Appreciating The Body’s Powerful Wisdom to Self-Heal with Lauren Walker [Episode #721]

This week’s topic is: Appreciating The Body’s Powerful Wisdom to Self-Heal with Lauren Walker

I am so excited to have my very special guest, Lauren Walker, who is a yoga and meditation teacher and author of THE ENERGY TO HEAL: Find Lasting Freedom from Stress and Trauma Through Energy Medicine Yoga. Listen in as Lauren shares the concept of energy medicine yoga, simple practices to clear your energy, the five element theory, and so much more!

[BULLETS]

• The concept of energy medicine, yoga and how it works with releasing energy in the body…
• Clearing our energy by moving the body…
• Practices that are accessible and simple to add into your spiritual practice…
• Defining the boundary of our field…
• Retraumatizing trauma explained…
• Lauren shares details on the Five Elements of water, wood, fire, earth and metal…

[FEATURED GUESTS]

About Lauren Walker

Lauren Walker has been teaching yoga and meditation since 1997 and created Energy Medicine Yoga while teaching at Norwich University, the oldest private military college in the country. She now teaches EMYoga across the US and internationally. She is frequently quoted and cited as an expert in Yoga Journal, Mantra Magazine, and Yoga Digest, and a feature article about her yoga work was published in The New York Times. In 2016, she was named one of the top 100 most influential yoga teachers in America.

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Lauren Walker’s Interview

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Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• The Importance of Grounding Your Energy
• The Power of Mantras, Heart-Based Yoga (Bhakti) and Community with Govind Das and Radha
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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Hi Beauty and welcome back to our Monday interview podcast where I’m very excited to delve into a topic today, which you may or may not have heard of It’s energy medicine, and it’s said to have been around since the beginning of time. It’s how we work with our bodies and bringing energy in to heal blockages and to rejuvenate the body in different ways. This is something that’s been talked about in terms of practices like Tai Chi and Chiang and yoga, and from some pioneers in this field in the western world, including Donna Eden was able to heal herself of fibromyalgia just through working with her own body bodily practices. And today on the podcast, we have another teacher in the space called Lauren Walker, who is a yoga practitioner and teacher. She is the founder of Energy Medicine Yoga, and she has written a book called The Energy to Heal, Finding Lasting Freedom Through Stress and Trauma Through Energy Medicine, Yoga.

So I was really called to bring this topic up today into our community because we wanna always take a multifaceted approach to our healing, to our wellness. And there’s so many different forms of nourishment, including the foods that we put into our body and clean water and sunlight and healthy environment and relationships, but also the ways in which we move the energy in our bodies through our will, through physical movement.

Please leave a review on iTunes and Subscribe

So I’m really excited to get into our show today before I do, Little reminder to please leave us a review on iTunes or Apple Rather used to saying that Spotify, wherever you listen to our podcast, thank you so much in advance. It’s a huge, huge way to support the show. So thank you so much. Please also share the show with anyone that you think would benefit. It could be a friend, a coworker, a sibling, whoever.

You can just send along a screenshot or a link. And finally, please be sure to subscribe to our show and that way you don’t miss out on any of these interviews, Solocasts or our Thursday Q&A Show. Last little reminder is to please check out our new book, Baby, which is called Your More Than You Think You Are. It is available wherever books are sold, and it is my practical guide for you on how you can tap into the energy inside of you and create more abundance and magnetism and vitality in your life. So check it out. All right, all that being said, let’s get right into our conversation today with Lauren.

Interview with Lauren Walker

Kimberly (01:33):
Lauren, it’s so great to connect and I have your wonderful book here and my hands, the energy to heal. I think you mentioned you have one of my books. So here we are full circle.

Lauren (01:46):
<laugh> full circle. I do have one of your books and I’m so excited to speak with you as well. And we were talking about you this morning, as we were drinking our smoothies, oh, to my husband. I said, that’s who I’m gonna be talking to. And that’s why we are having so much spinach in our smoothie.

Kimberly (02:03):
Wonderful. So, you know, it’s funny because, uh, we have this online community called the Solluna Circle and we talk about different themes every month. This month, we’re talking about releasing the need to control. Last month, we talk about protecting our energy, connecting inside, and what’s been coming up a lot. Is questions organically around a lot of the members just sensing there’s this heaviness in the body and wanting to move some of this energy because we start to get these realizations in the mind, right? Or just spiritually like, yes, I can be more free. This is what I choose. I don’t believe in this. I believe in this. But then sometimes the body takes a moment to, to catch up or we’re holding energy. Can you talk a little bit Lauren about this whole concept of energy medicine, yoga and how it works with the, with the body and releasing energy, did it in a general sense to get started?

The concept of energy medicine, yoga and how it works with releasing energy in the body

Lauren (03:02):
Yeah, that’s a great question because we do have this sort of unclear idea of what energy is. Most of us think of it in terms of, I have a lot of energy and I can go through my day or I have no energy and I need to take a nap or have a coffee, or the things that we do. We don’t have energy, but we don’t realize that we are energy and that we have nine distinct energy systems that make up our body and they all need to be online and working and moving in the right directions. And energy has a specific language. It’s a very, it is not esoteric. How many of us, especially in the yoga world learned about energy as PR, but mm-hmm, <affirmative> that was it. And like, how do we get PR? Where, where is it? What does it mean?

But energy is a very specific language. And when you can start to learn to speak that language, then you have this intimacy with the operating system of your own body. And you’re right. There are so many of us right now that feel stagnant. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and don’t know how to work with that and get stuck in the mind. And one of the things, I mean, this book specifically is geared towards releasing trauma and stress. And one of the things that we are recognizing more and more in, um, Western medicine, as well as in alternative, or I like to say original medicine is that you cannot think your way out of stress. Yes. You cannot think your way out of trauma. It’s an energetic issue. And if we don’t learn to understand those energies so that we can release them, we’re really, um, we’re in a, we’re in a tough position individually and collectively.

Kimberly (04:41):
And what I like as well in your book is you’re bringing in some of the, you know, the, the science and the scientists to help ground this for people that have a discerning mind. Because sometimes when we hear this idea of PR and energy, it can feel a little bit, like you said, just woo, woo or esoteric. But I like how you talk about, um, Bessel. I think I’m saying his name, right? Bender Kolk, who wrote the wonderful book. Um, your body keeps the score. And then some of the research from Bruce Lipton showing that some of this really is measurable. Some of it is Newtonian some of it’s quantum, but we start to, when we tap into this more expanded view of who we are, not just this limited, you know, the, the physical, the BA the, you know, the bag of skin and bones, we realized that energy is affecting us on all levels.

So like I said, we can start to meditate and go deep into practice. We can eat healthy foods, which is where I started on the journey in my first few books, what really nutrition focused. And then I started to really go beyond that. Cause you realized, oh, that’s not what all this is. I started, you know, working with chakras and then meditation and Yogananda does work and Korea yoga. And you realize, oh, there’s just so many layers of this. So back to, you know, the, the exercises, these practices in your book, which is working with physical movements, can you talk about how that can actually really clear our energy just by moving the body? How does, how does that actually work?

Clearing our energy by moving the body

Lauren (06:12):
Yeah. So, okay. So we’ll go back to the language and the rules of energy. So the first two rules of energy are sort of how I emerged energy medicine, yoga, because I had been studying traditional yoga for years. And it sounds very similar, but then when you get to the practices, it sort of went away the understanding of energy as the, as the primary part of who we are, not something afterwards, we are energy. And so energy needs to move and energy needs space to move. So you think of a yoga practice and you’re moving your body in these very expansive ways, creating space in the body for energy to move. So just by doing a traditional yoga practice, you are moving energy. But when you add in these techniques that are in that very specific language of energy, then you start to speak to it in a very specific way. Mm. So you spoke about chakras, which is one of the biggest topics and most exciting for most, for yogis. They love chakras, but everything that I learned about chakras before I started studying, um, energy medicine, and it was specifically with Donna Eden,

Kimberly (07:23):
Mm.

Lauren (07:24):
Really anchored in the reality of how energy works in the body. And so I kind of had this idea of chakras and okay, you do twists to get to the third chakra and you do heart openers to get to the heart chakra, but that’s actually, um, a, a very, uh, it, it doesn’t really speak to how chakras work in the body energetically. And so we work in a very specific way. And so you can move the body and twists and all of those things, heart openers. Absolutely. But then you add these other techniques in that work in a very, very specific way. So you’ll be tapping on points. You’ll be smoothing points, massaging points, holding points. All of this comes out of the understanding that the body is electromagnetic. We are electric. We have electric hearts. We have electric brains are bones and muscles and fascists, Paso electric.

We are electric, which means we have a field around us that is electromagnetic and has a polarity. And so as we start to understand that language of ourselves, then we see that if I smooth my hand down my arm, one way it has one effect. If I smooth it down the other way, it has another effect. And if I know exactly what paths or swirls like the chakras are wheels or swirls of energy, if I know where I’m moving my hands and why that is one of the languages that we can release and, and move energy and start to bring it. I think of it as tuning up your own orchestra, because you have all of these different instruments. And if they’re not all playing together, you have challenges, depression. Yes. This ease patterns, all of these things that we know, just lack of energy, lack of focus. That’s our body not tuned up. And when we tune the orchestra altogether, we get every energy system online and moving in the right direction. Then we have a symphony.

Kimberly (09:27):
So in a sense, we can say that we know along the spine, there are these, you know, big junctures, the chakras, but I know yoga also talks about there’s 72,000, nadis in the body. You talk about Meridian points and all the acupuncture, all that stuff. So what you’re saying is there’s more directed ways. And I, you know, I flipped through your bucket. I look at all these specific points, you know, here and in the body, you’re saying there’s points beyond that. That kind of like you said, tune the symphony as a holistic unit. Yes,

Lauren (09:57):
Absolutely.

Kimberly (09:58):
Got it. So

Lauren (09:59):
Interesting. Nine energy systems. So chakras is one of them. You talked about meridians. That’s one of us. Yes. But we have nine. And in traditional yoga, I learned about chakras. I learned about the aura or the biofield, which is also one of the systems, but I never learned all nine of them.

Kimberly (10:57):
So Lauren, I’m hearing you speak. And it’s funny, we’re having this conversation today, this past week, I actually reread the Dow a couple times the Dow day, ch I love the Steven Mitchell translation and I’ve quoted him in some of my books. But anyways, it goes back to this idea of just harmony, right? And you know, the lines in the book where it goes into do nothing and nothing gets undone, which isn’t about being passive, but it’s about melding into this moment. So when I hear, you know, you talking about the energy and there’s this real intuitive part of us inside that we know our emotions are creating every energy and all of this, but then sometimes, you know, we get so heady. And when you’re talking about the nine systems and all of this, it starts to get a little bit complex and it starts to feel like I’m in my head thinking about this system or this system versus just, yes, I’m letting my body move in this nonlinear intuitive way. So how can we reconcile or how in your book do you kind of go beyond that overthinking into offering practices or teaching this in a way that doesn’t feel so inaccessible or too complex for the average person?

Practices that are accessible and simple to add into your spiritual practice

Lauren (12:05):
That’s an excellent question, cuz it really can feel overwhelming. Follow these practices, you are activating all of them and bringing them into harmony. And the beauty of, um, of these practices is that they’re very simple and they’re very intuitive. And some of the things, yes, um, you are doing already, but you are not maybe cognizant that it is energy medicine, things like, um, just if you have a stomach ache, right, you rub your belly. If you have a headache, you might put your hand to your head. If you have a shocking piece of news, you might put your hand up to your heart and, and kind of flutter it a little bit.

There are these little things, and you’re gonna start to see these through the practices and recognize you are already practicing energy medicine. This oldest medicine, the only reason that we are here at all today is because our ancestor knew how to utilize the intuitive healing nature of the body. Not even intuitive intrinsic, your body is built to heal. And so the practice is really simplify. If you wanna go into the Roger yoga and the like the me, you know, the thought of what is behind everything and the philosophy. There’s no end of that as well. But if you just wanna do the practice and get the benefits,

Kimberly (13:43):
Yes,

Lauren (13:44):
You take this to your mat. You don’t, you, if you’re already doing a yoga practice, you use these techniques within the practice that you’re already doing. So you’re not even expending any more time than you’re already giving to your practice. And yet the benefits off the charts.

Kimberly (13:59):
Yes. And I think understanding some of these fundamentals, or just giving us the confidence to go on the mat and to move intuitively. I know sometimes my spine just wants to move in that Sahaja freeform way instead of thinking this system or this system, and just sort of trusting and we’re touching on different systems and that the body has this innate intelligence, which, you know, leads me to this next question, Laura Lauren, as I was going through your book, there was this, and you use this word just a moment ago of the field, right? So it’s like our energetic field. And so that starts to get, like, we start to blow the mind because there’s us spirit, individualized universe, a drop of consciousness, and then we’re connected to oneness. So when we’re talking about doing this energy work, how do you define the boundary of like where our quote unquote field is that we’re working with? You know, is it in the boundary of the skin? Is it three feet out? Like how are we even creating this idea of our field?

Defining the boundary of our field

Lauren (14:57):
Hmm. Yeah. That is one of those mind blowing ideas and questions because we are on some level, there is no end to us and to the etheric field of which we arise from, we are, it just gets more and more and more and more diffuse. But for our needs to understand how things work, we need to put a bookend on things. Yes. So that we can speak about something in this area and then understanding that everything is interconnected, but we’re gonna just kind of frame off this little piece so that we can talk about it. So the, the most, um, the biggest field that we have that is the most accessible as well is the or field, which is also in Western science called the bio field. So this has now been proved by Western science. This is no more a woo woo yoga idea.
I love it. Right, right. This is a real thing now. And that is actually a measurable field. And it’s, it, it can be as far as 15 feet off the body, if you are, um, really, uh, empowered and grounded in all of those things that, that are again, energetic concepts. And so, but there is an end to that field. So the aura has seven layers to it. And the outermost layer of the aura has, um, all of these geometric patterns in them. And it actually is called the, the Celtic weave. And that is also a practice that we do of this moving the hands back and forth in front of the body to bring this figure eight pattern in this is one of the most, um, common geometric patterns in all of the fields. And it is the most important feel, uh, uh, shape to have the more figure eights you have in your fields, the healthier you are and the healthier you are, the more figure eights you have in your field. And you can bring them into your field again, where just

Kimberly (16:43):
By creating that shape, you’re actually creating that pattern. Wow.

Lauren (16:47):
And if you have an injury or an illness or something, you maybe you have a broken wrist, right. So then you’re gonna start to do the trace, these figure eights over your wrist. And you’re gonna start to help increase those. I, I was just at a, a training and I don’t have it with me, but do you remember those, those toys that were all these iron filings and there was a face and you had a magnet stylist and you would pull the iron filings over to make, uh, a pattern on the face. You could put a beard or eyebrows or hair.

Kimberly (17:16):
That’s what, I sounds like a cool toy. I don’t know that one. I should get it from my sons.

Lauren (17:20):
You should, it’s really, really fun. And the thing is that we are the same. Yes. We can move our energy just by moving our hands in specific ways. If we don’t know that we’re still moving energy, even as I’m talking, I’m moving my hands. But if I move them in very specific ways, I’m actually doing things that are helping my health and wellbeing. And so that is one of the fields that we have, but every energy system has a field because everything is electric, right. And so we’re back to that, um, that everything has a field around it. So all nine of these energy systems are fields that are interlocking or interconnected. And then, and that’s sort of what is underpinning the physical form. So the chakras, which we all learned were inside the body are actually not inside the body, right?

Kimberly (18:10):
They’re around us.

Lauren (18:11):
They start, they, yeah. They start inside the body. But then they extend off as far as our fields extend from us, which depends on our moods and our health, how far that field expands out from us.

Kimberly (18:24):
You know, the, the work of the Heart Math Institute, really talking about this heart energy. It’s so true when you tune into it, you couldn’t really feel when someone’s coming from their heart or when there is more of a blocked nodded hard jocker right. There’s just a bit more blockage and rigidity. It’s something that’s. So you just, just feel it. You just know that it’s true. The more you tune into that. So I love that there’s more, this research backing up all of these energetic concepts. And I also love Lauren in the book, how you bring in writing because as a writer, myself, as a big journaler, myself, there’s practices and exercises around writing, which I have found personally in my own healing journey to be so powerful. And then there’s this part of the book where you talk about, I think this stemmed from, um, some of the work of Bessel veer, Coke as well, where he talks about telling your story, right?

Cuz the essence of your book is really healing, trauma. These, you know, apparent patterns or these, you know, non-healthy patterns that continue to play out, but then you bring up this interesting point of not retraumatizing. So can we talk about that? Because there’s this aspect where sometimes things happen to us and we don’t really have the voice. I know as a child, you know, when I was bulimic, when I was 16 years old and I was taking in all this, I couldn’t cope emotionally. So it was like, I was trying to expel things, right. So then layer as an adult, we get language, we start to understand more, but where is the line between healing processing? And then we just keep living in the past, you know, and also in your energy work where we’re bringing that up. And so we’re kind of reinforcing trauma. Do you know what I’m saying? There’s like there seems to be a line and um, I’d love for you to explain a bit more. Yeah.

Retraumatizing trauma explained

Lauren (20:07):
Yeah. That’s really true that reinforcing the trauma can happen and more and more I’ve been working and talking a lot with different trauma therapists and, and Bessel was one of the first ones to say this too. Um, not in these exact words, but you can’t talk yourself out of trauma. Mm just can’t that’s not the way to release trauma because trauma ultimately is an energy. And so we think about it, we process it in our heads. We get stuck on it. And the more we think about it, that creates a PTSD loop, right? Yeah. That we have the thought doesn’t matter that the circumstances are different. You can think back or, or have a trigger that then floods you with all the same stress chemicals that you had when the trauma originally happened. And if you don’t interrupt that call, it’s called the limbic loop.

Then you will keep having that PTSD. That is the definition of PTSD. And so whether it’s a trigger, a door slam, or you telling your story to your girlfriend, or you telling your story to your therapist again and again. Yeah. And then, then you are reinforcing actually the trauma energy in the body. And so part of what we do in energy medicine, yoga is really speak to the energy of the trauma and to interrupt that loop. And so whether your trauma is preverbal, like a lot of us had trauma before we even knew that we were separate beings, right? We had no words we had no. So traumas that happened there aren’t things that we even can talk about. We, we can’t annunciate, we don’t know exactly what happened. And yet we know we’re living in a field of trauma, which by the way, also is a field.

There’s a field that holds your experiences to you and hold your traumas to you and draw more traumas to you. That is the other deficit of not working with your trauma. You will draw more trauma to you because that is the nature of the energy of trauma. And so that idea of writing your story down. So you are speaking your truth, you are telling your story in detail, you can remember everything that happened. Um, everything that you thought and felt your emotions and all of that, you write it down. And then while you’re doing that, you’re also holding a very specific set of points. So you’re holding some points here and some points right here, which start to interrupt that limbic loop so that your story stops having the charge that creates that PTSD. You stop having that flood of chemicals through the body. So if you’re using those points, those energy medicine techniques, while you’re writing your story or telling your story, then you can start to diminish the charge of the story and start to release the trauma. This is one of the first things that I did to release my own trauma. Even before I created energy medicine, yoga, when I was going through incredible traumas, I was just, I would just hold these points.

Kimberly (23:11):
Oh. And for anyone that can’t see, uh, Lauren’s holding her forehead and a point on her throat, like at her lower base.

Lauren (23:20):
Yeah. So hand over your forehead is if you’re taking your temperature and two fingers in the hollow at the base of the throat, it’s called the sternal K notch. So like right between where the collarbones meet. If you go together and then slightly up, there’s this little hollow and holding there, and those two points help to interrupt that limbic loop. And so you can write your story or tell your story. And then we ask you to rewrite your story with you as the superhero, what would you have done? Had you been able to be present during that event? Had you not been disempowered, had you not been victimized in whatever way your trauma happened to you, whether it involved another person or, um, uh, uh, an external event, if there was a flooding or a fire or, you know, a car accident, what would you have done if you could, could you fly? Could you see through walls? Could you lift a heavy thing? What would you do? And then you rewrite the story there, and then you are building in your own resilience and power through that. One of the things we know about trauma is every time you tell the story for a traumatic event, it is exactly the same. Exactly. You’re

Kimberly (24:32):
Just reliving it. It’s almost like you’re reinforcing it. Exactly. And that, that victim mode, like this happened to me, this sucks. Then you get the feelings back in your body. Yeah.

Lauren (24:42):
All of it, all of it. And other memories that aren’t traumatic, they are not exact. Yes. You’ll forget things. You’ll embellish things. The rainy day was actually a gorgeous sunny day. Your shorts and t-shirt was actually a ball gown. Like you forget, everything becomes different. And so then if you take the traumatic memory and you start to release some of the, uh, the energetic trauma of it, and then you rewrite the new story, you’re breaking that. Yes. And you’re bringing yourself back into that. Things can change and transform. You are okay in this moment right now, you don’t have to relive that experience physiologically, ever again, your trauma is still gonna be part of your story. If you were bulimic, you were bulimic and that’s part of your story. But you can tell that story and not go back into the pain and the stress you went through and feel all that again, it’s just, I was bulimic and then I got over it. And then I wrote all these books and now I do this and I love helping people. It’s just a part of the story.

Kimberly (25:45):
Yes. And I think when we look at all the parts without shame, right? And we say, well, this is what led me. And I was coping and this was the best I can do this huge compassion really grows. <laugh> this acceptance, this big heart energy. And I feel like that’s been such a huge way for me to grow that heart chakra. So I, I do think this whole concept is very interesting and I think, yeah, so wherever we’re drawn, there’s so many different systems and this comes from page 38. And I wonder, you know, just briefly cuz there’s five of them here, Lauren, if you could just say a sentence or two about, you know, giving us some concrete information does start opening up, opening up this, this <laugh>, you know, this whole, um, just this aspect of your work, which is, which is very interesting. If you’re stuck in fear, work in the water element. Can you just explain a little bit how water mm-hmm <affirmative> helps with fear

Lauren shares details on the Five Elements of water, wood, fire, earth and metal

Lauren (30:27):
Mm-hmm <affirmative> so fear. So fear is in the water element. And so working with that element, I is a way to help us move through that fear. So in yoga, we’ve often heard you hold fear in your kidneys, but fear is actually hip

Kimberly (30:42):
I’ve also heard as well in

Lauren (30:44):
Your hips, in your hips as well. And, um, there’s yes, but there’s also more, usually what I’ve heard in traditionally yoga is that, um, all of your sort of sexual issues and, and, um, things are in your hips as well. And that sort of speaks to a different energy system than the elements, but, um, but fear from the water element, the, um, the two energy systems are the kidneys and the bladder. And just as an example, if you are about to do something that you’re afraid of, maybe public speaking or deliver, you know, deliver and address somewhere or get up on stage or, you know, you’re about to take the, the, the goal, you know, to go take the winning goal or not often when we’re afraid we have to go to the bathroom. Right. We have to go pee. Yeah. Because that is connected to the element of water, which is where fear comes from. And so all of the poses in water are about working with those systems, the bladder and the kidney and the emotion of fear that can be present.

Kimberly (31:45):
Mm-hmm <affirmative> I love that. Okay. So the next one, if, is if you’re stuck in anger, work with the wood element. Yeah. Give a sentence or two to explain that. Very interesting.

Wood Element

Lauren (31:56):
Yeah. So again, with the, with the, um, different organs in the body, this one, we hear that you hold anger in your liver, right? Yes.

Kimberly (32:03):
I have heard that.

Lauren (32:04):
So liver and gallbladder are the two energy systems and the organs of the wood element. So that is where anger is held. It’s also, um, muscles and tendons and ligaments in the body. And so you can see really angry people might be really stiff, right? Because they they’re, they’re holding their anger and they, they don’t know quite how to move that through. And so poses that start to relax those systems, but then teach you at, stand in your power, finding your voice. What is it that you need to say, what is it that you will stand for? So standing poses are, are, are things that we do traditionally to help move that as well as each element and, and emotion has a sound, a peak pose and a hold of the head that helps to continue to move and transmute those challenging emotions.

Kimberly (32:57):
You’re stuck in anxiety work in the fire element. Yeah. A lot of anxiety and modern life,

Fire Element

Lauren (33:04):
Lot of anxiety. And we feel that. So that’s the heart and the pericardium, which is the protective coat or the protective, um, uh, tissues and muscle around the heart that keeps it beating in rhythm. And then the small intestine, which is our ability to discern what is good for us and what is not good for us, which something kind of that gets wavery when we’re, when we’re in anxiety, we don’t know what we need to do anymore. And the energy system that is most complicit in our traumas and in all our, our disease patterns. And, um, all of that is also in the fire element. Like, oh, you’re anxious. Well, what could you be inspired by? Cause that’s not really helpful. Sure,

Kimberly (34:27):
Sure. I’m saying you’re attending that fire. So it’s not this crazy out of control, but back to a manageable state exactly. Of inspiration. I, I can feel that I

Lauren (34:37):
Like that. And that’s a physical practice. Like we’re gonna actually draw, bring that fire and, and calm it right down, like drawing a, um, I live in fire country, right? So when a fire comes, they try to dig a, a line around the edge of the fire so that it can only burn so far and then it burns back into the middle and it burns itself out. So we do that. What’s the boundary of the fire that we can create energetically so that we can bring it back into the fire of the hearth, the fire of the, you know, the fire in the belly that the digestive fire that that’s the fire that we wanna have.

Kimberly (35:11):
Mm it’s interesting. Because in Ayuveda, going back to the, the synergy, when someone has a lot of anxiety and their vata is out of balance, they do get that constipation. They tend towards that. There’s too much air in the colon. So that’s really interesting. Okay. So the next one is stuck in worry, work in the earth elements.

Earth Element

Lauren (35:31):
Yeah. So that is the place of I’m worried what everyone else is doing, but I’m also worried what everyone else is thinking even about me. Mm. So I’m not anchored in my own sense of self. I want, well, what do you think about me? Are, am I okay? Am I doing this okay, or what’s going on over here? I’m like kind of the busy body what’s going on in everyone else’s life, but not focusing on myself. And so the antidote of that is coming into love for the self, which is the root of all healing is love for the self. And there are a lot of practices that we do for that, because this is one of the biggest challenges that most people have, they can find. And that’s how we start to anchor. Can you find one thing, can you compliment yourself in on one thing, can you say one thing that you love about yourself?

And then we start to grow it from there, we start to reprogram the unconscious mind, which is where so many of those internal voices, especially the negative challenging ones live. So we do practices to, to, um, to reprogram that. And, um, and we do a lot of forward bending, right? Bringing ourselves into, uh, the, the self nourishment back to the earth and the systems for that are stomach and spleen. So stomach it’s like, how do you nourish yourself? And this is, you know, kind of in your belly w right, are you feeding yourself, delicious, organic whole foods that make you feel good, or are you eating potato chips in chocolate and, and not making the connection that you might not feel so good because you’re not feeding yourself with love and then spleen, which is, um, part of our immune system, but it’s also, um, energetically it it’s the digester and the assimilator.

So everything that you take into your body, whether it’s food, liquids, drugs, um, interactions with other people, everything that you read, every news thing that you see, every movie play music, everything that you take in needs to be digested and assimilated into your body, mind, spirit, and energy systems, and that spleen’s job. So it’s a huge job. So if you’re constantly watching like scary movies and listening to heavy metal and eating bad, you know, foods that are, you know, denatured and all of that, then it’s gonna be that much harder to heal yourself. Yes. Because all of those things are not feeding your ability to love yourself.

Kimberly (38:01):
Mm mm. Yeah. Everything creates an energy. So, yeah. And again, back to how all the yoga gurus talked about diet, not as the ending path, you know, part of the practice, not as asanas as are the end goal, but just because it’s such a contributor to energy, which, as I mentioned, it was so interesting because that’s where I started to heal. I think it’s a very easy pathway to get started because it’s physical. We need to eat every day. But then by, you know, couple years in, by my third book, I realized, oh, like, I’ve taught people about this. I’ve taught myself about this. Now there’s so much more to explore in the work and then the self healing and in real true wellness.

Kimberly (39:57):
So, I feel like a lot of people become so disconnected from true nourishment because it becomes really heady. And a lot of these diets are very, you know, charts based numbers focused, which is why, when I’ve always talked about food, it’s going back to that wholeness and what feels good inside of you. There’s more of this intuitive way of eating and connecting with natural foods in the world, because I think it, you know, when we get into so much overanalyzing and we get confused that it does cut off that real heart connection, it cuts us off from real nourishment. So yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. You know, it’s all part of it. And we talk about in our Solluna community, the four cornerstones food body, emotional wellbeing and spiritual growth. So it’s like feeding that into the pot. And I find, you know, and myself included when you’re over focusing on food or body or one of the cornerstones it’s because the other ones aren’t being nourished right. And vice versa. So it all works together. It’s all important. So the last one here, and I’d love for you to comment on Lauren, just to sort of complete this system, which is fascinating if you were stuck in grief work in the metal element.

Metal Element

Lauren (41:07):
Yeah. And that’s often the most challenging one. That’s kind of the, the end of the wheel before it starts up again. That’s where we harvest our wisdom. And that is a place of any situation that we go through. We need to find meaning from it. That’s just how, how we are as humans. We need to find meaning. That’s why storytelling is, has been the through line for humanity. Since we started as being human beings, stories and information turned into wisdom and in the metal element, the, uh, body that’s part of that is the lungs and the large intestine. And so the lungs are where we hold our grief. And you can think about that in terms of crying and sobbing and where that comes from, and also the breath and how important breath is in our yoga practices.

And that we can see all of our intellectual and emotional pieces if we just watch our breath. Hmm. So we hold that, we hold grief in the lungs and you can see that in, um, in people that haven’t been able to release their grief, you can kind of see, um, some challenges and difficulties with, with parts of breathing. Yes. Then the large intestine is another area that we let go, right? We let go through our lungs, every exhale in, in yoga, they call it the little death. Every exhale is a little death.

Kimberly (45:17):
Well, thank you so much, Lauren, for giving us some information about, you know, to that level of detail. So thank you so much for being with us here today and giving us sort of an overview and detail on your work and yeah. And just spending time with you today, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

Lauren (45:45):
Oh, thank you, Kimberly. It’s been just an honor to sit with you and I just appreciate your interest in this work and then helping to get it out to the world. So thank

Kimberly (45:54):
You. Must stay. Must

Lauren (45:56):
Namaste.

I hope you enjoyed our conversation today about this incredibly interesting field of energy medicine. Please be sure to check out our show notes over at mysolluna.com for more information on Lauren on her new book, again called The Energy to Heal Other shows. I think you would enjoy articles, recipes, meditations, and so on. We will be back here Thursday for our next q and a show. Till then, I’ll see you in cyberspace. I’m on social at underscore Kimberly Snyder. I’m actually starting to put a little bit more effort as well into TikTok. You’ll perhaps be happy to know if you’re on that channel. Um, otherwise, I’ll see you back here Thursday. Sending you so much love, so much gratitude, and Namaste.