Latest / The Body Rhythm: Nervous System Health, Digestion & Daily Rhythms for Women / You’ve Done the Therapy. Why Does Your Body Still Feel Stuck?

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You’ve Done the Therapy. Why Does Your Body Still Feel Stuck? · The Body Rhythm: Nervous System Health, Digestion & Daily Rhythms for Women

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can have a lot of things that are stored up into the body.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then they can appear like being emotionally numb, shallow breathing, appetite changes, muscular tension, lower back pain, sciatica, lethargy, sleep disturbances, tiredness, all of this can be a type of trauma nervous system response.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Body Rhythm Podcast, the podcast for women who are ready to stop pushing through and start feeling like themselves again.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm CJ, Ayurvedic Wellness Guide, helping women reconnect to the natural rhythm their bodies have been craving.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't that long ago that I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't fix, bloated no matter what I ate, and lying awake at 3 a.m.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: with my mind already running tomorrow's to-do list.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I just needed to be more consistent, more disciplined.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize that my body wasn't feeling me.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was completely overwhelmed because you're not broken.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: You've just been living outside your natural rhythm for a long time.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Body Rhythm.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: So glad you could join me today.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And have you ever felt like you understand your patterns?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: You've done the yoga, you've done the journaling, the therapy, the reflection, the self-inquiry, whatever it might be.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you can explain exactly why you feel the way you feel, but your body still reacts the same.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: You still feel anxious, you still feel on edge, you still feel stuck in something that you can't get out of.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the part that no one really explains.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: So today we're gonna talk about something that it's taken me a long time to understand in my own body, in my own experience, and in the women that I work with.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: That understanding is not the same as processing.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, I was thinking about this because uh I'm a yoga teacher and uh somatics is really what I am into working with trauma.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I was going to counseling, right?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if you've ever been in counseling, but my experience is the counselor is asking you these deep personal questions, bringing things out of you that maybe you're not prepared to answer, and it's uncomfortable, and there's a lot of feelings there, and maybe you're crying, and the counselor asks, continues to ask the questions, and then before you know it, time is up and you're on your merry way.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, the experience of bringing up all of these emotions, all of what was happening, left me sometimes more anxious or more depressed than when I started talking to the counselor.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: All the things that were brought up in the conversation were still living in my body, and I didn't know what to do with it.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, how can I make dinner after I've just brought up all this stuff and I'm anxious and my thoughts are going?
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I really thought that the counseling experience for me was missing the somatic container.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And what is a somatic container?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's the experience of stress in our physiology, in the body, in the neurobiology, in community with others.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's talking about how I feel is different than feeling how I feel.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe this is you.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you've worked on yourself, you're aware.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: You're not avoiding, you're not one of those people, those women who pretending that everything is fine.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know your patterns, you might be able to explain them to someone else so clearly, better than they could explain their own.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And still you're feeling dysregulated, you're still feeling reactive, you're still feeling exhausted, you still have the gut problems and the sleep problems and the energy problems, and it can feel like you're doing everything right, and yet nothing is changing.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: But here is what is missing trauma, whatever it might be, stress, overwhelm.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever word fits for you doesn't just live in your thoughts, doesn't just live in your words, it lives in your body and it lives in your nervous system.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: It shows up in your reactions, in your patterns, in your capacity, the amount that you can hold before you finally tip over.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: It shows up in how safe it feels in your body to just exist.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Trauma is how our nervous system responds to all the things that have happened to us over time throughout our entire life.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you're like me, somebody just kind of goes over it, pushes it down to get on to the next, you can have a lot of things that are stored up into the body.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then they can appear like being emotionally numb, shallow breathing, appetite changes, muscular tension, lower back pain, sciatica, lethargy, sleep disturbances, tiredness, all of this can be a type of trauma nervous system response.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And our trauma, our stress response can overwhelm our ability to cope.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so maybe you can intellectualize your trauma, understand what you've been through, but you can still be living inside of it.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can still be feeling it in the body because talking about it isn't the same thing as the body moving through it.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing your story is not the same as your body feeling safe and supported.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Awareness is not the same thing as being regulated.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if your body never had the space to actually process something, the stress or fear or a moment that your nervous system didn't get a chance to complete the emotional response, it doesn't matter how much you understand it, your mind will finish the story while your body is still waiting to finish the experience.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so healing from trauma becomes a lifestyle.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a medical condition that you can treat with one protocol, one supplement, one session.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes a lifestyle of how you allow yourself to feel safe and supported and connection and how you deal with stress because our trauma is stored in our movements, in our sensations, in our behaviors, in all of the cells that never got a chance to experience or express, release, or to integrate the experience that you had.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: So how do we actually get things to shift, right?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: If it's not more inside, if it's not more self-help books, if it's not the next sound bath, if it's not the next um whatever it might be for you.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's not pushing, it's not fixing, it's not even performing, right?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not doing all the right practices while you're still bracing underneath of everything.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's allowing yourself to be with your body.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It is slowing down, listening, creating safety, bringing connection to the body.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it is just the hands on the heart and bringing your awareness to the five fingertips that are touching the heart space.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And this signals a state of safety because we can't feel, right?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: But we're when we're in a trauma response, when we're in a um a state of anxiety or overwhelm, the body isn't prioritizing being able to feel itself, it's prioritizing getting away from the threat.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So anytime that we're allowed to come back into our container, we're uh allowing ourselves to bring connection back into the body by touching, by the breath, by moving, then that is how we begin to process and heal and experience.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's important to note that slowing down doesn't mean calming down.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Slowing down means creating intentional moments of pause throughout your day.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it begins at 30 seconds and increases to 60 seconds, or maybe it's 90 seconds.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's a bit longer if that feels okay for you.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a time when you give your body nothing to do, where it can just simply be with no expectation, where it can just rest for a moment.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe the mind is still racing, maybe the anxiety is still there, so you're not necessarily calm, but you're creating space, beginning to give small, consistent signals to the body and your nervous system that it's safe and it's supported.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you do this every day, woven into your daily routine, and it begins to cue the body that it's safe and supported, and it can begin to release what has been stuffed down into the cellular level.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we're healing our trauma, when we're trying to move from the mind being in control of everything back into the body, we have to be able to trust ourselves to fall apart.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so often I think that through our experiences, we can be disconnected from trust to ourselves because we didn't respond the way that we wanted to, or didn't go the way that we thought it was gonna go, or we were criticized, whatever it might be.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: But to deal with our own trauma, to become re-embodied, we have to trust ourselves to fall as to fall apart.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it can be messy and it can be layered and nuanced, and it can be slow and it can be nonlinear, some days better than others, but there's no straight line from dysregulated to regulated.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: But what does start to happen with time, with safety, with practice, is you begin to see softer reactions.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: You begin to tune in more to what the body is feeling and recognize the symptoms that are occurring, whether it is the sleeplessness, whether it's always waking up at 3, 3:30 in the morning, and begin to see what's happening.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's creating moments of peace throughout your day, it's beginning to expand your capacity, your emotional container a little bit bigger than it was before.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's important to remember that you don't become this perfect, idolized, healed version of yourself, right?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: That that version of ourselves doesn't exist, at least I don't think so.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: But you can become someone who can hold yourself, who can trust yourself, who knows so deeply what is happening, can tell the moment that there's a shift in digestion, can tell when there's a shift in sleep, can tell when there's a shift in energy.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you begin to know yourself so well, you've become so embodied that you know the medicine that your body needs.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Whether that's a food or an herb or connection or relationship or time outside or at the beach or at your happy place, whatever it might be, you begin, you begin to know yourself so, so well that you become your own healer.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're a woman who spent years holding everything together for everyone else, your family, your team, your community.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've rarely, if ever, felt held in that same way, this is what I want for you.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's not perfection, it's knowing that you can become someone so in tune with themselves, so trusting of themselves, that you hold your own medicine within your hand.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps as you move throughout your day, instead of thinking and intellectualizing all of your trauma, all of the stress, maybe a different question you can begin to ask is what is my body still holding that it hasn't had space to process yet?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the bracing in the back or in the neck, in the shoulders?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Or is it the digestive issues that keep creeping up?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you just sit with the question.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's something that you just haven't had the space to feel or wanted to feel because it just feels like it would be too much to let go.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And this is when you begin to create a rhythm of resilience, a rhythm of lifestyle, of resilience, whose container can be expanded, can experience things, and not let it overwhelm you.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And if this is resonating with you, if you're realizing that your body might be holding more than you thought it was, or you've done all the things and the body still quite doesn't feel like you would like it to.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: The link is in the show notes.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Please grab it if you haven't already.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And let me know if any of the top nine signs resonate with you.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Email me at Chelsea at Chelsea JohnsonIyurveda.com.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you for joining me today on this episode of the Body Rhythm.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is how we live longer and feel better in our bodies by beginning to recognize what is happening underneath all of it.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Have a wonderful day.