#40 - Allie Armitage: Body Wisdom, Trust and Embodied Leadership

In this episode, Sam Bell speaks with coach, facilitator and somatics practitioner Allie Armitage about body wisdom, creative practice, ancestry and embodied leadership.

Allie shares how learning to listen to the body changed the way she relates to decision-making, creativity and trust. Together, Sam and Allie explore somatics as a way of accessing felt intelligence, practising differently, and noticing when something is alive, complete or being overworked.

The conversation also opens into conscious business: celebrating the small shifts that lead to big milestones, allowing soul to be present in work, and building with other people who want to practise entrepreneurship differently.

This episode explores:
• Somatics, felt sense and body intelligence
• Small practices as anchors in chaotic times
• Trusting body signals alongside rational thinking
• Ancestry, lineage and stories held in the body
• Horses, nature, music and creative practice
• Refining work without overworking it
• Conscious entrepreneurship and soul presence in business

Bio:
Allie Armitage is a coach, facilitator, trainer, writer and somatics practitioner. Through Embodied Visionary, she supports emerging leaders, entrepreneurs and forward-thinkers to bring ideas to life with embodiment, alignment, integrity and awareness. Her work draws on systems and design thinking, emotional intelligence, conscious leadership, human-centred design, somatics, creative practice and mysticism.

Guest links:
• Allie Armitage: https://www.theembodiedvisionary.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alliearmitage
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/allie.armitage
• Allie's writing, creating and upcoming events: https://allisonarmitage.substack.com/

Conversation references:
• Christian Duell's Natural Genius: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1GdoioUsgMWdFLDOb5Motl
• Bomba Estéreo - Astropical: https://open.spotify.com/album/21U3vjlzUXb642LW0Ventl
• Reyna Tropical: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7i6bx5ASeX99tjQYqahDXL
• My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34146782-my-grandmother-s-hands
• SAND documentary: https://scienceandnonduality.com/films/in-the-circle-of-life/
• Morning Pages / Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/615570.The_Artist_s_Way
• Conscious Venture Labs in Baltimore: https://novellacenter.org/

Chapters:
00:00 Welcome and Christian's introduction thread
01:29 Practice as an anchor in chaotic times
04:22 What somatics means
05:25 Learning to trust the body's signals
12:03 Reaching the edge of familiar tools
13:50 Ancestry, lineage and embodied stories
24:31 Imagination, horses and embodied communication
32:36 Nature, Morning Pages and creative practice
35:24 Music, aliveness and creative expression
37:38 Refining, overworking and noticing what is alive
41:40 Creative practice, clients and meaningful milestones
44:00 Conscious entrepreneurship and practising business differently
47:03 Natural genius, growth cycles and closing reflections

Credits:
Hosted by Samantha (Sam) Bell in Kiama and Baltimore, 22 April 2026.
Produced at the Kiama office, 22 April - 7 May 2026.

Natural Genius Podcast https://naturalgenius.com.au

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to the Natural Genius Podcast. We're here to help you tap into your natural genius. Let's go. Having just met with Ali, I'm absolutely delighted to share this with you. We talked about ancestors and the feeling sense in our bodies and being able to trust that, having practice, being able to connect in with ourselves and to feel more peace. And had just the most beautiful time together. I hope you enjoy listening to Allie. Welcome to the Natural Genius Podcast. I am overflowing with excitement. It's so great to meet you.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

It's so great to meet you too. I feel such a delight in getting to be in conversation with you and getting to know you too.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

We've got to do a quick shout out to Christian from the get-go. Yes, absolutely. Thank you, Christian. So we've just worked out we're both on the East Coast, but different East Coasts, aren't we? Landmasters, yeah. You've also got an award today. You're the first third generation natural genius guest, which makes me pretty excited. The way that this lovely network is growing. I'm sure you see this through your clients and your work that you get recommended by one and then the next. This really lovely web of interested souls. What do you want to talk about first?

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Endless themes that we could go down. Something that's been top of mind for me lately is practice, actually, and what living practice means. And just wrestling with the chaos, the change, the tumult. Um and in my last chapter of learning, I would say I've gone pretty deep into somatic work and working with the body and the nervous system. And a lot of that is about the practices that we have to be able to connect and to, and then also I'm really interested in creative practice and what practice means in that way, and just like the little rituals that can hold us in our lives. And I find them to become more and more of a lifeline when the world is just doing this, and of course, living here in the United States right now is it's doing this, the spinning, the incredible collapse and change that we're a part of. And I also look for the micro, like the smallest things that could actually be a helpful anchor. So I've really started to think about practice as some of that anchor and lifeline of just like, oh, if I can write for 10 days for 10 minutes a day, or I go for my sunset walk, or I connect with these friends in this way, or I just let myself feel the inside of my body and rest there for 60 seconds, just the smallest of small things. Um, and how helpful they can be, as well as a way of getting out of the overintellectualization, which I'm very wont to do. I love my brain loves ideas, but I've really started to recognize I can get so lost in them. And I think sometimes I look around and see the landscape of like, wow, we're getting so lost in hashing out ideas, but like what is happening? Like, how are we actually practicing? What does it mean to like bring these things down through the body and into earth and onto this plane in a way that like really moves things forward or alters our tangible world? That's what I've been thinking about a lot lately.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Thank you so much for sharing because practice, a few different people recently have said that to me, and I just think it feels like it's in a few people's landscapes, which is so lovely to pass on to others. Tell me about somatics for those who have never come across it.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Beautiful. It's it's also one of those that could have so many different words put on it, but really it's experiential. It's kind of tapping into the aliveness of the living organism that is a body, which includes um our felt sense of things, it includes the nervous system, it includes sensation. I think it includes emotion, it includes actually the mind, the brain as well. It includes all of it, and it doesn't stop at rational intelligence, just the intellect. So it's really taking into consideration the aliveness of our, you know, skin cells and all the other parts of us. And um, there's a lot of modalities into that practice. Um, so a lot of things fall under somatics, but that's kind of the definition of it, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

It must be unique to everyone. Tell me about what you love about the work that you do now.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Oh, yes, for sure. It has changed so many times over an experience for me where I didn't know how to listen to my body, and it had some challenging impacts for me. So I was moving in to a home in DC when I was living in Washington, DC with a couple of friends, and um, we were really trying to do this like intentional kind of co-creative living together. And we were looking at this house that on the surface looked beautiful and like just had what we wanted, was affordable, which is like impossible to find in DC. But the landlord who was walking us through, I just got these like spidey senses of a no, I don't, I don't feel comfortable. And yet, the two friends I was looking with, one of them was just really sure this was the right thing. And like the my mind could rationalize all the reasons why it all made sense on paper why we needed to do this and why we needed to move fast. But my body was like giving me all these signals of discomfort, like a lot of tension in my belly, a lot of just tightness, a lot of those alarm bells that saying, like, I don't know about this. And I overrode them because of many reasons, and it's been my own journey of forgiving myself for that in that moment. And then what transpired was two, we signed a two-year lease, and it was just two years of really dramatic and hard things happening. We had mold in the house, we had a flood, we it was like the plagues came down, and it was really painful, and it took a lot to extricate myself from it. And as I was leaving that situation, I just felt this deep need to learn how to listen to my body because I knew that I had known in the beginning, but something wasn't lining up in my capacity to trust and understand that knowing and let it override the logic or let it be important in the conversation. Not that one has to dominate the other, but they just need to have equal footing. And so that through a winding path of moot moves, I moved to the southwest in the United States. I was living in New Mexico for a while, I was there during COVID, and so it just became this like landscape for me to really start studying my body and how I learned to listen to this language that's happening within me. And so taking different trainings and learning from different teachers, and it was really just an incredibly profound experience that opened me up to so many other areas of discovery, as well as I think my own creativity, my voice, my ancestral work, which we were talking about a little bit before, before recording, of just like, you know, I think our bodies carry the stories of those who came before us as well. And so I started to realize that learning about my body meant I need to kind of I need to learn more about the stories of my ancestors, and that's been its own incredibly rich area of learning and growth and expansion. And so it's changed my life in so many ways. Um and I would say, I suppose when I bring that in to work with clients, there's all different ways that we want to work with the body. And so some folks, sometimes I think of it as a language, like some people really want to get fluent in it, and it's the language they most speak. And then others, it's like, I'm not as fluent in this language, and that's okay. And there's no judgment on, you know, it's just which languages do you want to be speaking? So for those that really feel the draw towards speaking that language, we do a lot of work of just attuning, using a lot of mindfulness practices, somatic awareness practices, and then practices for helping process and move through what's coming through the body, and also understanding how you know, what we're struggling with or what we're trying to create, how the body is a part of that process, how it's communicating with us, how it's connected, what it's sharing, where we might get stuck, and how we support that at the body level. And um yeah, I one other thing I guess I'll say with that is that it's so fascinating to me, at least, that working with the body feels like kind of bottom-up work a lot, where I can try to change my mind, but my mind just wants to loop and like do the habitual thing. I have found it so liberating to work with the body because the body's often influencing what the mind is thinking, like our state, our nervous system state, what's happening in the body has a really profound influence on our thoughts, when we're relaxed and open in the body, when we feel safe enough, we're we can see things in a different way. And our mind makes up that story. But when we're on alert, when we're tense, when the nervous system's agitated, we start creating a different kind of story about what we see, and it may or may not match reality. So if we can help support the body into more states of just relaxation or embodiment or our capacity to feel the full range of what is moving through us, I think it's helped me change in really profound ways that I don't have to try and convince my mind. Like the mind will follow. And that's one thing I think that folks really grab onto once they start experiencing it. It's like, oh, I can I can work in a really different way. Things start opening up and shifting when I work from the body up.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

The two threads that I wanted to go with is there more people being drawn to this sort of work and also the ancestral pace seems really obvious for us to keep talking about.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Yeah, totally, for sure. What a great surprise, too, because I never know who wants to talk about it and where they want to go. I love it so much. My sense is that there is an aware, a growing awareness that we're kind of hitting the edge of how certain tools can help, or how certain ways are working. And when we hit the edge and they're not working, or they're not helping us anymore, or we cannot experience the relief, the aliveness, the growth that we're looking for, we have to turn towards something else. And I think it's often when we come to that edge that we're more willing to look outside. And it was the same for me. It took me going to a point of like, I have run out of, I have literally been using all the tools I was taught, and I can't move the needle on this anymore. So I need something else, I need another perspective, another way. And I think that's that's what's bringing a lot of folks to this place now. I mean, I guess that's how we change, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:14

That's just such a gift in hindsight.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Exactly, totally.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

I really do think it's wonderful to connect into ancestry and to sense into the support that is there through my cells, through my spiritual sensing. I mean, even in this conversation, I've got sort of tingles through my body, and it's lovely that we're talking about somatics. It's the opposite to what you felt going into that house in DC. Sometimes things feel like they're being guided. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

I completely agree with that so much. I mean, one other, I guess, thread to draw from the somatics piece is I feel like the other powerful part of a somatic awareness is we're so attuned to, like you're saying, you can feel the tingles. Like that tells us so much that like do we even have words for, but it can be such a an orientation that I think is so powerful that sense. Um, yeah, it's really amazing. And I feel like with my what was so incredible and has been so incredible, I've had multiple moments where I've just known my ancestors are speaking to me. And I mean, you saying what you said to me at the beginning of this call, I was like, okay, that's another one. And it's just, it blows my mind every time. Um, but when I started maybe four years ago, five years ago, to really want to know more about the history of parts of my family, I took a class. Um, I was taking a class that was specifically for folks of European ancestry who live in the United States, um, and within like a social justice context. So really helping people go trace their lineage to kind of know who they were before they came over here and participated in the project that was colonizing the United States and what we now have as um this version of our government here. And uh yeah, so that alone was so fascinating to just start like tracing the lines in the movement. And as I took this class, my mom just started discovering all this information about a particular line in her family. And we they found a a cousin they didn't even know they had through Ancestry, through my aunt who had done Ancestry, and she had been given up for adoption, the family never knew, and so they were having this reunification and he had this hunger to learn. So he was just uncovering all this information and connecting with people, literally right as I'm taking this class. And I just felt, um, I just felt like, oh, my ancestors want to be known, like they really want to be known, and they're coming alive. And as I'm trying to go down this process, they're just like, here's some information. And that is also such a blessing and a privilege. And I know not everyone has has that experience, and so I'm really grateful that that was something I was able to experience, and I came to find a particular great great aunt of mine who was just incredible. Her name is Cecilia, Celia Greenstone, and she was like a radical organizer even in Poland before they immigrated over to the United States. She was super involved on Ellis Island, helping Jewish immigrants come over and not get deported, and in the early 1900s, and so and there's a room named after her in Alice Island, which is really incredible. Just like this richness, this aliveness that was so beautiful to learn about and understand and know some of my story and um create a connection to someone who I feel real kinship with and who I kind of look to as now as an ancestor that I feel really inspired by, even though I didn't know her by any means, but I can feel the liveness of her like wanting to be known now and have her story here. Um so that's been one just incredible piece of discovery and starting to like place context around my family and the things we've gone through and experienced and what's in my body because of what's been, you know, passed down kind of on each side of my family. Um, both the brilliance and the trauma and the things that have been hard, um, but trying to look for for both of them. And it helps me. Um, I think it's Rezma Manneckum, the author who he's a US author who writes a lot about race and culture. And he wrote this incredible book called My Grandmother's Hands, and he talks about how we need to contextualize what people are experiencing, like what shows up in people's bodies today doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It's like often tied to the stories and what's happened generationally. And when we learn that we can like redignify people and give more humanity to the things that maybe we otherwise would stigmatize or look at as an issue or a problem. And so I've even found that for myself. Like, you know, having ancestors that fled pogroms in Europe, um, you know, the the anxiety or the like moments of just like fight flight that seem to come out of nowhere. I'm starting to understand now. Like, oh yeah, I get why that might be happening for me. It needs support, like that response needs support in my body. And also I'm not making this up necessarily. And I just I think I wonder for all of us to have more of that context for ourselves. It just helps us have a little more humanity for who we are. Keep talking, Ellie. Oh, well, thank you. Um yeah, it's great to have an outlet for these thoughts because it's things that I I do think about a lot. And, you know, I was also thinking of a movie, a documentary I saw that um I don't know if you have come across. It's created by the Science and Non-Duality Sand Organization, and they are doing these documentaries of indigenous organizations all over the world or indigenous communities all over the world. And they did one that I saw, I think it's called In the Circle of Life. Um I think that's what it was called, and it was about Aboriginal peoples in Australia, and it was mind-blowing, just absolutely incredible. And the healing that takes place when people, especially those who've experienced erasure of their culture and their life ways, are able to return to that. And what that does for someone in knowing themselves, knowing who they are, having this ancestral connection, having like just like life pour through them in another way again. It was so profound to watch that documentary. So I highly recommend it, and it really touched me in a way beyond words, I think, of just like why that ancestral work is so profound because it does animate something in us and like a resilience, a knowing, a sense of kind of belonging to our own skin. Um, you know, I've been in a practice I wasn't raised with much Jewish tradition, but my mother is Jewish, and I've been starting to learn more about different practices and really specifically. Trying to seek out those that I align with, um, who I find, you know, progressive and politically aligned with. And it's been just mind blowing to start realizing, like, wow, look at all this wisdom that's like hidden in our lines that we can return to and and bring alive today and evolve and change and doesn't have to stay exactly as it was. But it just to me has felt like such a treasure trove of wisdom, which is another thing I know we were mentioning of like, where is the wisdom for how we navigate in these times? And I felt so grateful to just be able to come into spaces where I can connect to that wisdom and realize, you know, all of that's here and and connects me to all those that I don't know. And as far back, you know, as it these practices were alive, like there is something that kind of passes through and is transmitted in that. And yeah, it I wonder if those things really help us in a time where there's so much, you know, in this time, there's so much friction, there's so much conflict, there's so much chaos that we're having to navigate through, being able to kind of root into something that's vaster than that feels really helpful. And I wonder what our ancestors like want to help us with, you know, and how they can help guide us. And this documentary I was referencing, that's a lot of what the indigenous folks who were talking about, their reclamation was also a part of like really bringing forth the wisdom that's here and how we navigate these times and and lead in really different ways and change, go through change.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Amazing, Allie. Isn't that the fun of conversations like this? We don't know where they're gonna go from when we first think about having them. Allie, tell me a little bit more about you. For some reason, I wanted to ask you about sport and when you were younger, what did you enjoy doing when you were younger? And was there a competitive edge to your life? Tell me about earlier, Allie.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

What a great question. Um, you know, when I was very young, I was so in my imagination. I was just an imaginal little child. I'm into astrology and I have a lot of Pisces. I'm like Pisces Rising, Pisces Sun. So I was always 12th house sun. Like I was always in those other realms, I think, and telling stories and drawing and having imaginary friends and imaginary communities, and my sister and I would kind of play inside these worlds that we constructed. Um, and so I was definitely oriented that way when I was quite young. And then, as you know, I think some growing up in my family and some just inside the culture at the time, there was a big push towards sports, and I had that in me as well. Um, but I had to bop around a bit before I found what I enjoyed. Um, my dad really wanted me to play softball, but I hated softball. I was just not into it. It's not my jam. I was forced into it for a few years, and then I was like um I ran track. I did like running, but once it got too intense, I was I was done with that. Um, my mom loves horses, and so we rode horses growing up and we did like competitive riding. And I mean, I now I also just like really enjoy the beings that horses are. And I think they also we grew up with horses at our house, which was incredible, and also a lot of work because we had to take care of them. Um, but I think it also taught me a lot about energetic communication. I look back now, and you know, with a horse, you're constantly communicating through the body, through somatic senses. You're reading them, they're reading you. When you're riding, you really try to like communicate through your body a sense of comfort and connectedness so that you can be in relation to one another. It's it's they're such teachers in that way. I didn't know what was going on in me when I was riding, but now I can look back and realize like, oh wow, that was, I think, developing my sense of like relating through the NL.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Just as a little interjection to show connection, I was just at um this friend Sarana, I was just mentioning her property. I don't realize Cal that they really don't need us. And how just kind of but leading with the heart and being around them, how much can come from friendship? It it was really profound. Oh, that's beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

Yeah, totally. Were you able to connect with a few of them? Is that what you said?

SPEAKER_01 27:29

Two of them that don't get ridden for many different reasons, but they're beautiful beings because they are so together. Then for them to come to me felt so so special over many days of being around them. And I hadn't understood that about horses before, but I think that that comes with a great teacher, like Sarana was fabulous at being able to quietly guide me around allowing and sensing into it. I love this about various animals. I remember when I was lucky enough to swim with dolphins in New Zealand and having quite profound experiences with them coming up to me. It's like this beautiful mutual respect that feels similar. And and with Sarana with the horses, she was saying, introduce yourself and don't get too close, don't reach out to pat them straight away. Quite a privilege to get to know them through that felt sense.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

That's so beautiful and so true. They're almost like peers in a way, and some of it, I'm sure, is their size. Like you can't you have to respect them because your safety is on the line sometimes when you're in their presence. But also, yeah, I I really experienced them to be relating with you in exactly the way we relate to each other. And I heard someone share this with me that the electromagnetic field of a horse's heart is really strong. And that's a huge reason, maybe why we have this connection, but also why they're used in healing. You know, a lot of there's a lot of therapeutic writing programs, and they're often used for different healing programs and I or just experiences. And I've known people who use horse work in leadership um seminars and workshops, and having people come in and like learn how a horse receives them as a way of learning about their impact and how they are impacting other beings. So cool. That's so fascinating. Um, when I was living in New Mexico, I heard of a woman who did a lot of this kind of work. And yeah, we learn so much from them, and they give us the feedback about how we are emitting our own energy and how they're receiving it and being in that you know reciprocal relationship speaking.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

And I'm conscious I interrupted you. So tell me more about growing up and being around horses and having to do all the maintenance around them as well by the sounds of things.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

Yes, totally. That that was, you know, when you're young, you definitely don't want to be going out and shoveling horse poo. But that was what we did. Um it's a good reality check when to of like what it requires to have a horse. Um I suppose the sport I took to a lot when I was in high school was field hockey. I don't know if that's a big sport in Australia.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Um it's yeah, well, one of many, I think. Yeah. Lots of different sports, I guess, like different parts of the world.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Keep telling you. Well, it was one of the ones, you know, the women's sport, I suppose, that we had. Um, but I also just loved it. I I kind of found it on my own. Maybe it was my teenage self just saying, I need to find the thing that's mine that neither of my parents are us telling me to do. And I just totally fell in love. So I played that throughout high school and probably middle school too. And I really enjoyed that. And I love being part of the team. We had a good team when I was in high school. We won our state championship when I was a junior, and so it was just such a thrilling experience to get to be part of that process, and and it brought out that competitive nature in me for sure. Um, that I I definitely have in me, even though I don't always acknowledge it.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

Many beautiful facets to the gym that's you.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

Yeah, totally, absolutely. And what a cool, I mean, I don't know if you played team sports, but team sports just teach you so much too about you know, camaraderie, working together, what it takes to like rally each other and communicate communication, organizing, all the things that are actually quite again. I started realizing this later in life of like, oh, I learned all that when I was playing sports in high school. It's pretty cool. It's pretty incredible.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

I missed it too. What a beautiful memory. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that question. Um, yeah, a beautiful realization that at different times, what brings you joy these days?

SPEAKER_00 32:36

Being in nature, I am just such a lover of the natural world, the more than human world. Um, and again, I think maybe that's a something somatics has helped me recognize is how good I feel when I'm in nature, like what my body feels like and what I can receive from the sensation of taking a hike through the woods by the water, or just right now it's springtime here, and the blossoms are just incredible, and the wildflowers, and it's so green, and it's you know, just a daily miracle in a way to be like, wow, look at what nature knows how to do over and over again. I really I am so inspired by the natural world as a teacher and something to look to for wisdom. Another one of our teachers of wisdom, um, and this the intelligence that I feel like modern Western society doesn't often recognize, just how profound that intelligence actually is. Um and so that is one of my practices. That's one of my daily things I need, and it definitely brings me joy. And I would say creative practice. I'm a big writer, I do a lot of morning pages, um, if anyone knows from the artist way. I'm actually going through the artist way again. That's been bringing me joy. I and I'm in a very slow journey of going through it again, but just like, you know, breaking up my own, all the places I get rigid around like what I can and can't do and what's possible or not, or how I need to create, I feel like that that journey through that that program is just like smashing that and like kind of getting you back into your flow, into your natural, you know, like organic creation. So that's been a really joyful thing. And then music, live music, especially, but just any music will consistently bring me joy. And again, like somatics helped me understand it even more, like you feel it in your body. It's just such an embodied experience, and it just communicates, you know, and and moves us in such a profound way.

SPEAKER_01 35:10

Oh, Allie, I love that you brought in music because I assume having become a friend of Christians many years ago, that music would be one of the things that you guys talk about. What music have you been listening to lately?

SPEAKER_00 35:24

Well, I was just talking with a friend about there's this group, there's a Colombian group called Bomba Astereo, and they have a really great album that's kind of like um, yeah, got some like Caribbean vibes and uh indie pop, uh really fusion funk. It's cool. I love their music, and they have they have an album that's based around the astrological signs. It's called Astrotropical, and I would just sent it to a friend, so that's the one that I'm really into. And on that vein, there's another group called Reina Tropical that I really love. Um, I think they're Mexican, but I've seen them perform in just incredible, incredible. I love groups from all different veins. Um, one of my other favorite artists I got to see last year was an artist called John Batiste. He's like jazz, yeah. My um my nephew introduced me to him. Incredible, absolutely incredible. And if you ever have the opportunity to see him perform, it's an experience. It's just incredible. Um, so yeah, a very favorite, favorite artist of mine, and and just like a musical genius, he plays ever almost every instrument on stage, lets himself explore different things, different genres, different ways of expressing. He's not confined to any one particular way of being. And yeah, I think I have not let myself fully explore whether I have a lot of musical talent. That's not been one of the places I dabble, but I'm so inspired by musicians and and their creative process and how they bring things into form, you know.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Allie, I want to throw another aspect into the conversation, and it is refined beauty. Aiming for perfection, sometimes it can have this sort of negative connotation to it. We've seen it in lots of movies about chefs in the last 10 years. We need to be able to pull, like go with that instinct to be able to pull us forward into new realms.

SPEAKER_00 38:02

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I was just thinking about this yesterday because I was writing a piece and I was being in the place of like, I'm refining it, I'm refining it, I'm refining it, and then like, oh, is this my inner critic? Am I like overly perfecting this? Or where am I working too hard or overworking? But where am I actually trying to? I am connected to something that wants to evolve or refine. I loved how you called it refined beauty, yes.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

And and Ali, sorry to interrupt, the um connection with AI agents at the moment. It's like sometimes we're just stuck in this loop of the last 20%. And at the same time, I think that is the human in the loop. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally, yes.

SPEAKER_00 38:55

And how do we untangle? I mean, I think that's like such a ripe question. I would love to hear different artists respond to like, how do you know when you're when you're stuck and you're overworking something to death versus when you're actually moving the work forward in a generative way, or sometimes it's maybe a little bit of both.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

Your version, Ellie. Tell me, tell me, tell me. What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 39:20

Well, one thing I'm trying to practice is this is actually, yeah, it's somatic. Noticing in my body where I'm I feel like there's a felt sense of generativity where there is an instinct to move something forward, and then there's a felt sense of it being kind of dead, but I'm trying to fix it, and I'm trying to learn the different feelings inside my body, as like can they indicate? Because, for example, I hit a point yesterday with this piece I was working on, and I had a call, so I had to stop it. Thank goodness, because I was I was hitting that dead, like nothing really was moving forward. Um, and I could see it once I stepped back and I just set it aside, I slept on it, and then I looked at it again this morning, and just like taking space more and more allows me to feel into my body and recognize, like, okay, there's more to do here, or this is complete, like this is ready. Like, I'm just reworking a word, but like, does it really matter? No, the the whole thing is here. So I'm trying to feel it, feel the distinctions inside of me, and practice stepping back and stepping away and setting something down and like stepping in and out of the of the practice of the work and noticing what's alive.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

Allie, that is so beautiful. In this conversation, like we said at the start, I feel like there's so many different uh themes and topics that we could talk about. Perhaps there's a part B. I feel very grateful to Christian for connecting us. And it feels like this is the first of many, Ali. I've got this list. I do try and stay present in these conversations, but I've got this list of different people that I would love to introduce you to. Yes, please. What are some of the things that you are delighted about in terms of memories with people that you've coached and things that you've observed?

SPEAKER_00 41:40

What a great question. I see why you're doing this. You ask great questions and and like they bring in unexpected angles, which I