Living a Life in Balance - PODCAST

Licia Sky on Embodied Trauma Healing: Insights from a Near-Death Experience and Psychedelics

• Abdullah Boulad

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Licia Sky, Co-Founder and Global Ambassador of the Trauma Research Foundation which she leads alongside her husband, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk; joins Abdullah Boulad on Living a Life in Balance to explore how healing begins when we reconnect with the body and learn to hold both joy and grief with compassion.

Licia shares moments from her own journey, including a near-death experience that transformed her understanding of life, love, and presence. She reflects on the power of embodied awareness, how the body remembers what the mind forgets, and why slowing down is essential to finding balance.

Together, they discuss the future of psychedelic therapy, the importance of integration and guidance, and how music, movement, and community can help us return to ourselves.

🔗 Tune in for a deeply human conversation about embodiment, trauma, and the art of coming back to balance.

About Licia: 
A somatic educator, artist, and bodyworker, she guides individuals and trains professionals in using movement, voice, mindfulness, and creative expression as tools for healing and connection. With over 40 years of experience as an artist, musician, and therapist, her approach weaves together polyvagal theory, parts work, and the latest research on trauma and the body.

00:00:00 – Early Trauma and Spiritual Experience
00:02:06 – Journey into Trauma Work and Meeting Bessel van der Kolk
00:04:24 – Intuition and Listening in Healing
00:05:58 – Childhood Mysticism 
00:07:34 – Multicultural Upbringing and Identity
00:12:03 – Generational Trauma and Family History
00:14:16 – Spiritual Experience at Age 12
00:22:34 – Integration and Search for Understanding
00:26:16 – Improvisation, Self-Learning, and Creativity
00:27:34 – Bodywork, Flashbacks, and Validation
00:30:40 – Working with Challenging Clients
00:33:48 – Lessons in Humility and Human Connection
00:35:04 – Intuitive Bodywork and Therapeutic Boundaries
00:36:47 – Meeting Bessel van der Kolk and Relationship
00:43:28 – Role at the Trauma Research Foundation
00:46:50 – Psychedelics and Ketamine Therapy
00:53:37 – Importance of Integration and Individualised Care
00:58:16 – Cultural Differences in Mental Health
01:05:05 – Singing, Vulnerability, and Healing
 
For further mental health information and support, visit The Balance RehabClinic website: https://balancerehabclinic.com/ 
 
Follow Abdullah Boulad:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdullahboulad/ 
https://www.instagram.com/abdullahboulad/ 
 
Follow Licia Sky:
https://liciasky.com/index.html 
 
You can order Abdullah’s book, ‘Living A Life In Balance’, here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/... 
 
Follow The Balance RehabClinic:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/thebalancerehabclinic/

Licia Sky 00:00:00  I didn't think I had the possibility of being a happy person. I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. I had a deep spiritual experience.

Abdullah Boulad 00:00:10  Can you share with us what exactly happened?

Licia Sky 00:00:12  I had seen the word suicide. I was trying to leave the life that I was living. And I demanded that God take me back. I came into the trauma world because I was doing body work. And then I met Bessel van der Kolk.

Abdullah Boulad 00:00:31  How did you meet?

Licia Sky 00:00:32  It's a cute story. I don't like the idea of being an important person. Really. I like the idea of being a human being. I have a practice of being what I know. We're also really interested in psychedelics. I actually have a really nice voice.

Abdullah Boulad 00:00:53  Would you think something for us?

Licia Sky 00:00:55  No. I can't believe you're asking me to sing now.

Abdullah Boulad 00:01:04  Welcome to the Living a Life and Balance podcast. My name is Abdullah Bullard, and I'm the founder and CEO of the Balance Rehab Clinic. My guest today is Leisha Skye, somatic educator, artist, and co-founder of the Trauma Research Foundation with Bessel van der Kolk.

Abdullah Boulad 00:01:21  In this episode, Alicia shares her deeply personal story from growing up in a home marked by generational trauma to a near-death experience at the age of 12 that forever changed how she saw the world and her purpose. In it, we explore the healing power of touch in trauma recovery, the promises and pitfalls of psychedelic and ketamine therapy, and the differences between Eastern and Western perspectives of mental health. At the end, Lisa sings a song and invites us into a moment of embodied presence through her voice. I hope you will enjoy. Alicia. What motivated you to do what you do today?

Licia Sky 00:02:06  When you say what I do today, there are so many different things. I came into the trauma world because I was doing body work, and I. I'd been doing it for a very long time. And then I met Bessel van der Kolk and my hands were tired. I'd been doing hands on work helping people process not just their physical tensions, but somehow helping them connect unexpectedly with their emotions. Much more so than I expected when I first started doing body work.

Licia Sky 00:02:49  I was told, you're not a therapist. You're a massage therapist. Don't talk to people. Yes, but I had a lot of freedom to improvise and a private practice. So I would move, I would breathe, I would do vocalizing with people. You know, very much following my intuition and trusting that that was enough and it was enough for me to have a very full practice. And then I put my younger son through college with my hands and my hand said, okay, that's enough. And when I met Bessel, I'd been thinking about different master's programs and integrative health and mental health. And I said, well, maybe I should go off and become a therapist or get a master's degree or a PhD. And, you know, he loved me talking about what I did. And he said, no, they'll ruin you. So, he said you have to teach what you know. Yeah. And I've been teaching with him for 13 years now. And. You know, over the years, really evolving and finding language for what had always been a wordless practice for me, finding words for what I'd always felt was intuition.

Licia Sky 00:04:24  And I don't really know what science has to say about intuition, but for me, it's a process of listening. And I've been helping people to learn how to listen to themselves in the workshops that we teach. It's been a journey for me. It's been like part of a spiritual practice for me. I, I don't think I could do this if it wasn't my personal practice first. It's how I've always connected internally with myself, as a way of listening to the people and the bodies that I was working with when I did more hands on work. But it's also how I connect with people when I'm teaching a workshop, or when I'm speaking in front of an auditorium full of people, or if I'm working with someone one on one, or even sitting here with you, I'm doing my best to stay in my body, listen to the sensations that tell me how I am and how we are. It's been a process of more openly becoming who I've always kind of quietly been.

Abdullah Boulad 00:05:43  I can I can feel a presence.

Abdullah Boulad 00:05:46  Certainly. Yeah. What what you're talking about. Have you always been that way or has this been developed through your practice, through your experience? Growing up.

Licia Sky 00:05:58  I think I've always been attracted to mystical things, but I'm not a religious person. I think that difficult experiences where you don't have other people to lean on, if you're lucky, you find a way to find something inside yourself that you can connect with. And I think I've always had that. I've always had a sense of wonder, and wonder feels atmospheric. It doesn't feel like. It doesn't feel like something in a movie or something. You would maybe you would see it on television and be wondrous. But wondrous for me is is like another dimension of reality. Yeah, I so and I should say I, I started my earliest years were actually in England in this area okay. And in Banbury. And so I had a lot of connection with nature and the outdoors and this misty kind of climate and, and, I had a freedom of solitude.

Licia Sky 00:07:16  I would say that maybe, maybe kids nowadays in a modern world don't have as much of that. I wasn't looked over constantly, so I had a lot of solitude.

Abdullah Boulad 00:07:29  As a child.

Licia Sky 00:07:30  As a child? Yeah.

Abdullah Boulad 00:07:32  How how did you grow up?

Licia Sky 00:07:34  My dad was in the military, and, he was a black man from the South Side of Chicago who grew up under very tough circumstances. And His parents came from the Deep South in America. His father's family came from Mississippi, and they were sharecroppers, and I'm quite sure they were slaves before they were sharecroppers. And I haven't delved very much into, you know, the genealogy of that. I didn't have access to knowing, like, family records. I have some, so I know some names and when they were born. But I haven't pursued it more than that. and my mother was a Japanese war bride. Okay. And so I was born on an Air Force base in California, and then my father was shipped over here. So, I identified as a British person.

Licia Sky 00:08:41  This was my place. I loved. I loved the gardens. I loved The tiny village that we lived in. The hillsides covered with sheep, had a British accent. When I came to the United States as a six year old. Okay,

Abdullah Boulad 00:09:02  How long? How long have you been in the UK?

Licia Sky 00:09:05  I'd been there from 1 to 6.

Abdullah Boulad 00:09:08  1 to.

Licia Sky 00:09:08  6? Yeah. Which is, you know, a very formative time.

Abdullah Boulad 00:09:13  Yes. And then you moved back to the US.

Licia Sky 00:09:15  We moved to an Air force base in the US. I think the military was much more segregated than I understood when I was young. the part of the base that we lived in was all people of color, and I just thought that was what the world was like. There were a lot of wives from Korea and Japan, and there were black soldiers and Native American soldiers and and some white soldiers and and we were just we were just a neighborhood that was very mixed. And I thought, that's what the world was like.

Licia Sky 00:09:57  And then in order to get a promotion, my father was told that he could only be promoted if he went to Vietnam. And he'd been in World War two and he'd been in the Korean War. And he said, no, that's enough. And so he retired. And, then we were moved into a very tumultuous time because it was the late 60s and we he was going to university. He, he started his schooling here at Oxford, actually taking classes part time. And then, then he went to university and it was a black inner city neighborhood where the student housing was, and a black inner city school that was very divided. And and there was a lot of fighting. And, it was such a strange place to be because suddenly where I had just been one of those normal mixed kids on an Air Force base, I was thrown into a very black and white world where suddenly people were saying, what are you, what are you? What are you? And wanting to fight because I wasn't one thing or the other.

Licia Sky 00:11:22  my parents decided to move to a very good school system that happened to be a very, very white school system, and we desegregated the school system. My sister and I, we were like the first non-white kids to go to the school. And, And so I had another experience of not really fitting in. Of being so strange that people would want to touch my hair or ask me where I was from pretty much every day.

Abdullah Boulad 00:12:00  Like a stranger in that in mind. Oh yeah.

Licia Sky 00:12:03  Yeah. And the United States, when I was born, interracial marriages were illegal in many states, so there were still miscegenation laws on the books until 1967. At the time, that was just the way the world was. But I look back on it now and I just have this immense historical context for all of that as being part of what formed me. my mother came from a lot of trauma because she lived in Tokyo as a young child and her family was from Tokyo, and she survived the firebombing of Tokyo and was separated from her family.

Licia Sky 00:12:53  She was sent up into the mountains with a grandparent and didn't see her immediate family for about ten years.

Abdullah Boulad 00:13:05  Wow. That long?

Licia Sky 00:13:06  Yeah. Both of my parents were really, really intelligent, creative people, but also because of the traumas they had are very reactive. I, you know, I grew up not knowing what PTSD was. It wasn't even a diagnosis when I was growing up, but I certainly lived with it. I could say that I'm a product of intergenerational trauma on both sides of my family. if you're a child of parents who've had a lot of trauma and they don't understand what it does to them, then they don't understand how to change the most volatile parts of themselves. and I can have a lot of compassion about it now, but I was a very angry kid. I had a lot of. You could say it was a huge crisis, you know?

Abdullah Boulad 00:14:04  Yes.

Licia Sky 00:14:05  There there got to be a point, because we were the only non-white kids. And I think my sister had a little bit better time of it, but I still had a British accent.

Licia Sky 00:14:16  I wasn't white. and I just come from a couple of really violent years in an inner city school system, and so I was a real fighting kind of kid. very reactive myself, much like my parents were. and I didn't think I had the possibility of being a happy person. I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. Because of that crisis, I had, a deep spiritual experience that, changed my perspective a lot, made me understand that it was okay to be different, made me understand that, that I had something very meaningful to bring to the world. And that experience sort of became my talisman or my milestone, my thing to measure where I was in the world against this vision that I had of who I was going to be, and even falling into bodywork was part of me listening and thinking, well, is this how I'm going to be who I'm supposed to be? Is this how I'm supposed to help people? Is this how I'm supposed to help bring light into the world? What? And so it was very purpose driven as a kid.

Abdullah Boulad 00:15:55  How old were you there?

Licia Sky 00:15:57  I had the experience when I was 12, and I found out pretty quickly that I should never talk about it with anybody, because it was such a strange thing, and I didn't want to be locked up or anything like that. I think I just gave myself permission to know it on the inside, secretly for a long time. And and there are a lot of things that I valued about myself that I kept secret for a very long time. Like, I, I love to sing and I actually have a really nice voice, but I never sang in front of Any buddy except my dog. When I was walking in the woods for a very, very long time. And so I know a lot's made of of magical thinking in children as being inconsequential or that it isn't real. But there is a way that my sense of magic and wonder about me was the most important thing in my life, and it wasn't something that I let go of when I became 6 or 7 or whatever.

Licia Sky 00:17:10  It was just my secret part of my identity. And I would say it's not such a secret anymore.

Abdullah Boulad 00:17:19  Yeah. Can you share with us what exactly happened, what this spiritual experience was exactly?

Licia Sky 00:17:27  I had seen the word suicide. I'd seen references to it in movies and, I knew that it was something that could be done, and I knew that there were different ways to do it. And I was a curious child, and I was also somebody who was good at doing things. And so I was trying to leave. I was trying to leave the life that I was living because I knew it was wrong, and I didn't want to be messy about it. So one winter night, after a really, really miserable experience with my parents, I closed my door and opened the windows to my room and lay on my bed in the freezing cold. And I could see my breath, and I demanded that God take me back. And it was sort of lying there, freezing cold with my fists clenched.

Licia Sky 00:18:37  Just angry. Angry that a god that was supposed to do good things in the world could put me in the situation that I was in. Yes, and I think I had the kind of belief in knowing that children are able to have that many adults don't have. And I suddenly wasn't in the cold anymore. I was warm, and I felt myself surrounded by light, and I felt myself rising through a tunnel of colors and seeing pictures, like moving pictures that were scenes of my life and feeling warmer and warmer and less tense and less tense and more. You know, somebody might have said that I'd fallen asleep and they might have not been wrong. But I rose through this tunnel and emerged into. It was almost like the centre of a galaxy, and there were just so many lights. It was like, if you've ever seen the sun in the sky and it refracts and you see all those colours around it, and I know you're not supposed to do that because it's not good for your eyes. But if you could imagine a sky that was completely filled with suns just like billions and billions of them, that's what it was like.

Licia Sky 00:20:14  And it wasn't hot. It was warm and it was brilliant. It was just dazzling. And all the lights were flashing and refracting, and I knew that I was one of them. And I was welcomed, not with words, but I knew I was welcomed and I knew I was loved. And I thought, oh, I'm home, I'm home. This is where I want to be. And then I was told, no, you actually have to go back. That was confusing. And I was given a life preview that was even more detailed than my life review was. There's so much of that that I don't quite remember, but I saw myself in the life that I have now. I'm traveling the world, really. I saw the planet Earth wrapped in lines of light, like a ball of yarn. And I was told that all those lines of light were me traveling around the world. Then I sort of got poured back into my body again. And that's a lot to have happen to a little kid.

Licia Sky 00:21:32  Yeah. And, I had no idea how much time had passed. And when I walked out the door, it was as if the rest to the rest of the world, nothing had happened at all. Even though it seemed like so much time had passed, I was sort of expecting everything to be very different than it wasn't. But what was different was me. I just became a very independent person. After that. I came back filled with so much energy and so much inspiration, and I. I didn't know what I knew before that experience and what I had gained after that experience. I've since read that children who have this kind of experience take a lot longer to integrate than adults do. adults tend to have a much clearer before and after.

Abdullah Boulad 00:22:33  What to do?

Licia Sky 00:22:34  But kids learn everything by osmosis, so I didn't really know. I just knew that I knew things. I went off to college very early. I got accepted when I was 15 and I left when I was 16 and, then didn't do that.

Licia Sky 00:22:52  I went on this very non-linear, circuitous path of just, you know, it was the 70s and 80s and people were hippies and they were macrobiotic and doing natural things. And I just kind of ran into that world as much as I could, and meant I met a lot of really interesting people, and there were people who were meditating, and I went seeking people who would understand the experience that I had.

Abdullah Boulad 00:23:26  Okay.

Licia Sky 00:23:27  I went seeking, different meditation groups. Hoping that somebody would know what had happened to me. Nobody really understood what had happened to me. They really didn't. I got into political movements and feminism. I was really looking to how do you help people? How do you make the world a better place? How do you how do people do this? The questions that I was asking, maybe I didn't form them in the right way, I don't know, but I've taken a little bit from every place that I've gone. I became a macrobiotic cook for people who are dying of cancer.

Licia Sky 00:24:09  I became a body worker, I practiced yoga, I had a couple of kids, I, I went to college for a year here and then dropped out and went to college somewhere else for a year and did something else.

Abdullah Boulad 00:24:29  Why did you change? Or try new things? Because. Because of trying. It was not a fit. You quickly figured out it's not the direction you. Well, you know, for.

Licia Sky 00:24:42  My dad, being a black man who came from real poverty, his accomplishment in life was that he got a master's degree. His first master's degree was in economics, and he'd studied psychology. And, you know, my parents were very well-read, very creative people. they had so much going for them and so much trauma that got in the way of them fulfilling everything. And probably a lot of racism got in the way, too. So they expected me to go further than them. And when I was 16 and went to college for the first time, I studied what my father wanted me to study, which was Economics? Yes.

Licia Sky 00:25:27  And it felt like the most dishonest thing in the world to me. Oh, I was. I was horrified, I was shocked at what they were saying money was for. And why you should have it and who shouldn't have it. And how to manipulate who had money and who didn't. And I, I just thought no this isn't for me. I can't do this.

Abdullah Boulad 00:25:51  Okay.

Licia Sky 00:25:51  And then they, they were sort of steering me towards being a lawyer or something, and I, I was a weirdo. I was a really strange kid. I wasn't going to be able to do that. And I just I didn't have enough experience fitting in.

Abdullah Boulad 00:26:07  Your, your experience you've had with 12 gave you some purpose, but you needed also to make the experience to get there.

Licia Sky 00:26:16  Oh, I've had so much experience. Every single experience that I've had everywhere has built on the next Experience. and every experience that I've had, I've been an improviser with. I've been a, a self learner, a self educator, a self practicing.

Licia Sky 00:26:42  And, I've had to trust my ability to improvise. Trust my ability to integrate.

Abdullah Boulad 00:26:52  Yes.

Licia Sky 00:26:53  And I guess some people would call that creative. I didn't even know that that was creative. I didn't even know that that was intuition. That just was what I was.

Abdullah Boulad 00:27:03  You said something interesting before. It's about the listening. and and I assume you, you meant not just listening with, with what someone has to say, but also to the body, to the expression to, oh, in combination with the work you have been doing as a body worker. Yeah. Was body work, like, the, the experience you, you have built which has shaped to the most today.

Licia Sky 00:27:34  It wasn't until I was in my late 20s when I started having flashbacks when my kids were small, I, I'm guessing that many people have flashbacks when they have kids who are the age that things happen to them.

Abdullah Boulad 00:27:50  Yes.

Licia Sky 00:27:51  And when I started having flashbacks about the things that happened to me in childhood, I started remembering my spiritual experience much more vividly.

Licia Sky 00:28:02  And by coincidence, there was an article in a newspaper about a gathering in a town that was hours away from where I lived, but when I saw it, I had this very, very urgent, strong need to go to that meeting. So I drove for hours, Ours left my kids behind with my then husband. And it was. It was like I was being called to be there. I was so powerfully drawn because I'd wanted for so long to understand it. And then when I got there and there were all these people who'd had the experience, then I was like, oh, no, maybe I don't belong here because these are people who died in car accidents, or they had a heart attacks and they were going around in a circle saying what happened to them? And then it was my turn to say, and I just burst into tears thinking, do I really belong here? And this, this little old man with white white hair and brown skin and bright blue eyes and very wrinkled but just beaming, smiling, walked up to me and he said, I just want you to know this really happened to you and it was validation that I needed to just own it and not question it anymore.

Licia Sky 00:29:28  And, for a little bit, I joined a support group for people who'd had experiences like mine, and they were saying, well, what are you going to do? What are you doing to be who you saw in that vision? And I said, well, I'm good with my hands. I grew up doing massage on my mother's shoulders when I was little, because that was part of Japanese culture. We did things like walked on each other's feet and massaged tents. So I knew that. But I thought, there's something in my hands that might be a good thing. And so I let myself follow that, even though I didn't have any training in it, like professional training. And as soon as I decided I wanted to do that, then suddenly there are all these massage therapists who wanted to send their most difficult clients to me. And that's the thing, getting people who are challenging to work with, and having the patience and curiosity and openness to make it safe for them to have a good experience.

Licia Sky 00:30:40  And I was really good at that.

Abdullah Boulad 00:30:42  Challenging? You mean.

Licia Sky 00:30:44  Challenging, demanding, difficult temperaments. Difficult personalities. you know, again, I didn't have any experience with the professional mental health world at all, but these were. Oftentimes very needy, self-centered people. Sometimes they were very affluent and, powerful. And sometimes they were very accomplished Professional people who and I learned something from working with every single one of them. And one of my favorite clients was a very well-known hand surgeon. And every time I would work on him, he would say, what's that muscle you're working on there? Is that the levator scapula? And he'd kind of test me, and I'd go home and I'd study a little bit more so I could talk with him more. And it amazed me that, People would open up and trust me so much. There was something about me that as a presence was. Open and didn't have any judgments about what I was seeing or who I was meeting that made it really safe. I understand that now.

Licia Sky 00:32:17  What I didn't understand back then was how much respect some of these people that I respected had for me. I thought, well, you know, I haven't even finished college. What am I to them? I'm just a pair of hands. Yeah, but that wasn't actually the case. And there was somebody who who I had assumed was not a high level professional person, and we just had this very friendly rapport with. And then it turned out that she was this very powerful head of a children's unit of a hospital. And as soon as I found that out, I had about five minutes where I lost my voice and was afraid to talk to her. And I thought, that's not fair to her. That's so not fair to her, because there's so much friendship here and so much safety here for her. And if I took that away from her. That was going to be hurting her. So I had to decide not to be intimidated by her position.

Abdullah Boulad 00:33:31  Okay.

Licia Sky 00:33:31  That was a big lesson.

Abdullah Boulad 00:33:33  When you look back to that time.

Abdullah Boulad 00:33:35  You know, you mentioned they had a lot of respect to you. Why do you think? Because there is a discrepancy obviously between how use so yourself and and how others.

Licia Sky 00:33:48  I think there's still a discrepancy between how I see myself and how others see me. and I think that's okay. I, I don't like the idea of being an important person really. I like the idea of being a human being.

Abdullah Boulad 00:34:06  Yeah.

Licia Sky 00:34:07  And I think that's the most important thing I am as a human being. And I think that's the most important thing anybody is. So I think that was the thing that people really loved and opened up to was that I was a human being.

Abdullah Boulad 00:34:23  And your humbleness, I believe your humbleness, your presence, your your calmness and, maybe also not being any, non-judgmental to to those people in today's world.

Licia Sky 00:34:38  Yeah. I, I had no, no preconception of what anybody was supposed to be. I did listen to my hands. I mean, when people would say, how do you know how much pressure to use? How did you know to put one hand on this shoulder and the other hand on the hip? And I didn't have that kind of mechanical biological training.

Licia Sky 00:35:04  It was all just following and listening. Eventually I did go and do enough hours to get a license when licensing was a big thing. It was really about what felt good, what felt right. I had a sense of feeling what does connection feel like? And I had a way of reaching in until I felt the body push back. And that point of resistance became one of the things that I always listened for, not to go beyond that and not to not to miss that point. And I think I think therapeutically that's that's the place, that's the the edge, that's the place where the discomfort is that you don't have to push anymore. Then that's the place to listen for and where I could feel that connection back to my core when I reached that place in the person that I was working with, because I don't really ever try and push anybody past that point, whether it's emotional or physical.

Abdullah Boulad 00:36:23  Knowing their limits.

Licia Sky 00:36:24  Yeah. Well, feeling that connection. Core to core, spirit to spirit, energy to energy, where the person who's being worked on can feel something that they weren't able to feel before.

Licia Sky 00:36:39  Yep. Does that make sense?

Abdullah Boulad 00:36:41  Oh, absolutely. Yes. We see this very often in our also daily practice.

Licia Sky 00:36:46  Yeah.

Abdullah Boulad 00:36:47  Something I'm wondering is also how did you meet your, current husband, Basil? How did you fell in love?

Licia Sky 00:36:57  It's a cute story. It's pretty wild. because there's always been this thing in the back of the mind that. Oh, I had this big spiritual vision. I'm supposed to meet somebody, I'm supposed to meet somebody. And then I think to myself, well, maybe that's because I've read too many fairytales. Maybe that's really not supposed to happen. Maybe that's not part of the vision. Maybe I'm supposed to be alone. and I didn't meet Bessel until I was 52.

Abdullah Boulad 00:37:31  Okay.

Licia Sky 00:37:32  And maybe you've heard the story. I don't know, but we met in a laundromat.

Abdullah Boulad 00:37:36  This.

Licia Sky 00:37:37  Year. Yeah. he was just a big person with a big presence who kind of connected with me and said, let's go to the coffee shop a couple doors down from the laundromat.

Licia Sky 00:37:56  And we had a cup of coffee, and he started talking, and I started talking, and he was asking me what I was doing, and somehow it just Everything made a lot of sense. We were talking about synchrony and how people nod with each other and understand each other and. You know, he'd he'd been teaching in some of the places that I had attended as a seeking person, and I'd never met him. I'd never heard of his name. And I'm really grateful for that, because I probably would have been very intimidated by him. you know, he was just a regular person that I was having a cup of coffee with. And, and he liked my stories about body work, and we we just had a lot to talk about. And, it was pretty early on in knowing each other that he said, no. Don't go to school. They'll ruin you. So, and that that was actually a hard thing to swallow, because I'd spent so much time looking for the right thing to learn, to just go, oh, I already know it.

Licia Sky 00:39:28  I'm supposed to teach this? I don't even know what it is I'm teaching. I have a practice of being what I know and inviting people to explore being that's, you know, who knows, maybe. And I don't think it should be codified.

Abdullah Boulad 00:39:51  Yeah.

Licia Sky 00:39:51  Just like there are people who write cookbooks and then there are people who cook.

Abdullah Boulad 00:39:57  Correct.

Licia Sky 00:39:57  And you can read a lot of cookbooks, and they're wonderful to read.

Abdullah Boulad 00:40:01  To another cook.

Licia Sky 00:40:03  But the thing is that when you go to the market you're gonna look for. What's the fresh thing that's exciting. What are you. What are the things that I can play with? How can this aubergine go with this tomato? How can. And and then you have a sense of time and temperature and flavor and smell and it's it's it's not going to be the same no matter what you do.

Abdullah Boulad 00:40:36  Yeah. But that's also your creativity and your presence with, with the ingredients.

Licia Sky 00:40:43  It's a matter of trust. It's a matter of trust and it's a matter of also.

Licia Sky 00:40:50  I'm never quite sure exactly what's going to come from it. You know, people come into the kitchen, they'll say, can I help you? And I'll say, I'll try and say, yes, but I don't know Until.

Abdullah Boulad 00:41:06  No. I. I fully understand. I mean, if I, if I think about my wife and myself, I cannot. I cannot cook. Based on a cookbook. Yeah. So I check what we have or what what looks good and tries to create something out of it. Right? Right. Where? My wife, she she tends more to be like, let's. This is the plan. Let's do this and this, then this than this. But I cannot do that.

Licia Sky 00:41:32  Some of my my worst cooking disasters have been from trying to follow a recipe. And I'm sure I have friends who cook beautifully from recipes. I'm just that's not my talent.

Abdullah Boulad 00:41:46  And then future. Maybe robots will do this for us.

Licia Sky 00:41:49  I hope not. I hope not. You know, I don't think a robot can smell.

Licia Sky 00:41:57  I don't think a robot can hold something in its hand and feel if it's ripe or not. Maybe they can do that. I don't know, but you know, does a robot have a heart that gets excited when they smell an orange and put it with cinnamon and ginger? I don't know, but.

Abdullah Boulad 00:42:16  Do new combinations, right. Right.

Licia Sky 00:42:18  And play. And I you know, it's interesting because I have looked at AI and said, you know, what do you do with this, this and this and, and what it does is it aggregates a lot of recipes, but it's not the same thing as knowing with excitement and joy for yourself. And it's there's a level of vulnerability and trust in just being willing to listen to what you feel and move with that. So I It's not creative. Like like I've got a plan that I've got. It's it's more like I'm following listening lists.

Abdullah Boulad 00:43:12  Right. And listen to yourself.

Licia Sky 00:43:14  Yeah.

Abdullah Boulad 00:43:15  What about the work you you do with Basil and the foundation? how how are you involved there? And what's the latest research and work you're doing?

Licia Sky 00:43:28  I'm not a researcher, but I have many things that I wish researchers were looking at.

Licia Sky 00:43:34  The whole sensory world, how we experience ourselves and experience the world around us, our senses. And I think we have many, many senses. Not just touch and sight and smell and hearing. The work that is coming out of Bruce Lanius lab is really, really exciting work because they're talking about sensory processing and proprioceptive awareness, which is spatial awareness and sense of balance, vestibular awareness. And I think the awareness of our maps of felt sense that are imbued with meaning are a next step in understanding how we move with reality. You know, we there's all this stuff happening around the default mode network and their sense of identity, your your habitual sense of identity. And I think those are important things because people who've been hurt can develop habits of identity that can be very limiting and circumscribing and and contribute to habits of reactivity when there isn't something that's dangerous to be reacting to. But felt sense goes beyond all of those things. It's a way of being in the world, and it's such an abstract thing that I don't.

Licia Sky 00:45:15  I don't know if I would know how to talk about it with a researcher, maybe more a philosopher or a monk or a some kind of spiritual visionary might have more of it. Maybe it's kind of a Zen thing, but this, this idea of beingness, of awareness and consciousness as a way of moving and interacting with the world, interacting and creating a life, being fully alive. I think that's the thing that Bessel and I are experientially dancing around. Okay. and that's what I try and bring in experientially for people who come to our workshops, our little groups, which we don't we probably don't have enough energy to do more than we do. And I wish there were more people ready. there are different ways to be, and we have habits that can point us in the directions of the chairs that we're sitting in, so that we're not looking around and seeing what's around us and not feeling how our bodies can move differently. Yeah. I'm trying to get us out of our recipe way of existing into more of a being, way of being.

Licia Sky 00:46:50  And it's interesting because we're we're also really interested in psychedelics and in the United States. Ketamine is a legal medicine. Yes. And, you know, the other medicines that are being researched, even ones that, you know, when I first heard that psychedelics were being researched, I thought, oh, acid LSD, that that's a dangerous one. They shouldn't do that. I was so naive, I didn't know. I just bought into all the propaganda of the 70s.

Abdullah Boulad 00:47:28  Most people would think so.

Licia Sky 00:47:29  Yeah. And and especially as a person of color, that was like a no trespassing sign that I was never going to walk past. but the embodied awareness work that I do now has been a very powerful part of doing integration work for people who've had psychedelic experiences. And, I don't think there's enough research yet around what it means to do integration. I would like to see a lot of that. as part of my training, I did have to take ketamine as a psychedelic. And, when we were first learning, they were saying, oh, you know, the drug will do it all.

Licia Sky 00:48:21  The drug takes away your depression. You don't have to have therapy if you're taking this drug. And we found out that people were being hooked up in clinics, I'm sure there are nice clinics with nice furniture and, you know, but people are being left alone. And, in the first training that I went to as a student, I did the maps training first, the maps training for people of color who were training to be MDMA therapists, but I'm not a therapist, so I didn't want to pursue that as a therapist because I didn't want to get a degree.

Abdullah Boulad 00:49:05  Yes.

Licia Sky 00:49:06  But in the ketamine training that we did. I am a sensitive person, so I don't need very much. I just needed a tiny bit to have a huge experience. And I thought, oh, this was pretty nice.

Abdullah Boulad 00:49:22  We tried. You tried yourself, psychedelics.

Licia Sky 00:49:26  And I tried a ketamine dose as part of a training that I was in to learn about it. And there were 36 people who were body workers or doctors or therapists who were all in the room together.

Licia Sky 00:49:41  And so we paired off in 18 pairs and took turns sitting for each other, first with low dose and then with higher dose. In that particular Killer training. The one where I had this huge experience with a tiny dose. There were people who had been running IV clinics who needed very, very high doses and weren't feeling anything and were feeling very frustrated. And, vessel had been invited to lecture about trauma for that workshop, and they made space for me to do a bit of embodied awareness for that same workshop. And the next morning, one of the people who'd taken a really high dose and had not had very much experience came up to me in tears and said, I don't need a higher dose. I need what you're doing. And I went and talked to the the leader lead facilitator, and I, I told him what she'd said to me And he's. He agreed, and he invited me to come and teach in all the workshops, which was, you know, he didn't have to do that.

Licia Sky 00:51:01  Yes. I think that was a stretch. Probably would have been a stretch. But he's a very, very open minded person and and a dear friend now. and he just said, come on, you're a colleague. And so I've been teaching in these workshops, teaching embodied awareness and learning from people who do things differently. It's not about blasting somebody off into the stratosphere. It's about opening a person to themselves. I think everything that happens in a psychedelic experience is something that you somehow carry in you, and maybe you carry inside you cosmic things that you're not able to be aware of until you open those doors. But you also carry painful things inside you, maybe that have been too painful to look at otherwise. I've been finding from some other teachers that really, really tiny doses where you you might not hallucinate anything, you might not see colors, but you might feel vividly the feelings that you didn't know you had. I've had people on a very, very low dose thinking they wanted to work on one thing, suddenly going and go, oh my gosh, I love my mother so much.

Licia Sky 00:52:25  I didn't know how much I loved my mother. And suddenly they're weeping about all the painful, complex things that happened with their mother. But it's at a dose where they have the ability to speak clearly and remember their experience and come back and process it in a different way With some level of compassion and understanding for themself and whoever they've been able to meet. And then I've also met people who, you know, have heard about my work and said, I think I need your help because I had a really, really bad trip 20 years ago and I've never gotten over it. I've I've had this whole inside me since then. I've felt like a ghost. I've been terrified. I've felt like I've been living in a fog all this time. And it it doesn't take very much to help a person like that integrate and meet the thing that they were terrified of in that experience, and come to a new sense of relationship with himself.

Abdullah Boulad 00:53:37  What I, what I hear is it's promising, but it's still an early stage to understand what the dosage, what's the correct dosage is, for what type of people and and certainly what what I hear from you is that it needs to be integrated as well.

Abdullah Boulad 00:53:55  Oh, yeah. integrated in a, in a, in a more a holistic approach, body integration, psychotherapeutic integration. And this is actually in line with what we experience. We get particularly from the US clients coming into Europe. They tell us, we have tried I've tried ten ketamine infusion sessions and it didn't help. Yeah. Why did it didn't help because it was just provided isolated.

Licia Sky 00:54:27  Right.

Abdullah Boulad 00:54:28  and not integrated. as what what you're explaining right now.

Licia Sky 00:54:33  I, I can't say enough about how I don't trust standardized, especially not for not for psychedelics, but I, I don't really I don't think you can standardize mental health. Maybe you can standardize a recipe, but you know, even with a recipe, a ripe tomato is very different from a tomato. That's not.

Abdullah Boulad 00:54:59  Right. Absolutely. That's why we we have to look at it individually, because it's like cooking locally with local products. It's different. It's not one size fits all right.

Licia Sky 00:55:09  The idea of leaving somebody alone in a room with an experience that can be that big.

Licia Sky 00:55:15  I just didn't feel responsible for me. I could never do that. But we were teaching one place and I was talking about how I really feel strongly that, preparation of intention, of holding space, of practicing, having proximity, eye contact, no eye contact. Voice. No. Voice. Hand holding. Pressure. No pressure. All of those variables. They all mean something. And they mean something in the context of your relational history. With other people and with yourself. I wouldn't expect that a standardized dose was automatically going to take care of a depression. And as I was saying these things during the break, this woman came up to me and she said, my husband has been in a terrible depression for ten years, and our daughter died in a car accident. And he went and he had therapy and he had antidepressants and he had electroshock therapy. And finally he went and had ten sessions of ketamine, and they gave him the first session, and it didn't seem to do much. So they gave him more and they kept giving him more and more and more.

Licia Sky 00:56:46  And three days after the last session, he killed himself. Wow. And. It's such a devastating story. You know, I can't say that he wouldn't have committed suicide anyway. Maybe he tried everything he could try. But to say that this is going to be a new gold standard, this is going to fix you like any other drug is going to fix you. I just I think people aren't machines.

Abdullah Boulad 00:57:26  That's why it's so important to do proper research and understand what helps, what doesn't help, or what it's what's the right amount and mix.

Licia Sky 00:57:34  But that that ability to be present, to listen and respond and know what you are feeling Inside and what you are holding in. Perceiving in another person. Because quite often, especially in the high states, that people get sent into their wordless states. And so you have to sense into as much as you can the person that you're holding space for. They're going into the ultimate of vulnerability, to be able to know what's right. As best you can.

Abdullah Boulad 00:58:16  Mental health is becoming more and more a big topic in the world. But there are also cultural differences. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you come from different cultures. Yeah. How you grew up and also the Japanese eastern culture. How do you see the differences between the Western world and let's say, the eastern culture? You have, got to know.

Licia Sky 00:58:38  I think the. modern Western educated world does not have so much permission to be spiritual anymore. Does not have permission to be vulnerable and wondrous and not know. We live in a world where experts are supposed to tell you what to do, and you're not supposed to know what to do or try and do anything without the permission of an expert, or until you yourself become an expert. you know, and and it's ironic that I'm paired with Bessel and worked so closely with Bessel because he is, like, the world's expert on trauma, and I'm the antithesis of an expert. Although people are starting to put that label on me, I really don't like it at all.

Licia Sky 00:59:36  I would rather have that sense of not knowing and that sense of exploration. I think that's that's maybe what Bessell was really attracted to me is that sense of not knowing. I think he really does hold a lot of that, not knowing that. Let's see what happens. Let's let's explore this. Let's find out more. and for me, that's where the wondrous ness is. For me, that's where the fullness and aliveness of being is.

Abdullah Boulad 01:00:14  like empowering the individuals and not make them dependent on someone or a concept.

Licia Sky 01:00:22  You know, there's a collaborative aspect to this, too. It's not like I just only want to rely on me alone. There's a really beautiful part of agency that has to do with being able to do something that makes things better. Do something that makes things beautiful. Do things that help other people to feel good. Or, you know, I love to garden. I love to cook, I love to make things. And and there's a way that when you do those things, you have this possibility of connection.

Licia Sky 01:01:00  You have this possibility of play, you have this possibility of collaboration. Bessel told a story recently in a lecture where he said, you know, as a medical student, he saw a lot of really, really traumatic things that if he'd felt helpless about, he would have been traumatized by. He saw a young child with burns over three quarters of their body. And if if he'd just seen the child and not known what to do and not had the training to do it. He just would have been horrified. Yes. But he, as this medical resident, had the training, had the know how and was able to do something that was actually the right thing and the effective thing to do.

Abdullah Boulad 01:01:54  Yes.

Licia Sky 01:01:56  so that that kind of agency also comes into play. And I think that's part of having meaning in your life, being able to do that. And I think that's a spiritual thing. That's that's an aspect of purpose.

Abdullah Boulad 01:02:13  I'm wondering, what do you do in your daily life to stay in balance?

Licia Sky 01:02:18  Oh, gosh.

Licia Sky 01:02:19  Well, I would be lying if I said I were always in balance, right?

Abdullah Boulad 01:02:24  No one.

Licia Sky 01:02:24  Is.

Abdullah Boulad 01:02:25  No one. Try to balance out.

Licia Sky 01:02:26  Always in balance. But what I have more and more and more and more and more and more is this capacity to come back into balance, to come back into repair? You know, I can have days where I feel absolutely terrible. You know, and I get a cold or we have an argument about something, or I make a dish that doesn't taste so great. you know. but I practice what I teach. What I teach are the practices that I live with when I'm up on a stage. Teaching. I'm teaching what I practice, and I practice it because those are the things that I have to be aware of, that I have to listen to that. Keep me connected with my center. Keep me connected with my sense of balance. Keep me connected with my capacity to slow down. I have a very busy life. We travel an awful lot.

Licia Sky 01:03:39  Yeah. And despite my best efforts, it seems to be getting busier. So sometimes the most delicious thing is when I get to step on to a stage and sit in a chair and practice and meditate. You know, it used to be that I would sit up on a stage and see all those people in my heart would be pounding and my hands would be sweating, and I would start to practice and everything would slow down. Everything would slow down. Now my heart doesn't pound so much. But sometimes, you know, because I'm not an expert and because I'm doing things that to me don't look like much. You know, you're feeling your bump.

Abdullah Boulad 01:04:26  And fear for others.

Licia Sky 01:04:27  I yeah, it's meaningful for others. But what are we doing, really? we're not doing very much. You're paying attention to your breath. You're paying attention to the sensations in your feet. And and I think to myself, well, doesn't everybody already know this? And maybe they do, but it's really nice to just.

Abdullah Boulad 01:04:51  Remind.

Licia Sky 01:04:51  Them space and time to do it in.

Abdullah Boulad 01:04:54  You have a you have a good voice you mentioned before. Yeah. When was the last time you have you have sing a song for for anyone.

Licia Sky 01:05:05  I did a workshop in Paris last week, and, I was doing vocalizing and vocal practices, and I always appreciate when people are brave enough to say that they don't like something. I never expect everybody to love what I'm inviting them to try. Yes. Because when I work one on one with the most traumatized people. They usually hate it. and this man came up and said, I felt so ashamed that everybody else was having so much fun and enjoying themselves, and I hated it. And it was like, wow, can we do a piece of work?

Abdullah Boulad 01:05:53  Yeah.

Licia Sky 01:05:57  and I invited him up onto the stage, and we did a piece of work around that. And he was he was really teary, and I didn't have a lot of time to work, but I could feel all his grief coming up around this and all this shame coming up around not being able to enjoy something that other people were enjoying.

Licia Sky 01:06:21  And I, I realized that, you know, we have moments where we encounter great joy, like a wedding, or people singing really joyously and beautifully together. And quite often I'm brought to tears. And I was thinking, well, what are those tears? And I realized right alongside my joy is often the grief of what I didn't have, and I was recalling the spiritual traditions of the blues and how people sing when they're feeling pain, and how sometimes singing when you're feeling pain makes you feel better, right? So I sang a little bit of that. I sang, The Motherless Child. I only sang of.

Abdullah Boulad 01:07:20  Would you think something for.

Licia Sky 01:07:21  Us right now? I can't believe you're asking me to sing now. Yeah. Well I need to sit differently. Okay. It's a very simple song. I learned it from the Sufis when I was seeking in different meditation groups. And I changed the words because some of the words were like an Islamic prayer. And it's not that I don't respect that.

Licia Sky 01:07:59  I respect it really deeply. But I wanted it to be accessible to anybody and from any tradition. So. So you'll have to learn to sing it with me.

Abdullah Boulad 01:08:14  I will try.

Licia Sky 01:08:16  So it goes.

Speaker 3 01:08:17  All I ask of you is forever to remember me as loving you all I ask of you is forever to remember me as loving you. I hold you inside my heart. I hold you inside my heart. All I ask of you is forever. To remember me as loving you.

Licia Sky 01:08:51  And you can go around and dance and dance with that song.

Speaker 3 01:08:55  Oh.

Abdullah Boulad 01:08:57  Thank you so much.

Licia Sky 01:08:58  You're so.

Abdullah Boulad 01:08:58  Welcome. It was such a pleasure to have you here today and share with us your life and your life story. And I enjoyed very much your presence. And I'm pretty sure you you will be a presence for so many other people out in the world.

Licia Sky 01:09:16  It was a joy to meet you. And you pushed me to go where I didn't think I was going to go.

Speaker 3 01:09:23  Thank you.

Abdullah Boulad 01:09:24  Thank you for coming.

Licia Sky 01:09:24  Thank you, thank you.