Elevate Consciousness to Confront and Heal From Trauma with Yemi Penn

Creating your own reality. Is it possible for me? I am Jennifer K. Hill, the Consciousness Architect, and I am here to tell you that it's not only possible, it's closer than you might think. Welcome to the show. Hello, friends. Happy New Year. Hope everybody had a wonderful holiday season. I am Jennifer K. Hill, CEO of OptiMatch, and it is a pleasure to have you back here. For another show of Regarding Consciousness. Today we have a special guest joining us from Australia, Yemi Penn. Yemi is an author, documentary producer, speaker, engineer, and all-around fearless thought leader on creating your own memo. Yemi's work is tirelessly to raise the vibration of acknowledging and healing our individual And therefore of our collective trauma. Yemi instigates all of us to use our trauma as a catalyst for transformation instead of transference. Yemi, I'm so excited to learn today a little bit about how we can all elevate our consciousness and elevate our trauma. Thank you so much for being here.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. And you just reading those words has things going through my body. So excited to see what we co-create here.

Me too. Me too. Thank you so much for joining us today. And I'd love to dive in. We haven't done— maybe years ago we might have done something on trauma, but it is such a hot topic, especially right now with the state of the world in some way or another, whether it's prior trauma we've experienced or the trauma of the sadness of the wars we're seeing waged around the world.

Yeah.

Can you talk to us about this? How did trauma become your passion and helping people to transform it?

I gave a talk literally about 48 hours ago, and I was speaking to a bunch of professionals, and I explained that I'm an engineer by profession and now doing research in trauma. And someone asked the question quite abrasive and harshly, why would anyone go from engineering to trauma? Are you traumatized? And even though there could have been a more sensitive way to put it, I get where it was coming from. But I've experienced trauma. Statistics say globally before 2020 that 67% of adults would've experienced at least one traumatic event. And if I take away the loading of the word trauma, it could be any distressing or disturbing event, and it varies on people differently. So without a shadow of a doubt, I've experienced one particular event that kind of had me get curious about how this had played out in my life and then started to see people acting out from their own trauma wounds without labeling them or trying to pathologize them. And I just got very curious, even though as an engineer I was working on these major projects. You could just see a lot of transference of trauma, and I just wanted to know more because I— and I truly believe all of us, maybe majority— are in the business of people. Whether you work in finance, whether you work in medicine, It's still people that we are effectively trying to serve. Even if you work in AI, it's people. You're trying to get people to use the service. And that's what brought me into trauma. And I know that it's a hot topic, and maybe we can touch on that because I think we might have a tendency to overlook it because of how much the term is being used at this moment in time.

So let's backtrack for a moment. What do you define as trauma?

I have to probably take that simple one, a distressing or disturbing event that overwhelms your ability to cope. And that could require even further, meaning that it differs. We have a lot of people in the field who talk about the window of tolerance, and I try to talk about it from a lived experience perspective as opposed to pathologizing, because that's what I think more of us have to do. There aren't enough therapists or psychologists in the world to deal with the amount of things we are experiencing. There isn't. Even if you had one-to-one, that's not even one-to- 100,000, million, still wouldn't get there. So it's talking about the window of tolerance, which is that all of us have an ability to tolerate some things. Trauma is when it takes you completely outside of your window of tolerance. For some people, it could physically be shaking, as we see in some animals who have just experienced trauma. For others, it could be leaving their body. And people leaving their body can look like domestic violence, can look like substance abuse, can look like food abuse. can look like other addictive personalities, which aren't just in the way that we've been deemed as bad. So that's how I define trauma— something that takes you out of your window of tolerance. And in some cases, people can't get back into their window of tolerance.

I really appreciate what you just shared there, Yemi. And one of the things that came to mind as you were speaking about that was years ago, my co-founder of OptiMatch, Julian, was my business coach many years ago. And he used to do these things called Ponderables, where he would share these beautiful little stories at the beginning of every week. And one of the ponderables about a decade ago was the ponderable about trees and specifically in the biosphere. I guess it was in the early 1990s. They had one of the first biospheres that was built in Arizona, and they ran a test that was really fascinating where they were trying to see, could we sustain life on another planet if we had to? And so they had amazing results and the trees were growing faster than ever before. They were growing vegetation. Yet something happened, Yemi, when the trees hit maturity. Do you wanna know what happened?

Tell me.

They fell over. What is the one thing that they didn't consider in this perfect atmosphere and biosphere was they didn't take into account wind, which is trauma. Now, a certain amount of trauma or stress is what they wound up calling it, which is eustress, is a healthy form of stress, which made me think of what you're talking about. A lot of us might go through friction from a boss or a sibling, but it might not necessarily be trauma. And what is discovered is when you give trees wind, which was absent in this biosphere, it causes them to become resilient. They need to

put down roots.

They need to create this— I think it might even be called stress bark— that allows the trees to bend in the wind. And I think so many of us Have failed to develop that resilience, those strong roots, that strong bark, so that when the winds of challenge and trauma do overwhelm us, that we're able to still bend and then come back to our center. And what I, I don't know why I just like—

Oh, I just, I know that's what we call using your consciousness. That's a download. I've never heard of that study or just what I need to know more because that is exactly it. And that's where my curiosity is. Are we trying to actually eliminate something that is actually just part of life? However, I do think humans can create this over, but there are some cultures similar to the story that you just told that talks about childbirth as traumatic.

Mm.

Yet it's this beautiful form of life that we celebrate. I actually think there needs to be a redefinition of it and maybe different classification on it. I don't know, but That's part of what my PhD is, is actually how can we delink ourselves from a dominant narrative? I love that study you just shared, and I cannot wait to Google the hell out of it once we get off here.

Yeah, just remind me, I can ask Julian the original source because it's so true that yes, there are going to be storms in life. There are going to be winds. Sometimes there are going to be hurricanes that might feel like they're breaking us in half, i.e., COVID in 2020 that none of us could have foreseen. So the question then that is coming to mind, Yemi, and all of our listeners and our viewers that I'm hearing from the collective is what the heck do we do about it? Because these storms of experiences, people, so many of the conversations I'm in every day are people feel like they're not going to survive it. They feel like it's just too, it's not just that lovely breezy beachy wind sort of a day. It is that hurricane that feels like it's about to level your house. Yeah. So how do we address that? Because it is a real life issue.

I've been doing a bit of work with Linda Tai and Resmaa Manakim, and collectively, even though it's different across both of them, the one thing that is consistent is embodiment. So one thing we need to do is reconnect with our bodies. Even today, had a difficult conversation with a school about some issues that are happening that probably will induce trauma in some of the children. And you could see the woman I was speaking to almost wanting to leave her body.

Mm.

She was looking all over the room, fiddling with her hands, her breath started to change. It's to actually maybe to just be aware of our bodies. Like, people, it sounds simple, but honestly, it's the first step. What you're doing is you're no longer becoming disembodied. You're becoming embodied. Somatically, you're checking yourself. So the next minute you find yourself having these conversations or reading material about what's going on in the world or your world, just check in with yourself and just remind yourself, I'm here. There's the EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique, or tapping. I do that when I find myself getting into some sort of erratic response to something. And erratic, I don't say that in any derogatory term, but it's actually just telling myself that I'm back in my body. Honestly, as a whole, we need to come back to being embodied. Because what happens is we sometimes, especially if it doesn't happen to us, if we see anything happening in the world, we just push it aside and we put our head in the sand. And let's give ourselves grace. That's the other thing. Let's give ourselves grace that we've maybe never been given the tools. It's never been a priority in the systems in which we've been part of, but this is part of the new learning we're having. Give yourselves grace that you may not have had the tools, but when you see the pace and the consistency in which we are experiencing trauma in the world, the invitation is for us to start owning it and coming back into our body. And then at some point we can start to use our voice because as Bessel van der Kolk says, the body keeps the score. There's wisdom in it.

I like to always just feel into people's responses as you're sharing that. And there is a visceral, yeah, but,

but,

but what is she even talking about? I know many of you listening, you've heard the shows with Deepak Chopra and many other wonderful thought leaders we've had. So many of you might be familiar with things like quantum physics or other things, but what Yemi's talking about is more of experiential as well as physiological. So what Would that look like? Let's say that I'm in the middle of an upset right now. My boss just screamed at me. I just, for lack of a better word, am out of my body. I'm just not even there cuz it's so painful. How do I quote unquote get back in my body and how does it not, not damage me because the pain is so bad, which is why so many of us leave the body to begin with.

Yeah. Observe, become an observer, especially if your listeners, you've all heard different concepts. Another one I can give is the fact that— who was the other one that said this? Michael Singer— that we are not our thoughts. I still give the side eye to that. What do you mean I'm not my thoughts? It's— I'm the one thinking it. But I've now gotten comfortable with I am the observer of my thoughts. So when you have that experience with your boss, something happens, just observe yourself and see what's happening. See if you can just even make it like a game. I'm just going to see what am I doing here? That's the first thing. The second thing, and part of the reason why I say get back into your body, but if you can't do that step yet, is ask yourself, Am I safe? Now I'm talking physically safe to begin with, because the mind and even the body sometimes— I have a rotator cuff injury. If somebody says something to me that upsets me, it starts to hurt because it's the weakest part of my body. And so therefore, all those stress hormones, whatever, goes through. So I don't need to be a scientist or a physicist. My body's telling me. That's the wisdom we've got to get to so we're not waiting for somebody to tell us, oh, it's XYZ. Let your body tell you that. So if you have any injuries, your Your body will probably tell you. The weakest part will come up and tell you. And what that would do is let you know, okay, something's up. What you can do is then come out and observe. Are you safe? Is anyone coming to get you? I know we make jokes about lions not coming to get you, but for most of us, it's the same fear as a lion. Am I going to lose my job? Am I going to be shamed? Am I going to be embarrassed? And we want to validate that, but come back and say, am I safe in this moment? And the minute you feel— another thing, That we tell people to do is to just look around your exit points. Just make sure you can see the door, you can see the window, that you're not having this feeling of being trapped. When you can do those things, be an observer, check that you're safe, that already starts to regulate you. Now, what happens when you come out of your window? Most people confuse that trauma with discomfort, and this is where we build our resilience. Is it discomfort? Or is it trauma? So the invitation is to say, okay, I might be out of my window now. And once we maybe get this form of vocabulary, we can say, okay, is it time for me to come back into my window of tolerance? That language might not work, but just say, is it safe now? But if there's still stuff you're thinking about, that's where you then have the opportunity to do more work, whether it's with a therapist or an alternative practitioner. But just those kind of 3 steps of observer, checking to see you're safe, then having the dialogue as to whether it's discomfort or trauma is what will determine whether you come come back into your window of tolerance. Because complex trauma is stuff that happens continuously. You are unsafe on the premise that it's going to keep on happening, and that's where you probably need to take a few more detailed steps.

It's a brilliant reminder, Yemi. It reminds me of a class I did about probably over a decade ago, maybe 15 years ago, on neuroscience. And what it said is that you look at anything in your life, And you ask yourself, will I survive this? Because our brain, our body has it. Somebody broke up with me. I'm not going to survive this. My child got hurt. I'm not going to survive this. COVID happens. I'm not going to survive this. Now in COVID, there was a chance some people might.

Yeah. Yeah.

A lot of things that are more these hypotheticals. And if we can actually get our brains to flip the switch and go, could I actually, will I actually survive this?

Survive.

Yeah. And that creates A space. And yes, space, you can begin to get curious and just wonder, I wonder how else might I respond to this? Now I will say, because I can hear what you're thinking out there, I like to tap into this. What I hear you thinking is, yeah, but when I'm like that upset, we've all been there, right? We have. We've all been angry, mad, frustrated, raged, whatever it is. One of my other favorite techniques that I love to share with people is just the breathing. Mm-hmm. So number one, step one, what Yemi is saying is to pay attention to the fact that, okay, could I just observe what I'm feeling? Now, sometimes even before you get to that, just teaching yourself any breathing technique. You've heard me share before on the show about HeartMath. I love HeartMath. I use it all the time because you can do it open-eyed. They teach it to the Navy SEALs, to police officers. You can just drop in real time while you're pissed, upset, fighting with your kids, your boss, your whomever. And if you can, if you have the wherewithal and consciousness, like Yemi said, to begin to breathe a little slower and a little deeper in and out of the center of your heart, and even imagine breathing in calm. For me, if I notice I'm getting activated, I'll drop into my heart space and start to breathe in calm, count of 5, and out to the count of 5. And if that seems like too much for you, you could also do simple box breathing. Breathe in to 4. Mm-hmm. Hold for 4, out to 4, hold for another 4. And that stimulates the vagus nerve, which when— what Yemi is sharing about is we actually lose access completely. This is funny. We lose access to our prefrontal cortex. So our prefrontal cortex is the thing, the part of our brain that allows our executive functioning to be able to tell us what to do next in a situation. Mm-hmm. Yet it's our amygdala, which is our lizard brain that takes over in these moments. So the question that will determine how resilient we can be as human beings in the face of trauma, either now or in the future, is our ability to shift, as Yemi said, to pull ourselves out and become the observer, then be able to look at it from a different perspective. Am I going to survive this? And using any of these sort of breathing techniques, box breathing, vagal nerve breathing, heart-focused breathing from HeartMath, all of these things will literally physiologically calm your nervous system to help you make better choices, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Beautifully summarized. And yeah, and if you can get to that place of tapping, I know that tapping for me is, is brilliant. It's almost a, okay, you're still here, you're still in your body. So I know it's got other reasons, but for me, it allows me to do that. But yeah, beautifully summarized. Thank you, Jennifer.

Yeah. And for people who don't know EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique, I know many of you are probably listening on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you're listening, that we do also have the episodes on YouTube. So you can go to @JenniferKHill and subscribe or find the video there on YouTube. Yemi, do you just want to show us really quick and verbally explain what you're doing in case somebody's feeling stressed right now and might want to try it?

Yeah. So once again, I have this habit of using liminal thinking. I like to give alternative perspectives. So I try not to use the pathologized wording, which is all fine. I actually see EFT, Emotional Freedom Tapping or technique, As a non-invasive form of, say, acupuncture. So what we have grown to learn about acupuncture, and there's certain parts on your body that you tap that kind of regulates you, and you usually say certain words. And obviously I won't put this through now because if you go on to where Jennifer's told you to listen, you'd learn a lot more. But I just typically start by tapping just on the side of my palm. I don't know if people can see this on the video, but you take— I've got my left palm here and I'm just tapping just on the side with my other hand. And then after that, while I'm speaking words, so firstly I start to speak out what I'm stressed about. So I'm stressed at the moment that I'm doing this podcast and I'm having imposter syndrome because what if people think I don't know what I'm talking about? I speak it out. When I do this as well as tapping, it actually releases, it releases the only way I can think about it. This is my download, the monkey on my back. I take away the power that it has. And then there are other points. At some point I can start tapping on the top of my head and still acknowledging things I need to. And then At some point, as I continue to tap on other parts, I believe there's underneath the nose, on top of the eyebrow, I start to say the things that I know I am. I've done this before. I know who I am. I am a wise being and I have done the work. And I start to fill in the void that this other belief that had caused stress comes in. I find it amazing in difficult situations to at least regulate me and bring me back into a window of tolerance That I can manage.

So beautiful. And for those of you who are listening to Yemi right now, or maybe watching on YouTube, another thing you could do— let's say you're on a Zoom call and Yemi was saying how you can tap. You can also do like karate chops on the side. Yeah, you could be doing that below the Zoom line. I used to coach a lot of job seekers for many years. I ran a legal recruiting firm and had a podcast on it. And people— this is long before— sometimes people would still do Zoom interviews back in the day, but nowadays it's very common. So if you're feeling activated or nervous, or you have an important call with your boss, nobody has to be the wiser. You could be doing this right below the camera line. Or another wonderful technique that I used or learned in the last year that's been life-changing is a super learning technique where you cross one hand over the other. And again, you'd have to go on YouTube to see this. Clasp your hands together and then pull them towards you. And again, you can drop it below the Zoom line. Mm-hmm. And cross one ankle over the other, and it immediately calms the nervous system. And as somebody who— I personally went through this. I used to have such bad anxiety that I would try to go to a concert or to an event with a lot of people, and I would be incapacitated because I would start hyperventilating from a panic attack, or at airports. Yeah. So all of these things, if you're listening to Yemi or myself right now and you're feeling like I'm not going to survive this. What they don't know what I'm going through. I will tell you, I've personally been through it all. And Gemmi, I'm sure you've been through your share of—

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, absolutely. There was one thing you said, I never thought that I could have panic attacks until one day I started to struggle to breathe. And I went to my friend and said, hey, do adults get asthma? And she laughed at me. But I had a belief that I could manage and do anything and my body wouldn't betray me. But what I found out that the psychologist said is that it just, it was my body almost forgot to expel carbon dioxide. And it's fascinating, the knowing helps. And so things like you've just mentioned, those somatic, those body kind of practices we can do allows us to regulate back in the time. And this is stuff I teach my kids, so definitely have experienced similar things.

Yeah. And the other thing too is if you've ever noticed your body, I remember I was in a class over a decade ago that was really brilliant. And they started talking about our body physiologically goes into the same like position when we get stressed. We're gonna clench our fists. Some of us cross our arms, some of us shrink down lower. And one of the things that we can do if we bring our conscious awareness, as my friend Arthur would say, if we bring our conscious awareness to it, is do anything differently that our body You wouldn't normally do. I used to teach this to job seekers as well. You could touch 2 fingertips together. You could touch your wrists together. You could do this all below the camera line, or even if you're out and about in public, even just doing something with your hands or with your body physiologically. Then by doing that, you've now opened up the possibility of having access to new ways of thinking, being, speaking, and acting, because we normally get stuck in the same physical response. Yeah. Which is tied into structurally what our body is doing.

Yeah, I love that. Doing something different. Somebody else also told me, because I'm right-handed, so to write with my left hand. So I just write a few sentences because I'm a nervous flyer. And so that's what I do as well. So I love some of these extra things you're giving me that would definitely reset my brain.

I love that, Yemi. Tell our listeners, are there any other tips or something I didn't get to ask you that you would love to share today that you feel would support everyone with whatever trauma might be coming up now or in the future?

I mean, this— when I think of the guests you've had and the work you do, my invitation to people, because sometimes you don't know what you don't know, and I'm also really cautious of not going looking for things that you don't need to know. But for those who want to work through things, is if cycles or patterns come up, just get curious. Get curious. Obviously, make sure you have the space or or the friendship or the support as you get curious in case you find anything, because it's extremely difficult to say goodbye to things we won't even say hello to. And I think that's part of the collective healing we can do for the world is by looking at our own. But outside of that, I, yeah, I love the questions you've asked and yeah, what we've co-created.

I love it. Yemi, thank you so much, my friend. Where can people find out more about this incredible work? Did you do a TED Talk as well? I believe.

I did. I did do a TED Talk. So that will be, if you just put my name into YouTube, the TED Talk would be there or on the TED Talk platform, but Instagram is where you find me being my most raw and vulnerable self. I'm also on LinkedIn. I try to keep it a little bit more above the line there, but I'm still myself. So yeah, you can definitely connect with people there where I give the updates on my PhD and my research, but we'll also be doing more of that later on in 2024, this year.

Amazing. Thank you so much. We've had today joining us from Australia, Yemi Penn, P-E-N-N. And we'll of course have the information in the show notes of where you can connect with her. And I invite every one of us as we go into this new year to come from a place of playful curiosity and resilience so that the next time something happens to you, get curious and ask, how might this be for you? I wasn't planning to share this, but I'm going to leave you with one little story I was sharing with a friend yesterday. I was at an event here in Lisbon a couple of months ago and I was, I'm a female founder and I was very excited. There was a woman who was a fan of female founders and invested in them and she was speaking on a panel. So I'm at this event and she's speaking on the panel and I know the guy who's throwing the event, over 200 probably people there. And I say to the, at the end, I'm given an opportunity to ask a question and my friend who's running it says, Jen, keep it really quick. We're trying to get on so people can drink and have fun. So I was like, okay, I'll ask a very brief question. And at the end I say to the woman, I said, I really respect what you're doing to support female entrepreneurs. You know, thank you so much for what you're doing. And what is your advice to a female entrepreneur like me so we can get from being only 2%, only 2% of, you know, companies funded are female-led companies. How can we get that number higher? And she looks at me, Yemi, and she says, that's too generic of question next and pass. Now, what's beautiful about that— talk about resilience. I wasn't planning to share this. In that moment, oh man, I was triggered. I was like—

I bet.

I was just like, I felt like I was hit by a bus and everybody's looking at me like, what are you gonna do? So I collected myself, I stepped aside, and I just went to compose myself so I could talk to her about it afterwards. But what was beautiful in that moment, Yemi, is I was able to Actually go back to the moment when I had done something similar to someone else. And I was just—

Wow.

The pain that probably— I tell many people I'm a recovering jerk. I could be with, wow, I've caused somebody else and I needed to experience it so I could have empathy for anybody I had ever done this for. So I ask next time something happens to you or something feels insurmountable, get curious, play with it. Ask, what is the lesson and how is this here to serve me? And get— use exactly what Yemi said. Drop into observation and allow your roots to grow deep and your branches to go out wide to be able to receive whatever the message is for you and to be able to be resilient in the face of whatever storms life may throw at you. So thank you, Yemi. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.