Trauma Release and Yoga with Dear Lovely Universe
Ripples over water
Transcript
Ericka Thomas 0:00
It retrains our nervous system reactivity. By letting ourselves approach that effort, and then stopping the tremor and resting, and then coming back in, you are showing that primitive brain a different way to respond to stress of all kinds, to effort of all kinds.
Welcome to the work IN your guide to natural ways out of stress, tension and trauma. My name is Ericka Thomas. I'm a certified trauma release exercise provider health coach, and yoga instructor, and I'm fusing my 20 plus years of experience to bring you a new perspective on health and wellness. I believe that true health and healing begins and ends with the nervous system. And that means, for most of us, we need to reintroduce those connections. The great news is that we can, and that's what the work IN is all about. Throughout this podcast, you'll find tools, resources, practices, people, and perspectives that will help you add to your own resilience arsenal and shake off the effects of all sources of chronic physical, mental, and emotional stress, my intention is solely to bring you information and empower you with permission to stop working out and start working in.
The work IN is brought to you by Kinetic Grace resilience, Kinetic Grace is an online program designed to teach safe self regulation of the stress response through the body using trauma release exercise guided body awareness, and the breadth. The program includes private instruction, exclusive access to certify providers and 30 days of group classes. And because it's online, kinetic grace is available anywhere you are. Enrollment is open now. Visit elemental kinetics.com to learn more.
Hi there everyone and welcome back to the work IN. I'm your host, Ericka Thomas, and today I have a very special treat for you. 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. And I hope you enjoy. So, let's get started with this episode of the work in with Kaelin Vu as your host.
Kaelin Vu 3:16
Hi Ericka, thank you so much for being here with me today.
Ericka Thomas 3:19
Hello Kailyn I am so pleased to join you.
Kaelin Vu 3:25
I am very excited. So today I really want to talk about shaking off stress, tension and anxiety with trauma releasing yoga, and I really love what you do, so I am so excited to see how this conversation goes. So my first question is, I saw one of your mission statements is to guide warriors like you off the battlefield of trauma for lasting resilience to all sources of stress and tension and anxiety. Tell me more about what that means.
Ericka Thomas 4:01
Yeah. So originally, when I moved out of corporate fitness, I was looking for a way to serve the military population. And, and everyone else who is suffering with stress and trauma. And that came from my family background. I'm actually, I was raised in a military family. Three brothers all of them served in the Army, my husband and I were in the army, my son serves currently in the Air Force, and so I am very aware of the trauma issues that come up for the military community.
In the course of my yoga teacher training, the workshops that I was being that I had the opportunity to participate in. There was a definite shift towards more trauma informed types of classes specifically for military, but what I found in my own, my own life, my own experience, my own experience with other clients both one on one, and in group settings, is that trauma and stress injury is something that is not limited to the military. And because of that. We, well, because of that I wanted to try to bring a more accessible way for people to move out of that tension that stays stuck in the body.
So, what really happens when we get exposed to any kind of stress or trauma or negative or positive activation is that the body asks us to do something about it. Right, that's the stress response. It wants us to take some kind of action. To survive, because that's really at a very basic primitive level, all that's going on with your primitive brain it's constantly scanning the horizon, looking for threats, making sure that whatever you're doing right now, doesn't look anything like what happened in the past that maybe caused you hurt. Okay, so if there's something that happens right now, that mimics something in your past the brain because all it's trying to do is create meaning for you and keep you alive, may see that current event, as just like what happened before and trigger all the same physiological responses in the body, fight or flight, freeze, withdrawal, sometimes simple things just as something as simple as just worry can be triggered. Even though maybe you know that this is nothing to worry about right, all kinds of things, thoughts and emotions can be triggered in the moment, right. And in our modern world, we are socialized, out of all of the, the primitive actions that our body would want to do to help keep us alive. We are not allowed to fight back physically anymore. Right. It's, it's not socially acceptable to punch a boss in the nose. You know. It's not socially acceptable to get up and run out of the room.
So we stuff all of those, those feelings, those requests from the body to do something. We stuff them down into the, into the body. They are held in our tissues, and the muscle in the fascia, especially, sometimes in our organs in our joints, all of that tension it's stored in the body. And for many people, they are looking for a way to kind of let go of that and one of the ways that you know is really popular is to go exercise right.
We try to go exercise for stress relief that's one of the main things that people want to do is to show up in a class, maybe it's a high intensity class maybe it's a kickboxing class maybe it's, it's a boot camp or something like that something was super high intensity, so that they can kind of beat it out of their body, righ. Because we're sensing this request for action, and it feels good in the moment, to do the that kind of movement, to do that kind of exercise.
Except that we're not releasing any of that tension. We are exhausting the body, not necessarily calming the nervous system. And what trauma release exercise does especially paired with the philosophies behind yoga, and yoga, yoga postures and flows, as well. When you can pair those two, it allows the body to experience movement in a safe way, that isn't adding extra tension and stress on the joints and the muscles and the fascia, and it allows us to practice this titrated stop and rest, as well as getting into this really primitive shaking tremor response, the same kind of shaking tremor response that you see in the wild.
If you've ever seen a video of a predator, chasing prey. So, you know, the cheetah, that is running after the gazelle. And if it misses that gazelle, and you watch what that Gazelle does after it gets away from that threat. It shakes, it shakes itself off. And then it goes back to being it's beautiful Gazelle self. It is not traumatized by that cheetah. Right, it doesn't go back to all of the other cheetahs, or all the other gazelles and get therapy. It just shakes, physically shakes off that response.
Now, obviously, because gazelles do not have this higher level of brain, it doesn't have this conscious mind that tries to create meaning out of that event, like we do. All right. And so that's where things can kind of get tangled up. When we connect and identify with the story that happened to us, and somehow that story holds more meaning than what the body really requires us to do to let go of it. So that's, that's really it. In a nutshell, that's what we're trying to do is to give people a way out of that tension that doesn't require this retelling of a story, so that the body itself can let go of that tension. If the body doesn't read any more tension in the body, and in it. If we're not reading any more threat when there isn't any, then there's no reason to go back and relive the things that have happened to us in the past.
Kaelin Vu 11:59
Wow thank you so much, that makes a lot of sense. Once you frame it like that, it makes so much sense why we can still work out but not necessarily be releasing trauma
Ericka Thomas 12:13
right there is a difference between physical exhaustion, and a calm nervous system. And I think sometimes when we get hung up on that. I know I was there, right, I thought, you know who I am. You know I'm teaching, I was right in that whole group fitness personal training world, and I thought, because I was still stressed out after a day of teaching like that that I needed to do more. And actually, my body was asking for less. It was asking for true rest from that tension, and I did not have any way to give that to myself at the time, this was years ago. But I want to give that to other people, what I did not have back then. And I think it doesn't matter what your background is whether you are a soldier or a housewife or corporate athlete or weekend warrior or just, you know, somebody who does zero exercise at all. You don't have to have a fitness background at all to be able to tap into your own, your body's innate wisdom to be able to let go of that tension.
Kaelin Vu 13:43
Absolutely, absolutely. It just reminds me that it's possible for everyone.
Ericka Thomas 13:49
Yes, yes, that is true, that is true because you are born knowing this. Well, not knowing it with your, your conscious mind but your body knows how to how to do all of this, we are then as we grow we are taught right we get, we get taught by the people around us, how to behave, how to function in society, and sometimes those are conscious lessons that we've learned, sometimes they're subconscious lessons that we learn, But we're learning them from people who are have also been taught from generations before their parents and their parents, parents, and that carries with it, this kind of transgenerational stress, tension and trauma, right, we are learning from, we are imperfect people who are learning from imperfect people.
Kaelin Vu 14:52
That's a really good point. So it's really important to figure out solutions on our own and sometimes pave our own path.
Ericka Thomas 14:59
right and there are so many things, there's so many things that are helpful for people, it's not just about one thing. This is just the one thing that I'm using, but there's other things that work for people too you know, Emotional Freedom Technique that tapping. Somatic Experiencing, just just yoga by itself, pilates, any kind of mindfulness, actually, that is the real key at the center of all of these opportunities to help people release stress. The center the key to each and every one of them is this ability to become more aware of what's happening in your own body, so fully.
Yeah and it takes some time to learn that right? I mean we don't, we're not, we're not really born understanding what we sense in our own body or even being very comfortable sensing those things. It can be pretty uncomfortable, you know, too. And actually I've had many many many clients, and other fellow instructors who flat out said, I, I can't do yoga, I don't do, I don't like it because I can't be still. I can't be still, I can't be by myself in my own head. Right.
And it's, it's difficult because we all have that little monkey mind thing happening right. Those little chattering thoughts that just raced through our head and not all of them are nice, most of them are not nice. Not nice thoughts. And I know you are, you Kailin are really, really focused on helping people move towards self love, right, and a lot of that is, is how you talk to yourself in your head, and so many people don't even notice how they're talking to themselves. They don't slow down enough to even hear it. It's just this, this record that skips over and over in their head about who they are and how that how they are and their worth, and, and all of these things.
Kaelin Vu 17:25
So, yeah, their core beliefs and patterns that play,
Ericka Thomas 17:29
absolutely, absolutely core beliefs and patterns, and those patterns can be really really deeply ingrained in the brain. And so deeply ingrained that you can't even separate them out. It's like this. It's like when you've got a bunch of necklaces that get tangled and it's just the big blob of chain, and they're just tied and there's just nothing that will bring them out except for patients. Slow patients to tease out each link to set them free again.
Kaelin Vu 18:06
I definitely want to just touch on that, and mentioned, it's totally possible. I think you said patience. It, it's totally possible though I mean we're both living examples of that.
Ericka Thomas 18:18
Yeah, yeah. And that's something that I think, that I think people would benefit from looking for in whatever. I would say whatever modality that they choose for themselves, for healing for themselves. To look for those that allow for that patience. That allow for practicing, replacing this pattern, replacing it with something new. Right.
So, in the nervous system. When we work with trauma release, and through other physical forms of stress relief. We're working bottom up. It's a bottom up process, instead of top down where we're talking through all of our issues right top down is talking through, bottom up is anything that we can do through the body.
So the way we move the body can communicate to the primitive brain, a sense of safety. What we're really trying to do when we practice that kind of thing is to replace some of those current patterns of reactivity with something new, something that's less reactive and some of the part of the beauty of of trauma release exercise is that you're practicing this stop and rest and noticing the effort that you're putting in to the, the movement to the tremor itself, and keeping that effort very very low.
And so, for many people it's, it's difficult at first to understand how hard they're working at anything, really. We’re just kind of, we are very driven people, right. It's just drive, drive, suck it up, suck it up and drive on. So, if you've been raised that way or if you've been raised with this idea of no pain no gain, it’s really, really hard to pull back from that and try easy, instead of trying hard in any kind of physical exercise.
And trauma release that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to keep the effort level to a five or less. And when we feel the physical effort or mental or emotional effort, start to approach that five, that is our, our message to stop and rest. It retrains our nervous system reactivity. By letting ourselves approach that effort, and then stopping the tremor and resting, and then coming back in, you are showing that primitive brain a different way to respond to stress of all kind, to effort of all kinds, not just when you're lying on the mat, not just when you are standing in a yoga pose or something like that, but off the mat. You know in traffic in line at the grocery store, in one conversation with a spouse. So those things, those small moments of practice over time can start to replace a lot of learned patterning, in the brain, but again it does, like you said, patience, right.
Kaelin Vu 22:08
Mm hmm. That's so important. Thank you so much for sharing all that it's so, so good.
So, I saw it but you mentioned this on your website, and I think it's a really important point to bring up that the body has infinite capability, or no capacity for healing that goes beyond our physical understanding, and if that, if we could get out of our own way miracles can happen. I love this because I'm always telling people your body knows what to do. But, tell me more about what this means to you.
Ericka Thomas 22:50
So, we are always looking for perfection, right. So, a quick fix, and perfection. This is, I mean, this is a big question right, this shows up for people in a lot of different ways, everybody you talked to, it's the same kind of thing, right, we all are sort of driven towards what we think is an ideal for ourself or for our body or for you know a family or whatever we're talking about right. When we're talking about the human body, the only job it has is to keep you alive.Like your nervous system is very very simple. At its simplest level it's just trying to keep you alive. It's going to do that. whatever way it can and not always in ways that we like. Okay, so it's going to adapt to whatever we ask it to do, in whatever way it can. This is, this is an evolutionary thing, it's a survival thing and this adaptation.
Right, so if you want to think in a very benign example would be just fitness in general, right, so the human body in order to get stronger, let's say you want to just be stronger, you have to ask it to do more than it can already do. Okay, so if I want stronger biceps let's say I have to pick up more weight than five pounds because I can already pick up five pounds. I have to use something more than what I can already do in order for it to change to get stronger to do more. Okay, the body will do that, it will give me that if I ask for that.
All right, but underneath that the body is constantly trying to keep me alive. And if I am constantly piling on different kinds of stressors, which could look like psychological stress when I say stress, a lot of times people just think okay psychological stress like we are very busy or we have a lot of responsibility or obligations and we're running from place to place to place to place a lot of people count on us. Yes, that is stress, that is one type of stress. It could also be physical stress from poor nutrition, right, so I could be stressing my system by eating garbage food, fast food, candy all the time. I could be stressing my system with a smoking habit, or an alcohol habit, or a drug habit. I could be stressing my system with over exercise because we think exercise is healthy, but as it has to be dose related right, if we go too much, then we injure ourselves, right. I could be stressing my system, by not sleeping, not getting enough sleep or drinking too much caffeine so that I can't sleep well. Right.
Those every single one of those stressors, by themselves, don't cause dysfunction. It is an a cumulative effect that will cause physiological dysfunction in the body, and that shows up last. And we're not even talking about stressors, long term stressors from unresolved traumas in your past, because that still stays in the body. The body remembers that if we have not released that energy. So, so, if, if you are at a point in your life where your body has started to scream at you. And what I mean by that is a physical dysfunction has shown up. So it could be, diabetes, it could be metabolic syndrome which is high blood pressure and high cholesterol and this cluster of illness, or it could be autoimmune dysfunction, right, as simple as allergies as simple as, as acne breaking out. These things are your body just, you know,whispering to you that something is not right, that, that maybe it could use a break.
But here I am stressing my body with layers upon layers upon layers of of work, and I just make it harder for it. I'm just making it harder for it. I am in my own way. And when you can start to look at your, this vessel that you live in, your body as something to be cared for, something to be cherished and start to behave in that way that you truly believe that that your body is something to be cherished. It changes everything. That attitude changes, everything about your health, and what actual wellness is in the body.
And then, because that mindset has to happen first, it's, it's really unless you have this big reason, unless you really believe that this body that you're in matters, then it's really really tough to move towards healthier things right. And because you don't have a why you don't have I mean, why should you quit smoking if you enjoy it so much. You know, why should you? I mean there's, I have a lot of family members who are smokers, and they are perfectly happy doing that because the consequences have been so far removed from the first cigarette. You know, they they're there, they're fine with it. Their body isn't fine. And, and they're making it very difficult to survive on this planet.
So, I'm all for personal choice, like, but I'm also for taking responsibility for your choices, and we don't have to suffer. We were not put on this planet to suffer in the body that we have. And so that's, that's what that is about. If we can, if we can lift some of the pressure off of not just our physical body, but the nervous system itself we lift that pressure off, and, and allow the body to recover. That's basically what we do when we, when we take care of our nervous system, when we give it that time to rest and repair it will heal. It will take time, but it will heal that absolutely wow. So yeah, that's it.
That's what that statement means to me.
Kaelin Vu 0:03
That's so awesome. Oh my gosh. I really love how you have like layers to your answers, and so in depth. It's so true. We put so many layers of stress on ourselves, and it builds up, it builds up first, it comes as whispers, right, right, yeah. And then it can be as sudden are seeming as sudden as our crash or something like that. Absolutely, until your body forces you to stop.
Ericka Thomas 0:36
Exactly, and we don't like it, we don't like it when it forces us to stop and then we're like, we think there's something wrong there, that we're broken right when the body forces you to stop we think we're broken. And it's not necessarily that it's just that, you know we've been stuck somewhere for too long.
Kaelin Vu 0:57
Oh, exactly. Whenever I have experienced where I get sick, or something happens like that. I tried to evaluate my life, what have I been doing to get me to this point. And, you know, make changes accordingly.
Ericka Thomas 1:16
Yeah and that's so important, especially now right Kailyn because we are, you know, hopefully coming out of this pandemic but immune system function is top of mind for a lot of people. And there are so many of us that have been living in a state of being that has suppressed our immune system for years, and it's no wonder that we're so susceptible to things, right, it's, it's, it's actually where you see and you can kind of see that across, across the population to. Right. And, you know, it's not that we want to assign judgment to that, good or bad or right or wrong, but we definitely should be moving towards a place where we are conscious of what it is that we're, we're doing for ourselves instead of to ourself. Mm hmm.
Kaelin Vu 2:21
Yeah. That is a really good point, and it comes back to treating ourselves with love and respect, and caring and caring about ourselves and nurturing our bodies, it's a huge shift in our mindset and perspective.
Ericka Thomas 2:38
Yeah and, and, you know, for I don't know how many of your listeners are for anybody out there who's a parent, you know, or for moms specifically I know it's difficult sometimes for women. We are often raised to be caretakers, but ourself, we ourselves, ended up being the last on the list if we even make the list. And as far as a priority to have to take care of. Right.
And so it can be really hard to see, self care, or to even pause in your day to do something specifically for yourself, to kind of lift that pressure off. If that's the space that you're in, you know. We can we can put a lot on our shoulders that doesn't necessarily have to be there. And, and so, yeah, I mean anything. It doesn't have to be something big. It doesn't have to be like well I'm going to go once a month to the spa. We don't have to do that for self care. We can do, like tiny little moments in our day, a little moment of of five minutes of breathing, you know, or a moment of prayer or devotion. Anything that allows us to come back into that mindful state, where we can just check in with the body and just see where we're at. Just like you were talking about, you know, if you're feeling like, hey, something physical is starting to happen maybe we need to think about what's happening, you know, up in our, in our head a little bit, and how that contributed, if at all.
Kaelin Vu 4:27
Hmm, definitely, absolutely. One of the things that I actually recommend to people is to have a list of things that make you feel better. And then when you, when you aren't feeling so great. Review your lists and choose something from there. Personally I know taking a shower and washing my hair makes me feel better. So when I start to feel overwhelmed or stressed out. That's one of the first go twos, for me, and, you know, calling a friend and you know walking my dog, those are the things I love to do and I just really recommend people to have a list that or at least know what it is that makes them feel better.
Ericka Thomas 5:07
Yeah, and it's interesting isn't it? Those things are just normal regular things. Right. They're nothing special. It's not like you have to take yourself out of your day to walk your dog, hopefully. But it still makes you feel good, it's something that you can put intention behind, and, and for a lot of people we lack intention, about the things that we do, we lack intention and attention. We've got all kinds of distractions, ways that will take us out of our head. The phone, TV, social media, you know, all of these things, they, they, they take you out of your head, but if you can do whatever it is that you do, as long as you're doing it intentionally, for your self, it, it will work. It will work.
Kaelin Vu 6:08
I really like that, and emphasize intention, that's that's a really important thing. Absolutely, yeah. So, I really want to talk about in touch on before you know then of this episode with the time that we have left your story. Man, if you could share that with listeners and kind of just what you've been through and how you got to where you are now.
Ericka Thomas 6:35
Okay. Okay, so there is a, this is kind of a long story because I'm old Kailin so please bear that in mind. I will try to keep it short and sweet, but for me I will say, okay, so I work in this trauma informed space now, but there was a point where I thought that the only people that experienced trauma, were soldiers and victims of sexual assault. And since I did not experience either one of those things, I felt like I was immune to the effects of trauma. However, there is big T trauma, and there is little T trauma. And when my family got out of the military. My husband and I came back from Germany. My children were very young. And that is the point where I started to experience some random anxiety and panic attacks, and my heart would start to kind of palpitate. And I couldn't catch my breath. And these things just started happening kind of out of the blue.
And at the time, I was not involved in any kind of fitness I wasn't in the fitness industry yet, so I just sort of ignored them I didn't know what to do with them, and they didn't happen ever in a doctor's office so I can say hey you know I'm having a heart attack right now, I mean, it didn't quite feel that bad but it was, it was very disconcerting, like when your heart races for, for no reason, when you're just, you know, standing in the grocery store, and I couldn't understand what was going on.
When I began my fitness career, it was through martial arts, and I loved martial arts. I loved the power in it, I loved hitting that bag and kicking that bag and sparring with other people, but it was just like we talked about earlier, there was exhaustion without calm and actually movement like that can kind of ramp up your, what we call activation or arousal of your nervous system. And that's what it was doing. And I had no idea what what this was doing to me, but it wasn't going away, you know, the tension was just coming up higher and higher and higher. When you ignore responses and reactions in your body, they don't just go away, they just go, they go somewhere, they go somewhere in your body.
And so over the years because I moved into kickboxing and other types of exercise. I basically turned everything that I love to do for myself into a career in the fitness industry, and I could not say no to a new class. And I know before we started recording we were talking a little bit about boundaries, I had zero boundaries. I had no way to say no. I said yes to every class and I was teaching at a level like 24 hours a week of group fitness classes where I was leading, actively leading those classes. So that's like doing three or four marathons, a week, and then,like I mentioned earlier, I thought I needed something to do for myself because I taught for other people but I needed something for myself.
So I picked running, right. Running 30 miles 40 miles a week on top of that schedule and my body physically was shutting down my digestive system. And it got to the point I had this, I had just excruciating gut pain that had built up so slowly, it built up so slowly I did not even realize it was an issue until I got to the point where I was aware I thought I have to quit my job.
I had moved into corporate fitness so I got to teach, like four hours straight and during the day. I thought I was gonna have to try to quit because I couldn't, I couldn't be there in that much pain. And I would go to the doctor. I went to the GI, went to see two differentGI doctors and all they can do, all they could do is, prescribe medication.And the medication had so many terrible side effects at the end it didn't alleviate any pain.
I was desperate. I was literally desperate so I had, I was still having panic and anxiety attacks. I was in a really bad pain, and I was slipping into a kind of a depressive state. I won't say depression because it wasn't diagnosed as that but this depressive state. And anyone who's been under chronic pain for any length of time that's, that's very, very common. It is completely related to how that Vagus nerve reads what's happening in your body and then how it communicates that to your brain.
And finally, finally, my husband found this random article about a food cleanse and I'm like I don't even know what that is, why should I never wanted to do a food cleanse, I never wanted to cleanse at all because I thought I am like this guru in the fitness industry Kailin, I should have. I eat, I can eat whatever I want, right if you burn 2000 calories a day you should be able to eat whatever you want. That was the thought in my head, the incorrect thought in my head.
Well, I was desperate to try anything. And so we did this food cleanse it was out of a book called clean, which was written by Alejandro Junger and that the last name is spelled J U N G E R, and it, it was a type of a cleanse that rested your gut, and that's what I needed, I needed rest. I needed rest from whatever the whatever was going on with me.
And it took nine months after doing that cleanse, and I'm not gonna lie, it was hard. It was a 40 day thing. And nine months later I woke up one day and I was, I felt like I was forgetting something. And I couldn't it was like, I don't know I made it to lunchtime and I, what is I feel like I'm forgetting something and then I realized that I had no more pain, that I didn't feel any pain. That was something that was like with me all the time.
Now, was, was it perfect, did it stay completely perfect? No, I had to make other changes through nutrition, and I made some big shifts in how I was teaching my classes, and the types of classes I was teaching I cut way back on the high intensity. And about that time is when I started to move into more trauma informed yoga, and to bring in that, that trauma release exercise with the tremor, to allow my nervous system to kind of rest and heal at the same time because everything is connected. It’s never ever ever about only one thing. You can't just pop a pill and have it fix everything because everything you intake into your body affects everything else. And food is a major way that we communicate with our body. So if we aren’t eating kindly, then the body takes it as an assault, and that's where, that's where I was.
And I will say that I am in a really good place right now, a lot of things resolved when my nutritional balance resolved, and I still experiment with different types and varieties of food to just kind of keep myself curious about what might work even better.
Right. So I think you know if there's a lesson in there for people it's that never give up on yourself. There's, there's something out there and the universe will provide you with a solution, it might not be the first, the first solution that you're handed, right, but we don't want to give up ever on ourself, on our body or our mind or spirit, because there's, there's something here that there's something that you have to give to the world. And we would all be better off with it.
Kaelin Vu 16:48
Thank you so much Ericka. Oh, it was such an amazing story. I'm so happy that you found your solution, and have come to this amazing place. It seems like, usually one, some of the things that people are having the biggest challenges but in their lives that that challenge that they overcome, and then helping other people overcome that challenge is, sometimes one of the greatest gifts.
Ericka Thomas 17:19
Yeah. Yes, and it's, it's, it's interesting because I think for me, sometimes it's difficult for me to remember that what I have experienced may not seem like all that big of a deal but somebody out there might need to hear it. Somebody out there might. And that goes for each and every one of us. We don't have to hide the path that got us where we are. And even if you're not through whatever it is, everybody is still going through something. Right.
I mean, we'd like to think that we can set some kind of wellness goal for ourselves, whether that's mental health or physical health or something, and then we can actually achieve it and then we don't have to work on it anymore. Wouldn’t that be great if we didn't have to work on it anymore? But it doesn't work that way. Right, yeah, because we are always growing and learning and, and, and, you know, having new experiences with new people, and I feel so grateful to be here with you today Kaelin because, because I feel like you have such a great story to tell as well. And, and I'm just so grateful for the opportunity to share my story with your listeners as well.
Kaelin Vu 18:53
Well, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your value, I really do and you spend incredible time. Do you have any final messages that you would like to share.
Ericka Thomas 19:05
I think we've covered so much today and I think it can feel really overwhelming to people when you are in the moment of overwhelm from stress from physical tension from chronic pain, whatever it is, it can feel so so overwhelming. Like where do you start, where can I go. But no matter what. Everyone, all of us starts only right where we are, that's the only place we can start is where we are. And so, we should really kind of let go of this idea that we have to be some sort of perfect person, in order to begin, whatever it is, that is our best life. Your best life starts right now.
Kaelin Vu 20:04
Amen. I love that. So good. Where can people find you Oh,
Ericka Thomas 20:12
we can get together on elementalkinetics.com in fact if you wanted to try one of my grace and grit fusion classes with yoga and trauma release, there is an opportunity to try a free class at elemental kinetics.com If you want to chat a little bit if you think maybe trauma release might be for you but you're not sure, on the website, elementalkinetics.com/inquiry is where you will find a link to my scheduler I'd love to chat we can do a free little 30 minute consultation and get to know each other, or we can connect on social media at Instagram, It's elementalkinetics and on Facebook, it's at elementalkineticsmovewell.
Kaelin Vu 21:06
Amazing, thank you so much for sharing. You know I actually signed up for your yoga class, so I'm excited for that.
Yes, thank you so much, Ericka. I really appreciate you coming on.
Ericka Thomas 21:19
Thank you Kaelin.
Thanks for joining us today on this very special collaboration with Kailyn Vu from Dear Lovely Universe. And if you like what you heard, and you want to hear a little bit more or learn a little bit more about trauma release in yoga, head over to elementalkinetics.com, and check out our free resources there as well as all of the show notes and transcripts from today's episode, and I'll see you next time on the work in.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Links
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Dear Lovely Universe
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I’m Ericka
I’m the host The Work IN podcast and your guide off the battlefield of stress using trauma release and yoga.
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