63: The Human Curriculum: Teaching, Suffering, and the Art of Being Human with Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

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Cherie Lindberg

Hi, I'm Cherie Lindberg and welcome to Elevated Life Academy, where we share real stories of healing, hope and transformation. Tune in to hear how everyday people are rising above and lighting the way for others. Welcome to another episode of the Elevated Life Academy and I am your host, Cherie Lindberg and we have Dr. Judy with us. And I will have her introduce yourself in just a second.

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Cherie Lindberg

We were just talking and we're going to talk about the human curriculum. We're going to find out what that's all about and how Dr. Judy arrived to that. So without further ado. Dr. Judy, can you tell us, you know, your your full name, where you're located and what anything else relevant that you'd like to share with us?

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Sure. I'll start off by saying thank you for having me here today. I'm excited to share with you. I'm Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk and I am currently located out of Treaty six territory. So that's Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. I teach at the University of Saskatchewan, located on Treaty six, and I usually describe myself as an educator, a researcher, a mental health practitioner, and a parent.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Those are typically the four main hats that I wear, and I spend most of my life teaching at the University of Saskatchewan in the college of Education, as well as the College of Law. So I have a bridge contract between the two colleges, as well as a private practice, where I provide some consulting and educational mental health support to organizations, school divisions.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Really? Anybody interested in the topic of humans being at the heart of what we do? And other than that, I hang out with my family and love reading and research. That's a passion.

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Cherie Lindberg

All right. Well, wonderful. So here at Elevator Life Academy, we we love to hear about journeys and how you have gotten to a point where you're living an elevated life. And I particularly want to know more about this human curriculum because I was reading through it about, you know, getting back to our values, like how important our values are.

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Cherie Lindberg

So can you share a little bit about that?

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Yeah, I think it's interesting how you start with, you know, living an elevated life. And when I hear that terminology, gee, I think that a listener might be thinking that I live a perfect life, an enlightened life, a life where I'm always living in my values and being successful. And I just would like to start out by saying, you know, the human condition is one of suffering and struggle.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And the human curriculum was a framework that I came up with to support, you know, guiding myself through a process of teaching. Initially, I found the the profession of teaching very difficult. I was trained to teach subjects. And of course, inherent in that is teaching students. But I wasn't really trained in the art and science of the nuanced human condition of the individual that was going to show up in my classroom with big behaviors, big needs, big life experiences.

00;03;17;00 - 00;03;47;19

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And so for the last 25, 30 years, I've built this framework that I call the human curriculum that has supported my own journey as a human thinking about my past, my present and my future potential, and then inherently guided me through the process of teaching and supporting others. So at its heart, it acknowledges that we're all unique. We're all in a process of struggling, suffering, thriving, surviving, and, you know, bouncing back and forth in that via life.

00;03;47;19 - 00;03;59;23

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And so it's really a framework and a guide that has a philosophical foundation, a process at the root and capacity building to support, you know, thriving and surviving in life.

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Cherie Lindberg

Mm hmm. Can you get more specific about building the capacity? Like what? What are some specifics?

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Yeah. So a foundational principle of the human curriculum to start off with is this notion of self-care to caregivers. So I realized really early on in my career as an educator, a.k.a leader in a classroom, that if I didn't take care of myself, then everyone was going to suffer. So it's that notion of self-care to collective or community care just as a foundation.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And so based on that foundation, I have a process that you work through in the human curriculum and that is aware care, cope, RCC And that process asks you to think about in terms of awareness. How am I building awareness of my needs, the needs of others? That's a knowledge gathering, sort of thinking cognitive domain of the curriculum, moving to care.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

How am I slowly integrating new knowledge into my everyday experiences to support thriving and flourishing? So that in itself is an attitude or an affect that I build. And then coping. So what skills am I practicing and using daily to build strength and resilience and cope with adversity? Keeping in mind, going back to what I said a moment ago, life is full of adversity and so be aware care cope process eventually leads to what I call cope, manage, grow, heal, repeat.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And the key part of that is repeat, because we never actually arrive at this place where we are enlightened or we are necessarily elevated. That might be a momentary place that we feel some strength and some success, and then life flows our way and inevitably we have to start the process again. So those are some foundational principles and processes that guide the curriculum.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And then it has content areas. So if you want me to talk about those, I can dive in.

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Cherie Lindberg

But yeah, I would love to hear more.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Okay, so the content of the curriculum is framed around five AMS and 5 hours. That is an evolving process that started with my master's and PhD dissertation and my post-doc experiences as an academic. So essentially the entire curriculum has been built on, you know, life experience, practice research from research back to practice and this loop, you know, that has built these things.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And so it's a living curriculum built around these sort of ten foundational pillars. So the first is that meaning and mindset are necessary for arrival and survival. So figuring out who we are, why we're here, what we believe in and value, You talked about that at the start. So we dig into that through meaning and mindset components. The next is honoring that mental health is a capacity that we need to build, and it is a part of the human condition.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

We all have mental health. We vacillate between being ill and well throughout our lifetime and how do we build literacy and capacity to support our wellbeing in that sense. From there we move to mentorship and management, and what those two stand for is thinking about ourselves as building capacity, as mentors to be a teachable person, as a mentee in life, and how we sort of float between those roles and how important they are for the human condition and our development throughout a lifetime.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And then management in terms of self-management, self regulation, building, self-compassion, self-awareness, there's a lot of components there. And then to how as a leader, if I am a leader, whether that's an educator or in another discipline or domain, how I cultivate and support managing the humans that I work with, keeping them in mind at the heart of what I do.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

So then that is the kind of content or thematic areas of the curriculum which work to build capacity in the five are areas which I won't dive into too deeply, but I'll just say what they are. And so first relationship, because as we know in the human work, if we work in the capacity of human development relationships at the root, so relationship building resilience, developing and accessing resources is working on routines for wellbeing and safety and support of others.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And then reflective practice, which kind of closes the loop and brings us back to the start. And so that's a big part of it, is that reflective component which is built in.

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Cherie Lindberg

Okay, so do is this like a class that folks take or several classes or different levels like.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Yeah, it's, it's, it's become a lot of things and so I started teaching or using the human curriculum as I was building it in my teaching in K-12 education. So I spent 20 years teaching K to 12. And as I was working through this process, I was bringing in into my classrooms and using that to support how I supported my students, which at that time was mostly middle years.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

st of my career teaching that: 1112

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

So I teach health courses, mental health courses, trauma responsive courses for educators and the lawyers. And we look at how to use the human curriculum as a guide to support, as I said, our wellbeing, but then bringing that to the collective wellbeing, because as lawyers and teachers, I see us in caregiving professions. Humans are at the heart of our work.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And so it has courses at the undergraduate level as well as at the graduate level. So I teach graduate courses rooted in the human curriculum and we take a couple of different focus areas. So we go in the direction of research in terms of educational research courses or curriculum, thinking about the human curriculum as pedagogy. So the methods and practices of how we do things that would be a curriculum focus.

00;10;01;21 - 00;10;39;12

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

I also offer the human curriculum to the communities. So I have organizations, government organizations, school divisions, legal organizations, community entities that will call upon me and in some capacity all deliver the human curriculum, whether it's in a one shot, three hour kind of workshop or whether it's over the course of several days for that organization. And with the aware care cope being the process, I just decide depending on the time that we have to go through the content, whether or not that is kind of delivered in a here is the lay of the land and what you can do with this information to an actual longer term process.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

So in a whole term course, for example, where we would gather 3 hours a week over 12 weeks, the human curriculum would go deep into the process of aware care, cope, where I would be doing a deep dive into myself and thinking about what I can bring from learning about me to my profession.

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Cherie Lindberg

Mm hmm. Wow. Pretty, pretty comprehensive. And interestingly, I just think about you're basically helping people that may have never gotten this education, have an opportunity like, you know, here here are some different ways that you can find meaning and purpose in your life. And I'm you're not saying this, but this is kind of how my brain's understanding it is helping them be more aligned, grow their capacity to be more grounded and live a healthy life.

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Cherie Lindberg

Like all these skills that normally we we get with our our caregivers growing up, but not all of us had that potential opportunity to get those things. Exactly. So I would say, don't panic. You you have a class that you can take that can really personal growth help you, help you expand?

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when I teach the courses, I focus on myself. I mean, as a therapist, educator, parent, leader, I have to be careful about what I share and still have boundaries, right? I have to acknowledge that my life experiences involve the experiences of others, and I just have to be very careful about what I share and how I share it.

00;12;06;23 - 00;12;30;23

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

But I do acknowledge that my life history has trauma and you know it. It also has privilege. You know, I'm white, middle class and settler Canadian and, you know, living and working in systems that include families that have intergenerational trauma, either at the root or surrounding us. And I do talk about how that evolved into mental health issues and concerns.

00;12;30;23 - 00;12;57;13

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

For myself, anxiety is a big thing that I carry root with me. And so I share, you know, my life experiences in terms of those kind of being the questions and queries I had that I wondered about that became foundations for the human curriculum and that I didn't have that guide. And so the curriculum is, like I said, that container or that framework and I also remind people it's not a prescriptive process.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

It doesn't come with the how to in the sense of here are all the things you need to do. It's a guide that says, Who are you? How do you find yourself within these content areas and what can you figure out that can support you on your journey right? So it's not something I come in and prescribe to people.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

I say, Here's a container and you can put in it whatever you need and we can follow sort of these pillars that support our learning throughout and through that, in especially in the courses that I teach, we delve deep into conversation and connection and building community through that content and in essence, just building us up and supporting ourselves from the inside out.

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Cherie Lindberg

Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm hearing. Is that helping everyone go in to their own inner wisdom and letting the answers arise from there. Yeah, yeah.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

We all belong within the human curriculum, right? Anyone can teach it. Anyone then can learn from it, and you can take it in a direction that you want. If you come from a particular culture or place or spiritual background or, you know, psycho educational background, you can take what you know helps you thrive and find where it fits in the container.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And in that sense, the human curriculum as a graduate course, for example, for Master's or PhD students has an element of heuristic self-study that kind of trickles all the way through the human curriculum. So it is a curriculum that helps you turn inside and look at what the gaps are, what your needs are, and how to support those first.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

So that kind of came from, you know, my early teaching and learning experiences as I was kind of bridging the gap between a student and a pre-service teacher. In the late nineties, I was coming into classrooms and we were learning about, you know, buzzwords like trauma informed teaching. As I started to move into my professional practice, I felt like that was kind of the end goal.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

But that's certainly not where we start, like trauma informed or trauma responsive leadership and teaching comes from starting with the self first. This isn't about others who need us to help them find the pathway we need to help ourselves. And then from that personal experience of ebbing and throwing, ebbing and flowing sorry, through life, adversity, we can then shine a light in a direction to be trauma responsive because we've done the inner work.

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Cherie Lindberg

So yeah, I love that because it's one of the things, because I teach as well and I think a lot of therapists and so I'm always encouraging, you know, self work because if we, if we don't do the work, we can't be aligned with, you know, because we're we're struggling ourselves. Yeah. So absolutely. Building the capacity to hold that attune space, you know, for our clients, for our students or friends even or family.

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Cherie Lindberg

Yeah.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And you know, you know, a trained therapist myself as well, like we all know, you know, given our registering bodies, whoever that may be, we have to have that component where we've done ours for self-care or certain hours for personal therapy. And sometimes we think about it, and I've been in that space too early in my career where I think of it as a box I need to check or and add on to what I do in my real work And coming full circle over the last 20 or 30 years, I realized that that like self-care piece that a lot of us say, you know, self-care, self-care or it's been more at a time or

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

it's been so often talked about on social media that it's kind of become something that, you know, is is irrelevant, I guess, or simplistic or simplified. It really is at the heart of everything we do, and it has to come first. Yeah, that's that's kind of been a driver or motivation behind that because it wasn't until I actually started applying self-care principles to my life, which also include forgiveness room for mistakes, easing my desire for perfectionism, you know, all kinds of things that include self-compassion and self empathy and struggling through the suck and just facing those things and not setting them aside.

00;17;04;10 - 00;17;10;22

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

When I go to work, bringing them with me to some capacity as I support others and help them try to help them.

00;17;10;25 - 00;17;37;20

Cherie Lindberg

Yeah, I mean, you're basically being a human. It makes sense that that's the human curriculum, right? Because it's like, okay, this is what it means to to be a human. Exactly what you're saying. So whatever you're comfortable sharing. How did your personal journey I always like to have a personal journey question here on the on the podcast, because so many you know, I did title it Elevated Life Academy because.

00;17;37;22 - 00;18;02;13

Cherie Lindberg

Yes, we do, we do suffer as human beings. We do struggle. And I wanted to help people know that, hey, if you build your capacity like you're talking, if you build your capacity for things, you can live more peacefully, you can feel free, you can flourish. And that's where the elevated life, you know, came from. And it's a process of getting there.

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Cherie Lindberg

Right. And so everyone that I interview is like, what are the skills or tools or how did you get there? So it's like, that's your own personal stories. I'm just wondering, you know, where did you begin? It sounds like this came in to really support you, to get you know, to get there. Could you share a little bit of your own personal story, Whatever you're comfortable sharing?

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Yeah. And I'll just tie in to what you're saying right now with this this elevated experience, which, you know, I'm sure has roots in Buddhist traditions and philosophies. And there's a great quote from not Han. I can't I can't remember the exact quote, but it's kind of like if you want peace from the world or in the world, you have to start with peace with it.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

That's how I see that. That elevated experience starts with the self. How do I elevate myself to to a new level, a level of self power and self-compassion to support that in the world? So, yeah, my life journey, you know, looking back, like loosely speaking, if I think about I don't know if your audience is familiar with the ACS, but a study looked at trauma amongst different groups.

00;19;03;00 - 00;19;29;08

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And I mean, it has it's, it's complicated factors It's not the be all end all as far as studies but it does give us a breakdown of kind of ten areas of trauma, abuse, neglect factors and families that we can grow up with. And and if people want to, they can kind of give themselves a score. And I did that early on in my life and realized that, you know, I had six out of ten aces and I don't get into what those are when I teach necessarily.

00;19;29;08 - 00;19;53;07

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

But that life experience and trauma kind of led me to feeling lost as a teenager. I didn't have purpose or direction. I dropped out of high school because I didn't see the point. I didn't fit within the system and I kind of floundered for a while, probably not even querying what was going on, just going through the motions of life.

00;19;53;09 - 00;20;22;24

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And eventually I became a parent as a teenager. I was 18 when my first child was born and that threw me into a place where I needed to focus on something and above myself. I could no longer just be focused on just living life. I had a higher calling as a mother, and what was I going to do with that so that my child wasn't born into a world where they potentially didn't have meaning and purpose?

00;20;22;24 - 00;20;43;14

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And so I started seeking direction and that led me to teaching. I thought, Well, I can finish school, I can become a teacher. I'll learn about psychology and the human condition, how to support young people, which I didn't feel I had when I was young. My parents did their best and I love them for that. And, you know, we're all just doing our best.

00;20;43;14 - 00;21;06;12

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And those experiences come with the good, the bad and the ugly. And so I wanted to learn about that and how to support other young people. I thought teaching was the most direct path to that. So I finished high school as a young mum and went off to university. And, you know, for better or for worse, came out and and worked in the school system.

00;21;06;12 - 00;21;33;04

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And I was drawn to schools where there was a lot of adversity. So in Saskatoon we have what are called inner city community high schools. At the time that would have been I don't know if we still designate our schools that way, but provincially they designate our schools in communities with high socioeconomic need or high impact of colonization, high cultural diversity, or poverty density environments.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

As inner city community schools. I spent most of my career, if not kind of all of my career in those schools, really drawn to supporting what I at the time termed youth at risk, because I saw myself as a youth at risk and wanting to bring to those students what I didn't have in school, which was an interest in life and learning.

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Cherie Lindberg

Right, right.

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Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And so that I thought was my calling. And to go back where we started the conversation within the first few years of teaching, I realized, well, I was taught to teach these students content, but not teach these students in terms of the heart of who they are.

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Cherie Lindberg

Yeah. Oh.

00;22;12;26 - 00;22;33;10

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Yeah. That, that kind of drove me into myself, my own therapeutic practice and trying to bring what I was learning to my own life and do my own reflective work. And that was then just an ebb and flow of teaching and life experience and reflection that led to an interest in research and further learning.

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Cherie Lindberg

And so when did the therapist part of you come into play here? Yeah, yeah.

00;22;38;07 - 00;23;02;21

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

That's a good question. I'd always thought about, well, as I was teaching, I always thought, you know, I worked closely with school therapists, social workers, psychologists, and tried to listen intently to what they were telling me about what I needed to do in the classroom. And I felt like and I didn't know a lot about therapy at the time, but I felt like what I needed to do was therapy in the classroom and, well, how do I do that?

00;23;02;21 - 00;23;31;28

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

You run up against questions like, you know, I'm trained to be a teacher, not a therapist. What's the line where where's the boundary? And I started taking courses and certificates and and different things to help me learn a little bit about the world of therapy. And through that and completing a master's in therapeutic counseling. Eventually I found myself working in a mental Health Day program as the teacher, but also with the therapeutic background.

00;23;32;00 - 00;23;55;03

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And we were working with students in that program who came to us because they were struggling in the regular school system. They were quote unquote, youth at risk. And we were providing a therapeutic school day for them. And so I started because I was the teacher in that program who also then had a little bit of a therapeutic background trying to bridge those two worlds.

00;23;55;03 - 00;24;26;01

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And I finally settled on. For me, the answer was therapeutic teaching. So I'm not a therapist in the classroom. I'm the teacher, but I can do this job therapeutically. There are components of, you know, attachment therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectic behavior therapy. There are components of all kinds of therapeutic modalities that can fit within the classroom that I can learn about and teach with those concepts at the root of what I do and help support my students in their learning journey.

00;24;26;08 - 00;24;47;24

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

So I'm not doing therapy in the classroom. I'm teaching through a therapeutic lens in a public way. And that also was growing and changing with my study and interest in a human curriculum. And so a big part of the human curriculum, when I teach it in an educational context, is learning about the art and science of therapeutic teaching.

00;24;47;29 - 00;25;21;08

Cherie Lindberg

Yeah, that's wonderful. I mean, you know, unfortunately, I think more and more teachers are having to have therapeutic skills because of the students. You know, we're where things are at. And I'm listening to you and I just think about there's a difference between, you know, we used to say trauma informed. And I really liked what you said about trauma response, because what I've seen over and over again is the knowledge is there, but the behavior is not aligned with a trauma spine.

00;25;21;08 - 00;25;53;14

Cherie Lindberg

And that's appropriate to to what's going on. So I'm hearing you talk about that in the end, bringing that into the classroom, which then connects to your human curriculum. Yeah, like, like, of course, like all these social skills and attunement and presence and relationship. Yep. Right. That's what you're talking about. I hear that. It's really wonderful. And now you've just taken it from the elementary middle school years up through high school, undergraduate and also graduate.

00;25;53;14 - 00;25;57;23

Cherie Lindberg

So you've been able to use it in many, many different places.

00;25;57;23 - 00;26;36;27

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Yeah, the five themes kind of that that came out, the five M's in the 5 hours were really correlated or they culminated through my dissertation work. I went from thinking about my own life experiences. So again, what I call the youth at risk. I wouldn't use that terminology today, but in the past, that's what I turned my life experience as to a master's program where I wanted to look at youth at risk, and I interviewed youth who were in high needs, specialized programs at risk of dropping out of school or at risk in life, trying to find out, you know, what might be at the root of your journey or your needs that I can

00;26;36;27 - 00;27;04;04

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

turn into pedagogical practice as a teacher to support you. And then I wanted to in my district dissertation initially look at teachers at risk. So teachers at risk of burnout or who were struggling in the profession. And then I realized, you know, I've looked enough at risk here. Maybe I want to look at the opposite of that which might be thriving in what are people who are thriving do that we can learn from.

00;27;04;04 - 00;27;21;29

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Yeah, And that really led to a lot of the rest of my research and practice because I worked with some teachers who felt they were thriving and I developed those themes and that's where I kind of landed on. I started vetting those themes through the people that I taught. Like, did they make sense? Does it fit with your worldview?

00;27;22;06 - 00;27;53;15

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

How would you reshape these themes and and just sort of over time realize that those those ten themes together can be integrated into any area of work or life practice. You can take it in any direction you want to go. And further research that I did that that really helped with that was we looked at teachers who were thriving during the COVID 19 pandemic, so we called them pandemic THRIVERS and we wanted to hear from people who, you know, we heard a lot in the news and a lot around the world quite naturally about those struggling during the pandemic.

00;27;53;19 - 00;28;19;03

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

It was a hard and difficult time. I would been at the post-secondary level during that time and shifting to online and supporting students mental health was very, very difficult. But I wondered who were the pandemic survivors first? Were there any and what were they doing? And from that study, it really took those. And are areas deeper and broader because I saw that they had those skills and capacities and that's how they thrived.

00;28;19;03 - 00;28;46;29

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

They did it in different ways. Some leaned on spirituality and faith, others leaned on cultural or ancestral knowledge, others leaned on community. There are different ways that those five them in five hour capacities or content areas evolved or supported them in their practice. But it all kind of still came down to that. So I still use as the foundation or the thematic areas for learning and development in my courses.

00;28;47;05 - 00;29;08;15

Cherie Lindberg

Yeah, that's really cool. I'm a been a trauma therapist for 20 years. The last five years I totally have shifted over to post-traumatic growth and flourishing. Yeah, it was like you can, you can excavate that stuff for the rest of your life. Yeah. About what does it look like to, like, live now and thrive and flourish?

00;29;08;15 - 00;29;33;10

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

So to me that's a big part of the curriculum is is talking about that that trauma lens. And we all know about PTSD, post-traumatic growth or sorry, post-traumatic stress disorder. We don't learn about post-traumatic wisdom or post-traumatic growth. And that really does tie back to my life experience, because I thought the only way for me to rule out of my childhood was with PTSD.

00;29;33;16 - 00;29;59;07

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

But that's not true. There was a part of me striving to learn and analyze and reflect on my experience. What was that part? I didn't have a name for it, and it's so wonderful that people like you and people in the trauma world are investigating those different pathways because going back to aware care cope, sometimes it's just the awareness that there's a different way to roll out of this experience than having a stress disorder.

00;29;59;10 - 00;30;02;29

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

So I that really speaks to my heart that yes.

00;30;03;01 - 00;30;30;10

Cherie Lindberg

Yeah, it speaks to mine too, because I think a lot of folks I have a higher score as well. A lot of folks look at that and it's like, Oh, my life is over. Like I'm going to get disease, I'm going to die early. Like they start to go down that path. Yeah. And so speaking to know there are these you have parts of you that if encouraged, if exposed to these different capacities that you can grow.

00;30;30;10 - 00;30;46;19

Cherie Lindberg

That's, that's the whole thing. Yeah. Well everything that you're talking about and why we have elevated life is to show people there's so much that you can do so that you can live the life that you really want instead of what? Just because of what happened to you. That doesn't mean that that is your identity for the rest of your life.

00;30;46;19 - 00;31;18;07

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

So exactly what you're to at the heart of that, I think, is healing. Like when I hear the practice again, I think that the root of an elevated practice is that healing centered focus. And from my experience, I wouldn't say this, you know, is a statistic or a research based opinion, but from my experience, those in helping professions find themselves to those professions because they had harm in their life and they, you know, wished or hoped or needed some form of help or healing that just wasn't there.

00;31;18;07 - 00;31;42;26

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And many of us find ourselves, like I said, in a helping profession, but potentially haven't done the work to get us prepared to work in a profession where we're going to be triggered by other people's trauma constantly. And, you know, then how do we support people without setting our own need for healing? Sigh And so that's like that cope, manage, grow, heal a little part of me, right?

00;31;42;26 - 00;31;54;15

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And then repeat the process and continue to use that learning in my professional practice so that I can show up as you know, the best practitioner that I can to be there as I've signed up to help.

00;31;54;17 - 00;32;05;10

Cherie Lindberg

Yeah, Yeah. Beautiful. So is there anything that maybe you would want to share that I haven't asked you that would be important to share with our listeners? Just double checking. Yeah.

00;32;05;11 - 00;32;31;16

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Gosh, I don't know. We've talked about a lot in the cover. It all know we've, you know, I think kind of my, my bottom line message is that humans help humans heal. And so if we find ourselves in a helping profession, going back to that human, who are you? What is the work that you've done to support yourself and strengthen yourself and build that capacity because you will be called upon.

00;32;31;19 - 00;32;57;04

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

You are called upon in your practice to support Mother's healing and growth. And I think that is both a responsibility and something that we can honor as having immense power to support the human condition. And I'm going to be stronger the more I work on myself. And going back to where we started, it's a journey. I'm not there yet as the perfect practitioner in air quotes.

00;32;57;04 - 00;33;16;10

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

I'm on a learning journey and I make mistakes at home and I have challenges in my personal and professional life. I'm just always aware and pain attention to what I can learn from that and how I can use that in my own capacity to help myself heal and then potentially others if I'm called upon to do that.

00;33;16;12 - 00;33;34;25

Cherie Lindberg

Absolutely. And I just call that the journey of life, really, and that this is this is going to be you know, I used to think that I arrive. This is when I was younger. I had arrived at a certain point, but now I'm realizing this is a path. This is a path so the rest of my life so I've let go of that.

00;33;34;25 - 00;33;52;14

Cherie Lindberg

Well, thank you so much for coming and sharing all your your wisdom and your human curriculum. Very fascinated by that. And we'll miss your that. We have all your socials so that people can reach out to you that find this, you know, fascinating or have questions for you.

00;33;52;16 - 00;34;11;08

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Yeah absolutely. And if I can can give a little plug if people are interested in the topic, I talk about it mostly. I give away most of my free knowledge on Instagram at Dr. Judy Johnson's for an Ex. So that's a great place to connect with me and hear some of these personal stories interwoven with my teaching and life experience.

00;34;11;10 - 00;34;28;19

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

And then I also, in the spirit of reflective practice, have a human curriculum journal available on Amazon. So if anyone's interested on that, they can check that out. And it has all elements of the curriculum woven throughout to help you walk a learning journey for, you know, whatever period of time you're interested in doing that.

00;34;28;22 - 00;34;40;05

Cherie Lindberg

Well, beautiful. Thank you so much for giving that to the world and being being who you are. And because we all need to shine our light for everything that's going on in this world to help people.

00;34;40;05 - 00;34;51;01

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Get into that space. So I also share what you're doing in getting people's voices out there and collecting thoughts around how to elevate our practice and move to that next level in personal and professional care.

00;34;51;03 - 00;34;53;03

Cherie Lindberg

Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you so much.

00;34;53;05 - 00;34;56;23

Dr. Judy Jaunzems-Fernuk

Yeah. All right. Take care.

00;34;56;25 - 00;35;22;20

Cherie Lindberg

So I hope everyone enjoyed hearing about the human curriculum. Sounds like a very comprehensive curriculum for all of us to learn different skills, different capacities, how to take care of ourselves so that we have the capacity to have the space to take care of another. So often I think there's a lot of patterns out there where we take care of others at the expense of ourselves.

00;35;22;22 - 00;36;02;17

Cherie Lindberg

And so this sounds a little bit more balanced. There's lots of reflection. These are skills and tools that could really help people maybe live in a little bit more harmony, a little bit more balance, and make sure that you're taking care of yourself until you expand and offer services to take care of another. Just as I have said before, if you're finding this podcast helpful, please share it with folks we are trying to share all over the world different ways, different skills, different tools so that we can rebuild the world in a more positive direction.

00;36;02;19 - 00;36;29;05

Cherie Lindberg

And if you want to be part of that, we would love to have you. We're trying to grow a big conscious community out there, so share with whoever you think would benefit. And thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it. And until we meet again. Thanks so much. Thank you for joining us today. And Elevated Life Academy stories of hope and healing as you move back into your world.

00;36;29;05 - 00;36;51;04

Cherie Lindberg

I invite you to take a breath and hold on to what ever stirred something in you from our podcast today. Healing isn't always loud, but it is always sacred. Whether today's story Open Your Heart gave you a new perspective or just reminded you that you are not alone, it matters. And so do you. Keep choosing alignment, keep trusting your becoming.

00;36;51;04 - 00;37;06;25

Cherie Lindberg

And remember, the elevated life is imperfect. It's present. If this episode resonated, share it with someone who needs a little more light. And if you're ready to go deeper in your own journey, you know where to find me. Until next time, stay rooted, stay rising and stay. You.