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Internalized and Inherited Body Shame: Healing What Was Never Yours to Carry · Regulating & Raising

• MaKenzie: Hello, welcome to the regulating and raising podcast. Today's conversation is for the woman who has carried shame about her body for as long as she can probably remember. And she's ready to find out that so much of it was just never even hers to begin with. So I am joined by Megan. She is a somatic embodiment and sacred sexuality coach. Who helps women reconnect with their bodies and their pleasure by releasing shame, rebuilding trust, and feeling safe, alive, and fully expressed. So her trauma-informed approach creates space for deep healing through body awareness, sensual aliveness, and authentic self-connection. So Megan draws from her training as a Vita sex, love and relationship Coach over 20 years as a somatic movement artist and her experience as a Kudalini yoga teacher, solo mother, and nature lover. And she holds a bachelor's in anthropology, which informs her work in ancestral wisdom and re-reclamation and feminine mystery lineage. So today we are diving into internalized and inherited body shame, where it comes from, how it lives in your body. how it gets passed down through generations of women and what it actually takes to break the cycle for ourselves and also for our children. So this conversation is tender, it's powerful, and so so needed. So Megan, I am so honored to have you here today. Meghan Machado: It's wonderful to be here, Mackenzie. Thanks for inviting me here. MaKenzie: I love it. So I am so intrigued of your workings. So first off, some insight of like how you got to where you are today. if you have children, if you know your human design, obviously I love human design, so I would love to know your your profile Meghan Machado: Yeah, absolutely. So my human design, I'll start there so I don't forget that one. Is a projector. I think two four or four two. I enjoy being a projector. aligned with with how I walk through the world. And I am a mother, I'm a solo mother of my eleven year old daughter. And I got into this work through life. Through life experience, right? I felt very disconnected from my body as a child, very physically and emotionally shut down. And there wasn't really anything that had happened to me to explain that. So I didn't, you know, I just saw it as normal. And I went through a pleasure reclamation phase very young, in my teens. I'm like, I want to feel more alive, I want to feel more part of this world, in this world, I want to experience. Everything has to offer, I want to feel alive in my body. And so I just started slowly cultivating that. And one of the main modalities that that I cultivated and that brought me back into my body was dance, just free-form dance, not not professionally trained at all, but I do consider myself a dancer, and that led me onto the somatic movement artistry path. And I also spent over 15 years as An art model, and that has been a path of deep embodiment as well, both for figure drawing and for photography. So when you it's a deep form of coming back home into the body as well. MaKenzie: Mm. my gosh, my mind is like racing at obviously I, you know, prepare a couple questions for these interviews, but now hearing more in depth of your background, it has me definitely brainstorming some additional questions that I'm excited to to get into. So the first thing that I did want to touch on is you know, so much body shame is not even ours to begin with. So we inherit it from mothers, grandmothers, you know, women even before them. So can you walk us through like how body shame is actually passed down, like both energetically and through the nervous system, and what is happening in a woman's body when she carries this shame that was never hers in the first place. Meghan Machado: Yeah. Yeah, I wanna speak a little bit there about the merging between science and and traditional Indigenous wisdom that's happening right now, where I feel like throughout across the whole world, Indigenous societies have been very well aware of the fact that what happens in one generation is passed down to the subsequent generations, that it lives in their body and in their stories, and that it's a collective trauma to be healed, not an individual. And so that's another facet that I feel like so much of our focus on healing in our Western culture looks at it as a you problem, as an individual problem. And I think it's really important to broaden our perspective and see ourselves as facets in a larger web and understand that collective healing is really where we're at and what's being asked of us right now. And I feel so many people feel very alone in what their experience is. And and when we zoom out, we can see not only how many other people are sharing this experience, but also where it's coming from, and that healing through it together is so much more powerful than going on this solo journey. and so there's that, and then with modern science of like quantum physics and epigenetics, and like love how much epigenetics marries. Spiritual and indigenous wisdom, right? So we understand that what happens in one generation gets passed down genetically to the other generation, and that through epigenetics, that we're able to through our lifestyle choices through through trauma healing, we're able to turn off and on different expressions of our genes, right? So that's just to say that like this is this is in our scientific understanding now, energetic and spiritual based beliefs and understandings. But When we're a child in our mother's womb, we started actually in our grandmother's womb because that egg that was there in our mother's body was there when she was developing as a fetus in her mother. And so if we just want to look at it in that like tangible physical Western mind way, like we started in our grandmother's womb. So of course, what happened to her and her experience, we carry that in us as well. I believe it goes back many more generations than just our grandmother and our mother. but so when a woman is carrying a baby, all that tension that she feels, all of that nervous system shutdown that she feels, all of that shame that she feels, the baby's co-regulating. it is regulating with the mother. It's not its own autonomous being yet. And so all of those experiences that the mother's feeling, the baby's feeling and somatizing that as well. And we can carry so much and not really understand where it comes from until we do that work of healing our ancestral lineage and and you know reverse understanding these stories that have been passed down to us. MaKenzie: I'm getting a little emotional It's it's a very personal story with my son. he had r severe eczema and it truly was because of the nervous system. that I was in whenever he was in my womb and whenever you were going through that I was kind of reliving a couple moments and just a couple things that, you know, were a belief of mine whenever he wa whenever I was pregnant with him. So we shifted from ancestral linear lineage, and those beliefs being kind of trickled down. When do you think that shift like started to happen and why is it now just like a you problem? Meghan Machado: Yeah, I mean the shift happened with colonization, right? it depends on where where you're from in the world for when you were colonized, when your culture was colonized, and when that separation of mind over matter, of individualism, of separation from nature started to happen. but certainly we can we can see it in all all places in the world have been colonized. It's just a matter of how far back. And so part of my work is a lot around decolon decolonizing the mind as well and wanting to study how we decolonize trauma healing. and my understanding of it is really that it comes just back to that, like collective healing, collective healing, bringing back rituals of healing and sharing it in community. And we're doing that right now by holding space for each other, by sharing our stories, by speaking to them out loud, by not holding it all in. That is shared communal healing. we're failing if we can't do it on our own. And it's like we are human beings. Human beings are social creatures. We are meant to be living, breathing, dancing, singing, sharing, healing, sharing food, together, not alone. MaKenzie: Sure. So you said epigenetics are from our ancestral line lineage. explain it to like me and my audience of like what it is. is there a certain Like number back that you like usually start kind of like the healing journey. Meghan Machado: I don't think there's a certain number back that you start the healing journey. I think you know your mother and your grandmother is a great place to start. And then as you're doing that work, other ancestors will come in to your and to your knowledge or into your felt sense. And to your you'll gain a connection with them and start to do that healing work with them if that's what needs to happen, for example, I know that I share a deep connection with my great grandmother. Grandmother on my maternal lineage side, and that she died two days before I was born. And there is like several different synchronicities and connections there that kind of weave our lives together that I found interesting. So once I discovered that, I did more research on her through our, you know, what was remembered of her in the family. and then for epigenetics, it's going back to my biological anthropology, biological and evolutionary anthropology degree. So as far as like the most cutting edge current science on epigenetics, that is not my specialty. But basically what it is is that yes, we're born with this set of genes, right? But which genes are on or off being expressed can change throughout our lifetime and when we're in the womb. So if a mother is starving herself in while she's pregnant, or if she is in an actual state of famine This is where this biological response comes from. It comes from if a woman was pregnant and there was a famine, then her baby would be pre pre prepared to survive in a famine state. It's signaling to the baby's body, hey, when you get out, there's gonna be a lack of food. There's gonna be a lack of nutrient dense food and a lack of c calories available to you. So we're gonna prepare this body now to survive in that state. But if it's coming from a mother who's starving herself because she has body dysmorphia or she's she has an eating disorder or shame around weight, then the baby when it is born is going to be more likely to be overweight because its body has prepared for a life of famine and instead it's coming out to McDonald's and preprocessed foods and an abundance of junk food and so most likely that child is gonna grow up to be overweight and struggle with obesity. Yeah. MaKenzie: And obviously we're seeing, you know, numbers of that increase, which just means that this work is just that much more important. for the mom who like logically knows like I, you know, feel ashamed, you know, But she feels it like deep in her tissues. Like, what does the work of releasing that shame actually look like? And how like does like somatic embodiment practices like reach the places that mindset work and affirmations like simply aren't, you know, healing or cannot? Meghan Machado: Yeah, that's such an important question. And I feel like it's really important to acknowledge that sometimes we understand that we're, you know, where the shame's coming from. We know we had a specific childhood trauma or our parents were constantly telling us negative things around our body, This is where the shame and trauma comes from. I know what I'm healing. And other times it can go back ancestrally, it can go back through our lineage or go back to our experience in the womb and we cannot have a lot of clarity on why that's there within us, why we're holding and carrying that and where that comes from. And so either one, you know, we heal that by going through the body, but I feel becomes especially more important. to heal it through the body through somatic work when you're not even really clear on where this comes from and how far back it goes because that makes it a lot harder to approach it from a top-down approach from I'm just gonna change my mindset. I'm gonna tell myself look in the mirror and tell myself I'm beautiful. I'm going to do positive affirmations. Like these are these are good and they're helpful. So my work is all about embodiment, right? Like really feeling it, owning it in your bones, not just speaking it, but really living and breathing it and no knowing it, that that that bone deep wisdom of experiential wisdom. Like this is me, this is who I am, this is my truth now. and so with the somatic work, when we're carrying a lot of body shame, we tend to be in a chronic state of freeze. a lot of tension in the body. There's a desire to make ourselves smaller, our voice smaller, voice is maybe you know coming from higher up in our body. and up here in the throat or even up in the nose and we can't bring it down into our chest, into our diaphragm, into the womb. And a lot of tightness. And when we're feeling tight, we're making ourselves small, and we're feeling like, okay, this is where it's safe for me. I'm safe and I'm comfortable when I'm not taking up a lot of space, when I'm not fully expressed. And so if that's safety to you, the body is always going to choose and prioritize safety over pleasure. or over our our desires for growth and and expansion, right? It's going to prioritize and choose safety because that is how we survive. And yeah. And so telling ourselves just get bigger, just take up more space, just just become more expressed. is is not going to create the shifts that we're looking for. So when we do the somatic work, we're coming into the body and we're becoming aware of where we're holding tension, of where we don't feel safe, and we're becoming literate in the language of our body and we're rebuilding trust with our body. Because chances are when you're carrying that level of of shame and unsafety in the body that you've learned to not trust the body and vice versa, the body's learned to not trust you because you haven't been listening to it, because you've been taught and trained in this world to negate the signals and communication from the body. You've been taught to ignore when you're hungry. You've been taught to ignore when it's time to rest. You've been taught to ignore the most basic, you know, human functions and override them. And you've also been taught that the language of the body is subpar, right? That we value logic of the mind much more than the language of the body, that it's not to be trusted, that it's it's woo-woo, and that women are untrustworthy as well if they're if they're focusing on embodied wisdom rather than the logic of the so we have all of this conditioning societ in our society in our culture as well of devaluing the wisdom of the body. And so on all levels, from the unsafety and the shame that we're carrying to the the soup that we're that we're being raised in, that we're that's conditioning us and growing us, we've been taught just not to go there. Just don't go there. And so it can feel really unsafe to even go and take that first step of attuning to and listening and being with what you feel. inside the body. but when you go there you learn to rebuild trust with yourself. You learn to listen again you learn to rebuild your connection with your intuition and you go into those places that are tight and that are carrying shame and you can just be with them. And the more acceptance and love you can bring to those areas that have been holding all that tension and say, I see you. Thank you for holding this for me when I couldn't, and I'm ready now to hold it and look at it. MaKenzie: If someone, you know, is listening and they're like, yes, like my self-talk when I look in the mirror is, you know, just awful. Where do you even, where do you direct, you know, women to even start that journey? Like is it just like breath work? Is it meditation? Is it journaling? what is your suggestion to deepen that connection so that the healing process can actually come to fruition? Meghan Machado: Yes to all of those. Yes to all of the above. And it's so individual where women are ready to be met and where they're ready to go. Right? So If a woman is comfortable with looking in the mirror and sending love to each body part, wonderful. If she is comfortable with beginning freeform celebratory dance ritual in her living room each morning, like wonderful, absolutely, like go there, do that. but some women are need need to be met just where they are in that moment. And that might be sitting with numbness and just being with the numbness. My whole body is numb. I don't feel anything below the neck. Then just just be with that numbness because numbness is also sensation. So the focus goes where the sensation is and we have this idea that numbness is a empty void. that there's nothing there and that we just want to reject that 'cause we were looking to feel pleasure instead. So if the numbness is there, be with the numbness. Because it's a it's a journey of radical acceptance, of being with what is. here and now. And so even with the breath work, breath work can be too activating and too triggering for some women. It can it can bring them too much back into the original trauma state, right? So even the breath work can change for who I'm you know, who I'm working with. And you can do really slow, MaKenzie: Mm-hmm. Meghan Machado: simple breath practices to begin. But if a woman is chronically, you know, only coming down to here with her breath, with her voice, with her awareness, only down to her neck, then even just doing a simple, deep, full belly breath can bring up a lot. So it's always really about meeting if I'm working with someone, meeting my client where they're at, or if you're doing this work on your own, meeting yourself where you're at and not expecting yourself to be somewhere other than where you are, because that's not self-loving either. And so it's really a a path of radical self-love, radical self-compassion, and radical acceptance. So wherever you are, just to be with that, with full love and meeting yourself there. but yes to the breath work, yes to the to the dance, all of those are beautiful when they feel like a full yes inside of a woman's body. MaKenzie: Yes. So try it and s see what your b how your body responds. you know, one thing that I've become aware is that, you know, this journey is a lot of inner work and so the wins are not, you know, super flashy. Meghan Machado: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. MaKenzie: feel like you're, you know, getting somewhere with this work or like feel like your body's responding, like the the work is working. Like how do you best describe to your clients or you know, just internally, how you kind of feel that? Meghan Machado: Yeah. well I'll speak just to to woman because you could be doing this work with me or with another somatic practitioner, or you could be doing it on your own. So I think the woman's internal experience can be huge shifts for her. It just might not be externally very measurable, right? So other people may not be noticing they might not be seeing it yet. but oftentimes Yes, that even your relationships will shift, especially in the home and in the workplace, right? Because as you come into more power in your body, you come into more power to speak your truth in the workplace. In the home, you come into more power to own your boundaries with love. more ability to self-regulate as well. That's important in parenting. Even though you're not seeing anything change, perhaps physically, any physical markers changing, the relational shifts are there, and that's in relation to yourself and in relation to the people who are close to you. and so for what a woman will experience changing in her body, she'll start to feel more rooted, you know, more of a Sense of okay, this is a safe place for me to come to, and eventually, like, this is where I come home, and I want to I this feels good now. I want to keep coming back home into my body. she'll start to feel more regulated within herself, right? She'll notice maybe that a lot of the nervous system responses that she's having, been having and been carrying, or the tension she's been carrying, starts to release a little bit, starts to soften, that the body starts to soften and release some of what it's been holding, start to feel a little more openness, a little more expansion. And These shifts don't need to be they they're not a one and done and they don't need to be a huge shift that can happen, and it might be less sustainable than the than the moderate ones over time. And so and then also to remember that healing isn't linear, that it is in si it moves in cycles. Everything moves in cycles and and spirals actually, but we tend to want to think of things as linear. just as our lives do not move in in a line, they move in spirals, so does our healing journey. So what can feel like backwards momentum, trust that too. MaKenzie: Hmm. you talked about posture earlier, whenever you were talking about you doing your artist's modeling. I have been experimenting with this of like just being aware, like whenever I, you know, walk into rooms or just, you know, right now, like sitting with my shoulders up, you know, and back. it has made me feel a difference. talk to me like why that is. And like you said that there's like different postures for like different release areas, I think. I would love to brainstorm a little bit and learn more about like what that those areas are and how to how to do that. Meghan Machado: Yeah, absolutely. And before we jump into that, I wanna go back to the question you asked a moment ago and I realized we never talked about pleasure as well. So so often when a woman is carrying shame in the body and she's in that free state, she denies herself pleasure. MaKenzie: Good. Meghan Machado: Pleasure can feel unsafe, or she can actively be in denying be denying herself pleasure either because she feels she's unworthy to experience it or because it feels unsafe. Whatever her particular story is about pleasure, it can be unique and diverse. But regardless, the common thing is that there's not going to be any pleasure happening. If there's not any feeling, any safety in going into the body and feeling the body, then most pleasure is going to be performative. Just as our beauty becomes performative. Right? Our body becomes performative. It's no longer like, when you're carrying that that level of body shame the the the feeling isn't like I want to feel beautiful for myself. It's I want others to see me as beautiful. Can you please validate me today? Can you please remind me that I'm that I'm beautiful or or tell me that I am or tell me that I'm worthy to exist in your world and in your life. And so so much of it is externally projected. We're receiving our validation and looking for our validation from outside of ourselves instead of from inside of ourselves. And so we're experiencing pleasure as well through somebody else's pleasure. Can I please this person? Can I give them pleasure? Because that's the only place I can feel pleasure, right? And I'm gonna perform my pleasure so that they feel better and have, you know, have a more pleasurable experience. And I'm not just talking about in the bedroom, I'm talking about in life. MaKenzie: Mm. Meghan Machado: and so when we start to come back into our body, one of the huge, biggest shifts that I love, love, love for women is reclaiming their pleasure for themselves and being able to feel that aliveness and and sensuality and pleasure in their bodies. MaKenzie: I love that. I've also been experimenting. I just got like the New New Testament and the first scripture was the Thanksgiving prayer and I've like I'm just at that point and it was all it's all about like being able to receive. So one of the somatic practices that I've been doing is like every night before bed, I pinpoint three different areas of the day that I allowed myself to receive. And then in the morning I before I put my feet on the ground, taking three deep breaths and literally saying the words like I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe like three different times. So that is something that I wanted to share that's been really working for me that has allowed me because I realize that that is part of my journey is that I wasn't allowing to even like receive. And that's not just with like, you know, money with support, with pleasure. Like it is also like compliments like if somebody compliments your outfit or your hair try doing this experiment where you just say like thank you and it has been like a world changing for for me at least. Meghan Machado: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love that practice for women. And s d there's very few women that don't need that that practice, right? Like there's so many of us who just learned that's the polite way to receive a compliment. so I can't receive that. And if you can't receive a simple compliment from a stranger on the street, then how much are you closing off, you know, your partner from loving you? MaKenzie: Mm-hmm. Meghan Machado: you know, and yourself from loving you and how does that trickle down into how you love your children, right? And so just really seeing like where these patterns are and if we can see them somewhere, then we can start to see them everywhere. And so what you said right now about that, it seems so simple. It seems so little. Just say thank you when you receive a compliment. Someone says nice shirt. Don't say I got it, you know, from as a hand-me-down for my mom. And starting and ending your day with gratitude, another beautiful practice. MaKenzie: Yeah, it's just so crazy to see it in big pictures of your life. I receive things just fine. But then it's like whenever you like really spend time with it. somebody asking me, like, can I hold the baby? And it's like, no, I'm fine. Like, no, let them hold the baby. that's just something that I've recently and have been chipping away layers. Meghan Machado: Yeah, yeah. Love that. MaKenzie: let's get back to the posture because I'm really intrigued about this. so tell me a little bit about this. Meghan Machado: Absolutely. Yeah. So you were speaking to which postures we could consciously shift to notice a conscious change in our in our relation with ourselves and our our safety and our feeling of being embodied. Yeah. MaKenzie: Yeah. And also what it does to like your body to just be aware of like just like good posture. Meghan Machado: Yeah. So I wanna invite you to experience it with me. So I'm not just modeling it by myself. So if you want, you can keep your eyes open or closed, but just notice what starts to happen to your body if you start to bring in fear. Now bring in unsafety. Shutting down. Making yourself small. And now do the opposite of whatever that is that you're holding right now. Come into the opposite expression. Through the body. And what did you notice shift in your posture through that simple exercise? MaKenzie: Everything. I feel like my shoulders were like crouching down. Like I could feel like my chest like closing up whenever we were starting and then whenever we expand like I could feel everything just kind of like there's like a string on my back like pulling pulling me up and just like expansion in my lungs and everything. Meghan Machado: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So this is somatic work. Like I could tell you what your body's gonna do and what to expect and what to think, or you can feel it in your own body, right? Because everybody's body is unique. Yes, we share common patterns, but it lands much more powerfully when we notice it and experience it in our own body, one, rather than someone telling you. And do we we notice it then, the next time, you know, we're really going to live this wisdom. We're going to embody this wisdom rather than someone talking at us and telling us what to believe about our bodies and what to look for in our bodies. the next time you come into a free state or feeling unworthy or feeling shame in your body, pause and notice what am I feeling right now? What's my posture? And then If you can try and bring in the opposite posture and notice how that actually shifts in real time in that moment, how you're feeling right then, the energy you're carrying in your body, the emotions you're holding, what shifts by consciously doing the opposite movement. And often it'll be moving from a contraction to an expanded state. MaKenzie: I love that. So beautiful. I have one last question for you. so many of us are terrified. Of passing a lot of this shame onto our children, especially our daughters. So as a solo mom yourself, like how do you mother differently when you are actively like healing your inherited body shame? And what does it look like to raise children who feel safe, alive, and at home in their own bodies, even why we maybe not feel 100% healed ourselves? Meghan Machado: Yeah. Yeah, and this is such a huge topic. And I think it is the heart of you know, w w why we do the work that we do, right? It's not just for us, it's for it's for our children, for their children. And I feel like so many of us in this generation in particular are cycle breakers and then the younger generations too. But I feel like we are, you know, generations upon generations now of of people who are waking up and being like, this stops with me. I'm going to change this and break this cycle. And you know, even if it doesn't even if you notice that I'm still passing on certain patterns to my children I think it's so important to be compassionate and forgiving of ourselves for that too because we can't break all the cycles in one generation. it's oftentimes beyond our capacity to do so. So some things will get handed down and give yourself you know forgiveness and and love for that too and even celebrate yourself for your awareness around that. that look, at least I'm aware of this pattern. My mother, my grandmother wasn't even aware of what she was passing down. At least I am aware and so I can I can begin to work with it more and more and give myself forgiveness for the parts and places where I didn't do my best. Or I did my best but it it it wasn't good enough for me, right? And I say this because I know as mothers we carry so much shame for those moments when we when we pass something MaKenzie: Mm-hmm. Meghan Machado: onto our children, we can see, gosh, I I didn't do that well, or look, my daughter or my son are exhibiting this patterns that I never wanted them to exhibit. And we can just carry that all on ourselves. And it's like these children chose to come in with us for a reason. And they are gonna have so many more tools than we did to thrive, to heal, to live their best lives, you know, and to and they're gonna be cycle breakers of their own. And we're not there yet. So to give ourselves some forgiveness and some space and some leeway to make mistakes and remember we're not perfect, we are human. And And then to answer, yeah, to get into the really the heart of the question, I guess I'll start with a story. my mother was somebody who struggled her whole teen and adult life with a severe eating disorder, I was a couple years old and she went in for hospitalization to finally get help and heal this. And And I was I was two at the time, so I have no memory of that. Now I know that my mother struggled with a severe eating disorder and body dysmorphia and you know carried a ton of body shame because she told me, not because she modeled it for me. So I was very lucky in that way that she was consciously and determined enough to heal this once she had her two daughters. and that she didn't pass it on to us through her behavior and through her words and through how she how she interacted with or talked to my sister and I. Could any of that have been passed on, you know, energetically? Yeah, absolutely. But the what she chose to model for us was somebody who loves their body and is at home in their body. Whether because she'd had that level of transformation by the time I was old enough to notice, or whether it was because she was choosing every day to just show up for us in this way because she know the consequences of if her daughters grew up not loving their bodies, I don't I don't know. I'll ask her. but what I do know is she was very conscious about raising us to love our bodies and to not feel ashamed of them. And and then my my my grandmother would come visit and you could see how my mother was raised, you know. My grandmother would would put a lot of shame out there on, you know, the bodies and psych of her granddaughters. And it's like, okay. All right. that's the home life my mother was raised in, the conditioning she raised in. So she was a cycle breaker as well. And for me, parenting my daughter It looks a lot like, you know, checking in with her and you know, how do you feel about your body and w and why and what does that mean to you? And like, you know, really nurturing empowering stories for her as well, like the the mm the books and stories and myths that I choose to expose her to, like making sure that they're empowering for young women. But also like if I catch myself wanting to look sideways in the at my belly or say something critical about a new line on my forehead, you know, being really aware, I'm not gonna do that right now. maybe maybe the impulse is so strong that I'm gonna do it by when I'm by myself still, but I'm certainly not gonna do that in front of her. And so changing how we show up for ourselves in front of our children as well and choosing to exhibit healthy patterns and healthy behaviors is huge. but also there's so much that goes into The upbringing that's beyond the home, you know, that we can't control everything and all of it, but we can certainly do our best to advocate for something different than the mainstream narrative that they're receiving. my daughter's constantly asking if she can get TikTok, and the answer is no. And it'll be no for, you know, as as many, many years as I it's under my capacity to do so because the the exposure to, you know, filtered women and AI women now. Not even real women. It's like It's like, Noah, I know what an impact it had for me the first time I got one of those thirteen year old girl print magazines and how it brought in body awareness in a way that I'd never had before. And fortunately my mom talked to me about that at the time and I talked to her about that. a a world that we have to be vigilant about for our daughters especially, right now. And our sons as well for the message they're receiving about women and women's bodies and sexuality and all of these, you know, things that are out there on the internet are are Targeting young men, I feel like, to be quite misogynistic. When I'm raising my daughter, I want to raise her without body shame and also without sexual shaming too. And that requires quite a bit of inner work as well because I think for me and for others it was rare to be raised without sexual shame. So getting really comfortable talking to her about those topics at child appropriate age appropriate levels and having it being an ongoing conversation and doing repair if there ever was a time when, response that was shameful, being like, Okay, you know what? That wasn't okay. Let's let's change the narrative right now, right here and right now. I'm sorry I responded that way and I wanna respond this way instead. You know, so that looks like reminding her that her body is capable of so much pleasure and and to celebrate that, like celebrate your body's ability to feel and experience pleasure. And that's wonderful and good, and you're totally free to do that in the privacy of your bedroom, like as you will. And also like getting her books that have drawings of the female anatomy on them, you know, children's puberty books, she's eleven now, and like Like encouraging her, like, look at your own anatomy. When you're by yourself in your room, look at your own gentility, look at your vulva. Like, let's use proper names here too. and yeah, there's there's so much that can be said for the intersection between sexual shame and body shame. But I'm definitely trying to be conscious to To raise her to be somebody who is not just comfortable in her body but also like celebrates her pleasure. MaKenzie: I love it. You just reminded me of And my daughter walked in the other day and she was like, she saw my pad and was like, what is that on there? Like, why are you bleeding? And like we've had the conversation, you know, of that. But obviously I needed to revisit revisit it. I love my period. Like this is part of womanhood and like reframing that, just being conscientious about, you know, those conversations. How I grew up is like this is terrible. I hate this, you know, time of month. It brings anger. It brings all these, you know, bad emotions. And like that's one that's like really a part of like womanhood that I am like consciously making an effort for her to ensure that she looks at that time of the month as something that is like blossoming and beautiful. So that just happened this weekend. I love that you mentioned the books. Meghan Machado: Absolutely. MaKenzie: recommendations there. But this has been amazing. I feel like it's such a crucial topic that I know that most women are dealing with, which is unfortunate, but fortunate that we have the control and tools and practices to heal this and break the cycles. So if my audience wants more support and wants more education and just your energy, Megan, where can they find you at and what resources do you have available? Meghan Machado: Yeah, absolutely. on Instagram I go by Wise Wild Embodied. so they can find me there. And I sent you, I believe, a link to the yep, yeah. it's called the sensual self-devotion ritual. so they can absolutely pick that up. It is about a 15-minute guided audio that brings women into their bodies in a way that is self-loving, that is celebratory, that is sensual, and it meets you where you're at. so it's a really beautiful journey that I recommend for everyone regardless of where they're at in their embodiment journey and their self-love journey. and it's a really it's a really fun one too. So that's the central self-devotion ritual. MaKenzie: I can't wait to try it. I'm super excited. And I will definitely link that all in the show notes so that you can easily find it and access it. So well, Megan, such a pleasure. Thank you for joining me today and we will talk soon. Meghan Machado: Thank you, Mackenzie. Take care.