Wellness work isn’t about collecting more certifications—it’s about integrating what you already know.
In this episode, I’m speaking directly to coaches, yoga teachers, and wellness practitioners who feel overwhelmed, scattered, or stuck. I dive into why so many of us feel like we’re drowning in tools but starving for strategy—and how embodiment, nervous system awareness, and community can change everything.
You’ll learn:
🔹 Why integration > accumulation when it comes to your healing tools
🔹 How movement + coaching unlock deeper emotional release
🔹 The three pillars of transformation: safety, strategy, and sisterhood
🔹 How to structure your gifts into a clear, confident offering
🔹 Why “doing less but better” is the most powerful shift you can make
If you’re ready to step into your role as a regulated, embodied coach or teacher—this is the episode for you.
💗 Experience Embodied Yoga Life Coaching => https://upliftedyoga.docsend.com/view/sqzq9wbksh4ytzxk
FREE Practice: Somatic Morning Weight Loss Workout for Beginners | Yoga to Find Your Voice & Feel Confident
Relevant Blog: Top Somatic Coaching Programs And How To Choose One
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
💖 Uplifted Membership
🎧 Also Listen to:
#318 – What Is Somatic Yoga?
#330 – Somatic Yoga vs. Traditional Yoga: Breaking Down How 5 Poses Differ in your Yoga Practice
#380 – The Internet Is Collapsing — And Why That’s Great News for Yogis & Healers
© 2025 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
FREE Embodied Yoga Workshop (usually $67) Somatic Techniques & Cord Cutting Ritual
Transcript:
Brett:
It’s time for you to walk through the world with the confidence and serenity of someone who’s deeply tethered to their inner wisdom. If you have this insatiable hunger to uplift your personal life and make a bigger impact in your wellness career, leveraging yoga’s ancient wisdom, welcome. I’ve certified thousands of yoga instructors online, I teach to over half a million subscribers on YouTube, but I still haven’t remotely quenched my thirst for more yogic knowledge.
I’m Brett Larkin, founder of Uplifted Yoga, and this is the Uplifted Yoga Podcast, where yoga enthusiasts and teachers transform their lives for the better. Let’s get started. Hello, hello, yoga family.
We are talking today about something, I don’t know, I can’t even believe I’m talking about this, but I want to address the fact that so many of us, so many students I see in the healing arts, it’s not that you don’t have the skills, it’s just that sometimes it feels like you’re scattered. And this is so natural, right? Because you don’t realize that when you sign up for the yoga teacher training or for the life coaching course or massage school or all the other things, that all of a sudden you are stepping into the role of a business owner. That means that you’re the CEO, you’re the copywriter, you’re the customer support person, you’re the ads writer, you’re the blog writer, you’re the VA, and you’re also the spaceholder.
And of course, that’s where you want your attention to go, is actually truly helping other people. So today’s episode is really about like, if you’ve taken multiple trainings, but you’re still feeling like you don’t have a clear method, you feel confused, then this episode I really designed for you because I’m sharing the hard truth I’ve seen with hundreds of wellness practitioners that come through our campus. It’s not necessarily that you need more tools, it’s that you need a container to bring them all together in a way that actually supports your nervous system and your income.
As hard as this is to say, your overwhelm or your addiction to courses and more and more and more might actually be a freeze response, like a way to stay stuck or to stay in a familiar pattern of like needing to hoard and gather more and more knowledge. And if any of this resonates with you, my embodied yoga life coach training, which is a somatic training, it’s a dual track certification in somatic yoga and life coaching was really specifically designed to help you take all the brilliance that you already have and actually do something with it. So today we’re going to talk about the certification trap.
We’re going to talk about how I think the future is really about integration as compared to accumulation and why you can’t build a business in survival mode. Obviously, I will also tell you a little bit and take you behind the scenes on the embodied yoga life coaching certification, because this is the really last few weeks to sign up and do that application interview if this is a path you want to take. But if you resonate with anything I just mentioned, I think today is really going to serve you.
So the first thing is to really notice if you are an addict to more, if you’re addicted to more. And I definitely am raising my own hand here as well, because that’s really what we’ve been trained on. We’ve been trained with the lie that if we have more, we’re going to feel more confident or if we have more, we’re going to feel safer.
And so we see this in materialistic purchases, you know, needing more cars, the bigger house, the nicer outfit, the better boots, the more expensive yoga pants, like all the things. But where it can be a little harder to catch is when I see this in kundalini yoga, for example, people always want the new Kriya, the next Kriya. They want something that’s going to, it’s like shiny object syndrome, right? It’s like, OK, there’s one Kriya for the liver, but I want another one.
It’s sort of like the Pokemon, like got to catch them all mindset when it comes to yoga. Or maybe for you, that’s like the hardest meditation or the longest meditation or an hour of Ekong Kars, or it’s the inversion, it’s the headstand, it’s the scorpion pose or the flying pigeon. And what all of this is doing is like denying our presence and our authority and our confidence and our ability to be with ourselves in the here and now.
And ultimately, it feels so much safer to keep learning than to start implementing. And just notice, does that feel true for you? But here’s a truth bomb. If information alone worked, like just access to information, whether it’s more courses or free content on the internet, if information were enough, we’d all be millionaires.
Regulated, we’re like fully booked clients. Information is not enough. It’s the integration piece that is missing.
And I’m in the process of actually rehauling all of my yoga teacher trainings and various certifications for 2025 to have more of this integration time. We have so much time together on live calls, but I’ve been noticing more and more how using those live calls to actually give you more information actually isn’t what I think serves you best. It’s that integration time, that time with peers, which of course we already do, but I’m looking into how do we expand that and create more space for digestion, connection, contemplation, friendships within the live calls of all my programs.
And the program that really is designed to do this and has been designed to do this from the studs is the Embodied Yoga Life Coaching track. So you’ve heard me talk about it probably in the past, but what I love about this program, and so you understand what it is, because I think this is very new, it’s basically a somatic coaching certification paired with somatic yoga. So I’ve taken somatic trainings at this point.
So like, you know, become a certified somatic coach or embodiment coach. And what you do in that is that you are helping people bring their awareness back to the present moment, back to their bodies, back into what’s called embodied self-awareness instead of conceptual self-awareness. So conceptual self-awareness is when you’re in your head, thinking abstractly, ruminating about the past, projecting into the future, problem solving, while embodied self-awareness is when you’re tuned in to the here and now, what you’re sensing, what you’re feeling, what you’re sitting on.
It’s essentially the five senses, what you’re noticing in this present moment. And then what’s happening, not just outside of you, but inside of you, and how what we call proprioception, how you are in your environment. A simple way I like to explain this is that animals, or maybe when you’re relating to an animal, you’re in embodied self-awareness because you can’t talk to them.
Or I mean, you can talk to them, but you’re very much grounded in order to figure out, well, what does the animal need? Or what does the animal want? Or the animal is not ruminating about what happened six weeks ago, or what’s going to happen potentially next month. It’s hyper aware about the present moment, whether that’s a mailman ringing the doorbell, or the fact that it’s hearing you open the can to give it its food. You’ve heard me talk about it on this podcast before, the animal body, and how much wisdom we have when we can drop into this embodied self-awareness.
But if you trained with me or studied any yoga teacher trainings, hopefully you learned about the nervous system and the way the brain works, and this idea that neurons that fire together, wire together. Meaning the more we use certain neural pathways or grooves in our brain, the stronger those grooves get, the more we tend to favor them. And here in the West, our neurons that fire together and wire together have just been trained in conceptual self-awareness only.
That type of self-awareness that’s very head-based, abstract thinking, what’s going to happen in the future? How did stuff happen in the past? What does it mean that this, and then I did this, and then someone said this, right? We’re really trained in that modality of conceptual self-awareness. We just haven’t had a lot of training in embodied self-awareness. I mean, sometimes I feel like people think, oh, I’m bad at this, or I’m disconnected from my body.
And that may be true. I think a lot of us are disconnected from our body. And when you enter your first yoga class, it’s kind of that realization like, oh, I have a body.
I’m not just a floating head. I have a body. And then it starts this much bigger journey that hopefully you’re on if you’re here and you’re with me and you’re listening to this podcast where you don’t just realize you have a body, but then that your body actually has wisdom and that your body is like this animal pet that you’ve been neglecting and not taking care of.
And that the body actually holds the key to all the liberation and all the freedom. And it knows how to release the stored trauma, all the things that you’ve been anxiety riddled about in your head since the beginning. But I digress.
So we have this embodied self-awareness. And what I’ve seen in these incredible somatic coaching programs and certifications, many of which I’ve taken and been certified in myself, is that it’s doing such a beautiful job of coaching someone while having them notice what’s happening in their body, leveraging their environment, things like that. But what’s missing is movement.
I truly believe that in order to unwind your habitual programming, and this ties into the fashion material that some of you may have studied with me in teacher training, but we hear that phrase, you need to feel to heal. Well, you also need to unwind or move to discharge trauma from the body. There has to be, I think, a movement element.
Not always, but if we want to start listening to the body, like the body loves to move. The language of the body is movement and the senses. So even though I’ve done so much amazing, what would call somatic coaching or body-oriented coaching, I’ve always so desperately wished that those trainers and that those great coaches, many who helped me a lot, but I so wish that they were also yoga teachers, for example, so that we could actually do some Kundalini type movements or yoga poses, or just get my animal body kind of like moving and expressing in a bigger way based on what I was going through emotionally.
And that’s why I created Embodied Yoga Life Coaching, because it’s somatic yoga and life coaching fused together. And if you’re listening to this and you’re like, I don’t want to train in this, but I’d like to experience it, look in the show notes because we can hook you up with the amazing graduates who’ve gone through this program. It’s entering its third or fourth cohort at this point.
So you get to start in conceptual self-awareness, talking about what you want, what your goals are, something you want to shift just like you would in a traditional life coaching type of setting. But then we drop down into the body and we access the incredible intelligence of present moments, awareness, the senses, but then we don’t stop there. Once we figure out what’s there, we actually nurture work with it in like a co-creative dance, move it.
And you, if you facilitate in this way, you actually start to learn what types of movements work best with what different types of emotions. How do I give the person who’s in front of me enough guidance? Because if I just say like stomp out your anger or shout out your rage, most people aren’t going to be able to do that. So you need to titrate with them, give them little ideas of ways that they can do movements that would support a safe emotional release for them or a safe expression of anger or frustration or anxiety or fear or whatever it is that they’re feeling, but not guide them too much.
Because if we guide them too much, well, then we’re back in the traditional asana class where everyone’s just following along with what you say. So it’s a very unique style of teaching because we want the client to lead. We’re seeing the client as resourced and whole.
It’s like you’re just there to help amplify their awareness and help them tap into their own body’s wisdom. Because the philosophy of this work is that we are all naturally wise. Like our body holds this intelligence that naturally knows how it wants to unwind, to move in directions of ease and release trauma or pain.
So we need to offer suggestions, but we don’t want to become dictatorial. We want to follow them, but often we need to give them some ideas to get them started because no one knows how to move in this way. Animals do.
Animals are very good at it. And toddlers, really small children are really good at it because it hasn’t been ingrained out of them yet. So I hope what you’re seeing here is that what’s really unique about the Embody Yoga Life Coaching program is that it’s giving you a structure that lets your different modalities begin to talk to each other.
So whether you’re coming from Ayurveda or traditional therapy or body work or cognitive behavioral therapy or tapping or Reiki, or maybe you’ve taken certifications in all of those, but you don’t know how to pull them all together to actually coach and help someone in front of you. Embody Yoga Life Coaching is designed to help you find the common thread amongst your different certifications and modality, combined with your unique genius, who you want to serve. And that helps your client work become focused and repeatable.
This is the weirdest analogy to use, but if you ever hang dry your laundry, like as opposed to putting your wet clothes in the dryer, you put your wet clothes on one of those hanging racks, which I do for all my yoga clothes, by the way, because I don’t like them to go in the dryer. But it’s almost like EYLC, Embody Yoga Life Coaching, is that thing that you hang your clothes on. That hanger that you’re putting all your different certifications, you’re going to look at them one by one, put them on this hanger.
And it’s giving you the structure to figure out how do I take this into a client setting that becomes focused and replicable. And it doesn’t have to be private. We’ll also talk about teaching somatic yoga or doing somatic yoga life coaching with groups.
So whether you want to work individually, one-on-one with clients or long-term, you’re seeing a bigger brand for yourself in group programs, you’ll be well set up for both. But ultimately, in whatever you do, you are the common thread. It’s about you, your personality, your essence, your unique fusion of gifts and talents.
And what I love about this program, it’s a place where you can really work through that. Now, yes, is it also going to teach you potentially new things? It is, but I feel like it’s really a coming home. And I invite you to, regardless of where you are in your journey, just think, does any of this sound like a coming home to you? Doing less, knowing that if you feel safe, you can alchemize anything, knowing that you have to feel to heal, but you can trust your body in that process.
So there’s six frameworks I offer within the program. But what’s interesting is that there, I think for the types of people who come in to embody yoga life coaching, these frameworks are enhancing things you already know. Yes, you’re going to learn how to coach.
So that is all new. But for example, one of the frameworks is very much related to the core concepts that you’re already likely familiar with from the yoga sutras, but helping you actually coach people on those concepts. One is all about frequency or what you might call energy or Kundalini.
One is about emotions, what we call the emotions framework, the internal parts framework, the chakras and their archetype frameworks. So I want you to visualize these as those clothes hangers. The thing about these frameworks is they support you in bringing your vision to life as you hang your clothes, hang your personality, hang your different certifications across them.
And I say very clearly in the program, or if you work with me, it’s like, it’s not about using all six. It’s really about as you explore each in your own body, and we work with you in the business portion of the program on who you want to serve, your unique value proposition, what’s going to resonate in the marketplace, sort of like a sculpture emerging from stone, like it starts to become clear, like which of these frameworks are something that you can hang your certifications on that gives you a lot of clear direction with clients and how to actually format it all in like a 75 minute session that helps someone and a lot of the other frameworks or information or even past things you’ve learned might might fall away. It might be like a shedding and you receive so much coaching as part of this process.
You’re being coached by me, your peers, because your nervous system can’t build your dream business if it’s in survival mode. Sadly, and I know this is ironic, but dysregulation is the reason most healers stall out or just give up on their business. So everything in this program starts with regulating your system first, your safety, your rest, your daily rhythm.
The way the program works now is that we’re doing really grounding somatic exercises at the start of every single call. And then it’s from that calm center that you begin to practice coaching, receive coaching, teach, step into your voice. And so by the time we get to the last piece of the program, which is the business mastermind, it doesn’t overwhelm you.
It’s all about landing in your body first. So if you’ve ever felt scattered or stuck or like you’re spinning your wheels, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not lazy.
Your nervous system is potentially in freeze. You need to regulate before you activate. And that’s pillar one of the program and why we start every session with breath and movement and grounding.
This is about giving you a replicable method to bring together all of your trainings and to really organize your brilliance, but without blowing up your nervous system. And whether you end up applying and joining or not, I want you to think about today, like how can you move your business forward? Whether that means clarifying your niche, putting out a new offer, figuring out the pricing. How can you do that inside a nervous system safe container? What would that look like? And do you really need more information or do you need implementation integration time with feedback, with peers, with coaching, making those real friendships, those real connections? I feel like there’s so many programs out there promising that you’re going to graduate with a business or graduate with XYZ.
But I think the more important question is like, are you going to do that with also your body being online? So this program isn’t just about becoming a coach. It’s about healing you and becoming more of you, amplifying what’s unique about you and the certifications that you’ve already completed, all the incredible credentials you potentially already have. And it’s about regulating your own nervous system first before you guide others.
It’s so incredible because as I spend more and more years coaching, I’m truly reflecting and realizing how much I have been in performance or how much I was in performance in my early years as a coach and why I’d find coaching so exhausting. With the skills I have now, coaching feels so grounding and relaxing for me because I’m not in performance. I’m not trying to impress.
I’m not trying to fix. I’m trusting that my client is resourced and whole and that I’m there simply to support their nervous system and almost like a midwife, allow what’s naturally coming through them to emerge and release. And this is such a beautiful place to be.
When I used to do body work many years ago, actually doing myofascial release work on people’s bodies, I found it so incredibly grounding. I would not be tired after sessions because there’s something about sinking into someone else’s body and achieving that resonance and helping them work through that I would find incredibly meditative and grounding. I never thought something like coaching could also be like that or feel like that, but it does now.
So maybe you’re someone who’s already coaching or already deep in business, or maybe you’re just starting out. But what we all have in common is that this journey of figuring out how to help and heal others while also tending to ourselves, what we call dual awareness in the world of somatics, it’s not something you’re meant to do alone. That solopreneur mode that I think I kind of started the episode talking about of being the CEO and the copywriter and the customer service person and the marketing person and feeling like it’s all on you to figure out how to get your pipeline sales and funnel up and working.
Why you’re so drained because you’re either teaching so many classes or coaching so many people. We’ve had so many studio owners move to this program too who are just burned out figuring out how to balance the emotions, the energetics, the economics. We were never meant to do this alone.
And that’s why this program is really an invitation, a six-month invitation to co-regulate with me, with your peers, receive some incredible hangers on which to hang your certifications. And no matter where you’re at in your journey or whether you think you might apply to join or not, I want you to think about this as a potential formula for success. It’s three S’s.
Are you ready? The first is safety. Without safety, no healing can occur. The second S is strategy.
This is the piece that I think so many people are missing, that strategy piece. And whether it’s this container or someone else’s or something else you find for yourself, I know that in Embodied Yoga Life Coaching, we have six beautiful frameworks that allow you to hang what you already know into repeatable coaching sessions with either individuals or groups that are transformative. On the business strategy side, we do mock sales calls and discovery calls and enrollment calls in there.
So your nervous system actually gets to feel safe doing all these scary things that other certifications, I feel like they just certify you and kind of kick you out the door. And then you’re expected to figure all of that out on your own. We actually practice selling to each other.
So when you end up closing a private client on the phone after the program, it’s not the first time you’ve done that. And the last S is sisterhood, really that friendship piece. And the three of these things together really create results that ripple into every area of your life.
I know one of our students who was an Ayurvedic health coach and life coach came into the mainly to enhance her own offerings, but through the coaching she received, she found her entire marriage transformed. We had another student based here in the States who moved through the program who actually had an MBA and used to teach about business, but was absolutely paralyzed when it came to putting her own energy, healing her own energy work online. Even though she had this business background, she was stuck and she couldn’t take action until she used these frameworks on herself and then hung her other certifications on top of them to package them into something that was actually sellable.
And one of our other past students who was on the younger side, she was out of not that long out of college. And she said the best part was the calls where, where we came together, where we held each other accountable. She just felt like she wasn’t building her business alone anymore.
So if you’re still listening, this is my invitation for you to apply. The application process is simple. You can click the link in the show notes or find the embodied yoga life coaching page on my website.
The application is essentially a conversation, a conversation to see if this program is the right fit for you, if you’re the right fit for it. And if it’s not, that’s absolutely okay too. We can either guide you to other resources we have, or even other experts and colleagues that I work with who could best serve you with where you are right now.
But at the time of recording this doors to this specific program only open once a year. So this is the moment. If this feels like something you want to slow down and drop into, yes, there will be new information, but there will also be a lot of time for integration and a nervous system rewiring that we will go through together, especially in the first essential months of the program where we’re focused on somatic yoga.
So whether or not you ever join embodied yoga life coaching, here is what I want you to take away from this episode this week. Number one, you don’t need to do more. You need to do less better.
Number two, create structure for your gifts and journaling can be a great way to do that. If you’re not part of a bigger program or mentorship group. Number three is to start with co-regulation before you coach or create or make another piece of social media content, or even send that newsletter.
Notice if you are even in your body. One of my favorite ways to just reset is take 60 seconds, place my hand on my chest and exhale with a sound. And fourth, and finally, don’t do this alone.
If you’re a coach or a teacher trying to lead and hold space for other people, my question is who’s holding space for you? Find those people or find your sisters. Your nervous system isn’t meant to hold everything on its own, especially with the huge changes we’re seeing in technology and the internet right now. Listen to my episode from two or three weeks ago if you want to hear my predictions about how the internet is about to completely change.
All the marketing rules are getting shaken up right now. And what’s going to win is authenticity and uniqueness. And of course, if this conversation resonated, you’re invited to explore UILC.
We go deep into integration, somatic regulation and supportive, intimate coaching and business building. And you can learn more and apply at the link in the show notes. And no matter what you choose or what path you’re on, I am cheering for you.
Your body knows the way. You already have so many tools. I know if you’re listening to this, you already have a lot of tools.
So use them this week and take care of you. Loving what you’re learning on the podcast? Apply the ancient science of yoga to your daily life surrounded by incredible peers in my uplifted 200-hour online yoga teacher training. Or grow into your role as a leader of others in my 300-hour professional program for yoga teachers, which is also a high-level business mastermind.
At any time, I would love to welcome you into my Yoga for Self Mastery course to help you uncover your personal blueprint to serenity. Or join my Uplifted Yoga membership for an all-access pass to my most popular yoga courses, thematic class plans and practice calendars. Don’t forget to prioritize your well-being and get on your mat today.
From my heart to yours, namaste.
