What if one of the most radical acts we can perform is simply being in our bodies?
In this episode of Witches Found, I sit down with somatic practitioner, dancer, and ritualist Lise Lønsmann to explore how embodiment is not only a deeply personal journey but a political and spiritual reclamation. Together, we unravel the many threads that connect somatic awareness, trauma healing, witchcraft, and resistance.
Disconnection is a System Feature, Not a Personal Failing
Lise reminds us that disconnection from the body isn’t a personal flaw — it’s a strategy encouraged by systems that benefit from our numbness. Patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy: these systems thrive when we are too dissociated to feel our needs, too rushed to notice our boundaries, too depleted to organize.
“Scaring us into not feeling our bodies is helpful for the system of patriarchy — because then we stay frozen.”
Coming back to the body — slowly, gently, with non-judgment — becomes an act of sacred rebellion. It’s not always dramatic. Often it begins with something as simple as taking a longer breath. Sitting in silence for a moment longer than usual. Letting yourself feel joy while watching the sunset. This is somatic resourcing.
Lise’s Journey: From Disconnection to Somatic Healing
Although she was known as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, Lise shares candidly that her early relationship with her body was shaped more by perfectionism and performance than true presence. It wasn’t until a cancer scare at age 40 that she slowed down enough to listen deeply. The experience — terrifying and clarifying — became a catalyst for transformation.
“I remember walking through the halls of the hospital and being like: if this is the time I have, what will I do?”
That question, grounded in the body’s truth, reshaped her entire life. She began training in somatics, first as a client, then as a practitioner, and now she supports others in gently coming home to themselves — not through force, but through curiosity and care.
What is Somatic Resourcing?
One of the most powerful lessons from our conversation is this: you don’t start by trying to “fix” yourself. You start by building safety. In Lise’s words, “Somatics is so different from everything else. It is a practice of showing up constantly for the little things.”
Somatic resourcing means noticing what actually fills you up — not what you should do, but what truly makes you feel alive. Hug your child. Do a puzzle. Sit in the sun. Take five extra minutes to cook your favourite meal. These acts may seem small, but they’re revolutionary because they run counter to systems that want us productive, disconnected, and burned out.
Healing as a Witch’s Practice
Lise’s somatic work is steeped in magic — not as escape, but as a co-creative process rooted in presence.
“To me, witchcraft is really about coming back to: Are there things I can do? How do I change this? How do I co-create? How do I bring ME into this context?”
Her rituals are embodied. Her magic begins in the flesh, the breath, the nervous system. It’s about reclaiming agency. Slowing down. Listening not to what the world demands of you, but what your body is whispering beneath the noise.
For Those on the Path
If you’ve ever felt disconnected from your body, if you’ve struggled with trauma, perfectionism, survival mode — this episode is for you. You’re not alone. You’re not broken. You’re living in a system that profits from your disembodiment.
But you can begin to listen. Gently. Slowly. With kindness. With breath.
Tune in to hear more from Lise’s incredible story and the transformative potential of somatic healing, here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lise Lønsmann is a trauma-informed somatic healing practitioner and an embodiment mentor. Lise has been guiding movement and body connection for 25+ years, and her healing work is deeply rooted in the wisdom of the body as well as a holistic approach to healing and thriving. The foundation of her embodiment
work is gentleness and reconnecting with oneself in self-supportive ways.
Lise teaches embodiment practices and strategies to heartled women who want to learn to navigate life and relationships from embodied wisdom and knowing, so they can better honour their needs, boundaries, and capacity and root deeply into their most authentic Self.
She guides her clients to start a gentle conversation with their body and tune into the guidance and the answers it is holding. She supports them in healing old inner wounds and creating safety in the body and inner world, so they can start rebuilding and transforming their relationship with themselves, others, and the
world into one of deep connection, trust, and aliveness.
Lise supports her clients through online somatic trauma healing sessions and online embodiment circles.
She is a lover of circles, rituals, and intentional community and lives in Aarhus, Denmark.
Lise’s Slow Mailing List: www.liseloensmann.com/mailinglist
Lise’s website: www.liseloensmann.com
Lise’s Instagram: www.instagram.com/liseloensmannhealing
Lise’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liseloensmann
Transcript
Witches Found: Lise Lonseman - Reconnecting with Aliveness to Smash the Patriarchy
Lise: When we're connected with our aliveness, we go out and smash the patriarchy, which is why scaring us into not feeling our bodies, is helpful for the system of patriarchy because then we stay frozen. Embodied rituals, reconnecting with aliveness,
it's absolutely a sacred process.
You aren't being a proper woman. Therefore, you must be a witch. Be a witch. Witch, witch, witch. Witch. A witch. You must be a witch.
[00:00:28] Welcoming Our Special Guest: Lise Losemann
Risa: Welcome witches. Welcome deep breaths. Welcome, rainy day, gray sky. Welcome all the pollen in the air and welcome especially to our guest today, somatic practitioner, longtime choreographer and dancer, someone who's been helping me in such a kind and profound way. Let me just welcome Lise Lonsemann.
Welcome. How are you Also, who are you today with the caveat as usual that we're not obliged to be the same person we were five minutes ago. I.
Lise: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. I've really been looking forward to this conversation. I appreciate deep conversation and spaces that hold deep conversation, so thank you for offering that.
I am also a tiny bit tired, and there's pollen in the air, so I'm. Sneezy and sniffly, and I also feel really tuned in because yeah, I'm here for, I'm here for this talk. I feel grounded.
Risa: Thanks for sharing. A good example of being willing to sort of be in our bodies first.
I find that. Hard.
[00:01:48] The Revolutionary Act of Being in Our Bodies
Risa: It's something that I've worked on a lot, but it's such exciting space for thinking about magic and activism and art practice and calling in the world we wanna be in. And it's sort of counterintuitive to be like, in my body to try to work into the world. Can you talk about why that is?
Why does being in our body feel so revolutionary somehow?
Lise: Love that question. My short answer would be patriarchy, because we've been taught not to be in our bodies. It is revolutionary because it's. The opposite of everything we see and feel around us. The expression of coming home to our bodies is often very connected with deep longing and you know, a journey of not being in our bodies.
People might think that someone like me holding space for body work must be like such an embodied person must have such a deep history with being in the body, which is partly true. And also I came to this work 'cause I'm an expert in disconnection in not being in my body, in running away in dissociating.
I think that's why it feels so revolutionary is because most of us live very mind based and the body is often something foreign that we don't understand. A lot of us are afraid of the body, afraid of connecting because it feels like there are things here we don't know how to handle, how to meet. And again, this is a lot less about us and a lot more about the systems around us.
I'm sure there are other. Times in history where we were a lot more in our body all the time. I'm sure there are other cultures than the one I'm living in, where people are more in their bodies. Checking in with yourself, being present, being slow moving, being in nature is part of everyday life, whereas in western culture, it's something we have to earn and find little pockets of being with the body on our to-do list.
So it's a different kind of relationship with the body. So that's why coming into. Embodiment practices being present in our body. Actually checking in with ourselves can feel so big and so revolutionary because it's just so different from everything most of us have been taught.
Risa: Can you talk about how you started to notice that you had a relationship with your body that you wanted to change, and how we can notice, I think some of us don't even notice that we're not noticing our bodies to borrow an expression of yours that you use in your work. Can we notice what we're noticing?
Lise: Hmm. Yes. Notice what we're noticing.
[00:04:34] Lisa's Journey to Embodiment
Lise: How did I start to notice?
I think. There's a two part answer there. Intuitively, I've kind of always known, but I've absolutely not had the language for it. I started dancing when I was 11, danced all the time when I was a teenager, wanted to be a dancer, never became one, but moved into teaching choreographing. And through all of that, I was kind of known.
Like in my circles of friends and students of like a, a dancing person, right? And I would assume that a person dancing would be in their body. Looking back, I'm like, I absolutely was not. And I can see how many of my students and colleagues were not. We were dancing and moving to have a way of being in the body, but we didn't have the language to say, this is what I'm longing for.
Help me practice this. So. In that way. I knew there was some disconnection, but I couldn't put it into words. I had no idea that it had to do with trauma. I knew nothing about the nervous system. I didn't look at my relationship with my body as a healing one. If nothing had interrupted that, I think it would've just continued on that forever and been like, sure, I'm such a dancey person.
I'm such a body connected person without actually being in the body. Getting older had something to do with it After teaching, I started teaching dance and movement when I was 17. At that point, I would argue most of us are not really that connected with our body because of our culture. I had a quite panicky relationship with my body at that time, and my relationship with dancing was very perfectionist, which matched the people around me very.
Striving to reach goals and what can I make my body do and I wanna get better at this, so very. Yeah, about how things looked and how to perform. And then as I got older and had been teaching for about 15, 18 years, a part of me was like, there must be more. I can't keep teaching the same kind of repetitive student copying the teacher, which is very western, traditional kind of dance teaching.
And I was slowly moving into. More embodiment without really knowing that that was the way I was going. And that really clicked for me, working with students who were older, who wanted to go deeper. I changed my structure from teaching in front of the class with everyone around me looking at my back and copying me to standing in a circle.
And that really changed the whole dynamic of how we were relating to each other. How we were relating to. The movement, the body work, how we were speaking to each other. That was the beginning of my embodiment journey. The thing that really clicked it into place for me was a cancer scare about five years ago.
That intuitively clicked me into exactly the thing you mentioned, which was body first. I was 40, right? So there was the awareness of landing in the cancer scare with shit. This is real. Like there's no time. Two waste here. So I clicked into a slower pace for the first time in my life of just deeply listening to what are the next steps, what is needed?
And this could be real, like this could be the end of my life, right? Thankfully it wasn't, it was just a scare. It was months of symptoms and, you know, exams and, and operation and, and it just clicked me into listening to my body in a way that. I hadn't before. So that led me to somatics first as a client, doing somatic healing with a practitioner, and then into doing the training and taking that with me into my professional practice.
[00:08:40] Somatic Practices and Resourcing
Risa: And for folks listening, are there practices or. Movements or thought experiments that can help us start to question our relationship with our body.
When
Lise: you say question, what do you mean exactly there?
Risa: Yeah. I guess what I mean is like, you know, you identified that there was times in your life where you, you wouldn't have said that you were detached from your body. You were living a very physical life. I think for a lot of us we're going fast, trying to survive, hustling hard, maybe squeezing in a fucking YouTube workout.
Whenever we can without having to get to the point of cancer. Is there a way of checking in to start to notice, am I numb or detached in some way? Am I not listening somehow? That's what I mean by questioning in.
Lise: Interesting. You brought up so many things there. Survival. One of the really important core practices of the way I approach somatics is non-judgment, rather than saying.
Am I listening, which can be a judgment of like, I'm probably not, so probably should be, which can feel like pressure if someone is like, listen, start listening now. Right? Our body is kind of in the same way. When I start working one-on-one with someone in sessions, the first thing I start with is not listening.
Because if we've lived a whole life not listening to our body, we can't just start listening. That somatics is very different from talk therapy, so we don't go straight to talking to the thing that is painful. Someone might come in and say, it's really painful for me. I feel like I'm not listening to my body.
I. Don't listen to my boundaries. I don't know when someone else is overstepping them or I'm overworking, or my days are too long or I'm running too fast. We don't go straight to that. The first thing I do is work on what's called somatic resourcing, doing things that help us be connected with the body before we start practicing the listening.
This could be. Anything. It could be movement, it can be going into nature, it can be yoga. Some of the things a lot of us are already doing, but if we are doing them without an awareness of the body, without us slowing down, if we're ticking them off, it's like, I need to do the daily walk. I need to do my breath work.
I need to do the thing. If we're doing it with that. Intention, there's a different connection with the body. Whereas if we allow ourselves to slow down and notice what are the things that actually fill me up, and they might be quote unquote silly things, right? They might be things like doing puzzles, for example.
That might be like, oh, I think it's more important to go for the daily work because I should do that. And then puzzles I can do if I have the time. That's the mind and the conditioning of like, this is how we schedule our days. Right? Whereas part of listening to the body, for example, can be noticing what makes me happy, what makes me joyful, can I do more of that?
It might be very simple things like hugging your child or watching a sunset. Things that you might already be doing. I. So the invitation for when I work with new clients is how can you deepen that? Can you stay two minutes longer with the sunset? Can you breathe in the air on a spring day and pause for a moment in your busy day before you move on to the next to do thing?
Can you slow down? Can you connect with things? It can be. Looking at flowers, it can be making your favorite thing for dinner. It can be having a conversation with a good friend, but really noticing, how do I take it in? How does it land in my heart? How does it land in my body? What is making me feel alive?
So mad at its core is about aliveness. Noticing what makes me feel alive in my body, not just what the culture has taught me that I should do. To survive. Mm-hmm. So aliveness as I see it, is the opposite of survival. When we're in survival mode, we don't think about aliveness. We don't prioritize aliveness.
That doing that puzzle or taking five extra minutes to play with our kids is not in our priority list because it's not what we have been taught. So shifting that, which is the shift that happened for me with the cancer scare, and I completely agree with you, I wish for all of us that we don't need something big as a cancer scare.
And for a lot of us, it takes something big like that to shake us out, to disrupt the freeze response of not noticing. What's happening in our body, not noticing how we are feeling about things. So the good thing for me was that it shook me outta my usual pattern and it awoke me to noticing the little things, noticing how I remember myself walking through the halls of the hospital because there were so many exams, and it's a huge hospital, so I had to walk around a lot.
I remember slowing down, just walking slower and being like, if this is the time you have. What will I do for the next six months? It wasn't from a stressful point of like, how do I fill the days? It was, if this is truly my time, what is important? It really shifted all of my priorities into how am I feeling?
How can I make my feel, self feel good, feel safe? How can I do the things that matter the most and let go of the rest? This was in this very intense cancer scare moment. After that when I was over, there is a part of me that came back to real life. I still have that really deep tuning in, which is helpful for me.
At the same time, it's really hard to navigate all of these things when we are living within systems that are not, I. Supporting this. Most of us don't have bosses or even partners or friends who say, how are you feeling? Should we just slow down? Do you wanna just check in how you're feeling? Or do you have the energy for this?
There's a complexity to connecting with the body when we are in environments that don't invite it. So it does take a lot from us. I don't think we need to have. A health scare necessarily. It does take commitment because it's about lifestyle, connecting with the body. It's about living in an embodied way, and we need to want that, right?
We need to want the deeper connection. If I'm talking to someone who's not interested in connecting deeper with the body, who don't see the value of felt aliveness. I'm never going to convince them. I'm also not going to try, but I'm never going to convince them that connecting with the body, feeling your feelings, being able to navigate the world from the body is helpful because they're gonna live from a mind.
I. Focus place and I will let them. Somatics is so different from everything else. It is a practice of showing up constantly for the little things. That's where I start with clients, with the little things, so that slowly we become more resource. Because what happens when we resource somatically, when we connect with the things that make us feel safe, make us feel alive, make us feel connected, we build our capacity.
When we build that capacity, we can start tuning into the body. Whereas if we start before we resource, there are many parts of us that are going to say, how do I listen? Maybe I'm listening wrong. What do you want me to do? All of our trauma is gonna show up all of our insecurities. If we are dealing with not trusting ourselves, which a lot of trauma survivors are, if you're not trusting yourself, yourself, you're going to be convinced that you're probably listening wrong.
You're probably doing it wrong. Maybe your perfectionism shows up. Maybe you're like, oh, other people are better at this. Or if you have relational trauma, you're gonna be wondering what the practitioner or the therapist is expecting from you. You're going to be like, what should I answer? Because they're asking me what I'm feeling in my body.
Should I just say I'm feeling good or I'm feeling scared? We navigate from our trauma pattern rather than from what's actually happening in our body, in my approach. Or start with the resourcing because we wanna start with creating safety. Creating safety in our bodies, creating capacity in the nervous system so we can actually listen.
This is Somatics is so much about untangling from the systems. Our conditioning says, don't listen to yourself. Disconnect, be productive. Help the system. The systems are about helping the systems not taking care of ourselves. That shift from would the systems. Need from me to body first Healing. First care first.
That's the biggest shift.
[00:17:42] Understanding Trauma Patterns
Risa: Can you talk about trauma patterns and how they show up in that mind body relationship?
Lise: They show up in many ways. Yeah. The work I do is somatic trauma healing. All of us have. Different relationships with our bodies, different relationships with ourselves, and most people that I work with in one-on-one sessions show up with childhood trauma.
Trauma can be different things. We all have different experiences, but when there is something in our past that made us feel not safe, which is the case for a lot of us.
When we didn't learn what safety feels like, not just from the mind, like I'm okay and nothing is going to harm me, but in a felt way. Let's say you grew up with alcohol abuse or drug use around you, that kind of unsafe, like no one is the adult here. No one is holding safe space. No one is setting clear boundaries.
There is adult problems going on. That I have to navigate as a child, right? That kind of unsafe is very felt, is very visceral. Unless we interact with that and heal that as adults, even in our forties, fifties, sixties, all the way through our lives, that is going to be there. That felt sense of unsafety. It doesn't mean that it shows up.
Only when there is alcohol abuse or drug drug abuse in the room shows up in all of our relationships. If there's any kind of unsafe, if there's any kind of confusion, if there's any kind of, um, activation, anything that is triggering us, that is going to show up. I think it's also really important. Most of the clients that I work with, their main.
Childhood trauma is often the trauma of emotional neglect, which means not the things that happened to you, but the things that didn't happen. If you have parents or caregivers who weren't present, either physically present, they might have worked a lot, so they might not have been there. You might have been on your own a lot of the time, or if they were there.
The room, but they were not mentally, emotionally present. They were caught up in their own mental health issues or challenges in their own relationship issues. There might even be if it was a dysfunctional family with a lot of fighting or dysfunction between the parents that might have played out while you were in the room, right?
And those things really affect our body. So let's say you were in a family where no one gave you the emotional attention and safety that you needed. You might have attuned to, oh, I need to take care of my siblings. So you might have ended up being the caregiver of your siblings when you were eight years old, right?
The way that affects our body and nervous system is we slowly start tuning out of ourselves and into others. Focusing on what can I do for others? How can I take care of others? We do that slow disconnection of, I don't matter. We don't think about checking in with ourselves because no one held the space of saying, how are you doing today?
How are you feeling? What do you need from me? Either directly in language or by showing it in action? Actually being present, actually tuning in. One of the things core to safety in childhood is attunement. Being able to attune to a safe, stable adult, someone who is emotionally. Solid. Someone who is there to guide you, hold you, protect you.
We need that as children, right? And if we don't have that, we disconnect from that attunement to ourselves. We don't think it's safe. This is survival strategy. It's adapting to the group. We are in the family system, and it gets us through childhood. It's a smart way for a system to make sure that we're still a part of the group.
So we're not an outcast. We're still part of the group, but we do it by abandoning ourselves. And then when we're adults, it's not like we magically come back to safe attunement. Safe relationship, we still have that disconnection. So we end up in relationships where we don't listen to ourselves, we don't listen to our boundaries.
We don't even know what healthy boundaries look like. We dunno what a safe person looks like. We don't know what emotional safety looks like. And we don't know how to attune to it. So it's a little bit like being lost because we are like, oh, I guess this is just how it is relating to others. It's always a little bit unsafe.
I get hurt, I'm confused. It's as good as it gets because we don't know there's actually something we can do. This is why.
[00:22:39] Navigating Trauma in Somatic Healing
Lise: When we're showing up trying to connect with our body, our trauma is going to show up For a lot of people, our trauma is going to show up and tell us that it's not safe to connect with the body, that it's something we should not do because we don't know how to do it.
We don't know that connecting with ourselves and connecting deeper emotionally, both with ourselves and with others. Is something that is safe, something that can be practiced, something that we can learn because we never had the environment to practice that and to experience what it feels like. So this is one of the ways that trauma can show up and it's often in the room that resistance of like, sure, I would like to practice this, but I don't know how to do it, and a part of me wants to run away.
This is how connection can feel like a, a false sense of safety. Because disconnection feels like what we can handle. It's a coping mechanism, right? Trauma is. Often, I would say almost always in the room. Sometimes it's right up front and sometimes it's just on the edges, but it's still there whispering.
This is part of what we practice in somatic healing. Noticing not just the, let me connect with the body because that sounds so simple, but all the things that are standing in the way of connecting with the body. This is what we explore, and the core thing is that we explore it slowly. Little by little, we create that safety.
So it's not going in and saying, let's connect now. You have to feel good about your body. Now you have to feel good about being emotionally present. We do it little by little by not shaming any of the survival patterns that are there. This is why non-judgment is so important because I will never pressure a client.
A lot of my background in. Holistic healing. Had a lot of toxic positivity of feeling good about it or saying you feel good about it. Every time someone asks me, how are you doing today? A part of me is like, should I answer, come really feeling or should I answer the toxic positivity version? Trauma is often in the room.
Risa: Yeah. It feels to me these days, like my references are often deriving from playing with a 6-year-old. It feels like bubbles. You know when you have bubbles on top of bubbles and they're all sort of reflecting and iridescent. I feel like every time I identify a pattern, it's the same pattern, and now it's just the same pattern from another level of the bubble.
I'm beating myself up about beating myself up, about beating myself up. Let's take a breath. Yes. Can you lead us in taking a breath? I feel like for our listeners and myself even talking about the way trauma bubbles is probably. Doing things to our bodies.
Lise: So what do we do? What do we do? Oh, that's the big question.
I never start with a question because it can feel like a lot of pressure, right? Like, what do I do? Thank you. 'cause my life, I know I need
Risa: to check it off.
Lise: I get it. I get the longing for, can you just gimme the roadmap? Can you just tell me what to do? And I will do it. I would like to get an A plus on this conversation, Lisa.
[00:25:55] The Importance of Slowing Down and Resourcing
Lise: Yeah, that's how I walked into my first many months of somatic sessions. I walked in just wanting to please the practitioner and get it right, and it was by doing that slow resourcing, that slow connecting with the body and not chasing the results, not going for, I want to feel better and it needs to happen soon, but staying curious, it's so core.
To stay curious, to slow down. For some people it sounds less exciting. We live in such a world where the coaching industry is so successful because it's about fixing the problems. I can help you fix these problems in three weeks or three months. I can help you fix this. Somatics is almost the opposite.
I'm never gonna promise you that I can help you heal your trauma in. Two months or two years, the body remembers everything, which can feel like a lot, right? We move through life and our bodies are with us the whole time. Of course, they're gonna remember what happens. It's so important to be in relationship with the body, with our trauma, with the pressure, with the self-judgment, the now it's showing up again.
Now it's showing up again, and I just wanna fix it. Like, if that was in a session, I wouldn't invite you to pause. To slow down to resource.
[00:27:19] Exploring Somatic Awareness
Lise: This is why, for example, we breathe, right? We'd invite a breath, a slowing down invite. Curiosity maybe I would say. I'm curious about that pressure, about the urgency to fix the problem.
What does that feel like in your body? We would start by noticing what's actually present in the body. You might say something like, it feels like I have to run. To fix things, like it needs to be fast 'cause there are things I need to get out of the way. Or you might say it feels like a pressure in my chest.
Or you might say it feels like I can't think clearly when you ask me the question, I'm not sure how to answer it. It's just really confusing. I don't know what I'm feeling.
[00:27:59] Understanding Self-Judgment and Pressure
Lise: There's not one way. That it shows up in our bodies. It shows up different for all of us, depending on where we are in our journey, what kind of tools we have, how much fear we have about connecting with the body, all of those patterns of judging ourselves, pressuring ourselves, rushing ourselves, wanting to do things a specific way.
They're part of this somatic process. And I think that's important to know that it's not just about connecting and feeling good and getting good at knowing yourself. A core part of the process is not judging and showing up, including when it is self-judgment or self pressure. So the process is to not judge that and notice, well, how am I being in relationship with us?
Risa: And from there, when we're thinking about how am I being in relationship with this? Can we come into more profound relationship with each other?
Lise: I love that question. Yes.
[00:29:03] The Impact of Self-Care on Relationships
Lise: This is one of the core reasons why I love somatic so much. When we're not feeling that safety, that groundedness in ourselves, and we are not coming back to self connection, to tuning into ourselves, we are also meeting others differently.
Hmm. We are meeting others on our survival level, in our survival patterns. That's why our relationships can shift profoundly when we start moving out of those survival patterns and into felt safety in the body when we actually feel deeply connected with ourselves in a way that is not based on self-judgment or shame.
Or unworthiness of trying to achieve or prove something in the world when we're actually connecting with ourselves from care comes back to that revolutionary thing you asked about. Sadly, in the world we are living in care. It's quite revolutionary.
[00:30:08] Revolutionary Care and Somatic Healing
Lise: Somatic trauma healing is a lot about coming back to care, caring for yourself if we have a trauma pattern that made us not like ourselves.
That is gonna feel counterintuitive. We're gonna be like, yeah, I don't care that much, or I don't want to care that much about myself.
Risa: I feel this so much. Oh, I'll be worthy of care when I, I just have to get this good grade first, do my groceries and eat only organic. Save the people in my community and vote properly.
And, and, and then I'll be worthy of care.
Lise: Exactly. And again, let's take a breath there. I would meet that, but curiosity, right. And say, what does it feel like in your body to listen to that list? There's no judgment. There's no right or wrong. Maybe you're like, that feels good. That feels like that's what I need to do.
Then that's where we start noticing what does your body remember? If your body remembers I need to do this long list of things to feel worthy, then that's how we live our lives.
Risa: Mm-hmm.
Lise: It doesn't mean until you love yourself, you can't love someone else. I don't think that's true. I think it's all a practice and it's all in relationship with each other, but I do think that the more we practice caring for ourselves, I.
Loving ourselves with no agenda. That also shifts how we are showing up in relationship. If we do have an agenda, we also have an agenda in relationships, right? If we are a people pleaser, we are going to show up differently, right? That's the fawning response If we're always going to do what the other person wants us to do.
Unconsciously, right? If we're just showing up, wondering what they want. So I'm just gonna do that because then I will be safe. And it's a false sense of security, right? If we're always going for that, we're going out of our bodies rather than being present and saying, listen, this is who I am. Not by demanding things, but by being who we are.
For example, I'm someone who deeply appreciates creativity in a relationship. If you're in the fawning response, you might. S com completely shut down. That created part of you because you're sensing that your partner is not that interested in creativity, and then you become someone who's like, yeah, when I was young I was creative, but now it's not really something I do anymore.
Where actually, if you come back to a place where you feel. Safe and healed and worthy. You're like, I'm deeply creative and there isn't space for it. In my relationship, that's a different issue. But if we don't have that capacity in our body, in our nervous system, we're not gonna bring that up. We're not going to go into session and say, I don't feel there's space in my relationship.
For my creativity, I would like to work on that. We're going to go in and say, I feel I'm not a good enough partner, and I feel like my partner's probably disappointed because they would probably wanna be with someone who's a better person, but I'm just me, so I feel like I have to do more things to live up to even earning my space in the relationship.
Right It, but it's the same situation. It's the same thing that's going on, but it's a different perspective on it.
[00:33:15] The Role of Magic and Rituals in Healing
Risa: Thinking about creativity in particular connects to this other question I have about magic witchcraft. Something I find really exciting about doing somatic work, thinking about change from inside the body.
I. Is this is the kind of like what I call magic, like really juicy stuff that makes me excited. I like working with plants and oils. That's fun. I like chanting to heck day. I love all of those parts of magic. The kinds of magic that I feel have been like really life changing to me have come. From body and relationship, and I wonder how you think about those words, magic, witchcraft.
Do those have meaning for you? Does your work connect to those?
Lise: Absolutely. This, I'm laughing because I'm like, Ooh, where do I start with this?
For me, rituals means embodied rituals. I don't do, I mean. Again, that's who I am. But here you with the body and relationships. I love doing rituals on my own. They are always embodied even in small ways. I also love doing rituals with others. There is something truly magic and truly like That's where my witch is really comes out with the cove feeling we can get together, even if it's three or four people, but being in circle with others, bring in.
What in a witchy context we call magic, which I would also argue could be called many other things, the witch, the rituals, the healing. It's all part of unraveling from patriarchy, right? It's all part of coming back to finding our voices. Speaking up, it comes back to aliveness. To me, witch is, and magic isn't as woo woo as it sounds to most people because it's really about empowerment.
It's really about coming back to, are the things I can do? How do I change this? How do I co-create, how do I bring me into this context, which in a patriarchal context is all the things. Like, this is all the things patriarchy don't want. Right? So to me, yes I do lots of rituals. The people who are working with me, either in session or in circles, they know this.
Most of them love this because it's one of the ways we can resource like embodied rituals. Any sort of ritual is a way of resourcing. When I say embodied rituals, it's because we can also use rituals to escape. We can use anything to escape, right? We can use anything as our drug of choice. We could also, you know, chant forever.
And by, by doing that, avoid to actually feel into our bodies. So. For me, it's important that it's embodied and it can be in little ways. One of the most important things I have learned is to do tiny rituals. On the days where I'm tired or the seasons, I always have big plans for seasonal rituals. They almost never happen because I don't have the capacity for them, and then I'm angry with myself and I'm like, I should have done this ritual, and then I'm like, oh my goodness, it was four days ago.
That is modern life, right? That's the reality for most of us, and I so appreciate this systematic. Principle, core principle of titration, of doing a tiny little thing at a time. Sometimes I do a tiny ritual. Sometimes it's one minute. My core of every ritual is a candle. Sometimes it's breathing while looking at a candle.
Sometimes it is putting a candle by the window. Sometimes it is humming or singing while sitting with a candle for a minute or two. If I have more capacity, if it's one of my good days or good seasons, I move. So I move. I still light a candle. One of my favorite embodied rituals is to turn off the lights in my home and then dance by candlelight.
I dance very slowly, so it's very slow, very tuned in, very intuitive, very moving with whatever the ritual is. So let's say it's a grief ritual. If there's some sort of loss in my life, like if someone left me in relationship or if something didn't happen the way I had hoped for it, they, if there's a big loss of hope, a loss of connection, a loss of relationship, I like to do grief rituals, to process that grief and movement is one of the ways to be in relationship with the grief.
It doesn't make the grief go away. It doesn't change the loss itself, but it helps us. Find a way to meet that grief and for that grief to be alive in us, rather than it being stuck and being something that holds us in place. It's something that we can move with being. I. Uh, conversation with, I like the, my embodied approach.
I like to call it a conversation with the body. That's part of what I do in rituals. Really listen to what is present for me and go with that in the rituals. I'm quite intuitive if I have a lot of energy and I. Big feelings. I walk and make walking part of the ritual. I go sit by the sea, listen to the ocean, bring in nature whenever I can.
If I'm lower capacity, I stay at home. I make it a few minutes, truly honor it. It's good enough to do a two minute grief ritual. That's okay. Then another day I can do another kind of ritual, but to make it part of my life so it doesn't become. Performative or something to check off the to-do list, and that's one of the things I love about rituals, that it can be magic and healing at the same time.
I think it's wildly empowering. I think it's one of the things that is scaring the shit out of patriarchy. I think they don't even know what to do with it, which is why it's labeled as weird. It's because it actually helps us connect with our inner power aliveness. What changes when we connect with aliveness is our feeling of having agency.
When we're connected with our aliveness, we go out and do things. We go out and smash the patriarchy, which is why scaring us into not doing anything, scaring us into not feeling our bodies, is helpful for the system of patriarchy because then we stay frozen. We do nothing. Embodied rituals, reconnecting with aliveness,
it's absolutely a sacred process and it is a process. It's not something to learn and then move on with our lives. It's an ongoing process.
Risa: I think it's empowering to think about this idea of titration, of like small things, accumulate small things, make big change, make yes deep river beds within us.
[00:40:15] Navigating Trauma and Collective Grief
Risa: One pattern I notice is that we have so much grief in our culture, in ourselves, personal and collective grief. It's so terrifying to truly look at that grief, to look at planetary grief, climate grief, global inequality, violence, injustice. We have to keep. Going and not look closely at it because it's so massive and overwhelming, but grieving it a little bit at a time can be enough maybe even though it doesn't feel like it'll ever be enough.
Lise: Exactly. This is building into the system. The systems by design are trying to overwhelm us. It's working. The last few years have been horrible to witness on a global scale. We are being moved closer by people's. Phones being there so we can see what's happening much closer. Our nervous systems are not built for this.
It's too much to take in. Some people in the systems know this and use it to overwhelm us. Some people are not that aware, but they're just playing into whatever their role is in the system, and it still overwhelms us right when there's a massive wave coming at us of. Too many horrible images, too many big questions, too many things that are unsolvable.
We move into a massive collective response. We see this playing out. Now, this is from a trauma and foreign perspective. This is why I. A lot of politicians, lot so-called leaders are not speaking up against things 'cause they don't have the capacity to do it. They don't feel safe enough in their body, in their nervous system to name the frequent thing that's happening right in front of all of our faces.
So they are playing the avoidance game, right? They're not naming the things, they're not speaking directly. This is trauma responses, right? The so-called leaders, the people in so-called power. They also have a trauma background. If you don't feel safe in your body, if you have a hurt inner child who's running the show, it's gonna show up.
It's not gonna be leadership from a grounded place, from a place of care, collective care. It's not gonna be from a place of wanting to create peace, right? Is going to be from a place of disruption. Chaos and that's gonna play out on a big stage.
[00:43:00] Disrupting Systems with Somatic Practices
Lise: This is also why somatics is helpful because we cannot hold it all.
We can't, and we're not supposed to. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't do anything or there aren't actions we can take. But it's really important to feel those boundaries in our bodies of not having to hold it all if we have a trauma pattern where we did have to hold it all where we were the ones holding everything together in our family.
Watching things like what is happening now, play out on a bigger scale can be terrifying, deeply depressing because we can feel we're back to being five years old and being like, oh my goodness, I'm holding all the things that I have no idea how to hold, and you're not supposed to hold, but you don't know that as a child.
And this can come back even if we're not aware, that overwhelm can completely. Set the tone of what we are doing. If we are not resourced, if there isn't that flexibility in our nervous system, if we don't feel empowered, if we don't feel alive, we're not going to go out and take action. Not because we are horrible people or because we are lazy, but because we don't know what to do, we end up doing nothing which serves the systems.
It's big and complex. Small steps absolutely matter. This is why I say that embodiment work is also quiet rebellion, right? Tending to yourself, caring about yourself, tending to your closest connections. That is absolutely rebellious as fuck. I love this about embodiment work, that it's not, you know, it's not the, the, the self-help, not wanting to make yourself a better person so you can achieve all the goals in the world.
It's creating actual connection. Coming back to our humanity, which is so freaking hard in our systems because they're so dehumanizing. Coming back to actually caring out of care, not out of some hidden agenda, but because care is actually sacred and important and core, if we don't care. We don't survive.
It's deeply sad that care is revolutionary, but it is. And yes, small steps. Can you imagine if you bring in one or two small breaths during your day, but you actually do it almost every day? That's still a lot, and that's small change, right? Then maybe someday. You might mention it to your child who's freaking out, and you might be like, how would you feel about taking a breath together?
I'm just gonna sit here and do it with you saying I'm just gonna go for a two minute walk in the garden before I come in and do dinner because I need it. But those kind of small steps accumulate over time and it absolutely matters.
[00:45:47] Practical Tips for Embodiment and Self-Care
Lise: One of the reasons why embodiment work can feel so overwhelming is because we think it has to look a specific way.
It looks like getting something under control. Including ourselves, which again is patriarchy. Connecting with the body is not about getting control of our feelings or learning to control our moods. It's about being in a caring relationship with ourselves.
Risa: Okay, I wanna talk about lying on the floor now because it's not about being in control.
This is a story about how sometimes I make things up. Uh, Lisa and I were talking in a group context a while ago, and what I remembered her saying was something to the effect, we're talking about trying to advocate for ourselves in medical. Contexts. Yeah. And how that can be really deeply anxiety inducing depending on where your trauma is and trying to stand up for yourself.
I had an experience of having really violent, full body, drenched the sheets multiple times a night, hot flashes, so I couldn't sleep, so my mental health was suffering. I. Asking other people in the same situation with chemically induced menopause, people sending me research documents on a drug that was not designed for hot flashes, but was successful because we can't use hormonal drugs, reading academic papers on it, taking it to my doctor and my nurse practitioner, and being dismissed.
I'm feeling so devastated, so frustrated. And I remember Lisa saying something to the, the effect of like, if you have to lie down in a doctor's office to get grounded and be able to speak for yourself, I. Lie down, do what you need to do, like be on the floor, be in the room. You have to help me, like whatever body I am in.
You can't dismiss me just because I'm panicked or because I read something on the internet that wasn't true. You have to meet me where I'm at. Just last night I lay on the floor again and it helped with some spiraling pain. I spoke to Lisa about it and she was like, yeah, that's, I don't really remember that conversation going that way, but that sounds useful.
And I do like lying on the floor. And I wonder if you would talk about ways we can somehow. It feels radical to lay on the floor like small radical disruptions of our body in space as a way of claiming our right to take up space.
Lise: I love the lying down on the floor in the doctor's office. I wish I could do that, and I think I'm in a place now where I can on my good days.
I'm in many medical situations that are anxiety inducing for patriarchal reasons. Medical professionals are not really trained to listen or be in relationship with the patient, which seems. Wild to me. It's not the person's fault. This is their training. If we show up with anxiety, their trauma is also going to show up, which is why they stop listening and we panic more and they stop listening even more.
So lack of relationship. If we had the capacity. I love lying down on the floor as an example of disruption. Only do it if you have the capacity. If you're struggling with anxiety, it's a lot of disruption. Care for yourself first. Disrupt later. Body first, notice how you're feeling if you're feeling resourced to do it.
Lying down on the floor can be helpful. In a situation like that, it's probably going to confuse the medical professionals, right? They're probably going to be like, I haven't really seen this before. I'm not sure what to do with it. They might react in a way that's not helpful for you, right? So we have to know that when we are disrupting.
Most people are not gonna meet us the way we would love for them to meet us, right? They're probably going to meet us from the mentality of the system, which might be like, I don't have time for you lying down on the floor, or, I'm not sure what's happening. They're probably not gonna say that, but they're gonna act in that way.
Maybe they're gonna call in someone to help. A lot of medical professionals are also gonna think that you're having some sort of mental breakdown, right? Because you are. Tending to yourself, which speaks to the revolutionary perspective of this. There are many little ways that we can pause. Even pausing in conversation in your everyday conversations with people you are close to, with people you're not close to, including if someone asks you a question.
One way that trauma shows up is that we feel like we have to have the answer to everything and have to know. If someone says, how do you feel about this? Or Can you help me on Sunday doing this? Often we answer without checking in with ourselves. So we answer, knowing this is actually not what is best for me, but I'm going to please the other person.
Or, I don't know what I feel about what they're asking, but I feel like I need to give them an answer. So even just pausing and saying, Hmm. I'm actually not sure. And often we either say or we, what we do is thinking, right? Let me think about it for a moment. My invitation for clients is always, I'm wondering if we can feel into it rather than think about it.
So not think about the practicals details, but feel into how I feeling about this. Sometimes the hard truth is. I feel like I don't wanna waste my time on this or feel like that is the completely wrong thing for me. Again, this is disruptive, right? You don't have to say things in an honest way that hurt other people.
You can say something with boundaries. You can say, thank you so much for that invitation. I'm not sure this is the right season for me. Let me just get back to you. Let me just feel into that. I'll get back to you in a day or two, because then we have the the space to fill into, how am I feeling about this?
Whether it's a tiny. You know, question or a big life-changing thing, giving ourselves time to feel into something slowing down is really disruptive. Can you imagine being in the boardroom in a corporate setting? Being like, let's just all take a breath. Let's just slow down before we move on to number five.
People would likely be annoyed and be like, what the hell is going on? This is wasting my time. I have the to-do list, the agenda, the urgency, so it's wildly disruptive to ask to slow down. So anywhere you can ask yourself and others to slow down is helpful. My invitation would be. To care for yourself before you start disrupting that self care.
The tending somatic practices, going to therapy, being in support groups, the, the being in, you know, women's circles, all the things that is disruptive. It is disruptive in itself. When we, if we are in disruptive mode first, we're often in a fight response, which is a valid trauma response, but it doesn't.
Put our care first. It can be very helpful to tune into, do I want to disrupt for the sake of disrupting, and is there a space for me to care first so my disruption has more direction? One of the ways that I love how Somatics can support disrupting the systems is that it can give us direction in our activism.
Activism doesn't always have to look like. Yelling in the street, which is great. I love when people go out and protest. It's absolutely necessary, and it's not everyone who can do that, right? It depends on where you are. What are your resources? Being able to tune in. To care for yourself, to create stability, calm within yourself so you have more resources to show up in the world, can also fuel your activism so it can have a bigger impact.
That's one of my favorite ways of supporting disruptors because the bigger the impact, the better
[00:53:44] Final Thoughts and Encouragement
Risa: Listeners, I hope that you'll walk away from this conversation taking tiny, gentle breaths. Caring for yourself and feeling loved in the radical act. That is Lisa. If folks want to find you, support you work with you, which is a really wonderful experience that I recommend, how would they go about doing that?
I have
Lise: a website, LiseLonsemann.com. I always offer free connection calls. If anyone is interested in working one-on-one, I offer a free connection call first for us to meet, connect again, create the safety first, you know, feel each other out. We're committing to anything. I'm always open to those conversations because I think that's so important, rather than diving into the work and the fixing straight away.
Being in relationship first, and I'm also always here for, you know, questions in an email or curiosity. Yeah, again, being in conversation around healing is, I'm very passionate about that, so feel free to reach out.
Risa: Thank you so much for being here and for all of this gentle nonjudgmental, wildly powerful. Insights. I feel very called out, but in a loving way.
Risa: No, I'm just kidding. I don't feel called out. It's just I see myself so much in what we're talking about and it is nice to know that even a little titration goes a long
Lise: way. If there's just one thing that people take away from our conversation today, it is that there are things you can do.
You can shift the way things are. Little things matter. It is possible by practicing slowly creating that safety first, there are things that can have an impact. Little by little. There is no right or wrong. It feels the way it feels, and that's where we start. That's how you meet yourself. Being with what is there.
