Maggie Reyes:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I have the most amazing guest for this week, and we are going to do something so unthinkable. We are going to be talking about stress cycles and stress. And sexy. Woohoo. That’s what’s about to happen right now. So my guest today is Maria Victoria Alena.
She is first of all a leader in feminist wellness. She is a somatic and cognitive coach. She is a master coach. She has a bazillion initials after her name that I don’t fully understand all of them. So I’m gonna ask her to tell us what they all are. But she is somebody who is as delightful and is enthusiastic and has such a passionate zest for life as she is nerdy and science-full.
That’s not a word. We’re making it a word today, and I just can’t wait to dig into how it affects our marriages, how stress affects our lives, how women are taught to deny their own stress responses and how that affects us. So many things that I want all of you to know that I know. I always think every episode is life-changing episode.
That is the truth. And I know that this is a life-changing episode once you understand how stress is affecting your life and you don’t even know it. It’ll just give you a level of awareness that you will always have with you for the rest of your time. So welcome Maria Victoria
Maria Victoria Albina:
Hola.
Maggie Reyes:
Tell us who you are in the world. Please include some of your initials.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Okay, well, my primary identification is as Maggie Reyes biggest fan ever. Biggest fan ever. That’s it. That’s all you need to know. I wish you all could see her face. Look at that. Huge, amazing. Beat red, redder and redder. Every second.
I love it. Maggie Reyes, do you like the way I say your last name?
Maggie Reyes:
I do. So You’re Argentinian, right?
Maria Victoria Albina:
Yeah, but I’m one of the good ones.
Maggie Reyes:
So you have to immediately declare that not culture. We have to like explain some things so Argentinians don’t have to. Best reputation.
Maria Victoria Albina:
The people of Buenos Air, the city of Buenos Aires don’t have a good reputation cause it’s like they’re often pretentious jerks.
But I’m from a po, like I’m from a small town. For the kind from the provinces, we’re kind, we’re loving, we’re sweet, we’re good people. For the most part, we’re not not just Buenos hashtag not just Buenos Aires.
Maggie Reyes: So if you speak English and you don’t speak Spanish, and you’ve ever found an accent sexy, like if you hear an Australian speak English, or if you hear a British person, person speak English, this is how the Argentinian accent is to me.
As a Spanish speaker, I’m like, keep talking.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Would you like me to introduce myself in Spanish? You want me to do it?
Maggie Reyes:
Okay, good.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Okay, good. So other than that title, which is an accolade, which is a title that I will forever hold as the most is number one fan. I am a functional medicine nurse practitioner.
I am a master certified coach, as you said, and I practice somatic and cognitive based coaching. I hold a master’s degree in public health and I’m the host of the Feminist Wellness podcast. I use she/her pronouns, and I live on occupied Muncie territory, also known as the Hudson Valley of New York State.
Damn, it’s words. It’s a lot of stuff I got. I’m a nerd.
Maggie Reyes:
I love that about you. I’m studying continuing education. What it turns us on.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Oh my god, it is so sexy.
Maggie Reyes:
Really. Literally right before our call I was working on something for, something I’m doing on women’s empowerment. It’s continuing education class that I’m taking and I’m like, I love it so much.
Maria Victoria Albina:
It’s so good. So I was just coaching before our call in Anchored, which is my six month coaching program, and someone brought up, so our focus is overcoming codependency, perfectionism and people pleasing and someone brought up how they, there was this person that they like kind of thought was hot and they were like flirting and they had this moment where all their good girl training, all their Catholic training, this was a fellow Kuana actually came up and she was like, I’m not supposed to think and feel this way, and then started like fell into this, you know, tumble like we do of questioning herself, questioning her feelings, questioning all of it.
And what we got to, and I promise this will come back around in just a second. But you know, a D H D and also high context cultures, right? Latinas will take you from, if you wanna go from A to B, you’re gonna go take a tour through Z and 1, 2, 3. Anyway, what we realized was that what she had was actually a competency crush.
Competency crush. I love that. It’s like a term my friends and I have used forever where you’re like, yo, check her out. She knows all about neuroscience. Damn. Or like, Ooh, yes. Have you seen their carpentry skills? That is so hot. Like I’m not sexually attracted to the human. I don’t wanna romantic engagement, but like damn those skills.
Maggie Reyes:
Oh, a Competency. Competency Crush. I am here for it. So right before we started talking, we were preparing for the call and we both have a friend in common named Sarah Fisk. Sarah Fisk has been on the podcast. We will link to her episode in the show notes so that you can all discover the magic and Wonder Tok. She’s the best and I have a competence.
Maria Victoria Albina:
This a hundred percent Judith Gaton too. Come on now. Brenda Lom. Let’s just name all the kickass Latinas in our Life Code School community. There’s so many. There’s so many.
Maggie Reyes:
We love you all. We love you all. If we didn’t, if we didn’t mention but you’re in our heart.
Maria Victoria Albina:
We just can’t spend the whole hour naming Latinas, though we could. It’s your show. Do what you want. But people probably wanna hear about the stress activation cycle, the nervous system, and polyvagal theory, just casually saying, I do. Just casual chat. Like no big deal.
Maggie Reyes:
So what, here’s what I want you to know as I, as I started to talk to you about this, and I wanna hear, I want everybody to hear this.
So the reason that I wanted to have Maria Arian to talk about this very specifically, because obviously she could talk to us about all the things, right? Is because what I have found. Um, I started my coaching journey. On the cognitive side and then went to the somatic side when I wanted to be able to coach on sexual issues.
And what happens is I did a training with an amazing coach named Lela Martin, who when she was teaching us about sex taught, taught us about trauma awareness and the body. And you can’t, if somebody, if you’re trying to troubleshoot in somebody’s marriage, a sexual issue, you can’t do that without talking about stress or without talking about trauma.
Like somewhere in there we must discuss what stress looks like. So in that journey, for me, I felt so unaware of how stress was deeply impacting so many parts of my life and my reactions and all of those things that I was like, people need to know, right. that, and that’s why I wanted to do a whole episode and really dig a little deeper in some, in some of the physiological things that are happening.
Because in the Marriage MBA, I teach a whole workshop that I call stress cycle awareness. I want everyone to understand what a stress cycle is and how it shows up in your marriage, how it shows up in different aspects of your relationship. So stress cycle awareness is just something that I have a very, uh, high affection for because it’s like once you understand how much it’s impacting you, you start to create your liberation from so powerful.
So I just wanted to give you the background of why we’re talking today. You and people listening. So, um, Maria has a podcast episode on her podcast, which we will also link to in the show notes. It’s episode 17 of the Feminist Wellness Podcast. It’s called Stress Response Cycle. So everyone, I printed this out and I took notes.
There’s some questions I wanna ask her about this. And as I was reading the notes, I could not stop laughing with some of the examples of the illustrations of the stories that she gives. And we’re not gonna use every single story that she gave. So we are gonna link to it in the show notes and it’s like we are going to make stress fun to the point where you’re going to want to listen to that episode also.
Maria Victoria Albina:
I love it. Wait, can I ask, what is your favorite of my super goofy examples?
Maggie Reyes:
Oh my gosh. That you talked about. Growing up not knowing all of the English, like slang phrases, is terrible at it. And so in the, in this episode she talks about for, she spent her whole life saying, we will jump off that bridge when we get to it. and like for years and years, nobody corrected her. And then somebody finally said, it’s actually we’ll cross that bridge.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Oh my God. It’s so fatally fatalistically Latin American though, right? Like, Argentina’s just been such a hot mess for so long that it’s like, well, we’ll jump off that bridge when we get there.
That just made sense. Made sense to the worldview in which I was raised. Like, what else are you gonna do? But jump off
Maggie Reyes:
Right? It’s fine ideals. So the first thing we want you to know about stress is why we want you to understand why it works is because people die from stress related diseases, and you talked about this in your podcast, and now I wanna just hear whatever you wanna share about it. But you mentioned that at the latest report, at some point, it’s probably higher now. 110 million people die as a direct result of stress, not an indirect result. As a direct result of stress.
Like we’re dying from something. We don’t even know what it is. We never talk about it.
Maria Victoria Albina:
That’s wild, eh?
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah. So tell us why we should care about understanding stress,
Maria Victoria Albina:
So like you said, stress impacts every single area of our body, mind, body, spirit, our physiology, our mood, our energy, our desire, our cognitive function, right?
Like when we are under stress, we can’t think so goodly because we’re not supposed to biologically speaking, you know? And so, so I’ll, I’ll back up to say I came to coaching from functional medicine. I was a primary care nurse practitioner for many years in many different settings in the US and in the global south, and worked in primary care and started to really see the connections between mindset Stress, distress and trauma and our physiologic responses.
My focus was functional gastroenterology. So I dealt with tummy troubles and started to really see that the way my patients were chronically thinking about themselves in the world, thus keeping them in a physiologic stress response, right, because it’s part soma body, it’s part mind mindset.
There’s a feedback loop of back and forth. It was directly and intensely impacting their digestion, but also their thyroid function, also their menstrual cycle, also their skin health, right? Also their eyesight, also Their brain function. Their mood, their energy.
And it, and it makes logical sense when there is a stressor, when there is, something external or. Our internal perceived response to the world, our habitual chronic response to, and thoughts about the world and our place in it. Our body reacts like we’re being chased by a lion, right? Like we’re a gazelle on the Savannah of life and we are being chased.
Now let me ask you, Maggie Reyes, if you were being chased by a lion, would you want your body to digest a cheeseburger ?
Maggie Reyes:
No. I want all my energy going into running.
Maria Victoria Albina:
to fight, to fight, to getting the hell out of there, bopping that cat in the nose. We get symptoms of indigestion. We get heartburn, we get irritable bowels, we have bloating and gas.
Our thyroid is sluggish. Um, or you know, our periods are late or heavy or painful. On and on. And what has happened is that white settler colonialism in the patriarchy has led to this, this divorce between mind and body. I mean, we can start by saying, F you decart. Right? And we can start from there. That whole concept of mind body dualism.
There’s a doctor for the mind and a doctor for the body. And never the twain shall meet.
Maggie Reyes:
Oh, pause there. Pause. It is so important. Pause. So I just was interviewed on an Arizona radio station. Shout out if anybody’s listening to it. Listen to that. And we were talking about dealing with relationships and just in the course of what we were talking about, one of the things we talked about was getting help.
and in Latin culture especially, but I think in culture overall, we would not blink an eye. If I said, my knee hurts, I’m going to an orthopedist. You wouldn’t even register. You’d be like, oh, she went to the doctor. Like, whatever. You wouldn’t even think about it twice. But if I said I’m sad I think I need to see a psychiatrist.
Or a therapist or get a life coach or whatever. Like what, what, what? The disconnect Between honoring the body’s journey. To health and the mind, heart, whatever we wanna call it. Journey to health. Like in our culture. I know everyone listening to this podcast, guess it cuz you’re listening to the freaking marriage life coach podcast.
But just for us to just have in our mind that stigma that’s, that is very pervasive, I think it’s just that adds to the stress cuz then we don’t get help for the thing.
Maria Victoria Albina:
We don’t get help for anything.We just go also, you know, go back into martyr culture.
Which is a huge thing I talk about in talking about the ways that codependent thinking keeps us stuck in these chronic stress response cycles and keeps us our body stuck in stress is through believing what we’ve been taught, again in the patriarchy. That it is our role as humans, socialized as women to live as the martyr, as the savior, as the fixer, as the saint, and not in the wholeness of who we are.
Instead, we’re responsible for everyone and everything outside of ourselves and we source our value from. taking care of others, from putting them ahead of ourselves, which is an inherent, it’s that it is stressful to believe that you don’t matter as much as your family. That you don’t matter as much as strangers on the bus.
You don’t Right.
Maggie Reyes:
Or you don’t matter if you’re not producing something . If you’re not, you’re not good worker doing something for the family. If you’re not doing something, the extra thing for your boss. The extra thing for the team.
Maria Victoria Albina:
For sure.
Maggie Reyes:
We get into these stressful situations, right?
There’s the socialization, there’s how we internalize that socialization. Then we believe what we have to do, right? What I’ve experienced in, for myself and also in coaching my clients, is we get ourselves into the situation, but then we don’t know who we are without it right? So then we perpetuate it sometimes while resenting it, of course.
Like, but what, what, who would I be if I wasn’t this?
Maria Victoria Albina:
And part of that is yes, mindset, but also physiology. So ages zero to seven is approximately when our nervous system gets its setting. And it’s when we start to create these heuristics, these shortcuts in our mind and body with the goal of keeping us safe.
So if you were in a family where raised voices were joyful, right? It was celebration, it was, yay, everyone’s happy and loud. Then you hear loud voices and your brain and your body go to happiness. But if there were loud voices, because there was anger, where there was frustration, there was danger, then even a slightly raised tone or volume, a slightly a to a tone of voice that your nervous system registers as harsh.
We’ll lead your mind and body right into death and doom, aka, the lions are coming. We need to prepare the body by starting the stress response cycle because we’re about to be a lion snack, right? And so then we’re flooded with adrenaline norepinephrine, eventually cortisol, and our body’s ready for attack.
And if we don’t have the skills and tools, and most of us aren’t taught these skills and tools, so compassion, not judgment here, right? But when we don’t have those skills and tools to regulate our nervous system, which means to bring ourselves through that activation, that panicky moment or that collapsed moment of like, all I’ve ever heard is yelling.
It’s always been lions. I’m exhausted. I can’t even react. I just need to retreat. That’s called Dorsal Vegas, right? When we go into either one of those places, what we need are the skills and tools to bring our nervous system back online. And back into ventral vagal. And that’s the safe and social part of the nervous system where brain works well, thyroid, digestion, re everything works optimally.
And we can influence our mood and we can do thought work. Cause we can only really do thought work from ventral vagal.
Maggie Reyes:
Oh my gosh. I love that you said that. That was one of my hypotheses when I was in master coach training. And we were just discussing sort of the craft of coaching and things like that.
And I was like, well my hypothesis is the best time to do something. Like questioning your thoughts and analyzing them and things like that is from center. Absolutely. And some people, you know, it helps ’em to calm down to journal and I’m like, yes, dump all your thoughts somewhere when you’re upset out percent out.
But if we’re gonna do like a mathematical formula about our thoughts, right. That’s, we wanna do that when we can think more clearly.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Yeah. And that’s really physiologically only possible from ventral vagal. From that part of the nervous system. I love science. I know it’s so amazing and I love that the inter lap of, of science and spirituality and uh, right?
Like we’re all at the end of the day saying the same things.
Maggie Reyes:
Just through a different lens and, well, here’s something I’ve thought about, I wanna get your thoughts about. Is we practice a very sort of cognitive, behavioral inspired type of coaching where we have a thought, we have a feeling, we have an action.
we have a result and we question those thoughts and then we create new, new results and things like that. And I’ve really thought about the law of attraction, which. Thoughts in kind, create after, you know, thoughts in mind, create after they’re kind. So in the law of attraction, you think things and thoughts become things as Mike Dooley would say.
And in cognitive psychology, you think things, you create outcomes. A psychology would say, and I think about it like one big circle where there’s a point where they meet in the middle There’s a point where they’re completely far apart. They’re, they’re completely not me.But you, you go deep enough, long enough into each, any of these, the law of attraction traditions or the cognitive psychology traditions, and at some point your thoughts impact your experience.
Maria Victoria Albina:
I’m with you at that end point. That Our, uh, the way we are, you know, there’s, there’s a scientific evidence base for this using functional m r i, right, the way we perceive our environment changes our stress hormones. Changes the amount of cortisol in the body, the amount of endorphin, the amount of oxytocin, right?
If someone looks at you, let’s go back to that example of my client this morning. Who is flirting? If someone looks at you and you’re like, yum, you’re gonna get a little oxytocin, a little endorphin, right? Your story is impacting your physiology. Your physiology is impacting your story, right? And so, yes.
Maggie Reyes:
wait. Maria, Vito did not know this, but in the Marriage MBA, in the module on stress cycle awareness, literally I teach something called the Story State Cycle. And it is exactly what you’re saying because truth with a capital T will always present itself in different like shapes and names and faces, but it will always lead you to the same places.
Maria Victoria Albina:
I love that.
Maggie Reyes:
So the story state cycle is exactly that. It’s the story impacts the physiology. The physiology impacts the story. And we can have influence. We can enter that circle at any point. And create a new circle.
Maria Victoria Albina:
And I teach pretty much the exact same thing in Anchor. So we’re twinsies again.
Maggie Reyes:
Hi.
Maria Victoria Albina:
High five. That was so nerdy. I loved it. I love, we just gave each other a high five over computer on a podcast, on the internet, on a podcast even. Hey, what’s up nerds? Love it. But even that, right? Like I now think of nerd as the greatest compliment. So I smile, right? I feel good in my body.
I feel warm in my chest. A little like a energy of joy in my belly. But like ask me in sixth grade if Nodo is a compliment.
Maggie Reyes:
Oh, no. I would come home crying. I was an nerd then too. And and it shows. And, and I would come home crying.
Absolutely.We love that. And now we’re comforting each other. And your child know, it’s so tender, right?
Maria Victoria Albina:
Everyone else was just confused about what nerd means and how magnificent it is. Nerd is the best.
Maggie Reyes:
Agreed. And I know that the people listening to this podcast, my podcast listeners, they either are nerds or love nerds.
So we’re in good comfort. It’s all good here. It’s all good. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about the difference between the stress, the physiological stress, and the stressor. because this is something that you talk about. Um, when you, when you describe this, and I talk about it too, and I think people don’t fully understand.
There’s, here’s how I say it, and then you can tell me how you say it. Let’s say you get an email from your cousin, do the, you’re planning the wedding and something is off, whatever, and then you get a, I don’t know, a message alert from your boss and the report is due There’s an action we take in the material world to respond to that email, to go to the meeting, and we think we’re done.
Most people, they go to the meeting , and then you think you’re done. But the body has not registered that that stress is actually complete.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Because we need to complete the cycle. Tell us all things. Beautiful. So I’m gonna go back to the It’s the very classic, all of us nervous system nerds.
Use this example in my, I train at the Sensory Motorcycle Therapy Institute as a coach and they use this example Somatic Experiencing Training. Use this example Jayden Clap and Trauma for practice. Everyone uses this. So anyway, here we go. Gazelle’s, you are a noble gazelle running across the Sahara and out of the corner of your eye you spot a lion.
So cuz it is the lions who hunts and she’s coming for you, right? So that energy starts to move through the Ner collective nervous system of the of the Gazelle family, the pack. And you start to book it out of there cuz you’re not gonna fight a lion, you’re a gazelle. You have no pause for fighting. So you book it out of there and you’re running and you’re running, but you’re the slow gazelle today.
And you feel that lion getting closer and closer and she clamps onto your ankle so you collapse to the ground. And in all your gazelle brilliance, you play dead. Knowing that what will that lion is do? She’ll say, Haah, we will eat tonight. And she’ll go off to get her cups thinking that you are dead. This is the feigned death response, which is dorsal vagal at its, you know, at the nth degree.
And so you lay on the ground, your heart rate has slowed. You are looking pretty darn dead. Endorphins are high, right? You’re not feeling pain. You guys got bit in the ankle after all. And when she’s safely away, you stand up, you shake your entire body snout to tail, and you book it out of there before she realizes that you are not dead.
And that is how a gazelle completes the stress response cycle. The stressor was the lion, right? And she needed to let it play all the way out. . So what happens in humans? Well, you’re on the playground, you’re six and you fall off the monkey bars. You land on the ground, you scraped your knee, you scraped your ankle, your elbow’s a little smooshed and you’re crying and you’re upset.
If your adult or your caregiver comes up to you and says, Hey, it looks like you’re hurt. What do you need? I’m here for you. Then you can complete your stress activation cycle. However your body wants, you can crawl into their lap and cry it out. And you know how little kids cry, right? They’re like, you know who?
And they stand up and run away cuz they completed. Meanwhile, if your adult says, come on kid, you didn’t fall that far, you’re fine. Get up. Shake it off. Misinterpretation of gazelle Wisdom. Dumb. Or if your adult says, oh honey, oh my God, are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?
Oh, my poor baby. Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. I don’t know how I wasn’t there. It’s about me now as the parent, oh my God, I dunno. I’m such a bad mommy. Am I a bad mommy? It’s no longer about you, it’s about someone else negating your feeling or it’s about someone else making it about them. And in either situation or any other, where you aren’t attuned to the way you.
You’re not able to complete the stress activation cycle, that stress response, that elevated adrenaline, elevated cortisol stays within you and you freeze within yourself. It’s called a high activation freeze, right? You’re still full of adrenaline, but you start to freeze to your own emotions, to your own needs, your own wants, your own nervous system state.
And when that happens, again and again and again, we walk through the world in this wounded walking way where we are numb to ourselves. And this was how I moved through life for probably the first 30 years of my life and what’s called functional freeze. I got all those degrees, all those certifications, all those accolades.
I did all of the things to be productive, right? To be functional, to prove my worth, to prove my Right to gain respect. But I was numb inside. I didn’t really know how I felt. what I wanted. What I needed because I was stuck in that codependent people pleasing perfectionist maelstrom of externalizing my sense of self.
So when I had a stressor, oh, I’m good, I’m fine. I’m totally, no, I’m okay. I’m okay. Are you okay? Cuz you watched me fall off the monkey bars. Are you okay? Let me take care of you. Right? I was just fine, thank you very much. But inside my body was spinning through all those chemicals, all those hormones, right?
And so your boss sends you the text, right? Whatever that stressor is, your body starts that chemical reaction. . And we need to give our bodies an outlet. And this is where somatic practices come in, where Soma means body and Greek, right? And so somatic or bodily practices are a return to the body. And its wholeness.
A way to reconnect with that brilliance, that intelligence, that wisdom that was, was negated, that was pushed down when we were small, right? And that’s what so many of us saw modeled for us in our families growing up, folks not having their feelings, not having healthy conflict in front of the kids, not having open frank discussion about challenging issues because the kids are here, right?
And so we learn to shove it all down. So we go in, we do the presentation, but we don’t attend to ourselves, right? We don’t ask ourselves how we’re feeling. We don’t ask our bodies what they need because. . Not only did we not learn to do that, we learned that it was smarter not to. It was brilliant for my body to go into functional freeze.
It saved my life and at a certain point it meant I was not living my life. I was walking through my life, but I wasn’t living it cuz I wasn’t in presence.
Maggie Reyes:
And it helped you survive. Like I always think about when we talk about these things like a hundred percent our highest in wisdom is always looking for the thing that will get us through to the next moment.
And sometimes some of our protective mechanisms, when we discover them, we’re not proud of them. We have all these thoughts about them and I always say, Hey wait, it got you to today. Yeah, it got you here. Thank you. Body. Did the best you could with what you had then. We’re so grateful. Amazing.
Maria Victoria Albina:
I’m so grateful. Super duper in an earnest real way. I’m grateful for that stress response. For that nervous system shutdown, you know, and, and I can see all the ways it didn’t serve me. And I can see them with the energy of, uh, an energy that motivates growth and change, not an energy that puts me down.
And that’s the shift.
Maggie Reyes:
I love it so much. So good. I love how you said we’re not taught how to do it. We’re discouraged from it. Especially if we’re socialized as women. It’s like, think about, this is what I think about, I used to work in HR and they can’t imagine how it would be if a man or a woman cried in a meeting.
Like we would be, what are they doing? Right? Showing emotion at work. You’re wild. What is that? I have always been. on the enthusiastic side of things. to put it lightly. To put it mildly. and people just were amused.. But I just did it anyway. was like, that’s amazing. You know, I would, I would definitely overexpress the positive emotions, but not the negative emotions at work.
But I was like, I’m gonna get some emotions in there. So we’re just gonna do the positive ones cuz I can get away with those. By the way, just for everyone listening about would happen is I was underestimated my whole career. It used to bother me in the beginning. because I was very enthusiastic and excited about whatever we were working on.
And then people thought I wasn’t smart. And I was like, no. Those things, that doesn’t go together. not mutually, uh, exclusive there
. I mean I always, this is the story that comes to mind, but I have to tell you my 30 Cuz this is what I, when I lived, when I was in hr, I had a boss.
It was my boss’s boss who used to say, she’s so Disney. about me because I was just positive and you know, sort of like He meant it as a complimentIt wasn’t a bad thing. So he said, oh, she’s so Disney and, and he didn’t really like interact with me a lot cause I interacted with my main boss, right?
And one day we’re in a meeting and he said to me, well what do you think about this? And literally I said, do you really wanna know? And he’s like, yeah, Well what do you think about this? And I said, well, if you do this, you have to worry about this, this, and this and this. But if you do this other thing then that doesn’t matter.
But this matters and this, but if you do this thing, then you have to worry about this. So like, I just gave him a whole analysis in like three minutes and the man looked at my boss nod at me and said, damn, she’s really smart. I had been working there at that point for like a year I think, and my boss turned him and said, that’s why I hired her.
It’s just the stress of dealing with that every day. You know, everyone listening is gonna have one of those moments.
Maria Victoria Albina:
For sure. All the, the, not just the aggressions, but the microaggressions. It’s like tiny tigers all over your office all the time, all over your marriage, all over your relationships.
Maggie Reyes:
And here’s one of the things I talk about when I, when I teach stress cycle awareness, is we always think about the gazelle, which I love that example. It’s so vivid. It’s so easy. But here’s what people sometimes don’t realize, that in our modern industrialized culture, we are not gazelle’s.
We will have a message from our mother-in-law about how we’re late for something.The boss, the landlord. , the spouse, the the kid’s school. Like the news cycle, what , the news cycle, whatever. Whatever’s happening on earth. And then the way I like to think about it, if everybody can imagine a semicircle, like the letter C, a semicircle, and we’ll have one thing and then another thing and then another thing and then another thing.
And all these open semi-circles, and they don’t happen in a nice organized fashion one right after the other. They might happen between three and 3 45 and the same day. and suddenly you have eight Open stress cycles.. All at once. And one of them is fight and one of them is flight and one of them is free.
and went in this fun And that shaking it off and having a physiological completion. Becomes even more important. And that idea of having multiple stress cycles open at once, when I really started looking at all the stuff I was coaching on, on a regular basis, I was like, wait, this isn’t just stress.
This is what I call compound stress syndrome. It’s compounded, it’s one stress on top of the other. So one, I’m worried about the thing that’s late, the other I’m worried about whatever the report that’s due and now those things are compounding each other. And bring it back to the physiology.
I remember years of my life where I had a knot in the pit of my stomach. , and I just thought that’s how people lived. . Like, I get it. I remember that later, you know, becoming a life coach and having a, just a different way that my life was organized and I was stressed about things. I was like, I don’t have a knot in my stomach anymore.
I don’t think that that’s actually how you’re supposed to just live. So anybody is listening and has a lot on their stomach just want you to know. , you need to question what’s going on.That’s. the optimal body.
Maria Victoria Albina:
No. And what you’re pointing to here, and I love that visual of the open seas and compounding is what us nervous system nerds call.
The literature calls the window of tolerance. I don’t like that language. Folks with codependent habits, human socialized as women, people of color, like folks have been tolerating way too much in life. I’m not trying to teach about Tolerating more bs. What I am here to talk about is our capacity, right?
So I like to call it the window of capacity. Or what my teacher Jane clap calls our window of bodily dignity. Isn’t that gorgeous? I’ve never heard that. Isn’t that beautiful? Jane Clap is phenomenal. Um, and so that speaks to you what you were talking about. How many inputs can our nervous system take right before we, we leave our capacity to stay in our dignity with ourselves.
Right Before we leave our capacity to respond with calm, with peace in our hearts. I’ve started to call it the window of presence. So much of my work is about presence And how we can cultivate a deeper and, and more profound sense of presence in every area of our lives. Because I really feel that presence is one of the key answers To these issues we’ve been talking about.
Maggie Reyes:
How would you define presence?
Maria Victoria Albina:
The first thing that came to me is it’s a felt state of being. Presence is, is being in the here and now. A nerdier science here. Um, definition would be being oriented to who, when, where, and what you are, which is the opposite of what happens in stress, distress, and trauma.
we lose connection to the here and now and we zoom right back into the past or dive right into the future.
Maggie Reyes:
Okay. We need to slow this down. This is so important. I want everyone to get this. So in presence,. We’re here and now. Here and now, and when we’re in a stress response,. When we’re in a trauma cycle, when we’re, when we’re appropriately responding to things,
That challenge our capacity. our focus is not in the here and now. Our focus might be in the past, it might be in the future, it might be in the moment of survival. In the topic of surviving. Not in the topic of, of here and now.And I think that when we think about our marriage
since that’s what I talk about all the time, it’s like if you have. . I call it chronic low grade resentment. That never goes away. It never goes away. Never goes away. It’s always annoyed about something. , this is like the yellow flag that becomes the red flag. That is that your capacity is being stretched beyond.
Like you know something is wrong, but you don’t quite know what it is.It’s this, it’s compound stress. We need to close, so a lot of times people will join the T pa and I’ll say, your first job is to close dress cycles. If you do nothing else, if I teach you nothing else in the six months, we’re together.
And all you learn is that you need to like, like you said, shake it off and we can talk about some of the self-soothing activities and the ways that we , but your number one job is to close them. Because once you close them, then you can think clearly. You can make decisions. You can be in your power.
You can be in presence
Maria Victoria Albina:
Yeah, no, that’s a beautiful lesson and I think it is the most important thing if we want to shift the way we are relating to self in the world.. Because our nervous system will demand because it can, it can just take over. And it does take over our mind and our body and demands that we deal with it.
demands that we react from it until we learn how to map our nervous. live, uh, in a more, how to say it? A more, it’s not a more loving connection with our nervous system, but a more compassionate and um, relational way. Because Austen people will say like, I feel I’m so, I can’t believe I’m still anxious about this.
And it’s like, yeah, baby, your, your body is still responding from anxiety because the adrenaline hasn’t left, the cortisol hasn’t left because that’s gonna take its time. And because you’re still, you have all these open seas of, right. Like, yeah, baby, it’s normal that you still feel anxious. You’re, you’re a mammal.
It hasn’t completed.
Maggie Reyes:
And we’re alive on earth, so we will always have thoughts. We will always have feelings. We’ll always have stress responses. Like, that’s not gonna go away. So to me it’s like the difference between being in a relationship with something that you don’t know, it’s there, but it’s it’s affecting you.
Anyway. Versus being in a relationship with something and knowing, oh, I’m thinking, they’re like, oh, I’m just in a fight response. I’m gonna like, that makes so much sense.
Maria Victoria Albina:
And that’s what coaching is so beautiful, uh, at, at helping us to, to really see the things that are, it, it’s about, and, and somatic practices in particular, I will say, are so powerful at making the implicit explicit.
The things that are happening under the surface, the things we can see because we can’t change what we can’t see.
Maggie Reyes:
so everybody Wait, hold on, hold on. We cannot change what we do not see. That’s how Maria says it.. , I say the same thing. Cause we’re twinsies. I love it.
So you have to see it to heal it. ,
Maria Victoria Albina:
which, and then,. Well, I was just gonna say that old, you know, you have to feel it to heal it. We can complicate that one if you want to.
Maggie Reyes:
Yeah. No, no. You have to see it. You get to see it. You have to see it to heal it. And then I bring in my husband, who I love to use all of the corporate terms that he learned when he was doing his MBA.
And it’s like, oh, you cannot manage what you do, not measure. If we have no awareness about the thing, we can’t do anything about it. All truth is always gonna take us capital T truth. We’re gonna call it different ways. Different words. And it’s always gonna take us to the same places.
Maria Victoria Albina:
I love it. In my program, in anchored, we start with mapping our nervous system. It is the first and most important thing because I just don’t think we can do this healing work in the way I do it unless we know what our nervous system is up to
Maggie Reyes:
So tell us what you mean by mapping
Maria Victoria Albina:
So it’s, um, yeah. Creating a map, creating, um, you know, uh, one of my teachers, Armand calls it psycho cartography. isn’t that so dope? Fancy, right? So it’s, it’s creating a map to help you to see your own psyche and the human psyche and how we relate to the world. So I know that if x, y, Z happens, right, I am likely to head towards sympathetic activation, fight or flight adrenaline, and then we can take it one step further because of, right?
Yes, because of the, what I am believing in that moment. I am and the world is right, I am bad and the world is mean. I am in danger and the world is scary when X, y, Z happens, right? That is my habitual nervous system reaction, thought, feeling, action, and outcome in response to that circumstance. Similarly, what is dorsal?
The shutdown response? The disconnected response. The frozen response. What activates that in my nervous system? What brings that to the fore in my body? Well, if I feel like I’m sharing something important and someone’s not really listening to me, right, then I might head into dorsal. I might disconnect and say, you know what?
Fine. Don’t, it’s, don’t worry about it. It’s fine. I’m okay. I’m really, I’m not that upset about it. It’s fine. It’s, I can tell you’re busy. Just go back to what you’re doing. Don’t worry about it. It’s okay babe. It’s fine. We don’t need to talk about it. I’m good.
Maggie Reyes:
We always need to talk about it. Always. Except. Except sometimes when we don’t
Maria Victoria Albina:
yes. Other than those moments. But in all the other ones we do.
Maggie Reyes:
Here’s the thing, we have to talk about this. Cause I talk about communication so much. So if we’re verbal we love talking about things. sometimes my coaching to make science is to stop talking.
. Because we want to throw more talking at it.
Maria Victoria Albina:
We need to get back to presence.
Maggie Reyes:
So sometimes if you, and here’s the thing for everybody listening, you know, if you’ve been holding back and there’s something you need to say, then you do need to talk about it. But if you have talked incessantly
About the same thing over and over and over again, and the result has not changed, you need to stop talking,
Maria Victoria Albina:
find it different, uh, different modality there.
Maggie Reyes:
For sure. Just had to mention that because
Maria Victoria Albina:
Yeah. I mean, and also, you know, to bring it back to the nervous system, I, was in a relationship once with someone who, uh, was very insistent that we talked things out until they felt comfortable, until they like, had the resolution and closure that they were looking for.
And at a certain point, my nervous system, I would, would check out, right. Would go to that dorsal, would get overwhelmed, exhausted. Sometimes it was really late at night, and I was no longer literally, able to hear them. Because my physiology had just said Baa enough. You know, making sure, making sure we can’t ever do that, but doing our best to check in and get consent and get consent again and check in and, and really co-regulate our nervous systems.
Like in a relationship, in a marriage. To do our best to keep both of our nervous systems online active in ventral vagal The safe and social part. And not checked out. Because yeah, endless talking is gonna get you nowhere if the other person, if their nervous system isn’t able to be receptive.
Maggie Reyes:
So, because we’ve talked so much about talking, we will link in the show notes to Soul-Centered Communication, which is the communication framework that I teach in. Communication framework. We talk about the soul part and the centered part. And the centered part is you can’t really have productive communication like communication where an exchange takes place that’s meaningful and valuable and moves you forward if you’re in a stress cycle.
So in the centered part, I discussed all of that. That’s a whole topic for another day. So we’ll link that.
Okay. Tell us, we’ve talked about our open loops. I think we understand the gazelle. I think we understand how it affect us in our daily life.
And then we’ve talked about we need to close loops. Yes. And it’s not just taking the action, no one part. for sure is taking the action in the material world to respond to the email, answer the thing, collapse if you’re the gazelle, sure. Keep yourself alive. Then the second part is the physiological.
We talked about shaking. , which I love doing. Let’s talk about some of the other ways that we can complete stress cycles.
Maria Victoria Albina:
when we are stressed, right? When there’s been a stressor, or there’s two options. One is to soothe and one is to heal. And this delineation is really important because people will talk about, if you’re stressed, just like take a big deep breath.
A number one, taking a deep breath and then not having a long, slow exhale is actually gonna ramp your nervous system up. So chill on that, right? But we can do things like taking a breath in. Long, slow out
to sooth the nervous. So if you need to parent to partner, to be an employee, to be an employer, to drive a car or a plane or a boat, if you need to like bring your llamas back to their pen, if you need to function in the world in that moment, that’s when we soothe the nervous system. That’s when we calm the nervous system.
Come back to ventral vagal. Quick, quick, quick. I’m driving a big rig, right? Or I’m in a fight with my partner. Like this is the moment where we do the self soothing things. And I’ll offer some tips in a second, but that is not the long-term nervous system healing work because what we’re doing because of necessity, because it is prudent to do so, is we’re shutting down our nervous system response again.
So when we go back to that kid on the playground who fell and hurt her arm and. Hush it. We’re doing that to ourselves. We are not meaning to and again.
Maggie Reyes:
It’s the necessity in that moment. It’s, here’s, here’s the analogy that I wanna give, right. Is if you have a bullet wound and you are bleeding there’s a point where you just need to bandage it and stop the bleeding. But we can’t walk around the world with a bullet wound in our arm.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Yeah. It’s not the best idea.
Maggie Reyes:
Not the best. So at some point we have to actually take the bullet out. To me, when we talk about soothing versus healing, there’s a role for both.
There’s a need for both. Absolutely. And we, it’s not like, of course we’re gonna put a bandage on Until we can get the bullet out.
Maria Victoria Albina:
So, exactly. So to your point, the, I think the key to the deeper healing work is once again, presence. is being with it. So if you’re feeling yourself getting ramped up and you are able to extract yourself from the situation, even for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, to let yourself have the anchor, to let yourself have the sad, let yourself be with the disappointment, right?
I talk a lot about befriending our emotions, whether it’s resistance, frustration, and it doesn’t matter. Become its friend. And I mean like B F, F, like you’re getting matching tattoos. Like really get to know it. Develop deep intimacy with your own emotions. So you can say, yeah, I’m feeling this like heat at the top of my chest, near my clavicles.
Hold on. That one’s disappointment. Frustration’s just a little lower. , right? So you get to know your own body and how it shows you what you’re feeling and you get to know your feelings and how they impact your body, your mood, your energy, and your mindset, right? Because again, it’s that, it’s that feedback loop, right?
And so in developing that profound and sacred presence with our emotionals, with our nervous system, that is when we really process an emotion all the way through and we give it the space to just be right. And from there then we can, we can do the things that bring us back to being able to cook dinner.
Maggie Reyes:
I love it so much. And when an emotion, when we allow it, when we let it be present.I like to think about emotions. as water. So we allow it. It’s kinda like you were talking about with a baby or a child.. And they’re like, oh, I was crying. And then it passes and then they’re done.
So this is what we were talking about is like, oh, we allow it and then it passes and then it’s done. It’s literally done. Right. It has fulfilled its purpose. And if you think about the ocean, it’s like a wave.. it, it comes, it heightens, it goes, it keeps going. Now, if you think about emotions like water, if you try to keep standing water it stagnates and becomes poisonous.
So anyone emotion, even the emotions we would put on sort of the negative spectrum of emotion, they’re not necessarily bad or evil. No. The only time they become dangerous, they become poisonous is when we try. To cut them off. And stagnate them. And then they become dangerous.
When we let them flow, they nurture the earth just like all the other ones.
Maria Victoria Albina:
This is my chance to say, I use a very similar analogy. I talk, oh my God. I love, I talk about, I think it’s week six in my program, I talk about stagnant emotions and water, and I take it, you know, a degree further and talk about, you know, but flies laying their eggs in there and then they, because of the fifth imagery, I love it.
But also because Right then something else is born of that stagnant water. An awfully aegypti. Mosquitoes are born of that water and then spread dengue chicken gunk, malaria. Right? So yes. The emotions we hold in will come out sideways. As pestilence, right? As jabs, as little sneaky.
Cutting remarks as yes. Passive aggression. As you know, I would go out, but I worked my full-time job and then took care of the family and then did this, and then did that, and Right. Like it’s gonna come out and it’s gonna come out nasty and gross and, and disease,
Maggie Reyes:
that’s vibe that you described. is poisonous to relationships. So listen, everybody, the more we are now feeling the less poisonous, the less poison we’re pouring into our relationship. The more likely we are to thrive. It’s like, oh yeah. All of the things we’re talking about today is to help every single person listening. To come back to a place where you could have the things you want in life.
A hundred percent in whatever relationship. The relationship with yourself, the relationship with your boss, your coworkers, your friends, your spouse, your digestion, your digestion, your body. Right? Your cheeseburger. Your cheeseburger. I wanna love cheeseburgers my whole life. I wanna enjoy them.
Maria Victoria Albina:
They’re frigging delicious, right?
They’re so good.
Maggie Reyes:
It’s so good. This was amazing. Is there anything else you wanna add before I ask you a question? From the questions For Couples journal,
Maria Victoria Albina:
I love you and I adore you, and everyone should work with you. And they should subscribe, rate, and review on Apple podcasts and share on social media.
And I’m not kidding, go do it. This is an incredible free resource that Maggie shares from the, her big, huge, open, amazing hearts. Give the gal some love. Uh, what else would I share? Other than that, that presence is the greatest gift. For ourselves and, and humanity and the planet, because the choices we make from presence are the most aligned, the most loving, the the most powerful are decisions from presence are pointed towards justice.
Maggie Reyes:
decisions from presence are pointed towards justice. , say more?
Maria Victoria Albina:
So when we are present, right? When we are in that deep awareness with ourselves and, and with those we love, right? That’s when we can tap into our big open hearts and we can live from that open heart, which allows us to name that, which is not.
And, and to speak truth to power and to do it from a, place and an energy that is based in agency and based in honoring our shared humanity. Because it’s from our presence that we are awake and aware of our own humanity and that of the people around us. Our communities, the collective, like what are we doing this healing work for, if not for the good of the collective.
The sin. Listen, it’s twinsies. I know. I just love you, .
Maggie Reyes:
I love it. So I really believe that a well loved heart. A well loved heart does not go to war with itself or others. So anything we pour into our marriages, into our relationships, into our homes, yeah. Is how we in the micro create what we want in the macro.
Maria Victoria Albina:
A hundred percent. a hundred percent. We show up with kindness when we treat ourselves with kindness. And we allow ourselves to receive kindness, which is often so challenging.
Maggie Reyes:
So we can’t wrap up talking about presence without talking about this. Cuz there’s a famous quote that I love.
It’s um, Steven RGUs. says that safety is the treatment. So he’s talking about therapy. And as we create a safe environment in which to open up, it’s like that is the treatment no matter what modality you’re using. That’s like his quote. So I read his quote and I was thinking about coaching and I think and say that presence is the coaching.
. Like no matter what modality you’re using, no matter what’s going on to be held in loving presence by another human, whether we’re asking questions or we’re doing a breathing exercise, or we’re doing whatever we’re doing that day. That is. The underlying healing moment.
Maria Victoria Albina:
And there is a not insignificant base of evidence, of scientific evidence to back that up.
Whether we’re looking at F M R I studies, EEGs, cortisol levels. Or looking at, at the physics of it. And the co-regulation of heartbeats..My cardiac rhythm impacts that of people around me. My nervous system can calm yours as yours Calms mine. With a, a smile with prosy of voice.
That gentle loving sing song voice that we both naturally have that soothes nervous systems.
Maggie Reyes:
So much. Here is a question from the questions for Couples journal. I cannot wait to hear your answer.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Oh my goodness. I’m so excited. What will it be, ?
Maggie Reyes:
What is something that used to cause you stress in the past but doesn’t anymore?
Maria Victoria Albina:
Having a dysregulated nervous system. I now trust and believe now that whatever life throws at me, I have the skills, tools, and most importantly presence to give my mind, my body, my spirit, what we need to move through anything and to show up through anything with a big, open, loving heart.
Maggie Reyes:
And would you say that all the tools that you use, that you teach, that you talk about on the Feminist Wellness Podcast and your programs, this is what helps expand your capacity
Maria Victoria Albina:
The more we can stay present to life. The more our window of capacity in our nervous systems expands to match that presence. We’re teaching our nervous system. We’re rewiring our nervous system. We’re rewriting the heuristics, those shortcuts in our brains that tell us if X happens, I have to respond in y way in order to be loved.
Right? We rewrite those old stories about love, safety, and connection so that it becomes safe a once more to show up in our authenticity and, and what, if not, that is the most essential human task to show up in our authenticity from our big open hearts.
Maggie Reyes:
Okay, listen, what if not that is the essential human task.
My heart is all a fluter . But if not that, okay, Maria. I know that everyone listening will have a crush on you. Wait, a competency, competency crush. after this episode. So how can everyone stalk you? We need all
Maria Victoria Albina:
Oh, I have a present for your people. It’s so exciting. If you head over to victoria albena.com/marriage mba, you can download a suite of meditations and nervous system supporting exercises just for you
And those are free just for you cuz you love Maggie. I love Maggie. We’re twins. We’re family. Right. You can follow me on the gram. I give good gram at Victoria Albina Wellness. You can, uh, check out my podcast, feminist Wellness wherever you get your podcasts, and you can check out my six month program anchored@victoriaalbina.com slash anchored.
Maggie Reyes:
I love it so much. Tell us for a second on Anchored, you talked about codependency. just give us like a little bit of what, what is anchored all about.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Anchored is a six month community-based program, uh, that uses somatics thought work and breath work all together to help us return to that centered embodied presence.
I define co-dependent thinking as chronically sourcing our sense of worth wellness and validation from everyone and everything outside of ourselves. So I’m working on sort of rebranding co-dependent as emotional outsourcers.
Maggie Reyes:
Emotional. That’s good.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Also say, yeah, instead of sourcing it from within.
And so what that does is it keeps us looking for everyone and everything to tell us we’re worthy of love, that we’re okay, that we’re smart enough, we’re pretty enough, we’re good enough, right? Instead of just believing it. And so we operate from that wounding. And of course, our nervous system stay jacked because we don’t believe we’re worthy of love.
So Anchored is a community-based program because community is where healing happens, right? Tick, Knott, Hans and Community is the next guru. And I love that saying, right. We need, it is a high time we move out of this young white cell colonialist vision of what wellness and healing are. It’s not, uh, individualistic.
That’s not how healing happens. It happens when we come together for the collective good. And so that’s what we do in Anchored.
Maggie Reyes:
Love it so much. I love healing, hearing about community because I found that so powerful in the Marriage MBA as well where, where people are so deeply moved By just hearing the stories and healings of The other members. And as I’ve gotten deeper into my own journey as a coach to really create non-hierarchical spaces.
It’s like I encourage everyone to be listening for the gold, not in what I’m seeing. it’s kind of fun, but whatever. Sure. Right. But it’s like in what everybody in the group
Is saying. And it’s incredibly po It’s exponentially more powerful. You know, us plus the communities, right. That we get to facilitate, like we facilitate them. We just help them get together. It’s so powerful, but so wisdom comes from each member.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Absolutely. And, and like you said, there’s. So much power and not just hearing that we’re not alone, but actually witnessing someone else. Like there’s this thing we say an anchor jokingly, which is Get outta my journal. And that just means like, um, hi, you’re completely reading my lived experience back to me through your body.
Like what is that? And what that is is magical and amazing and life changing because. These ways of thinking. These habitual mindsets and nervous system ways of approaching the world are, are just so isolating. So alienating.They make us feel so othered in our own bodies, in our own lives. We become so alien, so foreign to ourselves, much less to like other people.
Cause we’re always protecting ourselves. We think we’re the only one.
Maggie Reyes:
The very earliest ones. All of us think we’re the only ones. Only, I’m not gonna say it from now. And I remember in one of the cohorts of the Marriage MBA, one of the members said, oh, what I realized is these are normal, normal people problems.
I’m not the loneliest one. We all have stuff like this. And that alone, even without solving the actual problem, just knowing that you aren’t the only one. Is halfway there.
Maria Victoria Albina:
Well, it, it helps our nervous systems to come back into connection, which is the root of ventral vagal. It’s the safe and social part of the nervous system where everything works optimally.
And so community does that.
Maggie Reyes:
I love it so much. I know. It’s, tell us again, what is your Instagram handle?
Maria Victoria Albina:
It is Victoria Albina Wellness.
Maggie Reyes:
Victoria. Albina Wellness? And mine is at the Maggie Reyes. We wanna hear your favorite takeaway. Today was deep. We talked about a lot. Tag us in your favorite takeaway.
We want to know. DM us. We wanna hear it. If you don’t wanna say it publicly, dm, we wanna know. Thank you.
We’re not gonna translate him. We’re just leave like that. We’re not. Bye everyone.
Hey, this is the best part. If you love the podcast and you know you’re ready for more, get on the early access list for a marriage mba. Right now, the Marriage Mindset Breakthrough Activator is my sixth month marriage breakthrough program where I will guide you through my most effective coaching tools and relationship building processes, and you will take what you learn and apply it at home every week.
We will activate your ability to create more connection and love no matter what is happening in your relationship right now, so you can move forward with more power, more love, and more confidence every day. Go to Maggie reyes.com/group to sign them.