Sense of Soul - Igniting Your Power to Pause

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Today on Sense of Soul Podcast we have Roseanne Reilly. She is a Coaching Specialist, a Certified Advanced Practitioner of Craniosacral Therapy, a registered ERYT 500hr Yoga Teacher, educator specializing in the Therapeutic Wisdom of Yoga, Mindful Strength Training, Intentional Meditation and Somatic Emotional Release Techniques (SER) . Roseanne specializes in walking people back to themselves as they rediscovery who they are and work towards recovery and a felt sense of safety. She helps clients discover and focus and their strengths and abilities to restore, strengthen, and rebuild confidence and a healthy functioning nervous system. Helping you shift from survival mode to growth mode, with the POWER OF THE PAUSE and she shares just how important the Vagus nerve is! Visit Roseanne’s website https://www.handsoftimehealing.com Follow her journey on Instagram! NEW!! Exclusive Sense of Soul episodes coming soon only available on Sense of Soul Patreon! Check out www.mysenseofsoul.com for courses, reading, reiki, merch, blog ans much more.

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mandy. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart and soul. It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, we are super excited to have on Roseanne Riley. She is the founder and the owner of Hands of Time Healing, and she helps people to heal from childhood trauma and helps them work through emotional flashbacks. Today, we're going to talk to Roseanne about many topics, but one that definitely was close to Shanna and I's heart was the power of pause. I can't wait to pick your brain and learn from you as a student to the wisdom that you've gathered over the years through your own traumatic experiences and healing.

Welcome today on to Stence a Soul. Thank you both so much. And I am so, so happy to be here. The power of pause really is something that I hope that whoever is listening to us today, if they take nothing else away, that they do understand that they do have the power at any moment in time to take a pause. And it is the difference between maybe having to redo something over and over again, it'll save you so much time and energy and maybe even apologies and God knows what not else in the long run. And it is your power. It really, really is. And a lot of times when people talk about breaking the

cycle, especially when and if we include childhood trauma with that and any kind of trauma with that, and even where we speak about chronic stress is really the cycle that we're trying to talk about is the cycle of the nervous system and what our system can just get into. It can get into such a rut, such a way of being, such a way of behaving and reacting. And when we can, a huge root and a huge hope for people who do suffer, especially in line with your childhood trauma through flashbacks and emotional flashbacks. It's to know that you can take some time out that you can retrain your nervous system because that's primarily what keeps happening. I was reading one of your blog posts and you were talking a lot about this and just go ahead and quote and read. It says the felt sense of safety and a healthy vagus nerve is the breaking mechanism of our

nervous system when the survival stress response is activated. Can you talk about the vagus nerve? Yeah, absolutely. For sure. I'll give you a little background in it. So however many years ago, over 20 something years ago, when I fully qualified, one of the first things I remember learning was about the nervous system and there wasn't too much attention given to the vagus nerve.

And I really didn't learn too much about that until I actually did my, my yoga training. And that's when my real kind of relearning of the whole nervous system came into play. And the power of this vagus nerve, I was like, oh, what is this? I mean, how come I don't know more about this? And it has such a huge role to play because this vagus nerve, right?

It is called the wandering nerve. So it is connected with almost every organ in our body. And what scientists over the years have learned and understood is that it feeds back to the brain more than the brain feeds to it. So when, yeah, and it's, it's real kind of really old part of our nervous system and there's many parts to it. So there's like the ventral vagus nerve, which is more to do with, say, our frontal version of ourselves, where we interact

with the world. And how just by being how and maybe you've experienced this, how just being in the same room as somebody can sometimes feel very connected and very healing. And maybe you resonate with them and you feel immediately calm so this is all messages coming in through your body through your whole sensory system all the way up to those parts of your brain that are trying to tell you okay am I safe or am I not safe so there's so much involved in it right so it's giving you this feedback so So we'll tie this in with, say, trauma and stress in the sense that if you do have no clear memory of an incident that occurred as a child, say, and you step into a room and you'll be orientated to certain things. Right. We'll all kind of we can all go to the same party and have a completely different experience. And some of that is based on the memory of our nervous system. And it becomes kind of hardwired into the system to look for certain things as a way

of trying to prevent those things from happening again. And when we talk about the vagus nerve, it's in relation to that, to the whole sense of like, am I picking up a vibration and a sense of energy? Is there something I'm not even conscious of that my body has picked up? That it's picked up as dangerous in the past, and I'm not even aware of it. So you could be going into an environment and having a whole load of physical stuff going on that's giving you feedback to the brain. And what you're in your body and mind in that moment is trying to say is this and I just came here for the party you know

you're talking about Vegas I just came here for the party why am I suddenly shaky why am I suddenly feeling anxious why has this suddenly changed for me like I came in in a good humor and now I just want to run and hide so there's a lot of there's so much being fed into our nervous system and when we kind of let the system run amok if you like it's it'll take you with it so the thing is to be able to be so connected you mentioned the false sense of safety, right? So no matter what kind of therapy or healing you go for, the first steps along the way are number one, to be able to resource yourself and to be able to connect with a felt sense of safety within your own body, within your own body, because no matter where you go, your body is going with you. You can't leave it behind. You can't leave the nervous system behind. It's always there. So that's the ventral side of it. And then we have

the dorsal side of our nervous system. And that's more related to the back line of the body. And it's more related to more, sometimes it's referred to as the dumb nerve. It's very dumbed down so it's like we can get into these really immobilized states lethargic states lack of energy states where we're just not interested really in life or we're very disengaged and maybe even to a point of being disassociated from ourselves or body in the environment around us so when we bring in working with the vagus nerve that is part of the breaking of the cycle it is part of the felt sense of safety because you are working through the body to access those parts of your brain that are used to um uh raising their hand there's an alarm there's an alarm there's an alarm where everything else outside you're like going there's an alarm, there's an alarm, there's an alarm, where everything else outside you're like going, there's no alarm. Why? Why is there such a conflict between what I'm

seeing and what I'm feeling? So it's about bringing in that sense of congruence, that communication that is not just through your thoughts. You know, we can think our way into things people think we can think their way out of things as well and to a point you can and it can be a step that maybe gets you there but at some level if you really want to learn how to have control of those breaks again we've got to start working at a nervous system level and the nervous system that really connects with that parasympathetic part of our autonomic nervous system, which is the relaxation response, the rest and digest response, then we've got to start working with the vagus nerve. And I tell you, it is amazing once you start it and you feel it because you want more of it because it feels so good. Shannon. Wow. I am blown away and I am a physical example and proof of that because I have been experiencing upper digestive issues and I started to, you know, hear everywhere, vagus nerve, vagus nerve, but it wasn't anything, you know, specifically about

the stomach, but I just kept hearing it every, I just, it was landing in my lap and I was like, okay, well, I'll start doing this. Then when I start, you know, kind of researching what was going on with my upper stomach, I start seeing that, oh, the vagus nerve has a lot to do with this. Well, it didn't matter what kind of medicine I was taking that wasn't working. The breathing worked. It really, really worked. And so I want to ask you, I also had some issues with my upper throat right here near my glands, but it's not my glands. It's actually up in behind my gland. And I had vertigo. Well, I tell you, when you were talking about this dorsal part of the vagus nerve during COVID, you described just now how I

felt. I don't know if there's a connection with maybe damage or inflammation of the vagus nerve being seen with people who have COVID because I haven't felt the same sense and you described how I felt okay the the it's you know what I would say in relation to that is during COVID right a lot of fear came in so when we talk about fear again again, we're coming back to our survival response. OK, so when we became activated, see, we weren't sure what was going on. A lot of stress started happening. Were we going back to work? Weren't we?

What changes do we have to make? How adaptable were we going to be? What were the pressures of the unknown? And what challenges were we all facing so this is the time when you'll see a greater activation of certain markers i.e inflammation and to bring it in with covid and with everything that happened and it didn't matter how old anybody was, how young anybody was. Everybody had their way of engaging it and reacting to it. And we are born and we are made to cope with stress. OK, the body wants us to survive.

And that is the job of our nervous system. OK, and when stresses keep happening, the chronic stress, it means that the loop maybe becomes faster, right? So there's a lot more happening a lot faster, and we're not getting a chance to really take the hamster off the wheel. We're not getting a chance to enter into those relaxation responses where we get to rest and digest. So when we talk about rest and digest, it's not just food, it's digesting whatever else

is going on in our lives mentally and emotionally. So when fear arises, we're talking about the response again, coming from the brain, the amygdala part of the brain, the alarm bell. And if that alarm bell rings, and we're not really sure how to switch it off or even what are the signs when it's taken over the whole system i.e we can't sleep we're not digesting our food maybe pain is is increasing different different symptoms start arising maybe we're not coping with the usual levels of stress that we're used to coping with maybe we're more reactive and we're maybe kind of looking at ourselves going, who am I? Like, sorry, where did she go? Like who hijacked me? Who took me over? You know, and a lot of times it's again, the nervous system that has taken us over. The thing about the vagus

nerve is to remember that there is, it runs down both sides of our throat as well. You just don't know how stress is going to show up in your body, especially long-term stress over time. Yeah, this is a new one for me. I've never experienced. Don't you think that collective fear plays a part in all of it? Absolutely. Whether we're talking about happiness or whether we're talking about survival or whether we're talking about fear or joy, when we share something, right, it has a bigger impact. So when you want to step into the room and you're around happy people, you're feeling happier, right? Next thing you know, this happens. You're seeing nothing but fear on people's faces.

You're listening to their stories. Maybe you're doing their podcasts. You're listening to their pain, their suffering, and being able to have those healthy boundaries between all of that so that you don't take on too much of that pressure. You want to help. But again, it's coming back to like going, hang on, am I getting swept away by all of this? How much of this is mine? How much of this is theirs? And what do I truly know right now? And that is where the power of pause has really kind of come in with people, especially during this time, because people were getting swept away. The news was constantly running. The reports were constantly running. The numbers were constantly running. Every country had its story. So you weren't just talking about the impact of you, just whatever your thoughts, your physical body. And if you have

children, you have them as well. So it is, again, that whole feedback system of your whole environment and the whole story and the whole picture. But what is underneath that picture? That is what my job was to try and help people keep coming back what is underneath this picture what is stable beneath this okay and what is stable beneath this is that when you take a pause you take a deep and meaningful pause and you look around and you take in the room you're in and you ask yourself what is basically okay right now what can I trust right now what What is the truth right now? Because that's what you have to keep coming back to. Because otherwise, you'll get swept away. And although maybe there was things that needed to be planned and adapted to and all the rest, it was like, keep coming back.

Within the field of work that I do, that's called, there's an element of titration, appendiculation and resourcing. And that's what you were coming back to your resources. And for a lot of people, maybe they hadn't experienced levels of stress like this. Maybe they already had stress and they're already full to capacity. And this happens on top of it. Right. So we get pushed out of what's called the window of tolerance. And the window of tolerance. Have you heard about that? No, but I like that. You would love it. And you know what? Shanna also got COVID and was very sick with it. So not only was she experiencing the fear of just what was happening throughout our country, our, you know,

our world, she was physically ill. The biggest symptoms that I had was what you described in the dorsal and detachment. It was more of that than anything in the chest or a lot of the symptoms. In fact, that bothered me more than anything else. It's frustrating to me that some of the things that Shannon and I have been awakened to that seem to be like really important to teach people are not talked about. And one of those is the nervous system. I mean, when I was in rehab for alcohol, we were taught just what a poison alcohol is to your nervous system and how it's the first thing it attacks. But in my mind, I didn't understand the importance of that until I started looking at just how much of what we do and the amygdala and the bigger picture of what the nervous system involves. It's sad. So I love

that you are putting this information out there because I don't think people not only don't know themselves on a skull level, but they don't even know their own bodies. Yeah. Yeah. Nor do they. And I'm not saying that this for everybody, but when you even first learned the first couple of techniques to self regulate, that's the realization when you step in and go whoa hang on a second here I can actually find my feet and and and almost like stay on track it's like yes I'll swerve off the road but I'm just not going to go as far off the road or as deep into the woods or whatever you know you'll go but you'll see the early signs and then you'll know what to do to help bring yourself back and these are the simplest techniques and all they require are your time and attention and when you experience it you want more

of it that's the thing because you can feel it it's like it's one thing knowing something in your mind and that's what I always say to people we can understand things we can understand them till the cows come home. Excuse me, I have a term. I grew up on a farm and, you know, you were always waiting for them to come home. And it's like when you can actually feel, as you have spoken about, Shannon, in your digestive system, there's so many millions and gazillions of those little receptors feeding back from the vagus nerve from your intestines alone. And if you want, we can do a little experiment at the end, or if you leave me with

five minutes, I'll teach you a technique that can just help your tummy. And when you think about your tummy and breathing, what's sitting right above your abdomen, you know, you've got your breathing diaphragm. So if we're holding tension right here, like we all have places where we hold tension. And even when we, you know, you were speaking about alcohol, different people will go to different things. Some people become shopaholics, you know, some people turn to alcohol, some people turn to work. People have the things that they turn to, but there are some that are more acceptable, if you like, you know, or less destructive, maybe in some ways. But there's still the root is still the same.

You are trying to numb something out. You are trying to feel better for some reason or you're trying to stop feeling a certain way. And a lot of that is down to the root of the nervous system because we don't like these feelings. And when we talk about fear, a lot of times it's the fear of the feelings of fear that we have. We just don't like feeling them. But when we can look at them and go, it's just like any other emotion.

It's just like joy. Do feelings affect the nervous system more than like outside things like food, alcohol, or is it all of it? I think there's a whole, it's like, it depends on on you and what you're drawn to in a way or what you were exposed to as even as kids as resources like um like where you soothed by being handed food you know when you first learn to regulate yourself

as actually as a baby you're mirroring from parents, from your mother, from that love and that kindness. And if you never got that, even as a baby, you're going to be automatically almost like predisposed to being more dysregulated because you never learned how to, you never got that mirroring from the first place, but you can learn it. That's the key to take home is that you can teach yourself. So many people talk about how, you know, the fight or flight is way out of control when it comes to, you know, we're not facing wild animals in the streets. So do you have anything to say about that, about how our genetics have um our nervous system or just how history our ancestors have yeah there's many different philosophies on it and there's many different pieces of research being done on that and there are people who do believe that what maybe your

grandparents had gone through had some kind of effect on your DNA and I guess to give you the other side of it and they've done research on if you clock up your hours in meditation and if you get into the over the 10,000 hours of meditation that it can actually have an effect on with regards to immunity and maybe things in relation to that too so is there stuff that can be carried through there is a lot of people who do say yes depend it really depends on the people you're talking to and what feels they come from you know there's patterns that have been continuously repeated over time through ancestors through different things and then it's like it's like it's pretty good question to ask I originally come from Ireland okay and every second

person I meet tells me their ancestors came from Ireland you know and they have this feeling that they just want to go there they just have this feeling they just want to go there and then they tell me and they go and they go and they have these big emotional kind of releases. You know, they go to this ancient land where and it is ancient over there in comparison. Some, you know, cities and buildings and even the stones and the diamonds and everything. And it's like people kind of have this feeling. And it's also interesting, interesting I think when people who are from a certain ethnicity and even if they practice the music or the dance they get this amazing like feeling it's like they explode or they just feel connected or they feel like they've come back to themselves so

I think on many different levels, I really feel like leave it up to the individual to decide. And like, of course, the more research there is, the more facts there can be. But it's like, why not? Why leave it out? You know, you can even talk about mindfulness, right? There's one side that will say it's just attention and open awareness and on the other side they will include or not intention meaning the love and kindness practices and the compassion practice there's a half of them that say it doesn't there's a half that say they don't that it doesn't and I'm not going it kind of feels good so why leave it out you know so again it's for people to come back to really making choices for themselves sometimes we want to be told but sometimes it's good to make decisions for ourselves sometimes you know

we can have beliefs that are out of date and very limiting beliefs but then we might have a whole other set of beliefs that we're not sure if there's a hard and fast answer for it we're not sure if we can prove it, but it's something that works for you. It feels good. Then don't, you know, disregard it. Can you tell us and our listeners how this journey started for you? Did you, was this something that just you found through nursing and education or was, did you experience trauma that then made you have to pay attention to your nervous system or both? Both so since I was a really little girl I would just pick up on things and I noticed how people around me could have a big impact on me and how

I felt so I guess you would call it sensitive in that kind of a way. And as I grew older, I always had this kind of leaning towards wanting to care for people. So it started out as a 16 year old in a private nursing home looking after the elderly. Loved it. And then that went on to nursing. There was a common thread in everything that I did. And the common thread then from nursing into the craniosacral therapy through the yoga and what I do now was that I always realized the safer I could help people feel the better they felt already you know and it was a case of even as a nurse sometimes you didn't have answers and there was no cure but if you could just sit and listen and let a person be seen and heard, it like shifted, something shifted.

So I wasn't sure what that was, or what you would have called it until, say, the last eight years, when I began to understand it as this felt sense of safety, being able to hold space for somebody, you know, where they can feel safe enough to shed a couple of layers or to feel safer but how about helping them feel that for themselves and that's really where the magic is in it because why not be self-reliant why not self-regulate why not be able to do it for yourself without having to hold what you need to hold until you get your hour with whoever once a week or once a fortnight depending on what you can afford so why not so that's when it really came home and in my I'm like I'm trying to think where am I now my own age I'm in my mid

40s so I'm trying to think back but see in my late 30s I had a lot of stuff happen in a very short space of time. And it wasn't until everything ended and then my life was finally petering out again that my nervous system was like fighting with me. It's like all of a sudden everything is calm. And it's like my body's like, oh, no, it's not. No, it's not. Look here. Look there. Look there. Something's coming around the corner.

The tiger's hiding in the trees and my my nervous system took off at the very time when everything was was okay and I was like what is happening and it was just because I got into such a cycle of having to work on overdrive that I taught my nervous system how to work in overdrive so that when I didn't need to be in overdrive anymore it didn't know what to do so it tried to point out everything that could possibly go wrong that there was really no validity yet there was really no validity and I was like taking myself down from the inside out and it was really and I really had to come back home again to myself and go I can do all this for other people what is happening to me and that's when I really dug deep and had to really get in

there and I go I want to know what's going on and that's when the whole part of the whole neuroplasticity comes in and digging deeper into the yoga and the vagus nerve and working how can I access this nerve how can I access it like I can't just go in and can I take it out can I get rid of it no but what I learned then was that I can rewire it because all my nervous system knew for for years and I didn't even realize it that I was doing it for years was I really was teaching it how to be stressed that's all it knew was like stress stress stress busy busy busy go go go fix fix fix do do do and then on top of it there was other things I moved country I moved house five times in one year my mother got cancer you name it whatever happened and thankfully she. So there was just too much, too fast, too soon. Now, I coped with it well at the time, but it left the mark.

And that's what happens. It leaves an imprint. So I had to go back in and like little by little unimprinted. So take it and lay a new footprint, lay a new footprint that was like, keep coming back, keep coming back. What is true in the moment right now keep coming back and little by little you learn to find that space again that space of pause and it's really training for life because the body is built to have a negative bias the brain is built as I said for survival so what the brain

is great at pointing out is everything that could possibly go wrong everything that went wrong and everything that looks like it's possibly heading in that direction again so even just knowing that it's been able to stand back and go when it happens and you feel like you're just orientating towards a lot of the negative the the fear is to go, hey, hang on a second. Now I know this. This is the nervous system. This is the nervous bias. I know this now. And then I have to whip it back and go, okay, what is okay? What is the reality? Let's take a moment of pause. Let's reset. And all those little techniques to be able to help us to do that and like I went from having six panic attacks a day in my early 40s I didn't know what was

happening my heart was bouncing out of my chest but I was standing there going there's no need for this why is my heart suddenly off to the races I have things that I was left with that I believe were caused by my nervous system being damaged when I was in ICU on life support for two weeks. And one of those things is I'm very jumpy. Like the slightest noise will make me jump. And my hearing is like superhuman. I can hear things from all across an entire restaurant it makes me feel a little uneasy at all times what are some suggestions you have for me with regards to your hearing and having come from the nursing background and just to maybe give you a little insight into that is that they say that

your last sense to go before you die is your hearing so if you're in ICU everything else is kind of switched off you know this is the part that's still the brain is still using what it can to keep you alive you know so it's again being able to come back to okay why this is the case and it's okay to just like even calmly just place your hands over your ears and it's almost like just like oh you can do it like even if it's just over your ears like that if you don't want to seem like you're depending on where you are and it's like to say it's okay I've got you it's okay this is a lot and then you try and come back to that one thing that you can focus on that does feel calming to you that does feel so that that noise can become distant so you're not fighting your nervous system is

not fighting to take it all in because it's got to be the most alert part of you right so you can kind of bring your focus in just on that one thing, even if it's just feeling your breath. Right at the tip of your nose, that inhale and that exhale at the tip of your nose. And with that. It helps to distance that noise. Instead of the system getting completely overwhelmed by all of those sounds that you can hear so clearly it's just too noisy and you want to scream and run away or just stick your head in a hole and not hear it anymore so it's like choose to go to a different sense come into feeling and maybe just even feeling your breath at the tip of your nose and it's like you're reassuring your system I hear you you, you know, there is a lot going on, but I've got this.

This is what I need to focus on right now. Oh my gosh, that's so helpful. Thank you. Because I just realized that I usually try to get the people I'm with to comfort me. And why wouldn't I comfort myself? And that's part of building that relationship with myself. Yeah. So giving you back that internal locus of control. And it's still okay for you to be able to say to people, I just need a moment just to reset my system here. The sound is overwhelming or the noise is too overwhelming.

And to be able to have that boundary for yourself, it's empowering for you. Okay. Because sometimes you're not always going to get exactly what you need from the people around you and sometimes their their means might be well-intentioned but they may be very sloppy and maybe you're not getting it as quickly as you'd like to so again it's bringing that internal locus of control back into you it's sensory as well as everything else. So to just come back to focusing on that one other different sense, that felt sense of your breath and train it, find that one thing that works for you and don't leave it until you need it to use it. Train it when you don't need it, because it's like, it's like anything. Okay. We train a marathon and then, you know, maybe

we run out of gas and we gotta we gotta get to where we need to go I hope that is helpful to you definitely helpful and I find it very fascinating that I didn't remember feeling anything while I was in my coma but I did remember hearing people talking in the room your your system was fighting for some kind of information. You know, it's like your body doesn't know really what's happened. And that's why even for yourselves, if you come across, even in your own families in years to come, just remember how you speak to somebody, even if they're unconscious, is hugely impactful in relation to recovery from a traumatic event,

say if it's an incident or an accident and to never speak over people like they're not there it's to always say the name of the person and you can just be so amazed that gentle therapeutic touch but before you touch you say I'm going to touch your hand now because it doesn't seem like such a shock when you're in a bed and you're at the mercy of everything and there's beeping going on they're shuffling and your brain is still trying to make sense of it all even though you might not have clear memories of it so all of these simple things are just again so helpful to the nervous system and for helping you feel safe in your body.

Because what ends up happening is that if you don't feel safe, you kind of, it's almost like you go one way and your body goes the other. You're trying to work it out. Is it safe? Isn't it safe? And when we don't know what to look out for, how can we know how to bring ourselves back? Even for you, Sean, I'm talking about the last year, and maybe you're still like you got COVID,

so you had a lot to experience so it's for you even to keep coming home to yourself and reassuring yourself okay how am I feeling feeling your feet on the ground grounding yourself in the moment of going okay I got through it what does feel good in my body right now because we can focus a lot on the pain and when we focus a lot on the pain the pain when we focus a lot on the pain, the pain gets bigger, but we can have pain and still feel good somewhere else. And so sometimes when I'm working with people who do suffer from chronic pain, we use that technique. We kind of go, is there a place in your body where you can feel mostly peaceful, even though you're in pain or even though you're in fear? So it's just always kind

of like that dual awareness it is a resource use your body as a resource when I say use I don't mean abuse I mean but to use it because your body's always trying to help you and your body is is huge it's so whole there's so many parts to us when we can sometimes think of our body as it was John Pendergast who said it and I could just so relate to it was that seeing yourself as your body being inside you right so it's like okay what else what else is here what else is here there's a cool breeze there's a calmness in the air you know whatever it is I'm only giving you one side of the nervous system there's a whole ocean of other information in relation to your microbiome if you grew up in the countryside exposed to the dirt and the bugs you've got a healthier gut to begin with you've got healthy

bacteria in your body and they have research is showing that a lack of that bacteria increases levels of anxiety oh my gosh gosh, yes, increases inflammation, the nervous system and the immune system share similar markers and receptors in the body. There's someone that recently sent me they thought we should try to have on who basically created dirt water. And that's literally what he sells. And he swears that it helps to rebuild your immune system and that's all it is is dirt water yeah it's like the it was in relation to like say people I think it was from Tibet from the mountainous areas and they brought them in for for meditation and they saw that they had this unbelievable resilience but they related it not only to to their practice of meditation, but also to their resilience just from from within their gut, their microbiome.

What I have learned throughout life is there's never just one thing and there's never just one thing that's going to heal you. It's always a collection of things relating to you as a whole person. And it's to just not give up. Just you never know. And it's to trust your gut in a way. And like sometimes when we suffer from trauma, we lose that connection with ourselves. We lose that trust with ourselves. And it's a way of bringing back that trust is again coming into the present moment take that

power to pause to put your feet on the ground and go okay what is the truth right now right now the roof is over my head there's food in the refrigerator I'm doing pretty okay I can breathe so the simple things the simple things we'll try and fix and and get out of fix mode I have a daughter as well she's almost 13 and last year that's what I learned I learned that she's not looking for me to fix this she just wants me to listen she just wants to be seen and heard it's the same as anybody else but also your nervous system is looking to be seen and heard too. Well, that's interesting because my six-year-old just asked me two days ago to help her be more seen and heard. Wow. Wow. That's powerful. And imagine six years of age to be able to ask that for herself. I mean,

that shines to you as her mother too, because she felt safe enough to be able to say that. So what a beautiful thing. So beautiful. And then taking it up a notch and teaching her how to feel seen and heard by herself and then the things she can implement. Her own resources. Exactly. Same way that, you know, you have your resources that has gotten you to where you are today and everything you have overcome and gotten through and more power to you. It's a real sign that like, oh, yeah, you've grown.

It's like you're you have come home to yourself in a way because nobody can really rock you now. You know, there's always people who want to pick holes and point and go. It's like I've left that past. Yeah. So it's it's a cool really cool thing for you yeah I wish your daughter well well and I love how our kids are teaching these things right I mean like that was the big lesson I mean I went to therapy and heard that same thing from a therapist you know that her little girl was able to teach in that moment yeah yeah I think it's beautiful I've always said it and I I'm blessed and I've always said that she has been my greatest teacher she really has I just have to

stand back they need to obviously to have a parent who's gonna keep them safe and and everything like that but not to a point of overprotection and the one thing that I will say that was the turning point for me in bringing a baby into this world was their best protection is their own self-awareness. For sure. So the more you can build that up in them, again, teaching them to trust in themselves, trust their gut, their resources, what they can rely on. There was something in your bio that touched me and Shanna, and it was about how not preparing your clients for healing is like sending a soldier into battle without any preparation or training yeah so many times you have people who are so vulnerable and they walk through the doors for help and sometimes

the help can end up being a little more harmful or it's too much and they're not ready for what is going to be revealed or what's going to come up you really need to be able to sit with a person and ask them the basics of do you know how to ground yourself do you know how to self-regulate and can I teach you some techniques to me it's like it's prevention in that sense that if people do not have resources the reason why it was trauma in the first place was because they were not resourced to be able to cope with whatever happened whether because they were too young because they were not resourced to be able to cope with whatever happened, whether because they were too young, because they didn't have the protection, they didn't have the parents, whatever it was.

And even if you were older and had traumas, there was something about what happened to you that you could not cope with because you weren't resourced to cope with it. So why would you revisit memories or take them on a pathway revisiting memories and this isn't just talk therapy this is this is body work too because even when in my field of craniosacral therapy people may not have had picture images and memories but you could actually end up touching somebody on the arm and they could feel very very fearful and not know why and then as a therapist as a well-trained therapist you know

how to help them come in and out not to go too deep too fast so that they overwhelm themselves and re-traumatize themselves again. But when they walk out of your office, you need to know that if something comes up in the next day or two, that they can understand the signs and know how to regulate themselves and to identify their own resources. Because if they've gotten this far, they have used resources, okay? They may have been survival resources, but they have worked for them this far and got them this far and then it's for to highlight can we develop more can we remove

one or two that are maybe limiting you now that are holding you back that are kind of keeping you in this little cage can we try new ones how about this or how much fun are you having in your life right now? Because sometimes people can get so caught up in their healing that they're forgetting to live. I find it so amazing that our brains are so wired in a way to protect us, right? Or to, or find another way. My son who's autistic, he's got a lot of eating issues, but I noticed that he smells his food before he eats it. So there's some disconnection there, but he found a way to process

that missing link. Using that as an example of how we do, we find these other ways and sometimes they're negative. But they got you somewhere. So they're not that negative. Do you know what I mean? We can lean very heavily into positive and negative, but you did what you needed to do at a certain time to get you somewhere, you know, or to just still be alive. I was thinking more like drinking or, you know,

numbing, numbing pain. I don't want to feel it. You know, part of my work sometimes is if people are open to it, is to help them to get to know that emotions are just emotions. They're messengers. It's like I tell people the story of when I first moved to America, I thought I was famous. I got so much mail. I got more mail than I've ever gotten in my whole life. And I'm like, how did they suddenly get my name? I know that I live here. And it's like so much junk mail, right? When I describe emotions sometimes to help people think about it,

it's sometimes it's like an aircraft and there's passengers, right? And we're never going to know all the passengers, nor do we need to know all the passengers business. But if you are flying that plane, you're flying it from the cockpit, not from a passenger in the back of that plane. So you decide what's relevant to what's not. You get to kick the passengers off. You know, you get to choose. And it's just to remember that because if you if you reverse it and you let all the passengers try and fly the plane, you're never going to take off. So the passengers are all these motions could be 300 different motions depending on how big the airplane is but at the

end of the day you're the pilot you can name them and you acknowledge them and you can tell yourself it's okay for me to feel this if you want to go deeper with it then you know over time you'll begin to notice certain ones that hang around that maybe need a little more investigation. But on any given day, even when it comes to thoughts, they've done the research on it. Like how many of our thoughts are actually relevant? Yeah. So it's to know that we are so much more than our emotions, so much more than our thoughts. Another thing I keep hearing, and correct me if I'm wrong, concentrating on the solution and not so much on the problem. So I believe our brain is wired the way it is for a very good

reason. And there are some memories that I really feel we don't have them for a very good reason, because it was too horrendous at the time to remember, you know, it just never got lodged into the hippocampus, into the memory part of the brain because it was too too horrendous so something short-circuited now when it comes to whether we should go back and dig things up or not I would say your body is going to guide you because if something is constantly coming up for you and it is really bringing you to your knees every time you try and succeed and move forward and it's the same thing and you're just like I don't know what it is I don't know what it is and then you go and you talk to somebody or you go

somewhere for some help then it can be really amazing in the sense that you can finally like integrate it because what you're trying to do is complete the cycle so that it didn't just get stuck in hyper arousal the no deactivation at the end and that is where you're trying to follow it through with the nervous system so that the nervous system can finally finish the cycle instead of getting constantly stuck. Like we can all get so far. Boom, we hit the same thing. We hit it again. There's great validity. And I would say your body is your guide. Your life is your guide. But I wouldn't ever force it. And I wouldn't ever allow anybody to force it on you. So and I would also say that it is very important, again, to know and to put the shovel down when you need to come back and resource yourself even better with even more stuff, because the more resourced you are, then whatever comes up, you've already survived it so it can't harm me anymore so there's there's the two sides to it and when we talk about the inner child work some of that work is so so beneficial in the sense that you can get a chance to reparent yourself if there is something coming

up and again the same kind of emotions it's okay to kind of visit younger parts of yourselves. And even if the memory isn't clear, you're coming back to like what you both spoke about with your children. What did your child need in that moment? You may not need to know the full memory, but what did your child, what did you in that moment need as a child that you didn't get that made this so terrible?

And maybe it was a hug. So you in that moment, when you get that feeling like this little me waving her hands going, I need some attention. You know, it's like you can actually meet yourself as your adult and give yourself what you need. So many of my clients have found that deeply healing. And that's even without knowing the details. There's that balance of caution and courage. But I'm into advocating for people. If you're not ready for something, you're not ready for it. So nobody says you have to dig it up. The more resourced you are, sometimes it just comes up naturally and just falls away naturally. But if you try and force it before you're ready, because you know you you want

to move on you want it you feel like it's got to be fixed then i feel like there's a little little more work in line with like going we're never going to be perfect there's always going to be something there's always going to be work again to slow it down but some people do not like slow slow does not work with some people and against like that vagus nerve we're like we're just gently applying that break and so that you know that you can apply it when you need it but if you don't have that break ready and that ball and that that rock starts rolling it's like why would you harm yourself so it's coming back to what are you resourced for and sometimes you don't get the choice.

Sometimes something comes out of the blue. You could be doing fine for years and just something somewhere along the line. And it can just be one event. And then it can just be like this release button, you know, that the movie reels start rolling and you may not get the choice so on on every level it's a case of just always working towards that self-care resourcing yourself you know so you have you have something built already you have scaffolding on the building I have had that exact thing happen to me I didn't even know it it me. And so it wasn't coming up. It

wasn't something I was seeking to heal within myself. And then all of a sudden it was like a movie, right? I saw the scene. It was my body. My body experienced a tension within it. And then everything like connected. Once I connected, oh my gosh, this has affected me. And this is why, and this is what's happening. I was able just to say, okay, well, that doesn't exist anymore. So I'm just going to let that go. And really it was for myself, freeing of that, just the awareness, just, and I didn't even know it existed yeah and it probably maybe cleared up so many things from the past we're like I get that now I get it exactly yeah it was amazing yeah but you know it wasn't something that I that I seeked to heal within

myself I didn't even know it was affecting my life. And like you said, I didn't have to go trying to find it. My body eventually told me. Yeah. Well, and part of that is because you're present with your body because people can be feeling things and some people just don't connect with their body at all. So the fact that you're very much in touch with that is going to be very helpful for you along the way, you know there's that congruence coming in and that integration and the more integrated we are then obviously it's easier

to be regulated you know very much very much so yeah and and it's like and you can feel it again if that comes back again you don't necessarily go to fear, it feels like a tight fist or does it feel like a swirl? And you know that it can just open a doorway to healing. Even with this situation with my upper stomach and my throat, now I've learned this new tools to stimulate my vagus nerve. your entire journey can start with the worst pain that leads you to discovering tools that you didn't have prior that maybe even would have prevented this situation I'm having but you know I'm so grateful to be able to you know have learned a few breathing techniques that I have yeah yeah that is great that is great and keep monitoring you know and you know I always say go to the person who's going to give you the best assessment so that if you really do think there's

something going on it's always worth investigating you know it's always worth getting that ultrasound or whatever it is you need we're in a country that thankfully has great health care there's no there's no harm in just doing that hum even that little hum sound to stimulate the vagus nerve and throat it's a wonderful thing it's a wonderful thing it's been such an amazing needed conversation today thank you if our listeners would like to know more about you and what you're offering right now you can find me at www.handsoftimehealing.com and I have just launched a course that I realized that I had to put together for people because I did these health summits and all these wonderful people are all burning out and are stressed to the hilt and I've really no resources as to how

to even measure if they're dysregulated and which direction to go on if they are. So this is a very simple course and it's forever on sale. It's called Find Your Feet and Stay on Track. And it takes you through a couple of techniques with the vagus nerve. It takes you through meditation. We talk about the window of tolerance. After that, you can reach out to me, have a 30 minute free consultation anytime. And you can also book me for private sessions if you want to, if you choose. And I teach yoga. So one of my favorite things to do in my past time is to teach adaptive yoga to the elderly. And they love it. They love it.

So that's that's me. I'm on Instagram, Roseanne Igniting Paws. So you'll find different bits on that, too. And for you, before we we go shannon the with this with regards to the sound is just to place your hand your like say your index finger and your thumb make a little little diamond shape drop it down so the index fingers are on the pubic bone thumbs are just below the belly button and to just make a voo v-o-o sound so that your tummy down there can get used to feeling nice feelings down there especially if we tend to hold tension there so you actually make the sound

but you feel like the sound is coming from your belly it's just again slow it down feel into it and really just like like you're that ship coming through the fog. So it's like teaching your tummy to feel good feelings again. And that reflects back into that side of the nervous system, the parasympathetic part of the nervous system, good feedback into the brain, part of the repatterning

and part of building vehicle tone. That muscle. Thank you. Thank you so much. I love that. into the brain part of the repatterning and part of building vagal tone that muscle thank you well thank you so much I love that yeah you sound you actually did sound like these boats that you passed my house on the Puget Sound in the fog oh wow oh my goodness Puget Sound that's up in Alaska it's not up up no it well it's in Seattle it's up yes yes on the way on the way I'm getting there I'm getting to know my geography I used to love when I would watch those big barge ships come by and through the fog and you could hear that horn the voom yeah and now it's time for break that shit down.

Keep inviting yourself back to yourself. Keep inviting yourself back to yourself. Keep coming home. Keep coming home. That's it. Oh, absolutely beautiful. Thank you so much. You've been such a pleasure.

Thank you for sharing your wisdom. I've had so much fun and complete strangers, but there you go. You know, we could probably talk for the rest of the day. I've thoroughly enjoyed this and wonderful people. I'm so glad that I actually got to meet you both. And thank you for sharing as well your story. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mandy. And thank you, Shana. And love to your families too. Take care. Thanks for being with us today. We hope you will come back next week. If you like what you hear, don't forget to rate, like, and subscribe.

Thank you. We rise to lift you up. Thanks for listening.