Somatic Healing & More with Anda Nix

Today’s episode is one of those conversations that stays with you long after you’ve listened. My guest, Anda Nix, is an intuitive somatic life coach, postpartum doula, and the founder of Cauldron Coaching — and she’s someone who has walked through the fire of chronic pain and come out the other side with a deep, embodied wisdom. 

Anda opens up about the years she spent navigating pain, the unexpected trip to Mexico that cracked something open in her, and the health crisis that forced her to slow down and finally listen to her body. That turning point pulled her toward breathwork… meditation… somatics… and eventually into the world of postpartum doula work and nervous system healing. Over the past decade — while living with both autism and ADHD — Anda has gathered a toolbox of practices that help highly sensitive and neurodivergent women shift from overwhelm into lives that actually fit them. In this conversation, she explains the power of energetic sovereignty and introduces the Mother STAR Method for grounding, discerning what’s yours and what’s not, and staying open without losing yourself. 

And she’s wonderfully practical. Anda walks us through simple somatic tools like the “pleasure sandwich” and the “Blue Pyramid,” designed to bring safety, softness, and calm back into your body — even on the most overstimulating days. She’s also offering you a free module from her upcoming Mother STAR course, so you can begin experiencing this work firsthand. 

Settle in, take a breath, and let this conversation remind you that your body is not the obstacle — it’s the doorway. Let’s dive in to Call IT in!!! 

The LoveTuner
The Lovetuner is a simple flute is considered to be the vibration of love and compassion.

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Transcript

Today’s episode is one of those conversations that stays with you long after you’ve listened. My guest, Anda Nix, is an intuitive somatic life coach, postpartum doula, and the founder of Cauldron Coaching — and she’s someone who has walked through the fire of chronic pain and come out the other side with a deep, embodied wisdom. 

Anda opens up about the years she spent navigating pain, the unexpected trip to Mexico that cracked something open in her, and the health crisis that forced her to slow down and finally listen to her body. That turning point pulled her toward breathwork… meditation… somatics… and eventually into the world of postpartum doula work and nervous system healing. Over the past decade — while living with both autism and ADHD — Anda has gathered a toolbox of practices that help highly sensitive and neurodivergent women shift from overwhelm into lives that actually fit them. In this conversation, she explains the power of energetic sovereignty and introduces the Mother STAR Method for grounding, discerning what’s yours and what’s not, and staying open without losing yourself. 

And she’s wonderfully practical. Anda walks us through simple somatic tools like the “pleasure sandwich” and the “Blue Pyramid,” designed to bring safety, softness, and calm back into your body — even on the most overstimulating days. She’s also offering you a free module from her upcoming Mother STAR course, so you can begin experiencing this work firsthand. 

Settle in, take a breath, and let this conversation remind you that your body is not the obstacle — it’s the doorway. Let’s dive in to Call IT in!! 

Speaker Dar 

Hello, and I'm so excited to have you with me in “Call IT in” today, and before we get started on our terrific topic, how about telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got to the point you're at today? 

Speaker Anda 

Yeah, thank you, Darla, thanks for having me so I used to cry every Sunday and most days before I went to work. And I was like, I just didn't…. I was so overwhelmed with my life. I had tried so many things to fix it, and I had fixed a lot of things, like, for example, I used to deal with chronic pain. This is actually how I got into somatics. I used to deal with chronic pain, and I did all of the things that people do when they have pain, and nothing helped, nothing worked. So I started seeing a somatic coach, a somatic life coach, and she invited me into a relationship with my pain, and honestly, Darla, I thought she was crazy. I was already feeling crazy because I was still going to work and doing all of the things and trying to deal with the pain, but it really was life changing. It shifted so many things. The next time the pain came, I just greeted it and I started listening to it, listening to my pain, and it actually had a lot to say. So I don't, I don't deal with that pain anymore. That somatic coach is the reason that I became a somatic coach. But even with those tools, you know, even with things like this, developing a relationship with my body, I still, I still didn't have the tools to deal with my life. I actually went on a trip to Mexico for 10 days, and by the end of the 10 days, I felt like I'm completely different person. I didn't even recognize myself. I was so like, I just had this joy. I was expansive, I was calm. I didn't even know that kind of calm was possible. I had forgotten about that calm and just that place of really, like being present within yourself. I had gone to the ocean every day, and then when I got home, things just seemed like they snapped back. Things went back to normal so quickly, and it was so disheartening.  But I realized then that things can be different.  And I had, you know, come through this experience with the chronic pain, and I knew that I could do hard things. And then shortly after the trip to Mexico, I had a pretty big health crisis. It really shattered me. And I just, I was determined and sorry, let me back up. I don't think the health crisis needed to shatter me, but I was already so overwhelmed. And, you know, I just was in a place where I don't know it's a place that I that I don't have a lot of a lot of words for honestly, but I feel like a lot of people, when I talk to them, they resonate with this place where it just feels like your soul is Being like shriveled away and you're losing yourself. That’s the place that I was in. And so when I had this health crisis, this health issue, it really, yeah, it really just shattered me, and it didn't need to. And so that was, that was really so like the Mexico trip and then the health issue really compelled me on this journey of like, something has to change. I can't keep living this way. So I started. I started doing things like breath work, meditation therapy.  It's been, it's been a real journey. So, like, for example, I was like, okay, so I was working a job that I hated, and I realized that I needed to, you know, I just needed a different job. So I trained as a postpartum doula. A number of years before that, I had trained as a birth doula. The birth doula work didn't really work with my schedule, so I trained as a postpartum doula, and I started working under two different midwives, and I was still working my full-time job, but I I started, I realized that, like I was, I was good at this, and there was something really healing about doing this life-giving work. And there's actually a really big coaching component. There was a big coaching component for me and my postpartum doula work. I did a lot of listening, a lot of deep listening to women in their birth stories. And I also did training, and then worked as a patient advocate in the world of sexual assault, so just sitting with people right after they had a crisis, and obviously, like pretty big coaching component in their deep listening required, I learned how to hold space really well in the world of patient advocacy and sexual assault. And I'm saying all of those things because I feel like they really contribute to where I am now and to the work that I offer. People want to be seen and people want to be heard. And I really developed those skills as both a postcard and doula and a patient advocate. 

Speaker Dar 

Yes, people want to be seen and they want to be heard bingo. So tell us a little bit about how semantics help a person be seen and heard, and our title has and more. So I'm sure you'll go into that as well. 

Speaker Anda 

Yeah, so the starting place really is you. That's what I've really learned for myself, and that is really what it what the shift when I, when I, when I I learned that, and I'm still learning that, and now I teach people that, and I've been teaching people that the starting place needs to be you and yourself. So that's why it's called somatics and more, because there's a whole bunch of tools that, that gets you there, not just somatics. So I realized that one of my problems was that I'm highly sensitive. I identify as neurodivergent. I actually have a couple of neurodivergent diagnoses, and one of my issues was, and is that, actually, I don't really consider it an issue anymore, but my sensory gates work differently than neurotypical people. So for a neurotypical person, I have, like, a hand illustration that I do for this, that I can't do because this is a podcast. But your sensory gates, as a neurotypical person, like, if you just visualize, like, two gates opening up, they just open up a little ways, and there's like a filter in there, and they the filter evaluates whatever the input is, and then it lets it in, or doesn't let it in. So for neurotypical people, or for neurodivergent people like me, our sensory gates are bigger and they just open wider. And I. When I, for many of us, myself included, like my sensitivity was not honored or trained when I was a child, and so that really is the source of all of the overwhelm that I was experiencing that most of my life I just felt like overwhelmed, and I would cry, and I had all of these patterns and ways of being that I realized were a result of this, but I, you know, most of most of my life, I couldn't identify that, and so I, Over a decade, have basically retrained my sensory gates. So if your sensory, if your sensitivity was not honored when you were a child, and if you weren't trained in how to, how to, if you were expected to just act like a neurotypical person, which, which many of us are in, which I was then like your sensory gates are going to go a little wonky, or maybe they're jammed, or maybe they don't close all the way, or  maybe they open way, way too wide. So somatics, which is we should just define the term here. Somatics is basically just awareness from the inside out. So we have lots of different ways that we see the world, and this awareness from inside of us is one of the ways that's often neglected and not trained. So somatics is just one piece of the puzzle, the puzzle that I put together in retraining my inputs, so somatics is just developing a relationship with your body. So anytime you have a big emotion. Anytime you have something going on in your life, even a small emotion, you can identify a place in your body where you feel that emotion. And it could be warmth, tingling, um, any there's no there's not a wrong sensation here. There's nothing. There's not a wrong way to tune into your body. So somatics is, like I said, a piece of the puzzle, a piece of this coming back to yourself, I like to use the words personal, energetic sovereignty, which is basically just honoring you for who you are and allowing that to like that honoring of yourself to flow out of you and from that place, then you interact with everything else that's around you. So I actually have a course coming up Dar where I teach all of this stuff in the first two modules are not somatics at all. The first two are the mother STAR method, and then eat an energy medicine, basics. And both of these are methodologies that it's really like the foundation or the beginning for retraining these inputs and these sensory gates, but they are modalities that help you to ground, protect, clear out what's not you recharge, start to balance your energies, and really start to live from this inside out place that really is the place that I live from, and that I help others to learn to live from, is inside, inside out, feeling safe from the inside out for so much of my life, Darla, I did not feel safe. I did not know what safety was, and I've realized that safety starts inside of me, and so the first two modules of my course really help you begin, because it's a journey, right? I am passionate about passing on these tools that I've learned to other people, but everyone's in a different place, and everyone is on their own journey. So we're going to start to or no, we're going to learn how to start feeling safe, safe in our bodies, safe in our own spaces. So. That's why we're calling it somatics and more, because the more is the learning how to protect and cleanse our own space, learning how to use intuition as a I don't treat intuition as a guess. I treat intuition as a disciplined skill set, and then, for me, the animal also includes things like trees, boulders, devas and nature spirits. I've learned so much from trees and boulders. I know it might sound weird, but if you've never sat with a tree, if you've never talked with a tree, I encourage you to just go sit with a tree for 1015, 20 minutes and just listen, trees have so much to teach us about, I mean, so many different things specific, specifically about stability and safety and presence and being still. So okay, so when I talk about, or like, when you ask about, how did I get from, you know, to where I am now, it's, it's really been a gathering of tools, a gathering of modalities to understand why I was where I was, which is this sensory overwhelm I was, at one point, diagnosed with sensory I don't know even what it was called sensory something disorder. It was basically like; my sensory cup is really small. It's this thing I'm talking about with the gates. It was like, my sensory cup just got filled up really, really quickly, she said. And that is so much more common than one might think. It seems like the more people I meet that have gone into some type of energy healing, the more likely they are to be labeled ultra-sensitive, extra sensitive. 

Speaker Dar 

 I know I was labeled a really unusual one, environmental allergies. So that means my gates were letting in everything. So let's talk about some client transformations that have occurred by using semantics and more. 

Speaker Anda 

So I have a client, and I'll just call her Barb. I'm actually just gonna read you the testimonial that she wrote, because I feel like her words are just sorry. I have it pulled up here and my computer is not doing what I'm telling it to do. I'm not sure why or what's happening. I'm really sorry. 

Speaker Dar 

Okay, well, why don't we come back to that? I know you have an activity to lead us through. 

Speaker Anda  

Yeah, I do. I just wanted to, okay, yes, I do have an activity to lead us through. I just wanted to lead us through a really basic somatic exercise. This is kind of the, just the place that I start with everybody. Some people you know, some people that I work with, have years of working with their bodies and developing somatic awareness, and some people don't. Some people are where I was 10 years ago, and don't feel don't have much of a relationship with their bodies at all. Can't really feel their bodies at all. So, so I'll just so Dar let's just go ahead and if it feels right, and if you're in a safe spot, go ahead and close your eyes and draw your awareness to your feet. 

Can you feel your feet?  

Can you feel one foot more than the other foot? That is really common to be able to have or to have more sensation in one foot than the other foot. 

Can you feel your individual toes? 

I had a client one day who was really startled because she couldn't actually feel her individual toes. So if you can't, it's totally fine. This is right now, just an awareness exercise. It's for information, so no judgment about the information that's coming up. So now draw your awareness to your seat. What are you sitting on? Now draw your focus to the top of your head,  and draw your awareness now back to your feet. 

Has there been any shift? 

And so that is one of the exercises that I wanted to share with you. Is it okay if I do another one? Dar, okay, so this next one is called the pleasure sandwich. This is one that was like when I was really in the depths of life where I was crying every Sunday and crying, you know, most days on my way to work, and then crying after work. That's not an exaggeration. It was intense. But this is one that would just like, pull me out of that, like, despair. You know, I would sometimes just get in these moments of despair. So the pleasure sandwich is from a modality called Organic intelligence. And honestly, like, if I'm in a good state, this practice doesn't do a lot for me, but if I'm not in a good state, this is wonderful. So it's really simple, you orient to something neutral in your environment, and then you find something pleasurable or beautiful in your environment, and focus, just focus on that beautiful thing for a moment, and then reorient to the neutral thing and do it three times, or maybe do it six times. For me, when I was in those moments when I was really struggling, it was really, it could be really difficult to even find a beautiful thing in the beginning. And that's how I knew, like, that would really tell me, like, what my state of mind was if I couldn't find, you know, the beautiful thing. So that's the organic intelligence pleasure sandwich. 

And I'd like to do one more. 

This is a part of the mother STAR method. The mother STAR method is, there's a lot of pieces and parts, so we're not going to do all of it. We're just going to do one thing, it's called the blue pyramid, and this podcast is coming out right before Christmas. So this is a really great one for those of you going into holiday parties, Christmas dinner with the family, with the extended family. This is just a really great way to give yourself an extra layer of protection as you're going into those situations, and maybe you sometimes feel dysregulated, or you lose your calm. The blue pyramid can just maybe feel unsafe. The Blue pyramid can help you feel safe and calm. So everybody experiences these things a little bit differently, but I'm very visual, so I'm just going to use visual language. And if you work with me, that bell that you hear is my cat. She sits with me for all of these things, she's like my little energy worker cat. So the blue pyramid. Sorry, that's my ADHD brain coming out there, but the blue pyramid is just a really great way to bring yourself back to A. Place of calm and to protect yourself. So I was talking about visuals so I'm more visual, so I often use visual language, but if you work with me as a coach, I make sure to understand your way of meditating or doing these things, and then we adapt it. But I'm going to go ahead and use visual language. So again, if it feels safe, close your eyes, and I want you to visualize a blue pyramid. 

The there's a blue floor to the pyramid and then four blue walls that come to a point up above your head, and the blue is see through to transparent blue, And the walls and the floor are impenetrable and indestructible. So it's really strong, it's really really safe, and 

I want you to go ahead and put yourself inside the blue pyramid and just allow yourself to be safe and to be held. 

And we'll go ahead and just do the next part, which is the blue mist. So now there's a blue mist inside the blue pyramid, and the blue mist is just clearing out what isn't serving you or what isn't you. So if you're in your holiday party and you're feeling that overwhelm, you're feeling that tension, you're feeling that anxiety, you can just allow the blue mist to take it away, to dissolve it, and allow yourself to be held and safe inside the blue pyramid. And that's just a simple, super simple, super easy thing. Nobody needs to know you're doing it that you can do to just give yourself an extra, extra layer of protection as you go inside into your holiday parties, 

Speaker Dar   

What a great idea, and such wonderful timing for this to be out in December for the holidays. Could you tell us a little bit about the gift that you have for our audience? 

Speaker  Anda 

Yeah, thank you for asking. 

Speaker Dar 

So the gift is actually the first module of the class, the course that I'm taking at Newgate sanctuary. So the first module is the mother STAR method. If you resonated with that blue pyramid, lots of people I've taught, I've taught the mother STAR method to lots of people. And I actually want to give credit where credit is due. It was developed by a guy named Steven Webb. He lives in Scotland. He's really great. So the mother STAR method is a way to help to protect yourself, ground yourself, and for those of us who are highly sensitive and neurodivergent, it's a way to start retraining those sensory gates. And it's not about fear. That's one of the things that I do, that one of the feedbacks that I get sometimes, like, people are like, well, is this because you're, you know, you're afraid, like you're afraid of what's out there. You're afraid of, of, you know, what's coming at you, and it's, it's, no, no. It's not about fear. It's just about honoring our own sensitivity and our own different ways of interacting with the world as neurodivergent and highly sensitive people. Um, so my free gift is basically Module One of the class I have coming up. It's not, it's not a deep dive. It's more of, it's a little bit of a shortened version, but we're just going to go over the mother STAR method. I'm going to teach all, all of the pieces and parts of the mother STAR method. So I'm really excited to share that with people. It's something that I personally do every day. I do it first thing in the morning. If I don't do it, I notice a huge difference in my day.  So I'm really solid to share that with people. Yeah, it's and there's the and one of. The beautiful things about it, Darla is it can be adapted to you can adapt it to what however you want. You might hear me do it, and you're like, Oh, I love that piece of it. Well, that's great. You take that piece and you make that piece work for you. Yeah, so I guess won't say any more about it than that 

Speaker Dar 

Well, great, and we will have the information in the show notes so that everyone who wants to get that beautiful gift can receive that. So we're just going to wrap up here, and I'm wondering if you have something else that in these last couple minutes that you're willing to share or called to share with our group. 

Speaker Anda 

Yeah, I'm sorry that I wasn't able to share a patient story. My computer still isn't doing what I wanted it to do, I can't pull it up, so maybe I'm just not supposed to share that. Yeah, is there anything else I wanted to share? I guess just what I wanted to share is that if you're neurodivergent or if you're highly sensitive, you are not broken. You are not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. 

Speaker Dar 

Yes, and you're here to help them come back to themselves. I like that you're here to help them honor who they are. 

Speaker Anda 

Yeah, yeah, honor who you are, and use that really, as a starting point, getting to know yourself, honoring yourself, being able to stand in presence and in your own energetic sovereignty, and then using that as the like, basically the starting point to interact with those around you, to really move forward on your soul's path, to live a life without that horrible overwhelm, without crying every Sunday, without crying, you know, in the weekends, without drowning in your to do list, 

Speaker Dar 

yes, yes. So important. Thank you. Thank you. What a blessing it's been to have you with us today. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai