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🔥 From Trauma to True Love: Breaking Toxic Cycles & Reclaiming Your Divine Partnership 🔥
2 Plays16 days ago
Episode 1 Show Notes: The Journey Begins
Welcome to the first episode of Yoga of Relationship with Dr. Amanda Brees! If you’ve ever felt stuck in surface-level love, trapped in toxic cycles, or unsure how to break free from insecure attachment, this episode is for you.
In this episode, we dive into:
✔️ Why most people repeat relationship patterns (even when they don’t want to).
✔️ The connection between your nervous system, trauma, and love.
✔️ How healing your attachment wounds changes the way you give and receive love.
✔️ A powerful reframe to stop attracting the wrong relationships and start stepping into sacred love.
🚀 Ready to do the deep work and reclaim the love you were created for? This episode is packed with soul-shifting truths and practical insights to start your journey.
🎙️ Key Takeaways & Timestamped Highlights:
⏳ [02:15] – Why “just trying harder” in relationships never works.
⏳ [07:30] – How your nervous system is wired for love or fear (and how to reprogram it).
⏳ [12:45] – The role of faith in healing attachment wounds.
⏳ [18:00] – The #1 belief shift you must make to step into a destined relationship.
✨ Resources & Next Steps:
🔥 Grab my free audio training on overcoming insecure attachment & stepping into divine love → [Insert Link]
🔥 Follow me on Instagram @yogaofrelationship for more insights, tools, and behind-the-scenes content.
🔥 Want to go deeper? DM me “HEAL” on Instagram for more details about my program, Abide, where we do this healing work together.
🎙️ Loved this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear this today. Let’s change the way we love—together. 🤍🔥
Transcript
Introduction to Healing Approaches
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi there and welcome to the Yoga Relationship Podcast. My name is Dr. Amanda Breeze. I'm a pastoral counselor, yoga therapist, and meditation researcher here today to help you streamline relational trauma healing by getting to the heart of attachment theory and yoga therapy.
00:00:15
Speaker
This podcast is about the yoga relationship framework and how to integrate faith, meditation, and trauma to catalyze breakthrough in your attachment issues. By listening to this podcast, you'll feel empowered with the tools of devotional yoga to do your own healing work and more effectively help others.
00:00:32
Speaker
Let's get started with today's episode. Here's the number one thing that you can do to be more impactful in your relational trauma healing work. Whether you're working with clients or you're doing this work yourself, it's sort of one process.
00:00:46
Speaker
There's no point in which we become totally whole and can now start helping others. That's called a pedestal. And in ministry especially, that's a really common way to minister.
00:00:58
Speaker
I've had this relationship for 30 years. That is my credential in order to be able to help you. And it creates a power differential that is potentially unhelpful and fails to really get to the heart of relationship and relationship trauma, which is more so about accepting the limitations and accepting that the initiation of the healer's journey is really being okay without necessarily ministering from this place of having it all
Meditation vs. Talk Therapy
00:01:27
Speaker
figured out. And there's nothing wrong with having victory and walking in faithfulness and breakthrough. There's nothing wrong with having a relationship that has lasted 20, 30, 40 years.
00:01:38
Speaker
ah It is more about though being okay with being a work in progress. And the one thing that you can do today to start having more impact in your relational trauma ministry is to accept that you will never be a jack of all trades when it comes to dealing with this work specifically. What do I mean by this?
00:01:58
Speaker
When I started on this journey, I was told that this work was too all over the place. you You can't tie all these seemingly unrelated things together because it just starts to look like you don't know what you're doing.
00:02:11
Speaker
And there's a little bit of truth to this. When it comes to this intersection between meditation, faith, and trauma, um what I really want you to understand is that If you try to get caught up being an expert in each of those things, it's going to slow you down considerably.
00:02:29
Speaker
It's going to diminish your credibility and and inhibit your ability to really help your clients because you're going to walk around with this feeling like you're just not quite ever good enough.
Integrating Trauma, Meditation, and Faith
00:02:40
Speaker
It's sort of this ah imposter syndrome.
00:02:42
Speaker
And the remedy to this imposter syndrome is accepting your limitations at the intersection. So the intersection between trauma, meditation, and faith is what's called a research gap. It's something in the research that had not been addressed previously.
00:02:59
Speaker
And that's what I sought to address in my dissertation study. What I found was, is that the the fields of the third and fourth waves of behavioral therapy and traumatology are having conversations with yoga therapy and meditation.
00:03:13
Speaker
This is now becoming mainstream. Like in the past, there used to be psychotherapists, who didn't that who weren't trauma informed. Now this is sort of becoming the standard of care that many more practitioners are trauma informed.
00:03:26
Speaker
And that has a lot to do with this awakening that has been happening simultaneously in the counterculture movement in the 60s and 70s. And in this awakening process,
00:03:38
Speaker
Meditative practices have really become the gold standard when it comes to building these skill deficits in relational issues and relational trauma and getting to the heart of the matter that might escape traditional psychotherapy.
00:03:51
Speaker
Not in all cases, but in sometimes, especially in developmental trauma, in chronic post-traumatic stress disorder or complex post-traumatic stress disorder, what happens is that when someone experiences person-centered pain,
00:04:08
Speaker
person-centered betrayal and trauma.
Yoga Therapy in Modern Practice
00:04:10
Speaker
Whatever overwhelms the nervous system's ability to cope, and this lasts for more than four weeks, this goes on and on, In those cases, it's really important to understand that talk-only interventions aren't necessarily going to be able to rewire the brain like meditative interventions can.
00:04:29
Speaker
Now, with meditation and contemplative neurotheology, what happens when one is dealing with attachment is that one is dealing with all of relationship, and this is embodied transcendence, getting into the experience of being a family member, a householder, instead of these spiritual aesthetic practices of trying to escape this life, this maya, this illusion.
00:04:53
Speaker
And this is the new conversation that transpersonal psychology is trying to have with mainstream psychology. And transpersonal psychology is largely responsible for bringing meditation into the mainstream trauma literature. um Yoga therapy has been a little bit behind the times in this conversation in the sense that ah yoga therapy has been going through its own process of figuring out where it belongs. It doesn't really want to be succumbed to this licensing process, which inevitably leads to this medical reductionism or trying to reduce yoga to asana or postures as a pseudo form of physical therapy.
00:05:29
Speaker
That is a betrayal to the essence and the heart of yoga as a spiritual practice. Yoga Yoga means coming together, yoking, union, union with the divine, union with God. It's absolutely a spiritual practice.
00:05:42
Speaker
And what's confusing is given the need to culturally appreciate its roots is very confusing about what it is in its essence. But in essence, the the experts agree yoga is essentially an advanced science of meditation.
00:05:54
Speaker
So this is where a disconnect is happening in the research between the third and fourth waves of behavioral therapy and marriage and family therapy in trying to address this person-centered family systems trauma, familial trauma, that isn't going to necessarily respond to the way that we might treat war veterans who have dealt with acute single incident non-person trauma, sometimes personal, ah but more so these situations.
00:06:21
Speaker
one-time acute incidences ah that that are different than the type of trauma that happens within heartbreak and betrayal and relationships and attachment.
00:06:32
Speaker
And so this has, has the the research is asking for a new way to look at this conversation, a new way to be more effective.
Cultural Sensitivity in Yoga Therapy
00:06:40
Speaker
And what's interesting is that transpersonal psychology says, you know what, each of the world religions and cultures have had different things to say about this state of union, but these wisdom traditions have all had the shared experience of awakening, of enlightenment.
00:06:56
Speaker
And although each of the world religions has a different understanding, a different worldview about the implications of enlightenment, that this is the purpose of meditation, of what we use the word yoga to refer to, ah and that these practices have been, ah meditation has been adapted like prayer and fasting by many different religions over thousands of years.
00:07:19
Speaker
And so this is where yoga therapy is needing to address the interfaith conversation in a way that it hasn't in the past. It's sort of been like, is it Hindu? Is it not? Is it Buddhist? Jain? We have these Jain ethics, these different Indian religions, ah trying to have this conversation in what has now become modern Hinduism, ah but what what has not been the case in in the development of yoga.
00:07:46
Speaker
And so in yoga therapy today, there's this new conversation regarding cultural appreciation and how to also avoid this um this non-dual attempt to lump all these divergent Indian religions into one process called non-dualism and sort of mass market that as this new age perennial thought that says, you know what?
00:08:08
Speaker
ah Love is the answer and we just need to set our disagreements aside and have this one shared non-dual perspective. And that really is the the cultural appropriation or misappropriation of yoga is a failure to recognize its evolution through a myriad of different worldviews and religions because it never claimed to be a religion. And that is what makes it different than Hinduism. That's what makes ah That is why in yoga teacher trainings, we have Buddhism present, we have Jainism, we have Christianity, we have all these different perspectives, we have a secular perspective.
00:08:42
Speaker
But it was never intended to be a secular practice. And that is what the world is trying to create of it, is how do we secularize this in order to be able to have it in public schools or whatever the case is. And the truth is it really is trying to Minister to the God of your understanding, however you understand the divine, whatever name you call spirit.
00:09:05
Speaker
That's what's important to be able to articulate. And what's important to be able to articulate in the research as you are helping people as a practitioner and doing the work yourself. Another tendency of the yoga therapy community is to attempt to define yoga in this very specific classical way. And so there is a place and space to study and and understand yoga's classical roots.
00:09:33
Speaker
classical yoga, which is different than the modern development of what yoga has become today in the context of therapy. And so what I'm really trying to have a conversation with is is this new world dealing with yoga therapy and where that fits more so than how we honor classical yoga. That's an important conversation.
00:09:53
Speaker
But transpersonal psychology is really the other half of that conversation that says, wait a minute, There are many cultures, many religions, many wisdom traditions that have offered this work to the world, especially in this global community that has become ah the modern world with the internet and the ability to share these wisdom traditions in a way that honors traditions and diversity of opinion and divergent thought instead of asking us all to reduce our belief system into one shared perennial mindset.
00:10:26
Speaker
And this is something, a conversation I didn't see happening in the research. I felt torn between either being a a good Christian, because that's my personal religious expression, or being a good yoga teacher and feeling like I had to choose between the two.
00:10:41
Speaker
So what I want to share with you in this episode is the one thing that you can do to stop this divide between your spiritual practice, your meditation practice, your yoga practitioner, yoga therapy work, whether you are just interested in yoga or meditation, or you are an experienced teacher or a therapist, the single most helpful thing you can do to appreciate culture and to appreciate yoga's connection with religion without being a religion is to be fully your personal religious expression.
00:11:14
Speaker
Now, are there places and spaces to have cultural conversations, absolutely. But that is how we're going to move this conversation forward. And between honoring your own religious expression within the context of meditation and in these advanced meditative practices, along with being okay with not being an expert in each of these different fields, meditation, trauma, and faith, that's how you can really come to terms with letting go of this need to box it all in really carefully.
Unifying Spiritual Practices
00:11:47
Speaker
and Instead of needing to be like, okay, well, this shamanic work is not connected to this Reiki work, is not connected to herbalism, is not connected to yoga therapy, to let it all be one spiritual expression trying to lead us on a journey towards union with the divine.
00:12:05
Speaker
That process is supposed to transcend these seemingly unrelated complementary therapies through the shared mechanism of action of meditation. And that's what's important to understand is when you can stay in your lane and stay confident just at the intersection, you can let go of the need to be an expert meditation teacher or to be an expert when it comes to understanding faith or how do maybe you're not a pastor or or you don't understand everything there is to know about having a masters of a divinity or whatever that is in your religious expression.
00:12:41
Speaker
Or maybe you're not a psychotherapist or a psychologist and you don't know everything there is to know about trauma, but you do know this, that meditation and your meditation practice has made a huge difference, not only in your spiritual walk with the divine and the God of your understanding, but in healing relational trauma with helping you show up as the best version of yourself with becoming more self-aware, more aware of how you show up in relationship, connection with God's self and others. And that's what meditation is trying to do.
00:13:11
Speaker
If you can focus there in your work, whether you are ah an advanced practitioner or just getting started, that is how you are really going to be able to dive in to this exhale of no longer feeling like you're just scatterbrained. I don't know about you, but that's how I felt was I was overwhelmed.
00:13:33
Speaker
studying literally for 12 years, certification after certification, training after training, trying to spend every moment of my free time healing and always feeling like there was more work to do, one more thing to learn, one more training ah before I was going to feel like enough of an expert to confront these gatekeepers that were trying to tell me whether they were teachers or pastors or medical authorities or whatever the case is, that these things can't speak, or they have to be different, or that I would have a different opinion.
00:14:06
Speaker
ah That really, I was frustrated because I was having these spiritual experiences. And to me, it had always been one thing. 20 years ago when I started out on the path practicing yoga and meditation as a believer, as someone who self-identifies as a Christian, this was really difficult for me because I deeply wanted to honor the system of yoga and its spiritual roots and how that interplayed with religion.
00:14:32
Speaker
And my pastors were concerned, understandably, because they wanted what was best for me. And so at each of my trainings on this path of what seemed like this never ending process, this rabbit hole of just finding one more thing and one more thing and one more thing in the work of healing, the work of awakening, the work of healing.
00:14:52
Speaker
of showing up in this life open hearted, and yet trying to become a, a more full expression of what I knew I was capable of in terms of living my life purpose and and dharma, my calling that, that was really not happening.
00:15:09
Speaker
This journey was was just one thing after another of getting pushback and concern and not really being sure where I fit. And asking my shamanic practitioner teacher, where do I belong in this conversation? And how is that related to yoga therapy? And why am I interested in so many different things?
00:15:29
Speaker
And the truth is, is that the Vedic sciences, especially, were always supposed to be this way. Joytish is the science of light, Ayurveda is the science of life. And yoga is the science of self-realization, of God-realization. And Yes, there are different worldviews, there are different opinions, there are different things, but ultimately being okay with your religious expression, whether or not someone else agrees with that, whether or not someone else is going to accuse you of cultural misappropriation for doing Christian yoga, or whatever your beliefs are, that's where we are moving forward in a new conversation. And that's really...
00:16:07
Speaker
What this is trying to be is is one practice of union. And what would better describe a yoga therapist than the word yoga and what society has tacked onto that word? to mean gym yoga and postural asanas would be union therapists. That's what really is at
Yoga Therapy in Spiritual Psychology
00:16:24
Speaker
the heart of it. And allowing that to move into that full shamanic expression of this transpersonal cross-cultural understanding how each of the world cultures has understood different understandings of chakra theory, of energy anatomy, of...
00:16:46
Speaker
ah Prana, life force, qi. And so for example, yin yoga comes from this traditional Chinese medicine understanding of life force. And yet we all have life force. This is something that is mentioned that people don't realize is mentioned.
00:17:05
Speaker
These joyous concepts These Vedic concepts of yoga therapy that fall within the world of bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, ah found in the Bible, in the Judeo-Christian cultural and religious understanding of using ah crystals are mentioned 1700 times in the traditional text of the Bible.
00:17:27
Speaker
ah New moons are an integral part of of worship, specifically mentioned over and over again as in an integral part of worship. Herbs and incense are burned in the sanctuary, again, as a part of traditional biblical living.
00:17:42
Speaker
And so to try and par this apart into what is classical, Indian yoga and what is today's yoga therapy and that conversation with the trauma literature on intersecting faith, meditation, and trauma really fails to acknowledge yoga's ever evolving process of becoming what it is today.
00:18:05
Speaker
That's what I want to share with you is letting yourself and Be whatever that is in terms of your transpersonal expression of awakening and that awakening process and realizing it might look different than the ways that the gurus of the past have understood it. And as we have come to understand in the light of of today's awakening...
00:18:29
Speaker
There are both pastors and yoga gurus who have been put on pedestals in terms of of guru mania, of of looking to leaders and authority figures ah for sort of an intermediary between us and the divine and realizing that that they were human too and that they had very real human frailties that need to be acknowledged as we continue this critical thinking process of moving forward and better thinking Getting to this intersection mainly so that we can improve the gold standard of treatment as yoga therapy sort of becomes a modality of psychotherapy, of spiritual psychology, transpersonal psychology, and letting that begin to have this conversation with the world of pastoral counseling, with the world of of spiritual psychology and other religious traditions and their understanding
00:19:23
Speaker
outside of of mainstream Judeo-Christian culture and
Practical Resources and Applications
00:19:28
Speaker
worldview in America. Specifically, though, letting these conversations become a single narrative, a single, let's talk about faith in the context of meditation, in the context of healing trauma, and let that become a new conversation instead of ah clients who need to go talk to their pastor, then go talk to a psychotherapist, and then go talk to a meditation teacher or a yoga teacher um
00:19:54
Speaker
and try to make these things work and then to try and help their clients as they feel called to share this work with others and then feel guilty for charging for this work because it's spiritual. That has to stop. We need to be able to streamline practitioners, streamline their work in the world so that they know when to refer when situations are acute, when people are having mental health emergencies and crises and they need personal one-on-one care ah that When that is understood and the scope of practice boundaries are clear, but then we can have a new conversation about how to open our hearts to this meditative practice of awakening, of union with the divine, ah without creating creating unnecessary religious divides between us as we create interfaith spaces to have these conversations and to move this work forward in the world.
00:20:46
Speaker
At the same time, the research suggests that 70% of Americans still claim to self-identify as Christian, and 40% of those folks claim to meditate on a weekly basis.
00:20:57
Speaker
So although my heart is to have an interfaith conversation with you, I will teach and at times share from my religious expression, which is Christian. That's what I self-identify as. I've been on a long journey of deconstructing that and reconstructing that in alignment ah with with my truth. And that's not something very popular in yoga teacher trainings and yoga therapy trainings, to be coming from sort of this outdated model, but that is my my truth and and my heart and sharing with you.
00:21:28
Speaker
And so although I do, I want to encourage you to adapt this material to the God of your understanding, following the recovery model of of the God of your understanding. Also, if you are a faith-based practitioner who also identifies as Christian or you have a passion for helping your Christian clients navigate some of this or you want to take this material on relationship and adapt it to your worldview, I just want to encourage you that you are welcome here.
00:21:52
Speaker
You are welcome with all of your self-doubt and self-judgment and concerns around a money and desiring to be a spiritual leader, but not quite feeling like you're the expert yet and feeling like you have one more thing to do and one more training to do. and And maybe if only you were six months down the road, then you would really feel ready to make the impact that you know you're capable of.
00:22:15
Speaker
and want to encourage you that you are in the right place. that this is a place that you are welcome to come and do the work. And that's what we're doing together. And my seva, my offering and paying this forward for my appreciation for my gurus is a a few things I wanted to share with you in terms of resources.
00:22:33
Speaker
So if you hop on over to my website, I have a free email course where you can get started ah in doing the work. There's over an hour and a half of additional content available to you there as well and getting started along with ah some meditations to to do the work, to not just talk about it, but to do the work along with a kickstart guide.
00:22:53
Speaker
and And that really is my heart is to provide you with the framework to just stop thinking about it and to do it because when it comes to meditation, that's the key. is we can't just have the theory, we need the theory, but we also need the experience. It is an experience that cannot simply be talked about in systematic theology.
00:23:15
Speaker
And that's what yoga with union with transpersonal, meditative, mystical practices have long been saying is that this experience with the divine in and of itself is something cross culturally that all religions have access to and usually have a mystical branch of that appreciates this this experience of oneness with the divine.
00:23:36
Speaker
So for me as a Christian, ah what that awakening process of evil union looks like is awakening to what it means to be made in the image of God as a child of God, as opposed to awakening to this idea that I am God or that there is no God, or that all paths are saying exactly the same thing.
00:23:55
Speaker
And so that's the beauty of divergent opinions, having ah the ability to disagree with respect, with love, with open heartedness, with a heart for inclusion.
00:24:06
Speaker
And that's what you can find here. I also have a workbook available you can check out if you want to dive in and do the work, you can order a paper copy of that on Amazon on my author page. yoga of relationship.
00:24:18
Speaker
And I want to encourage you, I really put that together so you could have something tangible. It includes half the work is the yoga relationship framework, really doing a deep dive into that, as well as a journal ah piece of this as well to include the yoga therapy process in doing and the work. And there are also meditations and scripts and whatnot in there ah to encourage you to to get started. and So feel free to check that out. If you're looking for a little bit more content or some certification, I have a mini course available, which has six additional hours of content in lecture and audio video format. If that's of interest to you, ah we will have discussion forums and community forums, journal articles we'll read and dive into,
00:25:03
Speaker
and And then also the full certification program, which was the 50-hour yoga relationship trauma specialization. So if you are a practitioner and you're like, you know what, Amanda, I am ready to not only dive into doing all of my work instead of jumping from healer to healer, ah person to person trying to patchwork this together, but I'm ready to go through the whole process. that That course is really for you to do your own healing work to also be able to help others from that place of doing the work.
00:25:30
Speaker
I designed that to be The condensed version, 50 hours, no more, no less, mainly podcast style, so that you can pop the lectures into your AirPods, your a daily life as you're folding your laundry, going on a walk, doing your real life.
00:25:48
Speaker
that you can take it with you. It's app-based, on-demand. I have accessibility and inclusion scholarships available for you as well, and so I want to encourage you to go check that out on my website, yogarelationship.co, and follow along on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram,
00:26:04
Speaker
You name it, I would love to stay connected and send me a direct message. Let me know you're listening. Let me know you're out there. Let me know what questions you have, what's resonating, what's not resonating, what you really want to see more of.
00:26:17
Speaker
I'm an open book and excited to be on this journey with you. This has been a a really exciting process for me doing my own healing work over the years. And I just felt like I finally have got to this phase of wanting to really share this work with others instead of working part time as a practitioner, as I did for many years, feeling like I wasn't making the impact I knew that was possible.
00:26:39
Speaker
And so if that's you, I have two upgrade options available as well. If you're interested in becoming certified as a practitioner, please. ah The first upgrade option is the professional pathway in which we'll also do your Reiki one and two certification live and group coaching format.
00:26:55
Speaker
And then the anointed internship program where we will take this work and apply it to your life and your healing journey and create your own. online course and digital offering to feel like you can automate your systems in a way that works for your life so that you can be freed up to focus on your spiritual practice, focus on your householder responsibilities, while also really helping people the way you knew you were created to help people in your God-given calling to this work.
00:27:24
Speaker
Because as you and I know, this is a calling. And so I want to encourage you, ah even if you have very little meditation experience, or you're an advanced and seasoned practitioner, this is a unique research gap, which has been unaddressed ah to date in the training literature on how to get to this intersection and streamline the process of certification.
00:27:46
Speaker
And so I hope to see you in the course. if you If you really are like, Amanda, I'm not sure I want to get started, but but I don't, this all seems like a lot, ah feel free to check out my contemplation guide as well. That's only $7. And that really is the let's get started, let's do the work, but we're not quite diving into the whole content or actually enrolling in a course.
00:28:08
Speaker
ah And that is available to you as well. And I really, think that once you get started, get into the material and start breaking it down that that you'll find that this doesn't have to be this process that drags on forever and ever, that there are some things that once we get to this intersection and start really getting,
00:28:29
Speaker
getting at the heart of the matter, that it has this tendency ah to bring up, especially dealing with your primary relationships. and These are the relationships with your parents, with your children, with your spouse and your siblings, ah that these relationships especially have a lot to teach us in the context of family.
00:28:49
Speaker
And so you could say, Amanda, family's not really my thing. We all came from a family. We all have work to do that instead of spiritual bypassing, ah the trauma research is asking us to really dive into that and to stop treating our God attachment, our relationship with the divine as something separate or different from this work. And so if that's you, if you've been that black sheep that's been jumping from training to training, patchworking the the healing if you've been feeling left out in your yoga trainings, not sure where your faith fits in. This training is for you. This work is for you. And I hope and I pray that you find breakthrough, that you find...
00:29:25
Speaker
that which you know has been in you, that has been being called forth by the divine for such a time as this, because I truly believe that the world needs this work now, that we are going through a transition and a change and a shift. And so my prayer for you is that if access is an issue, ah that these free resources will support you in moving forward. So thank you so much for tuning in.
00:29:50
Speaker
I pray that you have a great rest of your day. And thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. And be sure to head over to my website, yogarelationship.co to sign up for the free mini course to kickstart your healing journey.
00:30:06
Speaker
And also check out the e-course while you're there. Make sure to hit subscribe and follow along on Instagram where you'll receive lots more additional content like this. And I pray many blessings over you on your journey of transformation.