How Hidden Emotional Pain Shapes Love And Work with Ben Oofana

Something can be “in the past” and still be living in your body. If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing all the right things yet you keep repeating the same relationship patterns, bracing for criticism at work, or holding back from real closeness, this conversation is designed to meet you where you are.

We sit down with Ben Oofana, a healer trained in traditional lineages, to talk about emotional wounds, childhood trauma, and the subtle way undigested experiences become a lens over the present. We get into why suppression and distraction do not equal healing, how reenactment shows up in love and attachment, and why the nervous system can stay on guard even when life looks “fine” on paper. Ben also explains how these stored emotions take up bandwidth, leaving us less present, less embodied, and more reactive than we want to be.

Then we move into practical ground. Ben shares a simple, body-based approach to emotional regulation: identify what’s happening, name what you’re feeling, locate it in the body, and use soft, deep breathing to help the sensations shift and soften over time. We also talk honestly about the limits of talk therapy alone, the role of psychotherapy for insight, and why many people benefit from a combination of supports like meditation, qigong, and other therapeutic interventions, plus real downtime in a always-on culture.

If this resonates, subscribe to Mind Meets Machine, share the episode with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more listeners can find the tools and hope inside this conversation. What old pattern are you ready to understand differently?

Transcript

Opening On Hidden Emotional Wounds

SPEAKER_00 0:01

I mean dear listeners, you know, like most of us are carrying something. Yeah. Not the obvious wounds, but the ones that would name in a kind of kind of conversation. But the older and the quieter ones. The hearts that shaped how much let ourselves love, how safe we feel in our own skin, and how fully we are willing to live. So we often learn to function around them. We get good at carrying them and we slowly forget that the weight that we have normalized was ever a wound at all. So today we are going to talk about those deeper wounds and the long and the honest work of actually healing them. So hey dear listeners, welcome back to another powerful episode of Mind Meets Machine. I'm your host, Evik, and today's conversation definitely will go deep into the emotional wounds that we carry, often without even realizing how much they shape us and what it means to truly heal them, not just kind of manage them. So if you have ever sensed that something old inside is quietly holding you back from loving fully or living the life that you were meant for. Then this conversation is for you.

Meet Ben Ufana And His Work

SPEAKER_00 1:29

And we have a very lovely guest with us. My guest carries a rare lineage and a profound calling. So I'd definitely love to introduce with. Please welcome Ben Ufana. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Hi, Evik. Thanks for bringing me on.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much, Ben, for joining us today. And dear lessness, like before we get into the discussion more deeply, I would love to introduce with Ben. So Ben has begun his training at the age of 20 with uh Horace. Horace Delkay.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

He's one of the last surviving traditional doctors in the Kyru Drive.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Exactly. Exactly. That's that's really and and and you know, dear listeners, like his works actually help people heal their bodies, minds, and the deep emotional wounds so that they can increase their capacity to love and to be loved, right? And obviously step into a true potential. So a lot of Major Dam, dear listeners, there are a lot of things to discuss about. So let's get started.

Why Time Alone Does Not Heal

SPEAKER_00 2:31

So Ben like definitely I want to start with a kind of misconception. Like, I think there is a deep one on or around the emotional healing. Like a lot of people believe that if a wound is old enough or if they have coped up with kind of long enough, it's basically just behind them. And that time alone has healed it. But according to your work, it suggests something very different. So according to you, what do people most get wrong about this? Like the deep wounds we carry and whether they are really healed or not. So what is it?

SPEAKER_01 3:16

We all experience adversity along the way. We're on a continuum, some people much less so, and many of us considerably more, a lot of it beginning in childhood, but now all throughout the course of our lives. And whatever we fail to digest continues to live on the inside of us. So whether these adverse or traumatic events occurred in childhood or adolescence, or even up into our adult lives, if we're not healing, transforming these parts of us, you know, that we experience those adverse or stressful traumatic events. We internalize the experience itself, whatever kind of stressful, distressing, upsetting events and emotions we experience. And and it it continues to live there indefinitely. And we make it worse by the fact that we tend to deny, suppress, we distract ourselves, we do whatever we can to not feel, to not go there. I don't want to look at that, I don't want to deal with it. As a child, we just didn't possess the understanding or resources or capabilities. And even as adults, a lot of people don't have the understanding because the vast majority of people have never learned to work effectively with their emotions. And so anytime you're numbing or suppressing what you're feeling in response to what's taken place, then it's pushing it further down into the body, it's reinforcing it. And what happens is we tend to attract or find ourselves drawn into subsequent events or interactions. We're drawn to the same kinds of people, we reenact the same kinds of relational dynamics. And so it's this cycle of reenactment that happens and that elicits more of the same kinds of emotions. And so that builds up in our bodies. It's reinforcing the patterns, it becomes more deeply entrenched, and there's a greater and greater accumulation of all this undigested emotional residues that just builds up in our body. It accumulates in our organs or tissues, it affects the functioning of the organs and systems of the body, it leaves us more walled off, more disconnected, less embodied. We're not as present, we're not as here. And it occupies so much bandwidth that we don't have as much of us here to function as at high of a level as we could be functioning.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Got it. Got it. And like when someone realizes that the wound they thought was just behind them is still quietly shaping their life, then what's happened for them? What happens for them?

How Wounds Show Up In Life

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Oh, it all kinds of things, like in our attempts to form romantic or intimate relationships, or just in the context of a relationship that already exists. There's we have all that lived experience that we're carrying with us that was stressful, distressing, adverse, traumatic, whatever, and all the emotion attached to it. So that creates a filter through which we perceive the other person and our interactions with them, and it has a huge bearing on how we respond or react to them. And w we don't often see what we're doing. It's our the way we respond or react to them is often not appropriate. We in ways that are harmful or that stress the relationship. And and then in in our professional lives, in other areas of our lives, it's just we're not, again, as able to be as fully present as engaged. And instead of, you know, like if we're at at work and we receive some criticism from our employee or for our colleague, we're more likely to to tense up, to to become defensive, to angry, to, you know, instead of responding productively with examining our behaviors and and adapting, changing, uh you know, performing in a way that's more suitable, that's more optimal.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Exactly. Exactly. And I think a lot of people who are listening right now and they have built the whole lives around managing the pain, they assume that was gone.

Turning Triggers Into Healing Chances

SPEAKER_00 8:01

And just naming that definitely opens something. So if you also just go beneath it, when someone struggles to live or not only live, just love fully, or they feel held back from the life they sense that they are meant for. So the surface story is usually about the personality, the circumstances. But uh you point to something much deeper into it. So what is actually going on that surface? Like uh, I mean, in your understanding, when an old wound is quietly running someone's life completely.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

So what's going on? Well, it's it's not completely, it's always it it has exerts a certain influence. And so it's it's somewhere on a percentile, and it it would be exactly hard to determine that. But again, the we may not be all that conscious of what's happening, but there's you know, we're interacting with this individual, we're product and whatever dynamic that's playing out. And and as it's happening, it's it's triggering the impressions that still live in our bodies of these past events that where we still hold a lot of charged, conflicted emotions. So it's triggering the event itself, activating that, and then it's also the the emotions that are attached to it. And so much of our bandwidth is engaged, involved in this backstory, like what we're carrying. And then there's what's going on in the present. And so it's that it doesn't allow us to be as fully present in the here and now with the person, the situation that that we're facing in the present moment. And so that's why it's so important for us to be able to take the steps to to access what we're carrying. It's the what happens in the present moment, the person, the situation, the interaction is going to put us in touch with what we're carrying. And we can use that as opportunity. And it becomes the opportunity when we can we need whatever's happening in the present, the circumstance, situation, the person to put us in touch with what we're carrying. Because on our own, that often doesn't happen. And so we see it as an opportunity and we learn to take advantage of it to work with what we're carrying, to to heal it, to digest what we're carrying, to cycle it through us and use that to to grow.

Reenactment Cycles And Numbing Behaviors

SPEAKER_00 10:56

And in this context also, if I if I talk about the daily part, I mean, in our daily, everyday version, like for someone who is listening who senses that they are carrying something old, and where where might these deep wounds quietly and what do you think? I mean, where these deep wounds actually show up in our normal day? Like the patterns they might not even recognize as well as connected to the old.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

You're asking, where do we carry them, or if a person doesn't recognize them?

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Or maybe maybe you can say like how they can I mean, where'd they show up or show up the patterns basically?

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Well, often what happens is we find ourselves drawn to the same or similar kinds of people, and we find ourselves reenacting patterns in our relationships. You know, it could be uh start out maybe if we experienced uh neglect or abuse, we tend to find ourselves drawn towards individuals who are not all that present or who them themselves could say and do things that are very hurtful, and it evokes a lot of the same kind of distressing emotion. So the important thing is that we learn to work with our emotional responses that arise when we experience these reenactments when we're interacting with someone, someone or something is eliciting these same kinds of emotional responses. And it can be challenging initially. There's a lot of disconnect that occurs, numbing, disconnect, dissociation, because we go through our lives and we learn from an early age to deny, disconnect, suppress people self-medicate with food, alcohol, other recreational drugs, tobacco, whatever, wheat. And they go on psychotropic meds because they haven't learned to work with their emotions. And maybe those meds are essential for some people who, with certain psychiatric issues, would be a danger to themselves or others. But but there's the fact that a large percentage of the population haven't hasn't learned to work effectively with their emotions. And and so in many instances, you have people who are just consumed by anxiety or you know, feeling depressed and overwhelmed because not having learned to work with their emotions, there's this backlog of distressing emotion that accumulates and they feel flooded. And but anyway, so I know when when I was starting out and I I found myself so consumed, flooded by this incredibly painful emotions when relationships weren't working all that well. And I was at a complete loss. I didn't know what to do. And so the initi initially I went into psychotherapy and I reached out to a psychotherapist from the community, and that provided me with critical understanding of the relational dynamic that's going through, but it wasn't actually healing the trauma itself. Now, that being said, psychotherapy is a critically important part of many of our healing processes because a lot of us we don't understand the patterns playing out or the dysfunction, the trauma we carry. And so we need this cognitive piece. I needed to take it much further, and so do most people, is that we need to learn to work effectively with our emotions. And

Step By Step Breath Practice

SPEAKER_01 14:36

so instinctively, I taught myself, like when a lot of this emotion was surfacing, I was bringing as much awareness to what I could was feeling in the moment. At that time, the pain was excruciating. And I would go so deep into the depths of it, and I would be breathing in the depths of what I was feeling very softly, very deeply. And often I would stay with it for hours at a time, but at a certain point I could feel it breaking open and coming out of my body in waves. As time went on, the intensity of the emotions diminished. It wasn't quite so bad. There are moments when it gets pretty intense, but but the really distressing, painful periods decreased in frequency, and I found that I could cycle through what was coming up a lot more easily. But the the basic practice itself, to so you're those in the listening audience know how to work with this. This is crucial. This is one of the most important practices you'll ever learn in your life. One, acknowledge what's happening. What is it that's going on in your life that's evoking such a strong emotional response? Where you find yourself stressed out or overwhelmed or, you know, just consumed by flooded with emotion. One, what's happening? Two, what are you feeling? Is it sadness, grief, anxiety, fear? You can work with the more pleasant emotions too, but in this case, we're starting with the more difficult emotions because that's where most people get into trouble. And bring as much awareness as you can to these feelings wherever they are situated in your body. Are they in your throat, down in your abdomen, are they deep within your chest, embedded within your heart and lungs? Bring as much awareness to where these feelings are situated. For some people, it can help if even if you put your hands over this part of your body where these emotions are residing. And then with your awareness centered in the depths of these feelings, fully open up to what you're feeling and breathe very softly, very deeply, breathe all the way down to your abdomen very slowly, expand your abdomen, then your rib cage, pause briefly, and then exhale all the way out completely, pause again, and continue the cycle. Because as you continue breathing from the depths of these feelings, they will go through a progression. Now, if you're in the midst of devastating breakup, like if you just got the news that this person just tossed your relationship, now you're it's over, it's crashed, maybe the death of a loved one or something. Sometimes it was something so painful that the emotions are not going to abate very quickly. They can hold on, they could be quite persistent for a while. You might be with these feelings for hours. But a lot of times, many other things that trigger us, what happens is as you drop into these feelings and sensations, you're breathing from the depths of whatever emotions are surfacing, they go through a progression. Sometimes they they spread and they occupy more of your body or they shift to a different location. Maybe you experiencing in several locations, but just stay with what you feel. The feelings often go through this transition from maybe it starts with anger to sadness to grief to acceptance to a sense of resignation to letting go. That's just one of many progressions. Whatever the feelings do, just follow them as they go through the progression. And as you continue to follow the feelings and sensations, they tend to soften and diffuse. It becomes lighter. And this is how you cycle your emotional responses through you. You're chewing it up and you're digesting it. It helps you to it engages your brain, mind, creative problem-solving capabilities, that innate healing intelligence residing within your body and mind. It engages that too. And so this is extraordinarily powerful effective practice. Any therapeutic intervention you're doing, this is gonna help you get a lot more out of it. You're gonna be able to sort through and work through issues and find it easier to come to resolution that's gonna enable you to stay more grounded, more present. It's gonna help you to function higher levels. But

Extra Tools And Modern Stress

SPEAKER_01 19:35

there are also to be realistic limitations to our body and mind's innate healing intelligence. We need to be making use of the most effective therapeutic interventions. For some people, psychotherapy, there's deep tissue body work, homeopathic medicine, Pachakarma, like you know, the Ayurvedic cleanse regimen, that can be very helpful to help to detox your body if you get to work with a gifted healer such as myself. In my own training, I do what's called the vision quest. It involves going out to fast in the mountains alone for four days and nights without food and water. And during this experience, I feel this extraordinarily powerful presence descend in my body and it's just helping me to transform and digest what I carry and it's building its much stronger foundation.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Amazing. And yeah, I mean homeopathic and it's it's there is no side to side effect to it. And also you I mean, even I also believe in homeopathy because being in India, it's it's basically, I would say it is something which we had seen from my childhood, and uh homeopathy is obviously it's a kind of uh I'd say even even uh if I have to say that in my home also, in my home also, most for uh anything which is happening and all, something or the other, we have at least some myths from homeopathy. Because it's a belief and it's not only about the belief, it actually heals you from inside and from the roots. So that is uh that is something I definitely wanted to say. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

And there's no one practice or tool or intervention. Yeah. We need a combination of you know, the extent of the emotional wounding, the trauma that I carried from childhood, and because of the reenactment that I went through during my 20s, those wounds were extraordinarily deep. So it I had to approach it from multiple angles. And it's an ongoing process, having trained with a traditional Native American doctor and also a master from China in many years as well. It's unlike a lot of yogis of sadhus, you know. It's like hours of intensive daily practice. And I I do that myself daily because it's this continual process of building. In the Hindu Vedic traditions, they talk about self-realization and and and people are so distracted these days, you know, with their social media feeds and the 24-7 news cycle and we're being plugged in and the demands of work. I don't know quite as I'm not quite as familiar with the work culture in India right at this moment, even though I spend a lot of time in Sri Lanka. But uh in the United States, now you're answering emails up till 11, 12, or 1 in the morning. And right here that's the moment you wake up and there's all these like demands and so all this pressure and everything and expectations, d duties to fulfill. And you need that downtime to digest, or that self-time, let's say, because we're when we're switched on for so many hours, then the stress, stresses accumulate, and your body doesn't have that time to recalibrate and and to do the self-healing.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Exactly. Exactly true.

Embrace Your Experience And Connect

SPEAKER_00 23:18

So Grid Ben, and if you ever give one advice to the listeners today, what that'll be.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

Embrace your lived experience as it is. There are a lot of things that you may not be happy about, that are distressing or difficult. But if you take the mindset of this is my karma, not in the sense that you did bad things some other lifetime or earlier in this life, and now you're being punished. It's not that at all. It's this is the lesson you have to learn. This your karma is the lesson you have to learn. So embrace your lived experience and work with the practice that I shared with you. There may be other practices you can incorporate, such as qigong or various yogic practices, work with incorporate the most effective therapeutic interventions. Because as you do that, as you face life head-on, you embrace your challenges to the best of your ability, work with what life gives you. And again, incorporating the practices and interventions, you're gradually building yourself, you're building that foundation, you're becoming more capable, you're you're expanding your range of motion. And this is how you become more embodied. This is how you become more high-functioning.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So thank you so much. And if listeners want to connect with you, where they can connect.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

There are a number of ways. My main website is benufana.com. I'll send the details for the show notes. There's a blog or section articles, a lot of detailed articles. And you can also find a lot of long form video content doing a deep dive on my YouTube. Just my name, Ben Ufana, it's my channel. And on Instagram, you could find me. Other websites too, teachmetomeditate.com. I developed a whole intensive series of meditations that are all about activating, awakening your body and mind to nature healing intelligence, getting you into your body so you're more present, more powerful, and effective. If you're in the midst of a breakup or divorce, you were ghosted, your relationship blew apart. There's breakupfirstaid.com and a more deep dive. If you're struggling with attachment wounds, patterns of abandonment, you keep attracting disastrous partners. There's Heal My Heartache. New website should be coming online within the next couple of weeks. It's Heartache Hotline, so that way people can actually get on the phone with me and talk with me one-on-one.

SPEAKER_00 25:59

So, dear listeners, what I'll do is I'll put all the links, details, everything into the show notes for easy reference. And I have to say thank you so much, Ben. The depth and the care you bring to this book is definitely rare. And I think a lot of people are leaving these conversations feeling a little more hopeful around about their own healing part as well. And I have to say that whosoever is listening right now, maybe will some get rare as well. If you have been carrying your own wound, old wound, and uh for the long time, maybe here is definitely I'd love to share with you that you don't have to force it to open today. Just allow yourself to consider how gently and maybe that something you have normalized might still asking to be healed, and the healing it could free up more of your capacity to love and to live than what you realize, right? Be patient with yourself, and that is the thing I'd say, and the deepest healing definitely takes time, it's not a kind of uh immediate thing, but yes, you are worth that time. So, with this hope, definitely I'd say this is your host awake, and this is my means machine. I'll see you in the next one. Thank you so much.