The Nourished Woman with Keri Marino

From Fake Peace to Real Peace

• Keri Marino • Episode 26

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What if the calm you present to the world is actually a costume your nervous system stitched together to keep you safe? We go straight at the quiet habit of “performing peace” and why so many high-functioning, caregiving women confuse numbness with resilience. Keri shares the rupture that changed everything—miscarriage and the grief no mantra could touch—and the practical path that followed: therapy, emotional intelligence, and somatic practices that made feeling safe again.

Across this conversation, we map the body cues that often get ignored—throat lock, chest heaviness, spiraling thoughts—and translate them into usable information. You’ll hear how fawn and freeze show up in conflict, why overthinking spikes at night, and what it takes to widen your window of tolerance so expression becomes possible. We talk about letting tears come without shame, raising your voice when truth requires it, and building boundaries that carry only what belongs to you. The goal isn’t to stay calm at all costs. It’s to become coherent: the same person inside and out.

By the end, you’ll have a felt sense of peace that isn’t a performance, plus simple ways to practice—naming emotions, grounding through the body, orienting to present-time safety, and speaking needs with clarity. Expect a reframing of spirituality too: not a bypass, but a return to the soul who can witness, feel, and alchemize. If you’re craving more joy, play, and pleasure—and the sturdiness to face whatever life throws your way—this one is for you. 

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If you know you want to practice yoga more this year, because you know it works for you. But don't  just want to "do yoga," you're looking to regulate your nervous system, cultivate emotional well-being and show up more embodied, at peace and alive. 

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Nourished Woman Podcast, a space for women on a growth and healing journey who want to experience more joy, play, and pleasure while feeling deeply rooted within themselves, body, mind, and spirit. I'm your host, Carrie Marino, somatic yoga therapist, mentor, and mama of three. Let's dive in, love. The reality is that it's easier for some of us to hide that we're struggling inside than it is for others. And I feel like not enough women are talking about this. And so I really want to get in on this topic because I know that you might be that woman who's really good at hiding that you're going through some things. And I have definitely been that woman myself. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about my story and showcase parts of it that might help you see yourself in it and also show you what's possible for you. And whenever I share this, I want you to know that I am sharing this because I know that it's helpful to hear other people's experiences, not because I love these stories about myself, but because they're real and they're things that all of us can relate to. And especially if you're one of those women who is really good at hiding that you're going through some shit and that you tend to be more on the numb side of the spectrum. So what I want to get into today is the concept that sometimes we perform peace. And really we're like things are not going well inside, right? Like we look on the outside like we're got all our shit together, things are going well, we're reliable, we're consistent, we're calm, we're kind, we're respectful. But really, there is a supreme level of overthinking that's happening inside you and a disconnection from your emotions and some talk from your body. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about that for me. I have been in my field of sharing yoga and working as a yoga therapist for a long time. As of the recording of this, I've been doing this for 16 years. And so, really early in my career, I had the unhinged belief that if I was not calm all of the time and choosing peace 100% of the time, that I was failing at yoga and spirituality. So I sort of shoved myself into this box of like perpetually calm, always calm, always at peace. And so I was performing this literally like it was my job, that this was my job as a yoga teacher, that I needed to be calm and peaceful all of the time. And what was actually happening is that my body was totally communicating with me the entire time that I had some bits and pieces going on. And so I would feel my throat lock up and that feeling of like I can't, I literally can't talk right now. Every time I swallowed another emotion down, I would feel these stones like sinking down in my chest, this heavy weight. I would feel things contract around my heart center. And at the same time, I was getting incredible results from my yoga practice. Like, if you've heard my story about how when I first came to yoga, you know that I had really intense things going on with my mental health. I had chronic pain, I had digestive issues, I had so much going on in my body. And so at the same time, my body is unwinding from layers and layers and layers and layers of what had been held in my body and in my nervous system. And what I oftentimes find for women like me and like you who are good at hiding, right? Like we've adapted to become these people who are like the peacekeepers of the world, is that as you get into your yoga practice, you inevitably heal lots of things, and then new stuff comes up to the surface. So it's like this idea that things will get messier as you tidy up, right? And as you heal and as you resolve things. So at the same time that my body is letting go of so much tension and I'm feeling incredible softness and spaciousness and relaxation and ease, I am performing peace, like it's my job, right? And swallowing my feelings down. And the reality is that this actually worked pretty well for me for a really long time because the yoga medicine is strong, right? Like yoga can make you feel so good in your body that in a way you kind of don't have to deal with your shit. Like you don't have to get into all of your emotions because the yoga medicine can help you to feel calm and grounded and relaxed and at ease. And this went along just fine. My body was not screaming at me, it was just kind of whispering and talking to me along the way. But then in 2017, the bottom dropped out. And I lost a child to miscarriage at 15 weeks pregnant. And this sent me into a depression. And there was no amount of yoga and meditation and mantra and affirmation or breath work that could help me handle that kind of heartbreak. And I was a mom already to my first child. I was brand new to living in Chattanooga. We had moved there recently, and I was not okay. And so I walked into therapy. Again, I've gone to therapy at many different times in my adult life. And I told my therapist at that time, I said, teach me how to become emotionally intelligent. Like that's literally the nerdy words that I would use. And if you're like, what is emotional intelligence? Hold up. Emotional intelligence is your capacity to name and acknowledge and even differentiate between the different emotions that you have. And it's also having skills around expressing your emotions. So, how do I talk about my emotions with myself and like acknowledge inwardly? But also, how do I talk about my emotions and relationships? How do I vent? How do I explore expressing them? And so I go into therapy. My therapist at the time was named Darlene. Darlene was amazing. I love you so much, Darlene. If you ever happen to listen to this podcast or this episode, and she helped me learn how to feel my feelings, which sounds so simple. And I know some of you listening to this, you're not the woman who has a hard time feeling your feelings. Like there's a spectrum of feeling, and there's numb like I was and disconnected. And there's some of you listening who are like, what? No, I feel everything times a million. I feel everything so deeply. I have a hard time not letting my emotions spiral and run the show, right? And then there's women like I was, which are like the numb, the emotionally flat, the disconnected, that I don't even know what I'm feeling or how to express it, women. And then there's women all along that spectrum in between. And so through therapy, I went through this process of actually feeling my emotions. She did some great things back then to really help me acknowledge that my emotions were being felt in my body. This was really like that first light bulb moment about somatics and somatic healing in terms of my own, like I was practicing it as I was learning how to feel my emotions. And I will tell you that things changed for me. I think on some level, I had viewed my emotions as bad before this time. Like I literally had that unhinged thought, like, I'm not yogic enough if I'm not just calm all the time. And I stopped during that period of my life. I was like, no, you know what? Like, hold up, screech. My emotions are great. My emotions are good, and I want to feel my emotions. And so I started to let myself feel my emotions. And this came out in kind of like comically bad, I don't know, silly, funny ways that were truthfully embarrassing for me at times. So an example of this is going out to breakfast on my birthday, and I go up to the counter. I've got my husband and my my firstborn kid, and I'm like, okay, I want to order this. And I try to order that, and they're like, we're out of that. And I was like, okay, how about this? We're out of that. How about this? We're out of that. It was just this constant barrage of like anything I wanted to order, they were out of. And so I grab my husband and my son, and we walk outside, and I just cry on the street in front of the restaurant. And my husband, the sweet, patient man that he is, he's just kind of looking at me like, what is happening right now? Wow, you're having some big feelings and just giving me space to feel them. And I told him, I this is part of me feeling my feelings now. And I, for whatever reason, need to cry on the street about the fact that everything I wanted to get for my birthday, I can't have any of it. And I just need to cry right now. So just give me a few minutes and I'm gonna cry right now. And this is an example of me and women like me, you learning how to let your feelings be there. And how it may seem silly to you from the vantage point that you have now that, or it may be like an aha moment for you, like, oh my gosh, I'm the woman that Carrie is describing that she used to be, but I'm her today. And wait a second, what is this idea that my emotions are actually a sacred part of my whole and not a bad part of me that I need to distance myself from? Right. And so for me, crying on the street about my birthday breakfast also translated out in so many different areas of my life because the reality is that in my first year of marriage to my husband, when a disagreement would arise, I could not talk. Like I would go completely silent and my body would shut down. It would feel like a heavy weight was on my body. I would feel myself contract in my body, and I couldn't think and I couldn't talk and I couldn't communicate about what was going on inside of me. I was just quite frankly shut down. I was shut down in my body and I was shut down in my emotions and in my mind. And that has unraveled. As I've done this work of actually stepping into being an emotional woman, I now am in a very different place, right? Now I'm able to talk through my feelings with my husband. I'm able to yell at my husband, which you might be like, wait, why are we like acting like that's a good thing? Actually, it's a good thing because past me, she couldn't even fucking talk at all when she was having a confrontation that felt like too much with my husband. And now me, I can cry and I can say the hard things, even if I don't think he's gonna like what I'm gonna say. And if I need to, I can raise my voice. That is actually a sign that my nervous system has healed so much because past me was really, really good at fawning and freezing. And that is how I felt safe in my body and in my relationships is that I would fawn. So I would go into that like people pleasing. What do other people want? What do other people need? How can I be that for them? And then freezing, which is like I can't even cope, I don't feel anything, I'm completely shut down, nothing can even get in here. I am just like a wall. And this journey of letting myself feel my feelings and then learning how to have that emotional awareness with myself and that discernment of what I'm feeling and my ability to communicate them and my ability to feel them fully, it let my nervous system learn that I could express the full emotional range of my capacity and that I could express it with myself. Like I could let my feelings be felt with me, but I could also express them in my closest relationships. And I could stop taking responsibility for how everyone else feels around me. Because I know, I know, no, no, so many women just like me that have struggled with being emotionally numb and performing peace in our lives. It's not just your body that's talking to you in those moments, right? Like you are experiencing the knots in your stomach and the locked feeling in your throat and the heavy weight in your chest and all those other things, but it's also your nervous system that's talking to you. Like it's not letting you express things that you want to express. I hear this from clients of mine that are working on in my mentoring place or my mentoring program, I hear them saying things like, I am really having a hard time expressing my voice. And I know that your nervous system is a huge part of that, right? Like it's putting you in the place of overthinking everything all of the time. It's keeping you up in the middle of the night because you are overthinking about everything, or anxiety feels like it's running the show, or whatever it is. Like your nervous system is a huge piece of that. So as you learn how to feel and become more skillful at feeling your emotions, it unlocks those things in your body that have been whispering or talking loudly or screaming at you all along the way. And it also helps your nervous system broaden its range of what you can tolerate and what you can hold. And so for me now, I can hold the fullness of my emotions and I can express them with the people that I feel safe expressing them with, like the people that are closest to me. I can let myself be seen and witnessed in that, even if it's messy, even if they're not gonna like it, even if it's just like temporary, and I'm like, this is just how I feel right now, right? I can let that be there. And that is monumental grief that earthquakes through your body, and anger that courses through your arms, and joy that feels so good inside, and your capacity to play, and your ability to feel lighter and freer, and the ability to put on that cute top and look at yourself in the mirror and feel totally neutral about yourself and walk out the door and just be like, here I am, I look cute, I look cute in this top, right? Your capacity to move out into the world and to feel whole and beautiful and good enough inside might be on the other side of you letting yourself feel things, letting yourself feel things deeply. Because in my own journey, this has been a huge doorway into expansion. I have never felt more light, more expressed, more alive. I've never felt better. Like, truthfully, when I was going through those periods of numbness and performative peace, I didn't know that this version of my life was possible. And let me tell you, girl, it is possible. Ah, it is possible, and I'm living proof of that. And I don't say that to be like, oh, here I am on this pedestal. Like, no, I am just a woman on the path with you, babe. Like, that's what I am. I'm a woman on the path with you, babe. I happen to be really skillful at mentoring other women to do this work for themselves. And I am just a human. I am messy, I am real, and I feel all the things. And that is massive progress for me. And I know without a shadow of a doubt, that that's massive progress for my clients who are on the other side of having done this work. Because this is the work of wholeness. And this is the work of peace that isn't a performance, but it's actual peace that comes from deep, deep, deep down inside of you. And this is the kind of relationships that we actually want to have with people, right? Like old me, I had a backpack full of heavy bricks of this illusion that I was responsible for how everyone else thought and everyone else felt about me and how everyone else perceived me. And as I've healed so deep and so wide and let myself feel all of the feelings, that backpack, like it's empty, right? And then when new layers of stuff emerge for me to look through and sort through, I get to empty it out over and again. So now I'm just carrying a backpack full of the stuff that I want to carry, right? And that I am actually responsible for. And it's full of fun shit. When before it was full of weight, emotional weight that led me to overthink and overanalyze and try to control and to feel all these things in my body of like me really just not being able to express myself. And so I want you to know, if you're listening to this, that this is possible for you too. Like I really, really mean that. And I see these light bulb moments go off all of the time in my one-to-one mentoring clients. I can see the illumination of the old patterns, but also the actual confidence that my clients, and if you're if you're one of those clients and you're like, Yeah, she's talking about me, I'm absolutely talking about you, honey. I'm referring to the growth and the change and the peace and the sense of sturdiness that is so strong inside of yourself that you know you can navigate whatever the hell life throws at you. Cause let's be real, life throws some stuff at us, right? And not all of that stuff is like sunshine and rainbows and butterflies, right? Some of that stuff is like me in 2017 losing a child and being brought to my knees, right? And some of that stuff like my husband having a stroke that was just like a medical freak accident for a young, healthy man with no nothing to indicate that that would have been a possibility, right? So life is gonna throw some stuff at you. And the more that you can wire up your capacity to feel, the more your peace actually becomes lived peace and peace that you can feel no matter what's going on in your closest relationships. And it's you untangling from this emotional weight that you've been carrying for other people that nobody asked you to carry, right? Like trauma brain decided, trauma nervous system decided that you needed to carry that and take that on in order to feel loved, safe, and accepted in your relationships. But that is an illusion. And the version of you that I'm always talking about in here, the nourished woman you, right? The whole, lighter, freer at home in your body and in yourself, the sturdy you, the version of you, you may not relate to this yet, but this is what I want for you. I want you to feel joyful. I want you to play hard. I want you to laugh loud. I want you to have so much fun in your life. I want you to have so much deep pleasure in your life, like toe-curling pleasure. Yes, I want that for you. I'm holding that vision for you. You can access her more if you'll let yourself feel all of the things that are coming up and learn how to alchemize those emotions. Because it's not just like, let me just go through like emotion after emotion after emotion after emotion, taking yourself for a ride. What I'm talking about here is more of a soulful approach to working with your emotions. I've learned how to let myself cry on a street if I feel sad about my birthday breakfast. And I've learned how to not take on emotional responsibility for my mom and to heal mother wounds, right? And I've done that from that bandage point of what yoga is all about, reminding us of and helping us remember every time that we forget, which is constantly we forget, and then we have to be reminded to come back. And that truth at the essence of your yoga practice is that you are a spirit who is having a human experience. You are the soul in the role. And so I am telling you this because you're the soul who's witnessing the emotions happen, and you're letting yourself feel the emotions as they come up, and then you're working with them and alchemizing them and noticing that they have plentiful information for you to draw from, so that every part of you gets told that it is loved and safe and accepted by you. Every part of you is welcome here. Your guilt and shame are welcome here. Your joy and happiness and contentment are welcome here. Your sadness and grief and despair and hopelessness is welcome here. Your love, like love so big, your heart feels like it expands out into every galaxy that exists anywhere and everywhere all of the time. That is welcome here. All the parts of you are welcome here. All right, I love to know what this episode stirs in you. And if you're like, oh my gosh, I am so, so, so ready to feel lighter and freer and more at home in my body and more at home in my soulful self, reach out and let me know. You might be in the perfect spot to jump into mentoring with me and to really work on healing these patterns of overthinking and disconnection from yourself and feeling that sort of spacious you, that whole you, that nourished woman you that I'm talking to you about and painting the picture of.com. And if you're looking for a space for deeper support, mentorship, or simply a space to feel helped, I'd love to have you join us inside the Nourished Woman Sanctuary. The beautiful music you're hearing is from Sean Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band, and you can find them on all streaming platforms.