The Alchemy of E-Motion: Navigating Sibling Loss and Trauma Through Movement and Intuition with Eileen Kielty

Trigger Warning: Discussion of sensitive topics. Listener discretion is advised.

What role does creative expression play in navigating the complexities of grief?

Eileen Kielty, founder of Kaia Evolutions,  a culmination of her life’s work and a love letter to her sister, Katie, who died by suicide in June of 2019.

She has degrees in both dance and psychology, as well as extensive training in somatic integration, embodiment and intimacy practices, and is passionate about consent-driven spaces with an emphasis on social justice.

She recognizes the importance of illuminating the darker, often hidden, parts of the human experience through sharing openly and authentically, as we’re not meant to do this alone. Eileen believes in the power of creative expression and its ability to reveal the unspoken language of being alive; that the body always knows, and that movement is our direct connection to our deepest truth.

In this candid episode, Eileen shares her perspective and experience as a surviving sibling, and trauma survivor, as well as how the creative expression of dance and movement has helped her and her clients navigate some of life's biggest challenges.


Eileen Kielty's Social & Website:

• Website: kaiaevolutions.com
• Instagram: @kaia.evolutions & @ekielty
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• Website: griefandlight.com
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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

I did not allow myself to feel the grief of those life events. I did not allow myself to feel that grief. So then when my sister died, it was all of that grief and all of the other grief on top of it. It all came out physiologically. You just lost your loved one. Now what?

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Welcome to the Grief in Life podcast, where we explore this new reality through grief-colored lenses. Openly, authentically, I'm your host, Nina Rodriguez. Let's get started. What role does creative expression play in navigating the complexities of grief? I'd like to introduce you today to Eileen Kealty, founder of Kaya Evolutions, which she started as a culmination of her life's work and as a love letter to her sister, Katie, who died by suicide in June of 2019. In the aftermath of Katie's tragic passing, Eileen's path has been one of illumination and transformation. And as a queer, multidisciplinary artist and intuitive, Eileen intertwines movement and introspection, inviting us to feel and embrace the messy shared landscape of grief. She has degrees in both dance and psychology, as well as an extensive training in somatic integration, embodiment, and intimacy practices, and is passionate about consent-driven practices with an emphasis in social justice. I am so looking forward to this conversation. Welcome to the Grief and Light Podcast, Eileen Kielti. Wow, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

That intro part of it, I was like, wow, that's so wonderful. Who is this person? Anyway, I'm gonna have a moment for that. So thank you so much. I'm so grateful to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:32

I'm honored you're here. And this has been a little bit in the making because we met at the Let's Reimagine's virtual vigil gathering of grief. So this last year it was a big virtual event. We were both participating as co-hosts. And I remember at one point, just to kind of center the energy before the event, the group leader said something to the effect of pick a person and send them a blessing. I don't know, something like that. Yeah. And I just remember you stood out to me so much. And I was like, oh my gosh, I feel like I know this person. Like, I don't know what it is, but I had an immediate connection with you. You were such a light. And I remember I we connected on Instagram afterwards, and you know, the rest is history. We we're learning, we have so much in common and yeah, good and you know, sad. Yeah, totally. But I'm so thankful you're here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Yeah, I was so excited that you reached out because you you DM'd me after the event and you were like, I just felt called to send it towards you. And that was back in November. So it was during November, yeah, yeah, holiday season. And my birthday is December 8th. And um, this well, last year, this past birthday was I turned the age my sister was when she took her life. So I was having a very hard time leading up to that birthday. And when you messaged me, and then I creeped you and then recognized that you were also, you know, a survivor of sibling loss. It was just such a sister moment that felt really needed and necessary. And then when I saw this podcast, I was like, oh my God. And then I was like, oh, I want to talk.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

So I'm so I'm so pumped to be here. Yeah. I think maybe intuitively we're both bang on intuition, and maybe intuitively that just resonated without even knowing who each other was. Oh, hi, cat. Oh, this is Barley, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

For anyone that can see us, Barley. He had the zoomies, so I'm hoping that he settles. Oftentimes when I record stuff, he'll take it the first five minutes to be crazy, but he's welcome here. Yeah, so he should be good.

SPEAKER_02 3:21

He is totally welcome here. So for those of you not seeing it, her cat just jumped up. Barley just jumped up. So we're we're here with our fur babies. Mine is sleeping next to me right now, so he's awake as well. Nice. But um, we're here to dig into your story. You have such a wealth of information, there's so much to get into, but let's start at the beginning because one thing that you specialized in is the alchemy of movement. So, when did your relationship with movement begin? And talk to us about that evolution.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Yeah, totally. So I'm a dancer. I grew up as a dancer, and I started dancing at eight, which is like considered old. Uh, most dancers, I know it's so stupid. Uh, start at like two or three. Um, but I started at age eight and and then quickly like fell in love, was obsessed, started competing in dance at 13. At 18, got into college for dance. But January of my senior year of high school, I blew up my ankle. And then nine weeks later, I did the exact same injury to my left ankle. And I was told that I would never dance again. And the week I graduated high school, I had to withdraw from my college program. Um, after I'd like found out I got a scholarship and like like it was devastating. And that summer was like, I don't know what to do with my life, like severely depressed, gained like 35 pounds. Um, and my mom kicked me out. Yeah, it was really rough. So so I moved in with my my partner, who we've been together this year will be 19 years. At the time, we'd only been dating for six months. So, out of financial necessity, we moved in together. But during that time, he actually convinced me to start going to physical therapy because back in the day, this was in 2005, when I went to the doctor, they just were like, get surgery, we're gonna fuse everything in your ankles. And then, like, that's it. Like there was no, now there's so much integrative therapy, which is fantastic. Doctors talk to each other, you know, there's different modalities that that work together. But at the time, the doctor literally was just like, yeah, it's over for you. And I had done like Reiki and polarity and massage and reflexology and growing up, I was I had treatments in that because my mom was a massage therapist and an energy healer. I was like, the body's amazing. Not that I'm against surgery. I love science, fully believe in it. Yes, do it. But I knew that those particular injuries, if I got surgery, I would never have the articulation in my feet or my ankles again. So I was like, I'm not gonna get surgery and I know that I'm gonna be able to work through this.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

So I took to for you because I know that a lot of people, you know, they default to surgery, but there are so many alternative methods. Not to say that everybody is going to avoid surgery, but there are other options that are good for you on that.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Yeah, totally. I again, intuitive, intuitive nature, right? Like, so I just like knew in my gut that's not the answer. So I started going to physical therapy. The physical therapist that I went to actually taught me how to fall. So I tore all the outside ligaments in both my ankles. Three sprain is like the worst you can have. And I had a three on one and a two and a half on the other. And basically, like I all the ligaments were like shredded. And the reason that they suggest surgery is because it's avascular, so it doesn't have blood flow. So even if you stabilize everything around the joint, those ligaments will never reattach. I just knew that I could do other things that would help build my body back up. So I did Reiki, reflex, reflexology, polarity massage, acupuncture, physical therapy, and I went to a sports psychologist to work on my fear of jumping because both of the injuries came from jumping, landing out of a jump.

SPEAKER_02 6:44

I'm sure you had to relearn how to trust your body's capability. Like just, and at this point, you were able to walk just fine, or did you need assistance?

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Or how was um I was on crutches for a while and then I had air casts, you know, like puffed up races, if you will, that would help. But I eventually, my pain tolerance is very high. Most dancers are, and also trauma survivors. I just was living in pain, you know, and 18-year-olds, like just being like, I guess this is my life now. But after two years of rehabbing and refocusing and really working on stabilizing in every way that word means, um, I reapplied to the same dance program two years later, got in. So I started college, quote unquote, late. I was 20, turning 21, my freshman year. I did two years in college. I was a dance major, psych minor. But after two years, I got into a program called the Eiley School, which is like the Juilliard of Modern Dance in New York. And I got into their summer program and realized like I need to be in New York. And because I was funding my education myself, I didn't want to leave college without a degree and just have credits floating around. So I graduated with my AA in dance so that those two years weren't for nothing. Moved to New York, started training at the Eiley School, did their independent study program for a year. So like 20 classes a week, started working at Radio City as the lead teaching assistant for the Roquettes educational programs. I moved back to Boston for two years, danced with a professional, a few professional companies, modern dance companies there, moved back to New York in 2012. I've been here since, had about a decade of professional work doing like cabarets and uh original works and independent projects and mainly dancing, but I sing and act as well. And during that time, I worked at the physical therapy office that I was a client at for a year as a rehab aide on the floor. I started getting certifications in fitness modalities and started teaching group fitness classes. I was teaching dance classes on top of that, guest artist, you know, uh coming into coach or choreograph. A decade after my ankle injury, I was doing a really small contract up in Boston at a regional theater. It was a non-union contract, which means I was not protected under a union and it was unpaid. I did it to get equity points to get into the union. At the time, now you can buy into the union. That's a whole nother story for a very different podcast, but but I took the job, not having the money to be able to take a month off of work to do that job, but I knew the opportunity would be big. Opening weekend, I was pulled over on the side of the road picking up a cast member with my blinker and brake lights on, and a woman hit me going 40 miles per hour from behind and totaled my car. The whole frame of the car moved six inches forward and was sitting on my back tires. I didn't have insurance, so I was like, I can't go to the hospital. And the show was happening an hour later. I pushed my car to the side of the road and ran up the hill to the theater and did that the show that afternoon, that night, and the next day, and the whole next weekend. And when I came back to the city, I had three bulging discs in my neck, bursitis and an impinged nerve in my left shoulder, herniation L5, S1, bulging L4, pinched sciatic nerve, and nerve damage down the left side of my body. And then I didn't dance for four more years.

SPEAKER_02 9:49

Understandably. So I am so sorry. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Here we are. This is why we're talking about it, right? It's like so that was in 2014. Again, went to the doctor. They're like, you need back surgery. Like, you're not gonna dance. It's not gonna happen for you. And I was like, no, I'm not gonna take pain medicine unless I only took it when I couldn't breathe. There's a lot of addiction in my family. And I knew that was a really slippery slope because of how sad I was that I was like, this could go wrong very quickly. I took those four years to really dive into teaching. So I was teaching a lot of fitness and movement with people's bodies. And at the time I was doing Legree Fitness, which is like on a megaformer machine. It's like all about stabilization and slow twitch muscle fibers, really good with alignment. Also an instructor trainer and director of training curriculum for a global fitness company called Anti-Gravity Fitness, which are the originators of aerial yoga and suspension fitness, the fabric that they hang from the ceiling and you go upside down. And yeah, so I was in charge of like all of their programming and taught the public and then taught trainers how to teach the public. I was so sad all the time because I did not, I was not performing, I was not auditioning, I was not dancing at the time. And it was my sister. I called her right around my 30th birthday, and I was like, I hate this job. It's so corporate-y. I love teaching, like forever in the classroom, in the studio, in a fitness spot, whatever. Yes, all day, every day. But I was behind the desk for so many hours, which is so painful with all of my injuries to sit for that long, way too painful. And I didn't have any support. And we'll talk about a lot of these uh things today about what my body was telling me, all of the symbolism and themes that were coming up in my body. But I was like, I can't do this anymore, but I'm too old to get back into the industry. My sister was like, fuck that. What are you talking about? So she convinced me to go back into the dance world and start auditioning again. Cause at that point, I was strong enough, I was stable enough. My physically, my body was not fine, but my body was able to do that job. Emotionally, psychologically, mentally, like spiritually, I was terrified. The physical trauma I had dealt with. I had thought I had dealt with the somatic residue, if you will, of all of those situations. So I went back to the dance world in 2018, started auditioning through that first audition season, the winter of 1819. It went okay. I got a call back here and there. I didn't book anything, but I was like, oh, I'm doing it. Six months after the phone call, my my sister convinced me to go back into the industry. She took her life. And then eight months later, we were in quarantine. So it has been nonstop, nonstop going at it for a long time. So I know that that's a very long extended version, but that's the shortest version of my movement journey to now. When she died, all of the trauma in my body that I had not moved that was still stagnant, that was still very much alive in me, all of it hit me at the same time, including, you know, I was in recovery for an eating disorder since 2004. I'm a survivor of sexual abuse uh in childhood. Um, there's a lot of stuff that I worked through through talk therapy, or at least I thought that I had processed through talk therapy. And when she died, my entire body just everything came up at the same time. Energetic ghost after energetic ghost. Uh, and it completely took me out, brought me to my knees in many, many, many ways.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

Understandably. So, and thank you for sharing so openly and deeply. I could take one of those instances and we can do a deep dive, and each one would be its own episode. So I want to appreciate and take a moment to acknowledge that everything you just said in a very short amount of time is a traumatic event and a grief event in and of itself that had to be sorted out over a very long time. A lot of people associate grief with the death of a person, but there is grief in being told you are no longer able to physically pursue your passion the way you you thought you would. So your dreams, your identity, how you process that, then getting to still work, good for you, following your intuition so many times, then that paying off so so good on that. And then you had these very severe. I mean, you listed, I was envisioning your spinal cord, just like all of it, just completely impacted. And I've known even my husband two weeks ago, he hurt uh one of his discs and he was not able to move for like four days. So I can only imagine the list that you had going on, how exasperating that had to have been. Plus, you said you didn't want to take any medication. Same. I will white knuckle through whatever I can get through as much as possible. If that's the only option, if it is opioids, painkillers, whatever words, suck it up. And I will try to suck it up as much as possible. That is a lot. And then you have brief related to loss event of your dear sister. Yeah. Not that long ago. It was the same year that I lost my brother as 2019. And then we had the pandemic because that is very surreal. There's people that lost loved ones to COVID and all at once. There is something so bizarre of having this life-altering experience followed by a global altering experience. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It really messed with my concept of reality and everything we do from here and just everything.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

And taking stock of the journey to now. My sister is a little over five years older than me. She was my mom. She was my mom. She was my mother figure and also like best friend and the opposite side of the same coin. What was difficult for me surrounding her death is the last few years of her life, she was going through a major spiritual awakening. Everyone in my family is incredibly magical. Like I am absolutely a witch. Like I'm clairsentient, which means that I sense the world around me psychically through my body. This is another reason why the physical injuries were so long-lasting and so aggressive because of all of the other things I was holding for other people in my body. I did not have the support system that I needed energetically or physically, emotionally within my own body. My sister was a doula, a shaman, a Reiki master, massage therapist. And the last few years of her life, she was really, really diving into her spiritual awakening and really, really diving into embodied trauma and what it meant to really release energetic ties that we have to other people, generational trauma, all of the above. Her and I had talked about doing this kind of work on the planet together. So so much of my anger around her death is we were supposed to do this together. Like I know we are doing it together now, inches away. I totally fully believe that. But she had moved internationally to Portugal to actually open up a women's center for healing. And she had already picked out the land and she was saving money to buy that land. When I look back and take stock of my injuries and what my body sustained over the years, if I look at each individual saying they perfectly align with something else that was going on in my life, in my relationships, and my family, your ankles represent your foundation. I blew out my ankles. I had no foundation at that time in my life. I had no, there was no, I there was no ground to stand on. So it's it's not shocking that my ankles were like, I gotta go. I'm hanging up. Thank you so much. Gotta go. Your spine represents your support system. Your pelvis and your hips represent your ability to move forward in your life. So at the time that I got in this car accident and that all of the spinal hip, shoulder, neck stuff happened, it was the weight of the world on my shoulders, no support and fear of moving forward. It was all of that combined into one thing. The work that I do with people's bodies is helping them to recognize where there's stagnant energy in the body by sensing it in my own body energetically, I can discern that. But also to recognize like what are the themes that are consistently coming up and what is the cycle of trauma that we haven't finished, right? Because we know trauma just takes us out, right? So it doesn't finish the feeling, the sensation, the energy, the emotion that is involved. And like you said, each individual thing that happened in my life, in and of itself, could be its own episode. But the overarching theme, hands down, is the fact that I did not have anyone. Support. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. And there was no one that understood. There was no one that cared to understand. There was no one that that I felt safe to go to. There, even like even doctors, right? Like I'd go to a doctor and ask questions, and it was just like, yeah, no, like surgery, drugs, or like you're just a girl, you know, and we don't believe that your pain is this high. There's no way you'd be functioning. Gosh, that's an episode in and of itself. Right. I work with people on restoring their access to choice and agency with their body by helping them to clear the residual energy that is theirs and that is not serving them anymore, recognize what is not theirs, get that the fuck out of there so that they can reconnect to their intuitive nature and trust their own intuitive voice. My tagline is alchemy and motion for embodied alignment, so that we're able to make aligned choices with who we are, what we care about, what we believe, so that we can live in integrity. No big deal.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

Your lived experience is such an example of the connection between mind, body, spirit. I'm learning this and I have been learning this through the past few years, but an injury is rarely ever just an injury, if ever. Um I've gotten into the habit of if something happened, I immediately search what is the spiritual meaning of it. Oh, what is the and it is uncanny. What seems unrelated is truly related. The second thing is the processing of grief.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Totally.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

I would say is way more physical than like if I were to make it a pie chart, right? Let's go back to math class here. But if I were to make it a pie chart visually, the biggest slice of the pie for working through grief would have a physical component to it. And most of us are very good about getting in our head. Yeah. Um, usually getting in there or not getting out. We're very good at being in our heads. We are more used to working through trauma with talk therapy. That component of the somatics and the physical energy and motion, that part. If I could tell you the conversations are usually like, I don't know how to feel my feelings. Yes. I don't know how to feel my feelings. That's what people say over and over again. Like, what is the feeling? And these are, you know, these are not children. It's yeah, I would even say children know how to do this better than adults. Oh, that yes, look at a child.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

Look at a child that throws themselves on the ground and we're like, stop doing that. That is the best thing that they can do. They, if they're quote unquote throwing a tantrum, when a child throws themselves on the ground and is banging against the ground, rolling around, screaming, they are regulating their nervous system. It is the best thing for them to do. We need to take a note from them and recognize, you know, you talked about energy and motion. That's another way to describe emotion, energy in motion. So in the somatic world, that's like what you'd say all the time, right? So if energy is not an emotion, if we're not feeling our emotions, then there's stagnation. And they've done studies on this. It takes 90 seconds for an emotion to go through your whole body if you let it do it. But what happens is the emotion comes up and it just gets stuck at the point where we severed it. And then it just lives there. Even as we're talking for the audience, I've been muting myself a lot and coughing. And the reason I know right now, the reason I'm not, I don't have any dairy near me. There's no reason that I should be congested. But I know today, because we're talking about sister stuff, my throat chakra is like, shut up. And like it's not that I haven't talked about her a lot, but because we are specifically talking about her death, my body is reacting to it. It literally is telling me, don't say that. But my gut is calm. I don't feel any nausea, my legs are very intact, which Tells me that I am here. I know what I'm talking about. I know what I'm doing. And it's just scary. Your first episode when you were Googling, am I having a heart attack? Am I dying? The amount of times, the amount of times. If people looked at that Google search that first year, who I don't feel like I would definitely have been admitted somewhere, 100%. The shit that I was looking up was insane. But that's the whole thing is it was out of control in the sense that I was not in control of what was happening because we're never in control. We just think we are. And my body was just like, okay, we're gonna cry so hard that your jaw is gonna chatter, your body's gonna convulse and it's gonna feel like you're fully dying or you're having hypothermia. That was one of the things that consistently happened for me. My jaw would go, even if I wasn't crying, I would get teeth chatters. And it has to do with literally, it's all connected to your nervous system. It's just trying to get the emotion out. When you found out about your sister's passing, can you say a little bit more about that? So, like I said, the last couple of years of her life, she was going through this really awesome spiritual awakening. She was really tapping into her power. She was like incredibly magical. And like I said, we're we're two sides of the same coin. The difference there was that I openly expressed myself and would share my opinion and, you know, have a say in things and be outspoken. And she wouldn't. We always said, I love you and I hate you because we did. It was our way really of saying like all of the stuff that I hate in you is the stuff that I struggle with within myself. Even though we had the same exact parents, we had very different versions of our parents. We grew up very, very Catholic. I was born on the Immaculate Conception. I had to go to church every year on my birthday. I went to church with my mom every single morning as a kid. And she would like my parents were Eucharistic ministers and it was a lot. We were white picket fence, four kids, dog, nice house. My mom stayed home and raised us and whatever. But my dad was a raging alcoholic. He was high, high functioning. I didn't know that he was drunk all the time until they separated when I was 13 because my sister protected me from it. I just knew that dad would drive the car sometimes with his eyes closed. And I didn't realize he was passing out behind the wheel. My mom was heavy for most of her life. And then when she was heading into her 40th birthday, she started aggressively dieting. So my sister was obsessive, convulsive, overeater, and I was anorexic. Our experiences in life were very, very different. And our aesthetic was different. How people treated us was different, how we showed up in the world was very different. But we had the same belief system. We would sit and talk for hours about stuff, and we would feel the same way about things. I would go out into a family event and I would say the same thing that I said to my sister behind closed doors. I would say it out loud to other people. And she wouldn't say anything and oftentimes would counteract or fight me on something that I said, even though, like 10 minutes prior, she would have agreed with me. And so again, a lot of the work I do, yes, is about stagnant energy, but I also tackle internalized misogyny, patriarchal structures, white supremacist ideals and things that we have embodied within our beings, all of that shit, too. You know, that was such a painful experience in so many ways because when she was struggling the last few years of her life, I was one of the only ones that she was sharing that aggressively with. So no one else was really believing how bad it was. She was in a domestic violence partnership. And that's something that I have not publicly stated as clear as that statement just now, but that's the reality of the situation. She was in a highly abusive relationship with a man who categorizes himself as a spiritual leader and a spiritual coach. What was incredibly difficult is the training I have in intimate partner violence and just basic psychology and advocacy one-on-one. She was isolating herself. She was severing, if you opened up chapter one, every single thing on the list of intimate partner violence and aggressive dynamics. She had always struggled with depression and anxiety her whole life because she's magical. And I believe this is such a big thing that a lot of healers and helpers don't talk about with how much we struggle with stuff we don't want other people to struggle with stuff. And so, you know, we go into healing modalities. Her whole life, she just wanted to help people and she just wanted to make people feel better. But she never extended the same grace or care that she gave to others to herself. Exactly. She started to get coached by this person. He was provocating for the last two years of her life. I was trying to get her help because I have some connections to like international organizations. There's a dance company called Gibney Dance. They're wonderful. Their organization is fantastic. And I actually got my internship to finish my degree in psych from them. But their company teaches beautiful programs like Hands are for holding, which teaches like middle and high schoolers consent-based practices through movement. The most important. When she died, the majority of the people that quote unquote knew her during that time in her life were very confused because she was, she was working on herself. She was like having this huge spiritual awakening. She was she was going to be opening up a new studio, like a massage uh studio, and she was like getting things ready and it was like all very exciting. But she wasn't sharing the other sides that were really heavy. And she was demanding that she did it herself. So anytime that I was like, sister, like you can't do this alone. And, you know, you need a community and you need a support system. And she was like, I'm powerful, I'm I'm connected, I can help heal our family, and you know, I can I can do it. I know I can do it. No one can do anything without community. So she was incredibly isolated. And I had to like talk with the embassy and I was trying to get an investigation done so that he can not hurt anyone else. No one was listening to me. Everything was in a different language. I had to get things translated. They didn't interview us, like our family surrounding her death. They only interviewed him and one of her friends that they knew for that she knew for like six months or something. I share this because so much of the stuff surrounding her death is wrapped in an insane amount of shame that's not mine. That's very much tied to so many other people in my immediate, extended, chosen family that don't know the whole story and are not interested in knowing the whole story. And because her and I present and presented very differently, I've been accused of like having an ulterior motive of either like outing her or trying to make money off of her death. I've been accused of that. No, there's a lot of abuse in our family. And so this is touching on that for you. This is touching on the shame of other things. And I recognize that if we name this, other things are gonna have to be named too. And so I'm at this pivotal point in my life where I feel inauthentic, not talking about how she actually fucking died. It wasn't just him, it wasn't just her being isolated, it wasn't just the spiritual awakening, it was a culmination of all of those things. But that part of it, the fact that she was hitting her head against the wall because she was trying to regulate herself. She got in a car accident a year before and broke her arm and her collarbone, and she was so angry that she didn't die. And most people don't know this shit. I don't share it to upset anyone, and I don't share it to blow up a family. I share it because people really only know what their experience of that person is. And I'm not saying that that's not real and true. It's also just one part of a picture.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Very hard to share that. I know it's very hard to share our stories, and especially when they have so many layers and have compassion. I'm so sorry you know this pain. I'm so sorry for the loss of your sister. I know it, thank you. The grieving sister in me completely understands where you're coming from and how this love that we have for them and this need to be the protective sister or do justice by them or speak on their behalf because they were the other side of the coin. What you just said about your need to share because you're at a point where you need that congruency. Yeah, I cannot express enough how powerful congruency is. It could be the difference literally between life and death. Yes. And I don't mean that lightly. I'm hearing, right? This is the way I received it because I don't know her life. I don't I didn't know her, so I can't speak for her. But there is something that I've seen and heard over and over between people who have experienced uh loved one die by suicide or people with suicidal ideation, and it is the dissonance between their inner world and their outer world. Yes. And the reason there's dissonance is because something, whether it's perception, family values, societal community restrictions, belief, whatever it is, there's so many reasons. There's something that hinders them from speaking their truth. You can be in a crowded room, you can have an entire community and be the loneliest person because nobody is seeing you.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

People like can see that your body is there, but they cannot, they cannot recognize all the underlying layers there. And that's the whole thing is that when we start to wake up to ourselves, when we start to like see ourselves, right? Which is really what a spiritual awakening is. When we start to go, oh, I kind of act shitty sometimes like that, or oh yeah, that thing I do really isn't serving me, or like, oh, that feels icky when I talk to that person. So like maybe I should address that relationship or whatever, right? That is an example. Those are many, there's many examples, but those are like the smallest versions of spiritually awakening to ourselves. When she started to awaken to herself, and this is the most common thing that happens, she started to get really sad. It's understandable because when we recognize that we have turned into, I'll speak for myself. When I recognized that I had turned into my own abuser, I had all of the internalized from my sexual abuse as a child, which the person that abused me abused her as well, which that's a whole nother thing. The way that I dealt with that was to starve myself because I internalized that disgust in my own body to then try and get out anything that was that made me feel full or penetrated. So a lot of times people with eating disorders have been sexually abused. That's like a very common intersection of coping mechanism. Once I started to deal with not just talking about my eating disorder, but once I started to move through the actual somatic trauma of that and actually continue feeling what it felt like to be full or to be fat, right? To feel fat, I recognize fat is not a feeling. When I start to quote unquote feel fat, I realize that I'm actually full of other people's shit, their emotions. I'm holding their weight in my body, their energetic weight in my body. So when I start to feel fat now in my journey, I don't immediately go to, I need to work out, I need to skip my next meal, I need to, I go, oh, I need to move, I need to punch a pillow, I need to hum, I need to scream, I need to take five deep breaths, I need to go for a walk, I need to look at a treat. Like it's like I need to, I need to presence myself and figure out how to get this energy moving. Often people don't recognize when these major life events take place, like all the ones I described in my life. I did not allow myself to feel the grief of those life events. I did not allow myself to feel that grief. So then when my sister died, it was all of that grief and all of the other grief on top of it. And it was all physiological.

SPEAKER_01 34:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

It all came out physiologically. Now, for her, when she was starting to recognize, oh yeah, I abandoned myself. Oh, I'm here for everybody else and I hate myself. Oh, yeah, I talk a big game of all my beliefs about, yeah, you can do it. Like the shit she would say to me, I believe in you, I believe in you. And I would yell at her and say, You can't sit here and tell me you fucking believe in me, and then not believe in yourself. Because I believe in you. It's so blatantly obvious to me how incredible you are. And for you to deny your brilliance while you're actively telling me to honor mine, fuck you. I'm not doing that with you. When she started to recognize, like, oh, I do do that, and it wasn't because of you know me saying that, it was like right on the journey. She recognized that she kept breaking her own heart. And this is the part where we need community. It's right there. And that's often when people get in shame spirals. They go, Oh, God, that's so embarrassing. Oh my God, I'm not worth anyone's time. Oh, and then they stay there. And that is exactly what you're talking about this dissonance of I know in my head and somewhere in my heart that I'm enough. But I can't ignore the fact that that, you know, best friend of mine in second grade said bah, right. And that's the thing that just keeps repeating in my body. I've embedded that in there. It's now an embodied belief system that I now have to unravel. But I feel stupid about it. So I don't want to look at it. That is exactly what happens, and that's where I believe so much suffering happens in that dissonant place. And this is where I feel my body having that dissonance because literally I watched my sister disconnect from her intuition. I watched her continuously tell herself that she was stupid. She didn't know what she was talking about, she had no idea what she was doing, she was unclear. And so much of that had to do with the person that was in her life affirming her biggest fears and consistently telling her to analyze it and get out of her body because she couldn't trust her body. Her body was signaling her to leave. My intuition, my bodily messaging has never been wrong. Have I ignored it?

unknown 36:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:36

Have I tried to silence her, belittle her, minimize her, disrespect her? Yeah, I've done it over and over and over again. And then every time I come back to myself, I have to go, oh my God, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I did that. And that's again where we need someone to go. I see you, I believe you, I'm gonna call you back in. If we don't allow people to call ourselves back in when we can't figure out where we are, that is where I believe that suffering goes. That's devastating. That's it's devastating to me.

SPEAKER_02 37:10

In your podcast, for everybody listening, you have a podcast. You have two podcasts. I too. We'll talk about that in a second. Yeah. But in the episode I recently listened to, you said something that was so powerful. I wrote it down and said, our our intuition is quiet, calm, and there's lots of space around it. It sounds simple, but to hear our intuition, we have to hear with our body. Yes. And I don't think people get that, or at least the people that I've worked with don't, you know, and even myself, that was a process for me to understand that that's very tricky. So when you say her body wanted to leave, I'm I'm understanding it's leave the relationship, correct?

SPEAKER_00 37:53

Okay, so her body knew, her body knew, and she was getting signals in her body, and I would, when I talked to her, I would, I would focus on that. So I'd be like, oh, you know, tell me more about that. But then she would start to say really upsetting things about herself. And I would say, Who is saying that to you? Who's talking? Who is saying that to you? Whose voice is that? Yes, because it was not her voice, the intonation in her voice would change. Like it literally was different. And because of my clear sentience and because of what I was sensing in my body, I could tell in our conversations when it would shift out of her body. Like my body would react to that. I would feel sick to my stomach, I would immediately get a headache and I would get pain behind my eyes. Oftentimes I would feel warmth behind my heart, right in between my shoulder blades, which is always my tell that I'm calling in the people behind me that I need to keep me present. But especially the last year of her life, and this is where I hold a lot of grace for myself and a lot of sadness. I didn't speak to her the last year of her life because I couldn't anymore. She was pulling me under with her. And I knew, just like taking, taking pain meds for my back, I knew that if I kept talking to her, that I was gonna not be able to, like my name means light. I see very much my life being good, bad, and different, an illumination of like the shadowy parts of our experience. I talk a lot about dark stuff, about shadow work and things because it festers, it poisons in the dark, right? And I could feel my light dimming more and more and more and more when I was around her. And I knew that I had to save myself. I also knew that, you know, just based on any training you take, any degree you have, right? If you can't make someone change unless they're willing to, right? And also, and so and rightful, right. There's a lot of pain surrounding having to make that decision because I knew at that point I was one of the only people that she had that still had some sort of illumination for her, but she couldn't hear me anymore. She had completely disconnected from her body for me when we got the call. My immediate thing was like, I didn't know that person. The last year I didn't know her because she had completely lost herself. And also I felt so much guilt and so much responsibility for having to walk away and protect myself.

SPEAKER_02 40:24

So many layers. And yeah, from what I heard, because you both experienced that abuse very early. And my understanding is that you were like less than 10 years old.

SPEAKER_00 40:35

Mine was like five to ages five to seven, so hers would have been ages like 10 to 12.

SPEAKER_02 40:40

And you were babies, yeah. And not that it matters if you're older, younger in terms of abuses, abuses, abuse. Like that's horrible at any age, but but man, the innocence, the it does matter actually. Your child, your baby, right? You didn't have the tools back then to deal with any of this. You probably didn't even understand what was happening. So my understanding is that she probably suffered from the same wound. It manifested differently in her life throughout her life than it did yours. And you said we live under the same roof as siblings, but we have different parents just because of the age difference, the plate, the life experiences, etc. It sounds like trauma upon trauma throughout many years, it manifested differently with her as it did with you. You are more vocal about it. The reason we were sitting here talking about these things, I envision it like mold. Yeah. If you don't rip it out, if you don't bring it out to the light, if you don't clean it up and expose it to light, it will fester and it will take the whole house down with it and everybody in it. We have to talk about these things. I honor that you you needed to do what you needed to do to protect yourself. That's extremely important. And I also understand that there's a lot of pain behind that. So I'm I'm very sorry. And there's so many layers to the to both stories, actually.

SPEAKER_00 41:56

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And going back to like the quiet intuition, right? Especially now in the collective, we are four years out of lockdown, right? And the dissonance that I believe is happening right now for people is those that want to act like the last four years didn't happen because it's too painful to look at. Like you just said, whether we acknowledge there's mold or not, the mold is gonna grow, right? It's like, right, exactly. You can act like the last four years didn't happen, but you're not going back to the person you were then. They don't exist anymore. That person has died. That was a death, that version of you is gone. It is fucking devastating. It is, it's devastating. All of us are collectively going through this. But the dissonance for me right now that I'm recognizing in the collective, and this is where like I have found it difficult to have people sign on to work with me because they know they're going to have to put effort in and everyone is exhausted. And my thing is the effort that you are taking to ignore, deny, or hold on to the things that are sad, uh shameful, difficult to look at, it is taking so much more energy for you to maintain your suffering than it is to feel and move through. And the thing is, like with somatic work, a lot of people think it's like re-traumatizing the body. So this goes back to like the intuition, right? Intuition is quiet, it's expansive, it's really, really deep down. It's not about going back into the trauma, which a lot of talk therapy is. And again, I am a fan of talk therapy. I've been in cognitive behavioral therapy forever. But if we are leaving out the body, it's not gonna work. It's gonna feel like it works, like in your head. You'll organize it, you'll be able to self diagnose and you'll be able to analytically explain something. But if you are no, and and that was the thing with like when she died, that was when I realized like, oh, I had intellectualized the experience of being. Alive, I had stopped feeling and sensing. Yes, did I have sensations and feelings totally? But anything that didn't feel good or felt too heavy, I was resisting. When she died, I didn't have the option to resist anymore. I had to allow myself to fall apart and everything in my life too as well. But when we go into somatic work, it's not about re-traumatizing the body. It's about continuing the thing that stopped, right? So I always talk to clients about, you know, when you're on the highway in the left lane and you're going super fast, someone slams on their brakes in front of you and you slam on your brakes, nothing happens, you have plenty of room, there's no one behind you, it's fine. 30 seconds later, your legs start shaking. Yeah. Right. And you're like, oh no, right? I could have died there. I could have yes. A lot of people, a lot of people are taught, like we are conditioned to be like, oh no, no, it's fine. It's fine. It's totally fine. So I don't even know. This is so weird. Like, I don't even like, it's fine. Every like if someone else is in the car, right? You're trying to convince them they're good. Like, I don't even know why I'm shaking. If we just let our body shake, probably 30 seconds, if we just pulled over, took three deep breaths and recognized, whoa, that was terrifying. Holy moly, we're good. But what happens is we go, stop shaking. So then the muscles go and think about doing that every single day. So the goal is that you're creating tools and resources to address physiological things that happen on a day-to-day to allow the cycle of energy and movement to finish. That's it. That's what somatic therapy is. And then through that, you integrate all the parts that you have segmented, because trauma and stress has made them parts. You integrate that and then you embody that into your experience of your most authentic self. So when I talk to clients about like safety, I'm not talking about the absence of harm or violence, because oftentimes that's not an option. For most of us, look at the world. For most of us, it's not an option. But when I talk about safety, it's about where, with who, when, how, what makes you feel the most you makes you feel like you can talk openly and safely. You can wear what you want to wear. You can express yourself in particular. You would love who you want to love. Where are you able to find the most amount of places, spaces, people, and things that make you feel the most you? And that is where we widen the lens. We have more expansion. Our nervous system is regulated. We feel our ratio. My ratio is like 85, 90%. A lot of people are like, whoa, a lot of energy. It's like, no, this is what my nervous system feels good at, right? Right. But I get to 150 real quick. It's the Sagittarius in me. But I will say that like I have the tools to regulate back into my 90%, which is cool. So the goal is that when you get to the ratio that your nervous system functions as your most authentic you, you can hear what you want. You can hear what you do and don't like because there's space. It's quiet. And I don't want to say it's calm. Nervous system regulation is not about getting calm or quiet. But you know, when you tell a kid that's thrashing, calm down, calm down. Like, be quiet. Yeah. And that's not, that's not nervous system regulation. Nervous system regulation is finding your ratio that feels good for you, the vibration of energy that feels good in your body. And when you're in that space within your body, you're able to hear yourself.

unknown 47:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:27

Thank you for that. And and learning how to release. I saw your cat in the back there again. And my dog is over here. And it reminded me, related to this conversation, that animals know this instinctively. You know, like have you seen whenever they get upset at the in my case, my dog starts barking at something furiously and all of a sudden it's gone. And he shakes it off. Like he just intuitively shakes it off. And it this is like a thousand times a day, right? Yeah. So what I'm hearing from you is in order to keep that ratio, it's not a one and done. No, no, no. It is like, hey, this is my spectrum. This is my recipe for my system regulation, right? Every person's a everybody has their own ratio. Yeah. And this is what I need to get down here or up here or whatever to make it more neutral for myself so I can be from in a regulated space. Yes. Animals know how to do this, but for whatever reason, we've been taught to separate the mind from the body. Yeah. And that is one of the worst things you could possibly do because a lot of people you ask them, so how did that make you feel? And they say, Well, I think I'm upset. Well, thinking you are upset is not a feeling, yeah, by definition. So tell us how how could you discern a thought from a feeling? What does that look like maybe to you? Or what have you seen in your practice with the clients that you work with? Oh my God, so good.

SPEAKER_00 48:40

Okay. So the second someone starts to get like really wordy about something, if I'm like, oh, how did that make you feel? Or uh what are you sensing in your body? Because that's a question I'll ask a lot. Like, are you sensing something in your body? Because for me, when I'm working with someone, I will get pings in my body that will tell me what's happening. And I don't say that to call anyone out, right? I say that because that's how I experience the world. And it's not me being like, oh, are you lying to me? It's more like I'll invite someone, I'll invite someone to investigate something that might be in their happening in their body, right? They might not be aware of it. Okay. So I might say, where are you sensing that? Is there something, is there some part of your body you're feeling something different? And if they go into like, well, and a lot of dancers do this, oh, um, well, my scapula, the second they start like using big words, they're completely intellectualizing. If they go, I don't know, bad, that is when I know they're starting to sense something. Because if they don't have the words for it, right, if they don't have the DSM definition that they're self-diagnosing, right? And again, this is what happened with my sister a lot uh towards the last few years. The more she learned about stuff, and this I have found, I will say, with a lot of female identifying, especially straight white female identifying people, loving to learn, loving to have information, gaining wisdom, uh, knowledge, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't get embodied. It stays in the head. So this is where the dissonance starts to happen. The things we talk about and the things we quote unquote believe, we don't actually take action on. And we don't actually internally believe them. So we feel like an imposter.

SPEAKER_02 50:27

There's a lack of congruency, and you just become essentially a living Google search engine that knows all the answers, but doesn't embody them.

SPEAKER_00 50:35

Yes. So one of my friends, and I'll name her because we love her and I know she'll be fine with it, Amy. Okay. Uh, Amy's who I do uh one of my podcasts with uh called Move with Eileen and Amy, and we interview dancers and movement artists. And she admittedly highly, highly analytical. A lot of like the stuff that she has done over her life has has been to really try and find the right words. She talks about this a lot. I want to find the right words so people understand me. And my invitation to her has consistently been like, what if they don't understand you though? Like, what if you found the perfect word and they still don't understand you? Yeah. Yeah. And she's like, you know, like that, you know, we talk about it a lot. But there's been a few times I've asked her, what are you feeling? What is the thing you're feeling in your body right now? And she'll start to describe like her cells, her musculature. I love so much that we are going like scientific x-ray, almost like an MRI, like the way that she experiences the world and her body is is right. She seems to be familiar with it. Sounds like totally. And I'm like, awesome, awesome. Love that for you. Could you give me another word? How would your like daughter describe this? Because she has three kids, you know? It can be a sound, it can be a color, it can be like sometimes I'll like move my hands like this and be like, it feels like, you know, like, and that's once someone starts talking like that, that's when I know they're starting to feel fine, yeah, feel and find themselves because it's gonna be messy. We tie it up in a bow. We want it to be this. This is how I'm feeling today. Thank you so much for listening to me. And that was what I was taught as a kid too, that like I had to justify every feeling. I had to, you know, I had to explain myself all the time. And this is the good and bad of being labeled resilient my whole life. So this is the helpers and healers are actually who I focus on. Any person I would love to work with who wants more somatic integration and embodiment practices. But the people that I very much want to spend time with are the healers and helpers that are not extending the same grace that are in this dissonant place, but they've hit a level in their work where they don't feel like they can say, I need help, where they don't feel like they can say, I don't know how to feel anymore because I teach other people how to do this and I haven't done it with myself in so long, or I need new tools because I've hit a different level of embodiment or trauma or whatever. The second I sense that in spaces, my body does not trust them. I'm not saying that you don't know all the things, right? You know all the things, that's awesome. But what if we knew them here in our heart? What if we knew them in our pelvis? What if we knew them in our perineum? Because that's a completely different experience. So when someone is like, I don't know what that feels like, I will invite ways that they can talk about their body that is not just an emotion. So again, going back to a color, it can be an animal. Is there a song lyric that you keep hearing? Because like it's the same thing you talked about when something in your body hurts, you look up the spiritual meaning. So someone names the color. I already know what emotion is attached to that. And I don't know it in my head. I know I already know it in my body because I have tells in my body that are telling me what the theme is that's coming up for them. And so when they start to name, you know, a sound, like I said, I don't know. I don't know what that feels like. It feels like, well, well, now we're here. Now we're in it. It's not gonna make sense. Let's be crazy together. It's great.

SPEAKER_02 54:03

There's so much to unpack there. Because no, you're hitting so many key points. And I thank you for that. It's so full of wisdom. It's one of these things that you could listen to this over and over and get something completely new out of it. Everything you just said, it's very powerful. So thank you. Yeah. Um, I want to touch on the resilience part. I had the biggest issue with the word resilience. I hated the word resilience at some point because it's to me an external expectation on your, hey, bad things happen, but you have about five minutes to get over that shit and let's move on, right? Yeah. And oh, you haven't done it, therefore, what's going on? Like there's a resiliency problem. I also remember this very vividly when do you remember a year? It's like 12 years ago when the earthquake in Haiti. Yeah. I remember somebody saying, they'll be fine. They're a resilient people. And I'm like, you know, the survival mechanism and instinct in humans, if you're alive, you're just you're resilient. And even people who are not with us, they were resilient until the end. Yes. So one thing does not negate the other, right? And so I have this issue with resiliency. That being said, it is a part of moving forward in life. It is required for living, it is required for existing and all of these things. But man, we need to learn to tie everything back in mind, body, spirit. We need to learn how to feel our feelings. It is such a big part of this pie that that we talked about earlier. And what it looks like in practice, like you said, sometimes it doesn't need to make sense because part of the things that we're getting wrong is trying to intellectualize and to give it meaning. And it has to be this profound thing. And like, how do you tie that into the rest of your life? No, sometimes it's just my back feels it's hot. It's it's moving up and down, it's vibrating. It's, you know, think of the closest thing that maybe could be relatable to some people. It's like if you go to the doctor, you say I have a pain, and they ask you, is it dull or sharp? Right. Yeah. That that 10x all over your life. Yeah. Integrate that into your daily practice. That constant check-in will reveal so much. Yeah. Moving forward, and you will understand your innate operating mechanism as a as an individual. Are you familiar with human design? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm a manifesting generator. My confirmation system is sacral. And the moment I learned that, I was like, oh my gosh, I have been ignoring it for so long. What? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:22

Yeah. I'm a generator and I'm I'm sacral space as well. And and uh your sacral space is all of your emotions. It's all of your self-expression and pleasure, access to pleasure, and then obviously we know sexuality. And so much of that space in bodies is like a brick, like energetically like a brick, because people people literally just turn off that space.

SPEAKER_02 56:45

You work a lot with consent-driven spaces. Can you talk about what that means and what that looks like in practice?

SPEAKER_00 56:52

It's probably 2020. I think it's 2021. I was meeting like a new group of people who are friends of a friend. And she was like, oh, let's all get together and like, you know, all of you are awesome. And I know you individually, and let's all meet each other, whatever. And that was great. And also I realized like it was an unaligned group for me, which is totally fine. But within that group, there was a dynamic that happened between someone in the space. And I realized now looking back that I was energetically non-consensually interacting with her. For example, again, as a clairsentient person, I sense the unspoken. I sense the visceral voice. So I hear the body's somatic story through my body, through sensation. Uh, so another way to define like clairsentient is a clear feeling or the sixth sense. So it's a clear feeling. Again, it comes in signs and symbols, but oftentimes it comes in sensations within my body. And with that particular interaction, I realized afterwards, I'm very consent-driven in dance spaces and like working with fitness people, like physically, right? Like I'll always ask, are you, is it okay if I touch you? You know, can I touch you here? Like if I'm adjusting someone's body, which in the dance world is not very common. Again, a whole nother podcast. But I realized that so much of consent energetically within the spiritual world is not honored. And in the therapeutic world, how many times have we been in spaces where you're talking to someone and then they offer advice? And I will absolutely admit that that was me in almost all of my friendships for most of my life. Admittedly, because I was one of, if not the only person that was looking for answers because I had no support system. So I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could about stuff so that I felt resourced. I felt good, and I felt knowledgeable about why things happen, how they happen, how they connect, whatever. So then when someone would be talking about something that was very, very clear to me, the theme, the energetic theme, I would offer advice. And sometimes that was received well. Um, most times it was not. And so that's an example of consent-driven spaces. I've been adamant about that in the physical space. Again, if I'm working with a physical body, but that also extends into the energetic, the celestial, the spiritual, the sexual. I'll say it like a lot of times when I work with people. Someone recently was telling me in a session, she kind of just got quiet and I just said, Did your genitals just light up? It's okay if you don't want to talk about it. And she just got really red and was like, uh, and I said, I want to take note of this because this is a perfect example of discernment in our bodies. Oftentimes we get turned on, which another word for activation, when energy is flowing. Oftentimes we feel it in our genital space because it's our perineum and it's linked to our safety and it's connected to our basic human rights, right? Of food, shelter, love, care, acceptance, belonging, right? So what we were talking about at the time when that lit up had a lot to do with empowerment, like her feeling more herself, speaking her mind, and like recognizing like her agency. And her body was like, let's do it. That's a perfect example of like inquiring about something that might be labeled as inappropriate or like taboo or like something that we don't talk about, recognizing that I had built a relationship with her where she felt safe. I felt safe to be able to ask that question. She also had every right to not answer it. That was a physical and energetic situation that required consent to talk about it because it is directly linked oftentimes to trauma, especially surrounding sexuality and genitalia. When I talk about consent-driven spaces, it's not just a physical space that bodies are in. It's also the relational space that our bodies are occupying together, the energetic space within and around them. Even if I'm sensing something, I have to really discern am I asking this to confirm that the sensation I'm feeling is real? I don't need them to confirm that. I trust the sensation that's here for me. Or am I asking this to bring more knowledge and insight and embodied wisdom to their body to bring them more awareness of what's going, what might be going on in their body so that they can claim a part of themselves that they maybe have been like, oh, I don't know why I feel like this. I'm not going to pay attention to it. So I'm constantly checking in on where their comfort level is. And most people have no fucking idea. Most people have never been asked. I know when I went to Planned Parenthood and they asked me, oh, is it okay if I, you know, do this part of the procedure? I hysterically started crying because it was the first time in a environment with a doctor that I had been asked consent. Oh, wow. You know what I mean? So, like when we hear consent-driven places, I feel like that is a buzzword, but it also is how's your heart today? And if you don't want to share that, that's totally fine. That is an example of consent. It's just as simple as like inquiring and giving someone a bailout option.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:10

Very helpful. I think that's very important information and very practical information because I'll be honest, but every time I hear consent, I always think physical. Yeah. I I didn't think energetically and I didn't think about like, you know, the type of conversations I that wouldn't even ring a bell. So I just became aware of that through this conversation. And it reminded me that, you know, whenever you lose a loved one or somebody dies that's very near and dear to you, and you're experiencing all these feelings, it's a very confusing and chaotic time, emotionally, physically, mentally, all the things. I just made this connection, you know, right now. It's that what bothers people the most, there's the pain of the loss, and then there's the suffering. The suffering is the shit layer of cake that nobody wants. And it's like, why is this on here? Like, I don't even like frosting gross, right? Right. So it's like what that suffering a lot of times has to do with the misaligned information and feedback loops from our well-intending, usually friends and family. So where consent would come in, it's instead of saying, Don't worry, you're gonna be fine, you're gonna get through this, you're a resilient person. Did I did I ask you? Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you ask the person what do they need? Why don't you ask the griever, what do they need? So consent plays a huge role. And I huge just dawned on me how big of a role it plays in caring for a grieving person, in caring for yourself as a grieving person. You also mentioned a little while back in the conversation how a lot of the healers that you want to help, it sounded like they resembled your sister, you know, personality-wise.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:44

Right. So that's that's really correct. I know very much a part of me wants to help that type of healer and helper because I felt like I couldn't help her. But I also recognize that the majority, I'm gonna say it majority of healers and helpers that I've talked to over the years, don't feel safe to be struggling. Don't feel safe. It's right like, and and my thing is I'm very open about what I struggle with. I truly don't share it for sympathy. I share it because it is more painful for me to not share it and act like that's not happening and then create this false narrative that I have my shit together. Going back to resilience, like my my partner, him and I have had many conversations about resiliency. For the longest time, he could not see me, could not see my pain, could not, even though I was articulating as much as I possibly could, trying to explain what was going on. The first like six months he had to carry me to bed because I physically couldn't get off the couch at night to go to sleep. Like uh, but it wasn't until I physically collapsed on our kitchen floor screaming and said, I cannot, I cannot hold space to convince you that you're being a good partner to me right now. And I cannot tell you how to support me right now because I've never been through this before. So all the times that you feel like you're not doing a good job as my partner, you're putting this on me to navigate this by myself because now you're you're asking me to carry the shit that you have here about, you know, being a good person. And I get that. I know you want to be a good person. I get it. I know you want to support me in the best way possible. And also, you're gonna fuck this up because you've never done it before. Also, I'm not here to educate you on this. I am learning in real time. And yes, do I have tools prior to this because of like my background? Totally. But none of them have prepared me for this at all. Do I have some vocabulary? Yes. Am I able to discern what's happening in my body and articulate it verbally to you? Yes. But it's it was very clear that for him to see me crumble, that was. The turning point for like I just kept saying, I need you to let go. I need you to let go of who I was before this. I need you to let go of her because you holding, I cannot get back to her. And I understand that's devastating. You just lost your partner. It's devastating. And I feel devastated about it. And I also cannot be compared to her because I have to let her go too. And that was actually when, you know, for a few years I've been asking him to go to therapy. Not because it was like outrageous that he like very much needed therapy, but I was like, hey, this will be a good time, you know. And at that point in that, in that interaction, I was like, I need you to get a therapist now. Like, I cannot educate you on this experience when I have no fucking idea what I'm doing. It is so unfair for you to put that on me. And this is actually, I lost all of my friends after my sister died. My entire friend group stopped talking to me because all of them, quote unquote, didn't know how to deal with me. You know, I'm sure you can, you can yeah, attest to that. This is a very common thing that happens. And when you're the person in the group that everyone goes to for advice or goes to for support or whatever, again, going back to resilient, they could not see if you're someone's lighthouse, and I don't say that like with ego, I say that like, right, if you're someone that someone looks to to calm their nervous system and they're a fucking mess, right? It's like that's scary. That's scary. And if you don't have the tools to regulate yourself, you're gonna take how they treat you personally. And oftentimes people just go, oh, this is too much, I gotta go. And that's devastating. But the resilient factor, when I say that word, it like tastes bitter in my mouth. We need to let go of that. This is also this links back to American dream of like, you know, pull yourself up by the bootstraps. It's like, no, sometimes you need to lay on the ground and just cry. Sometimes you have to do that. One of my friends lost her husband a couple months uh before I lost my sister, and it was a very tragic. She found him. It was like, it was not good at all. And he was very young. I would text her emojis, or I would just be like, fucking sucks. Do you want to call today? Do you want to spend time together? Do you want to, you know, whatever? And it a lot of times it was, I don't know. And I'm like, okay, I'm here. Sometimes I would just text, I'm here. People don't stay. That's what it is. And with grief, we have to stay. We have to be present in it. And people just don't want to do it because it hurts. And it touches all the places in their life and in their soma, in their history, in their energetic history where they abandon themselves and others abandon them. And they don't want to touch on it. So then they abandon us. And when we're brave to stay with ourselves, that is where resilience is built. It's that's where it is. And it's not the strength of like Phoenix rising, but you're building your ability to widen the lens to expand the container of pain and joy and suffering and grief and sadness and love. The second those things expand, all the other ones do too.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:05

So powerful. Yes. Even the Phoenix, the analogy of the Phoenix, the Phoenix had to be burnt to ashes before it rose again. So we have to allow for ourselves to become a puddle of mush wet towels on the floor and mush. You know, like there, that is important as well. And when you were saying about your husband, I have compassion for both of you because it's not easy for anybody. I hear you so much. I I had to communicate that to my husband as well. I was like, you need to understand she died. Yeah. A part of her died that day. She's not coming back. And I'm trying to accept that myself. Yeah. Somebody said to me, This is the first time you're meeting this version of yourself. And it's literally getting to know her. Yeah. Who is she? You know, and what does she need? And I'm caring for this new version of me that I don't know her. I'm meeting her right now. So I cannot tell you what she needs because I don't know what she needs. Totally. I hear you. And and the resiliency factor, it has to come from within. Yes, it cannot be imposed externally. It has to come with from within. It's real and it's powerful, and resiliency is amazing. Yeah. When it comes from within.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:08

Yeah, I'll like tie that up into a perfect little bow. My sister was found on a Friday morning and we were trying to get my mom to Portugal to deal with everything. And so I only told close friends over that weekend. And I went to work the next week because we were my mom's one of 13, my dad's one of five. We have a huge family. Wow. Um, a lot of cousins, a lot of family. So we were trying to tell everybody before, you know, it got out on social media and all of that stuff and whatever. And because the nature of her death, it was a lot. So that interim week, I was still teaching fitness classes because I was like trying to have a semblance of normalcy. And then we announced it the following Saturday. But in that interim, I didn't, I couldn't eat. I physically couldn't eat anything. This again, f physiologically, I couldn't. Anytime I put anything in my stomach, it felt like knives, horrible pain. So I was dropping weight very, very quickly. And I saw someone that Wednesday. So at that point, it was like five days after, five or six days after. And she was a somewhat like close client. So it was before class, and she was like, Oh, how are you doing? And I just, I was like, you know what? I actually, you know, no one really knows this. But um my my sister took her life last week and I'm I'm just having a really hard time and I I no one really knows, but I I'm trying to get through these classes. And yeah, today is just a really hard day. And she looked me up the down, she goes, Well, you look amazing. Oh my. And I just oh my goodness. And like, she knows my history with anorexia. Oh my. It was like of all the things you've just said right now, but it was a perfect example of just a sociological conditioning of like, oh, but you're thin. All this shit you could have said to me. I at that point, like my whole body hurt because I was so I was so small, you know, not eating for five days and then grieving and then crying. And then, you know, my body was just in so much pain. I could not believe that that was the reaction. Since then, I I have a lot of grace. I get it. But in that moment, I was like, oh, I'm gonna burn this entire building to the ground, right? Like it was like, I'm this is not gonna go well. I got through the class, it was fine, whatever. But I I rage cried that night. I looked put together. So the appearance was like, oh, she's resilient, she's strong, she's here, she's doing the thing, and she's in shape. What are we saying? Like, right, totally, totally. You fooled everybody. And my thing is like, oh, I don't want to do that. That's I am so after that comment, that was when I was like, everything online, I was very open about it because I was like, the last thing I want you to do is perceive that this is a walk in the park. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:50

You know, it's not. I made a promise to myself in a similar moment. I was like, I'm not gonna let this live in my bones. It's yeah, I'm it will go through me. I will experience it, I will acknowledge it, I will honor it. It will not live here like this body, right? Yeah. And I'm not saying I've gotten it 100%. I I have still have a lot of work to do, but um, we are a work in progress. A big part of it is having these very open conversations. And thank you so much for being so vulnerable with your truth. This helps people. People feel lonely because they feel alone because they think they're the only one going through something like this. And although we're alone in our particular circumstance, because I'm not you, you're not me, I'm not them. Still, there's that common thread that we can relate to and and feel seen in our circumstance. There's so much. I mean, maybe we need to do a part two. We need to do a part two. We need to do a catch-up, but share a little bit about how people can work with you, where they can get a hold of you, and anything else that you want to share.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:50

Yeah, I do one-on-one uh virtual, mainly virtual, but I will do in person if it if it feels good for us. Hope coaching, it's called. Uh, so it's healing opportunities, processing emotions. So we word hope is an acronym for healing opportunities processing emotions. I love it. Yeah, okay. And uh and hope one of the definitions of hope is a feeling of trust. So the goal is to get back the feeling of trust in our bodies. So that's my one-on-one stuff. And then I have a couple different group offerings. I have some, like I have a course called Alchemize Embers, which is about harnessing the energy of fire, especially with like taking action on our goals and things. Um, I'm gonna be getting that a session of that up in the this year. Um, I'm working on an in-person offering in New York City called Somatic Stories, where it'll be a 90-minute in-person class where we'll stretch and resource the body, and then we will create a movement piece together for the sole purpose of just moving the stagnant themes in the body that's within that collective group that day. That's amazing. Yeah. So literally learning our somatic stories for that day. But I also have a 10-day virtual version of that that you do with me. So you can find out about that. And then last but not least, I have a monthly somatic support group that's called No End, Only More. You can check out my website for the April date. Um, it's right around the second or third week of April. And um, it's named after a line from one of my sister's poems that that reads, There is no end, there is only more. And it's where she's talking about creative life force and love and how our energy just changes shape, but it never dies. The goal of that is to gather in community and really share what's going on in our bodies and again, resources and tools. You'll be able to give a little and get a little, so that you're leaving there with some nervous system regulation options, um, and also that you're doing that in community. Uh, you can go to KayaEvolutions.com. Kaya is K-A-I-A. Um, and it's named after my sister Catherine. Kaya is a diminutive of the name, Catherine. It means pure. It also means my elder little sister. And so Kaya Evolution stands for pure little sister transforming.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:56

That beautiful thread of symbolism in your work. I love it. Thank you so much. Oh my God, I'm so grateful to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:02

I I like I just want to be best friends. Yeah, yeah. The best part is this does not feel like a trauma bond. This feels like a somatic, energetic, hopeful bond. We can recognize the pain and meet in the heart.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:14

Yes. Oh, I like that. I can recognize the pain and meet in the heart. Oh, I love, love, love. Some people say, I don't know how you do it, how you hold these conversations. There's so much light to these conversations. It's the yin yang. There's lightness and darkness. This is how we experience life and the meaning of life, and we get through it together with each other. And I think that's why these conversations are so powerful. This is how we get to love them. This is how we get to be sisters to our siblings. This is how we get to say their name. This is how we get to tell the world about them. This is how we get to remember them. So I thank you for this. I thank you for everything you're doing. It's beautiful work. So I will link all of your information in the show notes. And as a final question, what would Eileen today say to Eileen in 2019?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:01

Oh. Everything you stand for is going to be tested. Everything that you believe is going to be questioned. Everything that you know is going to be revealed. And all of it is you. Thank you so much, Eileen. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:21

So grateful. That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the Grief and Light podcast. I'd also love to connect with you and hear your thoughts and your stories. Feel free to share them with me via my Instagram page at grief and light. Or you can also visit griefandlight.com for more information and updates. Thank you so much for being here, for being you, and always remember you are not alone.