DTOP #42: Shake It Off – Exploring TRE® And My Journey To Gray Hair

Hello friends. Welcome back to another episode of Doing Things On Purpose, the podcast that empowers women to take charge of their time, health, relationships, and money by doing things on purpose. This is episode 42.

I’m your host Suri Stahel – married for 15 years, mom of two, and a self-love and self-empowerment coach for moms and heart-centered rebels whose calling is to serve.

So let’s get started, and as with many of my podcasts, I’ll do a quick mom check-in.

Mom check-in

How are you doing today, moms and of course caregivers, or whoever you are, and however you serve in this world?

Have you been taking care of yourself in the past week?

I think it was last week, or was it two weeks ago? …I’ve been exploring somatic practices.

If you follow me, you know that I do daily yoga and meditation. But I’ve been curious about how somatic practices such as breath work, tapping, and in this case TRE, which is short for Tension & Trauma Release Exercises – can help me deepen my practice of self-regulation and self grounding.

Because a lot of the work that I do is about holding people where they’re at, and it can be quite dysregulating because it might be a different energy than the one that I carry in my own personal life. And so for me to be a grounded and stable presence for my clients, and also to be able to hold myself in these spaces, I’m always interested in how I can better manage my energy.

Interestingly, it’s also a topic that my clients, whether they know it or not, are wanting to explore in their own way.

So when we talk about somatic, we’re talking about body-based practices. It’s not where you try to mentally process a situation to regulate your nervous system. It is through experiential exercises – and TRE is a way that leverages our natural tendency to shake.

What is TRE®?

So the theory is that, if you go back in time and you’re in the caveman times, or you are in the animal kingdom and you see a predator wanting to chase you and kill you – you run or you prepare for action.

And then let’s say nothing happens and the threat has passed. Our natural animalistic response to releasing that tension that we were holding in getting ready to flee or fight, is by shaking or or shivering through our bodies.

Unfortunately, in our modern day society, we are still constantly bombarded with high stress situations, but also a lot of it is constant low-level stress that accumulates over time. But we are not able to release this tension. 

You know, sometimes we use therapy, sometimes we exercise, which are all beautiful ways to do that, and this (TRE) is just another way to explore doing that.

TRE is as I understand it, seven sets of exercises that you use to activate and fatigue some muscles. And then at the end of the session, you activate these tired muscles (even more) so that they begin to shake – as you would shake in nature. 

So I tried it out. I was lucky enough to be offered a free session with Laila Atmane and you can find her at movewithagility.com, and she provides this kind of support online:

• We were on video together.
• I had my mat out.
• She had her mat out.
• And she was teaching me how to go through these exercises and helping me correct my poses.

And so what are the effects?

Yes, I had the shaking, I had the tremoring, and then we had kind of a rest phase, and she talked me through what I needed to do to support myself after the session. Then she checked in with me a few days afterwards, to see how I was doing.

From my own experience, I can say that I slept like a baby.

I could sleep deeper than I had in the last few days. And if you followed me a while back, you know that I started meditation because I wanted to sleep better.

So this has been like a layering system for me because when I started meditating, I was in my coaching school and I just had so much information that I was absorbing, and so much I wanted to learn, which was different than the life I had before as a stay-at-home mom.

I needed to learn how to manage all of those things so that I could still be, in a peaceful state as I move through my day, and so I don’t wake up feeling like I’m running behind.

And so meditation really worked for that. But then, as I started practicing what I was learning, both with my clients and also in my daily life, as well as trying to process a lot of dysregulating issues in my extended family environment – I started to notice a residual stress that wouldn’t go away with my current meditative practice.

Keeping in mind that with running my own business, I have a lot of decision-making that I have to do with regards to how I want to best spend my time – and that also takes a toll on my energy levels and my mental capacity.

The Pros of somatic exercises

In experimenting with somatic exercises, I feel like it’s a quick-fix technique because it’s telling you to do a specific set of moves to get a specific and very quick sense of relief without too much effort.

If you’ve ever tried meditating, for instance, or keeping your mind quiet during a yoga session, you know how challenging this can be if you’re juggling a few things at the same time. Oftentimes, thoughts are just bombarding your brain space.

When you’re doing somatic work, it’s almost like you physiologically process things on another level, that you don’t really even have to understand… because you just feel clearer afterwards.

The Cons of somatic exercises

For me, the only con is that I don’t feel like I’m cultivating resilience by doing somatic practices. It’s almost like a bandaid. A very healthy bandaid (!) – to help me deal with situations that are overwhelming.

It’s an amazing tool to have in your back pocket (for sure!), but you might not be cultivating the practice of noticing when you’re triggered. You might not be practicing sitting in discomfort, or sitting with patience. All of these slower lessons that come with slower practices.

This is just my input after two times of doing it (TRE) and seeing it as a tool that I will definitely come back to if I need it.

Points to consider when choosing a practice

And again, any tool that you use has to be something that you enjoy, and something that you can fit in your day, or your week’s schedule – that you know you’re going to come back to, and allow yourself to grow deeper in that practice.

So please take that under consideration.

I know this is a bit of a long mom check-in. But I just wanted to share my experience. If you ever want to try it out, I would say just explore anything that piques your interest. You never know what effects you will find from them, until you try…

On to the topic of hair – because, why not? …I’m sharing my journey to going gray

So the second half of this strange episode is about my hair. And I wanted to talk about this because first of all, I wanted to have a bit of a fun episode, and it is also something that people actively come up to me and give a positive comment about.

So whether I’m in a restaurant or I’m getting off the bus, my husband always notices people looking at me and my hair. So, I guess it’s a thing nowadays, right? (to have gray hair) 

And if I go to the hairdressers, they will tell me, “Oh, you have such nice gray hair. You know, who colors their hair? …Everyone!” 

It is such a normal thing for us women to want to look young and, we love to experiment with color as well! It can be part of our, personality. 

Who I used to be

Just some background story about my hair: 

• I am somebody who has early gray hair. So since I was in college in my early twenties, I already had some white strands. And so I started coloring my hair, and I remember using Revlon at home color kit. That was basically my go-to brand throughout the years that I was coloring my hair.
• I’m also someone who used to spend hundreds of dollars cutting their hair at fancy salons. I remember when I was working in Hong Kong, I even went to this one salon that offered champagne, which my, future husband (then boyfriend) said, “You really went to that place?” So yeah, I used to spend on haircuts.
• And I also straightened my hair. Because that’s a thing in Asia – that you love to have your hair, silky looking.

So this was my life.

When things changed

And then I got married, and we moved to Switzerland. And long story short, when I had my second baby in 2014, at that time I wasn’t working. So I was, you know, saving money.

I also noticed that I started to have a reaction to my hair color. I would have very red, burning scalp when I colored my hair. And I was also noticing that as my hair turned more and more white, I had to color it more often. 

And obviously with my growing sensitivity, that didn’t really make sense.

The big thing that kind of changed my life was actually a holiday experience. We were in Bali, in a nice little boutique hotel. 

I had just swum in the pool, and before the holiday I had colored my hair and washed it a few times. So, I got out of the pool and was lying down on my lounger with a towel on it.

And then afterwards when I got up to leave. I saw that there was this big ring of dark hair dye on my towel, and I was so embarrassed! I quickly put it together and put it in the used towel section, which I’m sure they must have been angry when they had to wash it with other white towels. 

But anyway, and I just felt so embarrassed.

So that started me on this journey of wanting to free myself from hair coloring – because it is like a cage, right? 

🚫 Because when you color your hair and you have new growth, if it’s a different color, you have to color it again.

🚫 Or you have to live with a few weeks or months of odd looking hair growth.

🚫You have to spend money on (hair coloring) product.

🚫 And it’s also bad for your hair and skin.

So it was a few different things from me not having the funds to go to a salon to color my hair with better products, me not wanting to be in that cycle of continually coloring my hair, and me just wanting to figure out a more sustainable way to grow mature naturally.

And this is a departure from people in Asia who I suppose as in anywhere else, we all color our hair. I mean, my mom, my aunties, they all color their hair.

So I started looking for photographs of women wearing white hair and being proud of it, and this kind of became my goal.

📆 Specifically for this episode, I even looked through my old photographs to see how the progression actually was for me stopping to color my hair, and me actually wearing it all natural right now:

1. So I must have had the holiday in Bali in 2015, but it still took me another year of coloring sometimes, you know, right before a holiday – to actually stop coloring my hair.
2. (When I completely stopped coloring) I believe that happened in 2016. So that’s around 10 years ago at the time of this recording.
3. I also started to look up natural ways to care for my hair.
4. I tried to do the no shampoo haircare routine.
5. I bought a CREA clip. If you don’t know it, you can Google it. It’s this little clip that you can use to cut your own hair, and I cut my children’s hair for the longest time. Even until now when they want me to cut their hair, I can do it. And so that saved me a lot of money and also made it seem uncomplicated – like it’s something that I can learn to do.
6. It took me about two years for my hair to grow out (2016-2018) – meaning to grow around shoulder length so it can be cut off and be less noticeable. And by that time, I was 36 years old.
7. 2019 was when everything just became suddenly visibly whiter. So my new growth was coming, not anymore in the darker shade, but it became this whiter shade.

Even today, I still have half/half white hair and my natural hair color.

💎 Also, I’ve noticed that my hair at 43 years old now, is thinner than it used to be – meaning that I have less hair than I used to.

In one of my past podcasts, I was mentioning that I use some treatments to help improve the growth of my hair: from doing scalp massage every once in a while, and also treating it with linseed oil.

I will include the link of the person that I got these haircare tips from on YouTube (Her 86m2) in the website page of this episode. But she doesn’t have white hair. 

💎 And I can say, if you are somebody who’s thinking of going white, that the texture of white hair is a lot rougher. I find for me as an Asian anyway, it’s a lot rougher than my original hair.

So it needs a bit more moisturization. 

I use things like olive oil, or I might mix a little bit of the olive oil with a bit of my Cerave moisturizer, and rub it on the ends of my hair. 

💎 And because I braid my hair, that also helps to retain moisture when my hair is still slightly damp and I kind of hold it together, so it (the water) doesn’t evaporate as quickly.

So, you know, over time you just learn some tips and tricks of how to tame your white hair. 

And if you can sense by now, I always love the strategies that are natural. That don’t require me to use heat to curl my hair all the time, because that’s also, again, hurting the hair instead of nurturing it. 

Questions on going gray?

So if you have any questions about how I care for my hair or anything like that. Or you just need some kind of support from somebody who has done it. Please feel free to reach out.

I would love to hear your stories. Please leave your comments. 

I think it is amazing seeing more and more women aging the natural way. I think about it as a rediscovering of our natural selves, and finally, learning to work with who we actually are, instead of trying to suppress it.

And of course, this is not me saying that you shouldn’t color your hair. If it’s something that you still love doing and you really don’t feel resentful towards it, then go you!

But for those of you who have a little bit of built up resentment over the years about this – I’m telling you:

💎 That it’s possible to break free. 

💎 And it’s even possible to receive compliments about your white hair!

Please rate & share!

So that’s my episode for this week. It’s a bit different than the ones I usually do, but I hope you enjoy it.

And as usual, I’d love to hear from you if you have any topics, questions, anything you would like my input or support with, just reach out at suristahel.com.

• If you like this episode, please don’t forget to follow, rate and share it with a friend. It really helps.
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• As usual, the show notes will be available suristahel.com/42 for this episode 42.

🐣 Have a beautiful Easter ahead and I’ll catch you again next time.