Lorne Brown:
By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.
Welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast. I’m joined today by Rabbi Doctor, I love this rabbi and doctor, rabbi doctor, Tirzah Firestone, PhD, union psychotherapist, author and spiritual leader. Now, rabbi Firestone is a pioneer in the field of intergenerational trauma healing and she draws on neuroscience, Jewish mysticism, and depth psychology, which is her PhD and her own powerful personal story to explore how our wounds we carry may actually not even be ours and how more importantly they can be transformed into wisdom and strength. Rabbi Dr. Firestone is the author of several books, including the one that I just read, the award winning Wounds into Wisdom, healing, intergenerational Jewish Trauma. And that book, by the way, is for any culture, not just Jewish trauma. So don’t get confused by the title. And she weaves in that book, neuroscience Psychology and Jewish Mysticism with Powerful stories, which I really appreciated of her own personal ancestral healing. Za, welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Tirzah Firestone :
Thank you Dr. Lorne. I’m so happy to be here with you.

Lorne Brown:
I want to start with the word trauma. I think we need to define it. Many people think of trauma as like a specific event, but I’ve seen in your work you’ve spoken about trauma as more than just the event itself. Something that can live on in the body, the psyche, and even in our lineage. So how do you define trauma and how might it differ from what most people currently understand it as?

Tirzah Firestone :
That’s a really good question because that word gets bantered about so much these days. Trauma means wound in Greek, it just means a wound. But what we’re understanding now is that trauma is not necessarily what happens to us from the outside, it’s what we hold from what happened to us on the inside. So two different people may experience the same accident or the same invasion or whatever it was that was an extreme life event that the nervous system just couldn’t quite cope with. But each of those two people might record it and hold in their nervous system in a different way. Trauma is really not so much about what happened to us here, it’s what happens to us here and what we store inside of us, which you’ll see as we discussed this and the meaning of ancestral trauma and intergenerational trauma is very, very important what gets recorded and transferred on.

Lorne Brown:
And so the way you’re describing it is it’s not so much the event, but how we perceive it when you say it gets recorded in us.

Tirzah Firestone :
That’s right. And it really depends on so many things, our makeup, our metabolism, our nervous system, our sensitivity, all of those things. And you’re reminding me of one of my favorite adages. No two siblings come from the same family. You can have two siblings who have the same parents and the same mishegoss, the same whatever it is upheaval at the dinner table, but they’ll record it in different ways.

Lorne Brown:
So I always say there’s no blame in this. We don’t blame the perpetrators if we call them that. We don’t blame ourselves for sure. But yet, like you said, two siblings don’t come from the same family. So do we have an understanding of how we come into this world? And this will get into your work maybe about intergenerational. It seems like, and I’m going to talk a little bit more on this. So many of us think that, okay, this is how it was during my mother’s pregnancy. This is what it was like for the birth. This is how I got imprinted on through the first eight to 12 years of my life. So my programming, so this is why I’m the way I am. I get from your book that there’s a thing that we call collective or ancestral trauma. I think you used the word interchangeably with intergenerational trauma
And
It can show up in our life. So can you talk more about that? How does somebody know then, let’s say it’s anxiety, chronic health issues, emotional patterns, could these have roots in the collective and what is that and can it be intergenerational?

Tirzah Firestone :
Each of us shows up with our own givens, our own neurological and physical biological givens. But like we said, each of us has our own deep inner experience. What we’re finding is that often the most sensitive child in the next generation and the new generation of offspring in a family system will be the ones to pick up. We call it unmetabolized life experience from the other generations. So we have stories in my, look, I’m a rabbi. I’ve sat with and worked with multi-generational family systems. So Barry, a great grandparent or a grandparent and everybody comes. The whole family is there and after years and years of working with many, many families, seeing that there are patterns that run through a family intergenerationally and as usually the most sensitive child in the new generation that is somehow picked up on the unfinished business we could say, or the strange character traits or the anxieties or the agitation of another generation.
I have so many stories about this and I do tell them, I’ll just tell one just met a 10-year-old on my mind, a 10-year-old child who had no clue about his grandparents or great grandparents who had lived through a terrible famine in Ukraine. It was actually a manmade self-imposed by the Russian embargo on food in Ukraine. And people were literally falling on the streets dying of starvation. This little kid knew nothing. He was 10 years old, but he wouldn’t leave the house without stocking his backpack with food, his pockets with food. He refused to leave unless he had a whole wad of food and treats that were ready for him. And his parents were like, what is this kind of hoarding that he’s doing? Where does that come from? It was just one of those strange idiosyncrasies not knowing anything. There’s so many stories like that where youngsters who don’t know anything about their great grandparents or grandparents or the history of the family react and say things that are uncanny because they are in a sense, carriers for this unfinished business.

Lorne Brown:
There’s people that are for listeners. We have the non-believers. There’s no mound evidence that we can provide that will change how they think. And then we have the believers we can say anything and they’re going to believe it. Then there’s a large group that are open, maybe want to believe however they need a little bit of supporting evidence from the sciences. So is there any research, is there any data to show that there is intergenerational trauma being transferred down generations?

Tirzah Firestone :
Yes, there is. And I think those of us who have that intuitive sensibility like wow, he’s so much like his grandfather and he never knew his grandfather, but he says the same things or he acts the same way. And again, these stories can be so uncanny, but now that intuition is being borne out in data, and you could say that there’s a new field, it’s relatively very new. It’s an offshoot of genetics and neuroscience. It’s called the field of epigenetics. It’s really worth knowing about. It’s still a very new field. It came to us about 20 years ago, and you don’t have to be a scientist or be scientifically oriented to appreciate it. It tracks the influences through the environment. That means stresses such as if there was poverty or displacement or God forbid, racial violence, discrimination, all these big forces that affected probably all of our ancestors one way or another, if your ancestors were displaced or they were, were just discriminated against.
Epigenetics demonstrates how their painful histories that they endure get encoded in us, not in our genetics but on our genetics. And that’s what epi means. Epi is on or above, and genetics is the strands that transmit the genetic, that transmit the inheritable information about blue eyes, long fingers, curly hair, all of that stuff. So the epigenetic function or like methylation, their strands that get, you could say in a sense very subtly gum up the works for the gene expression for the expression of the genes to function in a great way. Now I want to say at the outset we inherit trauma and let’s say the residues of difficult life experiences might be 2, 3, 4 generations that it affects the genetic expression, but the genes do not change. But it could also be that ancestors are very resilient, they’re street smart, they’re savvy, they’re brilliant. They stuck together.
They figured things out a million ways that they survived and that’s because we are the beneficiaries of that as well. It’s not only the traumas and unfinished life stories, but it’s also the way they survived and flourished despite their environmental stresses. So we’re the beneficiaries of both of those, the influences that come down to us. But epigenetics shows that even if we are not, it actually began, the whole field began in animal laboratories. I know some people don’t even want to know about such things because it’s painful if you’re an animal lover. But let me tell you, one of the first experiments that happened that sort of blew open this field was on mice. There was a generation of mice that was given a cherry blossom smell.

Lorne Brown:
I like the study. Yeah, go ahead.

Tirzah Firestone :
That took place in 20 14, 20 15, and it was accompanied that fragrance was accompanied with an electric shock on the mouse’s paw. So in true Pavlovian style, when the mice after a while were given that fragrance, they freaked out. They didn’t want to get the concomitant shock on their paw. So that was understandable, and those two things were neurologically paired in them. The mice were bred and then those mice, the next generation were bred again, the grand pups of the first experiment, the grandchildren who had never their grandparents, so to speak, their grand when they were born, they were given that cherry blossom fragrance. What do you think happened? They freaked out. They freaked out that neurological wiring and then they, of course they took that into it’s much harder with human beings because we live longer. But the Dutch hunger winter was the next big piece of data that came out of epigenetic research that showed that the embargo and other starvation and manmade starvation on the the Northern European countries during the Nazis, I think it was the winter of 42 and 43, these women who were carrying children and the children of that embargo, that starvation that they went through, they understood that the embryos of the women who were pregnant at that time would be suffering because the mothers were not getting any nutrients, but two generations, hence the levels of mental illness, the levels of diabetes, heart disease, anxiety, were all off the charts.
So we do know that big stresses, and by that I mean not only poverty and low nutrition, but also mental stress is like how am I going to cope with this sense of shock, fear, and anxiety? Those responses do shift us biologically and those get recorded in a transmissible way, in a transferable way to the next generations.

Lorne Brown:
Some of the research now that I’ll share on that is they’ve shown with the sperm, it seems to be the sperm that’s tagging some type of methyl group in the DNA. So making it change the trauma. So they’re starting to be able to track it. Now that doesn’t mean it’s also not in the egg. It’s just really easy to look at sperm, right? Yes. So I’ve seen a couple of studies on this now where they’re actual tracking and looking at how the DNA is tagged. This is really important because the trauma can happen and it’s in your lineage now, but like you said, it’s not your genes. Genes take long time as I understanding to mutate to change, but in one generation they say you can remove that tag and the trauma’s gone, which I think we’ll get into with your work. So there’s research to validate your work is what I’m saying. I don’t know if you’ve seen those sperm studies.

Tirzah Firestone :
That’s a little bit where I stop because I’m not scientifically, I’m more metaly oriented. What I do know is, and thank you for that piece, it is in the sperm that much I know. I think you’re bringing up perhaps the most important and the best advertisement for doing the work of consciousness, for doing the work, of getting aware of where did we come from. We live in a culture that is so individualistic so much about me and mine and often because we’re so mobile and we’re very goal oriented as a culture and we get separated from our families and so many of us don’t really even know where our grandparents and great grandparents came from or what they endured. That is all so influential. The more aware we get about their sociopolitical background, about their religious background there, what made them tick, what made our grandparents and great grandparents, what did they value?
What did they endure in their lives that is going to give us a looking glass that’s going to give us keys into our own self-awareness and what every traumatologist around the world, all the greats, and I’m talking about ya, Danieli and Bessel, VanDerKolk and Gabor mate, they all say the same thing. They all agree that there’s one factor that changes our ancestral trauma transmission. Just as you’re saying in one generation, if we think we got stuck with our grandparents anxiety or neurosis, the one word to remember is awareness. Bringing the light of awareness. When we go, aha. Oh, that anxiety didn’t begin with me, that fear, that shame, that sense of scarcity about money or worry about finances, that kind of, sometimes we just feel like we have always had these fears and anxiety. Sometimes they didn’t begin with us, and as soon as the light bulbs start to go off and we start to open the lens, widen the aperture so that we can see ourselves in the context of our ancestors, and by that I mean parents, grandparents, great-grandparents as far as we can go. Then literally our physiology begins to say that’s to change. That’s what they’re saying. What we’re carrying in our physiological systems begins to metamorphs.

Lorne Brown:
It could show up emotionally, spiritually, and physically, right?

Tirzah Firestone :
Absolutely.

Lorne Brown:
You can be carrying stuff for heritage stuff from people you’ve never met.

Tirzah Firestone :
Absolutely.

Lorne Brown:
Now you said something that made me smile. You said the awareness, bringing the light of awareness to the trauma. I think, am I hearing that correctly?

Tirzah Firestone :
Yeah. Bringing the light of awareness to whatever we’re carrying,

Lorne Brown:
Whatever we’re carrying,

Tirzah Firestone :
Who we are, who we are, and what we’re carrying in our systems now that remember that our ancestral legacies are many things. There are probably some pain and historical trauma, but there are also probably a lot of smarts, a lot of resilience, a lot of wisdom and good values. So we’re packaged deals, let’s say that.

Lorne Brown:
Well, the reason I was smiling, my listeners will know that one day I had an aha moment. Some people would say a download. It just became very obvious to me that there’s process of healing and everybody I’ve interviewed that have written books or doing this incredible healing, this idea, this process that I call notice, accept, choose again fits on everybody’s process. And so truth is truth, right? Here’s why I was smiling. You said something and I’m like, I’m curious what’s your process? Which we’re learning. There’s this, I use this language in my practice and I’ve heard you say, which also made me want to talk to you, is when I work with people and we’re dealing with this vibration, you can call it trauma, you can call, it doesn’t matter to me what you want to label it. There’s a frequency of vibration. How do you know it doesn’t feel good?
It’s lodge in there, right? That’s how there’s something in there and I always say, we’re going to metabolize it. What happens is there’s a form of alchemy. I have an understanding what I think or why I think it’s happening. I just know it happens and I had to give it a reasoning. But this idea of notice, accept, choose again. These old programs, these uncomfortable feelings get metabolized. They literally get digested. There’s a Buddhist saying that says light can transform darkness. And my interpretation is darkness is those old programs, those uncomfortable feelings or what you may call trauma lodged in the system. That’s the darkness. Light is awareness. So when they say light transforms darkness, all that is required is to bring awareness light to the darkness and it gets transformed.

Tirzah Firestone :
Beautiful. That’s the

Lorne Brown:
First step. Now you got to make the unconscious conscious. Now I want to hear more about your process then because you said you got to bring awareness to it, and I’m aware that awareness is not just it. There’s more than awareness. You got to make the, because by making the unconscious conscious, you can know your history, you can know the program, and yet it’s still being activated. So I’m curious of your process and see if I can put my process model on lay over yours, which usually it can be.

Tirzah Firestone :
I think where we intersect Lorne is at the place of the felt sense. So in my work, I am a psychotherapist and I do have a private practice as well as teaching large groups. But in my work, whether it’s with a large group, and maybe we can do this here to go into a different state of consciousness so we can talk about things. I know you know this, we can talk about things until the cow comes home. But when you start to get the felt sense at a deeper level, at the deeper shifted level of consciousness, then we start to change starts to happen. So in my work, I often ask people to go inside and through maybe a brief relaxation and to bring their, whatever that quantity, unknown is that darkness to the table and ask for ancestral help to actually ask. And in my tradition and in many traditions around the world, when we die, it’s not curtains, there is consciousness, there is love there, a desire to help. On the other side, we have spiritual allies. We have ancestors who are deeply invested in our getting it and are waking up in our health and happiness. And so even if that is just an imaginal practice, it shifts something on the inside and maybe at the end of our time together we can do a little practice.

Lorne Brown:
I’d love to do a practice and I want to unpack something you said to help the listeners relax and let go in what you’re about to share. When you talked about you can imagine it. So one is there are people that have shared near-death experiences, people that have experienced the other side or people who have had relatives come and talk to them and they check in with their parents and they could not have known this, right? Then there’s the imaginary part. I just want to share that with our audience. This is the subconscious part of it. The subconscious can’t tell the difference from an inner and outer experience, from imagination and reality, and your subconscious lives in every cell. It’s your autonomic nervous system. So it’s not to take that word lightly when you can imagine ancestors coming because the subconscious cannot tell the difference from an inner and outer experience, real in imagination. It’s as if it’s happening on a cellular level. And I heard you say, and then you can have that shift.

Speaker 4:
That’s right.

Lorne Brown:
And so I just wanted to give permission to our audience to pretend or imagine, because there is research on how that kind of imagination can change epigenetics, change the wiring of your brain. So it’s worthwhile to do.

Tirzah Firestone :
Absolutely. And anyone who’s done yoga or conscious childbirth or as the mind goes, so goes the energy. And in my field of step psychology is jgi in psychology. There is an understanding and an understanding in many traditions that the imagination is actually, it’s not Disney imagination. It’s not coming up with some magical thinking, I want to think of myself like this. But it’s more of a receiving. It’s from where it’s the place from which dreams come from. We don’t make our dreams in bed at night. They come to us. They’re coming to us from a very deep wise place if you know how to read them. So in the same way, the imaginal realm is a place between the conscious and unconscious mind, just like you’re saying, that has enormous creative capacity

Lorne Brown:
And the body responds. Everybody knows that if you think of a terrible experience, your heart will pump and we’ll know through measuring your blood. Cortisol will go up, your adrenaline will go up. Same thing. If you’re imagining a great place, you go from sympathetic to parasympathetic, high beta to alpha, oxytocin, dopamine. You could pretend biting into a lemon, and people will have salivary enzyme released from their mouth. So the body will respond to your imagination. So I just want to share, because sometimes people go, this is nonsense and I want to share. It’s not nonsense. And the sages have said this a long time, and now western sciences confirming, validating what was said thousands of years ago.

Tirzah Firestone :
That’s right. Absolutely. We’re incredible beings. We’re full of healing capacities. Can I tell you a story?

Lorne Brown:
Love stories, because you said stories are important as well.

Tirzah Firestone :
Stories are so important. I worked with a family from Iran and I tell about this one woman in my book, her name was Estee. She was a really healthy, beautiful millennial who came to me, not because she had anything wrong, but she had a 7-year-old daughter who had a severe separation anxiety. She couldn’t let go of her parents, and she couldn’t have play dates because she couldn’t be alone with friends without her parents being in the room. And parents were, quite frankly going crazy. And Estee came in and we sat on the floor and with big butcher block paper, we drew out her family tree. What was going on? Because maybe there was some connection. I just had an inkling. And she told me this amazing story as she drew out her family tree that her parents wrote out on opium bundles from Tehran in 1981 when the revolutionary guard was cracking down at midnight.
They wrote out on this donkey cart on opium bundles out of Tehran, and they crossed the border into Achi. She told me all these, they paid these people and they bribed these people and they finally got on a plane to Zurich and then to Miami where she was born. The mother Estee was in her mom’s tummy at the time. So she interally felt all of this enormous rush, I’m sure, and also the relief of freedom. So there was a very big success story. So she charted me that out in the family tree. I said, but what about your father’s side? I don’t know anything about my father’s side. Well go home and find out. So that night she went home and she asked her mother and she saw something was really wrong. When she scratched the surface, her parents shut down. They were very angry.
Don’t talk to us about this. Finally, she was very persistent and her parents unearthed a very shameful secret that for all of her life, 35, she was 35 for 35 years, they never told anyone that they had left town. They had left Tehran in the middle of the night without telling the father’s father, the father’s mother, rather the paternal grandmother who was 94 and blind and lived alone with caregivers. They visited her every day. All of a sudden they just left town. They never said goodbye. They were afraid that she would tip off the caregivers and they leave town. And the grandmother is so bereft that she all of a sudden her, she’s blind. She doesn’t know what happened. All of a sudden her family is gone and she dies of heartbreak. Shortly thereafter, they get word that she died and they feel horrible. The parents, Estee parents feel terrible.
They never say goodbye. This secret comes out and Estee being who she was, made them pull out all the pictures and there’s crying and there’s grief, and there’s a memorial that she insisted they have to memorialize this woman, who was she? Everything gets crazy and chaotic in the family. Now, why am I telling you all this is because that little 7-year-old girl at the same time that that whole terrible secret gets metabolized and all the shame and grief get out and tears and rage, all of that, and the other side of the house, this little girl is healing and she’s demanding what’s really crazy. She didn’t understand any of it. She just wanted to go to school. She insists on going back to school and she starts having play dates and she becomes a normal 7-year-old, a third grader, who is magically healed by the metabolizing of this terrible family secret, this separation anxiety, which in a sense she picked up on inherited from that great-grandmother, thousands of miles away whom she had never met. So it’s a family system story in a sense to say, when we do our work, when we really face our feelings, when we do the awareness work and say, no, no, no, something’s not right here. I need to know more. We scratch the surface, we wrestle, I call it God wrestling. It has big ripples in the family system, and there can be healing for other people besides ourselves.

Lorne Brown:
Say this again. So if I show up and do my work and I have healing, you’re telling me my children can benefit and my deceased family members can benefit.

Tirzah Firestone :
Well, now we’re thinking metaphysically, of

Lorne Brown:
Course, but

Tirzah Firestone :
I really do believe that there is retroactive healing. I really do believe that, and I have seen that among my students. I teach people all over the world from different backgrounds culturally and religion, that there is a sense of calm and ease that comes when we tune into our ancestors. We will never know when we do our work, whether there is retroactive healing, but we do know that it changes. It changes our world. And when we’re working with earnestness and sincerity with the most sincerity in our hearts, not just transactionally, but really because we care, that does shift, I think me mentioned course in miracles. How do they describe or define a miracles, a radical shift of perception, a radical change in perception, and that is when I move from here to here, that is going to change my world and everything around it. So I have all kinds of stories about doing the ancestral healing work, and we’re going to do a tiny little piece together in just a little bit.
I have students call me from all over the place. You won’t believe this. I just literally finished that meditation and there was a knock at the door and my grandfather’s prayer book was delivered to me by FedEx because the next door neighbor found it. I mean crazy things. I started doing my own ancestral healing and came from a family that was full of post-war, post traumatic World War II history. My mother was a refugee. My father was at the death camps on liberation as a US soldier, and they parented us with lots of trauma, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought that was just normal. Later posthumously, I found out their history. But when I started to do this work, all of a sudden out of the blue, seemingly out of the blue comes an email that in an auction house in Jerusalem, a box of hundreds of letters between my parents were found.
These are 80-year-old letters from the war, from their engagement, 19 42, 19 43, 19 44, in which they were young lovers writing back and forth about the war and their love was incredible. And I got this box from Jerusalem. I said, yes, don’t destroy it. Send it to me. And it completely opened my eyes to what their world was about. All I’m saying here is that there are synchronicities. There are these inexplicable coincidences that start to happen that give me the sense that there’s something on the other side that wants us to become more aware. There’s something on the other side that wants us to heal, wants us, wants our lives to be better. And if we start to open the doors and start to say, oh, maybe, maybe this is true, then things start to cook,

Lorne Brown:
Synchronicity start to happen, and you start to become more aware of it. And I don’t know if it’s on the other side that wants it for us and inside there’s something inside of us that wants it as well. That’s why I’m a fan of going to work on the inside before you start to go work on the outside, before you start to change everything on the outside, go work on the inside and then see if people are motivated to change the outside.

Tirzah Firestone :
Well, let’s try something. Okay?

Lorne Brown:
Yes.

Tirzah Firestone :
Maybe I’ll ask your listeners to take a moment, take a sip of water and you can do this lying down. You can also do a sitting up and cheers.

Lorne Brown:
We’re drinking water for those that can’t see us, this is on YouTube. But for those listening to the podcast,

Tirzah Firestone :
We

Lorne Brown:
Stone are both drinking. We’re both drinking.

Tirzah Firestone :
And I’m going to ask you now to, as you’re starting to just sit back and relax, think about one thing in your family life, one thing in your current life that you worry about, that you have anxiety about. Maybe it is your attitude toward money or your attitude toward your health or your job, your relationship. Just one, but just one and something in you. We are all concerned about our world right now, but let’s, let’s not get global. Let’s just say something inside me that makes me not as happy as I want to be. What is that thing? What am I going to bring to the table? And with that, I want you to close your eyes or soften your gaze and sit back and we’ll just slow down a bit.
As you reflect on one of the things that you would love to become more aware about, something that you would love to relax about, have more perhaps compassion for yourself, something that you carry within you, but just one thing that’s current, and I’ll just be quiet for a moment as you consider that. Okay, so now with your eyes soft or closed, your gaze is more internal. I want you to imagine that you are standing in front of a door. Any door could be a cast iron gate. It could be a wooden door. What size is it? Just notice its size, its color. Is it wood or metal? Is it ever knocker or a bell? Again, let your imagination tell you and let it be comfortable. Let it be fun.
You’re standing in front of that door fully embodied, fully present, fully comfortable, and at any point you can stop and say, no, I’m not going forward. You can do this not going forward. You can do this imaginal exercise in your own way, and if you’d like, you can knock on that door three times or ring a bell if there’s a bell three times. And what you’re doing as you do these knocks or rings, is to let the beings on the other side know that you are entering into another dimension. These beings who are no longer on earth, but whose consciousness, whose intention, their good intention, their wisdom still lives on.
And once you’ve knocked on the door three times or rung the bell three times, I want you to push the door gently open and walk across the threshold of that door and just stand in the foyer of what we call the ancestral dimension. And this is the place where your relatives who no longer walk the earth, where they abide, and your job right now is to holding in your mind that one thing you would like to be more aware of, you would like to heal, you would like to shift inside you to be happier, to be more whole. Your job right now is to mentally invite to you one of the wise and well ancestors from your lineage, whether you knew them or not. This could also be someone who is simply a teacher or a friend who’s on the other side, someone who’s a spiritual ally, we call it.
In some cases, sometimes some of my students say, well, my dog came to me. He was my is still my or he or she, my spiritual ally, my friend on the other side. But I’m asking you to invite with a whole heart with the most sincere self, the most sincere heart, someone to come toward you now with something for you, and I’ll just be quiet. Now, as you allow that to happen, you may be running through all of your relatives to see where, who is the one to speak to you to come to you today. But don’t effort. Just allow whether it’s a grandfather, grandmother, and or teacher from the past to come to you and let yourself be surprised by who steps forward in this imaginal realm. Let yourself be surprised.
If it’s two people, that’s okay. Let them approach O and feel their energy, their positive energy, feel their wise and well intention for you. You are breathing. You’re fully embodied. You’re not leaving. You’re very much yourself as you receive the continence, the figure of this person now who knows what you are going through, you’re holding it in mind. You can pose a question, but you may not even have to for this person to offer you in words or in feeling a message that is helpful. Their message may come in words or in images or just a feeling, a felt sense, and your job is to receive it. Don’t be afraid to ask a question to clarify,
And when you’re ready to press the enter button, so to speak, to say, okay, I hear you. I got it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Offer a gesture of thanks about, or a namaste if nobody came by the way, please don’t worry. Often it doesn’t happen on the first try, but just know that there are beings who care about you, who are wanting to help, who are holding you at this time of your life. We want to give you their gifts of resilience and wisdom and safety that you’re going to be okay. And with your next breath, let those beings recede back into their abode. As you begin to step backwards with three steps across the threshold of your door and close the door in front of you, fully embodied, fully present, I want you to wiggle your toes, stretch your fingers and your wrists. Do little wrist circles. Feel your extremities. Take a little stretch and before coming out completely, just record anything that you want to remember because it will evaporate very quickly by jotting it down or just recording it mentally. What did you hear? What did you receive that might be helpful to you today? Okay, thank you all so much for that indulgence. Thank

Lorne Brown:
You.

Tirzah Firestone :
Helpful.

Lorne Brown:
I have a question for you, and what is required or what are the steps for this healing of this trauma? We talked about that there’s trauma. We’ve talked that you can heal and when you heal, we didn’t use this word, but I often say we’re like wifi, our whole family benefits from the wifi that we give off. And what is your process? Then I got the sense and we’re on the same page versus to let the body feel safe and relax so we can use breath, drink water. There’s the vagus nerve hum, inner experience, body scan, all those things to take you as sympathetic to parasympathetic. There’s awareness. And I didn’t have you continue last time. I was wondering if you can continue, so bring light to the darkness. You create awareness. Can you share a bit more of how you understand your process and how it helps transform? I think we both use the same word metabolize these trauma programs issues in our tissues.

Tirzah Firestone :
It’s important I think, to know that there’s help and that little exercise that we did just now starts to build up a sense of being held that there is something positive out there, out there in here that is our advocates are allies that we can do the work. If we’re talking about ancestral history, that needs to be metabolized, that we can do the work of facing versus facing some sometimes very serious pain and that we’re going to be okay. So first we build up our allyship. We have a sense that we’re being held so that we can face into some of the traumatic wounds in our lives or in our ancestors’ lives. We never do the latter before. We have that sense of being ensconced and I’m, well, I’m being held, I’m safe because some of us do have some really terrible things in our family’s histories that we’re never grieved.
So when there is a lack of grief, there is this kind of buildup in the physiology and also in our psychic lives, our internal psyche lives, psyches lives, and that will to be really whole. We feel that. We feel that resting upon us. So to do the work of facing ancestral trauma, we want to, and also garnering the very positive attributes that our ancestors had. We need to feel like we’re okay. I’m not alone here. I have goodness around me so that I can face these things. Then we can do the work of facing the shadow we call it, and feeling these things, feeling the losses really. And then we can start to what I say in my book, quoting one of my heroes in Israel, harness the power of our pain, harness it for good so that we can say, oh, it was so terrible what happened, but I am using it. I’m using that pain to do something with it to transform my life. I’m going to use my injury or my family’s injury to do something that I couldn’t ever have thought imagined doing had this not happened. And that usually means some kind of service or teaching or being in a way that’s different, that radical shift of perception that happens in our lives.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, I’ve heard it said it’s happening for you rather than to you. And so it becomes an opportunity for healing and like you said, give it new meaning. And my notice part notices everything is neutral and we give it meaning we’re meaning makers. So part of this is a perception shift. And is that in Israel, you said? Is that Thomas? What’s his name?

Tirzah Firestone :
Thomas Bel? No, no, it’s not. It’s actually someone who, Thomas is actually German, but he lives in Israel. This is somebody who lost their 14-year-old at a suicide bombing one day. This is a long time ago now, 20 years ago. And that was such a blow, the loss of this beloved daughter. And he became, as he tells it, this is a man named Rami Hannan, who’s very famous in Israel now because he’s such a moral leader and a peacemaker. He tells and he confesses. At first he was like an animal. He was so full of vengeance and so full of anger and wanted to kill and wanted to avenge her death. And then there was a radical shift of perception because he got invited to an event in which he met Palestinians who had also lost children due to Israeli snipers or terrible things have happened on both sides.
Atrocities have happened on both sides, and something went exploded in his mind, and he got it that it was bilateral, and it wasn’t only him who had suffered the loss, but he met a woman who had lost her 6-year-old in the same way. And so he became this amazing peacemaker because he was able to harness the power of his pain. He says, our pain is like nuclear power. We can use it to destroy and create darkness or we can use it to create heat and warmth and love. And that was the turning of the key for him at that moment.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you for that. It’s kind of like the difference between love and hate, right? One destroys, one creates when you do this healing work. I don’t know if it’s your experience and what you share with the people you work with, but for myself, and what I share with my patients is I often tell them that you have to be willing to feel uncomfortable because it’s definitely uncomfortable during one process of it. That’s

Speaker 4:
Right.

Lorne Brown:
Usually there’s a sense of relief and peace when you move through it, you metabolize it, however, not

Tirzah Firestone :
Right away.

Lorne Brown:
No. Well, that’s the whole thing. I believe what’s happening. My understanding is it’s activated, so you are experiencing it. That’s how you get to heal it. If you’re like, oh yeah, this happened to me as a kid, but there’s no visceral, no somatic experience, it’s not activated, so you’re not healing it. You’re like you can’t tap on it. But if it’s activated and you’re able to witness it, that’s where the accepting key is. If you’re able to observe it. That to me is the light. And I think what’s happening is when you sit with these uncomfortable feelings, they act as portals.
The presence and the mirror focusing on ’em, noticing it, noticing it tunes you into witness consciousness. And witness consciousness is what does the metabolism beautiful. It’s not ego Lorne or Rabbi Firestone that’s doing it. It’s something other than that you talked about. That’s on the other side. And my metaphor for this is when you bite an apple, you have to choose to bite the apple, the ego, you, but I don’t say, now release salivary enzymes, now release acid from my stomach, now absorb the nutrients. I can be playing basketball, I can be sleeping. I can do whatever that’s going to happen. I don’t have to say, can you pause Rabbi Firestone for two minutes? I need to release some enzymes in my mouth and I got to absorb. It’s happening. So something other than my ego is metabolized in the apple.
I have to choose to bite it. Put this metaphor to your work is you have to choose to bring up the feeling and allow it to be experienced. That’s the efforting. But then something else is doing the metabolism. That’s what I’ve come to understand. Lorne Brown’s not letting this go, letting go of me, and something other is digested in the background. And so I’m sitting there, I’m in my shame. It’s intense. Oh my God, can I bear it? I’m noticing it. I’m noticing it. It’s incredibly uncomfortable, and then all of a sudden it just fades and I’m at peace.

Tirzah Firestone :
That’s beautiful.

Lorne Brown:
Is that what you experienced? I understand.

Tirzah Firestone :
I experienced that in a much longer fashion, and I love that you do the Ske and EFT and beautiful. I think this a bit more has more steps in between, which probably we’re not going to go into today, but the idea is by opening the aperture to a much bigger context of who we are and who our ancestors were and what they went through, there is a sense of compassion. And compassion is a very big key for me because for me, that’s like the fuel that allows the shift. When I can say, my parents, and this actually happened for me. Not only were they, yeah, they were neurotic and they parented in all kinds of strange ways, but when I opened the aperture and I could see, wow, they were actually, they were trauma survivors without the words, I didn’t know that. There was no terminology, but I saw them in a different way and I could see, wow, they had so much unprocessed grief of their own. I held them in a different way with compassion. That shifted my whole, that I had my resistance, which was always persistent, and I was able to loosen the grip so that I could choose not to be like them.

Lorne Brown:
There’s to choose again. And you saw it through their ego, so you didn’t believe in that story, so you saw through it. I love the compassion part. It’s so important. I always say before, when we go into witnessing, noticing uncomfortable feelings, usually the guiding I go is with curiosity and compassion. Come alongside that part of yourself. If you have time, I have another question because of your background as everything with your background, but particularly as a rabbi. So I’m in a mentorship program on Dao death medicine, and it’s all about the transition, and Daoism has a whole thing about the souls and what’s on the other side, and the idea of this life is to live your life fully now. You don’t wait till die. You’re here to live, right? Somebody in the group was asking questions, but it was at the end about Jewish traditions. They were talking with the Dao, and Judaism has some incredible traditions around death. We don’t traditionally, we don’t burn the body. We bury the body quickly, and there’s a shiva, and I want the metaphysical answer here. I would expect from the Shiva, the seven days of mourning, it makes sense to comfort the mourners. Like what a beautiful thing that the community comes for the mourners. But I kind of wondered
Because endos them, the body, the spirit they say hangs around the body, but end Daoism. And so I’m wondering in Judaism, is there also a metaphysical that you maybe know or Cabalistic perspective of part of this process of why we bury not burn, why we bury quickly, and the purpose of the Shiva in a cabalistic perspective?

Tirzah Firestone :
Yeah. Now you’re asking for a whole course.

Lorne Brown:
Okay, I didn’t know that. Okay.

Tirzah Firestone :
I would love to teach your listeners, because

Lorne Brown:
This is okay, have you come back for that. I may have you as a guest then on the other mentorship, if you’re okay with that,

Tirzah Firestone :
An area of my fascination. But I’ll say in brief, everything that we do, ritually on this side has a corresponding importance and significance for the soul on the other side. So the idea is no, death does not end consciousness. We drop our bodies, but our soul is still very much alive after death. Some of us who’ve worked with death and dying as any clergy person has, knows that this is true. You feel that there’s a felt sense. But what I could say right now is that there is a very big emphasis on honoring the soul as it makes its passage. So for this reason, we want to be very gentle. Now, many Jews, let me just say at the outset, many more Jews are choosing cremation. Now, that’s just a given for environmental reasons, for cost reasons, for many reasons. Maybe because after Auschwitz, there was such a burning.
Some people say, why should I be any different? I’ve heard it all. I’ve heard every answer. But traditionally, we haven’t burnt the body. We don’t cremate because there is a sense that a person is very identified. We’re identified with this thing for 70, 80, 90 years, whatever we are allotted in this life, and we become identified with our bodies. Our bodies are us, at least in part, it’s part of a big part of who we are and how we identify and burning is the cremation process is so radical and strong. It’s a powerful, you’re here and then you’re not here. You’re Ash. The rabbis of old taught that that was an undue violence, that we didn’t want to subject the consciousness of the dead person for the same reason we cover our mirrors in the house of mourning. There’s a mystical reason for that as well. It’s not only so you don’t see how terrible you look and you look awful, and you should because you’ve been crying all day.
But also so that the soul of the dead isn’t scared when they come into the mirror to because they’re inhabiting the house that they lived to see nothing. There are all these mystical reasons, but to just say that the house of Shiva, the house of seven days of mourning, or some people do three days, some people do less, that that is a place that has a corresponding, that ritual has a corresponding meaning for the dead, who is also going through a seven days of life review and harvesting what their life was about, what was meaningful, what was not, what did they accomplish, where did they fail, where did they achieve to feel the love and the stories and the holding of their life is very, very important. So it’s not only for us, it’s for us psychologically, extremely important and astute that we take that time away from work and let our community feed us, and all those things that happened at Shiva, but also that the soul can rest in the nest, so to speak, of the love and the stories of how important I was to this family. So being grieved, grief is very, very important. We know that physically, physiologically, we know it emotionally. We need to be grieved and we need to grieve. So there’s much more to say there, but everything that we do, we say mourners, kaddish, or we say certain prayers, they’re all have a corresponding effect on the soul, which doesn’t really die the soul lives on,

Lorne Brown:
And you’ve shared something that so many of the guests on our podcast have shared. There’s what’s happening here, but simultaneously, there’s other layers or dimensions that things are happening, and we have a very narrow view here with our five senses. If we had eyes like cats, we’d probably see more stuff. And so yes, thank you. I know you’ve spent so much time with me, so I’d love our listeners to know about where they can learn more about you. I want to mention your book, again, wounds into Wisdom, healing, intergenerational Jewish Trauma, and again, this is for any culture or family consolation of trauma. And on Instagram, your website. Can you give us a shout out for what your website is, we’ll put in the

Tirzah Firestone :
Show? Yes. It’s www.tirzahfirestone.com. Very easy, and you can sign up. I will send you newsletters, Tirzah Firestone on Instagram, but the best way is just through my website.

Lorne Brown:
Okay, perfect. So we’ll put that in there as well. So it’s tirzahfirestone.com, and again, you’ve got a couple of books, tirzahfirestone.com.

Tirzah Firestone :
That’s right. Yes.

Lorne Brown:
And yeah, sign up to your newsletter. And I want to thank you for spending the time with me today and spending more time than we had even scheduled to share. I really do appreciate that.

Tirzah Firestone :
I do too. It was wonderful. Take good care.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you.

Speaker 3:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance. They help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach, using low-level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Acubalance.ca. That’s acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne_Brown_official, or you can visit my websites, Lornebrown.com and Acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.