I met Dayana a few years ago while working with a holistic center in Doylestown, PA. I noticed that she moved with grace, and there was a calming presence about her. Whatever she had learned that got her to that point, I wanted to know more about it. This in-depth interview will introduce you to someone who learned valuable lessons, sometimes through pain and sometimes through joy.
What was the major life event that led you on the path to healing for yourself and then with clients?
In 2006 I was living in Brooklyn, NY, and I went through a life crisis. I was depressed and lost, without a sense of purpose or much connection to self or others. I moved to the US in 2004 to pursue a career in music, and in two years, I was successfully playing jazz piano & working as a DJ, having what it seemed from outside “a great life.”
Inside I felt empty and worthless, and all my limiting beliefs were fully turned on, all the time, looping in my head and keeping my body lifeless, though, on the outside, I was playing parties for 500 people, making everyone happy. I felt as if I was in the bottom of a dark hole. A year earlier, I had gotten pregnant and decided to have an abortion. I felt guilty and shameful. There was no reason to do anything anymore. Only once before, when I was about 15 years old, I had felt suicidal. This was starting to feel the same.
I started praying and asking for help. As an answer to my praying, I remembered the feeling of wholeness and expansion I used to have while participating in Feldenkrais© group classes (back in Uruguay in 1995, during acting school). I searched for training, which I found in NYC.
I tried 1 class, and I felt as if those 10 years were just 1 day. My brain remembered the experience!! I immediately felt better, more connected, and clear. In the following months, I joined the professional training program, got offered work at the Institute I was training at, met the father of my two girls, and moved to a much better part of Brooklyn.
Life, somehow, righted itself up. But what actually changed?
What I was doing with my brain & body, intentionally, to find healing.
Witnessing this transformed my life, and I vowed to help as many people as I could experience the same level of health, trust & love in themselves that I was feeling.
Over the years, as I started working professionally (in NYC first, then in PA since 2014), I continued my post-graduate training in Feldenkrais and also in meditation, quantum mechanics, and breathwork. The integration of these disciplines allowed me to help thousands of people to this day, from all over the world. I am blessed to continue being a student and to learn as much from the people I work with as I am honored to share.
Why are somatic therapies helpful when talk therapy is insufficient?
In my experience working with people from all over the world, in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, no matter your language or cultural background, talk therapy on its own is equally insufficient as somatic therapies are on their own, without verbal integration of what is emerging.
Mind & body are one, and they affect one another. Only talking about your traumatic experience won’t necessarily teach your body & mind how to change the thoughts and behaviors your body set once to protect you, and still repeat themselves today after the traumatic event is long past
The wounds or scars of trauma are “triggerable at any moment” and your body holds keys to recognize when this happens, as well as being able to create more time to respond instead of reacting.
At the same time, if you are experiencing pain or discomfort in your body, and only “treat the body part” without connecting it to what is causing the pain, you will feel good for a moment, find temporary relief, and the pain will return, without you knowing what is causing it. You may have to go back for years and years to the “feeling good experience”, or to the pain meds, or decide that you have to live with that pain. Unless you can look “under the rug” and explore further within.
The key to profound, long-lasting healing is integration. This means that the individual is able to recognize, accept, inquire, and nurture whatever is out of alignment or balance. This can be in the mind, and in the body. It usually lives in both, since they are indivisible, and only because of the conventions of human language do we dissect the two.
How does it look in practical ways?
We learn to notice and to “retrain” or align a body part that is habitually “getting out of whack” and causing pain, as well as avoid movements & positions that keep us in pain in daily function (walking, cars, sitting, stairs, sleeping, and all kinds of movements we do repeatedly).
At the same time, also look into those areas of our psyche that have become “frozen” and continue responding as if the trauma or the false belief is still true (see answer below re: trauma). Here is where we find “the gold” and will often see how what we believe to be true is leading the body to move (or not allowing it to move) in a specific way. Usually, these two are interconnected.
Let’s say, for example, that you were told or made to feel that you’re too fat, ugly, or worthless of love. That your breasts or your buttocks are too big. Chances are that you will hold your hips from moving too much, keep your knees close together, round your shoulders, and sink your chest (or any combination of these). Very soon, pelvic or low back pain, shoulder or neck pain, shortness of breath, and lack of self-esteem will follow. You may treat the pain with anything from a massage to a chiropractic adjustment, to a pain pill, to a surgery. But as long as you keep listening to and believing that voice within you that tells you about your body fat or how ugly and worthless you are, the pain will return. It may take a different shape or body location, but it will return until you look at the root cause.
Together, we release pain & trauma from the body and, at the same time, identify the thought patterns that are keeping us in stress and away from full vitality, finding a fuller expression of our self in freedom, joy, and love. It’s a process of noticing, unlearning, and relearning.
Please tell us about Feldenkrais and how it works.
The Feldenkrais© Method of Somatic Education (formal name) is an efficient and creative way to retrain your brain and body to move, think, feel and sense with ease, expansion, and freedom.
From Feldenrkais.com (our Professional Guild):
“The Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education uses gentle movement and directed attention to help people learn new and more effective ways of living the life they want. You can increase your ease and range of motion, improve your flexibility and coordination, and rediscover your innate capacity for graceful, efficient movement. Since how you move is how you move through life, these improvements will often enhance your thinking, emotional regulation, and problem-solving capabilities.
The Feldenkrais Method is based on principles of physics, biomechanics, and an empirical understanding of learning and human development. Moshe Feldenkrais said, “We move according to our perceived self-image.” By expanding your perception and increasing awareness, you will become more aware of your habits and tensions and develop new ways of moving. By increasing sensitivity, the Feldenkrais Method assists you to live your life more fully, efficiently, and comfortably.
You can experience the Feldenkrais Method in two ways. Awareness Through Movement® lessons are taught in a group setting, with students following the verbal instructions of the teacher. Functional Integration® sessions are one on one lessons where the fully clothed student is guided through touch, movement and verbal instruction.”
Since it uses the subtle pathways of your brain and nervous system to retrain muscle, fascia, and bone, it can be applied to improve function at any level: from pain reduction, better posture, recovering or preventing injury or surgery; to playing stronger tennis, pickleball, violin; to sitting, walking or running with ease.
Through Feldenkrais, we make explicit the connections between your body and your mind. It can be used to refine how you perceive and move in the world, re-interpreting everything around you.
It’s based on developing awareness of yourself in movement and in stillness, and it creates a profound sense of wellbeing and ease, much like being “high” on your own neurochemistry. It feels really good!
My favorite application of Feldenkrais? To approach every day with choice and awareness, instead of running on autopilot. I use it to become a more present mother and to listen to my children and clients with full presence. I love it when I can’t sleep, and I let the small movements I’m trained to do to relax during the day help me fall asleep and dream. I especially go to my Feldenkrais practice when I’m walking and rushing and my leg hurts. It works every single time. The fact that is so reliable is what is appealing to most of my clients.
How does trauma live in the body and manifest emotionally?
The meaning of the word trauma, in its Greek origin, is “wound.” One of my favorite experts on the topic, Dr. Gabor Maté, explains that “Trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you.” Is not only the traumatic event and your organism’s response at the time of the event to keep you safe -silence, hiding, disassociation, repression- but the wound that lives in you and that is triggerable at any moment.
Dr. Maté refers to it as a psychic injury, which can stay open, pouring out over and over again, or otherwise forms scar tissue around it, turning it into a numb, inflexible spot within us, unable to grow.
Trauma is sometimes preverbal (from our childhood before language was established) or subverbal. As Peter Levine explains, “Conscious, explicit memory is only the proverbial tip of a very deep and mighty iceberg. It barely hints at the submerged strata of primal implicit experience that moves us in ways the conscious mind can only begin to imagine.” In other words, trauma may live in a zone where there are not even words to speak of it or to make it conscious. It flies under the radar of our awareness, keeping us numb and rigid or reliving the injury over and over again, in autopilot.
Dr. Mate further distinguishes between two kinds of trauma: “capital-T trauma” (simply put, things that happen to vulnerable people that shouldn’t have happened: a child being abused, violence in the family, a rancorous divorce, the loss of a parent). And “small-t trauma,” which he calls “nearly universal in our culture.” Bullying by peers, casual but repeated harsh comments of a well-meaning parent, or even just lack of sufficient emotional connection with the nurturing adults.
In his words, we get traumatized “by bad things happening, as much as by good things not happening.” All of it can lead to disconnection from the self, a fragmenting or fracturing that is at the very essence of trauma.
Emotionally speaking, we get used to seeing and responding to the world through this fragmented lens, believing in it as if it is real. This disconnection becomes the norm, separating us from our bodies, our feelings, and ourselves. While not finding relief and refuge outside or within, we get used to distrusting and not feeling.
Unable to feel safe while being in our bodies, we become strangers to it. If we don’t feel, nothing can hurt us. Unable to fight or flee the abuser, we become immobile, frozen. Unable to trust ourselves to avoid further harm, we stop listening to our intuition. We then embody a “psychic shell” surrounding a set of automated behaviors, replaying old strategies -coping mechanisms that once protected us- that have become a way of being, even though they keep us fragmented. As an example:
- not allowing ourselves to feel
- pretending not to care
- pleasing others at any cost
- dishonoring our own feelings
- neglecting our own needs
- silencing our voice
- denying ourselves
- always vigilant of possible aggression
- distrusting of self & others
- self-assaulting shame
- unworthiness
- negative self-talk
Looking further into the effects of what carrying these wounds and scars year after year can do to us, Dr. Maté links trauma to the addiction response and the onset of many unexplained illnesses of our modern times, such as autoimmune diseases and cancer.
Our bodies not only keep the score (as Bessel van der Kolk has well described in his book about PTSD) but also pass along the unresolved trauma to the next generations. We are bound to maintain alive the trauma that our ancestors experienced and pass it on to our children…. unless we don’t.
Once you see something, you can’t unsee it. That’s the beautiful power of awareness, upon which my whole body of work is based. Though it may be uncomfortable, sometimes a first glance is all it takes to get us started. As the ancient Daoist saying goes, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
You talk about your mission to “help 1 million people to find freedom from trauma, anxiety, and chronic pain, without addiction to medication.” How do you do that?
That’s a great question because it is my life’s purpose and has become the study of my life. To answer it, I have to give you a little background:
I come from a small country, Uruguay, that, for the first 10 years since I was born, was oppressed by military dictatorship. Not only the government would tell us what we could do, what music to listen to, and which books were OK to read or not… people would disappear in the middle of the night, and you’d never see them again. Sometimes pregnant women or children.
It was a culture of terror and protest. Every night at 8 PM, we would turn off the lights in the whole city of Montevideo, where I was born, and people would come outside or to the rooftops to beat pots and pans to complain against the military regime. It was equally exciting and scary.
As a child, I was sent to a school run by nuns, who tried to coerce us “wild children” into behaving and standing in quiet lines looking like the very own military that was telling the nuns what was okay to do and not to do. I “misbehaved” almost daily and spent years of recess watching the other kids play, standing in line, or in detention, my mother always called to the office. With each punishment, I heard the reminder that no matter that I was very intelligent top of my class, I shouldn’t hope for much for my future since I was behaving so badly. I was taking away all the honors in my class due to “bad behavior.” That instilled in me questioning and rebelling against nature against those repressing us.
My mom divorced when I was 4, and my father was not around except on some weekends or holidays. As a family, we moved often, were very poor at times, and experienced emotional struggle. My mom, an abused child herself, used to hit me and my brother hard as a way to punish us for fights or arguments. Not knowing how to cope, she was depressed and would frequently threaten to leave us and go to live in a hotel. “One day you will wake up, and I’ll be gone” was a common phrase I knew by heart.
She never did leave but did her best to raise my brother and me as a single mom, she left us to live with my Grandfather 3 months out of every year in the summer while she worked in the city, 90 minutes away by train. She’d come to visit us most weekends and leave every Monday before we woke up, reopening the abandonment wound once and again.
I grew up in a mix of fear and anxiety while wanting to be “a good girl” and not let my mother or grandfather down. As part of this regimented lifestyle, I wasn’t allowed to go out with friends anywhere until I was 15 years old. Once I did, I set loose, finding relief in drinking and partying drugs, and dangerous situations that forced my mom to “ship me” to the US to live with my grandmother for a year in 1990. I was living as if holding on to a wide swinging pendulum, which took a long time to find the middle.
After returning to Uruguay at around 18 years old, I knew there was more than our aimless hangouts in the park, weed, and wine, cutting class. It was as if my soul knew there was a path for me out of the numbing addictions of victimhood.
I started practicing yoga from magazines, meditation, and then Feldenkrais, Martial Arts, and Holotropic breath work. I was being taken on a path of self-inquiry and was lucky to avoid becoming a statistic by finding the inner strength and support that allowed me to live a life of purpose.
I am grateful for the possibilities that I have been given, and I’m devoted to helping others achieve their own freedom from whatever it is that is holding them back, keeping them prisoners of their circumstances.
My studies have shown me that our beliefs signal the environment which controls the gene. That even if we live in a country where human rights exist, we can still be locked in the prison cells of our own minds. We can be our own abuser with the thoughts we allow ourselves to have, depriving ourselves of love and support by ignoring our own needs.
Or we can be the loving, supportive mother and father ourselves that we wished we had. We have a built-in system within ourselves, called our mind and body, to dismantle every limiting belief and behavior, and program ourselves with empowering, loving, supportive practices to lead our bodies & minds into full health.
How do we do it?
In the process of working together, we identify the sources of our suffering and recognize our infinite power as spiritual beings living a human experience. We find freedom from habitual thinking, feeling and sensing. We discover simple & reliable ways to stay in alignment with ourselves. This can mean staying out of pain, connecting with your life’s purpose, and anything in between.
We use tried-and-tested practices: breath work, brain plasticity, movement & neurological training, meditation, inquiry & reflection, journaling, and sharing in a safe space. We train the mind and condition the body to become the best environment for the expression of health as we re-interpret anything that is holding us back.
I believe that we don’t need addictive or numbing behaviors to access the freedom that is our birthright. I tried that a long time ago, but it doesn’t work!
Our process is designed to allow you to feel the loving and nurturing nature of yourself once it accepts that freedom is possible, no matter the conditions of your upbringing or current situation. Step one is to want it. Step two is to know that it is already yours.
Why is self-love an important component of wellness?
The answer to that important question, in my experience, is a paradox of chemicals and habits.
We could say that FEAR runs deep in the human psyche, and since the early days of civilization, it determines our every action. “Is it safe to eat this?” “Can I walk that far without danger?” “Will I be OK if I let this strange person/animal get close to me”?
The basis of this fear for our survival was useful back in the day and kept us alive in a time of predators and famine when self-preservation depended on accurately spotting danger. In that sense, the neurocircuits for fear are well established in our brains and guide us still to this day. They especially live in our “amygdala,” which is the part of our brain that lights up when we feel fear. It’s a powerful sensor of sorts.
What’s tricky is that too much attention to fear and spotting danger can also keep us frozen, unable to move, make a change, or seek support. It’s the ancient brain’s “fight/flight/hide/flee” branch of the nervous system activated all the time (formally called sympathetic).
In day-to-day life, it looks like micro-moments of anxiety that suppress healthy movement in lieu of staying “safe.” Anything from giving someone a hug to running again after an ankle sprain. From a chemical point of view, the cascade of hormones that are invited to this party are all your typical “stress hormones:” cortisol, adrenaline, norepinephrine, and vasopressin.
On the other hand, the ability to open, relax, trust, and surrender -which can feel very unsafe in this context- is key to access the nourishing “rest/digest / conserve energy/repair” branch of our nervous system (named parasympathetic). That which allows us to trust in our environment, to “relax” and receive. In daily life, it can look like a 20-second hug, a nourishing meal, a deep breath, or a walk in nature. This chemical cocktail is made of serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin. The love and happiness hormones.
So how does this fear/love dynamic play on a typical day in a country like the US?
(We intentionally leave out countries currently under war, refugees, or places where human rights are routinely violated). A country with relative safety:
Let’s say we wake up with a little pain somewhere, or we find a spot on our skin, or suddenly we’re not sleeping well, or we are feeling unfocused and depleted.
What happens first? Our amygdala quickly reacts to this possible “threat” and triggers the whole domino effect of fear. “What if something is wrong?” “Am I gonna die?” “How did I get this?” “I’m broken,” “Something’s not right.” Depending on your prior experience or trauma, you may also go into “This always happens to me,” “This is my fault,” or “I’m doomed.”
From then on, our amygdala starts running the show. Soon the stress hormones keep us looping in that train of thought & feeling, and dis-ease sets in. This can make the initial “issue” worse in days or even minutes. It’s a vicious cycle.
In a context like that, self-love seems impossible. How can I open, trust, and surrender, when my whole body is telling me to panic, to freeze, to run away? How can I like (much less love) what’s happening to me? I feel defective, broken, and sick. Not enough, not worthy, hopeless.
As paradoxical as it is, that’s why love, especially love for self, is the #1 antidote for fear, the root of all possibility of healing, and why without it, the path to balance and connection is much harder & uphill.
Once you activate love & happiness, the opposite domino effect begins. You feel held, supported, not-broken, and worthy. Suddenly there is a speck of trust that the intelligence that made your body can heal your body. From the eyes of love, you can see the shadows of your mind for what they really are. You can thank them for trying to protect you, to keep you safe, and once again let yourself be held in the power of your love. Like the arms of a mother, you hold yourself. And this is so healing, you could say it’s miraculous.
While it may seem very difficult to love yourself when you are being gripped by fear, it’s the absence of love that makes the fear worse, like a shadow in the corner of your room at night. Love, even a homeopathic dose of it, has the power to dissolve fear, like when you light a candle and see the shadow for what it is.
Furthermore, armed with love and gratitude for this very breath, you learn to realize that as long as you are breathing, there is a possibility that you will be healed. All you need is the next breath and the next. This ignites in your brain the resilience and life force we typically associate with athletes of supernatural ability. We all have it. It’s rooted in self-acceptance, which leads to love and honoring ourselves and everything we are.
What are the three guiding questions you ask when working with clients and students?
We usually start our process by asking ourselves, “What do we want? and Why?” This is important to clarify the intent. Our intention is like a radio frequency, emitting a signal all day and night. If you “do things” but your intention is not in alignment with what you do, your actions are half as powerful.
If, for example, you do something and at the same time don’t believe in it, no matter what you do, it won’t work. Similarly, the placebo effect determines that your belief can add up to 72% of the efficacy of what you do.
If you align your intentions with your actions, you access flow, that effortless feeling that “things are going well.” In simple words, you connect the why to what you do.
The tricky part? We have to do this again and again until is the way we think automatically. Because, as humans, we are biased for the negative, this is a crucial and indispensable part of the process and why so many other modalities fail to sustain long-term benefits (most forms of PT, some massage therapy, some surgery, most support groups, etc.).
The second question is, “What is in the way?” This may be experienced as a blockage (pain, lack of energy, feeling unfocused, disconnected) or a loss of hope (having tried everything before without success). It can be very specific (a diagnosis) or vague (feeling lost, without a purpose).
During this part of the process, we recognize and accept what is holding us back. We inquire into it and find out what is its nature, what can we learn from it, and how to work with it from a loving and accepting perspective (versus ignoring it, denying it, or wishing it away).
The third guiding question is: What step do I take next? This engages us in motion by creating CHOICE moment by moment. Sometimes the next step is a movement practice that will keep your body limber and out of pain. Other times it may be noticing that you are holding your breath often or clenching your teeth. You may notice that every time you set on to do something, you have a persistent self-deprecating thought that keeps you frozen no matter how much you “try.”
The beautiful thing about this part of the process is that is alive. Is not a prescription but a series of access points for your attention. It feels like you have a GPS of your own internal state and a series of options or paths back home.
This is very important since the challenge that life presents you will never be the same or “as expected.” Uncertainty is the nature of the universe, and nothing is guaranteed. You will benefit from a dynamic set of principles more than from a rule book.
Let’s say we got you moving in a way that you can now walk or go up the stairs or walk long distances without pain. And as you are sitting at the computer trying to get your online banking to work, you feel this pain again. You may not have noticed, but your teeth are tight, and you are hardly breathing. The pain in your hip/knees has more to do with your stress & anxiety than the actual hip or knees.
At that moment, the next step may be to take a deep breath and hold yourself in the trust that you will figure this out. Or that you can ask for help. You may soften your teeth and take a few rounds of breath. You may move your pelvis in circles and remember your awareness training. And the pain will go away.
It’s the accumulation of these little steps and the repetition of the awareness process (what do I want? what’s apparently in the way? what’s the next easy step?) which can lead us to a fulfilling process of being with ourselves as we do whatever we want to get done in the world, without angst, suffering, or despair.
It’s a remembering that you have refuge in yourself, and you know what you need. No matter what you heard or experienced growing up, during an abusive relationship, or when you got physically or emotionally hurt. You get to come back home to yourself over and over again, every single day.
How can we incorporate our dreams into our healing process?
I propose instead:
Why are sleep & dreaming important to our healing process?
The role of sleeping health has been studied for a while, especially during the past couple of decades, which is coincidentally when we saw brain plasticity in action thanks to Functional MRIs (neuroplasticity = how our brain continues to grow and expand, which is the basis upon which Feldenkrais works).
We now know for a fact that without an adequate amount of sleep we are at risk of developing dementia, Alzheimer’s, hypertension, heart attacks and strokes, obesity, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, decreased brain function, memory loss, weakened immune system, lower fertility rates and psychiatric disorders.
What’s even more compelling is that not only do we avoid risk for the above conditions as we facilitate cell repair and regeneration during sleep, but we can also process challenging emotions that can cause depression or grief during the day.
In simple words, everything you are experiencing during the day can become better or worse depending on the quality of your nighttime sleep and content of your dreams. It pays off to invest in getting the best sleep you can get, and to understand that the preparation for sleep begins the moment you wake up.
Two interesting facts about sleep:
- We sleep for a third of our total life. Let’s say you live 90 years. You will spend 30 of those years asleep. You could be using that time for healing and nourishment, or throwing them out the window, depending on your choices when it comes to sleep.
- Research carried out by Dr. Rosalind Cartwright found during the course of 12 months studying clinically depressed people going through divorce, that those study participants that were able to dream with the emotions they were experiencing as part of their break up, after a year, were not clinically depressed anymore. Those that were having random dreams were still clinically depressed after the 12 months. It makes you wonder…
This is why I developed my latest online offering called “Wonderful Sleep: a 10-day Journey to Self-Nurturing”, a simple guide to reclaiming the high-quality sleep that you deserve and getting the peace that you need to heal.
Also, why I am carrying out an experiment within my Insight Timer App community where we are using lucid dreams to explore how to access difficult emotions during our dream time and use them to accelerate our healing.
How is nature healing?
One of the underlying principles of my work is the fact that movement is life. Though there is greatness in stillness, even as we sit in contemplation, our bodies are staying alive by all kinds of internal movement (our organs, breath, blood, cells, etc.). Whatever doesn’t move, gets stagnant and dies over time.
When we are in nature, we are immediately connected to the natural laws of the universe. We are renewed by a deeper breath; we receive the effect of the elements. We feel our scale in the larger landscape, we look far into the distance and deep into a flower. We connect with the greatest chain of life, finding our place in the universe among insects and animals. And this is free. It doesn’t ask of anything from us but to step into it. We don’t need to make an effort to take a breath or look at a tree. It’s given to us by default of living on this planet. It’s a great gift. It can elicit gratitude and awe.
In nature, we reconcile the fragments of ourselves into a larger self. We put our feet on the ground and look up to the sky. We are reminded that we are not alone.
If we are lucky, we go to nature at different times of the day, and in different seasons. We are reminded that change is the nature of everything. As we can’t hold on to the beautiful clouds or the sunset or the birds we see around us, we become aware that by not attaching ourselves to anything, we can find great freedom. As we close our eyes, we can feel the gifts of nature within us. We get to take this home. And then, we realize that we were home all along.
Is there anything else you want to share?
I’d like to share a little bit about the meaning of my logo. For the longest time I used to have a spiral as my logo. This is in my view the nature of the cosmos, the expanding universe, the way energy moves within us, etc.
Most recently, I realized that even though we are part of the greater universe, we have a human task. That is to travel the path of unity within ourselves. To see and accept each fragment and seemingly broken part of us and lovingly hold them together, in movement.
I noticed that the path is not linear. Sometimes we move forward, sometimes backwards, sideways, or upside down. At times we take quantum leaps, and other times we stay on a plateau, as if forever, integrating…
I saw that we get to walk this labyrinth to our “whole self, guided and at the same time alone. That on the path within we find ourselves knowing all the answers we were searching for. As we keep walking and pausing to reflect, we are transformed, once and again, since it’s our very own nature of being on the path that holds the magic.
We may walk one labyrinth our whole life, or one every day. Perhaps several times a day! We may want to walk it, run in it, dance our way through it. We may want to bring others with us, in person and in spirit. We may share our path and our discoveries or keep them to ourselves. Everything is possible.
Your inner labyrinth is a refuge from the ordinary, as well as our connection to the extraordinary which lives and breathes in us in every moment. It’s technology. It’s movement medicine. It’s sacred silence. A pathway to alignment of heart and mind. Your own. One that you get to build as you go.
Dayana’s website: www.dayana.io
~~~~~~~~~~~~
References:
Cartwright, Rosalind D.: “The Twenty-Four Hour Mind. The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in our Emotional Lives,” 2010
Levine, Peter: “Trauma & Memory. Brain & Body in a Search for the Living Past,” 2015
Mate, Gabor: “The Myth of Normal. Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture,” 2022
Edie Weinstein, MSW, LSW is a psychotherapist, colorfully creative journalist and author, dynamic speaker, and interfaith minister. She teaches people how to live rich, full, juicy lives. Find her at www.opti-mystical.com