Women and Our Bodies - Body Image Truths & Finding Liberation

In this episode, Somatic Yoga Therapist Keri Marino unearths the honest truth about women and our bodies including body image, the desires you hold, and what really helps you feel free. We explore what informed how you feel about your body so you can see that the struggles you've grappled with were never your fault, and get insight and inspiration into what really matters most - to help you heal your relationship with your body in a way that sets you free. To be more present, liberated and at peace. 💜

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Come Home to Your Body - free somatic yoga practice for women

->https://kerimarino.eo.page/comehome

Daily Devotion - 21 day therapeutic home yoga practice 

-> https://www.kerimarino.com/daily-devotion-21-day-program.html

The Nourished Woman Sanctuary - on-demand and live somatic yoga for women ready to feel wildly whole & free

-> https://www.kerimarino.com/the-nourished-woman-sanctuary.html

If this episode resonated, share it with a woman who needs it and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. 

Connect with Keri at https://www.kerimarino.com/ and @the_nourished_woman

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Welcome back to the Nourish Women Podcast, ladies. Today we are diving into a really focused conversation about women in our bodies. This is a yogic practice and satya and truthfulness. And it is also a conversation that I feel like I have been having with you all in my practice since the very beginning. But I want you to know that I'm going to be focusing in on it a little more directly and that this is a long-term conversation. Today is just the starting point again after so many different conversations around this. And so we're going to be exploring women in our bodies, not from a perspective of fixing them. This is not about optimizing your body. This is not about biohacking. This is about coming home to your body. And this is for any woman who has ever felt like you were in a battle with your body or that you struggled with disconnection with your body. This is for the woman who has already come so far in your relationship with your body. You can feel the progress that you made, but you know that there's more available for you. This is for the woman who loves yoga and suspects that it goes deeper than you imagined, or you want to know more about how to deepen your practice. This is for the woman who has done inner work, has done therapy, and can still feel the somatic imprints of unresolved things living in your chest or in your hips or in your jaw or in the pain that you feel in your body. And so, if you don't know me, I'm Carrie Merino. I'm a somatic yoga therapist for the past 17 years, and I've been practicing yoga as a therapeutic tool for the past 20 years. And so, just a little backstory. I originally came into yoga because I was having chronic pain and mental health issues, and those mental health issues included anxiety and eating disorders. And the chronic pain that I was experiencing was predominantly low back pain, but I was also having recurring migraines that would really take me out. And so I came to yoga just purely as a seeker, looking for mystical answers, looking for body-based solutions that were gonna help me. And it was just happenstance that I came into a yoga practice. But it radically transformed the very foundation of how I related to my body, and I never knew that it was gonna do that. Because a little further back in my story, I have had body image concerns as far back as I can remember. I literally put myself on my first diet when I was in kindergarten. I would take those like snack-size candy bars and I would cut them into like twelfths, and then I would allow myself like one twelfth of a piece of a candy bar so that I wouldn't get fat. I would run all over my house to try to burn calories. I was constantly comparing my beautiful little body to other girls' bodies and measuring up like, are they bigger than me? Am I smaller than them? And a lot of that tells you about the system that I was in, about my home life and about the trauma that I was experiencing in my childhood and the tumult of growing up, because I do firmly believe that a lot of times body image and food issues can begin as a coping strategy. It's a way to try to control and it's a way to find stability in the midst of what felt like a very chaotic and difficult experience, even amidst all the beauty and goodness of my childhood and all the love and all the constancy, all the food security, all the ways that I had a clean bed to sleep in and two parents in my home, right? Like I share a little bit about this because I want you to know that when I speak about body image issues, I'm not just talking about it from a clinical perspective. I am talking about it from a deeply personal perspective, with which this goes very far back into the youngest years of my childhood that I can remember at least. And it's been a lifelong journey for me ever since that time. And the place that I'm in now, I'll talk to you about a little bit later about where I am with my body now. But I think it's important to know that when we're diving into sensitive topics like this, that other women speak from experience, not just from I'm this isn't a trendy topic for me. This is like, oof, this is a major one that I've had a lifelong journey with. So I want to explore this a little bit more through the lens of where we came from. So, what is the backstory to body image issues and struggle? What is the back scenarios, the cultural influences that actually informed how you as a woman feel about your body? Because I can tell you one thing right from the start. If you are a woman, then I can guarantee that you have had body image struggles at some point in your life, if not currently, and that it's not your fault. It's not your fault. I have been working directly with women for the past 17 years and holding space for deep truths and inquiry and yoga therapy, and I've never met a woman who has not confessed or confided in me that they've had some body image issues. And when I've done polls on Instagram over many years, a hundred percent of the time women write back and say that they've had body image issues. So let's talk a little bit about what has molded and shaped how you view your body right from the very beginning. And so, oftentimes, just like speaking frankly, we've been taught to view our body from the outside. And so, diet culture, for example, if you grew up watching the elder women in your life try to control or restrict their weight and being vocal about that or criticizing their body, if you watched the male elders in your life criticizing women's bodies or people's sizes or themselves, if you watched the people that were the leaders in your life, your parents, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, the women and the men that you were looking to as examples of what was possible, if they were mirroring back to you criticisms of the body or other people or judgment or shame or difficulties, loving their own body, then you received programming, right? Information about how you should view your body. And so at the end of the day, all of us are looking for love and safety and acceptance when it comes to our bodies and ourselves. Like those are like core needs of a human being on a psychological level. Are we feeling loved? Are we feeling safe? And are we feeling accepted? And so, if you grew up watching, like one of my clients, for example, she's talked about watching her mother just abandon her body and really not take care of it at all, just ignoring her body, not nourishing it well, not brushing her hair, not doing the fundamental and basic things to actually just care for her body routinely in a way that would make it make it appear like she cared for her body. So we have all that like direct family inner circle of community influence over our body. But then we also have medical relationships with our body and medical relationships with those people. So if you had any early medical issues with your body, so I've had a client who was born with a club foot. I have had clients come into my practice who had very severe digestive issues at early ages, or heart issues, or things like that. Like if you had anything medically going on in your body at a very early stage in your life, or you witness that in the people around you, then that can inform how safe you feel in your body and how you view your body as a place of security and comfort, or a place of fear. So there's those pieces. There's also diet culture as a little bit more than what I was mentioning, just with your family unit. So, for example, going through a grocery store, there are tabloids and there are magazines all over lining the aisles. And I remember as a kid constantly seeing media around weight loss, and then hearing at family gatherings people talking about weight loss, and it just kind of feels like this diet culture influences everywhere. And so, if you've never heard the term diet culture, basically it is this idea that you need to fix your body, that there's something inherently wrong with your body, and that there are good foods and bad foods, and that if you eat these foods, then you'll get fat, and that like all these different ways that we're taught to fix our bodies in some way. And then there's the beauty industry, which similarly does the same. Please fix your body because it's not good enough as it is. We're sold this in any number of ways. Now, in the age of social media, if you ever so much as search in your search engine some particular topic that you're concerned about with your appearance, then good lord, every ad on your social media will be about that topic. You will be constantly getting it from every single angle. Every ad on your like browser, if you're looking at somebody's cooking blog or whatever, is gonna be talking about that issue that you're concerned about. And it's just constant, and it's I it feels like the beauty industry marketing is so much more pervasive now than it ever has been before. Because in the past, it was more just like seeing a billboard or walking through the mall and seeing like the perfume ladies and the makeup ladies. And now it's on, it's like intimate with us, it's constantly in our ear and in our faces. The like, for example, on YouTube, there are just so many different makeup tutorials that are out there, and it's awesome. Like, go for it. The beauty industry can be a way that we empower ourselves because we get a haircut that makes us feel like it represents where we are and how we want our appearance to be. But the beauty industry can also be a capitalist source of stress and strain on how you view your body. So we've got all these different influences. And then if you grew up in a faith tradition that was a part of your early childhood and middle childhood and beyond, then you had whatever the religious ideals of that community were layered into how you see your body. And so I came from a Southern Baptist upbringing, and there was a lot of purity culture and body shame just baked into, baked into it all together. I was at an event this past weekend and there was some dancing. I was at my brother's wedding, and I overheard a man in his 30s saying, like, I don't dance because I grew up Southern Baptist, and we were taught that dancing was the devil. And I just, I, I kind of inwardly chuckled. He was not talking to me. I just heard this in passing, and it's like, it's right. Basically, we were taught to not trust our bodies, that the urges and impulses of our bodies were not okay, and that we should be ashamed of them and we should absolutely not listen to them. And so a lot of the religious constructs over our idea of our body informed how we viewed pleasure or arousal, like very natural things that happen in the body, or the desire to move freely or dress ourselves. For me, growing up, we had to be worthy of going into God's house. And so getting ready for church was like an entire thing with doing our hair and wearing like these frilly fucking socks that I hated that had lace around the top of the socks. If you had to wear these, you may have loved them. I hated him. I thought they were itchy and uncomfortable. You had to be like dressed up heavily. And for me as a little girl, I was just much more interested in playing than getting dolled up and having big curlers in my hair in order to go to church and be worthy of being in God's house. Like there's just so many different layers. And what I'm trying to get at here is that you have had a lot of unique influences over how you view your body. And that these influences became the framework that you built upon throughout the course of your life. And this framework, if we tie it back to yoga philosophy, it really represents a vidya, which is one of the five klasia, which are the klasia are the five reasons why we suffer. And so avidya is like the core one, and it's this idea that we have some mistaken understanding of the truth. And so the truth from the yogic perspective is that your body is a vehicle for connection to God. And that's like the aim, right? We we want to view our body as a sacred vehicle for us to access and feel closer and do God's work here on this planet. And remember, I don't define God for you. That's your definition, girl. That's you deciding how you understand the divine and whatever words you want to use and whatever descriptions you want to use, but yoga is trying to elevate our state. And so physical practices in yoga historically have looked at this differently. Some of them have been about austerity and ascetism, which was like neglect of the body, the body as being something that we needed to turn away from, we needed to feed it very little, we needed to basically do the bare minimum for survival because it was all about moving above and transcendence. But in more modern yoga history and tantric yoga history and bhakti yoga, like we view the body more as the temple and as the sacred vehicle that we want to cultivate health in so that we can have access to these deeper parts of self, so that we can do God's work, so that we can be a vehicle for it here on this earth. And so Avidya means mistaken perception. And it's the idea that you and me and every woman and man and child and non-binary person, we have been handed a false lens to see ourselves through. And yoga's aim in part is to help us restore clear seeing, to actually see things for what they are. So body image wounds, body image struggles, they were never your fault. Like it was never about you. And we live in this very hyper-individualistic time in the wellness industry and even in the yoga industry where we feel like we have to take a lot of personal responsibility for something. But I'm gonna just challenge you to have a good laugh and to maybe have a good cry and to look at all these things that gave you a vidya because it was never your fault. These things came through you just moving through the world. And these industries, they've been benefiting from you being disconnected from your body. And even like patriarchal influences, which I didn't really even get into. Like they've benefited from women not knowing the holiness and the sacredness and the power of their own body. And I believe that this seeing through through more clear lens is something that we're gonna get to through this conversation. So I want to talk a little bit about what this actually looks like for you today, like what daily lived experiences like for women are as a result of these influences. And so I shared early on that I had a lot of body comparison as a child. I was constantly looking at other girls' bodies and comparing them to my own. I felt the need to restrict food and increase exercise in order to fit in and have an acceptable body. So it can look like that for kids and teens and adult women and elder women, it can look like that for all of us. But it can also look like tension that lives in the body or hypervigilance that lives in your body. So a feeling of stress in your body. And a lot of times, what's interesting about that, and I know you know the contrast of it, a lot of times we don't even know how much stress and tension we're we have in our bodies until we experience what it's like to let it go, which I know you've had that in a yoga practice already. And you're like, oh, I didn't even know those muscles were holding that. And then now they're not. This can also look like looking in the mirror at yourself and your eyes always going to the part of you that you don't love. Or I had a guest, Kat Smith, on my podcast, and she was, we were talking a lot about your relationship to your body in that episode. It's a great episode, by the way. And it's called self-love and perimenopause. And um she was talking about how she was getting ready for our episode, and she looked in the mirror and turned her face to the side and saw that she had some new wrinkles. And she was like, Oh, hi, girls, look, look at these wrinkles. But we're not always that kind and playful with ourselves. Sometimes we see an age mark. Um, yesterday I looked in the mirror, I was wearing a bathing suit, and I was just kind of like criticizing for a split second this part where the bathing suit like hugs my hips and what that looks like. It can look like that. It can look like complete denial of the body, like um not listening to hunger cues or satiety, like when your body is telling you that you're full. It can look like emotional eating, it can look like avoiding food when you're stressed, it can look like holding back from sexual pleasure or communicating about your body's needs. It can look like any number of things. It can look like watching a show and then feeling terrible about your body afterwards. It can look like having issues with your digestive system that conventional medicine can't help you solve. Like there can be so many different layers of how we relate to our body in daily life that I want you to start paying more attention to. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about my experience of my body at this stage. So I can tell you that I'm really pretty neutral about my body at this point in time. I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about my body as I move through the day. And this is completely contrasted to a past version of me that spent a vast majority of my time, a lot of it, thinking about my body, what it looked like, what people were thinking about it, what it was doing, like all the different, just so much time and energy spent thinking about the body. And now my relation to it is pretty darn neutral. I don't, it doesn't consume a lot of my energy. And also I view my body as a devotional, sacred temple. It is something that I tend to with love and care on a daily basis. I don't like every part of my body. For example, I've recently shared that I have varicose veins in my legs. And this came on as part of my pregnancy journey. So I got them in my first pregnancy and then they went away, and then I got them in my second full-term pregnancy, and they stayed. And then when I carried my third full-term baby, they stayed and worsened. And I'll admit, I don't love them. I don't love how they feel. I don't like the heaviness that they cause in my legs. I don't like the bulging veins that I see when I wear a pair of shorts. There's this picture in my grandmother's house where I wore a shorter dress. And for whatever reason, the way the light hits and the way that the photo turned out, it just really showcases my varicose veins. And honestly, every time I see that picture, I cringe because I just feel misrepresented by my veins. Like I love my body, I love it so much. I am so Seriously grateful for my body. I feel so in awe and in reverence of my body. And then when I see my veins in a picture, I'm like, oh man, I don't love that part. And that's the thing. Like, we used to have this really big idea around body positivity. It was a whole cultural movement. I can't remember the exact time, but I want to say like the early 2020 range or a little bit before that. And women were really preaching that we needed to love our bodies, love our bodies, like our bodies all the time, always feel good about our bodies, only be positive about our bodies. And I think, just frankly, that this is bullshit. I don't think that this acknowledges the full spectrum of what it's actually like to be in a body because it's complex and there is love and there is immense pleasure and there is play and there is joy. And there is also sometimes pain or complicated medical issues or dynamics where you have nervous system patterning or psychological patterning that are showing up in your body and they take real time and effort to resolve. Or and some of them don't resolve, they end up being things that you live with. And so where I am now, mostly neutral, still have bits and pieces that I don't love, but I very much accept and practice compassion around because I'm so grateful that my body gave me beautiful babies and varicose veins are part of that. I would do it all over again. And also, one of the things that I'm probably the most proud of is that I've actually learned to trust my body and to stay in my body. Because when you have the background that I have of sexual abuse and the religious shame and the different childhood trauma that I experienced, it it that was not my default setting. And I have worked long and hard to get to a place where I can stay in my body during sex and I can be open and available to experience a lot of pleasure and I can dance freely and wildly like the white girl I am and have the very best time. And so whenever I share things like this, just know that it's not about comparison. I'm just trying to give you an honest example of women's experiences, and I am a woman sharing part of my experience. And I don't want to like this is real. This is real, truthful things that I've seen from women in my practice and in myself. And I think that a lot of women in my practice, you might be one of them, know how far you've come with your body. Like you can see the difference and you can feel the difference, but you still don't feel free and you still don't have the kind of access to pleasure or relaxation or ease or trust or safety or joy or neutrality that you're looking for when it comes to your body. And so I want to name how far you've come, and I also want to name the desire. And part of how we get there in the yogic philosophy, there's a concept of svhyayaya, and it means self-study. And it's basically honest inquiry without judgment. It's really looking into your relationship with your body, not as a criticism, not as evidence of your faults, but as something that you're consciously engaging in and you're looking at. Let's talk about what we want. Ooh, let's get into desire. What do you want when it comes to your body? So there's a quote by Ruby Cower, and I might be mispronouncing her last name, so please forgive me if I am. She has this poem. And I said to my body softly, I want to be your friend. It took a long breath and replied, I've been waiting my whole life for this. So that's the poem. And every time I read that poem, it makes my eyes tear up a little bit. It makes my heart feel warm. And it makes me feel happy because I genuinely believe I've oftentimes talked about women's bodies like the giving tree. If you've ever read that book by Shelley Silverstein, like it will just give and give and give and give and give. All your body wants to do is be here for you. I think of the body as like an ultimate loving, generous part. And so let's talk about what you, real women, want when it comes to your bodies. I think that at the core, you just want to feel at home in your body. You want to feel comfortable in your body as you move through the day, as you try on different outfits, as you have intimate relations, like sexual relations with people. You want to exude comfort and confidence in your body that carries you through the day and also ripples out and positively impacts other girls and women in the world. I know that so many of you are thinking about my kids are watching me. So I want to be giving them an example of what a healthy relationship with my body looks like. And I want to be encouraging them to form healthy relationships with their body as well. I think that women want to be present and to feel genuinely and wildly at home in yourself, in your body, in a way that leaves room for the deep belly laughs that literally make you tear up because you're just so good. You want to be available to receive pleasure. Toe curling, yes, pleasure. You want to eat a meal and actually look at the meal and feel your mouth water and smell it and enjoy every bite. You want to eat the ice cream and not feel guilty about it. I don't really like ice cream. Maybe you do. Maybe you want to eat the cookie and just enjoy the fuck out of it and not feel like you need seven more or judge yourself for wanting it. You want to be able to really be satiated and feel content in it. You want to be able to take on compliments and actually let them sink into you. You want to be able to rest in a way that really restores you. You want to roll out your yoga mat and have a delicious yoga practice. And you want abundance. You want to feel healthy. You want to have, when I was in nutrition school, they talked about how one of our roles was to help people have better quality of life. And so I know so many of you are looking for more quality of life. You want to live longer and you want to have a better life as well. You want to look in the mirror and just feel neutral about what you see as you put on makeup or wash your face or deodorant or whatever you're doing. You just want to feel pretty neutral about your body. You're not taking inventory, you're not analyzing, you're not judging or shaming yourself. You want to stay engaged and present during sex. You want to be able to communicate what your wants and needs are. You want to be able to navigate difficult conversations and have tools that you can work through in your body to find ease and comfort and to expand your capacity to hold those hard moments. During ordinary moments of being alive, you want to feel fully in it. You want vigilance to soften, that like chronic looking for danger that your nervous system can be doing. You want that to soften. You want anxious feelings in your body to chill out. You want to stop managing your body and start living in it. And I think underneath all of this, what you really want is just to feel like your body is something that is genuinely yours. It is sacred, it is worth tending, it is worth knowing. It is something that you have shradd, you have faith and you have trust in, you have lived experiences, lived relationships with this. You understand that your body holds wisdom and that you're able to listen to your body when it communicates with you. And you're able to open up and enjoy your body in a way that really improves your life on so many different levels. So it would be really easy to stop this episode here, but there's more to say. Let's talk about what actually helps you get there, what actually helps you get to where you want to be when it comes to your body. And it is not biohacking, and it is not some magical formula for the perfect morning routine or the perfect nutritional regimen. It is not just affirmations that you write on your mirror and you say back to yourself, it is not the right outfit, it is not the right hairstyle, it is not some magical invisible box that you're gonna check that's just gonna turn the light bulb on of feeling good and at home in your body long term. One of the women I was gathering your research for this episode, I was polling women on Instagram and Facebook and asking them different questions over the course of a week. And one of the questions I asked is what is the hardest part about healing your relationship with your body even after all the work that you've done? And one of the answers was that everything is permanent, is temporary. So basically, she's doing things to improve her relationship to her body, but then they don't last. And so I want to talk about how we can actually make sustained change, durable, lasting change in terms of how you feel in your body and about your body as you move through your life. And really, like honestly and truly, it is the devoted, sustained, embodied practice of tuning in over and over again. Because this wound, these wounds that we carry from past experiences and from programming and from trauma and from fear, like fear that we won't be loved, saved, or accepted, the shame that we carry, it actually is not just in the mind, right? It's also in the psyche. It's in the it's in the psyche, the nervous system, the body. And so we actually have to address on a regular, ongoing basis where we actually hold that stuff. And so if it's in your body, if it's in your nervous system, then that's what I mean, babe. You got to keep coming back home to your body over and over again, because that is what is going to literally rewire how you relate to your body. That is where you're going to shift the paradigms that you hold, the nervous system patterns that you keep defaulting back to, is through that steady yoga practice, through this ongoing conversation of tuning into your body and listening to it. Because it's one thing to understand these concepts in your mind. You can understand that body image struggles were never your fault and still feel the effect of it every single day of your life. Knowing doesn't release the somatic imprints, practice does over time, consistently, with the guidance of someone who understands both the psychological aspects of it and the yogic technology that can reach it. And so, really getting in there in a way that's going to address the underlying things that are going on is an important piece of it. And this is where yoga practice works in ways that nothing else does. From my, this is my biased opinion as a yoga therapist. Because yoga works with the full spectrum of you. It is not just about your fitness, right? I know you know that, or you wouldn't even be listening to this podcast. Yoga is about your relationship with your body, your mind, your spirit, and your life. It's working the four pillars. And yoga is a full spectrum therapeutic tool. It is not just about asana, which are the physical poses. Asana on a deeper level means embodiment. Asana is about connection to your body on a deeper level. It is the kinesthetic intelligence that you build when you practice. Kinesthetic intelligence is literally you can feel your body. You can feel the intelligence and the wisdom of your body. You can understand it. And yoga practice is also about philosophical aspects. And I've been highlighting those as we move through this podcast episode. It's about understanding through that clear lens and lifting the veil of avidya. As we breathe, as we move, as we tune back into clear understanding, we're retraining our nervous system to respond differently. For me, yoga practice, and I've heard this time and time again, fundamentally rewrote the way that I even thought about my body. Because for so many women, the yoga practice is the first place where you simply engaged with curiosity with your body. You moved, you breathed, you noticed, it wasn't a performance, nobody was expecting anything of you. You were just in a safe place that impacted your nervous system positively, that held space for what was going on psychologically, that gave you time and space to just feel, that engaged the healing potentiality of your own being for itself with itself. And so yoga can literally rewire all of these things. And when we meditate, it allows us to be quiet and connected and still. When we do restorative yoga, we're still learning how to do these, these like technologies, these ways that we're present and engaged with our body in a variety of different body positions and body states when we practice yoga. And this devotion to yourself and to your practice rewrites the story. And I'm not talking about, just to be clear, I'm not saying like a once-a-month yoga practice is gonna do this for you. I'm trying to be really honest that a regular, consistent, ongoing practice is where you're gonna get these results. And part of the yoga philosophy that applies here is called tapas. And tapas is about discipline, it's about the heat of a consistent devoted practice. It is not coming from a place of like force or willpower or like punishment. Tapas is about the discipline that comes through love and devotion. It's about coming back again and again in a steady way that produces transformation over time. And this slow, sustained, unsexy, deeply effective work of showing up for yourself regularly is enough to produce massive structural change in how you relate to your body. And I say that as a woman who's felt that for myself, but I've also seen it in hundreds of women, if not thousands of women in my practice over these past seven years. I have seen time and time again what this does to a woman's relationship with her body. And I will say for some of us, people like me, the relationship with your body was much more complex and layered due to trauma. And so it wasn't yoga practice alone. It was getting into the philosophical aspects and looking at the psychological aspects too, that was really important. So we're just getting started in this Women in Our Bodies series. I hope that you walk away from this conversation having a lot more understanding about yourself, a lot more compassion about where all this stuff even came from. Let's stop making systemic issues personal failings, shall we? And knowing that it's not your fault if you struggle with body image issues today, or if you don't feel as free and at home in your body as you want to, and also knowing that you hold so much power, so much possibility to shift this, to make progress, to transform your life for the better in ways that are gonna leave you feeling more wildly whole and free. The work that I'm talking about here, this is part of what we do inside of the Nourished Woman. I have a program called Daily Devotion. It is a 21-day guided program that helps you engage with this kind of therapeutic yoga practice in just 10 minutes a day, and you've got two months to work through it. It's heavily guided, heavily structured. You just log in and do a practice every single day that's gonna help you with that. And on a bigger level, I have the Nourished Woman Sanctuary. And it is a place for ongoing devoted practice. You get a monthly calendar at the beginning of each month that talks you through specific practices to do. You get a theme, and you also get two live Zoom classes with me every single month. And so this is a place for you to feel really held, really supported in a devotional somatic yoga practice that weaves in the full yoga medicine that's out there. I would love to hear from you about this episode, about what stood out for you, about what felt tricky about it, about the progress that you've already made and where you want to go. Because we are going to be digging a lot deeper into this conversation in future episodes. And I want to know, like truly, I love conversations with you. I want to know what's on your mind, what's on your heart, and what you'd like me to speak on next. Bye for now.