At Indigo Luna, we believe that conversation is a powerful tool for personal growth and evolving.

By listening and sharing with one another, we can learn from each other's experiences, and perspectives. Together we can learn to live more from the heart as a collective.

Today's share is with our beautiful friend Eva Kandra, @evakandra from @from.soma, where we dive deep into the importance of gathering, community and the relationship we have with our physical bodies and higher self.

Please tell me about what you feel your calling for is in life?

So many ways to interpret and explore this question.

So many ways and paths to answer this question but simply, I think my calling is to Feel. To create spaces of deep intimate meeting of myself and the relationship that emerges from the internal field that I inquire into. Much like an unfurling, I feel the Calling is a never ending evolution. The craft, the river changes along the route to the ocean, but the water that flows is ultimately the same drop from the source; just molded, shaped and intimately touched from the journey from Source to Source, from Spring to Sea.

I love using nature to express myself. It is so beautiful, and poetic but sometimes the reality of what I'm actually saying is damn hard. To feel is a courageous act.

For people like me, it feels less like a choice and more of a non-negotiable, set in motion by my soul that agreed this was how I wanted to explore life in this cycle/incarnation. Some days feeling feels euphoric, like the most refreshing breath of AC after a day spent on the back of a motorbike; boiling, sweating, and inhaling exhaust. Some days feeling feels like a broken tap to a bath that is about to overflow and spill all the bubbles and water all over the floor, with no indication if the water will ever stop flowing out the faucet or if I will be sitting in a metaphoric bathroom filled to the brim with burst pipes.

All I know is my body and my breath. My devotion to listening to my soul speak, and some days she whispers, and some days she screams.

What is so special about women coming together in a ritual setting?

This question makes my body feel like a cup of honey.

Excited about even hearing about the gift of gathering. Tribal, community, circular living has been a fundamental necessity for humanity to thrive for as long as we have. The foundation to a tree blooming and blossoming, growing and expanding so big with her branches thriving, all comes from the thousands of individual anchors that create the roots. Gathering is how I see the unification of these individual streams into roots. The trunk, the channel from which we can then plug into to receive life. Drops of honey dripping to the earth.

When women come to gather, something truly remarkable happens. A light ignites and a long lasting flame re-emerges. We are reminded of the knowing of how nourishing it is to be with our bodies, in intentional space of listening to her and in that the receptivity of the field emerges. A returning home to essence. We don't have to do anything, the power can be felt by simply being and sharing space together from an embodied place. This is what is so special. The magic of the moment revealing itself.

What does embodiment mean to you?

Embodiment in essence means to be with, and in contact with what is moving through, moment to moment. Not just the awareness of observation, but the inquiry into relating. This is my current resonance with what embodiment means to me. For whoever is reading, I invite you to ask yourself, what does embodiment mean to you? For us all have a different orientation and experience to what the essence of embodiment inspires uniquely within us. Take a breath, bring some touch and ask your body, what is embodiment for you?

In what ways have you noticed women becoming disembodied? What happens as a result?

We become disembodied because there is an experience in the body that we have desensitized/ we don't want to feel because we have the experience that it is unsafe. Women, in female bodies, have spent generations living in states of perpetual fawning.

Fawning is 1 of the 4 trauma responses that come online. Briefly; Fight, is where there is high adrenaline and there is an impulse to defend and keep the system safe by overpowering/challenging the threat. Flight, is where there is still high adrenaline, but the adrenaline is used to flee the threat, escaping the situation and running towards safety. Freeze, is whereby the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system are both online and at high levels, making it very difficult to move or act, and the individual freezes, becomes paralyzed and non responsive, the whole system shuts down in hopes that the threat will wear itself out/ become disinterested.
 

Here we come into interesting territory.. Fawning. Fawning comes from the origin Fawn; a baby deer at a young, fragile and vulnerable age. Fawning has only recently been discovered as it appears primarily in female bodies, and because research, study and data is majority tested on male bodies, the discovery of fawning has only recently been recognized and explored by scientists.

Fawning is when there is high adrenaline, but the social part of the brain is still online and active, so the native/individual who perceives the potential threat is able to detect the desires and wants of the predator. The native is able to manipulate her/him/their self to fulfill the desires in hopes to rectify the danger, and establish safety again.
 

This is the birth of the trait called People Pleasing.

This is why healing the nervous system is essential at accessing a life of freedom, joy and authenticity. Every unprocessed emotion is stored in the body, directly interwoven with the nervous system. The more we create space for entering Soma, entering the body, creating safety and titrating the emotions that arise with breath, sound, and touch, the more we have access to being in contact with our true self, and have the opportunity to choose to act instead of responding from memory of threat and abuse. 

How is embodiment achieved?

I wouldn't use the word achieved, I believe it is more cultivated. I choose the word cultivated because it requires effort, time and devotion to wanting to create spaces to meet one's self. At first it can be super overwhelming, so this is where the concept of titration is brought in and where I focus my somatic education on.

Slow, consensual and titrated.

Titration originally derives from a chemistry term where you take two highly reactive substances in test tubes and with a pipet, slowly, slowly, mix them together to create the combined mixture safely. If titration wasn't applied, and these two substances were to mix all at once, poured too quickly, the substances would react and explode. This is the essence of titration when we relate it to trauma. Trauma is anything too fast, too much, too soon that overwhelms the system to digest, and our nervous system creates strategies to cope with this stress which are the trauma responses mentioned earlier; fight, flight, freeze, fawn. So by working with slowness, breath, we provide the fertile ground for digestion. Training our system to be anchored in feeling safe as we approach the tender areas of our psyche.

What effect does an embodied woman have on her surroundings?

Hmm.. I love this. To me I see this as a visual. As a stream feeding crystal waters of smaller streams. I see it as a grand oak tree, firmly rooted and at the same time completely expanded into swaying, playing and dancing with the wind. I see it as a circle. A beginning and an end with no interruption in between one fluid movement without a beginning or an end as they merge to create a third entity, a wholeness that I believe only women, in female bodies experience. This deep connection with the physical womb and the chalice from which the sacred waters nourish our life. I see villages of people thriving as a result of the empowered, embodied women they have the humble privilege to stand from, the women of their ancestry that chose to live from aliveness and embodiment that then paves way for a new wave of relating to life, earth and body. 

Share with me more about your work and what it means to you to hold space for other women?

As a Somatic Educator, I create a safe space for body based exploration. Providing the environment to start allowing what was suppressed and deposited, opportunity to start moving. As practitioners, we invite people to return to embodiment, to live life in an attuned state of felt presence. In order for this to happen, the focus is on building safety, so the safety begins relating to the pain, with the aim to develop capacity to feel safe enough to feel, so we are able to have access to the Aliveness life has to offer us.

My aim is to create intentional space for women to gather, learn, feel, grow, evolve, empower, connect, experience an established sense of internal safety and heal. To fine-tune the instrument of our bodies and our 5 senses for exquisite sensitivity, so we are able to be in deep fulfillment and intimacy with life, and how it desires to move through our being. That we are able to simply feel who we really are, moment to moment, and bring this into relationship with the world around us - dropping the constructs of who we think we “should” be in order to belong and experience life from a place of connection, authenticity, depth, aliveness and simplicity.

Are there any practices you can share with us for a woman to feel more embodied?

Embodied simply means being in the body. 

So the foundations for regulation and accessing body wisdom is through 4 ways; through breath, sound, touch and movement.

For me, when I get triggered, or experience an adrenaline spike or stress, I place my hands on my body, wherever it feels the most needed, nourishing and genuine. Bring my attention to my breath, and focus on candle breathing (slow, long exhales through pursed lips). Touch and breath are my go to, and if I need and the environment is appropriate, I will stretch; lengthening the body, creating space for breath to reach into the discomfort and bring a wash of relief.
 

Any final words? What would you like to leave us with?

Women are breathing, living art. We are the wave as we are the dirt and bud. We hold creation in our psyches, in our bodies, in our wombs.

When you need a reminder, feel your feet, feel the mana of the Āina, the power of the Land hold you in deep reverence and celebration, for you are the one that has choice. Choice to choose. Choose to use your dollar as your vote, to choose to listen, to choose to reclaim, embody and empower.

You got this. And as my friend continuously reminds me ~ be as big as your soul knows it to be and don't let anything stop it's magic.

We’re so grateful for our friendship with Eva. If you would love to hear more from her you can sign up to her Love Letters of Leo with the link below:

https://view.flodesk.com/pages/643e25d7783811d05bbf7d93

A beautiful offering of hers to share and connect more intimately with like-minded souls. 

You can find her on socials @evakandra @fromsoma

Photos captured of Eva by the creative angel @laucastrou