Building Community Through Self-Connection

In this episode of the Becoming mBODYed podcast, host Shawn L Copeland and guest Karen Cubides delve into the evolving landscape of leadership, inspired by Brene Brown's insights on empathy and connection. They discuss the importance of self-connection as a precursor to building community and explore the challenges of language in creating safe spaces for musicians. The conversation also touches on energy healing, the science of chakras, and the biases that exist within music education regarding the body and intuition. Through their dialogue, they emphasize the need for authenticity and the value of trusting one's inner voice. In this conversation, Shawn L Copeland discusses the profound impact of energy work and the importance of grounding techniques in personal development. He shares his journey into understanding energetic frequencies and how they relate to our interactions with others. The discussion emphasizes the need for community and connection in healing, as well as the development of a personalized coaching program that integrates somatic practices. The conversation culminates in the exploration of agency and choice, highlighting the importance of aligning one's authentic self with their life and career.

Becoming mBODYed is a production of and copyrighted by mBODYed, LLC, 2024. www.mbodyed.com
Follow me at https://www.instagram.com/mbodyed/ and https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61566020594221
The intro and exit music is Dark Matter by Carlos Velez, recorded by Tosca Duo on their CD Dimensions.
A link to Carlos’s music is available at
https://composercarlosvelez.wixsite.com/carlosvelezmusic/about-me.

Transcript

Shawn L Copeland (00:04.29)
Welcome to the Becoming Embodied podcast where we explore how safety and belonging cultivate embodied creativity, curiosity, and authenticity. I am your host, Sean Copeland, the founder and CEO of Embodied, a program dedicated to embodied education in the performing arts. Karen Kubidis is back with us today. She is a saxophonist coach and marketing expert. She's also the founder of the Karen Kubidis Agency, the one stop stop, one stop shop.

for musicians looking to take their career to the next level. I'm gonna leave that in and not edit it out because that is great. Karen, thank you so much for continuing to be a part of this journey with me. We're eventually gonna have to call this the Sean and Karen show, because I'm not sure when you're not gonna be a part of this podcast or what's gonna happen when you're not, but.

Karen Cubides (00:38.274)
you

Thank you.

Karen Cubides (00:55.54)
No. Thank you for making my day with that introduction.

Shawn L Copeland (01:01.664)
I have to leave that in. That's not going to get edited. that's great. Let's see. There's so much to catch up on. But I think today we're going to talk about the real about Brene Brown and kind of her take on the future of leadership and my response to that and the workshop that just happened as a result of that. Does that sound like a good plan?

Karen Cubides (01:31.81)
Yeah, let's tell people first though, like what this was. Because I don't know if they've followed you on socials and know the reel you're talking about.

Shawn L Copeland (01:31.928)
Yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (01:38.594)
Yeah, so I guess it was about three weeks ago or so. I saw a reel that Brene had put out where she was talking about leadership. And the quote that she said that really struck me was that leadership has in the past been defined by physical strength, authority, and dominance. Today,

We define leadership by intelligence, strategy, and problem solving. But what about the future of leadership? It's going to be about heart. It's about empathy, compassion, and connection. That true leadership will be defined by how deeply we understand and care for our teams. It's about creating environments where people feel valued, heard, and inspired. And I had such a strong response to that that I

sat down and actually made my own reel about it, where I think I said something about that the path forward to this, to creating environments where people feel valued and heard and inspired, has to begin by going in first. That we have to build those pathways and those places of connection with ourselves first before we can build them in relationship to others.

and that our capacity for understanding value and understanding inspiration and having empathy and compassion and connection in relationship and in community comes from our capacity to have all of those within ourselves. That this is something that we need to begin to cultivate on a somatic level with.

within the relationship that we have to ourselves. And through that, the ability to create community and connection will grow beyond us through our own understanding of ourselves. I keep saying the same thing over and over again. And I thought this is a great opportunity to...

Shawn L Copeland (03:57.208)
to bring back together the community that we started with the retreat in early September, and also maybe bring more people into it. And so we got the idea to do, and this is where it gets really fishy, we started to do a special event on Sunday that we even struggled with, well, what is this? Is this is this a,

conversation, is this a community building event, what does that mean, is this a master class, is this the workshop, is this a chat, you know, how do we even figure that out, and what is the term that we should use that's going to bring together the people who we want to be there, you know, that's something that I'm struggling right now with in this work is there are certain

There's certain terms that musicians are comfortable with in terms of signing up for and showing up. And one of those is a master class. Continuing education or workshop is not really a term that we use in the music world. And so I've been meeting that kind of head on with what's the, what is the right language around this? And ultimately we went with master class because that's.

Karen Cubides (04:59.636)
Yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (05:24.096)
a mutually defined term in our field. And so far, Embodied has been primarily serving musicians, although I think with this work especially, we're beginning to see it growing beyond the performance world. And I'm excited about the possibilities with that.

Shawn L Copeland (05:49.986)
Gosh, there's so much to say about this.

Karen Cubides (05:52.874)
Yeah, no, I'm super excited. And I was also thinking, you know, even back to the language, because, language matters like masterclass just seems so much more passive and something we're more comfortable as creatives versus a workshop where you're actively engaged or whatever. And I think as you're trying to build safety and a community of belonging and, all the good stuff like it sometimes can just feel like really overwhelming to be like doing that work. So I'm really excited about your approach of.

you know, just accessibility and like come as you are and, there's no like scariness to it. which sometimes in this work, I feel like it's just like trauma in your face or like, what your energy's off here. And you're like, what's happening? You know? So I just really liked that. It's like, you know, you're dipping your toes in the water. We're having meaningful conversations and obviously your safety is paramount. So you can participate, join as much as you want. There's also a replay. So I think just, it's so awesome to know that people can join and be a part of the conversation, however they want to.

And I'm excited for how this is going to morph into other resources in the future. So, yeah, if you could tell with us, because I wasn't there, like how Sunday went and what you guys talked about.

Shawn L Copeland (07:02.52)
Sunday was very exciting. think it developed very much in the same way that the content around the retreat developed. As I was trying to do my academic habit of, Sean, you need an outline, you need a plan, you need to know what you're doing, you got people showing up, they are coming with some expectations.

And I wanted to be as prepared as possible. I had to do a lot of deep sitting with Sean, know this work. You know it at a somatic level. It's cellular at this point. And knowing where you're going, you can't possibly know that yet because you have to wait for the people to show up.

You have to wait for who's going to be in the room, what are they bringing in the room, what is their level of commitment and comfortability around, is that a word, comfortability? Around participating, safety, before you'll know where it is that you're going to start. And that's really what happened. But there were a few pieces that needed to fall in place.

around Sunday, that became integral to what we actually did. And that goes all the way back to something that you and Jen said to me, your sister, Jen said to me, as we were doing the retreat wrap-up, and in response to what people were saying about our retreat and the work together, that you had encouraged me to...

consider this word healer and what that meant to me and my experience with that work and my history with that word. And that became a very important piece of being ready for the work that we did on Sunday and understanding.

Shawn L Copeland (09:25.603)
the nature of the work itself. So let's kind of back up a little bit. My use of that word healer comes from my background as a nervous system energy healer and energetic spiritual healer. I am formally trained and continue to train with two.

giants in this field, Jim Kepner and Carol DeSantos up in Cleveland. And I was introduced to their work through Bill Conable and Dale Beaver and Donna Dollinger, are, we've talked a lot about Bill, these are all also all senior pillars of the Alexander community and body mapping community and kind of known as the Columbus, Ohio cohort.

of Alexander teachers that have existed in that city for, goodness, the last 30 years possibly. And I was introduced to their work, to Jim and Carol's work, through them in the very beginning of my training as an approach to understanding when we put our hands on someone, we need to know where we're going and what we're doing.

And it turns out through their energetic work with Jim and Carol, they learned that our tissues within our body have a signature vibration to them, a frequency that they vibrate at. Bone feels like something, marrow feels like something, muscle feels like something, organs feel like something, and connective tissue and skin.

they all have a certain frequency that they vibrate at. And that it's very similar to how overtones work in music. Like there's a bass fundamental pitch and then there's all these octaves and fifths and thirds above that. Our bodies are the same way. And that may sound frou-frou-y and woo-woo-y, but it's not. We're talking about

Shawn L Copeland (11:44.984)
the electromagnetic energy of our nervous system. That is how our nervous system functions. It is pure electricity. And as synapses fire and electrical current runs through our nervous system, we emit an electromagnetic field all around us. We call that heat, but that's what it is. We perceive it as heat, but it's electromagnetic energy. And you know this.

It's how, you know, if someone sneaks up behind you and you can't hear them, you still know that they're there because you, no one can see me, but I'm hunkering down, like someone is sneaking up behind me and you feel that, you know, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up unless you're like me and you shave them off. you know, there's nothing up there to alert me anymore. But yeah, it's gonna be a fun day.

Karen Cubides (12:34.177)
You

Shawn L Copeland (12:43.96)
But it doesn't, this isn't, it's not woo woo. It's real, it's science. And human beings can sense this and match this. We do it all the time. It's a basic part of being a human being. Any creature on this planet that has a nervous system can do this and does it all the time. And I could give you,

plenty of examples of that. One of the easiest example is if anybody's driven a car and they're on the interstate and someone swerves into their lane, you actually move in the car as you turn the wheel to get out of the way. Because to your nervous system, it has mapped the car and the vibration of the car as part of you. Your nervous system has extended

to the car to include the car and your nervous system doesn't know where you end and the car begins in that.

you

We do this just inherently. so some people, humans especially, but for thousands of years have learned how to harness this and use it for healing practices. And that has been sort of the most ancient medical healing tradition before we discovered antibiotics and pharmaceutical drugs and...

Shawn L Copeland (14:20.984)
and surgeries and things like that and all the sort of Western tradition that complements that healing system quite well most of the time. So I was trained in that tradition and I still work with these individuals and have continued to develop that information. And there's a layer of this information that I refer to as sort of the religion of it, the metaphor of it. And that is the chakra system.

You know, and we, those are fairly common.

vocabulary that most people know what a chakra is, but you have seven major energetic places in your body that actually coincide with clusters of nerves in your body. And wherever there's a cluster of nerve, there emits a large field off of that. That's called a plexus, a nervous system plexus. And you have several of them up the front of your spine.

that ancient traditions have labeled and established meaning around. One is at the base of your tailbone. One is right in front of your navel, the mesenteric plexus, which is all of the nervous system energy around your intestinal tract. And then you have the field that comes off of your phrenic nerve underneath your diaphragm. And then the cardiac plexus around your heart and lungs, and then around your throat and in the center of your brain, in the top of your brain. Like if you look at

a map of the actual nervous system, you can see all of these places that lo and behold, we've created a vocabulary and named these places chakras. And chakra comes from the ancient Sanskrit word that means a spinning disk, because often humans will say the energy coming off of this field is moving in a circle, like a disk. Again, that's interpretation.

Shawn L Copeland (16:23.64)
but it doesn't dismiss the fact that it's there and it's measurable scientifically. So I have worked in this field for close to 20 years and had a pretty significant practice as an energy healer when I was teaching and working in Greensboro. And that piece of it was a significant piece of my

Alexander teaching, because it gives language to a piece of Alexander work that within the Alexander realm has not been well defined. And that is what's happening when we put our hands on someone. You know, the traditional Alexander language says, my use is talking to your use. That means nothing. But when we say

Well, my nervous system is communicating, is matching your nervous system and communicating something directly to your nervous system. Okay, that makes perfect sense. And we don't need very many examples to understand that we're doing that all the time. There's nothing special about that. We can do it because we're human and we have a nervous system. Your dog can also do it with you. You do it with a horse when you ride a horse.

You know, we do this all the time. So when I moved to Idaho and was working in northern Idaho with predominantly undergraduate students in the full tenure track pathway, I needed to, or at least I decided that that needed to go in the background for a while.

Shawn L Copeland (18:17.46)
not really a safe place to be out as an energy healer in an academic setting. And I certainly did not want to make my students feel unsafe, because that could be considered magical or any number of labels. And I didn't really want to.

create that space. So this work became very closeted for lack of a better way of explaining it.

Shawn L Copeland (18:57.378)
really until you brought this up to me and said,

Karen Cubides (19:01.824)
And what's crazy is we never talked about it either. We just like experienced you and we're like, yeah, this is what you are.

Shawn L Copeland (19:08.258)
This is what I am. Yep. And I have only...

I have only embraced this work in the last 10 years in my workshops and work with Bill and in the teaching that we do together. The work that we do in the Intermountain Alexander teacher training fully incorporates energetic principles with Alexander technique. And even the work that we do in Embodied and

Karen Cubides (19:55.906)
can hear you.

Shawn L Copeland (20:08.745)
Okay, am I back again? Okay, I just got some notice that said you've disconnected from something rather, refresh and rejoin. They are being still recorded, but I'm not, I'll edit all that out.

Shawn L Copeland (20:24.985)
The energetic piece of it is a silent part of embodied pedagogy in the sense that I teach embodied teachers how to navigate the layers and sense into the layers of a person's body. So that if they need to bring attention to a joint or the space between a joint or the bone that a person doesn't realize how

large their spine is or how deep or the size of their femur. We can show you that. We can feed into that and match that such that it lights up in your awareness and you're very aware that it's there. Same thing with if we need to release a muscle or a muscle system. We can do that. We can match that and know with intention exactly where we're going.

Shawn L Copeland (21:20.751)
As I embraced this idea more fully, it's particularly in relationship to this work on connection and started to develop the content for this workshop and even the title for the workshop, finding your true voice, your intuition, and your authenticity. And like those were...

That was something I felt very strongly about. But I didn't quite know why. And then as all of this started kind of coming together and the pieces fell together, it became crystal clear to me. Authenticity is heart. That's heart chakra. True voice, inner voice, that's throat chakra. Intuition.

That's sixth chakra, third eye chakra. So we're talking about four, five, and six. And in particular, we're talking about building into our energetic system such that our fourth, fifth, and sixth chakras that we can open the back of them into the unmanifest possibility.

so that we can hear ourselves in an environment where our internal direction and our internal senses are the softest, most subtle in a world where everything is much louder. Everything that's coming in externally through our visual systems, through our auditory systems, through our.

our relationships with other people and the expectations around those societal expectations, career expectations, all of those things. Those are much louder sounds and frequencies and pulls. And we're not, we're taught to respond to those and we're not taught how to listen to value and respond to our internal sense. And probably one of the best examples that I can give you of that.

Shawn L Copeland (23:42.529)
is, you know, if you're faced with a decision, you will immediately go, well, my gut says this. And then you'll go, I can't, why? And I can give you a pros and cons list for so many other choices in the decisions and all the possibilities, but my gut, I'm likely not able to give you a very descriptive reason.

pros and cons for that. And we'll probably go with something else because we're not taught to value. Like that gut reaction doesn't have the same weight as all these external ways of validating these decisions. Does that make sense?

Karen Cubides (24:29.162)
Yeah, want it does. I wanted to pause you right there, though. So first of all, this is the most beautiful explanation of chakras that I've ever heard, because I feel like as soon as you throw that word out, people are like, OK, this is weird. Where are your crystals? Like, let's not talk about this. But this was very scientific, which I very much appreciate. I also really like that you kind of answered the question for for anybody who perhaps is a nonbeliever or not familiar with the Alexander work around like, are people touching other people? So I think that that was also such a

great connection. But I'm curious, thinking of, you know, somebody listening to the episode being like, wow, Sean's got off the rails. Why do we have this bias? Like, where does this bias come from? Because because you're right, you know, talking about learning to look inward and to kind of trust what already exists there and why do we have these biases, perhaps as musicians or performers, where, know, everything we do obviously requires our bodies, but there's a

Shawn L Copeland (25:05.937)
You

Karen Cubides (25:25.11)
complete disassociation from that for whatever reason. So like, why do we not talk about what we're talking about right now? And why do we all have this reaction to it?

Shawn L Copeland (25:42.045)
I think, let's parse it out because I think the answer to each one of those different biases is different. I think our bias around the word energy work and chakras comes from a blend of...

Shawn L Copeland (26:06.459)
ancient medicine versus modern medicine. It comes from a blend of things that we can see and things that we can't see. And we are taught to be afraid of the things that we can't see. It comes from the fact that most of us come from some tradition of organized Judeo-Christian belief. And that particular tradition has

gone more and more into a dependency on the religious leader and the organization as opposed to your personal relationship with God. And so there is a definite bias in that. Whereas if you step away from what your priest or your pastor or your religious leader is saying to you and actually go into the Bible and read the Bible and religious texts, there's all sorts of references to

humans being energetic beings. The halo is what a crown chakra looks like open. And when we talk about a person beaming with light, and the light of God and the light of, all of our religious iconography and references are all bathed in.

this idea of light and the light of God and shining shimmering this, which comes from the energetic system being full, you know? And so we've known about this for the, for the entirety of human existence. but because it's not visual and it doesn't, it, it to some extent contradicts organized religion.

which I don't think that's true, but I think people think that it's true. many of the people who I work with are ordained priests, ministers, Catholic nuns, you know, it, it, fits, it fits Judaism. If it's Christian, it fits it, it molds onto all of those because it's the beginning of this is where all of our modern organized religions came from.

Shawn L Copeland (28:31.067)
is this understanding of the body in this way. I think we are taught because of our religious traditions, we're taught to not pay attention to the body because the body is equivalent to sin, and it goes all the way back to Adam and Eve and original sin, which is deep and that we could talk about on another episode, because I don't want to get into that. But I think that that's a lot of where it comes from.

Karen Cubides (28:55.938)
Thank you.

Shawn L Copeland (29:01.021)
And then in terms of music, I think that we are, and this is something that we said in the last podcast with Brian Chen, that we focus so much on the objective, the things that are measurable that we can look at on a page and compare them to what happened. Notes, rhythms, intonation, those kinds of things.

and we spend the least amount of time on the development of the artistic qualities and the artistic creative vision of the person in front of us.

I think the greatest challenge that we have as educators is how do we sit down with a person, know, 18 years old, freshman in college, first lesson of their adult professional career, and we say to them, everything that you know right now is valid and the world needs to hear it. Your creative vision has value, and I value it as your teacher. I valued it so much so that I...

successfully placed you in my studio. And from this point forward, all we're going to do is refine that and make it better and better. But what you know now and what you're already doing is valued and important to the world and the world deserves to hear it.

How do we start there and cultivate from there that your artistic vision is valid, such that, you know, I want you to listen to it. I want you to follow that intuition. I want you to cultivate that intuition. That has to be practiced.

Shawn L Copeland (30:56.829)
just like everything else. And you have to do it and trust it and see that it worked and do it again and trust it and continue to develop that trust in your own intuition and in your own.

Shawn L Copeland (31:14.151)
in the information that comes to you from the cellular level. You know, it is the softest, most subtle of messages. And we just don't place value on

Shawn L Copeland (31:32.157)
that? Did I cover all of them?

Karen Cubides (31:34.196)
It did. You did. And I just can't even imagine or I'm hoping that in our lifetime, we could see a world where that is the first lesson your freshman year, because that would be just absolutely beautiful. And yeah, that did answer my question. I was also thinking to like from a marketing perspective, I feel like the capitalistic nature of some of the woo woo stuff when it comes to healing and manifestation and all of that.

I feel like it's been, you know, not been misleading historically speaking, at least on social media. And I think that that just obviously leaves a bad taste in people's mouths, but you know, any personal development space or practice that I've done in my coaching work or in any of my certifications, including emotional intelligence, there's a degree of energy that you're working with. Like if somebody's looking at you, you feel that if you're engaging with somebody, if you're mirroring somebody, like there's

energetic exchanges constantly and you can call it what you want to call it, but there's just so many different practices. So for anybody feeling any kind of bias and if you're still with us, just explore it in whatever way feels good and whatever word you need to use because it's life changing.

Shawn L Copeland (32:45.541)
Any communication is energetic.

Period. The transfer of energy from one person to another.

That's what communication is. If it's visual, we're still talking about light and photons and traveling from me to you and your nervous system is picking them up. You know, if we're talking about sound, we're talking about sound waves, but that's still energy. That's vibration coming from my body, which is generating that sound, traveling through the molecules between us. And then your sensory receptors are receiving that and translating that into an electro...

an electrical impulse that then your brain interprets. Like, it's energy, you know? And somewhere, somewhere, we understand like light is energy and heat is energy and there's this whole quantum mechanics thing about, don't even get me started on that. I'll fall off the deep end. I'm way over my head even in just saying that.

But there's a quantum mechanics piece of it, quantum science piece of it too, and some nerd is listening going, yeah, yeah, yeah, go into this. I'm going, no, back away, Sean. But I'm with you, I'm with you. If you're that person listening, I'm with you. I wish that I could rattle it off on the top of my head, but I can't. But somehow, we're comfortable with that, but when it becomes like the energy,

Shawn L Copeland (34:24.659)
coming off of us, like at some point the word energy becomes uncomfortable.

Shawn L Copeland (34:33.681)
I don't know why that is.

Shawn L Copeland (34:39.913)
When I first was introduced to this concept, I was in Bill's office in Ohio. It was like 2004, 2003. Southern Baptist boy, that's my background. And he says, we're doing energy work. I went, no, no, we're not. No, come on. He's like, yeah, I'm going to teach you how to find the marrow in someone's bone, and I'm going to teach you how to find bone.

And I was like, mm, OK, I can survive the next two hours of this. And then I put my hands on someone, and I'm there. And I'm like, yeah, I can sort of feel that. And I can sort of feel that. And then I'm like, Bill, my elbow is really, really hurting. And they said, yeah. The person I was working on said,

I think you're getting the pain that's in my knee because I had surgery like last month and my knee is still recovering from surgery and it's really inflamed and I went, huh? Like, what? What? What? What? What? And it was like, yeah, that's what's happening. You can feel that. I think I could like, you know, so this Southern Baptist boy was like, like I got a rapid introduction really quickly to.

Karen Cubides (35:47.724)
Yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (36:06.215)
this is real. This is real. It's tangible. You can feel it. And often when I'm working with young people and they're a little skeptical, we're talking about matching someone else's frequency. I'm like, it's the same thing that you do every orchestra rehearsal. Someone gives you an A and you can tune your instrument to someone else's instrument. You're tuning your body to someone else's body. You can do that.

You know that you can do that. That's just the way our nervous systems work. That's why you have people who are allowed to be really close to you and people who are allowed to be somewhat close to you and some, and then people who need to be like an arms distance away, like because you match their energy to a certain extent and our loved ones, like our intimate loved ones, match our energy and are allowed to be in our intimate space and our.

know, family and close friends are allowed to be in that personal space, but not that intimate space. You know, and then we have sort of that friend's space and then there's the professional space, you know? And when people, we know this, when someone who's in the professional realm gets a little too close, you're like, that's creepy. You know, the reason for that is because the energies don't match. And

And that person doesn't have permission to be in that energetic space with you, with their energy. You haven't negotiated that yet. And we have lots of names for that. But really, at the heart of it, it's energetic. That's what's going on. know, someone walks in the room and they're like, everybody turns to them because, know, they, you know, we say, they just lit up the room with their presence.

We're talking about their energetic being. We're talking about how energetic they are and how much they shine because they're full. We say this kind of stuff all the time. We just don't know that that's what we're talking about. And we certainly are, we're afraid of it. Or at least we're taught to be afraid of it. But all it really takes is someone to kind of sit down with you and...

Shawn L Copeland (38:31.623)
go slowly and show you like, all of this lines up with science and this is the scientific piece of it. And then this is just the metaphor, the way of explaining it, the way of interpreting it. And that piece of it doesn't matter. There's many versions of that. Find the one that resonates with you. Find the one that fits with your tradition.

Shawn L Copeland (39:00.755)
There are some pieces of this that were very important. There's some pieces of the energetic tradition that were very important to talking about the work about fostering connections and the work that we did on Sunday that I want to make sure that we cover, because I think that they're very important.

And that is that to go up in our energetic system, we have to first go down. So if you want to rise up in energetic frequencies, you must be full in the lower frequencies. Think of this in terms of music. You can't have overtones without a fundamental. And the stronger the fundamental, the more present the overtones are.

The more resonant the fundamental is, the more present the overtones are. And our energetic system works in the same way. If we want to access the sort of more holy energies at the top of the system that give us access to our spiritual connection, whatever that is, Allah, God, Jesus, Mary, you fill in whatever works for you.

We must be connected to the ground to do that. And so the idea of a grounding technique is connecting to the earth and connecting to the energy of the earth, which is this gigantic magnetic field that is just emitting energy all the time that we live in it, we swim in it. And we are designed to be open to that and to feed off of it.

and stay connected to it like all living creatures are on this planet. And we are.

Shawn L Copeland (41:05.317)
as young people, as children. We're born into that and we are open to it until we start learning ways to see the world and understand and interpret the world that begin to kind of disconnect us from that system. The other piece of it is really where my connection to Brene's quote really comes from.

is that to go out, we must first go in. And our capacity to open out and to connect to others comes from our cultivation of what's within us first. You know, there's these balances of paradox. And the other one that sort of fits with that is to go forward, we have to go back. If I'm going to open my heart,

which by the way, the heart chakra is a receiving chakra. We don't send love out through our heart. We receive love into our heart. We give love through our voice, through our hands, not from our heart. Our heart is the place for us to receive it. And our ability to open the front of the heart to receive love is

contingent upon and dependent upon our ability to open the back of the heart into the unmanifest. We can't open the front any more than we can open the back. We can't go up any more than we can go down. So if you want to go really high, you have to go all the way down to the ground. And sometimes I get really spiritual with you. If you think about your real spiritual people,

Dalai Lama's and like Tichanot Han and Pema Chodron and gosh even Oprah. know, Oprah is spiritual. know that she's spiritual.

Shawn L Copeland (43:19.091)
They have learned how to connect to the core of the earth so that they can be so connected to spirit. They go much further in their connection to ground and groundedness so that they can be in those upper spiritual realms and be our true spiritual leaders. There's another person whose name,

Shawn L Copeland (43:49.019)
skip it because I can't think of what his name is, but it'll come to me at 2 a.m. I'll shoot him out of bed. That guy! But it was it was my kind of reconnection to this that once all of those pieces fell in, I went, I know where we're going on Sunday.

Karen Cubides (43:55.682)
you

Shawn L Copeland (44:17.979)
I know why the title needed to be finding your inner voice, your intuition, your authenticity. It all made sense to me. And what was beautiful is that people showed up. People arrived. People wanted to be in community around this work.

and in particular, they were the questions that they came with, and in terms of how they checked in with me in the beginning, was all pointing at Sean, have to do this energetically. You can't talk about this intellectually. We have to build our connection to this. I can't, I can't say to someone, listen to your intuition.

until I build energetically into their systems so that their third eye is full and supported and they can open their third eye and listen to the possibilities that their third eye sees.

Does that make sense? You know, we can't open the heart chakra unless everything below that is full. And then it will open because it's supported. And that support begins from connecting to the earth, opening the feet, opening the tail bones so that that root chakra is being full and receiving all of that deep earth magnetic energy.

Karen Cubides (45:34.902)
does.

Shawn L Copeland (46:02.609)
And as that comes in and fills the tissue and fills that energetic center, it fills up into the second and into the third. And then now the heart is resting on support and it can open and it opens the heart represents beauty and love and, and our connection to the divine. and once that is open and supported, then the throat can open and the throat is truth.

and expression, perfect form and perfect the balance between form and function and the perfection of that. It's our template, which is if you think about the template, the template is like what our DNA is structured on. It's beyond DNA. That's where we look to heal from is from the throat, but it's also where we express our identity from.

where we speak from. And then once that is full, then the third eye can open and the third eye is our place of intuition. And what's beautiful about it is that it opens backwards. It opens behind the head and into the place of unmanifest, which is behind us, where we can illuminate possibilities. It's not about seeing into the future.

It's about illuminating the possibilities that are here, that are with us. And when those three are working together, we have all the tools that we need to be our authentic selves and to know that we're being our authentic selves because that authenticity will resonate at a cellular level in who we are and we will know it and it will feed

us. We will be fed by being our authentic selves. And when we're in tune with these energetic centers of our body, we can also understand I'm not responding right now in my authenticity. I'm responding to expectation. I'm responding to the expectations of others. I'm responding to the expectations of my career.

Shawn L Copeland (48:29.603)
And these are all, these are falsely laid upon us or falsely accepted by us. And none of them are true.

if that makes sense. We can adopt them and they can become part of our authenticity, but that's a process. The problem is that most of us have just taken them because we've just been told that that's what has to happen. And we feel that dissonance.

Karen Cubides (48:44.583)
Yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (49:08.761)
And we're constantly trying to resolve that dissonance because we know that we're not acting within our authenticity.

You we know that we're doing what other people expect of us. Or we believe that our expectations of ourselves are actually our expectations and really they're the beliefs of others, the expectations of others. So that's what Sunday was about. I know, right? I know, right? Simple and shallow.

Karen Cubides (49:37.6)
My god.

casual.

Shawn L Copeland (49:46.941)
Really shallow work. I learned a lot. I learned that this work takes time. I was afraid. I had allotted 90 minutes, and I somehow had it my mind that I was going to run out of time. Or not run out of time, sorry, run out of content that I didn't have enough to say or that I didn't have enough for us to do. Yeah.

I was afraid that no one was going to show up and that nobody was interested in this, but very much like the retreat.

community happened. We established safety right from the very beginning and people, those who came were willing and open to going there and made tremendous insight in their own personal work. And it just ended up being a really beautiful experience.

Shawn L Copeland (50:55.667)
And I was just really touched. Again, there's a community for this. There's a desire for this work. There's a need for this work. People are ready for it.

Shawn L Copeland (51:13.223)
So that seems to be, I'm kind of turning a corner here. That seems to be the direction that embodied is headed into, gosh, 2025. Is it already 2025? It's pretty much, we're right there at it. I'm excited about bringing more of this work into fruition.

through a personal coaching program, I guess. I'm not really sure what the right word is going to be for it. It's not lessons. It's not therapy. The best word that we have available is coaching. But unfortunately, that word has gotten a little clouded by the idea of life coaching and that kind of thing. And it's a little bit of life coaching.

But it's from a somatic energetic perspective. Really learning to listen down at a cellular level for what resonates with you so that we can, our work can be that authentic expression of who we are. And what is amazing for me,

I keep, one of these days I'm gonna actually just get to sit down with her, I think, and tell Brene that she's my hero. I'm living her journey. I had to do this. I had to step back into my authentic self in order to do this work.

You know, I can't just talk about it. I've got to do it. And in order to be my authentic self, I have to keep doing the work. And I reached a point where, Sean, you're not enough. You're not enough because you're not connected to your whole self. You need to reconnect to this word healer. And you need to be who you are in order to do the work.

Shawn L Copeland (53:33.693)
that people are asking for.

Karen Cubides (53:39.626)
Yeah, how does that feel?

Shawn L Copeland (53:44.027)
exciting, really exciting, terrifying, in a great way.

Shawn L Copeland (53:54.163)
There's a lot of, there's this moment of like, I have to run a business. I have to be able to translate this into money, income, right? So I'm terrified, you know? Because there's a piece of that that feels disingenuous to the nature of the work.

Karen Cubides (54:08.29)
Yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (54:16.969)
There's just, you know, or when it officially launches, will people show up? You know, it's terrifying. But yet, I have to trust. I have to trust the work. I have to trust the community.

Shawn L Copeland (54:40.424)
It's scary.

Karen Cubides (54:44.674)
Yeah, it's real. I mean, you're paving the way. And even from like a marketing perspective, like there's no way to fully explain this without living it or without showing proof of concept. And I think that that's gonna be a really fun, you know, path you get to pave for people to feel like they have permission to access.

Shawn L Copeland (54:45.353)
Bye.

Karen Cubides (55:09.63)
spirituality, energy, whatever, and career that those two can go hand in hand. In fact, that's what makes you superhuman versus they're all in these individual silos or in these compartments that you only open up one at a time. And it's like, no, all of them together is really what make you you. And well, you know, the world needs to hear. And I feel like that has the trickle down effect from, you know, young students all the way up to seasoned professionals. And I mean, I think that's such a gift. And

It'll be a fun, crazy journey to figure out how to explain this, but it's needed now more than ever. mean, given the week that we are in from a world standpoint, like more than ever connecting to self and being freaking grounded, which is literally what you're talking about is so important. Yeah, that's amazing. Very excited.

Shawn L Copeland (55:59.305)
Yeah, we started with just some basic breathing techniques and then some grounding techniques to get us grounded. What does that word mean even? To remodulate our nervous system down into a parasympathetic state. Calm, resting, not in an elevated state of panic.

Shawn L Copeland (56:27.667)
getting us connected again, connected to ourselves, knitted back together so that we know who we are and we can feel that. And that what you're talking about in terms of like the compartmentalization versus decompartmentalization, like that's when we really start to resonate.

is when all of those things, all of those pieces of us...

Shawn L Copeland (57:05.629)
find an alignment with one another.

relationship with one another.

Shawn L Copeland (57:15.878)
and they resonate like sound frequencies. And when the base of us is full, all of the other pieces of us...

pop out like a chord, like a perfectly harmonized chord.

and when one of them isn't in balance...

chord is upside down, you know? And it's, that musical piece of it is so, it's such a easy translation for me. Like it makes sense when I relate it to music. We're several times in the workshop on Sunday where I was like, so if you speak music, this is what I mean, you know?

And thankfully, I think I remember correctly, everyone was a musician or music adjacent. There was one person who was not maybe a musician by profession, but she was married to a musician. And I think she did have some musical background. She knew what I was talking about. But I kept saying, like, if you speak music, this will make sense. But.

Shawn L Copeland (58:32.423)
Yeah, I'm just, really thrilled about developing this into a body of work. and right now I, I see this as a personalized coaching program, where we're working in reestablishing a somatic connection.

and reestablishing the somatic connections to ourselves. That is, this will be different than teacher training.

Shawn L Copeland (59:15.271)
And it could include performance work. It could include just meditation work and inner work on yourself. It could include work around a particular project or a goal, life goal for yourself. Maybe it's a performance goal. Who knows? There's so many different ways that we can apply this.

And I'm just, I can't wait. I can't wait for this to debut and see what people do with it.

Karen Cubides (59:56.258)
Yeah, for sure. I feel like in my work, like the only times that I've seen professionals or anybody at the top of their field or anybody that's accomplished a goal and actually felt good about it or that it was enough is when they were aligned. And if that's not enough of an invitation to be like, if you want to actually have career satisfaction or life satisfaction, I think that that's what makes this work.

a necessity and not to sound like preachy or annoying, but you know, in my, my side of stuff, like I see people, I work with people in the New York bill and like the best of the best and just, it was so demoralizing to see how dissatisfied and how unhappy and how unfulfilled in these positions that we would consider to be the best or the top. And, you know, for a long time, I thought like, yeah, you can be successful and unhealthy, but the more

that we talk about this, you actually can't. Sure, you could externally be doing all the right things and be the best and be revered, but you still wouldn't actually be living your best life, because it wouldn't be your authentic life. You wouldn't be happy or fulfilled, and you wouldn't be the healthiest version of yourself. So I think that this is more of the path, less least traveled in the sense that by going inward and looking within, you actually have the agency to determine success for yourself.

and satisfaction and fulfillment. And that's a whole other ball game to play in versus that external voice and that inner critic and the meanness that is available in the toxicity of our space.

Shawn L Copeland (01:01:34.089)
That's the piece of it that you're talking about, that agency and the development of agency. To me that, I learned that from Alexander. the, you know, there's so many different definitions of Alexander out there and so many ideas about it and so many, so many definitions point to it being about posture and alignment and, know, it's about, it's about.

the possibility of choice and us realizing that we have choice in our lives. If we can just put a little bit of space in between stimulus and reaction, then we discover that we have choice and we can make choices. We can intentionally direct

our life.

Shawn L Copeland (01:02:34.867)
That's agency. And it's not.

This isn't a solution to control and being in control. We're not talking about that. We're talking about having the ability to intentionally affect our lives.

Shawn L Copeland (01:03:05.695)
and be instruments of change.

for ourselves and for our communities and for our students.

Shawn L Copeland (01:03:15.401)
for the world around us. Talk about needing that right now. Yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (01:03:23.207)
Yeah. my goodness. Have we done it?

Karen Cubides (01:03:28.578)
I think we've done it, yeah. It's been an hour.

Shawn L Copeland (01:03:29.467)
I think we've done it. I think that that's a lovely place to pause here and just say thank you for all of you who are listening. That was something that came out of Sunday that was so precious to me was how many people said, I've been listening to your podcast and here's the opportunity to work with you in person. I'm like, what? That's fantastic.

No, that just feels really cool. So again, thank you to all of you who are listening and following. And if you're new to us, by all means, please subscribe. You can find us on all of the podcast platforms and please reach out through all of the social media platforms. Let us know what you're thinking. Let us know if you have questions or have a.

a personal response to anything that we've talked about or a story that you want to share. We'd love to hear about it and maybe even circle back to the conversation and fill in some gaps that we maybe have missed over or just bring up your story and see where it takes us. So you can also always reach out to me through the website if you want to communicate with me personally. The same goes for Karen. You can reach her on her website as well.

And I look forward to our next episode coming up. Thanks.