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Isha  0:00  

Welcome to Devotional Anarchy, a podcast about intimacy, attachment, sexuality, spirituality, self expression and other relational themes from a trauma responsive somatic energetic lens, and with a queer polyamorous twist, of course. I’m Isha Vela, trauma psychologist somatic intimacy Alchemist shadow doula love anarchist, intuitive channel and sovereignty coach, you’re here because you understand that integrating intimacy wounds build safety and trust within your body. And that safety and trust is what allows you to fully own and direct your erotic and creative lifeforce in your relationships and purposeful work. My intention is for the conversations and tools shared in this podcast, to light a fire in your heart and under your magical ass while supporting you on your kinky human journey to owning all of yourself. Hi, there it is. It is a very hot day in the northeast part of the heatwave we’re experiencing and I’m sitting in the hottest room in my house because it’s where I have the best acoustics. So I’m taking some deep breaths here. And today, I want to talk about mindset. Because I want to clear up some misconceptions about mindset, misconceptions that I have. I’ve held. And I’m really wanting to support you, in your mindset work, in particular, in adopting a mindset that supports intimacy, healing, that supports release through the body, right, because often the way that their somatic work is talked about or mindset work is talked about. They’re presented as being separate, right? The mindset people talk about mindset, they don’t really talk so much about the body, although I see some people changing that.

And you know, this, this separation perpetuates dualism, it perpetuates like the mind body separation that is so you know, that really, we’re trying to dissolve, right? We’re trying to dissolve these binaries. So we’re gonna say the obvious thing, your brain is part of your body. And it communicates with your nervous system and your body. You know, your nervous system communicates with your brain. Right? So I, before we really dive in, I want to talk a little bit about the, the Mind Body Soul business incubator that Pamela Barbra and I are putting together, it’s called harmonize. And it’s really for people who are wanting to do business in a way where they’re not extracting from themselves, they’re not doing things in a way that don’t feel right to them. It’s about it’s about doing business in a way that feels really aligned to how you operate in the world, right? If you’re a sensitive person, a lot of your business is going to be is going to involve like emotional processing or spending time with yourself or meditating. Right? You know, and a lot of times, we don’t really recognize the way that trauma affects the way we do business or affects how we don’t do business, right? Sometimes we avoid doing things that we know, are good for our business, and even good for our clients. Because there’s fear in our bodies, there is trauma in our bodies, right? And so I want to ask you, like, what would it be like to be so committed to your mission, with your mind, aligned with your body, aligned with your soul, allowing people to find you more easily and feel excited about working with you and you feel excited about showing up for your business everyday, even when it’s challenging, right when some of the fear gets activated? Showing up is a whole body experience of backing yourself mentally, emotionally, energetically. And so the harmonize business incubator is really for people who are wanting to do the nervous system work to feel safety and trust within themselves to be able to bring themselves forward into their business in a way that feels good for them that feels pleasurable that feels easeful, that feels joyful, right? And we are offering a we’re offering an event like a taster event, called back yourself showing up for your juicy offer with mind, body and spirit. And that’s on Wednesday, August 3, at 11am. It’s about an hour hour, 15 minutes. I’m gonna include the link in the show notes. And it’s really about like the energy of deciding that is not just a decision in your brain, but that you can back up with your body. All right. So, I’m going to start this episode about mindset with a story because it’s different than most people’s stories. It’s the back words the back door story. So there was a time when I believed that all beliefs existed in the body. And, you know, this was probably a product of me having done four years of intensive somatic work, you know, five intensive weekends a year. And so there was so much processing through the body, it was like I, I, my experience was that I was vomiting belief systems, I was really like, there was stuff unraveling, I was like shaking things out, there was tremoring, there was like crying, there was a lot of just like, right, just expelling of belief systems of trauma of intimacy, wounds of ways that I had protected myself that were no longer serving me. And, and there was, there were a lot of things I didn’t believe anymore. Like, I really started to believe in, like trusting my own leadership, which was something that was really challenging for me like to believe that the stuff that I had to say was important or valuable, right, that was huge for me. And so I was, I was freeing myself of, like, really harmful thought patterns that had been with me for most of my life that I really like,

you know, that had informed a lot of my choices in relationships, and in my work, right. And so I graduated from the program, I felt really, like, open and really, like alive. And, and then I noticed, and even in talking with some of my colleagues, like we were, we were getting like, especially as when I graduated, I started to like, get a little deeper into my, into my business, and wanting to expand it a little bit and try some new things. And I would notice that especially in those moments of expansion, I would feel the stories creep up again. And they were like, they were very, they were the same ones that were coming up over and over again, it was the story of like, like the not mattering, like who wants to hear that. Nobody wants to hear that, or, you know, just really things that were discouraging me from just putting myself out there. And I knew that they were connected to colonialism, because I could just really feel that they were that the way they were tied to certain experiences around colonialism around having grown up in a small place in the shadow of, you know, us hegemony. You know, the experiences of feeling small, right, in that in that relationship between Puerto Rico in the US. So the feeling of smallness, the feeling of insignificance, the feeling of neglect, right, that is so pervasive in a colonial experience, at least in mine. So I knew those things were coming, I could feel them coming up. And then I was in a peer process group back from my somatic community. So the peer process group and they were also doing, we’re talking about business talking about introverted entrepreneurship, our practices, right, our business. And people were having the same stories come up similar stories, not the same ones as mine. But similar stories around like, just fear, just just regular fear around, like, putting yourself out there around visibility, especially. And so I was like, I was listening to the same this is the same shit coming up. And then I would see clients, of course, and when I started to trace back their, their fears, I started to trace them back into the same collective wounds. And yes, some people. Some folks of color would have the same colonialist, mental, mental stuff come up some, some people had sort of a more general collective trauma, right, the collective wounds, collective intimacy wounds come up, which I talked about in a previous previous podcast episode, the limits, right, the lack of the feeling of being too much or not enough feeling of isolation from from spirit, or feeling like a victim and feeling like an imposter. The self doubt the shame, right? Those are sort of the overarching, collective intimacy wounds. So I realized that this was not this was like our our brains are just going to be telling the same story and and that’s what inspired me then to go into mindset work like Okay, so what am I? What am I start like, I didn’t believe them. But I didn’t believe the thoughts that I would have it I was having, because I knew that they had nowhere to land in my body. There was nowhere for to land my body. I knew it wasn’t true in my body. So when it was coming up mentally, I was just kind of like, Why is this still coming up? And I I realized that the brain is just doing its thing. It’s just running its program. It’s doing what it’s used to doing. Right. And so that’s when I was inspired to do mindset work. And it totally changed. Like, really consciously curating what I was allowing in, and what I was giving my attention to change the way that I stepped into my business. And that’s when my business accelerated. And because I had already the body work background, like just aligning my mindset, just supported me in unraveling a lot of the the, and I’m gonna say business, like an entrepreneurship beliefs, because there’s, there’s a way that I had thought about like leadership and entrepreneurship in a way that was also quite colonized. So I was doing unraveling on the body level there as well, not just the personal stuff, but also the entrepreneurial leadership power stuff really talking about power here. Right? When we’re talking entrepreneurship, we’re talking leadership, we’re talking about power, that doesn’t come from a position it doesn’t come from

doesn’t come from power over it’s just pure power from your beingness. Okay, I don’t want to digress too much. I want to come back into the mindset in the coaching industry. So the typical culture, around mindset in the coaching industry, is that, like, mindset is everything. They don’t really necessarily talk about bodywork, they do some nervous system stuff, but they don’t really address the trauma at a deeper level. And most coaches will tell you most, you know, business mindset coaches will tell you that your feelings come from your thoughts. So I was working with a coach with The Visibility Coach, I had like a one time offer that I that I jumped in on where I want to illustrate this example. And I love this coach, this coach is still very supportive. I still follow her. She’s amazing. However, the way that she used mindset was in a very in an overlord kind of way and in a very top down where there was a denial of what I was feeling in my body. And so we were working on visibility, and I have some, some trauma around visibility, not not sort of the usual time, but there’s some particular things around. But I’m not going to I’m not going to share it because it’s not important. But there was something about visibility, visibility that wasn’t just ancestral that wasn’t just collected, there was a very specific personal thing. And so when I was I, and that’s why I hired her as a coach, because I was like, There’s something here that I’m going to, I’m going to be unraveling. And so as we were, we were doing this thing together, we were recording a video together. And I could feel myself tremor, right. So I was definitely working some things out through my body. And I was I was narrating as she was coaching me. I was narrating like, Yeah, I’m feeling this come up. And she’s like, Nope, don’t say that. Say this. And while I found that helpful to some degree, there was a there was a part of me, the part of me that didn’t get to have her feelings was angry. I was like, No, I want to be able to say that this is happening. Even if I don’t, I’m not buying into it. I’m not believing it. I want to name that it’s here. I want to presents it. Right, I want to give it just an acknowledgement. But there was there was like, Nope, we’re not acknowledging that. We’re say this. And so I felt like that very much that that was not my style. Even though the coaching was effective, and did what it needed to do, it was I knew that it wasn’t my style, that I wasn’t the type of person that was going to deny, or bypass bypass any emotions or any experiences. So having done body work and mindset separately, I know. And I want you to know that mindset alone isn’t enough to, let’s say unblock you, right? If we’re going to use that term. It isn’t. Mindset alone isn’t going to get you unstuck especially if you’re holding a lot of ancestral trauma because that is held in the body through epigenetics, like those little freeze responses you experience are real right? And so we don’t want to like slam down on them. We want to be with them. We want to like honor them, we want to like say yes, you’re trying to keep me safe. Thank you. And we’re going to take aligned action from here right we’re going to take courageous aligned action. So in my experience, and in my experience of working with a lot of bodies, beliefs are held both in the mind and the body, sometimes the mind It feeds sensations in the body, like, sometimes I’ll have an existential fear come up of which I have quite a few. And I could just feel my body kind of start to like, oh,

and then I’m like, okay, you know, we’re not, we’re not doing that right now. And I can, I can sort of switch channels in my brain, and then call my body. Sometimes, the nervous system feeds the stories in my brain, for example, you know, I have, I have a thing around relationships, like I fear being taken advantage of right? Fear, there’s some sort of fear of betrayal. And I know when that comes up, I know what happens in my brain, my brain starts to make up stories about the person and I start to want to distance myself. So whenever I find myself making stories about the one of the people that I love, and like, I have to find where the fear is, and it’s pretty deep in there, like, it’s pretty, like, very old and ancient. So I have to like tunnel in there, and I’ll find it, I’ll be like, okay, and that will be feeding my ego brain that’s trying to protect me, right, trying to protect my heart. So it’s neither a top down or bottom up thing. It’s bi directional, and relational, right? The brain and the body are always talking to one another, right. And sometimes we experience our brains as being like, very out of sync with the body. Right, and we want to get them aligned. This is what this episode is about. So when the body and the brain come into alignment, it is incredible and powerful, right? Because mindset is how you filter and process information. And like I shared earlier, like left to its own devices, your brain is going to continue doing what it does based on what it’s been fed, for, you know, the time that you’ve been alive and beyond, right? And so it likes would feel safe and comfortable in order to keep you safe and alive. Because that’s its job. Right? And it’s and it’s very cozy with your nervous system, right? It’s always like, yeah, the nervous system like we’re alive, alive, right? Not, not the kind of spiritual aliveness, but breathing, your breathing, your eyes are open your conscious, great, right? That’s all it cares about. So, and your brain will actually lie to you, in the attempt to keep you safe, right. So it will convince you not to do things that are actually healthy for you, or growth promoting, because its version of safety is very different from your soul’s version of safety and freedom. Okay. So for example, in business, you know, you may have plenty of strategy, you may know exactly what to do in your business, but you’re not doing it. Because it involves risk involves putting yourself out there, and that’s activating some freeze responses, right. And so you you don’t do the thing you know, you need to do because you’re avoiding it, because it brings up fear. And in relationships, we often don’t say the thing that we’re really feeling, right, we don’t say the thing that we’re feeling, we don’t say the vulnerable truth. Because there’s also risk and uncertainty involved. We fear losing the relationship with fear, pissing the person off and therefore losing the relationship. So there’s a pattern of avoidance there, too. So where there’s a nervous system experience or response, there’s a pattern thought to go along with it, right.

And I’ll get into that in a little moment. But so want to say that when I talk about mindset, I’m talking about adopting a mindset that’s oriented, to healing through the body. So you’re putting your mind in service of the body. And you can train your brain to be in service of your body and of healing these intimacy wounds, right. So. So these are some of the ways that, that you can align your mind to your body, right? You, you give mental attention, or you devote mental attention to tracking what’s happening in your body, you track not only your own thoughts, like you observe your own thoughts, but also tracking sensations, experiences and motions in the body. You’re tracking your nervous system, right noticing when it’s in fight or flight or when it’s in freeze. And that takes some some pretty granular observation, right? It’s gonna, you know, oftentimes, you know, when somebody’s new to Cymatics, you ask them, What do you feel and they will describe physical sensations, right? They were like, Oh, I’m tired. But they, it takes time to get into those more nuanced and like, oh, yeah, I’m noticing tension in my jaw. Or I’m noticing this like, tiny contraction in my lower belly. Right? So you start to get and then you start noticing your nervous system, which is I often say is like the hum. It’s like the hum of a refrigerator, right? You’re not often aware of it and until it starts to make you like loud clicking noises or something strange. And that’s usually when we feel anxious is when we hear it right when we’re able to track it. So we want to get more granular with the tracking. Another way to put your brain in service of your body and your healing is to be attuned to your nervous system is to be like, not just tracking it, but to be like, like gentle with it, like noticing when the freeze responses happen to be noticing those and to be like, Okay, so we’re gonna move our bodies now. Right? So you want to be like talking to your body, you want to be like noticing the need, in your nervous system, like, yeah, my body really wants to feel safe right now. And it does it. Right. And so there you can respond to your nervous system in a way that is gentle and kind and that feels safe. So you can also put your mindset in alignment with your body by welcoming sensation. So let me tell the truth here. We grow up numbing ourselves, we grow up numbing ourselves completely. So welcoming, sensation is a matter, like there’s a lot of layers here.

We often feel tiredness, we often feel like, you know more of the upper layers of sensation. When you get more attuned and more nuanced, you can go deeper and deeper and deeper into sensation until you can start to feel ancestral patterns, you can feel how old something feels in your body, you can know just by feeling it that it’s not yours, that it comes from another dimension, or from another generation, right. So you want to be really, really attuned and welcome sensation, to be focused on it. And, and like allowing it to speak to you. So another way to put mindset in service of your body is trusting your emotions, trusting your feelings. Again, we grow up, honoring our mind, emphasizing mind emphasizing thoughts and ideas which I talked about in another episode embodiment of white supremacy. So we really want to honor emotions, emotions are the way that we know ourselves. And when we know ourselves, we have power. So as long as you are trusting your thoughts more than your emotions, you are actually doing yourself a disservice because you are not in your fullest power. Every emotion that you allow yourself to feel is sort of like this a portal, a portal into a deeper knowing of yourself, right, there’s when you move through an emotion when you allow yourself to feel it. On the other side, you have more knowing. And by allowing yourself to feel it by not bypassing your emotions, you actually build safety and trust in your body. So another way is permission to move your body. Again, we control our bodies with our brain. This is how overlord culture lives in us. We don’t allow ourselves to shake or we say like, oh, well, I’m not going to do that. Because that looks weird. Or that looks unacceptable. I can’t do that. Right. So allowing yourself to shake and tremor and move in whatever way your body is needing to in order to release whatever is moving like belief systems, right? Outdated shit. And lastly, I’m sure there’s not a complete list. But for me, just for the purpose of this episode, you know, training your brain to be in service, your body also involves curiosity, like all of these things is our curiosity based, right. But curiosity, especially about your shadow, and about your defenses, and about the patterns, and the beliefs that get in the way the protection that gets in the way of deep intimacy, in your relationships are the fears that show up in your business, right? So all of these are attitudinal and body oriented, right? And mindset that’s aligned with your body is always connected, connected to willingness and curiosity. It’s like the willingness that the allowing the permission, the willingness, yes, right, you’re Yes. And to stay curious about your nose, right? The parts of you that I’m like, that are like, I’m fucking scared and I don’t want to feel these feelings. Or I’m not that fucking interested in my shadow right now. You know, so just noticing the parts of you that are holding back and that are like, we’re not doing that and then being like, Okay, so the being curious now about where those noes are, where those fears are in your body. And mindset is really about conscious choice. Right? I can have a thought come in, about, about wanting to withhold about wanting to withhold even from clients, maybe But mostly like in a personal relationship, like, Well, they didn’t do what I wanted them to do. And now I’m pissed. And I’m just going to not message them and I’m going to withhold, right? And so mindset is a conscious choice. It’s like, okay, well, I’m noticing that I feel hurt. And I want to, I want to withdraw. But I am going to because I noticed this, I noticed this pattern, actually going to make a conscious choice to not withdraw, and I’m gonna reach out, or I’m gonna least reach out in a way that feels like it honors my boundary and and honors the fact that I am angry. And, and name it. So mindset, again, also giving permission, right? The willingness, the curiosity, giving permission, and mindset as deciding, right, you are making a conscious choice, you are making a decision, you are in choice. And when you are in choice, that is liberation. Right? When we you are able to be in choice, oftentimes, our our mentals, like they, you know, they do all sorts of crazy shit based on our conditioning.

And, and when we’re acting on those on those on the monkey mind, we’re not in choice. We’re in a pattern, we’re in automation, right? We’re in our conditioning, we’re perpetuating what we know. But what isn’t like, it’s not new, it’s old. We’re responding in real time in the present and in the future based on the past. So yeah, so mindset is a critical component of the decolonization and the deprogramming process, and I’m starting to get really, really warm right now. And distracted, noticing sensation in my body. So think about it, you get 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of messages in your daily life, about your unworthiness, you’re not enoughness you’re undeserving this, about how you need something outside of yourself, right, like, you need money, you need this face cream, you need, I don’t know this car, to be happy to feel good to feel beautiful, right? And you get that over several decades. And so this is an illusion, we’re operating in an illusion. And so we’re operating in an illusion of unworthiness and powerlessness and mindset that is aligned with your body is about like, aligning with the real power that you are, you are power, you know, and mindset, body aligned mindset allows you to be in your power allows you to live in your power. And when you live in your power, right? You show up in your business differently, right? Like, you show up as your full self, you’re like, yes, like I am so passionate about this, right? You you express yourself joyfully, you show up and in, in, in this expanded state. Right. So I want to briefly, I want to briefly share my trick of living room analogy, right for the pesky thoughts that you no longer believe are the pesky thoughts that come in, I’ll just I want to share like two, two tricks that I like to use. So for the thoughts that I really don’t believe that are just really just pesky. Like, oh, God, here you are, again, we’re, we’re I don’t feel rattled by it. I use the the psi and slide, right. I’m just kind of like, Ah, there you are again. And I actually like mentally imagine it just kind of falling off me just kind of like, you come in. All right, here you are again, right. Like when I whenever I feel a sense of urgency, for example, yesterday, I felt a sense of urgency, or like, Oh, what are you going to post today? Oh, you gotta have something. And I was like, okay, chill. I’m just going to post what is true and real right now. And I’m going to tie it into whatever I’m doing right now. But I’m just going to post what’s real and true. What I always do every day, hashtag reminders. So that’s what I do with the pesky thoughts that are kind of like very much like, Oh, I know, I have this sense of urgency or I know I have this. Yeah, I’m sort of nonplussed by that. So I use the psi and slide. And then I have the living room analogy for the thoughts that are a little bit like maybe they grabbed me a little bit like there that I have to have more solid boundaries with these thoughts. So for example, let me think of something. I usually have like my fears are all like existential. But yeah, so let’s say let’s talk about a business one. So let’s say I have this fear of or like this thought around.

Yeah, nobody’s really interested in that. Like so. Sometimes I have things that I want to write about. And I have the thought, Yeah, nobody’s really interested in that. And so I think of my brain as a living room, with a door has windows, it’s an actual, like, really nice living room. Well furnished, has a rug in the center. And I’m standing sort of at the head of the living room, my doors to my right. And sometimes I’m able to keep those thoughts at bay, like, they don’t even get to come into my living room. And sometimes, thoughts sneak in, sometimes beliefs sneak in. So when they do like this, like, Yeah, you don’t really want to post that. I know, that’s my nervous system trying to protect me and I feel a thought come in, I acknowledge it, I let it sit down in the living room for a moment, I acknowledge it, I acknowledge the fear that’s there. And then I gently escorted back out the door. Like I actually visualized that happening as a way of like, okay, you came in, you’re here, I see you, I know that you’re trying to protect me. And I’m going to gently escort you out. Because I really, I know that that’s not true. I’ve had I have evidence that that’s not true. So I’m gonna I’m gonna let you out. Thank you. Right. And so I very gently escort them back out the living room door. And, right, the idea here is that you acknowledge you let it in. But you don’t let it hang out on the rug. You don’t let it make a mess of your living room. You just escort it back out after acknowledging it and maybe even saying thank you to it. You know, because we want to acknowledge, like, how our bodies are protecting us. We don’t want to get mad at our bodies. They’re just doing the human flesh thing. Right? We’re meat sacks. You know, we we have nervous systems, we’re messy humans, and so we’re doing messy human things. And then we’re also in our businesses in the love relationships that we’re trying to cultivate and have spiritual partnerships. We’re like, you know, in a way, we’re not, we’re not trying to transcend the body. But we are making choices that move beyond the meat sack, right? We’re moving beyond the experience of simply being in our like, in our primal cave person, human right. We’re making choices that are aligned with our hearts were aligned with spirit. Okay, so I’m gonna leave it here. And let me know what sparked your curiosity from this episode. What landed for you? What was an aha moment? I love hearing feedback from people. So definitely let me know in an email, or DM me or pm me, and I’ll see you in the next episode. Okay, bye. Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Remember to hit the subscribe button to get notified of new episodes dropping on the new and full moons of each month. And if you haven’t already, leave us a five star review on iTunes to make sure that everyone who needs this transmission receives it. Until the next episode I’m sending you fierce, fierce love.