My pleasure. It's one of my favorite topics. This whole discussion we're going to have, I've had to journey from the inside out for my own life healing and also get really skilled clinically to help others. Oh,

Yes, you're exactly right. I had no intentions to even be a therapist. That was not on my list. Um, so when life brings upset, You know, the, the body mind goes into patterns of defense or protection or coping mechanisms. And then we have to figure out what to do. And so for me, getting into birth trauma as even an interest started on the journey of trying to recover from some early trauma in my twenties.

And so then at age 23, by that time, we had some stresses financially and work wise with other people as part of our team. And my partner started drinking, which I didn't even know about and then realized He, for, uh, you know, I didn't know what, what do you mean? Beer is good for you that much beer. And so anyway, it was, you know, some of the struggles of the early twenties.

And he unfortunately burned our house down when I was visiting my parents.

And I kept going, we built our next house, I got a job on a fishing boat off Cape Cod to get money, because we didn't have any money, and then I had one of those wake up calls. Which for me was not planned. It was just, oh, okay, here I am working on the fishing boat. It's time to take my lobsters up to the wharf.

And the feeling was so strong and so clear that I had this awareness, if my body survives, If it doesn't, it doesn't matter because what matters is this love. And so, of course, you know how these things go. I kind of watched my body do this spiral over to the side, and instead of landing, which could have been fatal, on a water tank with rebar welded onto it, I hit the tire to the side and bounced.

It's kind of in the hub of where somatic psychology was starting. This was back in 1978, and they were just starting to talk about Tom Hanna, had a magazine out called Somatics, and there was all of this beginning inquiry of how does the body and the mind work together for health. And for me, I joined [00:06:00] a school of meditation, and it was a clairvoyant school, it had practices of listening to your body.

And like putting your attention in your shoulder or in your other shoulder or in your chest. So all of these practices started to stabilize my mind. And that led me to realize, wow, we are so capable when we have the right tools. Yeah, I think it's frozen. So I'm going to leave session, but the problem is it's frozen and I can't leave the session.

We'll just be doing some editing, I think. Hello, can you hear me now?

Yeah, good. All right, just so you know, that's okay. This is how it happens sometimes. Um, the red button at the top of my screen, I cannot access it because it's grayed out.

I'll just, yeah. So, let's have some, okay, let's have some hand cues. I guess if it freezes we won't even see our hand cues. Right?

Okay. Okay.

So I'll just pick up.

And thank goodness, isn't it? Totally. And that's what I did. I was very fraught with indecision. I thought, finally, if I just go for a week, that'll be okay. And I had a little teeny suitcase because everything had burned up. And there I was, I got to the school and it was all, it was Sufi based, which is, the Sufis are about the heart and the heart with wings.

And so I stayed there and taught at the school. I went back through their, their secondary level training. Meanwhile, I joined a training that for four years, that was called healing ourselves. And this was, bioenergetics and neo Reiki and breathwork and transactional analysis group process and Gurdjieff studies and using movement and we looked at our finances and dance.

And then the movement and I started studying improvisational theater and contact improvisation. So I felt like, wow, I am in the university of body, mind, spirit right now. That was phenomenal to have been in such a difficult situation and then to come through it. with the tools, and it became my passion for life.

And, wonderfully, so, I read a book by Chilton Pierce, The Magical Child. And I was working at the time in a daycare, you know, working part time in a daycare and teaching at the Clairvoyance School, and reading The Magical Child was the first idea that I was separated from my mom at birth. I didn't even think about it ever, right, because what, yeah, I had a good enough family and I have two sisters and two brothers and, you know, my mom was a social worker.

And so I continued to, you know, I got my license and my practice and continued to study and move along and eventually found my way here to Colorado. where I became the director at Naropa for the body psychotherapy. So this was, you know, now I'm in my late 30s, my 40s, doing this, and I found the book by Otto Rank, and he was a colleague of Freud's, and it was a book about birth trauma.

I was like, oh my gosh. Otto Rank said, that's the origins of all of his patients distress.

There's actually people through time who have been curious and finding their, their clients are talking about things that they could only remember somatically from their birth in some way. And so I had my memory starting to come up. And then I was, uh, teaching in Boulder. I was teaching at the university at Naropa and a colleague of mine had studied my contact improvisation class, which I taught developmental movement through my studies way back in California.

The ability to curl in, and that the last six weeks in utero is when we have the flexor muscles start to fire. And I, and I was a mover, I loved to, you know, and I, I had been dyslexic, I couldn't, when I would take dance classes, I would leave in tears because I'd go the other direction trying to follow the teacher.

But so it was always this, this thing of the body, that we are body, mind, spirit. And we are these babies who come in and have a lot to say, you know,

They won't know why they go into a rage, or they won't know why they have low self confidence or low self esteem, even if they've had a good enough life. And very often I started In my own research, I started studying actually, going back to my story, I was in the copy shop where we used to make flyers to post about events.

And yeah, I mean it's like the warm womb and People weren't actually relaxing, they were leaving the body. And so my colleague David Sawyer was instrumental in getting me interested in understanding, uh, the training that it takes to work with the physical self, the emotional self, the relational self, using the understanding of birth trauma.

So I had all this experience working with gang youth and children who were sexually abused, foster children, and working as a therapist in the public schools, and volunteering at Children's Hospital to work with the traumatized children. And I kept holding that inquiry. Well, where are you? Hello. And looking at what are the resources.

And I remember at that point I had a client who was saying, you know, I'm doing these birth sessions with this fellow, Carlton Terry, and he says I have parasympathetic shock. And I was like, I don't know what that is. It was to be ethical. I better find out. So I started going and doing my own sessions. And that's when I really started to realize I had body felt memory of experiences that I couldn't remember.

My love of neuroscience and kinesthetic science because of my body mind centering training and my improvisational theater training, movement was such a key element. So all of that rolls into my background and that's where it, where it all started.[00:22:00]

That's such a great way to say it because it is a foundation in the primitive brain. And I have these questions I think about is, is the world, an infant will be asking, is the world safe? Will I survive? Will I survive in relationship? And then will you keep me safe? Those are like what I call the biological imperative.

Right. And breaking all of this down into capable inquiry and methodologies to understand and help oneself so you're not a victim to what happened at birth. It's really, really important for the integration of self. And so, I started teaching, well, to backtrack a little, with David Sawyer, I ended up co teaching with him for five years.

This is a prenatal experience, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah, it's, it's way more common than people think that what vanishing twin means is that at conception, there are two, as, as the cells divide, they divide into two beings or souls and that prior to implantation, one of them leaves. There's not enough food.

Yeah, I think you have to explore that level prior to, because it's the loss and the, the, the, um, you're almost like it's a spiritual connection because you don't have a body yet.

Yeah.

Oh, that's yes. Well,

hmm.

It really, really is. And that was the, the, um, aspect of the, you know, during the pre and perinatal training, there's themes. You look at incarnation, you look at vanishing twin, you look at ancestral history, you look at what happens when mom discovers she's pregnant, you know, and all of these things have a little Because you're this rarefied being, there are strong impacts.

Like really, David, we can remember all that. And I would just, I decided because of my movement background and my improvisational background, I was going to role play the twin that left. And so we, yeah, I had sort of gone through my own healing with it. And I thought, okay, if it's, if it's possible during the time when we were working on this for the people in sessions, I would go up and twin with them.

The people would stop me and shake me, they'd have heartbreaking tears, they'd want me to come, they'd say, oh no, I'll go and you stay. Right? And I was like, oh, this is really has a sense to it. You know, oh,[00:29:00]

yes, I call it the hidden story. It's the cellular memory, precognitive, so it has no context, but it's experiential. And so all of that is stored as, you know, there's a lovely book called Molecules of Emotion by Candice Peirce. It's from the 80s, and she said, Any emotions we don't sequence or process have a signature, have a chemical signature.

So the support of that touch allows the, ooh, the chemicals of the emotions to start moving, access those memories. It's, it's so primal how interconnected our experience, our foundation of coping, our emotional safety, or, again, coping patterns, like some people will over exaggerate emotions. It's so sensitive they can't function in day to day life.

Yeah. And to learn how to stay the adult, access the baby self experience, comfort and realize I survived. What I didn't even know I, you know, I might have dissociated at that time. [00:32:00] I, and so now can I stay in myself and let that experience integrate? How do you listen to the hidden story? How do you let it sequence through the body?

and become part of your integrated life narrative.

Key, that's so key, because people tell themselves, I worked with a six year old who was born premature, and she had really good parents, and they brought in pictures, and here she had all these tubes in her nose, you know, and, and she was laying on her mama's chest, and her dad's chest, and, and she brought in a card that said bad baby, and the next page, bad, bad baby.

And I realized that the, the overwhelming sensory overwhelm she had to experience without being able to regulate was so chaotic. So it's a brilliant strategy. I call this the strategy behind self attack thinking. So that some people really struggle as adults with blaming themselves, you know, trying to be perfect.

She didn't know where she was unless she self attacked. So, isn't that brilliant?

that's exactly the strategy of the nervous system. It forms a sense of safety, even though it's so detrimental to have self attack thinking. All right. Yeah,[00:36:00]

it's wonderful to know how to organize your sort of clinical thinking if you're a practitioner helping others or if you're studying for yourself. And so I wrote a book called Birth's Hidden Legacy. And in that I list, okay, the prenatal themes, the things that can happen at birth and the things that can happen at post birth.

And that's the first volume, and the second volume is how do you treat it all? What do you do with all this stuff? And then ten case studies. And prenatally, the soul coming in, does it get shocked? You know, maybe we're in this wonderful sense of connection to spirit, and then we come into the layer of the personal more, which is more like your soul.

Yeah. So, so what can happen is we call it incarnation shock. Did you kind of, did your soul leave the body right then? Cause it was too much. And you'll see symptoms of this in adults who are always longing, you know, their partner is never going to be spiritually good enough. They're always longing for the soulmate, you know, and that can be an incarnation shock.

So there's incarnation, then comes implantate, you know, then comes. the journey through the fallopian tube into implantation. So then what happens when you experience the mother's energy field? And I always say, mamas, do not worry. You do not have to be perfect. You did the best you could, but there can be a shock there, especially if there's been previous miscarriages or if there's been abortions.

And we just talked about, oh, a bad, a man, a bad man hurt mommy and mommy couldn't keep the baby and mommy had to say goodbye to the baby. We had a little stuffed animal, and the mom started processing and grieving. And the child, in the presence of the mother's grief, could see her processing it, and we could externalize and say goodbye to baby despair, because that would have been a sibling.

So people who suffer and you don't, you can't get beyond that certain odd suffering. Like I always want the perfect partner, or I never want to leave home. You know, things like that. It's like, well, what's the energetic imprint? Look at the sperm and egg journey. We'll look at incarnation shock. We look at vanishing twin.

Did you have a special other? We look at implantation, what was it like? Do you receive or do you avoid receiving? Do you, you know, what is that ability to, um, trust and take in nourishment? It's often very much related to implantation. And what happens when mama discovers? And again, moms don't have to be pregnant.

And so we call that discovery. And were you discovered like one of my teachers wasn't discovered until her mom was seven months pregnant. And the doctor said, Oh, you know, you're not really pregnant. This was back when they didn't have all the tests. And yeah, yeah,

yeah. So then we work with the heart and discovery and can you, even if you weren't wanted, how can you be good enough? How do you heal that early imprint and not let that determine your feeling about yourself? And then we work with the ancestral history. That's sort of the prenatal aspect. And then the birth itself, you know, I've, I've taught, uh, probably eight of them by now, eight two year trainings.

Where I train, I take people through these journeys, and they do their own personal work. And they do it to study to be therapists, they also do it for their own evolution. And we look then at the different phases of birth. You know, how did you enter the birth canal? Were you premature? Were you born with forceps?

You can have an adult look at the ways they engage their life, and you can sometimes see, oh. That they were born premature, they never plan for anything.

Once you start looking at birth trauma, you can go, Oh, that's where it came from. It's okay. I made it. So it's a really an in depth psychology with really wonderful embodiment you know, tools to help the nervous system repair, integrate, put to rest. Once the story's, a hidden story's called implicit. Like it's just cellular memory.

Literally working with the brain states of the infant, how to bring that together. And how do you use the reflection of a skilled therapist, or the reflection of the right tools to hold space for you to complete the early experience so that your foundation now is strong, is available, is integrated, and you're not going into primitive brain shock behavior responses.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I had the whole family in a session at one point, the older brother, and this little girl who was so fussy and so anxious and so couldn't tolerate if mom put her down, which is exhausting. As the mother and I did the work of her healing of that big, oh, traumatic experience, the baby started to get more relaxed.

integrated, less fussy. It was so beautiful to see how mama going back through her experience, and daddy, a big important part was when dad, because he had to drive the car a million miles an hour to follow the helicopter, you know, and get to the hospital. It was just like, wow, a movie.

You're going to be worried.

hmm.

That's so key, I was just letting my person know they're out there, that will be a moment. Um,

And I've worked with all kinds of issues across the life cycle. And when I can anchor all the way back to the foundation of someone's first impressions, it heals their adult experiences. It starts to make a, like connect the dots. In, oh, that's why this was happening in my childhood. Oh, that's why at, at teenage it really amps up because you're going through hormones like you went through during birth.

So I'd love to share more. I say my books, you know, I have a free PDF library. I have lots of resources because I think this healing is so deep, so profound, and so accessible now.

You're welcome. It was wonderful to visit with you and I look forward to next time.