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"Mining the hearts and minds of unorthodox teachers"
For the life-long learner who wants honest, human conversations about how we grow, heal, create, and understand ourselves. These are longform dialogues with artists, thinkers, authors, meditators, psychologists, musicians, creatives, leaders, philosophers, healers, and everyday people with something real to teach.
Each episode offers a perspective, story, or insight that tends to lands exactly when someone needs it most. Thoughtful, curious, and quietly life-changing, this show exists to help us live a better life by understanding our own inner world more deeply, through the perspectives of one another.
The Junkyard Love Podcast - for a better life.
0:00
Jacob: Let's dive in.
[Junkyard Love Podcast intro plays]
0:24
Jacob: Well, welcome Christine. Thank you for your time. I would like to start with kind of the elevator pitch. I was just saying you have so much interesting in your background, in your work, in your history of things to teach and share about. What’s the elevator pitch? Say we just bumped into each other. It’s a long elevator ride — a hundred plus floors — and I say, “Hey, what do you do? What are you into, Christine?” What would your answer to that be?
0:48
Cristine: Well, some of it I pick from where you are at, you know, Junkyard Love, right? So the power of that, as both an emotional — which I call a vital body — solution and a spiritual or quantum body solution. So that’s, you know, we can go a couple directions there. But love is an answer. It’s a solution for sure.
1:14
Jacob: Okay. And you study love, you study… I mean, you already mentioned quantum.
1:18
Cristine: The four bodies. So an ebook I have available for people is Four Bodies, Four Medicines. And so when you talk about the heart, you know, on a physical level, the heart, obviously there’s medicine, right? I’m not a cardiologist, so I’m not giving any of that advice today. But I do have a degree in natural medicine and understand that if stuff’s showing up in your physical body, it typically has to do with what’s going through your vital body, your mental body, and your quantum body. So those are the other bodies in the four-body model. So there’s a summary of where we could go in this discussion.
2:07
Jacob: Okay, I definitely want to explore more of the specifically quantum, but I think even just starting out with seeing our bodies and who we are on four different levels, four different planes. So how is that important? Normally we go to the doctor and they see us, they check out the physical level — what do we see, what do our tests give us, what’s the data? What are the more expansive ways of understanding ourselves?
2:32
Cristine: So I just did another podcast where we talked about how some people question anything that’s not physical. Like, “Give me the evidence. How do I know that there’s this thing called spirit, or that there’s an essence, like you’ve got chakras or something that you can’t see?” And there’s the analogy of the wind. We’re talking about the weather. Can you see the wind? If you look outside, can you see wind coming by? No. You can see the effects of the wind. Are the trees blowing? Is there paper coming up from the ground? Are the clouds going faster than normal? You see the effects of the wind. And that’s the same thing. The wind is actually the spirit. The effects are the physical body. So we see the effects of that in our body from what has been going on on the invisible level.
3:37
Jacob: Right. Okay, so these are a couple of the levels. Let’s back up to how you even got to understanding these things. Did you have a history? I know this, but my listeners may not. Can we talk a little bit about your history of understanding your own body and diving more into these things?
3:57
Cristine: Yeah. So I had a chemical imbalance growing up, and that showed up for me as chronic depression — almost incapacitating anxiety. I barely got to school in junior high. I had so much anxiety, peer pressure, things that were just beyond… I didn’t even talk about them because I was so blocked in my ability to process and get through that. And so I actually turned to substances by the time I was in high school. I just basically threw my hands in the air like, “I just don’t think I’m ever going to get better using what I know.” And so I went to unknowns and even no-nos to try to self-medicate. I found that it did change my brain, and I went on this quest to find the substance that had the impact I was looking for. And for me, that became my first career: substance abuse counseling. And I can tell you how often people are self-medicating without even realizing they’re self-medicating. They just want to feel better. They want energy if they’re tired. They want to feel happy if they live in this dense, heavy depression. They’re looking to function if anxiety is getting in the way of basic life. So that’s typically why people get into something that’s physically changing them.
That was my first experience with understanding the physical. And so I wrote the book 10 Ways to Balance Your Brain Chemistry after my whole life was transformed and I realized that the chemical imbalance didn’t all go away, even though the substances weren’t the solution anymore. I still had chronic depression. I still had bouts of anxiety. So I discovered natural ways — higher frequency ways — to resolve those chemical imbalances. That’s what I talk about in the physical body. You can alter your physical wellbeing through a lot of different things, and if you go a natural route, you’re more likely to have better, longer-term solutions without side effects or other consequences.
6:36
Jacob: What did you discover in your long path of dealing with substance abuse and helping other people, and with your own journey? Now that it’s been so long between your years as a substance abuse counselor and the things you were doing… what would you say that you learned in big part?
7:05
Cristine: Well, that’s where I started. If you break down the chemistry — and let’s talk about endorphins because your show is about love — it’s tricky to look at how to correct endorphins. Serotonin is one that we talk about a lot more. Serotonin is a physical condition, a chemical that gives you a sense of wellbeing, and you can get it from your food, your diet — carbs, comfort foods. There’s a book called Potatoes Not Prozac that says a lot in the title. That was one of the first primers that was a launchpad for 10 Ways. I was figuring out that what I was eating mattered, and the carbs I was going to were actually causing my depression because I had a wheat sensitivity. This was in the nineties. We weren’t talking about gluten-free then, but it made a huge difference for me to change my diet. But how would I know that? That had to be informed through a higher source. I was also on a spiritual journey at the time. What I found is that I can actually be led to solutions in my physical wellbeing through a higher source — a truth that, if I’m aware and open to it, can come through.
That’s the serotonin side. What I figured out also is that it wasn’t really the serotonin that was out of balance for me — it was the endorphins. Potatoes Not Prozac talks about that too. Serotonin is influenced by carbs and comfort foods, but the endorphins… I’m going to see if you can guess. It stands for “inner orphan,” which is like morphine, right? Endorphins. This is your pain receptors and feel-good chemistry, but highly addictive, like narcotics. Do you know the food group that fits with this?
9:34
Jacob: Oh, like alcohol?
9:35
Cristine: Close. Alcohol affects GABA levels. Sugar. Sugar is actually on the continuum of narcotics. It’s a narcotic. Isn’t that interesting? That made so much sense for me to understand that I was addicted to sugar as a kid. So many people try to get off of it and go through serious withdrawals. That’s been a battle for me — to be the master of my endorphin pathways and not let sugar take over or the cravings.
10:24
Jacob: So you went through this journey of discovering what different substances even are. It wasn’t just alcohol or drugs. You discovered addictions to food… Did it expand into understanding addictions to patterns or even our relationships with one another?
10:45
Cristine: Yeah, there are two areas I think are worth looking at. One is dopamine. Dopamine is a very different chemical than endorphins, and they’re both highly addictive. Dopamine is more charged. My drug of choice was cocaine, so that fits in the dopamine category. It numbs and creates that high, but you can’t sustain dopamine. You can’t be high at that level all the time — it will actually turn into psychosis if you try. Those big bursts are what some of us go after. Gambling is one of those. It helped me understand I was bipolar. I got that diagnosis at one point, and I had to become the master of my dopamine as well, because I realized if I come up, I will go down. The trick wasn’t to try to change it and stay up. The trick was to realize when I was down, there was some work to do, some healing to do, and not just try to get back up — but allow myself to find that natural middle path in living. That was a big lesson.
The other one is with endorphins — that’s where the love addict comes in. Sugar is the chemical or physical fix with endorphins, but on the emotional level it’s typically we’re seeking love. For a lot of us that’s romantic love, or some kind of belonging or security — that warm, fuzzy thing. And it’s not necessarily wrong. One of the things I found is what I call the spiral. The spiral includes things you want to do abstinence with on the outside — heroin is probably not a good idea on the endorphin continuum. You’re going to let that go. The next layer inward is moderation. I had to find a way to do moderation with this romantic craving. You get into the honeymoon and you want to stay there, and then it fluctuates. Some of that is moving past the addictive nature of love and into the third part of the cycle, which is attainment. Attainment is doing the work to have longer-term real solutions. In a relationship it’s not just “we love the honeymoon and then it gets hard — do we stay or do we go?” With the attainment part, it closes that gap, that inner hole which is really what we’re trying to fill, to a solution that’s more solid — a deeper love, a more complete sense of self. It could be self-love. You start getting into that center with that.
14:37
Jacob: With these cycles, what are we trying to complete with these cycles ideally? What is it that we’re trying to get?
14:47
Cristine: It is a healing — an inner healing. I actually developed this spiral model when I was working in a jail. I took my recovery and started creating a curriculum with these concepts as a substance abuse counselor. I was teaching this, creating this, as I was working with inmates. Some of them told me they had even done this attainment thing. They’d say, “We did twelve years sober doing the AA thing,” and some of the attainment things are self-help programs or religious commitments or health and wellness commitments — things you’re probably not going to get addicted to, like going to the gym, or education. They were doing all these things right and they still relapsed. I took it as: this is the challenge. I had twenty years clean by the time I was teaching this, so I felt pretty stable, but there were areas of my life, like relationships, that I hadn’t figured out. I kept getting into unhealthy relationships. I knew that if I were to figure this out, that was the challenge.
I’d gone through the attainment model myself, and I remember there was a night I left the jail and my boyfriend broke up with me as I was driving home. It was a Friday night, going home alone. What’s interesting is I was on this spiritual journey — I was studying Kabbalah — and it happened to be the moment of Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur in the Jewish tradition starts at sundown and is a 24-hour Day of Atonement. If you look at that word, atonement is “at-one-ment.” It’s a devotion after Rosh Hashanah. You’ve done ten days of deep diving, excavating your past year and where you could improve. This 24 hours, people typically dress in white, they fast, they don’t work or engage in regular life stuff — they just spend that 24 hours in divine connection. I got home and realized, “Okay, well I guess I don’t know what this means, but I choose this.” I was lying on my couch and the sun went down. I remember there was this light — it almost entered like a shaft through the top of my head and poured through. It felt like my spine, from head to toe. I felt light enter me. And that was the solution. The solution of this spiral is at this center: really, all that matters is that you are whole and complete through a divine connection, and you bring your whole self to it.
18:41
Jacob: Can I ask — I’m not sure what language you typically use for this now — do you call this a Kundalini awakening? Obviously spiritual awakening is terminology you’ve used, but have you dove into Kundalini?
18:55
Cristine: I have. I love Kundalini. Kundalini was very supportive. There was a phase in my life where my healing journey was very much influenced by it. My experience with that, though, is that the Kundalini was more about making corrections in my vital body. The vital body contains the chakras, meridians, and your aura field. That’s a layer of us that is very much neglected by Western medicine, but important in influencing the physical self and connected to the quantum self. So that’s where I would place Kundalini — a very effective vital body tool and process to clear and strengthen the vital body.
20:03
Jacob: When you had your first kind of initial awakening… have you always had some sort of spiritual side to you? Did you grow up in a religion? Were you always spiritual, or was this kind of a later-in-life awakening?
20:20
Cristine: That’s a great question. I grew up in a religion, Christian-based, and I followed as much as I could with it. But like I just shared, my chemistry was not working, and religion didn’t fix it. So I left religion in my path with substance use. Here’s what’s kind of cool — and I’m going to release my recovery story, so I don’t want to give it all away because that’s going to come out. It’s called Yearning for Freedom. In my late teens and early young adult life, I just wanted freedom from the guilt, because that is one of the things that happens with someone who’s got a religious influence and is fighting against it or steering away from it. I wanted freedom from guilt, but I also wanted freedom from pain and suffering. I just thought if I could just find this, it’s got to be out there. I was looking definitely outside myself, but not only outside myself — down, frequency-wise. I wasn’t looking up. And so I found cocaine. It was a great solution for a few months, and then it started taking a toll on me.
When you talk about spiritual things, I think it’s important to look at the dark as well as the light. There was a moment when I had used this drug for about eight months or so and still could kind of take it or leave it — I could still do life and then wait for the weekend. But there was a night I remember very specifically. I was with a couple people and we were using, and a friend came to the door. This friend had been bubbly, energetic. She didn’t have depression like I dealt with… until we opened the door that night and her whole demeanor was different. Her vibration was different. Even then I could sense, “What happened?” She’d come back from a funeral — a friend of hers who had overdosed — and she just couldn’t shake it. She came over and joined the party, and I remember that almost in an instant I’d gone from the freedom I had with this drug to being controlled by it. Theoretically — and this is just me looking back — I believe the person who overdosed came with her and walked through the door. So this entity, this earthbound essence, attached to me. After that point in time I couldn’t say no. I didn’t have power over what was going on. I started losing weight. I started experiencing all the late-stage consequences of my use. That’s my theory. People may or may not get that. There’s actually a book that coincides with this called Return from Tomorrow. Richie is the name of the author. He talks about his near-death experience where he was moving in and out. He stepped into a bar and watched people sitting around the bar, but there were also earthbounds sitting around the bar with them, waiting for them to drink to a certain point, and then it was like they kind of unzipped them and entered to vicariously continue to have that experience. Isn’t that interesting?
24:40
Jacob: That’s a very interesting way to look at it. I feel like it coincides with my experience as well — back in my days of drinking and partying and nights of cocaine. So what do you think that is? Do you see that as a positive way of addressing these things that people are dealing with? How can you spot it? If someone comes to you nowadays and maybe they have one of these entities hanging over them… what’s your approach if you deem that’s the case? How can we shake off these entities?
25:22
Cristine: This is actually where we start talking quantum things. In Quantum University they refer to this as perverse energy. You’re working at the spiritual level. Sometimes it’s generational. I’ve had clients who are affected by something that’s always been there. As we tune into that — and I use a lot of intuition with this — sometimes I’ll just know it’s an ancestor, like a great-grandfather or grandmother. I’ll say certain things and they’ll be like, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard that — my mom’s mom had depression,” or whatever. Sometimes I’m actually doing therapy on both. We invite them to stay and experience the healing. That’s quantum stuff.
Kundalini is really interesting when you say that. My first Kundalini session was actually geared toward addiction release. The series was done by a gentleman who was using it for addiction recovery as well. I remember starting the process and experiencing my grandfather. What I did in that Kundalini session actually cleared something for him. He had passed away with a lot of heavy emotion — we knew he wasn’t well when he left. It cleared it. It was amazing. So that’s one approach. I do other energy healing type techniques with clients. When you’re working with the vital body, it’s like a bridge between the physical body and the quantum body. It’s denser than the quantum, but higher / other-dimensional than the physical.
27:35
Jacob: And you have success… obviously it’s very intuition-based, but are there series of other more commonly known psychological techniques? I’ve heard you talk about tapping and EMDR. Do you use various different types of psychological treatments to feed into your intuition of what needs to happen next?
27:57
Cristine: Yes. EFT is the tapping technique — Emotional Freedom Technique. I started training in 2002–2003 when Gary Craig was actually doing his program. I went through all of his basic and all of his advanced. I loved it. I was in a career at the time where I couldn’t use it, and it inspired me or motivated me to get into private practice so I could have the freedom to use it with clients. As I was using that, I started developing very unique adaptations. Then with my training with Quantum University, I brought in accessing the zero point field and doing things to clear at the quantum level. So it became Zero Point Meridian — that’s what it’s called now, ZPM. Yes, I absolutely use that. In the case I described, a woman comes to my office and we figure out she’s carrying something that’s not even just hers. When we’re doing ZPM, I will actually do it with the client and even that other being that may be influenced, because it can cross over, especially when there’s a generational connection. I find that it can clear at multi-level. I’ve used that in place of EMDR. I did get certified in EMDR, but the research I’ve done shows this ZPM is actually twice as effective in relieving physical and emotional [symptoms] on the four bodies — twice as effective as EMDR. So yeah, it’s good stuff.
29:41
Jacob: That’s awesome. I want to add just one more time back on this entities thing. I think it’s always a very interesting thing to explore: what thoughts aren’t my own, what are old patterns or ways of thinking that don’t serve me, what is my intuition versus maybe a negative thought pattern or a negative entity or something that’s not me. I don’t necessarily have to get in the ring with boxing gloves, but I can treat it as separate from me. Can you help explore for anybody listening — how do we delineate these things? How do we separate what’s us and our intuition?
30:20
Cristine: Perfect. We’re stepping right into the mental body. This is so interesting, and I hope people grab the Four Bodies, Four Medicines ebook to really explore this too. The example I use in there is: if we try to use the mind to correct the mind, we can get just a lot of chaos going on. It’s trying to go back and forth between positive thinking and negative thinking. “Oh, there I am doing negative thinking,” and then the judge comes in: “You shouldn’t be negative thinking.” So we have that voice, and then “You better be positive thinking,” and we have that voice. Just a lot of chaos. The solution I found for that is it goes back to zero. It’s actually neutrality. Neutrality has the option of not charging your thoughts with anything. I like playing the neutral game.
The neutral game is a way to bring the mind to the present moment with zero emotion — just neutral state, present moment. If I’m playing the game in my setting right here, I’m going to say: “Okay, there is a clock in front of me.” I can give the time. I can look around and see there are four frames on my wall. My chair is black. Then I can go into auditory senses: I hear some white noise… I might see something out the window. You’re bringing yourself back to “Oh, I can feel.” If I put my toes on the ground, I can feel my chair protector. I can feel the texture of my chair. You have to slow down to be able to identify the experience, and you avoid qualifiers or adjectives that add emotion to it. The goal is just: there are four drawers. The water bottle is blue. I smell… You can do it in your room. You can do it while you’re driving. A lot of times when I was driving and had a commute, I’d go into some headspace. Just practicing this: sky is blue, there’s a white car in front of me, turn off the radio, and just be in the silence. The trick is you’re actually changing your neural pathways with it — like a mindfulness exercise, basically.
33:51
Jacob: I think it helps people really notice, because when you start to stack on a few of these different sense techniques, you actually realize you’ve been smelling this whole time but you didn’t really notice… You have the taste of coffee or whatever in your mouth… When you’re naming things, either saying them out loud or at least identifying them, what happens is a lot of people suddenly get pulled out of their thought loops. They didn’t realize they’d just been in this world of only thinking. Thinking is a sense, just like smelling and seeing, but I think we give it so much power. It’s the ultimate always-thinking sense. We get stuck in thinking and ignore the other senses. That’s where the thought loops and old patterns can take place when we’re stuck in just the thinking mode.
35:02
Cristine: Yeah. Mindfulness is a way into the present moment. It took me a while to get to meditation as a practice of stillness and silence. For me, my mind was so busy. The first thing I got to do was yoga. It was so divine — I knew it was God — because I had to be with people for almost a year to get it. I was supporting a woman in recovery. I would support her with principles, and then she would tell me, “Oh, you should go do yoga,” and she would ask me every week, “Have you done yoga?” By the time we’d worked together for several months I was like, “I have to go do yoga so I can at least answer yes.” So I got the book by Baron Baptiste, Journey Into Power, and that’s how I started. I didn’t go to a yoga studio — I just started at home. Reading his book, I was compelled. I was like, “Oh, this is a solution.” He talked about the gap between stimulus and response. Basically he’s talking about the power we have to change our neural pathways with a pause, and that when you use your body as part of that process, there’s something to it that you can’t just do with your mind. It’s definitely the mind-body connection. It’s critical for me. I do not go a week without yoga. I do go to studios now, and I like the slower pace because it creates that gap between stimulus and response. It creates the opportunity for me to be present in the moment, to make a different choice, and to slow down. Yoga is definitely a solution for the mind without involving the mind, without creating the chaos.
37:15
Jacob: Yoga is so satisfying on every single level. Even just doing twenty minutes of yoga from YouTube a day… the breathwork aspect forces you to breathe in ways you probably wouldn’t otherwise. It was certainly a part of my journey too. Christine, I have to ask you — this might be a selfish off-trail — I’ve mentioned that you have gotten into Transcendental Meditation. I like meditation generally as well, but my daily practice is still the 20 minutes, the mantra. I still just love that one. I still do it. So I want to ask about your experience. Assuming a listener hasn’t really even heard of TM, can I just hear a little bit about your journey with Transcendental Meditation?
38:30
Cristine: Yes, for sure. I’m going to tell you about my whole journey with meditation. I did my yoga, got that down, and then I knew I was meant to explore Eastern meditation. My first glimpse at that was actually a movie called Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. Real meditation looked like Vipassana to me. That requires ten days of silence. There is a Vipassana retreat within distance from me that I could have done, but I was like, “I don’t know how I’d do that.” In the documentary it shows how Vipassana changed the nature of one of the worst prisons in the world in India. They brought it into the prison and it transformed the inmates — reduced the general issues, created better dynamics with the guards. It was really transformative. I thought that was so interesting. I did a teaching about principles around Eastern meditation on 11/11/11 at 11 a.m. I’m all about the numbers. November 11, 2011, I opened this door in a big way. I went on record saying, “I hope I do not have to go to prison to learn how to meditate.” It felt like a prison concept to me. I couldn’t imagine ten days of silence unless there was nothing else to do.
Later I encountered a former Buddhist monk who sat with me. I hadn’t been able to get into silence and stillness, so he worked with me. He taught me Mahasati, which is a movement-based meditation — like a transition between yoga and meditation. Then we started talking about my deepest fears. I had this fear that if I were completely silent and still, it wasn’t safe. I associated it with non-existence. My deepest fear was that I would cease to exist, and the more still and silent I was, the more I felt like I fell into that fear. The doings and the act of motion was like a survival mechanism for me. My subconscious felt like I was alive and I existed as long as I was doing. Being wasn’t as safe, because at some level — and it has to do with that emptiness in me — it was like I would fall into the black hole of nothingness. I worked with him on that fear for a while, and through that I was able to grasp zero. When we talk about that neutrality, there is something beyond that on a quantum level that is actually the zero point field, where all energy is removed from a system. It is actually a ceasing of all. This thing that I was so afraid of, I actually had to move through it. In moving through it I found — and some of this was through quantum entrainment; Dr. Frank Kinslow is an advocate of this pure awareness — he talks about this transition from the zero point field to the unified field. There’s an amazing teacher of Transcendental Meditation that also talks about this: John Hagelin. John Hagelin is a quantum physicist who’s also a Transcendental Meditation teacher. He talks about the same kind of thing. There’s the dense 3D stuff, like a chair. Underneath that you’ve got molecular composition, then atomic, then subatomic, particles, the quantum weight… and when all of that’s gone, you’ve got the zero point field. But adjacent to the nothing is the everything, the all. In Buddhism that’s also a principle — the empty bowl, the Zen. If you take everything out, including ego, you have the potential for all, the vastness of Source to enter. I started to get this and recognize that that black hole fear was really just a tunnel to the everything, or a transition place. I actually created a technique, a meditation practice based on all this information, called Quantum Wholeness Meditation. Then I went to do TM. There’s a teacher here in Salt Lake. He mentioned that there are more billionaires than TM teachers, and I thought, isn’t that interesting? There’s only one in Utah. I felt really privileged to have that experience and learn about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I still am very much a fan. That led me to other solutions. I stuck with the 20 minutes twice a day for months, and then went back to Quantum Wholeness Meditation, partly because I do better and am more committed to it as a group practice. I’m one of those people that I’m going to do yoga if I go to yoga class and there’s other people in the room and somebody’s guiding me. I do meditation if I know it’s Monday at 12:30 and we’re studying A Course in Miracles and doing meditation with intention together.
45:55
Jacob: That’s so cool that you had all that experience with meditation before you stumbled into TM as well. I found that there’s a lot of overlap with certain words they use in TM and the Maharishi — when they talk about the unified field and cosmic consciousness. The Maharishi was a quantum physicist, did you know that?
46:42
Cristine: Yeah.
46:44
Jacob: Yeah. There’s a lot of gold in there. Conversations I’ve had with guys who’ve been meditating twice a day for fifty years… talking about quantum physics and consciousness… it’s just so fascinating. There’s this guy — if you’ve ever heard of the podcast Buddha at the Gas Pump, Rick Archer — he used to be a TM teacher. He lives in Fairfield, Iowa still.
48:36
Cristine: I love the research that’s come from it. The university… it’s the reason that meditation has the strength in our Western culture that it does, especially in research-based or mindfulness-type [approaches]. MBSR — mindfulness-based stress reduction — is kind of the same model as 20 minutes twice a day. People have adapted it, but it has become a huge part of our even academic models that support real solutions in mental health. So grateful for it.
49:14
Jacob: I would recommend if anybody could do the 20 minutes twice a day. There have been periods in my life where I followed it really well, and now most days I get my 20 minutes at least once a day. I think anybody would benefit from that, whether it’s a mantra or just mindfulness or whatever. You don’t forget your mantra. It is this loving thing — this personal word that doesn’t mean anything to anybody but you. Throughout the day if I think of my mantra I go, “Ah, that’s nice.” It is a resting place within, to some degree.
49:58
Jacob: Where I wanted to go with this, Christine… I think you would speak elegantly on something I often bring up on this podcast, and it’s identity. I find identity to be a big linchpin to a lot of what ails us and what heals us, and the different versions of us that are trying to bloom on the other side of what’s keeping us down. If I was throwing out there, let’s bridge this into a conversation about identity — what comes up for you?
50:36
Cristine: So big. We didn’t really talk a lot about the quantum body, but I think we can tie it into that a little bit. Moving from the mental body to the quantum body, I think the core shift or element that allows for the healing to take place is mastery over the ego. The ego isn’t really the identity — if we were to use that, it would be a lowercase i. I don’t know if you have any background with A Course in Miracles?
51:07
Jacob: Yeah, it’s on the shelf. I know it’ll be good.
51:11
Cristine: That’s where I’ve actually found the most support for my own journey. Identity, I guess you could say with a capital I, or Self with a capital S — that is the spirit-infused self. The quantum self would be that higher self that we can trust and lean into, which has more sourced identity. With Kabbalah, it is in a higher frequency than we are. That’s something I’ve continued to work on. I think I went into the psychology field because I recognized there were some core issues with me that I didn’t know how to fix. When I delved into personality disorders, I definitely studied that deeply, trying to understand myself and flaws. There’s not a lot in mental health and psychology to solve personality disorders, and those include things like narcissism. There’s a lot out there about “are you narcissistic abuse?” I just keep seeing that pop up and I kind of cringe with it because it’s fuzzy and it’s not solution-oriented. What I find is it pulls up the victim, which is also an identity. That victim mindset, or it’s really an ego structure, is just as big an issue as narcissism — it’s just not talked about as much. There are definitely structures around borderline personality disorder, and that’s so tough that you bring that up in the field of mental health and you watch the therapist turn and go, “I’m full, I have a wait list.” Because there’s not really a solution. And the problem is because there’s not really a spiritual solution in the mental health field. That’s what I’ve discovered: when you go to that quantum, you’re solving at a spiritual level, and it’s transformative in a way that only Source can really solve. Part of my transformation is I had a spiritual awakening, and that’s what woke me up from a drug-induced lifestyle, but it also woke up a true identity, and I started a path of recovery towards that.
My daughter and I have a lot of deep talks — my 18-year-old — about personality disorders. She’s attracted a lot of friends who’ve already been diagnosed, or whose dad is a narcissist, or whatever. I’ve actually influenced the psychology of some of this new generation. I got to speak to her psychology class even and talk about this. Ego structure is something that I think needs to be part of the education of people, because you’re going to run into it, you’re going to deal with it. Understanding that there is a solution — it just doesn’t look like a pill, it doesn’t look like talk therapy, but it looks like a spiritual transformation. That’s the answer.
55:16
Jacob: Is there a way to intentionally induce it? I know we have psychedelics, ibogaine treatments, ayahuasca… people are having good effects with these. But if people are just listening and noticing, “Hey, me — I want to get started on my journey,” what’s maybe a direction that they can go? I’ll have the links to all of your work down below, of course. They can explore more of your work. You have a lot of great stuff on your YouTube channel. What’s something maybe they could try if this sounds like right up their alley?
55:58
Cristine: I do have something called the Quantum Solutions Masterclass, and I include an ego structure component to that. It walks people through it if they want to go deep dive. I talk through all the Cluster B, Cluster C personality disorders and talk about what a spiritual solution looks like. It’s amazing for people that are in the field of mental health, or really… my daughter’s going into probably psychiatric nursing or something like that, but she’s using it for life. She can now understand why she has this conflict with this person and how to frame that in a better way. It’s deep dive stuff, but I think your listeners are ready for it.
56:48
Jacob: Oh, no, definitely they are. If you’re listening to this, you’re down to explore some of this stuff. That would be down below. We are getting up here in time. I kind of want to end it with one thing. Where I want to send us off with is chronic pain. You’ve kind of briefly mentioned this. If someone is coming to you… why would the spiritual approach or the quantum approach be useful for chronic pain? What are our relations with this chronic pain?
57:50
Cristine: Pain is tricky. You asked a question that made me think of the pain body. Eckhart Tolle talks about the pain body. It was during this time that I was trying to understand my ego that I was also studying meditation and A Course in Miracles, and I was also studying Eckhart Tolle. I started to realize, “Oh my gosh, this pain body is a separate entity from myself. I can separate myself from it.” I actually had some tools at my disposal that helped me do that. Some of it is related to the four bodies. Definitely finding a solution outside of narcotics is key, and that can be mind over matter — what we learn about mindfulness and powered meditation. A simple solution would be: notice where you’re not in pain. Tune into even if it’s your hair. Isn’t that funny? I don’t know anybody whose hair is in pain. It could be the tip of your nose or your earlobe. Even with people with fibromyalgia that are hurting all over the body — their hair doesn’t hurt, the tip of their nose probably doesn’t hurt, their earlobe is probably pain-free. So you move around into those pain-free aspects of yourself and you can meditate on that, or use those as anchors when you’re meditating, and teach yourself where you want your focus to be.
And then love. Back to this — the essence of endorphins, that’s really on a quantum level. What people are looking for in the endorphin experience is love. And it’s a capital L-O-V-E which can be infused by… and I know there’s stories of people that they can have that moment of enlightenment or awakening and it could just be being wrapped in the arms of love.
1:01:00
Jacob: Amen to all that. That’s wonderful. I think that’s a great place to end it. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate this. Thank you so much for exploring this with me and going down some of these pathways that we went down today. I’m sure everybody who is listening is going to come away with something positive from this. Of course I’ll drop some links below — they’ll be able to find you and explore more of your work. Anything that you want to mention to sign us off here?
1:01:32
Cristine: Well, I’m trying to just get all that good stuff on my website in a way that people can explore it. It’s cristinehull.com — if you’re listening, it’s no “h” in Christine: C-R-I-S-T-I-N-E H-U-L-L. And I’ll try to have all this good stuff for people easy to find as well.
1:01:51
Jacob: Cool, love it. Well, thanks one more time. Everybody, listen to more Christine, check out more of her stuff, read more of her books. And love yourself, drink some water, stretch if you haven’t stretched today. Come on, man, you gotta get your stretching on. And we will see ya next episode. Thanks for tuning in to the Junkyard Love Podcast.