The Truth Beneath "I'm Fine": What Our Body Already Knows

There are moments in life when something deep inside us starts asking questions we can no longer ignore.

Am I really happy?
Am I living authentically?
What truth am I avoiding by telling myself “I’m fine”?

In this solo episode of Becoming Lotus, Tamara explores the quiet tension between comfort and truth, and the courage it takes to listen to what we already know beneath the surface.

Inspired by a recent conversation, Carl Jung’s powerful quote about the unconscious mind, and even the surprising wisdom behind Heart Rate Variability (HRV), this episode dives into the connection between our nervous system, our inner truth, and the life we are creating in the spaces in between.

This is a conversation about:

• complacency and self-honesty
• the stories we tell ourselves
• vulnerability and emotional awareness
• listening to the body’s signals
• unlocking new versions of ourselves
• and trusting what rises to the surface when we finally stop suppressing it

Because maybe the coin never really decides anything.

Maybe it only reveals what we already knew.

And maybe the truth we keep pushing down isn’t there to disrupt our life…

Maybe it’s there to guide it.

Until next time—keep rising, keep blooming, and keep soaking it all in. 

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📖 Explore my book I AM LOTUS and my life coaching offerings at tamaraoshaughnessy.com

  Instagram – @soakingitallin 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Becoming Lotus Podcast. If you've landed here, it's probably because something in you knows that there's more. More to life. More to you. This is a space for those who feel like they're still becoming, still blooming, and still figuring it all out. It is my hope that this podcast awakens something in you, a passion for life and for the infinite possibilities within it. I'm your host, Tamara O'Shaughnessy, and I am honored you're here. Before I get into today's episode, I want to share something beautiful with you. I never know who's listening or what someone might take from this, but I've learned that I don't need to. Because even if one person hears something that shifts something for them, then this podcast has done what it's meant to do. Recently, someone shared something with me after stepping outside of their comfort zone. They had taken a leap into something new, something uncertain. And they said to me, I'm unlocking a new version of myself. And immediately I thought, that's it. That's becoming Lotus. Not becoming someone else, not reinventing yourself into a completely different person, but unlocking the parts of yourself that were always there, waiting for you to trust them enough to step forward. And I think that's what so much of life really is: growth, expansion, awareness, becoming more honest about who we are and less afraid to live as that person. And so we continue on. In my last episode with Matt Sochan, we touched on the idea of complacency, how so many of us don't take the time to sit and ask ourselves the important questions. You know, the ones that nag us deep down inside, the ones that maybe keep us awake in the middle of the night. Am I really happy? Am I doing what I want to do? Am I living someone else's dream? What do I really want? And what's interesting is that we already know the answer. Someone recently shared with me this idea of the coin flip. You know, the times when we can't decide something, when we can't make a decision, so we flip a coin. If it's heads, I'll do this. If it's tails, I'll do that. But when we really look at it, when that coin is in the air, we've already chosen. We hope it's tails, or we hope it's heads. We suddenly realize what we want it to land on. The coin didn't choose, it only revealed what we already knew. But when we do ask ourselves those deeper questions, so many of us choose to ignore what the answers are. And we say, I'm fine, because we don't want to take the action necessary in order to change. It's easier to ignore and continue along doing what is comfortable. And it's not always in big life-altering decisions. Sometimes it shows up in really small ways, like saying yes when you really mean no, staying quiet when we want to speak up, avoiding something we know we need to face. Those are all moments when we say I'm fine, when something in us knows that we're not. Because ignoring that voice doesn't make it go away. It will just get louder or heavier or show up in ways that we didn't expect. This episode is inspired by the quote by Carl Jung. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Jung is referring to the parts of us that are operating underneath the surface, the parts of us that we don't fully look at or want to look at. Our beliefs, our fears, our desires, and the truths that we don't want to face. They are the ones running the show, if we let them. As someone who is fiercely independent, to a fault sometimes, I'm fine is something that I've been quite familiar with in my life. Historically, I would rather do something by myself than ask for help. I would rather just say I'm fine and not have to explain what I was really feeling. Because in admitting it, saying it out loud would require action. And taking action can be scary. Taking action can mean uncertainty. It can mean facing fears. It can mean change. Over the past couple of years, I've repeatedly told myself I'm fine. And for the most part, I believed it. When we ignore our truth, our bodies know before our minds admit it. But over the course of this past year, I've embraced asking myself those deeper questions, not searching for answers, but making a conscious decision to listen whenever I felt a stirring inside me that something wasn't right. And the more I allowed myself to sit with those feelings, instead of pushing them away, the harder they became to ignore. Because once you become aware of something, once you acknowledge a truth inside yourself, you can't really unsee it anymore. And after a lot of reflection, there came a moment when I had to decide whether I was going to stay where I felt safe or open myself back up to something that I couldn't control. There are parts of life that ask something of us. And for me, one of those moments was deciding if I was willing to be vulnerable again, even knowing what it could cost me. And that was not an easy question to answer. But I chose to make the unconscious conscious. That I want to be the best version of myself, that I want to live my best life. So when I paused and really sat with that, I realized that the coin had been tossed. It was in the air, but I already knew the answer. I just needed to take action. And on the other side of that decision, something beautiful found its way into my life. A gift I hadn't even realized that I was ready for, that I never would have experienced if I had stayed where I was. Because I finally gave myself the space to sit with the questions and trust what came up and to act on it. I was willing to be open to it. I'm sharing this with you today because undoubtedly there are listeners who are going through something right now and maybe are suppressing, ignoring, choosing comfort, choosing complacency. But I ask you to zoom out on your own life. Listen to what your body is telling you. We can tell ourselves we're okay, but our nervous systems tell us a different story. And actually, this is a perfect place to add in something really interesting. I have a Garmin watch. It's like a supercomputer for what's going on inside me at any time, a biofeedback loop. There's one metric that it measures called the HRV, which stands for heart rate variability. Now, without getting too technical with this, basically it's the variation in between heartbeats. So not the actual heart rate itself, but the space in between the beats. This rate is affected by stress in the body. A higher HRV usually means you are adaptable, you are resilient, and regulated. A lower HRV can indicate that your body is stressed, taxed, or under some sort of strain. It's a window into your nervous system. It doesn't measure how hard we're working, it's measuring how well our body is handling our life. And it's so much more than just physical stress. It picks up on emotional stress, mental load, the things we don't always admit to ourselves. So what this means is that we may say, I'm fine, but our nervous system is responding to what is actually true. When we are regulated and grounded, our body is in a state where it can recover to think clearly and to respond. And when we're not, we're in a subtle state of stress under the surface, even if nothing looks wrong from the outside. Even if we're telling ourselves we're fine. HRV is something that I now track. And what it's really showing me isn't just fitness, it's how my body is responding to my life. Because our body knows when something is off, even when we tell ourselves it's not. So now when I see fluctuations in my HRV, I ask myself, what changed? What else is going on that may be affecting it? And more often than not, I can usually pinpoint the reason. And I think most of us have experienced this, maybe not through a watch, but through our body, the sleepless nights, the tension in our chest, the exhaustion that we just can't explain, the feeling that something is off, even when our life may look fine. Because our nervous system is always listening, even to the things that we're trying not to hear. And that's why so many of us can only suppress something for so long before it finally asks to be acknowledged. Something so simple yet so powerful. We can say I'm fine, but our body already knows the truth. That quiet voice that we've been ignoring, our nervous system, has been responding to it the entire time. And that's exactly what Young was talking about when he said that what's unconscious will direct our life. Because if we don't face it, we don't get to choose it. And maybe that's what it really comes down to. That life isn't just about the big moments. It's not just the milestones, it's not just the major decisions, it's everything that happens in between. The way we think, the way we feel, the way we respond, the choices that we make in those quiet in-between moments. That's where our life is actually happening. And maybe that's why those spaces matter so much. Because just like the space between the heartbeats, those in-between moments are telling a story too, about who we are becoming, about how we are living, about what we're feeling, and about what's actually true beneath the surface. And you know, looking back now, I am incredibly grateful that I listened, grateful that I stopped ignoring that quiet voice inside me and trusted what it was trying to show me. Because the things we're most afraid to face are sometimes the very things that lead us back to ourselves. So the question shouldn't be, am I fine? The question should be, am I willing to be honest about what's actually true? Because the truth that we keep pushing down isn't there to disrupt our life. It's there to guide it. So maybe that's the real question. If the coin was already in the air, what would you be hoping for? Because somewhere inside you, you probably already know. And that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you so much for being here with me on Becoming Lotus. If something in today's story stirred something in you, I invite you to take a quiet moment and ask yourself, what is one small step that I can take today to live more truthfully, to live into my potential? You don't have to do it all. Just one choice toward becoming. And please always remember you are not alone. If this episode spoke to you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who might need it too. Subscribe, leave a review, or just reach out. Until next time, keep rising, keep blooming, and keep soaking it all in.