Create, Automate & Scale
Tune into this inspirational, straight to the point, relatable content for entrepreneurs to help you mastermind the everyday hassles, give you business tips, networking opportunities, shameless money talk, and scaling secrets.. Created to support Coaches and Course Creators to help you take action, stop trading dollars for hours, and explode your business. It's time to hit that 6 figure ... and Beyond!
Create, Automate & Scale
Somatics for Autistic Entrepreneurs With Cheryl Folland
In today’s episode, I’m thrilled to welcome Cheryl (they/them), a Certified Trifecta Alchemist and neurodivergent entrepreneur who’s passionate about creating trauma-informed and inclusive spaces for healing and growth. Cheryl empowers clients to tap into their full potential through a unique blend of Neurosomatics, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and gender-inclusive practices.
Tune in to "Somatics for Autistic Entrepreneurs" as we dive deep into the transformative power of neurosomatics and its role in helping autistic entrepreneurs regulate their nervous systems, reduce overwhelm, and bounce back from burnout and overstimulation.
If you’ve ever felt stuck or disconnected, this episode is packed with insights and tools to help you thrive. Let’s get into it!
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Welcome to Create Automate and Scale podcast. I'm your host, sophie Reilly, an automation nerd, business strategist and CEO and founder of the VIP Hub. If you are an entrepreneur looking to create more impact, automate your system and scale your business, you're in the right place Today. I am so, so excited to be joined by Cheryl to have Cheryl on the show, one of my absolute favorite human ever. We are tackling such an interesting topic. Cheryl, who uses the pronouns they, them is a certified trifecta alchemist and a neurodivergent entrepreneur who's passionate about creating trauma-informed and inclusive spaces for healing and personal growth. Cheryl empowers her clients to unlock their potential through a unique blend of neurosomatics, emotional freedom, technique and gender-inclusive practices. Hi and welcome to Create Automate and Scale podcast.
Sophie Riley:Tune in to this inspirational, straight-to-the-point, relatable content for entrepreneurs to help you mastermind the everyday hassle, give you business tips, networking opportunities, shameless money talks and scaling secrets Created to support you, to support coaches and course creators just like you, to help you take action, stop trading dollars for hours and explode your business. It's time to hit that six-figure and beyond. Let's go. In this episode, we are going to tackle somatics for autistic entrepreneurs. We'll dive into the transformative world of neurosomatics and how it can help autistic entrepreneur like you regulate your nervous system, reduce overwhelm and bounce back from burnout, meltdowns and overstimulation. If you've ever felt stuck or disconnected, this is the episode for you. Let's get into it.
Cheryl Folland:Welcome. My name is Cheryl and I use they them pronouns. I am the owner and creator behind Queer Alchemy. It's a metaphysical brand that is designed for one-on-one and group coaching, mentorship and spirituality in a way that is accessible for neurodivergent folks, gender diverse folks and people with different physical abilities. Today I'm going to share with you how somatic practices helped me, as an autistic person, gain confidence, moving through overwhelming situations. Confidence moving through overwhelming situations, combating and limiting autistic burnout and rebounding quicker after a meltdown. I'm so excited that you're here. When Sophie Riley, my friend and internet bestie, invited me to share a teaching from an autistic perspective, I was stoked and a little intimidated because imposter syndrome creeps in there and you're like am I autistic enough? Because I'm articulate, and then we cast that out the window. So if you're here and you identify as autistic, regardless of whether or not you are clinically diagnosed, welcome. If you think you might be autistic, if you prefer terms like neurodivergent or neuro spicy, you're also welcome.
Cheryl Folland:Let's talk a little bit about the word somatic. So soma is where we're talking about the body. Whenever you hear the word soma, think body. So when you're on the internet and you see all of these different practitioners and service providers, and they're talking about somatic processes or neurosomatics. They're talking about the connection between your brain and your physical body when we start to bring in energetics. We're talking about the connection between your physical body, your brain, which is run on electricity, and the electromagnetics between you, your brain and the world around you, depending on the practices that you do yoga, kundalini yoga, meditation, sound therapy, any of these different practices that you've seen on the internet, that you've seen on social media, that you've seen practiced in studios around your community. They're all designed to take the different parts of our human experience and bring them back into integration, because for a long time, humans didn't live compartmentalized lives. We were one with nature and nature was one with us. Over time, society has evolved to compartmentalize people and it's putting stress on the nervous system and those of us who would have been knowledge keepers. We would have been the ones who predicted the weather because we feel it in our body sooner. We would have been the ones to alert others to danger because of a heightened sense of smell, heightened sense of touch, more sensitivity to physical environment like temperature. All of these things that are now considered autistic traits had functional uses in human evolution. Through the power of neurosomatics, we can increase or decrease the vibration inside of ourself and either invite or repel different energies.
Cheryl Folland:I know this might seem a little mystical and a little ambiguous, but I promise it's measurable by science. I want you to think for a moment back to grade school science, when they were talking about matter, molecules, electrons, protons, etc. All matter moves. It moves at a speed that cannot be witnessed by the human eye, but it can be measured by tools that have been invented and are continually being invented. Like. Isn't it cool now that they have cameras that can take a picture of your electromagnetic field? They've given color values to different vibrations and you can actually measure how far out from your body your electromagnetic field projects. Now, if you are the kind of person who can tell when an animal or a human being is looking at you without turning around and you've verified this because you turn around and sure enough they're staring at you welcome. You already have an awareness of your electromagnetic field.
Cheryl Folland:Kundalini yoga what I'm certified in, that I teach people how to do uses different postures with our hands and bodies, known as mudras and bandhas. It has breathwork patterns and mantras, or sound codes that change the vibrational pattern of our physical body, affecting the chakra system within our electrical body, and that has an impact on our electromagnetic field, our aura or our energetic body. Okay, so in trifecta alchemy, in queer alchemy, we focus on these three places, because mindset work for autistic people doesn't really work. We're often at the mercy of intrusive thoughts, we miscommunicate with others and even with ourselves. Sometimes Grasping rules that serve no purpose and change over time can be difficult, difficult. Mindset work alone often leaves less to be desired for autistic folks.
Cheryl Folland:However, being able to do a practice that moves my body, that has me in control of my breath, that has me using different things that give the satisfaction of stimming If you're new here, stimming is the term we use to talk about self-stimulating behavior used to regulate your nervous system so I get to use all of these things every day to support and anchor myself, and in doing so it has helped me go from a person who was hiding in my room, completely reclused and drawn away from social situations, from anything that had like an emotional, energetic taxation on me. I couldn't work in the workforce regularly because it was too loud, it was too much, the rules always changed and there was pressure to socialize instead of just go in, do my job, get out, and it led me to this place of isolation. It led me to this place of what is the point of life if all I'm doing is managing burnout and I never fully feel like I have hope to do anything without it being so costly. What is the point? Then I found kundalini yoga. I started with a practice that's very simple. You just sit cross-legged or on a chair with your feet on the floor. Cross-legged, or on a chair with your feet on the floor, you put your palms facing upward and your thumbs tucked in. Then you bring your hands together, palms up, pinkies towards each other and the meat of your hands are touching, and you touch them together, and as you touch them together, you say then you bring your hands back out, flip them over, bring them back in and hit the part by your bum and say hud, and you do that for three minutes, sitting with your eyes closed hud, hud, hud, hud, h, hud, hud.
Cheryl Folland:When I first started doing that practice, I thought this is silly. There is no way that slapping my hands together, sitting cross-legged on the floor and chanting a sound is going to change my life. At that point, though I was so desperate I was on antidepressants for an illness that I didn't have because I was undiagnosed autistic. I had started and stopped so many things that I was carrying a lot of shame and guilt. And I had seen that this had worked for my mentor, who was self-declared ADHD diagnosed from childhood. So what it allowed me to do was to see that someone else had gone and done this and had results. So I said what have I got to lose? I'm already sitting at home. Nobody's here to witness me feeling silly, nobody's here to witness my body making the sounds that it makes, to see what's difficult or easy for me. And I went into it. I let myself trust the process and now here I am, three years later. I'm certified in this modality.
Cheryl Folland:I spend my days mentoring and spiritually guiding folks just like me to find the fit of the tools for them that make them feel like they love the life they're living. What if simply adding something for 11 minutes every day had the potential to reduce your reactivity, had the potential to limit the length that burnout happens for you, and it had the potential to cut through the overwhelm in the moment that it's happening so you can say hi, body. We're safe. You're okay. I see you're overstimulated right now. Maybe we need to take a break. It allows you to own your agency and your power so that, instead of the world happening to you, you are happening to the world. That shift happens over time. It's not instantaneous, but it is possible.
Cheryl Folland:As an autistic entrepreneur, I had to let go of the idea of building a work schedule that I follow every single day and instead I had to allow a period of exploration. So for one year I tried the things that I wanted to try. I tried to launch the programs that I wanted to launch. I said yes to the clients that I wanted to work with and I listened to my body, and sometimes I had to cancel, sometimes I had to move things, but what I've learned is that my body is very affected by the sunlight and I live in Canada, so I no longer launch, create or host programs that happen between November and February, because I do not have the energy to do that. That is my hibernation time. I think of my energy similar to like a bear, where I start to build up all the things that I'm going to need during the winter and then I take a rest. I take a break from creation from everything except a certain amount of one-on-one clients on very specific days between very specific windows, and I haven't lost income doing that. I've actually increased it.
Cheryl Folland:The other thing I had to do in that year was find the tools that really supported me both in my business and in my life. So I'm a member of the VIP hub and I have been for a few years, and I had to allow myself to ask for help without feeling shame, to get things set up. Now that they are a client can find me on Instagram, click a link, download a free resource, take that entire program, get a series of emails that I already built from my heart that go to them, and then they enter into a funnel that literally takes them on a client journey At any time. They can book a one-on-one call with me, they can talk to me on social media or join my Facebook group, or they can go through the entire client journey through all of my programs that I have living in my library without me having to spend a single minute with them. It's still potent, it's still transformative and it still works.
Cheryl Folland:Wouldn't that be wonderful? Wouldn't that be wonderful if it could all be automated and it could be automated in a way that actually sounds like you. How supportive would that be? So that's one tool, another tool that I have, because autistic folks like me often have a hard time understanding what their emotion is.
Cheryl Folland:There's an app that I downloaded from the Google play store and I'm pretty sure it's available on um, like the Apple store as well. Um, you can download it. It's called how I feel, and what it does is it separates emotions into four color categories and you can click on the bubble and read what it is and see if that's how you're feeling and, if not, you can choose a different feeling. And what it's helped me to do is it's helped me to identify the emotion that I'm having, the predominant emotion that I'm having. Identify the emotion that I'm having, the predominant emotion that I'm having, whether it's high energy or low energy, and whether it's desired or undesired, because in my world there is no such thing as a good or a bad feeling. There's only information, and the best thing you can do, as an autistic entrepreneur or a person serving autistic folks, is learn how to read the information in a way that makes sense for you.
Cheryl Folland:So when I'm feeling all hummingbird-y like, I can't sit still and I'm flitting from thing to thing and I'm just saying words all over the place and not quite making sense. I know now. I know now that that's anxiety. I used to think that anxiety was something different altogether, but I now know that that's untethered anxiety. And I also know that I have a Kundalini Kriya that helps me physically move the anxious energy out of my body so that I can focus on the facts after so, what does that look like? It looks like me spending three minutes getting the physical energy up and out of my body and then sitting, in my case, with a journal or a voice note app and just info, dumping everything I'm thinking and feeling. And then I leave it for a while and go to a different room or a different location, turn on music, maybe have a bath. I physically leave the space that gave me the anxiety and revisit the notes I took once I'm feeling more regulated.
Cheryl Folland:We need to resist the urge to problem solve while we're in a trauma response. We need to resist the urge to find solutions to manage emotions rather than creating safety in our body, to be who we are, how we are when we are. That way, I would like for you. If you feel comfortable to close your eyes, please do. If not, that's okay. I'd like for you to sit. However you're sitting or however you're standing. Maybe you're doing the dishes. If you're doing something else, please, please just pause for a moment. Put a hand on your heart space and a hand on your belly and take a deep breath through your nose. Hold it for a second and, as you exhale, I want you to drop your shoulders as if the tension is leaving your body, and I want you to do that again. Deep breath in, hold it for a second, feel that air suspended in your body, notice the sensations in your body, in your body and, as you exhale, let the weight go. And on this next breath, I'd like you to hold it and, when you exhale, bring your hands down to a comfortable position and bring your awareness to anywhere in your body that you're feeling tension, pain, heat, numbness, tingly sensations.
Cheryl Folland:By noticing how we're feeling in our physical body, we move from intellectualizing our physical experience to being in our body. What does your body need right now? Do you need to readjust it? Have you drank any water today? When was the last time you ate a vegetable? Trust your inner knowing. You know what makes you feel safe and secure. You know what makes you feel anxious and upset. You might not be able to identify the feeling of anxiety, but you know how it feels in your body. You know when you get sweaty palms, when you get a dry mouth, when you start to be unable to sit still, when you physically want to leave a situation. Learning to trust what your body is telling you will help you so much when interacting with others, when being in stressful situations, and it'll allow you to take a break from building that website, setting up those automations, going somewhere else, getting some clarity, shaking that energy off and coming back and trying when you're in a more regulated state.
Cheryl Folland:The power of the spirit, energetic, physical connection is one of the most bypassed things in modern society. If you're curious to know how this might work on a personal level, I would love for you to click the link below this episode and get my Hidden Bene the masks we wear masterclass absolutely free. It'll show you a little bit on the where masking comes from, how masks were used historically, how we use them now, the element of choice in whether we wear a mask or not, and some exercises to support you. Thank you so much for listening today. As always, if you have any questions, comments or you would like to connect, you can find me on Instagram, at the Cheryl, or online at wwwcherylfollandca slash. Welcome to QA. The link will be posted below so you don't have to try to type it in. Bye for now.
Sophie Riley:Thank you so much for tuning in to an episode of Create, automate and Scale. I hope that you've gained some really valuable insights from Cheryl about using neurosomatics to navigate entrepreneurship. As a neurodivergent individual, it is truly some powerful stuff and before we wrap up, I want to remind you that Cheryl has an amazing free gift for our listeners. Hidden beneath the mask we wear, it's a deep dive into understanding the layers we often hide behind and how we can embrace our authentic self. You can grab your copy right now just by clicking the link in the show notes. Until next time, keep creating, automating and scaling your way to greatness. This is Sophie Riley signing off, reminding you to stay inspired, stay innovative and always dare to dream big Thanks for tuning in to the Create, automate and Scale podcast.
Sophie Riley:We hope you found today's episode to be inspirational, informative and straight to the point. Our goal is to provide you with relatable content that helps you mastermind the everyday hassle, grow your business and achieve your goals as an entrepreneur. We know how tough it is that it can be to navigate the world of business, which is why we're here to support you with valuable tips, networking opportunities, shameless money talk and scaling secrets. We're dedicated to helping coaches and course creators take action, stop trading dollars for hours and explode their business to hit that six figure and beyond. Make sure you subscribe to our podcast to stay up to date with the latest episode and feel free to leave a review or reach out to us with any feedback or questions that you may have. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode of Create, automate and Scale.