Dating Your Body

If you want to tap into your sensuality, learn how to listen and reconnect to your body, or investigate changing the negative narrative around your body - this nourishing episode is for you.  Aurora Allen introduces us to the concept of “Taking our body out for a date" and learning how to listen to our bodies. She shares profoundly simple practices to help us move toward more grounded, connected, and embodied lives.

Aurora Allen, M.A, RYTP-500, is a somatic and embodiment coach and certified yoga instructor. www.wellalignedwoman.com

Learn more about these topics
Learning to  listen to your body
Book review: The Body Is Not An Apology
Book review: Mother's, Daughter's and Body Image

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:08

As a registered nurse and educator for over 30 years, I think I really need to break the silence around sex, especially for women. This podcast is about opening doors to healthy conversations about sex. What I found is that when women have comprehensive education about sex, their self-confidence stores. And when that happens, women can truly express experience and enjoy their sexuality. They give themselves permission for pleasure. Welcome to Permission for Pleasure. I'm Cindy Sherky, your host. And yes, I'm smiling. You can probably hear that in my voice. I'm delighted you're here. And so grateful for you sharing with your friends. They message me and say, I found the podcast through my friend, or my friend sent me your podcast. I just love that our community is growing with more people learning and listening. It's beautiful. And this episode is beautiful. It is all about our mind and how to be more grounded and embodied. It's it's lovely. I hope you enjoy it and that it served you well. Today my guest is the lovely Aurora Allen. And she attended a workshop of mine, oh, several years back. I I can't even think of when, but we've stayed connected over IG all this time. And her platform is called Well Aligned Woman. And it has really helped me to stay grounded and embodied. I just I love what she's doing there, and I've followed along ever since we connected. And so I'm just delighted that she could be with me today and that you all could be introduced to her. So, Aurora, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Thank you so much for having me. And I feel the same about your IG. I love the messaging that you're bringing forth for women to experience their bodies and find pleasure. So just as much love and respect for what you're doing out there.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Thank you. Let me tell the listeners a little bit about you. Aurora is a somatic and embodiment coach with a master's degree in psychology and certification and behavioral analysis. As a certified yoga instructor, she supports her clients in healing through body and breath practices that are grounded in yoga philosophy and techniques. I would love for you to start off just by sharing a little bit about your passion for your work and this work that you're doing in the world.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Yeah, absolutely. So the reason that I work with the body the way that I do is because it's what supported me in my healing journey, just as a human, just healing the wounds of past, right? Um, I am a seeker and a student forever. I love to learn, I always have. And what I recognize as I look back into my life is that I was really trying to figure out what was going on with my mind, right? I was going to school and I was uh doing all the things that I thought I should do. I was on this path of learning in a way that just kept me asking more questions. And I thought I understood uh at some point, right? I have my master's degree in psychology, I understand behavior in this way that is very cerebral. And what it was that started to shift things for me was when I began actually training in yoga. So as I started to explore the body and understand why it felt so good to go to yoga, then it just led me into a place where I shifted the learning into okay, what's actually going on in the body that is connecting with these things that I've learned in the field of psychology? And ultimately it led me to this place where now I'm working as the somatic and embodiment coach, pulling both sides together and supporting other people in reconnecting to their bodies. And so I work alongside an incredible group of therapists and mental health coaches that talk people through their story. And then I come in and I reconnect people to their bodies, and then the experience is very holistic and it uh has been super fulfilling. So that's why I do what I do.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

And I would love to hear more about teaching people, helping people connect more to their bodies.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Well, typically, well, first of I just want to share a little bit. I think that what's happening in our culture and society is that we are very, very reinforced for our prefrontal cortex processes, our planning and our doing and our intelligence and our language, and all of that is um rewarded so highly in our culture. And so we're, you know, we live in this culture of hustle and go and achieve and do, and what gets lost is our connection to the hindbrain processes, the lizard brain, the feeling and the sensing part of our brain. And so when we talk about reconnecting to the body, we're kind of building the muscle of the hindbrain and just remembering that there's another piece of us that's important to reinforce and spend time with. And so the way that I often begin is just by increasing the sensory language. And so I will actually send my clients a list of sensory words like airy and flat and smooth and bubbly and warm and tight and you know, all these different descriptive words. Because when we're not accustomed to spending time in our body and feeling the sensations that are happening, sometimes we've disconnected from sensation because the loud sensations are the painful ones, the ones that we're trying to avoid. And so then the more subtle sensations get lost in the shuffle as well. And so, to just remember, there's all these different kinds of sensory experiences that we can have. And when we begin to reconnect to our sensory experience, I'll often go with something pleasant that's not connected to a trauma or the things and the reasons we disconnected from our body in the first place. So I will often um have somebody talk about a memory, or or I'll just wait until they're talking about something where their face lights up and I can see in their body that there's some kind of energy happening. And so then I'll invite them in and say, Do you notice that your energy is different? And how do you feel? And sometimes they'll talk about the emotions. Well, I'm feeling happy talking about that. Well, how do you know you're happy? What is your body saying to tell you that you feel happy? Well, I don't know. And so then we explore, you know, does it feel tight or loose? Oh, I feel, well, I don't feel tighter, but I kind of feel open, maybe more open. Okay, where do you feel open? And so then we just kind of go on this like, I don't know, scavenger hunt to kind of see like what is actually happening. So that's typically the way that I'll begin. Um, but there's all different kinds of somatic tools that we can use to enter in. That's just one way. There's grounding exercises, there's movement, there's somatic touch, right? Meeting ourselves with contact in different ways. Um, so there's there's lots of tools that I use. And from my experience in the yoga world, um, learning techniques of self-massage and then understanding the psychology side. And it I think that there's just this whole bag of things that we can try on and take off as needed if they don't fit.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

There's a lot there. I wish you could see her as she's speaking, because even even as she said somatic touch, she had crossed her hands and put them over her chest as she said that. I'm trying to describe it to the listeners because you can't see her, but she's actually demonstrating with her own body some of these things that she's talking about. So, Aurora, I mean, you are um, you know, this is your life work. I mean, you live it out every day. As a nurse, I'm thinking back to so many situations when, you know, clients didn't really listen to their bodies. And often we don't listen to any of that whispering or gentle speaking to us. We wait until we our body has to scream at us for us to pay attention. So I think this I'm thinking about that in a more of a medical nursing standpoint, but I have found that to be true translated just into everyday life.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Yeah. And I think that there's so many layers to why we disconnect or we stop listening. Uh, one of them is again going back to just the cultural influence of today. We have been conditioned to wait until something gets bad enough and then go to the doctor. And oftentimes when we see a doctor, the doctor is trained to treat the symptom of what's happening, which will dull the symptom and it will support the symptom. But is it actually addressing the reason why, the root cause of why the body is speaking so loudly? And typically that's not the case. Um, and so how can we begin to reconnect? I think that has everything to do with safety. Safety is something that is really important to consider when it comes to our body experience. Like I mentioned before, we typically disconnect because there's some kind of trauma or experience that's too much for us. And so we start to shut down the sensory experience, and that's out of protection. We're trying to protect ourselves from this pain, this trauma, this experience that's outside our window of tolerance. And so when I talk about safety, I like to share with clients that we are wired for either connection or protection. Well, we're wired for both, but we can only be in connection or protection. We can't be in both at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

So, in other words, we can't connect if we're trying to protect.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Exactly. And so the word safety is kind of in the middle of these two. Like I think about like, let's say connection is on the right and protection is on the left. Safety lives in between the two. And it's the question: do I feel safe? If the answer is yes, then we will be able to open and connect and expand. And if the answer is no, then we will protect, we will contract, we will care for ourselves. And it's not a bad thing to protect. What happens is we get stuck in protection mode. I work with the nervous system. If you've ever heard the phrase, the body keeps the score, it's a phenomenal book. I'm reading it right now, finally. Yeah, Bessel Vanderkoel put this book out now quite a while ago, but it is still kind of new for us to be considering in uh the connection of mind and body. If we wonder, like, well, how does the body store emotions? How does the body keep the score? It does so through the nervous system. The nervous system is what is telling us if we're able to connect or protect. And it's actually like running behind the scenes. This is a below consciousness process. And there's actually a name for it. It's called neurosception, which is the body constantly scanning to determine whether it feels safe or not. So we're not thinking, do I feel safe or not? The body is saying, I feel safe or I don't feel safe. So this is where that hind brain, that lizard brain comes into play. And can we get connected to that? And when we don't feel safe, can we start to learn why? Can we start to find safety within ourselves by using body tools that help our nervous system settle when it's too upregulated, or come back online when it's totally disconnected and placed ourselves in a state of freeze or shutdown? And so it's not one answer for everyone. Everyone is so unique and so different. And so, what we want to do is learn how to get connected to our own nervous system so we can start to see what state are we in? Are we anxious and buzzing with energy and needing something to help us calm down and settle? Or are we needing to move out of a depressive state to be able to engage again? And there's tools that are supportive of both sides. So there's hope.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Yes, that there is hope. So tell me about a couple of those tools. I mean, I'm sure people are listening and going, okay, well, but what? What are those tools, right? Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

So again, it's it depends, right? One of my greatest yoga teachers, her answer to everything, every question in a workshop is, well, it depends. Okay, I'm gonna say it again. It depends because it does. It depends on circumstance and the present moment. That's why learning how to be in the present moment versus worrying about the future or being stuck in the past is such a vital piece of the process of working with the body. One of the ways that I teach learning how to be present is just by orienting to the space that we're in. The way that I do it, there's so many different ways, again, to practice orienting. I take it in my sessions a little bit more open-ended. And so the way that I like to invite people to orient is to, and you're welcome to do this if you're listening, is to take a moment to allow yourself to sit back in your chair wherever you're sitting, and and literally and figuratively like lean back and start to observe your environment. Allow the head and neck to move as you look around the room that you're in. And sometimes the busy mind will want to start to say something about the object in the room, and so you're inviting the brain to lean back and allow the visual stimulus to enter through the eyes and just gain a felt sense of where you are. What does it feel like to be here in this space? And as you look around, you move the head and neck, which is kind of engaging the vestibular sensory experience, and you look all the way around, you take plenty of time, you give yourself time to be in the space, and then when you're ready to be done, you look down at your body and recognize that your body is here now, and then there are different ways that you can go with that. You can continue to go inward, you can start to recognize the feeling of the clothing against your skin. Where is it tight? Where is it loose? And then you can start to get more subtle with that. Can you trace the edges of your body and start to notice how the hair is falling? Notice the weight of your glasses against your nose and your ears. Can you sense that? Maybe you get more subtle and recognize that there is some kind of gentle pressure, that the air meets the skin. And then maybe you go inside. Once you've traced the edges of your body, maybe it feels okay to go inside and start to sense the internal experience that you're having. If it's not safe to do that, then you just stay with where you're at. And you just connect and you give yourself a moment. And then if you've closed the eyes, blink them open, maybe just quickly look around one more time and return yourself. It's like we're taking the the outer environment, we're working in, and then we come back out and we connect the two, right? We're still aware of our sensory experience that are our our bodies experience, and now we're also looking outside of ourselves and we're here. So that can be a grounding exercise, but actually just physically grounding, maybe shifting your weight in your in your seat. So you're shifting your weight side to side and you're feeling each sit bone press into the seat, and then you slow that down a little bit. Can you still feel the sit bones? Where are your feet landing? Can you spend a little time with what it feels like to feel the contact of your foot with the floor? How soft is it? Is it cool? Is it warm? So we're going back to the sensory words, right? And we're just spending time connecting to the sensory experience as neutral as it can be. And then just notice how you feel after.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

It's profoundly simple, isn't it?

unknown 19:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

And it's always available.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

And it's always available because our bodies can only be in the present. And I I hear you saying, you know, that our bodies are communicating with sensations.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

Our body speaks in feels. That's Jill Miller. She is um the creator of Yoga Tune Up and the therapy ball work that I do. She's amazing. And I just I just remember that. The body speaks in feels.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

And how do we learn that language?

SPEAKER_00 19:38

I like to think of it as a relationship, like a like we're like we're dating, right? Especially if it's been a while, right? So it can be like a marriage where you know you used to be really in touch with each other, and then over years, maybe you know, you've lost touch, and then it's like coming back together and learning new patterns of communication and new ways to be together, or it could be like a brand new relationship where when you're dating somebody, you show up and you don't just talk about yourself the whole time. But if you're really interested in this person as being a partner, then you hear what they have to say. And can you imagine starting a relationship with somebody who speaks a different language? How vital your listening would have to be to learn that language, and so to spend time listening, and then there's like a wooing happening. There's a there's a tenderness and uh, okay, how does this feel? And do you like this? And what about this? And there's attention that's given attention and intention with the moves that you make when you're beginning a new relationship. And so it's like that with the body. Take your body out to dinner, whether that means going to a yoga class so you have an hour to connect, or if it means that you have five minutes to go run your feet through the grass outside in the backyard or at the park down the street. It doesn't have to always be these long, expansive, fitness-based things to connect with our body. That can be one way, but it's not all that there is.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

I just love the idea of taking my body out on a date. That that idea of allowing myself to to take time for the listening and the developing of the relationship. It's been such a new thing as I've gotten older to investigate and explore, and I've just found such beauty in that.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

I'm so glad. Is there something that you Been doing lately that feels really nourishing and connecting uh to your body?

SPEAKER_01 22:06

I think uh I would say two things. One is seeing my body as a subject, not an object, and referring to her as her and she instead of it. It helps me care uh for her better. I think for a long time in all my growing up years, certainly I was pretty mean to her. Man, I didn't let her eat, I exercised her to death, but you know, I did all the things, talked to her in a really mean way. And the older I've gotten, the more I've realized that that isn't how I want to live anymore. That there's there's a lot of joy and peace in coming to just accept my body as she is, and also to listen, listen to her like you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

I was just gonna say that's that's so kind. There's so much kindness in the way that you are responding to the body's cues. And to become more kind to ourselves is not always easy. It's a lot of it just simply has to do with patterning. Taking a look at where did these patterns come from? Why were we being mean to our bodies? And when did that start? I will constantly go back to the nervous system because it is uh what houses and holds our fight, flight, and freeze response, which is what happens when we are faced with a threat. And it's typically when we are mean to our bodies, there's usually something in the stuckness of our uh response to threat. And those patterns get started usually in our childhood when we viewed the world differently and when things were out of our control, and we relied on the big people in our lives to take care of us, we create patterns for survival. We're also getting messages not only from culture, but from our culture in our house, from the other women in our lives. So, what are the messages that they are saying about their own bodies that we are internalizing before we're really even conscious of it? And not that these women around us are bad or wrong. It's just a passed down message. It's what they learned from the women before them and the women. And so it takes a lot of awareness to even begin to try and challenge and shift those messages. I remember it was amazing to me after I had a therapy session several years back where my therapist asked, Well, what did you say to yourself? What was it that you were? And I was like, I don't know. And that after that session, I started to hear my internal dialogue and how awful it was. I wasn't even aware I was speaking to myself this way. And so awareness, I think, is really important to be brave enough to see yourself and to see your patterns because that's the first step in making any change.

SPEAKER_01 25:14

And I do think so many of us grow up with that. And the older I get, Aurora, like the more I see it, I can stop now and like I won't participate. Like, this is not the way I want to communicate. I have three daughters. I mean, I can think of so many times when I didn't do this well until I figured it out more and more. And now I tell them now, as the young adults, you know, I'm so sorry. I didn't realize what I was saying back then, you know.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

I and that is so reparative. Hmm. That is so reparative for you to have the awareness to not only see and to stop, but also to come back and recognize, gosh, I'm sorry for those those things that I said. I I didn't know.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Yeah, I didn't recognize some of it. Gosh, this is probably a whole nother episode we could do uh as parenting and and how we talk about our bodies, but I think this is so important to remember that that our little ones and not just our little ones, those around us, the people in our circle, in our community, you know, they're we're listening to each other. And this could be this is such a a generous gift to each other to change that narrative.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Absolutely. And when we consider like diet culture and and the way we view our bodies, I think it's interesting how there's this intuitive eating paradigm that's kind of coming up, and it's really interesting and expansive, and yet intuitive means that you need to be able to tune in and be with your feelings and be with your sensory experience. So if we're really listening to our bodies, then we know intuitively what is going to be nourishing. I, you know, I talked to some clients. Well, I'm really interested in intuitive eating. Can we work on that? I said, we already are, because we're learning how to be with our sensory experience. When that becomes more ingrained and natural for us to go to, it will just infiltrate our whole lives, including what we put in our mouth, because we are going to be with along the whole process. Well, how does that feel? Well, that actually made my stomach ache. And the subtleties of it, right? It's very clear when you eat something rancid and you get sick. It's less clear when you eat a cookie and the reward centers of the brain are saying, Oh my gosh, that was so good. That was so good. And we're in our thought process, right? Like, oh, I want a cookie, and right, or we're in kind of the sugar addiction. But if you really sit and come out of the mind and go into the stomach, how is that cookie actually sitting in your belly? Can you feel the subtle sensations of nausea or discomfort or bloatedness or whatever it is? Those are subtle. So it takes practice and time to get in and sense. And then when you can do that, I mean freedom around food.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

I'm sitting here thinking, well, this is such a key for women in related to their sensuality. Oh, yeah. And their sexuality. I mean, I am just sitting here going, this is this is why one of the reasons this is so important for your own sexuality too, is the same idea of listening to your body.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

I'm laughing because I can't believe we haven't gone here yet, especially with the the conversation of the nervous system. I do a lot of supporting women in pelvic floor restoration after having babies and reconnecting to the pelvic floor as part of the core system. And that comes from my trauma, my personal trauma that I had after having my first baby, um, and learning how to repair this structure down there. But it's the nervous system that supports whether we feel safe or not, to feel in that area of our body. And so we need to learn how to be in whatever state it is we need to be to feel safe so that we can allow for pleasure. And so to get connected and to get into the subtle experiences of what is actually happening, mind, body, mind to pelvic floor, can I sense what's happening down there? Is it contracted? Am I able to soften? If I'm not able to soften, how can I support myself in feeling safe enough so the body will soften on its own?

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Or why, you know, being willing to ask ourselves, well, why will it not soften? And I just think there's such a huge connection, like you're talking about, between uh our ability to experience our sensuality, uh, you know, through our senses, even pleasure because we and then to bring that into our sexuality, it's all so connected. And and people want there to be an easy button, like this would just work. I should just be able to feel sensual. And I I I want to say, uh, you know, friends, it it's a process, all these things Aurora's talking about, and the whole idea of taking the time to sit with ourselves and and listen and pay attention and practice, right? Re reading our cues or um learning our our language of how uh we interpret sensation and being able to put words to it, even like you've been describing. These kind of things they just they move you right into sensuality, I believe.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

Yes. The body likes to go slow. The body likes to go slow, and there's that cultural messaging again. I want to push a button and just have it be, right? We're conditioned to think that that's how it's supposed to be. And if it's not that way, there must be something wrong with us. That's never been true. The body is always expanded and contracted. Well, it expands more slowly, tends to contract quick when there is a threat. So safety and connection, there's a slow expansion, unsafe, contract.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

Beautiful. I I wish the listeners could see your body movements and hands and how um it brings it home in such a beautiful way. Oh, I just I do love the way you communicate. And I know we've we've brought up so many things here. I I just want to encourage people to hear you again say it's a process and it's not fast.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

No, it's it's never going to be fast when it comes to connecting with the body. Not only is it slow, it's always changing. It's ever-changing, it's about finding the rhythm and the flow. Sometimes that rhythm will be fast and vigorous, and sometimes it'll be just mellow and calm. And can we ride the waves of all of it? And can we be present and connected for all of it?

SPEAKER_01 33:15

Lovely. And I love encouraging people to remember that we do change and that we do go through waves, seasons, ebbs and flows. And so these conversations I found around my own body are ones I need to revisit often. We want to revisit the conversations that matter, and you and your bodies talking to each other and learning to listen, it matters deeply.

SPEAKER_00 33:47

There is a poem that I'd love to share, and I'm probably gonna get it wrong because it's not right in front of me. But I do have it on my IG account so you can go and look at the exact wording. But it's this idea that we're gonna get there, that we're gonna get to the destination, is another message that somehow we got ingrained, and it just is not a truth. Um, it's by Kurt Vonnegut, and he says, Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Where we go matters less than what we notice. Where we go matters less than what we notice. So can we just be and notice and be with and uh stay curious?

SPEAKER_01 34:36

Yes, stay curious. Yes. Since you've you've kind of brought in a poem, I'm going to also bring one in from Butterflies Rising. I I love her poetry. I you can find her on IG at Butterflies Rising, but it says there is this uh stunning breathing rhythm in a woman learning to love herself. This slow rise as she feels her way into every inch of her skin like honey. And this soft fall as she settles into grace. This is the breath I seek.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

That's one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

Oh, so community, wow. This is a a nourishing conversation for me, and I hope it is for you too. I would love uh you to share where people can find your work, Aurora, and how to connect with you.

SPEAKER_00 35:38

Yes, I am at wellalignedwoman.com. You can email me from there. And I'm also on Instagram as at WellAligned Woman, all one word. And you can also check out um if you are interested in private coaching with me, I do online sessions in somatic experiencing and learning how to reconnect through our group called Radical Wellness. So you can find them on Instagram at radical underscore wellness. That's it, or it's radical wellness co one of those.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

So on my podcast, um, we have a pleasure practice, Aurora, of trying to stop and notice, pay attention to what delights us. I wonder if you might share something that makes you stop and delights you day to day.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Oh, yes. So dragonflies are my reminder that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be. I just I see them everywhere. In places I'm not supposed to see them, like when it's raining. So they are a great reminder. Um, and and to expand on that, just nature being outside. Nature is really nourishing for me to be and feel connected to it. So I would say I'm finding a lot of pleasure in my life in this season because we're always changing being out in nature.

SPEAKER_01 37:17

Lovely. I feel the same. Thanks for sharing that. Well, community, I hope that this has been a nourishing conversation for you. And I do think these practices of connecting and listening to our bodies will truly help you in your journey of giving yourself permission for pleasure.