Why do I still feel stuck… even though I love Jesus?

In this honest, compassionate, and eye-opening conversation, Willow sits down with trauma therapist and author Aundi Kolber to explore the connection between faith, emotional health, and the nervous system—and why so many women feel disconnected from the healing they long for.

Aundi shares vulnerably from her own story of childhood trauma—how she learned to survive by “white knuckling” life, staying hyper-aware, and becoming the “good” and successful girl on the outside… while internally feeling anxious, disconnected, and afraid.

What she didn’t realize at the time is something so many women experience:

just because something feels normal doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

Together, Willow and Aundi unpack the moment when survival strategies stop helping and start hurting—and why healing often begins by simply noticing the mismatch.

They also gently challenge one of the most common beliefs in Christian culture:

that if you have faith, you should already be healed.

But the truth is—healing isn’t instant, and it’s not something we earn by trying harder.

In fact, trying harder might be the very thing keeping you stuck.

Instead, Aundi introduces a new invitation: to try softer.

Not as a way of giving up…

but as a way of becoming present.

Present to your story.

Present to your body.

Present to the God who is already with you.

This conversation will help you understand why your pain may still be showing up, how trauma lives in your body, and what it looks like to invite Jesus into your healing in a real, practical way.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why “trying harder” can actually block your healing
• How trauma impacts your body, faith, and relationships
• What it means to “try softer” in everyday life
• Why naming your story is a powerful step toward freedom
• How to stop spiritually bypassing pain and start processing it
• What it looks like to invite God into your healing in real time

Final Encouragement

You don’t have to rush your healing.

You don’t have to prove your faith.

And you don’t have to pretend you’re okay.

God isn’t waiting for a finished version of you.

He meets you right here—in the middle of your story.

And maybe today…

He’s inviting you to try softer.

Connect with Aundi

• Website: aundikolber.com
• Instagram: @aundikolber
• Substack: substack.com/@aundikolber
• Books: Try Softer, Strong Like Water

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Hey, there. Welcome to the Collide Podcast. This is Willow Weston, and I just love learning alongside you. I get an interview guests every single week.

It shows up to your inbox on Wednesday.

If you have not subscribed, you should subscribe because you will get interviews with people who are running into Jesus and experiencing his hope and his healing and his purpose. And they're being used in the world to bring hope, healing, and purpose to other people. And so today I got to sit down with Aundi Kolber.

She's a licensed professional counselor, trauma therapist. She's an author who is known for her work at the intersection of faith, emotional health, and nervous system healing.

She's the founder of Restoring the Soul Counseling Counseling, and she specializes in helping people understand how trauma is stored in the body. She also wrote the book Try Softer and Strong Like Water.

She's working on her third book, and today I got to sit down with her and talk to her about trauma and how it impacts our lives and how we can experience healing and myths around healing. We talked about so, so many good things. You're gonna want to take notes, friend.

And if this episode impacts you and you think you have a friend who could be blessed by it and benefit from it, make sure that a simple share that you just simply share it with them and you could truly bring help into their life. So take a listen.

Aundi, it's so good to have you on today.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, well, it's cool we just talked off air, but to hear all that the Lord is doing through your life. You've written several books. You're a licensed professional counselor, a trauma therapist.

You're becoming well known for your work that intersects faith, emotional health and the nervous system and healing and all of these things. And so I just wanted to jump out of the gate and say, how did this become your passion? Like, how. How did this become your work?

You could have been writing, you know, recipe books, or you could be, I, I don't know. You could be leading somebody at corporate Disney, but this is what you're doing. How did this come to be in your life?

Yeah. Well, I'm so glad to be here, and thank you for that question.

I love talking about this, and I think a lot of the heartbeat of this for me is in part because of my, you know, something I write about and I do talk about publicly is just the reality of my own.

I experience pretty significant childhood trauma, and just a lot of the impacts of those experiences and part of what was confusing and what we now have more research to help us understand, but I think for a long time wasn't understood is that sometime in the midst of. Sometimes in the midst of trauma, the ways that we react don't always outwardly look concerning. Right.

Like sometimes those experiences, sometimes the way that we are moving through that our body, God designed our bodies to survive. And part of the way that I learned to survive a really traumatic childhood is that I became really good at what I call white knuckling.

I got really good. I got really good at reading the room. My dad was extremely abusive. And I just. I got really good at adapting in lots of different ways.

And it took me a long time to untangle these different experiences where on the outside, I think people often thought I was doing really well.

And I think that it's understandable that they thought that, you know, because I was able to be pretty successful in sports and school, I was a classic sort of good kid. But internally I was terrified and I was often dissociating in my home. I was finding these ways to adapt.

And so that's a long way to say that part of my journey was ultimately becoming a therapist. And in that work, I really started to dig into my own story. And I didn't understand. I really would not have told you.

I experienced severe trauma as a kiddo. I just. I just. That's not the languaging or the perspective I would have understood.

And what began to happen as I began to do my work is realize, oh, this is actually really not normal.

And not only that, but I began to recognize that the disconnects that I experienced in myself, like, you know, my faith has been a part of my life, my entire life. Like, I don't have really a period of time when I. When faith was not woven in and that I'm so grateful for that.

But there's ways in which I couldn't fully access that. And that's what trauma does to us. It disconnects us, that it fragments us. And so, yeah.

So to come back to your question, what made me passionate about talking about this has been the concurrent journey of my growth as a person and as a therapist. And recognizing the ways that oftentimes we need so much more than ideas, we need more than facts. We need embodied experiences.

This is what transforms us and shifts us.

And so a lot of my writing and work focuses on this idea of honoring the gaps we experience between oftentimes what we might know in a part of ourselves to be true, but then what we actually live out and how do we Begin to close that gap and live more in alignment with who God made us to be and to really be present to ourselves, to others and to God.

Aundi, there's so many things I want to ask you about that, and I don't want to skip over, because I think sometimes, like, people like you or people like me, we can get on a podcast or whatever, and we're talking about things and just kind of skip over the whole fact that you went through childhood trauma. And I. I'm sorry that you went through all of that. I, too, went through childhood trauma, and so I just want to pause for a second to recognize that.

Thank you.

That's. That's something that I wish you never would have gone through. And I love how the Lord's purposing it in your life to help other people.

And you talk about something that I think so many people listening right now can resonate with you when your survival skills no longer serve you. Did you have a moment? I mean, you talked about what it felt like.

Did you have a moment where you were like, I used to have to do this, like, the white knuckling or whatever, but it's now actually harming me more than it's helping me.

You know, I had many moments. It's been a whole journey.

And sometimes one of the things that I say and one of the things that's so tricky about developmental trauma, and for me, that developmental trauma resulted in what is known as complex ptsd, which is probably a fairly severe consequence of that. That doesn't always happen, and there's a lot of nuance to this.

So I know I'm saying these in broad brushes, but I just want to name just, like, those nuances within that. But what I sometimes talk about is the reality that the more complicated the trauma, the more complex the healing will be.

And there's no shame in that. That actually makes so much sense that we're like that.

And what I would say, for me is that those moments that you're speaking of, it's like, I would. I think of it like. Yeah, it's almost like an onion where there were, like, layers. Like, there was, like an outside layer of. Of recognition.

Like, oh, man, there's a mismatch here. You know, and one of. Not the only mismatch, but one of the early mismatches I talk about in my book, Try Softer. That's. That's my first book.

And I talk about, like, my.

I had this supervisor because as a therapist, you know, you sort of get apprenticed into the work and So I had this really gentle, wise supervisor named John. And you know, even then, and I had done, I had done therapy. I'd been in therapy for probably three years at that point.

And not always, like, not always consistently, but I was doing my own work. And I was beginning, you know, I was seeing clients. I had just graduated not that long ago from seminary. There was.

But even still, so much of my childhood templates lived in my body. And part of that template was a try hard.

It was a, like you have to sort of over accommodate outside of yourself and disconnect from yourself to make sure that everybody around you is okay. And it was its own version of white knuckling.

And so John, bless his heart, because this could have gone so many different ways, but John, in just the skillful way, the skillful manner of a seasoned therapist, one day, you know, he says to me, andy, you're, you're doing such a great job. And I'm, I'm just so proud of you. And he was so empathetic, like in terms of like honoring and validating like the work, what I was doing well.

But he said to me, he said, andy, you know, I'm just wondering if instead of trying so hard, if you could try softer, like, what would that be like? And that was one of those moments that you're naming. Like, I was like, oh, there's the mismatch, right?

Like these tools that, these, these skills that I had developed, these protective strategies that I developed in childhood to keep me like, alive to survive, they were a mismatch with my life at that point because I did have space from my dad, who had continued to be abusive into my adulthood. I, I was actually safe, but my body didn't fully know it yet. And so that invitation from John was so reorienting to me.

And I wish I could tell you I flipped a switch and like, here we are 20 years later and I'm tada. But there's so much, so much of my writing has been about the granularity of what does that look like?

You know, how do we take it from this beautiful slogan, Try softer? How do we take that? What does it look like in our bodies, in our day to day, in our experience of God, of our experience with ourselves and others.

And so that moment was huge for me. And it began one of those big aha moments that made me think, you know, I would really love to know what it felt like to try softer.

You know, it's interesting as you're saying that, because I think for some people hearing Try softer sounds like a really great invitation. Like, almost like you're inviting them to live life on a vacation. But.

But for people who've been trying, like their survival skill was to basically work their way out of their circumstance, like, try softer sounds terrifying. Because all. All I know is I had to get myself out of hard things. Right. So it can feel like a scary invitation.

Yeah.

And I want to talk more about that, but I do want to ask you, because you said something a few minutes ago. You talked about how. And I resonated with you so much on this for my own story. But you talked about how you didn't even realize.

You wouldn't have said that you went through trauma until you started doing your own work. And you're sitting across from a therapist who's maybe reflecting back to you. I remember this like a therapist saying, this is trauma. Like, this is.

This is dysfunctional. This is. And so here I was processing things that I'd never told anyone about.

And there's power in someone naming what you've been through and almost saying, like, you've been living, like, this is just sort of a normal experience, and this isn't a normal experience. Talk to us a little bit about why that can be so life shifting for people because it could help people understand why therapy is also so important.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's a great question. And I also want to just acknowledge, you know, what you had said to me.

I'm so sorry that that's your journey too. I'm sorry that you know how painful that is, because it's. Childhood trauma is significant for so many reasons.

And I won't go on the full of rabbit trail, but I just want to name that developmentally because we're so vulnerable and we require, like, literally our bodies neurobiologically require the presence of enough safety from a caregiver to develop, like, the ways that they need to be able to develop. And so it's. It is different to experience those things in childhood than in adulthood. And I just want to just recognize that.

And even for listeners, like, this is why these things can have such big impacts later in our life, because we don't have the resources as kiddos that we have as adults. So I just want to. I just want to acknowledge that. And then I want to.

And then I want to answer your question about why it matters when people validate or when like someone like a therapist or a therapist is able to mirror back what they're hearing from us. And sort of almost like, I think of it almost like a form of reality testing. And there's a lot to that.

And one thing I'll just say is that, you know, in many ways, I talk about it like when you're a fish and you're swimming in water, you're not reflecting on the water, at least as far as I know how fishes are created, but. Right. But just to say, like, it's just the norm. And the thing about our bodies, the way this is something that, for me, I just.

I am always amazed by the way God designed our bodies because we are actually magnificent in our ability to survive. Like, it's. It to me, is like, just actually a sign of a creator, like, the ways that we can survive. And part of that is.

Is that we adap and we can find ways to adapt to some pretty terrible things. And part of that is in order to maintain a certain level of.

It's almost like if we don't fully allow ourselves to see how bad it is, it makes it more possible to keep going. And that especially can be true in childhood because your brain is actually getting formed in childhood.

Our experience of the world is reflected in part through the lens of, like, our caregivers. So how our caregivers experience us impacts how we then see ourselves, which then impacts how we see the world.

So if we have caregivers who are completely emotionally unavailable, if they are deeply overwhelmed with, like, their own stuff and so they're misattuned, if they are scary or intrusive, right? That's not just like, a moment in time. It's actually shaping the brain of that person.

And so when we bring that into adulthood and we are in the presence of a regulated, grounded, attuned person, first of all, our nervous system experiences that in a way where sometimes it takes a little bit of time to even get used to that. Like, we might be, like, what is. Why does this person care so much like what you know? So we might have to even get used to that.

But as we begin to be able to receive that, it's sort of a corrective experience for what we've maybe previously, like, how we've previously seen ourselves.

So if our caregivers were mirrors of ourselves that were inaccurate, like, sadly, in my childhood, one of the really harmful things my dad would reflect to me was, like, how selfish I was, how bad I was just for being a kid, that's profoundly harmful, right? To the developing sense of self. So think about what that's like.

When an attuned person in the present corrects that and says, that's not how I experience you. And when our body can receive that reality, what begins to happen is this isn't just a cognitive thought that begins to change.

Our internal templates, the neurobiological templates that help us to predict how we are in relationship. It's like they start to get edited, and we begin to be able to say, maybe what happened wasn't okay. Maybe that was bad. Maybe that wasn't about me.

Maybe that's not how God sees me. Right. Like, there's the opportunity for repair.

And oftentimes, particularly when our bodies have had to do all this survival mode, we really require the presence first of another person to be able to hold that space for us in order to be able to begin to reflect and have our body begin to receive what might actually be true.

So good, Aundi. So good.

I actually just had an experience this week, and I meet with people all the time, but a young girl in her early 20s who just was falling apart, sharing kind of this family of origin role. And that wouldn't be her language, but as she was processing her story, this is how I would reflect back.

She was recognizing she was handed a role that was so heavy, such a burden to bear that should have never been put on her as a child. And she's still carrying it.

I'm wondering what your advice is for those of us who have grown up with childhood trauma and in families, families where we were given roles and we're still being asked to fulfill those roles. And what. What should we do with that? What. What can we do with that?

Yeah. Well, it's a big question. It's a big question. And there's absolutely.

I think this, to me, is one of the things that is exciting about the work that I do in many respects, is that the reality that we do have choices and we have often so much more agency than we realize.

And I think for folks who might be listening and they are hearing that, and maybe they resonate with, like, they came out of a family of origin where they really felt this is the only way for them to be.

And oftentimes it can feel like our ability to stay connected to that family is contingent on remaining on that role within that role, which is painful. Right. Because we are designed to become ourselves. God willing, by the grace of God, we will become ourselves. Right?

Like, that's part of, I think, in the work of fullness and wholeness and even shalom, that idea that. That shalom is fullness.

And so part of, like, healthy maturity in adulthood is sort of having what we need to set down, what we no longer need, what doesn't serve us, what is not in alignment, there's a way in which we can honor, that's a way of dying to the parts of ourselves that we've needed but no longer are for wholeness. Right.

And so one of the big things that we begin to learn, I think for people is just to say where in your life, first of all to I think, look for some actual safety, some authentic safety.

And what I mean by that is like if we try to go right into our family of origin and be like, listen here, I'm not going to stand for this anymore and I am just not doing this anymore. And we try to go in and maybe just control and manage in order to make the change.

Maybe folks already know because they've tried to do it, it doesn't tend to work very well, right? It's like it because we're exerting our agency beyond what is ours. And so often the journey is of finding safety, finding authentic safety.

Sometimes that can be with a therapist, sometimes that's in the presence of other grounded friends that might be, you know, a spiritual director. It might, um, folks who what.

The way I describe safety is when your nervous system, when you're with someone and you feel like you can actually fully exhale because you know that like you can be yourself. You know, it's almost like your body is telling you before your mind can register that you feel safe.

And so what's interesting about these things is that when we find those, those areas of safety, we can leverage that to help us stay connected to agency. So that helps us remind ourselves like I am an adult.

Like what, what helps me to know that I actually do have choices in the present, that I am maybe not a, you know, a 12 year old girl, a 14 year old girl, an 8 year old, how, you know, who, whatever those ages are, that it makes you feel.

That's often what happens when we're in, when we get back with our family of origin and what we're trying to do is to enter that space more from our adult self.

So that when we come back into that space with our family of origin and we feel compelled, you know, someone is wanting you to rescue them, the other person is wanting you to over function.

You know, people are asking you to go beyond your capacity, whatever those roles might be, we develop more of the tolerance to be okay with them not liking us being ourselves. Right. And that's something that we, we just, we kind of develop like that's why?

It's like we kind of go between connecting to the safety because that helps us almost like a fuel. And then we can go to that space and we try to live in alignment in that space, and then we notice our capacity.

And when it gets to be too much, we take breaks. And so that's something that I think sometimes takes. It takes some time. It takes some time to develop that.

But good, healthy boundaries, good healthy support in the present and staying grounded and rooted in your actual self in the present can be such helpful resources.

What are some myths that you think we believe about healing?

Great question. Gosh, there are so many. There are so many.

I think, you know, certainly trying harder is a myth that we think that if we push hard enough, that gets us where it will get us to whatever this mythical, using the myth again, whatever this dream world is, where there will be perfection. And I think in the Christian space, we have our own versions of that.

Like, if I pray hard enough, if I'm good enough, if I am, you know, if I know enough scripture verses, like, there's these ways in which it's feels like we make these bargains to sort of like. And a lot of this I won't go down the rabbit trail. But, like, it can be about a little bit our attachment style with God.

Like, it's almost like we're like, oh, God is waiting for me to prove that I'm worthy of love. And so here's me proving God that I am worthy of love. And once I prove it, you will give me the healing I long for, right?

But just like in any relationship, you know, that could be described as an insecure attachment. And I think there's lots of evidence for us to see that God's actual heart for us is that God wants us to come and experience to.

To experience God from a place of, like, we are loved because we're loved, because we're loved. That's just like the ground of our being. That's like the truest thing about us.

And interestingly, that aligns with attachment research that says when we experience that secure base, that gives us the courage to show up to a lot of things, including healing. And so I think in these myths, I think often it's the try hard versions and like, the. The faith versions of that.

I think there's also sometimes without realizing, we outsource our wisdom and we say, hey, will you. Hey, Willow, will you tell me what it is, you know, that it's going to take for me to heal?

Even though you might have Some really good things like you can be a companion and you can be a support. But, but God designed us to live in our bodies. God designed us to have discernment.

God designed us to have these abilities to connect with this wisdom and being. And that's not something that if we're not careful, we. We sort of outsource that.

And I think in doing that, that keeps us sometimes from embodying the path that we are invited to walk on healing.

And then I think the last one that I would just say is that, yeah, I mean, as I'm thinking about it, I'm like, these are a lot of these go back to what I think of try hard ones. But I think that it's somehow, I think the thing that just keeps coming up again and again is just that there needs to be a convince.

There's some convincing that needs to happen in that process in order to heal versus us being able to little by little take those steps and learn to embody that healing, knowing God is with us.

Aundi, you shared that you been through your own story and set of pain and one of the myths that I feel like I experience in Christian culture and I wasn't raised in the church. I met Jesus when I was 21, but I've been walking with him for a few decades now.

And it feels like there's this idea that when you, you know, give your life to Jesus or you pray a prayer or whatever, you go to church, whatever idea it is that you, you're healed, that you should be healed, that, that all. And for me, it just looks so different.

I mean, I didn't really even start processing my stuff until my twenties, my thirties, and then when I had kids, a lot of my childhood stuff started really coming up. And so I'm curious when you talk about that myth of the healing journey is almost something that should be in our rear view mirror.

And so you have all these Christians who aren't really. They're like, I don't need to deep dive into my past or I don't need to think about the trauma I went through and how it affects me today.

I have Jesus. I'm good. Talk to us about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for pulling on that thread. I think this, what you're saying is so prevalent and really common.

And what's interesting about it is that as I hear it, especially as a, as a therapist, is I hear the combination, the conflation of like, both the myth of like, that we need to be healed quickly. But then I hear also the Combination of what I would call spiritual bypassing. And that's not my term.

That's a term from John Wellwood, a psychologist that basically means it's not that we don't want faith. I think faith can be just a profound resource in healing, which is why I integrate faith in so much of my work.

But faith, if we're not careful, the concept of faith, the concept of having a religion or a faith experience, can be used more like a way to not touch pain, more as a way to avoid reality. And when that's the case, it can be really tricky because what that does is on the outside it can look really good.

And this is where it gets so difficult because none of us know what another person is experiencing internally and why it's so important to be connected to ourselves. Because it's this, this journey, this, this ability to honor, wanting to integrate our faith, but not at the expense of reality.

And in many ways, I think of it like a litmus test is does this area of, you know, this faith, whatever it is, whatever the, you know, angle or the way we're experiencing Jesus or the prayer, is this empowering me to be with the reality of whether it's life or my story or this other person or tragedy. Now, that doesn't mean we need to over identify with pain. That's not what it means. But it is this idea that God is with us.

I love that Jesus that, you know, biblically that we call Jesus Emmanuel, God with us. That's attachment language. This is very potent language for this idea that God doesn't say, go figure out all of your pain and then come find me.

Jesus says, you know, God says, I'm coming to be with you. I'm gonna come find you.

I don't know where you are, I don't know what you're in, I don't know what kind of mud and muck and, and whatever you're experiencing, I am coming to be with you. And in many ways, to me, that's sort of our picture of the way that faith is a profound resource. And so we want to be mindful.

I think that that myth that you're talking about that we should be finished is sort of an avoidance of this is still really painful. It feels kind of big. I kind of maybe don't know what to do. It makes me feel insecure, maybe. It might make me feel alone.

It might make me feel like I'm not doing enough. It might make me feel like my faith doesn't matter.

There's all these reasons that Looking at the truth that maybe we still have maybe more work to do is scary. And for listeners, the thing that I just would invite us to be aware of is the way that God's heart for us has always been about.

It's always been that God so loved the world. It's always that we love because he first loved us, right? Like that.

There's this way in which there is a firstness to God's love that empowers us and not the other way around. And so when we are in process, we can be confident that it's not the finishing of the process that allows us to be loved. That part's already done.

The love is the fuel.

Such good words, Aundi. I'm a big fan of inviting people to lean into their pain with Jesus instead of avoid it. I don't think our avoidance is working at all.

And I. I often tell this story, but I was speaking at a retreat once, and I kept running into this girl, like before I spoke. And then after a session, then at lunch, then at dinner, every time she would cry, and she's like, I don't know why I'm crying.

And I would talk to her. And then finally on one of the breaks, I said, let's sit down and talk about why you're crying. Because she's like, I don't know why I'm crying.

I'm good with God. And she said something that happened 10 years ago. I should be good. I have a savior. I have the Lord.

And it just struck me, you know, because I sat down, I said, what happened to you 10 years ago? And, you know, she shared this really traumatizing story of a fiance that she broke up with, and he committed suicide.

And I'm like, you're crying because someone ending their life is sad, and it's tragic and it's hard. And somewhere along the way, she had these spiritual mentors and pastors who said, you. You should be good. You should move on. You have God.

Like, you made the right choice in breaking up with him. You're good. And so I think sometimes. And you talk a lot about kind of like listening and paying attention to our bodies.

I mean, her emotions were telling her something, right?

But she was trying to avoid her own emotions and do this spiritual bypassing you're talking about and telling her I should be good because I have God. And I think there's a lot of people who've been doing that in their bodies for maybe weeks, maybe months.

But I know people have been doing it for decades, and their pain Is like coming out sideways, bleeding all over other people. And they keep thinking that to be good little girls, to please God, they have to keep ignoring that pain.

And it's painful to watch, let alone to be living.

Yeah, yeah. What a powerful story. And, you know, I'm so grateful that you were able to hold space for her and just honor. Honor that.

And it, you know, it's interesting because I think sometimes people, it's like in some ways it sounds so simple. Like it may be for some people, that might sound so simple just to, like, acknowledge. Right? Just to acknowledge reality.

That's what we're doing, is we're saying this happened. And because this happened, there's impact from that. And what we know about trauma is that trauma does not process in our body.

It is not stored in our memory, memories the way normal memories are. It literally fragments into your body from, like, you know, various sensations and those sensations.

Then if something reminds us in the present of those sensations, it reactivates the experience as though it's happening in the present. And when that's true, you think about how difficult that is for experiences that have been terrifying.

And that when your body has not had an opportunity to fully metabolize that, first of all, that in and of itself is so difficult and painful.

But then when we have internalized voices or we have actual external voices that tell us that we are bad or that we have a lack of faith or that it is proof that we don't trust God because we are experiencing that pain that compounds what has already been so painful. And so, yeah, I mean, this work is so. It's. It's so important and granular, right? And it is the work of participating with God.

And the language I use in my book, Try Softer is, is learning to pay compassionate attention to our minds, bodies and spirits in the same way that our God is already offering that to us, right? Like, that's just available to us.

But God invites us to participate because we have agency, because we are not robots, because God doesn't want us to be any of those things, right? And that the healing can actually reach those parts of ourselves that are the most wounded and the most isolated and the most afraid.

When we have what we need to allow those defenses, like spiritual bypassing, to soften. And we can say why? Like, it makes sense why we've maybe spiritually bypassed. Maybe it really was too scary and felt too big.

And as we are able to, we come into the. The truth that says, and we can feel our feelings and God loves us and doesn't shame us.

That's part of our humanity that God Jesus constantly modeled his humanity, showing that that's what it means to be incarnational. Right.

And I love that that is so connected to this work, is that these really, in some ways basic things like being able to grieve, being able to feel your feelings, being able to be connected to people who see you and get you, being able to co regulate with the spirit of God, being able to co regulate with people and nature, and feeling grounded and secure in your body. These are like, these are medicines for these types of pain.

Aundi, this will be my last question because I know we could talk forever. You just speak right up my alley and I love it so much.

But you mentioned that faith has always been a part of your life, even when you are going through, you know, hell as a child and all the things you went through. And God has just kind of always been a constant in your life. When you. What does it look like for you or what does it look like for you now?

When you have a moment where you sense you some pain, you're hurting or you're aching, or you're sensing a need for healing in an area of your life, what does it in a very practical way look like for you to invite God into that space?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think for me it often looks like, I mean, I think typically, like, if I, if I'm, you know, like, let's say I'm really activated or flooded, which still occasionally happens because I'm a human. And all the reasons why that happens usually, first it's just getting grounded. Like, it's not a faith thing. It's just like, what is that?

I need to just sort of like feel enough. And what I mean by grounded is I feel oriented really to the moment. And it's sort of like I'm.

I'm bringing in cues of safety, like I, you know, noticing things around me. And like, that's, that's kind of what I mean by grounded. And sometimes that might mean getting outside or things like that.

And then once I've done that, oftentimes for me it looks like a prayer. Like, and usually it's a really. It's usually real basic. It's just like, God, I don't even know.

Or like, let's say, like, it's sort of like God, I don't even know. But like, I really need your help right now. Or it might just be something like, I really need to know that you're with me.

And it's sort of Just my own. You know, partly it's. It's just that tender, raw conversation with God. Like, I think when I was younger, I felt a lot of pressure to feel like I was.

Was praying correctly, that the way that I prayed fit a certain template almost.

And as I've grown in my own healing journey, I think of it like I just want to be in conversation with the spirit of God, like, and just sort of that continued openness. And so a lot of times it looks.

Those prayers are really basic, but it often looks like an opening of my heart or a softening to just being aware of, like, the way that God actually is here. Like, God actually is present to my life and in me. And then from there it often looks. A lot of times music plays a really big role for me.

And just like walking, music and prayer are some of the big things that just help me sort of find my middle again.

And then I think when I can't find that middle on my own, or when I can't find it, you know, just without the support of another person sometimes there are.

There are several people, maybe not several, but there are at least a handful of people in my life who, when I am connecting with them, there's something so sacred about. It's almost like I can hear.

I not only hear my own voice again, but it's like there is an orienting to hearing God's voice more in alignment than I'm able to do when I may be in a lot of pain. And so there's something about that that's really stabilizing for me.

Well, I love that you have those people in your life. We all need those. So, Aundi, I love the work you're doing. Thank you for sharing your time with us.

And I know that there's going to be women who want to grab hold of your books and your resources and follow along with what you're doing. How can they do that?

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. You can find my books anywhere books are sold. I'd be honored to have you do that.

You can also look on my website, aundikolber.com and it has links to various booksellers.

And on my website, I also have some other resources like videos that go along with, like, my guided journeys that I do for both try softer and stronglike water. So for folks who like hearing, in addition to reading, that sometimes is really helpful.

And then I'm also on social media, on Instagram, at Aundi Kolber, and also on Substack, so would love for folks to check it out.

Thank you so much for being with us, Aundi.

Absolutely. It was a pleasure.

Friend, I hope that you enjoyed that interview with Aundi. I know that I did. And if you feel led to share it with a friend, do that.

Also, would love for you to go and rate and review this podcast, because that just helps us get our ministry out there so other people can experience conversations like the one you just had heard today. And I want to remind you, in case you need reminding, that God is real. He's a real God, and He can handle your real pain.

He can handle your real story, your real truth, your real feelings. And so invite him into those places and don't be afraid to be real with Him. He loves you. He loves you. He loves you.

Keep colliding and we'll catch you next week.