Feeling as Essential to Healing | Ep #73

Do you wonder if the Yoga Therapy Certification will serve you in your retired life? I’m discussing this with two Yoga Therapy Certification grads who both happen to be over 60 years old, Lory Newmyer and Ruth Ann Penny.

 

Lory and Ruth Ann are sharing their experiences as trainee elders, why they decided to take the therapy certification, and how they have put their skills to use post-graduation. Discover the power of being a lifelong learner, why growing old can open new possibilities in business and life, and how the Yoga Therapy Certification may benefit you at any age.

 

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What You'll Learn from this Episode:

  • How to discern between an emotional vibration and a physical sensation.
  • What I mean by emotional stability.
  • How to see pain as a helpful tool in your recovery.
  • Why the quality of our actions comes from the quality of our ability to heal.
  • How your actions are impacting your healing and recovery.
  • Why you have the power to make a difference in your situation.
  • How to become clearer of your own reality.

Featured on the Show:

Detect Compensation Patterns in Common Yoga Poses

Retrain Compensation Patterns in Clamshells

Learn how to spot compensations as they’re happening and retrain your yoga students or clients to have better movement patterns

Male Announcer: You’re listening to From Pain to Possibility with Susi Hately. You will hear Susi’s best ideas on how to reduce or even eradicate your pain and learn how to listen to your body when it whispers so you don’t have to hear it scream. And now here’s your host, Susi Hately.

Welcome back to From Pain to Possibility. With this episode I want to dig into a component of recovery and healing that I find to be the most essential in supporting people in getting better. In fact, I would say that it is the key piece that is consistent amongst all of my clients who have quick and sustainable results in terms of recovery, and truly of healing.

And when I talk about recovery and healing, I mean that transformational work that’s required to be able to connect to the conversation to the conversation. Where the top conversation is symptoms, but then there’s the wisdom. The wisdom of these symptoms coming around and what they’re there to share with us.

And when we can kind of clue into that, then we can really take the steps that we need to take. But to get there, there are four key areas that support you in this feeling process. Because as I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, and in the emails, and some of the social posts that I post is that my clientele are very smart.

They know how to pull together disparate pieces of information, and they know how to come up with solutions. They’re really good at that. And in addition to them being very logical and analytical, they’re also highly intuitive. So they come up with solutions in some cases that have no conscious reasoning that they just know them to be true.

Now, sometimes it might be thought that these two ways of being can be opposite or can be at conflict, and sometimes they are. And for the crowd of people that I work with, they can be very complimentary. What becomes interesting, though, is that their skills of being super smart and being able to do this problem solving in their head, as well as intuition has kept them out of their body.

And they, if I can be so bold, really quite suck at feeling at first when they come to see me. And it’s one of the reasons why they are in the predicaments that they are in, because they are tuning into their symptoms as something to resolve and to solve from their brain perspective. And yet intuitively or innately they know that’s not the way to do it. But they just don’t know how, because they haven’t been trained or tuned into their body.

Now to set context for this and why this might be an obstacle is that many of my clients, they were born into the world smart and intuitive, but they were also utilizing those characteristics from a compensatory way.

So for example, they may have been teased on the playground, for example. Or maybe they were in a family with an alcoholic and they needed to be smart in order to get around certain scenarios. Or they needed to be on high alert and really tune into some of the subtler symptoms or signals to know that they needed to get away in order to protect themselves.

So then they can develop this high vigilant state, which isn’t necessarily intuition, but it can blend into pushing their intuition into a certain direction. So these can then be compensatory strategies, which aren’t nourishing at all. But it’s why they end up focusing where they do, because they are techniques and tools they’ve used to keep themselves safe.

So part of my job then is to recognize how they’re utilizing their skill set. How they utilize their intelligence, their ability to analyze and be logical, and how they’re utilizing their intuition. Because when I notice how they use it, it’s a very effective way for me to support them in the process. Because I’m not telling them at all to not do those things.

In fact, I want to help hone their ability to feel themselves so that they can utilize their intuition and they can utilize their analytical and logical brains to even serve the world and serve themselves even more. It’s much like someone who’s very driven and ambitious, I’m not asking that person to stop being driven and ambitious. In fact, I want to use their ability to be driven and ambition to get themselves out of the predicament, out of the pain scenario, out of the symptom scenario that they’re in.

So I want to set that first as a context because a lot of what I teach can seem and kind of appear to be meta in nature, like it’s a bigger picture view. And then as I drill down, you get an understanding of some of what’s feeding my bias or feeding the granular detail of what it is that I do.

So this is coming from the perspective of working with clientele who are very analytical and logical, also are highly intuitive, but at first sort of suck at feeling and feeling where their body is at. Maybe it’s an interoception concept. Maybe it’s a proprioceptive concept. Maybe it’s a real fear of actually feeling for all sorts of reasons that they have learned as they’ve grown up. There’s tons of reasons. But that’s the first and the context that I want to set.

The second is, is when I’m supporting someone in this process of feeling, there’s two key arenas of feeling that I’m addressing. One is emotional and then one is physical sensations. When I talk about emotion, I mean things anywhere on the spectrum from happy, joy, relaxed, calm, to stressed, fearful, angry, sad, melancholy.

I mean, there’s gazillions of emotions out there, but I really do mean the emotions and what they are. First of all, naming the emotion and then where that emotion is felt in the body. So it’s like the emotion has a vibrational quality that is experienced in the body. Sometimes people feel it in their solar plexus, or around their heart, or in their face, or on their foot, or in their guts, or the pelvic floor, even really directly the anal sphincter. I mean, you could feel emotional vibration really anywhere in your body.

You can also feel physical sensation. And physical sensation can simply be that, like there’s an ache in your back. Or there’s a spaciousness in your belly, or there’s a grippy or braced-ness in your rib cage. Those physical sensations may or may not be correlated to an emotional vibration.

So early on in my work with people, I help them to be able to discern between what’s an emotional vibration and what is a physical sensation. Because when we recognize that, the physical sensation, most of the time, can be impacted by a biomechanical change. Whereas emotional vibration is more something to be with. And I can get more into detail in a future podcast and I probably will. But there’s a real discernment.

Now, what’s interesting is as we become more biomechanically in tune and more biomechanically balanced, what you’ll also find is that there’s more emotional stability. And so the ability to feel emotion, that’s what I mean by emotional stability, the ability to feel emotion and feel the vibration of that emotion just becomes more and more easy to experience.

There’s also discernment too, and there’s a better alignment, or better containment, or better connection with ourselves and into our feelings. We also can discern if we need more support outside of the world of yoga. You might realize that you need more medical support or more psychological support.

So as you get clearer on these feelings you really can discern, “Okay, do I need more support to be able to navigate these or to process these or to support myself to digest through whatever it is that is arising?” But when you have that understanding, that discernment, it’s much clearer to be able to make a choice.

So then what we’re playing with then, first of all, is this contextual piece of people who are super smart, able to logically and analytical pull together information and then deduce what to do. And then there’s this intuitive piece.

And then the missing piece, often, for where people start with me is being able to tap into this feeling and being able to discern between emotional vibration and then physical sensation. And being able to discern that really helps move the boat forward. Because when we are able to get clear on emotion, we can start to see how emotion and physical sensation really fuel the actions that we take.

I see a lot of people who have been to a lot of professionals. And I know a lot of those professionals and they’re good at what they do. And the exercises or the techniques or the tools that they’re offering to their client, for whatever reason, is not landing. And then as the client and I continue to work, what we start to realize is that there is a shutting off of feeling and there’s a whole lot of doing.

So the actions are being fed by a real lack of connection. And what I have noticed over almost a 30 year career is those people who are cut off from feeling and listening to their body, the actions that they take are just a whole series of doings, and it doesn’t really land.

And I like to say that the quality of our action really does come from the quality of our ability to feel. So the more able someone is to be able to discern those emotional vibrations and the physical sensation, the more they can discern whether the actions they are doing to support themselves are helping or are not.

Because if you don’t have a baseline of what that physical sensation or that emotional vibration are to discern those, then you have no idea if the actions that you’re taking are actually being supportive. That’s where you get sort of caught up in that top line symptom conversation and getting fixed. And if it’s not going away, well then eff it, F bomb. That thing doesn’t work.

When in reality, you’re not really sure if it actually works because you didn’t really have a real baseline from which to go with. When you have that baseline and then you can really determine how your actions are impacting that from a real place of understanding your patterns, then a lot more change can happen. And you can get a much clearer understanding of if the result that you’re getting is the result that you’re wanting.

So the bottom line then, is this third piece is we’re seeing how our emotion and our feeling and our physical sensation really drives the action. And the quality of our action stems out of our quality of being able to discern and our quality of connection with the feeling state of ourselves.

Then this leads to something really interesting, because as you’re able to work through those three phases I’ve just spoken about, you’ll start to become clearer on your own reality. And how, whatever your emotion or physical sensation is, there’s a neutrality that comes with it, that you just realize the humaneness of who you are.

So prior to recording this podcast, I was working with some private clients. And each of them had emotional responses inside of our sessions. And I was okay with all of them. One person was mad at her symptoms, another person was thrilled, another person was sad. And I could be with all of it because I just recognized the human who is having the human condition.

We have a spectrum of emotion, we have a spectrum of feeling. And what’s interesting is it’s not being shut off from it, but it’s just recognizing the humaneness who’s having a human experience. When I can demonstrate that, when I can be a model of that possibility for someone of seeing the neutrality of it, then what interestingly starts to happen is the person, the client, then has less stress over their own experience. They start to see the neutrality of their experience.

It’s like when I first started out in my career, I would tell the groups that I would teach like, “Listen, I need you to tell me what you feel.” Because I really believe that all sensation is good sensation. Even flare ups of pain is a good thing, because at least we know what’s happening and we can address it.

So whether something that we perceive to be bad happening, or whether something we perceive to be good happening, both are good because that’s information from which we can make a better choice. And so the same thing happens here, is that the more that we can really get clear on what’s going on in our world, the more we just understand our human experience and the human experience. And we can just give ourselves a little bit more slack, have a little less stress, have a little more compassion.

And I’m not just saying that from like being euphemistic and as I like to say, putting chocolate over top of caca, I mean that for real. And when we can get into that place, there’s just overall a lot less tension. We still might not like where we’re at, we still might want to have change. But that excessive layer of “Ugh” starts to fade away.

And it’s really interesting the connections that clients like mine start to make. Because remember, as I’ve mentioned, my clients are super smart. They know how to pull together disparate pieces of information. So when I can support them into this arena where they can feel so much more clearly, so much more cleanly, and see how that is driving them in their actions, see how that is leading to the results that they’re having, they really begin to see the power that they have for themselves. They themselves can be the part that’s the difference maker in their situation.

Which is really cool then because then what starts to happen is that they own, or I like to say claim, what I like to call their inner authority. Some other people call it inner compass or inner wisdom. And they really can take on their own recovery and healing process, which really is what recovery and healing are all about. It’s a reclamation of a part or a piece or some part of ourselves that is asking for that reclamation, that is asking for transformation, that’s asking for evolution.

And that’s what’s really interesting, so that symptoms really become this knocking on the door saying, “Hey, hey there, we want your attention. Will you please give it to us?” And then we can work through this process of connection and of re-connection to really support you in the direction that you get to go.

So there are four things that I mentioned on this episode. The first is to recognize that if you’re someone who is highly intuitive and you’re very logical and analytical, you know how to come up with solutions very effectively. Whether it’s with conscious logical awareness or not. And then to recognize that you likely have have a gap. And that’s partly in feeling your body and the emotional vibration. And being able to distinguish between physical sensation and emotional vibration that’s being experienced physically.

And then to be able to take that discernment into noticing the quality of your action and how you’re taking actions, the exercises or tools or techniques that you’re doing. And are you doing it in the mind space of what your emotions and what your feelings are? Because your feelings and your emotions really do generate that.

And then how does that then lead you to really having this really profound compassion and neutrality to your situation? And that’s really where the healing starts to kick up a notch. It’s super fun.

So if this interests you, if it gets your your juices going around, huh, this is fascinating. This idea of recovery and healing, where we’re working with the body but we’re integrating the mind and body in such a specific and profound way. Then you will love Healing and Revealing Human Potential.

And this is my lifetime membership program, where you’ve got a whole curriculum that helps you really connect into your body, to your mind to really discern what’s actually going on inside of you and be able to connect the dots. So you hone your super smart, logical brain, your intuitive capacity together with the ability to feel.

And as well inside that program we have weekly calls, experts, speakers that really help bring these concepts to life. To access that send us a note to [email protected]. I would love to be your guide. Take good care.

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