December 13, 2025 • 35 mins
If you’re feeling stuck in your writing or in your life, it’s very possible your body and mind are telling two different stories.
In today’s episode I talk not only about why this happens but also how to reconcile the two, and even share a simple writing exercise to help you do it.
When you integrate the story your mind and body are telling, deep healing takes place. I hope you enjoy the episode and the extra resources I share below.
If you’re ready to begin writing your story, please take advantage of my BIG December gift to writers: more than 75% off my signature course A Book in Six Months. Use code GRATITUDE at checkout to get this $999 product for only $222.
Listen to the episode with Elizabeth Bennett HERE!
The Body Keeps the Score Link HERE!
The Body is a Doorway link HERE!
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You get the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cold? It's all about and write,
(00:24):
write your story. Write you write your story. Hello and
welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon,
I'm your host, and before I get into the topic
that I want to talk about in today's episode, I
want to just remind you, because I've gotten a few
emails to this effect, that the gift that I'm giving
you for the month of December twenty twenty five is
(00:45):
still available all the way through the end of this
calendar year, which is a massive discount on my signature
course called a Book in six Months. You can go
to the landing page a Book in six Months dot
com and you can purchase my signature course for a
fraction of the usual price. The course sells for nine
hundred and ninety nine dollars, and I'm offering a discount code.
(01:06):
All you have to do is type in the word
gratitude at checkout and that will give you the course
for two hundred and twenty two dollars. Some of you
I know who listen here on the podcast are not
also on my email list, which I need to figure
out a way to get you on my email list.
But if you're not on my email list, you may
not know the whole story about why I'm offering this discount,
which has to do with my dad. My dad's birthday
(01:28):
was February twenty second. I lost my dad last year,
and I can tell the whole story at some point,
but basically, I woke up in the middle of the
night with just like what felt like a message from
my dad or I don't know how you want to
say that, but it just felt like an impression on
my brain in my body. I was like, I'm supposed
to give this away for two hundred and twenty two
(01:48):
dollars through the end of the year. So if you
are someone who's always wanted to write a book, if
that's been on your bucket list for a long time,
if you've been like, you know, I would do this,
but and you have your list of excuses, and to
be honest, one of the excuses is usually that you
can't justify the expense of investing in your art, because
(02:08):
you know, life is busy and expensive, and there's so
many other things going on, and it can be challenging
to take what is really a big risk on yourself
and spend one thousand dollars on a product that you're
not sure if what you produce is going to be
something that you can share with other people. You're not
sure what's going to come of it. You don't know
what the outcome is going to be. And so what
(02:28):
I wanted to do is remove that barrier of entry
for you and offer this at a much more affordable rate.
And that's just my gift to you this December. So
this is your Christmas gift, this is your New Year's
gift if you have been needing a little push off
of the edge of the cliff to jump in and
get the book written. The course is designed to be
self paced, so you can move through the exercises at
(02:49):
your own pace. But if you're following the trajectory of
the course, you'll finish a video lesson and one assignment
every single week and then in six months your manuscript
will be written. So whether or not your full manuscript
is written in six months, or whether you take a
little bit longer. Imagine a scenario where halfway through twenty
twenty six, or three quarters the way through twenty twenty six,
(03:10):
or maybe this time next year, you have a finished
manuscript of a book that you've written, and you can
feel that sense of pride and sense of accomplishment, and
you can have a creative project that you get to
share with other people that represents something deep that is
within your heart. And maybe you publish that piece of work,
and maybe you don't technically publish it, maybe you just
share it in some other kind of way. But either way,
(03:32):
I can promise you with one hundred percent authority that
you will never regret taking the time and energy to
write your own book. I can't promise you with one
hundred percent authority that you will publish it, because you know,
like I teach in the course, publishing is complicated and
has become even more complicated since twenty twenty. So I
talk a lot about that in the course. I teach
you about the different publishing options that are available for you.
(03:54):
In some ways, publishing has become easier for independent authors
or brand new authors since twenty twenty, and in some
ways it's become harder. But I talk about all of
that in the course and lay out all your options
for you. And then the one piece of advice that
I give that I will give to you right here
and right now, is do not wait for a publishing
option to become clear to you before you begin writing
(04:16):
your manuscript. Because the manuscript that is whispering to you
right now, that is kind of tugging at your shirt sleeves,
is there for a reason, and that reason has nothing
to do with how and when or if this piece
of work will be published. It has everything to do
with who you're being invited to become. So I stand
with the whatever that is that's inviting you to become that,
(04:38):
you know, whether we want to call that God or
inspiration or universe or whatever. I stand with that energy
in that invitation and invite you to take a book
in six months. I invite you to take advantage of
this massive, massive discount. Once January first arrives, the price
of the course, we'll go back to nine hundred and
ninety nine dollars and that's where it will stay for
(05:01):
the foreseeable future. So, if you've always wanted to write
a book, if you've been putting it off for any
number of reasons. Now is the time to jump in,
and I invite you to do that with me. Okay,
so let's dive right into the topic that I want
to unpack in today's episode. What I want to talk
about today is the story that your body is telling
(05:24):
that might be quite different from the story that you
are telling with your mouth or with your pen. If
you are in process of writing a personal story, your
body might be telling quite a different version of the
story than you are telling with your mouth. I had
an experience recently that is probably very familiar to you
and actually quite mundane. The experience went like this, You're
(05:46):
going to recognize this, I promise when I say this
to you, you're going to be like, this is nothing
new or profound. I bumped into a friend who I
love dearly, and we know each other quite well, and
we had a few minutes to have an exchange. This
was not like a flyby in traffic or anything, but
it was like I knew we had about three minutes
to catch up and then we were gonna have to
move on to something different. She looked me in the
(06:07):
eye and she goes, how are you doing in a
way that said, to me, tell me the whole story,
not just part of the story. Tell me the deep,
tell me the truth, the true version. And I knew
that there was safety there to tell her the true
version of how I was doing. And I opened my
mouth to tell her the true version of how I
was doing, and I just heard the words come out
of my mouth. I'm good, We're good, everything's good. And
(06:30):
there are a thousand reasons. I'm not really faulting myself
for saying that when that wasn't the whole truth. It
is true that I'm good and we're good and things
are good, and also there's so much more to the
story than that, So I'm not really faulting myself for
saying that. It was more just like one of those
moments that I tagged in history. I was like, oh,
sometimes the words that come out of your mouth tell
(06:52):
a different story than your body. It was like, my
body could have burst into tears moment, my body could
have collapsed on the floor in that moment because there's
so much to say, Like there really has been so
much going on, and I mean, there's truth to the
fact that like I'm good, we're good, everything's good. There
is some truth to that. You know, everything's okay, everyone's safe.
(07:15):
But there have been some big things going on in
my life lately that I would have loved to talk
about or disclose if we'd had more time. We just
didn't have this spaceport in that moment. So it's like
I opened my mouth, I heard these words come out,
I'm okay, I'm good, We're good, everything's good. And I
felt my body tell a very different story. And if
you have been around here a while, you probably remember
that I interviewed Elizabeth Bennett a long time ago. This
(07:39):
was like the beginning of twenty twenty four. I'll link
the episode in the show notes. But Elizabeth Bennett is
an energy healer who I saw for a while and
she's now become a friend of mine, and she's just
such a wonderful person and I adore her. So go
back and listen to that episode if you've never heard
it before, or if you're interested in learning a little
bit more from her. But she talks about kinesiology and
this idea that our bodies are always speaking to us,
(08:02):
they're always telling us a story, and sometimes you know,
like this moment that I saw my friend and the
words came out of my mouth, I'm good, everything's good,
all is well, and my body is telling me a
different story. Sometimes we're conscious of the fact that our
body is telling a different story than our words are telling.
And sometimes we're just not conscious of that. Sometimes our
(08:23):
body is trying to speak to us and we're not
getting it. It's just not coming through, it's not connecting.
And I don't know if you've had an experience like
this where maybe you're having physical symptoms over and over
again that you're trying to treat from in various different ways.
Maybe you've tried Western medicine, maybe you've tried alternative methods.
Maybe you've kind of, I don't know, like run the
(08:45):
whole gamut, like seen different practitioners and tried to figure
out what's going on. If you've been listening to the
podcast for a while, you know that I've had some
of that going on too, Like I've had some respiratory
issues going on since last year. At this time last year,
after I lost my dad, I was having like back
to back to back to back respiratory illnesses and could
not figure out what on earth was happening. And you
(09:07):
can probably hear in my voice right now, I have
another little something happening now. So the question is, you know,
on the one hand, it's like, sure, I go out
in the world, there's a lot of sickness going around
right now, I'm going to encounter a pathogen. That pathogen
is going to make me sick, and that's just the
end of the story. But what if there's more to
the story than that. What if your body is trying
to speak to you. I'm not trying to insert meaning
(09:30):
where there is no meaning. I'm just asking the question,
what if your body is always, always, always in communication
with you, And what if the story that your body
is telling you is actually different from the one that
you would tell if you were going to pick up
the pen or if you were going to speak out
loud to a friend what's going on with you. Have
you ever had an experience where you're telling a friend
(09:54):
about what's going on and they're saying, like, oh my gosh,
I'm so sorry that's happening to you, and you're saying,
it's okay, it's fine, we're fine. But you can feel
that your heart is racing, or you can feel that
your palms are sweating, or you can feel that your
GI tracked, your whole system is just contracting because your
body is saying like it's really not fine. Even though
my words are saying it's fine, my body is saying
(10:17):
to me, this is not fine. So this is what
I want to talk about today. This is what I
want to unpack. Is what happens when our body is
telling us a different story, then our mind is telling
it's telling us a different story than the story we
want to tell on the page. One of the reasons
I want to unpack this is because I think it's
really powerful for holistic healing in the body. It's something
(10:38):
I've been exploring as I think about my own fertility,
as I think about my own you know, like my
physical health, sinus issues, respiratory issues, whatever's going on there.
There's some other physical symptoms that I've been working through.
I'm trying to figure out, like how is this all connected?
What's it all saying to me? Like, I think there
is an opportunity here for holistic healing and health. And
(10:59):
so that's part of what interests me about this topic
is it's like, yeah, I believe that our birthright is
to be healthy and happy in our own bodies, and
so if our bodies are using these physical symptoms to
speak to us, then we ought to be listening to them.
And we have an opportunity to listen to them and
to experience holistic healing in our bodies and minds and spirits.
(11:19):
So that's part of it, but even deeper than that,
I think this is the other reason that I want
to talk about this topic is because many of us
who are working on taking a story from their life
and putting it on the page, which I am also
doing right now. I'm working on a new memoir. As
you take an experience from your life and you work
to put it on the page, you will have both
(11:41):
the story that you want to tell, the one that
you have maybe told and retold about a thousand times,
and there's also a deeper layer to that story that
you have not yet accessed, or in my belief, you
would not be pulled or drawn to write this story down.
(12:07):
Part of what's happening when you write the story down
is you're moving from conscious thought to unconscious thought. You're
pulling unconscious thought up into the conscious and you're drawing
this connection and this integration between mind and body. So
you have the story that your mind wants to tell,
the story that's been on repeat forever and ever and ever.
And you've heard me tell and retaell this story about
(12:28):
this journey that my husband and I have been on
and trying to get this business venture off the ground
and losing everything, and how much that has affected me.
You've heard me tell the story in the way that
my mind wants to tell the story over and over
and over and over again. And I really am trying
to rewrite the narrative, but I can't actually rewrite the
narrative until I'm willing to drop into the body and
(12:49):
to put the story on paper and let those conscious sorry,
let those unconscious thoughts come up into conscious, and to
let my body speak. And so this is the real
reason that I want to talk about this topic, because
I think when we let our bodies speak, we end
up telling a much truer story than we could have
(13:10):
told or would have told, if we were only letting
our minds speak. This is something I have lived in
my own life. I've experienced it over and over and
over again when I was writing Indestructible, which is the
story of leaving a toxic marriage. The story my mind
wanted to tell is like this is so effed up,
Like I can't believe he would do this to me.
I can't believe this would happen to me. The story
(13:31):
in my mind wanted to tell is like, this is
so unfair. This is the worst day of my life.
This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
The story my body wanted to tell is like, this
is the beginning. You know that Billy Collins Boem, this
is the beginning. Almost anything can happen, So like open,
stay open to this opening in your life. My body
wanted to tell me that story, and I could not
(13:53):
connect with that story until I started putting pen to paper.
And so this is why I care so much about
this topic because it has directly touched my life. It's
touched the life of every single client that I've ever
worked with. It is the reason that I believe that
a book idea is calling to you, that a story
from your life is asking to be told, because there
(14:13):
is a deeper, truer, more powerful, more meaningful, more important
story to be told than the one that you can
tell from your mind, which will put you on loop
and on repeat over and over and over again. I
was in the bookstore with my husband a couple of
weeks ago. My mother in law took the kids so
that we could go out for our anniversary, which was
so lovely, and we have a tradition where we'll go
(14:35):
get a cup of coffee, we'll go wander for a
few hours, and go into one of our favorite local
bookstores and usually spend way too much money. One of
the books that I picked out that day is a
book called The Body Is a Doorway by Sophie Strand.
It's a memoir. The subtitle is a Journey beyond Healing,
Hope and the Human And this book jumped out at
(14:56):
me for exactly the reasons that I'm talking about TODA,
because this topic is so important to me, It matters
to me so much and resonates with me so deeply.
I instantly was like, Hey, it's a memoir, and I'm
such a sucker for memoirs. B It's a memoir about
the body being a portal, being a mouth beast, the
body speaking to us in really profound ways, and her
(15:20):
story is one I haven't finished the book yet, so
I cannot yet wholeheartedly recommend the book but her story
is about her up against these impossible physical symptoms in
her younger years like teens and early twenties, as she's
supposed to be leaving for college and experiencing this rite
of passage that we have as young people, and instead
(15:44):
her body seems to be boycotting, seems to be, you know,
working against her, seems to be shutting down, seems to
be failing her on every level. And she decides, instead
of calling this a failure of her body, she decides
to listen more deeply and to ask her body what
this is about, and goes on a journey, which I mean,
I'm only forty three pages into the book, but because
(16:08):
I've done this work for so long, and because i
know how books work, I can already tell you what
the narrative arc is going to be, or what the
reader hopes it's going to be, which is she's going
to go on a journey to listen to more deeply
to her body and find a deeper healing than she
could ever even imagine. And so this book jumped out
at me immediately. I immediately came home and was sucked in.
She has a beautiful way of articulating what was happening
(16:31):
to her. She's pretty heady, so it's not like simple
prose by any means. It's a little hetty, which is
why I'm moving more slowly through the book. I want
to really take my time with it and understand what
she's talking about. She's there are a lot of links
in the book to other pieces of literature, other texts.
That is a fun way to read a book, but
is also just takes a little longer to read, so
(16:53):
I'm taking my time with it. I'll link this book
in the show notes. I'll also link the conversation with
Elizabeth Nay in the show notes so that you can
have some other resources on this topic. But I picked
up this book, I was instantly intrigued by it, and
I just thought, yeah, like, I also am going to
need to learn to listen more deeply to my body
(17:14):
if I'm going to write this story. This is true
for all of us. It's not just me, and I've
written so many books before. It's like, I know how
this process works, and yet and yet, and yet it
never gets any easier. There's something about this that the
human mind resists. We want to stay above the water.
We just do It's less chaotic up here, it's more predictable.
(17:38):
We can kind of go like, we have a strategy,
we've got a plan, we've got a program. We're working
above the water. And yet, what if all of the
depth and meaning and healing that you're looking for is
below the water and you have to learn to scuba
dive and to go down deep and to ask your
body what it's trying to tell you. And maybe maybe
(18:00):
there are some obvious physical symptoms that your body is
already giving you similar to me, like I've got respiratory infections,
I've got fertility stuff going on, hormone things. Maybe my
body is already speaking to me, or maybe you are
not having that experience and you think, like I don't
really know if my body is speaking to me. I
can promise you that your body is speaking to you,
and you may not be quiet enough to hear what
(18:24):
it is saying. And so what I want to offer
in today's episode are a few different ways that we
can tune into what the body is saying and hear
the deeper, truer version of the story, so that when
we open our mouths isn't just oh yeah, I'm good,
Everything's good, all as well over here. That's not just
the only thing that comes out when we tell our stories,
but we can actually tell the true guttural story, what's
(18:48):
really happening, what really happened. You know. What comes to
mind is I'm saying this too, is I'm remembering that
when I was taking improv lessons at Third Coast Comedy
Club that one of the things one of my favorite
instructs their name was Max, and Max taught us to
speak from the gut, like to put your hand on
your belly and speak from your gut, like speak from
(19:11):
down deep. And there's a correlation there, there's a there's
a connection there between you know, telling the story just
like bop surface of the water story, just telling it
in like the clean, simple way that other people can understand.
We learn very quickly to tell our stories that way.
We learn quickly by the way that like in casual conversation,
(19:33):
a lot of times people don't want the deeper, true
reversion of the story. I don't know if you've experienced that,
but I've definitely had the feeling, like I'm an enneagram
for so, I have had the experience. I just had
this Thanksgiving where I was like, hey, everyone listen up.
I have a poem I want to read. And I
read the poem and everyone just stared at me and
was like, wow, that was deep, like and one person
(19:55):
was like, okay, that was kind of heavy and sad,
and I was just like, wow, okay, oh, I forget that.
People kind of don't want And this is not a
criticism at all, It's just part of this conversation around
like why do we avoid going down under the surface
of the water. Is because in casual conversation and in
just day to day life and living, people kind of
(20:17):
don't want to go that deep. And so if you
have a book idea that's tugging at you, that's kind
of like nipping at your heels a little bit. This
is an invitation for you to go deep with your story.
To stop telling the story the same old way, on
the same loop, on the surface of the water, the
way it's been told since the moment this happened, and
(20:39):
to ask yourself, is there something deeper going on? Is
there something below the surface that has something to teach
me that could usher me into a new version of myself,
a new way of living. So I want to talk
about a couple of ways that we can tune into
the wisdom of the body and what the body is
trying to tell you. One simple way is sitting in
(21:00):
silence is meditation. I'm not going to pretend to be
some kind of meditation expert. I have been meditating since
I don't know twenty nineteen ish. I maybe did like
some short meditations and moving meditations before that, because I
started doing yoga in twenty fifteen. Yoga is technically a
moving meditation, so if you want to count that, you
would say I'd started yoga in twenty fifteen. Yoga is
(21:26):
technically a moving meditation, so if you want to count that,
you would say I started meditating in twenty fifteen. I
guess so started my yoga practice in twenty fifteen, started
meditating in twenty nineteen. My entry point to meditation was
doctor Jodaspenza. I started using his He has a meditation
called Space I Believe, or in Space, and then he
(21:46):
has another one called Water Rising. I think you can
purchase them for like a couple of dollars each, and
for a long time, before my kids were born, I
would do one of those, I say a long time.
My daughter was born in twenty twenty. So for months
and months before I had children, I would do one
of those meditations every morning. They're like an hour and
ten minutes long, and it was a really great introduction
(22:07):
to meditation. And also once I had kids, it was like,
I don't have an hour and ten minutes to sit
for a meditation, So I started doing either shorter meditations
or just silent meditations, and I'll talk about I'll talk
about a few other options too, because I've now moved
on to I've done a little bit of yoga nindra,
which is also a type of meditation, a sitting meditation.
(22:27):
I found through a client and a friend of mine,
a man named John Vossler who does free yoga nindra
meditations every Monday afternoon and evening. I think it's like
noon and six pm Pacific time. But then he also
has a library of resources where he houses all these
meditations after the fact, so you can also listen to
the recorded meditations later. And I'm a huge, uge, huge
(22:49):
fan now of John Vossler. All the meditations are free.
He has a donate link if you want to donate
to his business his program, but otherwise you have free
access to those yoga, Nidra meditations. There's also just like,
I don't know my husband's using a brand new app.
I should find out what the name of the app
is that he has really been loving. I know, there's
like Headspace, that app has been around for a long time.
(23:11):
There are so many different ways to enter into meditation.
But what I have found over and over again, and
maybe part of this is because of my yoga training,
but I have found that when I sit in meditation,
my body will start to speak to me. Like the brain.
You have all these thoughts that kind of float through
your brain. Eventually the brain will quiet down and the
(23:32):
body will speak. And sometimes what happens when I'm sitting
in meditation is the body speaks so loud that it
actually becomes quite overwhelming. And part of the practice of
meditation is learning to sit with what the body is
trying to say to you, so the body might speak
to you in sensations. You might feel like nauseous. That's
happened to me before. In meditation especially, I had to
(23:53):
start altering my meditations during pregnancy because I would feel
so nauseous. In pregnancy. I would just like be like
I cannot sit still for this, I have to move
my body around, so the body might speak to you.
In physical sensations you might get like a sense of something,
or a word might come to you, or just like
an epiphany, a realization. It comes in a lot of
(24:14):
different ways. But in a sitting meditation, as you quiet
the mind and listen and tune in a little deeper,
sometimes the body will speak to you about something the
mind couldn't quite access yet. If sitting still for meditation
feels impossible to you, I know this is true for
a lot of people. If it still feels really challenging
(24:35):
for you, I would encourage you to find a guided
meditation because guiding a guided meditation does make it a
little bit easier to sit. You're not sitting in utter silence.
You're sitting while someone is speaking to you. So check
out John Bossler, check out Jon Despenza, check out an
app that you can find, or someone else that really
speaks to you. Everybody is so different, Like my husband
and I meditate in different ways and have different experiences
(24:57):
in meditation, and so find something that just works for you,
fits for you, and speaks to you. But if sitting
still still feels like too much for you right now.
A moving meditation is another really great way to go.
A moving meditation can be a nice like soft entry
point into meditation. There are walking meditations that you can
find on YouTube or on Spotify, and I know so
(25:20):
many people who will go for long walks and play
the walking meditation. Yoga is also a moving meditation. So
this is, like I said, something I've been doing since
twenty fifteen and is a really nice way to quiet
the mind. And I talked about this in last week's episode.
But there's something about doing a power flow yoga class,
like getting in a room where the room is hot,
(25:40):
your body's going to get heated up. All you can
focus on is staying in the room and breathing, and
you know, beyond that, maybe doing some of the postures.
But there's something about challenging your body to that extent
that will quiet your mind and give you an access
point to listen to the body. And then so meditation.
(26:02):
Not an expert on that, but have been doing it
for a while. Yoga also not a total expert on that,
but did just finish my yoga teacher training and I've
been teaching yoga and can just testify as both a
student and as a teacher, that yoga is an amazing
way to quiet the mind and listen to what the
body has to say. So often when I'm laying in
my resting pose at the end of a yoga class,
your wrestling boats called shabasna. As I'm laying in shavasna,
(26:25):
it will be just like a sensation will come over me,
or a realization or a person's name will come to
mind that I should reach out to someone, to call,
someone to you know, uh yeah, someone to reach out to,
to text, to call, to connect with. And those sensations
that come through are from a slightly more pure place
(26:45):
because they're not, you know, clouded by all the noise
of the mind. And then finally, this is the part
that I want to spend the most time talking about,
is writing. How writing helps us drop into the body
in a way that's speaking just doesn't do. Speaking does
not force you to drop into the body in this
same kind of way. I want to teach you a
(27:06):
writing prompt that I use. I want to teach you
a writing prompt that I use to have a conversation
with my body. And I want to just teach you
this in a really simple way, so that literally anybody
(27:27):
can do this. You can do this right now as
soon as you're done listening to this episode. You could
you know, if you're driving, pull your car over or whatever,
but as if you're seated somewhere, just pull out your
phone and you can do this exercise with me. I
do this exercise almost every day. I open the notes
app on my phone and I just write at the
top of the notes app, what would you like to
show me today? This is a letter to my body
(27:47):
or a conversation with my body. What would you like
to show me today or what would you like to
tell me today? I'll write that at the top of
the page. Extra bonus points if you can do this
with physical pen and paper, and you can and actually
switch the hand that you're writing with, So when you're
asking your body questions, you can write with your dominant hand,
which is for me, my right hand, and then when
(28:09):
you're answering from your body, you can switch to your
non dominant hand. And switching to your non dominant hand
just cues your brain, cues to your brain that we're
answering from a different part of the brain and body.
So ask the question, what would you like to show
me today and then listen to what your body wants
to say. There is a different tenor that's the only
(28:30):
way that I can think to explain it, that comes
through when I ask the body to speak. So my
brain speaks in one tenor. It's really the tenor I'm
speaking to you right now. This is coming from brain.
I mean, maybe part of it is coming from body,
or moment's coming from body. But when I ask my
body to speak, there's a different tenor that comes through.
Maybe the first thing that comes through for you is
(28:52):
just a physical sensation. Maybe there's a pain in a
part of your body, like a physical pain that's been
there for a long time, a chronic pain, and that's
all that you can feel. So you can just describe
the pain. That can be your body speaking, or maybe
you could ask that exact physical pain. What do you
like it's your knee, your left knee left mee. What
(29:14):
would you like to show me today? What do you
want to tell me today? Do you have a message
for me? And if this practice feels weird to you,
because it can kind of feel weird sometimes, or if
you catch yourself, this is your brain by the way, going,
like I don't really know if this is a thing.
I don't know. If my body is actually speaking, that's
your brain talking, which is fair like our logical, analytical
(29:35):
brains are needed and necessary. So just let that be
fine that that's what your brain is saying. If your
body chooses not to speak, or if you're not sure
if what you heard is really from your body, you
can also just let it be fine that your body's
choosing not to speak today. Come back to the practice
again tomorrow. Ask your body again tomorrow. Imagine that you're
speaking to a five year old child, and by showing
(29:59):
up every day, ask me again, Hey, is there anything
you want to tell me today? Anything you want to
share with me? Is there anything you have for me today?
You're gently tuning in and being present and building trust
over time that you are a safe person to share with,
that you are a safe person to speak to, that
you're a safe person to open up to, and over time,
(30:22):
that child, that five year old child is going to
feel safe to open up to you the first day
or two or five. She might not feel safe to
open up to you the first I don't know. I mean,
it might even be longer than that. If you know
if your brain, your your logical analytical mind has dominated
for you for longer, a longer time. It might even
(30:43):
take a little bit longer for that trust, that bridge
of trust to be built with your body. So don't
be surprised if you sit down to do this exercise,
then it's like, no, not really anything today that might
be possible, or maybe something immediately comes through. And if
that's the case, then lean into that and give that
energy and attention so that your body knows that she
(31:07):
is allowed to continue to speak. And I'm calling your
body she. I don't know what your gender is, if
you are a she or a he, how you identify.
I'm calling your body she because in the ancient concept
of masculine and feminine, or like yin and yong, the
body is the soft material of your existence. Your body
(31:28):
is the feminine. Your body is the she, and your mind,
your logical analytical mind, is equally as important and as valuable.
But that is the masculine. And I think one of
the reasons why we have such a hard time listening
to our bodies and believing that our bodies have anything
interesting to say. I mean, just think about the metaphor
here we live in a world that prioritizes, that venerates,
(31:53):
that emphasizes, that pedestalizes men and the masculine. And this
is flipping as we speak, but we minimize, we invalidate.
We really have strong negative feelings toward the feminine, toward women.
(32:14):
And so every time that you catch yourself going like,
I don't really think my body is talking to me,
like that seems kind of like a little out there.
If you catch yourself, I mean, you might even be
someone who's read all the books. You've probably read The
Body Keeps the Score, maybe you've read The Body's a Doorway.
Maybe you have listened to the episode with Elizabeth Bennett.
(32:34):
Maybe you like, maybe you're in some ways intellectually on
board with this idea, but when you drop into your body,
you're just like, I don't really know if this is
a thing. And that analytical mind comes online nice and strong.
That is internalized misogyny or internalized I mean, I don't
even know if that's the right word for it. It's
(32:56):
that internalized sense that the feminine is somehow less valuable
than the masculine, the internalized sense that intuition is not
as powerful as intellect, that sense is not as powerful
as analysis, that creativity is not as important as productivity.
(33:20):
Those ideas are so deeply internalized in us that many
of us, like I can speak for myself, are living
those ideals out in the world. Like I, deeply in
my body believe that creativity is equally as important as productivity.
And yet I don't live like that's true. I don't
prioritize creativity in my life the way that I prioritize productivity.
(33:43):
And so I'm still doing work in my body to
clear out those old ideas and to give more space
for the feminine to flow, give more space for the
softer parts of me to exist, and to really begin
to venerate and elevate and pedestalize the woman in me,
the feminine in me, the softer nature in me, my body,
(34:07):
and listen to her and trust her and know that
when she says something, she says it for a reason
and she's not playing. And we gaslight ourselves, that's really
the term that's coming to my mind, like we do.
We gaslight ourselves. We have a sense that something is true,
or something is available, or something is out there, or
(34:27):
we're supposed to, you know, write a book or there's
a baby, or we're you know, just a sense that
something is there. But because it's not physical yet, we
downplay it. We pretend like it's not as big of
a deal. We pretend like we're just crazy. That's just
a crazy thought that I have. What if it's not.
What if the messages that your body is sending you
(34:49):
are actually the most important messages that you could listen to.
And what if you took the time to tune in
and to listen and to really hear what she's trying
to say. That's the invitation for you this week. I
hope the writing prompt is helpful for you. I hope
you enjoyed trying that. Let me know how it goes.
I would love to hear, and I'll see you back
(35:09):
next week. I'm About Your Story Podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You get the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cold? It's all about and write,
(00:24):
write your story. Write you write your story. Hello and
welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon,
I'm your host, and before I get into the topic
that I want to talk about in today's episode, I
want to just remind you, because I've gotten a few
emails to this effect, that the gift that I'm giving
you for the month of December twenty twenty five is
(00:45):
still available all the way through the end of this
calendar year, which is a massive discount on my signature
course called a Book in six Months. You can go
to the landing page a Book in six Months dot
com and you can purchase my signature course for a
fraction of the usual price. The course sells for nine
hundred and ninety nine dollars, and I'm offering a discount code.
(01:06):
All you have to do is type in the word
gratitude at checkout and that will give you the course
for two hundred and twenty two dollars. Some of you
I know who listen here on the podcast are not
also on my email list, which I need to figure
out a way to get you on my email list.
But if you're not on my email list, you may
not know the whole story about why I'm offering this discount,
which has to do with my dad. My dad's birthday
(01:28):
was February twenty second. I lost my dad last year,
and I can tell the whole story at some point,
but basically, I woke up in the middle of the
night with just like what felt like a message from
my dad or I don't know how you want to
say that, but it just felt like an impression on
my brain in my body. I was like, I'm supposed
to give this away for two hundred and twenty two
(01:48):
dollars through the end of the year. So if you
are someone who's always wanted to write a book, if
that's been on your bucket list for a long time,
if you've been like, you know, I would do this,
but and you have your list of excuses, and to
be honest, one of the excuses is usually that you
can't justify the expense of investing in your art, because
(02:08):
you know, life is busy and expensive, and there's so
many other things going on, and it can be challenging
to take what is really a big risk on yourself
and spend one thousand dollars on a product that you're
not sure if what you produce is going to be
something that you can share with other people. You're not
sure what's going to come of it. You don't know
what the outcome is going to be. And so what
(02:28):
I wanted to do is remove that barrier of entry
for you and offer this at a much more affordable rate.
And that's just my gift to you this December. So
this is your Christmas gift, this is your New Year's
gift if you have been needing a little push off
of the edge of the cliff to jump in and
get the book written. The course is designed to be
self paced, so you can move through the exercises at
(02:49):
your own pace. But if you're following the trajectory of
the course, you'll finish a video lesson and one assignment
every single week and then in six months your manuscript
will be written. So whether or not your full manuscript
is written in six months, or whether you take a
little bit longer. Imagine a scenario where halfway through twenty
twenty six, or three quarters the way through twenty twenty six,
(03:10):
or maybe this time next year, you have a finished
manuscript of a book that you've written, and you can
feel that sense of pride and sense of accomplishment, and
you can have a creative project that you get to
share with other people that represents something deep that is
within your heart. And maybe you publish that piece of work,
and maybe you don't technically publish it, maybe you just
share it in some other kind of way. But either way,
(03:32):
I can promise you with one hundred percent authority that
you will never regret taking the time and energy to
write your own book. I can't promise you with one
hundred percent authority that you will publish it, because you know,
like I teach in the course, publishing is complicated and
has become even more complicated since twenty twenty. So I
talk a lot about that in the course. I teach
you about the different publishing options that are available for you.
(03:54):
In some ways, publishing has become easier for independent authors
or brand new authors since twenty twenty, and in some
ways it's become harder. But I talk about all of
that in the course and lay out all your options
for you. And then the one piece of advice that
I give that I will give to you right here
and right now, is do not wait for a publishing
option to become clear to you before you begin writing
(04:16):
your manuscript. Because the manuscript that is whispering to you
right now, that is kind of tugging at your shirt sleeves,
is there for a reason, and that reason has nothing
to do with how and when or if this piece
of work will be published. It has everything to do
with who you're being invited to become. So I stand
with the whatever that is that's inviting you to become that,
(04:38):
you know, whether we want to call that God or
inspiration or universe or whatever. I stand with that energy
in that invitation and invite you to take a book
in six months. I invite you to take advantage of
this massive, massive discount. Once January first arrives, the price
of the course, we'll go back to nine hundred and
ninety nine dollars and that's where it will stay for
(05:01):
the foreseeable future. So, if you've always wanted to write
a book, if you've been putting it off for any
number of reasons. Now is the time to jump in,
and I invite you to do that with me. Okay,
so let's dive right into the topic that I want
to unpack in today's episode. What I want to talk
about today is the story that your body is telling
(05:24):
that might be quite different from the story that you
are telling with your mouth or with your pen. If
you are in process of writing a personal story, your
body might be telling quite a different version of the
story than you are telling with your mouth. I had
an experience recently that is probably very familiar to you
and actually quite mundane. The experience went like this, You're
(05:46):
going to recognize this, I promise when I say this
to you, you're going to be like, this is nothing
new or profound. I bumped into a friend who I
love dearly, and we know each other quite well, and
we had a few minutes to have an exchange. This
was not like a flyby in traffic or anything, but
it was like I knew we had about three minutes
to catch up and then we were gonna have to
move on to something different. She looked me in the
(06:07):
eye and she goes, how are you doing in a
way that said, to me, tell me the whole story,
not just part of the story. Tell me the deep,
tell me the truth, the true version. And I knew
that there was safety there to tell her the true
version of how I was doing. And I opened my
mouth to tell her the true version of how I
was doing, and I just heard the words come out
of my mouth. I'm good, We're good, everything's good. And
(06:30):
there are a thousand reasons. I'm not really faulting myself
for saying that when that wasn't the whole truth. It
is true that I'm good and we're good and things
are good, and also there's so much more to the
story than that, So I'm not really faulting myself for
saying that. It was more just like one of those
moments that I tagged in history. I was like, oh,
sometimes the words that come out of your mouth tell
(06:52):
a different story than your body. It was like, my
body could have burst into tears moment, my body could
have collapsed on the floor in that moment because there's
so much to say, Like there really has been so
much going on, and I mean, there's truth to the
fact that like I'm good, we're good, everything's good. There
is some truth to that. You know, everything's okay, everyone's safe.
(07:15):
But there have been some big things going on in
my life lately that I would have loved to talk
about or disclose if we'd had more time. We just
didn't have this spaceport in that moment. So it's like
I opened my mouth, I heard these words come out,
I'm okay, I'm good, We're good, everything's good. And I
felt my body tell a very different story. And if
you have been around here a while, you probably remember
that I interviewed Elizabeth Bennett a long time ago. This
(07:39):
was like the beginning of twenty twenty four. I'll link
the episode in the show notes. But Elizabeth Bennett is
an energy healer who I saw for a while and
she's now become a friend of mine, and she's just
such a wonderful person and I adore her. So go
back and listen to that episode if you've never heard
it before, or if you're interested in learning a little
bit more from her. But she talks about kinesiology and
this idea that our bodies are always speaking to us,
(08:02):
they're always telling us a story, and sometimes you know,
like this moment that I saw my friend and the
words came out of my mouth, I'm good, everything's good,
all is well, and my body is telling me a
different story. Sometimes we're conscious of the fact that our
body is telling a different story than our words are telling.
And sometimes we're just not conscious of that. Sometimes our
(08:23):
body is trying to speak to us and we're not
getting it. It's just not coming through, it's not connecting.
And I don't know if you've had an experience like
this where maybe you're having physical symptoms over and over
again that you're trying to treat from in various different ways.
Maybe you've tried Western medicine, maybe you've tried alternative methods.
Maybe you've kind of, I don't know, like run the
(08:45):
whole gamut, like seen different practitioners and tried to figure
out what's going on. If you've been listening to the
podcast for a while, you know that I've had some
of that going on too, Like I've had some respiratory
issues going on since last year. At this time last year,
after I lost my dad, I was having like back
to back to back to back respiratory illnesses and could
not figure out what on earth was happening. And you
(09:07):
can probably hear in my voice right now, I have
another little something happening now. So the question is, you know,
on the one hand, it's like, sure, I go out
in the world, there's a lot of sickness going around
right now, I'm going to encounter a pathogen. That pathogen
is going to make me sick, and that's just the
end of the story. But what if there's more to
the story than that. What if your body is trying
to speak to you. I'm not trying to insert meaning
(09:30):
where there is no meaning. I'm just asking the question,
what if your body is always, always, always in communication
with you, And what if the story that your body
is telling you is actually different from the one that
you would tell if you were going to pick up
the pen or if you were going to speak out
loud to a friend what's going on with you. Have
you ever had an experience where you're telling a friend
(09:54):
about what's going on and they're saying, like, oh my gosh,
I'm so sorry that's happening to you, and you're saying,
it's okay, it's fine, we're fine. But you can feel
that your heart is racing, or you can feel that
your palms are sweating, or you can feel that your
GI tracked, your whole system is just contracting because your
body is saying like it's really not fine. Even though
my words are saying it's fine, my body is saying
(10:17):
to me, this is not fine. So this is what
I want to talk about today. This is what I
want to unpack. Is what happens when our body is
telling us a different story, then our mind is telling
it's telling us a different story than the story we
want to tell on the page. One of the reasons
I want to unpack this is because I think it's
really powerful for holistic healing in the body. It's something
(10:38):
I've been exploring as I think about my own fertility,
as I think about my own you know, like my
physical health, sinus issues, respiratory issues, whatever's going on there.
There's some other physical symptoms that I've been working through.
I'm trying to figure out, like how is this all connected?
What's it all saying to me? Like, I think there
is an opportunity here for holistic healing and health. And
(10:59):
so that's part of what interests me about this topic
is it's like, yeah, I believe that our birthright is
to be healthy and happy in our own bodies, and
so if our bodies are using these physical symptoms to
speak to us, then we ought to be listening to them.
And we have an opportunity to listen to them and
to experience holistic healing in our bodies and minds and spirits.
(11:19):
So that's part of it, but even deeper than that,
I think this is the other reason that I want
to talk about this topic is because many of us
who are working on taking a story from their life
and putting it on the page, which I am also
doing right now. I'm working on a new memoir. As
you take an experience from your life and you work
to put it on the page, you will have both
(11:41):
the story that you want to tell, the one that
you have maybe told and retold about a thousand times,
and there's also a deeper layer to that story that
you have not yet accessed, or in my belief, you
would not be pulled or drawn to write this story down.
(12:07):
Part of what's happening when you write the story down
is you're moving from conscious thought to unconscious thought. You're
pulling unconscious thought up into the conscious and you're drawing
this connection and this integration between mind and body. So
you have the story that your mind wants to tell,
the story that's been on repeat forever and ever and ever.
And you've heard me tell and retaell this story about
(12:28):
this journey that my husband and I have been on
and trying to get this business venture off the ground
and losing everything, and how much that has affected me.
You've heard me tell the story in the way that
my mind wants to tell the story over and over
and over and over again. And I really am trying
to rewrite the narrative, but I can't actually rewrite the
narrative until I'm willing to drop into the body and
(12:49):
to put the story on paper and let those conscious sorry,
let those unconscious thoughts come up into conscious, and to
let my body speak. And so this is the real
reason that I want to talk about this topic, because
I think when we let our bodies speak, we end
up telling a much truer story than we could have
(13:10):
told or would have told, if we were only letting
our minds speak. This is something I have lived in
my own life. I've experienced it over and over and
over again when I was writing Indestructible, which is the
story of leaving a toxic marriage. The story my mind
wanted to tell is like this is so effed up,
Like I can't believe he would do this to me.
I can't believe this would happen to me. The story
(13:31):
in my mind wanted to tell is like, this is
so unfair. This is the worst day of my life.
This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
The story my body wanted to tell is like, this
is the beginning. You know that Billy Collins Boem, this
is the beginning. Almost anything can happen, So like open,
stay open to this opening in your life. My body
wanted to tell me that story, and I could not
(13:53):
connect with that story until I started putting pen to paper.
And so this is why I care so much about
this topic because it has directly touched my life. It's
touched the life of every single client that I've ever
worked with. It is the reason that I believe that
a book idea is calling to you, that a story
from your life is asking to be told, because there
(14:13):
is a deeper, truer, more powerful, more meaningful, more important
story to be told than the one that you can
tell from your mind, which will put you on loop
and on repeat over and over and over again. I
was in the bookstore with my husband a couple of
weeks ago. My mother in law took the kids so
that we could go out for our anniversary, which was
so lovely, and we have a tradition where we'll go
(14:35):
get a cup of coffee, we'll go wander for a
few hours, and go into one of our favorite local
bookstores and usually spend way too much money. One of
the books that I picked out that day is a
book called The Body Is a Doorway by Sophie Strand.
It's a memoir. The subtitle is a Journey beyond Healing,
Hope and the Human And this book jumped out at
(14:56):
me for exactly the reasons that I'm talking about TODA,
because this topic is so important to me, It matters
to me so much and resonates with me so deeply.
I instantly was like, Hey, it's a memoir, and I'm
such a sucker for memoirs. B It's a memoir about
the body being a portal, being a mouth beast, the
body speaking to us in really profound ways, and her
(15:20):
story is one I haven't finished the book yet, so
I cannot yet wholeheartedly recommend the book but her story
is about her up against these impossible physical symptoms in
her younger years like teens and early twenties, as she's
supposed to be leaving for college and experiencing this rite
of passage that we have as young people, and instead
(15:44):
her body seems to be boycotting, seems to be, you know,
working against her, seems to be shutting down, seems to
be failing her on every level. And she decides, instead
of calling this a failure of her body, she decides
to listen more deeply and to ask her body what
this is about, and goes on a journey, which I mean,
I'm only forty three pages into the book, but because
(16:08):
I've done this work for so long, and because i
know how books work, I can already tell you what
the narrative arc is going to be, or what the
reader hopes it's going to be, which is she's going
to go on a journey to listen to more deeply
to her body and find a deeper healing than she
could ever even imagine. And so this book jumped out
at me immediately. I immediately came home and was sucked in.
She has a beautiful way of articulating what was happening
(16:31):
to her. She's pretty heady, so it's not like simple
prose by any means. It's a little hetty, which is
why I'm moving more slowly through the book. I want
to really take my time with it and understand what
she's talking about. She's there are a lot of links
in the book to other pieces of literature, other texts.
That is a fun way to read a book, but
is also just takes a little longer to read, so
(16:53):
I'm taking my time with it. I'll link this book
in the show notes. I'll also link the conversation with
Elizabeth Nay in the show notes so that you can
have some other resources on this topic. But I picked
up this book, I was instantly intrigued by it, and
I just thought, yeah, like, I also am going to
need to learn to listen more deeply to my body
(17:14):
if I'm going to write this story. This is true
for all of us. It's not just me, and I've
written so many books before. It's like, I know how
this process works, and yet and yet, and yet it
never gets any easier. There's something about this that the
human mind resists. We want to stay above the water.
We just do It's less chaotic up here, it's more predictable.
(17:38):
We can kind of go like, we have a strategy,
we've got a plan, we've got a program. We're working
above the water. And yet, what if all of the
depth and meaning and healing that you're looking for is
below the water and you have to learn to scuba
dive and to go down deep and to ask your
body what it's trying to tell you. And maybe maybe
(18:00):
there are some obvious physical symptoms that your body is
already giving you similar to me, like I've got respiratory infections,
I've got fertility stuff going on, hormone things. Maybe my
body is already speaking to me, or maybe you are
not having that experience and you think, like I don't
really know if my body is speaking to me. I
can promise you that your body is speaking to you,
and you may not be quiet enough to hear what
(18:24):
it is saying. And so what I want to offer
in today's episode are a few different ways that we
can tune into what the body is saying and hear
the deeper, truer version of the story, so that when
we open our mouths isn't just oh yeah, I'm good,
Everything's good, all as well over here. That's not just
the only thing that comes out when we tell our stories,
but we can actually tell the true guttural story, what's
(18:48):
really happening, what really happened. You know. What comes to
mind is I'm saying this too, is I'm remembering that
when I was taking improv lessons at Third Coast Comedy
Club that one of the things one of my favorite
instructs their name was Max, and Max taught us to
speak from the gut, like to put your hand on
your belly and speak from your gut, like speak from
(19:11):
down deep. And there's a correlation there, there's a there's
a connection there between you know, telling the story just
like bop surface of the water story, just telling it
in like the clean, simple way that other people can understand.
We learn very quickly to tell our stories that way.
We learn quickly by the way that like in casual conversation,
(19:33):
a lot of times people don't want the deeper, true
reversion of the story. I don't know if you've experienced that,
but I've definitely had the feeling, like I'm an enneagram
for so, I have had the experience. I just had
this Thanksgiving where I was like, hey, everyone listen up.
I have a poem I want to read. And I
read the poem and everyone just stared at me and
was like, wow, that was deep, like and one person
(19:55):
was like, okay, that was kind of heavy and sad,
and I was just like, wow, okay, oh, I forget that.
People kind of don't want And this is not a
criticism at all, It's just part of this conversation around
like why do we avoid going down under the surface
of the water. Is because in casual conversation and in
just day to day life and living, people kind of
(20:17):
don't want to go that deep. And so if you
have a book idea that's tugging at you, that's kind
of like nipping at your heels a little bit. This
is an invitation for you to go deep with your story.
To stop telling the story the same old way, on
the same loop, on the surface of the water, the
way it's been told since the moment this happened, and
(20:39):
to ask yourself, is there something deeper going on? Is
there something below the surface that has something to teach
me that could usher me into a new version of myself,
a new way of living. So I want to talk
about a couple of ways that we can tune into
the wisdom of the body and what the body is
trying to tell you. One simple way is sitting in
(21:00):
silence is meditation. I'm not going to pretend to be
some kind of meditation expert. I have been meditating since
I don't know twenty nineteen ish. I maybe did like
some short meditations and moving meditations before that, because I
started doing yoga in twenty fifteen. Yoga is technically a
moving meditation, so if you want to count that, you
would say I'd started yoga in twenty fifteen. Yoga is
(21:26):
technically a moving meditation, so if you want to count that,
you would say I started meditating in twenty fifteen. I
guess so started my yoga practice in twenty fifteen, started
meditating in twenty nineteen. My entry point to meditation was
doctor Jodaspenza. I started using his He has a meditation
called Space I Believe, or in Space, and then he
(21:46):
has another one called Water Rising. I think you can
purchase them for like a couple of dollars each, and
for a long time, before my kids were born, I
would do one of those, I say a long time.
My daughter was born in twenty twenty. So for months
and months before I had children, I would do one
of those meditations every morning. They're like an hour and
ten minutes long, and it was a really great introduction
(22:07):
to meditation. And also once I had kids, it was like,
I don't have an hour and ten minutes to sit
for a meditation, So I started doing either shorter meditations
or just silent meditations, and I'll talk about I'll talk
about a few other options too, because I've now moved
on to I've done a little bit of yoga nindra,
which is also a type of meditation, a sitting meditation.
(22:27):
I found through a client and a friend of mine,
a man named John Vossler who does free yoga nindra
meditations every Monday afternoon and evening. I think it's like
noon and six pm Pacific time. But then he also
has a library of resources where he houses all these
meditations after the fact, so you can also listen to
the recorded meditations later. And I'm a huge, uge, huge
(22:49):
fan now of John Vossler. All the meditations are free.
He has a donate link if you want to donate
to his business his program, but otherwise you have free
access to those yoga, Nidra meditations. There's also just like,
I don't know my husband's using a brand new app.
I should find out what the name of the app
is that he has really been loving. I know, there's
like Headspace, that app has been around for a long time.
(23:11):
There are so many different ways to enter into meditation.
But what I have found over and over again, and
maybe part of this is because of my yoga training,
but I have found that when I sit in meditation,
my body will start to speak to me. Like the brain.
You have all these thoughts that kind of float through
your brain. Eventually the brain will quiet down and the
(23:32):
body will speak. And sometimes what happens when I'm sitting
in meditation is the body speaks so loud that it
actually becomes quite overwhelming. And part of the practice of
meditation is learning to sit with what the body is
trying to say to you, so the body might speak
to you in sensations. You might feel like nauseous. That's
happened to me before. In meditation especially, I had to
(23:53):
start altering my meditations during pregnancy because I would feel
so nauseous. In pregnancy. I would just like be like
I cannot sit still for this, I have to move
my body around, so the body might speak to you.
In physical sensations you might get like a sense of something,
or a word might come to you, or just like
an epiphany, a realization. It comes in a lot of
(24:14):
different ways. But in a sitting meditation, as you quiet
the mind and listen and tune in a little deeper,
sometimes the body will speak to you about something the
mind couldn't quite access yet. If sitting still for meditation
feels impossible to you, I know this is true for
a lot of people. If it still feels really challenging
(24:35):
for you, I would encourage you to find a guided
meditation because guiding a guided meditation does make it a
little bit easier to sit. You're not sitting in utter silence.
You're sitting while someone is speaking to you. So check
out John Bossler, check out Jon Despenza, check out an
app that you can find, or someone else that really
speaks to you. Everybody is so different, Like my husband
and I meditate in different ways and have different experiences
(24:57):
in meditation, and so find something that just works for you,
fits for you, and speaks to you. But if sitting
still still feels like too much for you right now.
A moving meditation is another really great way to go.
A moving meditation can be a nice like soft entry
point into meditation. There are walking meditations that you can
find on YouTube or on Spotify, and I know so
(25:20):
many people who will go for long walks and play
the walking meditation. Yoga is also a moving meditation. So
this is, like I said, something I've been doing since
twenty fifteen and is a really nice way to quiet
the mind. And I talked about this in last week's episode.
But there's something about doing a power flow yoga class,
like getting in a room where the room is hot,
(25:40):
your body's going to get heated up. All you can
focus on is staying in the room and breathing, and
you know, beyond that, maybe doing some of the postures.
But there's something about challenging your body to that extent
that will quiet your mind and give you an access
point to listen to the body. And then so meditation.
(26:02):
Not an expert on that, but have been doing it
for a while. Yoga also not a total expert on that,
but did just finish my yoga teacher training and I've
been teaching yoga and can just testify as both a
student and as a teacher, that yoga is an amazing
way to quiet the mind and listen to what the
body has to say. So often when I'm laying in
my resting pose at the end of a yoga class,
your wrestling boats called shabasna. As I'm laying in shavasna,
(26:25):
it will be just like a sensation will come over me,
or a realization or a person's name will come to
mind that I should reach out to someone, to call,
someone to you know, uh yeah, someone to reach out to,
to text, to call, to connect with. And those sensations
that come through are from a slightly more pure place
(26:45):
because they're not, you know, clouded by all the noise
of the mind. And then finally, this is the part
that I want to spend the most time talking about,
is writing. How writing helps us drop into the body
in a way that's speaking just doesn't do. Speaking does
not force you to drop into the body in this
same kind of way. I want to teach you a
(27:06):
writing prompt that I use. I want to teach you
a writing prompt that I use to have a conversation
with my body. And I want to just teach you
this in a really simple way, so that literally anybody
(27:27):
can do this. You can do this right now as
soon as you're done listening to this episode. You could
you know, if you're driving, pull your car over or whatever,
but as if you're seated somewhere, just pull out your
phone and you can do this exercise with me. I
do this exercise almost every day. I open the notes
app on my phone and I just write at the
top of the notes app, what would you like to
show me today? This is a letter to my body
(27:47):
or a conversation with my body. What would you like
to show me today or what would you like to
tell me today? I'll write that at the top of
the page. Extra bonus points if you can do this
with physical pen and paper, and you can and actually
switch the hand that you're writing with, So when you're
asking your body questions, you can write with your dominant hand,
which is for me, my right hand, and then when
(28:09):
you're answering from your body, you can switch to your
non dominant hand. And switching to your non dominant hand
just cues your brain, cues to your brain that we're
answering from a different part of the brain and body.
So ask the question, what would you like to show
me today and then listen to what your body wants
to say. There is a different tenor that's the only
(28:30):
way that I can think to explain it, that comes
through when I ask the body to speak. So my
brain speaks in one tenor. It's really the tenor I'm
speaking to you right now. This is coming from brain.
I mean, maybe part of it is coming from body,
or moment's coming from body. But when I ask my
body to speak, there's a different tenor that comes through.
Maybe the first thing that comes through for you is
(28:52):
just a physical sensation. Maybe there's a pain in a
part of your body, like a physical pain that's been
there for a long time, a chronic pain, and that's
all that you can feel. So you can just describe
the pain. That can be your body speaking, or maybe
you could ask that exact physical pain. What do you
like it's your knee, your left knee left mee. What
(29:14):
would you like to show me today? What do you
want to tell me today? Do you have a message
for me? And if this practice feels weird to you,
because it can kind of feel weird sometimes, or if
you catch yourself, this is your brain by the way, going,
like I don't really know if this is a thing.
I don't know. If my body is actually speaking, that's
your brain talking, which is fair like our logical, analytical
(29:35):
brains are needed and necessary. So just let that be
fine that that's what your brain is saying. If your
body chooses not to speak, or if you're not sure
if what you heard is really from your body, you
can also just let it be fine that your body's
choosing not to speak today. Come back to the practice
again tomorrow. Ask your body again tomorrow. Imagine that you're
speaking to a five year old child, and by showing
(29:59):
up every day, ask me again, Hey, is there anything
you want to tell me today? Anything you want to
share with me? Is there anything you have for me today?
You're gently tuning in and being present and building trust
over time that you are a safe person to share with,
that you are a safe person to speak to, that
you're a safe person to open up to, and over time,
(30:22):
that child, that five year old child is going to
feel safe to open up to you the first day
or two or five. She might not feel safe to
open up to you the first I don't know. I mean,
it might even be longer than that. If you know
if your brain, your your logical analytical mind has dominated
for you for longer, a longer time. It might even
(30:43):
take a little bit longer for that trust, that bridge
of trust to be built with your body. So don't
be surprised if you sit down to do this exercise,
then it's like, no, not really anything today that might
be possible, or maybe something immediately comes through. And if
that's the case, then lean into that and give that
energy and attention so that your body knows that she
(31:07):
is allowed to continue to speak. And I'm calling your
body she. I don't know what your gender is, if
you are a she or a he, how you identify.
I'm calling your body she because in the ancient concept
of masculine and feminine, or like yin and yong, the
body is the soft material of your existence. Your body
(31:28):
is the feminine. Your body is the she, and your mind,
your logical analytical mind, is equally as important and as valuable.
But that is the masculine. And I think one of
the reasons why we have such a hard time listening
to our bodies and believing that our bodies have anything
interesting to say. I mean, just think about the metaphor
here we live in a world that prioritizes, that venerates,
(31:53):
that emphasizes, that pedestalizes men and the masculine. And this
is flipping as we speak, but we minimize, we invalidate.
We really have strong negative feelings toward the feminine, toward women.
(32:14):
And so every time that you catch yourself going like,
I don't really think my body is talking to me,
like that seems kind of like a little out there.
If you catch yourself, I mean, you might even be
someone who's read all the books. You've probably read The
Body Keeps the Score, maybe you've read The Body's a Doorway.
Maybe you have listened to the episode with Elizabeth Bennett.
(32:34):
Maybe you like, maybe you're in some ways intellectually on
board with this idea, but when you drop into your body,
you're just like, I don't really know if this is
a thing. And that analytical mind comes online nice and strong.
That is internalized misogyny or internalized I mean, I don't
even know if that's the right word for it. It's
(32:56):
that internalized sense that the feminine is somehow less valuable
than the masculine, the internalized sense that intuition is not
as powerful as intellect, that sense is not as powerful
as analysis, that creativity is not as important as productivity.
(33:20):
Those ideas are so deeply internalized in us that many
of us, like I can speak for myself, are living
those ideals out in the world. Like I, deeply in
my body believe that creativity is equally as important as productivity.
And yet I don't live like that's true. I don't
prioritize creativity in my life the way that I prioritize productivity.
(33:43):
And so I'm still doing work in my body to
clear out those old ideas and to give more space
for the feminine to flow, give more space for the
softer parts of me to exist, and to really begin
to venerate and elevate and pedestalize the woman in me,
the feminine in me, the softer nature in me, my body,
(34:07):
and listen to her and trust her and know that
when she says something, she says it for a reason
and she's not playing. And we gaslight ourselves, that's really
the term that's coming to my mind, like we do.
We gaslight ourselves. We have a sense that something is true,
or something is available, or something is out there, or
(34:27):
we're supposed to, you know, write a book or there's
a baby, or we're you know, just a sense that
something is there. But because it's not physical yet, we
downplay it. We pretend like it's not as big of
a deal. We pretend like we're just crazy. That's just
a crazy thought that I have. What if it's not.
What if the messages that your body is sending you
(34:49):
are actually the most important messages that you could listen to.
And what if you took the time to tune in
and to listen and to really hear what she's trying
to say. That's the invitation for you this week. I
hope the writing prompt is helpful for you. I hope
you enjoyed trying that. Let me know how it goes.
I would love to hear, and I'll see you back
(35:09):
next week. I'm About Your Story Podcast
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
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