The Fat Doctor Podcast

Healing Trauma with Elle Bower Johnston, Body Witch

• Dr Asher Larmie • Season 5 • Episode 17

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In this episode of The Fat Doctor Podcast, I'm joined by Elle Bower Johnston, a  breathworker, rest teacher, and somatic trauma resolution practitioner who describes herself as a "body witch." Our conversation explores the intersection of trauma, embodiment, and healing beyond traditional therapy.

Elle explains trauma as "when our body-mind experiences something that it can't digest in the moment - either too much too fast, or not enough over too long." While our protective mechanisms (fight, flight, freeze, and fawn) are natural responses to threats, trauma occurs when these responses get stuck and can't complete.

We discuss how systems of oppression create ongoing trauma, particularly for marginalized bodies accessing healthcare. Elle shares how our bodies develop protective mechanisms that may have been necessary for survival, but can become limiting patterns later in life.

The conversation moves beyond cognitive understanding to explore embodied healing. As Elle notes, "You can't think your way through" trauma - we need approaches that engage the multifaceted aspects of our bodies: physical, emotional, energetic, and relational.

In a world disconnected through capitalism and colonialism, Elle suggests that rest isn't just about lying down or taking a bath - it's about reconnecting with something larger than ourselves. This might be as simple as noticing the seasons changing or feeling gravity's pull on your body. These small moments of connection become pathways to true rest and healing.

This episode invites listeners to honor the wisdom in their protective responses while exploring gentle ways to expand beyond them, finding rest and embodiment in a world that often disconnects us from our bodies and each other.

You can learn more about Elle through her website. 

Got a question for the next podcast? Let me know!

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Asher Larmie: Hi, everyone welcome to the Fat Doctor Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Asher Larmie. I'm very excited to be talking to you today. It's mental Health Awareness month, which has really become quite commodified. But I like the idea of talking a little bit about mental health, and I was like, who am I going to invite on? And I am very lucky that I get to speak to someone who has massively helped me with my mental health.

I've known you now for a couple of years. I did your Summer of Rest program last summer, which had a huge impact on me physically and emotionally. And so I'm so excited to talk to you today on the podcast. I know people are going to get a lot out of it. And I'm just going to hand over to you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Elle Johnston (she/they): Hi, I'm Elle Johnston. I call myself a body witch, which often takes a lot of explaining, because actually, that's not a professional title at all shockingly. But what that means is that I work with the body. I am a somatic trauma resolution practitioner. I am a breath work practitioner. I am a rest teacher. I have a lineage and a history of sort of coming from a Yogic lineage and then moving into somatics, and the more Westernized study of how we exist in our body and how our bodies exist in the world.

And then I also weave in a lot of folk magic. So Tarot and animist spirituality, because that all is deeply rooted in the body for me as well. I love to work with folks who kind of stand on the margins. Folks who are often kept out of wellness spaces as much as the word wellness kind of raises every heckle in my body.

I have to admit that that is the industry that I work in. So I'm here for the weirdos. I'm here for the queers. I'm here for folks in disabled bodies, folks in bodies that are different from the norm, and folks who are generally living with some layers of oppression in their experience, in their own experience of the world and their body's experience of the world.

And we kind of work together to see if we can unravel some of that and see what it feels like to concurrently unravel the ways that these systems of oppression have impacted how we exist in our bodies and how we exist in the world. That's my vibe. That's what I do.

Asher Larmie: It is, and if you're listening, people who know me right now will automatically understand why I deeply love Elle, and why I've always loved Elle since the first time I came across her, because everything you've just said is like, yes, yes, yes. I mean just Body Witch - you could have left it at that. Who says it's not a real thing? It is a real thing. It totally is a real thing.

A lot of the work that you do has been quite transformative for me. I was looking at your website. Am I right in thinking you are a Libra sun? You are a Gemini moon, not stalking you. I just read it. And what's your ascending sign? I've forgotten your ascendant.

Elle Johnston: Aries Rising.

Asher Larmie: Oh, you're an Aries rising! Oh, powerful.

Elle Johnston: I am all air and fire, which means that I like literally, my chart has maybe 2 or 3 earthy placements maybe, and beyond that I'm all air and fire, which means that this has been transformational work for me as well because I existed purely as a floating head for maybe the first 25 years of my life.

Asher Larmie: I'm very earthy. I'm super earthy although I am a Sagittarius rising, just a little bit of fire. But actually, no, I'm not very earthy. I have a lot of earth placements, but I also have a lot of air. My moon is in Aquarius, and I am a very analytical person. The way I tend to process my emotions is through thinking about things. I think that's also partly because I'm autistic. I like to rationalize and understand things and understand why I feel the way that I feel which is great.

But there comes a point where I'm just like I've talked this to death, but I still I'm still no closer to a breakthrough, which is why I found working with you quite transformative. Because you, whilst you talk and you explain and I understand a lot from what you've explained, the main thing is helping me be present in my body.

I wanted to ask you what I think is quite a basic question, and I think perhaps you'll have a really good way of answering this. So forgive the basics, but what is trauma?

Elle Johnston: Oh, low key, just a low key starting point. It is my bread and butter. As an embodied experience, which is where the idea of "the body keeps the score" kind of comes from, you know, Bessel van der Kolk and his famous book about somatic trauma...

Trauma is an embodied experience. First and foremost, let's kind of dissolve the idea that the mind exists outside of the body because it doesn't, because our mind influences our body and our body influences our mind, and our literal brain is part of our body, and our gut has a whole bunch of capacity to think and interact. So everything is connected, first and foremost.

Trauma is when our body-mind experiences something that it can't digest in the moment, that it is either too much too fast or not enough over too long. There's a sense of you can't process it all. You can't digest it all. You can't stay present with the experience. And so your body-mind, which has this beautifully intricate, wondrous security system, moves into ways to protect itself.

When we're dealing with trauma, our body moves into ways to protect itself when we meet any threat. Whether it's starting a new job, whether it's running away from a tiger, whether it's a threatening email from an ex-colleague - threatening is very loosely interpreted. It comes from our own histories and our own perceptions.

When we meet any threat, we move into these protective mechanisms of "am I going to fight this thing? Am I going to run away from this thing? Am I going to freeze and try and pretend like I'm not here until the thing goes away?" Those are all really natural, and we move through those in waves every day in large and small ways.

Trauma is when that wave or that safety response gets stuck, when it's not able to complete. It's when you can't run away from something or when you can't fight something, or when you can't freeze and the thing will disappear. You can start to see why I am very interested in the overlaps of trauma and oppression, because if you want a bunch of things that you can't run away from or you can't fight - there we are, we're talking about the systems that we live in a lot of the time.

Asher Larmie: Best explanation I've ever had, not just saying that to you. I wrote notes. I was like the first bit about your body just can't digest, can't process. And also that kind of differentiation between "we experience threats all the time, and our body is perfectly capable of dealing with them. But trauma is when we get stuck, and we don't complete that loop, that process" which is a really great way of kind of distinguishing between, you know, getting a threatening email from a colleague might be just one of those things that you deal with, or...

Elle Johnston: Janet's at it again.

Asher Larmie: Yeah, right? Or you've been tremendously bullied at work and there's all this financial instability. And all of a sudden that threatening email is way more than just a threatening email.

It makes sense, then, that's really helped to explain or make sense of the fact that when you are a fat person, a disabled person, a black person, a trans person, or, as you say, anyone existing within these layers of oppression, that accessing healthcare can be traumatic as opposed to just a bit stressful. It can be actually traumatic because you cannot run from the threats that you're experiencing within the healthcare system. You can't run, you can't fight, you can't freeze, you can't do anything. You're just forced to endure it.

You sort of said your body can't close the loop or can't process it. So what happens? What happens in your body/mind?

Elle Johnston: What you can find is that there's this sense of an imprint of the initially traumatizing experience, which, as you cleverly modeled, turns the email into an existential crisis. The imprint of that trauma will echo and spiral, and can get stuck. You can kind of get looping into that. So there's this sort of sense of hopelessness or powerlessness. One of the things that really comes through when we're talking about the body in trauma is a sense of loss of agency.

And a loss of feeling like you're within yourself, like you're centered and you have integrity, or capacity to meet the world in present time. When we're in a trauma response, it can show up so many different ways. But it can feel like you're not present, like you've been pulled out of yourself, like you're running on automatic responses where you might surface once you get back to a place of more regulation and be like, "Wow! Why did I respond like that?"

You might beat yourself up for being like, "why didn't I stand up for myself, or why didn't I? Or why did I try and literally run away?"

You can find the replaying of those patterns. You might habitually get stuck in a fight response, or habitually get stuck in a flight response. You might find that there are parts of you that are just living in freeze. It might be a part of your body that you don't have access to. It might be an emotional state that you don't have access to.

So there's all these different ways that our bodies kind of essentially learn to keep us safe and then keep trying to play out that route to safety when we meet something that feels like that old threat.

Asher Larmie: The first bit that you talk about I sort of wrote down "dissociate." But you didn't actually use that word. Is that what you meant? We often use these terms. I'll use the term "dissociate" and I think I know what it means, and I might Google it. But is that what you were talking about, that kind of feeling like you're not really in the moment?

Elle Johnston: Yeah, dissociation can definitely be a trauma response, like a way of keeping yourself safe. That's not necessarily the same as not feeling like you can be present, but yeah, being pulled out of yourself, feeling like "I'm just gonna go away from this" - that's my very rough definition of dissociation.

Asher Larmie: As you were describing it, I was like, this is exactly how I feel whenever I come into contact with a health professional. Whatever it is, it actually doesn't matter what I'm going to see them about. It doesn't matter if I'm going for myself or for someone else that I care about. I get into a room with a health professional - I am a doctor, I know the stuff they're talking to me about - and yet it's like I'm not really there.

This calm, centered, grounded Asher that has some idea of what they're talking about, maybe half the time, but is floating around in the world and kind of present in their body just disappears. And there's some kind of robot who is responding in these very frustrating ways. And then you describe that moment when I'm back in a familiar place, and I look back and say, "Why didn't I say that? Why didn't I do that? Why did I say that and do that?" It just baffles me.

And so that's why I've started thinking about - is it trauma that makes me feel this way when I'm around a doctor?

Elle Johnston: I'm not here to diagnose - I literally not a doctor, and it's not my place to diagnose anyone, let alone you specifically Asher. But it could be that there is medical trauma that is spiking for you. It could be that there's trauma somewhere else, with authority figures, where it's transferring from some other route. But I have the same level of threat, therefore my body is clicking into the same protective mechanisms.

Asher Larmie: You talk about protective mechanisms, and I have become more aware of internal family systems. I've been exploring these things purely as a sort of armchair psychologist who reads and listens to people who are interesting.

But I wonder about these protective mechanisms, because I used to hate myself, my body, my mind for responding the way that it did. It used to be like "why do you do that?" And then I learned actually, probably I'm doing that or my body/mind is doing that to protect myself. And that felt a bit better. I was like, "Okay, you're just trying to protect me. I'm not so angry with you anymore."

But I wonder about those protective mechanisms. In your experience, are there common things that you see in your work that people tend to do to protect themselves in these moments of trauma, when they feel threatened?

Elle Johnston: I love that you had that little reckoning moment, because there is so much wisdom in these responses. They are perhaps frustrating when looked at from a different angle, but there is so much wisdom, and these are the things that got you to where you are.

When we can bring in just that little tiny bit of compassion and care, like "thank you, my flight response, my freeze response, for doing what was needed at the time." Because a lot of these responses - I'm talking about developmental responses, or the more long term trauma rather than immediate PTSD trauma - there is a slightly different layer there.

A lot of these were developed when we were really young, when we didn't actually have the capacity, the ability, the wisdom, the skill to handle the things that were given to us. And so our body found a way to survive it as best it could.

That's what I always try to come at any response with. Certainly when I meet it within myself, as best as I can. Definitely not perfect with this - I spend a lot of time being really annoyed at myself as much as any other human. And certainly with clients, which is like, "where is the wisdom in this? How does this make sense to me? How can this, given all that I know of my history, make sense that I'm responding like this?"

To answer your actual question, the Big 3 with threat responses would be fight, flight, freeze, which I think a lot of us kind of know from the Internet ether. What fighting, flighting, or freezing looks like for you is really personal and dependent on your own experience.

For some people, fighting might look really fisty. For some people, fighting might look like being furious all the time at the state of the world, at anyone who slights them. Flight might look like literally running away. It might look like avoidance. It might look like the desire to just escape. The fantasy of "maybe I'll just run away and live in the woods" feels sometimes when it emerges in me like a flight response of just "I just want to be out of here."

And on a very practical level, it can look physically like twitchiness, like a desire to keep moving, like "can I get out of here somehow?"

And then freeze - if fight and flight are quite within our systems, they move us into function. They are faster, they are hotter. In the parlance of alchemical alignment, which is sort of one of the trainings that I have done, they talk about them being like a hyper response.

And then freeze is the opposite. Freeze is like a hypo response. It's cold, it's slow, it's frozen. So there's a stillness there. And a sort of moving away from liveness.

That can look any number of ways. It can look like "I know that I want to write this email, but I just have no words. There are literally no words in me." Physically in freeze, it can look like that sense of "I don't really think I can feel into that part of my body, that doesn't really exist here."

It can look like almost there's parts of you in hiding where you might see little flashes of them, and then they kind of tuck back away.

And then overlaid on all of these different states, there's the kind of 4th protection mechanism, because we are relational beings, which is what people call fawn, what I call either hypersocial or dissonant social, where you're like smile plastered on saying what the person wants to hear: "Oh, my God, that's so interesting." For those of us raised female, it might be a really familiar response to finding safety of just "oh, my God! Let me say what you need me to say. Let me be pleasing to you."

And that can stand alone, and that can also overlay like "I want to fight you, but I'm plastering on my smile and hypersocialing instead, because that is a safer mechanism a lot of the time."

Asher Larmie: You said it so well, and as you were talking about it, there was this moment that I had when Elle was teaching me a bit about the nervous system. This was quite recent. I have always thought I was a fighty type of person. I've always felt like fight was my go-to response.

And then I realized, having spent an hour and a half with you - oh, gosh, no, it's nothing to do with fight. I am actually constantly in flight. And I didn't realize this. And one of the things I do when I'm in flight, which I assumed was fight - I don't get angry at people, I don't want to actually have an argument, in fact, quite the opposite.

When I feel threatened, I will often sort of aim torpedoes at a relationship or a situation, and blow it up like a social media frenzy. I mean, I don't do it anymore. I haven't for the last year. But I would play out things on social media, or push people away before they push me away. All of this stuff, which I thought made me a fighter. But I realized, it's complex, right? It's nuanced. I'm a bit of everything.

But I realized that a lot of things that I assumed were just kind of anger and aggression - I've always been told that I'm an angry, aggressive, rude, belligerent person, and so that's what I assumed that I was. But actually it was just my way of coping with that kind of trauma response which, as you say, dates back to very young, vulnerable times.

So thank you for explaining freeze and fawn in a way that no one has ever done for me before.

Elle Johnston: I like to think of the fight and the flight, both of them have that energy, but fight you are moving towards and flight you are moving away from.

Asher Larmie: I get these moments when I'm like - I've done a lot of therapy, and I have absolutely nothing against therapy. I don't want people to think that I am bad mouthing therapy at all. When I was in medical school, we learned people have mental health problems, and we spent 5 minutes doing psychiatry compared to everything else. I spent years learning about the cardiovascular system, the pancreas and the gastrointestinal system and the musculoskeleton. I had to learn anatomy. I had to learn the name of every single tendon in the human body, but I learned this for 5 minutes. I did one single term where we combined psychology and sociology together, and we had, I think, 2 or 3 classes a week, and that was it.

And then I went and did psychiatry. I did a module of psychiatry, which, by the way, has nothing to do with anything. Psychiatry is not really about the nervous system. It's about medicating people, and psychiatry is very flawed. We're not getting into that.

So as a doctor, I learned when you're mentally ill, when you're depressed or anxious, and you can imagine, now this is at least a third of my day in general practice, dealing with people who have issues that are more, or at least partly linked to the brain inside, the way the brain is impacting the body, the gut, all mixing together.

So we learned medication, because, of course, doctors, and then therapy, and that was about as far as we got. And therapy is great, and I've been doing therapy for many years, and sometimes I am sick and tired of talking about something. I'm like, I get it. I have Daddy issues. I understand why I am experiencing this sensation in my body. I know where it comes from. I know all about it. We can repeat it if you like.

But I don't get like that's it. I'm just stuck here in this place of understanding, which is great and very helpful and very useful. And I'd just like to point out I still go to therapy every 2 weeks, and I think I couldn't cope without it. But I've realized there needs to be something more. And I wonder what your take is on that - when we're sick and tired of talking about our problems, what else can we do?

Elle Johnston: There comes a point, and I say this as someone who loves to think and overthinks, that you can't think your way through the thing. And that is because, as we discussed, actually, you're not just a brain, you are a brain and a body, and many layers of a body.

So I know we've discussed this before, Asher, but the body isn't just this meat and bones and flesh kind of thing, which I could go on a big rant about the objectification of the body and the way that ties into capitalism. But we can come back to that maybe.

The body is multifaceted, multi-layered. You have the physical body, the emotional body, the mental body, the energetic body, the spiritual body, the relational body, because we are all constantly in a relationship with the world around us, with the people around us.

And so therapy is really great for understanding what is going on in the mind. Understanding the roots of your thoughts, understanding cognitively why you're responding in a certain way. But because it's just dealing with one piece of the whole, at some point you kind of hit a wall where you're like "great, this needs to go somewhere else," or "this needs to include other parts, perhaps."

Which is, for me, what somatic work is so much around - bringing in that wholeness. As you know, Asher, I'm not only working with the body. This is not a nonverbal, non-cognitive experience. But we also need to bring in the felt sense of "how does that land in my experience?"

And "can I even feel my experience of having a body?" Can I feel parts of my body or can I feel emotions as they move? What do they feel like? Is there a sort of energetic resonance that I can tune into?

I know, especially for those of us who have been raised in Western rationalism, talking about energetics and spirituality can be like "whoa, red flag, that's too kooky." And I have very much come from that background. But the more attention I can pay to the fact that I have a body that is energetic, even just on a scientific level - my heart is beating and creating electricity, and my brain is creating electricity, and I have a magnetic field the same way that the earth has a magnetic field - that's wild.

So my thoughts are that therapy is really great, and you also need to be able to weave the rest of you into your healing in some way.

Asher Larmie: Two things really stood out from that. The first is, and it's kind of why I brought in a bit of astrology at the beginning, because I know that Elle and I both love astrology, and you mentioned Tarot as well. As somebody who spent 20 years learning about medicine, I was raised in Western rationalism with no religion, very atheist parents. And then went into a scientific field, where we are arrogantly presumptuous and believe that we know everything about the human body, because we're experts in the human body, and then realize we don't know much at all. We really know so little. Even the stuff we think we know, every so often something comes along and we're like, "oh, I thought it worked that way, but apparently it doesn't work that way at all." So we know so little.

I began to realize that when I was learning about things like Chakras. I remember people would talk about chakras, and I would roll my eyes. And now I am humbled because I spend a lot of time thinking about these things, and I also love the fact that Western science is beginning to prove these theories that have existed for thousands of years.

And so I am learning to weave magic. And that's why I love that you're a body witch, because once upon a time witchcraft, magic, these words were a red flag. Now I'm just really learning to embrace them, and realizing just how powerful they have helped me to move in a way that where therapy kind of hit a wall. And it's wonderful. And like you say, I need it for that part, the mental part, the processing, the thoughts part - and astrology, and Tarot and learning about Chakras and doing yoga, all of those things, have helped me in a way that other things just haven't and can't, and have allowed me to access parts of myself.

Speaking of which, you mentioned about not knowing what feelings feel like. And I love that you said that because I just didn't. I'm just starting to learn what a feeling actually is, what the embodied sense of a feeling like, what does fear actually feel like in my body. Fear was, in fact, fear is the easiest one, I think.

Elle Johnston: The ones that are really loud. That's how you begin.

Asher Larmie: Right! I'm really struggling with joy at the moment. I was describing this feeling of I'm sort of trying to experience pleasure, and then there's this kind of "is this pleasure?" It feels okay, but I want more - isn't it supposed to feel bigger than this, more exciting? It's a very weird thing. But I still don't know that I feel feelings correctly.

Elle Johnston: Is there a correct way? I have a chart. It's a lie. There's no correct way. You're doing it!

Asher Larmie: But the feeling of not being able to experience feelings, of not quite being present in my body. I think that we've grown up in a world where it makes it harder to access these things and the relational stuff as well. Thanks to capitalism and colonialism, we've been cut off from our relationship with our own bodies, our relationship with other people, our relationship with our environment. We've literally been cut off from those things.

So I did Summer of Rest with you last year, and you did talk. You explained a lot of stuff which was great, but we did some practical things. We did some breath work. We did some somatic practice. I still don't think that I could explain it to other people. What did we do?

Elle Johnston: I'm not sure I can explain it either. We rested with the understanding that rest is as multifaceted as the body. We can mentally rest, and we can physically rest, and we can rest in all these different ways.

Knowing me and knowing the way that I work, I know that we definitely worked with the breath, because that is almost like a shortcut - not loving the use of shortcut, but it is a really swift way of accessing our nervous system state and of shifting our nervous system state.

And we definitely worked with some somatic explorations to root us and ground us into our bodies and into the world around us. And I believe we probably also did some restorative yoga, which is surprisingly challenging. It's a lot of slowness - for those of us who aren't used to going slow, it can be really challenging.

Asher Larmie: I have struggled with yoga. I was always the person that went to the Yoga class, and when I say went to the Yoga class, I wasn't going to the right Yoga classes, and that's probably one of the main problems. But I'd go to yoga class, I'd do the thing, it would be really painful and uncomfortable, and I wouldn't really enjoy it. And at the end we'd get to lie down and relax. That'd be my favorite part. I was just like, I wish I could just do this part and not do any of the other parts.

For me, Yoga was kind of a sort of Westernized thing, and it was very much about showing off what your body could and couldn't do, and missed out on all of the important parts, I think. But I know enough to know that Yoga is not about showing off what your body can do.

Elle Johnston: Not about handstands. No, no.

Asher Larmie: But I remember when we were doing Summer of Rest, one of the first things that you said was "you can say no to anything you like." You can just be like, "no, not doing that," and no one ever said that to me before. It was wild.

But we did do some breath work. And when you talk about somatic explorations, what do you mean by that? I'm sort of trying to give people a flavor of things that they can explore outside of talking.

Elle Johnston: The somatic work generally is a vast and broad world. What we were doing was some really simple, gentle movement to start to bring our awareness in to "I have a body" - not even "I have a body," but "I am a body," and I can start to notice the experience of being a body. The experience of life as it moves through me.

When we practice paying attention to our bodies, that's what kind of starts to emerge: "I am a collection of cells that is made alive by some kind of wild magic that nobody really understands." Doctors don't understand it. If you talk about yoga and the Yogic science of the body, they have theories of prana, life force that enlivens. If you talk about traditional Chinese medicine, they talk about Chi.

So there's a thing that makes us alive, and we get to pay attention to that and experience how that moves through us. And that was part of what we were kind of doing in Summer of Rest - just attuning to that in a small way. Nothing massive, nothing overwhelming, just "hey, you are a body, and there's stuff going on in there."

Asher Larmie: And it's really important. This month I have been talking a lot about heart health and cholesterol. We have this idea that if you want to manage your cholesterol, you need to eat 5 fruit and veg a day, and oily fish, and all this stuff, which there is plenty of evidence doesn't work. It just really doesn't. And there's actually very little evidence of how we can reduce our cholesterol. In fact, the whole thing is really quite fascinating. The more you pull back the layers, you realize "God, all this stuff that we do in medicine, it's a complete waste of time," even the drugs that we're giving out. I mean, essentially, I'm an overpaid drug dealer, or maybe an underpaid drug dealer, whichever way you look at it. But that is essentially what we do for a lot of our work, and a lot of times, what's the point? It seems all a bit futile and pointless.

One of the things I do know is that stress and threat, and constantly living under threat, absolutely interferes with us on a cellular level in terms of all the different systems in our bodies.

And so as a doctor, I'm starting to move away from "just take this pill," and certainly don't tell people what they're supposed to eat anymore. We talk about movement and movement is really important. I'm not suggesting that it's not. But there is actually very little evidence that movement in of itself is going to be massively beneficial for your cardiovascular system. It is something deeper that we don't quite understand.

And I do think a lot of it has to do with if you're constantly under threat, constantly feeling threatened, constantly in that trauma response, it's harming you on a cellular level. And so I think, "you need to rest more." That's what I'm supposed to say now - "rest, reduce your stress levels" - like that's feasible, like "oh, I'll switch that button off." And even when I say to people "you need to rest," it can feel very much like "what a bullshit thing to say. What does it mean? And also when and how am I supposed to do that?"

But I also know the benefits of rest. And so, I wonder - can we explore what rest actually is as opposed to what social media has taught us it is, like the commodified, pretty wellness culture version of rest?

If someone said to me, "Asher, how do I bring my blood pressure down?" And the answer isn't "take more medication." The answer is "rest." How can I help? How can I support them?

Elle Johnston: My first response is to look at the systemic picture. I want to kind of give a great "here's 3 easy things that we can do," and we can get to that. But the larger picture is that we (assuming that you, dear listener, are probably living in the Western world, in a society shaped by capitalism and colonialism and patriarchy - if you're not, I love that for you, please enjoy your life) - for those of us who are living in hetero-capitalist patriarchy, we have been for generations living away from wholeness.

Living away - and this is part of the birth of rationalism that I was talking about before, and the objectification of the body. We all have ancestors who lived before capitalism. No matter how far back you have to go, we all have them. They all existed. They are all in us still.

And at some point in Europe, to reclaim or not even reclaim, but to steal the common lands, and to bring in capitalism as the economic force over feudalism, and to justify colonialism as it was being birthed, there was a dislocation of body and land, of relationship between our ancestors and one another.

There was - you have to think about what do you need to do, what do you need to vilify, what do you need to forget about yourself, to be able to dominate someone, to be able to move away from a more reciprocal relationship with the land.

And so that kind of sits as what I think of as the core wound of what we see playing out for so many of us, as a system spirals tighter and tighter.

So my answer to your question "how do we find rest" is: how does it feel possible for you to connect to something bigger than you? And that doesn't have to be God, that can be like, "I understand that I live on the Earth, and she is a planet, and I live within an ecosystem." Even if it is daffodils and squirrels, that is still an ecosystem. Even if the ecosystem is mostly paved over, there is still life happening. And there are still ecosystems happening. And I live within that.

And that sounds perhaps really wafty and ephemeral, it doesn't sound like 3 easy steps that you could write about in a cute little listicle. But certainly in my own experience and with the people that I've worked with, the ways that we counteract the forces of capitalism as they act on us is by choosing to find something different, choosing to turn your attention and your energy and your body towards something different, even in some small way.

For me, I have started taking myself for a walk like a Labrador every morning, because that's what my body needs. But it's not like "oh my God, I'm just dragging my carcass around for a walk because, fine, stupid little walk for my stupid mental health." It's like, can I pay attention to how the seasons are unfolding?

So I walk down to my local park, and I will just notice "that tree has more leaves budding than it did yesterday," or "look, the daffodils are coming up." And it's those very small moments of remembering that there is a whole world that I'm part of, that is also a living being, that help to land me in the possibility of rest.

Asher Larmie: I actually think that was amazing. I'm so glad it wasn't a list of 3 things to do. That's actually something that we can all do, and I love the way you describe the fact that, like even with the earth, for many people, it's paved over. Most of my life - I mean, I grew up in London. I didn't know, I had to drive quite far away to find nature.

Elle Johnston: Nature. Yeah.

Asher Larmie: But actually, you're right, it's everywhere. There is some green space somewhere where you can look at something. And even if that's not the case, there is something that you can find, birds traveling through the air.

Elle Johnston: You can feel gravity working on your body, like that is a massive force that you're in continual relationship with.

Asher Larmie: Beautiful. And also rest is not like, it's not lying down. I mean, I'm not saying...

Elle Johnston: Absolutely.

Asher Larmie: Rest doesn't mean go to bed, doesn't mean take a bath, or it can mean all of those things, and it can mean so many different things. My favorite thing to do - I'm really lucky now, I live in nature. I live in the middle of nowhere, and every day when I go for my walk, it's on farmland. Yesterday I noticed, and two days ago it wasn't there, but the farmer has sowed some seeds, and so the brown earth that had been churned up - it's really beautiful, it's a very rich shade of brown - there's like a green shimmer over the top of the brown. What is that? And then I looked closer. I didn't have my glasses on, so it wasn't very clear. I was like, "Oh, my gosh!" The seeds are sprouting. This is really exciting for me, and I had this real moment of just looking at the prettiness of it, this green shimmer over the brown earth, and just being like "spring!" I know it's spring already.

Elle Johnston: Again, cognitively you know, but that was an embodied experience of "oh, spring! Oh, rebirth!"

Asher Larmie: Rebirth. And yeah, something really beautiful about that. So that was restful, as is spending time for me with other people and having relationships. And just being present in a room with someone I find to be quite restful.

And this has been amazing. For people who are like, "all of this is great, but I want to know more," and more importantly, "I would like a guide" - if I may, I recommend Elle Johnston. If I may recommend anyone. Tell us how people can work with you, what can we do, where can we go to find you?

Elle Johnston: So I love to work one-to-one. I first started working one-to-one with the coaching model of "we're working together for 3 months." And whilst somatic work is really long and unfolding, and does well with continual support in that way, I found that being like "you're locked in for 3 months" was actually really stressful for a lot of people. People's nervous systems were like, "you're dealing with inescapable things that feel threatening? How about we don't make that a part of the work that we're doing?"

Which is to say that I love to work one-to-one. I offer single standalone sessions, and then you can just continue to book them as and when you need. I recommend longer rather than shorter, because this is ongoing work that unfolds slowly. And I offer my one-to-one sessions on a sliding scale, because I feel like financial accessibility is deeply important within the healing world.

Beyond that I also run a little Patreon called Studio Dreamland, where we do monthly breath work and somatics workshops which you can find on my website, which is just elbowjohnston.com, and that will take you wherever you need to go. Those are the best places to find me.

Asher Larmie: Fantastic. And yeah, obviously, I will put links in the show notes as a good responsible podcaster does. But I really recommend going to Elle's website because it's really fun to read. I was a little bit envious. I was like, I wish my website was this good! But I really like the "about" section - it's really good, and it gives a real flavor of who you are.

Five out of five stars, can recommend! It really is. I found it to be really liberating. A lot of the somatic work was stuff that I perhaps tried before. But it's really left a lasting imprint. It was almost a year ago now. I was thinking, gosh, it was August, right?

Elle Johnston: Wild, I know.

Asher Larmie: But I still think all the time, even when I'm moving my body, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I remember when Elle taught us to do this." So thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate you and thank you for explaining things in a way that I found super accessible. I will see you again soon, but I really do hope everybody makes sure you go and check out Elle's website. All right. Take care, everyone. I will see you next week.