Your Nervous System Is Choosing the Familiar, Not the Joyful with Anni Eza

In this episode of Joy Unfiltered, Rachel sits down with Anni Eza, mental health expert, master healer, shadow priestess, teacher, and co-founder of Seeds of Bliss.

Annie brings a powerful perspective on healing, nervous system resonance, shadow work, fear, grief, and what it means to expand your capacity to hold the life you actually want.

This conversation explores why the nervous system often chooses what is familiar over what is freeing, why shadow work is not about “getting rid” of the dark parts of ourselves, and how grief, fear, anger, and joy all belong in the full human experience.

Rachel and Annie also talk about the difference between living from endurance and living from capacity, especially for high-functioning leaders, nurturers, creatives, and people who are used to holding everything together.

This episode is a beautiful reminder that you are not broken. You are not here to fix yourself into perfection. You are a miracle in progress.

Connect with Anni:

https://seedsofbliss.life
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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Welcome to Joy Unfiltered. I'm Rachel, and this is a podcast about joy. Not the shiny performative kind. Not the everything happens for a reason kind. This is joy as a strategy. A way to stay steady when life feels loud. A way to stay human when things are hard. A way to lead, love, and live without burning out or checking out. Some episodes will be just me. Some will be honest conversations with people who have lived their way into a deeper, truer joy. No fixing, no bypassing, just real stories, real tools, and room to breathe. Let's get into it. Well, welcome back or welcome to Joy Unfiltered. I am Rachel, your host, and today I am delighted to have Annie Ezra with me. And let me get let me introduce her before we get started. And if you're watching online, I'm gonna get my glasses so that I can see. So Annie is a mental health expert, master healer, shadow priestess, teacher of different healing modalities, and co-founder of Seeds of Bliss. After over 10,000 healing sessions and certifications in 10 plus modalities, she created Awakening the Seeds, a deep process guiding people to remember who they are far beneath conditioning and survival patterns. Can't wait to delve into that. Her work lives in the space between life and death, that between light and darkness, helping others hold both with skill. She believes true healing comes when we stop running from the shadow and start listening to it, embracing transformation, leadership, creativity, and human evolution. So, Amy, welcome to Joy Unfiltered.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Thank you for having me, Rachel.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Absolutely. And we were chatting just a tiny bit before I pressed record. Can you just give us a little bit um of kind of where you are in the world and how you came to kind of how you came maybe just to being here today?

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Okay. First of all, I was born and raised in Greece. I was born in the northern part of the country. But uh the last decade I have been residing in the absolute southern part of the country because I'm a child of suburban warmth. Um so I reside in the island of Crete, which is a famous packet list destination for many people around the world. Um and about how I'm I'm here today, what brought me here today. Uh, first of all, if we we are talking about how did I decide to be a guest on several podcasts, it's all about spreading the word around the world about how we can expand our capacity, how we can expand our nervous system so that it can hold more of our dreams so that they can become true, they can manifest in our everyday life because where I come from, everything is absolutely possible if you have the capacity to hold it.

SPEAKER_02 4:05

I love that, and I was just taking a couple of notes. Although the first note is I am also um a creature of the of the sun and of the warmth. And those of you who know, and those of you from the United States, I was living in in Texas for a while and just moved back to where I'm from in Minnesota. So I'm not sure I can't got that backwards somehow because I moved back north. Um so somehow, and maybe you can maybe you can show me how today my my dream is still living in California. So I will I will get there someday putting it out into the into the universe. But a couple of the things that I think resonate or will resonate really with the audience as we talk about joy, we often talk about regulating our nervous system. So I think you said, unless I run it down on how do we expand or how do we hold our nervous system so that, or how can how can we support our nervous system to hold our dreams? So would love to delve into that. One of the other things that you even in your file that you talked about, the shadow self. So I also want to talk about what's your definition of that shadow and how do we um kind of get be get beyond that? So let's start with expanding our expanding our capacity and let's actually start with the nervous system. So I think it's something nervous system regulation feels like a kind of a buzzy word right now. Everybody seems to be talking about it, which I think is a good thing. But I also think that sometimes the definition of what we actually mean when we talk about that gets gets skewed. So I would love for you to share when you talk about the nervous system, what does that mean for you? How do you talk about that with your with your with your clients or with the people that you coach?

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Okay, first of all, um nervous system regulation is not my thing. Okay, my thing is nervous system resonance.

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Thank you for saying thank you for clarifying that, and language is important, and language is very important to me. So um our or our words are important. So nervous system say that again, resonance. Resonance, yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

This is where everything uh starts, and this is where everything circles back. So imagine that we have a certain capacity, like we have uh certain space in our wardrobe. If we want to get more things into that space, we need either bigger space or to declutter the existing space, which is my favorite thing, decluttering. And how do we declutter ourselves by uh seeking closure of the past experiences, whatever has traumatized us, and has been integrated as behavioral patterns in our everyday life as adults. So we choose and relive and reproduce patterns of the past, although they are not pleasant, although we do not want them anymore, just because they are familiar, because this is what our brain and our nervous system does to keep us alive and safe. It is always orienting us towards the familiar situation, even if they look like hell, even if they feel like hell, they are familiar. So the nervous system is programmed to keep us alive and safe. Safety means familiarity by definition. So the nervous system will always drag us to a familiar hell rather than an unfamiliar heaven.

SPEAKER_02 7:55

So can you say that again? I don't mean to interrupt you, but say that again because I think that that concept is so important. So I want to make sure that those of you who are listening, if you're driving or walking, like, well, don't stop if you're driving. But I really want you to get this that our nervous system will um will go to the familiar, we'll choose, we'll choose the familiar over the unfamiliar, regardless of how awful it might be. Is that what you're saying? Yep. I got that right. Okay. So how do we, how do we, how do we um, because you also said safe and familiar, they equal each other and our and our nervous system is all about safety. So how do we how do we bust through that? How do we say, you know what, you can also be safe over here? How do we get out of those behavioral patterns?

SPEAKER_00 8:55

We have to to receive some guidance, of course, because our brain is very good at making excuses, inventing excuses. So although we realize some things, even on the superficial level, because to go deep into your trauma and um heal it and take care of it, you need some guidance, you need a compassionate weakness, someone to hold you while you're experiencing the process. Even though we are realizing things on a superficial level, then our brain will put us back to the behavior and the choices we have learned with the excuse that I'm not ready to shift that yet. What if things go south and everything falls apart? So we get stuck, which is totally unfair because we just have a life to live here, and I think we deserve to be happy and healthy, and we deserve to experiment and choose and choose again as many times as we like until we've got the perfect life. Because it's our responsibility to create the life we want. So the first step is to have a compassionate witness, a healer, therapist, a guide that you resonate with because it's a very personal and intimate relationship, and it's important that you feel inspired, that you feel safe to be held by that person, and then you have to learn to stay in that uncomfortable position. Have you ever um experienced this pressure on the top of your head when you're realizing something really hard about yourself? You're so desperate to move out of that state because you think you cannot handle it. But that's a lie. If you stay long enough, then you touch trust and surrender on a whole different level, and all of a sudden life is holding you instead of pushing or pulling you.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

Oh, that's so hard though, right? Because you said you had two things that I wrote down. So when we're sitting in that uncomfortability, I have two questions about that. One, you you said often your brain is gonna say, I'm not ready, or ask what if, right? So that feels really um familiar. That feels really familiar to me, those questions. And I'm sure those of you listening too, you can think about when you're in an uncomfortable situation and you think you you can you know you're ready, or you know, you don't know, you don't know you're ready, like I'm not ready, or what if something goes wrong? But you also said, and you used the word feel, and you talked about feeling something on your head. Can do does everybody feel viscerally or feel physically those that in the same way? Is it always at the top of our head, or could we feel that someplace different in our bodies?

SPEAKER_00 12:17

It could be in the stomach, it could be in the chest or the throat, something like a tightness or a knot. Uh, but when realization happens during the healing sessions, I mean most people feel this tightness on the top of their head. And this is the real work to hold them there so that their system learns to stay in that uncomfortable situation because just a few minutes after that uncomfortable experience, the whole system recalibrates, it expands. This is how we expand our capacity. Learning to be comfortable in uncomfortable situations and feelings.

SPEAKER_02 13:08

And have you found in the work that you do, Amy, that because you did say, and I'm writing that down, that the steps are one, to find to find a healer or to find that compassionate, compassionate witness. As um is it is it ever a time where you could do this by yourself, or do you always suggest that someone does that with someone else?

SPEAKER_00 13:34

You know what? I think that maybe in the future, humanity will be able to shift by itself. But for now, we haven't reached that level as a human species, and it's very tricky to try and do that by yourself because when there's trauma involved and deep, uncomfortable, unpleasant emotions, then you will withdraw, you will disrupt the procedure, your brain will create some excuses like I have to cook, I have something else to do, I have to call my mom. You will remember everything that you have to do only to avoid this uncomfortable feeling. But when you have another person with you, you're witnessed. So you're not alone, you cannot drift away, you cannot fall off track, which is very important.

SPEAKER_02 14:33

Yes, I can I can definitely see that, and definitely see that it would be easy to either find something physically to do, or even for my own brain to switch back into those questions, I'm not ready, I'm not this isn't this isn't for me, or make excuses why that, oh, that that isn't even for me when that's not the truth, right? Yes, this is the famous resistance. And is that so when you talk about the shadow, so is it is that are we talking about the same thing so that that's my shadow self that's telling me those things, or is that a totally different concept that that is separate from what we're what we're doing right now, or we're talking about right now?

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Shadow work in my world is something really, really deep, and it's all about reaching your next level of understanding yourself, the universe, human beings, life, everything. So it's all about going to the next grade of um the school of human life, mastering the next version of yourself, mastering the next level of yourself. This is shadow work because there's so much going on about the light and how we should stay in the light, and darkness is so underrated and we create a conflict between light and darkness, but that's not true because they are meant to be together, they create wholeness together. The only thing that makes them different from each other is that your light parts is that they you know them, they are in the light, they are seen, they are heard, they have been mastered by you, but your dark parts hold all the possibilities. Everything that is not yet known to you resides in your dark side, so it's all about we're not talking about a judgment between like light and dark, meaning good or bad.

SPEAKER_02 17:02

You are so say that again. So the things that you define that are in our light are the things that we know about ourselves. So, can you give us some practical examples of what that what that looks like, and then practical examples of what that looks like about the darkness, yeah, or the shadow?

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Since we're talking about joy, joy belongs to the light of our existence, of our souls, because it's pleasant, it's easy to experience joy, there's no conflict, no friction. But what about sadness or grief? It's uncomfortable because it holds the keys to your existential wisdom, and at the same time, the more you're available to feel that grief, to feel that pain, the more you expand your capacity to feel joy. So it's not about being good or bad, it's about known and unknown aspects of ourselves. Our light parts are the known aspects, the dark parts are the unknown aspects. And they hold the keys or evolution because if we only stay in the light, we deprive ourselves from the privilege to learn something new and integrate it and utilize it and become wiser and more whole.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

What an interesting word. I love that you use the word privilege. Um, we often talk not often, but we talk about um, or I talk about the joy and grief going together, right? And you can't really have one without the other, and they're not separate, right? Because you can experience them close together. I think of them kind of as as sisters or as cousins, right? Because you need you need both and um, and I but interesting way to think about that grief is showing us more about our capacity or our possibilities. I hadn't thought about it in that way before, just that we need both. And I um have thought about how if we have the capacity for joy, it allows us to go deeper into grief because then we know that we can come back out of the grief. If we're scared about going into the grief because we don't know about joy, then it can be scary to be there. But think about like help me think through that concept a little bit so that if I'm going into grief, how is that showing me more about my more about myself or more about my capacity if I let myself experience grief?

SPEAKER_00 19:52

Okay, think of uh the human existence as a tree. This is my favorite example. All the pleasant things, all the things that are in the field of light, are the trunk and the branches of the tree. They are both the soil, and all the unpleasant feelings and situations that trigger us and challenge us are the roots in the darkness. So when you're breathing and you let it flow inside your body, inside your system, you're deepening the roots, and the more work we do with ourselves, we feel it really flowing throughout our body. So you can literally feel this expansion happening in your body, in your nervous system, when you're sad, when you're grieving, when you're even when you're angry, which is a very uh misjudged emotion in the spiritual and feeling uh world. But anger is the existential fire. It's your fuel. There's a reason why all those emotions exist. If they weren't needed, they wouldn't have been existing in our system. We wouldn't be able to fill them.

SPEAKER_02 21:21

Say that again, if they were not needed, they wouldn't.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:29

Except they were not needed.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:35

So one of the things that I am now, well, that's going through my head is that you are because they are needed, and it's and it's not about relieving ourselves from our shadow self or or or eliminating those things. So it's not about eliminating grief or or anger.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

anger or anything or or those shadow pieces it is about learning from them and is it a do you use the word balance or what how are we what is the kind of conceptual piece because we the conceptual piece of the roots we absolutely need them but how are we nourishing them without getting stuck there we get stuck there only because we are resisting the process what we resist it persists true they they want to be experienced they want to flow we suppress them so they are coming back again and again but if we let them flow through they will complete their cycle and move away until the next thing happens and we experience a different level of kind of sorrow or sadness or an unpleasant feeling in general so it's about integrating the shadow parts giving them the pathway to flow because they belong to us who would like to to mutilate themselves would you cut your hand off no why would you cut your emotions off we become less functional by denying the privilege to be fully alive and experience life with everything that it has to offer this is why we are here so beautifully so beautifully said so when you are working with um people then going through all of this though helping them understand you talked about 10 plus modalities that you you use are is it that you're using the same process with everybody or is everybody different and how do you take someone what does it look like to work with you what will what am I sitting here just talking to you are there are you using EFT are you using healing touch like what are those what does that feel like to work with you okay uh I have studied many many modalities and then I brought together everything that is working well I hate I hate the flap so I removed the flap set what is working well and filled the gaps with my experience so I have created my own modality and it's structured and flexible at the same time think of it like a Jenga tower do you know the game the Jenga yes with this so we we use a different order with each person but we work with the nervous system the emotions the physical body the trauma family dynamics the relationship the important relationship in their lives and it's really holistic and bringing everything together so that the individual can really understand what is happening in their lives and why this is happening. And once you understand what is really happening and why this is happening then we can expand the capacity of the nervous system so that the individual literally makes different choices effortlessly without pushing or pulling it it becomes natural.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

It becomes just who they who they becomes the who it becomes who they are so how would I if I am listening to this how where am I in my in my life or in my thought process that I raise my hand and say yes this is something that would help me am I struggling with my relationships am I struggling at work am I thinking I'm not worthy like what where are your clients or how do they raise their hand to say I want to work with you first of all our clients are all high functioning people nurturers creatives holding a lot of responsibility the reliable ones those are the people we work with the people that are holding everything together I'm sure some of you listening you are saying yes that is me I am doing everything at work I'm leading I'm leading the organization or I'm leading high functioning teams and then I go home and I handle everything at home and I take care of my own body so I'm I'm making I'm making all the decisions I have a couple of clients in my own head thinking about like yes that is exactly who they say that they are they are handling it and would you say then your clients from the kind of from the outside look like they're handling it all yeah so what's happening what is happening then on the inside they feel the pressure and they operate from endurance not capacity which is a whole different level of living your life we you are speaking my language that is one of the things when I talk about joy-led leadership that that is the first thing that we need to lead with energy not with endurance because that is endurance is the old model right yeah but this feminine model that we need to lean into about joy-led leadership is all about I love even that we're using the same words it's all it's all about it's that energy it's not the endurance we don't want to just do more no not at all yeah we want to to build the capacity to hold what we are meant to hold and outsource everything else in a wise way so that our life does not collapse but it literally blooms and flourishes yeah and I hope you heard that whole sentence those of you listening that she didn't say hold everything she said hold what you were meant to hold right so we're not meant to hold everything so what a beautiful what a beautiful piece so I know at the beginning you had said and I and I am with you and trust you in saying that we need to work with someone to help hold witness to help us make those breakthroughs but are there some things that if I'm listening that there are some things that I can start to do on my own to start to you know build this um nervous system resonance um or start to expand my capacity before I work with with a healer yes there are uh first of all slowing down and remember to breathe because all the people I work with have a very shallow breath and I can hear it in the way they are speaking and it it reflects it mirrors in my body I saw the knot in the diaphragm like something is happening there slow down close your eyes and breathe deeply do you have favorite breathwork exercises or is it just your suggestion to breathe deep uh I think belly breathing is the best practice because it brings us back to our childhood we breathe naturally um with belly breathing or I think it's also known as child breathing until about the age of 11 or 12. Then conditioning starts taking place and our breathing changes not to mention that it's not sexy to to breathe fully and move your belly which is uh a reality distortion that I I find very perverted so when you say belly breathing I think most people know what that means but can you just can you walk us through what that actually feels like to belly breathe or what that what that either feels or what that looks like for those that don't know yeah breathe in through your nose and you move the air all the way down to your belly like you're you're having a balloon yeah and you want to fill it with air let your belly be like a balloon let it expand and if you want if you want you can also watch it expand and then you breathe out through your mouth so if everybody could even do that right now so you you open your eyes or close your eyes take a really big deep breath and sometimes I find it helpful just to put my hand on my belly even so that because if I'm not um if you're if you're someone who is not you know wholly body aware put your hand on your belly and you can feel it move right so if you get that breath down there take that really big deep breath and then you set in through your nose and then blow it out through your through your mouth that's so simple right and it's so simple but yet as you said we are conditioned not to breathe that way so if we can remember um to do that a couple times during the day in the morning you know as as you're practicing that being habitual we just need to maybe even you mark it on your calendar you're gonna do some belly breathing today but that I like that that that's the first place that you you start because that helps connect us to our bodies yeah yeah yeah and it's very important because well without our body we're dead literally we have to restore that relationship and make it work yeah I mean to put it bluntly you are very true right you're that is that is true without our bodies we are not we are we are we are not here but but that's important what you said as well is that we need to restore our relationships with our bodies I often talk about working with our bodies not against our bodies especially when I was working in wellness and it's true so that but I like that you started with just reconnecting through our breath.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

So breath work is one thing is there anything else one other tip that you could give the listeners about how they can start this healing um even before they reach out reach out to you or or another trusted healer befriend your fear just don't wait until you're not afraid of anything to to take action this will never happen and especially when you feel the fear you should do what scares you this is your next level of expansion this is the step out of your comfort zone and into your growth zone and this is something I I do in my life the the more you do it the more the less you're afraid that there's always something that will scare you and you have to follow that. So a couple things I heard in there one we have to be aware enough to know what we're afraid of so it's defining that and then what you're saying is we once we've defined that is is that is that fear giving us a message really that that is where our growth is um is is the fear the the shadow or what the fear is not the shadow the shadow is being stuck the fear is actually pointing to the direction that will help you expand and grow okay but the fear is only emerging because you are heading towards your expansion you're about to leave the comfort zone the the familiar situation so you feel scared because you're about to step into the so-called unknown which is another distortion because nothing is unknown you create your life there's no such thing as the unknown so to listen to our to name listen to our fears and do you talk about medit with your clients talk about meditation how do I sit with that how do how do I as you said befriend right befriend how do I befriend my fear because that doesn't seem like I don't want to be friends with my fear so what how do I how do I do that first of all you want to be friends with your fear you just don't know that yet fair fair um when you feel the fear just notice it and let it be there you you're not going to avoid the fear it's an emotion it's a feeling it will appear that you let it be and you take action while being scared it's not about healing the fear there's no such thing fear is a very useful feeling it keeps us alive it's all about survival if we are fearless we will be dead within hours so we want the fear to be present but only to keep us alive and safe literally on a physical level all the other kinds of fear we notice them we leave them be and we take action regardless of the fear so if I have a fear of making that sales call or of speaking in public or of you know doing sending sending the email sometimes just sending the email can can bring up some sort of fear so first I need to sit with it and second I just do it I just I just do it and know that it's not gonna kill me.

SPEAKER_02 38:08

It's not it's not the saber toothed tiger right so it's not gonna kill me. Yeah it will not destroy you might feel like that but it won't and you're saying by repetition then if I continually do that. So this you so the other thing I think that I heard you say is that if I'm befriending my fear it's not a one and done and I move on it could be something that I need to take that action again and again before that fear before I can really befriend and before that fear doesn't does it dissipate does it go away does it what happens to it when I repeatedly take an action that pushes me forward you feel the fear that you're able to take action without freezing because your system is educated by previous experience and it really knows that this is not really dangerous. I can feel scared and live my life take action I can feel scared and expand my capacity at the same time and since I'm here alive talking to you I've done that million of times you're not in any danger yeah right right no this is so this has been this is fascinating I love the way in which you talk about things I think the thing that I am like still going back to is the analogy of the tree and knowing that I need to use and let my and like they're not fears but let that shadow self live and work through. So thinking about grief or thinking about anger that it's there and it is grounding me and rooting me to the earth or to other people so it is that it is that system that I need but yet so I can't cut it off but I also can let it work through so that I can have these beautiful leaves and branches and and continue to grow and expand. Exactly exactly oh my goodness I like the fact that I am able to speak differently and give some labels and some context to things that um that I hadn't before so that this is this is great. So what else is there anything else as we kind of come to a close that you want the listeners to really understand um about your process or understand about themselves better about themselves uh first of all the process you have to experience it to understand it because it's totally unique for each person it's experiential um bad for themselves I think the most important thing is to understand that every person is a miracle in progress you're not broken you don't need fixing and the next best step is to end the war within between light and darkness they are they're meant to be together in holy matrimony if I may say stop separating them you're making yourself and the world miserable so live into both and the light and the darkness live into that and you're a miracle you are a miracle in progress I like that you are a miracle in progress so if someone is listening and they say yes I am a miracle in progress I am high functioning I am doing all the things and I wow I'm feeling exhausted because I'm living in this endurance state how do they get a hold of you how do they work with you what are their next steps if they resonate really with you and with your energy and feel like you would be a trusted healer for them how do they get a hold of you they can find me on social media under the handle of seeds of bliss and on our website seedsofbliss.life perfect and I will put both of those things in the show notes because I do know that there are people listening that resonated from the very beginning both with your beautiful energy but with the words that you were saying as well and feel as though they need or are ready even though they might be experiencing some fear that they are ready to take that next step. So if you are if that is you if this is speaking to you one please go to the show notes um find those links share this episode with others that you also know because you have that knowing inside of you that you know would resonate with Amy's beautiful energy and all the things that she had to share today. So thank you so much for being here I appreciate your gifts I appreciate you sharing your gifts and to the listeners remember I'm Rachel and from my heart to yours I am celebrating you today and every day. So have fun live well enjoy