Bodyful Episode #09: Dr. Rachel Allyn Reminds Us that Pleasure is Ours to Claim

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by Valerie Martin

Pleasure is not just a sex-positive buzzword or a euphoric state to chase sometimes— it is essential to our humanity. When we prioritize pleasure, we connect back to the truest version of ourselves.

In this conversation with Dr. Rachel Allyn, holistic clinical psychologist and author of the recently released book. The Pleasure Is All Yours, we chat the power and importance of pleasure, WTF “bodyfulness” really means, and why it matters.

Pleasure is most often associated with sex— and while sex is important, pleasure is SO much more than just that. It’s one of the fundamental aspects of being fully alive in the time we are given in these beautiful, messy, awkward, miraculous flesh suits.

The full spectrum of life includes the capacity for both tremendous pain AND tremendous pleasure— and learning how to make space for both to coexist is a necessary piece of feeling the truth of our own aliveness, instead of always feeling removed from our experience or seeking to fill the good ole Bottomless Pit of Despair. While the experience of pleasure may seem fleeting, cultivating moments of pleasure can compound into deeper, lasting states of joy and contentment.

For many of us, we’ve spent so much time being conditioned into how we’re “supposed” to think, feel, and act that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to trust the knowing of our own body. This leaves us feeling a disconnect, both with ourselves and with others.

Through Dr. Allyn’s bodyfulness framework that she shares in her book (this conversation is just a teaser!), readers can learn to reconnect to their bodies, their hearts, and release internalized shame and conditioning.

To listen to the episode, stream from the podcast player below, or search & subscribe to Bodyful on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About Dr. Rachel Allyn (she/her)

Rachel Allyn, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist, certified yoga instructor, public speaker, and relationship columnist. She is the founder of YogaPsych, PLLC, a psychotherapy practice for adults that blends Western medicine with Eastern philosophy, and connects the mind with the body. She has been in private practice for almost fifteen years working with individuals and couples dealing with sexuality, intimacy, and relationship problems as well as trauma, depression, anxiety, and loss. She’s been quoted in books and magazines including Yoga Journal, Women’s Health, Outside, Good Housekeeping, and Cosmopolitan.

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Bodyful Episode #08: Amber Karnes on Yoga and Body Inclusivity

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by Valerie Martin

What does “accessible yoga” really mean, and how is it challenging other wellness/fitness communities to move toward greater inclusivity?

These questions are just part of what we explore in this powerful conversation with Amber Karnes, currently the board president of the Accessible Yoga Association.

While Amber was first introduced to yoga by her trainer as a way to “burn calories on a rest day,” it actually ended up becoming the path that helped her finally feel at home in her own body and give herself permission to drop the cycle of dieting / trying to force her body to be a size that could only ever be maintained through starvation and overexercise.

Among many other things, Amber is the creator of Body Positive Yoga, which offers resources for both students and teachers to empower folks in bodies that don’t fit the “thin ideal” of western white-washed yoga to make the practice supportive and accessible in ways that often don’t happen inside the average yoga studio.

Amber is passionate about challenging the yoga and wellness communities to change, rather than perpetuating the dominant message in those spaces that people should change their bodies.

To listen to the episode, stream from the podcast player below, or search & subscribe to Bodyful on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About Amber Karnes (she/her)

Amber Karnes is a yoga teacher trainer, ruckus maker, the founder of Body Positive Yoga, and a lifelong student of her body. Amber trains yoga teachers and movement educators how to create accessible and equitable spaces for liberation and belonging. She also creates community for folks who want to build unshakable confidence and learn to live without shame or apology in the bodies they have today. Amber is the co-creator of Yoga For All Teacher Training and the Accessible Yoga Training School, an Accessible Yoga Association board member, and a sought-after contributor on the topics of accessibility, authentic marketing, culture-shifting, and community-building. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her husband Jimmy. You can find her at bodypositiveyoga.com.

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Bodyful Episode #07: Tara Galeano on Women Rediscovering Their Bodies

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by Valerie Martin

The more I learn in my clinical sexology doctoral program, the more I’m blown away by the field of sexology in general and the highly skilled sex therapists, coaches, and educators like this episode’s guest, Tara Galeano.

Tara got into sex therapy initially because her therapy clients were walking to talk about their sexual challenges and longings, so she committed to deepening her knowledge and expertise to be able to better support them. Later in her career, she had an awakening of her own, in which she recognized just how much she had been falling into the cultural trap of minimizing her needs and desires.

In Tara’s case, that reckoning coincided with the end of her 25 year marriage (due to layered issues that you’ll hear about in the interview)— and the beginning of a deeper commitment to herself and the fulfillment of her needs, desires, and pleasure in ALL capacities.

Tara also developed a specialty in working with women in treatment for cancer, which led to the creation of her book, Rediscovering My Body— first written for women with cancer, and then revised and re-released for ALL women longing to reconnect with their sexuality. It’s in a beautiful interactive journaling/coloring format with guided exercises— I got a copy since we initially recorded our conversation, and have started working through it. It will definitely be one I recommend to many of my clients!

As I mention in the intro of this episode, we had a technical glitch where we lost the last 15 minutes of Tara’s side of the conversation— so the episode ends more abruptly than we intended, but there’s still a lot of goodness in this one. I hope you enjoy it!

To listen to the episode, stream from the podcast player below, or search & subscribe to Bodyful on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About Tara Galeano (she/her)

Tara is the founder of Rediscovering My Body and Boulder Sex Therapy, and is an author, speaker, retreat host, and  sexual empowerment coach. She has worked with women for over two decades to get their sexy back. Tara knows that there is pleasure in the body, beyond our wildest dreams, and every woman can access it. In “Rediscovering My Body”, she teaches women how to show up for pleasure in their lives. Tara rediscovered her own body after leaving her twenty-five-year marriage. Realizing that she had given so much of herself away, she knew that she needed to come back to the inherent wisdom of the body. Now Tara has embodied this path and is moving forward to share this with women everywhere with her book, her online courses, and community, and her retreats. She lives in San Francisco with her soul sister and is learning how to live more fully in her nomadic heart.

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Bodyful Episode #06: Michelle Cassandra Johnson on Finding Refuge & Prioritizing Collective Care

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Michelle Johnson Bodyful Podcast

We each have maybe a handful of teachers in our lives that fundamentally shift the way we see or experience— Michelle Cassandra Johnson has been one of those teachers for me.

Michelle is a true embodiment of grace, fire, compassion, and grit, and is a radiant example of how to to show up with skillfulness and heart in a dysfunctional world.

Her new book Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief was released just this week, and I am so excited to dive into and savor it starting next weekend when I’ve carved out some special time and space to do so.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Michelle, and that if you arent’ already familiar with her books and other offerings, that this will be the first of many times you get to experience her gifts.

“Our culture conditions us to notice what is going on from the head up and not from the throat and heart down. The only way out is through, by way of the feelings. If we are going to make social change, we need to cultivate a practice of feeling... When one connects with their feelings as yoga teaches us to do, one can connect with their heart. If one is connected with their heart, they have the opportunity to be changed and to shift their perspective. They have the opportunity to feel the pain of living in a world that is designed to break the spirit through violence, oppression, and injustice.”
— Michelle Cassandra Johnson (from Skill in Action)

To listen to the episode, stream from the podcast player below, or search & subscribe to Bodyful on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About Michelle Cassandra Johnson (she/her)

Michelle is an activist, social justice warrior, author, anti-racism consultant and trainer, intuitive healer, and yoga teacher and practitioner. She has led dismantling racism work in many settings for over two decades and has a background and two decades of practice as a clinical social worker. Michelle’s work centers on healing from individual and collective trauma, coming back into wholeness and aligning the mind, body, spirit, and heart. She published Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World in 2017 and her newest book, Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief was published by Shambhala Publications in 2021.

Michelle teaches workshops in yoga studios and community spaces nationwide and is on the faculty of Off the Mat, Into the World. In 2020 she created her own podcast, Finding Refuge, which explores collective grief and liberation and serves as a reminder about all the ways we can find refuge during unsettling and uncertain times and of the resilience and joy that comes from allowing ourselves to find refuge.

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Bodyful Episode #05: Sarah Jane Chapman on Yoga Therapy & Body Liberation

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Sarah Jane Chapman Bodyful Podcast

Occasionally you meet someone who makes you feel good just by being in their presence, no matter what you’re doing or talking about. Sarah Jane Chapman is one of those people.

She is (in my words) a modern-day witch who lives in alignment with the earth as an extension of herself, and has worked hard to heal her relationship with her body after years of slogging through diet culture and eating disorder recovery.

Sarah Jane is a mama, a massage therapist, and a yoga teacher who teaches the kind of classes I actually want to take (which, TBH is rare 😄). And does a lot of other cool shit, which you can hear about in our conversation or read in her bio below or at her website. I hope you enjoy this conversation!

“Yoga therapy is an individualized practice created to work with someone’s specific system. I typically see clients once or twice a month to check on their practice and tweak it if necessary. If practiced regularly, I can see changes in my clients’ systems. It’s truly magic.”
— Sarah Jane Chapman

To listen to the episode, stream from the podcast player below, or search & subscribe to Bodyful on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About Sarah Jane Chapman

Sarah Jane Chapman was born in Upstate New York where she would spend her days climbing trees and laying in the grass. She started practicing yoga at 14, which helped her through some of the most difficult times of her life. In 2012, she traveled to Rishikesh, India where she became certified in Hatha Yoga, and shortly thereafter moved to Nashville, Tennessee. Sarah Jane is a licensed massage therapist trained at the Mind Body Institute, and offers a plethora of body work and Reiki, as well as astrology and tarot readings. She is currently playing a lot with creating tinctures and teas from plants to facilitate health and connection with the earth, and loves spending time outside with her daughter and going on walks with her husband in their east Nashville neighborhood. You can follow her on instagram @sarahjanechap and learn more about her in-person and virtual offerings at sarahjanechapman.com.

Bodyful Episode #04: Rachel Lewis & Paula Scatoloni on Embodied Recovery for Eating Disorders

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Paula Scatoloni Rachel Lewis Bodyful Podcast

You might think that working with the body would be a central component of eating disorder recovery.

And from a standpoint of medical safety and nutrition, that has always been the case. But as far as working with the body as part of the actual biopsychological healing process? Not so much.

The field of trauma recovery has come a long way in the past 2 decades, with a great deal of research showing us that we MUST go to the body (rather than exclusively relying on traditional talk therapy) if we want to help people heal more fully from trauma. Rachel Lewis and Paula Scatoloni have been on the leading edge of applying the learnings about the neurobiology of trauma and attachment to working with eating disorders, which almost always overlap with trauma and/or attachment issues, and historically have been viewed as one of the most challenging mental health issues to work with and recover from.

Both coming from strong and varied backgrounds in somatics and psychology, Paula and Rachel co-developed the Embodied Recovery for Eating Disorders model of assessing and treating eating disorders. I had the privilege of taking the level 1 Embodied Recovery for Eating Disorders in North Carolina in 2017, and I am looking forward to taking the level 2 training in 2022.

In this conversation, we talk more about what has historically been missing from eating disorder treatment, and explore some of the foundations underlying the ERED model. While this particular episode might be more intriguing for clinicians or folks in recovery from an eating disorder, I also believe there are nuggets in this conversation that will be intriguing to any listener with an interest in the body and psychology.

To listen to the episode, stream from the podcast player below, or search & subscribe to Bodyful on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About Rachel Lewis (MS, EDS, LPC, LMBT)

Rachel is a somatically integrative psychotherapist, dually licensed in counseling and therapeutic massage and bodywork. She is a Certified Advanced Practitioner in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and has advanced training and 25 + years of experience in diverse somatic therapies including Craniosacral Therapy, Energetic Osteopathy, Oncology massage and Aromatherapy. 

She has extensive experience as a teacher and presenter, focusing on accessing the body’s unique capacity to give voice to the subconscious and to lay the foundation for healing and maintaining psychological and physical health. In her private practice in Chapel Hill, NC, Rachel specializes in working with people exploring recovery from trauma, eating disorders, and dissociative disorders.

About Paula Scatoloni (LCSW, CEDS, SEP)

Paula is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Certified Eating Disorders Specialist in Chapel Hill, NC. She has additional training in neurophysiological interventions. She is a certified provider of the Safe and Sound Protocol, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges. She has worked in the field of eating disorders for over two decades providing clinical services and teaching extensively on the etiology and treatment of eating disorders through classes, workshops, professional trainings, and conferences.

Prior to developing EMBODIED RECOVERY, Paula co-developed the first intensive outpatient program for eating disorders with Dr. Anita Johnston. She served as the Eating Disorders Coordinator at Duke University Counseling Center (CAPS) for nine years where she developed campus-wide policies and managed a multidisciplinary treatment team treating eating disorders.

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