If you're an entrepreneur striving for greatness in a fast-paced world, finding balance and success becomes paramount. Traditional methods may offer temporary relief, but what if there's a more profound way to achieve lasting transformation?
Stay tuned as we explore why the innovative fusion of neuroscience, bodywork, and natural remedies is transforming the lives of go-getters, keeping them grounded and focused on their goals.
In this episode, I’m joined by the insightful, licensed therapist and nervous system coach Marie Benoit. She takes us through:
The importance of healing and establishing the groundwork for generational wealth.
Approaching life as an adventure and embracing challenges with enthusiasm.
The distinction between cognitive behavioral therapy and a somatic approach.
The importance of going into the body and uncovering unconscious patterns.
The potency of somatic work in addressing intergenerational trauma.
The concept of internal family systems (IFS) and how it helps in deep healing and exploration.
Her use of micro-dosing and psychedelics in her work.
And so much more!
Marie Benoit, a licensed Clinical Social Worker and Nervous System Coach, is dedicated to empowering ADHD entrepreneurs through a transformative journey. Her expertise lies in a holistic fusion of neuroscience, somatic parts work, and plant medicine, cultivating adaptive resilience in her clients.
In a unique role that bridges the gap between conventional business coaching and therapy, Marie provides a tailored approach for her clients. This approach not only enables them to build generational wealth but also ensures alignment with their passions. By steering clear of burnout on their entrepreneurial journey, clients under Marie's guidance embark on a path toward richer lives, fostering happier relationships.
Marie's vision extends beyond individual success. She believes in experiencing the soul of the world, utilizing wealth to help others, and creating lasting legacies. Her mission is to guide entrepreneurs in achieving success while maintaining a holistic balance that contributes to both personal and societal well-being.
Website: thesomatic.ceo
Instagram: @thesomaticceo
LISTEN WHILE READING!
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 and experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy. Here is where you free your Soma.
A: Hello everyone, welcome to Free Your Soma; Stories of Somatic Awakening and How to Live from the Inside Out. Today I have Marie Benoit with me. She is a nervous system coach, a licensed therapist who specializes in neuroscience, somatic parts work, and plant medicine.
She works with ambitious entrepreneurs who are stuck in fight or flight and are ready to regain balance and control in their nervous systems to take their success and leadership to the next level. I am so excited to talk to you today, Marie. We have worked together personally over the last couple of years and I consider you a dear friend.
And some of the things we're going to talk about today are really exciting and relevant, specifically what it means to heal and lay the foundation for generational wealth through working with our nervous systems. And that is so exciting to talk about. I'm going to love sharing your personal story with our listeners as well. But let's just take a moment for you to introduce yourself and say a little bit about what you do.
M: Hey, I'm so happy to be here and just kind of be in your energy, Amy. My name is Marie and I am so passionate about just helping other people heal. I have been since I was a little girl and I always knew that there was just going to be something big out there happening. I just didn't know what that was.
And all of the strategies that I use as an entrepreneur, as a self healer have helped me unlock what it is, the path that I get to be on now, that I say I get to be here because it's pretty cool. I think a lot of us get in the story that this is hard, that we can't do things. So every day I try to wake up and tell myself I get to be on this journey and that's pretty cool.
A: Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you. There can be a kind of like weight of the world that we feel like we're carrying and then you realize like, oh wait, there's another way to look at this. It's actually some kind of grand adventure that I'm on. Yeah. With struggle, of course, because it wouldn't be an adventure without struggle. I've been thinking about this a lot recently.
M: Yeah, it's almost like I've heard a podcast talk about like gamifying your life a little bit. It's like you're like Sonic the Hedgehog. Let's see just how many coins I can get. You think about it in a fun way. It kind of makes the mindset say you can really just do anything that you really want to. And I finally feel that in my body now.
That's the thing. Through working with you too has helped me unlock so much of that. And all the work I've done and just the people that I've learned from in my life, that's been everything.
A: Oh, yes, absolutely. It's like there's multiple tools that we're going to find and utilize that are going to synthesize together to do something greater than just like one thing. Like if people are out there and they're looking for just one thing, it's like, actually it's never going to be just one thing. Like going back to like what you just said about like the game, right?
And Sonic the Hedgehog. Let's say you fall off the cliff or whatever. I don't know. I don't know what you do, but like you're in you start over, right?
Okay. You have to go back to the next level and start over. It's never starting over because you have just done the thing and now you're going to be a little bit better at it. You're going to have gained some knowledge or skill, right?
And even maybe just more patience for the process, right? Oh, yeah. Starting over. It's always even if it feels like you're back to where you started, you always are there with new perception, right?
M: Right. I love this like tracker on because it makes me think of like, I used to play the game Donkey Kong in the nineties, like many. And there's a part, I remember you're on this like little train track, you're in this like mine, and you have to jump way up high to get like to the next train track. And like, I didn't know as a kid like how to do that.
And so I had to continually try to figure it out until I figured, oh, you have to smash the button twice to get higher, you know, to like make it a certain way. And it's just like an entrepreneurship. It's like figuring out like, okay, like just because I failed doesn't mean anything about me or I'm not succeeding. It's just that I get to figure out what is going to work for me.
So I have told my body and my mind that I can pivot, which I always come back to the word pivot. I think there's two groups of people. It's like the mindset that tells you I'm stuck and there's nothing I can do to control the situation. And then there's another group that have the mindset that say, well, how can I make this situation that doesn't feel good actually work for me? You know, like COVID, nobody can control that. But it's like some people became victims in the experience and some people just made it work for them. Yeah.
A: And I mean, there's lessons to be learned in both ways. You know, I've learned so much from kind of my victimhood years.
A: Oh, yeah. It's like part of the journey. Yeah. Yeah. And see, you know, before we can really step into like that ownership of our shit, we have to like first figure out what's ours and what's not ours and what we like picked up and are carrying around with us that actually came from our parents or came from a previous generation or maybe we picked it up from some kid at school, right?
And then, you know, we just carried it around like it was ours. And so it's like, yeah, that kind of differentiating is like so important. But as you're saying, like that's just one part of the journey and what it means to be a leader. Maybe you can talk a little bit about leadership here is stepping into responsibility for the things that we're experiencing. Exactly.
M: And it's really, I love the term radical responsibility. It's like, you know, kind of like radical acceptance. I used to teach a large group of DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy to people with borderline personality disorder, which are in the industry I've been in, people with that diagnosis are looked down upon because there's like, what's wrong with you? You're terrible. Which that's another story.
But like, given those labels that we sometimes see people as, we condemn them, essentially, and we tell them, you're bad because you have X, Y, and Z or you act like this. And really, if we were just to being a leader means that you can like have the capacity to look at the whole situation and realize there is way more to the story here than what you perceive on the outside.
A: Yes, you know, as someone who worked in that field, you know, or works in that field to some degree, like, you know, as well, like, can you say a little bit about this distinction between cognitive behavioral therapy and a more somatic approach and how, you know, sometimes there's, like you said, another story that we're not seeing because we're focusing on the behavior. Yeah.
M: And, you know, talk therapy, dialectical therapy, cognitive therapy, it's helpful. Like, it definitely helped my clients when I was with them. But I think the most helpful thing that I did for people was that I was a safe place for them to be a safe energy. I know I get told all the time, you have a very calm presence.
And like, I take a lot of pride in that compliment because it has taken me a lifetime to cultivate the calmness in my body. Because I used to feel out of control and on edge and like chaotic all the time. And so to have that base and then to be that for my clients in the last 10 years, so that they can feel safe enough to open up. In a way, that's everything.
And talk therapy, you know, you're just looking at the thoughts and the behavior. The somatic work that we both love and are passionate about has my heart because you are looking at, like, you're going down to a cellular level of what has happened in your family system, like intergenerational, you're starting to get curious about lifetimes before you that maybe you don't know for sure, but you have an inkling or maybe an understanding of like, oh, yeah, my grandfather had to go through the Great Depression, you know, my grandfather had to live in an orphanage. So how do you think that impacted my mother, you know, and him and me? It's all it all gets passed down. Yeah. Yeah.
A: Yeah. And I think that when you start to go into your Soma or your body or that like kind of living record of like, everything that's occurred and happened, that's mostly unconscious.
Like, it's a pretty big thing to do. And having someone who feels like they can co-regulate with you during that process, which is another way of describing kind of like what you are offering people with the calmness that you've developed in your nervous system, is you're offering them that safe space where they can begin to feel what it's like to go through this shit, but stay in this calm place while they're also simultaneously experiencing memories or thoughts or feelings that are really uncomfortable.
M: Yes, because you cannot change what you are not consciously aware of. And when you do the deep body work, your body, it knows how to heal. And so it'll show you the dark secrets you've been holding on and putting in a closet for years, you know, that's why I love, you know, neuroscience and, you know, using microdosing because it literally, those things in somatic parts work will literally bring these things out naturally in you because it's just inherent.
A: Yeah, we have our own answers. For sure. Like the way that you have guided me personally through the experiences that are showing up for me with just this kind of calm uncertainty, like, I can say for myself that that was so incredibly beneficial, you know, and similar in some ways to like other, you know, talk therapy that I had done, but because you are now like a somatic person, anything that you do is now like more somatic, like you're, you know, inviting me to check in with my body and with my breath and where do I feel it in my body.
And it's not like overly complicated, except that you're inviting me to like really sense in and notice, right. And I found that, you know, in previous encounters I'd had with therapists where there wasn't that invitation to be present to what's happening in my body and we were just continuing to like talk about it and talk about it. I would just get like more and more worked up. But yet you would actually like invite me to be with the sensations and there was like this space, like you would just allow there to be like space instead of continuing to talk or work through it or something. There would just be these pauses. It's like in those pauses, I was able to actually start to calm or catch my breath or yeah, or like not be overwhelmed by the processing. Yeah.
M: And what you're speaking about is that calm is a sea of self and Richard Swartz terms, IFS, internal family system, which is the parts work that I talk about. And well, it's one of the first ones you need to cultivate because to do this deep work to get into abandonment and mother wounds, father wounds, even you have to feel a sense of safety in your body and calm is part of that to feel grounded, to feel connected to yourself and the earth to other people.
And so you're just laying the foundation to go to make it okay to be here, you know, that this is okay to be uncomfortable because we live in a society that tells us not to be uncomfortable even for a minute to take a pill, to take it away. That's why people often ask me questions like, well, I've done micro dosing or I had a, you know, experience with the psychedelic and it made me feel more amplified. Like I micro dose and I felt more anxious and that could be a few different things, you know, doses wise.
But a lot of times it's because like the dark secret that I'm talking about, I felt really anxious when I first did psilocybin because the anxious part of me needed to be heard. And once I could hear it instead of hate it and try to crush it, I started to heal it because I was like sitting with it. And realizing it's a catch to like a lot of younger versions of me that have been feeling very unsafe and powerless for a really long time.
A: Yeah, I'd love for you to share a little bit more about like the way that you have used micro dosing not only for yourself, but for your clients. But maybe we could backtrack just a little bit back in the internal family systems for our listeners who aren't familiar with that kind of work. Can you kind of give us an overview or describe like how that works?
M: Yeah, I'm obsessed. So basically, Richard Swartz was a family therapist, and he was talking to his clients and what he really is or what came through was that we actually all have family systems within us. So we are Russian dolls within Russian dolls within Russian dolls. Humans are intricate. And how he describes it in his words, and you can use your own words, is that we have parts.
And these are like protective parts of us. And we have one category parts who are like managers, but I more see them as like parents or like parentified parts like people pleasing. And we have another group of parts called firefighters or people call them maybe saviors. And they try to swoop in and save the day, but they often cause a lot of chaos because it's like anger or anxiety, fear, shame.
They're trying to make things better, but they're often reactive and come in hot intensely. And what these parts are really trying to protect are different versions of you called exiles, but I call them more just inner wounded children that are trapped or frozen, which is a response in your nervous system, in different parts of your life. So I connect and I've been healing the last couple years with a 10 year old version of me that has been left alone in her room after her father passed away in the dark and feels very alone and sad.
And there were different experiences in my life, like even like my husband turning his back at me when I want to talk to him at night, which is understandable because he wants to sleep, of me feeling angry. And then me being able to feel that in my body instead of react off that anger, tell that part I see it. What's really behind that anger is sadness parts, see that part. And then I was able to connect with that 10 year old and really see what was going on here, that it's not me, it's that little girl who's feeling very helpless, because her dad has just passed away. And that's like, that rocks my entire world. And like an interesting thing about those parts of us is that if you notice a part of you, the more reactive or like big energy from that part is an indicator to tell you the more helpless and alone or powerless the little girl or boy behind that feels. Yeah.
A: So if you have like a really big reaction, it's relative to how much the holding like how much that little version of yourself has been folding.
M: Yeah, so much shame, you know, so much, you know, I'm getting like chills. I feel like my body's talking like my right side of my body just reacted to that because it's like, it's like parts are hearing what I'm this and like are reacting to that because like, there are still parts in me that need to be healed. I don't think that you're ever fully healed. I think you just get to pull away because you're always going to suffer in life, you know, but the work that I do isn't fixing you or totally healing you. It's holding the capacity to hold joy, to hold suffering in your life, to hold it all so you can just be here in your experiences. Right.
A: So you can experience what it is to be fully human and not denying any part of your humanity and you can connect with other humans in an authentic way where you're not denying their humanity either. You're not trying to make them into a perfect person that then disappoints you or something like that. Exactly.
M: That's part of a story because, you know, it all comes down to needs. Like, you know, everyone is just trying to get their needs met. That's what I always try to remember.
If somebody reacts to me in an unpleasant way, I just try to tell myself like that person is just trying to get their needs met and they just don't know maybe an adaptive way to do that. It's more maladaptive. And that's really why I love this work, especially with psilocybin, because it has helped me transform myself. And so it's a radical, rapid way to have pathways in my brain to be resilient adaptiveness versus maladaptive. Right.
A: Yeah. And I mean, there's more and more research that's coming out about the, you know, potential benefits to your brain of microdosing in the way that you just described and that we're building new pathways. And, you know, part of what I understand about this research is that they're looking at the way that it stimulates different areas of our brain simultaneously, so that our brain actually start becoming more lateralized or basically working together.
The right and left hemispheres are working together, which, you know, with trauma, what often happens is that we get separated and we start functioning either from like, you know, just our logical left brain, you know, analyzing, you know, an emotional area. We're stuck there and we don't have access to our feelings or we're in the other side where we're overly emotional. We have no, you know, reason or logic and we're completely, which is like parts work.
M: It's like, I got a logical part of me that really wants to overanalyze this, or I have a really reactive emotional part of me that like, can't just can't ride gets tumbled in the waves instead of like riding the wave with me. Right.
A: And what happens when we start getting both of those parts of ourselves to interact and experience this, you know, whatever it is that's there to experience together, we get to be someone who has our feelings and has a connection to the wisdom of our feelings, right, in our body, and also be able to problem solve simultaneously, that we don't have to be the other.
M: And that's what makes you literally, I think an unstoppable entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship, as both of us know, is hard. There's no roadmap. There's nobody telling you what to do, you know, especially if you're a solopreneur, it's you, you know, before maybe you have the sustainability to hire people. It's all on you.
You're the decision maker. And, you know, what a lot of what I do is the results people get from this work is they have more emotion regulation skills so that they don't get caught up in feeling overwhelmed, which tells them, you know, in the microdosing experience, the new neural pathways, I can do hard things. And if I don't know how to do something, for example, it doesn't make me, I'm stupid, it means that I get to learn how to do this thing. And how cool is that it's like a total abundant mindset versus like scarcity of saying like, this is too much for me.
And I can slow down too, which is a big thing, especially for the people I'm working with, which are more stuck in sympathetic like ADHD, anxiety on edge, I can slow down, I can feel calm in my body, and I can actually get more done this way versus hustling all the time.
A: Yes, I think that there's a lot of people out there that can relate to burnout and hustling and pushing themselves so hard that they don't have any energy left. I mean, my dad is also been an entrepreneur for a while and he listens to this one podcast, I can't remember what it's called right now, but something he told me that just really stuck in my brain is like, entrepreneurial small businesses don't fail, the entrepreneur gives up.
M: That's exactly I say the same thing I say businesses don't fail, people fail businesses. Right. Because you run out of steam, like my business has had like five different niches or something. I started out with two other women, and our target audience was women with gut pain.
And what I did that was completely different and it's on my own, you know, in the span of two years. And like my business is showing itself to me because I'm just allowing for that to happen. I'm open for what's to come.
I'm open and that's what you have to have is an open lane in life to say that like anything is possible and to not shut yourself off from it. You know? Yeah.
A: Maybe you can tie this in with this concept of, you know, healing and laying the foundation for generational wealth. Like what it, how is our nervous system and these things that you're talking about related to being able to create wealth, right? Maybe you can define that for us too that, you know, that goes on for generations that has passed down through our children to our children. Yeah.
M: I mean, I could, I was meeting with one of my clients the other day and what we encountered was that, you know, she helps people make 10, 20, 25, 30 K months every months for them themselves. She's really good at what she do. She's an online business manager. And every time she gets to the point of making consistent like 10, 15 K months, she will self sabotage.
She will do something. She will like put her energy into the things that don't actually move the needle bit. She'll like kind of like do the things that don't keep her there because when it really comes down to it in her body, she does not feel worthy what came out in this session together. And she's worried that if she's not worried, if she's not actually worthy at the end of the day, then that means that there is something inherently wrong with her. And that's almost too much for her parts to take. And so they sabotage completely to keep her stuck in a zone that feels safe, but it's not actually safe.
It's just that protective place that she's used to being. And so really starting to help your nervous system and feel safe to help your parts will save to build new neural pathways that tell you that it is safe for me to take up space. It's safe for me to make this amount of money. And it's safe for me to do the things that I thought I once couldn't do. And if things don't work out for me, it doesn't mean anything about me. It just means that I'm continually growing, like I said.
A: Yeah, when we start to heal this wound in our nervous system and reconnect our brain, then skies the limit. We really can go after the things that we're interested in going after. And then the other piece that I know you've brought in here is about finding that responsiveness to what our body and our nervous system is telling us. And because I've done this, we've probably all done this where we take pieces of this, but then we just apply the same strategy.
We're like, okay, I'll do the work around my worthiness and I'll do some somatic body work or something so that I can keep pushing myself and grinding. And it's like that is an extra intention, right?
M: Because your intention is to keep doing the same thing you've been doing, which is insanity. And that's why intention is so important. It's like, why are you doing this for yourself? It's interesting. I saw post the other day was talking about what should entrepreneurs really be working on. It was like nervous system.
It was like, and it had all these things crossed out. And then it's like what we really should be aiming for is profit. And I was like, uh, I was like, okay, so yes, we all want to make money, right? But if we don't feel safe to make money, none of it's going to matter because people can be very successful, yes, and make a lot of money. But what I am seeing out there is they are not enjoying their life.
Right. They're not enjoying the journey. And money doesn't ultimately make you happy. It's like, it's what money can do for you, right? So it's like, I heard a comedian once say like, you know, they say money can't make you happy, but have you ever been on a wave runner?
What's the joke? And it's like, it's not the wave runner. It's the feeling you get on that wave runner, because you could, you know, have money to buy whatever you need. But if you're in your head on a yacht stuck in your phone, you're not actually enjoying what that island that you're on, you know, like it doesn't matter. Right.
A: Well, and that's that's a new way of looking at the concept of wealth. Wealth is not just like money in the bank. It is your inner world being a profoundly enjoyable and like exciting place that your perception and the lens that you're looking out at the world with is one that is rich and full, not limited and tiny and dark.
M: Yeah. And, you know, a large part of what I do is helping my clients come back to their values, because at the end of the day, most people will tell me their number, you know, top three values, money is not part of it. Money is just the vehicle. It's usually, you know, I want to have my health, you know, I want to have my body. I don't want to be in pain. You know, I want to just have my family like be have connections in my life that give me purpose that feed my soul. And for me, it's like, I want to help people. I want to give more than I get in this world. That's a mantra I tell myself every day and I tell my daughter, you know, who's learning how to share, we give more than we get, we give out to the universe because the universe, I believe gives back eventually.
A: Wow. That's a big foundation of building any kind of community, you know, whether it's a the community of your family. So if you think about, let's say, generational wealth, you know, the families that maybe we have ancestors, if we like look back on it, who had wealth, and then we look at their children's children didn't have wealth, and we go like, oh, what happened?
What happened here? And often the, you know, the thing that happened was some kind of trauma, whether it was like an internal family trauma, like that the relationships between the parents and the children were not healthy, were not well, the children didn't want to follow in their parents' footsteps because there had been some kind of abuse or some kind of neglect.
And so they didn't want to take on the family farm with a family business. And then therefore, that wealth of, you know, that thing that their grandparents had built, like just kind of wasted away. Or maybe it was something even more out of control, like a war, you know, or famine, or, you know, or sudden death of like family members. And so there was some kind of trauma that is often the reason why this wealth stopped being passed down, stopped being created, right?
M: Yeah, exactly. And those are all things out of your control. You know, like, my family has had so many things happen this year out of our control. My husband, you know, I almost died this year for the second time during childbirth, out of my control. My husband lost his job the day I came out of the hospital, which is insanity, could not control that.
My husband just again is being laid off from his job again, second time this year. Like there's, and people would say, wow, like, aren't you freaking out inside? Like, hasn't this been really hard?
And yes, it is hard. And when these things happen to me now, I just see it as the universe is opening another door for something more expansive. I feel very confident about what 2024 is going to bring. And I don't see these things necessarily as bad experiences. I just see them as opportunity.
A: Yeah. And I mean, that perspective, you know, it comes from having healed those parts of yourself that maybe 10, 15 years ago would just be losing their shit, right? Oh, I would have. Yeah, yeah. And I, and I know what you mean, because like, there have been things that have rocked my world in the last year, for sure, things out of my control. And there, you know, there has been like another layer of stress. And in that, there's been opportunities for me to further, like, address the pain that was, you know, that was unconscious in me, because that's kind of in the same way that like when you take a microdose, or you take something like this, it kind of brings up that stuff out of the closets. That's what these tough experiences in life that we don't have any control over, they do that too.
But if we have strategies and we have tools and we've developed a way of like working with our bodies as that's going up, right, then it's a totally different game. And so I can totally see the link you're drawing here between if, you know, the reason that generational wealth never occurred or never was happening in your family line was related to traumatic experiences, then why wouldn't it, you know, make sense that like to heal what's happening internally would lay that foundation for, for that wealth to be created and then passed down and shared. Exactly.
M: And the reason why I like to work with entrepreneurs, female entrepreneurs, particularly is because a couple of reasons, because I have seen a pattern that a lot of, not everyone, but a lot of entrepreneurs that are doing, you know, this type of work of like giving something good to the world, it's because they have come from trauma. They know what it feels like to suffer and they never want to be in that position again.
And so they work tirelessly and effortlessly like I have myself caught up in that fight or flight to get out of a bad situation and to be successful, to prove everyone wrong that like I can do this. For me, it was like I'm going to prove all those people wrong that thought I was stupid, that told me I was not enough. But now, because I'm not in a fight or flight, I don't think about those people anymore. I just think about what I get to do and how the people I get to serve and the connections I get to have how amazing this is and how much I love doing what I do. And I have a lot of gratitude because I know that there's a lot of people out there that don't love what they do.
A: Yes. And that can be its own kind of prison, you know, hide into it when your whole financial world is locked into something that doesn't actually feel good, right, in your body or that you don't feel like you are following your own values and ethics. And I think that this isn't even like you assume, you would assume that like an entrepreneur would love what they do because usually they're their own boss, you know, or they're they're the one in charge of like their business, except that it can be that way if their perception of their business is that my business is hard.
And then they do not like what they're doing, even if it's something they created because it's that perception that internal experience they're having, you know, and so, you know, the concept and, you know, I think you really were one of the first people who kind of like introduced me to this, although there's different like iterations of it out there, but specifically this idea that, you know, the foundation of a successful entrepreneurship is your nervous system, is your body. And if you don't have that, what's going to happen?
M: Exactly. And like, you know, I didn't know that until like, you know, a few years ago. And then that I had that epiphany, I was like, Oh, yeah, of course, it makes sense. Like, if you don't have that foundation of safety built within yourself, you're not going to be able to put yourself out there in these really big ways. And I have realized in the past year, I, yes, I've done a lot of cool things, like I've launched my abundance blueprint course, I got to do that live in the beginning of January, when I had this big, I took like a month off last December, from, you know, social media.
And I had so many downloads, and I created this course, and I hosted it live, and I had so much, so many people showed up and it was a good experience. And now it's a self paced course that I put out there, but it teaches people how to master their nervous systems, because like, if you don't have that foundation, it's really hard to then open the door to like, really see, Oh, I have a mother wound.
And oh, yeah, I have codependency with my mother, which really means I have unwavering loyalty to her no matter what, even though she treats me really bad. And whoa, like, what do I do with that? You know, like, Oh, I don't feel safe to do anything with that. So I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. And actually, but this is hurting me. You know, so like, you have to build that safety first.
And then, because like, I meet a lot of people that tell me like, now I have this conscious awareness, and I'm starting to feel safer. But what do I do with it now? What do I do with all this energy? How do I feel better?
A: Ah, well, in the house, and, and you know, that you have a self paced course, which by the way, sounds amazing. You guys should check it out if you're listening. And then also the how that, you know, I have experienced that you guide people through. Can you give us like, just like, maybe there's a few different versions of this, but the one that comes to mind, like, what do people experience with you during a one on one coaching session?
M: So I had somebody say the other day to me, which was really cool. She's like, when I've worked with healers in the past, like the first time we like, they always just want to know my life story. And I kind of felt like you like just interviewed, and it doesn't make me feel safe. And how you just led the session made me feel very safe, because I felt like I didn't have to tell you anything. And we just kind of went with it.
And like, because I've been there, I don't want to be interviewed by people, you know, I want to just be with somebody and for things to naturally come through. And my husband calls me the intuitive magician, because I feel people's energy, I'm open to feeling people's energy. And so I'm able to like, I think it's a lot about, I'm really big on just asking the right questions.
And you're really good at that. So you ask really important to get to the heart of it questions. And that's a skill to be intuitive about what are the questions to ask people to get to the heart of it. And so I think I'm really good at asking those questions, creating space for people by saying like, Hey, like things like we're going to just experiment. You know, if we don't feel safe yet, we're going to just do start at phase one of like feeling into our body of helping ourselves feel safe. And we're just going to see what happens.
And I don't expect anything from you don't expect anything from yourself, you're just going to see what happens. And that's it. And it's like, Oh, it's like a light bulb of like, I just have freedom here. Like, you don't, I don't have to do anything for you here. You know, because like a lot of times people come to a therapist and like expect, Oh, I have to say the right thing to you. You know, like, I've felt like that. And that's not helpful. That's not helpful.
A: Yeah. And so then, then depending on what shows up, like kind of creating that neutral space for something is, and getting an intuitive hit and asking, you know, a question or two, then, you know, you might come in with just a conversation that includes somatic parts work that starts to introduce them to these ideas. Or yeah, the other kinds of methods that you blend might be, I mean, we've done some EFT together, right?
A: And then, you know, I'm also curious how you're bringing plant medicine into this like conversation, like how do you bring that up with someone? Do people come to you like already interested or how do you approach that?
M: Yeah. Well, so I'll go back to the parts work just real quick. Yes, yes, eventually, I'll hear what people are saying and what they're feeling. And I'll be I'll just ask them the question, like, does it feel like this or like, where do that experience? Where do you feel in your body?
And what does that feel like to you? And if you're open, which most people are at that point, it's like, Oh, yeah, I feel a lot of anger. And so that's where we go with the parts work of like, Okay, and they're like, you know, I felt a lot of anger around like, you know, just like people are not listening to me. And I was like, Okay, when is the first time in your life where you felt like somebody was not hearing you? And if they are open to it, which 99% of the time this is the response is like, you will know.
Suddenly, you'll see yourself like a smaller version of yourself and you will instantly know and you'll see a scene and it's people are like, Whoa, did that just happen? Like, I was six years years old, and my mother's in the kitchen, and I'm trying to get her attention. And she's not giving me what I need. She's telling me to be quiet.
And it's like, that's where we go to that little girl. And there's a whole process that comes through that of healing that version of you, so that she can feel heard and seen. And that makes a big difference with how you show up now in your life.
A: Yeah, you know, and what's so interesting about connecting with the experience in your body and not being in your head about all this stuff is that, you know, and I know from my own experience, you know, when we look back on our child selves, or we look back on the way that our parents treated us, you know, there can tend to be like mental justifications that try to explain away why something happened so that we feel the impact.
So we don't have to actually feel what that felt like to be heard. Oh, well, obviously, my mother was busy. She was on the phone and I was, you know, whatever it is, the story that we have that justifies the experience. But the truth is that our younger self doesn't, it does that justification doesn't matter at all.
M: Because your body, your body is living the experience still, it's just constantly reliving it. And so any energy close to that energy will trigger it. That's all triggers are their teachers to show you there's something underneath. And what you're also getting at is that the thing about children is that we will never ever think of our parents as bad. Because if we think about our parents as bad, then we come from something bad. And so we naturally internalize, it must be something about who I am, how I'm showing up, I'm the bad one.
It's my fault. I should be different, you know, and like abandonment really just comes from self abandonment of saying like I can't be who I am. The world doesn't like me for who I am. Because my parents didn't like me for who I am.
A: So, you know, these feelings, I'm sure there's so many people who can relate to this because they feel like it's such a universal experience, this internalization, you know, that it's our fault or that it's the way that children naturally do this as you describe it. It's very obviously like a protective mechanism, you know, to protect ourselves from, you know, the idea that we may come from something bad. But the truth is that this makes sense because, you know, as a child, you have no life experience in context for what's happening around you.
It's a deeply immersive, like somatic experience and that doesn't have, you know, explanation. It's only later as our brains are developing that we start coming up with explanations and creating stories. And I was just doing another woman the other day, we were talking about how what's so incredible is that you know, as you're describing with somatic farts worker with, you know, asking the right question, sometimes a story does come back. And sometimes it's not really a story, it's just a feeling.
Or it's just like a moment, you know, in a sensation or a smell. And it doesn't have to be a whole story. In fact, the story gets in the way of just being with what our nervous system recorded. Exactly.
M: And what you said about mechanisms made me think that I think so much of who we are are just a bunch of mechanisms like coping mechanisms, survival strategies, you know, like, I never felt good when I was in community mental health, taking people into a small room with a fluorescent light and basically interviewing them for about two hours to only then give them a diagnosis.
It never felt good to me ever. And while I see like, you know, a diagnosis like ADHD, as helpful, because it kind of like shows you things about yourself, you're like, oh, like, I feel seen, I feel very seen right now. The other side of it is like, I don't think there's really, it's not those things aren't really diagnosis, I just see them as conditions and like spectrums. Because you think about it, I think that people with like ADHD, if we're going to call it that, that type of energy has been around throughout history.
They are the scientists, the inventors, the explorers, the people that dared to think outside of the box and be different to create something different. Right. We needed that. And we still need that.
A: Yeah, we just didn't have a pathology and like, you know, a label for it back then, you know, and, you know, the other intersection here that I've heard you talk about before is that, you know, many of the symptoms of ADHD are also the symptoms of trauma.
M: Yeah, there's a big overlap and there might be people that come after me for saying a lot of this, because I see a lot of this, I think it was a Gabor Mate, was talking about ADHD on a podcast.
And I think this happened like a year ago, but it's been circulating around Instagram recently. And the comment section is just so interesting, because people are outraged on what they're seeing him say and they want to cancel him, which is crazy to me because I don't know him personally, but the man seems like an amazing person. And I love what he has done for the trauma community.
And if you're listening to his words and you think, no, no, no, no, no, like, what he says is all wrong, basically what I just said, I think it's that you don't really truly understand intergenerational trauma. And like what has been passed down and what lives in your body. And so it's a combination of biology and environment still together. And like, why can't both be true at the same time? Right.
A: Yeah. Yeah. And we just have different languages to talk about the same thing. And sometimes it's going to be, you know, one language is going to be more accurate for that person than a different language. And just like some healing strategies are going to be more effective for a certain type of person.
And you're going to need a different type of healing strategy for another person. Like, yeah, we're very individual. And so having multiple languages to talk about this is valuable. And we shouldn't be just shutting down on a whole conversation because I don't know. And can you actually even like, just say a little bit about what people were saying? Like, why were they upset that there's this conversation about the overlap between ADHD and trauma?
M: Well, I know, like, you can just, I know some of these people and their therapists, and they are canceling him because they're like, no, if you listen, I think it's Russell Barclay. His research is talking about how it's all biology. But I forget this.
I wish I could recite exactly why. But I believe his name is Dr. Russell Barclay. And he talks about the biology. And I think even just like that people with ADHD is because we have like, our guts are different, we've gotten different viruses and that kind of thing, which I believe because, you know, your body, what happens, the pathologies change things, of course, in your gut, your vagal nerve is connected to your second brain, your gut and your brain.
So yes, I believe that. But also, I think the people that were really triggered, I honestly think it's their protective parts, not wanting to hear that something, you know, because, you know, we get so triggered sometimes about it being an emotional thing about me that there's something to be healed like society still isn't ready for that, even as much as we become in self healing nation, we're still not ready to heal, to hear that there is something within us. Because when we hear that, we ultimately hear there is something wrong with me if there's something that needs to be healed.
A: Right, it becomes kind of almost a morality thing of, you know, if I could just be different or feel differently, you know, that everything would change. I think that the term psychosomatic kind of almost used to be this like, way of, yeah, disregarding like, issue that somebody had, like something that would be otherwise medicalized, you know, if they're having like, a gut health issue, and they, you know, check them and they can't figure out why this is happening, they just say, well, I think it's psychosomatic, I think it's all in your head, I think, you know, kind of just making it up. That's kind of what the term used to like be thrown around as in some, you know, kind of like people you throw around the term placebo to mean like this doesn't work.
When in fact, what the placebo effect is and what psychosomatic actually is, is actually super amazing and remarkable and powerful, that thoughts could actually change our biology, you know, or that our experiences could change our biology and how we processed experience could change our biology and kind of going back to what you said a moment ago about the changes in gut flora that people with ADHD have and how that could be a way to measure something biologically, right? There are changes in gut flora from trauma too. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. When you regulate your system, your gut is going to be impacted. Your ability to do this is going to be impacted by being in fight or flight.
M: I actually, so when I, in 2020, when I experienced the trauma with my first birth and nearly passing, I had to take so many, like I was pumped full of, you know, IV antibiotics that it wiped out my gut, right? And so then I had nothing to really go from. And so then I got a parasite during this experience of also having the layer of PTSD. And thank God I do what I do because I still back in 2020, which I have grown immensely since then, I still knew that intuitively, like something is wrong here.
Like it's not just the PTSD, it's not just in my head, like something in my body, there's something going on in my body too. And Western medicine told me wrong. And they actually made it worse by telling me to get an implant in my arm scaring me into like having another, that I would have another baby and that may be even sicker because then I would have night sweats that I was making, you know, it's just thankfully I took that out. But, you know, I was able to heal because I just started to touch my intuition to hire somebody to help me heal my gut then. And a large part of that healing process was doing nervous system work was parts work.
I hired somebody to do parts work with and tapping. That's when I first microdosed ever. And I changed my outlook. I started walking every day during, you know, 2020 during COVID, I still do that religiously. I started going to my hot tub more often and just being like not on my phone, just being in the trees, just sitting there meditating. And I still do these habits to this day. That's the thing. And within six months, I did not have PTSD symptoms anymore.
A: Turn around. That's a powerfully short turnaround, but it sounds like you were so proactive. And what this speaks to is that, you know, any teacher or master of their craft is going to have deeply received the teaching. And it sounds like you threw yourself into deeply receiving these things.
M: I threw myself into like this sucks. And I'm just going to throw myself kind of over the edge into the darkness and just see where the darkness takes me like literally. And like, it's interesting because like I've had a macro experience of mushrooms this year where actually it was the night we were together, I took like a gram of mushrooms and I was alone at this point. And I started to come up on this experience alone.
And I went to some, I call it like the day I think I woke up and said I had the dark night of the mushrooms last night, Amy. And I heal was healing a lot of grief because this year my dog Karma, she was my sole dog. She was more than a dog to me. She passed away right before my son was born. And my son was born. And then there was all the trauma of being in the ICU and just a lot of suffering after that of being in really deep dark days.
And like people would say to me, like when I would share with them, I shared with my husband and sometimes I just don't want to be here. And I felt safe to say those things to him because he knows when I say those things, it's not like I'm actively going to act on this, but I just need you to know how much I'm suffering right now. And people that I told that I was close to would say, oh, you have postpartum depression, like you need to take medication, like they were trying to problem solve for me.
And immediately that fell off and it didn't feel like it. But one of our mutual friends who's also a coach student in human design, Krista, I told her one night what I was experiencing. And she looked at me unfazed by it. And she said, does it just feel like your soul is really tired of the lessons sometimes? And I was like, yes, my soul feels very tired right now, because not only all that stuff, but I had been healing my mother wound. My mom had, you know, she's not in my life.
And she called me when I was in the ICU unexpectedly and made me believe she wanted a relationship with me, only to take it away two weeks later. So it's like my abandonment got ripped open when I'm not sleeping when my healing, you know, from a C section and from being septic, you know, trying to have two children at the same time and like have a relationship with my partner.
That's a lot to have to experience all at the same time. And but thank God I do what I do again, because I'm able to understand it and just be with it. And through this whole experience of this year, like I wouldn't take any of it back, I have, I feel at the top of my game. And actually this week that we're speaking to that I really feel like I've been reciting to myself, you are unstoppable, you can do anything. There's nothing in your way. I feel like my body feels that for the first time, really feels it doesn't feel like BS anymore.
A: Right. I mean, there's this phrase that's coming to mind, but there's this somatic tweak that I want to make to it of, you know, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And I feel like that's true. And it's, it's through actually like being able to take off the armor after the battle is over, you know, come down out of our fighter flight and our capacity to do that, you know, with less and less like difficulty, you know, with less and less like we're closing that gap of how long it takes to come down out of the stress once we're able to once we're, you know, out of it. And that's so much of what your work teaches a person to do.
That's what you mean as, you know, as far as I understand it about having control over your nervous system, being friends with your nervous system, knowing how to start helping yourself come down out of that fighter flight stay when you find yourself in it again. It's not that it won't happen again, it absolutely will. Whatever doesn't kill you is going to make you stronger, but only if you're able, yes, only if you're able to come out of that stress.
M: Yeah, because it could take you down farther, for sure. And that's what happens sometimes, you know, and that's why I think the inner work, I always say the inner work is like 70% at least of entrepreneurship, mostly everything. And like it's only like 30% or so is like strategy, because if you have yourself, and you know yourself, nothing can get in the way.
So no kind of rejection or like nobody telling you we're doing it wrong or like the things we constantly see out there, like this is the right way is going to get at you if you know yourself and what you want and where you're going, what you hope to accomplish, because the rest of it will come, you know, like the business strategy, that's easy compared to like, if you have the clarity, you can take those strategies and apply them, because there's so many strategies out there that you can use.
But when you're aligned with yourself, you know what is going to work with you. And there's no right way. I hate that so many entrepreneurs think that there's a right way.
I recently had a call with a woman that's booked a call with me because I do free calls, by the way, just to see what I'm about and how I can help people and she's asking like, well, what's the right way? You know, I'm like, if you think there's a right way, then you're telling yourself that you're doing it wrong constantly. There is no right way. It's just your way. And if it doesn't work out, you just pivot, you just, you know, try something else.
A: I mean, even large corporations pivot and try something else all the time. They have one way to do something. And then that says the trends are changing, the demographic is changing, the generation that they're relating to is changing. And so they switch up the way they're doing things. And that's that's the normal part of the game. If we think that there's going to be a right way to do something, right, we're missing out on the flexibility that is actually like necessary to do this. Exactly.
M: And that's everything because that creates your body pathways in your body, which is why I love microdosing and like back to your question. I love microdosing. It has saved my life because it has let me live my life. And generational wealth, you know, isn't just money. And I, you know, I plan on like making lots and lots of money in my life, but it's not because I'm greedy and want to like, you know, buy a Ferrari.
It's because I want to do a lot of things to help the world and help my family be the best they can be to feel abundant, to, you know, experience joy in life too. Because if you have these foundations, you can cause a ripple effect of being there for other people in the world. And you can give more than you get, because you fully feel that in your body that you're not losing anything.
A: Yes. I'm thinking of these ideas that we've had for like, you know, for example, like, Oh, what would you do if you had, if you had money, it's like, Oh, I would throw an amazing Soma festival and I would all my somatic healer friends and we would have a beautiful space with probably like a hot spring or something. And we would, you know, invite people from the local community and from wider communities to come and experience like an entire five days of like, you know, healing, you know, extravaganza of just like self care up the wazoo like
A: joy and crying and being seen and all of this like that's the kind of day by the way, the soma festival.
M: You're totally doing that. Absolutely. Like those are the kind of things when, you know, it's like, when we think about why we want to have wealth, so that we can create things like that so that we can share this amazing stuff with other people. Yeah.
M: That's, and that has always, I realize I have always been a manifester since I've been a child. I have constantly been imagining what my life will be like and how I want to feel and how I want to move through the world. And like, we live in a 1926 home in Portland and love our home. And, you know, if we never did anything, never changed anything in our house, we would be completely happy because it's perfect the way it is. And we love building, we constructing, like we lived in 1880 house in Boston and we redid the whole thing ourselves.
We love creating and just like seeing a vision and we have plans to restore this house, bump out some walls, redo the basement basically. But like the reason why we want to do this is because we want to fit as many people as we can into our house and to like have experiences like, you know, like I was on a call with your friend Serena yesterday and she was like, oh, you're a hostess.
Like you love to like host and like, yeah, like I love to create community to have people to, you know, because it's amazing in this call we're talking about, it's amazing how you can, you create this group and people together and you get to see how all those people who get to interact that didn't maybe know each other and like what comes through that and the relationships and the connections that come through there is like, that's amazing.
I love seeing that happen. I love creating services like that. And that's why, as you know, it's an ultimate dream of mine to create more of that in person and ultimately have like retreat settings where people can do this and share this experience together. The closest thing I have to this right now is an online group experience that I launched this year, which is called Unleashed CEO where I teach my clients how to microdose for two months.
And we use somatic parts work and nervous system work as a layering on through calls together to really open up to what needs to be healed so that we can embody the self energy becoming a self led CEO that knows who they are, what they want, why they're here.
A: Amazing. When's that going to be coming out or taking place?
M: Well, I am planning hopefully, I'm not like a huge person on timelines because like, I never want to like tell myself I have to do something. It's like, oh, I feel this, this is working for me now, we're gonna do it. So I'm thinking I'm going to launch this again in January, February 2024.
I'm really excited about it. But if anyone is curious, I have a free guide on the experience of microdosing. I have a free guide on that. And I also have a free guide on moving to your nervous system on my website, on my Instagram, there's a bunch of links. So, and I'm always open for questions.
A: Yeah, everybody, check that out. Marie is absolutely fabulous. As I've mentioned before on this podcast, I've worked with her personally, and I can speak to her skill and just the incredible space that she holds for others to be with themselves and see what shows up. As we kind of mentioned these links, like if people are listening and they're wanting to connect with you, where can they reach out? Can you tell us your website or your Instagram handles? All that'll be in the show notes too, but sometimes it's just nice for people to hear.
M: Yeah, so they call me the Sematic CEO. So that's my Instagram handle, it's my TikTok handle. You can find me on YouTube that way and look out on YouTube. I'm planning to create a lot of value this year. That's my goal, it's just to give more than I get. And then one way I'm going to do that is just put it all out there on like how to heal, how to do these things.
And if you can't afford it, I get it, go to YouTube because I'm going to create a space for that. But yeah, my website is thusmatic.CEO. And right now I am calling in for January three entrepreneurs that are not stuck in fight or flight. I call this more of the, so I have like Spirit Animal CEOs on my website that you'll see is the Hummingbird is somebody more stuck in fight or flight that's learning to heal their nervous system.
That is for the person that will want to master their nervous system by using the abundance blueprint. And then I have the CEO that kind of has moved up to the wolf energy that wants to learn from others, wants to grow, wants to be in connection.
And that's Unleashed CEO, my group program about microdosing. And then I have elephants. And that's what I'm calling in three elephants that are wanting to move a little bit more slowly and methodically in their process and really hone in on their skills, their strengths, their strengths. And then I'm going to call it self led energy. And that is for one on one mentorship for a three month program together.
A: Wow, three months with Marie, that would be very transformational. It's a good time. Love it. Absolutely. I love your openness. I love your authenticity and your candor. And it's been such a pleasure to share and amplify your voice today with everybody. Let people hear about what you're up to. Because you really are one of my favorite people.
M: Yeah, likewise. Thank you so much for having me. It's been definitely lit me up to now I can start the day and about to go to Jiu Jitsu with Krista. So it's, it's a good day. I'm going to go joke some people out now.
A: Beautiful. That's a very somatic experience.
M: So is it is actually been one of the most acutely experiences I've had. That's another whole story. But yeah, using your body and just a safe way to fight when you've never been given that chance is kind of amazing. Yeah.
A: Awesome, maybe I'll join you guys someday. Yeah. Yes, please do. Okay.
M: We'll talk again very soon. All right. Thank you.
A: You've been listening to the Free Your Soma podcast. To find out more information about today's guest, check the show notes. And to find out more information about me, Aimee Takaya and the Radiance Program, visit www.FreeYourSoma.com.
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