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© 2025 Holistic Life Navigation
Description
This podcast explores holistic stress and trauma recovery. I am your host, Luis Mojica. My work, Holistic Life Navigation, was modeled after my own journey in healing myself from chronic illness and PTSD. I share this podcast with many brilliant minds who, like me, healed themselves through unique, unusual, and unorthodox ways.
For more information, please visit: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com
Written, produced and recorded by Luis Mojica. Edited by Fredo Viola. Intro/outro song: "Witch Love" by Luis Mojica.
345 Episodes
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![[Ep. 295] Humanizing Charlie Kirk: Using Somatics & Technology To Expand Our Hearts](https://storage.buzzsprout.com/5ka8j6962jq9ohfxophf3dqvm2oq?.jpg "[Ep. 295] Humanizing Charlie Kirk: Using Somatics & Technology To Expand Our Hearts")
On today's episode Luis discusses his practice of humanizing those he disagrees with, and how the killing of Charlie Kirk, and the response to it, inspired him to share his reaction. When one of the people who had abused him died, Luis thought he'd feel relief, but instead found grief and love underneath the fear he'd been trapped in. His own self-inquiry made him decide that it hurt him more to hate his abuser than it did to humanize him. From this realization Luis began his personal r...
![[Ep. 294] Trauma Healing 101: Learn How To Combine Nutrition + Somatics In Just 7-Weeks](https://storage.buzzsprout.com/hsyomvpconp1pwy961h7w18e79s7?.jpg "[Ep. 294] Trauma Healing 101: Learn How To Combine Nutrition + Somatics In Just 7-Weeks")
Most of us were alone during our most traumatic experiences—and then left alone to try to heal from them. In this episode, Luis explores why isolation is at the root of so much trauma, how unexpressed survival responses can stay stuck in the body for decades, and why healing requires connection. He shares why group work is so powerful, how somatic practices and whole-food nutrition work together, and what it means to witness your body rather than become it. Register for Food Therapy Explore...
Luis has lived the ADHD diagnosis, along with tics, tourrettes, binge eating, self-hatred and suicidal ideation. All of this stress does a number on the gut lining, which leads to brain inflammation and brain fog. Luis began to notice that all of his symptoms would shapeshift depending upon what food he had eaten. Eventually this practice taught him how to eat for a nutrient deficient brain, while somatics taught him how to be a conscious witness. The combination of nutrition and somatics all...
Do you have ADHD? Has anyone ever asked you what kind of food you eat and if your life excites you? Luis had self-medicated his ADHD with sugar, caffeine, and cigarettes because stimulants boost dopamine. This can help with short term productivity, but these substances also stimulate the heart, nervous system, and adrenals, eventually leading to burnout. What if we learned how to use dopamine deficiency as a compass to find what truly lights us up? Want to learn more about how to ...
Luis explores the correlation between ADHD, dopamine, and the gut. He explains how certain foods can change and shift your microbiome, which then can improve your dopamine levels and lower brain inflammation. You can read more about, and register for, the live 7-week foundational course here: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/course Sign up for our 6-month Embodied Relationships group, beginning in October: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/relationship-group ---- You can learn ...
Have you ever heard the reference to, "a seat at the table"? As in, "everyone deserves a seat at the table"? Camille and Luis riff on how they feel about "the table". They. Don't. Need. Your. Table. Luis wasn't allowed into spaces to spread his work because of how he looked, so he built his own HLN-shaped table. If we are constantly searching for a table to belong to we are always in a co-dependent state (that most of us were modeled as children). Fawning and controlling might get us a ...
Let's explore attachment styles. Luis has learned from personal experience that avoidant attachment types are simply bodies overwhelmed by a connection that feels overly needy, like a burden, and as a result they over-identify with independence. Anxious attachment types seek safety outside of themselves, and often end up seeking that safety in an avoidant partner. So anxious types and avoidant types often end up partnered. The overwhelmed avoidant's behavior "proves" to the anxious type...
Join a crow, a fawn, and Luis on a morning walk to chat about the avoidant attachment style. There is a myth that avoidant attachment style folks are narcissistic psychopaths. He challenges this through the lens of somatics, seeing the avoidant attachment style as a habit in bodies that don't have capacity for connection. Their lack of capacity for their own feelings makes connection feel repressive work. So they push connection away. Instead of processing the feelings they often soothe...
1Today Luis chats with Dick Schwartz, developer of Internal Family Systems (I.F.S.). Dick started his career as a family therapist. Upon asking the question, "why isn't family therapy working?" he began to develop what has become I.F.S. He learned from being in the field, and from making mistakes, how to tend to the parts of us that are usually frozen in the past. Dick found that when we talk to the inner critic with compassion, the deep healing work unfolds. Luis asks if Dick's work sprang fr...
On today's episode, Luis discusses navigating conflict through a somatic lens. As he speaks about conflict, he does not mean abuse or threat, but disagreement, disappoint and frustration. Luis teaches about his "Tending To Rupture" method, and how he's been able to apply it to his client work, as well as his personal life. He discusses how the physiology of trauma response creates the conditions that make conflicts so difficult to resolve. Luis offers practical tips and guided practic...
On today's episode, Luis speaks with Will Harris, a farmer, cattleman, and owner of White Oak Pastures. Will shares his personal story of how he inherited his family farm, and how he transitioned the farm from an industrial model to a regenerative one. When taking an industrial approach to farming, Will had caused desertification on parts of his land from the use of chemicals and monocultural farming. His cattle were taking hormones and pharmaceuticals to make them produce more. Over time, h...
Trevor is back for a second podcast episode with Luis to discuss parenting in the age of social media and screen prevalence. The hard first question is, what social media and screen patterns do the parents model? Do parents use their own free time to disassociate and isolate with the screen? Do parents use the screen as a babysitter for their child/ren, so that they have time to resource themselves? When parents live an authentic, meaningful and satisfied life, they can connect to...
Trevor Spring joins Luis for a tender discussion about masculinity, and how to tend our boys. Many boys and men have grown up, or are growing up, in isolation around their emotions and sexuality, with little to no physical or emotional attunement from caregivers and mentors. Porn becomes the de facto teacher prompting a chemistry shift in a frozen, dissociated body. Sexuality is learned with and from a screen, not body to body in a relationship of reciprocity. This pattern reinforces misattun...
In this episode, Luis continues the short series on male puberty by exploring parallel co-regulation, which is similar to parallel play -- meaning they're playing near or next to each other -- and how important it is for teenage boys. During puberty, many boys lose access to their feelings while stuck in a body overwhelmed by testosterone and transformation at every level. An increase in sensation added to a decrease in capacity for sensation leads to inevitable shut down and isolation....
In this episode, Luis dives into the developmental trauma of boys -- a continuation of Episode 279: This Is Why I Think P*rnography Is Traumatizing For Developing Boys -- and how they are generally unsupported through puberty. There's a lot of discourse around "toxic males" and problematic men in our society, but not a lot of somatic discussion around how to support young boys in a new way so they can walk a different path: a more embodied one. Luis encourages community building for par...
Join Luis as he riffs about gender-affirming surgery, hormone therapy, and puberty blockers for minors. He looks to Marci Bowers, the first transgender female gynecologist and surgeon, who makes the case for not giving minors puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Children can safely explore who they are through temporary means, such as: make-up, fashion, roles, gender and stereotypes. The teenage years are inherently dysphoric, lets support kids to flow through these years with as much...
On today's episode, Luis begins a conversation about male puberty that will continue into another two videos to explore what they face when testosterone begins to transform their bodies, minds, and chemistry. Because of this sudden biological change, p*rnography can be a developmental traumatizing experience for boys that leaves them further isolated from their bodies and emotions. For parental support and mentoring for boys, check out Trevor Spring's program: https://www.trevorspring...
On today's episode, Luis discusses how our skin health is affected by our hormones, and by our liver health. Everything from acne, rashes, eczema, and psoriasis can be caused by impurities coming out through your skin when your liver is overtaxed. The focus is usually on sex hormones, but stress hormones can also tax your liver, which then can trigger flare ups. We can work with chronic stress externally, as well as internally by removing foods from our diets that can trigger an adrenal res...
On today's episode, Luis discusses the connection between movement and glucose. Movement and modern, industrialized food now lack a reciprocity. Movement is required for gathering and processing food; movement that many of us no longer need to perform in order to access calorically dense food. Refined foods can often cause a glucose spike, which is followed by an insulin response, and then an adrenal response. When muscles are engaged after eating, it helps with your glucose storage, and can...
On today's episode, Luis discusses protein: how it affects mood, the nervous system, and the brain, and why it's so important to understand. Proteins are a combination of amino acids, and dopamine and serotonin rely on them. Refined foods can temporarily fill the dopamine need caused by low amino acid intake, but ensuring you have enough protein is necessary for sustained balance. And sometimes the body's need for protein can change, depending on life circumstances. Luis talks about both plan...
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really appreciate when you address the schism of how people read one's identity from your inner experience, and especially when you relate it to all different aspects of eco-social-somatics, meaning the physiology, the social, and the experiential aspects of "passing white white (cis, straight)" (recognizing the privileges that come with that, while still acknowledging) at the same time the inner experience of an identity that's different than what is perceived in the surface. and you got deep into some of complexities if that here really so well, acknowledging ancestry and so much n thanks!
this is a great one! important!
I'm quite enjoying this and thought you would as well... [Ep 14] Decolonizing The Psyche | Dr. Amber McZeal on holistic life navigation podcast. https://castbox.fm/vb/311433122 If you Install Castbox use my referral code - rewards! Se Instalar o Castbox use esse código! https://castbox.fm/tasklist/gold/invite?invite_id=YYXJED thank youuuuu sss