How Music, Prayer, And Journaling Can Rewire A Wounded Mind

When your life gets bigger, the inner critic often gets louder. We sit down with Dr. Elizabeth Fulgaro—award-winning author, songwriter, and financial coach—to explore how song-driven prayer and simple journaling can transform self-talk, rebuild resilience, and heal the hidden wounds that surface under pressure. Her journey from lifelong self-hatred to self-acceptance and then self-love is disarmingly honest, practical, and grounded in research with women veterans.

We unpack a 28-day practice that pairs curated “song prayers” with a quick daily check-in to track mood before and after listening. The results? Every participant experienced measurable improvements in resilience and well-being. Dr. Fulgaro breaks down why: music reaches the emotional brain, lyrics that speak directly to God reinforce being known, belonging, and purpose, and neuroplasticity does the rest. We go deeper than clichés, confronting the gap between performative spirituality and the hard, hopeful work of loving God, loving others, and loving yourself—without losing your voice or your boundaries.

Expect clear next steps: how to choose the right album by intuition, protect focus with ad-free listening, and use Companion Journals to guide a simple rhythm—select, reflect, listen, reflect, repeat. We also cover playlists for grief, anxiety, courage, and winding down at day’s end, plus why journaling unlocks stuck thoughts and anchors a new identity over time. If you’re ready to replace shame with dignity and move from coping to healing, this conversation gives you a map and the tools to start today.

Learn more about Elizabeth's work and how you can her materials at: https://www.elizabethfulgaro.com/.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs hope, and leave a review to help others find these resources.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Dr. Elizabeth Figaro
• 3:01 The Book On Self-Hatred To Self-Love
• 5:59 Facing Inner Lies And Identity
• 11:26 Big Life Leaps Expose Self-Talk
• 14:14 Coping Strategies That Stop Working
• 17:14 Choice, Neuroplasticity, And Self-Esteem
• 21:06 Music As Brain Change And Prayer
• 26:40 Vision, Albums, And Early Healing
• 31:54 Research With Women Veterans
• 36:39 What Song Prayers Sound Like
• 42:14 Finding Substance Beyond Clichés
• 47:34 Love God, Love Others, Love Self
• 53:04 New Companion Journals And Method
• 58:34 Make It Daily: Listening And Journaling
• 1:03:04 Practical Rewiring With Simple Tools

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:36

Hi, everybody. Welcome to Moral Injury Support Network Podcast. Uh, today we have a great uh guest with us today. Uh this morning, uh today, this morning, afternoon, whatever time it is you're listening to it. Dr. Elizabeth Figaro is an award-winning author and songwriter. She creates resources for soul care, emotional healing, healthy relationships, abuse recovery, and financial capacity building. She has written nine books and developed over 250 song prayers on over 25 albums. Her doctoral research with Women Veterans shows listening to song prayers daily contributes to increasing resilience and emotional well-being. She's a certified financial planner and professional financial coach. She has been serving veteran and military family communities with her albums, books, blogs, and audio messages since 2006. Dr. Fagaro has personally experienced how devastating self-deprecating thoughts and inner wounds can be. She is passionate about facilitating inner healing and longs for each person to embrace her innate uh priceless value and choose to courageously become more fully who she is. Recently, Dr. Figaro was named Doctor United States of America 2026 with her platform Healing Hearts Help More Hearts Heal. She is a 2024 recipient of the Women Veterans Alliance Patriotic Supporter Award. In her free time, she enjoys long walks in the countryside with her husband, Needle Point, and visiting European foreign exchange connections who have become family. Welcome to the show, Dr. Figaro. How are you?

SPEAKER_01: 2:18

Thank you so much. I'm just glad, I'm really glad to be here.

SPEAKER_00: 2:23

Good. Well, um, the first of all, I picked up your book. Last time we spoke, it was a few months ago, and I picked up your book, Learning to Love, Not Loathe Me. And I found that to be an extremely powerful book where you talk about some of your life experiences, how they shaped your self image, and how you then overcame like that low self-esteem to see yourself in a more valuable way. And um really powerful book, and one of the things I appreciated about it is so brutally honest, and I think that's refreshing to hear. So um I I appreciate that that particular manuscript, it meant a lot to me. Um was that the first book you wrote or or what? Where was that at in line of like your writing career?

SPEAKER_01: 3:28

My writing uh so if we look at it from today, more the middle. Uh I'd written a children's book, I'd written a Christmas devotional for hard Christmases, actually inspired by Gold Star families to put together something that they could hone in on Christmas and Jesus without being triggered by all the cultural things that we've attached to Christmas. Uh I'd also written a book that I had been sending to military on understanding God a little bit more and self-care and self-forgiveness called Truth Spiritual Manual for Battle. So I'd been writing for a long, long time. That was never intended to be a book. It was going to be a text message. No, really? So and so yeah, I had come far enough through self-hatred. I didn't know I hated myself. I thought all the thoughts that I had against myself were 100% true. So if you'd have told me, uh tried to compliment me my whole life, so this is until my mid-50s, I'm in my mid-60s now. If you'd have tried to compliment me, tried to say those things you're saying about yourself that you're inadequate, that you're not good enough, that you're a disappointment, those things aren't true, I would have smiled at you and said, and I would have thought to myself, you don't know me like I know me. And they are true, right? And so it it I lived in the lies of who I thought I was, and it was all very self-deprecating and hatred oriented without knowing it was self-hatred, it was just the truth. Yeah, yeah, and and then I had an experience that where I realized where God pointed out to me, no, you hate yourself. And I committed to the very hard path because those are the thoughts I lived in. I didn't know, you know, it's like that's my reality, that's my identity is wrapped up in that. So to then have to face changing those was super scary. And God led me through it one thought at a time until I was at self-acceptance. I did not have self-love, but I had self-acceptance and I shared it with someone. And she said, Oh, I've hated myself too. And we said, Well, let's continue to share our journeys until we get to self-love. And two days later, I had a miraculous experience. Most of the moves along the way were very practical. This was a miraculous experience that moved me on the spectrum from self-hatred to self-love. And I had promised to share with her, so I went to send her a WhatsApp message. You'll never guess what just happened, and realized it wouldn't mean anything to her without background.

SPEAKER_02: 6:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 6:20

I've never written anything so personal. And I wrote it then in 2017, felt led not to publish it, and then went through my doctoral journey and learning more about healthy family and relationships, and realized the root for most of us of these types of thoughts are our own experiences with others or emotional abuse. Some type of abuse is in our background that causes us to form these thoughts as in an interpretation of who we actually are. And so it became a then very vulnerable book in sharing what I hadn't even recognized was abuse. I didn't know what emotional abuse was. So the book stands in the middle. Um, but it's interesting that it was through the song prayers I was developing album by album that the incremental steps towards healing came. So both of those are deeply interconnected with each other.

SPEAKER_00: 7:23

I do I do find it tremendous interesting, uh, tremendously interesting that it's not often not really until you experience some high level of challenge or difficulty that these um programs that have been running in the background um come to the forefront. Like you don't you don't realize until um you take on something challenging. Like for instance, when when I when I started trying to build this nonprofit, you know, and I had to take on challenges that I was never trained for, didn't really know how to do, most particularly about um, you know, finding money to to um you know support the work. And it it's not only had I never really built a business before, but also this is a unique kind of business in the nonprofit world that's even more complicated than a for-profit business where you can you can unwisely but easily borrow money for a for a for-profit business. I mean, there's a whole long line of people waiting to give you money, even with the shoddy business plan, you can get dollars. But in the nonprofit world, it doesn't work like that at all. So, so anyway, um, these challenges of like 32 years in the military didn't prepare me for um, you know, that's when I started really running up against my own feelings of inadequacy and so on. I I experienced those in the military, but I always um for the most part found a way to overcome them without too much difficulty. Um and you know, so all the different challenges I had in the military all those years, yeah, there were scary times, you know, there were there were times where I failed and so on. But they they really didn't like they they triggered certain emotional responses, but I was just strong enough, more or less, to deal with those, you know. Sure, I had a normal level of fear, a normal level of uh frustration, a normal level of anxiety over all the challenges that you experience in a job like the military. But when I when I encountered one of my biggest fears, which was related to money and stuff, that's when I really noticed a lot more uh self-talk, if you will, or self-thoughts about not, you know, not being good enough, not being capable enough, a lot of guilt over mistakes I made, and so on and so forth. And so, you know, it's like the point I'm trying to make is we all have this stuff running in the background, but it's often not until you really try to advance your life in some way, uh major way, that you really have to confront them. If you if you're living your life in a fairly comfortable, like, yeah, you're miserable because you want to do more, you want to have a better life, but you don't really step forward and do it, you kind of can let reach this level of discomfort, comfortable comfort with the level of discomfort you have over your life. When you try to really make a big leap, that's when all the little demons come out and say, You think you're good enough to do this, bulls, you know, and and then you get into this real battle. Do you find that to be true at all? Or does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01: 11:15

Oh, 100%. I think you've brought out a super important point. And it can be related also to healing, but yes, it's when you face some of life's bigger challenges that the self-talk becomes more evident, or you become more aware of this obstacle that's within yourself. There's actually uh research that's been done in this field. I don't have the name of one of the more prominent researchers, resident for recall, but that there's this continuum of leadership or of life experience that you start at this one spectrum, youthful, and in your youth, you develop coping strategies, ways to survive whatever you're in, because we're all dysfunctional in some way, right? And so we develop these coping strategies that work until we hit a particular point. It's usually midway through whatever our uh continuum of work life or uh contributory life is going to be, usually midway through it, where all of a sudden what we've been using to cope is now an obstacle and it doesn't work anymore. And we actually have to face it and and and and then part of our work towards improving or moving forward on the goals that are important to us or that we feel we're led to do becomes dealing with ourselves. And that, yeah, it's actually very powerful, it's ugly and hard and it frustrating, right? And yet to have to be confronted with those parts of ourselves ultimately, that's why I said courageous in my bio to be courageously and if it and if you have the spirituality that you and I have, we believe that God is there to help us through that healing process, and uh the other side is so much brighter.

SPEAKER_00: 13:14

Yeah, I I love that, and I think um at least when when it comes to you know, self-talk, self-image, self-esteem, all that, um a large degree of that is controllable, it's changeable, you know. There's probably um when you look at research like into happiness, there's you know various well on the average, basically researchers agree somewhere around 50% or so is completely controllable by us. And the other 50% has to do with hardwiring and so on and so forth. Um, but uh, you know, so self-esteem is in a similar way. I mean, that's something I can control. I can't control um if I if I try to sell some products, I can't control if the person buys them or not, but I can control the integrity with which I sell, the confidence that I show, my ability to go after big fish or whatever, right? I can I can control the what the way I think about my experiences and so on. Um, and I can control what I decide to what I decide to say about myself. And I and I've done some uh some of the a lot of the counseling I've done has to do with self-talk because I I've learned to be such a believer in it myself that I will just teach people techniques that I learned or read about in self-talk. And you know, oftentimes people kind of see like, eh, that sounds silly. That sounds either silly or that's sounds like I'm lying to myself. And and for me, it's like, well, there's no objectivity when it comes to your self-value. I mean, there's no like way you can objectively determine your value, it's totally subjective, it's up to you. There's no lying to yourself. Like if you believe your garbage, you are. If you can convince yourself you're not garbage, then you aren't. I mean, it's solely your opinion. In fact, even if other people say things about you, you are the one that chooses to believe them or not. You know, if somebody says, hey, you have red hair, I know I don't, I can choose not to believe that. It's easy to believe because it's like, I don't know what you're looking at, my hair is gray, right? But it's no different if somebody says you're a bad person. No, I'm not, I'm a good person. You know, it's I decide that. But if somebody says, hey, you're a bad person, and I get upset about it, it's only because I believe what they said to be true, and so you can you can control that, but people feel they're not used to it, so it sounds like weird or foreign to them, but it's sort of like you already have an opinion of yourself, it's already the one you formed. You can just choose to change it. Um, and you know, who's to say only you? I mean, you're it's you that are saying what you are, not what other people say. So um, but it's a weird concept for people to get a hold of, and something we don't teach out in the you know, in our daily life, we don't teach this kind of stuff. Um, but it's can be incredibly valuable for people who are struggling. Uh, I want to get into what I want to get into, it's just related to this, is the work you're doing, and it's very much related to self-image, self-esteem, self-talk, and and all this very spiritual, where you where you're integrating music um with self-talk and so on, uh, to help people heal. Tell us about that, um, that program, if you will, or your ministry as it relates to that.

SPEAKER_01: 17:12

I think where I'd like to start is to connect actually to what you were just saying about the practical side of very practical, tangible, research-based of helping people with switch the self-talk. But you also mentioned that's 50% and the other 50% is hardwired. And I know that you also, as a as an ongoing student, always learning and growing like I am, that you've also looked into neuroplasticity. Absolutely. In other words, that that the brain can change, right? The brain can change. So that which is hardwired really is temporarily hardwired if we choose to address it. And so I I felt led by God into the work that I'm doing. What I know is the outcome. So I'm going to start at the end and then go back a little bit to the beginning because we're kind of talking about this healing of the self-talk. The part that's hardwired can be changed through changing the brain. A part of those self-talk you're doing is neuroplasticity. But music has a very different effect. Music kind of gets into the brain and helps change things without you doing that practical work. Just through the music listening, there's through the frequencies, through the tones, there's change that happens in the brain. And there's been some research done that, you know, as human beings, part of this negativity towards ourselves, like I said, comes through this, the reflection that other people have made back to us of ourselves, how they've acted towards us in response to who we are, that reflection we've absorbed. And as human beings, we have some very basic needs. We're designed with them. We need to be known. We need to belong. We need purpose and for our life to have meaning. And so what the research that uh has shown is that resilience, that ability to cope through hard things, when you find your meaning, your purpose, when you have that sense of belonging, when you feel known, you can stand, you can stay, you can work better through the hard stuff. And research has shown that connection with God will do that. And research has also shown that, for instance, engaging with poetry, which song lyrics are, changes the brain. And so if you're engaging, for instance, with psalms, not even musically set, but set, just the recitation, and of course, in there are God's promises of how he sees you and how he knows you and how you belong and the meaning of your life, through engagement with God, through many means, including psalms and including music, your brain can change. And some of that hard wiring without such an exerted effort, those really deep feelings you have about yourself that came through these experiences can shift. And that's what happened for me. Very basically, I had a supernatural experience. I'd been writing some songs because some friends prayed I would. I've been writing some songs, and I'd been praying for the military. I'd been praying for military and military families. Uh, it was in 2005, started writing the songs in 2004. And in 2005, uh a crossing guard up at my children's school asked me to pray for a young man being deployed with the Marines to Iraq. Would I pray while he was deployed? I said, of course we will. And then I walked to my car, and instead of the softball field being next to me for the junior hires, I had a vision and uh it changed my life and actually took me not only on the path to develop the songbores that are now available to you, but I was healed through it. I'm one of the first ones who was healed.

SPEAKER_02: 21:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 21:21

But I saw a group of troops marching in a desert in formation. I saw a canopy fall from heaven and hover over them like a flat top, and then the sides kind of rolled down to their knees, so I could still see them marching underneath. And as they marched, and this covering moved with them, hovering over them. I had one of those messages from God where, you know, he doesn't usually speak in auditory sentences, right? He just kind of plops a whole message, a whole paragraph into your heart and mind as one piece of knowledge that then we put sentences to in order to describe what happened. And so for me, the message was if you will get some of those song prayers that you've been writing and the patriotic song I gave you over there, I'll be their covering, I'll hem them in before and behind, I'll be the banner over them and shine my light in the dark places so the enemies found. So now I actually had to do something with these songs after a year of looking for whatever door would open to me, because I had no connections with military at that point and no connections with music. I ended up at a recording studio and started developing albums, and I started shipping them to military in the Middle East. Now God kept giving me these uh suggestions that I develop more albums, which my background's financial planning didn't make any sense. Didn't make any sense. Now I was able to do it, but it was illogical to keep, and each album had a slightly nuanced focus. One would be if you're going through grief, another would be if you uh are having anxiety, another one would be, and it's so each album was slightly different. I've just kept developing them over the years. Well, if you're developing an album of music, you have to listen to it. You have to listen, you have to think about the melody, you have to go into the studio and actually develop the song and finalize the lyrics and sing it and sing it again and develop the harmonies and sing those. And I started being changed. I my issues started coming up because this was way outside my comfort zone. Yeah. Like, like I wasn't a singer, I had people very close to me tell me that I should never sing again. So to be in front of a microphone in a studio was a little bit intimidating. So my stuff started coming up, and that's where the self-hatred ultimately was revealed. But it was a progression, even to get to that point where every album I developed, I started, my wound started becoming apparent, and I started experiencing improvement in my sense of meaning and purpose and belonging through engagement with God, through the poetic lyrics and the songs. Now, I knew that I was supposed to get this to the military. I was serving as a CFPB financial coach for veterans in uh 2015 to 2019. So I was doing free financial coaching all over Northern California in various vet centers, in the VA, uh in county veteran service offices, to try to help people through this intersection of emotions and money, which is really, very real for all of us. But there was no way for me to introduce that I had all these songs that I knew were transformative. And I had friends who were transforming as well. And some of the military families I served, they were experiencing a change.

SPEAKER_02: 25:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 25:08

And in their levels of anxiety and self-acceptance, I was seeing change. And so I kind of yelled at God and said, Where's the academic research that validates that this is happening? Uh, because I can't just march in and say, say the Bible says we need to have some academic research. And the message I received in return was, you do it. So I enrolled in a doctoral program and it was a leadership program. And one of the other gifts I received through that program was coming to understand healthy family dynamics. And that is part of the reason the Learning to Love Not Loathe Me book exists in the form that it does. But I also did an academic study with women veterans, wonderful, amazing women, of listening for 28 days to a playlist of psalm prayers. They could pick. I have over 200, almost 300 now. And I gave them a list of 20. I said, you have to listen for a minimum of 20 minutes a day. You can be doing things, just you can't be using your mind. So you can be riding a bicycle, you can be cooking, you can be laying on the floor, you can be anything that's not causing you to use your brain to think other thoughts so that you can absorb it and be in the atmosphere of it, right? You can be still, you can be moving. Minimum of 20 minutes consecutively a day for a minimum of 28 consecutive days. And I ask them to keep track before they listened every day on a scale of one to 10. How do you feel before you start like how are you doing? And then after they listened, same thing. How are you doing? And then just any notes, self-checking with themselves. What did they notice? I mean, honestly, the the process, I'm also uh I have postdoctoral work and spiritual direction, which is really becoming more aware of God and where he is in your life. And so it's kind of it edges up along that as well. And so at the end of the 28 days, I reinterviewed the women, and every single woman had an increase in both resilience and well-being. In other words, her numbers, where she started at the start, you know, what she'd say before she listened every day, their starting numbers got better. And their ending numbers were never lower than their starting numbers. There were a few women that had very stressful things going on in the course of their 28 days. And so perhaps they didn't lift as much after the listing, but they didn't go backwards.

SPEAKER_02: 27:54

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01: 27:54

Which was just stunning results. Yeah, that's and it's so easy and it uses the music, it uses the the poetry, right? It uses, and this is a way to do to do do battle, if you would, in a very comfortable way that you're not doing a lot of work against those demons that have kind of locked in some of the hardwired stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 28:23

Yeah, that's that's tremendous. So so um now what do you have in terms of um a catalog of like do you do people what if if people say hey I this sounds great, I want to listen to these songs, I wanna um well let me ask before I get into that. So what kind of um you you mentioned prayer songs, what kind of uh content are are we talking about?

SPEAKER_01: 28:58

So when I started with this, I called them worship songs in the art that you would find in a non-denominational church, for instance, or in a charismatic Christian church, they all are Christian-based, uh, but they're really geared towards having a conversation with God. They're all what a radio disc jockey told me is vertical. In other words, instead of saying he did this, he did that, it's hey, you, I'm talking, you know, you're you're having a conversation with God. Um, I decided, I I coined the term song prose during my doctoral work because I just found to call it worship music, it makes it more unapproachable. What if you don't go to one of those types of churches, right? And when you look at the research, music has been used to connect with God for millennia.

SPEAKER_02: 29:57

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 29:58

And so let's not call it a category that's only existed for the past 30 or 40 years, contemporary worship and praise music. Let's actually call it what it let's describe it. There's songs which are prayers. The the the bulk of the ones, I have a few instrumentals where I am doing improvisational piano where there are no words, and they're called no words. And and in and literally I am I am thinking a prayer to God. I'm saying, you know, I trust you, or I'm thinking you are you are the one who takes care of. Everything and I'm praying it through my fingers. And that creation of that song happened once. It won't happen again. And we recorded it. But otherwise, they are fully arranged. They're they're done in a recording studio with and we have you know drums and percussion and violins and guitars and the whole gamut. But they are songs that are prayers, they are conversational with and the topics really vary. For instance, if there's if if if if life is just really hard, for instance, if you're standing up against injustices, right? If you're standing up against these awful things that are going on or have happened to you, I just released an album in September called Road's Not Easy. And in those songs, there's an admission through the lyrics of there's some, it's really hard right now. And it's hard to make sense of what's happened or what's happening. And so, but we I know you're still there, and I know you're still working, and this is how you've worked historically. And and so there's there's those, there's also songs for when you're grieving, you know, it's like so, and there's songs to just adore him, to just be in his presence and to talk about his attributes. It's like this is who you are, this is how you operate. None of what I do relies on platitude. The goal is always to go deeper. There's a tendency sometimes within the Christian community to take certain fragments from scripture or maybe a particular verse and to slap it on every situation.

SPEAKER_02: 32:12

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 32:13

Right? And it's unhelpful. It doesn't really address what's going on, and often it's taken out of context. And by the way, you know how you were talking earlier about how your wounds start to show in a way you have to deal with them when you hit challenges. What I have found is that in these almost 20 years of developing these songs and making them available, very rarely does anyone come to what I have when they think life is great and God's got everything handled and they're just so blessed. Right. You come to my materials when the platitudes don't make sense anymore, when what being or saying doesn't make sense, and you are looking for something more, you absolutely need something more. In the past year, we've finally gotten all the current albums. Uh the no words right now is only on YouTube, but on all the major platforms. So if you look up my name on Spotify or Apple Music or Amazon Music, I have a YouTube channel, um, on the on the streaming services, all the albums are there. It's super easy to find. The challenge will be, and I am challenging your listeners to this. If you decide you want to try the spiritual practice of listening, and by the way, you can listen to an album or playlist or one song as long as you want or as short as you want. You don't have to stick with 28 days, right? That was just for the study.

SPEAKER_02: 33:36

For the study.

SPEAKER_01: 33:37

Yeah, but the these uh you will also my website, elisabethfulgaro.com, if you go to full collection of music, it will list the albums and it'll give you a sentence about what each one's about. But my challenge to you is listen without commercials. You've got to find a way to listen without ads. Now I have an app, it's called the Eagles Nest Soul Care Song Prep that's out there. You can listen to some of the albums without ads. That app is going to change. We're going to change providers, which is why I'm not giving you a lot on that right now.

SPEAKER_02: 34:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 34:12

But you can, and on YouTube, uh, I've got a playlist. You have to go to playlists, and then I've got a playlist for every single album. And I've got other playlists that combine songs that talk about um this one takes you from anxiety to peace, or this one takes you right to joy.

SPEAKER_00: 34:30

So I love that. Yeah, I love that you're that you're making it easy for people. I was just gonna ask, like you that you answered the question I was gonna ask about uh streaming services and playlists. So that's that's really wise that you've made it as easy as possible and different playlists and different ways where someone can come to this and find what they need fairly easily, fairly quickly, and sort of pick, handpick what they need at the moment. That's really powerful.

SPEAKER_01: 35:02

Yeah, the website's gonna be the best place for that by going to the uh because it's gonna lead you a little bit easier to what you're looking for. We're developing some master classes in the spring. We're gonna make it even easier for you to kind of describe. Um, if if your listeners want to kind of keep up to date on what's coming out and when I have a publication on SubStack and a newsletter on Substack. And if they subscribe to the newsletter, that's where I'm gonna announce and say, okay, now we've got this, now we've got that. The website you can check back with too, but that will be more of a formal announcement place.

SPEAKER_00: 35:42

That's good. So in the show notes for this, we'll put all this information um uh for people that are listening online or whatever. Um but so your website is just say it again and kind of slow.

SPEAKER_01: 35:59

It's it's so it's elisabethfulgaro.com. Okay, you can also get the books. You can also find links to the books there on the website. Right. Uh, I would like to share about the new books that I'm developing to go along with the monthly listening.

SPEAKER_00: 36:20

Yeah, I definitely want to get into that. Um before we do that, I just one of the things that that struck me as you were talking about um you know, the cliches and stuff, and the um you know, I I I find that that's to be so true, and I and I think you know, I'm a little bothered. I I'm I have a Christian background too. Uh I'm kind of a universalist in a lot of ways, really, but but my background is Christianity. I study Christianity a lot. I study um and I I come at the Bible from a very open interpretive viewpoint. I've learned that over the years. I grew up in a very conservative background, and I found that when I encountered the biggest challenges that did nothing to help me. Like I totally lost my Christianity for a while because it was so useless to me, you know. And fortunately I've regained it, but it's only through some help of some other writers. I've read some books that I was like, wow, this is a totally different way to look at this. And I was just, I think it was this morning, I think it was last night was well, often when I lay down to bed, I kind of go through some prayers of thankfulness and all this stuff. But it just really struck me of like, after all these years, I'm finally in a place with my Christianity. I feel like it's helpful to me in in every way, you know, like I can see it able to view it through a lens, excuse me, a lens that is incredibly helpful, not for me, just me personally, but my work, my purpose, and so on. And so all that to say, like I find it to be um in many ways, maybe to be like a sliver. I I it feels like to me, um many of our ministers, especially with with the um availability, you know, uh of ministers, preachers, um, especially the big big ministries, to just have so much um exposure on social media and on the radio and all over the place. But it it's so uh so much of it to me is is so like templated and cliche, and it's really more about the guys that get all the airtime, and women too, mostly men, but that get all the airtime and all that, it's by the force of their personality and their style, not really having substantive things to say, and so it's really disturbing to me that that something so powerful as uh what Jesus says, and and there's other religions that have important, good, powerful things to say. Um, but you got to really hunt for that stuff to find it because it's so it's so much about marketing and money and other things now, I feel like, that if you're if you're a person that's really trying to struggle through some difficult stuff, good luck finding help, um, and getting the right books and stuff. I I I go through there's a local used bookstore, I love it. We we buy so much, so many books at that store. Um, and she, you know, she has all kinds of books you have, she's a good person. Um, but she has a whole huge section of of religion, it's mostly Christian stuff, and it's like book after book, it's like this is all the same stuff by different authors and blah blah blah. So, do you find that to be true at all? Like that there's a lot of just really um unuseful content that's doesn't get at some of the deeper stuff, or is it just me that's seeing that?

SPEAKER_01: 40:35

No, I I I find it too, and that's I think I think I think the main points have been missed in looking at a lot of details that aren't the most essential. And I I really think the most essential Jesus summed up in the two greatest commandments when they said, Hey, what's the most important? And he said, Love God, love self, actually love God, love others as you love yourself, which means you love yourself, right? Absolutely. And if you if you you know love God, number one, love your neighbor as yourself, love the one. And I started really chasing after when it became apparent that what I was being told was love wasn't in my family of origin. It just it hadn't felt good for a long time, and now I was starting to get some real information that there were wrong behaviors going on. I went to God and I said, and I he'd led me on this journey to find the balance. You you really really so the answer to your question, you really, really need this balance that Jesus is talking about. You don't just need the spirituality of I'm gonna love God and I'm gonna stand in his presence and I'm gonna let him touch me in a worship service, right? You really, really need to love God to be present to him and to and and to believe he's God so that you can maybe live learn to listen, ask him to teach you to listen so he can help you with your movements through life. You can really be that shepherd. But if I was taught then to just love others, right? Go serve, go serve, go serve those others. If you're missing that piece of love yourself, you cannot love others on right balance. You absolutely cannot do it. He wants you to love and value yourself. So I think this core message where Jesus said, if you do that, it fulfills all the other commandments and fulfills all the words of the prophets, right? He's really driving us, the new creation is really driving us back towards wholeness with all of us together. Wholeness is what he's driving towards, right? The the old creation, okay, so we decided we didn't want him as boss, right? So we kind of run our own thing. Jesus comes, he goes, and then Jesus demonstrates he's taking us back to wholeness, where we treat all people with dignity and respect. I mean your work specializes in moral injury, which means that values, deep core values that I believe are God-given, have been violated, right, right, by human beings. Right. That's not God. That is not how he operates. And yet a lot of people who have titles in Christianity are operating in ways that are causing emotional and spiritual harm to people. I mean, I'm going to take it a little further than where you were, right? Right. And and but if you go back to loving rightly, when you love yourself rightly, you're going to stand against injustice. And that is loving in that moment.

SPEAKER_02: 43:56

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 43:57

To yourself and the other person. You're going to you're going to speak up when you need to speak up. You're going to stand for others. Right. That is part of love, which I was never taught. I was never even told what different abusive behaviors were. Right. So beyond that's one segment, but I think the and and then the deeper connectivity with God through a more contemplative lifestyle, right? Which allows, which is what the mu music listening does in a very easy way. It puts you in his presence. You're not a church service, right? You're literally putting yourself with God in relationship, going, I'm here, I'm listening. Do you have anything you want to impart to me? Like, like I'm here. What do I need to know? It's very different than going to God in prayer and reciting a scripture or saying a prayer that lasts five minutes with all these special words that people are saying. Right. So so I agree with you 100%. I think that in a large I think we've gotten very far from Jesus.

SPEAKER_00: 45:02

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I don't and I I want to get into your your your series, the series of books you mentioned. Um, but we could we could definitely talk about this a long time, but I I completely agree with you too. It's just um and and so I I think you I think you summed it up nicely, and you're talking about the connection between loving yourself and loving others, and how how much self-esteem building there is involved with advocacy and and sacrifice for others and giving to others. And I never got that, right? I didn't understand that until I started really doing it. Um, and that doing, I was already doing it, but then seeing, seeing in scripture of you talk about look at the sermon on the mount. It's so, you know, his most popular, most, most like most common, you know uh sermon that people recognize that several chapters there, Matthew, wherever else it is, but the sermon on the mount and how much he relates to the lowly and the so on and so forth, and these people and being salt and light and so on. And so you start doing the work and you recognize and you start getting away from a religious upbringing that sort of somehow miraculously avoids that piece and avoids what's in James about true religion is visiting the widows and helping the poor and all that. I mean, James just somehow avoids all that and really gets either focused on the prosperity message or uh gets focused on the very legalistic message about how wrong society is, how wrong people are, how wrong trans people are, you name it, all the people that are they're going to hell or whatever. And those are such fringe like concepts in the Bible. And there's this huge, huge section in the New Testament and in the old, if you really want to look, about love and sex and all the low, you know, and all this, like, and we just this huge sections of Christianity um are missing that, and part of it is because you know it doesn't it doesn't preach that well um to people who are are looking to to make more money or looking for God to put, you know, like the real hard work of developing your life is uh and and being that wholeness you talked about, it's hard work, it's a lot of discipline, it doesn't feel good always and all that, but you got to do it, you know, where it's easy to to hear the message about hey, if you do this, God wants you to be rich and all whatever. And so so with your music as a way for people, one one of the things that that is important with self-talk is being able to lower your own resistance, right? Be able to sort of get it in past the the the defenses of your of your prior programming, either by your parents or wherever you got it, right? This this message you have about how how how much garbage you are. You almost have to sneak those messages in. And so with your music, it's a great way to do it. Um, and I love that. And so so I want to uh build up too because you mentioned you have some more stuff coming up, uh new series you're doing, I guess you said. Can you tell us about that?

SPEAKER_01: 48:38

I do. I want to I want to address what you've just spoken about first. Uh when I started recognizing that what I was in was abuse, not love in my family of origin. And it started, I started asking God, well then what does love look like? Like what does loving self and others, how do I fit that together? I did some albums that are related to this. So I just I'm gonna mention the names of them. The first album I did wrestling with love was it's called Fly Like an Eagle. And that is literally wrestling with the wounded heart, being close to God, intimacy, how he sees me. But it's also about you love them too, like, like yeah, right. All right, right, okay, but but also beginning to understand that his love looks different and I need to stand up. Then I did an album called Courage, and that album is songs I'm singing to him as I'm learning what abuse is, and I'm trying to get courageous enough to stand. So songs of intimacy and standing. And then, like I said, the most recent one is Road's Not Easy. You're in it now, and it's uglier than you thought. And and it's not easy, and you need some encouragement through looking, talking to God about it. And then the most recent is as evening falls, which goes with that, which says, okay, now let's amp down. You're working hard all day on these hard things. This as evening falls, let's now be with God and let Him calm you down. Yeah, the work's gonna be there in the morning, right? So, what I've been developing is all of my study participants told me separately, please make other, please introduce this spiritual practice to others in a way that they have to do what you had us do. Have them pay attention to what's going on inside. So I've been developing a book to go along with each album, and they're called Companion Journals. The there's two parts. Part one, you only need once, because part one goes through and explains to you why the album, why this, what the spiritual practice is, listening every day, right? Why I'm proposing that you do it. The research study, what it showed, it's like 10 pages of just kind of explaining it so you know what you're doing. And then part two is very album specific, where what I do is I give you a two-page, they look like this. I've got a picture of the album on the cover. This was my very first album in 2006. And then what I do is I give you a very short two-page devotional for every one of the 30 days. And then I give you two pages to work through on that day's listening. So the including, so it's really the listening's easy. You select your songs. Well, you already picked your album, right? But you might want to stay on three of the songs and not the rest, whatever. Select, select your songs. Now I give you the one to ten scale. How do you feel? Step two, select, reflect, select, reflect. Where are you right now? Listen, and I give you a little space to doodle and draw or fiddle around there. So select, reflect, listen. And afterwards you reflect again, and you again you mark it, and then I've given you a couple questions to help you. What did you sense or notice? What did you feel? Is God speaking to you? And it's okay if he's not. And then you have a scripture. And then the last step is repeat. So select, reflect, listen, reflect, repeat. And this contains for each one of them 30 30 little devotions and then your two listening pages. And I'm creating them for all of them. The the because of the urgency for many of us of coming through these feelings of how to when it's right to stand up, what abuse is, um, learning to love ourselves. I've done Ascend in Worship, Walk on Water, which is my second album, which is really when life isn't going the way you hoped. And uh also for grief. And then I've done it for and courage. They're all up on Amazon right now. You can find them via my website. But the but the courage album just felt super important because I think a lot of people are there, and until we recognize and begin to do that loving self and standing up, we really can't become more fully who we are. We we're lost. We we we don't know how to function in the space that we're in. And then I've written for others, they'll be out in the next couple months, and then I'll be writing more next year.

SPEAKER_00: 53:38

So, really, you're talking if someone is really busy, um, they really want to do this process, but they're thinking, ah, I'm so busy, I'm all so really you're talking 30 minutes a day.

SPEAKER_01: 53:52

Well, and and and the thing is, right? Music, you can listen in your car during your commute. You can listen in your car during your commute. You can listen while you're on the treadmill at the gym. You can do the song per listen wherever you want. I've also created audiobooks for each of the companion journals. Now, they're not going to be out probably till um maybe the end of the first quarter next year. But then you can also listen to the devotions, right? That that are there every day for you. But it this is not something that busyness stops you because most of us have time during the day when we have to take care of activities that are not our emails, that are not doing calculations, right? And you insert it there.

SPEAKER_00: 54:32

Yeah, and then the it's a few minutes to do the writing, like do the workbook piece. Uh and I found journaling, I love they call the journals because I I found journaling to be incredibly powerful. I mean, if you read my journals, you'll find all kinds of uh like I'm all over the map sometimes, like for a few weeks I'll be on this one kick, and then I realize, okay, that's kind of garbage. And I but so but um in the sense, like I I uh like maybe I'm following this process or I have the certain belief about myself or my purpose, and I go down that road for a while, and then I change and I think you know what, I really da-da-da-da-da. But each each one, uh, but but I keep all these journals. I I I never really go back through what I what I've written occasionally, but each each day was an important piece of me discovering. Like a year from now, I might not believe at all what I'm writing right now. Um, but it still was important at that moment to write that down. And because one of the things about writing that people who don't journal maybe don't realize is that often you'll get a certain thought stuck in your head, and it's hard to move past it until you write it down or you begin writing about it, and then it sort of opens like the blockage, and uh then you have all kinds of um consequential thoughts that you couldn't get to because it's you just kept getting this one thought over and over and over. But then you write it down, and how you're thinking all of a sudden it's like, oh, and this, and oh, and that, and oh, and that, but it wasn't until I wrote it down I could release it somehow to get the next thought, and so that's one of the beauty beauties of journaling is there's all kinds of thoughts and ideas that are in there you don't know you have until you start releasing that one thought, either through writing or I don't know, another way to do it, maybe speaking it or something. And then, you know, by the time I'm done writing two or three pages in my journal, because it just starts flowing, you know, and then I I feel so good. Um, and I've like really uh processed some deep stuff, even though my intention may have not been to do that at the moment.

SPEAKER_01: 57:04

So you there's all kinds of research that validates exactly what you're saying, and even and in trauma recovery, you're probably aware of this too. They use narratives writing your story as a major way of helping your brain heal from whatever you've been through, drawing pictures, writing the story. So the journaling helps you with those positive ideas of getting the ideas out. And yeah, you always end up more than usually in one line, right? You write the first line and the next thought comes right after. It's like pulling the stopper on something, but it also writing is journaling, it doesn't have to be a lot, you know. Don't be intimidated by the page, just kind of you can sit down and write, I don't have anything to say right now today, right? But journaling is a healing, it's part of trauma recovery.

SPEAKER_00: 57:56

Yeah, and and I I like I really encourage people to use journaling. It's also a way of um reprogramming your brain, you know. I I've taught people to do journaling, uh, like one woman was struggling with um, you know, she's a really great military leader, but she'd always been minimized. And here she was, a company first sergeant. So she's in charge of all these people, and she did all this great work. She had NCOs to mentor and all these people to take care of, and she was a reception company first sergeant, so people were moving there to the to the installation after moving somewhere else. Uh, especially young soldiers showed up with pay problems, family problems, all kinds of stuff. And she compassionately and patiently worked people and she made NCOs do their work. She was, but she just saw herself as nobody and nothing because it wasn't combat duty, and it was and and you know, she's had this whole long career of people minimizing her because she's a woman. And so I encouraged her each night to just write two or three things that she did that day that she thought helped somebody. I said, it may not seem important to you, but just write down, like, hey, I helped so-and-so with a pay problem. I helped, you know, one NCO like think through a different way, I'd mentor it. And I said, pretty soon you'll find every day you're doing tons of important stuff taking care of people, and you're just not giving yourself credit because you've been programmed that what you're doing is not important. And I said, You'll begin to feel like, hey, wow, I'm gosh, I'm I'm really uh doing good stuff, you know, and so that kind of thing, uh, other ideas about what you're grateful. There's a lot of different techniques out there, um, and people aren't taking advantage of them, and they're so easy and they don't cost money. You don't have to get thousands of dollars of coaching from someone. You can you can, you know, there's a lot of great books out there about NPR and uh or NPL neuralistic programming linguistics and different things, but you can once you get the idea, I mean you need a piece of paper and a pen, and you can literally change your life and what you think about yourself over time, you know, if you spend enough time doing it and you have the discipline. And this is just another to me, this is just another great avenue um of you know, your your music is another great way that people can um. What is the word I'm looking for? They can do something else and be changing their mind, literally changing the way their mind functions at the same time. And it's just so, so simple. It's it's amazing. And it can, it can, you know, it's not like they is, you know, if you want to change your physical body, you have to go to the gym and spend hours and hours at the gym. You don't have to do this with your mind. You can listen to your music, do do some of your journaling, you know, it can literally change somebody's life in in 30 days, um, because you've done all this amazing work, um, all this empirically supported amazing work, all for the purpose of helping people. That's that's tremendous, and I really applaud you for it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:24

Thank you. I would really encourage people to like go to the website, look at the music collection, or go to go wherever you're gonna go to look, listen to the music, but allow God to direct your steps of where to start. And the way that will work is you'll get this little intuitive nudge of that one. The description doesn't really match me, but for some reason that cover, that photo on the cover draws me in. The cut my albums don't have my face on the cover, like they're they're all yeah, because my face on the cover with a microphone does not help you get closer to God.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:01

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:01

Okay, so all of them are gonna have a picture, usually outdoors, and what draws you when you go and look at the list, the playlist, if it's on a uh streaming service, which titles draw you in, start there. He actually knows where you need to start, yeah, right. So we've been convinced not to use our intuition, to use our logical mind all the time. Really, we acquire knowledge different ways. We all have that capacity, both factually and intuitively. And so a good way to start, you can you can pick one because the description matches. I'm just saying, please don't ignore that little nudge that doesn't seem to make sense, but comes with a sense of peace of for some reason I want to start there.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:48

Yeah, that's good. Well, we're out of time, Elizabeth. It's been great talking to you though, and just for everybody, it's ElizabethFogaro at uh.com. Um, and you can Google it, you'll find all kinds of stuff. We'll have the links in our show notes. And um, but I I appreciate you being on with us, and it's it's good to see um that you're just continuing this. And I know that anybody who who uses this material, because I've read your book and um it's really powerful, any of your stuff that they're gonna really get something great out of it, and and just the genuineness is amazing because we find that genuineness uh in this world today sometimes is can be a little bit rare to find. And so uh I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:38

Thank you so much. It's been good to be with you again.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:41

Yep. Okay, all right. Till next night, everybody. Bye.