What happens when life throws you into an unexpected and overwhelming situation? In today’s episode, Aimee shares her deeply personal story of moving into what seemed like a dream home—only to discover its shocking past as a meth house.
Through grief, frustration, and uncertainty, she learned the power of processing emotions, embracing change, and ultimately finding a new path forward.
In this episode, Aimee explores:
-The emotional rollercoaster of losing a home and finding an unexpected reality
-How childhood beliefs and financial shame surfaced during this experience
-The importance of allowing emotions to be felt rather than suppressed
-The role of somatics in managing stress and navigating life’s upheavals
-How unexpected detours can lead to clarity, healing, and transformation
And so much more!
Follow Aimee Takaya on:
IG: @aimeetakaya
Facebook: Aimee Takaya
Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at www.freeyoursoma.com.
LISTEN WHILE READING!
A: Hey there, listener. Have you ever gone through an experience in your life and while you're in it? You're wondering what could possibly be the blessing in this. How could this possibly turn out good? Right? I'm sure we've all been there.
I'm gonna share with you today an experience in my life involving a meth house, running my first three-day retreat, two music festivals, and what finally got me to move to Buffalo, New York, after five years of talking and talking about it with my husband. So stay tuned.
A: Every day, there is a forgetting, and every moment, there is the possibility of remembering. Remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world, to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy, and here is where you free your Soma. I'm your host, Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power, from tension to expansion, and ultimately from fear to love.
Hey, everybody, I'm coming to you now from Buffalo, New York, whispering into my microphone at 11 30 p.m. in my fluffy purple bathrobe and my winter hat that I am wearing inside my house, one, because I just got out of the shower and I have wet hair, and two, because we are experiencing sub-zero temperatures this week in Buffalo.
Buffalo is not a place that I ever intended to move in my life, although I think that there is a 14-year-old girl in me that would like really enjoy that I'm living in Ani DeFranco's hometown, because I think that's what I first became aware of Buffalo, New York, was when I was 14 and listening to her music, right? But aside from that, how did I end up here? How did I end up living in Buffalo, New York, after building my business and my community in California?
Now I'm all the way out here in this snowy lake town, right? Well, it's a story that some of you who are listening may know pieces of it, especially if you're my clients and my friends who knew me during that time, like knew what was going on with me during that time. This story takes place in August, September 2023.
So yeah, it's about a year and a half ago that all this went down. And I just want to say that I have been thinking about telling you guys this story on the podcast for a while. I kind of realized, like probably a year ago, that this story needed to be told, but I just needed to let it marinate more, I think, before I was ready to serve it up to you. So let's just say there's a lot more backstory here that I will be getting into, but I'm going to start in August of 2023.
We were told by our landlord, previously, I guess I'm not starting August 2023, I'm starting like three months before August 2023, we were told by our landlord up in Crestline, California that he was going to sell the house we were living in and we weren't really ready to buy it. And we did a lot of looking around for things, but honestly, we weren't being that aggressive about it. I was kind of just hoping that something would arrive on my doorstep, right? It was kind of like the mode I was in, was like, let's just let things come to me. And I want to find this special, perfect situation that I would never have thought of.
I want it to show up on my doorstep. And we looked at some places in Joshua Tree, but I was living in this mindset where I really wanted to have cheap rent. I didn't want to be spending massive amounts of money on rent in California. And so a lot of the places that we were looking at just didn't feel like they had enough space in them because I really wanted to live in a space that it was large enough for me to have events and community experiences. Right? Because the house that we had been living in, the house that was for sale, was so tiny and small and awkwardly shaped little cabin built in the 1920s in the woods, loved it.
But it wasn't really an ideal space for holding gatherings and experiences. So eventually, something just arrives to me through a friend. We had up in Crestline. He told us about this house that he knew about that was empty and had just been sitting there empty for like a year. And he knew the landlord, and the landlord wa,s according to him, like a really chill guy.
And he got us in touch with this guy. We went and saw the house. He told us, kind of upfront that like the people who had lived in it before had kind of trashed the place. But you know, he really believed that the house was like a good house and had good bones and he was fixing it up. But you know, he wasn't like actively renting it out because he was still in the process of fixing it up. Well, we saw the house and we kind of fell in love with it because it was one of these weird kind of cool old mountain houses with like a vaulted ceiling and a front deck and a big backyard.
And we just felt like it was a really good spot and it was really close by to our other house. So like moving wouldn't be like this big ordeal necessarily. Like, I mean, it's already always an ordeal when you move.
But we thought, okay, like this is something that is manageable. Like it's not that far from where we already live. It was minutes to walk down to the lake, right?
A beautiful lake in Crestline, California. So we said yes. And he gave us this insane price that we were like, wow, we get this three-bedroom house for $1,250 a month because it's a fixer-upper and the guy knows it. And we are going to help him fix it up. And it's going to be this little project house that we're going to do, right? And we were really thrilled. We thought we had hit the jackpot.
A: Did you know that your muscles are holding on to thoughts, memories and feelings? If you have a tight neck or back, you're not just getting old. You're experiencing a buildup of tension from the life you've lived. Most people don't know this, but there is a part of your brain that can reverse and prevent chronic tension. When you relax your muscles, you not only move better and regulate your nervous system, but you also free yourself from the grip the past has over your body. So you can live with freedom, confidence and enjoy your life now. How does that sound? Join me, Aimee Takaya, and discover what my clients are raving about at youcanfreeyoursoma.com.
A: And then you kind of can guess what happened because I already mentioned methamphetamine at the beginning of this podcast, but we ended up finding out, smoking some weed. I wasn't thinking hard drugs. It was pretty shocking to me. I had already known that the house had strange energy, which was another red flag that I had been overlooking because of the great price point and the fact that I just wanted to see what I wanted to see.
And that night, that day after finding out that it had been contaminated by meth, and the guy really told me how much the people were smoking there and that they were in it really hard in it while they were there. It was like a crack house kind of situation. I was very disturbed because now things that were kind of a little weird to me about the house were alarming, and I started seeing it with totally different eyes.
I didn't just see it as a little bit of a fixer-upper house that the last tenants had not been so kind to. I saw it as a space where lots of tents, probably pretty insane things had occurred. If you can imagine a house full of meth heads who are really high on meth.
And I gotta say, like force of suggestion, whatever it is, becoming aware of another layer of like your surroundings, right? I could not sleep that night. We stayed in the house.
I didn't want to, but we just did because we didn't really have a plan of where else to go. And honestly, we were all kind of in shock. But we slept in like the area's most open part of the house. And I was spooked the entire night.
And then, of course, I was thinking is my nervous system being affected by this? I didn't know enough about methamphetamine to like know what to do, right? But I basically was very clear the next morning that, like my son and I and like, I didn't want my husband to stay there either. But I was like, we can't stay here.
Like this is a hard no, like I can't be here. And you know, for those of you who like have ever been to like one of these little mountain towns, right? They have like weird stairs. Like when you go up to a house, you might like walk up like three awkward flights of stairs, because everything's built on like an incline on like a hillside. So this house was like that. It was built on this incline and like the stairs to get up were like awkward four flights of stairs just to get to the front door. And my husband had laboriously carried all of our belongings and our stuff like moving into this house, you know, had been a task. And we had not hired movers, right?
We were doing everything like low budget. And my husband was like not wanting to believe what I knew from like my nervous systems reaction from like the guy next door, because oh, there's there's one more piece to this that was a really big red flag that made me believe every single thing that the next door neighbor said, which was that in like the downstairs bedroom, there was this weird smell that I could not get over.
It was like this like floral fake perfumey, but like Roddy smell. And I had not smelled it before because whenever I had been in the house before, the landlord had all the windows open and he was painting the walls and then he was refinishing the hardwood floors. And so there was just a lot of smells in the space. But this weird floral smell like I could not be in that space very long and we couldn't figure out what it was or where it was coming from. But there was this whole like negotiation with the space while we tried to figure out whether we could live there, although I knew I couldn't at this point, right?
But I had to like prove that my suspicions and the neighbor's intel was correct. And I got to say like I moved through so many emotions and looking back on it, I mean, even at the time, I was like really blown away by how much I was letting myself feel about what was happening. Like I was just having these moments where I would just like let myself cry and not even like dramatically cry, not like sobbing my eyes out, but just like let sadness fall out of my face, you know, or let my worry be known to my husband, like let my fear be like palatable, you know? Whereas I think in the past, like who I was before when stuff would happen that was really intense, like I think my go to reaction would have just been like anger and like bittiness.
And instead, in this circumstance, like I really was getting in touch with like my grief, because I really had wanted what I had wanted. I had wanted this big, well, it wasn't really that big, but I wanted this larger space so that I could throw community events so that I could bring people into my home so that I could host things. You know, I'd wanted my son to live in this beautiful little town like a few minutes walk from the lake. Like I wanted what I wanted. And I also wanted like cheap rent. I wanted, you know, to find and be the exception to the rule that I could somehow find this Easter egg or unicorn of a house, right?
And I thought I had found it. And so I went through like so much grief over the bubble being burst and also like shame in having wanted to be special shame and having wanted to have cheap rent shame in living in like this poverty mindset shame in general of like having been poor at different times in my life and not been able to afford certain things. You know, I felt shame about like being kind of a beggar or something who was trying to get around like the rules of how things work and like get hooked up or something, right?
So there was like a lot of pain that I was experiencing during this period of time. And it was strange because we had all this travel plan. That's why we wanted to move in August, right? We scrambled to like move in August because in September, it was like, like so much was happening. So we move into this house the day after we move in, I realized I can't live there.
My husband is freaking out because he doesn't know where we're going to put all this stuff which is sitting in this house with like piles of stuff. And I'm like saying we can't be here, right? We don't have a plan of where we're going to go. And we have all this stuff planned for September. The first thing was actually traveling to Buffalo to here to go to a wedding.
And so we did that. And while we were in Buffalo in the wedding, I kept doing like all the research about the meth house, I kept like learning about like the problem, you know, how to test the walls and all that stuff. And by the time we got back, the testing kits that I had ordered from this reputable company that like a housing inspector recommended, like I did the whole thing, I wanted to be like really, you know, clear on what was happening and want any room for like error on my part to prove that this was real, right?
By the time we got back, I had the tests, and I tested the walls. And by the way, a little meth lesson for all y'all who don't know much about meth and the impact of meth. Let me just say, if I was a meth smoker and I was sitting in this room, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see right wearing my fluffy purple robe with these curtains.
And I were to smoke meth just once in this environment. Some of that smoke, what's not really smoke, it's vapor would soak into the robe would soak into the curtains, right? And then someone else who wore this robe or touched those curtains might receive some of that meth product into their nervous system through their skin or through their breathing.
Now, imagine that the person who is smoking this doesn't just smoke at once, but smokes it multiple times a day, every day for years. What happens is that the vapor soaks into the walls, it soaks into the wood fibers into the drywall.
And when I started researching this, there's like very little you can do to rehab meth house, you know, of a certain level of contamination, other than literally remove all the drywall and take it down to the studs and replace everything. And we're not even mentioning like the air back system or whatever the heating system in the house that has to be cleansed as well, right? So this level of research that I was doing was just further having me realize that I could not live in this house, right?
Obviously. And when we got back, I tested the walls. Oh, and I also learned that there's a certain amount of meth contamination that is allowed in a home. And it varies from state to state what's allowed in a home, right? That, oh, the people who lived here before smoked meth, but they didn't smoke it that much. And so there's only some residue in the house.
And the homeowners scrubbed the walls and painted. And when they test it, you know, it only comes up this amount of meth, right? That's leftover. Well, in California, it's 1.5 micrograms per cubic feet or something like that, right? It's like this 1.5 micrograms, that doesn't sound like much except that that amount that is allowed is three times higher than what's allowed in other states. Or California and a few other states allow more meth residue in a home to consider it still habitable than other states three times the amount, right?
So this was disturbing also. So I got a testing kit that was going to test for like a higher amount of meth. It could test up to three micrograms and so I tested the walls and it was three micrograms or higher.
It wouldn't go past three, so it couldn't tell me how high the meth residue actually was in these walls, but it was twice what's allowed in California homes, and so I had my evidence there. You know and I presented it to the landlor,d and we basically said like you need to pay us back like obviously for the rent and the deposit but also for our moving costs.
Also, for my mattress that has been sitting in that stinky room downstairs leaning against the wall and I don't feel comfortable sleeping on that mattress after it's been soaking in that space for who knows how long amount of time to soak in residue. Like I actually like contacted like a meth testing company and asked them if I could like send them a little piece of my mattress. That was the only way they'd be able to tell whether my mattress is contaminated.
It was like send them a little sample and they would test the fibers of it. You know then I'd have to cut you know into this like expensive nice mattress that I had like financed at one point right. Such an ordeal. Such an ordeal and then okay that happens right I test the walls we have to move everything out and into a storage unit. So we did we moved all of our stuff out into a storage unit and then I literally had no time to do anything else because I was about to do a festival right in Oregon.
So this is what my September looked like. Go to a wedding in Buffalo about a week and a half off drive up to Oregon for a festival in Bend right which is like a 12-hour drive and then 12 hours back right. Then host my first three-day retreat on Mount Baldy in California. Then about like a week off and then go do Joshua Tree Music Festival as a presenter and a bodyworker. That was like three straight weeks of work that I had already lined up that I was planning on doing. And all of a sudden I'm homeless all of a sudden I don't know where I'm gonna live or what I'm gonna do or whether my child has been exposed to methamphetamine right.
Yeah talk about like a really crazy time and the stress that I was experiencing was extraordinary. Luckily I had really really great tools right. I had tools to reduce the pain and tension that was going on in my body that had gotten lit up from all the fear and stress of moving and then stress of a meth house. And so you know there were days that I was having an extraordinary amount of pain in my legs because that's where it tends to show up in me.
You know and I wasn't slowing down enough to have it go away. I was like continuing to lift boxes and move my body and do things and you know I would lay down and be literally in so much pain in my legs. You know my legs would just be screaming at me or the bottoms of my feet and I would go through a series of more advanced somatic movements that I knew were gonna target where the pain was actually coming from in my body because it's strange like some of the pain that we experience in our bodies is not happening like at the place where we feel it. It is referred pain from a different area right.
So, in my case, it was referred pain from my sacrum being twisted that was causing me to have this like weird numbness in my thighs and this awful like aching sore, miserable pain in the bottoms of my feet. And I knew that it was referred pain from my twisted sacrum because when I did stuff with my feet, and I did stuff with my thighs the pain didn't go away. But when I did this series of movements to untwist my sacrum and bring balance back to my pelvis then the pain went away and it would go away pretty powerfully right?
But then as soon as my stress would start up again as soon as I was moving my body so continuously without rest and reeling and worrying and you know stressing about what was going on right the pain would start up again you know. And it was up to me like to slow down right and feel my feelings and not just bulldoze my way through the day to regulate that to regulate the stress in my nervous system right?
And I do I have one of those bodies that complains a lot it's part of why I'm so good at what I do, and also why I've been like my biggest, you know, I'm my own client because my nervous system and my body is quite sensitive and complains a lot. And I didn't really you kno,w when I was younger I didn't really know how to deal with that I just sort of learned to ignore i,t and I had a very high threshold for pain because I was ignoring a lot of pain that was going on all the time right but now you know.
I would say I don't have as high a threshold for pain because I don't tolerate pain for that long in my body I do something about it I do my somatic movements, I take the time to unwind my nervous system I feel my feelings and I don't just like avoid them avoid them avoid them I know what things help soothe and calm my nervous system and what things activate it right and so during this experience like god if I didn't have somatics.
Like I would have just been like insane like I would have just been so so so stressed out of my mind but I was successful I ran my three-day retreat very successfully the people who came had life-changing experiences I managed all of the staff and everything well you know the festivals went really well I made some really beautiful connections in Oregon right? And I also you know made some wonderful connections in Joshua Tree and from the outside.
I don't think that anybody could really see what incredible stress I was going through in my personal world right there were definitely friends that I confided in and let in and let know what was going on but I just didn't really feel like safe to talk about it at the time because there was so much going on in me about it like I mentioned before the grief and the shame and the frustration and the fear you know in the uncertainty and so then my husband brought up moving to Buffalo we just been there right at a wedding before we moved out of the meth house.
And you know I have to admit that like while we were here in Buffalo for the wedding I was kind of looking around and going oh you know it is actually quite quaint here quite beautiful oh there actually is kind of some cool things going on right and we'd actually we'd honestly been talking about it for a few years because my husband is originally from this area you know.
And I'd always resisted for different reasons you know but it finally felt like okay we don't have rents we don't have a lease we don't have a living situation lined up maybe this is the time to take like a big leap into a whole new reality and so we started the process we agreed on it in September October and then started the process to have us move over here and so my husband came over in November of 2023 got a job found us a place and by March of last year we finally moved in to our new house new space and we're renting.
But it's really really really really nice to have our own living space after all of that because it was August that we moved out of it out of the place we were living into the meth house then it was September that all the confusion and fear and craziness was going on and my my husband and my son were staying with my dad and then while my husband was out here in Buffalo setting everything up we lived on a pad in my dad's practice room for like six months without a lot of privacy or most of our stuff living out of suitcases putting our stuff away and putting the pad away every day so that I could do sessions with clients so my dad could do sessions with clients you know.
And I guess it's only easy for me to talk about all of that like now that it's over because while I was in it I really had a hard time like seeing the blessing of it it was like a struggle it was just hard and a struggle. Now I look back on it and I realize that being able to manage those difficult emotions and those things that were coming up with me and to get in touch with my shame of being poor and my shame of not having you know what other people have and you know.
Getting in touch with like the beliefs that existed in me that said that was somehow my fault that I was somehow like just like a bad person or a trash person or whatever like mean thing my brain was saying to try to protect me or something right getting in touch with that was actually very healing it created a lot more compassion in myself for myself because of my somatic way of handling it because of the way I let myself feel all the things as I was feeling them and be with the feelings didn't make it any easier to like share it with somebody or like go on my podcast and talk about it.
But it I see the value of it now I see the value of being with my feelings and going through that experience and now if I'm totally honest like the home that I'm living in Buffalo is exactly what I wanted I just got to run my first day retreat here and share the some serosimatics with people share delicious food with people in my home you know I want to have more group events and community events and you know my son had like a movie night and we had like three families over here to watch a movie.
I just I wanted what I wanted at the time back then and I was unwilling to see that maybe what I wanted was absolutely possible but just would take more effort and more work than you know what I wanted it to be like and I invite you to consider that as you're hearing my story of like you know you've ever bought into these like oh it has to be like easy you know like if it's if it's for you it's just gonna be easy and easy and easy I'm here to say that sometimes it's hard and it's not necessarily like bad hard it can be good hard right it can be like effort that is about getting where you need to go like think about effortful things that are also pleasant there's plenty of effortful things that are also pleasant right?
Like sex can be kind of effortful and it's very pleasant right but also like you know planning an event planning a birthday party or writing a book or any number of things right it's not a sign that it's not for you if it's hard work if you have in mind the vision of what you want to do or what you want to have or what you want to be putting in the work is actually so nutritious to that outcome to the creation of that opportunity. Or that's that way of being, you know that's part of what I love about somatics is that I'm not giving people a magic wand to just like your back's better, right?
It's not just gonna happen in this snap your fingers instant and they're enlightened you know for the rest of their lives right like this is a practice and it's something that you learn and you get better at the more that you do it it's a skill that does take some effort in the beginning to learn something new to learn a new way of moving to learn a new way of being. And when I am in my house when I'm experiencing like my pretty little office space or my living room and you know paying the rent that I pay here which is definitely not 1250 a month there's gratitude in that I get to have this because I know what it was like to not have it and I try to remind myself of that every time I'm irritated with cleaning this 1700 square foot space I'm like oh but you wanted this.
You wanted a larger space that you could make beautiful, that you could make mess,y that you could do what you wanted to do in it remember that doll remember that love like you're getting what you wanted it's just that sometimes getting what you want is an effort and it doesn't have to be like the worst effort in fact somatics made it an effort less compared to probably what I would have gone through without having these really powerful tools to regulate my nervous system and turn off my pain and you know process my feelings right so we don't have any effort-free life we don't have effort free experiences right?
But we can make them more effort less with skills with help with guidance right who so yeah that's the story it's an interesting thing like renting the meth house changed my life and it also opened me to deeper compassion for myself and other people who are struggling financially and feeling shame over their situation and shame over their poverty and shame over their circumstances and making themselves wrong and making themselves the problem when in fact sometimes we are you know a victim of circumstance and chance and this happened to be where I was you know.
And what showed up for me, you know, and how did I how did I manifest this, you know, through my beliefs that like you know it should be easy and I shouldn't have to like pay X amount of dollars in rent right like there's all kinds of ways that I may have manifested this experience to learn something right perhaps I'm not totally bought into that idea all the time but I'm willing to entertain it right because in the long run like post all of that I do feel a sense that I learned something here I do feel a sense that it enriched my life to go through all that and to go through all that while running a business and fulfilling on my mission which I certainly could not have done without the tools that I teach right?
So it was another opportunity to like practice what I preach so as you're listening to this story like first of all you've learned some things about meth and Fetamine and houses right and contamination and also perhaps you can think a little bit about the insane things that you might have experienced or might be going through that while you're in it are just going to seem like they suck right and while you're in it just seem incredibly uncomfortable but I want to offer that if you have tools to allow yourself to feel all of the feelings that are coming up and become more soft and compassionate towards yourself.
These painful hard experiences can grow your soul and they can grow your faith and they can grow your heart in a huge way so those are my pearls of wisdom yeah and you're gonna hear more stories like this from me from my life because I've actually lived a very interesting unusual life and I feel like I've been holding out on you guys on the podcast not sharing this stuff and some of it if I'm totally gonna be frank with you is like you know beliefs that I've had or fears that I've had about being my full self with my audience you know.
Because maybe I've had some idea that like I can't be goofy and funny and like weird or whatever and also be deep and profound and like professional right but I'm starting to just like realize that like that if it's a thing that I was carrying like whatever maybe that's just a thing that I was carrying and it's not real and it's actually fine to be like a goofball and like a silly person one moment and then say something meaningful and heartfelt and compassionate the next moment you know.
Like maybe I don't have to like try to cut out all of my glibness or cut out all of my manualisms or my silliness, you know or my peculiarities right? Or my shameful stories of renting a meth house right I can lean into those things and I can bring you my full energy and my full self because honestly that's what my clients get you know.
They get my full self and that's part of why we have such awesome relationships and I have so many return clients and I have this awesome community that has been growing is because I do let myself show up as my full being and I invite other people to do that too so just know that this is you know this along with the two previous solo casts that you've heard it's me opening up to you all more and sharing more of my experience my living somatic experience through my stories and my life and I hope you guys enjoy it.
So if you found something about this story helpful, or maybe you have your own like weird story of like renting a house or having everything just like crumble and fall apart, whatever has been going on for you, I would love to connect, so follow me on Instagram at AimeeTakaya share this podcast follow my podcast leave a review all the love I can use all the love to share these stories and share this message with people and yeah stay in touch because this is an ongoing conversation and I'm here for it I'm here for these conversations and these stories so yeah
A: Hey there, friend I hope you enjoyed today's episode I would love to hear your thoughts follow me on Instagram @AimeeTakaya and send me a DM about this episode I'd like to thank you for being part of this somatic revolution, and if you'd like to support the podcast and help more people learn about somatics consider leaving a review or a rating and finally, if you'd like to have the experience of relief in your tight hips or back and learn to understand what your body is really saying to you visit youcanfreeyoursoma.com I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible bye for now
Comments