Episode 40: Languages of the Body

The Heart of the Conversation:

The core of this episode centers on the human body as a highly intelligent, functioning bio-organism designed to partner with our consciousness. While the body possesses deep innate wisdom to help us navigate human existence, we often live in states of survival, dissociation, or distraction that cause us to override or completely ignore its constant stream of communication.

The Transmission: 

Elisha breaks down the layers of how the body speaks and how we can decode its signals:

• Interoception & Nervous System States: Interoception is our internal radar—our ability to recognize what is happening inside the physical form, from a full bladder to subtle emotional shifts. Traumatic pasts or prolonged states of survival switch this radar off, trapping the nervous system in a dysregulated, sympathetic "fight, flight, freeze, or fawn" loop where true body awareness becomes inaccessible.
• The Manifestation of Thought: Mental processes and heavy emotional states eventually solidify into physical reality if given enough time. Sudden "phantom" or unprovoked pains are often the body's way of flashing a warning light about a stagnant emotion or a situation requiring a change in course.
• The Somatic Geography of Emotion: Different regions of the body house specific emotional templates. The hips and pelvis act as our physical and energetic foundation, frequently throwing out signals when our sense of life stability, safety, or security feels compromised. Similarly, the sacral area stores unexpressed trauma and creative blocks, the solar plexus mirrors relational anxiety or butterflies, the heart anchors grief, the throat holds back unspoken truths, and the jaw tightly locks away repressed anger.

The Invitation: 

Listeners are invited to transition from passively inhabiting a body to actively walking a journey of living inside of it. Elisha offers a few practical, somatic entry points to build this skill over time:

• Commit to Mindful Movement: Engaging in a practice like Qigong or Yoga highlights the body's micro-shifts, helping individuals learn the baseline difference between healthy muscle soreness and genuine systemic pain, inflammation, or bloat.
• The Minute-Long Body Scan: Pausing daily for just one to two minutes to take deep breaths and intentionally sweep awareness from the toes to the head to simply observe—without judgment—what sensations are present.
• Sensing the Present Moment: Intentionally filtering out the overwhelming static of the world by tuning into the top five physical senses—sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and textures—to ground back into the pristine current moment.

Time Stamps:

00:00 Living Organism Paradigm

01:29 Interoception Definition

02:38 Loud vs Subtle Signals

03:41 Nervous System Dysregulation

04:50 Emotional States & Dissociation

05:45 Thought Manifestation Process

06:51 Correlating Emotions to Pain

07:45 Drop-In Body Questioning

08:38 Pelvis Foundation & Stability

13:01 Chakras & Traumatic Storage

15:00 Emotional Body Regions

17:50 Yoga & Movement Awareness

20:30 Discomfort & Diet Shifts

22:16 Soreness vs Pain Interpretation

23:12 Daily Body Scan Method

25:47 Five Senses Grounding

27:35 Age, Pain, & Versatility

29:10 Consciousness & Body Navigation

Link to Transcript of Show:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xFnPW9pfg-1TrPR6MA7GeSwtps2jQ3wq/view?usp=sharing

Apply to be on the Show:

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Find Elisha Elsewhere on the web:

https://linktr.ee/elishalightangel

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The ways that it moves, the things that it tells us. What a beautiful gift to be able to live in these bodies and get to experience that. Hello and welcome to That's Just Human, a podcast that explores all aspects of being human, living in a human body, and dealing with life's obstacles. I'm your host, Elisha Light Angel, and by day I'm a massage therapist, right now a podcaster, and like you, I happen to live in a human body and I have a plethora of experiences. This is the space that I use to share about my own experiences and hear about other people's experiences as well. Today I'm just gonna be chit-chatting with you, and I would like to talk about the languages of the body because we are living in the body, and it is this highly intelligent functioning living organism that our consciousness is sitting in and being in connection in, but that doesn't mean that we're actually listening to the wisdom that our body has to share with us or to the way that our body is trying to help us navigate our human existence. So the first thing I want to touch on is this concept called interoception. So if you've never heard of that, interoception is the ability to recognize and feel what is happening internally. And so as opposed to maybe somebody touching your skin or recognizing something that's outside of you, these are the smaller aspects. So it's something that might be allowed interoception that you're probably familiar with. You know, you know when you need to use a bathroom and your bladder is full or your bowels are moving, that is something that you've learned to recognize from early childhood, and now it's just something that you know. You know when you feel like you're hungry. Now those signals can get screwed up for a variety of reasons, but in general, if your stomach is making the sounds, you're pretty aware that you might need food or your body is asking you for food, whether you answer it or not. You are aware if you get a headache or you feel some kind of pain internally. I would call these the loud signals that your body gives, but I think there's a lot more subtle signals that the body gives that are a lot harder to tune in to and be aware of if you are not being intentional with your awareness to your body. Now, one reason that you can not is if you have had like a traumatic childhood or some trauma and you've learned dissociation as a way of coping with life as a way of surviving, then the interoception can shut off because it's no longer coming down to what's making you thrive, it's survive, and those can live on opposite ends of the spectrum and what you're feeling in your body. So when you're just trying to survive, a lot of times your body's gonna go into that bite, flight, freeze, fawn moment. Your vagus nerve is overstimulated, you're in that sympathetic state, and you cannot calm down. I can tell you that I lived in that state of existence for a really long time, years, from teenage dumb to probably my early 30s, and for me, my changing of that particular state was learning Qigong. But there's a lot of different ways that you can, and learning to get in tune with your body, learning to get aware of what's happening internally is a process if you aren't already aware of what's happening on these subtle little changes, these subtle little shifts. So if you're in anxiety or you're in that fight, flight, freeze mode, you really can't pay attention to what is happening to you. You have to get out of that first. So there is kind of a step process depending on where you are. Um, you could possibly be feeling numb, and that could be like an emotional numbness, which turns off your ability to really tap into your body as well. That could be from depression, uh, other things that are happening in your life. So there are definitely different emotional states that will take us a lot out and away from our body. If you are feeling in pain, you probably automatically are living in a level of dissociation, as it were, to try and block out some of that pain, which uses quite a bit of your energy, right? So that's what I mean by the loud signals. So, what are some of the softer signals that the body might be talking to you in? And how do we get aware and learn how to pay attention to those? So, um whenever we are in thought processes, all of these thoughts become physical manifestations if you spend enough time in these thought processes and moving things around in your mind mentally, feeling things emotionally. Eventually, there is a point where your body feels it physically, right? So, how can you pay attention to when you're feeling something and then your body is trying to tell you that you need to take a different course of action or a different mental state, but you're not aware? It's learning how to tune in, it's learning how to be an observer of your own process, your own thoughts, and the way that you are perceiving the world. I would definitely say learning how to become perceptive of the thoughts that you're having, as opposed to them just taking over your mind, which is also a skill that takes years to really get there, and it's a slow process, but it can be done. And eventually you're kind of being aware, oh, I'm feeling this. Why am I feeling that? Okay, I'm feeling that, and I also noticed that my wrists started hurting when I started to think about such situation that happened and an emotion got brought up. So you can begin to correlate some of your emotions, some of your thoughts to some of the different things in your body. I don't know about you, but I've had this happen where there'll be a random pain. Like I'm all of a sudden, I'm doing good. This isn't a pain that I have every day, and all of a sudden an area begins to hurt for no reason. I didn't stress it, I wasn't doing anything. I could just be sitting on the couch and I'm like, man, what's happening right now? That all of a sudden my knee is hurting, I haven't moved it, I haven't changed position, I haven't done any crazy working out, um, it doesn't normally hurt. What's happening? So that's when I can drop in and kind of ask my body, hey body, what is it you're trying to tell me right now? This does require a little bit of the ability to be in a more meditative meditative space, to be able to silence your thoughts enough to receive the answer from your body. That doesn't mean silence your thoughts and be like a monk in meditation for hours. We're talking a few seconds to a minute just to tap in and ask your body if something needs to change or what it is that you need to pay attention to. So let me give you a few examples of things that you might could experience that could possibly have relations to emotions or thought processes that you're experiencing. So a lot of people might experience like lower back pain, pelvis, um, hip pain, um, even like putting uh sciatic pain could fall into this too, because all of that are different micro adjustments within the muscles and ligaments and vertebrates that have to do with the foundation of our body. So you might think feet are foundation because that's what you're walking on, but I like to think the hips are the real foundation of the body. From the hips, everything moves up, everything moves down. And if your hips go out, and I have had this post-pregnancy, and if you're a woman and you haven't given birth yet, if you give birth vaginally, then your hips split open. It is a physiological function of the body, and your hips will never ever ever be the same again. If you do not do strength training, which I did not because nobody told me after I had a kid, and you carry your child on your left hip because you're right-handed and you do everything with your right hand, then it can cause your hips to go out because those ligaments and muscles have already loosened and they haven't had the opportunity to regrow the strength or even attempt to go back before you shifted things. So that's what I did. I carried my son on my left hip. It caused my sacrum to go out of place, and this is something that I've actually dealt with for the 20 years that my child has been in existence and it's on and off. I have addressed it with chiropractic care and massage, and that helps a lot. Yoga helps also. Lately in life, as I've learned more about how our emotions affect some of the states of our body, knowing that the pelvis and the hips, the lower back, that whole area is the foundation, it also can relate to the foundations or how we see our own foundation in our life. And so that comes back to the survival kind of thing. I notice in my own self now that there are times where I don't feel the stability or the security of life. Like any security I have feels false, and therefore my foundation isn't always feeling like it's there for me. And then here I am having this lifetime issue of experiencing in my hips, but I've had a lot of struggle to where I haven't had that solid foundation, and so it makes sense that based on my experiences, based on my mental space, based on how I'm processing and how I'm feeling about it and how I'm thinking about it would manifest in my hips. When I unintentionally am in a fear of losing things, my hips will go out, or I will have more issues. And the more I become aware of this as things shift, I am noticing how my body is shifting with my mind. It's absolutely wild, but I'm telling you, when you start becoming more aware, you'll begin to recognize things in yourself that you didn't see before, and then it gives you the power to aim to make corrections. So that's when for me I can go back to reminding myself that I do have some security, I do have some safety, and that I just have to trust that my life will work out. Um, I also live by a lot of hope, guys. So if that's not your your thing, I just let you know it works for me. Another thing that uh you could be having, we're just gonna kind of work our way up the body a little bit. So in our um in the chakra system, you have the root, so that would be the root, the lower back, the pelvis, like that, your foundation, how you're rooted, how how secure this is, not being able to fall over, right? The sacral area is in relation to your creativity, but it's also where it holds your sexual organs, and a lot of people can have a lot going on there, especially women and experiencing things like endrometriosis and PCOS, other ovarian issues. Um and I'm sure men have a variety of different issues that as a woman I'm just not as familiar with, I'm sorry. Um, but yeah, it can impact your physical sexual organs, especially if you have had some type of a sexual trauma in your life, and so the emotions and the physicality of that that got stored in your body are then causing some pain. And while it feels like something's happening, it is your body speaking to you about what's already happened. So sometimes it could be a trauma that's stuck within your body, and because you have that trauma, your neurology, the way that you process things in your life shifted when that happened. And as long as your neurology keeps going down these same pathways, then you keep having some of the same thoughts, you keep having some of the same emotions, those don't go away. And I've seen people be able to heal by learning how to address some of these other areas and reforming those neurological pathways and making friends with their body, but that's just one area that the body can talk to us. Here's something I'm pretty sure the solar plexus is like the stomach area in um the chakras, but it's it's that area where you get butterflies, right? So if you meet somebody and you're like a little bit anxious because you want to talk to them, that's butterflies. Or it could be that almost makes you really nauseous, want to puke because you're being asked to go up in front of a bunch of people and have to say something, and now everybody is looking at you and you're not comfortable with this. That is a place I'm pretty sure we have all at one point or another experienced something. So it could be butterflies, it could be anxious butterflies, it could be excitement butterflies. Ooh, I'm about to go get this thing. It's the same kind of feeling that happens in the area of the body. That is the body also talking to you in response to some of your emotions. Are you aware? How about the heart? The heart is the chest, right? And so when you're dealing with like sadness or grief, um, heartache, like we use that term heartache, to deal with some of these sadnesses and these griefs, that emotional state where you're really feeling it, where your heart hurts, where uh when you go through a really intense breakup or you lose somebody that you loved a lot, it feels like you're literally physically in pain in that heart area. Something that you do, but what about when it's just a minor subtle little heart something? What is that telling you? Are you aware? Do you even know that's happening? Do you pay attention? The neck, um, which can also be the throat. So if you're not able to speak your truth, then you get that how do I describe it? Like a knot in your throat to where you feel it's really hard to vocalize, and it's because you're holding back. Um, sometimes you're holding back an emotion that you don't want to show other people because it's you're gonna break down. And again, you get that lump in your throat, you can't get anything out, and it's it's hard. That's also your body responding to your emotions, but talking to you. Your jaw, you can grind your teeth, it's repressed anger, and also not speaking some words or not speaking the truth that you're keeping it inside, and so it settles in your jaw. So these are just a few of the different things. You can have some really subtle stuff happening, and the best way that I can explain how I have learned to pay more attention to what's happening inside of me is been through doing some workouts. So I think any kind of physical movement that you do is gonna be good. If it's one that you like and you're gonna do it, that's the best one for you. For me, recently in life, I have found yoga to be a really interesting, amazing tool for getting in touch with my body. Um, when I first started, I was doing about four or five days a week. And my body was definitely not fit, not strong, and I had to work it into shape. So there's a lot of what I call micro shifts whenever you're going to yoga. You do a lot of the same things every day, not always this exact same, but a lot. So you're in there in the beginning and you can't do things. Your body just doesn't move that way, you don't stretch that way, you don't you're not strong enough. I know it took me about seven months of doing chaturango, which is kind of like a push-up with your elbows, um, just to be able to hover there because I hadn't had the strength, and it took that long to build up strength just to hover. But it was a micro win the very first day where I hovered for two seconds. It doesn't sound like a lot, but when you haven't been able to do it and you recognize that you can do it, the other thing with doing yoga is because you do some similar moves regularly, you notice when your body shifts or when it feels different. So as I mentioned earlier, I have a lot of hip and pelvis issues, and so I began to recognize when it is shifting, when maybe I'm feeling it more on the right side as opposed to the left side, or I'm feeling it down my leg, or I'm feeling it up my back. There's all these little shifts that happen as I'm going about this process, and I've noticed that different things in my life. This has actually helped me to become aware of what inflammation feels like in my body versus not being inflamed. It helps me to know what it feels like to be bloated or not bloated, what it feels like to retain water and not retain water. All of these different ways that I have felt and not felt because I have paid attention when it's happening, has brought me a greater awareness of what's going on inside of the body. Becoming more aware of that helps me understand what changes I need to make. So, for instance, inflammation is painful, water bloat is painful, tummy bloat, uncomfortable. They're just not pleasant places to be in, and they affect the quality of life that I am able to enjoy and actually make it a lot less enjoyable because now I'm having to deal with my body suffering, and I don't want to be in that state, so I'm constantly trying to think of what I can do to get out of that state. And these are things you can tackle. Like, if you're if you're bloated, you can change some of your diet to not be bloated, you can change some of your diet to combat the inflammation and the water retention. Like, there are definite steps and how tos to get to that. Place of being. So, how do you even begin listening to your body? Well, as I mentioned, um, for me, yoga is being and currently is the thing that's really helping me to tap in, but I would say find some sort of a movement practice that allows you to feel your body. Know what the difference is between feeling sore from a workout that utilized your muscles and is building strength, or feeling pain. Because while both of them might be signals of pain to the body, they're different kinds of pain. And personally, I'd rather be sore from a workout than in pain because it's completely different on the way that the body interprets and feels that it's something that you have to pay attention. So if you're a journaler, you can journal about it, you could just keep it in mind, you could talk about it, but any which way, simply becoming aware and continually being more aware, just being in that body. So the other thing you can do is a body scan, and this really doesn't take a lot of time, one to two minutes. You can do this on the daily, you can do this if you start to feel something and go, hmm, what's happening? So to do a body scan, you want to start with just a couple deep breaths, just allowing yourself to kind of calm, settle down, get your thoughts that are racing to go away. We're talking about one to two minutes here tops. And bringing the focus and your awareness into your body. And it's good to start down at your toes and just bring your awareness and attention to your toes. What do you feel? Anything? Nothing? You know, this is this is what you're asking. You're gonna go up your whole body, all right, moving from the toes into the feet, being aware and observant of any sensations that may or may not be there, moving up into the ankles, and then the calves, the knees, up the thighs, into the hips and the lower back, up into the torso, what do you feel in the abdomen area? What do you feel feel in the back area? Up into the chest, the shoulders, you know, that upper back area. What do you feel in the arms? Down the arms, the elbows, the wrists, the hands. How about up the neck or in the head? What do you feel? And so just taking a little bit of time to tune into your body, bring in your awareness, asking how you feel in each of these areas. It's simply making an observation, you don't have to do anything about it. It it's this is the practice of becoming aware of your body. Because when you're aware, then you can start to be more observant when you observe patterns or things, you can make shifts, right? You are aware of emotions when they come up in your body. So you're in a conversation, you have a constriction in your throat. What are you holding back? Maybe you feel warmth coming to your cheeks, or you feel tension in your armpits, or in your arm, tension in your forehead, and you you know your armpits start getting sweaty and you're not working out. Your armpits are getting sweaty. So you might be a little nervous about something. Um you have nausea in your stomach, or your heart is pounding in your chest. Uh, if you're getting goosebumps about something, if you need to pee a lot, then your blood pressure might be up from whatever's happening to you. So, what are these emotions physically doing to your body? And with those examples, you may have felt any of those at some point in life, and that was a correlation to whatever was happening or transpiring in a moment to add to your emotional state. You can also pay attention to your five senses. So, what am I seeing? What kind of colors are around me? Can I notice more? Can I notice anything different if I just look at what's around me? What am I smelling? Just becoming aware, taking it in. What do you taste? What do you hear? What do you what textures can you feel? Bringing it back to these five senses because these are our top five ways that we are aware of perceiving on this human plane in existence. These top five ways that we really tap into this body. There's a plethora of other ways that our body is constantly perceiving because our brains are taking in, I think it's like 11 million bits of information per second. So it has to filter that out. We get about 27 bits of that information. So imagine how much information your brain has to filter out in order to have you be in this moment in this existence right here, right now. That's a lot. And some of that is also going to be tuning out what's happening within your body, and this is just bringing you back into it so you can be a little bit more aware and walk the journey of living inside of your own body. I would say that the goal being to have the best existence in your body as you possibly can to make it as pain-free as possible. Um, I know that's not that's not always possible, and for some reason, as we get older, the bodies like do a little bit more of the pain, but I see young people being in pain from the way that they use their bodies. And if we can have a little bit less, then why not, right? Well, that's the way I see it. So these are just some of the ways, you know. Get physical, pay attention, um, do a body scan, pay attention. Tend to your five senses, pay attention. The keyword, paying attention to all of the clues. The more you begin to practice becoming aware of your body and observing what's happening, the more you say, take a moment when you feel a phantom pain to ask your body what it's trying to tell you, the greater awareness you'll have around this, the better you're going to get. It's like a skill that you build up. We all can do it, whether you've practiced it or not. And by practicing over time, it only helps you get into a better sense of who you are and how you're living life in this body. Our bodies are taking us through our whole life. Like you don't get another one. But it's a living bioorganism, so it can change. I mean, looking at how much it changed since birth to where you are now, and all of the other changes that you've had in between. That's one of the really amazing things about the human body is the versatility in which it can change, or the ways that it moves, the things that it tells us. What a beautiful gift to be able to live in these bodies and get to experience that. Because, as a consciousness, we would not experience that without having this physical body. So, as you're going about your life, I would encourage you to learn to tap into your own body and hear the wisdom that it has for you and let it help you navigate life. It'll tell you what's good for you or not. Uh, when it comes to foods, you know, you can figure out by by listening if your body wants that food or it wants a beverage, or it maybe it doesn't, and it will tell you when you learn how to listen to it. But if you have been overriding all of its signals for quite a long time, you're probably gonna keep overriding those until you practice enough learning how to be more aware of those signals. I hope you are able to listen to your body and live better in it. As you embrace your humanness, be quiet, be human, and remember. Everything is part of the picture.