Welcome to the Revolutionary Rompereglas Podcast where we converge at the intersection of trauma healing, embodied spirituality, decolonization, pleasure, intimacy, leadership and culture change. I’m Isha Vela, trauma psychologist and somatic expressive energy alchemist for healers, change agents and bridge builders. You’re here because you believe that unraveling fractured concepts that live in your emotional, spiritual and mental systems, while moving toward embodied sovereignty is the real work towards your personal liberation and our collective evolution. In this first season of the podcast, I’m interviewing New Earth leaders who are sharing their personal journeys, and how it’s brought them to the purpose led work they do now. Occasionally, I’ll chime in with my own inspired episodes. My intention is that the conversations and tools shared in this podcast will inspire and support you on your own magical human journey to owning yourself fully.

Hi, and welcome to another solo episode of the Revolutionary Rompereglas podcast. And I thought I dropped an episode about sovereignty, it’s my birthday month, I’m obsessed with sovereignty. It’s a term I use a lot. And I wanted to clarify the role that it’s had in my life, how I conceptualize it, and the role that it has in love partnerships, or any type of partnership, professional partnerships, you know, relationship with money, how you co create your life based on your desires, everything. So, I wanna back up first and talk about where I first learned that the word and my relationship to it, how I conceived of it for myself, how it showed up for me. So, the first time I’d heard the word was through a dear, dear friend who is now deceased, but she is (uhm) she was Hawaiian. And she talked about it in the context of decolonization, and about preserving indigenous culture, maintaining culture, and she was very connected to land, she was connected to plants and Spirit through plants, and beauty. So, in those conversations, that’s where I was first exposed to the word. And the way that it showed up for me was through my energy body. I was in a codependent relationship, long term codependent relationship, you know, in which I disowned outsourced aspects of myself that I wasn’t too fond of, and was basically like, you take care of this, and you take care of that. And I’m not gonna love that part, you love that part. And what I had to do was really begin to take ownership of those parts of myself, those aspects that I didn’t have such a good relationship with, and really develop a tenderness and a care for. So, it’s like it was really like a reclamation process and ownership process of like, nobody’s gonna save me, nobody’s gonna rescue me from loving these parts of myself. And so, I had to learn to love them. And that was, for me, a form of attaching securely to myself. I know that most of you are familiar with attachment theory, I’m not gonna get into it here. I’m just going to talk about sovereignty in the context of, you know, early attachment trauma. So, the way I think of sovereignty is really being in full command of your lifeforce energy, being in authorship of your life, being the decision maker, the decider of what you’re gonna do, right? So, you’re not a victim, you are in full command. And something that I, I like to talk about in my online community is that you’re in full command of your witch, your bitch, and your whore This is a term that my colleague Amy Lorbati came up with. I’m gonna be inviting her on the podcast in the future. But you know, claiming your witch is your spiritual power, your intuition; Your bitch is your boundaries, sort of your ferocity and your whore is your sexual power. So really being in command of all of that energy, which is all just one energy, but I like to sometimes talk about it separately, so that we know sort of what we’re dealing with. So, let’s go a little bit into how we lose our sovereignty. So, when we experienced trauma, we experienced it’s usually like in our early life, most of us, if not all of us experienced some sort of just a little bit of developmental trauma because our parents are imperfect and we come into this life with a lot of big needs. And not all of them are met. So you know, a lot of our suffering in the world comes from the stories that we form, the narratives that are formed in these early caregiving relationships where we develop narratives that are not accurate based On the experiences that we’re having with our caregivers, you know, they form our personality, they form how we conceive of ourselves, how we conceive of other people, how we see the world. And they really form like early attachment templates that we then carry into our adult life. And that’s what creates a suffering. We’re like, you know, we’ve just owned parts of ourselves, we experience shame around aspects of, you know, maybe really beautiful parts of ourselves. And we say, No, we can’t bring that because if I bring that you won’t love me anymore. Or if I bring that I won’t get accepted, things like that. So, we don’t just have imperfect attachments to our caregivers, we also have unhealthy attachments to systems. As soon as we’re born, we begin to absorb what’s in the collective field, right? Is this totally unconscious, we don’t have any sort of ego protection to say yes to this, and no to that, so we absorb it without discernment. And what we’re ingesting is basically poison, right? Whether you grow up in a colony or not, you are ingesting white supremacy, which underwrites patriarchy, capitalism, all the things, the work that I do is in healing these early attachments, it’s in really changing the narratives, because those are the things that keep us blocked, and in our suffering, because we’re so stuck in our stories, and these stories live in our bodies, they’re not just mental. So, it’s more than just mindset, sometimes we really need to move the energy of the thing that got stuck of the expression, that didn’t get to be seen and heard. Okay. So what I what I help people do is in working without those early attachments, is in helping them or you form a loving relationship to those parts or those aspects that you learned to disown, that you learned to abdicate, that you learned to exile. And in that process and attaching to yourself, you’re really cultivating self-love, you’re cultivating an environment or an ecosystem of love within your own energy body. And that, for me, is a process of decolonization, it is a process of self-ownership, right? And attaching to yourself also means attaching to spirit and attaching to Earth. What I mean by that is that, you know, because we form these attachment patterns with our early caregivers, sort of if we stay in that place of just looking at ourselves, in the context of these early attachments, we kind of missed the big picture. And the big picture is that your soul came into this body to have these life experiences and that we can attach or we can learn healthy attachment to ourselves and all of our aspects through our relationship with the universe, with God, with goddess, with the divine, whatever you wanna call it, this is how we can sort of come back to ourselves. So, it’s in sort of this think of it as a bowl (eheh). Like in the space of connection to spirit, we can come back to ourselves more easily and see ourselves through the eyes of the Divine. And self-ownership requires a healthy, secure attachment to all of your aspects and includes all of your inner children, and we have many, your shadow right? the parts of your negative intent, the parts of you that wanna hurt other people, that could kill other people, like things that are taboo and forbidden, based on the dogma of society. So what this all comes down to is that is to an understanding and not an intellectual understanding, because we can get there, but in embodied experience understanding that you belong to yourself first and foremost, and that any external system of power, oppression, contraction, or strife is not welcome in, right? And the problem is that we often have the interject of the society within us, right? The parts of ourselves where we belittle ourselves, where we shame ourselves, where we criticize ourselves. Those are all aspects; those are all basically lies that we tell ourselves about who we are. Like they create inner schisms. They create splits within the psyche and the soma. And what I needed to do at some point, what I decided, was that whatever was not free or true to my system, was not to be allowed in. Like I could receive it, I could feel it, but then it needed to go, then it needed to like, leave. And that’s how I was able to have a greater sense of peace within myself. Like if I began to self-criticize, or I began to judge myself I was like, that’s not true to who I am and maybe I can look underneath that and see if under my judgment, there’s a need that I have, right? To really find the softness under some of the harsh voices that I had in my head. This process that I’m describing came after my four years of being in my program, where I had to sort of wash out of my body, all of the personal traumas that were there. And then after the personal traumas, were really like where I could really see all of them and really like recognize, like, Oh, these are all of my parts. That’s what I could sort of move into some of the collective and systemic traumas, which is, you know, our, our power blocks, right? The places that we shame ourselves, where we feel like victims, or where we, you know, we feel like imposters, things like that. So, sovereignty obviously happens over a lifetime. You know? It’s not a static state where I just say, like, “Oh, I’m always sovereign”. I know that I’m always sovereign. But sometimes I forget, sometimes I fall into patterns. It’s a practice, like anything else. And the practice of coming back to myself is what I call devotion, like radical embodied devotion. And maybe we can get into that in another episode, I just want you to know that it’s a practice, you’re going to fall off, you’re going to forget, and that’s always okay. Because it’s in the practice, it’s in that coming home, where the healing happens, coming back to the truth of who you are, right? you were born sovereign. And what you’re doing is coming back to a sense of wholeness within yourself. So, I just want to really quickly breeze through some of the facets because it’s really sort of like you’re a multi-dimensional being, and sort of self-care needs to also be dimensional. And it needs to be radical, because it needs to say “stay the fuck out” systems of oppression and strife and really holding yourself in your wholeness and your goodness to use a binary term. So, on the physical realm, right? you have a right to your personal space, you have a right to freedom from unwanted touch harassment violation, right? Like nobody gets to encroach upon that. And of course, this is not always guaranteed, because we live in these systems, and there’s racism, there’s oppression, there’s patriarchy, but it’s about being so clear about that within yourself, right? So that if something does happen, if there is an encroachment upon your personal space, you’re not gaslighting yourself about it, you’re not blaming yourself for it. You are so clear that what happened was not okay. And that it guides you towards taking aligned action about it. So mental facet; So, sovereignty is mental. This is where we do the mindset work. This is where we make sure that whatever stories or narratives or limitations are running are being sort of examined and, and pulled down, if necessary. So, (eheh) it’s pulling down, but it’s also inserting the new narrative and the new story that is aligned with the truth, which is your wholeness and your sovereignty. Right? So, you know, like the story about being unworthy or not being enough or being too much. Like I’m always pulling shit down. You know, I told a friend of mine the other day, like, I’m always pulling stuff down off the shelf, and sort of placing things back up. It’s a process, right? It’s this practice of like curating the stuff that comes in examining, and really like, “mmh, is that true? Is that true that, you know, I’m not worthy?” Heck, no, it’s not. What is true? The truth is that I am worthy like, I don’t need to like hustle for worthiness, I am worthy because I’m here and I was born. Right? That’s it done. So, sovereignty is also energetic. When we experienced trauma, whether it’s personal trauma, or collective trauma, or from systems of power, we hold pockets in our energy field. And the way that I see them in my sort of intuitive sense, I can feel them, it’s really like, you know, imagine sort of a matrix around a person, the way I see it, it’s sort of there’s pockets, there’s almost like, they’re like little black holes in the energy field, there’s little dense, shadowy aspects. And that’s why we do the embodied work and the energetic work, and especially the work of emotions, releasing emotions, because emotions are energy and oftentimes, these, these pockets from the energy field resolved unless they’re like, based on a past life, and they’re a little bit more difficult to get to. So, sovereignty is also spiritual. It’s about grounding in your spiritual truth. You know, this is something that I already said before, like anchoring in the divine, seeing yourself through the eyes of the soul, right? You came into this body into this experience into this lifetime to have for a specific purpose. We don’t always know what that is. And sometimes the purpose is really simple and straightforward. It doesn’t need to be like this magnificent thing. Sometimes it’s really simple. Sometimes it’s just to like touch somebody’s life in a particular way. So, this is sort of a simplified version. I’m just gonna leave it there. If you’re listening to this. podcast, your spiritual and you already, I’m just preaching to the choir right now. So, your sovereignty is also sexual, right? Because eros is sexual energy, you’re made of eros and you have a responsibility to that desire, you are made of desire, right? Desires, sort of what runs the world. Eros is just like life force; you are made of that. That’s what your energy field is made of. We learned that some desires are good, and some desires are bad. And when we’re children, we are very free in our sexual expression, we are happily naked, we self-pleasure without concern. And that’s not allowed by our culture, right? Our culture tells us that’s bad or you we can’t do that with certain like in certain company, and that’s private. And, you know, even in the most subtle ways, even with, you know, parents who are very open and wanting to provide an environment of freedom, you know, child minds often make false interpretations. And we then hold these narratives in ways that were not intended by the people who are transmitting the message.
Hey, Rompereglas, I wanted to tell you about a free two-day series I’m teaching on relationships. It’s called Love Unleashed Relationships That Heal. And I’m so excited about this because it’s the accumulated learning of a lifetime of relationship challenges. My trauma healing journey, most of which was relational ten plus years of private practice and my own deep immersion in the study of embodied intimacy. And really, the alchemy I offer is and has always been centered on relationship. First, the relationship to the greater self, which includes the inner selves emotions, intuition, sexuality, lifeforce energy in general, and two; the energetics of relating in the context of social justice and human evolution. So, this Tuesday series is a promotional event for my twelve-week immersive healing journey called Sovereign, which begins in August. So, in the two-day series taking place on July 20th and 21st, you’ll uncover how sovereignty supports lasting and healthy partnerships, revolutionize your perspective on the real function of relational love. You’ll learn how relationships can heal your deepest wounds, but not in the way that you think, you’ll practice embodied relating for intimacy and connection. And you’ll understand the core components of healthy relating. So, on day one, we’re gonna tackle sacred sovereignty. And on day two, we’re gonna do revolutionary partnerships. And I’ll include the registration link in the show notes so that you can join us on July 20, and 21st, at 3pm. Eastern, there’s gonna be a replay if you can’t make it live. So, I really hope to see you there. Bye.

You know, when we live in a culture that even on Instagram, you know that it’s sort of this like anything goes, no, anything doesn’t go. If you talk about pussy too much on Instagram, if you post naked pictures of yourself on Instagram, you’re gonna be taken down. So obviously, there’s so many ways that our sexual sovereignty gets chipped away from us, or we get chipped at. I’ve shared on other podcasts that you know, I grew up recognizing or coming to the conclusion rather, that having a pussy was not favorable, like it was did not put me at an advantage. You know, I had the experience of older men sort of leering at me, and I just felt like, Oh, God, I need to hide, I need to just kind of shrink myself and I just, I packed my sexual energy away. And I am a very sexual person that but I, for most of my life I hadn’t really like contained, it was hidden. It was dangerous to come out with all of that. So this is really like owning your lifeforce energy is hugely sexual, and I’m speaking especially to women who really don’t get to have a lot of that or we have our sexual energy, but for a specific purpose to please particular people, or you get to use it this way, but not this way, or this way is dangerous, right? But this way is okay. And so we then channel it in different forms, but you can use your sexual energy for whatever the fuck you want. You can use it to run your business, you can use it for all sorts of things. I know that you know that sovereignty. It’s also emotional, right? I forgot to talk about the emotional pieces. I talked about the energetics and you know, emotions are energy but really about like honoring your emotions. When you feel something, don’t push it down. Feel the feeling. You are not your feeling. Emotions are a human experience. For example, I woke up today sort of feeling grief. I had no idea where it’s coming from. But I decided there’s a little bit here so I’m just going to move it I’m just going to clear it. I put on some sad music, felt it, kind of move the energy a little bit and then it was like then it was done, right? They sort of just come in, you know, you’re having an experience of them, who knows where it was coming from, and then we move on from it. Right in the same way we get down on ourselves. When we’re having a specific feeling. We’re like, oh, why are you feeling sad? or Why are you feeling angry? Like why gaslight yourself? Why question yourself? Why not just feel it, move the energy and be done with it? Like, you know, sort of like a revolving door. That’s how emotions are for me. It’s like, oh, you’re in? Okay, what do you need, you need to you need to be felt, okay, I’m going to feel you and then you move right on out of it. Right? You don’t need to stay there. You don’t need to sink into it too far. Unless that’s what it’s asking of you. Yeah, I feel like emotions are energy portals, right, they’re places to visit. They’re not places to camp out and stay. But they’re experiences to have and when I move emotions, there’s always something on the other side of it, there’s always some sense of, of emotional growth of yes, some more claiming of this energy. So, sovereignty is owning and being responsible for all of those pieces, those facets that make up part of your energy, that is the practice of which I call radical embodied devotion. And basically, you know, like, own all that shit, own your energy, own your, your emotions, (uhm) you know, be responsible for how you show up, be responsible for your big energy, right? Take responsibility for your healership energy, for your visionary energy, for the part of you that came to do something here on Earth, maybe something exciting, maybe something really simple but profound, right? If you’re a space holder, you know, that’s a big job. And you need to claim that big energy that can hold the expanse of a group, let’s say, because I work with big energy people, oftentimes, the thing you didn’t get to express is the thing that you need to claim is what you’re being called into your power for. Right? Like if you didn’t get to express how loving you are, right? Because you live in a family that was more like jaded. Well, you need to claim this big love, right? Or if you didn’t get to own your anger or your rage, right? And that’s part of the reclamation process, then yes, then get into your bitch energy and own that shit. Yeah. And part of it is acknowledging like, I have big fucking desires, I have big wants, and I want more, right and giving yourself permission to have that, because we often tell ourselves, oh, but you know, he or she loves me, or they love me. And I, you know, that’s enough. And I should be satisfied with that. But part of you like something in you is asking for more. So why not give yourself permission to have that, and we often gaslight ourselves into being satisfied, right. But in my experience, now that I have more, I feel satisfied, I feel very satisfied now that I have more pleasure in my life, I feel satisfied. And the reason I didn’t feel satisfied was that there was something really profound and important missing. So I think this is really important like around needs as well, you need to get really clear on your needs. And what I find non binary folks who are visionary leaders, who are healers, who are the women that I work with the people that I work with, we need to recognize that we have big needs. And oftentimes we are the type of people who go out to other people, as helpers. And in that process of helping other people, we often abandon ourselves, we abandon our needs. And so part of our sovereignty part of your sovereignty may be to claim your big needs, because it’s a reciprocal relationship, that big energy, the amount you give out to other people, the amount of compassion and love and good shit you give out to other people, that is the size of your need. Right? So, I want you to recognize that yes, what goes out is really big. And your need is also big. And there’s no shame in that claim your big need, and you may need to spread your need among many people, I know I do. Right? I would it would be unfair if I just had like one friend or one partner, that I that I said, oh, here here are all my needs. That would be unfair to them, and I take care of my needs, you know, I have to ask myself every day, what do I need today? And then follow suit to the answer that my body is giving me. So, we need to give to ourselves. We need to nourish ourselves as part of the devotional process of giving to ourselves so that we can feel filled up and so that you can give from a place of generosity and sort of like you can give freely. And then there’s a piece around boundaries. sovereignty requires boundaries. Boundaries are physical, mental, energetic, all of the things that we had talked about before, and most of the time, those boundaries are gonna be with yourself deciding how am I gonna show up? What am I willing to do? What am I not willing to do? What do I need right now? What do I feel like doing? What do I want and then deciding based on the responses that your body gives you. Sometimes, this process of consciousness, this process of sovereignty, is about really recognizing our stories and our narratives like what are our projections? Are we in a fairy tale narrative? Are we in an expectation? Are we in a child need? Can we be responsible for that need? We often get triggered in relationships, for example, and those triggers are yours, they’re not the responsibility of somebody else, of your partner, or of your friend or, or your parent. Sovereignty means being responsible for your triggers and expressing them cleanly. Even if somebody else was the trigger for that experience, that trigger is still yours, your responsibility is looking at what got brought up, I don’t necessarily see triggers as a bad thing. I don’t like them when they happen. But I see triggers as opportunities to bring up what needs to be healed, right? Usually, when you’re triggered, it’s some aspect of your inner child, right? And we have lots of inner children, like I said, before, your inner children are yours to mother, they’re yours to mother, they’re yours to parent, you have a responsibility for them, as well as your, you have a responsibility to your goddess and to all the other archetypes that live inside of you. But yes, you are the mother of them all. And especially the children, they’re the ones that, that need you the most, right, they’re the first relationships that we have. And because of that, the most powerful, they’re the ones that call on us for the most help. So that’s what sovereignty means to me. It’s that sense of deeply knowing yourself, we are always developing more consciousness. But it’s really having a sense of yourself, embodying your energy carrying it around with you, being aware of your, the power that you actually do have and how how you use it, knowing yourself is power. Owning your shit is power, even, you know, owning your imperfection, your flaws, that is power, being able to name them. When you know who you are, it becomes really clear what’s yours, like, What are your triggers? And what somebody else is really that helps this healthy separation that helps us set boundaries. Yeah, I think that’s really powerful. Knowing where you begin and end, knowing where another person begins and ends. There’s a clarity in that, there’s a cleanness that you can bring into your communication based on that sovereignty. When you are indeed triggered. You can say, oh, that part of me got triggered. I’m feeling my rejection wound, you know, and it, it helps us create deeper partnerships with the people that we love, with the people that we play with, with the people that we work with.
Yeah, I hope this was helpful today. I went through this rather quickly. But um, that’s sort of where I wanna sort of close things for right now. So, join me in another solo episode in the future, and I will see you next time, Sovereign. Big Love, big love.
That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that this conversation supported you in accessing a deeper truth. I just want to remind you to hit the subscribe button to get notified of new episodes dropping on the new and full moons of each month. If you haven’t already, leave us a five-star review on iTunes to make sure that everyone who needs this transmission gets it. See you next time Rompereglas.