Welcome & Listener Name Suggestions
Renee: Gaga has Little Monsters, Taylor has Swifties, and we're on the hunt for a name for our listeners.
Renee: Please submit your ideas via social to either myself or Christine, or synergytosynastry@gmail.com.
Renee: And don't forget to subscribe.
Lisa Caruso Introduction
Christine: On today's show, we have Lisa Caruso, who is the founder of JoyWelle, a wellness lifestyle and consulting brand that blends her expertise as a visionary and strategist, stemming from years in corporate PR and communications in luxury travel, wellness and hospitality industries with her mastery, passion, training and lifelong practice in wellness and intuitive arts.
Christine: If you ask me, she's kind of a big deal.
Christine: A creative visionary and wellness expert, Lisa consults on and curates meaningful and impactful wellness experiences and programs.
Christine: Lisa also guides and facilitates group retreats and private sessions, empowering clients to trust their own intuition and inner magic, manage their stress and energy and live a more well balanced and joyful life.
Christine: Lisa is a certified Reiki Master practitioner, breathwork facilitator, Nuurvana Certified Psychic Intuitive and a lifelong clairvoyant.
Christine: Lisa, we're so excited to have you here today.
Christine: Welcome to the show.
Lisa: Thank you Renee and Christine.
Lisa: I am so excited to be here and honored to be your first guest.
Renee: I just have to say though, before we start, with a name like Lisa Caruso, is she even Italian?
Renee: But we're all Italian here.
Christine: We are.
Christine: And I would like to point out to the listeners that we mentioned in one of our episodes that Renee is a 3/5. manifesting generator.
Christine: So is Lisa.
Christine: So the conversation today is gonna be juicy and flowy and I feel like it's gonna bounce around a little bit.
Christine: So buckle up and enjoy.
Wellness
Renee: Lisa, first question that we have for you is, how did you get into wellness?
Lisa: My journey to wellness started very young.
Lisa: I was intuitive as a child and I saw visions, I saw people who had passed.
Lisa: And to be honest, at that age, I assumed every child had this experience.
Lisa: So it wasn't something I talked about, it wasn't something that I even paid any attention to, it was just a natural state of affairs.
Lisa: I went to college, I was the first person in my family to go to college and was a little unsure of where I wanted to focus, what I wanted to major in, what I wanted to do.
Lisa: Sort of accidentally landed in public relations.
Lisa: I lived in Florida at the time, I worked in a small agency, we did PR for various types of clients.
Lisa: And then I eventually transitioned in-house into a golf and spa resort in Florida and found myself very drawn to the wellness side of things and the spa in particular, creating programming for the spa, bringing in experts, bringing in spa media, hosting wellness weekends.
Lisa: And it really lit me up.
Lisa: And frankly, at the time, I thought I was simply lit up by being in this line of work, being in the hospitality industry at that point.
Lisa: Intuition, as we all know, speaks to us -, but I really wasn't as tuned into it as I had been as a child.
Lisa: I came to New York City for the first time and I came here for work in the late s.
Lisa: I was standing under a heat lamp in a blizzard at the Roosevelt Hotel at the time.
Lisa: You know, I was here to do media appointments.
Lisa: And I suddenly had this overwhelming feeling that I was home.
Lisa: And I knew in that moment, like I still get chills when I tell that story, I knew in that moment I was gonna live in New York City.
Lisa: And I had no family here, no connections.
Lisa: Like logically, it made no sense.
Lisa: But I knew it was my intuition because I just trusted it.
Lisa: And at that time in my life, and for many years thereafter, I was very analytical.
Lisa: Like everything that happened, every question, every decision I made was all about tearing it apart.
Lisa: Every possible iteration solution that I could come up with.
Lisa: And the fact that I just accepted that information in that moment in a blizzard, I just knew.
Lisa: I went back to Florida and I thought, okay, like how do I put this in motion?
Lisa: Eventually you have to take action to bring desires to life.
Lisa: So I had a lot of PR agencies in New York that I worked with that represented us in New York.
Lisa: So I just started having conversations with people and started exploring like, what would that look like?
Lisa: And I will say it's just that intuition that sort of like quelled the need to figure it out.
Lisa: And - happened.
Lisa: And it was really interesting because of course, the tragedy of - is without saying.
Lisa: And it didn't scare me.
Lisa: There was always this voice that's like, it'll happen when it's time.
Lisa: There was a part of me that was getting anxious and my anxiety was getting the better of me because I'm like, well, now I know, and I know I'm moving and I wanna do this.
Lisa: And like, when is it gonna happen?
Lisa: I remember living with one of my girlfriends and her boyfriend at the time was moving in with us.
Lisa: And so it was time for me to move out, right?
Lisa: I did not have a perspective, anything in New York at this time.
Lisa: It was December of 2002.
Lisa: I marked my boxes going to storage NYC.
Lisa: I put them in storage and I knew it was six months.
Lisa: I moved in with my parents May of that year.
Lisa: I interviewed with the PR agency and I moved to New York City on June 30th of 2003.
Renee: Just a great example of trusting your intuition, but just being so guided by it in such a big picture sense, we tend to think in a lot of stories that Christine and I have talked about in this podcast are one-off events.
Renee: You have some sort of information, you don't understand where it's coming from tied to that, but this was a very big life decision, moving how many miles away?
Renee: Thousands of miles away?
Renee: I did have a question about this connection with New York.
Renee: So had you only felt or experienced this knowing that first time that you went and it had never crossed your mind prior to physically being in New York?
Lisa: New York City was certainly on the bucket list to visit, but I'd never even considered moving.
Lisa: I knew I didn't like Florida.
Lisa: My parents are both from Italy.
Lisa: I was born in Canada.
Lisa: We moved to Florida when I was a child.
Lisa: I hated it from the beginning.
Lisa: I love the beach.
Lisa: I love the ocean.
Lisa: I love it now because I can visit and have that moment and then leave.
Lisa: But I just never loved the lifestyle.
Christine: I feel like it's just perfect for the energy of our podcast.
Christine: We were just going about our day and then realized we had this gift.
Christine: So I love that.
Christine: So you had these experiences that led you to New York.
Christine: You knew you wanted a bigness of things.
Christine: You had this intuition that you were following blindly.
Christine: And then how do you end up getting into Reiki or energy work from this beginning?
Lisa: I spent most of my career in the PR world, mainly in PR agencies that specialized in luxury travel, hospitality and wellness.
Lisa: We would go to the spa and I would find myself journaling about the energy of the place and what mosaic tile I liked.
Lisa: And I remember thinking like, why do I care?
Lisa: Like, why can't I just enjoy?
Lisa: Why do I care about the decor and the energy and how I feel and all of these things?
Lisa: And eventually I moved to going back in house in New York and I was at a luxury hotel here in the city with a spa.
Reiki
Lisa: We started offering Reiki at the spa in this hotel and I met with the woman who would be providing the Reiki treatment because honestly I had no idea what Reiki was.
Lisa: But in hindsight, I went to Massage Envy and my massage guy had been like early certified in Reiki.
Lisa: So like there are many levels of becoming a Reiki master.
Lisa: And he had like Reiki one, maybe Reiki two.
Lisa: And he would do massages with me and he's like, I'm just going to do some energy work with you.
Lisa: And so when we started to offer it in the spa and I from a PR marketing standpoint needed to understand what it was so that I could best support it, I found myself telling the practitioner that I had been researching how to study Reiki.
Lisa: Literally the next day, she emails me with these resources to start studying Reiki.
Lisa: I'm sitting at my desk saying yes, and my brain is like, what is the rush?
Lisa: You're going to Hong Kong.
Lisa: But I found myself going to my Reiki one first level training.
Lisa: It was a full weekend.
Lisa: I arrived Friday night, and I knew that night intuitively that I would be a Reiki master.
Renee: Give a quick overview of either what you learned from that or just what Reiki is for the listener who has no exposure to it.
Lisa: So Reiki is a Japanese energy healing modality.
Lisa: Meditation is one of them.
Lisa: Breathwork, aromatherapy.
Lisa: I mean, there are various...
Lisa: And they all activate the calm side of your nervous system, the parasympathetic side.
Lisa: As humans, we are defaulted in fight or flight.
Lisa: Our brain and our nervous system is always in protection mode, which is a very constricting way to go about life.
Lisa: When our parasympathetic nervous system is activated, it literally balances your energy, helping to sort of unravel the tension, unravel the stress and the anxiety, if you will, that lives in the physical body, but also in our energetic body.
Lisa: We are all energy.
Lisa: Like, this is literally a meat suit.
Lisa: But our energy is within us and without us.
Lisa: We're working with clients physically, so there may be hands-on therapy.
Lisa: But if I'm sensing that there's a block or a need to move energy somewhere in the energetic body, my client may feel me hovering over them because I'm there, but I'm working in different layers of their energy.
Lisa: And this for me has been intuitive.
Lisa: I learned very quickly in Reiki that my intuition and my psychic ability was what was activated when I shared Reiki.
Lisa: It's how I see energy.
Lisa: It's not what you study in Reiki, if that makes sense.
Lisa: Many Reiki masters are also clairvoyant, intuitive.
Lisa: They actually see the organs or the chakras or like what needs to be blocked, what's blocked and what needs to be moved.
Lisa: For me, I see it psychically.
Lisa: And the more I've practiced Reiki, the stronger that becomes.
Lisa: I think the turning point for me was like this profound experience I had with Reiki as a client.
Lisa: I had a cat for 17 years, Chloe, who was a soulmate in this life.
Lisa: She grew up with me, basically moved to New York with me.
Lisa: Her passing was one of the most spiritual experiences I've ever had.
Lisa: She passed in my arms in the middle of the night.
Lisa: I saw her soul leave her body.
Lisa: And I didn't remember in the moment that I said to her, my Nana, who was also one of my soulmates in this life, that she'll take care of you.
Lisa: You'll be with Nana.
Lisa: But that weekend, I booked a massage and I said, I'm not really in the mood for deep tissue.
Lisa: I'm very sad.
Lisa: I just need something more nourishing and more supportive.
Lisa: So he mainly did Reiki.
Lisa: And as I was in session, I saw Chloe, fluffy gray cat that she was, all healthy with her little red heart collar on.
Lisa: And then I saw my grandmother walk over and stand next to her.
Lisa: And I remembered in that moment, what I had said to her as she was passing.
Lisa: The depth of that healing in that moment was inexplicable.
Lisa: And it's in some ways, it's so challenging to explain to people the benefit of energy work, because you can't explain those moments.
Lisa: It provided me closure and a sense of peace that I didn't even know I needed.
Lisa: And then I started my own Reiki training journey.
Lisa: And as a Reiki master, a breathwork facilitator, and really tuning in to my intuition, allowing that to guide the session, allowing whatever comes up to come up.
Lisa: Sometimes people who've passed are in the room, and they have messages.
Lisa: Honestly, just being able to travel the world and see other cultures and be exposed to other modalities and other environments, other energy, has all been such an intricate, beautiful way that was meant to be so that I could launch JoyWelle and be a practitioner and create programming and be consultant and do all the things.
Christine: Full disclosure for the listener, Lisa is my Reiki practitioner.
Christine: And after listening to your story, it sounds like what makes your Reiki slightly different, and if you ask me, special, is that you have the intuitive knowledge to bring in other aspects of your skills when and if necessary.
Christine: So for example, both Lisa and I came to one session separately thinking about possibly doing breathwork, and after the Reiki session, you know, Lisa brought it up and was able to curate a breathwork plan that kind of worked with my Reiki, and we're still doing it now, and I have to tell you it's incredibly supportive.
JoyWelle Reiki Sessions
Christine: Do you want to give you the opportunity to kind of expand on what makes your flavor of Reiki so special for the sitter?
Lisa: Well, thank you.
Lisa: I appreciate that live testimonial.
Lisa: We are all our own healers, and we all have our own special sauce, given my background and given my own journey and how I've shifted my own way of being and still shift on a daily basis because there's no destination.
Lisa: The fact that I'm able to intuit what my client may need, like I work with clients very intentionally.
Lisa: They're very committed and they want to move through something.
Lisa: And then we curate the session or sessions based on what is your intention?
Lisa: How are you feeling?
Lisa: What do you need?
Lisa: And the thing with Reiki, energy goes where it's meant to go.
Lisa: I am simply a channel.
Lisa: It's not an exchange of energy with Reiki.
Lisa: I think that's really important.
Lisa: I am a channel of universal source energy, as are you, as we all are part of being trained.
Lisa: And Reiki gives me the tools to ensure that I can be clear and hold that space and hold the intention for all of my clients, whether it's stress or anxiety or otherness or value and worthiness that they're struggling with or grief even.
Lisa: And it's like unraveling that tense energy and helping them sort of be with it and respond to what's happening in life versus constantly reacting.
Lisa: If you've never run a marathon or done Iron Man, you don't go to the gym tonight and you're like first in line tomorrow.
Lisa: Similarly, energy is the same, and especially because we're in fight or flight, always, we're always in this sort of tense state of being because we feel like we have to be in protective mode.
Lisa: So this work helps to loosen the grip, and I can take a breath and I can be present and I'm okay.
Lisa: And the goal is never to bypass emotions and pretend you don't feel what you feel, because our feelings are actually the reflection of what's going on.
Lisa: It's to be able to allow that and flow through that with more grace, more ease, more compassion for yourself, rather than try to fight and resist what's happening.
Renee: I want to dig a little deeper into something you just mentioned.
Renee: Could you outline what some of the biggest misconceptions are around energetic healing work?
Lisa: It's more in the woo category.
Lisa: It's not as mainstream as massage, facial, yoga, pilates, not like other modalities that you move your body, you address mental health.
Lisa: There are other things that are more mainstream.
Lisa: So I think it's a little bit more elusive for people because it's not hands on necessarily.
Lisa: And it's very, very subtle.
Lisa: The effects are immediate in that you feel calm in a session.
Lisa: But if you're working through deeper emotions, it's not something that's done in a session.
Lisa: It's not a quick fix.
Christine: Do you work with the chakras in like a linear form when you're doing Reiki?
Christine: Or it's kind of like, I feel intuitively into the chakras and kind of work through it from there.
Christine: Both.
Lisa: And I say that because I always start every session with a chakra balancing.
Lisa: There is a protocol in Reiki of how you move along the body, how you move along the energy.
Lisa: So to some degree, I do follow a protocol.
Lisa: If I'm guided to work in some other area or go to another area or, you know, be there longer, you know, maybe a lot's going on in the upper chakras and like we spend more time there.
Renee: I know there are a lot of chakras, the most basic ones we tend to think of are from root to crown.
Renee: For those that are familiar with it, it's really from, you know, your base, like your butt, essentially, to right above the top of your head.
Renee: So like, what about your arms and legs?
Renee: So when you're doing this work, are you mostly focusing on that core or are you delving into other chakras and kind of expanding out further?
Lisa: It's not linear by any stretch of the imagination, but if I'm working with someone and I'm in there working in their heart chakra, but at like, you know, level four of their heart chakra, I'm working in the corresponding chakra of their energy, if that makes sense.
Lisa: And that doesn't mean there's a chakra there, it's just there's levels.
Lisa: Think of energy, right?
Lisa: It's like expands and it's infinite.
Cool Reiki Experiences
Christine: What is like the coolest experience that you or a client has had during any one of your sessions?
Christine: Reiki, breathwork, anything that you want to highlight?
Lisa: There's so many.
Lisa: I'm a channel.
Lisa: I don't remember things.
Lisa: You know, I take a lot of notes during a session so that, you know, if I'm getting information, somebody who has passed comes through for someone, we can brief at the end.
Lisa: But when that lands and that resonates, I have a visual and they had the exact same visual in the session or they see the same color that I'm seeing.
Lisa: Like it just is like this evidence of the oneness of it all and like the unity of it all that I think is really beautiful.
Applying Reiki in Our Everyday Lives
Christine: How can listeners engage with energetic healing in their everyday lives?
Christine: Either they've just had a session or they're doing their own energy work.
Christine: What's your advice?
Lisa: I love this question because.
Christine: Surprise, this episode is a two-parter.
Renee: Tune in next Saturday to hear Lisa's answer, as well as the rest of our interview, and for Lisa to provide a reading for the collective.
Christine: Thanks for listening.
Renee: If you'd like to learn more, the resources we used to prepare for this episode are listed in the show notes.
Christine: You can reach me, Christine, @channeledbychristine with one L on Instagram.
Renee: And you can reach me, Renee, @_readbyrenee, or connect with both of us via email at synergytosynastry@gmail.com.
Renee: Keep your spirit curious and your aura sparkling.
Christine: We'll see you on the stars next to the line.
Comments