Transcript:
Isha Vela:
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 at our guest, 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.
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Why do we not trust ourselves? Why don’t we trust our creative vision? Why do we feel challenged to truly own our desires? Why don’t we trust that our needs are legitimate? Why doesn’t it feel safe for us to truly be ourselves to express our radical truth in our business messaging, for example, or in our intimate partnerships,
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you’re going to love this episode, because it’s really going to tap into the essence of intimacy, which is safety and trust. And of course, I’m not just talking about safety and trust in romantic partnerships, but also intimacy in your business, specifically conscious leadership and obviously space holding, if that’s what you do.
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So just want to preface by saying that I’m just getting over a little cold. So I sound stuffy bear with me.
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Feeling good enough to record this definitely not yesterday, today. And we’re sort of in the halfway point of the mercury retrograde. So yes, there’s a lot going on emotionally.
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So safety and trust is at the foundation of everything you create, right? Anything, anything creative has to come from a place of feeling safe to express yourself, and trusting that what you have to express is worthy in some way. Right? That it that it’s medicine for the world. And that can be you know, anything that you create can be artistic, it could be entrepreneurial, it could be relational.
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So, I want to back up for a second and ask you, How good does it feel in your body to be in the presence of someone you feel absolutely safe with?
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I’m guessing that if you’re anything like me,
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your nervous system can relax.
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It can let go of having to be vigilant, right from tracking,
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you know, danger in the environment, it can finally take a vacation for a moment. Right? And they can, what’s happening in that moment is that there’s co regulatory processes happening right when you’re in the presence of someone who radiates safety and trust, who you can let go, your shoulders drop, your belly softens, right, and you can open yourself intimately, you can share yourself, it feels, it feels good, right you can be who you are.
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Think about how that might change the quality of the sexual connection. For example, like if you whether you’re able to open up sexually or not or how deeply you’re able to open up sexually.
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Think about how you’re able to share yourself emotionally, right? Whether it’s with, you know, a coach or a therapist, right being in the presence of that safety and trust is an energetic holding experience. It is both mystical from the energetic sense and also
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right 3d, like body level on the nervous system level.
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So, you know, when you think about a professional situation, like what motivates you to get into somebody’s container and lay her money down for their program or mentorship, it’s trust, isn’t it, right? It’s feeling safe, that they can hold space for you. It’s trusting that they can guide you through the process you need help with, and that you can surrender control to their guidance, like you can sort of let go right from from you doing the thinking and the planning and the strategy and just be guided, that they’re gonna take care of you and follow through on the goals. Right? And if you’re an entrepreneur listening, what facilitates your authentic online visibility, you’re no BS marketing, your content creation, right?
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It’s feeling safe to be seen.
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It’s it’s feeling safe to express yourself it’s feeling trust that your voice or services or message is needed and wanted in the world. Like I said earlier
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It’s trusting in your method and your medicine, the way that you get people from point A to point B, okay? And that all that has to do with safety and trust
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within your own system, right, nobody outside of yourself can create that for you. And it all connects down to the roots of intimacy, and how our intimacy wounds, create energetic templates that limit safety and trust within our own systems, energy systems and bodies, and therefore also the intimacy that that you’re able to offer other people, or that you experience out there in the world. So in this episode, I’m going to talk about how safety and trust or lack thereof play out in your relationships in your business. And because this podcast is about sovereignty and embodiment, I’m going to focus on cultivating, like, ways you can cultivate safety and trust in your own body, your own system.
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And, you know, this is important, because when you don’t experience safety and trust in your own body, it distorts the way you perceive people,
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things experiences you have and it really limits how you’re able to move in the world. Like you don’t, you don’t experience a sense of expansiveness, because the world is a dangerous place. And your nervous is like, No, we need a nervous system. It’s like we need to protect ourselves from everything that’s out there. And then you sort of your energy just compacts or constricts, right, you’re not a fool yes to it.
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You will project that lack of safety, and that distrust onto people in situations for example,
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I understand that not everyone is a safe person to be around, right? That’s real.
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And your distrust of yourself will be reflected in your conviction that even situations that are actually safe or not, and that certain people or even like when kindness is coming your way, or when love is coming your way, or when God like you’re experiencing God or like money is coming your way that that can’t be trusted, right, there’s sort of the limitations on what you’re able to take in what you’re able to receive.
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It can either it’s, you know, it’s difficult to receive, because it either feels vulnerable, or you feel like you don’t deserve it, or you’re or it’s unfamiliar to your nervous system, and it wants to push it away.
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Or that it feels like there’s a catch of some kind.
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And I just want to share that, you know, there’s a lot of examples that I have of not feeling safety and trust in my own body. One of them is that I used to feel really unsafe being in certain groups of people, my my edge has always been has always been being in groups, because of my bullying experiences before or having the sense of like, not belonging,
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culturally, perhaps because of my sexual orientation, my queerness
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I used to feel really unsafe in groups of people, certain groups of people. And I just felt like, I had to chameleon my way, through different groups of people in order to be like, Okay, I had to, like read the room, in order to understand, okay, like, I can bring this part of myself, that part is gonna stay behind. And so I kept like, you know, pushing and pulling my my personality shaping it in order to fit whatever I felt was appropriate or wanted in a particular space.
Unknown Speaker 8:34
Yeah, and I just, I just didn’t feel like it was safe to express myself authentically, I just felt judged and misunderstood pretty much all the time. And in my projections of those groups of people, or individuals in those groups of people, you know, I used to attribute it to cultural differences, right, specifically race or class as we go, oh, this is a group of white people, they don’t really understand my Puerto Rican Ness, the way I express myself, or I felt like because of my class background, and having been, you know, grown up, sort of middle class in Puerto Rico, which is kind of like, lower middle class in the United States.
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You know, I felt felt like I couldn’t be around people who didn’t have that experience. So what was really going on internally,
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is that on some level, I didn’t accept myself.
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I just, I judged and disowned parts of who I was at my core. And in order to keep myself safe from a superficial ego perspective. I pointed my finger at other people and judge them coming up with a list of reasons why they couldn’t be trusted. So it’s just it was basically like, I look outside of myself for confirmation of things that are happening inside of my body.
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And judging people got me off the hook from taking any risk to truly show my authentic self because I wasn’t willing to show myself and to be seen
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In, right, I wasn’t willing to be vulnerable, people couldn’t see me. And then I would feel end up feeling misunderstood. And even angry when I was overlooked or when I felt invisible, because there was a part of me that really wanted to fucking be seen. And as you can probably, like, glean from this example is like, this is such an entertaining and delightful way. We fuck ourselves out of what we want. Out of our deepest desires. This is this is sort of shadow work, right? You’re getting an idea of some of the shadow alchemy that’s here that’s involved. I don’t want to digress too far from the topic. But yes, Shadow Work has a lot to do with it.
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So I’ll get into another example later. But right now, I just want to clarify some definitions like
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trust is a vital component of safety. Often they’re thought of as interchangeable but they’re not.
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And I’ll go into the definitions like components of trust. So what exactly do I mean by safety? Safety is not the absence of getting hurt, like you’ve often heard of like, this is a safe space. Well,
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what does that mean? Well, you know, a lot of people have the belief that they’re not going to get hurt in a space that is safe. That’s not accurate. Actually, safety is
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about there being
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like a high likelihood, right? reliability and consistency that if there is a grievance or a hurt, it will be heard and held. So it’s not that you’re not gonna get hurt. But if there, if you do get hurt, you will get hurt, because we hurt each other were humans.
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But if there’s a grievance, you’ll be you’ll be heard and you’ll be held and you’ll be seen and felt. And that that is a tremendous component of safety. We think about it in a partnership, right? When you are bringing a grievance to a partner.
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They’re like, yeah, let me hear it. I’m here for it, bring it. And it’s like, Ah, right, your system again, can relax and can, like, let it out laid out on the table, and your partner or partners hold it.
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In a business sense, if a client has a grievance with you, right, the client wants to know that you’re someone that is not going to gaslight them is not going to throw it back at you. But that you’re going to be able to like yeah, you know, like, even if you don’t agree with the grievance, the client is bringing at least hear them out. And you know, on some level, take it in.
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Excuse me.
Unknown Speaker 12:36
So it’s being able to take the risk to be vulnerable, about your needs and your desires and maybe about conflict, right? So what is trust, trust has, in my opinion, five major, five major components that have like
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sub components. So the first component is consistency, right? That is reliability, and accountability, right? Consistency is like the likelihood is probability like, you can trust that they’re going to be there for you that they’re not going to like be coming and going all the time.
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The second piece is compassion that you know, that there’s there’s a non judgmental space, and that there’s generosity of heart. So there’s, there’s the energetic piece around the heart here too.
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The third component of trust is boundaries.
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Being just ethical, right, like not having your energy be all leaky and drippy and all over the place, but about like holding your sovereignty and respecting other people’s sovereignty and like that goes along with that goes truth and consent.
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Then the fourth not the fifth component is confidentiality, respect for sovereignty, right. So boundaries and confidentially confidentiality, they kind of go together. But I wanted to add, have it be a separate piece instead of having so many sub components? And so the sixth, what am I on? It’s the fifth sorry, brain not functioning. The Fifth Element is integrity, embodiment and competency. So that is about you walking your talk, you, you know, doing as you say you do, and being your beingness is consistent to your messaging who you say you are, and like what you what you believe in your values, embodying your values. So it’s consistency, compassion, boundaries, confidential confidentiality, and integrity.
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So when you hear that list of five, five pieces of trust, I want you to think of the ways that you’re not being consistent and showing up for yourself
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emotionally, spiritually, physically, energetically and mentally.
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What are the ways you’re not being compassionate with yourself?
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Or, or generous with yourself in terms of like the love that you offer yourself, I want you to think about the ways your boundaries might be porous, right? Where you might be over giving, and under receiving,
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okay, or even, like
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entering other people’s energy in a way that is that where you’re not respecting your own sovereignty, other people’s sovereignty? And where are you out of integrity with your own heart, right, where you are either reactive, where you’re not speaking from Heart Truth, or you’re not speaking from, like, from a compassionate place or from your values, let’s say,
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Okay, well, you’re more in a reactive state, and you’re doing things that are dislike, yeah, that don’t align with your values.
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So I ask you these questions, because,
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you know, my work is about being radically responsible for your own energy, right. And about being able to hold space for all of your internal experiences, right? Whether your experiences are emotional, energetic, like, like, sensational. That all adds up to nervous system flexibility, which is the body level manifestation of safety.
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Right?
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Because nervous system flexibility or having the capacity to regulate your nervous system is gold, because other people will be safe in your presence as well. It is like we are all affected by one another, right? You come into a room, like people are meditating and you’re like, Ah, right, or you go to a Cuddle Party, for example. And you notice that when when you start people are kind of like, anxious, and you can tell people are a little bit freaked out. And by the end of the Cuddle Party, everybody’s like, dropped in, like, ah, you know. So this, this goes for romantic relationships, as well as it does, you know, even for with in your relationships with your children, as well as business relationships, your kids will notice when you are, when you’re not regulated, they can, they can tune into that. And they will also feel that sense of like,
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like, they can’t settle in your system, right. This is why I talk about leadership as being sort of a wide concept because it you know, your leadership can be as a parent, like an awesome leader to your children, it can be business leadership, or it can be leadership in your partnership, right, where you hold space, and you offer something to your partner. And you also like you’re in that in that like beautiful, give and take of intimacy, right, of being radically honest, and bringing your your real self into your partnerships.
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So in we all want to feel safe in relationships, regardless of their form, it doesn’t matter if it’s a friendship, right. And if we didn’t, we wouldn’t constantly. If we didn’t want to feel safe, we wouldn’t be constantly scanning for danger in our environment, right, their nervous system is all about doing that all the time. So as I mentioned earlier, your body knows exactly what it feels like when you can bring all of yourself with someone, your Messy emotions, your fears, your sexuality, your kink, right, knowing that there’s a high likelihood they’re gonna hold space for it, that they’re not going to make it wrong, or flip it back on you in some way. But we often do this with ourselves, don’t me.
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In episodes three and five, I go into the nitty gritty of intimacy ones, what they are and how they affect our relationship with ourselves and other people, and even our relationship with life and money and garden, all of them, all of the all of the facets of life.
Unknown Speaker 18:58
So just to recap tiny, tiny recap, in the process of getting hurt emotionally, as we you know, aged zero to six, usually, by not receiving the nourishment we needed by not getting our belonging needs met all the way not only in relationship with our caregivers, but also with the community we grow up around and the systems of disempowerment that we engage just as we enter into the world, we learn to exile parts of ourselves for survival. And
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you know, as I’ve said before, survival is more important than authenticity. So
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our internal process becomes unsafe because we began to fragment parts of ourselves and put them away in boxes. We began to split the self and put it away we get begin to exile we began to write we turn away from parts of ourselves and like
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beautiful parts of ourselves, but often the parts that are
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excuse me
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When we receive the message, that it’s not okay to bring that it can be an energetic piece, right?
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We also learn not to trust our experiences. And this is where our survival strategies are ingenious, right? If we were to trust our experience, and recognize that what was actually happening to us, in the moment, as it was happening, it would be incredibly overwhelming, we might not survive it emotionally and mentally, right. So we have to somehow, like in our survival strategy, we just internalize that we make it about us so that we can continue to be cared for and loved by our caregivers.
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So the limitations that we experience in the outside world, in our environment in those first relationships get turned inward, get interjected. So that lack of safety and trust within you shows up as gaslighting right place where you give up your inner authority to an external one.
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It shows up as avoidance or denial, right? And that, you know, avoidance now becomes an projection, right stuff that you’re not, you’re not seeing within yourself, like shadow pieces you projected on out onto other people, like, you know, there’s the judge, like judging criticism and shame, like demanding of yourself in a particular way, just sort of nitpicking yourself mean, like, oh, you could have done better, and why didn’t you get up in the morning and wanting to do this or that? Right, that kind of shaming and judging of yourself, Oh, why are you angry right now, right, those internal voices, the main girls are the mean, boys are the mean folks in your head. So then there’s also sabotage, right? We destroy efforts to, you know, be big in the world, or to express ourselves, there’s ways that because our nervous system, it doesn’t feel safe, we will,
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we will shut it down, we will destroy it, we will, you know, find ways to kind of
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pull out the roots of it and like make it collapse, like, make it not work. And then there’s the bully,
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the ways that we are actually really punitive with ourselves where we,
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you know, we can punish ourselves, even through food, you know, like,
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sort of eating in ways that are that are harmful to our bodies, or, you know, this can happen with our thoughts or even the relationships that we get into. So, these all in some way,
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are a rejection of a part of ourselves.
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And when you create the the internal conditions for safety and trust, you can move forward with creative visions with you can scale in your business you can create from the assumption, like I said earlier, that you have medicine to offer the world. And that anything that you create is worth is a worthwhile endeavor for someone in the world, right? You’re not questioning your worthiness, you just you come from a place of like, just knowing and understanding from the body sense of like, Yeah, this is good. People need to hear this.
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You don’t need the external world to be safe. You don’t have to guarantee that this, this person will be safe, because you are so grounded within yourself, you can hold space for yourself, you’re not making any part of yourself wrong. You can meet yourself exactly where you are, you can offer yourself comfort, when you’re hurt, you can attune to the young parts of yourself that need love and attention. This is not a head thing, or a thought thing. This is a felt experience a settled pneus of your system, non activated and grounded. And I’m not saying that you’re never gonna get activated, because certainly I get activated a lot. It just doesn’t last very long. Because I’m able to regulate like my, it’s a nervous system. Flex is really about a bendiness of the nervous system not like you’re always regulated, like that just doesn’t exist. Nobody’s ever just regulated, that sort of it feels very flat.
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No, your nervous system is going to move up and down. But there it doesn’t stay activated for very long or like the charge dissipates quickly, you’re able to sort of be flexible and bendy.
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So how do you create the experience of safety and trust within your own body? Okay, so here’s where I offer you five steps to creating the conditions when the within your own system so that you can truly create intimate connection in your relationships,
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in your business, with your clients, right with your team, whatever it happens to be. So the first is be consistent and showing up for yourself. What does it mean by showing up just responding to yourself emotionally? Respond to yourself spiritually ask yourself what you need, physically, energetically, mentally, right? Sometimes when you have an emotional charge, you want to be able to meet it
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and and say what do you need? Oh, I need to move this emotional charge right? Whatever you encounter in your body sensationally
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offer it radical approval. You know, what I call devotional practice is about like,
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giving, it’s giving it what it needs like, and you have to attune to what it needs attunement is is an internal, like it’s an interoceptive process, right that I teach in my containers, About going inward and tuning in to the sensation and really having a relationship that is about radical approval, and to and listening. So the second step is be compassionate with yourself. offer yourself grace and gentleness. You know, oftentimes, we can be pretty harsh with ourselves, like I was saying earlier, like the internal bully, or the critic or the judge. This is not about giving yourself excuses and getting yourself off the hook. Right? This is still about accountability. But off yourself grace and gentleness, like sometimes,
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you know, this was the best you could do today. And that softens the nervous system, when we’re hard on ourselves. It makes the nervous system brittle, like we, we don’t feel safe inside, because we are, we’re like, going hard on ourselves.
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Honor your boundaries. So the third step, this is huge. Again, boundaries are a way of showing up for yourself. What are you agreeing to, at all times, ask yourself, what I what am I in agreement with? Right maybe like if you’re in a relationship where you don’t feel cared for, where there’s maybe a little bit of neglect.
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Be honest about you agreeing to that neglect, as long as you’re in that relationship you are agreeing to neglect. Pay attention to your needs, and set limits around them, right, ask for what you need. And oftentimes, honestly, we’re not connected to our needs, so we can’t feel them. So we can ask for what we want. That is also a whole body process. Right? That can be that you can tune into overtime, you learn to tune into that. Fourth step is respect your own sovereignty. This means doing your mindset work, not engaging harmful, self destructive or self denying thoughts, right watch for any any energetic entanglements, which also has to do with boundaries, right, you set boundaries with the with the thoughts that you entertain, right, what are you agreeing to again?
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Are you agreeing to collude with systems of disempowerment and your thoughts? Hopefully not? Right? No, you’re gonna align with thoughts that feel good that that, that really respect your,
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your goodness, right, your inherent goodness and Your divinity.
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And the fifth, and last step is stay heart connected, do the shadow work required to dissolve the negative ego, and so that you can be at choice and in alignment with your values, right, because when, when the nervous system is activated, right, when, when the nervous system like says this is not safe, right doesn’t come up as a thought in our head, it’s just a reaction we have in our body, our brain will come up with a reason why like a will justify having to protect yourself having to engage in a strategy having to maybe push someone away, or, like hide or do any of the things that, you know, we tend to do when we are in fear,
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which all has to do with intimacy ones right? Are the five different fears. So
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know what your patterns are.
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And when you know what your patterns are, you can sort of work your way through them and drop down into being heart connected, so that you can respond from heart alignment from values alignment and not reactivity, you can respond, even though you’re feeling activated, you can say like, you know, you can still make choices about how you interact with a partner, or with a client in your business who is triggering you, right? All that stuff.
Unknown Speaker 29:05
You know, it’s like, you know, the thing I said earlier about, like, what are you in agreement with, it’s like, don’t break agreements with your truth, right? Oftentimes, we, you know, we’ll let’s say, we’ll start like this healthy food, you know, we’ll start taking care of our bodies will start well, we’ll be really motivated. And at some point, we’ll drop off, and we’ll abandon ourselves, right? And so that registers in your body as you’re not being safe, you’re not consistent. You can’t be trusted because you leave, you leave yourself. So again, coming back to those pieces of trust around consistency and honoring yourself and being reliable is really like that’s when I talk about when you practice the practices that builds your safety and trust muscle over time.
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And you deepen the intimacy within yourself when you practice these five ways of creating safety and trust in your system.
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And the more intimacy you create within yourself, the better you know yourself, which is fabulous, right? Like Self knowledge is really, like, I think what what the work is all about. When you know yourself, you can also allow yourself to be known, you can allow yourself to be seen, you’re not in shame about any part of yourself.
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You can, yeah, you can allow yourself to be seen, because you see yourself clearly, you know, who you are, you can let people in.
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Right? Whether you know, in your business, you can let your customers or your clients see you, and then they can, oh, yeah, that’s, that’s the person I want to be with, or that’s the person I want to follow, or that’s the person I want to be in community or in connection with. Right, and you can also receive what I was saying earlier, money, attention, love care, essentially, you become magnetic, right? It’s like this whole beingness concept that I talk about, that is created through the process of cultivating safety and trust within your own body. So I think this is like, cool. This is the big work.
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You know, I when I
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in my four year training, when I was able to create safety and trust in my body, like there would be people sometimes who would have really strong reactions to me, I was able to get bolder in my expression. And that’s not something that’s been easy for me, like I said earlier, like, I’ve always been this chameleon type and really good at hiding. And cultivating safety and trust in my own body has helped me come out and be seen and to be known, and to let people in because I I am showing myself I am expressing myself my real true authentic self, my vulnerability, my truth, right, all of that stuff. So I hope this was helpful and I will see you on the next episode.
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