Standing on Love with Nick Macaluso
Nick Macaluso is a holistic wellness coach who serves to enhance his clients’ physical, mental and spiritual abilities by guiding them to their own inner resources. Simply put, he helps students reach their goals by training them how to use those resources safely, effectively and efficiently. He teaches workshops and 1:1 sessions via his company SOLPWR® and is also an all-star part of the Work From Om team, leading a somatic meditation class on Thursdays as part of our donation-based Community Studio.
We took a deep dive with Nick into somatic meditation, mental health and the importance of living rooted in love while respectfully playing our human game.
How did your personal journey into yoga, meditation and physical training begin?
It started at 8 years old with capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian rhythmic martial art, when my Brazilian mother took me to my first class and I fell in love. Then at 19 I started practicing yoga at the Urban Yoga Foundation as a physical compliment to capoeira. Urban Yoga Foundation’s founder Ghylian Bell, an amazing yoga teacher and mentor, introduced me to the idea that yoga is a profoundly spiritual, mental, emotional and holistic practice. Between her teachings and capoeira my eyes began to open to the more subtle energetic aspects of reality.
After that I was introduced to a group of energy healers, The Noble Touch, and signed up for a free session at a health fair at The City College of New York. I was blown away by my experience. I fell into a deep meditation and when I came out of it my body felt completely renewed. The founder, Jeffrey V Noble, ended up becoming a mentor of mine and has taught me energy work and neurolinguistic programming which is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Capoeira, yoga and energy healing: those three practices, and my mentors have played a huge role in my introduction to the world of health and wellness in a very holistic, mind-body way.
Although you describe yourself as a holistic health coach, underneath that umbrella you have so many certifications! (Therapeutic personal trainer, yoga instructor, energy worker, human potential engineer, capoeira instructor, end of life doula and studying Ayurveda, to name a few.) You’re very well studied.
Yes, I identify as a lifelong learner and student. I’m extremely curious and fascinated by life, specifically with regards to human beings. From a very young age I had deep, philosophical questions about reality. I was also fascinated by the human body—how we heal, how we grow, how we learn and how we communicate with each other.
How did you transition from being a student into the role of educator and guide?
Being a teacher is a core part of my identity; it’s the skin that was born with. I was even teaching capoeira when I was 16 to adults and tutoring my classmates in junior high school—I’ve been teaching my entire life.
Plus, I’ve always been fascinated with the process of understanding things. I love understanding the process of understanding, and that helps me be a teacher. Let’s say you want to learn something: I will understand how YOU understand things, and then I will explain things in that way.
In your various studies did you ever come across guidance or learnings that contradicted what you had been taught by other experts? There’s so much information out there in the wellness space, do you have any recommendations or tips for sorting through the noise?
I use two steps to sort through information. When I’m presented with something, I will first decipher whether or not you are giving me your opinion or sharing verifiable, scientific information. Once I’ve discerned that, if you have given me scientifically oriented information (that I can verify) I will take it and research it. Even if I don’t resonate with it, it could be something new that I didn’t know so I am grateful for the gift.
If you are presenting to me your opinion or your perspective, then I will check how it resonates with me, because what you are presenting me with is your personal truth, your reality. And I will verify that with my personal truth and my reality. If it doesn’t coincide, that’s totally fine, because then we can have a conversation. Depending on the nature of the conversation, we can try to convince each other of our truths or simply try to learn from each other’s truths.
That second part is core to my work and what I teach. What we’re talking about here is something extremely deep and esoteric and philosophical, but also simultaneously extremely practical and relevant to mental health. It’s the idea of subjective and objective reality. When I’m working with someone’s mind, I would never say “what you’re experiencing is not real.” For example, if someone is experiencing anxiety or paranoia because they think that an asteroid is going to fall onto their house, I would never tell them that it’s not real, because they’re in it. They feel anxious. They feel scared. To their body, it is real. So, at the core of what I do I understand your reality, I bring myself into your reality, and I act as a guide, or facilitator, to help you be in a more harmonious relationship with your reality and the collective reality.
How did you come up with SOLPWR®, your acronym from Stand on Love Play with Respect, and the name of your company?
This story is so dear to my heart. When I was studying yoga with Ghylian Bell almost 10 years ago I shared with her my understanding of the relationship between capoeira and yoga. She then offered me a position in her foundation teaching capoeira and yoga to elementary and middle school students in Harlem. The kids I was teaching immediately thought about punching and kicking each other, like in karate, since capoeira is a martial art. But in capoeira you don’t hit each other because it disrupts the flow.
So, I needed a way to explain to kids why we don’t hit each other in capoeira, and I thought of the acronym SOLPWR (pronounced soul power). I explained to them that, first, we are fundamentally rooted in and standing on love. I love you and I love myself—that’s why we are not hitting each other. Next, when we do begin to interact, to play or fight or dance or talk, whatever it is, we have to do it with respect—no matter what, or else the game is over. Whenever they would lose control of themselves, I would ask them if they had their SOLPWR and that really centered and helped them.
Capoiera is my soul. SOLPWR is my mantra for life. If there was one message that I could give everyone, it is to stand on love and play with respect.
How do you manifest that mantra in your practice and offerings?
Most of us have aspects of our lives that we have deemed a problem—my anger, my boss, my bad back, etc. So when I’m working 1-on-1 with someone, I am not just taking a stance of love and respect towards the person, I take that stance towards the “problems” as well. How can we work with your emotions, your body and your mind in such a way that everything gets treated with love and respect? That’s the orientation of my work.
I go into that approach more explicitly in the SOLPWR® 60-day emotional wellness program. The program starts with evaluating your mindset—the set of tools that your mind uses—and then we progress into emotional stability, movement and resilience. Two of the primary tools that I focus on with mindset are your map and your compass. The map is your reference point, it’s what your mind uses to help you understand what things are. Your compass is where you are going, and what is guiding you there. My map is SOLPWR. In the program we go deep into recreating our maps and our compasses to start to own our inner lives.
What exactly is somatic meditation anyway?
Somatics as a whole is the personal and intellectual study of our first-person experience. So, from a somatic perspective, I don’t “have” a body, there’s just this thing that I feel—and in somatics we call that “soma.”
It’s hard to explain in words, because the whole concept is about tapping into the language of our body. More accurately, it’s tapping into the world without words. Somatic meditation is a practice of being with your body and hearing and feeling and tasting and smelling everything.
Traditionally, somatic meditation is only focused on what you’re feeling, and typically the concept of what you’re feeling is limited to the physical sensations. But neurologically, everything is technically a physical feeling whether it’s light waves hitting your eyes, scent molecules going up your nose, or sounds that are vibrations in your ears. Everything touches you and physically interacts with your nervous system. So with SOLPWR® services, we go beyond the realm of traditional somatics and include all of the senses in the work.
We have to recognize that our minds have the ability to create experiences that exist only in our minds. So, the voices in your head are touching you in the same way that the voices of the people around you are touching you, just to a different sensory degree. When I work with people thru SOLPWR® I take the radical perspective that everything, including everything “in your head,” is real. Because as far as your nervous system is concerned, everything is real. We have intellectually created this idea of a dualistic subjective/objective reality, and it’s a very useful idea, but when it comes to us having conversations with our bodies, our body doesn’t “know” what is real and what is not. It only “knows” what it feels, and we have to meet it there.
You describe SOLPWR® as a unique style of meditation that trains your ability to influence your physical health, mental activity, emotional states, and spiritual vibration using your mind. Can you share more about how you integrate this technique into your work?
I took a natural ability that we all have and formulated a system to train that ability. It’s the innate ability of our mind to influence our physical body. For example, it’s the ability that we have to make ourselves sick, to get ourselves so stressed out that our stomach hurts, or to get so caught up in an anxious mind loop that we’re petrified and can’t move.
In traditional psychology, the ability that I am describing is called somatization and is defined as a symptom of pathology. I see it instead as an ability we have because our brains can create a reality that doesn’t exist, and convince our bodies that it does. So if this ability can make us unwell, why can’t we take control over it and use it to make us well?
The “how” is the tricky part though and that’s where my system is unique. From studying and practicing a lot of different modalities and schools of thought, I’ve created this practice so no matter where you are on the spectrum of your mental abilities and mental health, if you engage with this practice the way it’s designed, you will harness the ability for your mind to physically influence your body.
Tell us more about your 60-day emotional wellness program to “exercise your core emotional muscles.” How do people who have gone through it describe their experience?
The two biggest things my clients say they gain from all the SOLPWR® services are 1) feeling more empowered and in control of their mind and body and 2) having a deeper relationship with their mind and their body. They go hand in hand. The essence of the work is to build a more effective relationship with your mind, body, environment and life.
How can we make meditation more accessible, especially for people who have never tried it?
I am a bit frustrated with the current state of meditation in the West because of how complicated and fluffy it’s gotten. It’s become something that so many people don’t know if they’re doing right and then that creates more stress for them. I encourage people who have never practiced meditation before or who are curious to start by just observing their environment without interpreting it. That’s like putting your pinky toe in the water when you want to learn how to swim. So, if my wall is yellow, I would just observe the yellow and study it. What is the feeling of my floor? What is the sound of my fan? Very gently, for short periods of time, simply notice something with one of your senses and study it without interpreting it. That takes away all of the fluff.
What I do through SOLPWR® is a form of meditation that I like to call “emotional exercise” because once we learn basic mindfulness and somatics, we move into a more functional practice of controlling and harnessing our emotions.
How can people get more SOLPWR® in their life?
For anyone interested in 1-on-1 private coaching, they can reach out to me and we can set up a free 30-minute consultation.
On Sunday September 13th, I am starting a bi-weekly series of “Emotional Muscle” workshops where you will learn how to work with your core emotions.
Following that workshop, daily emotional exercise classes will be available to anyone who has attended a workshop.
And in October I’ll be launching another round of the 60-Day Emotional Wellness Program.
To stay up to date with everything, I recommend signing up for my newsletter.
Community access to these practices is also really important to me, that’s why I teach the Work From Om donation-based classes on Thursdays. I hope you’ll join me there and I can guide you through a meditation!