Michele Lawrence
You're listening to this as yoga therapy. I'm your host, Michele Lawrence. And I've had the opportunity to interview many of those who are making a difference at the intersections of yoga and health, and I'm here to share with you their stories and conversations. Thanks for listening. In today's episode, I interviewed Donna Brooks. Donna is a somatic movement therapist and educator. She's a yoga therapist, and embodied meditator who has 35 years experience teaching, counseling, and coaching in movement and the healing arts. Donna has a long history of developing programs in the health and wellness fields including designing and teaching embodiment programs for cancer patients and survivors at cancer connection and Northampton Massachusetts, creating a yoga for menopause program for Kaiser Permanente insurance, presenting for Dartmouth Hitchcock on fascia and movement for Parkinson's, teaching yoga, meditation and relaxation for chronic pain throughout the Valley Medical Group and assisting I anger teacher Karen Stephen in her programs for people with HIV AIDS. In her own practice, she also teaches popular walking workshops in Northampton, Massachusetts, pelvic floor therapy clinics, she hosts weekly online embodiment group classes and creates somatic yoga programs for Yoga University online. And even with a lifetime of learning and experience, her biggest lesson was a sudden death of her 36 year old son. She says that when her son died, she actually felt she was at a fork in the road, she could either collapse into unending suffering or find the richness of life in the shadows. She chose the ladder and says that her daily embodiment practice allows her to feel her emotions while also having her life. And we're going to talk about this on the podcast today and how Donna sees embodiment as an act of courage, and how it creates a foundation for enacting the change so many of us want to see. So it's so great to meet you today. Donna, and have you on the podcast.

Donna Brooks
Yes. Thank you for having me. Michelle, I'm excited to be here.

Michele Lawrence
Wonderful. Well, let's start by having you share with our listeners a bit more about yourself. Clearly what I've already shared, indicates that you have a wealth of experience. And I just felt like that list went on and on you do so much right. But how did you come to this time? What you do? And what kind of education and training did you receive?

Donna Brooks
Well, I homeschooled my son for part of his education. And I'm a little bit homeschooled myself. So what I actually like to tell people is I always had an affinity for yoga, because when I was a child, I used to go to my mother's bed and put my body in all these positions. And I didn't know why I was doing it. I just did it. It felt good to me. And later on I was as I got introduced to that I realized that Oh, I was looking for this. Hmm. So that is I'm going to say my starting point. I have an undergraduate degree in social sciences. So you know, I'm really good with history and anthropology and sociology, but I wasn't really I didn't have a career path out of that. And I was a dancer with injuries. And I fell upon a couple of yoga classes. First just a yoga class in someone's living room, an older woman near where I live to was a student of Swami boa. And there's a lot of funny stories about him because he was very unique yogi. And then I got very involved with iyengar yoga, and definitely rehabbed a lot of dance injuries. And I missed moving. So when I was very concentrated in my anger Studies in Washington, DC, I was also taking Feldenkrais classes at the Feldenkrais Institute in Washington DC. And so right from the get go, and I'm not trained in Feldenkrais, and you know, I don't know if now if there's an official training for Iyengar, but my own, you know, this was the early 80s. So sure, there were no yoga trainings. You know, you went and studied and just like a dancer, you would put up your shingle. So I was already combining somatic work with yoga, just combining what I was learning and Feldenkrais class with iyengar yoga. I went on to study quite a bit with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and senior students of hers school for body mind centering. I studied with Emily Conrad continuum. I'm a member of the International somatic movement educator, there and there therapists association which has credentialed me for somatics. I also am a credentialed yoga therapist, and that was another thing I was basically doing yoga therapy. Before there was that as a field, I got hired to work out of private high school and work with athletic injuries, the early 90s. So, that's kind of a little rundown of my background. Great. I've always tried to find really, you know, meaningful teachers. And it's Karen Stephen, by the way, she  is an Iyengar teacher who was pioneering working with people with AIDS. And I started a lot with John Schumacher, anyway, but go on.

Michele Lawrence
It sounds like a really cool sort of collage of disciplines and teachers and therapies and modalities that you've integrated into the work you do. So would you say that? That's a good description of it? 

Donna Brooks
absolutely, yes.

Michele Lawrence  
So tell me how you would describe what is embodiment therapy, or somatic movement therapy? And how is it similar or different to yoga therapy in your description and your opinion?

Donna Brooks
Yeah, I would say somatic movement therapy has a lot of facets, you know, people use it for emotional reasons, for artistic reasons, my particular interests, it has been in creating more easy movement. So movement, that's easy, but also has a lot of integrity. And in my approach to semantics and and a lot of other people's I use really gentle movement exploration. And in that exploration, we come to a place of not knowing. And I think you often come to this place of not knowing with yoga, too. But it's not typically a place where a teacher says be in the not knowing, it's like, oh, well, you do this, this and this. And in somatic movement therapy, when you come to a place where there's confusion or difficulty, or you can't just do it, you realize that it's a moment for repatterning, that all of our habits of movement are encoded in our nervous systems in our brain. So the kind of basic ideas that if you didn't have habits that were encoded, you'd have to think about how to start your car, which you do when you get a rental car, right? You have to think like, oh, yeah, where's the key, where's the ignition, but with your own car, you have a shorthand and lots of times that shorthand serves us really well. But then sometimes we have shorthand, because we copied someone's way of moving that we liked intellectually, but isn't our way or we've had injuries, or we're compensating for a place where we feel weak or unsure. Sometimes emotional trauma is part of this. Certainly, we have cultural conditioning. And all of those things limit the possibility of us being the best we can be in terms of our flexibility and in terms of our activity. So we don't hurt ourselves as we move about the world. And there are kind of templates for natural integrated movement that might be obscured. And so somatic movement, just therapy kind of loosens that up, so that your body can start to find a healthier, more supportive way. And then that informs your mind, or your nervous system, your brain to make a difference. Mm hmm.

Michele Lawrence
That's interesting. And so when you work with clients, I'm just kind of curious, do you bring in whatever would meet the client and serve them best in the moment? Or do you have certain clients that only want somatic movement therapy, other clients that just want yoga therapy? Do you weave it together on the fly? Or do you make a distinction,

Donna Brooks
I really weave it together because I think embodiment So also what happens when you release these patterns is there's just more space to be an experience in your body. So there's a kind of meditative quality to that. And there's also that this might sound a little far out, but I'm gonna say it anyway, like, please, our, all of our tissue is alive. You know, it doesn't have like sentience consciousness, like our brain, but the flow of your blood has a really different quality than let's say, the flow of your lymphatic system. And as you experience embodiment, you can become tuned to different types of tissue, different types of movement, you know, there's a whole pathway of developmental movement patterns. And you might find that some of them you're quite good at and others of them you seem to have skipped so as you allow access for these things. It's, um, as I'm going to quote Feldenkrais here for a moment, it's like you have more options. Mm hmm. And then as you have more options, options, you just have more, that's really a body minutes like you're living in and with more of yourself in totality, and letting that inform Asana is quite profound.

Michele Lawrence
Mm hmm. I really like what you said there. And, you know, I did a rundown of your specialties as I introduced you on the podcast, but I'm kind of curious from your perspective, and where you're at, like, which one of those things that you're doing right now is sort of what fills you the most right now? Or what excites you the most, I mean, you're doing the work with cancer patients and survivors and menopause and Parkinson's and the HIV AIDS work.

Donna Brooks
I haven't done that in a long time. It's very old, and I haven't actually worked, you know, what I think excites me. Yeah, is when people feel there's some need to be more in their body. So sometimes that's just pain. I've worked a lot with women who have pelvic pain, in conjunction lots of times with, you know, really experienced, nuanced pelvic floor pts. And certainly right now, a lot of what's happening is loss and trauma, and people feeling shell shocked. And that's a disconnection from our bodies. But I think it's less about what brings people to me. And it's more about the desire to enter into more of a full experience of life in the body, you know, rather than kind of getting pulled into it, if there's something that you can't ignore anymore, or the crisis has just gotten so bad, whatever it is that you can't ignore, that you are in a body because, you know, lots of us, our culture supports us in being distracted from our bodies, right? Like oohed Lee. So it's really the person's passion that I connect with.

Michele Lawrence
Mm hmm. Well said. So thanks for being willing to talk with us about the loss of your son. And as you've written on your website, without your history and experience in your work, this could have destroyed you. And instead you're experiencing and understanding the power of your work more deeply. So I'd love for you to share with us more if you could tell us about your son and when he died, and what this turning point was like for you. How has it transformed you and what you do in the world? Yeah, so there's a lot there. 

Donna Brooks
Yeah, well, my son died July 2020 20, from a non COVID related blood clot. And we found out that he had three genetic predispositions to blood clotting, none of which we were aware of. He had flown a lot, which increases your odds, he had a minor surgery, which increases your odds. And because of COVID, he wasn't doing his regular kind of level of exercise, which also increases your odds. So it was kind of a perfect storm that he died. And he's a always encourage people to look him up. Definitely, he was not a middle of the road political person. He was definitely a Democratic socialist. And His thing was very much political. But he also really hated canceled culture on both the left and the right. He really was person who believed economic justice is what we need at the end of the day. And he was really starting to take off in his career. His name is Michael Brooks, and his program was the Michael Brooks show, there's a book there was another book in, in the wings, there was just a lot on his plate, and a lot of possibility, but the tributes poured in from all over the world and from very famous people, presidents of other country's political figures. And maybe for our audience, probably the most famous person might be Marianne Williamson was a fan. He also was a Buddhist, or he wouldn't call himself a Buddhist, but he had a really deep Buddhist practice that went back many, many years. He was working on concept, a concept of roadmap. He was very interested in the left winning the left being people who give a shit about social justice, but especially economic social justice. And he was developing this plan in his mind or this framework in his mind where people need to to have internationalism as part of a lived experience. And he saw that playing out with labor unions that were international a lot that everyone in our modern culture is really a historical, and that that is a horrible thing that really the lack of understanding and being rooted in history needed to be generated, that people needed to have an analysis that was material he's a person was like, you know, he did sweat lodges, he went to Union analysis, he was like a new age guy. But he hated when people tried to apply the new age to political structure, that this is a different animal. And that's a huge mistake that you have to really analyze politics, materially who's holding the money, who's holding the power, who's holding, it's not about like, one of his pet peeves was actually Jordan Peterson, who he thought was great at giving Boys good advice to clean up their lives, but was very destructive entering the political domain. And our own inability to understand history as a culture contributed to the rise of someone like Jordan Peterson. So and then his last precept was that he, you know, right wing people, or I'll say it Christians generally, you know, they have like moral solidity to run with and that the left needed moral solidity. And he was looking at all of the kind of spiritual, psychological work that is so important to so many of us and really overcoming trauma, making personal growth and how to create that as a foundation of a progressive politics. So that's what my son was, yeah.

Michele Lawrence
Sounds like an incredible man. And I wish I had a chance to know him. Yeah,

Donna Brooks
yeah. A lot of people have discovered him after his death. My daughter's Still, she's actually doing a documentary on him. And she has there's something called the Michael Brooks legacy program where she's releasing old podcasts. And she's also did a, like, 14 part academic series are all these professors who wanted to talk about my coursework. Wow, wow. Yeah. So he was quite a force. So part of the tragedy is personal. And part of the tragedy is, in my own personal process, you know, I'm angry for the world, too.

Michele Lawrence
So tell us how it has transformed you and the work that you do?

Donna Brooks
Well, I think that how it has transformed me is that I have a deeper Well, of presence, honestly, it's like the bottom fell out on me in such a way that I had never experienced before in my life. I suppose this happens when with people when there's a big shock, but I just literally collapsed, it was like the ground went away. And I had a period where I would say I was in such, you know, freeze. And we're going to look at this as a trauma, which I think you could argue that sudden loss or even any other kind of loss is a type of trauma. You could argue that. So the kind of disassociation that I felt, though, those two things, the collapse and the disassociation, I'd never experienced the depth of that before. And I think it has made me more respectful, and able to be really in myself and really grounded with people who feel this more commonly. Now there are people who maybe always feel a bit disassociated, or who have had traumas that are really difficult to unwind or move away from,

Michele Lawrence
what does your process look like in terms of practice, work, processing?

Donna Brooks
Well, one of the things I think where I was kind of blessed in this is that I already had spent a lot of years feeling into being able to be inside myself, while all other kinds of things were happening, physical things, emotional things, mental things. And so that gave me the bandwidth to deal with the grief and how I'm framing it right now. And I don't know that it's fully fleshed out, but I am framing it this way is that this has been a trauma, and that loss is a trauma. And so if we look at the forges idea about the polyvagal that, you know, if you're always kind of scanning for danger through these different aspects of embodiment, and then if you see a danger that you think you can escape from, you're going to either be in fight or flight, and those have their own physiology. And I think that that that is also part of loss, you know, if someone loses their job, for instance, they really go through a period where they're like, oh my god, I have to get out of here. I can't even be in this town anymore. Or conversely, they might be like, you know, those sob is I'm gonna sue them till I get everything and more. And those could be fight and flight reactions and their natural to loss and how do you work with those so that you don't shut them down? But Also they don't run you. That's the key. And I think my prior experience has prepared me for that. And then of course, if there's no way out, if you perceive there's no way out of a danger, then you freeze. So that might mean just being in a kind of mixed sympathetic and parasympathetic state where, you know, you're like a rabid on the front lawn, you just don't move, your heart is racing, but you're preparing for the worst. Or you might actually just out now collapse. And in both cases, there's a kind of disassociation. And how, again, do you be present to that and allow that to be because it's protective? You know, if you have a really deep shock, and you can't process it, then it's protecting you to be this associated. Right? So how do we get present to our bodies in such a way that we can accept these things? But, you know, in a kind of Buddhist viewpoint, we're not grabbing them or pushing them away?

Michele Lawrence
Mm hmm. So you're doing some work for others around this now to not that you hadn't been before. But I'd love for you to share what's upcoming and where students can learn more from you and work with you. I know you've got something upcoming with Yoga U Online too.

Donna Brooks
Yes, I have a course coming up with Yoga U,  how to step safely into the chaos of grief. Because this is chaotic. There's so many thoughts, there's so many emotions, there's so many shifts, that the whole grieving over any kind of loss. Obviously, my loss was my son, but people have been losing friends have been losing normality people have been losing a lot through COVID Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, an income whatever people are losing health care, you know, like, a doctor or whatever, your your people aren't going to regular acupuncturist. And so, how do we step into this? What could be an abyss of loss and grief, but instead use it for our own growth? And to bring us more deeply into our own experience of our own bodies? And that is the yoga you what the yoga you course will cover? When is that? Oh, okay.

Michele Lawrence
More, more details in the show notes. 

Donna Brooks
there's a link to I don't know if I sent it to you a link. Okay. Sure. Yeah. Great. Thank you. It's February 15. And February 17th. So it's set up is two, our PowerPoint presentations. One on Tuesday, the 15th. One on Thursday, the 17th. And then people get a 15 minute long practice video afterwards. Great.

Michele Lawrence
Well, thank you for offering that, like you said, so needed, particularly right now. There's been just tremendous loss over these past couple of years. And with the ripple effects spanning out who knows how long, right? Yes, absolutely. So good to talk about it, to acknowledge it to validate people who are having experiences of loss and all that comes with it right now to let them know, they're not alone, and that offerings like yours can be really helpful. Thank you.

Donna Brooks
Oh, you're so welcome.

Michele Lawrence
So finally, and I like to ask this question on each of the podcasts to each of the guests. And it has to do with your own personal practice. And I know you've spoken to it a bit throughout here too. But we really put so much emphasis on our students in our training programs. When you're training to become a yoga therapist. First you have to do your own work, right, you have to have your own personal daily practice. It comes before holding space and doing any work with others. So on a day to day basis, I'm curious what your practice looks like you told us that even when you were a little girl, right? You started doing movement practices, what does that look like for you on a regular basis now and it may be it changes day to day or over the seasons? or what have you

Donna Brooks
It definitely changes often I start with an embodied meditation but not not always sometimes I need to work through movement on particular embodiments you know if I have whatever digestive upset or I went cross country skiing and my right shoulders hurting me then it might be more of a movement embodiment, which can also lead me into a pretty deeply meditative state. You know, you're talking about holding space. And I think that the main thing that I really endeavour to practice is to really exist in my core. So I think that how, at the end of the day we can experience so much hardship and difficulty in life. without getting sunk, is to be able to stay anchored or present in this core part of ourselves that feels whole. And that at the same time, like, it's not like a really endeavor not to jump out like, Okay, now I'm out, I'm stressed whenever I get to, I better get back into my core, really endeavor to realize, okay, I'm in my core, and there's just going to be waves of whatever that are going to come. And they're just there. And it doesn't have to be separate. You can have deep peace and whatever is unsettling you or irritating you at the same time.

Michele Lawrence
Beautiful. Yeah, really. And it was so nice, just getting to know you a little bit on the podcast today. And now I'm sort of you're on my radar, if you will. And I'm happy to share this out with others who might be listening here. So and I know you're on my radar, but I know you've been around a lot longer than I have. So I say that in a way that doesn't want to diminish that. But I look forward to having other people learn about you too, and take part of what you're offering and just kind of uphold you in high regard, particularly right now as you serve so many who could be benefiting from your help.

Donna Brooks
Thank you, Michelle. I really appreciate that.

Michele Lawrence
 Yeah, and I'll include links in the show notes. So folks can also check you out on your website, which I believe is original body wisdom.com. And also get a link to the upcoming workshop with yoga you online. Thanks so much, Donna.

Donna Brooks
You're so welcome Michelle. Thanks for having me.

Michele Lawrence
If you'd like to learn more about who we are and what we do, visit us at inner peace yoga therapy.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai