This podcast explores holistic stress and trauma recovery. I am your host, Luis Mojica. My work, Holistic Life Navigation, was modeled after my own journey in healing myself from chronic illness and PTSD. I share this podcast with many brilliant minds who, like me, healed themselves through unique, unusual, and unorthodox ways.
For more information, please visit: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com
Written, produced and recorded by Luis Mojica. Edited by Fredo Viola. Intro song: "Wood Smoke" by Fredo Viola.
Welcome to the Holistic Life Navigation Podcast. I am your host, Luis Mojica. I'm a somatic therapist and nutritionist who combines nutritional therapy with somatic therapy to help thousands of people around the world, including myself, recover from stress and trauma. This podcast serves as a way for me to teach you what I learn for free. How can food aid in the recovery of stress and trauma? What does it really mean to be embodied? And how can simple somatic practices help us better navigate this strange and sensational human experience? Let's find out. You may love and want to connect with someone so deeply, be it your child, your friend, your lover, or someone else. Yet you lack the capacity and certain behaviors emerge instead. You shut down, you yell, you avoid. Your body reacts to these people in a way that makes you undesirable to be around, because your very intelligent body is trying its hardest to have a boundary and say, I don't have capacity to connect right now, but you don't have those words or insights yet. Learning this has been life-changing. My father and I did not have a good relationship. Between overworking and overdoing extra activities, he was rarely home. When he was, it was very stressful. One thing I learned as a busy parent who sometimes travels a lot is this it's less about how often you're gone and more about how present you are when you're not. I make it a point, even when I only have two free hours during a workday, to really connect with my daughter so she feels my love, my attunement, and how much I care about her. She misses me so much when I'm away, and even when I'm in the other room working, and that is success for me because I never missed my father. I actually fantasized about us leaving him many times throughout my life. So the fact that she misses me feels way better than her enjoying my absence. But it took me becoming a father, a provider, and a worker to really understand my patrilineal bloodline of how all these men never had fathers to teach them how to be one. Men who were taught to shut down, man up, work endlessly to provide, and essentially only see their worth through what they could offer instead of how they could connect. And all that landed inside of me when I became a father. Thankfully, I had already been doing the deep dive into healing and exploring these wounds since age 19 when I left home. So I wasn't as set in my ways. And when I was, I wasn't defending or trying to uphold them. And by the time I was 27, fresh into my Saturn return, I became a father. And very quickly, I became a provider because of the impact childbirth had on my wife's body. She simply couldn't work. And what I learned is this as loving, kind, supportive, and therapized as I was, we all require one important thing to connect: capacity. Capacity is our body's ability to withstand sensations, emotions, stressors, and input of information energy all comes down to capacity. Our capacity is largely determined by two things. One, our environment, which includes people, places, foods, and situations or circumstances, and two, our perception, how we relate to and see the world and ourselves. Processed foods, screens, caffeine, drugs, coping habits, overworking, sleep deprivation, and hormonal cycles all affect our capacity. It changes by the minute. And I learned this in the first year of becoming a father. I was running an herbal chocolate company, and I was working 12 to 14 hour days, getting little sleep and eating three bars of chocolate for breakfast to wake up. I was jacked and not in the hot way. And I would look at my gorgeous, tender wife, and I would look at my otherworldly tender, beautiful daughter, and I would feel nothing. I literally could not connect. Sometimes I would pretend, sometimes I would fawn, sometimes I would just overwork to avoid the pain and argument that came from not connecting. But one day it hit me. This was not who I was, but something my body did when my capacity was low. We are unable to connect when the body is in fight or flight, because it's a biology geared towards survival, not joy and connection. I remember crying deeply with this realization, which wasn't used to validate why I should keep isolating and avoiding, but it was used to stop the self-hatred that came in around the line of quote, I've become my father, end quote. And as I understood and forgave myself, I also understood and forgave him. He had no capacity. Plain and simple. And unlike me, he had zero therapy, zero access to self-help books. He can't read. The endless free videos on the internet for teaching you how to father and parent didn't exist for him. Nor did he have any man around him who would support him to work on himself or show him how. When he was 27, unlike me, he had no resources. And all of my anger, hatred, frustration, and judgments for him released from my body like smoke released from sage. Consider this for yourself. You may love and want to connect with someone so deeply, be it your child, your friend, your lover, or someone else. Yet you lack the capacity and certain behaviors emerge instead. You shut down, you yell, you avoid. Your body reacts to these people in a way that makes you undesirable to be around because your very intelligent body is trying its hardest to have a boundary and say, I don't have capacity to connect right now, but you don't have those words or insights yet. Learning this has been life-changing, and it's a huge part of my upcoming embodied parenting program. This six-month program begins on October 6th, but on September 2nd, I'll be hosting a webinar for just $10 that will begin exploring this practice of capacity-based parenting. Whether you're a parent, uncle, or auntie, grandparent, teacher, or an individual who wants to learn more about your own child, your inner child, or even future children, you are all welcome. In fact, we have learned so much over the years from people with different perspectives when we've done past programs. So take a breath. Release the idea of not doing anything right, and just notice what your capacity is right now. I'm gonna give you a simple practice of mind to begin. Step one sit in a chair that allows your head to be held and supported, and just let your body drop into it. I'm gonna let you have 30 seconds of music to feel each prompt. Just give it your attention for the next thirty seconds. From here, you simply ask yourself two questions. Question number one, feel into the place that's tense and ask it, what support does this part of me need? And question number two, feel into the part that is open and ask it, how does this part want to relate to this person? See what emerges. See how different parts of you have instructions and ways to navigate different people and situations based on your different capacity levels in your body. This is what it means to consult your capacity. This is what it means to relate to people from an embodied place. That's the end of today's episode. Take a moment to notice where you feel the episode. Take a breath into that place. Maybe even put your hand over it and let whatever wants to come up come up. And remember, our bodies speak through sensations. What's yours saying right now? For more information on any upcoming events, please visit holisticlifenavigation.com. And feel free to check out my YouTube page where you can watch any of these episodes, leave a comment, and even request a future topic for me to dive into. I'll see you next time.
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