EP 84 Letting go follow up

EP 84 Letting go follow up.

Host Amy Christensen delves a little deeper into the complex topic of letting things go. The discussion explores how emotional stresses manifest physically and highlights techniques like somatic therapy to release emotional pain. Amy shares personal stories and professional insights from her journey through somatic work and emphasizes self-compassion in facing challenges. Listeners are encouraged to use safe, guided practices when dealing with emotional traumas and to seek support if necessary, to improve overall health and wellness.
Links:
Peter Levine -   https://www.somaticexperiencing.com/about-peter

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Letting Go
00:27 Welcome to the Podcast
01:11 Exploring the Concept of Letting Go
01:35 Client Experiences and Insights
04:40 Personal Story: Discovering the Connection Between Physical and Emotional Pain
08:56 The Power of Somatic Work
14:44 Practical Steps for Letting Go
26:59 Final Thoughts and Encouragement
28:04 Podcast Closing Remarks

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/all-things-good-for-you--4972263/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
When we want something and we are so attached to
it and it has become our norm, it has become
our survival, our way to manage things. It is challenging,
if not downright scary and threatening, to think of letting
that go. So if it comes from a breath, it
comes from a movement or an expression, maybe that's the

(00:26):
safer place to start. Hey, friends, thank you for listening
to the All Things Good for You Podcast. Join us
as we explore ancient traditions, modern tools and practices in
the world of health, wellness, and personal development. I'm Amy Christensen,
your host and your curated mind coach, and I'm.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Your co host Brian Bowen, founder of Integrative Health, Inc.
And Better Human Company High Performance Coaching. Are you ready
to take control of your life and start feeling enthusiastic, empowered,
and limitless each and every day for a life well lived?
Let your curiosity flow with all for you.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Hello, Hello everyone, it's a me. It's just me today.
I'm just going to pop on and do a quick
follow up from our last podcast on letting things go,
putting it down, what you carry in and I wanted
to follow up on a number of aspects, but this

(01:27):
is going to be a short so I'm going to
try to keep it short and sweet and focused, and
we may do a couple of more follow ups around
this topic as we go. So the previous podcast conversation
was around letting things go. What came up for some
of my clients, both direct for nutrition health coaching and

(01:48):
a couple of hands on clients around this topic of
identifying something that's causing you some stress, some irritation, maybe
really hyper focused on something or something you feel like
you're just really heavily pursuing. A lot of times we
can't tell what it is. It's why it's nice to

(02:09):
have somebody on the outside, whether it's a therapist, a coach,
a trusted friend that's straight up and honest with you
that can help you see some of the things that
are difficult that you might need to readjust and reframe
and put things down on or like go have a
little control or just release some of the inner stuff
that's going on around a scenario that's causing your stress.

(02:33):
Because it's hard, it's difficult to really look at the
reality of self awareness, of the reality around self awareness
of having to let something go. You have to be
willing to really look at it from a couple of
different standpoints. And when you can see something that you
don't like or it's something that is just not working

(02:54):
for you, you're kind of in an easy space to
let that go. But I had a client, this was
a hands on client, and a lot of my hands
on work is helping people just not just decreasing their
pain with an elbow or stretching movement, but a lot
of it's talking it through a recognition of where are

(03:15):
you holding this tension? What is this pain? What is
this tension, this energy, this feeling, heat, stiffness, all of
those things. What is this telling you? What does it
look like? And some people have a really hard time
visualizing that kind of thing. Take some time, and some
people are pretty quick to recognize it. But when you

(03:35):
can get to that place of going, oh, yeah, I'm
feeling this pain or this discomfort or this sluggishness or
this ache, this heaviness, I feel it in this joint,
or I feel it in my chest, I feel it
in my belly. I feel this ache, or I feel bloated,
or I keep getting this odd sensation creak catch in

(04:02):
my knee, I get these pulses or sensations or I
get these shooting pains. All of these things can have
a direct physiological explanation. Right if you've twisted your ankle
or you had a knee replacement, there's obvious muscle issues
and joint issues that we can address there, but a

(04:22):
lot of times, almost every time, whether we really dig
deep enough to figure it out or not, but almost
every time, there's also emotional and memory type pain connected
to traumas, little traumas, big traumas, discomforts of where our
bodies wanting to express ourselves. I'll try to make a
quick story to tie this together, to make it make

(04:44):
a little more sense, So hang in with me. Years ago,
I was after having gone through my divorce and getting
myself set back up, and I had a decorative painting
company back in Texas, and I worked for very wealthy people,
and I felt very I felt it was meaningless. I
felt like it seemed shallow, and I felt like I

(05:05):
wasn't making an impact or having a purpose with putting decorative,
pretty things on people's ceilings and walls that they would
probably just paint over the next year. So I was
seeking something more. And that's when I was like I've
always been told to have really great hands, and I
have a really good energy. Maybe I want to do
some side work with some massage, and so I took

(05:28):
a base massage course. During that time. One of the
instructors opened my eyes to scar tissue deeper work and
relayed that she had a medical massage degree and whatnot,
and that led me on a chase to go to
a school in Boulder. So, at the time I lived
in Texas, I located the school in Boulder that specifically

(05:50):
had a two year program that worked with trauma and
the body and more medical sports injury massage, and so
I made way Boulder area to go to school. And
I was very excited because one of the people that
I had worked on that intrigued this was a woman

(06:10):
in my base massage school that had severe scar tissue
from having a heart defect as a teenager that they
found when she was young, and she had many surgeries,
and over these surgeries, it was just she had so
much scar tissue that she really as an adult still
could not carry like a heavy purse or a bag
or reach fully up over her head because of the

(06:31):
amount of restriction in her shoulder from all the surgeries.
So we worked on that tissue, and of course we
only did ten or fifteen minutes because it was pretty
intense of tearing up that tissue so that she could
get back into some range of motion, and it takes
time and it was very emotionally unwinding for her as well.
And that was my initial intrigue thinking I wanted to

(06:54):
go into trauma and the body work. I was thinking
physical trauma right, like actual scar tissue and broken bones
and those good things. When I ended up going to
the school in Boulder, there were multiple classes, multiple ways
to go. Like it was you know your college courses.
You have to take your main focus, and you had
several electives. And by the time I finally got to

(07:15):
the trauma in the body program, in that semester, I
had had a lot of the touchy feely woo woo
part of massage, and as Reddy like, all right, this
is the meat of what I came here for. And
I go in and there's person laying on the table
and they're doing a demonstration and they're talking about where

(07:35):
do you feel pain. I don't remember who it was,
but they just said, you know, I feel it in
my shoulder. And it was what does this pain feel?
And the person was like, feels like hot and stuffy,
and that instructor is, what does this pain want to do?
And I just about blew a gasket because I thought
we were going to be working on really hard to
shoe physical like tearing up scar tissue and really helping

(07:58):
people go through recovery. I was so frustrated. Lo and
behold as I regrutgingly went through the cloud course over
the next few days and sessions that we were in
these courses, I had to get on the table and
walk it through and do one for myself and be
the student. To my surprise, at that time, I've never

(08:20):
had any you know, significant injuries or anything like that,
but I did have this odd little pain and ache
that showed up in my knee. It was hard to trace,
like it wasn't like under my knee cap, it wasn't
always in the back. It's just roamed. So we talked
this through and there's a process for it. I don't
need to go into all the details of it here,

(08:41):
but there's a process to walk through it safely to
make sure that you're not triggering any deep, heavy traumas
that you're not prepared to walk through any psychological emotional weight,
so be aware of that when you, if you do
go into do any of this type of work for yourself.
But as we walked through it, what I came to
understand is, yes, the pain did have a sensation, It

(09:04):
did have emotion and a movement, whether it was expanding
or pulsing. Sometimes it wants to run down the leg
or up into the thigh. Sometimes it's even like people
will get images of a color or it's a ball
of prickly brown sphere that's just stuck in there. Like
this can be very descriptive, and the more you could

(09:26):
get descripted with it, the better. And then that pain
wanted to move. And what I came to realize working
through this process is that I had ridden. I was
a cyclist, an amateur cyclist back in Texas and rode
with some pretty successful semi pro writers, but they smoked me.
I just always was happy to finish the ride, but

(09:49):
was pretty good at it. But I also used that
time as a way to work through processing the pain
of my divorce. And yeah, it's obviously painful. It's still
painful to this day, and I've been divorced longer than
I was married, so I think I'm I I have

(10:10):
surpassed it by eighteen years now, so it's still very painful.
But I was so surprised at how that showed up
in my body and the revelation and the realization that
that pain that was coming up in my knee, the
pain that I was feeling in my heart and my
head was really tied to an actual process. And now

(10:33):
I didn't feel pain in my knee. I never hurt
myself riding my bike, And yeah, we can talk about
mechanics and oh, you might have pushed too hard with
this one, or maybe your quads fire more on this
side and less with your hamstrings, and therefore you did it.
It's there can be a physiological process to it too,
but the emotional content and when I was able to
make this revelation and listen and pay attention and visualize

(10:57):
almost create a separate identity of like an entity in
my body that was that pain and this discomfort and
listen to it and create a safe environment around it.
So there is a process to this. If you're out
there and you're thinking you can do this, if it's

(11:18):
significantly traumatic, you've got to be careful and work with
a professional on that space, because we can create environments
that helps you mitigate the stress and the remembering of
a trauma and the feelings and emotions that come up
with things that are so painful for us. But once
I was able to identify it, label it, give it

(11:38):
a name, give it a feeling compassionate and see the safety,
I'm safe and it was okay to have that feeling
and I wasn't in a threat and let it be
its own thing and then listen to it. And it
sounds a little silly if you've never done the work.
Ask it what it wants to say or what it
wants to do. Is there emotion or a feeling or
something of it that it wants to express, and then

(12:01):
just allow your body and your energy to say, yeah,
I wants to do this, and then let it do that.
So for me on the table, I think, if I
remember correctly, it was I didn't even know I could
identify the pain, I could describe it, and when it
was the point of what does it want to do
it I was able to say, I think I want
I think I want to kick, I want to move,

(12:23):
And I made this motion with my leg that looked
like a bicycle pedal, and that's I believe, if I
remember grectly it's been a few years, that's when it
really connected to me that this pain was so connected
to bike riding and managing my emotional pain around my divorce,

(12:47):
and that moment of understanding that compassion and that pain
and allowing that to be expressed. It sounds crazy, but
you guys, I got off the table and I did
not ever experience that knee pain in that knee ever again,
and I was really I struggled with the understanding of this.

(13:14):
It felt so odd and so weird and woo to
me that after years later and I'm working in physical therapy,
it kind of came up a few more times and
I started utilizing this in physical therapy. And I had
worked with some really nice, good open PT people, physical
therapists that I worked under, and they allowed me and
asked me to utilize this on people, and it really

(13:35):
made a difference. And there were people who were stuck.
Helping them process their emotional pain and identifying this pain
in their body and making those connections and then expressing it.
It really released so much of what was holding them
back in there, moving forward and progressing in their physical therapy,
and then they would overcome this big plateau and feel

(13:58):
better and get stronger and release the pain. I cannot
deny that there's such a deep connection. Okay, now maybe
some of you guys listening to this, this was back
in gosh, Massage school in Boulder was like two thousand
and nine, all right, so that has a long time

(14:19):
ago when and my course work was in with Peter
Levine and somatic work and the book Waking the Tigers amazing.
And then since then we've had a lot of somatic
work come out. We've had a lot of things that
came out to support it, improve it, and we have
a lot of science and research. The body keeps the score.
A lot of that work in somatic connection with healing
and pain control and pain management is becoming normalized. And

(14:43):
I'm grateful for this. Why all this is around letting
things go right. So back to my client, thank you
for following me down that road. This has become normalized
where we are a little more able to talk about
how things show up in our bodies, and yet we
still have a disconnect from it. So my client on
the table and I'm working with her, and I can

(15:05):
tell she's got some stuff going on, and I'm just saying,
sometimes it's helpful if there's something that you're ruminating on,
if there's a problem or a struggle or a stressor
that you're focusing on, you know, why don't we take
these last bit of time here in our session and
as I'm working on you feel like those what would

(15:25):
it be like to let that go? To not have
that stress, that stressor is resolved. Now, I'll caution people
out there that sometimes when you start digging into problems
and feelings, yes, it can stir up things. So everybody
take it with a grain of salt, and if what
comes up for you is overwhelming, just slow it down

(15:46):
and take it in a space that you need to
with a friend or again a therapist or coach. But
what came up for her it was so interesting to me,
was her body got more tense and I walked her
through and guided her through some stuff and breathing work
and trigger point work, and then it was like, let's

(16:07):
just see that releasing from your body. And for her,
the idea of letting go of a problem one I
don't know. We didn't go into the details of it
of what it was like. I don't know if she
was thinking, if she's in a space around whatever the
problem was, where she was in denial and ignoring and

(16:29):
numbing herself to the problem even though she knew it
was in there, she doesn't really facing it. And so
as long as you're not facing it, you're not really
aware of how much that stress is carrying you. But
the moment you say, what's your problem, what's problem struggling with?
What's your problem that you're struggling with, then the problem
comes up to her awareness, and that causes stress. But
what I found interesting was the ability of us to

(16:51):
go what is causing me stress? And what is what
is it that happens if you were to imagine that
this problem was resolved or you simply no longer had
this problem, one way or another, the problem was gone.
And how some for some people that is the problem

(17:15):
like that caused stress. The idea of letting go of
something was stressful and caused so much tension in her
body and caused so much And I had to ask Chris, like,
we might need to think about what are you getting
out of holding onto this problem? And that can be

(17:39):
a little prickly for people to get into that. I
know sometimes it's really hard to confront a problem, and
that especially if you feel like it's not yours and
it's not somebody perpetrated something on you, or a problem
that somebody else's quote unquote fault, and that somehow you
are getting something out of it, or you brought it
into your life or whatever. Those manifesting or or these

(18:02):
self responsibility discomforts that come up when we talk about
that we are getting something from it. It's a threat
to our reality. It's a threat to our value system.
It's a threat to who we might be. It's a
threat to an ideal we have about how something should

(18:25):
look or should be. I think where we might want
to try to go with that when that comes up,
one have that self compassion, have the reality of letting
go of something maybe that's too scary or too threatening,
or too confusing, or just too much for somebody's reality

(18:45):
to deal with. What if you just put that problem
in a bowl on the table in front of you,
like you took it outside of yourself and you just
put it in the bowl, Dick, It's right there, It's
not gone. You can pick it back up if you
want to. It's still there. Case you get your baggage
and you can set that bag down, but you can
pick it right back up again if you want to.

(19:05):
But if you put it out in the bowl, you
set it in the bag. What happens in your body
when you're not carrying the weight of that problem anymore? So?
For those of you who listen to the other one,
or if you've ever done somatic work, it would go
something like this, if we were going to look into
the somatic thing, if we're talking about something that stresses
you out, or if I open a coaching session and

(19:27):
we take a nice deep breath and the first thing
I say is how are you feeling? Most people will
tell me what they're thinking feeling. You know, Oh, I'm
worried about this, or I'm angry about this, or I'm
disappointed in myself. And I say, okay, and how is
your body feeling right now? Do a little bitty scan,
a fast little run through. Where do you feel the tension,
the pain, the anxiety, or the stress. Some people will

(19:49):
say I feel heavy and thick in my head, I
have a headache, or I feel like my throat is
stuck in your atom's apple for men, or right below
for women, like at the base of your neck, at
your vocal cords, or maybe they feel a little sick
to their stomach or just anxious kind of butterfly. Maybe
some people feel it in a joint, my hip or

(20:11):
my little back hurts, or if I've had an old injury,
that's where it always shows up. I feel stiffness. You
can just do a quick body scan and see what
your body is feeling and take a deep breath, and
what happens if you were to see this discomfort or

(20:34):
pain or tightness, anxiousness that's in your body, and you
were to take the anxiousness and that feeling and put
it into the bowl with the issue, the stress or
the problem. You were to just let that flow from
your body out and sometimes it's taken a deep breath.

(20:55):
Sometimes it's doing a little head wiggle or a nod,
a shit making the body, kicking the leg a little bit,
allowing that energy to and visualize that energy coming out
and going into the bowl or into the bag hang
out with that problem. Put those two things together. How
does your body feel after that? Does that area of

(21:17):
pain or discomfort feel a little less. It doesn't have
to go away. Were very attached to these things. It
takes a little practice to let that stuff truly flow
out of our body and then just check back in
and how's your body feeling after that? Does feel a
little lighter? Does it feel a little smoother, a little
less pain? Was there? Some resolution? Has it moved? This

(21:42):
is just a quick idea of what it might look
like to do some somatic work around letting things go again.
It takes a little practice, and you might get some help,
but the biggest thing is and the first thing is
to build that awareness. Most people I work with don't
even realize the tension that they're holding in their body.
They don't even realize that they're not relaxing their neck muscles.

(22:06):
Or I've taken a deep breath, but I've taken it
from my upper chest, and i haven't done breathed wide
into my rib cage and expanded my belly and really
just breathed that anxiety that's sometimes stuck in your gut.
Just let it flow out of your body. They're just

(22:29):
not even aware they're holding it. So it can take
some practice and some help. Sometimes you need some tactile
movement sometimes you need expression, whether it's vocal cords or
movement of your body, or to potement something outside of you,
tapping on your body, to bring a deeper awareness into
what's happening and how you're truly holding your body. So
when you go into this place of letting something go,

(22:52):
this idea, that the idea of letting something go brings
up more frustration and anxiety that perhaps you were neglecting, numbing, ignoring,
put tabling for later, it's probably still showing up in
your body. And if you can't address the problem specifically,
if you can't come to a place of truly visualizing

(23:16):
and feeling in your body in your mind, what it
would be like if that problem was no longer a problem,
whether it went away, it was resolved, or you just
simply let it go, the control, the need to fix,
the need to change it. If you can't go to
that space, could you see how it's showing up in

(23:37):
your body, See if there's a correlation to a pain
or dysfunction, and see what it would look like if
you were to let that part of the body go relax,
Visualize that discomfort or pain flowing out of your body.
Taking a breath, doing the movement, whatever it is you
might need to do, recognizing it and have and compassion

(24:00):
for it, bringing that awareness in then letting it just
do its thing, knowing that you're safe. What happens if
you practice this on a regular basis. If you can't
get your mind around the problem, maybe starting with the
body is the first place you can do right. There's
no sequence that has to happen there, so do what

(24:21):
works for you. But I just found it interesting because
it came up in a couple of ways this last
week another client who's a nutrition coaching client, very strong, beautiful,
strong human and just crushes it right in life. And
just that level of control also shows up in the

(24:46):
desire to hold on to a story that we tell
ourselves that if we don't do it, it won't get done,
or if it doesn't happen this way, I don't know
what will happen, and therefore I have to hold on
to the devil, you know, you know, kind of a
statement like this is the chaos I'm comfortable with. If
I don't have this chaos that I can predict, it

(25:08):
might go away, but it might be a different chaos,
and that might be harder for them walking this person
through the idea of Okay, it doesn't have to be forever,
it's just in this moment, You're just gonna let the
chaos go for a moment. You can put it down
in a bag, and you can pick it right back
up again, right now, in this moment. If you did

(25:30):
not have that control over everything, how does that feel
in your body? I help this person walk through it
took a bit of time, so it is not, by
any means just a quick and simple process. All the time.
When we want something and we are so attached to
it and it has become our norm, it has become
our survival, it has become our way to manage things.

(25:51):
It is challenging, if not downright scary and threatening, to
think of letting that go. So if it comes from
a breath, it comes from a movement or an expression,
maybe that's the safer place to start. And maybe that
decrease of tension in the gut helps you, Like it

(26:12):
helped my coaching client who found themselves doing a lot
of mindless stress eating in response to having some semblance
of control in the chaos. In that moment of taking
a breath and just saying I don't have to do
it right this minute, right now. The world's not going

(26:33):
to spin out of control as I let go for
just a minute, and that feeling of the stomach ache
and the anxiety and the stress settled, and so did
the desire to stress. Eat. That person felt control, they
felt full, and they felt more in control of their
inner self than the outer world that was dictating where

(26:56):
this response was to eat that. Maybe following up this
way will help you process even more the idea of
letting things go. And if anybody has questions or anybody
wants to ask more questions about somatic work, please give
us a shout out again. If you are dealing with

(27:17):
some heavy trauma or when you do think about letting
something go that it really spends you out of a
safety feeling and rex your day or makes you feel
threatened and scared, please reach out to somebody, get some help,
Get somebody who you can talk to and depend on
and lean onto and feel vulnerable with in a safe
way to help you process that. So thank you everybody

(27:38):
for jumping in and listening, and I would love to
hear your feedback if you have any thoughts or ideas,
and we'll see you on the next podcast coming up
with Brian and I have a feeling we'll continue to
talk about things and processes of letting things go and
how that shows up in the body as well as
in our life choices and our health and wellness. So
join us again soon. Thank you everybody, have a great day.

(28:04):
Hey friends, thank you for tuning in to the All
Things Good for You podcast. Please note, any information, experiences, ideas,
or opinions discussed today are for educational and thought provoking
purposes only, and not intended as medical advice. If anything
piqued your curiosity, please consult with your doctor or personal
medical professional. And if you're enjoying All Things Good for

(28:26):
Your podcast, hoop on over and leave us a five
star review so we can continue delving in and providing
great content. Thanks again, and we hope you are inspired
to stay informed and responsible along your health and wellness journey.