AN UMHLANGA COACH IS INTENT ON HELPING PEOPLE LIVE FULLER LIVES BY CHANGING LIMITING BELIEFS AND BEHAVIOUR – A JOURNEY SHE HERSELF HAS TRAVELLED AND CONQUERED
Sipping coffee with Ishanie Munn in her office aerie in the fever tree tops of The Square on the Ridge, it’s hard to imagine that this centred woman in a striped jacket and kick-ass black boots, was once in a place of disempowerment.
She’s protective of her private life, but shares: “Eventually I figured there just had to be a way out of emotional oppression and I had to find it. There were people who’d transcended pain and emotional crisis – what did they know that I didn’t? What were they doing differently? This curiosity was the foundation of my learning journey.”
Until then, Ishanie had been a stay-at-home mother to her son, now 16, and a businesswoman, designing and running a CMT for her own fashion boutique: “I was ready to move on, to move deeper.”
She set out on a journey of discovery by reading, studying and travelling to India. It was there, on a spiritual retreat in 2016, that she met Dr Bruce Lipton, an American cell biologist and author of The Biology of Belief, Spontaneous Evolution and The Honeymoon Effect.
“I was reading Bruce’s books at the time, and there he was in front of me, giving a lecture at a yoga festival I visited by chance. He had this presence that envelops a room with warmth, like a glow coming off him. We chatted, and I haven’t looked back.”
In Cape Town and Johannesburg, Ishanie pursued PSYCH-K®, a set of processes originated by another American, Robert Williams, 30 years ago, after a “spiritual awakening” that saw him quit corporate life to become a professional psychotherapist. Today he has a Masters Degree in Counselling and Personal Services, and in August this year facilitated a retreat called “Aligning Yourself with the Wisdom of Nature” together with Bruce in Mexico.
“Bruce uses PSYCH-K® as his preferred tool for personal development,” says Ishanie. “He also recommends hypnotherapy for subconscious change. It puts you in a “Theta” state, which you experience naturally each day when dropping off to sleep or waking. Theta waves are associated with super learning, problem-solving, increased creativity, intuition and spiritual creativity.”
PSYCH-K® is centred on the notion that we are programmed by limiting self-beliefs and behaviours that we’ve come to accept without questioning. “This programming – very often adopted in our childhood – still mostly directs our lives,” says Ishanie. “It’s a challenge to change at a conscious level, because our beliefs sit mostly in the subconscious domain, and unless these beliefs are uncovered and changed at the subconscious level, they’ll continue to drive our thoughts and actions.
“It’s especially sabotaging when we hold self-limiting beliefs such as ‘I’m not worthy’, ‘I don’t deserve’, ‘I can’t be successful’, ‘I can’t find love’, and when it comes to illness, ‘I’m a victim of my genetics’. Unknowingly, holding on to these beliefs leaves us feeling stuck, hopeless and disempowered. But the end of suffering is literally a belief-change away.”
The idea that both positive and negative beliefs determine the quality of our lives, she says, has been proven by Bruce in his study of epigenetics: “Beliefs, both negative and positive, shape our biology. Only two percent of illnesses are genetic: environment affects our genes, and our thoughts affect the environment in which our cells either grow or die – and that determines our health. There are beliefs that support the presence of disease in the body – once they’re broken through, the mind is free to claim the blueprint of perfect health held within the subconscious mind. By harnessing this power, and achieving the ‘Whole Brain State’, we can create our most idyllic reality.”
Though sceptics label PSYCH-K® as questionable, Ishanie is unfazed: “One has to undergo regulated training to understand the framework that supports the process, and only then can one execute the facilitation of PSYCH-K® effectively.”
Ishanie recently completed the Master Facilitation level, and plans to do her Advanced PSYCH-K® training in London in November. In addition, she has been pursuing other ways of helping people change their subconscious self-beliefs, including hypnotherapy and neuro- linguistic programming.
“I’m now a COMENSA-registered Master Neuro-linguistic Programming life coach, and accredited with the American Board of Hypnotherapy and the American Board of NLP,” she says with quiet pride.
“I’m not out to convince anyone – I can only speak from the experiences of my clients. One who was able to release anger and shame from a past traumatic event, now enjoys improved overall health and she’s happier and more in control. Another is enjoying improved personal relationships after breaking through rigid beliefs about control and emotional security. And a third had sabotaging beliefs about money and success, but is now seeking out financial opportunities he once thought were ‘out of reach’. A number of others have empowered themselves to make healthier food choices and have started exercising after removing limiting beliefs about weight loss.”
As to Ishanie herself, she’s clearly in a positive place in her life, at peace in her tree-top aerie – and excited at the future she can see from it. “I’m passionate about pursuing goals with gravitas,” she says. “Last year at 7.45am on October 5, in celebration of my fortieth birthday, I summited Mount Kilimanjaro.”
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