Finding Safety in Your Body with Sariah Bastian | Ep #50

Andrea:

Hi, I’m Andrea Giles and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity
podcast episode number 50, finding safety in your body with Sariah Bastian.
Hello and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast where courageous
women learn not only to heal from their spouse’s betrayal but to become the
boldest, truest, most decisive, and confident versions of themselves ever.
If you know there’s more for you than the life you’re currently living but
don’t quite know how to get there, you are in the right place. Stick around
to learn how to create a life that will knock your own socks off. Is that
possible? It is, and I’m here to show you how. I’m your host Andrea Giles.
Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

Andrea:

Hey everybody, I’m happy to be with you today. I have a special guest with
me today for episode number 50. I wanted to bring somebody on who is a very
special person to me because she helps me in my healing process and has a
wealth of experience, a wealth of knowledge. And I wanted to bring her on
today to share with you and to give you some of her wisdom and hope and
comfort. And I’m just so thrilled to have her with me today. So today I
have Sariah Bastian. And I am going to let Sariah introduce herself. She’s
going to share with you her story, she’s going to share her experience that
led her to where she is. S is a master yoga instructor. She works with lots
and lots of women who have been through betrayal, trauma and helps them
heal through yoga and breath. So I’m going to turn it over to Sariah.
Welcome Sariah, thank you for being here.

Sariah:

Thank you so much.

Andrea:

You are welcome. And I’d love for you to tell my listeners all about
yourself, how did you land where you are today? Tell them about your
journey.

Sariah:

All right. Well, I’m Sariah. My name is Sariah, and I am a professional
yoga therapist. I have been teaching yoga since 2006. I have about, oh
goodness, we’re probably pushing 15,000 hours of teaching underneath my
belt. I just heard the other day actually that an expert, you can call
yourself an expert if you have 10,000 hours. And I was like, “Yeah, I don’t
have to worry about that imposter syndrome, I got the hours.”

Andrea:

I got the hours. That’s amazing.

Sariah:

Thank you. It’s my life’s work, and I love it. I’m 38, I have six children,
that includes three stepchildren. And I am on my fourth marriage, which is
something that I used to experience a lot of shame over because when people
would ask me what my last name was, I would be like, “Well, which one do
you want?” I can say to you now that I’ve been married four times. And I
can accept that as my story as I have been able to learn my programming and
learn from my experiences and have been able to find and heal myself. And
I’m a healing, I’m not always healed because I still have day-to-day
moments of coming back to myself. But in my lifetime, I come from a
divorced family. My parents divorced when I was five, my dad hasn’t been in
my life a lot. We lived in Utah, he lived in Nevada growing up. And so I
got to see him once or twice a year.

Sariah:

And he’s dependent on narcotics for survival. Right now, he’s in
California, he’s been homeless for the last three years. And I haven’t seen
him for about four years. I got married really young right out of high
school. And I had never been in a serious relationship prior to that. I
didn’t stay married to him for more than a year and was divorced and
remarried within three months of the divorce state to a man who fathers my
children. My two oldest boys are almost 17 and 15. And I was married to him
for seven years and divorced him and remarried about two years later to a
man who was unfaithful to me who I was married to for I think, it was
almost three years, almost three years.

Sariah:

And so my history men comes from an internal desire to be accepted. I
sought for love and I sought for acceptance through men’s approval in my
life. And I had no idea what life was about. I had no idea that I had the
opportunity to be present for life. Even though I taught yoga for some of
those years, nothing registered in me until I felt like I was dying. I went
from man to man, marriage to marriage thinking that … I even remembered
Dr. Kevin Skinner who I love, who I’ve worked under for years out of
recovery who was like, “Oh, you’re chooser’s wrong.” And I was like, “Yeah,
that’s what’s wrong is my chooser’s wrong, I keep choosing the wrong men.”

Sariah:

But I had something to do with that because my beliefs about myself
resulted in the men that I chose to be with in my life. So in my third
marriage to the man who was unfaithful to me, I was going to say rudely
awakened, but that’s not the word, gratefully awakened, but harshly
awakened to my reality. My body was screaming at me in ways that I had
never experienced and wasn’t sure what to do with. And I felt as though I
was going crazy. So when I tell my story, and I preach this. I don’t like
to tell my details because I have my story and my ex-husband has his. But I
will tell you my experience and the way that I held myself in that marriage
and in all my other marriages actually. The thing was is that I showed up
as the same person in every marriage with the same belief system in every
marriage. And so I had the same experience in every marriage.

Sariah:

I didn’t know that I had a right to be in my marriage. I didn’t know I had
a right to be in the home that I was living in. I felt that I had to prove
my worthiness on a daily basis by cleaning, by being there whenever he
needed me to be there. I had to show my receipts to prove that I was using
the money correctly. I felt as though I had to have the perfect body in
order to be attractive enough for him. I let myself be cut open with
surgery to get a boob job with the hopes that he would be attracted to me
and wouldn’t be unfaithful to me. I didn’t sit in my feelings, I did not
share my feelings. I numbed them, I hid them. I was stiff and rigid in my
reactions to life.

Sariah:

And I look at my pictures, and I have the same smile in every picture. It’s
the open mouth fake things are fine picture back in that time. And it was
not real. I had sex with my husband when I didn’t feel emotionally close
with him. I put myself and did things in situations that did not honor my
sacredness at all. I questioned who I was as a person, and I allowed the
vision of my husband to be the vision that I needed to be of myself. And I
tried to prove myself through my actions and my behaviors to prove to him
that I was good enough to love, to prove to him that I was good enough to
care for, to prove to him that I was of value or I wasn’t worth.

Sariah:

I loved from a place of expectation, I did things with a desire for
something in return. And when I didn’t receive that in return, I let that
affect the way that I treated himself and that I treated other people. I
wasn’t breathing. I had no idea that I was breathing, I’m sure I was. I’d
never thought about the fact that when I breathed it would bring up, I
would cry whenever I would breathe. I would cry, and so I just stopped
breathing. I used my voice, but I didn’t hear myself. I didn’t listen to
the words I was saying, and I didn’t listen to the communication that my
body was telling me. And I let the craziness of gaslighting and the
craziness of his opinion overrule the truth that my body was speaking.

Sariah:

And I lived in fear of everything. My body was robotic in the way that my
daily life was lived. I have to close my eyes, and it’s kind of hard
sometimes to take myself back there to feel that again so that I can share
that. And I feel my heart pound and my body gets a little jittery as I
reintroduce those feelings or those thoughts to my mind. But I have been
able to through my experience of this, my knowledge of yoga and my desire
to listen to my body, I have been able to find safety within the walls of
my skin. And I have been able to shift the awareness and knowledge of
myself to know that I am a sacred being. And now when I hold myself and
present myself to the world, that’s how I present myself as instead of
trying to make myself fit in or prove that I fit in, I know that I have a
right to be here and I plant my feet on the ground and walk steadily in
that direction over and over again.

Andrea:

So amazing and powerful. I want to go back to something you said, I want to
know at the point where you felt like you were going crazy like I feel like
a crazy person, what happened? What happened at that point?

Sariah:

I actually wrote an email about this just this morning. I remember I was so
scared to get help. I knew I needed help, I knew something wasn’t right.
And he kept promising me that things were fine, that it was all in my head,
that I was crazy, that I was making it up. That I was a very negative
person, that I brought this all on myself. And I remember one day I went to
work and I talked myself into calling the therapy office that my friend had
recommended to me. And the receptionist answered, and she was like, “Okay.
Well, we’re going to get you in with one of our therapists for an
assessment.” And I said to her, “So are you assessing if I’m crazy enough
because I promise you I am?”

Sariah:

Please accept me. I was afraid that they weren’t going to accept me because
I wasn’t crazy enough even for that. I learned that that crazy was a way my
body was telling me something was wrong. But I went to a therapist, and I
love my therapist. And she helped me so much talk about it. But I was
looking to her for the answers that my body was already telling me. I can
say that now, but I didn’t know that then. And so the crazy, the fog. It’s
scary, the crazy is the crazy of being wrong. But also I think the crazy of
being right is what’s crazy making because you don’t want your reality to
be right. And that makes you even more crazy because you want to change or
fix or do anything to make the right or the truth of your situation be
wrong.

Andrea:

Because then you have to look at it and go, what do I do with this? So
there’s the internal struggle of you know that things are off, you know
that things are off, you know that there’s things that you need to pay
attention to, and it’s terrifying. Go ahead.

Sariah:

The crazy making, just the crazy of being right. I call that please God,
don’t let this be truth, truth. It’s a harsh reality. As I teach getting
into your body, healing can only begin when truth is accepted. And you do
have to accept the crazy of what your reality is is truth. People have
asked me this, when was it that you finally woke up to yourself? I remember
this one situation when I was standing with my back against the wall. And
he’s a big man, just tall, very strong. And he wouldn’t ever touch me, but
he would push me against the wall with his nose, my nose to his nose. And
he would back me up against the wall.

Sariah:

And some things from inside of me said, “Sariah, feel your feet on the
ground.” And I remember all of my energy going down to the texture of the
carpet, and I wiggled my toes. And then something from deep within me said,
“Look, look out of your eyes and see this.” And I saw like, “Oh, he’s
pushing me up against the wall, his nose is on my nose. This is reality,
this is my crazy truth.” And then something deep within me said, “Breathe.”
And I breathed. And I started using those tools, and that’s the foundation
of what I teach now. The very first thing I teach people, feel your earth.
Soften your body and breathe because what are you are is exactly what’s
happening in your reality. And you cannot move on or move forward, and so
you can accept the truth of your present moment.

Sariah:

So it started there. And I continued to go to therapy, and I relied on my
therapist to talk. It felt really good to speak all those deep truths that
were in my body and the fears. But when it came to the crazy making, it
slowly dissipated as I trusted myself. I believe that the crazy was there
because I put more trust in him than myself, that’s where the crazy began.
And when I was able to put trust in myself and listen to my body and step
into and rely, rely the truth that my body was telling me, then the fog
dissipated and my reality was showing me in neon signs. And then I was able
to make decisions to move and step out of that space with him and continue,
oh my goodness, and continue to heal myself in lots of different areas and
lots of different moments in my life.

Sariah:

And I still get to as I experience life. Now, I’m married and I have a new
baby. And I’m experiencing new things in my aware self. And I get to still
practice all those things over and over again, to trust my body over and
over again.

Andrea:

That’s so amazing. Right before we recorded today, Sariah and I were
catching up a little bit. And we both are remarried to different people.
Sariah, I worked with her when I was single, and I was dating my current
husband and had a lot to work through. I remember Sariah telling me to
breath. I did yoga with her and then regularly went to yoga. And then I
regularly went to, or not regularly, I went to a retreat, a several-day
retreat where she did some concentrated yoga practices and different things
there. And I remember her telling me that I was not breathing, that I was
just so tight. Sariah, I’m wondering if you can explain what that means,
because of course for we’re breathing to stay alive. But when you talk
about not breathing, I want you to tell my listeners how you teach that.
What does that mean?

Sariah:

The program that I teach is called, the creed is called Beyond Breath. And
breath is life. I believe and have read, I love when I read something that
I’ve already come to accept as a truth for myself but solidifies it. And I
read something the other day that said there are two beings, there is the
holder of the breath, and then there’s the one who’s being breathed. And
for me, that gets into spirituality and my relationship with my higher
power. As I believe that your breath has been granted to you and through
this life. And you are a spiritual being in a physical body here on earth
to have that experience. And you are supported through your breath. And so
for me my breath is a link to my higher power.

Sariah:

Now, when we are in our physical body and we experience the pains and the
traumas and the griefs that life I believe gives to us to remind us of our
sacredness, it pushes us towards our refined sacred self. Our body hardens,
we become stiff, we become very rigid. And it’s almost as if we put on an
external armor to protect ourselves from the external world. And what that
does is that creates a shape of your body that will only allow for the
space that’s available within you to breathe. Does that make sense? You can
kind of visualize that, right? So if I’m clenching my fists and my feet,
I’m squeezing my butt, I’m holding my stomach in, I’m rounding my upper
back and I’m clenching my jaw and I breathe, I’m not fully accepting the
breath or the life that’s being given to me.

Sariah:

So what I work with and how I help people move into themselves is to
recognize that you are held, that gravity and the earth are actually a
continued support of your physical form. And your only job is to be here.
Your job through this life is to be present and to fully accept the life
that’s been given to you. Life meaning breath. Where as we decide
unconsciously that we’re going to take control over this situation, that
we’re going to protect ourselves from getting hurt again, that we’re going
to make sure that this never happens again or whatever it is that our
unconscious thinking is, our body moves rigid, and rigid, and rigid. And we
live in that tight and constricted space. And that is the shape of your
body, is the breath you breathe. And the breath you breathe is the life you
live. So if you’re in that tight rigid spot, the only breath that’s
available is according to the shape of your body. And then that will be
your life’s experience over and over, and over again.

Andrea:

You’re just reminding me of something that I talk about a lot with my
listeners is about how most of us live in a very small space of emotion,
that we have a very small little space of our comfort level. And because of
that, we keep creating the same results for ourselves over and over again,
Like you said before, picking the same kind of person, only allowing …
And it’s positive things as well as negative things, it goes both ways.
Many of my clients have a really hard time receiving, it’s very hard for
them to receive. It’s both sides of the spectrum. The way that you’re
explaining that, it lines up with that to where when we drop into just
experiencing life, just experiencing right where we’re at and not trying to
get out of it, not trying to change our own mind from a place of fear or
what’s going to happen if I actually sit in that.

Andrea:

It can be a little bit scary, but that’s where we live, that’s where life
happens. That’s where we become present to this life that we have and that
we get to create when we can expand. And so I love thinking about just
breath, the expansion of breath, the body softening, making space and
allowing space for emotion, for positive and negative. Things that feel
good in your body and things that might feel a little heavier, but those
are the things that help you heal, that help you to actually move forward.

Sariah:

Yes. For emotion, but also it makes room for internal power. It makes room
for love, it makes room for communication. It makes room for dreaming and
creating. That’s what we’re closing off when we close off our body and we
feel like we’re not held and we’re not supported. We have to put a trust in
our body and rely on our body to tell us the truth. So I teach that after
you have a solid ground beneath you, you can move through emotions. I
worked with the chakra system, and the first chakra is safety and security.
Your environment, exactly where you are right now. And it helps you plant
yourself here once again so that you can sit in your reality and heal from
exactly where you are.

Sariah:

And then second chakra is fluidity, it’s emotion. The element is water. And
feelings are information, that’s it, fluid. They’re there to tell you
something, to inform you of something and then they leave. But if you
experience a discomfort, and we are uncomfortable with discomfort. And so
we try to hold on and stiffen our body. We do, we clench our glutes, we
become very stiff through our physical movements, which is a representation
of our emotional body. And if we can imagine a solid ground and safety
within the walls of our skin, and then from there experiencing emotion and
feeling and knowing that this is, oh, this is telling me something right
now. And I need to step into this and then act the third chakra. The third
programming is action and behavior or your solar plexus, is your power,
your internal power to step into your sacredness.

Sariah:

And so life then becomes fluid like your breath where one moment you can
experience joy even in the midst of trauma. The sun is still shining, the
rain still falls. Rainbows still express themselves in the sky. Your
children still laugh, love is still there. And you can experience that when
you’re there in that moment. And then when you’re in those moments of
trauma and chaos, you can feel that because that’s information that you’re
being given to through the sacred of your body. And then you get to hold
yourself as sacred and act and behave according to the senses that you’re
being fed in real time. Not from your mind, not from your fears, from real
time. And then you get to experience life and then you get to step or move
away from that chaos and that trauma and experience joy. And then you get
to experience sadness and grief as life continues to enroll for you. That’s
what life is about is that experiencing it and trusting that your body is
there to hold you through the entire show.

Andrea:

Oh, that’s so good. One of the things that Sariah and I were talking about
a little bit before recording today is how we’re presented with new
opportunities to heal different parts of us. And I was telling her how …
And I’ve talked a little bit on my podcast about this, Sariah, but with I’m
expecting. And it has just shown me some areas of growth, it’s showing me
some areas that I need to work through. And I often will have clients, what
will make a lot of headway, they’ll feel more like themselves. They’re
waking up, they’re waking up and seeing themselves again. And then
something will happen, a circumstance or something that feels very
triggering and they’ll feel discouraged like I thought I was further along
than I am, and I thought that I was doing better than I am. And it can be
very discouraging.

Andrea:

And so I want to ask you what you would say to that about … You touched
on it briefly before, but I think that we have this idea that it’s like a
one and done like, oh, check, I’m all better now. And in reality, we are
… Well, I’m going to turn it to you, I want to hear your thoughts on
that.

Sariah:

I love this. So actually my logo for Back Pocket Yoga is a spiral or a
widening circle. And I have that there because I teach that you are never
widening being, you are continually expanding. And you are never in the
same place that you were before. And although what you might be
experiencing in this present moment feels very familiar to what you’ve
experienced in the past, you are not breathing the same breath that you
were then. You are not the same person, you have new cells, you have new
hair growth, you have new nails. You are a new person now, and you are not
back in maybe the center of that spiral where you are widened and you have
expanded.

Sariah:

And you get to use the tools in this moment that you have been learning and
you get to apply them to life because that’s what’s going to be asked of
you over and over, and over again. When you wake up, that doesn’t mean life
is easy. That just means you get to continue to practice and widen and
refine your sacredness. And I always say holding yourself sacred is the
hardest thing you will ever do. And you’re going to be asked to do that
over and over, and over again. But it is the most amazing experience to
allow your widening circle to continue to expand and towards that sacred
being.

Andrea:

I feel a couple of thoughts. One that with infidelity, the biggest breach
of trust is with ourselves. That we stop trusting, the words are I don’t
trust him, he broke my trust. But what’s really happening is this internal
breach of trust. And I think that’s the biggest tragedy of it. So when we
learn to trust ourselves, I think too it’s the hardest work we’ll ever do
and the most important work we’ll ever do, and the most important work. And
it overrides so much of the programming of what women should be, what a
good woman is that many of us have carried with us our whole life about
taking care of the feelings of other people, not being too much, stay in
these lines. I feel like infidelity is a perfect opportunity to really look
at all of it, to really expose ourselves and really see maybe for the first
time ever. To really look at all the stories that have led to where we are.
And it’s this great opportunity to start unpacking those things and moving
forward in a way that’s true, true to us.

Sariah:

Yeah. I’d say recovery is discovery. Beyond Breath teaches you how to
understand the programming that we’ve all been set into. We all are living
in an archetype, if you will. We’re all placed into a situation, maybe
you’re the third oldest in your family or maybe you were the youngest or
maybe you were the smart one or maybe you were the comic relief or whatever
it was. And we end up playing roles that we haven’t really necessarily
signed up for in life. Through Beyond Breath, I help you understand and see
the role that you’re playing and decide is that the role that is me or is
that something that I’ve been expected to play in my life?

Sariah:

As you do refine yourself, you refine yourself and expand at the same time
I loved that image. I’m very visual, and so I loved the idea of refining
and chiseling out who I am. And at the same time, I expand and I create
bigger shadows that God can walk in because I know who I am and I can stand
in that, I invite people into that. And so it’s a refining and it’s an
expansion at the same time. And every moment of every day, it gives you the
opportunity to refine yourself. And you’re going to be presented with
situations that you had no idea you were ever going to be presented with.
We can start with infidelity, we can start with the loss of a loved one. We
can start with even infertility. You can even say dealing with an ex-wife
or an ex spouse. You are going to be presented with so many different
things in your life. And every moment as you learn about you, you get to
refine and expand you and that sacredness and who you are.

Andrea:

Yup. What do you think about, a way that I have tried to articulate to my
listeners is that when we start to have experiences, circumstances come
that can feel like they’re tripping us up, I like to think of them as a
signal to myself that I am ready for deeper growth. And so it feels
actually even though I don’t like it. Really, come on? Not cheering,
another thing to work through. But in the end, I like framing it that way
like it’s an opportunity for me to go deeper and to become more of who I
am. It means that I am growing. It means that I am ready for expanding that
circle like you talked about. I want to hear your take on that.

Sariah:

The next level. So tell me again, just ask the simple question because I
was listening to your explanation?

Andrea:

Sure. So my question for you is how do you frame, when your clients come to
you and say, “I feel triggered,” or when they are presented with a new
circumstance, something new. Let’s say one of their children is really
struggling or whatever, and it’s opening up some things that they thought
maybe they had worked through. How do you frame that?

Sariah:

Yeah. Okay. So I love, and I say it a lot, when your body speaks, listen,
it’s a call to return to your sacred self. And I believe that your body is
a resonating cavity for truth. And when something is happening, so say your
child is struggling. For me, that goes two ways. They’re expressing to me
through their physical being that they’re hurting or that something is
going on. And then I get to practice listening to the call of my body and
standing in that without … I can speak personally because teenagers are
hard.

Andrea:

What an opportunity.

Sariah:

What an opportunity. Thank you. And it’s hard because I feel like a lot of
the growth that I’ve done, I’ve done that in relationship with my spouse,
but I haven’t practiced that with my children or with somebody else that I
love deeply in the role of mother. So I find a lot of my old programming
coming up with my son trying to prove to him that I’m a really great mom.
Why does he feel this way? What did I do to make you feel this way? I’m
uncomfortable with the way that you’re feeling, and so I want to make you
feel better. I find a lot of those old programmings coming up for my
children. It’s hard, I wish I had the answer really. And especially when I
talk about my children because if I did maybe I wouldn’t have the
experiences that I do with mine.

Sariah:

At the end of the day, even my stepchildren, I get to be reminded
constantly that every being is a sacred being. As I learn about my
sacredness, and I know that word sounds deep. But the understanding of my
value, nothing I do or don’t do changes the value of who I have. I am
whole, I am whole. And if I can hold myself as whole, then I can see others
as whole. Andrea, I don’t know if I’m answering your question correctly.
But when I’m triggered, I get to practice holding myself sacred. I get to
continue to refine who I am, and I get to have the opportunity to see
others and hold them as sacred as well. And at the end of the day, it is
all about love.

Sariah:

And as you talk about, like you said, your clients have a hard time
receiving. For me, that’s a closure of cells, that’s a closure of heart.
That’s a pushing away of your breath because your breath is something that
you can be receiving from your higher power and is a gift of love and gives
you the opportunity to love. And as you can see other people as sacred and
you can hold them and your heart open with love, that will be the
experience that you have in life. And it doesn’t make it easy, but at the
end of the day, for me it all is a call to love. I don’t think I answered
your question.

Andrea:

I could not agree more. I really do believe that we are given opportunities
all the time to practice again and again, and again being who we actually
are. It’s who we actually are, and we are just being reminded opportunities
to be with ourselves and to love ourselves. Now, a question I have for you
Sariah is I have a lot of clients and listeners who have experienced some
kind of breach of trust in their marriages. Many of them want to stay. Many
of them, they can see their spouse’s earnest efforts to try to regain
trust. What I teach in that regard is that it’s not on my clients to go and
kind of be the babysitter of things, it’s on the person to become a
trustworthy person, that that’s their work to become a trustworthy, safe
person.

Andrea:

But something that I see a lot is such fear of they know that there’s a
part of them that feels true where they know that it’s okay to step back
in. But then that fear and tightness and closing off can be very, very
loud. And so how do you recommend for people who are wanting to be more
present in their relationships and are finding it very difficult, how do
you help people with that?

Sariah:

I love this because as you said earlier, in betrayal I believe that there
are two sort of betrayals. One is, yes, the betrayal of our spouses in
their breaking of the commitment that they did right in marriage, but also
the betrayal of ourselves and the mistrust of ourselves. I have a lot of
single clients who are even looking to get into another relationship. And
they come to me and they say, “I don’t think I can trust again, I just
don’t think I can trust again.” And I love this because you don’t have to
worry about them or trusting them. What you need to worry about is trusting
yourself and staying present because your body will tell you if there is
safety, then you get to step into safety and you get to let that truth be
real.

Sariah:

You get to let the truth of recovery be truth because that’s hard. And you
get to let the truth of somebody loving you, you get to let them love you.
So that acceptance of relying on your body to speak truth to you and the
trust that comes from that. I don’t know if you’ve ever read, I think the
book is called How to Not Fall in Love with a Jerk. Have you heard of that
book before?

Andrea:

Fascinating.

Sariah:

I think I just pulled it up. So I’m just going to pull it up really fast so
that I can say the right name. It is How to Avoid Falling in Love with a
Jerk. In it, they have a relationship attachment model, and it’s kind of
like a radio dial. You get to know somebody, and the radio dial of the know
is high or gets lifted. And then after getting to know you or to know
somebody, then you start to trust them. The trust follows know, and then
from trust follows rely. So you know, you trust, and you rely, and then
next to commit. So you have the stair step down from know, to trust, to
rely, to commit. And then in a relationship, it’s a physical touch. That’s
what should come after all of that. But I love this model in my own
relationship with my own self because that’s what I feel like recovery is.
It’s a relationship that you have to build with yourself again because you
have betrayed yourself.

Sariah:

And so it’s stepping into getting to know yourself, getting to understand
the language that your body is speaking to you. From that, you begin to
trust your body again, and that’s who you need to trust. When you step into
your home again after being separated, when you step in to say, yes, I’m
going to work on this marriage. And I’m not doing it with my eyes and my
binoculars magnifying you and being able to trust you while you check these
boxes that I set for you. No, no, no. It is I will trust myself and then I
will rely on my body to speak truth to me constantly as I am here and
present in this moment. And then I will commit to myself, I will commit to
listening to it and honoring it and trusting myself over anybody else
because that’s where the crazy steps in again.

Sariah:

So if you want to step into your marriage in a new way, then you have to do
things differently. And if you go back to trusting him over yourself, going
back to our very first section of this conversation, trusting yourself over
somebody else keeps the crazy at bay. But if you are looking into stepping
into your marriage and hoping that you can trust this other person again,
then you’re going to step back into crazy. The crazy is subdued, that’s the
word when you can trust yourself. And it starts here.

Andrea:

You put that perfectly, so true. And it becomes much less about the other
person and their behavior and so much more about being present to yourself
and then making decisions from that place not the other way round.

Sariah:

Moment by moment. And that’s what’s so powerful about that is because
getting married again, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, Andrea, but
getting married again was so scary because I had to let somebody love me
when I’ve been loved in the past in quotes, loved in the past, they’ve
taken their level way. And so if I’m getting married expecting this person
to love me, and that’s why I’m marrying them, then I’m setting up a high
expectation that I don’t have any control over. But if I step into this
marriage and I have myself, and I love with an open heart and I honor my
body moment by moment, my husband and I have had moments where I’m like I
don’t feel emotionally safe around you right now. My body’s stiff, I can’t
look at you in the eye. I’m speaking and you’re not listening to me, I’m
not going to talk until you become a safe person for me to talk to.

Sariah:

And moment by moment, I get to make decisions on whether or not I want to
be close to my husband or whether or not I want to be a way. And it’s not
from my fears, it’s in the present moment. And I come back to my feet on
the ground, and I feel the texture of the carpet. And I soften my body and
I breathe. And I’m like, okay, this is my reality right now. And I’m not
going to force anything different than this because this is my life at this
moment, and I can trust myself.

Andrea:

So powerful, so powerful.

Sariah:

It is.

Andrea:

And that can lead out the very next step that we choose to take, right?

Sariah:

That is where the next step comes from.

Andrea:

So powerful. So something that I do with my clients, you don’t know this,
but I’m going to tell you now, I learned from you. And sometimes when
clients get on the call, it’s like their breathing is so stiff. I can see
it, I can see where they’re at. And rather than going into a discussion and
talking, I take them through a breathing exercise right on the spot over
Zoom. And I use some of the words that I learned from you. And one of the
things specifically that I remember when I worked with you is not just
taking in breath but expanding ourselves through breathing out. And I
remember this description that you gave about a wet rag that you’re
squeezing the water out of. You are squeezing it, you’re using strength and
muscle to really get that water out. And that’s what we’re doing with our
lungs.

Andrea:

And I love thinking about the space that we’re creating when we do that. In
the last little bit here, this is what I’m hoping for. I want you in the
last, we’ve got about eight minutes or so. I want you to share with my
listeners some exercises that they can do to breathe and to teach them some
things on their own that they can do on their own. And then at the end of
that, I want you to tell my listeners where they can find you, how they can
find you to learn more. So go ahead, turning it over to you.

Sariah:

All right, you got it.

Andrea:

Thank you.

Sariah:

So breath is … Thank you, thank you very much. Breath is tricky when
we’re in trauma because you may have been told when you’re experiencing an
anxiety attack to calm your breath. Count to eight as you’re breathing in
and count to eight as you’re breathing out. I believe that that can cause
more anxiety because when you’re not breathing and then you’re told to
breathe, like if I was breathing, I wouldn’t be anxious. So breath is life.
And I say this, breath is life. And if you don’t know you’re breathing, how
much are you living? So the first thing that I would offer you, and Andrea,
you can see me, I close my eyes a lot. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this
today while I’m talking to you.

Sariah:

I really try to feel my body. I believe that breath is, so breath is an
element of air, which is the element of your heart chakra. And so when I
speak the words that are coming out of my mouth, I’m very aware of, and
they’re coming from my heart. So I’m giving this to you from me, from my
sacred self. I believe that the most important thing that you can start
introducing into your life at this moment is to become aware of yourself.
And for me, that’s been three tools that I use that I teach, feel the earth
beneath you, soften your body and breathe. And what that means is at any
given moment, you are connected to a solid foundation, whether that be the
floor of your home, even if you’re on the second floor. Whether that be on
a mountain top or even in an airplane, there is something beneath you that
you can let your body rest into.

Sariah:

You are held, and you do not need to hold yourself up. The anatomical
alignment for most of our physical structures is created in a way that our
bones stack. The perpendicular line that our body makes to earth creates a
perfect 90-degree angle, and you are held. And so feeling the solid
foundation of the earth beneath you gives you the opportunity to find
safety in your body and in this moment because the safest place you will
ever be is within the walls of your own skin. And after you feel the solid
ground beneath you, you can allow your body to soften. You may not
recognize that you’re clenching your glutes or holding in your stomach or
tightening your jaw. And just by recognizing these places of tightness, you
trust that the earth is there and that you have yourself. And you can just
give permission, it’s not a force, give permission to let go.

Sariah:

For me, this visually creates space in between myself and allows for more
breath to be accepted and more life to be lived, and my life to be lived in
this moment. Whether that be a positive, happy, joyous moment or whether
that be a moment of please God, don’t let this be truth, truth. But the
more that you practice being with yourself in your daily life, you’re
cooking dinner, you’re having a conversation with your girlfriends, nobody
needs to know that you’re doing this at all. The more that you can check in
with yourself there, the easier it will be to check in with yourself when
you’re in those moments of trauma and those moments of chaos. Your anxiety
is a way your body is talking to you but lack of breath is a way your body
is communicating. And so just recognize that your breaths are shallow,
recognize that you’re in your head.

Sariah:

Don’t try to control anything because that’s opposing forces. Soften and
breathe and let the truth of your reality to be and your breath will on its
own naturally calm down. When you breathe, you might cry. Your heart is the
love program, and the demon is grief. And we hold onto our griefs by not
breathing because it hurts so much. Breath is cleansing. And when you begin
to find a solid ground beneath you and trust that there’s safety in your
body, your body begins to unravel, and you can soften. And your breath will
cleanse you of your grief so that your breath can be even more accepted and
you can experience even more love.

Andrea:

Just beautiful. And it’s taking me back to when I worked with you. And I
consider that for myself, it was like a sacred time each week when I would
come. And I cried I’m pretty sure every single time. When I would connect
with myself, I remember just crying, just crying and letting myself feel. I
just listening to you just want to say you’re just a very powerful, just a
beautiful person, just a beautiful person. I hope all of you can hear the
love that just oozes out of Sariah. You can’t be around her and not feel
it. She really loves people, cares about people and has done the work to
where she can do what she’s doing. She’s done the internal work to where
she can be this light to so many people. So thank you for being you, for
being here. I want you to go ahead and tell people where they can find you.

Sariah:

Yeah. The easiest place I always say is Instagram. But I know that during
trauma sometimes Instagram is not a fun place to be. If few are on
Instagram, you can find me at sariah.bastian. I don’t know if you have
links underneath your podcast, so we can link that. But also you can just
email me, I would really love to connect with people one-on-one and
personally. My email is sariah@backpocketyoga.com. But if you’re not ready
for that conversation yet, you can find a little bit more about me and my
program at my website backpocketyoga.com. I’ll tell you really fast, I know
you have to go. But my company is called Back Pocket Yoga because as I
began working with people, they would tell me, “I just wish I could put you
in my back pocket.”

Sariah:

And I was like flattered, but at the same time I don’t want to be in your
back pocket. So my idea or my intention behind that is that everything that
I teach you, you have with you in your back pocket. You always have the
earth beneath you, you are always with your body and you are always
breathing. So everything that I teach you, you have within yourself to
create.

Andrea:

Amazing. So powerful, so powerful. Thank you so much for being here. And I
look forward to hearing from my listeners. I know that they’ll love you,
that they’ll love this episode. And yes, just thank you so much, it was
very powerful.

Sariah:

Thank you.

Andrea:

Thank you for being here.

Sariah:

I feel honored that you asked me, so thank you.

Andrea:

You bet. I’m honored to have you on. All right, I will see you all next
week. Thank you for listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast. If you
would like to be kept in the know about upcoming free classes, new podcasts
episodes, and other ways of working with me, go subscribe to my weekly
email. You can subscribe at andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/. Again,
it’s andreagiles.com/lies-about-infidelity/. I will see you next time.