Coming Home to the Body: Somatic Healing for the Adoptee Nervous System

You cannot do deep healing work from a state of fight-or-flight.

I wish I'd known that a decade ago. I would have saved myself hundreds of hours of therapy I wasn't biologically ready to use. Because the body — your beautiful, brilliant, way-too-loyal body — is the one carrying the wound. And until we learn to come home to it, no amount of insight is going to move the trauma.

This week we're going somatic. We're talking about why the adoptee nervous system runs the way it does. The five survival responses — fight, flight, freeze, fawn, collapse. The Peter Levine concepts of titration and pendulation that changed the entire field of trauma healing. The "voo" sound. And — for the first time on this podcast — I lead you through a real, daily somatic breathwork practice. Clearing and integration. The kind of work that finally let me release decades of stuck trauma from my body.

This is the episode where the body finally gets to be the teacher.

If you've ever felt frustrated that you can "understand" your wound and still can't seem to heal it — please hear me. The understanding was never the problem. The understanding just hasn't reached your body yet. And today we change that.

Inside this episode:

• Why talk therapy alone leaves so many adoptees stuck — and what's actually missing
• Peter Levine's life-changing concepts: titration, pendulation, and the cheetah-and-impala story that explains every locked nervous system you've ever met
• The five survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, collapse) and how they show up in the adoptee body
• The "voo" practice — the simplest, most underused somatic tool I know
• A guided eight-minute somatic breathwork journey — the clearing phase and the integration phase, together, in real time
• Why "islands of safety" matter more than any single breakthrough
• A listener question from Young Suk on the friendship that keeps "leaving verbal paper cuts" — and how the body answers before the mind does

A quote from the episode

"The wound was made in a body that couldn't yet speak. So no amount of speaking will ever fully reach it. We have to go back the way we came in."

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Transcript

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I want to start today with just one sentence. And I want you to actually let it land. Okay, here we go. You cannot do deep healing work from a state of fight or flight. Let me repeat that. You cannot do deep healing work if you're in a state of fight or flight. You just can't. I can't. Nobody can. And if your nervous system is screaming that you are unsafe, even if intellectually you know that you are safe, your brain literally cannot access the tools, the insights, the frameworks, the affirmations. None of it can really reach you because the body is somewhere else. And I think this is actually one of the most undertold truths that in our Adoptee Healing journeys. We read the books, we do the therapy, we listen to all the podcasts, we understand the wound from a hundred different angles, right? And then we wonder why is the wound still there? Why are we still reacting the same way when we get triggered? Why is the relationship still falling apart the same way, time after time, relationship after relationship? Why is the panic still hitting the same way? And this is because, and just hear me out, the wound was made in a body that really couldn't speak. So no amount of speaking will ever fully reach it. We have to go back the way we came in through the body, and that is what we're doing today. Last week we talked all about coping mechanisms and took you through the four-step loop that hijacks your brains, the five-step framework I used to interrupt it, and um afterwards I got so many messages, and I just want to acknowledge something and call something out too. Because I know that a lot of you are probably thinking this as well, and you're probably thinking, Okay, I get the loop, I see the perception piece. I'm trying to do the five steps, but when the wave actually hits, it's like everything that I know and and I've learned, it just leaves my body. I can't even really remember any of it. I just freeze, or I'm reaching, and then I just, you know, hate myself for not being able to use the tool. And I just want to say this, okay. If this is you, I totally get it, I totally hear you. Because the loop is real, and there is this layer underneath it that we just have to address, or none of this cognitive work is really going to stick. And that layer is your body, the nervous system. Okay, this is the episode I should have done before last week's episode, just to be honest. But oh well, here we are. Because the cognitive tools I gave you last week they work so beautifully, but they work when your nervous system is regulated. Um, and if your nervous system is dysregulated, there's no cognitive tool that's really gonna land at all, to be honest. So the body has to come back online first. Alright, today is the foundation. Today we're doing the work that makes every other tool I've taught you actually usable. And today we're coming home to the body. And I want to say one more thing before we dive in because I know some of you already are like thinking this. I've tried to feel my body. I try to get into my body, like I don't even really know what that means because I just can't. Maybe I feel numb, I'm just not in there, and I don't even know what there is. Like, how do I get in there? That's okay. This is perfectly fine, and in fact, this is a great place to start. Okay, we're going to really go slow here. There's nothing you need to bring to this episode except just maybe a willingness to be curious. That's it. Curiosity. We're gonna do the rest together, I promise you. Okay, so let's start with the definition here. Because most of us walking around in the world have like this really limiting idea of what trauma even is. And I know we've talked about trauma in the past, and I've have I have already given you definitions, but I really want you to hear this one because most people, when they hear the word trauma, they think it's like capital T trauma, war, violent assault, PTSD. And so a lot of us, I mean, a lot of us in the adoptee community, especially, we kind of think, oh, that's not me. We let ourselves off the hook and we're like, well, my adoption was at birth. I don't remember anything. I had a really great family, I was really loved and cared for, and I just don't have trauma. Okay, alright. But then we also wonder, why is our body panicking? Maybe that time when our partner took too long to text back, or why did our throat close up when we had to set a boundary with our adoptive mom? Or maybe why did we dissociate the moment a relationship got too close and too real? Why is it that we've never quite been able to feel safe in our own skin, no matter how good our life looks, maybe on paper or from the outside? So I want to give you the definition that really changed everything for me. And this comes from Peter Levine. He is, in my opinion, one of the most important voices in the trauma healing space who is alive today. And so he developed something called somatic experiencing, and he wrote a book called Waking the Tiger, and this honestly should be like required reading for every single adoptee. He says, if you go to the Greek root of the word trauma, it doesn't mean what we think it means, it actually means wound or injury. That's it. So we have all experienced trauma, all of us, okay, like adoptees and non-adoptees, because we all have experienced wounds. Some of us were wounded in this big loud way, and is pretty obvious. Some of us were wounded and were quiet, ongoing, no one really noticed it ways, and some of us were wounded before we had the words to know that we were being wounded. But the wound is a wound, and this lives in the body. Listen to this. Peter Levine says trauma is not the event, trauma is what happens inside of you when an event that you didn't have the tools to process occurs. Say that with me. Trauma is not what happened to you, trauma is what got locked in because you didn't have the tools to move it through. And now here's a part that absolutely like changed my whole way of thinking about trauma and how we process trauma. Um, so Peter Levine talks about the cheetah and the impala. And just stay with me here. You're gonna really this is gonna blow your mind. Okay, so imagine in the wild there's this cheetah that's chasing an impala. It's like this life or death encounter. And the impala, her nervous, her entire nervous system mobilizes this massive amount of energy. Fight, flight the works, maximum energy. And the cheetah, let's just say the cheetah catches her, brings her down, and in that final moment, when there's no escaping, that impala just goes into freeze mode, she collapses, her body shuts down, and she plays dead. And this might be the last survival strategy that her nervous system has when fight and flight have really failed her. Now, here's what is the wild part. If the Impala survives, like let's say the cheetah got distracted, or there's another predator that interrupts the chase in the fight, um, she manages to just get back up. And what does she do? She shakes, she trembles, her whole body just convulses for a few minutes, and then she just walks off and she lives the rest of her life completely fine. No PTSD, no flashbacks, no anxiety disorder, nothing. Because she found a way to discharge the energy. Her body completed the cycle, the fight, flight, freeze response, it ran through her and came out on the other side, and she completed that cycle. This is the nervous system reset, and boom, it was done. Now let's take a look at what happens to humans because humans almost never get to complete this cycle because we have cortexes, because we have shame, because we have this culture that tells us not to fall apart. It's not okay to do that. Because maybe we have parents who said, Oh, you're fine, stop crying, stop crying, we're all give you something to cry about. Maybe if you grew up in the in the 80s, you might have heard that, right? Because we have um also because we have therapists who wanted us to talk about it, talk about our trauma instead of shake it out, and just keep talking and talking and talking about it, right? Because we have these whole lives where we just had to keep functioning the morning after that thing that broke us happened. So the energy just gets locked in, the shaking never finishes, and the body keeps repeating the response, it keeps bracing, it keeps clenching, it keeps holding the breath. Maybe this happens to you. It keeps going into freeze mode forever until something or someone helps it complete the cycle. Now, for us adoptees, and just hear me out. This locked-in response, it started in infancy. Before we had words, before we had memory, before we had any way of knowing, we were being wounded. So that original loss, that loss of our birth mother, the primal wound, the loss of her smell, her heartbeat, her voice, this was the only safe environment that our nervous system had ever really known. And that loss happened to a body that didn't have one single tool to be able to process it. And so the response got locked in. The bracing, the hypervigilance, the shutdown, the disassociation. And then we lived the rest of our lives running a nervous system that was just still preparing for an event that had already happened. Now, I just want to say this with a lot of love and a lot of kindness and compassion. This is not a character flaw. There's nothing wrong with you, and it doesn't show that you're weak. This is just simply biology. That is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is just to keep you alive and under impossible circumstances. And the work, the actual healing work, is helping that locked-in energy finally finish his cycle. It's help we're helping the body finally do what it didn't get to do the first time. Helping the shaking finish, helping that cycle close the loop. And that, my darlings, that is the work. That's the somatic work that we're here to do. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Alright, so let's get really clear about how this is showing up in our everyday life. Because I want you to to just be able to identify your own nervous system state by the end of this episode and learn what this feels like. Okay, your nervous system has two main modes. One mode is your sympathetic. This is your survival mode. This is the gas pedal. When your sympathetic nervous system is activated, your breathing goes shallow, your heart races, your muscles tense, and blood moves away from your digestive organs and goes towards your arms and your legs because your body thinks that you need to run or fight. Now, your prefrontal cortex, the thinking, the reasoning, the perspective taking part of your brain goes offline, and you just can't think clearly. You can only react. And your second mode is your parasympathetic. This is your healing mode. This is the breaks. This is your rest and digest. This is your repair and regulate mode. This is where your body actually is able to heal itself, where your immune system functions properly, and where you can just think, where you can feel, and where you can connect. The goal is actually not to never be triggered because triggering is a part of being a human nervous system. The goal is to learn how to downregulate, to know how to come back to your parasympathetic when the sympathetic has fired up. That's it. That's the whole game. Up and down, up and down, the capacity to come back and not stay stuck in either one of these modes. Okay, now within those two moods, there are five survival responses that your body might run to. And I want to name all five because I want you to be able to find yourself in one of them or all of them. You probably have a default mood, and to be honest, most of us do. Okay, number one is your fight mood. It's your sympathetic, it's when the body wants to push back, to argue, to rage. For some adoptees, this might look like you fight with your partner over nothing. You're snapping at your kids, you explode at work over the small thing just because the big thing has been buried for so long. Alright, number two is your flight. This is also your sympathetic mood. And this is when the body just wants to escape, to leave, to get out. For adoptees, this often looks like you bolting, you ghosting, you moving cities or countries. Um, maybe you quitting your job often. Um, you often will overschedule yourself so that you just never have to sit still. And maybe you just leave the conversation, like you just check out. Um, maybe you leave the relationship and you check out. Whatever it is, you leave your body. Okay. The third mode is freeze mode. This is where sympathetic and parasympathetic actually fire at the same time. You're terrified and shut down. Your body is screaming inside, but you can't move on the outside. And for adoptees, it sometimes looks like you're going completely still while in conflict, like you can't speak, you can't cry, you can't move. Um, you feel like you're watching yourself maybe from outside your own body, like you're looking down on your body and you're dissociated. Okay, this is where the dissociation lives. Number four is your fawn. This is the sympathetic activation channel through people pleasing, and the body decides that the safest thing is to disappear into what the other person wants. For adoptees, this one might land really hard. I know with me it does. Um, saying yes when you really mean no, becoming whoever the room needs you to be. Um, maybe the reading is the reading the energy of every person who walks in. Apologizing for existing. This is the survival strategy of so many of us who learned very young that being good was the price of being kept. And just a quick note on this one there is a word in the Korean language that I've learned recently called nunchi, and I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it um correctly, but um, from what I understand, nunchi is what we refer to is the ability to read the room, and I I think that so many of us, especially Korean adoptees, we carry this with us and we have developed this skill, or maybe we've thought of it like a superpower. I know I did, so it's just like the a being able to read the room and know, like as soon as someone walks in or as soon as someone gives you that look, like you're able to just scan their face or their body language and know exactly what you need to do to protect yourself or to keep the connection or not be rejected. And um, this was definitely a survival strategy. Alright, number five in the last one is the collapse. This is the deep parasympathetic, what some people call the dorsal vagal shutdown. And this is the impella on the ground, playing dead. Energetically, she's just gone. Her body is heavy, and there's just no motivation, like zero motivation. Some days it feels like you might just not be able to get up out of bed at all, and you don't even know why. Um, this is also where adoptee depression lives, not always, but often. I know I have spent so much of my time, especially back in um my teenage years and college, just living in this collapse mode. Like I just had no motivation, I was just depressed all the time, no energy, and I find myself coming back to this mode, um, especially when I am feeling and sensing like more bigger emotions. Like, for example, my birthday is coming up next month. Um, and I've been feeling like this heaviness, this energetic, um, just there's no energy in my body, and um, like I just have like no motivation or energy to go work out. Um, I really have to drag myself out of bed and to function. And um, I don't know, maybe you can relate to this, but I definitely feel this in my body, and now that I know looking back, I can identify times and like specific examples of when my own nervous system has gone into fight, gone into flight mode, freeze, font, and collapse mode, like I mentioned. So maybe I didn't know it at the time, but I remember what it felt like, and today I'm much more aware of my body, and I can realize it in real time when it's happening. Now, I don't think it's bad when it does, it's just simple information about my body and how it's reacting. So when I'm able to connect and get curious and have the tools to self-regulate, I find myself stuck in these dysregulated states less often and for less amount of time. So here's what I want you to hold on to. All right, the behavior is not your personality. This the behavior is the nervous system state, which means this, and this is so important. When we change the nervous system state, the behavior changes on its own. We don't feel like we have to white knuckle ourselves into being braver or being kinder or more patient or more present. We just have to regulate, and the bravery, the kindness, the patience, the presence, these really just start to show up on their own because they were never really absent. They were just blocked under all of that locked-in survival energy. And I just want you to take this one thing from this episode: the whole framework, is that you don't have to become a different person. You just have to come back to the one that you've always been underneath the survival. Come back to the person who you were before the world started to tell you who you should be. Okay, here is where we get into the most important Peter Levine contribution to this whole field of somatics. And it's these are two words that I want you to remember, maybe write them down somewhere, and they are titration and pendulation. These two words are like the entire architecture of safe somatic healing. Okay, and let's look at these one at a time. The first one, titration. This is a word from chemistry, and it just means adding a substance one small drop at a time, very slowly, very carefully, without overwhelming or shocking the system. And Peter Levine took that word and applied it to trauma healing. He says, when we work with trauma in the body, we have to do it one tiny drop at a time. So we don't go all in at once. We don't have to face the trauma either. We do not process it in a single cathartic session. So we just sip it, we titrate. I love this concept. Because here is what's true about a traumatized nervous system. If you go into a stored trauma too fast with too much intensity, too much volume, too much at once, the nervous system can't really tell the difference between the memory and the original event. It just re-experiences it and it re-traumatizes sometimes. And sometimes you end up worse than when you started. I know that when I went into therapy, um, this is what happened to me, and I went to therapy and I was doing brain spotting, and this is a type of a type of therapy where it helps to unlock certain parts of your brain and memory, and in order to access those feelings and emotions and sensations that are tied to the stored memories. Okay, and that's what happened to me was when I started to access them, they all came out at once, and then um it was great. Like I had my therapist there to talk me through it, but I didn't have any somatic tools to help me regulate my nervous system or to help to move those physical sensations and emotions through my body. And um, maybe you can relate. Um, have you ever had that experience? Like maybe you finally just let yourself cry about something, and then you couldn't stop crying, like for three days or for an entire week, and then you might have felt like completely wrecked, or you finally talked about that hard thing in therapy, um, like I did, and then you just couldn't function for like a whole week, and you couldn't get out of bed, and you know, like I did, um, where I was literally like I could not function, I could not adult. I like I couldn't even go grocery shopping, I couldn't do my laundry, I was just like in bed wrecked and um complete dorsal vagal shutdown. And I just want to say that that's not healing, okay? That's flooding your system, that's the nervous system being asked to process more than it can hold. And I think that also one note on this is what this is just my own perception. Um, and I think that our bodies are so intelligent that it knows when it's safe to access some of these really big emotions and bring it up to the surface because my whole time I was raising my daughter, I was in survival mode, like I had to function because I had a human being who was actually dependent on me. Like I I couldn't just shut down. So I survived. And the minute she goes off to college, and I um, you know, and I that that wrecked me, that whole like abandonment uh wound opened up and just flooded my system. Everything came out. Oh my gosh, I came out of the fog, I was just like um flooded with all of my core wounds that you know just hit me so hard. And I think that that was my body's way of saying, Okay, now is the time to deal with this. Okay, and it wasn't like when she was um a baby because I couldn't have dealt with it then. Okay, back to titration. Titration is the medicine, and we touch the wound just for one drop, and then we come back to safety. We touch the wound again for one more drop and we come back to safety again, and the body learns slowly that it can handle that thing that it was never able to handle before. The second word is pendulation. I love that word, pendulation, and this concept is so beautiful. Pendulation just means the natural movement between contraction and expansion. So your contracted state and then the expanded state. Tension and release, distress and safety. Um, the nervous system, when it's healthy, is just doing this all day long, up and down, up and down, activation, regulation, activation, regulation. This oscillation between the both is healthy, okay? That's a healthy nervous system. I want to also say that this is a big part of why I um have really gotten into somatic breath work because it has really helped me to personally get out of the contracted state and move between the contracted state and the expanded state. And I'll explain a little bit more. I'm actually here's a sneak preview. I'm gonna take you through a somatic breath work practice in a little bit, and you'll understand how this is so helpful for your nervous system. Um, but because for like a traumatized nervous system, the contraction gets stuck. Peter Levine has the most beautiful line about this pendulation. He says, every contraction has an expansion. Every contraction has an expansion. Say that to yourself. And the next time that you feel locked up, the next time you feel braced, and the next time the panic starts to rise, every contraction has an expansion. The wave will go back out, it always does. You just have to stay in your body long enough to let it. Okay. So um, let me just say one more thing about titration before we move on. In our community, the adoptee community, I see this mistake all the time. Like, maybe it's not a mistake, but it's just like a phenomenon. Someone watches, um, I mean, someone discovers the relinquishment wound for the first time, they're coming out of the fog, maybe they read the primal wound or another book about adoptee, um, about adoption, and or maybe they watch a documentary or they listen to a podcast episode like this one, and they decide just to go all the way in, okay? And then what happens is they unleash like 20, 30, or 40 years of stored grief all in a weekend, or all in one day, and then they crash, they just can't function, they feel worse than they ever have before, and sometimes they just like have to retreat and shut it down and kind of take a step back. Now, I want to say that that's not the wound being too big to heal, and this is a sign that there's a beautiful sensitive nervous system being given way more than it really can metabolize at that time. And know that carrying it alone without the titration, without pendulation, without support, without these tools, um, is really really hard and it might be too much for us. So if you this is a message to anyone listening, if you're early in um in your journey, if you're coming out of the fog, if you're in this stage of discovery, I just want to offer you this. I want you to go slow, maybe find a therapist, find a coach, find a circle or um community of other adoptees who can really hold you while you sip the wound drop by drop, and you don't have to chug this all at once, okay? You have the rest of your life to heal. Titration is not avoidance, and titration is wisdom, is just knowing your body and tapping into your body's wisdom. Alright, so I want to teach you one of the most underused, most underrated somatic practices that I know, and it's so easy. You're gonna think I'm making it up. It might seem a little silly, but I swear to god it works. And this is one of Peter Levine's gifts to the world. We're going to do this practice called the VO. And let me just tell you why it works. Okay, there is a nerve in your body called the vagus nerve. You've probably heard of it. This is the largest nerve in your body, and it runs from your brain stem down through the throat, the lungs, the heart, the diaphragm, and into the gut. And it kind of like sends this blanket over all of your organs, okay. Actually, Darwin wrote about it in his book on emotions and called it the pneumogastric nerve. So here's the part that medical people often miss. Um, 80% of the vagus nerve is sensory, and what that means that it means that it's mostly carrying signals up from the body to the brain, not down from the brain downward, which is what a lot of us think. And this is why we need to take a bottom-up approach to healing, not a top-down approach. Okay, and this is huge. Like when I learned it, this is huge because what it means is that your body is constantly telling your brain whether you are safe or not. It's not the other way around. So your brain is reading your gut, your heart, your lungs, your diaphragm, and using that data to decide, am I in danger or am I safe? So if your gut is twisted, if your heart is racing, if your breath is shallow and your diaphragm is locked up, your brain is going to say, We're not safe. We're in danger. Even if intellectually you know nothing is wrong, even if you're sitting on your couch with your dog, just drinking a cup of tea and reading a book, like you feel really chilled out, your brain is going to keep firing the survival response because your body is signaling threat. Okay, this is why all the affirmations in the world don't always work. You can tell yourself I am safe until you're blue in the face, but if your gut is twisted up or dysregulated and your breath is shallow, your nervous system isn't going to believe you one minute. Okay, it's going to be like you are a liar. Because the body has the louder vote. So, what do we do? We send a new signal from the body to the brain. We give the vagus nerve something to feel that just contradicts the threat signal. And one of the most one of the best ways to do that, and I learned this directly from Peter Levine's work, is the vo sound. Here we go. We're going to do it together, and I want you to try it with me. So, what you're gonna do is take an easy full breath into your nose. Don't force it, just let the breath drop down into your belly. And then on the exhale, you make the sound low and from the belly, slow and just let it vibrate inside your belly all the way until the end of the breath. Okay, let's do one together. Breath into your belly, and exhale. And what this sound does is it vibrates the receptors in your gut, it vibrates the vagus nerve directly, and it's sending the signal up to your brain that says, wait a minute, something here is okay. We are safe to let it go. And so let's do this together another couple of times. All right. Breathe in and out. Taking it all the way to the bottom of the breath and letting the vibration just land in your belly. And one more time. And just notice, don't analyze. What do you feel? Do you feel warmth? Is there like a tingling, maybe a settling in your body? Maybe you had just a natural spontaneous sigh, or maybe you felt a wave of emotion kind of run over you. Now, all of those are completely normal, and all of those are just your nervous system going, oh, I'm safe enough to drop a little bit into my body, and that's the vagus nerve doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Um, and so some of you right now, you might feel this wave of grief come up, you might feel something in your body. That's because once your body has softened a little bit, that grief that's been waiting underneath that has space to finally surface. And if that's what's happening right now, please just let it okay. Maybe let yourself cry, just let your body relax and soften because your body has been waiting for a very long time to feel safe to do this. Um, and I love to practice this like several times throughout the day, especially if I'm feeling like I'm in my fight flight or my freeze mode, or um, I feel myself shallow breathing. I just know, okay, let me just drop into my body, let me do some vagus nerve activation healing with the Vaux. Okay, you can do it any time of the day. Um, it's great to do in the morning as a practice, in the evening, before you go to bed, anytime. And so, um, okay, let me just go back to one more concept that I learned from Peter Levine before we move on. Um, and this one really has changed my whole mindset around healing and what my healing journey has looked like, um, especially like the healing on a timeline, okay. Now he talks about building islands of safety, and he says when you've been traumatized, it can feel like you're swimming in this raging seat. The whole ocean is the trauma, and there's no land anywhere, there's nowhere to stand. So we don't really ask the nervous system to swim to shore because there is no shore, there's nothing in sight. Okay, so instead, what we want to do, think of building one small island at a time, one little moment of safety, one voe practice, one self-hold, one walk in the sunlight, um, or walk in the woods, one conversation that just landed gently where you felt really heard and seen. Um, one nervous system reset, and each one of these tiny practices is a tiny island in the middle of all of that ocean. And then over time we build more. Another island, another one, and another one, and another one. And eventually those islands just start to connect and they form bridges. The bridges form this land mass, and one day you're gonna realize that you are not swimming anymore. Okay, you're not just surviving, you are standing on solid ground that you have built one tiny island at a time, and the feeling of this is so so empowering. Um, let me just say, if you've also felt this, I just I want to just recognize that and acknowledge it in you. This is the secret to healing, and we don't heal, we don't get to heal in one big breakthrough, although we want to, right? Sometimes we want to just get it over with, but in reality, we heal in several in actual thousand small islands, okay. And just don't underestimate what looks small, okay. You might feel like you're really far behind in your healing journey. I know I have felt that way before, um, being like almost 52 years old, and I see some adoptees in the community are like in their early 20s and they're so um aware and they're so conscious and they're just so woke and you know, like I I can't even imagine what it would be like to be that young and already starting on this healing journey, and then I feel like I'm way behind, but don't let that not saying don't feel that way, but don't underestimate what looks small, okay, and where you are in your journey because the body remembers all of it and you will get there, I promise you. Okay, so I told you that we are healing in a thousand small islands, and that is true. And sometimes the body decides it's ready to do something bigger to activate and um tap into some of this healing work. So I'm gonna tell you the short version of my own journey of my own healing journey. I had the experience of a somatic breath work session um several years, maybe five years ago, and I was doing this um this work on myself, it was a lot of personal development work, and I was invited to this conference and um I experienced somatic breath work, and I was like, I've never done this before, but what I experienced in my very first session, I felt like um I was actually just cracked open like a lobster shell, and like 40 years of stuck trauma, fear, anger, it all moved through me in like one session. So, and I want to say this might not be true for everyone, but what I experienced, all of the chronic neck and back pain that I had been carrying for years and years and years, like since my teenage years, it was gone. The chronic rashes that I had experienced, um, you know, as a result of all of my you know chronic stress, it was gone. The gut issues that I experienced for decades, it calmed down, and I just finally felt so good in my in my body for the first time in my adult life. I just was able to feel like I was in my body and connect with my body. So I want to give you a taste of what that work looks like right now. This is a condensed version, this is a daily practice that you can do on your own. Um, you know, you can do it every day. It's safe to do that every day. It takes about eight to ten minutes. And this is the somatic breath work daily practice. Okay, before we begin, if you're driving, you're walking, doing dishes, holding a baby, just listen. Okay, come back to this episode, bookmark this spot, and come back to it when you can lie down or sit somewhere supported in private. Okay, and it helps if you have some headphones on and maybe a blanket if you get cold. And on one safety note, um, just want to put this out there. If you're pregnant, if you have a heart condition, if you have a history of seizures, just maybe skip the active mouth breathing portion, the first half of the breathing, um, and just stay with the gentle nose breathing the whole way through. Your body will still receive the benefit of this of this breath work, but is not going to be as um activating for you. Okay, so this practice is called somatic breath work, and just to give you a little bit of information about it, soma means your body. This is an inward journey to move what has become stagnant in your body, in the cells and tissues of your body. And we are not talking about what's stuck, we are moving it through your body using your breath. So I want you to ask yourself quietly, what am I carrying today that isn't mine to carry? And what would I like to lay down today? And then also ask yourself, what am I here to receive? Don't just answer with your mind, let these questions land and maybe write them down if you journal. Yeah. Let's start with the clearing breath. These are deep breaths in and out through the mouth, all the way down into your belly. We're using your diaphragm. This is called diaphragmatic breathing. Put one hand on your belly, and I want you to feel it expand just like a balloon. And as you pull the breath down into your belly, let it expand all around into your lower back and sides as well. All right, let's try three breaths together, in and out. Beautiful. And we're going to practice that. Um, you're just going, you don't have to think about it. You're just going to follow my lead. And then we'll even do a um a breath hold. And again, I'll cue you through everything. You don't have to fall, you don't have to think. After the diaphragmatic clearing breathing, we're going to go into a much more gentle type of breathing. This is the integration breath, and it's gentle in through your nose, out through your mouth. Elongating the exhale. Okay, let's try that together. In through the nose, and out through the mouth. Alright, before we begin, I want you to remember that one word that you are here to receive, and that is going to be your intention today. Let's begin. I invite you to close your eyes. Feel where your body meets the surface beneath you. Maybe it's the chair underneath you, the floor, the bed. Bring your awareness to your spine. Imagine a white ball of light that's running up and down your spine. Send the energy down through your body, down through your sit bones, down your legs and your feet, out into the earth. Feeling so rooted, feeling so grounded, connected with Mother Earth. Take a nice deep breath in. And as you exhale, let your shoulders drop down. Now feel that white ball of light running up through your body, up through your spine, one vertebrae at a time, up, up, and out through the crown of your head, into the sky, into the universe. And while you're feeling so connected to something just greater than yourself, another deep breath in and out with a sigh. Now I want you to bring that energy, pull it down from the universe and up from the earth, and have the energy just meet inside your heart space. Draw it into your center point. You are the center point between earth and the sky. Taking a deep breath in, pull that energy back into your heart, and just feel it, feel that warm ball of light as it sits there, right in your heart space. Maybe put a hand over your heart and just breathe. This place right here. This is your anchor point. This is your birthright. This is home. And just know that no one can take this away from you. Okay, we're going to begin our breathing with our clearing breaths, deep full breaths in. Here we go. In and out through the mouth. Let's go. Pull the breath all the way down into the belly. Finding your rhythm and just stick with it. That's it. Keep going. And as you breathe, just think about where in your body are you holding on so tightly. Breathe into that place. Anything that comes up is coming up just to move through you. So don't hold on to it, don't analyze it, simply breathe. Where is your energy stuck? Is it in your throat? Your heart, your solar plexus, maybe it's your gut. Just feel into it, just breathe into that place. What are you carrying that isn't yours to carry? And whose grief are you holding on to? Let's just clear it all out today. That's it everyone. Last 30 seconds of clearing, given everything, we're almost there. Let's push the breath. Empty everything you came here to empty today. That's it. And now, on your next big breath in, we're just going to take the breath and hold it at the top. Just for a few seconds, notice what you've been carrying. Just for a few seconds. Just notice where you've been carrying stress in your body. When you're ready to release the hold, go ahead and release it. Beautiful. Now we switch. We're going to switch to our gentle breathing in through the nose, into our belly, out through the mouth, slowing it way down. How relaxed can you become? Just elongate each exhale. There's no rush. The work of clearing is done. How much can you relax? How much can you feel good? Now we are just receiving. This is the part where we get to reclaim our power. This is the repatterning. We're breathing in who we are becoming. Remembering who you are. I want you to breathe it in. What is your dream? Just feel it. Feel it as if it's already happening in every single cell of your body right now. How do you want to feel today? Breathe it in. And how do you want others to feel from you? What is your soul's mission? See it clearly, and I just want you to breathe your soul back into your body. What do you want to create? Breathe it in. How good can you let yourself feel? We're breathing in all of the scattered parts of yourself. Just breathing them all back together.

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Beautiful.

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One more deep breath into your nose. And out. Alright, and last breath in. At the bottom of your exhale, just hold the breath out. Just become empty. And in this hold, I want you to connect to your heart. Ask your heart, what message do you have for me today? And just know that love that lives in there, there's no judgment, there's no criticism. It's holding you exactly as you are, always, with deep compassion and kindness and deep care. And when you're ready to take that first breath, I want you to breathe in the love for the little child who lives inside of you. Just see them clearly and remember them. Breathe that love into every single part of you that has been waiting just to receive it. Every part that needs to be held feels seen and honored. No matter what it looks like or how it feels. Beautiful. And let's take one last deep breath in together and let it out. Now slowly start to bring your awareness back into the room. Wiggle out your fingers, wiggle your toes, maybe roll onto your side if that feels good to you. Take as much time as you need and just hold yourself. Sometimes you're the only one who can hold yourself in this moment. So let yourself be held. And when you're ready to come back, come back to a seating position, and I want you to notice what sensations are present in your body right now. And maybe where are they in your body? Where are you feeling them? Um ask yourself what emotion is connected to those sensations. And what is a new, more empowering story that your body is telling you in this moment? Beautiful. Alright, so I want to just say thank you so much. You opened yourself up so much today, and I just want to remind you to be careful of what you put back in, you know, um, when it comes to social media or food or drink or people. Give yourself space and don't be afraid to flex your no if you need to today, for the rest of the week, for the rest of your life, whatever that looks like. Just be gentle with yourself. And um, yeah, if anything came up for you that you want to hold on to, I encourage you to write it down, journal around it, write into the Dear Claire podcast and let me know. Please reach out, I'd love to connect with you. All right. This brings us to our Dear Clara listener question. And oh wow, this one is gonna land. Let me just read it to you first, and then I want to use everything that we've talked about to walk you through how to hold this question because the somatic work that we just did is going to teach us exactly what this listener might be needing. Young Suk writes, I have a very close friend that leaves verbal paper cuts every once in a while. I'm navigating how to address this in a loving yet firm manner. And when I ask her what she's feeling in her body when she when this happens, she says, I feel shitty all over, but not right away. My heart hurts, my stomach knots up, my shoulders just tense up. Yes. Okay, good. And when I asked her what's the story that her mind is telling her about herself, she wrote, The story is I am not worthy of being treated well and with love. Why do I go back to it? She makes me laugh, and that is a drug from me, laughter. And what is she actually needing in this moment? She writes, I am unsure if it's worth bringing up and salvaging the friendship at this point. Um, we've been friends for decades, though. Okay, Young Suk, thank you. Thank you for your awareness. That is beautiful. Because um, to be honest, every single word of this question is like pure gold. And I want to walk you through a few things the body, the laughter, the story, the boundary, and the practice. Okay, Jung Suck. You've done something here that is so beautiful, and a lot of us can't even do that. So, what you've done, you have named three specific body locations where the paper cut lands, right? Your heart, your stomach, your shoulders. And that's not a small thing. This is a body that has been listened to. And I want to acknowledge that and celebrate that first. And I want to lift up something else that you said is the delay. I feel shitty all over, but not right away. And this is so important to recognize. The delay is the body processing in slow motion because in the moment with her, you've learned to override that signal. Maybe you stay in the room, you stay laughing. Um, the shoulders don't tense up right there in her presence. They tense up later, alone, in the car, maybe in your bed or in the shower, thinking about it. Okay, because that's the only place it's been safe to actually feel it. And the body is telling you something. The body knows it's just like filing away the bill and waits to hand it to you in private. That delay is just information, it's telling you exactly where the override is happening and exactly where the somatic boundary needs to come back online. Young suck, you made one of the most brilliant observations and I've heard a listener make on this podcast. So you said what you said was she makes me laugh, and that is like a drug for me, her laughter. And yes, yes, yes, that's exactly what's happening. And if you listened to last week's episode on coping mechanisms and addiction, you already know what we're looking at because the laughter is your dopamine, laughter is your hit, it's that thing that for a moment makes the paper cuts worth it. Because that high of being made to laugh by someone who knows you that well covers up the sting of the cut. Here's the part I really want you to hear. That's not moral failure, okay? That's your relinquishment wound. Just choosing connection over self-protection. Because for an adoptee, especially one who lost her first family, the cost of losing a decade-long friend sometimes this can just feel bigger than actually the cost of being paper cut or that little girl in you would rather absorb the cuts rather than lose another person or lose that connection. Okay, so the laughter has become the regulating substance that makes it all tolerable. I just want to say also, you're not weak for going back. You're someone whose inner child has learned that before language, that imperfect connection is really safer than no connection at all. Um, and the laughter is what your nervous system uses to drown out that part that knows better. So you said in your story that your mind tells you, I am not worthy of being treated well and with love. Young suk, that is not your truth. That is just your wound talking. And that's the original belief that got laid down in your body who was relinquished before she could ever ask why. That's where that core wound comes from. And every time you stay in a friendship where someone cuts you and you stay to absorb it, your subconscious gets a little bit more and more evidence that that story is true, even though that story was never true in the first place. Now, what I want you to do is let's run the five-step tool from last week. Number one, we're gonna question it. Can you know with a hundred percent certainty that you are not worthy of being treated well and you are not worthy of being treated with love? No, you can't know that for sure. And let's look at the counter evidence, okay? We're gonna poke holes in that, we're gonna equilibrate that story. So here's three things. Number one, you wrote into a podcast for adoptee healing. Two, you went looking for tools, and three, you have a body that's been telling you the truth for years and years, and you have been listening. Okay, those are just three, and I know that there's probably ten or twenty or a hundred more, okay? Even though the wound is loud, the wound is not right. This is a lie, this is not your truth. Now, the actual question is it worth bringing up? Is it worth salvaging after all of the decades of friendship? I don't know the answer. But here's what I want to offer you. The decades of friendship are not the issue. The decades of you not protecting yourself while inside the friendship, while inside the relationship, that is the issue. So the question might not be, is the friendship worth saving? But the question might be, am I willing to keep abandoning myself to keep this friendship intact? And Yung Sook, only you can answer that for yourself. But please hear me on this, okay? This is important. The boundary conversation is not the verdict on the friendship, it is the test, okay? This is going to be the information that you're going to use so that you can answer your questions. It is the moment that you find out whether this is a friendship that can hold the real you, or a friendship that is never, or a friendship that has only ever been able to hold the version of you that they want. Okay, so maybe it would be helpful if I give you some scripts that you can borrow. And you know, I'm just offering this as an example. You might want to say, hey, um, I love you, and I want to share something that's been sitting in my body. Some of the things that you said over the years have stayed with me longer than I think you realize. And I'm not bringing it up to make you wrong. I'm just simply bringing it up because I love this friendship and I want to be all the way in it. And to do that, I need to be able to tell you when something lands hard. Okay? Are you willing to talk about it? That's it. That's the whole script. Now, if you pay attention to it, you're not attacking, you're not diagnosing her, you're saying just that my body is telling me this, and I want this friendship enough to risk this conversation. And then you watch to see what she does because how she meets you in that moment is the answer to your question. So if she softens, she asks questions and says, Oh my god, tell me, I want to know. Young suck, that friendship can possibly hold the real you. But on the other hand, if she defends, if she deflects, if she minimizes or gaslights you, maybe makes you the problem for even bringing it up in the first place, then you know that that's information that the friendship that's been held together by you absorbing, by you not having boundaries, by you receiving those paper cuts and just being okay with it. And you get to decide from a regulated body whether that's still the friendship that you want. And lastly, Young Suk, here's the part where everything we just talked about comes home. Don't have this conversation from a dysregulated nervous system, please. Just don't have it the day after a paper cut and when your heart is hurting and your stomach. Is in knots and your shoulders are up here by your ears. I want you to think about it having this conversation from a more regulated nervous system. Have it from your adult self. Now, between now and the conversation, just practice. Every time you remember one of the paper cuts, do this. Put your hand on your heart, one hand on your belly, and practice your voes. And then say to your body, I see you, I'm not leaving you there alone with this anymore. And we're bringing this up together. Okay. I want you to practice this every day until you feel ready to have that conversation. So when you walk into it, your body already knows your body is feeling regulated. Your body has practiced telling the truth. And then the conversation just becomes that moment. Your inside and your outside finally line up together and you feel alignment with your true self. I want to close with this. Okay, the laughter is real, the friendship is real. The decades of paper cuts are real. And nothing about that is fake. And you are allowed to have all of that, and you're allowed to have a body that doesn't have to tense up every time you spend time with her. Okay. You are worthy of being treated well, you're worthy of being treated with lots of love. And not because someone tells you this, just simply because you are. And your body has been trying to tell you this for years. And today I want you to finally receive that message and finally listen. Okay. So, Young Suk, thank you so much for your courage for writing into the Dear Claire podcast. I hope that you feel love and compassion and support while you navigate through this. As we close out, I have one last message for you. If this episode lands with you, I just want you to know that you do not have to do this work alone. I want to invite you to come join us in the Empowered Adoptee Circle on School. It's a free community for adoptees who are on a journey where we put all of this work together. Um, the cognitive work that we did in the last episode, the somatic work that we're doing today, the boundary work, the inner child healing work. And I put it into this one structured supported path to healing. And you're gonna have a whole community of other adoptees doing this work together. We're gonna have live coaching with me and a circle of other adoptees walking this path with you. So come on in, you know where to find me. I'm gonna post the link in the show notes. So I'm excited to invite you to come into this community with us and do the work together, and I'll see you inside. Thank you so much to Jung Suk for the honesty and your vulnerability of your question. Thank you so much for being brave and looking at the friendship that's been leaving the paper cuts. And I just want you to know I'm holding you as you walk into that conversation. Um, thank you to everyone who wrote in this week. Thank you so much for being brave. Thank you for letting yourselves come back into your body one drop at a time. And thank you again just for being here for doing the work together. Take care of yourselves this week and be gentle with the part of you who's just beginning to come home. See you all next week. Before we close out today's episode, I want to take a moment to acknowledge you. Thank you for showing up for yourself today and for having the courage to do this work. Remember, healing isn't just a concept, it's a practice of reclamation. And to make sure that you never miss a step on this journey, please hit subscribe to the Dear Claire Podcast. This ensures that you'll be the first to know the moment a new episode drops. It's also a sign of a commitment to yourself and for committing to doing the work on your journey. I would also be so grateful if you could just take 60 seconds to read and review the show. In the world of podcasting, your review acts like a lighthouse. It helps us reach more adoptees who are looking for this space to heal their attachments and find their way home to themselves and bring more joy and peace into their lives as well. Remember, this is a conversation, so if you have a question about your relationships, about your core wounds, about your manifestation journey, please submit it via the link in the show notes. By asking your question, you aren't just helping yourself. You are empowering every other listener who is likely struggling with the exact same thing. I'm so honored to be on this path with you. I cannot wait to do more of this healing work together. This is the Dear Claire Podcast, and I'll see you next time. Much love.