Transcript Interview Episode with Carisa Montooth

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Carisa: [00:00:00] I always describe it and the way that I work, really my whole guiding principle of it is that you don't make love happen, you make love welcome.

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah.

Carisa: Make love welcome. And we make it welcome by clearing out all of the things that are obstacles in us, and believing that it's not possible for us. Cuz we're really the only ones that are strong enough to stop our own manifestation of love. We're the only ones powerful enough to do that.

Laurin: Hello, friends, and welcome to Curiously Wise. I'm your host, Laurin Wittig. And I have the beautiful and love filled Carissa Montooth with me here today.

And I am so excited for this conversation because I think love is such an important thing to bring into the world right now. And Carissa happens to be an expert on the topic. So welcome Carissa.

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Carisa: Thank you, Laurin. I'm so excited to get to talk to you about love.

Laurin: Yeah. Makes you feel [00:01:00] good. All right, so let me just read your bio real quick so people know all of the wonderful things that you can do and, and are. Carissa is a love coach, a certified sixth generation healer. And if you've been listening to my podcast, you know, I'm a healer too, so I love that. She's an author and a speaker.

Carissa shows single women how to attract and date marriage minded men without self-sabotage. That's always a good thing to get over. She helps her clients identify their blind spots in love, heal their subconscious blocks to love, and navigate the dating world with grace and confidence. She's been featured in Yahoo Finance as a top 10 love coach, and she holds advanced degrees in psychology and counseling and has written extensively about topics relating to relationships, dating and love.

So I'm just super excited about this conversation.

Carisa: Me too, I can talk about love all day, so I always have to make...

Laurin: Oh,

Carisa: …sure that I'm careful with my time.

Laurin: I'll watch the time. We'll just have fun,

Carisa: Great.[00:02:00]

Laurin: So let's start with this idea of love coach. So tell us what you do as a love coach.

Carisa: Yeah, because I'm a love coach and a healer, I have obviously put a lot of thought into how those two roles function. And the love coaching part of things has to do with the things that are about mindset, the things that are about learning communication, the things that are about understanding differences between masculine and feminine energy, and all those kinds of questions that you get if you're on YouTube.

So things like, you know, where do I find this person? Or how do I write a pro a dating, an online dating profile? Or what do I say if they ask me this question? Those kinds of things all fall under the umbrella of coaching, which is about 20% of the whole process of manifesting love is really the mindset changes are really only like 10 or 20% of that. But…

Laurin: Then the rest is the healing.

Carisa: The rest is the healing part. Yeah. The rest is healing.

Laurin: Tell us also about that part.[00:03:00]

Carisa: Yeah. So the healing part has to do with all of the things that we are holding in our subconscious mind, which I like to almost think of as another word for our spirit.

Laurin: Mm,

Carisa: Really how psychologists are defining spirit, which is kind of indefinable, right? So, we hold all of these things in our subconscious that are these beliefs that came out of experiences of disappointment, or wounds from the past. And we are now telling ourselves things to save ourselves from future disappointment.

So we run these programs in our subconscious that say, do this so you don't get hurt again. Believe this, so you can avoid this pitfall. And a lot of times, you know, 99% of the time those things are not actually true, or they helped us at that time, but they're not true for us anymore.

And because they feel so true, we don't usually question them. We just manifest from them and operate from them and move from them as the basis of everything that [00:04:00] we're doing. But we're not really looking at it and asking, is this true for me? And is this true for me now?

Laurin: Yeah. That now part I think is really important cuz somewhere along the line, somebody taught me that a belief is just something we keep telling ourselves until we believe it.

Carisa: Absolutely.

Laurin: And so we carry a lot with us that maybe at one point did protect us in some way. As a child, maybe you didn't like conflict, so you made yourself into a person who didn't create conflict. But maybe that's not serving so well anymore.

Or maybe you were one who went and fell in love too fast, you know? And you need to maybe take a little more time to really know yourself and know the person that you're working towards, you're coming towards. So tell me a little bit more about how you do your healing work. Because I am an intuitive energy healer, so I get a lot of information from spirit, from the person's soul, spirit from the body, [00:05:00] even.

I’d have niece that talk to me, you know? I talk to spleens. It's, I know it's weird and wonderful. But I know that one of the things my main focus is finding those energetic blocks and I'm covering the source of them, which is almost always emotional in my experience. And then helping them to process that, I call it bringing it into the light.

Carisa: Yes.

Laurin: And so it sounds like we…

Carisa: I call it bringing it up to the top.

Laurin: Yes. Yeah. Yeah,

Carisa: It's really similar.

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah. So that's so where you can see it, you know, bringing it up where you can, you can see it, acknowledge it, and work through it.

Carisa: Where you can deal with it.

Laurin: Yeah. And then transform it into something wonderful. That's, yeah. So that's a very similar process.

Carisa: Yeah, my process is very similar in that. A lot of times I believe in the sovereignty of my client in their own wisdom, in their sovereignty. So I am always connecting with consent, is one thing. But the other thing is,[00:06:00] looking at what is there to be healed now. Because I've noticed that their spirit will bring forward the thing that needs to be healed now. That they're actually ready to heal now.

Laurin: Right.

Carisa: And we don't have to go in and do a bunch of exploratory digging and get to 100 of the blocks that are there. We really just have to look at what's between them and where they wanna be right now. And their spirit already knows that. So, a lot of times we will connect an energy with permission, and then I will ask for, I will ask for my guidance about what it is we need to start testing for.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: So I might have an idea of what I think it is, but I'm also aware that that might just be an idea I have in my conscious mind. And so, I'm really careful about making sure my agenda is separate. I don't have an agenda I'm bringing. So, then we see what's coming up for them. We test to make sure that if that's really what's happening for them.

So we do muscle testing to make sure. So [00:07:00] that it's also not just a story that they're saying in their conscious mind, but something that's actually really happening in their spirit. A deep, deeply held subconscious belief. And then because we are connected in energy at that point, I can ask for that to be cleared. That specific need to be cleared.

And usually, I'm bringing in something that is equal and opposite to that. I'm asking for a download that's equal and opposite to that. Because a lot of times nature’s a force, a vacuum, right? So we can clear something, clear something, clear something. But if healing isn't just about clearing out the things that aren't working anymore, it's also bringing in those things for wholeness.

You know, we, we wanna bring that into anchor.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: So a lot of times with love, that will mean let's look at what's really behind this belief. Let's get really clear about what this belief means. So for example, I had a group I was working with to do energy healing a couple of, a few days ago. And one of the beliefs that came up to be cleared that really just resonated with the group, cuz it was almost like I don't know what it looks like for you and energy, but for [00:08:00] me, have you seen those scenes of like Christmas, it's miniature town and it's Christmas and there's houses, little houses everywhere and all of these things and they all have little lights in them?

For me, if I'm working with a group, what I see, it's almost like I see it, the lights go on in little houses all over Christmas Town kind.

Laurin: That's cool.

Carisa: It's like, oh, everybody's got this, you know? And the more lights that I'm seeing go on, the more that that I know that it's something that resonates for the majority of the group. So that's what I look for when I'm doing group healing because I want to make sure that as many people as possible are able to clear that belief in the time we have. But what I noticed is this particular belief was it had to do with, I am hard to love.

Laurin: Oh.

Carisa: But everyone's version of I am hard to love, had a different flavor to it.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: So some people's I am hard to love was [00:09:00] because I need to lose weight first. Some people's version was because I'm a single mom.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: Some people's was because my standards are too high. For some people it was because I have a hole in my heart and I'm trying really hard to fill it up, and nobody wants to do that for me. I'm asking for too much. So a lot of times in that kind of a situation, what's under it is so important. So when we're bringing, when we're clearing, we can clear I am hard to love, but then we need to bring in maybe 10 different versions of I am easy to love.

Laurin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Carisa: And 10 different versions of why I'm easy to love. I'm easy to love exactly as I am right now in this body.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: I think for the one that was the single mom we brought in I am easy to love and so are my kids.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: You, you know, and my kids are one of the lovable things about me, you know? [00:10:00] How good of a parent I am and those kinds of things, you know? So it's, it's, a lot of it is that, that energy work, and when we're doing the energy work, the mindset part is kind of easy afterwards.

It's like driving. It's like you take your parking brake off, driving with your parking brake, parking brake off now, you know?

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah.

Carisa: Because the way that I always describe it and the way that I work, really, my whole guiding principle of it is that you don't make love happen, you make love welcome.

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah.

Carisa: Make love welcome. And we make it welcome by clearing out all of the things that are obstacles in us. And believing that it's not possible for us, cuz we're really the only ones that are strong enough to stop our own manifestation of love. We're the only ones powerful enough to do that.

You know that you're a healer.

Laurin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Yeah. I have to remind myself of that for myself too. Even though we're healers, we still have that some of that stuff that's gotta clear out regularly.

Carisa: Oh, yeah,

Laurin: So, it sounds to me like a lot of that is really about self-love. It's [00:11:00] about how do, how do you create, how do you love yourself as you are in the right now?

So do you have any other, I mean, that's a lovely way of figuring out what the block is and then bringing in these affirmative statements to create a new belief. So, do you have any other tools that you use to help people with that self-love kind of aspect of this work? I'm sure you do.

Carisa: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, some of what we do if we're looking at the love coaching side, it's bringing in specific practices of self-love on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: So it's things like a gratitude practice, not only for what's good in your life, but for yourself.

Like, I'm grateful for myself. I'm grateful for me. I'm grateful for who I am when you're first waking up in the morning, bringing that in with you into sleep and doing things for yourself. Like one example was I got myself, I remember I got myself this really beautiful night gown for my birthday, and I wrote myself this message like, [00:12:00] Happy birthday sexy, you know? And I said, you know something when I got it, I was just like, that's right!

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: You know? Yes. You know, So some of it depends on kind of who I'm working with and what would feel most like self-love to them.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: So it can be things like, oh, she's waiting to use her favorite perfume until she has a date. Well, no. Use that every day. Spray your sheets with it, you know?

Laurin: Yeah, yeah.

Carisa: Really coming into it and that you're worthy of using that thing right now as you are. Some of it has to do with some of the work that Louise Hay pioneered in terms of mirror work.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: And looking in our eyes, and telling ourselves, I love you, but also saying thank you when we're looking in our eyes. Noot only thank you for being you, but thank you for manifesting all the great things you manifested so far because of how manifesting is such a self-actualizing kind of a process.

So the more that we're saying I'm a master manifestor, the more of a master manifestor we become.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: You know? [00:13:00] So it's, yeah.

Laurin: I, I remember when I first learned about Louise Hay's mirror work and tried it. It was hard to do.

Carisa: So hard.

Laurin: Yeah. Which, I mean, it doesn't seem like it should be that hard, but looking yourself in the eye and going, you are perfect just the way you are. It's like, you all these, but yes, but yes, but yes, but, you know, things would come up.

Carisa: Yeah. You sometimes can feel, especially depending on how much inner work you must have done up to, that you might have done at that point, because you can get instant pushback.

Laurin: mm-hmm.

Carisa: You know, you just hit that instant resistance wall that it's just like, what are you doing? This is ridiculous.

This is not ever gonna work for you. You start to hear all these kinds of things. And so it's really great when I get to do this with my clients because one of the things I'll do is make them stop on the call and go do it right now for 60 seconds. Because then they can tell themselves, well my coach is making me do its homework, so I have to do it, you know, and then that takes away a little of the resistance.

Laurin: [00:14:00] Yeah! That's brilliant.

Carisa: Yeah, So I just make them do it right now for 60 seconds. I'm timing you 60 seconds. Go do it right now. You know?

Laurin: That's brilliant. That is really brilliant.

Carisa: And it's, it's really helpful to give them permission to love themselves and a space to love themselves without excuses. And then you just find like, it's because I'm looking for blocks to clear a lot of the time, that tells us instantly what's going on. Because if they're looking in the mirror, we listen to what the resistance is saying.

So if they're saying, I love you, and this block is saying, oh, well, if you lose a little weight, maybe. Or if you hadn't messed up with X, Y, Z, so then I'm like, that's gold. That's great.

Laurin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Carisa: We need to, that’s what we needed to know. That's what we needed to hit on, because that's what we wanted clear.

Because so often people get this gospel of positivity at all costs, and [00:15:00] so it's, which really just turns into, I'm pushing down all of the things that I actually feel, but I'm still manifesting from those negative beliefs.

Laurin: Right. It's, and it's so hard to maintain that false positivity,

Carisa: It's impossible and unnecessary.

Laurin: Yeah, it's work and then you get pissed off cuz it's work and then you're back in the mere. I am amazed over, I've probably been doing this internal work for well my whole life, but really consciously for the last 10 years or so.

And I'm amazed at how much easier it is for me to just kind of roll with punches and go with the flow. Now where 10 years ago, 20 years ago, I was just super reactive. Everything was always an emergency. It was like always like I had this amazing startle response and which really would act to kind of freeze me, you know? Intellectually I couldn't problem solve because I was emotionally already in fight or flight.

Carisa: Yeah. You were [00:16:00] deer in the headlights.

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and you have kids and one of them's got bad asthma and other things. And you know, everything was always an emergency to my nervous system.

Carisa: Yeah.

Laurin: But as I've done the work, and I've worked with a lot of healers at this point and released so much crap, not just from this lifetime, but from many, many others I find it's really easy to be positive.

Carisa: Mm-hmm.

Laurin: Not that I don't get down or you don't have those moments of what is happening, but I can very quickly go, okay.

Carisa: Mm-hmm.

Laurin: What can we do now? You know? And that for me has been a remarkable change because it does make me a lot easier to live with for one thing, you know? Both personally with myself and, and my family. You know?

Carisa: And for them, yeah. And I think that what that does is it shows it helps us to be able to feel the difference between trying to be positive all the time and trying to be perfect.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: Right?

Laurin: Right.

Carisa: Because there is this thing of [00:17:00] feeling like we need to be perfect in order to deserve love, or we need to be perfect in order to have whatever the thing is.

And sometimes that whole positivity thing kind of bleeds into that. It's like, I need to be 100% positive all the time, or I'm gonna manifest a bunch of freaky stuff and not have what I need, you know? It's kinda like the biggest thing, like even, even when I'm working with women to create a love list, it would just like this four-part process that we use, right?

Sometimes, the fear of it not being perfect will paralyze people because it's well, what if I ask for it and it comes? But I forgot to ask for…it wasn't perfect, you know, it's like, you know.

Laurin: That's where I somebody my, well, my best friend taught me when setting intentions even is to set the intention. I love myself unconditionally or better.

Carisa: Yes. This or something better.

Laurin: Something [00:18:00] better, you know? It just, it's this magical thing. Just whatever it is, or better.

Carisa: Or better. Or even more compatible.

Laurin: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It just takes away that responsibility for getting it perfect. It can get close and or better.

Carisa: Or better. I'm open to that.

Laurin: It was a, like such a, an aha moment. It's like, oh yeah. Cuz it does take that responsibility for asking exactly perfectly for what you want. You know?

Carisa: Yes, yes. And feeling like you have to do that. And I know, like what I've discovered about all of that is that tools, like the love list or anything that requires you to get clarity when you're asking for something is such a thing of us being taught to be manifestors. Anything that makes us have to get clarity…

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: …is so powerful just for our own growth in terms of like manifesting the vision for our life. So I know that those tools, I had a client once, we used the love list 13 [00:19:00] times. Every time she manifested the person would come into her life. But the thing was, the lesson from it for her was, clarity.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: Be good at being clear instead of getting wrapped up in the one of my healer teachers always call that the romance of the astral. So it was this idea that I'm using this tool and it works like magic, and then we can go, oh my gosh, it works like magic. Oh gosh, it worked! And then we just kinda constantly go, it worked!

Did you see that it worked? Can you believe that it worked? Which is amazing. It's an amazing thing. But then we have to go, okay, but since I know that it works, how do I use it with intention?

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: And with clarity? And in a way that's for my highest good?

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah.

Carisa: And, and that always comes back to the healing part of things, because it's so much we can only manifest what we think is possible for us.

Laurin: Right.

Carisa: And all that has to do with what we [00:20:00] believe, although that has to do with our wounds and those kinds of things. So, it's just interesting how all of that is so related. I couldn't do the coaching without the healing part.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: That's how the sustainable relationship happens afterwards, because we become that fullness. We walk into that fullness of ourselves. That is the person who can have that relationship,

Laurin: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So, Hmm. Yeah. That's wonderful. It's, I, the, the idea of manifesting is something that I'm still learning for myself. I mean, I know the mechanics of it, if you will. I, I manifested a family dog years ago. I had like this list of eight things that had to happen in order for us to get a dog.

And I manifested seven of them. you know?

Carisa: Yeah.

Laurin: And damnit we had a dog who I loved, but it was like, but I didn't do it knowing I was manifesting. I did it cuz I had a list of things that you [00:21:00] have to meet all of these criteria in order for me to go, okay, we can have a dog cuz we had allergies in the house.

And you know, just, but looking back at that, I go, oh wow, that was powerful.

Carisa: Yeah.

Laurin: That was really powerful. And because I mean everything down to it was a dog that wasn't allergenic and had to come from the pound cuz we wanted to adopt from the pound. Well, my husband and daughter found her at the pound when they went to volunteer there cuz they did, I mean, just this, it was just this amazing.

Carisa: Everything.

Laurin: Everything. And I, I always go back to that when I think about manifesting because it was such a heart centered list. Like, like you're talking about the love lists of things that in order for us to be able to have a dog that would not be dangerous health wise or anything like that in the house it just, it was a hard thing.

I knew my husband and daughter really wanted a dog, and I was like, okay, but I have some parameters.

Carisa: Yeah. I need to [00:22:00] make this safe for me and for us. It needs to work for us. Yeah.

Laurin: Yeah, yeah. Right, right. So it's a touchstone for me when I think about manifesting because it was done for me. So much of my personal manifesting comes because of something I want for somebody else.

Carisa: Mm.

Laurin: And I've learned that from looking backwards at the things that I was really super powerful at manifesting, which I've done my whole life, even before I knew what manifesting was.

They've always, for me, they've always come because I loved someone that I wanted to do something for.

Carisa: Which is healing.

Laurin: Which is yeah. Yeah.

Carisa: That’s healing. That's, Yeah. You're a healer, so that makes total sense.

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah, I know. Cuz I'm always about how can I help somebody else feel better?

Carisa: That's why we're here.

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm still learning to do it for myself because I love myself. I love who I am now, and why can't I, why don't I use that power for good, you know, to manifest in some other ways.

And, so it's interesting to kind of notice how you manifest or [00:23:00] what your motivation for manifesting is, and then figure out how to bring it back to a place consciously that, that you can, you know, or better.

Carisa: Absolutely. I love that. Or better.

Laurin: Or better.

Carisa: That's the favorite phrase. That's the magic phrase. But I think that what you said about looking, there are a couple things, right? So one of the things is looking back at what you've manifested.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: And that's not only powerful for kind of figuring out your formula.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: But it's also powerful when you're in the middle of what I call like the leap of faith, which is I've sent out this request and I'm waiting for it to manifest in objective reality.

Because a lot of times we're so focused on this is where I am, this is where I wanna be, and I'm not there yet. And look at the space between here and there. And then when we actually look at, this is where I am, but this is where I've come from. That's a powerful space. That's a really powerful space. And it reminds us that we're already [00:24:00] manifestors.

Laurin: Right.

Carisa: You know? We remind ourselves over and over again that, oh, I know what it's like to live in the joy of the answered prayer. I know what that's like. I've done that over and over. So this is just a matter of moving toward that. It's happening, and then the other part of it is the clarity of vision that you had with writing this list.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: It has these eight things, right? Coupled with the intensity of emotion that you had, because your emotion was saying for everyone else in the family, right? For the, for your husband and for your daughter, was, I need them to be safe.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: This needs to be okay for everyone. So it's out of this depth of love for them.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: You know? Which is a super easy thing for a healer to do, is to love other people.

Laurin: Right, right. And when it's your own children, it's even easier.

Carisa: Your own child. I know there are a lot of times when I'm working with women on self-love and we're doing the mirror work together. One of the things I ask them to do is imagine that they're [00:25:00] talking to their daughter. What would you say to your daughter?

Would it be hard to say that to your daughter?

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: Or certain things that have to do with, we don't use a lot of affirmations just because they take too long to do anything. Because affirmations work at this level of your conscious mind and so to get into the deeps of subconscious where they can actually begin to manifest in your circumstances takes so much repetition that people usually give up by then. They just, life happens, people get distracted and whatever.

So we don't use a lot of those kinds of feeling statements. As affirmations over and over. We usually just go into the subconscious and download the things that we need to as beliefs. Cuz it's like a shortcut. It gets us past the resistance.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: Like through hypnosis in a similar way.

Laurin: Yeah. Get that, get that conscious ego conversation out of the way and sneak in behind it.

Carisa: Just sneak in. Exactly. I'm gonna [00:26:00] sneak in. Great! We’re gonna sneak in with gifts.

Laurin: Right. Exactly. Like Santa Claus. I'm bringing the gift.

Carisa: And then we're gonna sneak out with the trash.

Laurin: I love it. I love it. It's such a great image too. It's I'm,

Carisa: Yeah, we're gonna sneak out with the trash and leave gifts. It's gonna be great. You won't even know we were here.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: Until you come down and see the gifts. But yeah, it's a thing of not worrying as much about the affirmations, but sometimes we do need that little thing of thinking about it in terms of how it would impact someone we love.

So even sometimes when, like, I never tell people to break up. I never, if I'm coaching with someone, I never tell them to break off a relationship.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: Because I don't know. No one can tell that person whether they've learned everything they need to from that relationship or what that person's giving them.

Right? So unless it's a matter of like they're being abused, they're abusing someone [00:27:00] else, or someone is being abused in that situation. Right? Which then you have responsibilities. Right? But legal responsibilities. But in that situation, a lot of times I will tell them, what would you say to your daughter if she came home and she was in this situation? Because they'll be saying things like, I don't know if there's anybody else out there for me. It took so long to get this person in my life. But to their daughter, they would say, you're an amazing person. Of course, there's someone out there who's going to appreciate you.

There's so many people out there in the world who, you know, you see nothing but abundance for your kids in terms of what they can have in the world and, and what they can be.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: You know? You just see potential everywhere for them, you know, and you want them to just to live in that abundance and to create whatever they want, and you just see it as this wide-open horizon for them.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: But then for ourselves, we get really limited in our thinking about what's possible [00:28:00] in really wanting to kind of entrench in a place that feels safe.

Laurin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carisa: You know? And in the meantime, we're like, get out there in the world and yeah.

Laurin: Sometimes it's the devil you know, as opposed to the devil you don't. Which is unfortunate, but yeah.

Carisa: Exactly! Sometimes we need that temporarily.

Laurin: Mm-hmm. Well, that's one of the things that I always remind my myself of, cuz I do, I call it mentoring, but it's basically coaching with some of my clients too.

And it's not my path. They're on their own path and I can support them. I can ask the questions that make them think I can help with the healing work because they ask for it, but they're on their own path. And sometimes they gotta go through some more crap before they are ready to clear it out and do something different or do something better.

Carisa: Yeah. It always, it…

Laurin: And find the person who's good for them.

Carisa: …it cracks me. There was this episode of the office and it was just so funny because so Michael said something [00:29:00] like he was trying to force one of the employees, Meredith, to go into rehab cuz she was an alcoholic. So it's this Christmas party, he's trying to do this intervention and stuff like that.

And she doesn't wanna go, you know, it doesn't matter that everybody thinks she's an alcoholic, she doesn't wanna go. So he's talking, he's doing this whole confessional thing and he's like, you know, I, I think the reason she's not going is cuz she hasn't hit rock bottom yet. So that's my job is to force her to hit rock bottom.

If I can get her to rock bottom, I will lift in my job

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: Like, it made me laugh that it's also that thing of like, everyone has to do their thing. Nobody can make you get to that point. And I've had people, the thing that's always in the back of someone's mind is, but what if they've changed? When they're thinking about taking an ex back, they're always thinking, but what if they've changed?

What if they are the person who can give me that now?

Laurin: mm-hmm.

Carisa: And no one can answer that. They have to actually experience it. But once [00:30:00] they have experienced, I tried to get back with this person and they have not changed.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: But I've changed a little bit just in the time I was away from them. Then they are done with that person. They are done.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: Yeah. There's an interesting thing too, with women and breakups as opposed to men and breakups. Where we break up, of course I'm generalizing, but where we sort of break up in a different sequence. So it's often that like women will start out by trying to just kind of ignore what's wrong and, and go, it's not that big of a deal. Not that big of a deal. Then it will get to a point where it seems like maybe it is a big deal. And so she'll just try to adjust on her end.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: And then it will seem like, okay, she's trying to adjust and she's done everything that she can. So now she's like, I guess I have to say something.

So she'll say something and see if it will change, and if it changes at that point, that's great. And she may even learn that she's safer than [00:31:00] she thought and bringing those things up and bring them up sooner.

Laurin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Carisa: But if it doesn't change at that point, then her option is she can lower her expectations or she can begin to grieve the end of that relationship. And she will grieve for a long time.

Sometimes she'll grieve for a decade. While she's making the best of that situation, but once she's actually ready to leave, she's leaving.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: After that grieving period, The thing that's kind of tricky is that when someone's in that grieving period, you can't hasten them along. They have to get to the end of their grief, not the end of their grief, but the point of taking action.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: On their own.

Laurin: Yeah. And then, yeah, I, I have friends who've been through that process and there was, I mean, there was no moving them forward. I, not that I tried, but they definitely did it on their own time and…

Carisa: Then I'm sure when they were ready to go, they were ready.

Laurin: Oh, yeah, Yeah, [00:32:00] yeah. So, so how do men do it differently?

Carisa: Well, the way, the thing that men do is they wait till the breakup is happening to think that this is when we should start to do the work.

Laurin: Yes. Ok.

Carisa: It's kind of like that too.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: So it's kind of like, well, no, we've been talking, we talked about that like we've already, we talked about this a long time ago. You know? And so they're initiating this conversation about how the relationship can be different at a point where she's already grieved the ending of the relationship.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: And so it's not, it's too hard of a cell.

Laurin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Carisa: And so, yeah, it's kind of a backwards thing. They start to think, maybe we can make some changes. Maybe we can fix this. But, they're out of sync at that point.

Laurin: Right, right. She's already moving on. Yeah.

Carisa: And then they feel like they were blindsided by it, and that they don't understand what happened. And it's kind of like, if it's different, they're not remembering the relationship through the same length.

Laurin: Right.

Carisa: Because they're saying, but we [00:33:00] had all these vacations. Yeah, we, but in the last 10 years, we, I remember vaguely that we have that talk, but we've done so many things since then. We've had vacations and we did these things and we celebrated this and we celebrated that. And yeah, she celebrated those things, but she was still sad and grieving…

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: …in that part of her. But to him it looked like everything was fine because to her she was thinking, but it's, I, I, we did the talking part and it didn't work. So, you know.

Laurin: And we are talkers.

Carisa: Yes. So usually if we've done the talking part, we didn't have one conversation about it. We've had many conversations about it. You know, we've…

Laurin: Over and over. Yeah.

Carisa: …and usually we only stop when we get kind of tired of hearing ourselves talk about it. And it kind of, that's what, it's kind of like a sadness that comes with that because we go, oh, okay.

Nothing I'm gonna say that's gonna change this. It's kind of, Alison Armstrong talks about that a little bit in some of her work where she talks about [00:34:00] how it's not when she's talking, talking, talking and sharing everything about her inner world with you, that's not a problem. Just because that's not a kind of typical thing for men.

She's like, what's the problem is when she stops. If she stops sharing with you about her inner world.

Laurin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Carisa: That when you know you have a really big problem.

Laurin: Okay.

Carisa: Yeah. So I noticed that, that that's kind of a…

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah. That's a, a good insight cuz I've never really thought of it that way, but, and I've been, I, I told you before, I've been married for 37 years, so it's been long time since I kind of went through a breakup as…

Carisa: Yeah.

Laurin: Thank goodness.

Carisa: Thankfully, yeah.

Laurin: Very appreciative. We have made it a long time and we're still going, so we're good.

Carisa: Yeah.

Laurin: So maybe can you just take a couple of minutes and talk about the idea of creating a sustainable relationship.

Carisa: Yes, absolutely. So a lot [00:35:00] of times what we're thinking about whenever we're thinking about manifesting love or we kind of start with healing from a breakup, and then we think about manifesting love, and then we think, well, this person's gonna come into my life and everything is gonna be perfect after that.

And it's gonna be like, fantastic. It's gonna solve every problem. It's gonna be fantastic. And there is an intense amount of joy and an intense amount of fulfillment that comes with manifesting a soulmate in our lives. But it's also a little bit like, moving to Paris when you've been looking forward to living in Paris for years and then moving there and remembering that you don't speak French.

Laurin: Right. Oops.

Carisa: And I've been looking at pictures of the Eiffel Tower and I have been planning my wardrobe and the places that I would go, but I did not learn French.

Laurin: Yep.

Carisa: So…

Laurin: That’s a good metaphor.[00:36:00]

Carisa: Yeah, it's beautiful and glamorous. It's everything. But I don't speak French yet.

Laurin: Right, right.

Carisa: So hard. You know? So it's a lot of it is when we're doing the inner work of healing, as opposed to just focusing on the manifesting part of things.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: Because the healing, like I said, is the part that, I don't like to say it turns us into the person who, because we are that person already.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: But it helps us to stand in that version of ourselves that can actually have the sustainable relationship. That is not so triggered by certain things of the past, and that is not responding to this person who's present as though there's someone from the past.

Laurin: Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Carisa: Yeah. So that is a huge factor of what makes it healthy and happy and sustainable. The other thing is that we actually do have energetic ties to people from the past that really [00:37:00] often need to be cut. We can have cords of attachment to people that need to be cut.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: And we can feel that because it can be the kind of thing where, this is such a funny thing, but I'll be doing this work with clients.

We'll be doing energy work and we'll find that there's an ex that we need to cut a cord with and they'll be like, I don't know why I need to cut the cord with this person. I don't know why my muscle test is saying that I need to cut the cord with this person. I haven't thought about them or heard from them in years. And we'll cut the cord and within like a couple of days, that person will reach out and talk to them, reach out to talk to them. Either they'll get in touch with them on social media. I had one woman that I was working with, she left the session and had a message from her ex.

Laurin: Oh my gosh.

Carisa: The ex we were cutting the cord from.

Laurin: Uhhuh,

Carisa: You know, and she was like, I haven't heard from him in months, like six months.

Laurin: Uhhuh.

Carisa: Yeah. And the thing about it is, it's because there is a connection in energy and there is something going back and forth between the two of you. And as long as that's still happening, we [00:38:00] don't have access to our strongest sense of self. And being able to bring that forward into the new relationship.

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah.

Carisa: So, and then once that's cut, it's this weird thing of energy like homeostasis, like the other person kind of go, they can feel, I have to call it that they felt a disturbance in the force. And I always tell my client like, they're gonna contact you. Look in my eyes, that is not significant. That does not mean that they have changed. Like, please. And believe me, they just felt the disturbance in the force moving forward. You are doing great, you know, because it's just like clockwork that it happens, you know.

Laurin: Isn’t that amazing?

Carisa: It's an incredible thing, right? It's like they just reach out, they can feel there's a change, so they reach out.

Laurin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Carisa: They try to like to reestablish the connection, [00:39:00] but there's not a, reason for the person who's healing to still have that connection in that.

Laurin: Right, right.

Carisa: Because it's not even a, it's not even, we're not even talking about like a bond. We're not talking about a loving bond or something like that. We're talking about a sewer line between you and this person in energy that there were just a bunch of stuff going is going back and forth.

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah. I've found that a number of times in clients that same kind of connection.

Carisa: Connection to the past.

Laurin: Like this is…

Carisa: You don't need this. Yeah. And you'll check and go. Yeah. Are you ready to ask? Gonna, are you ready to let go with this one?

Laurin: Can, can I just please love you

Carisa: Is, is sovereign, but I'd really like to get rid of this for you.

Laurin: Right. Please.

Carisa: All you have to do is relax. We can totally let this go. Yeah. Yeah. It's a…

Laurin: And of course, like you said earlier, what I learned with my clients is nothing shows up unless it's ready to be processed in whatever way it needs to be processed. [00:40:00] So those chords never show up for me until we've worked through whatever the continued emotional situation was between them and finally that cord, I was like, oh, look what I found?

Carisa: Look at that, yeah.

Laurin: This showed today. I think it's time to work on that.

Carisa: Yeah. I think it's time. Let's muscle test that. Oh yes. Got it. Yes. Fantastic. Yeah, and it's like it shows up in order, right? It shows up that's the day this is our healing priority for today. Yeah. It's an amazing thing that that happens, but it's everyone's own inner wisdom is sovereign. And that, I think that's such a, and it's such a powerful thing to be able to remind people of that.

Laurin: Yeah.

Carisa: While you're doing that with them is that this is coming up for you because you are ready.

Laurin: Right, right. It's, it's why I like to work with the wisdom of women particularly, because I think a lot of us are taught, I know in my generation that we’re [00:41:00] less than, we're not worthy of, we had all of these sorts of limitations put on us. And what I'm discovering as I am now moving into my sixties is that everyone is wise about something.

I mean, we all have our little areas that where we're maybe a little blind to things, but everybody has some deep wisdom that is so much more valuable when it's shared with others.

Carisa: Absolutely.

Laurin: It just, it's a gift that you can give to others. And most of us don't know where we're wise because it's just the way we are. So if somebody else will go, that was really wise, that really helped me. Or that, you know?

Carisa: And we're kind of like, oh!

Laurin: Yeah, exactly.

Carisa: Who said that? You said that just now. I did?

Laurin: Like maybe that was spirit talking through me. I have what I refer to as Wise Laurin, which is my higher self, a soul voice, and voice. She is, she's smart and wise and all those wonderful things and [00:42:00] I'm so happy to just let her come through a lot.

Carisa: And whenever you listen to her, you're always happy that you did.

Laurin: Yeah, Yeah, yeah. She's very wise and we all have a wise Carisa, a wise Laurin, a wise whatever, but sometimes we just don't recognize it. So…

Carisa: Yeah. My friend has a great phrase for that, that she always whenever she's kind of in a, at a crossroads, she'll say, I am absolutely qualified to make this decision. And as soon as she says that, it like flips us. She can access her wisdom then, you know? But it's like we are so, especially as women, we're so sort of socialized to get other opinions, get consensus before we move forward.

Laurin: Yes. Yeah.

Carisa: Things like that. So I love that she does that. She just goes, I am absolutely qualified to make this decision.

Laurin: I'm gonna have to remember that one. I love that.

Carisa: Yeah.

Laurin: So empowering.

Carisa: She taps into what? She's like, I'm doing this, I'm doing it. But it's like she has to remind herself first, yes, this decision is mine to make. I'm absolutely [00:43:00] qualified to make this decision.

Laurin: Yeah, yeah. No, I'm one of those who I, occasionally have to go, wait, I can make this decision on my own. I don't need to ask spirit or ask my husband or ask friends, or it's just like, this is what feels right. This is what feels in alignment with who I am and what I'm here to do, and I'm gonna do that.

Carisa: I'm gonna do that thing.

Laurin: How I came to have a podcast.

Carisa: Which was perfect. Right? Like, and I'm sure you've also noticed that as you've done so much growth and healing for yourself, it was so much easier to come to that.

Laurin: Oh yeah.

Carisa: That would pop up like faster.

Laurin: Much faster. Yeah. And I mean, I don't have that wonderful phrase of your friends yet. I'm gonna write it down so I remember it. But just that moment of, you know, what I am, I'm perfectly capable of knowing what's best for me. And I, I feel it in my body when it's right.

It's like everything clicks, you know? So but yeah. So that wisdom of the [00:44:00] body that you were talking about is really important for everybody to remember and understand.

Carisa: Oh, absolutely.

Laurin: I mean our body is so wise, our soul is so wise and the two together, you can move through this world.

Carisa: Absolutely. When, right before we started, when you were saying about having those three deep breaths together before we started, and it's such a powerful practice because it does, it, it's like, oh, all of a sudden, we can hear our bodies, you know? And it's a minute to just be grounded and actually connected to our bodies.

It's a weird thing. Just really quick, I found as a healer, when I first started to do that work on a professional basis, I gained a lot of weight.

Laurin: Hm

Carisa: I, I learned afterwards why that was happening and was able to regain my equilibrium and get to where it was healthy for me again. But what I've noticed happens, and this happens, I think for a lot of people that do [00:45:00] energy work and spiritual work and things like that, is that we're functioning in an energetic realm a lot of the time.

We're kind of sending ourselves into this energetic place so that we can connect and so that we can serve and heal and do these things. And our bodies go, hey, you live here, come back here. And so they keep doing things to ground us back into our bodies. So for me, I had gained all of that weight because every time I would finish with a session, instead of grounding before and after, cause I wasn't, I wasn't aware of that practice.

That wasn't something that was part of my family's lineage to do because we weren't doing it on a professional basis all the time. It wasn't, you know, like client, client, client, client. So what would happen for me is I would just get intense cravings for sweets after every single session.

Laurin: Fruit and sugar. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Oh gosh, yeah. And I know so many people who, who do that. You know, it's like, and, and, and they just, it's like, okay, let's ground. That's one of the things I had to learn [00:46:00] very early was how to ground. It's one of the things I teach almost every one of my clients is how to ground themselves into their body and connected to Mother Earth, cuz that's such a beautiful, nurturing energy. And we've evolved to really thrive on it. So yeah, it's great for me.

Carisa: That's a really beautiful practice.

Laurin: Good. Good.

Carisa: I really appreciated that at the beginning of coming into our conversation because it was like, oh great. There wasn't anything I was particularly concerned about, but I was like, this is nice.

Laurin: Yeah. It just…

Carisa: This is comfy energy.

Laurin: And there's also something about breathing together.

Carisa: Yeah. The resonance.

Laurin: So yeah, it creates a connection through the breath.

Carisa: It creates a resonance there, an energy that's really, really beautiful.

Laurin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad, I'm glad that you enjoy it.

Carisa: I did. Thank you.

Laurin: All right, So let's just take a few minutes here and switch over. Switch gears to our rapid-fire questions.

Carisa: Rapid-fire questions. I'm ready. Let's do this. I've had coffee. I'm ready to go.

Laurin: [00:47:00] Like I said, just whatever pops into your head first. And I have not told Carisa what these questions are.

Carisa: Do not know.

Laurin: My other podcasts, you probably do know what they are. I can almost repeat them by heart now. The first one is, who is or was the wisest person in your life?

Carisa: Oh, my grandmother, absolutely. My grandmother, Betty, she taught me so much about healing. She was a natural healer and yeah. All my grandmothers were healers or midwives or doulas or dousers or herbalists and all of that. But yeah, she always had, I think about every day, three or four things that she said come into my mind.

Laurin: Oh, nice. Okay. A true wise woman.

Carisa: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Laurin: All right. What's your favorite self-care practice?

Carisa: Baths.

Laurin: Okay.

Carisa: My favorite is to create spiritual baths based on whatever it is that I need energetic support for and to make them also smell amazing.

Laurin: I was gonna say, do [00:48:00] you use like essential oils or bathtubs, or…

Carisa: I use essential oils. I use different spiritual waters. I use different herbs. Sometimes I make my own little bath sachets and stuff like that.

And depending on what's going on. But yeah, the baths for sure have always been for me. I, I remember my, one of my first boyfriends, he remarked that he's like around you most of the time, women have all of their products around their sink. You have almost nothing around your sink, but your bathtub is just ringed with eight other things around your bathtub, not on your sink.

Laurin: Priorities.

Carisa: Exactly.

Laurin: Yeah. I find a lot of my daughter is one who even when she was a baby, I knew that to calm her or, or de-stress her, I just put her in bathtub.

Carisa: Oh yeah.

Laurin: And I mean, even from her very first bath, she would just coo and grin through it. I mean, it was so, yeah. So I, I understand I don't happen to, to share that one, but I understand [00:49:00] it how powerful it is for people, so that's lovely.

What lights you up when you're feeling down?

Carisa: I have a few friends with the same sense of humor that I have.

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Carisa: That it's great to be able to switch gears with them, because they like the same things that are silly.

Laurin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Carisa: It's really wonderful to have, because often I will have, I have people in my life who know that I, who are familiar with my work and stuff like that, and want to talk to me about how they can apply that into, in their lives and in their situations.

And I'm always, I'm always happy to do that. But it's really lovely to have friends that just wanna laugh with you about something stupid that you're both watching on TV or that you can fan girl about Bridgerton with, or something that you know, you know?

Laurin: Yes. Yes.

Carisa: You know, there's an, oh my gosh, you know.

Laurin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That laughter is so important. I mean, I think it's often [00:50:00] underrated in how wonderful it is for your body and your psyche and your emotions to just laugh with people.

Carisa: Yeah. And it's an instant split-second thing where you just, I mean, one of my friends just said the funniest thing to me when we were having dinner, and it was like he knew exactly what to say to make me laugh. And he said, he said it in, like hit his fist against the table, like to make this point.

And we must have laughed for 20 minutes. Like it was ridiculous. you know, but we just kept it, it's there's nothing like those kinds of, especially when it's kind of unexpected and, and you think someone's being really serious and then all of a sudden this, this…

Laurin: Surprised.

Carisa: I love that.

Laurin: Yeah, no, laughing is one of my favorite things. All right. And what's your favorite mantra or affirmation? You've already said you're not big on affirmations, but…

Carisa: Yeah. Well, my favorite mantra is you don't make love happen. You make love welcome.

Laurin: Yes, yes. I often say to my [00:51:00] kids that I didn't meet their dad until I got happy. I was perfectly happy on my own. Then he showed up.

Carisa: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Laurin: So, yeah. Yep. You don't, you welcome it. I love that. That's wonderful.

Carisa: You don't have to hustle. You don't have to deserve it. You don't have to earn it.

Laurin: You don't have to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Carisa: Make it welcome.

Laurin: Yeah, yeah. I love that. That is one of the wisest things that I've heard, so it's, yeah, that's make it welcome. So I'm gonna pass that one along to some of my clients.

Carisa: Lovely.

Laurin: All right. Can you tell us where the best place to find you online?

Carisa: Yeah, so I was thinking about that. I always kind of default to my website because who knows what's going on with social media these days and where you can, you know, what people will have and all those kinds of things.

Laurin: Yeah. Right.

Carisa: Yeah, so really it's my website, which is carisamontooth.com, so it's C A R I S A [00:52:00] M O N T O O T H.com. and then if Facebook is still in existence as people are listening to this, they can find me whenever that, you know, as the winds blow, you know. I have a free group that is called the Secret Seduction Sorority. And it's on Facebook and I love to do some group energy work there with, the members of that community and share some tips and things like that, so…

Laurin: Oh, that sounds lovely.

Carisa: Yeah.

Laurin: All right. We'll have that in the show notes as well. All right, well I think we have come to the end of our conversation. This has been so wonderful. Thank you for being here.

Carisa: Thank you so much for having me. It's been lovely.

Laurin: Yeah. So I wanna thank the listeners for joining us today. I hope you have enjoyed this conversation as much as we have, and that you feel the love cuz we've been really trying to, spread a lot of love [00:53:00] today.

And I think, I think we've done that.

Carisa: I think so.

Listen to full episode here

Laurin: So I hope you'll join me again next week. We're here every Tuesday with a new episode. And in the meantime, have a lovely day and I'll hope to see you next week. Bye.

Thank you so much for joining us today on Curiously Wise. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe, so you don't miss future fabulous conversations. And if you had any ahas, please share them in a review on apple podcasts, so we can continue to pay forward the unique wisdom we all have.

If you want to know more about me or my intuitive energy healing practice Heartlight wellness, please head over to my website www.heartlightjoy.com.

Curiously Wise is a team effort. I am grateful for the skill and enthusiasm. Arlene Membrot, our producer, and Sam Wittig, our audio engineer bring to this collaboration. Our music [00:54:00] is Where the Light Is by Lemon Music Studio.

I'm Laurin Wittig. Please join me again next week for another episode of Curiously Wise. From my heart to yours, may your life be filled with love, light, joy, and of course, curiosity.

Listen to full episode here