Interview with Robin Humphreys
In this episode, we will uncover 3 keys:
- The Journey to Healing
- Empowerment and Transformation
- Energy Healing Techniques
A Podcast Transcription
Episode 35: Energy healing techniques to shift anxiety & depression into PEACE and JOY!~Robin Humphreys
Intro
Odiva Vasell: (00:00)
Welcome, my fabulous fempreneurs! I am excited today; here I have with me Robin Humphreys, who is an expert in energy and the energy that is related to anxiety, depression, and so many of the things that we try to suppress instead of healing. And we’re gonna learn more about that healing today. Welcome, welcome, Robin.
Robin Humphreys: (00:39)
Thank you, Odiva. It is really wonderful to be here with you today, and I’m looking forward to this conversation very much.
Odiva Vasell: (00:47)
So let’s get started talking about your story. How did you begin, or what motivated you to get into this industry?
The Journey to Healing
Robin Humphreys: (01:00)
Yes, as with many healers, it was a journey for myself first, right? And I actually recently did a TEDx Talk talking about this part of my journey, which was a fantastic experience, but that’s another story. I had a lot of childhood trauma, emotional abuse, some neglect, things like that, divorce, parents all over the place, that kind of stuff. And I ended up experiencing suicidal depression in high school. Creating art and writing poetry kind of saved my life at that time. Over the years beyond that, starting in my early 20s, I started working for a chiropractor who did really a combination of holistic modalities. There was massage, there was yoga, there was Pilates. And that just really started to open my eyes to what was possible in healing and how different parts, different modalities can work together towards someone’s wellness and well-being. And it took a while; I ended up going to art school and took a while for me to really start to realize that I needed and wanted to focus on myself. But I had some pretty challenging relationships over those years and started to really reflect on the behavior that I was bringing and then noticing where that was coming from in terms of my own personal history. And so then I just began to pursue some different workshops and found that it was really fascinating and enthralling to me. I just kind of couldn’t get enough, like, lapping it all up. And then I started to realize that I had the ability to put my hands on somebody and get a lot of information and receive things about what was happening in their body and their emotions. I’ve always been very empathic, and so from really early on I could look at somebody and tell what they’re thinking and feeling. And that was kind of part of my survival mechanism growing up. And then I just eventually decided, like, okay, I got to do something about this. And the very next day after I had this kind of reckoning with the cosmos of like, all right, I need a sign. If I’m going to pursue this gift that I seem to have, I need a sign. And then the next day there was a call for this practitioner training program that had all of these synchronicities involved with it that just like, oh, that’s it. Wow. Thank you. That was fast the very next day. Didn’t have to wait long for that message.
Odiva Vasell: (04:08)
If we all could get a sign just like that the next day, and the phone rings! But it was meant to be. And it sounds like you prepared yourself. Unfortunately, you had to go through the journey of making mistakes and bad relationships. Finally realized that the one thing you had in common in all those relationships was you were there. You had this gift of touch. This is the first time I’m hearing something like this, touching people and feeling their energy. What’s the difference between the touching and the empath? Because I’m running across a lot of people on social media saying they’re empaths. I want to know more.
Robin Humphreys: (05:03)
Yeah, so there’s definitely some potential crossover there. I would say an empath doesn’t necessarily have that ability through touch, but the people who have that ability through touch are always empaths, if that makes sense. So an empath is really somebody who picks up on the energy and the moods of other people and is very kind of sensitive to the circumstantial happenings in their environment. And then oftentimes, we take that in and can experience it internally as if it is our own. And that’s when problems can happen because a lot of the people that I work with, for example, will say that when somebody around them is in a bad mood, that they then get into a bad mood. Like they can’t help but absorb that into themselves, and the problem can arise when we are unable to discern what’s ours and what’s not. Right. It’s like suddenly you’re in a bad mood, and then you start to go into your whole story spiral, whatever it is, about how you’re feeling without realizing that it’s actually something that you just took on from somebody else.
Odiva Vasell: (06:39)
Yeah. So that makes perfect sense because I’ve actually experienced that. So it makes perfect sense. And then you talked about modalities. You learned about different modalities through your experience and through your training. What do you mean by that?
Robin Humphreys: (06:58)
Yeah, well, there’s so many ways to heal, right? We’re pretty much at this point all familiar with talk therapy, and I do a lot of talking in the sessions with my clients, but there’s so much more. And I will admit that I kind of became a little bit of like a chronic workshop taker. I was always seeking new information and more and more. And then at a certain point, I realized I had to like, okay, I got to deepen the roots into what I already know versus trying to just keep expanding out but staying shallow or superficial with it. For example, my primary practitioner training course included guided meditation, breath work, movement, hypnotherapeutic journeying, sound healing, the list goes on. It’s a kind of conglomeration of the various practices that my mentor gathered along the way. And then I’m also trained in EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique or tapping). Like I don’t know if you’ve ever done the tapping. And I’m a Reiki practitioner, and I practice something also called compassion key, which is really amazing for offering compassion to our wounded younger selves and really healing the inner child. What’s important to me about having this many modalities because it could be like, oh, that’s a lot. But what’s important to me about that is that I have this vast toolbox to use with my clients. I’m not taking somebody through a program where all the steps are determined ahead of time. I’m working with where they’re at, what they’ve been through, and then what they really want to be experiencing and their ideal vision for themselves. And then I’m picking and choosing as we go along the different modalities, the different tools, practices, processes that are going to support them to get there.
Odiva Vasell: (09:23)
Excellent. And we can see that in coaching and in teaching the best of the best, kind of customize it for the individual. But I want to focus a little bit more on anxiety. Anxiety. When I first started hearing the word anxiety, actually, it’s quite later in my life I started learning and studying anxiety and we started thinking that it was a fear of something like a phobia, phobia of water spiders. Those kinds of things bring about anxiety. It’s only now that people are starting to talk about having anxiety every day. And many of us are living in a state of anxiety constantly, and we don’t even know. I’ve read books about having your set point at this level where you’re overcompensating, maybe by being completely busy or not busy at all because of your struggle with anxiety.
Empowerment and Transformation
Robin Humphreys: (10:33)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It’s almost like its own pandemic, if you will. And I feel like you’re right, that part of the conversation is just that there’s more awareness around it now. So it could be that everybody has been anxious all the time for centuries, and we just weren’t talking about it. Right. But I also feel like we are in this time now of so much technology, which really has the potential to foster disconnection and where busyness has been so glorified, and I can kind of attribute that to capitalism, really, that we are culturally conditioned to just go, go. And exhaustion gets glorified. Like, if you are burnt out, then that’s something to be admired. Right. From certain perspectives.
Odiva Vasell: (11:54)
Especially as a woman. Like permission to disengage. I cannot pick up a phone and call any of my contacts and say, “How are you?” and have them say, “I’m just relaxing and taking it easy today.”
Robin Humphreys: (12:10)
Right.
Odiva Vasell: (12:11)
I mean, if they even posted that, because I’ve tried this. You post this on social media, and people are like, “What’s going on? You have to accomplish so many things in the day and be so busy.” And what brought this to my awareness is in my travels in Europe, I lived for a period of time also in Italy, and it’s ingrained in the culture that you take a break.
Robin Humphreys: (12:41)
Yes.
Odiva Vasell: (12:42)
Where are you going? “I’m leaving the office to go have espresso or I’m going to have a coffee.” And it’s like, who does that in this culture? We have to go nonstop, or we get ashamed or feel like we’re going to be judged.
Robin Humphreys: (13:01)
Right. And we’ve internalized it. There’s the fear of judgment. But then the shame piece is how that gets internalized, where we’re telling ourselves that we’re not doing enough. Right. And so then we’re just stuck on the hamster wheel or stuck in the rat race all the time. Yeah. And I like to use the phrase that “rest is revolutionary” because at this point it really is.
Odiva Vasell: (13:30)
“Rest is revolutionary.”
Robin Humphreys: (13:34)
Yeah. And so I just want to talk a little bit more about the ways that anxiety can show up too. Because I for years had anxiety and I didn’t even realize it. And that can happen to a lot of people as far as the people I talk with. So for me, anxiety was showing up as a need to control everything. And that’s part of what I was talking about those relationships that didn’t go that well. That was part of at least some of those relationship dynamics, was me being critical of the other person, like having to have them do it my way or I would get really anxious and kind of thrown off center. And what I know is that for me, that came from having that happen to me as a kid, my stepdad did that exact thing to me. And so part of my healing has been to really start to unwind and dismantle that because I don’t want to pay that forward to anyone else. And that’s really a big part of the healing journey for most of us when we choose to step onto that path, is figuring out where our patterns have come from and then finding the tools and finding the practices that allow us to make different choices. So that generational healing can be kind of a big, potentially overwhelming term. Like it just feels like a lot, right? Sometimes. But that’s really what it is. It’s like just getting into a place where you have consciousness and then you are exercising your autonomy of choice around the behaviors that you are imparting onto the future generations.
Odiva Vasell: (15:38)
Yes. And this is a learning journey, really a learning journey, which I am so glad that I am on now myself. Learning to be aware. It’s ongoing, it never stops, but be aware of your decisions. One of the things that came to me when you talked about choice, they always say fighting your battles or choosing your battles is one of the old expressions. And what I’ve learned about that is, as you say, this controlled thing. In addition, say women, mothers, parents, everyone, in addition to being exhausted in the busy, busy, busy trying to be the head of someone else’s life and make sure that things go the way you want it. Your intentions may be perfectly noble because you want to create a safe space for them. You want to create a safe space for yourself. You know, what they’re doing and how they’re doing it at all times but you’re just exhausting yourself.
Robin Humphreys: (16:56)
And potentially damaging the relationship.
Odiva Vasell: (17:02)
Heart really goes out to kids because I see so many parents thinking that their kid has to be involved in five or six different extracurricular activities in order to get ahead in the game, in the system and it can lead to a breakdown
Robin Humphreys: (17:28)
absolutely. Yeah. And what I recognize also for myself and many people as far as some of the origins of anxiety, is that it comes from having to abandon or suppress parts of ourselves that are not deemed acceptable or perceived by us as acceptable by our caregivers, our authorities. So that means having to conform in school. That means having to follow what your parents want from you, at least up to a certain age, and then you might get rebellious. And it’s because we are internally disconnected from the essence of who we really are and the things that really drive us. And then we learn to reference all of the external factors, all of the outside expectations and yeah, I feel you. I had to take a deep breath when you were talking about the kids and their crazy activities. Yeah, that’s a lot. And what happens is then there’s no space for the kid to just be. Yeah. Be! It’s so huge and hugely important. For all of us. For all of us. Yeah.
Odiva Vasell: (19:02)
And this is the greatest lesson I’m learning as I’m approaching age 50 now, is the being is so important. We are allowed from birth, permission to just exist, and just be!
Robin Humphreys: (19:23)
Birthright, isn’t it?
Odiva Vasell: (19:26)
It is a birthright. And parents going back to parents, but you have permission to be with your child and just be you’re not doing sports with them, you’re not watching TV, you’re not checking their homework. Just be!
Robin Humphreys: (19:43)
Yeah, and I feel like that social media has really impacted this whole arena for so many of us because we get into that comparison space. Right. And it’s easy to take for granted what’s being presented on the surface level of what’s happening in someone else’s life as far as, like, somebody makes a social media post about all the things that they did with their family this weekend or whatever. It’s easy to look at that and feel like, oh, man, I got to step up my game. And we don’t know what’s happening with that picture-perfect family behind the photos that get posted. Everybody’s got their challenges and their struggles. It’s so important to focus on ourselves, give ourselves that space to just be, as you were saying, and forget all that noise on the outside as much as possible.
Odiva Vasell: (20:55)
Let’s talk a little bit more about anxiety as how it relates to depression, because if you look at this picture-perfect families on social media and you look at your real life, you can really start to think, oh no, I’ve missed the mark. How does it connect?
Robin Humphreys: (21:13)
Yeah. For me and for so many people, depression and anxiety can really go hand in hand. And it comes back to, from my perspective, that disconnection from ourselves that happens early on that we don’t even know is happening. I really look at emotions as messengers. In my world, there’s no such thing as a bad emotion or a negative emotion or a good one or a positive one. They’re all here as part of our human experience to support us in learning about what it is that we need. Depression is oftentimes a call to slow ourselves down and to connect inside. If you think about somebody who’s really depressed and maybe can’t get out of bed, for example, there’s a call there that’s actually an invitation to honor the need for deep rest, almost like a hibernation, if you will. And when we can, the thing that happens is when we notice ourselves feeling depressed, the urge then typically, oftentimes is to get ourselves out of that funk as soon as possible. Right. And then we’re wanting to bypass it. And of course, then it’s going to come back around. Like an elastic band! pang. Right, and. The message wasn’t received that time. And then anxiety is really like a call to some kind of action. Depression and anxiety is like, we can get anxious about being depressed. We can get depressed about feeling anxious. The big thing that I’ll just sort of repeat is that it’s all about honoring what that emotion is really calling forth in us. And that’s not always easy. That’s a big part of why I do what I do as a practitioner, because most of us don’t necessarily have the tools for that. It’s easy to say, oh yes, honor your emotions, but what does that actually look like in the moment of it? Right? And I’ll just go like one little step further here, which is for me and for the way that I work, how to be with those emotions largely comes down to recognizing what is happening in your body because it’s all coming from your nervous system. It comes from the body first, and that sends signals to our brain and then we make meaning from what our brain is doing. Right. And so we might think about anxiety as something that’s happening in the mind, right? Because an anxious mind, you got thoughts that are overwhelming or something like that. That’s one example of anxiety. But signals are coming from your body first. And so when we can slow down and listen to our bodies and even just name out loud, like, I feel my heart racing, I feel my chest is tight, I feel my breath is shallow. These are all potential signs of feeling anxious. And sometimes even just doing that can Help to actually start to diffuse that experience by honoring what you’re feeling and what you’re experiencing.
Odiva Vasell: (25:25)
Just acknowledging, hey, this is happening in my body. That’s the first step. And of course, having a coach like you is the next step. And tell me a little bit more about the touch process because that’s something new that I haven’t heard before. You touch as part of your healing process. How does it work?
Energy Healing Techniques
Robin Humphreys: (25:47)
Yeah, there’s a variety of ways that I use touch. One of the things that I do is chakra readings, although those can be done just as effectively on zoom or even through a photograph, which is kind of mind-blowing. But anyway, so in my initial practitioner training, I learned something called permeating touch, which is basically just using my intention and kind of opening myself energetically as a channel to…. kind of sink into someone else’s energy, energetic field, energetic state, with my hands. In this case, it would be on their body and then just being open to whatever information comes through. And it’s taken practice as part of my training because I mentioned at the beginning about naturally being able to do that before I even had any training. And I think it’s just part of how I’m wired, it’s part of my empathic nature. I’m an artist too, and so I’ve always had a lot of energy moving in my hands, if that makes sense. Yeah, it’s part for me anyway It’s part intuitive and just like how I exist already. And then it’s part training to really open the channels of receiving so that I can get more clarity in the messages that come through.
Odiva Vasell: (27:46)
And that’s beautiful. I mean, it makes perfect sense that touch is healing. But to be able to navigate those dangerous waters, receiving other people’s energy, as we talked about before, and anxiety, receiving that energy when you don’t really want to take that on, but here taking it in a safe space. And that allows you, I assume, to be able to kind of diagnose and assist in the healing of what’s going on in that person’s life.
Robin Humphreys: (28:20)
Exactly. And I want to clarify too, that I am not taking on their energy when I’m doing that kind of permeating touch. I am receiving information and messages, but I’m not absorbing whatever their energetic state is, which is a really important distinction and very important for me as a practitioner. Yeah and there’s a really powerful energy shielding practice that I do pretty regularly that really helps me to maintain my energetic autonomy. And then I also have tools like I can smudge myself with sage or Palo Santo to kind of clear my own energy field and various things. If I do feel, like, know, picked up anything after a session, then I can kind know even sometimes just like shake it out a little bit or something. Yeah.
Odiva Vasell: (29:20)
but this is amazing. And I love to hear about the work that you’re doing I want to thank you for joining me today to help bring even more awareness to the women of the world who are on this journey. And hey, it comes from childhood and maybe some bad experiences, but using that experience to better other people’s lives is so precious. So, again, thank you. And tell me, what is the name of your Ted Talk? What was the name of what it was or the topic?
Robin Humphreys: (30:07)
I know. Well, because it was one name, but then they’re putting the clip up on YouTube for my individual talk, and they asked me to change the name because it was too long, and honestly, I couldn’t tell you what I changed it to. I’d have to look it up. But it was about using creativity and art to overcome depression. Yeah.
Odiva Vasell: (30:31)
Okay. We’ll be on the lookout for that.
Robin Humphreys: (30:34)
Yeah.
Odiva Vasell: (30:35)
Thank you again for joining me today, Robin.
Robin Humphreys: (30:38)
Thank you, Odiva. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you, and I’m just so grateful for the work that you’re doing in the world to really help women connect with themselves and each other and to lift us all up. Fantastic. Yay!
[music]
Conclusion
Robin Humphreys’ journey through anxiety and depression serves as an inspiring narrative of self-discovery and healing. Using energy healing techniques and the power of touch, Robin not only overcame her own challenges but emerged as a beacon of empowerment for others. Her message resonates with millions of women, highlighting the potential within each individual to create a life of joy and fulfillment. As Robin shares her transformative experiences, she beautifully underscores the profound truth that healing begins from within. This is an invitation for every woman to embrace her authenticity, find solace, and craft a life that aligns with her deepest desires.