71: The Secret Senses That Guide You Forward

In this week’s episode, I dive into An Immense World by Ed Yong and what it teaches us about life after divorce. Aristotle may have told us we only have five senses (he was wrong about that and about women), but neuroscience shows we actually have 20+ ways of perceiving the world.

And here’s the magic: divorce is like being dropped into a brand-new sensory universe. The signals you relied on in marriage don’t apply anymore—you get to recalibrate, upregulate, and expand your perception of life.

We’ll talk about:
 ✨ The hidden senses you didn’t know you had (like interoception and proprioception)
 ✨ Why boundaries are essential to avoid sensory overload after divorce
 ✨ How to listen to your inner compass and follow your true north
 ✨ Turning “stuck” moments into grounding, stabilizing ones
 ✨ Seeing divorce not as the end, but as a doorway into an immense life of awe, curiosity, and freedom

Babe, your post-divorce life is bigger, brighter, and more expansive than you’ve been taught to believe. You are immense.

PostDivorceGlowUp.com

Email: quinn@postdivorceglowup.com

Transcript

0:49

Hey babe. Welcome to the podcast. Divorced Life is treating me so well. You know, I love being divorced, right? But it just seems to be getting better and better and better. I was lying in bed yesterday alone, like spread eagle starfish, taking up all this. Base and just enjoying being with me. God, I love it. And school right now is inspiring. My kids are fun and funny, and I was able to get a blood draw to check my hormone levels because my hot flashes have returned recently and I like being hot, but not like that. So I'm taking care of business. We just figure shit out. Right. And I've also been reading a lot of great books because I got off of social media and I wanna talk to you about one of the books that I've been reading. It's so fascinating. It's called An Immense World by Ed Young. YONG. This book piqued my interest because I am fascinated by the fact that humans love to trust what we can experience through our senses. The whole, I'll believe it when I see it kind of idea, but there is so much that we as humans cannot see or hear or taste or smell or touch. That is very real. We see just a very small bit of the light spectrum. We hear only a tiny speck of available sound waves, and we smell just a fraction of what other animals can smell. We are so limited in our senses, so if we only trust. What we can sense through our five senses, we miss out on so much of what the world has to offer. a couple thousand years ago. Aristotle decided humans have five senses and most of us can name them. But you know, Aristotle, I gotta say, he also thought women were inferior, should be subservient to their husbands, and under no circumstances should be allowed into the public sphere. So he was wrong both about senses and about women, but this is kind of our starting point. Now, let me ask you something. What have I told you That you have more than five senses? Like a lot more, that your body has dozens of ways to navigate, feel. And perceive the world in ways that you maybe have not thought about. In this book an Immense World, ed Young discusses all the ways different creatures sense their environments from insects to big mammals. For instance, he talks about how a bat sees with sound or how a shrimp sees colors that we don't even have names for. Isn't that wild that there are colors? That we cannot see. And it got me thinking divorce is a lot like. Being dropped into a brand new sensory universe, and suddenly the signals that you were tuned into in your marriage don't necessarily apply anymore. We have to recalibrate and discover and maybe invent new ways of sensing life. Though some of us do take what we learned in marriage And just by default, we continue using those ways of sensing life after divorce. And it may be a mismatch now, you might think, but I'm human and I only have a human senses. But no, guess what? Guess what? This blew my mind. We can actually train and expand our senses to become more adept at using them and more sensitive to the input of the world around us. You're probably familiar with the idea that when someone loses one sense, the other senses kind of upregulate so that they can manage the world through their other senses, but we don't have to lose a sense in order to gain that ability. We can put Our focus and our intention towards becoming more sensitive to gathering the information around us in ways that feel really good and setting boundaries in ways that also are supportive. So today we're talking about what happens when you expand your senses after divorce and how this can unlock. a whole new world of wonder, and freedom and peace, and that is what I want for you. Now, ed Young introduced me to this delicious little word. It is uml. It's German for a unique sensory bubble that each creature lives inside. So for a dog. Their velt is mostly smell for bats. It's echoes and echo location for us humans. It's a cocktail of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, and I'm going to talk to you about some of the hidden senses. So. All of that is included in our vet. Now, when you were married, you lived inside a certain vet too. Maybe it included survival mode. Maybe it was walking on eggshells. Some places were not safe to go. Maybe it was keeping. Everyone else comfortable while ignoring your own senses? There was a really fascinating study done on dogs that most dogs don't have a great sense of smell because most owners of dogs. don't allow them the amount of time that they actually need to go and sniff all the things that they want to sniff to develop that. And so their sense of smell actually downregulates. But in taking dogs on smelling walks, where the point is not to get from. Anywhere to anywhere else. The whole point is to allow the dog to smell and sniff all the things that it wants to. So that sense can upregulate. It reminded me about my marriage, that there were parts of myself that I felt like I had to downregulate in order to function within the marriage that I was in, and it's only post-divorce that I've been able to begin exploring and healing in ways that I feel like I'm upregulating. My ways of being in my authenticity, in my ability to speak up and to setting boundaries. So many gorgeous things. divorce, ripped my, um, belt bubble open. Painful, oh my God, yes, yes. So painful, but also freeing because now. Girlfriend, you and I get to decide what is my, um, belt now. Oh my God, do I want my, um, belt to include listening to my heart, trusting my gut? Do I want my umm belt To upregulate for adventure. To upregulate so that I can hear my soul calls and sit in stillness. Do I want it to downregulate my sense of terror within relationships? All of those are possible. Divorce has the ability to start shifting our perception of life and what's possible and perception is everything Alright, let's bust this myth that humans only have five senses. I was shocked. I was shook. So neuroscientists count 20 or more senses. Can you believe that? 20 or more. Let me introduce you to a few, and as I do, I want you to play along One of the senses that we have is proprioception. It's your sense of where your body is in space. if you have ever done one of Joe Dispenses meditations, Google it, go online. He's got a bunch on YouTube. He uses our proprioception in order to help get us into a meditative space. Close your eyes right now and touch your nose. That is proprioception. Where are you in space? Where is your nose in space? Where is the space between chambers of your heart in space? This perception, this sense is how you learn to trust your body again, where you are, not where someone else thinks you should be, but where are you in space? Where are you in your life? Another sense is vestibular, which is balance. The reason you can walk or dance in the kitchen, or go from your bed to the bathroom in the dark without falling, not being able to see with your eyes that sense of balance. Is a sense. And divorce teaches us balance too, right? Balancing grief and joy, chaos and peace. Your needs and your child's needs, or your lover's needs. This sense of balance, balance within space, but also balance within your life. another sense is. interoception, and this one is big and I can't believe I didn't realize this before. This is your sense of your inner state. How do you know if you're hungry? How do you know if you're full? How do you know you're feeling anxious or calm or that you need to pee? That's interoception after divorce. Interoception is gold because that's how you learn to listen to you and not the noise outside developing this sense of your interstate. How you feel is one of the most important senses for us to develop post-divorce. Another sense is thermoception. Hot and cold. So it's not just touching, but it's that next level sensing of the temperature. Now divorce can feel like stepping into fire or out of fire. It can feel like stepping into cold night air that is bracing and cooling, Or it can feel like frostbite and both heat and cold can wake you up, wake you up to your life, wake you up to what's available for you. Another sense is chrono concept. It's your sense of time. Have you noticed that in divorce, in this process and just in life, time can bend some days, crawl along, but sometimes weeks can go by and a flash. I have found that my internal clock has recalibrated to where time with my children or time with a lover. Time can slow down and it can rock it ahead. But my sense of time this, my sense of life and me in this stream of life Is something delicious and elegant that I love right now. Now, here's your first exercise. Put a hand over your heart and close your eyes and ask yourself, what do I need right now? And then pause and listen. Your body knows That's your interoception. Guiding you back to yourself. Start trusting that sense. Now as I'm talking about upregulating your senses and developing them and taking in more information from the world, it's important we talk about overstimulation and in the book. Yang talks about how too much sensory input can overwhelm us as well as other animals. It's just a thing. So city lights, disorient, sea turtles ship noises and sonar. scrambles a whale's ability to talk to each other. And having too much input into your life can also scramble your sense of direction and your true north. Does that sound familiar? After divorce or through divorce or in marriage, everyone has an opinion. It's a very human thing to have an opinion on someone else's life. So you've probably heard a few, perhaps your parents had some advice. Your ex, your lawyer, your kids, the internet. It can create sensory overload. Now boundaries are the answer. Boundaries are like dimming the light, turning down the noise, pollution in your life boundaries. Protect your nervous system so that you can actually hear yourself. Think last week I deleted. All social media. I limited my exposure to the news, and not just for me, but for the children that live in my house. And just this morning, my daughter asked me if I had seen a video going around about the coming rapture. Evidently it's scheduled for October 23rd. I had not heard that, and I was better for it. in stepping away from social media and the news in the past week, I avoided seeing reruns of videos of murders and hearing opinions of other people during a time when I needed to recenter myself. As a client told me just this morning after I guided her back into her body, she said, it's like you closed all the tabs on the computer. In my mind. Yes, babe. You get to close all the tabs, you get to take a breath, you get to recalibrate. And this is up to you. For some people it feels good to have a lot of tabs open, per se, in their life. They really thrive on hearing what other people want to say and. Having lots of input and so this, this upgrading and bringing in more sensory information is gonna feel really great, but I just want you to be careful because it's easy to go from high input to way too much input very quickly. I really suggest creating at least a five minute. Quiet bubble or um, belt. No phone, no demands. Just you protecting your senses. Because the world is built for stimulation and overstimulation, and in a world where overstimulation is the norm, seeking out peace, seeking out yourself becomes a radical act. And such an important thing to do for yourself. Now, something else in the book that was fascinating to me that I knew, but I hadn't thought about. For humans is that animals have these incredible ways of finding home. The birds read the stars. There are some birds that read the ocean. That's so incredible to me. They see things that we don't see and see. Turtles, they sense magnetic fields. Salmon sniff their way upstream after divorce. It's easy to feel like you lost your map, like you were given a map by society. Find the one person, get married to the one person, stay married to that person. So stepping away from your marriage may feel like you don't have a compass and you're trying to find home. I promise you, babe, you have something deep within you that knows the way home. It's your intuition. It's your values. It's that true north. It's that subtle whisper in your body, not necessarily in your mind, but that deep knowing in your body. Learning how to hear and trust your inner compass is one of the greatest benefits of divorce. My choice to go back to school and pursue a degree in nursing with the goal of becoming a midwife is not something I even imagined for myself until a couple years ago. as I take step after step towards this goal, I keep noticing. That it feels like home and taking these steps. I have always given myself permission to quit or pivot or do something else. If at any point it feels incongruent, but what I've noticed. Is that it continues to feel very congruent and it doesn't necessarily make sense in my head. And also it's not easy. What is easy is my, Ability to become frustrated and overwhelmed with my studies, but each step on this path feels like I'm finding my balance and following a path back to myself. This semester, I'm taking a class about nursing theory and clinical decision making. I get so excited learning about this stuff, and this excitement helps me take other steps that I don't find as exciting, like writing the papers and taking quizzes and taking other classes that I find incredibly boring or filled with busy work. But this week, babe, ask your body simple. Yes and no questions. Do I want to go to this event? Do I feel safe with this person? And notice the response in terms of actual physical sensations, do you feel tension? Do you feel ease? Do you feel a heaviness, a lightness? That is your compass speaking. Here's the thing, Divorce is not the end. It is. It is such a beautiful beginning. It is an expansion, an opportunity to upregulate and experience more. You have more ways of knowing and feeling and perceiving than you have ever given yourself credit for. Yeah, and just like Ed Young shows us in his beautiful book, the world is immense. It is full of colors. We cannot see sounds, we cannot hear and signals we can't even imagine. And your post-divorce life is also immense full of colors and sounds and signals that even though you're not experiencing them on a purely intellectual, physical level, it doesn't mean that it's not there. There is a full life for you too. Two, you can live in a shrunken bubble of vet of fear and loss. But you can also step into the immense world of curiosity and serendipity and awe. I was talking to a woman this morning who was telling herself the story that she was stuck and that life is hard. And as we talked and I showed her some different images because sometimes. Images have a way of speaking to our subconscious, and we're open to the message of the image more than we are to the message of a coach or a friend. So we talked about an image that showed a person in place not moving, sitting And I offered the idea that maybe being in one place, just being in this moment of time is not necessarily stuck, but it could be seen as deeply grounded. It could also be seen as a stabilizing period. Our language and the story we tell ourselves, color our experiences more than anything else. So check on your stories. Are your stories closing windows to new perceptions? What if you let it be easy? What if all of this is just a matter of relaxing into life? So let's go out there this week. Let's use our new senses, our new, um, belt. The world is immense and so are you, babe. So are you. I'll talk to you next week.