E397 | Rupda: Somatic healing, self-awareness & building meaningful connections

0:28Welcome back everyone to the European VCBZ Podcast. everything around how she works with founders and VCs and executives around the self work. It is the most honest conversation. You can really in this conversation feel why Ruta is such an incredible guide to have with you on a journey like this. So I really hope you'll listen and tune into this episode because it is incredibly important work for anyone in the ecosystem. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did making it.

1:01Tear down this wall. It's more than just an alliance. This is a union of values. Let's start acting. This show is not investment advice and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. Mike and Robda, welcome back to the European VC Podcast. Good to see you. Hi. Once again, but this time in a bit of a different format because the last time I spoke a bit, but this time I'll lean much more back and let you, Mike, take the lead and really dive deep with Rupda because you've worked with Rupda for a long time. You have her involved in the work you do with founders as well.

1:41And of course, also with the deep dive retreats we're doing. And you are much further on the path of self-development than I am. So I'm really just leaning back here and enjoying this show. And then I'll add in questions along the way when there's something that I cannot keep myself from asking. Yeah, definitely jump in. I think the last time the four of us talked about the retreat, I think we missed a bit on the background of Rupta. And just to go deeper into this, which is why we said let's do the follow up together. Before we start, maybe just setting the stage, because I would really love to hear more from Rupta.

2:16But I think what really got us into the work are the benefits, right? I mean, to your point, Andreas, I've been working with Rupta for a long time, but I think it's good to set the stage as to, like, how do I feel now? And what are the key benefits? Because it's really around having more energy, feeling more connected, feeling more gratitude, you know, more focus, and overall also more purpose. And to start setting the stage with this, I think it's important for people, like, why should I care? Why should I care about the work if you feel you don't have any problems? And we're going to go into this in depth, and I'm glad we have the time now to really talk for almost an hour.

2:56So, Rupda, let's just really go a bit more into your background because I love your story and how you got into this work. So tell us a bit more about you, how you grew up, and what got you into the work. Hi, thanks, Mike, and also Andres for having us back on. I love our last talk. yeah I just felt it went way beyond where I thought we were going to go and I love that the openness and the unknown. The entry into this work was really of course by personal experience and we don't enter of course into trauma work I think naturally unless there's a direct experience there. I've come to find out by the way that we all have different layers of what trauma really is in growing up in our environment.

3:44Everyone has different degrees of it. So the understanding around trauma itself is starting to get updated in people's, yeah, understanding in their brain. What is trauma, my definition? Mine is very extreme because when I was born, I was given away at birth. And that already in that moment was in a way when a baby's nervous system is pulled away from the mother's nervous system, there's no regulatory to go to because they put the baby immediately on the mother's chest and the baby can start to regulate. But already from conception, she was homeless and living on the streets, so her nervous system was very rattled and dysregulated.

4:30And so she wasn't able to have this baby as a homeless teenage girl, and the baby was given away for nine months until she was able to come back and get me. And when she did, she took a decision months later to go to London. And I think that was another impact moment for her. I think it was about a year and a half then where she had a nervous breakdown in the snow on the streets of London. Her money was stolen, all her money, and her passport. and then the baby, myself, at one and a half, was taken away for another six months. I don't really have a recollection of these two moments of being taken away.

5:16But if you work somatically, of course, it's in the nervous system, and that's why sometimes I don't even know or need to know the story of an individual's upbringing. I can work through the body. But the one that, of course, I did remember was when I was five and I was taken away. My mom left me at boarding school in Oxford, and I was there for a couple of years. And that was the one I really remember. That's the full kind of visual and also somatic reaction that I had watching her driving away. And of course, that also set me up with many imprints of beliefs that I'm not good enough, I'm not lovable and damaged goods.

5:58So the first seven years were so heavily sort of traumatizing, if I'm really honest, I didn't talk. Yeah, I often speak about that. I didn't really even share this until recently, until the last year that I actually didn't speak for the first seven years, because there was so much shame around the fact that I didn't speak. Now, as a trauma therapist, and the more I work with helping people to sort of open up these layers of shame as well, I find myself really exposing this area of my life where I've kind of kept in sort of privacy. And I see the value in it. Now, I sometimes share in my work, you don't have to have the big trauma, you know, upbringing.

6:48You could have a missing parent, a missing, you know, a connection, a feeling of someone not being present for you. You can have someone not validating you, assuring you, making you feel safe, holding you, giving contact, saying I love you. You know, if these things are not there, that also can be traumatizing for a little kid and can set them up into all sorts of personalities and how they get love. We can talk more about that later. But what I try to let people know in the retreats and the trainings is that, you know, if I can get through heavy trauma and come to this place of relaxation and regulation and stabilization, then you can too.

7:30That's what I'm hoping to impart when I share that story. It doesn't matter what degree of trauma, there's still possibilities. The door's not completely closed. What I think is also very unique about your upbringing is you grew up in a community, that you already grew up as a young child meditating for hours every day. You know, back in the days, mindfulness wasn't really a thing, right? And now many people talk about meditation, mindfulness, obviously, something popular. Maybe also touch base on that a bit, because I think not only do you speak from experience, obviously, but also you have a very unique background that gave you a lot of different tools as well.

8:11I'd love for you to elaborate there a bit. What I really truly believe was a pivotal moment was when I was seven. I was in the mid-70s, and my mother did take me to that Tibetan Buddhist commune up in Scotland called Semilin. It still exists to this day. And having those monks who are Tibetan and who didn't speak any English, I was nonverbal. They were nonverbal. It was a perfect storm for establishing a connection that I didn't have in the boarding school. Everybody was twice my age and I was in many different violent situations that happened to me. And the extreme of contrast of being in this monastery, this Tibetan monastery, was feeling held, feeling compassion, feeling safe.

9:01That was really important to establish so early on in contrast. And the meditation was a big, big support to that because it helped me immediately to develop a foundational place inside myself in this sort of fearful, you know, anxious kid that was shut down, withdrawn to the world to start finding ways to kind of regulate. I didn't know that's what I was doing, but that is what I was doing. And I didn't know that all these Tibetan Buddhists were showing me love in action. And, you know, that was a game changer for me because it really saved my life. And, you know, I could have been on the street homeless as well with a kind of level of shock and trauma I experienced.

9:50So maybe then let's go into, I think, the effects that we see in society. high stress and you know that we experience especially in this industry with founders working long hours, investors as well. So we talk about anxiety and we talk about loneliness, we talk about even extremes like burnout, depression. So there's so many effects here that we see in society. I'd like to start right there. How do you work with it? What do you see and where do you start? Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's prevalent. It's everywhere. I mean, I'm fortunate enough to travel the last decades in many different countries, many different continents, culturally seeing it showing up everywhere.

10:39So it doesn't really matter where you are, especially if you're in the Western adapted kind of mind where you work. obviously if you're living in the Amazon it's a different thing and the high functioning high stress and the burnouts and the overwhelms it's prevalent definitely prevalent and then I just to speak a bit to that you know the irony is when I get some of these sort of you know I have been working with CEOs over the last decade or so in different touch points where they come and get one-on-one sessions, and they have depression, and they have isolation, they have, you know, thoughts about low self-esteem, unworthiness, and what's the whole point, what am I doing?

11:27You know, they get to very dark places in themselves, and they're at the top of that, you know, supposedly big heap where everyone is trying to go, which is the, you know, the big bank account and the big job and the big house and, you know, all of the bigness of what is perceived is going to give us that happiness and they're feeling depressed or suicidal. It really is a testament to it's not out there. And I do understand that people really want to make good impact in the work that they do and make a difference in the corporations and the companies and the organizations and different businesses.

12:10It absolutely matters. If that is at the expense of disconnect to yourself, you're going to feel lonely or isolated or depressed or burnt out along the way. So to do that differently means that you need to include self. And many people since childhood have not learned how to include self because what they've done in order to get love recognition to be seen to be heard, to look competent or the winner or the achiever, is to abandon aspects of themselves, which is parts that were not loved or recognized or rejected. And then they kind of adapt into this false self of how they need to achieve. And then by doing so, they separate from parts of themselves.

13:03And then they go out there and they go, look at me. Look what this amazing job I've got, amazing car I've got. Look who I'm working with, which is great. It's all great. But if that becomes your identity, that outer identity, and it's not connected to the truth of who you are, you will feel the pain of that separation. And no wonder then we have extreme in isolation and depression, especially in men. And then the other side of that is the disconnection also creates It's a disconnection to the body. And when I say to the body, it doesn't matter if you're doing extreme sports and going to the gym every day.

13:41It's just knowing how we overwhelm and overrun our own bodies to the point that we get burnout. So a big key in some of this is awareness, self-awareness, and including ourselves, inclusivity. Yeah, happy to speak more to that. But does that kind of give you a sense of how people end up situation. I think what's interesting is to, for instance, I feel that oftentimes people don't even know how disconnected they are. And I'll give you an example because I experienced it myself. So what I would say is that I've had for a very long time, I've had a poor relationship with anger. I always saw anger as something negative, right?

14:29Something which I didn't feel much. and also working with you and others i really got more in touch with that energy what i noticed is how much life energy comes from that place so anger is obviously something that can be expressed in bad ways but it has extremely powerful effects like boundaries just feeling that energy in your body of suck no this is a clarity you know a clear yes a clear no and the problem with let's call it numbness in society is actually quite profound. And I don't think many people realize how numb they've become. So I talk from my own experience, because looking back, I realize now how I've been distracting myself with work, how I've been already like phone podcasts, you know, and that all serves a purpose.

15:21But at the same time, like, you know, the level of energy I feel now is fundamentally higher. The level of connectiveness and gratitude and all of this comes from a place that energy is flowing more freely in the body. So I would love to hear you talk a bit more about numbness in particular because a burnout is already an extreme case where people know, okay, they've clearly gone too far. And if you're really in depression, you know clearly you've gone too far. So they know they have to start doing something. I think the real question is you're not there yet, but you're somewhere, you're disconnected, and you don't even realize you're disconnected.

16:01And I feel that's a big part of the audience and me included where I think it's a massive benefit to talk a bit more around signals there and your experience. Absolutely. You know, I want to just give a little bit of a starting point of how that comes to be. And classic is that, you know, growing up in England, you know, you're taught very, very early on as a little child not to be too much. And you learn how to turn off your emotions. and I often use the analogy of the little kids two years old playing in the sandpit together you see them in their full expression of their emotions and then over time they are told to quiet down or to pipe down or to slow down and to keep everything down and including feelings especially ones that are not sociably acceptable and I understand we don't want to walk around I'm just screaming at everyone.

17:01But what then happens is we start to reject those feelings ourselves and we start to deny them and we start to not allow any space for them. And that becomes very painful because we split off from those feelings, but we're not always aware of it because we want the approval of mom, dad, or the school system. We want that kind of where good girl, good boy, or we rebel, yeah, and then shut down differently. You know, that's the other extreme. But by shutting down our feelings, you know, we kind of learn to navigate strategy in our head and less orientated towards our hearts and what we feel. And the pain of feeling also, that disconnect, is too excruciating for some people.

17:49So they also split off from that. And now imagine if a kid has a depressed mom or an alcoholic dad or something's out of control in their environment, and the pain of that is too much for them to bear. So then now they learn another way of splitting off from those feelings, right? So it becomes a learned behavior. And then if they see their parents numbing out in different ways, whether it's through alcohol or workaholism and so on, there are many different ways people numb out. Now, sadly, today you see parents walking with kids, and they're on their phone and they're not really with their kid.

18:24So the kid is already learning that behavior of disconnecting. So they learn how to, we all have, learn how to kind of pipe down and hold back our emotions. And then through conditioning, meaning the environment you grew up in, the school system, the home, maybe religious temples, whatever it is, you learn more and more what's okay, what's not okay. Because our need to belong is so strong, we compartmentalize our feelings. But we do it so much so that we forget to even sometimes allow ourselves to feel even vulnerability of tears. I just had a client yesterday on a one-on-one, and he hadn't cried in 10 years.

19:07And that's just shocking to me. Because remember, tears are natural. They're natural to our humanness, but they're also a natural release in the nervous system. They're not wrong, but we got the information early on that it's wrong. And I can't tell you how many times you see parents saying, stop crying, and it happened a lot generations ago, but it still happens today. So if you then switch off that whole thing, you start to numb out from feelings. Now this person I was talking to yesterday, he's a founder and he's founded two very very successful companies but because he's switched off from his feelings and he can't feel tears he can't feel when his girlfriend's crying he can't hold space for her because he can't connect to them himself but also he can't feel the joy of his success so he can't feel the fulfillment and the contentment of wow how beautiful this bed of garden that I've created because he's switched off from feelings.

20:18So you don't only switch off from the bad ones now, you're switching off from the good ones. So that deeper love and connection and trust starts to become a far away, distant, you know, concept, you know, and not something that people have embodied. So it was a strategy is in essence, you know, and how to survive in an environment that was saying it was not okay to be too much. Yeah. And I feel a lot of founders, investors will read a lot of books trying to help themselves, right? I mean, we're great at that. But it's a very limited approach, right? And it's so different than like really doing the work and especially working with the body somatically, you know, and working with you, Rupda.

21:03So I think what is amazing about you is that you've been doing this now for what? more than 30 or 40 years even, right? And really the group work and using various different tools also in the way you do this because you work somatically, you work with the body, but you also do land of constellation work and all kinds of techniques that I find very unique. So maybe you can talk a bit more about a few of those techniques before you go a bit deeper also into the open work and other areas because tell us a bit more about somatic work. Why is it important? When I see work, you're so switched on, you'll see like, hey, the shoulder of that person is tense, right?

21:42The leg is shaking. You notice the tiniest details. Tell a bit more, why does that matter? What do you pay attention to? How do you do this work? Absolutely. I know I've said this a multitude of times, but it's really important to get the essence of how I work. I was in a conference in Mexico City a few months ago with all practitioners. and doctors and I said to them I work through the four centers of intelligence the head the heart the belly and there's a fourth one you know which is I refer to as the unknown you know which is constantly informing us and I said I'm standing here in front of you all now and I first have to work through the head center to get your agreement and your awareness and your understanding otherwise I get your resistance and I get the what the bleep is this person talking about you know so first i have to go through the intelligence of that head center which is is it has its place obviously it's it's where most of the western culture has you know uh focused its time and energy on and then i drop into the belly center which is the for the body and i do that because that's relatable to people even if they can't feel and they've been numb for years at At least we can say we have a body.

23:03And I can even put my hand up and say, who here carries tension? And, you know, mostly 90 % of the room will say yes. And then there's something relatable for them. And where they carry the tension, you know, is important because the body holds. The body holds so much through the stresses of the day. And it's carrying that. Through that, I'm able to give people an understanding that even if you minimize your stressors or you minimize your triggers and activations or your traumas, it's going to show up in the body. so if you think you're fine and dandy you know if the body is you know giving you symptoms or you're having a hard time sleeping at night or you feel disassociated or disconnected a hard time slowing down and being still and present when your partner's looking at you you're impatient you're losing your cool your temper I would say hello hello we've got something to work here with because through the body we also release yeah even though we hold in the body that good users will be released through the body.

24:08And then if I can get you to come into the body, then now we're getting closer to the heart center, the intelligence of the heart, which is the big transformer. It works beautifully in cohesion with the unknown, which is the biggest one. But for people who have spent years of numbness, I'll take the person I gave a one-on-one yesterday with the founder. He asked me, how do I get out of this numbness? So I propositioned him in the very process that you guys have done, the deep dive retreat. And I told him that if you were to sit in a circle with people, sharing an opening about their feelings, it's going to touch something in you.

25:01Nine times out of ten, unless you're on the spectrum, then we're going into another zone. And I want to give deep respect to people who have Asperger's and are on the spectrum because the way that they do feelings is another set of parameters that I would work with. Yeah? But to speak to the general masses, when you sit in a circle and you hear what people are sharing, they start to open and they start to dare to go to places and they start to open and feelings start to come. If you're one of those people sitting there in that numbness, resonance happens. That's what the heart does. It creates resonance.

25:40It creates empathy. It creates compassion. And the mind starts to get activated. And even to the point that it can say, I want some of that. I want to feel that. They can get excited and go, wow, I want that experience. You can get inspired, turned on. And that's why I find that doing group therapy work, which is what I was raised in in the last 48 years, is more powerful than anything. Because, yes, I do one-on-one therapy. I have a big respect for that. And actually not everybody is ready for group therapy. and those that are have seen in transformation in such short time, you know, than I have when I hold them in a one-on-one.

26:29Can I ask you, Rub, about an experience at the retreat we did in September? Because I'm trying here, I'm thinking many of us are a bit less understanding of what does it mean to get inside your body, what is actually happening, what is this connection between the mind and the feelings and what we have in our bodies. Even having been there myself, I would say I didn't feel that much in the body in terms of the body releasing. I did, but to be clear, not as much as, Because I wanted to bring this situation up where we have an individual that is really facing trouble in sharing openly. But who you then recognize what this person needs is to let the body talk.

27:31And then you go over and assist the person. And then you see this incredibly powerful physical release. and shaking of the body that I've never seen in my life. I'm sure I speak for the whole group. We've never seen anything like that. It was as powerful as any shamanistic ritual you would imagine in a Hollywood movie. And it was playing out there right in front of us. And it was so powerful for the person and for everyone there. And when I say I didn't feel much in the body, by way of that, It was in no way to that level for me. But I could definitely recognize all of this in me as well, happening, but just to a lesser degree.

28:20Could you talk a bit about this? What is it that happens here where the body overrides what your mind can do, so to say? I want to say that the release, when the body does a release, we call it an involuntary movement in the trauma work. And if we give it the right conditions and the right environment, and of course the right holding, which is what we do in the deep dive retreat, so that the body can feel safe, you can feel safe, to go to that place. And then if I'm working with you, I can work with access points, you know, working through the body, and sometimes it's a question that will activate or trigger something that will take the body into a movement, and then all of a sudden starts to do a release.

29:08And the release can look like the body's shaking, It can look like all of a sudden an outburst of laughter or tears. It's completely unknown in how the body will start to do its release. And this, if you're not a trauma therapist, will be kind of a shock to the brain because you're like, what is going on here? But the intelligence of the body, when given that right environment, can do repair. and as a trauma therapist that is of course I'm more than a trauma therapist because I've done years of this group therapy work and I do other bodies of work that I bring into this but that piece in helping people to work through the body the cognitive mind doesn't fully understand but the intelligence of the body knows exactly what to do it knows when to yawn when it needs oxygen yeah it knows when to you know a stretch when it needs us do a stretch it knows how to give you signals and signs for what it needs next it knows how to tell you when it's hungry and also knows how to release when we give it the conditions and sadly because we're so up tight and contracted and restricted and tense and you know because of work and and little or no space for our bodies to actually have this rest and release.

30:30Actually, I always say it the other way around, release and rest, because that's what starts to happen to the body after the parasympathetic comes up and then, yeah, after a big release. So the good news is what you've just shared, is that you don't actually have to know how to do it because the body knows how to do it. You, of course, ideally want to work with someone that can support you in going there. And then because we take this into a group setting, in this case with the deep dive, you can be sitting, observing someone, witnessing someone, and intellectually might not understand what the bleep is going on, but you have resonance, your body has resonance going, wow, I relate to this, I'm holding this.

31:17And that's the power of the group dynamics. That's when it does more than just a therapist suggesting something, when you see it in real time in action in front of you. So the body wisdom is profound. And with the right therapist, they will give space and time for that body, let's say in this case, to shake without stopping it, knowing that there's a repair happening. And with the right guidance, they can really bring it into completion. Sorry, go ahead. yeah it's just to to double click because indeed with the trauma work i wanted to go a bit deeper there of like what what's happening and why it's so important because there is actually many and i think maybe you should speak to specific situations where we think we can solve everything here but the problem is that like even if you want to change something in your life like change a habit right it's extremely powerful to let the body experience it first to then initiate that change it's just one example like andreas mentioned the example of a full-on like trauma release so it's a lot of tension and and things leaving your body which can relate to childhood trauma can relate to something else entirely you know or just tension related to rejection that's been building up for 10 years or whatever it is you know you do not even have to rushly understand it the point is after a release like this you feel this lightness a lot of anxiety or or tension or other emotions that you didn't get out of before suddenly are gone right so something that you may have wanted to solve with a therapist or reading books or you're trying to figure out here may suddenly just be gone and and and you know you have a different access point to initiate change and i think that's why i want to go a bit deeper there also when when you work with people you give them those somatic experiences essentially what you're doing is you're giving them the chance not only to release right but to really change a habit to really like you know overcome a trauma which can be a small one or a big one so to to zoom a bit deeper into the why this is so powerful because to andrea's point i think for the audience and for us it's still something a bit of abstract you know that we're looking at is like and and the mind wants to understand and i think the whole point is that it's not about understanding this right it is it is around accepting the science behind why this is so important to actually address the somatic system in the body and how this can bypass and you know they say it's like whatever 10 years of therapy potentially or multiple years of therapy that you could have within four days working with a somatic system right so that just to double click a bit more on that.

34:05Yeah, absolutely. And I know that when I'm working, especially with founders and VCs, because they take on such long work hours and such big kind of stresses of what they're holding, that there's a lot of tension in their body, even if they go to the gym and they do a lot of sports. Sometimes they're more tense than someone who, you know, who is actually just, you know, not doing all of that extreme sports. And I want to speak to that because sometimes it feels like a discharge for them because they're holding so much to go out there and ride a bicycle or pump weights or do whatever it is just so that they can kind of come back to the body.