MICHAL CURRY
Breath for Your Life
Robyn: Hi everyone, I want to welcome you to the Self-Care Revolution. We are so excited to be in month three, which is all about releasing trauma. My name is Robyn Benson.
Kevin: And I’m Kevin Snow.
Robyn: We’re so excited to have our very own Santa Fe Soul Self-Care Coach, Michal Curry, with us here today. This whole month, which is all aboutreleasing/transforming trauma, realizing that when we think about achieving optimal health, or when we think about how we reverse a certain condition that we may have, that this is a big part of it, that we know healing is about the physical, mental, emotional and the spiritual.
Michal is like the perfect person for us tointroduce to you today. We’re just so grateful for all the work that you do and all the ways in which you provide for your clients and everybody who walks in the door. I always know to send my patients that are experiencing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to you.
You also have this amazing yoga practice and we love your connection with Dr. Harvey Zarren. We would thank you for bringing him to the Self-Care Revolution because he was one of our well-received speakers in February.
For all of you who are readingthis, February was all about Breath and Heart Matters. Dr. Harvey Zarren spoke that month. As a full-time member, you have access to all these calls. Just looking down in the future, we have 12full months. The Self-Care Revolution is a 12-month Self-Care themed series. We’re just in month three now so let’s get started in introducing Michal Curry.
Michal comes from a family of healers; her dad, a priest and her mom, a nurse. What she learned was to do unto others before ever doing unto yourself, so there was not much self-healing happening. As a student of healing touch, Michal learns tools for self-healing, the healer healing herself. What a great idea! For almost 20 years, Michal has been working as a healer with matters of the heart, trauma, and the dying.
Michal also teaches conscious awareness through hatha yoga, which includes asanas breath work, imaging, Qigong, creative mantras and the observe self. These are all tools for self-care and wellness. Yoga means coming together of mind, body, and breath.
Michal has been co-teaching with Dr. Harvey Zarren at the Heart of Wellness for over 10 years in the States and abroad. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, Michal was hired by FEMA to be part of a team to work on first and second responders. Michal’s intention is to be present with her whole amazing self,to be a mirror for that in a compassionate and creative support for wholeness and healing and joy. The cosmic blessing is: you are it. Thank you for being here.
Michal: There you go. It’s so interesting hearing that read out loud by someone else.
Robyn: I actually learned a lot about you in that first paragraph. This is great.
Michal: Thank you. I am very glad to be here and be a part of Self-Care Revolution. It’s a blessing for all of us to be able to participate. It’s been like a calling out of our strengths; who we are and what we can contribute to Self-Care Revolution. When I say with both parents as healers, that was their paradigm, you did for everyone else.
So, when I was having emotional stuff come up or whatever healing was going on with me and I was in the middle of divorce, and I usually saved up five or six things and I go to the doctor and he’d say there’s nothing wrong with you,but I knew something was up, so I started taking the healing touch course curriculum. They did actually teach you ways to heal yourself, in a way and I thought that makes sense, right? My parents, I’m very grateful for their part, because they did their work, but they showed me how we needed to move into a new paradigm with that.
Kevin, maybe you and Robyn both have noticed over the last 15 years that your client comes in and they’ve got information. They’ve done some of their homework. They’re asking questions. They’re not just coming in and saying, do this to me. So, it’s a relationship and collaboration between the client and the healer paying attention.
Welcome to our amazing journey for all of us. I do have an intention for today that part of what I share helps inspire, encourage people and give them hope because we are in this together. I made some notes so I could stay focused, because I get excited and bifurcate.
Kevin: We were wondering what got you on to this. You mentioned your parents. If you want to expound on what brought you here. You’re sitting here on the chair with us today, here in Santa Fe Soul.
Robyn: You’re also a grandmother of four grandchildren.
Michal: Yes and they are huge teachers. I have stories about them too, which I may or may not share. What happened was it really started with yoga. My intention is to remember that we’re all in this together and to just take a breath, look around and be present.
Kevin: Excellent idea.
Michal: Breath was actually the first things I learned as a student of yoga. I actually got bored in yoga. I would do the class, this is as a student, with my eyes closed and I’d play with my breath. I’d move it to different parts of the body. Then, even noticing at the end of yoga class, you could get your mind still which I didn’t even know was a possibility. So, I didn’t go to yoga to do all the poses and asanas, I went to become still which was so interesting to get that peace.
I guess the turning point was actually my divorce. I knew I had to get clear in my life what was working, what was not working for me, to not be afraid anymore and simply pay attention. It was really about paying attention, and nobody told me this.
Actually, like I said when I was going through my list of things, I realized I could call myself self-care queen because it’s like I have the training, but the real experience was in the daily life, like the kids in front of you that needed something. Or my son, even when I was divorced, at seven was saying I’m going to give you extra hugs because dad’s gone. Or, when I was being sarcastic, he’d saywell you know that hurts when you do that and I was like, okay, thank you for reminding me. So lots of stories and all a journey, for sure.
One of the things was the observer self, that I noticed, which is a great tool. I guess there are books about it. I never read about it, but I started noticing my thoughts and tracking them. I started noticing when somebody said something and it punched my button, so I’d track that energy, which is a very shamanic thing to do, which I didn’t even know.
The thing is I was tired and fed up with, either what was happening that I had no control over or what I was feeling. So, I just started noticing it. When I started noticing it in the observer self, I realized that my attachment to it started to lessen. This is really good for trauma work too, or anybody. So you notice it and then it’s like you breathe, take a breath and step back and actually, you can see it in a different way. You’re changing your perspective. You’re not caught in it or caught in the loop, as I found out.
Kevin: I had a meditation teacher that brought that to light for me. We’re sitting there and thinking thoughts and he says to us, well who’s noticing that? Who’s noticing that you’re thinking thoughts? If you were your thoughts, you wouldn’t notice.
Michal: Right.
Kevin: I think that’s beneficial and it’s absolutely imperative to understand while doing this trauma work while being the healer in the process and also the person being helped.
Michal: That being said, one of the biggest things I found over the years that I do in my practice is listen. Recently, with the Self-Care coaches, actually in the New Year, we were doing our little together thing, what we were going to do for the year. I taught the listening bowl and this is a really interesting story, so I’d like to share it. It is a great tool and a great technique. I find, when I’m getting pulled into someone’s story, whether it’s a client, my family or someone I have issues with, anything like that that I can actually stop, lean back and relax and breathe into this listening bowl.
Here’s the story with the boyfriend and the beautiful restaurant. Everything’s fine, wonderful food and all of a sudden, he says, “I got a letter from my old girlfriend.” I, “What?” “She wants me to come see her,” and he’s going on and on. I literally felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.
In my head, in my body, I said, I’m so sick of this feeling, whatever it is. As he’s doing this, I realize I’m collapsing and one of the things we do when we are injured or even in an old pattern, it’s like you are punched. It’s like we collapse and our breathing gets shallow. This was happening in my body. It doesn’t even matter what it was related to.
So I say to the body just breathe.As I kept breathing, I started to relax and then I said maybe I can listen. Maybe. The mantra in my head was ‘listen’. I would lean forward and I felt myself paying attention. As soon as I did this, I sat back and I could relax. The more I said ‘listen’ to myself, so I was attending to me, clearing my response or balancing out my reaction. I didn’t even know it was going to happen.
It was interesting, this bowl came up that comes out of the heart because the heart’s a transformer and it had holes in it. The icky stuff went through the bowl. By the time he finished I realized that this is the end of the relationship. He’d done this before. It wasn’t new, so when we literally did stop talking I said to him, whatever you have to do. I felt balanced. I felt grounded. I felt totally present.
I shared this with a lot of you Self-Care coaches and I offer this to everyone. We started our whole visioning with…
Robyn: Listening.
Robyn:You started our whole visioning mirror.
Michal: Right, with listening. Because it creates not only a relationship, so it’s not me just listening or doing something, but it creates a container and I can expand it to my bigger self. There are a lot of ways to do that, but it’s been a huge tool for me again and again, so listening bowl for listening. That and your observer self, throw that out to people.
Kevin: Awesome.
Robyn: I was wondering, just in your journey in life and doing this practice that you’ve done for quite some time, who have been some of your greatest teachers?
Michal: Actually, my own self. I have to say that. I feel almost self-conscious saying that, but it’s so true. That’s why; if we pay attention and we’re listening, because our body is always self-healing all the time, always moving about. Now, we may not notice it, even if we have an injured knee on the right, the left is going to compensate. That’s balance.
Once we don’t have the injured knee on the right, that’s a lot of what yoga does, and other polarity therapies, we shift the weight back into the right. But, if we’re not conscious we stay with it on the left. So the body’s always self-healing. So I would so offer to everybody, stay in the body, because when we are traumatized, injured or ill, our awareness actually leaves the body and it does add a safety mechanism.
That’s good information. The dragon is not chasing us even though it may feel like it. The Fear Factor, as we see on TV may or may not be true, but we can still decide that. Your body is one of your biggest teachers.
Robyn: As you say that, I immediately think of leaving our body and people often go to their favorite addiction–shopping, smoking, eating, drinking– especially when it relates to a traumatic event or just what we talked about, why we’re focusing this month on releasing trauma. The root of so many addictions lies in what’s been suppressed for so many years.
Michal: Right, and really finding ways to release it, there are so many ways to heal and the definition I know of healing is to become whole or to remember your wholeness. One of the things I notice that we are actually, if you believe that your spirit being manifested in the physical body, we are actually with our wholeness and our whole self all the time. We usually don’t remember that.
Here’s an example. When we are diagnosed with cancer, the mind automatically attaches to that unconsciously. We begin to unconsciously react and respond out of cancer or trauma. Now, it’s an illness it’s not who we are. But the mind attaches to everything saying, that’s who I am. That’s why the 'I am' is such a powerful meditation, and that’s a different subject.
The first time I taught a multiple sclerosis yoga class and said you are not your illness. You are not your diagnosis. You are more than that. You are creative beings, manifest in this physical body. You’re spirit beings.So when we remember that, tuning into that, and reminding our clients that then we have infinite possibilities it’s not just one road or one way.
Another perfect example like, we’re all at the movies we love the movies. We respond and react to what we’re seeing. Is it real? This is the question. When you’re in trauma, when I’m doing the work in the clinic, I tell people to put their hands on their chest and their belly. That is very soothing. Then we breathe to our hands. We deepen our breathing. Then the question we ask is, if they’re triggered, is this true now? Is this happening now?Because we’ve got the cellular memory that’s coming up, you see when we’re triggered and it feels like we’re back in that place.
If we’ve had multiple traumas or addiction, as we know it can be overwhelming. If we stop and ask ourselves, is this true now? And the word ‘now’ actually sets up an energetic barrier for the past and future so you can be totally in the present. So having any kind of intention with now is a wonderful thing you can do for yourself.
Robyn: Now is good.
Kevin: Now is great.
Michal: Now is great.
Kevin: I’m being in this now.
Robyn: This makes me think of Eckhart Tolle, a brilliant job in helping us see the glory and grace in now. Thank you for sharing.
Kevin: There’s a little connection there that I came to when I was looking at the cover of that book actually, and thinking about self-care and realizing that if you took the ‘W’ off of it, it would be the power of no. In case of trauma, I think that that’s super relevant to what we’re dealing with here.
Robyn: Can you expound ‘The Power of No’?
Kevin: Understanding this idea that we can say no to anything in our lives. And when we have been traumatized, we don’t do that as much. We allow our boundaries to be blurred and we allow a lot more energy to come in. That’s why Michal’s listening bowl exercise is so powerful, because that really is essentially saying no to allowing that energy just in, and allowing it into this bowl.
Michal: It transforms it or lets it go.
Kevin: Absolutely. When we did this on our visioning, it was very profound.
Robyn:Just so the readers understand, Santa Fe Soul Health and HealingCenter every January, we have a visioning for the whole year. This was Michal’s gift to our whole group January 5th. I remember it well we started with a fire ceremony.
Getting back to what you’re saying, the no, that is so powerful to really appreciate now. When there are so many choices out in the world right now and people don’t really know how to do that.
Michal: ‘Choices’ is the optimal word, too, because one of the big things in my practice isknowing that you have a choice. If ever you want to know where your power is it’s knowing that you can choose differently at any moment of your life. If you’re caught in that pattern, even if you physically take a step back so you can look at that, breathe and know that you can choose differently. You may not even know how, it’s just knowing that you have the choice. I don’t really care to use the word power, but to me that is our power, is choosing at any point. That’s very cool.
Robyn: While we’re still on this question. I’m really curious. I send people, who are highly, let’s talk about out of their body they’re a 10 in alarm state.
What is the best way, whether someone is going through it themselves, is it through contact, connecting with their breath?
How do you really work with someone?
I know what acupuncture certainly does and certain supplements, calming tea and essential oils. I’ve seen you; you’re so transformative in your effect, often.