Episode 2: Emily Hightower - Building resiliency and the capacity to self heal
Emily is an expert in the neurophysiology of trauma and has over 25 years of experience as yoga instructor, wilderness guide and EMT and River guide.
- She has worked with combat Veterans, athletes and anyone looking to enhance their stress tolerance, heal from trauma and learn skills to improve their lives. She created her own blend of neurophysiology and yoga nidra called Neuro Nidra. She is also my personal coach.
- Emily talks about about her “why” and her life circumstances that guided her to this place. 2 mantras she created from her experiences are “Don’t miss it” and “Just put me to work”. This was the beginning of her understanding she could create an internal place of peace so she could face life and help others do the same.
- She spent her childhood in the mountains, thanks to her mother, who supported a low pressure environment, which she says is not too late for anyone to create in their life. She began as a river guide in the summers and a wilderness EMT in the winters, and after 5 years she wanted to pursue more.
- She followed her love for yoga to work more around preventative healing. She early on discovered that breath was key to managing fear and pain.
- She explains acute stress vs. chronic stress exposure and what that means in the body and mind and how awareness is so important. She discusses stress and how it can be healthy or unhealthy based on how well you can respond to it.
- When being overstimulated by our modern attention economy, she explains, “we are incredibly mentally overstimulated while being physically disconnected, this means the physical system is not getting a chance to process the stress in a healthy way.”
- She discusses how you can create awareness without judgement. She talks about the zones of connection, which is the model they use at Shift. She is currently working on educational resources for therapists and counselors to help them integrate some of what she teaches into mainstream medicine.
- She talks about her work and learning from combat veterans. She explains her model of Read / Regulate / Reinforce. She very interestingly explains the ptsd response of veterans and the chronic stress response and how the talk therapy model is often not working for them ad can leave them frustrated.
- She gives a real life example of this, by relating it to being at the bottom of ski lift with a bunch of people and starting to overanalyze and increase in the stress response and gives a practical breath strategy that can help change this response. “It’s not just the same as saying, take a deep breath.”
- I discuss a bit about how I’ve integrated some of this understanding into my own teaching with my clients and my students so they can recognize when positional breathing drills and tuning into certain areas of the body, might be frustrating and not work with people. Working with these tools prior to these drills might allow for a better experience in their body so you give them a better connection with their body.
- Emily talks about the importance of not placing importance on “outcomes” but instead “creating more loving awareness and present time in the tissues.” She loves eastern philosophy; “when the student is ready, the teacher appears” vs. “I have something to give you, you need this, I’m going to fix you…”
Links:
Shift Health - https://shiftadapt.com/
Decoding the metabolic breath print of disease - https://shiftadapt.com/product/3-part-talk-decoding-the-metabolic-breathprint-of-disease-and-mind/
Shift Health Course - https://shiftadapt.com/shifthealth/
Instagram:
Emily Hightower: https://www.instagram.com/intrinsic_way/
Shift Health: https://www.instagram.com/shift_adapt/
