Welcome to The Work IN!

Trauma Release and Yoga with Dear Lovely Universe

Episode 38, and 39 of the work in our, a beautiful collaboration between myself and Kailyn Vu from Dear Lovely Universe. We decided to get a little creative and swap hosts for each of our podcasts. So today you're going to hear Kaelin, interviewing me about trauma release exercise and yoga, about the connection between the nervous system and our health, about how we can better nourish ourselves, body, mind and spirit. It's a great conversation.

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Ericka Thomas Ericka Thomas

4 Reasons Yoga Works for Depression & Anxiety

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. for ages 15 to 44.3. Nearly half of those diagnosed with depression are also diagnosed with anxiety disorder as well. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the US affecting over 40 million people while only 35% of those seek treatment. An even more disturbing statistic is 25% of children are affected. Today I want to highlight 4 things that are baked into a yoga practice that make it a highly effective tool beyond “regular” exercise for relieving depressive symptoms and anxiety.

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Ericka Thomas Ericka Thomas

Resilience: Physical fitness for your nervous system

We can't remove all of the challenges, all of the triggers that we could possibly come into contact with simply to make ourselves feel more resilient because resilience isn't about being calm all the time. Resilience is about rising to the challenge whatever it is, and then coming back to our calm. And if we want to get better at doing that, then we need to practice doing that.

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Ericka Thomas Ericka Thomas

Connections Part 4: Invisibility of chronic pain and trauma

When you live with chronic pain, there is nothing about your life that is not affected when you live with chronic pain. And that is an aspect that the people around you can't quite understand so it's difficult to share the experience. You know, one of the most challenging things I think for most people is their sense of identity their sense of self often the things that they did that they identified with as being them, are things that they are no longer able to do and then you have this whole identity crisis moment of figuring out well who am I?

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Ericka Thomas Ericka Thomas

Connections Part 3: Giving the body a new story

Physical pain is no different than feeling abandoned. It's no different than... our nervous system doesn't recognize emotional pain from physical pain, it's all the same. So whether you're someone who's dealing with anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma, chronic pain, acute pain, if you can learn how to tune into your nervous system. Become aware, learn to titrate, give it what it can accept, and keep trying to give it just that little bit more and then always bring it back to the safety when it's at a point where it can't quite handle it anymore. And then go there again. It's amazing the changes that you can see.

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Ericka Thomas Ericka Thomas

How the Body Perceives Stress: An Insider’s Guide

I want to share my Insider's Guide to How the Body Perceives Stress to help you understand how your emotional response and stress response are connected through the body. Because chronic, toxic levels of stress can affect not only our mental and emotional health but our physical health as well.

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