Ep 57 with Dr. Genevieve von Lob

Ailey Jolie: 00:06

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Alaie Jolie. Welcome back to In This Body. I'm Aile Jolie, and today I'm joined by Dr. Genevieve Von Laub, a clinical psychologist whose work moves between the clinical and the mystical, the individual and the collective. Over 20 years working in the NHS and private practice, Genevieve has specialized in supporting highly sensitive people, particularly parents raising sensitive, strong-willed children. She's the author of two books, including Five Deep Breaths, The Power of Mindful Parenting, and she's the creator of the Resonant Parenting Project. Her clinical training spans trauma modalities like the Comprehensive Resource Model and Internal Family Systems, but her current inquiry extends into Thomas Hubel's two-year Timeless Wisdom training, where she is exploring collective trauma, healing, and the spiritual dimensions of embodied presence. Genetive's work asks, What becomes possible when we parent not from inherent patterns, but from a deeply resourced, attuned body? Today we're exploring what happens when the work of healing moves through us, into our children, and perhaps into the lineages we carry too. I hope you enjoy this episode of In This Body with Me, A. Jolie. So my first question for you today is one that I often start the podcast with, and I would love to hear from you what being in your body means to you.

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 02:28

Yes, what a great question to start with. So this is something actually, Ailey, for many years I was not in my body. Like I didn't know what it meant to be embodied. I was very disconnected and dissociated for so much of my life. And I think that came from kind of one of my earliest, most defining experiences and traumas was when my mother was killed in a car accident when I was nine years old. And it was such a shock and

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 03:02

so overwhelming. I was so overwhelmed with grief that I did what many children would do. I left my body, like I disconnected. And I went through my life. I can think about school. I was very spacey, very zoned out. And it's amazing actually, because you can actually do school and learn. And I realized I could do academia being living from the neck up, like I could do that in a disembodied way. So I managed to get through school, through university, and I managed to become a clinical psychologist, all feeling very disembodied, although I didn't realize. And I think it was only when I got to my late 20s and I was realizing just how much anxiety I had and what a busy mind I had, like my racing mind. I had mind loops, and I was kind of self-medicating through alcohol and busyness. And I thought something has to change here. This is no good. You know, I'm a psychologist. I have a responsibility to hold spaces for others. And that's really, it was my late 20s, which took me on a path of trying to find ways, I guess, to heal. I was searching for relief from my mind and from so much feeling so unsettled. And that took me to more embodied practices. So up until that point with clinical psychology, it was the start of my journey of talking about my life and my traumas. But then I found my way to sweat lodges, plant medicine circles, repassionate meditation, sound healing. Like I've tried everything. And I think it's through these practices that I started to, to come back to your question, start to actually understand what embodiment was. Because I started to feel my body, and I'd never felt it before. I'd just been so numb. I think the first experience of feeling my body was numbness. It was a kind of feeling of feeling nothing. But I think I was starting to become aware of feeling nothing, and I really honour that dissociation now because that's what enabled me to stay here, to live. And it's such a protective mechanism. But now as I've done more work and more, I guess, just being with my own system, my own body, and letting go of more layers and starting to crack through and really cry and really sob, I've started to feel what really being in my body is. I'm starting to land. And it's an ongoing journey, isn't it? Because even just a few weeks ago I I hit another layer of numbness and I thought I'd I thought I'd done all this, but no, there's always another layer. This embodiment now I feel is something that I can offer in my work as well, my embodiment to parents, to the children I work with, and help them to come back to their bodies as well.

Ailey Jolie: 06:03

You said something there that I often pull out that comes from a meditation teacher of mine, Haroko, and she often says, we need mindless moments to have mindful moments. And my variation of that wisdom is we need disembodied moments to know what our embodied moments are, and that disembodiment is protective and normal, and oftentimes a very brilliant strategic response for us to one day to have more embodied experiences later on. So I love that you name that in your answer, and you started to actually begin to answer my next question. And I would love to hear from you how just even the topic of embodiment relates to the work that you do today.

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 06:46

Yeah, so I mean I think embodiment is my work. It's everything now. And I didn't realize that at the beginning of my journey. I thought it was about talking, but I don't think you can do the work of healing without realizing it's all about the body. And so the work I do now, I work with parents. I use kind of conscious parenting approaches, and I work with children, highly sensitive children and teenagers. For me, conscious parenting is all about embodiment. Because when parents come to me, they want tools. They've read books, they've listened to podcasts, they want scripts, they want things, how do I speak to my child? And that's helpful to an extent, but really conscious parenting isn't about just awareness in our minds, it's about being in the body. Because what's the greatest gift that we can give our children when we're parenting? Children don't respond to what we say so much as how they feel with us. And they respond to feeling attuned to our presence. And they can feel when we as parents are not connected to our body. This is so much of the work I do, and it's it's not intuitive in our culture. We haven't been trained to recognize that the body is so important. We've all been trained to stay in our heads. There's so many ways that this culture keeps us disembodied, even through technology, through the phones, through the busyness, to come back into our systems again. It takes some awareness and it takes some work. But I really see, you know, the the results of when a parent really starts to make an intention to connect with themselves. And we talked about the numbness and dissociation. Most of us are dissociated, and I include myself in that. And so it's okay to be dissociated. I love what you said about the mindless moments. But what our children really appreciate, and our children are very forgiving, is when we can start to just become aware of ourselves, and that means becoming aware of the not feeling.

Ailey Jolie: 09:03

Or the listener who maybe doesn't know just yet, what is conscious parenting?

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 09:09

Conscious parenting. For me, conscious parenting is awareness, it's becoming aware of how we respond to our children, not to go into automatic reactivity. Because what I find with many of the children of this generation is they can be very triggering for parents. Many parents come to me, they feel very triggered, they have their buttons pushed. And so so much of conscious parenting is saying, okay, let's bring this moment with my child into more awareness. What's happening in me? What's this replaying from my past? Because we think the parent thinks is about the child, but actually, when we get triggered, it's about the past being reactivated. Awareness is the first step. And then if we wanted to take it another step further, I think conscious parenting is about how we're healing the ancestral past, our lineage, because we're not just carrying our own individual biographies and histories and the things that happened to us. In our nervous systems, we're all carrying our lineage. We have ancestral traumas and resources that we have inherited. And so this is an opportunity to not only reparent ourselves and as a parent to become more aware of our own individual childhood traumas and the things that happen to us, but to also break cycles. And I feel like parenting and conscious parenting can be such an incredible step in our evolution. It can really be a path of growth and healing. So when I work with parents, they feel like all the times that they lose it, they shout, they get angry at their kids, and I say, no, this is an opportunity. Every one of these moments is an opportunity for you to wake up, become more aware, more conscious, and bring all of that more into awareness. Because I really don't believe that the individual work is separate to the ancestral dimension or to the collective dimension. So it's breaking cycles and patterns.

Ailey Jolie: 11:24

One of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the podcast is some of what you're starting to speak to there on breaking cycles and patterns, but also because we just haven't spoken very much about the embodied experience of parenting on the podcast just yet, even though it's something that I've spent a lot of time in my practice speaking about with, but it's not an area of expertise at all. I would love to ask you what are maybe some pieces of wisdom that you find yourself sharing often with the parents that you work with?

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 11:54

That's a beautiful question. And I think I work with many. So people are drawn to me, the sorts of parents who work with me are very empathic, highly sensitive types of parents. I find that they're naturally very intuitive and they want to do this work on themselves. That's why they've come to see me. And what I notice about very intuitive parents is that they are very tuned into their children. So they almost feel all of their children's emotions viscerally in their body. It's a very intense experience when you're a very highly sensitive parent to parent because you feel it all.

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 12:42

So I think we can then lose ourselves in our child's emotional storms, we can get almost enmeshed, and then we struggle to co-regulate. So coming back to the embodiment piece, one of the main things I work with parents on doing is learning to track their bodies, learning to become aware of, you know, where's that feeling in the chest? Is there a tight feeling in the chest, a tight feeling in the jaw when you're starting to get triggered? So I do a lot of work on that working around the trigger and prevention, but really to really tune into the body. Because the truth is obviously with if we're not in our bodies as parents, we cannot, it's very, very difficult to hold that space and corregulate. So parents are learning how to track themselves, and you learn how to become aware and say, okay, my child is overwhelmed right now. And I am still anchored, I'm still in my body. We have to stay in our bodies as parents, not get, you know, swept up in our child's emotions. And I think this is very critical, particularly for very empathic parents. So that's one thing that I talk about with parents. I think another major piece that I would w want to speak to. Many parents feel very guilty and feel like they're failing. And this is a theme that I see all the time in my work. Parents are struggling, they struggle to hold it together. And often they feel like they're in survival mode and they're really not coping. And parenting is hard work. It brings up all your triggers, it brings up all your patterns in such an intense way. I think in these moments, I think what our children do is they trigger that part in us. So let's say you have a six-year-old child and you had a particularly difficult time at the age of six, your child will trigger that part in you, your inner six-year-old. And I think in those moments, when we get triggered as parents, our ability to stay present, to stay kind shrinks. Our capacity, it's like that inner cup. Like our capacity to be there and hold that space shrinks. And parents beat themselves up about this. They feel very guilty. And I think what we need is a different perspective and to recognize no, no, no, your system is overwhelmed. This is the protective response that that you needed in your own childhood. And so you are actually a parent who needs more support in this moment. And the other piece is that we were never supposed to parent alone and in isolation. And I think this is the difficulty with today's world, the way it's set up. Parents are very isolated, and many parents that I work with are not living near extended family, so they're doing it alone, and then they wonder why they're struggling. But you see, we're not designed to bring up children on our own. We were always designed to bring up our children in a village, in a community. Like I see it as like a collective nervous system, a kind of collective co-regulation, and that feels natural. And you'll see children in groups, and when they're with lots of people, children tend to settle down because it's intuitive to a child to be in a big group of people. And that's really what they need. They need the co-regulation of the different aunts and uncles, the grandparents. And so when a parent says to me, I feel like I'm failing, I feel so bad that I can't hold it together, I feel so guilty, I remind them of the fact that we're not living in the way we're designed to, in that sort of community atmosphere. So, really, what we need to do today is find, and this is another part of conscious parenting, is how do we find ways to rebuild our villages around the children? And this is why I'm so committed to creating communities for parents, because I think when we create communities and the supports for the parents, the children feel that. The children are very intuitive, they're very sensitive, and they naturally fall into place, like their nervous systems just settle.

Ailey Jolie: 16:53

I know that you use this term to describe the quality of connection between parent and child, but it might also extend outwards. So if it does, please, I would love to hear your thoughts and expertise. But you often use the term resonance to describe the quality of relationship between parent and child. And I would love to know what resonance feels like somatically and how maybe it's different than enmeshment or over-identification.

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 17:17

So many parents, when they probably hear that word, would be very confused by that word. It's not maybe an intuitive word. And in a way, it's very connected for me with co-regulation. So if I was to speak to kind of the co-regulation and the resonance, and I think many parents would think immediately think, well, that just means giving my child a hug or physically soothing them or rocking them. And yes, that's part of co-regulation, that's part of resonance. But for me, resonance is a deeper layer of co-regulation. It's energetic. And it's how we have our nervous system to nervous system, like the child's nervous system starts to resonate with the parents' nervous system. So how do we do that as parents? And I think really it's about how do we remain present and attuned and connected to ourselves and grounded in our own bodies so that energetically we're in resonance ourselves. So we're in a kind of congruity, a state of congruence, where our words and our emotions and our physical bodies are all aligned. For me, that's also a sign of real authenticity when a parent is truly aligned and congruent. So it's not about being calm all the time. Definitely not. You can't be calm all the time as a parent. But it's about being congruent. It's about recognizing I'm overwhelmed right now. And there's an authenticity in you know, awareness. I'm overwhelmed, I can feel my thoughts are racing, my mind, my body is feeling overwhelmed, I'm feeling tense. So having that congruence is very important. And when we're congruent, we're authentic. And when we're authentic and embodied and congruent, our children feel that. And then their nervous systems start to almost resonate with ours. So that's how we help our children to come back into their window of tolerance. So as parents, how I see it, we're holding a safe space, but we anchor our children. Yeah, so we we hold this beautiful space of resonance. And you know, it's not possible all the time. It's really not possible. But it's hard, but you can, the more you practice this, you know, and I think it's the the journey of starting to really micro moments of connecting with yourself throughout the day as a parent. So how do we really tune in? And I like to do what Thomas Hubel talks about, which is the three sync. So he says to check in with our mental activity, our mind, our thoughts, check in with our emotions, and check in with our physical bodies. And I do that every day, check in with my mind, my body, and my emotions. And I think those are the kind of practices as parents that we can start to do. And you can do that anytime when you're you know, boiling the kettle or waiting at the schoolgate.

Ailey Jolie: 20:32

I would love to explore some of the pieces that you have learned from Thomas, as you just named there. But before we kind of shift to that space, I would love to just kind of pick a little bit at what you named, which is so absolutely true, is that we cannot stay in a completely regulated place all the time. Sometimes that wouldn't be congruent or authentic. And in that, sometimes rupture is inevitable in parenting. And I would love to hear from you how a parent can repair from an embodied place rather than just apologizing with words.

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 21:07

I always say to parents that even if it goes all wrong, you shout, you lose it, you you say words that you didn't mean, you always have repair to fall back on. So there's always going to be the rupture, but we always have repair. And I think this is such a big intervention that we have that previous generations of parents didn't use because I haven't heard of many parents in past generations who did this repair work. It's really now I'm seeing this generation of parents who are really starting to go back to their children and apologize. And so, yes, it needs to be more than just words. It needs to be coming from your whole body and self. And I think for the parent, often these moments can be very traumatic actually for many parents when they lose it with their kids. Sometimes children can be aggressive, they can say horrible words, they can throw things. And I think for parents, these moments can really hurt. And I think we need to, as parents, really show ourselves compassion and forgiveness and to really allow ourselves time to recover from that. I don't think you can rush the repair process. It needs to be genuine. And so I always say to parents, just do it when you're feeling recovered. So you need to really put on your own oxygen mask first, and you need to go away, look after yourself, tend to yourself, come back into your body again. And it's like we spoke about earlier, it's being able to track your body, how am I doing in my body, and finding some ways to ground again, whether that's taking some deep breaths or going for a walk in nature. And then I think it's at that point then we need to be with our children and only apologize when it feels like you can do it in a genuine way. Because I know some parents go through the motions of saying sorry, and of course the children pick up on that. They can feel it. Especially the children I work with, they're very intuitive and sensitive, and they pick up on tone of voice, they pick up on micro-expressions in their parents' faces, and they also pick on the underlying energy. And children can even pick up on our traumas. They pick up on our undigested traumas and emotions. And it's not to say that we don't need to blame ourselves. We've all we're all carrying our peace, but it's just to be aware that children know more than you realize. And I think we really need to honor that and recognize that children are working often on a different level of consciousness. So I always call them like little tuning forks. They're kind of scanning and they're really aware. They're aware of so much more than parents realize. I really want to also honour the children and have deep respect for what they're bringing in this generation because I think they're bringing in a lot of teaching. I think they're bringing in at the moment a lot of lessons for us as a collective and much healing. And I think when we as parents can recognize that this journey of parenting with this other human being can become a journey that we're on together, where we're guiding them and navigating them and holding the space for them and attuning to them, but they're also teaching us too. So it's a joint partnership. And I think it's very hard, it's it's very important that we respect, just respect the relationship of the parent and child.

Ailey Jolie: 24:52

I know that many parents do carry shame from their mistakes or their energy or their lack of patience or their own trauma, as you've named and as we've kind of explored a little bit. But I would love to hear from you how maybe shame lives in the body and what does it take to actually metabolize it rather than transcend it and metabolize it in such a way where, as you just spoke about, it doesn't kind of recycle to the next generation, or a little one doesn't end up acting it out. If you have maybe some some wisdom or some advice on how we can metabolize shame in a way where it doesn't get passed forward.

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 25:29

I think in terms of not passing on shame to the next generation, it requires awareness of the templates that live in us, of how past parents parented. Because parenting, I would say up until very recently has been based on a more authoritarian way of being with children, which has been about punishment, fear, control, and children being suppressed and being told to be quiet or at least suppress their true selves, suppress all their feelings. And in that process of being raised, many of us now carry that shame, as you said. And so this is generations upon generations of shame that's being passed down, which hasn't been digested, which is just sat in the nervous system and it hasn't been seen and witnessed. I think the first thing is we need to become aware of those past patterns and we we need to think about how we do not repeat the parenting of the past, which was based on shaming our children and punishing them, but that we're moving more towards a parenting style, which is about relationship and attunement and connection with our children and really seeing them. And of course it's very difficult because many parents I work with have these intentions to break these cycles and to parent in a very relational way, but in the moment of the trigger, the past comes up again, and the shame is there. And the parents may shout at their children, or they may even say something that sounds like their own father or mother or even grandparents. This is very delicate, tender work. Personally, I think the work that we do with our shame as parents, we can do it in therapy, we can do it one-to-one, we can work with a therapist, maybe using I love IFS, internal family systems, I love working with parts, and we can digest and bring the shame into that. But even better than one-to-one work, I really believe in the power of doing this work in community. And because I think there's something about doing it in a group. I at the moment currently, like as part of my training with Thomas Hubel, we have triads, and that's where you have three people and we meet every week, and one person shares, and the other two just witness. And there's no fixing, there's no feedback and no advice. It's just witnessing. And I think when you create these safe containers or little almost little micro communities, that's what really allows those exiled parts of us, so the exiled parts like the shame, to feel safe enough to come up. So I really believe that shame needs to be handled with such tenderness and really needs to be met with tenderness. But when you do it in a group, then the shame can come up and it can be safe enough to be witnessed. And what happens in a group is the group can help to digest, feel the shame with you. And this is really when we can do this work in relationality. For me, that's the ultimate work to actually have your shame be held in relationality with others in a group who are safe. Because so much of what has shamed us as children, we were alone. And so to do it on our own is very, very difficult. In fact, it's almost impossible to access those parts of us. And of course, even if you have a bigger community, a bigger group that's got coherence and safety, that can be even more powerful because the shame can be brought into a group and can be held, witnessed, and almost digested by the entire group. It's like a collective nervous system. And this is what Thomas Hubel talks about so beautifully. He talks about how we create fields and we create safe, coherent fields for which our XR parts can really start to feel safe enough to come up, and then they can be seen, and then they can be processed and transmuted. But I think with any of these emotions and feelings and parts of us it has to be done in a slow way at the pace of someone's nervous system. So this work must never be rushed. And I think part of it is also how do we it's just beautiful, just to create space around the feelings. So we don't change shame, but we just meet shame.

Ailey Jolie: 30:29

As you've mentioned there, you've been studying with Thomas Hubel in the Timeless Wisdom training, which is a two-year immersion in collective trauma and also mystical practices or spiritual practice in many ways. And I would love to know what called you to that work and that offering and how maybe it's changing the way that you understand parenting and sensitivity, but also intergenerational transmission, as we've been talking about lightly in here.

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 30:56

I guess for many years, you see, I've I've been a psychologist and I've been working one-to-one, and I still do lots of one-to-one. I I do lots of one-to-one work. But I guess I was increasingly realizing that so much of my own healing has happened in the group. And I've been interested in community and group for a long, long time. I even did my doctoral research in in kind of group singing because I was very interested in something almost magical happens in a group that can't happen one-to-one. So I guess it's been a long-term interest. And through my own experience of realizing that I could access more and I could heal more parts and go deeper within a community. And I mean a safely held community because not all groups are equal. Some are not good and some are unhealthy. I was very drawn, I guess it's just the next step on my evolution as well, because I've done the individual piece, but I was very much longing to look more at my own ancestral traumas and resourcing the ancestral piece and also in the collective. And in terms of why, in terms of parenting, I I because I see so much of parenting, not as an individual, it shouldn't be a solo thing. I feel like parenting has become something individualized where we point the finger at the parent. And I feel like parenting needs to be seen again as a collective endeavor. It's a community endeavor. And we need to create spaces for the healing to happen. And I think we can do so much more when we when we do it as a collective than when we do it individually. So I think there's something in my own work where I'm wanting to shift from that one-to-one work to the more community. I guess also I just feel I'm drawn to it because there's so many, I feel there's so much on the planet happening at the moment, which is affects us as a collective. And I think so much of healing is seen as something we do in isolation. But none of us is separate from each other. We're all connected to our earth. In fact, we are the planet. The body of the earth is our body. We're connected to each other, we're connected to the whole of the animal kingdom, biodiversity. So for me it just isn't making so much sense that we work individually, but to realize we're all participating in this collective process and we're all part of an ecosystem, whether we're parents, whether we're in a work community, but we're part of a whole human family. And so for me, what I see in the work is that when one parent starts to begin to do this work and starts to connect with their own body and starts to learn to sit with their own discomfort and to attune to their child and meet their children with more presence, we don't just do that work for ourselves. We do that work for our lineage, for the ancestors. We break cycles, and we're also doing the work for the future of the human species. And so every time a parent does this work and tracks themselves and heals a little bit more inside themselves, they're contributing to the collective field. I see that we're all we all share a field. And so when we do this, we contribute. There's a whole collective field that we're helping to heal. So I really feel, you know, the what's happening inside us when we do our piece of work, we heal the whole. And that is not a small thing. It's huge. It's for me, it's the most meaningful thing, and it's the reason that we're here. We're not healing in isolation anymore. We're healing, we're not parenting in isolation. And I think we need each other in these times because we have so much that's happening on the planet at the moment from climate change to war, to systemic injustice, to racial injustice, so much disconnection from the planet. And it's a lot to hold. There's a lot of pain and suffering on the planet right now. And we can't do this on our own. We need to do this as a collective. We have power. And what I love about Thomas Hubel's work is he does work with big numbers, big groups. What I see in Thomas Hubel and what I feel like he models is his spaciousness inside him. He has a lot of space to hold and to digest a lot of the pain. And he talks about how, yes, he he talks about the pain on the planet, but actually that what we need to do is the more of us that become more aware, more embodied, you know, we'd rather do this journey consciously and feel the pain. Because as we feel the pain, we help to digest it. Because this is what's needed at the moment. There's so much repetition of trauma, and it now needs digestion. And we have these bodies, which is such a gift to digest through, you know, digest the trauma. So we digest our own individual trauma, but we're digesting the collective trauma as well through this body. It's a sacred tool that we have, and it's something that we don't have when we're souls. We come into these bodies to do this, and it's a gift.

Ailey Jolie: 36:23

Could you say a bit more around what you mean by digesting the trauma?

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 36:28

Hmm. So digesting the trauma for me is when we can really feel into the wounding, the cracks, whether that shows up in numbness or intention or in pain. And when we can actually meet all of that with space, we give it gentle space and we allow it to be there, bringing awareness, and it's not changing. I always used to think I was trying to fix myself, you know, but now I've realized it's actually meeting ourselves just as we are, and we don't have to change anything.

Ailey Jolie: 37:07

For the listener who maybe doesn't know, how what is the difference from maybe an embodied perspective between fixing or trying to fix yourself and meeting yourself as you're describing right now?

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 37:20

For me, fixing yourself comes from a more mental place. It's like I've got to fix. And I have clients come and they say I just need to be fixed. And it comes from here, from our mind. It's a mental thing, it's a story, but none of us need fixing. Not one of us. We all just need to meet ourselves as we are. And I also have a spiritual perspective which I bring into embodiment work as well. And I think this is one of the things that's also drawn me to the Thomas Hubel work, the mystical part of this. Because we need to be grounded in our bodies, and that's the work is to come back and return home. But it's also to recognize and understand and have this awareness that there is a a healing intelligence available to all of us at all times, an intelligence that wants us to heal and be balanced, and some people might call it the soul or the spirit or the higher mind or consciousness. But there's something, there's an frequency or a consciousness that we can all tap into that's available to every single one of us at any given time. It's just that we don't trust it. We don't trust that it's there for us and that it's got our back and that it's supporting us, and that it's there with no judgment. It doesn't judge any of our wounds, any of our traumas. But I do believe there's an intelligence that's trying and and there available that can help us to come back into balance again.

Ailey Jolie: 39:00

I would love to hear from you if the essence of spirituality that you bring to your work is something that you maybe have lived experience around, or it was always in your household, or and more from religion. Essentially, what I would love to know is just the origin story of that piece. Obviously, we haven't gone through similar training, but both are chartered psychologists, different training. None of my training really had any emphasis on spirituality or the mystical. I really had to find that through studying depth psychology, but also in the realm of psychelics and mindfulness and enzymatics, it's there. So I'd love to hear from you maybe what the origin of spirituality in your practice as a clinical psychologist is and how you feel it maybe changes the work that you offer.

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 39:52

Yes, I also didn't have any spirituality on my doctorate in clinical psychology and my psychology degree. But the origins of my spiritual journey I think happened with the defining moment that I told you about when my mother was killed when I was nine years old. Something happened, it's it's really hard to explain, and I think I didn't understand it the at the time, so I only look back at myself as a child. But it was almost like something awakened in me, like an a knowing of more, that there was more, there was a mystery to life. I don't know, I just felt I could just feel something, and as a child was very perceptive. I also did grow up in a family, so my mother was very spiritual as well. And so she did introduce me to I was a very little girl, but to my gut her guides. So she had spirit guides, and she was very much into tarot reading and psychic mediums and all of these kinds of things. So I guess I also marinaded in a kind of spiritual upbringing, even with my mother at the beginning. And then my grandparents raised me from the age of nine, and I think they just really wanted to honour the way that my mother had brought me up. So they raised me to be very open to everything. And my grandfather was certainly very interested in spirituality, and he'd often be reading books on consciousness and what happens after death. I mean, he was very interested in that question, what happens at that moment of death. There was a kind of openness in my family, and we didn't follow a religion, but we were just open to the mystery. I guess my grandparents taught me very much about the importance of being humble and humility, that we don't know everything, and that scientists can't know everything yet. And so it's just an openness. But I think that closed down that spiritual part of me when I started studying psychology. I think I kind of shut it down. And it was only really when I came back to doing more of the embodied practices, and you mentioned psychedelics. I I did psychedelics, and I think my very first psychedelic experience, I had what you might describe as a a classic mystical experience and a mystical awakening, if you like. It was absolutely I mean, it's just completely opened my eyes to the spiritual planes and the different dimensions. And it was just so, so beautiful. I went in with an intention to remember who I was, and it's something that can't be put into words, but I really experienced remembering who I was, really. I just knew in that ceremony and that experience that I would never be the same again. I felt fundamentally changed by that experience. And I always go back to that experience. If I ever wobble or I get caught in my head, which happens, you know, in the daily life, I always come back and remember that connection. I was so grateful to receive. I received a connection to who I am, to my soul. And then from then on, I've just become more and more, you know, open to spirituality. But I think for me, now spirituality is how I bring that energy and bring from the spiritual dimension into the human experience. I I recognize that at the beginning of my journey, I wanted to leave my body and I could very much have floated off into those spiritual dimensions because it feels good, it feels beautiful, in fact, they're blissful. And I think my learning has been knowing that these dimensions are there and that I can access them from my body, through the body. The body is a portal to these higher dimensions. And the more you come into your body, The more you can bring that energy through and that comes through and affects the consciousness on the planet. And that also ripples out. And that's part of I think what healing is. It's to really be able to channel this energy and to become more and more spacious. Get out of our own way and and channel the energies through from a very grounded place. And I also love to sing as well. And I also find when I sing that I can even access some of that energy even more because somehow my mind gets out of the way. It's kind of like to me, voice and song and music is a frequency. So I find that very healing for myself and be very healing for others as well.

Ailey Jolie: 44:51

There is a time, this was a few years ago now, where I went and I took voice lessons with the strict and only maybe quite rigid intention that I wanted to bring sound to different areas of my body. And it was so incredible of it, just like in regards to a felt experience, because it really, with this specific coach who's highly well trained, really guided me to bring voice to specific areas of my body and kind of give it almost like an internal massage. And from that moment forward, I was just like, oh, there's something so juicy here in regards to how we experience the body, the energetic connection, what voice signals to each other. We know it has so much. If we go into an interpersonal neurobiology lens, there's so much information we get about the nervous system of the other through their voice and the inflections of their voice. I would love to know maybe what some of your daily practices look like, ones that allow you to really tend to your nervous system and your body. This was not your language, but I'll use it, allow you to be some of that spiritual channel when you're one-on-one with someone, but also hold that energy of spirituality when you're maneuvering and navigating around the rest of your life.

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 46:10

Yes. So I think for me, my practice is now, I feel like I'm practicing all the time. I uh my husband's also on this path, and he's also uh done the training with Thomas Hubel and um practicing with facilitating holding groups. So I feel like as a as a partnership, as we we kind of have this atmosphere at home of really working on ourselves and trying to create uh an environment where it's about awareness. And so one of the practices that I follow is meditation. I think meditation is something I've really struggled with for a lot of my life, to actually sit down and observe my thoughts and observe my body. And I recognize the reason that I've struggled with it for so long is because it's not meditation that's the issue, it's what's there, you know, what's in me that I'm not wanting to feel and be with. And I think that's when I've had times when I avoid the meditation, it's because I I just can't be with myself. But I'm seeing the benefits of meditation, and even if I manage, so I try to do an hour each day, but sometimes for me, I don't always manage that. So sometimes it will be half an hour. And if I eat sometimes, let's say I've had a very busy morning getting my daughter out, even just sitting and observing myself for 10 minutes is good. So I don't beat myself up, but having a regular meditation practice is an essential part. I feel like it's sort of spring cleaning almost to just observe myself. I also love to do breath work as well. I don't I used to do that every day actually, but I've kind of got out of the practice of that. But when I can remember to do a kind of breath work practice, I find that very beneficial. And I think just generally the way I live now is to try to be healthy, to try to show myself compassion. I try to reduce the stress in my life because I think stress causes a lot of inflammation in our system. So I try to kind of keep my life quite slow-paced. So I find ways to, you know, I'm very lucky, by the way. I want to just say I'm very fortunate that I do the work I do and I can put my clients around my own schedule. So I I very much I'm in charge of my own timetable. So I do appreciate that because I have spent many years working in kind of nine to five, nine to six jobs where I haven't had that. But now as I've got older, I've managed to create, I guess, the lifestyle for me that suited my nervous system because I had burnt out a few times and I realized that I've got a very sensitive nervous system. So I need to take things quite slowly for myself. And I think really the slow-paced nature of my day, walks in nature, seeing clients, spending time with my daughter, bringing more awareness and presence to everything I do. But it's not, I'm not always I'm not perfect. I mean, it can sound like I'm I I do I'm only human as well. You know, I have my moments, and I think sometimes you have particularly busy, busy times, and I I'm someone, if I I have too much in my schedule, I get quite overwhelmed quite easily. I get quite stressed. And I can see that that can come out in my parenting, and I can end up being a little bit snappy or irritable with my daughter and not very present. So that's usually a wake-up call to me that I'm doing too much. And then I kind of look at my schedule and think, right, what what what can I not do? You know, what invite can I turn down?

Ailey Jolie: 49:56

I would love to hear from you what you're maybe learning right now in your own body through your study with maybe Thomas or your ongoing clinical work that's changing the way that you understand healing and embodiment.

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 50:12

I'm learning that the more work I do on myself, I am growing more capacity in my cup. It's like an inner cup. And as I grow more capacity in my cup, this allows more of the emotions or materials that have been suppressed to be able to come up. So it's almost like the more I'm growing my cup, the more unconscious layers are coming up to the surface. So I'm in a period now, and I've been I feel like I've been doing healing work for years and years, but I feel like I'm in a period now where actually I'm doing some of my deepest healing work because actually my cup is now expanded to a point where I'm ready to bring more layers up and and and really digest. But I really don't see this journey ever. I see this is a lifelong journey, and I never I know it will never be complete, and I am not here fixing myself in any way. I feel it's all about remembering who I am, coming home to myself, coming home to the parts of me that have been exiled, but just not the parts of me that have been exiled, but the parts of my ancestors and to really feel and be present with what my ancestors could not feel and be present with. So I do this work for them, for my lineage, and I have so much more deep work to do on my ancestral lineages, so I'm excited about that. But this is to me the most important work that I can be doing. The fact that I can feel what hasn't been felt, I can interrupt generations that were silenced, that were per persecuted and also for the first time to bring these parts into relation so that these feelings are no longer alone, that they're shared. And I really, really now believe in this greater intelligence. Like I'm trusting it more and more that this greater intelligence is here and it wants us all to heal and it's available. And I think when we can trust it and when we can just a little soften to it, and when we can actually make an intention to ask for help, the support is there for us. I really am very committed to being a leader for people, being a leader for parents and for young people, and to be a pioneer of someone who can start to really rebuild communities for parents, to rebuild the villages that we've lost, that we can all be in it together. And I'm here and I have a willingness to keep showing up for others. And I am committed, I've committed to this kind of life of service. When you are in a life of service, it's just like a calling, it's like a mission, and I commit to keeping doing the work myself and keeping serving others. And I think we just need more of us on the planet who are committed in this way, who are committed to being embodied and to do it consciously and to do this together.

Ailey Jolie: 53:38

Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your insight and wisdom with us. We will have all of your information in the show notes so the listener will be able to find you, but also your writing. Is there anything upcoming that you want the listener to know about?

Dr. Genevieve von Lob: 53:53

Yeah, so I have a newsletter called the Resonant Parenting Project and also a newsletter called the HSP Revolution. So I would just recommend that people follow me on those newsletters if they want to hear more about what I'm doing because I hold retreats. I hold an annual retreat in the UK for highly sensitive people. I'm also going to be holding more webinars and courses for highly sensitive people and for parents. So I would just recommend following those newsletters and then you'll hear all the information. Thank you so much, Ailey. It's been such a pleasure to be here with you and to have this conversation.

Ailey Jolie: 54:30

Thank you so much for being here too. I really hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Genevieve and myself. There's a moment in this conversation that I keep returning to, and that's when Genevieve described what it felt like to spend years, even through becoming clinical psychologists, living from the neck up without really knowing it. I think so many of us can relate to that. The way disembodiment can be so complete and encompassing that we don't even recognize it as disembodiment at all. It just feels like life. Why this moment stood out to me is because what I really heard was her honoring that protective response. She didn't frame her disassociation as something that was wrong with her. She recognized it as what allowed her to survive, to stay here. And I think that reframe is so essential for anyone who's in the process of coming home to their body. We didn't leave our bodies because we're doing it wrong or because we failed. We left because we had to. Genevieve in this episode also named something that I believe deeply: that we are never meant to parent alone. The isolation so many parents feel isn't a personal failing, but that it's a design flaw in how modern life has been structured, or maybe it was intended. But we're wired for the village, for the collective nervous system, for what she called as a kind of collective co-regulation. And when that's absent, of course we struggle. Of course, our cups overflow. The guilt that so many parents carry often isn't about being a bad parent at all. It's about being a human without enough support. It's a reality of lacking relational support. I really appreciate how she spoke about resonance, not just as attunement, but as congruence, being alignment with yourself so that your words, emotions, and your body are all telling the same story. That's what our children feel. That's what our children feel. That's what creates safety, not just for children, but for adults too. This isn't perfection or perpetual calm, it's authenticity. And finally, one last thing I hope that you really take from this episode is her perspective on collective healing, the idea that when we do this work, when we track our bodies, when we digest what our ancestors couldn't feel, we're not just healing ourselves, but we're also contributing to something larger. We're interrupting patterns that have moved through generations. And I don't know about you, but for me, that feels both deeply humbling, but also deeply liberating too. If this conversation sparked anything in you, if you're feeling called to explore your own embodiment, understand how your body holds your history and your becoming, I'd love to have you in Embody. It's my course on embodiment where we move beyond the intellectual understanding into the felt lived experience of it. Thank you again for being here and thank you for listening. Thank you for being in the process of coming home to your body with me, Aile Jolie. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platforms. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.