Do you know Tamay? He is a LifeForce student, coach, mentor, and a gentle spirit with a warm smile and a lovely German accent! He believes that courage, serenity, freedom and lightness are your natural state and can work with those interested in rising to their full power to realize this … and beyond. We connected in a small organic and eco-happy grocery store in Tulum because of the minimalist shoes he was wearing, followed each other on social media, and met for lunch … where we didn’t order food but sat for hours talking. We spoke about creating some breakout sessions on TWIC (perhaps coming soon), and I was fortunate enough to experience a session with Tamay involving movement, mobility, breathwork … releasing tension with a lightness of being. Tamay holds safe trusted space and it’s apparent that he loves what he does and is a forever student himself. I hope you enjoy our exchange … the questions and his answers are all from the heart!
If you’d like to meet Tamay and be in community with her and other good humans, join us in The Wellness Intelligence Collective. Find all of our interviews, including this one, and so much more Wellness Intelligence.
You claim to be a “professional feeler”, can you explain?
In a workshop that I took many years ago, I was able to let go of enormous amount of tensions that I carried for years in my body just by being guided into feeling my emotions. They just vanished in minutes as i was able to let go and finally feel my fear, joy, sadness, love and pain that i had built high walls of muscle tension around all my life.
I – and we all – do that to protect us to not feel helpless or vulnerable again. To now show sides of ourselves that we were once shamed for and to not open those wounds up that have not healed yet.
Playing with many different tools from meditation to primal therapy to bioenergetics and somatic experiencing I at one point realized that, if i just felt my emotions, just watched my thoughts, just felt the sensations of my body, they effortlessly and gracefully faded away and transformed into clarity, joy, love, an inner knowing and strength.
Sounds pretty spiritual – “Wuh wuh” and I know one needs to experience it to believe it.
It’s ever since then that i wanted to get to the bottom of this process. To understand and find ways to teach how to feel everything, how feelings get processed and how naturalness and spontaneity and freedom are restored from doing this.
To feel is to heal. And to feel happens in the body. That’s why I use movement, breath and sound & expression as tools for self-healing. Healing happens through the body, not the mind understanding and talking about it. By feeling, connecting to the body and its sensations. By expressing loud and active what could not be said. By giving the body and the limbic brain and reptilian brainstem a powerful experience that proves our previous patterns wrong. To prove to us: Next time, i can really deal with it, i felt it, i know it, I’ve been there fully. With my whole Body&Mind.
To feel is to be in the world and there will never be a time in the world where there will only be “nice feelings”. So, to be a good feeler is so essential to enjoying this life like not much else i know.
Does everyone need to transform or can we be fine with who we are right now?
This is a very significant question. It goes to the basis of what it means to be alive and how wellness is created:
To transform is to be alive. We transform the food we eat into energy and nutrients you can use. To transform these again into a creative project of your love.
We also must grow to stay alive. It’s not that we protect all of our cells from dying. It’s more that we produce so many new ones every second that we stay healthy.
Nature is incredibly wasteful in that way. But it can be because it knows how to transform. As the waste of one is the life force of another.
In everyday life our body and subconscious decides every second where to shift our energy. To rest and digest, to fight, flight, freeze or to create, socialize, love, even be spiritual. Is it safe to be myself or do i need to put on my “bad boy” “cool cat” or “nice girl” mask? Is it okay to have my own business or do i still believe & feel my dependency patterns from childhood?
And more often than we are aware of we actually flee or freeze in front of our work project we are afraid of. Of that woman that looks so interesting but a memory of rejection freezes us and sends us into our heads preventing us from talking to her. Of that dog walking down the alley, reminding us of that one time we were bit by a dog, increasing our heartbeat in a second.
Our bodies mobilize incredible amounts of energy in these moments, tensing our muscles, jaws, breathing shallow, pumping adrenaline throughout veins to help us!
And yes, often without there actually being a threat, but more importantly without us ever taking any time to release these survival activations and processing them through the body.
How does that work?
I’ve watched a bird nesting outside of my window here in Stuttgart Germany. It is constantly being bombarded with stimulus that triggers its survival mechanisms. A door is being shut, a window is being opened. Every time this happens, the bird uses some of its energy to check if it’s safe. One time a window was shut harshly. The bird jumped up from the nest, mobilizing tons of energy into its muscles, ready to fight or flee. When I realized it was only the door, it did not sit back down. It Had to move the enormous energy and was shaking itself off in its nest stirring up all the feathers until it sat back down.
In this moment the bird transformed its energy from survival energy into involuntary movement of the muscles to calm back down and keep on breeding.
It’s not so much that the bird needs a “destress program” or needs a “guided transformation journey”. It just does what nature does with its energy – It’s activated, it transforms and transforms again. By that staying healthy and alive. Constantly moving.
What is so natural as to take a breath for nature, has become so complicated for us today. We often don´t allow ourselves to have involuntary movement, to run, scream or shake something off. And life is filled with things that trigger our survival pattern or activate unhealed wounds of the past that overlay what is actually happening with something we are reminded from the past.
And if this energy stays activated inside us, it’s very harmful to the body as it was not designed to stay in overdrive-mode all the time. It was designed to charge and discharge. And to be active in the world means to encounter danger, to get activated, to get scared, to freak out and to shut down sometimes and push feelings and charge away until we can deal with it later. That’s natural too. It’s just not natural that these stay stuck and is being kept in our nervous system and being held back by muscles and shallow breathing forever. But this is how most of us live now. Having stored a lifetime of unprocessed emotions, trauma and held-back expressions and parts of ourselves.
So, it’s not that we need to learn to transform. Transformation is the nature of our aliveness and health. It’s not that we need to “be better”, it’s that we just have so much unprocessed stuff from the past inside of us that no-one ever told us how to let go of and move on. It’s that this is not in our culture anymore as it was in every tribe ever with rituals, dances, fire ceremonies and all the great shebang that my generation and parents’ generation has discarded as “stupid uncivilized primate stuff from the past”. This i believe was actually very very useful and humans’ early version of the bird flapping its wings in the nest to not stay stuck in that heightened activation mode with tight muscles.
I believe more than ever before we need to re-connect to this spontaneous, natural capacity we have in ourselves that involuntarily knows what to do to get us back into flow and rest when we finally let go. And it’s that what i support people i work with. It’s really just a reminder to the power that lies within and an invitation to love life with all its strange, hard, cold, soft, heartfelt and joyful feelings.
What is the best way to find our voice?
That’s the beauty of it: We don’t need to find it. We actually just have to stop all the things that are not it:
To have one’s own voice is to let go of all the things that we´ve learned we should do and should be. To let go of all the rules and incentives that society puts on us. To even surrender the mind of ideas of how things work and how one can make money and be successful. To even not protect from the hurt and suffering it may bring to just try something where we don’t know at all if it will work. To completely allow ourselves to jump into the unknown. It’s a leap of faith really.
It’s at these moments that we loosen this grip that something deeper has the chance to finally surface again. We don’t need to search for it, it just is there and has always been.
That’s our own voice.
Then we can start a new process which is to get to know ourselves and also get to know previously hidden parts.
This comes with a lot of responsibility and also patience to work with these parts and find out how to use them for the good. But man is it exciting! I mean there is you in there! There is someone that has never lived before in there! There is a gift that no-one has. There is that which you admire in a superstar genius and want to sometimes mimic. But just in your unique form. Go be it! Let go and be it! I want to see it!
Inhales best through your nose or mouth? Exhales?
A teacher of mine once said the best answer to that: The breath is way too alive to be bound to one specific or right breath.
It’s true that we can influence our state by manipulating our breathing. And from that sprung forth the idea that nose breath is better because it’s more parasympathetic and relaxing in a time where everyone is so stressed.
But when we want to for example heal an emotional wound of abandonment or rejection, we often need to be very very angry first and allow us to breathe heavily through the mouth to then drop into fear and finally into deep sobbing sadness and then into joyful understanding, acceptance and love to really heal the incident by re-living it, this time supporting ourselves and being seen and accepted and changing the meaning of it.
All of these necessary emotions that encompass this experience and its defense patterns have its own breathing pattern that the body naturally knows and will go into by itself to move it through. And some are nasal, others are through the mouth.
And we can use both if we know as trainers and teachers what experience we want to activate in a body to support contacting different emotions or expressions for example. But there is no best. There is just life that always needs a spontaneous response from us that our body knows best 🙂
Favorite morning ritual?
Actually, only one: Listen to my body and ask what is needed now. Then doing that and being open at any minute to change it once i get new signals.
Then that can be meditation, that can be a run, that can be a breakfast, it can be staying in bed. The more I understand the signals of my body I really understand the limitations we have put onto us especially with scientific knowledge dictating to us what is right for us.
There is a body there that has IMMENSE intelligence, more than science or any teacher has ever been able to recreate. I mean a body can produce another human by itself! Without ANY thinking required or any scientific knowledge of what is best.
And that intelligence we can tap into every second. It’s often an irrational intelligence why we are a little afraid of it in our “wear a suit and tie and be a respectable man/woman” society. But it’s that juicy, profound intelligence that knows what is right for you at any moment! I tap into and use that. It’s always so revealing and gives me so much life.
Science and knowledge about what “works best” can be a great start to get us more in contact with our own body. But then at some point it needs to be dropped or it becomes our next biggest hindrance.
Why did you travel to Mexico? Is your work portable?
It was pure intuition. Actually, a super strong one that i resisted for a few weeks because it wanted to “know why” and “what will be in Mexico for me”. But when i finally surrendered to it was so joyful to go and the first days arriving i was so full of energy and the most beautiful coincidences happened to me. Only stopped a few days later when i closed myself up again more🙂. I’m on my path and always growing as well. It really was an educational experience into trusting my intuition even more for me.
Yeah, my work is fully portable since a few years. I mostly run my social media (YouTube, Instagram), do online workshops and work with clients via Zoom. Btw one thing that everyone always says about this online work is: “I never thought we could go so deep and live such intense emotions here via Zoom!” Well the Heart knows no boundaries and we are much more connected than we think. It’s nice that online-work lets us discover that. However i also LOVE in-person work.
Can muscle tension really come from repressed feelings?
Yes! Feelings need a certain breath, sound and movement to happen. When you feel joy you laugh and that has a certain movement to it. When you are angry and defend yourself verbally, it also has a certain movement, breath frequency and sound to it.
It’s like singing, there needs to be resonance space in a singer so that he can sing certain notes. He can’t sing them when he is all tense.
Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen did lots of studies into this very early on and all the research that’s being done on Trauma by amazing people like Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Mate or Peter Levine speaks this language.
The best example i always use is that if you really tensed your fist for a few minutes, you would not feel the soft touch of a feather anymore on it when opening it back up.
All children figure that out at some point and we manage to control ourselves this way. At some point we need to crack up these controls again and re-integrate the parts we needed to hide and disown as children or they become a ground for serious illness and dissociation from ourselves, what we want and who we are.
How does lying affect our overall wellness?
I think it affects our wellness negatively if we are not aware of it.
I will say that to lie is to survive and those survival patterns need to be dropped at some point or they become illness.
To lie is to pretend something that is not and to use your energy to make it seem as it is. That is very energy consuming and you will always need to be on the lookout that the pretense does not break or someone sees through it.
With that you stop the natural flow of energy and awareness which is great for surviving. But not so great for love, creativity and joy.
So, drop it as soon as you can and discover all the lies you’ve told yourself over the years so that you can come closer to yourself and to that flow that wants to happen through you with no effort at all. At least for most of the time. It’s not useful to be always completely honest i think and sometimes it’s to find creative ways to still be honest but also be respectful and compassionate to the level of comprehension that another individual might have about a matter. A bit like talking to a child that may not yet understand.
But to be aware of it is to be able to wear the mask as needed, know its effects and then drop it again. That seems quite healthy to me.
I love your passion for mobility work, what drives that?
Thank you!
Yeah this was my first big love in the field of living well. I was able to work on myself being a person that had not done sports until the age of 18, had flat feet, many surgeries, knee pain, back pain and would often be picked last in sports class. It was a way for me to work on myself any time i needed to and for years to get into an alive and moving body. I was really able to do the impossible with this work on myself, where doctors and trainers told me that i would never walk without insoles for example and today i run 15k casually on barefoot shoes.
I think that is what motivated me so much in mobility back in the day. Seeing that it’s all possible and we can do it ourselves. Sharing that with others and seeing them making leaps was and still is incredibly amazing!
Why is posture important?
I’d say it’s important as it is the visible outcome of a tension pattern that makes it happen. I still look at posture as it gives me a clue of what might be going on “under the hood” with tension patterns. Posture for me is however not the goal as it is also so dynamic. The tension pattern that a person uses to move and stabilize him/herself in space is what is important to me.
Posture also can give away a lot of clues of a person’s developmental history and emotional blockages. There are many maps about this like the “7belts of tension” for example. Really interesting stuff if you like to dive deeper. Maps are however never the real territory so it’s important not to blind ourselves by these maps to what is actually going on. And the way to that is again to feel.
Do you like social media? Does it help your business?
Yeah i like it and i don’t. It’s a reflection of our current collective development as it highlights high stimulating and addictive content that is based on stimulating our lower instincts to draw our attention to it. That works best by showing sex, scaring people, fear of missing out, shocking, promising instant results with no work. And a whole industry has evolved around it to better speak to these parts of us. So it’s also great as we all suffer from social media a lot which reveals how we are really bad at spotting and dealing with our addictions and be leaders for ourselves and care for ourselves.
And now it even happens on a global scale that we are all participating in it and changing ourselves to fit into the form that social media wants from us. So it’s really a great mirror i think and also one that is very challenging for all of us. For me it for sure is!
It helps my business tremendously! I am ever grateful for YouTube especially where i was able to connect to millions of people online and support hundreds of thousands and still am to this day without me being physically there. It is a blessing. And it sucks.
What makes you laugh the most?
Jokes that reveal how we really are. I love if a comedian can tell us what we would never acknowledge in us in a funny way so that we can say – “yeah I’m kind of like that too – But of course i would never do that”. Also looking at myself in the rear-view mirror and seeing what my reality was a few years ago and how convinced i was of it. All with good friends of course.
And i laugh especially hard when i let go of something. That releasing laughter feels so good in the belly it is amazing.
What does Wellness Intelligence mean to you?
So, there was a time when we didn’t need to be intelligent about living well at all. But in this time, we also had little opportunity and possibility. Think from the beginning of time until only 200-300 years ago. Nature took care of us waking up when the sun was out, move our body far and wide because we needed food and water, eat little sugar as there was no snickers bar available and have a lot of social contact because living alone was not even possible and so on.
But in those times, it was not possible to communicate to someone in Australia instantly, to be individualistic, to create great art and poetry and broadcast yourself to millions. To have a car that drives itself.
Here is the important part: Every possibility opens up choice. Nothing in life is inherently bad, it’s how we use whatever we have choice over. And so with increased possibility comes increased responsibility to make choices that are wellness increasing for myself and thus for the whole. But we all need to try out the possible choices to come up with wisdom about how we want to exercise our freedom.
And that is what building wellness intelligence is about to me. To support as many people as early as possible to experience both sides of a freedom and then make a choice from truth and the heart about what to do in any given moment. That makes a powerful individual that has the power to defend himself with force but choosing love and compassion because of his own life experience.
That’s a person that feels the pull of the chocolate bar but decides for a dance instead because he knows consciously what’s on the other side of that coin.
And it also brings forth a person that with full awareness smokes 10 cigarettes a day absolutely aware and responsible of the consequences and not complaining about anything to anyone about it.
Especially in a time in which we have infinite information we need much more wisdom and understanding coming from experience with the fundamental building blocks of a well lived life. To me a few hot candidates are emotions, movement & physical body, trauma & processing of suppressed emotion, energy & nervous system, self-regulation, food and mental process.
While we as a coaching & self-development industry have in my opinion focused intensely on the mental process for a while, it’s time to give a lot more love to our bodies and its processes. To be responsible, to understand, to allow to experience the whole spectrum in a safe space, to be able to make the right choices. Not from rules & blaming a “bad government system” but from a deep sense of knowing & life experience. One person at a time, everyone for himself, together reminding each other of it & supporting one another. That for me is the new way into wellness, health and consciousness.
That to me is wellness intelligence.
