Moving Into Wholeness Podcast

This is an ever-changing space to guide & support you on your journey into Wholeness. We talk about the self-healing journey, provide powerful tools & practices as well as talk to thought leaders and how you can apply what they do to your own life.

Transcript

Welcome to Moving into Wholeness. I'm Carly Wood. This is an evolving space for sharing stories to inspire and connect, Practices to guide and heal in hopes of supporting you as we all journey into wholeness together. Hi, I'm Carly. Thank you for joining me on my first podcast. I'm nervous, But mostly excited because I know what I'm talking about today is really big for some and it was transformative for me. And my hope is that it finds those of you that connect to it deeply. I want to talk all about the self healing journey, Including spiritual bypassing, Embodiment, The feminine way. And lastly, The nervous system. I'm going to share my biggest a half moment on my own journey, What I learned and how that can apply to you in your own life. And then I'm going to give you several beautiful and powerful practices, Some of my own personal practices that I've developed, And some are well known ones that you may not have realized can help calm and ground you into your body in safety. Safety is the key term here. So I'm in my 40s. And I've been doing some kind of healing and spiritual practice since I was a young child. So lots of opportunities to learn and experience healing and wisdom through so many modalities. I was really lucky that my mom exposed me to a lot of this sort of thing growing up. I remember one time, She sent me to a meditation camp when I was in primary school, Which is elementary school for America and other parts of the world. And at the same time as this meditation camp, I had an opportunity to sing backup as part of a choir I was in for a big star in Australia. But I missed it because I was sitting on a rock in the bush somewhere with other kids my age learning to meditate. So needless to say, I rebelled against this. But eventually I came back to it learning Reiki as a teenager and countless other things after that, Including multiple yoga teacher trainings, Bowen therapy, I practice aware parenting and lots of other mindfulness practices. And after over three decades of searching and exploring, Having a daily spiritual and healing practice, I still didn't feel aligned with purpose or happy. So this leads me into spiritual bypassing, Which is a way of avoiding the real healing that we need to do. As part of my own journey, I've tried different sorts of healing modalities and energy workers. And I'm a facilitator of energy myself, And it can be really powerful. But there are several factors that can prevent healing from being effective. And the one I want to talk about in terms of this conversation is underlying beliefs and imprints subconscious desires. And the only way to heal or even uncover what those things are is with self inquiry, Being and feeling. We can keep seeking outward but the real healing lies within. When our pain is witnessed and heard with compassion, The energy of it changes and all that energy that was previously spent suppressing the emotion is then freed up and available to use and shift in different ways. Because it's no longer stuck in your body. This act is often called holding space when you express your messy terrifying parts to someone, And they listen without fixing or judgment. One of my fave writers, Anne Lamont, Everything she writes is like poetry for the wounded soul. I heard her say that having someone holding space for you allows you to fall into them and them to fall into yourself. I love that. Because for me, When someone holds space for you, I think of it as they're holding a container and you can step into that container. And there they are loving and accepting the wholeness of you all your messy bits. This acceptance allowing you to be whole in that moment allows you to experience that. And when it's over, You're more equipped and connected to the experience of being whole, Which so many people that have suffered trauma haven't even had that experience. You've spent so much of your life pushing those shameful scary bits down and suppressing them, Or stepping out of your body to avoid them. So in that moment of connecting to all those parts of yourself and being completely whole, Having someone accept you and then accepting that in yourself, That's wholeness. It's all of it together. But so many of us don't exist in our wholeness. We live in a one-dimensional expression of ourselves where we're denying the trauma and the pain. And the longer it goes unexpressed, The deeper we can dig ourselves into a cocoon of protection that separates us from the joy and connection that life can provide. Spiritual bypassing is a really well known verb nowadays. There's so many seekers looking outward to heal themselves and not enough of us understand this missing piece for those that need it. John Wellwood in his book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening, Defined spiritual bypassing as using spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal emotional unfinished business, To shore up a shaky sense of self or belittle basic needs, Feelings and developmental tasks. The emotions need to be peeled away like an onion and felt and moved through the body. E-motion, It's even in the name. And this is a tricky balance because so many of us try to avoid the negative emotions because we know that holding high frequency emotions such as gratitude and love attract more of the same. This is the law of attraction. Also you can go down the rabbit hole of epigenetics if you're looking for reasons to experience happy emotions. So ultimately, Yes, Living in these higher frequency emotions is the goal. We all want to be happy, We all want to feel happy. But if you have an expressed trauma that will pull you out of those higher emotions through mirrors or triggers, Some situation in your life is going to bring up that unheard and unfelt emotion because it wants to be seen, Felt and heard. In yoga, We call these imprints Samskaras. We're here to heal and process and at this moment in our evolution that still requires feeling. It can be quick for some certainly, But we all must face our shadow. I read this quote that I want to share with you. In a message to Thailand, Pope Francis quoted an old Alpine song that says, In the art of climbing, The important thing is not to keep from falling, But to never remain down on the ground. Gosh, I love that. And then he goes on to say, I offer you these two pieces of advice. Never stay down, Immediately get up. Let someone help you to get up. That's the first thing. The second thing is don't spend your life sitting on a couch. It just speaks to me because for those of us that have been down on the ground a long time, It's hard to know how to get up and it's hard to find the balance. For those that have had a lot of trauma in their life that they need to heal that keeps tapping them on the shoulder or hitting them over the head with a mullet. Yes, Allow the feelings in because when they arise, They need to be felt. Don't be scared, Invite them in like an old friend, But just don't stay in it for longer than needed. That's the thing that only you can decide for yourself and you of course must trust your own guidance of when that is. But if you're replaying a single trauma over and over again, Then you need to break that cycle because you're not moving through it, You're staying in it. Not to say we don't get the same lessons over again. I believe we all have a handful of big lessons, Some more than others, Traumas that we play out over and over again. And they do repeat but each time we heal a little and then life tests us again. But that's different to staying in it constantly for months, Years on end. So when that happens, Ask for help, Ask your spirit support team or your human support team, Talk to friends, Pray, Be in nature, Meditation, Whatever is in your toolbox. This is the dance of the self healing journey, Feeling and releasing and healing, Then going back to holding the higher emotions. And ideally, You can get to the place where a samskara is coming up for you an imprint, And you recognize it and you can just be the observer with no judgment. You don't need to, You know, Fully live in the expression of it, You can eventually just breathe, Work with your prana and allow it to pass through you and release. Life shows us things are not meant to be linear. Everything works in cycles, The cycles of nature, With birth and death and rebirth, The cycles of the moon, The cycles of our own bodies with our menstrual or birthing cycle. These cycles live in the realm of the feminine. Cycles are everywhere. And in a similar way, If we don't deal with our trauma, We can be pulled into a negative loop, Repeating the same negative patterns over and over again. But then once it's felt and expressed and heard with compassion, It will die, It will dissolve and allow space for something new and better to be born. But this is not as easy as it seems for so many. A lifetime can pass without realizing you're skipping this fundamental piece of feeling your emotions to release and heal. That's because shaming emotions is part of our culture. And we weren't always this way we used to deeply honor and respect the feminine. And that actually changed eons ago with the introduction of the written word. And there's a beautiful book on this, But we will possibly talk about this in a later episode as it's such an exciting time of transition that we are in. And it warrants discussion. Most of us have been raised to be ashamed of the feminine. Boys especially in our past, Thankfully, This is changing. Raised to man up and toughen up. And women and girls too, Of course, You're too much, You're too dramatic. We've all heard these things. Many of us will not listen to us children when we were sad, We were told to stop crying or were left alone until we got our acts together. So of course we learned that big feelings aren't safe. And as adults, We suppress our feelings, Binge watching TV, Drinking, Overeating, Working all the time, Sex, People spend more time and energy avoiding the feelings than it would have taken to just feel the feelings. On my own journey, When I was ready to stop bypassing and attend to my own trauma, I couldn't access the emotions. And I was doing all sorts of courses and walking the path with other lifetime practitioners. And I didn't understand why they were able to access their emotions and I wasn't I felt so stupid. Like why was I not getting it? But no one could tell me how to fix it. So I followed what we all learn growing up, Keep trying, Keep pushing work harder. But that is the masculine way in our patriarchal culture. And that does not work with emotions. Emotions live in the realm of the feminine energy. To access them, You can't force it, You need to allow, To soften, To be vulnerable. And then they arise. And it's not just about embracing the feminine. And I'm going to share my big discovery around that in a moment. But ask yourself, What do you do for your own self healing? Is it reading the self help books and seeking healing outwards, Listening to talks, Which is great and amazing and valuable. But that's also the doing, The masculine. I've had many clients come to me with so much effort already put into their healing journey and wondering why they're still adrift. Because it's all the busy work and none of the stillness and allowing. So we need the balance of both. We need the being component, Which is the feminine, Just to sit and be with the feelings as well as the masculine component. The masculine encompasses doing, Effort, Discipline, And the feminine energy is softening, Allowing, Receiving, And being. But we're lacking in the feminine energy, The softening and allowing and receiving, Because the feminine has been shamed in our culture. And this shame is not gender specific. It touches the entire spectrum of gender, This shame of the feminine. So we've covered the shaming of emotions and the feminine. And now I want to cover not being embodied, And they can be one in the same. And if you're not grounded in your body in your physical body, These underlying traumatic emotions from your childhood won't be accessible to you because that's where they sit. That's where they're stuck in your physical body. Your body is the vessel that holds the trauma from your past. And there can be a multitude of reasons that you're not inhabiting your body. There can be physical components, You had a physical trauma that made your body unsafe, Can be really common things like asthma, Eczema, Hay fever. I had that, But I never gave it a second thought because it's so common, But commonality doesn't diminish its influence. So when I began feeling into my childhood experience, I remembered that my skin hurt almost constantly. It was literally painful to be in my skin, The sneezing and the itchy eyes on top of that, And then the regular asthma attacks where every holiday I'd end up in hospital. So of course I didn't want to inhabit my body. It didn't feel good. I'm choosing to share this small piece of the asthma, Eczema, Hay fever. Even though I have had big traumas I've had to process, I want to illustrate that it doesn't have to be big, It can be small and you could be disassociated and not embodied and not realize it because you don't view your own experience as being particularly traumatic or special. Because the thing about experience is when you take a deeper dive into it, The more layers are revealed and what looks normal and healthy on the surface can really have big painful feelings underneath, But you have to uncover the layers to see it. You have to give yourself the energy and the time and the love to really look and that can be a real barrier when you have underlying beliefs of unworthiness for example. Because you have to feel worthy, You have to be willing to invest in yourself to sit and really look at your feelings. If you're not fully embodied or disassociated it can be especially challenging for the empathic people or the sensitives because you're unable to filter out what's yours from what's being felt in the collective which now more than ever is a lot of fear and it's really intense. But being in your body can help with that because your body can act as a filter system through which you run whatever input you're getting to see how it feels, To see if it feels like your own truth. For example when we talk about having a gut feeling about someone, You're meeting someone, You're hearing what they say and it's a physical experience in your stomach. Being in your body is also a doorway into your intuition. There is so much that exists once you are grounded fully in your body. Now before we get into practices there's a last piece I want to talk about and that's the nervous system. When we're disassociating it's because it didn't feel safe to be in your body for all the reasons we've talked about. And if you've spent a lot of your life being ungrounded the likelihood is is that your nervous system needs a lot of attention. When a person spends most of their time in a trauma response your nervous system is fundamentally out of balance. Very briefly just to summarize the nervous system controls all the senses that interpret the outside world for us as well as perspective, Emotions, Thoughts and actions. It effectively controls the way we experience the world and connects to every organ in your body. Heart rate, Respiration, Digestion. Your nervous system controls the things that happen without your awareness. If you're unhappy, You feel unsafe, You're having big reactions to things you can't control, You feel numb, You have no energy, Making new friends or connecting with friends feels like too much. These are all expressions of an unbalanced nervous system and there are many other expressions but too many to mention right now. So if you've spent a lot of time disassociated and having your nervous system working overtime then meditation may feel too hard for you. Yoga nidra is a great option. It's a form of guided relaxation that follows specific parameters and whilst it doesn't offer the same distance from the mind that meditation does, My personal opinion is that it offers a bridge to that place of mindful awareness because yoga nidra specifically addresses the nervous system and simultaneously works on embodiment which is basically the perfect practice for someone struggling with these things. But it therefore equips you to sit in stillness and observe what comes up without going into a fight-or-flight reactionary state. So it equips you perfectly for meditation. It's a bridge. Most, If not all, Of the practices I'm going to provide you with do follow this feminine energy of allowing and softening and being receptive rather than the more masculine energy of discipline and effort. There are some varying opinions on the difference between yoga nidra and meditation and this is just my thoughts. So I'm beginning with well-known practices and ending with my personal ones. The second well-known practice is yoga. Now it's of course yoga is an embodiment practice but you could practice it for years and still not experience the embodiment. And the best way I can describe this is we will often go and do a yoga class and it'll feel great and you'll relax your body and get the kinks out and feel calmer but you can still not be fully dropping into your body. And this is different for everyone. Not everyone has this issue. Obviously I am not speaking to the masses here and these specific practices it's like tricking the mind into you actually dropping down into your body and I'm encouraging you to not just blindly do whatever asanas I may call out. It's about checking in with your body every time and building that trust and building that relationship with your own body. And we so often don't do that. We'll go to yoga classes and we'll twist ourselves into pretzels even if it doesn't feel good because we're conditioned to do whatever the instructor is calling out. So this is a different kind of yoga practice. And then some other offerings are ritual bars or showers. And so in this process you can really make it whatever you want it to be but you're connecting to the felt sense of the water on your skin. So it's not so much about the clearing of your mind rather it's about the physicality of your body dropping into that experience of inhabiting your body through the felt senses. Now this one may sound a little bit crazy but I recommend a daily screaming practice. Now as you begin this embodiment journey think of your body like a cup of water. It's not a stretch since we're a 60% water and the water represents all the emotions and feelings you've had in your life. All the betrayals and losses and heartbreak and the glass is your body the vessel that holds all that emotion. And then think of your beingness your experience as a ball. What happens when you drop your beingness that has been absent from the full glass of water into the glass? It overflows because the glass was already full. There's just too much water slash emotion to fit in the glass to fit in your body. So having a daily practice when you choose to just emote big feelings without exploring where they come from or attempting any kind of resolution or healing just start with the place of expressing. It lets some of the water out. Now this works on multiple levels because not only is it letting the water out but it also gets you comfortable with expressing bigger emotions because like all things it's a practice and the more you do it the better you will get. So a great way to incorporate this into your daily life is when you're driving alone in the car not stuck in traffic because that would probably scare people. And of course if you can't maintain conscious awareness and safety of your surroundings then maybe do it at home or in a place that you can find some space. But this pure emotion with sound is really powerful especially if your voice was not heard as a child. It is liberating. And then to bring in some of my yoga training, Mantras for example work with sound. So in addition to purifying your thoughts and giving your mind an anchor they also work purely on vibration and the sound is raising your vibration. We are vibration. We're all vibration. And so it's my belief that expressing the pain in sound is really really powerful. So it might be that you're making sounds that sound like a pained animal. It might be groaning. It might be screaming. You might just want to sit in your car and swear and or just you know pretend that someone you're angry at is in front of you and say all the things you wanted to say. Expressing it with sound is really powerful. I really want to thank you so much for listening. Bye for now. Thank you for listening and I hope that something in this landed for you in a way that supports you on your own journey into wholeness.

Reviews

I’m still suffering from a huge trauma still from years ago quite likely and also I feel damaged by injustice at present. That is why I meditate and that really has helped me in so many ways for which I’m so grateful. I need to work out a strategy for peaceful presence and to rise above the need for justice as that sometimes or even quite often, does not happen. One must learn to accept and find the right way to move forward and be courageous too. I feel this despite my privileged life where I consider myself as being lucky. I’m really grateful for all I have. I really am.
Thanks for sharing and I always remember Jack Kornfield’s quote regarding a young difficult pupil who gave him a piece of pottery she made… thanks for trying.

So insightful 🙏🏻❤️