In my last post, I told you about how I realized I was running my entire business (and my life in general) on wounded masculine and feminine patterns... I had already resigned from my elementary school teaching career and made my first 6-figures in my business, but I was holding it together by a thread. I thought I could control it all... if I just held on a little tighter, it would all work out.

For years, I bought into the subconscious story of: "I'll be happy when."

I'll be happy when we sell the house...

I'll be happy when the baby's born...

I'll be happy when we're settled...

I'd been telling some version of that story since I was a teenager waiting for my boyfriend of over a decade to propose.

If you'd rather listen to me tell this one, it's Episode 3 of the Wake Up with Jenna podcast.

And Then, It All Cracked Open.

I found out I was pregnant with my daughter in 2020 right as the world shut down for the pandemic. I was the least "awakened" person on the planet back then, and I fell hard into the fear narratives surrounding the pandemic. To the point where I would call and report my husband's family-owned business to the health department daily, hoping to get them shut down. He owned a golf course, and I hated that he was one of the only professions still open and forced to serve the public... for something as unnecessary as golf, nonetheless. So I reported them... every day... for weeks.

Spoiler alert: that did absolutely nothing for the state of my mental health and wellbeing. 

My business partner at the time was a few weeks ahead of me in her own pregnancy, and my husband and I made a decision that says everything about where I was at the time: we sold our house, moved in with my parents "temporarily," and decided the second we were settled somewhere new, everything would finally feel okay.

It never occurred to me that I couldn't control that timeline.

We had a drive-by baby shower where people handed gifts through car windows. I walked down the stairs every morning, saw the moving boxes stacked against the wall, and started having daily panic attacks because I could not picture a version of the future where I'd have this baby at my parents' house and still feel okay. My parents were loving and supportive and incredibly helpful... it just wasn't the situation I'd envisioned for myself, and I was determined to be settled before our daughter came. To help with my anxiety, I was doing "all the right things"... daily workouts, journaling, essential oils, and the second I was done with my practice, it all came flooding back. I felt lost for the first time... which was terrifying, because I'd always been in control up to that point. 

We finally moved into our house 5 days before my daughter was born in October of 2020, and I thought the panic would ease up.

But it was just getting started. 

The Birth That Took The Control Out Of My Hands

I went into labor with zero contractions, just my water breaking on the couch. No warning. In hindsight, that was fitting, because the entire birth became a lesson in surrendering to a timeline I did not get to choose.

At the hospital, they started pushing Pitocin within a couple of hours because my contractions weren't intense enough yet. I told them I wanted an unmedicated birth, and that I wanted to trust my body. I had my essential oils blasting through the diffusers in the room... I was doing everything I could to follow my plan. Then, they told me it wasn't safe for my daughter anymore if I didn't get induced. I unwillingly caved, feeling borderline bullied into it, because I could not hold my own truth against that level of authority... Not yet.

And holy balls... there is no way to describe a Pitocin contraction compared to a natural one. Every muscle in my body was seizing, to the point where even my calves were cramping with each contraction, and I stood against the bathroom door telling my husband I didn't trust my own legs to hold me anymore. 

My doctor walked in wearing jeans and tennis shoes, with no urgency at all, and I later found out he'd promised the hospital staff a round of Starbucks if they could get the baby out of me by 10am. I went from barely dilated to fully dilated in a couple of hours. She was born at 8:33 that morning, and because I was so tense, so disconnected from my own body by that point, she got stuck coming out and I tore.

A resident I never consented to stitched me up, without any medication, because I'd refused the epidural. As he worked, my body started convulsing... uncontrollably shaking... which I now understand was trauma discharging in real time. They told me they couldn't stitch me if I wasn't still, so I held my legs down, while simultaneously holding back tears.

I stopped my own body from shaking.

I suppressed it...

And I'd later realize that this was the exact same pattern my whole life had been built on: don't be too much, don't make the person in charge uncomfortable, earn love by staying still and staying quiet... It was all mirrored back to me in that single moment, on a table, minutes after becoming a mother.

The Body Keeps Score When You Won't

I thought the hard part was over, but it wasn't even close.

At 6 weeks postpartum, I was cleared by the same doctor who'd bet my birth time on a Starbucks run, so I went straight back into the full Beachbody workouts I'd been doing my entire pregnancy. After the very first one, I had pelvic organ prolapse. My bladder was, quite literally, falling out of my body, and at the same time I was running a weight-loss challenge for other women about fitting back into their pre-pregnancy jeans. My entire surface identity was about weight loss while my body was screaming underneath it. The dissonance I felt between what was actually happening in my own life and who I was claiming to be was the most dysregulating experience, and I didn't know what to do about it. My clients were still getting results... but I was a completely different person, and my heart just wasn't in those surface-level transformations anymore. But, I also had no idea where it was... 

A few weeks later my daughter was diagnosed with hip dysplasia so severe her hip was fully dislocated. She spent weeks in a Pavlik harness. For 23-hours a day, she had her legs pinned up in a permanent M shape, and was unable to sleep unless someone walked her in circles around the house. We eventually resorted to letting her sleep in a baby swing because it was the only way any of us slept at all. 

In the middle of this, I showed up to a pelvic floor therapy appointment that I had begged my OB to refer me to, and at this point I was barely holding myself together. I told my therapist how incredibly exhausted I was. She told me she understood completely, because she'd just gotten a new puppy that woke her up at 5am. Somehow, I didn't actually punch her during that appointment... though I'm still not sure how I was able to hold that back. I walked out of that building and never went back. I logically knew she was just trying to relate to me and she meant no harm, but I was drowning. And everyone around me kept telling me, in a dozen different ways, that I didn't have the right to be as devastated as I was. "Other people have it worse." "It's just a harness." "You should be grateful neither of you needed surgery." I even caught myself, in a low moment, wishing hip dysplasia on someone else's baby out of sheer rage at being unseen, and then being terrified of myself for thinking it. That's not who I was... But my nervous system was done with that fact that I had no one witnessing what it was actually carrying.

"Forgive Your Daughter"

Eventually I asked for help. And, in true Jenna fashion, I thought I needed help with my business. I felt completely disconnected from what I'd believed before I gave birth, and I didn't know what that meant for my work. So, my business partner and I hired a mentor: someone who'd been through her own near-death experience and rebuilt her life around subconscious work. We hired her for business coaching... and that turned out to be the last thing either of us needed. 

Thankfully, our mentor saw that long before we could. 

She split our calls up, mine and my business partner's, and for the first time in my entire life, I was in a room with no one to hide behind. On our first individual call, she looked at me and said, "Jenna, you need to forgive your daughter." My daughter was 3 months old at the time, and I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to be forgiving her for. I agreed anyway, because I trusted the process even when I didn't understand it.

I got off that call, walked into the living room, laid down on the floor next to her on her play mat, looked her in the eyes, and said, "I forgive you." And I started sobbing from a place I didn't have language for. My body knew... something... that my mind had absolutely no idea about. 

I traced that moment all the way back to being sent to my time-out chair as a kid until I could stop having big feelings and rejoin the family... calm, quiet, and put together. I traced it back to the day my mom told me our beloved babysitter had died, and I flatly responded, "Okay, can I go play?" because I'd already learned that showing zero emotion was the safest option. I'd bottled up every big emotion I'd had for over thirty years, and lying on that floor with my 3-month-old, I finally let my body do what it had been asking to do the entire time: actually feel something.

The 97 Percent

Working with that mentor at the time opened me up to the world of the subconscious, and I realized quickly why everything I'd tried up to that point had stopped working.

Your subconscious mind runs roughly 97 percent of your life. Your conscious mind, the part doing the journaling, the affirmations, the talk therapy, and the mindset work, is operating maaaaayybe 3-5%.

You cannot think, journal, or affirm your way into rewiring something your subconscious mind has a deep pattern around.

Once I started doing real subconscious work: EFT tapping, hypnosis, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), I quickly found a belief that had been running my entire life: "No one is listening."

It was there in my old classroom where my ideas got ignored...

It was there in the delivery room, when I told the doctor I didn't want Pitocin and got it anyway...

It was there in my prolapse appointment where my postpartum exhaustion got compared to a puppy...

Once I saw that pattern, I saw it everywhere, including in my own messaging, where I was over-explaining everything because some part of me believed no one was actually listening to me.

That subconscious work unraveled a 15-year binge eating control disorder I'd been hiding since I was 14 that had somehow felt "normal" because a family member shared it with me - plus the fitness industry I was working in at the time normalized it.

It cracked open my relationship to religion and God, where I ended up standing in my kitchen sobbing because I didn't know what I believed enough to teach any of it to my daughter. And now, fast-forward 3 years and I channel through the Akashic Records for my clients. 

Point being: once you actually see a pattern instead of just controlling the symptoms of it, you cannot go back to unseeing it.

What Actually Changed

I burned my business down.

I couldn't keep teaching weight loss once I'd healed my own 15-year eating disorder in just a few weeks... but I didn't yet know what was next. I was deep in The Void, and there was nowhere out but through. We also went deep into debt following my awakening - close to $150,000 - and we had to cash out my STRS retirement fund to cover the mortgage on the new house we'd just bought based on my income... that no longer existed.

And here's the part that still surprises me every time I say it out loud: that was the happiest I had ever been. Broke, uncertain, completely unbuilt, and finally myself. That taught me something no amount of strategy ever could: overflow was never about money... not really. It becomes available when you no longer need it to prove anything.

Life kept testing that theory.

My business partner was later diagnosed with cancer, and it threw both of us into some of the hardest years either of us has lived. That full story belongs in another post, which I'll share soon. But what I can tell you is that I kept building anyway... because the mission underneath of it all never crumbled, even when everything around it did. The AWAKEN course I built in the middle of all of it is the one I still use with my clients today who are in the middle of their own awakenings.

3 Things To Take With You

1. Your body will eventually make you feel what your mind has been refusing to feel. Exhaustion, illness, panic, collapse... that's all a sign that your body is doing the work your logical mind couldn't do on its own. When that happens, it's time to stop and listen. 
2. Your subconscious is running the vast majority of your life, which is exactly why journaling and mindset work alone were never going to be enough. Real change happens underneath the 3-5% that your conscious mind can actually see.
3. Surrender may be a lifelong practice. Seeing it as ongoing work instead of a problem you're supposed to solve once will greatly improve your relationship to being a human and doing "the work."

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Real transformation happens across multiple planes of your system, unfolds in phases of leadership, and progresses through stages of healing as your nervous system learns to stabilize a new identity.

If this resonated and you’re brand new to this work, my Coming Home  mini course is the gentlest entry point into subconscious reprogramming, EFT tapping, and somatic tools. 

And if you’re ready for the full body of work, The Empire holds everything that came from this season of my life, including AWAKEN, more than 75 subconscious reprogramming processes, somatic tools, deep Human Design teachings, and the frameworks I now use to support transformation across every area of your life.

You can explore everything here: → Work With Me → Free Resources

Trust yourself to choose what resonates. I'm glad you're here. ❤️

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