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Dr. Charleanea Arellano

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Dr. Charleanea Arellano

Psychologist | Board Certified Life Coach | Keynote Speaker | Host of She Is Mother Podcast

I am a psychologist and psycho-spiritual transformational life coach who helps people create and experience the lives they crave.

10/17/2025

Healing is not the absence of pain. It's not conquering pain or escaping from pain.

It's sitting with the pain and letting it exist. It's not about pushing it away—it's about almost bringing it closer in a way.

Which feels very counterintuitive. It is counterintuitive because we think that fighting it is gonna make it go away. But actually, fighting it makes it bigger.

This was the hardest lesson I had to learn. For years, I thought healing meant I wouldn't hurt anymore. That if I did enough therapy, enough self-work, enough meditation, the pain would just… disappear.

But that's not how it works.

Healing is learning to be with your pain without being consumed by it. It's developing the capacity to feel hurt without letting it run your entire life.

When you stop trying to eliminate the sadness and start saying "Okay, sadness, you can sit here with me," something shifts. When you stop fighting the anxiety and start saying "I see you, anxiety. What do you need me to know?" it loses its grip.

The pain doesn't go away. But it stops controlling you.

Most of us spend so much energy trying to outrun our feelings that we never learn how to actually be with them. We think the goal is to feel good all the time, but the real goal is to feel everything without being overwhelmed by it.

Your pain isn't your enemy. It's part of your story. And you can hold it without letting it hold you hostage.

10/16/2025

Our minds are amazing. They can do wonderful things, and they can get us into a lot of trouble.

Here's a technique that changes everything: When you feel that constriction—maybe it's your diaphragm, your chest, your throat—instead of buying into the story your mind creates about it, you go directly to the sensation.

Instead of "I'm not okay, I'm not safe," you say: "This is a sensation. I'm feeling constricted in my diaphragm."

Then you close your eyes. You go to that exact place where you feel the tightness. And you visualize taking this big, slow, gentle breath that will expand your rib cage, expand your torso.

Just try it. Just do that.

Most of us get hijacked by the story our mind tells us about what the sensation means. "My chest is tight, therefore I'm having a panic attack, therefore something terrible is happening, therefore I'm in danger."

But what if you skipped the story entirely? What if you just went straight to: "Oh, interesting. Tightness in my chest. Let me breathe into that space."

Your mind wants to make everything mean something dramatic. Your body just wants to be heard and helped.

The sensation itself isn't the problem. It's all the stories we pile on top of it that keep us stuck in the spiral.

Breathe into the constriction. Expand the space. Watch how quickly your nervous system gets the message: "Oh, we're safe. We can relax now."

10/15/2025

When we think about our mind and our bodies, they're in constant communication. There's this feedback loop happening all the time.

The moment we get into constriction and tightness—whether it's your shoulders, your jaw, your chest—that's a signal to your brain: "Uh-oh. I'm not okay."

And then survival patterns kick in. Fight or flight. We get into this place of "I'm not safe, I'm not safe, I'm not safe."

When you're in survival mode, your ability to respond to life is severely limited.

Think about it. When your nervous system is screaming "DANGER," you can't think clearly. You can't be creative. You can't connect authentically with other people. You're just trying to survive the moment.

Your body literally changes your brain's capacity based on what it's experiencing. Tight chest? Your brain gets the message that there's a threat and shifts into protection mode.

But here's what's wild—it works the other way too. When you consciously soften your body, when you breathe deeply, when you relax your shoulders, you're sending your brain a different message: "We're safe. We can think clearly now."

Most of us walk around with chronic tension we don't even notice anymore. And we wonder why we feel anxious, reactive, unable to access our best thinking.

Your body posture is literally programming your mental state. Start paying attention to what signals you're sending yourself throughout the day.

10/14/2025

A lot of times what I tell clients when they say "I don't want to feel this anxiety, I don't want to feel this depression"—the fact that you fight the emotion actually perpetuates the emotion.

Here's what blew my mind when I first learned this: The typical human emotion only lasts about 45 seconds.

45 seconds. That's it.

When you just allow it, you'll notice that it loses its power.

But most of us never find this out because we're so busy fighting the feeling that we keep it alive way longer than it needs to be.

Think about it. You feel anxiety coming up, so you immediately start: "No, no, no. I can't feel anxious right now. I have too much to do. This is ridiculous. I shouldn't be feeling this."

All that resistance? That's what keeps the anxiety going for hours instead of minutes.

It's like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. The harder you push it down, the more forcefully it pops back up.

But what happens when you just... let the beach ball float? It sits on the surface for a bit, then drifts away naturally.

Your emotions work the same way. They want to move through you, not stay stuck in you.

The next time you feel something uncomfortable, try this: "Okay, anxiety. You're here. I'm not going to fight you. Let's see what happens."

Watch it peak, watch it pass. 45 seconds of discomfort versus hours of resistance.

10/13/2025

What I was doing? I couldn't do it anymore. I just couldn't.

I literally spent at least two decades going from surgery after surgery because I ignored my body. I didn't pay attention to the signals.

I approached pain as an inconvenience. Like somehow it was getting in the way of my living.

But here's what I finally understood: Pain is actually your body's way of taking care of you.

I know it doesn't sound like that. It doesn't feel like that when you're in it. But that's exactly its purpose.

For twenty years, every ache was something to push through. Every signal was something to medicate. Every warning was an obstacle to my productivity, my goals, my life.

So my body kept turning up the volume. Surgery after surgery, trying to get my attention.

What if I had listened the first time? What if I had treated that initial discomfort as information instead of interference?

Your body isn't trying to ruin your life. It's trying to save it.

When your back hurts, it's not sabotaging your workout routine—it's telling you something needs attention. When you're exhausted, it's not weakness—it's wisdom.

Pain is your body's emergency communication system. It's saying "Hey, we need to change something here before this becomes a bigger problem."

Twenty years of surgeries taught me: You can either listen to the whisper or wait for the shout. But your body will be heard.

10/12/2025

In American culture, we've been conditioned to be against our bodies on so many levels.

We don't like the way they look. We're taught to hustle and ignore what they actually need—rest, sleep, proper food. It's been revered and admired that our minds can be strong enough to "just push through."

But here's the truth nobody wants to hear: At the end of the day, your mind isn't going to win this fight. Your body is going to lay you out.

We've been sold this lie that willpower conquers everything. That if you're tough enough, disciplined enough, mentally strong enough, you can override your body's signals indefinitely.

Except your body doesn't care about your deadlines. It doesn't care about your hustle mentality or your productivity hacks. It has its own timeline, its own needs, its own limits.

And when you ignore those limits long enough? Your body will make the decision for you. Burnout. Illness. Complete exhaustion. Panic attacks. Your nervous system saying "We're done. We're shutting this down."

The most successful people I know aren't the ones who learned to push through their body's signals. They're the ones who learned to listen to them.

They treat their body like the wise ally it is instead of the obstacle they thought it was.

Your body isn't weak for needing rest. It's intelligent. Start listening.

10/11/2025

I turned toward the pain. I listened to it instead of fighting it, instead of trying to get away from it.

And you know what I discovered? There was actually wisdom in it.

The pain gave me information I needed to hear. Information I needed to focus on so I could actually take care of myself.

Now when I experience pain—whether it's emotional, spiritual, physical—I ask: What is it here to show me?

This was revolutionary for me because I'd spent decades treating pain like the enemy. Something to medicate, avoid, push through, or overcome as quickly as possible.

But pain isn't punishment. It's communication.

Your body is trying to tell you something. Your emotions are trying to guide you toward what needs attention. Your spirit is trying to redirect you toward what actually matters.

When your back hurts, it might be saying "slow down." When anxiety shows up, it might be saying "this situation isn't safe for you." When depression settles in, it might be saying "something in your life needs to change."

The wisdom isn't always immediately clear. Sometimes you have to sit with it. Listen deeper. Get curious instead of immediately reactive.

But every single time I've leaned into the discomfort instead of away from it, I've learned something essential about how to take better care of myself.

Your pain has something to teach you. Are you willing to listen?

10/10/2025

What I typically did? I ignored it. I dissociated from it. Made it wrong.

Like somehow I was weak for feeling what I was feeling.

But those strategies—the ignoring, the disconnecting, the self-judgment—were actually keeping me in the pain. They were doing the very thing I didn't want them to do.

I needed to do something differently.

Here's what I learned the hard way: You can't think your way out of feelings. You can't logic your way past trauma. You can't shame yourself into healing.

All those years I spent trying to be "stronger" than my emotions? I was actually making them stronger. Every time I pushed down the anxiety, it came back louder. Every time I told myself to "get over it," the depression dug in deeper.

The thing is, your nervous system doesn't care about your timeline for healing. It doesn't care that you think you should be past this by now.

What it cares about is being seen. Being acknowledged. Being allowed to exist without being immediately fixed or eliminated.

The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to get rid of the pain and started getting curious about it. When I stopped making my feelings the enemy and started treating them like information.

Turns out, the very thing I was running from was trying to show me the way through.

10/05/2025

What would bring me a sense of peace? What would bring me a sense of being open and expansive?

These are the questions that'll change everything about how you make decisions.

When you're considering your next move—whether it's a job, relationship, or life change—ask yourself: When I think about this thing, when I imagine getting there, does it create urgency? Or does it create excitement?

There's a huge difference between the two.

Urgency feels tight in your chest. Like you're running toward something because you're running away from something else. It feels desperate, frantic, like you have to have it or you'll die.

Excitement feels expansive. It feels fun. There's flow to it, like you're being pulled toward something that genuinely lights you up rather than pushed by fear.

That's how you know where you're making decisions from.

Most of us are so used to operating from urgency that we've forgotten what genuine excitement even feels like. We think anxiety and enthusiasm are the same thing.

But here's the kicker—typically, the thing we're desperately trying to avoid is gonna bring us right back to the very thing we're actually running from.

You can't outrun your internal landscape. You can only change it.

So before you make your next big decision, pause. Breathe. Ask yourself: Does this feel like peace and expansion, or does it feel like fear disguised as ambition?

10/04/2025

When we're in hustle, we're in fear. We're in urgency. We're trying to make up for something.

You're hustling because you're trying to get somewhere else other than where you are, right? Instead of coming from the place of "I am not that…"

Here's what I mean. Hustle energy feels frantic because it's rooted in "I'm not enough yet, so I have to work harder to become enough."

It's exhausting because you're literally running away from yourself while trying to run toward some future version of who you think you need to be.

But what if you flipped it? What if instead of "I am not successful enough," you started from "I am someone who creates value"? Instead of "I am not where I want to be," what about "I am exactly where I need to be and moving forward from here"?

Same actions, totally different energy.

When you hustle from fear, every setback feels like proof you're failing. When you create from wholeness, setbacks are just information.

When you hustle from "not enough," success never feels satisfying because you're still operating from scarcity. When you create from "I am enough," success feels like a natural expression of who you already are.

The work isn't about working less. It's about working from a different place inside yourself.

10/03/2025

Envy is just showing you something you want.

But most of us get it backwards. We focus on the fact that we aren't that thing instead of recognizing—oh, that's actually a possibility for me too.

The fact that it's bothering you? That's information. That's your inner compass saying "Hey, this matters to you."

So why not focus on creating the thing you want rather than torturing yourself about not having it yet?

When you see someone living the life you want, your brain has two options. Option one: "Look what I don't have. Look how behind I am. Look how they got lucky and I didn't."

Or option two: "Oh interesting. If it's possible for them, it's possible for me. What would I need to do to create that?"

Same trigger, completely different response.

That person you're envious of isn't your competition—they're proof of concept. They're showing you what's available in the field of possibility.

Your envy isn't a character flaw. It's a GPS system pointing toward what you actually care about.

Instead of "Why don't I have that?" try "How can I create that?"

Instead of "They're so lucky," try "What did they do that I could learn from?"

Your jealousy is trying to tell you something. Listen to it.

10/02/2025

The "when I get there, then I'll feel..." bu****it.

We think when we get the thing—the notoriety, the income, the dream house—then we're gonna feel differently. But that's not how it works.

What you actually want to do is shift out of that frantic energy of urgency. Get to a place where you're asking different questions entirely.

What is it that I really want? Not what I think I should want, not what looks impressive on paper, but what actually lights me up?

What's the thing I enjoy doing where time just disappears? Where I'm not checking the clock every five minutes because I'm genuinely absorbed?

What can I do right now, in this moment, that gets me closer to an experience I actually want to have?

See, most of us are living in the future. "When I get promoted, then I'll feel successful. When I buy the house, then I'll feel stable." But you're missing your entire life waiting for some external thing to give you permission to feel good.

The shift isn't about lowering your standards or giving up on goals. It's about changing the energy behind them.

Instead of "I need this to feel worthy," try "I'm creating this because it genuinely excites me."

Instead of "I'll be happy when," try "What would make me happy right now?"

Your life is happening now. Not when you get there.

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15321 Heritage Circle
Thornton, CO
80602

Opening Hours

Tuesday	11am - 6pm
Wednesday	11am - 6pm
Thursday	11am - 6pm
Friday	8am - 5pm

Website

http://www.drcharleanea.com/

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Dr. Arellano @ Empowered Living

Dr. Charleanea Arellano's life work is inspired by the beautifully powerful resilience of the human spirit. Her heart has been deeply moved by stories of people who have not only overcome personal adversity, but have used this adversity, courageously, as a springboard into greatness. These stories of courage, hope and strength have fueled her passion to help and support others, as they heal, reclaim their personal power and pursue their highest potential.

Dr. Arellano pursued formal training in psychology. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Denver with Honors in Psychology, Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She received her Doctorate in Psychology from the University of Denver. Dr. Arellano has been a psychologist and Work/Life Coach for over 25 years.