Pattern Interrupts: Break What You Keep Attracting with Jenna Hedstrom

Spirituality is often marketed as serenity. Soft light. Calm voices. Positive affirmations. But real transformation rarely begins in peace—it begins in rupture.

In this deeply clarifying episode of Let’s Get Naked, Anne sits down with Jenna Hedstrom for a conversation that strips spirituality of performance and returns it to its rawest form: reckoning. Together, they explore grief, addiction recovery, embodied healing, and the mechanics of real change—not as theory, but as lived experience.

Jenna’s spiritual path did not begin in comfort. It began in tragedy—the violent loss of a close friend. What followed was not a tidy awakening but a destabilizing reorientation of reality itself. “Visitations,” a new relationship with God, and an unraveling of identity forced her to confront what she believed, who she was, and how she wanted to live.

This episode is not about spiritual aesthetics. It is about spiritual responsibility.

When Tragedy Cracks Open the Door

For many, spirituality begins as curiosity. For Jenna, it began as grief.

After her friend was shot and killed, the foundation of her world fractured. Loss has a way of doing that—of pulling back the curtain on what feels stable and exposing the deeper questions underneath.

Who am I?
What is this life?
What remains when control disappears?

In that destabilization, Jenna experienced what she describes as profound spiritual encounters—moments that reshaped her relationship with God and expanded her understanding of consciousness.

But this wasn’t escapism. It was confrontation. Spirituality, in this telling, is not about floating above pain—it’s about moving directly through it.

The Body Keeps the Score

The conversation moves from metaphysical awakening to something deeply grounded: the body.

Jenna reflects on how yoga became a mirror for what her mind had suppressed. Chronic tension. Subtle contraction. Emotional residue stored in muscle and breath. The body, she explains, reveals what the intellect can rationalize away.

You don’t always know what you’re holding—until you slow down enough to feel it.

Anne and Jenna challenge the idea that healing is purely cognitive. Awareness begins in the nervous system. When you build the capacity to sit with sensation—tightness, discomfort, grief—you access information that no affirmation alone can unlock.

Embodied awareness becomes the gateway to transformation.

No Gurus, Only Guides

In an era saturated with spiritual influencers and self-proclaimed teachers, Jenna offers a sobering reminder: no one is your guru.

There are guides. There are mentors. There are frameworks. But ultimately, the responsibility to integrate, discern, and apply wisdom belongs to you.

When your work impacts others—especially in healing spaces—the stakes are higher. Jenna speaks candidly about the accountability required when you step into leadership in spiritual or recovery communities.

Spiritual authority without humility becomes manipulation.
Healing without responsibility becomes bypassing.

The message is steady: empowerment means returning people to themselves—not making them dependent on you.

Spiritual Bypassing and the Myth of “Let Go and Let God”

Few phrases are as common—or as misunderstood—as “Let go and let God.”

Anne and Jenna dissect the hidden danger inside that cliché. Surrender does not mean suppression. Faith does not mean avoidance.

You cannot outsource healing to spirituality.

If grief remains unprocessed, it resurfaces. If shame remains unnamed, it leaks into behavior. If triggers remain unexamined, they continue to run the show.

Bypassing pain is not transcendence. It is postponement.

Real surrender requires feeling fully—not numbing, not distracting, not spiritualizing discomfort into something more palatable.

Addiction, Shame, and Pattern Recognition

The conversation turns toward Jenna’s history with heroin addiction—an experience that shapes her compassion and credibility in recovery work.

Addiction, she explains, is not about weakness. It is about patterning. Shame loops. Numbing behaviors. Attempts to regulate a nervous system overwhelmed by pain.

Her sobriety—now four years—did not arrive through willpower alone. It required pattern recognition. Interrupting habitual reactions. Building tolerance for emotional intensity without reaching for relief.

Addiction recovery becomes a case study in transformation: how do you sit with craving? With shame? With memory? How do you interrupt the automatic?

The answer, again, returns to awareness.

Emotions as Superpower

Toward the end of the episode, a core truth crystallizes: emotions are not liabilities. They are information.

We’ve been taught to manage emotions as problems to fix or suppress. But emotions are signals. Indicators of unmet needs, unresolved wounds, or internal misalignment.

Jenna reframes awareness as currency. The more attuned you are to your internal landscape, the more choice you have in how you respond.

Triggers rarely originate where they appear. A partner’s comment may activate a childhood narrative. A colleague’s tone may echo an old authority wound.

Without awareness, we react to ghosts. With awareness, we respond to reality.

Why Affirmations Don’t Always Work

The episode closes with a practical insight that challenges surface-level self-help: affirmations fail when your nervous system doesn’t believe them.

Telling yourself “I am worthy” while your body remains contracted in shame creates internal dissonance. Words alone cannot override physiology.

Instead, Jenna suggests finding evidence your body can accept. Micro-proof. Tangible experiences of safety, capability, or growth that gradually reshape internal belief systems.

Transformation is not about reciting new language. It is about building internal alignment.

A Broader Reflection on Transformation

This episode refuses easy answers.

It does not promise enlightenment through slogans. It does not romanticize trauma as destiny. It does not present spirituality as escape.

Instead, it offers something steadier: the courage to feel.

Spiritual awakening is not detachment from reality. It is deeper contact with it. Addiction recovery is not about perfection. It is about awareness. Healing is not about bypassing pain. It is about building capacity.

The answers, as Jenna reminds us, are already within—but only if you are willing to listen.