How to Come Home to Yourself

Last month I had the beautiful opportunity to connect with Kiah Burgos on her Latinaly podcast. 

I feel our conversation is a great listen for the women who have ever felt disconnected from their body, their voice and their intuition. 

So many of us learned how to survive, how to push through, stay strong, keep going. Often we were never taught how to feel safe-enough again in of our own bodies after life, love, trauma, or survival pulled us away.

Feeling so comfortable with Kiahs warm approach to our discussion, I opened up and in our sharing we covered a lot of ground. 

We get into:

~ What disconnection actually feels like (emotionally, physically, spiritually)

~ Somatic healing explained in a way that finally makes sense

~ Why survival mode can look like “I’m fine” while your body is still reacting

~ How to heal trauma you don’t consciously remember

~ The difference between intuition and fear (and how to tell)

~ Why creativity is a powerful doorway back to Self

You can watch on Youtube, and listen on Apple or Spotify. 

What’s been important on my journey of self-healing is being able to recognise past patterns, behaviours and coping mechanisms that served me once but were actually avoiding truely looking at what I needed to. I explained in this conversation how I was in a pattern of ‘over giving’, wanting to give to others what I truly desired and needed myself but keeping the focus on them rather than looking inwards. Something I know many women fall into as we take on care-taker roles for our parents, partners, children and are pulled in so many directions, we aren’t supported or encouraged to make self-care a priority. 

The practices that I invite readers to explore in my Body Wisdom book and guide clients to begin to integrate into their lives through our sessions ~ these are practical embodied application to begin a journey of increasing our self-awareness, form habits to check-in with ourselves and be more kinder and compassionate rather than harsh, dismissive or filled with guilt/shame. They are pillars of my personal practices and why I am so passionate about sharing! 

I understand the barriers to connecting to ourselves in intentional ways: we keep ourselves busy, we are afraid to stop and feel, we aren’t resourced to do so - so we do suppress, we numb, we distract. We need evidence to show that we can feel and we can handle it, and we can support ourselves through it. 

In the conversation with Kiah, I speak to some of the gentle entry points I encourage, the first one being presencing the body. Most of the time we are so in our minds we don’t notice what’s happening in our body. And being able to notice what is happening in the body, without going straight to judgment or straight to a solution-focus, it’s a practice. Here I encourage us to bring in a curiosity lens. This awareness and curious approach is how we start to reconnect and unnumb the connection with our bodies. It is how we learn to feel safe-enough again to begin to feel. 

In doing this, I also want to make clear that I’m not advocating for the need to dig everything up. We don’t have to go into all the details and memories of our trauma. Sometimes it’s not helpful. But reframing the focus to: how is it showing up now, in your body, your heart, your relationships?

It is through learning to feel safe-enough again to be and feel and viewing what comes up with compassion, rather than jumping to dismiss it, suppress it, avoid it or overanalyse it - can we get curious and see what it needs? Give expression to it. That for me is when things started to shift in my own healing - finding avenues for creative expression and creative self-reflection. 

The theme of our conversation was ‘Coming Home to Self and this is going to look so different to so many people. To me, this feels like a returning, a remembering of the power we’ve always had and a strength to continue to move through the world heart-led and strong in our sense of who we are. There’s a confidence in how you move through the world when you’re connected to yourself in this way. 

I believe in the power of this work. In the consistent intentional way we can be with all parts of ourselves and keep remembering, keep returning. Healing allows us to feel safe enough to experience joy, play and happiness without guilt or shame. It allows us to be connected with support systems and resources that build us up and continue to hold us when life comes at us. 

I loved this conversation and I hope you do too.

May it nourish you, inspire you and get you ever more curious about your connection with your body, your intuition and what practices may support this next season of your life.