From Survival Mode to Peace, Purpose & Power

Women's wellness, nervous system regulation, self-trust, emotional healing, and the mind-body connection have become increasingly important conversations in today's fast-paced world. Many women find themselves navigating chronic stress, burnout, people-pleasing, overwhelm, anxiety, and a deep sense of disconnection from themselves. While modern culture often rewards productivity, achievement, and constant doing, these patterns can leave women feeling exhausted, disconnected from their bodies, and stuck in survival mode.

In this episode, Dr. Supatra Tovar sits down with board-certified holistic nurse, health and wellness nurse coach, and founder of Oubaitori Wellness, Samalie Rivera, for a powerful conversation about women's wellbeing, nervous system health, self-care, embodiment, and sustainable healing. Together, they explore why so many women feel disconnected from their inner wisdom, how societal pressures contribute to burnout, and why true healing often requires looking beyond symptoms to address the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of health.

Drawing from her experience in emergency medicine, psychiatric nursing, holistic health, somatic coaching, and nervous system regulation, Samalie shares how her journey led her from traditional healthcare into a more integrative approach to healing. The conversation explores the impact of chronic stress, people-pleasing, emotional suppression, comparison culture, social media, and the ways many women unknowingly abandon their own needs while caring for everyone around them.

Dr. Tovar and Samalie discuss the relationship between burnout and physical health, the importance of reconnecting with the body, and practical ways women can begin cultivating greater presence, self-awareness, and emotional wellbeing. They also explore the role of breathwork, movement, yoga, nature, self-compassion, and women's circles as powerful tools for healing, connection, and nervous system regulation.

The episode highlights the concept of Oubaitori, a Japanese philosophy centered on non-comparison, and offers a refreshing perspective on self-worth in a culture that constantly encourages women to measure themselves against unrealistic standards. Together, they examine how healing begins when women stop striving to become someone else and instead learn to trust themselves, honor their own journey, and reconnect with who they truly are.

If you've ever struggled with burnout, stress, anxiety, people-pleasing, emotional exhaustion, self-doubt, or feeling disconnected from yourself, this conversation offers valuable insights into healing, self-trust, nervous system health, and creating a more sustainable relationship with your wellbeing.

Subscribe for more conversations on psychology, nutrition, mental health, emotional wellness, women's health, nervous system regulation, self-development, healing, resilience, and sustainable wellbeing.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction
 02:00 From Nursing to Holistic Healing
 04:15 Why Women Feel Disconnected
 06:20 Burnout & Modern Culture
 08:30 Breathwork, Nature & Healing
 10:10 The Meaning of Oubaitori
 11:00 Social Media & Comparison
 14:10 Signs of Nervous System Overload
 17:20 The Power of Women's Circles
 20:20 Stress, Burnout & Women's Health
 23:30 Self-Care & Daily Wellness Practices
 25:00 Closing Thoughts

Episode Summary

In this episode, Dr. Supatra Tovar sits down with holistic nurse and wellness coach Samalie Rivera to discuss women's wellness, nervous system regulation, burnout, self-trust, and emotional healing. Together, they explore how chronic stress, people-pleasing, comparison culture, and disconnection from the body can impact wellbeing, while sharing practical tools for creating greater balance, presence, and sustainable healing.

What This Episode Covers

• Women's wellness and holistic health
 • Nervous system regulation
 • Burnout and chronic stress
 • Self-trust and emotional healing
 • People-pleasing and self-care
 • Breathwork and mindfulness
 • Social media and comparison culture
 • Women's circles and sisterhood
 • Mind-body connection
 • Sustainable wellbeing

🔗 Connect with Samalie Rivera

Wild Woman Project:
 https://thewildwomanproject.com/samalie-rivera-wallingford-ct/

Oubaitori Wellness:
 https://www.oubaitoriwellness.com/pages/home

LinkedIn:
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/samalie-rivera-rn-bsn-hwnc-bc-ryt-07254082

Continue Your Journey

📘 Book: Deprogram Diet Culture: Rethink Your Relationship with Food, Heal Your Mind, and Live a Diet-Free Life

🎓 Course: Deprogram Diet Culture
https://anew-insight.com

🌐 Visit the Website
https://drsupatratovar.com

🎥 Watch More Episodes
ANEW Insight Podcast

🎤 Watch the TEDx Talk
Rethinking Your Relationship with Food in the GLP-1 Era

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to the A New Insight Podcast. Empowering and inspiring your journey to optimal health. Hosted by Dr. Tipatra Kavar, clinical psychologist, registered dietitian, fitness expert, and author of Deprogram Diet Culture. Rethink your relationship with food, feel your mind, and live a diet-free life. I follow my guest's journey to optimal health, providing you with the keys to unlock your own wellness path. Tune in and evolve with us. Hello and welcome everyone. I am so excited to have board-certified holistic nurse and health and wellness nurse coach Samalie Rivera with us today. Samaly, welcome. Hello, happy to be here. So wonderful to have you here. I'm very excited to talk with Samaly today. So I'm going to read a little bit about her and then we're going to get right into the questions. Samalie Rivera is the founder of Obatori Wellness, a somatic coaching and psychedelic integration practice dedicated to women with ADHD. As a board-certified holistic nurse and health and wellness nurse coach, she combines her training in feminine embodiment and yoga with her extensive clinical experience at a world-renowned psychiatric hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. Samalie helps women navigate the journey from dysregulation and survival mode to a state of pleasure, purpose, peace, and power. With specialized experience in interventional psychiatry, including the clinical administration of ketamine and ECT, Samile bring bridges the gap between clinical science and somatic healing. Through Vitory Wellness, she offers monthly women's circles and a structured three-month coaching container designed for deep nervous system regulation. While Samile is on a five-year path to becoming a psychedelic assisted therapist as she begins her DMP studies this fall, she currently serves as a vital guide for women seeking to ground their healing through embodied wisdom. So lovely to have you. Really happy to be here. So you began in traditional nursing. I would love to know what moments or experiences led you to realize that true healing needed to come from the emotional, spiritual, and nervous system aspects of health.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Great question. So I've been in healthcare since 2018. And I started in the emergency department. And what I noticed while I was there is that people would come in for a cheap complaint, say headache, chest pain. And I noticed we would treat the symptoms, however, we weren't treating the root cause. So you would see these people come back into the hospital, the same issue, if not even worse. So this along the way of being in healthcare, um, I came to question what was really going on. I was like, why is this happening? Like we're here to help people, but we're not really we're doing something, but we're not really getting down deep. And this caused me to come into holistic nursing where they have a holistic view of the person, the mental, the emotional, physical environment, literally everything, because humans are very complex. And when we just focus on symptoms, we're not actually treating the real problem.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Yes, I can relate completely. I used to work uh as a dietitian in the hospital, and I was often so frustrated because I would see the same patients come back in, even if you'd give them dietary education. That's why I decided I needed to go on and become a clinical psychologist, because I needed to understand people on a holistic level. So I can completely relate to you. I think that's a big frustration in the hospital that we're just kind of slapping a band-aid on a gaping wound. And if we don't address all of their functioning, then we are not really serving the patient. We're just giving them something to help them get through the pain, but we're not actually helping to cure the pain. I really like this. So you often talk about this idea that women are not broken. That is probably one of the most favorite things I can say. I it actually just gave a TED talk, and that was one of the last lines of my TED talk is that we were never broken. But people are disconnected, and I completely agree with that. What do you see as the biggest forces in our culture that pull women away from their bodies and their inner voice?

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Another great question. And I feel like it's this hyper focus and hyper importance on the masculine, specifically masculine energy. We live in a society where it's very potent, you know, it's like go, go, go, do, do, do. And this leads to burnout, this leads to a disconnection from the body, and you know, just away from the feminine energy, the feminine essence, which is more intuitive, it's within the body, and also this focus on the external environment and feeling like, okay, if I get the car, if I get the house, this is going to make me happy. But what I've noticed even personally for myself is that when you go within and you make the internal world more important, it starts, first of all, you're more connected to yourself. And then your world around you starts to blossom.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Absolutely. It's interesting that you talk about it in the realm of masculine and feminine. I didn't never really think about it that way. I think, but I I mean, absolutely, right now we're living in the manosphere essentially, uh, especially with our political climate and how women are being categorized back into more traditional roles with a huge emphasis right now. It's really always been an emphasis on their external appearance. I would say that diet culture is probably the, you know, the epitome of that kind of thinking and that kind of pressure for women. Um, how do you get people to learn how to tune more into their internal world and tune out the external world, especially because it's so loud right now?

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Yeah, so something or something I do and I encourage my clients to do is simply starting off small, like baby Dilsis's baby steps, and doing something like connecting to your breath, that vital life force energy or whatever you want to call it, that's within that helps you feel connected. It helps you feel grounded and present in the moment and presence, it's all about connecting internally. The more internally connected you are, the more present you are, and the more happy and satisfied you would feel because when you're not in the present, you're in the past or the future and you're not within. So I would say definitely connecting to your breath or even going out in nature, even if it's a 10-minute walk, I recommend 30 minutes. But even if it's 10 minutes, you get so many benefits from the sunlight, the vitamin D. It's great for your mental health. And also just another beautiful thing as you're in nature, you realize you are nature. So it's just so vast and so beautiful. And I love it.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Oh, I love it too. I recommend the same things all the time. Work the with the same kind of breathing exercises and and give those same kinds of recommendations. What about people that have a really hard time focusing and trying to get into the present moment? How do you help them?

SPEAKER_00 9:02

Yeah, so people that have a hard time in the moment. So something I love that I highly recommend, and it's great for also connecting to your body, is dancing. Because sometimes when you're still and you're trying to meditate or even tune into the breath because you feel anxious and a bit chaotic and it are overwhelmed, just simply turning on your feet heard song, taking a moment to dance, goes so far and it helps you to get into your body and into the present moment and release stress. If you're at work, go to the bathroom, you know, do it in private because it will help you feel more right with them.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Absolutely. And I would say too, like people can do something very simple. If they're at their desk, they can just do some little bilateral stimulation, and that helps to activate the vagus nerve. And if you just are are having trouble, you can't focus your mind, just doing this will help to calm you down and get you into the present moment. I love those. I'd love to dance in between my session. That's like my favorite thing to do in between clients and to shake off some of the you know harder things that I've heard. So you and I are extremely aligned. Tell us more about how you created your wellness company and what the name of your wellness company actually means.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Yes. So Obai, that is a Japanese concept of non-comparison. There's actually four trees in the spring that bloom at different times. So it really goes back to focusing on you, your journey, and knowing that you are meant to be where you are at this moment in time and space. And, you know, a lot of the time also on Instagram, you're seeing people's highlight reels. This is most likely not even the full big picture of what's going on. So it's like, don't compare yourself and just focus on you and your beautiful garden. Nourish yourself, water yourself so you could grow and blossom and see the person you're meant to be.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

I love that. And you know, I love the quote comparison is the thief of joy. It's a Benjamin Franklin quote. We are in a time though of such comparison, especially if you look at social media, you look at uh, you know, diet culture and the advent of these uh weight loss medications taken from you know these GLPs brought into diet culture to be used for very, very extreme thinness. What would be your recommendation for people who are looking at this stuff and feeling that pressure out there to try to emulate what they're seeing in the celebrity world?

SPEAKER_00 12:17

So, my recommendation, first of all, is to give yourself some compassion and some love and learn to love yourself and the beautiful being that you are. And just yeah, that's my biggest recommendation. Focus on loving yourself. And if you can, I highly recommend doing a social media detox and getting away from all of the noise because when you go on social media, it tends to bring down your mood, and then you tend to go into a negative spiral and you know, get into this mindset of comparison, which is very detrimental on so many levels. So I focus, I mean, I recommend doing that. I actually just got off of a five-week social media detox, and let me tell you, I am so much present, so much grounded, and I'm doing so much more in my life, and I have so much energy. And use that time to focus on cultivating a loving and caring relationship with yourself.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

I love this. I also think if people are on social media, it doesn't have to be all bad. You can actually curate your feed and guide it toward things that you like the most. So if you look at my feed, it's puppies and it's all animals and it's just people that inspire me. And anytime I see something that makes me feel a negative emotion or bad about myself, I hide or I block them. And I think that if you are a little bit more uh, you know, in tuned with your desires in your feed, uh and you're you're guiding your feed toward making you feel good at all times. It can be a force of good. But what you tend to see all of the time on any social media, or even in the news, are advertisements. And I think advertisements are inherently meant to make us feel bad. They are meant to make us feel like we aren't good enough, that we need that product. So that's also something that's very difficult. And that's why I think a detox is so important too. So you can just uh remove yourself from all of those influences. So let's talk about women in particular pushing through stress. Women tend to ignore their knees, they tend to put everybody else ahead of them, they are constantly in survival mode. What are some early signs that someone's nervous system is overwhelmed, even if they think they're functioning just fine?

SPEAKER_00 15:13

So some of the symptoms that you see in this early overwhelm is first of all, you start neglecting yourself. You know, you're not caring for your basic needs, simple things such as hydrating, uh, eating meals at the right time. That's a huge one. And you start to see a sense of irritability, even agitation, making mistakes, and also insomnia, because when you're overwhelmed, you tend to be again in this state of go, go, go, do, do, do, very much in the masculine. And that could cause you to have racing thoughts at night, and it's keeping you up at night because you didn't take the time to wind down to regulate your nervous system. So those are early signs that you're in survival mode, overwhelm, and um just doing something as simple as it deep breath, belly breath, because it really helps to calm your nervous system, could go so far.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Yes. I think that women in particular are conditioned to people please. And by that I mean the expectations placed on young girls at a very young age to think of everybody else before them, to, you know, anticipate other people's needs. If you look at that in terms of even a trauma response, people pleasing or fawning, as it's also called, is an attempt to make your environment safe. And I think it's really important for women to try to grasp the concept that no matter what you do around for everyone else, even if you are doing 100% your best, will never ever really make you safe because you cannot control the reactions of anyone else. And you can really exhaust yourself trying. That's why I think it's so important to make the internal world safe. If you can do that and then operate from, I'm gonna do my best, I'll just do what I can today. I will try to make sure I'm taking care of everyone else and myself. I think we would have so much less burnout, especially among women today. So let's talk about the the women's circle that you facilitate through the Wild Woman project. For someone who's never experienced a circle, what actually happens in that kind of space? And tell me why it's so powerful.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

Yes, so woman circles, one of my loves. It is a space, a safe space to meditate, reflect, share, set intentions, do rituals with women. And this is so powerful and vital because sisterhood is powerful, and having that space to drop the mask and actually reveal your heart, your true authentic self, and share your truth and be seen and heard in a non-judgmental space could go so far, and yes, they're just very powerful.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

So tell me how they typically go from start to finish.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

Yeah, so usually a woman would come in, I will greet each woman at the door, offer a hug, tea, um, as well, and I invite them into the circle. There's an oracle deck in the middle, and the women have the option to choose it uh if they would like to. I do share that the oracle deck, I view it, I view it as a psychological insight into your life. So I'm a spiritual person, I'm not religious, and I'm here to meet people where they are, and um never force anything on anyone. We sit around in the circle, I open the circle, set a few agreements to create the container so it's safe for women to feel safe to express themselves. And I will go over the theme, and then we will ground ourselves, get ourselves into our hearts because we tend to be in our minds all the time. And then, yes, we meditate, we get into a reflection, we start sharing, and then we set an intention for, for example, for the new moon cycle. I tend to do these around the new moons, and it's very beautiful, it's very powerful, and I love it.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Oh, I love it too. It sounds so relaxing and healing. I love setting intentions. I I always tell people at the at the new year, maybe instead of a resolution, set an intention for what you'd like to see, because resolutions can be sort of punitive and um you know difficult to maintain, but intentions are something that you're striving towards, something that you would love to see happen. I think it's just a softer form of you know carrying a vision forward for yourself. So, from your perspective as both a nurse and a holistic practitioner, how do you see the relationship between chronic stress, burnout, and the physical symptoms many women experience today go into more of what people are experiencing into their bodies?

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Yeah, so what this makes me think about is what you mentioned earlier, and that's the people fleezing. So a lot of women, as you mentioned, tend to people flease. They tend to put others first, neglect themselves, abandon themselves. And this first of all causes a disconnection within, but also it's one of the contributing factors to things such as autoimmune disease. Uh Gabor Mate, um, he's uh really great author. Um, recommend reading his books. He mentioned he mentioned how 80% of women have autoimmune disease. Disease, things like rheumatoid arthritis, uh lupus, you know, the list goes on and on for autoimmune. And part of this, as I mentioned, is that women are not putting themselves first. You know, um, when we start ignoring that fast heart rate for our tense months, muscles in the neck, the shoulders, the jaw, eventually we we start to get numb and even more disconnected. And then years down the line, we develop an illness. And a lot of this is because we're ignoring ourselves and we're putting others first.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

Yes, absolutely. One of another favorite thing for me to say is, you know, you got to put the oxygen mask on yourself first. I realize we can't do that all the time. We've got, you know, kids and things like that. And sometimes their needs come first, of course. But creating and carving out a self-care routine is not selfish, everyone. It is self-preservatory. And, you know, I often talk about mine, which is a little excessive for people. I don't have kids, so I can do this, but I really do carve out several hours in the morning where I, you know, wake up, I meditate, I work out, I create, you know, make an amazing breakfast for my family. I walk my dogs, I make sure I sit in my massage chair before I sit down and I help people. And I will tell you what, if I don't do that, I can't sit all day in front of my patients. I can't listen as intently as I would like to because I'm not really feeling you know present in my body. So I think if people can start to imagine self-care as self-preservation, as a way to be able to give more, as a way to, you know, be more present in their lives, we would be so much better off. Tell us your self-care routine.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Yes. So I just have to say I love the quote: you can't pour from an empty cup. Like you need to fill yours before you can fill others. And I agree, it's not selfish. And something I love doing is yoga. I'm a yoga teacher myself, but I also love yoga. And I swear I see and I feel the difference when I don't do yoga, when I work at the hospital. When I don't do it, I feel like uh a little irritable at times. I'll be honest. However, when I do it, I'm so much grounded, I'm so much like present in the moment. I have such a great attitude, and yoga has, I swear, made such a huge difference in my life. I've been doing it since 2020, and it's been incredible mind, body, spirit. And I also love nature walks. I mean, I walk four miles several times a week, and it's just because a nature, it just seeing the beautiful trees like during this time of the year, the birds singing, it's so therapeutic. And also singing and dancing. I mean, the list goes on and on, but those are my top favorite self-care activities to do.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

I love this. Well, Samaly, we're out of time for this half of this podcast, but we're going to be talking about so much more. So everybody join us for this second half of our amazing conversation with Board Certified Holistic Nurse and Health and Wellness Nurse Coach Samalie Rivera. Thanks for tuning in to the A New Insight Podcast. Please remember the content shared on this podcast is for entertainment purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. You can find us anywhere podcasts are streaming on YouTube at my.com under the Anu Insight Podcast tab. And follow us on our socials at my dotanew.insight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and threads for more updates. Tune in next time for Evolve With Us.