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Ep126: Food as Trauma Recovery with Luis Mojica

Updated: 1 day ago


What if the food on your plate is silently driving your anxiety, depression, and stress—without you ever knowing it? 


Aimee Takaya sits down with Luis Mojica, a somatic educator, certified holistic nutritionist, and author of the book Food Therapy: Conscious Eating to Navigate Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma. 


Together, they explore the hidden link between what we eat and how our nervous system responds, revealing that food isn't just fuel or medicine—it's a powerful environmental force that can either amplify our trauma or help us heal it. 


If you've ever felt trapped in cycles of emotional eating, orthorexia, or unexplained mood swings after meals, this episode will forever change how you see food. 


Luis takes us through:

  • Why food can trigger a fight-or-flight response just like a threatening event 

  • The difference between stimulants, depressants, and balancing foods 

  • Why "healthy eating" can actually worsen anxiety if your nervous system isn't ready 

  • How food allergies can sometimes be trauma responses in disguise 

  • A simple somatic practice to track tension and ask your body what it needs 

And so much more! 


Guest Bio

Luis Mojica is a Somatic Educator, certified in Holistic Nutrition, and author of Food Therapy: Conscious Eating to Navigate Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma. With years of experience working at the intersection of trauma and healing, Luis has become a sought-after teacher and speaker in his field. He reaches thousands of students annually through his online courses and webinars, and hosts the Holistic Life Navigation Podcast. 

Can be purchased wherever you buy your books [Amazon, Book Shop, and others]



Connect with Luis Mojica


Connect with Aimee:

Instagram: @aimeetakaya 

Facebook: Aimee Takaya 

Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠www.freeyoursoma.com⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠



LISTEN WHILE READING!

A: Hey there listener, welcome back to Free Your Soma. I'm Aimee Takaya, and today we're going to explore the intersection between trauma recovery and food. This is a very important topic for me personally, and I'm super excited to have Luis Mojica here, a somatic educator and certified holistic nutritionist of nearly 20 years.


We're going to explore his book Food Therapy, Conscious Eating to Navigate Anxiety, Stress and Trauma, coming out at the end of April, 2026. Please stay for this conversation. I'm sure you'll get a lot out of it. I know I will. And as usual, just enjoy the conversation, enjoy the journey.


A: Every day there is a forgetting, and every moment there is the possibility of remembering, remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world, to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy and here is where you free your soma. I'm your host, Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power, from tension to expansion and ultimately from fear to love. Hello Luis, so nice to finally have you here on my podcast.


L: Yeah, Aimee, I appreciate being welcomed in. Thank you.


A: Yeah, thank you. I mean, I was saying this before we started recording but I've been following you for a while. One of my clients that I was working with a few years ago turned me on to your work and I've been following the conversation and I love just how deep you go into also sharing your own personal story and using that as a beautiful example of kind of what it really means to be in a recovery process in your physical human body and all of the layers of things that we carry and are challenged by.


So that you have this book Food Therapy where you're tying us all in with eating. I just, I think it's really apt right now. I think it's a really important intersection that's not being talked about and so I'm very thrilled to have you on the podcast to explore this deeper today.


L: Me too. Thank you so much for having me here.


A: Yeah, so maybe for our listeners who aren't familiar with your work, maybe you can give us kind of a way into understanding like how is it that you came to be a somatic educator, like giving us kind of the short rundown version maybe that they might find in your website or the book?


L: Yeah, well, I was always very curious about the human mind. So I was studying college psychology in my senior year of high school and then I went to college to major in psychology. But as I was doing that, I was paying my bills at a health food store right across the street from the college. And while I was working at the health food store, I started reversing all these conditions in my body that I was told would never reverse just from eating differently and taking herbs and supplements. And it blew my mind because I did not come from a holistic culture at all. So the thought that I could eat something, which was also part of my disorder at the time, that I could eat something and that would heal my body was it felt like a miracle.


So I couldn't stop talking about it and helping people and customers would come in and they would see my enthusiasm. And I would see them start transforming and they would get off their SSRIs and they'd get off their medications and their chronic illnesses would reverse. And I would think, I'm going to school for an eight year program to identify people's disorders and then send them to psychiatrists to medicate them.


I don't think I can do that anymore. So I dropped out, studied nutrition instead, and really worked as a nutritionist in private practice for a long time, 10 to 12 years, until I got really interested in somatics because I wanted more information about what was happening underground, right? There were these behaviors around food. And as a nutritionist, we were really talked to be curious about the behavior, but we still didn't understand enough about trauma. I had no trauma training. So it took a three year somatic experiencing program and did tons of mentoring and studying and shadowing with so many different amazing teachers. And then these two worlds came together and I started working as what people call a trauma nutritionist.


A: Fantastic. Yes. And it's a very needed area because I think a lot of people are not aware of how food affects them. They see food as just entertainment or it's something that they do as needed or to fuel their workout or whatnot. And people are not necessarily tuned into the nervous system response that their food habits are linked to, right? And how we can get really, not just addicted to the food, but addicted to the relief we experience or the shift in our physiology that we experience when we eat something. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like how is it that when we eat something, our physiological response can interact with our trauma? Yes.


L: So that's what really in 2018, I had this epiphany right when I was about to begin training and somatic experiencing. And the epiphany was what you just said that food actually creates a response in the nervous system, a firefly response, just like a stressful event or a threatening event or a car accident would.


And I had only been trained in food as a way of healing illness. I never thought of it as the way it impacts the nervous system. You know, no one ever talks about that.


And my medical colleagues, none of my doctors that I know, no one talked about that, no one really learned about that. But what was fascinating was this one biochemist, her name is Karen Herd. She's an incredible woman and she wrote a bunch of books about soluble fiber and food and how it affects adrenaline.


And she had become my mentor. And she really put together these two missing pieces, which are any food that essentially spikes your glucose is going to create a fight or flight response anywhere from a half hour to an hour and a half after eating these foods. And that was the moment that I really finally understood what was going on with my clients, but simultaneously understood this massive gap that was missing in the field of psychology and trauma, because we were talking about getting people into rooms for an hour a week to undo decades of trauma response, which essentially just means an overactive, hyper-vigilant nervous system.


But if you're going into therapy for one hour a week, and then 12 to 16 waking hours a day, you're stimulated because of what you're eating, you're barely putting a dent in any nervous system recovery. So I started understanding, well, food itself could be seen as a form of trauma therapy, not as this nice way to lose weight, which we think of it that way. Or like you said, entertain ourselves, but it could actually be a trauma therapy itself because of how it impacts the nervous system. Beautiful.


A: You know, it's so interesting because in my own personal journey, so much of what you're describing, like I hear it and I'm just like, yes, this is absolutely true. When I was a child, I had some really challenging health issues that led to early onset puberty. So that's part of my story is that I went through puberty at the age of eight. And that was very traumatic.


And I ended up, you know, begging my mother to homeschool me and food was my number one thing that helped me cope, right, during that time, which is why I relate so much to, you know, for those of you who are familiar with Louise's work, the way that you talk about your early experiences, you know, in this intersection of how we relate to our bodies and the, you know, the sexuality of culture at large and how we can find comfort, right?


Specifically, the easiest source is like food. It's so primal. It's so immediate, the relief or that sense of regulation, you know, so I completely relate to what you're saying.


And that was intertwined in my nervous system for a very long time. You know, especially things that are sugary and very high in saturated fat like ice cream, classic comfort foods, those are the things that I would gravitate towards. And when I was 11, I finally, my mother took me to a functional medicine doctor and they ran a bunch of tests and I was told I was allergic to dairy and soy, which basically in 2001 or whatever meant no processed food, right? So we did this aggressive transition of my diet away from the things that I had been eating that were, you know, my, my regulators in some way, right, because of how stressed and full of trauma my body was, meaning overactive my, you know, nervous system was.


And then now I, you know, took away those comforts. It felt like I was, I was like going crazy, you know, as a child, I felt like I was going to lose my mind not being able to have these things. But my health within three months of, you know, stepping away from gluten or well later on, it was gluten, but dairy and soy and again, that meant no processed food at that time meant that I was eating more whole foods and my body started to heal.


My nervous system started to heal, right? Granted, I was still in like the situation I was in and I was 13 and you can imagine it's like everybody knows that's not easy anyway, right? But what you're describing, I've lived, I've lived it. I've seen that interaction and it, you know, it continued on the struggle like in high school, I was like, oh, I just want to be normal and eat pizza. I just want to eat what all my friends are eating. And so I would stop, you know, taking care of myself by eating these things that I knew my body didn't like or that had these responses.


And, you know, it took me a long time to break out of this paradigm of like, I have food allergies and instead see it as this more complex interactive trauma response that I was having. And, you know, I think that, and maybe you can speak to this the way that people can get what do they call it where you're like orthorexic, where you're obsessed with like eating healthy. I went through a phase like that in my 20s as well, where, you know, again, in this attempt to kind of heal myself, I was actually keeping myself in a stress pattern around food. So maybe that's, that's a great segue into like, you know, even as we're trying to attempting to recover and heal, what are some of the things that we end up doing around food that get in the way?


L: So much there. The first thing is just understanding that I see us as unconscious alchemists. And I have a whole chapter in the book called Becoming a Conscious Alchemist. Because just like you said, these bodies are so intelligent. So if you're going through something like you went through, then we have a parallel story. And you have all this trauma in the body. For people listening, when we're saying all this trauma in the body, we're saying a overproduction of adrenaline, which is our fight or flight hormone, which creates an over excite excitation of the brain and the nervous system itself, tense muscles, higher blood pressure, quicker heart rate, this is whole biological expression that that emerges from high adrenaline, high levels of adrenaline.


And so when you have trauma in the body, you have this overproduction of these stress hormones and changes your whole physiology. So these bodies will immediately within a split second know exactly what food to go to to start quelling that. And the one way I like to categorize the food so we can get away from healthy unhealthy, because that can be confusing. And it's endless contradictions of what's healthy and unhealthy.


I put them into three simple categories based on the nervous system and how they affect it, stimulants, depressants and balancing foods. And when you understand food through this lens, then you get to this place of, okay, I eat ice cream at night, because it slows me down, it softens the pain, it helps me fall asleep. It's a great depressant. Or I have coffee in the morning, I have chocolate in the morning, I skip breakfast in the morning, because it's a great stimulant.


So we see foods not as again, right or wrong, good or bad, but how are they affecting my nervous system? Because then it teaches you what your baseline is. If I'm really dependent on these depressants, my baseline is quite anxious and overwhelmed. If I'm really dependent on the stimulants, my baseline is quite depressed and underwhelmed and I'll have a lot of motivation or energy, especially true for people with ADHD and neurodivergence, they'll really, really rely on the stimulating foods and food habits to get that dopamine hit to motivate them to do something that they can't move through, right?


Because freeze response takes over. So we are constantly moving when you sit about processed foods, stimulants and depressants, most of the processed foods fall into those categories. So we're depending on those to get through these things that we don't know how to hold ourselves. And when you don't have agency to change your circumstance, especially when you're that young, sometimes the only agency you have is to eat something to shift your biology, even for a couple of minutes, right? So it gives you a little break from the hell you feel when you're holding all that stored energy.


A: Did you know that your muscles are holding onto thoughts, memories and feelings? If you have a tight neck or back, you're not just getting old, you're experiencing a buildup of tension from the life you've lived. Most people don't know this, but there is a part of your brain that can reverse and prevent chronic tension. When you relax your muscles, you not only move better and regulate your nervous system, but you also free yourself from the grip the past has over your body. So you can live with freedom, confidence and enjoy your life now. How does that sound?


Join me, Aimee Takaya and discover what my clients are raving about at youcanfreeyoursoma.com. Right, but it becomes this really hard and fast loop when those foods actually increase, you know, the adrenaline production in our body when they actually keep us in that cycle of needing them in order to recover, right? And that's where the somatic piece comes in, which is how can we diversify and create more tools for you to experience a new lower and lower baseline so that those foods are less compelling, that you have other ways of getting those needs met.


So maybe you can tell us a little bit about that intersection, like when people are starting to realize like, oh, okay, maybe they call it emotional eating or comfort eating, and they're trying to shift away from that. What are some of the really necessary things they're going to need to do to support themselves so that that actually works? Absolutely.


L: Well, the first thing to understand is like you said, you're increasing your stress response without even realizing it. So the temporary relief you get from stimulating or depressing your body based on where your system is, just wanting to come up, it's wanting to go down. It's a temporary relief that then results in more stress hormones.


So it literally becomes this loop of the very foods I'm relying on to manage my stress are now compounding and increasing my stress because the way they treat the adrenals or, you know, affect the adrenals and the nervous system. So one thing to understand is when we talk about the balancing foods, these are mostly whole foods. The top three balancing foods are beans or legumes, green vegetables, and proteins.


And protein can be vegan or animal, and we can get into that later if that feels important. But those are the three groups I like to start with. So people get a sense of what do we mean by balancing? When you start bringing in more of those balancing foods, these are not exciting foods to eat.


They're very humble. They're very neutralizing to the body. They don't create a big hit of dopamine. So you don't really crave them, nor do you have an issue with eating too much of them. You usually eat exactly how much you need and your body tells you when you're done. But what that means somatically, and this is where it really helped me as nutritionist, because you would put someone on a diet or a protocol, they would follow it mostly short term for maybe six weeks, three months, have tremendous outcomes, including a reduction in anxiety, better sleep, weight loss, cholesterol lowering, all these things. But then they couldn't maintain it because when you're bringing in balancing foods, and you're bringing down the depressants and stimulants, you're titrating in emotions now.


Yes. It's right when you're going between stimulants and depressants, what I call seesaw regulation, you're consistently softening your own receptivity of your emotional states. So unmetabolized traumatic experiences, memories, needs, feelings you have about people or your life, all those things come up to us through what we call anxiety, that pressure, that rush, that building overwhelm that comes up the chest. It's something wanting to express itself. And we learned from a very young age how to repress that with many things, but especially food use are the primary repressor of that. So as you're taking out your stimulants and depressants, you're titrating in more of that sensation.


And this is why people will quote eat healthier and then have much more emotional turmoil in the long term, because all these things are coming up to meet them, especially people who eat from a traumatic body or traumatized body. So this is the piece that a lot of us are missing. This is the piece psychologists and therapists are missing. This is the piece nutritionists and the doctors are missing. You can tell someone exactly what to eat. They can do it, but only for as long as they have the capacity to feel their emotions.


A: Right. And tools and ways to actually interact with those sensations that are coming up instead of finding another way to suppress them. Let's talk about this intersection for a moment, because I feel like it kind of ties in really well here with the way people can over exercise or over stimulate through physical activity.


Right. And that's the other end of this for people who are kind of coming from diet culture is like, okay, I'm eating healthy and I'm like exercising a lot. And that can, that can be like a legitimate way.


Someone's nervous system helps move out stress is through physical movement. Right. But it can also burn their adrenals out more.


It can be too stimulating. Right. And then they crash, you know, or they get injured because they don't have that awareness. They're still in that trauma body. They're still dissociated. Right. And then this can become part of that loop of just exhausting their nervous system. Yes.


L: And that's why I really love so the one thing, the way I teach and understand somatics, because it's such an umbrella term, it can mean so many things for people at this point, is really two things is the ability to track sensations. So that means I'm witnessing different sensations in my body, particularly the two I like to focus on the umbrella of tension and the umbrella of softness. So can you notice where in your body you're bracing?


Can you notice where in your body or not? That's the first kind of important practice around somatics. The second is that how do I relate to that? And I see somatics through an animistic lens. So the body is not me.


It's this, you know, beautiful creature I've inherited. So how do I relate to it? How do I take care of it?


How do I speak to it? If I feel a tension in my chest, most of us get so identified with the tension that we say things like, I'm anxious. When really there's anxiety in my chest, that's not me, it's something in my body. So that ability to track tension shows me where my body's bracing. And then the ability to respond to it, there's a bunch of practices we can go into later on or in the moment about that, but to respond to it and literally touch into it.


And you start to feel it respond to you. It's a very biofeedback. Yeah, it's a beautiful psychedelic experience that people experience on psychedelics. It's the biofeedback, the body's responding to your conscious attention to it. So I'm just bringing that in because without that, you can't really understand what we're talking about on a somatic level.


You can cognitively hear this, but cognitively you're thinking, well, I eat organic, I have a smoothie every morning, and I work out like an hour a day. What's wrong with that? Nothing's wrong with it, but it's some of that can be stimulating to your nervous system. So fruit juice, for example, fruit juice is a massive nervous system stimulator. Tropical fruits are a nervous system stimulator for a lot of people because how they affect glucose.


Just like you said, exercising, especially exercising on an empty stomach and then having caffeine stimulating for the nervous system. It doesn't mean we're trying to avoid stimulating the nervous system. It's where your nervous system already is. The baseline is already stimulated, putting more stimulation on that then has these other side effects people don't really want or understand why they have because they're quote living a healthy lifestyle. So to track the body, to track how stimulation feels, to track how the depressant qualities of food feels, and to track how the balancers feel, your body becomes your barometer, right?


So then when you're eating a certain meal, you realize, whoa, I didn't know this was a stimulator. Sushi, the amount of people I work with who eat sushi and have no clue that is driving the stress response for hours after they eat it because most sushi is predominantly white rice. So it's a refined carbohydrate and some sushi even has sugar added to the water that the rice is treated with. So you're eating this sushi, it's a health food and it is on many levels. There's no doubt yet it's spiking your glucose. And then for four hours, you're having a fight or flight response, which you can see on the glucose reading.


And I use a lot of those to help track my clients bodies. So I'm just kind of bringing this all in so we can get a sense of it's not as easy as calling something healthy or not. We have to embody the effect the food has on the body within minutes and hours of eating it. It's not like long term health effects. Nervous system effects are pretty, pretty immediate.


A: And every person's body is different in terms of their responses, which is the also like very interesting somatic layer here. You know, I'm sure everybody knows that person who can eat a bunch of chocolate chip cookies and seem like fine. And then someone else eats a bunch of chocolate chip cookies and they're passed out on the couch, or they're like really amped up and anxious, you know, because we're all resting at a different baseline in our physiology. And we all have different microbiomes and we all have different genetics.


And so this really does become a personal practice, you know, where you need to kind of embrace your own experience, your subjective experience, while at the same time, you know, these, these pieces of data, right, that you're also going to light, which is these generalizations, we got to be able to see that macro view, but then really at the end of the day, narrow down to our own personal experience. Yes.


L: And that's why I love somatics, because there's research that will say, you know, a thousand people out of 8 billion on the planet had this experience with chocolate. And it's true for those thousand people. But there's billions of other people are going to interact with chocolate, and they're going to have their own experience because how that stimulant affects them, it might actually turn into a depressant. It might be a perfect amount of stimulation that they metabolize really well. Like there are people who can metabolize coffee really well.


They sleep beautifully at night, they don't get jittery, it really works for the bodies. There's other people that are slower metabolizers, so they can't sleep at night, they wake up with anxiety, they're jittery. So your body really shows you how it shows you how much you can handle of these different food groups, based on sensation. And this is what I'm trying to teach through the book. There's a difference between eating for health, the way we think of health, like a long-term health outcome, like aging really gracefully, not having inflammation or having glowing skin.


Great, enjoy that. And then there's immediate effects, meaning how does my nervous system respond to the lunch I have, an hour after I have it, right? What's my energy level? Where are my emotions?


How's my heart rate? These are all the ways the nervous system shows you how it's actually being affected by that food. And that's an immediacy. So when you eat the balancing foods and you learn especially which ones really work for you, you immediately feel it within four hours.


You have this experience of being way more neutral, way more calm, way more open, having more capacity even for stress. Even if you're on a long-term diet for a health issue, that might take six or seven months to achieve whatever the goal is, but the nervous system response is within minutes. So I really like to separate eating to regulate your nervous systems over here, eating to reverse health conditions in age or over here. So they're two different things, but they can work together. Beautiful.


A: I love that breakdown. And also the fact that we're living in this dynamic, ever-changing body with ever-changing environments for some people, right? Where we're maybe traveling or we're not living in the same place from year to year or from decade to decade, right? And all of these different environmental factors, they can change the way that our nervous system is responding to food.


I know that was very true for me, which was that certain foods or ways that I was eating at a certain point in my life when I had a certain kind of environment, right? When I was like, I used to teach Bicram hot yoga. That's part of my own story, like very extreme, very adrenaline based yoga. So the foods that I would feel really good eating while I was engaged in that practice and in a hot room every day, sweating my guts out, is very different than the foods that worked for my body when I was meditating and being very still and having a very down-regulated or down-regulating state.


So being able to be able to kind of understand that it's a dynamic living process, it's not fixed, right? What we're going to need changes. And that's why developing that somatic awareness and that real-time moment-to-moment, sensational checking in and being with and assessing and then making a moment-to-moment intuitive plan for yourself, right?


L: Yes, that's exactly it. That's why the health outcomes aren't enough for me, because that's all I used to focus on. All my clients would be, I need to lose 20 pounds. I need to lower my cholesterol.


I need to support myself through chemo. Like all these really important things. And they were pretty successful doing it because food is incredible medicine. So it works very quick for the body.


So I had a very high success rate. However, what I didn't have a high success rate with, because I didn't know, was how to have these people relate to their bodies in the process. Because you can dissociate and look at a protocol for a year and have amazing benefits occur. But you're not noticing how your body is writhing, even while you're having these health benefits. Because you can fuel adrenaline and at the same time reverse certain side effects of different chemicals, life experiences, illnesses.


The two can go together, which is why it can be really confusing. But your example with Bicram is a great one. I used to do lots of Bicram yoga. And I remember I would have a giant coconut water afterwards.


Like a banana and some dates and an apple. I was just riding the wave of stimulation all morning. And every day at lunch, I would have this massive adrenal crash.


And I couldn't figure out why. And what I would tell myself as I was detoxing, this is right, because detox is a big part of our story when we're feeling low, when we're doing healthy things. I'm detoxing, I'm detoxing, this is good, I'm detoxing, but like years are going by and I never finally detoxed. And so I learned looking back now that I understand this, I was highly activating my adrenals first thing finally I'm class in the morning.


A: Oh yeah. And I mean, I, you know, I have my own complicated story with teaching Bicram yoga, you know, globally and just that, you know, the, what is it the year after I got certified was when Bicram's whole thing just blew up. So it was like, Oh, wow, I just invested $11,000. I got connected to this international community. I'm like traveling.


This is like my livelihood. And now there's this incredibly divisive, difficult thing that I'm having to like figure out how to navigate. You know, so, you know, I have my own like drink in the Kool-Aid, you know, be an in it story, but like, you know, the the way that so many patterns of adrenal burnout were just part of that community.


And there was no understanding of it. And people were, you know, they, and they would attribute it to the benefits of yoga. Sometimes two people be like, I have so much energy. Like I don't need to sleep. I just, I sleep like four hours a night. I feel so energized and like, I just drink juice every day and do like two, three hours of yoga and blah, you know, and the truth is like, you know, if you were kind of to come out of the bubble of that and like look at what was happening to some of these people, they were underweight, they had bags under their eyes, their eyes were like bugging out of their head. Like their thyroid was just on like hype, alert.


L: Yes, it was. It was. And, and yeah, and it wasn't sustainable. You know, I had a really cool conversation with a lady at a farmer's market one time. I told her, I used to teach Bikram Yoga. She was like, Oh, so you were an addict. And I was like, what? And she's like, the intersection between people who go crazy for Bikram Yoga and were previously an addicts of mind is huge because she said it. She's like, you're not going to get another high higher than when you know how to do it and you do it well in a Bikram Yoga class. Like that's the next It's true heroin.


Right. This is a great example of the association I'm talking about because I remember that the, oh my gosh, the first 15 minutes of every Bikram class were like torture. I'm like, why am I doing this to myself?


I have 75 minutes in here. And then something would shift the endorphins would kick in the adrenaline and kick in, I would dissociate slightly. I wouldn't fully be in my body becoming in and out. And I mean, that's, that's what addiction is all about. It's what do I do that can temporarily take me out of something I'm holding. And the way this gets branded or rebranded dissociation gets rebranded in spiritual communities is exactly what you're saying. Before I did Bikram, I did Kundalini.


A: It is the same. It's Kundalini. Everyone is chasing the awakening. They're waiting for this moment and this massive Kundalini energy going up their spine is trauma response. And so every time we're engaging in these really high vibrational practices, they're really high adrenaline practices. Then that fuels you to have high adrenaline results or foods you're looking for that create that adrenal response. So you're just running on fight or flight all day and your community is calling it spiritually elevating or awakening or enlightening. And like you said, people will boast I only sleep three hours a day. I'm so high in my vibration.


I barely need to sleep. And they're actually right. Their vibration is actually so high.


They are vibrating because they're nervous system. So overwhelmed. They can't settle. They can't get into a restful state. And the amount of people I have worked with who have Kundalini induced psychosis and has taken them years to come out of it, it's profound. And I'm not saying that to say everyone does it gets Kundalini psychosis. It was a very important medicine for me when I started. But what you just said was important. If you have a history of trauma or history of addiction, those patterns go right into these exercise lifestyle wellness patterns, right?


Don't think. And they just feed the same physiology. And that's kind of one of these things that's quite interesting to look at too is that everybody has their free will in their agency. Everybody gets to choose what they want to spend their life doing. For some people who are on a very whatever kind of you might say like spiritual path that involves transcending their body that involves not being in their body but being in the next dimension, right? There are people who choose that path.


And then at the end of the day, when I discovered the word somatic and started studying this and understanding it was like, Oh, wow, like, this is a totally different route than some of the things that I've been chasing and exploring or diving into when it comes to like even Vedic philosophy, right? Like we can choose the path of being here in our bodies in this kind of corporeal reality. But it comes with those kinds of serious like consequences of is this actually sustainable for my physical body to experience this, you know, enlightened state over and over and over to live in this super high vibrational state. Or is that actually going to shorten my lifespan? Yes.


L: And that's what interests me is as well when I discovered somatics and really, I mean, I eat, breathe, sleep, somatics. I'm like, I'm like obsessed. This is where my addiction has gone in the most wonderful way for me. Like, I finally have found an obsession with something that actually supports me and doesn't burn me out. But it's been almost 10 years of just this nonstop thinking, teaching, learning, experimenting, because it's the first time I really understood how to commute with my body. So it's like, and this is really what I hoped I wrote the book from.


This is like my goal with writing and how I hope people read it. It's not a diet book. It's not about there's something in it I call the quiet diet, which is just my name for these balancing foods and how to incorporate them.


But it's really a book to teach you how you and it's really philosophy to teach you how to commune with your body again. And food is one of the most prevalent tools of doing that because it's everywhere. We have to navigate it.


We have to eat it to survive. Why not use that as a barometer as a tool, not just to even regulate the nervous system, but to learn where you are through your habits. Because when you slow down and feel the sensations, the somatic experience behind an addiction or a craving or even like a food habit craving, like skipping breakfast, all these incredible unmet needs start to surface. Right. Like comfort and relational needs.


I want to travel, but I'm afraid to and historical trauma. I mean, I'll never forget the first client that really told me this. He was addicted to cocaine and he discovered through lots of somatic work for a couple of months that the cocaine helped him feel big because he was reminded about this era in his life as a little kid where he was molested. So this smallness of a little kid and someone bigger oppressing his body, the way his body, his psyche renegotiated that was, well, I'm never going to be small again.


I'm going to be always on, always alert. So even quitting Coke, it went to actual Coke, like the drink. And then it went to Diet Coke and then it went to coffee.


And it just, he kept finding stimulants. So just his food habits when we worked with him alone, traced back this unmetabolized trauma he had never even spoken about or thought about. So that's the power of using food in this way to get these unmet, you know, subconscious parts of us to come to the surface.


A: This makes so much sense. I mean, food in so many ways is kind of otherness, right? Just like our environment.


L: Food is an advice that we can in and it becomes and interacts with our internal environment. You know, this was something that really took me a while to like fully understand and grasp because, you know, like many people, I think who are drawn into these modalities, I had very poor, you know, proprioception and boundaries in my physical experience of my body. So when we talked about like this being mine and this being yours or this being the environment, and I was like, I don't know, like it's like all swirling around and just this confusing muddle all the time for me.


But as I started to gain more of an embodied experience and gain more proprioceptive awareness of the sensations in my body and what my body's doing and feeling and experiencing, right? And yes, tying that in with maybe the things I'd already, you know, determined about my life and talk therapy on like that mental plane. Now you can start, you know, playing with that like, okay, this otherness of food that I'm taking in is absolutely part of that interaction. It has the same quality as say a drug or a drink or a pill, because it's coming into my physical body and it's changing things. And it's changing them in a way that is either interacting with my trauma or suppressing it, which I guess you could say is another form of interacting with it.


Yes, that's exactly right. And two things you said I love, I love that you categorize it as an environment because exactly what I'm trying to teach people. We talk about how environment affects us, no one includes food. It's like for some reason we have become so dissociated from food as a relative, as a being is something that interacts like you said with us. And you're listing those things like medicines, drugs and people, right?


The way we are around people, we go to therapy all the time talking about people, my coworker, my boss, my mother, my child, we talk about how people affect us. Food is also a being, you know, it might not be a human being, but it is a living creature that has all this intelligence. So when you eat that food, you're eating its experience as well, animal and plant. So all these things are changing inside of your body. And your somatic experience, your sensational response tells you how your body is experiencing that.


But it also gives you a view, a window into your psyche. Because so many people I have worked with, they think they're moody, or they think they're unmotivated or they're depressed or they're miserable, but it's really a very healthy physiological response to nutrition and what they're eating, how it's affecting their brain chemicals. So one person's breakfast one day will make them feel completely hopeless about the world. Because their dopamine is just tanked, their serotonin is tanked, their adrenaline is off the charts. The same person the next day with a different breakfast, the world is amazing. They love everyone around them. They have so much capacity even to witness pain.


Everything shifts within a few minutes because of how their blood sugar is affected and how that affects brain chemistry. So it's yes, seeing food as part of our environment is so important because the one part of our environment we actually have a lot of say over. It's the one thing we can actually, I don't know, I like to use the word control, it's the one thing we can actually have a relationship with and affect change like moment to moment versus the bigger existential things, collective things. We as much as we want to don't have direct effect on those things. They take much longer. So I think it's a very important piece of the puzzle and conversation.


A: Oh yes, absolutely. And the way that food is personal and experiential and cultural and how we eat, that's something that I explored a lot because I had this belief and I had this somatic experience that for about 10 years, this was after high school, I discovered bickering yoga, I started eating healthy, I went raw food vegan for a year, I saw all these huge health benefits, my skin was glowing, I lost 30 pounds, I was fit and all these things that I never got to be when I was younger, kind of blossoming. And at the same time, I became what you could say is orthorexic in the sense that I was very strict about staying away from gluten, dairy and soy.


And I had a complex about it. I would get anxiety going to social events. And if I would eat something and I didn't know all of the ingredients that were in it, I didn't realize it at the time, but I would have this psychosomatic reaction of adrenaline spiking in my system, my digestion would shut down.


And whether or not it had soy sauce in it or not, I would experience it as like a dangerous thing to eat this food. And so it became this cycle that I was kind of trapped in for like 10 years of, you know, eating really, really healthy and well, like neurotically, you know, and then slipping off of that or being in an environment where I couldn't control all of the food things that I was eating, because I was again, traveling globally. So it was like, sometimes I just couldn't control that, right? And I would eat things that I wasn't sure about, and I would have this reaction to it.


And so how and the energy I bring to it. The other thing was like, I realized that so much in my early childhood, I ate as a way to like reward myself or punish myself. And sometimes it was like the exact same food that I was eating this with, right? It could be eating, you know, I'd walk down to like Safeway when I was like, whatever, like 10 or something, and I would buy a piece of white birthday cake with like the white frosting and I'd like sit in the graveyard and eat it.


It's such a weird, like, kind of, you know, morbid sort of experience, because I would, I would be eating the cake simultaneously to like, you know, praise myself or help myself feel good or is this like active self love the same time it was self harm, it was like, you know, your, your gross and fat or whatever the narrative of my 10 year old self was and just like, you know, eating the birthday cake and having this very multifaceted experience, you know, so the how we approach things, I think they're absolutely eating healthy, but they're eating healthy was so much anxiety and fear about it, that it almost like negates like those balancing foods if they're coming at it from like, I'm a problem and I need to be fixed and this food is going to fix me.


L: You're absolutely right. I had this phenomenon, we keep witnessing and observing and my clients over the years that at first I couldn't make sense of it seemed confusing, then it started making more sense, especially with the trauma piece coming in, is what you just said, how do I show up to food when you have a history of illness like I did, like you have, and you found that food cured that illness that can actually give birth to orthorexia, which is what we keep these words, what's where we keep saying, which when we show up to food with an extreme rigidity, because there's almost a panic of going outside of that, who's going outside of the means I'm going to be sick again, or I'm going to be fat again, or I might get cancer again, you know. Whatever the thing, the food were relieved, the food has now also been over coupled with that. So food itself is either a source of threat or a source of safety.


So when you're showing up to a meal and the body starts tensing, the body is going into a trauma response just in response to what might be in there and how is it going to affect me. And when we do that, we can't even break down the food. So there's all these studies that show that digestion gets impaired when fight or flight hormones increase.


And something as simple as praying over a meal, even like a really shitty diner meal, you know, just praying over it can increase your digestion by 30%. You have to make more enzymes when you go into parasympathetic states. So your actual ability to digest is impaired when you're activated. And so showing up to the food, how you relate to it, how you feel grateful for it, all that the actual relationship between you and the food you're eating is even more important than the compounds.


A: This was shocking to me when I started physically experiencing this because I think it was about, you know, eight or nine years and I was starting to basically question kind of started practicing somatics at this point, I started to question like, you know, am I really allergic to these things anymore? Like I've been living with this story that I have these food allergies, which is just the easiest way to explain to other people why I'm not going to eat whatever they're serving me, right?


But at the same time, like, is that really true? You know, and so I would start like experimenting by, you know, eating something. And again, just noticing the how I was doing it. And instead of telling myself the story like, oh, no, this could have something that's not good for you and it blah, blah, blah, whatever my analysis was of the food. Instead, I was like, well, what if this is actually just fine right now?


What if this is okay? You know, and I found that, you know, years of avoiding soy, I ate like some tofu, and I didn't have this horrible response to it that I was, you know, that I always had that made me believe I can't eat soy where my throat would get kind of itchy and, you know, my stomach would tighten and I would feel really lethargic for hours, you know, that was an experience I was having that I wasn't having anymore. And I was like, whoa, did I create some of that? Like, was that in part created by me and not actually from the tofu or the food that I was eating?


L: I write about that a little bit in the book because there's this philosophy, I think it's called German New Medicine or yeah, I do.


A: I know about this one. It's really interesting. It's brilliant, right?


L: And this philosophy is if you were going through a traumatic event or an era of trauma response, while these foods are plentiful in your diet, especially if these foods themselves were chemically altered or genetically modified from their original source, you will have an allergic like response to this food, because higher adrenaline means higher histamines. You can't break down the food as well. So you actually start having a histamine response to food you're not allergic to, but the trauma, the adrenaline is impairing your ability to break them down. So now your body associates them with something dangerous.


You're not actually allergic, but you have a response like you are because of that fight or flight. It's amazing. I had the same experience. You've gluten and dairy and soy and even corn at one point, all these four were like, nope, can't do these. And now I do them whenever I want to. I'm completely fine. There's no response.


A: Same for me, you know, and it speaks to the ability of your nervous system to reorganize and your consciousness to reorganize. Let's take this another step further if we're going to go into like the German new science category here, which is that they talk a lot about like polarities, right, and our masculine and feminine energies. I literally had this like, you know, kind of an aside, I have quite a story, but I was in a psych ward when I was 19.


And that's when my mother, you know, suggested to them that I stop eating gluten because she'd read this book about, you know, things like bipolar disorder and their relationship to like omegas and our gut and blah, blah, blah. And so she basically told them, okay, you know, make her food dairy-free, soy-free, and gluten-free. And when they delivered me like my food dish, suddenly it had gluten included on there. And I was like, gluten, am I allergic to gluten? I was still in this very altered state.


And basically, I had this voice just come in instantly. And then there was this like, kind of weird poetry thing that kind of was going on at the time where it's like, I cannot eat like the bread of my father. I will not digest the milk of my mother. Like, and then soy, because I'm part Japanese was such a big part of like the food that I ate when I was growing up in my dad's household, because we would always have soy sauce with everything, you know, we'd have soy sauce with our eggs at breakfast.


So I started kind of having this awareness that like the foods were also representing like these relationships that I had with myself, but also with my caregivers and my parents and that there was this rejection of them, this like unwillingness to process what they represented to me, you know, while at the same time, like probably craving those things very intensely, you know, craving bread, craving, you know, dairy and ice cream, but having this way that my physical body was like rejecting it.


L: Even as you're saying, and you're doing this push with your hands, yes, that's a boundary, you know, physical body boundary of move back or get away or I don't want you. Sometimes we don't know how to say this things because they're they're subconscious. So the thing that makes sense to the mind is I'm allergic to wheat. And I'm not saying some people truly don't have a celiac, expressions and people truly do. Most people don't who I've worked with actually, but they have this thing where they feel safer not having it.


And just like you said, which I think is fascinating in the not having it, there's a boundary against their loved ones, people that maybe only even understand how to cook things like that. So there's this way of showing I'm not like you or I long for this or I don't want you around me. But it's said through, I can't come over because you have wheat, I'm going to eat a home first and then I'll see you for a walk. So the food quote food allergy actually acts as a boundary against people and situations that we don't know how to boundaries for in a more kind of, let's say conscious way.


Instead of I don't want to see you or I can only see for an hour, please don't speak to me like that. We bring a piece of Tupperware with you know, rice and beans in it because we carry the family meal. So we're individuating from them that way. So I think that's all very fascinating and important to consider here.


A: Yeah, no, I mean, it was such a kind of long journey that I really had no way to talk about or verbalize until kind of the discovery of this realm of somatics, which is why I have a podcast about somatics because I find this endlessly fascinating, because in so many ways throughout my life, I was having these somatic kind of lights go on, but not knowing what it was not know what that communication was from, you know, from my from my body or my spirit, right. Or my consciousness, trying to kind of get my attention about something so much of it came through disaster and, you know, pain because when we don't, we don't understand these messages that our body sending us, we ignore them, we ignore them, we ignore them, and then our body screaming at us.


So I want to ask a really specific question about GERD and about things where people are pushing out because I have some clients that when we dive into that, there's layers that are there. Some of it is like throat chakra work, like not expressing things. And some of it has come from like traumas to their esophagus as infants with like feeding tubes and stuff.


L: Yeah, feeding tubes. Yep. Right. So I was just curious, like, what do you know about GERD and its intersection here with the things that we're talking about of that rejection right away of the food? Yeah. So there's a couple of things. One of the first things is to understand when we're talking about fight or flight response, we're talking about a behavior that emerges from the inter-emunalized state, right? So big production of adrenaline, adrenaline makes you move. Like the whole purpose of adrenaline is to get you into action to survive a situation.


And the preferential expressions are fight or flight. My body is either being propelled at a predator, at a threat, or away from it. So fighting unpropelled towards you, fighting unpropelled away from you. Now, one of the ways that we have a fight response when we can't move our body is through vomiting. Volmetting is one of the most primitive fight responses we have. That's so interesting. So you're seeing the connections. Totally.


A: I'm also thinking of friends that who had these like projectile vomit issues that I never understood.


L: Yes. So when you have a fight response, that's been what we call thwarted. So you haven't been able to have the boundaries. And then let's say especially, I went through this, you go through a period of fawning, which is the chronic people pleasing way of essentially living and being around people. You're stuffing down how you really feel all the time.


And that little bit of anger or irritation or frustration becomes like deep resentment and rage. It sits in the belly. And so sometimes the food going in gives the stomach something to fight against and it will vomit or you'll have this constant reflux response. Other times when people are holding a lot of anger that hasn't come out, they're living in a constant state of nausea and a really tight stomach.


And that physiology alone doesn't allow for food to even go into the stomach or get digested very well. So understanding that most people that have an issue with vomiting, especially as you said projectile, lots of indigestion, lots of overproduction of acid. These are people that usually have a lot of suppression of their fight response and their boundaries.


And when you work with that over time, it starts to reduce, you know, quite drastically. The other thing you mentioned is medical trauma. A lot of people have preverbal medical trauma.


They don't have any memory of it. Of a feeding tube, of a breathing tube, all these different things that go down the throat and the body couldn't say no and push it out. So when something enters the throat or the mouth area, it might actually feel like an invasion to the body still and it's trying to get rid of it.


And it could be through vomiting, through nausea, through even like dry heaving, just feeling gross about something going in your mouth. This is especially true with sexual trauma. Any kind of physical violation or penetration that was unwanted, the body will live in a braced state around those areas. And this is why somatics was really developed. It was for people that didn't understand why their bodies were doing what they were doing. And decades of psychotherapy and coaching and talk therapy wasn't getting at it because there was no conscious memory of it.


So when there's no conscious memory, what there is left over from these events are sensations. So bracing, going back to what I said earlier, being able to track the parts you buy that brace, not just to hold you up, but brace even when you're laying down, those are the parts that for whatever reason have some memory of having to stay vigilant and protected.


And when you start working with those, the bracing itself shows you what it wants to do. I mean, could I actually walk through a practice? Sure. Yeah, I'd love that.


Then we can give back in just for a couple of minutes, just for people to hear what I'm saying. So everyone listening, if you just sit and sit with your head being held or lie down or hold your head in your hands, you want to really let your head be supported because your neck and shoulders will then soften. You might even notice your core, your pelvis, your feet, some areas will soften when the head's not being held.


And just take a few moments here to breathe into the feeling of being held yourself by rather having yourself held by something that's not you doing it. And really track the parts of the body that start to settle. Just breathing into them, noticing your face, your jaw, your throat, your shoulders, what parts start just slowly softening.


And just find one place that doesn't, one place that holds tension, one place that has pressure, and put one hand there. Because we want to get out of the habit of thinking about this and analyzing it and just touching it. And this is first what we mean when I'm talking earlier about tracking. I'm tracking these sensations and now I'm just holding one. And just take a moment to breathe into it. You're not trying to settle it, you're just trying to locate it with touch.


And then the simplest question you can ask this place, so I'm holding my solar plexus, there's like a slight amount of tension there. I would say to this part, as if it's a person, how do you want to move? And I'd wait to see if it shows me through a movement, if it gives me an image, if a motion unfolds, a memory, there's many ways it can come up. I'll give you all a couple seconds in silence just to feel that. And you can pause if you need more time, because the follow up question would be, and how can I support you?


What kind of support do you need? And again, give that a couple seconds, it might be a stretch, it might be a breath, it might be an image, it might be an actual instruction like go eat or lie down. Say a couple seconds when to sing it. And then if you're doing this with us, you can open your eyes, just look around the room, you can move your shoulders a little bit if you want, just let your body refresh back to just not focusing on it so much. Because I want to show people it's a very small dip, doesn't have to be hours, two minutes of just tracking the tension, touching it, getting a sense of what it wants, getting a sense of what is holding, how it wants to move you. Because this is how we start tending to those braced parts without any kind of story. Beautiful.


A: I love this. It's, you know, the modality that I work with is called Hannah's Sematic Education. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. No. Yeah, so it was developed by a man named Thomas Hannah, and I was trained by his widow, Eleanor Chris Wilhanna.


She's now passed since 2024. But what we do is we kind of do similar to what you're describing, but then we like work with these contractions and very, very slow releases out of the movement. And so what you're describing is such a beautiful kind of first step. And like you said, it doesn't have to take very long.


It can take a couple of minutes. But as you start to interact with the sensation of those places of tension, right, it starts to show you what it needs. And I thought you described that so beautifully. It starts to, you know, it starts to be like, oh, you're listening to me. Let me tell you what I need. Right.


L: And that's the long term practice right there, because you can't intuitively or instinctively relate to food unless you have that. Because if you're slowly, like we said earlier, if you're removing some stimulants or even reducing them, and you're reducing depressants, sensation emerges. And that's when we go, well, I don't know how to be with myself, and you go back to the stimulants, depressants. So what we're doing here is just making that a normal, regular chronic habit in your life to touch in. That gives you capacity to start being with sensations that come up. And you actually have the ability to stick to food that's going to be more balancing.


A: Yes, beautiful. Wow, this is so great. I love the way you're tying all of these pieces in. I feel like your voice is so unique and like refreshing and much needed in this like somatic conversation that we're having as a collective. So I'm very excited about continuing to read your book. For those of you who are interested in the book, it's coming out at the end of this month, right now. This is April.


But by the time this podcast has come out, it might have come out a couple weeks ago, actually, because you know, the hell the post production goes. But food therapy, conscious eating to navigate anxiety, stress and trauma by Hay House. And we're again, looking at reframing food, not as good or bad, but as information that can either support resilience or amplify the stress and trauma already stored in your body. So this has been such an amazing conversation. I'm really, again, excited about what you're up to. Can you tell people a little bit about like, as they're reading this book, what are some of the things that you want them to keep in mind?


L: Yeah, one thing I've done in this book is almost at the end of each section, I have some kind of somatic practice, because I want people to notice their body's capacity for what they're reading. Because as you read it, your mind's going to be interested and you might be really motivated to read more, but your body might actually be bracing, and you might be getting overwhelmed, and you might not be breathing deeply.


And this is how your body is actually saying, I keep this is too much. So I like people to notice that as they're reading and pause and just sit with what they got and start there and then go to the next chapter.


A: I love that. That's something I feel like I've done intuitively at different times, especially when I read the China study, I had to take it in


L: bites, you know, like things like that. You're like, okay, my body's starting to feel like a bit overwhelmed. And then let me just digest that it's kind of, again, that pacing in our nervous system.


So that's, that's a really great tip for people. Yeah, anything else you'd like to add here before we complete our conversation? No, this is a great conversation. I mean, I love how deep you are in this practice yourself. So it was really, it was really satisfying. I want to thank you.


A: Oh, yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. I feel like there's so much more we could talk about maybe once I finish the book, maybe if you're open to it, I'll have you back on the podcast and I'll, we can dive even deeper into some of these things.


L: That'd be great!


A: Yeah, beautiful. Thank you.


L: Thanks, love.


A: Hey there friend, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram @AimeeTakaya and send me a dm about this episode. I'd like to thank you for being part of this somatic revolution, and if you'd like to support the podcast and help more people learn about somatics, consider leaving a review or a rating.


And finally, if you'd like to have the experience of relief in your tight hips or back and learn to understand what your body is really saying to you, visit youcanfreeyoursoma.com. I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible. Bye for now.

 
 
 

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