00:00:00 Kendra

We’re on the healing journey, we’re all excavating, we’re all doing inner child work, we’re all doing compassionate inquiry or we’re doing this stuff. But what I have found is that the emotional story, even if you’ve worked on it in the energetic sense, or in the mind sense or in the nervous system, there’s little pieces of that story stuck inside of the physical scar tissue. And until it’s liberated, it is not fully 100% resolved. And that’s really where my work is. I’m trying to find everybody’s 100%. The way home to ourselves is to stop, stop externalizing the process, trying to tack on more and more complexity into our “healing journey.” But to notice that the scar is actually the road map back into yourself, to your body, to reclaiming neglected parts of ourselves that have been damaged, that have been shamed, that have been forgotten. This is the road map. This is the gold mine into getting the integrity back in your system. Feeling true function, support, stability in a way, where your body is working as a unit.

00:01:20 Rosemary

This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast stories of transformation and healing through compassionate inquiry.

00:01:38 J’aime

Welcome back to the Gifts of Trauma podcast. I am J’aime and I am so thrilled and honored to be here today sitting with Kendra Toothill. Welcome Kendra to the show.

00:01:53 Kendra

Thank you so much for having me, J’aime.

00:01:56 J’aime

I feel very lucky that you’re here with me today. This is a conversation I’ve wanted to have with you for a couple of years now. I just want to share with our listeners that I am a client of Kendra’s and I’ve wanted to, like literally from the first moment of having a foot workshop and sitting amongst maybe 15 participants, I just knew, this woman is trauma informed. This woman knows so much more. This is just the tip of the iceberg and I’ve just got to get alone in a room with her. And that journey has looked different ways over the years as your client being able to participate in Circulate Classes, which we’ll talk about a little later. But I’m just really grateful for this present moment that I’m sitting here with you.

00:02:45 Kendra

Thank you. I’m happy to be here as well. Thank you so much.

00:02:49 J’aime

For those listeners that are on the other end, receiving this conversation right now, if there was one key that they could come away with, from the conversation we’re about to have. What would you like them to know?

00:03:04 Kendra

Front load the goodies. I think that every person has the answer inside of them. It’s just that we’ve all lost the skill to ask ourselves good questions. And so that is the base theory concept that I work with. And from my own personal journey and working with others, I would say that what it is that we’re seeking is not so far away. It’s really close and it’s much simpler than we could ever really imagine. In my own personal journey, sometimes I have to laugh at myself and go, really, that’s what it is. It’s so simple. It’s been here the whole time! So the wisdom that I would like to send towards all of the listeners into your community is really about learning the skill of listening to your nervous system, listening to your body. And a lot of what I work with is scars. So listening to your scars, seeing to your wounds, because they have great potential, great wisdom inside of them. And the way to listen is often just ask them a really good question. And that “good” doesn’t need to be anything complex. It doesn’t need to be fancy. It could be just, what do you need right now? I’m here, I’m listening. What are you feeling? What’s going on? The same way that you would talk to a really good friend or a loved one or a small child, just tenderly approaching yourselves with a desire, like the curious desire to know more. And you’d be surprised what kind of clarity and information and insight can come out of that experience and how much that can grow the relationship that you have with yourself. Whether you have no relationship or very little relationship or a blossoming relationship, there’s so much that can come from just slowing down, asking good questions, actively listening, and then taking action. Whatever it is that your body is telling you, follow it, listen, and then take action with what it’s telling you. So that may seem a little bit amorphous or intangible right now, but I think as we continue to speak, we can outline that more clearly, but really it’s so much more simple than we can ever imagine. Usually the thing that we’re fighting to find is right under our nose, like the thing where we’re looking for eyeglasses and they’re on our head. That’s how it goes.

00:05:39 J’aime

Looking for our eyeglasses when they’re already on our head, looking for our keys and they’re already in our hands. Yeah, I relate to that. And I do feel myself settling as you reassure this truth that simplicity is the key and that we’re not as far away. Always feels good to hear that we’re not as far away as we think. If you’re already here listening, it’s safe to say that there has been some level of journey in your life and I’ve heard you say before that you don’t love the term” journey or healing journey” as we dropped that word a couple times. I feel curious and want to ask you about what it is about that term journey that is not your favorite.

00:06:24 Kendra

Yeah, it’s more the kind of whirlwind that we’ve all kind of jumped on, myself included at times. I want to get off the bandwagon, but the “healing journey,” I think it provides this idea that we always have to get somewhere. There’s always more to do. There’s always this new cool diet fad or this new supplement or this exciting thing out in the health and wellness worlds, Health and healing, new plant medicine. There’s so much in the healing ‘journey” that I don’t jive with anymore because I really feel like the healing journey has this kind of idea that we’re always going to be on it. And that to me feels overwhelming. Like it feels like I have to do all of these tasks before I get to enjoy my life. And as I’m sure many of us realize, myself included. on the healing journey at one point, you’re like, wow, this healing journey is life. This is enjoyable. I’m getting pleasure out of this experience now. It’s not so painful. Yes, we absolutely go through the suffering phases and it’s, it’s a roller coaster. It’s an up and down ebb and flow. It’s not like the suffering or the pain parts, once we heal them, we’ll never have that experience again. But at some point you hit a stride in your process where you’re enjoying it and you realize this is actually life. This is what it means to be a human being, having a human experience, feeling emotions, processing things in real time. And I myself, and what I teach my clients, is I want myself and my clients to have a very robust nervous system. I want us to enjoy life in the whole capacity and spectrum of what life has to offer us. And that means getting off the roller coaster of canceling foods out, canceling movements out, canceling and editing our life like modifying it so that what I say, I call it backing ourselves into a corner where we have very little option. We have no resiliency or or no kind of capacity within the nervous system. And then it feels like we are taken along on this ride of how do I heal this thing? What’s next? I got this dealt with, but oh, now this part is really like angry and calling to me. Now I need to assess this thing. And it just feels endless. And so I’ve wanted to jump off the train and I, I catch myself when I say that “healing journey” and I still say it, but I want to come away from that whole mindset that I just want myself and my clients to build this feeling of I want to thrive in life and I want to experience life in its fullness because I’m a human being having a human experience.

00:09:00 J’aime

So hopefully if you’re on the other side listening to this right now, you’re starting to feel a little relaxed that maybe what you’re doing is just perfect for right now. There’s like a level of acceptance and appreciation that can come in for being here in this present moment. Before we go on any further, I think it’s a good time to talk about who you are, Kendra, and what you’ve been up to for this last decade of your life. Learning, teaching, building upon, that gives you this confidence and constitution about you that I feel immediately in your presence.

00:09:41 Kendra

Professionally, for the past 12 plus years, I have been working deeply in uncovering the power of scars and how physical scars impact the nervous system. Meaning your physical body, your emotional body and your energy body. How they weigh heavily and burden and drain and deplete you in every way. And so my journey began out of university. I got a science degree in Exercise Science specializing in Athletic Therapy and quickly got out of university and just was a little bit disenchanted with how effective the work was. Just – I wasn’t really hitting the depth of healing that I wanted to with my clients. I felt like is this it? Like, I went to school for this? I really wanted to go deep with people and I didn’t really even understand what that meant at the time. I just felt like it wasn’t enough to get full range of motion back or get functional movement back – there was something more that I was really craving. I thought to myself, literally within 6 or 9 months of me graduating university, what is in charge of the most processes in the body? Who is running this ship? What’s happening in the body, Who’s on top of the food chain here? And I quickly just stumbled on, OK, it’s the nervous system. The nervous system is really impacting and influencing many parts of our body and system all at once.

00:11:00 J’aime

I got to interrupt you for a minute here. because this is 12 years ago that you just stumbled into the nervous system before anyone was really talking about the nervous system and had that understanding. Can you just say a little more about how you stumbled into that?

00:11:17 Kendra

Yeah, I feel incredibly lucky. When the nervous system hit the scene, I was already a decade in. I honestly was just hanging out, frustrated, working with clients. And I had a conversation with a classmate and he was like, I started this course. What is it? He was like, I don’t know, it’s about the nervous system. And then so I really got into this, like deep nervous system, fell into a hole about what the nervous system really is about. And so I started out working with the nervous system in terms of nervous system rewiring, which is different from really like the mainstream nervous system regulation stuff that is flooded on social media right now. So I’m in a slightly different camp than the regulation state. This is not my area of expertise. So if I just paraphrase really briefly, it’s more around trying to find from what I understand, just that pause, from being very overwhelmed in conditioned responses and trauma responses, just feeling dysregulated. I cannot get into my body, back into the present moment. So there are these many different regulation techniques and they’re really about returning back to homeostasis or baseline or managing, really finding the pause to just take a breath. 

So that was never my jam. I entered the nervous system world and because my original interest was in movement, I was in athletic therapy to really get into the deep little nooks and crannies of what a person’s movement patterns are, and how they function at a very high level. I started to work with the nervous system rewiring in terms of finding movement back in the system that was no longer there because of trauma, because of accidents, because of surgeries, because of giving birth. So in my way of understanding scars, there’s only three ways to receive a scar; from an accident, from surgery or giving birth. And so this really just set my world into a very niche direction that I think at this point, I am one of the only people who work with scars, particularly, in this way that I do with a neuro scar lens on top of all of it. Lots of people may be touching scars or manipulating or massaging scars. But what I’m talking about is something way more profound, which is giving people their power back, giving people their life back after they have been debilitated by different symptoms. And these symptoms may not necessarily be related to their scar, in their initial perception. But when you go back into the original conversation that we had about asking good questions, and really doing your own detective work, you start to recognize that a lot of the symptoms that people are feeling can trace back to their scars.

00:13:57 J’aime

I really want to get straight into the scar conversation with you, but you are also pointing to something that’s really significant and different. We were just talking to somebody last week who is a doctor, and she was talking about her experience of only being able to say, 1 problem at a time. That’s all the time her doctor ever had before treating her. And what was so significant to me, Kendra, in my intake session with you, was you just kept asking questions and you just kept listening. And I was 45 minutes in, she’s still asking me questions about this scar. I was taken aback, but I loved it, because I could feel all of your presence with me. And I was able to talk about something I’d never deemed important. So there’s a couple pieces in there, right? That we don’t think our scars are important, or we’re ashamed of our scars, or we want to get rid of our scars, or we’re just simply not even aware that they’re draining our life force in any particular way at all. Can you talk about your diagnostic process of how you take the story in? And then later we’ll talk about scars specifically.

00:15:13 Kendra

Yeah, you want a little glimpse into the madness, into my noggin? I had a university professor who tragically died. He went out for a run one day and never came back from that run. And he had this deep teaching that really instilled in me. And his work was all around. “The client has the answer,” it’s just, “Nobody asked them a good question.” Ask good questions. And so I learnt that really young, like in my professional career in my first year of university, this incessant questioning because we are so disconnected from ourselves and our experience and the details. Maybe we don’t have access to all the details at the beginning. Those can come back, but just simple things like when somebody tells you that they got into an accident, they’re like, yeah, I got into a car accident on this day and I got another like rear-ender. I will stop each thing that they say and I will be like, “Where were you sitting in the car? What direction did that car hit you at? Were you pushing on the gas pedal? Did you see it coming?” Because everyone of those yes/nos gives me a little glimpse at the tension in their body, at the vectors like the force vectors that would have gone through their system when they were in the accident. Their emotional state. Like just their ability to recall information and what it brings up in their system. While I’m literally sitting with them and watching the words that they use, their body language. All of this stuff becomes just like a very intricate weave of their story. And I tell everybody, usually at the end of the session, people will be like, wow, I have a lot of stuff. They’ll feel a little bit overwhelmed, Wow, like I have a lot of stuff. No wonder I’m here. There’s so much stuff wrong with me. And then I always neutralize that comment and say, Nope, I just talk to everybody until we get a page and a half.

00:17:12 J’aime

Let me just get a little bit more of your intention there. It’s so important you are helping somebody reconnect to their experience, when they had to go away from it, by necessity. And also I also hear you saying that you’re collecting an energetic signature of that moment in time. Is that an accurate reflection? And do you want to say more?

00:17:37 Kendra

It’s all of those things and it’s also the way that I work with their body, because we just so quickly don’t talk about the mechanism of injury. So one of the big things in athletics, in sport, that I learned, is that the mechanism of injury matters. So if you play rugby, there’s a million different positions in a rugby pitch and the mechanism at which you hurt yourself completely matters as you get pushed from behind. Did you fall? Did it happen in the scrum? Did you land weird? So like the mechanism of injury totally impacts how your nervous system is receiving that impact to the system, particularly in the way that I work, which is like working directly with the proprioceptors. Every injury, every trauma, every accident, surgery, everything that’s happened, it’s like the nervous system takes a little snapshot, like a little freeze frame of everything has gone on, and I want to be in on that snapshot as much as possible.

00:18:37 J’aime

This is the intention of the rewiring. This is how rewiring is possible, when you understand that mechanism. Is that right?

00:18:45 Kendra

Yeah, definitely. That’s definitely one of the many aspects of rewiring. One of the phases that I talk about with my clients is when we can build enough safety in the system. When we are in the body enough, we are grounded enough, we have created that container that feels stable. Then we can go into the phase that everybody skips over, which is the ‘get real moment.’ What do you really get real with what’s going on in your body? And oftentimes it can feel very overwhelming. And that helps the rewiring. Like only when we shine a light on the situation can we solve the problem. But if we’re in the dark, we have nothing to go off of. Where do we start? How do we go through this process? And so we really want to gather content, gather information, gather a baseline, see where we’re at in every single way so that we can move away from that place through the journey.

00:19:39 J’aime

So I’m appreciating how inherently you’re bringing them along through this diagnostic process. They’re not inside your noggin, but it’s transparent where you’re going with them. Now, what is the experience that, if there is one you can remember, that got you to pay attention to scars in particular? Was there a like a light bulb experience you had with Yeah, you’re shaking your head, yes.

00:20:07 Kendra

I’ve had, in my early days, I had many, many different stories. A couple of people come to mind, and they started to highlight not just the importance of scars, but typical actual patterns that the nervous system plays out person after person. They are almost always present with people who have scars, who have trauma in their system, that’s just sitting there unresolved. One of them was a man who we were working on like his shoulder or his arm in some way. And it wasn’t really getting better. And this to me, I’m so curious, if stuff’s not getting like changing, I’m immediately like, what is happening? Tell me more. Like we got to go back into the history. Tell me more about your life. Something is not right here. We’re not achieving progress like I want to at the pace that we should be. So then he told me a story of this situation where he essentially impaled himself from falling off of his roof. He was doing construction, had some rebar sticking straight up. He slipped off the roof, impaled himself through the metal, and immediately when he told that story, it’s interesting, people who have the trauma site, they always pass it off as nonchalant or they forget it completely. It doesn’t hold a lot of weight when they first start talking about it. It’s a very common pattern, or the exact opposite, holds an incredible amount of weight and it holds like an emotional charge. But for this person, he, he just brushed it off, and I’m like, can I see the scar? Show me Like, where did this go through your body? And he started to lift up his shirt and looked down at his body and he couldn’t see where the scar was. He couldn’t figure it out. He had to like look and touch. He couldn’t just, it’s right here, like I thought a person would do who had been in such an accident where they impaled themselves. And that was my first thought of, oh, this person so strongly dissociated from this trauma. He doesn’t even know where his scar is. He doesn’t even know where this incident happened on his body. Interesting. And so that was one of the situations that kind of lit my brain up. And it’s a true pattern for everybody who has a big, a scar, particularly ones from the top of the head to the pelvic floor, which hold the most weight on the nervous system, is we have dissociated and disconnected from this place. We don’t breathe into it, we don’t touch it, we don’t look at it as we pass by a mirror. There’s all these like little subtle, nuanced things that we do unconsciously where we have dissociated, disconnected and detached from this area. We don’t live here in this area or place we must reclaim and reinhabit. And there’s another woman that comes to mind just on the emotional piece around the emotional weight that’s inside of scars. I was working with a woman and she had an appendix surgery when she was really young. This woman was probably in her 60s and she had her appendix removed when she was really little. And back then you would have your appendix removed in the hospital, and you would be left alone in the hospital. Your parents would leave you there overnight. And so when you’re a little child being left in the hospital overnight, you’re not able to compute/understand why your parents have left you there. It held this very strong emotional charge of abandonment, inside the wound, inside her scar as a sixty year old woman. And so I’m touching her scar. We’re working on it. It’s quite gnarly, it’s quite bound up and we’re just having a conversation just about anything. We’re talking about the weather or something, let’s just say. And then all of a sudden she starts recounting this story. Like she starts just going into the memory bank of, Oh my gosh, I felt really alone. I feel a lot of like abandonment, like she’s using these terms of, of telling the story of being left alone in the hospital for getting her appendix removed. And then she breaks out into just a huge sob. Like this sob had been stuck in there for six decades, sitting inside of her body that just got pushed out very strongly with the scar work. That took me by surprise. It was in my early days when I was working on scars. It’s like, oh wow, look, this story is inside of the physical tissue, which I think is a really, another important piece because we’re all very like we just spoke about, we’re on the healing journey. We’re all excavating, we’re all doing inner child work, we’re all doing compassionate inquiry or we’re doing this stuff. But what I have found is that the emotional story, even if you’ve worked on it in the energetic sense or in the mind sense or in the nervous system, there’s little pieces of that story stuck inside of the physical scar tissue. And until it’s liberated, it is not fully 100% resolved. And that’s really like where my work is. I’m trying to find everybody’s 100%, and that to me was very profound and started a whole series of experimentation around how much emotional charge is really inside of people’s scars. And it’s different for each person and it’s a beautiful process to go through. But that was definitely two people in my early phases, that I remember very strongly.

00:25:13 J’aime

Yeah, I’m imagining almost I was there with you witnessing this happen. And before we move on, I just wanna know are there any other points that you really want to convey about the connection between the nervous system and scars? Because for someone like me, it’s not straightforward at all that this bound up piece of, I want to say dead area. And I don’t think about the nervous system that way. So how does somebody with layman… or even instagram informed information about the nervous system… How do they make the connection and start to understand that maybe they should be paying more attention to their scars and doing less talk therapy?

00:25:53 Kendra

The most important piece that I would like to get across is understanding. I called it the wound story and I don’t want to go into the whole detail of the wound story, but the piece that is super significant, that is from what I can see in the online spaces and just what I have looked and scanned through over the years, is that there’s very little understanding of what the scar is doing. And I feel like I fully am in conversation with the scar and what it’s doing. And so what the scar is doing is when we have surgery, accident, giving birth, we are cutting through many different layers of muscle tissue, of fascia, of things that hold the integrity of our system together, provide us support and stability and function. When we lose that, we need something to keep us moving around in our day-to-day, keep us doing the things that we do daily, but also with our movement and our sport and all that stuff. And so when our body’s coming back and mending together, after the wound, creating a scar, what’s happening is the muscles, they lose their connection, they unplug from the nervousness system due to the trauma. Muscles are the one of the most important things to help us do all the activities that we do. And so when we no longer have them, we have this scar that replaces. One example is something I call false stability, which is a compensation pattern, which is brilliant. Compensation is our friend, as I like to say. However, the compensation pattern is of low quality because like you said, J’aime, the tissue. If you were to open up scar tissue in the medical textbook, they would call it inert, which means dead tissue. However, it’s not dead at all. It has an incredibly valuable function which is trying to give you a feeling of support and stability, but it’s not true. It doesn’t function like muscle. There’s no contractile components at all in scar tissue. And so the scarring is always looking for something stable, solid, reliable that doesn’t go anywhere. to anchor on, to provide that stability. It is always looking for bone to provide those stable, solid support of never going anywhere. And this creates a cascade when our scar tissue latches onto bone, when our scar tissue is functioning in a way that is trying to give us something that we just don’t have the highest quality of. It creates a whole thing through the system, it creates tons of body pain. It creates a bunch of dysfunctions through the organ systems, a ton of different things.

00:28:19 J’aime

I’m so excited right now because I’m just making this parallel that’s so much fun over here for me. And a lot of us listening will have had some experience with Dr Luke Snewski, who is one of the core facilitators of Compassionate Three, and he gives a talk called Digging for Gold. And it has to do with our core beliefs. It has to do with revealing whatever our core beliefs are. Like I was talking earlier about how the core belief kind of takes the place of our connection to ourself,  and we latch onto it with everything to survive. And it’s reminding me a lot of this false stability and this compensation pattern that you’re talking about. Now I’m getting progressively excited because what we know is one of your taglines in your work is, ‘your scars are gold mines.’ So this feels like an exciting segue now that we’re trying to really appreciate how vastly underlooked and taken for granted this area of scar is in our body, this landmark, you’re calling it a gold mine. I’d love for you to share with us why it’s a gold mine.

00:29:30 Kendra

It’s a gold mine because, to the very first point that I said at the beginning, we go searching externally for all the answers. We do the psychotherapy, we do the diet, we do the yoga class, we do the detox, like we do all of the things, trying to sort the problem out. We have many different symptoms. Most people now are struggling with eight or so symptoms. If you really have a good conversation with them. So the way home to ourselves is to stop, in my opinion, is to stop externalizing the process, trying to tack on more and more complexity into our “healing journey.” But to notice that the scar is actually the road map back into yourself, to your body, to reclaiming neglected parts of ourselves that have been damaged, that have been shamed, that have been forgotten. This is the road map. This is the gold mine into getting the integrity back in your system, feeling true function, support, stability in a way where your body is working as a unit. I don’t know if anybody’s felt this before. When you feel like your body’s working in harmony, like when you lift something that’s like kind of medium to pretty heavy, like if you’re doing a gym workout or just lifting something and you feel your whole body is helping you with that. It’s not like you feel your biceps and your back and well, I feel like I’m just barely doing this, but you feel like this cohesion, like this whole system is working together, not only just on a physical level, but you have the confidence that you can do it. You’re maneuvering it with ease because you just have this like, deep sense of self. You know how to move your body, you’re in your body. You know how to root through the feet. All of this is what I’m talking about when I say your scars are gold mines, which is we come from a place of disconnection, of feeling separate, feeling burnt out, feeling depleted and exhausted. Like we’ve tried all these things, and we’re confused and lost about what to do with ourselves. How do we get back home? The answer is under your nose, in your body. Like that man was trying to find it on his own. he couldn’t quite find it. It was such a beautiful thing to watch. And when he found it, that ended up being the thing that freed him from his shoulder pain. And so this is really what I mean when we say that our scars are gold mines. It provides the physical healing, the emotional healing, and the energetic healing to upgrade your system in every single way.

00:31:56 J’aime

I’m appreciating how you said that a scar can only be caused by an injury, an accident, giving birth, and I’m thinking about how these are all highly stressful life events. Without a doubt, all of them. You stress, negative stress, again, as evidenced by a very recent conversation we had on the show. Stress is stress and your body just measures it according to that scale and that intensity. So I am really appreciating the simplicity of a landmark sitting right in our body as this portal back into ourselves. I just wanted to share with you as I was listening to you on another recent conversation on a different podcast, the host, she reflected, “No doubt people out there right now, they’re thinking about scars that they’ve had in their body. Maybe they’re even touching a scar.” And when she said that, I couldn’t believe it. I was holding the airbag scar on my throat and my other hand was on my appendix surgery scar. And I had no idea, no attention whatsoever given to it. So I’m curious to know what you make of that.

00:33:11 Kendra

There’s a couple different reactions. So I would say, above all, the nervous system is highly intelligent and we do a lot of stuff unconsciously that we don’t even really know why we’re doing it. And so one thing as an observation is to notice where people put their hands as a protection. So sometimes when people lay down on my table, they’ll put their hands over their heart or protect their belly. It’s also a very good question to ask people how they sleep. People who have been very traumatized will sleep on their bellies with their arms tucked in, just basically protecting all the vital organs and making a shield, making that armor. And so when we put their hands on our scars, we could be protecting, I know that this is a vulnerable place. This has what we’re calling the false stability. We have compensation here. I know that this is not efficiently working. And so I’m going to protect it by putting a little added pad. There’s also something that I use in my work, which is bringing awareness to somewhere. So it can also be called therapy localization. So when you put your hand on something, it immediately brings attention to it. You’re adding more stimulus there. There’s more touch, and so the body can pay attention and feel that. So oftentimes people can touch those areas, when the area is primed and ready to be healed. So I’ve noticed when people are primed and ready to heal a certain area, they can also put their hand there. It’s like a way of, OK, you’re safe here, I got you, let’s go forward now. And that’s more of a conversation to have with the person to see what feels most real.

00:34:51 J’aime

You teach people that touch is bidirectional and that’s very significant and I want to understand why. Why is that an important quality?

00:35:01 Kendra

I think that, more than ever, everything I’m about to share was highlighted and amplified because of what happened during the pandemic, when I was unable to touch bodies, people had to touch themselves, and I was afraid at first. I was like, Oh no, I can’t touch someone, this is gonna not go well. And then I was pleasantly surprised that it put more power in the person’s process. It put all of the emphasis on the person of it’s only you, you got this. I’ll teach you how to be my hands, but it’s your hands in the end. And so that kind of ignited this beautiful silver lining of the whole experience, where people got to take their own health into their own hands, literally. And so touch is, like you said, the only sense of the five senses that are bidirectional, meaning both things are receiving healing benefits to that. So the ear, the senses, one-direction, sound is coming in, same with sight, smell, taste, they’re not going in the other direction. And so when we use touch as a bidirectional sense, it actually creates like a closed neural loop where you get to one of the first stages that teach people is you get, you want to rebuild your neural map, which is essentially just trying to rebuild the connection that’s been severed, that’s been fragmented and lost. You do that with your hands because both things receive benefit. I’m touching my hand to the scar, but my hand receives healing and my scar receives healing. And that closed neural loop, is so powerful for the nervous system because there are literal, like greyed over areas inside the brain when we have trauma, like the scar. And so making hand contact there as a first initial thing starts to remind the body of, oh yeah, this place is here and I have forgotten about it in so many different ways. I can look at it like I can look at my scar visually, my eyes can see it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that area is mapped out like the terrain and the 3D like quality of that area of the body. It’s very fragmented and disconnected. So touch builds that back. And so what can people do to from here is I think just learn the power of their scar in a way that touches really sweetly into nervous system safety, really touches into the power of touch. And then also, it can help you understand some of your symptoms, which gives people hope in the doorway of, Oh my gosh, I can do this. You don’t have to swim in all these different protocols and different plans.

00:37:38 J’aime

And I love that so much because I’ll say in my experience, it has been a huge door into self compassion unlike any other. And it’s just this… and my mind is not involved at all. It’s just simply the witnessing, the presence, the empathy. And it’s just me. So I just can’t stress to you all who are listening, how powerful, how truly powerful, and sometimes in the beginning, I think about it like, because I’m a mother, I’d use my ‘mother hands’ on my heart or on my scar. And that again, similar to compassionate inquiry, when we think about, if we can’t think about our own pain, we think about soothing a child that’s not us. And that’s the pathway back to soothing your own child is like imagine my own son or I imagine you imagine someone who you loved small and little, like you mentioned earlier. So I really just want to thank you for bringing that notion of tenderness back into the game when we want to become taskmasters in our healing and sweetness and softness. We’re coming to a close in our conversation, but there’s too little itty bitty points I really want to touch before we part. And they have to do with your Circulate Class, which I’ve also had the luxury of being able to attend in person. And you do also teach those online, is that correct? Yeah. Shaking your head. Yes. One of the first things you do that I’ve never experienced in any kind of movement class before is, as we’re orienting in the beginning. Yes, you have us close our eyes. Yes. You have us touch our bodies. Put a hand on the heart, a hand on the belly. OK. But then you invite us to start to key in and attune to the people around us, everybody in the room. This is something that you say in every class is, you start to bring this coherence into the room and this recognition that other people are doing this while I’m doing it, and you bring awareness to the power of that. Where does that come from and why do you do that?

00:39:45 Kendra

It came from my own personal journey of realizing that you can only do it for so long on your own, and at some point, healing needs to be done with other, or in community, and the humanness of recognizing that we are all on some sort of path. We’re all in it. Humans having a human experience. If you gather a room up, you gather the subway or the restaurant up and you ask them what are you struggling with or what like is really feeling like painful in your life right now, I think we’d all say. Same thing. We need to be reminded of that. I think that reminding ourselves that we’re not in it alone also brings like a joy quality back, like this doesn’t need to be so heavy. And that really is a quality of the circulate class is it is a curious, playful dynamic where I really want us to feel like we can only touch into some places, because we’re together, because it does bring a quality out of me when I’m really in it. I feel like nobody understands me and I’m all alone and you know, all those stories that we all have. But when we can jump out of that, everything just feels much more accessible, much lighter, much more. ‘Oh, I can do this. We got this, we’re in this together.’ And that’s one of the main reasons that I do it in the class.

00:41:04 J’aime

And you’re making connections, you’re dropping little pearls while we’re moving our bodies to stay in the physical sensation and the energetic blueprint or signature of what we’re feeling. I do appreciate the very explicit invitation to move out of what think about muscles, what we think about moving in a certain way, or of yoga to let it all go, and just to imagine fluid circulating through our body. So you’re just OK if you really can’t get out of your head, at least think about it like fluid moving in your body.

00:41:36 Kendra

I found my whole meditation journey to be really hard, when I was in it, and my mind was spinning, to just sit down and breathe smoothly and just pretend that my mind was going to empty itself. I found that practice to be so frustrating. And so I thought, what if I just meet the intensity of my thoughts with something else? Like with movement. Can I move my body in a way that meets the energy? Like I have a lot of energy and sometimes when I’m feeling really overwhelmed, the last thing I want to do is like smoothly breathe, or relax. But what if I start shaking? Or what if I rhythmically pulse in and out of shapes that I know pump my fluid and my energy body and can help me change my state. That is some of the foundational pillars of my Circulate Class, which really helps people drop out of their talking, thinking head and into their feeling body, as I say.

00:42:26 J’aime

We’re going to link in the show notes to where people can find out more about that. People come from all over the world to work one-on-one with Kendra will also put information there about the one-on-one retreats that you offer people. And that brings me to my last point and connection I want to make, that in Circulate, you’re always inviting us to check out the jungle. You’re always inviting us to open the cells in our bodies, the pores like they’re funnels, and to take in the energy of the jungle. What is it about that invitation?

00:42:58 Kendra

Our yoga shala that we practice at is beautiful, and some teachers actually face the opposite way. They’ll face the jungles. And I find that to be so interesting because the jungle helps us understand that we’re not alone, that we are part of nature, that we are an integral parts of the natural world and we come away from that so much. Nature is always in motion. Another really good lesson that I always look at, of nature is it’s always doing something. It’s always birthing, growing in that creation phase or in the opposite, the crumbling and the dissolution and the death phase. The only thing that holds things rigid and stagnant in the human being is, at the end of the day, at the ultimate form is ourselves. We hold on to our stories, our stuff, and to be reminded that we can be a little bit more like nature and move it, and something beautiful will come off the back of that is something I really like. And we all need to be a little bit more in reverence towards nature and the natural world in this time and day.

00:44:05 J’aime

And then you work with people individually and give them these really sweet one-on-one experiences from time to time, and a huge and foundational part of that is bringing them into this jungle environment and the ocean.

00:44:22 Kendra

Yeah my one-to-one neuroscar jungle retreats are special in that I say that myself and Mother Nature are Co facilitators. So I’ve facilitate a really what I feel like is true down regulation of the nervous system that is mostly facilitated by Mother Nature in between sessions. And then you come in for sessions one-to-one with me, as a client and we use those two doorways of harmonizing with the rhythm of nature here, which is very strong, and rewiring the nervous system through my Neuroscar method. So that happens whenever the person’s schedule allows for it. It’s always an open invitation for people to come down to Costa Rica and to have that experience. It’s intentionally done as a two week retreat, because I don’t believe that we can really settle into a space in seven days, so it is a 14 day minimum experience.

00:45:15 J’aime

I know you do travel to the States and you offer retreats and you work with people, and you could be making a whole lot more money and a lot more prestige of a position if you wanted to, but you choose to stay and live a very humble life. Before we part, did you want to speak at all to that? I feel like that’s a really significant thing worth touching about who you are, that this is the life you’ve chosen right now.

00:45:41 Kendra

Yeah, I think I’ve been on the other side of it. I know what it feels like to be in the hamster wheel, to burn the candle at both ends, to get all the accomplishing, achieving, striving energy moving forward in a ball of hormonal soup. And I know it doesn’t feel good at the other end of that. And I’m choosing to intentionally curate spaces for people where they feel close to me, because that’s important. I don’t. I’m not in the retreat business to work with 20 people at once and when I do stuff in online spaces I want it to feel intimate. And I love this small little jungle town, for that same intimacy reason. My word for 2025 is intimacy, and I think that relational intimacy is a dying thing. We’re coming farther and farther away from each other. Not here where I live, which is one of the reasons why I’m intentionally staying in this space, staying in harmony with nature, with a group of people that are really important to me, and being able to provide a service that I feel really heals people and changes people’s lives and helps them get their power back. That’s where it’s at for me. That’s all I need.

00:46:56 J’aime

Do you have a parting invitation you would like to leave our listeners with?

00:47:01 Kendra

Yeah, just to finish off where we were going with, what is something tangible that people can do in dancing around it? What is it? We listen and we pay attention and we ask good questions, but really something that you can do that is easy and do it now or do it whenever it feels accessible. When you have the time to really drop in, you have a contained space that feels safe and nourishing. Just put your hands intuitively on a scar, whichever one doesn’t matter, or on your heart, if you don’t have a scar and just close your eyes and just drop in with smooth, relaxed, steady breathing and justice. Talk to that area, maybe for the first time, in a way that deep in our own wounding. We want to be spoken to. The scar wants to be heard, we want to listen, and we want to feel like we’re not abandoning this area, that we’re not neglecting it. We’re available to go through this process of transformation at this site. So it might just be something like, “Hey, I’m listening. You’re not alone anymore. I’m here for you, I’m not gonna go anywhere. I’m not leaving”. And just having those in your own words, like a tender conversation with these neglected abandoned, abused, traumatized, wounded parts of us while we maintain our breath and, what we do, what I call a steady earth element touch, just like heavy, solid, stable, reliable, persistent, patient touch, that again, in another way relays the information going, “I’ve got you I’m listening. What’s happening here? I want to know.” That can open up doorways, and to your point, like I love the word tender and cherish. We want to cherish this place. This is the doorway to becoming completely embodied. We want to, as I say, like reclaim this place, and we want to inhabit every little looking cranny. And this is just the beginning of recognizing that there’s places that you’ve left and that the answer to come back in may not be as complex as we think.

00:49:01 J’aime

Simple and so profound. And so impossibly not possibly more under our nose. Yeah. Kendra Toothil, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for what you do. Thank you for your devotion.

00:49:17 Kendra

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real blessing to have this chat with you.

00:49:21 J’aime

Thanks for being here.

00:49:29 Rosemary

If you’ve been listening to our podcast and are curious about the Compassionate Inquiry approach developed by Doctor Gabor Maté and Sat Dharam Kaur, consider joining the Professional Training Program. It’s open to all healing professionals, including naturopaths, physicians, body workers, coaches, and therapists. In addition to learning how to use compassion to support your clients in their most vulnerable moments with greater empathy and authenticity, you’ll also deepen your own internal process. If you’re interested, look for the link in the show notes. Applications close March 30th. 

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