You Know Better. So Why Does Your Body Still React?

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Welcome to the Body First Healing Podcast.
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I'm Britt Piper, Survivor Turn Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Aut.
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If you feel stuck in old patterns, overwhelmed by your emotions, or disconnected from yourself, you're in the right place.
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Each week, I'll share practical somatic tools, personal stories, and conversations to support you in building a more regulated and embodied life.
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Because you can't talk your way through healing.
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You have to feel your way through.
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Together, we'll explore what it means to come back to yourself and create a life that feels safe enough to fully live in.
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I am so glad that you're here.
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Maybe you're the kind of person who knows exactly when you have gone into survival mode.
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Like you can feel the acceleration, the energy, the stress in your body before you have even found a reason for it.
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And somewhere in the back of your mind, you're narrating the entire thing, right?
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You're likely telling yourself, I'm activated.
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I'm in fight or flight right now.
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I need to regulate.
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You know what's happening, you have language for it.
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Maybe you even know which experience from your past taught your body to respond in this exact way.
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And yet none of that knowledge, none of that knowing seems to convince your nervous system or your body or your physiology to stop.
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Maybe you know exactly when anxiety arrives.
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Right.
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And again, there's no story attached to it.
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Like there's nothing that's happened.
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There's no difficult phone call or conflict.
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There's no obvious threat that's happening.
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You might just be in the middle of making coffee or answering your emails or just lying in bed next to someone that you love.
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And then out of nowhere, your body has already begun preparing for something that your mind, again, can't quite figure out.
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Your chest tightens, your breath becomes shallow, and then your thoughts speed up.
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And there's just like this low hum of something is wrong beneath an otherwise probably ordinary moment.
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And then your mind does what minds do really well when the body sends an alarm without an explanation.
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It starts looking for one.
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Now, on the flip side, for some of you, it might not feel like anxiety at all.
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It might feel like absence, like someone is speaking to you and you can hear them, but you feel several feet behind yourself, almost as though you're kind of observing like your own life through glass, or you walk into a room and your attention immediately leaves your own body and moves toward everyone else.
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And in these moments, when you're monitoring the world around you, it's like you notice just the smallest changes in tone, the slight withdrawal, the expression that disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived.
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And before you've even consciously decided to assess the room in this way, your body already has.
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Now, regardless for what side you fall on, it's likely that the place that you see all of this most clearly is in the moments that you wish you could take back.
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Like when your child asks you for something for the fourth time while you're trying to get everyone out the door and your response just comes out a little bit sharper than you intended.
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And then almost immediately another part of you arrives and says, Why did I do that?
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I know, I know better.
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But that sentence, I know better, contains so much of what I want to talk about today.
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Because you may, in fact, know better.
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You likely know better, right?
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You've spent years knowing better.
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You may understand your childhood and your attachment patterns and your triggers and your trauma responses and your relationships and coping strategies.
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You may have done years of therapy.
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You may have read the books and listened to the podcasts.
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Hello, we're here listening to another one.
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You may be able to explain yourself with extraordinary accuracy.
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And your body may still react before any of that knowledge has a chance to step in and to intervene.
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And I think this is one of the most difficult and demoralizing places to arrive in healing.
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And I know this because I experienced it myself.
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And it feels that way because it can create the illusion that all of the work that you have done hasn't worked.
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But I don't think that's necessarily what's happening here.
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I think sometimes we have simply misunderstood what kind of change we were asking that work to create.
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Your symptoms make considerably more sense when we stop asking only what is wrong and begin asking what the body learned to do.
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Anxiety can be anticipatory protection.
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Hypervigilance can be a body that became exquisitely skilled at detecting changes in its own environment.
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Shutdown can be a body or an organism reducing contact with experience when that experience becomes too much.
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Our reactivity, think of it as mobilization arriving faster than our conscious choice does.
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Now, that doesn't mean every response is useful now.
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It doesn't absolve us of responsibility for how our adaptations or what I call strategies affect other people.
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And it doesn't mean that every symptom should just be romanticized as wisdom.
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I want to set that straight.
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Instead, it means there is context here.
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And context changes the question.
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So by the end of today's episode, I want you to understand why your body can continue doing something long after you intellectually understand it.
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And I want you to actually experience one way of working with the part of you that talking has not been able to reach.
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Because the truth and the reality is the body is not failing to listen to you.
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It may simply have learned through a language other than words.
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Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Body First Healing Podcast.
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My name is Britt Piper.
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I am your host, somatic experiencing practitioner, trainer, author, and speaker.
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All right, my friends.
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So let's first talk about when you understand the pattern, but you're still chronically living inside of it.
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So there is a particular frustration that I hear from people who have already done substantial healing work.
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They aren't coming to somatic work because they have never reflected on themselves.
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Usually it's the opposite.
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They are deeply reflective, they have language, they have insight.
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They can often tell me exactly why they respond the way that they do.
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And then they'll say something like, Britt, I understand all of this.
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Why am I still doing it?
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And that question matters because it exposes an assumption that we make about change, that if we can understand something clearly enough, eventually the body and the nervous system should follow.
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And don't get me wrong, sometimes it does.
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Okay.
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Insight is very powerful.
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Language can organize experiences that once felt chaotic.
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You know, for me, therapy helped me to make meaning.
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It helped me to challenge my distorted beliefs and to build relational capacity and understand the story of my life differently.
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So I would never want to diminish that work simply because I teach somatics.
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But insight is not the only way that a human organism, our body, our nervous system, our brain, the totality of who we are learns.
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There is a kind of memory called procedural memory.
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And I think it gives us an incredibly useful doorway into understanding why the body can seem to lag behind the mind.
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Procedural memory is often described as the memory of how.
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Okay.
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It is a form of body or implicit memory.
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Think of it as muscle memory.
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Okay.
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Now, example, you're getting on a bike after years of not riding one.
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Okay.
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You don't need to stand beside the bike and consciously remember with your mind every muscular adjustment required to balance, right?
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Your body has learned an organized sequence through repetition and experience.
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Now, trauma responses are obviously more complex than riding a bike.
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Okay, we can definitely agree with that.
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And that is that the nervous system can learn patterns of action without requiring a conscious story to initiate those responses.
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Okay.
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It can learn that when someone's tone changes, we monitor them more closely.
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When conflict begins to appear, we appease or keep the peace or forego our boundaries.
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When closeness becomes uncertain, we pursue and we chase.
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When emotion becomes overwhelming, we disappear and disconnect from sensation.
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This is why a person can sit in therapy and genuinely know I am not trapped anymore and still feel their body collapse during conflict.
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So your conscious understanding isn't necessarily false.
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Okay.
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And your body's response isn't false either.
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They are different forms of learning existing in the same human being.
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And this is where I think healing becomes much more interesting because instead of spending all of our energy trying to convince the body that its response is irrational, we can begin asking what kind of experience would allow the body to update what it expects.
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A nervous system is constantly making predictions based on what has happened before.
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Okay.
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It is not waiting just passively for reality to happen and then responding from scratch every single time.
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It is using prior experience and filtering that experience to anticipate what is likely to happen next and then preparing the body accordingly.
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Okay, this is extraordinarily useful.
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You wouldn't want to consciously relearn the world every morning, right?
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Think about it in that way.
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But it also means that a pattern can persist because from the body's perspective, it remains the best available prediction.
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So this is part of why I don't love the language of getting rid of trauma responses or nervous system responses and expanding its choice, its flexibility.
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So for instance, ifilance has been the body's most reliable way of staying connected to other people, we don't want to rip vigilance away.
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Instead, we help the body and the nervous system to discover that there are moments when attention can return to the self and that connection can still remain.
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So ultimately, the body and the nervous system updates through experience, through showing, not telling, which means that at some point we have to give it a new experience.
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So for the next few minutes, we are going to stop talking about your nervous system and we're actually going to work with it.
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Okay, let's get into just a short, brief somatic practice.
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So if you are driving or doing anything that requires your full attention, of course, I wouldn't recommend doing this practice right now.
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Definitely come back to it.
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And wherever you are, just remember that you are in charge of the pace here.
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Okay.
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Your eyes can remain open.
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You can stop at any point.
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You can do less than I suggest.
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Okay.
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There's no benefit to overriding yourself in the name of doing a somatic practice quote correctly.
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Now, I also just want to say that we are also not going to begin by just diving into the body.
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Okay.
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For someone who is maybe highly activated, internal sensation can already feel really loud.
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Okay.
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For someone, for instance, who's dissociated, being told to suddenly go inside can feel inaccessible or even really destabilizing.
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So instead, we are going to begin with something a bit simpler.
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Okay.
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We are going to allow the nervous system to gather information about where you are now.
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So my invitation to you, without changing anything, can you allow your eyes to just notice the space around you?
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And we don't need to, you know, search for something like calming.
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We don't need to find the prettiest thing in the room.
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We're just allowing the eyes to move at a pace that feels natural.
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And we're also allowing ourselves to just take in a little more of the environment than we were taking in just a moment ago.
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Okay, maybe notice what's in front of you.
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And then without, you know, forcing your head to necessarily move, can we allow our vision to become just a little bit wider?
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Okay, so for me, I'm noticing just kind of the window off to my right, out of my peripheral.
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Okay, just allow yourself to register that there's more to the space than the single point that you were just focused on.
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Alright, now allow your eyes to move again one more time.
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And to just land somewhere naturally.
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And if they do land and pause, can you just allow that to happen?
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Allow them to rest there for a moment.
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Maybe just notice just one ordinary detail about what you're seeing.
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Maybe it's the way that the light falls against something.
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Maybe it's a texture, an edge, a shape, movement outside a window.
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Okay, there's no correct object here.
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We're simply giving the orienting system.
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Okay, our sensory motor system is always orienting.
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We're giving our orienting system time to receive present day information.
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How is our body showing us that we are here right now?
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All right.
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So now I'll just invite you to notice that your body exists inside of a larger environment.
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We call this our peripersonal space, our peripersonal bubble, right?
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There's space in front of you.
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There's space on either side of you.
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And even without turning your head around, you may be able to register that the world continues behind you as well.
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Now just start to see if you can begin to notice just where your body is being supported right now.
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So if you're sitting, for instance, you might notice the surface or the contact underneath you.
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Okay, we're not noticing whether we like it or whether it makes us relax, just the fact that something is holding some of your weight.
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If you're standing, you can notice just where your feet meet the ground.
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Okay, if you're walking somewhere safe enough to continue listening, maybe just notice the change in contact as one foot meets the ground and then the other.
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And in fact, you know, I might encourage you to see if you can release the expectation that this practice is supposed to calm you down.
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Instead, we're just getting curious about what is already happening.
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You know, maybe you notice pressure where your body meets the chair.
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Maybe you notice the temperature of your hands or the contact of clothing against your skin.
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Maybe you're noticing the movement of breathing without forcing it or trying to deepen it.
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And maybe this is common, maybe internal sensation feels difficult to access today.
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And if that's true, can you just stay with the outside world?
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Okay, we don't have to go inward simply because I invited you there.
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So we're either orienting inward, which we call interoception, or we're orienting outward, which we call extrosception.
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Okay, so if there's somewhere in your body that feels relatively neutral, okay, see if your attention can rest there for a moment.
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Okay, and I'm not saying it has to be the safest place or even just the calmest place.
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Think of this as being somewhere that isn't asking very much from you.
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And from that place, is there any weight, any temperature, any pressure, tingling stillness?
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Maybe you can't quite find words for it.
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We don't need words.
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That's okay.
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But just notice what happens when you allow your attention to remain there without trying to amplify the sensation or hold on to it.
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And then can we allow our attention to widen again?
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See if you can be aware of that place in your body while also remembering the room around you.
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I think this is a moment where there's kind of that invitation to just remember that we don't have to disappear into our bodies, tracking our sensations in order to be quote, quote, embodied.
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Okay, we can be here in our bodies and still connect into the world around us.
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Now I'll just invite you to see if there's any small adjustment that your body wants to make.
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Okay, and this isn't necessarily an instruction to move, it's just an invitation and notice whether an impulse is already there.
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So for me, I'm kind of stretching out my back a little bit.
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Which is followed by a yawn.
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Right.
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So maybe your posture wants to change, maybe your jaw wants to move, or maybe you want to shift your weight, you know, stretch your body, stretch your fingers, or maybe your body.
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Wants just absolutely nothing from you.
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Okay, let that be true too.
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Alright, and now without evaluating the practice, okay, just see if there's anything that feels different from when we began.
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And notice I didn't say better.
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Okay, I just said different.
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Okay, maybe you can feel the floor more clearly.
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Maybe your breath has started to change on its own.
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Maybe your eyes are just taking in more of the room.
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Maybe you feel more sensation or less if it was really loud.
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Maybe an emotion appeared.
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Maybe you're irritated that I keep asking you to notice things.
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Okay.
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And maybe you feel exactly the same.
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Okay, all of that is information.
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Alright, so as we close out our practice, just allow your eyes to register the space one more time.
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Just noticing where you are.
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Okay.
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And then give yourself a moment to just come fully back into whatever you were doing before we started.
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Now, before your mind immediately starts grading that experience, I want to catch you.
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Okay, because there is a tendency, especially among people who've done a lot of personal work, to turn even a five-minute encounter with the body into another performance metric.
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And man, was this me?
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Right?
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Did I did I regulate?
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Did I feel enough?
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Was that the sensation I was supposed to find?
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Like, why couldn't I access anything?
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The point wasn't to produce a state or to produce a feeling.
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The point was to create an experience in which you remained in relationship with yourself without forcing your physiology to become something else.
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Okay, some people might notice a spontaneous breath or a swallow or warmth or maybe more visual clarity.
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There could be a small muscular release or just kind of this overall sense of being more present.
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For others, you might be landing after that practice, feeling or noticing maybe discomfort that you hadn't been aware of until now.
00:24:33.519 --> 00:24:35.519
And some people notice very little.
00:24:35.759 --> 00:24:36.079
Okay.
00:24:36.559 --> 00:24:43.839
Okay, so practices like this, you know, we're not trying to prove that we can withstand more, more discomfort.
00:24:44.160 --> 00:24:51.039
We are creating the conditions in which your nervous system doesn't have to protect you quite so intensely.
00:24:51.359 --> 00:24:53.440
So this practice is yours now.
00:24:53.599 --> 00:25:02.480
Okay, we've made it its own chapter in this podcast episode so that you can come back to it without having to find the entire conversation again.
00:25:02.720 --> 00:25:10.240
And now I just want to transition, okay, and I want to talk about the difference between a moment and a capacity.
00:25:10.960 --> 00:25:16.240
So whatever you notice during that practice matters so much.
00:25:16.960 --> 00:25:22.079
But I also don't want to inflate it into something that it isn't.
00:25:22.160 --> 00:25:22.480
Okay.
00:25:22.640 --> 00:25:37.359
A few minutes of orienting can give the nervous system a new reference point, but it cannot undo years of adaptation and procedural patterns, okay, in one sitting.
00:25:37.599 --> 00:25:45.440
And anything free on the internet or paid for on the internet, okay, that implies 10 minutes will permanently reset your nervous system.
00:25:45.599 --> 00:25:50.559
They are selling you a fantasy about how biological change actually happens.
00:25:50.799 --> 00:25:51.039
Okay.
00:25:51.200 --> 00:26:02.400
This is one of the places where I think nervous system culture has accidentally reproduced the same urgency that many people are actually trying to heal from.
00:26:02.559 --> 00:26:06.799
And that can look like becoming obsessed with the release, right?
00:26:06.960 --> 00:26:15.359
The somatic release, the shake, the cry, the breakthrough, the dramatic moment when the body finally lets something go.
00:26:15.759 --> 00:26:30.480
Those experiences can absolutely be meaningful, but they are not the metric that somatic experiencing practitioners, which is the modality that I'm professionally trained in, that is not the metric that we go off of.
00:26:30.880 --> 00:26:32.640
We measure capacity.
00:26:33.039 --> 00:26:39.680
Okay, and capacity is less glamorous because you usually recognize it after the fact.
00:26:39.920 --> 00:26:40.240
Okay.
00:26:40.400 --> 00:26:46.160
It is realizing six months later that a difficult conversation didn't consume the rest of your week.
00:26:46.319 --> 00:26:53.039
It is noticing that someone else's disappointment no longer immediately becomes an emergency that you have to fix.
00:26:53.279 --> 00:27:01.759
It can be feeling anger and discovering that you can remain present enough to decide what you want to do with that.
00:27:02.000 --> 00:27:02.720
And stress.
00:27:02.880 --> 00:27:04.160
I mean, let's talk about stress.
00:27:04.240 --> 00:27:08.640
It can be feeling stressed, which we feel all of the time, right?
00:27:08.880 --> 00:27:12.880
Without interpreting stress itself as evidence that you are unsafe.
00:27:13.039 --> 00:27:13.359
Okay.
00:27:13.839 --> 00:27:23.119
That kind of change tends to be built incrementally because nervous systems adapt through repeated experience.
00:27:23.680 --> 00:27:29.440
Now, think about as an example, what happens when we build physical strength.
00:27:29.599 --> 00:27:29.920
Okay.
00:27:30.160 --> 00:27:31.759
The body needs weight.
00:27:31.920 --> 00:27:32.160
Okay.
00:27:32.240 --> 00:27:33.359
Think of dumbbells.
00:27:33.440 --> 00:27:35.119
It needs weight, what we call load.
00:27:35.359 --> 00:27:39.279
But load alone doesn't create strength.
00:27:39.599 --> 00:27:41.680
The dose actually matters.
00:27:41.839 --> 00:27:42.160
Okay.
00:27:42.559 --> 00:27:44.240
Recovery matters.
00:27:44.480 --> 00:27:46.079
Repetition matters.
00:27:46.160 --> 00:27:47.599
It doesn't happen overnight.
00:27:47.759 --> 00:27:50.559
Now, the nervous system is the same.
00:27:50.640 --> 00:27:50.960
Okay.
00:27:51.119 --> 00:27:54.960
It doesn't just change its patterns overnight.
00:27:55.119 --> 00:27:55.440
Okay.
00:27:55.599 --> 00:28:00.799
The ways that it shows up, these survival strategies, these procedural patterns.
00:28:01.039 --> 00:28:03.200
It adapts over time.
00:28:03.759 --> 00:28:08.799
So nervous system capacity asks something very similar of us.
00:28:08.880 --> 00:28:09.200
Okay.
00:28:09.279 --> 00:28:11.599
The goal is not a life without activation.
00:28:11.680 --> 00:28:14.480
And activation, we really just mean stress.
00:28:14.720 --> 00:28:18.720
And that's something that we explore deeply in the body first healing program.
00:28:19.039 --> 00:28:28.319
And I actually think that idea profoundly misunderstands biology because a healthy nervous system should mobilize.
00:28:28.480 --> 00:28:28.799
Okay.
00:28:29.039 --> 00:28:35.279
It should give you energy when something matters, when something feels stressful or activating.
00:28:35.359 --> 00:28:37.759
It should help you defend a boundary.
00:28:38.079 --> 00:28:42.079
It should increase your vigilance when there is genuine danger.
00:28:42.319 --> 00:28:48.240
It should conserve energy when resources are really scarce and you are just spread thin.
00:28:48.480 --> 00:28:48.799
Okay.
00:28:48.960 --> 00:28:57.359
So healing cannot mean eliminating the very survival and nervous system responses that kept our species alive.
00:28:57.599 --> 00:29:13.119
What we are looking for is the key term here: flexibility, which is the ability for our nervous system to respond or to go into survival mode, we could say, without becoming indefinitely stuck there.
00:29:13.279 --> 00:29:13.599
Okay.
00:29:13.920 --> 00:29:16.079
And that takes practice.
00:29:16.240 --> 00:29:24.799
And it's not because we're doing, you know, healing wrong if it takes time, but because adaptation itself does take time.
00:29:25.039 --> 00:29:29.200
So that's what the Body First Healing program was really built around.
00:29:29.440 --> 00:29:36.160
And I just want to say if you're not ready for something like that, I have a free nervous system assessment linked in the show notes.
00:29:36.319 --> 00:29:37.839
Okay, you can begin there.
00:29:38.079 --> 00:29:44.640
And that's a place where you can learn a little bit more about the patterns that your own system tends toward.
00:29:44.960 --> 00:29:56.480
But for those of you who have been wondering what it would actually look like to spend more than a podcast episode learning this work and experiencing this work, then I want to give you some clarity around that.
00:29:56.640 --> 00:29:56.880
Okay.
00:29:56.960 --> 00:30:02.079
So let's talk about just what six months of body first healing work actually looks like.
00:30:02.240 --> 00:30:02.559
Okay.
00:30:03.039 --> 00:30:11.279
I first just want to say that I didn't come to this work because I needed another like interesting thing to study.
00:30:11.440 --> 00:30:13.119
Like I am such a nerd.
00:30:13.279 --> 00:30:15.119
My bookshelves are next to me right now.
00:30:15.200 --> 00:30:16.400
They are piled high.
00:30:16.559 --> 00:30:16.880
Okay.
00:30:17.440 --> 00:30:36.720
I came to it because after nearly 15 years of walking the traditional route of talk therapy and a cocktail of medications and just doing all of the things that so many of us are told to do when we are recovering, healing, or trying to become more well.
00:30:37.440 --> 00:30:43.519
There were still places that my understanding or that my talking could not reach.
00:30:43.759 --> 00:30:49.519
Kind of like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, I had language for exactly what had happened to me.
00:30:49.680 --> 00:30:50.720
I had the insight.
00:30:51.039 --> 00:30:52.240
I had sought help.
00:30:52.400 --> 00:31:01.200
I could tell a very coherent story about my experiences and understand why certain things affected me the way that they did.
00:31:01.440 --> 00:31:03.279
So none of that work was wasted.
00:31:03.440 --> 00:31:06.000
I mean, some of it absolutely changed my life.
00:31:06.240 --> 00:31:13.200
But there was a difference between being able to explain my body and being able to inhabit it.
00:31:13.440 --> 00:31:22.160
In other words, there were things that I understood cognitively that my physiology had not yet learned experientially.
00:31:22.640 --> 00:31:36.799
And this is why for so many of those years, I was stuck in the debilitating cycles and patterns of coping strategies that became really destructive to my health, to my relationships, and just my overall well-being.
00:31:37.039 --> 00:31:47.200
Now, once I began working at the level of the body, healing became less about collecting just another explanation for myself.
00:31:47.440 --> 00:31:52.240
And it became more about creating different experiences inside of myself.
00:31:52.400 --> 00:31:58.079
Now, that distinction eventually became foundational to the way that I work.
00:31:58.319 --> 00:32:10.319
And that sounded like, you know, not how do we get rid of this symptom or this coping strategy as quickly as possible, but what makes this response make sense?
00:32:10.559 --> 00:32:13.039
You know, what is the body attempting to accomplish?
00:32:13.119 --> 00:32:21.039
And how do we help it develop more options than the ones that it learned when options were limited?
00:32:21.279 --> 00:32:24.799
Okay, so that is the work underneath the body first healing program.
00:32:25.119 --> 00:32:31.680
Now, the body first healing program is a six-month program because I don't think this work lends itself to being rushed.
00:32:31.759 --> 00:32:32.079
Okay.
00:32:32.160 --> 00:32:44.160
In the somatic experiencing world, we really value what we call titration, which is slow, tolerable baby steps in helping the nervous system to stretch but not stress.
00:32:44.400 --> 00:32:44.640
Okay.
00:32:44.799 --> 00:32:48.880
We always say that slower is actually faster when it comes to nervous system work.
00:32:49.200 --> 00:32:57.440
Now, the format, okay, there is a self-paced educational curriculum because understanding your nervous system does matter.
00:32:57.599 --> 00:32:57.920
Okay.
00:32:58.319 --> 00:33:04.240
But the program is deliberately built so that information is paired with experience.
00:33:04.480 --> 00:33:37.279
So throughout those six months, you're learning the framework while practicing it in your actual life with weekly nervous system gym sessions, live question and answer calls with me weekly, live somatic experiencing, one-on-one sessions with me, a community connection and co-regulation call, and also a private community, as well as an on-demand library of somatic practices that you can return to when you need support.
00:33:37.519 --> 00:33:43.039
Now, the curriculum itself can begin with roughly 30 to 45 minutes a week.
00:33:43.200 --> 00:33:43.440
Okay.
00:33:43.599 --> 00:33:50.799
These are bite-sized little lessons every week in the suggested program schedule and their videos that you watch.
00:33:51.039 --> 00:33:57.680
And then you can choose how much of the additional live support or the live calls make sense for you.
00:33:57.839 --> 00:34:13.360
Now there's also flex time built into the program, okay, because I have no interest in turning healing into just another rigid standard that you might fail at when your child gets sick or work explodes, or life just simply becomes life.
00:34:13.519 --> 00:34:13.840
Okay.
00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:25.119
So in this program is where your body begins discovering through repetition rather than persuasion that there are other ways to move through the world.
00:34:25.440 --> 00:34:35.840
And rather than me telling you what that impact can look like, I want you to hear directly from previous graduates about the impact that this program has made in their lives.
00:34:36.719 --> 00:34:40.000
Hi, I'm Donna, and this is my story in a nutshell.
00:34:40.239 --> 00:34:50.159
Some of my symptoms were abdominal discomfort, bloating, muscle spasms, sensitivities in my nose, my eyes, my ears, fatigue and brain fog.
00:34:50.239 --> 00:34:54.559
I found Brit and decided to give the Body First Healing Program a try.
00:34:55.679 --> 00:34:59.760
Here I am six months later to try to explain what this has been like for me.
00:35:01.039 --> 00:35:12.400
Britt consistently continued to answer my questions, to encourage me, and just acknowledge that what was happening made complete sense and that I wasn't crazy.
00:35:14.159 --> 00:35:18.559
Yeah, I was so thankful for that, and I've felt really supported throughout this whole process.
00:35:18.800 --> 00:35:26.719
The difference between then and now, the original symptoms are completely gone, and I gained resilience and capacity to move through hard things.
00:35:26.880 --> 00:35:29.760
Probably the biggest takeaway was just what I learned about my own body.
00:35:29.920 --> 00:35:35.920
We are designed with intentioned and with the capacity to truly heal.
00:35:36.480 --> 00:35:40.159
And it's beautiful and amazing and miraculous.
00:35:40.320 --> 00:35:44.719
And uh just really thankful for getting to learn this step.
00:35:44.800 --> 00:35:47.280
And I wish everybody could learn it.
00:35:47.519 --> 00:35:48.480
Thank you, Britt.
00:35:49.920 --> 00:35:59.199
So I'm 33, and for as long as I can remember, I've lived with anxiety, fear, intrusive thoughts, compulsions, OCD.
00:35:59.679 --> 00:36:05.519
For the first time in my life, I feel safe and I feel at home in my own body.
00:36:05.760 --> 00:36:11.440
Instead of kind of trying to think my way out of everything, I've learned to track what's happening in my body.
00:36:11.679 --> 00:36:14.079
I live far more in the present.
00:36:14.320 --> 00:36:21.840
And it feels like I'm I'm kind of seeing the world for the first time with like fresh eyes.
00:36:22.239 --> 00:36:32.079
And I'm now able to recognize those early signs of activation, and I feel like I've got this inner like well of resources.
00:36:32.320 --> 00:36:40.159
My relationship with my husband, with my friends, my family, and even my dogs have completely transformed.
00:36:40.400 --> 00:36:44.320
The Body First program has transformed my life.
00:36:44.559 --> 00:36:54.480
And if you are considering it or thinking about whether it would be something, you know, that would be helpful, I would highly, highly recommend.
00:36:54.719 --> 00:36:57.519
It has just been life-changing for me.
00:36:57.599 --> 00:36:59.039
So thank you so much, Br.
00:37:00.000 --> 00:37:12.400
So I also want to be really clear about the scope of the program, okay, because good nervous system work requires honesty about what something can and cannot provide.
00:37:12.559 --> 00:37:12.880
Okay.
00:37:13.360 --> 00:37:15.280
This is a group program.
00:37:15.599 --> 00:37:18.639
It is not one-to-one trauma processing.
00:37:18.800 --> 00:37:24.960
And it also isn't just a substitute for therapy or medical care or psychiatric care.
00:37:25.199 --> 00:37:25.519
Okay.
00:37:25.679 --> 00:37:37.440
It is a structured six-month environment for learning and practicing and embodying nervous system work with guidance, with repetition, and with community around you.
00:37:37.679 --> 00:37:47.519
So if you have been listening to this episode thinking this is the next step, this is the missing puzzle piece in my healing journey.
00:37:47.840 --> 00:37:53.760
Then the next actual step is to simply apply through our application.
00:37:53.920 --> 00:38:01.840
We ask just a few questions because we want to understand what you're experiencing, what you've already tried, what kind of support you're looking for.
00:38:02.079 --> 00:38:13.840
After you submit the application, you'll receive information about the program and next steps so that you can make an informed decision about whether the structure really, really aligns for you.
00:38:14.079 --> 00:38:18.480
Now you can apply at bodyfirsthealing.com forward slash program.
00:38:18.880 --> 00:38:22.559
Again, that is bodyfirsthealing.com forward slash program.
00:38:22.800 --> 00:38:26.079
And of course, the link is down in the show notes.
00:38:26.400 --> 00:38:36.079
But whether you apply or never do anything else, okay, after this episode, I just want you to keep the practice that we did today.
00:38:36.239 --> 00:38:36.480
Okay.
00:38:36.559 --> 00:38:40.800
And maybe even more importantly, I want you to keep the question underneath it.
00:38:41.199 --> 00:38:50.719
The next time your body does the thing you wish it wouldn't do, just see what happens if you become curious before you become corrective.
00:38:50.960 --> 00:38:51.280
Okay.
00:38:51.440 --> 00:38:56.800
Not how do I make this stop, but what makes this response make sense?
00:38:57.039 --> 00:39:02.480
Okay, there is a very different relationship to the body on the other side of that question.
00:39:02.639 --> 00:39:06.880
And it doesn't mean that we surrender agency to every impulse.
00:39:07.039 --> 00:39:07.199
Okay.
00:39:07.360 --> 00:39:13.519
It doesn't mean that our histories and what we've been through excuse the ways that we affect other people.
00:39:14.079 --> 00:39:19.840
It means we stop requiring shame to be the mechanism of our change.
00:39:20.000 --> 00:39:26.800
Okay, we can take responsibility for a pattern without despising the body that learned it.
00:39:26.960 --> 00:39:35.840
Okay, our bodies and our nervous systems were incredibly brilliant and they learned to survive and adapt in overwhelming experiences.
00:39:36.480 --> 00:39:43.920
And so what we do here and what we do now is we just update those patterns because they're a little outdated.
00:39:44.079 --> 00:39:44.320
Okay.
00:39:44.480 --> 00:39:51.039
You can want something to change without treating its existence as evidence that you've failed.
00:39:51.119 --> 00:39:51.360
Okay.
00:39:51.519 --> 00:40:00.000
And you can understand that healing is sometimes less about finally finding the sentence that explains everything.
00:40:00.239 --> 00:40:10.960
And it's more about accumulating enough new somatic experiences that the body no longer has to organize the present entirely around the past.
00:40:11.360 --> 00:40:15.280
So whatever you decide, the practice in this episode is yours.
00:40:15.440 --> 00:40:17.920
Okay, come back to it whenever you need it.
00:40:18.079 --> 00:40:33.039
Not to force yourself into calm, not to perform regulation correctly, okay, but just to practice being here long enough for your body to receive a little bit more information about where and when you actually are.
00:40:33.440 --> 00:40:35.440
All right, my friends, I will see you next week.
00:40:35.599 --> 00:40:40.159
If this episode landed so well with you, remember you can always send it to a friend.
00:40:40.400 --> 00:40:47.440
Reach out over DM at Heal with Brit on Instagram and let me know just what resonated, what stood out.
00:40:47.599 --> 00:40:52.400
I hope to see you again soon here on the Body First Healing podcast or in the Body First Healing program.
00:40:52.719 --> 00:40:53.199
Thanks, guys.
00:40:53.360 --> 00:40:54.719
See you next week.
00:40:57.760 --> 00:41:02.000
Thank you so much for tuning into the Body First Healing podcast.
00:41:02.239 --> 00:41:10.239
If this episode resonated with you, I would be so grateful if you subscribed, left a review, or shared it with someone that you love.
00:41:10.480 --> 00:41:12.079
I'll see you back here next week.
00:41:12.159 --> 00:41:14.719
And until then, be gentle with yourself.
00:41:14.880 --> 00:41:19.599
You're doing the best you can with what you have, and that is more than enough.
00:41:19.840 --> 00:41:27.119
Just a quick note this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice.
00:41:27.360 --> 00:41:31.039
Always consult a qualified provider for personal support.