1: From Feeling Numb To Living Untamed And Embodied: My Journey Of Coming Home To Myself

I often wonder how different life would be if we didn't confuse pushing through, no matter what, for resilience.  Of course, at times we simply have to show up and deal with whatever is going on in life. But as women, to operate only from that mindset is like living only half a life. 

We end up paying a high price.  We lose touch and connection with our own truth. We disconnect from our body's wisdom because we override our needs and what is alive in the body, in order to get on in the world.

Today I want to share some of my story with you of how I went from feeling numb to living untamed and embodied.  This is my journey of coming home to myself.  It is a journey that is still unfolding, and I imagine that it will continue to do so.  

In this episode you hear me talk about:

> The catalyst that put me onto the path of embracing a more feminine way of living, and becoming more embodied.
>How I bought into a masculine way of living and thinking, and not being in touch with my feminine, feeling side.
>The cost of connecting your self-worth to something external to you.
>When numbing as a survival strategy no longer works for you.
>My definition of living untamed and embodied means, and what I want for you through this podcast. 

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Transcript

I often wonder how different life would be if we didn't confuse pushing through no matter what for resilience. And while I believe that there is a place to be strong and show up and deal with whatever is going on in your life. I think for as woman to only operate from that mindset is like living only half a life. So I want to say a very warm welcome to the first episode of the podcast. And I'm so grateful to you for tuning in. Thank you very much for listening now, in this first episode, I want to share with you a little bit about my journey and how I came to living in a more embodied way and how I came to work as a feminine embodiment coach. And I'll also talk a little bit about the name of the podcast, the name of the show, the untamed and embodied show and my intention, what I hope to, to bring to you through the episodes that are coming up and through the interviews that I'm going to be doing. So let's get into it.

Hi and welcome to the untamed and embodied show. I'm your host Tertia Riegler, feminine embodiment coach, and here to help you cultivate a life of radiance everyday pleasure and unapologetic self expression. Join me every week as I share how you Can tap into your feminine flow, so you can come home to yourself and live your life from a place of inner freedom and aliveness.

So if I have to choose a point to start, it would be, it would be with a birth of my son. If I look back at this, now this was almost a decade ago. If I look back at it now, and I look at my journey, I can see that this really was the catalyst. This was the event that kind of put me on the path where I am today. Now the birth itself was quite traumatic and there were many factors that, uh, contributed to this. I had just moved to a new country. I was five months pregnant when I moved to a new country. I wasn't very fluent in the language. So I struggled to communicate and express my needs. My mom wasn't there during the birth. I was still dealing with a loss of moving from my, from my, my country and my friends and closing down my business back home.

So there were many factors that definitely in looking back at it now that contributed to making this experience not as joyful as I obviously hoped that it would be. And what happened after the birth is that I found myself to be really disconnected and disembodied is the word that I would use today, even though back then, I didn't have words for what I was going through. I just knew that I didn't feel like myself. The way that I handled this though, is I started building my new coaching business as soon as I was able to. So within a few short months after the birth of our son, I started working again, as much as I could. And if, if I had to give a message to, to the first time mom, it would be sleep when baby sleeps and don't work on your business while baby sleeps.

I never gave myself chance to really rest and recover and heal from the experience and all of the emotional shifts and upheavals and changes that that I have gone through. But this was not unusual because that's the way that I always used to deal with things is I would just show up and push through regardless of what was going on. And, you know, I started by saying perhaps we sometimes confuse pushing through full resilience. And that certainly was the case for me. And even if I look at my friends and my family and the, the world that we live in, we pride people on, you know, overcoming the odds and we pride them on being strong and getting through the hard times. But we don't always consider the cost of doing that in order for us to push through no matter what is going on.

It means that we have to push our feelings and our emotions to the side. And this is not unusual. This is how we live. Most of us live like this, and we also live in a world that makes it easy for us to be distracted. We live in a world that prizes, success and achievement, and we also live in a world that makes it easy for us to believe that who we are our worth and our value is attached to something outside of us. It's attached to our results. It's attached to the things that we can show in the outside world. This is how we measure our success and our worth, but what happens in the processes? Of course, we lose touch and we lose connection with our own truth. We, we disconnect from our body's wisdom because we override the needs and the desires and the feelings and the sensations that are alive in the body in order to get on in the world.

So for me, this was a survival strategy. This is what I used to do to get on in the world. And perhaps you can identify and resonate with that, that you do the same in your life. When we push all of our feelings away, we do that in order to survive in order to get on. So I recognize that this has a place, but when we live in constant survival mode, the, the scientific way to explain it is to say that you fry your nervous system. Now, part of how my fried nervous system made itself known was that I was feeling flat. So emotionally I had access to only the very strongest emotions like extreme sadness or extreme excitement or extreme anger. There was nothing in the middle. And I remember thinking I have to get myself back. I had to get my, my feelings back because I was numb.

I was literally not feeling much. I also started struggling with physical symptoms like chronic pain and fatigue and digestive issues. And at the time it felt like I ran into a wall because no matter what I try to fix myself, something else would always show up. There would always be another problem or another issue that needed healing. And today I'm very grateful to my body for crunching to a halt because she forced me to stop so that I could learn how to listen to her so that I could learn to tap into her wisdom and follow her guidance instead of overriding and pushing away all of the undesirable and unpleasant feelings and emotions that I didn't want to feel, and also not wanted to face. So in my research on healing, chronic pain and fatigue, because I had to find a solution for my problems.

I came across the concept of masculine and feminine energy. And this I would say was then the, the second pivot in my life when I discovered that these essences are alive or present in us. And I recognize how in my own life, I relied a lot on my masculine energy, which is the go energy. It's the directive take action, make things happen, kind of energy and my feminine energy, which was more receptive and open and slower and cyclical. The more feeling flowing part of ourselves. I mostly denied that part to be alive inside of me. I had really bought into this hyper masculine way of living, where we always go for the next goal. We always go for the next achievement and there's no time to stop. There's no time to slow down. There's not time to explore feelings because they get in the way of getting things done.

I found it really difficult to slow down and to relax, just simply taking some downtime was very difficult for me unless I was able to justify it unless I was able to give myself, uh, to give it to myself as a reward. And again, I'm not unusual or unique in this since, since I've been working as a feminine embodiment coach. And since I've seen this play out in my own life, I can recognize it in the lives of other women as well. And so many of us put our own pleasure at the end of our list. And of course there are many barriers that stand in the way of why we struggle to explore pleasure for ourselves, why we struggle to practice self care, why, why we have this low self worth that underscores everything. And these are all things that we are going to get into in future episodes.

So this is really where my journey of starting to reclaim my feminine energy began. And then finally I landed on the work of gen ward and she runs the school of embodied arts. And through her, I did my feminine embodiment coaching certification. So the thing that I've learned through my journey is that our bodies hold so much wisdom and the four planes like our mental plane, our physical plane, our emotional plane and our energetic plane, all of those can be felt in the internal body. And they can be felt as our internal felt senses. But when we are always in go mode, when we are always moving to the next thing, when we are always taking action and being busy in our minds, thinking planning, strategizing, doing, we are effectively shutting out the information from our body and these messages will keep on getting louder until you pay attention.

So this is what I want for you through this podcast is I want to share with you the skills and tools and techniques so that you are able to access your wisdom. The name of the podcast, untamed and embodied is really then a reflection of my own journey and my own experiences. Untamed refers to our wild nature, which we suppress. So this is our nature of our intuition, where in the world, often logic is favored over intuition. We like to see empirical evidence of things instead of going for the more subtle and unseen, uh, experiences. And yet the subtle and the unseen this often nebulous, this is the feminine, this is part of our wild nature. Another aspect of our wild nature is the ability to speak up, speak up for ourselves and for our needs and for our values and for what we believe in.

I always say that parts of living in your head and effectively being cut off from the neck down often also cuts off our voice box. It cuts off our ability to speak up for ourselves. And it's really when we land in the body. When we come back into our bodies, that we can find our voice again, our wild nature also allows us to be grounded in our own self worth, where we don't have to look for that validation and recognition and appreciation and confirmation of our own worth. In the outside world. We don't have the need or the desire, or even the inclination to measure ourselves to any external standards, but we deeply grounded in our own value and in our own worth. And then finally our wild nature is to allow ourselves to feel and experience and live fully alive, not live only half alive in go mode, but fully alive, where we have access to an entire bandwidth of experiences and feelings and sensations.

And then the second part of the name embodied to be embodied means that we are in the body. We are inhabiting the body, as Jan says now, because we are inside bodies. We are always embodied to some extent, but the degree to which we are embodied defers. And as we spoke about already, our body really holds the keys. Our body holds the wisdom. We can feel our yes and our no, and our impulse inside the body. And when we begin to honor that, which is alive in us, it allows us to flourish. It allows that inner fire to become activated so that we step out from this shackles of numbness and flatness and overwhelm and overthinking. And we can step into our own sovereign power where we unwind and unravel all of the, the tensions and these blocks and internal a oppressive systems that di our light.

And that keeps us small. We can move beyond that and really have access to a full and expanded life experience. So I'm so excited for you to be joining me on this journey. And thank you so much for tuning into the first episode. If you enjoyed this episode, then please, would you do me a favor and leave me a review as this is a brand new podcast, I need all the help that I can get to get it out to more amazing women, as many amazing women as possible. And by you leaving me a review, that's going to help that happen so that more people can hear about the podcast.