Getting Out of Your Head and Into Your Body

Fiona: 00:02

We often think of wellbeing as one-dimensional. What if we look at it from a different perspective?

Josephine: 00:08

The possibilities are endless. All we have to do is step outside the square.

Let's walk this walk together and hold on tight for the ride.

Fiona: 00:16

My name is Fiona. I'm a corporate wellness facilitator, body image and eating psychology coach and a lover of joyful experiences.

Josephine: 00:24

And I'm Josephine, a dietitian, somatic release therapist and a recovering people pleaser and perfectionist.

Fiona and Josephine: 00:30

Welcome to Outside the Square.

Fiona: 00:35

Welcome back

Josephine: 00:36

And we're back.

Fiona: 00:37

Here again for another episode of Outside the Square, welcome.

Josephine: 00:42

Thanks. I have a confession to make, Fiona. I gave the exercise from our last episode a really good shot on multiple occasions and yeah, decided I’m not in love with it, it’s hard. Breath work for me in general is hard and this was no different, ah box breathing homework that I went away with.

Fiona: 01:04

Well, I'm glad you tried it. Yeah, I found it really hard when I first started particularly with the box breathing as well, I think the holding was really difficult for me and it took some time to drop into it. Now I love it, but it didn't come easy.

Josephine: 01:21

Mmmm, yeah, it felt like restraint to me. So both on the in breath to hold and on the out breath to hold. It got easier, it did, I could see myself making progress. So yeah, there was a light at the tunnel there for sure, but yeah, it is a challenge that one for me and I know that I'm a mouth breather, so breathing through my nose can always be quite challenging for my nervous system. And yeah, for anyone listening, if you find breath, breathwork or breathing exercise challenging, yeah, me too. It can be really hard.

Fiona: 01:55

Yeah, and I think sometimes continuing to practice or trying a different breathwork exercise, you know, there are lots of different breathwork exercises out there that might work better for you. And also, thinking about where that link is with other things going on in your life, so you just mentioned restraint there, that sort of sense of restraint so my question to you would be Where else in your life are you feeling restraint? And where is that link?

And that might also make it easier if you can make that link and potentially look at what's going on in that area as well, so a couple of things that you can do around sort of making that breathwork a little bit easier.

Josephine: 02:34

And I know the answer there, it's an all areas of my life really. Surprise! In that, one of my highest values is freedom. Freedom to express myself, freedom to feel my emotions, and that's because that's the part of the spiritual journey I'm on at the moment is reconnecting with my unique expression and my ability to feel what I'm entitled to feel, which I’d shut down in the past, because of conditioning, and like anything it's finding that balance point, isn't it? Like, I don't need to express myself every moment of the day. You know, there's times where I work as a team, I work in partnership and of course, like in those moments, you have to learn, when do you want to feel freedom and when do you want to feel collaboration? So yeah, I think the exercise will be valuable for me to keep doing.

Fiona: 03:27

Well, as you said, it was starting to get a little bit easier so it might be interesting to see where else that has sort of where else in your life that things are starting to get little bit easier in that space too. I guess that balance between structure and freedom is potentially for some people that the structure of that breathing exercise can help give you the safety to be able to be free as well, so there's a lot that kind of goes into breathwork.

So for our listeners who have just tuned into today's episode and didn't listen to episode two last week, we would encourage you to go back and have a listen. We were talking all about overwhelm and provided a couple of different techniques for you to work through overwhelm and a breathing exercise was one of those, so go back and listen, turn this one off, go back and listen and then come back if you haven't listened to that one yet.

But this week we are talking embodiment. So we’re talking all about that, I hear this a lot, I don't know if you, I'm sure you hear this too, Josephine, people say “I just need to get out of my head”.

Josephine: 04:40

Yeah, all the time

Fiona: 04:41

Have you heard that expression, I've heard that I've heard that expression.

Josephine: 04:43

I'm an over thinker, I over analyze, yeah, I'm A-type. People say it in all different ways, but yeah, that phrase, “I need to get out of my head” is so valuable because it literally tells you, it's your body intuition telling you what you need to do right? That's one of those golden phrases we need to listen to that. Yeah.

Fiona: 05:04

Yeah, and yet, that can be really challenging for people in a lot of ways because we can be so disconnected from what's happening in our bodies physically in terms of the sensations that are happening, in terms of the different feelings that we have physically and emotionally running through our bodies, so it can be a really challenging thing to start to do to just go, I need to get out of my head and into my body well, how do I do that? So let's dive in.

Josephine: 05:31

Perfect. I'm so excited for this topic, I think it's for me the essence of why we started this podcast and on a personal level, being able to get out of, my head and into my body is the one thing that totally changed my life. My ability to feel content and joy in my life, and I think it's fascinating that we only want to learn to do this when we finally stop.

Like I was a very busy person. I was running a business, I was busy in my spare time, and then went on maternity leave and realised, I've got all these incredible things in my life. I've got the house, the husband, the baby. Yet a lot of the time I'm sitting here not knowing what to do with my emotions, I definitely don't feel the contentment and joy easily that I expected to feel when I ticked all those boxes, and for me and that moment it’s like something is really wrong. Like, I can feel joy, but I also feel this anxiety bubbling up all the time, whenever there's quiet, whenever there's space, whenever I'm alone in this house, and that's not how I expected to feel with the new baby and yeah, I guess it was the first time I started to really feel or want to feel and had to figure it out, and that started this journey of self-development and spiritual development where I had to, yeah, stop striving to be busy and learn to be content in just being me, and yeah, it was magical, hard but magical..

Fiona: 07:10

Oh, there's so much that you've just touched on there, we could be talking, we could talk for days I think about all sorts of things in there, but I think you're right, there's often a tipping point for people, and I've seen that in my clients, you would have seen that in clients of yours as well, that there's that thing that becomes that reason to go, okay, I want to look at this.

But we do tend to put it off. You know, “when I've got time, when I take that, let me just shove all this down for now, I'm so busy and I've got so much on and I'm struggling and, you know, I might be burning out. I don't know what to do with my feelings. I don't know how to move to that contented space.”

I might have fear in feeling that contentment as well, and that joy when I’ve felt that before and so that can be a difficult balance as well, so we sit going through it and through it in our heads thinking “if I just push through to this if I just get to that next thing, then I'll look at it”. But as you say, there's often often a tipping point or often something that that gives us that moment to reflect and and go okay now's the time and for a lot of people that can be a physical illness.

Josephine: 08:33

Absolutely.

Fiona: 08:34

That stops them and you know I've had that experience before where I've realised when I've gone down, that I needed, I needed the break and I hadn't taken it myself so my body went “I'm going to do that for you”, but what that means is that I wasn't able then to be doing that in a way that was empowering for me. It wasn't my choice. So I learned from that.

So I think what we really want to do is help bring that connection with what's going on in our head, into what's going on with our body so that we can have that flow.

Josephine: 09:14

Mmm, Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, and I think you know you're there, again, it's quite obvious to know you're there, but it's that slight little thinking about one thing. So I know for me, I would dive into an area of the business which needed to be fixed. Right? “I just need to do a project here. I need to improve this”, and that would keep me busy for another month. Because we humans, right? It's not easy to feel emotions, they're really icky, and ironically, by pushing them away, they start to pop up all the time. So for me, it was anxiety. I'd push the anxiety away, I'd go do something to keep myself busy, but it would keep coming up. Because it’s there, it's there to be seen and acknowledged and dealt with, and I wasn't doing that for a very long time.

Fiona: 10:04

Yeah, and I want to bring this back to food a little bit because I know you and I both are in the food world or that's that's sort of where our journey has brought us into this space, is quite often, I want to talk about the comfort eating because that was me. Emotional eating, that is a huge thing, a lot of my clients come to me with emotional eating and it's about the getting out of our head and into our body piece, it's about that connection and what I used to do and what a lot of my clients do is when we eat we feel a bit better. We find ourselves feeling a little bit less stressed, and if we think about our nervous system response, our sympathetic response and our parasympathetic response, which is our stress response, versus our rest and digest response. And I’m going to use those two key words ‘rest’ and ‘digest’, so our bodies are designed to digest best when we are not in a stressful place, and if we are in a stressful place, or we are feeling stress and we eat, our physical body tries to put us in a rest and digest mode.

So we feel a little bit better because our body is trying to get us to that calm state so it can digest itself, but that's not actually dealing with the emotion, so the emotion then comes back up again and we might then eat again to help us feel better, and then that emotion comes back up again. So I think it's a similar type of thing that you were talking about with that “I found something else to occupy myself in the business and that took my focus for a time, but then the anxiety came back up again” and this can often be the root of a lot of emotional eating and comfort eating issues, is about being able to feel that emotion rather than using food to be the tool because it's not actually helping you work through the emotion. It's giving you some temporary relief, and there are times where that temporary relief finding that project to do in the business, you know, having something to eat is helpful, a helpful tool because you may not have the time or the capacity or the space to be able to work through what's happening, but it's not a great long term strategy as we've just discussed, there's going to be a point at which from a long term perspective something's going to happen and give you a chance to look at this more deeply.

Josephine: 12:40

Yeah, so true it doesn't matter if it's being addicted to work or you catch yourself in that phase where you're binge watching Netflix again, you know, it's just that sort of, they're all ways for us to numb some emotions, which feel too difficult to address, but can be done. Yeah. And make, I think as humans, it's so normal for us to run from these emotions and almost, like when we are children, I can remember being, I don't know, maybe even two years old and denying myself emotions, because I’d figured out if I reacted with a certain emotion, everyone around me then reacts more, and I don't want to deal with that, you know, I just want to keep the peace. So to learn how to deny yourself emotions, to not feel the painful ones, at such a young age, which I think a lot of us do, means that it's so, yeah, it's such a pattern that's just, it's always going to be there for us unless we consciously choose to start feeling.

Fiona: 13:47

Yeah, absolutely. We kind of, as kids, we become chameleons a little bit, don't we? It's often we find ourselves adapting to the reactions we get from those around us and often when you're a kid it’s the reactions of adults and that, you know, as a kid, you want to make the adults happy. You want to please them, you want to, you know, how much do kids love it when you congratulate them or when you say, good job or, you know, you're really excited? That's what they crave, so yeah, as you say, if you, if you have that experience and see that that's not the outcome we can often adapt and as you say, have that denial, which, which then just grows into being part of us and often you know, when I talk to people who are adults, your yourself included Josephine and myself. I'm now a perfectionist. I now want everything to be perfect, I want to please everybody, I want to do everything to help everybody else and make everybody else feel comfortable, and that's not always the best way to show up.

Josephine: 14:55

Yeah.

Fiona: 14:56

And actually what I’ve found as an adult is it's in the spaces where I have switched that off, so to speak, I've learned to switch it off and I've showed up as my authentic self, as me, that has given me the most authenticity in my relationships with other people more than the people pleasing aspect of me.

Josephine: 15:19

Hugely, you have to be vulnerable to connect, right? Yeah.

Fiona: 15:23

And speaking of that connection, you have to be vulnerable to connect to your body. A lot of my clients also come to me with body image issues, it's a big thing that I've had my whole life feeling like my body was not the right look. It was too big. It didn't fit the mould. It wasn't strong enough to do the physical things that I wanted to do or it didn't look right to do that. You know, I loved ballet as a kid and was very unceremoniously told that I did not have a ballerina body type and I didn't dance again till I was an adult. And dancing is one of those things that is such a brilliant embodiment practice to feel your body moving. But it was something that I denied myself, so it can be, you have to be really vulnerable to be able to connect your body, and for a lot of people that can be scary.

So a sense of being in my body potentially for me to feel my stomach jiggle against a flowy top, oh, that was just the first time I felt that and I noticed it, I immediately retreated to my head with horrible self-talk about how awful I was, rather than being able to just sit and go “this is what it feels like to have a tummy like mine”. People who have chronic illnesses or chronic pain, it can actually be really painful to connect and be in your body, so it does take I think that vulnerability, a little bit of courage and a lot of strength, and it's something that you can do gently. It doesn't have to be something that you try and connect and sit with yourself in a way that's really harsh.

Josephine: 17:12

Yeah, you can go as deep as you want to. You could choose the area of your body to connect with, which does feel nice and expansive, and focus on that while there's a lot of pain potentially in other places. Yeah, I think that's a really great point to make that yeah, it's about trusting yourself, like this piece of reconnecting with your own body intuition means that you trust yourself to go there, and you trust yourself to do the breathing exercise as much as you want to, and then skip it when you don't want to, or you choose how long you do it for and with all these practices, I recommend that they're pretty short to start with and then you build up from there.

Fiona: 18:01

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think something as simple as as, you know, water is such a brilliant thing to connect us back to our physical feeling, so for me washing my hands or putting my hands in water or under water brings such a sense of just, you know, you can say what does that feel like you can you can ask yourself that you can really connect to that feeling. That's a really simple embodiment practice, you're feeling just that sensation on your, on your hands or, you know, running water, you know, over if you have a shower over your body, whatever that might be. So there are some really simple, as you say, things that you can do that's really short. That is a choice of just how deep you want to go. And I know, Josephine, you have a brilliant exercise for us which is another, another one that we can do that's maybe a little bit longer than that hand washing, but a way to help us sort of feel safe in that embodiment space.

Josephine: 19:01

Yeah, I'm going to talk this exercise up a little, I have to before we go into it. Just because this for me and a lot of clients that I've used it with, whether they've got a gut condition and they're in pain or whether they've been on a weight loss journey and have all this fear of weight regain or whether they're working through big emotions or stopping numbing with binge eating, whatever they are working with, this exercise is one that I will always teach, and one where people are always quite gobsmacked by how they feel after just doing it the first time, and it simply is a way to get it out of our head and into our body, and what I find really reassuring about it is that yes, once we're in your body some difficult sensations, be those physical or difficult emotions might come up, but we are only going to be sitting in that for 90 seconds.

So it's creating a safe space in your body to feel discomfort so that you can move through it and feel lighter on the other side. Going from a place of something which feels dark, sticky, heavy, uncomfortable, to something which feels at least 1% lighter, maybe even more, maybe radically lighter as well.

Fiona: 20:27

Yep, and having done this, I mean myself for the first time, I think just a couple of weeks ago you taught it to me, yeah it absolutely, I was really surprised at how much I felt a lightening and just a letting go of a particular sensation that was happening for me. So I'm really excited to do it again. So I hope you're all excited to join me. So let's get into it.

Josephine: 20:51

OK, beautiful. So if you're somewhere where you can close your eyes, I'd like you to do that. If you're not somewhere where you can close your eyes, I'd like you to steady your gaze somewhere. If you're driving, you can do this exercise, continue, obviously to look at the road, you just may not get the same benefits as if you weren't driving. If you've got things happening in your workspace or your home space, try the exercise and then when you've got time to be alone and close your eyes, try it again because you'll go deeper.

So we've got our eyes closed and I want us to start by taking three deep breaths together, breathing in through your nose if that's available to you, through your mouth if it's not, and as we breathe in, I want you can see light coming up from the earth through your tailbone and up through the crown of your head.

As you breathe out, you can drop that light all the way through your body back down to the centre of the earth.

Breathing in again, drawing the energy and light up from the centre of the earth through your tailbone, through the crown of your head to the sky and dropping it back down. All the way back down, down, down to the centre of the earth. Maybe one more, drawing that energy and light back up as you breathe in, drawing it through your entire body and then dropping it back down. Maybe letting go of one percent of the tension in your body if that's available to you today, dropping the light back down.

Now, I want you to come into your body and we're going to do a bit of a scan to see what you're feeling today. So feeling in your face, your head, your jaw, your neck. Your shoulders, your upper back, upper abdomen, lower back, lower abdomen, the bowl of your pelvis, your legs, feet, arms, hands, and what you're looking for is absolutely any sensation. It might be a pulsing, it might be pain, it might be heaviness, it might be stickiness, it may be tension. So once you've got a sensation somewhere in your body, if you've got multiple, pick the one prominent one, but once you've chosen that place, stick with it.

And I want you to bring your attention to that part of your body. And what we're going to do here is whatever sensation you're experiencing, say it's a heaviness, I want you to breathe in and let that heaviness expand, like you're breathing up a wave, and on the out, breathing out, going down the other side of the wave, letting go of some of that physical sensation.

So we expand the sensation on the breath in and let it go on the breath out. As you're doing this, you may have an emotion come up, you may you may not, but with this physical sensation expanding, you can also let any emotions come up and expand as you ride up the wave and then let them go as you come down the other side of the wave, just that one percent if it’s available to you.

And now if you have a thought, that's okay, we're aiming to get out of our head and into our body, but thoughts are very normal, they're going to be coming in, so when you have those thoughts, I want you to thank them, accept them and then come back to this breath, breathing in to let the physical sensation of the air of your body you're focusing on, expand any emotions with that, and breathing out to let it go a little bit in this physical place and maybe get some relief from that emotion if it's come up.

And so what I'm going to do, now you've got the feel for that I'm going to be quiet for the next 90 seconds so that you can keep breathing in and out with that wave of emotion and physical sensation and I'll let you know once you've completed your 90 seconds.

OK, it's almost 90 seconds. I want us to take two final breath together, breathing in to let that physical sensation and any emotion expand. Breathing out to let it go. Breathing in again to let it expand one final time, and then breathing out to let it go and settle back into your physical body.

And while you're here, grounded in your body, I want you to also ask your body what is it that you need from me today, and just give yourself some time to listen to any messages, any downloads that come through.

And then when you're ready, I'd like you to come back into the room, you might want to wriggle your toes or your fingers, or take a big sigh as you open your eyes and come back into the room.

There you go, you’ve just embodied an emotion, somewhere in your physical body. How was that for you Fiona?

Fiona: 27:53

Thanks Josephine. I feel very relaxed. Yeah, it's a real treat to be able to do that exercise with you, and it's something I probably need to do more of just to be able to really tap into those different particular sensations and seeing what comes up. So hopefully you're feeling nice and relaxed, maybe you want to stay in that little position wherever you are. for little bit longer, so we'll head off for this week. We've touched on a lot today. I'd love to hear how you found that exercise, I know Josephine would as well, or if you are going to practice it on your own again later on in the week, please let us know how you get on. You can connect with us through our Instagram @OutsidTheSquarePodcast.

And we've touched a little bit today on our inner child and how that can influence our emotions. We're going to be diving more into the lives of our inner children next week. So join us for that, and until then enjoy your embodiment, give some of these practices a go. Try something really simple around just feeling what's in your body and allowing yourself to feel that and let us know how you get on, but until next week, we'll see you then.

Josephine: 29:25

Bye everyone and for those New Zealand have a beautiful long weekend for Materiki.

Josephine: 29:30

Before we finish up for today, we would like to acknowledge the original custodians of the lands on which our podcast is created, the Ngāi Tahu people of Aotearoa New Zealand,

Fiona: 23:22

and the Cammeraygal people of the Eora Nation Australia. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging and to all our listeners who identify as Aboriginal, Torres Straight Islander, or Maori.

Josephine: 23:34

We love connecting with you, our listeners and talking about the topics that mean the most to you. Reach out to us on Instagram at Outside the Square Podcast and let us know what you want to hear more of.

Fiona: 23:45

Until next week, keep stepping outside your square.

Fiona: 30:10

I have this persistent itch in my back, and it’s in, it’s basically the band in between my shoulders, so I’ve worked out that it’s about heart chakra

Josephine: 30:21

Yeah

Fiona: 30:22

And I can’t reach it to itch it, and it’s really annoying. So that’s what I went through today was the itch, and that whole sense, and I got rid of my itch.

Josephine: 30:34

Oh, yay, we have to celebrate. Awesome!

Fiona: 30:39

I mean how long it will stay gone I don’t know, but I now have a practice that I can use to help get rid of the itch.

Josephine: 30:47

I’m so glad you had that experience. Yes, no itch!

Josephine and Fiona: 30:50

Ha ha ha.