Ep 52 with Courtney Smith

Ailey Jolie: 00:00

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile 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, a 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 body.

Ailey Jolie: 00:49

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, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to In This Body. I'm Ailey Jolie, and today I'm with Courtney Smith, an executive coach and Eneogram expert, and co-author with Elise Lohan on the workbook Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, a process for reclaiming your full self. Courtney's path is beautifully unexpected. Yale Law, a master's in public health, over a decade at McKinsey advising healthcare and nonprofit organizations, then stepping away to raise her family. During that pause, she began examining the assumptions, habits, and patterns running her life, which led her into the deep study of the Enneagram with renowned teacher Russ Hudson, trainings with the conscious leadership group, the Alexander Technique, and the work of Byron Cady. What makes Courtney's work so compelling is how she integrates the mystical with the pragmatic, the analytic with the somatic. At the heart of her practice is conviction that the most reliable path back to her presence begins with the body, because sensations are here now. Today we're exploring how fear shapes our choices without us realizing it, the drama triangle and how it keeps us stuck, and what it actually means to choose wholeness over the relentless pursuit of goodness. I hope you enjoy this episode of In This Body with me, Ailey Jolie. So, my first question for you is a question that I often start my time with guests. And I would love to hear from you what is your definition or your understanding of being in your body today?

Courtney Smith: 02:32

When I think about what it means to be in your body or to inhabit your body, the first thing that I think about is would I be willing to be curious, aware, and welcoming of any sensations I'm experiencing? And would I be willing to let my attention go there? Which doesn't mean it's the only thing my attention goes to, but I am committed to at least some portion of my attention, tracking the sensations that are flowing through my body with curiosity, acceptance, and profound trust that those sensations serve me.

Ailey Jolie: 03:13

And you will correct me, but I'm assuming that there is a little bit of a journey or a story to the understanding of embodiment that you just provided for myself and the listener. And I know that you have a history of academia and working in um a very intense corporate sector, I would say. And I would love for you to just share the pieces that you feel are resonant for the listener to get to know you and to understand not only your perspective of embodiment, but the work that you offer the world today.

Courtney Smith: 03:48

It is true that um my professional experience begins in what I would call a very heady space, where I was a lawyer by training. I work at a management consulting firm. I really gravitated toward fields and a way of being in the world that was heavily analytical, a lot of uh linear thinking, a lot of deep dose of skepticism, and really trying to figure out how things work. Really a baked an assumption that the way we figure out how things work and the way we figure out what to do next is something that can be answered through a heady way of knowing, breaking it down, investigating it, looking at it from every angle, doing research, pumping up against it to check its validity. And that really was a dominant way of being for me, really the bulk of my life. And I got a lot of feedback that that was a great way of being. That's what I got hired to do for the different companies that I worked for. And it it really, really, really served me well. And eventually I took a little bit of time off to have children. And when I did that, I was staying at home and I had two small little ones, and eventually came to the realization that that wasn't the right way for me to be in the world. And when I mean right, it's interesting to like talk about it in the context of the body, not not congruent with what lit this body up. And as part of that realization and needing to take responsibility for that and figuring out what I wanted to do next, I really embarked on a whole bunch of personal transformation work and a whole different bunch of different tools, a bunch of different teachers. And one of the modalities that I became exposed to and obsessed with is this personality tool called the Enneagram. And the Enneogram is can be looked at a lot of different ways. Sort of it's most accessible in the way that it's kind of commonly understood is it's a personality typology tool that roughly categorizes people into one of nine different types. So that's the way we sort of think about it now. Like if you were to Google what is the Enneagram, you might end up at Truality Truity or, you know, personality cafe or something like that, and they would take you through like a free test and you could figure out like what type you are. That's one way of interfacing with the Enneagram. At the same time, a lot of the threads and inputs that go into that personality system are actually rooted in very, very old spiritual traditions in the West about what it means to be a human being. When you start to study and interact with the Enneagram, not just at a typology level, but what were some of these scholars, deep thinkers whose ideas informed the Enneagram, they were really wrestling with what it means to be human and why we're here. What is unique? What is what are some of the fundamental challenges about being human? And over here, how I would understand it, one of the fundamental challenges of being human is to both be a creature of animal and spirit, right? To be a bridge that's operating in both worlds. We tend to think of ourselves as either an animal body or a spiritual body, and we find tension between the two of those. One of the big foundational assumptions of the Enneagram, not just at a personality level, but at a deeper level, is part of being human is to reconcile these two aspects of ourself. And as I was beginning to think about that, and actually not just think about that at an intellectual level, but begin to look at like where were those ideas showing up in my life, both in good ways and maladaptive ways. One thing that began to happen for me is you begin to relate to your body differently. From the perspective of the Enneagram, personality is a set of tools and strategies that we use to help get our needs met. But by definition, when we start to pre-baked assumptions of how we're gonna show up in the world, by definition, we actually take ourselves out of presence because we now have rigid set expectations of how we're gonna be rather than letting our way of being emerge. And so, regardless of what type you are and what personality you start out with, one of the core tools that I work with myself and I offer my clients is if we want to be present and we actually believe there's value in being present, how do I do that? And over here, my learning came to be that the most reliable path back to presence begins with the body because sensations are here now. And when we look at feelings or thoughts, feelings and thoughts are often generated by things that happened long ago or things that we imagine may or may not happen. And so they're actually not a reliable channel back to what is happening right now. And so as I began to study and work with the Enneagram, I had always, I had not always, I had for several years already done meditation, but it really shifted my presencing practice to understanding to begin always with body sensation. And the more I grounded myself in body sensation, and this is the paradox of the Enneagram, oddly, the more present and spiritually grounded I felt. And so rather than animal and spirit being in opposition to one another, the more I was willing to be with my actual bodily sensations and to trust that they were a reliable path or conduit to the present, the more grounded and in my body I felt, the more I became available for all the other things that are in the present moment that have a spiritual quality. And so it really like kind of rocked my way of being in the world because it it put the head needing to be grounded in the body first in order for it to do its thing, which was a very opposite way of being for me for most of my life.

Ailey Jolie: 10:17

You named it there, which is something that I've often encountered, which is why one of the reasons why I want to spend time with you is your knowledge and how you bring the Enneagram and how you speak about presents and these pieces. But in that there, you name the paradox there of the Enneagram can give us a really deep understanding of personality traits, maybe relational strategies, all of these things. I know for myself, there was a time in my life where I was like super keen and really, really into it. But I know for me and some of the clients that I've worked with, I also used all that information as like a beautiful way of bypassing any of the stuff inside. I was like, well, I know, I I know that I will act this way and I will be attracted to these types of people and I shall struggle here. So like I don't need to sit with the sensations because I have this. And I would just love for you, if if it feels possible and and and resonant, for you to dive into that a little bit deeper. Because I think using any type of self-development knowledge, or we can use the enne here, to bypass the body and actually get away from all of the wisdom and the residue of the past that maybe has created these personality structures.

Courtney Smith: 11:30

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things I could say about this. And, you know, I want to just name that even though I can talk about this, it doesn't mean that I have it all figured out in my life, that it's something that I'm regular evolution with myself. I think one thing that I would sort of say upfront is, you know, in scientific inquiry, they talk about is this tool a descriptive tool or a prescriptive tool? And what we mean by that is are we using the tool to describe what is, or are we using the tool as a prescription for growth and movement? One of the things I really love about the Enneagram is that it's both. It is both designed to help you see what's really going on in service of growth and evolution. And one frustration I have sometimes with, you know, on the one hand, I love that the Enneagram is broadly accessible and people, you know, and it's like featured in White Lotus and these other, you know, like what type are you? And that's kind of like I get a giggle out of that. And at the same time, when we touch into the system in a more superficial way, that's a fine place to start. But if we leave it there, often the tool can be weaponized to validate and justify and rationalize to just keep doing even more. I see you, keep doing even more of what you do. And that would be using the tool in a descriptive way. And I want to argue that if you look at the antecedent texts and the objectives and the inquiries of the people, the founding individuals that really contribute to the tradition of the Enneagram, it has always been in service of evolution, awakening, emergence. And so it is holding the Enneagram as a tool for describing and helping me see who I am is really just the first step in a bigger game. And understandably, that gets lost when, you know, you Google what the Enneagram is or you ask ChatGBT. And so that's one of the big things that I like to talk with people about when I work with them, A, to make sure they're up for that, but also because um some people have been turned off by the system because their broader exposure has been to it being weaponized. That's one of the things I like to do is help people see there's another way of holding it and using it.

Ailey Jolie: 13:53

And this is a larger sociocultural question. See, we can dip in as much as you like, but you named it there of like there being an engagement with the superficial. I think this extends out into a larger realm of even personal development or embodiment work or therapy. There's like a curiosity to maybe learn some of the language. We scratch the surface, we like it, we adapt some of it, but the actual like real juicy depth, maybe not so comfortable, maybe actually deeply uncomfortable pieces oftentimes don't get the same buy-in or don't get the same lead-in. And I would love to hear from you how you yourself have maybe even experienced that and how you support individuals when they're wanting something deeper, but maybe don't know how to find it or it hasn't been presented in such an accessible way.

Courtney Smith: 14:46

Yeah, so I'm gonna say what emerged like as I sit in my body and I'm grounded in my sensations and I'm, you know, looking at your lovely face and experiencing the attunement between the two of us. Like I'm just gonna say what arises to my mind in this now moment. You know, many of my teachers, Diana Chapman is a really good friend and uh collaborator and um one of my early teachers. And she really stands for the idea that many, many people start down the path of waking up and stop. And she really wants to honor the intelligence of that. Because over here, one of the things that I would say is that when we enter this world as little people, we start out in presence. We start out in the present moment. That's all we know how to do, actually. And present moment is a wash and sensation. Much of that sensation is uncomfortable. And so I would argue that part of the reason personality, no human being doesn't have a personality. It's a universal trait. There might be a wide variation in what those personalities are, but we all have one. I would argue that the personality is the natural response that emerges to help a human being deal with the discomfort of the present moment. It is a really, really smart strategy that helps us manage. We all talk about, like, oh, I want to be present. Oh, yeah. Do you actually? Are you willing actually to be present? Because it's really uncomfortable at times, profoundly uncomfortable. So because the personality arises to deal with the overwhelming discomfort of the present moment that happens at times, no matter what personality you are, there is a way of managing discomfort that is baked into it. And so when we talk about growth, whether we use the Enneagram or another any other tool for personal development, we are talking about peeling away strategies that in some ways have served us because they've helped us get to where we are, but we're typically experiencing other forms of suffering or cost or pain because of those strategies that's causing us to want to like undo them. And typically we kind of want our cake and eat it too. It's like, well, I want, I want the ways that this strategy works for me, but I also, I'm also getting feedback that it's causing me to fight with my partner, or I'm, you know, I'm not able to accomplish professionally what I want, or I have no idea what I want. Like I start feeling these other costs. And so I've got the benefit of my strategy, which is it allows me to titrate the parts of the presence that I find good and the parts of presence that I find uncomfortable. But it also has a cost, which it limits my range, limits my tool set, and it's automated rather than intentional. So it doesn't always get me what I want. And I start weighing those things. And typically, as a coach, I show up for someone when they're in the middle of that accounting dilemma. Like, this is really working for me, it feels really familiar. It's helping me like stay alive, it's helping me manage, get out of bed in the morning. Ah, but it's costing me in all these ways. And so my role as a coach is the stuff over here compelling enough that we're willing to risk and experience more discomfort in sake of these larger objectives. And eventually, if you're someone like me, and again, I'm gonna talk about this at an aspirational level, knowing that I fall down all the time. If you're like me and someone who's been on this journey for a long while, you begin to realize that actually discomfort is not just something to tolerate, it is actually the way through. And no problem when I resist being uncomfortable over here. I'm gonna do it over and over and over again because I am a human being. But at some level, if I commit myself at a higher purpose to awakening or emerging or my own evolution, I understand that baked into that commitment is an ever-growing capacity to be with what is, even if it is profoundly uncomfortable.

Ailey Jolie: 19:10

Thank you for that. And how you broke it down was so unique. I really appreciated just even the playfulness that you brought in there with doing the accounting. Because it is like that is the balancing point, essentially. And I would love to hear from you if there was maybe a moment in your own life where there's a few quotes, classic quotes that go through my mind, but in essence, the discomfort or staying in the discomfort was so intolerable that you just had to, like there was no other option. And I would love for you to maybe share if you feel comfortable any of those moments, because in my time spending time with people one-on-one, it's often so helpful to hear the stories of others who have been in that same place and will be in that place again and again throughout our lives. And to make that choice of actually the only way out is through.

Courtney Smith: 20:02

The first thing that I would say is, you know, I spoke a little bit about when I was, you know, I'd had this big kind of professional corporate life. And then I took some time off to raise children. And, you know, oftentimes that aha moment that I'm speaking about of that, like, what am I doing? For me at least, but I think this is true for other people too, happens when the reason the reason that we're twisting ourselves into knots, the thing that we're hoping to experience or we're hoping to create in this world, we realize that the strategies we're using to go after that are actually backfiring and taking us further away from what we long to experience. And so for me, when I made the decision to stay home with my children, it was in service of my children, right? And, you know, I had lots of friends who worked and I didn't have any judgment about that, but I did have at least some internal judgment that I hadn't fully explored because I did make a choice. What would be best for my children is for me to stop working. And what would be best for my marriage would be for me to stop working so that someone can be dedicated to these children and take care of their needs. I really made that in service of my marriage and in service of my family, I'm gonna stop working. And lo and behold, what I discovered is in order to do that, I was denying a lot of parts of me that actually didn't want to do other stuff in this world. And I was stuffing them down and I was prioritizing the needs of others over my own. That leaked out very counterproductive ways in terms of how I began to interact with my husband and how I began to interact with my children. Um, so I was resentful, I blamed them, I ended up oftentimes relating to it from like, I don't want to be here, or this is an obligation as opposed to something that is freely chosen on my part. I began to relate to. It from like, I don't have a choice. The work I would use now would say that I was kind of like caught in a in the drama triangle of like victimhood consciousness for the choices that I had made. And so it really took requiring getting feedback from my husband and from my children. This isn't very pleasant. You say you're doing this for the sake of the family and for the sake of your marriage, but the reality is that you are putting your family and marriage at risk because of your lack of willingness to focus on what really you want and what makes you come alive and what feels really makes you happy to be here, which is still being a mom and is still being a wife, but just on very different terms. And so it it really took that confronting, I'm getting in my own way, in a really big way for me to begin to embark on some of this work.

Ailey Jolie: 22:56

Thank you so much for the piece of your history that you shared because it it opens up so many threads for me to ask questions around what is such a common socialization pattern of like, I'm gonna take my lean needs like very, very last and provide to everyone else around me. And somehow that that's just all gonna work out. And I would love to explore before I ask you about the drama triangle, which I'm gonna circle back to. I would love to ask you some questions around what you feel like creates a socialization pattern, why it's so important that we break out of it. And my third little question in there is how do we notice that we're in it before maybe we see it or we feel it in our bodies?

Courtney Smith: 23:38

Okay, so I would argue that one of the ways that socialization actually ends up working, the actual process of socialization, we receive an externalized message about identity or about how we should be or what we should do. And we perceive it as an externalized message. And then we have to decide whether to be in accordance with that or not. And when we contemplate, and I'm speaking about this as if it's like this very like structured, and when all this is happening like really fast and unconsciously, when we think about daring to act or conceive of ourselves in a way that is different than externally received messages, when we contemplate deviating like that, fear is going to arise. I teach and have learned that there are three broad buckets of fears. There's fear of loss of security, fear of loss of approval, and fear of loss of control. The experience of fear in the body is profoundly uncomfortable. So this is a great example of to connect it to what I was talking about earlier. I'm in the present moment. I've got this external, external message, you know, good girls don't get angry. I'm feeling in the present moment a ton of anger, actually. What do I do about that? I can go into the anger, but I can feel fear now arising in my body about the loss of approval I might risk if I do something that is out of alignment with what I've been told. I can feel a loss of security that in that people might abandon me or something bad might happen to me if I make such a bold choice. So now I've got the sensations of anger arising in my body, but now layered on top of them are the sensations of fear. I actually go towards what feels in alignment with myself, which is to be angry. I am going to have to tolerate the sensations of fear in my body. And that is a very, very difficult ask. What many of us choose, myself included, is again back to that accounting ledger, it feels less costly to me to just give in or align myself with what has been externally taught to me. Because if I do that, it is true that I have to disconnect from my anger and I have to figure out what to do about my anger, but it keeps me feeling safe. And so those profound feelings of discomfort that are arising in the body around fear, I don't feel them anymore. And so I make a choice. I'd rather suppress, disassociate, deny all these things that we do about our own internal experience so that I don't have to feel fear. That's a lot where my like the idea of socialized messages, but up against what we were talking about earlier in terms of the human journey of being with discomfort and all the way the personality emerges as a response for titrating or managing discomfort. I would argue that a lot of the personality, which is some temperament, but a lot of it is two cultural messages that we take in and then we just think that's who we are, is about it's constructed so that we don't have to experience fear.

Ailey Jolie: 26:60

You answered in the question one and question two. And question three, you touched on, which was like, how do the which was the question of how do we maybe start to notice that we're in one of these patterns or we're disconnected? And I know for myself, and it might be the same for you, it might be totally different. I'm not attached. One of the ways that I've been able to begin to notice more in the moment, because a lot of the stuff that we're speaking about is happening so quickly, it's so unconscious, it's subperceptual, is knowing the cultural narratives and really educating myself around the scripts that have been socialized, what are the external demands, what are the cultures I'm in, what's coming through history. And so then I can hold that information in my mind that absolutely loves to be overworking and kind of look for it and scan for it in such a way and then kind of just subtly check in with my body around why it's being drawn to certain things or pulled away from others. But I would love to hear from you if you have any additional ways that maybe you notice the stuff that's out there, the very seductive conditioning and scripts that live out there, and start to slow yourself down or catch yourself too.

Courtney Smith: 28:12

The drama triangle is an idea that was created by this um psychologist named Stephen Cartman in the 1960s. His work is slightly different than how I'm going to describe it here. But it really is about when we are making choices that are about managing fear and the sensations of fear in the body. One thing that happens is because fear is such a strong, profound, uncomfortable feeling in the body that is designed to get us to move to safety as quickly as possible. And many people have written about this, right? Fear ends up sort of hijacking our higher cognitive faculties and doesn't really, by design, basically says, brain, you don't have time to noodle around and look for all the exceptions and do the creative problem solving and, you know, sit in the unknown. Like we don't have time for that. We gotta get ourselves safe. And so one of the things that fear is designed to do is to take us away from higher order ways of seeing in the world because we have decided it's inefficient and therefore risky to expend energy in that way. The second thing that fear does when we have decided to orient toward it is now we're in a world where the number one priority is feeling safe. And so, by definition, safety, which again is loss of security, loss of approval, or loss of control. So a temporary feeling of safety because I secure one of those, that's my number one concern. And because I'm not willing to tolerate it, I'm not able to solve for deeper questions or values or objectives. Because if I were to orient instead towards those values or those objectives or those goals, I'm gonna have to risk feeling scared. And I'm not willing to do that. So when you have an individual whose number one priority is feeling safe and who has limited cognitive capacity because of what fear does in the body, you get a lens on reality that is called the drama triangle. And the drama triangle is a simplistic way of seeing the world where the underlying assumption is I am at threat. I am not okay unless I feel safe. And when that sort of pervasive assumption is driving all that we do, we either show up as a victim, a villain, or a hero. And those are the three points of the drama triangle. The villain feels at the effect of the world and circumstances and feels powerless to do anything about it. They're so scared, in other words, they're not willing to risk owning their own agency and power to do something differently. So fear has them by the throat. And because of that, they limit their range and the they limit literally their ability to see different ways of showing up in this world. So to use my example, here I am at home taking care of my two little kids. God, I wish there was something I could do. These kids are just so, I mean, they're they take so much time. God, it's so time consuming. And like they're not sleeping, and I'm not sleeping, and there's nothing I can do about that. I guess I'm just gonna have to like muscle up and get by. That's the language of a victim in those circumstances. I have to endure. And you can feel in that like a lack of, I'm not willing to look at some of the things actually that I could do that might profoundly shift this, that feel off the table to me, because if I were to go toward them, they'd be too scary. So that's the victim. The villain is gonna be the person or the system or the people that I blame or I think has to change in order for my circumstances to be different. So here I'm going to, you know, my baby has colic and she's so difficult. And why is it that like 80% of other families, like they don't have a baby that looks like mine, mine is always in pain, or I have a husband who's like insists this is what I do, even though he's never said anything like that. He says he has to work and I have to take care of the rest of this stuff. I'm he, I'm stuck because of him. I might go to cultural programming and I might say, like, this is just because of like this, like the society I live in. There has to be a whole shift of the patriarchy before I can like come out of my own like little marital familial box that I've put myself in. The whole patriarchy has to shift before I'm willing to do that. And so I blame someone outside of myself. I have a lot of conviction or certainty that you're the problem. And then the hero is about rather than letting the pressure of my choices of orienting around fear build up so that then I say, I can't do this anymore. I there is actually more that I can do. I do have agency here. I am gonna do something differently. The hero kind of creates like temporary valves to relieve the pressure of living from fear so that we actually stay in the system rather than popping ourselves out of it. So this might be if I overeat or I drink or I, you know, start going on an antidepressant because and like you might need an antidepressant. I don't want to dismiss that entirely, but but I might use something like that to help with my mood rather than looking at like, actually, this doesn't work for me. I need to do something differently. Or I might have friends who are in a similar boat with me, and we like to get together like once a week for coffee, and we like to complain about like what it means to be a mom in the modern era. And we do like a lot of complaining and kvetching and a lot of sympathizing. And then we all go home and do the same thing for the next couple of weeks, and then we come right back and we just continue like so the kvetching and the building of community through complaining is a hero move that is relieving pressure so that I can continue to run a system that's built on fear. And so, to answer your question, because exactly as you described, all of these systems are happening very quickly, and um, we've been doing them for our whole lifetime and are really built, like they have enabled us to survive. And they by definition, they're automated. It's very, very difficult to catch them live. So, one of my favorite tools with my clients, but also with myself, is to look at the behaviors of what would a hero do, what would a victim do, what would a villain do in these situations? And is any of that language or way of being creeping into me? Because if it is, that's a good sign that I'm operating from fear in a way I don't even realize. Can I trust that the presence of these behaviors or the presence of any of these sentences that I just said out loud are indicators that I am living from fear rather than something else? And the other tip-off would be, and this is why it's called the drama triangle, is when we're operating from fear, by definition, it's because that's the only thing we're solving for, we get repeating situations because we're not willing to stand for a larger objective or a larger value. So we don't actually make long-term change. And so the other tip-off that the drama triangle points to is if I find myself in a situation where the same role, the same behavior, the same sentences, the same thought pattern I'm in, and I've done, I've been here at least more than two or three times, that's a good sign that the way I'm conducting myself is from fear. And the reason I know that is because I'm not getting the results to say I want. And the reason I'm not getting the results that I purport to say I want is because I'm not willing to risk being with discomfort and order the discomfort of fear specifically, in order to really go after those things.

Ailey Jolie: 36:19

When you're working with a client, how do you support them in staying out of the spiral of fear if we acknowledge that right now in the world for very real and not imagined reasons, there's a lot to be afraid of. Great question.

Courtney Smith: 36:35

So the first thing is we kind of went back to like, what does it mean to be in your body? It's to be curious, aware, attuned, and welcoming to whatever sensations are arising. And so one of the first things when I work and I do this all the time with myself, is would I just be willing to see how scared I really am? And would I be willing to actually move toward the sensations of fear in the body rather than finding them so uncomfortable that I do everything I can to not be with them. And so perhaps counterintuitively, one of the ways that we support ourselves to live a life that is grounded in something beyond fear is to admit and be with and welcome how scared we really are. Because once we get with how where fear is in the body already, we then are increasing our capacity and tolerance for being with it so that it doesn't drive us any longer, which is to not not to say that it goes away. It's just because of our increased capacity to be with it, we no longer orient our lives around it. And so that's a lot of my support with myself and with clients is can we just like how scared you are? Of course you're scared. Can we be with that? Can we exaggerate the sensations of that in the body? Can we honor the intelligence of that? And then is that actually can we be with that so that we don't need to make it go away?

Ailey Jolie: 38:07

And I think that's the really key piece there is not asking it to go away, is actually going into it so you can integrate the wisdom of it and understand it and hold it differently, and so that it does ripple out and change how you act. And for the listener who's maybe new to your work or also to some of the way that you're describing things, because I do think you have a really unique way of making it accessible and playful, but also it's quite profound and deep all at the same time. So for the listener who's new to your work, curious about maybe what is running them, maybe it is fear, maybe it's some of that socialization we've spoken about, maybe it's a great avoidance of discomfort. Not that I know any of these things, of course. I'm very much still working on them all myself. What is maybe one piece of wisdom that you would like to leave them with? And that could be the piece that you just shared there of really going into the sensation of fear. But if there's anything else that you would like to leave the listener with in regards to figuring out what's running our lives?

Courtney Smith: 39:07

Yeah, I mean, the big question I think for me that I ask myself over and over again is if I weren't scared, what would I be doing? Which is not to override and not see and deal with and comfort and be with the part of me who is very scared. But one of the ways that fear continues to operate and be in charge of us is we have a lot of strategies for denying the cost of that way of being. And so when we ask the question, what am I compromising? What am I not even allowing myself to move toward? So if I couldn't feel fear at all, what would I be doing differently? Like beginning to open yourself up to there are aspects of ways of being or things you would love to do or try that likely at this point in your life have been so cut off that you don't even think to illuminate them any longer. They've been off the table for so long. And so, in addition to would I be willing to see how scared I am right now and what those sensations look like, would I be willing, what would I be doing if I couldn't feel fear any longer? And again, that doesn't mean naively going toward those things, but it is beginning to open that accounting ledger that I spoke about very early on.

Ailey Jolie: 40:28

My last question for you is what are you maybe, what are you discovering right now in your own body and in your own life about what it means to be in your very own body?

Courtney Smith: 40:39

So I think that like one edge for me that I'm really playing with is, you know, one of the costs of living a life based in fear is that we do have to manage and some of us disassociate, some of us, you know, we're we all got all kinds of things that we do over here to manage the discomfort that fear creates in the body. When we do that, we often end up cutting ourselves down, like cutting ourselves away or um from sensations overall. And one of the edges that I'm playing with is how much contact I have lost with pleasure in the body as a profoundly orienting and wise direction to go in. And so as my capacity to be with discomfort has increased, one upside of that has been that I get to feel more pleasure. And that's really, really fun. And then the next layer for me is would I actually be willing to trust there is wisdom in pleasure, which is not, you know, I have a lot of stories as many of us do around like being irresponsible or wanton or, you know, a mercurial or you know, doing things I'll regret. Like all of these stories about like what would it really mean to orient to a life of pleasure? And so I'm really sort of in active inquiry around like some of those stories make a lot of sense to me. So this is not just like a walking erogenous zone like of gluttonous pleasure over here. But would I be, I'm way over-indexed toward not trusting pleasure as a reliable compass. And so for me, one edge of what it means to be in my body is not just would I be willing to be with discomfort and accept and welcome discomfort, but would I be willing to trust other signals, the signals of being lit up alive in pleasure as a compass for leading my life.

Ailey Jolie: 42:33

There's so many things that I really love about what you shared right at the end because I definitely from my training and clinical time, we get so my experience has been we get so micro-focused on expanding our capacity for discomfort or looking at pain and growing the bandwidth and processing all of the pieces. And I know for myself, when I was studying global mental health at Harvard, I looked around and had this moment and I was like, these are amazing clinicians. And I'm so grateful to be in this room and probably be 30 years younger than absolutely everyone in here. And not one of you looks like you're living in delight. And I need to figure this out quickly because I am in absolute awe of what all of you have done in the room, and my body feels very tense and afraid near you because there's a lack of aliveness here. So I love what you brought in because I think oftentimes this piece of pleasure gets just left out of the conversation, or it's the only conversation that's being had. And so actually bringing them together and honoring them both as important signs and pieces of wisdom from the body is one of my biggest passions. So you've played in quite nicely into a piece that I love to talk about. I know that you have a book and we'll have all the show notes of the reader so the listener can read your work and and learn more from you. But I always ask if there's Anything upcoming that you would like the listener to know about?

Courtney Smith: 44:03

Sure. Of course they can find choosing wholeness over goodness. I appreciate you plugging that. My website, Courtney Smith Consulting, has a place where you can sign up for my Substack, what we're really up to. And then I am going to be offering a bunch of workshops, both solo and in collaboration in the spring, about the Enneagram and also some of these other ways of being that I've been speaking about. So please sign up for my newsletter and come to my website to hear about all these offerings. Yeah, I'm excited to do more in-person work with people in 2026.

Ailey Jolie: 44:32

Lovely. Thank you again so much for your time. Yeah, thank you so much. It's been a lot of fun for me. What stays with me from this conversation is Courtney's reframe of discomfort, not as something to push through or manage away, but as the actual doorway and that question she gives returning to. What would I be doing if I couldn't feel fear? I think so many of us have cut ourselves off from whole territories of possibility because fear made the cost of exploring them feel too high. We've been running that accounting ledger she describes, and we've been cooking the books, overvaluing safety, undervaluing aliveness. And then there's what she said at the end about pleasure that's really stuck with me about how the same strategies that help us manage fear also cut us off from feeling too much of anything. I felt that in my body when she said it, this recognition that expanding our capacity for discomfort is only half the work. The other half is trusting what lights us up, what feels good, what might actually be wise. If you want to go deeper with Courtney's work, her book with Elise Loen, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, is available now. And if this conversation stirred something in you, if you're ready to explore what's running your own patterns from the inside out, my Course in Body is where we do that work together. It's a space to practice being with sensation, to build capacity to come home to your body, not as a concept, but as a lived experience. As always, thank you for listening and allowing me to be a part of your process of coming home to your body. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.