72: Release, Rewire & Restore with Sarah Jackson Panther

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[00:00:00] Chazmith: Hello. Welcome to Our Power Is Within Podcast. I'm your host Chazmith, and my mission for this podcast is to inspire you to take your power back and to realize that you are the healer that you've been looking for all along. If you are enjoying the content from this podcast and the guests that I've had on the show, there are a few ways that you could help support future episodes in the new year. First, you can click subscribe. On your apple or Spotify podcast app so that you have every new episode waiting for you in your library each week. Secondly, you could leave a five star rating and a review on Apple Podcast. Third, you could share your favorite episode on social media and tag me at our power is within.

And lastly, At the bottom of the show notes, you will find a link directly to a tip jar if you do feel called to support monetarily. 

Okay, now that we got the housekeeping out of the way, how did your first challenge of 2022 go? If you don't remember what that challenge was? It was all about transforming a goal to have an emotional motivation behind it.

For example, Rather than me saying I want to stop worrying about my dog's wellbeing, I now say I feel at peace trusting that I have the ability to discern what is best for cocoa each day, and I can enjoy our time together. Another example is instead of saying I want to get better at sleep, I can say I wake up feeling recharged and rejuvenated after restorative night of cozy sleep.

So if you haven't done this yet with your goals for the year or for the quarter, or however you set your goals, it is not too late. 

This week's challenge is actually my favorite. It's all about movements. Yeah, so I challenge everyone listening to move your body not only every day, but every day. And every other day and every other day after that, you get it every day.

And preferably move every day in as many ways as is currently possible for you and if you can move in different places. So I love this challenge because I love movements. And I truly believe that we were designed to be in movement and our bodies need to move. Movement literally helps us heal on so many levels.

So if you are sitting here right now telling yourself that you can't move, like saying, no, Chaz, I can't do that. I challenge you in this new year to shift that statement into a question. Of curiosity and ask yourself how can I move? How can I move more often? How can I move in more ways? How can I move in new ways?

And if movement, is it your specialty and you just don't even know where to begin or don't know what kind of movement to do, you can always join one of my weekly movement classes. You will find all the details in the show now. Speaking of movement, our guest today is Sarah Jackson Panther. Some of you might already be familiar with her work, some of you not, and this will be a really wonderful introduction.

Sarah actually has a very successful monthly class that is designed for people in the healing community that integrates somatic sensory exercises. polyvagal exercises, gentle breath, mindfulness, grounding and spiritual formation practices. 

And Sarah is here today to share with us a little bit about her healing story, what led her into the work that she's doing today, which includes supporting other people along on their journeys into wellbeing. She shares with us the different tools that she has discovered and used and thought to be valuable through her personal experience. And honestly, ultimately, I just really enjoy chatting with Sarah because she has this amazing, calm presence that I feel confident you might experience shortly here, once I turn on the interview just like I did, So I do hope that you enjoy the show and I will get into it. All right, Sarah, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here with me and everyone listening today.

[00:04:58] Sarah: I'm so glad to be here with you today, Chaz.

[00:05:05] Chazmith:Yay. Yeah,  I've actually had several people request you.

 Yeah. So I thought you should know that you're actually being requested. 

[00:05:15] Sarah: Oh that is so kind. Thank you. 

[00:05:16] Chazmith:  Yeah. And I actually, we have a I, I have a a person a beautiful, lovely woman that's actually one of your clients that also participates in my movement class. 

[00:05:26] Sarah: Oh, I love that.

Yeah. It's a small world, this healing world.

[00:05:31] Chazmith: It is. So what I thought we could do to start out is I don't know. I would like for you to start just sharing a little bit about your experience through your own healing. We don't need to get into the whole depth of the story cuz I'm pretty sure you have that online and people can seek that out if they need that testimonial.

But I know you bring a lot to the table through your experience, so you could maybe share with us what combination of tools that most supported you in your journey and why.

[00:05:57] Sarah: The brief overview of where I was at when I started finding effective tools was I had spent the better part of six years in bed with viral co-infection, mold, parasites.

We weren't ever able to rule out Lyme. I was pretty textbook for Lyme with my symptom presentation, and I had chased treatment after treatment and seen. Dozens of doctors, and there were a couple of times that I saw temporary improvement, but then my body would always go back to a baseline of illness, and eventually my body began rejecting treatments and the only thing my body could tolerate was a benzo.

So no supplements or medications. And about a year into that place of feeling totally hopeless and despairing, because my body couldn't tolerate anything that was supposed to help. I found DNRS, the dynamic neural retraining system, and spent a full year practicing that program daily. And saw really significant improvement in that first year.

Got a lot of my life back, but it's been five years since I started DNRS and I really wanted to take a much more holistic approach. I knew that this wasn't just my nervous system randomly moving to a place of impairment. It wasn't just the viruses and the mold that brought my nervous system to this place of impairment.

It was also core beliefs and grief that I was carrying and wounds, emotional and spiritual wounds that I hadn't been tended to. DNRS really serves to help signal safety to the limbic system. To help the limbic system understand that there's no present threat, and so it can relax. And as the nervous system relaxes, it moves out of hypervigilance toward regulation.

That's where the body moves into homeostasis. Where the immune system can clear infection and the body can detox and digestive system can repair. So there are a lot of different holistic ways that I wanted to be able to signal safety to my limbic system beyond. Limbic system retraining. I knew my body felt really unsafe.

I felt unsafe in my body from the years of infection and really difficult symptoms. I felt unsafe in relationships because relational trauma was a factor in my health challenges. I felt unsafe in the world, and so I started engaging. Somatic work. We call this bottom up processing it. Somatic work really uses the language of sensation, which is the language.

Your nervous system speaks to signal safety, so the body, and it uses movement to break up tension patterns to help the body release store an emotion. Your vagus nerve has. These little fibers that are like little highways that carry information from your body up to your brain, and 80% of its fibers carry information from your body up to your brain, 20%, carry information from your brain down to your body so that I knew if I could change what was going on in my body, if I could introduce relaxation to my body, my vagus nerve would take that information up to my brain and that would help signal to my brain. There's no present threat. We're okay. Limbic system retraining programs focus on what's called top-down processing. So the brain is sending messages down to the body and I knew that I wanted to tap into the fullness of my body's power to heal bottom up and top down.

So somatic work was a really important part of my healing and continues to be an important part of my life. And. I also started intentionally engaging grief work. I was blindsided at about eight months into my DNRS journey, there were just these waves of grief for everything that I had lost.

I was, I think, in a place where I had the margin to step back and survey the past years, and my body was finally in a place where it had the neurological margin to process all that emotional grief that I'd been carrying. And as I was intentional to process grief, and a lot of it was relational, I saw significant shifts in my health.

Church had begun to feel really unsafe for me, even though I love the church, and the church has been so good to me in so many ways. Also, I think as a lot of people experience in their communities and the church has no exception, there can be a feeling of abandonment in neglect when you're.

In your bed all the time and people stop showing up. And so I had to really grieve some of the failings of my church community, and as I did that, church started to feel safe again. It was for me as simple as beginning to unload that grief. And then I did EMDR to help reprocess traumatic events, and I've had a psychologist for the last 11 or 12 years.

That's a wonderful support, and I've been really intentional about the kinds of relationships that I cultivate, finding relationships that are emotionally safe. It's been a really important piece for my body to learn the safety of living in this world.

[00:11:56] Chazmith: Wow, So you've really done a lot of different tools to really help you get to the place you're at today.

[00:12:02] Sarah: I have. I've really wanted to tap into the power of the body and the soul and then for me, I'm a follower of Jesus. And nobody on this journey has cared for me like Jesus has. And so in addition to tapping into the power of my body and the power he wired into my soul, I've also wanted to invite his power of God's power into my life to teach me.

To teach me how loved I am, because that's ultimately where the body find safety is in this experience of being loved, and the ultimate experience of being loved is being loved by God.

[00:12:44] Chazmith: Yeah. Absolutely. 

And it feels like they all really had an integral role. They were all, it was very thought thoughtful in your decision of what steps to take and what to work with as far as the different modalities and tools.

They all played a really significant role in a specific they had a specific place. 

[00:13:04] Sarah: Yes. And I think so often people come to this journey and feel overwhelmed by all of the options, all of the things that we could do. And it starts to feel like all the things I should do, the stakes feel high, all the things I have to do to heal.

And the truth is, I didn't have a vision for healing. I just kept looking for the next right thing. So first it was DNRS and then I was blindsided by grief about eight months in. And so I started in very small doses to process the grief. And then at the year and a half mark, I had more capacity to really lean into that processing.

And then the next piece was, okay, what does it look like to really involve my body in this process? So it really was one layer at a time. I discovered it when I was ready for it. There is a real freedom, I think, in just being able to focus on what's in front of you and trusting that you'll have insight for the next step when it's time to take the next step.

[00:13:59] Chazmith: That key word, trusting. Yes. Yeah, and my guess is that your relationship with God had really probably was a really important factor that helped you trust, because there’s a layer of surrender and trust that comes through that relationship. And I think that trusting is a huge thing because it's, we get sidetracked and overwhelmed by all these different options and not knowing which direction we want to go if we don't really just allow the process to unfold.

[00:14:28] Sarah: Yeah, and that trust piece is I think, a central heartache for a lot of people on their journey where. The relationship with our own body feels ruptured.

The relationship we have with ourself feels ruptured. There's so much shame that we can feel when our ability to participate in life is stripped away, and we feel like we have so little to offer our relationships with other people can feel ruptured, right? The weight of illness is heavy on a relationship, and there can also be a real spiritual disorientation where it feels like that trust in God is ruptured because he allows.

Such painful, relentless suffering. And so for me, the first few years of my healing journey really was before I ever found DNRSA wrestling with what does it look like to trust God? I had always knew known God as someone who gives out of his sort of blessing bank account, but what did it look like to love him for him when maybe that bank account, he He wasn't offering to me what I wanted from that bank account.

He was offering something better. And that was intimacy with him and understanding that I am loved, not because I have things to offer. I'm loved because I'm loved. But there was a real wrestling. There's a, we can know God through the person of Jesus. And we can look at the life of Jesus to understand what God is like.

And also there's a lot of mystery that thankfully he's not someone whose character, we can't plumb the depths of his character. We can't know everything. We can't wrap our minds around him. And I'm glad that he's big enough that we can't wrap our minds around him. But that mystery, the mystery we confront in suffering is really hard.

And so much of trust, I think is a practice long before we feel the trust. It's a practice of trusting him and the feeling comes with time and practice. But you're right, Chaz, that was, it's like I always say with any sort of trauma recovery, Relationship loving, safe relationship is the container within which we use the tools.

Tools are just tools and what matters is how we use the tools. So there's this loving relationship we learn to have with ourselves and our own bodies. It's gonna utterly transform the way we use the tools. But God's love for us is really what teaches us how to love ourselves and our own bodies. And so his, our relationship with him ends up being the container of all containers within which we learn to use these tools with love.

[00:17:15] Chazmith: Beautifully said. I have a question. Yes. You said you did DNRs for about 12 months before you started peeling back more layers. Did you find in your personal experience that once you started peeling back other layers and working on the grief the grief, healing and the somatic work integration.

Did you continue doing DNRS or did you let the intensity of that practice, 

[00:17:39] Sarah: Subside? Yeah, Initially the intensity of the practice subsided. I will use principles of DNRS my whole life. I think they're really powerful principles for anyone with a nervous system. Yeah. And simultaneously the last several years for me have been marked by a lot of trauma.

Right? Life continues and there have been some uniquely hard traumatic challenges. And so there have been seasons where I have returned. To DN r s in its fullness. That was really helpful. Yeah, so that's our short answer to that question. It's always there. It's always a tool that's an option for when life presents hard things.

[00:18:27] Chazmith: Yeah. Absolutely. So what are some of your to dates daily type of like rituals or self-care routines or just practices that you regularly still engage to sustain and maintain this level of wellbeing that you seek?

[00:18:45] Sarah: I think the central practice is one of attunement of learning to attune to the state of my nervous system and attuned to the state of my soul.

And attunement is a really relational word, right? This is what we first ideally experience with a good mom who's attuning to our cries as an infant and trying to discern what they mean and how she can care for us. And so a big part of the healing journey, whether healing from. Chronic illness and the trauma of chronic illness, or you're recovering from other kinds of trauma, is to understand the messages that your nervous system is sending you to be checking in with the nervous system, not from a place of hyper-vigilant body scanning, but from a place of curious, loving attention so that if the nervous system starts crying out, there's not a turning away, an abandoning I think that's one of the reasons a lot of people end up crashing and burning into a pit of illness is there's a, I think a real cultural model of ignoring the body's limitations and needs.

Limitations are a nuisance. They're even shameful, right? We're a just do it, do more culture. We value people, celebrate people who are self-made and self-sufficient, and there's a lot of shame culturally in. What we might label excessive limitation. And so there can be a real tendency to blast past the body's limitation and discard the body's basic needs for rest and love.

And I think unfortunately, sometimes limbic system retraining programs can inadvertently perpetuate this practice. The sense that we need to turn away from the body because it's. It is important to stop obsessing over symptoms that feels very threatening to the limbic system. We wanna stop doing that, but there's a way of doing that still involves a turning toward the body with love, when it has need, and when it's making the window of tolerance.

As DNRS calls it, the training zone, when it's making that really clear, we wanna listen and work with the body not against it. So attuning to my body, attuning to the different states of the nervous system. There are different survival states that require different kinds of care. So there's a fight or flight state of activation that we're all familiar with.

There's the adrenaline. It's the feeling of being in danger. This is a state of mobilization where the body wants to move you to safety. This is where emotions can feel amplified, like anger. This is where irritability can set in and the story that feels true in this state is. I have got to do something about this now or else.

But there are two other nervous system states when that fight or flight energy starts to feel overwhelming to the body will move into freeze. And dorsal vagal shut down. Dorsal vagal shut down is where the nervous system literally does begin to shut down. It's an analgesic. So if you think about.

If an antelope gets caught by a lion it's gonna go into this state of shutdown where there's less blood flow to the brain, into the muscle so that it can't feel pain quite as much. And in this state, we also can't feel emotional pain. So there's a sense of being disconnected from our emotions and our bodies disassociating sometimes feeling really fit.

Fatigued, like that lead weight, like that lethargy can't move. The story that feels true end dorsal vagal shutdown is, I can't, I'm overwhelmed. I don't have what it takes. And then freeze is the state. That's a combination of fight or flight, dorsal vagal shutdown. So these equal opposite forces. So in this state, the body wants to move you towards safety, but it can't.

And we wanna tend to the body differently. Dorsal, vagal shutdown then we would fight or flight and fight or flight. One of the focuses is discharging that survival energy. If we're safe, we don't actually need it, we don't actually need to run or fight. So we can discharge that and that's what somatic practice will help us do.

But in a state of freeze or dorsal, vagal, shut down a state of immobilization, we wanna introduce really gentle movement to help wake the body up to help mobilize the body. So it's really helpful for me to be aware if there are triggers throughout the day of what's happening in my nervous system so I can respond appropriately, not just with somatics, but with the way that I talk to myself, the way that I the thoughts that I focus on.

And then there's a turning toward and attuning to what's happening in my soul. I think one of the practices that I had begun to engage bef without my awareness, it was just a habit of the heart that I didn't know I was engaging before I got sick, was distracting from painful emotions like grief and really big anger.

But I've come to understand that these emotions are information, they're really powerful information to help us understand our needs and our wounds in the moment. And so when I feel those things turning toward an and exploring with God, who knows me better than I know myself, what's going on here? What are my needs?

What do I need relationally, emotionally, physically, being able to care for myself? Let me think. The container within which I engage this practice of attunement really is trying to be open and attentive to the way God is in every moment attuning to me and my need and advocating for me and drawing there so that I can imitate that as I practice attuning to myself.

[00:24:29] Chazmith: It sounds like you have a great deal of self-awareness and self-compassion.

[00:24:33] Sarah: I think that is some of the fruit that I'm getting to taste after years of practice. I think probably the self-awareness is something that, Started. That was the starting point, right? We become curious observers. We sit in the grandstand of our inner being and we observe our thoughts, our feelings, our physical sensations tumble about on the field, and we just observe.

And that curious observation really is the precursor to. The compassion. When we can step back and look more objectively at what we're suffering the way we would with a dear friend or a child, that's when the compassion arrives. And so I'm so grateful. It was my psychologist who helped me begin that process of curiously observing that changed everything for me.

That and curiosity moves us away from criticism and condemnation, right? Toward compassion.

[00:25:38] Chazmith: yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Beautifully said. 

In your experience as a coach, cuz you've, how long have you been coaching now since you got about three years. Okay. Three years in, through this experience and having the background and personal experience in these different tools what do you find most supports people in their healing?

Do you think there's like a recipe or is it really unique to the individual? 

[00:26:00] Sarah: I think it's both and it is always unique to the individual. Everybody's story is different. Everybody's wounding is different. Everybody's bodies are different and simultaneously. There's this experience that I think everyone has.

I had it. Every client I've worked with has had it. It's this feeling like my issues are different. My issues are so big and so complicated that I am outside the reach of healing. Healing is possible for everyone else but me. And so there's this whole set of challenges that we all bring in and we all feel so alone in it.

And so now I can see as I've gotten to work with hundreds of people intimately, oh, we all struggle with these same issues of despair and doubt and feeling like everyone else will heal, but us feeling like the process of feeling is taking too long. We all deal with shame feeling, inadequate feeling We feel grief.

We all deal with resistance to using the tools and to healing. And I think we all, to a degree who have suffered trauma, feel unsafe in the world and in relationships and in our own bodies. So there are some principles that I think ring true for everyone. As a coach, and the first is just something I've already mentioned, that relationship safe relationship is the container within which we learn to use the tools and we heal.

And so a safe relationship with the coach is of course, foundational place where you can feel seen and share things that you might normally be embarrassed about, but still feel loved and accepted. I think in the West a lot of our trauma is relational. It's not necessarily shock trauma and I think in other developing countries, if a grenade goes off or in, and it's truly just about energy in the body that needs to be discharged if you were present for that experience.

But with relational trauma, it's not just about releasing. The traumatic survival energy. It's not just about re patterning the nervous system with our somatic and cognitive tools. It is about learning, safety and relationship because the limbic system is so relational. So that's a big piece. I think along those lines, for everyone.

Environmental safety is a really important part of healing that's necessary for the body to feel safe so that it can move back into homeostasis. So in central environmental safety really is our relationships, the people around us, our community, and I think there are two things that people start to do as they heal.

Maybe they were doing it before, but they lean in with more intentionality. One is learning to create boundaries that really keep out the toxic and invite in the good that help protect the body's window of tolerance and honor the image of God in them. I believe that all of us were created in the image of God, and there's inherent dignity and boundaries.

Help us to honor that. But then also there's a discerning process of recognizing the friends that are not willing to abide by boundaries, the friends who aren't willing to be a present and safe support. And so there can be a winnowing process, a sifting process, or there are friendships that are lost or that change, and then there's a new intentionality in the kinds of friendships we cultivate.

So that's one thing that I'll also explore with clients. And then, Of course, a big piece is finding safety with ourselves and in our own bodies, and central to this process is learning to use our power of choice in ways that usher and healing trauma really is the experience of being helpless and stuck, right?

If you have two people that experience the same thing, You can have one that's traumatized and the other that's not, and it's not because one is like mentally weaker. What happens is your survival brain, which is functioning without your conscious awareness, it. It will step back and survey this scenario.

And if your survival brain feels like it has options, feels like it has resources to move you to safety, to get you away from threat then you're not gonna be traumatized. But if it feels like it's lacking the resources and the choices to move you to safety, that's where traumatization happens. And in that state of traumatization, which everybody with chronic illness has, there's a perpetual feeling of lacking options and of being stuck and helpless, and it's a feeling that the body is signaling that to the conscious mind. And so part of healing is learning to step back and think bigger than we feel. Identifying our power of choice, even when there are limited options.

Still looking for the choices we do have. And using those choices to affect change in the body in the moment, to introduce that experience of safety, that's central. And then as I've mentioned, learning safety with God. I have a really spiritually diverse community, people f different faith communities.

But I do have a lot of clients that come to me because they feel They feel unsafe with God. They feel unsafe with God because of their ongoing suffering, and they're wondering why he's allowing it. And so there is a real, a journey that I get to support clients on as they explore what. What is God and what might he be doing in this hard thing, and what does it look like to trust him and to experience his love, even in the midst of this darkness?

I think those are probably the core things that all of us need, and then each person in a sense, There's different tools or modalities that can support them through those needs.

[00:32:21] Sarah: Exactly. So these are the framing principles. These are foundational. And then for each person There will be an individual approach to what's working for you.

What a common challenge that people experience is when they go to use a tool, the tool can trigger some sort of story around it, like a grief story. So one of the DNRStools to help rehabilitate the hippocampus and awaken implicit bodily memories of health and happiness. And introduce safety is these memory visualizations where you'll enter a memory and relive it as if a happy memory and relive it as if it's happening in the present moment.

And for a lot of people the happy memories trigger a grief story. The happy memories seem to highlight all they've lost, and so there can be real resistance to the tools. So for each person, it's a matter of. Exploring that resistance, tending to it, moving through it, finding the tools that feel like the best fit for their temperament, the rhythms of practice that feel like the best fit for their temperament, and then noting what are the body's needs.

A big part of somatic practice is breaking up tension patterns in the body, introducing relaxation so that the vagus nerve can carry that information up to the brain. And everybody's tension patterns are different, and so the somatic work can look different also.

[00:33:56] Chazmith: That brings me to the question I wanted to ask you actually, about your class that you have monthly called Release, rewire and Restore.

I was wondering how you came up with the different modalities that you use in the class, but also, so yeah, just who it's ideal for and, anything you wanna just, that you feel passionate about. Since it's a class that you've designed, that I have heard from other friends is a very highly sought class, like very successful.

[00:34:26] Sarah: I am. I, this class is such a fun development. I started teaching in March of this year and. I just love the community that has developed, excuse me, around this class. I think this class, like my coaching approach originated from my own experience of illness, which can feel really dehumanizing and degrading, so there are these doctors who poke and probe and can often overlook your emotional experience as a human and. And so it can be this sense of being treated like a body, just a body. It can feel like an inadvertent objectification, though I'm sure that's not the intention. And then I think in religious communities and spiritual communities, there can be a tendency to overlook the body in favor of the soul dismissing its needs, dishonoring its limitations.

And so I really want to give people safe places to be a whole human, where every part of you matters. And not only does every part of you matter, but every part of you has power wired into it by God that we can use to heal. Your body and your soul, your mind and your heart. And so that's what this class is intended to do.

We want to turn toward ourselves with love. We want to work with our bodies, with compassion, and we wanna do it in this. Greater container of the presence of God at work with us and the exercises that we do. We've got, we work a lot with sensation because sensation is the language of the nervous system, so we might call those somatic sensory exercises.

We do polyvagal exercises for vagus nerve health, gentle movements to break up tension patterns, and then we open and close with the spiritual formation practice. That's grounded in Christian, ancient Christian tradition. Open with a prayer and close with a blessing, and it is a diverse, spiritually diverse community that comes to this class.

I love that. I love that we can all come together and do this. And I think that it is for anyone with a body, it's anyone who stores stress in the body, who experiences hard things. And this is all of us to a degree. And I also. Develop the class with those who are in bed in mind, those who have chronic and visible illness with the window of tolerance that's smaller, so that almost all of our practices can be done lying down or seated.

It's very gentle practice. 

[00:37:18] Chazmith: That sounds really beautiful. And you mentioned that you have a diverse group of spiritual people that come into this community. So if there is anyone who's listening who does consider themselves spiritual but not practicing per se, religion there's still a space for them.

[00:37:32] Sarah: There's a space for you. Welcome. And I always say in my class, if you have. A different set of spiritual convictions than I do, than I just offer this, prayer to you as a blessing. Everybody is welcome.

[00:37:52] Chazmith: That's good to know. And on a, in your personal practice, are you only coaching people who are in a brain retraining program or also people  who are not?

[00:38:05] Sarah:I work with both. I have a lot of clients who are doing a brain retraining program and there are quite a number of programs represented among my clients. And then there are those who are not doing a brain retraining program. And often when I'm working with someone, it becomes clear that a brain retraining program would be helpful.

And so they might end up practicing that. But a lot of people come to me because they're overwhelmed and they don't know where to start, and they just wanna start somewhere. Yeah. So I'm able to come alongside them and help them explore, cut through all of the clutter and on the noise to what feel like the core challenges for you right now, and what are the resources we can look at to help you tend to those.

[00:38:52] Chazmith: That makes sense. And do you tend to have mostly Christian clients that gravitate towards you? Do you also in, in your personal coaching space, have a diverse array of belief systems?  

Sarah: It's very diverse.

[00:39:06] Chazmith: That's very great. That's really awesome that, cuz some people, you're, you mentioned it somewhere, there's sometimes some people who have a resistance when they s hear anyone talk about anything that could be deemed religious. So to be open to whatever and to be able to feel supported by a coach, regardless of if there's a slight difference in the belief systems, a really awesome thing. Cause like you said, we need that safe relationship.

[00:39:29] Sarah: Exactly. That's, that is. Foundational if, and that's where, finding a coach that's a good fit is such an important process. Somebody where you do feel safe and you do feel heard, and you do feel equipped and you can have a great coach and not feel that way because it's, sometimes I think of, dating where you go on a date and it's this is a great person, but not feeling the, not feeling like it's a great fit.

Looking for that great fit and listening to your body. How does your body respond? Does your body respond with. A sigh of release. Or is there a clenching and a constricting that can be a helpful guide as you're looking for a coach. 

[00:40:12] Chazmith: That's such a good point. Yeah. That is so important.

So I have heard that you're working on a new program. Outside of just your one day, a month class and your personal private coaching practice. 

[00:40:27] Sarah: Yes, Chaz, I am so excited. This has grown up out of my coaching and the class that I teach each month, and it's a holistic healing toolkit called Restore.

That's coming in January, and this will have a couple of components. The class is included in this program, so there are two different times each month that I offered the class, and I'll add more times as I'm able and then of course, class recordings. But there will also be a video library with resources for somatic practice. There will be folders or shelves in this video library. If you find that you're in a state of activation of fight or flight as you're attuning to your nervous system, and being able to click on that folder and pick a video, and I will guide you through a practice to help you discharge that mobilizing energy.

Or if you feel like you're in a state of dorsal vagal shutdown or freeze, you'll be able to click that. Folder and find a video practice that can help you. There will be resources for limbic system retraining. My approach to limbic system retraining was as I started at the beginning, so much more holistic and so I want to help people fill in the gaps of system retraining programs. What does it look like to turn towards your grief with love and allow yourself to process grief in small doses that keep you in your window of tolerance as opposed to just ignoring it and treating it like a neural pathway of the past that we want to eliminate, like grief is natural and healthy, and what does it look like to do this in conjunction with our program?

What does it look like to integrate somatic practice so that we're using the bottom up capacities of our body, the power of sensation and movement to rewire the brain and to use that in concert with the limbic system retraining program. There will be visualizations. To help people as they're doing their own limbic system, retraining trauma education with trauma skills for, or trauma recovery skills, we hope is that it will be a one stop hub for people to start to take a more holistic approach to their healing.

And then there will be forums where. People can explore different topics without the triggers of Facebook. Forums, where people are. It can feel like doom and gloom. Sometimes in those forum people are talking about their symptoms and how hard the journey's been, and so I want to create a space where people can come and ask questions that I can answer.

And feel supported and encouraged and then members of Restore will have access to group coaching classes. I'm gonna be doing some limbic system, retraining group coaching in the new year to help people take a more holistic approach, understand their program, and fill in the gaps.

[00:43:30] Chazmith: Is this a like a monthly membership where people can pay ongoing?

[00:43:33] Sarah: It's a monthly membership, so there's the option of paying monthly and then you could pay for a year at a time and get two months free. Oh, okay. 

[00:43:42] Chazmith: And they're in, within this membership, it sounds like they'll have access to you to be able to check in with you or communicate with you.

[00:43:49] Sarah: Yes. So that's where the form will be a help.

And then the classes that I will be teaching each month that members can come to so that they, cause of course, the more that you. Engage these different healing modalities, the more questions arise. Yeah. So being able to ask questions and then of course the group coaching classes are a place to have even more access to be able to ask those individualized questions in a much smaller group context.

[00:44:27] Chazmith: That sounds really awesome.

[00:44:27] Sarah: Thank you, Chaz. I'm excited about it. I really am. This is something I've been putting my heart and soul into and I love that I'm getting to use my experience as a coach and sort of the core issues that I see people dealing with and my experience teaching this class and merged them into this toolkit that will help.

Hopefully help people move further up and further in on this healing journey.

[00:44:56] Chazmith: It sounds too like it will really be for anybody so anyone who's out there that already takes your monthly class, this is probably gonna be a good fit.

[00:45:02] Sarah: Yes. And for the Christians in my community, Who are often asked me, what does it look like to more intentionally integrate spiritual practices, Christian practices to my journey?

There will be a folder with imaginative. Practices that are a wonderful compliment to brain rewiring that will have the benefit of rewiring the brain, but also opening the soul to the healing work of God and discerning how he is inviting us to participate with him in the work that he's doing in our lives.

So I'm really excited about that folder for those who would also be interested or that shelf in the video library because I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of goodness and power there.

[00:45:48] Chazmith: That’s awesome. So I have one final question. If you could only share one message with the world for the rest of your life, what would that message be?

[00:45:58] Sarah: Oh, I love this question, Chaz. I want people to know you are loved by a personal relational God who wants you to know the worth of your soul. And the goodness of your body who will draw near to you in the darkness. No, darkness is too dark for him. He can transfigure it all into light and he's in the business of turning, scarcity into abundance.

I was thinking last night. As I was considering this question about Jesus' first miracle. His first miracle is at a wedding and they run out of wine, which would've been a social embarrassment. It's like the guests show up and you don't have enough for them. And Jesus' mom comes to him and says, can you do something about this?

And so this is the miracle that's gonna set the scene for his whole life in ministry. Not his whole life, his whole ministry, and he turns water into wine. And what this miracle shows us is he moves things from scarcity to abundance. That's what he does. That for me, my experience was I was in bed, I. Often, all I could do was breathe and blink.

I had nothing to offer him but my heart, and he gave me more of himself. And that was abundance I had never tasted before. Getting more of God was so much better than more of work or more of exercise, more of the things that I had lost. So as he meets with us in the darkness, he wants to move things from a place of scarcity to abundance, and.

You know the second piece of this that I was thinking about last night, there's this amazing story where there's a big crowd of thousands of people who follow Jesus because they want to hear him teach and people are getting hungry, and one of Jesus' disciples says, listen, this is a desolate place. We should just move on from here.

Let these people go home and eat. And Jesus says no, wait. Essentially, let me show you what I'm gonna do in a desolate place. Let me show you what I can do in desolate places. And there's a boy who's got a few fish and a few loaves of bread, and he brings them to Jesus and Jesus multiplies them and he feeds thousands of people with this small little lunch against scarcity to abundance.

And then, There are leftovers. There are these keeping piles of leftovers, and Jesus turns to his disciples and he says, let nothing go to waste. Remember I read that a few years ago and it struck me. That Jesus is not one to let something of value, sit and rot. And if he cares about these scraps of food, how much more must he care about your life, about the broken pieces, the crumbs of your life?

He wants to turn them into a feast of abundance. He's not gonna let anything go to waste. These are the promises that he offers us in the darkness. I care so much about physical healing and relief, but it's that spiritual healing that has brought me the most joy and hope and restoration and. That is what I long for everyone to to taste and see.

You are loved by a God who wants to teach you the worth of your soul and the goodness of your body. I love that. Thank you for sharing that.

[00:49:40] Chazmith: I love that. Thank you for sharing that. 

 Sarah: Thank you for asking. 

Chazmith: Do you have any final thoughts or just anything you wanna share that I maybe didn't ask you? 

[00:49:46] Sarah:  You know what I'm realizing I didn’t share with you where to find Restore.

So my website is www.sarahjacksonpanther.com where you can learn more and you can find me on social media, Instagram, that same handle, Sarah Jackson Panther and Facebook, Sarah Jackson Panther, and YouTube.

So those are places to connect. For those who are interested in learning more about the, I'll still be offering the class. It's generally the second Sunday of the month to those who are not part of Restore, and then those who are part of Restore will have access to that class as well as the second class and then the toolkit itself.

[00:50:40] Chazmith: Awesome. Thank you so much for remembering that. And there'll be links for all of that good stuff in the show notes as well. 

[00:50:46] Sarah: Wonderful. Thank you Chaz.

[00:50:50] Chazmith: Yeah absolutely. I really appreciate your time today, your energy and your willingness to just show up and share. The wisdom that you've gained along this journey. 

[00:50:59] Sarah:Thank you for having me. It was a delight to talk with you this morning.

[00:51:06] Chazmith: All right, so that was Sarah Jackson Panther. What are your thoughts? How are you feeling right now? Do you feel calmer, more regulated? 

Do you know someone who could benefit from Sarah's message today? If so, please do not forget to share it with that person.

Do you have a story that maybe you wanna share? You wanna share the wisdom that you've gained along the way in your experience of growing, of healing, and of becoming. If so, please reach out to me and let's connect. Also, maybe you have a request for someone specific that you would like to hear on the show.

Let me know that as well, and I will do my best to connect with that person and bring them on. I would really love the year 2022 to be as interactive with everyone listening as possible. Let's see. Do not forget. Please give yourself the gift of movement every day in all the ways possible for you.

And until next time, as always, make the week great. I'm your host, Chazmith.