Marla Miller 0:35

Welcome back to Open Minded Healing. Today we're going to be talking about the nervous system's role in conditions that talk therapy and medicine struggle to resolve. My guest, Hannah Blake, is going to share the Somaya method with you, which is a modality she has developed over the past 13 years that helps those suffering from trauma and a deregulated nervous system. She will also be sharing her personal story of healing from Crohn's disease and how she is now able to live symptom-free. Welcome, Hannah.

Hannah Blake 1:09

Thank you so much for having me. It's really nice to be here with you and to see your face for the first time.

Marla Miller 1:15

Yeah, on Zoom here. Well, I know you have so much to share. So I do want to get started. Your method that you're going to be discussing, is it a form of somatic breath work?

Hannah Blake 1:28

Yeah, it's a good question. It's a good place to start because it is at its core somatic method. So the root of the framework that we operate in is the understanding that the body is the subconscious mind. And that if we are just working cognitively with our left brain primarily to heal, we're actually really missing a fundamental intrinsic component of holistic healing, which is addressing how the body and the nervous system actually also store our biography, our history, our trauma, our memories. And so at its core, it really is a method that prioritizes the soma, the body, and the nervous system. And it does so through hypnotherapy, neurolinguistic programming, and yes, a type of breath work and also movement along the body's meridian channels and energy channels. And that's how the method started, but it's become significantly more robust over the last nine years. It also incorporates a type of parts work that I've been doing long before internal family systems really became a thing and adopted in therapy. But it's somatic-based parts work and also working with the brainstem to essentially shift the brainstem from sending what we call an overaffect to the amygdala that then can flood the system into fight, flight, or freeze. And what we're seeing in today's world is that the vast majority of people are living with a bracing brainstem that is sending some form of affect to the amygdala. So what this also does is soften the brainstem so that also the vagus nerve can also come online. The initial kind of threat detection response in the brainstem can also help us reorient the nervous system to a new baseline of regulation.

Marla Miller 3:34

So it's a lot of different things, and I'm happy to share more about yeah, that that's a very good description to start there with all of that. So before we get into the details of your method, I do want to get to your personal story. You had Crohn's disease.

Hannah Blake 3:53

I did, yeah.

Marla Miller 3:54

So can you tell people a bit about your personal journey and then how you went about trying to heal yourself of that?

Hannah Blake 4:03

Of course, yeah. And before I share a little about my journey too, I just want to acknowledge what we talked about on our phone call and how you've really created this podcast and digital space through your own personal healing journey. And it's just so generous and kind and beautiful that through your own healing, you're sharing alternative ways that other people can heal too. So I just want to thank you first for creating this space.

Marla Miller 4:32

Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Well, I think it is good when we all spread what we learn that can help other people.

Hannah Blake 4:39

Exactly. And it's amazing how I find our hardship can actually, in many ways, shape and carve so much of our life's journey in a way that's impactful. And that's very much what my healing journey was for me. And a tremendous amount of physical pain with Crohn's disease when I was 20. I was hospitalized and then for about two weeks felt really scared and had tons of antibiotics and steroids next to my bedside table that I really didn't want to put into my body. I remember this part of my brain kept coming online and saying, Hannah, you don't want to be another number in the pharmaceutical system. You don't want that. You know you don't want that, but you also don't see another way through right now. So I kept looking at the bottles, the prescriptions on my bedside, and then that part of my brain would come online. I'd turn away, come back to center, and honestly just meditate and pray. And what started to come to me was this understanding that this illness, we'll call it, was actually this profound opportunity. And my background was as a professional dancer. And so I started to see that even though dance and movement and my body and expression had been such a big part of my life for so long, I actually hadn't been tuning in and really listening to the subtle signals of my body. And my inflammation was all in my small intestine. And through my academic studies with psychobiology and somatic psychology and art therapy, and also my fascination with acupuncture and ancient Chinese medicine, it felt like this world had started to open up where I started putting all of those pieces together, realizing first that of course I have inflammation in my small intestine. The small intestine meridian is directly paired with the heart meridian, the energy systems in acupuncture and acupuncture and acupressure and ancient Chinese medicine. So I started mapping the course of my life and seeing that when I wasn't processing something in my heart during times of deep heartbreak or traumatic experiences from my childhood because I felt like I always had to be the strong one. I had to be the one to hold it all together all the time. And so I was really suppressing what I what I needed to process in my heart emotionally. I was literally pushing it down into my small intestine where there was severe inflammation. I wasn't getting hydrated, i.e., I wasn't processing emotions from my heart, right? Emotional, the waters are the place of emotional processing. And so big light bulb came online. And then I started breathing in this new breath pattern to also stimulate my vagus nerve. And then moving with the breath along that meridian energy channel from the small intestine all the way up and out through the left pinky, where the energy meridians function. And I was doing this every day while also revisiting the memories from the past that had been really traumatic for me and doing this in a titrated way so that my window of tolerance of my nervous system could stay in regulation or kind of between the ventral, vagal, parasympathetic state, and also a slight sympathetic activation, but where I could return to ventral when I needed to. So I'd bring in the trigger, get into sympathetic activation, and then start breathing and moving along this meridian channel. My inflammation went down. I started getting hydrated again. I started feeling free from the traumatic memories of the past that had been causing a lot of constriction and contraction, obviously, in my physical body. And then I realized, okay, I'm on to something here. So I started essentially testing similar methods with friends and family members who are also struggling with physiological symptoms, autoimmune diseases, working a lot with the grief in the lungs and the large intestine, working with people with thyroid issues and supporting them and speaking their voice and breathing and moving with the different energy channels that seem to be blocked. And for 13 years, I've been working with this method. I took it around the world and worked with various populations. I started working with women in safe houses across California and Nevada who were survivors of domestic violence and sex trafficking. I saw tremendous results in those communities. And then, and this might be another topic, I've started pairing it with non-ordinary states of consciousness and neuroplasticity for the last nine years and have really just found that profound acute transformation has been at the intersection of neuroplasticity and somatic psychology and nervous system regulation. And it also lends itself to the most lasting integration I've seen over the last 13 years as well.

Marla Miller 10:33

Well, I have a lot of questions for you. So going back when you were doing this on yourself and you were doing essentially, I guess, a breath work. You said, and down to the fingertips?

Hannah Blake 10:58

Exactly, over the shoulder, elbow, and literally out through the left pinky.

Marla Miller 11:04

So up through the small intestine, all the way up through the heart, around to your specifically the left arm.

Hannah Blake 11:12

For me, for me, I kept working with the left, but meridians are bilateral. You can work with both for me, the left close to the heart as well. Okay.

Marla Miller 11:22

Like so breathing in as you're bringing the air up through your heart, and then as it's coming out through your fingers that when you're exhaling. Exactly. That's really interesting. And then when you worked with these communities, so when you worked with domestic abuse survivors, what were you specifically working on with them? Was it also the heart similar to what you had experienced? Because the trauma is kind of in the heart.

Hannah Blake 11:57

But I was working with most of the time groups of 12 women. And so I actually created a dance healing method. At the time it was called the Kaya method, which is now evolved into Somaya. But the workshops were two hours long that would start with a body scan, supporting each of the women in coming into the places where there was constriction and contraction in their own bodies. And then from there, guiding breath and movement along each of the meridian channels. So we'd start with the root chakra that is paired with the spleen and stomach meridian. And then we work up to the solar plexus. And that works in this method with the liver and gallbladder meridian channels. So when we'd get to those spaces specifically with these women, it's also the place of anger. It's where anger can really transform and catalyze into courage. And so this space, there was a lot of cathartic and catalytic release of emotion. And from that place, we move into the heart chakra and the heart and small intestine meridian, where there tends to be a lot of emotion that moves from beneath where the anger was the protector and the guardian. We start to access the emotionality from the waters of the heart and the small intestine. And then we move from there after there's usually a big kind of collectic cathartic release into a meditative visualization that supports a pacification of the nervous system, an integration of the material into the system and a safe landing back into a real parasympathetic ventral state so that we can move forward in our lives in a way that feels not so raw and exposed, but like there's closure around the experience. And then we have always an integration post-workshop as well. So during that iteration of the Kaya method slash Somaya, that's the overall high-level flow of how those workshops would go.

Marla Miller 14:14

So as you said, you have a group, each person is going to be different, right? What they've experienced or what they're working on. So did you find that people would express emotion? What does it bring up for people? And are people feeling that at different chakras or different levels as you work along them?

Hannah Blake 14:37

Yeah, absolutely. The group field is fascinating to do this work in. I find that there's this relational field of coherence that happens where there's not only a feeling of we're in this together, but there are ways where one person's tears, one person's anger, one person's liberation can actually trigger and catalyze other people in the circle as well. That the medicine that one person is feeling and then offering to the group might actually be the exact and precise medicine that someone else needs, almost as a permission slip for them to also feel into and through the material that they're working with. I think there's a really intelligent reason why so much healing in Indigenous communities doesn't happen one-on-one in a room away from nature and community. It happens in community. In plant medicine and theogen medicine ceremonies, we don't really see in Indigenous communities where those medicines come from one-on-one work. That doesn't really exist. It always happens in circle, in community. In doing some of this wellness healing work in these spaces, I see the profound intelligence of healing in a group. And of course, it's really important that not only as facilitators, we're keeping our finger on the pulse of the group, but we're also keeping our finger on the pulse of the nervous system of every individual, because yes, every individual experiences their own unique journey within it while also being a part of a greater intelligent relational field.

Marla Miller 16:25

I love that observation that not only having, I guess, a community around for support, but also how, like you said, the resonance of one person then spreads and then everyone gets in sync. It gets very coherent when you're in a group. It might start off patchy, everyone comes in with their different levels of emotion. But as you work together, suddenly you become coherent and that becomes a strong force. That's very interesting. I just think of that because I know with Dr. Joe Dispenza, like at his events, he speaks about that as well. That when people come in from all different countries and all different backgrounds and traumas or whatever it is, by the end of the week, there is this very strong coherent thing happening in the entire group of, you know, could be thousands of people.

Hannah Blake 17:21

Exactly. It's incredible. I haven't been to one of his events, but I know it's been studied that brain waves sink, even with Navy SEALs, it's that flow state that we don't just have access to within ourselves, but actually gets created with more productivity and ease, almost like a domino effect when we are in a group, where if someone's brain waves move from beta into kind of deeper alpha and the Ada states, there's a domino effect, a cascade effect that happens in the group. And it's profound, yeah, to witness and be part of, I imagine, in Dr. Joe's events, it's amazing.

Marla Miller 18:02

Yeah, it is amazing. So when you work with people, are you offering group sessions specifically? Or do you work one-on-one with people as well?

Hannah Blake 18:14

Yeah, so the way that the method has shifted is I still will facilitate for sometimes very, very large groups at festivals, these two-hour workshops, hundreds of people at a time, and it can be really profound. And my work has in many ways pivoted since I started to incorporate entheogenic medicines. And so I do work with individuals, I work with couples, and I also work with small groups. And the method has also shifted quite significantly as I have been initiated into working with and stewarding different medicines like psilocybin and San Pedro. And a lot of that started happening when I was part of the founding team at a retreat center in Costa Rica that specializes in working with these medicines and really seeing that when people are entering non-ordinary states of consciousness and when they're integrating non-ordinary states of consciousness, there's a profound importance to understanding the nervous system and the somatic piece around healing into and on the other side of really deep non-ordinary states.

Marla Miller 19:28

So, what have you found that to be very helpful with, as far as say psilocybin, let's start with that? How does that impact people in their healing?

Hannah Blake 19:39

The example that's coming to me right now is actually a client who was so accustomed to living in her really genius brain. And so as she was coming into the experience with psilocybin, the experience was staying quite cerebral. She really wanted to analyze her experience while she was in it. And so the invitation then was where are you experiencing this in your body? How are you actually feeling and sensing the way the intelligence of this medicine is working, not just in your brain, but actually in your heart, in your chest, in your lungs, in your solar plexus, in your lower back, in your shoulders, in your jaw. And when she had the courage to follow the thread of that invitation, it was like opening a whole new world for her. And we ended up coming to this place of realizing that when she was very, very young, there was a dissociating part that came online because she had an experience that showed her it was not safe for her to be in her physical and energetic body, her son same body. And so she dissociated, moved into her brain and was living for 40 years primarily from her analytical cognitive mind. And she wasn't actually interfacing with life from the experience of the body. And the body is the way that we that we interface with life. It's the way we touch and smell and taste and love and feel excitement and also feel despair and heartbreak and grief. And so this journey for her with the somatic component allowed her to widen her aperture of her understanding of experience of her life, not just from a place of analysis, but from a place of really sensing what it is to feel alive in her body. And we were able to then get to that protector that had been dissociating her very intelligently, actually, and helping her get another job. And that job is now to actually help keep her in her body, keep her in her sensing, keep her in the experience of being ecstatically alive inside of not just her brain, but her entire system. And of course, for those six hours that she was in the session, we also were ensuring that she wasn't out of her window of tolerance. We were tracking her jaw, the back of her neck, because that's where we can see that the brainstem might be bracing. Detecting threat. And so we were helping her over and over again, softening the brainstem, encouraging her nervous system that it was safe to be in her body over and over and over again. Sometimes she would dissociate back into the mind when the protector would come online again, and that's totally fine. And then we would work cognitively, but also somatically again to support her nervous system and feeling it's okay now at 45 years old to come into the body. I'm safe now to be here and did that throughout the six-hour session. And her integration now, about eight months later, has been really profound.

Marla Miller 23:14

Well, I think that's a good point. Not only that you were there supporting her throughout the journey, because some people probably go and do different plant medicines and different things without that support. And then they don't know what to do with it after, or they may have a weird experience during it and don't know how to process that. And also how you talked about integration after your Samaya method, that whatever you're doing with people that you are helping them integrate it. I think that's just a very important step from everything I've learned. If you really want to change your life in some significant way, it's not strictly up to one method or one medicine, but it's then knowing how to integrate it into your life and do the work that's necessary to make it a habit or make it a big impact.

Hannah Blake 24:09

Exactly. Integration is so important. There's a slippery slope, honestly, between non-ordinary states of consciousness and then chasing peak experiences. And without the integration, a journey like that can be another peak experience. And I'm really uninterested in that. I think if we aren't taking our insights into action, into embodied action in our life, then we're missing the whole point because we don't do ceremony to do ceremony, we do ceremony to do life. And life is the most profound, beautiful, wild, scenic ceremony there is. And so integration is not just a somatic integration that's unique and individual for each person who comes, but it's also very practical. It's how are we actually taking these insights forward into our lives, into our morning routine, into the way that we treat ourselves and speak to ourselves and tend to ourselves? How do we take these insights and very practically apply them to our relational field, our friends, our family, our partners? And then how do we very tangibly practically take this out into our life and our mission and our purpose in the world? And so a huge part of integration is actually roadmapping this. So people have a very clear, this is what I'm doing with myself, with my partner, with my children, with my relationships, and in my work when I get home. And then we continue the integration afterwards, after they leave the in-person session and we see, okay, what's on track? We celebrate that, what's off track? It's understandable. Integration's not perfect. How do we support you getting on track again? And it's it's a continuation into the ceremony of our lives.

Marla Miller 26:02

How long does the integration continue, or is it a certain number of coaching sessions after? How does that work?

Hannah Blake 26:09

I always include two coaching sessions with me. And then there's always an option to continue working together. I have clients I've worked with for years. And then I also have a network that I can refer people out to of integrative medicine physicians, various therapists, various coaches, and other medicine facilitators all over the world and from Canada down to the Amazon. And so when someone comes to do this work, it's not just working with me that they'll have access to, but it's a whole network of really, really high integrity people who are devoted to this same prayer at the center of the altar, which is the ceremony of life.

Marla Miller 26:54

That's great. It sounds like you've really created a smart system.

Hannah Blake 26:59

Yeah.

Marla Miller 26:59

And incorporated a lot of different things that are very beneficial, not just breath work, but you sound like you really brought in things that you have found for yourself that worked well. So I do want to go back. I'm just very interested in the Crohn's.

Hannah Blake 27:15

Yeah.

Marla Miller 27:16

So as far as why you got Crohn's, do you believe there was a lot of buildup in your heart? A lot of things you, like you said, you were tamping down that were too painful to feel into at the time. And was it a number of things or one big event?

Hannah Blake 27:36

Yeah. I, for myself, no. And from what I've seen and deduced in doing this work, that my physiological symptoms were very much psychosomatic. And due to not only the experiences that I had as a child, which were many experiences, it was not just one event. But the event that sent me into the hospital was actually a heartbreak. It was two things. I was doing some work in the Middle East, and it was very, very stressful. My intention was to bridge gaps between Palestinian and Israeli culture through the arts and prayer. And I did see a lot of hope actually in working with the youth. But when I was a student diplomat in the region, it was very, very stressful, and I saw very little hope. And I started to feel that pain coming on in my lower belly again. Then I went home and I ended a relationship with someone who I'm very good friends with now, and I love him deeply. And the heartbreak of that relationship combined with the stress and the heartbreak of the work that I was trying to do in the Middle East sent me into the hospital. I looked like pregnant with twins. I mean, my stomach was so radically inflamed. They thought my appendix had ruptured. They were actually preparing me for surgery to remove my appendix. And I was like, I don't think that's what's going on. Please run more tests. They um did a contrast CT scan and then saw that I just had wild inflammation in my small intestine. So it was an accumulation of many events over the course of my life. And I am a half Oshkenazi Jewish. And there is a significantly higher percent chance that people with Ashkenazi Jewish lineage have an autoimmune disease of the gut. And so I don't believe that this was just my healing journey for me. I believe this was also epigenetically transgenerational trauma that I was moving through and releasing. So not just for me, but also for my paternal bloodline. So it was very deep. And in moving through it with the method that I developed and bringing in the traumatic memory, and also in implementing this method with non-ordinary states of consciousness that I was also utilizing, I was very clearly working with memories that were also not mine, but that were also a part of my lineage. A lot of my family died in Camp Methausen. It wasn't actually a concentration camp, it was a death camp. And so there's a lot of the work that I did that was beyond my own personal memory and actually went back into my lineage.

Marla Miller 30:38

I think that is something that is starting to come into people's awareness, the idea of generational trauma. And some doctors work with that aspect. There's still a lot more that the public needs to become aware of because I think that is a big part of some people's healing journey, is addressing that aspect. So that's so interesting. Well, I'm curious. So you've worked with different plant medicines like psilocybin. Were there any other ones you worked with personally that gave you insights into things like that?

Hannah Blake 31:17

Yeah, I personally would never ever serve ayahuasca. I work alongside facilitators who do serve ayahuasca, who actually come from those lineages in the Amazon. And I support people through the ARP from a somatic healing perspective, but I would never serve the medicine. With that, my own personal journey has been profoundly supported by ayahuasca. I worked through my deepest childhood wounding with the support of that medicine. I don't want to share too specifically who these people are in my family, but someone very close to me became suicidal when I was 11. I have other people in my family who were addicted to heroin and opiates and other drugs. And I became the caretaker to a lot of people in my family very young. And I developed this belief that if these people in my family don't want to stay here, if they actually are willing to take their life and not be here with me, if they are willing to overdose so many times and almost die and not be here on this planet with me, this little girl in me developed this belief then I must not be enough. If I'm not enough for them to want to stay, then how could I be enough for anything? And working with ayahuasca helped me understand so deeply why I believed that. Helped me really tend to the little girl who believed that, and then very profoundly helped me liberate myself from that belief. And I do not sit with that medicine anymore. I haven't for many, many years. But the journey that I had with that medicine, I can very clearly, very honestly say changed my life profoundly.

Marla Miller 33:24

And was it one experience or was it multiple times that brought that to fruition?

Hannah Blake 33:30

I sat with the medicine many, many times, especially when I was living in Costa Rica in the middle of the jungle and supporting building this retreat center. And I was also building the arc around the intake, preparation, and integration of this medicine. So it also was part of my professional responsibility to really build a deep relationship with the medicine. And in doing so, I experienced profound personal healing. And there are people who work with this very powerful medicine in a way that does not have a lot of integrity. And there are people working with this medicine in ways that have phenomenal integrity. And those are the people that I've worked with and learned from. And in that setting and context, I benefited profoundly.

Marla Miller 34:19

So maybe you can just add a little note here about when people are looking for an experience like that. What would be your caution that you want to share with them? And what should they look for?

Hannah Blake 34:33

Yeah, I am a really big believer in this work being held at the intersection of the clinical and indigenous, more traditional wisdom keeping. And what I mean by that is I think it's really important that there's a robust intake that people move through, a medical, physiological, and psychological intake. That the facilitator or facilitators have in the past said no to someone sitting with the medicine because it's not for everyone. There are people who physiologically are contraindicated, whether it's a significant heart issue or they're on certain medications that are contradicted with ayahuasca. And there are certain people who are also psychologically, I believe, contraindicated with coming to meet this medicine. If someone is in an acute state of PTSD or distress, this medicine is not one that is necessarily going to support further regulation of the nervous system in that experience. It can actually create more dysregulation. And so I think it's really important to ask a facilitator A, do you have a robust medical intake process that I will go through? And have you said no to people before? And if the answers are yes to that, green flag. If there are preparation calls, preparation meetings, another really green flag. Also with this particular medicine, it's, I believe, really important to sit with the medicine multiple times during an immersion or experience or dieta or retreat. This is a relationship-building medicine. It's not just a one-and-done, again, peak experience. It's I'm meeting the medicine, I'm developing a relationship with the medicine, respect for the medicine. And that happens over the course of multiple sits. I think kind of best practice numbers three. And then hopefully there's a really robust integration. Again, there's community integration, integration circles. And ideally, people are also getting individualized support inside of that as well. And then ideally, there's integration post the arc of the journey. So community integration calls and or hopefully individual integration calls as well. And I think for me, those are all green flags. Another green flag in working with the medicine is the person or people actually serving the medicine have studied traditionally with, for example, the Shepeople lineage or the Mestizo lineage in the Amazon with stewards who have been stewarding this medicine in their lineage for thousands of years. If someone is facilitating because they sat with the medicine a few times, my partner and I call this the neo-shamonic nightmare. Suddenly they think that they're equipped to work with this very powerful medicine. That's a huge red flag. Huge red flag. And if people have questions too, they can also reach out to me personally. I'm a big believer in not people just coming to work with me, but in being a resource that can point people in the right direction to work with medicines in a really safe way with facilitators that I know and trust around the world.

Marla Miller 38:05

Great information. So when you look back at healing from the Crohn's, what would you say were the top things? And where do you stand today with regards to Crohn's? Do you feel like your gut is healed?

Hannah Blake 38:19

As a practitioner, I cannot legally say that I am cured. I can say that I am healed for 12, 13 years since I really started healing. I have not had symptoms. And in scans, I do not have any signs of it. So I attribute this to not just one thing, but so many things, of course. The method that I developed and tested on my own body, managing my stress and really tending to my nervous system and stimulating my vagus nerve as much as possible. And also, diet was big. I did the gaps diet for a year. And I still do not eat any gluten. And I'm very careful with grains. And so it's not just the I'm gonna work on this emotionally, psychosomatically, and spiritually, but also very, very practically with my diet. I'm going to help rebuild the lining of my intestinal trap with animal protein. I was a vegetarian when I was hospitalized. And through bone broth, through the gaps diet, taking out grains, cutting out gluten, cutting out dairy epitome, and continuing to work with this hypnotherapy breath movement along the meridian lines and doing healing with deep, intelligent plant medicines, all of that became the tributaries through which I was able to what feels like fully heal myself. And clients that I've worked with who also have had Crohn's and colitis and diverticulitis and even fibromyalgia, we've had profound results. And I am not saying at all this is just through working with me too. Something that I'm launching here in Southern Oregon is an institute that's also going to be combining functional medicine with an incredible MD that I've been partnering with for many years because we both believe that just the medicine component, the diet component, isn't enough to support complex chronic illness. Just the somatic psychology and psychedelic medicine isn't necessarily enough to support complex chronic illness. It's all of it. It's approaching it from every angle that we can at once is where we see the best results. And that's what I'm dedicating my life to, to building for people. I think the medical world, the psychology world, even the psychedelic medicine world, it's very siloed. And I think it's very hard for us to have access to true healing inside of these avenues that are so siloed. It has to be holistic, it has to be multifaceted. We have to approach our healing from a whole person approach. We have a whole ecosystem. We have so many territories inside of us, biologically, physiologically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. So how do we approach healing in a way that honors the multifaceted territory that we are?

Marla Miller 41:46

I love that how you worded all of that and the acknowledgement of that, all the different layers there are to healing. We're not just a body, we're not just the emotion and it's all of it.

Hannah Blake 41:58

Exactly.

Marla Miller 41:59

Well, I have three questions I like to ask people that have gone through a tough time and come out the other side healed during the time that you were healing. What was the biggest obstacle that you faced?

Hannah Blake 42:14

Such an important question. Thank you for that. Letting myself fall apart, letting myself be the one who needed to heal. Because I had been the one in my life, my family, my friendships, I'd been the strong one, I'd been the support, I'd been the person that everybody went to for healing. So getting radically humble and letting myself need help from myself, from others, from medicines, letting myself fall apart. And actually the book When Things Fall Apart by Pima Chodram, that was an incredible accompaniment on my journey. It was one of the greatest obstacles to my healing. And it actually became the greatest gateway into my healing.

Marla Miller 43:03

Amazing. What was the biggest lesson you learned?

Hannah Blake 43:08

That my body, even when it's in a profound amount of pain, is not my enemy. And my body is actually my best friend. My body is actually the greatest roadmap into understanding myself, my needs, what needs my attention. And it's also the most profound gateway into my liberation.

Marla Miller 43:33

I love that. I have been hearing a lot recently about how they say people are healing themselves by talking kindly to their bodies. And when you can imagine it, like you're a team, you know, your cells, your bones, every part of your body is a team with you rather than an enemy force. It really does shift things when you think about it that way.

Hannah Blake 43:58

I love that.

Marla Miller 44:00

It reminds me also when people say if you know in your heart, like the universe is always for you, not against you. It really shifts your perspective on how you view things. So I feel like that's the same with the body. The body is for you, not against you. Well, so what was the biggest kindness someone showed you throughout your healing journey?

Hannah Blake 44:24

The timing of this question is really profound because it was actually her birthday yesterday, her name was Eilish McSweeney doctor, and she passed away a few. Years ago, but she was my sole mother. And she, with so much compassion, absolutely no judgment, really allowed me to receive help and love. And she held my hand through not just the physiological parts that were hard for me, but also the emotional material that came up for me. She held my hand the whole way through for the five years that she was in my life. And she also supported me with the Gaps diet. She made me bone broth. She helped me when I had a Herx response from it. That actually ended up being just my gut microbiome completely shifting. And she's the first person who helped me learn that I didn't have to be a team of one when things got hard. Helped me learn that I could really trust someone else's help and support and love. And I also got to care for her during her passing and I was there when she transitioned. And that felt also like a full circle moment for me. And it's actually in many ways because of her that I am now in a really beautiful relationship with an incredible man. And I'm learning to receive love and I'm learning to receive help. And I'm learning that I don't have to be a team of one. I can really be a team of two in my life. And I really attribute so much of that to Eilish.

Marla Miller 46:11

That's amazing.

Hannah Blake 46:12

Yeah, thank you.

Marla Miller 46:14

Well, if people want to work with you or they want to learn more about the Samaya method, where can they go?

Hannah Blake 46:22

Samaya Method.com. And I'm also on social media, Hannah Blake Schneider. And people can reach out to me there or through the website, either way, and I'd be really happy to hear from people.

Marla Miller 46:36

So do you help people remotely as well, or is it all in person?

Hannah Blake 46:41

Yeah, my remote clients' schedule is super full right now, but there are moments that spaces open up. I do work remotely, but just with a small select group, because most of the work is in-person, three-day immersions. And that's where I've seen kind of the most profound breakthroughs happen is in-person in those three-day immersions.

Marla Miller 47:08

Well, that's great. And do you do retreats in other places as well, still?

Hannah Blake 47:13

Yeah, I do in southern Oregon, here where psilocybin therapy is legal, and also in Costa Rica, at a partnership space by the ocean in Santa Teresa, and then at the retreat center that I helped found in the Diamante Valley called Holos. It's beautiful jungle waterfalls, 206 acres. So in those three locations, and then sometimes uh up in Canada as well, with some doctors that I partner with up there.

Marla Miller 47:42

Well, before we sign off here, do you want to give an example of one more success story of someone that's worked with the Somaya method and what that outcome was, how it changed their life for the better in some way?

Hannah Blake 47:56

I would love to. The one that's coming to me right now is working with someone with fibromyalgia. And again, I am not claiming to cure anything. This client's success story was really amazing. She had fibromyalgia symptoms for 18 years, very severe, was doing tons of Botox, trigger point injections, et cetera. And we mapped really intense trauma between ages zero and two can really, really deeply affect the nervous system, specifically the brainstem. And that's where her intense trauma of the capital T happened. And so we saw that she had an incredibly, incredibly bracing brainstem, significant tension in the upper neck, shoulders, pain and tension behind the eyes, and a super locked jaw. And so we worked with medicine while doing a process called deep brain reorienting to actually help the brainstem reset around the traumatic memory from her childhood. Um, at the end of the three days together, she was symptom-free, went home, went to her neurologist. Her neurologist was completely blown away. Um, and it's been many, many months. No symptoms, no migraines, no trigger point injections, no Botox. Again, I'm not claiming a cure. I am trying to push something like this up into clinical trial in Canada with some doctors I know who are leading incredible research up there. They're some of my best friends. I do believe that not just psilocybin, but actually low-dose fibemeODMT, which is the most powerful psychedelic node to man, I believe that that, with the process of deep brain reorienting, can be a profound treatment for people with fibromyalgia. And again, this is a small data set that we have right now, but hopefully there will be some clinical trials that will reveal this and be able to support more and more people with physiological and psychosomatic challenges that they're working through.

Marla Miller 49:59

That's a great story with a happy ending.

Hannah Blake 50:03

Yeah.

Marla Miller 50:04

Well, I am excited for the future of healing, like the methods that will be used and that address more of the energetic system, or like you mentioned, generational trauma, different things like that. And all the energy work. I think there's so much coming out now that'll be great for people. Thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your own personal journey with Crohn's and the method you've created and how beneficial this can be for people with hard to treat conditions.

unknown 50:39

Yeah.

Marla Miller 50:39

You know, instead of struggling for years with things, like to know that there's hope is really great to get out there to people to let them know. So thank you so much.

Hannah Blake 50:50

There is hope, and thank you so much for creating a space where we can bring hope to people who might be struggling. And thank you so much for having me and for your questions and your curiosity and for your kindness. I appreciate you.