These days it feels like trauma is everywhere. If you have ever felt like your healing journey was taking too long, or that no matter how much therapy you did something still felt stuck in your body, this conversation is for you.
I recently sat down with Josh Schrei, the creator and host of the Emerald Podcast and one of the most thoughtful voices working at the intersection of myth, animist tradition, and embodied healing. What unfolded between us was one of the most expansive and nourishing conversations I have had in five seasons of this podcast. I have been listening to Josh’s work for years and I can tell you that sitting across from him — even virtually — felt like being held by something much larger than either of us.
I want to share some of what we explored together because I think it has the potential to genuinely shift how you understand your body, your pain, and your path forward.
The Body Is Not Separate From the Cosmos
One of the foundational teachings of Josh’s work is rooted in the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient alchemical text that carries the teaching: as above, so below. As within, so without.
What this means in practical terms is that the cycles happening all around us in nature — the turning of seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, the pulse of day and night — are also happening inside us. Our nervous systems are not separate from the natural world. They are expressions of it.
As a somatic therapist this lands deeply for me. So much of the work I do with clients is about helping them reconnect to their own inner seasons — recognizing when they are in a period of expansion and when they are in a necessary contraction. When they are in a dark night of the soul that isn’t a sign something has gone wrong but a sign that something is composting, preparing to grow.
Josh put it beautifully when he said that the universe is not a giant 7-Eleven, always open. It exists in pulses. And so do we.
Ritual Is Trauma Work. It Always Has Been.
One of the most powerful reframes in our conversation was Josh’s insistence that ritual — real embodied communal ritual — has always been this kind of work, even when it never named itself as such.
Traditional cultures built their entire year around ritual calendars. Dedicated times for ceremony, for altered states, for communal re-patterning. Not because life was easy, but precisely because it wasn’t. Ritual existed to move what needed to be moved, to re-weave what had come apart, to reconnect individuals to each other and to the larger ecology of life.
What strikes me about this as a clinician is how much it aligns with what we know about the nervous system. In states of altered consciousness — achieved through singing, chanting, dancing, repetitive rhythmic movement — the brain becomes genuinely malleable. Things can be re-patterned. New neural pathways can form. This isn’t mysticism. This is neuroscience.
And yet we have largely stripped this from modern life and replaced it with individual talk therapy conducted in a private office. Which can be incredibly valuable — I have seen it change lives, including my own. But it is incomplete. We are not meant to heal alone.
You Cannot Think Your Way to Embodied Healing
This is something I say to my clients constantly and Josh said it with such clarity that I want to repeat it here: we are beings of enactment. We do not heal by thinking about our healing. We heal by enacting it. By taking our bodies on a transformational journey.
This is why I use martial arts practices in my work. Why I run somatic group sessions. Why the practices we do together — breathwork, movement, touch, sound — are not supplementary to the therapy but central to it.
The western psychological tradition has given us something incredibly valuable in naming and validating individual experience. But it has also, in many cases, reinforced a deeply individualist model of healing that puts enormous pressure on the single person to extract, process, and resolve their trauma on their own timeline in their own head.
Josh offered a different image. He talked about looking at a forest of old gnarled cedar trees and not being able to tell what was the trauma and what was the tree. We are our patterns. Trauma is not a foreign object to be removed. It is part of the lattice work of how we grew. And healing is not extraction. It is re-patterning, re-weaving, growing new rings.
Sensitive People, Porous Bodies, and the Cost of Doom Scrolling
We spent time in our conversation talking about what Josh calls porosity — the experience of being highly sensitive to the energy and pain of others and of the collective. As a therapist I see this constantly. People who absorb the suffering around them into their own bodies, who feel the collective pain as a physical weight, who come into my office depleted by simply existing in the world right now.
Josh was direct about this in a way I deeply appreciated. He said that one of the most important practices for sensitive people right now is guardianship — developing a conscious, embodied capacity to choose what you let in and what you don’t. Not as a form of spiritual bypassing or closing yourself off from the world, but as an act of genuine self-stewardship.
He also named something that I think needs to be said more loudly: doom scrolling is not staying informed. The medium through which we consume information about the world has an enormous effect on our nervous systems, particularly for sensitive and porous people. Flashing, decontextualized, algorithmically curated fragments of content are not a holistic way to be with what is happening in the world. They are a way to dysregulate.
This doesn’t mean we disengage. It means we become intentional about how we engage.
The Trickster, Cultural Disruption, and Finding Your Footing
We also talked about the current political and cultural moment — the sense of things falling apart, of old orders being disrupted, of not knowing what comes next. Josh brought the lens of the trickster archetype to this conversation in a way that I found genuinely helpful.
Trickster is not good and not bad. Trickster is the force of cultural disruption — the one who arrives when a culture has become too rigid, too married to its own story, and shakes everything loose. What comes after the disruption is never guaranteed. The work of trickster creates an opening. What we build in that opening is up to us.
I found real comfort in this framing. Not because it makes what is happening less scary, but because it places it in a larger context. Disruption has always been part of the cycle. The question is how we tend ourselves and each other through it.
The Pralaya Meditation: Don’t Skip It
At the end of our conversation Josh guided us through one of the most beautiful meditations I have experienced in a long time. It is drawn from the ancient Indian concept of pralaya — the great dissolution — in which element by element, the body and the world dissolve back into void space, into the in-between, into rest.
In a culture addicted to production and forward momentum, being guided into dissolution felt genuinely radical. And deeply necessary.
Please don’t skip the last fifteen minutes of this episode. Your nervous system will thank you.
This Is the Work
After more than twenty years of helping people heal from trauma in my practice in Oakland, California, I am more convinced than ever that the path forward is embodied, communal, and rooted in something older and larger than any of us.
If this conversation stirred something in you and you are ready to go deeper, I welcome you to work with me directly. You can also explore my book Pathways to Peace: A Practical Guide to Embodied Healing and Living Somatically, which offers accessible tools for beginning or deepening this journey wherever you are.
Find me at charnacassell.com and passionatelife.org and follow along on Instagram and Facebook at LaidOPEN Podcast.
And please , listen to the Emerald Podcast. Find Josh’s yearlong course The Mythic Body at themythicbody.com/courses. These are resources I return to myself and recommend without hesitation.
