On Doing Differently this month, Marcel has a conversation with Janice Cathey. Janice is a healing practitioner, visionary, and entrepreneur in the field of integrative health. Janice is the CEO and founder of Ha.Lé Integrative Health in Nashville, Tennessee.
Janice and Marcel have worked together with the Core Resonance Works process that Marcel developed over the last few years to help healing practitioners that are leaders or entrepreneurs Identify, Cultivate, and Integrate their Core alignment. Listen as Janice and Marcel talk about leading and creating organizations from the principles of healing, and hear Janice share her inspiration behind the creation of Ha.Lé, her integrative health center.
If you haven't yet listened to Episode 6: Supporting Highly Sensitive People, A Conversation with Leah Burkhart, please be sure to check it out! This episode discusses how to better understand sensitivity and sensitive people.
Janice Cathey
An immigrant-born brown woman entrepreneur
Working in the capacity of the healing arts
She is the executive director and founder of Ha.Lé Integrative Health
Janice is a member of the House of Beautiful Business, a platform and community to make humans more human and businesses more beautiful.
She holds an INNER-MBA from NYU
Instagram: @HaleIntegrative - https://www.instagram.com/haleintegrative/
Twitter: @HaLeMindAndBody - https://twitter.com/HaLemindandbody
Facebook: @HaleIntegrative - https://www.facebook.com/haleintegrative
Website: https://haleintegrative.com
TikTok: @HaleIntegrative - https://www.tiktok.com/@haleintegrative
Ha.Lé Integrative Health
Ha.Lé Integrative Health is a business that provides whole person healthcare for whole people like you. Their mission is to inspire transformative change through integrative healthcare. They focus on:
Improving health outcomes
Increasing individual resilience
Empowering patients
...and so much more! This process begins with a phone consultation and continues into a journey of finding the right treatment plan for you.
Our Sponsor: Core Resonance Works
Introducing our newest sponsor: Core Resonance Works!
Core Resonance Works provides coaching and resources for entrepreneurs and healing practitioners in integrative health. They help you align your business with your values, grow your vision, and be authentic. They use the principles of healing to help you be less stressed, more nourished and more connected.
Doing Differently - Episode 7 - Transcript
(Please excuse any typos or imperfections. This transcript was created with AI software.)
Marcel: Today I have with me, Janice, Cathy. Janice is the. CEO and founder of Holly integrative health. But I think even more importantly, she's a healing practitioner and we've been working together for several years.
And I wanted to have a conversation with Janice about herself and what she has created. And I worked together over the last couple of years. So Janice, welcome to Doing Differently.
Janice: myself. Thank you so much. It's so good to be here.
Marcel: . So I thought maybe we could start out with you just saying a little bit about, about yourself , and what you have created and what you are building
Janice: It's. Sort of a process of, of investigation and also a journey as you can imagine.
And as we've, we've discussed and gotten to know each other over the past couple of years, it's certainly something that I, I didn't necessarily stumble upon, but it's certainly something that I have been formulating almost like sculpting with clay.
Marcel: The strongest link that I've discovered between the two of us is that we both are deeply impassioned and dedicated to healing.
And we both fascinated by. The subtleties and the dynamics of understanding what healing is and how it works how it shows up what it feels like, and, how to, come from that, how to come from I mean, if you call it a process, how to come from the principles of. So you've, you've created a integrative health center in Nashville, Tennessee.
That's right. Could you say a little bit , about your impetus for creating that or what, how that, how that came about?
Janice: Sure. Yeah, the impetus really came out of sort of a guttural response to what it was that I saw being a body practitioner. Working manually with people's body, mind and somatically processing with people.
What I found is that there was only so much that I could provide as a healthcare provider in the context of the healing arts and that relationship that I was building with those individuals. I found that, gosh, wouldn't it be really amazing if. I wasn't in the silo in this treatment room, but that I was in a center of many practitioners who were inputting and traversing through this landscape of inner being and outer relationship.
Mm.
Marcel: All of this work we've done together. , a lot of it is rooted in our personal life with our own healing, but also as healing practitioners and understanding what healing is and how.
I had this background in working with organizations and communication and then became interested and started a whole nother career in a way, focusing on yoga and yoga therapy. And what I realized was that these principles of healing, these thousands of Euro principles they apply.
In context for leadership and groups and organizations. And so one way I think of it is it's all about alignment. Like when you look at healing, you're helping someone be aligned with themselves. And so you talked about business traditional business practices. And I, I kind of look at that as.
Best practices in business. And I think one of the challenges that we've talked about is when you're coming from your own alignment some of those best practices don't always fit. Could you say a bit about your experiences in navigating that like coming from your own alignment of core resonance and then your experiences as a, a leader and an entrepreneur with.
Best practices in business.
Janice: Well, first of all, , there's, there's this idea that it's a money making venture that is based on procuring and excelling and expanding and always being on that trajectory. It has no room for. All of the other aspects of a living system. So if we look at business as like an ecosystem, there are places and times when you need to retract and really kind of reevaluate, perhaps pause and wait for the new season to come.
In order to kind of watch seats. Maybe it's like sanding, I'm not a sailor, but you know, you, you're waiting for the right weather patterns in order to continue to be an entity. And I think that in those spaces that I entered that were traditional let's for lack of a better term Didn't provide that ecological idea of, of business.
And I think that that was something that grew out of our relationship that I started to see and started to map out. I really see the practice Holly, as a living laboratory. And I also see healing as a living laboratory.
Marcel: Yeah. I mean, this kind of speaks to. Coming from principles of healing in that it's, it's largely about process rather than outcome.
And it's also very much about experience, much more than information. And I love what you said about a living system because like organizations or groups of, of living people and they're interacting with one. and just like in healing, when we look at an individual person, they, they have this degree to which they see clearly are not, they have past experiences and patterns that sometimes.
Get in the way of seeing clearly or they get activated and, and they have practices. We do practices as an individual person to help us be reg better regulated and more effective emotionally, these kinds of things. And the idea behind this this process of working with organizations from principles of healing was that these principles T.
and an organization is living and it has experiences and it has patterns. It has behaviors and it's you know, it's, it's very much about the process of it having a set of practices for itself and understanding itself and, and being in alignment, just like as individuals, when we're in alignment, this tends to be.
Like when we're moving towards being more healed I'm interested. I often talk about how most of this is about alignment and then in our work together, and as I've developed this work, I've come to talk about it as being integrated alignment and this difference between alignment and integrated alignment.
Does do those terms work for you? I mean, how do you, how do you hear that or feel that
Janice: yes, those terms definitely resonate for me in a big way. And I'm still traversing through like understanding and growing my relationship with it. Right. And so it's like, We look at body and we think of a singular entity, but bodies are actually a multitude of trillions of entities.
And that I'm not here on my own volition. I'm here because of the hundreds of thousands of micros and parasites that allow me to be here. And in the same way, the. Way in which an individual behaves integrative or the way in which we integrate behavior systems and, and body systems. It's, it's this relational.
Soup that that is continu. It's a continuation of a relation relational soup that ingredients are, are, are inputted. And also at they're added in order to create a delicious broth.
I think that what I've learned is that the process. The container, the container of the process and the relationship, which is something that you've taught me is something that kind of holds the, the, the process in intact. And so I can always kind of look at it and going, okay, where are we with this?
Where, where are we with this process? And whether it be a, you know, a, a business decision that I need to make, or. Decision that we're making about the care of a patient. It formalizes the principle in order for me to really look and, and see, think seeing is, is a big part of this.
Marcel: I like the way you describe it in terms of being relational, because one, one way of understanding healing is it's, it's all about self relat.
It's our relationship to ourself. This is what we're healing and, and there's an intelligence inside of us that that's not coming from our sort of brain. It's an intelligence in our being. And I think that being aware of that and tapping into that has a lot to do with, with alignment. And that in an organizational context, it's about the organization's relationship with itself and its ability to see itself and understand itself.
With this process of identifying the core resonance, the idea is how, how do you identify what that alignment looks. In terms of what we were talking about before in a function based way. So that like, as opposed to form based the application of something with form is limited to where it's in that form it's useful, but with function based, regardless of the context of the form, you can still use it.
Janice: Yeah. I, I, I always like to say everything begins with a conversation and oftentimes we forget that we're in conversation, even beyond the words that we're using. So the, the body gestures, the, the, the way in which we're seeded on, on the furniture that we're, that we're in or on the surroundings that we're in.
So it's all about this. Huge conversation that we're having with our surroundings and with one another. And so when we, when we stay or when I stay in relationship, it does keep me in that integrative process or iterative process that integrates the relationship into it. And I'm, I'm always curious to see, like, what else
Marcel: Yeah. I mean, part of it is really this idea that healing has so much more to do with process than outcome. The idea is that if you, get to know yourself in your own alignment and work with that and cultivate it and, and and touch it regularly and take care of it, the idea is.
, like we've used a phrase a couple of times a living system, it's something that is, is happening and it is having an influence. And so part of the principle of a lot of this work is that if the alignment is taken care of.
The outcome is gonna be effective and appropriate and, and aligned in itself. So like you and I have often used different ways to describe that what we're doing is really like cultivating or caring for something. What's, what's your your sense of that sort of approach to, yeah.
Janice: It's also my, my perceived idea of outcome taking that out of the formula, if you will, because if I'm perceiving that I'm going to get dozens of sunflowers, because I put sunflower seeds into my, you know, garden bed, and I don't see these giant, you know, faced yellow, beautiful flowers. Mid season.
Am I disappointed? Or am I watching for what else has S sprouted, what else has come forth through this place that I've cultivated? So it's, I think that it is that with, rather than putting a pond.
Marcel: What you mentioned is so fundamental to a lot of teachings, which is what we're doing. It's not just coming from the process of healing, but it's coming from these ancient lineages of knowledge and learning.
And they all say the same thing in that. In yoga, it says, practice, watch yourself. And to the best of your abilities, let go of your outcomes. The idea is that if you get too identified with your outcomes, you're, you're actually gonna be trying to see that instead of seeing what is actually happening and what is going on.
So, right. You know, a big part of alignment is the idea that if you're in alignment, you're nourished and you have capacity. You're able to see more clearly and be far more responsive rather than reactive. Like whether it's in alignment as an individual or a team of people or organizations. So in many ways, a big part of this is about seeing clearly, you know in terms of what we're experiencing.
Janice: Yeah. And unfortunately there are no goggles that you can purchase, you know, online or otherwise to help you with that, that clear scene. It becomes the practice. It becomes the process. And as a practitioner, I'll always, you know, I hope I'm always in that space of practice that I'm not aiming.
Get it right all the time, but I am aiming towards being in relationship with the process. And hopefully that relationship allows me to be in , the right alignment with what's happening. I mean, I want that for my inner relationships at home. I want that with my relationships in my company. And you know, and I want that in my relationships that are, you know, in, in the mini, in the multitude.
Marcel: Yeah. Another, another very powerful aspect of this idea of healing and alignment is that as you heal. Naturally as you progress in healing, you begin to realize that you don't have to hold it all and that there's something else that's holding. And yeah, I think similarly, if you're an entrepreneur or a leader in something and you're you're cultivating something or, or in an organization, if, if you're able to cultivate a depth of alignment and have that be more.
What happens is it starts to get held externally as well as the holding you're doing as an individual. I guess, I guess part of what I mean is this is going into much more subtle territory, but there's, as something is aligned within itself, it also begins to. Be aligned with what resonates more with it in terms of its external connections.
Janice: My partner is a builder. And I think about the benches or stools that he makes the alignment of, of a stool that it's three Legg. and that it's balanced in its dimensions and it can hold weight. Isn't going to give away when weight is applied, if it's built and structured in a way that holds it, it's, it's capable of holding what may be input upon it in the same way that building a structure, an entity like a company.
You want to align it so that it can hold. Like, I, I wish I knew this a long time. I mean, maybe I didn't, I couldn't know it a long time ago because it's been a learning process for me, for sure. And as an entrepreneur, going into business making
and, and structuring and growing relationships with other. Providers and other companies and growing that access and that ability, it really isn't about me holding it. It's about me continuing to be in relationship with it, knowing that the structure in which it is based upon will hold what's coming with.
Marcel: Yeah, this is beautiful. Like, so really, I mean, a thread underneath what we're talking about is
we're cultivating something and it's a relationship. And as you mentioned, I often think about this as in healing. There's a container, there's a relationship and a process. It's really essential that all three of those are taken care of. You can actually, make big mistakes in a lot of other areas, but those three are so foundational.
It's supporting the way something, the way an entity is functioning. Like I use these everyday words. Stabilize and regulate and build capacity. So how do you put into place practices that help that entity be stable so it can regulate itself so it can like build capacity and if there's more capacity, then there's more ability to work on.
like optimizing rather than just trying to, to get by. And I think part of what we're talking about is the work of cultivating something so that it becomes integrated and it almost begins to support itself in a self-reinforcing way. Yeah.
Janice: You know, this is something that is beyond what I could have thought.
10 years ago, this is the, the process has been such a beautiful alignment of doing something very differently than I would have imagined doing it. And all of the coursework or classes or organizations Will kind of hold the, the idea of entrepreneurship or, you know, women in business or make your first million dollars.
All of these sort of entities are hyper focused on a growth aspect. And whereas of course we wanna grow, but overgrowth, as we know with. You know, plant life, you have like an overgrowth of bamboo or an overgrowth of, of any kind of plant it overtakes the rest of the ecosystem. And so staying within the alignment for us, for myself and sharing that with others allows us to be in.
Marcel: Yeah, we, you and I have had a few conversations about permaculture, which as a, as a perspective is about kind of a harmonious relating among things together. And I think there's, there's an extension of all this too. It's like our own alignment individually, our alignment as a leader, entrepreneur, and then the alignment within the organization.
And then. The alignment of when you're connecting to other things in your network what you were sharing about these classes and courses on entrepreneurship and business. One of the things it made me think of is the, one of the fundamental principles of this work in the core resonance works, is that where you're coming from is just as important as what you're.
There's so much focus on execution and outcome. I think we're, we're kind of taught that and conditioned that way. And a lot of what's happening when you're coming from healing is it's, it's kind of learning to practice more coming from a process perspective
Janice: right. It's the in. and, you know, so it's like it's coming from within so that you can, you know, embody and be on the outside.
And if I can't come from within first, and I think, you know, for me, I spent, you know, hundreds of hours being in practice with individuals. . And so that really, I think, prepped the ground for me in, in being in this role of, of leadership,
Marcel: I love what you were saying about the inverse. I often think of this as that a lot of these more dominant models in, in business practices are outside in and healing is inside out.
Yeah. The whole idea is to. To come from a knowing or an understanding or relating to your sense of self. And then there's this interaction with the external environment. And then there's like, there's a response. So the whole process, it's true, like in what you're conveying about it being inverse in that really you are wanting to becoming.
From the inside out like to sort of connect that to what I was saying previously. Like it's not to say that that outcomes are not important or that problems need to be addressed. The key here is where are you coming from in your orientation and you're relating to it. Are you coming from the problem or from the desired outcome or are you coming from your alignment?
So like one of the ways I convey this is that for a lot of us in our everyday actions, we're often coming from things like challenges or opportunities or distractions, instead of from the alignment. Like we wanna focus on those opportunities, distractions, et cetera, but we want to come from our alignment.
So I think, and then like what we've been talking about, it's a practice of cultivating that alignment. So it becomes self reinforcing and like you're shepherding and it kind of care taking it. But then just like in these analogies of a natural environment, there's the, ecosystem itself.
That's doing the. I mean, the farmer just plants, the plants and conditions, the soil, and then mm-hmm . Yeah.
Janice: Right. And you're not guaranteed rain, you're not guaranteed sunshine. You know, you could get whole systems of, you know, drought or you can get, I mean, just like this pandemic really, you know, and we're still in, it, it, it is being in relationship with, with what is.
Mm, what is happening? Mm. And can I be nimble? Can I, can I, can the entity Halle be nimble enough to not react, but be with the present moment? And so if she's in a reactionary mode, you know, she. She, she potentially could get very frozen
Marcel: yeah. Yeah. It's like our, the, the gardening analogy it's the farmer or the gardener is, is paying attention to all these forces and how they're influencing things and the interrelationship between them.
And as a result, begins to learn how to relate to them effectively. So, Yeah. It's, it's like, I think what's also really powerful. I use this analogy of it's an influence model. It's not a control model, like, oh yeah. I mean, we're so conditioned to like how do I be affected by controlling this? But if you're instead thinking about, you know, how can I influence it's so much more reality.
Janice: Absolutely again. I think that kind goes to the, the relationship. How can I be in relationship, you know, with this entity? And so instead of a control model, which will not get you very far how, you know, how can I be in a relationship and possibly.
Marcel: Lastly
could you say a bit about how people can find out more about you and Holly integrative health
Janice: So we. Located in Nashville, we have a brick and mortar. And we're also located online Holly integrative health. You can find us on YouTube. You can find us on Instagram on Facebook.
I think we just started a TikTok, we've got some mindfulness programming that we're launching purely soon. We have a cancer program that we just launched and also a recovery program that we just launched that I'm really proud of. So I think to Marcel in closing,
this process has really helped me stay with what's relevant instead of getting distracted by. The ideas of business making it has helped me stay with what's relevant within myself as a healing practitioner and watching it unfold as an entity with healing practices at its core.
Marcel: Janice, thank you so much. This has been lovely. Yeah, it's awesome. Thank you. You're welcome.