I knew I wanted to talk with her and get her story on video so I called her on Skype and here she shares her story of healing and transformation.
Lisa: Hi everyone, I’m Lisa Natoli and I’m really excited to be here with a woman named Wendi Johnson, welcome.
Wendi: Welcome, thank you. I’m so honored to be here.
Lisa: Well I just am really excited to hear your story. Wendy is someone who took a program that I’d offered called The 40 Day Program, and it was a program that I came up with a couple of years ago and I really wanted to take what I considered the major themes of A Course in Miracles and I put them into a very simple program.
I sent out an email and a video every day with some practices, and I really wanted to have people say yes to a new way of living. You know I know that that’s how transformation happened in my own life, where I just said, “Yes, I’m ready for something new to happen.” And that’s what Jesus did and I chose the 40 Days because of his journey in the desert where he just said, “Okay, enough with my old life and I’m just going to be in this new space and allow something new to occur.” And that’s what the 40 Day Program really is.
Wendi took this program, and I just love your messages during that time and I would love for you to share your story because at the very end of the program, you said that before the program started, you had been diagnosed with a throat tumor and that during the program you had decided to really do the work that was being offered.
You took responsibility, you realized that you had caused it, you didn’t know why but you just were dedicated to removing those blocks and obstacles in your mind, not dealing on the physical level.
So I would love if you could just jump in and tell us a little bit about yourself and you can start wherever you feel you would like, just about your story.
Wendi: Thank you, my story’s kind of complicated and I’m trying to figure out. Some of the stuff is with my mom. A lot of my issues were with finding my voice, finding my voice and being connected and taking responsibility for myself and for my own healing and who I am really resonated in the 40 Day Program. Getting connected to God and to my Source and finding how I am taking part and parcel to who I am and through that journey, a lot of discovery happened.
I found the 40 Day Program through my best friend Dennis. He said. “You gotta take this” because we’d been on a journey for a while and I had done A Course in Miracles for two years and I’d read the lessons every day but it wasn’t until I started taking that program that I actually said, Now I’m going to really apply it, rather than just reading the lessons every day and kind of going, “How is this making things better?”
As a child, my father left when I was three and he was alcoholic and well I’m a big person in general but a lot of it came from this idea, and I discovered it through the 40 Day Program, that I had this deep knowing within myself that I was not wanted. My mother always told the story when I was a little girl, that she tried to miscarry me before. She would tell me, “Oh well I tried to miscarry you and I went horseback riding when I first found out I was pregnant and I kept horseback riding but you wouldn’t miscarry.”
That was meant to be some kind of fun thing but, when I said this to a friend, she thought it was a bit odd and twisted and I just kind of spent a lot of time where, even though I’m a loud person and I’m a theater person and I’m a big person, I’m 6 foot tall and you know, I weigh two hundred pounds and I’m a big, gregarious person, but I never would speak my voice, I’d never speak my truth. So if somebody would ask me a question and they would say, “Well you would tell me the truth right?” and honestly I would not. I would not tell them because I had so much fear of abandonment.
My father left when I was three and abandoned me. My grandfather died and that felt like an abandonment when I was three, so I had all of this loss at the same age when I was three and because my Dad left, I had to be put into daycare quite a lot from when I was little. My mom worked crazy hours, she was a nurse, and I spent a lot of my time in daycare and places that were not safe and I never felt like I could tell my mother anything, that if I told her, she would go away too. I felt very much like I need to sit in the corner and just do as I’m told and be a good girl.
So I was just raised this way, and a lot of abuse, mental, physical and sexual abuse happened to me, and I couldn’t tell my mom, I couldn’t tell anybody and through my life, I’ve done a lot of things including getting pregnant in high school and having two kids by 19 and trying to put myself through school in order to be a good girl, a good girl.
I started on the journey of trying to find myself and A Course in Miracles was like a natural place for me to go. Through all of this time, I had done a lot of self-damage to myself. There was a lot of loathing, a lot of self-loathing to myself and hurting myself in order to get rid of that pain and I had gone through therapy and group-therapy and A.A and all those different twelve-step programs but it was finding my spiritual self that was able to lead me on a path and I believe everything happens for a reason and finding your 40 Day Program was just, and I’m going to take it again by the way, it’s just continued to help me open up my Spirit in so many different ways.
This vocal issue that happened to me is just a keeping up of all kinds of, what I thought I was healed. You know it’s like you go through this process in journeying through your life, where you feel like, “Oh I’m good, I’m okay, everything’s great” and you realize, oh oh, something’s really happened. I haven’t gotten far enough, you just keep digging deeper and deeper, you know as you go through a journey.
I’m an actress and I was in a play and the director happened to remind me a lot of my father, he was very rude and demoralizing and in the process of that production, I had ruptured my vocal chords and being the person that I am, rather than going to the doctor, I just kind of kept going and kept going and kept pushing and pushing and then I was in another production and I ruptured it again and I had bruising and bleeding in there and I just kept going and going.
Finally, I lost my voice, like it got so bad. Now I identify myself with my voice, because now I know, after going through this deep program and continuing to work afterwards and through, I know that my voice and my size were all created in order so that I would not get lost, that I created this entire persona so that my mother would see me and that I would not be abandoned completely or disintegrate.
I felt often like I would just fall through cracks and that nobody would remember that I was there. So I have spent a lot of time trying to find who I am and in this case, this laryngitis just got worse and worse and when the doctor told me, I finally got into the doctor and when she told me that I have this tumor on my vocal chords, it was devastating because, first of all, I’d gone in there just thinking I had nodules, and she was so grim and it was so devastating and I was all alone and they didn’t think I could have therapy and they were just going to start surgery in the beginning of July and I was devastated because there’s a chance you’ll never get your voice back, the healing was going to be an 18 month healing process, in addition to not being able to speak for three weeks and it was just a whole identity thing for me.
So I had gotten that diagnosis before I started the 40 Day Program and I had, it’s kind of like this falling on the knees, you know, hands to God and I’m surrendering, kind of situation and I don’t know what else to do. When I got into the program, I decided I was going to delve into it 150,000 percent and writing, then praying and continuing to do my lessons in the Course and continuing enriching my program through writing and visualization and imagining, like you said, that I am light, that there is light, that I am the light of God, all of the things that are in the Course, and really envisioning the healing within myself and really envisioning and spending a lot of time envisioning and re-looking at how I’m addressing people.
I had discovered that I really don’t speak, especially to people like my boss, who’s scary or anybody who reminds me of my father or anyone that reminds me of my mother, that I have a really hard time telling them the truth or they’ll say something and attack and I will not speak up for myself, well, I would not, I do now, I’ve been doing it a lot.
Lisa: I was just going to catch you on that. I was going to say, “You do or you did?”
Wendi: I did. It was a did because now I’m speaking up so much, like I speak up for everything. I’m kind of almost in a pest kind of situation but I feel that way and it’s me still working through. I’m actually asking for what I need to be healthy and what I need to speak my truth, so that I can live my life to the best, so that I can give what I am here to give.
Lisa: Did you notice a point when there was a shift, like did it happen like right when you got in the program, when you made a commitment that you were going to give 150,000 percent? Was there a point when you actually felt that you were light, what happened exactly?
Wendi: Well what happened exactly is, like at the beginning, the thing that really hit me was the “default switch” that you talked about and that helped me with some eating disorder stuff, and I was like, “Wow this is pretty crazy, I’ve never thought or realized this.” It was like an opening up of doors and then I had the default switch thing and then I went, “Oh my goodness” and I wrote my friend and I was like, “I’ve never thought of it this way and this is exactly what I’m doing to myself.”
That started and then the next, it continued on and it just kept like, it’s hard to explain, I felt very centered and connected to my Source. It feels tingly and I feel like that more and more every single day in general but I felt like I was in this world but not of this world. I’m like here, but I’m not and I was very focused on visualization and writing and being love and being in the moment of love and being love, and being loving awareness and being connected always.
I did a lot of, “There is nothing my holiness cannot do.” I kept doing that over and over and seeing that and feeling very connected and I have determined that I was going to be on this journey whatever it was.
So what you had said, you know I’m going to be on this journey and I’m going to be centered on this journey, whatever the doctors say, I’m going to actually do this for myself because I also tend to be the one that doesn’t go to the doctor and I break a foot, I’m fine, I’ll just wrap it because I don’t want to make anybody upset, I don’t want to make them feel they have to do anything for me, which comes directly from my childhood, and I never realized that until it was like this huge aha epiphany and I just sat there and went, “Oh my goodness!”
It kept coming up with me because I’d had breakfast with my best friend and he was like, “You haven’t found your voice.” And he said this before that lesson and he kept saying things like, “You haven’t found your voice” and somebody else said something and I went whoa, and then the lesson came up and I was like “Whoa!” and thought, maybe this is what this is and I started changing everything.
Then I went to the doctor on July 2nd, so I was not quite done with the Program, and she was in shock, she had a special person there, because she told me that she didn’t think that there was any way that therapy was going to work and apparently this doctor was not that kind of doctor, she always wanted to send people to therapy first, and to have her say that to me, well I was just sobbing. To have her just like, “It’s gone! Do you see?”
She showed me the picture. They do this thing where they put the scope down the throat and you say e’s and ah’s and she just showed me the pictures and my vocal chords had not come together because they were just so large, so I couldn’t do higher registers, I could only do low registers and I could only do a whisper and it and I could do the registers, it had all come together, she’s like, “This is shrinking, it’s getting smaller. I don’t think you’re going to need surgery” and I said, “For a while?” and she’s like, “No, I don’t think EVER!” and I was like, “What!! What, what, what, WHAT!” I was like, “Oh my goodness.”
It was definitely not what I expected and it was a moment of tingly awareness that the healing I was doing spiritually and the healing I was doing emotionally, and the healing that I was doing that was coming from the work that I was doing, was making a different not just mentally, but physically. I still have to go to physical therapy and I’m still working on it, my voice is still a little raspy, but the tumor is completely diminished and I can do high registers and it’s pretty amazing.
Lisa: I love it, because the thing is that I’ve always known that this is true, and that when someone shifts so completely to this truth of who they are as Spirit, and they’re not mixing the levels anymore of worrying about the body or trying to heal anything, you’re just being who you are, who God created, as light and joy and love, and then what happens is that any fear that’s there starts to come up.
So it starts to come to the surface, and what I love about A Course in Miracles is, now we have a practice called forgiveness, where you can just start releasing all of those blocks. You can start really saying, “Okay, this is the work that I’m doing” and what’s happened in the 40 Day Program is, when I first offered it, I didn’t think anyone was ever going to take it. I just thought okay, this is just something that’s deep in my heart and I just want to offer it with love and that first one I think had 300 people that had taken it and now, 6,000 people have taken it and I keep hearing stories like yours.
There was another woman in the Program who was in hospice, dying and during the 40 Day Program, one of the days was “Pick up your bed and walk” and she did it. She said I’m done with hospice and she walked out of hospice and she’s totally alive, she’s completely healed. So when I got your email and i realized, it’s happening, it’s not because of anything that’s in the Program, it’s your dedication to shift. I know that that’s the truth, that you said, “Okay, I’m going to live and I’m going to just do the work”. It sounds like you weren’t even focused on the physical healing.
Wendi: Not physical no. It was all spiritual, it was all releasing and forgiving, a LOT of time forgiving, a lot of cutting the chords of pain and being in a state of love and joy, of seeing myself as light, of seeing my mother as light, my mother passed away 14 years ago, so seeing her and hugging her and loving her and forgiving her and doing the same thing with my father in an envisioning kind of situation.
The power within, it is really, truly, I mean Lisa, when I was young, I had no friends. I was a very bitter, very angry person who would rather beat you up. I had walls that were thicker than a castle and very few people could get in and since working A Course in Miracles and I mean, I want to say I’m a theater artist and I had actors who hated my guts, it was really kind of heard to work with me because I was just very clippy and mean and rude, and now, just the way people react to me, I find appreciation and love, that it’s residual, like it comes back and I keep seeing evidence of that love and joy.
Heal yourself and it heals the world in so many ways and so I give it out and I give it out and I’m not ashamed and I’m not abased and I tell my students, I mean I’m in high school, in public high school and I tell them I love them. I tell them all the time, they say not to but you know, it’s truth, I do love them and I care for them and I care for all the people in my family, in my life and it’s because of your teachings and because of A Course in Miracles and just to have this with people I’ve worked with recently, your love, your dedication, your passion, your joy, makes it so that I feel that way, so it spreads.
So your message is spreading out to me and then to whoever and whoever and we’re going to change the world and make it a world full of joy and love and peace and I can’t even express the difference in who I am, and not just physically, in every part of me, heart and soul.
Lisa: I love it. I was just talking to my husband Bill before I came on the call tonight and I was saying to him that the world is going to change very quickly from now on because people are going to know that they’re doing it to themselves. They’re going to realize, any suffering, any sickness, any sadness, all guilt, you’re doing it to yourself and when you know that you’re doing it to yourself and that it’s causing literally, physical symptoms and problems, you’re going to stop doing it.
I was saying to Bill, it’s like I can’t even remember what it was like to live the other way. I can’t remember anymore what it was like to live in fear. So I’m just grateful just to have you share your story and I’m just going to read a little bit from the letter that you wrote because it’s just so great, you said, “Why this tumor? What is your body telling you? I discovered my outer me. My ego created me is all survival to protect the little little girl who was hurt so completely and had no control.”
“I had no voice, so my ego created the illusion of hugeness to protect her. It worked for many years. I have been in various forms of recovery for over 26 years. I have become a truly happy person with a mission to inspire joy and love in all I meet. But.. Still this deep core pain body was not available to me until I began and worked this program. Yesterday, I went to my doctor and the tumor is gone. As well as the reactive lesion! She was astounded and so am I! I have moved from definite surgery to therapy and possibly no surgery needed!”
“I have heard of such things, but Wow! I have found my true voice! I have hugged and loved and forgiven. I have dug deep deep into my core pain! I am not needing to fill up emptiness in food because truly I am filled with God! I can speak in a normal tone without fear of being lost or ignored or left behind. I can speak for myself when a person is ” bullying” me.” In quotes because you know they’re not bullying you anymore.
“I speak my truth. I have my 48th birthday next week! I am excited to see where this next chapter leads! I am lighter and happier than I ever have been. I want to spread happiness and love to all being I encounter!
I brim with joy. I brim with love. I brim with deep deep gratitude. I brim with compassion. Thank you so much! Namaste.”
That’s a good letter! I was happy to receive it. What would you say to somebody, somebody who’s in a situation like you were in? What would you say to them? What would be the first thing they should do?
Wendy: They should love themselves. Find that truth, to know that they are worthy. I know when you’re in it it’s so hard. Take your program, start reading A Course in Miracles as it matters, it’s non-denomenational so it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make you feel like oh oh! You know, oh they’re pushing religion on me. It doesn’t feel like that, ever, ever, ever.
To begin the journey, to take one step forward and to trust that it’s going to be good and well and awesome because they are awesome and amazing and full of light that we can see it in them, that I see that potential and know that truth in every person I meet, so it’s in them, as it is in all of us and that that’s true, and that to start it, to just begin that healing and not worry about failing or any of that but to know the truth and seek out the love that’s theirs, it’s their right and what they deserve to have because they do.
So I don’t know, everybody’s so different but definitely start with your Program and to go into A Course in Miracles, one step at a time and take one step at a time, you know and not worry about failure, but just love and love themselves first.
I had to love myself first and if I didn’t love myself first, I couldn’t love anybody else and I needed to do that for myself and now that’s how I live and I don’t have flack, everybody just loves the love, so I’m much easier to live with!
Lisa: Yeah you’re gorgeous!
Wendi: You’re pretty darn gorgeous yourself, so I’m so honored to be here and to meet you and if my story can help somebody, then please, I will do anything to help somebody go through and know that it’s okay where they are and that they don’t have to be perfect, that it’s progress, not perfection, you know, to use some of those A.A things, and that works the same with A Course in Miracles too and your program. You know, it’s progress, you do one step at a time, one day at a time and you open yourself and be willing to trust.
Lisa: Well I’m so happy to hear you say that because I’ve always wanted to tell people, just be yourself, but without all the layers of fear. Don’t try to be perfect, don’t try to be spiritual, don’t try to be your version of what you think it looks like, because we’re becoming children again. We’re going back to that place now where, before the fear started coming in, when we were just living life in celebration and play and we weren’t worrying about adult things, and it’s just incredible. You know it really is an experience also and that’s why I just love having you here.
So I want to thank you Wendi Johnson, for being here and sharing your story. You’re the light of the world and I know a lot of people are going to be blessed by really hearing and seeing you and seeing the joy that you are. I love you.
Wendi: Thank you so much! I love you.
