What if your inner chaos is sacred?

When I first pictured a yogi, I imagined someone always calm, serene… maybe even a little untouchable. But the more I’ve learned—through somatics, spirituality, and lived experience—the more I believe that true healing means feeling everything. Even rage.

In this episode, we dive deep into:

🔹 Why stress isn’t an emotion (and how that changes everything)

🔹 How Kali represents sacred rage, transformation, and nervous system completion

🔹 The trap of spiritual bypassing and the myth of “staying calm”

🔹 How to embrace the full spectrum of your emotions—and finally close the stress cycle

If you’ve ever felt like you were “failing” at healing because you weren’t calm enough… this one’s for you.

💮Sign Up Free: KALI YOGA CHALLENGE Get my Kali Guidebook as an instant download.

FREE Practice: Easy Beginner Yoga to Connect with Feminine Energy | Yoga for Soft Feminine Energy with Music

Relevant Blog: Female Archetype Quiz: What Female Archetype Are You?

Relevant to Today’s Episode:
🐍 Yoga for Self Mastery

💖 Uplifted Membership

🌀 Somatic Yoga Life Coaching

💫 Somatic Certification

🎧 Also Listen to:
#324 – The Importance of Emotional Processing and Regulation: DENT Model Trauma

#325 – Archetypes, Dreams & Why Nightmares are Good with Kari Hohne

#345 – Somatic Shaking: What Is It? Why Does it Work?

Transcript:

Brett:
If you’ve been listening to the uplifted yoga podcast for years or you are brand new here, I have a very special invitation for you today. We are kicking off my Kali yoga challenge. Yes, this is a five day experience. If you’re listening in real time, we begin on June 20th and every day I email you a video in which you embody the archetypal energy of the goddess Kali. And we’re going to talk about different wisdom traditions. If you don’t resonate with Kali,

But the idea with this challenge is that you’re going to shed your fears, spark your inner strength and step fully into your power and really tap in to your anger, your strength and that wild ferocious love that Kali has for you. Some of you may have already done this challenge with me. You know, I love hosting it every single year and you’ve told me you love doing it more than once. And if you’re new here, you absolutely want to get in on this.

You can go to the link in the show notes or just go to brettlarkin.com forward slash Kali. So B-R-E-T-T-L-A-R-K-I-N.com forward slash K-A-L-I for Kali.

and invite a woman in your life to do this with you. That way you can keep each other accountable for these five days, whether it’s a mom, a sister, a friend.

This challenge is open to everyone, whether you’re a teacher, a student, or brand new to yoga.

We’re going to do lion’s froth. We’re going to do bear claws. We are going to move our body and really allow you to.

Create a safe space to express and unleash whatever has been holding you back.

This challenge is completely free. And when you register, you’re going to get this beautiful Kali guidebook from me, as well as an additional podcast that goes deeper into

backstory of Kali and her energy.

And today on the show, I wanted to really tie together this idea of working with archetypal energies and the power of somatics. So we’re going to talk about in this episode why stress isn’t an emotion. You might think stress is an emotion, but it’s not actually. And how Kali represents this sacred rage, ⁓ transformation and nervous system completion of the stress cycle.

that’s a really key principle in somatic yoga. We’re also gonna talk about the trap of spiritual bypassing and the myth of sort of like staying calm and how you can really use your yoga practice to embrace the full spectrum of your emotions. So if you’re someone who ever felt like you were kind of like failing at healing because you’re not calm enough or because you’re resentful or have some like anger.

simmering beneath the surface like this episode and this challenge is for you.

It’s completely free. Sign up, invite a friend, and let’s dive in to this week’s episode.

So often, so many of us who get addicted to yoga think that healing means being calm all the time. I am guilty of this as well.

But what I want to explore today is what if your inner chaos is actually sacred?

What if we could reframe regulation to mean range, like being able to feel the full spectrum of human experience as opposed to repression? So instead of calm being the goal, calm is like that feeling that you have after a good cry, after you’ve released ⁓ emotion. And I want to talk also a little bit about stress because

So many students tell me they’re stressed. I often say I’m stressed. But the invitation I want to explore today is like, what if stress isn’t actually emotion? Spoiler alert, it’s not. Stress is not an emotion. Stress is you resisting feeling an emotion. That’s what stress is. stress is a very

healthy cycle that humans are incredibly well designed to cope with. And in my book that’s coming out, my new book, I talk a lot about the stress cycle. And if you haven’t heard this term or this phrase,

The stress cycle refers to this very healthy, healthy loop that happens to us, just like, you know, we eat food, we digest the food, we eliminate food. ⁓ Humans are very well wired, actually. ⁓ Our animal body is very well wired to deal with stress. We intake stress. So there’s a spike in cortisol and adrenaline. Then we’re supposed to discharge that stress. And then we’re…

Back to homeostasis. So the missing piece in this cycle is actually the discharge piece. So for example, if, and I think I’ve given this example before on the podcast, and there’s a great podcast, I think about the dent model of trauma that you can go ⁓ look at. We’ll link it up in the show notes for you as well. If you want to learn a little bit more about fight, flight, freeze, fawn, know, these different ways, these different patterns that stress comes in.

and the different ways we might need to discharge it. And I think the example I give in that podcast is that of, you know, if we’re in the wild, I want you to imagine millennia ago and we see a lion coming at us, we would run as fast as we could, right? We would use our glutes and our legs and our breathing and yeah, cortisol and adrenaline would be spiking like…

we would be shunting blood away from our stomach ⁓ to like go to our extremities in case the line catches up with us and we need to fight, know, cortisol would be increased in case the line bites us so we can have a faster clotting factor if we’re bleeding. Like all of our rest and digest activities temporarily turn off as we run, maybe have to fight a little bit, then climb a tree and we’re frozen. And then we survive potentially this experience and then we run back.

where to our tribe and our tribe is going to welcome us and we’re going to tell our tribe, our clans people, I just, you know, almost got eaten by a lion. I, you know, this happened, that happened. And I think, you know, the lion is sort of wounded now and we could potentially all, if we went together, we could go, you know, fight it or hurt it or something. And, and then with my tribe, we would either, you know, finish off the line or try to tackle it together, or we would like celebrate.

that I survived this lion attack or if we didn’t celebrate like I’m sure there’d be some sort of tribe celebration soon like a birth, a death, a new moon, something and in that kind of tribal celebration would be together, would be around a bonfire, we wouldn’t have technological devices, we would play drums, we would stamp, we would stomp, we would sing, we would pray, we would potentially eat lion stew together, we would do all these activities.

that would help discharge the stress. And in the story I just told you, we discharge stress actually in physically running away from the lion, from fighting the lion. And then we discharge it again and maybe some ceremony and ritual with our tribe. And when we talk to our tribe about how we survived, you know, that’s, and hugging them, that’s the oxytocin, the cuddle hormone, these other hormones naturally flooding in, right, to help us close the stress cycle. So stress was open, but I

had a physical reaction to the stress, the running, the climbing the tree, you know, maybe victory dance later. The problem we have now is that we have all these stressors coming at us, not in the form of wild animals, but in the form of email and deadlines and overstimulation screens.

not having a clan, so we’re looking after our kids and our older parents by ourselves. We have all of these stressors and theoretically life should be less stressful than ever before because we’re no longer living in the wild. We have ample food supply, we have shelter, we have all the luxury and comfort imaginable and yet we’re still so stressed. Why? Like there’s always been stress, the body’s well equipped to deal with stress.

The issue is we’re not discharging the stress. We’re not completing the stress cycle. So, you know, imagine I see a lion out in the wilderness now and

I feel all the same fear. My animal body has all the same impulses of wanting to run away and all this stuff. But let’s just for fun picture that I have a gun and I just pull out the gun and shoot the line. All of that energy that was in my legs and my glutes and my pelvis to run, kick, fight, scream, all the energy to scream and shout for help is locked in my voice box. Like I don’t do anything to complete the stress cycle because I just shot the line. didn’t run away. I didn’t fight. I didn’t do my physical body didn’t.

do anything to signal to my animal body that I survived. So I’m kind of like mid stress loop. All of the activities that would reduce the cortisol, reduce the adrenaline, I’m not doing them. I’m not kicking, I’m not fighting, I’m not punching, I’m not screaming. just use my little finger to pull a trigger. That’s it. So rationally, my intellectual mind now knows I’m safe. But my…

animal body because I think we also talk I’ve talked before on this podcast of how you are like the owner of a pet called your body, which is an animal It poops it menstruates it needs food. Like it is not it is an animal It you know, is doesn’t like certain sense. It has an aversion to certain lighting like it’s very much primal and that primal part of you

doesn’t actually know that you survived because you didn’t do any of the activities to complete the stress cycle, the fighting, the running away, the screaming, the celebration. And then again, because we’re, you know, think about COVID too, like that cuddle hormone that we get from oxytocin or by being in groups with other people, we don’t get any of that either because, you know, it’s getting better now, but we actually went through a whole period of social distancing. And what do we do instead? We feel uncomfortable because we’re mid stress cycle.

We’re not doing any of the things that would discharge the stress cycle because it’s socially unacceptable to like scream or yell or punch or kick or hug people or start a ritual tribal dance. So what do we do instead? We numb, we suppress, we turn to our phone to distract us from the uncomfortable, know, cortisol adrenaline that we’re living in. And we never actually finish the stress cycle. So those of you who are practicing,

Somatic yoga with me in the uplifted app in the somatic yoga category or just kind of getting a preview of it on YouTube You’ll see that a lot of what I’m doing in the sequencing of those classes and the recent one that came out about releasing guilt and shame for women is a great example is that we create some safety in the body first so usually that means Breathing putting the hands on the body trying to tell our animal it’s safe kind of like trying to pet our dog or cat letting it know you’re safe, but then

Once we have a little bit of safety established, a lot of times in somatic yoga, I’m trying to have you do movements or have us do movements together that are actually discharging stress and helping the cycle complete. And that’s why we’re punching and that’s why we’re kicking and that’s why I’m inviting you to make noise.

You can’t think your way out of the stress cycle and get these hormones to shift. You can’t meditate your way out. And to circle back, there’s a little bit of a tangent, but to circle back when we find and fall in love with yoga, which so many of us do and I have, it becomes in many ways, I feel like I didn’t understand the term spiritual bypassing for many years. I was like, well, I kind of get what people are talking about. What are they talking about? But now that I understand the stress cycle, I feel like I do understand this idea of spiritual bypassing because

spiritual bypassing to me, at least what that connotates is like, instead of feeling the feeling, I’m just going to like move light up and down my spine and I’m just going to transcend it. And, you know, that can only work for so long because here’s the thing when you’re suppressing a lot of emotion in your body, or there’s a lot of stress cycles that you haven’t completed because you haven’t emoted and physically released them out of your system, like

Somatic shaking is a great example of how you can do that. And there’s a whole podcast episode on that. If you want to nerd out on this train of thought more with me.

But suppressing energy in the body, living mid stress cycle consumes an insane amount of energy for your body. It’s not like this isn’t work. It takes so much energy for your body to shove these things down, to repress, to be in like, you know, what we call orange alert and yoga teacher training that like elevated levels of, of cortisol and adrenaline, like that slow drip where you’re just in it all the time because

You.

didn’t discharge, didn’t emote, you didn’t express, you just sat still, froze and meditated and told yourself you were just going to elevate out of it.

And maybe you are moving, but it’s in a yoga class or a fitness or wellness class that’s in a very structured way. love asana, love yoga, love practicing it, but let’s face it, a lot of these postures are very specific. They’re not about catharsis. They’re not about emoting. They’re about having, you know, your, your front heel bisect your back arch. They’re about knee over ankle. They’re about.

knitting your front ribs in. It’s almost like taking our body, if we go back to the dog analogy, to the dog show and making it prance around and do tricks.

Now I am not saying that the modern postural asana practice has no value. absolutely has value. Meditation absolutely has value. But what I’ve been inviting you to think about this week is that your inner chaos also has value and letting it out, discharging stress and emotion through your body and setting up a sacred ritual container to do that, which is what my next book is going to be about.

is also vitally important and it’s a piece that’s been missing. It’s a piece that many of us I think have been avoiding. And what’s exciting about this particular moment in time is that if this feels awkward for you to do or some of the somatic yoga that I’ve offered has felt a little too much or like a little too extreme or you know like you’re not sure. Working with an archetype can be so so powerful and every single year and if you’re an uplifted member you can do this at

anytime if you have the uplifted app because the program’s in there. But every year I lead what’s called the Kali Yoga Challenge. And if you don’t know who Kali is,

She is a Hindu goddess who is the fierce, fierce mother of liberation. Her name Kali in Sanskrit is derived from Kala, which means time or death or blackness. And she is this force that devours something, transforms and renews. And if you sign up for the challenge, which is completely free to do, and I’ll put the link in the show notes, I’ll send you a podcast all about her archetypal energy.

She’s an incredibly interesting goddess because she’s often depicted ⁓ black or ⁓ nude or often the color blue. And she usually has her tongue lolling out. She’s wearing ⁓ skulls. She eats demons. She often has blood dripping out of her mouth. And she really represents this divine rage, which I think if you’ve been in like…

good girl sitting straight meditating yoga world for a very long time, which is a great place to be. Like I’m there, I’m with you. But exploring anger as something that’s sacred within you, that’s purposeful, that’s actually like anger is such a fun emotion and that it’s very pure and that it can move quickly and easily. And all emotions need to be moved, right? If we even look at the Latin like imovere is the root word of emotion. It means to move. Like emotions are designed

to move. When we suppress them, suppressing them actually takes a ton of work for our body. Like imagine like holding a dumbbell or a weight in midair and just like holding it and squeezing it and not letting it pull in and not dropping it either, just holding it. Like think about how much energy that wastes. Well, that’s what like our fascia and our subtle body and our energy is like doing internally when we don’t let these emotions move through us, when we don’t complete the stress cycle.

And like anger is an emotion I really want to focus on because if you’re a woman listening to this or identify as a woman or no matter who you are, honestly, like anger is incredibly socially unacceptable.

If you’re like me, you grew up and you were told to be nice, be polite, sit still, not, you know, not say too much, not say too much about yourself. Be kind, be generous, you know, be a good girl and earn the gold star.

And if you identify with being a perfectionist or being a people pleaser, like this archetype of Kali, and if you don’t resonate with like the Hindu mythology, I’m going to talk a little bit about how we see this archetypal energy in other cultures as well. So just stay with me. But she can be so powerful to work with because she’s showing you that your rage is divine, that your radical truth, your authenticity matters. Like when we see her depicted,

with the blood and the tongue and the skulls and the eating demons. It’s like, this isn’t about a physical death. This is a metaphorical ego death. Like she’s devoted to your liberation and killing all like the ego good girl plastic doll shell that you’ve been hiding under so that your rage resulting in your liberation, your liberation from Maya, that Sanskrit word Maya meaning, you know, illusion.

the kind of the fakeness that maybe you’re living in, the people-bleasing, saying yes, but meaning no, all of these things, the conditioning, the fear. That’s what she wants to liberate you from. She’s devoted to your liberation. She’s also about shadow integration. So she’s like inviting in the dark, representing the dark, not to destroy you, but to free you. And what’s so beautiful is that in the Kali Yoga Challenge, we actually explore her archetypal energy on the mat. And again, if you’re someone who

is curious about somatic yoga or…

maybe you already love it, in which case, like 100%, this is for you. But even if you’ve been a little bit more on the fence, I think often connecting with an archetype can be such a powerful component of your healing. And it’s like, if you’re listening to this, you probably spend a lot of time on your yoga mat, on your meditation cushion, but you’re maybe not leveraging or pulling in archetypal energies as part of your healing work. And all of these different archetypes are frequencies of the divine and here to help and heal us. So,

I don’t want to say like it’s a waste, but it’s just it’s just a pity if you’re not leveraging archetypes in your yoga practice, which is why Again in the uplifted app. There’s these entire, you know, like 10 20 day 14 day plans that you can do exploring archetypal energies On your yoga mat So you’re not just moving and getting a workout and breathing and doing all the things you like to do But you’re also playing with these different textures of energy which can help close the stress cycle for you I think all of them can in different ways

but especially Kali for the discharge piece, for the moving emotion piece and specifically that emotion of anger.

And I found a really interesting quote. This was ⁓ from Devdutt Patanak. ⁓ But he said, she is terrifying, meaning Kali, Kali is terrifying because she does not conform. And I think there’s something so interesting about that because once we start honoring our radical truth, our authenticity, and putting that first instead of serving others,

we’re maybe no longer conforming to a lot of the stereotypes that society has placed on us, whether that’s being the good girl or the nice mother or all these different things.

So from a somatic lens, know, Kali is really representing this embodied disruption, right? The shaking, the burning, the clearing out, the clearing away of what we don’t need.

And she’s bringing anger or resentment or unhelpful patterns to the surface so that they can be fully felt, metabolized and released. This is a key principle of tantra. Anything that can be felt fully will release, will move, will change. So coming back to stress, stress is not an emotion. Stress is you resisting feeling an emotion. If you create sacred space and time to feel the emotion, like stress is the bracing.

Stress is the bracing of not feeling fully. And I think if that is a reframe that you can integrate into your life this week or explore with me in this upcoming challenge or get it on the uplifted app, like that is huge. Because all of a sudden when you’re stressed, you realize like stress isn’t happening to me. Stress isn’t an emotion. Stress just means that I need to create some space for myself, go into the mother archetype.

Right, which we also, there’s a whole class exploring the mother archetype and the membership as well. Go into the mother archetype, create safe space for myself, just like a mother would for a child. And then I need to let myself have a tantrum and move whatever energy, whether it’s grief or sadness or rage or whatever. And then I’ll complete the stress cycle. I’ll feel much lighter.

all the energy that was being used to brace and hold that emotion down and in, which is like a lot of energy, very wasteful, just like holding that weight, my arm is shaking and never moving it and never letting it go and never pulling it in. Instead, I’m gonna go through this sponda, this like contraction, expansion, moving, shaking, kicking, you know, I’m going to move some energy.

feel it fully, which is the scary part, but once you feel it fully, it releases, it transforms, and then it’s gone.

Now here I’m talking about like, I don’t know, maybe you, you’re angry about a text message or an encounter earlier in the day. Of course we have these like deeper trauma patterns as well that are going to take a lot longer to move through the body. And you might want to do that with a somatic coach or in a supportive space. But the idea here is that.

One way we could define healing is you mothering yourself and then asking yourself to stay with discomfort or feel something fully until it transforms.

Is that healing or is like sitting as still as possible, just focusing on my breath, like moving light up and down my spine, chanting an internal mantra like peace, peace, peace, or is that healing? I don’t know, right? I think you could make arguments for both, but I’m just being cheeky here. What’s interesting is when we even look at the iconography of Kali, like a lot of things we talked about, we see like her sword is often said to represent discernment, her wild tongue that’s kind of lolling out of her mouth.

is representing expression, expression without shame. And her, you she’s often depicted kind of dancing and moving. And I think that’s like this embodied healing.

In tantric traditions, Kali is often defined as like the power behind Shakti. I think that’s really interesting. Shakti is that pure creative ⁓ energy and you you can’t have creation without destruction. ⁓ And so part of this primal original power is like the ability to let things go, the dark side, to be able to move through that and… ⁓

You know, we often see Kali aligned or associated with Kundalini energy rising through the body in the sense that it’s burning away impurities, right? That’s what Kali is about. She’s devoted to your liberation. She wants to burn through, slice through, eat up, stomp on anything.

that’s not serving you. And this is my invitation to you, like explore her energy with me. If you’re listening to this in real time, like you can do it completely for free. Link is in the show notes. I’ll send you a class each day. I’m going to send you a workbook. I’ll send you another podcast just about her and her energy that you can listen to. And of course, if you want to dive more into archetypes and really pull them into the work you’re already doing on the mat, know, grab the uplifted membership.

You can explore Lakshmi, can explore Kali, you can explore the archetypal series where we look at, you know, the mother, Kuan Yin. There’s some really powerful anger classes in there as well. And I promise I’d talk a little bit about this archetypal energy of like fierce love and transformational power, transformational fire and shadow work and truth at all costs ⁓ across other wisdom traditions as well, because if you’re not comfortable,

you know, working with Kali or that particular Hindu deity, that’s completely fine. And there might be, you know, think cross-culturally, we see this archetype everywhere. So Sekhmet in Egyptian mythology is this lion-headed goddess of war and healing. And she’s often called upon to destroy injustice. And similar to Kali, she had a lot of rage. Her rage was so great it almost…

ended the world, but there’s a happy ending to that story. She’s also associated with fire. ⁓ The Morrigan in Celtic mythology, she’s kind of like a triple badass.

sovereignty and fate.

But the Morgan’s a lot about like this idea of internal sovereignty, reclaiming choice, reclaiming agency, which I think can just be really powerful to explore in your body. So you could kind of be channeling her going through the same challenge and doing this, these same classes ⁓ from the Hebrew lineage. have Lilith from, from kind of Judaism and she was cast out of Eden because she was not submissive. And she also kind of represents this like exiled feminine rage.

And then we have the underworld goddesses, right? We have Inanna, we have…

Hecate in Greek mythology. She’s a torchbearer, which I think is really interesting because she’s supposed to help us see in the dark, which to me is this somatic link of like holding space at the end, at the edge of transformation, right? Where you can’t really see what’s coming next when you’re, when you’re in that release moment. ⁓ and you know, think about how good you are going to cry. You know, that’s, I think a really strong, the power of closing the stress cycle. Like you just feel so much lighter.

⁓ And then last but not least, if you’re Christian, you know, we have the Black Madonna and she appears across Catholic tradition. She’s often in caves. She embodies this idea of sorrow, earth, ⁓ and maternal protection in the void, which is really, I think, what we’re trying to create for ourselves energetically in a practice like this. Maternal love, that unconditional love, maternal protection in the void.

And she has absolutely radical compassion, which makes me think of, you know, how do we regulate our nervous systems through grief? How do we hold ourselves as we express fully? This is what I invite you to explore with me whether you do this challenge free with me live or you go on to do the larger version of it in the uplifted membership. I will put all the links for everything I mentioned below the other podcast episodes and where you can get

the free challenge if you want to do it with us in real time starting super soon here. And it’s really powerful to do it with the energy of the group ⁓ or anytime, you know, find it in your uplifted app and maybe explore the archetypal series that I have in there as well.

The core message I want to leave you with is that across every tradition, we see a dark feminine figure who’s teaching us that rage can be holy, that discomfort can be an initiation, and that the body is a place where we can.

discharge energy, but also like meet our most authentic self.

And when we stop fearing the darkness and start dancing with it, life becomes a lot more fun, becomes a lot more interesting. I say this in a lot of the somatic classes, if you’ve practiced with me, ⁓ know, healing can be fun.

And so let’s close with the question we started with. Is calm always the goal?

Thank you so much for being here and listening to the very end. If you like this episode, please share it with a fellow yogi, someone who maybe could move through this challenge with you. I usually make these challenge classes adaptable for all levels. So maybe you want to share it even with your mom or your sister or someone you wouldn’t, you know, maybe typically do yoga with. It’s really fun if you can move through a challenge like this with someone you know in real life. You can always DM me your thoughts on the show and find me at LarkinYogaTV.

And the best way to keep this show coming to you is to leave a review and of course, consider uplifted membership.

Your rage is sacred and I hope to practice with you next week.