Feeling safe, connectivity and unresolved trauma

This Q&A blog post features Danny Morris, our dear awarenow guide who has a unique coaching approach and provides a profound help and relief to people with awareness and other custom coaching requests.

My purpose is: bring awareness to and heal unresolved trauma, so that we may live as interconnected and whole.

My teachers/guides are… Shinzen Young, Alan Wallace, Soryu Forall, Reggie Ray, Swami Rama, Sweigh Spilkin, Katie Asmus, Anna-lisa Adelberg, Lorraine Delear, Todd Norian, Kathy McNames,

If you could wave a magic hand and say “I’m going to change people’s everyday lives” — what would happen?

Each person would see the patterns of conditioning they have been living in and where those patterns came from. They would heal the wounds that have caused those conditions to sustain themselves. From there they would be deeply connected to their personal essence and life purpose and live a meaningful life that is in service to the whole.

Why should business and community leaders pay attention to things like stress or, more generally, mental/emotional health and well-being?

The actions that we take in the world come from our state of being. As leaders, if we are acting from a place of stress and emotional distress, the things we create will often perpetuate those responses. When we give attention to emotional health and wellbeing, the things we create will be aligned with spreading them as well.

Can we control our stress response?

Yes, we can control our stress response, but we can’t control the stress itself. Stress is normal it is part of the feedback on life. It is important to see it as feedback that something needs to change. If we allow ourselves to feel it and allow it, without resisting it, it can be discharged. Then we can use the feedback to make new choices that don’t bring the same stress back.

Does stress affect everyone the same way?

No, we each have our patterns of reacting to stress. Someone, we act out and take it out on others, Some of us retreat and keep it to ourselves. It is useful to understand your pattern of coping with stress and how to balance it.

What impact does stress have on people’s mental and emotional well-being?

When there is stress in the system our fundamental sense of safety is compromised. If we don’t feel safe it’s hard to think clearly and feel connected to others.

What about you, how do you release stress in your own life?

I have learned to notice how I am holding stress in my body and just release it directly. It’s like seeing that you are gripping something tightly and then letting it go. I have trained myself to do that through meditation, somatic work, and dance.

How would your approach make me (female, millennial, tech executive) more productive/ happy/successful person?

Being productive, happy and successful is a natural state of being. My approach doesn’t try to make you more of those things, but it helps you to realize the parts that you are identified with who don’t yet know that by becoming aware of the somatic and energetic patterns that keep us separated from our natural self you can choose not to identify with them. From that place, you can find alignment to your natural productive, happy self.

What three practices would you recommend for people that are trying to be balanced in their life consciously [as leaders if applicable?

Somatic Mindfulness, Authentic Relating, a physical activity that is counter to your typical energy.

How does one know he/she needs a coach?

When one is willing to admit that we need support to grow. There is a false sense in our culture that we should be empowered to do things on our own, and asking for help is a sign of weakness.

The reality is that we are interconnected and it is in our biology to ask for and receive support from others. When someone has tried everything to shift something on their own and nothing has worked, that is the time to consider that help might be needed and a coach might be the missing piece.

How to find the right guide for you/ your family/someone else that you feel might need help?

Finding the right guide is a sense of trusting your intuition. It should be someone you feel safe with, you can trust and shares a similar story to your own so they can relate to where you are coming from. At the end of the day it’s just a feeling, do I feel safe enough to trust this person?

What as a coach do you do? (compared to other professionals in the field)

Using a meditative and somatic based approach, I help people realize that how and where they are paying attention has a significant impact on their actions/patterns/feelings and thoughts.

I help my clients find an experience of safety and comfort in their bodies and help them notice the places in their lives where it’s hard to connect to those feelings.

We then process those areas, by staying with the direct experience of the body rather than getting caught in stories about it. Once the energy in the body shifts , the unconscious patterns shift as well.

The client’s role in the process is to simply stay present to their experience and to allow what is happening to happen.

I ask a series of questions or make suggestions about how and where to pay attention that catalyzes energetic shifts in the body.

How to understand that one might need a coach like you (VS nutritionist, therapist…)?

I work directly with your nervous system response and the felt sense of your bodies unconscious reactions. Other modalities work on surface shifts. My works address the core or root of your issues that then ripples out into all aspects of your life.

Here is a story a client shared with me :

I like to think I’m very sensitive to “healers” with a self-serving agenda, and I can’t tolerate it. When Danny puts his attention on me, his support and guidance feel totally “clean,” which I experience as a complete lack of resistance to his support.

I’m excited because I’m already experiencing a new freedom.

For all of my life, I have experienced the world as if I am set to the “devour/consume everything” mode. This has to lead to me being overweight, addicted, and distracted. As hard as I tried to stop this pattern, it always felt like self-denial, and pressure would build up until I launched into another binge. So my life looks like the management of 4 moderately destructive addictions, with a relationship, career, community, and family squeezed in wherever they fit, with a lot of volatility and no secure spot for any of those.

It feels like Danny saw me and understood this, and then gently guided my hand to dial on my “control panel” that I had never noticed before. The dial was cranked to 11, or “devour the world.” He showed me how to start turning it down toward a setting that is still so new that I’m not sure what to call it, but maybe something like “be with the world.” As I dial down, a LOT of stuff comes up, and Danny helped me work with that stuff very skillfully. Since then, I have been able to consistently find the dial on my own, and I have gotten a lot of relief from just bumping it down a little bit. Not so far that I end up going into the wild deep unprocessed, but far enough down that it feels much more comfortable to pause and rest rather than keep swiping, scrolling, seeking, or snacking.

What a relief! I feel hopeful in an arena where I had lost hope.

If this resonates with you feel free to reach out to Danny for a free intro session 

We’re building the bridge between your needs and an international network of evidence-based holistic health & wellness professional so taking care of yourself is easy, anywhere, anytime.