Imagine being held captive by a legacy of addiction and suffering, only to find the strength to break free and redefine your relationship with a Higher Power. That's the reality for our esteemed guest, author and coach Dr. Luciana Passeri. Her memoir "Gods in a Box on my Dresser" is a testament to her unforgettable journey that's sure to awaken your consciousness and inspire personal growth.
Our conversation delves into the transformative power of plant medicine and how it can be a catalyst for aligning thoughts, emotions and behaviors with life's highest purpose. Listen in as I reveal how my exploration of plant medicine has not only contributed to my coaching practice but expanded it to include other areas such as personal freedom and slow fashion entrepreneurship.
But we're not stopping there. Together, we're diving into the realm of ancestral trauma and exploring the healing potential that lies within us all. Dr. Passeri shares a moving account of an encounter with her grandfather during a ceremony, leading to profound healing and release from past traumas. If you've ever felt bound by the chains of your ancestry, this episode will open your eyes to the power you have to heal, grow and thrive.
Tune in for an enlightening and soulful conversation. Dr. Luciana Passeri's memoir is available on Amazon in both Kindle version and hardback or paperback. Don't miss out!
To learn more about Dr. Luciana Passeri, click here
We hope you found the episode to be enlightening and insightful. Our goal is to create content that not only entertains but also helps you grow spiritually and connect with your inner self.
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, we would greatly appreciate it if you could take a moment to like, subscribe, and write a review. Your feedback is incredibly valuable to us and helps us to improve the quality of our content and reach a wider audience.
We believe that by sharing knowledge and insights about spirituality, we can help to inspire positive change and personal growth. So, if you find our podcast to be meaningful and informative, we encourage you to share it with your friends and family.
Imagine being held captive by a legacy of addiction and suffering, only to find the strength to break free and redefine your relationship with a Higher Power. That's the reality for our esteemed guest, author and coach Dr. Luciana Passeri. Her memoir "Gods in a Box on my Dresser" is a testament to her unforgettable journey that's sure to awaken your consciousness and inspire personal growth.
Our conversation delves into the transformative power of plant medicine and how it can be a catalyst for aligning thoughts, emotions and behaviors with life's highest purpose. Listen in as I reveal how my exploration of plant medicine has not only contributed to my coaching practice but expanded it to include other areas such as personal freedom and slow fashion entrepreneurship.
But we're not stopping there. Together, we're diving into the realm of ancestral trauma and exploring the healing potential that lies within us all. Dr. Passeri shares a moving account of an encounter with her grandfather during a ceremony, leading to profound healing and release from past traumas. If you've ever felt bound by the chains of your ancestry, this episode will open your eyes to the power you have to heal, grow and thrive.
Tune in for an enlightening and soulful conversation. Dr. Luciana Passeri's memoir is available on Amazon in both Kindle version and hardback or paperback. Don't miss out!
To learn more about Dr. Luciana Passeri, click here
We hope you found the episode to be enlightening and insightful. Our goal is to create content that not only entertains but also helps you grow spiritually and connect with your inner self.
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, we would greatly appreciate it if you could take a moment to like, subscribe, and write a review. Your feedback is incredibly valuable to us and helps us to improve the quality of our content and reach a wider audience.
We believe that by sharing knowledge and insights about spirituality, we can help to inspire positive change and personal growth. So, if you find our podcast to be meaningful and informative, we encourage you to share it with your friends and family.
Hello everyone, welcome to our spiritual spotlight series. Today I am joined by Dr Luciana Passeri. She is an author, coach, entrepreneur, and I can't say that we're somebody who works with nonprofit organizations. Thank you so much for coming on the spiritual spotlight series. I'm so happy you're here.
Speaker 2:
Thank you, rachel. I'm pleased to be here, really grateful.
Speaker 1:
I am cracking up because before we started I was having a hard time pronouncing things and it may continue throughout this interview, so I appreciate the patience that everyone is giving to us. So I'm actually going to talk about your memoir. She has an amazing memoir. It's called Gods in a Box on my Dresser. It delves into deeply personal and challenging experiences. Can you maybe share, like, what led you to writing this memoir and tell the reader, the readers and the listeners about their book?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah. So really I wrote this book because I come from a legacy of addiction and suffering, legacies of people who grew believing they were the disempowering narratives that they were told they were. And so as I grew up, I grew up also in the Catholic tradition, and as much as I loved my religion and my faith, it was also very, very confusing because of just how my life unraveled. So the title of the book Gods in a Box on my Dresser An Inquiry into the Human Capacity to Thrive really the box part is about how people, religions, traditions continuously tried to define God. And my point, one of my points in the book, is that we can't define God. And when we do define God and I get why people want to because it can feel really safe and we're in control if we know what God thinks and wants and doesn't want to that. But limitations really prevent us from expanding our consciousness and growing. I have a kind of a quick example of what I mean by that, if I could.
Speaker 2:
So I lucid dream. Okay, I don't know how many people are familiar with lucid dreaming, but lucid dreaming is the quick and dirty is when you become conscious in your dream even though you're sleeping. So you're like, yeah, I'm in my dream, oh, cool, I'm going to do X, y and Z. Well, because I was a gymnast when I was younger, my lucid dreams often include not flying per se, but I can do like backflips and reach chandeliers and all of that kind of thing and it's super cool. You know I'm flying through, you know rooms or whatever. Okay, but here's the deal and how this connects with the whole expansesness, expandedness.
Speaker 2:
A consciousness is, even though in my dream I can control, like, how many flips I do to the next chandelier or the next beam, I can't control who's walking beneath me, I can't control the next chandelier.
Speaker 2:
And I share this story because my dreams, then our dreams, are examples of something outside of our consciousness trying to connect with us. Right, and so I just I know that to be true from my experiences. So, connecting that to God in a box. It's very similar when we have God in a box, we miss out on the opportunity to hear the whispers of divinity, and people don't have to believe in God, you know, to get this concept. It can be spirit, it can be whatever part of us that's intangible, you know. Put a name to whatever you want for that. So it's this idea of how important it is in life to take divinity, to take God out of that box. We can still have religious beliefs if we want, but the box, if we don't kind of allow the box to soften or open, we remain constrained, not just from a religious perspective but from our own perspective and our own ability to fearlessly bring our own gifts into the world, because we're naturally constrained by the limitations of a really powerful belief system.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely that you bring up so many valuable points as you're talking, just growing up in the Catholic faith, listening to the whispers of divine, like there are all just such important themes and how we kind of, even when we're working with spirit guides, what's one of the questions we always hear? Well, what's their name? Like that just puts a limit on it and I just I find that fascinating because some things I know for myself. There's a guide that I have and they will not name themselves. It's like names are limiting, like it's not going to happen.
Speaker 2:
Right, so that's right.
Speaker 1:
It's like throw that out with the bathwater.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's right, quit trying, Rachel, not going to give it to you.
Speaker 1:
Rude, I'm just kidding. Tell me, ask you this, as we are laughing this is going to be more of a heavy question. So your story touches on themes about childhood abandonment, sexual abuse and addiction. How did you find the strength and resilience to not only heal but thrive after facing such adversity?
Speaker 2:
Well. So I was desperate to thrive. I had a relationship with Jesus since the time I was four. That's when he came to me for my first time. So my abandonment was experienced as I was the youngest of technically seven kids. The full story, of course, is in my book.
Speaker 2:
But by the time I came along, my parents were wiped out. Man, they had been through so much. But of course, as a kid you don't know that. You just wanna be loved and seen and heard, and even any excuse later in life, when you know, as a teen or whatever, it didn't matter what the excuse was. A kid just wants to be seen and heard, right.
Speaker 2:
Well, I later came to understand their suffering from a much like bigger picture in any case. So when I was really little, jesus came to me and we started to have just this beautiful relationship together, which was so lovely, and I credit my religion too with helping me to be able to nurture that. Well, little did I know. You know, after that beautiful relationship had started, when I was just four years old, by the time I was six and seven, I would experience sexual abuse. That is incontrable. I was abducted Again. I won't go into it here because you know, trigger warning. There's people who have suffered a lot and I wanna make sure and be respectful of people's space. But from there I went on to suffer from sexual abuse from a family member for many years and so, as a result of the abuse, I developed which I came to find out is not unusual a raging eating disorder that almost killed me. So I had this eating disorder that allowed me to cope with all of these disempowering narratives and traumatic experiences, and it was the only way at that time I knew I could like keep it together, if you will, but it's an exhausting way to live, absolutely exhausting. On the outside I was successful. I had master's degrees, doctorate, beautiful daughters and yadadadada, but I was so desperate to heal, so desperate. I made so many deals with God. I tried everything from therapy to I mean, you name it.
Speaker 2:
And one day actually, I was doing a philanthropy project in Tanzania and, out of the blue, one of my project managers, from the back seat, said hey, luciana, have you ever tried ayahuasca? And I was like what? I had no idea what it was, zero idea. Good little Catholic girl, no idea what that was, and my entire body, my entire energy system just went and I just knew I didn't know what it was, but I'm like I gotta get some of that. And he was like it's not how it works actually, and he told me a little bit about it. But this is how powerful that experience was. From that point, it was only like three weeks. I started immediately Googling this. I, three weeks later, was in Peru for my very first ayahuasca ceremonies, and that, for me, was the medicine that helped unlock the secrets to me thriving. I ultimately and the book is about 30 days actually that I spent in the jungle on this little island with just a few other people sleeping under a mosquito net running water no bab-blah-blah-blah, nothing like that.
Speaker 2:
And it was there where everything sort of solidified, and all my desperate desires to heal finally downloaded in this quiet space with the animals, the critters, the medicine, the shaman healers. And so I mean long answer to how did you cope with it? The first quick part of the answer is I didn't. I coped with it with an addiction, like so many people who suffer do. And then how I coped with the addiction was stress, anxiety and all of that. And so the jungle really gave me the space to do the work that I needed to do. We have so much clutter whether any part of the Western world there's so much clutter in our space and distractions that it can make it really, maybe even impossible, I don't know but very difficult to heal from such traumatic deep wounds. That then PS the dramatic deep wounds, create belief systems within us, all these disempowering narratives that so many people just conclude oh, it's just who I am, that's just who I am. It's like no, no, no, no, no, no. You get to decide that you have total power, total power over that.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I just love how vulnerable you are with your story, like it's just amazing. And with Plant Medicine now, with using two things, with ayahuasca one, I did an interview a while ago and she said it calls you. And you just said that, like when you're ready for it, it calls you, and I find that I appreciate her in saying that and you saying that. I was like, oh my goodness, she's right, I love that. So tell me more about your journey with Plant Medicine and is it something that you use with your clients, because I know that you're also a life design coach.
Speaker 2:
Can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so I am a life design coach and I believe that we all have the power within us to thrive and to clock our disempowering narratives. Ps thriving to me is when we align our thought, our talk, our emotions and our behaviors with our highest purpose. I love, that that's perfect, clock it all.
Speaker 1:
Clock it all.
Speaker 2:
So clock it all so that's thriving. And so what I do in my coaching practice is I support people in kind of excavating their patterns, their personal patterns of thought, talk, emotion and behavior, and then I support them in aligning those so that they can access this part of themselves that maybe they didn't even know existed. And I can give you one really simple example of clocking a thought. So when I came out of the jungle I actually it was three days leaving the jungle I walked into a store in Cusco, peru, and I was like, oh my gosh, my husband joined me. My husband and I he's amazing, we've been together 36 years yeah, he's not a jungle guy, though. So he came to meet me in Cusco for a vacation. We walked into this store and I looked at him and I said this is it? Now? What did that mean?
Speaker 2:
What that means is, for over 20 years I've been working with Indigenous artisans through my non-profits, supporting them and bringing their crafts to market and supporting them and living their best life, la la la. So when I walked in, when I said this is it? It's like oh no, no, this is a company that is going to be world-class and be built, and now, of course, many years in, we create wearable art, beautiful Indigenous shoes and bags and yadda-da-da, so anyway. So that company started like I didn't really start it. It started and I just showed up. But here's the deal I didn't speak Spanish and so one summer, right as I was starting it, I had the summer to do it. So I'm walking down the street in Cusco and I kept having these massive fear waves Like you have no idea what you've done. I've never built a world company right.
Speaker 2:
A global company or anything, I don't know Spanish. I'm walking down the street and every day, all day, I would get these like fear-stopping you have no idea what you're doing. And I go ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, oh my gosh. And one day, I know, one day, I'm walking down the street and that dang narrative came and it said you have no idea what you're doing, but this time I stopped in my tracks and I just I did this sort of thing and I went, yeah, I said you're right, you have no idea what you're doing, but you'll figure it out. And that's an example of like clocking thought. Right, of course I don't know, of course I don't know what I'm doing, but I can figure it out. And all of the anxiety and everything, the barriers that came along with that, just one little thought and emotion evaporated and became vanquished. Wow, yeah, but we have so many like that.
Speaker 2:
When I was in the jungle every night, well, the first couple of nights, this massive rat okay, like I said, I was only sleeping under a mosquito net, right, this massive rat would run between my head right, like brush my head right. And most, well, a lot of us are afraid of huge rats running next to your head, right, and I would have these like major panicky things, but same kind of thing. At one point I just stopped and it was like, okay, you are day three of 30, you can be completely terrified or you can let it go and name them. So my friend and I named him Mr Tickles and then every night when he would run by my head, I would just go, mr Tickles, go to bed, right.
Speaker 2:
And so I share these two stories because I am so not alone in having these disempowering narratives. But the cool thing is, when we just change our minds so quickly, that changing of the mind and that experience is transferable to every other area of our life. Because once we know we have that power and the effects of that power, we can do it with emotions, we can do it with behaviors, with talk. It's just a really beautiful like oh, that's actually not that hard.
Speaker 1:
Right, and that's what you label the clocking, disempowering narratives. Right, that's awesome and it's just, it's like very quick.
Speaker 2:
Right, you just change your mind about it, you just go. Okay, I have a choice about this, and it can continue to creep back in. Of course, I mean, that's our minds, that's kind of their job. You know, if we start to like challenge some of our old patterns of behavior, our mind tries to keep us safe and be like oh no, no, no, no, no, no, you're not safe, you're not safe. And we have to continue to remind it like, oh no, I am. And then eventually the switch is just on and we don't have to remind ourselves anymore. They just drop away.
Speaker 2:
And it becomes more on that, which I have stories about too.
Speaker 1:
But yeah, so I you kind of brought up a couple of different things. So your work covers a wide variety of topics, from personal freedom to slow fashion entrepreneurship. So how did these seemingly diverse subjects connect in your mission to inspire and guide others?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, okay, so I can tell you, because the pillars to my company and the slogans for my company actually came to me in the jungle before I knew the company would exist.
Speaker 1:
The right.
Speaker 2:
So the pillars of the company and the pillars of my life, right, are these. It's be beauty, live compassionately, love everyone, create peace and be kind. And so those qualities, those pillars that had become my life even before the jungle. They didn't crystallize as perfectly, but those, those kind of pillars and guiding principles I bring, of course, to the coaching, because when we can be those things for ourselves beauty, compassion, love, peaceful and kind it naturally transfers into the world. So my work then with indigenous people had been supporting indigenous people and also living their dreams and thriving in whatever way they desired, whatever that looked to them right.
Speaker 2:
And then with the company, the company started and the company is a slow fashion company, which means things are made by hand. We use hand woven textiles from the Quechua people who live in the mountains of Peru. We have livable, thriveable wages that we pay. We pay for our employees meals and I mean it's just this really like beautiful. I don't know, it's not a bubble because it's, it's not contained by anything, but it's just these pillars. And so how my life has come together has been through these five lenses that I do everything and we call our, our products in our company, wearable art. So it's kind of like we as people, we are art, all of us, and our own beauty and unique way of presenting in the world, and so, yeah, Let me ask you this before I go on to the next question If anyone's interested in purchasing the sustainable art, where?
Speaker 1:
what is the website to go to?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's my last name, so it's Passeri. P-a-s-s-e-r-i dot today.
Speaker 1:
Dot today. Okay, perfect, I gotta make sure to write that down. I love that. That's amazing. I'm gonna go back to your memoir. So God's in a Box on my dresser and inquiry into the human capacity to thrive. You kind of touch on ancestral trauma. Can you approach, how do you approach healing generational wounds, and what advice do you have for others dealing with maybe a similar challenge?
Speaker 2:
Okay. So I'll share this through the lens of ayahuasca, but I will tell you I just want to give this caveat too Ayahuasca is a very powerful medicine and I do not recommend people engage in tourist ayahuasca and it's hard to know what is and what isn't. It's dangerous. So that's the first thing you absolutely do, that's the first thing. The second thing is that? So okay, so let me tell it through this. So ancestral trauma. So I personally believe everybody has as part of our DNA structure, part of our ancestral structure, of course, because it's DNA right that's passed down. Well, as I shared at the beginning, we have in our family tradition tremendous amount of addiction, and most of that, through grandparents, came through alcoholism. You know, hundreds of years ago, I don't know how long, you know, there wasn't meth yet in the way we know it now. So anyway, that was the drug of choice, not making light of it, but that was of choice.
Speaker 2:
So in one of my ceremonies, actually, my grandfather came in to the ceremony and he's been dead for a very long time and he came in in such a beautiful, beautiful way and he came in and he apologized for bringing addiction into the family and I saw my dad in the back, who was also an alcoholic, and I saw him very emotional and not quite sure and my dad has also been dead for quite some time not quite sure how to manage all of this.
Speaker 2:
And so, as I am observing, what I'm experiencing is, you know, whether we want to call it the energy, the DNA, whatever, of this ancestral trauma that was held in this space, on this little island, right, and it was in that space. So addiction and all of this is just energy. And when we have the power to look at it without judgment turn off the analyzer button right, Turn off the judgment button and when we are just able to look at it without having to figure it out, it can bring this healing salve to our energetic space. That is indescribable, it's absolutely indescribable. So how do you do that with you know out ayahuasca? Well, we don't need ayahuasca to do it. What we need is to untether God, our belief systems from any kind of box and allow ourselves to sit with the energy of ancestral generational suffering.
Speaker 2:
Might not be trauma as therapeutically defined, but deep, deep suffering, when I started to excavate my parents' life, for example and my and learn about my grandparents a little more, the stories that I saw and that I heard and that I evidence through, like ancestrycom or whatever Tremendous. And so it's this lightning of that oppressive feeling of heaviness that we carry right. You know, I often say to my clients or my students you know, we suffer tremendously as humans in many, many different ways, and suffering is real. But there's always a story behind the suffering and I believe that all suffering is relational and thus I also believe that, because all suffering is relational, all healing is relational. Now I don't have to be in a relationship with somebody as abuse me. That's not what I mean, but I mean I have to heal the story about that relationship so that I can then have space to look at my thoughts, talking, emotions and behavior that keep me stuck in that space. Abusers have so much power. They have so much power Dead, dead for you know, 20 years, however long, and they still can have power over people. But what I want people to know, maybe more than anything, is that when we step into our power, we write the stories. When we have histories, like I do, that were filled with trauma and neglect and abuse, we have the right, even maybe the responsibility to sit with those stories in a safe way, sometimes with a therapist, right, Very often with a therapist but sit in a safe way with those stories, without judgment about ourselves, and just allow ourselves to breathe and to heal Ancestral trauma is no joke. It is no joke. And so the idea of being open and curious to allowing the stories of our ancestors to be sort of it's kind of like cheesecloth, you know, to be filtered through us without us actually taking it on, but just allow it, yeah, to filter through us.
Speaker 2:
I have a really quick story. I had an experience where I was in this really deep meditative space and I kept seeing, you know, like huge fishing nets that have like squares and sort of things. So I saw fishing nets being carried by people going by, but in every little square there was a skull, every little square, and I'm like, oh, that's curious. And it wasn't scary, but it was so weird. I'm like, okay, oh, there comes some more, and some were babies, some were big, some were old, some were, you know, whatever. And as I then reflected on that experience, what I learned was that every single one of those skulls represented a disempowering narrative that I had to let die? Wow, and I think we all do. I think we all just need to let certain things die, just let them go to their natural death without judgment. We don't need them anymore and their attachment to us is not helpful to us. It thwarts us.
Speaker 1:
That is so powerful, what you just said. Just let it die, let it go. Yeah, let it die, it's okay, and think about how much more of an empowering person you would be if you just Just took off the weight you know Right. Just take it off, and for what?
Speaker 2:
And for what are we carrying it Right? To what end?
Speaker 1:
Especially, like you said 20 years ago, you're right about people that holding power over you years and years and years. It's so heavy.
Speaker 2:
It's so true. I know, I know I'm like I gotta go, and yet it's not that hard.
Speaker 1:
It's not. It doesn't have to be hard, but you have to be willing to look at it and be willing to actually, like you said, people have suffered, you've gone through trauma, but you have to be willing to take a lens to it. You know, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2:
You're one hundred percent correct oh my goodness.
Speaker 1:
Before I ask the last question about being a life design coach. If anyone is interested in purchasing your memoir God's In A Box in my Dress or an Inquiry into the Human Capacity Thrive, what is the best place for them to go to?
Speaker 2:
Well, Amazon.
Speaker 1:
I will just say that I purchase it off of Amazon and you can get it the Kindle version and hardback or paperback Amazon, and then you have two different websites. Can you tell us those one more time please?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, what I got today is the company website, and then LucianaPasaricom is my other site, which I need to update. But yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 1:
So let me ask you this yeah.
Speaker 2:
Like we do.
Speaker 1:
We all need to update.
Speaker 2:
Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 1:
Every day. It's like you can't just be an entrepreneur, like it's just there's so many layers, especially when we have small businesses. So, for those that are maybe considering seeking out a life design coach like yourself, what are the key areas of life that you focus on and how can individuals determine if working with a life design coach is the right step for them?
Speaker 2:
Great question. So I never direct people to where they have to start their work. One of our first sessions. It's a very much story opportunity for stories. There's often a couple ways. This presents One a lot of crying, which is so normal. It's beautiful, I love to cry.
Speaker 1:
I love to cry, I know right, I love to cry.
Speaker 2:
And even when I say healing is easy, I don't mean like ha ha ha, hold on heal. I mean like I'm balling my eyes out and going what the heck? And I'm doing the work. So this piece. So that's one way it presents. Another way it sometimes presents is with a lot of defensiveness, a lot of I got this. My life is actually good. I just need to talk about a few of these things. So those are the two different ways it usually presents in those first couple of sessions. But those are the sessions that help us go deeper and say, okay, let's look at this pattern, what's beneath that pattern and then what we do over.
Speaker 2:
Typically it's 12 weeks, but there's other options for people, and the 12 weeks gives us the space to really I'll use the word again excavate the thought, talk, emotions and behaviors that are out of alignment. We have these life visions for ourselves, or some people don't, and we need to talk about what's the life vision for yourself. Where's your soul calling you to? So the idea is to align all of these things so that our stories from the past they come into alignment, our story about how we want to create our future come into alignment. And, of course, when we bring into alignment, we are then living in our authenticity and in our truth. So it's a really powerful way to. That's why I call it life design coaching. It's a really powerful modality for people because it's looking at all the patterns that keep us stuck.
Speaker 1:
So yeah, and you don't necessarily have to be a spiritual person to have a life design coach. It could just be that I'm feeling a little blocked, I'm feeling a little stuck and I just I need to look at something a little bit deeper.
Speaker 2:
Oh, 100%, in fact, about maybe 40% of my clients are either atheist or agnostic. I mean, that's absolutely. It's not relevant. What's most relevant and what happens with most people, is a lot of people do have traumas and things that they can think of, but just as many people who come to me are like I just feel like there's something more for me. You know, I'm 30, 40, 50, and I've had these visions and I've had, but for some reason I'm not there.
Speaker 1:
And.
Speaker 2:
I help them get to the there.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that is beautiful. I love that. I'm sorry, I'm not, I am, I'm not sorry. That's beautiful, I love that. Again, I'm not sorry. I want to thank you so, so much for coming to the spiritual spotlight. Sorry to you, you are amazing. Thank you again.
Speaker 2:
And thank you, rachel. I appreciate this opportunity to share a little bit of the story. Thank you, let's go.
