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. My guest today is Christina Grote, and I am really excited to talk to her. I’m just loving these podcasts and I’m meeting such amazing people. And I think Christine and I are in sync here in some of the desires and dreams we have for the future. And I can really see what she’s doing in the world and the resources she’s going to talk about today can support the women and the men that are on their journey to grow their families. And so let me give you a brief introduction to Christina and then we’re going to dive into some fun stuff today, I hope. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and she shared with me this unusual choice to move to Columbus Ohio, because not too many people go from San Francisco to the east that way because it’s so beautiful there. And that was back in the 1970s.

Then that was after her following four years of international travel where she lived in Amsterdam and Afghanistan and in my country, Montreal. And eventually landed, as she shared, in the hill town of McLeod Ganj India and where she sat with the Dalai Lama. We’re going to get lots of stuff to talk about because she’s got some great history. She does have a passion, a lifelong interest in natural healing, and she became a licensed massage therapist back in the ’80s. And many types of body work, energy work, therapeutic sound, music and color therapy as well. And her quest to find ways for her clients to improve their wellbeing led her to create self-care classes that included elements of Integral Transformative Practice known as ITP. And we’re going to talk a lot about this. And Christine and I have off of camera talked about how there’s some overlap with my strategy of notice, except she’s again, my NAC approach as well.

Her practice further let her start an ITP group in Columbus in 2004, and she’s truly a lover of nature, the arts, the outdoors. She’s a jack of many trades, not just in body work, but she enjoys painting, sculpting with clay and concrete. And she also gets out there and hikes and paddleboards, plays music and she loves to learn new things. And that’s why, Christina we’re so glad to have you come and join us today, just because you got a really cool diverse background. You’ve studied with many, and I’m really interested in talking about this Integral Transformative Practice. Because the people that are listening to this podcast are looking for transformation. They’re looking to grow their families and transform themselves into mothers and fathers. Welcome to the podcast.

Christina Grote:

Thank you, Lorne. I’m excited to be here.

Lorne Brown:

Can you start with maybe tell us a little bit about ITP, what this is about and why our listeners may be of interest to this resource?

Christina Grote:

ITP, well, it stands for, as you said, Integral Transformative Practice. That’s a mouthful. I’ve just finished writing a book to further describe it with a collaborator and friend, Pamela Kramer. That’ll be coming out in a month or so.

Lorne Brown:

What’s the title of that book, by the way?

Christina Grote:

The title is, Living an Extraordinary Life. That’s what we’re trying to point to. The founders of ITP were pointing towards our greater potential as human beings. It was begun in the early nineties with an experimental group actually in Mill Valley, California where I’m from. George Leonard, he passed 10 years ago, a senior editor for Look Magazine, very involved in the civil rights movement, reported all over the world. Michael Murphy is the co-founder of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and also author of multiple books. And I should mention, George is also a fifth degree black belt in Aikido. The two of them met at a dinner party in the ’60 shortly after Esalen had opened, which was in the early ’60s, and immediately clicked and together they wrote a manifesto for a human potential. They’re considered to be the fathers of the Human Potential Movement.

In the ’60s things were different. The awarenesses that we have now were just starting. For example, the mind-body connection. Yoga was not on every street corner. There was a lot of conversation then about, who can we be, beyond what we’ve been told, beyond what we’ve believe. And they both worked through the Esalen Institute and their own writings to provide pathways for people to explore their greater potentials. Finally in the nineties, they came together and said, “Hey, let’s put some of our ideas into practice and create a program that people can work with on their own to advance their own potentials, their openings that they might have had.” At Esalen people go for workshops, people do all kinds of other transformative work, but oftentimes there’ll be an opening, there’ll be an experience, an aha, but there’s no way to carry it forward. You go back home, you go back to your life, it becomes a memory.

How do we build on that? How do we continue to open and unfold? This practice they created is integral, meaning that it involves and integrates all aspects of ourselves. Body, mind, heart, and soul. It’s transformative. And that’s how really can define that for yourself. We say transform yourself, transform the world. ITP is about inner transformation, but since really there’s no separation, whatever you do inside yourself, of course has a reflection in the outer world. Transformation we define as any positive change that you want to make in your life from ordinary to extraordinary. And then practice, of course, we talk about it as a long-term practice, meaning something you stick with, something you commit to, it becomes part of your life really.

Lorne Brown:

I want to touch on something you had said about, what was the phrase? Transform yourself. Transform your world.

Christina Grote:

Yes.

Lorne Brown:

And to just emphasize, you’re talking about this as inner work, you’re having an inner transformation and then the world reflects back to you what’s happening inside of you is what I think I heard.

Christina Grote:

Yeah, that really seems to be the case. I think everyone’s probably had an experience where when they were able to change their attitude about something or someone that the world around them seems to change as well. We could talk about that more when we talk about affirmations perhaps, which is one of the practices of ITP. The actual practice of ITP has nine, what we call core practice intentions. It has a structure, but it’s a loose one. It’s just we’re trying to bring together healthy practices for the body, for the mind, for the heart, and for the soul. And together, when we practice these things, we can create a sense of balance, sense of inner coherence, and ultimately it can be a launch pad for what George Leonard called places yet unknown.

Lorne Brown:

When you talk about the ITP, you mentioned how you explore your ordinary and extraordinary capabilities or capacities, I think is the word you use. Do you have examples of this? What are you thinking of or what have you witnessed when you talk about ordinary, or in this case, extraordinary capacities, using this approach?

Christina Grote:

It could be as simple as learning to make a better lasagna.

Lorne Brown:

That would be extraordinary for me, by the way. For some people that would be ordinary.

Christina Grote:

When I talk about extraordinary, I’m referring to Michael Murphy’s work, just when they were creating ITP, Michael was finishing his magnum opus, the Future of the Body, which is a big book. It’s encyclopedic, but it’s also laying out the vision for what became ITP. But in that book, he gives examples throughout cultures, throughout times of people who had extraordinary abilities. He was looking for commonalities of what those people were doing and what they were able to experience. And some of it is natural. I think that’s what I want to say about that is, the future of the body is pointing out what is natural. These capacities are latent within us, but we are not trained, we’re not normally developed. We don’t learn about it in school. He’s pointing out things like people’s ability to remember in extraordinary ways, or things like precognition, all the whole realm of what we’re calling psychic ability, telepathy, clairvoyance.

Lorne Brown:

You’re talking about they’re there and their natural meaning, so you’re unlocking these capacities. I think of the video game idea where you’re unlocking certain things of your character, now you’ve got more capacity abilities, they’re always there, but you had to reach a certain level to unlock. And this would be the practice that you do in ITP. By practicing you’re going to start to unlock some of these capacities or abilities.

Christina Grote:

You could say unlock, you could say set the stage for their arising.

Lorne Brown:

Right.

Christina Grote:

There is this dialectic, I suppose is the word, the practice then setting this stage or allowing it to arise, is it there already and it’s unfolding, or is it actually being developed? It’s probably both. We have these potentials, but they’re not developed. Allowing this whole being integration seems to enable whatever, if it’s setting the stage or if it’s unlocking. We start to become naturally more and more aware of these things. I mean, people in our practice communities talk about things they experience, like having more synchronicities. And I don’t know if you have talked with your listeners much about this?

Lorne Brown:

Let’s talk about the synchronicities, because some of the women I’m seeing in my practice doing the conscious work, that’s one of the coolest things when they start to notice all these synchronicities that line them up with a procedure, or product, or service. That was the tipping point for them to grow their family, for example. But a few things had to happen, synchronicities, coincidences, which are really just synchronicities. Let’s talk a little bit about that because I think that’s important in that, because some people are looking for the big miracle like the wow. And it’s been my experience that there’s often small little wows that if you notice them, you get momentum and you start to notice more of these synchronicities opportunities that happen in your life. Has that been something that you’ve also experienced or you’re seeing only big wows?

Christina Grote:

Oh yeah, no, no. All kinds of, mostly little wows. And that’s great. What I should back up and say for a minute is, we’re seeing this is an evolutionary process, an evolution in our way of looking at it tends to go incrementally, small steps. And maybe sometimes there’s a big wow, but usually incremental change. Those little synchronicities, or you could call them micro synchronicities, to me they’re affirming that I’m on the right track, I guess when they happen to me.

Lorne Brown:

That’s what I heard recently in my practice just last week is she got this synchronic, she put something out there, she wanted a sign basically, and she got it literally exactly what she had asked for. And that gave her some confidence that she was on the right track.

Christina Grote:

It’s like following a trail of breadcrumbs sometimes. And of course you have to use your discernment within all that. It can be very exciting. And I find that in our practice, the use of affirmations where you’re really taking a stand for something and you’re clearly visualizing it and you’ve made a positive present tense statement about it. We have a whole practice around the use of affirmations. When people do that, that seems to be what allows for, you may be noticing what was there all the time, but we didn’t see it. Or perhaps, I mean we don’t know. We don’t know how this works. There’s this interplay with the imagination and our outer world, our inner world, and our outer world. And things can manifest in ways that we would have never dreamed of. And that’s a big part of this too, is we stand for it, but we also surrender to what wants to show up. Because our ego isn’t really in control and we have to let go so that greater things can happen sometimes.

Lorne Brown:

Can we talk a little bit about the affirmations? Because I talk about baby manifestation and when I looked at the ITP site and how you realize your affirmations, I thought your process was quite similar. And I want to share, because some people say affirmations, come on, some people say, “Affirmation is just lies that you tell yourself.” I want to bring up Einstein’s quote as we go into this discussion, because Einstein says, “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Affirmations. You could say an affirmation and it’s just this one-liner and that may be too simple. And so it’s simple. There is some steps and processes that seem to make it more beneficial that you guys talk about in the ITP. And so that’s why I say Einstein says, “Make it as simple as possible, not too simple.” You could distill it down so simple that it loses its value is basically what he’s saying. And I think the way you guys are doing it, how I share as well isn’t too simple. Can you walk us through some of the steps that you guys do with the affirmations?

Christina Grote:

Our basic process is to identify a key area and then create a positive present tense statement that embodies that transformation that you want to make in your life. It’s always in your life. It’s always positive and present tense. And the way that George Leonard spoke about it is that we’re creating a parallel, present tense reality.

Lorne Brown:

I like that.

Christina Grote:

We’re not denying what’s happening right here right now, but we’re creating a parallel reality that we empower through the affirmations.

Lorne Brown:

I’ll share here on this, just to tie this in is, one of our episodes we had Bill Bengston and he says, “Assume there’s multiple dimensions of you, and there is a dimension where you have a child. Because right now you’re in a dimension where you don’t have child, there’s a dimension where you have a child or another child.” He says, “All you’re doing is changing lanes.” This is a process to change lanes, as you said, to go to a parallel, present tense. I like how you’re saying this, just it’s a parallel, present tense. You’re not denying what’s happening now. In my training from in clinical hypnotherapy, we just have understood that the subconscious only understands now. Hence, it has to be present tense, not in the future. And it only understands positive. The joke is, try not to think of a white elephant. That’s why it has to be not what you don’t want, but what you do want and as if you have it now.

Christina Grote:

That’s right. You create the statement, ITP is all about embodiment and the wisdom of the body. We bring our affirmations into the body and we have a lot of ways of working with them. One of them is doing the movement series we do called the Kata, which is part of keto and some yoga and joint movements. And it ends up going through affirmations and then releasing it into meditation. We do affirmations in a very relaxed state, and that’s very important, I think you say that as well, that for them to go deep in the psyche, you need to be physically as relaxed as possible. We go through a progressive relaxation sequence as part of this kata, tensing, releasing the muscles, all the muscles of the body, and then going through an internal body scan and releasing every part and some breathing.

And then by that time, after you’ve done all the movements and all the relaxation, you’re in a very fertile state, a very receptive state for affirmations. But that’s the period that we do them as part of the kata. And so we try to bring them alive as much as we possibly can in our imagination, feeling, believing, seeing, hearing, smelling. Any of your senses, all of them that you can bring to bear if yourself in that transformed state, whatever that you’ve chosen for yourself. You bring it alive. And we also add physical movements that would express how you would feel if that affirmation has come to pass, or it already has in that present tense reality. How do you feel? What parts of your body do you want to bring alive? There are a lot of things you can do just to use your hands and just make it as alive as possible. That’s the focus part. And then though it’s very important to surrender it.

Lorne Brown:

Now, that is a huge ask. I have approach that I call NAC to help us surrender, get into the present moment. But I’m curious what your approach is. And the reason I say it’s a big ask is, yeah, I want to be in the now. Yes, I want to surrender, but do you have a how to, to surrender? It’s a nice intention to set, but-

Christina Grote:

It is. It isn’t easy at all, because we always want to control the outcome. We want what we want. We’re going to hang on so tight to it, but that can actually get in the way of things working themselves through the way that they need to that we might not realize.

Lorne Brown:

Some of our experts have called that being attached to form an outcome, and that leads to resistance. In Chinese medicine we say Qi Stagnation, and then that, as you said, gets in the way when you have resistance in the body. Body, mind and spirit, it slows down receptivity and allowing. And our whole goal here for when it comes to reproductive health is receptivity to receive. And Christine, I think you had something you wanted to share more about the practical use of affirmations and I had interrupted you, so do you want to get back on that path and share that with us?

Christina Grote:

Yeah, just a few things about ways to work with them. Besides doing them as part of your practice, you’re not doing ITP or the kata. You can go through your own relaxation process and do your affirmations in your own way. But also, you can work with them in ways, like putting them on Post-it notes and sticking up them up around your house where you could see them, or have a screensaver on your computer that will come up and just to keep reminding you throughout the day of what you’re affirming. And another way we work with it is we as much as safely possible to act as if this affirmation has already occurred. And so part of that is it’s not so much the external manifestation as much as what does it feel like for me in me to have this affirmation manifest in my present reality, so that that’s a way of acting as if.

I love the story that Tom Waits told, he’s a songwriter, singer-songwriter. And he was asked about his creative process. He said he likes to imagine his songs are like birds or insects and they’re coming in through the window and they’re going out his hands onto the page or anything, and then they fly back out when they’re done. But he says, “You have to be an interesting place for them to land.” That’s for me such a powerful idea. It’s like, what is attractive about you that’s going to bring what you want to manifest to you? I guess that’s a way that I look at it.

Lorne Brown:

I’ve heard it as in you have to become in right for it to find you. Again, dispense this as your personal reality is based on your personal personality. And so if you take your current personality into the future, you’re going to get the same world. This ties into our very beginning of the inner work and people have inner transformations and then they perceive the world differently. They experience it differently. I share that sometimes miracles happen and the external world changes as well. But the key is your perception changes. And this is that idea of being interesting, right? It’ll find you is that you have this transformation inside. Something about you is a little different. Not all of you, you still get to bring some parts of you into the future, but there is a transformation. And so your beingness changes, which is why your experience and your world is different from what you’ve experienced in the past. I think that’s how I’m interpreting that idea of being interesting.

Christina Grote:

Am I the kind of person as I am now who could experience this? Is there something in me that needs to shift or needs to become more interesting, in his words?

Lorne Brown:

We seem this practical in real world, people that win the lottos, few years later, they have the same amount of money as before they had the lotto. I’ve heard some entrepreneurs like the Jim Rohn say, “To be a millionaire you have to be a millionaire inside. You have to know it’s you.” If you have a poverty mindset and you win $10 million, what they show is in a few years you’re in poverty again.

Christina Grote:

Yeah.

Lorne Brown:

Because you haven’t changed, the external world changed. You got the money. This is about first you have to change on the inside and then the external world matches you. Curious to hear more about your surrendering process, to bring down that resistance, to encourage allowing and receptivity?

Christina Grote:

It can close you off to, like you mentioned, the synchronicities people see around them. If you only want to see this thing, it’s only going to show up this way, you could miss everything else around you that could get you where you need to go. In terms of surrender, Michael Murphy wrote In the Future of the Body about the unseen forces of grace. And that’s a phrase I use a lot for myself. We don’t know really what these forces are, but we know that there are forces beyond our ego. At the simplest level, it can be your unconscious, at other levels it could be guides, angels, the divine God, however you’re oriented. There are greater forces in the universe that seem to be there to help us when we’ve set a firm intention.

We can consciously engage those energies and we can just surrender to, you don’t have to know. I don’t have to know. Some people do. It’s just letting go and letting God is one phrase that people use and that’s a great one. It’s like, we don’t know. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re holding our intention and we’re letting it go. And we do have an exercise, a few exercises that we do to aid that process, like hitting a gong and focusing on the sound as long as you can. And the sound gradually dissipates and dissipates into silence. And you can just sort of travel with that into that surrender silent place. You can do it with your breathing too. Just when you inhale breath and you wait, you exhale, you wait. And that in next inhalation is almost like a surprise. Breathe out, we surrender to breathe in.

Lorne Brown:

This surrender again, the NAC, this structure I have, I can see how the ITP works with this in the accepting what it is, which I call surrendering. Like you mentioned, there’s the breath, you can use sound. I’ve used tools like EFT, PSYCH-K, all things bring into surrender. And I wanted to share a metaphor I have for the surrendering process of this letting go. The idea, the imagination that came to me was that we’re going to find this surrendering and you can either be brought to your knees with fertility. I see this with so many people. It’s such a struggle. The journey, the unsuccessful pregnancy test or IVF cycles, it can bring you to your knees. And as you mentioned, you can do it unconsciously or consciously, this surrender, and you’re talking about consciously.

You can do it kicking and screaming unconsciously, you’re suffering. Or you can consciously use tools to help you surrender. And the story I share is, you’re in the pool, but you’re not aware you’re in the shallow end and your knees are bent and your arms are flailing and you think you’re drowning and you’re getting exhausted and your arms are just going and you finally can’t do it anymore. You’re exhausted and you just surrender. You give up and you sink a bit and your knees hit the shallow end of the pool and you notice that your nose is above and you can breathe, and you’re okay. That’s unconsciously doing it. And consciously I tell people, “You’re in the shallow end.” In my innate notice I keep on drowning and then surrender, “Oh, I’m in the shallow end. Stand up.” You don’t have to be brought to your knees, you can just choose to stand up.

And that’s how I, thinking what you guys are doing with ITP and the surrender, give it to a higher power, surrender, let it go, breathe. Rather than going fully unconscious, you’re choosing to stay with this unpleasant experience and using tools to help you surrender into the moment. I’m just wondering if that’s, because that’s how I’m interpreting what’s happening. And then in that surrender, in that letting go, the resistance diminishes or goes. And now I think what’s happening is you now have access to these extraordinary capacities.

Christina Grote:

Yeah, I think that’s a great way of putting it. For me, I can feel it when I’ve surrendered. Because I will, personally I’ll call in my helpers, my guides at the end of my practice if there’re things that I’m working on. And I’ll just call them in and I’ll just be there with that presence. And I can feel a presence. And it feels like a handshake almost, it’s like there’s sort of a click or a clunk, or it’s hard to describe, but a feeling of settling and it’s like, “Oh yeah, I feel you.”

Lorne Brown:

It’s a knowing though, it’s a visceral, it’s in your body, you know that you’re okay.

Christina Grote:

And sometimes just things will drop into my mind, which can be really helpful.

Lorne Brown:

And that’s also where I’m thinking of Eckhart Tolle, the author of Power of Now. But when you’re in that surrender, I’m interpreting it as that when you fully surrender, you have that handshake, you know it in your body. For me it’s a sense of peace and relief because the resistance is gone. That’s why it feels good. When you’re fighting with it, when you’re in resistance, when you have this chest stagnation, you’re stressed, you’re in that reptilian brain and so you’re in survival mode. But when you can surrender as you’re describing it, you become whole brained now. You’re resourced and as you said, thoughts or ideas drop in. That’s what happens because now you have, and we know this from research. You actually have access to creative parts of your brain that you normally don’t have access to.

And there’s those extraordinary capacities again. This idea of being able to surrender and how often every moment surrendering, then you get to access these. And that’s why it’s a practice because I wasn’t born that way to be able to just surrender, surrender being in the moment. And it sounds like the tools like ITP are again tools to help you be in that moment. That’s the way I’m trying to understand or describe it.

Christina Grote:

Yeah, particularly with that one of our core practices, but it’s part and parcel of the whole thing. Taking care of the body, exercise, ingesting good food, good drink, all of the things that you ingest, being positive, even your mental attitudes, of course. ITP stress is being your own authority too. And that’s in fact number one, we know what’s best for ourselves and we have our own inner knowledge and inner wisdom that we can rely on and use our own discernment. In our practice people decide what’s good for them. And this came out of the gurus who were coming in the ’60s, and people would tend to give over all their authority to these exotic people who seemed to be enlightened and know everything. And sometimes that didn’t turn out very well. George and Michael really stressed personal autonomy and personal authority. People decide what’s right for them in ITP. Even though we have these nine practices, people interpret and use them the way that they see fit and the way that works best for their own lives.

Lorne Brown:

I have a question around that. I’m a fan of that knowing, being your authority, knowing your yes. When you’re at a balance mind and body though, those signals can get messed up or mixed up. And so I guess what I’ve witnessed is for myself and for others is when I’m really out of balance, I’m making choices to stay at a balance, there’s that momentum going there. I’m just wondering what you think of that? Because it’s not always like, oh yeah, the person’s like, “Yeah, it feels yes, doing cocaine every day feels like a yes for me.” We can talk ourselves into that, so there’s some layers to this. That’s where I’m saying, “Things can be made as simple as possible, not simpler,” quoting Einstein, just for our listeners. Because I know there’s going to be somebody that’s going to go, “Oh great, yeah, I’m going to go back to my sugar diet and my Coke habit because it feels good. It feels right. It feels like my yes.”

Christina Grote:

You’re bringing up something really important. I guess all I could say right now is, those yeses will eventually turn into nos. We may be following this path, but ultimately we hope that the wisdom comes, the insight comes to move us in a more positive direction. I mean, that’s what ITP is focusing on, is how we can transform our life to providing practices to do that. If someone’s not ready, they won’t take advantage of that. And of course, we recommend that people seek guidance when they need it, professional guidance.

Lorne Brown:

And that’s part of being authority of knowing when to ask for help.

Christina Grote:

Yeah.

Lorne Brown:

There’s a reason why we’re not the only person on this planet, if we could do it all, then there’d be no need for anybody else. But there’s a lot of us because we need each other. And I can’t remember who said it, but I love the example he said that maybe it was at a Joe Dispenza retreat I was at, I can’t remember. But what I heard is we’re all in these glass jars and everybody has a label facing outward. It’s obvious for me to tell you, Christina, what you need to do, because I can read your label, but my label’s facing out so I can’t figure out for me. When you know what exactly, probably what could help me, but I can’t see and it’s not obvious to me, because it’s facing out, so I need you to read my label for me.

Christina Grote:

Yeah, I heard something similar. I think it was Rosalyn Briar who said it, she’s a healer and teacher, many years ago at a conference. She said, “You can’t heal yourself.” We could certainly debate this. She said, “You can’t heal your yourself.” She said, “That’s what other people are for.”

Lorne Brown:

Interesting.

Christina Grote:

And that really stuck with me. It’s in a way I can understand that from the point of view is we only have our own energies to work with. And if we need a different energy, we need to go to someone else for that. That’s how I hear it.

Lorne Brown:

And I always think of yin yang, it’s both you’re doing the transformation healing. I would take it, this is how I’m experiencing anyhow with my patients is, I’m the facilitator, you’re the healer. You’re doing the healing, you’re doing. Because when I’m doing conscious work and with your ITP work, I’m saying things and maybe having the somatic acupuncture body movement, but the thought process, the feeling, it’s all inside them. I’m not experiencing that, that’s happening inside of them. And so I really got clear on, “I’m your guide, I’m your facilitator, but you’re doing all the transformation and the healing, not me.”

Christina Grote:

Absolutely. That’s how I approached my healing work too, is just creating the conditions for their body’s wisdom to kick in and do what it needs to do.

Lorne Brown:

I had another question for you on the topic where we’re talking about you’re authority. I’m in agreeing with that, by the way, because nothing is always absolute this way. There’s always the exceptions. I’ve experienced this for me personally, and I’ve experienced this in the people I’ve facilitated. Conscious work with is sometimes they have a subconscious programming that’s preventing them currently to have those extraordinary capacities or capabilities.

For one is, “I don’t deserve to have it.” So, we self-sabotage. And so again, that’s why I was questioning we’re an authority, I’m like, “Well, sometimes there’s things that will help me get what I think I want, but I unconsciously will sabotage it.” Because I don’t feel like, well, most of us in humanity, I think we’re more the same than different. We’re running the same programs. The stories may look different, but, “I’m not enough. I’m not lovable. I don’t deserve to have it all. How good can I have it? When’s that shoe going to drop?” I feel that’s very unconscious where sometimes we make decisions because things are going so well. People may be coming to you, working with you, and they’re having momentum, things are going great, and then all of a sudden they cancel and stop seeing you, find all their excuses. Why? Because they don’t deserve to have it all.

Christina Grote:

Yeah, absolutely. Gosh, I’m blanking on the name now of the person who developed it. But we’re talking about competing commitments too. Yes, I want to be healthy, but I really like to stay in bed. I mean-

Lorne Brown:

Right.

Christina Grote:

Simple and extreme, but we can have these scripts that are running unconsciously. Inner work is really important. I mean, the work that you’re doing with people and sometimes we really do need to uncover those things. The point of ITP, I guess is to bring ourselves into conscious alignment, into coherence, so that we’re as much as possible a 100% behind our affirmations. Talking about that again. If part of you is just not buying it, not into it for some reason or other, it’s not going to work as well.

Lorne Brown:

It reminds me for our audience where in the conscious work, after a series of sessions, what comes up is what they realize is they don’t want the baby, but socially they’re supposed to have it, or their partner wants it, or their parents wants it, or culturally they’re supposed to, but in the end they really don’t want to have children. You don’t have to justify it. Or there’s a program because of the childhood they had and the parents they had they’re afraid for their child. Or there’s a fear of pregnancy loss because they’ve seen loss or miscarriages. It’s just interesting how sometimes there’s this little bit of resistance that’s getting in the way for some of the healthy choices.

Christina Grote:

It’s so important to uncover that in that case. And those are life-changing revelations.

Lorne Brown:

And it’s all about being conscious. I’m not here to decide what you want, you are. And I’m here to facilitate, help you come to terms with what you want. But it’s just interesting as you mentioned that, competing doesn’t happen often. Majority of the people I see, they’re pretty clear what they wanted and they’re looking to grow their families. But there’s been, in my 20 plus years, a few revelations where they share at one point, “I don’t want this child.”

Christina Grote:

And that’s a wow, tough one too.

Lorne Brown:

Because of your experience, because you have 20-plus years of practice. You shared with me that there’s this idea that there’s more available to us than we believe. Do you unpack that for me and tell me what you mean by that? That there’s more available to us than we believe?

Christina Grote:

Yeah, I guess we’ve been talking around it quite a bit. George Leonard said, “What we’re made of is mostly unused potential.” In our culture, we tend to value certain things and we provide resources for those things, but not other things. So, things like psychic ability, for example, hasn’t been valued in our culture. We’re not encouraged to explore it. And children often will have experiences that they tell their parents about. They see colors around someone, for example. You’ll say, “Oh no, no, you’re just imagining things.” And after a while the child shuts that down and usually forgets it ever happened. That’s just one example. These things are natural to us. There’s a book called First Sight by James Carpenter, and he says, “We have information coming to us all the time, but it’s filtered out of our conscious awareness.” Most all of it is. So, we’re not even aware that we’re processing on this other level until something does come to consciousness, but most of it doesn’t.

But we can learn to listen more to the information that’s coming to us. It’s like we have these capacities that just aren’t recognized, they’re denied, they’re laughed at. Sometimes people are afraid of them. What would it be like if we could read each other’s thoughts? That’s a scary thought if we could all do that. I think there’s some natural dampening down of this just for societal health, but I think we do have these capacities. Precognition is a big one. I know Julia Moss talked about that. She’s a friend of mine.

Lorne Brown:

And Julia introduced you and I, Christina, so I’m grateful. She’s episode 18. And then we have her colleagues Dean Radin and John Kruth, who’s part of the TIC Institute IONS. If you’re the SIBO precognition and telepathy and the other things that you’re talking about, these capacities that we have. Dean Radin in episode 16 and Julia was episode 18 and John Kruth was episode 15, if people want to explore that more. I’m curious what you have to say about it?

Christina Grote:

Yeah, Dean’s done great research on it. In my personal experience, it’s very minimal. I’m a nature person. Where I tend to play is with, I guess you could call it nature mysticism. I feel, I guess the moods of nature, the movement, a deep sense of connection. And of course, we’re part of it all, right? I mean, we arose out of single celled organisms back in bubbling tidal pools. We don’t know for sure. There’s an unbroken connection from there to here to us in our human bodies that I like to feel into that.

I like to feel, I guess Bert had talked about this active seeing that we are engaging with an intelligent universe that we’re in reciprocity with. And we talked about that earlier, the inner and the outer. There’s really no separation. There’s a continual reciprocity and continual generation the way I see it, between us and what we observe as the outer world. And I start to feel that relating that relationship more and more. I’m not talking about any particular capacity. Maybe I don’t know what even that is, but that’s my personal experience, where I am right now in my life. I’m interested in that deeper felt sense of relationship.

Lorne Brown:

You’re reminding me of a few personal stories about this messages or precognition. And I remember when I was living in Montreal, CA, CPA. I’m trained to be, and I got a clear message and a dream to move to Vancouver and to get into, I didn’t even know what it was, some type of holistic medicine. It ended up being Chinese medicine and clinical immunotherapy, but I didn’t know what I was doing. And I did get up and leave without a place to live or a job. And I went to Vancouver and it’s worked out really well.

Christina Grote:

Wow.

Lorne Brown:

And then I got another sign where I wasn’t sure whether I should go back to accounting. Because I had tried to go into, I had left my career. I was a controller for the Ocean Spray cranberry growers here in British Columbia, so still in the accounting world. And I moved here, but I went into my old career. I didn’t go into what I thought I was going to do, didn’t have the courage, and to try something new. And I asked for a clear sign. A week later I got the exact sign I asked for.

And it was like, I got head-hunted for a job as a controller for another company. But at the time I was getting ready to go into a Chinese medicine school, thinking about it. I had an interview set up with that company, but I got the clear sign and I canceled the interview and I went to my Chinese medicine school and here we are today. You’re talking about these capacities. And to me that’s listening to the synchronicity. Because somebody go, “Oh, I can dismiss it.” But I asked for pretty clear sign and it was a weird one, and I got it. And I’m like, “All right, I can’t make this stuff up. Something out there has got my back. I think I’m going to go for it.” It was still scary, but I was like, “I can’t explain this. I’m going for it.” And I think that’s part of what we’re sharing here, correct?

Christina Grote:

I love that. I mean, that’s so good. Yeah, I can’t make this stuff up. To me that gets really clearer when things start happening around you that you never imagined and just seem beyond belief and it ends up changing your life. And I’ve had some things like that happen where you just go, “Wow, what is going on right now?”

Lorne Brown:

These capacities are miracles. There’s somebody recently that I really like her story where she was diagnosed with premature ovarian insufficiency. She’s in her 30s, but meaning that she’s no longer kind of ovulating, her ovarians are diminished. And in her case, her FSH levels were elevated, her AMH levels are really low. And her antral follicle count was zero. And when we did testing for ovulation, it was showing no ovulation. And for the people who are on the fertility journey, that’s their language, so I don’t even have to explain what those numbers are. They get that, they know those numbers, both of them.

And in her case, what I want to share is that she came to do her work, the conscious work with our acupuncture laser herbal medicine. So again, it’s still body-mind, right? It wasn’t just one little aspect, it was a very holistic approach. But the key for her was the conscious work. And she had some trauma in her life. And again, I know with ITP, you talk about the emotions getting trapped in the body and how they can affect our health and wellbeing. And so, she did her work and it was just neat to see her transformation mentally and emotionally. And she started ovulating again. These are the things where you just can’t explain this, where she’s now well into her pregnancy, she got pregnant naturally. And again, and I want to share, that doesn’t mean, oh everybody, this happens for everybody. I do share, to put it into perspective, it’s like buying the lotto. For every person that buys a lotto ticket, you get a winner. She’s a winner. But there’s so many people that didn’t win the lottery, but you can’t win the lotto without buying the ticket.

But what was interesting with her, and it’s with what I call these miracle cases where women have come where it doesn’t make sense from a scientific perspective, the likelihood’s never impossible, but the likelihood is pretty low, is they do come to a place. And this comes to that where you talked to earlier about that attachment to form an outcome. Not having that, have so much resistance there that it has to happen. They all come, “I have to have this baby. I’m not going to be okay if I don’t have this baby.” So they pretty much start that way. And then a few of them through the work come to a place where they go from, “I need to, I must, I’m desperate,” to, “I still want the baby, and I’m okay if I don’t have the baby.”

They don’t stop wanting it. And these are the women that I see often end up having these miracle babies. But even if they don’t, it’s still a success because they’re no longer suffering. They’re enjoying their lives. They still have the desire for the baby. And they’re still disappointed they didn’t, but there’s not this struggle. And I’m curious, from the work that you’re doing, are you seeing this with the people that you’ve worked with, that they have a desire, but they don’t always get that material manifestation of their desire? They’re even better off because of the inner work and the transformation that’s happened. I’m curious, with the work that you’re doing, have you witnessed this?

Christina Grote:

Or you might find as you work with the practice and the affirmations, that the affirmation that you’ve made isn’t exactly the right one. And so you can go and change it. And we tend to stick with them for six to 12 months. But if it turns out that, “Gosh, that wasn’t quite it, there’s something under that, or there’s something more that I need to work with maybe first,” then you can shift your attention to work on that.

I want to say something though. You mentioned about the miracle case. That reminded me of something about surrender too is, it’s often when you’ve given up that the shift can really happen. I’ve seen that a lot in my own life too. Trying to get a job, trying to do something, trying and failing and it’s not working and it just finally just let it go and boom, they get a call or something. And they’ve done this with research too, with, I guess you could call it mind over machine types of experiments where people have attempted to influence, say a random number generator. And we’re getting a little arcane, but these are little machines that will truly put out a random stream of numbers. And so, to influence that you’re trying to make it less random. So, people will come into rapport with these machines. But if you try, try, try, usually nothing will happen. But it’s in the surrender of, it’s in the not trying, even though you’re-

Lorne Brown:

You’re trying, you want it. Well, and I will share, because I’ve been doing this for a while, so I’ll tell you what I see is, they come in saying, “I’m not trying. I give up.” They stop their supplements or acupuncture, they go back, they say, “I’ve given up, I don’t try.” But they’re now using, “I’m giving up” as a way to get pregnant. They’re not really giving up. They’re pretending to give up. That doesn’t work because they haven’t really let go. I want to clarify this, because I see it all the time where they’re saying it and they’re pretending they’re doing things. The giving up that we’ve seen is where people literally give up and they’re like, “We’re done. This cycle didn’t work.” They go with, if they’re in a relationship, to a beach, they get really drunk and stoned and have sex and then they get pregnant. Because they really gave up because they weren’t expecting to get pregnant.

Actually, I got another good story for you. A woman I had worked with had repeated unsuccessful IVF cycles. And it destroyed her relationship with the man she’s with, they ended up getting divorced. And she came back to me afterwards, because she was on a one night stand and the gentleman asked her, “Oh, are you on birth control pill? Do I need protection? Because I don’t want to get you pregnant.” And she goes, “Oh sweetheart, I am birth control pill. Don’t worry about it.” Well, she got pregnant from that night, so we were working on her pregnancy time. That’s giving up, right? No expectation, full letting go. And so that’s that surrender idea.

I want to go back to that miracle case where she came to that place where she was, “Okay, actually, I want to clarify or correct it.” Because it ties into what you said about affirmations and really believing it. I remember now, she was there and we’re working together, she’s lying there, she’s got some acupuncture needles in, the laser, and we’ve been doing the mind body stuff. And she clearly said, “I’m a mom and I know I’m a mom.” She wasn’t sure how it was going to happen, but she just felt so confident that it was going to happen for her. And she wasn’t clear how it was going to happen. She was not open to IVF for donor egg cycle, but she was definitely open to adoption, hoping it would happen naturally, which it ended up for her.

I did want to clarify that, because I do remember that day, and I’ve seen this in other women, where there’s this knowingness, and you talked about again, being the authority and this believing as if you’ll have it. And it’s just, I’ve seen this only in a … I’ve been doing this for 20 plus years. I can count on one hand where no is not an answer for them. And there’s this belief that they have, and it goes against modern medicine some of them when they say, “I’m going to have this baby.” But they’re like, “No, it’s happened.”

Christina Grote:

But we know the body is quite malleable. And the whole mind-body connection, Candace Pert wrote Molecules Of Emotion. In the ’70s, I mean before that we really didn’t understand how the mind impacts the body and vice versa. Now we know a lot more about the intelligence of the body, the belly brain. There’s neural tissue in the heart. We’ve got all this communication going on. And so the more that we can empower our belief in things, it can be magical. And now I’m thinking of something even further out, which is the Miracles of Lourdes that the Catholic Church has studied and lots of things happen. They get reported, the church really drills down. And there are only 60-some that have actually been certified as miracles. But some of these people have before and after X-rays where they can show that bone regroup. Say someone had bone cancer and this missing part of their bone actually seems to have reappeared. So, we don’t even know, I think what our bodies are capable of. I don’t think we know what we’re capable of.

Lorne Brown:

I think as you said at the very beginning, there’s this parallel that you just, and you changed lanes, you went into that other lane or that parallel place where you have that bone or you have this health. If I can put you on the spot, do you have a little exercise that we could do for our audience? Is there something that I could ask you to guide us through?

Christina Grote:

Yeah, yeah, I’d be happy to share. There’s a short exercise that we do at the beginning of the movement series, the kata. But you can do it really anywhere, any time, sitting or standing. Since we’re sitting, we can do it.

Lorne Brown:

Except if you’re driving or operating heavy machinery, I’m assuming, right? If you’re going to do this right now?

Christina Grote:

Well-

Lorne Brown:

Or does it matter?

Christina Grote:

Yeah, I guess it depends. Let’s do it and then decide if we could operate heavy machinery.

Lorne Brown:

Well, thinking, I mean, while they’re doing it. Just for safety, some people are listening to this while they’re driving, because it’s a podcast. You’re not going to ask them to close their eyes, for example?

Christina Grote:

I’m not. No, I will not.

Lorne Brown:

I’ll just ask, I’ll put it out there one more time just, is it safe for somebody to listen and do this while they’re driving?

Christina Grote:

I think so.

Lorne Brown:

Okay, good. I just wanted to check, because I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I definitely don’t want somebody to just be listening to the podcast and go, “Oh yeah,” while they’re driving and drive off the road. I’d like to keep everybody safe. So perfect. All right, so we got Christina Grote, going to take us through a little inner work exercise here. I’m ready for you.

Christina Grote:

All right, okay. This is called GRACE, and it’s an acronym that stands for ground, relaxed, aware, centered, and energized. We begin with grounding. We’re seated, so we’re just going to imagine a line of energy going down from our center, which is a little bit below your navel, the energy lines going down your legs, out the soles of your feet and rooting deep into the earth. And you can imagine that earth energy, however you want to conceive that, coming up through your legs, up your torso, and out your crown, way up into the heavens or to the sky. And then bringing that same line of energy down through the crown, through the torso, out the legs, and rooting that back into the earth.

And now for relaxation, you can begin at the crown of your head and just feeling a warm, relaxing sensation. Just maybe softening your eyes, your cheeks, your jaw. Letting your shoulders soften, maybe melt down towards the floor, relaxing your breathing, the diaphragm, the belly, the hips. If you’re standing, just letting your knees be slightly bent, not locked. And feeling your weight on the floor. If we were standing, we would check our balance side to side, front to back and look for that equally balanced place where we feel fully aligned and supported by the earth. And now becoming aware. We’ll first be aware of our internal state. How are you feeling today? How’s your energy? How’s your mood? Do you notice anything internally in your body? Any tightness or holding discomfort? Do you notice pleasure? Whatever you might notice.

And then moving out, say into your environment, in the room, wherever you are, just noticing, is it warm? Is it cool? Is there a breeze? Do you hear sounds? What’s the energy like in this space you’re in? Just being fully aware. And you can even go further out of the walls as far as you’d like to. And then coming back to your body. And the next is C for center. Bringing your awareness to your center, a couple of inches below the belly button in the center of your abdomen. In Japan they call it the hara. The hara is considered to be the area of the center of our physical mass of our body. Some people consider it the center of intention. And we like to, when we do the movements, we move from center or from hara, such as bringing your awareness there for a moment. And you can ask yourself how you would like to move from this place to express your highest and best self.

And then lastly, from the center we’re going to energize. You can reach your arms out, unless you’re driving. Spread out your fingers and just imagine that you’ve got high voltage energy streaming out of your fingertips, out of your entire body, your chest, the backs of your knees, your head. Like you’re radiating energy in all directions. And just check to see that it’s equal and you can move a little with that energy. I imagine it as sort of lighting up like a light bulb. This is our greater energy field that we can start to feel our way into. And just bringing that to a close, you can just stay in that energized state as you go into the rest of your day. Obviously this is quick, you could go in a restroom and do it. Nobody has to even know you’re doing it if you don’t move your hands.

Lorne Brown:

Well, thank you for this exercise. I love it. GRACE, ground, relax, aware, center and energize. Christina, where can our listeners learn more about you? Your IG handle, or Facebook, or websites. Where can they learn if they want to experience your treatments or learn more about ITP? Do you have some resources you can share? And then we’ll do our best to make sure they get included in our show notes as well. I’ll get you to email me them afterwards, but let’s hear them?

Christina Grote:

Certainly the resource I would point people to is our website for ITP International, so that’s the organization that stewards this practice. And we have workshops and lots of free stuff online, so it’s itp-international.org. Our book will be coming out hopefully in the next month or so, called, Living An Extraordinary Life: The Magic of Integral Transformative Practice.

Lorne Brown:

So it should be available by, because when we release this, so your book will be out, and so can we hear the title again?

Christina Grote:

It’s Living An Extraordinary Life: The Magic of Integral Transformative Practice.

Lorne Brown:

Excellent. We’ll include that in the show notes too.

Christina Grote:

Thank you. Yeah, so that should be on Amazon, and there’ll be a paperback and a e-book version of that, and there are a lot of resources on the website now in our library that people can go to to learn more about the practices.

Lorne Brown:

Perfect. Christina, thank you so much for being born, and thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, experience, and wisdom as well with me and our listeners. It’s truly appreciative.

Christina Grote:

It’s always a pleasure for me to share this work, and I hope that it’ll be beneficial to all your listeners.

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 lornebrownofficial. That’s Instagram, lornebrownofficial. Or you can visit my website, 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.