Latest / The Priestess Temple Podcast / Ep 7: The Power of Vulnerability in Healing
Transcript
- Embodied By Jenna: Today I want to talk about something that has been so alive for me, y'all. It's really about the topic of humans don't heal in isolation. Humans heal within community. And I have been part of so many different countercultures throughout my life in search of healing. I lived in an ashram yoga school in Pennsylvania when I first got sober. I lived in Mexico with a family when I was creating yoga content for their website. I lived at an Ayurvedic retreat center in Puerto Rico. Want to talk about something that has been so alive for me lately. And the topic of today's discussion is humans don't heal alone. You need community. This has something that has been come. This is something that has become incredibly apparent for me over the past few months since getting over my fear of being seen. And I've made some unique discoveries about coming out online that I need to share with you because nobody is fucking talking about this. And I think this is really juicy because it gives you insight on how you can heal in a way that is conducive to your human nature to get you to the version of your to get you to the version of yourself that you desire to be just a little bit faster. So What I'm gonna do today, I'm going to tell you a story from my own personal life. And then I am going to share valuable information about how you can use my experience to change your life and heal in rapid pace. Mm. Today I'm gonna talk about something that has been so alive for me. And the topic of today's discussion is humans don't heal alone. You need community. I have had some incredible experiences over the past month since going to Spirit Weaver's Gathering in Southern Oregon, where I was immersed in a community of 800 women. And then I came home to Buffalo, New York and continued posting online. Now, you may or may not know this about me, but recently I have just gotten over the fear of being seen. I did a 30 day fashion challenge in April that pretty much allowed me to come out of my shell and start posting on Instagram and start this podcast. And so I'm gonna talk more about that in the next episode. But for today, what I really want to talk to you about is how I have been immersed in community and how it has really healed me. And then through coming back home and coming back to creating digital content in solitude, basically, I realized some things about my body and mind in terms of my healing potential and my ability to connect with others that I want to share with you because this shit is so important and nobody is. Fucking talking about it. Trust me, if you have goals to heal your body or to have more intimate relationships, well then buckle the fuck up because this conversation is for you. I'm going to start off with a story from my personal life because I think that makes the information really tangible. And then I'm going to share. Very practical tips about how you can implement what I have found. Into your own personal life so that you can use community connection to heal faster and to evolve into the highest version of your disself that you so desire to be. All right, so story time. I went to a women's gathering called Spirit Weavers in Southern Oregon. And this gathering happens two weekends out of every year. 800 women come and gather in the woods. And at this gathering, master teachers come from all over the country to do Skillshare workshops. So each teacher teaches something a little bit different, but the topics vary from arts and crafts to female empowerment. To dance and yoga, you you name it, they have it at Spirit Weavers. And so you sign up for whatever classes you want to take, and then you are immersed in these really deep, in-person, three-hour lectures with an intimate group of your fellow women. And in these lectures, teachers were teaching me things that just blew my fucking mind. I'm telling you, there were such vulnerable. Shares between members of the group. And it was something that completely blew my mind wide open. In such a short amount of time, the gathering was only five days. I had experienced radical change and interpersonal connection. The women that I was in the classes with, I just felt such a deep level of intimacy with. Even though I had only known them for a couple of days. And now that I'm back home in Buffalo, I come back and I really want to share what I've learned because this experience was incredibly healing. Just having other women hold space for me was something that hasn't been safe in the past. You know, having these wounds in the collective of the mother wound and the sister wound, I don't Know if I ever really grew up feeling truly safe around women. And this experience helped me to feel safe enough to share my true self, my thoughts, and my feelings with other women in community who were doing the same. And so that is my passion. After having this super energetically intense emotional experience, I come back home to Buffalo, New York, and here I am in my bedroom, in the park, talking to my phone, creating alone. Creating alone. And I'm sending the message out on my phone that I had this beautiful experience and I really want to bring groups of women together and da-da-da-da-da. Right. I'm super excited about it because I just had the embodied feeling of what it felt like to be held and to be safe. And so I decide that I'm going to host a yoga class, just a low-stakes $20 yoga class as I prepare to. Create this collective of women in Buffalo, New York who want the same things as me, you know, leaning into pleasure, having these intimate connections. And I just think, wow, the yoga class is gonna be so great. So I announce on my Instagram stories that I'm having a bad bitch support group and yoga class. And I give myself about a week to promote it. I figured that gives enough time. For women to respond to my posts to schedule, and I'll have like a nice big group of women. And so I start posting online. No one's answering. I keep posting online. No one's answering. I'm starting to get anxious and stressed and fearful because you know, I'm a person who has just gotten over the fear of being seen. So for me to even be on the camera and to be on this podcast talking to you right now. It's stretchy. Okay. It's uncomfortable for me. It's getting better because I'm practicing doing it more. Getting better because I'm practicing doing it more, but at the end of the day, it's still not something I feel super confident with. So for me to be posting online and to hear crickets, that sends me into a spiral. Okay. So I'm ruminating and I'm just thinking, what if nobody shows up? What if I'm just doing yoga in the park by myself? Like, am I just gonna be this loser who just, you know, is crazy, right? Is thinking all these crazy thoughts because nobody's answering me. And I just had this amazing experience that maybe not a lot of people would understand until they experienced it themselves. And that's really what I wanted to give people the opportunity to do. So the week goes by, I'm spiraling, and then The day is there. The day of the yoga class is there. I have two people who are friends of mine. You know, I wouldn't say we're the closest friends. We're more like acquaintances. They confirm that they're coming to the class. The class is at six o'clock in the evening. So I go to the location of the class and I'm sitting there in the park and I'm feeling a lot of anxiety because six o'clock rolls around. They're not there. I tie some rope on my body to calm me down because this really helps to regulate me. And as I'm sitting there, I get some text messages on my phone. They're coming from women who follow me on Facebook and who consume my content. And these women are singing my praises, y'all. They're telling me how my content has changed their lives. They're telling me how their life is different, that they feel. Feel another way about their body and about their clothing that they've never experienced before. And it felt really fucking good for me to get that feedback from them, especially as I'm sitting there in the park, super anxious that nobody's gonna come to my yoga class. And so 605 rolls around, no one's there. 6'10 rolls around, the first woman shows up, and I'm like, ugh. Thank God I'm not gonna be doing yoga in the park alone. 6.15 rolls around. My second participant arrives. Yay, there's three of us. I'm like, okay, this is fucking awesome. Let's fucking do this. So we go to the park, we pick out a spot, we start doing the practice, and we get really fucking deep. Like I am telling you. This yoga class was probably one of the best yoga classes I have ever taught in my life. And I have taught a shitload of yoga classes. And then we do an activity afterwards called Remember When. And in this activity, what we do is we talk about our dreams and our goals as though they had already happened. And by the way, you can do this at any time with a friend, or you can record a video of yourself doing it. But basically, The person starts off and they go, Remember when I took this amazing trip to Puerto Rico and I experienced the island for the first time. I ate fresh coconuts directly from the tree, and I met a Latin lover who took me salsa dancing for the night. It was so magical. And pretty much you go on and on and on, right? Talking about your Dululu fantasy that you want to happen as though it has already happened in the past. And then after your partner witnesses you in your desire, they then repeat back what you just said in their own words. So for example, the partner would go, ⁓ girl, remember when? Remember when you went to Puerto Rico for the first time and you met that high. Hot salsa dancer guy, and you had the most steamy, dreamy evening kissing on the beach under the stars. You guys ate fresh coconuts and felt the toes in your sand, and felt the sand in your toes. ⁓ that was so magical. And when you do this, what it does is it really helps. The mere neurons in the person's body to link with yours. And through this activity, what happened is that we all shared our dreams and our fantasies with each other, and we got so excited. Like I'm telling you the level of joy and passion and pleasure that was coming from the body of the woman who wanted the desire. And then The woman who was reflecting it back to her was so strong that we all started crying. I am not fucking kidding you. We all started bawling our eyes out because we were just feeling the emotion so strongly, and we were so connected to each other, looking each other in the eyes and feeling the resonance of the joy and the pleasure and the Passion in real time, face to face, holding that space for each other. It was just so fucking magical. ⁓ like even just thinking about it now, I'm getting so worked up because I just want more of it. I crave that depth and that intimacy with other people. I think as humans, it's something that we all want. But it really takes being vulnerable. It does. It takes being vulnerable and telling the truth with other people, which can be quite uncomfortable. But I was so proud of myself for hosting the class and not giving up on myself, even though people weren't responding to my posts right away. And I was also so proud of the women there who shared their big Goals and dreams and fantasies, even though there was a little bit of fear and a little bit of hesitation to claim those desires as theirs. They fucking did it. And we all felt it in our bodies, and it was magical. So then I go down the hill to this event in Buffalo, New York called Flow Night. And at Flow Night, everyone comes and gathers near Hoyt Lake and people dance. People dance with flow toys and spin fire, and there is like a live band playing. It's such a fun event. There had to be like 500 people there. And I go down the hill and I'm just hanging out, chilling in the park with my girls. And this one beautiful woman strikes up a conversation with me and she says, Hey girl, I love your content. I love what you're posting. And we start talking about how the things that I have produced online have deeply impacted her life. And I was just sitting there shook because I've never really interacted with this person in real life before, nor did I know that she was following me. So for her to reflect back to me how my content had changed her, I was just feeling so much. And Through that experience, I realized, like, okay, no, you know, it doesn't matter how many people come to my classes. It doesn't really matter how many people respond to my posts. But what really matters is how I am serving the people who are there. So then the next day, you know, after I go to sleep, I wake up in the morning and I have this huge revelation. And this is the part that I really want you to listen to. And this is the part that I really want you to listen to because I think this is the part that nobody's talking about in this conversation when we're trying to connect with other people in the online space. So I'm thinking about how I felt last night. And I'm thinking about how when I received the compliments on my phone. The women who I was talking to were amazing. They were singing my praises. They were telling me how my content has impacted their lives. I was even exchanging selfies with someone. Okay. So we were really connecting over the phone. However, when I think about going down the hill and having the experience that I had in the park and talking to the woman who I met there face to face about my content. She was saying similar things, and there was something about that experience that landed so much more deeply inside of my body. Like I remembered that conversation so well because I remembered how she made me feel, and that hit me so fucking hard because nowadays. We are so used to being on our screens behind a phone. We're connecting through social media. And don't get me wrong, social media is beautiful. I would not be talking to you right now if it was not for social media. Okay. I would not have this podcast, and I would not be able to have the impact that I have on your life. If it was not for social media, you would not be able to have the impact that you have on my life if it was not for social media. However, social media has completely taken the feeling out of community. And when we feel, we heal. I want you to hear that so deeply. Let that land in your body, your capacity to feel. Is directly linked to your capacity to heal. And that's why I say we cannot heal alone as human beings. We need to heal in community, in communion with one another. A woman's primary a woman's primary regulatory hormone is oxytocin. Okay. And I'm gonna tell you something about oxytocin. When a woman has a baby and she births the baby, and then the baby lays on her chest to breastfeed, that is when the hormone oxytocin is made in the highest quantity in the body. So for women in particular, we need community to heal. We need touch. We need Sensation. We need to be with another. Think about after a woman has a baby, her body is in serious need of healing. There's a lot of tissues that have just changed. There's a lot of hormones that need to be regulated. And so that skin to skin contact with her baby heals her fucking body. That's why I tie rope on my body for my podcast episodes because I have felt the sensation of the rope on my skin directly impacting the way I feel in my body and in my mind. So it helps me to channel my messages so much more clearly. Now, oxytocin can also be made through touch. So Giving people hugs on a daily basis, yeah, it fucking works. It actually heals your body. Now, if you don't have another human to hug, you gotta start touching yourself. And one of the easiest ways to do this is by rubbing oil on your skin every single day. Giving yourself this beautiful oil massage is a way to create oxytocin. Which helps to regulate all of the hormones in your body. Now, those are just a few couple simple things you can do to help your body heal. But the main thing I want you to think about is how can I be with people? Because after COVID, after 2020, we were all trapped in our houses, we were all wearing masks. Look, if you're watching this on YouTube, I'm covering up my face. You cannot see the emotion that I am conveying through my mouth and through my speech. When I remove my hand, you get a totally different experience of what I am fucking saying. We were forced to be six feet apart. And I think that fear has continued to linger. Either consciously or subconsciously within the collective, people are afraid to step out of their houses and from behind their screens to actually be face to face with another human. But I am telling you, y'all, this is the secret sauce to healing. It is literally finding yourself in a vulnerable state. In front of another human and feeling the emotional resonance of that state, whether it is fear, anger, sadness, joy, pleasure, disgust, all of it, when you feel those emotions in communion with another person, what you get to do is you get to co regulate with that human. And this is the experience that social media and the digital age has robbed us of. And I feel it as a creator. I do. I feel it because I'm here creating and creating and creating and putting out content. And sometimes I hear crickets. And so I don't know if it's landing for you or not. Even as you're listening to this podcast, I cannot see the look on your face. I cannot feel Feel your emotional resonance with what I'm saying. And it makes me lonely. It makes me lonely and it also robs me of the experience of understanding how what I'm saying is making you feel. So with that being said, I think the best thing that you could do is intentionally find community in your local neighborhood. If you're working on your laptop, go to a coffee shop. If you are, you know, in a place where they offer yoga classes or gatherings in the park, even if you might not feel like it all the time, I Get it because I need my alone time to rest and recharge. But go go once per week. Make sure that when you are Reach out to people when you need help because I guarantee you other people have probably felt the same way that you feel or have been going through something similar alone and in isolation. And when we share our emotions in communion with another in partnership with another person, it helps the resonance of those emotions equalize. Because you don't have to carry the extreme feeling alone. Now, what I'm really going to do and what I am going to invite you into is that I know from this experience that I am meant to create communities. I know that I am meant to help bring women together into groups to heal. They're not gonna be big groups. It's gonna be small, intimate groups, but through these groups that I am going to offer you in the future, you have a really unique and profound opportunity to learn a little something about yourself and heal in a way that is deeply profound. Probably in a way that you could have never even imagined because that's what's happened to me. And it really required me to face my fears, my fear of being seen, my fear of being judged, my fear of being vulnerable. Because I was the person who was hiding behind the screen not so long ago, watching other creators create the life of their dreams. And I said, you know what? Fuck that. So now I'm going to be the person who launches this community platform for women to come together, both in person and online. I don't have all the details yet. It's still being fished out, but what I will invite you to do is Please, if this conversation has helped you, leave me a comment. Reach out to me on my Instagram, embodied by Jenna, and stay tuned for next week's episode of the podcast, because that is when I am going to be launching my community offer that I would so love for you to be a part of. Because at the end of the day, babe, you deserve to be seen and supported. And empowered to live the life that you want to live, to have everything that you motherfucking want and to follow your dreams unapologetically. When we're doing it alone, that weight and responsibility can feel really fucking heavy. And it's easy to get lost. And so, what I offer you is an opportunity to perhaps join a community. Connect with other women, heal in the process, and move forward towards the path that is destined for you. What I don't want you to do after this episode today is just say, huh, that was a nice conversation and then continue on your way. No, I want you to get out from behind the screen. I want you to get into your local community and I want you to connect with other people because we do not heal in isolation. Humans heal in community.