Working in partnership with your Body
- Cathy Williams
- Oct 25
- 5 min read
Yesterday I got up on stage - which just happened to be at the same podium and in the same room of the glorious QVWC building where I launched my book Body Wisdom two years ago.
I was part of an incredible line up of speakers curated by Dr Sonja Skocic for the Empowering Women Summit focused on Growth, Power & Purpose, hosted by the Melbourne Centre for Women’s Mental Health.
It was a full glorious day, both moving and inspiring to hear stories shared of what women go through and the strength of what they overcome. We heard stories of self-doubt and comparison, feeling inadequate. We heard stories of migration and challenges to assimilate and build community. We heard stories of how women just ‘get on with it’ and don’t realise how extraordinary their stories are. We heard stories of being dismissed by medical professionals, and undermined in their field of expertise. We heard about the ramifications of diet culture and not being financially literate.
I was one of the last speakers. My talk I titled ‘Intuition - Your Body of Knowledge’ which was a little play on words because my story and my experience has been about coming to know my Intuition through my body - learning my bodies signals and coming to understand what my body is communicating with me. Even if it doesn’t make sense to my mind or my mind tries to override a feeling - I now have a felt sense of how I feel about something and I’ve come to trust in that and work in partnership with my body and have my intuition as a guide.
But in my talk I shared how it wasn’t always that way. I have a long history of living solely in my mind - really having my mind on a pedestal and keeping myself very busy - in the overthinking, over productive, never switching off way of doing doing doing - keeping myself so busy in fact that I didn’t offer myself any space to feel, any pause to be, I treated my body just as a vessel to get from A to B.
I know from the nods I received in the room and the women I‘ve worked with that I am not alone in doing this. That through so many different circumstances and life experiences, be it our bodies response to a traumatic event, burn out, unhealthy coping mechanisms - we can become disconnected from our bodies, dissociate from our bodies, look to numb or distract ourselves from our feelings. Because feeling the full spectrum of our emotions is overwhelming, I was scared to feel my feelings, to sit with what was actually going on, to feel all the anxiety, the stress, the sadness that I assumed would be all encompassing and consume me to a point where perhaps I couldn’t function. And I had to function, I had to keep working, keep mothering, keep showing up each day.
And I wonder what it is about women and our feelings that have us feeling so ashamed.
I’m sure many women can relate to the experience of having it reflected back to them in a negative way that they are “too much”, that they “feel too deeply”, “you’re too sensitive” etc.
This is what I experienced, particularly as a child - my mother, bless her for all that she is and has done for me and my sister - but she was never allowed to express how she was feeling, so she was never taught or shown healthy ways, so in turn I was shown and taught what she learnt which was that there were acceptable ways to behave, and that there were ‘good’ feelings and ‘bad’ feelings and I never wanted to feel the bad feelings - I was never given permission to feel, never felt safe enough or held enough to allow such feelings to be shown - so we develop ways to cope, ways to dismiss, avoid, numb distract.
But what we avoid becomes our shadow and what we suppress still gets stored in the body. As a Movement & Art Therapist I know that our bodies carry all of our experiences and when not given an outlet to be expressed we hold it inside and it can build and fester and cause dis-ease.
So here I was, learning from a young age that feelings were bad, that I need to mask and suppress and that’s when I started to disconnect from my feeling body.
What I know now is that our feelings are there to be felt, what we feel we free - what we come to sense and feel are intuitively telling us something and when we connect to that we can work with our whole system - body, heart and mind - to support us in life.
INTUITION has been defined as “a sense of knowing without knowing how one knows”.
“Knowledge from an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts.” Also said as ‘a gut feeling’ or ‘a hunch’ - “the essence of intuition or intuitive knowing is that they are reached with little apparent effort and involve little conscious deliberation.”
Now I personally am all for the woo but Intuition isn’t a woo woo concept, it is a deep feeling and connection to your truth. My intuition is my compass. From a young age I had a really strong sense of Self - but through life experiences and responses from the people in my world and my environments I started to really doubt this inner knowing.
And I imagine we’ve probably all had our own experiences of micro moments where we doubt ourselves, where we’ve abandoned ourselves, where we’ve felt something, sensed something but then overrode it with some mind logic.
I’ve had many big and slight moments where I have overrode my intuition, dismissed her, let someone else words be louder than my own inner knowing.
And this year it has become ever more clear for me that that is not only my biggest WHY but my greater purpose: To support women to reconnect with their intuition. Through first acknowledging that it exists and then working with the body to learn how to work in partnership with it.
So in my short 30 minute talk I invited the women there to lean into this concept that your body is a resource that communicates with you and when we start to get curious about what it could be saying - there is great wisdom here.
We can tap into our intuition and work in partnership with our body as an ally.
This process can be intimidating but it doesn’t have to be. We don’t need copious amounts of time or to go on a week long retreat, though that would be nice - we as busy women, as busy mothers can start this relationship right now.
Start simple - start by finding a pause, checking in with your body, by meeting ourselves with curiosity, with compassion, with nonjudgmental acceptance. What we feel, we free.
And your brain overrides what is new with what it knows - so this is why I encourage you to make it a practice, foster this relationship with self.
I am here to support & guide women to reconnect and work in partnership with their body: to see their body as a resource - the home of their story, their strength and their potential.
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