The Nervous System, Lived Spirituality, Trauma & Emotional Mastery with Marissa Jane

Jordane: Hello. Beautiful. Welcome to Episode 7 Girl and Her Moon, the podcast. It is Jordane here and today, we are having a beautiful and deeply informative conversation with Marissa Jane, exploring the nervous system, and how it plays a role in lived spirituality. Marissa is incredibly knowledgeable and has so much wisdom to share. This episode is truly packed with so much valuable insight around emotional mastery, connecting with the messages of our body, intuition, and so much more. And just before we jump in, I want to make a truly exciting announcement.

We have taken a huge step at Girl and Her Moon, and now our beautiful astrologer, Georgia, is for the first time with us offering both live and recorded astrology readings. And so, to celebrate this with us, you can use the code PODCAST for 15% off any of our astrology readings, and to be one of the very first to explore your chart with Georgia. So, pop on to our website, girlandhermoon.com, check out our readings, our astrology readings. We have quite a few different exciting options and avenues and perspectives to explore your chat within.

Okay. So, let’s dive into this episode. I hope you enjoy it. I adore you, and thank you so much for being a part of our journey.

Jordane: Hi, Marissa.

Marissa: Hi. How are you?

Jordane: I’m so good. How are you?

Marissa: Really well. Thank you. Thank you for having me on your amazing podcast.

Jordane: No. It truly is a pleasure. I don’t know if I’ve been a bit late to the party, but I’ve been seeing I would say this year, just the words nervous system, healing, and regulation, and somatic healing everywhere.  And so, to get to have a conversation where we kind of strip things back and go to the beginning and become more familiar with what it is that we’re actually talking about is a true gift. So, thank you for sharing that with us.

Marissa: My pleasure. My pleasure. I’m looking forward to this conversation as well. It’s going to be a beautiful journey, I think.

Jordane: Yay. So, I wanted to start with just your journey as to how you got here. What’s your relationship with this kind of work? And what excites you about it?

Marissa: Wow. So much. Well, my background actually was in physical fitness and physical performance. So, my studies started off in exercise physiology and human movement and my career sort of traversed through from personal training to health and fitness and then worked with Olympic athletes both in New Zealand and Australia for a big portion of my career in the physical preparation phases, if you like. And it was really interesting. What I noticed was at the top level of sport, at the elite level, a lot of athletes were very similar and capable in their capacities at a physical level, and it was what was going on between the years, so to speak, that really determined game day, performance on game day, so to speak. And that piqued my interest in understanding more about human behavior and psychology and that sort of stuff, which was many, many years ago, now still working in sport.

Yeah. I’m curious.  I’m a lifelong learner so I started studying coaching and human behavior and psychology. And that journey started to awaken me to my own inner world and awaken me to my own upbringing and just my own behaviors, when I would feel stressed and overwhelmed and why I might feel that way when others weren’t. It wasn’t such a one pivotal moment, but it was a time in my history that really started to turn my perspective from outwards and curious about people and well-being and performance and getting the best out of them to starting to reflect inwards. And, of course, when we go on the inward journey, we discover a whole lot of things that we may not have known were there.

And so that in itself sort of brought up some different things for me around my childhood and what I was conditioned to believe was normal. And it was normal for us because that’s how we experienced it, right? That was our lived experience. So that was normal. And thankfully, for me, I didn’t have a violent or an abusive childhood, but some of the wounding that I experienced during childhood was more around emotional neglect for various reasons, which in itself is now I’ve done this work is it’s a bit of an it’s the invisible wounding, if you like, or the invisible trauma. And so, a lot of people don’t recognize that they’re holding these things because they don’t have memories of what happened to them. It was more about means that were not met.

And so as I uncovered all of this, I started to notice different physiological reactions and responses within my body. I remember the day I decided to leave my job I turned up to work, and my body was shaking. I felt sick. And I just wanted to start crying. And I’m like, what is wrong with me? This is like a really privilege position. I’ve worked really hard for this. What is going on? It was like disconnect between my body was saying something in my mind was saying something else. And so that started more inquiry and more research into not so much just psychology, but what’s going on in our biology that is affected and influenced by our thoughts and our feelings and our psyche, so to speak.

And so that took me down a rabbit hole of standing the nervous system better. My background in exercise science and exercise physiology gave me a really good handle on anatomy and physiology and biology. So, it wasn’t a new language I was learning. And so, it all really resonated well. Everything started to line up as I began my business because I was looking at the body and the nervous system and understanding human behavior and psychology and all of the things that really made me curious and, for me, are really juicy, just started to come together in this beautiful whole container. And I was like, okay, this is great. So, yeah. I mean, to shorten that answer now that I’ve given you the long version of it, it really was my own stuff that I wanted to learn know more about so I could reclaim that sense of agency and autonomy over my feelings, my emotions, and ultimately my decisions and my actions. So yeah. And here I am. I don’t know how many years later, seven, eight years later in business teaching people a little bit about the nervous system from a biology perspective, but also how our emotions are almost like the language that our nervous system talks to us through to our mind.

Jordane: I love that. That’s so great. So, if we were to start from the beginning, one, what is somatic healing? Two, what is the nervous system in the most kind of basic way for us to metabolize and understand?

Marissa: Yeah, for sure. Well, the nervous system, like as you said, it’s really popular language that we use now. But a lot of what we see and hear around nervous system regulation pertains to one part of the nervous system. So, our nervous system includes our brain. Interestingly enough, our eyes are actually part of our brain, the only extracranial brain matter. So, our eyes literally are the window to inside of us and now, as like in our soul. Our nervous system is our brain. The central nervous system, which is all the actual nerves that run down our spinal cord. And then that branches off into the peripheral nervous system. And in the peripheral nervous system, we have the autonomic nervous system, which is the part that is basically operating without us having to control it. So, it regulates our breathing, our heart rate, temperature, metabolism, those sorts of things.

The other part of it is the somatic nervous system and that is parts of the nerves that go out into our peripheries and into our sensory organs. And basically, the nervous system is sending and receiving information from within our body to our mind and back again or to our brain and back again, and also from our environment to our brain and back again. So, we’re in this constant state of communication, if you like, through this information super high– We’re highly complex organisms, and the nervous system is highly complex, but they’re the basic parts, right? Brain, spinal cord, nerves, the autonomic part, which is the things that we don’t have to think about, which is great because if we had to think about our heartbeat every moment, that would be a bit overwhelming. And then the sensory system. And also, from the somatic space, how we move. So how we move, how we sense and feel, and how we interpret that information and send it back to the brain so to speak.

So that’s the nervous system. And when we talk about nervous system regulation, what we’re talking about is teaching and resourcing our nervous system to be as healthy as it can be to work optimally. And so, our nervous system is innately designed with the intelligent to regulate ourselves or regulate itself. We’re constantly looking for this state of well-being or what we call homeostasis. And so, with life being extra stressful at the moment, sometimes– And there’s quite a high percentage of people that have what is termed nervous system dysregulation, which means our nervous system struggles to come back into that rest and balanced state. And so that’s part of the work we do.

And with the somatic healing side of it, what we do is we use bottom-up approach, which is basically accessing the felt sense of the body and movement of the body and resourcing ourselves with being able to feel into the physical sensations, use a thing called enteroception, which is basically being able to sense and feel the internal parts of our body, as well as be able to resource ourselves with different kinds of movements that may have been arrested or impacted or taken away from us in traumatic experiences. So somatic healing works from a bottom-up approach. And it’s really important because it’s a huge part of who we are, right? Like psychotherapy and cognitive therapies work from a top-down approach, it’s thought based, which is all absolutely necessary and relevant as well. We need both because we are both, we’re all humans.

So somatic healing really, there’s so many different types of somatic healing, but somatic healing really is based on what is going on in the body and helping us reconnect with our body, ground and anchor back into our body, to feel safe so our nervous system can be in that safe homeostasis. Alert, but not too alert. Can rest when it needs to rest, but not fall into a state of complete shutdown. So, it’s that nice balanced space. And so, they link together, the nervous system and somatic healing work together.

Jordane: So, when we see a mention about the nervous system in the more spiritual and holistic healing space. What are we speaking to there?

Marissa: So, I think that’s a really great question because I think different people are speaking to different things. When we talk about nervous system regulation, what we’re talking about is working with parts of us that we can access through conscious thinking and practicing conscious practices like breath work, for example, or meditation to help tap into the part of our nervous system, that autonomic nervous system that usually operates on its own accord. So, we know, for example, with breath work, we can help change whether the nervous system is in a fight or flight state, and we can downregulate that or calm the nervous system down, or we can use more intense breath work practice, for example, to move the nervous system from a very shutdown state into a more open and connected and a live state or an excited state even if you were having to go and run a race or, get something done for work.

So, most people I think are talking to that small part of the or that part of the nervous system which is under the peripheral nervous system, which is the autonomic space. I think it’s really important to understand that there’s so much else going on as well. It’s something that when I’m working with clients, for example, I’m very mindful that people are aware of this language and need to know that working with the nervous system is not the silver bullet. We’re complex organisms. Sometimes looking for that special silver bullet, but what I will say is it is a huge part of our healing, our well-being, and also our performance. And I believe, the more in tune we can become with our body as a whole and our whole being, the better we’re going to be.

Jordane: Yeah, for sure. And so how does this show up in your work? Because you’re in coaching, you’re in the somatic space nervous system. You’re coming from a few different approaches. How does this all tie together and how does it show up when you’re working with someone?

Marissa: My title is an integrative coach, so I operate based on a top-down and a bottom-up model. So, I use the cognitive, the talk processing, the thoughts, the mindset, as well as helping people connect in with their felt senses and work with their body, understand their body, and re-resource themselves whether it’s through movement or changes in sleeping patterns, for example. All of these things contribute to healing the nervous system which has a big impact on healing our emotional and psychological well-being and vice versa. The better we think, the better we feel, the better our nervous system is. So, this constant communication between mind and body to the mind-body connection. And so, integrating it based on each individual is complex, but it’s also very necessary because some people need more work in the mental space, some people need more work in the physical space.

Having the nervous system as a foundation to the work is I do what I call nervous system mapping. So, it’s basically a process where I’m helping people understand how their nervous system’s communicating to them, whether that’s through body sensations like tension, tightness, that sort of stuff, whether it’s through their breath, whether it’s through emotional states. Often, it will show up, people will show up or present with things like exhaustion, non-clinical anxiety which is really common at the moment. We’re coming out of, obviously, a two- and a-bit year pandemic, which has had an impact on everyone even if they feel like it’s not been that bad. Our brain and our nervous system are not designed to cruise through so much uncertainty unscathed, so to speak. So, it’s so exhaustion, fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, emotional dysregulation, meaning people feel like they’re either really sensitive or unable to regulate and control their emotions, which then those personal things can then follow through and flow through into motivation, work environments, relationship conflicts, those sorts of things.

So, where people pick it up is really based on their sense of awareness. So, some people are picking it up at the relationship level, it’s about taking them inwards to where what’s going on within you. Some people might be picking it up saying, “All right, all of a sudden, I’ve got these gastrointestinal issues or I’m not sleeping well, I can’t concentrate.” All of these things are indicators that perhaps the regulation part of your innate intelligence is a little bit out of whack or there’s too much load on it for it to be able to really regulate and come into that rested more open, more connected, and anchored state by itself, which is ultimately, that’s what we’re designed to be able to do. But our lifestyle is such that it really challenges us to be able to do that naturally now without having interventions like coaching, or therapy, breath work, meditation, spiritual practices. All of these things now are becoming less of a luxury and more of a necessity.

Jordane: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. So, you mentioned a few of the ways that the sense of dysregulation of the nervous system can show up in a lived experience. And I think that’s so great because reality is our greatest teacher, it’s our greatest mirror, right?

Marissa: So true.

Jordane: So consistently, like you said, we search for the silver bullet everywhere, what’s this answer to this question or what’s happening over there. But really, if we just step back and look at the literally, what’s going on in our life, our relationships, our health, our jobs, everything, they’re all a mirror to some of our greatest internal teachings, I think, and they can really mirror what’s happening inside of the body. So, we were talking I think about a week ago, and you were mentioning what about the lived experience, which I love because it encompasses all of it, right?

Marissa: Yeah.

Jordane: It’s about creating that sense of harmony, peace, fulfillment, joy, presence in the lived experience. I don’t have a specific question, but I love you to just explore of it.

Marissa: Yeah. I almost feel like if there was a silver bullet, this would be it, right. It is what ancient teachers have spoken to for ages about being present and grounded and aware. Yeah. So, some of the work I do is based off a psychologist-psychiatrist called Karl Rogers, and he talks about the humanistic experience and the lived experience. And it’s great because really often, especially in our current reality, life is busy. Often, we’re living with thought into the future, we’re projecting into the future, and often not in a visualization, goal-setting, manifesting kind of way. Often, it’s in fear of the future, worried about future problems that haven’t happened yet, which these are some of the things that can exacerbate non-clinical anxiousness.

So often we’re living into that future of what if, what’s going to happen, trying to predict a future or we’re ruminating on the past. We’re stuck in a place where the past either looked better than it was or we’re trying—You know what I mean? We have those rose-colored glasses on going, but it was so wonderful. Just take me back to the time. But the reality of both of those places is their projections of our thoughts, right? And when we were in the past, my question usually is, were you present when you were in the past? Were you aware of that lived experience? And really, the nervous system, our nervous system in our brain is currently, it lives in the present, but what happens is if we have, say we’ve had a traumatic experience in the past. If we remember that traumatic experience, the brain and the nervous system doesn’t have a reference point to whether that’s happening right now or whether that is a memory.

So, if we’ve got, say a week ago, let’s make it not too traumatic, but say a week ago, we lost $50, and we really needed that $50, and it was a bit stressful and we were a bit, whatever came up about it. We might have regretted it or we might have blamed ourselves or whatever might have happened. The week goes by and life happens, and we come back to today, and then we have that memory, and our body goes into that same state that was in a week ago when I lost the $50. And so, what we do then is, essentially, we time travel, right? We’ve time traveled into the past. So, while we’re spending time worrying about that thing that happened a week ago, there might be beautiful amazing things happening in our life right now in front of us, but we’re not in that present moment lived experience to actually receive and engage in them.

And so, this is really the part of the human condition, isn’t it? It’s really about coming back into present and starting to work with our body, our emotions, our mind, and our energy systems, our soul, if you like, our spirit, to actually experience being grounded and anchored right here and right now, understanding and experiencing everything that’s going on in our peripheries and internally as well. And that from that place, it’s safe. From that place, our nervous system deems us to be safe. Because if we really thought about it, I mean, you and I, I’m not sure where your listeners are right now, but you and I are in our own separate spaces. if we looked around our environment, there’s nothing dangerous in our environment. We’re warm, we’re got a roof over our head, everything’s safe. We’re here. It would be quite easy for either one of us to flick into a worry about the future or stress about the past, and our nervous system would deem that unsafe.

And so, the lived experience right here and now is what really matters is because we’re not only experiencing it. We’re learning from it. We’re growing from it. I sort of liken it to spices, the lived experience is when all of our senses are on board and operating, and that’s the juiciness, that’s the spiciness. We can see all of the colors. We can feel all of the sensations. We can smell the smells and hear the sounds, and everything comes alive right now. And also, possibility is endless when we’re in this present lived experience. And I think it’s like if you were to look at a for a silver bullet, that’s it.

Jordane: Presence.

Marissa: Presence. Yeah. And, I mean, the caveat to that is ensuring that you are in a safe space. That you’re not in the middle of a war-torn country or in a violent situation and things like that. It’s not about deluding ourselves that all spaces and all lived experiences are beautiful, but it is about being able to recognize what’s happening in your lived experience, if there is actually a threat or a danger so you can move away from it to keep yourself safe.

Jordane: Sorry to cut you off. Do you think that when we are more regulated within our bodies, that there is a greater sense of safety or a sense of safety being able to go into different environments? Whereas, previously, maybe I only felt safe in my home, or if I go to a shopping center, I would freak out. Just as an example. It feels almost like the body can be the anchor for safety that you can take into different environments. I’m not talking about extreme environments, just to make that clear, but there’s a sense of safety that can come within that we can take everywhere we go.

Marissa: Yeah, absolutely, it can. And there’s two parts of that. One is the more grounded and anchored we are into our body, the more resources that we have to be able to adapt to new situations. So, our nervous system is not designed to always be regulated. Our brain and our nervous system are purely designed to keep us alive. Our heart, our soul, our consciousness is designed for us to enjoy being alive. So, we don’t want to take away the resources that the nervous system has and needs. We need to be able to be okay with going into an unfamiliar environment and being able to manage and hold space for ourselves when we feel a little bit uneasy or anxious in a new environment. And that is building our capacity. It’s called a window of tolerance essentially. And it’s basically about building our capacity to be a little bit uncomfortable and a little bit in the fight or flight or in the anxious state or in the more reserved and quieter shutdown state in a healthy way that it doesn’t go to the extremes and be dysregulated.

And we need to be in our body to be able to sense and understand that experience, number one, and also to be able to soothe ourselves through it. So, for someone who might be overwhelmed by a lot of people going into a supermarket, it’s about building the capacity within your nervous system to say, okay, this uncomfortable feeling of nervousness is actually safe. It’s okay. It’s my nervous system talking to me saying, this is a new environment that you might need to just pay a little bit more attention in. So, what we’re not doing there is making the nervous system the villain of being dysregulated. It’s actually doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, and it’s our job to build capacity to go, okay, I’m going to be a little bit more alert in this new environment and I’m also going to use the techniques and tools that I can access like my breath, like my felt sense like feeling my feet on the floor or feeling my nice woolly jacket against my skin, to keep me in this safe zone as I navigate this new environment. So that’s capacity, right?

And we can only do that when we’re in a really deeply intimate relationship with our body, when we can tell all of a sudden that we’re feeling a bit nervous or a bit tense. Or for some people, it might be really subtle things like just their jaw tightens. For other people, they might feel their posture change. Other people might get that sick feeling in their stomachs. It’s these teeny-tiny little sensory experiences that give us this feedback and then we can start this beautiful communication with our body and our mind, if you like, to help us in those situations.

Now there is safety in the body. There’s definitely safety in the physical body, and grounding and anchoring into the physical body is very healing. The caveat to that is people who have experienced trauma, especially physical or sexual trauma, but other sorts of traumas as well and also unprocessed emotional content that may be uncomfortable, painful, etc. Because unprocessed information that comes through emotions, for example, can get what they call it stored in the body. But really, I mean, there’s layers to help how that works. But, essentially, for some people, their body wasn’t safe at a particular point in time. And so, they learned in that moment or those moments to disassociate or disconnect from their body, which is why a lot of people will feel like they’re in their head or they’re out here somewhere and they’re not grounded in their body. So, coming home to the body is really important for people to heal. It will need to be a process for people who don’t feel safe in their body.

So, to answer your question, yes, the body, anchoring and grounding of body is so nourishing and such a safe space to be should the conditions support that and should the process of getting people back into their body be one that’s really effective in treating any unprocessed information that needs to be processed, and they’re not coming back into their body and further activating any trauma loops and all sorts of things.

Jordane: Well, obviously, we’re going in this direction. So, can we just have a look at what is trauma. And there’s probably a million layers to this, but just from where we’re coming from right now, what is trauma?

Marissa: At a very high-level, level, if we’re talking about the nervous system, trauma is essentially when our organism, our whole organism, our nervous system, our psyche, our soul, experiences information that’s too overwhelming for it to process properly. Meaning there’s either too much information coming in, it could be pain, it could be disturbance like physical abuse, it could be hearing information like secondary trauma, it could be seeing overwhelming stimulus. So, whenever there’s too much trauma or too much information that comes in either too fast, too intensely, or its way out of our ability to understand it, trauma can happen.

And so, what that basically means is the nervous system doesn’t have resources to understand and process everything that’s going on. That can include, for example, if someone is physically hurt, when they’re in that experience, if they’re physically hurt, sometimes their motor control or their ability to make a movement is taken away from them. Their resources to run away or to fight back have gone offline for some reason or have never been taught to them for some reason. So, when the system is overwhelmed, that’s when trauma happens at a nervous system perspective.

Quite similarly, that happens in our psychology as well, right? We can’t really separate those two things. Psychologically, it shows up more as thoughts and emotions, memories, flashbacks, etc. At a physical level, it shows up as tension and trembling and shaking, changes in body temperature, those sorts of things, panic attacks, heart rate, breathing changes. So, it is really the overwhelming of our system with too much information and not enough resources to process it, which kind of sounds not very human.

Jordane: Yeah. So, I’m sure that like everything, there are levels to trauma.

Marissa: Yeah.

Jordane:  I hope that I’m not going to be saying the wrong thing when I question this, but do you think that most people, if not everyone, has on some level small amounts of trauma that their body is holding on to, I’m not sure if that’s the correct way to say it, but just is inside of the experience?

Marissa: Yeah. I think many professionals, whether it’s in the psychology space, the medical space, the coaching space, will say that not many people have come out of childhood unscathed on some level. And it is emotional injury and trauma is– And again, I don’t want to sound like I’m saying the wrong thing either, but if we were to compare it physically, right, we could fall over and scrape our knee and have a graze, a physical graze on our knee, or we can have an accident falling off our bike and break our arm. There’s a spectrum of injury that can happen physically, and the same can happen mentally and emotionally with trauma as well. So, there’s some schools of psychology that have termed a big t in little t trauma. I think the important thing is to understand that when we use the word, I do hear people sort of have having stressful situations in their life saying it’s traumatizing. And it’s like we need to really articulate if it’s a stress that you have the resources to manage and mitigate and learn from and grow from, it’s not traumatizing. It’s just stress. And not all stress is trauma.

Yeah, I would say most people have got some sort of trauma within them, most probably unconscious if they haven’t become aware of it through one of those vehicles we mentioned before, relationships work, health, that sort of stuff. So many people were little people at one stage and there’s these magical big people we call parents taking care of us. And at the end of the day, they’re human beings as well. They’re not superheroes like we think they are. So most of us as children, for example, will have unmet needs or boundary violations that have no malicious intent behind them but have had a lasting impact because, perhaps as a five-year-old, I didn’t have the capacity or the internal resources to see that horror movie that my big brother or sister were watching. There’re all of these little nuances as well.

Now that tiny amount of trauma may not show up in my life as a big thing, but if it plays out over my life as a little pattern, there can be a bit of a snowballing effect. So, if I’ve got that one little thing going on when I’m little and then I repeat that pattern over time unconsciously, perhaps by the time I’m 20 or 30 or 40, there’s an anxiety response to something because of something that happened that I was very unaware of when I was little. So, yeah, I think most of us do hold some sort of emotional wounding on some level and energetic wounding on some level within our systems. And perhaps that’s part of our journey. Perhaps that’s part of our journey of healing and coming back into our wholeness and fullness. And some wounds are meant to be held, not fully ever resolved or I think some people think healing is to get rid of that experience, but really, it’s some wounds are bigger that need to be held, and some wounds are smaller that we can really work on and overcome and shape and change ourselves for a better being this and a better tomorrow, if you like.

Jordane: What are some other ways that we can almost begin that communication with self to safely hold and be with those what-feel-like wounds.

Marissa: I love how you said that, communicate with ourselves. That’s really the key, right? Hearing our internal monologue, really understanding that we’re the observer of that, we’re not actually the thoughts that we’re thinking, we’re observing those thoughts. Having the level of awareness and self-compassion to perhaps interrupt some of those thoughts, if they’re not supporting or serving us, is one way. Understanding our emotions is huge. When I talk about regulation, and we talk about nervous system regulation, but a big part of that is actually understanding our emotions and building an emotional vocabulary, building emotional literacy, and understanding that our emotions have a biological nature. They have hormones and chemicals and stuff to them as well as thoughts and stories as well as feelings and sensations.

So, if we can tune in to our emotions and really start to identify what they are and how that emotion feels and shows up in our body, what thoughts are associated with it,

you’ve started to create a really juicy relationship there. You know what you’re thinking. You know how it’s making you feel and you know your body sensations. Okay. Cool. There’s a heap of information in that. What do I do with it? What’s it asking of me?  So, helping people really tune in to their emotional state is such a great way to build that depth and intimacy of communication with themselves as well as self-awareness.

The other thing that’s really important for people who perhaps have learned to numb and disassociate a little bit from their emotions is starting to tune in to their body sensations.

It sounds really simple. Sometimes it’s a bit more challenging than what it sounds like, but really being able to tune in to their body sensations like noticing when their posture changes, who are they around, what’s the experience. Coming back to that lived experience. What’s going on externally around me that’s perhaps given me that insight that I’ve tensed up for some reason? And also, what’s going on internally for me? Did I have extra coffee, or did I have some something that my body didn’t like? There’s both, right, internal and external. So, tuning into those body sensations and just going, “All right, what’s that about?”

And most of us will have an intuitive insight. There’re very general things that are out there about where our body stores different types of emotions and things like that, but it’s really about building your relationship with your body. When do you feel your jaw tensing? When do you feel yourself holding your breath? What are the conditions that create that response and how can we then start to shift that response and bring safety into you being in those conditions should they again, outside of extreme conditions? So, they would be emotions and body sensations would be the two go-to that I would encourage people to really start to listen to. You don’t have to really change much or do too much to start with, but just listen to them.

And one of the biggest ones is our breath. Our breath is the one thing that gives us direct access to that autonomic nervous system. It is very hard unless we go for a run to change our heart rate by thinking about it. We can through stress thoughts, of course, but our breathing gives us direct access to that peripheral nervous system. And so, what’s really super cool about some of the parts of science is like, we know now if we breathe in, imagine someone jumping out Halloween and scaring you and being like, “Boop”. So, you breathe in and you hold your breath. Like it’s a shock response. And so that increases our heart rate. It elevates the stress response in the nervous system. Whereas if we lengthen our exhalation and how people have a sigh of relief, there’re neurological mechanisms in the heart and in the brain that say that when we exhale, we can start to downregulate the nervous system. So again, listening to the breath, really bringing your awareness to the breath is huge, a huge part of building that relationship with yourself as well.

Jordane: That’s incredible. I love that. I know that this is very complex, but I love that. It usually comes down to the simple things like being present with your body, watching your mind, breathing. Breathing, the thing that we’re doing all the time without thinking of it can be so deeply healing.

Marissa: So deeply healing. Yeah.

Jordane: What I love about this so much is that, I think that when we allow ourselves to, we can be both the healer and the self-receiving that healing. We can be almost both that mothering or that parent energy to ourselves and the child. We can hold ourselves from both capacities. There were so many incredible things that you said that my mind went in so many different directions, but I think just something so beautiful that you mentioned was the intuition that comes when we do ask ourselves these questions or when we do sit with our bodies and really let them speak to us.

I think there’s not enough emphasis on trusting those subtle messages of intuition. I told you the story about I was googling one day why so many women that I’m familiar with at least hold so much tension in their hips. Mind you, I’m not a very good Googler. Some people are, I swear. I’m not. If I don’t click into something and see the answer in big bold letters in front of me, I’ll give up. So, I didn’t find my answer but instead I was like, “What if I just ask myself?” And so, I was stretching and my awareness was with my hips. And what’s kind of strange about this is sometimes when I do feel quite safe, I will just be stretching, in particular my hips, and I will just cry.

Without having a lot of conceptual labels added on that emotion, just the movement and opening of my hips brings a lot of emotion. And so, I did sit with that one morning, just curiously, and allowing myself, allowing then not to be any right or wrong about my experience, because that’s when we get really caught up in our heads and we block off the messaging that our body is bringing us. And the answer came. It was a lot about, for me, at least, a lot of sexual repression and trauma. It’s weird to say that word now, but sexual trauma held in those areas. And I’ve explored that a lot, but yeah, it’s just interesting. They’re allowing ourselves to, this is what I was saying before, but be both the answer and the question at the same time. We hold so much more wisdom than we give ourselves credit for. What are some of the ways do you think that we can begin to maybe trust those answers or trust the safety inquiry?

Marissa: I love that you shared that. I think that’s a beautiful experience to share. It’s really quite common that people do have emotional releases when they do bodywork. It could be massage, stretching, yoga, running, those sorts of things as well. Learning to trust your intuition really is about understanding your enteroception and your nervous system, as well as having—so having that relationship with your actual body, but also having that relationship with your awareness, that more conscious, more spiritual aspect of yourself. Because often, our instinct, people sometimes will confuse instinct intuition. So, our instinct can come from our internal gut responses, and that often is fear-based. It’s often when we have a gut reaction, like a tension in the gut, once the nervous system going into a stress response, right? And it can be sometimes confused with intuition. Whereas intuition tends to be less charged. It tends to be very consistent. It tends to be this knowing that comes from somewhere else, but also, from within us.

And so, I think learning to trust that is a practice. And whether you’re more spiritually inclined or more physically inclined, get to know that part of you really well first so you know the messages and the signals and then learn the other part. If you know your body really well, know what a fear response is so you don’t confuse it with intuition. Know what an excited response is so you don’t confuse it with intuition. But really, when you’re cultivating intuition, as you all know, is allowance. Like you said, take the wrong or right away from it. Wrong or right creates judgment. It removes you from that present moment lived experience. You’re layering in a whole lot of beliefs and expectations that may or may not even be yours when we put a wrong or right to it. And it’s about allowing it to be what it is and trusting it. And if you have to test it a little bit to trust it, feel free to test it a little bit to trust it.

So, allow yourself to feel and experience what’s there. And then if you need to go and do a Google research or ask someone professional about it to get a little bit of validation and feedback from it, to help build that trust in yourself to that. And ultimately, I know my personal experience with intuition is it’s almost blindly trusting it, if you like. I’ve learned that over time because when the intuitive nudges were little, there was a little bit of trust there. And each time I gave that little intuitive nudge that amount of trust and faith, and usually the action that came from whatever it was telling me, that intuitive insight would be bigger and bolder and more clear. And so now it’s just like it’s there. And there’s times where I’m like, really, you want me to do that? All right.

Logically, it doesn’t make sense, but know because I trust that every intuitive message forward has given me something that I either really, really wanted or really, really needed that I didn’t know that I needed. It’s always my mind that’s taken me in the wrong direction, if there is. I don’t know what that’s like. Even the wrong direction, you’re still on the right path, right. But my intuitive nudges have always given me exactly what I’ve needed. It’s not always been comfortable. Having those awarenesses that come through is like, oh my gosh. There’s repressed trauma in this part of my body. What does that mean? That’s where it’s about trusting the feeling and the sensation, trusting what your intuition is sharing with you without trying to make it make sense logically or conceptualize it, like you said or put labels on it. And allowing it to be.

When we talk about somatic processing, often that emotional response that comes from the movement or the pressure or the touch of a certain part of your body is what it needs to start the healing journey.

Jordane: Is that awareness permission?

Marissa: Permission. Permission to be present and permission to move through us. These emotions, we want to metabolize them and move them through us. It’s usually when we attach a story and then we keep running the story that we keep creating the same situation that holds the trauma stuck in our system, so to speak. So, that was a bit of a convoluted answer to your question, but I think it is about allowance and trust, ultimately

Jordane: No. It’s beautiful.

Marissa:  And do what you need to really learn to trust. Yeah. And I think the big thing about this that I like to make sure people are aware of is that healing, growth, intuition, all of these beautiful things that we really want to develop more and more often come with the little subtext of often uncomfortable. Usually, some level of discomfort involved, and that’s okay as well. So, allowance and trust in your intuition to teach you, to share something with you.

Jordane: I’ve had a real devotion this year to saying yes to whatever shows up in my human experience. Whatever comes and knocks on my door of awareness, I’m like, “Okay, you can come in. Hi.” But I think we have permission to say this is a bit too much for me right now. Let’s just calm it down for a bit, and I’ll return to some more layers of whatever’s happening here when I feel safe and okay to do so. And even just saying that out loud, giving us up that permission, you don’t need to– There’s a difference between taking a step into something versus diving into it and feeling like you’re dying because it really can feel that way sometimes.

Marissa:  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely 100%. In somatic psychotherapy, there’s actual practices that teach you to do that, pendulation and titration, which essentially allow you to tap into the trauma and the dysregulation of that, and then they bring you back out to regulate and create safety again. But it’s also true to a more macro level, right, is if we’re chasing this healing journey, if we go digging for more and more and we don’t allow the integration. Integration really is sit with what comes up. It’s not a whole lot more complex than that in that in that it’s about sit with what comes up until you understand it, till you’ve digested it, till you feel safe with what you now know before digging for some more. Yeah.

Unfortunately, I do see it quite often people do go digging without the adaptation and the healing part of it, which is the integration. I liken it to when I used to work with elite athletes. They don’t train all day every day to become elite athletes. They train a certain small portion of the day, and the progress is actually made with how well they rest, how well they fuel their body, how well they recover. And so, our journey is the same. Our inner journey, our healing journey, our emotional journey, even our spiritual expansion, it’s all at the pace of nature.

You can’t rush a river. The river is going to go nice and slow and fluid some days, and then maybe after torrential rain, it’s going to be rushing and faster, but it’s at nature’s pace and our healing is as well.

Imagine getting a little paper cut. You can’t sit there and be like, “Heal, heal faster, heal faster. If I keep cutting you and pulling the scab, I feel you’ll heal quicker.” It doesn’t work. Your body will naturally heal it in its own good time based on how well you nourish it, how well you rest, how well you eat, all of those sorts of things. So, it’s about allowing the layers to come up and come off, and then sitting with yourself in that new awareness with that new level of understanding. And sometimes that might mean getting additional support because it is quite overwhelming or traumatic information that you might become aware of. And sometimes it might open you up to a deeper level of self-acceptance and self-belief and self-trust.

And whichever it is, it’s about allowing that to be there with you and really become a part of your fabric, if you like, until the next intuitive nudge comes along and says, or your body comes along and says, hey, there’s this thing, there’s this niggle, there’s this journey that we have to go on, and it’s about uncovering the next layer. So, it really is about allowing yourself to be and work and evolve at the pace of your innate nature. And I mean, in the performance [crosstalk – 00:59:40] that.

Jordane: Sorry. I don’t know if there’s a delay, but I’m sorry for cutting you off again.

Marissa: No, no. It’s all right.

Jordane: That can be really difficult to let ourselves go at our own pace when we’re taught from so many various different spaces and environments that we need to go really quickly, that our worth is determined not just by our speed, but our output. Yeah. I was thinking about this recently about my journey with business. And we categorize our lives into these different places, but my journey with business is just my journey of me, because it’s in my experience. But I really, I was looking outside of myself at the speed at which other people were going or the things that they were doing so effortlessly that felt incredibly unsafe and difficult to me, yet at the same time, seeing some of these things as right for me, as on my path. And I’m trying to think if I can make this clearer.

2019, Girl and Her Moon became a business. And at that point, this is something I was saying to you, at that point, I was receiving podcast interviews. And even just opening the message or opening the email, my body would go into this complete freak out. Everything in my body said unsafe. You’re dying, run, disappear, everything. Finally, enough, the thing that would really calm me down was being in water. I don’t know. Maybe that could be helpful for someone, but being in water was really, really healing just in those hyped-up moments. But allowing myself to say no because it was too much and then begin to move at my own pace regardless of what it looked like other people were doing in the pace that they were moving at, allowed me to arrive here with a podcast in my own time and it couldn’t have happened any quicker no matter how much we’d love to speed things and force things and make them happen as we desire.

 Marissa: Yeah, 100%. I love that experience and your awareness of your journey in that. It’s so true in our modern world where looking outside of ourselves to try and keep up with, and it’s like what the Buddhist sort of identified as suffering is that we’re either in this place of craving what we don’t have or averting what we don’t like that we do have. And again, it’s about being able to then turn inwards and go, all right, what’s true for me? Like you said, you knew that those invitations and those podcasts were part of your journey, but it was about resourcing yourself so you did feel safe and empowered as well.

I mean, safety is a huge part of it, but it’s also to feel empowered of where you can say yes and when you can say no. It’s having those resources. It’s what we call in the somatic psychology space is resourcing ourselves internally through self-talk, absolutely, through our own boundaries and giving ourselves permission to say yes, to something that might be a little bit scary but exciting, and also no to something that’s just too much right now. Yes, I’d like to do it. Yes, I see all of these other people doing it. But right now, I innately know that it’s not the scary excitement that I’m avoiding. It’s that it’s too much.

And learning those little subtle gears within our system, within our nervous system, within our energetic systems is so, so important so we don’t go into that overwhelm and burnout which many people do because they’re living above the body, they’re not actually listening to their body. And if they are listening to their body because their body’s screaming at them with whatever it might be, gut issues, blood pressure issues, often they’re still trying to fit into the world and the world’s pace around them and medicating and further disconnecting from their body. It’s actually saying that they say it, I think, in the military, it comes from the SAS, is slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. And it’s essentially saying, find your pace so your journey is as smooth as it can be because you’ll get to where you need to go quicker based on your innate nature and the nature of the evolution of your business and your relationship and that sort of stuff. So, it’s a big, big, big lesson for people to learn and it’s challenging. It really is challenging.

We have this thing called comparisonitis. And, we do we do feel like we’re missing out if we’re not keeping up. And that in itself is a very primitive innate survival mechanism. So, understanding that these are just old survival instincts and being able to use the newer parts of our brain to say actually I’m okay, it’s okay for me to go at this pace because the deeper primitive parts of our brain are saying, well, if you don’t keep up, you’re going to be the weak one of the gang or the tribe or the community, which means saber-toothed tiger’s going to eat you. It’s imminent death.

So, it’s about really understanding what’s going on internally for you, what your nervous system is saying to you, what your emotions and your thoughts are saying to you because they’re offshoots of a nervous system state. And then being able to actually again trust yourself and acknowledge the new answers within yourself to say, I need an internal resource which is a no boundary, no not yet, no not at all, I’m not sure or yes, yes, but not now, yes, let’s go now. This whole what’s there maybe seven different little boundaries, little tools that you have there. And being okay with using them in a way that makes you feel, like you said, safe, but also open and like you’re moving forward in your way and in your time.

Yeah, and it’s true. Like, we live in a really fast-paced world now. We’ve got Instagram feeds activating our brain at crazy speeds. Neurons are firing all over the place. We’ve got traffic and business and marketing and noise and life is a lot. Life is a lot and it’s overwhelming at the moment for a lot of people because of the pace of life after the last two years. It’s becoming that it’s a bit too much for the system to regulate and so, it’s about learning your rhythm. What does your innate rhythm say to you in terms of flow and ease? And I realized that those words have been overused to the nth degree, but flow and ease but progresses well because we need progress, we need growth to make us feel fulfilled, to help us feel fulfilled. So, it’s about finding your rhythm. And sometimes, you’re going to be beating the drums a bit too hard and fast, and sometimes it’s going to be a bit too slow, but you’ll find your gears.

And I think the message that I would suggest to most people is play with that. Learn your own rhythms. Learn what feels good for you and nourishing for you and works within the environments that you’re in so you can do what you love, and be who you want to be, and be well and healthy at the same time in that space. Especially for women, I think we have our own monthly inner rhythms, our own inner cycles, and if we can attune to the phases of our own menstrual cycles, for example, and the moon phases, it all influences us. We had that conversation the other week, as above so below, it’s a reflection. It’s not about blaming Mercury retrograde. It’s not about blaming your nervous system. It’s about going, all right, what are you reflecting back at me that’s already within me?

And tuning into your own rhythms is really important. And I think that’s a gift that women actually have. We have these superpowers in each different phase of the month. And if we can tap into that, we’re going to find the places that we’re slow and paced and healing and softening, and then we’re going to find the places in that month where we’re like, yes, let’s go. Let’s get stuff done. So, it’s about coming back to that, like you said, about intuition, learning to trust, learning to trust in your pace, learning to trust in what actually moves you forward more or faster because it’s your version of smooth.

Jordane: That was very cool, all of that. The saying that you’re reflected from the military, that’s very cool. Thank you for sharing that.

Marissa: Yeah. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I’ve always had that in my brain when I feel like I’m– With all the tools and resources I have, I’m still human. There’s days where I’ve just left too many tabs open in my brain, and it’s like, I got to do all of these things, and I’m rushing around doing absolutely nothing except for rushing between all of the things. And I was like, “Slow it smooth, smooth is fast, Merissa. Tap into that” And it comes back to focus. Focus is a superpower in our very fast-paced modern-day life as well.

Jordane: Gosh, yeah. That’s amazing. There was something that you mentioned, as above so below. We were talking a little bit about the nervous system being almost like a connection point when we’re talking about a more spiritual experience. I would love to explore this with you.

Marissa: Well, I see our nervous system as like an antenna, right. So, if you think about that purely throughout five senses, our five main senses like vision, smell, sound, all of main senses. We also have our intuitive sense, our sense of intuition. We have our enteroception as a sense of awareness. We have lots of levels of awareness, but ultimately, the nervous system is like the antenna that dials us into all of this delicious good information, right, information data pool. And interestingly, for example, vision, we have we as humans, we see in a certain range of visual frequency, but the range of frequency that actually exists in the visual spectrum is from ultraviolet to infrared.

Now the human eye doesn’t see those extremes. We only see a certain amount. And so, our nervous system is really like the antenna that’s tuning into all of this energetic information, these frequencies, if you like, sound frequencies, visual frequencies, sensing, knowing, thought frequency, thoughts are essentially little neurons talking to each other, creating electrical signals. This all emits a frequency. We have an electromagnetic frequency ourselves. And so, our nervous system is really like the interface between our internal workings inside our body and nature and life, the universe, if you like.

So, there’s just so much. It’s amazing. We know the HeartMath Institute has done a lot of work around the heart as an organ, having its own neurons and its own little it’s not really a brain, but like a mini brain having more of an electromagnetic field than our actual brain, for example. And our intuition is tied up in this in different ways. We’re always sending and receiving information out into our environment. The easiest way to think about that is if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re hearing our voices through sound waves. We haven’t jumped into their brains and typed it in. it’s through sound waves, it’s through energy frequency. Our humanness has created technologies to pick up on that, which is really cool. And so, using our nervous system to start to tune in like a radio station to the frequencies that are around us to receive that information is really important.

I think we’re equipped with sight and smell and all of those sorts of things to a degree, but we can create practices to enhance that connection with life, with energy, with source or nature, or the universe. Whatever it is that describes that great mystery to you, we can tune into that. So, our experiences, spiritually, are exactly that. They’re experiences. They’re lived experiences. They’re not beliefs that we want to believe are true. And I’ll share a little story if you’re open to it about that.

Jordane: Yeah.

Marissa: It’s going to start sad. A couple of years ago, my beautiful Indy dog who I’d had for 11 years—she was my baby, she was my Fairchild—she passed away naturally at home. And the year or two leading up to that, I was doing a lot of deep diving into shadow work, spiritual philosophy, especially around the Shamanic principles, union, psychology, all of that sort of thing. And I had over time cultivated a great deal of wonderful beliefs. And there were beliefs, I believed them. They were stories that I’d told myself enough and researched enough that I held to be true and real.

The night that Indy passed away, I was standing in my doorway to go to my bed to go to bed. It was like 10:30, 11:00. And there was something that was stopping me walking into the bedroom, physically stopping me walking to the bedroom. I was trying to push myself against the door jamb to get into my bedroom and in my brain, in my head, I heard this thundering voice that was ancient, but almost it was super loud, but very compassionate.

I can’t even explain it, but it was like you can’t sleep in there tonight. Don’t go to bed. And it was like just this spiritual experience. It was an experience and I was like, ooh, what was that? And I’m like, okay.

And again, it was just trusting. It was different to my intuitive voice. Different knowing to the intuitive voice. As soon as I acknowledged that, I was able to walk into my bedroom, grabbed my pillow, grab my journal. A couple of weeks prior, I knew the dog wasn’t super well, but we couldn’t, like vets couldn’t really figure out what was going on. She was old, all that stuff. So, I put my stuff next to her bed and I laid and petted her and was just talking to her. And eventually. long story short, eventually she passed. I was with her as she took her last breaths.

After that, there was a whole lot of other stuff that came up for me. There was guilt, trauma of like I should have done more, I was supposed to save her, all of this sort of thing. But from a spiritual aspect, there were just these really very obvious experiences that I had that challenged those beliefs that I’d constructed. It was really about, are you going to believe the stories that you made up based on the information and the knowledge that you developed, or are you going to believe in this spiritual experience that you had. And it was like it challenged me for months.

I always thought I’m very spiritual person, I’m very open, I believe in all of these things. And then when I started to have these bigger, more profound spiritual experiences, they cracked those beliefs open and I had to start to believe in my experience. I had to start believing in the auditory sound of that voice that no one else, if there was anyone else there, which there wasn’t, would not have heard it because it was for me, so I had to start to believe in this lived experience. And that challenged me in ways that teachings and learnings and all of that sort of stuff that you go looking for haven’t, and it was beautiful because it really started to connect me in properly with how intelligent nature and the universe really is and how we’re always in communication with it.

We’re always receiving and sending information out. We talk about vibes and energy and all of that sort of stuff. The way we receive information comes through our filters. So, for me, it came through a voice that was in English. Now if I was a French person, perhaps it would have been in a French voice. That’s not to say the universe is English or French, for example. It’s because that’s the filtration system it came in through my system through. So, I think being able to start to work with the nervous system in ways where you can expand your awareness to connecting with that more spiritual information, and also, understand better, understand your influence and your impact into the spiritual space or that collective energy space or the collective consciousness space is super important. And for me, it was about tuning into the felt sense and starting to work with feeling and sensing the energy in and around the body.

There’s the old trick where—I don’t know if you did it at a primary school—where people do this and you’d feel the energy build up. So, you can play with these sorts of things and it’s about trusting what you start to feel. We talk about heat building up people’s thoughts, heat, electromagnetic energy. Of course, it is. That is energy, right? That is energy. And so, the more you can develop those skills and that broadened bandwidth, the more connected that you will feel, the more connected that you’ll feel to earth and nature and to a spiritual experience with your energetic systems and your spiritual experience. So, yeah, it’s a beautiful experience because you all of a sudden never not feel connected.

Jordane: Yeah. I mean, I feel like you have to do everything on your own.

Marissa: Yeah. And so that’s how I sort of interpret the nervous system at a more holistic level is that it is like an antenna just constantly in communication with life and nature in the world. And I think we spoke about it last time as well. Some people don’t consider themselves spiritual. And that’s okay. That’s their belief systems. And it’s not to say that they’re not spiritual beings, they’re just not. Their belief systems and their humanness perhaps hasn’t created the consciousness and the relationship with that part of themselves. Working with the nervous system’s quite the same. We can’t always go into blaming the nervous system for being dysregulated in a certain situation and then linking it back to trauma. It’s actually just part of our whole organism. We are spiritual. We have a nervous system. We have emotions. We have thoughts. We have all of these things that make us a whole human being and really, it’s our level of consciousness and the relationship we’ve built with each part of ourselves, with each aspect of ourselves that really matters the most to healing and bringing us back to that whole grounded anchored self.

Have you got a great relationship with your thoughts? Have you got a great relationship with your emotions? Do you have a great relationship with your body? Do you know how your body speaks to you through nervous system responses? Have you got a relationship with nature?

Can you feel the pulse of the earth if you stand bare feet on the ground? You have access to all of that should you choose to want to cultivate the awareness and the relationship with it.

Jordane: That was great. Thank you. And thank you for sharing that story. I was getting really, really crazy goosebumps when you were speaking about that voice as well.

Marissa: Yeah. Yeah. It was surreal, the whole couple of weeks in and around it was just like, whoa. Great experiences.

Jordane: It’s incredible. We all experience so many things differently and then express those into different teachings or the way that we share it with the world. How should I say this? Their experience can still be valid and true and real, and it can be completely opposite to ours, which is also valid and real and true. And so, it really is about whose experience am I going to trust? One that I haven’t actually experienced or this thing that I’m living inside of? Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.

Marissa: I think that’s a beautiful way to articulate it and it is. It’s where I think relationship dynamics can get complex. It’s about building the capacity to trust your experience, but also have the openness to allow another to experience something different. And that’s where all of the juiciness comes from, I think.

 Jordane: I’ve loved this so much. I wanted to close this off with some healing tools and practices, and I think that a lot of them have been mentioned along the way, but I think just bringing it together just some small steps or not even– They can be physical steps or they can be just perspectives to open to and ponder on. But really, I was going to say regulating the nervous system, but that almost feels like it’s cutting off 90% of our conversation if I do say that. To return to self, I suppose.

Marissa: Yeah. There’s so many. I mean, regulating the nervous system is a good foundation to come back to, right? There’s a somatic practice which is a really, I like to start this with people because it gives them an idea, a very foundational idea of where their nervous system state tends to be. And I don’t know if you want to actually try it. You can try it if you want. If you’ve got space to either sit up, just sit up or stand up, it’s up to you. What I usually get people to do is close their eyes for about 20 seconds, and we won’t do it for the whole 20 seconds. Standing is usually a better way to do it because if you can– Have you got space there to stand up with your headphones and stuff?

Jordane: I can. I just need to up my table. I think it’s a bit slow.

Marissa: Slow is smooth.

Jordane: It is, yes. We’re standing.

Marissa: So, this is basically just a posture assessment, right, and it gives you an idea of the state of your nervous system, and I’ll explain to you in a minute why. So, if you feel safe that you’re not going to topple over or anything with your eyes closed, you can close your eyes. If not, you can just pick a spot on the wall that is seemingly innocuous. Just take a moment to connect in with your natural breathing rhythm. You’re not changing your breathing. You’re just allowing yourself to observe how you’re currently breathing for two or three breaths.

Now I’m going to get you to feel into your posture, feel into your body. And if you were to describe yourself as feeling grounded, centered, and upright, forward-leaning or backward-leaning, what resonates most with you right now?

Jordane: I think I’m leaning a bit towards you, so a bit forward.

Marissa: A bit forward leaning. Yeah. So, if you think of stressful experience, real or imagined, it doesn’t matter. Do you go more into a forward-leaning or a backward-leaning space?

Jordane: I very obviously went backwards.

Marissa: Backwards, yes.

Jordane: I could literally feel myself going into my heels.

Marissa: Yeah. Awesome. So, this is about really understanding how your nervous system is changing your position based on your state. It’s different for everyone. This is not a cookie-cutter approach. And I’m going to go out on a limb here, based on your response, I would say, in stressful and overwhelming situations, you’re more inclined to retreat or run away as opposed to be front up and fight. Now if you are more of a fight or flight kind of creature, if you got to imagine a stressful state, you would probably lean forward. Yeah.

So, this is a little bit of an insight into nervous system, the nervous system mapping I do with people, is to help them understand what their body is doing in response to different nervous system states. So, using that tool gives you a little bit of self-awareness and insight. If you think of a happy thought, your cat, for example, and you were to stand up, where would your body go in that state if you were to think of that? So, it’s a really simple tool. Think of a stressful situation, a neutral situation that doesn’t really mean too much to you and a really loving situation and just see if you are retreating, if you’re leaning in, if you’re wanting to fight, or if you feel centered and grounded.

So, that in itself can give you a whole lot of information and feedback, and you can use that as a way to calm and regulate your nervous system in very simple state. For example, you might have a stressful thing that you’re focusing on for work or relationships or life, what have you, and you feel like you’re stressed. So, what you can do is find yourself in a really grounded, centered, either seated or standing position and allow yourself to think about the stressful situation while maintaining your groundedness and your centeredness until that stressful situation, charge, if you like, starts to soften. This is one tool you can start to use to learn about your body a little bit more.

Jordane: That’s incredible. Just to explain that with the dog in the background.

Marissa: That was a dog. Lenny, do you want to say hello to the people in the podcast? Can you see him? Lenny?

Jordane: Yes. Hello.

Marissa: He’s adorable. So that’s one way. There’s two other ways that I love to give people as tools. One is the breath. Now without going into too much of deep breath work practices and philosophies and things like that, if you’re feeling lethargic, not motivated, and you really want to do something and get yourself active, you can start to take some more intense inhalation-based breaths. So, you’re really firing up your system. If you feel overwhelmed, stressed, a little bit too much, lengthen the exhale. So, you’re simply simple tools working with the inhale to activate and arouse your system, working with the exhale to soften and relax the system.

Jordane: You know what I think is so incredible about all of this is that it highlights how fluid the body is. I think I said to you recently, I’m starting to see my body more as like water rather than this fixed, almost earthly stable, not stable, but just an unchanging thing. I can see how it’s constantly moving. Even just my posture, I’m amazed at that. That was really, really cool. I think we’ve said this, but even when there’s an ache in the body, I’m noticing how quickly and how interlinked my emotional state and my body is, and they change so quickly. It blows my mind how fluid the body is. Yeah. I can’t even find words.

Marissa: Yeah. And that is our true state is constant change, much like the universe. From what we know of the universe, it’s constantly expanding. We might see our body and the earth even as solid, but it’s constantly breathing and expanding. The earth itself breathes. There was a beautiful image on James Nesta’s Instagram the other day who’s a breath work practitioner and author about the earth breathing. And so, we are in this constant state of birth, death, rebirth, change growth, and evolution. And our resistance to that is where we come into conflict and struggle and progress.

Our ability to tune into that dynamic fluid state of our body and our emotions is where we actually do find progress and growth and freedom, joy, and liberation. And the cool thing about emotions, I’m a bit of a geek on emotional stuff, is that we can metabolize the biochemistry like the enzymes, the hormones, and the peptides of emotions within minutes if we allow ourselves to connect in with our emotions and allow them to process and move through us.

Jordane: That’s right. I remember you saying something like the last time we spoke and I was totally mind blown. The body can metabolize an emotion within was it three minutes or something like that?

Marissa: About 90 seconds to three minutes.

Jordane: And you think of how long we usually feel something. It’s generally quite a bit longer than that.

Marissa: Yeah. And it’s often because we’re not connected to it intimately. It’s there. There’s perhaps subconscious thoughts and stories going on. There’s perhaps conscious narratives and stories going on. Perhaps we have disassociated from the experience of it because it feels too much or the idea of feeling something like sadness, for example, feels too scary. I often hear people say “I don’t want to feel sad because I’m scared that I’ll get stuck in it. I’m scared that I’ll never be happy again.” And so that story starts to run and keeps us from actually feeling and processing sadness which can or intuitive to our thinking continues the neural circuitry of creating the story of sadness. So, it’s there until we feel it.

I mean, that’s the technical stuff around it. We still are human. And often, most of the time, we’re not privy to our unconscious thoughts if we’re not connected to our body as well. We don’t always know our unconscious thoughts, but if we’re connected to our felt senses, we can start to understand what’s going on subconsciously a little bit more, and we can start to process that. So, agitation, what does agitation invite you to do with your body? Invites you to move and shake it off. Honor that the best you can.

Jordane: We’re such interesting beings, aren’t we? So many layers.

Marissa: There’s so much complexity and we’re so innately wise and intelligent, but we think that the conscious thoughts that we think is our level of intelligence. It’s like the furthest tip of the iceberg. There’s so much wisdom to access if we can really dial into that felt sense, our sensory systems, our awareness. With all of the science and research that we have in the world across all industries, psychology, neuroscience, medical, we still have not found where consciousness comes from. Different to the thinking, conscious-thinking brain, there’s still not a place that we’ve found that consciousness comes from, which is our experience of our spiritual self or our lived experience of life. And it’s like start to build a relationship with it because we know it’s there because here we are.

We’re innately wise, and we’ve got so many tools within us to help us regulate and heal. And really, our whole organism is designed to be well, to keep us alive, to keep us reproducing, to keep us to be well. It’s constantly trying to bring us back into wellness and safety. And sometimes, it misses the mark with these dysregulation experiences, but these things that we try and get rid of in ourselves, feeling anxious or overwhelmed or procrastinating, it’s actually your nervous system doing its job, but it’s about you now building a relationship with that to help it do its job even better, to reassure if it doesn’t need to freak out around all of the email invites or build a no boundary if it is too much. If we can come into relationship, right relationship with all of our experiences, the good, the bad, and everything in between, we’re going to be able to access that wisdom. That’s exciting in my world.

Jordane: It’s so exciting. I’m right there with you. This has been so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing all of you, your energy, what excites you, your wisdom, your experience with me, and with anyone who’s listening. It’s such a gift.

Marissa: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I could talk about this stuff all day. So, it was my pleasure.

Jordane: Well, isn’t it?  It’s such a joy to be around people when they are in the experience of something that they’re passionate about. You can’t help but feel that excitement. So, it’s a real gift to me. So, if people would love to connect with you, where can they find you?

Marissa: Instagram, like everyone, so Instagram. I have a website which I’m currently updating at the moment to fit where I’m at now in my business. My website is just integrativecoach.com.au. My Instagram is marissajane.integrativecoach. So, they’re the two places. And my phone number and email address is off those two sites, so people can reach me.

Jordane: Beautiful. Thank you for sharing. We’ll put those in the show notes. That sounds like such a professional podcast [crosstalk 01:38:10]. Thank you. Thank you so much again.

Marissa: You’re very welcome. Thanks for your time. It was great to chat.

About Girl and Her Moon, the Podcast

Join us as we:

⊹ Explore our hearts in one-on-one conversations.

⊹ Dive into our oneness with the cosmos through astrology and numerology.

⊹ Explore soul-based systems through which we can understand the world.

From topics like self-worth, creativity, expression, intuition, Soul, coming home to self. To astrology, numerology, tarot, channelling, business, energy, healing, akashic records and more. And topics that are undefinable and ungraspable. Exploring what it means to be alive, to be rooted in both our divinity and humanness, and returning to the space where they are one.

Hosted by Girl and Her Moon’s founder, Jordane Maree, this Podcast is a space to connect, share our experience, and become one for a moment.

There are no expectations here. Only spaciousness and invitations for truth.

At the core of this adventure:

Connection. Vulnerability. Authenticity. Truth. Love. Expansion. Realness.

Where we share from truth, not fear.

Where we witness the innate power in our vulnerability.

Where we take off the masks of expectation, of needing-to-know-it-all, of performance, of abandoning-the-self to fit in.

Where we explore self, and all that we meet as we stumble our way through this beautiful human experience.

Where we value all cycles of being alive. The moments of cracking open, the moments of beautiful bloom, the moments of confusion and doubt, the moments of excitement and clarity.

Where we value the breaking open and the becoming.

All of it is welcome here.

All my love,

Jordane

If you enjoy this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also share it on Instagram and tag us to enter a draw for a free reading.