Releasing Trapped Emotions from the Body with Marina Nabão | Episode 28
Consider this as an invitation to take your healing journey and personal development journey to the next level.
Marina Nabão is embodiment coach dedicated to supporting people through a trauma-informed journey of somatic healing and empowerment. She is a Brazilian, biracial, Black, cis-woman living in the SF Bay Area, CA.
As a daughter of a psychologist and a philosopher, curiosity and the search for a broader understanding of life is her natural state. So it’s no surprise that her own search to understand her inner world and grow in all areas of life – professional, relational, affective, sexual, and spiritual – have taken her on a very rich journey.
This episode we discuss
* How trauma remains in the body
* Stages of healing
* Healing through meaningful self-connection
* Somatic work for non-binary folx
Episode Resources
Dalia: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Body Liberation for All. I'm your host and decolonize wellness and body image coach Dalia Kinsey. I help queer folks of color heal their struggles with shame self-acceptance through nutrition and self-care so they can live the most fierce, liberated, and joyful version of their lives.
Today I have a special guest on the show to talk about a subject that's really been calling my attention a lot lately. I have been rereading The Body Keeps the Score and thinking about the ways that trauma and unprocessed emotions get trapped in the body.
I've noticed myself some very strong reactions to seemingly minor incidents in my life at work clearly connected to previous negative experiences and racialized trauma is just like any other kind of trauma. You can have issues with purging these negative sensations from your body and having a very powerful instantaneous, negative trauma, like response to anything that reminds you of these past experiences.
So, embodiment work and focusing on the body and those sensations and moving them along so that I can have a reaction that feels manageable to stressful things is what I'm focused on right now. So, I’m so excited to have Marina here, Marina works with them, body meant and trauma of all kinds. The things that Marina discusses, and this episode will be useful for everyone, but very useful for somebody working with trauma, you've already gotten other treatment for that you still aren't feeling peace around, because the embodiment piece has been missing from your healing work so far.
This is such a good conversation. Let's jump right in.
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Dalia: Hello. Thank you for being on the show.
Marina: Yeah. Thanks for having me so excited to have this conversation.
Dalia: I am excited, always to connect with other folks of color from all over the world, but in particular folks of color that do healing work that come from different cultural backgrounds, especially anybody connected to the diaspora. I just get super excited about that, because it's interesting to me to see how as you change, as you kind of become part of the country that your ancestors were pulled into and you become a blend of the different peoples that are from there. And then the people who colonize that area, we all have really interesting ways of manifesting some of the old healing traditions, you know, that we have no possible conscious way of connecting to.
It's just beautiful to see how nothing is ever lost and keep coming back to the surface and it looks different on different people and in different parts of the world.
Marina: Yeah. I love that cause I love that integration of the different ways that we can approach healing and really reclaiming the old ways of healing that have big been parts of generations of the original people of the planet.
Dalia: Right. Right, exactly. So I know you're based in the U S now and you're on the west coast. But can you tell us a little bit about where you were raised and when you were growing up, did you have a connection to healing practices or what was that relationship like with you?
Marina: Yeah. Yeah, so I was raised in Brazil that's where I'm from and I think that's part of my upbringing was connected to receiving what we can call unusual healing. There are many people who are, I don't even know how to say this in English I think it would be something like ‘the blessers’. So these old grandmas who actually developed such a beautiful connection with themselves and their intuition and their spiritual guides that they can bless other people. And we’d go there to receive a blessing. Then they share something that they feel called to share around the ways that you are treating yourself. The food you are eating the people that you're hanging out with and things that you could do so that you would find more balance in your life.
So this is a big thing in Brazil, especially in communities where people are more integrated socially. So like Black communities, people who live in what we can call marginalized neighborhoods or something. And this has always been part of my life. I never even thought of a life without it.
That's what you do. You feel you're feeling off. You're not so sure. You are feeling sad then you communicate with one of these grandmas, they will share their wisdom. So that is one thing, the other is that my mom was always into what we can call integrative medicine.
She was always into floral therapy, healing, our body and spirit, good eating habits, macrobiotic, whole food products, and things like that. So for me, I think part of my growing up was learning that our bodies have this self-healing capacity. That it's a matter of us being patient enough and aware enough to connect with it intentionally so that we can find ways to notice what a disease is trying to tell us, what a discomfort is trying to show us. To find ways to address the environment that is creating the disease, the environment that is creating discomfort not just the symptoms.
Dalia: Now it makes so much sense, but you said something really crucial it's being patient enough to wait for it to work because that I think is one of the hallmarks between western medication when we approach our symptoms that way. And sometimes those don't even work as quickly as you want them to, but typically you can expect to see a change maybe that day, maybe in a week, maybe two weeks and a lot of other approaches because you're not just putting a band-aid on one symptom, you're trying to get to the root of the problem, it can take longer. So in a culture where we feel like we don't even have time to sit down and feel unwell. We don't have time to take one day off, then what do we do? So, what has it been like for you coming to the U.S. do you feel a big difference in the pace that we're living at running counter to the way the human body actually functions and thrives?
Marina: Oh my God. That was shocking. That was really shocking. To really notice this shift in the speed at which things happen here. Right. So, I don't know if I can speak for all Brazilians, but in our culture in general, we have this idea of the U.S as the land of opportunity, right? Hollywood sales that so beautifully to us.
So you come here, you're nobody, you come with a dollar in your pocket and then you become this millionaire, blah, blah, blah. You know, and also the fact that in order to do so, there are no boundaries, no limits to the amount of work that you do. Beca…
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