In this interview, Anat Peri shares a candid, 19‑year personal and professional journey through healing, somatics, and trauma work. She recounts early exposure to psychology, a decade of trial‑and‑error blending mindset and NLP, and the realization that those tools alone were insufficient. A pivotal low point in 2012—depression, debt, a broken relationship, and a spontaneous move from New York to California with only $2,000—forced her to surrender to the unknown. Embracing surrender, she stopped over‑planning, listened to teachings like Marianne Williamson’s on miracles, and committed to a 100‑day “dating myself” experiment to cultivate self‑love. Within weeks she secured a role at the Chopra Center, deepened yoga and meditation practice, and encountered plant medicine (ayahuasca), which opened her first embodied experience of feeling in her body. Repeated ceremonies revealed that while emotions were released, underlying subconscious scripts—rooted in childhood wounds and beliefs about invisibility and people‑pleasing—remained unchanged. Anat reflects on how integrating body‑based work, surrender, and conscious self‑relationship finally allowed her to shift those deep patterns, illustrating that letting go is essential for lasting inner transformation.
Chapters
I surrendered to the unknown, surrendered to letting go of a needing to know and needing to always plan and living more in the moment. And in that moment, I was hurting, I was heartbroken, I felt lost, um, I was angry, I was bitter. I had so many things that I needed to process that I wasn't thinking about like, where am I getting a job?
Sennat, thank you for joining today. I'm so excited to dive into all things healing, trauma, somatics, and so much more. How did you get into the space of healing, somatics, trauma? I'm so curious what drew you in.
Yeah, it's been quite a journey. I've been in this field for 19 years. I've had my business for 9 years, and so there's a gap there between the 19 years and the 9 years, and that was 10 years of like trial and error and research. Because, you know, today you can go on Instagram and you can find a million choices and know about all the options, you know. But 19 years ago was before all those, uh, all those moments of recent findings, and a lot of it was just hearing about it through a friend. And then a lot of the work was really mindset and NLP, which is part of the equation, 100%, but not the total equation. So in those 10 years, I was really seeking my own healing. I always loved the world of psychology. I was always the person in high school that my friends came to for advice. I wanted to major in psychology. I didn't want the 8 years of schooling, so I did business and finance instead. And then in my mid-20s, uh, experienced my first transformational workshop and just knew instantly, like, I'm home. Like, I love, I love this. And, uh, at the same time, I was there for my own growth, really my relationship with my mom. We actually did program together and she paid for it. And I said to her, you'll see, I'm right and you're wrong. Like, I remember saying that, being that like rebellious daughter. It took me 10 years because a lot of it was just trimming the weeds. Yeah. And I didn't know that at the time. At the time, I thought I found the Holy Grail. I thought all the awareness, I know it all, and I'm doing great. And, you know, I started, um, training and mentoring, uh, inside of a lot of these programs. And, uh, that was— that fulfilled me so much so that I lost more and more sight of— and not— your life doesn't work.
Oh, wow.
Like, you're like— naturally I was good at coaching and I loved it, and I could immersed myself in being a student of it, uh, and practicing of it. But I was personally— suffered from a lot of anxiety. Always felt like being by myself, like spending time by myself, felt really uncomfortable. Like there was this alone in my chest, and it— and, and I— it was like this black hole that can never be filled. Yeah. And so when I was by myself, I constantly needed to distract. And at the same time, I was living in New York City in the hustle and bustle of all of it. I was in a 5-year relationship that was very codependent, and I needed to be with people all the time. But also being around a lot of people was overwhelming to me. So I was in this constant battle of like, I don't want to be by myself, but I'm also overwhelmed by the amount of energy and people that there are out there. And I had no self-love, very low self-esteem. And again, I say this now, I wasn't so aware of it. I was that disconnected. I was living in this illusion fantasy of myself and in so much survival that I couldn't say to you, if you talked to me then, I wouldn't be by myself. It was just hindsight 20/20 looking at all that and seeing. And then finally in 2012, hitting my rock bottom of feeling depressed, eating a half a pint of ice cream a night. And I don't even have a sweet tooth. Like, for me to want to eat ice cream, uh, and was it good ice cream? I'm sure, yeah, probably had chocolate Ben Jerry's. Back then, probably hogging the couch. Um, so for like the whole summer, that was me. I was falling into that of just feeling so lost in myself. Um, I was hopping into different startups in the finance space and sales in New York and, uh, getting myself in debt mainly, and through self-development. Like, I was still seeking and working on myself But like I said, trimming weeds, not making any progress in it. And then I hit my rock bottom. My relationship came to an end and I was grateful for it. But at the same time, I was like, this is the only thing that's important to me in New York. And so 2 weeks later, I hopped on a plane with $2,000 to my name, $40,000 in debt, new car, no job lined up. No home and one girlfriend in San Diego who said, come stay with me. And that was 12 years ago, almost. Yeah, yeah, it's almost 12 years ago. October will be 12 years. And it was a very humbling moment, I think, for those of— for me, like growing up on the East Coast, that we have a bit of this attitude, like, if you could make it here, you can make it anywhere. So very much just like, go, go, go, force. And so it humbled me, this experience of like, Clearly, I don't know what's best for me. And so for the first time, it was like, God, take the wheel. Like, I do not know what I'm doing. I surrender.
Yeah. And so what did you surrender into? Like, when, as you are in that surrender process of like, feels like all the external measures of life have fallen apart. In some regards. Then, you know, one of my friends Dan Clark says when you hit rock bottom, you, you actually don't hit rock bottom, you hit rock foundation. So I'm curious what—
I love that you said that because I specifically remember saying to myself, well, you can't fall off the floor, so it's only up from here. Like, it's literally just like you said, it's just like, okay, up from here. I have nothing I had literally got nothing to lose because there's, you know, and the only thing that I have now that I'm proud of is, you know, the living in California where I had wanted to move to for so long. And then of course having like wonderful family support and things like that. Um, I surrendered to the unknown, you know, I surrendered to letting go of a needing to know and needing to always plan. And a little more in the moment. And in that moment, I was hurting. I was heartbroken. I felt lost. I was angry. I was bitter. I had so many things that I needed to process that I wasn't thinking about, like, where am I getting a job? My mother was. My parents were like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm healing. I need time to just and heal and do nothing. And I remember saying to myself, I'm so used to being someone that would take action, that would take initiative, that I didn't know what it was like to let things just come to me. And I remember hearing Marianne Williamson speak. I went to see her in LA. Course in Miracles. And she said, miracles are available to us all the time. The reason we don't experience the miraculous more often is because we're too busy doing. And so I started to say, you know what? I'm not going to do. I'm not going to take action. I'm just going to practice being and allow whatever is meant to be to come to me, to unfold. It was the very beginning of my relationship, I'd say, with the unknown, with the universe, with letting things just unfold for me, with living in that surrender that sometimes felt sweet and sometimes felt scary. Yeah. And it quickly, quickly, like within A month, I found a home and a great coach that started to open me up to seeing where the reason that things went the way they did was just because I didn't love myself. And I never saw how much I didn't love myself or couldn't be with myself. And so then I challenged myself 100 days of dating me, of being with myself and not always reaching for someone else to save me. And I had no clue what I was doing. I did not have the tools I have today, but I challenged myself to just experience that void that I've been sitting with for so long. And then, you know, over the course of the next year, I was led to— well, within a month, I got a job at the Chopra Center and I started learning about yoga and meditation. And then plant medicine found me a few months later. And that began my journey of my first time being in my body. When I did ayahuasca, it was the first time that I could say I actually experienced being in my body. Wow. Yeah.
Tell me about that. What did that feel like? And was this part of where it led you into the body as the pathway through healing? Or anyway, can you tell me more about that? How you experienced being in your body and the self-love maybe that unfolded from that.
Yeah, um, I didn't see how much prior to that I lived in my head. I thought about my feelings, but I didn't know actually how to feel my feelings. Uh, you would see me, like, I would cry a lot. I could definitely cry, but it wasn't a crying, like, feeling sadness. It was more a hopelessness where you where you drown. So to me, that's not feeling feelings, that's been being indulging in it. Um, so it was that experience in ayahuasca of first off tremoring, like I felt like a fish out of water. My whole body is tremoring and releasing all this tension that I've been holding and, uh, just feeling through emotions that I never felt before. Feeling the grief, feeling the anger, feeling the resentment. All these things started to percolate for me as an experience of like, oh, there is more than just this here. And I embarked on, you know, the next 6 months of doing ceremonies every month and thought that that was it as well. And I think because of my background in NLP and mindset work, I had a lot of ability to integrate it outside of the session. But yet I still found myself repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Because what happened is I realized that in those sessions I'm having powerful releases, but I don't actually know my inner landscape. I don't know what it— like, What beliefs are tied to that? I know that I was grieving the fact that my dad didn't spend enough time with me as a little girl and the heartache that I never realized was there around that. But I didn't realize that the beliefs that came from that was you don't matter, you're invisible, men will always be before you, and be okay with that and do whatever you can to please them and win their love. So that became my script. That became how I operated for many, many, many relationships and continued to operate in because I didn't see that part. Even though every session, every ceremony, I was moving through the emotions of it, I didn't know what it was that I was really shifting on a subconscious level. And so I'd come out and I'd still be operating from that old script.
