Emotional Sobriety Part 1: Feeling Bodies That Think

What if your body is speaking first and your thoughts are just catching up? We kick off a three-part journey into emotional sobriety by reframing feelings and thoughts as information, not identity, and by teaching a grounded, practical way to listen from the neck down. Through personal story, science-informed insights, and a guided practice, we explore how childhood conditioning trained us to override our nervous system and why that keeps us stuck in loops of overthinking, exhaustion, and disconnection.

I share how a health crisis forced me to stop analyzing emotions and start feeling them, and what changed when I learned to befriend fear instead of outrun it. We unpack the gap between insight and integration why you can explain your patterns yet repeat them and show how embodiment transforms triggers into signals. You'll learn simple steps to locate sensations, stay present without creating a story, and let memories surface just long enough to gather the message before returning to the breath.

This approach builds capacity so emotions stop hijacking your day and start guiding your choices. We close by anchoring the practice of self-regulation alongside healthy co-regulation. When you can create safety within, intuition sharpens, discernment strengthens, and connection with others deepens because you're actually present.

Consider this your invitation to come home to a feeling body that thinks, and to prepare for the next episode where we unpack one of the most misunderstood emotions: anger what it protects, why it's maligned, and how to befriend it.

If this conversation resonates: Subscribe to Lift OneSelf, share it with someone living from the neck up, and leave a review to help more people discover the work. Ready to go deeper? Visit liftoneself.com for the Emotional Sobriety Workshop and one-on-one sessions.

Chapters

• 0:00 Series And Purpose
• 1:09 Feelings As Information
• 2:00 Personal Reckoning And Body Wisdom
• 3:56 Childhood Conditioning And Disconnection
• 6:04 Knowing Versus Embodying
• 8:10 Returning To The Body
• 10:02 Guided Mindful Practice
• 14:20 Integration, Self‑Regulation, Next Steps

Transcript

NATNAT BE : 0:00

Hey, welcome back to the Lift One Self Podcast. I'm your host, Nat Nat. And I've been getting a lot of questions about wait, this is work you actually offer? And the answer is yes. Yes, it is. So I decided that I'm going to create a series because people have been asking me, what does emotional sobriety even mean? How do I work with anger without letting it hijack me? Why do I feel so disconnected from my body? So I'm going to create three episodes, which is the series of the emotional sobriety that breaks this down, not just theory, but practical tools you can actually use to give you more exposure to my work. We're going to explore what it means to live in a feeling body that thinks and how to befriend emotions you've been taught to fear and what emotional sobriety really looks like when you're living in it, not just understanding it. If you've been doing the inner work, but something still feels missing, or maybe this is all new to you and you're here to learn. This series is for you. So let's dive in. Here's what most people don't realize. A lot of times it's a feeling or sensation in your body that activates a flood of thoughts, not the other way around. When you're not aware of your triggers, when you're not in tune with your body, something will hit you from left field and suddenly you're flooded with thoughts, with emotions, with reactions, and you have no idea where it came from. So the work is learning to engage with what's actually happening, to pause and say, wait, what emotion has been released? What is this information here? But here's the most important part. Your feelings and thoughts are information. They are not facts. They are not your identity. I want to start by telling you something about my own journey. Years ago, when I had lesions in my brain and I was told I was going to die, I was forced into a reckoning. The only thing I could do was allow my body to somatically release all the stuff that I had suppressed in my lifetime. I had to stop living from the neck up. I had to learn to really listen from the neck down to what my body was giving as information and wisdom. And that was terrifying at first because I didn't know how to do that. I'd spent my whole life thinking about my emotions, analyzing them, trying to understand them cognitively, also while keeping a distance from them, drinking them away in social settings, working them away, keeping busy, but I'd never actually just felt them. I'd never learned to trust what my body was telling me. The biggest thing, I didn't know how to befriend fear, to truly acknowledge it. Most of us haven't. We've been taught to override our bodies, to push through, to stay focused, stay productive, stay in control. And somewhere in that process, we lost touch with what actually allows us to experience our lives, our body, our nervous system. Your body isn't just a transportation device for your brain. It's not just carrying your head around so you can think brilliant thoughts and make good decisions. Your body is the instrument through which you experience being human. It's where your emotions live. It's where your nervous system is constantly communicating with you about safety, danger, connection, threat. It's how your spirit, soul communicates through. But if you're not listening, if you're up in your head all day thinking about your emotions instead of feeling them, you're missing the most important information you have. So how do we get here? How do we end up so disconnected in our heads? A lot of it goes back to childhood. When we were children, there were certain emotions that were expressed to our caregivers, our parents, teachers, siblings, and they told us that emotion was inappropriate, that we shouldn't be feeling that way. Maybe you were told that boys don't cry, that you need to toughen up, suck it up, don't be so sensitive. Or maybe you were told you were too much, too loud, too emotional, too dramatic. Maybe you were a little girl who was told you're not allowed to get angry. Whatever the message was, you learned something critical. The emotion you were feeling didn't match the situation. You were told it was the wrong emotion for the experience you were having. And so you started to disassociate. You started to separate yourself from your sensitivity, from your vulnerability. You created an armor, a mask, a way of showing up in the world that would keep you safe, that would help you feel loved, appreciated, valued. But in that process, you stopped listening to your body. You stopped trusting what you were feeling because you've been taught that what you felt wasn't accurate, wasn't appropriate, wasn't safe, and it was disappointing. The adult didn't have the capacity to hold space for your emotion. So they projected their own fear onto you. They told you how to navigate the world based on their own unhealed wounds, their own fear of you experiencing pain or being judged. And that's where the split happened. That's where you separated from your authentic self and started living from the neck up. This is where the ego begins to develop and create protective mechanisms as a form of defense. Here's what happens when you're living from the neck up, when you're thinking about your emotions instead of feeling them. You know something intellectually, but you can't embody it. You understand your patterns, you can explain them to your therapist, you can write about them in your journal, but you keep repeating them because knowing isn't the same as feeling and embodying. Understanding isn't the same as integration. I had a client recently, a high-functioning executive who had done years of therapy. And she told me, I know I have abandonment wounds. I can explain them, but I still feel them every single day. And it's annoying. And I asked her, Where do you feel them? She went quiet. She had no idea. She'd never dropped into her body to actually listen. Within three sessions of doing this work, she could identify the tightness in her chest as the abandonment signal. And she learned to co-regulate it herself. That's the difference between knowing and embodying your struggle to truly connect. You might be physically present with your children, your partner, your friends, but you're not actually there. You're in your head, thinking about the next thing, managing your to-do list, trying to control the environment so you feel safe. You're exhausted because living from the neck up is exhausting. Your nervous system is constantly overwhelmed, constantly taxed because it's trying to communicate with you and you're not listening. It's sending you signals, tightness in your chest, tension in your shoulders, that not in your stomach, and you're ignoring them. Or worse, you're trying to think them away. You can't trust yourself. Your discernment is cloudy, your intuition feels fuzzy because intuition lives in the body, not in the mind. And if you're not connected to your body, you can't access the wisdom. So how do we come back? How do we return home to our bodies? It starts with recognizing that this isn't about fixing yourself. It's not about becoming a different person. It's about reuniting with the parts of yourself that you separated from because it didn't feel safe to feel them. It's about coming back to emotions that you may have exiled: sadness, anger, fear, vulnerability, and allowing yourself to feel them without the story that they're wrong or dangerous or too much. At the beginning, it's going to be messy. It's going to be uncomfortable. You're not going to understand what's going on because there's too much data, so much information that's been stored in your body that's finally getting a chance to move. But the more that you do this, the more that you listen, the less intensity there is. The emotions don't hijack you anymore. They become information. They become guides. And that's the work. That's the return home. It's learning to listen to your body, to trust what it's telling you, to feel the full range of your emotions, not just the ones that are socially acceptable or spiritually correct. It's allowing yourself to be human, to experience the depth of what it means to be alive in your body, not bypassing it, but being fully in it, to allow integration. This isn't something you figure out once and then you're done. This is a practice, a continual coming back. Every time you notice you're in your head, thinking about your emotions, analyzing them, trying to solve them, that's an invitation. An invitation to drop back down, to feel into your body, to ask, what's here right now? What's my body trying to tell me? Maybe it's tension in your jaw, maybe it's heaviness in your chest, maybe it's restlessness in your legs. Just notice, you don't have to fix it. You don't have to make it mean anything. Just be with it. So now let me introduce you into the work. Join me in a mindful moment. Let's put this into practice so you can see how it benefits you. Get comfortable in your seat. And if it's safe to do so, gently close your eyes or soften your gaze. Now you're gonna begin breathing in and out through your nose. If that's uncomfortable, then breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. And you're gonna bring your awareness to watching your breath go in and out. You're not gonna try and control your breath. You're gonna be aware of its rhythm, allowing it to guide you into your body. You're safe to feel, you're safe to let go. Surrender the need to control. Release the need to resist and just be with your body. Now I'm gonna ask you to take your right hand and place it on your heart and your left hand at the bottom of your belly. And just hold yourself. Bringing your awareness back to your breath. Now ask your body what it wants to communicate with you. Perhaps you notice tension in your shoulders. Maybe your stomach grumbled. Maybe you notice your jaw is tight. Perhaps your lower back feels tense. Maybe your thighs are aching. Whatever the sensation is, allow it to be observed while staying with your breath. There's no need to analyze it. No need to create a story to explain it away. Just be with the sensation and drop into it, allowing it to have space to move. There's probably a memory that came up and it was quick. Let that memory unfold to give you information of what that sensation has been holding. Bring your awareness back to your breath. Allowing more ease in the body. Now, while still holding yourself and bringing that awareness to your breath, tell your body thank you. Hold yourself and whatever comes up, let it arise. Let it flow naturally. Now while holding yourself, reach around each side of yourself and give yourself a great big squeeze. Hug yourself. So wherever you are in your breathing pattern, I'm gonna ask that you join me in that exhale right now. Now let's begin. Deep breath in through your nose. Hold it and let it go. Another deep breath in through your nose. Hold it. Now let that shit go. Another deep breath in through your nose. Hold it. Gently exhale out of your mouth. Now coming back to a normal breathing pattern. When you're ready, at your own time and at your own pace, you're gonna gently open your eyes while staying with your breath. These practices, this is how we start to rebuild trust with ourselves. That's how we strengthen our discernment, clarify our intuition. That's how we stop abandoning ourselves and start showing up for ourselves, to allow ourselves to be vulnerable with ourselves. Because here's the truth you've been looking for safety on the outside, in other people, in perfect circumstances, and having it all figured out. But that's disempowerment that keeps you small. Don't get me wrong, co-regulation is needed. Yet many of us have no idea how to soothe ourselves, how to regulate ourselves. The work is reminding yourself that you are capable of creating safety within yourself, that you can regulate your own nervous system, that you can feel your emotions and not be destroyed by them. That's where your power is and you're embodying. And that trust, that's the foundation for everything we're going to explore in this series. So that's where we're starting. We're in feeling bodies that think. And there's a whole world of wisdom waiting for you from the neck down. In the next episode, we're going to talk about one of the most misunderstood emotions out there: anger. Why it gets such a bad rap, what it's actually protecting, and how to befriend it instead of fear it. I know most of you guys are like, what? Befriend anger. What the heck are you talking about? Stay with me in the next episode because once you understand anger, really understand it, everything shifts. Until then, I'm curious, where in your life are you thinking about your emotions instead of feeling them? Just notice. That's all. Don't try to fix it. Don't make yourself wrong. Just notice. If this episode resonated with you, I'd be so grateful if you'd subscribe to the Lif Oneself wherever you listen to your podcast. And if someone came to mind while you were listening, someone who's been living from the neck up, someone who could use this work, please share this episode with them. This may be the medicine that they're looking for. Help grow lift oneself so we can reach more people who need to hear this. If you want to work with me directly, I offer one-on-one sessions. And I also have the Emotional Sobriety Workshop. Everything is at liftoneself.com. That's L I F T O N E S E L F dot C O M. Please remember to be kind and gentle with yourself. You matter. I'll see you in the next one.