Done alot of Inner Work and Still Feel Stuck? Here's Why.

You’ve journaled about it.
Talked about it in therapy.
You understand your patterns…
So why do you still feel stuck?
In this episode, we’re talking about the gap so many self-aware women find themselves in — where you know what’s going on… but your body hasn’t caught up yet.
Because healing doesn’t happen in your mind alone.

Your body has to feel safe enough to actually process what’s there.
If you’ve been stuck in overthinking, analyzing, or trying to “figure yourself out”… this will help you understand why — and what’s actually missing.

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💜 If you’re ready for a gentle yoga practice that helps you feel at home in yourself and opens you up to feel more present and alive. Get a 10 minute somatic practice here. 

→ (https://kerimarino.eo.page/comehome)

🌿 More Free Resources for Women Ready to Grow

Good at Meditation and Restorative Yoga Guide
For self-aware women who feel like you’re bad at meditation and are ready to feel successful. 

Get it here -> https://kerimarino.eo.page/meditationguide

Meet Keri Marino 

Keri Marino is a Somatic Yoga Therapist and founder of The Nourished Woman, helping women move beyond overwhelm, anxiety, and self-doubt into embodied confidence and nervous system balance. Through women’s empowerment yoga, somatic healing, and inner work, she guides women to regulate their bodies, break old patterns, and reconnect with their strength, pleasure, and purpose. Her approach blends grounded spirituality with practical tools for real-life transformation.

Connect with her here:

https://www.kerimarino.com/ https://www.instagram.com/the_nourished_woman

https://youtube.com/@thenourishedwoman

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

If you still feel stuck on some level, even after having done inner work and having an incredible understanding of yourself, maybe you've got boatloads of notes in your journal. Maybe you have worked with a therapist for years. Maybe you have so much insight into the patterns that you notice in yourself and into the trauma that you've experienced and how it's informing how you're showing up in your life today. Like maybe you know all the things. And I think what people don't talk about enough in a growth and healing journey is that knowing all the things, having all the awareness, having done a lot of top-down processing, right? Like what we do with a psychotherapist or a mental health provider is a game changer. It will help you understand yourself and have so much compassion for yourself and really work with helping you not respond so much to the things that you're experiencing. Like it is incredibly valuable, and I'm in no way throwing shade on the mental health field because I love it and I I use it. I go and see a therapist regularly. And also there is this really common experience for so many self-aware women where you know all of the things and you have all of the insight, and maybe you are even the kind of woman that can literally like do therapy speak, like you know all the words, right? But it's still it's still like not fully clicking into place. There's this gap where maybe you don't notice, notice the difference that you really want to see, or maybe you keep sliding back into old ways of being that just don't feel good anymore, and frankly, you know better than to be doing, or maybe you're still feeling this real disconnection from your body. Like it's one thing to know it up here, but it's a whole different thing for your body and your nervous system to have caught up. And there's a reason for this. Like, if you're not crazy, you're not probably missing more conversations around it, or like you're not probably needing more analysis around it. You might be needing something very different to fill in that gap between all the self-awareness that you've gained and all of the understanding and insight that you've acquired from all the work you've done, which by the way is fucking fantastic. Like, I'm so proud of you. I'm so happy for you that you've gone as far as you have in your growth and healing journey that you would even be listening to a podcast like this one and making room for it in your life. Like, yes, good on you. So incredible. You are doing life-changing work that has a ripple effect on everyone around you that you relate to, but also I believe in the world at large. And hey girl, let's talk about this gap. Let's talk about the gap between knowing and embodying. Knowing and embodying. Because you're not stuck because you likely need to check some invisible box of better analysis. You probably need to bridge the gap, right, between what you know in your mind and how your body and nervous system are actually communicating and how they are working together. Because here's the reality there are two different systems that we're talking about here in my yoga therapy practice and in yoga therapy in general, but I really talk about it a lot in my practice. We work on the four pillars, and so the four pillars of you are actually your body, your mind, your spirit, and your life. And so oftentimes in conventional environments where you would be working on doing some inner work or doing some growth and healing work, you'd be working heavily on the mind part and hopefully on the life part too. And so you definitely probably have a lot of support that you've already gotten when it comes to how you're thinking and how you're understanding yourself, and also how you're applying that in your life. But if you notice, two of those four pillars probably weren't addressed very much in that therapeutic environment, and they were your body and your soul. And so to me, this is where somatic yoga therapy really steps in and fills in the gaps that were left out. And first off, I want to say if you're listening to this and you're like, hold up, she said soul. What I mean by that is your highest self. Your soul is your inner witness, it is the neutral, ever-present part of you that a yoga practice really helps you get in touch with. And really, if you've only practiced yoga as more of an exercise, or maybe you've only had like an exercise mindset about yoga, like, honey child, let me tell you, yoga at its core is a spiritual practice. And we do the physical yoga to prepare ourselves for the deeper work of tuning into our innermost selves. And so your soul is just that part of you that's present and neutral, and it observes and it has access to a connection to something bigger than you. So in yoga philosophy, we recognize that you have a singular soul, but that it's anchored into something infinite, and then that whole, like, how do you describe that bigger thing? That's up to you. You might call it God in a religious sense. You might relate to it as more of a spiritual misfit where it's like your own interpretation of what the divine is or the universe or the source is, or some of my clients really feel this connection through nature or through humanity, like it could be any number of things. But the soul work is really about integrating with your soul, connecting with your soul, transcending into a relationship with your soul on a regular basis, and yoga is pretty freaking good at that. And the other part of that is your body, and so in the body category, we're talking about like your physical body, like literally the bones, the muscles, the joints, the fascia. Fascia is so cool. And we're also talking about your nervous system, and we're talking about you know the different states that your nervous system tends to go in. So if you've been in therapy and there has been any talk about nervous system, or you've been like a nerd on TikTok or Instagram and you've been learning about your nervous system, you might already have some sense that there are these different states that your nervous system could be in, like fight or flight, or the window of tolerance, or fawn or freeze. By the way, that's huge for the approach that I take inside of my practice. And so when you're working with these four pillars, like we are in somatic yoga therapy, we're really tending to the body and the nervous system, and also the subtle body, which is like your energy body. It's the chakra system, it's the prana, the way the energy moves through your body. And so we get to work on all of those things. And in conventional approaches to mental health, you're not really able to touch on those two layers very often. The one exception to that would be if you are a person of faith, like for example, if you're a Christian and you were working with a Christian psychotherapist, you might have gotten some of that integration in there. Or maybe you worked with this psychotherapist who also had some kind of somatic training, right? But for the most part, generally speaking, you probably haven't worked with somebody that's just a somatic therapist or just a yoga therapist that can bridge these gaps for you. And I want to talk about the fact that those gaps are there. We've already acknowledged it, and the reason why is that we haven't fully brought in all four pillars of you. Body and soul have probably been left out of this equation. And so another truth that I want you to hear me say loud and clear is that all the great work that you've done on your mind, it does not translate to healing and integration in your body. Your body is a separate, connected part of your whole, and your body heals differently. It does not benefit as much as your mind from all the talking it out and the storytelling. Sure, it can that be very settling for your nervous system to have somebody validate your experience and listen to you and co-regulate with them. Absolutely. But also true, somatic-based healing, yoga, somatic yoga-based healing, they're just freaking different. They're different. Let me explain a little bit about that. So, somatic healing is about healing through the wisdom of the body. So we're actually tuning into your body and we're allowing your body to have its own embodied experience of processing what it didn't get to process. And I love to look to Peter Levine. I might be mispronouncing his name, so don't judge me if I am. It might be Peter Levine. I've like messed it up so many times in my head that I don't know which way is right anymore. But, anyways, his body of work, somatic experiencing, tells us so much about the fact that your body is an animal. And it actually like it has these cycles, these patterns of how it actually works through traumatic experiences. And if we don't get to complete those cycles, then we get these like patterns baked into our nervous system that we have an opportunity. It doesn't matter if something happened 20 years ago, for you to actually work through it in real time and to help your body catch up with all the great work that you've been doing in your mind, which has been amazing. I just want to affirm that. So we're really letting your body lead its own experience of healing from what has like created these patterns inside of you that no longer feel good to you and you would like to move past. And then somatic yoga therapy, it takes a slightly different approach. We're still using the wisdom of the body to heal what it has been holding. And it's not, I don't want you to think of it like some people think of it as like holding it like as a physical object, and it's not, it's not that. Like your body, you don't have like trauma like stored in one part of your body. That's not how this shit works. That's way oversimplication. It's more of these like patterns that get that wire up in certain situations and responses. So it's not like a physical block, it's moving a pattern through and helping your body process it. But in somatic yoga therapy, we're not just letting your body lead that experience, we're letting your soul lead that experience. We're really bringing a soulful connection into the healing process and into the integration point. And I think that this is such an important distinction to make because I'm biased, like let's be honest, this is my work, and so I am naturally biased that this approach is a great approach. So you can totally throw my insight into the trash if you're like, I disagree, like that's completely fine. Disagree with me if it doesn't feel right. But to me, if we're only working on the mind and on the life and we're not really tapping into the body and the soul, then we're missing. Like we're missing some of the key ingredients here of what really sets you free. Because to me, growth and healing, like, we don't do it because we're like gluttons for punishment. We do it so we can get into our full range of self. We do it so we can feel more expressed and alive and free, and we can soak in more pleasure, and we can like really have our hearts wide open to receive what we want to receive in relationship and give what we want to give in relationship, and we can be that like channel for good in the world. That to me is the nourished woman, that is the archetype of what we're working towards. I'm not her. She's all of us, she's all of us women out here doing this incredible work. But we're missing some of the key ingredients, and if we just do somatic work, we're still missing some of the key ingredients. Like, where's the soul in this equation? And so, what I love about somatic yoga therapy is gosh, like we get to work on every single layer, we get to work on every single ingredient that we need to actually be able to produce the thing that we want to produce, which is that liberation, it's that freedom, it's that wholeness, it's that space, it's that ability for you to show up in your life in the way that just like there's a part of you that knows deep inside that that's what you're moving towards, and that's what you're working toward, and this is what you're going to. Then I want to paint the picture that it's possible, and that there's these different aspects that need to be brought into the healing journey in order to help you move beyond what you've been feeling stuck in. And if you're listening to this and this has resonated on any level, I want you to know that there that this is exactly the work that we do inside of the nourished woman. And this is the work that I guide my clients through. And a really easy way for you to actually join in and experience this in real time is to join me for my candlelight restorative yoga on Zoom. It's twice a month. It's the best$20 you'll probably ever spend on yourself. And it's lovely because you not only get to experience these practices in real time, but you also get to be around other women who are all over the world and are doing these practices too. And you get to like feel that collective benefit of other women coming together and soaking it in. And of course, there are deeper ways. Um, like in candlelight restorative yoga, we don't really get to do a lot of like intense processing together. There are other ways that I hold spaces for that too. Walking away from this episode, I want you to know that if you still feel stuck, despite all the incredible work that you've done so far, it's not at a fault of your own. It may just be time for you to like work on these other pillars of yourself, and that there are very easy ways for you to do that. And really take an embodied-based approach to healing is a huge piece of it, and really weaving in the soul aspect of it is a huge part of it. Or maybe you're listening to this and you're like, wait, I didn't really work on my life part yet, because that can happen too. We can spend so much time working on here and working on within that we don't really apply it into our life. That may be your edge and your area. All right, it's been so great to connect with you today, and I will see you in the next episode.