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"Moving" Into Wealth Consciousness: The Somatic Healing Way
8 Plays4 months ago
Wealth and Money energy is not just about what you think and believe and repeat to yourself. It is also about what is stored in your body. If you're a woman, you have some b.s. stored in your body. If you are a business woman or entrepreneur, you most definitely have some stuff stored in your body. How do we move it? How do we connect with our bodies in a way where we break generational curses and heal our money wounds? Join Dr. Isha Vela and I as we explore Moving Into Wealth Consciousness.
Isha Vela, Ph.D., CCEP is a former trauma psychologist, certified somatic practitioner, wealth activator and financial professional on a mission to help creative disruptors build generational wealth and co-create sustainable futures. Isha (they/she) is a lifelong activist in racial/social justice, decolonization, and queer rights. With the help of her team, Isha is revolutionizing the financial services industry using foundational financial tools, education and healing. They are a solo mom raising 2 neurodiverse queer rebels she's retiring from the educational system next year.
To contact Dr. Vela go to: www.ishavela.com
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Transcript
Emotional Challenges in Business
00:00:00
Speaker
You know as i move towards my goals of building my business growing my business. There was there were a lot of emotions that came up a lot of fears a lot of like old hot it's almost like.
00:00:15
Speaker
ancestral whispers, like things that I felt were not coming from me, but came from my lineage. And I mean, it was really kind of like shadowy, creepy, scary stuff. You know, it's like, you're never gonna reach your goals. I'm never gonna get there. You're never gonna make it give up now. I mean, like stuff where you're just
00:00:36
Speaker
What the hell? Where is that coming from? Where is it coming from? Exactly. And just like for me, one of the things that I teach people is to when you're having an experience, whether it's like a thought loop or when it's like a, when you're, I don't know, when you're sort of standing in your power or like entering into different communities or growing your business or becoming more visible or speaking your truth, it's going to bring up a lot of sensation.
00:01:03
Speaker
A lot of emotions and sensations. And so what I tell people is become an observer of what's happening in your body, but don't get attached to it. Don't believe it necessarily, but just hold space for it.
Introducing Latoya Zavala's Podcast
00:01:18
Speaker
Welcome to Freed and Powered Up. Here is where conscious female leaders who are taking their exit from the overly dominant male patriarchal energy, however you experienced it, can really start to break free from the energy that keeps us back from being who we came here to be and leaving the legacy we came here to leave.
00:01:37
Speaker
the fear, the triggers, the self-sabotage, and limiting behaviors and beliefs without all of it. Every episode, I'm going to connect you to your inner power and awaken the divine feminine within you. I'm your host and your sister, Latoya Zavala. Let's go.
00:02:05
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome, welcome again. Welcome my phoenixes, welcome my goddesses, and welcome to everyone else who enjoys the juiciness of this podcast. I am super excited, as I always am, because my guests are handpicked, as you know. And I have long been intrigued by, excited about, and just in love with,
00:02:31
Speaker
many, many healing modalities, including those and especially those that have to do with the body itself. Because I know that oftentimes when we're going through a lot of trauma, we go through a lot of bullshit, we end up holding that in our bodies. And so I really love to talk to professionals.
00:02:48
Speaker
who deal with moving energy, healing, really becoming our fullest selves through energy work and through the body. And so today, my guest is all about that.
Isha Vela's Journey and Healing
00:03:01
Speaker
And I can't wait to bring her on. So without further ado, would you tell the people who you are and what you do?
00:03:08
Speaker
Thanks Latoya. I'm Isha Vela and I was trained as a trauma psychologist. I did my doctoral training in trauma psychology and then I, after some years of working in the field, I became really physically ill. And I had multiple levels of a chronic illness and I wasn't able to digest food and obviously I went through all of the
00:03:37
Speaker
went to all of the doctors and physicians, but it led me to go into my four-year somatic trauma certification. And what I discovered there is that I was holding so much trauma. Before that, even though I had been trained in trauma, I had no awareness or understanding how I was holding it and the effects it was having on me. It was clearly coming out.
00:04:06
Speaker
As I was doing this work and working on myself and releasing all of this stuff from my body, it just opened up my consciousness in huge ways.
00:04:18
Speaker
I also realized how some of my really early wounding was affecting my relationship with money and how it was affecting my husband's relationship with money and how our wounding came together to create this toxic financial soup that then let me know I needed to end the relationship and
00:04:42
Speaker
I promised myself as I was leaving that relationship that I would heal my money trauma so that I could create or leave my children a different financial legacy than what they were inheriting and had inherited ancestrally. Though I basically like I prayed to God the universe. I was like, please, if I get this done, right, I'm going to get this done. I cannot be doing this.
00:05:08
Speaker
That led me to like for two or three years, I did a lot of work on money.
Financial Empowerment as Self-Love
00:05:14
Speaker
I hired mentors and did all of that thing, all of those things. And then when I was ready, you know, as a divorce was finalized, I said, I'm ready to meet with a financial planner. I met with a planner and it was, I was super intimidated because financial literacy, I had none. I had no idea what planning looked like. And the experience with her was so incredible.
00:05:38
Speaker
I felt so incredibly empowered and I was loving on myself. Financial planning felt like a form of self-love, and I believe that it is. And it was a form of self-provision, providing for myself in the ways that I had secretly wanted my partner to provide for me. I was now doing it.
00:05:57
Speaker
Oh, okay. So, I mean, there's so, so, so much goodness and juiciness in what you just shared. And that could go so many ways with that. But I want to, I feel that it,
00:06:15
Speaker
merit giving space for what you just said, which was, you know, all in the ways that you were wanting him to care for. Yes. And, and part of that probably was expectation, right? Maybe coming even from culture and tradition, like this is what
00:06:37
Speaker
the male partner is should bring or should do to as far as money is concerned. Would you say some of that was, I feel like that wasn't so much the case for me because, you know, I had been in relationship with women before I had been in queer relationships. So that wasn't, it wasn't so much the gender aspects that were there for me. My relationship with money was like, you deal with that. Like you deal with that dirty, corrupt stuff. For me, it was like taking out the trash. You take out the trash.
00:07:07
Speaker
Wow. And where did that come from? That came from growing up in a colonial country, right? In Puerto Rico. And seeing how closely politics, money, corruption, how just the fabric of colonialism is really just about exploitation. And then on top of that, I went to school with
00:07:34
Speaker
army brats and I was friends with kids at another school that had money and I just saw how corruption was like alive and well in their families. And then with my parents fighting about money, each of them had a different relationship to money. I was just turned off.
00:07:52
Speaker
And in an unconscious level, I just decided to separate myself from that as it's like, I don't want anything to do with that. That's just like gross. And so that's, it just felt yucky to me. And so I didn't want anything to do with it. And from a point, the point of view of like, you know, how we liked our ego likes to feel superior. I'm separate from that.
00:08:14
Speaker
That is below me. I'm above that. Yeah, exactly. I'm above that. The classic form of separation is I'm better than I'm above that, right? And so that's how I separated myself from money.
00:08:29
Speaker
And I feel like a lot of us sometimes slip into or fall into that sometimes and we don't even know it, right? I almost feel like we're led there sometimes, right? Because this is one of those things that I kind of push against, I think.
00:08:46
Speaker
Like, I understand and I'm so grateful that we came into the consciousness of wealth and we came into the consciousness of abundance and that this includes many areas and aspects of your life. And then I feel like that was an invitation and permission.
00:09:03
Speaker
to continue saying, well, money is dirty and we don't have to be abundant in money. And we don't have to be wealthy in money because we can be abundant in happiness and family and, you know, and, and all the joys of life that are quote unquote free. Right. And so I feel like there was like, even in there, there could be that slippery slope of I'm above wanting money or, you know, in the whole money thing because I'm in the area of wealth and abundance and who needs money.
00:09:32
Speaker
and why money, right? Exactly. So, consciously, we could get into this place of, like you said, this separation, right? It's very tricky and slippery. It is just another form of spiritual bypassing. And what we're bypassing is our desire, our desire to have
00:09:50
Speaker
like to want money to have money, right? We are not above that. We are humans and we have like primal needs and wants, you know, and to really like own the grittiness of being human is like, yeah, I want that. And I, you know, and that's okay. Exactly. It's totally okay. And it's more than okay. Because when you imagine when spiritual people have money,
00:10:16
Speaker
Imagine what we can do with that. Imagine how the tides would shift if we became conscious millionaires. It brings in a whole new level of like, ooh, redistribution. How would treat other people?
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And this is just kind of a side note to just say how very aligned I am with this thought because when I'm doing the Vedic astrology charts, there are four soul pathways. And one of them is Artha, which is wealth consciousness, and another is Kama, which is pleasure and joy.
00:11:00
Speaker
And guess of the four, right? The other two are duty in the deepest sense of purpose and duty, and the other is spiritual ascension and elevation. So of the four, which would you consider that women have the hardest time with accepting that that is their sole path? Really the wealth consciousness piece? Wealth consciousness and even more so, comma, which is joy and pleasure.
00:11:28
Speaker
We really have a hard time thinking that not only is it okay to have joy and pleasure, but that might actually be part of your purpose in life. Like it's mind blowing that you could be here called to be a part of and to impart joy and pleasure. And I really just wanted to bring that out because part of our block with this money thing is
00:11:55
Speaker
It's okay to want it and just want it, right? And not it being altruistic. Right, right. There's nothing wrong with altruism, right? There's nothing wrong with wanting to give back and wanting to take care of the community and stuff, but it is also okay. There is also nothing wrong with you wanting to have pleasure and joy. Exactly. Right? Absolutely, absolutely. Like I want it because I want it.
00:12:23
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And there doesn't need to be any qualification attached to that wanting. And what you said just now reminded me of a conversation I was having with my ancestors one time in my morning prayer a couple years ago.
00:12:40
Speaker
And when I tuned in, what I felt them say to me was to live my life on the pleasure path, right? It's like, the question that I asked them was like, how can I honor the sacrifices that you made so that I could be here? And they said, walk the pleasure path. I love that so much. Ooh, that is so good. That is so good. Oh, because we often just feel like
00:13:10
Speaker
We have to carry the story and the legacy of suffering. Exactly. When in fact they went through much of that so that we don't have to. Exactly. Yes. Oh, that's so beautiful. And so now how
Somatic Practices for Trauma Healing
00:13:29
Speaker
do you connect the somatic piece, right? The movement with the body. I would love if you could talk about that a bit.
00:13:39
Speaker
Yeah, so you know, when
00:13:43
Speaker
I'll go back to the ancestor piece, right? I think that I identify, I'm part white, I'm part Puerto Rican. In a lot of ways, I identify as a woman of color, having grown up on the island. And there was a lot to unpack with around wealth consciousness and really feeling worthy. Having up in a colonial place where you're sort of second best, this is sort of what we inherit in terms of how we see ourselves.
00:14:12
Speaker
And so really coming into this like a sumptive, healthy entitlement of, I want and I get to have period, right? Without qualification, without having to do something for it. And so,
00:14:28
Speaker
as I move towards my goals of building my business, growing my business, there were a lot of emotions that came up, a lot of fears, a lot of old haunts. It's almost like ancestral whispers, things that I felt were not coming from me, but came from my lineage. It was really shadowy, creepy, scary stuff.
00:14:56
Speaker
you're never going to reach your goals. I'm never going to get there. You're never going to make it give up now. I mean, like stuff where you're just, what the hell? Where's that coming from? Exactly. And just like for me, one of the things that I teach people is to, when you're having an experience, whether it's like a thought loop,
00:15:17
Speaker
or when you're standing in your power or entering into different communities or growing your business or becoming more visible or speaking your truth, it's going to bring up a lot of sensation, a lot of emotions and sensations. And so what I tell people is become an observer of what's happening in your body, but don't get attached to it. Don't believe it necessarily, but just hold space for it.
00:15:46
Speaker
That's what I did. I held space for my emotions. I held space for whatever was happening up here with the thoughts. I was just like, okay, you get to be there, but I'm not going to believe that. I'm not going to engage with that. It's just going to hang out there until it's done looping and then it fizzles out. Because what people don't understand is when you start to uncouple,
00:16:09
Speaker
belief systems from like nervous system wiring, like your brain is gonna go a little scrambling. And so you just have to kind of let the thoughts loop until it gets uncoupled and it just loses, right? It loses the connection.
00:16:27
Speaker
So I felt like, you know, for those years I was doing a lot of money work. My mission or my daily practice was like moving my body, moving my body, moving my body every morning. With whatever intensity I was feeling, I would walk, I would go to the gym, I would lift weights, all of those things to regulate my nervous system, to be able to show up in the ways that I wanted to.
00:16:55
Speaker
It's so beautiful that you said that because I know that we talk about the body being one, right? Mind, spirit, soul, heart, mind, body, however people say it, right? All the parts of us are one. And yet a lot of times, even when we think about somatic healing, we're not really thinking about
00:17:14
Speaker
common everyday things like going for a walk, right? You think that it has to be like this very deep spiritual movement or dance or something. And I love that you said that. I love that you said like, no, go walk.
00:17:30
Speaker
Go walk or go for a ride or or or go to the gym and and have a nice exercise routine or something and yeah there's actually like there's scientific studies that says like movement keeps trauma at bay or like basically
00:17:47
Speaker
like reduces the effects of trauma. You can just stay in movement, whether it's dance, right? Whether you want to like do this intense dance or whether it's just a walk for you or whether it's like intense cycling or aerobic activity, whatever it is, whatever works for you, that's what it is for you. That's what it is for you.
00:18:07
Speaker
Yeah.
Experiencing Money and Wealth Trauma
00:18:09
Speaker
Um, I'd like to ask in your work, um, and especially people maybe who are dealing with money, trauma, wealth, trauma, um, have you found any recurrences or trends, you know, like maybe specifically in the body or people tend to feel or the body tends to react? I'm just curious.
00:18:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, when I work with people, obviously we're not walking on those calls, right? What I have people practice is really about attunement and listening and attuning to those sensations and to be able to catch themselves
00:18:50
Speaker
Like, oh, the sensation is here. I'm noticing this. And then you have a conversation with whatever that sensation is. So you're having a conversation with the intuitive ancestral body. And the things that come up, you know, usually I get like, oh my God, I wasn't expecting that, right? Because you discover
00:19:09
Speaker
uncover parts of yourself that, you know, maybe shadow parts or, you know, a lot of times we talk about money shame, but we don't know exactly how it's showing up in our lives. And then boom, there it is, right? Shame around debt or shame around having made past mistakes with money.
00:19:29
Speaker
The unworthiness stuff is so deep, let me tell you. It always comes up. It always, always. I know. Lots of different ways. In so many different ways. I remember when I was listening to Mercipere a lot and she talked about, you know, she's a
00:19:50
Speaker
hypnotherapist, she mostly celebrity level, right? And she talked about no matter who she's working with, it always boiled down to enoughness. Yes. Like no matter what it was, marriage, movie, car, and Lamborghini, debt, you know, foreclosed, whatever it was, whatever it was,
00:20:17
Speaker
It always boiled down to, am I the worthiness piece? And I guess I'm wondering, as you're working with, and they find, okay, where am I feeling in the body? I was just curious, are there tendencies as to where people tend to feel it? Is there a large percentage of people who are
00:20:42
Speaker
that feel it in their stomach or feel it in their chest or feel on their side. You know what I mean? Hey, infinitely expanding soul. How could I let you leave this podcast episode without knowing about an amazing opportunity to know yourself deeper and fall so madly in love with yourself that you ooze it out in everything that you do. To know your life path for certain and erase the doubt. To know your soul's purpose and what it came here to work out and the cycle it came to complete.
00:21:11
Speaker
to know where your major energies are aligning in your talents and your gifts, and where your major energies are aligning with your wealth consciousness. Yes, more money. And maybe most importantly, how to integrate it all into your life so that we stop spinning in circles trying to figure all this shit out in a world that hopes that we don't.
00:21:31
Speaker
in a super tight container with some energy clearing, laser coaching, and a vortex of women who are about not only their transformation, but they're about yours too, so that there's no room for leaving this space without getting what you came for.
00:21:47
Speaker
Welcome to the new and enhanced Goddess Collective, a 90-day journey into yourself and your infinite potential, your purpose, your prosperity, and your power embodied now. Click the link in the show notes to reserve your seat for the next cohort and do not delay.
00:22:07
Speaker
I mean, yes, there's a lot of books that are written that way. And I would say that, yes, to some level, that is true. A lot of our emotions, we carry it in our bellies. The solar plexus has to do with our personal power. Definitely, money is at sort of our root chakra. I help support people's root chakra a lot.
00:22:33
Speaker
But I think there's a lot of individual and how our personal experience shape our bodies, I think is very true. There are generalizations. And then I also find there are differences among racial groups to say it like that because
00:22:50
Speaker
When you think about the history of the United States and how, let's say, enslaved people where we're violently marginalized from engaging in the economic system, those collective wounds also manifest in our bodies and shape our bodies. When I work with black women, especially, shoulders are a huge deal, carrying the burden.
00:23:15
Speaker
That's the same in my work. It's the same. I can read bodies when I look at a person and I notice where people are holding energy or where people are either contracted. There's so much pelvic stuff around women. So much pelvic stuff, sacral work.
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, you know, and then really like, again, just the lower, the lower, the lower part of the body, because I think that we have really mastered like, heart centered and, you know, third eye as spiritual people, I work mostly with people who are the spiritual space. So we really need to move that energy down into the
00:24:02
Speaker
into the body. And when you start to do shadow work with people, it's in the thighs, it's in the pelvis, there's a lot of rage we need to get in touch with, right? To really like, there's ways that our nervous systems, because of the ways that we are socialized, we're not really able to tap into that, our fire.
00:24:22
Speaker
Whether that fire is passion, whether it's rage, it's just energy. But we're afraid of feeling angry. We're afraid of really owning that animal part of us. So that is what I help people harness as well.
00:24:39
Speaker
that fire just becomes motivation. That just like when you channel it the right way, when you direct the flow of that energy, it is powerful. It is power. It is, absolutely. Absolutely.
00:24:56
Speaker
Absolutely. No, I 100% agree. Yeah. I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful. You have shared so many gems. You have shared just so much. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for sharing your expertise. I know that I know that I know that there's someone listening right now that's like, oh my goodness.
00:25:22
Speaker
I'm realizing or I'm understanding something about myself even right now. And so this is really the purpose for someone to listen and to feel an awakening and feel enlightened and feel unlocked in some way. For the person who is like, I need Isha in my life. I need her in my life.
Connecting with Isha Vela
00:25:44
Speaker
How can they get in touch with you?
00:25:46
Speaker
You can find me on my website, ishavela.com. I have a, on my IG, I'm Isha underscore Vela. You can find me on Facebook under Isha Vela. And I have like a, you know, like a three-part money series that you can access when you visit my website.
00:26:08
Speaker
I have free events. I have a YouTube channel. I have a podcast called Devotional Anarchy. I will be changing that title to Waking Up Wealthy. I love that. Yeah, the next year. I love that. Yeah. And that's basically how to find me. And I was wondering if it's okay if I just added one more thing about what you said, the enough piece. Sure.
00:26:32
Speaker
And I want to just mention that because I feel like that's also tied into the collective. Yes, we experience not enoughness because obviously when we grow up in our families of origin,
00:26:46
Speaker
there are ways that, you know, our parents or our caregivers might not appreciate all of who we are, right? And so we sort of mold ourselves to be the people that they want us to be. And so we leave parts of ourselves aside and we don't feel like those are enough to receive love and belonging and, you know, care, attention. However, that exists on a collective level as well, right? Through systems like capitalism or white supremacy, there are ways that we feel like
00:27:16
Speaker
We can't produce enough. There's never enough. There's like a hunger for us, right? So that exists on multiple levels, right? And so when you unravel that in one person, you unravel the system, you unravel your family ancestry, right? It's all connected to that one central wound of not enoughness. And I believe wholeheartedly that when we unravel that within ourselves,
00:27:44
Speaker
that, you know, think about it when you feel like enough and when you feel like you have enough, what do you do?
00:27:52
Speaker
you give because you have enough. You don't have, you don't feel the need to hoard or keep to yourself or protect. You give it freely. It's okay. And so that for me, it changes, shifts the energetics of the world. So working with that wound in particular is critical. And it's like, I always have that bigger picture in mind than just the individual that's in front of me.
00:28:16
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, I love that so much. Thank you so much for sharing that because I am 100% on board and believe that too. And I feel like it's kind of the way that our society runs, right? Our commerce literally runs on us feeling not enough.
Healing the Collective Feeling of Inadequacy
00:28:35
Speaker
Exactly. And I feel like just like you said, if we heal that wound personally and individually,
00:28:42
Speaker
When you said, what would you do? And you were like, you would give. And the other thing that came to my mind is, and we would buy differently. We would definitely purchase differently because I feel enough. So there are certain things that I just don't feel the need for anymore. I would also react to, and not me personally, but we, right, when we heal that wound, we would also react to the messaging.
00:29:09
Speaker
differently, right? The messaging that's coming through the commercials and the media and the music, right? The collective projection is what I call it, right? And so we get to not buy into that anymore. And I mean that psychologically and physically and physically. You're right. We don't not buy into that.
00:29:33
Speaker
Right. When we have an ad, right? When we have an ad marketing to us, we don't respond to the ad if it doesn't have anywhere, if it doesn't have an insecurity to attach to that we're already holding in our bodies. Yes. Yeah. It just doesn't land. Absolutely. Slips right off. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, such a beautiful, such a beautiful, such a beautiful message. Thank you for, for hitting that because it's, it's such a, just as you said,
00:30:04
Speaker
And this is a large part of my work too, that so many of us feel like this is an individual wound. This wound happened because of my family, my culture, my religion, whatever it was, and that is not necessarily untrue, but you get to also know that it is a collective wound that we also get to heal from collectively and elevate collectively, even as we are each doing our own part in our own healing.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, that was huge for me and it really allowed me to, whenever that wound came up, I was able to sort of like look at it and be like, oh, I can press the delete button on this because this is collective. Clearly, this does not belong to me. Let's take it out. Yes. Absolutely. Believe, transmute, move. You know how you can say, you can go anywhere you want to, but you can't stay. Yeah.
00:31:02
Speaker
Let me escort you out the door. Thank you for what you have done up until this point, and it's time for you to go. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, once again, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your energy. Thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for all that you have shared. And thank you for all that you do for The Collective. Yeah, this was lovely. Thank you for the invitation, LaToya. You're still very welcome.
00:31:32
Speaker
Listen, this is not just for you to listen to. This is for you to take action, change the trajectory of your life and live in your power. If you're liking what's happening here, hit that subscribe button so you do not ever miss a powerful episode and definitely share it with that sister who you know needs this power in their life.
00:31:56
Speaker
If you are not yet living in your power, if you are not yet loving yourself completely and deeply, trusting yourself and using your intuitive tools, knowing undoubtedly who you are and why you are here, being yourself unapologetically, head on over to LatoyaZavala.com. That's LatoyaZavala.com.
00:32:20
Speaker
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