Ep 45 with ailey jolie.

Ailey Jolie (00:06.264)
Welcome to In This Body, podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Ailee Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment.

podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own

This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailee Jolie.

Welcome to today's episode of In This Body. Today, there won't be any guests joining me. Instead, I'll be answering some of your questions and letting you know about the pause that I'm going to be taking. Before we dive in, I want to acknowledge that the questions that my paid subscribers asked me had a level of depth and realness that might be a bit different than some of our prior episodes. I also didn't hesitate to go into that depth and messy nuance.

in my answers. So today we're talking about bodies, about pain, about trauma, and about the messy reality of healing. As you listen to this podcast, I invite you to stay connected to your body, to take what serves you, and as I say to my clients, leave what doesn't. Before I dive into some of those questions, I wanted to give all of you a little bit of a life update. Some of you may know this and some of you may not, but over the past year, actually,

Ailey Jolie (01:58.442)
a little bit longer than a year, I've been navigating some significant medical challenges, things that I definitely didn't talk about publicly because honestly I was still making sense of them myself and I wasn't ready. And I also know for myself showing up to my client work and showing up to writing and showing up to friends while navigating this really big, scary medical crisis.

was absolutely what I needed because it would have been so easy for me to just get lost in the pain and the fear, lack of certainty that I had around my life. And it did make it quite challenging for people in my life because it was this constant wave of not knowing what was going to happen next. But my clients and my writing and my work and my offerings were really the rock.

In many ways during that time, I don't mean my clients per se. What I mean is the ritual of knowing that I got to be of service and that I got to be of support and that I got to show up in this way outside of my own wavy life. And so at the time it definitely felt important for me for there to be some separateness between those two things. And it's really wonderful now that I don't.

need to have that separateness and that the two can become more merged together. Which is why I'm going to share a little bit about it today, but a lot of it is actually woven into my upcoming book that I'm taking some time off to write. So it was over a year ago now that I got sick, really sick, and I ended up being diagnosed, retrospectively diagnosed in air quotes, with a form of West Nile.

And West Nile is a rare infectious disease that comes from mosquitoes and it caused neurological inflammation in my body and just a whole host of peculiar, strange, abnormal symptoms. I would be totally fine if I was sitting, but if I went to go do anything else, it was just complete madness inside my body. So I could sit and I could write and I could

Ailey Jolie (04:09.62)
sit and talk to people, could sit and scroll, could sit and read, but if you asked me to do anything else, it would be a strange pain or fainting and all of these other really peculiar symptoms. Anyways, that experience resulted in them kind of throwing the book at me medically in regards to MRIs and CTs and scans and blood work and this and that and consultants and specialists and everything else. And in that process, they actually did find two

Well, it's quite large or quite scary, more life threatening things. And with that, then it was going through this process of needing surgeries and medical interventions. And there was this weird period where it just felt like all I was doing was going to surgery or waiting for a surgery date. And during that time, I wasn't doing client work at all, but it was this deep moment for me, particularly coming out of one.

surgery went well, it's relatively small and nothing too big or too scary. But I got put in an MRI right after and I call it the sacred MRI. It's just this most spiritual, beautiful, humbling, hard 45 minutes of my life. And I've done a lot of psychedelics, not that that gives me any type of more validity than the next person I'm just giving reference point to.

how potent that moment was for me in the MRI that it had more spiritual gravitas than all of the other elaborate fancy spiritual things that I've done. But in that MRI, I just had this deep moment of pause and of reverence and of really deep listening for my body.

And what my body kind of told me in that moment was that I needed to write and I needed to write the stories I had heard that I had been privileged to and the stories that lived inside me that belonged to my clients and my clients bodies. And so to be able to honor that really sacred body wisdom, and there's so much more to this than what I'm sharing in this moment, but I'm trying to be brief and trying to keep some mysteries for the book.

Ailey Jolie (06:25.528)
For me to be able to do that, I have decided to take this pause to one, really remove myself from my client work so that I can just focus on my body. am well now. I'm very well now. It's been such a journey and I'm so grateful to be well and also to focus on writing this book and to honor the kind of sacred

contract that I made in the MRI. Another reason why I'm taking this medical leave and this writing leave is to prepare myself for an elective surgery that I will be having this fall. And I know I just spoke about having a lot of surgeries and going through all this stuff with my body and then you're probably like, why would you choose to have an elective surgery? That sounds very strange. And in writing this book, it's come to the forefront of my attention and my awareness of

how important preventative care is on the body and also how important it is to just listen to just the smallest little whisper that comes from your body that tells you, hey, I think you need to pay attention to this. Hey, there's something off here. And so I've chosen this electrosurgery and it's big and it's scary and it's bringing up all types of weird things for me. And I know that I will share more when I'm on the other side of the surgery.

And I'm well and I've processed it and I've integrated it and I've made sense of it. But it's another reason why there's going to be a gap. There's going to be some pause between this episode and the next time you hear my voice in this format. Between now and then there will be some episodes recorded in 2024 and 2025 that will be released on my sub stack every second Thursday. So next Thursday, if you're listening to this on release date,

You'll be able to head over to Substack and we have a series of episodes that called In Conversation. And they're really beautiful. They include journal questions. They go a little bit deeper with the guest and they're just a great way to engage with the podcast community as well. Have some of those deeper conversations around embodiment and really share what came up for you on the podcast. The In Conversation portion of my Substack is not behind a paywall, so it's accessible and available to all of you. Lastly.

Ailey Jolie (08:52.086)
When I return, I will probably have had my elective surgery. I think I will, but what will definitely be happening is I'll be bringing something new with me. Starting in January, I'll be offering a brand new 14 week online course called InBody. It's the most integrated offering I've created so far. It's a space for women to explore the relationship with body through the lens of somatic psychology, narrative healing, spirituality, traditional psychology, meditation, and so much more.

There'll be guided meditations, journal prompts, embodiment practices, psychoeducation sessions, and live calls with me. If you've been wanting to go deeper or to work with me in a more supportive way, this is it. Early Bird Registration is now open through November 1st for 2000 Canadian plus GST. You can put down a deposit and if you change your mind before November 1st, 2025, we will refund you with complete ease. After the Early Bird ends, we will be coming out with payment plans.

And live calls will be scheduled across the time zones to make the course accessible to the most amount of people. This is why deposits are so important because they give us a sense of where everyone is so that we can schedule the calls. You can find out all the details on my website or through the link in the show notes. Okay. But enough with all the logistics and details. Let's get into the heart of today's episode. I asked my paid subscribers on Substack to send me some questions.

Something I plan on doing again when I come back, so if you want to ask questions and have me answer them, paid subscribers on sub stacks is the way.

check out.

Ailey Jolie (10:32.13)
The question that I'm going to start with today is why does my body feel like it's not mine? I look in the mirror and feel like I'm looking at a stranger. I really resonate with this question. I had experienced a lot of traditional therapy and even somatic therapy before I felt like I knew the person and was in the body that I was looking back at when I looked in the mirror.

It was actually after about a year of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, after one specific session, I came home and I just caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I just sat and cried because it was the first time that I felt ownership and understanding and reverence and connectivity to my own image and could be in both the observation of my body, but still be in the felt sense of my body. So when I saw this question, I was so keen, just a little side bracket. You don't have to do psychedelic assisted psychotherapy to be able to really feel your body and to feel a connection to the image of your body. So question really gets to the heart of what we call embodied self ownership and what you're describing and what I was experiencing when I looked in the mirror and

is

Ailey Jolie (11:56.194)
didn't feel a connection to that person I was looking at is a form of disassociation. And it's not the dramatic kind that we see in movies or that maybe you've read about in an Instagram story or seen on a TikTok reel. It's a form of disassociation that's quiet and persistent. And disassociation is really understood as the disconnection from our own physical experience. But because of how female bodies are portrayed,

in the media and through capitalist lenses and consumerism, we have from a very young age, regardless of gender, been trained to see the image of our body as other than our felt experience. So there's this subtle disassociation that is in the culture, just inherently around image. So I just want to name that. But there is also the experience, and this was mine, and was the reason why I felt no connection to my image.

And maybe it will resonate with you. Maybe it won't, but oftentimes people feel this way if they haven't at some point in their life and been safe enough to fully inhabit or fully embody their very own body. So maybe you learned early that your body was something to be managed or controlled, or maybe it's something that was really commented on by other people. Maybe you received messages that your body was too much, not enough, or somehow wrong or something that others could violate or take from. And

If you have any of those experiences, your nervous system in its infinite wisdom creates a distance as a way of creating protection. So our own nervous system, the wisdom of the body, if it's being violated or negatively commented on or harmed will remove us from our body. And when that happens is we also lose that connectivity to our image. And what this process really is, is when we disassociate from our bodies, we lose what's called interoception.

So this is the ability to sense what's happening inside of us. It's ideally when we do a body scan or a meditation or we go to a yoga class or we breathe into our abdomen during Pilates, we're increasing our interoceptive awareness because without this internal awareness, the body can feel foreign like a house that we're visiting rather than one that we're living in. so path back to the body and feeling that connectivity with our

Ailey Jolie (14:18.102)
our own image in the mirror is really one of embodied self ownership and it's gentle and it's gradual and it's slow and it starts with these micro moments of connection. So I started answering this question by sharing that I had this psychedelic experience and I came home and I my image and I felt this connectivity and that was the first time I felt that but I had to then really integrate that through all these micro moments.

At this point in my life, had a very strong yoga practice and a strong meditation practice. And I don't mean physically like doing all the things. mean, I was deeply committed and I had been for a while already in my life. And so I could bring in these micro moments of embodied connection or body fullness. And this kind of looks like placing your hand on your chest and feeling your heartbeat or noticing the temperature of your skin or feeling your feet in your shoes or

really lengthening the sensations of that exhale. So in this, you're not forcing belonging or forcing connection or really making it this huge conscious part of the day. This isn't staring in the mirror and doing intense eye gazing until you feel connection to the image staring back at you. It's actually all those other subtle moments in the day where you

where you honor that you are a soul or being in this body and this body is you and you are this body. And this is how we create interceptive awareness, but it's also how we extend invitations for more consciousness or more self if we use internal family systems language to come home to the body. And the more of our consciousness or self energy or spirit or whatever we want to call it, the more of that that we feel in the body and

we know and we resonate with and we experience, the more likely when we look in that mirror, we will know the person that we're looking at and we will feel like we are them. And so this is how we bridge this gap. again, the gap, it can come from culture. We are all objectified in the culture around us to a degree or another. And then it can also come from trauma. And so I really...

Ailey Jolie (16:39.886)
I love this question because it brings up so much and it's an experience that we've probably all had to some degree or another of not recognizing ourselves in a selfie or a photo or a video or even the mirror. So the next question that we have is, can't tell the difference between intuition and anxiety anymore. They both feel urgent in my body. How do I discern what's actually true? I love this question.

because I get to say something that I say inside my mind often. And it's this little piece of information that anxiety and excitement run the same circuitry of the brain. And I say that to myself often because I am relatively hardwired to be a quite excitable, bubbly,

Zesty fiery human, which means that I have a lot of arousal. I have a lot of adrenaline and I have a lot of cortisol pulsing through my body like all the time. so depending on my frame of mind and my mindfulness practice or my yoga practice or my movement practice or my journaling or what's happening in the world, that natural hard writing and my nervous system can get framed into anxiety or excitement.

So I know that the question was really wanting to speak about the difference between intuition and anxiety. But before we got there, I wanted to give just that little piece of information because I feel like it gives us great context into how we understand anxiety and how we understand intuition. So we know when the nervous system has been in survival mode, everything can feel.

Urgent, everything can feel like a threat or an emergency. And we also know that anxiety lives in your future or your past. It's never in the present moment. It's your nervous system trying to control outcomes to prevent imagined disasters, to solve problems that may never exist. Anxiety contracts your awareness, narrows your options, and demands your immediate action and attention. Intuition, on the other hand, lives in the present moment. It's spacious.

Ailey Jolie (19:04.384)
Even when it's guiding you towards difficult truths, it does so in a really graceful way. I know for myself, a few years ago I had this horrific rental experience. I tell this story and people are like, my goodness, I'm so sorry. Because it was just so bad. And the whole time I was going through it, I was on a retreat with the class, JC, who's been on the podcast, and then I went to

A woman circle with Shamali has also been on the podcast and I had this spaciousness and I a lot of spaciousness actually to really be in my body and I kind of in the plan and then this huge awful rental thing had happened. so every time I tapped into my body, I knew I was anxious about this. There's a lot of money wrapped up in this really crap experience. And I would tap into my body and I would feel this pulsing energy and I would

use the practices like the class, thank you, JC, she helped during this time and Shamali and to calm myself and to get present. But even when I was calm, I still had this voice that this isn't going to work out well for you. It's really not going to play in your favor here, Ailee. It's really not. And I am so grateful that I had a

a practice that I could hear that as my intuition and discern the difference between it being my intuition and it being anxiety. And I say that I'm grateful because I had the tools and I knew the felt sense of my anxiety in my body and I knew the difference between my intuition and

it's for me kind of speaks in a different language and it doesn't always tell me things I want to hear. Like I really wish that, you know, my intuition had told me something different and I really wish that situation had played out in my favor, but it didn't. I, but one of the many teachings of that experience of which there have been so many, even though it was, you know, quite a superficial thing, but it was quite

Ailey Jolie (21:27.116)
teachings of which there are many, taught me my capacity to discern the difference between my anxiety and my intuition, because intuition will say hard things, but it will say them in such a way that it's still and it's calm. And there's emotion and there's feeling around it. There's not just like panic energy, because in the body, anxiety often does feel tight and restricted and is accompanied by shallow breathing and muscular tension.

But intuition feels more expensive even when it's guiding us in ways that we don't really like or we wish a different outcome, but there's space around it and it breathes. When my clients come with a question like this, I always just ask, what is the story in your head? Let's pull this apart between anxiety and excitement. When my clients come with something like this, I always do some of that history checking of like, okay, are you someone?

who runs a little bit higher on the arousal or on that sympathetic nervous system state. Are you kind of like me? He's got a little bit more juice in the battery than others. And if yes, how do you frame your anxiety in your mind? Is it always anxiety? Do you have a relationship to excitement? Do you know the difference between the two? Because that's so essential to know the difference.

It's so essential to know the difference. then once those have been pulled apart, then it can be this conversation around, okay, what tools do you use for your anxiety? You know, what works for you? What is the cycle that you need to complete? And having that context information around what is the natural state of the body, if it's a little bit higher or a little bit lower, will give us information on how we complete the stress response cycle so that the anxiety can actually complete its physiological response.

So then it can be in that space of, was this anxiety or was this my intuition? Because it's only when the anxiety gives a little bit of space will we be able to hear the intuition. And your intuition, like in my super, super, super crap rental situation, both of them were saying the same thing, the exact same thing. But I could actually receive it and then be strategic.

Ailey Jolie (23:52.574)
and thoughtful and mindful and also quite angry when I could honor it with my intuition versus my anxiety, which was just everywhere. So this is slow work and it starts by noticing moments when you feel genuinely at ease and moments when you feel genuinely a little bit anxious and it requires digging into your past and learning about your stress response cycle and where you are with your nervous system, kind of more baseline.

but it is a really beautiful process and it's such a deep and intimate way of knowing yourself but also the world around you because...

Because intuition is all of the things that we say it is. It's total super super power. And when you can really discern that away from your anxiety, you really start to tap into the full wisdom that's within your body. And when you have that, mean, it's different. Okay, so the next question. My nervous system seems stuck in hypervigilance even when I'm objectively safe.

Superpower.

Ailey Jolie (25:06.134)
I can't relax what's happening in my body. Hypervigilance is your nervous system's way of trying to keep you safe by staying constantly alert to potential threats. just like I shared about how I'm kind of a little like, a little zesty as a human that is a natural kind of residue in my nervous system of being someone who lived with a lot of hypervigilance for a very, very, very long time.

And hypervigilance is really when the nervous system and the body gets stuck on this on position and your body never gets the message that the danger has passed or the threat is gone or that we can take the big exhale now. So hypervigilance really develops when we've experienced chronic stress or trauma or undetectable environments where vigilance was actually necessary for our survival. So not being able to rest in the body is a sign that the body has done a good job at protecting and it just hasn't got the information just yet that things have changed.

And so it's really important if this is you, it's important, it's really important if this is you to honor that the exhaustion you feel isn't just mental, it's nervous system fatigue and being hypervigilant requires tremendous energy and your body's working overtime when you're trying to rest. So the path toward regulation isn't about forcing relaxation that often backfires and makes the nervous system more vigilant. It's about teaching your body that it can let its guard down.

incrementally and that safety can be built in small moments. For me, this is a really slow, slow, slow, slow process and over many years of my life, I don't think any everyone needs a multi-year process to be able to actually release the hypervigilance and go into more of that parasympathetic nervous systems date and get that really juicy yummy

relaxation and rest, but for me, it required this titration of slowly moving down the stimulus and the arousal and the adrenaline in my nervous system. And with my background in movement, that was kind of the process of doing this really intense movement. Also, you know, really intense therapy.

Ailey Jolie (27:27.982)
psychedelic assisted psychotherapy at some points, also trauma treatment centers and eating disorder treatment centers and really intensity and just slowly moving it down. And I brought in the psychological intensity as well and kind of moving that down because stress, regardless of it being physical or psychological, fills up the same cup. And so if we have a really large capacity because of trauma or because of our history,

Okay.

Ailey Jolie (27:57.112)
hold stress and our body's used to holding stress, it's going to be hypervigently looking around for more stress that could just somehow end up in our cup and guard and safeguard against it. So it's really important to just like slowly go, actually, you don't need to hold all this stress. Actually, you can let a little bit more go. And so over time, I noticed that in myself of actually choosing things slowly that were a little less intense.

a little less demanding, quite a little bit more space, a little bit more pause until I found myself in a place where I could spend weeks on a silent meditation retreat or I could spend time just reading a book at home because that's something I really couldn't do with how fast my brain moved. I'd be like reading a book and

you

Ailey Jolie (28:49.568)
listening to podcasts and taking notes on both of them at the same time. It was just how my system was wired because of this hypervigilance. And so I offer a little bit of that tidbit because oftentimes it gets pathologized. Like I can't rest what's wrong with me or you should know how to relax, but it's actually really hard in our very primed capitalist and productive society that really values that to take that pause. And so if you are someone who, you know, you are working

has been stripped from.

with your physiology to do something different, but you're also working against the cultural norm to learn something different.

So the next question ties into pieces of what we just spoke about. So the question is, why do I feel safer being disconnected from my body even in therapy, embodiment work feels threatening? Question, there is such a giant misconception that body-based psychotherapy, so somatics or embodiment practices should be easy and

Love this

Ailey Jolie (29:57.39)
fluid and calm and spacious and yummy and connective and we should just be able to do it because we know it's good for us. However, that is definitely not my experience when I gave into body-based psychotherapy or somatics and I can say with confidence it is not the norm. And the reason is our

world around us, put aside personal trauma, a world around us, how it's designed and set up is not done in such a way that would support our connectivity to our body. If anything, the world around all of us is designed in such a way to lead us into disembodiment. So

If you feel safe for being disconnected from your body makes perfect sense. That is how the culture and society around the majority of humans in the world today has taught them and trained them to be so that they are safe in the world. So I want to always acknowledge that this intelligence of disconnection from the body is, you know, wise and this isn't your nervous system being difficult. It's being protected.

And for some of us, disconnection from the body was literally a survival strategy. I'm one of those people. And your body, it's really having a hard time, you know, being able to be accessed in somatics or yoga or embodiment practice, your body's doing the thing it knows how to do and it's doing it really well. Your body knows how to keep you safe and it's like,

I'm not going there today, not today. I don't know, but this doesn't feel safe or I'm not ready yet or I need more support or this is going to take time. I need to know that it's going to be okay for me to go in there. Specifically, if your body holds memories of violation or betrayal or overwhelming pain, staying disconnected can feel like the safest option. And this is because your nervous system learned that feeling everything meant feeling too much.

So.

Ailey Jolie (32:25.068)
And disassociation became a brilliant adaptation, a way to survive the experiences that were too intense to metabolize. The threat you feel around embodiment work or somatics isn't irrational. It's totally normal. And it might be your way of your body saying, if I start to feel, I might feel everything. If I open up, I might not be able to close back down. If I inhabit this body fully, I might remember what I've been trying to forget. And those are things I have said.


Ailey Jolie (32:54.99)
There are things I've heard in trainings. It's all so, so, so normal. And so I really, if this is you and you feel disconnected from your body and go to a somatic therapist and you feel threatening or weird or overwhelming or crunchy or icky,

I've heard clients say...

Ailey Jolie (33:14.818)
That's part of the process.

And you know, there does come a point where you're like, maybe I should go try someone else or try a different practice. Of course. But also that discomfort is a natural, is natural considering all of the factors I've spoken about. And so what I also want to just add to this is that healing never requires you to force. I have done a lot of quote unquote healing things and a lot of them were done with force.


And I look back at those experiences and hindsight is always 20-20. And I'm very mindful that I am here today and I have a life that I really love and I have congruency and I'm well. It's kind of a foreign concept considering my history and being someone who lived with.

really intense PTSD for a very long time. And so I don't want to sound hypocritical, but

Ailey Jolie (34:24.469)
is such a danger.

dress word, isn't it? But I look back at some of those healing, healing, quote unquote, experiences or practices I engaged with and the ones that I did with force. When I heard the voice that went, mm, Ailee, I don't know about this. Mm, it feels kind of overwhelming. Mm, I know they're saying that you should go do XYZ. Mm, I think Y is just good for you. Every time that I forced

that voice inside my mind. Nothing good happened. Nothing could happen. I can very much pinpoint and go, you know what? I heard that and I forced it. you know, I knew I was deeply overwhelmed and doing another EMDR session, probably not super helpful, but I forced my psyche in this way. I want to honor some people can't get that force. It's just not how they're.

their nervous system is driven, but as I kind of named, I have this really intense kind of blasting energy. And so I use that oftentimes to force past my body and my own limits. So I say this as a deep reverence. If this is your system and your system is saying, just don't feel ready yet, or feels really hard or threatening, just honor that. Go slow.

it comes last.

Ailey Jolie (35:50.754)
Be patient, build safety, expand your capacity. And this might mean starting with the edges or just maybe noticing your breath for three breaths or noticing your little toes as they wiggle around or placing your hand on your heart and just feeling the heat. We're not trying to feel everything all at once. No one is saying that you have to feel everything or feel it all at once. The intention with

all of somatics or body-based psychotherapy is that you build a relationship with your body and that relationship is in your choice and in your control and in your curiosity and in your care ultimately as well. So your body will tell you when it's ready for more. You don't have to force, you don't have to push past those voices and just trust that and trust that it's timing and trust the limitations that you're perceiving in the moment.

Trust them as insight and information into the ways that your body has kept you safe in the past and also trust that, you know, there is a voice that's saying, hey, I don't think just yet or hey, I don't know about this. You know, that's such a beautiful piece of information and reassurance that there is a voice and an intelligence inside of you keeping you safe.

This next question is, how do I know what my body actually needs versus what my conditioning tells me I should need? This question is really at the heart of what we call embodied liberation. So your body's authentic needs have been overlaid with decades and decades and generations of conditioning that tells all of us what we should want, what we need to do to be accepted, what makes us a good person.

How you kind of start pulling this apart is really listening for the should. So conditioning speaks in this language of shoulds. You should be productive. You should be grateful. You should need less. You should be stronger. You should be more present online. You should be kinder. You should be more romantic. Your body's authentic needs speak in sensations and impulses and quiet, quiet and speaking, quiet knowing I'm tired and I'm hungry. need more space. I want connection. I want intimacy. I want

Ailey Jolie (38:11.904)
nature. Many of us have learned to distrust our body's voices and our body's signals and our body's impulses. And if your needs were inconvenient or too much or met with punishment in the past, we can really learn how to silence this. And that's why it's so important to do this process that we sometimes call somatic archaeology. And this is the just a gentle activation of your true desires from underneath the layers of conditioning. This starts with small moments of honest inquiry like

What does my body actually want right now? Not what I think it should want, but what is it actually asking for? Why I, I love this question of the cultural conditioning of should and what the body actually wants is I have a body that loves, loves some foods and it won't say them aloud as a clinician who knows how to work with eating disorders, but my body loves some particular foods that the culture would put around as quote unquote bad food.

I don't believe that they're bad food. They're just foods that my body really, really loves and thrives on and does really well with. And there have been multiple moments in my life, specifically when I was sick, where I would go to one of these foods and have them and just be like, thank you. This is, this is to me right now, the most nourishing thing that there could ever be. just, for me, this works.

And I would oftentimes have people in my life comment and say, you should probably have da da da or you should, your meal, your meal should be balanced in this way. Or why are you having to do? And I was quite sick. It was very sick, but all of my time really building this relationship with my body made it pretty much impossible for me to listen to anyone else. Now my body is telling me that I need this right now.

I need, need, need, need, need this right now. And maybe that need is because life is really, really hard right now, or I'm scared, or this reminds me of another time, or maybe the contents in this food is like even my body, hardcore boosted needs. I didn't do an investigation into why I needed it. I just allowed the need to be real. And I think that this specific one around what we should, should do with the body and what

Ailey Jolie (40:38.53)
We hear the body ask for or want or need is such a beautiful place to practice with food and our relationship with food because there are so many narratives around we should and should not put in our bodies. The reality that our body wants things and it needs things and we don't always need to understand or make sense of it. We just need to honor it and hear it. The next question that we have is I can give love easily, but receiving it makes me want to run.

And then they just

Ailey Jolie (41:08.226)
What happens in my nervous system when someone tries to take care of me? This is such a common pattern, and it speaks to how early attachment experiences shape our nervous system's capacity to receive care. For many of us, giving love feels safer than receiving it because giving keeps us in control. When someone tries to take care of you, your nervous system might interpret this as vulnerability, as dependent, as potential danger.

And maybe you learned early that receiving care came with strings attached, that love was conditional, that needing others led to disappointment or harm. And your body might have cataloged this information. If I need too much, I'll be abandoned. If I receive care, I'll owe something in return. If I let someone take care of me, I'll be vulnerable to their choices, their moods, their availability. The impulse to run when someone offers care isn't a rejection of them. It's your nervous system trying to protect you from the perceived threat of interdependence.

your body learned that self-reliance was safer than vulnerability. And I am someone who definitely felt this way for almost all of my adult life. And I look back at a lot of my romantic relationships that were quite healthy and beautiful. And I can see how I didn't know how to receive care or love or

nurturance and how I did all of these things to try and push that away. And it wasn't really until I got sick more recently, and there's several moments in that experience because it took me a while to learn this lesson of receiving care where I surrendered and just let someone take care of me. And I really had to learn the extreme of that of like being carried into A &E or just fully surrendering, not by choice, my body. And

I re-

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allowing myself to receive and it was probably the hardest lesson I've had to learn is that I can receive care and there isn't something that's going to be taken from me or it's not going to be used against me. But for me, this was such a hard lesson. And so I have a lot of compassion and space in my heart for the person who sent this question or if this resonates with you, you know,

receiving love and allowing yourself to do that when love has been coupled with betrayal or deception or violence like it was in my experience. Essentially though learning to receive care or love requires slow expansion of your nervous system's capacity to tolerate being cared for and this might start with receiving care from yourself noticing what it feels like to give to yourself what you need to be gentle with your own struggles.

You can practice receiving in tiny doses. I didn't really get that experience in being sick. had a pretty good self-love and self-care practice, but definitely really struggled to receive it from men in romantic relationship. It was lot more comfortable receiving it from male platonic friends, but not so much romantic relationship. Definitely learned. I had a big growing spot. If you aren't thrown into the depths of the health,

crisis, you can start practicing by receiving it in tiny doses, maybe letting someone buy you coffee, maybe it's accepting a compliment without deflecting, maybe it's allowing someone to help you with something small. Your nervous system needs evidence that receiving care can be safe and that interdependence doesn't automatically mean danger. The people who love you want to care for you, not because you're broken, but because caring for each other is how humans bond, how we create connection and how we heal.

actually such a gift to let someone be there for you in that space and I'm so grateful that I had someone teach me that that was.

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a gift that I was giving them.

Our next question is, I've spent years learning to be regulated and calm, but lately I'm wondering if I've been regulating myself into compliance. How do I know when my nervous system regulation is actually serving me versus silencing me? such a good one. Love this question. This question cuts right to the heart of what's happening in wellness culture right now. And it's a topic that's really thick in my book and well,

What you're asking about is really the difference between authentic regulation and what I call regulation as compliance. And it's one of the most crucial distinctions we can make in our kind of healing journey, quote unquote. True nervous system regulation creates more capacity for your authentic self to emerge. It supports your ability to feel deeply, to maintain boundaries, to access your voice when it's needed. It grounds you so that you can respond from integrity rather than survival patterns.

Regulation as compliance on the other hand teaches you to manage your authentic responses in the service of appearing healed or keeping others comfortable. It asks you to be calm when you should be angry, understanding when you should be boundary, peaceful in situations call for disruption. I know that might sound a bit heady, so here's how you can feel the difference in your body. Authentic regulation feels like coming home to yourself even when you're processing difficult emotions.

There's a sense of groundedness of being connected to your own truth. You can feel your boundaries. You can access your voice. Your needs feel clear and valid. Regulation as compliance feels like performance. You might appear calm on the surface, but there's tightness underneath. I imagine a little duck paddling under the water, paddle, paddle, paddle, paddle, they look just like useful floaters on top. So one thing you can do is ask yourself, does my...

Ailey Jolie (46:57.742)
you know, my regulation practice, my breath work, my meditation, my yoga, my movement, my whatever, help me feel more of myself or less? Does it support my ability to say no when I mean no? Does it help me stay present with my anger, grief, or fear? Or does it teach me to transcend these emotions before I fully metabolize them? The world doesn't need more regulated people who can do anything with serenity. It needs embodied people who can distinguish between what serves their genuine

self and their authentic expression and what serves someone else's comfort. Your nervous system job isn't to make you palatable, it's to help you stay present with what's true. I often really ask my clients this question because there is a lot of wellness practices right now and wisdom taken from somatic traditions that can make you feel really calm and in a parasympathetic state and less reactionary and

That's beautiful, but it's really also important to check in with, have I lost my capacity for reaction? Because there is wisdom in the full mind-body spectrum. And to notice the part that experiences anger and has that fierceness or that blast of energy or that zest, to know that that still exists within you and that you haven't lost access to it because you're now kind of embodying

or performing one version of what you think wellness culture or wellbeing, what you think wellbeing looks like because of wellness culture. So I love this question. It's so nuanced. There's so much more that we could pull into and get into. I do have an article on Substack all about this. So if you're keen to kind of dive in a little bit more, it's there for you.

I've been told my whole life that my anger isn't spiritual or feminine. Now in my healing journey, I keep getting the message that I need to transmute or alchemize my rage. How do I reclaim my anger without spiritual bypassing? This question, the idea, where I would like to start with this question is that the idea that anger is unspiritual or unfeminine.

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isn't wisdom, it's conditioning designed to keep us compliant within systems that harm us. Anger is information, it's such good information. It tells you when your boundaries have been violated, when something sacred is under threat, when the status quo is no longer acceptable. When spiritual communities ask you to transmute your anger before you fully felt it, they're asking you to abandon your instincts in service of appearing evolved. This is what I call spiritual bypassing, disguised as healing.

same patriarchal conditioning dressed up in wellness language, telling women that their authentic responses are too much, too messy, too disruptive for spiritual advancement. But the truth is spiritual work doesn't ask you to transcend your anger. It asks you to have a conscious relationship with it. This means feeling it fully in your body, understanding what it's trying to protect, and then choosing how to respond from that informed place and staying in relationship with your anger. So you're noticing it at all times. It's not something you just raged out or

sticks around and then it's gone, it's there, it's a voice, it's a part of you, it's a piece of wisdom and insight and information. So start by giving your anger permission to exist without immediately trying to fix, heal, spiritualize it, understand it, feel where it lives in your body, really know that place inside of you.

So maybe it's heat in your chest, tension in your jaw, energy in your hands, let it move through you, maybe through vigorous movement, maybe through writing, maybe through screaming into pillows, whatever. Feel it in your body, get to know its texture, if it comes with an image, a sound, a movement, let it expand, let it be present. And as you build that relationship, then you'll know the next time you're in a situation, you start to feel that tension in your fingers. You're like, yeah.

That's the part of me that holds my anger. Maybe I'm gonna like get very mindful and thoughtful in this situation and really listen to what's happening in this conversation because this part of me that I know my anger goes to is starting to feel tight. The goal isn't to become this super angry human being who's always feeling the fingers or anything like that. It's to become someone who can feel and work with their anger consciously.

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Some of the most spiritually advanced in air quote people I know are those who can feel their rage at injustice and let it fuel their compassionate action in the world. Your anger is not a spiritual problem to solve, it's spiritual information to

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body.