The Shuniya Shift: Stop Using Kundalini Yoga To Fix Yourself With Bailee Buckendorf – Brett Larkin Yoga

What happens when healing becomes another thing you’re trying to achieve?

In this episode, I’m joined by my friend Bailee for a tender conversation about grief, the feminine, Shuniya, and the power of not fixing yourself.

We explore grief not as something you “get over,” but as a living process to be felt, held, and slowly alchemized. Bailee shares how her journey led her into deeper stillness, sensory awareness, sound, archetype, and the feminine mystery.

This conversation asks: What if there is nothing to fix? What if the next step is learning how to listen differently?

Inside this episode, we explore:

🔹 Why grief is not something we complete, but something we learn to live with and honor

🔹 How Shuniya, or zero-point stillness, can create space for healing to land

🔹 Why “am I doing this to avoid a feeling?” and “am I doing this because I think I’m not enough?” are powerful questions

🔹 How simple rituals, sound, sensory awareness, and intentional contemplation can support integration

My hope is that this episode gives you permission to stop treating healing like a race.

You do not have to prove your worth through how much you process, achieve, fix, or overcome.

Sometimes the most sacred shift begins when you pause, listen, and let what has already been planted finally land.

🐍 If this conversation stirred something in you: Download your FREE Feminine Kundalini Starter Pack:

GUEST EXPERT: Bailee Buckendorf | @rebuilding.roots

Bailee Buckendorf is a grief integration guide, contemplative writer, and founder of Sunia Shift. Her work weaves Kundalini yoga, archetypal practice, sacred ceremony, sound, somatics, and matriarchal wisdom to help people relate to grief not as something to fix, but as a source of knowing. Shaped by her own lived initiations as a widowed mother, ultra runner, and lifelong student of loss, Bailee supports individuals and groups through one-on-one containers, digital offerings, and seasonal experiences.

Book Mentioned: Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés https://www.amazon.com/Women-Who-Run-Wolves-Archetype/dp/0345409876 

FREE Practice: KUNDALINI YOGA FOR EMOTIONAL RELEASE with Music 💜 Trauma Informed Yoga for Beginners 💜

Relevant Blog: The Best Somatic Exercises for Grief: Find Healing Through Movement

Relevant to Today’s Episode:
🐍 Kundalini 200-hour YTT

💫 Yoga for Self Mastery

💖 Uplifted Membership

🌀 Somatic Yoga Life Coaching 

🎧 Also Listen to:
#281 – Grief as a Potent Healer with Kris Carr

#324 – The Importance of Emotional Processing and Regulation: DENT Model Trauma

#332 – 7 Ways to Release Anger & Grief Through Your Yoga Practice

© 2026 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com

Transcript:

[Brett Larkin]
It’s time for you to walk through the world with the confidence and serenity of someone who’s deeply tethered to their inner wisdom. If you have this insatiable hunger to uplift your personal life and make a bigger impact in your wellness career, leveraging yoga’s ancient wisdom, welcome. I’ve certified thousands of yoga instructors online, I teach to over half a million subscribers on YouTube, but I still haven’t remotely quenched my thirst for more yogic knowledge.

I’m Brett Larkin, founder of Uplifted Yoga, and this is the Uplifted Yoga Podcast. Let’s get started. Hello my friends, welcome back to the Uplifted Podcast, and especially huge welcome if you’re new.

Today’s episode is a tender, real, non-linear, yet beautiful conversation with my friend Bailee Buckendorf. Bailee is a grief integration guide, a contemplative writer, a Kundalini practitioner, the founder of Shuniya Shift, we’ll be diving into what that word Shuniya means in Kundalini as well, and her work really weaves together grief and sound and archetype work and somatic, sacred ceremony, and the feminine mystery. I want to name that this conversation is not a perfectly linear teaching of bullet points, it’s more like sitting down with a dear friend, opening your heart, and letting the conversation move where it wants to move.

I think so often in the wellness world, even in Kundalini yoga or somatic work, healing can quietly become another place where we’re trying to achieve, another place where we’re trying to be healed enough, spiritual enough, regulated enough, good enough, and this is kind of a soft, sacred interruption to that pattern. If this conversation stirs something in you, absolutely explore the show notes, you can see more of Bailee’s resources, and I’d love to gift you my free feminine form Kundalini starter pack. These four cl***es and a PDF that I’ll send you are a beautiful place to begin exploring Kundalini through a more feminine, embodied, and nervous system informed lens.

So grab that at the link in the show notes. So send your energy into the back of your body, relax, let this episode wash over you, and let’s dive in. Hello, Bailee, welcome to the Uplifted Yoga Podcast.

Brett, thank you. We’re such good friends, and I love you so much, and I’m so excited for everyone to experience some of your brilliance on the show and the things that you’ve been working on behind the scenes. So I was thinking about how to dive in, and I think we really honed in on a couple ideas for this.

We wanted to talk about grief and the feminine and shuniya. So maybe a good place to start is like defining some of these terms. Like what do you think grief is?

What do you think the feminine is? And let’s define shuniya for everyone. Some Kundalini yogis listening may know, but that might be an interesting place to start.

[Bailee]
Yeah. So I like to, when I’m defining things, I give it a little bit of space and then room for breaking the rules of like exactness. So I’ll just share from more of a archetypal, like a living experience of it.

So to me, grief is something that is a living journey for each of us. And then I say it’s shuniya, but there’s different ways to say it, is that point of stillness. It’s called zero point stillness, and it’s that space that you get to, some people can get to it in meditation, or some might get to it when they’re in like an endurance sport, and it’s where you’re in the absolute present moment.

It’s a space where things can start to land. It’s not necessarily a state of action. And then in this context, the feminine to me represents the mystery and the dark, the womb life creation in a way beyond what we can see with our eyes.

[Brett Larkin]
Interesting themes in all of this. I think grief as a lived experience is, I mean, there’s so much I want to talk to you about. Okay.

So grief is a lived experience, which means it’s an ongoing thing. It’s not like we grieve and then we finish, or there’s like these steps, or I feel like modern culture often teaches us like there’s these stages of grieving, because obviously I know you’ve been through like tremendous grief in your life, like more than I think most people could ever even comprehend, and so much of it’s happened to you when you were like young and a new mom, but is there anything you just like want to dive deeper into just on that piece? Like grief is not something we get over. It’s not just this emotion.

It’s like this lived process, and like how is that like arising and descending for you over time?

[Bailee]
Yeah. I think that when I originally went out to heal, I was like, okay, I’m going to grieve and then I’m going to come back, and in a way society sort of agreed with that. It was like, ooh, your emotionality is like way too fierce to be in this with us, and what I think is that grief is never separate, and so we cause more severance to humanity as a collective if we keep pushing it to the side, because grief, if we know that we live and die, grief we have to invite in to our world, and I think that that would help people not hide so much when they’re going through transformation, and then be like, okay, I’m back. Now I’m great, when it’s equal part neutral when you’re going and you are grieving and you’re moving the feeling, and that’s it.

Like sometimes it doesn’t have to be more than that, other that we have the courage to go sit with the feeling to then alchemize it.

[Brett Larkin]
So tell listeners like how do you invite grief into your world? How do we do that?

[Bailee]
My process has been, I mean, my whole world left of everything that I knew. So I had to start saying like, okay, show me what I can’t see and help me process in full what I can’t see, and when I simply do that, that’s where the feminine mystery comes in that starts to bring things to your life to help you feel it to then move beyond it and heal it. That’s my main invitation to, okay, I’m ready to grieve, and then allow me to receive the holding and the nourishing aspect because in more matriarchal societies like males, for instance, the elders wrap around and then the person in grief is held in the middle and they’re not expected to do anything in that moment.

They’re in their full process, but it’s part of the whole, and that’s sort of how I approach it in my life.

[Brett Larkin]
Show me what I can’t see. That’s such a beautiful entry point, I think, into any deep emotion, but particularly grief because it’s like telling our logical mind, like, thank you, you’re cute, but like, please take a break. Like the ***ytical part of the mind, and it’s trying to wake up this like other dormant part of our intelligence that’s sort of saying like, what’s underneath all of this?

So I really love that as just a prompt in general, like show me what I cannot see. I think a lot of times about like turning my palms upward and this like gesture of like surrender or curiosity or just like sometimes when I’m just really frustrated, I’m just like palms up. Right?

Like, but it kind of reminded me of that. I don’t know. Is there anything you would riff off hearing that reflection?

[Bailee]
Inspired by your podcast, I listened to one of yours talking about the Bhagavad Gita and how it was all oral storytelling and how it was lived and experienced. Grief is the same. If you get to express the love and the life, it gets to stay living, which means it gets to give you more life and it gets to be part of that community knowing, not separateness.

So everybody’s sort of working with it together in the in the nuance realm, which we can’t always see.

[Brett Larkin]
So do you mean like for my father’s death, for example, like instead of it being something that I grieve and get over, like the more that I think about him or have moments that are like poignant and sad or feel him with me or all these things, it’s like he’s more alive because I’m thinking of him and the story that I’m telling moving forward. And like, am I on the right track?

[Bailee]
Yeah, I think that’s one portion of it. You know how they say that in fairy tales, we get to see ourselves in them because they’re so abstract or like archetypal, so we can embody ourselves in the character. It’s like connecting to archetypes lets us feel the grief in a deeper way.

Yeah. And Clarissa Pinkola Estes, her book Woman Who Runs With the Wolves, she has so many different archetypal stories to where you’re like, whoa, I can relate to the bluebird story because I was so naive in the cirblockstance and then this person finally saw it and then you feel it. So you get that resonance, I think is more of what I’m going towards, like you would in the storytelling that you would get from your elder or your teacher.

Like it allows you to go deeper so that you’re not just reading about the grief or the person, but you get to sort of be them but in a new way each time.

[Brett Larkin]
Is there a particular myth or story that really helped you when you were in a dark place?

[Bailee]
I read that book so much for three years and it ripped in half. So I think I identified with each one for a long time. But bluebird, that one probably the most of just the naiveness in sometimes having an open heart and giving it all out on the table doesn’t mean that other people have the same intentions or the same values.

So it was a very humbling, like learning that just being kind or good, even in grief isn’t necessarily going to help you heal from it. And then skeleton lady was the second one and it was can you have the courage to die of everything that you think that you are and the people that you meet and the relationships that you’re in. If something brought you together, are you willing to let go and go all the way into the intimacy of being empty and not having these identities or titles to hold on to?

Something about stripping all of that and then knowing that life was on the other side of that after you were willing to palms up surrender. Those are my two favorite.

[Brett Larkin]
Okay, let’s go to Shuniya, or I know you say it slightly differently, it’s also good. And then feminine. So you talked about it as like a zero point stillness and I relate to that.

I also have heard it p***ed down or taught to me. I know we have some like we have a lot of Kundalini teachers in common, but we also have many teachers not in common. So I remember I think in my like first training, Shuniya being really talked about as this concept of like a vacuum.

It’s like where you’re completely emptied out and then something new can potentially come in. So yeah. What does that make you think of?

Same concept.

[Bailee]
I also consider it like the state of rightness where it’s like you give yourself that space for something to land. So it’s the same, same thing. Is it kind of like skeleton woman in a way where it’s like a dissolution and then a rebuilding?

It’s more in the context of where you’re at with it. The rightness part I’m getting from like the Zen Osho Tarot deck, I got it in one of my healing circles that I did and it was like everything already is and it is to be let it land. I was like, oh, like I don’t have to keep working so hard.

I just have to sit still so that it can receive which then in a way creates all the space if I stop attaching. So yeah, I guess skeleton lady comes in there because it’s you let go in that process of coming to absolute stillness.

[Brett Larkin]
Okay. So I like what you said about not working so hard. So let’s noodle into that.

I do also want to come back to the feminine and what we cannot see. But something you said really early on was like how there’s so much that we feel like we have to achieve, but by doing less or by not knowing like two big themes, right? Like do less, know less.

It seems like you’ve actually made more, I mean, progress in quotes because it’s like what does that even mean? But tell me about this journey like away from achieving.

[Bailee]
Yeah, it was in my third, one of my third PTSD brain treatments or fourth and I feel like I already I knew in my body that I’d cleared a lot of things and I’d faced some really hard waters. It was so awkward to come back out into the world not being like I’m on a mission to go heal. Like I just, that was almost more, it had its own pain of coming into.

So I feel like I’m not, no longer achieving as I had to learn how to allow the integration of all of these seeds I’ve planted on my healing journey. I had to learn how to sit still long enough for them to have a place to land and be in this place of non-expectation and not controlling where I wanted this energy to go, where I thought I should be if I was healed all the way.

[Brett Larkin]
When you said I’m on a mission to go heal or like finally you felt like you weren’t on a mission to go heal, I feel like that’s so powerful because I’ve felt similarly, right? Like I feel like a lot of us get like attracted to yoga or meditation and then we’re on like this self-help circuit, right? Like where we need to like learn this and fix this and then we need to, you know, learn all about this system and fix it.

And then, you know, we learn about the chakras and we need to fix the ones that are imbalanced and then we have like the next self-help trend on and on and on. And it’s sort of just like this never-ending gerbil on a hamster wheel situation. And so I think what we’re talking about in some ways is like getting off of that.

However, when you’re off that, it’s very hard and I think that’s why language is a little bit of struggle because it’s just like what does society even do with that? What do we even do with that? Because we’ve been so ingrained that like we should achieve and we should fix ourselves.

So then you said something really interesting. You said you needed time to let all the different seeds that had been planted in the healing journey to grow, which required stillness, which brings us back to shuniya. But that you wanted to do that in a way that didn’t have expectation attached, which brings us back to like yoga sutras, right?

Like practice and non-attachment. So what did that process look like or like what were the struggles that came up or what did what did that actually look like day to day when you’re like, I’m off the self-healing mission that I’ve been on for so many years and I just need to allow these seeds and these things that I’ve been through to saturate a little bit, but I’m not going to be anxious about anything.

[Bailee]
Oh, I was definitely anxious for a while. That didn’t go away. It was more of I felt like Dash from the Incredibles, you know how he’s like in that race and he goes really fast, but he has to slow down because otherwise he’ll be too fast.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that movie, but I feel like when I was trying to relate to my p***ion because I feel like I love that I love my fiery side. I think that it’s gifted me so much in life and my courageous side that I didn’t know how to relate to it anymore if I was no longer on this path to healing. So I had to be like, does that get to come with me still?

And it was very awkward and so confusing. And then I have worked with mentors, which has been super helpful. And the one that I ended up working with was more from a like, let’s just go to creating inner safety and small routine and let go of maybe some of these super large goals for today so that what you have worked on has a place to land.

And that meant like stopping ultra running for just a moment, just stopping anything that had so much output so that I could actually restore. Wait, you stopped ultra running? Well, only for a little.

I love it still, but I’m like, that’s where I was like, what do you mean? Only for a little. I just had to really look at am I doing this to avoid a feeling?

Am I doing this to say I can do hard things? Am I doing this because I’m afraid of sitting still to truly receive what life is giving me? So that’s that’s really what was leading the journey of, all right, I’m going to stop everything for just a moment because I really did achieve a lot for a while.

[Brett Larkin]
Am I doing this to avoid a feeling? I think that’s a really powerful question to ask everyone listening. Like am I doing, insert the blank, which could be a very positive thing, like running, going to the gym, working and making money, teaching yoga, doing even like charity work.

Like, but am I doing this to avoid a feeling?

[Bailee]
And there I question, am I doing this too because I think that I’m not enough? In some ways, at the end of when I was really starting to be over my trauma hump is what when I was transitioning to like, oh, actually, I think that I am no longer identifying as my trauma. I clung to the things that gave me that sense of safety and sense of, but I’m enough here.

So when I stopped everything, it was to figure out like, what is my worth and I have nothing when I’m not on a mission to heal or on a mission to achieve a goal? How can I relate to this state of being? Because one, if another mother was in my shoes, I wish that she would have had different resources without having the narrative in her head of like, I have to prove that I’m worth receiving help with my kids.

I have to like be extra nice or extra kind or I have to like invent something spectacular.

[Brett Larkin]
Yeah, I think the other question you said is so important. Am I doing this because I think I’m not enough? So that’s also everyone listening.

Am I doing blank to avoid a feeling or am I doing blank because I think I’m not enough? I think like for a lot of us, we get like trapped in the addictive like work cycle or perfect homemaker cycle or like perfect mom cycle or whatever it is because it’s like I’m trying to prove my worth. So all of this coming back to the power of dropping everything, shuniya, stillness as a place to allow seeds to grow without expectations.

And then I asked you what that looked like and you said it looked like very simple routines to create inner safety. Can you talk a little bit more about those? Because I don’t want people listening to think like, oh, okay, that means like go to a retreat center for three months.

Like you have three kids. You obviously did not do that. I did not.

I thought about it though.

[Bailee]
Yeah, it actually was the most challenging for me because caring for yourself and the way that you would want to mother your children and then turning that mirror and putting that same comp***ion and understanding and grace, that was hard for me to do. So what was my ritual was I remember sending my mentor something of like, okay, I’m going to do something this mantra for 44 days. And then I’m going to have this, this and this.

And she was like, amazing. That might be what you have done and it has worked. How about three minutes that you do this breath?

And then how about you make yourself warm tea and breakfast? Because when I was processing deep grief, my relationship with hunger was like high and low, which I think my relationship with creativity or my life force of like, am I alive? Am I not?

How’s this going? Really started to just be like, ah, but it’s simple to feed myself and like sit and say I’m eating, I’m drinking water, I’m present. And then lighting incense because living in your head is not bad.

I got stuck there a lot. And so lighting the incense allowed something beyond to sort of carry my senses with me. And then I got to be like, okay, I’m going to follow the scent.

And then the next one was sound. So I would put on like some binaural beats and whatever, and this would be in the evening and whatever like big emotion or like if I was processing something, I would just do that and set a timer for, I don’t know, a reasonable amount of time, two to five minutes and just become the sound and listen to like, okay, if the sound is in my left brain, where is it going in my right shoulder? Is it?

And then something about that process over time really did something that I don’t still to this day have words for, but it helped me integrate some of the stuff I’ve been working on and trying to arrive to in my healing process.

[Brett Larkin]
Sounds like really awakening the senses, the sensorial body, which has been really powerful for me too. Right. That’s like why we love somatic work so much.

Yes. So that’s helpful because I think it’s like allowing the seeds to grow, giving them space, no expectation of someone’s listening and like trying to visualize, well, what does that look like in day to day life? I think you’ve really helped us get some ideas.

It maybe means like not doing the most intense yoga practice ever, which is, can you know, sometimes be like another achievement bandwagon that we hop on, but just like keeping it short, keeping it simple and then like really going back to the basics, like feeding ourselves, making sure we get sleep, good meals, and then like waking up the senses. Like for me, orienting has been so powerful, which I teach a lot about in the somatic course, but it’s essentially just looking around and daydreaming. It’s like what we all used to do 24-7 before we had like phones and screens and stuff.

Like if you were waiting in line or, you know, outside, you would just look around your environment and like register safety and see things. And it’s sort of like a forgotten art. So that has been really helpful for me.

And it sounds similar, like kind of what you were doing. It’s like pulling and then like the senses, pulling the five senses into your day to day. Like what am I, what am I feeling?

What am I smelling? What am I hearing? And then what you described with the sound sounded really, really interesting.

Was that a particular method or technique you learned, or was it just sort of like self-discovered? Hey there, sorry to interrupt and we’ll get right back to the show. But if you’re curious about Kundalini Yoga, but want an approach that’s grounded, trauma-aware, and relevant for modern life, my online Kundalini Yoga teacher training honors the roots of the tradition while teaching it in a way that’s safe, embodied, and deeply human.

You’ll learn how to work with breath, mantra, movement, and energy without byp***ing the body or overwhelming the nervous system. This training is for practitioners and teachers who want an integration of anatomy with energetic systems, know how to design and adapt Kriyas to support personal growth, prioritize nervous system regulation, as well as feminine energy, somatics, and nervous system science. This training is open year-round and fully online, so you can move at your own pace.

It also has an interactive live component, so you can get supported. Explore the curriculum at brettlarkin.com.

[Bailee]
I learned it along the way with my sound integration journeys I went on. Yeah, I would say that, like, when I lead my immersions, we do that. Because, like, if there’s any parts of us that are really hard to look at, and we’re like, I don’t want that, or we’re afraid of that part of us to come back, it’s like, we’re not, we don’t want to push that fear away.

It’s like, oh, hey, and then I’m going to notice you. I’m not going to make meaning of you yet. I’m not going to label you.

The sense is here. OK, can it be just that? And then I’m going to use sound and I’m going to explore maybe what that head thought feels like in my body.

And then maybe I’ll decide. Maybe not. It’s just something about giving space and not needing to arrive to an answer sort of allows the answer to come in.

[Brett Larkin]
And just so in case someone wants to try this. It’s basically like you’re noticing a thought that is something that’s like a little overwhelming or you don’t want to look at. You bring in music like you suggested, binaural beats, but like it could be any music of their choice.

And then with the music as an undercurrent, you’re like listening to the music.

[Bailee]
I would do binaural sound or binaural beats. So binaural sound is like 360. Binaural beat goes left brain, right brain, left brain, right brain.

I would do the sound. So it’s like you’re almost in this moving meditation of your following where the sound is going around your body. So I would do that.

[Brett Larkin]
OK, great distinction. And then you’re kind of noticing with the undertone of the sound, tracking then in your body what that thought does to you and where it shows up. Is that right?

[Bailee]
Tracking without making meaning of it. So if the sound we’re feeling or this is where the archetype comes in. So you get to become like this living experience and give yourself the freedom to go.

Sometimes if we make ourself a character, we give ourselves more permission to go do something. So if you were the sound, how would the sound move in your body? How would the sound move with that scary thought?

So it takes you out of your body and allows you to become something else and become a student of sound, essentially, which life is sound.

[Brett Larkin]
Yeah, that’s really cool. So it’s almost like the sound is an access portal to kind of get into like a character or an archetype or explore something that feels highly personal in like a new, different way, incorporating the body.

[Bailee]
Yeah, and it’s helping you stay in the body so that you don’t get lost in your thinking brain and stuck over there. It allows you to sort of become both and connect like a bridge connecting point, sort of.

[Brett Larkin]
Yes. Thank you for saying that, bridge. That’s totally what I was thinking, too.

It’s really cool because a lot of times it’s like, you know, train the brain, don’t think the thought. We all know that doesn’t really work. And then, you know, there’s like heightening the senses, which is good.

And, you know, let’s orient away kind of from the thought. But it’s actually like kind of a genius idea to be like, you know what, let’s keep the thought. We’re just going to like layer in music to it that allows you to maybe experience it in your body in a new way.

Am I still on the right track here? But I just think this is really profound. I think this is cool.

[Bailee]
Yeah. Oh, it was. It’s profound when you’re in it as well, when you’re in the experience of like something about the permission to not feel like you have to keep fixing because there’s nothing to fix there.

It gets to stay. So you’re like, yes, you’re on the absolute right path with that.

[Brett Larkin]
Yeah, it gets to stay. It just now is being deejayed, too. So let’s talk about the not fixing, coming back to that theme of like the not fixing and the not knowing and the feminine, because something you said that I thought was really interesting was like this, the mystery.

You talked about the feminine mystery. And then you talked about, you know, going back to like, show me what I can’t see. And that I think a lot of times what’s happening in the feminine realm is maybe under the hood or not celebrated by like society’s typical milestones.

OK, handing over to you. Like, am I? But I think there’s something very interesting here.

[Bailee]
Yeah, I think so. If I go to like when I first got introduced to like divine feminine or feminine masculine, it goes to like feminine is beautiful and sensual and can receive and the masculine is more authoritative, the pillar and stabilizer and both exists with us. And then there’s also the feminine side that is messy and raw and feral and is creating and that is protecting very, very life creating of the seed.

And so the way that our society works is we want proof immediately or we don’t trust it. And the feminine isn’t going to give you any proof if you’re demanding proof. It’s like you have to take that leap into the unknown without expectation and then not need to go improve or promote or just go and talk about it.

And I’m saying this because sometimes when we go into these sacred experiences while we’re bringing new things to life, we can plant the seed and then we might make meaning of it too soon before we really let the sound or this nuance sort of alchemize it into something. Or our energy body isn’t grounded enough yet and it’s still strengthening itself to be the pillar and hold it. And then we feel empty and depleted and we go down that shame exile spiral of ourselves, which it doesn’t mean it’s permanent, but it causes that severance.

And I think that the feminine aspect in this gives us permission to have the agency of knowing I can share when I’m ready and I don’t have anything to prove when I go into the mystery or the dark. Like I get to have that experience and it can be mine. And it can take some time.

[Brett Larkin]
And it can take some time. And I have time. And how do you know when you’re in that?

And how do you know when you’re just like procrastinating because of fear?

[Bailee]
Yeah, I think when I’m going to the feminine, I’m talking about it this way. It’s more me being protective of what you really, really want to come to life. Like sometimes we can modify like I want to achieve this because it sounds really great on the outside.

And the feminine is like, no, go deeper, like own what you really want and have the courage to face or to state what you need, because that’s the procrastination of that is that you’re not being honest. And that’s OK.

[Brett Larkin]
I feel like we’re going on this theme of like the feminine needs time and she needs to, like I love what you said, be protective of what she really wants. And maybe that takes more time to develop. And I think for someone, people who are like, you know, the more rajastic go-getters, pitta-dominant people out there, like we really need that work.

We really need that message. But I know there’s other people out there who are maybe more tamastic, right? Like or someone with like a more katha imbalance, right?

Like what? I guess that’s where my my brain was like, I want to speak to that, too. Like, is there a place where you get too extreme in that space of darkness and just waiting?

And is there a way for people to know?

[Bailee]
I have observed and you it’s like tune into your senses, feel in your body when you’re listening or when you’re speaking of what you want to happen to. You can usually feel if you’re being honest with yourself. It’s a very like instant nuance feeling of like and then then that’s where you’re like, OK, what do I need in this moment?

And then you get honest for this exact moment. But I think that people can get lost in the let it flow. Let it come to you to where you’re not.

I would say it’s a lack of clarity. And there there’s also lack of intention, because when you have the intention, you’re still give you’re like handing it over to the feminine, the mystery side. But you’re you’ve got some sort of root in there.

What I think is easy to hide behind is being like, I’m just letting it come to me. And then you’re not taking responsibility for yourself or your actions or your feelings. That’s exactly what I was getting at.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it’s I just like to ***ume like, you know, and then it’s and it’s OK if you’ve made errors or what comes at what might land as an error and that maybe you ignored a signal. No problem. I just invite it here.

Now, what I don’t want anyone listening to is to be hard on themselves or for me to ignite any sort of lack of internal safety. This is more of it’s maybe inviting the courage to set the intention of where you’re wanting to go and then to go sit in that discomfort and have the intention of show me what I can’t see. Help me find safety in this feeling that I’m not comfortable with, because it could be love that if you’ve been through severe trauma that that doesn’t land is safe yet.

And then give yourself the time and the space like there’s not forcing yourself to sit in it. Just try it. OK, that was a lot.

No problem. Back off. Go go take agency of what you as the person sitting like.

I just the reminder is you have agency. You have the ability to direct your intention.

[Brett Larkin]
So I heard it’s like the courage of really setting an intention for what you deeply, deeply desire, which everyone on a surface level would be like, yeah, we should do that. But very few of us really do that at like a deep, deep level where it’s like we’re excavating, we’re excavating. We’re really finding the still point.

We’re letting it ripen. We’re kind of being in the mystery of it and really getting that clarity. And then I think you’re right.

It’s like when you have that clarity and it’s true. I feel like the the impulses or we might say like the more masculine energy to like do the thing and create structure like naturally will arise. But the other piece of this that I heard was that like as you’re in that intention setting and, you know, clarifying of what you really want, like things that are scary can come up.

Yeah, right. Like in that process of show me what I can’t see, all of a sudden it’s like, boom, you might end up feeling really uncomfortable. And a having an awareness of that is super important.

And then that’s where the safety comes in. Right. Because if I mean, we can just use me as like an example to make it like sound more practical.

But like if I really slow down and. I’m saying like, well, I want I want to work less, like that’s the actual deep, true desire. All of a sudden, that’s going to bring up like a lot of uncomfortable emotions about, you know, well, what does that mean?

Because I derive so much safety and self-worth from working. Right. So it’s like you need the safety piece as you sit.

[Bailee]
Yeah. And it’s like giving yourself the intention of like show me safety in new ways, show me safety beyond work, show me safety in working less. And then that gets to it gets to bring new things to your life.

And if we wanted to tie Sunia into this, how do how do we do that? So Sunia also, to me, means the ability to listen. It’s like the art of listening differently, like listening beyond words.

I love working with energy nuance in the subtle body. So it’s set the intention and then start the practice of listening with without words. So whether you’re sitting or if you just take a minute in your car and you are like, OK, I just had the thought of the goal.

But if I was Sunia, what would non-interference look like? What would me dropping expectation look like? And yeah, it’s it’s it’s almost like just that pause of creating the pause.

You’re like disrupting your regular way of being just enough to create more ability to get to that Sunia state quicker over time as well.

[Brett Larkin]
Well, what was coming to me is it was like, well, what would this look like in the vacuum? Like what would this look like in a place of not knowing? Right.

It’s like, I think I want this. And then it’s like there’s all my processes and society’s thoughts about that that like jump in really quick.

[Bailee]
Yeah.

[Brett Larkin]
But it’s kind of like, well, what if I was totally empty? What new information is here? Listening beyond words.

Is there anything else you want to say about that? Because that’s. I think of like that’s like a lot of what people are trying to do with meditation and block Kundalini techniques as well.

[Bailee]
But yeah, I think that we can go to to going into these meditations or going into these spaces. And we unintentionally have such a high expectation of getting to non-expectation that part of it is just being fully present in what is so let’s say I’m like this May season was insane. I have three kids and so two of them were on two teams each and then one was on one team and then whatever else the school has for the end of year.

And I think that we can go into like, well, we used to have a village maybe, but that’s not real today. So it’s not as nourishing to even invite that thought in. It’s getting to this is what is.

I can be OK in this and I don’t have to do all the things that I think I have to do. I’m going to pause. I’m going to sit.

I’m going to listen and I’m going to get up and I’m going to go do the next best thing. I think that’s also a practice of getting to rightness or sunya. It starts to integrate the energy so that we stop running because I think the procrastinating is also in too much forward movement to where we’re like, if I keep moving, it’ll get there because they said to just keep doing it or they said to keep going to the networking events and then it would compound, compound.

But part of it is knowing, no, I got the actual intuitive hit to go make this next move or to say this word. And that starts to come when you sit.

[Brett Larkin]
So as we close, what would you want to tell listeners, yogis, people on a healing journey? Kind of like Bailee’s top tips in terms of things that they might do. What what little habits or things could she do morning or evening or just in the like what what’s your like top pieces of advice?

[Bailee]
I would say spend parts of your morning and parts of your evening in intentional contemplation. So if there’s something like you’ve set a timer for five minutes and if there’s something that you’re wanting to solve and you’ve talked about it, talked about it, and that feeling of angst just won’t go away, you can open a book and pick out one phrase. And then when you’re inviting in contemplation, you’re inviting in the feminine, the ability to have the words start to land and work with your life beyond just being like the book said to do, to breathe deeply and let it go.

Like sit with what what is letting go mean beyond something getting thrown in the trash or leaving your life forever? Like, is there a letting go to where it actually just gets to get repurposed in your life? Sitting with questions like that.

I had severe trauma grief. So sitting with loss was one of the scariest things for me. And I had when I also had to keep my boy’s dad alive for theirs, I had to really figure out how can I let go so I can live in my present moment and honor his life?

So it was questions like that that that really helped me, because if I would have went off of what society said or like where I should have been in grief, I don’t know if I would be here. I know that one was more in I was more of an advanced yogi one.

[Brett Larkin]
But no, I really like that. Let’s just like go into that one, one like a little bit deeper, just because I say like the intentional contemplation morning and evening, like I do this with journaling and it’s actually so beautiful. And it really ties into like everything we’ve been talking on the podcast about this year, because something that I keep talking about on the show was like picking an ancient text and sitting with it, because you’ll notice that like ancient texts aren’t written like self-help books telling you like, do this and do that.

And then like, here’s an infographic box of like the thing to do. Like all ancient texts are written in like metaphor or cones or like incredibly complex stories. Right.

So it’s either something like a riddle, sort of like you have to figure it out or it’s not immediately obvious or it’s a story. And like you said, stories can kind of like allow you to put yourself in them in many different ways. So whether it’s like journaling, spending time with an ancient text, like a little piece of it and then asking like a deep question or like and this is what I wrote down, like asking your brain like really great questions.

Like I think our brains are supercomputers, but most of the time we’re just not asking them good questions. Like, for example, how might I achieve this in a way that feels pleasurable and fun that deeply, deeply like nourishes my sense of safety? Like that is a great question to ask your brain about like whatever the goal is.

But usually we don’t ask that question because we’re so busy or we’re so surface level. So like this time of intentional contemplation. Where obviously you’re like not scrolling Instagram at the same time, you’re not, you know, stuffing food in your face at the same time, which is probably what I would be doing this time last year.

You know, you’re not multitasking. You’re actually just letting yourself sit with the deeper question or if you don’t know the question, like looking at an ancient text and kind of seeing what it’s spurring in you. But I think that that is a very powerful habit slash tip.

Although I don’t want to close the door on you sharing one more with us.

[Bailee]
I would just also I think that we all we keep being like, oh, I just want to go back to how my life was or I was really happy here. I loved how ambitious I was there. Just to invite that part of you here and also give yourself permission that your life might not make sense to a lot of people that haven’t been through what you’ve been through.

That doesn’t mean that two things can’t exist at once. They can have their experience. And if you’ve gone through deep trauma, life takes you on its own inner journey that feels very isolating and consider just changing, trying on new definitions of what is loneliness.

And can I am I and I sit with this uncomfortable, really deep sadness and trust that it will transform into something for me. And it might not. But just trust that if you get there and it’s going for too long, that you can make the decision to then go get help in a different way.

But it’s just your life doesn’t have to look the same as other people’s anymore. We live in a nuclear family society, and there’s just so much beyond our tiny little units that that whole worlds exist within that.

[Brett Larkin]
I love that. Yeah. Permission to be different and permission to not even have to justify to yourself why you’re not like you were in a different stage.

And of course, not to other people. Really beautiful. Thank you.

Anything else you want to share before we close out?

[Bailee]
If you are someone who is working with someone that’s been through grief and you use a lot of pathology to define or to describe their experience, I have an invitation of asking, how would you describe it without words? Because it’s so much easier on the other side of trauma to label people or even in the relationship world where we’re like attachment, non-attachment, secure, like sometimes energy is just moving and we don’t need to box it in to like any of those styles. I think it’s very isolating and limiting to the people that are having to figure out how to create in this new way in a world that isn’t as normal or accepting of a different lifestyle.

Just to maybe meet that curiosity of am I helping with this thought? Is this thought giving life to the person going through transformation? And am I seeing them as equal as me?

Or am I seeing this myself as better than when, you know, we’re all just in different life experiences? I think it could be really helpful and humility giving in a beautiful way if we all sort of approached our judgment in that way.

[Brett Larkin]
Yeah. Thank you for that. And loving the, you know, how would you describe it without words?

So I love that. Yes. It’s why I like somatic coaching so much, right?

Or the embodied yoga life coaching. I do because it’s like we don’t just talk. We’re like moving.

We’re like on a mat. We’re exploring, right? Because it’s just crazy how much we’re seated and just only thinking about things on the intellectual level, even often in like so-called somatic spaces.

No one’s still like rolling out a yoga mat and moving or shaking or some of these other things. So where can people find you if they want to keep in touch? What’s the best way for folks to stay connected to you and whatever work you’re birthing into the world right now?

[Bailee]
Yeah. So my website is rebuildingroots.co and my main body of work that I’m birthing is the Sunya Shift. And it is just the shift back to the present moment so that you have some space to work.

And then my Instagram is rebuilding.roots. OK, but we’ll put all of that in the show notes.

[Brett Larkin]
Thank you for for being here and taking us on this lovely meandering thought process of so many interesting concepts. I love you and I’ll see you soon. Love you too.

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