May 19, 2023 • 64 mins
Today’s podcast is pulled from The Ode To Joy Podcast, hosted by Elena Box. This episode features guest Hana Rakshani, Somatic Movement Artist, who shares brilliant tools for releasing emotion through movement. This episode leaves you better in touch with your own body, and provide life long tools for your own emotional release that feel REALLY GOOD!
Follow Elena on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elenabox/
Check out her Book, “Grieve Outside the Box”: https://www.amazon.com/Grieve-Outside-Box-Traveling-Embracing/dp/B09S63PVDK
Learn more on her website: https://www.elenabox.com/
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Host @lisahayim
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Edited by Houston Tilley
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
No feel.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Even when times gethard and you feel your in the
c see just how beautiful life can be when you
saften your heart, you can finally start to live your
(00:29):
tu seious life.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Truthiest Life. It's
your host, Lisa him and I'm so excited that you're here.
You're going to leave this episode with so much usable
information about how to get better in touch with your
body emotions, release them, and things that you can like
actually do right now to get in touch feel the
sensations and get that release that most of us are
(00:54):
in need of. So this episode, again I'm featuring on
from a podcast that I love from somebody that I
just met but very much look up to. And to
give a little bit of a backstory. In my town,
there's this place called Commune, and essentially it's not a
yoga studio, but anybody can rent it by the hour
and teach their own class. It opened up about a
(01:16):
year ago and it's kind of slowly been gaining press
and people knowing about it, but it's still very much
snuck away and a little bit of like if you know,
you know type of a thing. And I've been very
fortunate because Commune has allowed me, I think, to stay
sane in a very difficult year. In person, yoga for
me particularly is just exactly what I need, crave and
(01:40):
is like medicine for my soul. I think I didn't
realize how much I needed that during the pandemic when
that went away. But one of the things that I
have been doing day after day has been showing up
for class, and I didn't realize that that would be
like part of my healing. It wasn't a prescription or
anything like that. But when I look back to the
(02:00):
last couple of months, a difficult seven or so months
that I've had, I see that these teachers that have
magically entered my life, despite having completely different philosophies, teaching styles,
energies and people, each of the teachers that I go
to Commune for teach me something and I leave different
(02:21):
because of them. It's honestly very much how I feel
about this podcast. Every guest that I have on it
doesn't matter if I agree with who this person is
as a whole or on every single level, but throughout
our conversations I pick up one piece of information that
changes my life drastically. So in person you'll get. Commune
has been huge for me and I bounce back between
(02:44):
these two teachers that teach once or twice a week.
And for whatever reason, on a Sunday, I saw there
was this class called Sunday Sanctuary with Reiki with somebody
I'd never heard of before, and I was like, you
know what, I'm just going to give it a try.
And I sit in this room and I look at
the teacher and I don't even think she saw, but
(03:04):
the stillness just gave way to a powerful purge of
emotion where I just started crying and I knew that
I was in the right place, in the right moment,
and it wasn't like I'm so sad, it was just
emotion moving through me. When I attended this class the
next week, I found that same thing happening, not just
in stillness but actually in movement. And so much of
(03:27):
the teacher, who is Elena Box, who podcast I'm going
to feature today, is the way that she was teaching.
It is very in line with my philosophy of you know,
wake and shake and shaking when we are going through
something traumatic or at the end of a traumatic event.
It's very in line with the podcast I shared last
week where with the somatic yoga teacher Charlotte Watts, and
(03:50):
you'll see that themes are kind of overlapping because this
is where I'm being drawn in my life to learn,
to heal, to serve all these modalities. I just want
to like soak up. But the way that Elena taught
had a lot to do with primarily letting go of
your emotions humming, rocking, screaming, and people were doing it.
That was kind of the best part of it. It
(04:11):
wasn't a room where people were feeling shy. I think
she really created a container where people felt comfortable to ah,
let it all out. That happened on the metreat as well.
And as soon as one person kind of starts to
live outside of the societal norm of just it on
your mat and don't make noise, it gives permission to
the next person to do so. And it's not that
(04:33):
we should all sound the same, but oftentimes with release
of sound comes emotion and we can get in touch
with all the stuff that's buried within. So I just
wanted to give a shout out to Elena. I never
even got a chance to thank her for her class,
but it did help me continuously unpack the emotions that
otherwise would be lodged in my body. So today's episode
(04:57):
is from Elena's podcast which is called The to Joy Podcast.
And Elena is a shamanic death doulah comedian And that
sounds like a lot in one sentence because it is
We're talking about death and comedy in the same sentence,
and I think that really well encapsulates who she is.
She's somebody that understands the depths of living and that
(05:20):
comes with dying, but she doesn't miss the joy in
it as well. In this episode, she has on a
woman named Hannah Rukshani who is a somatic movement specialist,
and in this episode, Hannah shares her top tools for
navigating and tracking emotion in the body and best of all,
shares how to actually release it. They cover all of
(05:43):
my favorite topics such as interception, seeing the internal state
of the body, yoga as that entryway into practicing somatics,
a topic called body mind centering that I was completely
new to. They talk about humming, which m so good
for this all. Even if you do it now or
go home, you'll get that like brain massage that is
(06:07):
so soothing and you can call on in times of need, Tapping, jiggling, bouncing, shaking,
all of it. All the things that I'm so passionate about,
they cover here in expert form, using all the correct
language and crediting the correct people. And it's a beautiful
episode that will allow you to take home new tools
(06:27):
that you otherwise didn't have before. I hope you're enjoying
these little shares that I'm finding and giving to you
from other people's podcasts. And best of all, I hope
that this introduces you to new people that are doing
incredible work out there and encourages you to support them
by way of social media, podcasts, or their books, all
of which Elena has. I'll put all of her info below,
(06:49):
and thank you for listening to the Truthiest Life. Have
a great day.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
Hello everyone, and welcome to the ode To podcast. I
am so glad you're all here today, and I have
on another very special guest. I am so excited to
introduce you to. Her name is Hannah Rakshani and she
is coming to us from Asheville, North Carolina. Welcome Hannah.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
I could just record here and you say my name
to me.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
I can do that for you.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Oh God, it's so good. It's so good.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
I'm so pleased to have you here and to give
a little bit of a background about you to our listeners.
Hannah is a movement artist and her focus is on
the embodiment and somatic arts, and currently she is facilitating
workshops on contact improvisation. So many juicy areas of expertise
(07:57):
to draw from, and the reason why I brought Hannah
on the show today was because I was looking to
talk with someone about emotional release techniques. So within this
chapter of my book, Grieve Outside the Box, I offer
different tools to navigate really deep feelings and a lot
(08:20):
of times it can be really scary to navigate that
when we're feeling it within our bodies, and so within
the book, I offer different tools and techniques that helped me,
and I wanted to expand this offering by bringing on
an expert in her field. So here we have Hannah
(08:43):
to talk all about her work and what she offers.
And thank you so so so much for coming on
the show.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Mm hmmm. Yeah. Oh goodness. The plethora of elements of
modalities and influences that have come together to interweave the
ways in which I walk through my emotional body or
walk with my emotional body is like vast and complex,
(09:12):
and I'm excited through the journey of this show to
kind of give thanks and give appreciation to the names
and the modalities that have come together to support me
on this journey. But more than anything, I'd like to
mention that the developing of the relationship of my relationship
(09:34):
with my physical body as my main router, my main
guide into listening to how emotion manifests and sometimes sits
or gets stuck, as an invitation to explore this like
communication on how to see witness ques with curiosity and
(10:03):
find movement. This word release sometimes to me has like
a beginning and an end. It's like, Oh, I experience trauma,
and my journey is to then release the trauma, which
absolutely is a desire of mine. But the curiosity and
the engagement with the sensations and the qualities of what
(10:26):
that emotion is for me has been the main kind
of pathway into its alchemization or transformation or dissolving.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
Yes, I'm so so so happy you're here because you've
really put something into words that I think is so
helpful for people to understand, is that it is real alchemy.
You know, perhaps in our modern day, many people are
walking around and we year of this word alchemy, but
(11:01):
it can be challenging to really understand what that is.
But I think bringing it down into onto, like into
a cellular level and and understanding that within our bodies.
Once you have that experience, you're like, oh, okay, you know,
I get it. So I'd be interested to hear from
(11:22):
your perspective, say, speaking to an audience member who perhaps
has no experience with this kind of work, and say
they have experienced some sort of trauma, what would you
how would you explain to them, just on the basic level,
(11:44):
how to notice emotion within their bodies?
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Mm hmmm, yeah, great question. I noticed when I was
hearing you asked that question. A part of me is like, ooh,
Like the bridge between between between exploring something sematically and
the somatic attention in individuals who don't already have a
practice is a bridge that I'm still trying to understand
(12:11):
and construct, And something that I would invite is a
beginning of a practice of witnessing of sensation, even before
stepping into like how to perceive emotion or how to
perceive trauma or stuck emotion, and that practice could look
(12:34):
so many ways like the vipasana practice. The Buddhist vipasana
practice which Goenka has made quite popular, but has been
an extremely ancient practice of using the element of body
scan or even the element of purely focusing on the
nostrils on apanasati, the element of exploring and sensing into
(12:57):
the breath as it meets the entrance of the nostrils
and its journey through the sinuses and down the trachea
into the lungs can be a kind of first step
into developing a level of attention that is interroceptive, so
a level of attention that goes beyond the skin level.
(13:20):
And this word interroceptive can sometimes be a little nerdy
or overwhelming. I like it, and I remember the when
my partner and I began to date close to three
years ago. I would talk to him about my organs.
I'd be like, Oh, I'm really feeling my heart being
(13:41):
massaged by my lungs, and he would look at me
and be like, what are you saying? We can't feel
our organs. It's like that is completely not He's like,
I don't know who I've never heard someone tell me
that they could sense into their organs and like anything right,
(14:02):
Like a person could say, how does a child learn
how to walk from crawling? Like our brains and our
nervous systems are so beautifully neuroplastic, or they're so malleable
and elastic in nature that when we begin, even on
the most micro level of sensing our skin, which thankfully
(14:24):
has all these lovely nerve receptors that make it a
little easier to sense. Starting at that kind of base
level of sensation on the skin level, and then beginning
to dive beyond the skin level into whether it's the
nasal passage or even the mouth and the esophagus, and
that relationship of like a swallow or a gulp, or
(14:48):
the relationship of the lungs in relationship to the ribs
would be kind of little stepping stones that I would
invite into beginning to develop an inter receptive really relationship. Ooh,
I've used this word relationship five times in one sentence.
I like that.
Speaker 5 (15:08):
Hmm wow.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
And for those of you who are listening and aren't
able to witness Hannah at this time, as she speaks,
she's constantly in motion, and as she speaks, it's like
the words are moving through her body, and she's fully
experiencing everything that she's communicating. It's like the most embodied
I think communication or conversation I think maybe I've ever had.
(15:33):
It's really lovely to witness you and and hear everything
from your perspective.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Wow wow, wow wow.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
So you brought up something that I think is I
want to say, it's crucial perhaps in in understanding where
emotion can get stuck within our bodies, and that is
the organs, uh.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
You know.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
And you also brought up something that I find really
delightful and a funny way is a lot of us
are walking around, you know, not even sure where our
liver is, or where our spleen is or where you know,
and not aware of what's within us. And I think,
especially when it comes to grief practice becoming really attuned
(16:20):
to our own bodies and remembering that we are, from
my perspective, a soul that is in a body. I
think it helps connect with a sense of mortality in
a way to say like, yes, I will die and
one day this will return to the earth in its
own way, and to really respect the organs as these
(16:42):
amazing like workhorses in our bodies and honor them and
nurture them and know where they are, you know, within
ourselves is so important. I wanted to share just a
(17:05):
story also, like what you mentioned about, you know, feeling
into your heart and you know, I had a similar
experience where I'm like, oh, you know, I'm talking to
my mom like, oh, you know, my liver. My liver's
feeling really sluggish right now. I think I'm gonna have
to take some herbs and do a little bit of massage,
get on my roller balls. And she's like, why do
you talk? How can you feel your liver? What are
(17:28):
you just sitting there feeling your liver all day? I'm
like pretty much like I'm just I'm in tune with
my organs. I'm listening to them, they're talking to me.
We're in communication. And I think, as you said, you know,
first starting out with something very simple like a tool
to get into the body. The examples that you gave
are so helpful and getting to know your body. And
(17:53):
from my experience, it was very much through my yoga
practice where I began understanding all of the organs. You know,
I would know, okay, I'm in this certain shape, and
now I can feel there's pressure on you know, my
colon or you know, you start to get like an
awareness of the systems working within the body, and you
can use the breath to massage different organs and move things,
(18:18):
and so it can really be this beautiful relationship, but
it takes time to develop. So I'm interested to hear.
I'm really curious actually to hear for you. Was there
a certain moment that gave you, like the key this
to this work. Was there like a pivotal moment in
(18:40):
your life that you came to this work. Yeah, that's
what I'm really interested to hear about.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
M thank you for your curiosity. Yeah, and I enjoyed
your story. Hmmm. Actually there's a there's a resonance when
I was hearing you speak to the yoga practice as
kind of a portal where you began to or one
of the portals where you were relating to your organs
(19:09):
and how movement and breath and like the sliding and
intermingling of organs play a role. I would say that
actually the yoga practice was for me a breaking point
into somatics, but it was not at all really like
(19:32):
the tipping point of me starting on my own healing
journey like I was really blessed to grow up in India.
My parents are in some ways wild nomadics, and at
the age of six we moved to the south of
India and they began on their own spiritual journey and quest,
(19:54):
and my brother and I were kind of trailing behind.
So it spent summers at ashrams practicing yoga and meditation
and fasts and Korea yoga and like whole plethora and
exposed to ayre Veda. And currently my father has his
pH d in the yoga sciences and is an Araveda
(20:15):
massage therapist. So there was this opening of a portal
of like, oh, here are invitations to begin tapping into breath,
to begin tapping into the knowledge of anatomy in an
embodied way, in a sense, and felt sensed and felt way.
When I began my own personal relationship with yoga and
(20:37):
got my yoga teacher training in India at a university
there and began to teach and explore that world, I
was still kind of in a bit of a toxic
relationship with myself, which was not to be judgmental, but
a little on the opposite side of truly and bided
(21:01):
I had disordered eating patterns and was battling with depression
and anxiety, and was looking outside of myself, looking at
yoga practices and meditation practices and Buddhist practices up in Daramshala,
where I would spend a few months in.
Speaker 5 (21:20):
A year.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
To be like, Okay, how do I find myself? How
do I find the answer to this this thing that's
eating my insides, this thing that in some ways was
killing my body. And it was a great lesson for
me to see, like, oh, looking outside of myself is
really even if it's embodied, and even if it's dropped
(21:44):
in and using breath and meditation and attention, Like the
very act of wanting to escape my own reality wasn't
in service of me. So a big kind of long
story of like the disordered eating into subs and some
of use into me having a bit of an awakening
(22:04):
at the age of twenty one. So that phase was
between fifteen and twenty one, the age of twenty one
of like being surrounded by people who were substance users
and who were also in this faux spiritual path where
we had crystals and we would do kirtan and then
(22:26):
also get really high on cocaine some nights, and maybe
I won't go into too many details, but this kind
of oscillation of desire to escape and a desperate clinging
on to what I thought was spirituality. And at that
point I got a reflection from my parents. I was
(22:47):
in college in Florida, had moved away from India, and
my parents were like, we are We're worried about you.
They had been worried about me for six years, but
I had stepped out of the disordered eating and they
were like, we are seeing this this darkness, which I
have my own feelings about that term, but this darkness
inside of you where there used to be a light,
(23:11):
oh oh, the spear and the heart. Yeah. And then
there was an invitation to move to Asheville, where my
father had his wellness center, and I took that invitation
and I moved here. And the summer that I moved
(23:34):
here was two thousand and sixteen. I all of a
sudden got exposed to two men that were playing with
each other on a field at a music festival, where
they were jumping on each other's bodies and gurgling laughter
and rolling off each other's bodies. And it was to
(23:54):
me like watching puppies play. Yeah, it was like I
have never seen adults in my complex of having experience
like whether it's homophobia or even in India, men are
quite physically in touch with each other, but very often
looking outside towards the women, like men are holding hands
(24:16):
and cat calling women has been my experience very often
with Indian masculine energies. And over here I'm witnessing like
two white individuals who I haven't seen that much in
the Western world of deep touch and play and like
embracing and rolling and holding and lifting, and something within
(24:40):
me lit up in a way that I haven't felt
in that time, I hadn't felt for six years. I
was like, oh, play and fully embodied self meeting in play.
And from that point I began my inquiry and journey
into contact improvisation, which for me was this grand mirror
(25:02):
that showed me where my mind existed. So I'd come
into touch with another body and fear about my body weight,
or fear about my worth or my goodness or my
ability all coming to the surface, which completely takes took
me out of my present state of attention with another body.
(25:24):
So it was this first portal for me of entering
into holding attention within the body, with the depth of
listening outside of myself and having this continuous internal to
external flow of attention and meeting of awareness. And from
(25:45):
that point the study of anatomy and somatics and specifically
something called body mind centering started by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen,
which goes deep into embodied imaginary imagination, to embody anatomy,
to delve into sensation and holding patterns, to kind of
(26:07):
take us back to our original nervous system in embryo.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
Oh yeah, I want to hear all about it, girl,
this is so, this is such a lovely, lovely conversation.
I want to hear everything. I am fascinated. I would
love to hear more about the technique that you learned
from Bonnie. It's Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, isn't it. And because
(26:36):
I would really love to offer some tools that you
learned through that work and through your own work, two
people too begin to dive in deeper for themselves. So
could you could you give us a bit of a
lay of that land if you can, I.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Would love to. So my exposure to BMC has happened
kind of like flickering stars in the sky until I
decided to jump and grab a star and be like, Okay,
I want to dive in many different contact teachers and
SOMATIC teachers had had their training as BMC facilitators. It's
(27:18):
a pretty long drawn out experience, and I'm not fully
trained as a BMC practitioner, but having had this kind
of beginning of exposure to something called cellular intelligence, which
inherently looks at kind of going back in time to
when we were single cellular organisms, and how incredibly functional
(27:43):
a single cellular organism can be functional, even to the
level of locomotion, so movement without having limbs, how when
we're how But embodying that kind of vision of how
every thing will sell in our bodies is so divinely
(28:05):
intelligent and intricate as a system, and it put into
stark contrasts the kind of psychological model that is like,
in some ways, it's like, oh, you have this disorder,
let's fix you in such and such and such way
because you're broken or not functioning as human society tells
you to. Kind of stepping away from that paradigm and
(28:27):
moving into like, every single one of my cells is
working in this complexity of respiration, excretion, taking in all
the nutrients it needs, balancing osmosis, balancing the fluid and
the tension of its own body DNA, and like the
wisdom that is within each of our cells was kind
(28:49):
of my portal opening into BMC. And that's a very
central element of BMC is cellular intelligent intelligence and BMC
being the short for body mind centering and from these
like little stars and flickers of gleaning the wisdom of
body mind centering. We had a course in my college
(29:14):
which one of my contact improv teachers was actually leading,
where we invited a BMC facilitator and instructor in for
multiple weeks to look at embryological development. And that for
me has been also something that's so yummy as a
referential point to how our body has been created. So
(29:37):
one example, and this example came away later. I ended
up spending maybe a total of eight weeks studying BMC
in Berlin between two thousand and seventeen and nineteen, give
or take. It's possibly more, but I'm going to kind
of intermingle the timeline and just offer the information from
(30:00):
this point on. But for example, one of the things
that embryology offers a reference to in my relationship to
emotional release is the relationship between the perennial body, which
Bonni has kind of labeled areas which haven't yet been
(30:21):
labeled as glands, but they have a lot of nerve
centers and there's some things being excreted and taken in
in these areas. She calls them bodies, and there's multiple
different ones throughout the body, but the perennial body seated
right in the center of the perineum. In utero, we
are three discs, and the central disc is the mesoderm,
(30:45):
and that central disc is what will turn the bottom
of it is what will turn into the perennial body.
And the mesoderm is also what creates our limbs, including
the limb of the larynx, the vocal cords, and the head.
So very often we don't perceive our head to be
a limb, but maybe we could just visualize that for
(31:06):
a moment, enter into starfish consciousness and have our head,
our arms, and our legs be limbs. And from this
relationship of the perineum to the larynx, there's an invitation
to use this upwards energy and the pelvic floor as
(31:29):
a baseline for beginning to open the vocal cords as
well as the limb of the face, which so often
I've had an experience, especially in the West, in the
United States and in some places in Europe, of the
face being very private, faces often closed off. And I'm
(31:50):
curious about like opening both the voice and the cheeks
and the jaws and the eyes and the muscles of
the face to express in the same ways that we
would when we're talking with our hands. So that for
me has been a big key into exploring emotion through voice.
(32:11):
Is beginning my attention in the permium, allowing for it
to spread through the pelvic floor, and the way the
cells travel up as they travel on each side of
the body, they come kind of like the pelvic halves.
They come as a two halves and climb up. So
there's this this, this two halves coming together to create
(32:34):
the larynx. And I use that visualization in my in
my toning and in my sounding to use all the
organs through the belly and the whole torso and the
halves of the neck to meet the larynx and the
face through sound and the tongue.
Speaker 4 (32:56):
I would oh, my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
So okay, I'm trying not to be too much of
a fangirl, but I'm a fan girl, you know. So
a lot of the work that I do with people
is really utilizing the voice because I believe that we
(33:18):
can release so much stuck emotion through the voice, and
so it's something that I will work into yoga practices
of releasing sound on the voice. I bring in my training.
I'm a trained actress, so we did a lot of
work within what we call voice and movement. But it's
interesting because you know, I would have certain people be like, oh,
(33:41):
you know, a lot of the yoga teachers were always
you know, moaning and groaning and sighing and screaming and growling,
and I'm like, well, that's I mean. But of course
they loved it. They loved it, but they made fun
of me for and so I'm sort of interested to
hear because this is something that I'm still teaching. So
when I'm working with people individually or like I said,
(34:03):
in a yoga class or in a workshop, I'm inviting
them to tap in and tune into their voice as
a way to release emotion. And I'm interested to hear
from your experience, because what I noticed is that there
is a lot of resistance, almost a lot of shame,
which is probably why they were poking fun at me,
(34:24):
because it's hard for people to really let themselves be
heard in a lot of ways, especially if it is
I want to say, like unguided. You know, it's hard
for them to really let themselves go and sound and
tone and make all of these different sounds that they
(34:45):
might not normally or maybe never have. So I'm interested
to hear from your experience in perhaps working with someone
who is facing that resistance, and perhaps what you would
guide them to do to work through any resistance and
releasing their voice.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
This point that you bring up is one that's like,
it's so alive. It's the point that I'm speaking to,
is that of like the level of restriction that somehow
is vast in our voice in our current society. Like
it's I wish I could say it's rare to meet
(35:32):
people in my classes who are like I struggle the
opposite of that. It's so widespread, and like I get
lots of feedback of like the tension that arises within
people's body at the quote unquote pressure right sound, which
is the opposite of the point of it, the opposite
(35:56):
words system reaction. Ah, yeah, I share a little story
about my own relationship to my voice. Do you have
the space for that?
Speaker 4 (36:08):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Okay. So in twenty sixteen, when I was here, I
began to be involved with the Umban Diamond medicine tradition,
which is a Brazilian medicine tradition that has quite a
bit of the African Yoruba and Ifa divination traditions, entwined
(36:30):
with Catholicism, entwined with indigenous practices. So the ayuasca medicine
is part of it. And I knew some songs. I
had had a Brazilian friend in the past who shared
some files with me, and it just like the style
of singing with the drumming just synchronized so deeply within me,
even without me knowing what I was singing or listening
(36:52):
to half the time. Then all of a sudden, I'm
sitting in these ceremonies and I'm like, oh, I know
these songs, and the ceremony had ended, and I mentioned
this to the facilitator, and the facilitator is like, oh,
can you sing back the song? And I notice every
muscle in my body tends up. My heartbeat was racing
(37:14):
and I'm sweating, and I.
Speaker 5 (37:17):
Go, so good, Mary has a little night, not the song. No.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
And then I sat with the same facilitator again a
few months later and he places a page of lyrics
and I'm deep in the medicine and I'm looking at
this page of lyrics and the words are dancing across
the page and he's like sing the song and there's
a drumming and it's just me and it's all in Portuguese,
(37:55):
which I have limited capacity with Portuguese. I could speak some,
but who whole other beast.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
To tackle I can't even imagine.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
And once again I have like this facilitation of plant
medicine in my body to kind of really show me
like where this constriction is existing and where it's coming from.
In my own internal mindset of you're not good enough
was like the inner sound like you're not like what
(38:28):
would make my voice worthy to be heard? And I
had a story that it had to be beautiful, and
it had to be resounding, and it had to be
deeply knowing of all the words with no mistakes. And
only then and then am I worthy of taking my
voice out into the space. We have these shows like
(38:51):
American Idol and like which we idealize a certain type
of voice and so much respect for people who have
trained their voices and are like blessed with the like
the the gods of sound and like melodics, and also
like a part of my heart shatters and breaks when
(39:13):
I noticed the difference between baby's toddlers into moving into adolescence,
like when we witness a baby, like so many sounds,
toddlers too are continuously in this exploring of just like
(39:34):
mimic mimicry and vocalization, and there's I feel so much
joy being around the aid ranges of like zero to
four because I get reminded of the state of being
before we embodied and took in this kind of I'm
(39:54):
gonna use the metaphor of a straight jacket. It's kind
of straight jacket that tells us, like, you don't take
up space with your voice unless it's worthy, unless you're
at the head of the podium and you've been assigned
or whatever it might be. And I'm like a deep
believer that when we're in shared spaces, like it's a
(40:19):
it's a listening, right, Like if I'm in a shared
meditation space that is one of silence, and that's the request,
Like I'm going to embody that request and if not,
I might ask the facilitator is like a certain level
of sound okay, et cetera. So there's a continuous navigation
of sound in space. But something that I have been
(40:39):
doing to support people kind of finding nervous system regulation
with the invitation to sound even when it's edgy, is
to firstly offer as an myself as an example, and
I'm deeply blessed also have people in the community here
(41:00):
in Asheville that have deeply dropped into kind of voice
and movement kind of what you're speaking to this capacity
of like where movement, where movement feels voice, and where
voice and sound influences and ripples through movement. So let's
say in a classroom of twenty people, there's seven people
(41:22):
who feel comfortable in their voice, and there is an
open invitation when I can create an ocean or a
frequency of sound. There seems to be opportunities where people
who might have restrictions or resistance to allowing for their
(41:43):
voice and their sound to expand there's this opportunity of like, oh,
maybe I won't be heard, maybe my mistakes won't be heard,
which is okay. Like if I can create this platform
where there's enough vibration and frequency happening that people could
be like, I could at least try and my like,
(42:04):
no one will know it's me whatever. And something I've
really tapped into and noticed is like embodying imagery. So
sometimes I'll do circles where it's like, can we enter
in as a character, whether it's a monkey or an animal,
And sometimes that can be the easiest key because people
(42:26):
are like, oh, I know what animal I can I
can embody an animal, so I can I roar and
I can yeow and I can purr and like those
we're all cat metaphors. I guess that's where that's one
one that's like has a has a much easier way
to step into for many individuals. And kind of when
(42:49):
I was speaking to creating the example, a part of
that is the example of not quote unquote beautiful sound,
the example of the grotesque and the like the dissonance
that can sometimes be sound. And I host women's circles,
(43:10):
and that for me is how I open most of
my circles is with drumming and sound or with finding
step work together to find a resonant movement pattern. It
could just be one step to the right back to center,
one step to the left back to center, super simple,
or even swaying from one foot to the other foot
(43:31):
to then begin a pattern of vocalization. And I sometimes
notice this invitation of movement tricks the brain a little
bit and enters individuals into a trance like state where
sound can come through a little bit more freely, because
(43:53):
it's like I'm I'm like lullabide into the movement and
surround it by the like the galaxy, this like circular
creation of sound that I too can somehow join, even
if it's in the most subtle levels. And I've had
like the utmost honor and bliss of seeing some people
(44:15):
in my life who associate as quote unquote quiet or
silent or fearful of speaking up even with words, noticing
their soft breakthroughs, whether it's the softest humming or growling
or melodics. Like the invitation is any sound. It doesn't
have to be at the maximum volume, but just beginning
(44:37):
to move that area of the body. And I largely
invite a loosening of the jaw and the pelvic floor
and the tongue as the baseline to begin any kind
of sounding sometimes supports.
Speaker 4 (44:54):
You've touched on so many fantastic points, and of which
is how sound doesn't have to be perfect and beautiful
to be worthy. And it reminds me, you know, of
a lot of my favorite musicians aren't what you would
(45:16):
think of as being, you know, perfectly trained vocal artists.
And I think about a lot of my friends who
are in the theater and their musical theater artists, or
their singers or their opera singers, and you know, a
lot of their craft is about perfecting this voice, and
if it's not perfect, it's not worthy of being put
out there. And I think a lot of the work
(45:38):
in my own journey has been exactly as you said,
is that it's connecting to that movement within and then
allowing the sound to come out. And what I believe
is that the sound that comes out is pure medicine,
whatever it is that comes and it can be low
(45:59):
and and and and you know it can be you know, beautiful,
angelic toning.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
It.
Speaker 4 (46:04):
It is what it is. And I wanted to just share,
you know, I love when things can come about in
that very organic way. I love listening, especially to like
old jazz musicians like Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald, where
they're just scatting, you know, and it's all just this
like wonderful expression of energy. And you know, I think
(46:28):
about sacred medicine music like ecotos, you know, if you
put that on, you know, at a party, like all right,
guess I'm gonna play some ekotos for you, you know,
and and it's and it's a kudandeta or whatever, and
she's there like ing you know what I don't do,
but you know what I mean. I played one once
for a friend of mine and she was like, oh, well,
(46:49):
she's not a very good singer. And I was like,
that's not the point, you know. It's it's about the
medicine that comes through the frequency, the resonance, and and
just to share for myself, I think like opening myself
up to receiving whatever voice wanted to come out and
not judging it, not censoring it has allowed me to
(47:12):
find healing within myself. And it is how I work
with people. So when I'm doing a shamanic energy healing
session on someone, I let them know I'm like, listen
I'm going to be singing to you. It's going to
be in this strange language. It might you know, I
might be growling, I might be hissing. You know, like
a lot of things can come up and it might
sound strange and they're just like okay, cool, and it's
(47:33):
it's wonderful because then I can really release and work
in that way with my voice. So I wanted to
hear a little bit more from you for our listeners.
(47:54):
So so bringing it back to the topic of emotional release,
and what I share in the book is, you know,
I try to give these like very practical tools to
people of like, Okay, so you're in a moment of panic,
or you're in a moment where a wave of grief
has come over you, you know, and maybe it's not convenient,
(48:16):
you know, so often these things take us over when
we're like sitting on the subway or you know, driving
the car or walking down the street when we have
to you know, pretend to be a.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
Normal person, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (48:29):
And so I try to give people these really practical
tools that they can tap into, you know, even if
it's five minutes. And so I'd be curious to hear
from you, like, what would you recommend for someone who
is trying to navigate a particularly challenging emotion and something
(48:49):
that they could do quite simply for themselves, like a
like a practice to release that emotion.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Yeah. So the first thing that came into my mind
as I was hearing you speak was the element of resourcing,
which which for me is kind of a baseline even
before using a somatic or embodiment tool, which it is
in itself an embodiment tool. But I'll offer the visualization
(49:22):
of I'll offer two separate visualizations, one being a person
existing in isolation, and I'll say me, my emotions are
my own, caused by me or caused by the outside,
but fully within this isolated bubble. That's one visualization. The
(49:48):
other visualization is I am connected through a my celial
or spider web, to the nat to the collective unconscious,
to my own cellular history, my ancestry, to the changing
(50:11):
of the seasons, like imagining myself as beyond the isolated being,
And that in some ways is the visualization of resourcing.
So a resource could be another person. Let's say I'm
going through something and I have my therapist who is
(50:31):
on call, and I go to call them. But really
the invitation of resourcing is primarily self resourcing and regulation.
And of course there are individuals who are in a
hyper aroused or hypo arouse pattern, and it's pretty hard
to expect people to resource in a state of extreme
(50:54):
nervous system distress. But the invitation is that in moments
that we are not at such a high level to
tap into what are our resources. So I don't live
in a big city, I don't take the subway for
I wasn't brill in I was. But for me, one
of my biggest resources is when my nervous system is
(51:16):
all of a sudden smack bang gone somewhere where I
can barely even communicate, I go outside, put my feet
on the ground, lay my back on the ground, and breathe.
Because one of my main resources is the earth. Is
pata mamma is like the immense, immense strength of earth,
(51:39):
of the gushing waters and the land and the air
and the tree, like so immense beyond even my comprehension.
And in that perspective, I'm very I'm very held in
my human form and the immensity of the world. If
I imagine myself in the embrace of something so grand
and immense, there's a brief opportunity of like, Okay, my
(52:02):
nervous system can drop that one level down because I
am not alone. Other things that can be resourcing is
like someone who you're deeply connected to in your life,
like let's say a grandmother or a guardian angel, or
even a mythical figure that might be on your altar
or might be really relevant in your life, and like
(52:23):
how to in our moments of high distress, whether it's
hyper or hypo, to be like, okay, can I lean
a little bit on something? Do I need to hold
the weight of this? Or can I Can I ease
myself yield I love this word, yield into something And
from that place, other techniques that for me are deeply
(52:46):
supportive are extending my exhale as long as I can,
and that also can be hard when the nervous system
is pumping the inhale and exhale through panic really fast.
Something that helps, though, is exhaling as a hum or
as a sound, which when the xhale is lengthened. Interestingly enough,
(53:09):
our vagus nerve is tonified during the exhale, so the
diaphragm pulls up during the exhale, and the vagus nerve
that connects our cranial nerves down through our stomach to
our belly brain can be activated or relaxated.
Speaker 4 (53:30):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
We're beginning to extend the exhale. And what we'll find
often if we begin to bring our attention to this
area is when we're in nervous system dysregulation, we'll be
inhaling more and will be like going deep into like
trying to fill up with air. And it's I find
that inhale to be really an activating, delicious sensation. Like
(53:55):
when I'm in in sexual explorations, I find how much
my body like going into inhale as an expansion of sensation.
And I've been really delving into the pleasure of the exhale,
the surrender of the exhale, the surrender of the holding,
and the strength that I personally relate the inhale to having.
(54:18):
So that'd be my first invitation is finding ways to
extend the exhale. Another thing that deeply helps me is
tapping or pounding, and that's of course dependent on where
you are in physical space. There's such a thing called
emotional freedom technique, which has its whole points of tapping
that are deeply synchronized with Chinese medicine and acupuncture slash
(54:42):
pressure points. But I really enjoy tapping on my thoracic
or my chest upper torso area as well as my face.
It could be around the eyes and then also where
the collarbone meets the or the breastplate and kind of
that whole area, the area of the what would be
(55:06):
the intercostal muscles, the muscles that are between the ribs.
There's a study of how tapping and jiggling can be
really helpful for micro stretches in tissue. So in my
dance and movement practice, I don't ever warm people up
with stretching. I warm people up with bouncing and jiggling
(55:30):
and vibration or partner tapping because it offers these like
micro information that wakes up the propioceptive the system that
relates our body to space. The propioceptive system is all
of a sudden woken up, and that could be a
way from going a way to go from nervous system
(55:50):
dysregulation into into your body into sensing the body waking
up these like nerve sensors and mud soul tendon receptors
bringing them in bringing the attention in. Another invitation is
the element of shaking, But that too is something that
I actually walk with care. In popular culture, it's kind
(56:14):
of become like, oh, trauma release, like you see animal shake,
so shake, and I'm such a big fan of shaking,
like I have no nothing against it. But when we're in,
for example, a hyper aroused state, and we choose to
go into shaking shaking until our body goes into exhaustion,
(56:37):
it's not Sometimes it's not trauma release. Sometimes it's allowing
for the nervous system to go so deeply into hyper
arousal that it shuts down and goes into exhaustion. And
there have been there's been feedback from individuals saying like
this pattern happens to me that I go into emotional response,
(56:59):
go into shaking convulsing vibration until I'm exhausted and come
back down and it keeps happening. And so within that
with having that in mind, I really enjoy this element
of resourcing to find a way to kind of come
more into our window of tolerance, which is a term
(57:20):
that's used in somatic experiencing, which is kind of like
the area through which we could experience arousal and the
come down of arousal in a way that we're not
yet breaking into hyper or hypo and who I can
go so deep.
Speaker 4 (57:35):
I love it.
Speaker 6 (57:36):
I love it to say that, like the element of
shaking and trembling, I deeply invite once.
Speaker 1 (57:47):
There's been a little bit of trickling of the nervous
system into our introceptive awareness, so once we feel like
we've been able to drop our somatic awareness slightly into
our bodies and are doing the shaking from a conscious
place of meeting the emotion, meeting the sensation to shake
(58:08):
it out, and finding where the peak is and allowing
for that peak to naturally come back down rather than
chasing a peak into higher and higher sensation. That would
be my invitation with shaking.
Speaker 4 (58:21):
You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. I love it.
Oh you've offered really some wonderful tools that you know,
I think are really crucial in helping people navigate some
deep emotions. So oh wow, wow, wow, wow. I could
listen to you all day really, So I'm interested to
(58:45):
hear if you could offer are there resources that people
can access if they're interested in getting into this work,
and if you have anything that you're offering coming up
that people can sign up for and enjoy.
Speaker 1 (59:01):
I love this question. My website is currently in reconstruction
and renovation, so maybe by February fourth, when this is aired,
I can have a website that you can maybe put
as a link on there. Perfect Every Monday here in
Ashville I offer contact improvisation classes and host a jam.
(59:26):
In February, I'm going to be doing a two day
workshop that looks at the axis syllabus, which is a
lexicon of information on the body and anatomy and dynamic motion,
so looking at things like walking patterns, fascial pathways, organ
(59:46):
systems in relationship to movement. And in the beginning of
May we'll be having a bit of a dance festival here.
I'm actually going to just pause on giving all the
dates and send you the links for you to put
in and outside of me and what I'm offering, I'd
(01:00:08):
love to share modalities and places where people can find
more information on some of these techniques, so one of
them being people can go to the Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
website where she has tons of workshops and videos for sale,
some of them even on donation basis, which is amazing.
(01:00:31):
Even YouTube has a plethora of her videos and the
Body Mind Centering website is also another resource. I personally
use Bonnie's personal website more because of the videos and
the information that I can get access to on there.
There are workshops happening across the United States for BMC.
(01:00:54):
That's something to look for. The Continuum movement method is
also really an amazing method that looks into the diving.
Literally they call it a dive, the diving into sound,
sensation and emotion, and it's a whole transcendental journey. So
(01:01:16):
it highly recommend Continuum movement method. Another method that I
am deeply entwined in is authentic movement, which looks at
the element of the witness's attention, so holding movers who
(01:01:36):
are moving from their own impetus with the gaze of
the witness. So there isn't music involved. There is a
deep usage of eye statements and tracking of sensation and
the power of dropping into our authentic movement as it
arises in each moment, in each second, and it could
(01:01:57):
be stillness for what it's worth and to be witnessed
in that has been groundbreaking for me personally. So the
authentic movement method is another one if you haven't heard
of sematic experiencing. I have been seeing my beautiful somatic
experiencing therapist for a year now and deeply in love
(01:02:20):
with the form, and have taken a couple of eight
series workshops that blend sematic experiencing with authentic movement. And
there's so much to say about it. But sematic experiencing
is kind of a method, a therapeutic method of tracking
our sensations and visualizations as anchors into emotion that exists
(01:02:45):
in our cells and in our bodies. So it's a
really embodied approach to exploring emotions and trauma and the
release of them or the alchimization of them.
Speaker 4 (01:02:58):
Yeah, you've shared so much absolute gold in this conversation
and so many beautiful resources. I will link them all
in the show notes, and honestly, I mean, we could
really go on forever. I have so many more questions
for you, but we're going to keep it short and
(01:03:18):
sweet for now so everybody can digest this all. And
it's just been such a pleasure having you on the show,
and thank you so much for sharing.
Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
Likewise, I super appreciate your level of presence like witnessing
you listen as I speak, witnessing your own delving into
your body. Yeah, and the openness of your face and
your facial expressions. I felt really safe and open and curious.
(01:03:51):
Hopefully one day you'll come to Asheville. Yes, yes, very soon.
Speaker 4 (01:03:56):
I'm looking forward to hearing more about this dance Partty
festival in May. Oh that's so lovely. Well, my friends,
thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you
enjoyed this episode as much as I did. And this
has been another episode of the Oh to Joy podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
Who
No feel.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Even when times gethard and you feel your in the
c see just how beautiful life can be when you
saften your heart, you can finally start to live your
(00:29):
tu seious life.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Truthiest Life. It's
your host, Lisa him and I'm so excited that you're here.
You're going to leave this episode with so much usable
information about how to get better in touch with your
body emotions, release them, and things that you can like
actually do right now to get in touch feel the
sensations and get that release that most of us are
(00:54):
in need of. So this episode, again I'm featuring on
from a podcast that I love from somebody that I
just met but very much look up to. And to
give a little bit of a backstory. In my town,
there's this place called Commune, and essentially it's not a
yoga studio, but anybody can rent it by the hour
and teach their own class. It opened up about a
(01:16):
year ago and it's kind of slowly been gaining press
and people knowing about it, but it's still very much
snuck away and a little bit of like if you know,
you know type of a thing. And I've been very
fortunate because Commune has allowed me, I think, to stay
sane in a very difficult year. In person, yoga for
me particularly is just exactly what I need, crave and
(01:40):
is like medicine for my soul. I think I didn't
realize how much I needed that during the pandemic when
that went away. But one of the things that I
have been doing day after day has been showing up
for class, and I didn't realize that that would be
like part of my healing. It wasn't a prescription or
anything like that. But when I look back to the
(02:00):
last couple of months, a difficult seven or so months
that I've had, I see that these teachers that have
magically entered my life, despite having completely different philosophies, teaching styles,
energies and people, each of the teachers that I go
to Commune for teach me something and I leave different
(02:21):
because of them. It's honestly very much how I feel
about this podcast. Every guest that I have on it
doesn't matter if I agree with who this person is
as a whole or on every single level, but throughout
our conversations I pick up one piece of information that
changes my life drastically. So in person you'll get. Commune
has been huge for me and I bounce back between
(02:44):
these two teachers that teach once or twice a week.
And for whatever reason, on a Sunday, I saw there
was this class called Sunday Sanctuary with Reiki with somebody
I'd never heard of before, and I was like, you
know what, I'm just going to give it a try.
And I sit in this room and I look at
the teacher and I don't even think she saw, but
(03:04):
the stillness just gave way to a powerful purge of
emotion where I just started crying and I knew that
I was in the right place, in the right moment,
and it wasn't like I'm so sad, it was just
emotion moving through me. When I attended this class the
next week, I found that same thing happening, not just
in stillness but actually in movement. And so much of
(03:27):
the teacher, who is Elena Box, who podcast I'm going
to feature today, is the way that she was teaching.
It is very in line with my philosophy of you know,
wake and shake and shaking when we are going through
something traumatic or at the end of a traumatic event.
It's very in line with the podcast I shared last
week where with the somatic yoga teacher Charlotte Watts, and
(03:50):
you'll see that themes are kind of overlapping because this
is where I'm being drawn in my life to learn,
to heal, to serve all these modalities. I just want
to like soak up. But the way that Elena taught
had a lot to do with primarily letting go of
your emotions humming, rocking, screaming, and people were doing it.
That was kind of the best part of it. It
(04:11):
wasn't a room where people were feeling shy. I think
she really created a container where people felt comfortable to ah,
let it all out. That happened on the metreat as well.
And as soon as one person kind of starts to
live outside of the societal norm of just it on
your mat and don't make noise, it gives permission to
the next person to do so. And it's not that
(04:33):
we should all sound the same, but oftentimes with release
of sound comes emotion and we can get in touch
with all the stuff that's buried within. So I just
wanted to give a shout out to Elena. I never
even got a chance to thank her for her class,
but it did help me continuously unpack the emotions that
otherwise would be lodged in my body. So today's episode
(04:57):
is from Elena's podcast which is called The to Joy Podcast.
And Elena is a shamanic death doulah comedian And that
sounds like a lot in one sentence because it is
We're talking about death and comedy in the same sentence,
and I think that really well encapsulates who she is.
She's somebody that understands the depths of living and that
(05:20):
comes with dying, but she doesn't miss the joy in
it as well. In this episode, she has on a
woman named Hannah Rukshani who is a somatic movement specialist,
and in this episode, Hannah shares her top tools for
navigating and tracking emotion in the body and best of all,
shares how to actually release it. They cover all of
(05:43):
my favorite topics such as interception, seeing the internal state
of the body, yoga as that entryway into practicing somatics,
a topic called body mind centering that I was completely
new to. They talk about humming, which m so good
for this all. Even if you do it now or
go home, you'll get that like brain massage that is
(06:07):
so soothing and you can call on in times of need, Tapping, jiggling, bouncing, shaking,
all of it. All the things that I'm so passionate about,
they cover here in expert form, using all the correct
language and crediting the correct people. And it's a beautiful
episode that will allow you to take home new tools
(06:27):
that you otherwise didn't have before. I hope you're enjoying
these little shares that I'm finding and giving to you
from other people's podcasts. And best of all, I hope
that this introduces you to new people that are doing
incredible work out there and encourages you to support them
by way of social media, podcasts, or their books, all
of which Elena has. I'll put all of her info below,
(06:49):
and thank you for listening to the Truthiest Life. Have
a great day.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
Hello everyone, and welcome to the ode To podcast. I
am so glad you're all here today, and I have
on another very special guest. I am so excited to
introduce you to. Her name is Hannah Rakshani and she
is coming to us from Asheville, North Carolina. Welcome Hannah.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
I could just record here and you say my name
to me.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
I can do that for you.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Oh God, it's so good. It's so good.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
I'm so pleased to have you here and to give
a little bit of a background about you to our listeners.
Hannah is a movement artist and her focus is on
the embodiment and somatic arts, and currently she is facilitating
workshops on contact improvisation. So many juicy areas of expertise
(07:57):
to draw from, and the reason why I brought Hannah
on the show today was because I was looking to
talk with someone about emotional release techniques. So within this
chapter of my book, Grieve Outside the Box, I offer
different tools to navigate really deep feelings and a lot
(08:20):
of times it can be really scary to navigate that
when we're feeling it within our bodies, and so within
the book, I offer different tools and techniques that helped me,
and I wanted to expand this offering by bringing on
an expert in her field. So here we have Hannah
(08:43):
to talk all about her work and what she offers.
And thank you so so so much for coming on
the show.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Mm hmmm. Yeah. Oh goodness. The plethora of elements of
modalities and influences that have come together to interweave the
ways in which I walk through my emotional body or
walk with my emotional body is like vast and complex,
(09:12):
and I'm excited through the journey of this show to
kind of give thanks and give appreciation to the names
and the modalities that have come together to support me
on this journey. But more than anything, I'd like to
mention that the developing of the relationship of my relationship
(09:34):
with my physical body as my main router, my main
guide into listening to how emotion manifests and sometimes sits
or gets stuck, as an invitation to explore this like
communication on how to see witness ques with curiosity and
(10:03):
find movement. This word release sometimes to me has like
a beginning and an end. It's like, Oh, I experience trauma,
and my journey is to then release the trauma, which
absolutely is a desire of mine. But the curiosity and
the engagement with the sensations and the qualities of what
(10:26):
that emotion is for me has been the main kind
of pathway into its alchemization or transformation or dissolving.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
Yes, I'm so so so happy you're here because you've
really put something into words that I think is so
helpful for people to understand, is that it is real alchemy.
You know, perhaps in our modern day, many people are
walking around and we year of this word alchemy, but
(11:01):
it can be challenging to really understand what that is.
But I think bringing it down into onto, like into
a cellular level and and understanding that within our bodies.
Once you have that experience, you're like, oh, okay, you know,
I get it. So I'd be interested to hear from
(11:22):
your perspective, say, speaking to an audience member who perhaps
has no experience with this kind of work, and say
they have experienced some sort of trauma, what would you
how would you explain to them, just on the basic level,
(11:44):
how to notice emotion within their bodies?
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Mm hmmm, yeah, great question. I noticed when I was
hearing you asked that question. A part of me is like, ooh,
Like the bridge between between between exploring something sematically and
the somatic attention in individuals who don't already have a
practice is a bridge that I'm still trying to understand
(12:11):
and construct, And something that I would invite is a
beginning of a practice of witnessing of sensation, even before
stepping into like how to perceive emotion or how to
perceive trauma or stuck emotion, and that practice could look
(12:34):
so many ways like the vipasana practice. The Buddhist vipasana
practice which Goenka has made quite popular, but has been
an extremely ancient practice of using the element of body
scan or even the element of purely focusing on the
nostrils on apanasati, the element of exploring and sensing into
(12:57):
the breath as it meets the entrance of the nostrils
and its journey through the sinuses and down the trachea
into the lungs can be a kind of first step
into developing a level of attention that is interroceptive, so
a level of attention that goes beyond the skin level.
(13:20):
And this word interroceptive can sometimes be a little nerdy
or overwhelming. I like it, and I remember the when
my partner and I began to date close to three
years ago. I would talk to him about my organs.
I'd be like, Oh, I'm really feeling my heart being
(13:41):
massaged by my lungs, and he would look at me
and be like, what are you saying? We can't feel
our organs. It's like that is completely not He's like,
I don't know who I've never heard someone tell me
that they could sense into their organs and like anything right,
(14:02):
Like a person could say, how does a child learn
how to walk from crawling? Like our brains and our
nervous systems are so beautifully neuroplastic, or they're so malleable
and elastic in nature that when we begin, even on
the most micro level of sensing our skin, which thankfully
(14:24):
has all these lovely nerve receptors that make it a
little easier to sense. Starting at that kind of base
level of sensation on the skin level, and then beginning
to dive beyond the skin level into whether it's the
nasal passage or even the mouth and the esophagus, and
that relationship of like a swallow or a gulp, or
(14:48):
the relationship of the lungs in relationship to the ribs
would be kind of little stepping stones that I would
invite into beginning to develop an inter receptive really relationship. Ooh,
I've used this word relationship five times in one sentence.
I like that.
Speaker 5 (15:08):
Hmm wow.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
And for those of you who are listening and aren't
able to witness Hannah at this time, as she speaks,
she's constantly in motion, and as she speaks, it's like
the words are moving through her body, and she's fully
experiencing everything that she's communicating. It's like the most embodied
I think communication or conversation I think maybe I've ever had.
(15:33):
It's really lovely to witness you and and hear everything
from your perspective.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Wow wow, wow wow.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
So you brought up something that I think is I
want to say, it's crucial perhaps in in understanding where
emotion can get stuck within our bodies, and that is
the organs, uh.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
You know.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
And you also brought up something that I find really
delightful and a funny way is a lot of us
are walking around, you know, not even sure where our
liver is, or where our spleen is or where you know,
and not aware of what's within us. And I think,
especially when it comes to grief practice becoming really attuned
(16:20):
to our own bodies and remembering that we are, from
my perspective, a soul that is in a body. I
think it helps connect with a sense of mortality in
a way to say like, yes, I will die and
one day this will return to the earth in its
own way, and to really respect the organs as these
(16:42):
amazing like workhorses in our bodies and honor them and
nurture them and know where they are, you know, within
ourselves is so important. I wanted to share just a
(17:05):
story also, like what you mentioned about, you know, feeling
into your heart and you know, I had a similar
experience where I'm like, oh, you know, I'm talking to
my mom like, oh, you know, my liver. My liver's
feeling really sluggish right now. I think I'm gonna have
to take some herbs and do a little bit of massage,
get on my roller balls. And she's like, why do
you talk? How can you feel your liver? What are
(17:28):
you just sitting there feeling your liver all day? I'm
like pretty much like I'm just I'm in tune with
my organs. I'm listening to them, they're talking to me.
We're in communication. And I think, as you said, you know,
first starting out with something very simple like a tool
to get into the body. The examples that you gave
are so helpful and getting to know your body. And
(17:53):
from my experience, it was very much through my yoga
practice where I began understanding all of the organs. You know,
I would know, okay, I'm in this certain shape, and
now I can feel there's pressure on you know, my
colon or you know, you start to get like an
awareness of the systems working within the body, and you
can use the breath to massage different organs and move things,
(18:18):
and so it can really be this beautiful relationship, but
it takes time to develop. So I'm interested to hear.
I'm really curious actually to hear for you. Was there
a certain moment that gave you, like the key this
to this work. Was there like a pivotal moment in
(18:40):
your life that you came to this work. Yeah, that's
what I'm really interested to hear about.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
M thank you for your curiosity. Yeah, and I enjoyed
your story. Hmmm. Actually there's a there's a resonance when
I was hearing you speak to the yoga practice as
kind of a portal where you began to or one
of the portals where you were relating to your organs
(19:09):
and how movement and breath and like the sliding and
intermingling of organs play a role. I would say that
actually the yoga practice was for me a breaking point
into somatics, but it was not at all really like
(19:32):
the tipping point of me starting on my own healing
journey like I was really blessed to grow up in India.
My parents are in some ways wild nomadics, and at
the age of six we moved to the south of
India and they began on their own spiritual journey and quest,
(19:54):
and my brother and I were kind of trailing behind.
So it spent summers at ashrams practicing yoga and meditation
and fasts and Korea yoga and like whole plethora and
exposed to ayre Veda. And currently my father has his
pH d in the yoga sciences and is an Araveda
(20:15):
massage therapist. So there was this opening of a portal
of like, oh, here are invitations to begin tapping into breath,
to begin tapping into the knowledge of anatomy in an
embodied way, in a sense, and felt sensed and felt way.
When I began my own personal relationship with yoga and
(20:37):
got my yoga teacher training in India at a university
there and began to teach and explore that world, I
was still kind of in a bit of a toxic
relationship with myself, which was not to be judgmental, but
a little on the opposite side of truly and bided
(21:01):
I had disordered eating patterns and was battling with depression
and anxiety, and was looking outside of myself, looking at
yoga practices and meditation practices and Buddhist practices up in Daramshala,
where I would spend a few months in.
Speaker 5 (21:20):
A year.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
To be like, Okay, how do I find myself? How
do I find the answer to this this thing that's
eating my insides, this thing that in some ways was
killing my body. And it was a great lesson for
me to see, like, oh, looking outside of myself is
really even if it's embodied, and even if it's dropped
(21:44):
in and using breath and meditation and attention, Like the
very act of wanting to escape my own reality wasn't
in service of me. So a big kind of long
story of like the disordered eating into subs and some
of use into me having a bit of an awakening
(22:04):
at the age of twenty one. So that phase was
between fifteen and twenty one, the age of twenty one
of like being surrounded by people who were substance users
and who were also in this faux spiritual path where
we had crystals and we would do kirtan and then
(22:26):
also get really high on cocaine some nights, and maybe
I won't go into too many details, but this kind
of oscillation of desire to escape and a desperate clinging
on to what I thought was spirituality. And at that
point I got a reflection from my parents. I was
(22:47):
in college in Florida, had moved away from India, and
my parents were like, we are We're worried about you.
They had been worried about me for six years, but
I had stepped out of the disordered eating and they
were like, we are seeing this this darkness, which I
have my own feelings about that term, but this darkness
inside of you where there used to be a light,
(23:11):
oh oh, the spear and the heart. Yeah. And then
there was an invitation to move to Asheville, where my
father had his wellness center, and I took that invitation
and I moved here. And the summer that I moved
(23:34):
here was two thousand and sixteen. I all of a
sudden got exposed to two men that were playing with
each other on a field at a music festival, where
they were jumping on each other's bodies and gurgling laughter
and rolling off each other's bodies. And it was to
(23:54):
me like watching puppies play. Yeah, it was like I
have never seen adults in my complex of having experience
like whether it's homophobia or even in India, men are
quite physically in touch with each other, but very often
looking outside towards the women, like men are holding hands
(24:16):
and cat calling women has been my experience very often
with Indian masculine energies. And over here I'm witnessing like
two white individuals who I haven't seen that much in
the Western world of deep touch and play and like
embracing and rolling and holding and lifting, and something within
(24:40):
me lit up in a way that I haven't felt
in that time, I hadn't felt for six years. I
was like, oh, play and fully embodied self meeting in play.
And from that point I began my inquiry and journey
into contact improvisation, which for me was this grand mirror
(25:02):
that showed me where my mind existed. So I'd come
into touch with another body and fear about my body weight,
or fear about my worth or my goodness or my
ability all coming to the surface, which completely takes took
me out of my present state of attention with another body.
(25:24):
So it was this first portal for me of entering
into holding attention within the body, with the depth of
listening outside of myself and having this continuous internal to
external flow of attention and meeting of awareness. And from
(25:45):
that point the study of anatomy and somatics and specifically
something called body mind centering started by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen,
which goes deep into embodied imaginary imagination, to embody anatomy,
to delve into sensation and holding patterns, to kind of
(26:07):
take us back to our original nervous system in embryo.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
Oh yeah, I want to hear all about it, girl,
this is so, this is such a lovely, lovely conversation.
I want to hear everything. I am fascinated. I would
love to hear more about the technique that you learned
from Bonnie. It's Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, isn't it. And because
(26:36):
I would really love to offer some tools that you
learned through that work and through your own work, two
people too begin to dive in deeper for themselves. So
could you could you give us a bit of a
lay of that land if you can, I.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Would love to. So my exposure to BMC has happened
kind of like flickering stars in the sky until I
decided to jump and grab a star and be like, Okay,
I want to dive in many different contact teachers and
SOMATIC teachers had had their training as BMC facilitators. It's
(27:18):
a pretty long drawn out experience, and I'm not fully
trained as a BMC practitioner, but having had this kind
of beginning of exposure to something called cellular intelligence, which
inherently looks at kind of going back in time to
when we were single cellular organisms, and how incredibly functional
(27:43):
a single cellular organism can be functional, even to the
level of locomotion, so movement without having limbs, how when
we're how But embodying that kind of vision of how
every thing will sell in our bodies is so divinely
(28:05):
intelligent and intricate as a system, and it put into
stark contrasts the kind of psychological model that is like,
in some ways, it's like, oh, you have this disorder,
let's fix you in such and such and such way
because you're broken or not functioning as human society tells
you to. Kind of stepping away from that paradigm and
(28:27):
moving into like, every single one of my cells is
working in this complexity of respiration, excretion, taking in all
the nutrients it needs, balancing osmosis, balancing the fluid and
the tension of its own body DNA, and like the
wisdom that is within each of our cells was kind
(28:49):
of my portal opening into BMC. And that's a very
central element of BMC is cellular intelligent intelligence and BMC
being the short for body mind centering and from these
like little stars and flickers of gleaning the wisdom of
body mind centering. We had a course in my college
(29:14):
which one of my contact improv teachers was actually leading,
where we invited a BMC facilitator and instructor in for
multiple weeks to look at embryological development. And that for
me has been also something that's so yummy as a
referential point to how our body has been created. So
(29:37):
one example, and this example came away later. I ended
up spending maybe a total of eight weeks studying BMC
in Berlin between two thousand and seventeen and nineteen, give
or take. It's possibly more, but I'm going to kind
of intermingle the timeline and just offer the information from
(30:00):
this point on. But for example, one of the things
that embryology offers a reference to in my relationship to
emotional release is the relationship between the perennial body, which
Bonni has kind of labeled areas which haven't yet been
(30:21):
labeled as glands, but they have a lot of nerve
centers and there's some things being excreted and taken in
in these areas. She calls them bodies, and there's multiple
different ones throughout the body, but the perennial body seated
right in the center of the perineum. In utero, we
are three discs, and the central disc is the mesoderm,
(30:45):
and that central disc is what will turn the bottom
of it is what will turn into the perennial body.
And the mesoderm is also what creates our limbs, including
the limb of the larynx, the vocal cords, and the head.
So very often we don't perceive our head to be
a limb, but maybe we could just visualize that for
(31:06):
a moment, enter into starfish consciousness and have our head,
our arms, and our legs be limbs. And from this
relationship of the perineum to the larynx, there's an invitation
to use this upwards energy and the pelvic floor as
(31:29):
a baseline for beginning to open the vocal cords as
well as the limb of the face, which so often
I've had an experience, especially in the West, in the
United States and in some places in Europe, of the
face being very private, faces often closed off. And I'm
(31:50):
curious about like opening both the voice and the cheeks
and the jaws and the eyes and the muscles of
the face to express in the same ways that we
would when we're talking with our hands. So that for
me has been a big key into exploring emotion through voice.
(32:11):
Is beginning my attention in the permium, allowing for it
to spread through the pelvic floor, and the way the
cells travel up as they travel on each side of
the body, they come kind of like the pelvic halves.
They come as a two halves and climb up. So
there's this this, this two halves coming together to create
(32:34):
the larynx. And I use that visualization in my in
my toning and in my sounding to use all the
organs through the belly and the whole torso and the
halves of the neck to meet the larynx and the
face through sound and the tongue.
Speaker 4 (32:56):
I would oh, my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
So okay, I'm trying not to be too much of
a fangirl, but I'm a fan girl, you know. So
a lot of the work that I do with people
is really utilizing the voice because I believe that we
(33:18):
can release so much stuck emotion through the voice, and
so it's something that I will work into yoga practices
of releasing sound on the voice. I bring in my training.
I'm a trained actress, so we did a lot of
work within what we call voice and movement. But it's
interesting because you know, I would have certain people be like, oh,
(33:41):
you know, a lot of the yoga teachers were always
you know, moaning and groaning and sighing and screaming and growling,
and I'm like, well, that's I mean. But of course
they loved it. They loved it, but they made fun
of me for and so I'm sort of interested to
hear because this is something that I'm still teaching. So
when I'm working with people individually or like I said,
(34:03):
in a yoga class or in a workshop, I'm inviting
them to tap in and tune into their voice as
a way to release emotion. And I'm interested to hear
from your experience, because what I noticed is that there
is a lot of resistance, almost a lot of shame,
which is probably why they were poking fun at me,
(34:24):
because it's hard for people to really let themselves be
heard in a lot of ways, especially if it is
I want to say, like unguided. You know, it's hard
for them to really let themselves go and sound and
tone and make all of these different sounds that they
(34:45):
might not normally or maybe never have. So I'm interested
to hear from your experience in perhaps working with someone
who is facing that resistance, and perhaps what you would
guide them to do to work through any resistance and
releasing their voice.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
This point that you bring up is one that's like,
it's so alive. It's the point that I'm speaking to,
is that of like the level of restriction that somehow
is vast in our voice in our current society. Like
it's I wish I could say it's rare to meet
(35:32):
people in my classes who are like I struggle the
opposite of that. It's so widespread, and like I get
lots of feedback of like the tension that arises within
people's body at the quote unquote pressure right sound, which
is the opposite of the point of it, the opposite
(35:56):
words system reaction. Ah, yeah, I share a little story
about my own relationship to my voice. Do you have
the space for that?
Speaker 4 (36:08):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Okay. So in twenty sixteen, when I was here, I
began to be involved with the Umban Diamond medicine tradition,
which is a Brazilian medicine tradition that has quite a
bit of the African Yoruba and Ifa divination traditions, entwined
(36:30):
with Catholicism, entwined with indigenous practices. So the ayuasca medicine
is part of it. And I knew some songs. I
had had a Brazilian friend in the past who shared
some files with me, and it just like the style
of singing with the drumming just synchronized so deeply within me,
even without me knowing what I was singing or listening
(36:52):
to half the time. Then all of a sudden, I'm
sitting in these ceremonies and I'm like, oh, I know
these songs, and the ceremony had ended, and I mentioned
this to the facilitator, and the facilitator is like, oh,
can you sing back the song? And I notice every
muscle in my body tends up. My heartbeat was racing
(37:14):
and I'm sweating, and I.
Speaker 5 (37:17):
Go, so good, Mary has a little night, not the song. No.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
And then I sat with the same facilitator again a
few months later and he places a page of lyrics
and I'm deep in the medicine and I'm looking at
this page of lyrics and the words are dancing across
the page and he's like sing the song and there's
a drumming and it's just me and it's all in Portuguese,
(37:55):
which I have limited capacity with Portuguese. I could speak some,
but who whole other beast.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
To tackle I can't even imagine.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
And once again I have like this facilitation of plant
medicine in my body to kind of really show me
like where this constriction is existing and where it's coming from.
In my own internal mindset of you're not good enough
was like the inner sound like you're not like what
(38:28):
would make my voice worthy to be heard? And I
had a story that it had to be beautiful, and
it had to be resounding, and it had to be
deeply knowing of all the words with no mistakes. And
only then and then am I worthy of taking my
voice out into the space. We have these shows like
(38:51):
American Idol and like which we idealize a certain type
of voice and so much respect for people who have
trained their voices and are like blessed with the like
the the gods of sound and like melodics, and also
like a part of my heart shatters and breaks when
(39:13):
I noticed the difference between baby's toddlers into moving into adolescence,
like when we witness a baby, like so many sounds,
toddlers too are continuously in this exploring of just like
(39:34):
mimic mimicry and vocalization, and there's I feel so much
joy being around the aid ranges of like zero to
four because I get reminded of the state of being
before we embodied and took in this kind of I'm
(39:54):
gonna use the metaphor of a straight jacket. It's kind
of straight jacket that tells us, like, you don't take
up space with your voice unless it's worthy, unless you're
at the head of the podium and you've been assigned
or whatever it might be. And I'm like a deep
believer that when we're in shared spaces, like it's a
(40:19):
it's a listening, right, Like if I'm in a shared
meditation space that is one of silence, and that's the request,
Like I'm going to embody that request and if not,
I might ask the facilitator is like a certain level
of sound okay, et cetera. So there's a continuous navigation
of sound in space. But something that I have been
(40:39):
doing to support people kind of finding nervous system regulation
with the invitation to sound even when it's edgy, is
to firstly offer as an myself as an example, and
I'm deeply blessed also have people in the community here
(41:00):
in Asheville that have deeply dropped into kind of voice
and movement kind of what you're speaking to this capacity
of like where movement, where movement feels voice, and where
voice and sound influences and ripples through movement. So let's
say in a classroom of twenty people, there's seven people
(41:22):
who feel comfortable in their voice, and there is an
open invitation when I can create an ocean or a
frequency of sound. There seems to be opportunities where people
who might have restrictions or resistance to allowing for their
(41:43):
voice and their sound to expand there's this opportunity of like, oh,
maybe I won't be heard, maybe my mistakes won't be heard,
which is okay. Like if I can create this platform
where there's enough vibration and frequency happening that people could
be like, I could at least try and my like,
(42:04):
no one will know it's me whatever. And something I've
really tapped into and noticed is like embodying imagery. So
sometimes I'll do circles where it's like, can we enter
in as a character, whether it's a monkey or an animal,
And sometimes that can be the easiest key because people
(42:26):
are like, oh, I know what animal I can I
can embody an animal, so I can I roar and
I can yeow and I can purr and like those
we're all cat metaphors. I guess that's where that's one
one that's like has a has a much easier way
to step into for many individuals. And kind of when
(42:49):
I was speaking to creating the example, a part of
that is the example of not quote unquote beautiful sound,
the example of the grotesque and the like the dissonance
that can sometimes be sound. And I host women's circles,
(43:10):
and that for me is how I open most of
my circles is with drumming and sound or with finding
step work together to find a resonant movement pattern. It
could just be one step to the right back to center,
one step to the left back to center, super simple,
or even swaying from one foot to the other foot
(43:31):
to then begin a pattern of vocalization. And I sometimes
notice this invitation of movement tricks the brain a little
bit and enters individuals into a trance like state where
sound can come through a little bit more freely, because
(43:53):
it's like I'm I'm like lullabide into the movement and
surround it by the like the galaxy, this like circular
creation of sound that I too can somehow join, even
if it's in the most subtle levels. And I've had
like the utmost honor and bliss of seeing some people
(44:15):
in my life who associate as quote unquote quiet or
silent or fearful of speaking up even with words, noticing
their soft breakthroughs, whether it's the softest humming or growling
or melodics. Like the invitation is any sound. It doesn't
have to be at the maximum volume, but just beginning
(44:37):
to move that area of the body. And I largely
invite a loosening of the jaw and the pelvic floor
and the tongue as the baseline to begin any kind
of sounding sometimes supports.
Speaker 4 (44:54):
You've touched on so many fantastic points, and of which
is how sound doesn't have to be perfect and beautiful
to be worthy. And it reminds me, you know, of
a lot of my favorite musicians aren't what you would
(45:16):
think of as being, you know, perfectly trained vocal artists.
And I think about a lot of my friends who
are in the theater and their musical theater artists, or
their singers or their opera singers, and you know, a
lot of their craft is about perfecting this voice, and
if it's not perfect, it's not worthy of being put
out there. And I think a lot of the work
(45:38):
in my own journey has been exactly as you said,
is that it's connecting to that movement within and then
allowing the sound to come out. And what I believe
is that the sound that comes out is pure medicine,
whatever it is that comes and it can be low
(45:59):
and and and and you know it can be you know, beautiful,
angelic toning.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
It.
Speaker 4 (46:04):
It is what it is. And I wanted to just share,
you know, I love when things can come about in
that very organic way. I love listening, especially to like
old jazz musicians like Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald, where
they're just scatting, you know, and it's all just this
like wonderful expression of energy. And you know, I think
(46:28):
about sacred medicine music like ecotos, you know, if you
put that on, you know, at a party, like all right,
guess I'm gonna play some ekotos for you, you know,
and and it's and it's a kudandeta or whatever, and
she's there like ing you know what I don't do,
but you know what I mean. I played one once
for a friend of mine and she was like, oh, well,
(46:49):
she's not a very good singer. And I was like,
that's not the point, you know. It's it's about the
medicine that comes through the frequency, the resonance, and and
just to share for myself, I think like opening myself
up to receiving whatever voice wanted to come out and
not judging it, not censoring it has allowed me to
(47:12):
find healing within myself. And it is how I work
with people. So when I'm doing a shamanic energy healing
session on someone, I let them know I'm like, listen
I'm going to be singing to you. It's going to
be in this strange language. It might you know, I
might be growling, I might be hissing. You know, like
a lot of things can come up and it might
sound strange and they're just like okay, cool, and it's
(47:33):
it's wonderful because then I can really release and work
in that way with my voice. So I wanted to
hear a little bit more from you for our listeners.
(47:54):
So so bringing it back to the topic of emotional release,
and what I share in the book is, you know,
I try to give these like very practical tools to
people of like, Okay, so you're in a moment of panic,
or you're in a moment where a wave of grief
has come over you, you know, and maybe it's not convenient,
(48:16):
you know, so often these things take us over when
we're like sitting on the subway or you know, driving
the car or walking down the street when we have
to you know, pretend to be a.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
Normal person, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (48:29):
And so I try to give people these really practical
tools that they can tap into, you know, even if
it's five minutes. And so I'd be curious to hear
from you, like, what would you recommend for someone who
is trying to navigate a particularly challenging emotion and something
(48:49):
that they could do quite simply for themselves, like a
like a practice to release that emotion.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Yeah. So the first thing that came into my mind
as I was hearing you speak was the element of resourcing,
which which for me is kind of a baseline even
before using a somatic or embodiment tool, which it is
in itself an embodiment tool. But I'll offer the visualization
(49:22):
of I'll offer two separate visualizations, one being a person
existing in isolation, and I'll say me, my emotions are
my own, caused by me or caused by the outside,
but fully within this isolated bubble. That's one visualization. The
(49:48):
other visualization is I am connected through a my celial
or spider web, to the nat to the collective unconscious,
to my own cellular history, my ancestry, to the changing
(50:11):
of the seasons, like imagining myself as beyond the isolated being,
And that in some ways is the visualization of resourcing.
So a resource could be another person. Let's say I'm
going through something and I have my therapist who is
(50:31):
on call, and I go to call them. But really
the invitation of resourcing is primarily self resourcing and regulation.
And of course there are individuals who are in a
hyper aroused or hypo arouse pattern, and it's pretty hard
to expect people to resource in a state of extreme
(50:54):
nervous system distress. But the invitation is that in moments
that we are not at such a high level to
tap into what are our resources. So I don't live
in a big city, I don't take the subway for
I wasn't brill in I was. But for me, one
of my biggest resources is when my nervous system is
(51:16):
all of a sudden smack bang gone somewhere where I
can barely even communicate, I go outside, put my feet
on the ground, lay my back on the ground, and breathe.
Because one of my main resources is the earth. Is
pata mamma is like the immense, immense strength of earth,
(51:39):
of the gushing waters and the land and the air
and the tree, like so immense beyond even my comprehension.
And in that perspective, I'm very I'm very held in
my human form and the immensity of the world. If
I imagine myself in the embrace of something so grand
and immense, there's a brief opportunity of like, Okay, my
(52:02):
nervous system can drop that one level down because I
am not alone. Other things that can be resourcing is
like someone who you're deeply connected to in your life,
like let's say a grandmother or a guardian angel, or
even a mythical figure that might be on your altar
or might be really relevant in your life, and like
(52:23):
how to in our moments of high distress, whether it's
hyper or hypo, to be like, okay, can I lean
a little bit on something? Do I need to hold
the weight of this? Or can I Can I ease
myself yield I love this word, yield into something And
from that place, other techniques that for me are deeply
(52:46):
supportive are extending my exhale as long as I can,
and that also can be hard when the nervous system
is pumping the inhale and exhale through panic really fast.
Something that helps, though, is exhaling as a hum or
as a sound, which when the xhale is lengthened. Interestingly enough,
(53:09):
our vagus nerve is tonified during the exhale, so the
diaphragm pulls up during the exhale, and the vagus nerve
that connects our cranial nerves down through our stomach to
our belly brain can be activated or relaxated.
Speaker 4 (53:30):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
We're beginning to extend the exhale. And what we'll find
often if we begin to bring our attention to this
area is when we're in nervous system dysregulation, we'll be
inhaling more and will be like going deep into like
trying to fill up with air. And it's I find
that inhale to be really an activating, delicious sensation. Like
(53:55):
when I'm in in sexual explorations, I find how much
my body like going into inhale as an expansion of sensation.
And I've been really delving into the pleasure of the exhale,
the surrender of the exhale, the surrender of the holding,
and the strength that I personally relate the inhale to having.
(54:18):
So that'd be my first invitation is finding ways to
extend the exhale. Another thing that deeply helps me is
tapping or pounding, and that's of course dependent on where
you are in physical space. There's such a thing called
emotional freedom technique, which has its whole points of tapping
that are deeply synchronized with Chinese medicine and acupuncture slash
(54:42):
pressure points. But I really enjoy tapping on my thoracic
or my chest upper torso area as well as my face.
It could be around the eyes and then also where
the collarbone meets the or the breastplate and kind of
that whole area, the area of the what would be
(55:06):
the intercostal muscles, the muscles that are between the ribs.
There's a study of how tapping and jiggling can be
really helpful for micro stretches in tissue. So in my
dance and movement practice, I don't ever warm people up
with stretching. I warm people up with bouncing and jiggling
(55:30):
and vibration or partner tapping because it offers these like
micro information that wakes up the propioceptive the system that
relates our body to space. The propioceptive system is all
of a sudden woken up, and that could be a
way from going a way to go from nervous system
(55:50):
dysregulation into into your body into sensing the body waking
up these like nerve sensors and mud soul tendon receptors
bringing them in bringing the attention in. Another invitation is
the element of shaking, But that too is something that
I actually walk with care. In popular culture, it's kind
(56:14):
of become like, oh, trauma release, like you see animal shake,
so shake, and I'm such a big fan of shaking,
like I have no nothing against it. But when we're in,
for example, a hyper aroused state, and we choose to
go into shaking shaking until our body goes into exhaustion,
(56:37):
it's not Sometimes it's not trauma release. Sometimes it's allowing
for the nervous system to go so deeply into hyper
arousal that it shuts down and goes into exhaustion. And
there have been there's been feedback from individuals saying like
this pattern happens to me that I go into emotional response,
(56:59):
go into shaking convulsing vibration until I'm exhausted and come
back down and it keeps happening. And so within that
with having that in mind, I really enjoy this element
of resourcing to find a way to kind of come
more into our window of tolerance, which is a term
(57:20):
that's used in somatic experiencing, which is kind of like
the area through which we could experience arousal and the
come down of arousal in a way that we're not
yet breaking into hyper or hypo and who I can
go so deep.
Speaker 4 (57:35):
I love it.
Speaker 6 (57:36):
I love it to say that, like the element of
shaking and trembling, I deeply invite once.
Speaker 1 (57:47):
There's been a little bit of trickling of the nervous
system into our introceptive awareness, so once we feel like
we've been able to drop our somatic awareness slightly into
our bodies and are doing the shaking from a conscious
place of meeting the emotion, meeting the sensation to shake
(58:08):
it out, and finding where the peak is and allowing
for that peak to naturally come back down rather than
chasing a peak into higher and higher sensation. That would
be my invitation with shaking.
Speaker 4 (58:21):
You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. I love it.
Oh you've offered really some wonderful tools that you know,
I think are really crucial in helping people navigate some
deep emotions. So oh wow, wow, wow, wow. I could
listen to you all day really, So I'm interested to
(58:45):
hear if you could offer are there resources that people
can access if they're interested in getting into this work,
and if you have anything that you're offering coming up
that people can sign up for and enjoy.
Speaker 1 (59:01):
I love this question. My website is currently in reconstruction
and renovation, so maybe by February fourth, when this is aired,
I can have a website that you can maybe put
as a link on there. Perfect Every Monday here in
Ashville I offer contact improvisation classes and host a jam.
(59:26):
In February, I'm going to be doing a two day
workshop that looks at the axis syllabus, which is a
lexicon of information on the body and anatomy and dynamic motion,
so looking at things like walking patterns, fascial pathways, organ
(59:46):
systems in relationship to movement. And in the beginning of
May we'll be having a bit of a dance festival here.
I'm actually going to just pause on giving all the
dates and send you the links for you to put
in and outside of me and what I'm offering, I'd
(01:00:08):
love to share modalities and places where people can find
more information on some of these techniques, so one of
them being people can go to the Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
website where she has tons of workshops and videos for sale,
some of them even on donation basis, which is amazing.
(01:00:31):
Even YouTube has a plethora of her videos and the
Body Mind Centering website is also another resource. I personally
use Bonnie's personal website more because of the videos and
the information that I can get access to on there.
There are workshops happening across the United States for BMC.
(01:00:54):
That's something to look for. The Continuum movement method is
also really an amazing method that looks into the diving.
Literally they call it a dive, the diving into sound,
sensation and emotion, and it's a whole transcendental journey. So
(01:01:16):
it highly recommend Continuum movement method. Another method that I
am deeply entwined in is authentic movement, which looks at
the element of the witness's attention, so holding movers who
(01:01:36):
are moving from their own impetus with the gaze of
the witness. So there isn't music involved. There is a
deep usage of eye statements and tracking of sensation and
the power of dropping into our authentic movement as it
arises in each moment, in each second, and it could
(01:01:57):
be stillness for what it's worth and to be witnessed
in that has been groundbreaking for me personally. So the
authentic movement method is another one if you haven't heard
of sematic experiencing. I have been seeing my beautiful somatic
experiencing therapist for a year now and deeply in love
(01:02:20):
with the form, and have taken a couple of eight
series workshops that blend sematic experiencing with authentic movement. And
there's so much to say about it. But sematic experiencing
is kind of a method, a therapeutic method of tracking
our sensations and visualizations as anchors into emotion that exists
(01:02:45):
in our cells and in our bodies. So it's a
really embodied approach to exploring emotions and trauma and the
release of them or the alchimization of them.
Speaker 4 (01:02:58):
Yeah, you've shared so much absolute gold in this conversation
and so many beautiful resources. I will link them all
in the show notes, and honestly, I mean, we could
really go on forever. I have so many more questions
for you, but we're going to keep it short and
(01:03:18):
sweet for now so everybody can digest this all. And
it's just been such a pleasure having you on the show,
and thank you so much for sharing.
Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
Likewise, I super appreciate your level of presence like witnessing
you listen as I speak, witnessing your own delving into
your body. Yeah, and the openness of your face and
your facial expressions. I felt really safe and open and curious.
(01:03:51):
Hopefully one day you'll come to Asheville. Yes, yes, very soon.
Speaker 4 (01:03:56):
I'm looking forward to hearing more about this dance Partty
festival in May. Oh that's so lovely. Well, my friends,
thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you
enjoyed this episode as much as I did. And this
has been another episode of the Oh to Joy podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
Who
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