Ep132: Surgery Is a Portal with Aimee Takaya

LISTEN HERE!

LISTEN ON YOUTUBE!

Aimee gets radically honest about what it means to slow down when your whole identity is built on pushing through. 

She shares the real story behind her congenital hip dysplasia diagnosis, the emotional excavation surgery has triggered, and why she believes this year of pain and transformation is actually a portal into deeper grace. 

It’s an honest look at weight gain, insecurity, intimacy, financial stress, and what it means to choose to feel. 

Aimee takes us through:

• The hurricane card–A tarot pull months before diagnosis

• Her life with undiagnosed severe hip dysplasia

• Why somatic work makes old patterns feel sharper before they resolve

• How her Aries intensity collides with a year that demands radical rest

• How surrendering control in intimacy became an unexpected gift

• The power of slowing down and feeling instead of bypassing

• Reframing physical crisis as an invitation into deeper grace and self-understanding

And so much more!

Connect with Aimee:

Instagram: @aimeetakaya 

Facebook: Aimee Takaya 

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

LISTEN WHILE READING!

Aimee: Hey there, listener. Today's podcast is all about my second surgery. If you're not sure why I'm having surgery, or especially a second surgery this year in 2026, go back and listen to episode 123, one, two, three, and hear the backstory to today's podcast, as this will be a part two to my somatic surgery and congenital dysplasia journey. So stay tuned for some heavy-duty updates as I explore surgery as a portal for my somatic transformation. And yeah, let's get into it.

Aimee: 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.

Aimee: Hey there, everyone. Wow. So tomorrow morning, bright and early, I'm going to be having a total hip replacement on my right side. I had a total hip replacement, actually a reconstruction, really, on my left side back in May, on May 13th.

So tomorrow, fingers crossed, is going to be my final surgery of 2026. Once again, if you aren't familiar with this story, I'll give a little bit of a backstory to it. But ideally, you would go back and listen to episode 123, where I go into the full kind of story of why I've had surgeries this year, what I discovered. Basically, in January of this year, I discovered that I'd been living with severe congenital hip dysplasia, meaning that I was born with very shallow sockets in my hip joints.

And it had actually gone so far as to no longer have a socket at all and be completely dislocated on my left side, bone on bone, for probably a good five to ten years, which was pretty horrific when I discovered this when I saw the X-ray and had everything explained to me by a wonderful physician's assistant, who I'm so glad I had her. She was so knowledgeable, she was so thorough in helping me understand what was going on. And so I had my first surgery May 13th. It was a success.

And now I'm about to have my second surgery, which I hope is also going to be a success. But what I want to explore on this episode today is the portal that I feel like I've been in and navigating through for the year of 2026. So, you know, let's backtrack like a month or so before I found out.

Okay, so December 2025. I had just completed my third watsu training of the year. And the water therapy was like a really interesting tool for me last year to discover, you know, kind of deeper roots of my own pain and discomfort.

You know, part of the reason that I ended up getting an image for my hips and deciding to do that was that, you know, spending five days giving and receiving water therapy, you know, and I would use these as like a little mini retreat, and I would do like 20 minutes of somatics, you know, morning and night while at these trainings. My body would feel so good.

My nervous system would relax so deeply, and I would find myself walking more functionally than I ever had in my entire life. I would find my body was just melting away like all of this tension and pain at a you know whole nother level, right?

And then what would occur inevitably is I would feel these patterns that I had been living with that I had been contending with, I would feel them come back. And I would feel them come back and they would almost feel more intense because of how calm I had been. Now, for anybody who's been doing somatic release with me, who's been doing Hana somatics, you kind of know that this is how it goes, right?

Right? Like when we release these contractions and we become so much more relaxed. Now the contrast of how much contraction can occur from our nervous system dysregulation, from our activities, from our mental and emotional, right? You could even say like karmic or spiritual patterns, when they come back or they start to emerge again, it's like you feel them more.

And it's not like that they're happening more, it's just the contrast between how calm you felt and how relaxed things were. Now you feel the tension and it's it's more in a way unbearable because you're like, hey, this doesn't have to be the way that I feel, right?

And so in some ways, my dad always likes to say that in Hannah-somatics, we are actually building some level of intolerance to pain because many of us come into this if you're coming to it from place of chronic pain, like I have. Your tolerance for pain is very high because you've had to live with it.

There hasn't been an alternative. And so as you release and the pain emerges again for all kinds of reasons, right? And I'm gonna kind of explain mine, you know, you feel it more intensely.

You are less tolerant of it because you know it doesn't have to just be in the background of your life all the time. So this is what was happening to me in like December. I was at this watsu training, and I just felt myself like falling into certain patterns after I had just released them. Like a day later, it was like, hey, I'm walking weird again.

Like, what's going on? Like I feel like this clenching at my sacrum. I feel this clenching like deep down in my perennium, like the base of my spine. Like, didn't I just release that? Like, why is it coming back?

And of course, I've been, you know, investigating the psycho-emotional aspects of all of this work for a long time because that's how I experience it often. I experience a lot of emotional and energetic release with the physical release. So it's always been like, okay, well, what's another thing that I'm letting go of here? Wow, okay, more shame, more sorrow and grief, right?

More rage. Like this stuff is coming up and it's getting cleared, right? But then it started getting to this point where I'm like, but I'm I'm not feeling that as much anymore. Or it doesn't feel like that's the root of it. It feels like that's the reaction to this sensation, you know, kind of like a, I'm not, it this isn't fear or sadness that's the creation of this.

I'm feeling fear and sadness because this is kind of bottom up creating that experience again. Like it's sort of like scratching this, this inner pain that, like, yeah, is there, but like, what if I stopped scratching it?

Like, what is it about my body that keeps going into this? You know. So the last day of the training, um, one of the women had brought like these oracle cards, and everybody picked one, you know, these like cards, and I can't remember which deck it was. It was a water-based deck. Um, and so all the cards were like different things about water, right?

And, you know, everybody was getting kind of these ones of like a new beginning, like a, you know, um overcoming something, you know, it just didn't sound like that heavy. And then I picked a card and it was hurricane. And I was like, what? Okay, well, and at the time I couldn't really think like what would be a hurricane in my life right now, like what kind of hurricane, you know, is is uh about to come.

And it was really this card was like just a collie card. It was like destruction, you know, and don't be afraid of it, even though it's gonna be heavy because it's gonna clear the way for something really massive and really big that's supposed to, you know, replace this whole system that doesn't work, right?

It was about a hurricane and the way it can smash through buildings and infrastructures and devastate landscapes and you know this is a this is a way that it's going to kind of the apocalypse so that the world is reborn again. You know, it's this kind of symbol, symbolism of a death that creates a birth, right?

And I mean, at the time I'm just like, ah, God, I don't know. So then I fly home, and the day I fly home, my husband and I sign on and buy the house that we're currently living in that my office is now in. And it's this big, exciting thing that we're doing.

We buy a house. A couple of days later, I'm driving my dad to the airport. He ends up in the hospital with sepsis and can't leave Buffalo for another two and a half weeks because he's in the ICU and I'm not sure if he's gonna die. And then he finally flies home in January and is, you know, recovering.

And then in January, we have a series of like snowstorms here in Buffalo, Buffalo while my husband and I are trying to move house. You know, so for the first part of the year, literally the first like two weeks and the last part of 2025, I'm like, okay, this must be the hurricane.

You know, that card was speaking to all of this like shit hitting the fan and all this stuff coming up that's way out of my control. And then I go in for this x-ray of my hips on January 20th, and I'm just thinking, oh, they're gonna tell me that I, you know, need an MRI, and maybe I've got a torn labrum and we'll get that fixed up. And no, instead, I get this truth bomb drum dumped on me that I have never had a functional body my entire life from birth.

I was born dysfunctional. I was born with this, like, in a way, impairment or disability that was invisible and we didn't didn't discover. And I've just been living with a lot of instability and pain my whole life. That's just been slowly getting more and more intense, right? Until I discovered somatics and then I found ways to mitigate it, you know. But like I said, in my journey releasing, releasing, releasing, I started discovering, well, the patterns coming back.

What do I know about this? There must be a reason for it. The reason for it is that my muscles have a had a full-time job of just holding my pelvis together, of just holding my femur bones on my body, right? Did you know that your muscles are holding on to thoughts, memories, and feelings? If you have a tight neck or back, you're not just getting old.

Aimee: 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 You Can FreeYour Soma.com.

Aimee: More about that in episode 123. But suffice to say, I'm really recognizing that the hurricane of 2026 is my own internal somatic experience because holy shit has so much like stuff been coming up that I had thought I have already healed, right? Like so much stuff has been coming up for review.

So many shadows of my own psyche have been coming up through this process. The process of first of all recognizing that validation of like, no, life literally has been harder for you than for other people who have relatively normal hip sockets, you know. Like it just has been, and that you have literally been impaired. You have literally found it harder to walk the earth.

And all the things that you've ever done, like global traveling by yourself with a giant backpack, hot yoga. Yes, it's so impressive that you did those things with this condition, and those relentless, intense, like kind of Aries, like fiery, like just willing to fucking push through.

That energy is part of what created some of the pain that you're daily living with, the dislocation, right, on your left side, and also this fiery intensity to like do it my way, do it myself, be this hyper-independent person for those of you who are familiar with astrology or Western astrology.

I believe in all the astrologies, I think they're different languages to talk about the same thing. But talking in a Western astrology language here, I have Aries in Mars in my 10th house, right? So everything I'm describing has, you know, like a we can explain it in that way too.

We can speak to it in that language. There's been this fiery, independent, like doing it my way or the highway, you know, willing to birth myself and birth uh a life that I want to live, you know, and doing that through these really physical modalities of yoga, somatics, right? And doing it in the world as my job. But that level of intensity and force is part of my pain pattern, actually, too. Because I have been someone who finds it very, very difficult to slow down.

Like I try to tell people all the time, you know, when they they choose me as a teacher, you know, and I they're like, wow, why are you so good at this? Like you're young and you're so good at this, and you really help me like be present and slow down, and you know, I'm slowing down more than I ever have in my whole life. And, you know, all these things that I hear from my clients and my students, I try to tell them, I'm like, I am my own most difficult client.

This is not easy for me. All of this that I'm teaching you has been something I've had to work on for years, and that I continue to have to practice because it is super hard for me to slow down, right? And and slow down physically because why? And I have a whole podcast episode about this, why you don't slow down, right?

And and you know, what's underneath the not slowing down, because I've investigated that one a lot too. It's where you feel things, right? And I have lived, and this is a whole other podcast, with a very specific kind of birth trauma that has imprinted in me the I don't want to feel story. And many of us, you know, may have that similar story too of I don't want to feel.

Feeling is uncomfortable, feeling is scary. I would rather feel a million other things than what I feel. I would rather feel other people's feelings. I would rather feel anger than feel vulnerable. I would rather feel, you know, pouty and victimized than truly vulnerable, right? And so in slowing down this year, I have had to feel.

And actually, I will reframe that because that's not totally true. I haven't had to, right? There certainly have been days or you know, moments when I choose not to feel and I fight myself on that, you know, because I'm human and I'm not, this is this is again like my life's work is to feel myself and be in my body, right?

It's my life's work. It's gonna take a while. I don't know, no top of the mountain here yet, right? So I choose to feel. And that was a message I I really received in my second watsu training last year was this choosing to feel. I I initiated part of what this, you know, hurricane portal of 2026 has been. I initiated it last year, right?

For those of you who focus on numerology, you know, as like an interesting thing. We all know many of us who are focused on that know that this is a year one. It's a fire horse year, it's a really powerful, like forging, you know, independent, creating new things, you know, nothing's gonna be the same.

It's changing everything, right? Well, on a personal level, last year was a nine-year for me, and this year is a one year. And so I really did go through this shedding and completing of things last year. And that shedding and completing is like the compost that provides the nourishment for the flowers, you know, and the sprouts and the branches and everything to grow this year. And birth is fucking messy, okay?

Birth is like that head, that bloody head pushing through this small tight space that is actively working to push out this giant object of the baby head, right? Like this is that Aries energy. This is that one energy. This is that determination to live and forge forward. And that is the energy that I'm so comfortable and used to. But in this portal, the paradox is that I have had to slow the fuck down.

It's been like the slowest fucking birth. And it's, and I'm in it still. I'm I'm recording this podcast, and you know, excuse me, there's gonna be a lot of cursing because that's just the mood I'm in right now. But it's my fucking podcast. I can fucking say as much as I want, right?

And my kid's not here right now, so he doesn't have to overhear my language. But, you know, this has been so messy. And at the same time, again, with these paradoxes, it's also been a radically successful year for me as I'm inspired to create new things and build new pieces of my practice and my community that have been kind of being called in for a while, simultaneous to having to slow down. I have more business than I can handle here in Buffalo in my private personal, like one-on-one hands-on practice.

It's been amazing. I get referrals all the time. I get people finding me online and calling me up and booking sessions, and they're already sure they want to do this and they pay me in full, you know, and I have a lot of in-person activity right now at the same time that I'm having to block off weeks on my schedule to recover from surgery, right?

And take an abbreviated schedule. You know, so it's causing me to have to innovate and create new ways of creating income because I can't just be doing hands-on work with people all the time. I can't just fiery push through and do that with like this passion that I'm used to doing things with, right? I can't just do what I used to do in yoga and just like be like, all right, I'm gonna teach 16 classes a week while practicing, you know, five a week and like just, you know, we'll we'll fix my adrenals when I'm, you know, taking a week off later, you know.

They can't do that. I can't because I have been put in this position to go through this portal of transformation at the very base of my body. You know, your hip joints are very much like this root and sacral energy.

This is a foundational re-arrangement, reorganization that I'm going through. And it's felt so so intense. And, you know, I've shared some of this online, like on Facebook, you know, I definitely made some like kind of more cathartic, like sharing really, okay, really what's going on with me, like not just like my my little sexy pose and my happy smiling face and like a little funny thing here and there.

Like, let me tell you like what I'm really feeling. I did make a few of those posts and I did have to tolerate like some kind of like comments that weren't so like aware or something, you know, like comments where people are like really concerned, oh no, or trying to fix me.

And it's like actually, what if I could just be crabby or be sad, and that was just acceptable and I didn't need to be fixed or like overly worried about, you know, like I'm a danger to myself or something like, you know, what if I could just be heard, right? And so I probably will in my recovery make a few posts.

Maybe I'll even make a post about that conundrum, right? Of like, hey, I, you know, I want to show you something real. I don't want to just show you the Instagram, you know, like perfect life shit.

Like, I want to connect with you for real and let you know, hey, I'm a human too, and I'm going through shit too, even though I'm, you know, a somatic leader and a teacher and a creator and innovator of some really powerful work. I have to do this for myself. I am my own worst client. Worst.

Here's like that's my old, old uh language coming in. I'm my own worst client. I'm my own most challenging client, right? Because I have to go to sleep in my body every night, right?

My challenging clients, and I do have some challenging clients who have multiple different things going on, and we've worked together for years, and they still have chronic pain, right? Because for them, the somatics is about building a relationship to themselves and building a relationship to the world, and their chronic pain is multi-layered and not just coming from their motor system, right?

Those clients, right? They are not so challenging for me because I'm so much more difficult for myself. And I don't have to go to sleep in their body, right? I don't have to live their life. I have to go to sleep in my body and live my life. And my internal space is challenging, and it has been challenging pretty much my whole life. You know, and this dysplasia is a piece of it. You know, this dysplasia is like a like a physical reality of it. So this portal that I'm going through through surgery, it's heavy duty.

And I'm facing, let's see, let me tell you some of the things I'm facing. I'm facing having gained about 20 pounds in six to eight months from inactivity, right? And also choosing to eat foods that my body feels some comfort in eating, right? Like I'm not like trying to diet and cleanse and like keep my body small.

Like I'm allowing my body to gain weight because I recognize that my body wants to feel safe right now because there's a lot of feelings of unsafety coming up. When I found out about how, you know, dislocated my left side was, for example, and how I've really been living on the edge of like not being able to like use my legs or like stand and walk around for a long time, you know, I was pretty disturbed. And I took a break from exercising and anything extra for my body so that my body could just rest, you know, and so that I would have the energy to do my job and serve people in the way that I have committed to, right?

And so making time to like exercise and dance and do these other things that were actually part of my pain cycle was difficult but necessary. You know, and I don't have the genetics of like a person who can just like eat normal amounts of food, you know, whatever, 2,000 calories a day, and not be kind of chubby. Like my genetics aren't like that, unless I physically exercise, I'm gonna be a little bit chubby at, you know, 2,000 calories a day or whatever my body wants.

I kind of have that like stout Irish woman genetics. I don't, I'm not like my husband, he eats like two packs of cookies and still has abs. Like, I'm that's not my metabolism, right? So letting myself gain weight, being like accepting of that has been a challenge.

And it's been bringing up all kinds of shadows from my childhood, my teen years, and feelings of insecurity, feelings that other people are gonna judge me for the way that I look, other people are gonna make comments about my body and the way that I look. Has very much of that happened?

Not really, to be honest, but I feel that guarding in my body. And what I find is that with other people not saying things, it doesn't stop my brain from thinking those things, right? And so my mind and my thoughts at some times have been the bully, you know, that's not that's not happening outside. And I know that my brain is doing that to protect me so that if somebody does say something, it's like I heard it already and I'm prepared for it and I'm already hurt instead of like suddenly out of the blue being hurt in a way that I can't control, right?

But it still hurts and it still sucks to have a mind that is shaming and uh attacking you for, you know, your body shape or size, you know, and also minimizing it, you know, telling myself, like, oh, you you know, why are you feeling bad about it?

You haven't even gained that much weight, and like there are people who are, you know, in worse condition or have more pain or feel heavier or whatever, and like that's also sort of like an unnecessary path to go down at the end of the day, because what I really need to do in these moments is just hold myself, hold myself, be kind to myself, remind myself that my body has changed so many times and will continue to change so many times, and that my body is wise and it's holding on to weight right now to protect me, to literally insulate me. Because guess where I'm gaining the weight the most?

Right at my hips and butt. Imagine if you're living with this kind of, you know, instability, and when you fall, things get jostled around and things get torn. You might want some padding. You might want to make sure that you're falling on a soft cushion, you know, like a big cushy butt or thigh. You know, so really understanding this is my body protecting me right now.

You know, this is my body making sure that I'm safe. So that's one layer is is the body challenges and having been, you know, uh a chubier kid, having had health problems when I was a kid, having had people say all kinds of weird crap about my body throughout my life, unsolicited, especially as a yoga teacher, you know, where 130 pounds was like fat as a yoga teacher, right? It's just been a lot to have to like deal with that again, you know, to be with all that again.

It's it's obviously another layer of healing of those wounds. And I'm embracing that, even though I don't like it when I'm in it sometimes. Some of the other things are coming up are about just my body not feeling strong, like my body feeling weak and tired and not feeling like I can do the things I want to do.

Like I have all this creative energy and I don't know what to do with it because there's exhaustion, you know. So it's not like, oh, I have this creative energy and I can't get up and move, but I guess I'll write, which is what I did a lot of as a teen, you know. I wasn't very physical, but I I did so much writing. I wrote like poems every single day.

And the creativity was just able to move. But like in the state that I'm in some of these days in recovery from surgery and working with clients, like I'm I'm mentally drained. The creativity is still there, but I can't focus. I need to just like lay back and let go.

You know, so then what do I do with that creative energy when it feels like it's moving through molasses, you know, when it feels like it doesn't have a place to move out, you know. And so just to kind of let you know here, one of the ways has for me that I've started embracing, and this is this is maybe like an upside, but still has kind of an interesting ramification. I've been really like letting myself enjoy sex more, like with my husband and by myself. Like I've been letting that be a way to connect with pleasure, you know, and it's a weird thing because I can't really move that much, you know.

Like I can't really do, you know, the physical like things that I used to be able to do physically, like when having sex with my partner. But like I'll just let him do the work. And he actually likes that. He's actually down for that.

He understands that. And so that's been a really interesting thing for me to kind of like lean back and just sort of trust somebody else to take the reins. Um, that's that's definitely been kind of like an upside of this portal is like, what's it like to surrender and kind of let somebody else take the reins and be more submissive in that area of my life, you know, and allow myself to feel pleasure and joy, even if my body doesn't look the way that I think it should, you know, at some moment, you know, of the day, right?

So that's another way that I've been kind of contending with this portal. Now, the sort of flip side of that, the moon side, the dark side of that, is that sometimes there's been a lot of like insecurity about myself that seeps into that space of intimacy, you know, where I find that I'm a little more shy about my body or feeling like I'm not quite as like sexually attractive as I, you know, like again, what my mind tells me, what my conditioning tells me about how my body should look.

And I've been having to revisit, you know, earlier times in my life where I had a lot more inhibition, right? And how can I dance with that? How can I move through that?

How can I make space for that? Because I'm not able to do what I did at that age when I was in my 20s, which was kind of like overcompensate or overperform. It's like, oh, I'm feeling insecure. Well, let me just like just get out there and just like perform. Let me just, you know, pose nude for artists and you know, take belly dancing classes and just like fiery plow my way through all this insecurity. Let me just, you know, oil my body up and do like yoga for two hours until I feel hot again, you know, like whatever it was that I would do to address that, I'm not able to do that stuff right now.

So instead, I have to do a much more yin version of it. I have to just be with those feelings, be with the insecurity, express it to my partner. You know, this is this portal has brought a lot more intimacy, I would say emotionally between me and my husband, because I've been with this guy for nine years, we've been married for eight, and we've gone through so much together, you know, and I know that he loves me, and I know that he thinks I'm sexy, even if I'm a little heavier or whatever.

And, you know, I can trust that if stuff and something's coming up, that he's a place I can be vulnerable, you know, even though, yeah, obviously, like we've gone through things, and sometimes he's been a jerk or I've been a jerk or whatever. There's still this safety of like, if I'm feeling insecure or afraid about something going on internally, he's willing to hear that. And so that's another way that this portal has been therapeutic but hard, you know, because again, I can't, I can't do the things.

The old way of doing things to move through these insecurities and these feelings, not really happening right now. You know, the yang part of taking energy and like transforming it through like all this action slowed way down. So, what does it look like to do one small thing?

What does it look like to engage with this energy, but like micro-engage with it? Micro-engage with it to the extent of my energy level at that moment, and then bookmark it and come back later. You know, so I've had days where it's like, okay, this insecurity or this fear is coming up, and I deal with it for 15 minutes, and then I have to continue on with my day.

And then the next day it comes up again, and I realize, oh, I'm kind of like back on that chapter from where I was yesterday, and I deal with it for another 15, 20 minutes, and then I gotta move on with my day. I got a client coming, you know. I I got a kid to feed, I've got things to do, you know, and I don't have the energy to do it all. I have to do these things in little short micro tasks, right?

So that's another big lesson that's been coming in. You know, my commitments, I take them very seriously, you know. Um, my integrity as a, you know, a uh a healer or a person in service to healing is, you know, immense.

I feel it in my soul. And so, you know, yes, my needs are important, and I do everything that I can to take care of myself, but I also feel a great sense of responsibility to the people who are, you know, working with me. And some of that is, you know, financial.

They're paying me, and that's how I'm paying my rent. And, you know, I don't have like another, you know, big source of income where I can just like walk away and take a month off to just like feel my feelings and you know, heal, like I'm like, you know, I'm still in it, you know.

So that looks like that looks like having online programs that I can teach from bed. That looks like having my dad come and work with my clients, you know, and the you know, third, fourth week of my recovery. If I feel like I can, I will see a handful of people, right? But I will have my dad here to, you know, step in for me and help my clients when I'm not able to.

It looks like diversifying the way that I receive support ultimately, right? And so this year and this portal, and it's not over yet, man. It's not over yet. This is just this will be to be continued. Surgery is a portal part two. It's just been bringing up all of these places in my life that I'm having to reassess and do things differently, right? Financially, that's another thing, like root chakra finances, right? Security, that's another piece that's come up.

Having to take all this time off to recover from surgeries and not make money during that time, you know. And I've received a lot of support from like clients and people who care about me. I've received so much support. I'm so blessed with how much support I've received, right?

And at the end of the day, with the economy the way that it is, it's been still very hard, you know, especially since I'm trying to do things the right way and pay my taxes and you know, they take a fat ass cut, and like it's it's been a place that I've had to reorganize and reassess.

And I believe truly, I know that this is for the best. I know that my body, my finances, my emotional resilience, all of that is going to be strengthened by this portal that I'm in and going through, right? And I can know that I can have that macro view, and I still allowed to be like this fucking sucks when it sucks, right? I'm allowed to ride the roller coaster of feeling.

Now, there are some healers and some of my contemporaries out there who think that you can bypass that, that you can somehow not have to ride that roller coaster. And they love to point that out to me. They love to tell me ways or philosophize ways that I don't have to suffer.

You're choosing suffering. It's like, well, maybe I am because I'm choosing to feel and feeling is messy, and feeling is the cutting edge of our evolution as beings, right? Our emotional center is evolving. We are growing so much more aware of ourselves and others through feeling. And feeling is a wave, right? I'm speaking a little bit of human design language here, been studying it casually for like 12 years now.

So it's just part of my understanding of the world now. But feeling is this wave. It comes in these waves, undulations, feeling is water, feeling is the ocean, the ocean of emotion. And sometimes the waters are smooth, right? And voluptuous, and you dance on them, and the light catches the waves, and you feel like you're in heaven, right? And then other times it's fucking stormy and there's garbage and there's dirt and there's mermaids like you know, choking on plastic bags, and you're just like, what the fuck is happening, right?

How can this be the same ocean? And I have to in my body choose to feel. Now, I don't think that my way is the only way that people should be. I certainly don't. I think that we are all here to experience what we're here to experience, and I don't get to define that for anybody else, right? It is the way that I am operating, though. I am choosing to feel. I am choosing to be in my body, in my feelings, and allow my body to metabolize them.

It doesn't always metabolize them quickly or as quickly as in the 90 seconds that some coach told me once, if you let yourself feel something, the feeling only lasts 90 seconds. I'm like, well, okay, maybe I just need to pump those muscles, those feeling muscles so that it doesn't feel so heavy, you know, because sometimes I have feelings that that last for hours, you know. Maybe that's a sign I need some facilitation, right? And which reminds me I'm having some amazing emotional facilitation, somatic release later today with my teacher Richard Bach, B O C K.

Um he's a wonderful teacher who I really have taken in as a mentor this year in this whole process. So, you know, there are people who are on my wavelength with choosing to feel, choosing to stay in their bodies as they feel, choosing not to emotionally bypass and to, you know, actually use their emotions as tools to connect back in with their grace, right? And that's where all this is leading to, right? This portal is leading to a new dimensional reality for me. Physically, I will have actually functional hip joints for the first time in my whole life. I have one on the left side, I've been loving it.

Oh my God. It feels amazing to step down on my left side, and it's just my foot receiving the earth. There's no interference, there's no anxiety, there's no terror, right? It's made the right side stand out a lot more.

That contrast again. The right side when I step down feels like I'm almost kind of floating and my foot's not really sure where everything is, and my I feel it in my knee a little bit. There's some referred pain from what's happening in my hip that will show up on the outside of my knee. And I know it's referred pain because the, you know, the muscles around my knee are not hypertonic, and I when I work with them, the knee pain doesn't go away. But when I work with my hip, the knee pain softens, right?

So I know that it's coming from there. But it's wild when I was walking, you know, about a month ago, like I have as my body recovered from surgery. I was walk around the lake near my house, and I could just feel with each step I took down, my left side, the side that I had the surgery on, was just like chill and just like connected and just like letting my body land on the earth. And the right side was like clenched upwards, right? And my right side was my good side, right? And the left side was always the worst one.

That's why they did the surgery over there first, because it was the completely dislocated one. So, you know, I'm headed through a portal, and on the way through this portal, I'm passing through the universe of grace, of love, of God. And it's speaking to me in all these different forms. It's speaking to me through suffering. It's speaking to me through self-hatred and insecurity.

It's speaking to me through vulnerability and grief. This is God speaking to me through this portal of pain into the next dimensional reality that I am headed into, right? I'm saying this for those of you who've been in any kind of pain portal before, who've gone through a period in your life where it feels like it's a hurricane and everything's getting fucking torn apart, maybe physically in your body, maybe emotionally, maybe spiritually, right?

Maybe literally, like your house or your home, and there's this invitation from God to feel, to feel your feelings. That's why there's so many feelings are bombarding you.

It's like, hey, feel me, feel me, feel me. I lead you to grace. I lead you to greater love and compassion for humanity. And many of us choose not to feel, right? And like I said, I've been there, you know, as I've gone through this pain portal. I've had days where I'm choosing not to feel, right?

And that's okay. Dissociation can fucking save your life when you need it to, right? I say that a lot, like dissociation saved my life at different times. Not feeling is okay. It's not virtue, it's not, you know, virtuous to just be a big ball of feeling all the time.

You get to say when you get to reach for that thing, your phone, you know, chocolate, you know, a beer, if you don't want to feel at that moment. But the invitation to feel is the invitation to be with the divine love that is available at all times. And as I'm going through this portal, I'm going through a portal of love. And I keep reminding myself of that, especially in my darkest moments.

And it ain't over yet. As I said before. So I hope that if you're listening, you're finding some solace in my words, especially if you're going through a hurricane right now. And you know, I work with people who are, I work with a range of people.

I work with people who are going through big transitions, who are actively suffering and in pain. And I also work with people who, you know, have gone through something and they're in the recovery phase, and their soul, their, their, you know, their emotional body, their mental body has already metabolized a lot of things, and their physical body just didn't get the memo, right?

Like I work with people who are really stable also. But sometimes people are coming to me who are actively in a pain portal. And it's why I'm so good at working with them is that I feel like I've lived my life in and out of pain portals, but I finally reached the point where I'm going through such a clearly initiatory one. Other times I was being initiated, I just didn't realize I was being initiated, and that just made it like extra confusing. This time there's no doubt in my mind that I'm being initiated. And that in a certain way helps my confidence to keep going, right?

And to keep surrendering into this process. So thank you so much for listening to my solo cast today of surgery is a portal. I'm gonna update you with part two because I'm having my second surgery, hopefully tomorrow morning, right? I say hopefully because I scraped my knee a week ago and it's still healing, and I have a scab, and I'm hoping that that won't prevent me from having surgery. So we shall see. It could, and then my surgery would be postponed, like a, I don't know, hopefully not that long, but it definitely messes up my plans to yeah, do all the things that I'm planning on doing if I have to have my surgery delayed.

So fingers crossed, the portal, you know, will open tomorrow, my right leg, and I will be traveling deeper, deeper into the next-dimensional reality. So yeah, if you've had experience, if you've been through your own hurricane, if you're in one right now, send me a message. Find me on Instagram, send me a message. I'd love to hear your story, right? If you are listening and you want to share your story of overcoming a hurricane, right?

Reach out to me. Maybe we would be a good podcast guest. I love to share people's stories of overcoming, you know, and connecting with their somatic, with their somatic self after some kind of rupture. With that, I say good day, good night, see you soon. Hey there, friend.

Aimee: I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram @ Aimee Takaya 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 you can free your soma dot com. I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible. Bye for now.