Stories The Body Won’t Let Us Forget with Hala Alyan

What if the stories your body carries are the map back to belonging? In this conversation with Palestinian–American poet and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan, we explore how narrative, trauma, and the nervous system meet inside a living body. Hala shares how displacement shaped her love of books and oral histories, why writing still arrives as mystery, and how creative practice can offer coherence when life feels scattered.

We move beyond buzzwords to talk about embodiment as a political act—how storytelling becomes witness and resistance when institutions fail. Hala offers practical ways to return to your body: hand over heart, 4-7-8 breathing, hot baths without a phone, and the simple mantra “this is just what’s happening.” She also unpacks why perfectionism makes somatics feel inaccessible and how choosing to feel—even discomfort—builds resilience.

This episode is for anyone curious about creativity as healing, building distress tolerance, and holding grief and agency at the same time. Expect clear language, grounded tools, and gentle guidance for reconnecting to your body and your story.

In this episode:

• 0:00 – Welcome And Episode Setup
• 3:37 – Narrative As A Unifying Thread
• 9:53 – How Narrative Works In The Body
• 14:46 – Displacement, Reading, And Early Survival
• 20:47 – Creativity As Conduit And Mystery
• 30:17 – Safety, Downregulation, And Rewriting
• 36:52 – Storytelling As Survival And Alliance
• 42:12 – Memory, Erasure, And Resistance
• 49:07 – Embodiment As Political Practice

You can read the transcript here

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Transcript

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Welcome And Episode Setup

Ailey Jolie 0:49

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, and today I'm joined by Hala Alyan. Hala is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and clinical psychologist whose work explores displacement, identity, generational trauma, and the intimate terrain of belonging. She's the author of several acclaimed books of poetry, including The 29th Year and The Arsenous City, as well as her forthcoming collection, The Moon That Turns You Back. Her writing has been honored with the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and has appeared widely in journals and publications around the world. What I love about Halla's work is the way she weaves the clinical and the lyrical, how the body remembers how migration and exile shape identity, and how grief and longing live not just in individuals, but in lineages too. Today we'll explore embodiment through the lens of both poetry and memory. We'll ask what it means to belong in a body when home is fractured, and how writing itself can become an act of return. It's an absolute honor to welcome Hala to the podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode of How to Be in This Body with Me, A. Jolie. How you weave things together in the intersections of your work is one of the reasons why I really wanted to have you on today to explore together. Amazing.

Hala Alyan 3:18

Well, first of all, thank you for having me on. I think for me, for the longest time, I couldn't quite figure out how I ended up having this kind of like dual. I mean, I don't even think the word career is right, but these like dual passion pathways. But the more I do it, the more intuitive it feels, actually. Like I think, I think the main thing that threads it together is that I am fascinated with narrative. I'm fascinated with how we build stories, how we co-create them with the people in the world around us. And in both of the things that I do in my life, kind of all three, because I'm also a professor. So my days sort of look like teaching, clinical practice,

Narrative As A Unifying Thread

Hala Alyan 3:58

aka therapy, and then writing and writing related things. In all of them, I'm constantly taking what feel like discordant, incoherent parts and then trying to thread them together. Like I'm trying to cohere. It's in a constant pursuit of cohering things. And as a therapist, obviously you're trying to do that with somebody. You're not doing that for somebody. Rarely do people come in with a really like well-gelled narrative of how they've gotten to be, right? Like you come in. I mean, I'm thinking of the times that I'm suffering in my life. It's like everything's falling apart, and I hate this person, and my mom never did this, and I don't, whatever. And I, you know, this isn't where I thought I'd be at this point in my life. And then you kind of, as a therapist, your task or the way that I see it is you're sort of walking alongside somebody as you're trying to create a narrative that really resonates with them of like how we got here, how do we kind of reclaim authorship of the story? And then where do we go from here? And it's really similar for me with writing. Like I find writing to be such a disorienting thing to do as one's life work. I'm constantly just like almost semi-assaulted with like images or fragments or the idea of an ending of a story or a like a line in a poem that I want to, or a stray piece of dialogue. And then the work is to sit and just do that kind of like at times tiresome like labor of just trying to stitch it and patchwork it into something that then can be threaded through, you know, so that you're looking for that coherence both for yourself, but also to be able to kind of emotionally translate it so that other people can take it in as well. So I think storytelling, I think narrative building, I think increasingly, like certainly like exile, displacement. I mean, given the populations that I work with, the themes that are in my books, the body, which is why I'm like I'm obsessed with the work that you do, like the, you know, kind of really thinking about where does somatic practice lay. Like that's I have ignored my body for the longest time, which means I have ignored other bodies. You know, like I'm not somebody that brought in somatic work into clinical practice for the first however many years that I worked. I was really very cerebral, you know. And that's kind of like I was a dreamy kid. I was a kid that was always kind of like head in the clouds, reading, trying to, I think, dissociate out of my life. And I really carried that into my teens, my early adulthood, my training. Like I loved learning about things kind of conceptually. I'm obsessed with theory and philosophy. And then it's really only been since I had such a like an intense journey with infertility and an ectopic pregnancy and like whatever in the last like half decade, which coincided with kind of the pandemic, that I've just been like, oh, you can't ignore the body, or you can try, but eventually it like, you know, it will, it will speak up. And so more recently, that's been one of the things threading the work as well.

Ailey Jolie 6:41

I would love to spend a little bit more time with you, kind of picking apart your love of narrative, because it's something I so deeply love. But I think like my love from it comes from a little bit of a different angle. So this is why I would love to kind of dive in with you because my love of narrative comes from this pretty like a young understanding that inside my body there were stories that weren't mine. And that came to me in like dreams and visions and words. And that's why I love narrative. And so I would love to hear from you about the role of narrative in your life, what it's brought you, how that love developed, because it can be assumed to be so cognitive, and yet it is like so deeply embodied.

Hala Alyan 7:19

It's embodied and it's actually incredibly mysterious. So for me, I'll answer in two questions. So there's the kind of like self as portal or conduit for creating narrative, and then like what narratives have done for me. So I was a kid that, you know, at age four, I was living in Kuwait with my parents and Saddam Hussein invaded. And so we then began like yet another chapter of displacement in my family's history. So we left Kuwait, we went to Syria for a little bit, my parents not asylum in the States. So from age like five to 11, 12, I was in Oklahoma, Texas, Maine as a kid that had just sort of fled a war. Not only me trying to assimilate to places that really kind of demanded assimilation, just kind of geographically and and culturally where they were, but also watching my parents assimilate. And then at 12, we moved back to the Arab world. Our narrative isn't that we came to the states and stayed in the States, right? We bopped around in the States, then moved back to the Arab world. I did my high school and my undergrad in Beirut in Lebanon. And so, like, had lived in the Middle East at that point in the Arab world for another like, you know, almost 10 years, and then moved to New York for graduate school and have been here since. I learned to read around the time that I was learning English, which was in the aftermath of having experienced and witnessed like something quite traumatic, which was this like, you know, dislocation, displacement, losing all the markers of the life that I understood at someone that had just turned four. I grew up in like, I think a quite a collectivist, very bonded, you know, place in Kuwait where it's like my grandparents were there, my aunts were there, my uncles were there, everybody was sort of raising all the kids together. And then it was, you know, this like the family kind of separated and went off on its own into conditions that weren't always the friendliest for, you know, immigrants and asylum seekers. And so for me, I entered the world of like the English language, learned how to read and write, and almost immediately began to lose myself in the world of books. And I think both adaptively and maybe a little bit pathologically, but like I'm not like I don't, I'm I'm a big like don't scoff at what saves you person, you know. So it's like, who cares? Like I think, yes, I was kind of like compulsively head in the clouds. I was really an almost like violent daydreamer, you know, like I preferred my imagination a hundred percent to reality. I was always like making up stories. And it took me a long time to like be like, well, that that's actually lying versus like like an adaptive way to do that is you can write the story down as opposed to tell. And so I was really just so saved and you know, tethered by stories and the ability to kind of escape reality and and perspective take and like enter the world of different books and stories. And then when I started to write, it's funny, it's a completely different muscle that was active or like a completely different thing in me got activated, which was that it felt really magical. I could not and still can't pinpoint

How Narrative Works In The Body

Hala Alyan 10:14

how I make a thing. And it continues to be just as mysterious to me as it was when I was six years old writing little stories. And it's so, it's it's what I delight in, you know, that like I don't know how this works. I really ascribe to the philosophy that like we are, you know, we're kind of conduits for creative expression. Like you just show up and you do the work, and like that's you know, the things come through. Because I have similar to you, I've dreamt entire like plot lines for novels. I could be one dream away from like having an idea for something. It also creates a kind of an interesting relationship to my work in terms of ownership or even praise, because I'm always like, I feel like I can own the showing up or the work part or the kind of quote unquote labor part of it, the discipline, the you create a craft and you stick to the craft, you stick to the practice. But in terms of the ideas or inspiration, it's always felt really strange to me to own that because I'm like, I don't know where it comes from. I don't know where it comes from any more than anybody else does. And I don't want to. Like that's part of the delight for me that I'll start to write. I've storyboarded so many stories, so many, you know, like both novels and the the one I'm working on now. Like, I, you know, begin, especially the second one, was like heavily storyboarded. And then almost immediately the characters just start misbehaving and doing what they're doing, and you can't like control them. And that's like such a delight for me. And so for me, yeah, part of my deep like reverence for it, for narrative and for storytelling is that I can't quite grasp how it comes to be or where it originates from. And it's one of the few places in my life. I mean, I'm getting better at like trying to be, you know, controlling things, but like or try to control things. But it's one of the few places where I've actually never felt the need to try to control. And so it's one of the few places where I can really exhale and like play, you know. So I I like both feel my wisest and my youngest self when I'm right ache.

Ailey Jolie 11:58

You're touching on one of my absolute favorite topics, which is I would say the catalyst or the healing effect that creativity and play have in relationship to trauma and how some of the most traumatized people have some of the greatest capacity to actually be that conduit for creativity. And I would love to hear from you about the relationship between creativity or play or art and trauma, because it's something that it's quite well known, I would say, in research. Whenever I bring it up in my clinical practice, my clients always kind of stare at me and they're like, I can tell that they want more. And I'm like, oh, okay, I do need to talk about this more.

Hala Alyan 12:34

No, a hundred percent. I mean, I think even in day-to-day interaction with conversations outside of clinical work, I think it's it's, you know, trauma is first of all, we mean a million different things when we talk about trauma, right? So there's like single incident traumas, there's PTSD, there's CPTSD, there's trauma, traumatic events that don't. Dr. Same Jabed, who's a Palestinian psychologist, talks about this idea that like the PTSD framework wasn't really created for communities in other parts of the world because it presupposes there's a post to the trauma. And that's not true for a lot of places, right? Like there's a lot of communities where the trauma is just ongoing and chronic. And what does that mean for treatment? And what does that mean for the coping strategies that people have to start to develop to be able to endure it and weather it? So I think for me, as someone that's like run, I've run creative expression-based groups for different populations. So including incarcerated individuals and like asylum seekers and people who've experienced sexual violence. I think one of the markers of trauma is that it's sort of it really like actually narrows your perspective. Like it, it is a very claustrophobic internal experience, right? It makes it so that a lot of untreated, right? Like it makes it so that you are kind of perpetually in a loop where your body, if it gets activated or triggered, your brain cannot recognize between the moment where there was danger and the moment right now where you're no longer in mortal danger, right? So you're kind of there's there's this way in which like perspective, the ability to your understanding of the world around you, of your own capacity, really, there's like a tightening and a narrowing that happens. And that's where I think like you're absolutely right, because that I think that can make it seem as though individuals who are traumatized or experiencing or dealing with trauma actually have less of a capacity for creative expression. But it's in fact the opposite. It's that when you, I mean, I think this is true for a lot of experiences of hardship, that if you are able to have to access resources and access treatment, any experience that we have in life that is intense, right, it cracks us open in different ways. And that's not to say that I'm trying to put a positive spin on it or like I would wish that on people, but it's just one of the things that comes with it, you know, is that you then have a wider range of human experience. You've been exposed quite literally to different things, right? That's one thing. And also the coping strategies that people employ even without ever getting treatment to survive trauma. We also under talk about resilience, right? The the things that we employ to just get through trauma, that oftentimes relies on really innovative, creative mechanisms. So

Displacement, Reading, And Early Survival

Hala Alyan 15:07

a system where like I have a really hard time with fireworks, for example. I've lived in parts in the world where like I associate them with like, you know, explosions and bombs and things like that. So if I hear a firework, my whole system goes on high alert. Like I have uh I took my my three-year-old to this fourth of July to something, and I like really almost panicked at some point. I started being like, I gotta get out of here. One can look at that as a really limiting experience, or you can be like, huh, what an interesting creative thing for the brain to do. To be like, this in a certain context is so terrifying and actually becomes an issue of like survival, potentially. Listen, I got you. I'm gonna go ahead and generalize this for you. You know, like it's it's it's oftentimes all the reactions to trauma, which again cause a lot of suffering and are really difficult to be inside that system, are usually your ecosystem's way of trying to like life hack, you know what I mean, and come up with a shortcut to ensure your survival. And so there's something in that where like your brain is already running on all of these creative loops. So this is really a long-winded way of saying that when I have worked with communities experiencing trauma or that have experienced trauma, there is oftentimes such a massive well of like, like just a huge deep well of creativity, of inspiration to draw from people. Oftentimes, once you're kind of giving them permission to just like do what they need to do, if they feel safe enough, the most beautiful things could happen. And that's why one of I'm curious about like, do you ever do narrative therapy or narrative techniques? Like that for me is one of the most beautiful, like the idea of like claiming and rewriting authorship of a story, like being able to really sort of perspective take, like and ask yourself, like, what is the story you've told yourself about the world, about yourself, about safety, about all of these things. I mean, it just Yeah, I don't know. There's just something about how when you really invite people to start to interrogate these things. And the caveat here, I'm sure you would agree, is like people have to feel safe enough to do many of this work. It's not like someone would experience a capital T trauma and the next day I would say, listen, let's just crack ourselves open and start writing a poem, right? But it's like if you're able to sort of like downregulate people enough, right? And give them enough tips on like what how to work with their nervous system and create a safe environment, then I think really incredible things can happen.

Ailey Jolie 17:21

I love that you brought in that last piece there of like actually taking the time to downregulate, find that safety to rewrite the narrative. Because one thing that I find, and I narrative therapy was like kind of my home, that and Hakomi at the same time were kind of interestingly two places where I kind of first got my training. And what I've noticed is that with my clients, when I do bring in the narrative therapies, there's often this kind of initial resistance to actually go back in because there's this assumption of reliving. And I would love to hear from you how we actually can rewrite the narrative without reliving it. And I think there's like a little bit of a conflation of those two things because of pop psychology.

Hala Alyan 17:59

Like you need to be able to have some degree of regulation capacity. Like you need to have like you need to either have worked on that in yourself, develop because again, I don't I don't I am I really wary and hesitant of trying to make it seem like people only heal through like Western psychotherapeutic models. It's just not the case because a lot of people don't even have access to that, right? It doesn't matter how you've come by the ability to downregulate or to work with your nervous system or work with your somatic ecosystem. If you have developed those skills, then you can quote unquote afford to be re-triggered. Like healing isn't that you're never triggered again. The healing isn't that you're never activated again or that you're never in a state of terror. It's that you get better and quicker at being able to soothe yourself and distinguish between real live threat, circumstances that are not in that, you know, like like that you can get better at being like, oh, I'm being activated right now. And it works in both directions, as I'm sure you know too. Like people who have had a lot of trauma can both overestimate threat. So they can be really hyper-vigilant, but they can also be hypovigilant. If you're more dissociative, this is one of the things where it's like people who've had traumatic experiences, oftentimes tragically, are like more susceptible to finding themselves in traumatizing situations because the threat recognition is off. So either you're like seeing threat everywhere or you're not recognizing it quickly enough, you know? Whereas like what you're trying to aim for is this ability to be like in the world in a truthful way, in a world in like a full-throated way, where it's like the world absolutely is a really dangerous place sometimes. And there is threat sometimes. And your nervous system should be sending cues sometimes. And some of those are going to be misfirings. And like it's not only a dangerous place, it can also absolutely be safe and it can also be beautiful, and you can also rest in it, you know, and like that. I always call it the ecosystem because I think it's like the most neutral language is like where your ecosystem is within that at any given moment. So yeah, I think like you want it to be so that you can be activated to your to use your language without like relitigating a trauma, you know? And I do think the distinction between that oftentimes has to do with proximity. So this is where it gets complicated to talk about things like what do you do then when people are still living within the chronic conditions of trauma? You know, what do you do when people have CPTSD and like have had really ongoing exposure to trauma, even if they're currently quote unquote safe? Like, how do you really begin to talk to the most pre verbal parts of your of a brain to say, like, you're finally safe now, you know? And how can you blame a system for not believing you? That's really actually quite adaptive to develop a certain suspicion of safety or a suspicion of, you know, quote unquote quiet. Right. And so I think for me there's something about like if we're going to talk about it within the communities that you and I are likely working with, it's usually there's some I'm hesitant to use this word, but I think you know what you'll know what I mean is like some detachment from the experience. There's been some space from it. That doesn't mean X number of months or years has passed. It's so different for everybody. A thing can be discussed, can be entered, can be brought into the room without

Creativity As Conduit And Mystery

Hala Alyan 21:08

a person really like not being able to tolerate it. I mean, so much of it is distress tolerance, you know? And that you're kind of building up people's distress. I mean, it's exposure therapy. All of life, I'm really a big like lifeless exposure therapy person.

Ailey Jolie 21:20

I love that you brought that in there, exposure therapy. One of the reasons why I kind of asked the question about narrative is because in my mind, you even said the word, you said storytelling. And storytelling, in my understanding and lineage of it, is it isn't a part of that kind of Western model. It is something more indigenous. It's not necessarily in that contained place of how we understand psychotherapy. What I have experienced in reading your words is storytelling that comes from that more raw place. And I would love to hear from you how storytelling has been a healing force in your own life or in the work that you've done with clients. Because it is different than narrative. Yeah, totally.

Hala Alyan 22:01

And I think taking in stories is how I survived my childhood. And I survived all the dislocation and the moving and the trauma. And that both means like by reading and even like other forms of media, but I think also by listening to people around me that were older tell stories of places that had been left behind and tell stories of how they had survived those things, you know. I mean, one of the ways that it's helped me survive or kind of build into this legacy of survival is that when you hear stories of people who've gone through difficult things, for you to even be able to hear it, they have survived it in some way. So already you are implicated in a legacy and an inheritance of survival. Like you're already now part of that because you are witnessing somebody tell you something that they have gone through, which by necessity means that they survived it. And so, like I think there's something about learning how to witness at a youngish age through exposure to different forms of storytelling, both oral and written, that I think really gave me a more fleshed-out appreciation for resilience and for sort of like human capacity, you know, because it's like I come from a family that on both sides has been like violently dispossessed of land, you know, like dislocated in really intense ways, exiled, et cetera. And so there is something about you're like a little, you know, a little girl in Oklahoma trying to figure out why you're so different from other people, why you don't like the same things. Well, you know, like fitting in, not fitting in, both at home and at school, et cetera. For me, it was always made me so proud, actually, to really think of myself as like connected to this larger inheritance of like people who had been able to get through things. Oftentimes they were getting through things. I mean, you're talking about indigenous practices, like, so I'm Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese. And so these are cultures, like many, where oral storytelling, musical storytelling, you know, like certainly the written word, poetry, et cetera, are such big parts of how people have kept the living archive of these identities that are often threatened with erasure, like going, you know? And so I think I like learned also like a deep appreciation for the arts through that. In working with clients, I've just seen how it transforms people. Like I've seen over and over again how you give somebody the chance to just tell their story, like to your point, forget a narrative, forget some fancy intervention, forget anything. I mean, how many studies have we seen? And yes, this is oftentimes still within the frame of psychotherapy or like Western psychotherapy, but it's worth noting, doesn't even matter what the interventions are. Where how many studies have we seen where like the number one predictor of whether quote unquote therapy is successful is the therapeutic alliance, which means the relationship between the clinician and the person. What makes a therapeutic alliance like work? It's that the other person feels seen and heard. It's that they are given a space where they can meaningfully and honestly and transparently be who they are and tell their story, knowing that their story is going to be respected and held. That's it. Everything else, it's like the dodo effect where it's like everyone gets prizes, nobody gets prizes. Like that's what I mean, quite literally, right? Like they've done so many studies being like, we need to find the one. And it's like, with the exception of, you know, certain disorders that really like OCD really needs exposure and response prevention, right? Borderline really responds well to DBT. Fine. With the exception of a couple of whatever. For the most part, you have your average like session with somebody, the marker, the metric of how well that went is going to be whether that person left and was like, that person listened to me. They really took in what I was saying. That's it. I mean, you give a person a chance to just tell their story before you've even given an ounce of feedback. And already something is transformed between the two of you.

Ailey Jolie 25:37

Why do you think at this specific moment in our culture and our world, storytelling is more important than ever before, than maybe ever before?

Hala Alyan 25:47

There's the sort of the Palestinian in me. That's like I'm also watching kind of like the genocide, extermination of my people, extermination of culture, right? It's not, I mean, absolutely, yes, it's uh attacking the archive of bodies, oftentimes children's bodies, but bodies in general. But I think also it's it's telling when one of the leading military tactics is to destroy homes, it's to destroy libraries, it's to destroy schools, it's to make it so that there's not a single university standing. It's to go after the archive, right? It's to go after the places that living memory exists. In the face of that, what are you left with? You're left with whoever is able to hold on to memory, whoever is able to transit messages. This is why, I mean, I can't, I don't think I have a higher reverence for any group of people in this world more than Palestinian journalists, like the people that are continuously under the threat of just like straight assassination showing up over and over again, what are they doing? They're just telling a story. They're saying this is what's happening here. I'm, I am seeing this, I'm taking this in. No external foreign, et cetera, journalists are allowed to be in. So if I don't tell you this, you're not gonna see it. And there's this way in which, with this era, when people talk about like first quote unquote live stream genocide, what they're saying is that everybody there that has access to being able to transmit what is happening, by extension becomes a holder of that truth, becomes a holder of that memory, becomes uh like an accountant, like someone that's accounting for what is happening. You know, when the attempt is to not just silence and eradicate and whatever, but and erase, but really to make like to obfuscate what is happening, right? So I say that because like obviously, I mean, I'm I I think I, like so many people, are really like embedded in that moment. In general, then you look at things that are happening in this country, which I are not unrelated, right? But like certainly like the rise of like fascist techniques and suppression and whatnot. I mean, again, what do people usually go after? They go after stories. You know, where do people spend billions of dollars in propaganda building? What is propaganda but a story? It's saying this is a story. I'm gonna tell it from this angle, and I'm gonna keep repeating it. And I'm going to engage in like thought policing and thought control so that you start to doubt your eyes and your ears and what you know to be true. So that this the state sanctioned thing becomes this story. It's incredibly compelling. It's an incredibly like there's a reason people have used these tactics for bajillions of years because they work, you know. And so then, like, what do what does that mean for like acts of resistance? What does that mean for continue? I mean, it makes it so that to continue to assert a truth, even when the cost of asserting that truth gets higher and higher and higher and higher, that becomes the original act of resisting something. To resist, like, you know, thought policing or thought control or or kind of being told, like, listen, it's gonna cost you, you know. And that cost, depending on where you are in the world, depending on how privileged you are, depending on how many protections you have, that cost can be, yeah. I think about um like a journalist, that cost can be your entire family. That cost can be like ostracization in your neighborhood or losing your job or not getting tenure or whatever, right? It can really like run the gamut of all of those things. I mean, that's the importance of the story. Like it's quite literally the only portal we have into truth, but also the only portal we have into curiosity. I've become less and less interested with like the idea of changing people's minds. I'm I'm more interested in like how I myself can change my mind about things or how I have changed my mind. And then kind of taking that as a cue to to understand how people get indoctrinated and how we end up places that we are right now. And I think a big part of that is that curiosity gets it's like dead in the water. It gets killed before it even starts to bloom. And that's, I mean, if we could invest in that, I think that would also like, God, that would mitigate so much suffering. It would mitigate so much violence. It would like, but yeah, there's, I mean, there's so many billions of dollars thrown at doing the exact opposite, unfortunately.

Ailey Jolie 29:45

What is the relationship that you see between disembodiment or not knowing the story of your body and being susceptible to all of the things that you've just named? What a good question. I asked this question because I often, and this is this is by my own dude, have presented embodiment and my desire for embodiment more from a psychotherapeutic lens, or because I had a dance, a background in dance and healing and all these things. But actually, my desire in embodiment has come more from that political activism place of like if I'm actually connected to my body, then I'm in resistance to all of these things. And when I'm not connected to my body, the systems around me that I see are causing harm and violence have one. And this is the one piece that I can have ownership around. And that's what kind of what leads this question and why I really wanted to have you on, because I saw the threads

Safety, Downregulation, And Rewriting

Ailey Jolie 30:38

of that in your writing and your work and how you present online.

Hala Alyan 30:41

It's such a beautiful question. I mean, listen, I'm gonna be like, I am tempted to give a more edited answer, but I'm gonna be honest with you because I think it's helpful for people to hear this. I'm a really dissociated person a lot of the time. I have been quite dissociated for the last couple of years. I have been trying as much as I can to continue to recommit to witnessing, showing up, speaking out against the things that we're seeing. My marriage has fallen apart in the last couple of years, not completely unrelated to everything that's happening and solo parenting most of the time. I'm trying to like be a good community member. I'm trying to think of the way, like all of these different things that we're all there's nothing unique about my experience. It's like you just replace the specific details with different details, right? Another way to say it is I'm really overloaded, right? I'm really overwhelmed. I'm oftentimes I feel really spun around. And my default is to dissociate. It has been since I was four years old, and it will likely be for the rest of my days on this planet. You know, that that is the that is my fail-safe, my quick thing that my system does automatically. It's not something I'm asking for. For me, dissociating has changed. Like what it looks like is different now. And it oftentimes for me means that I, again, get a little bit more cerebral. It has meant that I tried to show up, especially the first year of like 2023 to 2024, trying to show up in more like academic, op-batty, polemic sort of writing of my conversations and whatever, then getting burnt out, then getting like, you know, getting strep throat like three times in a row. Like, you know, like the body sort of like having really loud protests. I was going from like running on empty to quite literally being like 105 fever, you can't get out of bed. What now? You know, like you have to confront it. And so I think that it's really been more recent that I've just been like, I can't mother the way I want to mother unless I really come into dropping into this body of mine, this little ecosystem of mine. I can't show up for community in the way that I want. I can't write the way that I want. Like, I think probably for the rest of my life, I don't know, I'm not a fortune teller, but I imagine that I will always kind of have this seesawing relationship with body because I was not modeled or taught how to be in the body. You know, I think so many of us are not. I wasn't in my the house that I came up, you know, was brought up in. I wasn't culturally in the era that I was brought up in. And it's really just been more recently that I've been like, you can't, this is such a crucial part to your point of resistance. One of the biggest things that I see in myself that I know is poison is my relationship to my phone. It's my relationship to screens. When I am not well emotionally, I am scrolling. And when I am present and I am in my life and in my body, I want to be clear here. Even if things are terrible, I am still present for the quote unquote terribleness, right? I'm still like attending to my life. I don't have those cravings in the same way. It's not a coincidence. Like there is a way in which I am more likely to your point you like they win. Like I am more likely to fall for the tactics of like persistent late-stage capitalism, like addictive relationships, to our devices, the monotonous, mindless, like I will pick up my phone, quite literally, with or without social media. Like, I'll just pick it up to look at a textbook. I will put it down and be like, oh, 17 minutes have passed by. I have no way to account for that time. Like nothing is more haunting to me than whatever zombie-like state happens when I bring that device to my face and I go in because I was planning on doing one thing, and now I'm way laid, and now I'm doing another thing. And now I'm looking at this thing, and now here's a video of a body of a like a children's child's body, and now here's this quick clip that my friend sent. And here's my other friend asking for dating advice, and here's a what would like I'm it's astonishing. And I'll look up and I'll be like, oh, half an hour has gone by. What the fuck did I just do in that 30 minutes? That for me is like like that's the best example I can give of how for me personally, because I want to be honest about this, is like that is how they win with me. Is that like, what could I do with the four hours a day that I'm on my phone that I'm not doing? Like that's one of the questions that like really haunts me.

Ailey Jolie 34:53

I love that you brought it into such a practical and real, like live moment of disembodiment. Also, how simple the act of resistance and reclaiming the body can be. It's just like I'm putting the phone down. I'm gonna just feel what I'm feeling.

Hala Alyan 35:07

Like I'm gonna take a breath. I'm going to be unhappy. Like, I really believe this is a big thing in my my like clinical work and honestly my philosophy in life, where I'm just like, the things we do to avoid being unhappy are so much worse than just commit to the unhappiness, commit to the misery of the moment, just be unhappy. It's like not that big of a deal. Like, there is something about like it's like the whole second arrow theory in Buddhism. It's like, like what we will do to wriggle away from discomfort. And this is such a cultural thing, this, you know, is so much worse. And I have that, I will say that is something I'm proud of of like the last years. I've gotten much better at that, where I'm just like, you know what? It's just what's happening right now. I don't feel great right now. I will likely feel something else later via, you know, like, and there's something about the like just like committing to the thing. And that's where I think also, like, yeah, you put the phone down and you just go, like, okay, what's up, reality? Here we are.

Ailey Jolie 36:00

I love that you brought in, really, really love that you brought in like committing to the unhappiness because I've been going through so much stuff with my health. And it was kind of about two months ago where I just said to myself, it's like, I'm giving myself four months where I'm allowed to be miserable. Like this is I just full on. Like, I'm not no whipped cream, just misery. Ailey.

Hala Alyan 36:19

Yes, yes. I I got a concussion early January. Do you know what it's like to start a new year and be like, here are my resolutions, everything's gonna be done. I was like so excited about the beginning of I mean, I was excited, but I was like really like we're and I had like all these things that I was gonna do. And I had most of January off because of my teaching schedule. So I was gonna work on this book, blah, blah, blah. January 3rd, smack my head, get a concussion. I'm like, are you fucking kidding? And I like the first week or two, I was like, this is just unacceptable. I can't, I couldn't look at screens, I couldn't write, I couldn't read, you know, all these different things. It was really hard to parent, etc. Loud noises, overstimulated constantly. And then I talked to my friend that actually really loved how he, he's a very practical person. He was just like, So yeah, I mean, let's just reassess this next quarter. And I was like, Oh, next quarter? Like what? And he's like, Yeah, let's just chat about it in like April. I was like, it's January.

Storytelling As Survival And Alliance

Hala Alyan 37:13

And I'm such a like time phobic person. You know what I mean? That's one of my big controls. Is I'm like, no, no, no, but time is the do you know what I could have done? I mean, this is really the capitalist hooks to me, even with like creative work, where I'm like, do you know what you can do in three months? And he was just like, let's just circle back and we'll touch base and see how things are going next quarter. And there was a permission slip in that, kind of like you're talking about now, where it was just like, just uh have whatever experience you're having for the next few months and we'll see where we are in a few months. And that was it.

Ailey Jolie 37:37

What do you think makes it so hard for people to take that on to actually just let themselves be in it instead of fighting it or resisting it? I think we're so afraid of suffering.

Hala Alyan 37:49

I think we're really afraid that if we conflate defeat with surrender and we conflate surrender with permanence, that if I were to accept that this is how I feel, it's the same thing as consenting to it forever. It's the same thing as saying, okay, so this is my life now. And I also think there's some, I mean, I'll speak for myself. I also think there's there is again that like capitalist tilt to it, which is like, I don't have time. Like if I just like there's this idea that if you're just able to accept that you're experiencing what you're experiencing, that you're going to just like wallow in it, quote unquote, or lie down and not get like not do anything or not be able to like, like I think there's some element of like mourning the lost time and what could be done with the lost time. But I think, but I think even more than that is like we're a very like death phobic, illness phobic, suffering phobic society. We're not taught how to do any of those things. You know, like we just don't, we have no framework for it. We have no blueprint for it. We're supposed to continuously quote pursue happiness, which is such an insane in directive because happiness, it's like saying, I want to pursue boredom or I want to pursue irritation. It's it's an emotion that has a half-life of a few seconds. And we're like, we're constantly trying to feel it, we're constantly trying to, you know, seeking it out and dopamine hunting and whatever. So it says, I think, yeah, I think it's just people are just like, oh, it's gonna be like this forever. And so I have to do everything to make sure that that doesn't happen. And then what do you do? Then you're just really unhappy because now you've thrown everything you have at avoiding a feeling, which is I I mean, like I've said this before, but it's like, I don't, I've never heard of somebody like waging a battle against an emotion and winning. Like it doesn't work. Emotions don't work that way, our nervous systems don't work that way. All you do is like pump your system with cortisol, become singularly obsessed with not feeling something, which guarantees that it's continuously being brought into your mind. And then that, and then now that's the centerpiece of your life.

Ailey Jolie 39:40

What strategies or words of wisdom do you have for people to get more comfortable with impermanence?

Hala Alyan 39:47

I think start looking for it in your day-to-day. I mean, it's everything's constantly ending, which means everything's constantly beginning, which means everything's constantly in flux. Like we have the cue, like nature-wise, we have those cues all the time, right? Like a day you peak the day, then the day starts to wane, then the night, then you know. But I think there's also just like every, I mean, I the best piece of advice I can give is the next time you feel something mildly uncomfortable, it's a little bit tricky to do it with like really like, you know, to be super activated, it's hard to sit in that. But like start small, like the next irritation you have, you know what I mean? The next time you're mildly inconvenienced. Pay attention to what that feeling is like in your body if you don't insert a story around it. Pay attention to the actual half life of emotions, which is quite literally seconds long. Don't fight it, don't resist it. How long are you irritated for? Because usually people are like, well, I was irritated all afternoon. It's like, well, were you or did you? Keep calling that back. Did you keep like doing the rehearsal of like what you should have said and like summoning the thing back? Like that's usually how we just we stay in bed with it, you know? So I think it's like you practice small. This can even be a meditative practice, but it's like you're in line, you're in traffic, like these minor inconveniences, and you just go, okay, this is this is just what's happening right now. You know, like that's become really a mantra of mine as I'm just I will off I'm oftentimes just like rubbing my eyes and saying quietly to myself, this is just what's happening. Like, because there is something in that just kind of like, what am I gonna do? Keep debating with reality, you know, like what that's I don't want to spend my life doing that either.

Ailey Jolie 41:21

Was there a moment where that shifted for you where you decided to no longer debate with reality?

Hala Alyan 41:26

I think I've had two moments in the last like half decade. One, I had a lot of infertility, like we were talking about, I had a really like medicalized period around the body. And I had a pretty dangerous octophic pregnancy, think fully passed, but like I couldn't carry. And I think there was, and it was during the COVID era too. And so I think there was just honestly, I feel like every time I have just committed to accepting reality, it's never pretty. Like it's never, I rarely like, you know, the whole like let go or be dragged. I'm often dragged. Like I'm not somebody that lightly does anything, or I'm not, I don't do anything gracefully. And so that's the truth of it. So like usually it's just like my will gets broken enough. And then I go, fuck it, fine. I'm I'm I consent, I accept. And then when I say that, immediately I can just feel my ecosystem. I can feel my nervous system exhale because now I've let go of at least fighting the thing. At least that energy gets to be reclaimed. And more, and this a similar thing has happened here where it's just like my reserves in the last two years, between everything happening in Palestine, between everything happening maritally, between you know, solo parenting, also like, you know, little kids are constantly sick. And so you're just like catching all these little germs. My, my body, my immune

Memory, Erasure, And Resistance

Hala Alyan 42:33

system was completely shot, all of these things. Like there was just a point where I was like, you know what? I just I can't fight this. Like, this is where I'm at. I'm not like it would actually be kind of concerning if I was constantly in a state of ease and joy, given all of these external circumstances. It would mean that something might actually be wrong with me. It's like I think I'm appropriately reacting to the stressors and overwhelms of my life. And the second like I can commit to that, and again, for anyone listening, that's not like I had that conversation with myself once and then it was easy. I have that conversation myself constantly, right? It's a continuous that's life. You're forgetting and you're remembering, you're forgetting and you're re-remembering. That's the task of living. And so for me, it's like once I'm every time I do it, it's like setting something down. It always feels like relief. It always feels like that's right. I'm remembering. This is the same thing as meditating. I I'm a terrible, I mean, I used to have such a great practice. I never do it now. And every time I do it, I'm like, oh yeah, that's why. That's why. That's why. You know? And this is like very similar where it's just like it's like coming home to something where you're like, remember, this is so much more easeful. And then I forget it. And then I have that beautiful task of returning to it, and then I forget it. I have the beauty, you know, it's like that's just I think I've like come, I've sort of like accepted that there is not gonna be one real, you know, turning point in my life where I never have to have the same goddamn conversation with myself again. I this is just what it is, you know? And that's fine. That's fine. It's like talking with a toddler. I have a toddler. It's like the number of times I have to have the same conversations with her, like there is something delightful in that. There is something so human in our tendency to forget and be like re-olit by remembering.

Ailey Jolie 44:14

Yes. One thing that really stood out to me there and how you answered that question and what you clarified is also that embodiment is that moment of noticing the overwhelm and or feeling the panic or being in the stress. And there's such this misconception that embodiment is this easeful, peaceful, regulated nervous system. It's like, actually, no, not not really. That's actually probably more a disassociative, expensive state than anything else. I was just gonna say, there's a reason I dissociate.

Hala Alyan 44:45

I dissociate because to be somatically present oftentimes doesn't feel very good. It oftentimes doesn't feel very pleasant, right? So it's it is actually, yes, there's a numb, like the numbness, at least I'm kind of quote unquote shielded from it. But then what am I being shielded from? My life. I don't want to be shielded from my life. I want to be in my life, you know? But it's like, yeah, no, that the to be in your body is not nobody anywhere said that that was gonna be a pleasant experience or that was gonna be always an easeful or a restful experience. It's that you're again, you're consenting to reality. You're consenting to being with what's happening. And that's like the, I think the biggest like undertaking any of us can do. No, I mean, there nowhere in the byline is it said that that's gonna be fun. It'll be meaningful. Those are two very different things.

Ailey Jolie 45:29

What are some practices or ways that you create or have created connection with your body?

Hala Alyan 45:35

I take a lot of baths, which I want to just say up top. I know it's not great for the environment. This is the one place that I really like M in my body. I take a lot of baths, even like in the summer. Like I'll take really halting hot baths. Uh unclear how good that is actually for the I don't know. Maybe it's, you know, it is what it is. That I really like. It's funny because the more dissociated I am, you know what I'm doing in the bath? I'm on my phone. And then when I catch it, I go, what the fuck? Do this on your couch then. Like the eras where I'm like more in my more willing, it's less more in my body, more willing to be in my body. There's no phone. There's maybe a notebook, there's maybe something to read. But usually there's at least five to ten minutes of contemplation. Like I just get in the water, I turn off all of the lights. So I'm just in pitch black in this like really hot water. I'm just breathing. Like there's not, there's nothing fancy about it. I'm not trying to seek out or invoke an experience. A lot of a lot for me, a lot of the techniques are usually just being like, hi, how's it going in there? Like, what is happening right now? How are we feeling? What's going on? Where am I feeling it? It's the the the problem with a lot of meditative and somatic techniques is that said aloud, they sound so simple and they sound so um saccharine and kind of annoying that I think people don't. It's the same thing with sleep hygiene, where like people are like, give me the trick of like how to combat insanity. And it's like, don't look at your phone for an hour and they're like, okay, okay, what's the real answer? And you're like, that's it, buddy. Like, just you gotta go to sleep around the same time. Like it's actually incredibly unglamorous. And I think it's very similar for me. Like, how the ways that I'm able to like do the check-ins or do the drop-ins, it's I mean, I'm doing it right now. I'm putting my hand over my chest. I don't know if people can see me, but it's like it's usually quite literally just hand over chest, take it. I love four, seven, eight breathing. You inhale for four, you hold for seven, you exhale for eight. Exhaling longer than inhale is always like a good nervous system reset. And it's just like a, oof, I don't feel well today. I will say that aloud constantly. I also talk a lot to myself. Well, I would just be like, ooh, I'm anxious today. I don't feel great. Oh man, okay. I'm a little bit, a little bit rattled. Like, like just that's it. I don't then have to go write a thesis about it. I don't have to go engage with it for the next five hours or philosophize about it the way that I used to, right? It used to be like every emotion had to have like a massive center stage thing. And like now it's just like, okay, that's where I'm out. That's where I am. It's okay, you know, kind of like then keep it moving. I I think especially if you're like I'm I'm sort of a I can be prone to obsessionality and so or like preoccupation. So for someone like me, it's actually really important to kind of keep it moving. So it's like, this is where I am right now. All right. Thanks for the check-in. Now, what's the next thing I need to attend to in my life? You know? Otherwise, I can kind of get in these like, and why do I feel that way? And how did that happen? And how did we begin here? How do we get out of here, et cetera? I think that's a big part for me is just like these quick check-ins. So the tactics for me are like being in water helps, just a quick hand on the heart helps. Like there's like these reminder apps, but you can say what's in them. Haven't done this in a while. I'm actually just remembering. I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do it after we hake up. Where it's like you can just five times a day have random messages sent out. And every now and then I will do it, and it will just be something like, How are you feeling right now? Drop your shoulders. And it just pops up on your phone at random time. It's like a way to work with technology instead of against it, right? Realistically, I'm gonna look at my phone throughout the day. That's where I am in my life. I hope it's not forever, but it is for now. And so it's like I'll look at my phone and just get a reminder, do a 478 broth. And then I just talk for a second. I go, where are we at? Okay, that's where we're at. Back to life, you know.

Ailey Jolie 49:10

In your answer, you really kind of pulled at something that often I have experience with clients is that somatics is phrased in this way that makes it inaccessible because of the languaging, or because of the tone of voice that's used, or how it can sometimes kind of turn into these like really

Embodiment As Political Practice

Ailey Jolie 49:28

deep internal processes when it's like actually, this is meant to cut through all the noise of the mind, which is really, really hard to get all of the different parts of your system, if I use internal family systems language, to allow them to all just sit down and all be online at once.

Hala Alyan 49:46

And also, isn't there something for you? Like, I mean, that's certainly this is true for me, where I feel like if I'm not doing it all, I'm doing nothing. And so if I'm not meditating every day, what's the point of then meditating every few days? You know what I mean? If I'm not going on a yoga retreat, that's a lie. I've never even won it's going to go. But you know what I'm saying? Like that's kind of like it can be marketed or targeted as like if you're not doing these things, because inaccessibility isn't just it's in language, but it's also in literal resources, right? It's assuming that like it's this, it's this framing that assumes people have the resource of time, they have the resource of money, they have the resource of mobil of space to do these really elaborate practices that I'm not denying going on a yoga retreat for five days would absolutely reset my nervous system, probably, right? Doing a silent retreat for a week, I'm sure it would do wonders, you know. But it's like if if I wait to be able to be in a place where I've cleared enough debris in my life to do those things or saved enough to whatever, like then what am I doing in the interim? You know, it kind of makes it seem like if you can't access that stuff, that don't, there's no lower, there's no quote, lower level things. There's no day-to-day, hour to hour things you can do.

Ailey Jolie 50:51

It's completely incorrect. It's a really wonderful trick of capitalism to keep us all in out of our bodies and more easily likely to consume. Um, before we close for today, is there anything that you would like to leave the listener with or something that you have upcoming that the listener could join?

Hala Alyan 51:08

As I talk about the evils of social media, I'm like, follow me on Instagram. I say that to say that's usually where I post event or that's where I post like if I'm gonna be at a reading, if I'm gonna be doing a thing or whatever, or a podcast such as this one. But there's nothing in particular. I have a not I have a memoir that just came out called I'll Tell You When I'm Home, which is like a look at fertility and motherhood and exile and all these different things and surrogacy. Um, check it out if you want. I'm not great at marketing, I'm like, if you feel like it. Again, always no pressure. Um, but yeah, I would say like count the book if you like, come to a reading. I hope to have more. I'm hoping to have more kind of like mental health creative expression offerings that are sort of accessible remotely, but not quite set that up yet.

Ailey Jolie 51:50

At this moment, there are your wonderful words and wisdom for the listener to read, which I have thoroughly enjoyed and recommended to many clients. It was so lovely to spend time with you and just kind of scratch the surface on these things. Thank you so much. This was such a delight. Thank you so much for having me. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.