Come Home To Your Body with Ailey Jolie

Why can you understand your patterns completely and still feel them happening in your body?

In this solo episode, Ailey responds to listener questions about the space between what we know intellectually and what the body has learned through experience. She explores why understanding where a pattern comes from does not necessarily stop the stomach from dropping or the body from bracing when something feels unsafe.

Ailey considers how our bodies learn through repetition and relationship, often long before we have language for what is happening. She reflects on what can happen when we repeatedly override internal signals and why reconnecting with the body may require something different from simply understanding ourselves better.

The conversation also turns toward pleasure and the surprising difficulty some of us experience staying present when something feels good. Rather than treating disconnection as another problem to overcome, Ailey invites us to become curious about what the body may be protecting us from and to practise staying with sensation in ways that feel manageable.

Ultimately, this episode offers a gentler understanding of why healing does not always follow what we know. Sometimes the body needs time to experience something different before it can begin to believe something different.

In this episode:

• 2:40 Listener Questions And What’s Next
• 8:44 Beauty Standards Stored As Reflex
• 14:10 Untangling Inherited Body Disgust
• 18:34 Relearning Hunger After Dieting
• 21:48 Building Real Space To Slow Down
• 25:53 Why Talk Therapy Isn’t Enough
• 29:18 When Pleasure Triggers Numbness
• 33:34 Making Embodiment Last In Life
• 40:17 Final Invites And Closing Grounding

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

• Find: Website
• Follow: Instagram
• Explore: Substack
• Experience: Insight Timer
• Sign up: InBodyMethod
• Email: info@aileyjolie.com

To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

• Follow: Instagram
• Find: Website
• Email: info@aileyjolie.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Ailey Jolie 1:46

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the pulp power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Shalee, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life away 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 share role? Join me for more 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.

Listener Questions And What’s Next

Ailey Jolie 2:40

Welcome back to another episode of How to Be in This Body. And if this is your first time here, welcome to the podcast. I'm so glad you found us. I'm Aile Jolie, a somatic psychologist, and today it's just you and me, no guests, no one else joining us. This episode is meant to fulfill a promise that I made to all of you a while ago. I promised that when I came back from my leave, I would answer your questions again. So the focus of this episode is answering questions that listeners like you have sent me. These questions come from listeners but also paid subscribers on my Substack. If you're someone who has questions about somatics, trauma therapy, or female embodiment, becoming a paid subscriber on Substack is one of the best ways to reach me. I get a lot of questions coming in via email, Instagram, and other avenues of social media. So one of the best ways to ensure that your question is actually answered by me is becoming a paid subscriber over on Substack. I've combined the questions I've received because so many of you are asking the same thing in slightly different words, and some I've rewarded to protect the people who sent the questions to me. But every one of them is a question that I've heard again and again in my inbox, in my practice, and also inside my online course in body. Before I dive into answering your questions, I want to let you know what's happening with the podcast in the coming weeks. After this episode, How to Be in This Body is going to take a pause for a little while because I'm going to be in the final months of book writing. And writing a book is a process that requires all of my attention. So between now and Christmas, there'll be in conversation episodes with other guests that will be released on Substack. There might be the odd solo episode here in the meantime, but I won't fully be back to releasing new how to be in this body episodes until the start of the new year. If you aren't a subscriber to Substack, I highly encourage you to go subscribe. It's aileyjalie.Substack.com. And if you subscribe, you will have access to the in conversations that we're going to release every Thursday. These are all conversations that I had with guests, but they also come with journal questions. These conversations are rich, juicy, and the guests are full of so much wisdom. So I really hope that you enjoy them while I take this much needed time to write my upcoming book. Between now and when How to Be in This Body returns, here to Spotify or Apple or wherever else you listen to your podcast, I do have one thing upcoming that I would love for you to join. I have my first Embody retreat happening at Blue Spirit in Nosara, Costa Rica, from the 21st to the 28th of November. There are a few spots still available if you're wanting to join us. The retreat runs through similar programming as my online course Embody, but we get to do all of the practices in person, in community. We get to use touch and sound and breath and movement. And the intention of the retreat is really to create a space where we can practice being in our body while also being in relationship with other women. The one last thing for you to know about the retreat is that it will become a part of the facilitator program that I'm releasing at the end of 2027. If you attend an in-body retreat in person and complete inbody online, you'll be invited to join the facilitator program. The facilitator program is really for those who want to become a coach or are already a therapist, a yoga teacher, or Pilates teacher and want to learn a feminine perspective to somatics. The facilitator program will teach you how to bring a feminine-informed somatic practice into the work you already offer today. I will have all of the details coming out at the start of the new year when I'm done writing my book. But right now, if you sign up for the retreat, you do receive a discount on the next embody program starting in March or the Facilitator program if you've already joined me online for embody. Okay, I think that's enough logistics now. Now that you're oriented to what's coming next, what I'll be doing, what you can expect from the podcast, and where you can find the in-conversation, let's get into the topic of today's episode. A quick content note later in this episode, I do talk about trauma, about the body bracing, and about sex and pleasure. Nothing graphic, of course, but if you're somewhere that doesn't feel right for that type of conversation, I'll invite you to come back to this episode. And I want to say this clearly. I'll invite you to come back to this episode. Lastly, a really important thing for me to say and you to hear before we dive in, this podcast, specifically this episode today, is not intended to be therapy. While I'm answering this question, while I'm answering these questions, and a lot of them deal with therapeutic frames and require me to use the knowledge I have as a therapist, this podcast and all of my work online is meant to be educational, not therapeutic. So if there's something that comes up for you, I would really invite you to bring that to a therapeutic container. Because the reality is I can speak to patterns, but I can't speak to your life the way someone sitting across from you can. And you deserve to be heard, known, acknowledged, validated, but also challenged. Before we get to this question, one last thing from me before we get into these questions. When I was in the process of deciding which questions to answer and which ones could be brought together for this episode, I noticed that a lot of them fit the themes that I talk about in Inbody. So today we have questions around the cultural story of your body, the intergeneral link, the intergenerational lineage in your body, the food and weight story that so many of us have about our body, relationships in the body, pleasure in the body, and how we rewrite our body story, which is something I'm so passionate about and is the focus of my upcoming retreat in November. So today we have six questions, one for each of those body stories, and a seventh at the end because a lot of you have asked me about the retreat that I have upcoming, and I want to make sure I've answered all of your questions. So, with all that being said, let's dive into the questions my paid Substack subscribers left for me to answer. The

Beauty Standards Stored As Reflex

Ailey Jolie 8:44

first question I've explored today is about the story culture has about our body. This question comes from one of my paid subscribers on Substack who wrote, I understand intellectually that beauty standards are a system. I've read the books. So why do I still look in the mirror every morning and feel like I'm failing at something? When I read this question, the first experience I had in my body is wanting to give this person a real compassionate embrace. And that's because I really resonate with this one. It's a question, but also a confession that I've heard so many times in my office. And when it's asked, it usually comes with a bit of embarrassment, as if somehow we should be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and not have Eurocentric beauty standards going through our minds, or not have AI faces come up that we compare ourselves against. It's so hard to unravel ourselves from such a potent and persistent system. So, what I want you to hear is that you didn't learn beauty culture with your mind. And this is why your mind can't unlearn it either, regardless of how much feminist theory or cultural analysis you consume. And I want to acknowledge that this is tricky. We think beauty standards are something we learn, but they're actually something we experience through and in the body. The body learns them the way it learns anything, through repetition, through witnessing, through words, through actions. Every time you are looked at, compared, or praised for taking up less space, less space, having your hair a certain way, wearing a certain type of shoes, your body was learning something. The philosopher Sandri Bartke wrote about this back in 1988. She described the way women come to supervise themselves. Nobody needs to stand over you and tell you your stomach is wrong because women have been trained to carry this type of watching inside of them. You check, you adjust, you correct, and it feels like your own choice, but it only feels this way because you've been conditioned and that conditioning has gone into your unconscious. The watcher that Sander talks about, or the unconscious that Young spoke about, lives in the body. It's the way you pull your stomach in when you catch your reflection in a shop window, the way your hand goes up to your face in photos, the quick scan you do of other women when you walk into a room. None of these are thoughts, none of these are cognitions, they're postures and reflexes that rehearsed thousands of times long before you ever read a book about any of it. So when you tell me or when a client tells me in my office that they look in the mirror and they judge and they judge or they dislike or they feel like they're failing, I don't hear a woman who hasn't done, hasn't done enough therapy or hasn't done enough work or hasn't read enough feminist or cultural analysis. I hear a body expressing exactly what culture has conditioned it to believe about itself. What I would invite the individual who wrote this question, or if this question resonates with you, to do is the next time you're at the mirror, don't argue with the voice, don't argue with the feeling, don't try and cover it up with an affirmation. One of my favorite teachers said affirmations can be, not always, but can be like putting whipped cream on garbage. Sometimes it's just garbage, and we have to acknowledge that and work with it and integrate it in in a way where it's no longer smelly, no longer smelly in our life. Yeah, I kind of love that image. That's why I'm sharing it with you. So if you look in the mirror and all that stuff comes up for you, my invitation for you, I know it's hard. I I truly get it, is to just notice where you feel it in your body. Is it your jaw that begins to get tense? Is it your breath that goes shallow? Is it the back of your neck? Do you start to pull away from yourself? Stay with the sensations that come with the judgmental voice, without trying to like whack-a-mole it away or whipped cream on top of it. Just let the voice be there as much as you can be. Without trying to make it nicer, without trying to make it kinder, you're not trying to love your body in that moment. In that moment, by inviting that voice to become louder or just even present, you're actually getting to know the watcher. You're getting to know that cultural conditioning that lives inside your body, in your unconscious. And once we get to know that voice and we can hear it, we can start to build a relationship with it, we can start to get curious about it, we can maybe put it into another area of our life where that type of criticism or critique or scanning can be really helpful for us. But if we are just whippreaming over that voice again and again and again, we one will miss receiving so much information about how culture has shaped us, but we will also lose the ability to build a relationship with this part that comes from culture that maybe just maybe really needs to be repurposed. So I hope that makes sense to you. This is a lot of the stuff that we get into in the in body course, and we'll be playing with exercises like this in person. The second

Untangling Inherited Body Disgust

Ailey Jolie 14:10

question we're gonna explore is one about the lineage story. This is about what we carry from the women who came before us. A subscriber wrote, My mother hated her body her whole life. I swore I'd never be like her, and I'm not in the obvious ways. But sometimes I hear her voice come out of my mouth or I feel her disgust in my own stomach. How do I know what's mine and what's hers? I have heard this question a lot, which is why we spend a significant amount of time in Embody exploring this exact question. I mention this because there is so much depth and nuance that I could bring to answering this question. And I also mention it because it's a question that so many women have because it's such a common experience. What I want to say is that if if you can notice the moments when it sounds like you're speaking her voice or taking on a posture that she would normally have, you're actually further ahead than you think you are. Most of us never notice what we've inherited. We just assume it's who we are or how we are. So let's dive in by talking about why her disgust would live in your stomach today. Disgust is one of the most physical emotions we can have. It's the lurch in the gut, the tightening in the throat, the urge to pull away. And we aren't born knowing what to be disgusted by. There are some things, but most things are culturally conditioned. We learn disgust mostly by watching the people who raise us. Babies and toddlers constantly check their caregiver's face to find out how to feel about something. Is this safe? Is this good? Is this something to turn away from? Researchers call this social referencing. Now imagine a little girl watching her mother pinch the soft part of her own stomach in the mirror with that look on her face, or watching her pull away from her own reflection or push her plate away, or push her plate away with a sigh. That child isn't learning an idea about bodies, she's learning a feeling in her own gut about a woman's body. And because she learned it so early before she had words for it, it doesn't get stored as memory she can go back to. It's it gets stored in the body as a reaction. That's why years later, it doesn't feel like remembering your mother. It feels like you. In internal family systems, which is one of the models I trained in, there's a name for this. It's called a legacy burden. It's a belief or feeling that was never yours to begin with. It was handed down through your family and often through the culture your family lived in. And you picked it up because you loved her and you were paying attention in those moments. So how so if I go back to the rest of this question, how do you tell what's yours and what's hers? Inherited reactions tend to have a certain quality. And I think you're already on to this because you're asking the question. Inherited reactions are fast and automatic. They show up in the same places they showed up for her, in the changing room, at the dinner table, in photos, and they're often bigger than what's actually happening in the moment. Your own responses are usually more flexible, adaptive, present. They respond to what's in front of you in the here and now. So the next time that feeling arrives, or you hear yourself saying something she would say, or saying it in the tone of voice you've heard from her, try this. First, notice the sensation itself. Where is it and what does it feel like? Then orient to the present. Look around the room, feel your feet on the floor, and remind yourself where you are and how old you are now. Then gently ask the question, did this start with me or was I given it? Often you'll feel the answer before you can put it into words. Sometimes you'll even hear her voice or see her face. When you can recognize it as hers, something will soften or loosen. You don't have to fight it. You can simply acknowledge it. I learned this from you. I inherited this reaction or this response, and I don't need to keep carrying it or acting then in this way. None of this means you have to blame your mother. She most likely inherited her reactions from her own mother and from a culture that taught her to be at war with her body. You can have real compassion for what she carried and still decide that it stops with you. If this is heavy for you, it's worth doing some work with a somatic or IFS therapist because setting something down this old is a lot easier when you have support. The

Relearning Hunger After Dieting

Ailey Jolie 18:34

next question focuses on the food and weight story that many of us have about our bodies. One of you wrote, I stopped dieting two years ago. Everyone says to trust my hunger, but I genuinely don't know what hunger feels like anymore. I either feel nothing or I feel out of control. Is there something wrong with me? First, I want to say absolutely nothing is wrong with you. And I want that to be really explicitly said and known by you. What you're describing makes complete sense to me. If you spent years overriding hunger or food cravings, your body learned that its signals don't end up in changed actions or behavior. The experience of hunger happened in your body and you ignored it previously. Fullness came and maybe you ignored that too or punished yourself for it. Over time, when this happens, the signal that comes from your body gets quieter and gets smaller. Not because your body has stopped speaking to you, but because it stopped expecting to be heard. The ability to sense what's happening inside your body is called introsception. There's really good research showing that people with a history of restrictive eating often find those internal signals harder to read. This isn't a character flaw on you in any way. It's simply what happens to any line of communication that goes unused for a long time in the body. So this is why the saying, just trust your hunger, can be a really lovely idea, but it also can skip a few steps and leave us feeling disoriented or not knowing what to do next. The reality is that you can't trust a signal you can't hear yet. This is why the first step is to rebuild your relationship with the signal itself. Marion Woodman, the youngin analyst, wrote about women caught in what she called an addiction to perfection and how food became the place where control and longing fought it out. What she understood is that swinging between nothing and too much isn't really about food. It's about a body that has only ever known two settings, lockdown or flooding, completely listening to all of our cravings and hungers, or not listening at all. And this is where refining the skill of listening to your body is so important because the work is finding what's in between, what's in the quiet. It might be a faint warmth or a slight emptiness in your belly, the moment before hunger turns urgent, or the moment before a craving totally consumes you, you find the sensations before an overwhelming craving or hunger that makes you anger by slowing down enough to notice again and again without making it a goal. Lastly, I want to say that if what you're describing includes binging, restricting, or purging, please feel empowered to find someone to support you in your journey. Finding someone trained in eating disorders or disordered eating to walk alongside you is so important. And needing support isn't a sign of failure at all. Having someone to guide you, to listen to that space in between, between being locked down and not listening to anything the body has said or flooding and following every impulse is tricky and challenging and hard. And it also goes against a lot of our cultural messaging as well.

Building Real Space To Slow Down

Ailey Jolie 21:48

I want to pause here for a moment because you might have noticed that in every answer so far, I keep saying some version of the same thing. Slow down, notice, stay with it. And I know how that lands when you're listening on your commute or when you're listening between doing different tasks. And I know how that can sound when you're listening on your commute or between tasks because my mind would respond in the same way. Slow down, sure, but when exactly? That question is honestly a big part of why I created the embody retreat. From the 21st to the 28th of November, I'll be at Blue Spirit in Ozar, Costa Rica, with a small group of women. Seven days, and each day follows one of the seven body stories I'm walking through in this episode. It isn't the online program delivered in person. There's a morning movement practice that only exists when we're in the same room, afternoon group sessions, time for the ocean and for rest, and evening practices too. Three vegetarian meals a day that someone else cooks, and I lead every session myself. It's all the slowing down I keep asking you to do with the conditions for it to actually take place. I'll tell you more at the end of this episode, including something extra for everyone who books before the first of November. For now, let's keep going with our questions. The fourth question really focuses on the relationship story that we have. A paid subsex subscriber wrote, I can read everyone else's body perfectly. I know when my partner is annoyed before they do. I know when a friend is upset from how they say hello, but I have no idea what I'm feeling until hours later. The reason why you know what's going on with everyone else around you, but struggle to feel inside yourself is because your attention has been trained outwards and for very good reasons too. Stephen Portis gave us the word neuroception. It describes the way your nerves. Nervous system scans for safety or danger before you've had a single conscious thought. For a lot of women, especially those who grew up in homes where one person's mood decided how the evening would go, neuroception got very, very good at reading other people. It had to, because that was its job. The cost is that there was no attention left over for you. If you spent your childhood listening for a parent's footstep in the hallway, you didn't have the space to ask whether you were tired or sad or hungry. This is why you learn to feel your own feelings later, afterwards, in the car or in the shower, hours later, when it was finally safe to feel. I want to honor that as a skill because it did keep you safe. It's kept many of us safe. And the skill also probably makes you a wonderful friend. Or if you work in the helping profession, it probably makes you very good at your job. And you're allowed to bring some of that attention to you. You are allowed to place the focus first on yourself. I don't know the exact conditions that are present in your life, but we can typically only start to do this work of bringing the attention inwards first when our environment or the people we're in intimate relationship with feel safe enough for us to let go of scanning and assessing and attuning to them constantly. If any of this resonates with you and you would like to notice your own inner world before you notice what's going on with someone else first, I have a small practice for you here. The next time you notice yourself reading someone else, and you will. First, ask what they're feeling and then ask what you're feeling right now while you notice it. Even if the answer is I don't know, asking the question starts to build the path to yourself. I know where

Why Talk Therapy Isn’t Enough

Ailey Jolie 25:53

it comes from and why I react the way I do. So why does my body still brace every time someone raises their voice? I have a lot of compassion for this question because it's one that I've asked myself. What I say to clients who ask me this question is the part of you that braces was never really in the conversation. Talk therapy speaks to the part of you that uses language, and the bracing lives somewhere older in the muscles of your shoulders, in your breath, in the startle that fires before a single word forms. Talk therapy is so incredibly important. Making meanings, seeing patterns, identifying relational trends is so important. We need a cohesive sense of self-history, self-story, and sense of self to do trauma work. If we don't understand our past or have a narrative of what happened to us, and we float back there and try and access the body of that, it's very easy for us to become overwhelmed or flooded. This is why a lot of somatic psychotherapy approaches start with a more cognitive framing. Ideally, as your therapist is guiding you to make sense of your story or participate in trauma processing through talk therapy. Ideally, there are some somatic interventions that guide you into your body. But this isn't always the case. There are a lot of traditional talk therapy approaches that do not have any somatic component to it, and they can be deeply helpful at certain moments of our lives and certain moments of processing our experiences of adversity, pain, or trauma. But back to the person who has done a lot of talk therapy but is still bracing when someone raises their voice. I actually want to talk about one of my teachers, Pat Ogden, who developed sensory motorpsychotherapy. And she describes her work as working from bottom-up rather than from top down. She trains her therapist to start with sensation and movement and let meaning come from there instead of starting with a story and hoping the body will follow. Her work follows a lot of what Judith Herman wrote about in trauma and recovery. And Judith wrote that recovery happens in relationship and can't happen in isolation. And I think that that's really true of the body too. If your body learned to brace around other people, it will learn that in relationship with safe people. And so if you have the talk therapy aspects done, it may be time to play with a bottom-up approach, as brought forward by Pat Ogden, but also really ensuring that you're working with someone that your body feels safe with so that you can start to learn something new. You can learn to soften in the presence of another being. All this to say nothing is wrong with the therapy you have done in the past, nothing is inherently wrong with talk therapy, and also nothing is wrong with your body. Your body just may be waiting for a different kind of invitation, one that includes movement, sensation, time, and the experience of being around people whose voices don't hurt. And if you're carrying significant trauma, please do this with a trained somatic therapist. That's the right place for this type of work. That's the right place to invite the body to begin to let go of the bracing and soften.

When Pleasure Triggers Numbness

Ailey Jolie 29:18

Our next question is about a very different topic. This question is about pleasure. One of you wrote, when something feels good, a hug that lasts just the right amount of time, a really good meal or steamy sex, I go numb or start thinking about something else. It's like my body won't let me have the moment. Is that normal? I want to tell this person that is so I want to tell this person that this is so much more common than you'd think. And I'm really glad that they asked this question and we're vulnerable enough to share. We talk a lot about the body shutting down in the face of pain, and much less about the body shutting down in the face of pleasure. But for many women, pleasure isn't neutral. It can feel exposing or un or it can it can feel exposing or undeserved or even dangerous, especially if pleasure and harm ever got tangled together in your history, or if you learn that wanting things may do too much. Emily Nagowski has a helpful way of explaining this, drawn from the dual control model at the Kinsey Institute. They describe there being an accelerator and a break in the body. Most of us focus on the accelerator, how to feel more and want more. But very often the accelerator is working just fine, and it's the brakes that are pressed down by stress, shame, self-consciousness, or old fear. You can press the accelerator as hard as you like, but if the brakes are on, nothing is going to move. I mentioned this, it changes the question we ask. So rather than asking, how do I feel more pleasure? I gently ask, what is my body protecting me from when it goes numb? And from that question, we have more to work with. Maybe the body is shutting down feelings because there's shame or grief or anger that hasn't been processed. And because that is present in the body, if the body opens and allows there to be pleasure, all that other stuff is gonna have space to come up through the body and be expressed. So this doesn't mean that you have to be with all those deep, dark, uncomfortable emotions to feel pleasure. That may be helpful to do at one time, but there is another way that you can start to experience pleasure. And you can start to do this in a very small way. For you, maybe just the first two seconds of that hug or the first bite of the meal, you really let the temperature of the body you're embracing or the texture of the food really soak it in. Maybe just the first two seconds of that hug, you really let yourself feel the temperature of the body you're embracing. Or maybe the first bite of the meal, you really let yourself savor the texture. You let yourself be present for the experience as much as you can be for just a short amount of time. And you consciously move your awareness away from the sensations of pleasure before they become too overwhelming. And in this way, we're breaking the body's pattern of experiencing pleasure and going numb. Now we're experiencing pleasure, allowing ourselves to have it as much as we can and moving the awareness away. And in this process, the body learns that pleasure, that body-based experience, doesn't need to be shut down. That we can move our awareness away, we can bring it back, but we don't have to go numb. The body is going numb because it's trying to protect us in those moments. What it's trying to protect us from, I did give an I did give an answer to that earlier. It could be unprocessed emotions, but there is lots of other stuff there too. So that might, so that might not be the right answer for your unique experience. But what I do feel quite confident in saying for everyone is that numbness isn't your body refusing you. It's your body asking whether it's really safe to have this moment. And that question deserves a patient answer. And you can practice being patient with your body by slowing down, being in the pleasure, moving an attention away, and coming back again and again and again. A

Making Embodiment Last In Life

Ailey Jolie 33:34

subscriber wrote, Every time I do a course or a workshop or a good stretch of therapy, I feel so connected to my body. And then I go back to my life and within a few weeks it's gone. How do I make it last? I love this question because it's honest about something the wellness world or even the therapy world doesn't really like to admit. Insights fade, and feeling connected for a weekend doesn't rewrite an entire lifetime. In narrative therapy, Michael White and David Epston wrote about reauthoring. The stories we live inside aren't fixed, but a new story needs to be lived, witnessed, and repeated before it can hold. Told once on your own, it's very easily swallowed back up by the old story that we had. This is what makes narrative therapy so powerful is that such an emphasis on reauthoring our lived experiences and doing this repetitively so that we have a new narrative of our life, so that we have a new narrative of our lived experiences, one that we chose and one that makes sense for us. Because reauthoring takes time, intentionality, effort, and repetition, it oftentimes isn't included in that weekend course. This is why you can come home and have the insights fade. This doesn't mean it wasn't real, just means that the element of repetition that is needed to reauthor wasn't present. There are three things that can really help us reauthor our lived experiences. The first is time, and I mean stretches of time long enough for your nervous system to actually settle, not practice squeezed in between anything else. The second is repetition, coming back to the same practices rather than trying something new every week, every month, every year, because the body learns through return. And the third is witness, other people who've seen you change and can hold the new story with you when you forget it. Most of our lives aren't set up to give us any of those three things. That's exactly why the embody method training is seven months now with live calls every second Sunday and check-ins after that. And it's why I think it matters to create even once a place where all three are there at the same time. When I was imagining embody, I really thought, I really thought about those three things that I've just named: time, repetition, and witness, and made sure to incorporate them into the new structure of Embody so that it wouldn't be an experience where there was insight gathered, but not necessarily the time and the repetition and the community to anchor lasting embodied change. And finally, the question so many of you sent me about Costa Rica. This paid subscriber writes, I keep thinking about the Costa Rica retreat, but every time I get close, a voice says, It's too indulgent, I haven't earned it, I'm not far enough along, I haven't even done embody. How do I know if it's for me? So many of you have asked a version of this that I couldn't leave it out, and I want to answer it as honestly as I can, including the parts that aren't a sales pitch. First, the practical side. The retreat runs from the 21st to the 28th of November at Blue Spirit in Nisara, Costa Rica. It's seven days, one body story each day with a small group of women, and I lead every session. Seven nights and three vegetarian meals a day are included. You don't have to have done in body to come home. You just need to be willing to come home to your body and community. The nature suites are $3,750 on your own or $3,300 each if you share. And there's one Hermitage twin left at $2,500 each when you share it with a friend or $3,000 on your own. There's a payment plan available, a checkout. So if paying all at once isn't accessible to you, we have options available for you. Lastly, I want to tell you something a bit extra about the retreat. If you book the retreat before the 1st of November, you'll get the Imbody Method training for $2,000 Canadian dollars when it opens in March. It's a $1,000 discount. Or if you've already done Embody With Me, you'll get $1,000 Canadian dollars off the Embody Method Facilitator program when it opens in the fall of 2027. The retreat is one of the requirements for certification. And if you were in the January or May cohort this year, you've already completed the training part. So the retreat and the facilitator program are what's left. Both discounts close on the 1st of November. Booking the retreat doesn't commit you to anything else. The discount is there if you want it and it applies to future programs only and can't be exchanged for money back. If you have any questions, please reach out to my team at info at elasialee.com. Now that I've gone through the logistics of the retreat, let's get back to the question. And the truth is that some of what that voice says may be true. If the money would genuinely stretch you into hardship, that's a no worth trusting and listening to. If you're in the middle of a crisis or trauma is very active right now, the retreat isn't therapy and it's not a replacement for it. And I'd rather you get the one-to-one support you deserve first. But I want you to listen for a different kind of no. The one that isn't about money or timing. It's the one that says, who do you think you are? You haven't earned rest, you haven't done enough, and you're not healed enough, or you don't deserve this. That voice isn't your body and it isn't your mind. Your mind may be very aware of finances and time, but but that voice that says that you don't deserve it is the watcher. If you remember earlier in this episode, I spoke about the internalized watcher. This might be coming from your mother's voice, it might be a story that she has, it could be culture. There's so many places where that voice of judgment pops in. So instead of putting whipped cream on it, I'd invite you to get to know that voice, to really listen to it, so that you can hear if anything it's saying about not coming to Costa Rica is actually true for you. The reality is that a yes from deep inside you usually shows at first as a sensation, like a little lift in your chest or a pull in your stomach. It comes before the story does, and most of us learn to make our yes smaller so we can put it away. If you notice that lift just now, it might be worth listening to. And if what you notice was a clear, subtle no, that's absolutely okay to trust too. Trust it. I'll still be here and the embody online training will also still be available to you. I hope that my answer there was helpful and that that little practice there of being able to discern between the voice of the mind, the voice of the body, and the watcher will help you get clarity in not only your decision to come to Costa Rica or not, but other decisions in your life as well. Thank

Final Invites And Closing Grounding

Ailey Jolie 40:17

you again for the questions. I really enjoying answering your questions. If you'd like me to answer your questions in a future episode, become a paid subscriber on Substack Words from This Body at alijolie.substack.com. That's where I gathered all these questions from today. And while the podcast is on rest and I write, there'll be new in-conversation episodes that will keep coming out on Substack until Christmas. That's the place to find me. If something in today's episode started, yes, the inbody retreat is at Blue Spirit in Osara, Costa Rica from the 21st to the 28th of November. Book before the 1st of November and you'll get the Inbody Method training at $2,000 when it opens in March. That's $1,000 off. Or if you've already done Inbody, $1,000 off the facilitator program in the fall of 2027. No commitment, the discount is there if you want it. And if November isn't your time, join the waiting list for the Inbody Method training in March. And if this episode meant something to you, I'd be honored if you shared it with someone in your life who you think could benefit. Before you go, wherever you are, I'll invite you to take one breath and to notice the sensations that come with. Again, thank you so much for listening and trusting me a leisurely 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 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 human body.