Laura Desimone is an elementary school teacher for the Peel District School Board and a Reiki master and founder of @illuminabodyandsoul. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Education at the University of Toronto.

In this episode we talk about the importance of self-love, ways to improve the education system and how Reiki and meditation can teach mindfulness. We also talk about her struggles with severe anxiety in her 20s and early 30s, which politician she thinks needs emotional healing and much more.

Timestamps

  • Do parents do what is best for their kids or best for themselves? - 14:10

  • Did you ever feel like you could be making more money if you weren’t a teacher and what kind of legacy do you want to leave? - 19:45

  • Why did you decide to pursue a PhD? - 23:30

  • Why do we need credentials in order to do things? - 25:25

  • The only reason people don’t reach their full potential is because there is a part of themselves they don’t like - 28:30

  • Why Laura doesn’t like giving students marks and the importance of focusing on process over outcomes - 32:30

  • What is Reiki and how did you find out about it? And Laura’s struggles with Anxiety in her 20s and 30s - 42:00

  • How to get better at loving other people and managing your emotions - 53:25

  • Sound healing meditation and importance of vision boards? - 1:14:50

  • What political figure she would want to talk to and why she thinks they need emotional healing - 1:19:10

 

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0m74ZmCPgjvp5WGOMg3P9C?fbclid=IwAR26eU5n3mrm_Budl3sRYnVouOfOrxsZhwLfZUUNmh2Ph97x-80E2uaJIf4

Listen on Itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-atila-podcast

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG2iWiYgJYkjBl4EdYGI5mw?view_as=subscriber

Full interview and transcript: https://bit.ly/atila-tv-laura

Atila Tech’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/atilatech/

Laura De Simone instagram: https://www.instagram.com/risemindbody/

Tomiwa’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tomiwa1a

Tomiwa’s twitter: https://twitter.com/tomiwa1a

Jacob’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/munenejr

Do parents always do what is best for their kids? [13:45]

Tomiwa Ademidun: You want to do this [your passion], parents want you to do this [what your parents hope you become]. So at the time you told me you made the decision what was the relationship like and then how did the relation progress over the years. - [13:45]

Laura De Simone: So my relationship with parents was always really good and in that time when they were being … they were just being parents. They had in their mind a vision for their kid and all parents I believe want the best for their children. And I believe, I truly honestly believe that every parent is trying their best. - [13:56]

Laura does not believe in the traditional grading systems [32:10]

Tomiwa Ademidun: First thing that comes to the top of my mind, so like maybe, what’s one change or what would you … I know you mentioned the thing about self-love, which is a great point. Can you think of something that you would do differently, like so like, the way the system is set up now, would you change anything about that? Because I feel like in order for you to start to give self-love, we need to stop doing something and start doing something else to change the way something is done. Does that make sense? - [32:10]

Laura De Simone: I feel I would stop putting so much emphasis on outcomes and put more emphasis on process, right. I don’t like giving kids marks, for the simple fact that a mark turns into how they define themselves. -[ 32:30]

Tomiwa Ademidun: Everything you are saying I agree with you but I feel that to be a good host I have to ask the counter question okay. If I’m a university, I have 500 high-school students, I need to know who the 50 smartest students are - [32:55}

Laura De Simone: Give them a problem, give them a problem to solve and see who comes up with the best solution. A real life problem. Make education problem based. At some point they will need an evaluation but let’s leave the evaluation to a later date. Not when kids are in grade one. - [ 33:14]

Improving your love for others and emotional health [53:25]

Tomiwa Ademidun: One thing that piqued my interest, you mentioned that with Reiki, it helps you like transfer to other people and makes you like happy to be around other people, what’s the word you said? Make you …

Jacob Munene: love people ?

Tomiwa Ademidun: Yeah makes you love people more. I think I definitely love people. I think with my personal relationships sometimes people make me upset and I’m trying to get better at getting over it, or even when they make me angry not being angry at them as a person and instead what they did. How do you develop that sort of relationship with people. - [ 53.25]

Laura De Simone: Because you kind of separate yourself from your emotions, right, like reiki is like, when people think of reiki. They think it’s just moving energy through a person’s body, but reiki practiced, like someone who really practices reiki, takes on another way of life. Where it includes meditating and includes constantly working on yourself and shedding of yourself of negative patterns and as you do that you become really sensitive to other people. And as you meditate you realize that you are not your emotions but your emotions aren’t who you are. You experience your emotions but it is not who you are. - [54.03]

Suffocating your potential because you do not like a part of yourself [28:23]

Tomiwa Ademidun: So you mentioned you wanted to start a school one day, what do you think most people get wrong, like most people in the education system right now. Teachers, administrators and even students, what is something that they get wrong in the education system - [ 28:23]

Laura De Simone: I think that the goal of education should be to teach kids to love themselves and that’s it but that should be your primary goal. Because of you think about raising self-loving people, what the impact of that might be, the only reason a person does not reach their full potential is because there is a part of themselves they do not love, that they do not believe in. They have a limiting belief or a limiting thought to some sort of fear. A truly self-loving person have that right? Knows how to combat those fears and knows how to mitigate them. They are really self-aware and they know how that I’m not doing this right now because I’m afraid and they know what to do with that fear and that’s what a truly self-loving person does. I truly believe if all we ever taught kids was how to be self-loving, they would reach their full potential. - [28:37]