Exploring Life & Business with Karin Robbins of Our Sacred Rhythm

Today we’d like to introduce you to Karin Robbins

Hi Karin, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
As early as middle school I can remember being drawn to people’s stories and how they dealt with adverse circumstances. I often say the Diary of Anne Frank started my social work career and led to me reading many other stories of teenagers in different circumstances when I was a tween. I spent the first two decades of my career working in agency settings, including hospitals, non profits, LA County child protective services and later the Department of Mental Health. I was most drawn to work on interdisciplinary teams, I loved different perspectives and collaborating to support people. In graduate school I was drawn to working with people living with HIV/AIDS and that was where I found my love of healing the emotional aspects of medical and health related challenges. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the start of what would later become my work as a somatic, body based therapist and coach helping people to free up their nervous systems to overcome stressful and traumatic life circumstances to live more fully expressed. Today I work with people in this way, integrating the mind, body, and spirit for holistic mental health care.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It’s hard to say that the life of an entrepreneur and healer is smooth exactly, and professionally I have been very fortunate to have had work opportunities that provided stability and helped me develop my professional self. I was able to develop relationships with people along my professional journey that introduced me to new ideas and new ways of working that continue to inspire me and were keys to my personal growth and development.. My struggles along the way have primarily been related to my own health. Perhaps not surprising when one’s career is dedicated to healing through the mind and body that my own life would present the opportunities to learn from the inside out. From stress related body breakdowns, inflammation and gut health challenges to later being diagnosed with multiple melanomas, more inflammation and metabolic challenges, and most recently high blood pressure and anxiety.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
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.

At Our Sacred Rhythm we truly believe that when you honor the past and build for the future, you can finally have an experience of embodiment and full expression. The freedom to have thriving relationships, upleveled health, and the deep knowledge of self that will impact the world becomes available to you.

The secret? We need to work with the body to support its natural ability to heal. The mind is very helpful, in fact, it’s an essential resource that I draw upon. However, if you don’t also integrate the content and experience of life in an embodied way, by inviting flow through your physical and energetic systems, you can remain stuck, unable to be who we truly are.

I feel very proud of creating a place in Our Sacred Rhythm where people can come to be supported in being a full human, and that I get to show up that way myself. Yes, I am a licensed mental health professional with many many years of training and education that I offer to folks. And really it’s about our relationships, healing and becoming more and more fully human that helps us feel that we matter and belong here. I love that we get to co-create a place like that through Our Sacred Rhythm.

I support people through somatic psychotherapy, private coaching, and group experiences. I love to connect with people and share the wisdom of Our Sacred Rhythm through my newsletter community blog and Instagram.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I’ve definitely taken some risks in my life, and I don’t necessarily think of myself as a risk taker. I think mainly because I don’t tend to go toward danger, and really taking a risk is so much more than just danger. In fact, knowing we are safe and can take a risk to grow or do something new or follow our dreams is something I help people with every day. The risks I’ve taken have been related to following my heart, whether that was leaving full time work in LA County Dept of Mental Health or moving to new cities or putting myself out there in a new way. They have not all worked out as I imagined they might, and honestly they turned out better, more expansive, and beyond what my limited mind may have created. That doesn’t mean things were easy, sometimes they were quite painful, like landing smack in the middle of a global pandemic 9 months after moving to a new city I had barely gotten to know yet.

I would say the deepest wisdom, an ability to trust myself and my intuition, has been the ultimate gift in taking risks to change something in my life. Sometimes I do still try to control outcomes, which always leads me to stress and tension, and I have learned that it takes courage not to try to control everything and to allow things to unfold. The nectar lives in that softening, that allowing, and trusting. I do believe in preparing, taking my time first to really listen in, and to understanding practical implications of things. And when that preparation meets the intuition and allowing, even when I had no clue what I was even preparing for sometimes, it has always worked out … even when it didn’t work out the way I imagined. It’s worked out. So, take the risks, do the work to help the nervous system feel safe enough to show up for them, and prepare just enough to meet the opportunities when they clarify for you.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.oursacredrhythm.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karincrobbins/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OurSacredRhythm
• Other: https://oursacredrhythm.com/blog/

Image Credits
Rhianon Brown and Nico Nelson