Can gentle body and energy work help people heal from trauma?
In January 2020, I spoke with Anissa Hudak, a Reiki master and yoga therapist who works with people living with trauma. We talked about Reiki, energy centers, sound, a deep muscle she calls the emotional warehouse of the body, and what to do when a trigger hits.
This is an archive episode, recorded when the show covered addiction, recovery, and mental health broadly. It is a short conversation, and much of it is Anissa describing her own methods in her own words.
What is Reiki, and how does it work?
At 0:58, Anissa described Reiki as a Japanese healing touch therapy. The practitioner can touch the person or simply hover a hand nearby, working in what she called the bioenergetic field of the body. In her view, her job is to create a sacred, safe space, and the person’s higher self decides where the healing goes.
So, someone may come in asking for help with a sore knee and still leave with the knee hurting. She explained that the energy may have gone to something that needed healing more. Most people drift into a state that is neither fully asleep nor fully awake, and that, she said, is where the self-healing happens.
People respond in very different ways on her table. Some talk, some sleep, some cry or laugh. Most say they feel warmth from her hands.
Why does a therapy without touch matter?
At 3:11, I said what appealed to me about this. A lot of people do not want to be touched and are uncomfortable with it. People with fibromyalgia can be so sensitive to touch that they really cannot be touched at all.
Anissa answered at 3:32 that she personally prefers hands-on work, because she can sense more within the body that way. Still, if someone asks her not to touch them, she does not. She simply hovers over the area and works from there.
What are chakras, and can sound affect them?
At 3:52, Anissa described chakras as energy bundles, which she said the West would call nerve bundles. She checks them with a pendulum to see whether they are blocked or moving the right way. She uses essential oils alongside Reiki to help unblock them, and she makes a point of applying Reiki to the chakras at the feet, the head, and the hands.
At 4:36, I mentioned a place near our office with a whole room dedicated to sound therapy, using bowls and tuning forks. Anissa said a friend’s tuning fork work had been a wonderful experience for her. She has seen singing bowls placed on the body, with each tone meant to create a different vibration for each chakra, although she has not had it done herself.
From 5:29, I talked about my own love of sound and electronic music, and about binaural beats. With headphones, each ear hears a slightly different tone, and the brain perceives a beat between them. For me, a slow beat in the theta range brings on a half awake, half asleep state where I hear vivid voices and feel more creative. Anissa called that state a great place to do self-healing.
Why does the psoas muscle matter so much in her yoga therapy?
At 6:28, Anissa explained that she is also a yoga therapist. She works with people who live with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injuries, and other trauma-related problems such as anxiety, depression, and insomnia. Her focus is the psoas, the deep muscle also known as the hip flexor.
In her opinion, it is the most important muscle in the body. It is the muscle that curls a person into the fetal position after an illness or an accident, protecting the internal organs. She also called it the emotional warehouse of the body, where happiness, anger, grief, and everything else is held.
Because the psoas is so deep, her classes work what she calls the psoas trail, from behind the knee through the inner thighs and up the spine to the skull. The goal is to tire the muscle until it offers small releases. Interestingly, she welcomes the shaking and jelly-like thighs that surprise people, because in her view each release lets go of emotional baggage and frees up room to handle new stress.
Why do survivors of sexual assault need a community of their own?
At 9:08, I asked about her program, Trauma Healing Yoga, and her work supporting women who have experienced trauma. At 9:29, Anissa spoke openly about being a survivor of rape herself. She created the SAS Community for women who are survivors of sexual assault and abuse.
In her view, community matters for any kind of recovery, yet women like her had none. In fact, she felt they were encouraged not to talk about it. She has no reason to be ashamed, she said, and if she had cancer, no one would expect her to stay silent.
Members can also use recorded yoga therapy at any hour, because a person does not get to choose when PTSD flares up. Healing is not one size fits all, she said. Something that does not work today may work months later, because by then the person has changed.
Can a trigger point the way forward?
At 11:55, I described how triggers can work in recovery. A person may be doing well, with no cravings, and then a street corner, a smell, or a sound pulls them back into the old state of mind. The cravings return, and often they feel terrible about themselves. Trauma of any kind can work the same way.
Anissa offered a different way to see it at 12:27. Triggers do not feel good, she said, but they leave breadcrumbs. Of course, nobody enjoys them. Yet in her view a trigger shows where to go next in therapy, so the move is to bring it to a talk therapist and unpack it.
How can someone stay present during a trigger?
At 13:14, I asked whether yoga and meditation help people handle triggers. Anissa said they can, and that the key is staying present, because a trigger wants to take a person back to that place.
She shared her own experience of an intense trigger. She took it to her therapist, and together they worked through it with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, which she found very helpful. Still, in her view, one try is not always a fair test. Different therapists do EMDR differently, she said, so if it does not work with one, it may be worth trying another.
Beyond that, she uses meditation, yoga nidra, and the five senses to help people stay present.
Who is Anissa Hudak?
Anissa Hudak is a Reiki master and yoga therapist who works with people living with PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and other effects of trauma. She runs the Trauma Healing Yoga program and created the SAS Community for women who have survived sexual assault and abuse.
What can listeners take away from this conversation?
Trauma lives in the body as well as the mind, and people heal in different ways and at different times. A therapy that does not help today may help later, and a trigger, painful as it is, can show where the work still needs to be done.
How do I approach this today?
Today my practice focuses on helping people come off benzodiazepines and other medications gradually, and on medication for alcohol and opioid dependence. Physical dependence is not addiction, and the safest way off is usually slow.
This page is educational. It is not medical advice, and listening to the episode or reading this page does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Decisions about starting, continuing, or tapering any medication should be made with your own physician.
Full transcript
A note from Dr. Leeds: my guests speak from their own experience and expertise, and the terminology they use is their own. Whatever the topic, this show holds to one distinction: physical dependence on a prescribed medication is not addiction. This transcript is educational content, not medical advice, and nothing here creates a doctor-patient relationship.
Read the full transcript (15 minutes)
Dr. Mark Leeds [00:09] Welcome to The Rehab on the Mental Health News Radio Network. I am Dr. Mark Leeds and I will be your host. Join me in exploring the world of addiction treatment. How can we improve the ways that we help individuals to overcome addiction? The goal of treatment is to save lives and help people to get back on track to a path towards success and happiness in life. Anissa Hudak, welcome to the Rehab Podcast.
Anissa Hudak [00:52] Thank you so much for having me here today. Thanks.
Dr. Mark Leeds [00:54] You’re a Reiki master. Can we talk about Reiki a little bit? Tell me how it works.
Anissa Hudak [00:58] Sure. Reiki is a Japanese healing touch therapy. You can touch people or you don’t have to. You can just hover. You’re working in the bioenergetic field of the body. Let’s say if you were able to take your hands and start pulling them closer together, and you’re going to get to a point where you feel the other hand, but you’re not touching yet. It’s in that energetic field that you are working in. You can feel your fingers and your hand, but you’re not touching it yet. With Reiki, it’s just about creating a sacred space for that person to do whatever kind of healing they need to do. And it’s about their higher self, their subconscious. So it’s not like I’m going to take energy from your feet and move it up to your head or anything. I’m really not in control of that. It is about just providing the sacred safe space for you and your higher self to do whatever self-healing needs to happen. Now, you could say, you know, you get on the table and say, oh, my knee really hurts. I could spend a lot of time hovering around your knee and working on that. But your higher self is going to take that energy and put it towards anything that it really needs. It sees fit to heal. And so it could be something else. And you could get up and say, gosh, my knee still hurts. That could very well be. But your higher self took that energy and put it towards something else that really felt like it needed to heal more. So I’m not really in control of it. I just create the sacred space. Your higher self takes it from there. Now, that being said, usually people kind of go into a place where they’re not quite asleep and they’re not quite awake. And that’s really where that self-healing happens. I’ve had people talk the entire time. I’ve had people sleep the entire time. Either way, you’re getting whatever it is your higher self needed during that time. I’ve had people cry on my table scream laugh talk you name it again it’s whatever they needed to do most people say they feel warmth some people say they feel cold and it’s really whatever their body needs in that moment the energy provides for them but generally most people say my hands are very warm and that’s the Reiki flowing
Dr. Mark Leeds [03:11] Just the idea of having a therapy that you can provide that’s hands-on but no touching involved. I know that a lot of people don’t want to be touched. They’re uncomfortable with it. Or even there’s people with fibromyalgia that are very sensitive to touch and they really can’t be touched. That’s really good to have something where you can come very close and actually provide or help with a healing energy and not actually have to put your hands on.
Anissa Hudak [03:32] For me personally, I feel like my hands-on touch is better. I’m able to kind of sense things a little bit better within the body. But if someone says to me, I’d rather you not touch me, I won’t touch them. That’s easy. And I can just hover in that area and kind of go from there.
Dr. Mark Leeds [03:47] So you still have the option to do it either way. Now, what about centers of energy in people?
Anissa Hudak [03:52] So chakras, it’s energy bundles. It’s nerve bundles. Here in the West, we would call them nerve bundles. And they absolutely exist within the body. We have seven main chakras in the body, but actually we have over 240. But there’s seven main chakras that we work with. I do work with the chakras. I have a pendulum. I can see if they’re blocked, if they’re moving the right ways, that kind of thing. Can I help unblock them? Absolutely. I know how to do that. I actually use essential oils to help me with that. In conjunction with the Reiki, I use the essential oils to help unblock the chakras. Also with using the Reiki, I do apply the Reiki to certain chakras, especially at the feet and at the head and also in the hands. I really like to make sure that I hit those three main areas, those three main chakras with Reiki.
Dr. Mark Leeds [04:36] There’s actually a place right across the street from us. They do sound therapy. They have a whole room dedicated to sound therapy. They have these bowls that generate different frequencies and tuning forks. And from what they told me about it’s all related to freeing up blockages of energy in the body.
Anissa Hudak [04:52] Yes, I have a friend who does tuning forks, and I have to tell you, it’s absolutely amazing. She actually was able to blow out my third eye chakra. It was beautiful. It was amazing. It was just a wonderful experience. The singing bowls, I have a singing bowl, but I have heard of and I’ve seen the singing bowl therapy where they actually put the singing bowls on your body. And the different tones of the bowls actually create a different vibration for each chakra and it helps to clear out the chakras and energy. I haven’t had it done. I’ve seen it. I think it’s pretty cool. So if you ever get the chance to really take part in that, I would do that.
Dr. Mark Leeds [05:29] I found it interesting because I just love everything to do with sound. I love electronic music and recording and playing with sound. And another thing, and this is a topic of conversation yesterday, we were talking about binaural beats and how you can use these sound programs where you put on headphones and you have different tones in each ear and your brain perceives a beat frequency between those two tones. And we’re actually talking about the theta range of brain waves. You know, I think it’s between like four and seven hertz. And in that range it can bring you into that half awake half sleep state where you kind of I mean for me I start to hear like really vivid voices and you know and I feel like it’s a stimulates creativity and it’s really kind of a great state to be and you know maybe right before you fall asleep or just you know if you’re meditating or relaxing
Anissa Hudak [06:16] It’s a great place to do your self-healing that’s kind of that area where you can do that self-healing
Dr. Mark Leeds [06:22] As far as yoga Now, in our previous conversation, we talked about the psoas muscle, which I found really interesting.
Anissa Hudak [06:28] In addition to being a Reiki master, I’m also a yoga therapist. And I work with those specifically who have problems with PTSD, TBIs, traumatic brain injuries, and other trauma-related issues. So anxiety, depression, insomnia, you get the gist, all of that kind of stuff. I work primarily with the psoas. Now, that being said, you’re going to get a full-body workout in one of my classes. And the reason for that is because we have what we call the psoas trail. Now the psoas, in my humble opinion, it is the most important muscle of the body and that’s because it is, well, have you ever been ill or been in an accident and your body has curled itself up into the fetal position? If you have, that is the psoas muscle and it protects all of your internal organs here in the front and so without that muscle, you would have been left totally exposed and possibly, as far as cavemen were concerned, you could have died, right? So that psoas muscle is absolutely paramount. Now, the other thing that psoas muscle does is it’s the emotional warehouse of the body. And so all of your happiness, your joy, your frustration, your anger, your grief, everything is contained and held in this muscle. You might also know this muscle as its other name, the hip flexor. Now the hip flexor is the deepest muscle of the body. So it’s really hard to kind of get to, which is why we work the trail. And the trail starts behind the knee and it goes into the inner thighs. From there, it’s the actual hip flexor, the psoas. From there, it juts into the back and it goes all the way up the spine to where the spine meets the skull. And this is why you’re going to get a full body workout in our yoga class, because we have to kind of warm up the whole trail so we can get really deep into that psoas. What we want to do is we want to exhaust the psoas as much as we can. And by doing that, it offers little releases. And so people sometimes say, gosh, my thighs are jiggling and I’m not moving. How come my thighs are like jelly? And why am I spasming? That’s great. We want that. Sometimes people don’t even feel it happening. And that’s okay, too. There’s no rhyme or reason. Those little releases release all kinds of emotional baggage that you don’t have to carry. And by doing that, it frees up room. So you can then tackle new things that are going to be coming up in your life. Because as we know, we live very stressful lives. And so it kind of gives you more room to be able to hold that stress. And so that in a nutshell is our psoas muscle.
Dr. Mark Leeds [09:08] You’ve started this program, Trauma Healing Yoga. You’ve provided treatment to people with PTSD, and I see that you help to empower women. And I know a lot of women have had trauma. You say on your website, one in four have had sexually related trauma. Do you provide coaching or counseling or yoga therapy if women from anywhere in the country could reach out to you and get help or talk to you?
Anissa Hudak [09:29] Absolutely, I do. I have a program. It’s called the SAS Community, and that is for sexually assaulted and abused survivors. It is all women. I am a two-time rape survivor. And so I walk the walk every day. I understand. I’ve done it. I live it. Sometimes I revisit it just like everybody else. And so I’ve created a community where women can kind of come together. We know that community is very important when it comes to addiction recovery, any kind of recovery, quite frankly. I mean, look at Weight watchers, AA and NA, and all of these groups have communities. And I realized that for women like me, we didn’t have a community. In fact, it’s kind of encouraged not to talk about it. Well, you know what? Quite frankly, I’m not ashamed. I have no reason to be ashamed. I have no reason to be embarrassed. I shouldn’t be allowed to talk about it. If I had cancer, I would be allowed to, right? So I should be allowed to talk amongst my peers and get support. And I’m sure there’s another woman out there who’s been in my situation. And it would be nice to get her feedback. We need a community. And so that’s what I’ve created. Not only will they get that kind of community, but also 24-7 access to recorded yoga therapy with me. And that’s because, you know, at 3 o’clock in the morning, when nobody’s really up, and you’re up, and you’re walking the halls of your house, you could get on your computer and take advantage of that and maybe help yourself go back to sleep or work out whatever it is that’s on your mind that’s pressing. We don’t get to choose when our PTSD flares up and when we need help. And so that way there’s always 24-7 access to a class. And there’s going to be other things in there, yoga nidra, meditations, all kinds of other healing modalities because healing is not a one size fits all kind of a thing. And I’m sure you’ve encountered that with your addiction recovery. Just because it works for someone doesn’t mean it works for someone else. People need options. And just because something doesn’t work right now, doesn’t mean it’s not gonna work for them in six months or a year or 18 months because there’ll be a different person then. And they’ve come through a little bit more of their recovery at that point. And maybe they need to try whatever it is again because it’s different for them at that point. So you need to be retesting things retrying things and have other things other than meds and talk therapy because there’s more to recovery than that
Dr. Mark Leeds [11:55] In your blog you’ve talked about triggers being an important thing and we discussed that as far as you know someone who’s addicted you know they may be doing great in recovery and they stop having the cravings they feel great and they’re walking down the street and something they see maybe they see a street corner or they a smell or a sound something triggers them they have they’re triggered back into that state of mind They start craving again. They start thinking about it again. They maybe feel terrible about themselves. And I know that’s in other kinds of trauma also, PTSD and any kind of life trauma that you might have something that triggers you back into a negative state again.
Anissa Hudak [12:27] I am of the thought process that triggers are actually really good things. Now, they don’t feel great when you’re going through them. Let’s be honest. They’re not fun. But they’re leaving breadcrumbs for you. They are leaving a trail so you know where to go next with your therapy and so maybe you need to take that trigger and a either go right to a meeting if that’s what you’re doing maybe you need to go see your talk therapist and say I’ve had this trigger and you need to unpackage it because it’s giving you the path of where to go next with your therapies they’re actually helping you and if you can turn it around and look at it as okay this is helping me I need to unpackage this next, then you can use it to your advantage.
Dr. Mark Leeds [13:14] Going through the different kinds of therapy, yoga and meditation, will that help people to deal better with triggers?
Anissa Hudak [13:21] It can. It can very well. I talk with people, when you’re going through a trigger, what can you do in that moment to kind of help keep you present? Because you know, a trigger wants to take you back to that place. And how can we remain present? And that’s really the key. For me personally, when I was triggered, I had a trigger back in January and it was intense. For me, I was able to go to my therapist. I unpackaged it with him and we actually did EMDR around it. And that was really wonderful for me. It may not work for everyone. With EMDR, different therapists do it differently. And so if you’re working with someone and the way they’re doing it doesn’t seem to work for you, maybe you need to try a different therapist because they’re going to do it a little differently and that might work for you. That I found out and I was kind of like, wow, I didn’t realize that. So just because you say, oh, I tried that once. It didn’t work. Try it with somebody else because everybody does it a little differently. But for me, that worked. Of course, meditation, yoga nidra, and I use the five senses to help keep people present.
Dr. Mark Leeds [14:29] Do you also do one-on-one coaching with people if someone wants to just talk to you and work with you directly, even if they’re not in your area, can someone reach out to you and have a session just one-on-one? Anissa Hudak, thank you for joining me today on The Rehab Podcast. Thank you for joining us today on The Rehab on the Mental Health News Radio Network. I hope that you have found this show to be interesting and useful. If so, please subscribe to The Rehab Podcast and share on social media. I appreciate your taking the time to listen to The Rehab.
