Episode 83: Healing Is Remembering: The Journey Back to Yourself

What if every healing path is leading us to the same place?

In this heartfelt conversation, Laura and Becky reflect on the surprising common ground they've discovered through two very different journeys.

Following Becky's recent pilgrimage through the South of France, walking in the footsteps of Mary Magdalene and exploring the wisdom of astrology, and Laura's deep immersion into trauma therapy, neuroscience and the nervous system, they realised they had both arrived at the same understanding:

Healing isn't about fixing ourselves. It's about remembering ourselves.

Together they explore how yoga, astrology, trauma therapy, spirituality all offer different languages for the same journey—from separation back to connection, from survival back to wholeness, and from the conditioned self back to our true nature.

Whether your path into healing is through yoga, astrology, psychology, spirituality or life's own challenges, this episode is an invitation to stop searching for something outside yourself and begin the journey home.

Because perhaps healing isn't about becoming more.

Perhaps it's about remembering that beneath every wound, every role and every survival strategy, you have always been whole.

Did you know you can subscribe to this podcast so that it automatically downloads the next episode for you?

You can check out our respective websites and social media here:

Becky:

www.instagram.com/therosealmanac

www.therosealmanac.com

Laura:

www.soulsanctuarystudios.com

www.lauraclaytonwellness.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okay, welcome back everybody. So today we are going to be talking about healing and we thought this would be a good idea. This was Becky's idea actually, and I thought it was brilliant because obviously this is something that we all feel that we are working towards maybe in this lifetime and it can take so many different avenues. And Becky and I have obviously been our own healing journey throughout our lifetime this far, thus far, and it's also moving on in like interesting directions. So, Beck, do you want to talk a little bit about like your journey of healing and what you think healing is first?

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Yeah, sure. I feel like my view on healing, like my definition of healing, has probably changed quite a lot over my lifetime, really. In terms of probably the first time I really thought about healing, other than like physical healing from an injury or you know, something like that, I think was when I found yoga, and I found yoga very healing. I still find yoga healing, you know, and then sort of went on this path of astrology, which gives a different lens to healing in the sense of our birth chart showing us our soul curriculum, and that's when I kind of really got clear on to me, healing is about wholeness, is not about being broken or unfixable or having something wrong with you, it's a sense of things being out of balance, and astrology can really show us that because every sign in the zodiac where we where we have our planets in our birth chart is in one of the elements, so we have obviously earth, fire, air, and water, and so you can see your balance in that, and astrology is like the a way of viewing that so that you can see, as I say, your soul curriculum. So, as well as showing us our soul curriculum, it can help give language to the architecture of our psyche, so where our energy flows naturally, where we have big concentrations of planets in signs and things like that, which is sort of happening for a reason, and I'm sure we might talk about that a bit more. So, astrology has been amazing as a pathway to help me get clearer on what my definition of healing is, and then more recently I've kind of brought it back to the body, but I think in a different way to you, Laura, because I know you've been very much in looking at the nervous system and healing from that perspective, which I can't wait to talk to you about today. And my journey has been physical in terms of I recently went on a pilgrimage to some of the Mary Magdalene sites in France, which is said to be where Mary Magdalene travelled when she was fleeing Egypt and all that happened following the crucifixion across to France as like this safe haven, and where she carried on teaching. And there are certain parts of France where they remember like all the teachings, the Cathar people, and so I went on a pilgrimage there and visited some of the caves where it said that she lived out her last years on earth. It said she spent like 20-30 years sort of living in this one particular area of France called Saint Baume, and we pilgrimaged, we walked up this hill through the forest, up the mountains to this particular cave, which is like a known tourist site. But what I experienced on that journey was kind of not what I expected. I think anyone going purposely, like consciously to connect with energy, like you are gonna have perhaps more of an energetic experience, but yeah, I really experienced at a physical level just so much in my body of letting go. So I basically cried all the way up the mountain, and I'm not really a dramatic person, and I don't cry loads, and I think if I had been observing me, like as someone just on a hike up the mountain, I would have been like, oh my god, you know, pull yourself together, love, because yeah, I don't know what what's going on for you. But yeah, I just cried for like two hours while we walked up this mountain that probably should have only taken us an hour, but because I was crying and just having to stop, uh, it took us much longer, and I had like this sensation in my body of just this extreme heaviness, and it was like I was pregnant, and obviously, having been pregnant in this lifetime myself, it was just really weird, like my mannerisms, everything, my feet got really swollen, like they do in pregnancy, and they're only just going down actually now, which is a couple of weeks later. And it was like this grief of being pregnant and alone on this mountain, and it was really hard to make sense of. It wasn't like I was feeling like I was Mary Magdalene or anything like that. I couldn't work out if I'd had a lifetime in this place, if I was grieving and feeling some aloneness that I felt in my own pregnancies, was which was definitely a thing, or if I was picking up like the energetics from the land itself, which I think definitely holds a lot of memory, and it's on like what's called the Magdalena ley line that runs from that part of France. I think it goes down to Spain as well, but it runs up to Scotland, uh, to the Rosslyn Chapel in the UK, and yeah, it was just this incredibly healing experience where I just felt all the feelings, and as a result, I'm sort of two weeks in now after getting back to the UK, just feeling changed, and something has healed in me, and it's really hard to explain. So, yeah, that's been my recent experience of healing, very different to the ways that I've experienced healing before, which I feel have been quite cerebral, like learning, and yes, doing yoga, but very much being in the theory of yoga and the fascia and knowing all that stuff, you know, from yin, and then even astrology, it's kind of very well, it's quite academic astrology, like you you have to study it to be able to decode it and understand it. And this was just a very different experience, a very physical healing experience that I feel has balanced something in me. Some things that have happened, you know, since I've got back that I've come into my world that are kind of showing me, like maybe there are things that would have triggered me before, and actually some very hard things to deal with that I feel like I've got more capacity to deal with now. So, yeah, that's been my recent journey.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

It's so fascinating to listen back because even though, like, I can hear your like intellectual mind trying to like rationalise it, trying to understand it, trying to make sense of it, like in your own words, it's been like a very physical experience for you. And and I think that's interestingly where our paths are crossing at the moment, in the way that you're coming to a physical experience through following potentially more spiritual path, I suppose you might say. Whereas I'm coming to the physical experience now being the priority through like a nervous system path. But what it has done, both like the overlap there is that ultimately what this comes down to is healing through feeling, through feeling sensation in our body and actually not intellectualizing this, and that's been the massive shift for me because I think it's I think it's a journey, right, to like excuse the excuse the cliche, but for me, I was so far away from healing, like when I started my journey, I was just totally obsessed with like achieving and materialism, like the Maya, the illusion of the material world. I was really stuck in that, and it obviously took for my dad to pass away for me to get that real wake-up call of like, it's just not about that, and life's too short, and what are you gonna do in this lifetime? And that obviously took me on the yoga journey, which which gave me the tools to self-regulate, which is what I needed. My first step of healing, I think, was coming out of the material world and coming into like a shift in values, and like health is more important than achievement. And so then it was like, right, so then how now how do I prioritize my health? And not from a like, how can I look better? How can I get more muscles? How can I do my red light therapy and get rid of the bags under my eyes? Not that health. I'm talking about like true, deep health within the body, and not caring what that looks like from a physical appearance was kind of the next stage that yoga taught me and was very healing on that journey, in the in the way that you know, you can do these poses and they're gonna trigger you, and it's gonna ask you to confront those samskaras, those poisons of the mind, right? Those deeply trodden pathways in the mind that are pushing you on to feed the hungry wolf, are like making you want to still achieve and perform and seek approval and all of that stuff. That was just a real gradual letting go. And those tools were invaluable on that process in terms of learning how to come back to myself through breath, through movement, moving away from using yoga as like performative and trying to please the teacher, and moving into a way that it's much more somatic about like, how does my body need to move to feel better? And and that was a big step in my healing journey and a shift in values that was like, you know, happening in my 20s. And then I guess as I got deeper into the yoga work through my 30s, has been much more philosophical. Obviously, I did my psychology training, so it was like mapping the psychology over the philosophy and the body and trying to really get clear on but how does this work? How does this heal us? Like I know it works because I can feel it, but how can I teach people the science between how it works? And so when I felt like I got quite clear on that with all the different frameworks and the eight-step path and all of that that yoga gives us, it was like yoga the frameworks are to free us from suffering. Like that's what it's designed to do. And yes, yoga poses are one of those, they are one practice because the poses taught in the right way will confront you to ask questions about yourself, and you will have to face truths that you need to heal. It is all it is all of freedom from suffering if we like use the tools in that way and are not doing it as a performative or like aesthetic focus. So for me, it was this journey of like inwards to self. It was actually like healing for me is massively about connection. It's coming from a place of being completely disconnected and then coming back to connecting to yourself, and like you, I a lot of what I had done so far was quite intellectual. It's and you might not think that because it was all to do with body and the yoga and moving, but I was thinking about how I was moving and learning that that was the way to move and that it made you feel better, and it did. But it is only really recently, like as I have changed my practice into like to stop thinking about it and start moving how your body wants to move, like feel and listen and move that way rather than think that has really moved me in this like much deeper level of connection with self, and then as it always does, my journey like took me in another direction, and that's because like astrology crossed my path that gave me a map, still kind of intellectual in the way that I was looking at something, thinking about it, seeing it, it's quite cerebral. That really helped me. I felt like I had like all the tools, and then still I was having these like heart palpitations, and it was when I was closing the studio and felt massive grief, like stress around all of that. And I was like, what's going on here? Because like I've been teaching yoga for 15 years, I get the astrology to a certain extent, like I feel like I'm well equipped, I've got like all the tools anyone could possibly have, and I'm still struggling. What's going on? And I knew this was a physical experience in my body, and there was nothing I could do to think my way out of this. And so I reached out to somebody who had done my training years and years and years ago, and I knew that she had now taken her journey into trauma therapy, and I've been seeing some of the work she'd doing, and it was just really speaking to me. So I just reached out and said, like, you know, I want to learn more about what you're doing. It feels, you know, follow the breadcrumbs, it feels like something that's sort of speaking to me at the moment. So I had started her trauma-informed like therapist course, which has just been a whole new level of like deepening my connection to self. And why that is, is that it works with sensation in the body. So it takes the intellectualizing out of it entirely, and it makes you drop into feeling the really detailed sensations in your body and educates you as to how ultimately we're animals, and like when an animal gets scared, it has to shake, right? To discharge the fear out of the body and to close the stress loop in the nervous system, so our biology. And us humans are animals, and we should be completing that loop through shaking, through physical sensation in the body, through heaviness, through whatever is the felt experience in the body, needs to be fully felt and not interrupted. And what we do as humans, like Peter Levine always says, we're we're animals who've forgotten that we're animals. Because as humans, what we do is we have that social acceptability piece that comes from the prefrontal cortex that goes, This is not acceptable. Like you're saying, like if you were looking at someone crying up the mountain, you kind of go like, What's going on? And that's like this human thing, but it really messes with our nervous system because the we are animals, and what we're trying to do is complete these cycles. And by us intellectualizing and going, Oh, but I even right, so intellectualising in the way that I shouldn't be feeling that because we demonize anger and sadness and all that stuff as bad emotions from childhood, which is nonsense, but that's the first sort of thing we do, right? So that's like ingrained in us, and then this is what's been really interesting is then you do what I've been doing for the past 20 years and going, I know what I can do, I'm gonna regulate my breath. You know, I'll do four counts in and four counts out, jump on my mount, I'm gonna do a down dub, blah blah blah. I'm actually still distracting myself from the sensation. I'm trying to make it go away. It's still a distraction technique, it's a really healthy one, and it definitely soothes the nervous system, but it doesn't heal the root that triggered us in the first place. And the healing, the root of the trigger, is in feeling sensation and is really in just deep connection with self. And when you're coaching that, you just you would go into the story and you're just bringing them back to sensation in the body and doing all these different grounding techniques to help them just stay with themselves and actually sense sensation in their body, and it's been so incredible for me because I guess if I'm really honest, like my personality type is very like do something about it, right? Like, I need to be doing something to be productive. That's still very much in me. And when I started this like coaching course, I'm sat there and you know, she's just like, okay, come back to the feeling in the body. And I'm like, no, I want to do something about it. I don't just want to feel it. I was feeling really uncomfortable with it, and I wasn't I wasn't convinced. Like first few sessions, I was like, this isn't gonna do anything, like this isn't for me. Like, and my capacity has just changed. Like, I can't tell you. I just feel like life can still be stressful. And before I had the tools, so I would be triggered and then have the tools to cope, and that was really helpful. Now I just don't feel triggered. It's amazing, and I can't put that down to anything other than like this type of training that I've been doing now, which is essentially just staying with the sensation in my body to let the stress loops close so that I don't need the soothing techniques anyway. And that has just been like transformative for me, and so that has been a really healing journey. But when I listen to you, it it's like it's like Peter Levine writes this book, The Un the Unspoken Voice, and it's about like he has a car crash, and because he's a trauma therapist, he can feel every sensation as the result of that car crash. And because he stays with his sensation and he lets it all complete, and he can literally track it, follow the journey of the sensation in his body every single time. He doesn't end up with PTSD because he let the loops close. Now you get other people who have not been in a car crash, have not been of war, have not been in anything, and even just being triggered by their parent, they interrupt themselves, they don't close the loop. So it is never about the traumatic event, it is about do we stay with ourselves to allow the sensation to fully pass through and allow it to close. And what I find really interesting when you're talking is that that happened to you when you walked up the mountain, and you fully experience these physical sensations in your body and to your words, like it was a healing experience. And that is where I feel like we're massively overlapping at the moment, and it's so interesting how we're coming at that from a very different angle, but what the root of that is is just deep connection with self and not distracting ourselves or doing the human conditioning thing where we try and interrupt that because it's not socially acceptable, and how healing that is when we allow ourselves to just be deeply with sensation and the truth that's in our body, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Yeah, and I think when things are deeply buried, or you know, I do think there is a there was a certain amount of picking up what was in the land and maybe healing that as well. I think you know, the thing about being on pilgrimage for me was like there was no escape, like I could there was nothing I could do. Yeah, I could have I could have gone back down the mountain and I wanted to, but the girl, the other girls that I was with, I just don't think they would have let me do that, and they supported me the whole the whole way, which I think was part of the healing experience of not being alone in my suffering that you know was kind of at a logical level didn't make any sense, and I think you know, there's a reason I guess like we're drawn to certain things, and with like the Rose lineage and the Magdalene stuff, I think there's a lot of stuff about restoring what was exiled because you know that's what happened to her, and of course, like that is a mirror of everything we've exiled within ourselves, and it's like on pilgrimage, like walking, it's like walk walking up that mountain and then going into the caves. Then we did do another journey and found like the secret cave of eggs. It's like you're I don't know, like you're walking through your own psychic terrain, but like the ter but through your body. So yeah, for me, like having that immersive experience was really powerful because I think you know, one of the things that I struggle with with things like yoga and kind of any any physical practice when I'm at home is yeah, I can get on my mat and I can feel things and I can feel sadness, but I'm in my head, I'm always like, I've got to go and do X next, I've gotta go and do Y. And I think. Yeah, and maybe that is a distraction from from the thing that I'm feeling. I think it's hard sometimes unless you Yeah, unless you have the awareness around that and then can put the time into it to Yeah, to fully feel and let yourself go there.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

This is it, and this is why the coaching, coaching of it is so important, because you dedicate time and space and that person's not letting you distract. Like when you distract yourself through becoming intellectual and trying to reason it and trying to do all those things, they're guiding you back to sensation. But what's really interesting as well, Beck, is like when you look at the theory of pendulation, which is like where you put the clocks on the wall and they can all be spinning at different time, and then essentially they synchronize. I mean, a bit like Newton's cradle, pendulation is a theory in trauma therapy, which is the idea that, like, of course, we synchronise, right? And what what we're trying to do is like the therapist or the person trying to space is be like the resource, be the anchor. And like with the the people who you were with on that journey, like they've held you there in that space so you feel safe enough to unfold. That's what happened to you up the mountain. That is what can happen in a yoga class, can happen in a yoga teacher training. Like having those safe resources where your nervous system does feel like it can fully let go because you are safe, is such a huge part of that process. And I think what you say about like the charge that the earth holds is such a real thing because it was an amazing experiment they've done. And I know I'm bringing like a lot of like science into this, but it's obviously just what I've been studying recently. But I think it really exemplifies the point on the more spiritual side of things, which hopefully is helpful, is they do this experiment with rats, right? And cherry blossom spray. So they have these rats and their feet are zapped, and every time their feet are zapped, the cherry blossom spray is sprayed. And of course, like Pavlov's dogs, eventually they don't need their feet to be zapped, they just spray the cherry blossom and they still have the same trauma response in the body. And then what's really interesting is that the children or the babies that the rats have, the pups they call them, they never experience the zaps in their feet. But if they spray the cherry blossom, their body goes into the same trauma response. And when I listen to you talking about walking up the mountain, it's like we know that our energetic, like our lifetimes are passed on, right, through the soul. And it's whether it's in this physical lifetime or whether it's in the energetic lifetime, like that charge remains. And this is why we see like children from you know war, war-torn areas who never experienced war themselves, but they will have PTSD in their system. And for whatever reason, you can't make sense of was it a past life? Was it what is it? There's some energetic charge that is still in your body, and we still need to close that out, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:00

And in a way, it doesn't matter if it's past life, if it's this time, it's this life, if it's something in you that is making you be in fight or flight, or not be able to be like face certain things, or you get triggered a lot. Like it doesn't matter if it's this lifetime, last past lifetime, stuff that's in your bloodline, stuff that's you know, you talk about war-torn areas, I believe, like the land holds some of that grief as well. So I don't, I honestly don't think it matters either. And I think we can waste a lot of time trying to figure it out when we'll never figure it out. And it can be interesting to talk about and like hypothesize, but it's kind of not the point of the thing that you're experiencing, is it? And I think when we heal in that way, we heal for the generations that have gone before, then of course we heal for the generations that are to come, we heal for the land and we heal for the the collective. So I think you know, when we talk about healing and it being this idea of wholeness and restoring, you know, the completeness of who you potentially could be in this lifetime, which is what your birth chart shows you, you know, it really is one of the most important things we can do.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Well, exactly, and I think, and this is why for me, I think the the journey of healing is a journey of connection, and and the irony of it all, and isn't this what we come back to is just how everything is in a cycle. So when we were born, like we were whole, you know, and and we and we always have been like enough as we are, and we have to go on this journey, this like thing called life, which basically impacts us, and and we can start to believe the lie that we're not good enough in some way, and all these compensatory behaviours come off the back of that. So if I'm not good enough, then I'm gonna work hard, or I'll be a workaholic, or I'm gonna become a perfectionist, or I'm gonna look the part, and I become, you know, appearance fixated, or whatever it is, because underneath I just don't feel like I'm good enough as I am, which is the lie. And the truth is that we were always enough, and it's like you know, if you were to say to somebody they're going through all their stuff, right? And you go to them, like, what's the fear? The belief that you're not good enough somehow? Like, what would you have to do to feel good enough? And they might reel off all this stuff that they feel they have to do, and then you go, okay, you got kids. If you've got kids, like what would your kid have to do to be good enough? And what do they say? Nothing, nothing. We don't have to do anything to be good enough, and we can see that with our own children, but we can't see it for ourselves, and really life is just a journey of going through this process of realizing that we're enough as we are, but we can't just say it. We it it doesn't do anything unless it's embodied, and it's like we have to be served all of these challenges to actually embody that feeling of being enough. So, yeah, in that way, I feel like all the challenges and everything that is laid out in our chart from an astrology perspective is is almost just like giving us the challenge to fully embody and really believe that we're enough as we are, to come back to where we started. And that's why, you know, yoga they call it, isn't it? Like the journey of the self through the self back to the self, and like the little S-self is like all the Maya, you know, the Prakriti, the versions that we get attached to, what we look like, and all of that. And the big S-self is the soul, is the Atman, and all we're trying to come back to is that pure essence of realizing that you know we are essence, and and we come back to the whole, and all of this challenge and stuff that we can get attached to in this lifetime is the Maya, is the illusion, and that is what is there to help us grow and embody that realization, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:04

Yeah, I was just thinking as you were talking as well about there's a kind of a different lens that I've been looking at recently as well, kind of around the soul healing, because I think you're right, like your human is always enough as it is, but the thing is, your soul choosing to be in a human body, you know, it's choosing to have that experience as a way to maybe do some healing work or restoration work, and in the kind of mystical teachings that like that were around at the time of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, there was a word called tikkun, and it means repair, rectification, and restoration. And I feel like it's so relevant to trauma because it's kind of seeing your soul through the lens of your birth chart as the human experience being the vessel and the opportunity to actually do cosmic repair to your soul. So it's so then you know, where every time we experience trauma and bring it back into wholeness, we're doing that in this lifetime, but then like at a cosmic level for our soul and our soul group as well. So I just think, yeah, like I I like that way of looking at this idea of fragmentation that happens, and when we repair, we're just reintegrating it, we're accepting the parts of ourselves that maybe we've exiled, or yeah, not let the world see, or you know, just bringing those things into the light. And something that I wrote as I was journaling and and kind of thinking about today's episode was that healing is the sacred act of gathering the sparks of self which get scattered by suffering. I just think it's like a really beautiful way to look at it.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

I love that. So beautiful. I want that on like a t-shirt or something. Yeah, I do. I think I think you're exactly right. And it's like it's it's in the tiny moments, isn't it, where we choose differently, where we stay present, like with uncomfortable feelings instead of avoiding them, and where we don't abandon ourselves, where we rest instead of trying to prove ourselves. So it's funny how these big kind of ethereal ideas that we're talking about actually come down to very small, simple acts of of choosing self and sensation and staying with rather than abandoning and distracting, you know. Yeah.