How to Root Yourself in Power & Presence

Hello, heroines, and welcome back for another interview, this time with the lovely Claudine Marchand, who is talking to us from Switzerland. And Claudine and I know each other from another group, and I thought because of what she does, it would be really good to bring her in and have her share her insights with you. So Claudine, welcome.

Thanks a lot for having me, Alex.

It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. So let's get started with the basics. Let us know where you're hailing from and what you do.

I started off as a kid with a handicap, so my first question in life was, how does life function? And this question was really following me, so when I ended in college, I decided I wanted to go and study things that were close to my questioning. I went to the ETH in Zurich, which is equivalent to Federal Institute of Technology, and it's the equivalent of the MIT in the United States. And we were only about 5% women. Even in science, in the other domains, engineering, and so even less. And so I asked this question wherever I could. I asked it in organic chemistry, I asked it in genetics, or I asked it in botany, I asked it in biochemistry, and I couldn't really get an answer. It seemed nobody was interested in how life functions. They just wanted to know how molecules function. The larger picture wasn't that important. So then after my master's, I went into a PhD and I studied neurobiology, transport, acetylcholine receptor, electrical organs of mantas and all these things, of rays. It was fascinating and still no response to the larger picture. So after close to 20 years in the labs, I decided to go towards looking at human beings as a whole. And I switched into alternative medicine. So I was really lucky. I started with the course where we were taught at the same time Chinese medicine, homeopathy, and osteopathy. So I had a really touch of the body and I had much more esoteric knowledge like the Tao and the Chinese way of looking at life and interaction, and homeopathy, which was a kind of esoteric way of looking at life in Europe. It was fascinating, and that really launched me into 30, 40 years of research on human being, on life, on interaction between the different realms of plants, animals, humans, rocks. And I'm still very much interested in that. On the way, I also got a degree in psychotherapy. Based on NLP and many other things and coaching. And I worked finally with, for several years, with Hawaiian elders, with American elders, First Nation elders, and before that about 10 years in Tibetan traditions. So for me, all the things came together, and that's what I try to share with people, to tell them they are much more than they usually think in this limited Western way of looking at the human being as a robot.

Yeah, it's, um, I mean, the image that came to my mind as you were talking was the image of an octopus. You've got all these different tentacles and all of these different things that make part of a whole. And sometimes I think we all focus on what's out here, but not on the whole thing.

I loved when you put into your group the image of Rumi's sentence, "You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop." When I read that many years ago, when I studied Sufi mystics and all these things, it clicked on me and said, that's exactly it. I want to see how a human being really lives being the ocean and not just living the drop. I'm a little part, I'm powerless, I'm just driven by the big forces in life. No, we are powerful. It's we who create our life. And if we are not aware of that, we are just like a blind leading the blinds.

And I feel like a lot of times we feel powerless, right? We have this impression that we can't control anything. That life happens to us when in fact I think we do have a lot more control than we give, than we believe we have.

So I wouldn't call that control. For me, control is limiting. Okay. Control is like creating a fortress and believing that Everything outside the fortress is an enemy. So when the enemy attacks with arrows, fire, with fire, what happens? We are being roasted in our own defenses.

Okay, so what's a better word than control?

I love mastery. Okay. And for me, the image of mastery is Aikido. This mastery of oneself, this inner alignment, which allows the person to welcome whatever comes from the outside and take this energy that comes towards them and divert it wherever they want them to go. They always stay in alignment They are not disheveled by what comes. They are not asking, "Why me?" They just say, "Welcome, you are here, and I help you go further." So it's altered.

Okay, so there's a certain level of acceptance.

First is the welcome. You can't work on anything that you haven't acknowledged. So that's the first step. I have to say yes to what is. If I say no, I'm in an illusory world, and whatever I do doesn't have any impact.

And there is no judgment, correct?

No judgment at all. It is what it is. It's here now. Okay, so it has to be here now.

And it usually— it's my belief that when something like that comes in, there's a purpose, there's a reason.

Very often it can be a catalyst for something else. Yeah.

So how can somebody, when something comes into their life and they are used to being more reactive and more judgmental of the thing that comes in. How does one start to get beyond that, to really get to that, eventually, that welcoming space, that accepting space, so that we can move through our life with more ease and more flow?

Yeah, and Grace. Yeah, there are several steps ahead. First, become aware of the reactivity. See what are the triggers. Then realize that this reactivity is due to insecurity, to feeling in danger. Sometimes even fear. So the first thing is to establish a safe spot in oneself. What I often use is the hara or tantien of martial arts, the little dip in our belly just below the belly button, above the pubic bone. The story goes that, uh, at our birth we receive there a big cauldron containing the energy from the universe, from our ancestors, and our personal energy. So we start our life with everything we need. Now the problem is that our education— the first thing they teach us is you don't know anything, you have to learn from everything outside in, you can't just go into yourself and take from your riches and experiences and see what you can do from there. So that has the physical effect to pull us out of this horror and up into our mind. You can see that babies, when they scream, they have a short in-breath, and then they can scream for ages. They are so powerful. Whereas afterwards, Kids are often short-breathed in school and so on because they stop it here. They don't take the whole energy from the bottom up through their body and let it generously come out. So either they squeak when they scream— what I hear every day on the on the playground next to me where there is a school. I always wonder why kids now have to scream when they come out of class. I know we didn't do that 50, 70 years ago. It's really the whole stress under which they are all the time to behave in a certain way because they are expected to do this and that and everything, instead of being asked, okay, what do you feel? What's the next step that you feel is right for you? Or go out in nature and play for 2-3 hours and then we'll see how you come back. That are all things that are missing in our society now. So that's the first step to go back to this hara point, where actually the matrix is, the uterus. It's not per chance that the uterus is surrounded by the big bones of our hips, the big muscles of the buttocks, of the thighs, the strong belly muscles. It's a really sheltered environment. And any woman who has had an abuse or something like that will have a hard time finding this safety spot in her because it has been desacred. So we really have to start by creating our nest again. And once we are there and we feel really welcome, at home, secure, when we stand up, we stand on the two muscles, two legs, which are like two pillars grounded into the earth, deep roots down to the center of the Earth. Mother Earth is feeding us her energy, her nutrients, her power. She's sharing with us. She's the one who gave us our body. And if you really want to have a third point of support, we imagine a kangaroo tail coming from our coccyx down to the earth. And so we have 3 points like any sturdy stool, and we can stay with such, uh, safety, security, sturdiness that nothing can un-earth us. Anything can come and we just say, "Welcome." It's a question of attitude. If I feel secure in myself, nothing threatens me, so I can welcome it.

Yeah, and you're not going to get destabilized.

Yeah, that takes away the threat from the beginning. Even if it's a very dangerous situation. I was reading Edith Eger's book lately. Somebody proposed it, The Choice, and she is a survivor of the Holocaust, and she says the moment the SS came to round up the Jews and put them in the brick fabric in in Hungary, her mother with the greatest calm got together some food to sustain the family for 2 weeks. She just packed everything that was necessary and it was fine before they were transported to Auschwitz. But that's, that's a power you have as a human being if you are not reacting to something. But once we are aligned, we do the right thing at the right moment, whatever the situation is around us.

I can see that there's something very grounding and very stabilizing in, in that. So I want to go back to what you said earlier about creating that nest again within ourselves. Is there something that women can do that is simple but with consistency can make a big difference in recreating that space?

One is breathing.

Okay.

Most— sorry— most people breathe shallow up here. We don't have enough oxygen. We get dizzy if we breathe more fully. Doesn't make sense. Often when I work with people in bioresonance like today, I find that they have too many red blood cells. What does that mean? They don't breathe enough, so they— the body thinks, I'm high up in altitude, I have to make more red blood cells. Doesn't make sense. Even at the seaside, it's just because most people have forgotten to breathe down to the pelvic floor. So the first thing is: don't breathe in but breathe out. When you feel you don't have enough air, it's because most of the time people have been taking in air and forgotten to empty out the lungs. So obviously you can't fill a full bottle. So the first thing is always start with the big sigh, ahh, and that automatically takes you down into the pelvic floor. And from there, imagine the air you are breathing in comes through your coccyx and it fills your belly then the rib cage, and finally it comes up here and goes even up to here. And then you let it go again, slowly and long out-breath. The advantage of this long out-breath is that you trigger the vagus nerve and that gets you into parasympathetic activity. You relax, you feel secure, you can digest. That's another thing. Many people nowadays don't take the time to be stopped when they eat, but they eat walking or in front of the screen doing things. Doesn't work. Our body has to be in parasympathetic mode to digest. Otherwise, in sympathetic mode—flight, fight, or freeze—all the blood is in the extremities. Nothing can happen in the center where you have the digestive system. So that doesn't make sense. So always, at least every hour, every 90 minutes during the day, just take some big breath out and a short breath in.— and a long breath out and a short breath in. And maybe take a sip of water. It's always a good thing. Get up, move around if you're sitting on a desk. Just to bring the counter down to zero so that in the evening the person doesn't feel totally overwhelmed, stressed, running to see their family, and not being able to stay with them, not being present with them anyway. You know, it's—

what you're saying is really resonating with me because last night as I was having dinner with my honey, I was telling him just how tired I was. And then I realized that I basically sat at my computer all day long. I did not take a break. I took a break for lunch. But aside from that, I was just— because I had one thing after another. So finding— or let me put it this way. My learning is I need to plan times during the day when I can do that. Because if I don't, then the day just runs away from me.

Absolutely. It's the day deciding what happens to you instead of you being the master of your time. And actually, brain activity needs muscle activity. If you don't move enough, your brain will become sluggish, and it will become harder and harder to be creative and thinking quickly. So—

interesting. Interesting. I think I could talk to you for hours, but we don't have hours. So just any last words that you think are important for our heroines to know given what they're going through right now?

The first thing is to acknowledge their feelings and not to be taken in by labels of what they should feel, what their emotion should be or anything like that. Just be an observer. Look at what happens, feel it, allow it, welcome it, and see how it will drive past you after that. Don't get stuck, allow movement. An emotion stays for maximum 90 seconds. If it stays longer, it's our mind that calls it back and reruns the program. So by just welcoming, letting it run through, you won't be a victim of any situation.

Beautiful. That is such a simple, simple but not necessarily easy thing to consider.

I always say life is very simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. If it's complicated, it's that our mind gets involved.

I can see that because we all have that monkey brain and it likes to be at the controls or at the wheel instead of like— It's a survivor control.

It's its job. We just have to thank it and say, thank you. I know you do your best. Now I take over.

That's it. But it's catching it every time. Yeah. 100,000 times a day. Yeah. 100,000 times a day sounds exhausting. But, Claudine, I want to say thank you so much for sharing your story, sharing your wisdom with our heroines.