In This Body

Embodiment Without Force with Alexis Florentina

• Ailey Jolie • Season 3 • Episode 70

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What if your nervous system is asking to be understood, not managed?

In this episode, Ailey sits down with Alexis Florentina, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, to explore how nervous system regulation has become another form of self improvement, and why that can leave us feeling even more disconnected from ourselves.

Drawing from her own experience with chronic illness and medical trauma, Alexis shares a gentler approach to embodiment, one that honors leaving the body as a valid survival strategy and recognizes that healing cannot be forced. Together, she and Ailey explore safety, titration, and the subtle signals that tell us when our nervous system is ready and when it is not.

The conversation also unpacks common misunderstandings about regulation, anxiety, and activation, offering a more compassionate perspective on emotions that are often treated as problems to solve. They discuss the difference between stress and trauma, the role of creativity in healing, and why aliveness, not perfect regulation, may be the real measure of healing.

If you have ever felt pressure to do embodiment the "right" way, this conversation offers a more spacious and supportive path forward.

In this episode:

  • 3:35 An Invitation Back To The Body
  • 4:16 Lexy's Training And Origin Story
  • 11:21 Holism Over Mind Body Polarity
  • 16:46 Regulation Isn’t A Task
  • 21:47 What Trauma Feels Like Clinically
  • 28:15 Writing Creativity And Aliveness
  • 37:13 Meeting Fear Without Fixing
  • 44:59 Fawning People Pleasing And Needs
  • 49:17 Your Body Is Fighting For You

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

Ailey Jolie

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, Aile Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. My guest today is Lexi Florentina, a somatic experiencing practitioner trained in the lineages of Kathy Kane and Deb Dana. Lexi came to this work through her own long history with chronic illness and medical trauma. She's the creator of Attuned to You and Held, two spaces online where she teaches from what her own body has taught her. This is a conversation about what happens when the language of the body starts to flatten, when regulation becomes another word for control, when being in your body turns into a demand rather than an invitation, when fear and urgency and the body's clearest communications start getting mistaken for the problem itself. If you have been trying to regulate, trying to be in your body, trying to do this right, this conversation is for you. Lexi provides tangible ways to start to digest some of the embodiment and somatic information you've been seeing online in a way that will help you come home to your body. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode of How to Be in This Body with me, Aile Jolie. So my first question for you is one that I always start the podcast with. And I would love to hear what being in your body mean to you.

Alexis Florentina

I feel like being in my body means an invitation to be in it rather than expectation. And so, at least in my relationship with my body, it's one that it's a it's a safe homecoming rather than a place that I need to be in, that I need to be out of. And I've worked really hard to get to that place. But it, yeah, it feels like it's a it's an invitation that I always get to come back to to return rather than something that, yeah, feels, feels forced.

Ailey Jolie

For the listener who's maybe new to

An Invitation Back To The Body

Ailey Jolie

you, I would love to hear from you maybe some of the informal and formal moments of education that you've encountered or experienced that have led you to support others in their process of coming home to their bodies or the relationship they have with their bodies.

Alexis Florentina

Yeah, yeah, of course. I'll start with formal. Um, you know, I'm I'm a somatic experiencing practitioner, um, which I believe you are as well. And so um spent a little over three years uh studying, you know, trauma and the nervous system and doing the hands-on work to work with that um through the trauma institute and through Peter Levine's work. And aside from that, I've uh also trained in uh the work of Kathy Kane, of Eileen LePera, of uh

Lexi’s Training And Origin Story

Alexis Florentina

Dev Dana, Polyvagel Theory, and and some touch work and a few others. But a lot of my, and I have a, I should probably name, I have a psychology degree too. But aside from that, uh a lot of my my real life experience um and a lot of my mentorship throughout my life that was a little more unformal. I really uh give credit to a lot of my work. Um from a really young age, I was mentored uh by body workers and practitioners and therapists and the like, um, healers and spaceholders who really gave me the firsthand experience of working with the body, really before I understood what I was doing. Um, and so I was fortunate to have a lot of language for it and a lot of understanding and a lot of felt sense understanding around it that has really supported me not only in my own experience with my body, but with my clients as well.

Ailey Jolie

Are there any personal moments that stand out that you can look back on or moments that you've had with your body that have really shaped how you show up today?

Alexis Florentina

Oh goodness, yes. Many, many, many. I have a history, a long history of chronic illness, complex trauma, medical trauma, and many experiences where my body went from being something that felt like an enemy to something that is now an ally. And so throughout all that, there's many experiences of uh either being worked on, hands-on by body workers or, you know, having really special moments with facilitators where uh they were so gracious enough to teach me while working on my body, where I could not only understand cognitively what was happening, but then feel it in my own system. Um, and so those moments were always so precious to me to allow things to click and to also feel it inside. And then throughout my experience with chronic illness and with trauma, there's many, many experiences and moments where the fighting, the internal fighting, the internal villainizing would begin to shift from my body feeling like something uh that I needed to fix to something that was clearly responding in a very specific way. So many, many moments where that existed, I can, I can think of. Yeah.

Ailey Jolie

I know that you have written about and shared about your experience with chronic illness and how that has changed the relationship with your body, but also been a catalyst for what you do today, as you kind of just named in the two questions I just asked. And I would love to hear from you because I think the perspective of chronic illness and embodiment is one that's filled with a lot of nuance and needs a lot of grace and compassion and it's kind of a tender place and can be quite tricky, even if, like, if I have pain in the body, do I bring my awareness out? Is that actually being more in my body? Because I'm listening, do I bring it in and find a place of pleasure? And so I would love to just explore with you and and maybe hear more of your experience of how the intersection of living in a body that has experienced chronic illness and your sense of embodiment maybe overlap in some ways, or in some ways they've been challenging. And again, you can speak from your personal experience or working with people, either one is great. Yeah, no, I love that.

Alexis Florentina

It's an important conversation, and I think there's a lot of there's a lot of nuance, especially when it comes to bodies that have historically felt unsafe and for really valid reasons. Anyone who has navigated any sort of chronic illness or chronic symptom sensation or feeling that has felt overwhelming or confusing can understand the feeling of um not wanting to go in their body for very valid reasons. Some of what, you know, mainstream wellness has started to name is that being in the body is the ultimate goal. And while, while there is some truth to yes, you know, like having this relationship with the body, having the body the center of the conversation is so, so true. The force of being in the body can actually do more harm than good. Especially in the beginning, you know, as I'm sure you know with your work, there's really good reasons for why we leave our body. And there's, you know, at least in in my work and in my experience, that's ought to be respected and validated and really listened to. And so I think, you know, when you name what's it like to be at the intersection of embodiment, but also a body that has experienced so much uh chronic illness and excuse about what feels safe and unsafe is that it's an ongoing dance. Um, and what you named about, you know, being in the body or coming out of the body is I've found there's so much relief and still so much embodiment and coming out of the body. I think there's a misconception with the word somatic, as I'm sure you experience too, is, you know, yes, does soma come from the root word body, but it's gotten a little lost in translation around what that's supposed to mean. And in at least in my work and what I like to write about is um, you know, somatic really is about allowing the body to have an experience, experiencing something through the body. And that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to be focusing on the body or being in it. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do for our body is to let our awareness come out of it, to be with something that's around us. And especially when trauma is uh a part of our history. Um, you know, yes, trauma can disconnect from us from our body, but really what trauma is doing is it's disconnecting us from the presence. And so I find that the most powerful piece to focus on is less about being in the body, at least at first, and finding what uh what naturally orients us to the present. And how does that then support what we're experiencing in the body? For me, it was an incredible relief when I realized, oh, I can just be with that tree, or I can be with the warmth of this heating pad or this cup of tea. And I don't have to just dive into this pain that is shooting into my abdomen or into my neck or wherever it is for the sake of embodiment or for the sake of being with it or feeling it or whatever that might be. And to my surprise, at least, you know, in in the beginning when I was uh doing this work as a client, so much relief happened in my body and through my pain. And I think that's something that's often missed is that where our body discovers relief and presence and softening is the direction that we we usually need to go into, even if it contradicts what the narrative says, you know, about it, if that makes sense.

Ailey Jolie

Absolutely does. And one thing that was going through my mind as you were speaking, I had a lovely therapist, she's also a meditation teacher, and I speak about her often, Haroko. And she would often say, We need mindless moments to know a mindful moment. And I apply the same thing for embodiment of like we need disembodied moments to know embodied what embodiment is or to have embodied moments as well. And so I would love to just dig in with you a little bit. I have lots of thoughts and feelings on the hyper emphasis on being in the body, definitely coming from a lens of studying somatics and a graduate degree and all the other things around it. I have a real tendency to be in the mind-body holism and to move away from dualism.

Holism Over Mind Body Polarity

Ailey Jolie

So I'd love to spend some time maybe exploring that topic with you and how that maybe in your perspective, if you feel this or think this or believe it, gets in the way of actually coming home to the body when we have with the body way up here and have put the mind or heart or psyche or whatever else underneath.

Alexis Florentina

Yeah, absolutely. Um, definitely. There is such a polarity and an isolation between the mind and the body, especially as the body has become more of a mainstream conversation, which is wonderful. But yes, like you said, the mind-body holism, you know, is that that integrative need for our entire system to be tended to and recognized and attuned to, not just the body or the mind or something specific, right? Because all parts of us are doing a very important job and all parts of us have a specific role. And I love that what you said that, you know, being in the body uh requires disembodied moments to actually know what it feels like to be inside. And I recognize that as a sticky place for many people where they find themselves, you know, in that tension, sometimes because there's so much force of trying so hard to be in when there's maybe a need to be out and a need to allow those disembodied moments to, you know, be the catalyst that drives you, that delivers you back in on its own, where regulation happens naturally, where embodiment happens as a discovery rather than like a determination. And I find that that happens much more easily when there is no villainizing any one part of us, whether it's mind or body or you know, soul or identity or whatever it might be.

Ailey Jolie

You've mentioned it twice now. And so I would love to explore this a little bit more with you. You've named kind of the my language is the propensity to be in the body and maybe bypass some signs that, like, well, maybe we should take this a little slow. I would love to just hear a little bit more from you around how that shows up, what it looks like, maybe how you work with that. Um, because I can definitely recognize my younger self in that. It was like, I just want to feel all the things, and then I would get there and be overwhelmed and be like, oh, okay, now we're even further away because that was too fast, too quick, too much.

Alexis Florentina

I can resonate with that. I I grew up as a really, really deep feeler. Sometimes, you know, feeling everything was both a blessing and a curse. And there's sometimes with the narrative or the belief of that feeling, um, you know, feeling is a gift and we need to feel it to heal it. Again, there's some truth in all of that. But where it can lead us astray a little bit is that we have a uh our eye on a specific target, and that is to be in the body or to feel. And sometimes we do so in such a pace or with such um determination that we can sometimes um unknowingly skip over subtle cues of tension or of um, you know, certain paces in the breath changing, uh, certain feelings or thoughts or sensations that come online that are not what many people call blocks, but are actually invitations to orient to some conditions. Because as I'm sure you know, everybody has conditions. And whether it's with feeling or with uh with experiencing co-regulation or connecting or whatever it might be, there's connection, there's conditions that the body has. And so I find that whether it's with my own body or with with clients that we're looking for some of those cues that a condition is trying to be communicated, whether that is, you know, oh, I'm going inward and it's blank and it's blank and it's blank and it's blank, I'm not feeling anything, or I'm going inward and suddenly my mind's getting really loud and it's telling me all these different things, or, you know, the pain is increasing, or you know, something's happening. And and maybe, you know, the first impulse is, oh, then I just need to keep sitting with it. And and I tend to see those as signs of maybe we need to back off a bit, or we need to titrate it down, or let's bring our awareness out. Um, let's listen to what your system is actually saying when the resistance comes online, when the contraction comes online. Um, because not everything needs to be regulated through, not everything needs to just be felt deeper. Some things are uh clear messages that are really, really important to name and validate and sit with and recognize. And it's in the not recognizing that that historically we have been hardened or we have experienced trauma, is because those subtle cues that either we were aware of or we're not, we're not tended to or attuned to, whether it was from the inside or outside. And so part of that slowing down and recognizing all of those ways in which your body's trying to negotiate is a part of trauma renegotiation in and of itself, if that makes sense.

Ailey Jolie

It does. And I would love to slow down the piece around not everything needs to be regulated through, because I know this is something like so deep to my heart. I'm like, ideally, our nervous system is a place where we experience the full totality of aliveness, and it's not about kind of squishing one side down so that we can have more of this or and so I would love to just kind of explore that piece with you around how maybe you've seen the word regulation be misunderstood or co-opted or used to become almost a cinnamon with calm down or control yourself, and how maybe you kind of unpack that or kind of challenge the people that you work with to view or understand regulation in the way that you just very gently tossed

Regulation Isn’t A Task

Ailey Jolie

it in there.

Alexis Florentina

The word regulation has become so mainstream and very, you know, much like a household word these days, which is which is great. And um, as you named, it can get tangled up in in the idea of calm or containment. Um, and and many folks that I work with, students or clients, they come in with that relationship to it. And sometimes when we're working through something or in my programs, when somebody is, you know, moving through something, there can be this uh this response from them of, oh, I then I couldn't regulate through this, or you know, this was happening, and then when do I go regulate? The common question is when do I go regulate? And this this came up a couple of weeks ago a few times in uh in my program. And I remember mentioning regulation isn't something you do, it's something your body experiences, and that can't be forced. And so when I name not everything needs to be regulated, it's it's two things. One, not everything needs to be forced into a certain state or shifted out of. And also dysregulation, what people name dysregulation or activation in the body, is very necessary. And so I think with the conversation around regulation, there has been a villainization of activation. So when we experience anxiety or tension or fear or contraction or anger or a response that feels incongruent with the uh with the situation, there has been a narrative that says, okay, well, now how do I what do I do with this? How do I move through this? And in my work and in my writing, I'd love to remind people that sometimes we're not doing anything with it, literally letting it exist because it's there for a reason. You know, there's there's a reason for why you might, you know, experience a ton of tension when you're trying to be intimate with your partner or why you, you know, feel so much anxiety when you're about to be seen. And those aren't quote unquote blocks that we need to try to work through or regulate necessarily. You know, can they can they uh change or be softened or move naturally on their own? Sure, but first and foremost, uh they're there for a reason. And so sometimes the the narrative around regulation has kind of taken taken this whole new shape that that has begun to mean something that it actually is.

Ailey Jolie

I would love to hear from you around maybe some other terms similar to regulation that has kind of grown into something else, even though it has become quite common in mainstream, and there's so many positives to that. If there are any other kind of words in the somatic realm that you have heard become a bit villainized or a bit confused, trauma is one of them.

Alexis Florentina

Trauma is uh is a big one that is used very loosely in many places. You know, it's I believe everyone has some sort of imprint of trauma in some way. You know, we're all human, we've all lived on this earth and have experienced ruptures and harm. And sometimes the word is used to describe stress. You know, Peter Levine has that quote that says, All trauma is stressful, but not all stress is traumatic. And I think the the uh you know the difference between the two can actually help us and recognizing when stress is in our experience or experiencing stress in our body can allow us to have capacity to move through activation without always naming it as something that is traumatic, and for trauma to actually be metabolized and work through in a specific type of pace that it needs to be in. And so um, yeah, I see I see the word trauma used often. Um, of course, it's it's not my business to name what's traumatic for someone and what isn't, because it's not linear. Uh however, sometimes uh it can be used in a way that uh might actually be, I don't like the phrase holding someone back, but but can be can be interfering with their experience um if it's used, you know, in a certain way. So that's that's one big one that I see.

Ailey Jolie

If I stay with this for a little bit longer, could you share a little bit of the difference between working with stress in the body versus working with trauma in the body? Because they can present so similar, specifically if that stress is overwhelmed or is leading to shutdown. But at least in my clinical experience, there's a little bit of a different tact. Like I put on different hats, I have different skills, I come in from different angles. And I am being led by the words that the client uses. So in this question that I'm asking you is someone is coming in naming stress and the other person is coming in and naming trauma. But I would love to hear how you work with it, how you pull it apart, and how maybe it's different in the body of the practitioner, but also the body of the client as well.

Alexis Florentina

Yes, a lot of differences actually in the bot in my own body when I'm sitting

What Trauma Feels Like Clinically

Alexis Florentina

with somebody that is has been navigating something traumatic versus something stressful. Um, and I think that's one thing that doesn't always get named or recognized, especially for practitioners, is how much of your own system will tell you what you're working with. Sometimes with trauma, there's a lot of confusion in my own system. And I start to recognize something that's very uncoupled or something that's very overcoupled by uh my own experience of really not knowing what's happening here, um, or starting to feel like something's missing, or starting to feel really, really overwhelmed by the amount of uh pieces that are all in the room. There's also a felt sense of something that I I actually don't have a word for. And it's something that I've been trying to name for a long time, and I don't know if I ever will name. And and maybe you can relate with it when when trauma is in the room. There is there's usually a lack of words in your own. System. There's there's a an imprint that when you know trauma, you know trauma. And you can feel it when you're across from someone. And like you said, when when there's stress in the room, someone's usually naming that over and over and over again. But then there's this kind of this line where the word stress, which is another thing, you know, some some can overuse the word trauma, some can overuse the word stress and not realize that they've been experiencing trauma. And so sometimes it's being used over and over and over again. And their response or how their, yeah, how their body has responded or adapted to it is showing up as something that has actually overwhelmed their ability to cope. And so I think that's that's always a clear, you know, delineation between stress and trauma is yeah, stress is stressful. Uh and uh there is a a way in which there's a return from it. And there's a way in which trauma is very difficult to return from unless it is held in a specific sort of way. And so folks can experience collapse, they can experience, you know, different states in their system in stress, but sometimes it can feel a little bit more like a wave, even if it feels like a chaotic wave. Whereas with trauma, it's a different shape. It's a different shape and it's one that isn't always predictable and it doesn't always have this like finite curve or direction. Uh and so, you know, I I I realize that as I'm naming this, it sounds quite vague. And I think that is the territory of trauma, is that I I think the world has been trying to define it for years, and especially in recent years, it's there's a lot of definitions for it, which I think are all, you know, beautifully describe it. And there's an element of it that can't be named. At least in my work and my practice, I'm really curious about how you how you see the differences.

Ailey Jolie

I want to stay here for a moment because I think the distinction between stress and trauma is one of the most useful things a practitioner can learn to feel in their own body, and one of the most useful things a client can learn to feel in theirs too. Stress at its cleanest is a response cycle. Something activates the system, the system mobilizes, and when the conditions allow, the system completes and the cycle returns. You can track the arc, you can feel where it began and where it wants to go. Even when the return is delayed, the shape of stress is still legible. Trauma rarely holds that shape. Trauma is often what happens when the cycle cannot complete. When the response had nowhere to go, and the body organized itself around holding it. In Hakomi and in sensory motor psychotherapy, we talk about this as a character armoring, which is a way of saying the body has been shaped over time by white it could not metabolize. So it began as a response, it becomes a structure, a posture, a pattern of breath, the way the eyes move or don't move when certain material comes close. That's why, as Lexi was pointing you to, you cannot map trauma the way you map a stress response cycle because you're not completing something, you're renegotiating a shape the body has been holding for a very long time, sometimes decades. It has a different pacing from the practitioner, a different kind of patience from the client, and a different relationship to what progress really looks like. Because the body did not build that shape that quickly, and it doesn't release it that quickly either. I wanted to name that before we move on because I think that distinction is part of what gets lost when the word trauma is used too loosely. The one thing that goes to my mind, and this is something that you shared about with stress, is often completing that stress response cycle. So as you name, there's a type of return that can happen to some degree, depending on how long the stress has gone on for. Is it acute? Has it become chronic? What is that relationship or intersection? With trauma, at least in my mind, there's a completion, but the actual stress response cycle has maybe been going on so long, and this goes more into Hakomi, where there's maybe been a character patterning or character arm wearing. And so instead of a return, there's more of a reinvent or a narrate or re-narrating or a rewriting. So there's like a little bit of a different quality that when you're working with a client, and I'm glad you kind of named the mystery feeling, or those are the words I would use. Because in the way that I can map a stress response cycle, I can't, even with sensory motor psychotherapy, which is a very like, you know, head-led psychotherapy, body-centered psychotherapy, even with that, you can't map it perfectly because there is just this kind of, I would say almost like spiritual component to it where you're just like, I don't really know how this is going to reshape the nervous system or the body or your lived experience as we move through this and it's held and attuned too. So I can definitely resonate with pieces of your answer in there as well. I know because I've followed your work. I so I know that you really have a gift with words. And I would love to just explore a little bit of that intersection of embodiment and writing, if those two things come together for you, and what maybe the role of writing has in the relationship that you have with your body.

Alexis Florentina

Oh yes. Writing is one of uh one of what I believe is the greatest medicines. Um, and it has been not only a resource for me my entire life, but um a way in which I get to be with my body, so to speak. Um writing has has been a part of my life ever since I could write. And

Writing Creativity And Aliveness

Alexis Florentina

uh so I believe that writing is an act of embodiment because, in a way, you know, we there's a few different ways you can write, of course. Um, there's, you know, the brain dumping, and then there is the cathartic type of writing, and then there is the writing that comes from the seed of your soul and that you can't think about, and it just happens. And when it does, there's something so medicinal in it because there is a rhythm that happens. And and maybe you can relate to this uh with your own writing is there's a rhythm that happens, and I I think some people call this flow state, but I find it to not be always a flow because there are moments of contraction with it. There are moments of pausing and reading the reading the word, finding the words, and then letting it move through you, and then it expands again and it comes back. And I find that rhythm returns me to my own rhythm. And that's the embodiment of it is that when writing gets to be something that is so rhythmic and such a dance that it does return you back to your body in a way that's not requiring you to look for something inward. And that's one of the reasons why I love it so much, is because it is that way in which you get to kind of orient away from the body to return to the body. And it gives you a place for your voice to be heard, which has been incredibly important for me personally, historically. My voice and speaking and words have always been a tricky intersection for me. And so it's it's very, very uh vital to my own process and to a lot of my clients' process. And, you know, one thing you named about trauma is that, you know, it it tells a story, it leaves a story. And I like to also mention that it, you know, can leave that imprint that stress doesn't necessarily leave. And so I find that writing gives you a chance to not necessarily always have to rewrite what happened, but write the next chapter, write what gets to unfold in your story. And storytelling in and of itself can be so, so therapeutic that it allows for movement to take place even in the most stuck-like seasons. It brings me to a quote that is might be my favorite quote, and it's by an SCP, and I always mix up her name. I believe it's Sonia Gomes. Um, but if that's incorrect, forgive me. And the quote is the opposite of trauma is aliveness.

Ailey Jolie

A quick note, and then I'll let Lexi keep going. The quote Lexi is referring to, the opposite of trauma is aliveness, is one you'll hear attributed in a few different places across the somatic field. And the exact origin is a little slippery, a little unknown, a little contested. I'll put what I find in the show notes. I care about the attribution, but I also really care about what the line is pointing to, which is that the work is not about subtracting symptoms. It's about returning to the full range of what it feels like to be alive in a body. I hope you keep listening because Lexi is about to take this somewhere beautiful.

Alexis Florentina

And I've always expanded on that, that, you know, the opposite of trauma is uh creativity, the opposite of trauma is um is is movement, is presence, is connection, is all the different things um, you know, if there is an opposite to it, but more so speaking to that finding that sense of aliveness. And I think you mentioned this at the beginning as being able to experience the full spectrum of aliveness, uh, whether that is coupled with excitement and joy and pleasure, or that is with grief and anger and uh, you know, outright indignation. There is a quality in there that lets our whole system and physiology know I am here. And creativity is one of those ways that that gets to happen. It not only, again, gets to tell its own story, but I think it's also a really beautiful um pathway to aliveness because it lets us explore what gets to be, you know, what wants to be named, what wants to exist. It allows us to tell a story, but it also allows us to, again, come out of the focus of what's happening just inside and just let it be named, let it be expressed. It allows for, you know, that that muscle of expression that may have been overridden or suppressed to also have a channel to move through as well, which I think is, you know, one of the most important parts of trauma healing.

Ailey Jolie

Do you have any ideas why that piece of aliveness often gets missed in the conversations around somatics? I do find that oftentimes somatic spaces don't bring that piece in or it gets left behind, or even gets left behind in some of the trauma spaces. Aliveness isn't necessarily a topic of conversation that's always brought in in the way that I think both of us understand it to be kind of the center point of why we're doing all the things that we're doing.

Alexis Florentina

You know, I think there's a bigger conversation just around that specific thing. We could get into culture and systems and, you know, all the different ways in which there's many corners of the world and people and systems that that gain something over our suppression of aliveness. And in specifically, the spaces of somatics and and trauma and therapeutic spaces at large, it gets missed in the conversation for a number of reasons. And one of which I sometimes feel is because of fear, fear of what it is, fear of, you know, there's a there's a misunderstanding. There's a what happens when I touch that, especially for those who have experienced trauma. When we've been disconnected from our sense of aliveness for so long, it can feel like the scariest thing to step into the vulnerability of saying I'm alive and not saying it, you know, verbally, but with your body. And especially for those of us who have experienced um near that near death experiences or assaults or any experience with our body that has brought us so close to an I'm not gonna make it feeling. The opposite of that quite literally is I am alive. And that's so vulnerable. That's so scary.

Ailey Jolie

I want to share something here because it's related to what Lexi just named about fear being an intelligent response to something the system is perceiving as dangerous. I live in a body that has experienced brain inflammation, and what that means, particularly in my system, is that sometimes I'll flood with fear for no traceable reason in the external environment. Nothing is happening, nothing is wrong. And the fear is still there in the chest, in the breath, in the quality of attention. For a long time, I tried to treat that fear the way I would treat any other fear, to look for what it's pointing to, to attune to it, to listen for the message. What that taught me and what I want to say carefully, because I don't want this to contradict what Lexi is saying, because she's right, is that the fear is not always a signal about throughout. Sometimes fear is a physiological event. Sometimes the body is flooding because of inflammation or hormones or something in the nervous system that has nothing to do with what's in front of you. And in those moments, the work is still the same. You still don't try and manage it away, but you also have to decode it. You don't have to do the finding what it's telling you. Sometimes the meeting is the whole response. I share this because if you live in a body that floods for whatever reason, the answer is not always to find the deeper psychological meaning in every wave of fear. The answer is to still be with it, of course, but you're allowed to be with it without interpreting it.

Alexis Florentina

And then, of course, we have the other piece, you know, that we named earlier is that the common narrative around somatics has been about be in your body, experience containment, calm it down, right? Like deactivate, de-escalate what's happening inside. And so activation has been villainized, but right next to activation is aliveness for many. And so it's kind of gotten thrown into the abyss of this territory that we don't want to go to because oh, we don't want to get too big. Oh, we don't want to feel too much, or we don't want to, you know, experience all of this. And so, you know, there's there's bigness that can come in aliveness. It doesn't always have to be aliveness can be experienced in the subtlest, smallest moments. But I think that the nuance and all of that is something that is really missing from the conversation.

Ailey Jolie

And I want to circle back to the place of fear because I think this is also another place that sometimes um the conversation gets a little bit flat or quite parallel in when we speak about fear in the body and how we actually work with fear and fear being a protective response or being an indicator of something. And oftentimes there can be this instant, like, oh, we need to soothe it, or like, ooh, stay away. And so I just love to explore fear because I actually don't think on the podcast so far we've had a conversation around fear and what it's telling us in our very own bodies.

Alexis Florentina

Fear is something that is so close to home for me because I spent most of my life in fear. Um and I really see fear, whether it's in my own

Meeting Fear Without Fixing

Alexis Florentina

body now or with clients, um, as something that so deeply needs to be related to. It's one of those, you know, every experience, of course, in the body needs relationship, but fear, especially because um it's coming online, like you said, for a reason. It's so self-protective, it's responsive, it's adaptive, and it's there for a reason because something you're experiencing, either in your body or outside, is being perceived as dangerous. And I think it's less important initially to focus on, well, why? Or what's happening in your neuroception, or, you know, has you know, the interoceptive fear conditioning has taken over, and all those things are important, very, very important. Um, but I find that the first step is that that fear needs to be attuned to. It needs to be recognized as making so much sense. There is this contractive quality to it, um, this hyper-vigilant quality to it that is so intelligent. And it's intelligent because it's responding to something that is either occurring currently or that has happened in the past that required that response. I think fear is one of our most brilliant indicators of a no in our body. And uh, even if that no no longer is, you know, uh resonant with our current experience, it still exists for a reason. And so I find that when fear shows up, it's actually, I wouldn't say exciting, but there's something important about it because it's communicating something really important. And so I I've found in my own system and in the systems that I've worked with that fear needs time, it needs space, and first and foremost, it really needs to be met because the last thing anyone not only wants to hear, but the last thing that supports anybody that is experiencing fear, as I'm sure you're you, you know, understand, is the phrase or the feeling of there's nothing to be afraid of. Just like an immediate misattunment to what's happening is even if there is nothing dangerous currently, the system's not feeling that. And so the experience that the system that our systems are having, um, you know, really truly need to be met. Because a part of that fear that maybe has been ongoing for a long time, if that's you know, the imprint that has come from trauma, a part of that is because that fear has never been met. And fear can perpetuate, at least I've seen, by the experience of wondering why is no one else responding the same way I am? Why am I the only one that is so deeply scared? Why is everyone else telling me there's nothing to be afraid of? And the fear then surges more because something feels incoherent. And that's because it is. So I find that fear is really it's an intelligent response, an adaptive response, and it really is ought to be listened to.

Ailey Jolie

I will withhold sharing my personal experiences with fear and chronic illness, but I live in a body that when because I've experienced brain inflammation, things go a little funky up there and the body will flood with fear. So I loved what you said about fear being an indicator of the body saying no. And on that thread, I would love to hear from you some maybe other ways that the body is saying no, that we maybe misperceive or can get a little bit confused about or misread every now and again.

Alexis Florentina

You know, there's so many ways that the body experiences a yes and a no. And what I'll name before I name some of the ways that it happens is that it's again not linear. And sometimes somebody's yes is gonna look very different than somebody's yes, somebody's no is gonna look very different than somebody's no. Um but we know one of the telltale signs, uh, of course, that you know, sometimes we hear often in in in the mainstream conversation is contraction. So anytime we experience any sort of contraction, any sort of hesitation, um, it's either a no or a not yet, or some sort of, you know, pause that's needing to happen. And sometimes that has been um seen as a block. And so the conversation turns into, you know, what's blocking me? There's a barrier. I have to move through this barrier. Uh, and I sometimes like to remind folks that not everything's a barrier. It more often than not, nothing is a barrier. Nothing is a block. It's more so uh, you know, it's a message, it's a communication, it's a there's a reason it's there. And uh so contraction is one of those really common things. Um, of course, there's experiences where the mind gets flooded, or uh we feel like we start to lose our train of thought, that kind of um fuzziness or dizziness, or like we've we've left our body a bit, or we we've lost the clarity, uh, can sometimes be a way in which our system is saying no. Um, one experience that took me a really long time to understand, and this happened to my own body, is feeling really, really urgent towards something and rushed towards something. So personally, what used to happen for me is that something uh I would experience something and there would be an incredibly high urgency that would come online for me to then do something, to move towards something. Um, I would, you know, try to fix something or change this or make a really quick decision. And even if something wasn't working within that decision, you know, whether it be like, oh, you know, okay, I'll I'll figure out the price or I'll, you know, I'll rearrange this to make this happen. And in that uh urgency that often also feels yucky, or at least it would in my body, but it felt like it had to happen. I learned the hard way. How it was often a no. It was often a no because of how uh much of an emergency it sometimes felt. And it wasn't that the um what I was trying to do or make a decision about wasn't important, but it was the the pace in which I was doing it was reflecting the no to me. That that pace was okay, no, that's a sign that something needs to slow down, that something needs to be, you know, paused here. And that took me a really long time to understand in my own system. Um, those are just a couple of the ways in which a no can show up in the body. Um, of course, chronic tension for me, pain. My own history of chronic pain was my body's entire no for the first 30 years of my life, maybe less. But um, you know, a lot of times a no will come through in a way we don't recognize because that's the only way the body is able to say it. And for me, that's how a lot of chronic illness emerged. Um, of course, the chronic illness was still real. Of course, everything I experienced was still real, but a lot of the conditions that created the environment for illness to thrive made it so that that illness was really the only way that my body could say no.

Ailey Jolie

I would love to hear a little bit more around urgency being a no and kind of because I'm assuming, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, the urgency also maybe came from, and you shared a little bit of this of like, oh, I need to do this for someone, or I need to accommodate for them, or I need to maybe do what may be called people pleasing. And I mentioned this because I know that you have written about kind of unpacking the people pleasing from the body and feeling more comfortable in the relationship with saying no, no. Knowing our limits, knowing when we can give and when we can't. And so I would love to hear a little bit around that process, and you can speak to your personal experience, or you can speak to the experience of working with clients.

Alexis Florentina

So I find that in that urgency, two things can happen. Um, the

Fawning People Pleasing And Needs

Alexis Florentina

sympathetic nervous system obviously can be online, and so that's driving a lot of that I have to. Um, and then of course, yeah, that that fawn response experience and the people pleasing tendencies can also be a part of it. And I find that both those experiences have happened for me historically and also with clients. And there's a there's a slight uh difference between the two. The the first is more so um like I have to do something, otherwise, something else is gonna happen. Usually, you know, I'm gonna miss out on something, or I'm gonna lose this opportunity, um, or you know, uh, this is all gonna fall apart, or there's some some sort of other story on the other side. Um, and then with the you know, people pleasing or fawning aspect, it's usually um I need to say yes so that I'm not discarded, so that I am indispensable, so that I remain close, so that I remain chosen. And, you know, as we know with the fawn response, it is that intelligent response to a relational threat. And for my system, that was one of its go-to modes for most of my life. And so when urgency would come on, like, oh, I have to do this, right? I have to meet this person, it almost always was coupled with some sort of dread alongside of it. But that dread was quieted by the intensity of the I have to, by the intensity of the fear, again, another piece of fear, of what would happen if I didn't, how I'd be judged, how I'd be seen, what this would mean about me, what would happen to the relationship. Uh, and so when all that gets tangled up, there's often a no somewhere in there that keeps kind of getting whack-a-mole in the process because survival says this is more important. And especially with the fawn response and with people pleasing, uh, there's a need to leave yourself. There's it's so necessary. You have to leave yourself in order to connect with others. And because that's what you've learned, right? And so um it's really difficult to access your no while fawning or while people pleasing. Because how could you, right? Your orientation is so far outside of you to connect or be there or meet the needs of others or uh reshape yourself for others that uh that no can feel very, very vague, which is why so many who are uh working with their own fawn response, when they come back into contact with their needs, they're like, I don't know what I need. I don't, I don't, I don't know, you know, what are my needs? What do I want? What do I not want? What's a yes, what's a no? It feels so foreign. And that's not because somebody is broken or because they don't have needs. It's because it was so far, you know, shoved into the files in in the far back because something else needed to take place. And so oftentimes, you know, the way that I first start to work with that um is not saying, let's find out what your yes and no is, or let's, you know, let's get really clear on your needs. Uh, usually those arrive on their own. And instead, we want to see what gets to happen when a need or a no arrives, and what needed to happen in the past doesn't need to now, right? Where that that little bit of contraction or that little bit of dread or that little bit of, you know, some sort of sensation or some sort of movement that's happening in the body uh gets to be recognized rather than immediately cast it out. And, you know, that's where some of the renegotiation gets to live.

Ailey Jolie

I'm glad that we got to spend a little bit of time exploring fawning and how that shows up in the body and the renegotiation of those pieces. While I still have you, I would love to hear from you. And you did kind of you did provide an answer to some of this question in what you just shared. But for someone who is relatively new to the process of coming home to their body, maybe this is a fawn or maybe it's not. What is one thing that maybe you wish you had come across earlier in your journey of coming home to the body or experiencing embodiment?

Alexis Florentina

It's what I always say, and it's that your body is not fighting you, it's fighting for you. And what that really means is that the experiences, the behaviors, the responses,

Your Body Is Fighting For You

Alexis Florentina

the emotions, the needs that we have been so conditioned to judge of ourselves or feel that need to be fixed or feel need to be optimized or battled, are not trying to fight you. They're not trying to break you, they're not trying to get in the way or block you from what you really want or need. Um, they're truly, truly there as your own allies and and and your own, you know, protectors, doing their very best to help you feel safe, to help you stay connected and to help you survive. And um I think most of us have spent a long time at some point in our life feeling or experiencing something that's happening inside as something that's wrong, or you know, our body is failing us or fighting us or is broken, um, which then further creates the narrative that something is wrong with us. And if so, if there's anybody that, you know, is again new to this work or new to discovering something that's happening in their body, know that first and foremost um it is not fighting against you. It is not there to be your villain. It is truly, truly your greatest ally.

Ailey Jolie

Thank you so much for your time. Um, in the show notes, we'll have your program that I know that you have. Is there anything else that you would like us to have in there?

Alexis Florentina

Attuned to you and held are the two primary places. You know, one's a community space and one's a program. So yeah.

Ailey Jolie

And it often gets lost. Regulation has quietly become the new word for control. Somewhere in the last few years, the idea of regulating the nervous system slid from meeting what was happening in the body into getting rid of what was happening in the body. And I've seen this constantly in my clinical people trying to regulate their way out of anger, fear, of urgency. But as Lexi so clearly named, the activation is not necessarily the problem. Activation is communication, but it's the body telling you something about what happened, something about what's being asked of you in the moment your system can hold it. What I hear underneath much of this somatic discourse is an older cultural demand. And this is of course just my interpretation, but I hear be smaller, be calmer, take up less space, make less noise. And it's been dressed up in the language of nervous system regulation. Regulation is a capacity and it's real and it's matter and it matters. But regulation as a performance, as a way to quiet the body is saying is an is another way of saying, but regulation as a performance is actually what I imagine you've come to somatic work to leave behind. So I'll invite you when you hear the word regulation, uh, to really be curious about how it's being used. Is it being used in a way to inspark your aliveness and curiosity around what's being communicated to you? Or is regulation being used as a way to kind of turn down the volume on your aliveness, make you more calm, more controlled, smaller. I obviously am more smaller. That's my curiosity for you. Another thread that I want to return to is the body's no. Lexi named urgency. I want to stay with it because it's one of the most unrecognized signals that the body gives us. Urgency as a no. And when something in your life is moving too fast, the decision, the commitment, the yes you're about to give, and there's a hot rush that feels like it's pushing towards you. That is often a no being outrun by a survival response. The fun, the sympathetic drive, the I have to, or it will fall apart. These are not cues to move faster necessarily. They're cues to pause. The body was never trying to keep you from what you want. It was trying to keep you from what was historically hurting you. And lastly, I want to comment on aliveness because I really hope this is the the part that you take with you. But aliveness is indistinguishable physiologically from the activation we've been taught to fear. The rise in the chest, the heat, the movement. This is what sensation feels like when it's not being managed. For many of us, particularly those with trauma histories like myself, aliveness has been dangerous and the nervous system learned to flatten it. Therefore, maybe when you entered wellness spaces, there was a reinforcement of the flattening that got called healing or regulating, as I said earlier. So I want you to know that coming back to aliveness, it's not a project, it's not a to-do, it's not a goal. It's what naturally happens slowly when the body begins to trust that it won't be managed out of its own responses again. If this conversation opened up anything in you, you can come join me on Embody. This is my online embodiment program. You can find at www.embody method.com. This is a platform where we have practices, guest teachers, and we go through seven different stories and how they live inside your body so that you can ultimately rewrite the story of your body. You can also join my substack community. There's both free and paid writing for you to enjoy. This is where I write more intimately about my experience in my own body being a clinician and the knowledge that I've gained through my master's degree in somatic studies and also years of practice. As always, thank you for being here and for allowing me to be a part of your process of coming home to your one and only body. 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 platforms. 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.