00:00:00 Josiane

We are more looking into… just like appreciative inquiry, we’re looking, not at what’s wrong in someone or a couple or a family or a nation or a community. We’re looking at what works for it, so Appreciative Inquiry, believe it or not, is a business model. But I see families and couples as a business of love. Okay? When I ask a couple in therapy, what’s your mission? What’s your mission statement? Did you write your vision statement? What’s your vision? They don’t have a vision. I’m thinking of that, but they’re not on the same wavelength, and that’s what is so important, and is part of the five strategies of Compassionate Love. You know, how to break away from the chains of all the programming that we receive if we take good consideration of the other, we honor the other, we respect them, and we know their pain. And their pain is a reflection of what we might not want to see and might not want to honor. And so when we are in the Appreciative Inquiry, we understand that life has its affirming moments in a human system. That’s where we can change the world. 

00:01:41 Rosemary

This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast, stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry. 

J’aime: Welcome back to The Gifts of Trauma podcast. This is J’aime and I am so delighted to be here today with Dr Josianne Bonte. Welcome Josiane to the show.

00:02:12 Josiane

Thank you, J’aime, thank you for having me. I feel so honored to be here in this specific time in our lives and I’m on honoring all of our common ancestors and attending in the world all of our connections with everyone in the world, that by sharing these ancient material with you about Compassionate Love, Compassionate Love to bring this new and ancient DNA awakening, that’s in earth and that’s been buried because of all the patterns of separation and division in our world that we are programmed in right now. So we have to awaken, awaken and to see and go within, in order to actually tap into what we have already in us.

00:03:15 J’aime

If we were at a party right now, If me and everybody listening to this show was at a party, you would be the one who came by with the tray, and you would waft this tray in front of us with all of these decadent, delicious looking things, so many words that you just shared, are to me, the appetizer to what we’re about to get into today. Words like Compassionate Love, Appreciative Inquiry, Family Systems. These are all familiar words, but I know they don’t mean the same thing to me, as a Compassionate Inquiry trained practitioner, and they probably will not be familiar to our audience. And so I want to take some time to become familiar with what is your map and your work, Dr Josiane, but before I do that, I just want to acknowledge this beautiful being in front of me. It was so exciting to dip into your work, and it was very rigorously academic and also metaphysical at the same time. So before we really get into definitions and operational ways of understanding what you do, I just want to hear from you. What is your mission? What are you here to do right now?

00:04:37 Josiane

Oh, that’s a beautiful question. So my mission is literally to go into the darkness of every single human being and bring them into the light. That’s why I call myself a lightworker. So I am officially  a couple and family therapist, but I call myself a lightworker, as I’m guided really by spirit to bring…  for everyone to see the sparkle of the divine in every single day, in order to stay away from judgment and for us to bring into our reality more Compassionate Love, which is unconditional love and compassionate. Again, and those two words came about in 1999. Lynn Underwood and her colleagues had a meeting in the World Health Organization in New York with a multitude of scientists, economists, spiritual and political leaders. And they could see at that time that there was a lot of confusion and violence, just like right now. And they asked themselves, what does the world need the most right now? Nobody could settle for one or the other. Some, they said we need more compassion. And others say no, we need more love. No, we need more compassion, no, more love. So they said, OK, let’s set a functional definition and bring in Compassionate Love. So they created Compassionate Love to be the love that centres on the good of the other. Lynn Underwood has a sense of humor, which you need in science. She says that it’s basically the type of love that doesn’t give you indigestion in your stomach. It’s real love. It’s pure love. It’s cosmic love. It’s even quantum love nowadays. It’s the type of love, it’s the type that’s within us, that we use to the minimum because we’re not taught anywhere how to love. So we hear a lot, the word “love” and we use the word love in so many different circumstances and contexts and misuse it. And so Compassionate Love is really not the type of love that asks you to sacrifice yourself. Often there’s a discrepancy. People forget about compassion. No, don’t give compassion. You don’t want to give yourself away to the other. You want to get this interconnectedness and fullness principles in African Ubuntu fPhilosophy, it’s not about I, It’s about we. “I am because we are.” In the Western world we say. “I think therefore I am.”  You see the difference? And I go back to the African philosophy often because a lot was taken from Africa but not correctly recognized, and for some parts of what we need right now, we need to go back to the source in order to remind us who we are. So if we say everybody comes from the same source or from the same place, but what we are is the question, and that is the essence. This is the difference between being in survival mode… when you see intimate relationships, or the world in survival mode right now, there is  a lot of fear, confusion, conflicts, misunderstandings, and abuses.

00:08:48 J’aime

You’re already starting to give me some of that delicious context that you write about that is so important. Definitely, I want to land where you are right now, but there’s a couple of things I would love to go back to, and revisit, that you just said. The first one that really stood out to me was that Compassionate Love does not require us to compromise ourselves. And I see a parallel in what we learn in Compassionate Inquiry because for me, before I embarked on this journey, compassion was giving myself away. It was bowing down. It was literally making myself smaller in service and in offering. And what going through the year long and the mentorship of Compassionate Inquiry did for me was it brought me back to myself. And it teaches us that as we listen to somebody, as I’m listening to you, I’m paying attention to how I feel every step of the way. And I’m trusting that, because that’s going to allow me to mirror truth back to you about yourself. So I’m feeling a lot of parallels. Of course, we were going to, but I wanted to name that one. I was wondering if you wanted to say anything back, around that because I’m watching you shake your head yes a lot.

00:10:10 Josiane

You’re naming exactly what it is to be feeling compassionate. It Is you mirroring… We are connecting beyond this space and time. We are connected yet somehow when we come from others, we decided, hey, on February 12, 2025, we’ll meet again. And that’s why, every time we see somebody, even a cashier at any supermarket or an older person, or whoever is in our reality in our space, they are a reflection of ourselves. They are mirroring a part of ourselves. And that is what compassionate love is teaching us to feel, accept the anguish of the other because they are part of ourselves that we might have buried or disowned or repressed or suppressed from our consciousness. So our consciousness, we always think that our consciousness is, we’re using all of it, but we might use maybe 10% or less of what it is to be in that unity of consciousness, to be spiritual, to have the spirit in us and to let it talk, to be in our essence is to allow Compassionate Love to lead us, not our fear, not our anger, not all those emotions that are part of what it is to be human, right now, in this three dimension.

00:12:05 J’aime

Me and maybe a lot of people listening right now love to live in this metaphysical habitat that you’re describing, but it’s hard to land these concepts into practiced, lived reality. And as a scientist, as somebody who has two decades of clinical experience and really, just the story about the World Health Organization in 1999 giving way to that definition, blows me away. And you’re opening a door for us to peek into. And they’re talking about that at the World Health Organization? So I want to know more about the science that establishes and affirms what you’re saying right now. And one of the foundations I think that we should talk about next, is talking about Family Systems, because a lot of us know about Internal Family Systems developed by Richard Schwartz. My mind went to that when I read it. So let’s talk about what is Family Systems, how is it different, and how does it too, begin to get us out of this individualistic approach to healing?

00:13:20 Josiane

Yes. So Family Systems came in with a bunch of different scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists and also anthropologists, like Gregory Betson. He was a big leader of  Family Systems because they were seeing, at that time, the psychotics, the family of psychotics and they were working directly with them. And they noticed that the communication is off here, and it’s not just the one member, the one that shows the actual symptoms, it’s actually also the family members, the parents and the siblings of that person. And so they agreed that, oh wow, we have to then depart from the scientific method that tells us just to see one person and to encapsulate love, the big picture of what that person is about. And that person is about relationships. We are in a web of relationships as humans. We cannot be separated or isolated from others because our brains function in relationship with another brain. So that’s the science of neurobiology that we incorporate in Family Systems. So we decided to go away from the diagnosis. So we don’t diagnose. Although I was a mental health counselor at the roots, I stepped away from diagnosing people. 

It was liberating to understand that humans have the capacity within themselves to self regulate, with themselves, and others, whoever is around them. OK, so the difference between Family Systems and, let’s say individual therapy, is that we don’t diagnose and we refrain… If the person, let’s say a child is seeing his parents in conflict. So the child could be acting out in school, and he’s acting out  because his parents are acting out, but he might not have the words to say this. There’s something wrong right now. I can feel it, but it’s difficult for me to voice it. So a child is going to actually act out what is living in another space. And parents usually bring their children as the source of problems but don’t bring themselves into therapy and usually in family therapy, we include the parents because they are the source. They are the tip of the pyramid that is supposed to be the one leading the other to show themselves in their essence and not in their survival mode. So the survival mode is what some call the ego, or some might call the dysfunctional part of ourselves, the neurotic part of ourselves. If we go into Freudian psychoanalysis, it’s all very prevalent. It’s very real. It’s in every single one of us, even though we think we are nice, we are trained, but we always have a moment where we’re going to be in our lowest vibration because of what’s happening around us.

00:17:14 J’aime

As you’re talking, the picture that’s coming into my mind is, first of all, the emphasis is on the communication between more than the subject. Like a signal. It’s the signal, and the acting out child is just showing what their signal is picking up. It’s not inherent to their being, their constitution.

00:17:37 Josiane

And that’s where the whole misunderstanding of OK, I’m bringing my child to fix something about my child. So it is showing the child of the person as wrong, as something less than. But that’s not the case. We should be very thankful and grateful for all the children who are closer to their incarnations, their past incarnations. And they bring a lot of wisdom to us.

00:18:13 J’aime

Yeah, again, I’m seeing a parallel with Compassionate Inquiry and what Gabor specifically talks about and names in addiction. Is that often the addicted person in a family, or the one with ADHD, they’re the sensitive one often, who is trying to show the ill health in the family dynamic. Instead it’s turned on them as if they are the ill one. So I, I hear that, and I also am getting very inquisitive about bringing in the parents and recognizing… I read something in your book that said this is about the brain specifically and about the regulation you’re talking about. Researchers have referred to limbic regulation or affect coregulation, which is the interaction between two people or more, that occurs simultaneously when one person knowingly or unknowingly regulates himself with the other and generates healing through the creation of new neural pathways.

00:19:21 Josiane

Yes, that’s a lot.

00:19:24 J’aime

That is really enticing to me, once I got into the waters of your writing. Yet, I tried reading it to my partner and his eyes crossed. In case other listeners are feeling that way. Can we break that down?

00:19:40 Josiane

So I’m going to break it down with what James Baldwin said, that if we didn’t have each other we’ll be dead, but because of the love for each other, and he was talking about specific things, the African American population in the US, the love that we feel for each other, enters our brain and it creates literally new neural pathways. There’s an emergent property that comes out of me being with you right now, and that is what we call like an entity, but it’s a positive entity. It’s our relationship right now. And that is what’s happening in an intimate relationship, that being together, even when I’m having the worst time, is still feeding my soul, my spirit. And that generosity of spirit comes because of your presence. I feel called to name Heidi Schlesser, she talks about presencing as she called it, and also call in Imago Therapy, which is a therapy for couples,are  that you sit across from each other and instead of talking you just in the presence. You just gaze into the eyes of the other, as gazing into the soul of the person.

00:21:21 J’aime

You’ve driven us right to where we really want to be, because this conversation is about intimate relationships and the capacity, the implications that they have for collective healing. So I just want to open the floor right now, to talk about this thing that you name, called the sacred link.

00:21:47 Josiane

Yes.

00:21:48 J’aime

What is the sacred link?

00:21:50 Josiane

Yes, thank you. So while I was studying family therapy, family systems, and interacting with so many different families, from different cultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds and whatnot, I noticed that we all are spirit, body and mind, or mind and body, right? In intimate relationships, though, it translates differently. So there’s still the spirit of each partner, but there’s also this man. And it feels bigger than man. It feels like the emotions, it feels like the love. It feels like something that really… when couples come to therapy, they come with a problem, but they don’t come really with their essence. And being a lightworker, I have to bring them back into their essence. And the first thing I ask is, what are some of the qualities that you appreciate in your companion, and they’re very surprised.

00:23:12 J’aime

I just want to say you’re pointing to something else you talk about a lot. It’ss this emphasis on deficit, right? Yes. And that’s where the world is right now. That’s what’s contributing to what’s making it feel really scary with climate, with politics, with a lot of health issues, with people, is this deficit focus. So can you just spend a little more time?

00:23:39 Josiane

Yes.

00:23:40 J’aime

Talking about how important this shift is and what it means to you and what it’s meant to the people you work with.

00:23:46 Josiane

So what has happened is we come from a culture of deficit. In science we focus on what’s wrong, on the problem on the actual issues and it’s difficult, once you get to the core, to the root of what is, what we supposed to do with it? And in Family Systems there’s also a portion of Family System that says we are more looking into – just like appreciative inquiry – we’re looking not at what’s wrong in someone or a couple or a family or a nation or a community. We’re looking at what works. So Appreciative Inquiry, believe it or not, is a business model, but I see families and couples as a business of love. OK, That’s where we can change the world. If we take good consideration of the other, we honour the other, we respect them, and we know their pain and their pain is a reflection of what we might not want to see and might not want to honor in ourselves. And so when we are in the Appreciative Inquiry, we understand that life has affirming movements in the human system. it could be in an organization, a family, a nation, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same, as long as it’s more than one person. Otherwise, that person is in isolation. So when Appreciative Inquiry came about in 1987, David Cooperrider was looking at helping a hotel that was doing really bad. He asked the employees to go look outside, in other hotels and see what works. And when they went, they came back and they were so excited. Oh my God, they are so nice with their customer service. They’re welcoming every person, almost like in a festive mood and it’s so beautiful and amazing. We want to do the same. 

Appreciative Inquiry is to see the positive core at the beginning. You know who you are, but to see the positive core in every person, to focus on it, not to see only what’s wrong. What gives life? So it’s a life affirming paradigm, versus starting from what’s wrong. That’s literally why I have to bring that component that trauma is also teaching us. Trauma is a big word right now.  Everybody’s talking about trauma and yeah, you can do trauma informing you again now, but trauma is the one and we as human beings get an experience and we have a tendency to say, oh, that was a bad experience. That was a good experience, but actually all experiences we have are teaching us, helping us to expand our consciousness beyond the universe, within our space and reality, in order to move us and innovate, to bring us all to a better road, to a better idea of what is it that we’re here for. And that’s the mission.

00:27:31 J’aime

That just led us into what appreciative inquiry is.

00:27:34 Josiane

Yes.

00:27:36 J’aime

Getting away from the deficit and getting into that field of possibility.

00:27:41 Josiane

Possibilities, generativity, creativity… when you are with someone there’s something else. There’s a synergy of energies, of dynamic speech in you and the person, that brings another entity. I like to say entity because it’s light, it’s moving, it’s not dead. Even when people think that they’re not changing, they’re just changing for the same thing because they’re not really putting out their intention. And I love the fact that we started with setting our intentions because that’s exactly what I do. Also, when I first have an individual or family or a couple which means that I use intentions, I ask them to set their intention.

00:28:32 J’aime

Yeah, the intention is everything. It’s like when you quoted James Baldwin and without each other we die. Without the intention, there is no Compassionate Inquiry session because it’s the North Star. And I want to really get into what you started with, talking about sexuality and naming sexuality as part of the sacred link. What is it about sexuality that has this capacity? And more specifically, why do you believe so much that it’s through our intimate partner that we can address collective healing? So let me just frame this with one of your quotes because I want the listeners to really appreciate how fierce and how bold your belief and your statement is that’s driving your work. I’m going to read this from your book. “Without cultural integration and the understanding of the multigenerational transmission processes, sexual mass violence and mass trauma effects from the slavery system and current institutionalized racism hold American couples as hostage of the dark times in American history. Couple research can end the culture wars and the excess of humiliation, shame and guilt that couples of colour in this population carry, consciously or not, for the fragility of the perpetrators descendants disseminated through literature and media.” And I would also say, disseminated through a lot of unconscious behavior in day-to-day microaggressions.

00:30:11 Josiane

Yes.

00:30:12 J’aime

So this is painting a picture and my hope is that we’re going to lead into your specific intention to work with couples of colour and what brought you to that. So I’m going to drop off right now.

00:30:24 Josiane

This quote, this is so essential and it’s really at the core… You’re right. Is at the core of what my mission is for us to understand that everything our ancestors have done, whether you are considering yourself as white or as black or enslaved ancestors, it doesn’t matter. They all commingle together because all we are is energy. All of what’s around us and we ourselves are energy. That energy infiltrates into the colour of ourselves, our bodies, our cells. We are memories from not only this incarnation, but many more, depending if you are younger or older souls. But they’re all stored in ourselves. Ancient. The energy of what the experiences. And so the past enslavement of one group of people and the one who have perpetrated the sexual mass rape, the abomination that is used as a weapon of mass destruction and oppression, not only because the Europeans did that, but it’s all over the world now. It has infiltrated all layers of the energetic field, every single human, because we’re connected. Just imagine the fishnet and those nodes are every single one of us and we’re connected beyond time and space in this present life. I started doing this study in 2013 and then 2017, we have the Me Too movement realizing that oh wow, it’s not just one person. It’s many more women and men that have been sexually abused. Why? Because if you go back to the source, the sexual energy is the strongest force in the universe. The whole universe is in perpetual creation and it co-creates with us. So when we’re not intentional, when we’re anxious, we’re letting other energies, entities, do with us whatever they want. That’s why it’s so important when I ask a couple in therapy, What’s your mission? What’s your mission statement? Did you write your vision statement? What’s your vision? They don’t have the vision, most of them, I’m thinking of that, but they are not on the same wavelength and that’s what is so important and is part of the five strategies of Compassionate Love. 

To know how to break away from the chains of all the programming that we receive. That we are supposed, first of all, to get married, we’ve noticed that in Finland and the Nordic countries, people are doing well without being married, so to speak. They live together and they are the happiest, based on studies, they are the happiest population in the world. Why? So it’s not about marriage per se. 

So I’m from France, right? And in France, we accept collaboration as a very honorable and official way of being in a couple system. In the States, I learned through friends and my clients that they marry and remarry, but they’re really learning about how to divorce and not to discover one another, and not to understand, first, the other and to want the best, the greatest for the other, because the other is reflecting part of us that we might have not accepted or rejected. And when we send the other and we are like, oh, I love this amazing way of hugging. I feel that you are so centred. And then I might feel I’m not centred, but if I see it in you, it’s because it’s also within me. So it takes one to know one, it is so important that when you call in people and you see their flaws or you see their quantities it’s  because you have them in you. That’s why we don’t need a guru. We are our own guns because within us is all of the universe. We are all of the universe. We are what Maya Angelou took from Terrence. Everything that’s human is in us. So we can be this mass measure and we can be more optimized. Literally, and when we judge one another, then we break ourselves, we become fragmented.

00:36:00 J’aime

Thank you so much for bringing us to that point of judgment and how that fragments us. You open your book, Josianne, with this quote. ‘Without context, there is no culture. Without culture, there are no people or connections.’ When I read that, I’m reassured on a lot of levels. Then everywhere you’ve been leading us, talking about becoming more present, becoming more conscious, becoming more aware, taking responsibility, that if I’m seeing something I don’t like in you, it’s a mirror. It’s an invitation for me to examine what is triggering me, to be thankful for the trigger. These are all principles that we learn in Compassionate Inquiry that I’m excited to hear you reflecting in this work that you do with couples. 

There’s two points I want to touch right now because we’re talking about the African Holocaust, we’re talking about generations of violence, sexual violence, physical violence, oppression, and you speak of this spiritual love sexuality link, named the sacred link. You explored that in your book and your dissertation that this may serve as a direct route to assess underlying mechanisms and promote couple resilience that support the expression of protective mutations in gene expression. We’re talking about epigenetics now. We’re talking about, instead of passing down trauma, and it living and showing up in an African population, specifically women, in forms of asthma, for example, right? You’re talking about the capacity of this sacred link to tap in and to heal that. Can you say more?

00:37:55 Josiane

Yes. So what we’ve learned… The first time that we have an idea about intimacy, we might not have learned the details of what it is to be intimate, and we might have gotten that from some of the media, all those different ways that are learning through technology, that to be intimate is to just standard genital sex. Many follow the men, to follow their wants, and as women we might carry all the emotional burden in a dyad in a couple in a relationship, and it comes back into the bedroom. It goes back in there and then we’re missing the most important part of what it is – in our divine feminine power – to actually be a welcome for the man, or whatever partner we have. We are to follow this, follow our breath. Breath is so important. The breath. When we follow the breath we are more in tune and centred into multi dimensions. When we come into our intimacy, we are changing all the messages that we’ve received that say – do it this way, do it this way. No. It also comes in science, where at the beginning scientists did some research on sexuality. They were interviewing one person, not the couple, and they were interviewing mostly prostitutes and – nothing against them – but there’s so much more to know about how to let in and out our sacredness, our sacred sexuality, which is really to take the time. It’s just like being in family therapy, we slow down, and that notion of slowing down scares people because this is in a world of capitalism, a society of consumerism and instant gratification. And so we get away from our essence, and we stand so strongly in our ego, that we lose our sense of ourselves and we scan the other because we are afraid, almost, to be eaten in our relationship. And there was one of the couples that one man who mentioned, it is like being a microwave generation, just like, it’s instant and good and it’s not really good. It’s actually very toxic and carnage to us, to our health, to our spirit, to our soul and body. The sacred link is there to actually get humans to slow down and understand that when you are in pain, don’t try to be out of the pain. Go through the pain, just enjoy crying. You can enjoy screaming. You are in pain and it never stays a long time. When you allow yourself to go through it, not to skip it, not to put it under the rug, or blame it on somebody else or a group, it could be, not only a person, but a group of people, our nation. So once we understand that we are not machines, technology right now is trained to dehumanize us, we have to remember this sacred language that we have to slow down in order to bind and from our heart, from out third heart feel, sensation, emotion, what it is to be human and to let our divinity naturally speak to the other person that’s in front of us – to connect with it – to really see them, not to create another type of person that’s in their deficit, not their abundance. 

Compassionate Love is not toxic positivity either. I have to mention, it’s really to see super survivors, and I borrowed that from them, to speak about the cop wolves and to one of them said they have to be super survivors, because when we experience trauma, we can be traumatized by, the first day of school. We can be traumatized from giving birth, we can be traumatized from being sexually abused. We can be traumatized from so many things. Not everybody is going to be having symptoms in this current moment, and usually when they have symptoms it’s because they don’t connect with the past, in the past and the ancestors. If you don’t know where you’re coming from, it’s difficult to know how you stay centred, how you go round yourself. because those roots are not just you. They’ve found your ancestors who make who you are. And unless you have this knowledge, and that’s why now in Florida, the nation, they’re trying to ban books, history, African American history, because they know, somehow, that if you remember who you are, you’re going to be so powerful. And that’s why also I love the Jewish thing and the culture because they make sure you remember what happened to them. You remember the Holocaust. So the Holocaust is not a Jewish, it’s actually the human Holocaust, right. The native Indians went through a Holocaust, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians the Rawandans, so many different populations had a Holocaust. So go back, bounce back to normalcy, a sense of normalcy when you go through the wounding, the experience of trauma. But there’s a portion of humans that actually don’t bounce back, they bounce forward. They have, right? They go on as that potentiality. It all depends on the choice that we make. And that’s why it’s important to know that the sacred link is not just in our relationship with someone else, it’s also with ourselves, the relationship that we’re building and cultivating with ourselves. There’s a philosopher, a French philosopher, Voltaire, He says we have to cultivate our own garden. OK, because when we cultivate our own garden, we’re cultivating the garden of everybody else. That’s the principle of wholeness and interconnectedness.

00:45:47 J’aime

Going to take a moment to take all of that in, what you just offered us and justice. Let that kind of rest in my body for a moment. And the garden part. Everything you said felt like a garden, like a lot of seeds planted. I see that our time is coming to a near end. And I wanted to take this opportunity, Josiane, to touch on something that you said is happening in Florida. It’s like a microcosm of a lot of things that are happening right now, because, as you outlined, the context is really important. Our current context as we sit here with each other is one that, in Florida, they’re trying to ban books about history. 30,000 migrants stand to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, where terrorists are held. The Gulf of Mexico is now called the Gulf of America, on and on. There’s no US Aid left. It’s assassinated in a couple of weeks. This is our context right now, and I have a very personal interest in hearing this answer. But I also want to hear for our listeners, what can you leave us with, given this context and knowing what you know about the power of Compassionate Love, so that we can bounce forward in this time where we desperately need to be able to bounce forward. Where we need to be awake and alive and breathing and not shut down and numbed by this litany of things happening. What would you like to leave us with?

00:47:27 Josiane

OK, wow, that’s a big… Yes. Everything is connected, right? So it’s happening. It looks like we’re going down right? It’s actually every force in the universe in its opposite. So all on the media, all the social media and whatnot are so focussed on what’s wrong. Just know on the other side in the silent space, they’re not talking about what works, they’re not talking or how are we doing well, how are we doing better? How emotional are you when you think, because all in the world is mental. It’s mental, we have a big brain and I mentioned we are all connected with each other, and when we are in the state of fight or flight, we are not in our essence. So we have to honor the truth of Compassionate Love, to create our heaven on earth. We have to remember that we can choose the truth, and when we see the truth, not to be scared, but to feel that courage in order to see the beauty in humankind and to reclaim our divine powers, our sacred link, for the well-being of humanity. Because we are one soul with one role to love with compassion.

00:49:04 J’aime

I get it. I get it. And I also really landed with your message that the most direct and immediate application of this thing you just said, belongs with my family, belongs with my most intimate relationships.

00:49:19 Josiane

Yes, yes. And knowing that your relationship, when you’re doing well, even when you’re experiencing challenges, OK, doing well doesn’t mean that everything is rosy, but it means that you choose to see, oh, OK, what does it mean about me that it’s a reality that I’m great right now and I can definitely alchemize, change it, I can transform it, OK. We all have that power. And it’s just to remember. It’s to remember who we are. That’s the struggle right now. We are being shown only one facet of humanity and it is not our divine selves. We have to remember that we are divine humans, OK? We are divine humans, alright.

00:50:16 J’aime

Let’s get to that Appreciative Inquiry of ourselves. Let’s get away from that deficit and toxic sort of sludge that we’re being offered and let’s open it up to Appreciative Inquiry. What is? What do we have? We have a lot, don’t we?

00:50:34 Josiane

We have so much. There’s always something that can be better tended in your garden, right? Like the weeds. But before you take them away, then you have to see. OK. There was a little something underneath and you look and you are being changed.

00:50:51 J’aime

Curiosity. Thank you for closing on that. Curiosity is the medicine against judgment. Yes. I can’t be more grateful for your words, your message, your wisdom, in this time of incredible polarity and the invitation for reunification and for seeing myself everywhere I go.

00:51:14 Josiane

Yes, everywhere. Yes. And it’s not only in people, it’s also in the 5 elements, the earth, the fire, the air the ether, the water. So wherever you are, in front of me, I have the ocean. And with the ocean, every time, I just wish that every being is happy and free. Every time. And my wish encapsulate all the beings on Earth, all the humans, all the plants and animals, everything on earth.

00:52:00 J’aime

Dr Josiane Bonté, thank you for being here on the Gifts of Trauma podcast. Thank you for your medicine to this world.

00:52:10 Josiane

Thank you for having me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

00:52:19 Rosemary

If you’ve been listening to our podcast, you may have heard guests connect their birth experiences with enduring subconscious, behavioral and emotional patterns. To help break this cycle, Compassionate Inquiry offers The Portal a 28-week trauma informed training for perinatal health professionals such as midwives, obstetricians, nurses and doulas who want to empower their patients to trust their innate ability to birth bond with and nurture their child. To learn more and register, just follow the link in the show notes and register by March 3rd. 

The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen on Apple, Spotify, all podcast platforms, rate, review and share it with your clients, colleagues, and family. Subscribe and you won’t miss an episode.

00:53:18 Rosemary

Please note this podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for personal therapy or a DIY formula for self therapy.