Movement is not just something that we normally do; it is what we are. In this crazy world, bringing fluid movement back into our bodies can help us release the trauma and stress we have accumulated over years of shackled existence. Do you want to learn tools for releasing trauma and stress? Debra Debra Graugnard shares this wonderful conversation with her teacher, Donnalea Goelz, Ph.D., executive director of the worldwide Continuum Movement organization. Join them in an enlightening experience and learn tools for releasing the effects of trauma on the nervous system and physical body.
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Listen to the podcast here:
Releasing The Effects Of Trauma With Continuum Movement With Donnalea Goelz, Ph.D.
With me is Donnalea Van Vleet Goelz. Welcome, Donnalea.
Thank you.
It is wonderful to have Donnalea here with us. Donnalea is my teacher of the Continuum Movement. I’m in the Continuum Movement Teacher Training Program. She is the Executive Director of the Continuum Movement. I’ll tell you how I experience Continuum Movement and then I’m going to tell you about Donnalea.
I come from a healing background, healing tradition. I’ve been in the healing arts for 25 to 30 years. Continuum to me is another healing modality. It’s a movement therapy but to me, it’s a healing modality that incorporates body, mind, heart, soul and spirit, your emotional, mental and physical body. Everything together to bring things home, bring you home to yourself, where you live and make this a wonderful, joyful, free, peaceful place to live.
It’s important in bringing a lot of pieces together in healing a personal feeling. We get into the cosmic. Donnalea can take us to some beautiful places. She’s going to talk to us about releasing trauma, the effects of trauma from the body using the Continuum Movement. She’s got some beautiful things to share with us.
Before she starts, I’m going to read to you her bio, just so you get a fuller picture of where she’s come from. Donnalea Van Vleet Goelz PhD is the Executive Director of Continuum Movement, a worldwide organization of somatic teachers founded by Emilie Conrad- Da’oud. Donnalea heads the Teacher Training Program for those seeking to become Continuum Teachers and practitioners. Donnalea is also the Founder and Owner of Cobalt Moon Center, a center for integrative health.
Donnalea is an authorized Continuum Movement teacher since 1998, a Tai Chi instructor since 1990. She is a graduate of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, where she served as senior faculty and Dean of the third-year class in the US and Europe.
She is also certified as a Brennan Integration Practitioner. She has a graduate degree at Barbra Brennan School of Healing that incorporates psychology and the human energy field. Since that bio was written, maybe that’s a little bit dated because you’ve got some more things to add to that, don’t you?
Yes.
You always got so much going on and always increasing.
I will share with the community that my most heartfelt, wonderful thing that I laid claim to is being a grandmother. I have three wonderful grandchildren. I’m in my offices in Neptune Beach at Cobalt Moon. The office right next door is Stephen Porges’ office. I started the Atlantic Beach Institute. With the virus, we’re slowly getting it up but everybody has to take steps back.
I’m doing research at the University of North Florida on trauma and how to help with PTSD specifically with veterans. I chair the military veterans committee there at the University of North Florida also. I have a Kabbalistic degree. I love it all but there is some point where you can’t share it all.
Freedom of movement – the unleashing of the fluids in the body – is our birthright. Share on XYou certainly bring it all.
I can’t talk or teach anything without everything that I’ve ever done at all my experience in forming into this moment at this time. We’re talking about Continuum and I’m going to be specific. Like you, Debra, when I’m at Continuum, my brother, Don Van Vleet back in the 1980s started telling me that I’ve got to come to this teacher Emilie Conrad- Da’oud. She’s wonderful.
The Continuum is everything he always had wanted to find and once I took a class, I felt the same way. I love education, schooling, all of that, but so much of that leaves the body out. In Continuum, the body is a central focus for our learning and experiencing.
That sunk with me from something that I’ve always known my whole life. I love it. Just so everybody also knows, I like Debra. What you’re doing in the world is fantastic. I’m one of your biggest supporters. You have a heart that in this day and time, we need heartful people like you.
Thank you. It’s a mutual admiration. Donnalea, for people who don’t know and haven’t heard about Continuum, can you give a brief intro about Continuum?
To me, that describes the nature of the world.
Can you describe the ocean?
I have thought about it, and I get asked this question a lot and I teach it and I will be teaching an intro about this too. I did soul searching because people would ask me and they have been asking me since 1990, “What is Continuum?” Especially in the old days, it was so clumsy when people would ask me. I would start talking, “It was this and then it’s this,” and then twenty minutes later, their eyes were glazed over.
I love Daoism. My undergraduate degree is in Religion. In Daoism, the Dao that can be named is not the Dao. I will start out the Continuum that can be named is not the true, pure, complete Continuum, but I can give you some glimpses into it. I came up with a statement about what Continuum is. Continuum is a movement modality.
I’m paraphrasing the actual thing that questions, “What does it mean to be a human being? Do we know what being a human being is?” Where we sit down on this Earth or our spirit, why are we here? What’s it all about? Even though it’s a movement modality, and I use modality, some people do not like the name modality. I love it because I harkens back to the original meaning of modality and it’s in the mode that something is experienced. That’s what modality means.
The mode of experience that Continuum offers to me is special. I love my Tai Chi, jitterbugging and all forms of dance. I was studying to be a modern dancer. There’s something about Continuum that resources, relaxes and nourishes me like nothing else. It is a movement in modality and we use breath and sound to evoke movement.
I’d like to speak about Emilie, herself. Every time I do, my eyes get more watery. She was this amazing creature. I say, creature, it has been said alien. They said it was the most fond, loving taste. She was way before her time. She’s the way she thought and what she birthed.
She birthed Continuum. She was ahead of what other things we’re doing. In Continuum, we investigate into physics, our biological nature and cosmic essence that we are. Were we put down here to fight globally and our nationalistic things, was that what we’re here for?
The pleasure of the flesh in a way that is not serving.
My brother used to teach with Emilie a lot. I feel that we’re in an evolutionary process. In this evolutionary process, we are still evolving or sometimes, I don’t know. Some of us are still working on the evolving of the soul and who we are, what we are and who we could be?
I’m going to ask a prompting question. Can you talk about the fluid?
That is another thing that is important. The body is roughly around 70% water, a little bit more when we’re born and a little bit less when we get older and dried out. Although if you get older and you stay juicy, being old and juicy are the important things to be.
The body has so much water, doesn’t that mean something or shouldn’t that mean something to us? Shouldn’t we be thinking about water and how fluids move, especially when we move? In Continuum, we evoke our water nature. Our movements are related to water instead of a mechanical model. Mechanical models we all know are weights and stuff like that.
Bone and muscle.
In Continuum, instead we are evoking fluidity, wave motion. For those of you at home, you can try this real fast experiment. I am a researcher and I like validity. I like to not just tell people something. Take your arms and go back and forth and feel how that feels. Go into fluid movement.
I want to do this all day.
We don’t want to stop, do we?
No.
There’s no 8, 9, 7 more. Already, I feel better.
With fluidity comes pleasure, and through pleasure, we learn and develop resilience. Share on XHow did you go from dance, Continuum, physics research into the work that you’re doing with trauma? How did you evolve into the trauma focus?
It was part of my PhD and I did go back to school in my late 50s even to get my PhD. I wanted to go back and make a difference. I was already a grandmother of one. In this world, I looked around and wasn’t so sure this is the world I wanted her to inherit. I wanted to try to see if there are possibilities.
Around that time or probably it was a few years earlier even, I had started being strongly affected by my children’s generation that was being sent off to war. When I was young, I was of the ’60s and my friends were sent to Vietnam. Here, another next-generation, they’re being sent to war.
What I didn’t know about my generation and those of my friends that returned that they were hardly ever the same. You can see how it affects me. It was sad. They had been profoundly affected. Some had a little bit easier time than others, but I have friends to this day that it’s hard.
My kid’s friends none of them went to the war, but one young man that was like an adopted son of mine, best friend of my son’s, he did. He came back and visited me on and it was his third time going over there. He was still maintaining, doing amazing things, but I was going, “We’re sending people into war. We’re sending them into traumatic areas and we have no salvation for them when they turn back.” They didn’t even hardly believe in PTSD, much less that there needed to be treated.
I knew from myself, we were connected way before this, but one of the things that we did collaborate was on your book. I was molested as a child and I held trauma in my body, my whole life. I went and thought about, “How did I deal with it? What were some of the ways that helped me feel better?” That was why I was a dancer. That was why I danced my prayers. Because of all of that, that gave me an idea that I knew movement could heal.
I don’t think it has to only be Continuum. I’ll be honest, my PhD, I did it on Tai Chi. The reason I did it on Tai Chi is because there’s an ability to have gotten that approved through the internal review board of a university because Tai Chi is known as oriental medicine, but it wasn’t known as of any help with PTSD. My Doctorate thesis was the first one on that.
I know I’m going broad on that. I know we want to get to teaching Continuum itself, but because I had experienced trauma, I knew that it was becoming an issue that stayed from my generation. It always stayed there. I knew someone from the Korean War. He was a good friend. He never became the person he was before he went to Korea. Even as far back as the Civil War, they called it the Soldier’s Heart back then.
We need to catch up. We need to do something about it. We’re making headway and more research is needed. That’s why I’m fortunate to have two dear friends, Dr. Stephen Porges, who most people know these days and his office is next door, and his wife, Dr. Sue Carter, and the oxytocin. We are forming the Atlantic Beach Institute and working to help change things. There’s got to be a way for our nervous system.
What is trauma? Let’s go back to that. It is when our nervous system gets activated or in certain cases gets deactivated because we’re in shock. We are depressed and can’t move. It’s the nervous system that has to be helped. What can help the nervous system regulate? We help each other regulate through social engagement, but for those who are cut off and have been traumatized, that’s a hard thing to do.
Through movement, safety can start being created. This is a Porges Polyvagal thing right here. If you create safety in a safe container, you can start to evoke change. The first thing one needs to do is to create safety and then from that, the process can unfold.
Settling the nervous system so that you can begin to come back into your body and reconnect with yourself.
One of the things that’s not as often, but it’s certainly there, is to be able to connect with your body because we lose connection. We try to avoid feeling when something is unpleasant a lot of times. We go in and learn how to feel our body. From that, if we are in shock because a lot of people are in what’s called a dorsal vagal response. To me, it’s not as many people, but it’s quite a few and those are the people that tend to commit suicide the most.
When I first started grad school, I was seventeen. It went up to 21, 23 and now it’s back down to 21 people committing suicide a day. Is that reasonable? No, it’s not. That’s the veterans. We have no idea. Let’s go into people. There are four groups that are highly traumatized.
The groups that are traumatized are military veterans, policemen, firemen and people who have experienced any childhood physical molesting and rape. There is another group in that group that has a healthiest ability to change it and it sounds trivial, but it’s not if you’ve ever experienced it as car wrecks and car accidents. If you factor in how many people were committing suicide that has had abuse?
Factor in how many people are committing suicide per day that are policemen environment. There are quite a few and I feel sorry. I want to keep stating this because they react sometimes poorly it seems. I get upset. It’s like they shoot somebody that should not. Is that not a PTSD reaction? The trouble with people that are police and firemen is they cannot seek treatment and get diagnosed with PTSD because they will lose their job.
You’ve done studies with PTSD in veterans. What if we had a program for our police officers and firemen that used Tai Chi or maybe we do?
That’s one of the things at the University of Florida. We’re working on this project opening up to first responders as well. Steve Porges is adamant about trying to help with that too. It’s coming. We realized it’s not one single population.
I look at what’s going on with this virus. People are being traumatized, even in our everyday life in the media. If you looked at our world back before World War l, say 1900 before the media and things happen and you would give it a color. When you go to the airport, it’s yellow, orange or red and we never get green anymore. Back then, it was green in 1900.
If we can get that and have the level of our cultures, anxiety, fear and trauma to be able to go back to green. The only way we’re going to do it is each individual doing it for themselves. Change starts here. I was out to change the world. I’m working on myself. I’m trying to work on and bring in my friends and we’re working together and that is happening. Continuum can do that in a powerful and fast way.
I live with my dad, who’s 97. He was born in 1922. The Spanish Flu happened in 1918 and he came in on the tailend of that. When this virus first was all over the news and initially plastered everywhere, he was paralyzed in front of the television and he wouldn’t move. He was barely breathing.
He said, “Let’s get up. Let’s move around. We can still go outside. We won’t go any to any stores or anything like that. Let’s go outside and do things in the yard. Walk around and go do something,” just to get him back moving and breathing. Initially, he was shocked. You’re right, a lot of people have become what’s that initial trauma response, frozen, not breathing. Would you like to give us an experience?
I would love to give you an experience. It’s on my website or on Facebook and I know it’s out. I have been sharing some Continuum breaths to help people. I rather dislike calling meditation a mindful meditation. I’m all for a bodyful for meditation.
This is a bodyful meditation that I would like to share with you. There is a breath that’s called the cave breath. I enjoy doing it. It’s also to me very cleansing and clearing. I could give you some other adjectives for it, but I would like you to experience it first and then you give me your experience because my experience is my experience. What’s important in this is for you to have your experience.
Movement is not something we do, it's something we are. Share on XThe first thing we do in Continuum is we always take a baseline. In a baseline, what that is what’s here now. If everybody could go inside, relax and feel your body, what’s here? Notice where you feel maybe alive, flowing, tingling. Also, give a little space to where you may not feel very much at all or maybe even an achy feeling. Allow everything, invite everything to the table.
With that, you’ve taken your baseline. I will share with you this breath. I take a large inhalation. There are many versions of cave breath, this is what I’m calling the modified cave breath. Do a little what is called open attention, checking in. We’ll take another large inhalation and do another cave breath. The sound I’m making is somewhat like if you were to have a mirror and you were trying to fog it up.
I’m trying to allow my whole face to be fluid. This is the ventral vagal system and the ventral vagal system is our social engagement. It’s the first thing that locks down in trauma. When people get traumatized, this is what they do. The whole face freezes. Some people say, “It’s not happening?” Encourage, allow all these different movements of the face while we’re doing it.
Let’s try it together. Go inside and when it feels right, take a large inhalation and then do your cave breath, open attention. Let’s keep doing this at our own pace because I want you to feel the effect. Do one more breath and then we’ll sit and open attention together. In open attention, be with what’s here. We’re going to come back because we’re doing a little bit of experience and I want to add movement to it.
Notice before we come back, is there a difference from the baseline that you took at the beginning and what you’re feeling now? Debra, is there any way we could check in with 1 or 2 of the participants to see if there’s a difference or how they are feeling or if they have any questions?
One person says, “I can tell you from myself, this whole neck and upper shoulders have been holding a fair amount of tension and now, it feels happy.”
I’m reading this one thing and it’s Kathy. In my train of thought, I have a multiplicity until I get to the conclusion. I always do. I apologize that I don’t go A, B, C, D. I can’t but if you stay with me, you’ll get it. At the end, it all flowers out. It does take a little bit of getting used to with me. I hope it won’t be too much of an inconvenience for you.
We have on Facebook, Sandra. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Sandra. It’s good to see you’re here. She says, “You put me in a super relaxing mood.” JJ says, “I’m yawning a lot. I’m definitely much more relaxed.”
It’s important to me. That was what, 3, 5, 4 minutes? I don’t even know. I didn’t check it and do a linear time with it. Debra, my body started relaxing and it started falling back into itself. It’s the easiest way for me to snap out of the high-paced craziness and get back home. We’re all looking to get back home.
Randy says, “Lots of yawns.” Julie says, “I was drawn to move my lower jaw back and forth and moving my neck forward and back. Is there anything we can do to enhance this part of the body?”
There is a lot we can do to enhance every part of our being. Julie, the wave motion which we’re going to go into next. Words are important and I will use the word, unlock, but it’s even more beyond that. Unlock has a little bit too of a mechanical sound to me, but there’s a way to unleash our body.
Your neck probably needs unleashing. This is where I take everything I know into this area. It is my seawall, I call it. It’s the concrete part of my body. The idea would be for your whole jaw, neck and all of that is to get back into its fluidity.
With the movement and the sound, let’s try it and let’s see if it works. I already talked to you about the difference between the mechanical movement and fluid movement. Fluids move in spirals. It goes under and undulating, and all of these types of movements are the movement of water.
We want to evoke this movement within our self. This freedom of movement, this unleashing of the fluids in the body is our birthright. For me, if I can’t be in a fluid state of being, if I have to be walked up, sit up straight and do all the things like that, that’s not pleasurable.
There are two things I want to say. One thing is the pleasure that with fluidity and fluid movement, we tend to have pleasure in our body. Through pleasure, we learn and develop resilience. I’ll be honest the resilience is connected to oxytocin.
That oxytocin with the fluidity and the undulations is the release of oxytocin. We should do whole oxytocin. In fact, Sue Carter and I are going to do a Zoom one of these days. We keep saying soon. Somehow, I’m supposed to have more time in this lockdown but I’m having less time.
You said words are important. I want to say a couple of things because things are popping off in my head. You talked about that being in this rigid stance. What is that stance of the soldier? You’re doing this work with veterans and they’re trained to be in that stance. You’re talking about being lockdown. That’s what we’ve been calling this time. All of these words that are relating to trauma, informing the state that we’re in. I wanted to point that out.
One thing that we do know that if you take over a person’s body, if you take over a person’s movement, you can control them. Think about why do soldiers march? Why do they have these grills? Let’s look at what Hitler did and how he was able to control things. It was locking down the fluid system. This is liberation. I did come from the ’60s. I am a revolutionary person. Take back our bodies and birthrights. Let’s take back pleasure. I could take back a lot of things.
The same with physical and sexual abuse. It’s reclaiming the right to the body.
There is a lockdown with the body. Do we want to add movement to this? We did the cave breath. I’m drawn to add one other breath and then go into movement. It’s would be nice for us. I want you to do it right in these areas and harking to the jawbone and the neck. I want to help. I know this will be good for the tissue there. I’m going to do a breath called the E. It’s easy.
We’re going to use our hands. Wherever I need to have the tissue unlock, let go, feel fluidity, I take a large inhale as I did with the cave breath, and then I do the E sound. Let me show you and then everyone try it with me. Feel what’s here.
Emilie used to say these little things that were cute. We call them Emilie-isms. Some are not cute but some of them were the most profound things ever. One of my favorites is, “Movement is not something we do. It’s something we are.” We are constantly moving. Our body is a form of movement.
What I would like us to do is to take our baseline, do the cave breath and then feel that, then do Es wherever you need it like we did. If you have space you can lay down in, lay down. That would be wonderful. If you could see my arm, those little movements, little tiny ones are exquisite for your feeling. That’s the guide. Cave, breath, open attention, Es and then into movement and open intension. If you finish, go back and start and layer it. You do cave breath, open attention and Es.
Randy says, “Let’s go an extra fifteen minutes.” Sandra says, “You sent me to outer space. The first time I hear you call with the sound, I’ll go over here.”
Continuum is a way we can start changing ourselves. By changing ourselves, we start changing the world we live in. Share on XLet’s do this. Let’s go ahead and I’d love for us to do this movement and sound and then we’ll do a check-in after that and see how it goes. Please enjoy yourself, feel the pleasure, feel whatever is there. Everything’s not all pleasure. Feel the pain too if it’s there. It’s all welcome.
Be sure to allow for that open attention and your final baseline. How does it feel different than when you began? Slowly come back to our circle. I would love to hear maybe your experience and a few people before we close out here. That’s what important.
Did this have an effect on what is going on in your body? Were you able to connect to your nervous system, yourself and have an experience of self-regulation for me to allow that connection with that I am and not what I get caught up in thinking I am?
From my experience, I would say settling into more of a state of being, a presence, it changes the relationship to the experience of being in my body. I feel happier to be here, at home in this physical space, much more present.
I often go self-empowered. To me, I like Continuum a lot too because it empowers oneself.
I am here. I am present and there is a sense of being powerful that comes with that. This is my space. I do have control and authority over this space, but not control in a rigid way. Andrew says, “Something just happened, thank you.” Julie said, “Thank you.”
Randy said, “My body had a lot of movement circular, but fast and strong, not slow. It was unwinding. My body feels tinglier. Can you teach us a full course on this?” Randy, you’re in luck. I can feel there’s something coming up.
There’s a free Continuum class, but it’s only an hour. It’s more to introduce Continuum like this will be or what this is. The real truth is I can never say the same thing twice. Heraclitus a Greek philosophy says, “You can’t go on the water the same way twice.”
My explanation on the way I feel about Continuum what comes through me that day is what happens. Go to ContinuumMovement.com. There are lots of things on there. I teach a course called Essential Elements that I love teaching. It focuses on breath, movement, sound, pleasure and innovation. Those are the essential elements of Continuum.
There will be another that’s scheduled to start in August 202. That will be there. There are teachers all around the world that’s on the ContinuumMovement.com that you can catch wonderful things with. If I do say so myself, we are a wonderful community that is full of loving, kind, intelligent people that are doing something that is different to evoke change in the world.
Don’t you have a class? You have one that started. Maybe it’s a little bit too late to get into that.
Essential Elements has started. We’ve had one class, so people still could join that. We videotape it like you do, Debra. What is true about it is that this time because of many people going through so much, I’m offering it on a sliding scale.
I don’t want anybody to be left out. If you can only afford a little bit, pay whatever little bit you can, or if you can’t afford anything, come sign up. The Essential Elements supports ContinuumMovement.com. It supports the staff of Continuum. I do not take any money from it. I sometimes call myself a slave of Continuum, but a slave that volunteered freely. All my work goes towards Continuum at this point of time in my life.
Thank you for that. Julie says, “Words can’t express how wonderful I feel.”
One of the things we believe in Continuum is we can get into repetitive movements. It becomes more comfortable for us to do that. I would say go into the fast and then try in your next cave breath and Es to do it slowly and then the next one, you go into your natural pace and the next one, try going slow. See what that happens. It is a formula of medicine for you.
Julie asked, “You make the blurred sound the Emilie used to make. I always have a hard time with it and I would love to hear it again.” That’s a hard one.
It’s a funny one to end on too, but Emilie’s in love with it for four years. The first blur was a longer blur and the last ones that she did were more staccato and shorter. She would say this could change and break up anything. It was a lot of movement and sound from my throat.
What it is doing is it’s taken us back to a time that we were pre-verbal. It’s a pre-verbal sound breath. Even the way I talk that I speak English versus speaking French, English has structured my throat in a certain way where Chinese, there’s a different structure in the throat area.
This is taking the blurs to deconstruct sound in the way we do sound. That’s why it’s powerful. It’s a great one to play with. Some people find it a little strange, I would say it does feel strange at the beginning, but try it. You might like it.
There are many of the different breaths and sounds and it’s infinite. Julie says, “Thank you so much.” There are many breaths sounds that we could do, and we could be here tomorrow and have barely scratched the surface. We take in what we can at each opportunity we get and continue to play with this and experience it.
Debra, thank you for having me on. Let’s do more of this. Everyone that was on, I know I’m a little partial or prejudice, but I do think Continuum is a way we can start changing our self. By changing ourselves, we start changing the world and the world we live in. Do feel free to join me on Essential Elements. I would love it.
Thank you, Donnalea, for your beautiful offering here and this wonderful experience. I feel different. Thank you to everybody who’s with us on Zoom and Facebook. Much love and gratitude for you and love and gratitude for you, Donnalea, Emilie and for Continuum and all the beauty that this brings. Thank you.
Important Links:
- Continuum Movement
- Emilie Conrad- Da’oud
- Cobalt Moon Center
https://ContinuumMovement.com/ - http://www.CobaltMoonCenter.com/
About Donnalea Goelz, Ph.D.
Donnalea Van Vleet Goelz, PhD, is executive director of Continuum Movement, a worldwide organization of somatic teachers, founded by Emilie Conrad- Daoud. She heads the teacher training program for those seeking to become Continuum teachers and practitioners.
Donnalea is also the founder and owner of Cobalt Moon Center, a center for integrative health in Neptune Beach, Florida. An authorized Continuum Movement teacher (1998), and a T’ai Chi Instructor (1990).
Donnalea is a graduate of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing where she served as senior faculty, as Dean of the third year class in the US and Europe. She is also certified to be a Brennan Integration Practitioner, a graduate degree at BBSH that incorporates psychology and the human energy field.
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