We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Karin Robbins. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Karin below.
Hi Karin, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
My resilience is ever evolving in many ways and has been cultivated over the course of years. On one level, it comes from somatic healing and learning how to work with my nervous system so that it feels safe enough to live more and more organically as who I am. Cultivating enough safety to be embodied and engage in the world has been huge. And ultimately my resilience comes from combining that somatic healing with my spiritual practice, allowing myself to be held by something much bigger than me that also frees my mind from a whole bunch of habits and patterns that contribute to fear, isolation, and anxiety.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in California and I am the founder of Our Sacred Rhythm. I created Our Sacred Rhythm to offer transformative healing practices, lifestyle rituals, and somatic therapies that help people heal from trauma, and other stuck places, in order to regain vitality and live a life most aligned with who they really are. I work with creatives, thinkers, and justice seekers who want to heal themselves from stuck and stagnant habits and patterns, including trauma, that prevent them from making the impact they desire. Ultimately we need to be able in inhabit these bodies to be engaged in the world, and we need to integrate the heart and spirit so that we feel connected with ourselves and others. I have a great love of most things ancient mystical and off the beaten path, which I bring into my work, grounded in the body while increasing access to vitality and aliveness in my clients.
I work primarily one on one with clients and share a weekly newsletter with musings from my week, practical somatic education with real examples, and practices that people can bring into their day. Group offerings will be coming more regularly soon, so feel free to be in touch for updates on that.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Studying mindfulness was the first piece in a few very pivotal few years from 2007-2009 when I began to learn more about present moment embodied living, which developed into exploring Somatic Experiencing™ and other somatic therapies that are the foundation of my work now. I was incredibly burnt out in my job as a social worker and it was a very dedicated study of mindfulness that helped me feel inspired enough to open my private psychotherapy practice in 2008. That dedicated study not only led me to expanding beyond mindfulness into healing trauma through Somatic Experiencing™, the NeuroAffective Relational Model®, and other somatic therpies, but also started my spiritual journey and dedication to ongoing practice and study that supports me in connecting with my intuition and a deeper sense of trust in the unfolding of things.
I am also someone who loves to create sacred spaces and daily rituals, it’s part of who I am and what brings me joy. Creating beauty, connecting with nature and its rhythms, studying Ayurveda, and expressing myself through creating these spaces and rituals in my home and office has been a huge resource in becoming more of who I am.
I would encourage folks who want to get started in cultivating resilience through the body, mindfulness, and creative expression to start simply. The natural world is an incredible resource, even for folks like me who live in a big city. Step outside, watch how the light hits the plants or where your attention is drawn. Then linger there for just a bit longer than you may otherwise, even 1-3 breaths is a beautiful way to begin.
What’s been one of your main areas of growth this year?
This has been a very transformational and challenging year for me. At the start of 2023 I had an inkling that it was time to close my 6 year journey in Northern California to return to my lifelong home, Los Angeles. On one level there are so many logistics involved in such a thing, to dissolve one home, move it, and create a new one in another space. I have done this in a lot of ways over the years, including moving 3 times in the past 6 years (I had lived in my prior home for 23 years so this was quite a change).
In reflecting on my time in Northern California there is so much that I learned … on one hand, it was that I could follow my heart and really let my soul find its place. Little did I know when I moved that I would be diagnosed with multiple melanomas by the end of the first year and land myself on a deep journey of healing and clearing many many skin cancers. I also didn’t know that we would find ourselves in a global pandemic a few years later, or that I would lose both of my parents within 6 months of each other. 2023 was the first year that neither parent was alive and there was some kind of deep resolution of an aspect of my journey toward becoming my own person that was also involved in this move back to Los Angeles this year.
The second half of the year was another huge area of growth in that I chose to focus on my health over anything else. My health in service of my work in the world, my health so that I can deepen my relationships, my health for my experience of joy and vitality, my health so that I am available and present for the rest of my life. I’ve been clear of the skin cancers for years now, and while I’m still screened every 3 months, there was a deeper level of health and healing being asked for. At age 55 there isn’t so much space to push and override in service of doing more like I may have done, well, almost every year before this one. And so I didn’t. I did what felt good to be engaged with in my business through connection with my clients and community. Anything related to growth or creation beyond these relationships was simply not for this season.
And now that I am here at the end of 2023, in my new home, beginning to feel better than I have all year, with a more open heart to be with so much love and the deep pain in the world, I feel so much gratitude for my willingness to give myself half of an entire year to be in this process. I trust that it will remain as the inspiration and desire to create and share more also comes in with this new year.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.oursacredrhythm.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karincrobbins/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OurSacredRhythm
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karinrobbinslcsw/
Image Credits
Nico Nelson and Rhianon Brown Photography
