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Photo Credit: Gilles Kayser

By Lumen Echomedicine Journal

In this feature, we sit down with a health coach specializing in hormonal yoga and trauma-informed practices to discuss how the body carries our history, and how we can reclaim our agency through movement.

1. What drew you to study trauma-informed yoga and systemic coaching?

Response: My journey started years ago when I was burnt out from a job I didn’t love. I spontaneously booked a yoga retreat in the mountains of Norway just to reconnect and get back to myself.

Going on this retreat was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It was very intense, and I had never been confronted with myself so deeply before. But it brought about so many revelations and healing experiences.

At the retreat, I met a yoga teacher who taught trauma-informed yoga. I was immediately intrigued, having never heard of it before, and realized that this practice—and yoga in general—needed to play a much bigger part in my life. Following the retreat, I started a Hatha Yoga Teacher Training to immerse myself in yoga, and I fell deeply in love with the philosophy and practices. My passion grew from there, leading me to more trainings, including trauma-informed yoga.

As my own healing journey deepened through therapy and yoga, and seeing how important trauma-informed practices are—considering how many people carry trauma in their bodies due to traumatic events and childhood experiences—I started teaching yoga.

Quickly, my desire to work with people grew. I wanted to dive deeper, so I decided to become a systemic coach. What I loved about the systemic approach was that it considers the whole system around a person and looks beyond the individual. It focuses on the dynamics and relationships within a person’s life, fostering sustainable change by addressing the root dynamics in a system. The interconnectedness of this approach is what made it so intriguing to me. It felt very aligned with trauma-informed yoga practices.

2. What does being trauma-informed mean to you, both personally and in your way of working with others?

Response: To me, being trauma-informed means recognizing that every individual is different. We all have different backgrounds, we’ve lived different lives, experienced different things, and we all need different things to heal.

It’s fundamentally about creating a safe space and giving back agency. If someone has lost their sense of control in the past, being trauma-informed means helping them reclaim their agency in their own life. They get to decide how far they want to go and what they need.

I see myself simply as the facilitator whose job is to create a safe space where individuals feel supported to move and explore as freely as they wish. They are in charge; they get to decide. It’s about empowerment. This principle guides how I facilitate and hold space for others.

3. In your experience, how does the body express or hold what words sometimes cannot?

Response: There is so much that the body knows that we often don’t realize is there. Feelings and emotions manifest in physical ways. This can take the form of tension in the body, pressure in the chest, shortness of breath, or back pain, for example. The body can hold and store so much history and trauma.

This is why it’s so important to create a safe space for individuals to feel these emotions—whether by simply sitting with them or by guiding them through movements that help process what is stored and hasn’t been processed in the past. The things we experience in life aren’t merely cognitive; they are profoundly embodied.

4. In Lumen Echomedicine, we often speak about resonance — that feeling when something within us vibrates with truth or connection. How do you experience resonance in your own life or practice?

Response: My body tells me right away if something resonates or not. The real question is whether I listen. My body is constantly giving me cues, like a feeling of safety or joy—or the absence of these feelings.

When something truly resonates and feels like my truth, it brings me joy and a burst of energy—it lights me up. I experience this in my own life when I do the things I love, such as sharing what I know, speaking about the things I’m passionate about, connecting with people, and dancing. In those moments, I feel a deep sense of energy and aliveness, as if something within me is fully awakened. I also feel this resonance deeply when I practice yoga.

5. What helps you create a sense of safety and trust when someone is moving through challenging experiences?

Response: What helps me create a safe environment is simply letting people know that they are safe and that I am there to support them. I make it clear that they have full agency. I offer different options, but there is no “must” or fixed way the session has to go. They have a choice, and they get to say no and set boundaries.

I am merely there to hold the space, help them move through what arises, and help them access the resources they already have within them. I also make sure they know that it is absolutely okay and safe to feel all the emotions that come up—every emotion is welcome.

Simply holding space, being fully present, and reminding them of their agency can be very powerful. Additionally, I make sure that the physical environment for the session is quiet, with no distractions, and feels warm and welcoming.

6. What helps you stay grounded and connected when you hold space for others or engage in healing work?

Response: Checking in with myself is the number one priority. I have to make sure I take care of my own physical and mental health so that I can fully show up for others.

I ground myself through my practices, which include good sleep and rest, healthy nutrition, setting and upholding boundaries, processing my own emotions, and doing the things that make me happy—like dancing, practicing yoga, and spending quality time with my people. Of course, all of this is also a work in progress for me. Sometimes I do well, and sometimes I neglect these practices more. It’s all part of the process.

7. What does healing mean to you in your own words?

Response: Healing, to me, is about getting to know yourself better, letting go of what isn’t you, and bit by bit becoming more of who you truly are. It’s a journey of unlearning, letting go, and making peace with what was. It’s about learning your worth, what you deserve, and what you get to have in this life.

It’s about being compassionate and kind to yourself while sitting with your emotions. It’s feeling what is present in your body, mind, and soul without judgment or the need to fix it right away. It’s growth without trying to become “perfect.” I don’t believe healing is linear. It includes ups and downs, steps forward and back. It’s a process, and probably a lifelong one.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to healing. You get to decide what works for you, and you are allowed to change your mind and try new things if certain practices don’t work. I believe healing can happen anywhere—in a yoga class, through therapy, by spending time with the people you love, by going on a solo adventure, through a book, a movie, or a conversation.

For me personally, a huge part of healing happens in connection with others. Healing can be hard and exhausting, and sometimes you just want to give up and go back to how things were before. But it’s amazing when you look back and see the changes in your life and how far you’ve come.

What follows is our conversation, shared in Sandra’s own words.

You work with many healing paths — shamanic practice, family constellations, cacao ceremony, and mediumship. How do these come together in your work?

They’re different doors into the same home. Each path gives me a way to listen — to the body, the lineage, the invisible, and the heart. Sometimes healing wants to come through the nervous system, sometimes through the ancestors, sometimes through spirit, and sometimes through the body opening. I don’t force a method. I just follow what’s already moving. The work is really about remembering what was always there.

When you facilitate constellations, you often sense what’s happening in “the field” — the unseen energy that connects everything. How do you experience that field when you’re guiding others?

It’s like a subtle shift in atmosphere — stillness, a pull, a knowing that doesn’t come from my mind. I notice where attention wants to go. The body speaks first: a sensation, a temperature change, an emotion that doesn’t belong to me. I trust that. My job is to stay out of the way, stay present, and let what wants to reveal itself become visible. The field is always communicating — we just have to soften enough to hear it.

As a medium, you bridge the seen and unseen. How does this gift help you support people in their healing journey or when working with ancestral energy?

Mediumship reminds us we’re not separate — not from our ancestors, not from spirit, not from the parts of ourselves we’ve tucked away. When I bring this into healing work, it’s not about messages for entertainment. It’s about restoring connection where it was lost. Sometimes an ancestor just needs to be acknowledged. Sometimes a spirit needs to be remembered. When those threads are honored, people feel less alone and more rooted in where they come from.

Cacao is such a heart medicine. What does it mean to you personally, and how do you see it helping others open or release during ceremony?

For me, cacao feels like an ancient friend — a steady, warm, loving presence that reminds us to slow down and listen to ourselves. It has a very grounded, earthly spirit; it doesn’t push or overwhelm. It works in the pace of trust.

In ceremony, I watch people soften. They drop from their head into their chest. The defenses relax. Whatever needs to move — a memory, a truth, a release — comes in its own time. Cacao creates a field where the heart is allowed to speak clearly, and where the body can feel safe enough to let go. It’s not dramatic. It’s honest. It brings us back to what is real, right here, right now.

In Lumen Echomedicine, we speak about resonance — how energy, emotion, and vibration affect healing. What does resonance mean to you in your own work?

For me, resonance is the moment something inside a person recognizes truth. It’s not an idea — it’s a felt sense. The body softens, the heart opens, the breath deepens, the eyes get clearer. Something aligns.

When I’m working, I’m not trying to create an outcome. I’m feeling for where there is harmony, and where there is dissonance — where something is asking to be acknowledged or met. When we bring attention to that place, it naturally shifts.

Resonance is the field adjusting itself back into coherence.

It’s the body remembering what it already knows.

Family constellations can bring up deep ancestral emotions. How do you create a safe and compassionate space for people to process what emerges?

By slowing everything down. By not rushing to fix anything. By holding presence instead of solutions. I let people know that whatever is coming up has a place, and that they don’t have to carry it alone. Safety is created when people feel met with compassion and honesty, when there is no rush, no judgment, just breath and permission to be exactly where they are.

You also help people live in more alignment and balance through coaching. What helps someone stay grounded and connected after a deep energetic or shamanic experience?

Integration is everything. I encourage people to come back to the body — eating, staying hydrated, resting, walking, nature, breath. Also: simplicity. Don’t rush to make meaning. Let the experience settle. The system needs time to reorganize before the mind tries to understand it.

If you could leave our readers with one message about love, healing, or wholeness — what would it be?

Healing isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about coming home to who you already are. There is nothing “wrong” with you — only places inside that are still waiting to be met with warmth and understanding. When those places are seen, the rest begins to unfold naturally.

Bio

Sandra Rowe is a Shaman, Medium, Family & Systemic Constellations Facilitator, and Founder of EmPath to Healing, a practice offering spiritual coaching, ancestral healing, and ceremonial work for personal transformation.

Website: empathtohealing.com

IG handle: @empathtohealing

photo James Maher

How do you see art as a tool for healing or connection in your life and work?

As an artist and cultural worker, I understand my work very much in political terms. I believe that art is one of several ways to understand how we are in the world, to raise questions, but also to deal with challenges, such as loss and grief. It is a form of acting (“Handeln” when put in Hannah Arendt’s words) in a network of relations, of power structures, of the world as we find it. It allows for forms of nonverbal communication in these relational processes. Let me make an example: I am very much interested in researching the construction of histories, of how we became what we are, and how the world around us can be seen through the lens of its own histories. This is particularly interesting for me concerning marginalized histories, for example, queer ones. Understanding who we are and where we came from, what we can trace back as our queer lineages and heritages, is for me a form of connecting to my own pasts beyond biological family lines.

At the moment, I am researching a file I found in the police section of the State Archive of Saxony, the region in Germany where I live. I found this file of a person who was living in the same city as me, Dresden — and was running a massage salon in the 1930s. These salons were sites of lesbian and queer sexual experimentation, in contemporary terms, cruising, sex work, or BDSM. Learning about this person means discovering queer local heritage, and this is for me a crucial connection when relating to the place I live now.

What values or beliefs guide your creative process?

I will be quite frank: I am an antifascist, a leftist, a queer person. I am opposing discrimination, structural power hierarchies, all types of authoritarianism, fascism, and other misanthropic ideologies. It feels like an inner compass, and I guess, everyone can see that in my work. During the process of working on something, though, there are also other qualities and aspects that play important roles: curiosity, interest in stories of individuals, and even the pleasure of dealing with certain techniques or materials, such as screenprinting, drawing or editing. Coming back to my research example: I am also aiming at translating historical and archival material into meaningful historiography, in an understanding following scholars like Benjamin or Trouillot — history is always something done from the Now, it is the story we make of the stories we find. Concerning the police files, I find ways not to reproduce the criminalizing or pathologizing language that is used there.

My role as an artist, I believe, is to narrate queer histories from the very few and problematic sources we have, in a way that is empowering rather than victimizing. There is an ethical dimension in this, because every decision about how I tell a certain history excludes other ways of telling it. Ideally, we can avoid what author Adichie calls “the danger of a single story”, and find ways of doing history in multiplicity, from many different viewpoints at once, even contradictory, always though in terms of relationality rather than individual biographies. This might sound very abstract, but my point is to rethink the way in which we relate to the past, and I really believe that changes our mindset about what kind of futures we can imagine.

What role does sound, silence, or emotion play in your work — even if it’s not literal sound?

Sound, in its literal terms, is an important tool for me. One thing about the histories I am working with is that they tend to be very ephemeral — a queer party that once happened, a gathering of which no trace is left, a life lived in secret. I work a lot with my own voice to tell histories how they could have been or to lend archival material my voice to bring it back to life. One example is the personal ads. I collected over one thousand queer personal ads from all across Europe, and partly international, and I use them as a tool and method to tell queer histories, specifically in places where no record of that exists. In a sound installation for my solo show at Schwules Museum in Berlin in 2021, I did a 6-channel sound installation that brought these ads from the last 100 years in a transtemporal and transnational conversation with each other — lending them my own voice. This is only one example of how sound is used in my work to open spaces of imagination, specifically concerning historical narration: How could things have been? How can we imagine them? What could they have sounded like?

What advice or encouragement would you offer to emerging artists or creators today?

I actually consider it a privilege to be able to be an artist, and I am really thankful for that. It is a wonderful way to deal with the world and with the challenges that we have to face. I would really encourage everyone to find their own ways to create space for imagination as a part of relating to the world around us; it doesn’t necessarily have to be the visual arts. I have to say, though, choosing to be an artist by profession brings its own challenges — choosing that way demands patience, strength, and a lot of endurance.

My advice here: Join the union, I am not joking. Being an artist is not a romantic thing where we mainly drink wine in the studios and are kissed by the muse. It’s rather hard negotiations, precarity, and bureaucracy. But once you get through all of that, no matter if you do it as your profession or your hobby, it is also a huge chance to discover completely new ways of relating to others, to the world around you.

Bio

Irène Mélix (*1988) is an artist and cultural worker. She studied art and cultural studies in Hildesheim, Dresden, Paris, and Kraków, and works in various media in overlapping areas of social and aesthetic issues. Her main interest is the potential of artistic methods for doing history. Interests include the construction of queer identities, political histories, border spaces, and the conditions of artistic work itself. She researches these topics in archives in Europe and beyond, teaches at universities, and is engaged in curatorial practices. Her PhD in artistic research at Bauhaus University in Weimar was completed in the summer of 2025 and dealt with artistic practices of queering historiographies. At the moment, she is an artist in residence at ISCP in Brooklyn, NYC.

irenemelix.de, instagram @irenemeli

I wish we could do a drag show in broad daylight. 2023 Irène Mélix in collaboration with queerANarchive, Split, Croatia

This piece is the foreword to my upcoming book The Codex of the Lumen Echomedicine, a spiritual parable exploring sound, story, healing, and remembrance. May it meet you wherever you are on your path.

For the one who is called to remember…

This is for you.

For the one who’s been told you’re too much.

Or not enough.

For the one who feels like you don’t belong —

like you’re on the outside, watching life happen through a glass wall.

For the one who’s been hurt, and is still here.

This is for the ones who feel invisible.

The ones who’ve had to dim their light so others could shine.

The ones who’ve learned to over-give, over-perform, and over-explain —

just to be loved.

You don’t have to do that anymore.

You don’t have to work extra hard.

You don’t have to chase love.

You don’t have to earn love.

You don’t have to become anything other than who you are.

All you have to do is be you.

Messy. Flawed. Imperfectly perfect. Human.

Maybe it hasn’t felt safe to be seen.

Maybe it still doesn’t.

I hear you.

So this is also for the ones who don’t feel ready to rise —

who feel safer in their cave,

who are still healing, still soft, still unfolding.

This is for the outsiders.

The quiet ones with secret power in their bones.

The tender-hearted warriors.

The edge-dwellers, the sensitives,

the ones who carry ancient magic but have been told to hide it.

This is for the ones learning to rise without apology.

And for those who aren’t ready yet — but one day will be.

This is a remembering.

Of your worth.

Your voice.

Your sacred rhythm.

Whatever your rhythm is — slow, fierce, quiet, wild —

it’s yours. It’s enough.

You have a right to be here.

You belong.

You always have.

You are no less than the trees or the stars.

Our souls are equal.

This is a prayer.

A reclamation.

A love letter to the parts of you that were never broken — only buried.

You’ve always been whole.

This is for the voiceless.

The powerless.

The ones carrying pain too heavy to name.

This is for the forgotten ones.

I think of you.

I send you light.

You are not alone.

I’m here with you — doing my best, within my power,

to make this world a little softer,

a little braver,

a little more beautiful —

even when it’s hard sometimes.

This is your remembering.

This is your return.

You belong here.

You’ve always belonged here.

You are one with all that is sacred.

The universe loves you more than you can possibly imagine.

And if your heart feels heavy,

may the butterfly land softly on your chest —

not just to lift the weight,

but to remind you:

You were never meant to carry it alone.

We are in this together.

We are all just deeply human.

We bleed. We fall.

We rise.

— Leyla

It is a soft anthem — for those remembering their right to be fully human.

“I’m human, even when I fall apart.

Even with a broken soul, I keep an open heart.

I’m human, I bleed and rise above.

I carry many scars, but I still give love.

I still give love, because I’m human.

I’m human, been dimming down my light,

Letting others shine while I stay out of sight.

I’m human, still learning how to stay,

To love the parts of me that I like to hide away.

I’m human — and that is not a flaw.

It is my gift, my breath, it is my sacred law.

I’m human, even when I fall apart.

Even with a broken soul, I keep an open heart.

I’m human, I bleed and rise above.

I carry many scars, and I still give love.

Because…. I’m human. ❤️

by Leyla

As a songwriter, sound practitioner, and somatic movement therapist in training, I explore how song, rhythm, and embodied sound can awaken the body’s natural intelligence for healing and connection. My creative approach — what I call Yoga Pop — merges contemporary songwriting with intentional frequencies, breath, and movement, transforming sound into medicine.

The Science and Soul of Frequency

Every cell in the human body vibrates. Sound, as organized vibration, influences those rhythms — regulating breath, heart rate, and emotional tone. Research in vibroacoustics and music therapy shows that tonal frequencies can calm the nervous system and restore balance. Yet beyond measurement, sound carries emotion and story. The timbre of a voice can touch memory; a mantra can anchor the nervous system in coherence.

I use harmonic layering, repetition, and subtle intervals to help the body regulate. Through songwriting, toning, or chanting, participants experience vibration internally — creating resonance between inner rhythm and outer sound.

Movement as Resonance

In expressive movement and somatic work, rhythm lives inside the body. Each gesture and breath holds a pulse. When we move with sound, what begins as tension can become release — emotion turns to energy, and energy turns to motion.

The integration of movement and sound invites not only catharsis but coherence — the body remembers its own rhythm of aliveness.

Sound as a Path to Connection

When we sing, hum, or tone consciously, we regulate the vagus nerve — the body’s internal bridge between safety and expression. Singing allows emotion to flow safely, breath to deepen, and presence to return. In this way, the voice becomes a grounding instrument, reconnecting us to self-agency and belonging.

Art as Medicine

Sound reminds us that healing isn’t the absence of pain but the restoration of harmony — between self, emotion, and the world. Through frameworks like Yoga Pop, art becomes a means of integration. Every sound carries frequency, and every frequency carries consciousness.

To sing the body awake is to remember who we are — vibration in motion, light made audible.

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