My Approach
Over the years I have cultivated an understanding of what I believe to be the foundational elements that shape the human journey. In our sessions we organically weave these elements together, building a strong foundation for enhancing self-awareness, changing our mind, regulating our nervous system, and cultivating a deep connection to something greater than our human experience.
These are the layers that contribute to our process. Each one matters. And learning about ourselves understanding the power our mind and nervous system and deepening our connection to Source can catalyze change beyond our wildest dreams.
Understanding Our Childhood Experiences
1
Mindset & The Nervous System
2
Identifying & Processing Trapped Emotions
3
How Our Ego Has Adapted
4
Deepening Our Connection to a Greater Power
5
Understanding Our Early Life Experiences
Trauma: Any unresolved life experiences that have negatively impacted our beliefs about self or the world around us, and have shaped our behavior and our belief systems. Trauma is not a life sentence and holds magnificent gifts if we allow it to actually become our power.
We all begin the journey of self-discovery because aspects of our adult lives feel painful. This is because we have old programs and limiting beliefs, learned when we were small, that have impacted our current experiences (AKA “traumas”). Many people don’t identify with having trauma yet still are faced with early life conditioning that has a negative impact on our lives. The intention is not to assign labels, but to bring bring compassion and awareness to our behaviors. Knowing ourselves more deeply will bring us to the root of the discomfort we carry. When the unconscious becomes conscious we are empowered to choose.
What remains hidden can never truly be healed. We must first understand fundamentally why we feel and behave as we do before we can claim what is rightfully ours; our worth, sovereignty and our intrinsic love for self and others. Only then can we become more present in our lives.
Many of us are disconnected from the reality of our young environments. Sometimes because there is much we don’t remember but even more importantly because we “normalize” what we experienced. If were grew up with yelling and fighting, we wouldn’t see that as traumatic. If we had a parent who would stop speaking to us for days or even weeks, we might not know how damaging that actually is. Even the devastating impact of something as obviously abusive as sexual violation is often unintentionally undermined by the victim and even those around them.
We all have wounds from our childhood- no matter how little “trauma” one feels they have. From these wounds we develop core beliefs and our ego’s coping strategies that are born to help us survive. They also block us from understanding our needs and creating healthy boundaries in order to take care of ourselves.
Many of us don’t know that when we are hurting now, typically it is our inner child that is feeling vulnerable, not the adult self. Learning how to nurture and show up for our wounded child when he/she is feeling hurt (often called “reparenting”) is a powerful way to embody love, acceptance, and compassion for self and for others.
2. The Nervous System & Mindset
Here is the piece that changed everything for me: you can do all the spiritual, emotional, energetic, and somatic healing in the world and still find yourself back in the same patterns. The nervous system is the first responder, but the mind is what's dispatching the call.
Your thoughts, your limiting beliefs, and your unconscious core programs are what primarily drive the nervous system into a primal state in the first place. When an old belief gets triggered, something like "I'm not enough" or "things always fall apart," your mind interprets the present moment through the lens of that old story. And your body responds exactly as if the threat is real and happening right now. The nervous system doesn't know the difference between a memory, a belief, and actual danger. It responds to what the mind is telling it.
This is why bottom-up regulation, breathing, somatic practices, yoga, toning, is genuinely valuable but not enough on its own. Without retraining the mind that keeps activating the body in the first place, you end up knowing better but not being able to live it. Mindset work is not a supplement to healing, it’s actually the foundation.
And the nervous system itself has its own story worth understanding.
When we are small our body and our nervous systems become attuned to the vibration of the environment around us. A stressful event or general environment activates the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight mode). This can start as early as when we are in the womb. If your mother is stressed and has a compromised nervous system or if she is using substances, this will be passed down into the fetus. And when a baby is born, the nervous system will attune to the energy in the home environment, positive or negative. This attunement becomes a baseline that we revert back to throughout our lives when we feel threat, it becomes our default mode.
As humans we are designed for connection, in fact our survival depends on it. Our caregivers are also fundamentally designed to be in the role of coregulating us when we are upset. The main role of these caregivers is to help us feel safe and nurtured so that we can return to a calm and safe baseline. Unfortunately, this is often not possible as many parents also have unhealed trauma and dysregulated nervous systems.
If the very person who is responsible for our coregulation is also creating the lack of safety with any type of physical, mental, emotional abuse or neglect it trains our brain and central nervous system to a baseline of this vibration. The fight or flight response is a physiological phenomenon and these traumas along with other unresolved negative experiences get stored in the body.
The Vagus nerve is a vital nerve that communicates from the body to the brain. It is in charge of the autonomic nervous system and controls all of the major bodily responses such as heartbeat, breathing, blood pressure, taste, hearing, digestion, bladder movement etc. When we experience a lot of stress and/or poor diet and lifestyle choices it impacts the health of the Vagus nerve, creating an imbalance. We then become susceptible to all types of dis-ease including but not limited to, anxiety, depression, digestive disorders, obesity etc. When the Vagus nerve is unhealthy, we cycle in and out of fight or flight constantly.
No matter how cognitively aware of our challenges we may be, awareness alone does not heal the nervous system. It is the mindset work, actively retraining the thoughts and beliefs that keep triggering the threat response, that begins to shift the baseline. From there, intentional somatic and body-based practices support the regulation from the bottom up. Psychedelics can also greatly release stored trauma in the body and begin retuning the central nervous system. My Radical Evolution Retreats can also unlock deep layers of healing that other approaches don't reach. Together, these create the conditions for the mind and nervous system to settle into something new.
3. Identifying & Processing Trapped Emotions
Emotions are a vital and unavoidable part of this human experience. Yet most adults (through no fault of our own) don’t have the emotional maturity to understand what is happening within us, let alone the ability to express ourselves in a clear and conscious way. This begins the snowball effect of unmetabolized emotions, generating a massive impact on our central nervous system and behaviors at .
Emotions do not go away unless we give them space to process consciously. They don’t simply lose power if we ignore them, quite the opposite in fact. When we consciously or unconsciously suppress our emotions, they become what Eckhart Tolle refers to as “the pain body”. That is, the unprocessed emotions become a body of pain that we carry around with us just bursting to express themselves, often at the slightest opportunity.
Some of us are “exploders”, discharging these unprocessed emotions onto others. Some are “imploders”, so averse to expressing any emotion that they cannibalize themselves internally and can end up developing a whole host of physical symptoms and dis-ease.
We learn methods of processing emotions based on our childhood environments. For example, if your father was rageful and expressed it outwardly in your home, you could either become similar in your expression of anger or go completely the opposite direction; adopting the belief that expressing anger is not OK. Therefor any anger you might experience would be suppressed, perhaps turning into to inauthentic happiness or people pleasing and an inability to stand up for oneself. We sometimes will do anything to get away from impermissible feelings. In either case, the anger is in charge and is unconsciously creating negative patterns.
Because most of us are not raised in emotionally intelligent environments we weren’t allowed, let alone encouraged, to express ourselves authentically. Most parents shut their children down at the slightest outburst or bend over backwards if they are crying insisting that “there is no need to cry”, quickly attempting to resolve the situation so that the parents can feel ok by hoping the kids feel ok These parents are quite unconsciously teaching their children that emotions are no safe and our emotional repression and suppression begins.
4. How Our Ego Has Adapted
Born from these childhood experiences and our unprocessed emotions come our limiting beliefs about ourselves and the world. Some examples of limiting beliefs could be “I’m unworthy, I’m bad, I’m ugly, I’m powerless, my needs are not important, I must please others in order to be loved” etc. In response to these beliefs come our ego’s creative defenses. These strategies are designed to keep us safe from the perceived hostility of the world around us. They are quite brilliant really and serve us greatly initially. Over time however they create a negative impact in our lives. We can learn to treat them with reverence while simultaneously working on finding a healthier approach.
There are two types of coping strategies: adaptive and maladaptive. The former are healthy ways of dealing with stress such as going for a run, taking a yoga class, meditating, confiding in a friend. The latter are the unhealthy and destructive options that reflect our limiting beliefs. These maladaptive behaviors wreak havoc on our lives such as substance abuse, behavioral addictions, people pleasing, discharging our emotions onto others, or eating ourselves alive from within.
Typically, we are coming to this type of work because these strategies have become unbearable. However, it is very important to honor that our minds created these mechanisms to help us to escape from the pain that we were carrying, and to ultimately survive the feelings of disconnection. Addiction for example (though sadly demonized in a conventional society), actually saves lives. Addiction helps people cope with trauma and disconnection from self so deep that without such forms of escapism they may have turned to suicide.
By understanding these strategies, we have the power to begin to make different choices in our behaviors.
5. Our Connection to Something Greater
This is the piece that is hardest to put into a framework, and also the one that quietly underlies everything else. I'm not going to tell you what to believe here, that’s your path. And I have come to orient completely around the faith that something ore powerful than I could ever be is guiding my process, and it is freeing beyond belief.
Most of us, at some point, have operated from the belief that life is happening to us, that our struggles are random, our pain is meaningless, and that we have to white-knuckle our way through it all by staying in control. That orientation is exhausting. And from a nervous system perspective, it is a guaranteed path to staying in primal mode. Control is a survival strategy. It feels like safety, but it is actually a form of chronic bracing. And the more we brace, the less capacity we have to feel, to receive, to change.
Think about your own life, specifically the hardest chapters. The ones that felt unbearable while you were inside them. When you look back now, can you see how those experiences made you wiser, stronger, more compassionate, more yourself? Can you see the ways they redirected you, cleared space for something better, or forced you to develop something you needed?
That pattern is not random. And noticing it matters. Because if it has been true in the past, there is real reason to trust that it is true now, even in the middle of the hard thing you are currently moving through.
What I have come to believe, and what I have watched transform people's lives, is that there is something bigger at play. Call it God, Source, the Universe, or simply a force larger than your individual story. The name matters less than the relationship you build with it.
When you begin to genuinely trust that force, not bypass the hard stuff, but trust that the hard stuff is shaping you toward something, something fundamentally shifts. You stop white-knuckling every outcome. You start to notice synchronicities. You become more willing to follow what is unfolding rather than forcing what you think should happen.
We move from control into surrender. And surrender, in this context, is not passivity or resignation. It is one of the most powerful and regulated states available to us. A nervous system that trusts does not have to brace. And a person who is not bracing has far more access to clarity, creativity, and genuine change.
When we are deeply connected to something greater than ourselves and fully trust this guidance, we lean in to life. We live fully knowing that nothing has ever or will ever “go wrong”, that it is all orchestrated for our highest expansion.
Are you engaged and inspired by what you are reading?