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Welcome back to Coast to Coast AM. I am Lisa gar and my guests CJ. Llewellen, who is the author of a book called Chakra and the Vegas Nerve, has dedicated most of her life to communicating about this very central communication system in our body called the Vegas nerve. And because the book's titled Chakras and the Vegas Nerve, I have to ask you, CJ, what is the relationship between the vegas nerve and the chakras.
It's frankly quite mind blowing. I started to see it now. I am a riki master and I am an intuitive. I started to see as I would process some trauma through through clients, their messaging systems and just the variants of their bodies that were processing through me, making me meaning we're all aligning with where the vagus nerve is along the chakras. And I just worked like that for years before I realized, oh my gosh, there's a booking here.
So most of the people you saw, the central location of the trauma was usually all along this.
Nerve, not always, but there was a predominant messaging that seemed to be taking place. So I started breaking down the root chakra, the sacred chakra, the solar plexus is what I was calling in my head sort of the essential, because that seemed to be where the messaging of early childhood wounds, what we call attachment wounds, were processing. And the lower the more the memories were not able to be recalled, they were feeling them in their bodies. We
call that implicit memories. So you know, things that happened to us as a baby that we have held information in our bodies, but we didn't have the brain capacity yet to have a more logical or explicit memory. So it was watching the messaging that we're going along with the root chakra, the survival, that the sacral chakras, the chakra of connection, and that full of plexus is that sort of identity, you know, the mind I call that
in the book the mind chakra. And then as we get up into the heart chakra, the throat chakra, the third eye, and the crown. Just as we were just talking about, that's ventral vagel activity. That is where the ventral vagel nerves are that portion of the vagus nerve
that's our safety. So while there may have been memory stored in certain air is of that body that those energy centers, there's also a lot of restoration that starts occurring once we process the trauma out people are making meaning there was a lot of heart chakra opening up. People were able to communicate suddenly and speak where maybe as children they were they felt their voices weren't heard and they were told to be quiet. Things would loosen up.
So it was really powerful and it was moving to see this this information center. While and frankly, I'll be honest with you, I think they're one in the same system. I just think one is what we can put our hands on. You know, our vagus nerve is something that we can actually see and study. Uh, the etheric energies seem to extend outward from the vegas nerve. We can't measure of them is easily, but they are there. They're there,
They're they're experienced all the time. We know this and a lot of the people that are listening know this because they've had these experiences.
Well, you know, it as also a raking master and an intuitive where you're able to I mean, tell me how that you experience the intuitive part of it.
So I hold a lot of space for my clients to start feeling comfortable with their own intuition. That's where I hold back on my own engagement because I don't want to feel like I am taking their uh disempowered. I don't want to feel like I'm disempowering them. I want them to start really understanding because I so believe what we are all intuitive. If we listen, we all have these gifts. I want them to start really feeling that comfort in their body, feeling the messaging in their body.
But I'm watching this, you know, it's I'm working with them. I'm watching this process and I'm hoping helpful, hopefully helping them to facilitate some of that intuitibility. But you know, I would just I would just see it, and I would kind of hold the space for them to really drop down and listen, because all in all intuitive processing, mediumship, reiki, anything that has that those spiritual components about it, you have to drop down into your body to hear and
see the messages. And that's where to me, the psychological is a spiritual because it is our bodies that are intuiting, whether we're doing mediumship work, whether we are listening to the uh, the chakras and the areas as we're working through you know, processing with reiki, we're utilizing the messaging through our own body, even though we are reaching beyond the body for healing as well.
It's got to be very I mean satisfying to see people unlock this level of trauma and their body really truly light up and go from pain to expansion when it works, when it actually works.
It absolutely is And what happens is they have more rooms, they have more room to access their own lights, their own soul. And I also very much believe that the soul within us, and I have to be careful with that because I am there to meet people where they're at within their own spiritual journey. So I'm not in there, you know, talking about soul all the time, because I have people who don't, you know, who believe you know, that we are once we're dead, we're gone. I cannot
you know, reconstruct that for them at all. That wouldn't be right for me. But this this light within us, I feel, is really directing a lot of and needs to have the expansion within it to have its experience in this world, and we can get so bogged down because our very human aspect of us is trying to keep us safe. Well, yes, that's to me spiritual doing the trauma work as spiritual.
Oh my goodness, I mean. But the also this trauma, when it gets launched in the body, can it manifest into physical pains or oh yes, bones, discs things like that.
Yes, absolutely absolutely sometimes you know, and if it's held onto too long. Now it's feel like the more we try, you know, I tell my client is all the time, the more you're trying to stuck this down, the harder it's getting in your body. You start, you know, developing vowel obstructions, you start developing neck pain, your fascia hold on to things, that's you know, you start getting experiences
within your fashion. It might be pain that is really registering lack of safety, but you think you're having a medical issue. So yes, it absolutely does.
So it can fully register in the body and manifest and where when you could think it's a physical problem or a disc problem or something, and you go to someone who's a trauma therapist such as yourself, and you can find that it's actually all stored in this vegus nerve and there's a lot of science behind this too, which is really interesting. But you put it together with the chakras and the reiki and the mediumship and you
really bring it all into one place. So I also you all use I noticed you use a lot of em DR techniques. What is the what is EMDR and how does that relate to this?
So E m d R is, Yes, it's one of my mortalities that I'm trained in. That's the use of bilateral simulation to clear things out of your body. Freensine Shapiro developed this back in the nineties. Now, back then polyvagel theory was just emerging as well, So we had all these really cool theories, you know, kind of growing
up side by side. We knew, uh EMDR therapist knew Wow, when we process out a trauma using eye movement back in the day, it was eye movement that mimicked rem sleeps that there was a there was really evidence of the disturbance believe being leviated from the body. Well, now we know through poly bagel theory that the ocular nerves through that bilateral stimulation or some blood flowed down into the body and so that's that's helping to work everything through.
That's a really big term, but you know, that's helping to really process out whatever might be stuck in there and with you know, em d R. At the basis of EMDR I movement, desensitization and processing was developed because, for instance, Shapiro noticed her eyes were going back and forth when she was thinking about something deep. She was working through a problem. And you know, isn't that really
how all great things were discovered? Is something that's occurring within you and you realize, oh, hey, this might be a thing.
Yes. Actually, that's my question for you is how did you get into this?
So I just I was drawn to the commune vcation aspects. I really did not think that I would ever be a trauma therapist. All I knew is I wanted to work with women, and unfortunately, working with women also meant that there was a lot excuse me, there was a lot of sexual trauma within.
Yes, I do the same thing. I coach for women, and I hear about it all the time.
It's it's yeah, that's a tangent we go off. But but that is what led me down the path of I need more, I need more information, I need ways to help this, and that's what led me to finding modalities that were going to help me, you know, clear this out and help me even understand what it was, because I also work with addictions and eating disorders, and that's that is a problem in itself because it becomes a problem, but it is really the attempt at solving
another problem. You know. Substance abuse generally one way of trying to manage an over sensitive system, a traumatized system. It's trying to in some ways, you know, modulate.
That, yes, And so it led you into finding exercises and ways to release this pain. And actually, I do understand what you're talking about. I do story coaching with women, and I hear the most horrific stories, and through what they've learned on the other side of their stories, are they able to heal And by telling it over and over again to people that they can help circumvent that same type of journey or learn a way out of it,
is healing for them. But this experience here gets into where the trauma is stored and starts to release it actually starts with this. So could you tell us some of the techniques that you use to start releasing the trauma?
Well, I use I think that it's important to know that before we go in and actually work through the trauma. What people see is you know, identifying trauma, doing the.
E M DR on it.
We have to assess if that's how that person feels safe, if that person has ever felt safe, So we have to develop part of the training as a trauma therapist is to really help that person understand what is safety for them. Notice if they're going into dorsal vegel shutdown,
how they're doing, how they're dissociating. So there's a lot of preparation and I use a lot of these examples in the book as to some of the ways that have helped clients develop resources for themselves that when we do start to touching those thoughts of the trauma, they can help themselves stay present to the processing while we're working it out. But if we go right in there right away and extract it, their system is used to
just shutting down techniques. Yeah. So, so part of the first aspects of approaching anybody helping them abbeviate trauma is helping them feel safe enough to actually allow for that trauma processing to happen. But I do I do a lot of MDR and I also do a lot of internal family systems, which is really amazing. What is that well, internal family systems to me is a very spiritual process. It gets to know these multiple aspects of our identity, who we are as people. We are not one person
walking around in the world. We develop multiple identities personalities that help us engage with the world. These are our parts. But our parts kick in early, and some of them are pretty burdened in the beginning if they're trying to get through childhood having to do things that they're not capable of doing, but they're trying to protect the system prior to them understanding that we have a higher self, that we have that light, that full light that I
was just referring to. So getting is sometimes it's hard to do the other work because we have these amazing protectors that won't let you in. So those are the child parts. Those are the parts we get to know. We get to help them understand that they are so safe. They get to know that they have a higher self in here, a higher wiser light within us that can actually be the one that's present because our soul can be present to a lot in this world and not be turned around by it. I mean, we know this.
It feels like there are so many different approaches to trauma and I'm looking forward to the next hour where we could take calls from people who have feel like they have trauma store in their body but they want they want to find out the connection to how they can release it in the vegus nerve or how that can move out of their body, and it could be
just create more space for people. It's not a tough technique, but it has a great, great expansive possibilities in order to get someone to a little bit more freedom, a little bit more space in their life. Right.
Yes, that's safety, and that is the key to anything suit in our life. We cannot pursue things unless we feel safe. If we're feeling safe in our mind and we feel safe in our body, we can become more spiritual because we can access more because we're safe. Safety is primary to us as humans.
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