Stories of Astonishing Light with KJ Nasrul

Transformation & Creativity Through Conscious Breathwork | Elle Luna & Andrea Tomasi

• Elle Luna, Andrea Tomasi • Season 4 • Episode 80

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Today's new SOAL gallery features artist, writer, and best-selling author (and Dream Guest for KJ)  Elle Luna and luminous Sound Healer and Shamanic Ritual Guide Andrea Tomasi in conversation exploring the intersection of art, breathwork, and the creative spark.

Compassionate Considerations:

🌱 Conscious breath helps us to REMEMBER our Soul Self, our Quintessential Self, The BELOVED

🌱 Conscious Breath can help us create from a place that is not solely in pain and suffering.

🌱 Creativity is the process of building the reconnective bridge where there was suffering and separateness. 

🌱 Creating comes from a place of devotion and service; a desire to create more LOVE

🌱 Self Compassion is in stabilizing ourselves and returning to our innate wisdom.

Connect With Elle and Andrea

Elle Luna

Andrea Tomasi

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SPEAKER_01

And that body was a remembering of what's beyond the small self or what's beyond the child self or the young self or the past, whatever you want to call it. It was remembering the soul self or the part that can't be, that doesn't die, and that quintessential self, or something you might call it the beloved.

SPEAKER_03

Hello, my lovely friends and healers. Welcome back to another session of Stories of Astonishing Light. I'm Kimberly Jane Nasrell, also known as KJ, and I'm so thrilled you've dropped in with me to listen into another exchange of astonishing stories. Today, oh my goodness, I'm honestly shimmering and quaking. When I began my podcast more than two years ago, I had a dream guest list for interviews. Today, one of those dream guests joins me with another extraordinary soul to discuss the transformative qualities of conscious breath, the intersection of art and breath work, and how deep inner work feeds our creative sparks. I mean, it's everything and more that I could spend my entire life musing about. Well, speaking of muses, a guide, a mentor for me, El Luna, is on the show today. And she brings with her the luminous Andrea Tomasi. So a little bit about Elle. Elle is a designer, painter, and writer. She is the best-selling author of The Crossroads of Should and Must. You have probably read this book. You've probably heard me talk about this book and how revolutionary it was for me. She is the co-author of Your Story is Your Power. Free Your Feminine Voice. She also previously facilitated the global art movement, which I'm still a part of, and it's called the 100-day project. She's also worked as a designer with teams on apps and websites, including Medium, Mailbox, and Uber. Elle experienced her first holotropic breathwork session in 2019 and has been waiting for the day that she could share the life-giving power of conscious breath with others. And we're so lucky because the time is now. Andrea Tomasi creates spaces for others to connect deeply to themselves and to nature so that they may remember their essence and reawaken to life. She is a musician, sound healer, shamanic ritual guide, and her services lie in the awakening of consciousness as the pathway home to wholeness and love. There is this incredible feeling of returning home when in her presence. And this conversation has transcended all of my hopes and dreams. Let's listen to this incredible conversation with Luna and Andrea Tomasi. Hello, my lovelies. It's so nice to see you today. Lovely to see you as well, KJ. It's great to be here. So I'm just so thrilled that we're here together in this moment and in this space. I tend to just touch base with folks with I don't know if I like to call them icebreaker questions, but just little curiosities. So I'm wondering if you two would be open to answering a couple curiosities. The first question I have for you is what is on your refrigerator currently? On or touching? I love icebreakers.

SPEAKER_01

I'll go first. Okay. I have a magnet on the refrigerator that is a yellow road sign. This is L, by the way. It's a yellow road sign and it says yield to the present. What about you, Andrea? Absolutely nothing. Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Love it. No magnets, no plans. I know nothing. I think part of it is that I'm in a newly built kitchen and so slowly adding things. I think I also just have a memory of having a fully loaded refrigerator on the outside as a kid. And so maybe there's some aspect of doing it a and creating a little bit more clarity on the outside of my refrigerator.

SPEAKER_03

I like that. I like that a lot too. Yes. Yeah. You basically answered my next curiosity, which was, did you ever have anything touching your refrigerator? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Oh yeah. I think it was definitely covered as a kid. I think, remember those like the Michelangelo sticker that or magnet that you could then put the different clothes on him, like the different outfits? Yes. You know what I'm talking about? We had that. So you get like the naked Michelangelo, and then you can put on like polka dot boxers or something. That's great.

SPEAKER_03

Oh. I had the create your own poetry. I had a lot of those on there where you could just move around words, but then I sort of ignored them. And so the same three words were stuck together forever until some new person came in and maybe got curious and started to move things around.

SPEAKER_00

Do you remember what the three words were?

SPEAKER_03

No, not in the moment. That would have been so great if I did. No, but it usually would be something silly. Like I would find myself giggling, giggling over it. So like the word pants somehow, perhaps, would find its way there.

SPEAKER_01

It's like those five-word haikus or the five-word stories on Twitter. It's the one I always remember is baby shoes never worn for sale.

SPEAKER_03

That's amazing. Love it. Oh thank you. Thank you for answering, my friends. Okay, one more for you. Speaking of childhood, favorite ice cream flavor when you were a child, and is it the same now as an adult?

SPEAKER_02

It's a hard one. Are we talking creamy, soft serve, or hard ice cream?

SPEAKER_03

Ooh. I didn't dig that deep into it. How you defined it as a child. Let's go with ice cream.

SPEAKER_01

Let's go with the scooped stuff. I hear you. Like I'm kind of a flavor burst on the soft serve, but I'm definitely like on the scoop side, the Superman ice cream, which is the multi-colored, and yes, it's still my favorite. It's filled with every piece of food coloring that exists chemically on Earth. And it's basically like, I guess it might actually be vanilla, but it is so creamy and delicious, and it turns your whole mouth like kind of a frightening shade of purple blue. And your lips. And now I have a nephew, and it's his favorite color. And I'm like, yeah, like he knows what's up. Summertime, letting it melt. Superman ice cream. There's one place in western Michigan where you can get it. Yeah, that would maybe be like a final meal on Earth. Superman ice cream, age seven, sitting on the hillside, the back of my legs scratching from the grass. Yeah, that was good. Nice question, KJ. Okay, so scooped. Something scooped. I like this. Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Something scooped. I think as a kid, it would have been something like vanilla Heath Bar Crunch or vanilla with chunks of cookie dough inside. Yeah. But definitely vanilla forward. I was not a chocolate ice cream person.

SPEAKER_01

Plus one. And do you still eat this scooped vanilla forward?

SPEAKER_02

Not as much. I'm thinking of the Ben and Jerry's brand, which these two flavors were notably from. I don't eat that brand anymore because it's very, very sweet.

SPEAKER_01

Isn't it interesting how our bodies and taste buds change as we get older?

SPEAKER_03

Yes. Yes. Hence that. And is this something that's still in your life now? Yeah. Mint chip when I was a child, and it's associated very specifically with walking to the corner liquor store, convenience store that also they scooped ice cream. And there was a Rite Aid, gosh, it was a thrifty. It was thrifty before it became Rite Aid. But the ice cream was still called thrifty. And it still is today. And so it was taking that walk with my childhood buddies. Let's go get some ice cream. Yeah. Can we gather all the coins and the pennies or however much? Can we gather that all together, dump it on the counter and say, I'll take a scoop? Mint you, please.

SPEAKER_01

So KJ, when you said you were going to the liquor store, that's not where I thought your story was going. That's like your own haiku, a child walking to the liquor store to get ice cream.

SPEAKER_03

You know, a little misleading, right? Because it was a convenience store. They had all the whiskeys and the tequilas and the hard liquors lined up next to the counter where you can also get your ice cream. So no ID required. No ID required for this goodness. So yeah, that's so funny. I know. Thank you for that because it was seemed natural to me to go to the liquor store as a child, but to get ice cream. So thank you, ladies, for participating. My next question is to open up and bring us into the juiciness and the layers of what we were hoping to speak about today as it is. How is it that the three of us are talking today? What brought us into this space? What are you drawn to talking about today?

SPEAKER_01

I suspect that we share a similar question. And I think the question is maybe in two parts. It's how to come home to ourselves. And the second part would be how to bring our unique and extraordinary gifts to that process.

SPEAKER_03

I'm letting that ice cream melt.

SPEAKER_01

So I'll speak for myself. My background is this is Elle, and my background, I'm a trained designer and a painter and a writer. And a lot of my work in those different domains has really been about exploring this question in different ways. And how I met Andrea was through a breathwork session in 2019. And from that point, for me, there became a real connection between my work as a creative and the ability to create a safe and inspiring space, a set and setting, which is breathwork, to open up the breath in a process that also opens up a doorway for inner exploration. And I think we're all familiar with Michael Paul, and we're all familiar with all these different ways that people can enter into altered states of consciousness and the powerful healing modalities, whether it's cold plunging or intermittent fasting or long distance running or whatever you do, how do you create space to go within? And how do you do that in a way that you're tending to your soul self, that you're really getting in touch with your multidimensional self? And I think that's what I've always been looking for as a creative is how to get to that place. It's like the sculptor Brancusi said, it's not difficult to make things. What's difficult is to reach the place from which we can make things. And breath work gets me to that place. And then my inner innate wisdom as a creative, as a multidimensional human being, can awaken. So there's something, and so for myself, that's how I experience the overlapping of the question with what do I uniquely bring into the world? And I suspect that's shared, but I don't know, Andrea, is that a fair assumption that we share a similar question?

SPEAKER_02

Mm-hmm. Yes. Very well said. Yeah, the two words that were coming to mind were reconnection and a remembering. And then Elle, you said an awakening, and it made me think about how do we come more alive while we're alive? And how do we open more to love? So it really feels like that coming home to self and the coming home to love.

SPEAKER_03

I'm resonating with the words remembering and recovering. You had mentioned cold plunges, Elle, and I very newly have come into the world of wild swimming and cold plunges. I did that when I last fall was in Scotland for the first time in the Scottish Highlands, and I dipped into Loch Ness with just my bathing suit on, and that's when I really, really discovered what was on the other side of breath. And I instantly felt like I remembered what I'd always known, but had managed to bury and forget in that nanosecond of feeling like my body was locking up and I could not breathe because of the cold. So I'm really, really resonating with what you both have said. How have we discovered these modalities in which we are coming face to face or we're embodying and understanding this transformative element of breathing, of breath? Like I said, I found it in cold, cold water. Where have you encountered this informing transformational understanding?

SPEAKER_02

The transformational understanding of breath itself, is that the question? Yeah. Well, I think for me it really comes from the training in a kind of breath work similar to holotropic breathwork. And really thinking about breath as it sounds obvious, but connection to life, and then breath as consciousness. So there's an important element to the breath work that we do where we make sure to connect the inhale and connect the exhale so that there's and the intention is so that there's no gap between the inhale and the exhale. So we're never holding our breath. Because the idea is that when the breath stops, then we go unconscious. So really something about connecting that breath just as simple as the connected breath is a way that we can connect to our internal awareness or consciousness itself in any moment. I've also really experienced breath as a teacher in different breathwork experiences. I had an experience recently where I was just becoming so, so intimate with the action of the breath that again, it was like a very simple takeaway, but it was this understanding that oh, we're meant to effort on the inhale, and then we're meant to relax on the exhale. And so I had experienced a little bit of struggle with how you're supposed to breathe in a breathwork session because I was fighting against that initial element of effort on the inhale, because I thought that I was just supposed to be relaxed the whole time, which you can be, but there was something about the realization where, oh, our body actually has to work to make that inhale and it can totally relax on the exhale. So what that did was that it actually shifted my relationship to work itself or putting in effort in other parts of my life because I realized that work and effort are by design and they don't just mean struggle. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I love the idea of the word remembering. KJ, I love that you highlighted that. The root of that word is when you remember, you're putting the body together, you're remembering your body parts. And there's this way that in a creative practice we call it a body of work, right? Like Andrea released an incredible album last year of her sound work, and that was a body of work. It was a true body of work because it had her body in it. And that body was a remembering of what's beyond the small self or what's beyond the child self or the young self or the past, whatever you want to call it. It was remembering the soul self or the part that can't be, that doesn't die. And that quintessential self, or some you might call it the beloved. Or that's my projection on Andrea's music work, which I find incredibly transformative. So this idea that the connected breath helps us remember ourselves. I really I love that connection. And yes, the breath is body. When we go into the breath, I mean what I love about the breath is that it's a very accessible model. You don't have to buy anything, you don't have to know anybody, you don't have to read a book. You have got it with you. It is the one thing that you have from the minute you arrive all the way until your final breath. And how connected are you to your breath? And this idea of transformative is also a word that catches me as you say it because there's such a difference between just receiving information and then actually going through a process of transformation. And the first time I encountered breath work that's inspired by holotropic breathwork was a group of practitioners who do this work. They sat in a circle and went around, and everyone shared their essentially what we would call like their core. I'm gonna call it a wound, although that's not really the right word because it's that implies that there's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. Let's just call it their core teacher or their core belief. And usually this is a belief that gets imprinted in a moment of trauma. Everyone went around the room and one after the other, they shared what their core belief was. This is my very first experience. One person said, I'm bad. The next person said, I'm hi, I'm so and so, I'm unlovable. Hi, I'm so and so, I'm not good enough. And it was the cheeriest group of shares. Hi, I'm Samantha, and I'm the one who's not chosen. Smile. Next person goes. It reminded me of this book, The Door into Ocean or A Door Into Ocean. It's a utopian science fiction novel about a group of enlightened beings in the future. It's a predominantly female society, and it's an entirely female society except for one man. And in the community, when a woman comes of age, it's called having a ceremony where you share your self-name. And it's where you say really what your work is in this incarnation, in this life. So uh, hi, I'm Nessie, and I'm the destroyer. And when you say your self-name, it's a sign of true maturity. And everyone in the community cheers for you. I felt that I was in a self-name ceremony. And this was a community, which was such a relief that understood what it means to be a human being as all of it. And that it means the parts that we have shame about, the parts that we have aversion to, or the parts that we're attached to, right? Like I'm so-and-so, I'm always this or I'm always that. And this was a community that was really looking at the question: where is my weakness? Where is my little self? Where is my helplessness? Where do I behave like a three-year-old? I mean, just even these questions, I can think of them in my daily life. Where do I become a victim and stomp my feet and say, I'm not good enough. I am not chosen. And that's the doorway. And I think the breath is that doorway, the connected breath that Andrea was just talking about, that effortful inhale and that relaxed exhale. That's the doorway. And so many of us, well, I'll speak for myself. I think as a seeker, I've looked for doorways all over the place in many very wrong places. But how do we opt out of our pain? Or how do we move through our stuckness? How do we sidestep? And really, the doorway into that expanded place is right there through that story of unworthiness that got imprinted in a very specific moment in the past. It's a specific story, it might be a personal story, what you tell yourself about yourself, or a cultural story. I look this way, so therefore that means that. And I can never do X, Y, and Z. But it's a story that's too small for you. What did you choose to believe? And I felt that I was in a group that could appreciate all of these different parts of being human. And they understood how to go through that doorway. And because of that, they got to experience the spectrum of experience, which is everything from the worst of us to what it means to be fully expanded. How present are we with our inner beloved, with our higher self on a daily basis? How might you use your breath to connect to your immortal self? You don't have to go anywhere. You don't have to be anyone. You don't have to do anything. You can connect to your breath. Now, of course, a setting for holotropic or a more rigorous, engaged process of breath work, you do want to be with someone, and there's a methodology to that. And there's a way that the breath can meet us right where we are, no matter who we are or how old we are.

SPEAKER_02

Can I piggyback on something that you said, Elle? Talking about those like really core beliefs that can arise into our awareness. Like there's something so primal about the breath that it really can connect us to those that life or death situation, which can then help to reveal what were the decisions that we made in those life or death circumstances, specifically referring to going down the birth canal. And one thing I love about breath work is because it's so primal and because you can get to those really core places, it feels like it has a unique ability to contact the energy that is still there in orbit inside of our beings, and actually start to discharge it. Where there are other really profound ways to alter consciousness that are very transformative. There's something very unique about the breath and where it takes you, and its ability to discharge those really old energies or that core wound or the core belief so that we can actually begin to open up more space in our lives now and live from a new place in our lives now that isn't as connected to that older orbit of energy charge.

SPEAKER_01

And Andrea, I'm curious for you what your process has been like as a creative. You've been creating art probably your whole life. You could maybe break that down into stages of your practice. I found that maybe a decade ago, I was really approaching my creativity from a place of pain or from a place of insatiability. It was actually a very young part of me that was stepping up to the canvas. And that part needed to have space to express. But my gosh, was that part hungry? And Tibetan Buddhism, it's called the hungry ghost. It's like no matter how much you eat, you're never full. And it's been a real process to create from a place that's not suffering. Now, I do believe that truly great art comes through suffering, right? It's like you would never wish suffering on someone else, but you wouldn't want them to miss the grace that comes from that suffering. And where I am in my practice now is how do I create from there? And it's a very different process and it's very new. It's like being in a new, I've begun to somatically create a new landscape or a new reality, and all the maps change there. And I'm probably just on the precipice of what is emerging in me in the most trained and well-worn grooves that I have around visual expression and writing and just historically the ways that I know where my creativity is. And it's an emergent process, right? It's an effortless that's not something that you can't push the river. What about you? How has your practice impacted, or have there been any noticeable changes as you've grown with your creative work and inner work?

SPEAKER_02

Totally. Yeah, that's so beautiful. I'm so excited for you, Elle. Yeah, I can relate 100% that so much of my musical creation and art used to be about this kind of sad story that I really needed to tell and was really so merged inside of my identity that I actually wanted to be loved for. And that word beloved comes to mind that you've been using, Elle. And I think what shifted for me in the desire to create was more from that sense of devotion, and then back to that word love. How can I be in service to creating beauty to share and create more love? I was also thinking about that word suffering, because it is so true that so much of art comes from suffering. And these days it's not like you and I, El, are sitting here saying, like, all suffering will be eradicated, because that's just not true. But when you said suffering, I thought of the word separation, and that there's something about when I can feel a certain level of space or that sense of separation that may be an illusion, is an illusion, perhaps. Still, there can be that feeling, and it's almost like the creation of the art is about coming back to that reconnection. There's that word again. Creating that bridge once again where we can come back into flow and then come back home.

SPEAKER_01

KJ, we're not even giving you a minute to talk, but there's three things I want to highlight from what Andrea just said. First, I'm a little shocked that we're not gonna get rid of suffering. Hate to break it to you, L. Good to know. Number two, there's such a subtlety in what Andrea just said, and it's such a big thing. It's a small big thing about separation and reconnection. This belief that, especially in the pandemic, that became so prevalent about the isolation or separateness, physical separateness. It exacerbated any story that we had around being separate. The idea that we could possibly be separate when you really, really, really sink into it is so ludicrous. I remember when I fully really got it. It's so impossible. Even if I really wanted to be in separate from everything and everyone, which occasionally I really want when I'm really young, it's so impossible. If one molecule in the whole universe were to be different or missing, we wouldn't even have this. It's like that saying, you have to, if you want to make an apple pie, you first have to build the universe. The final thing that Andrea just said that was so subtle is around choice. Like Andrea, because her suffering and her sad music, her sad story of pain, because she went through that, she now is in a place where this devotion has the texture of that suffering. And I think that's really important. I was listening to a Ramdas lecture. There's so many of them on YouTube for free, and they're wonderful. He was talking, a young kid said, I want to start altering my consciousness and I want to go into non-ordinary states of consciousness. And Ramdas said, I love the motivation, kid, but you gotta be somebody before you can be nobody. And there's something so lovely about looking back and really appreciating all the ways that we try to be special, the try the ways we try to be somebody, and we go through excellent somebody training here on earth. And then to be special, and especially in a place like America, with there's just such a lack of systems in place compared to other countries that support people. So you really do have to be somebody, and you have to be really good at being somebody and be very special at it so that you're taken care of. And then you get to begin the process of becoming nobody, and that nobody-ness is what reconnects you to everybody, anyway. You all know this. But I appreciated, Andrea, how conscious you were about the choice, or maybe now at this point. And I think that's one of the things that this work that I can appreciate about this work is it increases your capacity for choice, it increases your capacity for agency, and it increases your capacity for love because who wouldn't want to choose that?

SPEAKER_03

Both of you touched on words that when articulated, this is exactly what I've known as well, or what I've experienced. And a couple of those words were premortal, pre, before understanding, before being in this defined body container. Also, beloved, that also spoke to me as well. And it occurred to me how when I've asked people about self-compassion or who your beloveds are, rarely do they include themselves in that answer of beloved. And so there's this separateness. It's tricky, right? It's tricky the way this arguer ego, this voice that says, You're separate, you're not a part of this cohesive stream. And then once the separateness is pointed out, is the suffering simply an understanding? And I don't mean simply in dismissive, but is the suffering because for a second we truly believe that we're separate? Or we believe that story that was told to us, the narrative of you are different, you are a part, you are separate from. Does that beckon and does that reawaken our truest fears, our truest questions?

SPEAKER_01

What surfaces for me around suffering is, Andrea, I believe that you and I have both really sat with our suffering deeply in unconscious and conscious ways, both. And we've been through years of training to be able to facilitate others to enter into that space from which they might be able to observe their own decision making, their own stories. And now that we're facilitating individuals and groups and sharing this work more broadly, one of the things around suffering is how helpful it is. And how, as a facilitator, and I guess just as a person in life, to trust everyone's process and do not try to take away someone else's suffering. There's a way that suffering can be really helpful in the way that it's the pressure on the stone that makes the diamond. There's a way that the process works itself out. And one of the things I really love about Breath Work is it's based on this idea that we all have our own inner healer. We all have our own inner wisdom. And how do we awaken that inner healer? How do we create the space from which that can be awakened? We've been in the pandemic, and a lot of this work has happened on Zoom, and the technology works. It can be done. The inner healer can be awakened on Zoom. And it can be awakened in person, in presence, when in person in space. It can also be awakened in relationship. One of the practices is a meditation, it's a 50-50 meditation where you put half of your awareness on the person in front of you and make sure that half of your energy or your awareness is with yourself. Can you be simultaneously aware of the very enigmatic and wonderful adventure playing out on the person's face in front of you? Or maybe it's a very sad adventure, maybe it's a terrible, heartbreaking adventure. Can you not fall into their story? Can you stay with yourself? And then, of course, how do we hold space with ourselves? How do we create space to allow our own process to unfold and to not get delusional by just going to the places that feel good? How do we sit with it? And the incredible teacher, Kurd Jeff, he asked the question if a prisoner wants to be free from prison, what's the first thing they need to know? And the answer is that the first thing they need to know is that they're in prison. Because if they think they're free, no escape is possible. So how do you sit with your own imprisonment? Or maybe how well do you sit with your own imprisonment? And that suffering or that discomfort or aversion or wherever your attachment is, wherever your that's the way to go. Like a story I recently heard that I thought was wonderful. This amazing, I call him a healer, but I'm sure he's a therapist, uh, Gabor Mate. He was talking about, he's an expert on trauma, and he was saying that, and we all have trauma, right? We're not talking about like, oh, I know someone who has had a trauma. It's we all have it big and small, happens throughout our lives in big and little ways. And we uncover it in different moments. But he talks about trauma as being like a ball filled with air that you're trying to hold underwater. And it takes a lot of energy to hold that ball underwater. And what the work is is to figure out how do we cope? What do we do to hold that ball underwater, right? Oh, I don't want to feel those things, so I'll eat, or I don't want to feel those things, so I'll shop, or I don't want to feel those things, so I'll just run away. Those are mine. But I think the real question and getting to know, like, okay, that's my short list. If I'm doing those things, maybe I'm trying to hold the ball underwater. But I think the real thing, the real question is what is the story that you're telling yourself about why you got to hold that ball underwater in the first place? And how do we lean in to the processes or the ways or even creating the space where this might even happen? It's sort of like in painting, if you want to paint a painting, you first need to create your tabula rasa. You have to get your canvas, you have to prime it, you have to get it ready. How do you create a space for your own self to go within and say, huh? Why do I feel like I have to hold that ball underwater? What's that story? Do I have space to actually express all the messy, mysterious parts of myself? And then you're on the trail. I have no idea what your question was.

SPEAKER_03

Answered beautifully.

SPEAKER_01

But don't you love that image of the ball underwater? When I heard that, I was like, oh, that's really that's it.

SPEAKER_03

I love what you just articulated around that image, which is what is it that's compelling us to try and hold that beneath the water, beneath the surface? What is informing our abilities to release or our choice to release? Release it. Pardon me, Andrea.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I just wanted to respond to you, Elle, because I feel like you're touching on the beauty of a healing container and the power of presence. Something about having just someone there who's there to witness and maybe not necessarily intervene, but to give a person that space to go into those places. There's something about the sentence you were saying about awakening the inner healer, and I would almost argue that the inner healer is always there, but we need that space and perhaps that resource of more people, of more beings, of that presence in order to, it's almost like to listen to the inner healer. Because I feel like it's always functioning, whether it's through ailments or disease or even those behaviors that we do while we're trying to keep that ball under the water. But it's really about the potency of the space that allows us to reconnect. There's that word, too, that inner healer that's actually always there.

SPEAKER_01

And one of the things about our friendship, Andrea, is I've have found surprise that that ball isn't always filled with sad stories or how I'm struggling, or it's also filled with my gifts. And maybe the role of friendship, the role of relationship, the role of being witness, let's just call it the witness, is to also develop the other end of experience. So often when we talk about transformation, we talk, oh, my suffering. There's almost this social currency around, well, that happened to you. Well, look at this. This way that we can put those deposits in our trauma bank accounts. But what is it like to be in a family or a community or a relationship where someone really appreciates your absolute extraordinariness, your total beauty as a luminescent person? Someone who for two hours will let you just go and be whoever, whatever, and to drop into bliss. I mean, at the end of the day, how was your day? Oh, well, traffic was bad and child care canceled, and how was your day? Oh, it was just extraordinarily wonderful dripping in ecstasy all day. That is revolutionary. Andrea does that really well for me, and she'll play it back. It might just be a reflection of you, Elle. But what you do really well. I don't know, partially true. And I think that's one of my favorite practices of self-care and self-compassion as well as with other people. How do we not only how do we reflect it all? How do we develop all of it? How do we redefine what it means to be a human being? How do we get to be all these parts? How does all of that get to be okay?

SPEAKER_03

Thank you for essentially circling back to my favorite way to at least pause in a conversation as profound as this. But I love to ask everyone, what is your favorite form of self-compassion, self-kindness?

SPEAKER_02

Hmm. Depends whether I'm lying down or sitting up. If I'm lying down, I like to go into fetal, but if I'm sitting, I like to put one hand on my heart, maybe one hand on my stomach, and to connect to my essential self, the self that is beyond my ego or my personality. And I connect to the love there that I feel that I am, and this deeper love that I have for myself that feels like the undercurrent of that's underneath maybe some of the more dominant voices, more of the critical voices that I hear more of the time. So it's almost like I sink beneath those voices and I really connect to this essential love, and then I consciously send that love to every cell inside of my body. So I'm filling up my entire body with love. It's my primary self-compassion practice.

SPEAKER_03

What a lovely, lovely place to have arrived.

SPEAKER_02

Mm-hmm. Thank you for helping.

SPEAKER_01

I feel better just having you talk about your self-care practice. I'll answer this in a roundabout way. I had a dream recently where I was in the backyard of a house, I guess it was my house, and it was iced over and it was covered with snow. And I was holding these root balls of vetiver. If you've ever seen vetiver, Google it. The root system of vetiver makes it one of the most, it's great for like the edges of seashores, be where you have the edges are crumbling, and the root structure is just extraordinary. It's vast and enormous and thick. And I was in this backyard in the ice and in the snow, and I was planting vetiver root balls in the snow, digging through the ice, digging through the snow underneath it, and I was planting it into the earth to stabilize the ground. And when I woke up, what awoke in me was that I have this ability to stabilize myself. I have these vetiver root balls, my inner resourcefulness. And there's something very expansive when we realize that we have capacity for agency and we have the capacity to find resources and to find ways to change the movie that we're watching, to actually stabilize the ground if that's what's needed. And it reminds me of an earlier time in my life when I was doing a lot of inner work around misogyny and internalized misogyny within really being very patriarchally identified internally. The more I kept doing that work, the more I kept planting those vetiver root balls in the snow, my dreams began to shift. And I started to have dreams where, like, if there were violent movies playing in the dreams where I would get up and leave the movie theater. Or later, this was actually recently, I had a dream where there was a mass shooting. And in the dream, I actually admitted to myself, like, oh, I don't watch violence because I know that the brain can't distinguish between reality and a movie. And the fact that this was in a dream makes this kind of fantastical. But in the dream, I understood that there was violence and that I needed to see it, but I didn't need to see it, see it. So I actually held up my hand to cover up all the violence in the dream. And your question about my favorite practice of self compassion is this realization that I can take action that changes the ground beneath my feet. That changes my understanding of reality or myself or who I am, going back to that story. Like if your story starts off as I'm bad, how's that going for you? How's feeling not good enough going for you in relationships or your job or your job search? And how do we come back to this place of innate wisdom? Which is, I mean, sure is nice to be able to shift the ground underneath your feet. It sure is nice to be able to become aware of that belief and to change it. And you can. And I guess self-compassion is what are the stories you're telling yourself about yourself? And if you don't like what they are, you have the capacity to dig through them, to go through that ice and that snow and plant these root balls and stabilize the ground that holds you. And in that place, I mean, I think that's how you come into love because it fills you. You get to give it to yourself. There's this one song. I guess if you wanted like a tangible thing about what I do, there's this one song by, I think her name is Lauren Redness. It's the song is called Rescue. And it's a love song, or I guess it's intended to be a love song. But I listen to that song and I dedicate it to myself. And it's really about letting the earth or whatever you something bigger than yourself, whether that's love or the inner beloved or God, whatever your God is, whatever God means to you, nature, or it could be a beloved pet. How do you let the earth hold you? How do you let the earth take care of you, cradle you, nurture you? I think that's what that song is about. So if I ever feel like I need to be held, a good romance song dedicated to the self is a nice workaround or nice, what's the word I'm looking for? That's a nice trick. Yeah. Shift it and make it about you to yourself. That feels like rich self-compassion.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, bring it home. I am in awe of and aware of this exquisite presence in this moment. Thank you both for spending a little time with me today. I look forward to a continuation of I mean, this is just the beginning, isn't it? Thank you very, very much.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you so much, KJ. It's been an honor. Thank you, KJ.

SPEAKER_03

Where can we find you? Where can we connect with you?

SPEAKER_02

You can connect with me, Andrea, via my website, which is Andrea Tomasi Music.com. That's really the best way. I'm not really on social media these days. So there's a contact form on my website and more information there.

SPEAKER_01

And also links to her incredible music. Thanks, L. Talk about a self-compassion practice. Yeah, just go there. Start there. For me, this is El go to lluna.art. You can sign up for my newsletter, and you can also see some of the offerings that Andrea and I will have this year. And on both of our websites, you'll see all kinds of ways to work with us and engage. Perfect.

SPEAKER_03

And KJ, thank you. Thank you, thank you. It is my pleasure and honor. I will have all of this information in the notes that come along with the show so everyone can find you. And they'll be hearing a lot more about how this is available and you are available. So thank you. Have a lovely, lovely afternoon. Well, talk about self-compassion practices, right? Listening to Andrea's ethereal, ancient sound healing, listening to the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, gently nurturing them and stabilizing them in the ground that holds us. What about dedicating a love song to ourselves? What a fantastic, fantastic suggestion. Why don't we dedicate love songs to ourselves? Or if you already do, amazing. Nicely done. There are so many takeaways, so many compassionate considerations. I'm just going to dive right in so that we can marinate in what we have just listened to. There are a couple of categories of these considerations. I see them as remembering, I see them as the creative process, and then there's the self-compassion practices. So first, remembering what do I uniquely bring to this world? Remembering what makes us come more alive while we're alive in the present. Remembering what is on the other side of breath, remembering our soul selves, our quintessential selves through connected breath. The creative process is building a reconnective bridge where there was suffering and separateness. Creating comes from a place of devotion and service, a desire to create more love. Conscious breath work can help us create from a place that's not solely rooted in pain and suffering, despite what we may have believed or impressed upon ourselves in self-compassion. What is self-compassion? In the realm of conscious breath work. Self-compassion is stabilizing ourselves and returning to our innate wisdom. Self-compassion is in knowing and letting the earth hold you. How do you let the earth cradle you, nurture you? I encourage you to look to the show notes to find all the ways to connect with Elle and Andrea. Andrea's sound healing album, Into the Mystery, is on Spotify and SoundCloud and on her website. Elle's books, these revelatory, revolutionary books, at least for me, The Crossroads of Should It Must, and Your Story is Your Power. They're available for you as well. If you haven't read them yet, I recommend they were completely life-altering for me. Andrea and Elle co-facilitate conscious breath work in their program, Awakening Breath. Another six-month session is slated for later this fall. Perhaps I'll see you there. I want to thank you. I thank Elle and Andrea. I thank you for spending time with me today, exploring and reveling in the astonishing stories that are around us, between us, and within us. First, you could post a screenshot of the podcast on your Instagram and Facebook stories or in your feeds, and tag me at Bliss Begins Within or Musings on Other, and I can repost you. Another way to spread the love is to share this podcast with your friends and family, anyone whom you think might enjoy it as well. A third way to support this podcast is to subscribe, download, and leave a positive review on any of the platforms you listen to the show on. And this way we can continue to grow our audience and reach more listeners. A quick and direct way to leave a review is by going to ratethispodcast.com forward slash astonishing stories. I am so grateful to spend this time with you exchanging such uplifting tales of resilience. We'll see you next time.