Lift OneSelf -Podcast
Step into the serene sanctuary of self-care, where our journey of truth and mindfulness begins by dismantling the stigma surrounding mental health. Immerse yourself in profound conversations as we unravel the mysteries of mental health, meditation, and personal growth, exploring the profound impact of trauma on the nervous system. Join our nurturing community, where we uplift each other by sharing invaluable tools and services, gracefully navigating life's challenges with resilience. Prepare to awaken your mind, nourish your soul, and embrace the transformative journey of self-discovery.
As I traverse the vast expanse of the digital world, connecting with diverse voices across the globe, I invite others to share their stories and provide insights and tools. If you listen deeply, in every story you can catch a glimpse of yourself in the details.
Welcome to the Lift OneSelf podcast, where every dialogue sparks curiosity and ignites your spirit.
Explore our website at
www.LiftOneSelf.com
and connect with us on social media under 'LiftOneSelf.'
Your time and presence are truly appreciated.
Remember, always be kind to yourself.
Lift OneSelf -Podcast
Tuning Into Ancestral Wisdom for Today's Mental Wellbeing - episode 104
Embark on a journey through time with our special guest, Susan Sophia James, as we uncover the enduring legacy of ancient wisdom in nurturing modern mental health. Prepare to be captivated as we discuss how age-old self-care rituals and the natural rhythms of the universe can illuminate the path to holistic healing. We explore the impact of trauma on our nervous system and share transformative tales of individuals reconnecting with ancestral knowledge to achieve profound personal growth and emotional restoration.
Feel the resonance of healing as we delve into the world of sound therapy, an ancient practice that's striking a chord in today's search for mental peace. Listen to heartwarming stories of spiritual awakenings and emotional release facilitated by the power of sound during times of isolation. Our conversation with Susan offers a beacon of hope, revealing how these timeless therapeutic sounds can re-tune our inner workings and provide a safe harbour for navigating the tumultuous seas of trauma and mental health challenges. Join us and let the shared vibrations of our collective history echo into your life's symphony, offering a sense of solace and connection.
Find out more about Susan here
https://3melete.com/
Remember, the strongest thing you can do for yourself is to ask for help.
Please help us grow by subscribing to and sharing the Lift OneSelf podcast with others.
The podcast's intention is to dissolve the stigmas around Mental Health and create spaces of healing.
I appreciate you, the listener, for tuning in and my guest for sharing.
Our website
Https://.LiftOneself.com
Find more conversations on our Social Media pages
www.facebook.com/liftoneself
www.instagram.com/liftoneself
Music by prazkhanal
Remember to be kind to yourself.
Disclaimer: Always do your own research. This is for information purposes.
Remember, the strongest thing you can do for yourself is to ask for help.
Please help us grow by subscribing to and sharing the Lift OneSelf podcast with others.
The podcast intends to dissolve the stigmas around Mental Health and create healing spaces.
I appreciate you, the listener, for tuning in and my guest for sharing.
Our website
LiftOneself.com
email:
liftoneself@gmail.com
Find more conversations on our Social Media pages
www.facebook.com/liftoneself
www.instagram.com/liftoneself
Want to be a guest on the Lift OneSelf podcast message here on Podmatch:
https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/liftoneself
Music by prazkhanal
Welcome to the Lift One Self podcast, where we break mental health stigmas through conversations. I'm your host, nat Nat, and we dive into topics about trauma and how it impacts the nervous system. Yet we don't just leave you there. We share insights and tools of self-care, meditation and growth that help you be curious about your own biology. Your presence matters. Please like and subscribe to our podcast. Help our community grow. Let's get into this. Oh, and please remember to be kind to yourself.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Lift One Self podcast. Susan, I'm so thankful you're here with me.
Speaker 2:Great to be here with you, natalie, will you join me in a meditation so that we can sink our hearts and our breaths together to come into this conversation? Yes, definitely, and for the listeners because it could be audio. As long as you're not driving, you can do the prompts. If you are driving, then just don't close your eyes, but you can follow the prompts that I'm leading. So I'll ask you to close your eyes and begin breathing in and out through your nose and allow your awareness to watch your breath go in and out through your nose.
Speaker 2:Don't try to control your breath. Just allow your awareness to watch it go in and out. Be aware of any tension or any sensations or feelings that may be coming up in the body. Let them arise. You're safe to feel. You're safe to let them go, while still staying with your breath, keeping your awareness on your breath and allowing yourself to drop into your body, into the present moment, still staying with your breath and dropping deeper into your body. While still staying with your breath at your own time and at your heart doing.
Speaker 3:My heart's doing great. I smiled during that. Where's the end? Because my dog is next to me on the floor and she goes, so she was in there too.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love that. Can you let the listeners know who Susan is?
Speaker 3:Sure, I am a person who's been very interested in how we can transform ourselves through all the different experiences that we have.
Speaker 3:So most of us have experienced some kind of trauma and also we have familial or generational trauma and how we're transforming consciousness at this time on the planet and how all of that goes together with our physical healing and our mental, emotional healing and expands us into our inner connection through our heart and also our awareness of the world as a bigger place than most of us have been acculturated into. That it is an expansive place where there's a reliable interface that is centering and has other benefits. So basically, I connect really deeply to ancient knowledge and it's time for this to re-emerge and many, uh, indigenous cultures already have. In the parts of those cultures that have continued, they continue to use those practices and we all came from a place a long time ago where we were connected in more profound ways, but we've kind of lost that approach. So it's bringing that back to our awareness as just an innate practice, because it's easy and it's part of all of us and it's transformational and it's taking us into the next cycle of our collective evolution.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that. You stated ancient wisdom, so for the listeners that may not understand that, can you explain it a little bit more?
Speaker 3:Ancient wisdom is content that speaks to our souls, that resonates with us and is soothing and allows us to ground and center into that energy, and it doesn't conflict with any structures of religion or other beliefs. It it's kind of deeper than that. So I think of our rhythms, of our, our body. So we were talking about our heart and meditation also. The movement of the cerebral spinal fluid that goes around our brain, our electromagnetic field, the pulsations of the earth, the sun's rays, there's all these rhythms and these are innate to us and the rhythms are kind of patterns of frequency and so when we sense those patterns, that are they, they that we feel them, they they feel heart-centered rather than chattery in our mind, so that the ancientness is something that was used around the world but also we can connect to it because it has that resonance through the patterns, through the rhythms that we are innately connected to, like the waves of the ocean going in and out.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned at the beginning about trauma and, yeah, before we started recording the podcast, you mentioned that you had created something online during COVID in regards to sound. Can you let the listeners know a little bit more about?
Speaker 3:it. A long time ago I was probably 30 years ago at least I was introduced to using certain rhythms to access states of consciousness and at the same time I became a medical hypnotherapist and I didn't really I actually didn't really even understand what I was doing. I mean, it wasn't like I thought about it, it just came to me sort of innately, and I used those rhythms with different populations. So I worked with people who had cancer and immune compromised illness, and I worked with people in treatment that had mental health diagnosis, they had trauma, they were in recovery, and also I worked with people in with pain and internal medicine. And then I also had a three year sound and energy medicine program and I use those same rhythms in all with all those different groups with these incredible responses. So the people in the energy medicine training program had many different kinds of spiritual awakening experiences. People have had near-death experiences and the benefits that they gained from using this method was really significant. And so it was later, when I was working in internal medicine, that I designed research for people with pain because I wanted to see how effective it would be for them, and they also had really significant responses to listening to these sound patterns. So that's.
Speaker 3:And then during the pandemic, probably like a lot of us, I was on social media more and I kept seeing and reading out of the just sadness and isolation and lack of appropriate diagnosis and methods that are outside the traditional model and methods that are outside the traditional model, and it was sort of heartbreaking and I realized that I could take the programs that I had been doing with people live and put them into online programs so that people could go through a series of protocols with the sound, because what happens to us? So when we're in ordinary consciousness, where it's a hypervigilant state in our brain, so we're on alert and we take in content differently. So when we change, like in meditation, we sink deeper into our awareness and that's a profound state to take in and process and also take in different protocols for what we'll just call transformation. So that was kind of the evolution of how that all transpired.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I deal with the nervous system so I let people know you know it's understanding your nervous system and when it's in fight, flight, freeze or fawn modes, and understanding that trauma has a significant impact of wiring your nervous system in that hypervigilant and so in that there's a lot of disassociation and so what I'm hearing is, with the sound, it's giving a sense of safety of coming back into the body and creating some attunement that you can come into that stillness, into that presence. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:It is correct. And the other layer of it is because it's a repetition of it's not binaural beats, so it's a repetition of the same pattern. Our awareness allows that repetition to hold us in that state. So we're not efforting and we just stay in that state until the cue allows the sound to go away and then people return. So it is affecting the nervous system but also the auditory. The particular sound patterns are a containment, so they allow us to kind of rest or be held in the consistency of the sound patterns and it's soothing for us and holds us there. And then when the sound is over, it slowly goes away so that we come back into. We're making that adjustment back from whatever level of brainwaves, back into ordinary consciousness.
Speaker 3:The interesting thing that I observed with many people was they would say I couldn't tell while I was in the listening stage that I felt different, but I knew that I felt different after it was over. So it um, and that's when they would say it seemed like either a very short time if it was 20 minutes, or a very long time same amount of time, it could be 20 minutes, sort of standard. Um, they either felt it was much longer or much shorter and I. My response is that's one of the ways you can tell it was affected, because it changes perception of time yeah, I was just going to say that the perception of time is is changed.
Speaker 2:Have you used this sound in your own personal life and, if you have, what have you experienced in that?
Speaker 3:all the time and, um, I use it to access. I would just generally guidance and specifically stating an intention or a question and then allowing unfolding to occur. I would say that that might be a little more advanced in that it's important for people who are just starting with it to get a kind of a familiarity with the how it works and the there's different steps, because I wouldn't, I don't, advise doing deep work unless there's a use of protocols, of grounding, because I think that's really critical to integration and being present and being able to process and being in the body as well.
Speaker 2:Because I was going to ask. It sounds like there can be some emotions and, as I explained to people, trauma replace it with energy. So there's energy that's in the body that can get stuck and lodged and it just grows. And so the sound therapy is sounding that there is allowing a somatic release with the body that they may not even be aware of in the moment of accessing the sound, but afterwards they're feeling the impact of that process. Are people explaining how they're able to interact with their emotions or interact with their body in a different way from accessing these sound therapies?
Speaker 3:I would say, not in the way like they wouldn't say yes, I'm able to process my emotions. It wouldn't be so direct, but it comes out in other ways, I suppose, where people say you know, I love you, or you saved my life, or something like that. So, because it's not, it's really different than therapy, traditional therapy or other approaches. It's more settling in to just inward and and allowing um the resilience development to occur by accessing those other states.
Speaker 2:What is it that you would like with this sound therapy? How would you like to see it in the world?
Speaker 3:I like to see it blossom and take off because it's a non-invasive personal method and it's also really beneficial for people to do it in groups so that creates another social engagement level of connection from feeling isolated, and so to me it has many applications, meaning you can use it on a in treatment as well, as people who are doing there's a lot of now research on the use of psychedelics.
Speaker 3:They have this peak or spiked experience and again that kind of discombobulates your neurological system and emotional system. It's kind of a huge peak experience and at using certain kinds of sounds are maybe considered more baby steps or smaller incremental steps. Maybe I'll take out the word baby steps, but incremental steps that help to integrate larger experiences through the neurological system and also to anchor it in the body so they can process it and continue. I hear a lot of people have near-death experiences or psychedelic experiences and when I look at their energy, their systems can be pulsing and highly activated and they have to in order to come back into the world wherever they were. It's like they have to shut all that down and then then they want to do it again, but there's nothing in the middle. So this is a system that can help to continue the development and expansion and integration, but also holding the space of being grounded.
Speaker 2:Yeah because, as you mentioned before um, these are experiences that can bring them to another dimension. Yet if you don't have grounding you can get lost in some spaces of not coming back into a sense of touching with reality per se. I would take it.
Speaker 3:Yes, also. So if you just spike up and come back because you have to integrate, then sometimes you want another one, because we're kind of hardwired. We love these peak experiences. So if you have a program where you can continue to make these incremental steps instead of spiking coming back, you might have this peak experience experience, but then you're continuing going upward to, so the gap isn't so wide.
Speaker 2:Um, and it's not this up and down, um experience which can be very exhausting, um, for the body and for your mental state, I take it.
Speaker 3:It can be. And also if you have a method that you can reconnect to a peak experience or an element of it, then you can continue to work with that dynamic system.
Speaker 1:Understood.
Speaker 2:For anybody that's listening, who would be an ideal candidate for this.
Speaker 3:For anybody that's listening who would be an ideal candidate for this. Well, the programs that I created are five different ones, so it sort of depends. In those programs there's one for pain management and one for getting good sleep. There's one for pain management and one for getting good sleep, and another one is called the healing program, which is for people who have mental health going to the doctor or they have surgery or they have litigation or some kind of upheaval in their life, so it gives them a system to use or they have anxiety. And then the other one is called Spiritual Awakening and Transformative Experiences, and that program is also for people who are using psychedelics I'm going to bring you into a reflective question.
Speaker 2:I'm going to ask you to bring your awareness right now and bring it back to your 18 year old self, and you're able to give your 18 year old self three words to carry you along the journey. What would those three words be?
Speaker 3:stay in your heart.
Speaker 2:That's four words yeah, and why is that?
Speaker 3:um, well, when I was 18 I was processing my childhood but of course I didn't know it and uh, and then I was in a relationship and eventually had children and got divorced, so there was a lot of kind of upheaval there. So that would be a good message for dealing with childhood and also the upheaval of going through a relationship ending.
Speaker 2:Where can the listeners find you?
Speaker 3:ending. Where can the listeners find you? My website is the number three M-E-L-E-T-E dot com.
Speaker 2:And what are the services that you provide?
Speaker 3:Well, I have those five programs and I mean. So. If somebody really wanted to connect with me, they could through the three malate site what is something that you would like to leave with the listeners that our transformation.
Speaker 3:What's happening on the planet in my awareness right now is that we're there's been an acceleration of healing that we have.
Speaker 3:This is a time that we can heal our own traumas and also familial traumas, as well as accelerate our consciousness, and we're in a time of shifting out of there's been kind of an iron clad hold on staying in the vigilant state of consciousness and it's really killing us because it actually is an underlying cause of many physical illnesses.
Speaker 3:The most common killers heart disease, diabetes, cancer, new compromised illness and then mental health disorders like anxiety and depression and schizophrenia and some bipolar disorders. And so that's one layer of it. And then the other layer is that we just can't, we're not thriving when we stay in one level of consciousness. So when we shift out, as you were mentioning, when we kind of reconnect into our nervous system and change how it responds and we shift out of ordinary consciousness, we are allowing ourselves to go into a healing state and also connect inside and develop and expand our inner awareness. And those are evolutionary changes that also create insight, intuition, creativity, problem solving, and those are developmental to our whole beings and and give us tools for managing and going in to the changes that are going on as a collective that will anchor us more into our hearts, and for compassion and kindness too. So the benefits are very profound and that shifting over into those states are very they're actually very easy. We just have forgotten. So it's just remembering.
Speaker 2:Do you have any questions?
Speaker 3:I do. I'm curious to know more about your work with the nervous system.
Speaker 2:So I call it energy healing. It's really understanding your biology. I don't think there's enough education and awareness of understanding how the nervous system works and how certain experiences can change how we perceive and how we interpret and how we engage with our emotions. And then what kind of language that you've created towards yourself to suppress those emotions and push them away. So it's being able to create safety, which a nervous system needs to be able to regulate. So if it doesn't have safety, it's going to go in hypervigilance, always looking for safety on the outside. So it's helping people to come back into their body, have an embodiment, by feeling the emotions, releasing them and creating that safety within themselves, and coming into presence, where presence has all of the answers and solutions. And we're always in the now, yet a lot of times we get stuck in our head or we're going into the past or future to try to control or, you know, relive something. Yet coming into that stillness and going into higher dimensions requires being in the now and being able to have a regulated nervous system.
Speaker 3:I like it. I like it Because, essentially, that's what the sound does. It's creating that containment of safety. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, Susan, for being a guest on the podcast and for any of the listeners, her information will be in the show notes, where you can contact Susan. Are you on any social media platforms?
Speaker 3:I'm on Pinterest and YouTube and I just started a new YouTube channel which is the read military sound healing, so there's going to be two videos up there shortly after we're done here, right? So, and I have something on Facebook, but it's very minimal right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Okay, so I'll make sure to link that all on the show notes of the podcast, but thank you again for sharing your lights and your services out in the world, because it's very needed.
Speaker 3:Thank you for your work too. You're very needed.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Please remember to be kind to yourself. Hey, you made it all the way here. I appreciate you and your time. If you found value in this conversation, please share it out. If there was somebody that popped into your mind, take action and share it out with them. It possibly may not be them that will benefit.
Speaker 1:It's that they know somebody that will benefit from listening to this conversation. So please take action and share out the podcast.
Speaker 2:You can find us on social media, on Facebook.
Speaker 1:Instagram and TikTok under Lift.
Speaker 2:One Self, and if you want to inquire about the work that I do and the services that I provide to people, come over on my website. Come into a discovery call LiftOneSelfcom.
Speaker 1:Until next time, please remember to be kind and gentle with yourself. You matter.
