Transforming Trauma: Episode 051

In this episode of Transforming Trauma, we welcome Julie Brown Yau, Ph.D. Julie specializes in developmental trauma, intergenerational trauma, and acute trauma, and has a unique perspective on integrating spirituality into trauma healing. She’s an author, speaker, and the Trauma and Spiritual Care consultant for Compassionate Care ALS. Her background in psychological, somatic, and spiritual traditions provides a rich combination of knowledge. She has a private practice in Laguna Beach, California, and sees clients virtually from all around the world.

Julie is also a NARM Therapist and was in the first North American NARM training with Dr. Laurence Heller. She integrates NARM into her work to support clients in healing from complex trauma. Julie is also an authorized teacher of Shri Vidya, which combines the resolution of trauma with spiritual practice. Julie integrates Shri Vidya into her work with her clients. Julie explains that Shri Vidya are embodied teachings, and that a lot of spiritual teachings do not include embodiment, at least not in an explicit way.

Julie shares about how she weaves together spirituality and trauma healing and how they support one another. “Healing trauma begins to look spiritual as we open up and go beyond our ordinary sense of self.” Julie distinguishes spiritual healing as “waking up to our true nature and being with expanded states of consciousness. Whereas trauma healing is about grounded and embodied states of being.”

Julie shares her perspective on the collective consciousness around healing from trauma. “Spirituality is about awakening or recognizing our wholeness and trauma is about reclaiming our wholeness,” Julie shares. Healing trauma is about compassion and love which also comes through these spiritual practices. Shri Vidya is predominantly focused on the feminine principles and energies that have been missing inside ourselves and within our culture. “We begin to heal the trauma of the patriarch in subtle and not so subtle ways and there is profound strength in embodying the feminine,” Julie states.

Julie shares with the listeners deep experiences she has had with people she’s been working with. “What comes forward right now is people having an experience of their heart opening, to feeling not only love, but grief or pain or sadness, and directly in a field in which they’re more able to be with it because both in these teachings of awakening and in healing trauma, we want to be able to feel more.” This is very aligned with the NARM Emotional Completion Model, which teaches that as individuals connect to their unresolved emotions, they are connecting to themselves; they are connecting to that which tey had to split off from in order to survive. This is a reclaiming of one’s wholeness, which is what Julie supports in working with trauma healing and spirituality.