Overcoming trauma is one of the most difficult things a person has to do in their life, but it’s something that ultimately must be done to achieve wellness. Being caged by one’s trauma can lead to being stuck in a proverbial quicksand that becomes harder and harder to get out of, leaving you paralyzed. Evolutionary catalyst and creative entrepreneur Anna Pereira, the Co-founder of Wellness Universe, talks all about wellness in relation to trauma. Along with host Jennifer Whitacre, Anna peels back the layers of how trauma affects you and the way you function. But fear not: at the end of that trauma is evolution – the evolution you need to becoming a stronger you.

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Overcoming Trauma: The Story Of An Evolutionary Catalyst & Global Change-Maker With Anna Pereira

Our guest is Anna Pereira. Anna has a background in both the corporate world where she was the head of a multimillion-dollar division for a manufacturer of pet products and entrepreneurship in which she had her own business in fashion and accessories. Anna is the Founder of The Wellness Universe along with one of our previous guests and cofounder of The Wellness Universe, Shari Alyse. Her life wasn’t always this way. She was bullied as a child, not nurtured by her parents and she experienced a significant amount of shame growing up. Anna managed to find herself and she learned to express herself through art and entrepreneurship. She answered her calling to make a global difference, which is how The Wellness Universe was conceived. Her mission is to bring out the best in you. She calls herself the evolutionary catalyst to raise awareness and create positive change and finds it rewarding to help modern-day thought leaders, wellness practitioners and co-creators of change reach their goals both personally and professionally. Welcome, Anna. It’s an honor to have you on the show.

Thank you, Jennifer. I can’t thank you enough for this opportunity. I’m a personal fan of yours. I love you so much. As a real active member of The Wellness Universe, I want to say thank you for inviting me on your show. This is such a blessing.

Thank you so much for being here. I love what you’re doing for thought leaders and as The Wellness Universe calls them, world changers because it’s a community of people who are coming together with a vision of changing the world.

Every time I think about it, it’s like I’m on the outside looking in. I think about how wonderful all of us, as The Wellness Universe world changers on the platform, in the community and how we come together in real-life events. It is beautiful that we have all found each other and found the space to be each other’s mentor and mentee, support system and also allow us to offer our services to everyone who seeks services and products for wellbeing, wellness, health, emotional, spiritual and physical.

For some of our readers, who might not be familiar with the Universe and maybe never heard of it, can you give them a little heads up on what they’re going to find if they go to TheWellnessUniverse.com?

The Wellness Universe is our baby. Shari and I have created it and built it from the ground up in a very ethical manner, an integral manner. We’ve connected with thousands of wellness practitioners, either providing services or products out there in the world. It all started because we were connected on Facebook. Shari and I had come up with this vision in 2013. I came to her at the end of 2013. In 2014, we started putting the word out there, gathering a Facebook group of these practitioners. After about a year and nearly a thousand members to start, we created a Facebook directory. People could come to this directory and find these amazing Facebook pages and connect with real people that were behind these Facebook pages to get the help that they need.

If you come to TheWellnessUniverse.com, what you’re going to find is all of these amazing people have their individual profiles and you can connect with them either on the platform or off the platform. Some of them teach classes. We have classes live and recorded on the website. We have tons of articles and blogs. We probably have over 40,000 pages on the site. That consists of the individuals that provide wellness resources for people seeking them, articles and classes. That’s what any visitor will find. Since it’s an open site, you can browse the directory and find what you’re looking for without even having to sign up.

It’s a fantastic resource. I’ve found some great people that I’ve worked with from The Wellness Universe who have helped me in my own personal growth. I can attest to some of the quality of some of the practitioners that you have recruited to the site. Anna, I’m curious. I want to circle back around because you’d mentioned in your bio that as a child, you had experienced bullying and you didn’t experience a lot of nurturing from your parents. You experienced a lot of shame growing up. Do you mind talking a little bit about some of those experiences? How did those experiences affect you in adulthood?

It started back in the beginning. I know a lot of us experienced things in our childhood. I see the way parenting is done these days and lots of parents show so much love or an overabundance of spoiling to their kids and their kid is the best. I think we’re about the same age. I think parents back then were more of like, “I’m the parent. You’re the child. You’re supposed to respect me. You’re supposed to stay quiet.†There wasn’t like this dynamic that I see happens where parents are encouraging and putting their kids in all different types of activities to develop them on different levels, socially and academically. Back then, from the perspective of the house and growing up inside the home, it was much like my parents come from an old school background. Everything is in the closet. You don’t talk about personal things. You don’t talk about sex. You don’t talk about these things that are part of normal growing up.

I’m going to share a story with you that maybe a little bit over the top for some people, but literally, it was the day that I got my period as a teenager. I was only eleven years old, so I was one of the younger ones, which nowadays I know it’s the normal age. I went to my mom and I was like, “I got my period.†She’s like, “Are you sure?†I was like, “What kind of question is that?†You get it and you know you get it. It frames how in the closet everything was, how you don’t talk about certain things. That’s how I grew up. For me to build my confidence and into young adulthood, it took a lot of my own searching, my own resolve, my own trial and error, and experimentation. All of these things that you go through as a teen, but almost very much on the road of alone where I couldn’t go to mom or dad and say, “I found out about this on the street. What’s this about?†There was none of that. I didn’t get nurtured.

As far as the bullying goes, I’m olive-complected. I’ve dark curly hair. I grew up in a neighborhood where you’re white or you’re black. There were not much of the in-between or people speaking a different language. If you did, maybe there was Spanish. There was no Portuguese in my town at the time that I was raised in Central Jersey. When you’re a kid and our microcosm is very small, it is limited to the kids on your block and the kids in your grade. Everyone that you may have friction with or somebody that doesn’t like you or calls you names, it’s magnified. It’s not like you could leave work and go home. If there’s one person that you don’t get along with at work, who cares? You’re grown up. When you’re a kid, you want to be loved and accepted by everyone. You just want to smile, laugh, have a good time and be picked for the team.

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I got made fun of my curly hair, for speaking a different language. That’s why I stopped speaking Portuguese when I was young because I got mocked for it. I was the one on the block that was made fun of. I talked about this very rarely because thank you for the platform, I typically don’t get this opportunity. I know a lot of people have experienced this in their own way because whether it was their brother or their older sister, everyone does and this is why what you do is so needed. The bullying was major because you’re young and every minute of every day when you’re 5 to 10 years old, it’s magnified. Whereas adults, five years could pass and be like, “I just bought that. It’s been five years since I bought that pocketbook. I think it’s time to change my pocketbook.â€

You are like me. I am not a purse-has-to-match-my-outfit girl.

When you’re a kid, anything that happened will affect your entire life. It’s a big deal. It had a big effect on me. I was fortunate enough to always have an outlet of being an artist and outlet of expressing myself and a little bit of a who-gives-a-crap attitude when I was getting a little older. That little bit of toughness is what helped me to level up and keep leveling up to get me to where I am or else I would have succumbed to that and been in that traumatic situation for my life. I would have had surrounded myself with people that are not desirable, not good for my wellbeing. Instead, I made the shift in my older teens and my young adulthood because I wanted more for myself. Between my home life and bullying, it was significant at the time and especially because it was my neighborhood. It was a big deal. As I got older, I started getting more resilient and finding my own and attracting my friends. Things started turning around for me, but it definitely could’ve gone the other way.

For a lot of people, it does go the other way. A lot of what you said resonates with my story and with a lot of guests. It’s very similar to a lot of guests that I’ve had on in the past with the bullying and the shaming. One thing I talk about as a trauma specialist is it doesn’t have to take intentional abuse for trauma to imprint on the nervous system. The type of trauma I work with is the type of trauma not about what happens to you. It’s a result of what happens inside of you as a result of what happens to you. It’s when we start to compensate for our behaviors and we start to modify who we are in order to please other people so we can fit in because we don’t have a sense of belonging. Did you compensate for your behavior? If you did, at what point did you become aware of it and start to turn around and go the other way? How did you come to that level of awareness that things needed to change?

It’s my soul desire for wanting more, like goal setting for myself. I wanted more out of life. For example, one of the things that I heard in the household all the time is, “We can’t afford it,†which translates to, “No, you’re not worth it. We’re not going to do that. That’s not important to us. That’s not we care to spend our money.†When you’re a child, you’re around everybody else that has something like Atari, MTV or cable. I was like, “This is crap. I’m not going to have this for my life. I deserve more.†I don’t know what’s inside of me made me think that way along the way. I do know that I have always been independent. I’ve worked since I was twelve years old doing side jobs. I worked 2 and 3 jobs, even when I was in high school and in college. I was seeing what else is out there and observing that there is an opportunity for me to do what I want to do, and then taking where I received the accolades and then implementing and expanding in those areas. Being good at art, having a flair for fashion and applying the art to fashion, I kept following those paths and unraveling where I was making achievements and where I was getting achieving small goals that it turned into bigger goals instead of going down the other path.

To answer your question, I did modify when I was too young to know better. When I was in a position of being subservient, I didn’t have control. In a sense, I was manipulated into a situation because of being a young person living under my household roof. Once I had the first chance and opportunity, I moved out when I was nineteen years old. I got my own apartment and that’s when the more of the big shifts started happening for me when I had real control over my own life. It’s very difficult when you’re living under somebody else’s rules to control all that. Becoming an adult made a big difference for me personally. God bless the child who can do it on their own, underneath their parents’ rule and acknowledged. I hope that people like yourself and the stories like this are heard by the younger generation because they’re growing up a lot smarter and knowing that they can have more control over if they’re dealing with the same types of situations.

I think there is a detriment with kids because some of the stuff you mentioned has a backfire effect on it. The kids that are in many different extracurricular activities, they’re overscheduled. I’m 47. I don’t mind sharing my age. I’m a Gen X and I do feel maybe we have that same petulant teenager, that inner child that comes up. I have a petulant teenager that shows up sometimes. When she shows up is when somebody tells me, “You can’t do that.†As soon as somebody says you can’t do that, she sticks her head out and she’s like, “Watch this.†I feel that petulant teenager is coming through your story that I don’t know if that’s a through-line for the Gen Xers or not, but I’m hearing that in your story too. It’s like, “Don’t put your thumb on me. Don’t hold me back. Don’t tell me what I can’t do. You said, ‘I can’t do this.’ I’m going to do it to prove you’re wrong.â€

That is exactly me.

I feel like we have that connection there. Back to the kids, there is value in learning to be bored. There were a lot of times when I was a kid when I had nothing to do. I grew up in the country. It’s like the city mouse and the country mouse talking and having a conversation. I’m the country mouse. There were a lot of times where I didn’t have a whole lot to do. That free time, that downtime, that time to be bored and have nothing to do, you stand around and kick rocks, pick up frogs, or pick up worms out of the dirt. I always had something in my pocket that was disgusting when I was a little kid. I was such a tomboy. It gives the capacity to be with ourselves and to get comfortable with what goes on in our own mind. I think that’s what a lot of kids lack, is the capacity to sit with themselves and be with their own mind because that downtime brings up so much anxiety that bubbles over and they don’t know what to do with it. I feel bad for kids.

I’m having visions of turning over rocks and going salamander hunting and everything when I was a kid. I can’t wait to get out of school to ride my bike to the park, go move the leaves around and see what kind of yuckiness I could find. I didn’t carry it around in my pocket, but I totally feel you. It was that time that we were developing our own inner thoughts, our inner dialogues and exploring the world. We are making a registry of our worlds around us that we have to explore and to think about how things live, how things exist. It gave us many soft skills by doing all of this. Nowadays, everything is scheduled, regimented and systematized for our children. For the children, those soft skills that we developed are abandoned in a way because they’re experiencing a lot of other dynamics growing up. Team-building is at its best because everybody’s involved in a sport. Empathy is much more heightened with children with the way that they’re learning. I think there are a couple of things that they are at a disadvantage. It’s more with the self-development inside because of these times that we spent digging up worms, looking for salamanders and things like that.

I’m hearing this early work ethic that started in your life and this early drive to not necessarily accept what your parents handed you. That’s okay. We don’t have to accept a lot that was given in life. Anna, I think you are a perfect example of how we all have within us the power to change and make a difference in our own lives if we set our minds to it. Once we set our minds to it, our actions have to follow suit.

I didn’t understand that there was a choice when I was a kid. I watch my friends or family go to feed their kid and it’s like, “They don’t want that for dinner. What do you want for dinner?†Who asked me what I wanted for dinner when I was a kid? You ate what mom cooked. That was it. There was no choice.

You eat it or don’t, or you got your butt kicked.

It was mostly force-feeding you like, “You have to eat. You have to clean your plate.†There was no choice. I’m like, “Is there a choice?†I had to realize that there were choices for me as I got older. It didn’t even occur to me that there’s a choice for children now and I’m like, “When they won’t eat this, you’re going to make something special for them. Times have changed.â€

Even at the school that I went to, there was no recess until you cleaned your plate. I was one of the few kids in my class who liked peas. Anytime that we had peas, we are always negotiating and like, “I’ll take your peas, but you take this bread and butter.†I hated bread and butter. That was the worst when I have to eat my bread and butter sandwiches. It’s like barf. When the food came, we were like, “What are we going to trade or what’s for lunch?†I know what I’m eating. I’m eating everybody’s peas. Everybody else could have all this other crap. It even spilled over into the schools. Those little lessons in life on how do you negotiate through a situation that’s not to your advantage and in the moment to make it to your advantage, kids don’t learn those skills. They demand their way through getting their way.

I experienced some of the anxiety from this over-scheduled regimented world that we live in. I miss the days when you could show up on somebody’s doorstep and show up at your best friend’s house and say, “I’m here.†You just walk-in because that’s how it was when I grew up. People walked into your house. You walked into other people’s houses. You can’t even call anyone unless you first text instead of that phone call. I can’t stand it. It brings up anxiety in me. How do you navigate that in your life? How do you navigate that level of anxiety or do you ever experience that level of anxiety?

Jennifer, anxiety is a major part of my life. I talk about it quite often when I do. I’m also one that doesn’t like to live in the musical called The Mulligrubs. It’s like in the muck, the mire and in this situation because here I am, I’m the Founder of The Wellness Universe. I should at least epitomize through the leadership that I exemplify, not be that person who’s always constantly talking about the issue. I try not to get into the issue because I’m about the resolution, but I do suffer from the issue. As if I had an obvious limp, I’m not going to talk about my obvious limp all the time. One leg is shorter than the other. I’m not going to keep talking about it. It’s one more thing that you deal with and that’s what builds your leadership, your resilience and getting through to the end situation where you’re happy.

I do experience anxiety. I do have to navigate it. Sometimes I do take medication for it. Sometimes I do take my Xanax when I go to bed when it’s so bad that I can’t find a way to meditate it away or I’m in a reactive situation because it all got too much. I’m not ashamed to say that because sometimes things happen like basements flood, roofs leak down your walls. There’s stuff that happens along with a high load that I already take on from having The Wellness University, living in between two countries, traveling all over the world all the time, living out of suitcases that I’m already here, I’m vibrating here. How much more can we take on? When something does happen, it does add to the anxiety level.

How do I navigate it each day? I arise and I try to tell myself, “This is a great day.†No matter what happens, at least I’m not rising and taking on and carrying around a negative or a very solid type of attitude or heavy energy. I’m approaching the day with an upper beat attitude no matter what when you’re dealing with the physical effects of anxiety. When people talk about anxiety, it’s the physical effects that people are suffering from. It’s more tangible for people to understand, want to deal with, cope with and dispel. There are EFT and all kinds and different types of things like that that I do.

Talking to my husband sometimes and being open with my feelings and telling him what’s going on, and him being receptive. Having that safe harbor of having someone to talk to, speaking with someone like you who is compassionate and understanding as a therapist helps out someone like me or anybody who’s coming to talk to you about that because we need to get it out. We need to release it, we need to deal with it. I tried my best ways to have that happen, especially being the founder of The Wellness Universe, people are looking at me for all the answers. I was like, “I don’t have all the answers.†You have to go to multiple doctors sometimes for it to get diagnosed. Even not every doctor has all the answers. I don’t have all the answers and my life isn’t perfect. I hope that makes you even more comfortable because I’m a real person and I understand. It is a conversation that takes place in my life. Anxiety is real.

Thank you so much for being so open, Anna. I appreciate that and I hope our readers take the time to read that entire answer. There are three reasons that my show was named Yes And. One of those reasons is, and consciousness. It’s not about the middle way. It’s not about denying extremes. It’s about expanding your consciousness to accept the extremes. It’s about realizing that we live in a world that is fraught with polarity, duality, hypocrisy, and opposing truths that are both true simultaneously. It’s expanding your consciousness to accept that sometimes the basement floods, sometimes the roof leaks, sometimes there’s anxiety and there’s going to be stress in my life. There are going to be obstacles that I have to deal with.

It’s expanding your consciousness enough to accept that there’s going to be another obstacle. I don’t know what’s next, but it’s going to be there. I’m going to have something to deal with. What you gave is a perfect example of and consciousness. One of the reasons my show was named Yes And. Thank you so much for sharing that and for living that example because my goal is to spread the word and hopefully more people will read this and start to say, “I get it. I don’t have to put my heels in and resist because the more we resist the obstacles, the more painful it is and the more suffering we create within ourselves.†Suffering doesn’t come from out there. It comes from the resistance we have to the obstacles. It’s from our internal resistance to the obstacles that we face out there in the world.

You have to keep leveling up, or you succumb to traumatic situations. CLICK TO TWEET

Thank you so much for getting people to understand that because creating that awareness is the key to the lock and you’re literally turning it and opening the door for people with that. I have a funny story to give you another example of how real this is in my life. I travel a lot. We got back from Soul Treat. I’m here, I’m there. I’m going to Miami for an event and I’m coming back. I came back and the water shut off at my house in New Jersey because I’m not here a lot. Things slip through the cracks, the paperwork. I have to go to a hotel for the time that I’m back home in New Jersey for four days. I’m dealing with these calls while I’m sick. I came back, the water’s turned on after Thanksgiving because everybody’s back at work. They came and turned on my water after a couple of days. After a few days, I had to go back down to Florida for some meetings. I came back and my furnace has blown up. I came back to no heat. My aunt collects a lot of my mail because I’m not here for literally months at a time. I opened up one of my envelopes and I found that I was driving on a suspended license. Now, I’m going to deal with the DMV.

I called the DMV because I was like, “Dealing with suspension, I have to go to Newark. I don’t want to go to Newark DMV. Let me see if I can call and I can resolve this over the phone.†I get on the phone and it says, “Your whole time will be over twenty minutes.†I knew that and a lot of other people will probably be ripping their hair out, figuring out what to do. That’s how I used to be. The first guy comes on, here I am thinking they will resolve my problem. I was like, “There’s a clerical error. I turned in the plates to this car back in October. I shouldn’t have my license suspended. I did what I was supposed to do. I have the abstract right here.†After listening to the whole story, the guy’s like, “Let me transfer you to the right department.†I get transferred to the other department. This is even better, “Your whole time will be over an hour.â€

By the time I finally dealt with Darrius, it was two hours and 40 minutes that I was on the phone. I did not move out of that so that I wouldn’t cut off. I was sitting there doing something else, occupying my time on the computer doing work while I have this phone call. I even took a phone call and I was like, “Excuse me, David. If you hear something ringing in the background, it’s because I’m on hold with the DMV. I could not hang up with that call. Let’s have our meeting, but you’ll hear this in the background. I do apologize.†It’s about taking accountability and going at it with a positive attitude. By the time the guy got up on the phone, it was like I wasn’t sitting there for two hours waiting because I knew what it was going to be and you deal with it as it is.

When he came on, I even cracked jokes with the guy because he’s like, “Your license suspension is now reinstated. You could drive with your license. You could drive your friend’s car, your sister’s car, your brother’s car, your boyfriend’s car, your husband’s car, but you can’t drive with your own car because the registration suspension hasn’t been lifted. They never re-registered a car.†I said, “Don’t tell my husband that I’m driving my boyfriend’s car.†He was not used to people cracking jokes because he’s part of the DMV. It took a few minutes for him to realize that and he’s like, “You are funny.†I was like, “I tried. I’m on hold for two hours and a half. I’ve got to have a sense of humor.â€

This all illustrates how do I deal with anxiety, how do I deal with not getting into those mindsets and not to get sucked into those tunnels that would cause another person to climb the frequent walls over. You got to take accountability for how you’re going to handle a situation like you were saying, how to react and how to go forward. I wanted to share these because I’m a real person like everyone else. The way you deal with things helps with the best outcome for you. The fallout from that is having anxiety, having depression, having a heightened sense of stress or not.

I love that story because in your story, I believe this is part of the collective consciousness that we have all across America and Western society. I’m not sure if it’s limited to America. I think it spills over into pretty much all developed countries. It’s that sense of entitlement. It’s that sense of, “I’m on the phone and how dare you make me wait for an hour?†There’s this sense of, “Me, me, me.†It’s like you can hear the choirs of, “Me, me, me,†in the background from people’s behavior. It makes sometimes painful to go out in public and witness it. At the same time, it’s quite entertaining to go out in public and witness it.

That’s the cynical side. I find it funny too.

I love that because the focus is it’s not all about, “What does the world owe me?†It’s about using what we feel inside of us is that internal compass. I think you’re such a beautiful example of that and how you live your life, how you approach life and how you approach the world.

Thank you, Jennifer. It is the same for you as well, or else you wouldn’t be able to do what you do. I appreciate that.

I’ve had to work hard at it. Hearing your story, it sounds to me like it flowed a little bit more naturally from your teenage years and early adulthood. I was one of those people that probably several years ago if we had met, you would’ve said, “I don’t even want to be friends with her because I was a lot more messed up and stuck in my own trauma.†That’s one of the things that I’ve been able to turn into a gift because I was stuck in my own selfishness. I can see it in other people because I’ve learned how to let it go. I’ve learned how to take a different approach to life and to step back from what I taught from an early age that I was entitled to certain things.

Jennifer, that’s a gift in itself because you’re seeing it from an adult perspective. Sometimes I could see it in other adults that still had to move past and you see it still manifesting. All their traumas are manifesting. All of their repetition of the same issues, they keep reliving the lack of boundaries. You’re lucky that you arrived at it as an adult. You have even different wisdom to take with you. Honestly, you’ve probably accelerated, even though it may have happened between when you were 19 to 21 years old. You realize that you probably accelerated yourself and you’re still on the same level. In fact, you’re a therapist, so you have a whole toolbox full of stuff much more than me. In your own right, it’s so much more valuable than you learned it at the adult level.

I don’t know that it matters when we learned it. The message that I preach all the time, it’s similar to what you preach too. It’s about self-awareness. It’s about using that internal compass, using your feelings, and what happens inside of you as your guide through life instead of using everything out there as your guide through life. We have to learn to differentiate between those emotions that come up as a result of past traumas and your actual gut feelings that are trying to guide you through life. There is a difference between the two and it’s easy to get them intermingled and not understand the difference. I call it the strong emotions versus gut feelings. You’ve heard me talk about it before. It’s important to know the difference. For me, it’s easy to spot somebody like you who naturally embodies that. You embodied letting your gut feelings guide you through life instead of your strong emotions.

It took a lot of trial and error.

Thank you for being that example, Anna.

You’re welcome. I’m working on it every day. It’s because as we evolve a lot of stuff has to do with our experiences in the past. The experiences we’ve encountered change the dynamics of our lives and also where we want to be, like, “Where are we going? What goals do we want to achieve?â€

I’m curious because from the outside looking in, I see you as a visionary with a lot of ideas. What’s next for The Wellness Universe? What’s coming up next? What can we look forward to?

I want to say thank you for calling me a visionary. I love being who I am and living my life. I’m blessed and I’m grateful. I think that another key to living your best life is being grateful for where you are and having some vision as to where you’re going. I love helping, even when we get together and we give each other ideas on how to do stuff. I know that you were on our panel before. That was a project within The Wellness Universe. I love coming up with these ways to share the resources of people who make the world a better place. I know personally that I have a true foundational belief that what they’re doing helps the world. They need to be shared with more people and get a global audience. A couple of things are coming out that are going to be the Extraordinary Instruction series. They’re going to be an independent series that our upgraded members are going to be hosting on different topics that they come to me with. That’s going to be great. We’ll have a Soul Treat coming around again in October 2020. In November 2020, we’ll have that site, WUSoulTreat.com. People can get their tickets to that treat. There’s a limit of 120 tickets because that’s how we keep it intimate. We have the experience that we did.

We have a leadership council that’s part of The Wellness Universe that helped Shari and myself as leaders to help us with The Wellness Universe. There are lots of other new things that we’ll be rolling out. More classes will be found in the lounge. There’ll be more articles and more content to read from the members of The Wellness Universe. There are a lot of exciting things to help spread the good words that our Wellness Universe members, our world changers have in different ways. Collaborations are taking place to help other people out there in the world. They have live events, we help promote that as well so people can get out there and get the help they need in a real, authentic way.

I’m sad that I have a conflict with the Soul Treat with the dates. I was like, “I want to go back so bad.â€

You’re going to be missed.

It was such a fantastic experience. Thank you for the opportunity. What’s next for Anna, personally?

I’ve been plugging along with the journey of The Wellness Universe. I don’t see my personal life-changing at all anytime soon. I live between New Jersey and Portugal. I spend a lot of time in France. I don’t know what the next chapter holds based on where my husband, Hugo, is going to hang his hat for a little while, what project he’s going to get more deeply involved in. He is a business person on the professional sports side. We are around the world for that. I’ll keep plugging along and evolving and getting involved with our fantastic members like yourself and walking the journey with you, with them to see where we can make bigger and better things happen and move the needle for the evolution of our emotional, spiritual and physical wellbeing.

The way you deal with things helps with the best outcome for you. CLICK TO TWEET

I’m looking forward to it. I think The Wellness Universe is a fantastic platform. I tend to think a little bit differently and counter-intuitively to a lot of the people in what I would consider the spiritual community. There are a lot of people out there that practice what I call spiritual bypassing or spiritual hijacking. You’ve heard me talk about this as well. I do have to say that the people I have encountered on The Wellness Universe, a vast majority of them don’t fall into that category. They understand what healing is. I think you guys have done a good job at weeding through some of the BS that’s out there.

The fact that we’re not just a directory and online platform, but we are a community. Everyone has to stand up and to be accountable for who they are. Once they’re in the room with other people, it’s like if everybody goes to an audition and say, “I could sing.†If you can’t sing, you’re going to step back and back out of the room very slowly with nobody noticing you were ever even there. Everybody who’s left are people with singing abilities. I think that was also helping to keep the environment and the collective clean because people are seeing like, “I’m not ready for this group. This group is an elevated group of people. These people come with locked and loaded with real tools to help people.†That is getting the people who are not ready to fall to the back. Those who are the front line are all the front and center on The Wellness Universe. Thank you for saying that. That is huge to me because my passion and what I know God put me here for is to bring the healers to the forefront. Healing can take place in a real tangible, real manner that people can walk away living a better life.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what I was going to get into for sure when I went to Soul Treat. It’s my first time there and I wasn’t sure what I was in for. I don’t know that I had an expectation. I was curious and I was so pleased and relieved when I saw the quality of all of the other practitioners who were there because there wasn’t a lot of nonsense to cut through. It was a lot of genuine people who truly get it. You could tell that the people in The Wellness Universe and the people at Soul Treat have had their own experiences in life. They’re not just talking based on what they’ve learned in a workshop or what they’ve learned from a textbook because there’s so much value to experience. You can’t take somebody anywhere you haven’t been yourself. It’s not possible.

Thank you for framing it that way because explaining what Soul Treat is very hard unless you experienced it because it isn’t necessarily going to reach a spiritual treat or we’re in meditation all day or we’re locked down. It’s more of a self-development and spiritual experience woven together with the people. You walk alongside. We were all part of Soul Treats, so we were not only presenting to the rooms that people who came to seek our guidance, but we were part of the experience which gave everyone like, “They’re just like me.†It gave them this comfort level and this family feeling. That’s why we keep it capped at 120. This is the experience that you walk away with. I’m glad that everyone who created that experience you found to be of high value and integrity. To walk away feeling these feelings and having this experience to articulate this, I know that it’s coming through in your voice emotionally that it did touch you in that way. I want to say thank you so much for sharing that message.

I’m so thankful that you and Shari were able to put this together. If any of our readers are out there and you’re not sure what The Wellness Universe is, or if you’re not sure what Soul Treat is, check out TheWellnessUniverse.com and WUSoulTreat.com. What are your go-to practices for self-care?

I want one glass of wine at night and I’ll be happy, maybe two. My humor is a big go-to. Once a lot of people are comfortable with who they are and the more that you can open up the humor instead of being so rigid or how am I being judged or being more judgmental on myself. Let go of all those things. You’ll see how much humor can come through in your personality and that diffuses so much emotion and helps you. Even if you laugh intentionally, that is so much helpful. I think finding time to walk out in nature is when I’m experiencing the downward slide of anxiety. It’s getting out there and taking a long walk out in nature at a nice park, staring at the water. I’m a Taurus. I had the real earthiness. I like to be connected to nature when I’m having times of stress, strife and can see myself going down that path. Getting outside, doing something, walking, experiencing the smells and the visual things that I get to see like when we were kids. I don’t go looking for salamanders anymore because I don’t want to look like a crazy person.

Those are mostly my go-to things, taking time for me, shutting off the phone, making sure that you cut off communications. You stop thinking about communications. You get real. You fall into that space of what you’re doing at the moment. You’re mindful of outside walking around and focus on different things. Focus on the smells, focus on what’s blooming or not blooming or the color of the trees against the overcast sky. How black they look, where they look gray in the summer against the blue background. Try to be intentional and having awareness about your surroundings out in nature. That seems to help me a lot.

I believe there are people out there who aren’t even sure what self-awareness is. I think most of my readers do have self-awareness. With your level of self-awareness, Anna, what’s the next thing you’re working on?

It’s the evolution of The Wellness Universe. I call it a project and a mission because it’s ever-evolving and so much more to do with it. It is going to be a lifestyle brand. It is going to be destinations. It is going to be online media. There is no end to what it is because it’s ever-evolving. The vision is huge and there are many ways to reach people and help people. There are many different types of people to help from children to the elderly to middle-age, women, men, different types of situations and circumstances. It’s broad. For me, The Wellness Universe as an ever-evolving project is what I’m committed to until the last day I’m here.

Anna, what are your preferred ways for people to reach out to you if any of our audience wants to send you a message or look you up online?

If you want to find me on The Wellness Universe, you go to TheWellnessUniverse.com and you can plug in my name, Anna Pereira. You can connect me with me there, which I don’t like to publicize a lot because I don’t like to do a lot of side coaching, but I have AnnaPereira.com. You got to at least email me through there also if you find it a little bit harder through The Wellness Universe. Either way the websites are the ways that you can connect with me. You can look me up on Facebook and everything else in social media and on LinkedIn as well.

Do you have any final tips or bits of wisdom to leave with our audiences?

I want to say thank you for the opportunity, Jennifer, for sharing this space with you and you opening up these doors and these platforms to people like myself and others. I want to let the audience know how essential it is. This is the ground floor. This is the lobby. This is getting in the elevator. You have to be able to release any of your preconceived beliefs about yourself, about an expected outcome, about what you think people expect of you. Self-judgment and judgment of others, you have to release all of these things before you can get down and dirty and make a change for your life. You have to be open to change. The funny thing is, as much as we say it, we don’t want to change. Change is what we seek and we have to be open to that. In order for anything to work out to our advantage, something has to change and it all starts with us being open and letting go. I feel that that’s one of the most important things and one of the things that we talk about at Soul Treat has been releasing would hold you back. I think literally it is the foundation to make any progress at all.

Anna, thank you so much for being a guest. I’m so grateful that you were here.

I love it. I’m grateful for you and I love you so much, Jennifer. Thank you so much.

If you want more information about Anna Pereira, you can find her probably most readily at TheWellnessUniverse.com where you can look up in a career. I will see all of you next time.

Important Links:

• The Wellness Universe
• Shari Alyse â€“ Previous episode
• Soul Treat
• WUSoulTreat.com
• AnnaPereira.com
• Facebook â€“ Anna Pereira
• LinkedIn â€“ Anna Pereira
• www.TheWellnessUniverse.com
•  https://www.TheWellnessUniverse.com/world-changers/annapereira/
• https://WUSoulTreat.com/
• https://www.Facebook.com/CirclesOfInspiration/
• @AnnaPereiraOfficial â€“ Instagram

About Anna Pereira

As a motivational public figure, my inspirational posts are known worldwide. Through my Facebook page Circles of Inspiration by Anna Pereira, I have helped the lives of over 700K.

Following my calling to truly make a global change, I am involved in several epic projects to better the world. Most recently, I have founded The Wellness Universe, along with my partner Shari Alyse and our company is Soul Ventures Corp.

Focused on building the space for a flourishing network of heart-based entrepreneurs, as the leader of The Wellness Universe, it is rewarding helping modern-day thought leaders, wellness practitioners and co-creators of change reach their goals personally and professionally. Through guidance and encouragement seeing world changers not only changing the world, but their world-changing as well is my life’s greatest reward.

creative entrepreneur evolutionary catalyst living your best life Overcoming Trauma Personal Growth Wellness