206. How to Follow the Wisdom of Your Body with Dr. Hillary McBride

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To be loved, we need to belong.

You know, I was reading My Grandmother's Hands by Resma Menekem, and he said that

all of his degrees and all of that, but he thinks the number one reason people come to his office is to sit with someone with a regulated nervous system.

Yeah.

Yep.

So I believe it.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Our goal for you today is that

you get a regulated nervous system during this next hour.

We are here with Dr.

Hillary McBride.

If you don't know her already, you're going to want to have her in your life.

She's just a leading thinker about embodiment.

And for me on my journey, she's been really important.

Dr.

Hilary McBride is a registered psychologist, researcher, podcaster, author, and speaker.

But she identifies most with being a mother.

She has lived experience and clinical expertise in the areas of trauma, embodiment, eating disorders, and the intersection of spirituality and mental health.

Her research has focused on women's relationships with their bodies across the lifespan, and her books include Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image, Embodiment and Eating Disorders, and the bestseller, The Wisdom of Your Body.

Her next book, Practices for Embodied Living, will be released in 2024.

And her CBC podcast, Other People's Problems, was listed in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as Essential Listening.

Dr.

Hillary McBride, thank you so much for being with us today.

I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now.

I'm so delighted to be with you.

Thank you for having me.

I would love it if you would call me Hillary.

Oh, Hillary.

That would feel so good.

I would just love to be human.

Okay, human person.

Okay, well, I have honorary doctorate, so you guys can all refer to me as Dr.

Wamba.

Yes, yes, yes.

And I prefer Miss Doyle.

No, Hillary, amazing.

Okay, Hillary, that's exactly what we're going to do.

I

have often wondered what the hell this embodiment thing is that has come into just the average person's lexicon lately.

And I heard you say that embodiment is reclaiming the body as the central place where we experience life.

And that

really helped me to understand what it is that we were talking about.

And so I wondered if we could just start from a place of you talking a little bit more about what embodiment

and disembodiment

is.

Yes.

Oh, gosh.

It is so hard to do this without also wanting to talk about my kind of personal sensory encounter with embodiment.

So I'm wondering if maybe it would be okay to start there and then I can fill it in kind of more,

yeah, with more technical language and how we understand it empirically.

I had been in eating disorder recovery.

I would call myself a frequent flyer at that point.

I was like in and out of treatment.

And most of what was happening in treatment was I was getting better tips about how to increase my symptoms and then kind of get out of the hospital and then really kind of dig deeper into my eating disorder.

And this was like a last ditch effort really on the part of my parents.

And I was in this outpatient treatment program with this.

woman and most of our work together focused on consciousness raising around the stories of what it means to be a body in our cultural context.

We didn't talk about my weight.

We didn't talk about my nutrition plan.

We didn't talk about kind of the behaviors that were going along with the eating disorder.

We talked about what it meant to be human.

And over the course of our work, she would reflect back to me occasionally.

Do you notice how you're sitting in the chair right now?

Just bring your awareness back to how it is that you are taking up space right now.

And she did this on one particular occasion where

I was showing up differently.

I could feel myself spilling over the edges of the cushions, the armchair cushions.

I could feel my leg kind of one curled under the other.

And she brought my attention to my body and said, Do you notice?

Do you notice how you are showing up in this space right now?

And I remember sort of getting what she was saying,

but also not.

And she said, Let me show you.

Let me show you what it was like when you first came into treatment.

And she pulled her legs up close to her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees, contorting herself really to the smallest possible amount of space that she could take up.

And she said, this is actually how you sat when you first came into treatment.

And I remember in that moment, it felt like there was a balloon that I'd pinched at my neck and all of my consciousness was living in my head.

And in that moment, the fingers that were pinching the bottom of the balloon released and all of a sudden my conscious awareness started to flow into my body.

And I remembered I had arms.

I remembered I had legs and I remember in that moment it was so striking to me.

I remember I had a foot because my foot had fallen asleep as it was kind of like pinched under my hip or however it was, you know, arranged.

And it felt like in that moment, I understood that my selfness existed not just in my mind, but through all of me.

And as someone who had been living in the world intentionally trying to erase and make my body disappear, to remember I had a body and that it could be safe to be a body, that actually that my selfness

spanned so much more than this like tiny little bit of cranial tissue that is responsible for our organized conscious thoughts.

Like there was more of me.

I had density.

I had dimensionality.

It felt like all of a sudden I came alive again.

And of course, I'm highlighting that singular moment and there were many others from that point on.

But it, to me, that experience of remembering that I was a body, not just that I was a mind that had a body,

was the beginning of changing everything.

And it took me from feeling like I was performing recovery and adhering to the performance of recovery that was expected of me by people outside of me.

Right?

Here's just another script of who you're supposed to be in recovery, right?

Here's just, you can't trust yourself.

Eat what we tell you to eat.

There's something about eating eating disorder recovery for me that was so much about realizing I'd switched systems of bodily control from cultural discourse to medical discourse.

And in that moment, I remembered myself.

I remembered myself.

I think that really highlights the operational definition of embodiment that I like to use the most, which is the subjective experience of being a self as a body, engaging with the world.

And whenever we look at embodiment, we look at it as having multiple dimensions, but two kind of directions to it.

The first would be, I am a body, not just I am a mind that has a body, but that experience of being a body is actually in a dialectic with the world around me, that my experience of being a body is shaped by how power is conferred, who gets access to space, what is considered valuable, which experiences I have learned are safe or unsafe for me as the lived body that I am.

But it is always this kind of bi-directional process of a dialogue between my physicality and my sensory development and my experience and what culture says about what is good, what culture says about what is valuable.

And so we can see embodiment as having a variety of qualities to it.

We know that there is actually a continuum.

So embodiment is something that we all are experiencing all the time, but you could be on the continuum of embodiment where your experience of being a body is pretty dissociated and disembodied, right?

Your experience of being a body is that you experience your body as a thing.

You experience your body as an object that you carry around, that you manage, that you negotiate about value around.

And then we have the other end of the spectrum, which is what we might consider these experiences of positive embodiment, which have to do with attunement and agency,

desire, voice, the ability to say, I am the place.

I am the place of my subjectivity, right?

Agency exists in my sensory self, that I am, I am just as much my fingertips as I am the thoughts that I have about them.

And that experience of being in positive embodiment doesn't necessarily mean that we are immune or inoculated against the social discourse, but perhaps we know how to locate ourselves in response to it, or we know that agency also lives in us, or we know that we can leave certain social spaces where our body is considered less than, and we can go and find social spaces where our body is considered treasured and valuable and worth protecting.

And so having a positive embodiment doesn't mean that you always perfectly have these, you know, really loving, nurturing thoughts.

In fact, most of the time, what I would argue positive embodiment is just accurate attunement.

I'm hungry, I feed myself, I'm tired, I go to sleep.

Felt a little nervous before this, I danced the hell out of this office because I was like, gotta get that energy out, right?

Like that to me was an experience of a positive embodiment, not necessarily like

I'm the most beautiful person in the world,

whatever the thing is.

I'm so grateful for this

approach because, as someone who has certainly platinum status on the frequent flyer eating disorder oh train i'm 46 i've been in some what oh i'm 47 i've been in some sort of in and out of treatment since for 37 years

and i don't know i also i have a gift for only hearing what i want to hear so if anyone's mentioned embodiment to me before the last year i didn't hear it My entire recovery has been about body image.

So

what I want to explain about that is it has felt my entire life like I

end up in some office somewhere or, you know, with some book trying to get some perspective on

eating disorder stuff.

And I feel like I'm going to an office and saying, I'm afraid of falling off a cliff.

Like my life has become unmanageable because I'm so afraid of falling off a cliff.

And whoever the expert is across from me says, oh, it's okay.

Let's look at some cliffs.

Look Look at this cliff.

Look at the shape of this cliff.

All cliffs are beautiful.

Just stop being so scared of cliffs.

And I'm like, that's, it's not about the cliff, it's about the process of falling that I'm afraid of.

So for me, it's always been like, I'm not worried about the shape necessarily of my body.

I feel uncertain about this whole idea of living in a body on this earth,

of being in a body.

So if I am a person who is on some spectrum of somatophobia, is that how we say it?

Sure.

Okay, so the fear of having a body.

If I am a person who is in a female body, in a trans body, in a disabled body, in a brown or black body, in any of these bodies that have been threatened since the beginning of time.

Is it a good idea for me to be at peace and feel safe in my body when historically I should not feel safe in my body.

Living on this planet in any of these bodies is a precarious, if not deadly situation all the time.

So

should I just have moments of dancing?

I shouldn't just be walking around the streets feeling embodied, right?

Because

is fear necessary in certain bodies on the planet?

Yeah, I'm so glad that you circled back to that because I think where I would go back to that metaphor that you're using of the anxiety, kind of the fear, the cliff, the falling is not actually to start even with the process of the falling, but to look at how scary it is to be on the edge of the cliff.

And I think what I would want to do is say, can we learn to be okay with how scary it is right here, right now, as we are on the edge of the cliff?

And can we feel that together?

I'm not going to ask you to jump.

I think that your system will actually be ready to jump when your system is ready to jump.

And I think I'm I'm going to hold your hand the whole way down.

But right now, what I know is that you are on the edge and it feels terrifying.

And nobody has likely taught you that that can be a thing that you feel and can be okay in.

Sometimes the thing that we actually need is to learn how to be okay with the fear that is an appropriate response.

to the constant threat that we have around us.

And instead of numbing and avoiding the fear and dissociating from our body as if our body is telling a lie, what we need to do is say that our body is telling the truth about these really messed up situations that we're in.

And instead of betraying ourselves, how do we learn how to be in relationship with the fear that also brings us into our lives?

Because I think that there can be a response that we have to fear, which is avoidant and inhibitory and takes us out of our lives or out of connection.

And actually, what we really need to do is learn how to be in the fear.

What do we do when fear is in our body?

And I would argue that it could be actually like fairly dissociative as a response, disembodying to inhibit the fear response that is appropriate.

And actually, what we need to do is learn how to see that our fear might be telling the truth and learn how to be in relationship with it.

And it is only when we can be experiencing fear and trust that it has some useful information for us, that safety, actual safety, is actually only an option when we have been been able to experience fear and know that it won't end us

a very

oversimplified version of all of that is like if you're the body standing on the cliff

looking over and being scared your mind is essentially victim blaming your body by being like, I do not, this is not cool.

I'm going as far away from you as possible because you are in a precarious situation and that is no good, as opposed to unifying with your body and being like, it is correct to be scared.

What is to blame is this scary ass cliff.

And I am with you in it and we are a team, but I'm not blaming you for having the appropriate reaction to this.

But when you can't control the cliff, it's easier to blame the body.

Yeah,

absolutely.

And that's the paradigm of disembodiment that we live in:

always blame the body,

always blame the body until we're hearing that from you know people closest to us and society and culture at large.

It's in our religious ideology, it's in the fabric of the way that we manage emotions.

And so it's really, really hard to do anything but that.

It's really baked into us culturally.

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Why do we hate the body so much?

Like, how do we get here?

What are all the ways we start cutting off the body and decide to live in the head?

Like, how did this happen to all of us?

Because it's not just eating disorder.

What's really important to me that this episode is for everybody, like, literally, everybody.

Many of us are on the spectrum of disembodiment and all of us have more life to live if we can be embodied more.

So first, how did we get in this mess?

Yeah.

I could look kind of big picture and tell you about the history of philosophy and how we are handed these ideas about how the body is bad and the spirit is good and get away from the body and be in the spirit because you've got a whole road ahead of you.

If you're the spirit, you never die.

And isn't that great when dying is terrifying and being a body is full of all of these mysterious ailments and the experience of suffering?

Like, here's a get out of jail free card, essentially, right?

Move into your head and then you never have to experience the challenges of being here, right?

Of being a body.

And we can see that as being shaped by discourse around theology and philosophy from Plato to Descartes and all the way, right, into the present moment, when we look at objectification theory and the use of media and

really selling bodies as a way of selling products, the commodification of the body, particularly the female body.

So there's like that whole history.

But I think where it really comes down to

for most of us is these really early experiences that we have of our bodily knowings being denied.

And what I mean by that is a kid being told,

no, you're not feeling that.

I'm hungry.

No, you're not.

I have to go to the bathroom.

No, you don't.

These experiences that we have as children where the adults in our life who we are dependent on for our survival needs

really

start to make us doubt the things that we know intuitively, internally.

And so I think that there's something that most of us have experienced, whether it was really, really early on or later on, where we had an instinctual bodily knowing emerge and we were experiencing the conflict of do I preserve the relationship that I'm in or do I stay connected to myself?

Is it going to cost me connection if I pay attention to what's happening inside?

Or will I be able to be in relationship with the people that I want to be in relationship, even if I'm connected to what my body is saying?

This is bringing up a story that I had.

I was sitting in the back seat of my parents' car.

I was in the middle seat because I'm the youngest child in between two brothers.

And my mom looks back and she said, Abby, close your legs.

My brothers, their legs were wide open.

She said, close your legs.

And I looked to my left and I looked to my right and my brother's legs were wide open.

And I was like, no,

that's uncomfortable.

I have to like sit there in the middle seat with my inner thighs like squished together.

I was like, no.

And I just remembered that was a, that was a moment that I chose myself over what my mom wanted this little girl to be doing.

It blows my mind that that was the moment.

I feel it deeply that I was like, no.

And what I'm thinking is when you say,

when you're a kid, there's a moment where you have to choose between the people you love or the connection that you have and your body's needs.

I still feel that now.

I feel that all the time.

Like my connection to the people that I love, like my team, my wife, my sister, my family is completely dependent upon me not paying attention to my.

I know that can't be true, but this thing we're taught to constantly override our exhaustion or our wishes or our desire to just stop.

And that the people around us, I don't know that their love for us or our worthiness in their life is dependent on us not honoring our bodies.

Does anyone else feel like that?

Can you give me an example?

Work or being a mother or the relentlessness of that.

Like, I don't know.

I just, I feel that what you just said, not as something in my past, but as something in the present.

And I think we can look at it as happening first in the past, but existing in the present culture where that tends to be the currency of connection for most of us, especially if you've been socialized into womanhood.

The story about femininity often is disavow your own bodily knowing as a way of creating comfort for other people.

And so there's actually phenomenas and research in which women will put themselves down as a means of making other women feel better

to feel like you can connect with other people, right?

That's taking the disconnection with yourself to that whole other level.

I'm actually going to further self-silence and actually kind of participate in my own oppression to create a sense of belonging.

I would argue that for many of us, that first moment that we experienced, I mean, I can certainly speak for myself here.

One of those first moments of disavowing our bodily knowing is when we experience caregiver distress, when we see our parent upset and we say, mom, are you sad?

And our parent goes, oh, no, no, you know, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm fine.

I'm fine.

Right.

And our body is so wired to be in tune with the feelings of other people around us that we know, right?

We know when the people that we love are upset.

But at some point, that seed is planted inside of us that says, don't trust that knowing that you have about how to be in connection with other people.

Don't trust that sense that your body is giving you that you know when the people around you are feeling something.

And so we learn to begin self-silencing as a means of saying, okay, well, I'm going to trust you.

You must know better than I do.

You, you have the authority on what's happening inside of my body.

And slowly and surely, we kind of hand those experiences over, not because we are doing anything wrong, but because in our development, our ability to be in relationship with people who approve of us and love us and meet our needs is so essential to our survival that we will 10 times out of 10, when we're not sure about the connection, sacrifice what's happening inside of us to make sure that we are safe relationally.

It is that important for our survival.

Wow.

And it feels like it's a self-perpetuating thing because

if we get the signs early, either with the withholding of praise or the praising of us restricting or having quote unquote self-control by not doing the things that our body is telling us to do then we never

do what our bodies

want to do and see that it is good and see that it works out well so we end up being grown people who have never followed down that path.

It's like Pandora's box.

You're telling me I should just eat whatever I want.

Oh my God, i will just eat the entire grocery store you're telling me to do what i want i'll sleep for the next three years we have no trust because we have no data as to if we follow what the wisdom of our body our whole lives won't implode

and i think that for the most part that is actually an exaggeration right because we won't sleep for three years and if we did eat everything in the grocery store we would live on the other side of that and we would be okay and we would find our way back into balance.

Like I don't think that those things generally happen or that they're as scary as we think they are.

But where that is actually true is often in trauma treatment because when we've dissociated from our body and we've not felt, usually what happens first when we start to feel again is we feel all of the things that we could not feel

before we had dissociated.

It's like we come out of dissociation the same way we came into it, which is through the bigness of the body.

And I think what happens then is people go, oh my gosh, here's all the terror that I never felt.

Here's all the fear.

Here's all the sensation that was too much for me before.

And so we pop back into dissociation instead of realizing that when we keep feeling and we stay with it and we get to the other side, that's where that safety feeling is, right?

That's where the piece is, that our body actually knows how to homeostatically self-correct.

And we can get out of the bigness and the overwhelmingness of it if we stay with the process.

But if you come back to where those ruptures were early, we can see that relationship is one of the things that we need to do that.

And many of us don't know how to let people into those scary places inside.

We don't know how to let people into what it's actually like to feel fear in our bodies and have them with us as we're doing it, which is what makes a sensation tolerable.

Can you say that again?

Many of us don't know how to allow ourselves to be truly accompanied and attuned to when we are experiencing an emotion as a bodily process.

Do any of us know that?

And how are we supposed to do that?

Like, can I just give an example of this?

Okay.

During early recovery, this last time, the way I described it, Hillary, is that if you drank that syrup stuff that lit up, what is it?

The radius.

Contrast.

Yeah.

Contrast.

Mine would have only been in the brain.

You wouldn't have seen my awareness anywhere else.

So that's how I thought of it.

Dropping down during recovery, I had a moment where I was in my body and with my people,

with Abby and a couple friends, and I had no idea.

It was so terrifying.

I didn't know how to go to my story about what was happening in my brain.

So I just had to sit there and say things like,

I feel

scared,

but like our trauma and our memories are in our body, correct?

Is that what you're saying?

When we start to become embodied, we

leave the safe place of our mind,

sink into our body, and inside of our body is all kinds of memory and stored trauma.

That's why we avoid it.

It's not a bad idea.

It works until it does it.

It works.

And maybe I'll just say it really explicitly.

God bless our dissociation.

I am so grateful for every single moment that I shut sensation out of my body because I needed that to survive.

Thank you.

I needed it.

It was the most important thing I could have done at that time.

It was everything that kept me alive.

And so like, bless my dissociation.

Thank you, mind, for being a safe place to exist into where I could escape of the terror of feeling what it was like to be me.

It is so important that we understand our dissociative processes as part of our survival response.

And at some point, we get to update our systems and say, I'm not in the moment that needs to be white knuckled and survived in the same way.

I am with people who love me, who want to help me meet my needs.

And it is okay for me to be seen in the fullness of what that means now.

And the reason for it, I can tell you my two little reasons.

And then you tell me the real reasons that we should be embodied.

Okay.

A couple of mine where I figured out at one moment that I was never loving anyone.

Like I couldn't really love my kids or Abby.

Meaning

I am sitting on a couch usually.

I am always in my mind.

My mind cannot touch them.

They cannot touch my mind.

I am gone in here.

I will never know their mind.

They will never truly know mine.

The only way that I can literally love my people and truly be with them is with my hands and with my arms and with their head on my shoulder.

Our bodies are how we love each other.

And then the other thing is, if the only way to be alive is to be in the moment

i was never alive because in my mind i am always in the past or i'm always in the future i'm always ruminating about something that just happened or planning for something that's about to happen that's how i live my hands and feet don't know how to be in the past or the future they are always always and have always forevermore been and will always be in right now.

So the only way that I can be fully present is to get back into my hands and legs and feet because they are always now.

Yeah, you said it perfectly.

The body is a terrifying place to be because the body is also where illness is, it's where death is, it is where oppression and power and disempowerment is, it is where suffering and aloneness and judgment, right?

Objectification of our bodies can be.

And our bodies are now,

right?

They're now.

And if now is not a place I want to be, right, like we talked about earlier, if there's danger around,

it's hard to be in a body, but the body is also,

right, where our aliveness is.

It is where pleasure is.

I have never had an orgasm except anywhere in my body, right?

Like this is our sensuality, our sense of interconnectedness, I could even argue, our ability to feel joy.

When I am feeling the most alive I've ever felt, my arms spontaneously do this, right?

I know all of ours do.

We're like, yeah,

right.

You've seen a person in the airport who's greeting someone they love that they haven't seen in a while.

There is no way that anything is happening inside their body except like,

right?

Like this hugeness of expression is our body communicating what it is like to be us and what we want and what we long for.

And so when here is somewhere we really want to be, our body is the doorway into being here.

But I don't want to give that version of the story without also the other, because it is, right?

Now is hard sometimes.

Now is painful sometimes.

Now includes feeling the grief.

and the losses and the suffering and the fear of life.

But the interesting thing is that when we get that back, we also get the other side of it back, right?

When we get the discomfort,

there's sensation in me.

I don't like this.

Oh my gosh, right?

Being human is so uncomfortable right now.

We also get the like, yes,

right, that comes along with being like, oh, it's good to be me today.

Oof, what a beautiful moment to be in.

It's the whole ball game, right?

Like you're playing the whole ball game.

It's going to be real bad sometimes.

It's going to be real good.

I think of it like if life is like this huge, just huge mansion and it has these rooms playing scary movies and it's got these gorgeous palace ballroom and it's got whatever.

And then we're just live our whole damn lives in the attic.

And it's like, it's fine there.

I'm safe there.

Nothing bad's going to happen to you, but you haven't explored any of the palace.

That's how I feel like I spent most of my life.

I'm like, the attic's fine.

Look around.

There's a book or two.

We'll just stay up here.

But it's not actually the whole spectrum of what is possible.

Yes.

And it feels important to say here here that embodiment is not, is not just for us as individuals, right?

I think that there's something about embodying when we first access it, we're like, ooh, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, which is a really good entry point into it to be like, where have I been?

Oh my gosh, I'm here.

I exist.

I think there can almost be like a kind of psychedelic quality to becoming a body for the first time again in our adult life and go like, whoa, totally.

Tastes, colors, space, pleasure, connection, emotion, all of it is so, so much, but oh my gosh, I can do it.

I can do it.

And I think embodiment taken to its natural conclusion brings us deeper into connection with each other

because it is emotion that allows us to do empathy, right?

Empathy is not perspective taking.

When we look at what empathy actually is empirically, empathy is my body intuitively responding with adaptive action tendency to your feeling in a way that brings us into right relationship.

Empathy is my body's ability to go,

oh, spontaneously, you're sad.

I'm going to move towards you.

And I think that that is something that we need to do justice work in a way that does not burn us out because it will always burn us out to do the runaround from, I'm going to think about what you need to try to access some feeling and pull up the energy, but I'm also really tired because I'm neglecting my needs.

And then I'm going to put that output into the world as something that looks really good for you but actually embodiment takes us into a kind of sustainable caring that brings us into right relationship with people around us and helps us know how to do boundaries i mean anger is the quality that is under boundaries so for many of us who have a hard time with boundaries we actually probably don't know how to feel anger in our body and anger is not violence or destruction or oppression anger is a little bit of heat usually in our chest and jaw and hands It's literally just nerve activation, nervous system response.

And it is because of that anger that we get a sense of clarity about what, what doesn't work for us, what we need to do.

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For people listening,

you might have an embodied response to a person in your life that feels a little bit like a prickle of anger.

That person is crossing my boundary.

I don't like this.

I don't feel safe with this person.

And you're having an embodied response.

And then you will quickly...

If you're me, you will quickly go disembodied from that, which means you will go right back to your mind and your mind will say, no, no, no, that person has shown up for you several times.

No, you should not feel this way.

No, no, no.

Like you're, you, that's the difference between an embodied response.

No, I don't feel good.

I don't feel safe.

That's good information.

But then if you don't listen to your embodiment, and I don't know, Hillary, if I'm saying this right, but then you jump back to your mind, right?

And your mind talks you out of all of the good information your embodiment just gave you.

Yeah, maybe a way of saying it is that we have these kind of neural loops in which our expectation of what happens relationally in response to us listening to ourselves gets triggered, right?

That's a kind of body memory in a way of like,

you know, when in the past, this is what comes to mind, like, when in the past did I learn that it would cost me connection to listen to myself, that I would somehow be less valuable or I would hurt someone.

And so our body learns how really quickly to replay that memory of, oh, I'm going to hurt someone again if I listen to this or it's going to cost me something.

And it is that kind of stepwise sequence of the memory of what we learned to do a long time ago playing out in the present moment as we inhibit what we know to be true as a means of doing what we're supposed to do.

That sounds right.

I have a question about, you know, managing, we get into our bodies, we have

good experiences, good emotions, we've got tougher emotions.

How do we get more comfortable with the fear that comes up in the body?

I think because as an athlete, I am trained to overcome it sometimes to a fault where I'm like, oh, this is not something to be afraid of.

And sometimes I, in my life, have taken bigger risks than I should have, or

maybe I am actually disembodying.

I'm getting into a disembodied state where I'm mining over matter.

So when the harder feelings come up, how do we manage those and remember, remember, okay, this is not forever.

What are some exercises or tools that you have for people out there who might feel the, want to feel the feelings, but are terrified?

Yeah.

I think it's really hard to begin that process at all if we don't make space because we can be really quick.

to distract ourselves and move into our, what we might call our defenses, our ways of intellectualizing or ignoring or kind of numbing out or deferring responsibility to somebody else.

We don't even make space around that sensation that we encountered.

So first noticing sensation and creating a little bit of space, maybe saying, there's something here.

I'm just going to check this out for a moment.

And I often like to allow myself to take a breath and imagine that I'm breathing into that sensation and ask the sensation, is there something you want me to know?

So Hillary, you're talking about if you get like a tightness in your chest or a signal.

A body significantly.

A signal.

Yeah.

And emotion is, right, we think about it as energy in motion.

It's a somatic process.

Emotion is not just the word that we give to it, but it is actually our body communicating with energy and temperature and impulse, what it is that needs to happen next.

So if we can start to slow down in our lives in general, then we're more likely to catch those sensations.

But when we catch those sensations, it can be a really good first step to just imagine padding that with a little bit of space and curiosity.

What is it that's there?

What is that called?

What does it want for me?

And I think that I have a practice similar to what you're saying, Abby, of being like, this needs to go away.

Maybe that's not what you're saying.

No, it is.

I'm not feeling.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like I'm not feeling fear.

Like, oh, I don't need that right now.

Like that doesn't have to be here.

And so it has been really helpful for me on the road of reclaiming the fullness of my emotional experience to invite things along with me.

imagining that there is a wise me who can move forward and make that choice to do the whatever the thing is, but there is also another version of me who is actually quite afraid and she gets to come along.

And I am not going to disavow her, right?

This is a very important part of my inner work right now is to say, there is a me who knows I want to make this choice.

And there is also a me, likely a younger me who doesn't know that this is safe and that I'm going to be okay, who is protesting.

and is saying, I am terrified.

And in the past, what I would have done is say, I'm going to lock all of those parts.

All of you get locked in a closet and you get to come out later maybe sometime in therapy right maybe if i'm around someone that i like maybe accidentally if you bust through the door but you're going to be locked in there for the most part and what i have started to say is okay fear

younger younger me

you can come along

you can come along and you can see that you're safe with me

And you can be here as long as you need to be here.

And I'm not, I'm not going to send you away.

And I'm not going to tell you that you're bad.

I promise you.

And it is okay if you're afraid.

I'll be with you as you feel that.

And how do you know

when it's a time to bring sweet little scared Hillary along, but go anyway?

And when it's something that you actually shouldn't do, because sweet little scared Hillary is exactly right.

How do you know?

Yeah.

I mean, wouldn't that be nice?

No,

right?

Look, I was like

waiting for her to tell me you're here seeing it.

I think what's interesting about the process of saying sweet little Hillary can come along

is that I also believe that angry Hillary is allowed to be there on the other side if I did make the wrong choice.

And sad Hillary is allowed to be there on the other side if I'm hurt about what happened.

And so the goal of being in relationship with my fear is not that I do everything perfectly from now on, but that I am in relationship with myself and I make space for the experience that I'm having about what it's like to be me, including I think this is the right choice and I'm going to give it my very best.

And I'm not sure.

And I probably won't know till later, which is if we face it, most of our adult choices,

like, okay, I'm going to weigh the cost benefits of this.

And they pretty much come out even.

So I'm just going to take a step in a direction because

I just want to live my life, right?

Like something needs to happen.

And then if we've built this relationship with our emotion, with our sensing selves, and we have have some capacity to tolerate that, I know that whatever happens on the other side, I'll be okay with that because I'm not going to send my grief away.

If it was the wrong choice, I'm so grateful for how you talk about this because

I feel

like it sometimes when people talk about just everybody get embodied that there's not a lot of talk about how then.

I love my community and I'm, I don't like just being like, yeah, just get in your body.

It's actually really difficult.

I believe it's worth every bit that it's the that it's, we always say the idea of brutiful, like it's brutal, but it's beautiful and you just get both.

And that's what living in the body is.

Yeah.

But there's trauma there and there's hard stuff.

And we have to help people figure out how to navigate being a body.

Yes.

Well, let me tell you a story that feels particularly relevant to me right now because I'm a new mom.

I got a sweet little baby at home.

And so I'm learning all of these things through that lens of trying to give her right experiences of being in her body and trying really hard to not have those relational ruptures where she feels like, oh, I have to believe mom at the expense of myself.

Like I want her to be able to feel like she can have both.

And

where that all really, you know, the rubber really met the road with that was she has hated being in the car seat, loathed it since she was born, just

screaming, right?

And you're like, okay, the solution is obviously I'd never drive anywhere ever.

This is a reasonable response, right?

I'm clearly dysregulated driving and I have a wild history history of nearly lethal car accidents.

And so, I'm like just having a hard time being in the car anyway.

And then I got my baby screaming in the back, and everything in my body is saying it is not safe, it is not safe, it is not safe, it's not safe for all of these reasons.

Meanwhile, I haven't left the driveway and it is actually safe because I'm sitting in front of my house buckled up.

The car is not on, right?

So, sometimes we have this awareness of like, oh,

you know, I'm in my driveway.

We get a glimpse of divine insight and we realize, okay, right, the car hasn't started.

I'm okay.

But I remember this one drive that I was taking with her.

And my history up until that point had been like, okay, we're going to take short drives and probably someone in the backseat to reassure her.

And I'm just going to be singing to her and talking to her the whole way.

And I was on this drive with her and she was screaming and then she stopped.

And yes, your face, Glennon, exactly.

I, all of a sudden, realized that that actually felt more more scary than when she was telling me that she was in distress.

And I said to her through tears in my eyes, don't ever stop telling me when you're upset.

Don't ever stop telling me.

Don't ever stop screaming.

If you don't like something, tell me you don't like it.

Tell me as long as you need to that you don't like it.

And I promise you, I will deal with my feelings about that.

That's it.

Oh, that's it.

That to me is like how I want to be with myself too, right?

Like that's for her, but that's for me

to say, fear.

It's okay.

Tell me as long as you need to.

Don't stop.

Don't stop, right?

You don't like something.

Tell me.

And I will be with you if we do it anyway.

And I'll be like, I know you hate this, right?

This is like how this translates to my relationship with my daughter.

It's like, oh, you don't want to have a bath tonight?

Yeah, tell me as I'm like shampooing at her, tell me how much you don't like this, right?

Because we still must do something.

She's still telling me.

Yes.

Like, we don't necessarily stop living our lives or stop doing things, but we say, you don't have to stop communicating.

But, Hillary, isn't that what's at the center of all of this?

Because the body, the body is a disruptor of

patriarchy, of capitalism, of ableism, ableism, all of transphobia, everything.

The body is what says no to all of that.

It interrupts every system that people count on to keep

the systems going.

Yeah, every perversion of humanity is disrupted by the existing

humanity, which is your body.

Right.

And our families, I mean, we learned not through evil parents, through parents who, you know, told us no pain, no gain, like mind over matter.

All the things that we learned were an honor, a badge of honor, because those things things have to be a badge of honor in our culture because we need people to ignore what they need so that they will keep being robots.

That's it.

You know, when you were saying that about your daughter, the like most extreme version of that, I've worked in orphanages before.

And there, when the babies get there, they cry and cry and cry and then they stop crying

because they know that no one is coming, that it's fruitless, that their needs are not going to get met.

So the only reason you cry is to try to get your needs met.

And

that

is the saddest thing

about growing up with a kind of microcosm of that, because there's a general just

surrender.

I feel like a lot of women feel a little dim.

It just like, it feels like it doesn't matter.

No one cares how tired I am.

No one wants me to stop because I'm meeting all of their needs.

It doesn't matter who I say anything to because

no one's coming to save me.

So I'll just stop listening to my body.

Which is, I mean, as a psychologist, we can start getting into mental health presentations and look at the diagnostic labels we put on that.

That is the actual nervous system response that causes depression.

Our bodies saying it's too hard hard to keep trying.

Give up.

Give up.

Stop engaging with the world.

And

it is our bodies communicating not necessarily that we are bad, but we live in a culture that is not exactly supporting every single body to feel safe and like it is okay to be in the world.

And so our bodies, again, thank goodness that they know how to do this at some point.

Give up.

We call that learned helplessness at times.

This is a whole research phenomena.

You can actually see how it happens to animals in experiments that our bodies at some point go okay i'm not going to be heard just just give up and this is what i mean about what i said earlier about you know when we come back into our body and all of a sudden the conditions are met in which okay maybe i don't have to give up anymore maybe i've got people around me

we might start screaming again

Think about the baby.

If you were to actually reverse that autonomic process from the shutdown into engagement again, you touch what you felt right before you shut down.

And that is really, really hard to be with.

To be in the not knowing, is someone going to come?

Am I overwhelmed?

The terror, the intensity of sensation, that is no joke.

And the world and families and partners reward you for keeping that shut off.

Yes.

Because when it turns back on, it's no fun for any damn body.

No, they're like, you want to be embodied?

Aren't you supposed to be dancing?

Why do you keep crying and yelling?

Yeah.

So I have two questions.

When people do start experimenting with getting out of their heads and back into their bodies, is it possible to do without therapy?

Because if there's a bunch of trauma there for all of us, is it even safe to do without therapy?

And then for people listening right now who might not have therapy, like, what are some ways that people can experiment with with embodiment without crashing?

Okay, I'll betray my discipline as I say this, but I think that psychology has perpetuated disembodiment.

I think that the paradigm of understanding the mind as the problem that needs to be fixed by another person who has more information,

this is one of our gateways to mass disembodiment.

Wow.

Whoa.

We in the discipline of psychology didn't even start talking about the body until, you know, not that long ago, right?

The emergence of somatic psychotherapy and sensory motor processing came out of trauma studies because essentially people's bodies were saying your thought record, your way of thought.

switching and stopping is not getting rid of my shell shock.

Exactly.

Right.

It is not getting rid of the sense that I am in danger all the time.

So we have to also take that one step further and see that most of psychology is inherited from an extremely androcentric, patriarchal, white, Western European way of understanding the self.

I have to remind myself in these moments of Audre Lorde's famous quote, you cannot dismantle the master's house using the master's tools.

So what I can tell you about embodiment and therapy is that the black church has been doing embodiment way

better than psychotherapy ever will.

Indigenous sweat lodge and circle, community movement, right?

Embodiment has been happening.

all around us all the time.

But the further we are indoctrinated into whiteness and androcentrism and patriarchy and cerebrality, the more we have had had to leave our body as a means of proving our goodness, the further away from disembodiment we feel like we are.

But it is around us all the time.

And it feels so important as a tool of liberation to give embodiment back to us by saying it is not owned by therapists.

In fact, therapists, I'm sorry, therapists out there.

We're not the best at it, right?

We have bought into the idea that we are in our minds, maybe more than anybody else.

So what I want to say is listen to yourself when you are tired, when you are thirsty.

I've just started keeping a glass of water on my desk because, and this is introceptive awareness, this is a cornerstone of embodiment.

When I notice I'm thirsty, that is me being embodied in a positive way.

That's kind of a tuned connection to myself.

When I have a sense of sitting at my desk and, you know, realizing like, whoa, I have been hunched over like a ghoul.

My loving partner reminds me that he can tell when I am kind of misattuned to myself because I assemble a kind of gargoyle posture over my laptop keys, which is not how my body was designed to be like this.

So like, am I pausing to notice that it's good for me to stretch and move?

What are the places where I feel mastery in my body and where I can experience myself as powerful?

Can I do those more?

Right.

Is there an activity that I do that I notice I feel better after?

What is that thing that I do that makes me feel better after?

And I think, again, as I mentioned, this kind of the way that embodiment takes us into connection with everything

is that I think when we start slowing down,

as you said, we disrupt capitalism, we disrupt hustle culture, right?

We start to all of a sudden go like, oh, that's not sustainable for me anymore.

But I notice that when I slow down, I'm noticing that the seasons are changing.

Like legitimately, I did not ever see a bulb bloom

for decades because I wasn't looking.

I wasn't here.

And I feel like I'm actually seeing daffodils come up in my garden.

And what it's doing is making me feel connected to the earth.

And the more I'm connected to the earth, the more that I want to be in relationship with the earth, and the more that I want to tend the soil, and the more that I want to understand the history of the land that I'm on.

And I think, I think it takes us into a kind of mystical oneness if we take it to its full extent.

Like embodiment actually brings us into relationship with all life because it's life

that is our bodies.

And when we start to encounter that, we start to see it everywhere.

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I sometimes think that

just engaging senses for me is really helpful.

Like

sometimes I can't remember the daffodils because it's just too hard, but I can light a scent that reminds me

anything that can bring me back to senses, something that's soft, something that smells good, a taste.

I mean, food has been huge in in the embodiment journey, but are those tips that you offer people?

Yeah, I mean, senses are one of the most

easily accessible ways for us to access pleasure.

And so what I would say to elevate that exercise is do something

through your senses.

Anything that, you know, the tactile, the sensations on your fingertips that feel really good.

But the way to take it further is to notice, and what happens inside of me when I touch that?

Like, oh, that feels good.

Or even effective action of being like, I want to light that candle.

God damn it, I'm going to light that candle.

Right.

And we do it.

And we're like, I don't have power over much of my life, but I'm lighting this candle.

And then we do it and we notice like, oh, what does agency feel like inside?

Like my spine straightens a little bit more.

I feel a sense of,

you know, oh, I could just take a deep breath, right?

So when we take those experiences that are sensory that help us extraocept, right, connect with the world around us.

We talked about intraocepting.

We notice what's happening in the world around us, but then we bring it inside and we stay with it.

And when we stay with it, we realize that our body is a place not just of challenge and overwhelm, but also like vitality, pleasure, joy, aliveness.

That's there too.

And it doesn't, like you said, Glenn, it does not have to look like sexy twerking or a kind of.

But it should occasionally.

Yeah.

But I think, right.

I think what's also really interesting, what you just said is that it's not just about the sense of smell what you just said is i had the agency yes i had the desire i had this thing happening and it's not just like one

response it's not helping you in one way there's all of these things that are really important about it it's nobility what i hear you saying and what i feel every time I'm doing one of these little returnings to embodiment through my therapy is

it's the opposite of ignoring yourself when we've learned discipline, which is to override the self's messages, to override, to ignore, like that is honorable.

But when you actually start to listen and honor yourself, even if it's, I want to light this candle, this magical thing happens.

And for me, the magical thing is a nobility, a regality.

It's like putting on a crown is the only way that I can think of it.

It's very honoring of self, which is a returning of nobility.

Because in lighting a candle, there's these micro things that happened that are revolutionary that we don't activate anywhere else in our life.

There's, I have the self-knowledge to know I would feel better if there was a candle lit.

Then I had the audacity

to do the damn thing

that the only reason to do it is because it's going to make me feel better.

And then I did it and I feel better.

And it's all because I did that cycle.

But when you think about it, we don't do that anywhere in our lives.

That's why it's slow down.

Yes.

We don't slow down enough to notice all of those pieces that you mentioned.

But I think that it is so important that we recognize that that wanting

came from somewhere inside of us, right?

That that also has an interoceptive quality to it.

What told me that I wanted?

to light the candle.

You could really like pinch to zoom with that and find that that connects with a little sense of impulse or sensation inside.

And when you start to know what that looks and feels and sounds like inside of you, then you start to recognize it with bigger things that wanting

has a quality to it.

Right.

That we can start to actually build a relationship with.

It reminds me of the Audrey Lorde.

I mean, to bring her up again, how she says that it's all on the spectrum of the erotic.

Like the reason why that little candle is so huge is that it is the same acknowledgement of want inside.

And she says,

the erotic is a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

So

that is living, the lighting of the candle.

And it's on the same road that is realizing the full extent of your desires with your partner and your sexual life force.

Exactly.

There's a few categories, right?

I didn't, I got so excited about answering this question.

I didn't add these pieces in, but when we look into the empirical research about embodiment, we see that there are a few different domains that help us access embodiment.

And we could add therapy into one of these.

But again, this is about being human, right?

This is not something that only people who have masters or doctoral degrees or candles.

or candles exactly

have permission to help you get access to.

This is our humanness.

This is our birthright.

So there are many, many entry points and you do not have to pay for most of them.

So the first thing that we see in the research about embodiment is something called the mental domain.

And this comes out of Neva Peran's work.

She's a scholar who's dedicated decades and decades and decades of her life to researching embodiment as an empirical thing, right?

We can study how we get there, how we get away from there.

And what she's found in her research is that the mental domain can be something that's constricting or liberating.

We like to think about embodiment in terms of the sensory qualities, but our body is our mind, right?

There actually is no distinction.

And so it is super important to recognize that our thinking about our bodies and other bodies shapes our experience of being a body.

So are we perpetuating these kind of constricting, corseting narratives?

Or are we engaging in a critical stance towards social discourse?

Are we mentally able to say, I'm not going to play that game anymore?

Or, whoa, like that's not an okay narrative to pass on about a body.

Whatever it is that we want to say, can we mentally free ourselves?

And even if that's the only place that you can start, that actually counts because your mind is your body.

The second piece is we've got the kind of the social power piece.

Many of us experience our bodies depending on our intersecting identities as places where we are devalued, but also there is something in our body that we experience that could connect us to a source of power.

And where are the places, even if primarily we identify in our bodies through the angle of how we have had power taken from us, how we've been oppressed, who are the other people who know about that experience?

So, even if I can't change anything about their lived reality in my body, when we are in social contexts with others who understand that, that does something to our bodies.

And the last domain is the physical domain, which is where we tend to think most about embodiment because it's the most kind of obvious in a way.

But we can access positive embodiment through physical freedom.

And really what that means is experimenting with agency and movement, experiencing safety, attuned care, noticing, slowing down, paying attention, connection with desire, right?

That actually in the empirical research shows up as a pathway into embodiment is noticing desire and honoring it and listening to it,

So you can do that through any number of things, the simple things day to day, but also maybe through bigger experiences.

Like what has my body not been allowed to do?

What have I been told by society I can't do?

And what would it be like to do that?

I'm just thinking back to your story of resistance, Abby, of, no, I'm going to keep my legs open because where?

Where else are my knees going to go?

Like what this is, I have to take up space here, but we can do adult versions of that.

I, as simple as like, oh, I'm supposed to be sitting in a meeting all day.

Maybe I'm going to stand.

Like, maybe I often do this when I'm lecturing, like, oh, my back is not feeling good.

I'll let my students know we're going to take a stretch break because even though I'm supposed to be in this performative role of the lecture, it feels really good to lecture from a place of being connected to myself.

So I'm going to, I'm going to disobey in a way.

I'm going to be in a body in the academy.

Yeah.

Wow.

So good.

Hillary, you're a dream, and I'm so grateful for your work.

I'm so moved by how you're mothering your little one.

I'm going to think about that forever.

And you all get Hillary's book, Wisdom of Your Body.

And what I do appreciate about your work is that it actually gives

exercises on how to make the embodiment real.

So it's not just words in a book.

Thank you for your work.

Keep going, please.

We need you.

And pod squad.

Brilliant, brilliant.

Get in that body.

Get in that body, pod squad.

But just for a quick moment, because it's dangerous in there.

We can do it.

It's not dangerous in there.

It's dangerous out there.

Right.

That's good.

It just, it gets worse before it gets better, but then it gets real good.

It's a lot of information.

It's a lot of information.

You dose that information.

You don't have to pay attention to all of it all at once.

You can hear a little bit.

You can pop back out and you can pop back in when you're ready.

I just

think you're wonderful.

Thank you.

you for watching.

You are wonderful.

You're damn international treasure is what you are.

See you next time.

Five squad.

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I give you Tish Milton and Brandi Carlisle.

I walked through fire, I came out the other side.

I chased desire,

I made sure

I got what's mine,

And I continue

to believe

That I'm the one for me

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on map

A final destination

lack.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do a hard thing.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the problem,

sometimes things fall apart.

And I continue to believe

The best

people are free

And it took some time

But I'm finally fine

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on that

A final destination

lack.

We stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do do a hard thing.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on that.

We might get lost, but we're okay with that.

We've stopped asking directions

in some places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find

our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do hard things.

Yeah, we can do hard things,

yeah, we

can do

hard

things.