191 | Using Emotional Release Therapy to Expand Your Capacity, Income, and Impact (with Dr. Stormie Johanson)

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In this episode, I’m joined by my chiropractor and emotional release therapist, Dr. Stormie Johanson, to discuss emotional release therapy and how it supports the nervous system.

Dr. Stormie shares what Neuro Emotional Technique and the Emotion Code are as well as what a session looks like in person or virtually. Dr. Stormie discusses what she sees in her clinic every day and how stress and emotions show up as physical symptoms, chronic pain, bracing, and that constant low-level “on edge” feeling so many of us have normalized.

We also connect this work to money and business.

If you’ve ever hit an income ceiling, overbooked your calendar, or tried to mindset your way out of the same loop, this will resonate.   

In this episode, we cover:

• How stored emotions can show up as physical symptoms and stress patterns
• What emotional release therapy actually looks like (in person and virtual)
• Why processing emotions doesn’t have to be dramatic to be effective
• The connection between your nervous system, business, and money patterns
• Why mindset work alone doesn’t always create change
• How overworking and staying busy can be a form of avoidance

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Synergy Wellness Studios' Website

Synergy Wellness Studios' Instagram

Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

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Transcript

Welcome + What We’re Really Talking About

Erin Gray 0:00

Welcome back to Your Money, Your Rules podcast with me, your host, Erin Gray. Today I'm bringing on someone very special to me, my chiropractor and emotional release therapist, Dr. Stormie Johanson. She and I are going to discuss a modality that has been incredibly powerful for me, and I encourage everyone to use and implement in their lives. In this conversation, we're going to explore what emotional release therapy actually is, how it supports the body and the nervous system, and why I believe and why I feel like that it is such a transformative tool for processing your emotions and letting go. Dr. Stormie is also going to share what she sees in her clinic on the daily and how stress and emotions and physical symptoms are often deeply connected and how helping the body release these stored emotions can create real shifts in how we feel, how we move, and how we live. Obviously, we're going to tie it into money and business. I thought about splitting up this episode into two parts, but after listening to it, it just felt better to keep it as it is. So know that you are in for an hour of just amazing goodness and wealth of information and knowledge from Dr. Stormie. So let's dive in. Thank you, Stormie, for joining us. I'm so happy you're here. You're like a fourth family member to us. So always an honor.

Dr. Stormie 1:22

Always an honor. I appreciated it.

Erin Gray 1:25

So you want to tell the listeners kind of your background, how you got into what you do, all of the things.

Neuro Emotional Technique: When Pain Holds a Story

Dr. Stormie 1:32

My name's Dr. Stormie Johanson. I am a chiropractor by trade. However, that turned into a large scale of other offerings to provide for people in my community, people I come in contact with. So I grew up in Iowa. I was around chiropractic. It wasn't something that we did, I would say, on a regular basis, but it was something that was introduced to me at a very young age. And in growing up in a small town, small community, there isn't a big focus around how do you heal the body from the inside out? It's more so, this is what's happening to us. Let's put the band-aid over, you have back pain, great, let's fix it up with an adjustment. Right. There are many different forms of that ideology that I was surrounded with. But from a young age, I was always so curious, like, why is it this way? Where do these big emotions in my little child self come from that were hard to navigate and understand? And being under the influence of you can get over it, which that's all most people knew how to do in the 90s, is you're either crying for a reason or it's useless. So when I went on to undergrad, I went to the University of Northern Iowa and studied biology, did the chemistry thing, was told I was too smart to be a chiropractor. I would be wasting my time, that I needed to go to med school in order to be successful. And from a very early age, I did not like being in the medical field. It just wasn't for me. Hospitals, the smells, the blood, no, it wasn't for me. No, thank you. Moving on. So, chiropractic, I came home during high school and decided this is what I was gonna do. And I remember my parents being like random, but okay, sure, we'll support that. So throughout undergrad, that was just my focus. I was going to head towards something holistic, something that I could discover within the body. And I've always been a person to challenge what I can do for myself that is an experience that feels different. So it really started out with fitness and eating. I in high school hated track. So instead I went on to do golf. But once I got into college, running became something that I felt a release in. There was something in my body that just finally got to let go, whatever the reason was, whether it was stress from school, whether it was just an emotional state with friends or family. But I learned how to set myself up through different programming. So really challenging that boundary of I used to run, hated it. Now I got into creating my own programs for learning how to run marathons. So pushing that envelope just with my body really started to open up. Oh, there's something more to creating a dynamic environment for myself, to really challenging what everything else can come about from that. And so from the running, it turned into, hey, if I'm already doing all this work in my running situation, how can I make it better? Which turned into fuel. So fuel for my body, the foods. I became interested in how I can support myself on my runs. I literally remember looking up all of these Pinterest things of how to fuel your run for 12 miles. And I was like, yes, this is it. Finally, something that I can actually get into. I'm gonna try it. So from then on, everything was an experiment. And I did not listen to the professors that told me you're going to waste your time becoming a chiropractor. So I went on, went to Palmer College of Chiropractic, and that's in Davenport, Iowa. So I never left Iowa, which is kind of cool. Family oriented. Never left there, but got to understand that from the first day, I remember just something coming into my brain saying, This is not your last step. So a lot of people go into school, entering saying, This is it, like this is my career. I'm a chiropractor. That is my title, that's my label, that's who I'm gonna be until I retire. And there was something that dawned in me, came down, source, what have you, that said, it's not your last step. Be open wherever that leads you. So I didn't really know what that understood, but I wrote it down on a note card and I stuck it up on my wall. And that stayed there for the rest of my three and a half years at chiropractic school. So during this time, you're studying, you're learning all about the body. It's literally drinking out of a fire hydrant. That's how much information that you're learning. It is essentially six years of med school crammed into three and a half years. And instead of learning pharmacology, you learn adjustments. You learn how to help the body process nervous system stress. So during all this time, I got deeper into how the body works well with fitness? How does it work well with different experimentations of foods? So I bounced around everywhere from doing intermittent fasting to weightlifting to CrossFit to all these things that I could experiment with, just to end up with a sore, painful hip day in, day out. Could not figure it out. And on campus, we had ways to learn about PT. So I was going in, doing some rehab, learning about okay, my hips are not balanced, what's going on? I was getting adjusted regularly. I was doing all the right things. I cut out sugar, I cut out my dairy, I cut out my gluten. Life. You cut out life. I cut out life, very unhappy, still in hip pain. I'm like, well, I guess I'm just a chiropractor with hip pain. Can't solve it at all. One of my friends at the time had just gone through a coursework to learn about emotions in the body. And this was actually a chiropractic technique that she had gone to a seminar and she had said, Hey, I just learned this. I don't know what it could do for you, but let's just experiment. Chiropractic school is all about experimenting. If you want to learn how to adjust, you have to be the student and you have to be the person who's going in there trying things out. So when we got together, I remember going over to her apartment and she had this huge coursework book. And this was called Neuroemotional Technique. And neuroemotional technique, if you've ever been around it or heard about it, it is a very in-depth question by question by question unraveling of what's the deeper layer that the body is needing to either find, release, or let go of. And when we were going through this, she taught me a technique called muscle response testing. So she was utilizing the response in my body to say, is this yes versus no? And your body will respond. Now she used the pressing down of my arm. She also used her own physical testing of her own body. But essentially, after this huge two and a half hour question by question, exhausting, bawling, crying session, learned that there was an emotion that was deeply seated in my hip capsule that was holding on, that was locked there, and it had been there since birth. Absolutely wild to think about, knowing that it was just coming to a head. It was manifesting as pain. And pain in general is your first signal that something is wrong, but there was a deeply corrective phase that never happened. And the emotion, I remember, it was deeply connected to myself and my parents. I'm an only child. There's a lot of love there. They had tried so hard for me over a course of 10 years. And there was a lot of pressure and almost pain of not having a child. So when I finally emerged into the world, there was a lot of heaviness, what felt like a burden to my own self to step up to be the child that they needed. So through that recovery, I went to bed, woke up the next day, never had hip pain ever again. Absolutely wild. I was blown away.

Erin Gray 10:16

Like on board already? Because you seem like you were very intuitive that you'd be like, okay, I'm ready for this. Like, let's experiment with this. Like, let's see what we can do here. So was there, it didn't take, did it take any convincing? I don't want to say convincing, but you know what I mean? Like you were already on board with it. Like, hey, okay, I've already tried all this. Like, let's see what this can do. Right.

From Chiropractic to Emotional Release Work

Dr. Stormie 10:33

Yeah, there was no convincing. It was more so I was there to learn anything and everything I could, be a sponge, challenge different thoughts, different processes of chiropractic care, of things that could help somebody. So I I was on board. What harm could it do to see what's under this process? And that really sparked so many questions after that. But waking up in disbelief of is this placebo? Is it because I sat down and talked about something? Is this what they talk about because of talk therapy? I'd never done therapy, still never have. So it was this whole mental unraveling of what does this mean? How did this happen? And where can I take it from here? And sometimes there's moments in life where you're on that rocket ship and you're like, yes, let's go, full force. This was not the time. This was an awakening, if you will. And then let me step back, let me absorb, let me understand what this means for the world outside of there. So I still had at least a year and a half of school, of chiropractic school left by this point. There was still so much technique, learning, etc., before I would even cross the stage to get out into the quote unquote world real world, if you will. So by the time I had finally graduated, I got really, really into working with kids, with children, with families. I always thought I was gonna be that petite little girl who's like, I'm gonna adjust the 250-pound men and it's gonna change her life. No, dude, come on. Not. I don't know why. I was always like, go up against the man, like, you know, be the difference and show him what you're made of. No, too much to wreck my body. So I had found this internship through Divine Signs and through other pathways that led me out to Idaho to take an internship working with autistic children, working with ADHD, sensory processing disorders, kids who would start out who couldn't even walk by the age of three, and helping them to process through their nervous system stress to start walking. And when I was out here, I absolutely loved it. This was all just during an internship and I wanted more. So I stayed on the team. And during that time of the two years that I stayed with that team, we had been introduced to the emotion code. And if you're not familiar, it is a very deduced version of the neuroemotional technique. It was created by a chiropractor, which is very cool. I have a gut feeling that because of that experience, he got to open up the world to this more digestible process of working through emotions. And when I read the book, I was allowed to start experimenting, if you will, with families and kids. And really what I started with was kids who wet the bed, kids who had tantrums that could not calm down, and families who were in chronic stress mode. So the beginning of that process really reminded me of back when I started my own journey in school. So this had been a time span of at least three to four years before I circled back around to understand what that meant. And understanding along the way that there are different ways to go about the emotion code. And in practicing that, it really started to help me understand that it's not just emotions that would get stuck in the body. It's an emotional complex, it's a response to your environment, it's how we experience life. But when we're not ready to process what that emotion is or means in an experience, you are going to make shifts and changes and patterns in your life to either avoid a similar situation or to create the same situation because it feels safe. So this could be anything from how your muscle structure is, right? If you're constantly feeling like you're bracing in your life because you had to brace for an emotional upheaval in the home as a child, you're that was me.

Erin Gray 14:57

Yes.

Dr. Stormie 15:00

Yes. Your pattern, your structure of your physical body was going to change the same way with how you make decisions. There's this thing called neuroplasticity, where the brain, the connections, the neural waves, you're ingrained into one subset of thinking until you have this opening experience where you can learn to make a different change. And that learning process and that neuroplasticity means that you're allowed to. You can. You're not just stuck in one way versus the other. So after working on that team for two years, being able to open up my own office, I knew that bringing a technique to my patients and to my people where if I got to work through emotional stuff with them and work on a technique by utilizing muscle testing, it would open up a whole new realm of healing for their body, for their life, for their future, even from their past, right? It's not just the current moment, it's present, it's past, it's future. So being able to do that to provide for my patients has been a huge learning curve, but one that has been so divine in timing and everything that I believe in and watch to be true in people's bodies.

What a Session Actually Looks Like

Erin Gray 16:24

So, do you want to share a little bit about what does a session actually look like if they're with you? And then what does it look like virtually? And then I have some more questions.

Why Emotions Feel Unsafe (Even When They’re Not)

Dr. Stormie 16:35

I'll preface this by saying our whole world is energy. Everything that we see, touch, feel, do is part of an energetic complex. Even this desk, your microphone, the walls in your house, they are energy. It is a different state where molecules are not going as fast or as slow. That's going to give you a different structure. But even your cells, your human body has this complex of energetic resonance to it. So whether we're working in person, if you come to my office, bringing you in, sitting across from you one-on-one, doing muscle response testing on you, I'm in your energetic field. I'm understanding, excuse me, there are body resonants that are going to show up in the form of emotions. And I have a whole list, a whole chart testing your body yes versus no, what emotion is showing up? Do we need to know more? Is it connected to a specific age? Is it connected to a specific event in your life? Is this something that you've been holding on to for a long time, or is it something that's more recent? So going through a list, allowing the body to show us when there's a beginning, there's maybe four, five, six emotions that pop up. When you get more experience, the body's more adaptable, it's used to releasing, seeing what's in there. Maybe you can get up to 20 emotions, 30 emotions during a session, and being able to let that process. So we can do a couple of different things. We can do breath work, we can sit there and breathe. We can run a magnet down the spine, but really this whole process is about awareness. And when the awareness is there, drawing it from your unconscious or your subconscious mind to the conscious mind, you now have a choice and being able to choose that same pattern, that same emotion, or being able to recognize, oh, this is coming up again. So what? This is where I can make a decision of I can choose to let this go and process, or the opposite. So when we're working in a room together, 30, 45 minutes, being able to slow down time, being present with one another. That is how that process works. Now, on the flip side, we can also do this online, which is really cool because again, that same component that we're all energy, everything is connection, just like we are connected here over the screen. You're still able to tap into hone. So I can tap into your body right now with your permission and be able to muscle test. I can use a pendulum, I can use my own fingers as a way of muscle testing to adapt and see what's underneath the surface there. So still the same principles apply. You're looking at the body, saying, What emotional complex is there? Do we need to know more? Or are we able to let time heal process this by doing breath work? Or you can even take an old magnet on your own head and do the same process there as well. So whether we're together or apart, you still get that same dynamic healing capability simply because we're all connected.

Erin Gray 19:57

So the Erin, like six years ago, would have been like, mmm, how does this all work? Because I think I was very much what I call the 3D of like it has to linearly, logically make sense. And then the Erin now is like, sign me up for all the things. So, you know, you're gonna have people that, and my husband has and he's totally fine with me, Sharon. You know, he has recently started with you. And he I think in the beginning, it's almost like we aren't aware or we don't know. Like, what do you think the resistance is for people wanting to use this as a tool? Do you think it's education? And it could be lots of different things, right? Education, unsure how it works because we're taught like we have to see it to believe it, kind of thing, versus the opposite. Like, what are your thoughts on why sometimes we might have resistance to either wanting to try this or even thinking it would work, things of that sort.

Dr. Stormie 20:47

Yeah. The first thing that always comes to mind is that there is one word in talking about what I do, and that's emotion. And as soon as I say the word emotion, we already have a pre-formed, complex idea of what this means. And sometimes even just saying that word emotion, emotional things, emotional processes, people shut down, go into fight or flight. We aren't really taught what emotion means. And there has been a huge movement of recent where parents are trying to understand what it means, especially in young children. So an emotion is just a chemical reaction in our body. That's really it. It's how we process the world, it's how we understand what's going on around us, but there's also a field around us, and I know this can be hard to comprehend, but each and every single cell in our body gives off an energetic frequency, and this is measurable. It's been measured for over years and years and years in our scientific research. The heart gives off a specific frequency versus our cells versus X, Y, Z. So when we have that. We also have an energetic frequency that goes around our entire body, and that's connected to everything else around us. So whether it's other people or whether it's just our own selves, we're constantly taking in our environment. And the same goes with emotional resonance. So we're going to have different frequencies that we feel, internal and external. And when we are not aware, because our world is very distracting, it can be absolutely terrifying to even talk about emotion. And I'm under the belief that we're all intuitive, we're all understanding, we're all really, really good at knowing our body, but it's the distraction that keeps us from getting there. And so I will notice even when people just come for an adjustment, they'll lay down on my table. I work on what I need to, but giving them a moment of just exhale to just be present. Sometimes there's even emotions that come up just from being in the moment of settling down. So sometimes maybe even trying something new with emotions. We have an idea of it has to look a certain way. We have to talk about it. We have to cry about it. We have to feel down or bad about it. And those are all misconceptions of doing the energetic emotional release therapy really comes down to you don't have to talk about it. We just see what the body says and what that energy frequency is coming up around a specific emotion. And then we get to let it go. You don't have to feel bad. You don't have to feel down. Often the most commonly reported sensation afterwards is I feel lighter. Nobody can really explain why. I mean, logically, I can say why, but knowing that it doesn't have to look a specific way opens up this door of it doesn't have to be scary. But it's really important to understand an emotional baseline for your own self. So when it's the unknown, we get terrified or scared or afraid. And we can think of instances of trying something new for the first time and maybe it didn't go well. Maybe you tried therapy and it didn't go well and it sent you into a spiral. And having that pre-formed complex of maybe it'll go that way, maybe it won't. I don't know what to do. I'm just going to avoid because that's comfortable. It creates an uncomfortability.

Erin Gray 24:34

Do you also think that there might be, like, I think about for me, I think why was I in the beginning, not with emotion release, but in general, why didn't I want to feel? It's like because for a long time, my feelings didn't feel accepted or safe to be felt. Like, and so is it that, and I don't think we always have to go back to our past, but I think about like how if you are into which I believe all of us are, we are all intuitive. We all have our feelings and have felt things. But if it was too intense in the body or it was too loud for somebody, or you got yelled at, or whatever it might be, then the body kind of figures out, okay, where are the little boundaries that I need to play in to maintain connection or to not get yelled at or to whatever it might be.

Dr. Stormie 25:25

Yes, created patterns at the very beginning of what we were talking about. When you're not ready to process or can't even understand as children, we're constantly learning how to react, respond, be in our environment, whether we're being disciplined, whether we're not, whether it makes sense to other peers around us, if we're crying. There's many different formalities that we can experience as a child, even into early adulthood. That prefrontal cortex isn't fully formed until around age 25. So the first 25 years of life, you think back to all the memories that you have, there's a lot of life that happens there. And if we're not coming to terms with, oh, emotions are a normal part of life, it's how we process them, that can create a story for our own self and saying, I'm not safe to talk about these things. I don't have time to worry about these things. I think that's a huge part of the majority of people that come to me have gotten to this point where their body had to make the time. And that's either through shutting down, such as even digestive disorders, mental health disorders, depression, anxiety, people who aren't able to function, they're just numb, they're just feeling out of sorts, out of body. These are the experiences that are just you get pushed to that point where a body goes, I can't handle anymore. You gotta do something about this. And that's the unfortunate part is that same with myself, the hip pain got to a point where I couldn't even work out to the best ability. Not that I wasn't able to walk or do any of those things, but it was uncomfortable to sit. And how much does that take away from your brain space? If you're in pain or if you're uncomfortable, you're not living that full expression of yourself to be able to do the things that you want to do. And this could be as simple as, man, I really wanted to get up earlier today to go work out so that way I'm present for my team at work. So that way I'm present for my financial needing. But there's something constantly nagging, pulling you away from that complete and total presence. And that can be from an emotional complex as well. So not being able to even think about having the time for it. I think as being an avoidant human population, we don't like the uncomfortability, but that's where we're led to until it grabs our attention.

Erin Gray 27:58

Do you think that it also has anything to do with like what we view ourselves like? I always think it comes back to like, what do we feel deserving of? What do we feel that like caring? Like sometimes we put so much emphasis on business or other things than we do on like always say, like we have one body. It's the only one that we'll ever have. Where are we putting our emphasis and our attention on things that matter more than our actual body does? And like you're saying, I mean, maybe it's a roundabout way of like this feels really uncomfortable. I don't want to experience this, so I'm going to choose to say these other things. And maybe we aren't even aware of that, which is probably true. But yeah, do you think that it comes back to like deservedness or worthiness or like some of that too?

What “Processing” Really Looks Like

Dr. Stormie 28:48

Sure. It's multifaceted for different people. At the end of the day, it comes back to distraction as well. And when we believe we have too much stuff to do, there's that component of that is a distraction as well. We commonly see phones now. That is our attention grabber. If you're also on the other end of this spectrum where I've been both, I wanted to either escape into the phone because I knew I had so many things to do and it was overwhelming, but I've also been on the other side of, oh, I just want to sit in this meditation or this moment forever, right? And that's another form of distraction. And so when you're learning about the body at the very beginning, it is just picking up on where am I getting distracted? Yes, it can be from a worthiness of did I understand that my business and where it was flourishing or where it wasn't was a direct reflection? No. And it can also come back to this idea of when we're working through specific things, when you come into contact with my monetary value or the amount of people that I'm serving or the amount that I'm reaching out into the world, is not a direct reflection of my worth and my place in the world. It can create a different dynamic for you. So distraction always, being on what spectrum you're on, whether you're completely in the zone, oh, technology, I'm gonna focus on my business all the time. There's a time and a place.

Erin Gray 30:27

So, in terms of like the actual sessions, I would love it if you want to share, like, I feel like you're so intuitive. I've had other people that I've worked with and nobody's like Stormie. A big one's for me is you have to be integrity, you have to be a product of your product, for lack of a better word. And Stormie definitely is. And what, because I know for me, if you want to use me as an example, like there are times when the body's like, okay, no more, we're done. And if you want to just share a little bit of like every session's different, and the body is kind of just like, what does a session look like? And I know it's different for everyone and even different for the same person, but kind of what is the process? Like you said, you kind of go through, you check different emotions and you clear them. And how can you also support yourself after? Like there are times when I come home and I feel really good. And there are times that I text you and I'm like, wow, we moved a lot today. And so, like honoring like taking a nap, or sometimes I'll get in the bath with some Ebs and salt or whatever it might be. Like, what are some of your thoughts on supporting yourself? Also before and after, right? Like all throughout. But yeah, we love to for you to share.

Dr. Stormie 31:36

Every session does look different. There are times where you're able to process more emotional capacity. And it really comes down to how much have you been doing and how much time have you given yourself to understand what's processed in the past and what's processing now. And the word process is really big. It's really vague. It's something that we don't always understand in terms of just speaking it out loud. So processing could look anything from you start to feel your breath deepen a little bit more where the body starts to relax. Or you're more aware that, ooh, I feel a little bit on edge today. What's going on in the background of my subconscious, my mind, what have you. Or it could look like tears coming down the face. It could look like I feel so good. Now I hit a low, and now I'm hitting a high again. It's this wave that comes back around. So being able to quote unquote process means you're giving your body this opportunity to acknowledge, to accept, and to be aware of what's there, and that it can also create patterns in your life. So for some people, we work on family dynamics. So this could be anything from their history, from their family, of working in their own family, of wanting to create a family and what that means. Some other people I work on, we work on business things. Erin and I work on business adaptability and learning about what feels good, what feels doesn't, what doesn't feel good, what's in this zone of what's blocking what could come in and help her in her business. Or I see people who are completely dysregulated where they're shut down, where they're in stuck mode, don't know what to feel, can't feel, can't even take a deep breath, can't understand that even just getting up every day is a miracle for them. So we can take sessions to either seated, standing, laying down on the adjustment table, having a space that's available to them to really take into account that whatever comes up is meant to happen. This could be a few emotions. And the way I describe it is we're all onion layers. And the further that you get to go along, and I've learned this in my own life, the more in depth that I've gotten to become with this process of emotional work and letting go, the more that can come out of it in terms of how free I feel in my body, how business things come in so easily, how connection becomes easier with my partner, how connection comes easier with my family. So it doesn't always have to look like a huge, big, dramatic thing where we're frailing and frawling all over the place and we're bawling our eyes out. And that can happen. That's absolutely valid. But these types of responses I think can be really dramatized when we're looking on Instagram, right? Because it sells and it's something that, oh, is intriguing and something that I think I need, which maybe you do, but maybe you need a more subtle approach. So it doesn't always look the same every time because we're dynamic. We're human beings, we're going through experiences every single day. And sometimes emotions pop up again because you came into contact with another situation that feels the same way. So, for instance, if you're a child and you had a moment where you did something wrong, and in your memory you watched either your parent or your sibling get so mad at you, and maybe physical abuse was involved, maybe just emotional abuse was involved. It was still an experience that you experienced as a child. And if you continue on, you start a business, all of a sudden you have a client yell at you and it puts you in freeze mode. Right? These emotional experiences come back up and around and can trigger those brain waves to say, I've felt this before, I don't like this, I want to fight, flight, freeze away from the situation because it originally caused me stress. So let's say that original emotion was fear. Okay, great. We're going to experience fear. But when we get to figure out where the fear is at, where the body experienced it, maybe held on, maybe created this dynamic effect of decision making to move forward or not, then we can address it, know that it's there, know that we can let it go. So that way the next time around, if it does happen where you feel fear, instead of feeling at a level 10, it's now down to a level four. And then it may pop back up to a level six in the body where we're feeling it and then drop back down. So these different shifts and those things that can happen over time, it's because we are. We're learning, we're processing, we're experiencing the world. And that's why every single session can look so different. And we're constantly up against challenges. I know, especially in business, every single week is different. And so when we're unraveling, understanding what's happening, usually it's from our own past before it shows up as an issue in our business. But being able to work through the body that way versus why do I always constantly hit a threshold at my income level, right? That's a deeper problem. That's a deeper issue that is an experience.

Erin Gray 37:13

I love coming to you because when you said things like, and this is like perception, right? Of what we think that it's going to be, but you said several things of like, you just feel lighter and you just feel this is obviously my what I experienced, but you feel lighter and you just there were things that I was looping on that there was no amount of coaching or changing my thoughts were helping me feel different in my body.

Money, Business, and Hidden Patterns

Dr. Stormie 37:40

Yeah, you can hit some nerves here with saying this, but I'm gonna say if you're constantly seeking out the same answer to the question that you always have, there's no amount of coaching yourself through it that'll get you to that result, right? This is huge, especially when we're talking about like business coaches or people who work with other people in business. If you're still stuck in that same phase of life, that same direction in your business that you just can't figure out, right? And we're constantly hit it harder, hit it harder, do this, do this, do this. It's really again going back to that avoidance of you can't coach yourself through something if you don't even know what's there. So that's what I love about the technique is that it takes away the pressure from somebody to try and understand why it's there. We don't have to know why it's there. We just have to know that there's something there that's keeping you from pushing forward. And that can be an emotion, that can be a pattern, that can be a belief, but all of that is wrapped up into where are you going to take your body and be able to be aware that it's there, adapt and release and let go.

Erin Gray 38:53

You talked a little bit about business. How have you seen this with money? Because I think what I have experienced with clients is they think that they're the only ones that experience what they're experiencing with money. And I think that that is a lack of a better word, like a fallacy, right? Like we all have a relationship with money. And I think that here go back to like we think we're the only ones. So we don't seek support or nourishment because we think like there's something within us that is, and yes, our bodies and our thoughts and all of that, but like there's nothing wrong with us that this is occurring. This is there's so much to it with money. So if you want to share, like what do you see with people with money? I call them like money loops or money thoughts and and things of that sort.

Dr. Stormie 39:39

The most interesting part about emotion work is somebody's relationship to money. And sometimes when people come to see me, we're so focused on, oh, I have a past, I have a childhood trauma, I have a relationship trauma, right? Which is great. I love helping people through that. And then I slowly learn that, oh, I've had this business that I've been working on. And I didn't realize how much it would impact me, but now I am miraculously, with air quotes, starting to make more money, and I don't really know why it's just happening. So people often relate their emotional discontent to three different categories in general. It's what they've experienced, what they have now, and where they want to be in their future. And the most dynamic part about it is nobody's explicitly coming to me, besides a handful of people who know, and we've had discussions, but nobody explicitly saying, I have issues with my business. I don't know what it is. A lot of people don't want to talk about it because we think we have to have all of our stuff together and misperception, right? That's part of it too. But truly, in understanding your own relationship with money, it is just a currency, it's a frequency, it's a value. And I know you speak about this a lot on your podcast too of money is just a flow. It's part of where you get to see yourself. And really how I see it through my own lens is that when you let go of the resistance that you've been holding on to, whether it's internal body, emotional weight, what have you, that also decreases the resistance out into the rest of your life. And so you can try and force and push and push and push for something that you really have wanted or know that you can get to. And you can still have this block on the other side of this energetic weight, this frequency that says, Oh, this has been there either who knows what? It could be abandonment, it could be self-worth, it could be betrayal. There are so many different dynamic complexes to what we experience. And then you finally get to be aware of that, let that go, and you watch your business flourish, not because of what you're doing differently, it's because of who you are. It's who you're being, and that's the difference.

Erin Gray 42:07

And I think when, because I probably came from old school of like push, push, push, push, push, which is exhausting to the body, I think. And it doesn't feel very good to move through life like that. And I think also too, we want to compartmentalize things, but it's like this affects this and it affects this. And it's like this spider web that the benefits of whatever you might initially come from is also going to help this area and this area because it shows up we're all intertwined. And what I love too is we're not like going and yes, you are asking the body, but we're not going and finding and like tell me about it's just like the body shows us what needs or wants to be released. And then, like you said, you might ask me some questions, and then that brings up, and then it allows me to become aware of maybe something I wasn't aware of or at a deeper awareness that maybe I didn't have. And then it just moves. And I think allowing yourself, like you said, the space to allow it to move. And I notice when either I've had a busier day and like we look on capacity or things of that sort. So just like really like one of my biggest awarenesses that I've had is like you were talking about a 10 and then coming down to a six, it's like, okay, my life used to be at like a 20. I moved it to a 10 and then I moved it to maybe a five, right? But I see where my patterns of going back to that, where that's like what the body's used to, but that and that's familiar, but it doesn't mean that's actually what I want. And so giving yourself time and space, I think like what you talked about of there's a book, I don't know if you've read it, it's called Um Stolen Focus by Johan. He's a Norwegian, but he talks about Google and Facebook and like how it was set up to keep you distracted and on all different realms of why their thought process was to do that. And when we're disconnected or we're distracted from our bodies, how often do we just check in with our breath? How often Do we just give ourselves, you know, like I'll ask some clients, like, hey, have you given yourself 10 minutes before you meet with me? Have you gone pee? Have you gone and gotten your favorite drink? Like, are you just back to back to back? Because that's what we're taught in the society of be so air quotes productive, whatever that means. Or are you giving your body, it's not just your mind, I know your mind is part of your body, but it your body some time and some space to just be before you're expecting it to do something else.

Dr. Stormie 44:28

Yeah. It's a huge, one of the biggest lessons that I've learned through working with people is that everything that we get to work on together, the person across from me, I am a mirror to them just as much as they are a mirror to myself. And that is beautiful in community to being able to understand what we all need to work together on or through or what have you. And just giving somebody the physical room space, if you will, to let their guard down, to feel comfortable enough to have me enter their space in their field, ask the body questions. I have a whole chart of emotions that we go through. And allowing that to happen is just enough for them to soften, to realize, oh, this feels good. Where else can I feel good in my life? And just taking that pause and that moment really can trigger and spark. What else can I draw this into? Where else can I create this in my life? And sometimes it takes a few sessions. Sometimes it's a continuous working thing. I had a handful of people where we did one session. I didn't hear from them for a year, a full year. And I was wondering what happened to you. She calls me back, this one specific instance, and said, Oh my gosh, life changing. I'm like, okay, tell me more, tell me more. Got home that day, cried it out, woke up the next morning, started my business, finished my Reiki master programming, got out 10 clients within the next three months, started continuously working on how I could show up for people. And here I am, owning my first office, going to open up a second. Like, what? So cool. That's amazing. I wish for everyone to go through that experience. But it's right time, right place, right environment where she finally felt seen and heard and felt safe in her own body, in her own capability, her own ability to go out into the world and be open and be seen and create something that she was guided to do. So I think at the very basis of all of this is I really try to lean in hard on the teaching and the practice with my patients that it's okay. No matter where you're at, no matter what you've done, no matter what you're planning to do, if it's not happening, it feels horrible in the past, it's overwhelming right now, it's okay because that allows you to say, all right, this is where I'm at. What am I gonna do next? So being to that moment of just being in a state of, I'm okay, that allows you to then make a choice and a decision. What am I gonna do next? What do I have the capacity for next? Maybe it's even just changing your schedule. We have a lot of times where we're stuck in our business, and you were saying this just right before we got into this little tidbit of how many times have you scheduled back-to-back meetings? How many times have you worked through your lunch hour because you just had to get it done, right? That's that force, that push that we were talking about earlier of forcing, pushing, just going. And there's a time and a season for that. When you're in flow or that state of where time slows down, where you're focused, where things are just blooming out of you, that's the time to do it. But if you're in a state of depletion where you get home exhausted at the end of the night, where you don't even have time to cook a proper meal, where you don't even have time to sit down, talk with your partner, talk with your kids, maybe even talk to a friend. If you don't have a partner or kids, there's the difference. And when you get to that state of, oh, I feel stuck in my business, you really have to look at what have I created in my life that doesn't actually feel great or awesome. And if it's continuing that way and you don't know how to get out of that loop or that thought pattern, that's when it's time to look at that deeper complex of, well, maybe it was from abandonment early on, where you actually created a busyness so that way you could avoid feeling abandoned. Because if you're always busy, you don't have to worry about not having somebody there, not having work to do, not having your future set up for you. Because guess what? It's already there. You got eight meetings in a day, but you only have six hours, perfect. Stack them all up. Great.

Erin Gray 48:58

The two words that I wrote down, one was allowing. And I don't know if that's an emotion, but that's something that I really try. It's like, how can we just allow ourselves to be where we are, which is non-resistance? I don't know what other words, but you know, like the allowing of just okay, because I sometimes see myself of like, okay, I want to get somewhere, but I have to stop and be like, okay, you're wanting to feel a feeling by getting there. You can feel that feeling right now. You can chill out, you can, you know. And the other thing you said was, oh, when we talk about like, I don't have time, or we have our stacked, I always think like whatever you believe in God, source, whatever. It's like, well, how are you gonna have more if you already are stacked to the brim? You know, like the where is the capacity, but also like, where is the time in the day to to have more if what you're saying is I don't have enough time, I already feel tapped out, there's already so much to do.

Final Thoughts + Where to Find Stormie

Dr. Stormie 49:50

So it's the biggest misconception that many money quote unquote gurus, if you will, talk about that the amount of time does not equate to the amount of money that you have, right? So you don't have to constantly put in more time to have more money. The biggest misconception that's a physicality where you can actually see that happen in your business for your input versus your output in financial sense, but it's also the biggest misconception for our bodies as well. When we are able to process, uncover, see emotions, it's creating space internally so that way we can filter through what we want to bring in more of or what we want to continue flushing out. And just creating a pause, a space, something for you to experience more, really leaning into more joy, more pleasure, more excitement, allowing that to come through. And I love the term allow, but really at the end of the day, too, to put it into a simple term, it's taking a moment. Anything else that you have that you want to share that we didn't talk about? I'll say, yes, emotions can be scary. I completely understand that. I have been there in my own life where there are times I'm an emotional person. I'm not afraid to admit that. Tears are such a good cortisol release. It's a good stress reliever, but there are times where I resist. And that has caused a lot of disruption in me continuing on my days feeling essentially okay. So the more that you resist, the more it's going to meet you where you're at and constantly knock on your doorstep, whether that's going to be with your own physical body, whether that's going to be within your own mental state, or even relationships with business, family, etc., with your own self, even. So being able to understand that emotions truly are just a process. There's no need to feel this resistance because once you meet that emotion and see it and express it and experience it, you feel so much better, so much lighter as people comment afterwards. So that way you're able to move forward. And getting to that process, that point, it can be such a huge buildup of an explosion of emotions. And even when people don't feel their need to express emotions, there are different forms of dysregulation. So when we're constantly overwhelmed, crying, really having big, huge expressions, we don't want that all the time. That's a form of dysregulation. But so is the opposite side where you're not feeling anything, where you're so numbed out, where it turns to alcohol, a drug, something that makes you feel like you're in control of your life or feel an emotional state, but also being dysregulated in you're not feeling anything, you're just numb, constantly going through the world one day at a time. That's also another state of being where it's really important to check in with the emotional body, with the emotional self and say, hey, what's what's going on here? What's holding me back from experiencing joy, expression, etc.

Erin Gray 53:08

I always say workaholism. I don't know if that's a term, but you know, like that is what I think was my drug of choice. And when I say it's easy, what I mean is it gives you that dopamine, like you're contributing, you're in control. Yeah. Yeah. And the ego likes it and all of that kind of stuff. And it's still it's no different than Netflixing or shopping or drinking or drugging or whatever it is, right? It's just another form that we use to not feel. Oh, Stormie, thank you. Where can people find you, learn more about you, all the things?

Dr. Stormie 53:46

On my website, so SynergyWellness Studios.com, or I mean, we're on Instagram as well, synergy.wellness. I am getting better at posting more things about this, but I am such a one-to-one connection referral type of gal. I love it when I hear somebody came from a podcast or from a friend or family member because that means they're already in it. They're recognizing that this is what I need. So that is the easiest way. You can email, you can call, you can go online and type into Instagram if you need it, but that's where you can find me.

Erin Gray 54:25

Love it. I'll put all the links in the show notes. Thank you for being here, for sharing your time with us, and for each of you listening. Love you all, and we'll see you in the next episode.