The Warrior Stays Calm in the Chaos
Episode 23 of Wellness Me Up — Wellness Me Up Diary Entry
with Healer, Space Holder & Emotion Code Practitioner Natalie Zacharias
Written and hosted by Amanda Reece, founder of Wellness Me Up.
My longest episode yet and I would do it again immediately. Natalie Zacharias is a healer, space holder, and emotion code practitioner where spirituality and psychology collide. Subconscious healing, trapped emotions, grief, plant medicine, Etch A Sketch, and why the warrior stays calm in the chaos. You're welcome.
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Who Is Natalie Zacharias?
Natalie Zacharias is a healer, space holder, and emotion code practitioner with a master's in integral counseling psychology currently based in Bali — though knowing Natalie she could end up anywhere. She works at the intersection of spirituality, psychology, and energy healing — and has been doing so since she was twelve years old when energy healing came into her life during her parents' divorce and quite literally changed everything.
She holds one-on-one transformational sessions. She does emotion code clearing. She holds grief circles. She hosts monthly song circles. She facilitates a priestess training called Daughters of the Milky Way. She recently launched the Divine Mother Culture community with her friend Liv Wheeler.
And she talks fast, thinks in layers, and will take you somewhere you genuinely did not expect to go.
This was my longest episode yet. Almost two hours. We also talked before and after recording. I have zero regrets.
Everything Outside of You Is a Mirror
This was the thing Natalie said early in this conversation that set the tone for everything that followed.
When we get activated by something outside of us — a person, a situation, a dynamic — it's not really about the thing outside of us. It's an invitation to look inside and see what's unhealed. What's raising its hand. What's saying hey, can you look at me right now?
She shared a story from when she was living in an 11-person shared house in San Francisco while getting her master's. She got into it with two housemates over passive aggressiveness — and then caught herself being passive aggressive right back. And it knocked her sideways. Because she thought she'd dealt with that.
She ended up crashing in a friend's room, her nervous system completely overloaded, and actually fell asleep sitting up. And when she woke up she had the realization — it's not about them. It's about the wound within me.
And then she said something I want to put on a wall somewhere.
I can't control what's outside of me. But in here? I'm the boss.
The Subconscious Knows. Even When You Don't.
This is the foundation of Natalie's emotion code work and one of the most useful reframes in this whole conversation.
Your conscious mind might have no idea what's wrong. You might show up saying I don't know what I need. I don't know what's happening. I just know something has to change.
But your subconscious knows. It always knows. It's the part of you that pushed you to book the session in the first place. And in emotion code work Natalie connects energetically with that subconscious — through a guided meditation, a grounded container, and a pendulum for yes/no questions — and asks it directly what wants to be healed.
What comes up isn't always what you expected. Sometimes it's connected to what you came in talking about. Sometimes it's not connected at all. But it's always exactly what needs to come up. And almost everyone leaves feeling lighter.
She also described what it looked and felt like when a practitioner cleared trapped emotions from her back during a ceremony in Panama. She saw the energy being pulled out of her spine like an Etch A Sketch being erased. Images and memories attached to each trapped emotion floating up to the surface as they cleared.
I told her I loved that visual and was going to tie Etch A Sketch into the episode title somehow. I wasn't lying. But then The Warrior Stays Calm in the Chaos won. Sorry Etch A Sketch. You earned your place in this blog though.
Big T Trauma, Little T Trauma, and the Grief You Didn't Know You Were Carrying
Natalie made a distinction here that I think so many people need to hear.
People hear the word trauma and immediately think war, famine, death. Big T trauma. And if they haven't experienced those things they assume trauma doesn't apply to them.
But little T trauma — the everyday wounds, the coping mechanisms built in childhood, the ways you learned to survive your family and your culture — that's also real. That's also dysregulating your nervous system. That's also shaping the reality you're creating right now without you even knowing it.
And ancestrally? You've probably inherited big T trauma too. It lives in the culture of your family. In the relational patterns passed down through generations. In the ways people are with each other that nobody questions because it's just how things are.
She also talked about grief in a way that really opened things up for me. Grief isn't just about losing people. You can grieve the version of yourself you thought you were. You can grieve the life you wanted but couldn't have. You can grieve your own health, your own voice, your own sense of who you were before something changed everything.
And most of us were taught to stop crying. Walk it off. Toughen up. Which just means the grief got stuck in the body instead of moving through it.
The Warrior Stays Calm in the Chaos
Some lines just light up pathways in your brain. This was one of them.
Natalie shared what happened during a plant medicine ceremony when she thought she had broken her brain. She went from feeling like a tiny kite — completely untethered, no anchor, absolutely certain this was her reality now — to feeling like a mountain.
Nothing changed around her. The chaos was still happening. But she had regulated her nervous system through her breath and her posture. And in that regulation she heard the message from spirit.
The warrior stays calm in the chaos.
She said that lesson has carried her through everything since. The pandemic. A business partnership falling apart. Leaving California when spirit told her to leave even though it finally felt like home. Every time something hits — she comes back to that.
I shared my own version of this too. I was terminated from a job and the panic started to rise. And then I just... stopped it. I pulled a tarot card. It said my exciting vibration attracts new job opportunities. And I did not look for a single job. Not one. Instead opportunities found me. And I found myself turning down work. How bonkers is that? I needed income but I held out and didn't go into that scarcity mindset. That was the moment I decided I was never going back to working for someone else.
And I haven't. I'm now living my dream of being a digital nomad with no fixed home travelling the world — basically avoiding winter at all costs. 😄
I Threw Out My Back in Portugal. Natalie Explains Why.
I had to share this because it made me laugh and also made me want to cry.
I threw out my back in Portugal a few months ago. My nervous system was completely shot. And I kept pushing through because I thought I had to keep going.
Natalie shared a story about the same thing happening to her during a workshop in Panama. Her back just stopped working. Not from a physical injury — she knew it wasn't physical. It was energetic. Her body was telling her she was abandoning herself by pushing through instead of resting.
A practitioner cleared four or five trapped emotions from her back. And then she could move again.
When she told that story I was like... where the fuck were you when I was on the floor in Portugal?
Our bodies are always communicating. The question is whether we're listening.
Singing Is How She Comes Back to Herself
The WTF wheel asked what instantly calms her down. And Natalie said singing.
This opened up one of the most unexpected and beautiful parts of the whole conversation. She has a powerful voice. She's known it since she was young. And she spent a long time being afraid of it — afraid of the energy that could move through it, afraid of what it might do, afraid of her own power.
She shared the story of singing in an ayahuasca ceremony for the first time — calling in Archangel Michael, singing in Spanish while deep in the medicine, feeling like she was surfing a tsunami. And then going into a deep shame spiral afterwards because of the old story she was carrying about causing harm.
She worked through that shame with her therapist. And what came out the other side was this — the voice is meant to be heard. Liberating your voice is part of liberating yourself. And now she holds monthly song circles and one-on-one voice liberation sessions for people who want to do the same.
She also said something worth sitting with. Songs are prayers. The words matter. The melody gets into your subconscious and starts shaping the reality you create. So pay attention to what you're singing.
You Are Not an Imposter of Your Own Experience
This was Natalie's answer to imposter syndrome and I want it on a t-shirt.
You are not an imposter of your own experience. Whatever you have lived through, whatever you have healed, whatever you know — that is yours. You are the expert of your own experience. And it is time to own that.
What Wellness Me Up Means to Natalie
Potential. But not in the grinding reaching never-good-enough kind of way.
More like — what is the part of you that you have been ignoring for way too long? Where is there disharmony within? And what would it feel like to finally show up fully for yourself?
When you do that inner work — whether through energy healing, coaching, movement, singing, painting, or any of the endless modalities that exist — the outside world starts to respond differently. Because the little universe shapes the big universe.
Start inside.
Want to work with Natalie?
Natalie Zacharias is a healer, space holder, and emotion code practitioner offering one-on-one transformational sessions, emotion code clearing, voice liberation sessions, monthly song circles, and the Divine Mother Culture community.
👉 tendingyourspirit.com
📱 Instagram: @tendingyourspirit and @daughtersofthemilkyway
🎧 Daughters of the Milky Way podcast
💻 heal.me/tendingyourspirit
🌐 Divine Mother Culture community: skool.com — search Divine Mother Culture
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