Carla Cohen: How to free the mind from stress and move towards greater peace

Carla is a member of the Global Woman Club Los Angeles and here she shares with us about her natural mind and body healing methods. Every one of us has felt pain at least once in our lives, each of us has sought healing, not only from medicine. Carla is exactly the person you need when you feel that despair is choking you. In her journey towards a healthy life, she has managed to heal and improve the lives of many patients. Carla shows how stress and food affect our lives, but she gives us a way out of the difficult situation we may bein. With more than 20 certifications in a variety of healing modalities, she describes the human body as our biography, so as a true professional she can intervene in our biography, by improving it.

What and who have been the greatest influences in your life, that have made you who you are today?

My experiences while traveling have probably had the biggest influence on me. Travel is also key to keeping me feeling happy and inspired. It has helped me repair and restore lost or broken parts of my soul and develop more trust in myself and other human beings.

Some of my spontaneous wanderings off the beat and path have helped me to connect with THE most amazing people – shaman, mystics, and everyday lovely, giving people.

As a child, I have fond memories of staring out the back of the station wagon at other people and places as we drove acrossthe United States multiple times. I remember fantasizing what it was like to live on the farms and small towns we passed, or explore some of the natural wonders. Speaking of driving and traveling, my second mother – who was really our neighbor – used to drive from California to Texas by herself. She was probably in her sixties. The act of her making that 20 hour drive on her own was very inspiring to me and made me want to have my own driving adventures.

In my early teens, my dad won a bet on a horse and gifted my mom and I a trip to Europe to meet friends of his from World War II. I got to experience my dad through their eyes – the man who helped liberate them from the terrors of World War II. Visiting Europe for the first time blew me away. I loved the history and the cultures I experienced. Seeing the Eiffel Tower and the London Bridge for the first time and experiencing the trains impacted me in wonderful ways.

 My mom was not about to drive so we traveled extensively on the trains and I loved it.The European countryside was gorgeous and the newness of it all excited me. My mom was a different person on the road. It was lovely to see her open up, smile and have fun. Unfortunately, I got very ill with dysentery, but everyone we knew and people we didn’t know were amazingly compassionate and helpful.

You asked about influences…I am not a religious person, but I am highly spiritual and feel a deep connection to source. As a child, I went with my friends to all of their houses of worship. I would get very blissed. I didn’t care for the rhetoric or gloom and doom I heard in some houses of worship, but when people sang or prayed in earnest, I could feel the presence and peace of something greater – that was attractive to me. It was like a love cloud embracing everyone in its arms ever so gently. I was fascinated by Mother Theresa and often wondered what it would have been like to sit and chat with her or work with her side by side.

Today, Amma, the hugging Saint, is my biggest spiritual influence. Her compassion and wisdom are endless. Her tireless efforts to relieve the suffering of people and our planet continue to inspire me to higher levels of compassion within myself. Because of her, I donate a fair chunk of my time to her global charities.

 As a healer, I also had some terrific teachers, who have mostly all passed on. The Shaman I learned from wouldn’t want their names shared publicly. I don’t even know the name of the Swami who initiated me with snakes all over my body or the man who made it possible for me to experience walking on fire. Walking on fire was definitely a peak experience on many levels and still influences me to this day. Once I walked on fire, I had a visceral experience of knowing my mind and body are capable of so much more than I had ever realized.

On my path as a healer, one of my first teachers who believed in me and pushed me beyond my comfort zone to cultivate my psychic abilities was Charlene Whitaker. She was probably one of the most gifted and unknown psychics of our time. In her day, she ran a kind of Hogwarts for new psychics and mediums. Jim Leonard was a genius with the mind and breath. He helped me understand how to shift context and the value of shifting perceptions.

Sondra Ray work helped me understand family patterns and Leonard Orr helped me cement my belief in immortality and the breath. One of my dearest and most treasured apprenticeships was with Don McFarland. He was like this beer brawling, rough edged sailor, who you would never expect to be the shaman he was.I am grateful to Don for helping me get out of my own way and to stop doubting all the information I was picking up from people’s tissue. He was also the first to publicly endorse my healing work. Lastly, Ida Rolfe, who taught me more about relationships within the body than anyone. I never got to meet her, but her work and her listening approach and understanding of tissue greatly impacted me.

I am not a religious person, but I am highly spiritual and feel a deep connection to source. As a child, I went with my friends to all of their houses of worship. I would get very blissed. I didn’t care for the rhetoric or gloom and doom I heard in some houses of worship, but when people sang or prayed in earnest, I could feel the presence and peace of something greater – that was attractive to me.

What led to you becoming a healer as your profession?

It was truly a series of events. Call it fate. I was seeking to heal myself after my own health crisis. Because I was getting nowhere with Western Medicine, I had to seek out alternatives.  It began shortly after my introduction to Transcendental Meditation. A group of meditators came to our home. One of the first to arrive was a very old, gray haired, clear eyed lady. When she stepped over the thresholdshe looked me in the eyeand said, “This is the home of a very gifted healer”.

 Within a week of that, I went to a psychic fair. There was this deadpan, biker chick who was doing Tarot readings. She looked at the cards and knew I had been sick and suggested I try Energy Balancing. During my first session, she ordered me off the table and told me to work on her! My first apprenticeship was doing bodywork on her and paying her for it. A huge crack had opened in my reality. My life went from a certain kind of order to a good kind of scary and exciting mystical chaos.

The crack in my reality continued to get bigger and more expansive because my whole perception of what is true and what is real was being reorganized and turned inside out. The truth is, there was no option to go back to Hollywood. The universe made that quite clear. Miraculously, a series of teachers and Shaman showed up to guide me to my next steps. I am skipping over all the in between, because it is too long for this interview. From there, the list of teachers and influences is quite long.   

What can you share with us about the experience of your long road to recovery from your health crisis?

I spent two years being examined and trying different things to heal myself. It was beyond disheartening to come to the realization that the doctors and my parents could not heal me. After the first year, I ended up very depressed and hopeless. You have to realize, I was a dynamo, and I went from lightspeed to a full stop. I had been the main wage earner, supporting my husband and myself and I had nothing left.

In hindsight, I can say that some of this could have been avoided had I understood what my body was trying to say to me early on, but none of us is taught to listen.I now teach people how to listen to their bodies and attune to the subtle so they can heal before they get to train wreck status.

When I had my crisis, I was working in Hollywood and I got very tired. I realize now a huge portion of that was stress, but it was also psychic overload. At the time, I had no idea that am a clairsentient. I can feel and was being affectedby many subtle energies. Even today, I still have moments where I lose the awareness between myself and someone else. I can easily feel what is going on in other people’s bodies.

One thing of important note is that I spent a fair amount of my childhood and early adulthood getting sick. Now I never get sick. Some of this is about innoculating the mind, but there are actual practices I have synthesized to help people. Sickness can be avoided if we understand how to work with the communication from our body.Our subconscious can undermine us or help us. Basically, people need to learn practical steps to keep their vibratory rate higher than the level of where sickness can come in – that is what I do with my coaching clients.

Most importantly though, it is about understanding the proper balance of mindset, self-care, food choices and the options we have that can tip the scales back toward wellness, before we hit a more extreme health project to deal with. I prefer to work with people before they are in crisis. It is important to remember that pain or other symptoms don’t happen overnight. Because of that, it can take longer to heal the root cause. Doing it my way, sometimes takes longer, but I am also helping people heal on so many levels.

Is reducing stress the key to becoming more healthy?

Reducing stress is a very important pillar to becoming healthy. The problem is that when most people think of stress, they usually only think about emotional stress. There are other factors that create stress besides work or relationships. Certain foods can increase stress. There are environmental factors that create stress.The impact of what you are eating, thinking or are exposed to, has enormous consequences over time.

Think of a leaky,dripping faucet. A few drops of water a day, doesn’t seem like much water, but while a drop of water may seem insignificant, it’s not. Even a very small drip, once every 10 to 15 seconds, can waste almost 15 gallons a month, or nearly a half a gallon in a day. After about ten years, you’ve wasted upwards of 2,000 gallons. It is the same with our food choices, thinking and our environment – the effects add up over time.

Most people don’t realize how many chemicals we are exposed to on a daily basis. When you add them up, the combined effects can throw off the endocrine system which controls our hormones. When our hormones are off balance, it puts more stress on our Central Nervous System. As the CNS is more stressed, our body’s resources that would normally go to digestion, energy or immunity get depleted. We have the ability to change that.

A few drops of water a day, doesn’t seem like much water, but while a drop of water may seem insignificant, it’s not. Even a very small drip, once every 10 to 15 seconds, can waste almost 15 gallons a month, or nearly a half a gallon in a day.

How can you understand the real symptoms that stress adds to your body?

Every body is actually someone’s biography. Every experience we have had over the course of our lives is stored in the tissue. Unfortunatley, things that you did not see as a trauma at the time, can still be registered in your body as a trauma. Like the faucet example I mentioned earlier, the cumulative effect of those unrecognized traumas, over time, can tip the scales from nothing to a health crisis overnight.

The most common symptoms I see in my clients, that they don’t realize are attributable to stress are: low energy, frequent fatigue, lack of motivation, difficulty bringing up vocabulary, mood swings, difficulty getting a full breath, inability to focus, general agitation, impatience, hair and skin issues, anxiety, difficulty making decisions or repeatedly self-sabotaging decisions, poor brain function, impaired healing, headaches, poor digestion and metabolism.

As the founder of Women’s Revolution, do you find it hard to help them to be healthy from the inside out?

By the time a client comes to me for help, they are usually fairly motivated to heal. In my private sessions, I have about a 98% success rate. I help them sink into themselves in such a way that they free their  minds from confusion and distress and move toward greater peace. The journey is not difficult, but it can involve great patience.

The practices I teach are not hard, but like any practice, they are better with repetition and refinement; they can and do produce miracles. Most people settle for “just enough mastery” to get to a certain level of peace or immunity. If they choose to continue and develop beyond the mentality of “just enough”, they will find that they can have more energy, less pain and sickness – and actually feel smarter. They develop a cleaner channel to their inner guide.

Developing faith in a new way of dealing with health, takes time. We are also talking about vibratory rates. Positive thoughts increase our vibration by as much as 12 Hz, similarly, negative thoughts can reduce our vibration by 12 Hz. As we travel down in vibration, we weaken our immune system and our ability to receive. As we raise our vibration, our immunity strengthens and our ability to attract abundance also improves. Immunity is like a muscle. If we don’t learn how to exercise it to strengthen it, we lose it.

Some people have trouble understanding and accepting that pharmaceuticals and over the counter medications are actually weakening their body’s natural immune response. Drugs don’t help us to exercise our immune muscle. As a matter of fact, drugs can kill both positive and negative substances in our bodies. There may be times when drugs are called for, but generally, they are overused. The average adult is on 5 medications a day. I help women strengthen their body mind awareness. Developing the discernment to know what is called for and when, is part of healing the body/mind connection and developing true health.

What do you teach women on how to take care of their health?

I have been in the healing arts for over 30 years. I have 20+ certifications in a variety of healing modalities. I may draw from any one of those in the moment to help someone get their desired result.  I typically will work with clients to teach them about how to understand their body’s language. The body is a communication device. It communicates to us and for us. I also will typically do some emotional release work, help them reduce their chemical exposure, take a look at what they are eating, help them improve their mindset, develop more conscious communication, work with the breath and sometimes, meditation. It is a multi-faceted approach.

Are you happy for all this work that you and other females have done?

Absolutely. When I see someone go from constant headaches or difficulty in making decisions to a point of clarity, I get excited. It is incredibly satisfying to see someone who has been in constant pain for years, let that go. I had a woman who had been suffering with foot pain for four years with no relief. Within three sessions, we were able to clear that up at its source.She has been pain free ever since.I also am very happy for the results I had with a man who was very depressed and in a lot of pain when we started. He was a long term project, but we worked together to get him off his sixteen different medications down to zero. His pain and numbness in his hand and arm cleared up and, most importantly, he went from being very depressed to a much better mental space.

Through my own health crisis many years ago, while I suffered a great deal, my hopelessness led me to become the healer I am now. I utilize all that I learned to help others, so they don’t have to have the same fate. I am so grateful that I can give that hope back to people.