Healing Black Trauma: A Conversation with Juli Nixon

As the host of the Black Trauma Podcast, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing many remarkable individuals working to heal and empower our community. But my recent conversation with Juli Nixon left me truly awestruck. Juli is a culturally competent, holistic life coach, healer, and clinically trained social worker with nearly 20 years of experience. She brings a deep understanding of black trauma along with innovative approaches using AI and hypnosis techniques.

Juli’s personal journey of healing and transformation is both inspiring and instructive. In 2018, she received a devastating diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension and was told she only had 7-12 years to live. Rather than accepting this prognosis, Juli embarked on a mission to heal herself holistically. Now, almost 6 years later, she has defied medical expectations and is thriving. This experience led her to become certified in hypnosis and energy healing techniques.

As Juli explained, “Bodies can heal themselves.” She found many holistic healing modalities were simply “scientific names and other cultures’ ways to do what we’ve been doing this entire time.” Her journey highlights the innate healing abilities within the black community that have often been suppressed or forgotten.

Epigenetics and Ancestral Healing

One of the most fascinating parts of our conversation centered on epigenetics – the way trauma can be passed down genetically through generations. Juli shared how learning about epigenetics was an “aha moment” that helped her understand many of the fears and behaviors she witnessed in her family and community.

For example, she noted how many of her relatives from Alabama sharecropper backgrounds have intense fears of dogs and water “for no reason theoretically, but epigenetically speaking our cells remember the damage, our cells remember the trauma.” These inherited trauma responses serve as protective mechanisms but can also hold us back from fully living and thriving.

The hopeful flip side of epigenetics is that we have the power to heal not just ourselves, but our entire ancestral line. As Juli beautifully put it: “When we heal epigenetically, when we heal ourselves…we are healing the line of folks who came before us who couldn’t do so.” This perspective gives our individual healing journey a profound sense of purpose and connection to our lineage.

The Connection Between Sexual Trauma and Disordered Eating

Juli brought light to an often overlooked connection between sexual trauma and disordered eating patterns, particularly binge eating. She noted that in the black community, “it is socially acceptable to eat” even when other coping mechanisms like substance use are taboo. Food becomes a way to “stuff emotions” and create physical “armor.”

For those who have experienced sexual trauma, weight gain can serve as an unconscious protective mechanism – “if I’m just unattractive enough, this’ll never happen to me again.” Understanding this link between trauma and eating behaviors is crucial for holistic healing.

Juli shared that through her own healing work, she was able to eliminate emotional eating entirely. She emphasized that we all have the ability to “sit with and transmute negative emotions” rather than using food or other substances to numb out. This speaks to the importance of providing safe spaces for trauma survivors to process their experiences and learn healthier coping skills.

Hypnosis as a Healing Tool

Many in our community are skeptical of hypnosis, associating it with stage performances where people are made to cluck like chickens. But as Juli explained, we are already “under hypnosis all day, every day.” Our subconscious minds are constantly absorbing messages and programming that shape our behaviors and beliefs.

Hypnosis is simply a focused state of relaxation and suggestibility that allows us to speak directly to the subconscious. Juli pointed out that many practices already familiar in the black community are forms of self-hypnosis – prayer, mantras, affirmations, even the rhythmic movements and chants used in traditional African healing rituals.

By reclaiming hypnosis as a natural, ancestral tool for transformation, we can tap into profound healing abilities. Juli uses hypnotic techniques to help clients release trauma, change limiting beliefs, and access their innate wisdom and power.

Embracing AI as a Tool for Empowerment

Perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of Juli’s work is her use of artificial intelligence (AI) in therapy and coaching. She is the first and currently only AI-certified social worker in the United States. While many in our community are wary of AI, Juli sees it as a powerful tool that we must learn to leverage.

She shared how she first dipped her toe into AI by using it to generate professional headshots. Seeing the impressive results sparked her curiosity about other applications. Now she uses AI for everything from answering client questions to helping people write books while retaining their intellectual property rights.

Juli emphasized that AI is simply a tool – like fire, it can be used for good or harm depending on who wields it. She voiced concern that by avoiding AI out of fear, we allow others to develop potentially harmful applications unchecked. “They have a flame thrower and we don’t even know fire exists,” she said.

Her message to the black community is clear: “Your ancestors went through all the hardship they went through so you can be afraid of a computer program?” We owe it to ourselves and our lineage to embrace new technologies that can aid in our collective healing and empowerment.

Juli envisions creating an AI literacy nonprofit to ensure our community isn’t left behind as the world rapidly changes. She wants us to harness AI’s power to collapse time, accessing information and insights that can accelerate our personal and collective evolution.

Holistic Healing for Our Community

Throughout our conversation, Juli embodied a holistic, spiritually-grounded approach to healing black trauma. She seamlessly wove together cutting-edge technology with ancestral wisdom, scientific understanding with intuitive knowing.

Some key takeaways from our discussion:

We have innate healing abilities that have been suppressed but can be reawakened.

Trauma is often stored in the body and passed down genetically. Healing ourselves also heals our ancestors and descendants.

There are often hidden links between different symptoms (like sexual trauma and disordered eating) that require a holistic healing approach.

Practices like hypnosis, energy healing, and even AI can be powerful tools for transformation when used consciously.

True healing requires creating safe spaces to process emotions and learning healthier coping mechanisms.

We must be willing to embrace new technologies and knowledge to aid in our collective healing, rather than letting fear hold us back.

Healing is always available to us – as close as our breath. We can tap into it through simple practices like mindful breathing.

A Call to Healing Action

Juli closed our conversation with a powerful guided meditation, inviting listeners to breathe deeply and release stuck trauma energy from their bodies. This beautifully illustrated how healing can begin right now, in this moment, if we’re willing to tune in to our bodies and breathe.

I left our discussion feeling deeply inspired and hopeful about the possibilities for healing in our community. Juli Nixon represents a new paradigm of a healer – one who bridges ancestral wisdom with modern technology and understands the depths of our trauma while believing wholeheartedly in our capacity for transformation.

To those reading this who are on their own healing journey, I encourage you to explore Juli’s work further. Her combination of clinical training, lived experience, and innovative approaches offers a unique and potent path to healing.

Remember, you have the innate ability to heal yourself. Sometimes we just need the right guide to help us access our inner wisdom and power. In Julie Nixon, I believe our community has found such a guide – one who can help usher us into a new era of wholeness, empowerment, and collective liberation.

Let us honor the struggles of our ancestors by doing the inner work to heal ourselves and our lineages. May we embrace all the tools at our disposal – from ancient breathing practices to artificial intelligence – in service of our highest evolution. The time for our resurrection and remembering is now.

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