Sacred Rage as a Catalyst with Erika Tourell (#065)

Could you just say what exactly that is or what that means to you? What does that look like in your practice?

Yes.

I've healed my own childhood trauma through my own, um, like being attracted to different practices and systems of healing and different traditions, different lineages.

You know, over the last 40 years, I've collected a lot of different tools, and I've seen what's really helped me heal, you know, chronic illness, long bout of depression, you know, connected to this developmental trauma.

Like, my nervous system was stuck in functional freeze, what we call it, for a long time.

You know, using different things like family constellations was incredibly healing for me.

Just learning, I mean, the missing piece for me, even though I've been doing body work for 40 years and teaching yoga for 30 years, the missing piece of the puzzle was the trauma piece.

So learning, you know, thanks to the pandemic that then I went on a deep dive into learning about trauma because I had a whole lot come up for me at that time, you know, acute anxiety.

And then I realized I was actually also going through my menopause as well as kind of sorting a lot of things out.

I had help from an Ayurvedic therapist and a constellations therapist, or a systemic coach.

And so it helped me to see things through different eyes, and I was like, oh my goodness, you know? I was missing the piece about the systemic oppression and the way the systems have been built to oppress people.

And so learning about colonization, imperialism, racism, capitalism, you know, misogyny, patriarchy, it was just like, whoa, how could I have missed all these pieces up until now? And so then that really helped me.

So realizing it's not an individual problem.

You know, we can be, like, living these hyper-individualistic lives and then, you know, finding all this stuff out, and it's like, oh my goodness, you know, where's the community? I need community.

I need the village in order to be able to heal.

It's not just me on my wellness path.

You know, there's that need to be able to lean into others, to be able to ask for help, that I can't do it all on my own, even though I might want to, and that I'd been trying really hard for many years, you know, to walk that kind of lone wolf path.

And, you know, that's when everything changed for me, when I, um- Took my work online, and then created, like, these moon circles, women's moon circles on the new moon and the full moon, to have a place to gather where people can be seen and heard, to show up and share, you know, what they're going through.

Like, to offer that just felt like so important.

30 years of teaching yoga, you know, it's an amazing practice, and it can bring so much self-awareness and, you know, really assist your body in healing.

But then, you know, you roll up your mat, and then you're out the door.

And so it was, you know, just really important for me to be able to create community.

So going back to your original question, so somatic trauma therapy for me is, like, learning to understand your nervous system.

So that's a big teaching piece, teaching people to understand how their nervous system works, and then the things that they can do, because the nervous system is something you can take control of.

And so you can up-regulate, you can down-regulate, you can start to notice the patterns that you're perpetuating which are maybe not serving you, like getting stuck in guilt or shame or fawning.