Episode Transcript
Hi, this is Rachel. We're here with Lisa Erickson, and she's going to tell us a little bit about herself. Hi, Rachel. Thanks for having me. I am a meditation teacher, a mindfulness teacher, and an energy work worker. That means I guide primarily women through guided techniques to help with trauma healing, personal healing, addiction counseling, and many other things. I specialize in women's energetics, personal development, and stress management. Fair enough.
How did you get into this type of work? Well, I had some health crises right after the birth of my first daughter. I had long been a meditator for personal reasons, but at that point I became very interested in the role that meditation, mindfulness, and especially chakra meditation, which has to do with focusing on energy centers in your body, can aid with physical healing. And at that time, I moved more into that kind of work, eventually started counseling women and encountered a lot of trauma issues that were really part of the healing process overall. So that's really how I get into it, first as a personal journey and then based on the women that I was working with and the histories that they had and the various issues that that contributed to in their lives, what is Char K and Ingenic release? Yeah. Well, the chakras are energy centers in our body according to a lot of different traditions. Chakra itself is an ancient word coming from the East, but really there are energy healing traditions from all over the world, and they all posit that we have an energy mapping that corresponds to our physical mapping. So anyone who's heard of acupuncture, for example, or Reiki. Or to some extent even yoga is actually based on the idea of us having this energy body and it interfaces with both our psyche and our physical body. So the idea behind chakra meditation or working with different mindfulness and meditation practices with your energy body is that you can be holding old wounds, old psychological wounds in particular emotionally in your body, in your energy body. And it causes stress response. We talk often about things like PTSD, having triggers, getting activated by things that happen in your current life that make you respond as if it's something from your past that traumatized you, etcetera. So this is a method for working with how those are stored in your body and helping to release them so that in the present moment you can recognize, oh, this isn't actually. From the past. This is actually just this moment right now. This conflict does not mean I'm about to get hit or a bomb's about to go off or whatever your past trauma was. And I can stay in the present in this moment without getting triggered into the old pattern. So that's really what is meant by release. OK
And why is this type of type of healing for trauma and sexual abuse survivors so helpful? It really depends on the person, but I think part of what trauma does is it can make you, especially sexual trauma, develop the pattern of disconnecting from your body. And initially that's a survival response, especially in the case of sexual abuse, but really for children in particular, for all different kinds of physical abuse. It could have just been a survival response that developed to sort of almost leave your body, go away. But then as an adult, that can mean someone's very disconnected from their body. And so talk therapy can just keep someone in their head. They can talk all about it and talk and talk, but they never feel like the underlying emotional patterns change. And so then when they're in a stressful moment in the current in their current life, they still kind of go away. Or they go, they go into fight flight or you know, we talk about fight flight or freeze, right. Or maybe they get really combative. So that's the fight response. But they have some sort of habitual response around stress. So I think for sexual trauma survivors, this kind of work is the most helpful because it keeps you in your body and it keeps you working with that pent up energy, whether it's stress or anger or fear that gets triggered in the body and you learn how to work with that through breath. Through different release techniques so that you don't get triggered into the traumatized response most definitely.
And
how has sexual abuse impacted and manifest in the body? Well, the one is 1 I just mentioned is developing a pattern of leaving the body, kind of disconnecting from the body and that can that can then have all sorts of ramifications. Someone can have difficulty taking care of their body, leading a healthy lifestyle. Maybe they have body shame, they hate their body. Obviously they can have issues with sexuality and challenges in regard to that. And a lot of times there could just be holding a lot of anxiety in the body all the time, which then has to. Be medicated in some way so it can contribute to addiction, right. Because that's the way of self medicating that anxiety. So these are the main things that get held in the body from trauma. And these kinds of healing techniques can help someone learn how to let them go.
OK And you've written some books. Tell us a little bit about those. Yeah. Well, the book most relevant to I think this conversation is called Chakra Empowerment for Women. And it is really 12 tools that someone brand new to this kind of work can use on their own to try to begin to work with the chakra system, the energy body system as a method for aiding their healing process.
OK,
you mentioned yoga being part of the healing process. Tell us a little bit more about that. Yoga can be and other kinds of mind. Body exercise methods can be really helpful because they're mostly focused on how do you stay present in your body as you're moving. So that helps counter any dissociative tendencies, any tendencies to kind of leave the body, go away, escape in the mind, space out, get on your phone, whatever it is to escape anxiety, as opposed to learning how to stay present and work through it in the moment. So mind body exercise helps you to do that, you know, as opposed to, you know, getting on the treadmill and just putting music in your ears that that's perfectly fine form of exercise, but it wouldn't qualify as mind body because you're not actually working on staying present in your body, you're just, you know. So yoga and other things that that really cause you to try to stay present in the body has this impact of helping to counter dissociative tendencies. Okay.
What would you say is the most helpful in treatment that has been the most powerful that you have seen? Yeah, the most helpful technique, which. Yeah, yeah, I think the most powerful. You know, the chakra system has seven main chakras. They go from your tailbone all the way up to your crown, and they're each associated with different glands and different body parts, but also different psychological aspects. Focusing on the root chakra, which is the first one at the tailbone, the base of the spine, and it is the base of our nervous system, the base of our skeletal system. Doing mindfulness exercises around this and learning how to bring the energy up are really some of the most helpful. And they really can transform someone's relationship to their body and give them a way of, you know, staying present in the moment, not going into fight, flight or freeze. When they get triggered by an environment.
OK Can you give me an example of what would you do on a typical day when, what would I do? Yeah. Or treat like with, you know, say I was walking on as a patient, What would be some of the first things that you were to teach me? And, you know, how would I go about that? Well, if someone has a background in trauma and that's really what they're here for, I do most of my sessions by zoom and phone. And so I would initially, after talking with you probably guide you through what's called the root bowl, which is also the first technique in my book and it's it is one that focuses on that root chakra and on feeling safe in the body. And what we would work with is memories, most recent memories of moments where. You would. You have felt stressed, triggered anxiety and you think it's habitual, meaning it's it's a trigger from something in your past. So maybe you're walking to the grocery store and someone bumps into you, but maybe any sort of physical contact causes you to really go into almost a panic attack mode. That's an example, for example, the client that I recently worked with, right? Any physical, you know, even accidental physical contact out in the world can do that. So we would practice in that memory, breathing through it, staying present, focusing on this root ball technique. At first, you're just doing it with past memories. It takes time to be able to do it in the moment. It's really a skill that you build up over time. So we would work on that over time, kind of walk me through that process. So we would. Imagine that you're in that supermarket and that person is just bumped into you. And I would ask you to describe what happens in your body. Right. And usually someone will say, well, I kind of freeze up. I feel like I can't move, My breath gets really short, my heart starts beating really fast, right. So then we practiced reversing that, right? We usually, I like it's individual for the person because you have to work with. What is the most helpful? For
some people, something visual is really helpful. So the root bowl is based on this idea that like a visual of you're in this protective bubble, right? We focus on the root chakra because that activates that energy of safety in your body. And we would, I would have you practice, I'm safe in my body in this moment. In this moment, I am safe in my body and really trying to feel that and breathe and reverse it. And then imagine in that moment that you did that. You took your supermarket cart and you kept going, right? And then I would ask this person to be practicing that root bowl meditation for a couple minutes a day if possible, between our sessions, and we'd keep working with it from week to week.
Okay. And how long does this process usually take to work before you start seeing results? Yeah, there's different ways to answer that. It depends on what other work someone has done, right? If they're in therapy, if they're also working on addiction issues, you know, what are they working on, right? But in general, in terms of just being able to feel the energies of a chakra, if someone focuses, does it a little bit each day, they usually really begin to feel it within 6 to 8 weeks. Now, does that mean they feel it in their body? They feel an energy there and they feel a sense of something shifting when they activate the tool at home? Now at what point are they going to be able to, in their day if they're triggered, utilize it? That's going to vary a lot based on the person's level of nervous system, dysregulation and their level of self-awareness. All of that takes time to build up, but usually within a couple of months,
okay, What's your success rate? You know, that's hard to measure because I really think healing is this ongoing process, I think. Most people benefit from the work. If someone doesn't then you know it's not the right modality and I try to help them find the right modality for them because I think everyone's journey is different. So in terms of do most people benefit? Yes. I think most people feel they benefit right. I don't I don't know if there's you can go oh are 90% of people never act triggered again by their, you know trauma based stress. Unfortunately we know from studies trauma just isn't really like that. You can get to a place where things that used to traumatize you don't anymore. Do you get to a place where you can handle absolutely everything? Well, there's always events in life that might cause you again to go into a stress response. So I don't know. I don't want to. I'm not trying to hedge on the answer. But I also think that sometimes it's not helpful to people to feel like there's this magic place where all the. All you're just magically healed and none of that stuff from the past ever happens. Because I get a lot of people that have gone to a lot of other They've gone through therapy and they've gone through this and they feel like they're a failure because they're not to that point. And they don't recognize the progress that they have made and that it really is a lifelong journey.
OK, what do you do for self-care? Well, I do meditate myself. I also like to walk at this point. That's my main form of exercise I like to read. I definitely am someone who needs a certain amount of time to myself each day, so I try to find that and usually it's a little bit of reading. So those are my main forms of selfcare would be meditation and walking and reading. OK? Is there anything else you would like to tell us about the process or like how would I go about finding someone that does this type of process? Yeah, well if you want to try it on your own and you want to try like something like my book, you can go to enlightenedenergetics.com or Amazon and look up chalk empowerment for women. Otherwise, you know there are you can look up energy healers, but we all work in different ways or meditation classes in your area. A lot of hospitals nowadays are offering meditation classes. They aren't necessarily energy work meditation classes like I've been talking about, but all different kinds of mindfulness and meditation can be helpful. So you can look at your local hospital and community centers and see if they offer anything. I think the one thing I would say is if someone has trauma in their background to make sure the person is trauma sensitive, trauma informed, they understand the way the body gets activated during trauma. Because if not, then maybe you won't feel comfortable with that person. Yeah, I mean, I do acupuncture and sometimes it'll just knock me out for a day. And I think maybe that's just my way, my body's way of responding. To processing the trauma, Yeah. Well, and I'll say something like acupuncture is a great example. I've had people who felt like they need, if they're going to go to an acupuncture or a physical body worker, they need someone who's going to explain everything they're doing. They don't like anything to be a surprise or they go into a panic response, right. Someone who's trauma sensitive knows that and they know to do that. Someone who isn't might not. And they might just have you lay down and they start sticking needles in and and someone not ready for that could be traumatized. Retraumatized, right. So that's what I mean by trauma sensitivity
is finding someone who will work with you and that you feel like it's sensitive to your needs. Okay.
Is this similar to Reiki Reiki? Well, Reiki is Reiki healing, which I'm also trained in, is really directing energy into someone. And and I do do that in person work. But this kind of work that I do in the book is more work that you're doing internally with your own awareness. It's more meditative. You're focusing on a chakra and activating that energy yourself as opposed to someone else directing energy into your chakras. So in that sense, if if it's the right modality for someone, it's very empowering. Because you're not dependent on someone else to activate that energy for yourself. OK. Is there anything else you would like to add that I have not brought up? No. I guess I would just say I think everyone's healing's journey is different. And to be if you've never tried something like this, give it a try and you might be surprised. If it's not for you, it's not for you, Right? But some people are surprised. Yeah. OK. All right. I think that's it. Is there anything else I forgot to mention? No, I think that's great. Thank you. I'm glad you're covering these topics. All right. Thanks, guys, for listening. Always TuneIn on Thursdays at 10:00 AM Follow us on your favorite podcast or social media platform. And always, if you have any questions, reach out to Rachel on recovery.com. And Lisa's information will be in the bottom of the episodes
summary. Thank you.
