able to measure it. It's replicable. There are clinical tests which could prove that certain people would benefit from this certain type of therapeutic protocol, if you will. But what happens is that there's so much more to us than just the physical. There is the soul, emotions, all of these.

Jennifer Norman:
And now sometimes people can say, we are starting to measure emotions through qualitative research. And do you feel good, better, best, that sort of thing. But it doesn't still hold as much weight as quantitative data and approaches, certainly. But how do you measure soul? How do you measure spirit? It's almost ludicrous and silly and funny to think that man would dare or even think that that would be something that would be reasonable. Because it's so much more powerful when we start talking about quantum and astral field and all of these things where there's so much power. If we think about imagination and thought. All of these things that we're thinking. All these thoughts had to derive from some imaginative place. Which was ethereal. Until somebody, some people brought it into the physical and created it.

Jennifer Norman:
And that is the physical world that we have. Which is heavier and denser. And because we can see, smell, taste, touch, hear it. It becomes so much more real to us than soul and spirit. Sometimes we forget that part of us. But, yes, I think that it's really fascinating to remember that there are so many different avenues and so many different ways, so many different paths to really understanding the full expression of you.

Jennifer Norman:
Which is so beautiful that more and more folks are becoming enlightened. And thinking beyond the physical into consciousness. Collective consciousness is elevating. As we are realizing that we are so much more than bodies. And that we are having these beautifully spiritual experiences in human form. Right, exactly. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
I'm curious, Maria. Do you think of the spirit and the soul as being one and the same or do you separate them somehow?

Maria Micha:
I think there's an overlap, but I would say they're different.

Jennifer Norman:
How do you differentiate?

Maria Micha:
A spirit is what makes us as our essence, and it is what we use to connect with the spiritual world. And for people who don't believe in all that, and they think it is very woo woo. When you're dreaming, your cognitive mind is asleep, your cognitive mind is not there, so your subconscious mind is awake, but your spirit is awake. And that's when your spirit can connect with the spiritual world. That's how you see your dead grandmothers or a friend who has passed on, and they give you a message that is so pertinent to your life. Sometimes the spirit world is coming to help us because we're struggling with something and they will give us a message. And when you, if you remember it and if you actually apply it in your life, you can resolve a very big problem and an obstacle. But we often say, oh, that was just something that happened, was a coincidence, or we won't even implement it.

Maria Micha:
Your spirit is awake at nighttime, but your spirit can also be awakened when you're working with a shamanic practitioner or through hypnotherapy. Your soul is different. Your soul is that internal space where you hold the true essence of who you are. Who am I? Who do I want to show up in the world? When I'm outside and I am meeting people that have never met before, how does my soul touch theirs? And it could be a smile. It could be seeing someone in Starbucks crying. And you might say, are you okay? Do you need any help? It could be me looking at people screaming in the streets. And I'm terrified. I'm scared because my soul is traumatized by a very similar experience that probably experienced when I was very young and I didn't have much defenses.

Maria Micha:
So there is a distinction between the spirit and the soul, and there is distinction between the mind and the brain. The brain needs the physical organ. It's how do I think and how do I create thoughts and how do I write and how do I bring my words together. For example, I'm bilingual. I speak perfect Greek, and I speak English as well. And my brain, the physical organ, has to decide which language I'm going to use and has to string the words together. But my mind can do math. My mind can see where am I going to be an hour from now? I can use my mind to describe that in an Hour from now, I will be doing Pilates.

Maria Micha:
So there is a huge difference between the two. But the mind and the brain overlap, and the soul and the spirit also overlap. And when we manage to bring all four of them together, that's when magic happens. And that you can do through hypnotherapy, through meditation, through taking a webinar that merges cognitive thought processes and also your brain, changing the structure of your brain, but also through meditation, shamanic practices, it incorporates the spirit and your soul. And you come out of this webinar or seminar or a retreat, and you feel so empowered because you have brought together all four modalities. Your spirit, your soul, your mind and your brain, and you have felt it in your body. All these entities that don't live outside of our body, they live in our body. And every time I'm shifting one of those, or I'm changing the energy one of those I'm feeling of my body, I will be feeling a lot better.

Jennifer Norman:
I tend to feel that way with breath, work or even singing. You know, sometimes if you're doing some, like, thing, if some people say in church, if they're singing in church or. Yes, during Christmas time or what have you, then there's just something that makes them feel floaty or just tingly and just vibrating a bit differently. You get a different energy about you. And it might be almost like a call for integration. And a big part of shamanic healing is sound and the drums and kind of bringing all of that immersive activity together to create that feeling and that almost like that container for people to have these really ecstatic moments and these real, I guess, period of learning more and going deeper into themselves.

Maria Micha:
There are different ways to access it. So I do drumming as well when I do my retreats. And the drumming is to call in the spirit, but you're also synchronizing the soul and the spirit of all the people that are there, but also through the drumming, because it's repetitive and you can, in a way, predict what is coming next. Your mind and your brain can shut down, but everyone is vibrating in very similar energy. That doesn't mean they're going to have the same vision, although it happens every now and then. One or two will get aligned, they will get synchronized, but they are having the same energy. This is the reason that when you are in a retreat with 10, 15, 2,000 people, sometimes your meditations are a lot deeper because everyone is meditating at the same time.

Maria Micha:
And the collective subconscious mind that you also talked about and Jung Talked about it extensively. Carl Jung, a renowned psychotherapist. It comes together and you're using their power and they're using your power. And as a result, your meditations and your shamanic journeys are going to take you a lot deeper. This is why I'm saying we need to recreate communities. We're very isolated and we're wondering why we're depressed and sad because we don't have a community. Yeah, I live in a building with 450 units. Most people, when you see them in the elevator, they're very nice for another two minutes because they know it's going to last one or two minutes.

Maria Micha:
If that was going to be extended, they wouldn't be so open. They wouldn't be so forthcoming with. How are you? How's your day? Oh, I see you're carrying something heavy. Do you need help or. Your dog is very cute. We do very well in a short period of time in a confined space. But when we have more time, we're scared. We're scared to talk, we're scared to show up.

Maria Micha:
We don't know what we're going to say and we need to go to our apartments and we find so much calmness and isolation. And yes, there is calmness, but there is also a lot of sadness. We need to come back together again. That's when we're at our best.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, there's so many studies about that, too. I mean, speaking about the science aspect of it, about. Yeah, loneliness epidemic and how we are becoming so isolationist and we've done it to ourselves. I mean, I think that with modern society, we think that we've been helping ourselves by creating these efficiencies, these conveniences, these. Okay, right at the... In the palm of my hand. I can order things, I can entertain myself. I can learn new things.

Jennifer Norman:
I can. But it separates us from other people. It closes us off. It makes us skeptical and afraid in many cases of other people and what their intentions are. And yeah, I think that we haven't necessarily looked at... Okay, what is the long game here? Or even if we thought that we did think about it, then I don't necessarily think that we've course corrected a lot of the issues that have come across socially and mentally, frankly, about what we've created with modern society.

Maria Micha:
You said something very interesting. What is the long game here? If I may give my 2 cents on that. The long game is to find why you're here, identify why you're on this earth. You told me earlier, before we started the recording, that you were in the beauty world for many, many years. And then you decided to switch. You listened to your soul's purpose. There was a part of you that said, this is beautiful. We've done that.

Maria Micha:
We succeeded. And now I want something else from me. I want something that expresses the true essence of me in a different way, in a more profound way. And I want to give back to the world. We don't understand that. Every time we give back, every time that I ask someone, are you okay? And I truly mean it, and I'm happy to help them if they're not in the best possible shape. I am changing the world around me because that person's energy will create a ripple effect. So what happens? What is the ripple effect? When that person is sad, the ripple effect said, we're sad.

Maria Micha:
There is no hope. Everyone around that person will feel exactly the same way. But just by intervening a little bit and saying, what can I do to help? That person is hopeful again. And now their bad signal, what they send out in the world through those ripple effects is very different. So it touches people differently. Imagine that in the building you're living or in your neighborhood, you had the ability to change the energy of 150 people. These 150 people were going to go out and they're going to change the energy of thousands of people. And that's how we change the collective subconscious mind.

Maria Micha:
And within.

Jennifer Norman:
And then it. Yeah, just help one. Just help. As in your own little apartment building in your neighborhood, in your town. Yeah, it makes bigger difference than we think.

Maria Micha:
And by helping someone else, we're helping ourselves. Because you are shifting the energy, the energetic charge of where you are. And if we do it in every city, then globally we have changed the energy everywhere in the world. And at the moment, there is so much uncertainty. There is a war going on or not going on. Very certain. But there is uncertainty. There's financial uncertainty.

Maria Micha:
People don't know if they can travel. People in certain areas of the world that don't know if they're going to be safe. Tomorrow, I have clients and friends in the Middle east, and they have all left. They have gone to Europe. They're staying with friends, or they're in Airbnb or a hotel because they are worried about their lights. And you think that this isolated, but actually their bad signal, the ripple effect, affects everyone, even in the United States.

Jennifer Norman:
You're definitely right. I feel like when people ask me, they're like, oh, I have a teen and he's going through a depression. I don't know what to do. I don't know what's going to get him out of this. And one of... I never like to give advice, but I often will say, does he volunteer at all? Has he thought about volunteering? Because if you get him out of his... The playing the video games, the violent video games, and get him outside to actually help somebody else, it takes him out of his own feeling of, oh, I'm depressed, because you're helping and you're giving your energy and you're supporting somebody else.

Jennifer Norman:
And then all of a sudden you're right, you feel your energy, you feel better about yourself for helping somebody else, that person feels better. And it's just this beautiful exchange. So, yeah, if ever you feel lonely or depressed, I think that it's kind of a neat thing. There's so many opportunities to. To volunteer, to give back and do it physically. Like, if you can, like, get up off the couch and do it, don't just, like, call and donate money. Although that's needed too in many respects. But yeah, physically, like move your body somatically, move your body physically.

Jennifer Norman:
Help somebody, give a helping hand. That's a good way to at least start.

Maria Micha:
It is called the helper's high. So when we're helping someone, we're truly helping someone and we are invested in them feeling better, they feel better. But then you feel so much better because our true nature is to help others. And we are actually not listening to that and we're not expressing that. I want to share a story from one of my clients many, many years ago. So I was living in Singapore for 13 years, and everyone who works and lives in Singapore travels a lot all over Asia because of work, but also due to the fact that it's three hours to Bali and three and a half hours to Hong Kong. So my client had gone to Hong Kong and he was suffering from depression at the time. And he called me and he said, I'm in my hotel room and I'm really suicidal.

Maria Micha:
I feel. I just. I'm on the 28th floor. I'm wondering if I could just find a way to jump out of the window. So I was very, very happy that he called me and I was able to take the call. And I said after I talked with him for a very long time and nothing seemed to be working. He was a little bit better, but then he was going back. I said, okay, take your phone with you.

Maria Micha:
Go down, cross the street. You will find a place that. They're called hawker centers in Asia. So these are places where people cook Food, not expensive food, delicious food nevertheless. But people who are of a lower income and they cannot afford much are eating there. So I said find a hawker center that everywhere in Asia. And he did find someone clearly looks like they need help and ask them what they need. So he did that and there was an old lady who said, oh, this is so nice.

Maria Micha:
I have all these newspapers, stacks and stacks of newspapers. My husband, my late husband would buy them and would keep them there. He used to read newspapers from 20 years ago and I'm told and to find frail and I don't know how to clear them out. Honey, please help me. And that guy in his suit, guy was making thousands of dollars every month, went over to her place, he rolled up his sleeves, took out his, his jacket, left it on a chair and he cleared all those stacks of newspapers. This woman was so happy, she was crying. And after that he called, said I feel better. I don't know what happened, but I feel so much better.

Jennifer Norman:
He made himself useful. He had made himself useful.

Maria Micha:
Yes. When he... You get out of whatever makes you sad and... depression is real. I don't want to say that it's not real. It's a very real experience. But when you get out of your experience and you go into someone else's experience and you help them and you see their joy and you know that your actions have contributed their joy, you're going to get the helper's high. And we don't do that a lot.

Maria Micha:
So I agree so much with you telling your friends. Did you ask your depressed team to leave the video games and go out and volunteer? This is what's going to get us out and it's going to reconnect us with the meaning of life. We're all chasing money. Don't get me wrong, we all need money. The world goes around with money. This is how the world is working for thousands and thousands.

Jennifer Norman:
For now, we'll see if AI change things.

Maria Micha:
Exactly. But also helping others. This is the real life. We were disconnected from nature, we're disconnected from others. And then we're wondering why we're not feeling well.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh my gosh, that is so true. And the other thing that I've heard a lot about lately are like epigenetic patterns where if a great great grandmother was holding some sort of trauma, little do I know that I'm holding it too. And you hear this a lot in the African American community with slavery and like a lot of these issues of just deep seated and of course society continues to reverberate in those messages. Unfortunately but what do you think about those sorts of things which didn't necessarily start with you per se, but you were born into this story, and you've essentially inherited on a story or a pattern.

Maria Micha:
There are two things there. One is epigenetics. And epigenetics is a gene that was inherited from many previous generations and has trickled down to me. And this gene makes me more prone to depression. And this is genetic, and it goes down from one generous to the next. But also, we know through epigenetics that emotions are going to activate this gene. So a difficult emotion is going to activate this gene. And now I have depression or have fibromyalgia, or I have multiple sclerosis.

Maria Micha:
But we also know that shifting our energy and changing the emotion is going to switch off that gene. And fibromyalgia is no longer an issue, or MS has gone into remission, or I'm not depressed anymore. One way that a difficult emotion will trickle down to me from five or 10 generations before is through genetic expression and inheriting genes that are defective. But the other way that we get emotions and feelings and we recreate behavioral patterns or patterns of feelings from previous generations and people that have never met and have never heard of is through transgenerational trauma. So there is a lineage of emotions that will trickle down from previous generations to me. I'm going to use my family as an example. I come from a family of doctors from one side, from my mother's side.

Maria Micha:
And their doctors help, right? They help others. And back in the day, like my great grandfather, he was the doctor and the pharmacist in his big city, but there weren't many. So there were times he would have to offer his services to people who couldn't afford his services, and there were times that he would, of course, treat people who could afford his services. And that's how he was making money. But back in the day, you could not refuse service because that was your neighbor, that was the house friend of a neighbor. And when you were a doctor, you're like the medicine doctor in an indigenous society. You had to help everyone. So the message that came down to me, although I never met this great grandfather, he died in the.

Maria Micha:
In the Second World War, was that you have to help everyone. You need to help everyone. And there were stories that were being recounted about him and his wife and his kids. And in the beginning, when I was young, that was so heavy on me, and I felt I had to help everyone, and I could not refuse anything that anyone was saying. But As a result, I was not depressed, but I was heavy and I didn't have time for myself. So until I realized what that transgenerational trauma and the message that was coming down to me was, and I was able to say, hang on a minute, Yes, I think that this can become my profession. I think that I will be helping and healing others, which is exactly what I did. But that also means that I cannot be helping everyone around me, otherwise I'm going to be unwell and I will not be able to help, not even one person.

Maria Micha:
If I cannot be strong myself, I will not be able to help you or 10 other people. So I have to keep something for me. And that's how I identified it and that's how I resolved it so that I can manage my own energy and I can offer help when I'm capable of doing this.

Jennifer Norman:
How interesting that you were able to know where that came from.

Maria Micha:
Yeah, well, psychotherapy. I started psychotherapy and I have personally been in psychotherapy and in contact with therapists for me since I was 18 and I am 52 now. It is a very, very, very long journey that has shown me so much. And I'm just. I'm still discovering things about me and about my ancestors.

Jennifer Norman:
That's really cool. That's really cool. For those who are entering into this world and they're like, I'm really intrigued. Maybe they've gone to traditional therapy or done certain aspects of hypnotherapy, but they're like, you know what? I want to learn a little bit more about me. I want to deepen my intuition. I want to understand and I want to help design my life going forward to be able to break these former patterns that might have been holding me back and really get to that situation where all of this integration is happening between mind, body, soul and spirit. How do you think is the best way for somebody to begin this journey?

Maria Micha:
There are some therapists like myself, who have the science part in them, and they have their shamans or their hypnotherapist. So look for them. If you cannot find someone who merges both science and spiritual wisdom, then you can have two different practitioners. I also want to offer to your audience an entry to my webinar on the 29th of May. It's a three hour webinar where I bring in the science of psychology, a lot of meditation, shamanic journeys. I will help people identify their spirit animal, find their spirit animal and create a bond with them. So your spirit animal is always there for you to Help anytime you need it. And I'm happy to offer, offer two free entries to your audience.

Maria Micha:
So they will contact you and you're going to let me know and I'm going to send them a link just for them.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, that is so generous. Thank you.

Maria Micha:
You're welcome. I'm very, very happy to do that. This is one way to do it. You either have a psychotherapist and someone who covers the more spiritual side of things, or you find someone who has both. But there are many webinars and there are many beautiful people like Anita Moorjani who creates those retreats. There is one coming up in Sedona, Arizona where you will merge both. You will be able to understand your thought process, but also go internally. And for the skeptics, I just want to say there is a spirit world and we have a lot of evidence now.

Maria Micha:
The evidence is people have had near death experiences and ease. They are coming out more, they are talking about it. They received messages when they were on the other side and their experiences are very, very similar. They all say that once they crossed over, it was so peaceful, it was so beautiful. They were greeted by ancestors who had passed on. A grandfather, a grandmother, someone who loved them. They all received a message. They were all told something.

Maria Micha:
They said, this is not your time yet. You're going to go back and this is what I want you to do. I want you to live your life fearlessly or I want you to live your life according to the core of who you are. You have forgotten who you are. And you're a helpful person, you're a kind person, you're a caring person. And once they come back and now we know their experiences because they're out there and they apply the message they received. Their lives are unfold in a completely different way. And I want to say we don't have to die to understand that message.

Maria Micha:
We can go there through a shamanic journey, through a holistic experience, through a very, very deep meditation.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, Maria, that is so lovely. For those of you who are interested, I'm going to put the information to the webinar as well as Maria Micha's website in the show notes so you'll have access. So I'm going to say that the first two individuals who contact me DM me and say that they're interested in joining the webinar, then you will be able to receive that. So hop on it. Once you see this go live, make sure that you're signing up. I think that's amazing, Maria. This has been Such a lovely, lovely conversation that we've had today.

Jennifer Norman:
At the end of my podcast episodes, I always ask three common questions of my guests which help to tie together our shared humanity. My first question to you now is, what makes you beautiful?

Maria Micha:
It makes me cry. I care for people. I care. I really care for people. And I think that this is the good part that came down to me from my ancestral lineage, that, that they cared. They cared a lot. They cared a lot for others. They cared for their community.

Maria Micha:
And I want to say, I hope people understand and feel that we are all designed to care. But our problems and our difficulties create a barrier and we cannot, we cannot show this. If you just bring your barriers down, the holes down, you will feel that care for others and that care will reconnect you with you, you and with your true power, with your true soul's purpose. So I think that this is a gift that I received from my ancestors, and this is the gift of my life. I care for people.

Jennifer Norman:
I see your care and I see your beauty. Maria. Oh, what a lovely answer. My second question, what does it mean to be human?

Maria Micha:
Oh my God. It is such a multi layered and multifaceted approach to human existence. It's everything. We get angry, we get happy, we get joyful. We are excited, we want to help, we want to stay in our corner and not do anything for a while. We're excited about a trip, an idea, a new project, a new business that we have. It's everything. We want to give birth to kids.

Maria Micha:
We are happy to hold our grandkids or to help our neighbor raise her child. It's everything that we are all at the same time.

Jennifer Norman:
Such a rich answer. Thank you. And my last question. What is one truth that you live by?

Maria Micha:
That everything is temporary and everything changes. My joy is temporary. It can be replaced by greater joy. And this is how I live my life. But also the pain that I'm experiencing is temporary. I told you as we started talking that I woke up with a very difficult head cold because I was walking not properly dressed by the water yesterday. And this is temporary. It's not forever.

Maria Micha:
So knowing that will allow me to go through the first two days, that it's going to be a little bit more challenging and I'm not going to stop doing what I'm doing. Of course, if I feel that I need to rest, I will rest. But I'm not going to change my life because of it.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. Knowing that things are going to change lets you appreciate when you had it for sure. And then know that you were stronger than the pain, that you can go through it and you can transmute deep, deep pain into purpose. And I think that you offer such a gift to the world through your expertise here, all that you are able to provide to people as far as guidance to help them heal their inner selves. Maria, I just want to thank you so, so much for your work and for this expansive conversation, for sharing your wisdom, your compassion, your perspective on healing consciousness and what it truly means to come home to ourselves. So thank you.

Maria Micha:
Thank you. It has been enlightening and I really felt that you asked all the right questions and you allowed me to give your audience the essence of what I do and what human existence is really about.

Jennifer Norman:
Yes. Yes. So, beautiful humans, you exist for a reason. Let's each and every one of us discover what that is. Thank you so much for listening. And if you really resonated with this conversation, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with somebody who might need the reminder that healing is possible. Your story is your message.

Jennifer Norman:
It is your legacy. And your soul might be asking you to remember who you truly are. Thank you once again. I'm Jennifer Norman, and this is The Human Beauty Movement podcast. I'll see you in the next episode.

Jennifer Norman:
Thank you for listening to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at thehumanbeautymovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.