The Nourished Woman with Keri Marino

The Power of Yoga for Growth and Healing

• Keri Marino • Episode 2

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Have you ever wondered if your approach to healing might be missing something essential? The journey toward growth and healing often leads us to work on ourselves in fragmented ways—treating our bodies, minds, spirits, and life circumstances as separate challenges requiring different solutions. But what if there was a single practice that could weave all these aspects together?

Yoga, at its essence, is precisely this practice. As I explore in this episode, the true meaning of yoga is "yoking"—connecting the seemingly separate parts of yourself into one integrated whole. This ancient wisdom offers us a revolutionary perspective on healing that modern approaches often overlook. Rather than compartmentalizing our healing work, yoga invites us to recognize that our body, mind, spirit, and life are inseparable aspects of one ecosystem—you.

This holistic approach is what makes yoga uniquely powerful for those on a healing journey. Whether you've experienced trauma, struggle with anxiety, or simply feel disconnected from yourself, yoga provides tools that address your entire being simultaneously. I share two distinct pathways for harnessing yoga's therapeutic potential: the indirect approach of regular practice that naturally permeates your life, and the targeted work of applying specific yogic tools to address particular challenges.

As a somatic yoga therapist, I've witnessed countless transformations as people discover how to let their bodies lead them through healing. The body holds wisdom that the mind alone cannot access—especially when it comes to processing trauma and emotional patterns. When we learn to listen to this wisdom and follow our intuition, we unlock healing possibilities that transcend traditional approaches.

The beauty of growth and healing lies not just in resolving problems but in the evolution of your soul that happens through the process. This journey leads to freedom, joy, clarity, and a deeper connection to yourself and something greater. If you're ready to experience yoga beyond the poses and discover its transformative power for your healing journey, this episode offers both practical insights and inspiration to guide your path.

Ready to take the next step in your healing journey? Reach out on Instagram @the_nourished_woman or visit my website KeriMarino.com to learn more about joining The Nourished Woman Sanctuary, where we explore these practices together in a supportive community.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Nourished Woman podcast, a space for women on a growth and healing journey who are ready to live more joyfully and feel deeply at home within themselves body, mind and spirit. I'm Keri Marino, your host, somatic yoga therapist, mentor and mama of three. Let's dive in. If you're on a growth and healing journey, then I want to just pause and congratulate you for a moment, because the work that you are doing or about to do is going to open doors and it's going to bring you into a new level. You are being initiated in some way, and I'm not saying that this work of growing and healing is always easy, because, let's be honest, it is just not. Sometimes, the beauty of going through a hard thing is the evolution of the soul that happens inside of you, on the other side, and, as a yoga therapist and somatic inner work, I get so excited when I see myself or somebody else going through this work of evolving, because it leads to freedom, it leads to joy, it leads to ascension, it leads to beauty and clarity and pleasure and a deepening, a deepening that is so good. And I want to talk to you a little bit about yoga's role in growth and healing, because I feel like the average person and that may or may not be you does not understand, does not even grasp at all how truly amazing and therapeutic and helpful yoga is, how, how, like much it can offer you on a growth and healing journey. So let's just unpack for a moment what yoga is. And yoga, as I'm going to describe it to you is, is how I approach it as a yoga therapist, how I've grown to understand it through all of the study that I've done. And so, ultimately, yoga is this process of yoking, and yoking not like an egg, but like, if you think about a horse being yoked to something that it was carrying like a chariot. It's like this hooking together of these separate parts, and so these separate parts of you are your body and your mind and your spirit and your life. So it's these four pillars of who you are, and so yoga helps you become yoked with your wholeness your body, your mind, your spirit and your life, and on a grander scale, its ultimate aim is for you to like, experience this transcendent wholeness and connection to your own divine self that exists inside you, that is also a part of something bigger than you, and I know that spirituality and words like divine can definitely stir some concerns inside of people. So before we get into this further, I just want to pause and say that you get to define spirit and spirituality and divine and God and all of that stuff on your terms. Yoga has nothing really to say about how you define it. It just has a lot to say about the fact that it's part of you and that it is an essential piece of your wholeness.

Speaker 1:

So when you're on a growth and healing journey, very often you're kind of working with fragmented parts of yourself. You might specifically do things that help you with your body. Maybe you exercise, maybe you drink more water. You're also going to specifically be working on parts of your mind, so you might be working on being a better witness of your inner dialogue and your mindset and directing your thoughts and your emotions. You might be working on your spirituality. You might start to read something again, you might have a spiritual mentor, you might start to attend some sort of spiritual service and you'll be working on your life in some way. You might start to get your money in order, you might start to explore your work-life balance and things like that.

Speaker 1:

But generally speaking, we work with these in a very fragmented way we work with them, as if they are separate aspects of self. But they are not. They are all layers of you that ideally would be woven together so you could work with the whole of you and balance the whole of you as one ecosystem. And this, my love, this is where yoga is so, so unique and powerful and effective, because yoga is working with those four pillars body, mind, spirit, life all in one place. And as a yoga therapist, we get to get into all of those things together.

Speaker 1:

And if you've ever had an experience like, let's say, you've done an online yoga session or you've done a class and you have felt a really unique feeling, state, come over Maybe you have felt a physical release of some kind, an opening of a channel in your body, a relaxation, a level of zen, physically and mentally and spiritually and that ripples out into your life off of your yoga mat and into your life, then you know what I'm talking about. You've already felt it, you've literally already tasted this. And this can all be applied to when we're doing like deep inner work for ourselves to really step up and take ownership and grow and evolve or heal from trauma, or love ourselves more and improve ourselves work. Yoga moves into all of those areas of you and you've really got two choices in terms of how you tap into yoga for this purpose. And the first one is a less direct approach. So this means you're going to do a yoga practice that incorporates body, mind and spirit and life teachings, so not just like an exercise class, but a true to the roots of yoga, like whole self immersion experience. You're just going to do the yoga and then you're going to let that yoga, that feeling of yoga, that therapeutic practice of yoga, ripple out into your life in a less like up, close and personal laser focused on certain issues kind of way. And the other option is to take more of a specific approach with applying yoga, and this is largely what I do in my practice with people. So one-on-one work with me. People will come with a specific goal or aim. Oftentimes it is kind of just like integrating their experience in a way that feels better to them. Maybe it is about working with anxiety, maybe it's about improving self-worth or just helping themselves untangle the knots that they find themselves in relationally and emotionally and with their concept of what they're allowed to have as they move through this life, so they can feel more free and digest trauma.

Speaker 1:

When, in my practice, we get to work on those targeted areas and use your entire self as a healing tool for you. We get to unravel the things that your body is holding. We get to repattern your nervous system. We get to let your body lead you through the healing journey. We get to come home to your body. We get to tune in. We get to work home to your body. We get to tune in. We get to work on the mind. We get to work on all the emotions that are coming up and building skills to emotionally balance and working on being a gentle witness of your inner dialogue and seeing those sort of patterns that are playing out for you mentally and intellectually that are keeping you stuck. We work on your spirit. We work on calling in a connection to spirit. We work on feeling the connection to spirit. We work on bhakti right, this practice of devotional living. When we work on life, it's the practical things like am I drinking enough water? How am I showing up and taking care of myself? Oh, how am I doing in this relationship? How can I be a better communicator? How can I be more alive and present for my experience of living this life.

Speaker 1:

Yoga can be this place where you weave every aspect of you together indirectly, by just doing it and showing up and receiving, or very directly, like getting in there. I always tell people that the kind of work we do in my one-to-one sessions is the same level of work you would do with a psychotherapist, but I have very different tools that we're using. They're yogic tools, they're somatic tools and I want you to know that whatever you're doing on your growth and healing journey, if you're following your intuition, if you're listening to that wisdom inside of you and that heart call and your body's like visceral responses to things, if you're following that inner guidance system, then you are doing amazing work. And if you're not, if you're shooting yourself, if you are outsourcing your power to something else, this is your reminder Come back and listen to that inner wisdom. And if you want to nerd out or ask questions about how yoga can help you on your growth and healing journey, I would love to chat.

Speaker 1:

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a message on Instagram, at the Nourished Woman, or on my website, kerrymarinocom, and if you're looking for deeper support, mentorship or a space to feel held. I'd love to have you join us inside the Nourished Woman Sanctuary. The beautiful music that you're hearing is from Sean Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band, and you can find them on all streaming platforms Without mystery. Welcome to the Nourished Woman Podcast, a space for women on a growth and healing journey who are ready to live more joyfully and feel deeply at home within themselves.