Episode Description - How to Clear Old Trauma and Create Extraordinary Love
What if the real block between you and the extraordinary love you want isn’t dating apps or “bad luck,” but the stories your nervous system is still carrying? In this podcast episode, relationship mentor Riana Malia shares how her own history of divorce, betrayal, a DEA raid, and multiple abusive relationships pushed her to develop a way of clearing decades of stored trauma without rehashing every detail in therapy.
Riana explains how tapping into the unconscious mind, releasing old emotional “marbles” like anger, shame, and fear, and practicing true forgiveness allowed her to stop repeating painful patterns and finally create a healthy, aligned partnership. Now Riana uses simple but powerful tools to help her clients do the same thing.
Riana’s work is radically different than traditional techniques and sits somewhere between therapy and traditional coaching. What matters most is incredible results Riana helps her clients achieve in a fraction of the time most people spend in therapy.
Finally, Riana introduces her Extraordinary Love Index (“Ellie”), a free diagnostic assessment designed to help you answer one big question: what’s actually standing between you and extraordinary love?
If you’re looking to break free from your old patterns and finally discover the love you’ve always wanted, this podcast episode is for you.
Show Notes
About Riana
Riana helps high-achieving women who’ve built a life they’re proud of in their career, family, friendships and growth but still feel stuck in the same old love patterns. Through her signature method, she helps them rewire the subconscious beliefs and recode the nervous system responses that have shaped their relationships for decades, so they can finally create extraordinary love that matches the life they’ve built.
Connect with Riana
You can connect with Riana on LinkedIn at Riana Malia and on Facebook at Riana Malia. You can follow Riana on her You Tube channel at Riana Malia and on Instagram at Riana Malia. To learn more about working with Riana, visit her website at Riana Malia.
Free Assessment: Extraordinary Love Index
A 40-question self-discovery tool that reveals the hidden patterns quietly shaping your love life and keeping you from the extraordinary partnership you’re ready for. Listeners receive a personalized 28-page report that highlights their unique blueprint and the next steps to reset it.
Key Takeaways From This Episode with Riana
- Riana Malia helps high-achieving women break lifelong relationship patterns by rewiring subconscious beliefs and nervous system responses rather than reliving past trauma.
- Her personal story includes childhood abandonment, divorce, financial instability, an abusive relationship, and being caught in a DEA investigation tied to her father—all of which shaped her work.
- She discovered that repeatedly retelling traumatic stories (even in therapy) can reinforce emotional pain instead of resolving it.
- Riana’s work focuses on releasing stored emotional energy (anger, fear, shame, guilt, sadness) from the unconscious mind without revisiting specific memories.
- Forgiveness is central to healing—not to excuse others, but to free oneself from carrying emotional poison.
- She distinguishes her method from traditional therapy by targeting the unconscious “operating system,” where 90% of behavior and emotional responses originate.
- Her Clear to Create Method emphasizes clearing past patterns before creating confidence, aligned relationships, and a fulfilling life.
- A major obstacle for women in love is lack of clarity—people often know what they don’t want but can’t articulate what they do want.
- Thought patterns drive outcomes: focusing on what you don’t want trains the brain to keep delivering the same results.
- Tools like the “away vs. toward” exercise and the Extraordinary Love Index help clients identify blocks, rewire thought patterns, and move toward extraordinary love and self-trust.
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Transcript
How to Clear Old Trauma and Create Extraordinary Love
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
subconscious, healing, forgiveness, rewiring
SPEAKERS
Karen Covy, Riana Malia
Karen Covy: 0:10
Hello, and welcome to Off the Fence, a podcast where we deconstruct difficult decision making so we can discover what keeps us stuck, and more importantly, how we can get unstuck and start making even tough decisions with confidence. I'm your host, Karen Covy, a former divorce lawyer, mediator, and arbitrator, turned coach, author, and entrepreneur. And now without further ado, let's get on with the show.
With me today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Riana Malia. And Riana helps high-achieving women who've built a life they're proud of in their career, family, and friendships and growth, but still feel stuck in the same old love patterns. Through her signature method, she helps them rewire their subconscious beliefs and recode the nervous system responses that have shaped their relationships for decades so that they can finally create extraordinary love that matches the life they've built. Riana, thank you for coming here. Welcome to the show.
Riana Malia:
Thanks so much for having me. Thrilled to be here with you.
Karen Covy:
I am excited to talk to you too. But before we dive into all the good stuff, as they say, um, I wanted to start with your backstory. What got you into this line of work? Yeah.
Riana Malia: 1:28
So it started. Went off to college. You know, my parents met in Maui, got married, had me divorced when I was two. Mom and I went back to Minnesota. Dad went to California. He had another family, wasn't around very much. I went off to college. He said, Hey, listen, I never helped you or your mom. I am gonna take care of room and board freshman year. And I was like, amazing. I'm really grateful. Thank you. Because at that same time, my mom was moving to another country. She was moving to Canada. And I got there doing the whole freshman year thing a couple months in. I got a call from housing and they said, Hey, so the bill was never paid and you're maxed on loans. So I, in that moment, and of course at 18, I couldn't have articulated it or understood even what it was, but it was like, okay, so I'm not important enough. We're as important as, and I'm just supposed to, you know, now what, quit school. So I think often whether we're 18 or 78, when we're faced with things that feel I don't know how to get through this or I don't know how to get on the other side of it, I don't even know where to start. We think it's because it's lack of resources. We think it's because lack of support or time or money. And really it's a lack of resourcefulness, which we all have, and we can really tap into that. So I left the dorm, I got three jobs, I rented a five-bedroom house, I filled the other four bedrooms and did my thing. Fast forward, I got married at the very old age of 23. And I do not recommend my baby girl is turning 22 in like 15 days, and she's a baby. I mean, she's amazing and not a baby, but you know what I mean. Like, you don't know who you are and who you aren't. So having that as you know, the foundation, there was it was lonely. There was a lot of issues inside of our marriage. And we, but we did have our miracle baby. We had Maddie, and then at six, we decided to um separate and end our marriage. And I felt like it was going to be a really calm thing. We went to mediation on a Friday. We made all these plans to like have Maddie be the focus this first year and do birthday parties together. And literally the next day I called to check on her. She wasn't feeling well, she was with her dad. And she's like, Oh, Daddy's friend and her daughter are here, and we're coloring Easter eggs. I said, Oh, okay. So it went from this calm, agreed-upon thing to this horrible, volatile nightmare for the next couple of years. And during that time, I did all the things we're told to do. I talked about it in therapy, I talked about it with my girlfriends, I read all the books, I did the journaling. All of those have benefit, don't get me wrong. But after a certain point, you just stay in the story and is back to the story and back to the drama. And can you believe he did this to me? And blah, blah, blah, blah, bright. It's just that negative stock. Fast forward three years after my divorce, uh, Maddie's now nine. My father, who'd been, you know, in and about life a little bit more over the last few years, always with these big, grandiose ideas, came to visit. We were in Minnesota. Maddie and I lived in this little town called Afton. We had horses and chickens and a pond that in the summer we would dye blue every Sunday, so it looked like the ocean. It was magical. Um, but it was also freaking cold. And, you know, that winter was like 40 below zero multiple times, and the metal broke off the water thing outside, and I had to like run a hose to the washing machine to give horses water. Like it was just kind of over it. So he comes in with this fabulous idea of hey, I think it's perfect time for you guys to move to California and come take over this amazing business, and you can just grow it. And Maddie can grow up in this little town at the base of Mount Tam and grow up at the ocean, have this fabulous life, and we can all, you know, be together. And I said, Okay, well, a couple of things. My mom had just had a surgery and they on in her neck and they nicked a nerve in her arm and she couldn't use it, and she did nails for a living. So that was a problem. And she was in pain. And I said, So I'm not leaving my mom, I'm not leaving the horses, I'm not moving on some whim of yours, and I will only disrupt Maddie's life once. Because I moved around quite a bit as a child, and it's hard. You don't feel grounded, you don't really feel safe, even though you don't know that's the feeling. And he's like, No, I promise, I promise. So, against everything that I knew to be right, all the there's like every billboard in Times Square screaming at me, no, no, no, you can't trust this. I did it anyway. Um I moved my mom, my daughter, two horses and three cats across the country and moved to California. And I didn't know a single person here. And, you know, it was exciting and it was nerve-wracking, and I was so worried about Maddie and making friends and you know, settling in. And did I do the right thing by her? And so I kind of put the pit in my stomach about that, like worrying about her, you know, being okay. And about six months in, I'm in the back of the studio, and very long story short, there's six or eight men with guns pointed at me who come in and put me in handcuffs and sit me down. And my baby was supposed to be home from school in like 20 minutes with my mom and a brand new friend. And I'm like, I need to call them and tell them not to come here. And they're like, you're not calling anyone. Went through this whole process. It would take us hours to get through it all. But basically, I found myself in the middle of a DEA investigation and walked into a whole thing. So now in this moment, I'm like, okay, now I they freeze, they froze the assets, so there's no money, there's no business. This fantasy that was so wonderful of this family, my parents being friends, and we had family dinners and we go see the horses and it was so beautiful. And now I was back to that same position when I was 18. I don't know how to get through this. What the hell am I gonna do? But before I even figured that out, I had to make a decision. Do I take Maddie and my mom and we go back to Minnesota, back to our friends and our family and our community? Or do I keep my promise to my child and break generations of not having integrity of keeping promises to our kids? For me, that was the most important. So we stayed. And several hundred thousand dollars of debt later and all the things, and you know, then getting into a relationship that was very abusive, uh, not physically, but in every other way. And my worth and my stories about myself and then the evidence given to me in this relationship about in many ways I was too much. So I had this big personality. But then in other ways, I was not enough. So I needed to like, you know, be more. I mean, it was horrible. And but then dealing with the my dad's situation. So again, back in therapy, doing all this stuff, finally got out of that relationship and said, never again, right? I will never, I will rather be alone and be so fine with that than ever put myself in a situation like this. I mean, it was horrific. So, but in that process and you know, writing letters to my father that I never sent, because classic narcissist, you don't feed the fire, right? So, but processing for me and just writing it all out, and then going every single time I went to therapy, I left feeling just as angry or sad, and sometimes more so, because again, going back into the story and the pain that caused the trauma in the first place just reinstalls the neurology. And because memory is cellular, every time we do that, our body experiences it as though it's happened again. So at that moment, I started being curious and found something that then became the basis for my life's work. And here we are.
Karen Covy: 9:27
What was that thing that was the basis for your life's work?
Riana Malia: 9:34
It was understanding that when we can tap into the unconscious mind and we can clear and release decades of that negative energetic weight that we hold of anger, sadness, fear, guilt, shame, all those limiting beliefs and limiting decisions without going back into any conscious memory, we get to actually release that in a way that's painless and peaceful. And there's an alchemical forgiveness piece there. And that's important because forgiveness is the most important transformative uh variable. And oftentimes, especially I'm talking to clients who have just gone through divorce or in the midst of or had been divorced and now have married the same person over and over again, or they keep dating the same person. And they're like, Why would I forgive them? They destroyed me, they ruined my life. Forgiveness is not about them. Forgiveness is drinking poison every day and hoping they die. Right? So when we don't forgive, that's what we're doing. So it's gonna, they don't care. It doesn't hurt them, but it eats us alive. Forgiveness is not letting anyone off the hook. Forgiveness is not saying it's okay. And just because you forgive doesn't mean they get a seat at the table. I fully forgave my father. He doesn't get access to me in any way for years and never will again. But I don't, that's not mine to carry that anger and that that sadness and that broken heartedness. Because when you can really forgive from that place, you go from being defined by that hurt and trauma to being refined by it, where you can stand on your story instead of in it.
Karen Covy: 11:14
Well, I'm curious. I mean, you were so you're in California and there's all the DEA agents, and you're in the middle of something. What happened with that? How did that resolve?
Riana Malia: 11:27
It went on for a couple of years. People showing up at my house, like DA people and you know, prosecutors and undercover people saying, you know, we we've been following you, we've been taking your garbage and going through your garbage. We know that you had no idea about this, but because you've deposited money in banks and you know, you're running this business, like, you know, you could lose Maddie. You could like the worst thing you could ever say to me, right? So this fear. So for two years, I didn't sleep because every noise I heard in the middle of the night, I was certain. But and Maddie didn't know any of this until she went off to college because again, I was so hypersensitive based on my childhood that I didn't want her to carry any of this, have the anxiety, the fear, the shame, even though at nine you wouldn't be able to, you know, figure that out. But it then it that roots in, right? And then your her nervous system would be dysregulated all the time. There was never any conviction around the DEA stuff. There was charges that were uh pressed against him and some other people around I don't remember what it was. They had he had received a inheritance and then put that in the business and into the family foundation. It was supposed to be distributed to other philanthropic things based on this woman's. So basically, whatever that is, you know, took money that was supposed to go to other places, but that's all they could ever actually charge him with, which is crazy. So yeah, it just, you know, it it's odd how it happened, but also as much uh trauma and pain that that caused me. Had that not happened, I wouldn't have just celebrated my two-year wedding anniversary three weeks ago to the greatest love of my life.
Karen Covy: 13:24
Congratulations! Thank you.
Riana Malia: 13:27
And I never thought that would happen for me. And had all of that not happened, I wouldn't be doing the work in this world that I'm called to do, right? This is so I think when we talk about gratitude, which is so important, but we often think about being grateful for the things that are good that you know that we're grateful for. But you have to be grateful for all of it because what one doesn't happen without the other, right?
Karen Covy: 13:55
Well, I would think that with all the craziness surrounding your father and the multiple times that he disappointed you, and I that's putting it mildly in life, um, that you would naturally end up with some trust issues when it came to men. So, how did you resolve those? How did you go from there to where you are now married to the biggest love of your life?
Riana Malia: 14:23
I first created this work for me. And my underlying, you know, like that limiting belief and limiting decision that just roots in so deeply is everyone leaving me. And that is the piece. And there's something that has to be wrong with me because everybody leaves me and I'm not lovable enough or I'm not whatever it is. And that was the piece, again, that's the underneath piece that's driving everything else in our life that I had to really look at. And then again, being able to release that and replace that in an unconscious process without going to unpack all the things that happened when you were five. Like that's not useful. It's not even necessary. And so that was the piece that I really had to let go. And I'm, you know, in all transparency, I mean, I'm human. There's still moments, not in the last few years, but when Pete and I started dating and before we got engaged, and probably and after, even after, I had moments of irrational uh fear and distrust that was not grounded in anything having to do with him. There was no basis in reality. It was all here. So it was, you know, it was a process. But to be able to understand that, you know, I am wonderful and I am lovable and I am who I am and all the things, and I'm too, I can be too much. It, you know, it's just who we are, and to be to have a love that meets you fully, where there's no, hey, put yourself in this box or make yourself smaller here, or you know, make sure you act this way around these people, you know, that's exhausting and that's not real life. And I can't stand inauthentic, fake, obligatory stuff, right? Friendships, relationships, professional partnerships. Like if it's not real, I'm not interested.
Karen Covy: 16:22
So I'm curious because when you say that, you know, you've been able to make this transformation without unpacking what happened when you were five and going back into the past, that to me sounds like therapy because you go to a therapist and they, you know, they try to get to the bottom of why are you this way? What happened in the past? So what I'm hearing you say, and you tell me if I'm not getting this right, is that what you do sounds very different from therapy.
Riana Malia: 16:53
Thousand percent.
Karen Covy: 16:55
Okay, how?
Riana Malia: 16:56
So you go to therapy and you get in that therapeutic loop and you go and you talk. Now, let me be clear. If you haven't done any therapy, you're not ready for me. You have to have done some work. It's not, you know, you need to go and let that out and talk about it and you know, process with somebody who can be that mirror for you and help you get through it. But don't stay there. Like, don't go to therapy for years, right? Because how many people say to me, I've been in therapy for years, I've done all this work, and then I feel like I'm good. And then something happens that triggers me, and I go right back to what it how I felt, reacted, behaved 15 years ago. Why is that? Well, because if we're gonna blow out strategy and behavior and ways of thinking and neurology, we have to replace it with something. Otherwise, the unconscious mind can't fill in the blank and it'll always go back to what it knows, which is how it survived in the chaos, the drama and the trauma. So if we think about on a spectrum, like far left is a psychiatrist, psychologist, medical doctor, and the far right is a coach of some kind, a life coach, et cetera, the work that I do falls in the middle because we're tapping into the unconscious mind. So it's just a quick distinction that's really important if you think about your body. Everything from the neck up is our conscious mind. It is everything we know, we use it all day long, it's our goal setter, it's 10%, which means the rest of the body, everything from the neck down, the other 90% is our unconscious mind. So if the conscious is our goal setter, the unconscious is our goal getter. It's the operating system. And it's the literal library of everything we've ever experienced throughout our lifetime. So we talked about that cellular memory, everything that's ever been said, done, we've experienced, it lives here. And when we don't release it properly, we see things like anxiety, depression, overwhelm, confusion, illness, injury, disease, autoimmune disorder, all of these things manifest in the body because of that. And when we get to release it in a proper way, now we get to call on what's actually meant for us. Theres room.
Karen Covy: 19:03
Okay, so how do you or how does someone go about releasing this? Because if you're talking about the unconscious, I mean, by definition, it's unconscious, you're not aware of it. So do you hypnotize people or what happens?
Riana Malia: 19:21
Yeah, no, no hypnotists, no hypnotizing. When I say it's a completely unconscious process, you're not unconscious, by the way. You're very relaxed, usually somewhere very cozy. Uh, but we're tapping into the unconscious, which you cannot do on your own. So this is part of the framework of the how we do this using quantum time release, right? And so we tap into the root cause of each of those negative emotions that we talked about anger, sadness, fear, guilt, shame, and then all those limiting beliefs and limiting decisions, so that we can clear it, but it's nothing you have memory of. And why that works and how that works is if you imagine every one of those emotions that we just named has its own ribbon. Okay. And throughout our life, every time we have a significant emotional experience with each of those, a marble goes on that ribbon. So we have a whole lifetime of marbles of anger and sadness, et cetera, et cetera. So today, when something happens that makes us sad or angry, whatever it is, it's not the today thing. It's the 40, 50, 60 years of marbles that are behind it. It's the gestalt, it's the charge. So you cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it. And my clients are emotionally intelligent, very smart. You know, if you could have figured this out by now, you would have. It's not another thing you have to learn or a course or a book or a doing. This is like, let's clear all this stuff that's no longer yours to carry so we can figure out who you are now and create the life and love that's meant for you. So you can own that and just that's and live and love and lead from that place.
Karen Covy: 21:06
So you said a couple of times now, you've talked about clearing. What exactly do you mean by that?
Riana Malia: 21:12
Yeah. So my methodology is called the Clear To Create Method. So that's the what. And then the, you know, the quantum pattern protocol is the how. So, and the reason that it's important to give you the backstory is so my tagline has always been your very best life, right? Whether we've been best friends for decades or we met at the farmer's market yesterday in the coffee line, I want you to live your version of your very best life. And that is different for every single person on this planet. But you can't go from being held back by past pain and trauma from childhood, from a divorce, from a failed business, from a friendship that you thought would last forever that dissolved. All of that stuff, you just can't go from living in that and processing through that lens to living your very best life. It doesn't work that way. We have to clear before we can create. We have to clear the story to create the life. How many times do we hear people say, I want a different story? Well, then you have to stop telling the old one.
Karen Covy: 22:15
But then do you just make up a new story? I mean, how does that work?
Riana Malia: 22:20
Well, no. So, when we have to clear the story, we have to clear the cycles to create the confidence because after we've been through all this stuff, we don't really trust ourselves. Like we thought we knew. Look how that turned out. So there's this lack of trust and confidence in our own decision-making process. We have to clear the patterns to create the partnerships. We want aligned, amazing partnerships romantically, personally, professionally in our friendships, in our family. But if we bring all that old pattern and all the old wiring and all the wobbles that we think and respond and act and behave, you're not going to get those partnerships. You just keep getting more of the same. It's why people marry the same person over and over. It's why people date the same person over and over. It's why people go to a different job. And isn't it isn't it crazy that every place I go, the boss hates me or my colleagues are horrible to me. Huh, interesting. I never get a parking spot. I I my nobody ever can cut my hair the right way. Uh-huh. So when we're always focused on the things we don't want, that's all you get. So having to flip those. So that's part of this, the whole process, right? But and we have to clear the loss to create the love. But how do we do that? So when we, if we're gonna look at clearing, before we can clear anything, we have to get clear. So the first piece of clearing is clarity. And we have to get crystal clear. And most women, I would say 90% of women when I ask this question, okay, what do you actually want on the other side of this? What will you be doing or not doing differently than you're doing or not doing right now? What lights you up? Often it brings tears with an answer of, I have no idea. I've spent my life putting everyone else's needs first, or my identity was super attached to my career, and I'm great at that. But these other pieces, I have no idea. I was a mom or a wife or whatever for so long. So it would be like if we went into a restaurant and said the server came over and said, What can I bring you? And we said, we would like a beverage, a protein of some kind. I want to start with a salad and then some kind of aside to go with the protein. Okay, great. He brings us back an iced tea and uh some roasted chicken and a Caesar salad and some um honey glazed carrots. We got exactly what we ordered. 100% exactly what we ordered, right? But what we wanted, unfortunately, was a glass of Chardonnay and a beautiful piece of salmon and some roasted asparagus and an arugula salad with goat cheese and fresh eggs. Big difference. The reason why most people don't actually ever get what they want in life is they don't get that level of specificity and clarity. And but how do we do that? We create your menu, which I call the clarity codex, and we do a values elicitation so we get really clear what your values are. Without these things, it cannot be. So we go through all of them and then we reorder them, and we only use the top 10 because anything beyond that isn't really a value. And then we look at your non-negotiables and your desires. And what that does is it gives you clarity in a way that you've never had. Now you are 100% exactly clear of who you are and what you want. And in a matter of 60 seconds, any person that comes into your world, you can know if they even get an opportunity to be in your sphere. Because if the values don't line up or there's anything on that non-negotiables list or not on it, it's a clean no, right? Which takes away the fear of not trusting our own decision-making process. Is this really a red flag? Am I being too picky? Maybe it's okay that he blah, blah, blah, even though I said that was really important to me. When we make values-driven decisions, then it's a clean yes and a clean no, and it keeps us out of the middle, which is the devil, where all the drama, friction, and noise and decision fatigue lives. Because then we're back and forth and we're like, oh, I don't know. And then we either make a decision out of fear or we don't make a decision at all. And we're just paralyzed and we say stop for a minute.
Karen Covy: 26:32
Well, I'm curious, why does this happen in this realm? Because I know that the women that you work with, and a lot of my colleagues and friends, and as I've gone through life, um they're super successful. They have no problem making decisions when it comes to their career or their hobbies or their interests or anything else except their love life. And that's where they feel like, you know, they're just not making progress, they don't have the life they want, they don't know what to do about it. Because when, let's face it, when you start and you're dating and you're 20, the world is your oyster, you don't know what you don't know. You're out there, you're just living the dream, right? And then as time goes on, and you always thought, well, I surely I'll be married by the time I'm 25 and then 30 and then 35, or maybe you are married and you're divorced and you're like, how did I get here now? I'm 40 something, 50 something, 60 something. Now what do I do? I mean, why is it love that's such a problem?
Riana Malia: 27:42
So I find it's a couple of things. So part of it is like kind of having to be an identity architect because so often, like you know, you've said 40s, 50s, 60s, the identity that you're currently holding on to isn't who you are now. It's an identity from 15 years ago or 20 years ago or when you got married, and it doesn't match up. Number one. Number two, you have so much evidence about all the things that are wrong with you and wrong with everybody else. So let me give you an example. You know, you're back out in the dating world, whatever it is, you've gotten a divorce, you have that conversation of I can't, I never imagined in my life I'd be 55 and not with my husband and just looking at retirement in a few years. And now here I am alone. I don't, you know what this is horrible, right?
Karen Covy: 28:36
Yeah.
Riana Malia: 28:36
And then you're going out there, and then the conversations that you're having with your friends are like, ugh, the this is, you know, everybody I meet is narcissistic or they're just so into themselves. And, you know, I don't want to be in another relationship where I'm not valued, and I don't want to be in another relationship where I don't feel like I can trust them, and then I become this crazy person, and then I'm constantly questioning them and me, and then it's horrible. And I don't want to be in another relationship where I don't feel like I can be all of me and be loved, right? And that's what we say. But problem is that we think between 65,000 and 85,000 thoughts a day, and 90% of those thoughts are recycled, right? Right. Same thoughts, thought yesterday, day before, especially when we're we, you know, keep talking about things in our head and to our friends and in the world. But 75% of those thoughts are negative. And I get a lot of pushback on that because people are like, nope, I'm clear. I will never, never, never. I don't want this, I don't want this. Well, the unconscious mind can't hear qualifiers, it doesn't hear the don't. It just knows what you're focused on. And it's no different than jumping in the car and putting an address in the nav system or putting it on your Google Maps. You give it the direction and it takes us there. Every time you talk about the things you don't want, the how What how the men are everybody in this area is blah, blah, blah. I don't want to, whatever. Then it's what you're feeding your nav system. And then you continue to get that over and over and over again. And so we have to flip that focus. And that's the very first thing is really looking at all the things you don't want. And then looking at all the things that you do. And every time you find yourself focusing on those things that you don't want, you gotta you gotta replace that thought with a better feeling thought. And that's the fastest way to change your entire world.
Karen Covy: 30:36
Yeah, I think you're so right. I mean, so many of the people that I work with, I say, what do you want? And then I get this laundry list of everything that they don't want.
Riana Malia: 30:45
Yes. And it's so fascinating. Every single time I ask, what do you want? I get all the things they don't want. And that's how the brain is wired. And we have to rewire that neurology because otherwise that's all you continue to get. It's all you see, right? Your reticular activating system in your brain is laser focused, looking for evidence so that you're right that all of these people are horrible and there's nobody in your area that's good and everybody's married or everybody's this. And you know, okay, that's what we're gonna see. It's just like if you decided you were gonna buy a car and you're gonna buy a white Lexus and you're thinking about it, and you're like, okay, and then all of a sudden everywhere you go, you see white Lexus, right? That's because the reticular activating system's job is to see and focus on the directions that we've given it.
Karen Covy: 31:35
So it sounds like step number one is figuring out what do you want, but then the negative thoughts or the thoughts of what we don't want, they come up so often. I mean, is it really as simple as saying, oh no, I don't want that, I do want this? Like, is it just like when you catch the thought in the moment to just say the opposite? Is it that simple?
Riana Malia: 31:59
So I do something with my private clients and I'd love to share. How are we doing that? I'd love to share it with your listeners. So this is actually something that you can do. And over the course of the next 72 hours, if you decide to play all in, we will rewire that part of your brain. Okay. We know that's not arbitrary. We can do this in 72 hours. So when we look at like my values for me and for my business, my values are love, generosity, impact, belief in what's possible, and being a magnet for miracles. And that's my favorite thing to teach. So that's the game we play. My daughter and I play this game all the time. There's always a parking spot wherever we go. Always, always, always, always, because we've declared that. And it's one of the easiest ways to play. But you know, when you say there's never a parking spot, it's always raining, you'll always be right. So let's talk about the process. It's very high-tech. You need two pieces of paper and a rubber band. That's it. Okay. I'm kidding about being high-tech. It's
Karen Covy: 33:05
Yeah, I figured that. When you get to the two pieces of paper and the rubber band, I'm like, yeah, I don't think so.
Riana Malia: 33:09
Yeah. So what we're gonna do is we are going to create two walls. Your away wall and your toward wall. Okay. And some people, if you're really visual, I actually want you to think about when you're in a room with four walls, one to your left, one to your right, one in front of you, and what one behind you. Your away wall is everything you don't want. So where is that? Is it behind you? Is it to your left? Is it to your right? Like for you, where would your away wall be? To my left. Okay. Now the other wall is your toward wall. Everything you want. Hopes, dreams, desires, wishes, fairy dust, magic wand, all of it. No filtering. No, well, that's not gonna be possible in my lifetime. No, everything you want goes on that wall. Where's that wall for you?
Karen Covy: 33:57
That one's in front of me. Okay, love it.
Riana Malia: 34:00
So you're gonna take two clean pieces of paper away on the top of one, toward on the other, and you are gonna make those lists. And you're literally gonna write down everything you don't want. More of ever again, etc. And then you're gonna write everything you do want. And then I want you to take photos of those two lists, and I want you to pin it in your phone, either in the notes app or top of an album, so that you can access it super fast anytime. You're gonna put rubber band on. Now it's very important that it's like the office one that stings when you snap it, not like a soft, silky, scrunchy one, because the brain needs the pattern interrupt. So you gotta, so, and you're gonna put this on and you're gonna wear it for 72 hours. And here's what we're gonna do. Over the course of 72 hours, anytime that you realize like you're going, you're you catch yourself and you're like thinking about, oh my God, I'm gonna be alone forever, or I don't want to be in this freaking financial position and blah, blah, blah, blah. You're gonna snap it hard. You're gonna figure out what it was you were thinking about, the last thing you can recall. You're gonna kind of note that, and you I promise you, it was something on that away wall list, guaranteed. And then we're gonna replace it. And there's three ways we can do that. Number one, the easiest is literally look at something on your toward wall list and imagine that it's that it that it is. Imagine it as is, but you have to experience it with emotion, with the senses. So, what do you see? What do you hear? What do you taste? What do you smell? What do you touch? Experience it though as though it's happening because the brain doesn't know the difference between something that's actually happened and something that we can visualize with emotion that uses all the senses. So that's one way. The second way is let's say you're like, I don't know where my phone is, I don't know what's on the list, I'm flustered, whatever. I want you to spend 30 to 60 seconds in gratitude for something you're actually grateful for. Not the Pollyanna, I'm so grateful for my life and blah, blah, blah. Like maybe it was cold and rainy and you're sitting in your car and the sun comes out and you're like, I am so grateful to sit here and have the sun on my face for two minutes, or I'm so grateful today that, you know, I got to catch up with friends, whatever it is, just something you're really grateful for. And if you're still feeling in the yuck, like it's just you still feel off, you have a pit in your stomach, you feel a little anxious. I want you to ask yourself, who can I serve in this moment? And it doesn't have to be a big deal. We're not talking about like a grand gesture. It could be a text to a friend saying, Hey, love you. It could be a prayer for somebody. It could be pulling up in your driveway and noticing that your neighbors, you know, haven't gotten their newspapers in a few days and it's sitting all piled up, and then you pick them up and put them on their door. Like just get out of your head and go do something for someone else. Now, the interesting thing about this process is the first day, you might not snap it at all, or maybe once, because you've been operating from this place for so long you don't recognize it. It's just more then the second day, you're like, oh, okay, and you're snapping it more, and you're thinking about what you were thinking about, and you're like, oh yeah, I was thinking about blah, blah, blah, and you do the process. And then by the third day, you're snapping it pretty frequently. Because the point of this, Karen, is not to say, oh, you're never gonna have these thoughts again and these feelings. And you know, we're not giving you a lobotomy. We're literally trying to rewire because it's not about not having them, it's about not staying in it. Because it only takes 17 seconds of holding any thought with emotion to either reinforce a current neural pathway or build a new one. So, the point of this is to get so good at recognizing it that you snap the thing and you pull yourself out of it in seconds, and that changes your entire life.
Karen Covy: 38:05
So that's fascinating because I would have thought, if you asked me before you got into the whole description of the process, I would have thought that you would have been snapping it like crazy on day one, and that by day three, you're like, yeah, I got this. I'm good.
Riana Malia:
Opposite.
Karen Covy:
It's fascinating. And it sounds like, I mean, we're having this conversation in the context of relationships, but it sounds like the same process would apply to a lot of things, actually.
Riana Malia: 38:37
Anything. And when I say write down everything you don't want, I mean everything in life, not just about a relationship, like, you know, all of the things. And you know, people come to me a lot, obviously, because they desperately want this peace, this extraordinary love. But I also work with a lot of people that have a fabulous relationship in marriage, but they're stuck in their life and they know that there's more that's meant for them and their life. They don't know what it is or they don't know how to get there. It's all the same process. We do all the same work. It's just, you know, we're having a little bit different of a focus. And the other thing is the way that this work works, it's this is not about a thing. It's not about having a business coach or a love coach or a health coach. This is about rewiring your internal stuff, which then affects every area of your life. So whether you're coming to me for love or, you know, transition, it doesn't matter. It's at the end of the day, you will have fallen in love with yourself again. You will trust yourself, you will confidently hold boundaries, you will expertly communicate your needs, you will deepen the richness in every single one of your relationships. You will integrate that and embody that and own that, which affects your whole life. And the ripple effect of this work into your family, your children, your grandchildren, your friends, your professional circles, it's actually life-changing because it changes our DNA. And what's so fascinating is if you look at water, if you say, play heavy metal to the water or speech to the Dr. Emoto did this whole thing in the 90s where he used high-speed photography, and you could see the distorted yucky water crystals would form when it was negativity and beautiful, like snowflake-like crystals when it when it was good. And the reason that's important is that the world is 70% water, but our bodies are 70% water. So, the thoughts that we think actually change our physiology. And the thought, our thoughts are the basis for everything because our thoughts mix with our physiology and become our state, which creates emotion. And then emotion creates behavior.
Karen Covy: 40:49
Yep.
Riana Malia: 40:50
And then that's what shows up. So is it it's as simple as complex as it all starts with that one spot and everything else comes from there?
Karen Covy: 41:01
This is fascinating. I I could keep talking to you forever, but I I want to be respectful of your time. And before I let you go, I want to talk about one more thing, just sort of shifting gears. You have something called the Extraordinary Love Index. What is that?
Riana Malia: 41:19
So the Extraordinary Love Index, which we lovingly refer to as the E.L.I., it is a diagnostic assessment that answers the question, what's standing between you and extraordinary love? And if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, that's not for me, because I have an amazing partner, it doesn't have to be a romantic love. It can be self-love, it can be all kinds of love. But what it is is looking at nine key areas and three sections, right? So um impact, trauma, uh, communication, all these different areas. And it's a 40-question assessment. So it's not a three question, what Disney princess are you? So, give yourself a good 10, 15 minutes to actually thoughtfully answer the questions, because then I'm gonna send you a 28-page personalized report that's gonna show you, based on your answers, what your scores are in each of those areas. And then it's gonna tell you here's what you might be experiencing in your life. Here's the cost of staying there, here's what you can do to start moving in the direction of who you want to be and what you want your life to look like. And I promise you, no matter what, you're gonna have insight into you that you've never had. So every human on the planet should take the E.L.I.. And it's incredible. And that's my gift to you. And it, you know, and I also actually I look at all the data, I review every single assessment because it's just so incredibly fascinating. But it will change, it will, it will give you a starting point to understand yourself in a way that you never have and just start getting an answer to the question that you've never been able to answer.
Karen Covy: 43:06
Okay, now you have totally piqued my curiosity, and I'm gonna have to go take this assessment. But I don't know where. Where do I go?
Riana Malia: 43:16
You can find it everywhere. Go to the website, RianaMalia.com. If it doesn't pop up, go to resources. There's a big big thing that says take the E.L.I.. All of my socials Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, at Riana Malia. There's a link everywhere to the E.L.I.. So go find me, follow me on socials, go to the website, and go take the E.L.I..
Karen Covy: 43:39
This sounds interesting. I can't wait to see what it what it's gonna say. So, Riana, thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom. I mean, I thought this was going to be a conversation about finding love, but it's actually blossomed into so much more. Thank you so much for sharing everything you did. If someone wants to follow up with you or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to do that?
Riana Malia: 44:03
So I would I also offer, you know, a nice connection called just to have a conversation about where you are and what it is that you want, if you know, and how I can support you in getting there. And that is also a gift. You can find that on the website. I, you know, there's stuff on socials. The work that I do is private. So this is not group work, this is not a coaching program, this is not a course, there are no modules, but also it's fast. It's weeks, not months and years. So honestly, if you, you know, whenever this, I right now it's fall of 2025. Who knows when you're listening to this? But if you reach out today before the end of the year, everything would be different.
Karen Covy: 44:45
I love that. I totally love that. And for those of you who are watching or listening, just go take the assessment. I mean, it's free. Why not? And anything, at least this is my belief that anything that gives you insight into you, into yourself, is always going to be helpful. It's always going to be a good thing. So, Riana, again, thank you so much for being here and sharing as much as you have. I appreciate it.
Riana Malia:
My pleasure.
Karen Covy:
And for those of you out there who are watching and listening, if you enjoyed today's episode, if you'd like to hear more episodes just like it, do me a big favor, give this a thumbs up, like, subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube station, and I look forward to seeing you again next time.
