The Daily Transmissions Podcast

Holding Both: Finding Strength in Life’s Contrasts

• Yelena Mogilev • Season 1 • Episode 2

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In this heartfelt and reflective episode, we explore the dualities of human emotions—grief and joy, rupture and repair, vulnerability and strength—and how these contrasts shape our relationships and inner worlds. Together, we’ll navigate the complexities of emotional responses, from fight and flight to fawn and freeze, and discover how they serve as protective mechanisms.

Here’s what to expect:

  • A grounding meditation to soothe your nervous system and reconnect with safety.
  • Personal insights on embracing the dualities of life and holding space for emotional complexity.
  • Practical tools for navigating rupture and repair in relationships, including playful approaches to communication.
  • An invitation to notice your default responses in moments of intensity, with curiosity and compassion.
  • Reflections on self-care, asking for help, and embracing the strength in vulnerability.

With a mix of grounding practices, storytelling, and humor, this episode offers you a safe space to reflect, connect, and move through life’s contrasts with grace and humanity. Join me as we journey together into the beautiful messiness of being human.

P.S. As mentioned in the Episode, one of my dearest friends created Bright Harbor to help anyone—from low-income families to the well-insured—navigate the aftermath of disasters. 🔥 Natural disasters leave devastation in their wake, and while this is going to be a hard road for many, recovery doesn’t have to feel impossible.

They are 📩 We’re focusing all their efforts on California right now.
Whether it’s insurance, FEMA grants, housing, or long-term peace of mind, they are here for you.

Text them at 775-477-4400 or visit www.brightharbor.com

To all our dear ones in LA and the Palisades: We love you and are with you 💔

Speaker 1:

hello, dear ones. Yelena here, so delighted to welcome you in to another conversation. I hope you've enjoyed the conversation so far and felt nourished and giggled at least once or twice and walked away having felt that that conversation was time well spent. Today I aim to model something that I suspect many of us have grappled with from time to time, and for sure at least once. Where do I begin? I suppose it's best to start with sharing something about myself, to give you a lens and construct.

Speaker 1:

So I have been told that I am not necessarily one for surface conversation. I venture in deep and it's not always just talking about the weather. So you'll notice that, although this is one of our first conversations, I'm just going to go where I'm being led and the discourse will unfold as it's meant to. To meet you wherever you are and, as always, my desire is that you listen for the gold. It was my desire, my invitation and you walk away with a nugget or some piece of musing or wisdom that ruminates around in your mind, in your body, in your soul, and amuses or heals whatever part it touches in there. So today I pulled a card, as I do prior to this conversation. Prior to this conversation and in light of what is happening in California, in the Palisades and the dry, scorched earth, in light of what's alive and what, for many, is a really tender reality, I wanted to start with an offering is a really tender reality. I wanted to start with an offering, a grounding, a bit of softness, a reminder, a way back to safety. A reminder, a way back to safety. With this meditation, my desire is to offer your body-mind, your nervous system, your inner landscape, to the deepest parts of you, some solid footing during a moment of tumult, whether you are someone who finds yourself living this tender reality and you can hear that this is bringing up sensations in my body that I will not mask for any sake of posterity. As I promised you, I will be here fully modeling the nuance that is our lived experience through the lens of mine. I'm also somebody who's very empathetic, can only imagine what these families and living beings and animals are going through, and yet my heart is with them. So part of the theme for this conversation today is how to be with the duality or the mult-dimensionality of the many parts that are alive within us the duality of feeling profound grief while also the exaltation and joy of relief.

Speaker 1:

Very often there are many things alive within us, all at the same time, pulling us in one direction or another, protecting us by stepping forward, embodying a traumatic response such as flight, and we don't have capacity to face the thing. The instinct is to just cut it and run and get out of dodge, or to fight, defend ourselves, assert dominance, reclaim the power that we perceive as being taken from us or is lost, or the sovereignty that is being threatened to freeze, which is absolutely a survival response. When the sensations alive, coursing through our body-mind, our bodies, our veins are just overwhelming, our veins are just overwhelming, we protect ourselves and we put on this coat of armor, the numbing that, although may be perceived as a lack of sensation, is quite distinctly its own sensation, its own world. Similar to silence being perceived as the absence of sound, when many, I suppose, would agree with me that silence can be loudest of all and can be quite deafening. And to take it further, sometimes the protective trauma response is to fawn and to go into overdrive, to just fix things and make it better, to placate for people guilty. Um, I have absolutely, at one point or another in my life, I've protected myself with one or all at distinct periods, and so so, with this conversation, I aim to to validate your experience, whatever it may be, because, whether it is your lived experience, or you are witnessing it, or you are witnessing it, sometimes to a degree, your body does not know the difference, and it can feel truly overwhelming for you and intense and take us to all sorts of different places and so on.

Speaker 1:

This day that likely may have brought up a lot of things for you or someone you know. I see you, I love you, I love you, I am you, and I would like, if it's okay with you, to sit beside you, to sit beside you. You're welcome to put your head on my shoulder, or welcome an embrace. You're welcome to share what's alive, or just know that silence is perfect too, what a world it is to be human, to come here and to experience the depth of humanity. It can be a really wild ride. Meow, if you haven't been breathing while listening, please do.

Speaker 1:

Science has proven that breathing makes you live longer, so please take this moment to exhale. If you've been holding your breath, as I've been sharing. Breathe my love, we're in this together. I or navigate or hold any of it by yourself and, as a reminder, you are safe, you are loved. You are wanted, desired and needed. You are wanted, desired and needed. Your magic is needed in the world, your expression, your truth, your joy, your humanity. And I've got you. So, whether you know me or not, whether I'm a voice just out in the ethers that you can come to, please listen to this and hear me. More importantly than anything, you've got you. You are the adult with the resources that you need to navigate anything and everything. You are in the driver's seat of your life and it goes the way you say it goes. And no matter how your morning has gone and no matter how your morning has gone, you get to write the story and you can change it at any point. And, as a reminder, people want to contribute to you.

Speaker 1:

And yet so often, when people ask, do you need help, our response is wild. We say no, no, no, no, no. I've got this, as we're holding 5,000 bags and an entire world on our shoulders and caving in from the like. Just vice, grip that. It is all around us. No, no, no, no, I got this, I got this. I got this. My love, I'm giving you a permission slip.

Speaker 1:

Put the heavy shit down or offer a chunk to the person who just asked you if you need help, because men, you give them purpose by welcoming their love and contribution. By welcoming their love and contribution and I promise you it does not make you look bad. Oy, oh, I can hear that. I can smell that in your thoughts. It's nasty. It's nasty baby, that fear of looking bad, of judgment. Even if they have judgment, whatever, they can keep it, because people are going to say and think and do whatever and you're not going to please everybody anyway.

Speaker 1:

So put on your oxygen mask. They say that on flights. You know they're not kidding. The most effective method, the life-saving method, is to put on your own oxygen mask before you help anyone else. I think, if it applies and is the number one rule on planes well, one of the top ones. I think it's pretty solid. Try it on, see how it works for you. No need to deplete yourself to prove anything.

Speaker 1:

Anywho, that's kind of been my ramble for a bit, but I hope that you've let your nervous system hear the things that I've said and if you haven't, and if you checked out, I love you. You're doing this perfectly. If you need a reminder that you can't fuck this up, you cannot fuck this up. However, you are engaging and listening, whether it's passive or active or playful or focused, whatever it is so perfect because it's yours and it's also a right now phenomenon and if you decide you want to do something differently, you're absolutely in your power to do it differently at any given moment. So I suppose why this is so alive in my heart, my mind, my soul, and ricocheting around in my head? It's because it's tender to see and hear about everything that's happening, how people are affected.

Speaker 1:

Also on a side note, I will put this in the notes, but I have some dear friends that started an organization to help people navigate natural disasters, no matter what's their income support level. It can be confusing and disorienting and frustrating and truly just gut-wrenching. On top of all the other things. Their organization is called Bright Harbor and the website is brightharborcom. They're dear, dear, dear friends of mine who are really mission-driven, integrous beings, and I do want to bring that to the space so that, wherever, however you are, it finds you or you can share it with those that it would really benefit.

Speaker 1:

I also would like to invite you all to be gentle. Be gentle with yourselves On a daily basis, as a collective. On a daily basis. As a collective, we are consuming so much, so much content, information from so many different spaces, places, physical, spiritual, work. That is our baseline before we get up and go to work and make a living or show up for our relationships, Our friends, our family, our loves, our children, our fur babies, you name it. So I want to offer you some grace. You're doing great. You're doing great. You're doing so, so absolutely wonderfully phenomenal at showing up, and if you think you could do better, it's okay. When you notice it, you can simply just start taking a new action.

Speaker 1:

All the things I started this conversation addressing dualities, dualities within us, and clearly you know there's so much duality around us and in our spaces and relationships. And, with that said, I do want to bring in an example that I was discussing with a client in our call today, where he was expressing a tender experience that he was having with a friend and how there were so many parts of him that were feeling different things. One part felt slighted and had anger and resentment and felt that the best way to support him would be to cut ties with this dear friend that he experienced a rupture with, and it felt that the best way to protect was to just I don't know if you can hear me kind of like not clapping, but you know, washing my hands of it right, trying to give us a visual of no, no, no, you don't't do this, you don't get to do this right, hard boundary wall, cut ties, raise your hand. If you've done this before, I know I have in the past right as a self-protection mechanism, mechanism because the truth is he was really hurt and that part of him right. I mentioned on in the other conversation that if you take it on, that's's a possibility, it's a thought exercise that all parts of us are living, consciousness, that have an embodiment and a voice and an expression and an experience. So this part of him was not available. It was like you hurt me, that's it, you don't get to do that anymore Fiercely protecting him. But then there was another part of him that was having conflicting sensations, emotions, experiences, that felt the hurt and the sadness and the disappointment and the desire that it had been different and really just wanted to reconcile and not lose this friendship that he treasured. And so that was there too. All of these things existed at the same time and what was happening is that in the meantime, while all of this discourse was happening within and his internal landscape.

Speaker 1:

But the, I guess the visual I would like to give you is if you could imagine a round table and all these parts of you are sitting at this round table, unpacking and sorting it out, trying to vie for and explain their point of view and why this is the move and the solution and the best way to protect you, right? They all are coming from a loving place with their own perspectives and it's up to us to navigate the discourse and to choose, from a place of power, what feels most aligned and authentic at that time, which can be a lot, holy hells bells. It can be super intense and so confusing which results in. The visual I'll give you is if you can imagine that we are as a being, our mind, our body-mind, is like a browser with many tabs. It's doing a lot at one time, right, we're an operating system, we're a computer and our browser has all these tabs open. One tab is the things that you need to handle at work and the million things and processes and the to-do list there, and that's just running in the background. And then there's you know, this conversation as an example which is just eating away at you, and so your mind just keeps drifting and rehashing and overthinking and processing and processing, and so much is happening.

Speaker 1:

It's this open tab that, as a visual or even I think, the better visual is. It's this program in the background. I don't know about you, but I definitely remember the times where there was this errant, rebellious program that was running on my PC, that on the outside I'm staring at a frozen computer with this wheel of death, where my computer is trying to complete a task. You know, open this window and I can't. It's frozen, it's glitching hard, and when you get to the task manager, you see that there's this program that's running and taking up 89, 90, 95% of your RAM, of the juice that you have to be running the program. It's a program. It's like taking up all your energy, hoarding it for itself as it tries to resolve this glitch. So it's pulling in every resource around it and stuck Because it needs new data and it doesn't have it, and so that's what's happening to us in the background.

Speaker 1:

Right, we have these open tabs that, yeah, you can totally cut and run, cut ties in moments of rupture or challenge or discord. However, as my client. So, uh, wonderfully put, as he was sending me a voice note about this situation and getting support. He's like I know you're gonna tell me that I have to talk to him. I know you're gonna tell me it's the right thing to do. I don't want to. I'm not a voiceover artist for what it's worth. I have other skills, but I hope that painted the elephant in the room and everybody's dancing around, nobody wants to just call out and address and talk through and be vulnerable. Oh, it's that nasty thing that they say all the time in therapy Be vulnerable. Ew, I hear you.

Speaker 1:

And if and when we can summon the courage to address the elephant in the room, to get consent and to invite the people we are in relationship with to have a conversation about what's alive for us, which very often is a reality of our own making that the other person generally has a very different version of. And yet, until we get confirmation from them, we don't have any different data. Our reality of doom is just so alive and we're operating from that perceived, constructed reality, distortion, perception of what we think happened. And now it made us feel and my client realized. I'd like to invite you to explore this possibility, a few possibilities also.

Speaker 1:

If you haven't noticed by now, I speak in stories and sometimes my airplane goes in different directions, but I promise you I always land the plane clearly. Also, today is a bit of a longer episode. It's been a day of a lot of feels and I don't want to shortchange you and not share what's alive or keep it to myself. I trust that you will take what works and leave the rest and come back as you desire. So the few constructs that I invite you to try on, walk around in, engage with and keep or discard. Because, number one, we don't know what we don't know and we cannot know without a shadow of a doubt that X is true if it's just in our heads, is true if it's just in our heads.

Speaker 1:

It is crucial, especially if it involves another person, to get in communication and to confirm what happened right, what's alive and what happened right what's alive. And I find that when we do this although it can be, you can take a lot of courage. It is the access to deep connection, to intimacy and possibility. In over a decade of studying communication and also being in the arena in my marriage and my relationships all the time, I have found this to be one of the most profound bridges into freedom and connection, and so I'm happy to report that my client did the thing and took a moment to really understand what he was experiencing, what was missing for him, what were the sensations and the impact of what happened, and to thoughtfully have a conversation with this friend and to show up for and embody and really be committed to repair, which I'll do a whole other episode on my communication methodology around all of this.

Speaker 1:

But in the meantime, I'd like to invite you to just notice what is, what is, your default response in communication in moments of intensity, and this noticing is not as an access to fix. My belief is that there's nothing broken. You're not a broken dish that needs fixing. We are, as people, here to practice being human and you are whole, you are complete, you are perfect, as I've learned in my training and I really relate to and there are things that are missing that, when we notice, we can put in place that make a profound difference in our experience of aliveness and thriving in our lives and in relationships. So I invite you to just notice with gentleness and curiosity, notice the flavors of conversation.

Speaker 1:

Does rupture feel like the protective response Does repair seem possible and the nuances of everything in between, the sensations that you have versus identifying with them. I think my favorite example of that is in Spanish. We don't use the identifying statement of I am hungry or I am angry, for Spanish speakers correct me about the second part. I know for sure about the I am hungry. In Spanish, the correct expression is I have hunger Versus the identity, the collapsed identity with the sensation Hunger, anger, grief, right. Also a really fun one that I liked that I'll share with you here is I read somewhere once, and it really stuck with me, that the practice was to name the sensation. So if anger is a big one for you, naming anger, henry, for example. Henry, for example. And when anger is really present, sharing with your beloved or whomever oh, henry's here. Yeah, henry is here and really present.

Speaker 1:

I might need a beat so that we can reconvene and it won't be the three of us, it'll be the two of us. Can we reconnect in five? It makes you giggle, but also can be a construct that can support diffusing tension and tenderness and creating some softness and play, which you can also acknowledge is not always easy, but try it on. Always easy, but try it on. Are you breathing? Continue the breathing. The breathing is really good for you. Meow, also for context. I meow Sometimes. There are simply no words, there's only a meow. If you are a wolf, that's okay. If you are a caca or some version of that, I love you. All right, my loves. We have traversed a lot of different parts of time and space today. As you can tell, I guess surface is not really my thing, and I hope it serves you with nourishment all the same. And I hope it serves you with nourishment all the same. In the meantime, until we connect again, stay delicious, because you already are. We'll talk soon, ciao.