Neuroscience and Inner Healing- a Journey To Wholeness

My heart is to share my journey into the world of inner healing and neuroscience, and how we can tap into both so that more souls can experience lasting freedom here on earth. Just like Jesus demonstrated as He walked the earth, His mission was to set the captives free! He cast out demons, healed the sick, and raised the dead. We are commanded to do the same. 

I do not write from the belief that I have it all figured out. I simply share my journey, and I hope it will equip the church with more tools to help people find lasting freedom. 

In 2013, I was invited to lead an inner healing and deliverance ministry at our church. I ended up leading that for seven years. This was a time of learning and growth for me as a leader, and I saw firsthand how much God desires to set His sons and daughters free. That ministry produced a lot of fruit, for which I am forever grateful.

One of my favorite testimonies from that time of ministry is a young man who struggled with addiction. He had a great family around him and a relationship with Jesus. He desperately wanted to get free. Through multiple sessions, he finally found freedom. Today, he is married, has a family, and is still sober.

This is just one of many stories of souls finding freedom. I am an avid supporter of creating space for people to encounter Jesus and watch the chains of bondage fall off as He sets them free! Most of all, they can walk away and experience greater intimacy with the Father.

My own story is one of incredible healing. My dad struggled with depression throughout my growing-up years. I never really knew him as a happy man, and rarely received the tender love from him that I needed as a little girl. This left me with some pretty deep father wounds. I always equated Father God to how I was treated by my earthly father- distant, angry, and harsh. I struggled with perfectionism. I thought God was waiting to punish me angrily if I messed up. I never truly experienced the deep love of my Heavenly Father until my early thirties. 

It also did not help that the religious culture I was raised in contributed to this need to feel like I had to perform and earn my way to heaven. It was very works-oriented, and there was hardly any emphasis on a loving, intimate relationship with God.

I will never forget my first inner healing session. I wept as I encountered a tender love I had not known. I broke off the generational curses over me, and Jesus ministered tenderly to those broken places in my wounded heart. 

Over the years, I’ve had several inner-healing and deliverance sessions. Because of that, I found a new level of freedom in my life. 

In 2019, I left for a sabbatical from my church duties as an elder. This meant I needed to let go of my leadership in ministry. I was quite tired as the intensity of leading that ministry had caught up with me. I handed it off and went into a short season of rest. 

When I returned from sabbatical, I kept asking God, is it time to pick this back up again? Over and over, I kept hearing no. Six months later, I still had no green light to return to leading that ministry.

Then, around that time, I received clear direction from God that it was time to pivot in my career. I knew the business I’d been running was not what I wanted to be in for the long term. This began my journey towards making my dream of becoming a life coach a reality. This dream came from my own experience of being coached by someone during a season of my life when I desperately needed it.

So, I embarked on a journey to become a coach, with the dream of doing this full-time. My first certification was in Christian life coaching. After receiving that certification, I created my website and hung up my sign that I was in business. But I got nothing more than crickets. I knew I needed to promote and talk about my life coaching services, but I struggled to do even that. What was worse, I had been a business owner for over two decades, so I knew business. Why was it so hard for me to get clients?

In my search for answers, I came across Dr. Shannon Irvine’s Neuro Coach certification through some God-ordained circumstances. Something inside of me knew that this was what I needed. I initially thought it was so I could help my clients achieve greater breakthroughs, but what I found along the way was that I was transformed in the process. 

A little backstory on why this piqued my interest so much: In 2000, our first son was born. He had a traumatic birth, and he was vaccine-injured. Between the ages of 2 and 3, we noticed that he was developmentally delayed. By the time he was 3 ½, I started working with him using a neurodevelopmental program in which I was trained to do therapy with him at home. 

All of these exercises I was given to do with him essentially tapped into the brain’s neuroplasticity and reorganized his brain so he could learn to talk and regulate his behavior. In the first three months of doing this with him, I saw such an improvement that I knew we were onto something. Fast forward many years, and he is healthy and thriving with a degree in business analytics and gainfully employed at a software company. I am still in awe at the profound healing he received and how tapping into the power of the brain made such a marked difference for him.

So, when I came across the Neuro coaching certification program, I was quite interested, as I had already witnessed firsthand what the brain was capable of.

What I have learned from Neuroscience:

The brain was created to keep you safe

• This is great when you encounter actual danger, but what is not so great is that the brain perceives anything new and unfamiliar as unsafe
  • For example, when you start a new exercise program, your brain will perceive that as unsafe because it is new and unfamiliar.
  • The brain will throw all sorts of neurochemicals at you to try to stop you. You will experience things like procrastination, overwhelm, anxiety, and fear. This is your brain simply doing its job of keeping you safe. 

90-95% of the daily decisions you make and the actions you take are influenced by your subconscious memory

The brain loves patterns 

• The brain stores thoughts in the subconscious after enough repetitions.
  • It takes about 67 repetitions for a neural pathway to be formed
  • From childhood into our adulthood, our brains scan the environment around us, looking to pick up on patterns
  • The brain does not know if a thought is good or bad, true or false; it simply sees patterns
  • These patterns that get stored can be good, but they can also be negative patterns, which have lasting negative consequences in our lives
  • Patterns such as I am not good enough, I am not loved, I’m a failure

The brain has a strong negative bias- 50-80 % of our thoughts are negative

The human brain is hardwired with a powerful negative bias, a tendency to notice, remember, and react more strongly to potential threats and negative events than to positive ones. This bias developed as a survival mechanism: our ancestors who quickly recognized and responded to dangers, like lurking tigers or other threats, were more likely to survive. This ancient wiring means that even in our modern world, our nervous system remains on high alert for what might go wrong, prioritizing safety and survival over happiness or contentment.

In all the years I invested in the inner healing ministry and the wonderful fruit I saw, a certain percentage of people would return to their old patterns of behavior. I would wrestle with God about this and wonder whether we were missing something. 

I still firmly believe that so much beauty comes from encountering Jesus in the deep places of our hearts, allowing Him to heal us. And the added layer of casting off any demonic influences in our lives. This means breaking off generational curses, repenting for believing lies, and forgiving those who wronged us. All of that is foundational to receiving our healing and freedom. 

Then people can be trained to continue walking in their newfound freedom, learning to hear God’s voice and daily growing in an intimate relationship with Him. These are all important components of living in continued freedom.  

I believe the missing piece in this equation is paying attention to our thought patterns and rewiring the negative beliefs we carry at the subconscious level to align with the truth of who God says we are. When that shift happens, and all of these components are combined, it is a potent fusion that leads to lasting freedom!

In my coaching practice, I have repeatedly seen how powerful this process is for my clients, who begin walking in their newfound freedom at a much deeper level than they ever experienced before. 

One example is a client who came to me for coaching on how to grow her business. Early on, I kept hearing her say things like I am such a procrastinator; I am so dumb. She would say these things like they were normal. As she leaned into the coaching process and began working on the process I gave her, she saw remarkable breakthroughs. She is now happily growing her business, motivated to do what needs to be done without procrastinating.

She recently commented to me that they were with some friends, and she caught some of the negative language they were using about themselves and picked it up right away. She has experienced greater freedom in her life by tapping into the power of her brain. Now, she gets to be a truth-teller to those around her.

Here is a short snippet of my own story:

Back to that time when I was struggling to grow my coaching business. Sitting in that first training class to become a Neuro coach, I felt like a fraud. I looked around at my classmates and remembered thinking, “You just wait until they find out how very little you really know.” Who do you think you are? What makes you think you have the skill to be trained in this? What shocked me was that this kind of negativity surfaced after all the inner healing I had experienced and the years of living in my newfound freedom in Christ. Where was it coming from??

I knew God had called me to take this training, so when these thoughts came up, it was clear I had to do something to change that narrative. Thankfully, in God’s goodness, the journey I was about to embark on led me to uncover a deep subconscious belief about myself. I believed that I was not smart enough to become a successful coach. Hence, I couldn’t build my business because I believed I couldn’t.

So, I began to rewire my neural pathways to believe I was smart enough. What fascinates me is that if someone had told me that I wasn’t smart enough, I would have told them that wasn’t true. However, it was so deeply ingrained in my subconscious that it still affected the results I saw in my life, namely, my inability to grow my business. This is proof that our subconscious beliefs influence so much of our daily results. 

After I went through the process of rewiring my neural pathways, here is what I saw differently in my life:

One of my greatest fears was talking to others about the work I was doing, whether in person or online. That began to shift for me, and I am now quite comfortable promoting what I do as a coach in both of these realms. 

As a leader, to some level, I had played small and held back. I am now more confident and secure as a leader. 

I am now living out my dream of being a full-time coach.

Where did this belief came from that I wasn’t smart enough? I had never had anyone tell me to my face that I wasn’t smart. What I believe happened was that since I did not go through high school or get a college degree, my brain scanned the environment around me. It saw that most people went through high school, and then, if you were really smart, you went to college. So, over and over, my brain was feeding me subconsciously that I wasn’t smart enough because I didn’t have a higher level of education. 

I knew that God had called me to build this business successfully, but I could not do so until I had rewired my subconscious memory to align with the truth of who God says that I am.

I often find in the church that we can recite all sorts of scripture about who God says we are, yet we struggle to fully believe it at the subconscious level. Until the old negative pattern is removed, we will have a hard time believing the truth about ourselves. Our identity is formed at the level of belief. For me, I had a belief that I was not smart enough, not qualified enough, etc. If that is never removed, how will I be truly effective for the kingdom of God?

Stay tuned for my next blog post, where I will dive deeper into how neuroscience aligns with what the Bible has taught us all along about our minds.

If you are someone who likes to take action quickly and you are ready to access the tools you need to find lasting freedom, set up a free call with me below: