Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Forgets: Somatic Healing - Julie Stevens

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Julie Stevens shares her personal journey through trauma and reveals how our bodies—not just our minds—store traumatic experiences. After years of maintaining a perfect exterior while crumbling inside, Stevens discovered that conventional talk therapy alone couldn't access the trauma locked within her physical form. She now guides others through quantum somatic healing practices and plant medicine ceremonies at her Northern California retreat center, empowering individuals to reconnect with their innate healing capabilities. Stevens challenges the misconception that we're "damaged goods" after trauma, instead offering a revolutionary perspective: trauma isn't who we are—it's simply energy stored in our nervous system waiting to be released. For anyone struggling with anxiety, depression, or feeling "broken," this conversation illuminates the path toward becoming your own most powerful healer.

Contact Info -  Julie Stevens

https://UrbanRetreatCenterOakland.com https://www.instagram.com/therealjuliestevens/

"We have [trauma] within ourselves what is needed to heal ourselves, even if you feel like you're broken beyond repair, even if you feel like nothing is worth the effort it takes to get there, you have within yourself the power that can and will heal you."

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Jack Heald: Thanks for joining us, folks. This is Predictive Health Clinic, and I am joined today by a friend of a friend, and I'm getting to know her just as you are, Julie Stevens. Why don't you introduce yourself to yourself. I'm totally sober, folks.

Julie Stevens: It's so nice to meet you and I love that you are laughing at yourself. That's always beautiful medicine laughing at oneself. As you said, my name is Julie Stevens and I am a somatic spiritual healer, life coach / psychedelic plant medicine guide and facilitator. 

Jack Heald: Wow. You are literally the first one of these I've interviewed, and I've interviewed a lot of folks.

Julie Stevens: Right on. Right on. Yeah. And I live in Northern California where I run, 

Jack Heald: Of course you do. 

Julie Stevens: And I run a retreat center. 

Jack Heald: What one specific health issue do you want to address with us today? 

Julie Stevens: Jack, that's a good question. So the health issue that I want to address today is trauma. PTSD, and what's now being called in this arena, PTG, post-traumatic growth.

Jack Heald: Oh, I hadn't heard that phrase before, okay.  So how'd you get interested in this? 

Julie Stevens: A lifetime of living and, you know, from the, as I like to say to people, the if I roll, rolled out the scroll of the myriad of traumas that had happened to me and through me, I realized at several different points in my life that I was not okay. Like in myself, I didn't really have a place to come home to, that I felt safe. And loved myself. 

Jack Heald: You didn't have a place to come home to where you felt safe or love yourself?

Julie Stevens: Yeah. Yeah. In my body. In my home when nobody else was around. It was just me. On the outside, I'd built up what I called the package. You're the biz, you're a business owner. You're you own a home you got it all together.

And I wanted everybody to see me as this package. However, I was crumbling inside because I'd gone so far away from myself trying to hide from the pain, that it was causing extreme suffering. 

Jack Heald: I suspect that's enough information for people who are experiencing it to recognize themselves. So let's let's move on. What's the biggest misconception that you deal with about trauma, PTSD, PTG? 

Julie Stevens: That's a good question. The biggest misconception, I think, and I had thought this previously was that I was damaged goods. I think that we can tend to think that we're broken and unfixable and almost our hat we wearing a mark on ourselves because what happens, what can tend to happen to us humans is we think that this somehow makes us unworthy, and we tend to isolate. because of that.  

Jack Heald: Okay, so what's the truth?

Julie Stevens: The truth is that we're not broken. The truth is the trauma, the event that happened lies dormant, somewhat dormant, depending on the spectrum of when it happened and what the thing was. It can lie in our nervous system, right? It lies in the body. So it's not the actual event that keeps taking place. However, we've recorded it in our cells into our DNA and almost shut it into a storage locker and tried to throw the key away. And the truth is that only works for so long.

Jack Heald: You may be introducing a new concept to a lot of folks, which is that trauma is stored in your body, not stored in your memory. I know when I was first exposed to that, it was an absolutely revolutionary thought for me. That, that what I had just thought of as memories was actually, it was literally in my body. 

I have a silly fun story. It's silly now, but in retrospect, it was not good. Where it was just demonstrated to me beyond question that this traumatic event is literally stuck in my body. So I wish you'd expand on that a little bit. 

Julie Stevens: Yeah. That leads me to think to remember two things is one is that. Memories can also be body memories, so physical physiological, you know, the triggers that happen and then our body goes into one of the three or four stages of our Vegas nerve, just ah, and going back many years ago I remember I'd been in talk therapy for most of my adult life.

Trying to make sense of who I am and how do I navigate myself in the world and in, you know, feel some kind of joy and love and I think talk therapy is amazing. However, I got to a point where I realized, like you said the trauma, the event was stuck in my body, right? And from there, it led me on a path of exploration, if we want to say. And I would love to go down that when, whenever. 

Jack Heald: With the goal being to help listeners, if you've identified yourself from this brief conversation or prior to that, as somebody who has suffered a significant trauma, which has resulted in long-term effects mentally, emotionally, physically, you're going to want to know, okay, what do I do?

And I realize in this compressed time period, that's asking a lot, but yeah, what do you suggest? What do you suggest? How does somebody start? 

Julie Stevens: How do you get started? I think first off is recognizing that something is out of balance. Or lying dormant in your body and you keep getting triggered, so recognizing that when I'm flash, as I say, flashing on people for cutting me off in traffic or huge reactions to smallish things, some of the symptoms that are arising, so recognizing anxiety, recognizing depression, recognizing isolation, recognizing wanting to even harm oneself, and hiding just generally recognizing those symptoms as your nervous system, and your unique body, your unique human is trying to tell you something.

And it's trying to keep you safe first and foremost because that's what our, that's why we're here to be alive. And then from there, um, there are so many different tools now that are available. One of the things that has helped me immensely has been plant medicine that I guide people with. I've been working with this medicine for 18 years now. It helps to recover dormant neuropathways in our brain; the ones that were like when you were fascinated by an anthill or a doll or whatever it was somatic healing, which is healing what's happening through, using body-embodied practices.

Jack Heald: What is an example of that? I've got an idea of plant healing. I don't have no idea of what somatic healing is? 

Julie Stevens: Well, so I was talking about the talk therapy, right? So that deals with this knowledge, which is stored up here. So talking is part of our knowledge and how we take things in and how we express ourselves. Embodied somatic therapy is dealing with from here down, the whole body, the wisdom in the body and addressing the nervous system specifically. 

So when you've had a traumatic event and you no longer feel safe because of something you perceive or something, somebody harmed you, your nervous system will go into a shutdown. It'll go into fight, flight or freeze, or you'll start people pleasing.

So to address that, talking about it is really great. However, healing physiologically your nervous system, you have to come back to practices that regain your safety, regain your peace and confidence. Like some people can’t even go through some of my somatic exercises because the dark or when their eyes were closed was the time when they were vulnerable and weak, if that makes sense.

Jack Heald: It does, but I also know that I have a fairly broad background as somebody who just tries all kinds of things. 

Julie Stevens: See what sticks, the pasta on the wall. 

Jack Heald: Yeah, pretty much. In fact, just before this show, I just got back from, uh, some bodywork that I have done regularly. 

Julie Stevens: Nice. 

Jack Heald: And this guy, I frankly, it feels like magic.

Julie Stevens: And it is.

Jack Heald: But it's, it has been so incredibly powerful. And I'm, Hey folks, I'm not talking about woo kind of powerful. I mean, like my physical body physically responds in with a healing response. I'm physically healthier as a result of putting his hands on me and kind of barely moving on. It feels like magic. He tried to explain it to me. 

Julie Stevens: Energy changes matter. 

Jack Heald: And I, that's gotta be what it is at the bottom, at the very foundation, it's he's got an ability to manage and maneuver energy in a way that we don't really have a common vocabulary for yet. 

Julie Stevens: And that's one of the things that I know I was put here to do is to help people contact that part of themselves. Where they can be their own healer, where they can contact that energy and Work with it and believe in it and know how to heal oneself. 

Jack Heald: It occurs to me that the best use of this short time that we've created here is simply to give folks that new idea, that new concept that you just stated that you have in yourself.

Correct me where I get this wrong. We have within ourselves what is needed to heal ourselves. Even if you feel like you're broken beyond repair, even if you feel like nothing is worth the effort it takes to get there, you have within yourself the power that can and will heal you. 

Julie Stevens: Yes. Yes, I believe in that with my soul.

Jack Heald: And you've experienced this? 

Julie Stevens: Yes, through many years of studying with shamanic healers, the plant medicine, learning from my grandmother, hands-on healing and practicing with hundreds of clients, I have developed tools to first and foremost heal myself from traumatic brain injury,  and CTE, which they say is unhealable.

Jack Heald: They do say that is unhealable. 

Julie Stevens: My neurologist over many years told me this is not going to get any better. In fact, it's going to get worse. Yes. I'm 60 years old and I'm here to tell you that I have healed myself through energy, healing matter, through my hands, through my beliefs, all the things. And somatic, I call it quantum somatic healing. You know, you make this stuff up. They're all, they're words. You just put them in a different order. And I've helped so many people heal from all the things 

Jack Heald: Before we wrap it up. I would like you to touch on if you can, maybe a couple of your favourite stories about the subject here, which is you have the power within you to heal yourself. 

Julie Stevens: Good Lord. Let's see. A couple of my favorite stories. I just sat with a woman through a plant medicine journey who was, who came into the ceremony with a lot of preconceived not feeling worthy and isolating and all the things, anxious, you name it, self-harm. And through doing the medicine, it definitely broke her open as they say, like when your heart breaks wide open and she was like feeling everything. And this was a, this was an extreme case and we, I sat with her for hours and hours, upon hours, like almost the whole day, and helping her to regulate her nervous system, helping her to come back to her breath, helping her to see that the things that she had put on herself the stories that she was carrying around and conscious programming were actually not her true nature, right?

And when she started to see that, tears of joy and what the hell have I been doing all of these years? Just rolling down her face, but a whole box of tissues. whole box. I can't sit. Here's another one here. So that is one of my very favorite stories. 

Another story is helping somebody at a conference who got tripped. It was a self-development awareness conference years back in New York and somebody called for me. I was sitting in my seat and they said, Oh, there's this person in the bathroom and she's calling for you. She loves your energy and she only wants to talk to you. And she was having a massive breakdown/breakout on the other side was the breakthrough and I went through, I went, she was in the stall in the bathroom on the floor, a pool of fluids coming out of her whole body.

And I just said, all right, God, here I am. I don't know why she wanted me here. But here we go. I worked with her to do some somatic healing work and helping her to regulate and calm. and teaching her some tools that she could put in her tool belt. And still to this day, we're in touch. 

Jack Heald: Okay. This is basically just an appetizer folks.

You're going to be able, you're going to be able to find out more. I have no doubt that many of you are, your curiosity is, has been stoked. We're going to ask the last question and then get contact information. 

My favorite question, I call it the billboard question. You've got no more than eight words to deliver your health message. What is that? What are those words?

Julie Stevens: Taking healing into your own hands is life-changing and evolutionary and your birthright. 

Jack Heald: I think you went way over eight. So we're going to have to get the editor. All right, Julie. If folks want to explore what you've been talking about here and want to know more, where should we go? 

Julie Stevens: That's a great question. If you want to have more than the appetizer and actually eat. I'm available and I'm so grateful to speak with any of you. I am at the Urban Retreat Center, Oakland, all one word, urbanretreatcenteroakland.com is my website, and I also am on Instagram at the @therealjuliestevens. 

Jack Heald: I suppose all those other phony Julie Stevens is out there trying to pretend that they're the real. 

Julie Stevens: That's exactly why I named it that. Yeah. All right. 

Jack Heald: Is it “the urban” or just “urban retreat center Oakland?” 

Julie Stevens: I'm sorry. Urban Retreat Center Oakland. 

Jack Heald: Okay. So it does not have the in it. urbanretreatcenteroakland.com is her website, Instagram, @therealjuliestevens. She's Julie Stevens. I'm Jack Heald, and this has been the Predictive Health Clinic. Thanks for joining us. We'll talk next time.

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