Iya Affo

Iya Affo, founder of Heal Historical Trauma and trauma specialist, is discussing the details of integrating versus healing ancestral trauma in our lives, as well as regulating your nervous system and tending to the living altar of your body.

About Iya

Iya Affo is the founder of Heal Historical Trauma, a Culturalist, and a Western-certified Trauma Specialist whose lifelong work bridges indigenous healing traditions and neurobiology. Descended from a lineage of spiritual and physical healers with heritage spanning West Africa and the Caribbean, she integrates over 35 years of client experience with formal certifications in models like Dr. Bruce Perry's Neurosequential Model for Caregiving, Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), and Native American-based trauma programs. Having lived, studied, and collaborated with indigenous, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, and Native American communities across more than 30 countries, Iya is an international speaker, author, and educator who advocates for the harmonization of Traditional and Western medicine to cultivate holistic healing, reculturing, and resilience for disempowered populations worldwide. 

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• Distinguish Historical Trauma from Ancestral Trauma: Historical trauma acts as the macro-level event (such as systemic violence or colonization), while ancestral trauma is how that macro event gets localized within a specific family's home life, cellular memory, and relational conditioning.
• Shift from Abstract "Healing" to Embodied Integration: Rather than trying to erase painful historical events, focus on integration—using ancestral rituals and somatic practices to process past pain so it increases your capacity to navigate adversity.
• Regulate Your Nervous System from the Bottom Up: Your neurobiology drives your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Decreasing stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline) and boosting feel-good neurotransmitters (dopamine, oxytocin) automatically changes how you think, feel, and relate to others.
• Utilize Rhythmic and Lateral Movement for Nervous System Regulation: Simple, rhythmic activities like swinging, hula-hooping, or walking (which induces rapid lateral eye movements similar to EMDR) calm dysregulated nervous system patterns that may have been passed down for generations.
• Tend to the Living Altar of Your Body: You are not starting from scratch; your physical body is the living altar of thousands of generations who survived before you. Honor your lineage by distinguishing the "fire" (creativity, strength, endurance) from the "ash" (outdated coping mechanisms) and making conscious space for your ancestors in your daily life.

Connect with Iya Affo

Website: https://healhistoricaltrauma.com/

Resources

https://www.emdr.com/about-the-emdr-institute/

Connect with the Show

• Website: justlikenana.com
• Share Your Story: If you have a family story or trauma you’re exploring, reach out via our website for a chance to be interviewed.

Connect with Just Like Nana's Website.

A proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective.

Theme music by Carter Penny.

Transcript

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Integrating Historical Trauma and Tending to the Living Altar of Your Body with Iya Affo

Amie Penny Sayler 0:21

Welcome to Just Like Nana. I am Amie Penny Sayler. If this is the first time you've joined us, excited that you're here. At Just Like Nana, we always address ancestral trauma. Today's guest expands that to include ancestral trauma within the context of historical trauma. And while that sounds heavy, and it is, the purpose of talking about it is to figure out how we move from one place to another. How do we get to the other side? And however you refer to that other side, if it's healing, breaking a cycle, my guest today refers to it as integration. Whatever that means for you, the theme that's been clear through many, many episodes of Just Like Nana is that the first step is acknowledgement. So that's why we talk about it. And also beyond the acknowledgement, the modalities or methodologies to keep moving past that stage. And so if you've listened to other episodes of Just Like Nana, thank you for that. And I hope you've found one, two, five suggestions or methods from various guests that have resonated with you and felt like a thread that you can pull in your own journey. Today's guest is Iya Affo. She is a visionary trauma educator, cultural wellness leader, and founder of the Pan-African Resilience Healers Network. She's a tribal African woman and a descendant of both spiritual and physical healers. Iya's work is rooted in the global restoration of ancestral wisdom and the decolonization of healing practices. Her unique integrative approach harmonizes traditional African and indigenous medicine with evidence-based neuroscience and Western modalities to foster deep embodied healing from trauma. We are so fortunate to be able to talk with Iya today. You will quickly figure out for yourself how amazing she is and just what a fierce advocate she is for those who need a little extra support, including me and perhaps some of you who are listening in. Welcome to Just Like Nana, Iya. So excited to have you with us today.

Iya Affo 2:53

Thank you so much for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here. And it's some of my favorite topic ancestors and grandmothers and all those things. So thank you so much.

Amie Penny Sayler 3:03

Absolutely. And I can't wait to get into the broader historical trauma. So thank you for all the work you do and what you put out in the world. Thank you. Do you have a favorite memory of a grandma or favorite or powerful, whatever story feels like it wants to be heard that you'd like to share? And what did you

The Fashion, Courage, and Legacy of Grandma Wilhelmina

Amie Penny Sayler 3:22

call your grandma? Absolutely. So probably 20 years ago.

Iya Affo 3:25

So my grandmother, you have to understand my grandmother. My grandmother was like this renaissance woman. She was born in like 1918 or 1919, but she was way, way, way ahead of her time. So she was quite a seamstress, and she could go to wherever the designer fashion was, and she could look at everything they did and go home and reproduce that same thing overnight. So this was hers. She was fashioned. She's the type of lady that was wearing high heels on the beach, right? Yeah.

Amie Penny Sayler 3:59

And somehow she's not sinking into the sand, which amazes me.

Iya Affo 4:04

But anyway, what was also very important to her was how she raised her family. So she made sure that they lived in the best neighborhoods and had the best things. Again, she's born in 1918 or 1919. She was a registered nurse at a time when black women, you know, or black people found it hard to graduate, you know, to move past third grade, fifth grade, right? So she was a registered nurse. She was well loved. She really wanted to be an interior decorator, but she could not. Um, at that time, black women weren't interior decorators. And so, but that was her passion, fashion and decorating and all those things. Okay. She pushed my grandfather to build a home in Sag Harbor in the Hamptons. And so this is an area of the Hamptons that was really reserved for middle and upper class black families. And so we're back in, I think, the 60s is when she had my grandfather build this home. So he builds the home. And so we spent summers there growing up. Anyway, here's the story. So 20 years ago, I was on the beach. There's a private beach there. And so I was on the beach with my children who were little guys, and a woman walks past me, and she has this billowing fabric that's kind of blowing in the wind. Another lady that's wearing heels on the beach, and she's like 80. And she billows past me. I see her look at me. She keeps going and she comes back and she stares me in the face and she said, Oh my God, you are Wilhelmina's baby. My grandmother was Wilhelmina. She said, You're Wilhelmina's baby. And I looked at her and I said, Yeah. And she said, That was my best friend. I sang at her funeral, my God, you are your grandmother. The thing of the story is, I never met my grandmother. She died before I was born. But all my life, I've been told, I get I have goosebumps just telling you the story, but me too. I've been told that I'm exactly my grandmother. My mannerisms, the way I talk, the things that I do, the interests that I have, all of the things. And all of my life, I have felt this connection to her, and that she has always been with me through some of the hardest times, through beautiful times. My grandmother has just always walked beside me, a woman that I have never met in the physical world. So I don't know what I call her other than Wilhelmina and grandma, because I just never got to see her in the physical world. But she's just an incredible part of the woman that I am, the grandmother that I am, the wife, the mother that I am. She's just a part of it.

Amie Penny Sayler 7:08

What a beautiful tribute to your grandmother. Thank you so much for sharing that. You're welcome. As you were describing her in the beginning, I was just thinking about what an incredible force of nature she must have been.

Iya Affo 7:25

She absolutely was. I mean, can you just imagine a woman born at that time and just pushing? She was the oldest of eight children. And so she had to kind of take care of her siblings. But the way out was to go and get educated. And so she busted her butt to get an education and to have a career. It's just incredible, you know.

Amie Penny Sayler 7:48

Absolutely. And I think, although I hear you describing that you look like her physically and that woman recognized you that way, I think there's probably something in your carriage also and just your fierce spirit that she also recognized. Absolutely.

Iya Affo 8:04

Yeah. It was just, yeah, the whole thing, my energy, my way of being, the way I carried myself, everything. I could see it in this woman's face, you know, like, oh my God, this is her. Well, you must be her granddaughter. Yeah.

Amie Penny Sayler 8:17

Yeah. I also love when I think about our spirit guides or kind of the people that are along with us for the journey. I don't normally think of what they're wearing, but I imagine your grandma is just impeccable while walking beside you.

Iya Affo 8:31

Absolutely. I'm at my mother's house for the last few days, and I saw my mother doing something yesterday, and I said, Wilhelmina's watching you, mom. You know, she would not approve of that because that way of being and elegance was just so important to her.

Amie Penny Sayler 8:52

Your work is so expansive. And I know that we're not going to be able to cover everything. But if you could just start with an explanation from your perspective and your work that you do of both ancestral trauma and historical trauma, and I know they intersect, kind of how they intersect and how your work addresses

Macro vs. Micro: Historical Trauma vs. Ancestral Trauma

Amie Penny Sayler 9:12

that.

Iya Affo 9:12

I think the best way, I was trying to think of the best way to describe it, but I think the best way to talk about the intersection of historical trauma and ancestral trauma is to think about it as historical trauma is the macro event, right? It's the it's the big overarching event. And the ancestral trauma is how that macro event gets localized within a family's cellular memory and home life. You know, like when a community experiences historical trauma or systemic violence breaks out, there's certain cultural structures and it creates a chronic survival state, right? We get these chronic survival states that happen because of that macro event. And those chronic survival states, like hypervigilance or emotional suppression or displacement, all of that gets passed down to children. And I mean through the epigenetic expression, how genes are turned on and off based on stress and based on the physical environment. But also it gets passed down through relational conditioning, right? Through how parents regulate their own nervous system around their children. And even in cultural practices, right? Culture changes as a result of the macro events that happen. So really, you carry the historical trauma through the history of the community, but you feel it in your daily life through the specific habits and silences and nervous system responses that are handed down by your immediate lineage.

Amie Penny Sayler 11:09

And I think everything you said, and there's also that energetic or spiritual component that follows a line.

Iya Affo 11:18

Yes, because yes, because when we really talk about human beings, we don't always talk about the spiritual DNA, but absolutely we have the spiritual DNA, the energetic DNA that also is impacted by previous generations.

Amie Penny Sayler 11:37

And I would love, if you don't mind, just expanding on that silence piece a little bit, because I feel like there is so much power and sort of oomph and meat in the silence that a family honors through lines until someone breaks that silence. And we don't really talk about the silence. We tend to focus on, you know, what is happening or the behavior or that sort of thing. So if you don't mind just talking about this, is what I mean by silence, and this is how it affects, you know, a familial line, or this is how it doesn't aid in

Traditional Wisdom vs. Colonized Secrecy

Amie Penny Sayler 12:15

the healing of historical trauma.

Iya Affo 12:17

Silence is complex because from our traditional ways of being, as especially as indigenous people or as African people, so much of our belief system is around the power of energy, the power of the tongue and the words. So part of silence is we are not always speaking about negative things that have happened, because in our belief system, we manifest more of those negative things. So sometimes we don't even realize that because we don't understand our culture or our history or how we were as African people. But some of the silence is that we're not always gonna speak because what the tongue speaks becomes part of the physical world, becomes be part of what your life actually is. So there's silence in that way. The other part of the silence is there's just things that are unspeakable. There are just things that we never talk about, that we never address, that we never take a look at. And in that unhealthy silence, that can be passed one generation to the next. And it doesn't allow us to really integrate the pain and the trauma that we endure, right? So I want to clarify one thing. When I talk about the silence of not using the tongue to articulate things that have happened, we may not be using the tongue in our ancestral ways, in our traditional ways to articulate things that are happening, but we're still recognizing those things. And traditionally, we would be doing ritual and ceremony and healing technologies so that we can integrate that trauma and that pain. So that's one type of silence. Just because the tongue isn't wagging doesn't mean that we're not recognizing that there's a problem and managing the problem. But because of colonization and because of being stripped of our cultural ways of being, we no longer know how to manage trauma and pain in that way. And so then it becomes a silent, that's a sickening silence. That's a we're not acknowledging, we're not recognizing, we're not seeing, we're just continuing to move forward. And then we don't have the opportunity for integration.

Amie Penny Sayler 14:57

That makes so much sense. And I hear what you're saying about what's missing is that piece of, okay, we're not using words in the traditional sense, but there are other mechanisms, rituals, you know, ceremony, like you mentioned. And now that doesn't exist. So there's nothing right.

Iya Affo 15:17

So there's nothing that allows us. I don't always use the word healing because sometimes when we say healing, it's kind of like abstract. And what does that really mean? So, and the things that happen absolutely become a part of who we are. So are we healing or are we integrating, right? We're integrating those experiences because those experiences also empower us. Those experiences also increase our capacity to manage adversity. So it really is an integration of those experiences that need to happen. But if we no longer have our traditional technologies to do that, and then we also are, you know, kind of imprinted with that silence to be silent, then we run into trouble because we don't have any mechanism for integration. And we just keep carrying that pain and that trauma forward.

Amie Penny Sayler 16:15

Yeah, I love what you said on two levels. One is thank you for that integration language, because you're right that, and of course, not saying, oh, well, anything that happened was good or anything like that, but you're right that the reality is it occurred. And then the integration allows for also the kind of silver linings, if you will, or you know, everything always has two sides, right? So that this was an awful experience, and there's something I can take away from it that leads to my better character. Exactly. Exactly. And then also just the what I'm really hearing, and one thing that that has sort of flowed through every episode when I've talked with someone, no matter which way they're looking at this, is just kind of that I'm gonna call it the acknowledgement piece. Just that one moment of, yes, this happened. I see you, I hear you, I imagine how difficult that was. This happened. And it seems that moment of acknowledgement, which I think is probably a first step to the integration, because you can't integrate something you're pretending didn't happen, is just incredibly powerful.

Iya Affo 17:30

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Amie Penny Sayler 17:35

Let's talk about the Pan-African Resilience Healers Network. Can you describe

The Pan-African Resilience Healers Network

Amie Penny Sayler 17:41

that for our listeners? Yeah.

Iya Affo 17:43

So I think that we struggle, and I say this, and sometimes it's offensive to people, and it is not meant to be offensive, but we're struggling with mental health all over the world, right? When we are utilizing our Western perspective on what it means to have mental health, we're failing. And we're failing in the United States because we see the number of sick people, we see the number of people that are doing unthinkable crimes, we are seeing people struggling and miserable and so broken on so many levels. So somehow we're missing the mark. If we look at the continent of Africa, the gap is even wider because we are looking at a continent that has been colonized. And so even in many communities in Africa, traditional ways of healing, our traditional technologies have been lost or are no longer respected because people are trying so hard to follow in a Western mindset, in a Western way of being. So they're putting down our traditional ancestral ways of integration and wholeness and moving toward Western ways of being and thinking, except that those Western ways of being and thinking aren't even that successful in the West. So, with this in mind and with spending time in so many communities that are still struggling and is still being impacted by violence, by trauma, by pain, I wanted to introduce another model. In Africa, you will never have enough medical doctors, like whether it's a psychologist or psychiatrist or a physician in the hospital, you'll never have enough because it's very difficult to get trained, right? You have to have enough money to go through all the schooling processes. And most of the time, the people that have access and can go through those processes are gonna leave the continent and go practice in Europe or in the United States, somewhere where they can make a lot of money. So we're never gonna have enough. And in reality, since time immemorial, we have managed mental health issues. This is not the first time we're living through adversity. Our ancestors have always had adversity, but we had indigenous technologies to manage it. So, how do we incorporate and infuse our indigenous technologies to fit into the 21st century? So, my idea was how do we collect the mothers, the aunties, the not just women, but the mothers and the aunties because we hold such a powerful place of healing on the continent, but also men as well, leaders and supporters in the community. How do we gather them, give them information about the nervous system and how the nervous system operates and what's happening with the nervous system when we're exposed to trauma and then work with local medicine people to help integrate some of those traditional practices with our 21st century biology so that we can help facilitate healing. That way, we're never looking for just outside people to come and save us, but we have trained our own and organized our own people from each various culture, 21st century neuroscience with traditional ways of healing to help facilitate people healing in the community. And so that's really what was in my mind. How do we do that? And I think it's hard getting going, and you have to have a lot of people believing in it because we have people that want to invest a lot in Africa, but we also have To have the people that want to invest in Africa trust and believe that we do know how to heal ourselves. We do know how to heal. If we can organize things, then we can have a system that is sustainable and empowering for people in their communities. So that's that's really what it was all about.

Amie Penny Sayler 22:18

How long have you been doing this and what sorts of results have you started to see? And I want to be clear, I think this is a very long game for generations to come. Yes.

Iya Affo 22:28

And we have not gone very far yet. I started really working on it probably about two years ago. And so just trying to get people involved, we were able to do some of it at a conference in Kenya recently. And so some of that was starting to manifest. And I could see light bulbs going on, but we haven't moved very far yet.

Amie Penny Sayler 22:51

Well, and to your point, there's just so many different cultures. So even if there's inroads in one place, you're kind of starting from ground zero elsewhere. Exactly. I would love to touch on a little bit because you've mentioned it a few times. You've talked about the nervous system. And so I know you're all over that and you understand the impacts of trauma through both trauma that we experience and the ancestral or historical pieces. What sort of wisdom do you have for listeners about here's information about your nervous system, and here are some techniques.

Iya Affo 23:28

I'm a person that thinks about healing and integration from what we would call a bottom-up perspective, meaning that the neurobiology

Bottom-Up Healing: How Trauma Impacts the Neurobiology

Iya Affo 23:45

drives everything else that's happening in the body, in the brain, in the mind are thoughts, right? So a lot of other people who practice psychology, Western psychology, are more top-down. And so the belief system is the thoughts drive everything else that happens. Okay. So my thought process is how do we manage what's happening in the neurobiology to affect how we're thinking and feeling? So if we think about it, the brain is driving everything. The brain is responsible for how we think, how we feel, how we emote, right? Like control our emotions or don't control our emotions, how we behave, and how we have relationships. The brain is going to control all of those things. If I can leverage the knowledge about the nervous system, I can absolutely affect how I feel, how I think, how I emote, how I behave, how I relate. So when I think about helping people that have gone through trauma, I'm thinking about how do we first help you regulate the nervous system? We want to decrease the amount of stress hormones in your system, the adrenaline, the cortisol, noradrenaline, that whole cocktail of stress hormones in our system. How do I help you decrease those neurotransmitters and increase the feel-good ones? Your dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins. Because when we can increase what I call the feel-goods and decrease the stress hormones, we're going to start to regulate our nervous system and it's going to automatically start to change how we think and how we feel, how we behave, how we relate to others. Okay. So that's kind of the fundamental thing. Now, if we add in historical trauma and things that have happened generationally, then is on the continent of Africa and the Home, where we came from. And they're aware that there are European people coming and they're snatching people off of the continent and they're taking them to work in this new world. And where you go is horrible and is destructive all the way down to the level of your soul, right? And I have an ancestor that's there. That ancestor has to adapt to living in that environment where there's constant danger. So it's going to increase their hypervigilance. It's going to increase their ability to distinguish sounds. It's going to increase their ability, you know, for vision. All of those things increase in order to survive in that hostile environment. So we can carry that. So when we get that, you know, like to simplify it, when that switch flips and we move into that hypervigilant state, that can pass one generation to the next on the epigenome of the DNA, the outside part, the chemical receptors that control what's happening with the genetic code, that changes. That can change for potentially 14 generations, according to the cherry blossom study. So potentially 14 generations can be impacted by something that happened all that time ago. But then also trauma is cumulative. So we had the incidents that happened perhaps on the continent, but we also have what happened once you were captured, when you were waiting in the dungeons, when you were watching people drown themselves in the ocean, when you were seeing people throw themselves overboard because of the middle passage on the ships, being trapped on the ships during the middle passage, all that way, chained up like sardines on the boat, getting to the new world, seeing all of that death and destruction around you, getting onto the auction block, being sold away from relatives, on and on and on through the civil rights era, on and on and on, all the way to what is still happening right now. So that trauma is cumulative over time. So if we have that, and it's not just you, right? I'm giving you the example of me and my lineage and my family, but it's not just that. What about if you're, you know, the Holocaust? What about the Irish potato famine? We have all of these things. So I'm not just saying only African people, but I'm saying, regardless of what your ethnicity is, you your ancestors have faced some level of adversity. Now your capacity to have integrated it over the generation changes depending on what your lineage is, but it's still there. And so if we haven't had that opportunity for integration and we've continued to have trauma accumulate over time, well, then we still have our generations, our kiddos, walking around carrying all of that with them. And then we add onto it our current day stressors, which everybody is really experiencing now. And we have very highly dysregulated nervous systems. So if we talk about healing and we start with the nervous system, how do we regulate the nervous system?

Amie Penny Sayler 29:43

And I just want to acknowledge a piece in there. Yes, there have been traumas that have been experienced throughout history, but the cumulative piece I think is really key because sometimes a trauma is experienced. And then based on privileges, future generations are able to move beyond that. And sometimes the trauma just keeps coming. Correct. Absolutely.

Iya Affo 30:11

Absolutely. Thank you for acknowledging that and pointing that out. Absolutely. So then if we talk about, I think the second part of your question was what people can do. But tell me again, what people can do with what?

Amie Penny Sayler 30:23

Yeah, I guess I'll call it nervous system regulation health, you know, kind of hygiene, or what are some first steps people can start to take to really understand? I love that.

Iya Affo 30:35

Like you're touching on my favorite thing to talk about because I like to empower people, right? We always believe because of the way mental health is evolving and how it's evolved. We have come to a point in 2026 where if someone has a mental health issue or if someone is struggling, or we have a parent who is not parenting in a way that's healthy for our child, oh, you have a problem, you need to go to therapy or you need to take medication. I'm not poo-pooing therapy or medication, right? Those are viable interventions

Everyday Nervous System Hygiene and Tending the Living Altar

Iya Affo 31:10

for some people. The problem is it's not a viable intervention for everybody. And so if we only think about talk therapy and medication, what happens to all the other people that have no access to talk therapy or to medication or who don't align with talk therapy? It's like now it's an embarrassment, like you're a jerk. If somebody says, Well, do you go to therapy? And you go, well, therapy hasn't helped me, then you're a jerk and you're somebody that doesn't really want to get well. And that's just not true. So I'm glad you asked me the question because that's one of my favorite things to do. We have the capacity to start to regulate our own nervous system. Okay. So if we every time, so if we think about the nervous system and I'm talking about stress hormones and all of those things, I want to clarify a few things. So when I talk about having a lot of cortisol or adrenaline, noradrenaline, and all of those things, stress hormones in our system, that's also equivalent to being in fight or flight, right? We know fight, flight, or freeze response, fight or flight mode, the threat response system, survival mode, all of that is interchangeable. So if we're having a nervous system that is dysregulated, we have the capacity to regulate it. Here's some of the ways we can do that. Every time I do something that is in alignment with my morals and with the way, my way of being, it activates the pleasure center of my brain and I have a release of those feel-good chemicals. I'm going to get a release of dopamine every time I do something that's in alignment with my belief system. So for me, for example, as an indigenous African woman, it's important for me to wake up before the sun comes up every day. So every day that I wake up at 4 a.m. and the sun is not up yet, and I do my ritual and I do, you know, the prayers and the things that I do, I'm in alignment with who I am as a person. Now, maybe for somebody else, that means going to church on Sunday or going to Bible study on Wednesday night. Great. Whatever that means for you, every time you show up at church on Sunday or every time you go to Bible study on Wednesday, you are in alignment with your belief system and you're activating the pleasure center of the brain and you're getting a release of those chemicals that are helping you to increase your capacity to manage daily stressors. Okay. Anytime we learn something new, we activate the pleasure center of the brain, we have the same chemical response. So if we're driving, so sometimes we have people that don't have a lot of time. Great, you probably drive to work every day. Every time you drive to work, what if you turned on your favorite podcast, just like Nana, maybe, or another one, right? Whatever your podcast is, where you're learning something. That means on the way to work, you're regulating your brain because by learning something new, you have activated the pleasure center of the brain and you have that chemical response. Every time when we have music or rhythmic sensory input, that's also going to help us with regulating the brain. It's also going to give us that same response. When we do rhythmic activities, if we're swinging in the hammock in our backyard, if we take our kiddos after school to swing on the swing before they come home to do their homework, we're helping them to regulate the brain and get the chemical response that we want in order to have that neurological regulation. If we do jump rope, if we hula hoop, all of those things are regulating to the brain. And then we're incorporating exercise in some of those things. And we all know, you know, that we get a release of endorphins and all of those things, um, you know, runners high and all of that comes along with exercise. So incorporating exercise is going to be important. Sometimes we have people that can't do all the different types of exercise. So I want to point out anytime we're in what's called optic flow. So that's when we're walking, running, or bicycling, our eyes are making these very fast, rapid lateral eye movements, which is what EMDR is based on. I people have probably heard of EMDR, which is supposed to be very successful in helping people integrate trauma. It's, you know, an intervention for trauma. EMDR is based on those lateral eye movements. And in fact, the the woman that really started to build EMDR built it based on when she would go out for walks. She was a professor at Stanford. She would go out on walks. And when she noticed that when she came back, she felt much more regulated. So she started to do research on why that happened. And we found that these lateral eye movements also helped to regulate the nervous system. And they built that whole EMDR system based on that. So going for a walk, taking 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and making sure that that's something that we do every day or do a couple of times a day is going to be another way to help regulate our brain. So if we create a lifestyle that incorporates all of these different opportunities for leveraging the neurobiology, we're helping to heal ourselves and helping to regulate our nervous system, which is going to change how we think, how we feel, how we emote, how we behave, how we relate.

Amie Penny Sayler 37:02

That is wonderful. Thank you for that explanation. I was really struck too while you were talking about the rhythmic movements. You know, it's fascinating because we rock babies, right? We all just understand intuitively this is going to help the baby.

Iya Affo 37:18

Yes, exactly. And that it's exactly what happens with the baby, and it happens for us too, right? And that's not even talking about our meditation or yoga or how we eat, making sure we stay hydrated, relationships. That's really at the top of healing trauma, right? Most trauma happens in relationship. We also heal trauma in relationship. How often can we make connection with other humans that are, you know, positive human connections is another way that we're helping to regulate the brain. When we have that closeness or we feel close to someone or close to our animal, we're going to have a release of the oxytocin and release of those feel-good chemicals that help us to change our brain chemistry. So all of those things are contributing toward our mental health and are true ways of regulating the brain and helping to change some of the maladaptive behaviors.

Amie Penny Sayler 38:16

Yeah. I love that. And just I'm a huge animal fan. So just a shout out to the animals and all they do for us. Absolutely. One of the explanations you provide for your work, and I'm going to quote now because it's such great language. We are the living altar of our lineage carrying its fire forward. And that's just beautiful. What does that mean to you? And what suggestions do you have for listeners as far as how they could engage in carrying their ancestral fire forward?

Iya Affo 38:53

Great question. What this means for me is that your body is not starting from scratch. You're the current physical manifestation of thousands of generations who breathed, survived, loved, and adapted long before you. Your lineage did not end with your ancestors. It continues directly through your pulse, your DNA, your choices, right? That Wilamina living in me and coming through me. And an altar is a dedicated space where intention and reverence and spirit meet physical form. So, you know, that's kind of our body as that altar. So when we recognize that we are the altar, taking care of our physical, emotional, spatial well-being becomes an act of ancestral honor. So sometimes we're looking for, like, you know, all of these advanced things, or I need to be able to do this, or I need to have enough money to do that. And I'm always trying to give information that's not based on whether you have money today, you don't have money, whether you have access to going to Peru and doing all of these beautiful indigenous rituals or Africa or wherever, right? If we don't have any of that, how do we tend to our physical altar, our own body? We can do somatic work, somatic check-ins when we ground our nervous system, like we talked about, when we deep breathe deeply or move our body intentionally. I'm a hula hooper, but even just intentional, right? Hula hooping. You are calming a nervous system pattern that may have been dysregulated for generations and generations. So that's the first one, right? Tending to our physical altar. The second one, how do we distinguish fire from ash, right? Our ancestors have passed both survival wounds, the ash, and the incredible strength and creativity and endurance that fire. So carrying the fire forward means choosing to honor the wisdom and the gifts while consciously laying down the coping mechanisms that no longer serve you. It may not be necessary for me to be hyper-vigilant 24 hours a day anymore. For some of us, it might be. But when can we lay it down? And how do we hold that fire, right? Without adversity, we don't have the opportunity for evolution. We don't have the opportunity for our consciousness to evolve. We don't have the opportunity to become stronger. We must have adversity to become stronger. So, how do we hold the part of that has allowed us to evolve and to strengthen? So that's the second piece. First piece tending to our physical altar. The second piece, distinguishing the fire from the ash and really trying to uphold that fire when we can. And practice conscious space making. Create physical spaces in your home, whether it's a quiet corner, a curated table with lineage photos, a simple candle. I have a woman that I work with in Germany who has a very tiny space and has a roommate. And so she has a little cabinet that she bought. And inside that cabinet, so that she's not disturbing, you know, everybody else in her space, inside that cabinet, she's anchoring her intention to live with purpose and awareness. How do we acknowledge all the time ancestor? Right? So sometimes we have someone who passes away. We have ancestor that passes away. In our tradition, ancestor is never gone, right? That relationship just transforms. So do I set a place for Wilhelmina at the table when we're eating, especially on special meals? Do I pour libation on the ground before I drink my own water? Do I set a glass of sparkling wine if that's what we're drinking? Do I set one there for ancestors who've come before? So it's that idea of being conscious about making space to carry ancestor forward. So I think those are our three great places to start for that without a lot of sophistication and need for, you know, resources and finances and so forth and so on.

Amie Penny Sayler 44:01

Thank you so much for that and all the wisdom you've shared throughout. I mean, there's just so many concrete takeaways that I think a listener can kind of that one resonates with me and sort of start to incorporate for that integration. I would love to end on you have this Pan-African Resilience Healers Network. How can listeners support that work?

Iya Affo 44:24

It's really supportive if we have people who want to invest in the wellness, supporting people who are living through constant violence, right? We have this whole idea here of like post-traumatic stress disorder. And this assumes that there's a post after the traumatic stress, right? But when we talk about people on the continent, there's not a post. And so there's a constant stress. And so there's the constant need to regulate, to integrate, to heal, so to speak, in the context of violence. So people who want to support that, if they have an inroad to a way in one of the African governments to support that, reach out to me. If they have an organization that wants to finance helping bring this work to wherever in Africa, I have some focus in Kenya and I have some focus in West Africa, in the Benin region. But anywhere in Africa where we can integrate that work, financial help is always needed because we've got to be able to train people and have material and so forth and so on. Any of those ways would be great. And to reach out to me, healhistoricaltrauma at gmail.com, or you can go on my website, healhistoricaltrauma.com.

Amie Penny Sayler 46:05

Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today, Iya. This has just been a lovely conversation. Thank you. It was such a pleasure.