Jenee: 0:06

Welcome to the Heartlight Sessions, a podcast about light working your way through dark times. I'm Janae Halstead. I'm a singer-songwriter, holistic vocal coach, intuitive guide and plant medicine facilitator. I'm also a survivor of childhood abuse, autoimmune issues and my 30s also a survivor of childhood abuse, autoimmune issues and my 30s. I'm on a lifelong healing journey and, along the way, I want to share the ideas and teachings that rock my world. Every week on Heartlight Sessions, I call in artists, healers and thinkers to explore what's helped them live and thrive from a heart-centered place, because the heart, it's where the best things happen. If you've ever wondered how to unlock your biggest breakthroughs or how to come back from that stuff that tried to kill you, you know the stuff I'm talking about, the stuff that's supposed to make you stronger. Or if you've ever wondered how to just do you straight from the heart, you're in the right place. So join me, won't you? Let's turn on that heart light.

Jenee: 1:18

Hello, hi, I'm so excited to have Emily Baldwin on the podcast today. She is a somatic experiencing practitioner. She has a community and a platform called Pachaccia. She's a transformational wellness guide, a little bit of astrology nerd, a little bit of woo-woo, some shamanic practices it's like the perfect package of everything that I love and the type of individuals that I like to talk to, and we are just getting to know each other. We know each other through like a circle of friends and we're already kind of nonstop in our in our flow, so I'm so excited to have you here. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor to be here. Yeah, it's very exciting. Um, I wanted to talk a little bit about um first. Just your, uh, your gut, your path to healing and really like what brought you into this world. I'm always very curious about that um, with people and kind of where, where you went first, what was your first stop on, like your journey?

Emily: 2:43

Um, so my body was absolutely shutting down and that was the start of this whole process. I was working in corporate at a consulting firm, one of the big four and um, of course, if my work is in healing and I don't think, I don't know if we mentioned somatic experiencing, but I'm also um, Um but yeah.

Emily: 3:06

So if that's my path, of course it was a complete mismatch to be, you know, working with a bunch of consultants and I was there for four years and I was so stressed out that I know now my body was shutting down and going through um high cortisol symptoms. Yeah. So, you know, big swollen face was carrying more weight than I normally do, my hair was thinning, I had heart palpitations, panic attacks two to three times a week, migraines two to three times a week and, yeah, just my whole body was shutting down. Even my parents were saying you know, emily, we know that you have a good, steady job and income and benefits, but it's not worth your health journey in the work started with meeting a woman on a subway platform and for anybody who lives in New York, you know we don't make friends down there, right? So I was in, yeah, and I was in full fuck off mode. Oh, sorry.

Jenee: 4:14

Can we cut on that? Oh yeah, I love, love me some explicits, okay, so.

Emily: 4:19

I was in full fuck off mode uh, earbuds, sunglasses on the subway platform and this woman just gets my attention and she is obviously not from New York and I do my civic duty, can I help you? And she wants to make sure that she's going into the city the right direction. So I was like, yeah, you are, where are you getting off? We were getting off at the same stop. So I said whenever I get off, you'll get off. And then I know now that it was a breadcrumb from the universe, totally, but all it presented as was a huh like a little open curiosity. So I say that because I have a feeling that someone is going to be listening to this, and the next time you feel that curiosity, follow it. It has led me to really, really good things. So that led me to this rebirth and renewal retreat in the foothills of Vermont, and then someone there introduced me to three different guides in shamanic work, and so then I started along you know the transformational wellness path and meditation retreats and from there someone that I was training with knew an SEP and he came to do a workshop with us, and I'm always, whenever we do workshops, I like to be the guinea pig and I like to kind of.

Emily: 5:45

You know, with this healing work I just jumped in both feet into the deep end. Within three months I was training to do work. You know, wow and my husband is also my co-facilitator he didn't want to do it. We were so codependent and enmeshed at the beginning he didn't want to do it. We were so codependent and enmeshed at the at the beginning he didn't want to do it just because I was, so he took his time and kind of waded in through the kiddie pool. But that was not my MO. Like both feet deep end three months in and um, so yeah, with SEP, I jumped in with that workshop, loved it. My whole body reacted to it. My whole nervous system was just like, yes, this, this actually works.

Emily: 6:28

And so then I started training. It was COVID, so a normal three-year training took four years. But I've been in the work for about eight years now and been working four and yeah, it's. It's been a crazy, amazing, incredibly healing ride so far. And you know, with some apprenticeships they take like 10 years. So while I feel like I've had amazing, amazing teachers, amazing training on multiple different platforms, many different fronts, and I always feel like I'm continuously learning and continuously growing. This is a forever PhD. You know, give a healing, get a healing is kind of a is a really good thing yeah.

Emily: 7:22

You know, I still also consider myself a baby in this. You know, I'm eight years into my 10 year, you know apprenticeship.

Jenee: 7:30

Wow yeah. So in case anyone doesn't know, SCP is somatic experiencing practitioner, and that's Dr Peter Levine's work.

Emily: 7:40

He I think he started, I want to say in the 60s or 70s, and drew from all these different methodologies, including Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory. He did a deep dive on the nervous system and it was all based off of the question animals in the wild don't get PTSD Right, psd right, but animals in captivity and humans do, even though animals in the wild have so many more daily instances of being under mortal threat so what's the?

Emily: 8:12

disease, and so he understood. He did this deep dive on the nervous system and then was able to understand. Oh, you know, animals in the wild are able to run it off, they're able to get away from their attacker, they're able to fight off their attacker, and what that does is it releases a tremendous amount of built up activation in our bodies, so they're able to complete the trauma cycle on a daily basis shake it off, you know get the activation out of their bodies, get the activation out of their bodies.

Emily: 8:50

But when we're at home and it may be your parent that is the stressor, or your sibling, or you know there may be abuse in the house or trauma in the house, you can't escape it and so you're continuously getting revved up and getting activated, which is just how our body evolved, you know. But then you're not able to spend the energy and so it gets stuck in the tissues of your body. We get, you know, things all the way up to PTSD and it could affect our health. And so his work works directly with the nervous system to re and train it into its natural rhythms. You know, SEPs are there as the guidepost for sessions to help the body do what it naturally does, which is be in a healing state, be in a healed state, come back to equilibrium.

Emily: 9:38

And, yeah, his work has been, honestly, one of the most efficient and quickest ways to release stuck trauma and activation from the body and to heal the body that I've been trained in or that I've, you know, just discovered along the way and dabbled in and, you know, gotten curious about, which is interesting to say that it's the quickest and one of the most quick and efficient because you're working on the body level, so everything has to slow down. Yeah, so it's one of those. The fastest way to get there is to slow down and even with the slowdown, it's still way more efficient, in my opinion in my opinion than a lot of the other methodologies that that I've been curious about along the way, methodologies that that I've been curious about along the way.

Jenee: 10:25

Wow, I'm, I'm curious, like how quickly you saw for yourself this, this recovery, like after you left corporate.

Emily: 10:33

So, with my personal healing journey, you know, I always tell people that healing is like this Yep, expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction. That is the rhythm of life and healing on our planet and you know, it's a heartbeat, it's our lungs, it's the seasons of the year. So, um, you know, and my healing has been like this. Yeah, I will say that I probably. It took about three to six months for me to go. Holy shit, this works and I am in such a better place and like I could really see the difference, and I, you know that used to be, that used to be the case. It's not anymore. Health wise, when I jumped into the work again, I was having three to three to five panic attacks a week.

Emily: 11:28

Three to five migraines a week. My hair was thinning oh um, it was like the, like a faucet got shut off when I quit the corporate and moved into training work. So I basically just kind of stopped having the migraines, or migraines went from three to five a week to three to five a year, and then panic attacks. I mean I probably have had I don't know a handful in the last eight years. So I mean just that there were some aspects of it that were just night and day. There were some aspects of it that were just night and day.

Emily: 12:02

Yeah, when I no longer had that day-to-day all the time drowning in cortisol and adrenaline environment, my body just naturally came to a more healed state pretty quickly, yeah. And then, just with this work and the SE work, yeah, you really can tell a difference in this work in about three to six months. Now you're also dealing with things that took patterns, coping mechanisms, strategies, ways that our bodies contorted into these unnatural shapes in order to survive and get through and react to whatever happened. And it's really important to know that. You know, if it took decades to form and then get reinforced and reinforced and reinforced, it's not going to be a month's long process. I mean it could be, but you really want to give your body just as much time and space as it needs. So, yes, I could see a huge difference in three to six months eight years ago, and I've been. I've been in this process for the last eight years and I'm still discovering new layers.

Emily: 13:26

I'm still this and will be for the rest of my life. And it took decades to create and reinforce, can sometimes take years to painstakingly and lovingly and gently and patiently untangle. So I think it's also really important for anyone who's listening to know like be patient.

Jenee: 13:51

Absolutely.

Emily: 13:52

Trauma happens too much, too soon, too fast, so healing needs to happen. No pressure, yep, all the time in the world with loving acceptance and just so much kindness, compassion and patience.

Jenee: 14:08

Yeah, this is so important. I think this is a message that you know so many people don't receive and it's like vital to healing because people give up up. It's a long game and I know for myself, like you know, I was on my path just of initial healing, kind of the big chunk, for 15 years and there was like finally, a moment where I knew I was at the end of the tunnel. It was only the end of a tunnel, you know. The only way out is through, and it doesn't and it's not a race and it does get better. I think that's the hardest thing is people. It gets harder and it gets worse before it gets better. Definitely true, and that I mean that's where people can just get stopped and stuck.

Emily: 15:05

You, know, so, that is the contraction part of this process and one of the things I try and totally normalize. And for anyone who's listening like, please hear us. We've been through our own versions of this and each time I go back into the contraction you know it's gnarly, it's not fun, it's not comfortable. But, girl, I learned so much more in this part than I do in this we get so much more out of the gnarly bits, the dark parts, the uncomfortable parts.

Emily: 15:36

We learn so much more, we purge so much more, we integrate so much more in those contractions and they are just as much a part of the healing process as this, you know. Yeah, and I totally agree with you about one of the things I see with clients is again, we come from this patriarchal. Everybody's nervous systems are jacked, especially, you know, coming from New York. Love um, love New York. But every time we go back.

Emily: 16:06

I just look around and I'm like everyone's system is jacked, everyone's baseline is up in fight flight. Yeah and um, that is not how we evolved. You know. We evolved to have our baseline down in ventral and and social, open, curious, you know that place where we actually can hear the messages our body is giving us and those little intuitive hits and our curiosity can lead us good places because we feel safe enough to be open and curious and social. Um, but I am finding that a lot of people, people with the do it now fast is better, do like just go, go, go.

Emily: 16:47

Breakneck pace of our culture and the, the way that western medicine has um created a pharmaceutical based uh model where it's if you have this, take a pill for it, and it's one of those. You know it's this quick and we'll just change this and we'll fix you. And you know it's absolutely the opposite of that it's. You're perfect as you are. You don't need fixing it's.

Emily: 17:20

Yeah, we're working on stuff, we're all working on stuff. We're going to be working on stuff for the rest of our lives and slow and steady wins the race. We want to be the tortoise here Because our bodies honestly our bodies could not handle the rate of change that our minds want to go. If my clients so many clients will come in and they'll be dealing with a particular thing and they'll have this idea of like when they want this done and I have to explain to them. It's just not how healing works and, truthfully, if you went as quickly as you want to, your body would break down. Yeah, physically, the cells in your body, the molecules that hold you together, could not handle the rate of change that your mind thinks is appropriate, yeah, and so it's really important if you're on this healing path, if you're starting this healing path tortoise, not the hare, and one step at a time, and it's not linear. It's this, so it is not. Oh, we just keep getting better and better and better.

Jenee: 18:41

No, no, no, like, sometimes there's the contraction after the big expansion and that's just as much a part of it. Yeah, it's to me. The big expansion and that's just as much a part of it. Yeah, it's to me, like I'm so passionate about.

Emily: 18:51

I'm always like the hill, the hill that I will die on.

Jenee: 18:54

Is um being a representative for the body? Yes, because the body is, I think, deeply embedded into Pachamama and into the feminine, you know, into the feminine aspect on our planet, that polarity, and it's the subconscious language, and we live in a world that is, you know, wants to dominate and control and know when things are going to be done and give me a timeline, blah, blah, blah blah. And unfortunately, as you experienced in, you know, working in your corporate job is like you have to bring the body with you.

Emily: 19:53

You have to start to understand and learn this language if you really want to have a quality life. My work lately has been around this, you know, coming from old model, uh, patriarchy, hierarchy top down, um, rushing things past. You know, going from the mind, mind, mind, all all masculine, um, the body, I feel is that, yeah, that more feminine, connected to mother earth. We need to be loving and respecting our, our mother, more than we are. She is very sick right now.

Emily: 20:27

And the way that we approach our own healing, the parts of us that come up that we had to abandon along the way in order to be connected with our family members, our caregivers, our cultures, our peer groups, it's not about getting rid of anything and it's not about dominating anything and power over that is the old model. The way to healing is how can we bring all parts into the whole, how can we take care of the whole, how can we be more whole? And that includes our light and our darkness, the things that we like about ourselves and the things that we don't. You know the things that are in our, the light of our awareness and then the shadow of our subconscious, which is most of us. You know, 99% of us, yeah, and. And I think, collectively, we're all at different parts of this path and this lesson. We're all at different parts of this path and this lesson, but it is so important for us, collectively and individually, to start to really unlearn that. All right, come on, dominator, like you have to go at my pace, or the mind is telling the body you have to heal at my pace, um and?

Emily: 21:44

Or disregarding the feminine, disrespecting the feminine, disrespecting the body. How many people do we know that are just like, oh, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Yeah, that's crazy. How many of us and this is something I used to do in corporate just body urges like having to go to the bathroom, and I'd be like, oh, but I have one more email and I got to do this and that, and then you'd like kind of wake up out of your disassociated state five hours later and you never went to the bathroom. How often do we do that disregarding, you know, big and small, these parts of uh and and functions of our body? And this is where it all is. Trauma lives here, the reason why we are finding that solely mind-based therapies like psychotherapy and I say this knowing a couple of really great therapists out there that bring a body and do really beautiful work. But the vast majority of you know psychotherapy and psychiatry kind of cuts you off at the neck and treats you from here up. But trauma is a body thing and so we're.

Emily: 22:56

we're seeing the limitations of trying to treat a body thing through the mind. So, yeah, you know, I think this healing process is a lot of unlearning things that we have learned in our families and our cultures and this dominator model. It's just getting unlearned and dismantled right now and, thank God, it's making us sick.

Jenee: 23:16

Totally. Yeah. It's very interesting too, because you know when you're in therapy and you're rehashing your traumas with your therapist, your body actually doesn't know the difference between the time that it happened and what you're retelling. So you're re-traumatizing yourself every single time that you rehash that story.

Emily: 23:42

I'm so glad that you brought that up. It's something I've been noticing in my sessions, especially lately. So one of the journeys that we have to bring clients along is that it's be patient with your body and it's going to take longer than you want it to. So another thing that I'm noticing all right, really important for all of your clients to know that there is kind of this magnetization, this pull to the trauma. Whatever the trauma is, it might be an event. It also could be little t trauma of just not being seen, not being heard. You know, both of those holes in the trauma landscape have a magnetization.

Emily: 24:31

In SE we call it the trauma vortex and there's a pole to the center of the vortex. So many of my clients want to come in and they want to talk about it. And there's this urgency of I have to tell you, I have to tell you and part of my job is actually to hit the pause button First off, your body is telling me the story. Second, if I let you just go off into the story, truthfully, you're just going to jump right into the middle of the trauma vortex, disassociate. We're going to spend the entire rest of the session, possibly the next week, getting you back out of freeze. Yes, yes, and so really it's funny because I've had a couple of sessions with clients where, like they don't take to SE or they feel like it's you know, they want to talk about it and and I absolutely get that, sometimes we need our story to be heard and there is a part of that and there's a way to titrate it and an SE practitioner is there to help kind of put the pauses in. Literally we ask your permission to interrupt for this reason. But it's so that we don't go zero to 60 on the runaway trauma train and just go up into disassociation. But people have and it's a natural. This is how our bodies are wired.

Emily: 25:56

Trauma has a pull to it For anyone listening. It's not always healing to just tell the story full stop and to let your body go with that runaway train and that pull towards the story full stop, and to let your body go with that runaway train and that pull towards the story and talking about it. Talking about it, like you said, absolutely can re-traumatize you and if you take pauses, again trauma happens too much, too soon, too fast. So if you take pauses and oh, we're going to pause here and let's just deal with whatever activation the body has. You know, in telling of the story, like you said, the body has no idea.

Emily: 26:35

We go back into a body state. We revert back to that body memory of whatever was happening at the time and can we pause and can we just be with this and can we just take a little baby bite and sit with the discomfort and the activation enough and map it out in the body in a safe way and maybe be with the edges of it instead of the whole thing until you get a release, the tingles, the heat, the sweat, the yawn the body wants to purge a lot of different ways and can we be with it and just take little baby bites out over time. So instead of saying it in two minutes, you might take two or three sessions on it maybe more.

Emily: 27:21

But by the time you're done with it, instead of re-traumatizing yourself, you will have actually metabolized the stuck energy in your body and you'll actually not be looping on the trauma in your body anymore. Yes, so I'm so glad you brought that up, because it's something I've noticed in client sessions and I think that it's really important for anyone going through their healing journey to understand.

Jenee: 27:47

Yeah, and I think there's what happens is there's this over time, I know, for me, when I started to heal from my own trauma, you know, and was just living in the neck up, you know, like we do and disassociating left and right, you know when, yeah, when I started to and I also went on, you know, antidepressant, went on an antidepressant that for my anxiety attacks, so you know, and was like very quickly, was like, oh my God, I don't want to be on this thing, you know, because I did actually like feeling, even though they were in these extremes, you know, I did like feeling. So I went off and I had a backlog of anxiety. So the thing that I went on to to, you know, make it go away. I had now way worse tidal waves of anxiety. Yes, and you know something inside of me knew this time that like, okay, I'm going to have to dive into the waves, I'm going to have to find a way to deal with this overwhelm.

Jenee: 28:51

And you've talked a little bit. I saw one of your Instagram posts on anxiety and I thought it was really powerful and maybe we can talk a little bit about that, because I thought the you know the connection there was like, oh, this is it. But you know like, oh, this is this, is it. But, um, you know, when you're initially kind of de-thawing or working, you know within the body, that's when it's like again can feel so uncomfortable and extreme, you know, but it's, it's, it's all about feeling, it's going into the feeling, into the body and moving it.

Emily: 29:29

I'm sitting here, I have these moments where I'm like be cool, baldwin, be cool because I'm just so excited and I love talking about this. And okay, anxiety is a natural byproduct of living in our culture, the way that it is set up right now. So I want to normalize all of your listeners that are battling and dancing with anxiety. Our culture is backwards. It's sick. It's not based off of what being an actual human, of being whole with all of our parts and all of our emotions. We are taught some backwards things that create tension and stuck flight. It's usually flight.

Emily: 30:16

There's some fight or two, but stuck flight in the body. So I want to normalize it first. Okay, quick thing on meds. Okay, quick thing on meds. One around depression and chemical imbalance straight up chemical imbalance. Honestly, there are a couple of clients that I've worked with or people that I know that actually have the actual chemical imbalance and they absolutely need those meds. Their life is better with those meds. Um, it's absolutely the right, you know course of treatment. The vast majority. I don't think it's the right thing for them.

Emily: 31:03

And here's why, with the SSRIs, especially if you're talking about, like the anti-anxiety meds, what they do is they cut you off from the messages that are happening in your body. Your body, your nervous system, has evolved for thousands and thousands of years to give you messages of danger and safety. Anxiety is basically when we're stuck with the gear in danger, on overdrive all the time. Trauma is a body thing, so it's usually, you know, a set of things that happened, that we weren't able to then complete the trauma cycle Like we talked about with animals. That happened, that we weren't able to then complete the trauma cycle like we talked about with animals. Same thing with humans. We can't run it off because we have to go to our room instead of being able to run it off and run away from a lion and the african savannah. So over time, that gets stuck in the tissues of our bodies. What an anti-anxiety med does is it numbs you, it cuts you off from the message that your body is screaming at you, saying danger, danger, danger. When we don't feel something, it gets stuck in the tissues of our bodies. The way to release something from the tissue of your body, release the energy of it, release the activation of it, the trauma is kind of how we contort ourselves into shapes that are unnatural afterwards. Trauma is not the event, it's how we, uh, it's how we react to the event, the stories that we make true of it.

Emily: 32:51

Yes, um, so with anxiety meds, honestly, the worst withdrawal process that I have ever witnessed a friend or client colleague anyone go through was a woman with severe anxiety who had been on benzos for about 20 years whoa, and it took her pain stakingly. I mean, we're talking like shaving parts of a pill off. Yeah, little by little, titrating down for two fucking years. Wow, wow. Ever since I witnessed that, I always encourage people.

Emily: 33:34

You know work with an SEP, do the harder. You know longer work, slower, slower work of really like in a guided way, like, get yourself somebody who is trained and educated on how to help you process this, rather than going the easy route, that patriarchal quick, you know faster is better, more is better, you know, backwards messaging that we get in our culture. Go the slower route, yeah, because what you're doing is you're just trapping the anxiety in your body, which is what you experienced, yep. And so, getting off of those, what you're going to do is, as soon as you bring the, as soon as you titrate the anti-anxiety med down, all of that stuff that you didn't want to feel, the panic attacks, the anxiety attacks, the you know just generalized anxiety, the not being able to sleep, the stress that what that does is it takes the lid off of it, so then it can come out.

Jenee: 34:37

Yeah.

Emily: 34:37

So, if you are going through this process, know that you're not going crazy, and it doesn't mean that you should go back on the benzos and you should up your dose. It means that you should go to a practitioner that you trust, that is trained, properly trained on how to work with this and over time you can purge all of this. The only way out is through the way that our bodies purge is by feeling it and remember that it goes out the way it came in. So if it came in as anxiety, you're going to sit there on a random Monday afternoon and it's going to come out and there's no stressor that happened, no stimulus, that happened. And you don't know why you think you're going crazy because you're just all of a sudden panicky. It's not that you're going crazy, baby. It's because two years ago you had a panic attack that you numbed yeah. It's because two years ago you had a panic attack that you numbed yeah, and that the energy of that literally gets stuck in the muscles and the fascia and the nerves in our bodies and so it's going to come out the way it came in anxiety. It's interesting. It's interesting the more I go into it and I'm a big Gabor Mate fan. Yeah.

Emily: 35:49

So Gabor Mate for those of your listeners who don't know is a brilliant doctor that is in this work and has written books on everything from addiction that I really I believe in his model rather than you know the AA model, and I totally honor the AA model and how many people it helps. He's written books on ADD and, oh my God, as somebody who was diagnosed as ADHD non-hyperactive type in eighth grade, totally agree with him. He wrote a book called when the body says no, and it is this brilliant way of looking at the body that I I mean in in our um, transformational wellness work. If you're training in it and our lineage and our little subsects of the lineage with our teacher, that was one of the first three books that that you read when you're training. That was one of the first three books that you read when you're training. And he has a whole chapter on the HPA axis your hypothalamus, to your pituitary, to your adrenals, little big beanie caps on the tops of your kidneys.

Emily: 37:02

Your adrenals are the things that release adrenaline and cortisol. So we evolved to release adrenaline and cortisol. So we evolved to release adrenaline and cortisol. And it's when it gets stuck in the on position and we're kind of drowning in cortisol all the time that it literally can create health issues. Our body was not meant to be stuck in on all the time, so we're going to pause for all the listeners that might be activated by talking about this, and remind everybody that your body is a self-healing machine, wants to be in equilibrium, it wants to be in a healed state, and I know plenty of people personally and I have heard of many stories about people finding healing by unlearning. These emotional and behavioral things that you know led to the disease in the first place, so wanted to plant that seed dis-ease in the first place, so wanted to plant that seed.

Emily: 38:15

We take anxiety as just this normal thing in our culture, but it's not. It is the body telling you something's up. It's the body telling you there's danger Now it doesn't necessarily have to be danger from your life right now. You could have a wonderful family life and a job that you love, and this and that, but there's enough. That's similar energetically to when the anxiety first got in your body when you were a kid, probably, yeah, or maybe there's a car accident that your body hasn't fully metabolized. You weren't able to complete the trauma cycle around it. So that's why you want to work with a practitioner who can help you release the energy and the activation from your tissues, and it's really important because you know it can lead to a number of.

Emily: 39:00

You know we have incidences of cancer, autoimmune diseases skyrocketing right now and a lot of that comes from being stuck in the on-flight position, and so it's part of the reason why I'm passionate about this and why it's important to not normalize it away and to not address it, because, you know, it does affect your health. Now, again, just saying to all of the people with super powerful minds it is absolutely possible to work with this and to reclaim that relationship with your body and to help your body get into its equilibrium and into its natural rhythms and to feel safe in your body again. And yeah, I've seen so many people you know cure their own anxiety and depression. I would say that I still have some anxious, you know. Again, my healing process has been this, and sometimes, in the contraction, I will go back to that anxious place, but I used to live there, right, these are now like little visits, exactly, and they're short visits. Yeah, and I'm so much more resourced Each time I go back to those uncomfortable places I've got myself. I have mapped out my body. I'm so much more in my body, I'm so much more connected to my body. When we go into body work, you know you've your listeners might've heard that we are just as infinite inside as we go in, as the universe is outside and I used to think that was total bullshit, but, honestly, in the last eight years, oh my God, it is absolutely true. I am completely an infinite universe inside and each and every person is as well.

Emily: 41:04

And so if we were astronauts on the International Space Station, and you know, doing trauma work or going into a meditation retreat or you know any SE work anytime you're doing the inner work it's like going on a spacewalk, yeah, on the space station. So what we do is we get a tether and any astronaut is going to have probably multiple tethers to the international space station. If they're out in space working on something on this, on the station, they're going to have a suit that is containment to keep them safe and to keep them, um, you know, give, give them the necessary things for life, oxygen being one of them. And so you want someone who's trained and can help. You have those tethers, the resources, the orienting, the titration, the containment of the SE session, so that we're not George Clooney and gravity just floating away, yeah, yeah, um. And so, and you know there are practitioners that are skilled at going out and finding you. If you were ever the George Clooney and you're out, lost in space they can go and find you and bring you back.

Emily: 42:24

Yeah, and so, um, so yeah, like you know, just encouraging any listeners to know that first, you're not alone. It is a natural thing to um have anxiety and reaction to our backwards ass culture and, um, and it's worth, it's worth the the step-by-step, slow healing process. Um, I think you know it's. I'm so glad that you mentioned it cause I I just think it's so important and it's so ubiquitous. You know, we just consider, we just consider anxiety to be a normal part of our society but, um, normalizing it doesn't mean that it's good for our health part of our society, but normalizing it doesn't mean that it's good for our health.

Jenee: 43:08

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you know the key really is to the stabilization you know of of the, of the self, getting your, your getting the equilibrium, yeah, and then you can go get suited up and go inside and go into the, you know, go to the International Space Station and go exploring. Yes, once you've stabilized, you know it's like then we can start to do the shadow work. You know then, because it's like, okay, I'm, you know, if you start to do the shadow work or you start to do you know, you start to, and a lot of people do they go in and they're looking at their past and they're already like so dysregulated, and then it's just like oh, I mean, that is a recipe for just like a mental break.

Emily: 44:00

Yes, you know, yes, I'm so glad that you mentioned that. So that is how we start pretty much every SE session and most of the you know, meditation and energy healing retreats that we, um, that we uh, facilitate. The first part is the tethers, it's the resources you know we'll have you orient to the room. Um, there's something and this is actually a tool that you can use anytime. Um, so, for anybody who's listening, um, literally, there's something about being a mammal and having a mammal's nervous system, that if we look around our environment, especially if we're not well, if we're out in nature, that can be really nice and can be really resourcing. But if you just look around and a lot of people will do the okay, I'm done. No, no, no. Again, we're going with the body, so it's slow. So take like at least 60 seconds, a minute or two and just slowly look around your room, look around your environment and look for things that make you feel safe. So you're literally orienting to safety. That's something that you can do and just practice it. You know, sometime today, sometime in the next couple of days, or even as we're talking for the rest of you know this podcast, like, feel free to just look around and let your eyes wander where they want to go. It settles the nervous system and then, if you can connect with something outside of you that makes you feel safe an object for me, it's plants. My husband has a green thumb and I'm so grateful. I am always surrounded by plants and so I have all of these beautiful resources and friends that can help in whatever work I'm doing and then spend time with it. They'll look at it and then look back at me and be like, okay, I did it. It's like no, no, no, no, like actually spend time with it.

Emily: 45:54

Yeah, the orienting and the resourcing. So, resourcing outside of you, finding an object outside of you and then going inside your body and just in this moment, as your listeners are listening to this, can you find a part of your body that feels safe, present, maybe let yourself hang out there for the rest of our time? Another thing that you can do orienting and resourcing. Anytime you can always come back to your ground. That's another resource, another tether to the space station. So in this moment, can you feel into your body and can you notice the parts of your body that are in contact with the surface underneath you and behind you and just let yourself be held. Can you kind of let yourself sink into the surface a little bit more, feeling it kind of come up from the ground and support you? There's one resource that's always there, even if you're in a plane there's the seat and the floor. The ground is always there.

Emily: 46:57

So, especially for my anxiety peeps, if you are feeling anxious, come back to your ground. Sometimes you might need to move and kind of burn off a little bit of the energy. But notice the difference also I don't know why I'm saying this, but there, evidently this is for a couple of your listeners Notice the difference between embodied movement and disconnected, disassociated movement. You know, I've got a client right now who's working through something like this and he's a runner and he runs miles and miles and miles every day, but it's completely disassociated, so he's not actually burning off the flight in his body. And so, yeah, like as you were saying, like you have to feel it, you have to be with it in order to release it. So, yeah, just those are three easy little tethers, easy tools that your listeners can take away from this, that can help bring them back to the present moment, find safety, be those tethers to the International Space Station if you're, you know, in a panicky situation or really stressed, or something Amazing.

Jenee: 48:09

Any last final recommendations, words of insight before we close out Many.

Emily: 48:19

Definitely, if you can do the science-y nerd out for the first quarter of the book, read when the Body Says no, yeah, it is brilliant. Any books by Peter Levine I highly recommend because what they're going to do is help you. It's going to help your mind have something to hold on to with this body process so that maybe you can let yourself go into the body a little bit more. Every time I've tuned into my guides, my spiritual support, my energetic support, the message I get is you are exactly where you're supposed to be. We want to all get to this like amazing healed state or you know, same thing around money, like if I have money then I'll be able to be happy, healthy, whatever. We have this like what I used to call horizon version. There was Horizon Emily and she did all of these things and made all this money and was totally healed and everything was great.

Emily: 49:27

First off, that bitch does not exist and never will. That is not like. That is. That is not if you've been holding yourself up to some sort of ideal outside of yourself or in the future. That person does not exist. The best thing to do is to go in where you are, who you are right now and make friends with that. Make friends with that person, be kind to that person.

Emily: 49:52

The fastest way to get there is to slow down and to go at the body's pace. I don't know if anybody here has seen that. There's like a meme of a wolf pack in a line and they put the oldest, the oldest wolves in the front. They set the pace, so the slowest set the pace, then they've got, you know, like the strongest, hardest core warriors to protect the pack, then the rest of the pack, then at the back they have the leader watching everyone's back, but they're setting the pace with their oldest and slowest members. So, if we can, let's be like a wolf pack and let's set our pace with our slowest part, our bodies, and honestly, it's the fastest way to go, because if you go at the mind's pace, you're going to leave a whole bunch of parts of you back there that you're going to have to at some point detour and go back and get.

Emily: 50:52

And if you go at that slow body's pace oh my God I the only way out is through and and you cannot get yourself there by hating yourself or making yourself wrong or bad or being impatient with yourself. Notice how you relate to the parts that are coming up right now, because we're in this collective process right now where we're being given the opportunity for some serious integration. It can come in the form of a purge, of a test of shit falling apart, but know that nothing is happening to you. It is happening for you and if you can find the lesson, the growth, the thing that this universe that loves you so much is trying to teach you, trying to help you heal, and if you can be with that part, that's my biggest piece of advice is to just be with it and and relate to the parts of you that are coming up in a kinder way than maybe our parents did, our siblings did, our friends did. Yeah, yeah, kindness and compassion and patience are the fastest way to get there.

Jenee: 52:19

Love it. Thank you so much. The Heartlight Sessions podcast is executive produced and hosted by me, janae Halstead. It's edited, mixed and mastered by me too, and that theme song you hear, it's called Heartlight. And yep, you guessed it, it's from my record. Disposable Love. Got questions about a certain healing modality or about heart-centered healing, or maybe you just need some advice on life, love or creativity. Send it my way. Email me at letters at heartlightpodcastcom. Until next time, I'm Janae Halstead, and thanks for listening to Heartlight Sessions. A thousand volts of sunshine Rays are burning so bright. Thank you.