Embodiment Coaching With Denny, Lydia Grace & Elisabeth Foster

1:18:15

1:18:15

Embodiment Coaching With Denny, Lydia Grace & Elisabeth Foster

by joshua dippold

Rated

5

Type

talks

Activity

Meditation

Suitable for

Everyone

Plays

86

Topics include embodiment, dark night(s) of the soul, body speak and wisdom, intuition, trauma, power, judgment, validation, allowing, pausing, clinging to the past, cellular memory, A.B.C., self-love, karma, meridians, meditation, repressed memories, stories, epigenetics, innocence, “qi-positive”

Meet your Teacher

Hemel Hempstead, UK

Meet your Teacher

Hemel Hempstead, UK

Transcript

Good morning, Good afternoon, Good evening, Welcome to another edition of AUA Ask Us Anything. And today we have two very special guests in addition to Josh and I, The Yin and Yang of Buddha Dharma. We have Lydia, Lydia Grace coming back for a second time. Seems like we know you so well now, Right? And in addition we have Elizabeth Foster, Who is a good friend of Lydia and more or less in the same profession. We picked today's topic to be embodiment coaching. So I'm really looking forward to this because I really want to understand number one, What is embodiment and number two, What exactly do you coach? So maybe I'll let Lydia talk and let her guide us and maybe with the help of Elizabeth we can kind of expand on this topic. Go ahead, Lydia. Okay. So yes, I'm an embodiment coach. I guess I can share a little bit of how I got into doing this. I became a yoga teacher in 2007, Became a massage therapist in 2009 and then a massage instructor in 2012. And starting around 2012, I was also like a health coach and did wellness programs with clients when I was first starting out and working for myself doing my own business. And over the years, So I've worked with close to 12, 000 people at this point in the holistic wellness field. And one of the things that I noticed the most as far as what people would say the benefits of what we did together was, Was they would say, Oh my goodness, I feel like I'm in my body for the first time in years. Like whoa, I feel like here again. And it was very interesting. And it was the most, Like I said, It was the most often spoken outside of maybe like pain reduction or something like that. And I thought it was very interesting that people would say that and that many people were saying that not just like one or two, That it was a very common experience that people would feel like they finally were back in their body again. And I, Before COVID hit, I was a little bit starting to burn out with massage. My original intention for it was not to do it the rest of my life. It was actually so that I could have some sort of technical skill to get myself through, Go get a master's or a PhD in something, Which I still haven't done. And so it wasn't going to, I wasn't wanting to make it like my career. I just turns out I started doing it for awhile and my passion is teaching. So like I loved teaching the massage and so much of the teaching aspect was less about technique and more about presence and intention and connection, Which all comes from listening. And so much of massage and the intelligence behind touch is it's not about us doing something to someone. It's about listening to the tissue. It's about listening to the body. They're going to come in and intellectually say, This is what I want, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah. You touch their body. Their body's like, No, This is not that they don't know. And so, So much of massage was the puzzle of how can I satisfy the intellect of the client and honor the wisdom of the body. So as COVID hit and everything shut down and I was one of the people that kind of freaked out and took everything really seriously and didn't want to leave my house. So all of a sudden I didn't have my day job. And ironically, I used to like kind of be skeptical and make fun of coaching. Like what people just give advice and they get paid for it. What like weird. And my intuition was like, Look into it because there's so much, I just had this intuition that there was so much that could be translated from massages and yoga into one-on-one over zoom. Like there was so much that I, There was so much more potential out there that we had, We hadn't explored or that I hadn't explored. And I'm, I was an art major. I'm a creative thinker and I want to explore creative avenues that have never been thought of or done at least in my life before, You know, Cause obviously embodiment coaching is a thing. So I started just taking trainings in coaching various styles and just started offering free sessions and groupings of sessions to people to figure out like, What am I good at? How can I, Do I even want to do this? And over time I started to realize I've always had the issue of being overly analytical and very heady and from various traumas and from various conditioning, I I'm so, It's so easy for me to get so much in my head and kind of dissociate from my body, Which is why massage and yoga have been so helpful and meditation and breath work have been for me. And so I intuitively over time was like, Oh, That's what I need to start bringing in. I really appreciate doing jobs that hold me accountable. So like when I taught yoga, I have to do yoga. When I do massage, I have to receive massage if I'm in full integrity in presence showing up for people. And so it kind of became this invitation back into my own body in order to hold presence for other people to, And facilitating that presence for other people to start discovering and coming either for the first time or the second time or coming back into their body and starting to listen again to the wisdom of what's down here instead of just what's up here, You know, Cause the Western paradigm is mind, Mind, Mind, But most of my training was ancient, Like Chinese lineage, Thai lineage, Which is all like the, The heart is the emperor of the body. What the mind? No, That's a servant, You know? And so it kind of brought me back to some of the roots of the lineages I had learned. And it's just been this really beautiful unfolding, Working with various clients and all the different types of people that show up. Like right now, One of my clients is retired military, Like total, Totally different than other clients I've worked with. But again, Each person comes in and learns, Like I've learned with all the clients that I've been working with, Each person has a unique language, Their body speaks and they get to learn the language of their body and it's maybe different than other people. And it's just, It's been extremely rewarding for me to facilitate this journey for other people because I get so much out of it myself. And then it's been an invitation into receiving a lot of coaching from other people and even therapy and going into right now, I'm in a 60 hour integrative somatic trauma therapy training, Not so I can work with trauma for people, But so I can understand my own deeper and kind of the human experience of trauma. So it can help me stay within integrity of my scope of practice and know how to refer people to therapists when they need that and all that. So that's kind of a little backstory context of how I came into specifically embodiment coaching. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you so much. Wow, This is really interesting stuff. We'll keep going around in circle and just sharing our own perspective. You want to pick up on that however you like. Maybe you can explain to us how you and Lydia meet each other and whether or not what you do and is related to what Lydia does. Yeah, I'd love to. So I met Lydia online, Like, Middle of July, I think last year. And I was in a very interesting situation in life. And I had, At the time I was currently living in Peru, I had like, Moved there and was working at this yoga and meditation retreat center. And, You know, Like everyone around March 2020, Everything shut down. And I found myself having to create something and feeling really, Really disconnected, Of course, You know, From my family from being home, And I don't know how I found on Lydia, But we found each other. And working together in the kind of first iteration of her work, The body speak technique, Which was utterly mind opening body opening to me. I mean, I come from a yoga and meditation background. And the way that her and I worked together for our first, You know, Several months was a whole new perspective, And it kind of allowed me to really own what I wanted and discover a lot more about what I wanted and ultimately helped me find my way back to the United States and kind of a little bit of a dark night of the soul before, You know, Actually moving out to Los Angeles of March of this year. So her and I have been through or rather she's guided me a lot in my process in the past year and a half, You know, Certainly through some of the darker times and helped me kind of just reconnect and really reconnect to my intuition, You know, And helped me kind of see where my gifts lie as well, Because I, You know, Was at the time I had been doing a little bit of coaching through the human design perspective. And with COVID just kind of set that down for a little while because I didn't, You know, Like Lydia mentioned the value of integrity, I wasn't feeling like I was in a place to really guide other people when I didn't really know where I was going either. So we took that time and, You know, Thankfully Lydia's work helped open up whole new perspectives for me and new possibilities and allowed me to really kind of get a reset so that I was open to the possibilities of, You know, A wonderful opportunity to move to Los Angeles and actually start a new pack with matchmaking and kind of relearn how I can best serve through my coaching work as well. So that's how we kind of know each other in a nutshell and a little bit about what I do now. So, Yeah. Very nice, Very nice. Josh, You have anything to add? I think if anybody's watched the show, They've heard enough about me and Denny, Maybe possibly, But you know, And then it's my spiritual ego speaking maybe that it's just like, I really don't have much interest in my personal story, Which is a good reminder that I should probably spend more time on that saying, Because you know, Our stories, They really make us who we are, Right? If we say we're something and we put emphasis on things, On certain things, That becomes who we are pretty much. And so, You know, This is a great cop out, I guess I'm doing here. I don't know what to say other than I'm just so interested in content and like the actual practice and stuff like that, Which probably will come off more like alien and cold. I won't say anything about myself. So I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what to say here. I mean, Instead of, Before we jump right into stuff like that, I think I'm just going to, Yeah, Bypass this, Right? And throw it over to Demi, Unless there's specific questions as well. Okay. All right. That's okay. That's okay. You do realize that you're your best friend. So you have to learn to talk about yourself and sell yourself before you can sell your craft. Well, That's right, But I'm not selling anything. So I do all my stuff on donation basis right now. And you know, I could do the whole Zen thing like, Well, Who am I? Who's Josh? I'd like to think of myself as like an art project. So I won't throw us into the deep end right away here. But yeah. I want to get back to what Lydia was talking about. She was having, Making this gesture, What's above and what's below. And we talk about how it was an eye-opening experience when she reintroduced the body back to her client. And it got me thinking, Because in the past, I talk about the difference between the Western versus the Eastern, Eastern meaning both India and China. And how one of the difference between the two cultures is that in one culture, We have what we call the dark ages. Whereas in another culture, The Eastern culture, It's a pretty much continuous evolution in terms of the intellectual development. Whereas in the Western, There was a time when you have the dark ages and then ultimately when people got out of the total control of the church, Then we have this thing called the Recart Renaissance. And so it's as if the whole Western culture was making up for lost time. And so they focus a lot on the intellect, Thinking that intellect and intelligence are one of the same. Whereas the Eastern culture, Because we never had to overcompensate like that, That we understood that there's the intellect, Which is the brain, Whatever that mechanism that does the analysis and so forth. And then there's a whole other set of that does really like experience sensing. So it's a difference between the brain and the spiral core. It's interesting to know that all our nerve endings goes to the spiral core first. And it's from the spiral course that goes to the brain. So just because you don't use your brain doesn't mean that you don't feel because you feel first, You actually feel it first. Before then you kind of centralize, Combine all that signal into your brain and do more processing. So the Western culture, Because of the history, We tend to just focus on the brain. We just focus on just how do we digest all the information without really understanding how the information come into the body. And so I'm just throwing out there, Lydia, Correct me if I'm wrong, But it seems to me that based on my limit understanding is embodiment is like rolling back the clock, Coming back to the body and that the people sense their body first. Yes, Yes. So there's a theory that was developed by the name, His name is Steven Porges. So the first paper he wrote on it was in 1994. He was developing it since the eighties. That kind of explains a lot of what I do. I had already been doing it. And then when I came across this theory, I was like this, Oh my goodness, This explains the science. And it's called the Polly Bagel theory. And it's the idea that our nervous system is much more complex than the paradigm we used to think of like fight or flight, Rest and digest. There's many blended states. He calls it the social engagement system. And when we're in our most effective, Healthy state with ourselves and with others, We're in what's called the ventral vagal state, Which is connection from the heart to the head. So there's a deep connection and there's an opening and physiologically, There's a lot happening in this area. And we're able to connect with others in a very safe, It's called the science of safety. And the majority of this understanding or theory is based on the vagus nerve, Which is the 10th cranial nerve comes out of the brainstem and it's called the wandering nerve. So it goes through like almost all the organs. And what's super interesting about the vagus nerve is 80% of the information that passes along this major highway in the body goes from the body to the brain. Only 20% comes, Goes from the brain to the body. So healing, It has a lot to do with dysregulation in the nervous system, Learning how to regulate our states through the wisdom of the body. 80% of that wisdom is coming from the body, Which totally matches like all these ancient systems of wisdom. And we, The Western paradigm is we're stuck in that 20% of like, I have to have an effect this way. So the Elizabeth mentioned the body speak method, Which is a method I kind of developed from a lot of integrated, I'm an integrator. I like integrating a lot of modalities to work with whoever's in front of me. So I just named it something for branding sake, The body speaks. So the body speak method, This idea that if we start to kind of like imagine or take ourselves into the metaphor, That every aspect of our body has a voice. And many times when we're listening to things, It can run away into some sort of spiral. So like spiral into pain and suffering, Spiral into over analysis, Spiral into, And the one of the missing components is we don't have a mediator. And so we're not creating a container of safety for internal conversations to be happening. And this was something I experienced firsthand over time. What I realized is when I would call up the parts of myself that had leadership abilities, So like big self, Inner guide, Intuition, Whatever people want to call it, Better angel, Every client has a different word for it, One client calls it new mindset. When that can come and become the mediator of the conversation, We're immediately providing an element of safety for then all these different voices within us to start having a say. And the mediator also has sway on being able to have boundaries, To put in boundaries of like, Cool, I do want to listen to you anger, But like, You're taking up a lot of space right now. You want to sit down. And so I call it the round table, The internal round table discussion. And when I'm working with clients, At first time, I say, I'm taking the role of the facilitator and mediator. So you don't have to worry about what that's going to feel like for you. And as we start opening this discussion with your sensations, With your narratives, With your emotions, With your breath, With your energy bodies, As we start calling, Whoever wants to say to start coming in, Eventually, You start to really hear your own mediator, Your own like inner leader. And you can start distinguishing who that is. And then eventually, That becomes something you can do on your own. And that's one of the techniques that I sort of developed that I will use with clients, Depending on how there's many people, Myself included in the past that where it felt very unsafe to be in the body. So dissociation was a very helpful, Safe, Protective mechanism because our bodies hold trauma. And so I don't necessarily always just jump into there. We have a big conversation of like consent matters. We've internalized lack of consent because our society doesn't honor really consent in life. And so first it's let's develop mechanisms of safety and consent so that we can first start learning how to trust and find ways to like even open the idea of listening to the various parts or voices. Interesting. Elizabeth, You were talking about how when you first met Lydia, You actually the outside of the country. And then through the epidemic, You pandemic, You would then slowly move back to the States and now settle down in Los Angeles. So that's obviously you were in a very traumatic time in your life. And then at that time you learn from Lydia. Give us a little bit more specific about how you use the word intuitive, Right? You were using the word intuitive. How does that relate to embodiment and together? How does that help you find your way out? Yeah. So I think one of the first things that I learned in my work with Lydia was kind of having that grace for all of the experiences and sensations that happen in the body. We were working through particularly for me at the time when we first started working together, There was a lot of shame, A lot of guilt, A lot of self doubt that we were working through. And a lot of decision and disconnection. And so I didn't really have a strong sense of my own intuition, Even though that's been something I've worked for years and years on. But at that point in my life, I felt so disconnected from that. So we started with, Just like Lydia said, Getting consent from the body and from the mind to be able to step aside and hear what the body has to say without judgment or without putting those extra narratives on it around how I should be or what I need to be doing. Just kind of being present to whatever comes up in the experience. Which I think for me helped cultivate a lot of self love and grace and courage even in that moment because I was able to see my pain for what it was and not something that needed to be fixed or relegated or shoved under the carpet. It was just what it was. And that didn't mean anything about who I was or what my strengths are or what was possible for me either. Because at that point I felt like not a lot was very possible for me. And that was a lot of what we worked through was getting to that space where I was able to trust, Really deeply trust myself again. But also realign the love for my experience, For my pain, For all the things that I had gone through in the past year and a half. And being able to hold space for it without judgment I think was one of the biggest things that helped me realign and helped open up to hear some more of those intuitive hits and lean into the possibility that started to show up for me. Because I don't think had I been given the opportunity that I have now, If that had happened right when the pandemic started, I don't think that I would have gone down this path in any way. I think for me it was really important to be able to be present to the pain and to the experience and the trauma that was happening. And not avoid it, Which I think is something that really is prevalent in our society, Is not addressing our pains, Not really addressing the issues that whether internal or external just kind of like going along and assuming things will get better. But Lydia's work really helped me reconnect to my power and grace in that sense. So yeah, That's kind of a long winded answer. But that was what it did for me. Interesting. You used the word judge, Judging. And I want to elaborate on that because that is either judging from the outside, Right? We were judged by parents, We were judged by a peer, We were judged by our siblings, Judged by our elders relative to our siblings, All kinds of judge. So we grew up with a lot of people judging us and we either had to live up to that or we had to live against it one way or the other. But there's a lot of judging too that is done internally. We judge ourselves. We judge ourselves more than other people judge us. And so going back to what Lydia said, I'm wondering if this embodiment is really about finding an anchor so that you put equal emphasis, At least equal emphasis on really feeling, Really focusing on the sensation and lessen the self-judging and just accept it and feel it as opposed to just feel it and then right away, You know, Went off the deep end judging whether it's the right or wrong. What do you think, Lydia? Does that have anything? Go ahead, Go ahead, Josh. Go ahead, Josh. Josh, You can go. Go ahead. There's a lot of stuff here to tie together. So there's the facing our pain, Right? That is so important. It was so important for me because we're conditioned to do everything we can to feel comfortable and not face it. So when we can be in a space where we can directly look our pain in the eye and be with it and sit with it and say, You know, I'm going to be down here in the mud hole with you as far as long as I can. And then when it gets too overwhelming, Well, Then we can switch to other techniques because sometimes being with our pain, Depending on so many different things and how severe it is, It can be just too much at certain times. But the more we're able to be with it and feel it, The more we can heal it. And now Denny's thing about the judgment, You know, This was especially for spiritually minded people. What I would consider judgment is only when we're deriving or somebody is deriving satisfaction from judging another. So as long as we're not doing that, We give a dang, You know, It's like, There's this kind of automatic judgment that will arise and we're like, Start judging ourselves for the judgment, Right? Oh, We shouldn't, I don't really mean that I shouldn't say that. And so one of these teachings I learned that was really helpful for me is that there's a silver lining in that. So we can say, Okay, I honor your Buddha nature, I honor your divinity. But maybe with this coming up in the other person that I'm considering a judgment and I don't want to judge is to say, Okay, I see your Buddha nature, See your divinity, And this is just not for me. You know, Doesn't mean I have to be disrespectful or, You know, Cut the person off or whatever. So that's the silver lining. Now, Denny, You said, What were you saying again about feeling? Because I, And then going back to Lydia's thing too, You know, That's so interesting, The body talk, Because when I finally transition to sensing, It's like a relief from all the internal chatter that's normally going on. So for me to go more intuitive in embodiment and sensing, It's like a break from that. So I can just let sensations happen and pay attention to them without giving them a voice actually. So it's interesting because, You know, I definitely see the value in that, Right? In Lydia's approach, Because that's how we, You know, People either want to be seen or heard, Right? Some people need to be seen to be heard and some people need to be heard to be seen. And I think the more we can do that to other people, The more we can help heal them, And especially to ourselves too. So I think that's enough for now. Lydia, What do you think? I have many thoughts as usual. The I want to say the body speak method or whatever, Is one of many asanas that I use in a session. So it's not the only approach or philosophy and I like 100% agree with you, Josh, Like, Many times, It's just about being with, It's not about trying to interpret or create any story. The biggest from behavioral science and research, Because I really like keeping up with research and behavioral economics, I'm always looking at stuff and listening to podcasts. And one of the biggest human needs is to be validated and understood. And that was one of the basis for which body speak became like one of the techniques I use because so much of our body would like to be heard and validated. And pain has a voice. There's a reason for it being there. There's a wisdom to the various expressions of sensation our body's going through. We are very quick to put interpretation on it. And I believe most suffering comes from our interpretation, Not the actual experience. And when you were talking about judgment, Denny, One of the things that I see is we're not necessarily trying to have less self judgment. We're simply trying to notice it and have less identification with it. And then it starts to naturally go away. And one of the metaphors that I've used recently when I do insight timer is if you can notice and kind of name, Which this comes out of like emotional intelligence, Behavioral science, Naming an emotion immediately separates you a little bit from identifying with it as your only reality. And it gives you a little bit of a pause between stimulus and response. When you can name or recognize something's happening, Like, Oh, Judgment, It's an opportunity to come into a space of mindfulness. And I consider our human selves as finite and like our cell selves as infinite. So there's an invitation to come into more of an infinite, Like conscious awareness that's holding the finite of the self judgment. And when we start to feel held by the awareness, The finite judgment is no longer, No longer needs to feel like suffering. It's just like, Again, You know, That metaphor of like watching clouds or whatever. And so to me, It's always about coming into the validation of I'm allowed to be human right now. I'm allowed to be having the experience I'm having because it is the experience I'm having. How can I support myself to expand my awareness within this experience? Because in that awareness, There's more pause and in the pause, We have more choice. You know, The Viktor Frankl quote, Which is like one of my mantras since 2020. In the pause is the space like between the inhale and the exhale and between one thought and another, That's where we can when we can expand that through mindfulness and awareness based on various techniques. And again, I always believe like the person coming that's in front of me has an amazing amount of wisdom. I'm not trying to put wisdom into their body. I'm here to facilitate a space for them to open up to it themselves. So I don't even know I don't know what it is either. But we're discovering together what techniques and tools and perspectives and body positions are going to help them hear it, Start hearing it with the greatest ease, The greatest curiosity, And eventually the greatest like compassion. Interesting, Interesting. So we use the word we've been using the word embodiment or body speak and Josh and I come from a different perspective. So we come from the probably the closest description to what we do is like the Talabata or the Southeast Asia Buddhist approach to meditation, As opposed to the North Chinese version of the meditation. And one of the things that we speak about is the mindfulness, The full foundation of mindfulness, The mindfulness of the body and the mind and the body and the feeling the mind and the Dharma. But actually, It really only boils down to the mindfulness of the body, Especially today, When we talk about embodiment, Body speak. So we are about the mindfulness of the body. Except in this case, The body is not just this, The body is actually the entirety. And so when we talk about the body, We talk about what we call the sense doors. So the sense doors are the eye, The nose, The tongue, The ear, The skin, And the brain, The intellect, We've been talking intellect. And so we think of them as the door. And so in modern language, The door is the physiology. What's outside the door is physics, And what's inside the door is the neurology. So the eye interacts with the sight, Whether it's visible or infrared. And then when the sight hits the eye, Then it turns into the electrical signal. So that's a very straightforward kind of way of thinking about how the body interacts with the world. Now, All that come together, As I said, Into the spiral core, And then the spiral core gives it to the brain. And we think of the brain as part of the body. We don't think of the brain as spiritual. So when we talk about materiality versus spirituality, The brain is materiality. The mind is something else, Something that is much deeper, That we're still trying to explore. So the reason we say door is because our job is to guard the door. And so that's how we distinguish pain from suffering, Is that the pain is when the physics interacts with the physiology that creates neurology. That's the pain. The pain can come, And the pain can go. What causes suffering is when the pain metastasizes into suffering. So often we suffer based on the event that has long gone. Someone spoke, Say something to me that hurts me. And that was yesterday. In my death case, That was like 35 years ago, You know? Find that the Japanese invaded China, Killed lots of people. I got that. That's a long time ago. Get over it. No, I'm still suffering. I got that. But that's the difference between pain and suffering. You're still suffering because you are already behind the door. And instead of just guarding the door, You're chasing after the demon. So we don't use the word embodiment. We use the word mindfulness of the body, Probably to achieve the same purpose, Which is to really focus on the body and understand how the body interacts with the world, Interacts with the surrounding, Interacts with your own mind, But at the same time understanding how that initial interaction doesn't need to generate further reverberation, So to speak. I'm going to disagree with you on that point. Please! Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please. Yes, Lydia? One of the things that I really struggled with when I first started learning about yoga, Because I studied a little bit of Travita Buddhism myself through Thai Ayurveda, Because there's a huge basis in that. Last time you spoke to the four components, I was like, That's exactly what I learned. And I hit roadblocks and there was a level of frustration of like, I was your dad of like, No, But there's something else here that I can't explain. And it's not because I'm doing it wrong, But I must be doing it wrong because I don't know the answer. The awesome thing that I've recently learned that has helped me understand it at a very different level than how you just articulated it was in trauma therapy, You know, There's a book called The Body Keeps the Score. So it's not, It's coming through your dad's mind and words to you, But it's in his body. There's been an effect on the physiology that has not shifted. When those events happened, Like from the perspective of like, We'll just say Thai medicine, From what I understood and learned in my lineage, There was a block, There was some kinks in the hose of his sen lines, Like meridians, The energy lines in his body. And it eventually affected the physical body, Which is like the slowest energy. And at that level, There wasn't a release in block of energy. And so it has continued and maybe had a cumulative effect with other life stresses that have built on it. And the perspective for embodiment coaching and a lot of trauma healing modalities, But I try to separate those two, You know, To keep my scope of practice safe and contained within my skill level is we hold trauma in our tissue, In the actual fascia and the connective tissue and the cellular structure and the neurology and the physiology. And when we can start to recognize that as an extremely wise adaptation of our bodies, There's less judgment, There's, And then we're able to come at it with more curiosity and almost a sense of deeper gratitude for the body's adaptation. And I have this sense that like the tissue, Our emotional body, Our physical body, Our mental body, The different aspects have some sort of consciousness. We can't say what it is yet, But there's a recognition of like, Thank you. Yes, I was trying to do this to protect you. This is what I knew to do. And it opens up a conversation where there's almost a release of like, Thank you for finally validating me. Now I can leave. Or like now you're the new, The new habits you want to, You're free to do the new habits or the new paradigm, You know? So it's almost less of like, Cause when I first started working with clients, I had clients that were in their sixties talking about stuff that happened when they were four. And I like, I was in my twenties being like, What? Like really people hold onto this so long. And then as stuff continued to happen to me in my adult life, I was like, Oh, People hold onto this so long. But then there was an understanding of like, Oh, And there's an actual reason for it. And it's more and more explained now by science and by so much research. There's so, And what is so brilliant and cool about humans is in all this trauma research, It's becoming non pathological, Meaning we're not looking for problems. We're looking for why it has worked. And through this non pathological paradigm, Everything's coming back to mindfulness as the solution to heal. So it's all coming back to these ancient wisdoms and it's science. Yes. Getting back to that path. And for me, It's such a like relief because I love the knowledge of science and the, I love being stimulated in my intellect. I just have to balance the role of it. You know, When it's being used or not, Because sometimes it is detrimental to my body. Sometimes it's wonderful, You know. So I may or may not be disagreeing with you. I don't think we are. I actually do not think that we disagree. At the deepest level, We might be like on the same page. Yeah, Yeah. I know. I think we're adding to each other. Yeah. So I want to, You said something about fascia and then also you said something about knowledge. So again, Let me come back to, You know. Can I interrupt? Yes please, Lydia. I'm sorry, I thought you finished. Liz was also a massage therapist. Okay. Elizabeth, Elizabeth, You got it. You got it. Come on, You can't let this team. I'm curious to know your perspective about being someone who's worked with bodies, Done coaching. We each own a little square. So now it's your square. Come on, Lydia. Come on, Elizabeth. Yeah. I mean, I think you're absolutely right, Both of you, As far as the body definitely being part of the medium of holding our pain and our trauma. I think kind of to touch back on what we were talking previously about the judgments and the stories, I think that was something that during our work together was able to help me kind of move through things a lot quicker, Was moving the story out of the way, But just connecting in with the body. And you know, We would go through kind of like a, Almost like a mini trans meditation where I would connect in with the body and just notice what was coming up. And in our sessions, It could be something innocuous or it could be something deep. And it's just whatever the body was wanting to express in that moment. And I've noticed in my own practices as a massage therapist that when we start moving in one of those points, We might find that, Okay, Well, It does actually move up the fascia in a physical way to the next point, You know, Like down the meridians. And as we start to move one thing, It starts to release something else. And then we move that thing and it releases something else. So we might find that there's a lot wrapped up into just one point in the body that can actually unwind a whole history, A whole, You know, An entire story that we've told ourselves like, You know, From childhood or from whatever experience it was that we've shaped our world around. So it's really interesting to me that the body has such intelligence and such memory for our experiences too, Even when we intellectually might not connect to some of those memories. This reminds me, If I could just jump right in here. After going through a lot of, You know, Meditation first on, First starting out and, You know, Had a lot of releases of just being with, You know, Pain and having a release and openings and then, You know, Layers and layers like an onion. So I went into this place and I talked to this healer and I was like, You know, What, You know, What's this? I just kind of got this ego going like, Oh yeah, You know, I can, I'm at a good space now, You know, And then he just said something like, Oh, Hey, What's that resentment for your day? And he said, Your shoulder, You're holding resentment for your father. And I could immediately notice the shaking in my voice. Like I didn't see it right away. I didn't know what he was talking about, But my emotions were just there and they could say, I said, You know, Thank you or whatever like that. And so I went and sat with that and sure enough, I mean, It was really obvious and it was just kind of like, You know, A release in some weeping there. And then lo and behold that, That, That part of the shoulder released. Cause when I was doing yoga for you, I couldn't like reach my arm all the way up over my head. It was, I could only get it so because the pain was there, You know I don't know. That's that's something that came to mind. It's just, They call it cellular memory, Right? Or cellular debris. It's my vision. Isn't there to see it, But I can kind of intuit that's how it is. Lydia talked about a space. There's this teacher called I forget her Jill Shepherd, I think she talks about ABC, A bigger container. So when we can make this, You know, This space to have this whole for these things to happen, Lydia's already talked way more eloquently than I could about this, But I want to go back to this thing about validation because this is a big thing in the feminine, Right? And worthiness too. And this comes from in the same way with the male side, Honor and respect. The only way we're going to get these qualities to the degree that we need and want is from the inside. So the more we can give ourselves honor and respect, The more we can give ourselves value and validation, Right? And that's what, You know, Lydia's method helps with that. It actually puts kind of like a real life situation on validation with the body talk thing. So yeah, The more we can self validate, Self realize self worth, Honor and respect. It's just I found it so helpful. One other thing before I pass on here is I just heard this new teaching about, You know, Self love and but what what would it what would it be like now to give ourselves more self love without having to imagine ourselves to be different at all, Or, You know, Having to work so hard to have something else happen? What can we do just the way we are now for more self love? And this is not an ego thing, Right? It's it's a self care, You know, Self respect, Self honoring, Worthiness, Validation. All right. Thank you, Josh. Thank you, Lydia. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you, Joshua. So I want to come back to this body body man body speak. And I heard, For example, When Elizabeth talks about the residual trauma that is trapped in the body, Josh talks about that. And so we often use the word karma, Karma as if karma is your destiny. But that's not what karma means. Karma just means memory. It just means memory. It means that if you have a thought, Even though there is no action that you didn't really actually take into action, Just the thought itself has residual memory. And it's not clear where that memory is. It might not be in the brain, It could be somewhere in your body, Or maybe even outside the body. But it's a cosmic memory of all the thought that we might have. So that's why in Buddhist teaching is all about understanding your thought. And even if you have a, What we call it a crystal of thought and non wholesome thought, There's consequence to that. Because karma, In this case is a memory, Because it's really about electricity's and magnetism, Right? Because our body is nothing but a electrochemical factory. Everything that we do is chemical in nature, And then it's also electrical in nature. So if there's electricity, Then there's magnetism, And if there's magnetism, There's memory. Because all materials are ferromagnetic. And once you have that in memory, Then the next time you have similar action, Then that comes back and influence the future. That's when the karma as a destiny comes in, Right? And so the question is that how does the body and karma and residual memory work together? So Lydia and you both mentioned the word meridian. Meridian meaning that we have these energy lines that flow in and out of our body. And the best way to think about them is that there's 24 hours in a day, And you can take that 24 hours and divide it into six different segments. And each four hours period, There's an energy loop within you that is more active than the others. And that energy loop, When it flows out of the body, It's called yang, And when it comes back, It's called yin. And each of the six yin energy lines is associated with each of the six yin organs, What we call the threshold organs. So the heart, The lung, The splint, The liver, And the kidney. Now it turns out that the heart separate into both the mental heart and the physical heart. The physical heart is called the pericardium. And that's the yin energy. Now what's interesting is that there is also the yang energy, Which has to do with the yang organ. And these are the what we call the vessel organs. The threshold organs are the ones that contains the essence. They were given to you, And at the time you were being developed. Whereas the vessel organs are the ones that you can utilize then to digest and to ferment food and so forth. Now what's interesting is that there is an organ, There's an energy line, There's a yang energy line that has no western equivalent. It's called the triple warmer. And of course, The word warmer was a direct translation from the Chinese word that could mean warm or burn. That's why sometimes it's called a triple warmer, Sometimes it's called a triple heater. But that same word can also mean focus. So you can also talk about triple focus. Because the Chinese separate the internal organs into three sections, The upper burner, The middle burner, And the lower burner. And they talk about the upper burner, The heart and the lung as if they are the fog. They're the ones taking the moisture, The nutrients from the outside and distribute into the body. And then they talk about the middle part as being fermentation and the lower part as being the gutter where you manage the waste. But before that we claimed they're valuable. Anyway, There's just one thing that there's no western equivalent, Which is called the triple warmer. So that has always intrigued me. At the same time, There's another thing that interests me, Which is the fundamental difference between western medical science and eastern medical science. Chinese do not like to dissect dead bodies. It's considered the utmost, Not disgrace, But insult to the family to dissect the dead body. So the eastern medical science is not based on the cadaver. It's actually based on meditation. It's really understanding these materials through deep meditation. Whereas the western science is always about the cadaver, It's always about the body. Now what you notice, The dead ones, Yeah. What you notice is that when the students, When the medical students, When they enter medical school, They each were assigned, Actually they purchase a cadaver. They actually spent months preparing the cadaver. And what is it that they do? They cut off all of the connective tissue. The connective tissue is the conduit for memory. So I finally went back and I said, I gotta really understand what this triple warmer is because it makes no sense to me. And the English translation makes no sense to me. And so I finally found this old Chinese medical book. And I realized that the word for the Chinese word that is used today has a very old meaning. And when I look into that, It means, The closest meaning of that is whatever it is between selves. So when they talk about the triple warmer, The triple heater, Whatever, It's really that one meridian that connects all the internal organs. And the one exercise you can do to activate that energy field is by deep breathing, By abdominal breathing. Because when you do abdominal breathing, You're exercising the diaphragm. And the diaphragm is the mother of all connective tissue. And through that, You're actually doing self healing. You're actually going through the organ doing self healing. So I just find today's conversation fascinating, Fascinating that we are coming at it from so many different angle. Lydia talking about embodiment, Getting his client to understand the body, Getting them to appreciate the trauma and then confronting it, Confronting it. But why anchoring themselves onto the body, Giving equal time to the body, The intellect. Elizabeth speak, Similar idea, Doing the massaging and healing and Josh talks about, So now I understand that he hated his father. I can tell from his shoulder. Isn't that fascinating how he had that insight and that intuition? I don't know. It's insight or just statistics. It always works. I mean, As someone who's done body work, One of the things I was telling my dad, It turns out the other day, Yesterday or the day before, I was like, So I've recently been starting to add a new modality into what I offer. And it was a training I took recently and it's kind of like this deeper intuitive body healing meditation with certain protocols and there's an intellectual level to it. And Elizabeth has received a couple sessions and it's like, What, Why, Why does this so good? And one of the, I was sort of explaining it to him, He's conservative Christian. So I have to like shift how I'm saying things so it's not scary, Threatening. But one of the things I said was because I had worked on like several thousand people at one point over time, There's an intelligence that we just lop in as intuition. Intuition is like an umbrella for so much of our intelligence. We don't have the English words to use. And I can, When clients would call me on the phone, I knew what was going to, I was going to work on by their voice. When they would walk in the door, I could, Their body was already talking to me. So yeah, Touch is important because it's this physical, Tangible contact we have. But the intelligence of my body and their body was so much far beyond anything I could even say that there was a level of like, When I, When we learned Thai massage, We start off the body and we slowly come in as a practice of listening. Where do you start feeling the warmth of the actual temperature of the body? Where do you start feeling the body actually inviting you in versus pushing your presence in? And so it was this very intuitive practice that I had in my training and in massage school where we would start listening from a distance. And by the time we got to the body, There was almost a recognition of my energy and their energy and like a recognition. And there was already a validation of like, I'm holding space for you. You have intelligence, Let's see what happens. And then when I would work on people like in actual massages, Sometimes I'd be like, I'm not sure how to explain this, But your body is saying you need to go do this. This is what showed up for your body wisdom. And of course I would start with consent. Like, Are you open to more woo-woo ideas because I have, Your body has something to say, But only if you want to hear it. And so certain personalities, Like I'd work on ER doctors, I wouldn't necessarily present it in that way compared to like someone who owned a crystal shop. Going back to something Elizabeth had said before about how our body has memory and our, Especially the fascia turns out as Thai massage had been, Has been studied more and more by like very intellectuals, Like PhD academics, Sen lines match fascial trains in the body. So fascial trains actually go the same way as these sen lines that seemed like these energy magical things in Thai. And it was very affirming and confirming to like, Of course, Like people understand the intuition, Our ability to tune in to the living form through meditation and awareness, Of course is going to be on some levels better than the dead could ever, Because there's not that living flow and movement and reactivity and responsiveness. I was giving a training back in 2012. And I had mentioned in the training, Sometimes when we work on each other, Memory comes up just from us touching a certain point within that training, There was this guy in his fifties and he suddenly had a repressed memory come back from when he was 10. So he didn't remember it for 40 years. We were working on the shoulder and he suddenly broke down and said, I got shot when I was 10 in the shoulder. And it was when you pressed on that spot. And so there was a cellular memory, Like you said, Josh, In the fascia, In the connective tissue that was holding a pattern that came out when presence, Conscious presence and physical touch was put into that spot. And like, Of course, We weren't trying to do that for anyone, But it came up and then he had to sort of work through, Like me holding space as a teacher was like, Okay, This is how you can kind of take care of your needs while you can see how you want to continue to participate in this training. But it kind of, I immediately thought of that when Elizabeth was talking, Because I've had certain clients when I've worked on where certain things happen and all of a sudden there's a memory. And that's even happened to me where a repressed memory came up in a massage when a certain body part was worked on. Well, We actually go further than that. We actually talk about memory of trauma from previous lives. I have a little thing on my thigh that I don't know why every once in a while I feel pain. And I remember talking to one of my Dharma master and he says, Well, Maybe you were a warrior in previous life and got shot in the thigh. And then like in science, One of the things they've discovered, I think in the past decade in epigenetics is when the mother is pregnant, The fetus, The baby inside for the female already has all the eggs they're going to have when they come out. Those eggs are the grandchildren of the mother being affected by the mother's experience. So I was in my grandmother who was born in 1912. So I am 100% have had some level of effect of her body and what she was going through when she was pregnant with my mom. And then when my mom was pregnant with me. And then for males, It actually also passes three generations through. I don't exactly understand everything, But I always thought that was such an interesting concept or sometimes it might even not be like the past life idea. It could just be like literally the past life of my grandma. Let's go forward. You have eggs for three generations later. Yeah. If I choose to exercise it. Even more so interconnected between all of us is the air we breathe. They said like just about every particle of air we've breathed. I forget the statistics. Does somebody know this? Like we've already all breathed each other's air. I don't know how many times. And no, Actually it's something like every breath we take, There's some kind of particles that like Da Vinci has breathed in or something like this. It's weird that it's almost gross. I remember learning it at one point and being like, What? It's so weird. But you just look awesome at the same time. That's how like small the quantum world is and how limited supply of air we have and then how all connected we are. I guess it's hard to kind of put that in perspective. So we should probably wrap this up. So I wanted to remind ourselves of the conversation we had a month ago when Lili was first on. We talked about how Insight Timer is such a good place, Such a good marketplace to explore different ways of practicing spiritually. But one thing is missing is that it doesn't allow sort of interactions among teachers. In fact, It does the opposite that it actually kind of sets up a competitive environment because it's a zero sum game. Either I spend an hour here or I spend an hour there. So one of the things that we like to do is to use this forum and have more discussions among us and maybe introduce more variety to our students and then kind of let this evolve on its own and continue, Continue, Continue with this information flow. So Elizabeth, You're the newest person here. So it's a tradition that you start with the wrap up. And then we work on that. It's a tradition because we just started today. The starting of the very first part of this tradition. And I apologize, I have to run right after this. But yeah, I mean, I'm just so grateful for being included in this conversation. You know, I appreciate you, Denny and Josh for inviting me in and Lydia for all the work that we've done together. This just feels like another beautiful iteration of what we've done. And I've just really enjoyed this conversation, Learned a lot. And yeah, I think this is this kind of integration of different modalities and different understandings is all beneficial for our evolution as a species and creating a better world for us all. So thank you so much for allowing me to share in this with you guys. Thank you, Elizabeth. And before I give it to give it to Lydia, I just want to remind myself what Lydia said about healing and what she was describing how that she could just be on the phone and just having that conversation with a person and a person that's seen already, You know, She knew what the person needs. I have heard that before. All healers have this gift. And it's just a matter of how they exercise this gift. Now, Now I'm going to put up a comment by Jonathan. This is Lydia, You are amazing. Love seeing you sharing your gifts. See, See. We were really good friends in Florida. And at one point we did a little bit of a trade. He's a brilliant artist and graphic designer and helps people build out brands. Him and his wife and kid moved to Arizona in the past few years when around the time I was moving out to Colorado. And yeah, So that's awesome that you're listening in. Amazing. So, So Lydia, Continue, Continue. I'm going to have to run. Thank you so much. OK. Thank you, Guys. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bye bye. So one of the things that I didn't mention about what kind of was unique about I kind of want to spiral back or whatever the word is, Come back to. Boomerang. When you were talking about self-love before and how we can, There's an invitation, Especially in these times always, But right now to like bring in more self-love. And I've always had this intellectual back and forth within myself of like, Is more self-love going to just boost our ego in the wrong way? Or is it like, What does that mean? And, You know, It's this intellectual kind of abstract concept that like, How can I actually practical? And I discovered this really beautiful experience using the body speak method on myself. So like we go into kind of a meditative space at the tone set intention, And then we kind of open it up. And I'm following my intuition being like, The last thing you said when we were coaching was blah, Blah, Blah. Where do you feel this in your body? If it had a voice, What would it say? And depending again, It's always this conversation of consent. If there's any question I ask, You don't want to answer. Awesome. If you'd rather say something else, Awesome. We're just opening up the possibility of what could be said or the voice. And one of the questions is if this part of you had an age, What would it be? And there's a lot of inner child work on the internet and on social media. And it's always about like going back into your childhood and re parenting yourself in those moments. Cool. And it just takes us back into story and out of our body a lot of times. And that's what it's done for me. And what I loved about kind of this technique, I sort of, I want to say I sort of developed because turns out there's a lot out there that's very similar to this is what age is that voice. Let's have that voice sit right now on the table and say what they want to say. What do you need right now? Four year old from me. So I was doing that in my journaling and it came up, There was a two year old voice in me that had a voice that wanted to say something. I was like, What do you want to say? And the two year old was like, Can you just give me a hug before you go to bed every night? And it was just like, Like tears of like, It's that simple. And my first acknowledgement to the two year old voice was like, I don't know if I'm going to remember to do that. Like, I'm sorry, I'm going to be a bad parrot to you. But then it was just this such a gentle experience of like, This young voice just wanted my attention a little bit more consistently. And all it wanted was a hug. All it wanted was like, What you were saying, Just a little bit of self love, A little bit of like, I love you, I got you. You're here with me. I want I'm paying attention to you. And like meeting so many needs that maybe at various times being the fourth out of five children, Maybe I didn't get, You know, And it might have felt a little traumatic to the two year old or whatever it was. But there was no part of me that had to go back into any memories, Because it was right there in that present moment. And I felt a shift in my heart space. And like, You talked about the pericardium, Which is like the wrapping of the heart. So there was like a softening of that protective space in my heart, You know, And it was such a gentle discovery that like, I didn't know. And the other day I was having I because I practice this kind of conversation with myself, I was having some anxiety come up like a decent amount, Like where I was like, Frustrated of like, Can I go to the Thanksgiving dinner? I don't know. So I was like, Okay, Get into your body, Go into the shower, Feel the water, Just meditate on the feeling of water on your body, You know, Get feel that come out of the stories. When I was in the shower, This inner little voice came up again. And it was like, Whenever you have anxiety, It's I'm trying to get your attention. You're not listening to me, You're trying to make me go away. And it was again, It was this like, What? I'm so sorry. Like there was just such a level of inner compassion and deepening of like, I was coming into the body. But because I've opened some of these ideas of like, Any part of me can have a voice, Any age can have a voice, Let's see what happens. I'm willing to listen. These spontaneous moments of using mindfulness of like, I'm in my head, My nervous system is activated, Let me settle, Feel water, Do some breath work in the shower. And then it opened into this beautiful wisdom that immediately me validating, Of course, I want to be here. I'm so sorry. I want to learn how to listen to you and hear you and hear your needs and like, Put you first and not ignore you. And then there was just this wisdom of how to shift out of this place of anxious thought immediately. And then I was able to go about my day in like a way that I was like, What, How is this possible? And again, It was like, I love creativity. I love art. I love imagination. So this feeling of like, We get to take the wisdom we're receiving from these lineages and from life, And then really make it our own and do it our own way. And I love some of the techniques I use. So I use them on myself. This is beautiful, Lydia. It is like this paradox between, You know, If we're too lost in story, That could be unhelpful. But if we don't listen to stories and validate them and use them as a way to understand ourselves and lives and all of our experience. So it's like, For me, It's a balancing act between those. And you know, For me to tune into that innocence, Unfortunately, Or fortunately, It took like some devastation to really wake up to that deep truth within me, That I was not only like, Ignoring my innocence, But also kind of like, Brushing it off and confusing it for stupidity and unconsciousness, Too, Which it's not. Innocence is not unconsciousness. Yeah, It, Well, I'll forego a personal story since we're running out of time here. But now, Yeah, It's such a beautiful practice that Lydia is talking about. Thank you, Josh. Thank you, Lydia. So as you were talking, Lydia, As you're talking, I think back to the days when I was an assistant professor at UCLA. And so I was there for the total of nine years. But after the six years, I get to take one year off the sabbatical at sabbath. And so I decided to spend that year in Caltech. So it's not very far from UCLA, But it's a world apart. And Caltech is a very small school, Very prestigious school, And a lot of famous people there. And one of the person who is really famous there is Professor Richard Feynman. And of course, By the time I got there, He already passed away. And he's a very, Very famous person, Nobel lawyer and all that. And I just love his books. And the one that I love the most is the one that says, Why do you care what other people think? So if I want to kind of put things in context, And I think as fellow teachers, What we really wanted to do here is to give you, Share with the students our own experience on how to provide liberation, You know, Liberation to our mind liberation, As much as liberation to our material needs, It's liberation to our spiritual needs. And so the idea that we own our own spiritual well being, And that, You know, The judgment or that we're going to put that in perspective, You know, So, So I remember, So in my case, Even though I don't use the same word, I don't use the word embodiment, Although I totally get it. I like to use the word chi positive, As in body positive, Because the chi, The energy is something that you can experience that no one else can. And so if you could actually experience your own energy in your meridians, Then it's exactly what Professor Feynman says, Why do you care what other people think? I love that saying I use a lot of times, What other people think about me is none of my business. Yeah, Yeah. Okay. Well, Thank you, Lydia. Thank you so much for inviting Elizabeth and really put so much thought into today's topic, Which is embodiment in coaching and embodiment coaching to get together. Yeah. And you know, Embodiment was just kind of the word that felt like the umbrella term of so many things, You know what I mean? Because I could be like, Who would have coached and I'm like, Like all the other words I was trying to intellectually figure out my title, Like it just didn't have it and embodiment, I was like, Oh, Embodied touch, Embodied emotion, Like it covered, Like, You can put any word under that and it becomes the adjective to describe a more full experience of that. And I want to extend a deep gratitude for both of you that you've created this space because selfishly, I got an amazing testimonial from Elizabeth, Like so much of what she said, I was like, Wow, Like, Really? That's so awesome. Because you don't always hear the experience, You know, Of someone that you've worked with. So it was like really cool to see how the work together has really played out for her. And I knew some of it, But it was amazing. But also just this paradigm of like collaboration and like discussion across modalities and kind of paradigms. I mean, I think most of it, We've pretty much shared very similar paradigms. And I want to thank you, Lydia, Too, Because, You know, Anybody that's on the wisdom side, They can immediately hear and know and ponder Lydia's wisdom. And anybody that's energetically sensitive can sense into the amount of hours and clients she's had and the amount of embodied intuitive wisdom that comes across that those of us that are energetically sensitive can pick up on. So it's an honor and a privilege and a pleasure to have you on here. All right. So with that, Thank you so much and we'll see you next time, Which will again be the last Tuesday of the month. That would be December 28th. See you then. Bye.