Welcome to Found in the Fire

What You'll Learn From This Episode:

• Why years of therapy, journaling, and podcasts can leave you more informed about your patterns — and still running every single one of them.
• The difference between the part of your brain that understands and the part that actually changes — and why they don't talk to each other.
• What the work looks like from the outside: the traffic that doesn't ruin your morning, the invoice you send without changing the number, the Saturday you actually see the bees.
• Why the gap between understanding and change is not a personal failure — and what it actually is.

You have done the work. You have the language for all of it. You can trace the pattern, name the wound, explain the mechanism with clinical precision.

And you are still running it.

In the first episode of Found in the Fire, Erica asks the question most healing content won't: why does understanding so rarely produce change? The answer lives in the gap between the thinking brain and the body — in the fact that the part of you that holds all your hard-won insight is not the part of you that runs the pattern. Those two parts live in different rooms. They don't communicate. And all the frameworks in the world won't reach a pattern that doesn't live where the frameworks land.

This episode is an honest map of where the real work lives. Not the methodology. The specific, lived, felt-in-the-body moments of what actually changes when the work finally reaches the right layer. What Tuesday morning looks like on the other side of it.

If you have been doing everything right and still lying awake at 2am reconstructing conversations — this one is for you.

Mentioned in This Episode:

• The Reclamation Primer — the best two hours you can spend if you want to experience all three modalities before deciding if this work is for you: untamedsovereigntycoaching.com/the-reclamation-primer
• Next episode: What Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You — on interoception, women's sensitivity as intelligence, and what gets possible when you stop calling it a liability.

If this landed: share it with the woman in your life who has been doing everything right and still can't quite figure out why it doesn't feel like enough. She needs to hear that the gap between understanding and change is not her fault.

Found in the Fire is a podcast about somatic healing, ancient wisdom, and the specific moments that change everything. New episodes every other week. Host: Erica Adams / Untamed Sovereignty Coaching.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Let me tell you about the moment I stopped. I didn't just slow down. I didn't pause to reflect. I hit a freaking wall. My body simply refused to go any further. Not because I had decided it was time. I literally had no choice. I had built a version of my life that looked from the outside like it was working. I was capable. I was competent. I was the person people called when they needed help. And I was performing all of it. The okayness, the togetherness, the having it mostly figured outness. Uh when deep down I had stopped believing any of it. The cracks had been there for a while. I knew they were there. My friends knew they were there. We would talk about it. You know how women do. Venting, commiseration. Certainly not in a way that was truly meant to fix anything. So I kept performing. I kept hoping that if I didn't look too closely, I wouldn't have to deal with them. That they would somehow resolve themselves if I just kept moving. Of course they didn't. They grew. They became chasms. Large enough that no amount of competence could bridge them anymore. Large enough that one day the whole structure finally gave way. I had been listening to healing podcasts, reading the books, doing the work, or what I understood the work to be. I had the language for everything, my nervous system, my attachment style, my patterns, my wounds. I could talk about all of it. And yet I was still running every single one of those patterns without interruption. Zero space between what would happen and how my body would respond to it. My breaking actually illuminated something. When everything I had built to stay safe stopped working, when the performance burned away, a future I had never even imagined became possible. Followed the breaking. Small strong. It was a voice that I had been talking over for years because listening to her felt dangerous. Staying small and agreeable had been for a very long time the safest thing I knew how to do. But that voice she didn't speak in frameworks or clinical terminology. She didn't use the word dysregulation. She said something much simpler. This is not your life. Go find it. And what I found on the other side of it is what this podcast is all about. Welcome to Found in the Fire. I am Erica Adams, a neuroscience-based life coach, a somatic healing practitioner, and a folklore scholar. Which sounds like a strange combination until you understand that every culture in human history has had its own version of this work. And my entire adult life has been spent asking why. I will also tell you up front that I am a big weirdo. I love being silly. I will probably laugh at some point in most episodes. And I'm not interested in performing wellness at you. I have stood where you're standing. I know the costs of performance when it has stopped meaning anything. This podcast isn't meant to be a course that you take. So, the problem with healing podcasts. Now, I say this with full awareness that this is a healing podcast. I am standing in the room that I'm about to critique. I have indulged in all of the things that I am about to criticize. I've listened to it. I've taken it in and I have nodded in my living room, in my car, in my kitchen, saying yes, yes, yes. So I'm not here to be superior about it, but I am here to ask a question I think is worth asking. Why is it that we can consume enormous amounts of content about healing? Intelligent, well-researched, genuinely useful content, and still find ourselves running the same patterns. And I think the answer is one that most of the healing content space doesn't want to say out loud. I think the answer is because understanding is not the same as changing. And most healing content, podcasts, books, courses, social media, operate at the level of understanding. It makes you more informed about your patterns. It does not necessarily move them. I want to introduce you to a distinction that changed how I think about my own work and how I think about the healing content in general. I first heard this from Emily Todd. She calls it broccoli and red velvet cake. And it has completely reshaped how I approach everything. Okay, broccoli is good for you, right? You know it's good for you. When someone describes broccoli, they tend to describe its nutritional content, its fiber, all the antioxidants. Oh, it's there's so much research showing how it reduces inflammation. And you might even feel pretty good about knowing this about broccoli. Yeah, broccoli's pretty awesome. And then you don't eat the broccoli. Not because you're lazy or undisciplined, but because when you're talking about it like this, no one has ever made broccoli sound like something you actually want. Broccoli is a fact. It is not a feeling. Red velvet cake, however, that is different. Red velvet cake, you do not need to be convinced of. You don't need the research. You don't need the 12 reasons why red velvet cake is worth having. You want it before someone finishes describing it. The desire is not intellectual, it's in the body. Here's the problem with most healing content. It is all broccoli. Regulate your nervous system. That's broccoli. Important, true, useful information. Yeah. Impossible to want from the inside of a Tuesday morning when you're already running late and the kids forgot their backpack. Heal your attachment wounds. Broccoli. Do the somatic work. Broccoli. Tend to your inner child. Broccoli. Expand your window of tolerance. Broccoli, broccoli, broccoli. I say this as someone who uses all of these phrases. I love these phrases. They are accurate. They are clinically grounded, but they don't reach the part of you that wants, needs, or chooses to change. Because the part of you that decides whether to change is not the part that understands. It is the part that feels. And what that part wants to know is not how does this healing approach a work? How does this healing approach work? What it wants to know is what does Tuesday morning feel like when I have done this work? That is the red velvet cake. Not the theory, not the framework, the specific lived, felt in the body answer to the question, what actually changes? I'm going to try to answer that question. Not in theory, but in specific examples of actual moments that look different when this work has reached the body and not just in the mind. Before you have done this work, your heart rate would spike, your jaw would clamp, you're already calculating how late you're going to be. Already noting everything that has gone wrong. And how today is just going to be one of those days your shoulders are braced before you even get to the next light. And by the time you get to work, you are already depleted. After this work, there's a flash of irritation, maybe, and then it moves through you. You take a deep breath, maybe you roll the window down, turn the radio up, and know that you're gonna be just fine. You notice that actually the flowers are blooming beautifully this year. That is not a metaphor. That is what changes. The capacity to notice what is actually in front of you because your body is no longer burning all of its resources bracing for what comes next. Your partner doesn't do the dishes before this work. That moment of disappointment doesn't stay a moment. It becomes the whole evening. Not because you're oversensitive, because your body reads that as evidence, confirmation. You are not a priority. Asking costs too much. Love is conditional and is really based on how manageable you are. The dishes aren't just dishes. After this work, you feel the familiar tightening in your chest, and instead of riding that into the whole night, you breathe through it, your mind clears, your voice just stays steady, and you say, I'm disappointed. I asked you to do this. And that's it. That's the whole thing. Then you go off and you read your book. No spiral, no three-day holding pattern, no apology for having had the need in the first place. You say what's true and you go on with your day. You have to price your work. Before you've done this inner work, maybe you would write down the number that you think you're worth, and then you doubt it. You look at it again. It feels too high, arrogant, unjustifiable. Your hand moves, you lower the price because you think, Who am I to ask for that much? Your nervous system has a pattern about visibility and safety and what happens when you ask for too much. And that pattern wins every time. But after this work, you send the invoice without changing the number at the last second. That's it. You send it, the number stands, no back and forth. Not because you've journaled about your worth or you've done affirmations, but because something in your body has shifted. The felt sense of safety has changed. When the moment arrives, the old pattern does not have the same grip it used to. Saturday morning, you look at the overgrown lawn, the dandelions everywhere. Before this would trigger a whole internal narrative. What you should have done this week, what you're behind on, how you're feeling at the basic maintenance of your life. But instead, you see the bees moving from dandelion to dandelion, the birds hopping in the grass, your neighbor walking her dog, the sun filtering through the trees. You feel your old robe soft from years of washing wrapped around your body that has carried you through more than you actually let yourself acknowledge. And this Saturday morning, you feel grateful, actually grateful for the overgrown lawn, for the bees. That is what changes. Not your circumstances. The traffic was identical. Your partner was the same. The invoice was the same. The lawn didn't change. What changed was the space between what happens and how your body responds to it. For most of us, that space used to be zero. No gap. No time between trigger and response. Something happens and the pattern fires automatic. This work creates the gap. Not by making you understand the pattern better, by changing what happens in your body when the pattern wants to fire. Now, I'm going to say something that I think the healing content space does not say often enough. If you have spent years doing the work, therapy, journaling, podcasts, workshops, courses, da da da, and you're still running the same patterns, that is not evidence of your failure. I'm going to say that again. If you have spent years doing the work and you are still running the same patterns, that is not evidence that you are failing. It is evidence that you have been using the right tools for the wrong layer. The pattern you have been trying to change does not live where you have been working. The insight you have derived from all of your hard work lives in the prefrontal cortex. The part of the brain responsible for reasoning, planning, conscious thought. When you listen to a podcast, when you read a book, when you understand your attachment style, that is where the understanding goes. It lands in the part of the brain that can hold information and make meaning of it. The pattern that is physical, visceral, and it lives somewhere else. It lives in the amygdala. The amygdala is the part of the brain that processes threat. That triggle triggers trigger. The amygdala is the part of the brain that processes threat that triggers the survival response that has been doing this job since before we had words that we could trip over, like I just did. And the amygdala doesn't use words like calm your nervous system. It doesn't understand I know intellectually that this is not actually threatening. It responds to what the body feels. This is not a design flaw. This is the design. The amygdala is supposed to bypass the thinking brain. In moments of perceived threat. That is what makes it useful. That's why it's there. Humans would not have survived if you had to think your way through danger before you could respond. The problem is that the amygdala cannot distinguish between a line at your throat and your partner not doing the dishes. It responds to the felt sense of threat. And for many of us, the felt sense of threat was installed very early by situations that were genuinely threatening at the time, by a mother who was unpredictable, by a father whose approval was conditional, by a childhood in which the safest strategy was to become as agreeable as possible and make yourself as invisible as possible, to earn love through usefulness, to deserve safety by never needing too much, never asking for too much, and never taking up too much space. So the body learned. And the body is still running what it learned. I know this because I ran it for years. With complete self-awareness, by the way, and zero ability to stop. I understood my patterns, their origins, their mechanisms. I knew why they fired when they did. They never once talked to each other. So I knew all about it, but I could not stop it. What finally reached the pattern was not more understanding. It was working at the layer where the pattern actually lived.

unknown 24:16

The body.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

That is what burned away. Not the knowledge. What burned away was the fear that was once necessary, had long ago stopped being so. And that small voice, the one I'd been talking over for years, she was still there. She had been there the whole time, waiting, watching, watching me perform, watching me manage, watching me make myself small, waiting for the fire to get quiet enough that I would finally listen to her. And this is where I want to be very honest with you about what this podcast can and cannot do. This podcast operates at the level of understanding. I am speaking to your pre-frontal cortex. I am giving you a map. I want to name what you have been living, to call it by its real name, so it stops feeling like a personal failure and starts feeling like a solvable problem. That's not nothing. But it's also not the work. The work is what happens in the body. The work is the somatic practice. The work is the EFT tapping, which sounds super strange and works anyway. The work is the inner world journeys and meditations, the nervous system repatterning that happens not through understanding, but through felt experience repeated over time at the level where the pattern actually lives. We're going to talk all about the work in this podcast, but I won't be able to do the work with you in this podcast. For that, for that deeper work, we need to move from this public platform into more intimate spaces. There are multiple levels of commitment and intimacy to choose from on my website at untamed sovereigntycoaching.com. And I'm only going to mention it once right now. And then I trust you to find it if you want it. But what I want to do in this podcast is this make the map so clear that when you arrive at the territory, you know where you are. I have a bias toward research. I will cite it when I use it. I also have a bias towards ancient traditions, the practices that humans have used for thousands of years to come home to themselves. And I'm not going to pretend that clinical validation is the only form of evidence that something is real. Seriously, if women have been passing down a practice for 10,000 years, returning to it again and again because their bodies know it works, that is evidence I take seriously. On our journey together in this podcast, you are going to encounter mythology, astrology, archetypes, the figures from the inner world, Kali, Hecate, Chiron, Eris, the wild woman, Lilith, not as belief systems that you have to adopt, but as companions, best friends, grandmothers, sisters, women that have been guiding women home for as long as women have existed. You'll also encounter the research, neuroscience, somatic psychology, the clinical evidence for EFT, for breath work, for the practices that sound super crazy until you read the trials. This is science catching up to what women's bodies have known for thousands of years. It's validation of the companions, the guides, the ancient practices. And most importantly, you will encounter the red velvet cake, the specific, lived, felt moments of what actually changes when this work reaches your body. Not you will feel more regulated. The traffic doesn't ruin your day. The dishes no longer haunt you. You know your worth, and you see beauty on a Saturday morning. And that is what most wellness and spiritual content never answers. What actually changes in your Tuesday, in your kitchen, in your ordinary life? I'm genuinely glad you are here. The women I work with are some of the most capable, self-aware, exhausted, and underestimated people I have ever encountered. They have been doing the work for years. They've been carrying enormous amounts of competence with enormous amounts of shame and fear and just never quite feeling like enough. They're not behind. They're not broken. They have been working at the wrong layer with tools that were never designed to reach the right layer where the pattern lives. And this podcast is for them. It's for you. And my single goal for every episode is this that you hear something that is not new information. Because let's be honest, you probably already know most of it. But that the information lands differently than it has before. That it lands in the body. In episode two, we're going to talk about what your body has been trying to tell you. We are going to explore the concept of interoception, the body's ability to perceive its own internal states. And this will likely come as no surprise to you, but research consistently shows that women have significantly higher interoceptive sensitivity than men. This means you have been receiving more information from a more precise instrument than most of the frameworks you have been handed were designed to hold. Most research was conducted on men. Most tools were designed for men. You were not taught that your sensitivity is an intelligence. You were taught that it was a liability. So let's get into that. It's going to be about the long, careful, culturally produced process that we all have lived and that we all know. Teaching women to distrust the most accurate instrument available to them, their own bodies knowing. That one's coming soon. And in the meantime, if this landed, share it with someone in your life who's been doing everything right and is still lying awake at 2 a.m. reconstructing conversations. She needs to hear that the gap between understanding and changing is not her fault. That message is a good one.