Episode 10: Living in a Human Body

Summary:

     In a solo episode of "That's Just Human," Elisha Light delves into the intricacies of living inside a human body. She emphasizes the body's intelligence and constant effort to keep us alive. Elisha shares her personal journey with body image, including developing bulimia as a teenager due to societal pressures to be skinny. She discusses the challenges of maintaining a healthy relationship with food and exercise, navigating hormonal fluctuations, and learning to listen to her body's needs. 

     Elisha explores the importance of somatic therapies like dance for emotional release and the body's innate ability to heal itself. She highlights the significance of gratitude for the body's efforts to keep us alive and the need to pay attention to its signals, including pain, energy levels, and the impact of food. Elisha encourages listeners to be more aware of their bodies and offers an invitation to share their own experiences on the podcast.

Time Stamps:

• 00:02 Introduction: Elisha introduces the episode, highlighting the body's intelligence and the focus on human body experiences.
• 01:14 Early Body Image Issues: Elisha shares early memories of body image concerns, stemming from societal standards and clothing choices.
• 03:36 Bulimia Development: Elisha discusses developing bulimia as a teenager due to pressures to be skinny and internalizing societal ideals.
• 06:28 Struggles with Food: Continued struggle with food, emotional eating, and attempts at balance.
• 11:02 Hormonal Fluctuations: Elisha navigates hormonal changes, pregnancy, and the impact of IUDs on her body.
• 17:59 Exercise and Movement: Exploration of exercise, finding joy in movement, and the importance of maintaining flexibility and strength as one ages.
• 23:35 Body and Emotions: Connection between emotions and physical sensations, exploring somatic therapies like dance for emotional release.
• 30:20 Body's Healing Abilities: The body's ability to heal itself, referencing superficial wounds and the impact of determination on healing.
• 33:26 Listening to Pain: Encourages listening to pain, understanding its message, and exploring meditative practices for emotional release.
• 37:47 Body Awareness: Emphasizing the importance of paying attention to the body's signals, including energy levels, random pains, and the impact of food.
• 45:09 Closing: Invitation to share personal body experiences on the podcast and a reminder to be kind and aware on your life path.

Link to Transcript of Show:

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Find Elisha Elsewhere on the web:

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Transcript

0:02

Hello and welcome to That's Just Human, a podcast that explores all aspects of being human, living in a human body, and having human experiences. I am Elisha Light, Angel massage therapist by day, and also living in a human body, having human experiences. Today, I will be doing a solo episode, and we're going to just dive into the human body and caveats of living inside of the human body. So, it's been one of my biggest, I guess, eye-opening lessons experiences in my life to learn about inhabiting the body, both by observing my own journey and because I work on bodies. I get to hear a lot about other people's journeys in their body or different. things that they're experiencing, which I may not experience, but I get to know that the body is doing a thing, or even cool stuff that doctors can do. So, first of all, I want to give acclimates to our bodies. I don't think we do enough of this, and our bodies are highly intelligent, designed with like trillions of tiny little cells that create this full being that we see when we look in the mirror, that we see when we look at other people. And all of those cells each have a specific function within our body to essentially keep us alive. Your body is 100% of the time doing things to try and keep you alive, and it has definitely helped to change. my relationship with my own body to come back and keep a remembrance that it is keeping me. So for my own personal experience, I would say there's different aspects of inhabiting the When I was young, I mean young, I don't know, four or five, six years old, something like that, I remember observing my own skin and thinking how pretty it was, how nice it was, how smooth it was. I recall being at a friend's house and there was a toy that was upside down. It had this little piece of plastic that kind of stuck out, and I accidentally stuck my knee on it in just the right spot that it caused a And that was the first scar that I ever had. What a silly. thing for such a young child to be concerned about getting a. I don't know why I was. There's not anything in my upbringing or in my family that was really attributing anything to. It is something that I internalize. I'm not sure if I carried it from another lifetime into this lifetime, but that's when I started having a concern. I first remember thinking about my looks about kindergarten age, and prior to kindergarten, my mom would make all of my clothes. I loved going to the store with her, picking out patterns, picking out materials. I felt very pretty. I was always dresses, and I come from a more fundamentalist Christian background. So when I was younger, it was always wearing dresses. There was never pants, and kindergarten was the first time I ever wore pants, and they were hand-me-downs. It was pants and sweaters from some second cousins, and I hated them. I felt ugly at the time. That's the first time in my life that I can really remember internalizing the feeling ugly or beautiful or anything. And somehow I carried that with me, that these clothing that I adorned my body with changed the way that I looked or the way that I viewed myself. And that carried on for me into my youth. My young aspirational goals were that I was going to grow up, and I was going to move to California. and I was going to become this famous actress. And to be an actress, I had to be perfect, had to be skinny, I had to have perfectly straight white teeth, I had to have hair that did what I needed it to do. Little did I know at the time, there are people in Hollywood putting on makeup, styling the hair, doing special effects. So what you see when you look at a magazine, or when you look on TV, or on the movie screen, is not the person that you would have in front of you if you were in person and seeing them directly. It's an entirely different way that they looked. But my young mind didn't know that. So it began with my own body internalizing the concept. Especially in the 90s, it was really pushed to be skinny. I'll consider myself an Amazonian build; I'm taller, I'm 5'8" and my bone structure is larger. So at the time, I was like a size 12, and I thought I was fat because the size that I was and the size that society told me that I should be were different. Well, I understand now I will never, ever, ever fit into something probably below a size 10, even if I were completely skin and bones, because my frame is larger. It just is what it is, but I internalized that when I was young, and so it became a lifelong journey with my own body. I look back at the pictures and I'm like, what the hell was I thinking? because I wasn't fat, I was perfectly fine and good for where I was at that age. That eventually developed into bulimia, and that journey for me was 17 years on and off, with the big driver really that I needed to be skinny. I needed to be skinny, I needed to be skinny. That's what went through my head, and so there were points in life where it might have been a couple times a week that I had the binge and purge cycle. The absolute worst of it, there was probably about at least a year to two in there where it was probably more like 21 to 24 times a week. So every day, every meal, and that's not healthy, but I didn't think anything of it at the time. It was just getting me to the goals that I wanted. I hid it from people because I knew they wouldn't like it, but it was helping me reach what I wanted to do. I got pregnant in my mid-20s, and the binge and purge cycle definitely had slowed down at that point. Anything beyond that was really contributed to emotional chaos, and it felt uncontrollable. So, for anybody who has not experienced this, it is very equivocal to what I assume somebody has they're addicted to something. It takes over the brain space. It was me 100% of the time in the back of my mind, always thinking about food. What was I going to eat next? How was I going to purge that out of my system. And then once that happened, the cycle continued on for the next meal and the next meal. So no matter what I was doing— going to school, going to work, hanging out with friends, having a grand old time, just goofing around— whatever it was, that was always running in the back of my mind, non-stop, and it had a hold on me. And so when it wasn't running as much in the back of my mind, then it became a point where I didn't know how to control my emotions. And so my emotional control became the binge and purge cycle because if I would binge, I would get all of the dopamine, serotonin, whatever, especially if it's sugary foods, stuff like that. So the release of those chemicals and then feeling bad and then purging that and then there was like this relief from purging it, as if when I purged, somehow that also purged some of the emotions that I had. I know differently now, but that's been part of my journey. So I would say that lasted until I was about 33, and I was going on a spiritual journey. I've done a lot of healing; I had a of different modalities and things that came my way that I was just saying yes to in life. And through that, I found food healing and started really diving into being healthier and just more mindful with the foods that I do intake and put into my body. And I for a while, I kind of started to see myself go down a path of being orthorexic. Like, I noticed it in my own mental state because it was becoming very rigid. I had to consume a smoothie, and then I had to consume certain vegetables, and I had to consume certain things that I thought were healthy. And if I didn't, then there was an entire internal beat-myself-up cycle because I didn't. And when I recognized that within myself, I intentionally started to pull back. And now I'm into my 40s, and I'm really about balance with food. Not to say that it's never a struggle. At 42, I had a binge; I had an emotional crap happening, and I binged for a couple. of weeks and I gained 15 pounds instead of my normal five pounds for the same binge that I have done previously in life. I'm 44, almost 45, and despite doing things, it hasn't gone. So, one that leads me into the next thing, especially with women's bodies and learning my own body as a woman, that we have hormonal fluctuations throughout our entire lifetime. So, when we're in puberty, it's, you know, first getting that period and figuring out what the body's doing amongst all these other crazy hormones that we all get to experience and lead to some wild decisions impulsively when we're teenagers— not being in tune with my body at all. I knew what was going to I had a mom that just explained to me, hey, here's what happens to the. Whenever you start bleeding, let me know and I'll get you some pads. That it was just a fact of life, but there wasn't anything beyond just being a fact of life. So I was busy. I did theater, I did a plethora of other after-school activities, I made sure to keep my grades up. By the time I was 16, I had a job. So I just kept myself busy, and paying attention to my body was the last thing on my. So my periods were initially erratic. I might have them once every three, four months, once every couple months; just came and went and I really didn't pay much attention. I didn't track them; I didn't care. They were really just a nuisance at that age. I was trying to do other stuff with my life, and here's this body doing these things. When I got with my son's father, we had sex more regularly, and my periods actually evened out. I started having them every month like women are supposed to have. I never experienced any pain, really. Very rare have I had cramps or any symptoms that have taken me down or made me feel like I need to be laying down or not doing anything. Me, the biggest thing is sometimes I get more tired. Pregnancy was a whole other beast for me. I'm pretty sure because my body was lacking nutrition. from the previous binge and purge cycles that it was taking all of the nutrition in my body to feed the baby that was growing in my womb, so I was just tired. The only thing I remember from being pregnant is how exhausted I was and not a bunch of. I didn't have morning sickness in that first trimester; I just wanted to fall asleep. I could literally sleep 15 hours a day, wake up, go to work, and start to fall asleep standing up because I worked on my feet. So that's the crux of how tired I was. I even remember one day we had friends come over to the house, and I just laid on the living room floor with the intentions of resting and fell asleep for And they just walked around me, played video games, did whatever while I'm laying in the middle of the living room floor sleeping because that's how tired I was. After pregnancy, I knew that it takes a lot to take care of a child, so I got an IUD. I got the Mirena, the little— I think it's a plastic one— and it has some hormones in it. So I remember the first six months of that was hell. It made sex hurt, I had cramps for the very first time in my life; they dissipated after the six months, but it was just not a pleasant experience. I didn't want to get pregnant again, though, so I kept it in. I kept it in for four years, and I feel that having that really dysregulated. my entire hormonal balance being poor, I never went to the I never sought help for this. I just lived with whatever my body was doing, and I feel that there's probably a lot of people out there that also do that because they also are living in the poor house and don't have money to go to the doctor, and it just wasn't a. So by the time I had had that out, it was about when I was coming into the knowledge of food and learning about high phytochemical smoothies and taking food in specifically for the nutrient values that they offer and not just eating to fill a void or fill a space or just because the body is signaling that I'm hungry or I'm. Emotionally bored, and I'm. So, I think that going on that journey really helped to refuel my body and the needs that it had been deficient in for several years. It took my body, what I feel anyway, probably about another four to five years to really regulate my hormonal space to where I felt that I was back on having regular periods. I was back to having the regular fluctuations that come in and out every month. But I didn't really start learning about women's hormones and the body until I was in my late thirties, and there's a lot of information that I've learned. One, that it has been my experience that when I track my cycle, it helps. me to get in tune with my own body. Getting in tune with my own body has actually helped my own body to regulate itself a little bit better and becoming aware of what my cycles are. So, it's not always the same exactly every month. I think other factors probably definitely probably and definitely do play into what the body is doing, but by keeping track of when it's doing things via an app, it's just given me better insight and ability to navigate my life while living in the now. In my 40s, I'm pretty sure I'm in perimenopause and things are still regular for me, but I might go a couple months where each cycle makes me super tired and then I go a couple months where I'm not really feeling the drain, and sometimes it switches up. So it's paying attention and seeing as my body's shifting and changing, and utilizing that to try and maybe give it the good food or the good amount of exercise or anything like that that it needs. Speaking of exercise, that's even a whole other aspect of living inside of the human body. So I was never sporty; I'm maybe, I guess, a little more arty. I'm not like a visual artist, but I've done performing arts. It's where I really find my joy. And I have also found that moving my body brings me joy, but I have to motivate to do it. It's a whole conundrum I never. was allowed to dance growing up, but I always wanted to. So I've taken very minimal dance lessons as an adult, but I've done things like Zumba or just done my own. I got into static dance. So like however I move my own body to the rhythm of the music, that's not a specified dance move or a choreography or doing things in a specific way, literally just dropping into the space, feeling my body and allowing the music to move through me. I've dipped in and out of exercising, trying different exercises over the years. I have still yet to be consistent. But I figure as long as I keep trying to move my body, and at this point, my goal is to move my body. to keep it flexible, to keep it strong, to keep the joints moving because I would like to live well into my 80s or 90s, however long this body will carry me forth in this lifetime, with my goals being that when I get there, I can still move, I can still do things that people do, I can maybe have grandkids that I can get on the floor, up and down, and play with them, or I can go on family adventures or adventures with my friends. I don't want to be the 80, and what I have observed in watching clients is because I have a lot of people that are quite older than me, and I get to see how the body responds. So, people who are not active and not taking care of themselves. their bodies start crapping out between, like, that decade of the 60s, and I've seen people not be able to get themselves up off the floor, and that scares me. It really does. I have people who are approaching 80, and they can run circles around me because they have kept up fitness levels, and some of them don't even start until they're in their 50s or so, creating a routine. But because they're staying physically active, they're the ones that are out there experiencing life and not just sitting at home. I think that the quality of life is way more important, and our body lends to the actually being able to have a good quality of life. or not I have witnessed people who are out there super athletic. I've witnessed people who have different injuries or autoimmune disorders or things that do slow them down, but they're still mentally determined to get out there and live life and not let things stop them. So I'm very inspired by the people that push through because, as you get older, your body just starts to have more and pains. And I've witnessed this with people as they start to come in and get more massages. Like I find that as people get older they get more massages. I think part of it is the ability to have built up the funds and the time to be able to do so. Also, learning that what their body needs and committing to a level of self-care of being in that body and helping that body to sustain while they are getting older, and the body just literally has more aches and pains. Those could be different aches and pains just because the body's doing something, or in your previous younger self, maybe you were more athletic and you have injuries, or just the way that you've lived your life, or repetitive motions that work has you doing. So if you're sitting all day, you're going to get sore in the lower back typically because your legs are in that sitting position, and they get the muscles get shorter. and tighter, and so it starts to pull on the lower back. So, if you're not doing something to counterbalance the activities that you're doing on a regular basis, you're going to feel it in the body. The other thing that we feel in the body is our emotions. So, there's this wonderful book I highly recommend; it's called The Body Keeps The Score. And even when it came across my path, I already had this realization of how much our body stores and holds on to all these things that happen in our life over the course of our life. So, from a very young age, I mean, from the time we're until wherever you exist in life right now, when you have an emotion. If you do not give yourself the space and the ability to feel and move that emotion out of you, the body's going to remember it. And early on, and even later, in these are safety and defense mechanisms. We are innately instinctual, just like you watch different animal species and the way that they're able to navigate life. And they don't have speech or the same things that we do as humans; they're still able to have innate sensibilities or know if a predator is coming and be able to run. That fight, flight, freeze, fawn response is not something that we think about or process. Where you're getting to that point, it just comes, whether or not. You have any thoughts, so it's it's your body's automatic response, and it's to help keep you safe. Throughout times in various situations, you might experience any of the four responses that happen when your body and vagus nerve go into that. I think it's the parasympathetic, but don't quote me on that because I get the sympathetic and parasympathetic confused. But your your body goes into this fight or flight, like, oh my God, so maybe you see somebody running at you and instinctually you take it off and book it. And that's because your body said run. The other thing, you know, freezing is maybe you want to run in your head, but your. body said freeze. It's kind of like an animal playing dead, freezing. So, fight or you might fight; someone's running at you. Maybe your response is, well, I'm gonna like fight, or you just start wailing. You know, somebody's fist is coming at you. I am, more likely than not, you might want to try to defend yourself. It's instinctual. It's just not something that you thought about prior to the situation happening. Well, this happens to us several times in our lives, starting at young age, and we internalize that in our body. And you may not feel it until you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s; it's held there. The other thing that we do when we're in this. state is we hold our breath, and when you hold your breath, you're tensing specific muscles. For a lot of people, it is the neck and the shoulders, or it could be that you tense your abdomen, or maybe you're just tensing your legs. You have an area of your body that you feel more pain, and that's the area that you're holding this tension in unconsciously. The biggest thing that I could offer to anybody is to start becoming aware of your breathing patterns and breathing. At a young age, we stop breathing rhythmically, nicely. So, a baby, if you ever watch, has a nice rhythm to their breath. It's a slow inhale, a slow exhale; you look relaxed, especially. a little sleeping baby. That's our natural rhythm of breathing, and we get out of that. We get out of that because of emotional reasons. We get out of that because of environmental reasons. It's a protective measure, especially if you live in a city with lots of smog and lots of pollution. The body doesn't want to breathe all of that in. It's having to filter it out every single time that you take a breath. And your breath gets shorter, and as your breath gets shorter, your muscles get tighter. So these experiences get held in the body. Depending on what the experience is, might depend on where your body is holding onto something and processing. It out would be finding a somatic therapy, Soma, to be in the body. So anything that is a somatic therapy going to be something that helps you to really center, be aware of what the sensations are happening in your body and being able to move that out. So for me, dance has been a very good somatic therapy, and my first ecstatic dance, because I had never been allowed to dance growing up, I was very apprehensive of even getting up on a dance floor. And the first time I went to one of these was like a mind-blowing epiphany. Like the skies had opened up and the gods were singing at me. And life changed. Literally, life changed for me. I experienced for the first time, the freedom to move my body I experienced for the first time the freedom to get out of my head and not worry about one other person in the room and what they might think about the way I was moving. When I dropped into that space and I danced, I found that the magic numbers for at least 45 minutes without stopping, that's when the ecstasy comes in. That is when the body starts releasing more of the dopamine, oxytocin. You start to feel high from dancing.

But here's the other thing I found: 30:32

If I was ever going through, or even to now, if I'm going through an emotional situation and it's sitting really heavy with me it doesn't matter what that emotion is. I can get out on the dance floor, and I start moving my body. And it's like I'm throwing those emotions out of me. I'm stomping anger into the ground. I'm being able to take anything that's inside of me, move it by moving my body. Therefore, using the body and the emotional state to move out of me so that my body's not holding on to it anymore. When our bodies hold on for a really, really, really long time, we get sick. Sickness is a manifestation of a long-term mental thought process. It didn't happen overnight. And it's all sorts of different diseases, not ease in your body that you're experiencing when you get to this state.

Here's one thing that's really cool too: 31:45

the body is incredible. The body can heal itself. I find this so fascinating, how the body has the ability to just think of a superficial wound. You've got a little scratch or a cut, or you stepped on a nail, cut on a paper cut, piece of glass. We've all had some type of injury like that. So, if you watch on your skin, it's a process. It doesn't happen overnight, but it begins to scab over, and then that scab stays there for a little while, and especially if you don't pick it. But it's healing. And then after a week or two, or however long your body takes, it's gone. Sometimes, it leaves a scar. Sometimes it doesn't. But the body healed itself. Now maybe you put some ointment on there to help the wound not become infected or to help keep bacteria out or to even help speed up some of the process of that healing. That applies to all the areas of your body, the organs, all of the muscles, the tissues. If you've ever broken a bone, you know that it heals. It hurts. It hurts really bad for several weeks. And it usually takes, I think it's an average of about six weeks for a bone to But how incredible is it that the body heals that and it can do it with anything? I really do believe, because I have witnessed people who are very determined. to heal their. Watch them go through process of. Part of it I think is just dropping into the mental awareness that you really want to and allowing your body to. Part of it is seeing somebody that would be considered a healer. It could be your doctor; it could be a— it could be somebody like me that's a massage therapist; it could be a head therapist; it could be any of these different modalities. All of these people are helping to provide you with tools that help your body to heal itself. They also provide you the space for you to believe that your body is going to heal itself. And we're not all gonna be walking miracles, but there are definitely. walking miracles out there. There are people that have healed things that doctors said were not possible to be. I really truly believe that if there are people out there that have the capability of going through this, that there's probably an essence inside each of us that also has that capability if we want it. But it takes work, and sometimes it takes several years, so lots of patience. And I would desire for everybody to to have their bodies healed, to feel whole, to wake up energized, to feel like they can take on the day and do really cool things that they want and are excited to do in. Because what's the point of life if All you're doing is laying around, and you're tired all day. But there's a lesson in that. I've gotten to talk to people who have different autoimmune conditions, and I'm sure I'm gonna talk to a lot more as this podcast goes on. I get to talk to people about different experiences that they have in their bodies, and I have heard people say that the pain teaches them something. And I feel that it teaches people different things. So, asking yourself, what is this pain trying to tell me? Because pain is always telling you that something's wrong and needs to be Whether it is you cut yourself— ow!—oh, look, there's pain there. Or you feel pain. Somewhere internally, and you go to the doctor so they can start doing the different tests so that they can look inside of you and try and figure out where in your body is experiencing something that it's not supposed to. And then they can tackle that and give you the right medicines, the right things that can help your body to heal. Pain can also be relating to emotions. I know we have all experienced emotional pain, pain of a breakup that feels like somebody is taking a knife to your pain of different feelings from different situations that we go through; they get stored in the. So sometimes the body gives you phantom pains. There's nothing wrong. A doctor might look at it saying don't see anything wrong; there's nothing there but you're still feeling it. I would encourage you to get into as meditative of a state as you possibly can. Ask yourself, " Why am I experiencing this? What is this pain trying to tell me? Do I have an emotion attached to this And sometimes that works for people. It is a tactic you can use, a very simple one, and it's just learning how to get in touch with your body. Learning to get in touch with your body is hard. You could journal about it. I'm not a good journaler personally, so it's not something— it's something I tell people if it works for you. do it and if it doesn't find something that does. And sometimes we have to experiment. It is learning interoception, which means what you feel inside. Not everybody is good at that. As a matter of fact, if you dissociate, and dissociation comes because you had some kind of pain, you had traumatic experiences, so you learned how not to be in your body, how not to feel your body. I know about this too because I had experiences of completely ignoring my body. Me, it resulted in I have a high pain tolerance. I can handle this, I can handle that. Look, that doesn't hurt me. I developed that as a coping mechanism because I got spanked a lot as a. I maybe it sounds funny I don't know but as a young kid I would squeeze my butt as tight as I could because if I squeezed it, the spanking would hurt less. That's how I viewed it. It developed later on in life as to just learning how to not experience pain. The more that I'm sitting in my body, if I'm having pain I feel it, it's not pleasant. Pain is not pleasant, but it's telling us something. It is a signal. So getting in touch, you can keep a, and just kind of write down how you felt in your body that day. Has your body been like the energy levels? Have you been high energy, low energy, or somewhere in between? Have you experienced, you know, maybe you have like this random ankle pain while you were walking or your wrist started hurting or a different area just randomly hurt for five minutes out of your day. Maybe it hurt for a good portion of the day. Are you having headaches? This is just things to pay attention and be aware of. Keeping a journal I've done on occasion, especially for food. So, foods can affect our body. And one of the biggest ones, which I love, sugar. I think a lot of us love sugar. It's quite tasty. It gives you the dopamine high, and you want more. It's addictive. They say that getting on sugar is like being on cocaine. I don't know if that's 100% true or not, but you know there's stuff out There that has related the two where they've done brain scans, and the brain lights up in the same way. But sugar is inflammatory. So, the older you get, the more you experience. When you're in your 20s, you may not notice that you had a sugar binge the day before; your body's hurting the next day because the process is a little bit better. The older you get, and oh my God, I really wanted to think that I could be defiant of my body aging, but I swear to you once you get to like, well, 35, things start changing, and you hit 40, 41 in there, and you really start feeling your body differently. Sometimes things are more tiring, or there's more little aches. and You eat a bunch of sugar one day and it takes you out the next day For me if I go on a sugar binge today then for tomorrow possibly the next day I experience inflammation in my And how I know that I'm experiencing that is because it feels like gravity has turned up a All movements feel a little bit more difficult Walking just feels like it's So everything just feels like an extra effort That's what inflammation feels like to me But it's only been by paying attention I can recognize this And it's paying attention over and over and over and over again And while I'm at this phase in life it's only going to continue the body keeps changing. So it's a continuation of what's happening in the. You're also very highly intuitive. So intuit into yourself. If you know something's wrong with you, there's probably something wrong with you. I don't care if you're going to 50 doctors and they're all telling you that you can't they can't see anything; that doesn't mean that it's just in your head. You know that something's wrong. And sometimes you have an intuitive sense as to what it could be, even though you can't get the doctors to give you the right tests or the right medicine. Don't stop trying to what can make you feel better in your body. Maybe you don't get to a point. of like full body healing but it's learning what you can do today helps you feel better in your body. What you can eat today that helps your body to feel better tomorrow. What you can do exercise-wise that helps your body feel better. I like yoga. Yoga helps strengthen and stretch. I have less aches and pains when I do yoga. I've observed this because I did yoga for a and then I stopped. And when I stopped, the pain came back. When I started again, the pain goes away. So these are the kind of ways that we evaluate. It's through the experience, through doing something, stopping something, and then doing it again. All of these cycles help you to be more in tune with your. So our bodies are amazing. We have to live in the one body that we're given for the rest of our life, no matter what happens to it. My philosophy is just trying to make it the best body you can make it be. And also, this is one practice I'm working on — just thanking the body for keeping you. Because whatever you're experiencing today, if it's put on more fat than you want, it was keeping you alive. Maybe you're skinnier than you want; it's keeping you. Experiencing a pain you're experiencing, autoimmune disorders — the body is attacking itself, but it's doing it to keep you alive. I know it sounds really weird, but everything our body is doing is in an effort to keep us. So just having a point of gratitude and saying, body, thank you so much for everything that you do to keep me alive. Your brain, your feeding, all of these cells are reporting back to you. How attention are you paying to it?

So that's what I wanted to talk about: 45:12

living inside of a human body and having human body experiences. If you're still here and you would like to talk about maybe what it's like for you to live in your body and some of the experiences that you have had in your life, I would really love to feature you on this podcast, ask you questions, let you share part of your story. and your human experience and how you've navigated life living in the body that you have and dealing with the issues that your body has given you. I have a form in the show notes. So if you go click on that, you can fill that out to be on the podcast. If you're on YouTube watching, please hit subscribe. If you liked this listening platforms, please follow. Feel free to leave me a review. If you think somebody needs to hear this information and would benefit, please, please share with them. Help me get this out. I really just want to bring more of an awareness to our lovely human experiences and put as much out there as I'm able to. So thank you. very much. And on your life path, just be you, be kind, and remember everything is part of the journey.