1. My Journey of Embodiment

Hello and welcome to the Marie Embodied Podcast. I am your host, Marie Zak, and I am so excited to be joining you today, to be getting to know you and for you to get to know me hopefully over the course of this podcast, but especially today as I'm really going to be introducing myself, my work, and what this podcast is going to be all about. So for those who don't know me, I am a somatic therapist as well as a clinical herbalist, and I have been doing this work for a number of years now. But what really drew me to make a podcast, create a podcast, is creating a deeper bridge between my inner world, the work I do with one on one clients and in my programs and whatnot with a wider audience. Because frankly, most of my work for the public has been online on Instagram, and I find it really hard to get deep, meaningful messages across on social media.

I'm constantly editing myself, cutting out half my words, and still I feel like I ramble on and people don't quite have the attention span for, you know, this longer form content. And so it feels really good to be giving myself a platform where I can express this really deep, meaningful work in long form. And so let's get into a little bit of my backstory and I'll talk about the modalities that I practice as well, how I got into them, why they matter. And big focus today is talking about what it means to me, how I understand it, and also it is the theme of the show. So it's going to be an ongoing theme moving forward as well.

I am going to take you back to some early imprints, foundational experiences in my life that really set the framework for who I became and why I ended up eventually seeking out somatic work, seeking out embodiment. I was extremely disembodied, very disconnected from myself. I was a major partier, I would even say I was bordering on being an alcoholic and just far away from myself. Where this all started was I was raised in a big beautiful family. I have five siblings and we were raised very Christian.

And in our household there were rules, very strict rules about what was okay and not okay, what was reality and not reality, what were we allowed to talk about and not, what were we allowed to explore and not. This strictness and this rigidity caused me very early on as a very sensitive soul to start to disconnect from myself because I didn't feel that there was space for me to be authentically myself, for me to authentically ask the questions that I was curious about and that I was compelled to move towards. There was a lot of fear in our family culture as there is in a lot of Christian families around exploring other religions, spiritualities, ways of thinking, a lot of shutdown, lot of repression around bodies and sexuality and being connected to our bodies, and a lot of just gaslighting in general around emotional attunement, which I am a very emotionally attuned person, I pick up on a lot, and often I would point out things or try to address things that I was feeling, and there often wasn't a lot of space for that. As I got older and became a teenager, I went through a pretty full on rebellious stage which is healthy and normal to a certain degree of course when we are in our toddler years and then again when we're in our teenage years we need to differentiate, we need to throw some fits, We need to really stand up for our autonomy and our power.

And that's actually a healthy developmental phase that everybody goes through. And it's necessary in order for somebody to define who they are outside of the family unit, outside of the community, but as an individual. And we have a need to belong, but also to have autonomy, to have sovereignty. And so all that to say is I went through my teenage phase and it was quite extreme because I really didn't resonate with the church. I didn't resonate with a lot of aspects of what was happening at home.

I didn't feel like I belonged there. My parents and I really didn't get on in those years. There was a lot of conflict. And so I've tried to find my sense of belonging, meaning purpose and connection in my peers, in my social life. And I got really into partying.

I got very caught up in, you know, just different social dynamics and I wasn't really being myself there either. So it wasn't like I was totally myself out in these friend groups and I wasn't myself at home. It was more like I was split into two people and neither of them were authentic to me. But I kept striving towards the social and peer version of myself because it felt like at least that belonged to me. I was choosing that and I was understanding myself that way.

And so I went deep down that path and carried on as a partier for many years until I was 20 years old. So from about 15 till 20, I was getting black out wasted regularly. I was doing recreational drugs. I was very unsafe in a lot of ways. I was just not making great decisions, frankly.

And again, there was a lot of conflict between me and my parents. Again, I was very disconnected for myself. I was super disconnected from my body. As you can imagine, if you're choosing to get belligerently drunk and blackout every weekend, you're probably not really the most self aware connected person, but really what was under that was a lot of pain and a lot of feelings of rejection and confusion, a lot of emotional depth that didn't have anywhere to go because it wasn't accepted in my family entirely and I didn't have the friend groups that had the emotional maturity to hold it either. So it was trauma, it was repression, it was pain.

And I didn't know how else to deal with it besides numbing out and acting like a fool, frankly. So that was how I dealt with it and luckily at age 20 I was already starting to feel like I don't want to do this anymore. This does not feel good to me. This doesn't feel right to me. It doesn't have depth.

It doesn't have meaning and I need to focus and orient towards something else. I was on a trip with my sister and some friends, we were backpacking in Southeast Asia and my sister and I broke off from the group and we went to Bali for the last month of this trip. And we were really cute at the time. We had been partying a lot up until this point and we just knew we wanted to have a healthy month and we called it that. We kept saying this is our health and wellness month.

We went and got massages. We drank green juices. We just nourished ourselves with really good food and did yoga like three times a day and really didn't do much else. And I had never had a wellness era. I had never taken care of myself at all at this point in my life.

I had always just been a partier. So this was a detox moment for me that was probably very needed. And it set me on a new path. It set me on a path of yoga because for the first time I was listening to my body and I was hanging out with people who were sober, who went to ecstatic dance sober to move their bodies and express themselves rather than getting wasted to go to the club or rave and do whatever I was doing. And so it felt so inspiring to be around these people.

And I knew that that was the new and next era of my life. That was what I wanted to move towards. I didn't know how, I didn't know how to make it happen, but that was my next goal. And so I came back to Canada, ended up going through a really sticky hard breakup with my partner at the time, and all that led me to being left with an open book and really not sure what to do next. So I did the only thing I could think of to do, which was to pursue yoga because yoga had given me so much connection to myself.

And it was the first time that I really felt like I was connecting with something that felt like medicine to my body, to my heart, to my emotions. That's what led me to Victoria BC where I ended up doing a yoga teacher training which was incredible. It was led by an Ashtanga practitioner. At this point of my life, I was in a really interesting transition where I still had all my friends from prior because this was a quick turnover. This was a six month turnover of going from extreme party girl to yogi who all of a sudden decided she was going to become a vegan.

And I was still going out and partying sometimes. What I needed to experience the closure of that partying chapter was being in my yoga teacher training and there being days where I showed up somewhat hungover, having been up till two, three, four in the morning and then showing up for six a. M. For my training and just being like, I'm so done. Like what am I doing?

This is so out of alignment. This does not connect. This isn't right. And I finally got to a place where I committed to going sober. And I was never an alcoholic in the sense that I drank on my own, but I would say I was a social alcoholic.

I didn't know how to socialize without alcohol to the point that I was usually bordering on being blackout when I was drinking. I couldn't just have one or two drinks. I always was getting quite drunk. And so for me to go again from that to all of a sudden committing completely to being dry was really dramatic and it took an entire identity shift. Like I was dropping who I was very quickly and all of a sudden becoming this yogi.

And as my training wrapped up, which was a three month training, I was looking around for what's the next step? What am I gonna do because I don't really know who I am. I'm not embodied in this next era, but I've just closed the chapter essentially on that party phase of my life. And that is when I decided to enroll in nutrition school. And nutrition school was at a college called Pacific Rim College.

They're still around, still kicking it. And in that school, they also taught herbalism. I didn't really know what herbalism was. I knew that there were some medicinal herbs. I had learned a little bit in my yoga teacher training, but nothing in-depth and nothing very meaningful at that point.

And in my very first semester, I signed up for a couple herbal classes that were electives, and I wanted to get them out of the way. I thought to myself, if I just get my electives out of the way at the beginning, then I can just really zero in on nutrition for the next five semesters and not have to do this pesky herbalism stuff. So here I am right off the hop in an herbal energetics class and our teacher was a druid priest and I was just a little over my head. I did not know what I had signed up for. And he was very deep and very poetic.

And he passed around. I still remember he passed around wood betne, which is an herb. And we were told to drop dose this herb. So we put a couple drops on the back of our hand and we sat there with the plant then licked it off our hand and I felt something in my body. I noticed my body responding to these herbs and I didn't know how to describe what I was feeling.

I didn't know how to make any sense of it, But slowly over time, week by week, as I was doing these herbal classes, I started to feel them calling to me and speaking to me. And the teachers that I was studying under were so inspiring and I could just tell they were so connected and so passionate and they talked about the plants as if they were their friends, as if they knew these beings on a deep, intimate, emotional level. It wasn't just talking about plants as these separate non living beings. There was a lot of recognition of the sentience of plants and the aliveness and how we can be a part of the natural world. And all of this was bringing something up in me that just felt so resonant on a soul level and on a body level in a way that I never really had found anything to be before.

And so I, after a few semesters, ended up switching into the herbal program and I became a clinical herbalist. I learned all about the plants and how to work with them medicinally for essentially everything under the sun, all kinds of different conditions, and my path went deeper and deeper. I became totally enamored with the plant world and quickly started to have my own relationships with the plants just in the same way that my teachers were. Where I started to know them as living beings who were teachers, who were guiding me on my path. I could feel them in my body.

I could hear them talking to me, calling to me, guiding me towards this path that for the first time felt so authentic and real and true to me. And I didn't have a lot of language to describe what was happening, as most of us Westerners do not, because typically people raised in North America, depending on your family's cultural background, you likely weren't offered a lot of language and frameworks that actually connect you to the intelligence and wisdom of the body. And so even though this was so visceral and alive for me, and it was something I couldn't ignore, I had a really hard time distilling it down and describing it. And I often just thought of it as magic that there was just all this magic around and somehow I had magically tapped into it and that's all I could really say. And I had such a hard time languaging my experience.

When I completed my training at Pacific Rim, I moved back to my hometown and this is when things got really challenging. I didn't expect that I was going to crash so hard, But up until that point in my life I had been running on fumes. I was so, so, so deeply depleted, so deep in burnout, and had just been barely scraping it together to be able to complete my studies. And I was in such an anxious state because I wanted to start up my business and get things going. But coming home, being in such a depleted state, having really severe insomnia at the time, as soon as the pressure of school was relieved, all of my unprocessed trauma that I hadn't really dealt with over the past many years of becoming a yogi and then getting into herbalism and all the rest of it, I hadn't actually addressed the really deep trauma that had been living in my nervous system.

And so when I came home, I crashed out, my anxiety went through the roof, my insomnia became so severe, I often would only sleep a couple hours a night, I just couldn't rest, I couldn't unwind. And I found myself in the office of a somatic therapist. I had already been eyeing a somatic therapy program, but I hadn't actually done any somatic therapy at the time. I just felt very drawn to it. Again, because I'm a sensitive person and when I know, I know.

Now I have more words to describe that, but at the time I would just feel things and I would just roll with what I was feeling. I ended up in this amazing woman's office and she was the one to help me realize how much unprocessed life experiences were alive in my nervous system that were all bubbling to the surface. So even though everything was fine, I was technically safe and had beautiful people around me in my life, I hadn't processed all this stuff. Now you might have heard the phrase before the body keeps the score and often what happens is as soon as there's enough space for us to wind down, that's when the deeper layers actually start to rise to the surface to be addressed. So for the next two years, for every week, I started seeing this therapist and we unpacked so much religious trauma, family trauma, high school trauma, trauma related to my addictions and my numbing and my checking out, my disassociation, why I was so disconnected from myself even though I had reconnected with my heart in so many ways.

I was a very suppressed person. I was very scared to speak my opinion, I was very scared to be myself, I was a people pleaser in a very extreme way, and I was in a lot of emotional pain. So I was working with her, I was enrolled and started my somatic therapy training, and I was getting my clinical herbal practice going all at the same time. And as time unfolded, I started to become embodied. I started to actually be able to feel myself, to not have to run away or escape what my body was telling me.

And so, as I did this work, I started to understand my past, how it was influencing my present day experience, how scared I was of the world, of myself, how afraid I was from so much religious trauma that had told me that essentially any exploration of spirituality and authenticity of yourself that doesn't align with that particular belief system would cause possession, would cause going to hell, would cause God to punish you, would cause all kinds of problems, not to mention that I would be rejected and was deeply rejected many times throughout my life from my parents. The somatic work was finally giving me the courage to be myself. And I wanna talk a little bit before I go any further into what embodiment is, because it's a word that I see get tossed around a lot. People like to use that word. And maybe people have thought about it deeply, maybe not, but a lot of people when I ask them, what does that word actually mean to you?

They have a really hard time describing it. And so the word embodiment only really makes sense when we acknowledge that there is a non physical aspect of the self. So there's a non material aspect of you that can be in your body or cannot be in your body. A lot of people experience this that when they are disconnected from themselves they often hold tension or numbness in the physical body. Maybe there's tension in the belly and they feel like they're up in their head.

Maybe they feel like they're even hovering above their head. I hear people say this a lot where they say, I'm always in my head. And that is literal. They literally feel themselves occupying their head rather than occupying maybe their heart space, their belly space, and so on. In extreme cases of disassociation people will leave their body and they will describe being on the ceiling watching their body from above.

Why does that happen? From my understanding, as somebody who acknowledges that there are non material aspects of life, it is a literal experience of your spirit or your soul or your non material being, your energy being, how ever you like to call it, the body. And as somebody who works as a somatic therapist, what I see all the time is people come back into their bodies when there is enough safety present. And so they literally feel themselves getting heavier. They feel themselves softening, like there's a widening, there's more space available inside of their physical container to hold or home or house that energy self, that soul self, there's a sense of landing, of settling, of grounding, and a deeper sense of wholeness, like a sense of connectiveness.

And so what I found for myself was that from all the things I've already described, there was so much tension in my body and I was so closed off that I was very disassociated and living in this very scattered, fractured kind of experience. When I would go to my therapist, I often described myself as feeling like a million particles in space that are floating around and haven't ever landed. My soul body or energy body was in a fractured state from all of those different experiences that were hurtful and harmful and essentially cracked me open, not in a good way, and shattered me where I couldn't be with myself anymore. And so as I started to piece each of these particles back together, I started to land in my body and to be able to tolerate the uncomfortable feelings that come with being in a body. Before, when I would feel uncomfortable feelings, I would start to disconnect and disassociate.

Now, I can mostly stay pretty present with them. I have a really high tolerance for feeling big things. I've trained myself to do that, as you can as well, if you desire. And so that's my description of embodiment. It's very relevant, of course, to this podcast, but it's also relevant to my life's work because each of the modalities I've chosen around along the way are the modalities that allow me to be embodied.

They're the ones that I can stay with myself while practicing them because they feel true to me. My body is giving the green flag while I'm doing them, versus other things that I've tried cause deeper fracturing. They caused me to go away from myself, to have to avoid myself, to have to disconnect further. And so when I finally found these modalities that were calling me in, I knew I needed to listen to those. And so I started to all of a sudden from the somatic therapy training, gain new language for the body and for what happens in the body and for how to describe emotions in a really articulate way and for how to describe how energy moves through the body, how it leaves, how it comes back, how it discharges, how trauma works, and how it shows up again on a body level.

And finally, I could describe what I'd been going through my whole life and many of the experiences that I had been told weren't happening, that had been gaslit around, I was suddenly totally secure in myself that I knew what was happening because I could trust my physiology to not lie to me. And so as I did the somatic work and I gained more words, it started leaking into my herbal work. I started to be able to understand the herbs better and how they were moving in my body and how they were teaching and leading me. And I started understanding also old perspectives a lot better, how people used to engage with plants because there used to be no scientific instrumentation that we have today that we can run labs and break them down into these individual constituents and study plants in this kind of way. People used to learn about plants from observing them, from taking them into their own bodies and tracking their bodies very intricately, and then deriving information from that, and repeating it over and over in their own bodies and in their clients, patients, families, friends.

And that is how herbal traditions got developed, was the plants telling people and giving messages about how they work in the body, and then people observing the plants doing their thing. And so my herbalism went from being a lot more of a modern Western medicine influence because the program I did is kind of designed to fit into the modern world and that you could look over labs for example, you could take these common modern diagnoses and understand them in that way and then apply herbs to work in that way. But what I actually found myself more and more gravitating towards was these ancient ways of knowing that were based a lot more on embodiment and connectiveness and belongingness. A sense of belonging and having even a relationship and a sense of family and kinship with the plants. That became so much more authentic to me.

Not that I don't think that understanding the science is important, I think it can give us a lot of really great information, and it's actually not my primary way of understanding plants anymore, even though I went to school and studying in a way that was informed by that lens. So anyways, all that to say is that my different modalities started to really weave together and form this picture. And what was beautiful about it was I didn't know they were going to come together. I didn't know that they would ever make sense. I thought I would probably be practicing them completely separately.

It seemed a little bit cuckoo to me to be doing a somatic therapy training when I was so fresh out of school and I basically spent the only savings I had to pay for this training. And it seemed like a really wild idea, but I knew in my heart that it was the right thing to do and I rolled with it. And that was one of the best decisions I ever made. And so as I have incorporated these different modalities and seen them work like magic in people's lives and seen people come back to themselves, settle into themselves, resolve really deep painful traumas, resolve ancestral old, old sticky stuff that has been passed from parent to child down the lineages for however long. I knew that these modalities needed to live together, and I've been really trying to spread that word, And this podcast is one of the places that I'm doing that.

So what you can expect from this podcast will be a lot of conversations about embodiment, about getting out of our heads and actually learning what is going on on a body level. And that both will have somatic therapy aspects of it, as well as embodied herbalism. So a lot of these traditional aspects, a lot of this earth centered connectiveness, connecting with the living world. People are so disconnected from the living world, so disconnected from their own hearts, so disconnected from the deeper magic that this universe offers. And we've been reduced down to these mechanical beings who are just floating heads.

And I frankly am sick of it. There are a lot of experiences that don't make sense if you're trying to be rational all the time. It doesn't mean that there is no rational explanation, but you may not have it available. And if you delete or push away or numb out those aspects of your experience without getting curious, you lose out on so much of life. Had I done that when I was early in the stages of this progression, I would not be where I am today.

I had to kind of navigate the messy unknowing. And as time unfolded, I eventually learned a lot of really powerful frameworks and languaging to describe what I was feeling. But for a long time, I was in the dark. I knew what I was feeling was real and I was willing to put in the legwork and the uncomfortable work of not knowing to discover what ended up being the most meaningful path of my life. And so this podcast will be offering you a lot of those frameworks, worldviews, bringing back in a lot of different traditional ways of understanding the world and of connecting with our own self, understanding health, disease, understanding each other, understanding the planet, the plants, and essentially learning to navigate the world in a way that feels deeply honoring of our whole selves, of our body self, our emotional self.

Emotions run through the body. They're felt on a body level, by the way, our spiritual self, which also can often be felt in the body, and our mental self, which is important as well, but it is not the only thing that matters, I can promise you that. If you are inspired by this conversation around somatic work and embodiment and you want to learn the tools, frameworks, and language to really start your own embodiment journey, I encourage you to check out my latest offering, is called Reclaim Your Power, and it is an eight week journey where we will be exploring through a somatic lens all the ways that we end up disconnecting from ourselves and how that results in us giving away our energy, our power, our autonomy, our sovereignty, and we can end up feeling very depleted and as if there's nothing that we can do. Maybe feeling like a victim, maybe feeling isolated, maybe feeling disconnected and alone in circumstances. And this program is designed to help piece you back together in this beautiful embodiment where you get to land in your body and hold your own energy and your own power through understanding things like where these early imprints around power came from.

You're going to learn about shadow work, parts work, and these deeper explorations of how to alchemize your emotions and really move them through the body without being overwhelmed so that rather than shutting down and numbing out, we learn to be with ourselves, be with our power, be with our strength. And this will really set you onto your embodiment path because such a big piece of becoming embodied is sitting with yourself. And sitting with yourself requires you to touch and feel and inhabit your own power. So that will be in the show notes. I would love to see you there.

If you have enjoyed this conversation today, please rate and review the podcast. Send it to a friend who you think would really benefit from this conversation and definitely tune in next week. I've got a lot of exciting conversations planned for you. I look forward to tuning in with you again soon. Bye for now.