Heallist Podcast

What posture can reveal about health and emotional patterns with Raya Friesen

• Yuli Ziv • Episode 69

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In this episode of the Heallist Podcast, we explore the relationship between posture, emotional health, and healing with Raya Friesen, an integrative practitioner with over 20 years of experience in holistic healing. Raya shares how her Lumina Method™ brings together breath work, energy medicine, and physical alignment to support people navigating chronic pain, postural imbalances, and emotional patterns held in the body. The conversation offers a grounded look at how the body may reflect lived experiences over time.

Drawing from real client stories, Raya discusses how emotional patterns can sometimes show up alongside physical conditions such as scoliosis, and how gentle, integrative approaches may support awareness and change. We explore how breath, posture, and presence work together, why pain can be viewed as information rather than something to override, and how healing remains possible across different life stages. The episode also touches on the role of practitioner community and collaboration in creating more sustainable, holistic care.

This episode is offered for educational and reflective purposes only. It does not provide medical advice or recommend specific treatments. Its goal is to add context to complex health decisions and highlight the value of informed, personalized care across medical and integrative paradigms.

Key takeaways:

  • The body may hold emotional experiences that have not been fully processed
  • Posture can offer insight into emotional and physical patterns
  • Breath work can support awareness and emotional release
  • Pain can serve as information rather than something to suppress
  • Healing may remain possible at any age with the right support and mindset
  • Community and modality integration can strengthen holistic care

You can also check out Raya's work and online workshops at https://driftandalign.com/ 

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Yuli:

Welcome to the Heallist Podcast, where we unpack the many layers of holistic health. I'm Yuli, founder of Heallist, your portal to holistic healers worldwide. Now let's go deep. Hello, dear friends, and welcome to the Heallist Podcast. Today we're talking about your posture and what it reveals about your health. If this episode resonates, please hit subscribe, follow, or rate, wherever you're listening. It's a small and simple way to support this free and independent content. And today I'm really excited to speak to Raya Friesen, an integrative practitioner with 20 years of experience blending physiotherapy, posture, and alignment work, breath work, energy medicine, and holistic practices to help clients heal at the root cause, not just managing symptoms. Through her Lumina Method, her signature modality, she guides clients to identify structural, emotional, and energetic drivers behind pain, tension, scoliosis, burnout, dysregulation, and chronic imbalance. And I'm so excited to dive into your modality, into your work. This is going to be one of those episodes that I call a selfish episode where I'm actually really curious to learn from you as well. Welcome to the podcast.

Raya:

Thank you so much, Yuli. I'm so grateful to be here and to share on this topic. It's one I'm very passionate about.

Yuli:

Absolutely. So I would love to dive right in and kind of give our listeners a maybe a reason to listen. Why posture? Why this is such an integral part of our health? Why did you choose to focus your practice on that? Beautiful.

Raya:

Well, I would say to start with that your body remembers everything. And when I first heard that, I thought that could be looked at as a very overwhelming thing. Yet through the lens of curiosity, I realized that as we start learning about our posture, so how we stand, how we move in the world, that it tells a story. And that when we're able to read the story, understand how to interpret the posture, but that we can learn more about the body and what may be going on beneath the surface as well. And so I began my career as a conventional physiotherapist and worked in the area of something called Schroth for about seven years. And during that time, this modality specifically is for those who are navigating scoliosis and other spine conditions. And during that time, I realized that I could put people in different positions for the exercises. And they would do spinal traction and they would breathe. And then all of a sudden, they'd have an emotional release. They'd cry. And at that time, I didn't know how to hold that. I wasn't taught how to hold space for emotions as a physio, but also I was learning that within my own life at the time. And I realized to really treat the whole person, mind, body, spirit, mind, body, emotions, that I had to go deeper than just what I was seeing in the posture. And so the posture, the spine specifically, was my gateway into, oh, maybe there's something more when someone's feeling something in the body, when we see a certain condition arise, like scoliosis or some sort of postural imbalance, that there might be a root deeper than simply what you're born with, a genetic component or an injury from your past. So that kind of got me curious. And then when I asked, you know, started asking questions, I ended up finding breath work. And breath work was my way into learning like, wow, the breath tells a story. Emotions are a part of this bigger picture. And that launched me into where I am now almost six years later with the Lumina Method and my current practice here in North Vancouver.

Yuli:

That's incredible and makes so much sense. And I can totally relate to. Give us an example. So somebody with scoliosis, what kind of issues are you uncovering under the hood when you're dealing with something like that?

Raya:

Yes. So energetically, there's a few things. So the spine, right? Our spine represents our stability. And I believe that most of our imprints, the wounding that we experience happen from when we're in the womb to about 15 years old. So how we felt growing up as a child, as a teenager, even as a baby, did we feel stable, supported by a maternal figure, by our paternal figure? And that will directly impact how straight, how stable our spine is. And also it relates to safety. So depending on where the curve is. So specifically you asked about scoliosis, we can see one curve in the body, we can see two curves in the body, and we can see three curves in the body. And so depending on where they are, it also tells a different story because each region of the back, each region of the spine is also connected to our energetic centers, our chakras, if you will. And then layered on top of that, we have all of our organs and the meridians, which are all associated with different emotions.

Yuli:

So interesting, fascinating. I could definitely understand some of those potential root causes, like you mentioned, the childhood. For example, for me, somebody as a child who grew up in a constant state of fear from my life. And I kind of developed this posture of, you know, curving my back, trying to hide. So I kind of knew that as I got deeper into my personal journey, wellness, spirituality, where those came from. But I think understanding is kind of one piece of it. And I think I have a good grasp on that. But then how do you connect that to actual healing?

Raya:

I felt that in you when you shared that. It's like when you start on your path of self-discovery, right? Your growth path and you start learning about your different imprints, your wounds that you experience, we can clear them energetically. I fully believe that. And since the body remembers, and perhaps if it's been stored in your body over decades, there'll be a change to your physical structure, right? So your posture, for example. Well, you can clear the energetic root and you may see some improvements, yet with that emotion, that energy, that wounding stored, that lack of safety stored in the body for quite some time, it creates stagnancy in the body. And stagnancy can lead to physical changes. So decreased range of motion, so how much your body moves, how you hold yourself, your strength, that type of thing. So for this work, what I love about it is once you get to the root and you start creating safety in the nervous system, clearing the emotional component to anything we experienced, then we can't forget about the physical body to actually restore the strength, the range of motion, how you hold yourself, feeling safe to stand up tall, be rooted, grounded in the body. So there's all those pieces that connect. Not sure that answered your question, but that's where I went.

Yuli:

No, no, this is all makes sense that I didn't expect for a full treatment plan. But uh, you know, I'm just always curious, you know, there's sometimes this understanding of once you kind of find the root of the issue, it kind of goes away, but it doesn't, and especially in cases like this, right? That are now like deep rooted in the structure of our body, this is kind of where the word begins.

Raya:

Yes. And understanding that, that's the key, right? So realizing, oh, okay, and it doesn't have to be hard, and it might not take a long time, it's gonna take the length of time it's gonna take, but understanding what I call the patho-mechanism scoliosis, so understanding it's a rotational condition, that the bones change shape, that the muscles change shape, everything changes. Then you can learn with that wisdom, okay, where do I need to breathe? What muscles need to activate so that I can de-rotate? I can correct the postural imbalances ultimately that were rooted in the emotion, in the emotional cause, in the emotional body.

Yuli:

So is um your work besides the emotional release and the breath work, is it also a sets of actual exercises that people then have to do?

Raya:

Yeah, great question. It is so the work itself begins with me hearing, just like you were sharing what you experienced. And then I go into a very detailed postural assessment of the physical body, the posture itself, through various measurements to understand the directionality of scoliosis or specifically what we're seeing in the posture mechanically. And then I go a layer deeper and I energetically tune in to where I feel and where I see the energy is dense and stagnant in the body. And that will guide my tablework. So you're correct, I might pull from breath work, I use various frequency tools like tuning forks, I use cupping, I use hands-on work, energy clearing. And then from there, I integrate in what I call the activation. So learning very specific exercises based on the story the body's saying and you know, what you're feeling or what the client is feeling, and we build out an embodiment program. And part of this work for me is that each person that experiences the Lumina Method feels empowered. So it's not about coming to me weekly for maintenance. It's about we've built out this program. You have the tools so that when you're feeling a bit more hunched forward or you're feeling a bit sore in your body, or you're feeling a bit weighed down, pick something from that menu, that tool that you can then do to feel more connected to the body as you deepen the language it's speaking to you and understanding how it's communicating with you.

Yuli:

Incredible. So tell me some of the maybe stories that you've seen on that table, some of the transformations and maybe some things that are unexpected, right? That people come, we do one thing and then you uncover the other.

Raya:

Yeah. Wait, you know what? This this work is full of miracles, and I'm blessed every day for that. But what's coming to me as you ask me that is oftentimes the conventional medical system will say to a person who's done growing, in the case I work with a lot of older people, and they'll say, Well, there's nothing you can do. And if you believe that, that may become your truth. Yet if you are open to the thought that things can change, then they can. And one of my lovely clients, I met her last spring. She came to me, and the common story I hear from clients is, I've tried everything, nothing works, or I got this far and I plateaued. And I received this referral for this person from my physio, the physio we share. And when she came in, she was having very extreme lower back discomfort on the left side, right into her SI joint, and she was getting nerve-related symptoms that travel down into her hip, past her knee. And she'd tried everything for about six months, and she was getting to that point. She was 69 at the time, so she's 70 present day. And she was getting to the point where she said to me, If this continues, I'm not sure I want to. And this woman is very active. She does tracking with her dog, snowboarding still, she landscapes, keeps two houses. So not being able to do the thing she loved really decreased the quality of her life. And so I started just with that. I taught her about, you know, how this works as not a one and done necessarily. Yet when we can accept our current reality, then we set the stage, the foundation for change. So through the process of education, understanding what was going on in her body, she has two curves in her back. One goes to the right in her thoracic spine, and one goes to the left in her lumbar. So her pelvis goes off to the right. So it's this S shape. And so when she understood how her body existed in space, and when we dove deeper into her childhood and some of the lack of stability she felt in her maternal line and being an only child and et cetera, et cetera, her story. Then within two sessions, actually, she got off the table in our first session. She said, Wow, I feel different. And within three months, she came back in and said, You know, Raya, I was just reflecting on how this work is like a miracle. I can do everything that I want to do now. So her pain fully resolved itself. And even though that's not necessarily something that I can guarantee, I have no guarantees in this work. But what I can say is that if you believe you can make change and you sit and you learn the language of your body and you're consistent with your practices, that's what I see leads to change most often. And for her, it's not about holding this pain-free place all the time because we're human. Things are gonna come up, we're gonna get triggered. In her case, in August, she had a big fall. She got hooked on her dog leash, landed right on her curve, she got into a flare up. Yet she knew that she could make change because she'd already proven it to herself. So we went back in, did more work, fine-tuned her program back to that pain-free baseline, doing what she loves. And that's a big part for me in this work and what lights me up and what I'm passionate about is showing people the potential of how amazing life can be. How your body is here to be this guide for you. That when you learn the language of your body and you let your heart lead versus your mind, oh, I should do this, I should do that, I should exercise like that, this person, that person, but it's like, what do I need today? What would feel nourishing to me? It's amazing how you can really decrease your risk of injury and you can really increase your capacity for joy, for ease in your body. And that directly gets reflected in your outer world because I believe the outer world is a direct reflection of what's going on in the inner world. So it's all connected. And for her, one of her big lessons was I remember her in tears one session saying, if I don't learn to relax and take care of myself at 70 and don't go a mile a minute, when will I? And so the body got so loud for her in order for her to actually slow down. And that was her lesson. And I think it continues to be because she likes to move and do things, which is amazing. Yeah, there's this balance, right? So yeah, that's one example that's near and dear to my heart. At 70, still doing everything she loves, and just really this belief that you know, age is simply a number, which is wonderful and inspiring.

Yuli:

I love that message. Thank you for sharing. Any other stories that you have that people kind of came and maybe weren't as open to this work or thought that you know it might be something different than what it turned to be, or kind of like had more resistance and and disbelief. Yes, I'm sure they were because what you do is as pretty cutting edge as it gets in terms of combining methods and alternatives, which is what I love. It's like my favorite conversations, right? Yes, me too. That's why we're here today.

Raya:

Yes. So when people come in to work with me, I do meet each person that's new to my work beforehand, just so it's clear, like what they're walking into, in a sense, clear as it can be without experiencing it. And I think a lot of people are quite surprised and maybe even a little skeptical at first of how impactful emotions are in how we physically feel. So when I actually go through and I have this really lovely diagram of all of the traditional Chinese medicine energy meridians, right, and all the organs that they're connected to, and that beautiful system that works on a 24-hour rhythm. And this diagram goes in deeper and shows how each pair of organs has a certain set of emotions that it's connected to. So that when we feel safe in our body, when we feel regulated, when we have capacity and a feeling gets triggered within our awareness, we can feel it. We clear it and doesn't get as disrupted in the nervous system in the body. Yet when a feeling comes up and we get triggered and we don't have the resources or we don't feel safe, or maybe we're out socially and it's not appropriate to feel that anger that came up, it gets pushed down. And so over time, energy likes to be in motion, right? Emotion is simply energy emotion. And when it gets pushed down, it can create stagnancy. And stagnancy left unchecked for a long time can create that inflammation, that dis-ease in the body, and we can start to see physical changes. So when someone comes in and they have something that they've labeled as chronic pain or a chronic condition, like, well, I don't know, I'm kind of giving up, I don't know. And I ask them, oh, based on where the pain is presenting in the body, understanding the energetics of each body area, ask them, okay, so did you feel supported growing up? You know, they're kind of like, huh, I'm here for my spine, like I'm here, help me with the pain. So I think that's the biggest surprise because when people are open to this work, it works. When they trust it, when they learn the language of their body and they learn that feeling their feelings leads to that freedom that they're seeking physically, it doesn't take much more to convince them. They're already there. I trust that when someone ends up next to me or across from me in that first session, that they're open or they wouldn't have found this work. That's true.

Yuli:

How did you decide at what moment that there was nothing out there that could solve this and you had to create your own method? Such a beautiful question.

Raya:

I think it happened over time. It wasn't one moment that I was like, oh, there's nothing that exists. I'm gonna create it. Yet there was that pivotal moment that I alluded to earlier where I had a woman in a specific Schroth posture on her hands and knees, and she was doing the breathing exercise and the lengthening, and she started to cry. And she asked me, Are you okay if we stay in this position a little longer? This is the most peace I felt in a really long time. And I thought, okay, great, we'll stay here. Again, not feeling comfortable with emotions at that time. And I remember going home and talking to a friend of mine saying, I feel like there's something missing, something missing in my current practice. And little did I know there was something missing in my life at that time, because every modality that I've integrated into ultimately create the Lumina Method is something that's helped me on my path. And so that moment for me was really pivotal. And then the next four years I really got into studying breath work and working with a TCM doctor myself and my shaman and just building out all these tools and learnings and, of course, self-study to eventually create what is now known as the Lumina Method. And uh I'm very proud of it. I'm really, I'm really excited about it and what it's offering people, communities.

Yuli:

And you work with other practitioners now to share this method with them as well. Is that right?

Raya:

That's correct, yes. So I have created the Lumina Method certification program where I take other practitioners who are curious to expand into the integrative space of health and wellness. Specifically, I do teach them the Lumina Method, the modality. And I also in this program have created a lot of business fundamentals. So I believe that, you know, when we're trying To offer our service to the world, it's nice to have that stable foundation where we can ground it into reality, bringing on my financial planner to teach, okay, everything about business they may need to know and finances. And then also teaching how do you set up and hold a space? How do you honor your own energetic boundaries? How do you clear your field so that you don't take on everything that your clients are navigating? And this program, yes, you learn the Lumina Method, yet part of it is that each practitioner feels held as they really honor their unique gifts. So it's about integrating the Lumina Method into what they're already offering. So, like some of my students teach body talk or womb workers and how these modalities fit together. Like you were doing with Heallist, like building out this beautiful community of like-minded practitioners who can support each other, become this little family of like, how can we, how are we called to serve at this time? So it's it's my heart work, this program too. I love that. I love that.

Yuli:

Same mission. I feel like one of the key things that are missing in the practitioner community is the community because a lot of them work solo and it's such an isolating space, especially for empaths and people that need support and sometimes reassurance, people who do things that are not always conventional or accepted by society, not even by their families often. So it's a really lonely path. So that's what I realize. And, you know, we provide support also in different shapes and forms from technology to, you know, programs as well that we run for practitioners to provide that support. So I definitely we're we're on the same mission, and I love meeting other people in this space because it's just such an important work. Just like healing work is important, but healing the healer, I feel like, is even more.

Raya:

Yeah, so beautifully said. Yes, like and really resonates with me as well. Yeah. And one of my students reflected back to me last week, actually, I was away doing some teaching and she said, you know, this week's really helped me heal my sister wound of the competition that can happen between practitioners of similar modalities. And I thought, wow, like the healing's happening within the learning of the course. Like, how beautiful is that? Because when we can come together in collaboration versus competition, that's that's the magic. Because we all have, I believe, something so unique to offer, even if it's labeled as the same thing, each practitioner is adding their own unique energy to it. Absolutely.

Yuli:

And I love how you're blending all those um things together and modalities that are sometimes unexpected to fit together. But I know a little bit from my own journey, like for example, even like breath work, it makes total sense that you combine that with alignment and posture, because to me, one of the most effective things and trying to correct my own alignment was a discovering breath work and the kundalini breath, then later getting into Joe Dispenza and his breath work. Yeah. That um, you know, he's also comes from a similar background, being a chiropractor, which is so interesting. And I feel like it's a topic that is not talked a lot about, at least not among like chiropractors, right? Or it's something from like a different universe, usually. But I love meeting people like you who kind of get that connection because I feel like this is really the cutting edge of you know, alternative medicine is combining those things together and really understanding the energy flow, but also learning to work with it, kind of bringing it all together, right? We're going from this like highly specialized medicine, right? Of like chiropractors, this and that. And now I think the integrative practitioners like yourself, you have this opportunity to like truly have this whole body vision and bring all the different modalities together for the service of the body and the person. And it's something I know, maybe like obvious to you, but I wanted to highlight that it's not obvious to most of the people. And I feel like a lot of people who might be even listening to this podcast, even though our audience tend to be a little more advanced, but I just wanted to highlight that that combination of even like bringing breath work into body alignment and structural work is pretty new. It's not something that is widely spread yet. Thank you for that, highlighting that.

Raya:

Yeah, I haven't seen it done this way anywhere else. And it gets me excited to think that there are people out there offering their gifts in their way. And I think there'll be more and more of this type of approach where we're really looking at the whole person and pulling from our toolkits whether that's was rooted initially in the conventional way and then expanded out into the more integrative way to best support the person. Because ultimately, to me, that's that's my intention is really that that I offer this loving space for someone to to reflect and do their own inner work and really feel empowered and grateful for the body they have and the path that they're on, which you know is the same for the path that I that I walk to get here, right? It's that reflection back.

Yuli:

Yes, absolutely. Anything else you would like to share with listeners that might be listening and thinking, maybe we kind of open their hearts to something new. Maybe we highlighted something that they've been dealing with, maybe ignoring, or maybe kind of gave up on anything that we would like to share to kind of encourage them to step on this healing journey because I feel like it's not always easy. This is definitely, it sounds like what you do, it requires some sort of commitment from a person.

Raya:

Yeah, an openness, a willingness, absolutely. Yes, I would say that there's a pain that when we think about pain, I want to offer a reframe. Because when I was a very competitive Irish dancer growing up, got into distance running, so pain was very familiar. And anytime I had pain, I'd want to book the appointment and get rid of the pain as fast as possible, get back to what I loved. But now there's been this reframe within my own world and what I teach to others is that pain is there to alert you that there's a lesson that you haven't learned yet. And it's the way that the body communicates. Often it'll whisper and then it will get louder. And even if you've had that loud stimulus of pain for quite some time, if you believe that you can make change, you can. And there is something there for you. Pain is there to be your teacher, not your enemy. And that reframe really has helped me along my path and many others. There's there's something more there.

Yuli:

It's beautiful. I love it so much. This is kind of the essence of our podcast. Try to reframe some of those things that were brought to us by conventional medicine, so there's media, our own blocks, who knows? There's just so many sources that kind of made a lot of this information very obsolete, right? Yes. Big pharma commercials that tell you to fight the pain that it all costs. Yes.

Raya:

Yes. Yeah. And I think, you know, with one other thing to add around that, and just thinking about emotion, you know, when I talk about emotion, that can be a scary topic for some. Yet when we think about emotion, it's often scarier, the thought of feeling it, than actually simply feeling it itself. And it takes about 90 seconds from the trigger of an emotion. So when it's first comes up in our body and our awareness, if we actually sit with it and we let ourselves fully feel it, we can integrate it back into the nervous system, back into that regulated place in about 90 seconds. And most people out there can do something challenging for 90 seconds.

Yuli:

It's amazing. I love this. Well, it was such a pleasure. I know we're almost running out of time, but I really love this conversation and love the reframe and the work you do is really beautiful. And hopefully, we inspired some people today to take a look at their pain differently, to re-examine their alignment and their structure, and also give them hope that it's never too late to embark on this healing journey.

Raya:

Yes, so beautiful. I trust that too. I hope that was the case today. I'm really grateful to have sat down with you, Yuli. Thank you for this space to share my work and to share to hear a little bit more about you and your journey. And I love hearing the alignment of our service and at this time. So beautiful.

Yuli:

Absolutely.

Raya:

If I if I may, for those in your audience, I want to share. I'm doing a free offering that might be of resonance. I am I'm offering a free online workshop. It's over three days. It's on February 5th to 7 from 11 a.m. to 12:30 PST. And it's open to anyone who's curious to learn more about what their posture reveals. I'll do some live postural assessments and talk more about the emotional impact on the physical body. And I'll also be gifting a couple of free sessions with me online that I that I'll do wherever you are in the world. This, if this resonates with you, I'd love to have you and share more about this work.

Yuli:

Amazing. Well, thank you again for being here.

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Yuli

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