Healing through breathwork and emotional hygiene with Nicole Rager
Healing through breath-work and emotional hygiene with Nicole Rager. Follow Nicole on: 🪷Instagram: @nicole_m_rager 🪷Website: www.nicolerager.com 🪷YouTube: Breath for Life Episode's Transcript: 00:20 Jennifer Norton: Have you ever wanted a quick entryway into a deep state of being where healing, insight, clarity, and deep release are accessible almost instantaneously? A Nebraska native now based in San Diego, our guest today, Nicole Rager, has spent the last decade teaching breathwork to people all over the world. She combines her DownToEarth lighthearted nature with a passion for healing, love, and wholeness to bring you an experience unlike any other. She'll introduce you to or remind you of the incredible transformative power that lies within your own body, a tool you'll be able to come back to time and time again. 01:12 Paola Castro: Nicole Rager:. Or as I would call her, amiguita, I would say to everyone, she's a human angel, a beautiful human angel. Her compassion, kindness, and intelligence are palpable qualities. One can sense where we are in her presence. I met her back in 2017 when were working at a retreat center, and it was love at first sight. Not only an incredibly powerful woman, but an extraordinary breathwork facilitator. She's a healer that uses breath as medicine, and when doing a breath recession led by Nicole Rager:, you're in for a treat in her presence. All of you is welcomed and accepted. Thank you amiga, for being this incredible angel that has given so much to me. Thank you for saying yes to being in our podcast today. Of course. 02:13 Nicole Rager: Thank you for inviting me, both of you. I just feel so much love like you. Sharing both of you sounds so lovely as you introduced the quality of openness and softness in my heart and the compassion you talk of. I feel you're reflecting back to me beautifully, and it just feels so good. I'm just so happy to be with you. Thank you. 02:38 Paola Castro: Yes, and we're happy that you're here. 02:42 Jennifer Norton: Quite. 02:42 Nicole Rager: Yeah, I can tell. That's so beautiful. 02:47 Paola Castro: Let's begin asking you, and I just said, and I want to repeat it, when I'm in your presence and when people are in your presence, there is this feeling tone of like, I am fully welcome here. You have this capacity to welcome whatever is arising, which I find an incredible quality, especially for a healer, because many of us and stuff for myself sometimes I'm very quick into jumping into, how can I fix this? How can I make this better? How can I release this? I feel that in your breathwork. When I'm in your presence, there's that space when you're welcoming whatever is arising, and especially I'm talking about our emotions. Can you talk about how you came to this consciousness that you carry? 03:46 Nicole Rager: Thank you. I'm so happy that you feel that way with me too. That's the greatest honor and gift I feel like I can give someone is to be able to hold that space of unconditional welcoming. As you were talking, I think that there's a way that I get to do that for other people. I want to with such honesty and depth because I need that also. I think throughout my life I've had a pattern or a way of being quite perfectionistic and like saying, I want to fix this. I want it to better, I want it to be the best. There are lots of parts of me that get sad and frustrated when I can't just be enough or I haven't just felt enough, ? In my own healing journey, with breathwork and with other people, with God, when I feel like, oh, okay, I'm enough, it's okay, all this working at whatever is actually okay just to be right where you are, that gives me the most profound sense of relief. 05:06 Nicole Rager: It's very easy for me, for some reason, to do that with other people. Because of that, I think it's like my greatest need, one of to know that I'm enough. Is that clear? Does that make sense? 05:20 Paola Castro: Yes. 05:26 Nicole Rager: We all need it to know that wherever we are is okay. I mean, maybe it's Western culture, maybe it's worldly, I don't know, but that there's something to fix, or even, like, be positive about it, even just pray about it. And I don't know, it's just temporary. Let it go. That kind of quickness to avoid the darkness can be pretty pervasive. We avoid the whole other side of like, wow, what is the depth of the sadness that I'm feeling? The shame, the pain, the anger, all of that? A lot of times it gets shut down because it's too difficult for ourselves and for others to be around. I like to get it, feel it, so it can come to the light. 06:23 Jennifer Norton: Yes, I know that there's a deep conversation emerging right now around the suggestion in contemporary culture around easiness versus ease or flow, and not that the two are opposites. I don't mean to be dualistic. I feel you're truly an expert on what allowance is, what self forgiveness is. In that moment of self acceptance of allowance, would you speak into that? You touched on avoiding our shadow side or our darker sides and perhaps a habit towards perfectionism, fixing this. I think that, from what I've observed, is species wide. Just that sense of unworthiness and our way through it is through it. It's got to be through it. Any of that stimulating you to speak into? Nicole Rager:, I have not asked you a direct question. 07:29 Nicole Rager: Yeah, well, so many. Go ahead. We're going to say more. 07:36 Jennifer Norton: I'm launching concepts at you without an exact question because I know how intuitive you are, so I'm going to stop talking. 07:45 Nicole Rager: Thank you. Thank you for your trust and see me as an expert in that. I feel there is a part of me that is expert in that. I'll just be very honest with you. I used to feel like if someone said, like, oh, that's just spirit talking through me or spirit moving through me, I thought that was very cheesy, and just like, what does that mean? You know? You guys are so versed in that, the divine qualities. We are the divine. It is the divine emerging through us. If I'm an expert in it's because when I'm in relationship with someone or if especially in breathwork, that's like, I was created to be in that space and for the divine to flow through me as a loving presence and loving exactly what is. I think, okay, there's a couple of things that are my anchors in that, which would be, if it's happening, it's good. 08:56 Nicole Rager: It is divinely allowed, essentially. Especially as a human, we have these emotions built in for a reason. They all have a purpose and they all have benefit, even if it's just growing the depth of our experience as humans. I guess that's one of my big anchors. Okay, if you're feeling sad, there's a reason for it. What happens if we just soften around it instead of resisting it? Because we know what we resist persists. Yet there's so much unconscious resistance of the darkness, the heaviness, the pain. You all have spoken about that too. Either pain pushes or something pulls, and a lot of times it feels more fun for the light to pull us. 09:55 Paola Castro: Yeah, that's so well said. And, it's reminding me of the qualities of the divine feminine. Divine masculine, the vine masculine is represented by the sun, light, knowledge. Divine feminine represented by the darkness, by the moon being able to be okay navigating in the darkness without judging it. So, yeah, you're speaking into that. We came into a world where the divine masculine is dominating, and religion is based upon that. Sick for light, sick for clarity, sick to know. God forbids you're an uncertainty. God forbids you don't have light during darkness because you be lost back into our evolution. Yes. If you couldn't see your surroundings, you could be killed. Were programmed to repel that, to say, I don't want to go there. Going back to what I said at the beginning, what I love about working with your being and in your presence is like, there is this moment of like, it's okay, we're going to cry, we're going to relieve. 11:23 Paola Castro: Because this is my favorite part about doing breathing with you. It's like this big release and you're holding the person saying it's okay. It's a good thing that right now you're feeling all of this. 11:35 Nicole Rager: Yes. 11:36 Paola Castro: Thank you for that. 11:38 Nicole Rager: Yeah, thank you. Let's see, what was the last little bit that was just coming. You've said this too. Whenever there's a darkness or a chaos, there's an order seeking to emerge. It's like the body knows how to find that. We just saw, like I was saying, soften into and relax into and allow, maybe meet ourselves with the love and light, then the body does what? It knows how to heal, it knows how to feel and to release and to transform emotional energy and all sorts of energy. I feel like with the feminine energy, there too of just being pure presence. Sometimes that is the catalyst, often the catalyst for the transformation that needs to happen instead of the driving and the sun and even the seeds. That's another analogy I've been really loving about the feminine. It's like when we put a seed in the soil, it's in the dark, and yet things are happening. 12:53 Nicole Rager: It has to be in the dark to allow the things to emerge from the unknown. That's kind of how I see the emotion going into the deep dark emotions, too. It's like we go into the void so that something new can emerge. 13:09 Paola Castro: Yes. 13:13 Nicole Rager: Thanks for speaking to the masculine energy, because a lot of it's good to recognize the culture we're in. That when it's difficult to slow down or difficult to drop into the feelings or whatever. It's not like something wrong with us, like there's a lot of us, we're kind of trained out of it in a way. Yeah. 13:39 Jennifer Norton: Such compassionate understanding. I love how you describe
