Embark on a journey of discovery and healing with Elizabeth Dare Andes—a Somatic Movement Therapist, Energy Healer, Educator and Founder of Evolutionary Somatics. As we delve into the depths of somatic movement therapy, energy healing, and the quantum field, Elizabeth shares her transformative odyssey, ignited in 1980 under the vibrant lights of New York City. Join us as we uncover the profound potential of energy within the body through the art of dance. Prepare to be mesmerized as we explore the intricate world of fascia, the body’s largest sensory organ, and its role as a living liquid crystal matrix essential for communication and movement. From the significance of easy water to the impact of modern lifestyles and trauma on our energy potential, Elizabeth illuminates pathways to vitality and well-being through practices like wave movement and sound therapy. With poignant anecdotes and insightful reflections, witness the transformative power of somatic therapy in healing from trauma and restoring harmony to the body and mind. Join us on this enlightening journey where mindful movement becomes a catalyst for inner transformation and holistic wellness.
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Listen to the podcast here
You can also watch the video interview:
Embodied Wisdom: The Quantum Field Of Healing And Movement With Elizabeth Dare Andes
Welcome. We are here with Amany Shalaby, my co-teacher in the Ocean of Sound. We have the honor and pleasure of interviewing Elizabeth Dare Andes. Elizabeth is an amazing woman. She’s someone that I met in The Continuum Movement Training program.
Whenever she spoke, there was a part of me that went into awe with her mastery of explaining some of the things that are difficult to understand or not really necessarily mainstream or intuitive. They are intuitive once you know them, one of those things, but you need someone who knows how to explain them, how to articulate them, and how to demonstrate them. Elizabeth carried that for me. I was always in so much awe of any time she spoke or taught anything, so I’m excited to have her here.
Elizabeth is a somatic movement therapist, energy healer, educator, and Founder of Evolutionary Somatics, a healing movement practice for restoring physical vitality, post-traumatic growth, and co-creative futuring. She’s an internationally recognized presenter on fascia, energy healing, and somatic movement for physical and emotional well-being, conscious evolution, and the new science of coherent inner being.
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Welcome, Elizabeth.
Thank you so much, Debra and Amany. It’s really an honor to be with you two.
Initial Spark Of Interest
The honor is ours. Welcome. It’s very impressive work you are doing and important. What ignited your interest in going through that field?
It found me, Amany. It started way back in 1980 when I was in a loft in SoHo in New York City, dancing with my mentor who was also a spiritual teacher. What we would do, we had this small class in his loft where we would put masking tape down on the floor and get inside a square that we had taped out. He would put on all sorts of fabulous music. We were restricted from moving within that square, but as time went on, the movement became more dynamic.
There was always a point in the class where we were instructed to rip up the tape. At that moment, it was like energy started roaring through our bodies. We moved and exploded out across the floor, doing the most amazing leaps, twirls, and spirals in the air coming down to the floor and back up again. We were dancing like the wind. I didn’t know I could even move that way. That’s when I began to experience how much energy potential we have in the body.
There was this other moment that I remember was a pivotal moment. My teacher’s name was Calvin. At that time, I was using this experience because I was a choreographer. I wanted to know why I could never repeat the movements that I did when I ripped up the tape.
I was trying to capture them in a dance piece. I was saying to Calvin, “Why can’t I get this?” He took me over to the window. It was nighttime. It was snowing gently. It was quiet as could be. There, I looked out at this traffic light at the corner of Prince and Graham Street and it was rhythmically flashing yellow. The snow was falling gently. There were cars going very slowly, another car going slowly, and a person walking this way and that way.
I want to tell you that what I perceived was this perfect order. There was this order that existed apart from my attempts to organize it in some repetitive form and control the flow of it. It was this constant flow of creation.
That’s very interesting. It reminds me a little bit of the dervishes in our Sufi dance that they start slow with their hands closed and at one moment, they open. This is very beautiful. I can relate to what you say.
It sounds really powerful. Also, having that moment of recognition of what may seem random, the movements of the individual parts of our existence in creation. When you step back and see them like that through the looking glass or the window, you see the perfection and the order in it. That sounds like a beautiful moment. How did this lead you to your discoveries and your a-has on fascia?
What Is Fascia
Can you also explain the term in case for someone like myself? I didn’t know what it was.
What is it? What is fascia?
Let me take Amany’s question first. I will be talking a lot about this largest sensory organ in our body with 250 million at last count sensory neurons. There are also motor neurons, but sensory neurons are the information coming inside of us.
We didn’t realize that this most powerful sensing organ of ours was anything other than packing peanuts or bubble wrap. We thought it was that stuff that was around all the muscle. When you get chicken, there’s all that white stuff around it. You have to cut it away because it’s gristle.
You get it inside other cuts of meat. It’s hard to chew and all that. It doesn’t have any protein. Nobody paid it any mind in the human body. In dissection, we cut it away to get to the muscles and the organs where we thought all the stuff was happening.
Fascia makes sure that nothing in the body touches anything else, including the cells. Everything is surrounded by this material that is both tissue and water. It has this ability to communicate at crazy levels. The more we are learning about it, the more we realize that who we thought we were is a tiny bit of who we really are. We couldn’t even see it before.
The more we learn about fascia, the more we realize that who we thought we were is just a tiny bit of who we really are and we couldn't even see it before. Share on XTo answer your question, Debra, about how I got interested in fascia, as I found Calvin and I started working with him, I’ve been following the path with the heart my whole life. It has led me to where I need to go.
I got into fascia a couple of years before the pandemic because I was interested in movement and how fascia helps us to move. Before that, you mentioned I was an energy healer. I’ve always been exploring energy and movement together.
There was a time when I was doing a sound meditation with a man named Thomas Huebl, one of my spiritual teachers. It was a recording. I was sitting at home in my bedroom and I was sounding. My heart opened. My throat opened. Every part of me opened.
I had a vision that was completely counter to what I had learned in healing school, which was a model of the chakras, a vertical power of current, and the human energy field around a body that was a human shape. Instead, what I saw was that I was energy.
I was this huge toroidal field. All the chakras had blended together. There was a toroid on the top and a toroid on the bottom. There was nothing but movement along the periphery and flow through the center going up and down. I could look out around the event horizon and see life events, but they were like flashes of light moving through. It was a technicolor experience. There were no drugs, but it was like I was having a psychedelic experience.
That implanted something very interesting in me. At first, I couldn’t even talk about it. I thought, “People will think I’m crazy if I share this.” I come from this traditional Sushumna and chakra vertical model. When I realized that that’s not how it is at all, I held this inside me and something started brewing. When I came across fascia and the quantum qualities of who we are, everything started to click for me. I hope that answers your questions.
The Quantum Field
It seems to me you went even beyond the energy. You went to to what we call the spirits and the observer where you watch everything moving around you. That’s such a powerful experience, for sure. Talking about the spiritual, I still like to connect that to science because I feel from my experience and studies, everything is interconnected. Tell us a little bit about the science behind how sound and movement affect the fascia.
I’m happy to.
Can I ask a clarifying question before you get too far into that?
Yeah.
The fascia and the interstitium, like in continuum, we talked about the interstitium, are they the same? I think of the interstitium as the fluid between everything and the fascia is very fluid. It contains water. Are they the same?
When I talk about the living liquid crystalline matrix, it might be a little bit easier to understand. When most people talk about fascia, they’re talking about collagen. All that wrapping around everything has collagen fibers in it. Collagen is made of amino acids. They’re in a double helix kind of a spiral thing.
Inside that spiral, they have to be patterned in a certain way so that glycine, one of the amino acids, is every third one. It’s glycine and then two others. Those fibers spiral around each other and make up long threads that spiral around each other.
In between those little threads when it moves or when it spirals is something that gets released known as easy water. It’s that fluid that changes the whole body into this living liquid crystalline matrix. It’s this superhighway of information.
We speak about fascia being able to be soft or gluey and dense. When that fluid doesn’t flow, the fascia gets gluey and dense. The fluid that is flowing through your whole body is this interstitium. It’s important that we think of it as one system. I know different names. It can get confusing. There are different types of fascia in the body. Fascia can change and all that, but it’s easier to think of it all as one thing.
One system. That clarifies for me exactly what we’re talking about in the body and how that really aids in the movement or lack of movement in the body.
Exactly.
Thank you.
I want a little clarification. Is it the fluid that causes the motion of the fibers or does the motion of the fibers make the fluid flow easily? Which is affecting which, or is both affecting one another?
You’re right in thinking that the quality of the fibers influences the flow of the fluid. What we need to know is that that fluid can be diminished or expanded by the practices that we do. It’s like epigenetics. That connective tissue along with the fluid funnels the information.
We have to get down to the cellular level and the mitochondria in every cell because, at a fractal dimension, every part of your body is made up of these fluids and fibers. Right down to the tiniest level of these nanotubes in the mitochondria that are fibers and spiral in a double helix, when that’s happening and they spiral, the fluid flows. Light as information is conducted. That’s what goes through the whole body. In answering this first, it might sound a little confusing.
I’ve taken you out of sequence. I apologize for that.
That’s okay. I’ll back up a little bit. The speed of conduction and the information that flows through it depends on the water that surrounds it. The water surrounding those collagen fibers is a special water that lives in us.
Most of the water in our bodies is not H2O. It’s H3O2. It’s called Exclusion Zone water or EZ water. It creates a barrier that’s very important because that barrier protects us from a lot of things like toxins that break down the cells.
That barrier, depending on how you live, what you do, and how you move, can shrink or expand. The more it expands, the larger our container for more of this information encoded in pictographs of light to flow through our bodies.
Two things to know here are that we want to talk about the importance of the kind of water in us and also how that water influences what’s known as the folding of the collagen fibers as they move into a spiral helix. It’s a double helix that is spiraling clockwise, counterclockwise, and also around each other.
I ’m going to reference an unrecognized genius who should get the Nobel Prize, Gerald Pollack. He wrote a book called The Fourth Phase of Water. He’s a brilliant man. He goes into this in great detail that not being a scientist, I can’t even attempt to go there.
Most water in our bodies is already this EZ water. This EZ water, how it differs from regular water, is that H2O is sloshy. When we think about the water in our bodies, hydrating, and all that, which I’m going to do, we think about taking that kind of water into us and becoming sloshy.
Exclusion Zone water is organized. It’s a liquid crystal. It also has a negative charge to it. What we know is that the cells need a negative charge in order to function in the healthiest way possible. When that happens, and this is the quantum part, it funnels electrons through the body faster than the speed of light. It gets that EZ water moving. I’ll talk about how we can do that and also talk about what disrupts it.
This is no new invention. Every living organism on earth does this. This is our natural heritage. This energy potential can shrink or expand depending on what we do. E xclusion Zone water is like layers. It’s around the cells. It’s around every organ.
We need to do things to stimulate those layers of Exclusion Zone water so they can come into our bodies. Those electrons move through the body faster than the speed of light. We’re capable of operating at this really high level.
This is why the living liquid crystalline matrix is a superconductor. It’s an information superhighway. We’re talking about quantum particles traveling through our bodies. There’s a part of our existence that has always been here that we’re coming into an awareness of that we are quantum beings. We are eternal beings.
We have a time-bound life with this lifetime, our memories, the trauma, and all of that, but we are not just that. We are eternal beings. We are capable of functioning at a quantum level. We can access that information. It’s fluid information. It’s not bound by our understanding of time and space in a 3D reality.
We are eternal beings. We are capable of functioning at a quantum level and we can access that information. It's not bound by our understanding of time and space in a 3D reality. Share on XThat, to me, a billion light bulbs go off. We have that term, “The light bulb went off.” That’s old thinking, the light bulb light, because light bulb light is choppy light. I’m talking about quantum light. I’m talking about a coherent wave. A coherent wave knows no boundaries. It spreads out everywhere.
That’s why you can know yourself in many lifetimes. You can know your eternal self. You can know your bio-intelligent, primitive self. We can access so much more information than we ever imagined that we could. Do you want to know a little bit about what’s not good, what shrinks it, and what can expand it?
Sure.
We are sitting most of the time.
Sitting is it. What does sitting do to us? It locks us in. Sometimes, we’re at our desks typing away. We are getting a carpal tunnel. We’re getting forward head. Our psoas is getting tight with this whole flow of information. The body says, “Do you want to sit this way? Do you want to be in this position? I’ll build you a body that keeps you in this position.” I t’s very agreeable.
EMFs from wireless technology are terrible. Being indoors all the time or most of the time, not getting out in nature, trauma, emotional, physical, collective, cultural, climate change, and all the crises that we’re facing leads to so much anxiety. That’s another way.
There’s injury, fluoride in our water, the diet that we eat, surgery, and scars. Our devices, having them around us all the time and being more in here than we are in the world, all those things disconnect us from ourselves. What expands it? Wave movement, pandiculation, cold plunging, and sound.
Sound is huge. This is epigenetics. It’s the little things I’m fond of saying. This is a Buckminster Fuller quote that I love, “It’s the little things that add up. Doing the small things in the right way consistently over time is what makes the big changes.”
Doing the small things in the right way consistently over time is what makes the big changes. Share on XThe fascia on your skin, the most superficial fascia that you have, has a direct line into the DNA of your cells through something called integrins. I can lightly move my hand and it can echo all the way down into the cells and the nucleus of the cells. While you’re doing all of this, you’re changing the DNA. You might have an expression for your BRCA gene for breast cancer, but you don’t turn it on. It exists there, but it’s dormant because you’re doing all these other things to support your whole self.
That really speaks to our self-agency. We can do so much more. It’s so easy to get so depressed about how you feel or how the world is. These little things that you do that make you feel better for ten minutes until you turn on the news or something, if they add up, they can change who we are.
That’s beautiful. When you mentioned diet, that’s another passion of mine. I feel like we could have a whole conversation about how diet affects in terms of your hydration levels, your stress, and everything else. It has such a strong impact on that. I won’t go there. I wanted to mention that.
I know times in my life when I’ve eaten fruit and gone on the frugivore diet where I got so alive, alert, fluid, and connected, talk about information superhighway going at lightning speed. The way that fruit hydrates and nourishes the body not just with water but with the hydration from the food that contains all the other nourishment is huge. That gives me more insight into how that works.
Healing Dimension
We are here, however, to talk about somatics, sound, healing, and how that impacts our bodies and our lives. Bringing this into the healing dimension because this is amazing information, can we talk about how we use it? You talked about the positive state, the expansive state, and the constricting state. How about healing?
Many of us live in that constricted state. We’ve all been through trauma. If you turn on the news, that’s a traumatic experience in itself. We live in these worlds full of EMFs. We eat foods that are stripped of their nourishment and dehydrated of any natural hydration that could support the body. There are a lot of dehydrating foods and things. How do we turn this into healing? Maybe you have an example that you want to share with us.
I have a very short anecdote and then I have a little bit longer story. I’ll start with a short one about a client of mine that I worked with for about two years who had had a number of automobile accidents and traumatic brain injury.
She lost the ability to even function in her life. She couldn’t think clearly. She couldn’t sit at the computer for very long without getting migraines. She was always a very active person. We started a program of somatic therapy together in conjunction with I was having her walk. She told me, “I’m going out and I am running really hard and fast.”
This woman could barely coordinate her movement. She couldn’t rotate her body. Rotation is a really important thing. I said there are two things to remember that are important. The folding of the collagen fibers was one of them. The other one was the EZ water. That’s rotation.
If you have a pattern locked in your body and you can’t rotate as a head, torso, pelvis, wave, and rotate back in the same way or from the bottom up, then you’re locked into a pattern. We’re talking then about the folding. If we can find a healthy way for this fascia and these collagen fibers to fold, then they act like a coiled spring. They can store piezoelectric energy. When you have more energy, you function better and feel more joyous.
What we did together was have her stop running. We started with somatic movement and had her slowly coordinate how to rotate an energy wave through her body. We then introduced a walking program. She took to it like a duck to water. People were stopping her saying, “What has happened to you? You are moving so much better. You look great.” It was a great thing.
Fast forward to this last Christmas 2024 holiday, this is a story about me. My dog’s leash was around my wrist. I should have been holding it in my hand. Somebody came and scared him and pulled me down with him. It was icy and snowy. I sprained my ankle. I remember hitting the ground and my ankle went sideways. I thought, “This is bad.”
Do you remember, Debra, several years ago when I was at Continuum and the tip of my right index finger, I pulled it? It’s still like that. It’s much straighter than it used to be . I went to the doctor and the physical therapist. They put a whole thing on it. What it did is it bent a part of my knuckle down. My body reshaped itself by being held in this position and I couldn’t move it. When I hurt my ankle, I said, “I’m not going this route. I’ll do my own experiment. If it’s terrible, then I’ll give in. I’ll go get an X-ray.”
I started this walking program for myself. I couldn’t walk. Even post-injury, I had to walk a great distance and I didn’t know that I could do it. I did it because I did this meditative slow walking using the principles I know about in terms of how to fold those fibers so that they could store energy.
Every time I put my foot down on the ground to take a step, it wasn’t my whole body weight collapsing down and having to force myself to find the momentum to step forward. There wasn’t that collapse in me. Instead, when I came down because things were folded well, I could store the energy in my body and I had a spring that lifted me up. I didn’t use as much of my energy in order to move my body.
I practiced it religiously, practically every step I took for six weeks. Going up and down stairs was such a wonderful challenge for me. When I started to get better, I could practice loading with my own body weight by leaning slightly forward, inclining myself slightly forward as I was moving up. I was moving my center of mass with my center of gravity. Posture is a really important piece also.
That’s fascinating and assuring. As I was hearing you in the beginning, I was like, “She is a dancer, but I’m not a dancer.” Many people maybe don’t dance that much, so I was thinking, “It has all of this difficult movement maybe for someone who doesn’t know how.” From your stories, it seems like a gentle movement. The resistance with a special awareness of the weight and how to focus your energy and something like that sounded assuring to me.
Everybody walks, right?
Yes. It’s distinctly walking.
I’m big on walking. It restores us back to full functioning. I look at how people walk. I used to get behind people when I lived in the city. I would park my car 30 blocks away from my studio, walk to the studio, get behind people, and imitate their walks. I would know them. I would get so much information about them. Walking is huge.
The great thing that you touched upon, Amany, is who’s walking, not so much how you’re walking. Are you walking or are you distracted? Do you have earbuds in and you’re listening to music? Are you being driven by something else? Are you talking to somebody or walking on a treadmill and watching CNN?
You have to go in and consciously with your intention and your attention moves your body to awaken your perception. We’re talking about our largest sensory body. It has more sensory neurons than the iris of your eye.
That’s what I was getting as you’re speaking. I’m sorry to interrupt you.
Don’t.
We’re so conditioned to be attuned to the sensory organs of the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. The sensations we take in through those organs inform us that we don’t recognize this huge sensory organ that we have, we disconnect and tune it out.
If we trained ourselves to be in tune with the sensory information coming in through the fascia body as we do through the eyes and the ears, how much information would we be taking in, and how much would we know about our surroundings and ourselves? That’s huge.
It seems also that it goes with every spiritual path that talks about being present in the moment. When you were talking about whether you are listening to something, watching CNN while you are moving, or in the moment and in your body fully present with the walking, right?
Yes.
That makes it maybe easier because it’s simple but also challenging in our modern style of living.
Don’t wear restrictive shoes. I love five-finger shoes because I can feel my feet. The disease starts in feet that are closed off from the earth. This whole ground reaction force can’t flow through restricted little feet. High heels are the worst if your toes are crunched in and then you’re walking on a hard sidewalk.
You want to feel the earth. If you can’t take your shoes off, wear shoes that enable you to conduct the frequency of the earth. It’s very important. That can really help you. If you have difficulty walking and you can go to a beach, walk on your bare feet. Wear those five-finger shoes or you have shoes with a leather sole so that you can conduct that energy of the earth through your body.
Do you know how you walk when you take a walk on the beach and you come back and there are all those negative ions from the ocean? You’re feeling good and it’s that uplifted feeling? That’s a well-folded collagen body because it’s bringing that through.
Are there other easy motions that you can give besides walking? I know you have a full class about making people move.
Opening The Eyes Of Our Fascia
How do we tune into our intake of information from this sensory organ? How do we open our eyes? How do we open the eyes and ears of our fascia?
One thing I do, we could do it. Sit up straight and put your feet on the floor. Feel the four corners of your feet. If you can take off your shoes, do or be in socks. Maybe wiggle your toes a little bit. Wake up those toes. Spread them out and feel all ten toes making contact, and then feel the ball of the foot. Start at the big toe. Apply the thought of a little more pressure on the big toe ball of the foot against the floor.
It’s like you’re standing on an ink pad and you make that imprint. Go cross the ball of the foot. You’re noticing each one making contact, but it’s a little bit different because it’s arched. Get that ball of the foot at the baby toe down.
Feel the lateral borders of the feet. Feel the whole cup of the heel, especially the insides of the heels right underneath your ankles. Give yourself a moment to settle in. Maybe you notice that your breath is changing. You’re sitting up straight and sitting on your pubic bone and your two sit bones ideally. You’re not tucked back and you’re not tilted forward.
I want you to imagine that your occipital bone, the back of the head, and you can go ahead and touch it, is floating directly above your sacrum, which is down here at the back of your pelvis. You can begin to maybe breathe nice and easy breaths. No deep breaths and intense holding. Nothing weird, but natural breaths.
Maybe your body wants to start to move in a little wave-like motion. Notice that. You don’t have to make it move, but if it wants to go, let it go. Imagine that what’s happening is that there’s this whole softening of the tissue and the spreading of that EZ water, softening all those cellular boundaries. The cells start to undulate a little bit.
Make it really tiny. Imagine, because we’re so visual and you can close your eyes for this if you want, that what’s happening inside your body is little tiny sparkles of light, like little bioluminescence. While that bioluminescence is sparkling away and you get a chance to see the little sparkles of light throughout your body, concentrate on one area of the body that seems to like to move.
If nothing likes to move or you choose to do this, you can go to your hand and your fingertips. You’re doing little tiny micro-movements with that light. You’re exploring this whole fluid refinement of your sensory system to awaken. Stay with it. If you start to lose it, find your feet again. Find your occipital bone, the back of your head, floating over your sacrum, the back of the pelvis, and let your body breathe nice and easy natural breaths.
If you want to make a little bit of a sound, pretend that you’ve taken a drink of the most delicious liquid you’ve ever had in your life. It’s quenching your thirst. You feel such gratitude for that whole awakening in your body of this waters-like ambrosia. Make a little sound as you exhale like, “Ah.” Extend that end of your, “Ah,” so it’s like a little hint of a sound, the breath of that sound, and let yourself float in this bioluminescence.
The last piece here is to let your awareness begin to spread out as far as it feels okay for you. You’re sending these little tendrils of mycelial roots out and begin to sense whatever it is you sense in your body. Maybe it’s time to take your palm and begin to get those little movements in your fingertips and your palm.
Whenever you’re ready, receive. Concentrate on receiving that flow of information. No sense-making is necessary. Simply receive. Maybe it’s a tingling in the palm. Maybe you can look out the window if you have a window nearby and reach your hand toward the nearest tree. Begin to receive the information that may be available and hadn’t been before.
Begin one more stage of pulling your awareness back to expand your awareness into not just you and the tree, but you and the tree as one. It’s you and the environment as one in this whole fluid expanse of time and space that can become available to us through our intention and our awareness. Whenever you’re ready, bring yourselves back. Feel free to stretch your body. We call it pandiculation. Shake a little bit if you need to. Stomp your feet, and here we are.
I want to stay in this because as I reached that tree, it shifted my energy and my feeling in my body and moved closer again. We say if the trees could talk, it was so strong and stable. It felt like the ancient wisdom of the earth. I don’t even know how to put words to it, but bringing myself to be one with that was like filling my body with this strength and stability.
Neil Douglas-Klotz, in one of his books, talks about the name of the word Salaam peace. It is Salaam, Shalom, and Shlama for the Arabic, the Hebrew, and the Aramaic. He talks about when you say, “Assalamualaikum. Peace be with you,” to someone, you’re saying return to the peace before there was anything other than peace or when there was not even any knowledge of anything other than peace. That’s why I felt connected with that tree, the ancient, before there was anything other than. That was strong. That was powerful.
Thank you. You named it.
For me, it felt like my feet were connected to everything else. Trees communicate through their roots. We can receive some communication. I felt like I was tasting the tree like it was inside of me or I was inside of it. It was beautiful and its symbol.
Trauma Healing
You in the biography talked about trauma healing. Since you gave us examples of physical trauma that happened to your friend or client and some injury to you, what about the emotional trauma that can also be released through that?
Yes is the very short answer. There’s so much we still don’t know about that subject, so I’m going to give you what we know, what people are experiencing that I’m in communication with or working with, and what my experience is.
One of my favorite research papers, and it’s a little old since it is from 2015, is about whether fascia can hold emotion. It goes on to talk about at least a dozen ways that the emotional trauma gets patterned in the fascia along the lines of something like a little cobweb.
There can be areas in the body where we have trauma. The collagen fibers can form a little cobwebby-like thing in an area where you develop sensory motor amnesia. Somebody will say, “I have a bad hip,” and then they disown that hip. They find a workaround where they hike the hip, limp around it, or their knees do something weird. You can have a specific area in the body that holds emotional as well as physical trauma. You can also have a more free-floating emotional trauma.
You can have a specific area in the body that holds emotional as well as physical trauma. Share on XOne of the examples in this article uses the idea of Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic fields. It floats in. You attract it. It doesn’t mean that it has nothing to do with you and you get whammed by some terrible thing. It’s that you already have something that attracts this and triggers this pattern, but you don’t feel it all the time.
It seems because it says that emotional pain triggers the same center in the brain for physical pain. The physical pain can be healed, but the emotional pain, you can continue to remember it or it’s in your subconsciousness. You continue to experience the pain somewhere in the body because that is how it accesses that center in the brain.
Unless you change your perception. We know that most of the memory of what’s going on is not our perception of it. It’s a memory that is similar to it that happened to us in the past. We reinterpret based on the pattern that we hold in our bodies. That’s another way that fascia holds emotion.
You have one area of the body with sensory motor amnesia holding emotion. You have this attraction to it. Something similar comes up and you get triggered by it, but you don’t always function that way. You also have this third way which is an overall body pattern.
You’re like, “Do I tend to shrink my whole body and collapse in? Do I tend to pull the energy out of my legs and puff up my upper body like a bird in a mating dance to appear more powerful than I am? Do I find a way to disappear myself from a situation?” There are lots of other whole-body patterns that we can do.
When we are engaging in that whole body pattern, then this thought that something new comes up in my life but I’m reinterpreting it based on an old memory gets locked into our tissue. The way we shape ourselves is we get caught in the opposite of what we don’t want becomes what we create.
You can talk about this, integrate your patterns, and begin to see an old story of your life. Write a news story of your life and have feedback from other people in a community where you feel safe and they’re holding a positive vision for your future.
These are ways that we can move through trauma in our lives, but we’ve also got to get into the physical body and get that EZ water moving this new information through us so it won’t stick. Stick is a bad word because you don’t want to be sticky. We want to be gliding.
Sound And Healing
We glide. I know that you work with sound in the healing, in the flow, and in stimulating the glide response and releasing the trauma. Can you share with us something about how you use sound along with this as well?
Yes.
Maybe a favorite sound you have that you like.
I’ll share a favorite sound. Try to feel the sound in you. This is my version of a continuum breath. Emily Conrad, the Founder of Continuum, which Debra and I met in Continuum Training, has breath called the cave breath.
If you go and Google Emily Conrad Continuum Cave Breath, you will see one of the most amazing videos. This woman opens her mouth and she sounds like a voice from the primordial past. It is chilling to listen to her.
I have another version of the cave breath. Cave breath is meant to be taken into you. The sound that emerges doesn’t have to sound like anything else. You are a cave. Sound is moving up from the earth through you. You get out of the way. You open up. If you start it and your throat is closing up and you can’t make a sound, then you know that that’s a part of your body that you can touch, love, and support.
Also, if you want to get more of it coming up, focus on the feet. Hold one hand on your belly between your pubic bone and your navel. Hold the other hand on that sacrum in the back of the pelvis and breathe in there. Feel the sound moving from the earth up your feet and legs into this part of you and then become it.
I’m going to do the breath. I have to focus on it, so I’ll do it in a second. What I like to do is imagine for myself that I am sitting in a cave in Hawaii carved out of lava. The ocean is coming in and out. I have that energy going .
I’m sitting in a cave in Hawaii. The ocean waves are coming in and out. I’m safe. They’re not going to hurt me so I can relax, which is really important. Behind me, the cave I know from the sound goes deep into the earth.
I then hear this wind that is like this life-giving breath of the earth. I deeply connect myself to this space. I feel myself there using my sensory awareness. I put myself in this space. I feel the texture of the rocks, the temperature, and the wind. I take a deep breath in, open my mouth, and make the sound of the wind.
I’m going to begin doing it. Try to hear it through your heart. Try to hear it through your fingertips. Feel it through your whole body, and then you will hear the silence in that sound. That’s what informs you. I’m going to start. I want you to join me at any time. Let’s try to do five rounds or so.
Settle in. S tart to land in that cave and locate yourself in the surroundings with your sound, your temperature fluctuations, the wind against your skin, and the energy from the waves. When you’re ready, take a deep breath in, open up, and do it again. Do it on your own timing.
Play with it on your tongue. Play with it in your mouth like you’re rolling it over your tongue. It’s this delicious, juicy piece of fruit. Taste it. If your body wants to move, let it move. Keep going. We’ll do a couple more.
Lift it up through your body and then let yourself be suspended and floating. Extend your palms and feel all around you. Take and receive. You don’t need to try to make sense of anything. Bring it all back slowly to your heart, your belly, and yourself. Feel yourself and feel the sensations that are flowing through you. Find your feet. Find your breath. When you’re ready, slowly come back. Open your eyes, but stay connected to that source.
That’s wonderful. That’s very beautiful. I like the way you lead it in a gentle way. Sometimes, it can be things, but the way you personalize it and make it the person going with their own flow. For me, the experience was really beautiful because I could hear the waves and the wind. I felt my breath was tuned with these sounds. It was a wonderful experience. I want to thank you very much for that.
You’re so welcome. Thank you.
What she said. I love the cave breath spelunking the inner cave. I love the way that you teach it. In case anyone lost that, it’s worth going back and checking out the video version of it so you can see it because I know the sound didn’t come through. It’s a really powerful breath.
I know when I remember to put my hand on my sacral center, my low belly, and make that intention of that wind coming up from the base through the cave of my body and moving from there. It’s a full-body experience of the movement, the breath, and the power of that wind that comes from deep in the earth. It’s beautiful. Thank you.
It’s my pleasure. I love doing it.
I’m so glad that we connected at all. Over the Continuum Movement practices, we’re bringing this together. The power of sound, vibration, frequency, somatics, the fascial body, and the quantum field, it’s all universal. However we learn it, it’s universal.
Everything is connected to everything else. That’s one of the beauties. Amany and I teach Ocean of Sound. You teach this incredible somatic practice that you teach and your expertise in the physical body, the fascia, and movement. It’s all connected. It all comes together. It’s all one.
That’s why Amany and I love doing these interviews with people who come from different perspectives on the same thing. It is so that we can really share and find that overlap and commonality of this incredible world we live in or this incredible universe. Thank you for that.
Reach Elizabeth
Elizabeth, I’m sure people will be interested to know about your work, whatever classes you are offering, or the healing you’re offering. How can people reach you?
I am wrapping up one of my group classes called THRIVE: Embodied Practices for Post-Traumatic Growth. I will be teaching a new round of that, beginning May 10th, 2024. It will be running for 6 weeks until June 21st, 2024. I also am always seeing people privately.
I encourage anyone who wants more information to reach out to me. Here are two ways that you can reach out to me. You can contact me at EmbodiedSouls@EvolutionarySomatics.org and/or you can find me on Facebook. You go to Facebook.com/Elizabeth.AndesBell/. I’m happy to give you more information. I love talking to people about what’s going on with their bodies and seeing what we can do to give them more health and joy in their bodies and their lives. Thank you.
Vitality and longevity. It feels amazing. Are there any last words you want to leave people with, Elizabeth, before we close?
I go back to Buckminster Fuller in doing small things like remembering to move. Don’t stay seated at your desk all day. Go outside. Be on the earth. Drink natural water. Open yourself to the gratitude of creation of which we are always a part.
That’s beautiful.
Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
It was my great pleasure. Thank you both.
Thank you so much, Elizabeth. This and eating hydrating foods is a huge one. Your fruits and vegetables contain their own structured water content. It’s like your body contains its own structured water content.
Exactly.
Thank you so much. We look forward to connecting and staying connected with you, Elizabeth. For everyone reading, please look her up. She’s quite the jewel. Thank you all.
Important Links
- Evolutionary Somatics
- EmbodiedSouls@EvolutionarySomatics.org
- Facebook.com/Elizabeth.AndesBell/ – Elizabeth Dare Andes
- The Fourth Phase of Water
- https://youtu.be/UiqJNetlG7c
About Elizabeth Dare Andes
Elizabeth Dare Andes – Somatic Movement Therapist, Energy Healer, Educator and Founder of Evolutionary Somatics, a healing movement practice for restoring physical vitality, post-traumatic growth and co-creative-futuring. She is an internationally recognized presenter on fascia, energy healing and somatic movement for physical and emotional well-being, conscious evolution and the new science of coherent interbeing.
About Amany Shalaby, Ph.D.
Author, Speaker, Teacher, Translator, Interpreter, Chaplain. Amany is Founder of Universal Chaplaincy and a Member of The Association of Muslim Chaplains, MWO’s Hakima.
Amany served for twelve years as interpreter and translator for Sidi Shaikh Muhammad Sa’id al-Jamal, who was the Imam for al-Masjid al-Aqsa and the Head of the Sufi Counsel in Jerusalem for thirty years. She translated twenty books on Islamic spirituality, written by the Shaikh. Shaikh Muhammad al-Jamal taught that there is only one Divine message for humanity: It is the message of unity, love, peace, mercy, justice, and freedom for all.
In her teachings, Amany integrates science, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, and clinical chaplaincy skills and experience. The foundation of her teaching is compassion, empathy, deep reflective listening, and facilitating a way for people to find meanings in life. To her, love is the main transformational Divine Power. She believes all religions have a spiritual path that can guide people to know themselves and know their Masterful Nurturer. She has a unique way of representing the common truth in all religions. She loves to participate in interfaith events to foster harmony and understanding.
