Nicole Vienneau  00:00

Welcome, everyone, to the Integrative Nurse Coaches in ACTION! podcast. My name is Nicole Vienneau. I am your host, and I’m also a board certified integrative Nurse coach, and I have the absolute pleasure of getting to share time with, interview, laugh, joke, learn, with fellow integrative Nurse coaches from around the world. 

And today is a wonderful day because we are welcoming Geralyn Retzel. She’s masters prepared in Ayurveda, and she also has her bachelor’s in Nursing, and she’s also an integrative Nurse coach and a holistic Nurse, and is doing amazing work in her corner of the world, near Bellingham, Washington. 

And it’s also really fun, because just a few weeks ago, her and I were actually in person together, enjoying a fun weekend and connecting on a different level. And so I thought, why not have Geralyn on the podcast? Her story is amazing, so let’s welcome Geralyn so she can tell us her story herself.

Geralyn Retzel  01:11

Well, thank you, Nicole. I’m so glad to be here, and thanks for the invitation. It’s pretty exciting. I love to talk with other Nurses, just such a kinship when we talk with each other and get to be real with each other. And I think that’s one of the best things about being a Nurse, is you really get to connect with our patients on that very real level. 

And I think that’s one of the reasons my primary focus, even though I did wound management and pediatrics and all this other, that I really loved psychiatry, because it is on that deep level of our mental and emotional health that creates our life, and we create from that. And so I would love to share my story of all that evolution, because life is all about our evolution. 

Our evolution as a human being, our evolution as a registered Nurse, our evolution in our relationships, in our life, and all things that happen are for our evolution. So I’m really excited to talk from that integrative Nurse coach connection perception. I think that’ll be great.

Nicole Vienneau  02:23

Well, wonderful. We can’t wait to hear a little bit more about your story. In fact, we love to go down history lane. So whatever made you decide to become a Nurse?

Geralyn Retzel  02:36

Yeah, well, I never wanted to be one. I have to be honest about that. I had a family full of Nurses, my uncle, my mom, my sisters, my cousins, and I thought, oh my gosh, there’s something else. I mean, there is something else. So I am going to be a musician. Well, because that was really my heart’s desire, but my father would not allow that. 

He said, over my dead body, will you study music. I said, Oh, well, I guess that’s the end of that. And so I said, Okay, then I’ll go into forestry. So I wasn’t allowed to go away to school either. So I had to pick something within the city of the university in Detroit, Michigan. And so I went to Wayne State University, and I studied geology for a few years, and I loved it. 

I loved crystallography and mineralogy and geomorphology and all these things that the Earth carried. I just love Mother Earth greatly, which, you know, showed up a big way in my life, in the future. But at the time, what I learned is, as a geologist, I was alone a lot, and I didn’t want to be alone. I discovered that. I worked for Mount Hood National Forest. 

I worked on a survey crew, and I really, you know, I loved going up into the rainforest, really high up in elevation. But I learned that I was not made for building benchmarks and carrying wet cement up hills. You know? I just, I had more to offer. Plus, I didn’t like hard labor. I just it’s like, oh, I can’t do this. I don’t want to carry wet cement around in a bucket and dig and all that. 

So it was this long journey, and I realized I was much more of a social person than a person who wants to be a forest ranger in a tower all by myself. I would probably want to go hang out at the campground and meet everybody, so realizing that I was much more of a social person. And again, this is that evolution that I was talking about. You know, we don’t know who we are, and we don’t know what our life is going to become, and it never turns out the way you think it’s going to become. 

It always evolves. It changes. And the people you meet change your life. So the people that I did meet on the forest service, I ended up hiking in the Pacific Coast Trail. I learned a lot about survival, like a ropes course on that trail for me. And eventually I decided I really am much more social, and I want to use my knowledge. I think I can integrate a lot of everything together. 

And so I did that, and I went to Nursing school, and I had a very… at Washington State University, I had a very holistic group of integrative Nurses as my instructor. And I thought everybody had that, but apparently that wasn’t the case. I was just super fortunate. And I don’t know if that’s because Washington State or it was just a wonderful group. 

And we studied… you know, that’s one of the beautiful things I would say about Nurses, is Nurses are so highly educated. We’re educated in nutrition, we’re educated in family dynamics. We are educated in psychosocial, bio, neurological, everything, everything. Our knowledge is so vast. And so what we bring to our patients is a vast knowledge, and in that process, we learn a lot about ourselves. 

And I think, you know, once I studied to be an integrative Nurse coach, what’s important in that, for me, is that it was a personal evolutionary time. It was beyond just the knowledge of books. It was beyond anatomy and physiology. It was really about our own mental health, our own emotional health, our relationship with our heart and our brain, our whole everything. 

And that really tied in, very importantly for me, but I did not learn coaching itself until about 20 years into Nursing. So it didn’t exist, but I lived a very seclusive life of how I looked at life and humanity and my patients, I was very cautious to not share too much information about my own spirituality and my own evolution. So what was your first question? 

Nicole Vienneau  07:40

I think you’re, I think you’re answering the question very well, because we were taking a trip down history lane, and you told us about how you were a geologist, I mean, and solitary was just not your thing. You didn’t want to carry cement buckets around. You’d rather hang out at the camp fire and learn about people.

Geralyn Retzel  07:58

Yes, and play guitar and sing and, you know, do all of those things, but always, you know, have this knowledge that we are much larger and that our bodies are always giving us feedback all the time. And I was in Nursing school at a time, and working in Nursing, when we massaged our patients at night. I mean, Nursing school taught us a little bit about massage, right? 

And so you would spend time, part of the HS care, the nighttime care with the patient was talking to them about what’s important. And people love to tell their stories. Often people would bring up challenges or painful things, you know, and some people wouldn’t, but it was an opportunity where when you touch your patients, you are exchanging your energy with their energy. 

And there is great healing that happens because many people don’t get touched across the whole age span, and what we have done in our society is said, Don’t touch. That’s bad. It’s abusive to touch. And we have taken out the gentle touch as well, and that caring touch that is such an important part of Nursing. 

And, you know, I’ve had family members in the hospital, and the Nurse comes in and she’s totally on the computer and totally engaged in all the technical stuff, which is extremely important. However, it is so important to make that mental and emotional and spiritual connection with our patients, because it gives them permission to tap into their inner healer. And that inner healer is something I really would love to share and talk about, because that was part of my journey too.

Nicole Vienneau  09:48

Yes, I love all this. And when you talk about evolution and Nurses as an evolutionary, and humans really, humanistic evolution, like, we’re always changing. We’re evolving. We started out as maybe thinking we wanted to do one thing, and then through that process, we are gaining more information and a deeper understanding of who we are, what we want from life, what we want to give, what we want to receive, and that ebb and that flow of evolution. 

And so I’m curious to know maybe some backstory for you, and how you are now doing so much work with Ayurvedic practices, and you are doing transcendental meditation, and you’re doing a lot of different holistic modalities that combine together now, and I’m curious to know what led you towards that?

Geralyn Retzel  10:49

Well, thank you. Yes, I think that is a great example of how you don’t even know how life is going to take you and you don’t always have control. That is one of the things I learned. And so when I was 17 years old, I had just graduated from high school and 12 years of Catholic school, which was for me, a very rigid program, like for whatever it was, I came to Earth with, my internal spirit, I’ve always held an intuition that’s always been a natural part of me. 

And that I knew when I was a child, and so being placed into, in my mind, a very rigid program of, this is how you think, this is how you’re going to pray, this is how you’re going to act, this is you’re going to go to church every morning before you start school, you’re going to go, you know, there was all of this rigidity and rigid thinking. And I kept saying, This is not how it is. This is not, this is not what I’m about. 

And I can’t imagine all these other kids, you know, being happy either. They didn’t seem that way. But we all did what we were programmed to do. We’re programmed and we in that programming we are removed from and told to think the way this external universe wants us to think, think the way we tell you to think, don’t even write with your left hand. That’s wrong. 

I mean, everything had to be a certain way, and if you wrote with your left hand, I think there was some kind of evilness attached to that. It’s, you know, but what it had to do with was the patriarchal religious teachings having everybody be the same because we’re much easier to control if we live in fear and if we do everything the same way. Then if you fall out of that structure, you are judged, and then you have that fear of being alone, and nobody loves you anymore. 

Okay, so the day after I graduated, I went with my girlfriends to the beach, and I love to swim. It was fresh water in Michigan, and I love swimming in fresh water, and I could swim across a whole lake, and love it. And so we were there, and I went up to the concession stand. It’s hot and muggy. And so I went up to the concession stand, which happened to be air conditioned, which was great. 

And I’m looking at all of the options that we can choose from. And at that time, it wasn’t a digital board. It was the kind of board, if you remember grade school, and you had all your little letters in boxes, and you had to put your little letters on this special board, and spell your words and all of that. 

And then so that’s what the billboard was like. It was all these individual letters and all of us, and I’m looking up there, and all of a sudden they fly off to the right. All the whole entire billboard is clear, and all the letters are mixed up, hanging out in the air. And I’m going, you know, why would anybody take off all the letters there? 

You know, when we’re all trying to look and decide what we’re trying to choose? And I noticed that nobody else was concerned about this, and like, I’m the only one, and then all of a sudden I start losing my balance and losing my vision. And so there’s this thing happening with my body, and I’m no longer in my body, but my body is over here, and I’m conscious. 

I’m aware, consciously aware that I cannot control my body and I am outside of my body and this was really weird and really scary, because I didn’t know what was going on. And I could hear people say, watch out, you know, she’s doing this, or, you know, whatever they made. And I’m thinking, oh my god, I’m inside this body, but I’m not inside this body, and I can’t hold my balance, so I put my arms out to… in case I fell over. And then people were giving me space and room. 

And then I feel myself walking. I saw the doors outside, and I thought, oh, I need some air. I need some you know, I can’t stay in this building. And so I’m consciously aware. And then I’m fighting whatever it is that’s going on and trying to understand, and I realize I’m out of control, and I have zero control. And I felt a man take my arm. He asked me questions and I couldn’t answer him. 

I could not… I could hear his questions, and I had my answers in my head, but I could not make my words come out of my mouth, and I could see him once in a while, and he was wearing a uniform, so I deduced he’s a first aid guy, and so he took me over to the first aid room, and I laid down on a cot, and I fell asleep immediately. 

And that was one of the patterns of these episodes that would happen, is that they would happen and then there would be this strong… I mean, there was no way to stay awake. It was like being drugged. It was I have to sleep. And that’s all there is to it. And so I woke up eventually, and he asked me if I was on drugs. Oh, he asked me that question also while I was standing outside. 

And, you know, Are you on drugs? Have you been on this? Are you on medication? You know, do you know what’s going on? It’s like, no, no, no, I have no ideas, and I can’t even tell you. But after that sleep and I woke up, I was completely clear again, and I was answering all his questions. And he said, I know you’re not on drugs, because you can answer every all of my questions, you know, clearly, like with regular sentences and everything. 

And I said, I really don’t know. This has never happened before, and here I am, 17, right? And so he told me to go home. My family was concerned, and I kept having more of those episodes, and they were all a little bit different, but I was always lifting out of my body. And so my big mission was to get back into my body. That was my purpose. 

And I know that nowadays, people are wanting astral travel and all, you know, they want to leave their bodies, but I don’t know. I personally, for me, I came to this earth to have a body and to be in this body. And I really feel like that was the foundation of my evolution, is learning to love this body with whatever it was given, all of the different DNA structures, with its challenges, with its miracles, and all of it’s a miracle, really. 

And that was part of learning and growing, and part of my Nursing and part of my way of operating and working through this world. So I went to the neurologist, and he told me I had a seizure disorder. You know, I had to do all these tests. He put me on Phenobarbital, which was terrible. I slept for like, three solid weeks. I had to get my blood drawn all the time. 

And Phenobarbital is so toxic and, you know, I never, intuitively, never felt like this is a good medicine for me, but there weren’t a lot of options. And that’s what he gave me. He was the doctor. I told him, I went back to his office for follow ups, and I said, you know I need… I said, I can figure this out. This is a spiritual imbalance. I know it is. I know it in my heart that there’s something here that I have to learn and do and I can do this. 

And he yelled at me. He was terribly mean and I cried and sobbed in his office, and he said I was a very sick girl, and I don’t know anything. And I said, No, no, I really do. I know this is an imbalance, like in my heart and my brain. And I pointed to my brain and my heart, and I said, I can figure this out. It’s just going to take me some time. 

So that didn’t go over very well, but in my heart, I knew I was right, and in my heart, I knew I had a healer in me, and that I came to Earth knowing that and perhaps this imbalance was so that I would figure it out. So in those three weeks, with that phenobarb in me all the time, all I did is sleep and eat a little bit. And you know, that was pretty much it. 

So I noticed that when I woke up, if I woke up too fast, the left side of my face… so I have a cleft lip. I was born with a cleft lip, and the palates all fine, but I had surgeries, and the left side of my cleft lip, my face would swell up, and if I woke up too quickly, I could feel this tingling, this whole neurological feeling, and I could look in the mirror, and my face would be swollen here and over to the left. 

So I learned to say, okay, body, my brain and my heart, we’re all going to go down back into the sleep state, and we are going to hang out down there until we can come up slow enough so that this doesn’t happen. And I had and I started learning this procedure in my own mind. I didn’t have a template. Nobody really had any knowledge at that time, but it was an intuitive knowledge that is in there. 

And if I go down into this very deep space, place where it’s so peaceful and so loving, and I can float around there until I find a thread of okay, I can come up now, and if I came up slow enough, I can come up without my face swelling. So sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t work. So I would wait till I could find a place of Yes, yes, this one I can come up with. 

And if I came up and I felt any of that tingling at all in my face, then I would say, No, no, no, we have to go back down. And we need to start all over, and we’re going to go back down. And so I learned to consciously put myself back to sleep and back into this place, which we now know is the unified field. But I didn’t know that at the time, except I knew that that was a great place. It was loving. 

It was so peaceful. It was an energy that I delved into. And I love spending my time there. And so I learned that was how I was going to calm my nervous system. And then with time, you know, I was still having these episodes, they would happen. And one time I was down in California at Half Moon Bay and driving back, and what started to happen… 

So they started altering, these episodes, you know, my leaving my body, and then I would… the signs… this is like terrible to even say, but it’s like the signs would start shifting, and I’m going, Oh no, no, no. I can’t be going in between dimensions. This is not the time, I’m in the car and you need to listen to me, body. I’m in the car. I’m driving a vehicle. 

You need to stop. You need to listen to me, and you need to wait until I can find a place to pull over, then you can do whatever it is you need to do. But I’m in charge here. So I started giving myself these demands. And so I found I was on this causeway, and I pulled over. It’s like California had built out these on the causeway. 

They had built out these rectangles, and you could just park and so I did. And so the Caltrans guy comes up and says, Ma’am, can I help you? You know, because I obviously look like I have car problems, and I told him, I said, you know, I’m having this brain issue, maybe a seizure, I don’t really know, but just give me, I need, like, 45 minutes, and it’ll clear up in 45 minutes, and then I’ll be ready to drive. 

And that’s what it became. It became I had 30 minutes of time before they started, that I could before they would peak. And in that peak, this is what was another thing that showed me how multi dimensional we are, and that primordial sound is happening all the time, all of these very bizarre experiences, is I would start seeing shapes that would be on caves, and they’re called phosphines I found out when I was studying shamanism later in life. 

I was working with one shaman who had written some books, and he talked about these phosphines and these different levels of going down into different dimensions, or up in different dimensions… over. And so I’m going, Ah, you know, there was just all these very odd, odd things. And I would have a Doppler effect, and I would hear the sound of a… think of a train, because Doppler effects are often related to that. 

It’s far off in the distance the sound is, and then as it gets closer and closer, which also correlated with the phosphines and the different visuals that would happen. And they were scary to me. It’s like, I don’t like this. This is… I am not in control here. And so I had to learn how to control my nervous system and I did that, and I did that. 

I eventually got off the phenobarbital. I went to a medical doctor who agreed to take me off. He wanted to know my story, and it was at a clinic that was a holistic clinic, and he was a medical doc. And he said, I can take you off of the medicine if you learn to meditate. And I thought, yeah, yes, absolutely. 

I mean, I’ll do anything to get off of this phenobarbital because it’s going to kill me eventually. If I don’t, my liver is going to be messed up, and I’ll never, you know, I don’t know. So, he taught me to meditate. I went to… he was so wonderful, he took me to his family’s home. And then we… I became part of this group of people that were meditating. 

Then I learned and somewhere in there, you know, like in Nursing school, if I started leaving my body like I went to a lab and we were doing dissecting frog legs, and I, as soon as I walked in, the formaldehyde set off my whole system. It was too much for my body, again this is your evolution of learning about your body, and for me to be, I think, looking at those frog legs, I started thinking about, Oh, my God, those frogs, those poor frogs. 

And all, you know, all my thoughts about, they killed these frogs, and have to pit these frogs. And it was like too much for me to think about that I was causing harm to these creatures of the earth. And it was… and so I left my body and I ran out because I don’t want to have one of these episodes in the lab. 

So I ran out of the lab and leaned up against a wall at the university and pulled myself back in. And just had to talk myself back in. You need to be in this body, you know. And it took so long, that time, it took so long to get myself together. And so then I would pull my whole… I don’t know if this even makes sense, but that’s when I learned that I am not my body. 

We are not our body. We have a spirit, and we have this physical part, and then we have this, you know, this fragmented part and we need to pull ourselves together. And when I think about all the things that we do now, about post traumatic stress disorder, and you know, fragmented parts that you know are now part of therapeutic counseling theory, that is kind of what I was experiencing and realizing that I need to pull myself back into my body so that I can function. 

And at this time, when I was in Nursing school, I think I was, I think I took phenobarb about four years or so, four or five years, and before I was able to get off of it. And actually, I have that wrong now, as I remember, because I didn’t go to Nursing school when I went to see that doctor, I wasn’t in Nursing school, but he took me off the medicine before I left that area, so before Nursing school. 

But I had this episode in Nursing school, so that meant I didn’t have the medicine anymore. So now I had to bring myself consciously back and loop myself and tie myself into my toes. I mean, I had to be that concrete with my energy field to say, you are… you need to be in this body and stay. And you need to stay, because I have to get back to lab. So you are going to listen to me and do what I say. 

This is going to happen. And so I finally got in there and I finished the lab. I was late, you know, but I finished the lab. And of course, I graduated from Nursing school. That whole experience of me recognizing that we are not our body, that everybody has a spirit and whatever their issues are, that they come with, they get to figure out what they’re going to do in this life. 

And it, you know, I could have continued on the medicine. I could have listened to everybody in the external world, but the truth was, I felt much more in control of my own life if I thought for myself and let myself struggle myself. And so that is where I started developing my interest of the internal universe, that there is a universe inside us of who we really are, and this is all about, this evolution of our life, is learning how to bring ourselves together as a body, as a mind, as a spirit, as a soul. 

All of this encompassed of who we really. And we are so wealthy and we are so complex, and we may never figure it all out, but we do our best. And that is how I came into my Nursing and looking at my patients, is that they are whole, and I started seeing a pattern when I was working in a cardiopulmonary unit that a lot of my patients there who were having heart attacks were severely depressed. 

And I brought it up to my Nurse manager. I said, you know, and I was like a new Nurse then, I said, you know, I think, I think there’s a relationship between depression and heart attacks, because all my patients are like, so depressed, something is just not right. And nobody’s coming to, you know, or they do have family visiting them, but I just think something’s deeper. 

She says, no, no, no, there’s no room for that. And I just thought, no, I don’t agree. You know, I think there is a relationship here between the heart and the heart, you know, the physical heart, the mental and emotional heart, and now we know that we have that relationship. 

So I really felt that my role in Nursing was to acknowledge people for their wounded heart, and I think that’s how I ended up choosing psychiatry to be my mode of expression in Nursing. I started out with the adults in cardiopulmonary unit and said, Oh my gosh, I have to get to them before they get to this broken heart, so physically broken that their heart is stopped up and, you know, we need to do something. 

So I went into adult psychiatry, and then I realized that in the adult psychiatry, it’s too late. Also, I needed to go into pediatric psychiatry, because that’s where the wounds are. The wounds start way back in the trauma of childhood. And so I started working a lot more on the child and adolescent unit and with the parents, and worked in different… 

Like a children’s hospital, where I was able to be a lot more involved with the children on that level and how important, and I love that role, because that is where our wounds start. Is our trauma starts in our childhood. And so let us work on that level and let us not forget. And if we push away those memories, we need to remember who we are, that’s important, but at the same time, remember and let it go so that you can create a new story. 

And one of the things that I realized with those neurological episodes that I was having is that was my story at that time, but I needed to create a new story, and it was actually through the teachings of the Catholic Church about the mystics, that was like the best part of that group of teachings, or the mystics and the people who like… Hildegard von Bingen, Francis of Assisi, and, you know, just other different I don’t know saints or whatever they were. 

They were mystics, and they would show… they would be in a state of ecstasy. And what I learned going through this, these episodes, these neurological episodes, is I was able to get into that unified field, which is that state of ecstasy. You are transcending your thought, and you are transcending, and then when I studied Ayurveda and we were required to study transcendental meditation, I thought… 

And so what TM did for me is it took me into the unified field with a mantra much faster than I was doing when I was figuring it out myself and laying in bed. So what Maharishi taught was that we meditate for the purpose of purifying our neurological system. 

So whenever it was that I went down into that unified field, when I was laying in bed at 17, 18, whatever, is I was actually creating a new sequence of neurotransmitters that would call my neurological system. And so I started learning, and in Ayurveda, there’s a connection between your neurological system and your bone marrow. 

And so Western medicine does not acknowledge that spiritual aspect which is so important in the healing process. And so I learned in studying Ayurveda, a true holistic process of life. And our relationship and our physical body and our divine self, or our higher self, our atma or Aham car, these different parts of you know, that we are, but we’re fragmented here as a human, and we don’t know that until we’re given an opportunity or a willingness to step into the unknown. 

Because when you go into meditation, it’s unknown, and I think that is… for some people, that might be scary, but the truth is, one of the purposes of a life is to make known the unknown, and in that we become whole, and we start operating from that wholeness within. 

So those episodes that I had took me into a very unknown, scary place, those phosphines, those were scary, hearing that primordial sound, that was scary. I didn’t like that, and I didn’t want that, so I didn’t know that they existed. I’m not even sure it’s a great place, but it exists. How can I incorporate all those pieces so that I am able to function? 

So I don’t know where to go with that now. You know, it’s just that we are amazing, our human bodies and our minds, we are so miraculous. And there’s a lot of people who are having near death experiences now that are talking about it. One of is a physician. He was a neurologist. And so a lot of this stuff is coming to be a lot more common in conversation. 

And people are beginning to discover these different aspects of themselves and realizing, wow, how amazing, how miraculous we are. And it’s for everyone. It’s for everyone. This is not for a special group. I mean, I don’t really want a near death experience, you know, but I suppose that’s not in my control I hear from those people that have them. But I think life is just so amazing. 

And I think as Nurses, we bring an opportunity for people to tap into their inner healer, and as integrative Nurse coaches, that is a huge part of what we are doing. It’s about inner awareness. I mean, if you even think about the Nurse theorists we’ve had, we had Peplau, we had Martha Rogers, and a lot of what their theories were about was increasing self awareness. 

So Nurses have been doing this a very long time. Transcendental meditation is about expanding your consciousness and your self awareness. Meditation is, sound healing is, and I love sound healing, and it almost doesn’t matter what forms of relaxation we find that work for us. And that’s what everyone needs to find, is what are the effective ways that we can calm our nervous system? 

So if TM doesn’t work, if meditation doesn’t work, you don’t have to try those. Do sound healing with the bowls, or use the alchemy bowls that are the seven metals, or listen to something online or a CD, whatever it was that you can calm your parasympathetic nervous system, because that… when you can get yourself and that parasympathetic nervous system in a calm place, that is when you start healing. 

That is when you heal your nervous system, and to calm that nervous system is such an important part of Nursing. And that helps us do our self care, that helps us to regenerate who we are, so we can function day to day. It helps us so that we can love ourselves and each other. It’s coming from that calm nervous system that is a primary focus of being human.

Nicole Vienneau  39:11

It is, it is, and your story, you know, we’re only hearing snippets of your story. Your story is so vast, and all of the gifts that you have received from what people would call big health challenges, right? I mean, potentially back in when you were 17 years old, that’s a few years ago, when things were not as potentially open as they are today, which is still somewhat closed, right? 

And all of those challenges that you decided you needed to take hold of, you needed to take action for yourself, because you saw in yourself that this was not a illness. But rather an opportunity for you. You saw it as, okay, these things are happening, and I choose that I would like to be in my body, and it is fascinating to go into these other places, and yet I still want to be connected to the earth. 

I still want to be part of the earth and be connected with it. And you chose to develop the skills and the tools for yourself to be able to do that, and then taking that story and then layering on all of the next stories and the learnings and everything— the evolution, as you speak of, right? 

Our evolution, your evolution, my evolution, our listeners’ evolution, I mean all of these things that are happening for us to get us to the point of where we are today. And how we’re showing up as the realness, as the authentic Geralyn, the authentic Nicole, which you know I’m working on every day, because some things in society tell me to squash those things that are real to me. 

And the choices that you have made bring you to where you are today, which is a beautiful truth that you’ve shared with us. So we’re so thankful for you sharing honestly your story and not being afraid of it, and then knowing that that is what started you on this journey to self healing, which now leads you to be a healer for others.

Geralyn Retzel  41:37

Yes, thank you. One of the things that Ayurveda also taught me is it’s called self referral. And so self referral is our body is always giving us feedback all the time, all the time, everything you eat, everything you think, everything is, you’re constantly getting this. And we want to pay attention to that self referral, because that’s our higher self also saying, look what happens when you eat this. Look what happens when you are around these people. 

How do you feel when you’re around these people? Are you feeling enlightened? Are you feeling angry? Are you feeling closed? Are you feeling like, oh, I want to get out of here. I mean, self referral is our neurological system giving us feedback of the environment, externally and internally, and that’s part of our story. 

You know, do I want to be around people with low consciousness that are using these kinds of words or having these kinds of judgments about other people. You know, this is how we evolve to our higher consciousness, is to, you know, be around people who perhaps enlighten us, right? 

Does meditation enlighten you, or does you know…  but I think it’s also important, because we want to run away from the things that causes pain. And there is something called Atithi Devo Bhava, and that is that everything that happens to you, life is happening for you, not to you, that there is a benefit in this trauma or this experience, and how is this a benefit for me? 

How, you know, what can I take from this experience that is going to benefit me? And then maybe I can help benefit other people, but we have to all come back to ourself and not run away from ourself and not think that, Oh, I’m, you know, stay away from that victim mentality that actually depletes our energy and takes our consciousness down, and start thinking about, How is life happening for my benefit right now? 

And that raises our consciousness right there, because we are choosing now to be more enlightened with this traumatic thing. How can I take myself out of this trauma mindset and look at it as a gift, so that everything that happens to you is a gift in some way.

Nicole Vienneau  44:21

Yes. Life is a gift. All of the life, all of the life.

Geralyn Retzel  44:27

It is, even though we don’t understand it all.

Nicole Vienneau  44:31

Right, and yes, and some days we don’t understand, and it’s difficult and it’s challenging and overwhelming. That is reality. It is. So I would like to shift a little bit and shift towards Nurse coaching, and just a little bit about maybe some of the things that you gained from becoming a Nurse coach.

Geralyn Retzel  44:59

You know, it was the program that INCA…

Nicole Vienneau  45:02

The Integrative Nurse Coach Academy’s program.

Geralyn Retzel  45:04

Yes, that particular program that gave me permission because it has a Nursing theory of our wholeness, right? And Western medicine needs theories, and Western medicine needs organized processes. And a lot of… and in the article that I had written about this episode that happened to me and my evolution with Ayurveda…

Nicole Vienneau  45:28

Well, let’s step back a little bit, Geralyn, and just mention the article. Maybe the title. This is in the Beginnings magazine, which is the American Holistic Nurses Association magazine.

Geralyn Retzel  45:44

Yes. And the title of the article was: Facing My Mystery: Physiology, Consciousness, Spiritual Evolution and Holistic Practices. And it was in the October 2023 journal of the Beginnings journal.

Nicole Vienneau  46:03

Is this a link we can share with our listeners? 

Geralyn Retzel  46:05

Yes, yes, we can.

Nicole Vienneau  46:07

Excellent. So we’ll put that into the show notes.

Geralyn Retzel  46:09

Okay, perfect. And so it was when I went into the Nurse Coach Academy that I started seeing that holistic… holism in practice, where I had before been keeping my mouth shut, because a lot in Nursing and survival in western medicine was you don’t go there. You don’t tell people what you really think. Because once I said to a psychiatrist, I said, Well, there’s more than one dimension. 

And he looked at me like, you know, eyebrows raised, and everything is, no, there’s one reality. And I said, okay! But here’s the thing, there’s millions of people on the planet. Everyone has their own reality. Right there tells you that there’s more than one, I mean, you know, and even if people all attend the same meeting, they’re all interpreting through all their filters. 

Yeah, so, I mean, we have to think that there’s more than one. And so Integrative Nurse Coach Academy gave me an opportunity to do some internal work, with permission, because there was research. The work that Barbara Dossey and Susan Luck and many others had published made me feel like I was coming from a place of support. 

And I could share this information about my weird story that, perhaps in medicine, perhaps holistic Nursing meant that we embrace people’s differences and look at them as strengths. Perhaps they’re in this Nursing theory. And one of the things that Barbara said, and I have it in my article, actually. So let me read this for you from Barbara Dossey:

“Spiritual intelligence is the recognition that physical reality is embedded within a larger, multi-dimensional reality with which we interact, knowingly or unknowingly. This larger reality includes and transcends the ego and the physical body.” And this was written by Barbara Dossey and Dr. Keegan as well. And this was they wrote that back in 2008. 

And so they gave me permission to take those odd experiences and bring it into the wholeness and share them with my patients, that you are whole already, and you are a multi-dimensional being, and I only am helping you with this very small part. But I know that the other beautiful thing about what Nurse coaching taught me is how creative and capable Nurses are. We are health educators. 

We are counselors. We work with family dynamics. We are counseling not just the patient with their physical body, but with their mental and emotional body. And all the family members that come in. Everybody is scared, everybody’s traumatized, we are there to help quell the fear that all of those people have. 

And by learning in integrative Nurse coaching what some of those skills are, that increasing our self awareness, having our self awareness journal, learning our own meditation, learning our own different relaxation processes through sound healing, through drumming, through meditation, through dancing, through holding each other, through listening. 

Those are what came forth for me in the INCA program, that the vastness that Nurses bring into that room to see that patient touches everybody, and that is a beautiful gift for the patient family as well as the whole Nursing staff. And so if Nurses could just remember how valuable they are from the start and know that wherever they stand, they are home and they are doing the right thing. They’re doing the right thing. 

And I learned that great support system through the integrative Nurse coaching program. I think also I learned in that program how to do an elevator speech. I never did finish that. I could… I always have too much to say and this is way too hard for me to have an elevator speech.

Nicole Vienneau  51:05

You need 30 floors. I mean, come on!

Geralyn Retzel  51:08

Yeah, you had to put that in like, one or two sentences. And it’s like, gosh, I’m not sure how to condense myself. I’m sure there’s a way.

Nicole Vienneau  51:21

So Geralyn, we have a few minutes left, few moments left together. And I would love to ask the question, my favorite question ever, which is, what is on your heart that you would love to share with our listeners today?

Geralyn Retzel  51:42

I would like our listeners to know that they are in the right place, no matter how challenging their life is, right now, they are in the right place, and that there is a gift in this challenge, and to love yourself through it. Know that you have internal strength that can never be taken away from you. 

Nobody can ever touch it. Nobody can destroy it. If you’ve lost touch with it, you are capable of going back inside yourself to gain it. And remember that your physical body is your instrument. It recalibrates all the time. It requires rest, hydration, movement, stillness. All of this is so important because we must all find out what nourishes us. 

And all of us are nourished on different levels, and some things work for us than others. Also, let us always continue to keep learning, expand ourselves out of the knowledge that we have, because knowledge always is past. If it’s knowledge, it’s already happened. That’s why we got it. 

But what is, you know, wisdom is moving into the unknown. So let us move into the unknown and come into our heart and find that coherence between your heart and your brain, your heart and your thoughts. Because remember that our nervous system is the energetic body that keeps us connected to the universe, and our heart is where our answers are. 

And by continuing to communicate with that, we can reach the unified field and find that peace and find those answers. And I think, I think the most important thing is that if we embody that relationship with our higher self, whatever you want to call the source, you are always connected, and you are never disconnected, and your answers are within. And sometimes we have to slow the pace of our nervous system in order to get there to that place of peace and knowing.

Nicole Vienneau  54:07

Thank you so much.

Geralyn Retzel  54:10

You’re welcome. I’m really grateful for what Nursing has given me, even though, in the beginning, I never wanted it at all.

Nicole Vienneau  54:21

We’re allowed to change our mind.

Geralyn Retzel  54:24

Absolutely. It’s our evolution.

Nicole Vienneau  54:27

It is our evolution. So Geralyn, how can our listeners find you if they’d love to send you a message or connect with you?

Geralyn Retzel  54:35

Well, I have a Gmail. I can give you that.

Nicole Vienneau  54:39

Okay, well, we will definitely have that in the show notes, so we can plug that in there, but you can spell it for people, if you’d like.

Geralyn Retzel  54:46

Okay, it’s gerringo@gmail.com. And I chose it because it’s playful. It’s kind of like…

Nicole Vienneau  55:04

Gerringo, yeah!

Geralyn Retzel  55:06

Playful, it’s silly. Yeah. And I don’t have… I’m developing a YouTube channel, and I have other podcasts on that, and it might not be easy to find yet, because I still am learning the technology, so really, the only way to reach me, really, is through that Gmail at this time.

Nicole Vienneau  55:29

Well, wonderful. Well, we’ll definitely share your email. We’ll share your article, and whenever you get your YouTube up and running, we can always add it to your podcast, as well. Ad it’s exciting. We are always learning, always evolving.

Geralyn Retzel  55:45

Always evolving. Yeah, we’re whole already, that’s the thing. You’re already whole. You’re just learning about integrating it.

Nicole Vienneau  55:55

That’s right, we are already whole. We’re just learning how to integrate. I love that. Yes, thank you for those beautiful words and for all of that, all that you have shared with us. We’re very thankful.

Geralyn Retzel  56:11

And thank you. Thank you for this opportunity. I really appreciate you very much and the work that you’re doing in bringing Nurses together, because we need this. We need to know that we have a family who understands and a family who appreciates and wants to expand also, because, gosh, we’re so varied. There’s so much knowledge that Nurses have to share with each other. It’s just amazing. Incredibly amazing. Thank you, Nicole.