Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: What'S worthwhile healing Mind, body and spirit. I'm Ramsey Zimmerman. I choose peace of mind, vitality of body and joy of spirit over stress, exhaustion or overwhelm. Together, let's explore and pursue the many ways to build holistic health and wellness.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Somatic therapy goes into where the story is, into where there's holding, into where there's pain, into where there's anxiety and inconsistent dis ease in the body so it makes it easier to touch into.
It's, it's, it's not like you have to think about it. Your body just expresses it and before you know it, you're feeling.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Hey there, it's Ramsay here. That was Angel Howard. Angel refers to herself as a somatic intuitive.
Not only does her own body talk to her, but other people's bodies talk to her as well. How Great question. All I can tell you is that angel is one of the most fascinating people you'll run across today.
She focuses on helping people release pent up emotions and issues through dancing, stretching, moving, generally feeling their bodies and interacting with the physical world.
In our discussion, angel also went through all seven major chakras or body energy centers and did an amazing job tying those to physical conditions and life experiences. I thought this was a great conversation and I hope you will enjoy it too, preferably while in your body moving around. Here we go. Hey angel. How are you doing today?
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Great. Really good. It's kind of end of the day for me here where I live, but I'm still energized.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Well, that's good.
Thanks for coming out and for joining me today. You are a somatic therapy educator and practitioner. You know, I really do wish that we could have this conversation in person, like in the same space.
And there's a lot of reasons for that because. But I say that because what strikes me most about you based on our previous conversation is that you are kind of all about physical presence and dynamic motion and energy flows inside of and between people.
All of that kind of works better in person.
But that's a, that's a lot of stuff. We're going to unpack that as we go.
But first let's, let's start out. I like to know and hear a bit more about your background.
What did you do professionally before you got into somatic therapy?
[00:02:56] Speaker A: This makes me giggle because it's nothing to do with somatic therapy.
I was a corporate sales manager with Coca Cola.
I was a financial planner before that out of college.
And then I went over to Europe to get an international master's in finance and business. So I was all business.
Yes. What I did.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: So all business and corporate and. But it seems like you made a big change. So how and why was it that you went a different direction?
[00:03:35] Speaker A: Well, first of all, I got married and I had children. So that kind of put a halt to some of the megalomaniac megalomania. Going to conquer the world. Being an international marketer, that's where I was headed.
Okay, but. And we also lived on a boat, so I was on a sailboat for two years. So that pretty much isolates you from the world.
When I came back, I was running my husband's restaurant and leading the charge and developing an area of downtown Columbia, South Carolina, that is now the place to go visit in Columbia, South Carolina.
Um, that was fun. Being a team player, using all my corporate prowess to pull people together, gather the numbers, make it all worthwhile.
But then I had a fateful day walking in on my husband with another woman.
And it was a big shocker because I was three and a half months pregnant with our second child and he was not amenable to being caught. It wasn't like, oh, my gosh, I'm sorry. It was something way different from that. Then he came after me.
So the. The thing that happened to me in that very moment, that very moment, I say it's when my candy ass world crashed.
And it was a moment that I. It was so shocking that I thought, what in the world is going on? What kind of message is here, what about me, that I've never seen any of this. I wouldn't grow up around this. I didn't have it in my neighborhood. I didn't have any of this.
Why am I experiencing this now at the age of. I guess I was 31 at that time. Two children or one on the way.
And it made me. It started my internal journey and I started going deep into everything. I used regular therapy, gestalt therapy, group therapy, breath work, past life regressions. I was going after it. I'm like, this is so weird that I would experience this out of the blue. I got to find out where this came from. So that started me on this internal personal growth journey.
But going to Somatic Movement Therapy, if you want me to go into that story, I can now or you can get a question in there.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
So tell us what Somatic Movement Therapy is and why and how it, like, appeals to you.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: Okay, so I'll answer the second question first. Why it appeals to me.
I've been a dancer most all my life.
I Competed in seven different sports. From the time I was literally three years old, I was skiing.
So I've always been a performer in my body. Very, very connected to where my body is in space, what my body is doing at any moment, manipulating tennis balls, rackets, skis, skates, horses, whatever it is. And I became a dancer in 9th grade, 14 years old, and that was the bomb for me. Dancing after a rough day as a teenager made everything better. I go to dance class, I feel much better about me and my day. So I knew something was up with this dancing thing and I just kept pursuing it. So I became a professional dancer at the same time, though, literally. In college, I pursued a psychology degree because I was fascinated by the human brain. I was in pre med, but decided I couldn't go to eight years of school. So I shaved it down to a psychology degree. So when you marry your fascination with the human brain and psychology with the love of dance and movement and why we feel better after doing something physical, that's what somatic therapy is.
Soma means body therapy means generally anything that makes you feel better.
So it's whatever makes your body feel better.
And then on a deeper level, it's what is your body telling you that's going on on a deeper level?
Because it's got chronic pain or stress or anxiety, and that's where the psychology comes in.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: So can you give us some examples of like how or when of how systematic therapy works?
[00:07:50] Speaker A: Sure.
I will give you an example of a client. Well, first of all, you know, people, it is not something, especially in certain areas of America, Southeast, where I live, it's not normal to say, oh, I'm going to my somatic therapist. You know, people don't know what that is. Some other areas, California, New York, you know, Asheville, North Carolina, a little more kind of spiritual and personal growth junkies kind of live in those areas. They know what this is.
But so somatic therapy, if you, if you come up on it, and I have to say this, that the title or the umbrella of somatic therapy covers a lot of things. Massage therapy is somatic therapy. It's. It's working with the body.
Acupuncture is a type of somatic therapy. It's working with the body and its meridians and energy lines.
So a lot goes under yoga. You know, there's yoga therapist, but it's about moving the body and aligning the body.
So it's not all that strange if you understand. Oh, it's anything that really does with the body.
So when I hung My shingle out. In 1998, I had two group classes. It was called Dance Kinetics.
And I was seeing personal clients at the time too. And people were curious, so they would come to the class and they just would feel so much better afterwards. I used seven different types of movement to seven different types of music that evokes that movement, but it also is connected to the emotions and the thoughts and the feelings that are there in those types of movements. And it kind of releases that. So everybody would say after coming to my classes, they felt like they had a massage and therapy at the same time. They felt completely relaxed.
And, you know, there's a lot of talk, we do a lot of talk in there too. So that you're putting together whatever's going on in your head and your body so you can release it in total.
So to give you an example, you want an example?
I had a woman come to me and so she came for a one on one with me.
Did not want to show up in a group, was not comfortable in a group at all. But she knew there was something that was not right with her because she was very uncomfortable in her body, in herself. And she saw me, saw what I did. She thought, well, I'll try it out. Shows up and I put on some music. I talked a little bit about, why do you think you're here? What do you think? She said, I don't know, I just feel really tight. I feel like I'm kind of bound.
And I said, okay, so let's put on some music. And we're gonna, we're gonna think like we're in swimming in water. Just move your body as if you're swimming in water. Just loosen up all the joints. Just let go and loosen all the joints. So she goes, I can't. I'm like, okay, just dance. Let's just dance with me. Let's get into the music. Let's just dance a little bit. Just move a little bit. Move anything. I can't, I can't, I can't dance. Like, I can't move.
And I'm like, you can't or you won't? What, what do you think it is? And she started to tear up. And she said, I can'.
I can't, I won't do it right. I'm like, oh, well, that's easy because in here there is no right move. So dance like no one's watching. Move your hips. I mean, let's, we're 80s girls. Come on. And she goes, I can't dance because always I'm always watched. I've always been watched. And. And she was always critiqued and judged in her family and felt like she could do nothing, right. So these kind of things that you grow up with, these things that you're told in childhood sticks in your body and you run your life, these beliefs that you have. So this was a belief that was running there. I didn't know. And she said, I've always been judged and I can't move. And I said, okay. So I took a scarf and I put it over her head. So this is another kind of physical biofeedback. I've got them covered now, right? I said, no one can see you now dance.
And she started to dance. But as she moved, as she broke through her very uncomfortable feeling about moving her body, she started to cry a little bit at first, and then ball, and then she was heaving, heaving, releasing this shame she had around her area, her hip area. Being a woman, being, you know, physical and sexual as a, as a. As a young woman and all this stuff was breaking free.
So. And from that point, she's. She's come to me for years and she's completely free. She became an amazing artist after this because now her artistic flow, which we do hold in our solar plexus, in our dantian, in the place between our belly button and our pubic bone, that lower belly area is, is the second chakra. But it's also where our creativity is. And it just released because of the, the restriction and the belief system that she could never do it. Right. All that got released in many sessions. It doesn't happen overnight. Being reminded and starting to think on that other level. And then she became this blossoming artist, had a fantastic relationship, got married. All the things released in that area which would help her with connection.
So the thing about somatic therapy, in comparison to maybe talk therapy, talk therapy seems a little bit arm's length.
Somatic therapy goes into where the story is, into where there's holding, into where there's pain, into where there's anxiety and inconsistent dis. Ease in the body. The ease of, you know, you understand what I'm saying?
So it makes it easier to touch into.
It's not like you have to think about it. Your body just expresses it and before you know it, you're feeling it.
And if you're in an environment where you can feel it, you can heal it.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: So I've always. So I think a lot about mind, body and spirit connections and about how the mind, body and spirit are different things, but they're completely interconnected and they cannot be separated completely from each other in the sense that you can't look at just one, you know, without looking at other parts of it. And it sounds like to me what you're saying is that, you know, the body is sort of storing up and being changed based on things that are happening within our mind or our spirit.
And then it sounds too like if we want to release those things, then they have to be physically released, even though they're sort of mental, but they restored physically and they need to be released physically. Is that kind of basically what you're saying?
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Yes. And to, to address the first thing, you said that the mind, body and spirit are as one. One affects the other. It's like you heard when one ship rises, they all rise.
I mean, when the water rises, it's not like it raises in one place and then, you know, you have this like gap. No, it, when one ship rises, all ships rise. And so when your emotions rise, your body energy rises, your mental activity rises. When your mental activity rises, your emotions rise, your body gets hot, and the same thing, your body temperature rises. All of a sudden your mental starts going and your emotions start going. So yes, one, the other, you can't, they, they just can't be isolated. We're not made that way.
And then as far as releasing, you can touch on things, you can talk about things, and you can continue to, to address things mentally, but it's when you can feel what it felt like at the time the thing happened, the shame, the pain that this, whatever happened to you at that moment, if you can actually go back and feel and release those emotions that are stuck there, you're letting it know it's okay, let's feel those.
It helps release the whole system.
And you can go back to the ships rising.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: Would that also be somewhat traumatic? Sometimes? Like if you're talking specifically about traumatic things that you experienced the first time, wouldn't you then be experiencing that trauma again? And you know, I had a, I had a guest on previously that was cautioning against sort of the, the level of potential.
You know, that that was, you know, perhaps counterproductive or that that was difficult at times. But what do you, how do you sort of address that, that issue?
[00:16:50] Speaker A: You know, you asked me this in our, in our discovery session and I've been thinking about it since then.
Good question.
And I actually talked to some other therapists about it and we agreed that if somebody is sitting in front of you wanting your help, I want to try what you're doing. They're usually already on the self development track.
They've already discovered some things.
You're not working with somebody who's dabbling or you wouldn't be. If somebody's dabbling, my conversation with them would be more about questions. Just how are you feeling? How do you know? How do you know that you have them come to the conclusion.
But if somebody's sitting in front of me and say, I know that there's, there's things in there and there's voices and there's this one voice that keeps coming back that will go into it because they want to.
The thing that I wanted to discern is I wouldn't take a stranger that sat down on a bench next to me that had horrible pain and start to interpret or, or intuit what their body's telling me. Because I do want to mention. I don't know if I mentioned this to you before. I really consider myself more of a somatic intuitive because bodies do speak to me. So when I'm working with somebody, I can go right into it. And if, depending on how deep they already are or where they want to go, that's how far I'll go with them and if I can take them further because they're ready and they want it. But yes, no, I wouldn't be, you know, slapping down like your mother's issues to somebody that I've never even hardly talked to before. Yeah. So there's a lot of respect there and you have to know who you're dealing with.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Tell me more about being a somatic intuitive. What do you mean by that?
[00:18:35] Speaker A: Yes, in fact, that word makes me more comfortable than some of the other ones that are thrown around about somatics. And it also helps explain why I can't always.
I can't always explain how I know there's been at least 27 years of study, deep study for me because I'm very, very interested in the brain, in the neurophysiology, the neurobiology and in the psychoneurobiology and all spiritual, spiritual genetics, epigenetics, all the things that come down.
And that's fascinated me. So lots and lots and lots of study there. And I think it's culminated over the years everything from the Kabbalah to, gosh, Miriam Williamson. But north, I can't think of any north right now that did the whole women's healing movement with all that and my own, as I age, allowing myself to become more and more receptive and open and trusting. That's the biggest thing that you'll read in my book, it was a journey of learning to trust what my body was telling me and what was going on outside of me and inside of me.
When a body speaks to me, when someone says, I had so much pain in my shoulders, or I had a man walk up to me after a workshop and he goes, explain to me why my elbows.
Why. Why I have so much pain in my elbows. Now, I could have said, hey, are you a golfer or a tennis player? But the body said to me immediately. And I couldn't. Because, you know, that's true, too. But I couldn't. I didn't go there.
My body, everything that came to me was, you're holding on to too much.
You're taking so too much on and you're holding onto it for dear life.
And I swear to the guy about burst into tears, he's like, you're right, I never thought about that. And so the body talks to me very clearly, and we discussed this before, and I have to be careful. You're right. I have to be careful because the body's screaming at me. So I'm trying to get them to listen to it.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: How is it that someone else's body talks to you and at the same time, the person who inhabits that body is maybe not hearing the same things that you are or hearing anything?
[00:21:03] Speaker A: Okay, so directly, I can say, because they don't want to know. Deep down inside, everyone knows, but you have put layers and years of coping mechanisms on top of it. A lot of the coping mechanisms are ignoring it.
Or, I'm not going to go there. I've had so many people tell me, I don't want to go there because I'll burst into tears. I know. And once I burst into tears, it's going to be a tsunami. I don't even know if I can stop crying. I don't want to even start.
And you're like, well, there will be a time that that dam will break and you might not like it, or it's timing, so why don't we go there now and let it break and let it flow?
Why do they not know? Because they're totally coping with the pain that's there by ignoring it, stuffing it, compressing it, depressing it down, and, you know, I'll deal with it later.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Yeah, because they're too busy in the moment trying to deal with whatever's directly right in front of them.
And I hear this phrase a lot of times that people need to get in touch with their bodies or a variation of that, you know, People need to get back into their bodies.
Like, what does that even mean? How can we be outside of our body? And how often are we outside of our body? Do you think?
[00:22:26] Speaker A: More often than we think. Really? Every time you're fully in your head, when you're sitting in a chair and all you're doing, you're playing a game on your phone or you're scrolling through social media or your emails, you're typically not in your body. And for your listeners, I say, right now, whatever you're doing right now, whatever you think about, whatever you're doing, stop. Just stop.
Take a break. Unless you're driving.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: Unless you're driving.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Unless you're driving.
But even. But even if you're driving, you can.
Even if you're listening to this, this podcast is. Continue with what you're doing, but take a breath. Take one huge breath and feel how that feels. Just breathing deeply sometimes opens up people's awareness of, oh, my God, my lungs or my heart or my chest is really tight.
And you'll end up coughing or clearing your throat.
That's you getting into your body. It's when you're sitting someplace, go down to your feet and drum your feet. Just drum your feet. It's like, oh, didn't even know they were there. Oh, my gosh, my middle toes numb. You don't even know it.
I'm just. It's getting into your body. See, for me, that's another thing. It's. I'm always there. I'll tell you another time. People are out of their body when they're having things done to their body that they don't like shots or somebody has to get stitches and there's no time to numb them up. It's like, think about being in a field. Well, you're asking of your body because you're trying not to feel.
So when you have emotional trauma, like you're trying to sew up a wound in your. In your heart and your. Your psyche, you're out of your body. You don't want to be there. It hurts.
It hurts.
And when people have experienced physical trauma, whether it's violence or sexual violence, they. At the time that these things happen, you're so out of control of the situation that you. You go out of your body just as a coping mechanism to get through this horrible thing, getting back into your body tells your psyche, well, I'm going to have to go experience that thing that I don't want to experience again.
That keeps people out of their body.
And that's where you really need some help and somebody there to help you go and touch that kind of pain to release it.
[00:24:57] Speaker B: You mentioned at one point pain being stored in a specific place. I think you mentioned it was like between like your pelvis and your belly button. And that was a particular example that you used. And you mentioned that it was a particular chakra for those who are unfamiliar. What does that mean? And what were you referencing when. When you said that?
[00:25:25] Speaker A: So the chakras, that's a Indian. India. Indian system, Ayurvedic system of organization of the different energy centers in the body.
And it's like your body's sliced into seven different energy centers, starting at the base of your spine, working up to the top of your head.
And it's just to say equal sevens going all the way down. And each one of those relates to emotional and mental things that kind of go on in those areas. So that area is the second chakra. And even in the Hindu tradition and in the one that I use, it is a place where you're connected to others. So it has to do with your relationships. And you say, why?
Because the first relationship, the first connection you ever had was to your mother. That's in the umbilical cord that's right there. And it's through creation. Well, why. When a woman's body, that's where our ovaries are, that's our uteruses, that's where creation happens. But even for a man to have creative desires, that's where our sexuality is too. And so there's. That's also the desire to create, to create a human.
And then another thing that's run by that this area is money.
And fear of not having enough or the need for more, the sense of lack. And that tends to happen in the lower back, lower back pain. And it's like you come from lack. And so the back tends to be not your past life, but your former life in this lifetime, your earlier life. And then the front part of you is your life, your future, and your current life that you're living into. So a lot of back pain has to do with the fear of not enough money. Maybe you come from a family that didn't have a lot of money. And so that fear of not having enough is going to lurk down in there until you realize that it is your mom or dad's fear of money. Like, we can't afford that. And those kind of voices stick in your head and they come out through these pains that you have in these areas that tend to deal with money. Relationship connection.
That's. I hope that helps explain it.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: Yeah, no, this is fascinating. Keep going. You want to keep working your way upwards.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Oh, all the way up. Oh, okay. So let's pull in and start at.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: One another five or ten minutes. Let's, let's, let's, let's work our way up like we had with the last one.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: Okay. So the first chakra or chakra is the base of the spine, your tailbone, but it's also the perennial, the perineum area and your, your sits bones, you know, so if you sit cross legged you can feel that area on the, on the ground, on the surface, on the earth. It's great to go sit in earth and feel you sinking down into mother earth.
And that first chakra has to do with your foundation, your community, your family and support.
So the questions to ask if you have things back here, I mean fistulas, hemorrhoids, constipation, I mean things like that, things that happen in those areas, pain, you know, hip pain, the things to ask are, am I supported in my family, am I supported in my community?
Do I, do I have a good foundation?
And who is supporting who is my tribe?
And a lot of our families of origin are not the supporters in our life. But we can pick our family, we can pick our tribe, our best friends that we can lean on. And I think if you realize you don't have friends, that's probably when you need to go out and find your tribe. You need somebody, people that you can count on and that's that area. First chakra, second chakra we, we dealt with. Third is the solar plexus. That's right in that lower rib and stomach area.
And the stomach is a discernment organ.
It chooses whatever you stuff down your mouth. It goes, this is nutritious and this is not.
So that has to do with discernment of what you allow in your life and what you don't want in your life.
So this is the place that you will feel when somebody walks in the room. And you know, I don't want to be, I don't want to be connected to that person at all. We feel those things in our stomach. We feel a tightness. But it's also about how you nurture yourself.
I love this connection.
Your body gives you signals of like, hey, hey, you're not paying attention to me. And when you say okay, I'll stop and I'll take it easy and I'm not going to do that extra thing I thought I was going to do. Because you're telling me I'm tired and I need to rest. And when you honor it, your body's very happy. And it goes one for the nurture side, not for the, the non nurture side. And when you nurture yourself, the body feels satisfied.
So think about people with eating disorders.
So people that don't feel like they can get enough, that they're not nurtured enough, they eat and they overeat because that's the area they're filling again, the belly or they don't eat enough. And that's more the control of what I want and what I don't want.
So any one of these you can take to the extreme and get to the disease of that chakra, fourth chakra, the heart area, the breast and chest, the place where we take in life. Prana, our lungs.
So prana. Well, let me go back to our first, our first sense of taking a breath when we breathe for the first time when we're born. Hurts. We've been basically a fish for nine months. We've had fluid in our lungs, been fine. All of a sudden they suck the fluid out of our lungs and they slap us and they say breathe now.
And you take that first breath and it hurts. And so a lot of people that have that memory have a hard time taking big breaths. It's very common.
But prana is the word in Hindu that means life.
So it's about taking in as much life. And if you don't feel you're worthy or you're not loved, because this is the heart, this is where you, you love and conn and have fire and passion. This is the passion area.
Then you won't take in life, you won't breathe, you won't, you won't want to breathe. And so breath works really great for people like that. The tightness in the chest, the tightness around the heart. You know when you, when something's hurt you as a young kid and it's like that hurts. Like you get broken up with at 9 years old, by the way, the girl that you used to nap with. And in kindergarten this happened to my son, he was heartbroken. So then it's like, well, I'll never do that again. And that's a safety mechanism. It's like that hurts. So now I'm not going to be in relationship anymore because that hurt and that sticks and that hurts in the heart. So it's about going to that heart place and opening that up.
Fifth chakra, the throat. And the throat's all about expression.
This is where we express.
But this is also the bridge between our heart and our head, our head and knowledge. What we know, what we can tap into, all the things we think about.
And then you have all the practical, pragmatic, and then you have the heart.
So when you speak, you hope that you always speak what you know, but you lace it with what your heart feels because you can't, you can't argue with speaking from your heart.
Also, the neck has to do with flexibility. So a lot of stiffness, a lot of things that are happening in the neck is your inflexibility, you know, your ability to turn, your inflexibility in life, and a lot of spine issues that's very, very, very flexible.
Inflexibility in the spine begs the question, especially which area, which chakra, it's, it's connected to where you're inflexible, where you have belief systems that say, nope, that's it, I'm not going to even consider anything else. And your curiosity gets squashed. So the spine has to do with flexibility.
I'm moving up. So now we're up to the sixth chakra, the third eye. That's that space right above your nose and right below your hairline. So it's right in the center of your forehead. And it's like a big eye into the world. It's your eye into the world of the feelings, the spirituality, the seeing of things unseen. And for whatever belief system you have, you can access the akashic records, the past lives. All this culminates into this third eye. And this is like your psychic eye. This is, this is a place that you can see beyond what makes sense, what looks, what you can see in just the physical sense. A lot of people have headaches and a lot of things that are. They're too much and they're thinking too much and they're. They're filling their heads too much and taking too much input.
And like your brain goes, wait, I've got things too, and I can assimilate.
So it's a lot about being quiet, being quiet and allowing the information come in at a slower pace.
And then the seven chakra is your connection to spirit, heaven, the ethers, the upper world, the anything larger than you, creator, whatever you have as something larger than you, this is where you get to connect directly to everything. All that is.
And for me, and the way I teach the seven chakra is, this is the, the element of ether.
And it's very suspension and ether is all around us, but this is a place of 100% radical acceptance. This is the allowing space.
This is where you allow all parts of you to show up and be there and you honor it. All parts. The good, the bad, the ugly. And just embrace it and say, you're, you're fine, you're great, you're enough. And this is. You're. You're fantastic. And this is that connection to the heavens and just allowing yourself to be loved by all that is.
[00:35:56] Speaker B: Well, that was wonderful. Thank you for talking us all the way through that. And that is.
That comes from the content of your book, issues with your tissues, right?
[00:36:08] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:36:10] Speaker B: So would you like to tell us a little bit more about the book or did we just basically cover it? Like, how does that, how does that get applied?
[00:36:19] Speaker A: Okay, there you go. See, I have elements with each chakra. And as a full disclosure and a disclaimer in the Hindu chakra system, my end in the Chinese system, we are not all aligned to what my chakra mental, which is the chakras and the elements that come together for balance.
I was actually downloaded in Peru with the elements and the chakras sitting in a chakra garden. When I was asking, you know, I've been teaching this stuff for 25 years, I think at the time. And I really want it to be easy and accessible. And the way I was teaching it was how the seven different areas related to the body fluids.
So the quality of movement had to do with synovial fluid or lymphatic system or the venous system or the heart.
And I really wanted it to be easier and accessible and fun. And I wanted to have this somatic vocabulary that anybody could access.
So the chakras are what they are. And then the elements come in as a form of movement, a quality of movement. But it's also.
Take the. To the heart. It's fire, it's passion. But fire blocked is anger. It's like somebody trying to stop you. You get angry.
So you need more fire when you're, when your passion is waning or you're. You're. You're retreating from life, but you need less fire when you are fired up.
And you can use this even in your, your context of your communication, which is in the second book that's coming out. But the first book I would, I would, would love for your readers to get. It's on Amazon and just it's. It's done in a way that's very easily accessible. And at the end of each chapter is a chakra chakra chapter in the element.
And I have diagrams are super easy little tables that are very easy to reference, and it's got tabs to reference. But I also have QR codes where you can dance the. The different element with me, with people in a studio, and there's a Spotify list for each one. If you're like, I don't even know where to begin, it's like, download the Spotify list and just try dancing. Just. Just try moving at all a little bit, just to let your body be free.
[00:38:40] Speaker B: That sounds really fun.
[00:38:44] Speaker A: It is.
[00:38:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
You know, whenever I have conversations like this or when I listen to explanations like this, where part of. Where my head always goes is like, how much of this do we mean literally? And how much do we mean sort of figuratively and metaphorically?
But I think listening to you and how you sort of connect it to physical sensations, like. Like the physical sensations that are in the vicinity of the specific chakras. Like, I think that's the most sort of applied and sort of literal kind of interpretation that I've heard before. So what do you think about that?
[00:39:36] Speaker A: Okay. While you were talking, I was like, ah, I got this. All right, so say that your ability to be adaptable and flexible in your relationships and your ability to move through different types of people, different crowds of people, is wanton. You don't. You're not very good at it. You don't really like it, and you're, like, very kind of stiff.
And people don't want to approach you because they feel it, but you're lacking the relationship. So you're like, I really want to change this about me.
And so I say, well, you need more water.
Water's flexible. Water is about adaptability because it doesn't matter what comes up in the way of water. It flows around it or over it or under it. It flows. It just keeps flowing. So it teaches you how to flow with life. And so then I'm like, go jump in the ocean and pretend you're just. You're flowing. Like, get that bodily sensation of taking all of the gravity away and just allowing your body to float and move. And it's a great.
Using metaphors and then actually having kinetic connection to it, it hammers it in. It's like, oh, I get it. And then drink some water. We're all hydrated. I mean, we're all dehydrated. And so it's like, drink some water and then feel it going down. Like, it. It cools the pipes.
So that's. That's one way of taking the metaphor and making it literal and one More, because this is very powerful. I do a lot of fire circles when I do retreats, because fires are so primal and they're nurturing and they're life, and they're also destruction and death, and they burn things up and they release.
So a lot of times I use fire in a fire ritual around your passion or what you needing to let go of, that keeps you from your dreams and your passion. And we write it down and we ritualize it, and we burn it it, and we release it with love and light, but we don't need that anymore. So the fire is metaphorically a representation of dissolving it, of getting rid of it, of turning it to ashes, and it's gone.
Like, let it go. You don't have to look at it anymore. You don't have to feel it anymore. It's the human needs, the finite. The brain needs that kind of representation. I mean, we can get all airy fairy about it and dream world and vision, but even envisioning, you have to bring in the smell of your vision, the sights, the feel of the sheets of the bed that you're waking up in in five years from now. You have to bring it kinesthetically. And for rituals to work, they. You have to have these metaphors like fire and water, wind and metal.
Like, even taking a sword. I've done this. It's in my book. There's a. There's a whole story in there how I took a machete, and I literally. I visualized that the. The things I was cutting. I was out in the country, so I was cutting away the chafe from the chaff and. And the. And the weedy dried stuff was falling away, and I was getting to the green live stuff in the middle, but I was getting so lost. And I was like, I love this. I want to. I want to cut more out of my life, and I want to cut more. I want to go, go, go. I actually got bloody hands because I just kept going. I was like, yeah, it's like that. You can take it to an extreme, but that kind of representation.
I felt like I was cutting the cords of some very, very toxic relationship in my life. So. And it helped. It really helped.
[00:43:29] Speaker B: So I use the terms metaphorical and literal, but I think maybe I want to talk about or think about it being metaphorical and experiential at the same time, because it sounds like what I'm hearing from you is that you're taking those metaphors and you're putting them into.
You're translating them into a Physical, tangible experience and that they, you know, then sort of have like physical impact on your body as the metaphor or the spiritual part has impact on your, your mind and your spirit. It sounds fascinating. You just said, you just said retreat.
So I would think that having, doing this in the context of a, of a retreat would just be incredible.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. And I've had several this year and I plan on having more next year.
And if I can do my shameless self promotion, have your people go to my website or get on my email list because I don't email very often. But I'll let you know when, when retreats come up. I'd love to meet some of your people at my retreats.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, tell us about how, tell us about, you know, what you do, you know, with people in sort of a.
[00:44:45] Speaker A: More.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: Detailed way and tell us how people can find you and get a hold of you.
[00:44:53] Speaker A: Now when you say when I deal with people, do you want me to tell you what I do to retreat, take you through like the beginning to the end, or do you want the one on one experience?
[00:45:02] Speaker B: Well, we're getting close to our time here, so we probably want just a short version of sort of how you work one on one and, and what maybe your next retreat is going to be like and sort of how people learn about that.
[00:45:18] Speaker A: So how I work one on one is first of all someone you have to feel the call, you have to be interested and maybe even curious, just curious of your own, like there's something deeper, there's something I need and be open, open and curious with yourself. Self curiosity is a phenomenal thing to develop in one's life.
I've worked with people online, I have to say, especially during COVID and had a speakers work with me, their presentations on stage. I have, I don't have that yet going into the future.
I'm working on my next book and the podcast and I've got a TV show so carving out the time to do one on ones. But it's coming up, so that's why I'm saying join the mailing list. And as soon as I open up for one on ones I will do that. But somebody comes to me, they tell me what's top of mind, what's happening. Well, I keep attracting the same person in my life. I think she's different or I think I he's going to be different. And lo and behold, three months in, it's the same narcissist that I always, you know, that I always attract. Why am I attracting this narcissist and then I start asking some questions. Family of origin. I see how much work they've done already and where they are located in their journey.
And then we go into the body. Where do you feel this? How did you first know?
What was your body feeling? What did it tell you? Is it a twinge? Is it a twinge in the stomach? Is it a pain in the shoulder? Well, let's go into that and let's move it. Let's move it and let it talk to it. And then you talk to that pain. What do you. What would you have to say? What would you say to me? Body?
Me, on the other hand, as a somatic intuitive, I see things like the left side of the body is the feminine side. So say their left knee is consistently in pain, doing things that breaking. Like my left knee. I had acl, all the meat, everything, everything went. And it was about my own feminine support in my life. I didn't have it.
So therefore my left, my feminine side was breaking on me.
So I can see these things and I can try to guide and see where they're going with it. And we just go a little deeper and they have ahas. You have ahas. I can. I don't want to say that I guarantee you, but I pretty much guarantee you'll have an aha in your first session with me. That just help you connect the dots. That's all I'm doing and that's all I want people to do. And I really want people to be independent. That's my biggest, my biggest thing for people is you be independent of these things that are holding you back. I want you to feel free in your life. The freedom to pursue, free from the things that hold you back, free to do the things you want to do.
And that really starts in having freedom in your body.
[00:48:11] Speaker B: Terrific.
Well, where can people find you online?
[00:48:15] Speaker A: Easy. Angel Howard. A N G E L H O w a r d.co angelhoward.co and sign up for the email list. But that's how you can keep up with me. And when I write the books so they're coming out and the retreats that I'd love to see you all at.
The next retreat that I have in my area in Tennessee will be in the spring. No, we're gonna have one in the winter. We're doing one every quarter. I forgot they asked me. They're like, please do one in the winter. So we're gonna do one in the winter. We'll do one in spring too.
I do have a retreat center out in Arizona. And we're planning a big retreat out there in the middle of the desert.
But just contact me on the mailing list. I'm on LinkedIn under Angel Howard. I'm under Angel Howard, official on Instagram and Facebook, Angel Howard. So Angel Howard, all those. And if you Google me, Angel Howard, author, you'll see all the things.
[00:49:15] Speaker B: So fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Angel.
And this was really great. Again, I wish we could have met in person. We're in different parts of the country, but who knows? Maybe in a retreat someday. Yes. So till then, thank you so much.
[00:49:34] Speaker A: Thank you, Ramsey. Enjoyed it.
[00:49:37] Speaker B: Looking for more? Visit whatsworthwhile.net to listen to podcast episodes, learn from books and articles, and live better by choosing healthy products and practices. I'm now offering services through worthwhile advisors for personal coaching, professional advice, advising, speaking, and group facilitation. If you or your team are ready to reduce stress and anxiety, build vitality and momentum, and accomplish your goals without burning out, then please contact me, Ramsey Zimmerman, through the website or on social media like Instagram X or LinkedIn. Thanks.
[00:50:18] Speaker A: Ra.
