Movement as Medicine: Qi Gong, Dance, and Trauma with Elia Mrak
Movement as Medicine: Qi Gong, Dance, and Trauma with Elia Mrak
In this episode of Going Inside: Healing Trauma From the Inside Out, I sit down with Elia Mrak, a trauma informed educator and Qigong practitioner, to explore the deep connection between movement,healing, and aliveness. We dive into how dance and Qigong can be powerful tools for transforming trauma, re-energizing the body, and finding vitality. Key Takeaways:
Movement, even for 30 seconds, is a powerful way to reconnect with your aliveness and build vitality.
Trauma isn’t something to get rid of but a stored resource that can be transformed into energy and life force through movement.
Qigong and dance can offer fun and deeply pleasurable ways to access our emotional energy and heal.
Learn more about Elia Mrak at https://www.eliamrak.com/
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Interview Transcript:
[00:00:00] Elia: The way I approach trauma is not to identify it, cut it out, and throw it away because that would be wasting a resource. In, in Qigong, trauma is a, is a stored resource. It's just energy. It's like any other energy. In Qigong, in a dance, the way I approach that is how do we recognize where, where trauma, stored energy sits?
[00:00:28] Elia: Where is it blocking? Where is it showing up? And then how do we mine it?
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[00:01:22] John: Head to the link in the show notes to book a personalized demo, or if you're ready to get started, you can use the code John at the time of signup for a one month grace period applied to your account. All right, let's dive in. Excited to introduce my guest for today. Elia Mrak is here with me. Elia is a trauma informed educator and approaches his work through a nervous system and systems centered lens.
[00:01:47] John: He uses the power of the healing arts, the movement arts, and the performing arts, dance, meditation, qigong, somatics, to transform community. He works from wisdom toward [00:02:00] truth and through creativity. I really love Elia. That bio, by the way I kind of read it in a, in reverse. Ilya, thank you for doing this.
[00:02:09] John: The way I met you is I'm taking this somatic training right now. And then halfway through that, all of a sudden they said, Hey, this guy's going to jump in and have us move our bodies and do some funky stuff. And I was like, okay, we're doing this. So a room full of hundreds of therapists on zoom, and that's how I met you and your work.
[00:02:27] John: I've had a lot of interest over the years in energy work, Qi Gong. That's part of my daily practice, but only within the past couple of years. And so yeah, I was just really excited to hear about your intersections, the intersection of your work and your interests as it relates to what we talk about here in the world of meditation.
[00:02:46] John: therapy and healing at large. So that being said, what else should people know about you in terms of who you are and how you got here and how you, how you found this work specifically?
[00:02:57] Elia: Oh yeah. Thank you, [00:03:00] John. I mean, as you read that bio, I was like, that sounds pretty cool. I was like, yeah, it's pretty poetic.
[00:03:06] Elia: That's taken me a really long time to distill it's taken me a really long time to understand what it is that I do, and everyday more letting go of that definition to really understand what it is that I do. And as you're reading that I was like, oh yeah, those things are all Are all different parts of me that are intersecting and are integrating right now in this moment of my life when we met, you know, two weeks ago, three weeks ago.
[00:03:39] Elia: And, and it's, it's exciting. I, I feel excited. I feel this like effervescence and getting a chance to talk about it and to. Unpack some of these things. The thing that would be actually really, I have a question for you, john, which is when we met in that experience, what did you experience? What did, what [00:04:00] did you feel? So for those of you don't know, this was a 30 minute guided somatic exploration after what is it? Three hour workshop, a two hour workshop.
[00:04:08] John: Yeah.
[00:04:09] Elia: Yeah. Led by a facilitator and a guide talking about different windows into trauma, different ways of understanding the biology of trauma, the physiology of trauma, early childhood, early developmental trauma, different subjects, but my part was to offer a way to drop into the body. I don't want to say a break, because that's not really what it is, but it is a way a way to, to drop from the head into the rest of the body.
[00:04:36] Elia: So, I guess a cool way to, an entree in is, you know, intuition to reach out to me. What, what did you feel? What, what did you experience in that half hour?
[00:04:46] John: Well, For me, and being a therapist, a psychotherapist for 15 some years so many of the models that we start from as therapists are very intellectual models.[00:05:00]
[00:05:00] John: It's thinking and thinking about your thoughts and thinking about this relational template you had with mom and now you're playing it out with your partner and you should probably stop that. And it's a very heady experience. And then. You know, 2016 I started doing trauma work with clients. I got EMDR trained and so, okay, we have these ideas that trauma kind of gets stuck in the brain and EMDR is a really good brain based therapy that helps memories go longterm storage.
[00:05:29] John: There's a somatic experience of it. You can also do it from a parts perspective. So that was kind of like the starting point. Then I eventually found IFS, which was kind of. Like the holy grail for me of getting to know these parts, this inner child, really just accessing love inside of you and spreading it through your system and do whoever needs it.
[00:05:47] John: Like that makes a ton of sense to me and is the main model I work from. And people feel their parts very semantically. And so what I've realized and ideas that I work from is like trauma. is not generally a [00:06:00] very cognitive process, right? A very physical somatic one. And the ripples of trauma are quite physical and somatic.
[00:06:07] John: Therefore, Hey, I wonder if the healing should probably be physical and somatic, if not also energetic and spiritual. And so I'm just more drawn to people like you these days and thinking number one, I'm, I'm constantly going back to square one as to what is my definition of healing, like What is healing?
[00:06:25] John: How does it happen? And I'd love to put that question back on you. And specifically what needs to happen for people to move through trauma and for their body and their spirit and their heart to recover and feel okay again.
[00:06:39] Elia: Yeah. Sorry. I probably committed like the, you know, the first Cardinal sin of podcasting, which is asking the host a question right off the bat.
[00:06:46] John: I love it. It's a treat for me.
[00:06:49] Elia: I love what you said about I mean, a bunch, a couple of things I want to, I want to join and build on one of them was you mentioned the different bodies. The, the, the sort of intellectual body, the [00:07:00] physical body, the spiritual body, the emotional body. And in the Qigong and Taoist practices that I do and teach, I've been, I've been, I've been open to the reality that we live in many bodies.
[00:07:19] Elia: We contain multitudes. We are each many people. And in those people, we have different, different. bodies that have different stories. So my energetic body is different than my physical body. It's different than my intellectual body, it's different than my emotional body, it's different than my causal body.
[00:07:40] Elia: Causal being like, if I do this, then this will happen. If I drink water, I'll be hydrated. It's different than my psychic body. It's different than my, you know, which is in a different time and space. We've all had the situation where, you know, we, we imagine something happening and then it happens. Or we had a dream about something, so the time and space continuum gets a little warped.[00:08:00]
[00:08:00] Elia: So that's all to say That's something that attracts me about Q Gong and about the qi for those of you interested is a, is a word that you can't define in English as like 35 different definitions. One is energy and another one is breath. So it's like ancient breath work. Gong means work. Qi means breath, breath work.
[00:08:23] Elia: So breath work is not a new thing. It's a very old thing. And she can also mean energy. So inside of this practice of energy work and breath work, it approaches our body as a multitude of bodies. that integrate. They're not separate, but they are differentiated. And so a lot of the practices and the work is about getting under the different layers of peeling apart and uncoupling the emotional body from the physical body.
[00:08:51] Elia: It was like, okay, where's that coming from? You mentioned love. I think you mentioned love as, and he's, I don't know if he said spreading, but what came to me was Yeah. The [00:09:00] heart chakra, for example, and in Qigong, we call the heart, the queen of the body, the empress. So how, when you take care of the emotional center, You're also taking care of the healthy blood circulation.
[00:09:13] Elia: So now you're dealing with, you know, a healthier detoxification lymph nodes. So these things aren't separate, but approaching any healing, approaching anyone talking about like, what is healing? It's to come back to that question. But approaching all of this trauma work from a multitude of places.
[00:09:36] Elia: And like, if I hold up my hand, I don't know. People aren't watching, you're just listening. You hold up your hand, and you imagine the hand as your whole body. My approach is that we can enter from any doorway. I can enter from here, and travel around here, and exit out my pinky. And I can re enter through my ring finger, and circle around the first [00:10:00] knuckle, and then exit out the sphincter in the center of my palm.
[00:10:04] Elia: And then I can enter back through the webbing between my first two. That's it. Meaning, there's no linearity to that process. Healing is far from linear, it's far from rational. I'm sure a lot of us have had injuries and we don't get better each day until the 30th day and we're healed. Or the 6th week of a broken bone.
[00:10:22] Elia: It's like, now you can take 2 steps forward and then 1 step back and then 5 steps forward and 12 steps back. So approaching the body and our bodies within the body as this, as this magical process. And I really use that term magic. I believe in magic. I believe in alchemy and sorcery. Something that imbues my work with a sense of wonder.
[00:10:47] Elia: There's a lot of ancient wisdom and there's a lot of childlike, you know, I don't know. I love being able to say, I don't know. I don't know. Let's play with that. I don't know. Let's investigate that. So, a [00:11:00] window into where I launch off a lot of the stuff is from that perspective of deep trust in the process that maybe can't be defined and is not linear and deep humility and wonder.
[00:11:14] Elia: Because healing for me, isn't something that we do. It's something that happens when we allow it. When we create the conditions that allow it. Like if I cut my finger, slicing avocados is a term in Brazil. In the ER, they have something called avocado hands and it's because it's when it's like it's so common that people cut their palm.
[00:11:39] Elia: Yeah. Avocado and they slice it. So if I cut my hand, open an avocado, the only way that my, my skin is going to heal is if I allow it to take care of it, clean it, nourish it, protect it, contain it. Because life wants to heal. The skin wants to close. [00:12:00] I believe that we are, we come. On earth, we are born to heal and what are the conditions in which we work to support that process?
[00:12:10] John: Yeah,
[00:12:11] Elia: so that, that's that's, yeah, I think that's like a nice context and ecosystem to understand some of the details we can talk about.
[00:12:20] John: Yeah,
[00:12:22] Elia: yeah Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll pause there. I have many, many things to say, but I can pause there for a second.
[00:12:27] John: This is a great start. Yeah, this is, yeah, exactly why I wanted to have you on the show.
[00:12:32] John: Is, I'm on this mission to kind of expand our definitions of healing. And especially, kind of, being a therapist and trained in these models and really kind of forced into the medical model of illness. And therefore of treatment or what healing is from the medical model perspective, which is the setting that most therapists operate in.
[00:12:52] John: And there's a lot of limitations of that. And there's a lot of ego in that and a lot of what's the fastest way to heal and how do we measure [00:13:00] that and how do we treat it. You know, do an academic study to prove that it worked. So there's a lot of those kind of capitalist values that drive the kind of healing industry or at least the side that I'm on.
[00:13:11] John: And yet something I noticed from you is like, well, well, with therapists, a lot of therapists feel pressure to know a lot to be the expert and therapist. We put ourselves in that position and also clients put us in that position of being the expert or even being like a trauma expert. Right? It's like, what, what does that really mean?
[00:13:29] John: I can tell and something I could tell from the facilitation you did at the group where I met you was you have a sense of. Yeah. Play and of lightness and levity and folly and that, that feels really contrasting to a lot of what a lot of what therapy is, which is like serious and heavy and like, why, why don't you just sit with that feeling, you know, sit with that heaviness, but maybe people want to move, maybe they would.
[00:13:57] John: Do better to dance or to be moving their [00:14:00] bodies or be weird. And so like these things don't come naturally to me, but they seem to either come naturally to you or you've just fostered the hell out of them. For however many years,
[00:14:09] Elia: I think both it's like usual. It's both, um, and so many good I want to pick up on a couple threads, one of them about the I'm a nerd when it comes to psychoanalysis.
[00:14:21] Elia: I don't practice it, but I, I, I listened to a lot and I'm, I'm, I'm interested in it. And I love the term subject supposed to know as like this idea of it gets put in the therapist chair. It gets put in the practitioner or the doctor or the healers chairs. Like you're supposed to know, you're supposed to know how to fix the problem.
[00:14:39] Elia: And something early on that a teacher of mine who turned me on to a teacher of teachers, which if any teachers listening out there, there's a beautiful book called the courage to teach by Parker J. Palmer. It's a beautiful little book. And he talks about the three pillars of teaching. And that a really [00:15:00] integrated, beautiful experience has three pillars.
[00:15:03] Elia: One of those pillars is information. So you're, you're sharing information. A second, like, Oh, these are your kidneys. They kind of sit down here. Well, okay. I didn't know that, you know? And I wish we got taught that stuff, like in elementary school. Like your liver is on the right side. So you don't have to wait 25 years to learn that.
[00:15:20] Elia: So that's information. The second one is structure or context that can support the client or the student to learn. Okay. So, we can call that safety, we can call that containment, we can call that, you know, a syllabus, whatever. And the third one, and this one is the one, you know, we're getting into, and what we experienced together in that session that I led, is that the practitioner, the teacher, takes the journey with the person.
[00:15:46] Elia: And that is like, yeah, it's skin in the game. The work is in the middle. I'm not in the middle. I'm never in the middle of the workshop I teach. I'm not in the middle of the, the client relationship. The fire's in the middle. The [00:16:00] work is in the middle. The potluck is in the, you know, the food is in the middle, the nourishment's in the middle, and I'm going to eat with you.
[00:16:06] Elia: I'm going to model that experience of subjects supposed to know. I don't know. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna be curious. I'm gonna be present. I'm gonna model that. I believe in the ability to model. And in supporting someone, because the second I let go of having to know, they can let go of having to know. The second that I stop trying to fix the problem, they can stop trying to fix the problem.
[00:16:32] Elia: The second that I stop pathologizing, they can stop pathologizing. Because all those things separate us. From each other from the situation. It's like, Oh, my shoulder hurts. I'm going to isolate my shoulder. It's like, no, what your shoulder needs is love. It needs to be included. It needs the rest of the body to help it out.
[00:16:48] Elia: So approaching the work, whether it's with a, a one on one or a class or workshop or 100 people online. It's like, [00:17:00] I always want to work those 3 things in. How can I share information? How can I create a container and a structure and sort of an arc that we can take and then I'm going to take it with you.
[00:17:11] Elia: I'm gonna take it with you because, because like, like everyone else, I'm perfect. I just need a little work, you know, so I need to and, and in that way I like the word you said, folly, silliness, playfulness, because the stuff is already serious. It's already charged. Yeah. It's already. I mean, second, you mentioned the word trauma.
[00:17:31] Elia: It's like, No one associates like, you know, rainbows, it's like, that's probably not the first, you know, free associative word. So there's, there's a built in weight to it that to me, I want to unweight because I think we can do serious things and be silly doing them. You watch a child play, play is very serious.
[00:17:53] Elia: It's incredibly serious. There was some study I was reading, like, they will, they've, [00:18:00] I don't know how they did it, I'm, I'm, it's a little overly simplistic, but it was like the child would go to the, would not go to the bathroom if they had to choose to stop playing. Yeah. Like kids say, potty trained. Right.
[00:18:13] Elia: It's like, no, play is so important, it's more important than my, than, you know, my need to go to the bathroom. I was like, yeah. It's deeply serious, it doesn't mean it needs to be heavy. And so well, I, I'll, I'll, I'll, I want to, I want to talk about dance and the, like, the actual modalities Yeah.
[00:18:33] Elia: Methodologies, but I'll pause there if there's Yeah. Something.
[00:18:36] John: Well, you know, from a, from an IFS perspective, children are full of their self energy and their C qualities. You know, I have a four year old daughter and so I have this immediate example every day of those C qualities. This morning I came in and she was getting ready for school and my wife had put on a song and my daughter was just dancing her heart out.[00:19:00]
[00:19:00] John: And
[00:19:00] Elia: what song was it? Sorry. I just got to know.
[00:19:02] John: I forget the song. It's my wife is really into like 80, like 80s pop right now, which is so great for dancing. It's like, so
[00:19:11] Elia: vibey
[00:19:11] John: and just like, yeah, it's 80s pop. It just feels good. So she's dancing so freely. And what I, what I look at her and think especially compared to myself is the lack of self consciousness is so liberating.
[00:19:28] John: Like, She's moving her body exactly how she wants to and it feels incredible and there's no limits to that and she's not looking in the mirror if she is just it's to look at how cool she looks and feels and I'm timid, especially with things like dance and moving my body and I feel pretty stiff and pretty uncomfortable and it's like There's just so many layers there of conditioning and shame.
[00:19:53] John: And like, if I can't do it right, I'm just not going to dance because I'm not good at dancing. And that has kind of ruined it for me. An entry in a [00:20:00] movement well, my whole life I've done martial arts. But that always feels like there's an objective, right? And you're getting better. And it's like this very primal.
[00:20:08] John: connection, but it's also an art form and it's beautiful and there can be forms and free form movements that you do that are more like dance. But for me, even starting to use Qigong to your point about information, I've been doing the same Qigong routine For a couple of years now, without any need to feel like, Oh my gosh, I need more information.
[00:20:27] John: I need to know like what this is or the history of it, or I need like to add more techniques. It's just been like the same six movements this whole time. And I feel like just as much of a beginner every time I do it. I'm like, Oh, that feels a little different. I could go a little slower with this one. Oh, whoops.
[00:20:43] John: I forgot to breathe. Oh, like I'm actually really feeling the energy of this one, or I'm feeling like I need to do. This one longer because my energy is up here or it's down here today. So that has like taught me a lot of humility and just a lot of exploration. And I'll stop there.
[00:20:58] Elia: Yeah. All these things [00:21:00] lighten up.
[00:21:00] Elia: Just pick up where you left off around the, the Qi Gong and doing the, the same quote unquote quote unquote, every day in the same body, quote unquote. I had a very similar experience in my first Qigong, when I met Qigong origin story. I was doing, I was involved in a, in a dance residency in Brussels and I was working with a group of people from all over the world and the choreographer from Venezuela, but he lived in Brussels.
[00:21:32] Elia: It was this three month project. This is, you know, as part of my performing arts that you mentioned in the bio, this is when I was dancers was just a performing art and we'll, we'll pick up on the next two acts later in the conversation. But as I was in the context of this residency, we had the first two hours of the day free to warm up however you needed.
[00:21:55] Elia: Which is an incredible it's, it's an incredible act of trust by a [00:22:00] choreographer to be like, I'm going to trust you that you know how to warm up your body. You know, all those bodies we talked about, the psychic, the emotional, the physical, the intellectual into a place where you, and we were working only in improvisation.
[00:22:12] Elia: So then we spent the next six hours a day improvising. And we'll come back to that. Remind me if I forget. So I was like, I had all these tools that I had learned from dance. in studying modern dance and contemporary dance in college. I grew up playing a lot of sports. So I, I was, I was warming myself up like that, like the first couple of weeks.
[00:22:35] Elia: And then I looked over one day and I was like, there was a guy, he's from South Korea. Young, cool park, a very dear friend of mine. Best name. And every day he would do this warm up where he was just like slapping his skin and he was shaking and he was sweating but he wasn't moving and then he would, he would like have this, this particular breath that every breath and every movement [00:23:00] went together and then he'd do these stances that looked like animals and I was just like, what the, what is that?
[00:23:08] Elia: And I couldn't, I had no idea what was happening but I was like, I'm attracted to that. Something there, because then I would see how he would, how he would improvise and be like, whoa, okay, like something is underneath he's, he's created some capacity for his imagination, his body to come together for his breath to support his movement.
[00:23:30] Elia: So one day I went, I was like, what are you doing? It's like, oh, I'm doing Qigong. I was like, what is that? He's like, tomorrow morning, stand right here next to me. I was like, okay. So for the next two and a half months, every day I stood next to him, he didn't speak very much English, I spoke zero Korean, and I just followed him, and it was this hour and a half practice, I had no idea what anything was, I didn't know about the meridians, I didn't know about the five elements, but it worked, and it's like, this is a beautiful line in Taoism, if you do it, you get it, [00:24:00] if you don't do it, you don't get it.
[00:24:02] Elia: And, and there's no promise of what you get. It's not causational. It's like, Oh, yeah, we'll get this. No, but you get something. And so my first entree was, was not understanding intellectually what I was doing, but I felt something changing. And so that, that experience of, of tapping into my cellular consciousness, tapping into something underneath my conditioning, underneath my patterning, underneath these tools was, was a life force was internal nature.
[00:24:35] Elia: that was so enlivening. So I was like, Oh my gosh. And every day I do the exact same routine to a T and I did that for seven years. I just kept doing that. And then later I was like, what am I doing? Like, what's happening? I want to be able to call it something. Yeah. So then, you know, I went. Got certified and stuff and found other teachers, but that that first [00:25:00] entry point into being able to just do it and not know it still is such an important value to me.
[00:25:05] Elia: And sometimes, you know, when I work with people, it's like, before we try to just, just have an experience of something, let's just have an experience, just shake. I know you don't know why. I know it might be weird. Just try it. You know, what happens when you have your skin? What happens? Something's happening, you know?
[00:25:21] Elia: Yeah, and then the the the thing about you mentioned about martial arts that you practiced and there's a certain structure and It's that structures feel safe And I know for myself, it's been a long road to, to feel safe in improvisation, to feel
[00:25:43] John: safe,
[00:25:44] Elia: Being vulnerable because when you dance, especially if you don't, if you're improvising, you are totally naked.
[00:25:51] Elia: You're completely exposed. And I think the survey is like the thing scariest to people is [00:26:00] public speaking, but that's only because they didn't ask about public dancing more. Yeah.
[00:26:05] John: It's
[00:26:06] Elia: a separate study. And so one way that I've, I work for myself, I've worked on it myself and I share with others is like.
[00:26:18] Elia: And there's something in Qigong called spontaneous Qigong. So like you use a structure, even a repetitive movement long enough, and then you let go of that structure and you let the chi take over. You let the chi, which is wiser than you, or wiser than your cognitive you, start to move. And if you can allow that, that's, that's the gap, you know, that really interests me, that you were saying, I feel the shame.
[00:26:41] Elia: I feel the resistance. I feel like I limit myself, the consciousness that you're, that you're Four year old daughter, not going to say doesn't feel, but is willing to swim in it more. That is the thing that really interests me as a big part of my work is helping create enough structure [00:27:00] that feels safe and then helping people deconstruct and dismantle that armor.
[00:27:06] Elia: So that you can be into spontaneous qigong, which is another way of saying spontaneous breath work, which is another way of saying dance.
[00:27:16] John: Yeah, I'll
[00:27:18] Elia: leave it there for a second.
[00:27:20] John: Well, I want to go further with, with this and with Qigong this conversation about Qigong. I've also know people and I have clients that are practicing like ecstatic dance more, which I understand to be completely free form.
[00:27:32] John: And there's some kind of things that make it ecstatic dance. And I've also, for instance, I I guess I've had on here a few times, Bob Falconer, he works a lot with What we call unattached burdens in IFS or basically things that have kind of stuck to us spiritually that we need to get rid of.
[00:27:51] John: And he said, guess what? A lot of people end up getting rid of them just by dancing or doing ecstatic dance, or these things just kind of shake off naturally [00:28:00] from a spiritual energetic standpoint. So that's probably no surprise to you. But when. I guess for someone wondering right now like how to get started with Qigong and maybe it's as simple as like finding a YouTube video or one of your videos but in this moment how would you help someone start to connect with Qi?
[00:28:20] Elia: Inhale, exhale and as you inhale make space for that inhale and as you exhale soften into the into the tissues that the breath is going into. So as we inhale it's making space. Good in a fancy way called capacity building and as we exhale can we soften like that's one very simple way Chi is breath. So as we inhale, I'm just going with my breath and as I exhale I'm going with my breath.
[00:28:58] Elia: There's an [00:29:00] internal atmosphere There's an external atmosphere. So that's like, I'm very, some very simple level. I mean, it's simple, but it's profound because our nervous system is interconnected to our breath, to our circulatory respiratory system. I know that's not exactly what you asked, but those of you listening, I hope you're, you're listening.
[00:29:21] Elia: Inhaling and exhaling with me. Because that is the heartbeat. That is the, that is the heartbeat of our movement and it's the bridge between our consciousness and our body. It's the breath. It's a reflex. It's the first reflex we take when we come out into the world. We take that breath and we keep doing that until we die.
[00:29:42] Elia: So what Qigong is, is helping us do is re pattern that reflex, re pattern that reflex. A lot of our Our survival stress and the way we react to situations is in a reflexive way. So when we, we're helping to repattern, give ourselves different [00:30:00] options to respond to situations. And that starts through the breath.
[00:30:05] Elia: That's one thing. Come take class with me, come study with me. I have online programs, I have retreats. So that's another thing, a plug I'll make because I really love the way in which I, I practice it for myself and I only share what I practice. Something that I'm very, that's, that's my guiding light is I share what I practice.
[00:30:27] Elia: Even the word teaching is like a little, I don't know if I teach, I show up, I'm present and I share my truth. Yeah. Facilitate. I facilitate. I guide. Yeah. And about the dance in particular, and this is something that, that has, that has shape shifted over time and transformed as dance. Even when I was growing up, I started dancing as a little kid.
[00:30:50] Elia: I was into theater, I played a bunch of sports I like to hike and ski and swim, like be outdoors. And then as I started [00:31:00] to focus on dance more, I saw it as this liberating thing to do. So I went to school and I was studying math and economics and I was in my head all the time and I was going crazy.
[00:31:11] Elia: Like I was literally going crazy. And I got back into dance because it was my salvation. I owe my life to dance which is a way of saying I owe my life back to myself for, or finding another way in and out that wasn't here. And so I started dancing again. And saw it as a performing art, as this, as this way to tell stories and to to inspire.
[00:31:38] Elia: and to be inspired in a, you know, in a, in a artistic stage setting. And then that transformed into movement arts. So understanding somatics, understanding you know, how we roll on the ground as developmental patterns, crawling, walking these sort of building blocks of, of movement in [00:32:00] life, ways to repattern.
[00:32:04] Elia: And then now I'd say it's in the healing art place. So it's a more spiritual, emotional understanding of dance. And. You said Bob Falconer. Is that his name?
[00:32:14] John: Yeah.
[00:32:14] Elia: And you mentioned the ecstatic dance and in your own case what I heard is a desire. I'm going to use that word to dance more, more freely is and what I help people with is that there is, to me, there is no healing without dancing.
[00:32:36] Elia: You cannot heal. And I don't, I don't see it as a destination, but if we just make it a little simple right now. If you're trying to heal, you won't get there, it's my opinion, unless you dance. And, and not learn a salsa step, not learn you know, a partner dance. I love that, I do that. Please, go, dance, socially.[00:33:00]
[00:33:00] Elia: But I'm talking about, you will not get to that place where you dance. and heal deep things until you can dance more freely for yourself. And the only way to do that is to do it. So it's like this beautiful catch 22 is you can't heal unless you dance in the way. To do that is to do it. So it's, yeah, dance is the path and it's the destination.
[00:33:25] John: Yeah, I
[00:33:31] Elia: have other things, but I'll, yeah, let me take it.
[00:33:34] John: It's great. I, again, going back to how I got here as a therapist and all of the sitting that we do in the sitting and talking and in my case helping clients reprocess trauma, you will see that their bodies want to do something. Yeah. And I think a lot of therapists probably don't invite that or you're on zoom or it would be weird or, you know you know, I don't want someone to watch me, whatever it [00:34:00] is, but more and more.
[00:34:01] John: I have just been inviting clients to move. However, They feel led to move right now when we're in session and we're doing this work and especially doing the trauma work. And they tend to do it and they know exactly how they want to move. And if they feel safe enough just to try it or to, you know not be judged.
[00:34:23] John: They, they move very intuitively, whether it's bouncing or shaking or moving all the limbs or just spinning around or turning or, you know focusing on their hips, right? Like moving their hips a lot. Maybe there's something there. They just kind of go for it. No way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So. You know, as a therapist, even if I don't know like what to do or what that is, I'm trying to make more space for that type of stuff to happen spontaneously in session because it just seems to want to happen, right?
[00:34:57] John: And the knowledge of the body, the knowing of the [00:35:00] body is so much deeper than like, you know, these things like EMDR that are a few decades old that we just discovered, you know, recently. So I'm just like, this stuff is so ancient. And so it's, it's a really sophisticated technology, so to speak. But our inclination is to be really in our heads and stay in our heads and figure all this suffering out through being in our heads.
[00:35:25] John: And I just, I don't think it, Is that way?
[00:35:29] Elia: I think that's beautifully said. I think we can get caught in this loop of being really clever about understanding what's being clever. Yeah, being really clever. That's right. I like to be clever because that's what's valued in our Western dominant cultures. Yeah, talk all day about all of their psychosomatic psychosomatic.
[00:35:49] Elia: experiences, stories, patterns, and that's important, but it will only go to some point. It's like, it will, it will only go to some point. And I'm glad you mentioned, you know, your experience in [00:36:00] working with clients. Anyone listening is like, when, when I say dance, it's just a small D dance. This is not capital D.
[00:36:06] Elia: This is not, not, this is dance that it's Like John just said, it's like shaking your shoulders, wiggling your hips, wagging your tail, squirming, I squirm in the morning. That's my ritual. I wake up and I squirm. I don't know what that is. I call it dance because, because that's an expression to me. It's a, it's a declaration of life.
[00:36:30] Elia: It's letting something. Work its way out and all I need to do is open that space. Just this morning I was doing a class with my Qigong teacher and I was reminded in the top of your head there's, there's two cranial bones that when we're babies, they're very soft and there's space between the bones.
[00:36:50] Elia: And as we grow older and more crotchety, those bones want to fuse. And so part of our goal, like this. [00:37:00] Keeping that, that wonder and that magic alive, that connection with heaven, is making sure those bones never fully fuse. That's our access to joy, that's our access to the unknown, that's our access, that's our medium, that's our channel, that's our, Healthy, safe inner child and maybe we had that and if we didn't, how do we rediscover or discover for the first time That, and the reason is I'm, you know, the cash, the cash value of this is that when we die, this is, again, this is a Qi gong, it's a DAOs perspective.
[00:37:36] Elia: When we die, we want our breath, our last. Spirit to come out to the top of our head and the only way it can do that is if we kept it open during life. So we don't want our death to come out through our senses, our human senses, our earthly senses. We want them to come out to the top of our head. And I, I mean, whether or not that resonates with [00:38:00] you, it doesn't matter.
[00:38:00] Elia: It's this idea of How do we keep this open, this open and way to keep that open is what John's saying. It's like, you know, how do we let something move? How do we wiggle? How do we, how do we let the body speak? Not through my understanding. That is another way. But how do we really let it out through the orifices of the body?
[00:38:24] John: Yeah.
[00:38:26] Elia: Just, I'll just take, get this example. Like yesterday. I was working with a client and she had some, she used to play the piano and she had some, some, some muscle loss and some loss of, of movement in the hands and some, some nervous system issues. And there's a lot of grieving and loss around not being able to play the piano.
[00:38:58] Elia: And so what we eventually [00:39:00] worked on at the end of the hour, we spent the last two and a half minutes of the hour. And I, I asked her what her, if she could play the piano right now, what song she would play. And I found it on title, not Spotify. I found it online and I played the song and we danced together with our hands.
[00:39:18] Elia: This is online and one hand doesn't move as well. So we use the other hand to help move the hand. So again, this is about integration. It's not, this hand doesn't work. So I leave it over there. I can't do this thing, so I don't do it anymore. It's like dance is a resource. Integration is a resource. So we were moving and we're moving together and we are just expressing what it was to be in that moment with our hands to the song.
[00:39:48] Elia: It was quite beautiful. It was quite moving. It was very touching. And it's not quite. Complex either. So anyone listening who's a practitioner in this stuff, it's not about [00:40:00] being smart or having all the, the playbook, the blueprint, it's about opening up to this possibility of what's showing up and how can we move with that?
[00:40:09] Elia: How can we support our, I guess, to me, the difference of movement and dance would be what's, what's that ineffable expression. How can I allow the story to unfold? How can I. It's like, we know the difference. It's like the umami of movement. It's like, it's that self inside that you can't define, but it's different.
[00:40:34] Elia: So this is a real life example of how this applies, how I apply it in my work. Yeah, it's yeah, it's
[00:40:41] Elia: that that's one way to define dance.
[00:40:43] John: Yeah. It's what the words that come to mind for me are like connecting with your aliveness. Yeah. And how, whatever you need to do to get there or to make that connection, even if it's 30 seconds [00:41:00] a day or sitting right here, you know, during this podcast and moving, moving your body as you listen or whatever it's quite possible that that's enough.
[00:41:09] Elia: 30 seconds is a lot more than zero. It's infinitely more mathematically speaking. 30 seconds. Exactly. It's a lot. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not tongue in cheek. Okay. I think. It's, I think I sometimes think it has to be a lot of something. It's like, no, a little bit is a lot.
[00:41:25] John: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:41:30] Elia: I think all the philosophers throughout time, all the mystics, all the poets knew this.
[00:41:34] Elia: Even, I mean, Nietzsche knew it. Rumi. Hafez. Rilke. Like, you can, you know, Mary Oliver. Like, name, name people that even weren't in the dance world. I, I use those. Those, those references, because those are dancers, quote unquote, but all of them talked about dance. All of them talked about this, this like deeply human [00:42:00] thing that and I want to touch on this before I forget because it's important to me because, and you know, we've used the word trauma.
[00:42:08] Elia: And it's important. But for example, like in Qigong, we don't use that word. It's not a word that's used. And one time I asked my teacher, I was like, what's, what's, you know, what's your perspective on trauma? And he's like, it never goes away. It never goes away. Trauma is a resource. It's a resource. It's like water.
[00:42:32] Elia: It's like a diamond in the earth. It's like coal. We don't need to burn more coal, but as an understanding, it's, it's wood. It's log. So the point is not to get rid of it. And this might sound very different than, you know, some of you may have heard, but the way I approach trauma. is not to identify it, cut it out, and throw it away.
[00:42:59] Elia: Because [00:43:00] that would be wasting a resource. In, in Qigong, trauma is a, is a stored resource. It's just energy. It's like any other energy. Emotion is emotion is emotion. Sadness is not worse than happiness, is not better than anger. So, in Qigong and in dance, the way I approach that is how do we, how do we recognize where, where trauma is?
[00:43:29] Elia: Stored energy sits. Where is it blocking? Where is it showing up? And then how do we mine it? How do we log it? How do we, you know, Use it send it through the hydroelectric plant so that we can turn it into energy Or like you said, aliveness, it's a beautiful word, vitality, longevity, life force. And so that to me is a shift that for me is important, is that I think in, in some of the Western perspective, I hear [00:44:00] people talking about traumas, this like tumor we want to cut out.
[00:44:03] John: Yeah. Some exorcism that needs to happen. Yeah.
[00:44:07] Elia: This is, it's just trapped energy.
[00:44:11] John: Very much so yeah, and
[00:44:13] Elia: so I know
[00:44:14] John: she
[00:44:14] Elia: gonna dance our ways to access it and then transform it and repurpose it That's the key.
[00:44:21] John: I love it Somehow we are out of time It's gone by so fast, which just means which just means I have to have you back sometime to do to do another hour of or whatever.
[00:44:34] John: That being said let me know or let us know how people can learn more about you, the offerings you have. I know you have a particular offering coming up here in a couple of weeks. So I would definitely want you to plug that. And of course we'll put links to all this in the description.
[00:44:48] Elia: Cool. Yeah, I do a lot of stuff online now.
[00:44:52] Elia: I didn't used to, but the pandemic in 2020. me to share this work online. And I was [00:45:00] dubious. I had my, my negative hat on. I was like, I can't do this online. No, actually I really love doing online now. So I offer a one on one sessions online. I'm teaching a seasonal workshop. So I do workshops every season in conjunction with what nature's doing.
[00:45:17] Elia: So the fall energy. It is about grieving, working through sadness, letting go, finding that courage and that healthy self confidence to spread our wings. So I'm teaching a workshop on October 6th, which is a Sunday at 10 a. m., so an hour and a half, and I use Qigong practices. Dance practices. And it's fun.
[00:45:38] Elia: I really believe this work also can be really fun. Deeply pleasurable. Deeply pleasurable and fun. The suffering will be there anyway. The pain will be there anyway. So how do we find the other side? And then I run seasonal programs. Right now I'm, I'm running one called the 4040 and it's a six week program that has recorded videos, one on one sessions, group classes question and answer, moderated [00:46:00] forums.
[00:46:00] Elia: And I'll be running another one this winter. So you can find out all that information on my website. So my name. Com, Elia meek.com. I really encourage you to join me. I'm sometimes not, not good. I'm working on how to, how to really shout it from the mountaintops and be like, come as ha say, come dance with me.
[00:46:23] Elia: Come Qigong with me. Come breathe with me. Yeah. Cause it's more fun to do it together. That's why.
[00:46:30] John: Love it. Ilya, thank you again for doing this. And yeah, keep, keep in touch. And I really appreciate the work you're doing and the, the perspectives you have on all this stuff. So thank you again for being here.
[00:46:42] Elia: Pleasure, John, thank you for reaching out. It's beautiful. The intuition that you followed. So thank you.
[00:46:47] John: Thanks for listening to another episode of Going Inside. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching and share your favorite episode with a friend. You can follow me on Instagram, @JohnClarkeTherapy and apply to work with me one one-on-one at JohnClarkeTherapy.com. See you next time.