Raise Your Frequency Through Transformative Alchemy – An Interview with Trina Gadsden

Join us as we welcome the extraordinary Trina Gadsden, who opens up about her journey of awakening and self-discovery.

From her early experiences as a highly sensitive and empathic child to a life-altering past life regression session, Trina’s story is filled with magical occurrences and profound realizations. Listen as she recounts poignant moments, such as seeing auric colors and encountering her late grandfather’s pocket watch, which motivated her to embrace her gifts and become an intuitive guide. (Interview has been edited for readability.)

Will you share your own story of awakening to wellness, spirituality, and personal development?

Trina Gadsden: I’ve always been an empath and been a highly sensitive kind of child and sensitive to energy, sensitive to animals, moods, people. And it wasn’t until I got a little bit older that I realized that not everyone had the energies that I had which was part of the awakening. I would say my big awakening occurred about 30 years ago, and I was visiting a friend in Montana who was a high school friend. I went to see her for the weekend, and during that time, we went to kind of a metaphysical store. And at this time I’m working at General Motors. I’m wearing the blue suit. I’m in the leadership position. and this isn’t part of my realm, and so we go there. She offered to buy me this reading, and I was like, “what’s that?” This lady said “I can’t because I’m doing a past life regression”, and I’m like “what’s that?” And she said, “Oh, I go in and help clear out stuff with people.” And I was like, “I got stuff.” So this lady came in on a Sunday, which was Easter Sunday, and led me through a past life regression, and it just awakened my world like something out of a movie. I was able to see every family member and see their auric color.

I had this amazing German grandpa that I loved dearly, who had passed, and he had this pocket watch, this Elgin pocket watch that got put in his pocket before they closed the casket. He showed up in this vision, and he had this pocket watch. He’s all filled with white energy, and he’s showing me that there’s a pawn shop in Missoula that has this watch. So I leave, after this big long session, drive eight hours back to Seattle where I was living at the time and had all these memories and things come through and was like, “What just happened?”

About four months later, I was visiting this friend and her family again. We were walking through this farmer’s market, and I saw this pawn shop that was lit up…like I see things have extra energy. It was lit up, and we go inside, and there are no watches whatsoever other than this Elgin pocket watch. I had to step outside, because it was so overwhelming and take a deep breath, and I went back in and said “please don’t be expensive.” I have this pocket watch on my altar to this day. It just was this reminder and this opening that life is way more magical and connected and spiritual than we ever thought it to be. That it kind of led me down a path of just curiosity and honoring the gifts that I saw and seeing what showed up and connecting dots in ways that I’d never connected them prior to that.

As you continued exploring, how did you unpack what you were learning? Was it particular teachers, courses, or spiritual encounters?

Trina Gadsden: At that time, I was just more aware when it came across my path. There was a really good bookstore…it’s since closed down called East West. That was in Seattle. I really appreciated it, so I’d go in there if they had someone talking or something going on.

One other kind of thread that led me to kind of that curiosity was at around that timeline, I had this cat that I’d named Ernie after my grandfather. The cat had told me it was time to go, and it was just this beautiful, amazing friend for 16 years. And so there’s this tree up in the San Juan Islands, this big Madrona tree with this broken arm that would call me like twice a year. I would just get this intuitive hit to come out. So I would jump on a 4am ferry and go hang out and sit and meditate by this tree. So I went to take Ernie out to this tree and put his ashes out there, and when I got out there and I was spreading his ashes, I had this poem that came through. And it came in through so fast that I grabbed a pen basically from my purse and I wrote it on the cardboard box that Ernie’s ashes were contained in. This is what kind of led me to the awakening, because it was such a concrete experience. I’m just going to read it.

We spend all of our lives building ourselves into something that we spend the final moments of our lives shedding. And in that hour of awakening with purity in our soul, we asked ourselves, “What took us so long?” And as our ashes flow softly in the wind and through the trees, we breathe our last moment and welcome ourselves home.

And that came in. It was a channel, and it stuck in my system in the sense of, “how am I not being authentic to myself if I left the world tomorrow? Have I lived my soul’s mission? Have I lived my truth?” So I started from those two kind of experiences started just exploring and eventually became a Reiki master through an amazing teacher who’s a medical intuitive, named Marie Manuchehri, based out of Kirkland. I was able to see and feel and experience energies on bodies very quickly, and I just started to go to these workshops. I started clearing and working with friends.

But I was kind of like hiding in my corporate world, too, and I had a shift from corporate to nonprofit, from a beautiful mother figure who had left the world from cancer, had a brain tumor, and I had a profound conversation with her, and she gave me all her regrets and I said, “I’ll do them all, I’ll do them.”

A couple weeks later, I was scheduled to climb Kilimanjaro. As I started at 10,000 feet…we were going to 19,304, and we’re just going slowly and the porters are singing in Swahili, and the stars are out. Charlie was her name ,and she came in. I was like, “What am I doing pushing cars down the road when I just watched someone die at 57?”

So I came back and got my master’s in nonprofit leadership and started working with nonprofits and mostly at-risk youth, disadvantaged youth, and then really saw that it was time for me to step into my true soul’s work. I’m going to say that your soul’s work is your embodiment. It doesn’t have to be so. I was still doing that when I was doing finance for car dealerships, but that’s when I really saw that I could help more people on the path quicker.

If someone meets you today and says, “Who are you? What do you do?”, what would you say to them?

Trina Gadsden: I like to describe myself as a multi-dimensional being, so I think I have many talents and many things that I love to do and many things that bring me joy. In regards to the work that I do, I describe it as transformative alchemy. I like to take dense energy and move it into a higher frequency, and I’m an intuitive guide. I’m certified as a life coach, so that’s definitely part of it. But the work that’s done is a lot of using the clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsentient skills and accessing and bringing that client’s energy in and helping them get to their highest potential. Some friends have said, or some clients have said, “you’re a soul whisperer, you’re a channeler, you’re a medium,” but it’s all that and more.

Can you go deeper into what transformative alchemy is?

Trina Gadsden: It’s taking dense energy and transforming it into the highest frequency or the highest timeline. I meditate prior to a client session, so I get my frequency as high as possible and work with a large team of angelic beings and my higher soul. Then I call in their energy, and I ask to see, feel, experience everything that’s going on with them. I just sit there and take notes. My eyes are usually closed, it’s hard to read my writing, but I just take in the information. Sometimes, I’m shown questions to specifically ask them to bring things up.

Oftentimes, people that have passed on pop in and it’s not to be like “hey, hi, I’m here.” It’s more to make sure their perspective shifts, because it’s one way right now and there’s a whole other situation that is happening. Then I get the client in front of me via Zoom or in person, and we just go through these things and talk about them. During the session, I’m able to intuitively see more ways of things that need to come up. I’m able to intuitively see more things that need to come up.

In shamanic terms, our soul oftentimes fragments out when we have traumatic moments. It could be that your parents are divorced as a kid, or something traumatic happens, or it could be something smaller that’s a trigger in our system.

I call our body, our system. Sometimes, we experience something and say “This is too much, and I’m out.” Those timelines or ages drive our bus of life, and our perspective is from that eight-year-old when your parents got divorced and your dad said this or your mom did this. I like to bring those pieces back into the body, back into the soul, spirit, to get them healed, along with, in most cases, cutting cords of energy that allow them to be in their own sovereign field of light and connect to source and the highest frequency.

We do a lot of talking in the beginning, and then I put them on the table and I open up their channels. I’m able to see energy within their field and what it’s connected to. I can do psychic surgery on specific things in their body. I don’t like to, because everyone is their own healer, and so I usually go through it with them and help remove it and get the lesson, so it doesn’t come back.

How do you introduce these concepts and experiences to someone who’s completely new to this world?

Trina Gadsden: When I have someone in front of me, I say, “Take everything with a grain of salt. Whatever resonates for your spirit is what you’re supposed to receive right now.” When I’m shown in the prior meditation on how to work with them, sometimes I’m shown that they’re not open to this whatsoever. Their friend said, “You got to go see my friend. Book a session!” I bring it to a level that they can digest.

As we know in leadership, it’s motivating getting people to a level that they can digest. It’s not the fire hose situation. What I like to say is that how I work and how most individuals who are intuitive…we’re just mirrors. We’re just able to see energy, help organize it and bring it back, and so you can receive it in. We’re able to hold a high frequency, and if you can match and see that you can change within that frequency, then anything is possible.

Does this make new friendships or relationships difficult? Are people kind of freaked out by you?

Trina Gadsden: That’s a hilarious and funny and accurate question. I just went to a dinner party a week ago and knew the couple having it, but it was all new people. I do have the ability to shut things off and let myself be at the dinner party. What happened was the opposite…a person’s grandfather came in. I was shown very clearly a traumatic situation. They’re moving from this country to another country, and this grandfather was just so loud that there was an access point to this individual. I said, “Hey, I just have to ask you a couple things” and it was this crazy scenario of being shot as a kid and all kinds of stuff that came out.

I made the pact with Spirit a long time ago to never hold back anything of what I’m shown and told. I had a neighbor when I lived in Seattle who I knew something was off, but I couldn’t figure it out and he ended up taking his life. I don’t know if I could have saved him…that’s not my role, but I know that I could have had a conversation with him. So, in regards to the question about are people freaked out or whatever, just because I see everything, doesn’t mean I say everything. But if I get invited in, then I would share, for sure. And no, I’m fine, people love me, and the people that don’t love me, I’m just not for them and that’s okay, because I love myself.

For me, it can sometimes feel a bit intrusive to share an intuitive insight with and individual. How do you navigate saying something like that to someone?

Trina Gadsden: Let me give a quick example of that. I have my executive master’s in nonprofit leadership, ran nonprofits in Africa and the United States. I was at a conference where a donor paid for me to be in attendance, and it was pretty intimate. On the last day, I saw very clearly in a woman’s energy field, some thyroid…I don’t want to say cancer, but there was something that was not great energy, high density.

I’m like, oh geez, how do you go up to someone after a week together and say like, “Hey, we never talked, but you got this?” But, I made that pact with Spirit, so I went up to her and I said, “Hey, you know, we never got to talk. I loved what you shared here. It was so nice to have you in this cohesive group, but I feel bad that we never had a moment.” I said, “I just want to know, if you’re open and take everything once again with a grain of salt, but have you got checked for thyroid or have you done anything with that?” And she’s said “no.” And I said, “I see something in your field that might just be good for you to check out”, and so I don’t make it like “Hey, you’re dying of cancer, go tomorrow.”

It’s not that I have a gift that everyone else doesn’t. I’ve just honed my intuitiveness in, and I trust it, because when I don’t trust it, I get my rear kicked bad.

When you don’t deliver that thought, that message, that intuitive insight, what happens in your own life?

Trina Gadsden: That’s probably a whole other podcast and probably a couple novels. What happens is I just get in situations that are not good. Let me just give you a quick example of trusting that.

I bought a loft in Seattle, and I was going to Italy with a group of friends. I was photographing their wedding. I do photography also, and it was two couples and me and this other guy that I was dating. We ended up splitting right before that, and I was like “I don’t want to go to Florence or Tuscany the most romantic place on the planet for this three-week period. I’ll just go for the last five days and document the wedding.” So I’m like, where do I want to go? I got really clear you’re supposed to be in Cape Town. You’re supposed to put your feet on the ground there. So I changed my miles, I go to Cape Town, and I get there. I’m just exhausted. I’m staying at this guest house on the waterfront. They’re like, “whatever you do, do not walk down there.” I’ve got probably 75 countries under my belt at this point, so I’m pretty in tune. Never had an issue.

I go take a nap. I wake up like a day later. I’ve never slept like this before, but my system was just exhausted from all the change and the breakup and whatever. So I just start walking, and I’m still waking up, and I’m hungry. I just start walking down the waterfront, and I’m just not even thinking, walking, looking down, and all of a sudden, my gut goes. I look straight up, and I see two guys coming at me and on both sides of the road there’s abandoned buildings. They’re burned down, and I instantly saw that if I ran, I’d never make it back up. I’d be rape and killed if I went to across the street. So, I just walked straight at them and said “good morning.” And they didn’t know what to do. My heart was pounding.

It was one of the scariest moments. It was the only scary moment that I’ve had in all of my travels. If I wouldn’t have acknowledged the feeling I had and if I wouldn’t have acknowledged the slideshow that I got shown really quick on the best way to handle it, I’d be dead in two seconds. So, that’s an extreme case, but it’s mostly…if I don’t honor what I’m being shown intuitively.

When we go through challenging situations in life, it often involves people that we loved or trusted. How do you help someone navigate how to still be in a relationship with that person, set boundaries with that person, or stand up for yourself? 

Trina Gadsden: When we look at these traumatic experiences at the end of our life, they’re blips on our radar screen. There’s that saying, You are the sky, everything else is just the weather.” So it’s not that I diminish what happens to them, but I bring it into perspective that they are Source, they are God, they are the Universe. When they have this boundary or this betrayal or this disappointment whatever the term is, that’s connected to what happened, when they remember that they are whole within themselves, it’s easier to define what is acceptable and what’s not acceptable behavior. Sometimes, if it’s not in alignment, when they’re going through that healing process, it’s okay to take breaks with friendships and family members and relationships and everything. You know, back to that ‘oxygen mask first’ sort of energy. If you’re not in a space to be in relationship with someone, it doesn’t mean you can’t love them from afar. It doesn’t mean if they didn’t call you and said “I need this”, you wouldn’t be there. But you get to choose who has your energy or not. So part of that comes down to just knowing what feels right and what doesn’t feel right, and honoring that intuitive part of you.

When you leave being with that person, are you exhausted, are you lit up? Are you clearing your energy field every time you have any exchange, because everything’s energy. There’s practical tools that I help get into place with them, along with just letting it be okay to not be in communication for a little bit.

We do cut a lot of cords of energy that I see entangled within people’s systems. There is this belief system that when you heal yourself, you heal seven generations back and seven generations forward. When I do this specific type of protocol, when I call in the seven generations that have passed, they’re there in two seconds to come in. They want us that are embodied right now to clear the generational traumas. It clears it for them. It helps the earth heal. Sometimes you have to remember that whole saying of “drinking the poison and expecting your enemy to die” is just really hurting you. So there’s a forgiveness process that goes in there, too, and seeing that everyone has their own human experience that caused trauma. It doesn’t mean that we discount or forget what happened, but you can forgive and make creative space so you can heal in that process. 

During this healing process, it can sometimes make us feel like curling up in a ball and avoiding everything that feels risky. How do you help people cultivate that sense of confidence again?

Trina Gadsden: I think it’s important for people to ask and say what they need, and I think that leads to confidence. For example, I had a client this week who has lots of trauma, and the first sessions are pretty intense. In this case, it was too intense, too fast. She had so much buried that the moment she sat down in front of me she’s bawling, because it’s so stuffed within her system. I’m like, “Hey, let’s take a pause. Do you want to take a break? We can come back in a week or so, and you just go and do some self care and work on your nervous system. I will clear you in this timeline in between.” And she’s like, “yes.” To me, that was an example of asking for what you need that is authentic truth to your soul.

I’ll put my hand on my chest and my other hand on my womb space and close my eyes every morning and just breathe. I ask my spirit, my soul, my being, “What do you need today?” Sometimes, you might be having lunch with a friend and be like, “Nope, you need to be taking a bath and writing in your journal and cleaning or writing a blog post.” I honor that I say, “Hey friend, can we schedule to a different day? Actually, I’m feeling this is what I need today.” No one’s going to argue with what you need when you start asking for it. People forget to ask for what they truly need, because there’s a piece of them that doesn’t feel they’re deserving of it.

If people have a 40 to 50 hour a week job, how do you help them navigate that process of healing when they have all these responsibilities, kids, and a job?

Trina Gadsden: I think there’s ways to do that within a 40 hour workweek timeline, and baby steps is better than no steps at all. Even just looking at, where are you not in cohesiveness within your system during your work week? Where are you not being authentic to what you need? So let me just give a quick example of that.

I had a client who had a colleague who lost a parent and was devastated. That colleague was at a company where it’s not really emotionally based as much as others. That colleague didn’t know what to say, was so uncomfortable with that feeling of what the other person was going through. So they were starting to not feel grounded within themselves, because they missed an opportunity to be authentic. So, we worked with “where’s a way that you can have that conversation?” We practiced, and the person ran into the colleague again, and said, “Hey, how are you? I’m really sorry to hear about your mom. How are you?”  They had this really human soul connection that they never would have had if she wouldn’t have taken the time and the space.

When she wasn’t clear, it upset her whole kind of day, cause she kept being like, “Why didn’t I do that? Okay, my family didn’t talk about emotions, I’m still doing it at work.” I’m like, “You don’t have to change everything and go have a powwow with your family overnight, but you can start with what’s ever in front of you.:” That’s the gift of being a soul.

In this human experience. We get opportunities every moment to practice being connected and living through the heart and living with love. And the more we do that, the easier it is to then say to your boss, “Hey, actually I’m going to work through this project, I’m going to get it done. I need to take like an hour and leave early today.” And they’re gonna be like, okay. I’ve been a boss of many, and I’m always going to honor what feels in alignment to that soul if it’s good communication.

Part of that confidence is just learning how to not compartmentalize, because I think that’s where we’ve gone wrong. When we take it and take all these emotions and put them over here and do this. That’s where you unravel fast. I think it’s more with having that opportunity to be embodied and working on that embodiment. Then you go through life and it doesn’t matter if it’s work, kids, spouse, whatever. You’re able to communicate your needs, even if it’s like, “Hey, I need a 10 minute break. I’m gonna go outside and hang with the dog.”

The term “embodiment” is used so often among healers. Help me understand that from your perspective. What does that mean and why is that important?

Trina Gadsden: This is my own journey with embodiment. I could use all the buzzwords of enlightenment and spiritual stuff like tomorrow, but if I’m not practicing what I preach, then it doesn’t mean anything, and it’s not authentic. Embodiment feels like I’m walking the path of what I’m trying to bring to the planet. If I’m not healing myself in the process, how can I help anyone else? I think what that means is that we’re all imperfectly perfect and doing the best we can, and the more we’re helping others with those tools, while staying true to ourself…that to me, is embodiment.

What does that look like? I think it looks like authenticity. I think it looks like speaking your truth. I think it looks like feeling your emotions. I think it looks like taking time for a timeout if you need it, and I think that’s what embodiment is. I think it’s looking at your opportunities, which are often called challenges. Looking at your life and what are the lessons? And how can you get that lesson and go check and and not bring them forth again and not manifest them in another person?

As people are regaining their confidence, how do you help them start to dream again?

Trina Gadsden: That’s really fun for me, because I feel strongly that if everyone was doing what lit them up, the world would be heaven on earth in two seconds. When I’m in a session with someone, if they say something and I see their frequency change with a spark, then I pull that out. We bring that in and sometimes that actually even helps the healing faster, because if your cup is filled with mud and dirt, we have to remove some stuff to be able to receive. But the moment you get a little bit of clarity in that water, in that soul, then you get all these intuitive hits and creative ideas and all the things that you dreamt of that you stopped doing for whatever reason.

Lately, there’s a whole other part of the journey of how I work with clients that’s going to be also connected to their soulpreneur alchemy. What’s your soul’s mission, what lights you up? Then, we could pull out what’s stopping you. That’s usually a thread here because “my dad said this when I was a kid, or my mom did this, or some teacher said I couldn’t” and that’s the one thing I could feel myself getting lit up around it.

I am the biggest cheerleader for people. One of my purposes of being on the planet is shining so bright that you see how magical you are as a soul, and you can not wait till your deathbed. In that poem that came in when Ernie passed…stepping into your highest frequency. In sessions, there is a kind of meditation, a journey of sorts, that I bring clients through, where we step them into that feeling. Once they have that in their field, it’s way easier for the Universe, God, Source to align everything that can get in there faster.

Who are the people that are most attracted to working with you? Is there a certain demographic or group of individuals that are most resonating with your work?

Trina Gadsden: I’ve had all the things that could happen to an individual happen in my lifetime. I’ve had all the ‘not awesome’ check boxes, and so, because of that, what happens when you heal these traumas is that you are able to have the keys, codes, activations within your system to heal others.

So I attract individuals who have had a trauma in some cases, or who have buried a trauma or it’s in a certain dynamic in the lineage of family, that can see that I have something. It’s subconscious, it’s not a conscious. It’s not necessarily baby awakeners, but it’s people that know there’s way more to life than what they’ve experienced thus far.

When we have anything traumatic, it shows up in us as shame, even though it’s done to us. In most cases, it’s shame. So I help them release that shame. It’s men and women, not just females. It’s all genders who are ready for a bigger life, ready to step into their highest blueprint, ready to stop wearing a kindergarten coat of trauma. It feels so comfortable they don’t want to get it off, but it also is suffocating them. When they’re ready to have that removed, then they show up.

Do you tend to see people over a period of time or just one-off sessions?

Trina Gadsden: It varies. I would say 90 days is usually a big change for people, but I sometimes make that in 45 days. No matter who I’m working with and whatever that container is, I clear their energy every week. 

Although I do one-off sessions, I think it’s best not to do the one hit wonder of going and roto-rootering everything out. On this beautiful planet that we’re on, we’re getting so much awakening frequency energy so fast that it’s overwhelming, and I think that having sessions broken out in longer ways can peel back layers. In the past, I was doing these kind three to four hour go deep sessions, because my mother, who left the world about four or five years ago, died with all her trauma. I kind of made a pact with her. She’s actually a really good friend on the other side. I made a pact with her that if I get someone in front of me in session, that I want to go as deep and as fast as I can. But I also realized that people’s nervous systems are too heightened to receive. So, 45 to 90 days depending on what they need.

What do you mean by clearing someone every week? How does that work?

Trina Gadsden: The benefit is tremendous. They’re not in front of me, it’s just their energy. I sit down every morning, and I get my frequency as high as possible. I call on their energy, and I go through their system and I’m able to clear energy. I’m able to clear subconscious patterns. I’m able to clear energies that’s not theirs.

What I teach and what I will always preach until I leave body is it’s so important in kind of Energy 101 to clear your energy through any interaction. So you walk into a grocery store, I would leave that. I say to myself, “I call back all my energy blessed and transformed, and I release any energy that is not mine and send it back to Source God, blessed and transformed.”

Because everything is energy, you could walk into a restaurant and a couple just had a huge fight and are getting divorced, and you walk through that. That’s in you. Every interaction is an exchange of energy, and if you don’t clear it and become a sovereign being of your own light, of your own Source, God’s Source, Energy. You get very convoluted very fast, so I’m able to, with the clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsentient, I’m able to bring in people’s energy and just see it and feel it and clear it out through the kind of quantum field.

When people are ready to work with you, what’s the best way for them to connect?

Trina Gadsden: My website is www.trinagadsden.com, and my Instagram is @trinagadsden. They can see all the different ways to work with me, and we can come up with a plan that works best for them.

I love the photos of you and your Dad on Instagram. Everyone should check out those pics. What great smiles!

Trina Gadsden: Yeah, I love my dad. My dad is one of my biggest teachers on this planet, because he is a joyful, happy soul, curious. He’s going to be 87. We get on the phone or we do road trips or we do anything together, and we just laugh. It reminds me of how precious present moment, awareness and joy of life is.