196: Natural Healing Show with Catherine Carrigan - Episode 196196: Natural Healing Show with Catherine Carrigan - Episode 196
UK Health Radio Podcast
Sensei Paul Coffey shares how his own traumatic past led him to martial arts and how structured movement, being heard and creativity can support healing. The conversation highlights practical ways people, including under-served groups, might use martial arts and safe communities to rebuild confidence after trauma.
46:28•25 Oct 2026
How Martial Arts Helps Heal Deep Trauma with Sensei Paul Coffey
Episode Overview
- Martial arts offers a safe setting for "ceremonial violence" that helps rebuild confidence and test responses to fear without real danger.
- Paul Coffey says healing trauma requires three essentials: creating and releasing work, being truly heard, and maintaining a strong movement practice.
- Structured training can retrain the nervous system, gradually shifting reactions from freezing or flinching to calmly creating space and protection.
- Under-served and LGBTQ students are taught situational awareness and practical self-preservation, starting with reading the room and trusting gut feelings.
- Choosing a martial arts school should begin with interviewing instructors and communities, prioritising emotional safety and fit over style or branding.
“"There are three things that you need absolutely: the ability to create, being heard, and a strong movement practice."”
Get ready to be moved by real-life accounts of traumatic pasts being met head-on with grit, movement and community. This episode of the UK Health Radio Podcast’s Natural Healing Show focuses on how martial arts can become a practical path for healing trauma, especially for people who don’t fancy lying on a therapy couch or talking endlessly about their childhood.
Medical intuitive healer Catherine Carrigan talks with Sensei Paul Coffey, host of the Keep Kicking Podcast and lead instructor at Giraffe Valley Martial Arts.
Paul shares a stark personal history: a serious birth defect, childhood abuse from an alcoholic uncle and the moment, aged 11, when martial arts became "the thing that saved me" and later led him into a life of "heal myself, help others heal." You’ll hear how ceremonial "play fighting" in a safe dojo helps people rebuild confidence, retrain their nervous system and gently test their responses to fear.
Paul explains that trauma lives in the body and that everyone needs three core elements for healing: "the ability to create," "being heard," and "a strong movement practice." Whether it’s martial arts, yoga or mindful strength training, he emphasises that movement should help the body release stored experience rather than become an obsessive escape.
The conversation also covers support for LGBTQ students and other under-served groups, with Paul stressing situational awareness, nervous-system training and choosing an instructor and community that feel genuinely safe. Catherine adds stories from her own work with survivors and offers practical ideas for clearing traumatic energy from physical spaces, from chanting to simple repainting.
If you’ve ever thought, "I can’t face therapy, but I know I need to do something," this episode gives concrete examples of how structured movement, honest conversation and creative expression might fit together for you. Could finding the right teacher, community and practice be the next step in your own healing journey?
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