What are the social and economic costs of widespread unresolved trauma? What does trauma do to our bodies and brains? What is required to heal trauma at its root, in our nervous systems?
In this episode we’re discussing healing trauma, specifically what is required to address trauma at the root: in our nervous systems. This topic is critical because what most of us don’t realize is how many people live in a perpetually dysregulated state due to unresolved trauma. This leaves us with an ongoing baseline of reactivity, hypervigilance, and anxiety that spills over into every area of our lives. Very often our unresolved trauma stems from so far into our childhoods that we are unable to parse out who we actually are at our core from who we become when our nervous systems are stuck in a fight, flight, or freeze response.
Our guest for this episode is Danielle Rubio. Danielle uses nervous system rewiring, movement therapy, and mindfulness to help her clients do the deep work required to truly address their trauma and live lives of purpose from a center, empowered place. She is a yoga and meditation teacher, reiki master, and touch therapist who has studied extensively with leaders in the field such as Dr. Fleet Maul, Irene and Seth Lyon, Gabor Mate, and Arielle Schwartz.
In this conversation Jenny and Danielle discuss:
Resources:
[INTRODUCTION]
"Danielle Rubio (DR): One of the reasons why I say this work is the Holy Grail, because if you're coming from a healed place and you're coming from a regulated nervous system, you're so much better equipped at tackling world issues, and social issues, and social justice issues. If you're coming from a hurt place, from a survival place, it's almost not really possible that that bigger change is going to happen."
[00:00:30] Jenny Stefanotti (JS): That's Danielle Rubio. She's a nervous system expert and somatic trauma therapy practitioner. And this is the Denizen podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stefanotti. In this episode, we're discussing healing trauma. Specifically, what is required to address trauma at the root in our nervous systems? The reason this topic is so critical is that we don't realize how many of us live in a perpetually dysregulated state due to unresolved trauma. This leaves us with an ongoing baseline of reactivity, hypervigilance, and anxiety that spills over into every area of our lives. Very often, our unresolved trauma stems from so far into our childhoods that we're unable to parse out who we actually are at our core, from who we become when our nervous systems are stuck in a fight, flight, or freeze response.
Our Guest for this episode is Danielle Rubio. Danielle uses nervous system rewiring, movement therapy, and mindfulness to help her clients do the deep work required to truly address trauma and live lives of purpose from a centered empowered place. She is a yoga and meditation teacher, Reiki master, and touch therapist who has studied extensively with leaders in the field such as Dr. Fleet Maull, Irene and Seth Lyon, Gabor Maté, Arielle Schwartz. I was fortunate to work with Danielle earlier this year, and it's an honor to bring her and her wisdom to the Denizen inquiry.
In this conversation, we cover how Danielle defines trauma. Its prevalence in the United States and the extent of its economic and social cost to society. What trauma actually does to the body? And what it looks like when we have an unhealed dysregulated nervous system? The distinction between true healing and bypassing illustrated by Danielle's rude awakening after the traumatic birth of her daughter. Critical learnings from Danielle's deep research that informs her practice today. What doing the work to heal actually looks like? And why it's important to do it with support?
Danielle shares with us some of her most essential tools. And then we talk about what it looks like to live in a more embodied state addressing trauma as it surfaces. And you won't want to miss Danielle's answer to my final question, what is one thing that you wish everyone knew?
As always, you can find our show notes on our website www.becomingdenizen.com. There, you can sign up for our newsletter where I bring our latest content to your inbox. If you're a fan of the podcast and haven't yet done so, I encourage you to sign up for the newsletter. There's a lot happening under the hood, including additional content and opportunities to connect to the Denizen community both online and in person.
Without further ado, here's Danielle Rubio.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:03:07] JS: Here we are, Danielle. Very excited to introduce you to everyone and share your wisdom with everyone. This is part of a thread. Sharing the work that I've been up to while I've taken some time away. And I love how central these topics are to Denizen's vision and mission.
Your work draws on disciplines to re our nervous systems and heal trauma at the root. Can you explain to us in a nutshell what it is that you do and the work that you do with your clients? We're obviously going to get into the details, but just at a high level so that we have that frame.
[00:03:42] DR: Sure. Yeah. I'm a somatic trauma coach. I'm a nervous system expert. I'm helping specifically women I work with. I'm helping them to heal their nervous system in a nutshell and to integrate trauma, to integrate past wounds, so that they can truly heal from constant chronic stress and from constant anxiety, from depression, from constantly feeling like they're in an undertow of life.
And I generally work with women who are high achievers. They're also generally mothers. And there's a lot on their plates. And so, I'm helping them understand that in order to truly, authentically, genuinely be empowered, it has to be in an embodied way. And in order to do that, you have to address the nervous system.
[00:04:40] JS: That makes me think of so many things. First of all, there's a principle in design thinking where you go to the extreme user and you find the needs that are universal. But for the extreme user, those needs are closer to the surface. And so, it's easier to find them. For example, the rolling suitcase came from the person who was the stewardess and the pilot. And, of course, now you can't imagine possibly traveling with carrying a suitcase like we used to.
The working mom feels like the extreme user that's surfacing this prevalent need to heal at the nervous system to be able to show up for our lives. Also, I just recorded a conversation with Dave Colley on adversarial versus relational paradigms and how we show up for conflict. And I closed the conversation with, and I'll probably close this one with that too, there's one thing you wished everybody knew what would it be. And he immediately went to understand your nervous system and understanding how that shows up in your relationships and in your interactions. I appreciate the ways in which this is the Holy Grail for transformational work. Because if you're sitting on top of it, you're still going to show up for everything that you do in life from this dysregulated state. And we'll talk in just a moment about what that looks like.
You once said to me you can't address individual trauma without addressing systemic trauma. And you said trauma work is social justice work. I also want to place this conversation into the context of the broader Denizen inquiry about systemic change from your perspective.
[00:06:07] DR: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, this trauma work is social justice work. So I first heard that from one of my teachers who I've trained with, which is Nkem Ndefo. And it's at the basis of saying that is essentially that many of us understand that there's systems of oppression at play. Many of us understand that there's a lot that we want to change in the world. But you're not going to change effectively if you're in survival mode.
Primary to that – and this is one of the reasons why I say this work is the Holy Grail, because if you're coming from a healed place and you're coming from a regulated nervous system, you're so much better equipped at tackling world issues, and social issues, and social justice issues. If you're coming from a hurt place, from a survival place, it's almost not really possible that that bigger change is going to happen.
[00:07:06] JS: I appreciate that point. That's a really important point too. And, also, the collective nervous system. The way that your nervous system affects other people's nervous systems. One of the things that really struck me is Charles Eisenstein in The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible talks about the leaders who try to save the world who are harried and overextended and not showing up for their families. And it's not really modeling the world that we want to get to where those things aren't valued more highly. I really appreciate that point.
One of the things you mentioned when we were preparing for this conversation were the CDCs adverse child experiences studies. I think this is really important to surface. Because so much of your work centers on trauma and its effect on the nervous system. And the ACE study really revealed both the prevalence of trauma and its implications for society. Tell us more about that.
[00:07:55] DR: Yeah. The ace studies – and so ACE is adverse childhood experiences. The ACE studies were done in the 70s. And, essentially, the conclusion from those studies was that when you've experienced a lot of adverse childhood experiences, if you experienced trauma. And in my field, we say that trauma is anything that overwhelmed the nervous system. And so, they found in the study that based off of the ACE score – so they were giving everybody this system of questions around their childhood, around the environment they grew up in, relationship with parents. It was a very extensive study.
And the women who had the highest ACE scores were most likely to suffer from disease when they were older. They were also more likely to have suffered an even bigger kind of big 'T' Trauma event when they came into adulthood. The big conclusion was essentially that trauma is going to affect you for life if it's left unresolved. And that trauma is going to affect your health. It's going to affect the whole ecosystem of you. The choices you make in your life. Your relationships. How well you're going to handle stress. How well you're going to be able to detect a toxic behavior or a non-toxic behavior. How well you're going to detect danger later in life? It's all linked to these adverse childhood experiences.
[00:09:24] JS: Yeah. And some people, when they think of trauma, they think of big 'T' Trauma, like PTSD from soldiers on the battlefield in war. Whereas this is actually, to your point, any experience that overwhelms the nervous system. And ACE showed that 64% of the adults in US reported they experienced at least one type of adverse childhood experience before 18. And 17% had four or more.
And it's interesting the throughline of that, which is it affects our nervous systems. We're in perpetual states of stress. We're perpetual states of inflammation. And then you get things like heart disease. The social cost, but also the economic cost. Healthcare is bankrupting this country. Then this bridges to your work. They say in the summary of the study, moreover, the time factors in the study make it clear that time does not heal some of the adverse experiences we found so common in the childhoods of larger populations, of middle-aged, middle-class Americans. One just doesn't get over some things. And this strikes to what it is that you do. Let's talk about what trauma does to the brain and the body. Why doesn't time heal all wounds like they tell us it does, right? What does it actually mean or look like when you have an unhealed and dysregulated nervous system?
[00:10:41] DR: Yeah. Yeah. And it's so funny, right? Because it's a quote that people put everywhere. Time heals all wounds. And it doesn't. It just doesn't. A dysregulated nervous system as a nervous system that essentially, it's not working properly. Our nervous systems naturally are wired to be able to perceive what's a threat to us and what we need to get ready to handle essentially.
Your nervous system has evolved over millions of years to keep you alive, to keep you safe. It's like your software system for detecting danger, for detecting threats to your life. And so, we want it to be able to go into fight, or flight, or freeze, these states, that it's going to go into when it senses a threat. The problem is when the nervous system gets stuck. When the nervous system gets stuck in an aroused state and then it can't get back to homeostasis.
And what we're finding is that most people have dysregulated nervous systems. Their nervous systems are stuck. And so, how did the nervous system get stuck? The nervous system gets stuck because of trauma. Coming back to trauma is anything that overwhelms the nervous system. If you had – and, again, it doesn't have to be a big 'T' trauma. But if you grew up in a household where there were a million little cuts, your system is going to sense that you're not safe.
And so, it also comes back to attachment theory, and that humans are so instinctually wired to connect and to survive in tribe, to survive with a healthy family. We're so wired for that, that any sensing from the nervous system – and your nervous system is so sophisticated and intuitive. And so, any sensing your nervous system has that there's not this attachment, there's not this secure safe attachment, safe from neglect or abandonment, parents that just don't have the time and are never making eye contact and are never engaging, your system's going to sense that that's not safe.
And then you have children on the other end of the spectrum that are growing up in extreme poverty. Or you have other children that are facing actual abuses or facing even verbal abuse from their caretakers. Your nervous system's going to constantly be in this state of arousal of I'm not safe. And over time, then the nervous system essentially is less and less and less able to automatically come back to that place of rest and digest. Come back to that place of social engagement. And instead, now we have people that are chronically in a fight, or flight, or a shutdown of their nervous system.
[00:13:33] JS: I think it's so interesting – well, two things. One, that a lot of these experiences are happening while your nervous system and brain are developing. It's imprinting an aroused state, which then leads to that being the homeostasis in adulthood, right? Which I think gets us to – I think that's a great segue to the distinction between true healing and bypassing. And I love that this ties to your personal story too. And I love that you actually say on your website that you had a rude awakening. Tell us about your rude awakening and how that illustrates this distinction between true healing and bypassing.
[00:14:16] DR: Yeah. I was a healer. I was a teacher for many years before I had my rude awakening. I was a meditation teacher, a yoga teacher. I was teaching workshops and retreats around the world. I was a Reiki master, a bodyworker. And I thought that I had things pretty figured out. I was feeling pretty good. I was feeling pretty good on the surface level. Any healing path you could name, I was doing it. From plant medicine, to sitting with gurus in the Himalayas.
And then I got pregnant. And as any mother knows, when you're becoming a mother, a lot of your own childhood stuff comes up. But I'll mention that later. But I had a very traumatic birth, essentially. And everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. And so, I ended up with PTSD. I ended up with shock trauma, with medical trauma.
And just a side note for people that are thinking, "Oh, do I have trauma?" Well, even something like a surgery, your system is going to sense this trauma. It's going to overwhelm the nervous system. Every single trauma arose for me in this birth experience. And this was my segue into motherhood. This is my entry point into becoming a mother. I had a newborn and I had PTSD. And I ended up with severe anxiety, severe insomnia. I was not sleeping 20 minutes even a night. I was not sleeping.
[00:15:46] JS: Which in and of itself will make you crazy.
[00:15:48] DR: Yes. Yes. And what really hurt, where the heartbreak arose was that I couldn't heal myself. Here I was teaching and healing other people and nothing under my belt, no tool in my toolkit was touching this. Nothing was bringing me relief. And it was like my house of cards just blew. And it was really this feeling of like, "What the hell have I been doing? What is going on here?"
And I remember this moment where I was sitting on my very dirty kitchen floor just totally in this state of almost shock, of that rug being pulled out. Of what was everything that I've been doing? What's going on? And I had this thought that just came over me of, "This is not how you go down." And I got up from that kitchen floor and I just started researching and researching. And somehow started coming across articles on trauma and trauma therapy, and the role of the nervous system in trauma. And I came across something. And I don't even remember what I was reading. But this sentence that said, "If you do not heal at the nervous system level, you do not heal."
And I went down the rabbit hole of nervous system science, neuroscience. What is the nervous systems role in trauma? And it was like the biggest light bulb went off. And it was this realization of, "Oh, my God. This is the missing piece." And I ended up working with some incredible people, Dr. Scott Lyons, Arielle Schwartz, some of the bigger pioneers in this field of somatic work to heal the nervous system. I ended up healing.
And then that's when I realized like I needed to bring this into my practice and train further in it. Because I realized that everything that I had done before was bypassing. It was simply bypassing my pain. Because your nervous system has a certain capacity. And at some point in life, something's going to come in. And it's like the straw that breaks the camel's back. But you were likely already dysregulated. And that's where some women who had the most healthy childhoods who went through what I went through in their birth experience didn't end up with as severe trauma.
What I realized in my own healing journey was that I had some developmental trauma that I had buried. That I had essentially bypassed with every other healing modality that I had done and realized we can transcend our pain and ascend our pain all we want through meditation, or spiritual practices, or through talk therapy, or even through plant medicine. But if the healing is not embodied, if you haven't dealt with the nervous system, if you haven't done the nitty-gritty work of actually working with the triggers and understanding where they come from and taking a look at your childhood, it's not going to be integrated. It's just simply like you're numbing it out.
[00:19:01] JS: Yeah. And that was something that you said to me just the other day, which I've been repeating ever since, which is this sits in your limbic system. It's not in your neocortex. That's why talk therapy doesn't work, because you're in the wrong part of your system.
So much of your work is just getting us back into our bodies. And a meaningful thread of the conversation is the Age of Enlightenment. And when many of the institutions that were talking about redesigning were developed, it was in a cultural moment of the Age of Reason and an emphasis on intellect and reason to understand the world. And from our perspective as a consequence, it disembodied Western society ever since.
I'm curious about your perspective. This point had never occurred to me until you were speaking just now. But I'm curious about the extent to what you feel like. Because if trauma is these experiences that overwhelm your nervous system, I'm wondering if there's just a higher prevalence of this, because we culturally live in a more disembodied state where we're not feeling our feelings and we're not really proc – that inhibits our ability to process these smaller traumas as they come.
[00:20:14] DR: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we are certainly a culture of intellectualism and a culture of –
[00:20:21] JS: Which I thought you say on Instagram post. You said there are two reasons why we're not doing it right. And intellectualism was one of them.
[00:20:27] DR: That whole, "I think. Therefore, I am." People really take their thoughts and their analyzation process to be everything. I mean, we're literally taught with teachers, by our parents, by a lot of our guides when we're little to think about a problem and then try to think about the solution. We're very stuck in our heads. And I would argue, we're talking heads at this point. People are so disconnected to what they feel. And that is certainly part of it. Because if you're so disconnected to what you feel, it comes to that famous saying, we're all saying in the embodiment and somatic nervous system field, that you have to feel to heal. Because stress is physical. Your emotions are physical. And you can't use a soul top-down approach through talk therapy or something with intellect to try and heal what's primary to that, the whole system that's informing the intellect.
[00:21:30] JS: And now I'm sure there are listeners who are at the edge of their seat wondering what was the second thing that you mentioned in that post? I don't remember offhand.
[00:21:38] DR: Individualism.
[00:21:40] JS: Individualism and intellect. Okay. Why don't we double-click on that point? And then we'll get into big insights from the research that you did.
[00:21:47] DR: Yeah. In that post I was outlining, what I was just saying in that intellectualism we're so disconnected from the body when stress is in the body. And your mind can so skillfully forget what your body is never going to forget. You can numb it out and numb it out from your affirmations, to your visualizations, to your talk therapy, to whatever you want to do with your head. And it'll push it further and further back into the subconscious and maybe even you'll forget about it, like what I did, and think you're healed. But the body is never going to forget.
Just an extra point on that intellectualism, but the individualism, humans of evolved as social beings. We have survived over millions of years as a tribe, as a collective, being together. Thinking that we're going to heal things all by ourselves, it's taking the very long road. And I don't know that you're ever going to get there trying to do that. This is why I don't think, in my opinion, there's so many different healing courses and modalities out there you can tap into to online. And so much of them are like, "Here's a course. And go through it on your own. And just go through these modules and you'll heal your nervous system." And I'm like, "No. You probably won't actually." I really think healing needs to be done with human connection.
[00:23:17] JS: That's fascinating. I just had dinner last night with John Wolfstone, one of the producers and directors of The Village of Lovers. It's a documentary about Tamera in Portugal. And he was making a point abo ut conflict resolution being much more effective in groups. At Tamera, they do a lot of this in groups. Not just with a therapist in front of you. But doing it with other people. That's an interesting point related to the one that you just made.
[00:23:44] DR: Yeah. And even what you were mentioning before all of our nervous systems being connected, sometimes I think of it as like the trees and the roots. And the roots of those trees are connecting with roots of all these other trees. Last night, I just taught my in-person pulse and presence workshop. And there's something so indescribable in words when a group of people come together to heal. And a group of people come together to face themselves and face these weights that they've been carrying for sometimes decades. To have that support and that feeling of community that's supporting you in this journey of healing I think is really important.
[00:24:31] JS: What that makes me think of is the role of shame. Because shame in a lot of the conversations I've had and work I've done is just really central. Actually, it's the pull quote to the living authentically conversation where she talked about. We have the shame. And there are parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of and we can't be whole unless we can own all of ourselves. Or the conversation I just had with David was like when you're not actually showing up for your partner, so often it's because you're ashamed of what you did that hurt them even if you didn't mean to. It's really interesting the way that group processes that are so vulnerable, that are shared can help us not feel ashamed of the parts of us that are human that culturally or for whatever reason aren't as accepted. It's interesting.
Okay. You did all of this amazing research after your rude awakening. And I know that you studied neuroscience. And you studied somatic movement. And you mentioned some of the major people that you studied under. Before we get into what the work actually looks like, can you share with us just what were the some of the big ahas from all of the research that you did?
[00:25:45] DR: I mean, the biggest aha for me was that your nervous system – if you think about like a computer, your nervous system is your entire software system of you. And so, if you had a lot of moments where you didn't feel safe when you were developing, you essentially developed these coping mechanisms to try and keep yourself safe.
Maybe as one example, it wasn't safe for you to speak up because maybe you would be yelled at if you spoke something that a parent didn't like. You would be sending these signals also to the brain of like what's safe, what's not safe. And you would eventually learn, "Okay. I'm not going to speak then. I'm not going to be outspoken with my needs." And that's your program that you're going to operate with now into adulthood.
And then we wonder when we're adults why we don't speak up when there's an injustice happening. Why we don't speak up when there's something that's unfair that's happening to us or that's happening in the world, that's happening to the collective? Well, your voice was shut down so many times when you were little. And now you're operating from this program.
And I think one of the biggest light bulbs for me was, "Oh, my God. People are operating from these programs that were coping mechanisms that are not even who they truly are." And then they're in some sort of argument with a partner or with someone else who's operating from their program. And everyone's walking around operating from these programs that are not even their truest identity, even in their truest power of who they are.
This is why I say this work is the Holy Grail work, because it's like if you can come back to who you truly are and you can shed all these weights, and these limiting beliefs, and these false ideas of your personality, then we can really make some change.
[00:27:44] JS: Yeah. Which is literally the conversation that I released yesterday. Talked about how you pick this up in childhood and what the work looks like to shed it and return to your true self. And, also, hoping to do a conversation on internal family systems with Richard Schwartz. Different paths of the same conclusions is that we operate from these parts that came from childhood trauma. And when we can sit in our capital S self, which is our true self, which is our spiritual self, which is the same self that the Hoffmann process teaches us to operate from. I love how all of these are so interrelated. What about neuroscience? I know neuroscience is a key thread here. I want to make sure we weave that in.
[00:28:20] DR: Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing there for me for the big light bulb moment and for others to understand is that, again, there's a biology of stress. Stress is largely physical. Because your nervous system, it's sensing some sort of danger, some sort of threat. And so, historically, our threats were trying to catch a prey or running from a predator or some territorial fight. And it's only in this tiny sliver of human evolution that now [inaudible 00:28:50] an angry boss, or a toxic parent, or these other stresses that really came big time after the Industrial Age.
Also, what's happened in human evolution is that we've become less and less connected to wild. We've become more and more in captivity so to speak. And we're not connected with the natural world. And we've become also so much more heady, that as the nervous system isn't functioning now properly and it's in this dysregulated state, it's constantly sending these messages to the brain that you're not safe. And then your brain is trying to create ideas and belief systems and ways of thinking to prevent these things from happening again.
[00:29:40] JS: Yeah. And to double click on that, I think what is such a critical point in one we made with David, people don't realize that when you're in that state, you're actually not sense-making as well as you can when you're in your optimal zone. And you don't even realize that it's such a critical piece of self-awareness to say, "Oh, wait. I'm dysregulated right now." Because, and I've been in this, thanks to my work with you, I know, I go into flight. So no wonder I'm having these thoughts of just get me out of this situation. And in the moment, I'm so certain that that's what needs to happen because I just want to get myself out of that situation. And then lo and behold, I wake up the next morning and it's literally like I'm a different person. Because I literally am a different person in my brain. That self-awareness is so critical.
[00:30:27] DR: Yeah. An analogy I use a lot with my clients is when you're, say, in that flight mode, it's as if you're running from a bear. And so, if you're running from a bear, if you imagine you're running from a bear and someone's handing you a lavender spritz and saying, "Oh, just calm down," there's no way that your thinking brain is going to overpower the nervous system. There's no way.
[00:30:57] JS: Oh, my God. I'm going to remember that anytime somebody hands me a lavender spritz. But then there's the neuroplasticity piece, which is critical for how your work actually works. Let's speak to that.
[00:31:11] DR: Yeah. The beautiful thing is that we can rewire. We're not stuck in these programs that we created so long ago. Because I am a very spiritual person. And I've studied for many, many years in ancient Eastern mindfulness practices, such as Dzogchen, these programs are not you. It's a software system. And through neuroplasticity, so now we know that we can rewire neural pathways.
And the biggest point in how we do that is we need to create safety. We need to give the nervous system a sense of safety so that it has a bigger capacity to handle stress, and so that we can also start taking out those traumas or those wounds, those past experiences that dysregulated the nervous system in the first place. And we don't need to do that through endless talking about it or analyzing about it. Again, that's not going to be very effective. We simply need to give the nervous system the opportunity to complete the processes that got trapped, or got stuck, or that you couldn't do in those moments of trauma.
[00:32:35] JS: And I remember when we were working together, you likened this to expanding the size of your container. And these are obviously bidirectional. But getting yourself into a space where you feel safe so your container is larger. And then taking the things, the traumas out of it. And, of course, as you take those traumas out, the container gets bigger. That's really interesting.
It's these insights about trauma that it lives in your body, in your nervous system, in your limbic system. And that the approach that often people do, which is the more superficial mindfulness work or talk therapy, it bypasses it. But then it's the essential insights from neuroscience to understand, "Okay. I get that. But are we just screwed?" Or is there something that we can do, right? And there's something that we can do, and that's doing that rewiring. And to your point, feeling the things that we didn't feel when those traumas happened. That's a perfect segue into let's talk it in a little bit more specific way, what does the work actually look like?
[00:33:36] DR: Yeah. Feeling is a big part of this. The two major ways that we're going to heal is touch and movement. And so, because we've been so cut off from the bodies, we've learned, we're conditioned to not feel. And it's even as an example of this, when we're little and we fall off a bike and we're crying on the ground, even if that parent means so well. And I always like to say no one's to blame for this. There's nobody to blame. And everybody is to blame.
This is also very much a societal thing, a cultural thing where you're little and you fall off the bike, it's so common that parents will go to the little one and they're like, "Shh-shh-shh-shh-shh." Kids crying and they're being shushed. Or they're automatically told, "You're okay. You're okay. You're okay. You're okay." Rather than let that child cry. Let the child feel what it's feeling and feel that pain.
We're so automatically taught to quiet what our authentic expression is in that moment. And taught to use that higher brain of just saying, "I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm okay." And then here we are as adults trying to put Post-it notes on the mirror of, "I'm healed. And every cell in my body is happy." And it's like, "Well, you're not feeling that." The more that you can feel that pain, and that rage, and that terror, and that sadness, and that grief, the more you're going to be able to feel that joy, and that bliss, and that pleasure also.
[00:35:22] JS: Okay. We need to feel the feelings. How do we even get there?
[00:35:25] DR: Start small. Start slow. Because for some people, they have faced a lot of trauma.
[00:35:32] JS: Because for a lot of people, it's just scary.
[00:35:34] DR: Yes. And feeling literally feels dangerous. And for some people it's like, "If I feel this grief, it's going to swallow me," is where some people are at. Where a lot of people are at. Really, it has to be a very slow process. Because, again, the first thing we want to do is create safety. Before we're trying to like go into the deep end, we've got to increase that capacity to be able to feel.
[00:36:05] JS: How do we do that?
[00:36:06] DR: First, I tell clients, "What are your resources? What are you usually going to?" And so, I differentiate with them, "What are your healthy resources? What are the not so healthy resources? What are your internal? What are your external resources?" Anything from holding that warm cup of tea in your hand, to going on a walk, to five cocktails. We want to get towards those healthy resources, like the walk, that warm cup of tea, or a massage, listening to soothing music. And we want to really stack up on those. Really have them right by our side. All of these resources that help us to feel good that we use to "calm down".
[00:36:52] JS: I appreciate that. That's saying all this bypassing stuff that actually is quite prevalent is necessary or valuable, but not sufficient.
[00:36:59] DR: Yes. Because at the end of the day, the point is not to calm down your nervous system. A regulated nervous system is not a calmed-down nervous system. A regulated nervous system is going to go into fight, flight, or freeze. It's that. It's not stuck there. The way that this survival stress has been stored in the body in order to move with it, we need to be able to feel it.
And so, resourcing yourself first. Getting that nervous system feeling safe. And then you can start to go in and start to feel those more uncomfortable parts. And this is also why I feel that this work is not going to be very effective with just an online course you're trying to do by yourself. Because you can so easily sabotage yourself. You can so easily hijack it. Or you can so easily re-traumatize yourself. Because you're not going slow enough. You don't have your resources on board. You don't have somebody watching you, and observing, and seeing how your body is moving. How's your breathing patterns? To have a practitioner, or a therapist, or a coach yeah who's highly skilled and educated pull you back when they're sensing, "She's on that edge of where this is too much."
[00:38:14] JS: Yeah. I mean, I would also note interestingly that the work is very subtle. And so, it's hard to see the ROI from that particular moment of dropping into your body. And so, I think if you're doing it by yourself at home with an online course, it's pretty easy to just give up. Maybe because you're not guided into going deep and held it. But also, because you're like, "Oh, I'm just sitting here doing awareness and orienting. And I don't really – okay. I'm busy. I'm going to get back to being busy."
I mentioned orienting. I know orienting is really central. Why don't you tell us about some of your go-to exercises to get us to a safe place? One of my favorite quotes from you, and I say it all the time, is, "Your senses are always in the present."
[00:39:06] DR: Yeah. Everybody is so different from the experiences they've had that dysregulated them to how the nervous system is dysregulated. I give very different things to each person. But something that I do give to everybody is orienting. And that is orienting with your five senses. And we actually have a couple more senses. But I'll keep it simple.
Our five primary senses; hearing, taste, smell, feeling, sight. And like you just mentioned, these senses can only ever be right here right now. And something that's so big for people that have any sort of trauma is they're living from a program that was created in the past. And so, this is why it's not to say that everything I was doing and all those meditating in caves I did in the Himalayas is not relevant. Because, actually, it is very relevant. And that's why I do pull mindfulness into my work and in my program, because we do want to be living in the now. But in the now that's embodied with our body. With everything that we're feeling in this moment.
And one of the tools I give right off the bat is disorienting. Having people drop into those five senses. And so, I lead them through this practice of going sense-by-sense and then being able to be with all those senses together. And if you think about even on a nervous system or in the wild level, if you look at animals in the wild, mammals particularly have the same exact nervous systems that we do. When they're safe, they're just grazing on the grass. They're looking around. They're listening around. They're feeling. They're in their senses. But when a danger comes, when there's a threat, then they're not exploratory orienting anymore. They are defensively orienting.
Suddenly, they're on guard. They have that tunnel vision. Their ears are pointing towards where they hear the threat. And they're bracing themselves to fight, or to run, or to freeze. And humans have become very stuck in that defensive orienting. The exploratory orienting is doing a couple of things, it's signaling to your system that you're safe. And it's also bringing you into the present in a really embodied way.
[00:41:48] JS: Yeah. In the same sense when we're meditating, and we're focusing on our breath, and we're coming back to our breath. And we notice that we've gotten into our thoughts and we come back to our breath, it's slowly rewiring you to be more capable of being present in your day-to-day experiences.
I have to throw this in there because I hope other people start doing this, which is now – because I hate my phone and I hate how much I'm on my phone. Now when I'm waiting in line at Starbucks and I have that reflex to look at my phone, instead of completely checking out and looking on the screen, I do your orienting exercises. And it's a very simple way to integrate that throughout my day and also redirect a very disembodying habit that we all have to supporting and doing this work.
[00:42:37] DR: Yeah. Yes.
[00:42:40] JS: Are there any other central exercises that we want to talk about in terms of what the work looks like?
[00:42:46] DR: Well, one thing that just came to my mind is starting slow. Because we've been so chronically disattached to the bodies. Start listening to your body. If you have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom. How many times I talk to people that tell me, "Oh, yeah. I'm often holding my pee when I have to go pee so I can just finish that next task." Start listening to your body. When you're thirsty, drink. When you're hungry, eat. Start honoring your body's wisdom. In all these very little very preliminary step ways, listen to the body.
Something to start people slow is start noticing how you're doing things. How do you put on your shoes when you're heading out the door? How do you get dressed in the morning? How are you with yourself? Your body is yourself. Your body is what has made you human. Right? If we're just consciousness, we'd be in all-pervading consciousness where we return, when we die, or before we're being born. But in this human body, we are a human. And we're human because we feel.
And so, when you're not feeling and when you're not feeling that feeling the full expression of all the things, there's no bad emotion. You're literally becoming further and further away from your own humanness. Simply start noticing how you're doing things. Start noticing how do you move? When you're on a walk, can you drop into how your feet touch that ground? Can you drop into how the air feels on your skin? Can you drop into how the breath feels as it's moving through your body?
And these all seem very simple or they wouldn't do anything. But I guarantee, once you start doing that more and more, probably, your body is going to start going, "Oh, you're listening to me. Okay. So let's start bubbling up these things that you're stressing for so long."
[00:44:47] JS: Just the slow and steady increased awareness of what's happening in your body. And you said something really important there, which was there are no bad emotions. And I think there's another really important cultural point to make there, which is we are not comfortable with uncomfortable, unpleasant emotional experience as a society.
If you come to me and you say, "I'm really upset," people tend to want to make it better. They go and immediately into fix it mode. Or they want to distract. And it's just like kind of pervasive cultural orientation that suppresses those experiences rather than just saying, "Tell me how you're feeling. I'm here to hold your sadness. I'm here to hold your grief. I'm here to hold your anger.
I mean, you actually taught me some really valuable things. You said, "When you get triggered into a sympathetic state in your day-to-day experience, and that could be as simple as somebody cut you off on the freeway, it is helpful to do high-intensity activities to get that energy out." I do a lot more kickboxing now, thanks to you.
We talked about expression in the Hoffmann cycle of transformation a couple episodes ago where it can be writing an angry letter, right? Now when I had these moments of getting triggered, I have ways to express. I have tools to express. I'll yell into a pillow. I'll get my plastic bat and I'll hit the pillow. I'll write the letter. I'll do the kickboxing. I've got to talk about the smash room, because that was amazing. Danielle – well, why don't you talk about the smash room? Because I had never heard of that before. And this was one of the first first assignments you gave me when we started working together.
[00:46:26] DR: Yeah. Yeah. Smash rooms. Look it up. See if there's one near you. Smash rooms are these places you can go to and you have your own little room. And you have a sledgehammer or a bat and you have all of these ceramics, plates, cups, all these things around that you can just smash. That you can go to town with that rage. You can go to town with that aggression.
And, again, we're so taught that anger is bad. Aggression is bad. Sadness is bad. Grief is bad. When we feel anything but "happy", we're so conditioned in this society that we need to get rid of that. I don't want to – and so, it's like no wonder people can't feel themselves. And people are so disconnected from their bodies and their emotions because we're so taught that that's not okay to feel.
And so, what I love about the smash room or any kind of healthy aggression work is that you're able to actually express that. Anger mobilizes. When you really think of the vibration of anger it changes things, it motivates things. It's simply that it needs to be expressed in a healthy way. It's not that we're ever going to somebody and screaming at them. You want to give an opportunity for it to get out of the body so it doesn't get stuck.
[00:47:54] JS: Yeah. One of the books that I read talked about anger just being a very valuable marker that effectively a boundary of yours has been crossed. We often project that anger out at somebody else. But often, it's a boundary. It doesn't have to be because of you or it's because of me. It's just I now have this awareness.
And I think you made a really important point earlier about being more embodied and being more aware of, "Oh, I'm hungry. I'm thirsty." Because so much of Western society just teaches us that we're machine, right? It's almost this mechanistic point of view. And if we are disembodied, then we work harder for economic growth, which is what the primary thing that we're all solving for, right?
But at Hoffmann, we learned this thing called the quad check, which is, every morning, you check into your physical body, your emotional body, your intellect, your psychic space. And then, also, your spiritual self. And that has been absolutely transformational. Because not only do you check-in. One is the check-in. It's just more awareness, right? So many mornings, I'll be like, "Oh, I need more water today. I'm going to drink more water today."
But do you ask those parts, "What do you need from me today?" It might be I need more water today. Or it might be I need to go to sleep early tonight because I didn't get sleep. But what was so transformational was what the responses were when I started to tune into my intellect, and my psychic space, and my emotional body. Whereas before, I would have been upset about something and spent a huge fraction of my day texting with my girlfriends. Or all the psychic space would go into overanalyzing something.
When I would notice that something was taking up a disproportionate psychic space or causing me emotional distress and then I would ask, "What do you need?" lo and behold, the answer was deal with this situation. Because this is not what we want to be spending our energy on. And, suddenly, swiftly, I was changing things that I used to tolerate days, weeks, months, years. And that has been one of the absolute most life-changing things that I have learned in the last couple of months.
[00:50:03] JS: I love that. And something that I'm always saying that really supports that is like follow the impulse of your body. Trust your body. And this is where I think it plays such a beautiful role in conflict resolution, and that when you're feeling this anxiety in the system, which, essentially, anxiety is a symptom of being in a flight response of your nervous system. Again, general medical systems or general psychology is often getting this wrong and saying, "Oh, anxiety is like a mental problem. Or it's a chemical imbalance." It's simply a symptomology of your nervous system being in flight.
And so, if you can drop into the body, "Okay, I'm feeling this flightiness. So and so just said something to me and I'm feeling this flightiness." So can you work with the nervous system first? Listen to the body first. Which is like move. Go use some of that energy. Use that sympathetic energy. Run. Actually, give that flight energy an action of running. You're going to find, once you really do that and listen to your body first, you're going to be so much more clear yeah to have that difficult conversation that needs to happen and be so much more prepared. And what you mentioned at the beginning this podcast is coming from a sensical place when you're in any sort of conflict that is happening.
[00:51:30] JS: Yeah. And knowing when you're not in a sensical place to not try to resolve it. Not have an unproductive conversation. Not do something that you're going to regret or say something that you're going to regret, which happens so often. Tell me if I get this right. From what I understand – again, this is very subtle work in the day-to-day. But it's like, "Okay. So I have processed that help me feel safe; activities, practices. And then as I become more embodied, I am able to tap into those traumas and actually feel them and allow my body to release them." That's how the healing happens?
[00:52:11] DR: Yeah. Exactly. I mean, it's put in a very simple way. But, yes. That's how it happens. And that when you feel more safe, you're going to have a better capacity to feel the difficult things. And if you can start in tiny sips, tiny sips of – the beautiful thing about the body is that it's right here right now. And you don't have to like go in and overanalyze what happened to you when you were five. Because your body is expressing it right now. It's expressing it through its pain. It's expressing it through that anxiety. Or it's expressing it through that sadness.
So then if you can, in tiny sips, start dropping in with your body and feeling that pain, feeling what's happening in there, you start to feel these wounds. And, essentially, the wounds simply need to be felt so that they can alchemize. So that those weights can be released. And so, that those past traumas are integrated into wholeness.
[00:53:13] JS: Well, it's so fascinating too, right? The practices allow us to reconnect to our bodies. This neural rewiring to our bodies that then enables the process processing. You told a great story on your Instagram the other day that you sent to me, which I think really illustrates what this looks like when you live this way. Tell us that story. Because I think that really is like, "Oh. There was a traumatic experience. But now I live this way. And so, when there's a moment that uncovers it, I can heal it."
[00:53:43] DR: What happened a few weeks ago is my daughter was going away. She was going to go visit some family of mine in Los Angeles. And I started to feel like more anxiety than I've felt in a really long time. And it was unusual. And it didn't match the circumstance, which I see in all my clients. And so, many people in the world, they have this reaction to something happening in the present day that's so out of proportion. They're blowing things out of the portion. And I was feeling this extreme anxiety.
And because I've done this work and I do it with so many people, I had the knowing that this is not about this moment. I'm having all these sensations in my body, this extreme anxiety about my daughter going to Los Angeles. And so, I had the wisdom to drop in and to not try and fix it. Not try and make this extreme anxiety go away. But rather, let me feel this. Let me just really let it rip. No thoughts involved. I'm dropped in. I'm not analyzing. I'm just feeling.
And it becomes more and more apparent this inner knowing of this is not about this. This is not about this moment. Not about this moment. And I, finally, on the other side came to this knowing that the reason I was feeling this is because I was having a trauma flashback. And I was having this traumatic flashback because the last time my daughter went to visit this family in Los Angeles, her father, my partner had a hemorrhagic stroke. And this was two years ago. And he was very, very close to death. It was very traumatic. I saved his life and brought him to the ER. I was then in the ICU room with him for a month. And so, that experience was the most traumatic event I've been through in my life two years ago.
And so, here we are two years later, my daughter's going to visit this same family in LA who she hasn't seen since two years ago when all this happened. And that's where this traumatic flashback was coming from and this anxiety. And it was like, "Okay. This is not about this. This is about that traumatic moment." And when I could just sit with myself and when I could come to that knowing and I could be with all that anxiety that was there and realize like this is another layer that needs to be shed from two years ago. This is another piece of this trauma that was still in my system, the survival stress that needed to come out. And when I could be with myself and sit in the incredible uncomfortable feeling.
And it's not like I didn't have things to do that day. I had a full schedule. And instead, I just stopped everything to simply feel myself, and move with my body, and be with my body. And it was done. The next day I woke up, anxiety is gone. It's fine. My daughter's on her trip. She's great. And if I hadn't have done that and I would have used intellect instead, I would have probably canceled her trip. I would have probably been like, "Oh. Nope. Something bad is going to happen probably is why I'm feeling this. I should just cancel it. She can't go." Or I would have gone down with her and then missed all of this work. And I really just needed to feel.
[00:57:12] JS: Or gaslit yourself, right? This doesn't make sense. This is outsize whatever I'm feeling. I'm just going to suppress it and ignore it. And, also, I think a really critical point you just made was that you stopped what you were doing. You had a really busy day and you stopped what you were doing. And, often, we don't stop. We don't give ourselves space. But I think it's also really interesting that even when we do give ourselves space, we're not necessarily going to process big traumas swiftly, right? They kind of have their own way of I'm thinking about grief.
I'm obviously thinking about losing my parents very quickly apart a couple of years ago where I stopped everything. I walked in the forest every day. I journaled every day. I meditated every day. I did yoga. I gave all the right space. And I know there is a colossal mountain of grief inside me that has yet to be felt.
I love the story of yours because it just so illustrates the point of when you become more versed in this type of work in this type of awareness, you can take those moments of outsize reaction. Know it's about something else. Feel it. And then allow that unprocessed experience to get processed. And it is this constant practice. Even if you do the heavy lifting in some big excavation and opening up the container, life is traumatic.
[00:58:32] DR: Yes. Yes. Life is traumatic. And just in my own experience with all the training I've done. I'm a teacher of this work. I have programs in this work. And it's not that trauma from two years ago is 100% resolved. I know that it's going to continue.
[00:58:51] JS: Yeah. The big ones. The big ones take a long time. And honoring that I think is important. Respecting that I think is important. I think it's also important when the trauma happens in relationships too for the other person to understand and respect that when it continues to surface even when you're doing all the right things.
This has been amazing. I thank you for the work that you do. And thank you for all that you've taught me and all the ways that you've impacted me. I'm going to close with the question that I'm just – I'm appreciating closing with for those who do this sort of work that's so relevant to the listeners of this podcast. If there's one thing you wish everybody knew, what would it be?
[00:59:31] DR: That they are perfect. That, innately, innately, you are perfect no matter what you've been through, no matter the trauma, no matter the stories, no matter how many times you're lashing at others, or you're stuck in a freeze mode. You, the primordial you, you are perfect. And you're not broken. And we simply need to rewire the software system. But you're not broken.
[01:00:03] JS: That was amazing. I'm so glad I asked that question. I almost didn't. But I'm so glad that I did. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time to share this with everyone. I really appreciate you deeply.
[01:00:18] DR: Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.
[OUTRO]
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