When Healing Stops Being Intellectual (Leave Your Brain at the Door to REALLY Heal) - 47

In this episode, I move from identity into embodiment and healing. 

Even after changing my life externally, I found myself still waking up in the night—carrying tension, trauma, and emotional residue in my body. 

This episode explores what it means to realize that healing is not just mental—it is physiological and somatic. 

I share my experience with Reiki, yoga, fitness, and energy work, and how these practices helped me begin releasing what my mind had already moved past but my body had not yet processed. 

This is an exploration of trauma, nervous system regulation, and the process of coming back home to the body. 

Transcript

Autumn G Noble (00:00)

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I'm really pumped about the topic for today. We're continuing our journey this month to talk about how to change your life. And yes, every time I say that, I absolutely cringe, but that's the topic that we're going through this month because it's the easiest way to describe the tools I'm talking through. Last week, we talked about some of the coaching modalities that really helped me kind of reset.

and reevaluate my own identity and my own path. Today I'm sharing with you how my initial kind of story and,

experimentation with this work eventually kind of hit a wall and I needed to engage some other tools to take things to the next level. And that is how I started getting into all of the woo. share with all of you here some of those tools and help you understand how they helped me, some of the science behind them.

and tell you a little bit about how I currently offer them and work with them for my clients. Years ago, when I started doing this work, I was focusing primarily on working with attorneys, because I was an attorney and I knew how much this work changed my life, just the mindfulness work and using the thought model that we discussed last week. Then I started to understand all these other holistic tools and how tremendously helpful they were.

for me in dealing with the stress of practicing law. And I thought, you know what, I'm gonna offer these two attorneys. So years go by, I'm offering all of these tools and I'm sitting in a continuing education course and there's a gentleman speaking and this is continuing education for lawyers. So we're in a huge auditorium full of lawyers from all across the state. And this guy starts talking about how lawyers not only have really high rates of psychopathy, so,

more psychopaths, are attorneys are more likely to be attorneys. Also narcissists, like we have a really high rate of narcissists. And look, I don't disagree with any of that, but I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, guy, know the room. Like, do you know who you're talking to? Like, this is a room full of lawyers and these egos don't really like to be insulted, Anyway, he continues on and he shared a couple things that...

really resonated with me and I think drove home my awareness that I needed to expand this work outside of the legal profession. And what he told me was this, lawyers have a very high degree of skepticism, meaning it's very difficult for us to believe things at first blush. And we also have very low levels of cognitive empathy,

which means it's really hard for us to feel for other people's positions on things. And so when I realized that, I thought, you know what, not only is it hard for lawyers to wrap their heads around this woo stuff, it is hard for everybody in general, but I think for lawyers, it's especially challenging for them to kind of understand and embrace and recognize that there is some value to all this weird stuff. So as I continued the work, I realized that I have to include

science and studies in all of my conversations of these things to try and build more cognitive support and awareness and buy in of these resources and tools. So that is what we're going to be talking about today. Before we get into the science of these modalities, I want to share with you why I even got down this path.

So as I said in the last episode, I was kind of going through this whole awareness of the identity that I had selected and the career path that I had embarked upon didn't really align with who I wanted to be. And what's more, I went down that path to becoming a lawyer because I was looking for a way to soothe some early needs in my life to be seen, to be heard, to be respected.

All of those, I think, really drove the desire to become a lawyer. Shockingly enough, I realized that having the title did not instantly cure all of those things and I had more work to do. And when I did that, I realized that I needed to change a lot in my life. From that space, I was able to start taking better care of myself. I started meditating and I started getting into yoga. And this was while I was still in some pretty toxic relationships professionally and

personally. And so even despite this hurricane that I was living in, I started meditating because I knew I had gotten really disconnected from myself and that authentic part of me. Then the firm I was currently working at, they had yoga over the lunch hour and I never really practiced yoga formally. I had been a dancer for years and so I knew how important it was to connect with my body.

And I always thought yoga held something for me that I needed to explore. So I go to these over the lunch hour yoga sessions. And as we're sort of concluding this session, and we're in a really small room in the basement of this building in downtown, and actually the room we were in was an old bank vault. ⁓ Years and years ago, this building was a bank. And so there's a vault door that's like eight feet tall and three feet, four feet wide or deep.

and it's swung open or kind of tucked away in this little nook. It was a very kind of cozy intimate space despite being in a corporate law firm. And as we wound down our session and we're lying there in corpse pose in the final Shavasana, the instructor came around with lavender oil and she gently tapped each of us on our third eye. And I know I talked about this in an earlier episode, but it was really, I don't know what it was about her.

her touch. knew there was something connecting me to her and I felt like this electricity. And to this day, she's one of those people that has this energy about her that I feel very drawn to, very soothing, very healing, very intuitive. But I remember when she did that, and then she pressed my shoulders into the ground gently, I felt this overwhelming sense of calm and peace and ease. So anyway,

Did she cure me of everything? No, she didn't. But there was something about her that I knew I wanted to pursue further. So I started working with her privately. And she says, well, have you ever had a reiki session or a tarot reading or a sound bath? And I said, no. We're done breath work. And I said, no. And so she says, why don't you come to the studio and we'll start exploring some of these. But first, let's schedule you a reiki session. So I go in for a reiki session. And she asks me, what's going on with you? And I start sharing with her.

how I'm feeling this disconnect of where I am in my life versus who I wanna be, how unhappy I am in my career and how it feels so toxic and unhealthy. And then I'm sharing with her that I'm also in this personal relationship that it's extremely abusive, feeling very unsafe, feeling just very scared. And she's asking me, is there anything you're noticing in your body and this, that and the other. And by the way, I've been going to see a therapist to deal with all of this as well. Reky and coaching is...

No replacement for therapy. If anything, I think it's a supplement. So she's asking me about, what are you feeling in your body? And I said, I can't escape this feeling in my hip, on the right side of my hip, kind of on the back side of my hip. It's just this pain that won't go away. And I go to the chiropractor all the time and it just will not go away. She's like, okay. So we get into the session. She puts me on the table.

She starts playing this music and then she starts playing these bowls. If you've ever been to a sound healing and someone's playing the crystal bowls, the resonance itself is tremendously powerful. It can be really uncomfortable for some people too. We'll talk more about what was actually happening in my body, but she starts playing these bowls. Then I feel her moving around me. Then all of a sudden, I feel this tingling and release sensation. The pain and the strain in my hip,

was gone. And I remember sitting up thinking like, this is the weirdest thing. I didn't know what I was in for. I had no kind of preconceived notion that Reiki could do anything for that particular pain. It was just something that I had kind of mentioned in our discussions. And she says, you know, there's some kind of a dark energy that's connected to you. Maybe it's from past lives or whatnot. But she said it's rooted in that side of your body. And I'm like, that's exactly where the pain is. And even as I'm saying this, I'm sure some of you are listening in, you're like, well, she

you told her that that's where the pain wasn't. So she knew what to say. I'm telling you, this is the only thing that fixed that pain. And I felt such a tremendous amount of release. So regardless of whether or not you believe in that, we're gonna talk more about the science behind it. One of the things that also came out of that session was she pulled some tarot cards. And one of the cards, every time I see it, I flash back to this instant.

And it was a card where an individual was lying face down on the ground. And there's all these swords in their back. And I want to say it's the nine of swords or the 10 of swords. And it's in the background, there's a sun rising as if something difficult was ending and a new beginning was coming. And that was the moment that it sort of clicked for me that I really need to cut this energy out of my life and sort of move on. And it was sort of a suggestion that I would be okay and it would be okay.

So that was kind of my first foray into this space. And truthfully at the time I was like, this is amazing, but man, this stuff is out there. And I don't know if I can fully get behind this type of crazy stuff. Fast forward 18 years and here I am fully into it. But it led me to start researching this work. And over time I started adding some of those tools and modalities to my own work. Because what I realized,

over time was that even when I was doing my work on intentionally altering my thinking patterns and unrooting some of those unconscious belief patterns and shifting them, and even when I was actively making changes in my life, some of that stress and trauma were leaving impacts in my body. And I needed fitness and yoga and Reiki and sound healing to help me kind of

clear off some of the dust that was left behind from those experiences. And if any of you have had a Reiki session, you'll know it's not uncommon to have tremendous amounts of energy and emotion kind of wash over you during those times. You feel sensations, sometimes you feel like your body is being pulled away from you. ⁓ It's a very powerful experience that I don't know that anyone can really understand it until they experience it. But now,

as a Reiki practitioner myself, I feel the power of it. And I have those very personal connections with the people that do this work with me. And I see and feel this energy release within them, whether within their bodies or just expressing it. And it's such a beautiful way to let some of that out and allow healing to begin. Okay, so that's the backstory.

Let me just give you, because I'm afraid I'm losing some of you here and the skepticism is clicking in, so let's start talking about some of the science behind these modalities.

Since we're talking about Reiki, let's start there and just unpack exactly what Reiki is. In very, very short summary, Reiki is bio-field energy therapy, where a Reiki practitioner is using their hands to support your body's natural healing processes. During a Reiki session, the practitioner is going to use various tools

to get a sense of where your chakras, your energy centers throughout your body are blocked. If you look at our nervous system, we have bundles of nerves throughout our body. Reiki and a lot of healing focuses on seven primary chakras. There are more chakras in your body, but we focus on the primary seven. And they are, they align from the top of your head all the way down to the seat of your spine and flow through all the way to your legs and your feet into your root chakra.

So those nerve clusters all have different vibrational frequencies and resonances, okay? So what Reiki does is it checks in with each of those energy centers to see where things may or may not be blocked. During the course of our lives, we as humans experience all sorts of emotions. If you listened to the last episode, I talked a lot about how all of our thoughts create emotion and that is vibration in our bodies. And if you think of our bodies like a tea kettle and you've got all these vibes going on,

Imagine what those vibrations are doing from a physiological perspective to your body when we're not releasing them, addressing them, or processing them. So as we go throughout our lives and maybe we don't have time or maybe we don't want to process those emotions or maybe we just think we have to stuff it down and keep going, that energy gets stuck in your body and it alters the flow of energy, the chi life force throughout your body. Reiki

finds those blockages and practitioners use their hands and sometimes other tools to open them. And so if you think about your nervous system as a freeway and when you stuff energy down, you're causing backlogs and traffic jams along that freeway. Reiki and sound healing and these types of modalities open those freeways back up so that the energy can move.

through and that is why during a Reiki session or a sound healing session, it's not unusual to feel tingling or a release or tremendous amounts of emotion just wash over you ⁓ out of the blue. So that is how Reiki works. Is this supported by science?

There's some studies out there suggesting and confirming what we as Reiki practitioners believe, and that is that Reiki can support stress reduction, relaxation, decreasing anxiety and depression, pain management, which I have found to be true, improved well-being and potentially healing overall. Most people who experience a Reiki session report that they feel calmer, they feel more relaxed and a lot less distressed after their sessions.

But I do wanna be very clear and transparent here. There's not a lot of really high quality studies on the effects of reiki. Some people may argue that it's just a placebo effect. For me, I always go back to the science and specifically the science behind entrainment. So I'm gonna take a pivot here, tell you a little bit about that and that is really kind of the root of why I believe all of this stuff actually works.

So our brain uses electrical patterns called brainwaves, and we all know this. And there's different types of brainwaves, and I'm not going to bore you with all of them. But throughout your day, your brain is cycling between these different types of energetic states with different types of brain frequencies. Your brain, however, it has a natural tendency to synchronize with external

rhythms. This is called brain wave entrainment. So what that means is that when you listen to certain types of sounds like drumming or crystal bowls or tuning forks, your brain is going to match that frequency. And that's what I mean when I say that reiki or sound healing can kind of open up those blocked pathways in your nervous system because those parts of your body are actually syncing and allow

lower frequencies to sort of dissipate. How does this relate to Reiki? So there have been some studies on Reiki practitioners and specifically kind of looking at the energy and frequencies coming off of practitioners hands during a Reiki session. Some studies have found that the vibrations, the frequencies coming off of practitioners hands reflect that frequency of healing. So as their hands move across your body, your body and your brain, our

are in training to match that frequency and resulting in that ultimate release. From this space, it's very easy to understand how sound healing works because it's just a much more audible way of causing entrainment. During a sound bowl session, the practitioner is going to play bowls with different resonances that match the frequencies of those different chakras. As those sounds are played,

your brain will match the frequency causing your body in those centers to open up, allowing the free flow of energy and lower resonances to dissipate.

The thing I love so much about sound healing is that this is not a new thing. If you look back to ancient cultures, there was a lot of power and ceremony built around sounds, drumming, chanting, singing bowls or gongs. But what's different is that today, science is finally catching up and giving language as to why that works and why that was such an important cultural element of those societies.

Because at its core, sound is just vibration and frequencies, and our body is also vibration and frequencies. Every cell, every organism, every system in our body operates at a specific frequency. So when you introduce sound intentionally or even reiki, you're not just hearing it, you're experiencing it on a cellular level.

This concept is actually demonstrated by a gentleman named Dr. Imodo. actually talked about his work on my sister podcast, the Lawyer Life podcast years ago, and I may repost that here. The long and short of his work is that he would play different frequencies.

and observe the impact that those frequencies had on how crystal structures formulated in water. And what he found is that when you played certain healing frequencies, the water structures would form these very beautiful crystalline structures that almost look kind of like little snowflakes.

In contrast, when other sounds were played around the water, they formulated disorganized crystalline structures. And when I say other sounds, I want to say he even used sort of hateful language or hateful words to notice the impact that they have on the water. And what he found was that there are certain types of energies and frequencies that actually create dislocated, scattered changes in the crystal structures of water.

and our bodies are a significant amount of water. And what this tells us is that the energies around us all day, every day, not just for sound healing and Reiki, but the energies around us, they are changing some of the structures within our bodies. Science supports that. And so when we use healing and Reiki, sound healing and Reiki, we're just using that science in a much more intentional way to create and stimulate healing.

So let's bring this all a little bit farther and discuss how it impacts your body. One of the most important elements of sound healing is how it impacts your nervous system. When we're stressed, when we're overwhelmed or burned out, your body can often get stuck into your sympathetic state. That's our fight or flight response. But sound, particularly slow or rhythmic frequencies, low frequency sounds,

can help shift your nervous system into your parasympathetic state. That's our rest and digest state that tells us that we are safe and there are no threats detected. In that state, our heart rate slows, our breathing deepens, and our muscles start to relax. That's when your body finally gets the signal, it's okay, you can let it all go.

That is why so many people feel an emotional release during sound baths. It's not random. It's truly your body literally coming out of a stress state. There is another concept kind of tap dancing in the background here that is really important, and that's this concept of resonance.

Resonance is the idea that one vibrating object can influence another. You've probably seen this in real life, like when you have one tuning fork vibrating, then it's gonna cause another one to vibrate without touching it. I see it all the time when I'm playing crystal bowls. I may be playing one bowl, but there's another bowl a couple down that I haven't touched that's going to start vibrating as well. It's gonna start resonating with the one that I'm playing. The same thing happens in your body.

certain sound frequencies can communicate with different parts of your system.

What this means is that as we're playing certain frequencies, your body is going to respond in certain types of ways. So for example, lower frequencies tend to ground and calm the body, the nervous system. Higher frequencies can feel uplifting or energizing. And while we're unclear about the exact mechanism around how this all works, there is growing evidence that sound can influence

heart rate variability, cortisol levels, and cellular function.

Finally, what's really kind of going on in the background of all of this is this concept that everything has a vibrational signature.

and sound healing or Reiki, it just gives us a tangible physical way to interact with those vibrational signatures. It's not about believing in something abstract. It's about experiencing a shift in your body.

With all of that being said, it became clearer and clearer to me that I couldn't just do the mental work, the problems that I was experiencing. Yes, it was beneficial to do the talk therapy, to do the mindfulness work, but I needed to find other ways to heal and kind of release some of the disorganization that I was experiencing in my body. And this is where these modalities became really essential and part of my ongoing self-care routine.

I recognized that my identity, my relationships, trauma and emotions were all really connected. And I found that patterns were showing up across all domains and that healing addressed the whole system and not just some parts of it, not just the patterns. It addressed every part of me that was impacted by that identity, that trauma and those

So I wasn't just learning how to heal some of those old patterns and traumas, I was learning how to connect with my body on a deeper level and support my body in its own healing that needed to be done as well and using some of these modalities to facilitate that. So as time went on, I recognized that coaching alone was not enough. I needed to be able to provide my clients with the same tools that I needed to kind of up level.

my own evolution and my own healing and my own sort of identity shifts and everything that went along with it. And so today I take a much more holistic approach to coaching, to personal training, to all of it, because I think that they all have to fit together to a cohesive pie that reflects who we are as human beings. We're not just our jobs or our identity. We're not just our trauma. We're not just our physical body. And we're not just our spiritual body. We all have to...

attend to all of those parts of ourselves together. And so these holistic tools round out those types of practices and that type of work to allow you to make changes on a deeper and more lasting level because we start to embody that new identity and some of those changes by releasing whatever is stuck within us that might be attached to that old identity, that old life, those old patterns and traumas.

This month on the Becoming Her side of my podcast, The Private Space, I'm offering all of my old coaching programs that talk you through how to change your life and leverage some of these tools to do that. Within all of those programs is some pretty deep discussion around emotions and feelings. And that is the piece of it that I think really dovetails with this holistic work. Because if you think about your emotions and feelings as energy within your body, and we think about

how often we ignore those emotions and we just bury them and we keep going. If we can recognize that that energy can have a physiological impact in our body or it can get stuck or we close it off and don't wanna deal with it, all of that has consequences. And so even when we're doing the mindfulness work and we're using the tools that I talk about on that side of the podcast, we also have to recognize that in order to work through the feelings portion of all of this,

Energy tools like Reiki sound healing all of this can allow you to sort of Accelerate that work and release some of those emotions that you might not even be aware That you're carrying with you and so I see it as sort of the the final part of the feelings work that we're doing on that side of the podcast as well if You're interested in that the link is in the show notes

If you have any questions about any of this, or if you wanna schedule a virtual Reiki session or a sound healing session or an intuitive session, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. Send an email to autumn at theuncomfortabledream.com. I would love to hear your thoughts, comments, and questions on this topic. I know it's a little out there, but I truly, truly love and believe in this work. So please don't hesitate to reach out if I can help in any way.

All right, my friends, I will see you next week as we continue this journey. We're rounding out this topic this month and digging into purpose. How to find your purpose, what does it mean, and how can we start living more aligned? I will see you there.