Latest / Inner Alchemy with George Stuby – Trauma, Music and Plant Medicine / E14 - Eliah Prichard: From Anxiety to Authenticity – Embracing Emotional Freedom
Transcript
- speaker-0: Your emotions are the language of your body. And most of us, we're never taught emotional fluency. we're often taught that anger is the only thing to show. That's the only appropriate emotion to express. But also don't express anger because then you're a dangerous man, right? Like, what kind of a catch-22 is that? So I know a lot of my male clients, they feel anger, then they suppress anger, and they don't know all of the other emotions that are coming up underneath that because they've... shut them down for so long and you just get more and more connected in a way that's so fulfilling and you get to have way more fun because you get to be who you naturally are out in the world without feeling contained by social standards or by the past that you experience and how you learned to be. get to choose how to be now. speaker-1: Welcome to Inner Alchemy with me, George Stubbe. Turma, music and plant medicine. This is the podcast for people who achieve a lot and still feel that something is missing. If you are caught between anxiety, perfectionism, emotional shutdown, and if you are ready to find a quiet mind flow and a sense of who you are is truly enough, then those conversations are for you. Through honest conversations with With people who have done the deep inner work, we explore what it truly takes to move from superficial success to deep meaning. I'm George Stubbe, a psychologist and certified music therapist specializing in nervous system regulation. I love to utilize music, breathwork, plant medicine and approaches that work through the body to create experiences that really shift the nervous system and not just the mind. because the true change is happening in the body. Let's dive in. Yeah, welcome to this episode of Inner Alchemy, Trauma Music and Plant Medicine. And I'm super happy to be here in London today with Elia Pritchard. And I'm just going to read her a bio and then we start it from there. Elia is a former therapist and trauma-informed breathwork facilitator, empowering the first therapy-free generation by teaching the skills most of us never taught. Emotional fluency and full self-expression. Through the Feelgood membership in the Self-Liberation School, she's building a global community of people who refuse to live stressed and self-contained. Together, they are raising the bar for emotional freedom, inspiring relationships, and meaningful creative legacies. speaker-0: Here we go. It's nice to be here. speaker-1: that we're here together. Me too. And I thought we could start with a bit of grounding. Yeah. Because that's usually how we would start sessions with clients, right? speaker-0: Absolutely, got a ground, got a ground, especially for folks that have really learned that doing the work means being up in your mind, connecting down into the body is so important. Especially if you want to create any sort of lasting change. Would you like me to lead that today? ⁓ the honor is mine. All right, so go ahead and just feel into where you're seated, what's supporting you, maybe anchor your feet on the ground here. Take a deep breath. in your nose, out your mouth, extending that exhale. You can have your eyes open or closed, whatever feels good for you. And I want you to start to bring awareness to some of the sensations of your body that maybe you weren't aware of before. the textures surrounding your feet. the air around your fingers. and the sensation of that breath coming in your nostrils. as it lifts your chest and your heart up toward the sky, fills your belly. and the sensation of that exhale with that beautiful contraction that it brings before your next breath. And with this really beautiful conscious kind of continual connection to your breath, I'm actually going to invite you to lift your hands up and to just start touching around your head. notice what it feels like to hold this space physically. that's often trying to move us forward in our life. from the mental or cognitive space. Right, our mind does so much for us, thinking things through and planning ahead. Notice any shifts that occur. as you move your hands from the front to the back of your skull. when the physical body is supported. And notice how good it feels. to support the body, to connect to it. And on your next exhale, breathing out as if you're letting something go that's ready to shift, ready to release. You might even move your hands down towards your shoulders or your heart space or your arms, wherever it feels natural. And again from this space, just becoming aware that it's not just the mind that leads us forward, but the body as well. and that there's so much wisdom in your physical form. here to support you in discovering what feels good, what feels like a yes for you and a no for you. and ultimately where to move forward into the life that you desire from this place, in this moment. One final beautiful big breath in and holding at the top. noticing your incredible ability to contain. and choose when to release at a time that feels right for you. and coming back to your space when you're ready. speaker-1: Wonderful. Thank you so much. speaker-0: So welcome. speaker-1: Yeah, you already gave a hint why it's important to do grounding and why it's important to carve out moments during our days to do those kind of tools and techniques. Can you expand a bit on that? speaker-0: Yeah, well, as someone who spent many, many years trying to figure out how to feel good in that I was really wanting to release the anxiety that I felt every day and the stress of being a student, being someone that worked in the traditional mental health field, ⁓ and someone that just had a lot of self-doubt. but could never quite figure out how to actually feel different in my body. I spent 10 years studying traditional mental health and still felt daily stress and anxiety. It wasn't... Yeah, right? And it can be frustrating, I think, when you're someone that's self-motivated and self-aware and you're like, I'm doing the work, I'm reading the books, I'm learning the things, but I'm not feeling tangible change in my body on a regular basis. I know I can feel better than this. What am I missing? What's the missing piece? It wasn't until I really started studying how to allow the wisdom of the body to direct the conscious mind through my trauma-informed breathwork facilitation training that everything started to fall into place and I started to free physically, not just in my ability to think things through and plan ahead and take action. And so I would say that at this point in my life, If I want to move through the day really meaningfully and also joyfully, I anchor into the body first. And I remember that there's so much sensation and thought and feeling here. There's so much information available to me about what's right or what I should prioritize or where I need to go, what I want to create in my physical form. allowing my body to lead from that place, allowing it to inform my structured mind on where to go, is so much more effective, not only in me being present during what I'm creating, rather than being stressed out, but in feeling really fulfilled at the end of it, I think, before I started really building a bridge between my mind and my body. Didn't matter what I accomplished, because I was on to the next thing, trying to move on to the next goal. the next program, the next career, and still feeling like there was just this hole in who I was that I couldn't fill. So these grounding practices, and there's infinite grounding practices you can do. You can use your breath, you can use movement, you can use creativity, you can use sound and music. Voice. Yeah, all of the senses, ⁓ they bring you into your wholeness and your presence. and ultimately your ability to feel safe creating whatever you want to create in that moment. So that's it. That's all we're doing. speaker-1: I think that's an excellent explanation why grounding is so important. Yeah, in that sense, I also always think about a therapist I worked with, like the first therapist I worked with in the ⁓ big world, and also Matic approaches, so approaches that work with the body and the nervous system. And The way she put it is that grounding also is preparation for bigger things to come up. Because the more we do grounding, the more resourced our nervous system becomes. So the bigger the window of tolerance, right? what our nervous system can handle without going into fight, flight or freeze. That's also really important to do the deeper work of accessing moments of our lives, of our past that we haven't found peace with yet. So it has served so many things. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. On a daily basis, I feel like most of my grounding is just supporting me and navigating the modern world. As Where I'm constantly being thrown emails and social media and recording content and there things that are useful and really beneficial in building relationships and working with people globally or internationally. And yet, the body is not evolved to handle all of those points of connection, all those points of information. But just as you were talking about, the more often you practice being grounded with those 7,000 tabs that you might have open in your mind or all the physical things around you that can seek attention from you and draw your focus, the more present you're going to be when something unexpected happens. speaker-1: It's a lot. speaker-0: the wider that window of tolerance for the unexpected and the unknown grows so that you can stay stable and grounded and present while all the people around you are stressing out and losing connection to their ability to really think things through and make informed decisions about how to move forward. speaker-1: Yeah. And that's why grounding is also a superpower, no matter if you're a doctor or a lawyer or a musician or anything, right? Because the more calm and focused and present you can stay, no matter what's happening, better your decision will be, the better you can perform in whatever you're doing in your job or in your... I don't like the word performing when it comes to relationships, but you can stay present with your partner even so she might say something that's challenging or that's bringing you out of your comfort zone. And you can stay in connection with people without going into anger or into fear or into like, I need to get out of here into running away. speaker-0: Yeah, or my favorite of the coping ⁓ defense survival mechanisms, which is people-pleasing. That was my favorite, anyway. A little fawn. Same. A little fawning. ⁓ I know that things like grounding and breath work and even meditation still for a lot of people feels very woo-woo. It feels very hippie-dippie and sometimes sort of counterculture to a lot of these careers where people are seeking to be successful in lawyers, doctors, CEOs, corporate managers, these sorts of things. And so for those folks that are listening to that and they're like, I don't know, this sounds a bit out there, a bit maybe spiritual or like counter-cultural, that you are breathing right now. So the word breath work really just means intentional connection to your breath. We already know too scientifically that breath work, for instance, speaker-1: Exactly. speaker-0: will actively decrease your level of stress long term when you do it in really simple short practices. And so there are so many things that science also supports as supportive for de-stressing, being present, and navigating anything that's unknown in your career. Putting your feet on the grass and literally connecting with nature, right? Even things like movement and dance and singing and I don't know, what are your favorite grounding practices? Because there's so many that there are scientific studies for it. speaker-1: Definitely breathing, breathwork in any form and thoughts. What I learned in breathwork is that holding the breath is actually the most powerful form of it. So I love breathwork where it's about long breath holds. Definitely music and singing, just playing guitar and singing. For me as a musician, tapping, I find really amazing, which is like using your fingers to stimulate. nerve endings or like maybe dents in your body. The face and the upper body. speaker-0: Yeah. Stillness is really good one. stillness. Slowing down. The hardest thing most people that are motivated to create something in their life ever learn is to slow down and feel safe slowing down. speaker-1: Yeah, for sure. just doing things very consciously and slowly like this kind of Zen approach of like washing the dishes and really washing the dishes and being there. like with like co-regulation with another person. speaker-0: What do you think? Collegation can be super powerful when you allow yourself to really mirror or receive a regulated state, a grounded state from somebody else. It's really, really juicy. speaker-1: definitely nature. And there are also some things like cacao, for example, which I love together with breathing. speaker-0: Well, we know that bitterness, like anything that tastes bitter, dark chocolate, cacao for instance, really regulating for the nervous system. So permission, yeah, permission to eat a lot of chocolate, you you eat your heart out with that one. Call it nervous system regulation. speaker-1: Exactly. And then I also love psychedelics. I'm a psychedelic assisted therapist. So I'm guiding a lot of people in psychedelic journeys, mainly with psilocybin in the Netherlands, where it's completely legal. ⁓ In that way, I also love microdosing with different psychedelic substances. And I noticed the more I do breathing and the other practices, the less I tend to feel it. calling towards that. speaker-0: Yeah, because you're being internally resourced in maintaining that connection with yourself. That's actually a huge shift, I think, kind of globally, a lot of us are awakening to and learning that we can find our sense of self-connection on our own. We can self-lead that in a way and be internally resourced. speaker-1: I agree, yeah, totally. speaker-0: rather than what a lot of us were taught was just to be externally resourced to refer to doctors or therapists or shopping, yeah, food, practices, lifestyle, belongings for a sense of personal safety, security, and also fulfillment. And it's a totally different thing to refer to yourself and go, something is activating in my system that's telling me I'm not comfortable right now. speaker-1: Yeah, that's massive. speaker-0: call it anxiety, call it stress, call it overwhelm, call it fear, whatever it might be. What does that actually mean for me? What's my body need me to know? knowing that you can find that by becoming emotionally fluent in really interpreting what your emotions are telling you as a language. speaker-1: Emotionally fluent meaning for you. speaker-0: Emotionally fluent is being able to accurately interpret the signals of your emotions when it comes to what they are telling you, what you need to feel safe and connected and inspired. Your emotions are the language of your body. And most of us were never taught emotional fluency, right? We learned history, we learned math, we may have learned cooking in school, but we didn't learn how to work with our emotions. And that is the guidance that most people are seeking outside of themselves. And then... kind of feeling flat when they're not getting the answer that works for them is because the answer is already inside your body, activating through sensation that we call emotion. And those are telling you exactly what's right for you, what's wrong for you, what you need more of, what you need less of, and where to go when you learn how to listen to it. But it's like building any other language, right? And really learning another language. You have to... start to notice it and become aware of the sounds and the shapes and how your body speaks to you through emotion. And start testing and trialing to see what works for you from that guidance. How did you learn to start listening to your emotions versus just trying to think everything through in your journey? speaker-1: 100%. Well, a few years back, I came back from a festival and I was like super dysregulated, like strong anxiety and I felt like, you know, walking, when you walk under, when you walk close to or underneath like this kind of high currency lines, high voltage lines, you have to, it's really loud, right? You have to sound. That's how I felt internally in my nervous system. speaker-0: buzzing. speaker-1: Yeah, like really buzzing, but not in a pleasant way. You really like, it's really unpleasant. speaker-0: Yeah, anxiety feels like that to me too, like electricity that you can't quite settle. speaker-1: Exactly. And Yeah, at that point I realized, okay, I need some support with that because it stayed like that for four days or 10 days or longer than that. As it goes, I... I just picked up a package from a neighbor in Amsterdam and the first time I met her, because apparently she was traveling for a long time. And we got into conversation and realized we have a lot of things in common with music and a lot of common interests. And then she talked a bit about her day and that she'd just seen a client and a client who dot dot dot. And then she described exactly my situation. So that was like amazing. speaker-0: Yeah. I understand. Synchronicity? Yes. speaker-1: ⁓ and I did a session with her and that was, would say the first session I've done that was really working with the nervous system and with the body. At that point, I've done 15 years or more of like self development and of therapy and different approaches. and it's really much what you described at the beginning, having done a lot, but still feeling like anxiety or uncomfortable. speaker-0: Yeah. Nothing is more frustrating. Yeah. speaker-1: It's really frustrating. Yeah. When you know, when you thought I've done every, I've tried everything. I've done all the things that are recommended and still not better in a really significant way. ⁓ so that was my first contact with it. And then I've done, a few sessions with her and then also with another practitioner in somatic experiencing was one of the approaches. speaker-0: Yeah. What is somatic experiencing? speaker-1: Sematic Experiencing is a therapy approach developed by Dr. Peter Levine who is one of the absolute pioneers in trauma-informed working. in doing therapy and work with people where you acknowledge that trauma exists, what trauma is and how trauma manifests in the body. And I like the definition of trauma, that trauma is not what happened to you, it's not the event. It's how your nervous system reacted towards it at that point. And usually the deep imprints are happening when we are very young. That means we don't have a lot of options how we react to it. ⁓ And it's usually freeze because we cannot fight and we cannot run away. So we freeze, we shut it, we push it down and that energy stays in the body and it's an unfinished cycle. speaker-0: All speaker-1: And yeah, Tor Mindform work acknowledges that and knows how to work with that. And in somatic experiencing, ⁓ The therapist or practitioner sits down with you and helps you to connect to your body and through that to your emotions. that's your question about how I learned being emotionally fluent was exactly through that. Through like, okay, what ⁓ I would tell about my day or my week and about something that irritated me and then she would take me back to that and ask me, okay, what do you feel in your body when you tell that story? speaker-0: And that's speaker-1: At the very beginning. And then, okay, I feel at the beginning, actually nothing. I was really not in my body. It took a few sessions to say, okay, I feel a bit of tension in my stomach or I feel a bit of nausea. And then, okay, what's the emotion behind that? And then, okay, the emotion is anger or sadness or fear. speaker-0: Yeah. I think that's really important though to highlight. speaker-1: While to learn how to also know this is sadness, this is fear, that's how it's showing up for me. And also to learn, fear sits more in the chest, nausea is often in the stomach, there's often sadness behind it. speaker-0: It takes time to build what you'd call emotional literacy. Right? Like how you put a name to or label the sensations in your body. But I think it's so important to acknowledge that for you in that moment of your life, having learned a million different ways to work with yourself and try to improve and try to be at peace and try to be successful mentally, you still felt stressed physically. And it wasn't like you started working with a practitioner who said, well, what do you feel in your body? And you're instantly like, oh. everything's now aligned and working and I have access to that information. There were a number of different sessions, were like consistent practices of showing up and learning to listen to the body rather than project onto it before you were finally able to start getting into conversation with your body. And I so many people feel that, especially if you were socialized not to express emotions, not to talk about them, not to really even feel them. It's so normal to turn towards your body and be like, okay, these people on this podcast told me to listen to my body. What do I hear? And to hear nothing. speaker-1: ⁓ This practitioner told me afterwards that I was the type of client that she had to ask her supervisor many times for like, this client can just, he's not able to go in his body at all, what should I do? I'm running out of my, of what usually works. So I was really far away from it. speaker-0: Yeah, but honestly, I think that's the norm for most people. Especially men. Especially men. Men, we're often taught that anger is the only thing to show. That's the only appropriate emotion to express. But also, don't express anger because then you're a dangerous man, right? What kind of a catch-22 is that? So I know a lot of my male clients, they feel anger, then they suppress anger, and they don't... know all of the other emotions that are coming up underneath that because they've shut them down for so long. that grief looks like anger, sadness looks like anger, frustration looks like anger. Even sometimes you're really happy and then suddenly you're angry because it doesn't feel safe to feel those other emotions. But then people that were socialized to talk about their feelings a lot also still don't have connection because they're used to just talking about them. speaker-1: Everything makes you angry, right? not feeling. speaker-0: and not actually feeling them, not actually listening to them, just assuming what they feel. Breathwork in that way is such a powerful bridge to help you drop into your body because again, first and foremost, you're already breathing. You might not be consciously aware of it most of the time, but just as you just did, you say the word breath or breathe and pretty much universally, we're gonna deepen into our connection to our breath. which brings our conscious awareness into the body. And how cool is that? Instantly you're starting to drop in and you're becoming aware of the sensations of your lungs expanding and dropping. And then the awareness gets to trickle out and be like, oh, what other sensations are in my body? And you don't even have to name them as emotions. You might just be like, well, there's kind of a knot in my stomach. Or I don't know, I just feel kind of like... tight in my shoulders. It just doesn't feel like 100 % relaxed. And connecting to those sensations is enough. The tightness or the knot or the electricity can tell you what you might need to slow down and feel a little bit more safe and a little more connected and a little more inspired by your life rather than contracted and contained. But that ⁓ experience that you had is so cool where you're like... I don't know, it a few sessions in, you're like, what do mean connect to my body? There's nothing there. I hear that from my clients a lot as well. And then one day they're like, wait, I think I finally figured it out. I felt something, I heard something, and then I did it. I followed wisdom and I feel better. speaker-1: I remember one client ⁓ who had exactly that situation that he couldn't connect with his body. And then he had like a deep session with psilocybin. And in the middle of the session, he just like had this big sigh of relief that, wow, I have emotions. And it's the first time in his adult life that he was able to connect with emotions and to see what is there. And it's such, ⁓ I think it's so important. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: and If you cannot connect with your emotions, you cannot connect with yourself. You don't even know who you are. And then what people do, right, is innocently to build this false self of like professional career, a person who is, let's say, ⁓ talked about lawyers, let's say a lawyer, and I'm a person who likes this kind of clothes and lives in like central London and drives this car and all those things that are totally made up. And that's who they really are. speaker-0: who they are. speaker-1: And I feel that this is also, well, it works really well for the system we have at the moment because these people will consume more, will ⁓ be quite easily to, they're just prone to be controlled. speaker-0: They're operating in the system. they're following the rules. And they're keeping anything that might be seen as socially disruptive. Unfortunately, at this point in humanity, for a lot of cultures, that's our emotions and our feelings and our personal desires. They're keeping those closed and they're keeping them shut down. Reminds me what you're saying that a lot of us, we've been doing that for so long. speaker-1: The following the speaker-0: taught to control our emotions or hide them or mask them, that we believe it's just our personality. Like people, my whole life, myself included, they would be like, Alaya is so chill, she's really emotionally even, she doesn't really get upset. And I thought that about myself as well. Like I don't know why you guys are all so fussy, like just chill out until I realized that no, I just wasn't letting myself feel any emotions at all. So if I was... devastated with anxiety, no one would know, including myself for a really long time. Because I would just lock it away in my stomach. Like I'd put it in a box and no one would see it and I would calm myself down. And I thought I was chill, but actually I was just in survival states. I was stressed out and that's speaker-1: People also told you, you have such a calm energy and you're always so relaxed. speaker-0: Yeah, you're such a good listener. You're like, cool, yeah, I don't feel safe talking about myself or connecting to any part of this at all. But we learn that our survival states are our personality. That's what we start to believe. yeah, I'm just really motivated, I'm really successful, and I don't have any problems, and I don't think things through, I just go for it. But actually, is that just how you learn to keep yourself safe? Yeah. What's underneath that? speaker-1: And when did that start? Because it didn't start in your professional career, it started usually in childhood. speaker-0: Usually, yeah. I like 99.9 % of the time we develop these in childhood. And that doesn't mean that our parents did anything wrong or right. It's just how we learn to keep ourselves safe based on the context that we grew up in. Yeah, exactly. But now, I think so many of us forget that we're adults and we can keep ourselves safe. We don't have to rely on our partner or our... speaker-1: Usually meaning 99 % speaker-0: job or financial stability really to keep us safe. Like we can access that sense of safety that we are seeking right now by guiding ourselves into it everywhere, no matter where you are. speaker-1: Totally. What I just had to think about is that this is not only talked about in these kind of somatic therapy approaches or trauma informed approaches, but also in yogic traditions, Victor Frankl, the man search of meaning talks about that, right? Like the gap between stimulus and response. mean, he published his work in the 40s. it's actually long standing, but I feel what's really different is to not approach it from, I'm just thinking I'm sad and all is good, but to actually feel it because we really are in the body. And we have found peace with like these unfinished responses or these unfinished things that happened in childhood and that are often still running the show when we are like 30, 40, 70, 80. All life is we don't address it basically. speaker-0: Yeah. Right, yeah. Yeah. And also learning that even if you are feeling that, that fear response or that desire to shut down and disconnect from your body, that it doesn't mean you haven't made it yet. The goal is not to just be super zen-dow, really at peace, blissful all the time. But the goal is to be at peace with all of the emotions that you're feeling. that it's great if anxiety comes up or fear or anger. Like that is data, it's information, it's telling you something super important. And when you can differentiate from it a little bit, when you can separate yourself from it and realize that it's not you, you're not an angry person, you're experiencing anger, then you can listen to it and get curious about it and be like, ooh, anger. I'm about to learn something really important about who I need to be to feel authentically expressed and what I need to do to get there. And it changes the way you experience all of those emotions so that you are like operating on the full emotional spectrum. But from that place of full expression, you're chilling because it feels safe to feel those feelings. know exactly what to do with them when you're willing to witness them and connect to them and get in a conversation with them. And that's where we get to that place, I think, where you're like, I'm at peace and I'm Zen, but I'm actually at peace. Actually Zen. I'm not just suppressing and telling myself I'm okay. speaker-1: Yeah, it's not super. 100%. You briefly addressed something that I want to point out and it's something I just heard in a conversation yesterday with a barrister, so like a legal professional. And ⁓ he said like that, he basically described a lot of the things that we touched on that he feels a lot of anxiety and feels like he's only as good as his last piece of work. that his reputation is always at stake. that he feels like an imposter very often and just waits until somebody figures that one out and tells you're an imposter and all those sorts of things. And I asked him like what he tried to change them and he said like nothing because I believe that's who I am and I can't change that. And I felt wow, this is such an important piece to address that. speaker-0: the attachment to these identities that we pick up along the speaker-1: ⁓ That's not who we are and what I'm always a bit at. ⁓ and war, so to speak, with this kind of personality models. ⁓ Because if at all, they're only a snapshot of who we are in this moment. And I really love Gabor Marti's perspective that the majority of what we call personality is actually coping mechanisms. It's a collection of how we learned to respond to threats. that's changed. We cannot change what happened to us. but we can change how we react. speaker-0: how we react and how we perceive. speaker-1: And how we perceive and also to realize, okay, this happened in the past and now it's not happening anymore. Not only as a mental construct, but really in the body and helping the body to come back to safety. speaker-0: Yeah, so many of us cling to the past or we cling to the future. speaker-1: I'm someone who... speaker-0: I'm someone who absolutely is full of self-doubt or I criticize myself constantly or I just have a really negative inner voice. I'm somebody who's anxious. speaker-1: got abused or ⁓ speaker-0: Yeah, I'm someone who got bullied when I was a kid or abused by my parents or had to have emotionally immature parents, right? When actually you're not that person in this moment. No, you are somebody completely different I think we self-identify as well with the sensations that we're feeling as Diagnoses kind of across the board like it's a permanent stamp of your identity. Yeah, you have anxiety then you're an anxious person you experience depression right now, then you're depressed. When actually these are just a snapshot of sensations that are moving through you and when you're connecting to them intentionally grounding, connecting to the mind and the body, being aware of what's moving through your system, you will notice they move always. And therefore they are not stuck or stagnant or permanent. They're fluid. So your identity is changing constantly. In one moment you might be experiencing anxiety. But in the next moment, you're noticing a sense of calm or confidence or joy or love towards yourself or compassion. And as you experience anger, you might then soften into a tenderness. Or into some sort of creative inspiration. You are infinitely growing and changing and moving, not only in your life, but within your relationship to yourself. And therefore, all of these identities we cling to because it makes us feel safe and validated and seen potentially after a lifetime of being really invalidated and told like, no, you shouldn't feel that. So something's wrong with you if you're feeling that. So it makes sense that we hold onto it. It's like a little baby blanket, these identities. But they keep us stuck when we then start believing this is just who I am. I'm somebody that always feels like an imposter. I'm somebody that's People think it's always about to drop the ball, and so I can't ever just relax and feel confident in my work or what I'm creating. It's a sad place to be, and it's also a great place to be when you notice that's you, if you're somebody that clings to that identity, because the moment you're aware of it, you can start to look for all of the other ways that you are everything else you desire to be. You are already peaceful, are already creative, you're already successful. You already maybe have never dropped the ball, you've never let somebody down, or you did and you were fine. Your worst fear is happening already and you survived. And so now you don't need that fear. You can choose to move forward in a different way. Like the awareness is so powerful when you're willing to get... curious about how it's actually supporting you moving forward rather than keeping you stuck, right? speaker-1: Yeah, that's where I feel it's, that's where I feel a strong connection between ⁓ connecting with your body, with your emotions and like spiritual teachings. I'd like, while you talked, I had to think about, ⁓ I always hope I pronounce him right, Rama Maharshi, the saint. His core question of his teaching is, who are you or who am I? And it's a really great question also to... I've been to retreats where the whole retreat was about that question and you just sit with someone for a few hours and they would ask you who are you and you would answer and then you would ask them. And it's kind of fascinating how much you can say to that and usually the first things are identity based. That's my name, I'm George, I'm male, I'm... 35 years old, I'm a psychologist, I'm a musician, blah blah. And after a while, you run out of your usual answers and then it's getting really interesting. speaker-0: How do you describe yourself if you don't use something like identifying characteristics, demographics, work, career, what you do for other people? How do you describe yourself? It's hard, but it's inspiring. I can imagine, I haven't been to that particular retreat, but I imagine after a few days of mulling on this idea of who am I, you realize that you could be infinite. speaker-1: Exit. Super inspiring. all made up. speaker-0: It's all made up. One day you're sleepy, the next day you're invigorated, one day you're creatively frustrated, the next day you're on your creative genius. Right? And so in that way, you know what I love to say to myself anytime like a self doubt thought comes up or a judgment around how I look or the quote unquote quality of my or value of my work. I just say, Aliyah, it's none of your business. It's none of my business. Me personally, what I think about myself and my perceptions, if they're critical or judgmental, I'm like, it's none of your business. Just follow your joy. Who cares what you look like in this moment? Who cares what other people think? Like, stop taking yourself so seriously. You're going to be somebody different 30 seconds from now anyway. Right? Like, your body is always changing on the cellular level and your personality is as well. So, like, we have to stop taking ourselves. So personally, especially those of us that are actively working on establishing a really healthy connection to our mental and emotional wellness. Yes, it can feel really challenging to feel like you're emotionally suffering or stuck or disordered or disabled and you know that something's better, but you haven't figured out how to get yourself there. Like you want to feel safe, you want to feel connected and inspired. Yeah, it sucks. It's frustrating. It's hard. And it is okay that you feel that sense of challenge, that sense of frustration is really about learning to tell a different story about what's coming up for you. ⁓ This is informing me a little bit more every single day about what I need to be more authentically expressed, to be self-aware, to move myself forward. The challenge is a part of the journey. It's a part of being human. It's not me that's messed up. This is just... the experience we have on earth. And so it's not personal to you if you're feeling this emotional overwhelm. It's just a part of your experience. And it will shift when you start to look at it in new ways, which you can do just by asking questions, just by getting curious. What's this mean for me? Maybe I could look at different stories today, different beliefs. How is this supporting me? What's this anger telling me? What's this depression telling me? What's this judgmental thought about, ⁓ God, I look terrible when I turn my camera on, like, how come everyone else looks so good? Right, what's that thought telling me? ⁓ it doesn't quite feel safe being seen, okay. Great, let's go practice being seen in my transparent truth. And feeling safe. Sweet. speaker-1: and feeling safe. And I feel this is really the key word here is practice, because it's all about practice. No matter if it's ⁓ the grounding tools that we touched on, ⁓ talking about your emotions, connecting with your body. It's all practice. And for me, a metaphor, like a metaphor I use a lot, it's like learning an instrument. And it's, you have to touch that instrument every day. speaker-0: You it. speaker-1: If you go to a lesson once a week and you don't practice underneath, you will not learn this instrument. So you have to show up every day. And it doesn't need to be five hours every day. It can be five to 10 minutes. And I always laugh about, I'm not laughing at people who say I don't have time, but I find it funny. And I'm getting curious that how can someone charge three, 400, 500 euros, pounds an hour for clients. speaker-0: Absolutely. speaker-1: don't give himself like five or 10 minutes. And that's getting interesting, right? Because they're like often resistance or fears and like, who am I if I allow myself this time? Am I going to lose my edge? ⁓ And in my experience, no one loses their edge. They actually become way more clear, more sharp, more like productive. And it's not about being more productive, but if you're more grounded and more focused and more with yourself. speaker-0: Right. speaker-1: you will be so much more efficient and effective than ruminating hours about like, I good enough? speaker-0: Yeah. And being grounded doesn't always mean being slow. No. This is the slow down to speed up situation, Like every single person has time to take 3D breaths and just remind their body that it's safe to be present and to be intentional and to really get curious about what you want to create in that moment, whether that's in relationship to other people or into your work or into yourself. Everybody has time for that and so that way so many people I think are using time. Especially like high achievers that have a really packed schedule. They're using that excuse of time as to avoid connection because it really doesn't feel safe yet to connect and that's okay. We weren't taught how to do that yet. But we can do it in all these little micro practices. It's the same thing with building emotional fluency. When you're teaching people to... speaker-1: And ⁓ it. speaker-0: move from solely relying on their structured mind to allowing their body to help guide them forward, allowing the mind and body to really work together in the way that it was designed to do. They expect to have answers immediately, as if it was something that they could just YouTube and then execute. But you are building a connection to your body and you're learning to get into conversation with it. And when you're learning how to get into conversation with a language you've never spoken before, the language of the body, most likely in this instance, you have to show up consistently. Like if you were going to learn Spanish and you'd never learned Spanish in your life, you wouldn't go to one class. speaker-1: and expect that you're like fluid. speaker-0: and expect to be fluent, you would show up consistently. takes two years in university, 40 minutes a day, five days a week, to be technically tested and ⁓ offered the certificate of being fluent in the language in many systems, With our emotions, it can happen faster than that, it can take longer than that, but you have to show up for these little tiny micro-practices of connecting to your body and getting curious about what it's saying. for that to really program into your nervous system as the new way of being. I am connected, I am safe, I grounded, and I'm fully expressed because of that. There's so much permission to take it easy and take it in like micro-practices throughout the day. speaker-1: Exactly. And every word that you learn, so to speak, is such a big step forward. And it's like this, it's a sad metaphor. I like the mountain without a top. Topless mountain. It's a journey where you never arrive, basically. You know, there's no destination. That's what the metaphor is about. The mountain without a top. ⁓ And it's not like only in three or four years time and I am super fluent. speaker-0: don't know that. speaker-1: and like 100 % fluent, it will make a difference. It makes a difference from like the first session and the difference becomes bigger and bigger and more more profound. speaker-0: and you get to have more and more fun. speaker-1: Exactly. More more joy because it's something you also you mentioned joy earlier. I want to just also emphasize that it's really about finding more joy in your body. The more you can feel one emotion, the more you can feel all emotions. It means the more you can feel sadness and pain and the things you usually don't want to feel. The more we can also feel joy and compassion and love and connection. speaker-0: Yeah. At all this, all at the same time, which is the coolest thing. Yeah. But definitely as you continue to practice, it's not like this big serious thing where you're like now emotionally intelligent and you've got it on lock. You're like, ⁓ wait, now I'm learning slang words. Now I can express myself more fully. Years in, you just get more and more connected in a way that's so fulfilling and you get to have way more fun because you get to be who you naturally are. out in the world without feeling contained by social standards or by the past that you experienced and how you learned to be. get to choose how to be now. Actively creating in a way that's way more fun. You get to have way more adventures. In my experience, my life has opened up so much since doing this work and I know yours has as well. And everything gets to be met with a little bit of levity because you know speaker-1: Exactly. speaker-0: it's constantly changing, it's gonna move and it's safe for it to do that, safe to play in the unknown with your humanity in that way. speaker-1: And it's totally possible to do it while you are in your job, in your family, in your life. You don't have to drop out and live on a mountain. In fact, it's actually even not really helpful because what I heard once is that most of our struggles come from, we are created within relationships in connection with others. That means they also have to be solved, matured in, in relationship to others. So... speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: It's actually really helpful to be in your family, in your job, in your normal context and learn how to apply it. speaker-0: Yeah, sometimes it's the hardest because you experience the pressure and the previously established beliefs about what those environments do to you, the impact they have on you, and you have to suddenly realize you get to choose what impact they have on you. But boy, is that a good training ground. If you really want to live your life from a place of emotional freedom and self-liberation, like, put yourself in the environments that challenge you most and do that consistently with so much... race, knowing that you're going to get better and better at navigating those over time. But you can't isolate yourself and then put yourself back into society without then still having to go through the trials of relationship, being in relationship to environment and to career and to people. There's so much to learn in that. And with yourself. You've got to allow yourself to be exposed to the things that challenge you and to really decide from that place. speaker-1: relationship with the system. Yeah, with yourself. speaker-0: Where are my boundaries with this and how do I want to express those? And where do I discover what's right for me? Which I hope after listening to this, people have a little bit of an idea about where to do that and where to find it. Yeah, but life really does open up after that because you just get to allow your life to unfold in front of you rather than trying to get it right or trying to speaker-1: to find out. speaker-0: keep yourself safe and protect yourself from it. speaker-1: percent. what I also really find important to emphasize is that, you know, we talked a lot about basically becoming more ⁓ independent, more ⁓ There's a word that doesn't come to mind right now. Fabulous. Well, yeah. And more, more, more you and less dependent on a system. And what I think it's important to say at the same time, it's important also to change the system. And I think that can be done so much better by people who are grounded, who are in connection with themselves, with others who have compassion for themselves and others and really feel like, speaker-0: Fabulous. Yeah. speaker-1: this thing is not going right, let's create something different, let's create something that's more nurturing and more fulfilling and more healthy for all of us. speaker-0: Yeah, we already know it's possible, which is why we're here trying to do it and together we can share the wisdom and the education that some of us need in order to understand how to do that for ourselves and then how to guide our communities into these spaces where we do feel more connected and we do feel more inspired and expressed and in a state of loving connection to ourselves. no matter what's going on in our life and with other people. Yes. Got the grassroots movement going, right? But we're here because we know that it's not in our nature to be constantly stressed and overwhelmed and experiencing a lot of physical pain and symptoms of that stress and to be... What's the word am I looking for right now? To be distracted. and mentally overwhelmed and burdened by our thoughts like that's not our natural state, that's your body being sustained in a survival state that animals can release on their own. They've learned to just let it go, but we learned socially it's more acceptable to hold ourselves in that stress state. So we can start to release it and to relax as we get all these little pieces of information about how to do that. And then that impact gets to ripple out into the communities and the world around us. And the system does change because speaker-1: percent. speaker-0: the bar of expectation changes. speaker-1: So true. The way I look at it is that what we're talking about is literally connected to every major issue right now on the planet. It's connected to climate change because I believe the more we rest in ourselves, the less we need to consume. And overconsumption is a massive driver for climate change, if not the biggest. It's connected to how we relate to each other. It's connected to we relate, how men and women relate to each other, which is... major issue obviously. ⁓ speaker-0: We can become so much more loving from a place where we are connected to ourselves. Loving toward the planet, loving towards other people. speaker-1: And like becoming more connected with your emotions is also becoming more connected with your feminine side. And that's equally important for men and women. ⁓ yeah. So I feel this, kind of work is really at the core of so many, many things. speaker-0: Absolutely. And you know what? It's not actually that complicated to start practicing and implementing a little bit of education, a little bit of guidance, and your whole world will shift. speaker-1: Totally. And that also brings me to my last question because obviously that's what you're doing in your work. ⁓ So where can people find information about you, about your work, about the programs you run, the online courses, the one-on-one work, all that? speaker-0: Yeah, I teach this in the feel-good membership, emotional freedom, and in the self-liberation school for people that really want the full system for how to move themselves into emotional fluency and full self-expression and start building creative legacies that are really meaningful. And you can find that at colitis-cope.com or come hang out with me on Instagram, which is colitis underscore cope.com, or sorry, which is colitis underscore cope. on Instagram. speaker-1: Wonderful. Thank you so much for this amazing conversation. ⁓ speaker-0: It's been great to be here. Yeah, let it be continued. speaker-1: Thank you so much also for tuning in and I'm looking forward to see you in the next episode. And of course, if you have any questions, please reach out to both of us. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here on Inna Alchemy. If this episode resonated with you, then please share it. with someone who might benefit from it. And if you want to go deeper, then you can check out my 10-day course called The Missing Piece that teaches you how the nervous system works and how you can start to regulate your own nervous system. You learn powerful tools, how to quieten your mind and your nervous system, how to get in touch with your emotions, and how to feel like who you are is truly enough. And if you would like to work one-on-one with me, you can schedule a free session through my website georgestuby.com. And you can also find me on Instagram as imgeorgestuby.com. I'm really looking forward to get in touch with you and also to welcome you in one of the next episodes. Stay present, stay embodied, and I'm sending you much love.