Full Body Presence with Suzanne Scurlock-Durana

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have. And today we have an amazing guest, Suzanne Scurlak Durana. And Suzanne is a teacher, She's a speaker, a therapist, and also the author of Full Body Presence. She's also the creator of the Healing from the Core program, which is a unique approach to energy and grounding and presence and has lots of interactive exercises as well. And I love her book and I'm so thrilled to welcome you, Suzanne.

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.

Yeah, thank you so much. And as we were saying earlier, I love your book Full Body Presence, and I'd love to start off with what is Full Body Presence for those that don't know what that is.

Okay. Okay. So I'll actually read you the definition because it's a bit of a definition. And as I was beginning to write, I had to define. I realized that I was using terms that are defined in our culture in slightly different ways. And so I really had to delineate what I mean by this. So full body presence is the ability to feel all parts of your body. Now, when I say it's the ability to feel it, it doesn't mean that we're all feeling everything at any moment, but it's the ability to drop in and feel it when you need it. So it's the ability to feel all parts of your body with a good flow of healthy energy moving through you. Also includes a connection to your inner and outer resources for health and a good sense of personal boundaries. Full body presence is the foundation of a strong therapeutic presence.

That's beautiful. So, you know, obviously, you know, this work is very important and I'm super grateful for it, but how is this relevant for our health and for our well being and for experiencing the pleasure of being alive?

Well, I think let's start with health. Okay? Health, well being, and the pleasure of being alive. Those are three big pieces and they all do fit together, honestly. But one of the things that I see in our culture is that people don't actually know how to feel, have a really clear felt sense of themselves in their bodies. Most of us are taught educationally, most of us are taught by our families, by our religions, to live between here and here, in our ears, in our heads, going by what we should do, what we ought to do, if we're good citizens or good Christians or good Jews. Or, you know, whatever our religion is, there are certain rules and regulations that don't really actually involve in listening to the wisdom of the body. And, you know, I'm also a craniosacral therapist. In craniosacral therapy, we talk about the cellular intelligence of the body. And this really is about taking the cellular intelligence of the body and expanding it to include all the cells of our body. So it says, you know, I'm, I operate best. I actually had the most joy. Candice Pert, who just recently passed away, wrote Molecules of Emotion. And she said in her book, and it was a real game changer. We're hardwired for bliss. When we are fully present in our body, our natural state of being is to feel joy and to feel juicy and to feel full and alive. So we've been actually trained out of that. So my original work was called Healing from the Core, A Journey Home to Ourselves. Because most of us have lost the way back to our bodies. Now, this doesn't mean we don't include our heads, our brain, everything from the neck up is actually a part of our body. But it's that I think of the brain as being a partner on a team as opposed to the driver of the bus. Now, there are times when I want my thinking, strategic mind to drive the bus, but it's driving with input from my whole body. So it's listening to my gut about whether something is really the right direction for me to go in or I really need to get the hell out of Dodge. Or I'm also listening to my heart about what deeply inspires me. I'm really listening to my bones about the clarity of who I am. All the different parts of me are giving input to the strategies and the decisions I make in my world. Yeah. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally makes sense.

Okay. So that kind of wraps it all up. Because if we're listening health wise to our bodies and the signals that they're giving us, we get signals that tell us when things are off and when they are, when we're doing something healthy. Now, there are things that confuse this. Addictive processes confuse our inner sense of when something's good and bad. The whole sugar processed food industry creates a kind of a weird thing where the body gets off in terms of not really knowing how to give us a clear signal. But at the core of it, our bodies do know when we're eating something that's healthy and life enhancing and when we're not. So there's a quality of health, a direction about what Kind of exercise is right for you, what kind of rest you need. All of those different things are important. So that process of really listening to what's important to your insides, not just what you should do here between your ears, that's how I think of full body presence as helping us with our health, our well being, and also the juiciness, being alive. I love that.

Okay, so what about resistance? Right? Because I know that we can. You know, I'm listening to this and I know other people watching this and listening to it are thinking, oh, this sounds great, but what about the resistance to actually getting into our bodies? Because this seems very addictive. You know, like we have all of our shoulds and we thinking and it seems like we, if we tune into our bodies and lose our mind, that something bad's going to happen.

Right, right. No, there is, there is that quality in our culture that anything that has to do with the body and sensuality is definitely questionable. And not only questionable, it's kind of dangerous. And the closer you get to the pelvis, that gets even more and more dangerous. So although there are some parts of our culture that really say, you know, following the deep inspiration of your heart is a dangerous or stupid thing. So there are many different parts of our who we are in terms of our bodily intelligence that's questioned in our culture. So what do we, what do we do when you, you go to start to pay attention to yourself and all the voices in your head say, oh, no, no, you have to be taking care of your kids, you have to be taking care of your husband. You have to be taking care of any friends you have that are in pain or in need. You have to be taking care of the people in your church or in your women's group or whatever it is. I have to take care of them first and then I get to take care of myself. That, that process is one that I think of as one of the chief confusion points for many, many people. And I actually wrote an article a while back called getting on your own to do list, because what. And one of my principles, my main principles about choosing nourishing resources moment to moment is actually all about getting your own oxygen mask on first. The airlines in this particular case are right. You have to put your own oxygen mask on first before you can help anybody in need around you or you're going to be face down on the aisle. And rather than up and able to help other people. So it's the same is true for us. We have to get over the idea that we're being selfish if we take care of ourselves and it gives us more juice, more capacity than to have compassion and the capability to create what we want in our lives, to be present for people. All those things that are so important. Yeah.

And other than that, and you talked about this in your book as well, is like this drive that so many of us have to achieve and to be successful, successful. And that, that is, you know, pulling us and forcing us. And we're not actually taking care of our emotional, our spiritual, our physical needs. So can you talk about how do we even start realizing what our physical, emotional, spiritual needs are?

Well, one of the things that that is that the cornerstone of my whole system is a practice we call grounding and filling. Actually, it's called opening awareness. Grounding and filling, which is that it's an exploration where I ask people a series of questions, they close their eyes, they go inside. I might say something like, you know, invite your curiosity on board right now and notice what the sensation is of your breath as you inhale and exhale. What's the feeling of it going in through your nostrils? Can you feel the rise and fall of your chest? Is there any place that your breath catches or is it full and easy? So in other words, I give questions that don't tell you what to find inside. They just ask you to start noticing what's inside, what's inside of you. And then once you have what we call opening awareness, you know, how. How am I doing? Oh, gosh, I've been so focused on getting this job done that I can't even feel much of my back anymore. Oh, I need to just take a moment and settle back. Okay, now I can feel my backbone again. What's the sensation of my backbone? All of these qualities of sensation in the body, and they can be very small sensations, they can be large sensations, but they're always first order sensations, meaning they are things having to do with no interpretation. There are warmth or coolness, sense of spaciousness or density, feeling like something feels like a particular color. Noticing, for instance, if I drop inside in my opening awareness in any given moment and I say to myself, oh, how am I feeling? Gosh, there's a heaviness in my chest. Ah, that's the grief of losing my friend Sarah. And what's the sensation of that? It feels wet, it feels heavy. I'm noticing that it feels very dense. And then I can sit with that. And I know what I need to do to take care of it. But if I am on operation, if I'm operating On automatic. And I'm. With this loss, I'm trying to take care of everybody else, and I'm going, going, going, going. I don't even stop to notice my own grief, my own sadness. And therefore it goes ungrieved until suddenly it explodes somewhere or I collapse somewhere. But when we get really going fast, we lose track of what's happening inside for us. And then we miss the signals that the body's trying to give us. Signals that can be wonderful, by the way. It can be signals of things that we're inspired to do. It can be signals when we need to slow down, and it can be signals about how to take care of ourselves. But when we get going too fast, we miss them. It's almost like we get blinders on. You know, All I can see is right here. I'm missing everything on the outside of these blinders. Yeah.

And then we just disassociate from our body because we just have to be only focused on this.

Right, Right. And dissociating might be one. Some people do that. Some people hunker down inside. They get real tight and compressed inside and. And they don't feel a whole lot there either. They almost feel like they're an island. I just have to get to the goal. And there's so much of that that people then start to lose track of who they are. Yeah.

And I love about your work, too, because I've been noticing for me, like, when I get really into a goal or just whatever, I start noticing where I'm tight. You know, I get tight in here. I'm at my computer, and I'm like, okay, let's. Let's do some awareness work here. But it's amazing. It just kind of like, creeps up on us.

It really does. When I was actually writing the final drafts of the book, I would be sitting at the computer sometimes for five or six hours, doing edits, and I would notice somewhere in the third hour that I was no longer. I could not feel my back. I was all focused on that computer screen, and it wasn't coming through in terms of. Of what was happening on the backside of my body. So in. If you take that to the nth degree, you know, if you take it right on out, what begins to happen is then someone has a back spasm. Their back goes out. It clutches. It's like the back saying, hello, I'm back here. I'm having problems. Because you've been sitting on a couch that's not comfortable. It isn't ergonomically Correct. You've been sitting for five hours, fool. Get up and go take a walk, you know, whatever it is. So that's. It does creep up on us and it happens to everybody. It doesn't matter who you are. Life generally in today's culture will pull you forward. And that's really the, the, the reason why I suggest that people do the practice that I teach that opening, awareness, grounding and filling brings us back inside, really just, okay, how am I feeling? What sensations do I need to cultivate in order to fill up the container of my being so that I'm connected to healthy resources and I can feel what's going on inside of me in any given moment.

Right. And that doesn't take a lot of time, right? I mean, because I think it's just the creating the practice, is that right? Of actually just doing it? Because we could do that in a minute or something, 30 seconds, you know.

You can do it once. It's really a habit or a practice for you. It's very easy to take four or five breaths and fill up. Usually initially it takes a little bit longer because you have to have the habit of dropping into sensation in your body. Knowing how to do it up here conceptually is not the same as actually dropping into your body and doing so that, so it has to be a habit. We know from all the work of Deepak Chopra and all those other people that it takes 30 days of practicing something to really make it a habit. And once it's a habit, then as long as you take time out in your life regularly to slow down, you'll easily be able to rejuvenate using the practices. And then in the short run, like in day to day life, you can take five deep breaths, feel your spine, feel your feet on the floor, feel your heart, feel your pelvis, and boom, you're ready to go. But it's because you practiced enough. When you breathe and feel your feet on the ground, you can drop right in, you have the sensation memory to be able to go back into those areas and to recognize what would nourish you that day. Pretty quickly. Yeah, quickly. Okay.

So I'm curious of who come, like people that are interested in your work, what are they coming for? What do you see mostly in your practice of like, what are people searching for?

Well, most of the time people are going for, how can I have more? How can I have more juiciness in my life? How can I feel more full? Oftentimes they come because they're having boundary issues. So they will say, I Absolutely am going to explode. If I have to deal with my angry husband or if I have to deal with my kids are running me ragged, or my mother is making me nuts, or my daughter is. My grown daughter is driving me crazy, all the trauma drama in her life, I don't know how to say no to her. So there's a quality of not really knowing. One of my most recent terms is to be your own authority. Not knowing how to drop back into the container of who you are and become your own authority. Really feel who you are so that when someone comes to you demanding something that's not right, that isn't good, you actually are home and steady and you can say, no, I don't think so. And if they continue to push, you can go, no, that's enough. And then you do whatever you need to do to maintain that boundary. You know, if, for instance, you're having trouble with your, with your spouse or with your boyfriend or girlfriend, you might go get couples therapy. So you learn words that have healthy boundaries. You might, if you're working with children that are a problem, you might go and take a parenting class so that you know the technical ways of having a healthy boundary. But the core of it in the beginning is believing that you're worth having a boundary, really being inside, having the self esteem to say, you know what, I gotta take care of myself. I'm the mother of these children, I'm the husband, I am the boss, I am. Whoever you are, you've got to have enough juice inside to be able to do what you came here to do. And in order to do that, number one, you have to be able to rest inside. Number two, you need to have boundaries. And those are a key piece. The third thing that often happens, and I find this often with people that have done a lot of spiritual practices. Most spiritual practices do not take you more into your body, by the way. They actually take you farther out of your body or they take you to controlling your body. Yeah. So. And this is also true, by the way, for good athletes, which is kind of frustrating because you would think athletes, you know, but most of the time it's about controlling. I have to finish this triathlon, I have to do this, I have to do that. So that quality is, how do I teach people how to have a partnership with their body as opposed to being the tyrant that rules their body?

Totally.

Yeah.

I love that. The partnership with their body. Yeah, I love that too. Because I've been an athlete, you know, it's been a process of coming back to my body. People think that just because you're an athlete or you do physical activity, that you're connected to your body and that I've had to work through pain. I mean, there's. There's some qualities that are very helpful, but there's. You're not connected if you're gonna actually push through it. You can't be that connected.

Well, what's happening is you're ignoring your body's own signals. And when you start to ignore the body's signals, the body goes somewhere else and starts another. You know, I mean, it either gets quiet and goes underground or it causes problems elsewhere.

So a lot of our physical issues, there's been signals that what's going on in our bodies that we've just been missing. Because a lot of times people will say, oh, this just came out of nowhere, you know?

Right.

I don't know what's going on.

Do you know what's fascinating is that when. That. When I get that story, I always go, oh, wow. Out of nowhere. Okay, let's take a minute. Let's drop back inside for a minute. Feel your feet on the floor. Let's feel your backbone. And I go through the opening awareness, grounding and filling. And then I'll say, okay, let's go back to that thing that happened. And whether it's the back going into spasm or whether it's something bad that happened to them out of nowhere, I will often, and this is 99 times out of 100, when I'm talking with someone who's had a traumatic event happen that came out of nowhere, will say to them, drop back in time just a little bit before that event, and tell me what it felt like in your gut and what's fascinating. And you can kind of see them, like, dropping down into their gut. And all of a sudden their eyes will widen. They'll go, oh, holy mackerel. I did have a hit. You know, just like the story in the beginning of my book. I felt I knew something was wrong with my friend that ended up strangling me. I knew it, I felt it, and I didn't trust it. And so often we put down the hits that we get from our gut or we let our. Our politeness or our shoulds or ought tos overrule the stuff that we should be paying attention to. But inevitably the person will say, oh, God, yes, I did feel that coming. And then it's. Then what's interesting about that, not that they should feel guilty, but that they then don't feel have to feel like as much of a victim. Because if they felt. If they heard the signal before, even if they didn't know to pay attention to it, they're going to hear it again. And once they start to pay attention to the body's signals, it does give us signals over and over and over again all the time. We are living in a sea of energy. We are like receivers. When our cells are open and our boundaries are good, we receive the information that we need moment to moment. And it threw out all parts of our body about what's coming, what you need, what you're inspired about, how to get grounded about it, how to have the power and the energy to follow through on it, how to have the clarity about what directions to go. And all those signals come from inside of ourselves in different parts of us. Yeah.

That's amazing. I love the intuition. Like, you said you knew. And for so many of us, we do know. I love that you said, you know, you go back and you're like, I did know that that was there. So how does somebody navigate. Say you feel it. Right. Whether it's a. It's somebody in your life or relationship or something, you feel like, I need to set up a boundary.

Right.

How do you go about doing that? Because I know that that's an issue for a lot of people, and especially women, to set that boundary without being petty or drama, you know, just being, like, straight and clear.

Right. So here's an interesting piece, and I'd love for you to give me a particular example, and maybe we can work with it. But here's. I'll say initially that when you drop into your gut and something doesn't feel right, you can, by using just the first person, you can say, if someone says, do you want to do this? And you can, you know, drop inside and say, you know, I don't know why, but I just have a hit that I need to say, no, thank you very much, but I'm gonna say no. Okay. Oh, but. But. But why. Why would you be saying, no, this is such a good idea. And you can say, you know, I don't actually know why. I just have a really strong hit that I need to say, no, thank you. I appreciate the offer. It's not going to work for me. Let's try again next week or next month or whatever. Okay.

Yeah.

And when I bring this up in classes, Alexandra, it's just amazing. We could spend the whole rest of the four days of the class talking about the hits that people had and how it came through one of the things that was so funny. You know, my whole story about knowing that this guy was going to try to strangle. He did strangle me. Try to off me. But I was at Esalen this summer, and Catherine Ann Jones, the screenwriter and the writer who did Touched by An angel, told us a story that was amazing. And she said years ago, she had been invited to go have tea with a friend at her apartment in midtown Manhattan, and there was someone she really liked, and she was looking forward to it. And yet, as it got closer, this sense of dread, like this gut sense of. Started to happen. Every time she thought about it, she could not logically figure out why she would be feeling that. So she finally, on the appointed day, she goes to her friend's house for tea. They're seated there by this beautiful window overlooking Central park at this little table. And she's sitting there, and she just starts to feel sicker and sicker. And she thinks, oh, my God, this is terrible. And she says to her friend, I am so sorry. I gotta go home. I don't know what's wrong. I just have to get out of here. And so her friend was polite. I mean, obviously shocked. But Catherine Ann got up, left. She gets a call from the friend a half an hour later, and the friend is really just beside herself. They had been trying to change an air conditioner on the roof of the adjoining building, and it had fallen off and had come through the window of her friend's apartment and crushed the chair that Catherine had been sitting in, having tea 10 minutes after she left. So how would she have known that this was coming? This is not like an intuition about someone here. It was as though she was truly, truly connected into the universe. And the universe was basically saying past and future. This path you're on right now, it's dangerous. Get off of it. There was no drama or trauma.

She.

You know, she just. It just. There was a clear sense of, this is, I. I cannot stay here now. If Catherine Ann were too polite to have left, she wouldn't be here today. Okay, so that's the. That's one of the key pieces. When I. When we talk about that, that's a really big thing. The other flip side of that is when you feel like something is really right and you have no logical reason for why it's right. And people have a lot more of those, you know, like falling in love is kind of like that sometimes, or. And it can be, you know, in Jungian terms, you could say, well, it's some shadow piece. You're not aware of, but there's. But also I think there's a sense of when a path is just right for you. There's a gut level of. It just feels. It's almost like dropping into place. Clunk. Oh, yeah. This is actually where I'm supposed to be. And again, no drama, no trauma, no grandiosity. It's just. It's right.

Right. And then you feel that in your heart. You feel that in your body. It's like a full body heart.

Yes. Yeah. And it's your heart, it's your gut. It's just a yes. This is right. This is right. Yeah. Now let's take this. Let's take this a little farther, though. Let's take somebody who's constantly falling in love and having their heart be broken. Okay. When I talk to somebody like that, and I do work with a fair number of young people, so, you know, oftentimes this tends to happen more with young people, although it doesn't matter age wise. You know, they'll say, I just keep having my heart be broken. And I'll say, well, tell me about the last relationship. How did it unfold? Well, I met him and he was so wonderful, and I just. I just had this sense in my heart that he was it. And I was so excited. And I'll slow it down, and then I'll say, okay. And then how did it unfold? And what begins to happen is the person will focus only on what they're feeling in their heart, and they'll start to be distracted by what's happening in my gut. And that person's gut may actually be telling them, you know, he didn't return phone calls. I'm starting to be the only one sort of reaching out. There are some other signs and signals that something isn't quite right that I'm ignoring. And I'm actually not speaking up for myself or my needs. And so I'm getting a little resentful, and so I get a little bitchy. And then all of a sudden, everything's over. And how did that happen? I was so in love. Well, you were only really living compartmentalized in one part of your body. Now there's not like a right or wrong to different parts of the body. It's just that we're not meant to live in just one part of our body. We're not meant to live just in our heads. We're not meant to live just in our hearts. Definitely not meant to live just in our pelvises for our feet and legs. We're meant to have everything talking and communicating to everything else. That's the full body presence piece of it, because they all balance and give different information to your awareness so that you make wise decisions.

Right?

Yeah.

And you talked about it in your book, too, because you're just saying that all of it integrated, but that there's sometimes a disconnect between the upper body and the lower body. Can you talk a little bit about that? And what do we do about it? How do we know if we're disconnected?

Well, you know, there's a sense of not knowing what it is you want in the sense of, okay, I know what I think I want. I know what I'm inspired to do, but I don't actually know how to follow through and bring my inspirations into action. That's usually when the pelvis and the heart are disconnected. The pelvis is like the engine of our body, the root chakra in the Vedic tradition. That's our engine. And when that's disconnected from the heart, you have lots of heart inspiration, and then it just kind of peters out. But if you have your pelvis and your heart connected, then that Ra Qi has a governor, and the governor is the heart and the mind, and you actually have the energy to follow through on things and to. Whatever you came here to do starts to get followed through on a lot more. So how would you know? You know by what you're not able to follow through on. You might know because you want. You say you want something, but it just never happens because you're not actually standing up for yourself. See, that would be feet and legs. You're not actually standing up for yourself and saying, no, you know, I don't. Oftentimes you get really confused by what everyone else wants, and so you get paralyzed with other people's needs or you get really worried that you're going to hurt someone's feelings or that you have hurt someone's feelings, and therefore, I'm a bad person. And. Okay, oh, wait a minute.

Wait.

I just. Oh, you know, I got to stop. I can't go forward. So that's often a sense of confusion in the whole body and in the messages that you can get from your whole body.

Fascinating. Okay, so I'm curious now on this pelvis, the engine, because that seems like a lot of. I mean, sometimes people have issues with inspiration, but it seems like there's. There's some mojo happening in the pelvis. And then also, that's where our sensuality, our sexuality, personal power.

Right.

Pleasure.

Right.

Talk to us about that.

Well, again, I'll say the pelvis is really, really important. And I think there's more and more research on how important the pelvis is and to our reproductive systems for women and our capacity to really be open and alive and feel pleasure there. It's a huge piece for women and men and to feel it in a way that has integrity so that our lives work better. I think that it's something culturally that's just starting to push through. But pelvic energy, when it's really compressed, where it's strong, but it's compartmentalized, is like. It's not connected to my heart or my brain. That's where people. You know, that's a traditional. I mean, I'm going to generalize here. That's a single spar.

Right? You know, it's like leading the way.

The pelvis leading the way. And not with a whole lot of wisdom. Usually you can do some really stupid things under those kind of circumstances, so. Or, you know, in a really dark way, you take someone like Hitler, he was very convoluted, compressed, twisted energy field, where his fear and his compression and the compartmentalization enabled him to do things that were horrendous to entire races of people. Okay? And, yeah, so the pelvis is a very, very, very important part of the body. In our culture, most men are given permission to have their pelvises in a particular way, particularly their power. Women, not so much, even younger women. I noticed that my generation has. It's really from my generation, women in their 50s and on down, that we have more permission in the culture to have our power. Women in my mother's generation, that's a whole. She has to be polite. It's got to be kind. If it isn't, then she can't do it. So that's. See, right there. You've tamped down the root chakra. Also, there was a very clear mandate about how much pleasure you were allowed to have. You know, you were really standing outside of the norm if you had. If you were very sensual and alive. You know, one of my people, that's one of my favorite people that has taught me a tremendous amount about my own sensuality, my own sexuality, is Emily Conrad and Susan Harper. Both of them are marvelous women with the whole Continuum piece. They are the founders, actually. Emily Conrad is the founder and developer of Continuum, and Susan has created Continuum Montage, and both of them have done a tremendous amount about movement and breath and sound and sensuality and fluidity and how that feeds our creative juices and they're both incredible women, so that. But that's. They really stand outside the norm. When I was looking around, I mean, I was raised on the front pew of a Southern Baptist church.

Right.

So my dad was a minister and I thought he was next to God when I was growing up. But one of the hallmarks of Baptist is that they don't live from here down. Yeah. You know, it all cuts off at the belt buckle. Okay. It just doesn't. They don't. They sing their hearts out. There ain't a whole lot below the waist. So I really. When I. When I graduated from high school and went off to college, I was like, I have to figure out what's, you know, what's happening here. I mean, I have been athletic as a child and I, you know, all that kind of thing. So it wasn't like I didn't feel anything below the waist. It just was definitely culturally verboten. It was not okay. And so I had a lot of exploration to do. Now I was, you know, I happened to be in the generation that. For whom that was an easy exploration, but almost too much so because it was being in your pelvis and exploring all kinds of things disconnected from the rest of yourself. So I think, you know, a lot of people in those years did crazy and stupid things in the name of figuring out who we were. But we need to have permission to start to explore and know who we are and in a way that has integrity. And again, that comes back to my third principle of integrating all the different parts of yourself. Because when you do that, you won't do things that harm other people, that stand in, you know, that are destructive. And it's an integrating. And it has its own internal morality, if you will, not outside rules. But if I have an urge to do something and I feel it in my pelvis, like just a real drive to do it, and I connect it to my solar plexus about what my world is about and will this fit this drive? And I feel in my heart, is it in alignment with what I'm really deeply inspired to do and do I have the courage to speak about it? And when I think about, strategically, what this would look like, if everything's having a conversation with everything else, your heart is not going to be deep. Deep heart energy is not going to be inspired to do something that would harm other people if it knows that that's going to happen. Okay. So that there's an integrity there that I think is innate to the human system. When people are integrated from the bottoms of their feet to the top of their heads.

I love that too. I just visualizing that of, like, what is a desire that we have and really running that through our body, like, you know, feed. And it's like, oh, wow, I've never done that before, but that sounds pretty awesome to be able to not only check in with your pelvis, but your gut and your head and all of it and your throat.

It's.

That's an amazing.

So this is what I actually did an exercise when I was speaking in London in May, where I said, let's take an idea. Let's take a problem that you're thinking of and you don't know the answer to this problem, or let's take something you're deeply inspired to do. You could have either or. Okay. And then if you close your eyes and drop into your body, notice what your heart says about it. You know, like, really, how does your heart feel in this moment? And when you feel that, notice whether it's actually in alignment with your. Your own inner purpose. Is this thing that you want to do or this. This issue that you're worrying and thinking about. How. What do you feel inspired to do about it? Let's take it as a problem. Okay? Let's say you have a problem that you don't know how to solve or you have a decision to make. Let's say you have a health problem and you're coming up on, do I do surgery, do I do chemo, Do I do vitamins and supplements? You know, you're sitting with it and you're thinking, what. What really do I feel inspired to do in terms of what's happening? And then you drop down into your gut and you say to yourself, huh? How does this feel at a gut level? What I just felt inspired to do. And sometimes when you drop inside, your left brain has gotten all the data and you know what you should do, and you know, all the pros and cons you've made the legal pad with, you know, the pluses and minuses, you'll get a surprising answer when you drop into your heart and then you drop into your gut, and it gets really interesting because you'll suddenly feel like whatever it was you were inspired to do. Oh, that's right. That is right. And then I have people, if they. If I can, I say, go take a walk. Get into your feet and legs and walk and don't even think about the issue. And when you come back from that walk, and if they can't walk, if you're just doing A meditation with them. I say, imagine yourself taking a walk and breathing and being out in the woods or being on the beach, wherever, and just breathing and walking and breathing. Walking while holding this problem or issue. And when you come back, allow yourself to drop into your bones, Drop deep into the deepest recesses of who you are. Your spine, your pelvis, your feet, your legs. And let the mud settle, let everything settle. And when you drop in there, where's the clarity about that inspiration, the right or wrongness of it? When you walk with it, what do you see? What do you feel? What do you sense? Then I say, now go to your head. How can you follow through on this? What can your brain do to make a plan for what you just felt? And it's fascinating. It's fascinating. I was speaking and did this meditation with 300 people. And some of the stuff that people came up with was stunning. People came up to me afterwards and said, wow, I've been worried about this. And all of a sudden, as I was doing it, it became very clear I hadn't even thought to do that. When I went to my heart, it popped in. And so it's a really interesting piece that the body does know. Sometimes it takes time. This was just a short exercise. But if you can work with your own system, journaling is sometimes a way to get the body's wisdom out onto paper. Drawing, doing artwork of different kinds, those are ways to get knowing from your body out on front of yourself so you can see it. So there are all these different ways of working with things that are very therapeutic. That honor the body and that gut, knowing the heart's inspiration, that deep sense of clarity about what would be right for you.

Yeah, that's so beautiful. And I love. Because earlier on, you said the partner, that your brain is a partner, not the driving. So that was a beautiful demonstration or, you know, example of how we can use that and then use the power of the brain. But that's not all of it.

Right. And it helps me to stay on track and stay organized. And I couldn't get from point A to point B without my brain. And it's not everything. Yeah. People say, how can you just walk away from that? You know, people that are still caught in the trauma drama of their lives, I just could see so upset. I feel so terrible. And I say, you know what? That really touched my heart, and it didn't feel good to me either. But I also knew it was not mine to deal with, so I did what I could and I left. You know, it was Just I did not get wrapped around it and dive into something that wasn't mine to do.

Yeah, that is fantastic. Yeah, that is good wisdom and I love that too. You know, obviously the. This is your work, but like really checking in with the body and saying, I don't. That's not mine to deal with. That this is how I feel about it. I don't know why. Like, it's literally bringing language to our body and being able to communicate even if we don't know it's happening. Like, it just doesn't feel right in my body.

I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. And you know, if you don't want to have an argument with somebody, you don't even have to tell them it doesn't feel right in your body. You can just say, you know, I just have a sense that this is not right for me right now. Thank you very much. And it doesn't matter whether you're saying an intuitive sense, a gut sense, whatever it is. It's just my senses that this isn't right for me. Thank you anyway. And I'm always trying to be as polite as possible.

Right.

But to really have a boundary and hold it no matter what. No matter what. And I have to say, people, if you think about it and you know, and I write about it in the book a lot, is people who over accommodate. And we as women are often taught to accommodate in our world. We're the relational ones generically. And that I hate to use generalizations because there are many good men in the world today that are also very relational. But we're raised as women, most of us, to be relational, to accommodate to the other person, to literally live outside of ourselves, checking out, am I doing everything for Alexandra that she needs? Am I? Is she happy? Is it all right? Okay, now I can rest back. But what's interesting is when you have grown up accommodating, I call it over accommodating, being an over accommodator. People who have grown up with that as a pattern energetically in their lives actually have a lot of difficulty knowing what they need inside. Very hard, Very hard. And if you take this to a psychological level, people that have grown up with narcissistic parents, very self centered parents, often they enter my trainings not having a clue what feels right for themselves because their whole lives were centered around pleasing that parent. And the parent never really sat with them and said, let's figure out what's right for Johnny or let's figure out what's right for Brian. It was Always a case of trying to please the parent. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that the accommodating and I think, you know, men and women have it, but it's. And we've talked about this a lot in this series as well, is like the people pleasing and you spend. I was just talking to my husband last week about it. I'm like, it's amazing. I've been doing this work for a long time and I'm like, I realize how much I want to control everything. Like, do they like me? Is it okay? Like, am I doing it okay?

Are you okay?

If you're okay, then I can be okay. And it's like, that's exhausting.

That's. It is exhausting. It's exhausting because you're living outside of yourself, checking out how everybody else is doing, being that people pleaser.

That's.

That's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. So, okay.

That is fantastic. I love that. Very cool. Okay, so I'm curious about emotion. How do they play into this? What do we do with emotions when we feel emotions coming up, like the fear, the anxiety, the joy? Because I think we even have resistance around joy. So how do we navigate emotions?

Right, so here's the deal. Emotions are in my definition, they are secondary feelings. So I talk when I'm teaching people about how to feel their insides, their inner landscape, really start to embody and live in the container of your being. I say, let's start with first order feelings. Let's start with emotion. Let's start with sensations that are first order that have no interpretation to them at all. So to go back to my example of having my friend Sarah die, for instance, I actually don't have a friend Sarah who died. But if I did, if I drop inside and I feel that grief in my chest, I have a capacity at that point to say to myself, what's the sensation here? Grief feels wet, it feels heavy and it feels warm. In some cases, it might feel cool. It feels dense. And so then I take those sensations and sit with them. Now, if I spin out into the story of I'm, oh my God, how much I'm going to miss my friend Sarah and how lonely I'm going to be and all the ways in which I'm going to end, that then takes me into the future. I've now left the present moment sensation. I've left it. And that's where people can start to spiral down into a hole that they can't get themselves out of. By the same token, if someone drops inside and there's a whole well of old emotion. We would think of it as like trapped energy. Dr. Upledger of Craniosacral therapy used to call them energy cysts. You know, where things have gotten locked in the body. If you hit a place like that that's full of emotion, it could be grief, it could be anger, it could be shame. Brene Brown has done a great job with us for shame and vulnerability. But any of those are things that the body tends to like, tighten down into little wads and when you run across them, if you can hold, if you can recognize it for what it is, but to feel it and hold it in first order sensation and stay in the present moment, it actually enables you to be with it and eventually to dissipate it. So it's no longer, I call it the driver of your bus of awareness. Because you're much more able to sit with a first order sensation than to sit with a feeling of something that then spins into a story. Am I making sense?

Yeah, totally. Okay, so what just popped up is if you have a story or feel. Or feel fear or anxiety of being inadequate.

Right?

Or something like. Right. You can feel those sensations, sitting with the sensations. Don't go into all the stories about why you're inadequate and why you're a loser.

That's right. That's right. Now this, by the way, is not an easy thing to do. Yeah, I know.

I'm thinking about that.

And that's why. That's why I actually have those three explorations that go with my book. You know, I have the grounding and filling, opening awareness. How am I doing? Then I have the grounding and filling. You fill up the container of your being. And then I have a whole exploration that's got three segments. It's exploration three that walks people through how to hold the parts of themselves that feel really crappy, scary, shameful, terrible. It's really interesting and important to know how to hold the things that cause anxiety and fear in us. Because if you don't know how to be with it and hold it and recognize it, it does drive your bus. It will ruin your awareness. It will run it either from behind the scenes or from right out front. You know, it will definitely ruin your life if that's all you can really concentrate on.

Right.

Do you know what I say?

Yeah, definitely.

So by recognizing it, holding it, being with it, and being able to manage it and be with it in a way that's loving and kind, that is what helps us to heal those things. That's where the healing comes in. Actually, I have a quote from my book about the energy that I work with. Can I read it to you?

Absolutely.

Okay, let me get my. I gotta find my glasses. Where did they go? Here they are. It has to do with this, really. It's one of my very favorite quotes. It says the energy that truly allows the alchemy of deep transformation to occur is love. Love in the sense of agape, the ancient, all encompassing, unconditional love of God, Goddess, Christ, Buddha, Great Spirit, or any other name given to the compassionate source of life. Agape brings us into a deep connection with the universe. Again, allow yourself to deeply feel this love in your body. Not simply to imagine it or to visualize it, although it may have visual components. The energy of love ignites the alchemy of true healing, transforming tight, painful, wounded places into connected, healed components of who we are. When this alchemy is complete, out of our deepest wounds can come our greatest gifts. And that. That for me, really says it all. Because people that are in the present moment with the sensations they feel in their body, who have consistently come home, learned how to come home to themselves, to feel who they are and to really stay present, to know how to sit with the times where there's anxiety and to hold their own anxiety or fear or shame or whatever it is until it resolves and becomes a working part of themselves again. Those are people that can make it through stressful times. Those are people who have resilience. Those are people that then have energy left over to be creative. Those are people that have energy left over to be juicy and full and. And enjoy life. So all the capacity to hold the shame of sensuality, for instance, until you're not ashamed anymore. The capacity to hold anxiety about creating something and being seen and being big, that you have to be able to hold that in order to do what you came here to do. If you're someone that's supposed to do something big in the world, all these things, we need the capacity to hold the parts of ourselves that we feel locked out of for whatever reason. And this process really gives that back to people, and it gives us the capacity to have our full body presence again.

That's amazing too, because I love the. Hold the emotions and I love what you said, the first order sensations, because sometimes when we do get in those emotions, I love that just going back to, okay, I don't need to get in the story or the emotions. I just get back into my body and what's happening in my body and is that where like the healing agape, the love can start to pour through.

And to hold it. And here's the other deal. You might still cry your eyes out at the loss of your friend.

And.

You'Ll probably have a big wave of it and it leaves. And you haven't wound yourself down into a hole. So it's not that you don't feel your emotions, it's that you're not locked into them in a pattern that doesn't allow you to release them and go on and do what you need in your life.

Right.

Yeah.

I have a question.

Yeah.

Because this is, this is like a personal question.

I.

What happens when you get. Because I can get into a lockdown with my husband. Like, I just have triggers and I literally lock down, right. And I can't even, like, see, I can't even, like, I just. It's like a shutdown. So what do we do when we're in like a shutdown?

Okay. So first thing you have to recognize is that when you shut down, that's a red flag that you're triggered. Okay. So. And by the way, if you're in that kind of discussion with your mate and you feel really charged, and particularly if you feel like you're right and you know that you're right, that's always a sign that I have to stop and back up. And what I do is I'll call a timeout. And we do this all the time, by the way. And every, every long term relationship has some level of this large or small. Okay? So it's not, it's not that you have problems or I have problems that nobody else has. Not true. However, the issue is then I have to be willing to go in and listen inside myself and say, hmm, can I be open to the possibility that how I'm seeing this isn't real? And usually, I mean, usually your mind will go, but of course it's real. He did this and this and this and he said, and all the stories start to build up and then you rest back and you go, that could be true in the past, but what of how I'm seeing this piece about how he has to do it this way. Way, because it's dangerous if he doesn't or, you know, whatever it is. How about if I could see it in a different way? If I could just be open to the possibility that I'm seeing it in the wrong way, that what I'm seeing is not real now most of the time, by the way, when you're really in a charged circumstance with someone else you make them what I call the other. You make them the enemy. So my beloved becomes the enemy. And we might walk around in the house just cold angry at each other for weeks with the enemy. I'm now sleeping with the enemy. You know, it's like. And I can't even see him clearly anymore because I'm sure I'm right. And so I'm really hanging on to that righteousness. That level of righteousness is really a killer for intimacy. So the thing I have to do is I have to come back again and again and sit with and hold the part of myself that is so sure I'm right and so sure he's wrong and so sure I'm being attacked and so sure you know, all those things. I just keep holding them and loving them and bringing that energy of love until my lens widens. And when it widens, I can start to get just a little inkling of his particular point of view. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I might have been wrong. Uh oh, okay. Or the way I'm holding onto it is not helpful. It may not be real. Okay. And that's when I know I have to go back and I have to apologize and say, listen, the relationship is most important. I was trying to control this circumstance because I was afraid of. Blah, blah, blah. I made you into the bad guy. I'm really sorry. How can we sit and talk about this in such a way that I'm not making you wrong, you're not making me wrong. And whatever we're projecting onto each other that we actually own it and take back our projections and just sit face to face until we can find that place of love for each other again so we can resolve what it is. Yeah, yeah. By the way, this can take. I've been married now for over two decades. This can take weeks to get to.

Weeks.

It's not pretty when it takes that long. God, it doesn't take me that long anymore. Yeah, but if you have two really stubborn people who are sure they're right. Oh yeah, yeah. I can tell you got a marriage like that too. So then that's really.

I mean, we're both very strong willed individuals.

Exactly. And I'm. I'm absolutely that way too. And so is my husband. So this is one we work on the time.

That's great too. I love what you said, the projection. Because I've been realizing recently projection has been helping us for sure, just for years. And you know, we're newly parents, so there's a whole nother dynamic in there. But I'M aware of what I'm saying because I'm like, shit, that's about me. Like, it's my.

Right, right, right. That's my.

I really want to put it on you, but it's.

Right. Exactly. And then. And then you have to just really be willing to be humble and honest and own your stuff and drop back inside and. And to hold. Sometimes. Sometimes you feel ashamed. It's like, oh, holy moly, how could I have done that? And that? So then, you know, it's about owning it and being gentle with yourself. You know, I just going, ugh. Okay, okay, I got it. Anybody can make a mistake. Let's start over.

Yeah, I love that. I love the openness, too. But you just as you were talking about the openness and the expansiveness that can happen, and I really love the timeout. That's a great even. I've never done that, but even. Just, like, I just need a timeout. Like, I need to tune into my body. I need to see what's happening.

Right. Why am I feeling so charged right now? I don't know. I don't know what's going on, but I am suddenly so charged, I can't even see you clearly.

Any.

I need to take a timeout. And when you go to a really good couples therapist, and the good news is there are lots of really good couples therapy systems around today that just have really come in the last 30 years. And when you find a really good system, there are all kinds of tools they have that do basically what I just said. I'm telling you the energy underpinnings. But these systems teach people, step by step, sentence by sentence stem, how to get back in contact with each other again when these things happen.

Fantastic. Okay, so is this like, when that happens? Because you write about this as well? Disrupted energy?

Yeah, just. You have a disrupted energy presence, disrupted body presence. Right. When you're stuck and feeling charged, your bus is being driven by the charged part of you. You're no longer being guided by your full body presence. Now, disrupted body presence can come from any number of things. It can come from feeling charged about something. It can come from illness. It can come from depletion. It can. I mean, you're a new mom. The depletion of being a new parent makes it doubly hard to really show up for your spouse or for him to show up for you. So you got to be gentle with each other. That's really an important thing. So there are many, many different things that can cause disrupted energy presence, and by the way that's a condition that we're all walking around with all the time, to some degree, just because of life and what it gives us.

Okay, so then the disrupted energy and how does that impact with. Because you write about this too. The noise and the distraction and all that's happening at a fast pace in our modern world. So how do you. How do we navigate that? Like staying connected in a world that's going so fast and so noisy and so stimulating?

Yeah. You know, I think when you start living from inside your body, when you take the time to make a practice of grounding and filling, as you start your day, you're dropping in, you're learning to do it. Whether you learn on my 10 minute or my 20 minute or the 5 minute one, whichever one you take as your practice. When you start living from inside your body, you're getting signals about what stimulation around you to turn off and what to leave on and what really nurtures you and what you need to listen to and what you don't. So you don't let yourself get overstimulated. Because, I mean, if you, if you kept the news on all the time, you wouldn't sleep at night. Right. So most people have enough. But look at email, look at iPhones, look at texting, all the stuff to have the capacity to go, I'm not checking my email every time it pains. I don't care who just emailed me. I'm in the middle of doing something that really brings me joy. I'll get to it later. So there's a quality of having it gives you healthy boundaries. When you live inside your body, you know when to pay attention to the outside world and when to let it go right on by the other pieces you start to learn. When do I slow down and take extended time to rejuvenate? I spent seven weeks at Esalen Institute this summer. Wow. Loved, loved, loved, loved it. Because I was being housed and fed and had all the, you know, the ions from the ocean and all that stuff. And when I came home, I was so rejuvenated, even though I'd been teaching the whole time I was there. And I had a pretty full schedule. But when I'm there, I take time. I take extended periods of time, and I do this at home, too, to just down and take care of myself, whether it means just lying on the bed, staring at the wall, or meditating or taking a long walk or eating a really good meal with somebody I love to just sit and chat with and talk with is really important. Really Important to pay attention to what nourishes me, because then that keeps me in touch with my own rhythm of my full body presence. In other words, how am I doing in my world? Am I on track? Have I gotten off track by trying to take care of everybody else's needs? Return to the center so that you're connected to your resources, you're connected to the source of what nourishes you most.

Returning to yourself. And I know you're talking about that earlier. Returning home to ourselves. And it feels like it's. It's a constant dance in our modern world. It is like, okay, where am I? What's happening? What do I need? And then also I love. As you were saying that for me, I was thinking, okay, and get rid of the story. Because sometimes I'm like, I feel tired or I need this. I feel like my body needs this, and I need to not be on email for three months or whatever it is. But then I start making stories. And I know all of us, especially women, like, I shouldn't want to do that. You know, I should do this, I should do that. And there's bills to pay and things to do that.

Right.

I shouldn't take a nap.

Right. And that's. And that is really one of the hardest things I. The work that I do, I love. I mean, love, love, love, love. I thank God I have found at, you know, in my early 30s something, or early late 20s, something that really made my soul sing. Love what I do. I love craniosacral therapy. I love hearing healing, the healing from the core work and teaching it to all different populations of people. I adore it. And if I work too much, I dry up. I mean, there's a quality of. You cannot. You need balance. You need spaces, you need rest times, you need practices where you are not working where you can just. Okay, I'm gonna just walk in that thing.

Yeah.

I'm gonna lie here and take a nap and rest. I'm gonna relax back in this chair and not think about getting up for an hour. You know, whatever it is, you're taking care of yourself and resting back and letting everything expand, letting yourself get more space between your molecules again so that you can rejuvenate. And as much as you work and the intensity of rework, you need to balance it with things that have to do with the opposite of.

Of that.

So if you have to spend highly focused time, you need to figure out a way to spend unfocused time for your brain to reboot. Yeah, yeah.

That's so awesome. I love that. Just coming home to coming back to the body too. Because I think in our culture there's. It's also celebrated being in the mind and, you know, always thinking and whatever. And it's like I always feel like my head's gonna pop when I know I'm like, okay, that too much time in the head. It's time to come back to the body.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Fantastic. Okay, well, I. This is fantastic. There's so much incredible information and I could talk to you for days. So we will wrap up, but can you share where we find out more about you and your work and your book and your workshops?

Well, most bookstores may carry full body presents, but the online booksellers are the sure deal. I'm sure you can get it at barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com full body presence. Learning to listen to your body's wisdom, you know, by Suzanne Scurlag Dorana and our website that talks about all the classes that we teach from two day weekend workshops to seven day workshops of all different kinds that have to do with embodying and healing and being more present and more juicy and full of life and learning how to really hold space for other people in a way that energizes you. All of that class information and all our products are on our website, which is www.healingfromthecore c o r e.com healingfromthecore.com Wonderful. Yeah.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your research and your work for the last 25 years and bringing us such great inspiration today.

Well, thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Mama Goddess. Sending you lots of love and blessings. If you'd like to connect more, go to mamagoddess. Com. Until next time. Keep rocking it and have an awesome.