Self-Transformation: The Secret To Overcoming Trauma With Christa Gowen

At some point in your lives, everyone experiences trauma in one way or another, and sometimes, it’s passed onto the next generation in the family. With self-transformation, awareness, and wellness, it’s possible to end it once and for all. This episode, Christa Gowen, a certified TRE® provider and yoga instructor, talks about her personal experience with trauma and shares how she dealt with it and turned it around for a better life. She gives out transformational techniques and trauma release exercises that can surely do you some good if you’re going through something. Learn how stuck emotions can actually hinder your life both professionally and personally and what you can do to avoid the worst-case scenario and understand how you can affect the collective by simply healing yourself as an individual.

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Self-Transformation: The Secret To Overcoming Trauma With Christa Gowen

I don’t know if embarrassment is the right word, but it’s the one that’s coming to mind. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this in any public capacity. I’ve been sensitive to something that happens often when I’m working out at the gym or in a yoga class. There are times where I have been doing an intense workout or I’m in maybe a deep restorative hip opener doing some challenging yoga pose and there have been a lot of times where two things will happen. My body will start uncontrollably shaking.

I’ve broken down in yoga class, cried and sometimes more embarrassingly, at the gym around grunting in heavy weight lifting, posturing, and rippling muscles. I’ve cried in the gym and it’s interesting to reflect back on this, especially during our quarantine and not going to the gym or yoga classes and not having those options available. I started doing some physical therapy for a foot injury and there have been moments where I’ve been unlocking some energy and some things in my body that those same sensations have been coming up with my body trembling and shaking uncontrollably.

Even doing my physical therapy exercises, I’m wanting to cry and I’ve never had an answer to all this. Whitney, you’ve been in yoga class with me. A couple of years ago, we did some deep work and I started crying in the middle of class. I wanted to use this as a jumping-off point, Christa, having you on the show with Whitney and I, to jump into a little bit of going to these deeper layers of healing. I’m super curious about what is happening. When we’re in yoga, we’re working out doing some deep work and we start this trembling, shaking, crying or emotional release. Also, Whitney, chime in on this because I know you’ve had some intense experiences in your yoga classes, too.

I have and it’s always such a beautiful thing when that happens. When we open ourselves up and get vulnerable that’s what, for lack of a better term, we should be doing. When we try hard to prevent ourselves from opening up in that way it doesn’t serve us. I had another experience that goes along with this, Jason. I have been running my Beyond Measure program and group calls every week. There was somebody who was on his second call ever. He decided to get a little bit more involved and vulnerable.

I always give people the option of observing because as much as I love it when people crack themselves open, I also know that some people aren’t ready for that and they have boundaries around that. They’re afraid and unsure. It can be tough in group settings, whether it’s a yoga class or it’s a support group like Beyond Measure. For this man on a second appearance in the group, at the end of the call, we had finished a group exercise and he started sharing about his experience with it and started crying.

He apologized for it and the group was incredibly supportive because that’s what we do. We support one another. He felt what I perceived as a lot of shame or embarrassment or for crying during the session, even though that’s what it’s for in his head. It didn’t feel appropriate and it was interesting. It’s similar to what you’re saying with yoga or meditation or whatever we’re doing in a group setting. For some reason, we’re conditioned or under the set of beliefs that it’s not okay to cry publicly and share our emotions. Men struggle with this a lot.

It was such an interesting thing of seeing his reaction, trying to comfort him, and let him know that that is okay. I had this moment of, “Maybe he’s never going to come back to these calls. Maybe he’s going to be afraid of being vulnerable that it’ll cause them not to ever want to do it again with us.” That was interesting, too. I wonder how many people have that experience where maybe they go to yoga and they get emotional and they think, “I’m not going back to that again. I’m not doing that breathwork class or that meditation. I’m not reading that book or watching this movie.” That’s super fascinating, Jason. That’s my experience. I’m curious for both you and Christa. What that brings up for you and even observing other people and their fears of opening up in those settings?

Whitney, you and Jason both touched on something interesting, which is that there’s this component of shame attached to these things like crying, shaking, trembling, or in any way, appearing weak or vulnerable. What’s happening is that our body is feeling safe enough to discharge the stored survival energy that’s been stuck in our body. When that happens, it’s such a beautiful thing because that’s when such a huge transformation can happen. It happens, too, because this stuff gets stuck in our body when we’re not allowed to fully express it as it happens.

When we’re in a stressful situation and we don’t allow ourselves to fully express the entire range of emotion that’s attached to that situation, it ends up becoming stuck in our physical bodies. When we are presented with these opportunities, and often it’s in situations where you’re at the gym or yoga class doing a deep hip opener and we’re deeply digging into some of these places in our physical body. It can’t help, but come out and be expressed. Often, there is a shame attached to it. Part of what my work in the world is to change that narrative and how we view those physiological expressions as a normal part of our nervous system reacting to life.

It’s such a fascinating thing, Christa, because, on one level in observing animals, I always look at, say Evie, Whitney’s dog, or my dog, Bella, or any of my friend’s dogs. Not just dogs, but observing other animals that when they are going through a frightening situation, they’re terrified. There’s some disruption or stimulation of their nervous system, they immediately shake it off. They do this quick shake and take a breath, and then they’re done with it.

It’s interesting to think about as humans, what is the biological adaptation or advantage if any? I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone this. I’m curious about your take. Why do we, as humans, have this biological ability or default mechanism in a lot of people perhaps, most people maybe that when we experience stress, trauma, or something we deem as negative, we somatically store it, compartmentalize it, and be like, “I don’t have time to cry. I don’t have time to deal with it?” Why are we doing that? Why do you think that happens in the physical body? We’re going right in the deep end. Why has that become a cultural narrative of, “Let’s not deal with emotions at the moment.” They want to be dealt with and store it for later knowing full well, at some point, we’re going to have to deal with it.

It almost makes me wonder like, “Maybe if I stored it away, I’ll never have to deal with it.” To add on to this question, I always get stuck on this word, Jason, epigenetics. That process of passing things down through our DNA. What are we holding on to that our ancestors, parents, or grandparents held on to? How does that manifest for us? The more I think about it, the more I wonder. With my parents, for example, the things that they don’t deal with like, “Do they come up in me because it needs an outlet or they’re not dealing with it?” Is it a disservice to children if their parents are like, “I’m going to deny this?” I almost feel like on some level that these emotions are going to find their way out no matter what and no matter how much we try to suppress them.

There are ten topics that we could cover. There’s so much to talk about here. Jason, to answer your question of why do we suppress this stuff? I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer for why we do that except to say that it’s cultural conditioning because I don’t think that’s necessarily the way that all humans deal with it. It’s something that we deal with in the Western world. Here’s an example, with boys, we tell them at a young age this distinction, “Don’t cry. In order to be tough and be seen as a boy to become a man, don’t cry, don’t show this emotion, and shut it down.”

We teach our kids at a super young age to start this process of suppressing things. I don’t know that there’s biological wiring for that, except that the shaking or crying gets viewed as vulnerability. We are hardwired to think that vulnerability is not strength. We don’t like seeing that because it compromises the tribe, if you will, of people as we’ve evolved. Weakness and vulnerability are not the things that we want to see in other people. I don’t know if that’s where it comes from but I know that it gets reinforced on this cultural level.

It’s interesting, too, because if you watch little kids, they express themselves and allow this stuff to go through them completely and fully. I have a son. He’s a toddler and we are in the tantrum phase. If there are any other parents reading this and your kids are old enough to have gone through the tantrum phase, you know what I’m talking about. It’s fascinating for me to watch him because he goes from angry and full of frustration and tears into smiling and cuddling with me so fast that my brain can’t catch up to what happened.

I can’t even figure out why he was upset in the first place and he’s meanwhile has moved on. The reason that he’s able to move on is that he feels it. He doesn’t know how to suppress it and he doesn’t have any shame about writhing around on the floor. He let it all flow through him. There’s a lot to be learned from him watching that. When we end up locking this stuff up in ourselves, that’s when we do damage.

To your point, Whitney, about how this stuff gets passed down, you’re right. We know through epigenetics that this stuff can change our DNA and different expressions of our DNA that do affect our children. It’s mind-blowing the way that the stuff gets passed down and it makes a lot of sense from a survival standpoint, the way that that happens. Essentially, if you have parents who are living in a stressful environment, then that changes markers in their DNA, that then informs their children that the environment that they’re about to be born into is also stressful.

It’s preparing them in a way to deal with that same environment that the parents are. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s rather brilliant. The problem is that when it’s constantly a danger in the environment, not a safe place, and changing these genes to our detriment, that’s when it starts to wreak havoc. There’s a point where this stuff is going to come out. Whether it comes out in our parents or our grandparents or comes out in ourselves or in our children, eventually, it’s like water eroding in the ground creates a canyon. In the same way, it’ll find a way out in our family lineage.

When we are that person that knows that it’s going to come out with us, it’s a huge responsibility because we’re bearing the weight of all of this work that these people that came before us weren’t able to do for whatever reason. It’s this huge responsibility and it doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s lonely work and it’s isolating. My mission is to help change that narrative because many people are starting to wake up to this idea that they are the ones that need to process this for their family line and they’re the ones that have to do that work. I’m seeing that conversation starts to slowly change and evolve to be more accepting of that work and of that reality but, we still have a long way to go.

Self-Transformation: When you start to cultivate compassion for yourself, that compassion doesn’t end at your water’s edge. It spills out and starts to expand to people around you.

I’ve had this sensation, Christa, that I feel like I want to cry. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe because I’m feeling like this is a super emotional topic for me. It’s such an interesting moment. We’ve cried on this show before. It’s not a new phenomenon. Talking about the lineage part of this that you and Whitney brilliantly spoke to, in terms of the things that we deal with that our parents, either weren’t aware of or things that they’ve passed to us that now we become aware of. We have chosen often courageously to deal with in isolation and dealing with these things alone.

For me, one of my greatest fears has been around parenthood. I’ve talked about this in previous episodes. One of the fears that I have around it is that somehow becoming a father will unlock some latent or more deeply buried traumas from my lineage that I’m not even aware of. I’m not sure why, but it scares me the idea of thinking about having to process hidden or deeper traumas as a result of becoming a parent and a father.

I’m curious about your journey of motherhood and also being this wonderful practitioner with the healing work you do around trauma. Did becoming a mother unlock any deeper layers for you of like, “I had no idea that I had that come up? That issue or this deeper trauma may be you’re more aware of.” What was that process like? Did it hit on Earth any of those latent, maybe deeper levels that you had to deal with or are dealing with?

It’s funny because that’s true for a lot of people and that’s a lot of people’s stories. For whatever reason, I was blessed to get to do it a little bit differently. To your point about being scared to have kids and recreate these traumas, that was my fear. I was aware of that from an early age, so I waited to have kids. I knew that in order for me to feel comfortable transitioning into motherhood, that I needed to do some of the work on myself first because I was not willing to pass that shit down onto my kids.

I knew that it needed to stop with me, even if that meant that I ultimately didn’t have kids. I felt it deeply in my bones that that was my responsibility. I had to get to this place where I felt healed enough to allow the responsibility of children to come into my life because I knew that I was not going to do it the way that my parents did. What ended up happening for me, which is one of the things that surprised me the most about having my son, is that I knew that the work I had put into myself and into changing the trauma narrative in my family was going to affect him.

I knew that even before he was born, he already was going to have a better life than I had been given. What I didn’t know and what I didn’t expect was that it was going to change the narrative backward. It was going to change the story with my parents and then it was going to change the relationship that I had with them. It surprised the hell out of me. When my son was born, I hadn’t spoken to my father in close to a decade. I hadn’t had any meaningful interaction with him. I had consciously cut him out of my life.

That was a decision that I made fully aware that he would not be a part of my children’s lives and I was okay with that. I needed to do that and set that boundary to protect myself and to protect my healing development that I had done. After my son was born, something shifted in me and changed. I had my infant son in my arms and I realized that somewhere along the line, my father had been this tiny baby in his mother’s arms that he wasn’t able to deal with the crap that had been handed to him and that turned him into the man that became my father.

Something about seeing the innocence and the purity of my own son, I realized that I couldn’t hold that against my father for not being strong enough to do the work that I had been called to do. In that way, I was able to allow him back into my life and it was hard. It felt tender, raw, and delicate at first. He didn’t meet my son for weeks because I wasn’t ready to let him in, and then when he finally did, we gently tiptoed back into having a relationship.

I have to say that of all the people in our life, my father is probably one of the people in my son’s life that he’s the closest to. It has changed the dynamic. If you had asked me if this was possible several years ago, I would have said, “No freaking way.” The healing that it’s allowed both for my son down the line and then backwards for my father has been incredible. It’s made all of the hard work, effort, and lonely nights crying, wishing for my parents to be in my life worth it because what I got back in was better than I could have ever imagined.

I am grateful that you shared that, Christa, because that line about remembering that your father was once this little innocent child is such important information. It’s something that I try to work on a lot, too. I spent my life almost from this victimhood mentality. A lot of, at least in the US, our culture perpetuates this idea of a victim. In some cases, it’s extremely justified but sometimes, I feel like it takes away from us recognizing that it’s not about us.

In other words, sometimes we can get focused on our experiences and how we’re affected by things. Into this place of blaming or creating ourselves to be a victim without recognizing that the person that we’re having this experience with has also experienced hardships and trauma and something shaped them to where they are and where they’re acting in this way that’s hurt us. I find it helpful when I can step back and say, “I’m hurt but this person is hurt, too, or was hurt in the past.” That might be why they’re doing something that’s causing me to hurt.

It has helped me because when things aren’t about me all the time, I feel more connected to the whole world. That’s what connection is all about and it’s easy to feel disconnected when we’re constantly focused on how we’re affected by things. Whether it’s our parent or a stranger on the internet, or anybody that we’re coming in contact with, there is something that led them to that point. It’s incredibly important for us to do that.

Otherwise, we can almost dehumanize people when we put ourselves in that place of the victim all the time without recognizing that person is human, too. They’re flawed and they’ve had those traumas and all of those things that have led them to that place. It’s not always that easy. Jason, I’m curious how you were feeling about this because I know that you often feel tender whenever you think about your father. What came up for you?

It’s interesting because it touches on some deep emotions around the work with my dad. Similar to what you had beautifully detailed, Christa about imagining your father as an infant on your grandmother’s arms. It’s one of the biggest turning points in healing, the deep anger, resentment, wounding and victimhood I felt with my father. This was apart from him because my father passed and I didn’t have an opportunity to necessarily do this work with him.

After he left his physical body, I started to dig a little bit deeper into what he had experienced with his father talking to my mom about it and people that were close to my dad about his relationship with his dad and the male lineage of what he went through. The biggest thing I had with my father was his absence, abandonment, addiction, and a lot of the things that I labeled him as, “You’re a piece of crap. You’re a bad father. You were never there for me. You abandoned us.” That narrative.

Once I got to zoom out and see a larger picture of him as a young boy growing up in Puerto Rico and his relationship with his dad and his grandfather, multiple generations of addiction, misogyny, abandonment and not being there, he took that pattern and that was what he knew. He took the pattern of how his father treated him and repeated it, and how his grandfather treated his father. God knows how many generations of that lineage.

Once I got that zoomed out the perspective of similarly imagining my dad as a boy and a young man going through what he went through with his father, coming to the mainland, the states, meeting my mom, having me and then repeating essentially almost to a tee the same archetype he’d experienced. It gave me compassion for him for the first time in my life. How else could he have responded other than what he knew?

My father wasn’t interested in going to therapy or getting treatment for his alcohol and drug addiction. He wasn’t interested in, I suppose, accessing those healing modalities. Maybe in the ‘70s and in the ‘80s when he was in the depth of it, the resources weren’t as plentiful as they are now. All of those things taken into consideration, it got me to a point where I was like, “With his awareness, lineage, genetics, and willingness to work or not work on himself, he did the best he could.” That was a tremendous healing point for me.

It’s funny that you say that because I can remember at one point in my twenties having this realization that when I got past the age that my parents were when they had me or at least my mother, I realized like, “I couldn’t have a baby right now. She was a child. I’m 22 and I’m not a full-grown adult yet.” No wonder this was the best she could do. She didn’t know any better. It’s interesting that you say that because often when we have kids without thinking about it, that’s what happens. They recreate these cycles.

There’s an interesting term called a transitional character. This is a term that was coined by Carlfred Broderick. These are his words, “A transitional character is one who, in a single generation, changes the entire course of a lineage. The most noteworthy examples are those individuals who grow up in an abusive, emotionally destructive environment, and who somehow find a way to metabolize the poison and refuse to pass it on to their children. They break the mold.”

Self-Transformation: When you have an awareness about how someone else might have ended up where they are, you are able to see the common humanity between them and you.

I remember the first time I came across that description and that definition, and it floored me because I had never heard anyone put in to words what I knew deep down in my body was that, “This is who I was. I was this transitional character.” It was validating to be acknowledged. I love that line, “That is willing to metabolize the poison.” That’s what it felt like. When I was growing up in the house that I did with my father and his uncontrolled rage, anger and temper, I could see where it was coming from. His father was the same way and I was stuck in that cycle and I knew that it needed to stop and that was going to stop with me.

I had no idea how that was going to happen. I was aware of this young age of being able to see those patterns and see that this wasn’t even him. This was the stuff that his father had given to him. Lord only knows where my grandfather got it from. What’s interesting, too, about the whole dynamic of our relationship, and, Whitney, you were the one that brought up this idea of compassion is that a lot of the work that I did on myself. One of the pillars of work that I do with coaching clients in cultivating self-compassion. I have tools and ways that we access that and my favorite way is through Nervous System literacy. The idea is that when you start to cultivate compassion for yourself, there are a couple of things that happen.

One, life gets easier and better for you but two, the surprising thing about it is that compassion doesn’t end at your water’s edge. It spills out. It starts to expand into the people around you, in your everyday life to the person that cuts you off in traffic, the coworker that is snarky to you in the hallway, or your partner coming in and having a long day and snipping at you. Even back to our family to your parents. When you have this awareness of how someone else might have ended up where they are, you are able to see the common humanity between them and you. You’re able to bring that to the table to have some compassion for maybe why they’re behaving the way that they are. You’re not excusing it. It’s not saying that their behavior is okay per se, but it’s having an understanding, and an acknowledgment may be why it’s happening so you can soften that interaction and relationship, both to yourself and to that other person.

When I look back on it, the thing that changed in my relationship with my father wasn’t him. He softened in his old age. His temper has subsided and cooled but the thing that changed was me. I did this inner work. I was able to go to him with this new lens and with this different perspective on him and on myself and on what I wanted out of life and our relationship. That’s it. There’s this great Ram Das quote, and let me start by saying I am in no way saying and thinking that I am enlightened but the quote says, “If you think you’re enlightened, try spending a week with your parents.”

It always makes me laugh because when I first came across that quote years ago, I was like, “That’s ever going to happen for me.” I can laugh now because I’ve done enough work that I’m like, “I could do. I would enjoy that.” It’s not that they’re any different. It’s that I’ve changed and that’s what’s so great about doing this work when we can take radical responsibility for ourselves. It changes life. It makes things easier. Life is hard in many ways that when we can make it easier for ourselves, however, and wherever we can and it makes it that much more enjoyable.

I feel there’s much to say and add to this. First of all, I love that you shared that Ram Das quote, which I think of a lot as well. I also immediately thought you and Jason have so much in common in that sense because he loves to drop quotes like Ram Das. You fit in here on our show in many ways. I wanted to acknowledge that point about softening. I love that and that’s such a beautiful way to express that. A lot of people are afraid to extend a lot of compassion when they feel hurt because it feels like, “If I forgive this person, they’re going to do it to me again or they’re going to do it to somebody else.” This could be our personal experience and this could be the experience around the world. There’s much resentment that builds up towards one another.

There is another instance of the police shooting and a man that was unarmed during Black Lives Matter. There’s much anger and resentment towards the police and we think that we have to go so far to prevent this and some people express that in hatred. They express their feelings with violence with this, “Police are bad.” It’s complicated because it can come out with anger because all we want to do is stop something and we feel that we can’t soften. We have to be hard in order to make a change.

With Black Lives Matter has shifted a lot of my perception because even though as a white woman, there’s that I will never fully understand that anger. I am starting to grok it as much as I possibly can through learning from other people. I still have this desire to hold space for that or to offer softness. I don’t want to go through life hard, rigid, and angry as a way of taking action. I personally want to reserve some softness for everybody because of all the reasons that you’re mentioning, Christa. I know that even those policemen that are doing some horrific things, they too are human beings and I don’t know what shaped them. I don’t know what led them to that moment. I believe that there are good police out there even though now it feels easier to have this blanket statement and it’s complex. I’m curious about that too.

I didn’t mean to spin the conversation in this direction so we could address it. I’m fascinated with your perspectives on things that like, Christa. Even for us, as vegans, for example, the vegan community can get incredibly angry and can be associated with rigid thinking and or wrong, black or white. There’s resentment that can come up for vegans wanting to say and do horrible things to people that treat animals poorly.

I can relate to that. I also still have a lot of softness in my heart for people that participate in the animal industry because I don’t know their whole story and what led them there. I also believe everybody is on a different path of their journey so who am I to be like, “My way is the right way. My way of thinking is the right way. You’re doing something wrong you have to change. You must be a horrible person if you’re doing this.”

I had a completely down the line question that I wanted to get to but rather than put the pause button on this, Whitney, because it’s profound. The thing that comes up for me and I don’t know that I’ve ever quoted the Bible on this show ever. This might be the first time and this is not my attempt to one-up your Ram Das quote with a Jesus quote, Christa. It’s like, “I see your Ram Das quote and I’ll up you with Jesus quote.” What comes up for me is, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

When I feel into that quote, it’s an extension of self-compassion to compassion for others in the sense that when people are making actions from choosing actions from conditioned behavior, ingrained belief systems, the lineage genetic dynamics that have been passed on through multiple generations. They’re often and, for myself too, how often do I act without full awareness, a grasp of being fully conscious of my actions, and the potential repercussions of my actions? If I can realize that I endeavor to become a more aware, intentional, and conscious person and act from that state of being. There are many times I do not and to think about whether it’s a person who’s taking someone’s life whether it’s a policeman or a lot of violence we’re experiencing.

There’s so much violence on the planet, especially at this moment but to have compassion for someone who’s not acting out of full awareness who’s not acting, necessarily maybe even of their own volition, we don’t know. What comes up for me, Whitney, was how can I forgive myself when I “do not know” what I’m doing and I’m not acting from full awareness, intention, and consciousness and extend that to others? It’s a practice. I don’t find it easy to do that, but it’s a worthwhile practice.

Jason, I agree with you completely. It’s not easy but that it is important this component of self-awareness and begins there. When you’re a self-aware person, mostly self-aware or more self-aware than the average person, it’s easy to go through life wondering why more people aren’t like you. If that’s true, whether it’s self-awareness or any topic, maybe it’s into veganism. Why don’t more people understand this the way I do? When I started digging into this healing work, I found this modality TRE, Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises, it made such a profound difference in my life. It completely removed my panic attacks. I started digging into the mechanisms of how it worked and this idea of nervous system literacy.

When I started doing this, I started realizing and understanding how much people on a day-to-day basis is operating from this place of survival because we exist in this modern society where we are not evolved and well suited or adapted to deal with this. Whether you’re dealing with big tee trauma, a catastrophic trauma, or not or you’re dealing with the trauma of living life in the year 2020. Many people are in this activated state. When you’re in this place of survival and your viewing the world is dangerous, not safe enough to engage in fully and completely with your guard let down. Another way to say it is with softness. That’s where that anger is coming from. It all starts to make sense why people would feel angry or why people would behave in certain ways and also why they wouldn’t have self-awareness.

When we can start to understand that, it can soften how we are able to view them and to view ourselves when we’re reacting from this place as well. To go back to your point, Whitney about the police, I agree, I don’t think that all police are bad. They get a bad rap in the sense that they are often traumatized as well and that’s not something that gets a lot of discussions and that it needs to. I don’t think it excuses their behavior. There’s a lot of police brutality that’s inexcusable but that doesn’t mean that we can’t understand where it arrived and came from and what perpetuated its existence. We need to be able to do that and have honest real conversations about what’s creating the dynamic of the systems that we’re living in order to change them.

Self-Transformation: It’s such a beautiful thing when our body is feeling safe enough to discharge the stored survival energy that’s been stuck. That’s when a huge transformation can happen.

It’s not about defunding the police. It’s not about taking money away. That changes some things but it’s not changing why it’s happening in the first place. Where that unchecked aggression is coming from, and why it’s allowed to perpetuate itself? Until we have that conversation, I don’t have a lot of hope that much is going to change. I get it too on the Black Lives Matter side of things where that anger comes from. Even the rioting, when people feel they’re left with no other choice, that survival energy has to come out somehow and when people are given no other choice, it starts to come out any way that it can.

What we’re seeing is this racial tension that’s boiling up of unhealed trauma and of people not being able to process things. It keeps getting worse because it’s not being addressed at the root. Without addressing it there, that’s what turns into the stuff that we’re dealing with. I’m at a loss for words. It’s devastating and it’s horrible. I’ll be honest, I saw this post and it’s raw and tender for me that it sickens me. Someone posted this thing on Facebook about a fourteen-year-old black child that was electrocuted. He was put sentenced to death and he was wrongly accused of murdering these two white girls and this was back in 1944.

He posted the images of this child being trapped down in this chair and I have not been able to get this image out of my head. Honestly, I haven’t even known what to do with these feelings and these thoughts and these emotions. The only thing that I can think to do is to come back to this place of trying to view it through this lens of compassion. I know how bad that sounds. There’s a part of me that wants to rage. How could anyone do that? Who could do that to a child? I realized it’s people who don’t know any better because they think that’s okay and it’s probably been shown to them that it was okay.

When I can start to frame it that way it in no way excuses this behavior or this awful image that I have in my head, mind, and heart but at least it can change the conversation about what we need to do to stop that from happening again. Stop the next police brutality or mother from losing her son. I’m starting to trail off because even with knowing everything that I do and all the work that I’ve done this stuff still is emotionally raw and tender for me. It’s overwhelming and that’s why it’s hard for people to have these conversations. We don’t have a good experience doing this, understanding things from other perspectives, and being able to have these conversations and understand what we need to do to change things.

I hear you on that and it is heart wrenching and confusing. One of the best things that I’ve learned over the Black Lives Matter Movement and things that have been happening in our country is, I’d rather move forward even though I feel confused and unsure. I hope the same for other people because a huge part of the problem is standing still and shrugging our shoulders. It’s like, “I don’t know what to do so I’m going to stay here until I figure it out.” Sometimes we don’t figure it out until we start moving and make mistakes. Sometimes there’s no explanation for things and it takes strength to do something when it is horrifying because we can start to feel jaded and fearful. We’re trying to protect ourselves. You were talking about survival and trauma. There’s much going on.

Going back to the police, to your point, about the trauma that they see, I can’t imagine. A lot of us like to watch True Crime for entertainment, but we can turn our eyes away from some of these horrific things we see on the screen. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in that field seeing horrific things and having to make the best decision you know how to at that moment or dealing with pressure from your higher-ups. A lot of us experience all the different elements of our lives personally or professionally. Even in the animal industry, there have been interviews with people that have worked in slaughterhouses.

They didn’t want to be there but they didn’t know what other jobs they could have or maybe they couldn’t get another job. There’s much going on and many different reasons and explanations for it. We have to keep doing our best with what we have and making the best decisions that we know how to make at that moment. The issues of standing still and not taking action are not serving us. Neither is making many judgments to other people and pushing them away because they don’t agree with us or we don’t like them. That’s gets us further away from change.

The thing that I’m curious about is, it seems like a gap but it also seems inextricably linked, the connection between individual healing and the healing of the collective. To be tangential as we do here on the show, I personally have a lot of belief in whether you want to call it the unified field theory or universal consciousness or the noosphere. There are a lot of different ways this has been characterized, but I do believe that there is a collective field of thought and consciousness that we are tapping into as individuals.

Maybe using that as a jumping-off point whether or not, Christa or Whitney, you agree with that. My question is, whereas if we as individuals acknowledge that we have lineage healing, we have some deep trauma release. We realize that we have a stress response that we are reactionary rather than responsive. I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about the Polyvagal Theory and more the nervous system. We, as individuals realize this and say, “I’m aware of this, but awareness isn’t enough and now I’m going to find a mentor, coach like you or modalities tools to help me deal with this and do the hard work.” Versus as an example, I have a good friend of mine, I won’t mention him. The people in his life have a consensus that he could benefit from some deep trauma release, some therapy and working on himself.

His attitude is, “I don’t need any fucking therapy. I don’t need to do crap. I’m fine the way I am.” The jump-off here is we have the individual work from people that acknowledge and are aware they have work to do. God knows there are how many millions or billions of humans on the Earth are like, “I don’t need to do any fucking work. What are you talking about?” What is that bridge between the individual healing and doing our best to heal the collective?

To your point, though, when we can heal ourselves individually, it affects the collective. That’s been my own experience. With this example of my father, it had this ripple effect that I wasn’t expecting. I say that he didn’t change but, it ended up changing our relationship which ends up changing the environment all around us. Some people don’t have the self-awareness to understand that they could benefit from things. We can’t change other people but when we start with ourselves and when we can change our own experience and do our own trauma healing work that has more of an effect than on us. That’s a place to start. When we have a community built of people who are doing this work, you have a community that feels more healed as well. The benefit isn’t on the individual because they are inextricably connected and there is this interwoven dynamic where our energy and vibration affect the universe and everything around us.

I want to talk a little bit about where the rubber meets the road on this, Christa, in the sense that you mentioned the TRE, yoga and the trauma release exercises. When you have a client or a person that you’re working with, someone who maybe has never had any experience with, I suppose a body awareness. Being sensitive enough to acknowledge where they’ve somatically stored trauma, stress, anxiety or why they’re having automatic reactionary responses like anger or rage. We could give a lot of examples. What are the things that you do in these modalities that you teach and facilitate to help people get in touch with their bodies, maybe for the first time on that level of sensitivity and awareness? How do you lead someone through that?

The primary modality that I use is TRE which again is tension and trauma releasing exercises. This is something that I found for my own life. In the household I grew up in, I was incredibly anxious. I was dealing with anxiety. I used to say, “Anxiety and I are on a first-name basis.” I started having panic attacks when I was twelve years old and they lasted for almost two decades. I tried all the things. I did everything that you’re supposed to do to treat panic attacks. The advice is, “Good luck.” That’s the place that I got to where I would find something and it would help a little bit and I was able to manage the symptoms but nothing relieved why they were happening and it wasn’t for lack of trying on my part.

I got to this point where I’d been doing talk therapy for a while and talk therapy is great. It saved my life. It served a great purpose. I can remember telling my ex-husband at the time, “I don’t have anything left to talk about it.” This panic attack is not in my head. I can keep going to therapy, but I sit there and I don’t even know what to say and I’m still having these panic attacks. It dawned on me that if it wasn’t in my head, it must be in my body. When I had that realization, it was like, “No shit, Christa.” If anyone’s ever had a panic attack, you know that they are a physical expression. There’s a mental component as well but it’s a physical event. When I had that realization, I put it out to the world. I said, “I need something. Give me the tool that I need because I know it’s stuck in my body.” At that point in my life, I had gotten stressful I felt the physical armoring of myself and I said, “Universe, show me the way.” This workshop came up and I happened to live in a town with a practitioner of TRE and I started looking into it. I said, “That’s it. That’s the thing.” I knew it.

I practiced with this guy and the first time I did it there was no looking back. It was an a-ha moment of this was what I needed and that was more than six years ago at this point. Since starting my practice, I haven’t had a single panic attack. In the last years, I have gone through all the life events that you could possibly imagine that would cause a person to have a panic attack. It’s because I don’t need to have them anymore because my body has remembered a different way of releasing that survival energy. I can explain a little bit more about what TRE is.

What it is, it’s a set of physical exercises that we do. As a practitioner, I guide you through these exercises and they’re designed to elicit an innate shaking mechanism in the body. This shaking or we call in the TRE world tremoring is a built-in way for your nervous system to complete a stress response. Jason, you’ve already alluded to this, but you’ve experienced this and you’ve also witnessed it. When you’re shaking in a yoga class, you have fatigued muscles. You’re feeling safe, calm and relaxed enough that your body which knows how to do this already allows you to begin shaking.

What that does is it starts to open up the body and return it to a place of natural pulsation. Think about breathing. Think about your lungs and your abdomen expanding and contracting your heart beating and pulsing. It’s a vibration. When we become stuck in these trauma response patterns, we lose that fluidity in our physical bodies. This shaking that we can induce helps to restore that and it starts to open the body back up. It allows energy to start flowing through a system in a different way. This is something that your body already knows how to do. We’re tapping into that wisdom of the body.

Self-Transformation: We are hardwired to think that vulnerability is not a strength. Weakness and vulnerability are not the things that we want to see in other people.

You bring up this idea of, “How I work with people who don’t have a sense of their body?” That’s a great point because a lot of times when we have experienced trauma in our lives, one of the things that it does is that it dissociates us from our bodies. It does that on purpose because that’s a survival response that if you think that your body is in mortal danger, you dissociate from it so you don’t have to experience the pain that you perceive is coming. That’s a good response at the moment. The problem is when that moment continues to last after the event has passed. That’s what becomes true for many of us because we live in a world one, where threats are continual. Two, we live in a world where we don’t give ourselves time to recover and respond and we don’t do it in a way that works with our body to allow the shaking to happen.

It’s not always shaking, sometimes it’s other things. Sometimes it releases crying and sweating. These are all different ways that your body is burning up these stress hormones. What we do with TRE by bringing this shaking, sometimes it ends up as crying. This is one of my favorites, sometimes it ends up as hysterical laughter. There’s a woman that I did my training with. Her tremor response was that she would get these gigantic belly laughs. What it is your diaphragm is tremoring. It ends up producing laughter. We would be tremoring in a group together in a room. Once she started going, the whole room would erupt in laughter. It was therapeutic and fun. I am grinning ear-to-ear thinking about her doing that. There are these different ways that our body has of releasing this stuff more than just laughter.

When I was 9 or 10, somebody had died. I was at the wake and I wasn’t old enough to understand the full implications of this. I can remember standing in line laughing nervously and I felt ashamed because I knew that laughing was disrespectful. I was old enough to understand that but I had no idea what was happening. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. Looking back on it, this is where this nervous system literacy can help with self-compassion. I understand what was happening. I was nervous as hell and that was the way that my body expressed it at the time. I can go back and tell a nine-year-old little girl, Christa, “It’s okay. You’re not being rude.” I can console myself and have that compassion.

The TRE work, when we start to tap into this, it allows for remembering of this wisdom that our body contains for healing itself. The thing is, these tremors and the shaking that happens are automatic and they’re subconscious. We have conscious control to start and stop them and to alter the way that they happen. If we can get out of our own way, they move through an inner body in whatever way they need to release whatever is being held in the way that the body needs it to be done. There’s this wisdom that we don’t need to self-direct like, “I’m feeling pain in my shoulder so I’m going to tremor my shoulder.” Sometimes you’re feeling pain in your shoulder and you lay down to tremor and your feet tremor and then your shoulder feels better because it’s all connected.

In the same way, we can have these experiences that have happened to us that become stuck in our body and sometimes it’s even without our conscious awareness that they’re there or where they are in our body. When we can allow this to run its course and does its healing work, the body can mend itself. It’s an amazing process to witness, to have both experienced it myself but also to witness this transformation with clients that I work with. We also work on self-regulation skills. I do have other embodiment techniques that I use. I’m a yoga instructor so a lot of that is about mindfulness, self-awareness, embodiment practices, right breathwork and that thing. I integrate those tools into my coaching practice. The TRE itself is working like that, in and of itself. Does that answer your question?

It was such a brilliant and beautifully detailed response. I’m curious in terms of the idea of trusting our bodies. Whitney and I talked about this a lot on episodes, in terms of intuitive eating and a lot of the programs around diet culture and what you ought to be eating. There’s much messaging around, like, “You should work out this way. You should have sex this way or not have sex this way. You should eat this diet. Don’t eat that diet.” It almost seems like allowing our bodies to have a natural completion of trauma release is part of a larger discussion.

In many cases, we have been taught or conditioned to not trust our own bodies, our intuition and the natural processes of intuitive eating, our sexuality or managing, in this case, stress and trauma. In a lot of cases, I’d have to imagine, it’s almost like we are learning to trust our bodies for the first time, whether it’s through this release of energy and trusting that mechanism or trusting that our body knows what foods naturally to gravitate toward. Sex is another aspect of shame and guilt. To me, it seems part of a larger lexicon of the disassociation. It’s almost a cultural directive for people not to trust themselves or their bodies. Does that resonate with both of you?

It does. Trust keeps coming up on our show over and over again. It’s something that I’ve had to examine a lot as well because I’m still trying to get the roots of where my trust issues are. It took me a while to even realize I had trust issues. It was a previous boyfriend that had pointed it out. He was upset because I didn’t trust him. At that time, I thought it was specifically about him. Over the years, I’ve examined it and it’s come up in many relationships, business dealings, friendships, and self-trust as well. For me to start to unravel it, like, “Where did this come from?” A lot of it is also coming back to that idea of survival and for me, feeling safe. I usually don’t trust things or people if I don’t perceive them as being safe. I’m afraid that I won’t be physically, mentally or emotionally safe in some capacity.

Part of this big struggle is a lot of us are trying to survive, even though our survival isn’t usually at stake. It’s not always that simple. It’s not like, “I’m going to be killed today.” For us, in the modern world, it’s like, “How do I survive with this job that I have? How do I survive with this friend group? How do I survive in this relationship?” It keeps coming back to all these protective mechanisms that end up causing big divides between us as human beings and that further results in us struggling with our survival. It’s incredibly important that we learn how to deal with these things because if we don’t, we’re continuing to make things worse. We’re not protecting ourselves as much as we might think we are.

It’s not like we wake up in the morning and think, “I’m going to get killed today.” Our nervous system isn’t adapted to the world that we live in. The part of your brain that is assessing for danger is your survival brain. The problem is that your survival brain doesn’t know the difference between your boss giving you a hard time at work and a cheetah coming after you. If you’re in this activated state, any threat, perceived or real, it all gets assessed is real and your body is doing what it’s supposed to, protect you from those things. Also, to your point about you finding it hard to trust people when you’re not feeling safe, you’re not supposed to trust people if you don’t feel safe. Your body is doing what it’s supposed to do. Your survival brain is telling your thinking brain, “Don’t feel safe. Don’t trust this person.” When we exist on this level of survival constantly, we end up in this stuck position of on activation, everything feels dangerous. 24/7 news feels threatening. Your inbox overflowing with email feels threatening.

There’s this woman that I follow on Instagram. In her stories one time, they were buying a house or something. It’s something that required an incredible amount of paperwork and bureaucratic red-tape and crossing t’s and dotting i’s. She was speaking to the fact that calling and being on the phone and having to fill out forms and deal with this thing and get this letter from the bank over to this person. She’s like, “It’s overwhelming.” It speaks to this fact that you don’t know the difference. We can think rationally, that’s not a life threat. It’s not a place of rationality, where these survival mechanisms come from. That’s not the way that we’re wired. That’s not the way that our brain works.

Jason, I love what you said. We’ve been taught not to trust our bodies and that’s valid. Especially as women, that’s true. I obviously can’t speak to the experience of being a man. I know for me, as a woman, we are taught not to trust our bodies. Even with things as fundamental as our bodies giving birth and the whole process of labor and delivering babies. I could go off on a whole tangent about this especially having given birth to a baby. We’re taught this idea of being told you’re going to need these interventions and the doctor knows better than your own body and you need to be at a hospital because bad things are going to happen. The reality is women’s bodies have been birthing babies since the dawn of time. My body is designed to do that. I can promise you, I don’t have to have any rational thought about that happening. It happens on its own because our bodies know what to do. It’s something that we are conditioned out of.

Telling little boys, “Don’t cry. Stop crying.” I see other parents do that and it makes me cringe and recoil on many different levels. Little boys that are taught not to fully feel and express their emotions grow into men that are taught not to feel and fully express their emotions. They still have them. They don’t go away. We then see toxic masculinity become this problem and it’s like, “No wonder this is what’s happening.” We’re training our boys to suppress this stuff until, eventually, it has to come out. One of the biggest realizations I had with my tremor work is I had this a-ha moment of every panic attack I have ever had has been a tremor that was trying to come out and I suppressed it because I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t understand it. I was afraid of it. I had no trust that’s what was supposed to be happening.

For me, in my body, suppressing that and holding that in over and over leads to panic and erupting. If you’ve ever experienced a panic attack, it’s this eruption and overflow of unchecked, uncontrolled emotion that’s chaotic. The thing is that when you tremor, it’s not chaotic at all. It’s this beautiful dance that your body does. It’s this elegant, beautiful expression that can exist. When it’s not allowed to exist in that way and it becomes stifled, it gets ugly. It feels like shit in your body. It feels like chaos ensuing inside until it erupts as this overwhelm and dread and heart racing. It makes me uncomfortable even thinking about it. I have such a visceral reaction to it. For me, I realized that’s what it was. That’s why when I had that realization and allowed myself this outlet of connecting and allowing myself to remember, that’s what finally healed it for me and then set me off on this path of doing other healing work. I got out of my own way. I was able to take that thinking brain and say, “You’re okay. You’re safe. We’re going to allow this to happen.” It’s beautiful to watch and to witness.

There are many moments in this show where I feel like I’m on the other side of the microphone and taking deep breaths. Even listening to you, Christa, it’s simultaneously pique-ing more of my curiosity and putting me at ease at the same time, which is a beautiful thing to experience sensation wise. You brought up multiple times this fact that we are not equipped to handle the constant bombardment of modern life. On the one hand, it seems that we are talking about things from our past or our lineage, things that are epigenetically stored in us that we need to deal with, things from our childhood hood that are traumatic or stressful. It also seems there’s this other side of the coin with the 24/7 news, the constant barrage of social media from billions of people all over the globe and living in extremely, densely packed urban environments for many of us, not all people and especially exacerbated during everything with COVID in 2020.

Self-Transformation: When you’re more self-aware than the average person, it’s easy to go through life wondering why more people aren’t like you.

Whitney and I have talked about this. I’m thinking about moving outside of Los Angeles and not being in a major city for the first time. I have often thought if I were to do better at limiting my news intake and my social media, which I am getting better at and I’m practicing that. Removing myself from the stress and realizing how sensitive I am to the bombardment of traffic, cars, smog, tens of millions of people being packed in a dense environment. If I, who is a sensitive being, were to remove themselves from that environment and maybe live more in nature, if that would facilitate deeper healing, if not, remove that constant barrage of stimuli assaulting our nervous system at all times. It feels like sometimes I’m doing yoga, therapy, and the healing modalities simply to buffer against the constant bombardment of overstimulation.

This is a long-winded question. Removing that constant bombardment of stress in our lives, if we can, because that’s a luxury, not everyone has the ability to like, “I’m going to leave the city and move to a country house.” Not everyone can do that, necessarily. Maybe some people can. What I’m asking is how do the external stimuli play into this overstimulation and stress response of our nervous system? Can we mitigate that?

To both of those, a resounding huge yes. Removing some of those extraneous stimuli is going to help. I love what you said about all these self-care practices that you have, yoga and things like that are acting as this buffer. If you’re staying in the situation, in your case living in Los Angeles, you could be taking all the time to decompress and care for yourself and do these things to set yourself up for success. If you’re in this toxic environment, you can only get much better. You can only heal much in an unhealthy situation, which in your case is the City of Los Angeles Being in nature is one of the things that we can do to help regulate our nervous system. It’s incredible.

Shinrin-Yoku is this idea of forest bathing. They’ve done scientific studies on this. It lowers your heart rate, alters your breath patterns and decreases your cortisol, your stress hormones. The reason for that is we are animals that are designed to be in harmony with nature. When we can go outside and be a part of nature, ground ourselves bare feet on Mama Earth, it has a downregulating effect on our nervous system. You’re doing two things. You’re removing the extraneous stimuli and you’re providing yourself with things that help to regulate your system. There are other things that you can do. It’s a privilege and a luxury to be able to pick up and move if moving is the thing that you need to do.

There are things that you can help regulate your nervous system with things like yoga, breathwork, TRE and gratitude journaling is another one. I like this one because it’s accessible. Gratitude practices have been shown to help our vagal tone, your vagus nerve, which are an integral part of your nervous system and especially your nervous system’s perceptions of safety and regulating and scanning your environment external and internal. When you do vagal toning exercises, the vagus nerve can be strengthened and conditioned. We know through scientific studies that a well-toned vagus nerve has a higher correlation of having a regulated nervous system. What it’s doing is increasing your capacity to deal with stressors.

Stress is inevitable. The goal is not to remove all stress from your life. We can grow from stress. Stress plays an important part in our lives. The problem is too much stress or stress beyond our capacity to handle it is bad. That’s also when things start to turn into trauma. There are a couple of different things that affect our capacity for stress like a cup. When the cup starts to overflow, that’s when you start experiencing the ill effects of stress and trauma. The size of that cup and how much it can hold are determined by two things. One is genetics. Some of us are born with bigger cups and some of us are born with smaller cups. We don’t have a lot of control over that. The other thing that controls the size of that is these things that we can do to improve our resiliency like vagal toning exercises, being aware of what’s happening, practices, yoga, breathwork, and TRE.

Those things can help change the size of that cup so that we can handle more before it becomes a problem, panic attack, insomnia, chronic pain, and before it turns into cardiovascular disease down the line. All these different things that we know have a correlation with too much stress in our lives, we can change that. We can control that and have an impact on that. That’s why I like this practice that I’ve found because I get to help coach clients through changing that for themselves. We can’t change the genetics that we inherited. We can change what we offer to our children. We can control this. We can control what we do for ourselves and that’s where we can find empowerment so that we can continue to live in this modern world.

It’s such a wonderful collage of techniques and advice. It’s been wonderful, Christa, to go deep with you in all of these ways. One thing that I recall Whitney and I are talking about was that sometimes I tend to have this feeling like, “God, more work on myself. Is it ever over?” Listening to you and your approach with TRE and a lot of the transformational techniques you’re using, there’s something wonderfully soothing, approachable, and heartfelt about your approach. Even those feelings I sometimes have about, “I have to do more work on myself. When is this going to be over?” It’s almost like that seems to dissolve during this conversation for me. I want to thank you for having such a loving, open approach. Even the moment we got on the microphone before the show started, we were saying how comforting, friendly, and warm your voice is. It’s been such an absolute pleasure to go deep. I feel like I’m walking away from this conversation with much to digest. Thank you for that.

Some great tools, too. I didn’t know nearly as much information about the tension and trauma releasing exercises. It’s something that I want to look further into. It’s such a wonderful thing to introduce others, especially with your story, Christa, of how it helped you with anxiety attacks. Jason, I’m curious if it’s something that you would try because I feel like sometimes you do have panic attacks or tough times. Have you ever tried anything like this before?

No, but legitimately I want to book a session with you, Christa, after this and go a little bit deeper into what I’ve been going through in terms of anxiety and panic attacks and stuff. I didn’t want to necessarily jump too deep down that rabbit hole. I do want to try out TRE and see how it feels for me. It could be beneficial.

That sounds great. I would be happy to help. It’s been a pleasure having this conversation and chatting with you. I’m glad that you found me approachable. It’s nice to hear that because that’s what I try to offer. I know that something that your nervous system can then connect to is offering those cues of safety. When we know how these things work, we can use that to our advantage. We can create safe and loving environments for the people that we interact with and also to ourselves. I’m such a huge fan of looking and examining the way that we speak to ourselves. We didn’t get into this part of my story but I have had some profound shifts in my life in realizing that my subconscious internal dialogue held the keys to my healing. I had this profound awakening to love. It’s the only way I can describe it when I realized that my celiac disease, which is an autoimmune condition, was continuing to ravage my body despite doing all the things that you’re supposed to with diet and lifestyle changes. I realized I had this like, “Come to Jesus, fall to my knees,” ugly tears moment where I knew that that was happening because I hated myself.

In that realization, my body was attacking itself. That’s what an autoimmune disorder is about. It was doing what I had told it to do. I was giving it the subconscious messages of self-hatred. My body was then seeing itself as the enemy and doing its job of attacking the enemy. It turned into these horrible symptoms that manifested as celiac disease for me. When I changed that, it changed everything about the way that I was able to heal from that disease and everything that it did to my system. I’m such a huge proponent of looking at that because how we speak to ourselves and then ultimately to others does shape how things exist and how they occur and back to this point of this connection that we all have with one another. This happens at the quantum level. When we can affect that in a positive manner, it does affect the whole world. It’s a huge honor to hear that from you. I’m grateful to provide that for you.

For the readers, I hope that you have stuck with us through this whole thing. Christa, you dropped another incredible, and for me, chill-inducing piece of wisdom from your own personal experience. As someone who continues to work on loving myself and to let go of self-hatred and self-judgment, that was perfectly timed and unbelievably potent. I feel like I’m in awe and resonating deeply with everything that you have shared. You can book a consultation session with her for online sessions. It’s something that I’m going to take advantage of because the resonance and the depth have spoken to my heart on such a deep level. Christa, I can’t thank you enough for your wisdom, your heartfulness, sharing your modalities, your story, and your journey. This has been one of the rarer episodes that have cut to the bone with me. I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve shared with us. Hopefully, the readers have resonated as deeply as well.

Thank you as well. I am enjoying your Instagram. I can’t wait to continue that journey there and for all the social media content that you do. Sometimes, it’s nice to go on social media and find something that feels good for the heart. I love seeing that. I love this conversation. I’m also excited to hear everything that Jason said because I care about Jason. When I hear him expressing that something is helpful to him, it makes me feel good. I love listening to all these realizations between the two of you.

Important Links

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About Christa Gowen

Christa Gowen is a certified TRE® (tension and trauma releasing exercises) provider and yoga instructor as well as a mother. Her coaching practice helps to empower other mothers on a journey of breaking free from inherited family trauma. Coming to this work out of necessity, she’s seen the incredible impact healing trauma can have in all directions of your family tree. As a natural teacher, Christa works to educate, support, and inspire people who are ready for radical change in their lives with methods that deliver results. She believes that self-love, compassion, and grace are the core elements of healing, and all start with a foundation of awareness.

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