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What does self-care look like when you’re 25, newly independent, and realising that taking care of yourself is up to you? In this week’s episode, I’m joined by one of my favourite yoga teachers and youth worker, the delightful Emily Rosenkranz.
As with all my guests, we get into the ideal and ACTUAL daily self-care, Self care and collective care.
Since recording this episode, I (twice her age) was inspired to keep MY phone outside the bedroom. Having got over my concern that a serial killer would break in (and my partner suggesting I ask to borrow theirs), I remembered the decades I walked the earth before phones were a thing (in my life at least).
My first Phone Free Night, I spent half an hour standing in the hallway scrolling before making it to the bedroom BUT it’s worth it.
Other topics include the simple morning journaling practice it took three years to actually start, shaking for trauma healing, the magic of collective healing through women’s circles, co-regulation, and what it feels like to cry in a room full of people without anyone needing to fix a thing.
Do you sleep with your phone in the bedroom? Let us know in the comments or email eve@solestosoul.ie
le grá (with love),
Eve
CHAPTERS
0:00 In an ideal world my days would revolve around self-care and self-love
0:14 Podcast introduction and Eve’s background
4:26 Introducing Emily Rosenkranz
5:08 Emily’s work in yoga and youth work
6:13 The Feel. Love. Heal. framework explained
8:03 Ideal self-care and building supportive daily routines
10:03 Keeping the phone out of the bedroom for better wellbeing
17:04 Self-love, yoga practice and connecting with the body
18:39 Shaking, crying and releasing the stress cycle
22:09 Breathwork and pranayama for nervous system regulation
24:30 Community, co-regulation and women’s circles
28:15 Advice to a younger self about healing and change
30:44 Reflection and closing thoughts
LINKS
Dr Karen Ward on energy work and Sacred Ireland https://youtu.be/scvnM_X9mZY
#stresscycle
#emilyrosenkranz
#traumainformedyoga
#neurodivergence
#evemenezescunningham
FULL TRANSCRIPT
In an ideal world, well, my whole days would revolve around self-care and self-love.
If you’re a trauma survivor and AuDHDer like me, or you simply find self-care more of a “should” than a joy, this podcast is for you.
I’m Eve Menezes Cunningham, a trauma therapist, AuDHDer and self-care coach, senior accredited supervisor and counsellor, columnist and author of 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-Care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing.
Each Tuesday I share a mix of solo episodes and conversations with other self-care professionals. From other therapists, coaches, yoga teachers and authors to neuroscientists and medical professionals, many of them neurodivergent themselves and all honest enough to share the gap between their own ideal and their ACTUAL self-care.
Find Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD with Eve Menezes Cunningham every Tuesday on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn to love and care for all your parts, from the soles of your feet to your soul.
And for bonus content, access to 100s of body-mind practices, polyvagal-informed journal prompts and more, sign up for my free newsletter, Míle Buíochas Mondays, at www.solestosoul.ie
Welcome Emily Rosenkranz! Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
My absolute pleasure.
I am still astonished that I attended your first ever yoga class and you were like a seasoned pro. You were just, your classes are so lovely at the Yoga Root and I just couldn’t believe it was your first class.
And I wondered if you want to let people know where they can find you online and anything else you’re working on that you want to talk about?
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess the easiest place to find me would just be my personal Instagram page, which is Emily Rosenkranz, exactly how it’s spelt. And I do make an occasional appearance in the Yoga Root whenever I can.
But I do live in Dublin right now. I’ve recently moved, relocated to the big city. So it’s probably easier to get me online.
So, yeah. And you’re a yoga instructor and what else?
Yeah, so right now I’m working in youth work. Yes, which is an interesting balance between the two and also doing youth work.
And then, yeah, hopefully I have plans for maybe September going onwards, but I won’t say anything.
No, don’t share anything you don’t want to share! I know what it’s like when things are like in kind of seed stage and you want to protect and yeah. So I use this framework, the Feel. Love. Heal. framework that I developed because on different days, in different moments, we have different bandwidths in terms of our self-care.
Sometimes it’s easier to do something regulatory, the kind of lowercase s hyphenated self-care and the things to help the nervous system, the things to help change the way we Feel, to help us feel better.
Then the Love bit, it’s kind of like the Love archetype in psychosynthesis, that kind of uppercase S Self, the miraculous self, the we’re all part of nature, we’re all part of the divine, we don’t have to do a thing to improve ourselves and it’s just that remembering.
And that sounds really simple, but can often be harder. So like things we can do to help us connect with that kind of, because cats don’t need reminders that they’re part of the divine.
And then the Heal part of the framework is the more co-regulatory collective care. You hold beautiful space in your classes. And if you want to say a bit about like kind of how you do that and also how you let yourself be held, like what helps you in terms of like the turning heartache into action. I’m also aware like this sounds like a lot and I’ll kind of go through at each stage again.
Yeah, I’m asking about the ideal and then the actual, because for some people, well for most of us, there’s an enormous gulf between what we’d like to be doing, how we like to be living, and then like kind of the essentials. So what is your go-to in each kind of area?
Amazing.
So if we start with the Feel, what helps you when you want to feel better, like in an ideal world?
In an ideal world, well, my whole days would revolve around self-care and self-love.
I think this is kind of a recent discovery for me of what self-care is. I don’t think I really understood it. You know, if you were to ask me, I’d think face masks and, you know, meditation and all these things that I didn’t practice in my everyday.
So I think recently for me, I’ve had the realisation, and maybe this is my frontal lobe developing, you know, I’ve just turned 25, so.
Happy birthday! Thank you! I’m officially an adult, the grey hairs are coming in. I’m 50, I still say, I feel like a grown-up, and it’s like a grown-up wouldn’t say that, would they? But yeah, I’m getting there.
I don’t yet feel like a grown-up, but I think I’ve just recently had that realisation that I’m the only one that is going to look after me, you know? I’m not a child anymore, no one’s waiting for school, I actually have a job, you know?I have responsibilities and I think I learned that how I set myself up for the day means the world. And I really had to work on what those basics would look like, because I remember when I was first trying to think of like a morning ritual or an evening ritual, it would go into the ideal where I’d say I’m going to do an hour-long yoga practice and then my 30 minutes of breath work and then I’ll do my shaking and I’ll do my journaling, but that’s a full-time job in itself, you know?
Absolutely, yeah.
Yes, so I’ve realised the little basics that helped me a lot. I like to keep my phone outside of the room, self-care-wise, because I think that it’s really easy for me anyways to like feed this stress response of scrolling, like I’d wake up and I’d look at my phone, search my notifications, you know, scroll through Instagram, like the craziest things that are happening in the world, and then a funny cat video, and then, you know, a makeup tutorial and then war and it’s like it’s all too much for your brain, you know? So I think that’s really important for me to just have that time to come into the present moment when I wake up in the which I actually got gifted in the Yoga Root, maybe three years ago. I’m outing myself now by a lovely, lovely lady called Naomi and she bought me the journal after a New Year’s resolution setting workshop that Derrick put on and I never, ever looked at it. Yeah.
I thought in the moment, like, isn’t this amazing? I’m going to do it every day in an ideal world, but it took me three years to bring this into my routine, and it’s really basic, you know, what you’re grateful about, things that would make today great and then a daily affirmation and you look back in the evening as well and review your day, but that really sets me up on the right track, you know?
For sure.
And even if I have a super, what I would imagine to be a stressful day incoming, like, my things that would make today great would be really basic, you know? Just, like, comfortable and confident in this meeting and then maybe getting a nice sweet treat when I have my coffee, you know? Just really, you know, some direction and some shape on the day.
Yeah, it’s that adaptability, isn’t it? The flexibility around it and so if you could only pick one thing, what would it be in that area? And I always feel evil when I ask this question.
I think it would probably be the phone away from me because I think if the phone is in my room, I can’t do anything else, you know? I’d automatically go for it but if I don’t have my phone there, I have to do something good for myself.
And how far away does it have to be? I’m just giggling in my head, because I’m thinking, I went through a phase where I’d be looking at my phone in the night when I got up for the loo and I forgot to turn my phone on silent and someone is ringing. That’s so bad. But I can’t believe I did that. So, yeah, if I was waking up in the night and I was checking my phone to see if my “body battery” was charging while I was asleep.
What is your body battery?
So, it’s on the watch. It tracks heart rate variability and various kind of physiological elements it can through the wrist, through the pulse and on the app. And I was like, looking, am I basically not trusting my body to do what my body knows well how to do? Yes, am I sleeping well in the middle of the night? Am I asleep? So, how far does your phone have to be to help you not get hooked into that?
It has to be in another room. Yeah. So, I’m in a very small apartment. So, just outside my room is my kitchen. And I’ll leave it there overnight.
I am going to do the same.
Really? Yes. Oh, my God.
Great. Okay. Yeah, I feel the anxiety rising. But I think that’s wonderful. There’s part of me, and I think I shouldn’t be sharing this, but I’m going to, there’s the fear of what if there were an intruder? What if there were a serial killer? I need my phone. But then it’s like, I went decades without a phone.
It’s fine to be in another room, I’m pretty sure. And I think even that ridiculous, catastrophising thought, what if I… And I do every week, I do a 12-hour silence, so Friday night to Saturday morning. And even within the first 20 minutes, I feel… loved ones have my landline in case of emergency.
But there is something so relaxing about not being on call and not being… As much as I love social media and the internet and all of it, it is all designed to keep us hooked in, isn’t it? And especially with ADHD, it’s like, kind of, yeah, you’ve inspired me. Oh, amazing. Amazing.
And it does take time. At the beginning, I thought I could never do that because what if there’s an emergency and someone needs to call me? But then I had to think to myself, how often is there an emergency? Not often. So that’s just my stress response coming in here.
What can you… What could I do? So do you have it switched off in another room or you have it switched on? So it’s on. So you can have… You can hear if someone needs you, like, you just… Probably not. But I could also be having it, you know? Yeah.
And I mean, I’m also aware we talk like this, like, we’re emergency first responders with pagers. My mum remembers, like, I’m Indian-Irish, and she remembers, like, her parents emigrated from India to Kenya, where she was born and raised. But she talks about, like, the penny post, where before people, like, it would take however long for a letter to arrive, and you’d have to pay a penny for it.
And sometimes people wouldn’t have that penny to pay for the actual news, but they would know that at the time that had been sent, the person was alive. Yes. So here we are, like, oh, like, phone not right next to my hand.
Yeah. I know. And it does make me feel like an element of guilt, but I’m not on call.
No. And I don’t… It doesn’t need to be my second limb, you know? I just sleep through the nights. I do.
As crazy as that is to say, I do deserve to sleep. We deserve to sleep through the night, absolutely. Yes.
So moving into the Love part, that kind of, that knowing you’re part of the divine, part of nature, you don’t need to do a thing to improve. Like, you talked about self-care and self-love, and it embarrasses me a little to think, like, I wrote a book about self-care. Like, this has been my work for over two decades, a lot like trauma recovery, all the rest of it.
And it’s only probably in the last few years that I’ve made the kind of self-love comparison. Like, I wrote on the side of my bathroom mirror, what would you, what would a person who loved themselves do? Do that? And it’s like, what helps you get into that frame where you know you are worthy of whatever it is you need, that helps you connect with that highest, wisest, truest part of yourself?
Mm-hmm. I’d say there’s a few ones.
Probably, like, coming back to my yoga practice and it’s something that I will never, ever regret doing my yoga practice. Once I get into it. And it is something that I wish I could do every day.
And hopefully, I do get to the space where I can do some form of movement every single day. Yeah. But I also love the class structure, because I think there’s something about that collective consciousness, you know? And I think that’s where I really feel it.
I also feel is coming in. Yes, so that free movement. I’ve also been getting into shaking recently.
The TRE?
What is, what does TRE stand for?
I don’t know. I personally used to shake as an involuntary trauma response, which I didn’t know what was happening to me. But I remember, like, especially when I was anxious, like, before handing something in at uni, I would have to stand against a wall, and I would be, and I later learned, like, kind of the impala, it senses the lion, it plays dead, it then shakes off. I know, like, I did some chakra yoga training with Anodea Judith, years and years ago in London. But shaking was a big part of that. But at the time, I couldn’t decouple it from the involuntary shaking that I’ve done for so much of my life. Yes. So I wasn’t going to be deliberately doing it. But I know people who swear by it as a way of releasing trauma. And I can’t remember what TRE stands for. But I remember thinking, I don’t need it, I do it naturally.
I know, and I was doing some research on it. And for some people, it might not work, if that’s, and it is a part of your natural reaction to stressors. And it might not be a super nice thing for you to be feeling, you know.
But for some people, it can feel really freeing and bring you back to that animalistic side. Like, I was reading a book by Emily Nagoski, I think. And she talks about the stress cycle which is about that. It has to move out of the body. Yeah, it’s got to get out.
And we in society just live with this accumulated anxiousness in our body, because we have no way of releasing it. And it’s about that. Like, I’m a crier. And I love to cry. And sometimes if someone sees me crying, they’re like, are you okay? And I’m like, yes, this is great, I’m enjoying this. But that is, for me, really, like having a roar and a cry is really cathartic for me.
And also having a shake and just getting it off of my body, brings me back down to baseline. Uh-huh.
Yeah, I’ll go with like, kind of strong movement, but something more in power, like it might be some Sun Salutations. My shoulder still isn’t right. But I used to love a few cartwheels or a handstand up against a wall. But something to like burn off or Chair Pose, like it’s that kind of, but you again, you’re, I will go back to my notes and have a look.
I’m thinking, I understand it. And I know so many people who swear by it. But I think because I used to be so embarrassed at how shaky I was.
And that was back in my drinky days as well. I’ve been sober since 2001. But people would sometimes say like, Eve shakes a lot, doesn’t she? It’s like, like, maybe I should try it like a counterphobic thing.
Yeah, you could take that. The decades have passed. So if you say the shaking, it helps you get to baseline.
The like, what would be your one thing that helps you?
I’d say, I just thought (conscious) breathing. But that’s very basic, but breathing. Yeah.
I mean, we’re breathing all the time. But what specific kind of breathing helps you? Well, I like just kind of breath control techniques. Back to your pranayama, which I probably never would have done until I started going a little bit deeper into my yoga practice.
And which specific pranayama? I like, now I can’t think of the exact words, but extending my exhale. So I like four, six breath. I also like doing the box breathing where you inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four and hold for four.
I think that they’re really, really deeply regulating.
Yeah, absolutely. 100%.
And sometimes I also quite like and I try to sometimes practice things. It’s hard when it’s coming because I’m trying to work a lot on my nervous system. Things like the fire’s breath.
They’re energising. But if you have a lot of maybe anxiety, things like that of, you know, quickening your breath can be really deeply dissociating and a little bit triggering. But I think something about, like we were saying, re-owning the shake, you know, re-owning the breath and realising I’m the one controlling this. I’m voluntarily breathing like this. Yeah, nothing is wrong and nothing bad is happening. I’m safe.
Yeah, I’m allowing myself to breathe in this way. Absolutely. And the kind of yoga I teach is lifting the nervous system, lowering it. So you’re doing active and then you’ve got like much longer pauses than you’d have in a traditional class. Yes. And you can do that with the breath, the calming breath, then the lifting breath, then the calming breath.
And it is that complete and it can be this is the thing with self-care. It can be an amazing thing to do for yourself or it could be triggering and it could be too much. And it’s only, you know, in any given moment what’s right.
So you’ve said already a lot about the kind of community element, but what helps you, what helps you feel held? What helps you co-regulate? And also I know you teach delightful classes. How do you hold for others? Like what would you like to say in an ideal world and the essential like I need this otherwise?
Maybe when it comes to me and how I feel held, I think, and this is something for my whole life, I remember and I forget and I remember and I forget what we do as humans. And I think it’s being surrounded by women.
And I went to a women’s circle in the summer, actually, and it was for a full moon ritual. And it was so deep. Like we sat in a circle and I remember going in and, you know, like we heard before we went in, you would have to release something.
And if you felt comfortable, you’d say what you were going to release to the group. And I was going around in my head being like, this is too much to say. This is too much to say.
Nobody’s going to understand this. And, you know, it’s too intense. I don’t know these women very much or for long.
And then when we all sat around and no one even said anything, we just all held hands and you could feel the collective understanding. And we wept so much. And there was there was no comforting, which I liked because as women, you know, like we’re fixers and there’s something horrible that they’ve been through.
We’re like, oh, I understand that because of this. And like I tried this because of this. But we just looked at each other and nodded.
Yeah. And I think I realised coming out of that, that there’s so much more than in here. My inner world is not the only thing that rules.
And really, nobody else knows that my inner world exists. You know, it’s just me. And if it can sometimes be a really awful place to be, you have to get out.
Yeah. And go out there. Yeah.
I think that came from the understanding of how deeply, you know, it’s all human beings, but especially women for me, of how deeply we can hurt. What a blessing, how deeply we can feel. Yeah.
You know. And I think that for me is a big co-regulation thing that I need to get it out and reality check myself. Yeah.
So can you do that more often or like. Yeah. In an ideal world, I would love community up here in Dublin.
Yeah. That worked in a similar way. Like I would love a woman’s circle, something to work with the moon.
I know I’m really. Are you familiar with Moon Mná? Moon Mná. Maybe I have heard of Moon Mná.
I’m one of their facilitators, but I don’t do women’s circles. I do mixed circles. But if you check out moonmna.ie and I can’t remember, but there’ll be a link in the show notes.
I interviewed Dr. Karen Ward for the podcast, but she works with Sacred Ireland and the Divine Feminine and the goddesses. And there are rites each circle. And I think you’d love it.
And I’m sure that there are facilitators near you. OK, great. That sounds right up my alley, right? Yeah.
Yeah. And if you could go back to younger you, what would you send in the way of love, in the way of wisdom? And if you feel comfortable saying at what age? Yeah. I think there’s so many ages and stages of me that I go back to if I could.
And give them some advice. We can, we can. I’m saying, yeah, I’m like, yeah, we can.
But I think every time the advice would be similar, that you will be OK. Yeah. And things will change and you will get better.
Yeah. Yeah. Very basic, very simple.
But I think that’s really what I say. If we, if we had hours here, I could go into more specifics. But.
But, you know, what I mean is you can connect with those younger age, age, younger ages, younger ages whenever they’re calling for you. And it’s incredible how much reparenting and healing. Yeah, absolutely.
And they do come out. I see those girls all the time, you know. And it sounds like I’m having like multiple voices in my head.
But it does, you know, like sometimes I’ll, I’ll feel like I’m the 10 year old girl again, you know, and I have to go back as an adult version of me and remind myself I’m not there. And the past won’t keep recreating this reality, you know. And again, the more regulated we are, the more we can soothe ourselves, the more we can remind ourselves the prefrontal cortex is more on board rather than the amygdala like 10, 10 year old helpless or whatever it might be.
And it’s like, yes, I’ve got this. We’re safe. We’ve got this.
It’s all. And yeah. Yeah.
I think maybe that would be my advice would be the bad things have happened, but they don’t have to keep happening. Yeah. Yeah.
I think that was my advice for every age and every stage. Yeah. I love it.
Yeah. I knew you would be a delight to talk to and I’m so happy that you were able to talk to me. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
As you think about this episode, I want you to imagine scanning your whole body, your whole energy field from the soles of your feet to your soul. Notice what has come up for you as you’ve listened and as you think about it now.
How might you show yourself some extra love, some extra care today, this week?
Make some notes, doodle, whatever feels good. And if it feels comfortable and you want to, email eve@solestosoul.ie or comment in any of the comment areas. Feel free to subscribe, rate, review, all the things. And thank you for listening. I’m your host and producer, Eve Menezes Cunningham. Find full links in the show notes and full transcript and let me know if you have any questions. Really looking forward to joining you again next week. Have a brilliant week.