Embracing Change: Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs

Deneen L. Garrett: 00:03 00:17 Welcome to another episode of Women of Color, an Intimate Conversation. I am your host, Deneen L. Garrett, and today's guest is master certified coach, Santana Innis. Santana, tell us more about you.
Santana Inniss: 00:18 01:02 Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. And yeah, just to say a little bit about myself and my journey. I recently left a decade plus career in tech and digital strategy leadership, really inspired by my own personal development journey and just a deep aspiration to align my work with What I see as my purpose on this planet, which is to reduce suffering in self and others. And so now every day I get to help people do exactly that. I'm a master certified coach focusing on alignment. I help people bring greater clarity to their values, their dream for life, and then how to get there by taking aligned action.

Deneen L. Garrett: 01:03 02:31 Awesome. And so all of that resonates and aligns with me. My focus is on empowering women to live a dream lifestyle. And I will tell you that. So yesterday I sat on a panel, it was for the female quotient and they do this. What is it? PAC, some PAC conversations that they have and the power of the PAC. And yesterday was centered around black women in experiences that black women have in corporate, right? How black women are kind of like thrusted into volatile roles and whatnot. And so a lot of the panelists, we were saying how, you know what, focus on yourself, focus on what brings you joy, whether that's staying where you are, whether that's leaving, but really just tapping into you and yourself. So this definitely is a conversation for those women. So let's get into, let's talk about, yeah, let's talk about your development journey in mindfulness, meditation, traditional and psychedelic assisted therapy. Okay. Okay. Self-compassion, which led you to receiving the transmission of the five mindfulness trainings in the Plum Village Zen Buddhist tradition. Like, what is this? and also how you've answered the call to align your work life with your life's purpose.

Santana Inniss: 02:31 06:36 Oh my gosh. So much, so much juice there. Um, I mean, let's start with the five transmissions. We'll start there. I'll go back and then, you know, we'll just go on a journey together here. But, uh, the five mindfulness trainings, they're an engaged Buddhist vision for spirituality and global ethics. So they're based on the five precepts, um, from, the Buddha from many, many thousands of years ago. And they've been remixed for the modern world by Thich Nhat Hanh, which a lot of folks know. He picked it with Martin Luther King Jr., was always on Oprah, so a lot of people can recognize that name. They're basically a set of aspirations that together they help us decrease things like discrimination, suffering, fear, And when you practice them, they kind of lead to healing, more presence, more transformation in ourselves and in others. And so when you are a practitioner, a lay practitioner in this Buddhist tradition, you can receive the trainings. And it's essentially a ceremony which marks your deep aspiration to commit your life to these values. And you're given a new name, you're given a Dharma name. So I have an additional name, a Buddhist name, in addition to Santana. um and uh yeah that name is inspired rootedness of the heart um this was given to me by a monk in the plum village tradition so how did I get there from like being the daughter of a first generation Afro-Latino growing up in the inner city to what I'm doing today and like all the steps throughout my career I mean life was rough, you know, growing up in extreme poverty, and not having a lot of options. You know, one of the quotes that I love most is, if you can't see it, you can't be it. And I think when you're growing up in that kind of environment, there are not a lot of other examples around you of like, what your life could be what a dream life could even be dreams are really small in that kind of environment. And so as I got older, I went to You know, finished high school, I did a year in community college and sort of fell in love with the process of learning transferred to Columbia University and ended up studying there and getting my degree there. went into a career and my father died. And I realized that life was really hard. Like, you know, my relationships were not hitting like I was suffering. I was struggling with, you know, mental health, with anxiety. And I just, I knew there had to be another way. And so that landed me directly in Barnes and Noble when bookstores were still a thing. And I found my first Thich Nhat Hanh book. The Miracles of Mindfulness. And I was like, this guy sounds pretty Zen, I'm going to see what this is. I had my Thich Nhat Hanh and I had my new therapist and you know, it started a journey that's been going on for a decade. A journey of answering the call to always go inward when something hurts, don't hide, look inside, like what is it? Can we love into it? You know, can we love it into into a state of transformation. So it's been many years and my career, you know, being a black woman in a corporate space is a whole mess. You just talked about that. And so like all of these sort of like pathways of spirituality, of meditation, of mindfulness, of therapy, becoming a Buddhist, All of these things sort of led me to a place where the inhumanity of being Black in the corporate space, being a woman in the corporate space, it was just not compatible with what wellness and what life looked like for me anymore.

Deneen L. Garrett: 06:36 07:56 No, I mean, I love all of that. And I really, I wrote down, don't hide, look inside, which is pretty much what we talked about yesterday, pretty much what I say. It's in you and it's for you to make those changes, right? And someone had messaged me afterwards and said, hey, did they give any steps, application as to what we can do about this situation? And I said, well, later in the conversation, we kind of did. But it wasn't a scholarly conversation. It wasn't for someone to walk away with, oh, one, two, three, how corporate can make changes. Because the deal is, they know what to do. The system is working. It is working the way it was designed to, right? And that's what we have to come to terms with. And so that's what a lot of us were saying yesterday. I was like, look, hey, it is what it is. For those that want to keep the fight, keep fighting. We want you to do that. However, there are those who are like, you know what, I'm good on that. and I'm going to do X, Y, Z, right? I'm going to go on a journey. I'm going to go, you know, I'm going to go into a bookstore, if you can find one, and a book is going to speak to me and change my life and my trajectory, which will also change other women's lives. So all of that is beautiful. But let's get into this psychedelic assisted therapy. What are we talking about? Mushrooms?

Santana Inniss: 07:57 10:49 It's mushrooms, it's mushrooms, but you know, there's a lot of research going into, yeah, mushrooms for mental health, you know. Things, you know, I saw some studies about, you know, treatment resistant depression or anxiety or PTSD or those sort of things. So I knew I wanted to try it. But I knew I wanted it to be with a therapist in a therapeutic setting. For me, I took it like very seriously. It's not a recreational drug, in my opinion. If it's in your world, your journey, I'd love that for you. But for me, I was like, this shit is serious. I'm not trying to mess around. So I found a lovely, lovely, lovely therapist who had been a therapist for 25 years. And in the last five or six years started, once the studies came out, like, ooh, can we experiment here? And so it was an interesting mix of therapy and what I call woo woo. So, you know, it was like, what are our intentions? Let's meditate together, you know, maybe pull an Oracle card or this kind of thing, just to put your mind in the right place to say, this is what I want to know. And I'm ready for this and I'm not in resistance and I feel safe. And when those parameters were set, It was about nine hours. And the therapist, yeah, I mean, it stays in your system a long time. And the therapist just sat there taking notes. If I said anything, if I wanted to talk, she'd come over and do some therapy and then she'd go back and sit down. And so that experience was like, wow, I mean, life changing. Like absolutely. There's the me before and there's the me after. And I came out of the experience with so much clarity and something I call phantom trauma syndrome. This isn't technical. I made this up. But so much is going on in your brain when you're having this experience or you've ingested psilocybin. synapses are being formed where there weren't any before. And so that also means that some are being cut off. So you'll wake up and you say, Oh, that thing that used to be very, very, very upsetting. I can't feel it. Oh, I just simply can't make myself feel that anymore. It's gone. But I remember that it was there. So it's kind of like a phantom. You're like, I remember it, but I can't feel it. And I think it was so beautiful on my specific journey there was such a like rich connection to my ancestors like they were so present. And there was so much like girl you got this like yes, yes, yes, yes, and like feeling that connection to them was just incredible.

Deneen L. Garrett: 10:50 11:27 And you know what honestly you know when i've seen people like you know on TV whatever you know having used it and even. What is it. Oh, my God, when they oh I can't even i'd lost my train of thought, but when they put you under yeah. Um, and you know, like anesthesia, not anesthesia, but hypnosis. Yeah. Hypnosis, both of them. I'm like, Ooh, I wouldn't mind, but that's okay. I'm good. Right. So I'm glad that there is an assisted therapy, right. Set up for that.

Santana Inniss: 11:27 12:13 Yeah. For me, you know, I, I, you gotta be careful, you know, You have to be careful. And you know, you hear a lot of things about people having really bad experiences. And that's why I think, you know, this, this medicine and this therapy should be available to everybody. And like, we really need it in communities of color. Because these therapies really started in communities of color. This is indigenous wisdom, right? And so bringing that access back to like start the process, waking up after, you know, waking up, being off the influence after nine hours of therapy under psilocybin was like having had therapy from the day I was born. Wow. That's what it felt like.

Deneen L. Garrett: 12:13 12:19 Wow. So what was one thing that really just blew your mind from that experience?

Santana Inniss: 12:19 14:56 Yeah, you know, I'll just share the intention that I set. And this is true of how I set all my intentions. I don't do New Year's resolutions. I do intentions. And I don't like goals. That doesn't mean she's not about a goal. She achieves goals all the time, but I don't like setting myself up for success or failure. So I will say my intention is to explore. I want to explore this thing. And that means maybe I read a book or maybe I do psychedelic assisted therapy. I've explored that. I have achieved my goal. intention. So my intention in that, in that experience was I wanted to explore why connection in relationships still felt so hard for me after so many years of therapy and so many years on that journey. So psilocybin wasn't the first part of my journey. It was like one of the most recent parts of my journey after a decade of personal development work. And so I had all kinds of ideas about what I was probably going to see. And I didn't see any of it. And the thing that I saw was my father. And it was so interesting because you don't like see it as, for me, it wasn't a like visual hallucination. It was sort of just like a transmission of deep knowing, like information was coming and you felt it and you experienced it and you knew it was true and real. And there wasn't a lot of vision with it, but there was this aura and I knew the aura to be my father, but it wasn't like the father that I knew in my lifetime. And he said to me, I'm sorry, you didn't get to know me in this way. Oh, wow. Wow. And it was just like instant release of like, ah, this is the highest manifestation of who this soul was meant to be, who this soul would have been if he hadn't have gone through all of the experiences that he had gone through. My father was born in 1939 to immigrants from Barbados. that were born in the 1800s, which means they were just a couple generations away from slavery, from being freed by the British. So this is generational harm and trauma being passed down. And so the experience of getting to meet him in this pure essence of what his soul would have been without that, it was transformationally, just deeply healing.

Deneen L. Garrett: 14:56 15:11 Yeah. And so now, you know your dad as that person, that being, right? So was that pretty much your memory of him, what you feel about him, like that higher being is who your dad was?

Santana Inniss: 15:11 16:17 It sort of just melds. It melds into everything that I know about him, right? Because he did experience all those traumas and all that pain, all that intergenerational trauma. He did experience those. manifested in his reality and in mine and so I know that. And with this context of like, you know, here are also the experience of ancestors, his ancestors and mine being present and saying like, okay, like you're the one. Like you're the one that stops this. Oh my Lord. So it's kind of a paradox, but there's a lot of peace that I feel when I think about my father versus before the experience, it was very difficult to separate my father from pain. And now it's like, oh, there's pain, there's peace, there's understanding, there's history, there's context. And that's a much more holistic, and human, I think, experience to have.

Deneen L. Garrett: 16:17 16:51 Yeah, wow. So deep, right? So deep. Super deep. I mean, the whole journey, right? Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. So this podcast, Women of Color: An Intimate Conversation, is about empowering women of color and elevating our voices. So you guide others to free themselves from beliefs that limit themselves. What are one of three of these limiting beliefs And what are three ways women of color can free themselves from these beliefs to tap into their power and voice?

Santana Inniss: 16:51 17:11 Yeah. Tremendous question. So, I mean, in the coaching space, something that I see a lot, something that comes up a lot, and this will resonate with some people and not with others, is this belief that if you're not struggling, then what you achieve isn't valuable.

Deneen L. Garrett: 17:12 17:13 Okay, okay, okay.

Santana Inniss: 17:13 20:20 I've seen that come up a lot and I think especially as women of color like we we grow up in struggle often, not always, but many times. And then going into the workplace, there's, you know, you got to work twice as hard, three times as hard to get half as far sometimes. And so like, wow, if it doesn't hurt, if I'm not bleeding, if I'm not stressed to the max, did I really achieve anything? And this is a belief system. It is a belief system, and if it is a belief system, it's something that we have control over. We have control over whether or not we believe that we're inherently worthy. Yes. We don't have any control over whether we are inherently worthy because we are born worthy. We don't get to opt out, right? Like that's just how we come into the world. And so we get to believe or not believe that that's in our power. And so we have the power to say, ah, okay, well, if I am inherently worthy, why must I struggle? Why must I bleed in order to feel that the fruits of my labor are worthy. If I'm born worthy, why, why this, why this? Right. So that's a common limiting belief that I see. Another limiting belief that I see very often in the coaching space is simply some variation of I'm not capable. And it's usually not that straightforward, but it could be something like, oh, well, the system is stacked against me or, you know, it doesn't really matter how hard I try, you know, I'm always gonna insert outcome. Yeah. This is also a belief system. And so the ways that we start to work with that in coaching is first of all, we need to identify that it is number one, something we think. Just get it out there. I think this. Neutrally. This is, you know, neutral. You can't really tell if it's limiting you or not until you start to examine how that motivates your behavior. If, for example, you can't turn in your work assignment until you've worked 70,000 hours on it, even though it was fine. 70 hours in, it was fine, but you got to work another 70,000 hours before you can turn in the project or the report, because unless you're working that hard, then, you know, Okay. You went through a lot of suffering to turn in that report. That could be an example of how it's limiting you. Or for example, with, with worthiness, you saw, okay, well, I see that promotion, but it doesn't really matter if I apply because I'm never going to get it. Or I see that other job posting that pays 30, 40, 50 K more, but I'm not going to apply because I'm never going to get it.

Deneen L. Garrett: 20:20 20:23 Yeah.

Santana Inniss: 20:23 21:19 All. Yeah, that's a huge one. It's common. Underneath all of those beliefs, and then the actions that we take around them, there's something really tender, right? There's a fear. And under the fear, there's usually a need that hasn't been met. Yeah. Right. And so that's the next step is, what is this thing doing for me? Because it's doing something. Mm hmm. What is it trying to protect you from? What are you trying to avoid experiencing, avoid feeling, avoid seeing, avoid facing? How does that keep you safe? These kinds of things. Okay, now I know what it's doing for me. I know how it's keeping me safe. Great. Do you know how it's keeping you down? Let's start looking at that. You could have been had.

Deneen L. Garrett: 21:21 21:29 could have been had, right? Answer whatever that is. Could have been. Correct.

Santana Inniss: 21:29 24:39 Fill in the blank. Fill in the blank. Right? Then the next thing I do is I ask people to imagine like, what would your life be like if you didn't think this? Look for examples because we all know someone And we'll get on our soapbox and we'll think like, wow, if she just didn't, you know, she didn't think that if she didn't do that, blah, blah, blah, she'd be so far. We all know someone like that. But it's also us. Right. So. look around you and see someone that you admire, someone that has something that you want, that's accomplished something that you dream of out loud or really quiet in your heart and say, okay, do I think they believe this same thing? Probably not. So that acknowledgement, that awareness that it's here, curiosity around what is it doing? How's it protecting me? What's tender inside? Starting to look for examples of how it might be holding us back. Now I can say, yeah, because then once we know, okay, this is holding me back. Here's examples where that's happening. You can start to ask questions like, is this thing even true? Can I find one example where it's not true? Cognitive brain science tells us that once you believe something, your brain gets real busy trying to maintain that status quo because brains are expensive energetically. They're like 2% of your body mass, your weight, but it takes 20% of the energy that you consume. So in nature, we don't know if we're going to find another banana tree. We don't know if we're going to find another roadkill, if we're going to hunt. We don't know. So we conserve our energy. And one of the ways that the brain does this is through confirmation bias. We will look for proof that something we believe is true. This is a plague on our species right now all over the internet, all over the world. is, you know, it can be harmful to us. It's great for the brain because it's conserving energy. But you can take the wheel, so to say, like the brain wants to be on autopilot around our limiting beliefs. But you can absolutely say, OK, no, no, no, I'm going to take the wheel now because this terrain is rocky. So I'm going to tell you this thing that we've been believing is not getting us where we're going. That means you're trying to protect me, but it's not working. So I'm going to choose to believe this instead. And if that sounds really simple, it's fine. Fake it till you make it. Say it over and over and over and over and over and over again. And then what is your brain going to do? It's going to get busy looking for proof that it's true.

Deneen L. Garrett: 24:42 26:34 And that's wasted energy there, right? You know, we're, you know, what you're talking about is designed to protect, but it's, it's wasted energy. And also, also when you were talking, you know, what is it keeping me from, or what is it doing for me? I like how you phrased that, but I was thinking about how, when I was thinking to start my podcast, something I wanted to do, but it was something holding me back. Right. And once I knew what it was, I call it a thing, a thing. I realized it was a fear of being vulnerable. Once I recognized that, I claimed it. Right. You know, and I said, I just like it and I did it. So I went ahead and launched the podcast. And that's what we have to do sometimes. We have to go ahead and say, OK, I want to do this thing. You know what? What is not doing it, keeping me from or doing for me? OK, OK. Then also, what is it keeping me from? Because what is keeping you from is much more beautiful and expansive than we really realize. And so we really need to get beyond that. And then also while you were talking, I'm like, she read, she listened to or watch my dream episode two of my How to Live a Dream Lifestyle series, because that's exactly what I talk about in dream, right? It's dreaming, it's stinking, it's beyond, you know, going big. you know, what you admire in other people or ways that you dream to just think about the possibilities of what could be and then work towards that. So I want to get into the power in the pause. So, you know, I'm sure some of your clients, you know, probably experiences they're doing too much, not enough, not necessarily taking care of themselves, not self-caring, not doing any of that. So why is it important for us or to take a pause and the power in the pause.

Santana Inniss: 26:34 29:36 Wow. So the power in the pause is that in that space, we have opportunity. That's the real power in the pause. And I think the second power in the pause, or put this in whatever order that you want to, As women of color, pausing has not always been accessible to us. And so in any space or place we're able to claim it, claim it for your ancestors. Claim it for them, claim it for revolution, right? So there's those two things that come up for me as you ask this question, but when I'm thinking about opportunity in the pause, pause is a beautiful word because to take a pause means to create this sense of spaciousness. So that could literally be, I'm burnt out, I need a sabbatical, right? Oh, things are really rough right now. I'm going to take a mental health day. Or I'm going to call out sick because I'm not feeling well. For some people, that's really difficult to do. And taking that pause that you need helps you to come back stronger. But you can even take a pause in a single moment. Yes. right? And that's that piece of mindfulness that comes in. If you're in a conversation with a manager and they're saying something like problematic or crazy, or you just got denied a promotion or, or, or, or, or, or difficult information comes your way at work, in your love life, in your relationship with your parents, wherever it happens, when you can create a pause between the stimulus and your reaction to it, You open opportunity. Yeah. Take a breath. You open. Take a breath. Take a breath or say, I'm noticing this feeling is here now. I'm noticing I feel agitated. I'm noticing my heart's racing. I'm noticing that I don't feel safe. Whatever it is, notice. take a few breaths, create that pause, because then you have the opportunity to act and not react. Because we are ancient bodies living very modern lives, which means our brain doesn't know that just because someone told us they don't want to go on a date with us doesn't mean it's not a lion trying to eat us. The brain doesn't know. This back part of the bane is real quick and it's like, lock in, attack. But really it's just, you know, it's just Chad making a problematic comment in the boardroom. Like it's just Chad, it's fine. It's always Chad.

Deneen L. Garrett: 29:36 31:01 You know what, it is always Chad. Listen, wait, wait. So I love that you said we have the opportunity. right, because that also came up in the conversation yesterday. And we were pretty much saying, you know, they were saying how, you know, other people, they're going skiing, they're doing all these things. They always, you know, did self-care and this, that, and the other. And we didn't. And that's because we were often the ones who were cleaning up behind them or making it possible for them to be able to do that. So now, so we don't know that we can pause. We don't know what pausing necessarily looks like. like you said, the opportunities, the accessibility. So all of that is something to make sure, you know, for us to talk about and highlight. It's important for people to realize that, right? But we do, because there's so many different ways that you can pause, take a breath, you know, like you just said. It could be going to that bookstore or a coffee shop or just in, you know, a different room in your home and reading a book. There's so many different ways to take a pause and it also could be going on a, you know, vacation. It's so many different ways too. We just need to actually do it, right? Start practicing that. So I want to pivot. I honor my late sister, author and poet, Soltrue, by asking about Dreams Deferred, which is the title of one of her books. Please share a Dreams Deferred moment.

Santana Inniss: 31:02 33:02 Yeah, that's a beautiful question and beautiful way to honor her. I went and read the synopsis for this book and I loved it so much, you know, and I thought about the answer to this question a little bit in advance, honestly, and I think the thing that's coming up for me is I've known for a while that one of my gifts is the ability to see things in others that they can't see yet in themselves and to help them to be able to see possibility pathways that they didn't see. I've known this for a while, and it's always been an element of my career, but so many of my own limiting beliefs were like, no, I have to get these degrees, otherwise I'm not legitimate. I have to get this title. I have to get this amount of money. I have to do all of these things. And so I put it off. I put it off. I put it off. Because it seemed just like, you know, this dream that, you know, keep dreaming girl, like that's not going to be for you. And taking this step to bring this into fruition and align my life with this work. This is the achievement of a dream for me. And it's beautiful every day to live that dream and to walk alongside the journeys of my clients as they're sometimes diving into this work for the very first time and to be that non-judgmental reflective supportive space. and partner with them as they figure out what their dreams are, why they haven't been going after them, and then how to take the steps to get there. This is definitely a dream that was deferred, but now she's here. She's entered the chat.

Deneen L. Garrett: 33:02 33:11 Right, right, right. Is she on mute though? No. She is not on mute.

Santana Inniss: 33:11 33:17 No, she's not on mute. She's sending gifts. She's in the chat.

Deneen L. Garrett: 33:17 33:35 I love it. I love it. I love it. So you've, you know, responded to, you've addressed, you know, Dreams Deferred, you know, what was Once Deferred is now live, right? Is you living your dream lifestyle. So I love that for you. So before we wrap, what would you like to leave the listeners with?

Santana Inniss: 33:35 35:30 Those that are listening or watching. Listening or watching, hey. I would say that feel the fear and do it anyway. there's no fear, feel the fear and do it anyway. Again, that back brain, it doesn't know it thinks it's a lion, but we got the front brain like we know it's not a lion. So, you know, and I think that that other, you know, piece of it is it can be so scary to look under the hood. And by that, I mean, into your mental health game into your heart into those spaces. So many people, get tripped up there in avoiding these big feelings and, you know, feelings at the end of the day, they're information. They're just telling us information. It's just like, wow, that surface is hot. Okay, I'm angry, right? And so, you know, not avoiding and not hiding and going inside. Thich Nhat Hanh often said, the way out is through. You cannot go around it. And that dream, that quiet dream, it will never go away, right? It will be in your heart. It will keep calling you back. The phone will keep ringing. And until you look inside at what is alive in you and what's holding you back from believing that you can walk toward this stream, you're going to be stuck in that same position. And so faith and a little bit of bravery of feeling that fear and doing it anyway. That's what I would leave the listeners with. If I can do it, you can do it. Right. If Denise can do it, you can do it.

Deneen L. Garrett: 35:30 35:48 We all can do it, y'all. Just do it. Okay. Just Nike. Well, Santana Ennis, I have really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for lending your voice on women of color and intimate conversation and enjoy the rest of your day.

Santana Inniss: 35:48 35:51 Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day.

Deneen L. Garrett: 35:51 35:51 You're welcome.