Somatic Expert: You Can’t Heal Trauma Without "Time Travel" (Sarah Baldwin)

Trauma work should not ever overwhelm you and re traumatize you. We have to go back to the state dependent memory in order to resolve it. That means we have to time travel. So I will feel, for all intensive purposes, the exact feelings sensations. I will have the same thoughts as that tiny child.

How exactly does that work? Sarah Baldwin is a somatic experiencing practitioner and expert in the field of trauma.

Resolution in romantic partnership. That is where our youngest show up the most. Because nothing replicates our childhood as much. Because I'm not here. I'm in 1985 or 1975 or 2005, or maybe I'm not in my childhood. I'm in that relationship where that person cheated on me. And I'm responding as if I'm in that experience from five years ago, not in the one from today. How do you pick different? You re parent those little parts. So if we are not the parent to these parts, your nervous system shows up as the ultimate parent in the form of a protective part.

Do you find that most people are attracted to this work because they're sick of feeling alone and they're sick of being exhausted? So let's just go into this beautiful space of time traveling. When you say time traveling, I love this because our nervous system has a memory and we actually, if we're unaware, we can travel and revert back to either the exact moment that trauma experienced itself in our body or that we developed a coping strategy which dovetails into attachment. What do you mean when you say time travel? I love this. Because it has nothing to do with the present moment, but our body thinks it does.

Yeah, well, you know, all humans are time traveling all of the time, and science really confirms for us, Right. That time isn't linear. We already know that. And, and when it comes to our nervous systems and the way trauma functions and lives inside of our body until it's resolved, we are constantly oscillating between this present moment and past moments and also future moments that are yet to be here. So this autonomic nervous system lives subcortically in our bodies. Subcortically simply means it's not connected to our cortical thinking brain or prefrontal cortex, where reason, rationalization in understanding lives. So the language of our autonomic nervous system, because it lives in our bodies, is the language of our body, which is not verbal. It's somatic. And somatic essentially means the language of the felt sense. Now, this brilliant nervous system has one primary job, and that's to keep us safe and alive at all costs. It's actually evolved for 500 million years to do this. And every mammal on our planet has this same brilliant self protective system. If you have ever felt, if anyone listening has ever felt like you're unlovable or unworthy of, of being chosen, your nervous system has never let you down for one second in our lives. You could have had the most amazing, loving parents, but they couldn't get it exactly right. Your nervous system has always shown up for you. And I like to say that because so many of us can feel like we're inadequate, we're broken in some way. And the beautiful thing is neuroscience really confirms for us that the opposite is true. Now, I think of this nervous system almost like it's a vehicle that inhabits our body. Someone has to be in the driver's seat of this vehicle at all times. And if I'm not in the driver's seat, that means that it takes over on cruise control and it's essentially guiding my life. Now, the first line of defense in our autonomic nervous system is called neuroception. It lives in our brainstem. And you can think of that like a threat detector. That term is coined by the amazing scientist. His name is Stephen Porges, behind polyvagal theory. So neuroception, or this threat detector's job, is to look out into the world every millisecond of our life to see if we're safe. Millisecond is very fast. There's a thousand of those in a second. So it looks out and it has three silos to categorize things in. Something is dangerous, life threatening, or it's safe. And those are the three categories that it decides. Now, how does it decide if something is safe? Well, we all have this brilliant internal database that has every lived experience we've ever had inside of it. It also has generational experiences, so that means experiences of our ancestors, our parents, our caregivers, and, you know, people inside of our lineage. So that's what it looks to. So as it looks out into the world, and I'm looking out my window right now and I see a beautiful tree. That threat detector, immediately in a millisecond, looks to my database and it says, what intel do we have on trees? Now, I grew up in a very, very, very dangerous home. In my childhood, in the middle of the woods of New Hampshire, the only safe place for me was going into the woods, which is what I did all the time. And I made a magical home there. That was my refuge. So when my threat detector sees trees, it looks to all those moments where that was my safety. And it immediately says, trees are safe. Now, as the result of it saying trees are safe, it allows me to be in something called my ventral vagal complex, which is our state of regulation. Essentially, that means it allows me to be in this present moment in 2025. I am right here. And because it's seeing that tree is safe, it's not actively self protecting me. So instead of guarding me or standing in front of me, it's like it's standing at my side. The result of that is I get to feel peace. I have just the right amount of energy in my body. I can feel curious and love and contentment and warm and open and available and creative and all the wonderful, yummy things that humans want to feel. That only happens when you are in your eventual vagal complex. The funny thing is people tend to think that we want all these things. I want this partner, I want this job, I want, I'll have a family, I want to have this career. Those things are all really nice to have. But if you aren't predominantly experiencing them from regulation, you won't be able to enjoy all of those things. So regulation is what allows us to actually be in this present moment and enjoy the things we're experiencing. Now, the way this threat detector works, remember, is it not only susses out safety, it also susses out danger. Let's say I have a partner who struggles with frustration. That's an emotion, anger or frustration that they don't yet fully know how to regulate in their own nervous system. Meaning they feel frustrated. And instead of being able to calm their nervous system down, it might come out a little bit like, I don't know, they get frustrated if the TV's not working, like, oh, what the hell's wrong with this stupid remote? And it comes out as maybe not the biggest amount of anger, but I can feel and hear the frustration. So my threat detector notices that and says, oh, they're in their sympathetic nervous system, which is where frustration occurs. They seem angry. What intel do I have on anger now? I also have some other intel here. This is my partner. That means that they're my family, they're my most important person. They are the place that I go to for contentment and home and bonding and all of that. So it immediately looks to my database. Now, the thing about the threat detector is it doesn't look for identical matches. It looks for flavorings of similarity. So if my partner is my most important person, they're my home, they're the Person I go to for love and connection, et cetera. Guess who it's going to look to? My earliest childhood caregivers. It's going to say, well, they must be a lot like my earliest childhood caregivers. Now my partner's also getting frustrated. And let's say in my database, I had a parent who got wildly angry and filled with rage. Maybe they were verbally abusive, maybe they were physically abusive, maybe they threw things, but they were unsafe. My partner's not doing that right. They're not throwing things around the room, they're not touching, hitting me, they're not screaming at me. They're frustrated with the remote. But to my threat detector, it's saying, that must be like this thing because there's enough similarity of flavoring. So in a millisecond, I am no longer in my living room. In 2025, I travel back to whatever the most predominant moment memory was or moment in time of that experience. And maybe that was when I was 8 years old that really got imprinted. So all of the sudden I have traveled back to being that 8 year old me, literally. Our nervous system, our vagal tones, the shape of your nervous system changes and it goes identically back to what it was like when you were eight. So I will feel, for all intensive purposes, the exact feelings, sensations. I will have the same thoughts as that tiny child. Exactly the same. Which is why we may notice. And by the way, I want to name this in romantic partnership, that is where our youngest wounds show up the most. Which is why a lot of people say, like, in my work, I feel like, yeah, I got this, and I feel clear with my friends. And then you get into a relationship and you're like, oh my gosh, what's happening? What's all this?

It's totally different.

Oh, what's all this stuff? Because that's the beautiful sacred container where these things need to be resolved. They can only be resolved in a romance. Some of them can only be resolved in a romantic relationship because nothing replicates our childhood as much or is enough of a a match. And so this is where a young part show up, which is why I then don't see my loving partner who would never do anything unkind to me. And this isn't an example from my own life, but it could be. I have my own examples. But what I then see is this really dangerous adult. And I don't feel like an adult. I feel like a little girl who has no power, no agency. And then what those little parts do is they either one they take on the role they had to as a child. So that might be placating. So I become small and I get quiet. I feel really scared of you. I, I just acquiesce. I fawn, I become whatever you want me to be. And I say things that I don't really mean. Even our, literally our language will change, so it won't be as eloquent. It'll sound like I'm eight. Or sometimes what happens is if I wasn't safe in my childhood to actually say, hey, this isn't okay. I may notice that I have misplaced anger come out from me and I have a hypersensitivity to their frustration where I, I'm not seeing them as being frustrated, I'm seeing them as being rageful. And I'll say things like, you can't speak to me that way or that's not acceptable or whatever because I'm not here. I'm in 1985 or 1975 or 2005, or maybe I'm not in my childhood. I'm in that relationship where that person cheated on me. And so my partner coming home late from work because they had a meeting that ran long, my threat detector says, that means you must be cheating on me with a coworker. And I'm responding as if I'm in that experience from five years ago, not in the one from today. And this is happening to humans all day long and we just don't realize it. I live in Los Angeles, a city that has crazy amounts of traffic and the amounts of times I'm driving down the street and people are getting, you know, what people call road rage. I'm looking at somebody who's 65 years old and I can see an rageful 13 year old that's probably angry at their parent that never considered them or saw them. And how's that coming out? Because the person in front of them didn't use their blinker and that's reminding their nervous system of being unconsidered. And so now the anger that they weren't able to express towards their parent is coming out by flicking off the person in front of them and screaming.

Oh, Sarah, I have to pause you. Wow, there's so much there. And I can feel the energy behind your work. I know we all can feel it. I want to go back to something you said because I have been there in traffic and I have actually said to my now fiance, I'm like, that person's just really unhappy with their life. This has nothing to do with them cutting me off or a red light. So I feel you 100%. I want to make a personal corollary, because when I asked you about time traveling, I have had moments, and I wonder if you could unpack this both personally, personally and also neurologically. Where the body keeps the score. We've talked about this book so much. We know Peter Levine's work. We understand the neural tree and how it impacts us, how arrested development actually can stick us and hold us hostage, unless we are here to exhale and do the somatic work. So my question for you is this. If we go back, if we ride a roller coaster back in our timeline, in that moment where we're essentially unconscious, right, and the nervous system is driving itself, there's no adult at the wheel. How do we personally. Maybe a personal experience that you've had or with so many clients you've worked with, now take the wheel again, because some of the concepts you're portraying are so vast and they're podcasts of their own. How do we just simply put our hand up and say, the adult is here. I'm going to grab the wheel? And we're not in that time anymore. We're actually here in this present moment. I think this is really powerful for all of us.

Yeah. You know, the thing about my field is it's. It's very bizarre that we've had, you know, decades of research, and yet it's left people with this mystical experience of healing. Like, it feels very intangible. What the heck is it? How do you do it? Nobody tells you the order for how you have to do it. And there's just a lot of books written that's cognitive, that's not going to really shift things. Whereas if you look at, like, physical therapy, for example, and I'm just naming this because I want to bring the corollary to mental health. If I break my knee, everybody knows there's an order to that healing process. That's public knowledge. They might not know the exact order, but, you know, you're not going to start with doing jump squats, you know, or deadlifts. You start with slowly, and then you build your capacity. The same goes for all of this work. The first and most important thing is we must build regulation within our autonomic nervous system. And become what? What I really see it as is we are becoming our adult self is becoming the warrior for the younger parts. That is first and foremost, if you try to skip to doing ifs. So internal family systems, inner child work. If you try to do that without Being the warrior, who the heck is trying to rescue that 8 year old? Probably a protective part who's like 13. A 13 year old cannot rescue the 8 year old. Only our adult selves can. So the first and the most important step is we have to bring regulation to our nervous system. This is like going to the gym. So we're doing consistent neural exercises. These are moments that support me to come closer into what we're calling our, what's called our ventral vagal complex. You can literally think it like, think of it like a rep at the gym. So if I do some box breathing, bilateral stimulation, controlled eye movement, tapping, feeling your feet on the earth, putting music on and dancing, shaking, jumping on, a rebounder, going for a walk, which is bilateral stimulation, Safe self touch, touch, Safe self, safe touch with others. These are just some, some ways to bring regulation. The more that you do that, the more that you build your capacity to hold activation. And something I say all the time is when we're becoming the warrior, it essentially means you're becoming a parent to those younger parts. And one of the important qualities of a parent is to not be scared of your child. Scared. I know that is not correct English. It's on purpose. What I mean by that is if a kid says there's a monster in the closet and I say, oh my gosh, you're right, there's a monster in the closet, they will not feel better. Now if I say, if a kid says there's a monster in the closet and I feel afraid, but I say, you're fine, everything's fine, they know that you do not feel fine because they can read your nervous system. And the same goes if you're trying to comfort a younger part. Like I'm trying to calm that part down and say, they're not cheating on you, you can trust them. But adult you doesn't actually feel that you're wasting your time. It will not work. And I say that because so many people think, oh, this work's not going to work. It doesn't work for me. I've tried doing ifs, I tried doing parts work. It doesn't work. That's an indicator to me that you haven't yet become fully the warrior your young parts need. The warrior is completely unafraid of what terrifies the young part. And you do that through regulating your nervous system. So once I have built that capacity, I can hold activation, then I have to know the difference between. This is very important. This is called the differentiation processor. I call it that. And that means that I have to know in my body, what does it feel like to be in my adult self, my truest self, my soul self. I use those interchangeably. And then what does it feel like to be in each of my parts? Because they feel very different in our bodies. They speak different, they feel different. The postural stance of your body will literally be different. You'll hold your face. People's faces actually morph. You look at people when they're in parts. When I'm in a part, I do not look like my adult self. I look very different. The way I hold my eyes, the way I hold my jaw. Everything changes. So I have to, as Sarah, know the difference between who's in my body. Because we have this thing called self like parts or these things that are really good at mimicking being an adult. And a lot of times we think it's adult us when it may not be. So something I invite people to do is think of just one moment in time where you have felt either in flow, you it's. It could have been a spiritual moment, a moment in nature where you have felt grounded, at peace, where you've felt connected to all things, where you have this deep sense of knowing that no matter what, I am okay and I am safe to be here. And we have to really clock what are the sensations I notice, what are the feelings I notice, and so on and so forth. Then we need to get to know who those other parts are. And they're locked in time. They're all locked in those experiences. So what we do in this work is we have to go back to the state dependent memory in order to resolve it. That means we have to time travel, which is so cool. So we become the warrior. My job is to help people become that warrior. Then we have to fall in love with these parts of ourselves. And the only way to fall in love with them is to stop identifying with them. They're not you. They're a version of you, but they're not you. So the more that I can tease apart who they are and who I am, and I can see this six year old as good and lovable and Precious, or this 17 year old as good and lovable and precious. I, I start to fall in love with them. Then what we must do is we must go into the state dependent memory. So we go back to the experience that once overwhelmed them. It's literally I am traveling time back to the experience. And what's so fascinating about this is we have their vagal tone present. So their panic, their feelings of Being worthless, their, their terror, whatever it might be, that's there. We can feel that. But I can also feel adult me here. And when I'm working with, and I've done this work myself, I, I, I, I, for 15 years, it's the most spiritual thing I've ever done. It's really shamanic in nature and it's totally scientific and there are no words to describe the power of it. I've done this with over 10, 000 people I've worked with and something as simple as if I ask someone if I have both parts present, tell me which hand is your younger self, they'll immediately know my right hand. And then I'll ask them, take the hand of that part and what they might say is like, whoa, the part's squeezing so tightly, like they don't want me to let go. And I'll introduce people to their parts in the, the state dependent memory. And then what, what constitutes being a, a good parent to our parts is two things. It's being ferociously protective and soft and attuned. If you look at a lioness, for example, with her cubs, she is both of those things. If you get near her cubs, she will maul you to death. She is ferociously protective. The cubs know that. And because of that, even though they are living in a very unsafe environment, they are free to play and be silly and do all kinds of stuff because they know my mom's going to kill you if you do anything to me. And that frees them up to be a child, which a lot of us, by the way, we didn't get. We might not have had a caregiver did. They said, oh, they're bullying you because they love you, or they, they have a crush on you and, and you know they don't mean it. So that's not being ferociously protective. So we have to be that for our parts, and then we have to be soft and attuned. Soft and attuned means feeling on an autonomic level what that part is feeling. A lot of people think attunement is what you say. Attunement has very little to do with what you say. Because we know that. Because you know, when you've had experiences where people say the right words, but it just feels like they're missing you. Like, you don't get me. Yeah, attunement is I'm meeting you where you are in your nervous system and your experience of fear, of panic, of not belonging, of being all alone. It doesn't engulf me so me as the parent, the warrior, it's like I have a rope to regulation. And my job is to come find you, to protect you, to hear you, and to rescue you from this experience. And when we do that, we actually. It's called completing the incomplete experience. It gets marked in our psyche as over. And to our bodies and to our psyche, that experience is now different. And the past actually becomes the past. Instead of a perpetual present I had for myself. I was sexually abused my most of my childhood and by multiple people. But this happened over years inside of my home. And what usually occurs for children is it comes internalized. So instead of that, you're bad, it's I'm bad. And there's no amount of talking out of that that works. What's necessary is our adult selves accessing the appropriate. What's called healthy aggression, meaning the appropriate response. So healthy aggression is the appropriate response to whatever occurred. So the healthy aggression to a waiter bringing me the wrong food is not to maul them, right? It's to say, hey, excuse me, sorry, I ordered the steak, I didn't order the broccoli. Whatever. Appropriate healthy aggression to something like what I experienced would be to be in my animal self and stop that. And what happens when we're in our animal body? Of course, just to name we aren't doing this in real time. This is done therapeutically in our mammalian system. For me, that was, whoa, my hands are wanting to strangle this person or to shred them into pieces to make it stop. Now, when that was completed, it was marked as complete in my psyche. And it was the what remediated? The shame. No longer. What was it internalized. I was able to externalize it. And from that moment on, after doing that work, the shame was dissipating until it was totally gone.

The beauty of which you speak, that I heard from you, is that the capacity, the switching capacity to be fierce but also to be attuned is part of being the parent. Yet so many of us were not shown any example of being fierce and being attuned. It was mostly, in my experience, either fierce or disconnected. My mom was manic bipolar. She still is. I love her. I've done many years of work to learn how to love her exactly where she is. My dad was very angry, very. In systems that I think men from that generation tended to fall into. Yet here we are. We're here in this moment. And so for the men and the women like myself, who have children, who are also parenting our own children on the inside, one thing you said that just hit my heart very deeply, was holding these two worlds of being the fierce and the strong, but also being the attuned. So it seems like, if I heard you correctly, it's about the switching capacity to know when to go from one to the other and to have a nervous system that can actually pull those levers effectively. How exactly does that work?

Well, this is why when I. I talk about a lot, the healing process, there's a roadmap to it, as I named. And that's why we cannot jump to parent these parts until. My job is to successfully equip someone to show up for these parts in the way that they need. And then my job is to be the middle person or the facilitator of the meeting of the parts. And then my job is to model and show someone how to effectively parent. Because most of us were not told how, taught how to do it. Even with loving parents, nobody gave them the blueprint. It was just like, you have kids. I don't know why the hell we learned so many things in school.

Like, if I would be so great if there was a parenting class, right? Like parenting on the door. Like, teach kids how to parent before their parents.

Yeah. Teach us how to do this. Teach us how to parent ourselves. How do I regulate my nervous system? So, you know, we're. We're animals, and I use nature as a teacher all the time. So if I go back to the lioness she has and. Or the lion they have, you know, any predator. And when I say predator, I don't mean unhealthy predator. I'm talking about in the animal kingdom, by the way, we want to be able to access our predator energy. Predator energy does not mean harming people. It means protecting ourselves and protecting others whom we love. That's it. What happens is, for a lot of us, when we saw unhealthy predator energy, we then fawn and we become perpetual prey. That's not how the animal kingdom is supposed to work. Like the chipmunk in my front yard, it's eating something and its friend comes over and it's like, I want that. It's not supposed to say, okay, you should have it, because you're really nice and I don't really deserve it. Right. The appropriate response is, hey, I found this. This isn't for you. No. And to protect itself, that's being in this healthy aggression energy. So if we look at, again, animals in the wild, a lion or lioness, they have that inside of themselves, that ability to protect, and it can be turned on in a millisecond. So the result of them being very confident in their ability to access healthy aggression means they don't have to wield it. We have a lot of humans who aren't actually confident it. So they're wielding it all the time. It's sort of like if I look at a sequoia tree, like the oldest trees in the world, they're not wielding their power. They're not like, look at me, I'm so great and so amazing. And they just, they know like, they know like they know who they are and they don't have to. That's real power. And so anyway, the point of this is that I don't have to get big unless it's needed. And so the lion or lioness does that only when their threat detector says, oh, that's a hyena that's going to try to come and get my young. Now, I'm turning this on because my job is to protect my young. And it's a reflex that happens inherently inside of them. Now what will happen is if there's danger, the first important response is to deflect the danger. So we're going to go, the lion is going to go into the first healthy aggression component of being the parent. As soon as the danger is gone, it will soften and turn towards the young softly and ensure that that young is okay, safe and regulated. And they'll start licking them. Licking them will bring them into regulation. And that's like saying, are you okay? I know that was scary. How are you feeling? Why don't you just come next to me, Feel my heartbeat. It's okay, I'm right here. I know that was scary. And I calmed them. It wouldn't be adaptive to do that first, right, because then the hyena might eat my baby. I have to first protect. And again, for most of us, we did not have. For many of us, we didn't have either. For some of us we had parents who were acted like dictators, but they were never soft and attuned. They never asked us how we felt, they never held us, they never welcomed our emotions. And others of us, there are other people who had that soft loving parent who had no idea how to protect them. And so our job is to be able to come into both. Children need that ferociously protective parent. They need. This is why kids need boundaries with their parents. Kids need to know there are limits. This makes them feel safer. But all of that without the soft attunement does not give them what they Need. And so our job is to be doing that for our parts.

It seems like, for lack of a better term, to reductionize. If someone came into life, like myself, for example. I've done multiple sessions of work on this that my mom, when I was in utero, was very stressed, very stressed. Probably the beginnings of her bipolar. And so I came into the world with a nervous system that was really wired for hyper vigilance. And I've spent many years in my life unwiring and really increasing the switching capacity so that I don't just operate from that toughness or being the male lion who's trying to protect the pride when honestly, Sarah, there's no threat. It's just a threat that I'm wired for. And so in my reticular activating system. This is a neurological question, but also a spiritual question. I love the fact that you said parts work is the deepest spiritual work you've done. I believe it is, but it's also radically scientific, which I love. That's why I'm falling in love with parts work more and more and more. And so here's my question. If someone like myself or any one of us out there in the world listening or watching, is noticed through their own practicing of attunement of nervous system regulation, that they themselves are hypervigilant, and they tend to operate more on that hotter side where there's always a threat being detected. What's going on in our brain? But more importantly, how can we close the space between our head and our heart so that we can move these emotions through energy and motion, so that nothing's stuck anymore, so that we don't have a lever that's pulled all the way to hyper vigilance. And we're just actually attracting experiences to us. We're calling them forth. I did for many years. What do you make of that?

So when we're in that hypervigilance, anxiety, worry, frustration, fear, terror, rage, panic, all panic attacks, all of that, erasing thoughts, lacking sleep, heart racing, tension in your body, all of that is a clue. You're in something called your sympathetic nervous system. That's our state of. Often referred to as fight or flight. Now, why did I go there? Because my threat detector saw something that it thinks is dangerous, but it thinks I can do something about the danger. And something to intertwine this with parts work. If we are not the competent protector. So if we are not the parent to these parts, your nervous system shows up as the ultimate parent in the form of a protective part. A protective part's job is to ensure that your most vulnerable parts never, ever, ever experience what they experienced in the past again. That is their number one job. That is all that the protective parts care about. A lot of people hate their protective parts when they come to me, because the protective parts, the result of their protecting is a lot of our suffering. Like, I'm stuck in my life, I sabotage relationships. I pull away, I shut down, I avoid things that are good for. I'm anxious all the time. I'm avoidant, dissociated. All of those things, those are just the symptoms of the protection. Now, the only way to stop that is for us to build a relationship with that protector that developed. Those protectors may have developed when we were in utero. We have developed when you're 2, when you're 10, you know, they're all different ages, and the number one thing they care about is the most, most exposed part of us, the part that had. It's like every part of our soul was exposed. It's like a child reaching up to their parents, saying, love me, and being met with no, or being met with, you know, maybe not the words no, but I can't or I won't. That perhaps is one of the most painful things a child can. Can experience. So what we do is we learn to fortify and a protector develops and says, I'm going to make sure that never happens again. I'm going to be an achiever, a perfectionist. I'm going to. To be the class clown. I'm going to be hypervigilant. I'm going to do all kinds of things. All of those are the protectors.

You literally just described me. I was in. In high school. I was voted class clown. I still struggle with pieces of achievement over fulfillment. You actually just described me live on.

The podcast, and I describe me, too, Josh. Yeah, that's the. And these are. What we want to do is fall in love with these parts because without any, you know, guidance, they developed in order to give us a semblance of safety, a semblance of love. Like, wow, if I can be the class clown, then I can be lovable. And I just want to be loved. Like, it breaks my heart when I think about these things, like, oh, these precious kids inside of us that we're just trying to find a way to get the things that they weren't getting. And my real job, one of my jobs, is to help people fall in love with these parts and see they've just been trying so much to be worthy and loved and Enough. And when we. Our adult self can fall in love with our protective parts and earn their trust, our protective parts are super smart. Once I had a teenage part of me that I was doing. I was doing a lot of work because she was. She's a. She would test people, especially in romantic relationships, because she didn't trust it. So she would, like, test them, push them away, because she just didn't believe that anyone was going to say. And she didn't want my vulnerable parts to be. Experience the kind of things they did again. So, you know, the truth was I wanted to get her to stalk, but I was wrapping that up in something that looked like I really cared about her. And she said to me in a session, she goes, she's like, do you know that I'm as smart as you? Like, do you know I know what you're doing right now? Like, you. You don't care about me. You're trying to manipulate me into doing what you want. I'm not interested in that. And I was like, wow, this. She's right. She is totally right. Our teenage parts tend to be, you know, take a while to earn their trust because they're incredibly complex beings. And when you can. Actually, what she wanted was me to love her. And when I actually fell in love with her and mothered her in a way that she never was mothered, and I showed her, here's who I am and here's the way that I help so many in the world, and I want to help you. She stopped having. She was so tired. You're protect. Everyone's protective parts are so tired of doing their job, exhausted when they're exhausted, and the only way to make them stop is for us to earn their trust over time. It's very similarly. I use this metaphor when I'm working with people, but it's like if you had a foster child that was dropped at your door and they have the same history as you, if you're reading their case file and you're like, wow, it's just like me. They wouldn't trust you after one day, like one session, right? It's like you had a kid that was neglected, and you, You. You get them. You're like, oh, my gosh, I'm so excited. They're 13. This is going to be so great. And you know what they would do? They'd come home from school and you'd be waiting. Like, you took time off work. You're like, how to go? They would look at you and say, like, fine. And then they would Walk into the room and close the door. And that isn't because they don't want to connect with you. It's because connection was either unavailable or unsafe. So what it would take would be our patience and saying, that's okay. And I'd ask them the next day, and the more that they saw, oh, this person actually, actually wants to connect with me eventually. I mean, this makes me emotional thinking about it. But you'd knock at their door and they'd say, oh, you can open the door if you want. They kind of pretend like they didn't care, even though they really did. You know, it's a teen. They'd be like, yeah, it was good. I mean, you know, this happened. And then it would become too much and they'd be like, can you close the door? But we'd eventually get to the place where they'd say, hey, can I have a hug? Hey, I'm scared. And when we work with our parts and we show them that we can be the protector, they no longer have to do that job or they can relinquish it. And it's incredibly beautiful to watch this occur. It is, it makes me very frustrated when I think of a lot of the self help world that it's changing now. But it used to be like the push through culture, like, just do it, do the thing, push through the thing.

Choose love. Love is a choice. Just these bypassing statements.

Yeah, it's so bypassing or just like, you gotta step into your purpose. Just do, just do it. And I spent a decade with this. I used to call it the invisible wall in front of me. I'm like, I am so determined and I cannot get past this invisible wall. What the hell is this thing? And I went to many therapists who didn't tell me what the invisible wall is. It's your nervous system and your parts. But when you actually work with them, you love them, you get to know them, they don't want to be working so hard. They relinquish their job. And life opens up in the most miraculous, beautiful ways.

So beyond, so good, so beyond learning how to mother. How old was she, by the way, the teenage Sarah?

She's like 16.

16. Okay. So Joshua, 17 just came up in a session. And the amount of strength that he has with the exhaustion that he's carrying, that I'm sure that your teenager was carrying, is so palpable, that becomes my fuel as the parent to be more patient. Do you find this is the case? And also, is it necessary for psychedelic intervention? I. I Heard Schwartz on Huberman talk recently that he believed that specifically, I think he said MDMA or one of the other entheogens was incredibly powerful because it can shortcut. It can actually take the hemispheres down to a place where the crack of the door from the foster child that you mentioned can actually start shining light through it. Do you feel like increasing parental capacity can be paired with psychedelic use for really intentional safe spaces for parts work? And if so, how.

Yeah, I think it can be an incredible tool. I want to give a caveat here that I think that something that tends to happen in the world of self help is that it becomes that that medicine, plant based medicine as well. Psilocybin, ayahuasca, ketamine, mdma, all can be incredibly helpful, but they also have become hijacked and monopolized and I think a lot of ways used very irresponsibly. Something that's really. So I be. And I've worked with people who, who weren't ready to be partaking in these medicines yet. They needed to do a little bit more regulating of the nervous system. I got to get adult me more present. Um, but they participated because they were told this is supposed to be really good for me. And their parts are saying I don't have any stabilization yet. Meaning from our adult selves. When that occurs, it can be very detrimental. I've worked with people that I've had to support over the course of a long period of time in getting stabilization back. So for me it would feel irresponsible not to name that. And I don't name that to scare people. But it's sort of like the physical therapy metaphor. Sure.

There's an on ramp.

Yeah, there's an on ramp. When we are ready, when we have that enough capacity in our adult selves. What I really find is it will. And now I'm starting to talk. I mean, all the work I do is very scientific, but I think science and mysticism are essentially the same thing. What I think happens, they're here at.

The table with us. Sarah, I say this all the time. Mysticism and spirituality is science, whether you want to say it or not.

A hundred percent same thing. Yes. And when we're, when we're really embodied, we're our animal selves. Like, how does the bird know it's going to rain? What is that? Because it's so attuned, it's so present. And so when you're really present, these things will actually start to call you. That's what happened to me personally. It's all of a sudden, like, you know, a year before you might say, like, I don't know, maybe that's the thing for me. Maybe not quite yet, but maybe. And then things start to arrive more and more, and it's that listening, our own internal listening that I want people to invite in and just sitting with and allowing, oh, that seems like maybe something more I'm ready for. And I feel kind of nervous. Want to name that. It's also very normal for Paris to say, wow, it's. I'm kind of scared. But when I have adult me taking their hand, I'm saying, I'm going to be here with you the whole time. Don't worry. And I can say, you know, I've worked with a lot of people who have done MDMA and psilocybin, and I have myself and. And ketamine and, you know, using plant medicine as a therapeutic tool when it is done in a way that is therapeutic and properly integrated. Peter Levine, Dick Schwartz Bessel talk so much about the integration process and how imperative that is, by the way, the preparatory integration. So what am I doing before to make sure all my parts feel safe and what am I doing after to make sure that that integrates? What can happen with something like mdma, for example, is it shuts down our fear center. And the result of that is it allows for these parts to fully and completely somatically feel and have the imprint of the experiences they perhaps never got in their lives. Like, I am being fully and so safely held, let's say, by my partner. That was an experience for me in a way that I have never felt in my life. Allowing another human being to actually hold me in a way that only I have held my parts to the 10 out of 10 degree. That's the power that some of these medicines can imprint for us. Or the experience of, I am wholly and complete, completely good. And I'm using words to describe this, but none of this is actually words. It's all happening on a cellular level in our bodies.

This is my. Sorry to interrupt you here. I just have to. Because the intellectualization in the spiritual commodification of your industry, in my world, it has never been more palpable than right now. So what you're talking about when you said that you can't use words to describe exactly what you're saying, it has to be a somatic experiencing, which is a bit of a buzzword, right? Somatic experiencing. Somatic work. The somatic experiencing that doesn't require words is really what we're looking for when it comes to unlocking capacity or healing and like you had said, having it be complete in the unconscious. Yet there's nothing that you could say on this podcast that would give someone the somatic experiencing that they themselves won't have to eventually earn. There's an earning process to this whole thing. And that's the part that breaks my heart. When I look at the quick fixes and all the therapists out that are, they're like, you know, I'll wave a magnet over your head and I'll clear your trauma in five minutes. It's like, what are we doing? Like, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But what I feel from you, and the question I want to ask you here is when does the good intention and the science actually meet to bring someone from stuckness to healing without them actually doing the work? They are the healer themselves, aren't you, in a way, just unlocking the memories and unlocking. You're a guide. You're a mystical guide that's bringing in these parts work and somatic experiencing that gets the human being to a place where they can see and remember who they are, who they really are. Without all these projections, without all this stuff.

Oh yeah. You know, I say this all the time. If anyone ever makes you feel like you need them, run away from them. There is no one person that you need to help you. There's no messiah. You are the light at the end of your tunnel. You have every answer inside of you. Your physiology, in your body, your. You are the. You are the whole universe. You are a miracle. And this is what science confirms. When I learned all neuroscience made me fall in love with myself. And I couldn't believe it makes me emotional. Like, oh my gosh, I'm not broken. Like, wow, like, look at how incredible these parts of me are. And I am. And when I was able to understand that, I then understand. Oh my goodness. And all of this is waiting to be completed. I've worked with people in car accidents. They were hit on the left, so their head is moved to the right, it's constantly clocked to the right. Because their system is still bracing for the accident. It hasn't moved beyond it. When we're able to go into that state dependent memory and actually complete the incomplete experience, swerving away from the vehicle and coming out okay, their physiology entirely changes. I've watched people's scar tissue change and my own, by the way, scar tissue change from abuse. It will literally go back to the way it was in the moment of the abuse and heal properly. This is wildly mystical. And my job and anyone's job in my position, just like I just named with plant medicine that I don't think I rarely see people taking it seriously enough in terms of where are you on your journey, what the intake looks like. I need to know how much access you have to adult you. I need to know what parts of you are really afraid of this. And it might be like, hey, let's spend another six months or a year making sure those parts feel safe. We work at the rate of the most apprehensive part. And my job is to be an advocate for the parts. My job is to introduce or help someone become the warrior. My job is to introduce them to their parts and model what it's like to be a good parent to them. But my job is to not become the parent. My job is to not give the impression that I am the answer. And when I work with people, I say this from the very beginning. Whether there's 2,000 people in a program or five that I believe with every fiber might be being and everyone's becoming and everyone's healing, and they don't have to believe it yet. I will believe it for them completely and wholly. And my job is to shepherd their system, to gently guide it to this healing. And that means also guiding their nervous system to learn how to do something called pendulate. Again, so to notice, ooh, that's. That's enough. Let's move that dysregulation out. And so it's a shepherding and guiding and pulling back when it feels like a bit too much and saying, oh, I think it's time to step in a little bit more. Trauma work should not ever overwhelm you and re traumatize you. It. You know, it's not for the faint of heart. I will say this is why most people don't do this, because it takes. It takes wild bravery to do. But it should never re traumatize you.

This conversation has the power and potential to heal generations if people really let it soak in. It really does. This is what I'll be doing for the next 10 years of my life or more, with emotional epigenetics and learning from people like you and going as deep as I can. Because for me, I don't know about you. For me and for many of us, Sarah, what leads us to this work is the pain of attracting a person that continues to show up and causes us so much pain that eventually we just wave the white flag and Say, I am done attracting people that leave me. I am done attracting people that abuse me. I am done. And it's from that place of honesty. I mean, my whole body gets a chill right now telling you this. It's from that place of honesty that I found my fiance. It's from that place of honesty that she found me. We were both, in her own words, waving the white flag. Did that happen to you? And do you find that most people are attracted to this work because they're sick of feeling alone and they're sick of being exhausted?

Yeah. You know, people don't. We humans, we don't change because we feel great. We change when the pain of suffering becomes bigger than the fear of change itself. That is when humans change. And so for myself, you know, at 15 years ago, the options were not be here because it was that severe for me or heal. Those were the only two options. And so I went on this long journey. Then I was married for while I was with my ex husband for 13 years. I found him when I was 21 and he fit the bill of my childhood. And he was the healthiest person I'd ever been with. Meaning he wasn't abusive to me, but I was invisible, I had no needs. It was all about him. It was a recreation, a version of that of my childhood. And then I healed inside of that container and I'm grateful, I bow to it because it's created this enough safety for me to heal inside of. The thing is we will. People ask me all the time, how do you pick different? You become different. How do you pick different? You, you reparent those little parts. And when they have. This is such empowering work, people think like, oh, I just better get on that dating app or this dating app or I better watch out for these red flags, green flags, whatever flags, stop looking at those posts. Instead focus your intention attention on getting to know these young parts that are, that are crying out to you and saying, see me, love me, please love me. And feel so inherently unworthy. And when you actually do that, you become home with you. I'll never forget I don't have parents. And I remember once my best friend said it was Mother's Day and she said, you know, it must be so hard. And I said, started to cry and I said, you know, for most of my life it was so hard. And I said, but it isn't anymore because I'm home. Wherever I am, I am home. And those parts turn towards me. And the result of doing that work was when I met my now partner, I was able to receive him because he was mimicking what I had given my younger parts. Because that was now my blueprint for love. No longer was my blueprint. Abuse, neglect, gaslighting, being on eggshells, you know, conditional love. It was being adored, being like worshiped in the best way. And you know what I mean by that? I don't mean that word in a negative way.

Sure.

I mean, no.

A true sacred union.

Yes. Fiercely protected, which I had never been fiercely protected in my life. Prioritized all the things that, by the way, prior, I would have pushed it away because I didn't. It's like people don't understand this, that you have to build your capacity for the good, meaning you have to give it to yourself over and over again. Otherwise it's like going from solitary confinement for 30 years to Bright sunlight. It would be too much for you and you'd have to go back into the dark. The more that you do this work, then when you, you not only a. You attract friends, partners and romantic partners who emulate what you've given yourself and you can receive it instead of having to push it away. So the beautiful thing. And by the way, this goes for our calling on our lives, our purpose. Because if you're aligned with your purpose, it means you're going to receive big. You're serving big, you're going to receive big. And wow, did I have to work on my own ability around receiving without suffering. Because for me, those younger parts that felt like the only way that I actually deserve to receive is if I suffer a lot, then I can receive.

Where did that come from? The receiving equal suffering, that was a program that you got to work through and unwind. The receiving equal suffering many people don't want to achieve because they don't want to outdo their parents because that's the brawn that would be broken if they out achieve them. This is, this is a universal thing.

Yeah. So many of us have it. For me, it was because I was made to feel. I mean, I was born from an affair. My siblings were very cruel to me, my mother didn't protect me. I was abandoned by my birth father and abused by my stepfather and abused by a brother. Just a lot of I'm so inherently bad. Just felt like I'm so unlovable, I am so dirty, I am so bad. And so those parts of me felt like, well, if I suffer a lot, so much, then I can have something. And that, that made it palatable to have something. And it was me having to Reparent them and show them how good they are. Like you know, using that foster child analogy. Oh my gosh, like any child, it makes me want to scoop them up and just love them so deeply and when those parts of me could. And by the way, I want people to know. People talk about like I want to receive more financially. Do this work. How do you do that? You do this work? Where does that start with? Go feel the sun on your face and receive it. And I mean like somatically actually receive it. That you don't have to work for it. And I want you to feel what pleasure without working feels like. What is that like to receive this? Can I let gravity hold my body on the earth? Lay down, let it. Let your fascia release. A lot of people who try that, if you have had to parent yourself, you're going to find it's very hard to let go. These are, these might seem like people say to me, like how is that going to lead to the life I want? It's these incremental neural exercises that open up everything. This is how we do it. And the beautiful thing I want everyone listening to know is there is a process for this and there is, it's tangible. The work I do is really to try to make it as tangible as humanly possible. It shouldn't be that people like me that have, you know, according to like an ACEs study, you know, I score very high in terms of the childhood trauma that I've experienced. Very few people I. Most people are not alive or homeless or certainly non functioning. And it shouldn't be that there are so few of people that get to where I am. There's nothing special about me. The thing is I was able to find all of the, the tools and the therapeutic modalities necessary to create the change because I devoted my life to it. And what I care deeply about is showing people wherever you are on the spectrum of trauma, no one goes through life unscathed by it. We all have it that there is a way to become free of it. Your system wants to, you just have to find someone a who's an expert. Make sure you know what that means. By the way, if they read one book or took a two day program, it doesn't make them an expert. Number two, they have embodied it. People can only take us as far as they've gone. So if they have not embodied it, your nervous system knows your nervous system is going to be like they're afraid of my dysregulation. I was just working with a group Actually, and someone told me, I hear this all the time, a therapist that said, oh, your story makes me anxious. Well, I'm glad the therapist said that because you should stop seeing them. They can't hold you. And it's incredibly important that they have enough capacity that nothing about anything that you share deters them or is makes them unwavering. When you have that magic recipe and you are a willing participant, your wildest dreams will come true.

How much of the somatic experiencing is transmitted through breathwork? Breathwork has been a big part of my life. In 2016, I was introduced and look, it's a tool. It's not the golden ticket. If any breath work practitioners out there saying, all you have to do is my seven week prayer program and you'll heal all your trauma, they're lying. But it is a great tool. And so you know, whether it's trauma resolution and Stephen Porges's work or somatic experiencing, a lot of this is stuck energy. And I believe that the body is a river or a dam. Right. Energy in motion can't be changed. Only it can be changed from a conscious place. If it's unconscious, it's going to tend to stay stuck. So I feel like, and I wonder how you feel. Breath work done in a really intelligent way, with skill can be extremely powerful when paired with many of the tools that you provide.

Yes, I think that I've been doing this work for over a decade. And what I found is even with therapeutic modalities, a lot of times these become really siloed. People will say ifs is the only thing. Somatic experience is the only thing. Attachment based work is the only thing. I've, I've trained in all of the modalities I just named and, and many more. No, we need all of them. What I, after doing this for so long, it was, I realized this is a web. All of these things need each other and when you bring them together, that's when magic happens. I will also say that there is no one size fits all. So if somebody tells you like this is the thing, I want you to be wary of that it might be a great tool for you. It might be a great tool for most people. It will not be the tool for everyone. Now here's an example. Breathwork, fantastic modality. But if you have a nervous system that does not yet have the ability to do something called pendulate. Pendulate, Think of like a pendulum that swings back and forth. It goes back and forth and back and forth. The nervous system on its own Knows how to do this. Like my dog, for example, he hates baths, so he pendulates. When he sees a towel, the bath towel, he pendulates to dysregulation, and he goes into something called freeze. He's like, oh, my God, my mom's going to kill me. It's 14. I'm like, Truman, I'm not going to kill you. It's been 14 years of baths. But he fell into a pool when he was a baby, and so he thinks water is going to hurt him. So here's what happens. After a bath, though, his nervous system still knows how to pendulate. So I get him out of the bath, and his nervous system takes that activation and it brings it over to deactivation and discharge. And it looks like him going on a running jag. He sprints around the house like crazy, and he's shaking and he's making sound. That's his equivalent of going to breath work. So his nervous system knows how to pendulate. When we're going to breath work, that's what we're kind of doing. We're pendulating over on purpose to what Peter Ling calls the trauma vortex. So I'm actually evoking activation on purpose now. The goal is that my nervous system has enough resilience that it can pendulate that out and dump it out and discharge it. What you're left with is feeling very regulated and clear. And I've taken that energy that might be 30 years old, 50 years old, 5 years old, 2 days old, and I've dumped it. If your nervous system doesn't yet know how to pendulate, what happens is you can get stuck in the trauma vortex. And actually, what happens for some people is you go into that sympathetic activation, because what you're doing is you're saying to your nervous system, there's a lion. There's a lion chasing you. There's a lion chasing you. That's what the hyperventilating breathing does. If your nervous system can't pendulate out, a lot of the times it will go into a deeper state of dysregulation called your dorsal vagal complex. And this is when people. I see this all the time. They leave breathwork and they feel floaty. They're like, I don't fully feel here. I feel like I'm in a dream. And the facilitator. If they don't know what they're doing, they're like, that's great. That's not great. You actually just imprinted in your Nervous system, a path towards deeper dysregulation. That dorsal vagal complex is our deepest form of dysregulation. So I do invite people try it out. It might be doing 60 minutes is too long for you. It might start with five minutes. That might be enough for your system. And this is when I say there's. It makes me frustrated as a. As someone who does trauma work, because I know there are people who facilitate breathwork in fantastic ways, and they really get to know each person's nervous system and help them to understand the listening. And then there's like, there's a way to do breath work for everybody, but I just want to name that. If you notice that you find yourself feeling fuzzy, shut down, you're not super clear after, then let's pause breath work. It's same goes with a cold plunge. Maybe we start with just put your hands in ice water and just let your. Your nervous system adjust to that. We can titrate all of this stuff. And so the breath work is fantastic, and we want to personalize it for us. Cold exposure, fantastic, but personalize it for us. And that nuance in all this work is wildly complex. And it's just really important for everybody to understand the nuance, because what I hate is watching people feeling like, oh, there's something wrong with me, instead of it being. No, you're a super unique being, and we have to find the exact right color that matches you. And when we find that, it works great.

I love that you said earlier when you found neuroscience, you realized you weren't broken. The freedom that that created for you, the capacity for curiosity. By the way, curiosity seems to be. Whether it's my interview with Dr. Judd Brewer or our friend Mark or yourself, you're all saying the same things with different words. But essentially the key word, the through line, is curiosity. Yet curiosity can't be fulfilled if there isn't the spaciousness because of trauma or because of a dysregulated nervous system for it to be present. Yet we all know that curiosity is fun. We love how it feels to be curious. Yet I think myself and many of us, we are human, and we block that curiosity because of things that we don't know, we don't know. That's why in nlp, it's called a blind spot. Right? Unconscious incompetence. If somebody is inspired by what you're sharing, like deeply inspired, I know I am. And they're realizing that the same way you got your breakthrough moment when you realized you weren't broken is the exact moment they can have for themselves, right here, right now. How do we take the intellectual teachings that you're sharing with us? And how do we bring them down to close that space that Hawkins describes as between the head and the heart? How do we begin to do that as we taper the podcast? I'd love to have another podcast with you, but this is so good.

How do.

How do we close that space?

Yeah. So what I recommend for people is to begin the process of doing consistent neural exercises with your nervous system. So, you know, number one, I really highly recommend working with a somatic clinician or practitioner, somebody who does this work. What that really means is they speak the language of your nervous system, and they know how to help you speak that language and of your parts. So that's really important. Something, though, that people can just take away right now is I recommend, right? And do this if you have kids. Oh, my gosh. If I. Someone did this for all of us when we were kids. Holy cow. What would set us up for in life? But I call it creating your toolbox for regulation. The reason why we want to write it down is because when you're dysregulated, you're going to forget all the things that help you regulate. So writing this down, doing with your partner, hey, let's both write down, what are the things that support us to feel more present? Hearing good. That's what a regulating resource is. It doesn't numb you like scrolling Instagram. Although sometimes when I look at videos of, like, birds on Instagram or ducks, it does regulate me if I'm really present. So it's meaning, it's. It supports you to feel really present. So what is that? For me, it's. I go outside every morning and I imagine I lost all of my senses. And then one by one, I get them back. And when you do that, and you imagine I lost my hearing, and then you hear birds, oh, my goodness. If that doesn't support you to feel more present here. And good. So that's an exercise. I also put music on throughout the day, and I. I hate the word dance because it's been hijacked by performance. Being performative for others, children don't consider it dancing. They're just moving. So I put music on and I let my body dance me. There's so much freedom in that. Hey, body. Where do you have some energy stuck? Let's move it. That's it. And that is a regulating resource. Cuddling with my dog, hugging my partner, each other, putting our heart, our hands, on each other's hearts. Feeling the sun on my face as I named. Like all of these things, write them down. What regulates me? Humming. Swaying. Doing this. Tapping on your chest. Humming. This is what we do when we hold a baby. That's regulated. This is where the sympathetic nervous system lives. So much of this is innate. So create a toolbox. Write them down. And then throughout the day, I invite you to put some chimes to go off in your phone. Could be two times a day, ten times a day. Every time it goes off, you ask yourself, am I regulated or not? That's all I want you to know. My regular Am I present? Hearing good or not? Fast yourself. That. Then whether you're regulated or not, even if you're regulated, engage in one of the regulating tools. And then I want you to ask yourself, did anything change? And I. We need to become expert in subtle shifts. So if it's. I'm still anxious, but I took a deeper breath. Amazing. That means you're more present. Oh, I feel my hurt shoulder. You're more present because you can actually feel it now. I notice the room around me. That means you're more present. Now I can feel my sit bones. Oh, the thoughts are a little less racing. I feel a little less fuzzy. All of those are an indicator that you're more present. And that means that you just did a neural exercise. That's like doing 10 pushups. You keep doing 10 push ups every single day, your body's going to get stronger. And so this is what happens with our nervous system. The more that you do, how do you change your life? Consistent neural exercises. It's one of the ways, and that's what I would invite in for people. The more that you do this, you're totally getting out of your thinking brain. Reading books is great, but reading books won't change your life. Understanding your nervous system and speaking its language and getting to know your parts, that's what will change your life. And it can happen so much faster than you think.

The reward for all of this, and it's so profound. This is like my 10th year of podcasting, probably episode 700 high 700 something. And the part of my heart that feels the most valued by this conversation, the most seen, is that all of this universal human experience of trauma and of nervous system impingement and of arrested development, it happens for all of us. It really does, to some degrees. It happens for more. Right? There's many capital T's, but then there's many lowercase T's. Now, the question that I Want to ask you here as we say goodbye is what is the ultimate price that we pay as children when at the end of the day, we all just want to feel authentic? We all just want to feel like we're us, yet we're impinged. Our nervous system gets wired to cope and to do all these things where a child's nervous system sacrifices their authenticity for love, and we carry that into adulthood. What is the price that's paid there? And what is the reward once we finally do the work to become authentically who we are?

Yeah, we get trapped. We get trapped. And hell, you know, every great religion has a lot of wonderful teachings, and they'll talk about this concept of something, say, called hell of some kind. After doing this work for a very long time, to me becomes very clear that hell is being trapped in the perpetual pain of what happened and not being able to find our way out. And what heaven is, is the freedom from that. And I will never forget the most profound moment in my healing journey. I had just completed what's called the eye of the needle, meaning one of the most intense moments of all of my. The abuse I experienced. And I landed in my body. I was working with one of my mentors and tears started rolling down my face. I'll never forget how this felt. My eyes were closed and all I saw was the most beautiful darkness. And the words that came to me were, I am everything and I am nothing. I am everything and I am nothing. And in that moment, what I felt was this. This communing with the universe, with God, in the most. In myself, in the most profound way. I am the trees and I am you, and I am everything, and I am the ocean and I am the stars, and I am me, and I am all of it at the same time. And there is no disconnection anymore. Makes me really emotional. There is no disconnection anymore from me, from myself, or for me, from the universe or for me, from others and from the world and everything else. Accomplishments in life, they're nice, but nothing. There will be never be anything I am more proud of than coming home to me and to have that experience of, this is what it's like. This is what heaven is. This is what it's like to be fully alive. That on this ordinary Tuesday that's kind of overcast in la, I get to feel fully alive with you and see you and see myself in you and see the goodness that is in you, that is in me, and communicate. We've never spoken before. And to feel such a Deep, beautiful connection of, oh, my gosh, within my system never knew that you could be with a man and that could be so safe, and they could just want to know you and, like, wow, what a. What a sacred gift that is. And. And. And when this occurs, everything about life becomes sacred in that way. And so I want everybody to know that this is what we get to receive. They're gifts that. I know I'm using words, but I hope for those of you that. That you get to that place and you experience it, that you reach out to us and say, oh, I get what you mean. That it was beyond what words could say, because it really is.

Sarah, thank you for following this path. You could have chosen to not go in. You could have chosen to be one of the homeless people, one of the people that are locked in visceral hell. So just thank you for committing to the work and for helping so many people. Gosh, it's great to have conversations like this. This is why I podcast, y'.

All.

Please share this episode with somebody who is struggling, that does not have to struggle so deeply anymore. Sarah, tell them where they can go to learn more, where they can start this journey of understanding who they are. Because essentially, they're not broken. None of us are broken. This is the real truth. Where do they go to learn about how they are not broken and to start unraveling this work with care, just like they would with the stepchild or the foster child.

Yeah. Well, you can go to sarahbaldwincoaching.com you can go to Instagram. I have lots of programs that I offer throughout the year. My Instagram handle is Sarah B. Coaching. Or you can listen to my podcast called you make Sense.

That's a great title.

Thank you.

When did that title come online for you?

I started to say it when I was working with clients, maybe like, 15 years, 10 years ago or so. And I was speaking to the younger me into them, like, how much you make sense? Can you see how much you make sense? And one. One client of mine made T shirts and started to give them out, and then another client crocheted on a pillow, and I was like, oh, my gosh, it's landing for people. Like, we all make so much sense. If we could just know that all this stuff inside that feels chaotic and confusing and, like, wrong. None of it's wrong. We all make so much sense.

Thank you so much for being my guest. Y' all go to her website. Please share this podcast. Conversations like this are so worthy of sharing because a lot of podcasts out there. They don't get into the actual how to and the understanding of embodiment. Sarah, you did such a great job. Thank you so much for the work you do in the world. Until we see y' all again on a maybe a future podcast, we'd love to have you come out to Austin. We're both wishing you love wellness, but most important importantly, peace and power. You cannot have power unless it comes from peace. We'll talk with you soon.