Aging with Purpose and Passion

Barbara Holifield: Empowerment and Healing Trauma Through the Body

Beverley Glazer Episode 110

Growing up in a small Texas town, Barbara Holifield faced a childhood shadowed by addiction and loss. She bravely shares her journey of navigating intergenerational trauma, offering profound insights into how the unresolved pain and chaos of one generation can ripple into the next. Through the power of education and the support of a nurturing alternative school, Barbara discovered the healing potential of poetry and storytelling, underscoring the critical role of moral support in overcoming life's trials. Her story is a testament to resilience and the transformative power of personalized attention and encouragement.

In our exploration of embodied healing, we reveal the powerful transformation that occurs when connecting deeply with our bodies. Through practices such as Gestalt therapy, authentic movement, and wilderness experiences, we uncover ways to heal on a primal level. These methods provide a path to self-discovery and liberation from trauma, emphasizing the importance of being in tune with our bodily experiences. Finally, Bev inspires us to live a life filled with purpose and passion, sharing invaluable insights to help you embrace a fulfilling lifestyle. Don't miss the opportunity to start a journey towards healing and empowerment, and share this with a friend who might need a dose of inspiration.

Thank you for listening, please drop a review and send it to a friend. Aging with Purpose and Passion redefines ageism one bold story at a time. If you've liked this episode, you may also like Boomer Banter - a podcast providing tips on Financial literacy, Mental & Physical health, relationships and aging with purpose.

Resources:
Barbara Holifield
barbaraholifield1@me.com
BarbaraHolifield.com
BOOK: Being with the Body in Depth Psychology
Instagram: @Jungbodytalk
LinkedIn  https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-holifield-985ba2122/

Beverley Glazer
Website: https://reinventimpossible.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverleyglazer/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beverley.glazer
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/womenover50rock
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beverleyglazer_reinvention/
 

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host. Psychotherapist coach and empowerment expert Beverly Glaer. Psychotherapist coach and empowerment expert.

Beverley Glazer:

Beverley Glazer, if you've suffered childhood trauma, can you ever let it go and have peace of mind? Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverley Glazer and I empower women to overcome challenges in life and business with renewed purpose and joy, and you can find me on Reinventimpossible. com . Meet Barbara Holifield. Barbara is an author, a Jungian analyst, with decades of experience helping others through trauma and through somatic psychology and psychophysical work, and Barbara's own childhood trauma was shaped by addiction and loss. So let's explore the power of healing and discover courage and clarity and joy for your very next chapter.

Barbara Holifield:

Welcome, Barbara. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me with you here.

Beverley Glazer:

It's a pleasure you have so much to offer the audience. You grew up in a very small town in Texas.

Barbara Holifield:

Indeed.

Beverley Glazer:

Yes, and when you think of someone that's so accomplished, you do not think of someone growing up in a very small town in Texas. What was life like back then?

Barbara Holifield:

Texas is a kind of curious place, you know, in some ways I personally find the land very beautiful. There's this oceanic quality to the horizon, you know, it goes on forever and the sky is enormous and the sunsets are gorgeous and the storms are amazing. But culturally there, you know, it started in such a narrow framework, in such a narrow framework, be it the railroad or oil or cattle. So it's not a place you would necessarily drop down and live if it weren't for those things. And there's a way that you know. I know a lot of people who are very challenged, who I grew up with and I certainly was one of them challenged. Who I grew up with, and I certainly was one of them. Um, the, there was just a lot of transgenerational trauma coming down that lower track, you know. Yeah, just a lot with those settlers and all that happened there. As a matter of fact, my grandfather came to Amarillo in a covered wagon.

Beverley Glazer:

Really, yeah, really, yeah. You know, when you say intergenerational trauma, I don't know what it means. A lot of people do not. Yeah, and it's true. I mean when you're coming to a land and you're coming and you're going to be settling and you're in the middle of nowhere, there is so much pressure. Explain what you mean by all those people in that small town of Amarillo, texas. Yeah, you know what was that like.

Barbara Holifield:

Well, so just to explain a little bit, intergenerational trauma.

Barbara Holifield:

So know, there's myself, my parents, then their parents and the parents before them.

Barbara Holifield:

You know many and the parents before them, and so much of all of our stories are colored by migration. You know people moving because something's not right, it becomes unsafe or there's war or there's drought or there's conflict you know racial conflict or whatever and with that kind of uprooting is a lot of loss and a lot of chaos and a lot of unsettledness and often the running I mean, I will talk about this a little bit there's a running away from the pain outside but also the pain inside. And what we know now is not only is there this environmental aspect of our development with our parents, which is huge and this round we're in, and the culture, but those generations of trauma, if left unresolved, they get passed on, you know, from the parents before you and their parents before you, and they even have an epigenetic effect and often you can see that in you know where there's no particular trauma at all, someone's really struggling and you look back a couple of generations and it's almost mimicking sure, yeah, our family, it was pretty overt yeah it was pretty overt.

Barbara Holifield:

There was a lot of unresolved grief, strife, conflict and struggle and it led to a lot of addiction. And that was very chaotic, you know, and very, very painful, and as a child the kind of downstream effect is neglect. Yeah, I said, and I can't hear you, beverly, can you?

Beverley Glazer:

hear me now. Yes, perfect yeah.

Barbara Holifield:

So that was, you know, a lot of what occurred for me.

Beverley Glazer:

And your mom was an alcoholic yeah yeah, and you had. Your parents had a divorce and you were with your mom yes, yes, very much so, and because that's so very hard.

Barbara Holifield:

Here's your caregiver yeah, yeah, and know she got hit hard after the divorce and then my father died and you know she was carrying a lot, a lot of grief and trying to take care of four kids and it was pretty much overwhelming, I think, for her.

Beverley Glazer:

You got out through education.

Barbara Holifield:

Education was so important to me and more than education, I just actually had the great good fortune of being, you know, kind of by luck, when I was a younger person, you know, through middle school kind of years, great and high school I was in an alternative school and the uh was a um uh Catholic school and the it was a very small student body. There was a great ratio of faculty to um students and their care and desire was really, you know, it was like in the seventies there was all this new, you know kind of blossoming approaches to education that were much more student centered at rather than you know requirements, and that was mine and I had a few fabulous people that really, you know know, helped me with what was going on through me, just by encouraging poetry and encouraging writing stories that would stem from literature, that could help segue in and help me continue to process. We never talked about things very directly, but they can see, you know right, and you were just so fortunate to be in that school.

Barbara Holifield:

I was so fortunate, you know, and they cared. There was a lot of moral holding, you know, in a school like that, and care and attention, people didn't fall through the cracks too much, which is a blessing, and you know, it affected me. I think everything affected me. I just didn't want to do the same thing as I had seen unfold with my siblings and the people in my culture surrounding me. I just I thought that's going to be dangerous for me. You know, either I'll go dead or get, you know, caught up in the same sort of patterns as they, because I was already struggling with eating problems. That's part of what, you know, so often goes on when there's not substance abuse, it will show up in eating problems.

Barbara Holifield:

And so I went to a college that was also alternatively oriented and very progressive and that was beyond fabulous. It really shaped me. The mode of education was that our classroom would be in the wilderness. Yes, so even when I was studying psychology and dreams, you know, we'd spend time seminaring, in class, in seminars, and then we'd go out on a long, extended rafting trip and work with our dreams that arose. I mean, it was so experiential, so immediate, really inspiring.

Beverley Glazer:

I could see how you just got into Jungian psychology. It was natural progression. It really really was. That's right, it surely was. So how did you get to understand about yourself through Jungian psychology?

Barbara Holifield:

Well, um, I was struggling as a teen and I really got interested in dreams and I read, you know, the books of the day about dreams, and not young yet. But I had a few really important dreams as a teen and when I look back I can see they were almost kind of guiding or prophetic, and I wasn't latched onto it but I knew they were very important to me. And so, as I started studying, there were two things that were important To listen to that kind of guidance from something that was me but bigger than me, which is how I think of dreams, and I certainly got supported in that and to be with a very direct experience of who me was, you know, which, as part of the human potential movement, psychology was really oriented towards a holistic approach, and that was again my good luck, because the guidance and the moral holding and the intent and being able to be in touch with kind of your guiding vision, what mattered to you, all that was important. But the pain that I experienced was still just imploding in my body. You know I was kind of stuck in a house of shame sort of, and pain, and so I, in those days, you know, the human potential was just blossoming, there was a lot of attention to what is the body has to have to do with.

Barbara Holifield:

Psychology. Gestalt therapy was, you know, really pivotal, and I got involved with all those different modalities. I just was hungry to find, you know, some sort of freedom, liberation and to know, and that led me down the path of directly experiencing that pain, not thinking about it but directly working about it, working with it at a very deep kind of primal level where things started to shift and change.

Beverley Glazer:

So you were gradually releasing.

Barbara Holifield:

Yeah.

Beverley Glazer:

Yeah, and as you were doing that, also healing circles which you bring into your work. Yes, that's right, wilderness. Tell us about that.

Barbara Holifield:

Yeah Well, the two levels, the healing circles would often come from doing group-oriented work, come from doing group-oriented work and later what I have stayed with is this group-oriented work with a kind of movement contemplative movement practice that brings together something like meditation, contemplative practice, the body, psychology and something bigger than all that emerges. It's a practice called movement in depth or authentic movement and the healing that comes from that. Once we start to tune into our bodies, we tune into each other and there's this mutual field of responsiveness that starts to develop and healing is expo-entuated, I think, or potentiated at least in that. So that's one way and it's so focused that you can really feel that sense of how, when we're, when we attune within ourselves and by attune I mean really drop down from our thinking mind into our feeling body and really start to be, as best we can, living in that place and listening, we're wired to attune to others. That's the way we're neurologically wired. And when that field is activated, you know you can feel it, and in a practice like that it's very focused. It's kind of like meditating together in a circle.

Barbara Holifield:

So the same thing is going on in the wilderness, but it's not quite as contained. You know you're contained in this bigger, immense, awe-inspiring power and beauty. I trekked all through the mountains and deserts of the southwest and working in groups like this, and that too, you know. Nature, whether it's being in your garden or stepping outside your door in the urban life and looking at the grass, going through the cracks of the cement, or the sunsets or the sky, nature's just been hugely, hugely, um, just been hugely, hugely, profoundly important, part of my transformation, part of my ability to recognize there's something much bigger than me going on yeah, no, as I'm listening, I would love to come on one of those journeys That'd be so fun with a group of others, people that have the same dreams and aspirations as you have and want to release something, whatever it is, and you're together in a very safe, safe space.

Beverley Glazer:

Over time, yeah, yeah, and that is healing just in itself, without anything. Absolutely Wonderful leader. You know you can be yourself and you can allow yourself to be yourself among others who can be complete strangers.

Barbara Holifield:

That's absolutely true, absolutely true. And the stronger the intent is around holding a circle and knowing that potency of it, the more will happen, even if you don't do anything, as you say, other than hold that intent Exactly.

Beverley Glazer:

Yeah, so you have a book, and this book is being with the Body In-Depth Psychology. What will readers take away from that book?

Barbara Holifield:

Well, I think they'll take away. Just you know how we are embodied beings, we can't escape that. But we can feel disembodied. Oh yes, and that's been so, you know, for eons people have struggled with, well you know, a feeling of separation, the whole idea of mind-body. It's kind of funny because our brain is in our body. You know it's part of our body, but we tend to override our body experience and think of ourselves as kind of these brains in the world, absolutely, or even in Jungian analysis. You know it's changing now. But sometimes we're psyches and those psyches are connected to our something and the body comes along, but it's not always central we, we really don't think of it unless parts of our body get sick.

Beverley Glazer:

Yes, other than that, we don't focus on our bodies, unfortunately. But what is the first step that a listener can do to start healing? If they're relating to anything that we're saying and they have their own trauma and they're absolutely even afraid to go there? What's a little step that they can take?

Barbara Holifield:

Well, I could break it down in a few little steps.

Barbara Holifield:

One is first like step again, like if you turn your attention inward for just a moment and breathe purposely and purposely, bring your awareness to your breath and feel it as it moves in you and out, and you don't have to do anything, you don't have to try to make it bigger, you don't have to try to make it right, just be with it and inevitably what happens is our breath will start to adjust by the virtue of our attention and that starts a self-regulating motion in progress, because we have the capacity to self-regulate, to work through trauma.

Barbara Holifield:

But instinctually we go away from pain and that's emotional or physical, and you know there's lots of cultural things and historic things and all that, but the emotional piece is probably as big as any that you know moves us out. So when we come in into the body and moves us out of the body, I mean when we come in body and moves us out of the body I mean when we come in and just you know, even if it's just a tiny little bit, be say, you know, here I am. It's kind of like the image would be a little bit like you know, rather than growing up like a tree, it would be like an acorn the myth of an acorn story where you have to grow down into the earth. Your seed gets planted, your roots grow out, you get planted here in your body and then we can start emerging more as a full self. So it's primarily attention, it's primarily bringing our attention. The body's always there.

Beverley Glazer:

And if it go ahead, yeah, no what. I was just going to say that, so anybody could do this really at any time. It's like a meditative practice.

Barbara Holifield:

It very much is it very much is. You know, some people will call it somatic mindfulness if we think of it that way, and many meditation practices are incorporating it, because many of those practices come from Buddhism and some of the earliest teaching of Buddhism is that enlightenment happens through the body, and really what that means is we're not whole, we're not our whole self until we drop into all of us. And so it's meditation, but a little bit different. You know, we can drop in and begin to like really let our senses help inform us. So just kind of the five senses, our sense of taste, of smell, vision though it can be helpful to close your eyes, your vision goes inward, you know, because we can get very distracted by our vision and start to objectify the world.

Barbara Holifield:

But when we turn inward, we are the subject of our own experience and textures and sensations, especially inwardly felt sensations, are very prime here. And really when we bring our attention, something starts to kind of, you know, like all the lights can start to come on. You know, like all the lights can start to come on Our kinesthetic sense, you know, like if we move slowly that can bring us down in. You know our proprioceptive system, like sense, where am I in space, but it's that other thing too of oh, I have an inner world and I can sense it. That's regarded also as part of our. We often limit ourselves to these five senses, but actually there's many more and this sense of I have an inner world and I can feel it is huge here. And to cultivate little moments where you know like, start with something fun, like, yeah, when you feel joy, you know like nothing, like a little child or a puppy or a cat to bring you joy, you know, and or a sunset, and to actually really feel it in your heart, versus think about it, you know, to feel your excitement, that's the best place to start.

Beverley Glazer:

I think that those are wonderful tips, absolutely wonderful. Anyone can do this. Sit with yourself, be in tune with what your body is saying, not just your mind. It's your body and your mind, and I'm sure there's going to be so much more in your book. I want to thank you, barbara.

Barbara Holifield:

Oh you're so welcome, you're so welcome.

Beverley Glazer:

Barbara Holyfield is a Jungian analyst with decades of experience in somatic psychology and psychophysical work. She has taught somatic psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies and continues to facilitate authentic movement internationally. Her new book, being with the Body In-Depth Psychotherapy, is published by Rutledge and available on Amazon. And so, barbara, where can people find you?

Barbara Holifield:

I have a website. It's my name barbaraholyfieldcom Pretty simple, not case sensitive, and that's probably the best place, as you say, the book through Rutledge, but also Amazon, but also you can find me on LinkedIn, facebook, especially through being With the Body. That's on Facebook where you would find me. Instagram.

Beverley Glazer:

Yeah, so it sounds like you're everywhere. And if you didn't get those links, all those links are going to be in the show notes and they're going to be on my site too, and that's reinventimpossiblecom. If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like Boomer Banter, and this is a podcast that focuses on financial literacy, mental and physical health relationships, as well as purpose, and so check out that link, and I will have that in the link below, too, in the show notes. And now, my friends, what's next for you? Are you just going through the motions or are you really passionate about your life? Get my weekly self-coaching tips to empower you through your journey.

Beverley Glazer:

And guess where that link will be In the show notes, the show notes below. You can connect with me, Beverley Glazer, on all social media platforms and in my positive group of women on Facebook that's Women Over 50 Rock, and if you think I can help you find your purpose or passion anywhere, anything, you think that I can help you schedule a quick Zoom, and that's also in the show notes right below this episode. Thank you for listening. Have you enjoyed this conversation? Please subscribe so you don't miss out on the next one, and send this episode off to a friend and always remember that you have only one life, so live it with purpose and passion, and passion.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website, reinventimpossiblecom and, while you're there, join our newsletter subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion and celebrate life.