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Lately I’ve been making some pretty bold body based decisions. Like the decision to move our family (in the middle of a pandemic), birth a baby at home, and take some radical steps in my business model….
These are decisions I would not have been able to make even 5 years ago.
I just didn’t have the skills, or the trust in my body.
So it seemed timely to share with you a podcast on the topic.
If you’ve got a current challenge/situation that needs some non-linear, feminine decision making fuel bring it along to the conversation where we’re discussing:
- The common reasons we don’t trust the body
- How to call on our instinctual intuition
- Riding the repercussions of taking ultimate responsibility in making bold decisions
- The 4 step process I use to navigate body based decisions
- Some current decisions (birth, business & family) I’ve been applying the process to
- The 3 most common tricks that trip us up including doubting our own answers
Body based decisions making isn’t about making the most “feminine”, “conscious” or “spiritual” decision. It’s about claiming the full power & sovereignty of YOU. In doing so, we’re opting out of the ‘typical expectations’ to actualise our fullest potential in the world.
The decisions that my body makes will be different to the decisions your body makes.
I celebrate that diversity.
You know your body (and her potential) best.
So you’re the only one who can navigate your way into these decisions.
Would love to know what decision you’re sitting with as you tune into the podcast! Let me know with a comment below!
Resources mentioned on this podcast:
- What is embodiment?
- What is a feminine embodiment practice?
- Feminine Embodiment Movement Practices – at home practice
- Feminine Embodiment Coaching Certification
- My pregnancy & birth [part 2]
Transcript
Are you struggling with a decision right now? Perhaps you have an idea in your head of what the right next step should be but your body is telling you something different, or maybe your body has revealed what the best next step’s for, but you’re finding it difficult to really trust and to relax into that body-based knowing? This theme, this theme around body-based decisions and how to gain trust in what our body shows us has been a really big theme of light. I’ve received several emails, and it’s been a big topic of conversation in our current coaching certification class. So in today’s podcast, I wanted to share with you some of the factors and influences as well as some of the steps that I use to make body-based decision, and to increase and expand the corridor of trust that I can infuse into that body-based knowing to move forward with more ease.
I’ve consistently seen in my personal life, in my parenting, and absolutely without doubt in my business that the more I let my body lead in the way that I make decisions, the greater reward and also the more at ease that I’m able to move forward in life. So I’m a big fan of operating this way, and I wanted to share with you some of the body-based decisions I’ve been making lately as well as some of the frameworks that I use in today’s podcast episode. So a really warm welcome to today’s podcast. Welcome, I’m Jenna Ward, Feminine Embodiment Coach, and you’re joining me here on the School of Embodied Arts Podcast for a discussion around how to trust your body and make body-based decisions.
So if you have a decision that you’re pondering at the moment, if you find yourself being more in your head and leaning more towards the logical rather than the felt, then today’s podcast is going to be a great one for you. We’re going to be exploring why it can be so difficult to trust your body, some of the frameworks and steps in terms of what to do instead, and a few of the most common kind of tricks or challenges. I’ll also be sharing some of the decisions that I’m navigating using my body as a compass and as a barometer towards the best path forward for myself and my family at the moment to help put this into context. I would invite you to have a ponder as we start this podcast. Let’s make it super useful and super practical.
Is there a current challenge or situation or desire that you are navigating and that you want to bring the innate wisdom and depth of your body forward to meet? Put another way, do you want to get your body to the decision making table so that you can navigate your way forward in ways that are aligned not only with logic but also with the deep felt sense of your body? Have a ponder for a second. If you need to pause the podcast and identify what that specific challenge or situation or desire is, and let’s bring it today to work with together. So when we think about what is trusting your body and what is a body-based decision, for me, a body-based decision is when I have this sense of a deep really anchored in knowing that I’m on the best path for me.
This is a really, really different felt sense to decisions based in logic. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a queen of writing lists of pros and cons. I love to engage the intellectual mind and to bring all the facts and figures and data along to a decision. But when we’re making a decision based on factual, linear, logical data alone, then we’re discounting the immense cyclic, chaotic, felt and emotional resource that the body is. When I think about what my body is, I imagine and I see that inside me, there is this expansive galaxy, this endless and big space that is full of the same beauty and primal life force energy that has actually created our external galaxy. And that depth, that space within me has so much knowing, so much resources, and so much to contribute to a conversation.
And so when I’m making decisions, I want to engage this internal galaxy and to bring all of the resources to it to the decisions that I make in my life. This has for many, many years been the way that I have navigated my business. Increasingly, it’s the way that I navigate parenting, which is a really new frontier for me. It’s how I have increasingly over the years been almost developing this skill to operate in life from big things like, do I want to go for dinner with you? Do I want to watch this movie or that movie, sorry, those are the small things, through to the big things. So one of the big things at the moment in my family life is we’re considering a move. So we currently live…
As you may know, I currently live on the East Coast of Australia, really beautiful part of the world to live in, very close to the beach, and I’m in fact, looking at the beautiful horizon as I’m speaking and having this conversation with you today. My family is contemplating a move from this location to another, and it’s a really big move for us. Because well, as you know, right now at the time of releasing this podcast, in many different parts of the world, we’re still in the throws of the Coronavirus pandemic and the uncertainty that this has brought. I also have a really young child, and so my family is very much in a stage of needing a lot of those bells and whistles in order to do life really well. I run a business.
My husband also runs a business. And so we’re a really busy family, and there’s a lot for us to consider in terms of how close we are to family, what this disruption to our businesses and our habits will look like if we do choose to move. And yet, it’s a decision that cannot be made on logic alone. Because like all decisions in life, there are more than just the logical practical considerations that are at stake. Our fulfillment as a family, our emotional richness as a family, our ability to actualize our individual desires but also actualize the desires and the dreams that we have as a family, these are all on the line. And these qualities, qualities like emotional richness and actualization of your fullest potential, these are not qualities that can be adequately measured in a list of pros and cons.
They just can’t be. They’re much bigger and greater. When I like to think about our role of the body in decision making, a concept or an image of the iceberg comes to mind. So our head, everything that exists within us from the shoulders up is like that 10% of the iceberg that’s existing above the surface of the ocean. But underneath the surface, that’s everything that’s in our body from the neck down is the remaining 90% of the iceberg that’s living underneath the surface.
I certainly don’t desire my life to be like the Titanic ignoring everything that’s below the surface and accidentally finding myself drowning. I really, really want to bring all of that often nebulous body-based knowing, that 90% that’s lurking underneath the below the level of the rational mind, I want to bring that to the way that I make my decisions. I think this is one of the big reasons that we can have trouble trusting our body, because this galaxy that I’ve described, this 90% that lives under the surface, for many of us, it feels foreign. It is a way of relating to ourselves the level of emotional embodiment, a level of sensitivity to the body, a level of trusting the body that may not have been role modeled for us.
It’s certainly a way of operating that we don’t see a lot of leaders in our political spaces or our popular culture spaces role modeling or celebrating. And so in that way, it can in a lot of ways be uncommon or a foreign way of moving forward and navigating life. And when you can’t have conversations with people in your life around making decisions the embodied way, you can begin to really quickly wonder, well, am I doing this right? Is this the right [inaudible 00:10:02] to go about it? Compounding this factor that many of us have trouble with making decisions this way because the body feels foreign is the fact that for many of us, the body also doesn’t feel safe. We live in a time whereby we are having and witnessing epidemic levels of disembodiment, huge sections of our societies and our cultures live in states of internal numbness.
We can see the cues of this, because when we are numb inside of our body, we begin to look for sensation and the feeling of aliveness in external forms of feeling. And a lot of those external forms of feelings are things like scrawling, and shopping, and sugar, and sex, and we absolutely can tap into those things with feeling in our body. I’m not here to say scrawling’s wrong or shopping’s wrong or sugar’s wrong or sex is wrong, but I am pointing out the fact that if we are not fully alive inside of our body, if we’re not tapped into the currents of life force energy and the richness that has created the galaxy inside of our being, then we’re missing out on one of the core fundamental purposes of life.
And to that end, we’re going to begin to search for sensations in other external ways as a way to tap up, as a way to be able to access that which we so deeply yearn for. And when we consider, well, why are so many of us numb inside? I would suggest that for a lot of us, our sensations don’t feel safe. There may be many, many different reasons in your body that sensations don’t feel safe. I can’t tell you what all of those reasons are because I’ve had a very different lived experience to you. Depending on where you live, the culture that you grew up with, your identities, your privileges, the challenges and the lived experience that you’ve had, your body will have a very different relationship to sensation and to the safety of sensation than mine.
I know that for me, one of the big reasons that sensations can sometimes feel unsafe in my body is that they’re so big and they’re so overwhelming, and sometimes I wonder if I will drown in their depths. Sometimes for me, sensations feel unsafe because they ask me to feel vulnerable and that can really break my heart, and that’s a feeling that I would often rather avoid because it’s not a comfortable feeling. For me, sensation sometimes don’t feel safe, because a deep heart of me is this eternal omnipresent longing, a longing that can be satiated but that always is hungry for more. I’m not talking about more money or more power here, I’m talking about more intimacy with life. That’s a unsolvable equation. That longing doesn’t have a specific solution.
And in this world that we live in where we want everything to be solvable and controllable, that always present longing, again, it can really feel so intense and uncomfortable to admit to myself. These are just some of the ways that my body can relate to intense and alive sensation as unsafe, and that’s not even to begin on the complex interplay of frozen tension that my body holds. So when we think about our bodies, if there has been a point in our past whereby there’s been an experience that was too much or too soon, an experience that we weren’t willing or able to meet, to integrate, and to complete fully, our body takes that experience almost as if it’s a block of frozen tension and it puts it in the warehouse out back. And it says, this, I could not assimilate. I could not process.
I cannot meet that in the moment. It might be a big thing or a little thing. It might be a life altering, dramatic, traumatic event. Or it might be the fact that you’re a busy woman, and just right now, you don’t have the time to attend to your need to, let’s say for example, pee. And so all the data associated with that really normal natural bodily response, big or small, is bound up. And part of you, the conscious part of you said, I don’t actually have the ability to deal with that felt sense data right now, so I’m just going to put it out back, put it in storage, going to freeze it up to deal with it another day. And many of us have been doing this since childhood. For many of us, it’s been happening for generations even before we came along.
And so for many of us, we have inside of our body this big freezer with this big warehouse of frozen tension of previously incomplete and unexpressed and unintegrated units of life data. And when that’s existing within us, this is a big warehouse, if we put it really bluntly, of shit that we haven’t looked at. That existing inside your body, that’s not going to make your body feel like a comfortable place to occupy. This is one of the reasons that it’s so hard not only to feel the body but also to trust what the body is feeling. The good news is that feeling and trusting the body is a skill. I think a lot of the time, we come to this concept of trusting this internal nebulous galaxy.
And for many of us, we think of it possibly correctly as a form of intuition. It is a form of intuition to inhabit your body more fully. But intuition in a lot of modern let’s say spiritual and self-development circles has been… It’s been corrupted and it’s been appropriated in some ways. I’d like to present with you one idea that I hold around what intuition is, because I inherently believe we are all, every single one of us, intuitive. And I see intuition as a spectrum, a spectrum from the intuition that everybody holds. Everybody is taking in constant impressions from the world around us. We are constantly accumulating data, and we’re only consciously aware of around about 10% of that data that’s coming into our body in any one moment.
We’re filtering out a lot of information and background noise so that we can focus on what really matters, and this is a wonderful facility that our body has. But that other remaining 90% of data, something is happening to that. It doesn’t just dissolve. It is kept. It is recorded as an impression inside the body. And so, a big part of what I see as intuition is this deep body knowing which is the sum of all of our impressions gathered in a way whereby our body can indicate to us through feeling and sensing and knowing additional data that our mind might not comprehend. Now this data, because it’s not necessarily conscious, a lot of us feel it and we sense it. We perceive it, and we know it. It is a form of intuition because we can consider this instinctual intuition as non-linear knowing.
I can’t explain to you how I know that I know, but I have this feeling. And don’t you believe that the truth of something is in the feel of it? I believe we all have this instinctual information available to us, and it forms a type of instinctual intuition. The more sensitive that we are to our body and the more that we trust our body, the more of this instinctual intuition that we can access and the more readily we actually go to it as a source of decision-making power. On the other end of the spectrum, there is a type of intuition which is very mystical intuition. Now, this is the intuition that you could not rightly know. This is the intuition of people who can do things like remote viewing and channel people or entities that they’ve never physically known in real life.
This is a wonderful and very magical form of intuition, this mystical intuition. Now, perhaps all of us also have the capacity to tune into other beings or realms or places that we could not possibly know from the sum data of our lived impressions. Possibly we all have that capacity. Personally, that’s not a gift that is readily become alive for me in this lifetime, but I have a few girlfriends that are totally tapped into this very mystical and magical end of the intuition spectrum. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a great art, but it is just one form or one flavor of intuition. And I think this distinction is perhaps quite useful, because it reaffirms to each of us that our body does have an instinctual intuition that we can draw on, that some tele of multitudes of impressions that we might not consciously be able to understand but that our body knows if we listened to her.
The final piece of the discussion that I just want to weigh in on in terms of why it can be so challenging to trust our body is to speak a little bit more about the repercussions of trusting your body. So for many of us, we find it difficult to trust for a number of reasons. As we’ve already described, the body feels foreign. It may feel unsafe. We may have a unhelpful view of intuition. We may not have had this role modeled for us. We may not have cultivated this skill. Realizing that body-based decisions is not something that you’re born with or not born with, it’s a skill that all of us can cultivate if we desire to grow in that direction. The final piece that I want to weigh in on here around trusting the body is the repercussions of trusting your body.
So when you decide to trust your body and take ultimate sovereign power over what is true for you inside your being, you are also taking ultimate responsibility. So when you follow your non-logical, non-linear, felt, instinctually intuited body-based knowing, you are in a lot of ways opting out of the conventional model of decision-making. And as a result of that, the repercussions, the side-effects and the implications of that decision are now something that you have to wear. You can’t blame a system. You can’t blame another person, because you have stepped into your power as a sovereign being, and that means that you’re taking the full weight of your power and the full weight of all the responsibilities that come along with that.
To put this into context, an example. I decided at about 30 weeks into my pregnancy, and I’ve shared this on my pregnancy podcast previously, that I wanted to change from having a hospital birth which was the pathway that my husband would just automatically set down by our initial health care professionals. I decided, I felt it was true in my body that my body was capable and wanted and felt safe, and it felt right to have a home birth. And so we changed our health care pathway, and we did decide to have a very beautiful home birth, which I’m so, so immensely grateful that we were able to have. It’s a real privilege to be able to have access to that. But in taking that decision to have a home birth, I was taking ultimate responsibility for all of the potential outcomes or harms as well as all of the potential gifts and beauties and richnesses.
That was obviously not a decision that we made lightly. If I had been in hospital and something went wrong, then it would absolutely have been a societal response of, Oh, poor you, the system. What was your doctor thinking, or what was your midwife thinking? There would have been a lot of additional insulating factors, because in following the path of least resistance, if we had continued to go down a hospital birth, it would have been the logical and linear path forward that as a society, I feel in the society that I live in that’s the approved and the endorsed pathway. And that’s why so many women are automatically funneled down that pathway. That’s why I was automatically funneled down that pathway to begin with.
But in choosing something different and choosing a home birth, which there is very good evidence to suggest that there is actually, from a research point of view, no additional risk for a woman of a certain age with an uncomplicated pregnancy, which was me. There’s actually no additional risk to my baby’s health in birthing at home. That’s what the medical data indicates, but that’s not what the societal impression of you of home birth is. And so if something was to happen as a result of having a home birth, who would have been wearing the full responsibility of all of that blame or shame or guilt or persecution? It would have been me, because I was the one that made the decision to opt out of what was seen as the logical step forward.
And so in choosing a home birth, I had to also choose the weight of that repercussion, and that’s something that is very challenging to be able to do, because stepping into our full sovereignty and our full power means stepping into the full repercussions of that power. I knew in my situation and I dived into this exploration in my own body that that was something that I could sit with because it felt so true inside me. But I’m very clear to say that even 10 years ago, there’s no way that I could have made that decision or that I would have taken on that responsibility, because my connection, my sensitivity and my skill of body-based decision making was absolutely not at that quality, that capacity or that level of refinement.
I believe everybody is capable of this, and everybody’s decision in that scenario would be different. Body-based decision making is not about making decisions that are, let’s just generalize them as the spiritual decision or the conscious decision. That’s not what body-based decision making is about. There is no one path or one right path for everybody because we all have different bodies, but you’re the expert on your body. You’re the only one who knows what the right thing for your body is. And so when we speak about stepping into that ultimate power that is ultimate sovereignty. And that means that as a result of taking on that sovereignty, you may have to ride ripples from… And I think we can almost see these ripples as a form of backlash from the society around us who see that luminous power and who feel like they are in the shadow of it.
And so all of this brings us to the question, well, okay, what are we going to do instead? As a result of all of these factors, what are the actual things that I need to do instead to increasingly trust my body and make increasingly body-based decisions? The first thing that I want to just highlight before we get into the four steps is that this is a skill. The more that you practice it in big moments and small moments, the more that you are cultivating the skill. You can almost think about this, and I love the way that [Barney 00:27:54] [Barron 00:27:54] speaks about this. She talks about this idea of trust as making small deposits in the bank. When you have made a body-based decision five times, you have five deposits in the bank, and that equates to a certain level of trust and predictability.
When you’ve made body-based decisions 5,000 times, you have 5,000 deposits in that bank, and that lends a very different weight to the trust that you can embed into these types of decisions. And so every time you have the opportunity from, what will I eat? Will I go on that date? What movie do I want to watch? All of these are small opportunities to build up more deposits in your bank of trust around body-based decision making, and this is what moves the skill forward; consistent constant practice. The four steps to actually making a body-based decision are really very simple, and these are the steps that my family has used to contemplate our pending move. So the first decision that you need to ask yourself, and we kind of preluded to this at the start of the podcast.
The first step is to ask yourself, well, what the decision? What’s the challenge? What’s the situation that is in front of me? I hope that you’ve already identified that, just getting clear on what is the actual decision or the challenge or the opportunity that I want to move forward with. Very often, we can have a nebulous feeling that something’s not quite right. But unless we actually get specific around what that situation is, then our ideas remain quite loose and unformed and up in the clouds and they lack grounding. So what is the decision that’s in front of you? My decision as an example was, are we going to uproot our entire life and move during a pandemic?
I think it’s a pretty clear decision. The next step might surprise you. The next step is, gather the facts. So body-based decision making is not about ignoring factual data. It’s not about ignoring your intellect. It’s not about not writing a list of pros and cons. Your body is going to be unable to make a decision unless it has all of the relevant facts. These facts are really important, because when we move into the future steps which are around formulating questions and feelings, if we don’t have all the facts, then we’re going to have big gaping holes on the potential map of this decision. We don’t want big holes. We don’t want unanswered questions because they’re going to trouble, they’re going to stumble us as we move forward into the framework.
So the second step is, gather all the facts. So for me in my situation moving in a pandemic, I’m looking at things like, are flights even available? What are the steps do we even leave the country? What is the likelihood of the incidents of actually contracting Coronavirus or any other travel-related disease at this time? What’s the recovery rate? What’s the mortality rate? What’s the death rate of this? What do the members of my family think? What’s it going to cost me to pack up my house and move it? How much time is that going to take me? All of these facts through a multitude of dimensions take a lot of time together.
But you need to have those facts, because if you don’t have that data, then you’re feeling into the decision in an uninformed way and that just won’t do. Now, it’s okay if you don’t have all of the facts up front, because we’re going to get to that moment in a sec… Get to that section in a little moment. Sometimes as you go deeper into this framework, you realize there are facts that you don’t have that you do need. So say for example, I was chatting with one of our coaching certification students who is also navigating a move at the moment, and we were chatting about… She was asking, “How are we going to really make this decision?” And we spoke about, well, you’re going to need all the facts like, what’s the commute time to school?
What schools are available in that area? What’s the cost of those schools? All of these facts are really important because we live in this three dimensional world, so be smart. Once we have all the facts, the next step that we’re going to move towards is really feeling this. But when I talk about feeling, I’m talking about feeling in a specific direction. So let me explain that in more detail. When we think about what embodiment is, embodiment is about inhabiting yourself, inhabiting who you are inside the temple of your body. That can only happen when you have sensitivity to your body. But when you’re wanting to make a body-based decision, there’s a particular direction or orientation that you’re wanting to feel your way forward into.
And when you’re able to orientate to that direction by asking yourself a really powerful question, you give the body a container or a context within which to feel. So one of the questions, and there may be multiple questions on the path of making your body-based decisions, one of the questions that I really had to sit with in my family’s contemplation of a move is, am I okay with our entire family potentially contracting Coronavirus? Now that’s a very uncomfortable question, a very uncomfortable question. And in many ways, it’s a fear actually that has bubbled up a few times as I’ve been moving through this decision making process around our move. But it doesn’t help me to ignore that fear bubbling up. It doesn’t help me to not have the facts around that decision.
I need the facts as an important factor for me to feel into my way forward. And by formulating that as a question, am I okay with myself, my young child potentially contracting Coronavirus, which to be fair is still a risk if I even stay at home? It formulates a very clear direction from my body internally to begin to orientate to and to feel towards. So think about this in the context of your own body-based decision. Think of one question. It might just be one facet of the greater conversation that you’re having to actually navigate your way to an answer towards. And as you answer all of these small questions around making your body-based decision, ultimately that begins to build a bigger picture, a bigger sense of informedness.
Now, I also do this constantly in my business. I just have some examples written down here actually, because I have my note pad in front of me. So recently in my business, I’ve been thinking about, okay, well in 2021, what is my private one-on-one work going to look like? Two of the questions that I posed myself, I actually wrote these down as I was feeling my way forward in the decision. It’s not surprising that I’m asking questions. I’m a coach as you know, and coaching is all about asking questions. Powerful questions are like doorways that create new awareness for us. So I love formulating myself a question and then using the pillars of embodiment to really feel my way forward into the answer using yes, the facts and logical decision making, but also that deep instinctual knowing of my body.
This is really what the model of feminine embodiment coaching is about. So in a lot of ways, what we’re discussing today as a form of self-coaching, if you will. So in contemplating, what does my private one-on-one work look like in 2021? I ask the questions, well, why am I doing this? One of the other questions is, well, what do I hope to create with my clients? What energizes me to create with my clients? Before I even got to the point of, how long is a session, or what’s the price for a session, or when am I available for a session, I’m really letting my body inform by feeling my way forward into these bigger picture questions and these bigger picture statements.
And so step three where we formulate a question, this is really important for creating the container and giving the body an orientation to feel towards. The fourth step is to dive into that response with sensitivity. You’re going to want to take note of the sensitivity through all dimensions of your being. What you’re thinking, what you’re feeling, what you’re sensing, what you’re noticing, all of the different responses are all welcome. This sensitivity, as we’ve discussed earlier in today’s podcast, this is a skill that develops every time we put a deposit in that bank of trust. As we move through these four steps, we may find that we need to cycle through them quite a few times to examine all of the different directions or facets that come under one big decision that we need to make.
So a lot of the decisions that we had to make, for example, for our move were, when’s the right time to move? Do we want to move? Are we okay with these repercussions? Do we that much money? A lot of different factors to take into consideration, and each of those would have been one cycle through this four-step process. But there’s three tricks that might bubble up, and let’s say detour you as you move through this process, and I want to just speak about these three tricks or these three common challenges. Let’s describe them as in making body-based decisions. The first challenge that I see a lot of women find themselves with is, I get an answer but then I doubt it.
So I get an instinctual knowing what the right thing is to do, but then I doubt it, or I discount it, or I ignore it, or I dishonor it. Recently, one of our… A woman who’s recently joined our community, I’m going to call her Sally. That’s not her real name as I actually haven’t got her consent to use her real name. She just wrote me an email recently, and I’m just going to share this small de-identified part of what she wrote. She said to me, “Recently, I was confronted with a situation and I received very clear messages not to go on a trip, but I ignored it. I didn’t want to be the deal breaker. To make a long story short, it was a disaster on all levels. And the one who had to pay the bitterest bill, yeah, surprise, it was me. I did not want to hurt anyone, so I ignored all the signals.”
That’s what she shared with me recently. This is very common where we have an instinctual knowing of what we want, what would be honoring to ourselves, and yet we doubt it or we dishonor it. And you know what, this happens and it’s okay. It does not mean that you’re not capable of body-based decision making. I would suggest that these kinds of experiences also put a deposit in the bank of trust. Because when we have the awareness to notice, I have dishonored myself there, I had the felt sense of a yes, but then I followed my no. Look at where this has gotten me. This is also very valuable data that deepens our trust in following our body’s yes. I’ve done these things myself many, many times, and I will continue to do them because I’m not perfect at making body-based decisions, but I have faith that it’s going to move us forward and it’s all going to work out okay.
When we get that in… The other aspect of this kind of solution to this first common trick is, when you initially get that sense of a yes or a knowing that happens in your body, a lot of women very quickly feel that or notice it or sense it and then move on to the next thing. Instead, what you want to do is feel the yes and find a way to sit in that and to let it permeate more of your knowing, more of yourself, more of your being. Let it grow bigger and wider and deeper, and really honor that yes by feeling it fully. That’s a really important tip. Because very often, we will feel the yes and then we’ll move into the next action step. Like, yes, we want to move. Okay, quick, let’s book a flight, for example.
But actually, what we want to do is yes, we want to go. Now, let’s really sit in this yes and make sure it feels really full permeating through all dimensions and all fields of our body. The second trick that I wanted to share is around what it actually feels like to make a body-based decision. A great example of this is when women decide to come and join our coaching certification. So often what I hear from women is, I’m an 80% excited, oh my gosh yes, and I’m at 20% mildly terrified, aaah. But I know I need to move forward, and so I’m going to move forward with that terror, with that panic, with that angst, whatever their flavor is coming along.
This is really normal. I know that feeling myself really well. Because what’s happening when we make a body-based decision is we are saying yes to actualizing more of our potential in the world, and that’s a big deal. That’s also a way of operating that you haven’t known before that is bigger, wider, deeper than you’ve been capable of in the past. And so, in saying yes to something that is going to actualize more of your potential, you’re saying yes to that potential and to those ultimate responsibilities that we spoke about earlier. That can be really terrifying, and it’s also, okay. So making a body-based decision is not only about feeling 100% yes, sometimes it will be laced with discomfort.
And this is the third tip that I wanted to speak about. It is okay if discomfort is there. Don’t avoid the discomfort. Don’t numb it out. Don’t silence it. Don’t pretend that it doesn’t exist. Allow yourself to feel that discomfort. This is the practice of emotional embodiment and allow yourself to be with it, to enter into it with vulnerability. If there is a fear of what if, or I’m worried that, or how about this, all of those very valid internal responses, doubts and fears, they’re all welcome at the decision making table. So let them, bring them into the decision making framework, move them through your body with sensitivity. One of the practices that I recommend for cultivating this greater sensitivity and the capacity in the body is a feminine movement practice.
I’ve spoken about those on the podcast, and I’ll include the link to that podcast in these show notes. We also have an at-home sensitivity practice that you can dive into if you’re interested. The details of that are at jennaward.co/flow. And again, I’ll pop a link to that in the show notes. But allow that doubt, that fear. That next question that’s bubbling up, allow yourself to enter into it with fulfilling sensitivity, and to know that that doesn’t have to mean that your decision should be a no. It’s just the next layer of depth that wants to be reckoned with your power so that you can resolve what the right decision is for you. So, I would love to hear what is your decision that you are dancing with, and what has today’s podcast illuminated for you? Let me know. You can either leave a comment on our blog at jennaward.co or shoot me a message or leave a comment on one of the socials.
I would be so thrilled to hear what decision you were dancing with in this body-based way. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, I would absolutely be so grateful if you’d head over to iTunes and leave us a review. This helps more women just to find the podcast and enter into these really delicious conversations that we’re having. Thank you so much for joining us. And for any further information on feminine embodiment movement practices, feminine embodiment coaching, or to access all of the free resources that we have available, different trainings and workshops, head over to jennaward.co and you’ll find a big, delicious, juicy library of so many resources for you to move forward. Thanks so much for joining us today, and I wish you all the blessings with your body-based decision, beautiful woman.
