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Women from all walks of life are experiencing epidemic levels of disembodied. It’s rife!
No matter our cultural background or country of origin, many of us know what it’s like to feel numb, disconnected from ourselves & overridden by what the world demands of us.
Today we’re speaking with three Feminine Embodiment Coaches, all from diverse backgrounds who have found their way home to embodiment work and are supporting their clients to do the same in the realms of dating, career & rites of passage.
In this episode we speak with Anna Rova, Siobhan Barnes, Amy Frankel & Jenna Ward about:
- How these 3 women from diverse backgrounds found their way into the world of embodiment
- We speak about the process & skill of disembodying and what it looked like for them, and for their clients
- Dating and embodiment: Anna shares with us some common themes & challenges modern women face in the dating realm
- Career and embodiment: Siobhan explores navigating career change through an embodied lens
- Rites of passage & embodiment: Amy shares her experience with rage, autonomy & rites of passage for women
Resources From Today’s Podcast
- Anna Rova | Founder of Claimed.com. Dating, Relationships & Feminine Embodiment Coach @annarova
- Siobhan Barnes | Life and Leadership Coach @iamsiobhanbarnes
- Amy Frankel | MPH, Feminine Embodiment Coach, Rites of Passage Guide @amycfrankel
- Feminine Embodiment Coaching – an emotional embodiment & vulnerability-based professional training for coaches
- Primal Feminine Flow – Embodied At Home Movement Practice
- School of Embodied Arts
- Leave a podcast review on iTunes here
- Thought or reflection to share? Leave a comment on Instagram here
Transcript
(This transcript is generated by AI so might not be perfect)
Jenna Ward (00:00:00):
Hello and a very warm welcome to this Roundtable discussion exploring the epidemic of disembodiment. Today we are joined by three feminine embodiment coaches, Anna Rova, who specializes in dating and relationship, Siobhan Barnes, a life and leadership coach, and Amy Frankel, a feminine embodiment coach who works with women through rites of passage as a guide. And we are talking about this epidemic of disembodiment and why across cultures and across countries, so many individuals really intimately know what it’s like to walk around feeling numb, feeling disconnected from ourselves and feeling overridden, having our desires overridden by what the world demands of us today. These three feminine embodiment coaches and practitioners in their own right are sharing with us some of the common themes and challenges that they notice within themselves, within their cultural context and within their clients around this epidemic of disembodiment in the realms of dating career and rites of passage, particularly for midlife women. This is a really interesting and inspiring conversation, and one that I think if you’re interested in being a practitioner in the embodied arts or if you’re a woman in the realms of dating career transition and or navigating midlife change, then this is a great conversation and round table discussion. So a really warm welcome to our conversation today.
(00:01:41):
I’m so delighted to be here today with Amy Anna and Siobhan who are joining me for a round table discussion around the somewhat epidemic of disembodiment, which I feel and many practitioners in the field feel that we are in at this time on the planet. So I wanted to start just with a round of introduction so you can get to know these fabulous humans. I’ll happily go first. I’m Jenna Ward, an Australian woman. I live on the traditional lands of the Gubbi Gubbi people and embodiment found me during my career as a clinical hospital pharmacist because I was so super disembodied. There was just this strong absence of sensations in my body, and so I would frequently substitute that with copious amounts of sugars, particularly the charity chocolates on level two in the kids’ ward in the hospital. I was like there every lunchtime buying my charity chocolate just to get some aliveness and some vitality because I was pretty much numb from the neck down. And that’s how one of the ways that I found my way into the embodiment world. Also joining us today is Anna Rova. Anna, would you be so kind as to intro yourself, please?
Anna Rova (00:02:55):
Yeah, thanks, Jenna. I’m Anna Rova. I live in Australia at the moment and I am a feminine embodiment coach, and I help single successful women attract committed masculine men. So I’m in the area of dating and relationships for women. And em, embodiment found me or I found em embodiment. And through you Jenna, I was looking for modality to work with people. And I don’t know about everybody else’s story, but it was quite random. It’s one of those stories where you randomly struck gold and then you realize like, oh my God, this is everything. And so yeah, that’s how I found em. Embodiment or it found me it wasn’t purposeful like that, but I got to the same types of conclusions that you’ve gotten to, although I still do eat my vegan chocolate sometimes. But yeah, that’s how I came into this work.
Jenna Ward (00:04:05):
Absolutely. No shame on the sugar front, as long as you know the dynamic that’s playing out in your body, like, oh, I see myself reaching for that. I wonder what I’m avoiding feeling. I’ll just avoid it for 30 minutes more and just really enjoy this. And then maybe I’ll look at that. No shame in that. Thank you, Anna. Siobhan, would you like to introduce yourself to us and to the roundtable today, please?
Siobhan Barnes (00:04:31):
Yeah, absolutely. So hi everyone. My name’s Siobhan. I am from Hong Kong. This is where I was born and raised, and I’m an ex-corporate commercial in real estate professional turn to coach. And I support high achieving professional women to step into purpose-led careers and to lead with integrity and alignment. I found embodiment because similar to you, Jenna was very disembodied and working in a corporate culture that was very much focused on productivity and your performance and output. And I remember transitioning into coaching and I’d been coaching for a while and done the traditional coaching and the mindset coaching, and similar to Anna, I was kind of looking for something different. So I remember looking up body-based coaching, somatic coaching or something, and clearly you had done your magnetism work because you just popped into my field and I think I first met you through a similar conference that you had been running many, many years ago and got the opportunity to hear lots of different people speaking of embodiment.
(00:05:34):
And it was the first time I’d heard language put to the feeling that I was sensing in my body that I couldn’t describe, but had a felt sense of. And I think just even in that experience of seeing you appear on my computer screen jenna, that’s such a testament to the power of embodiment and you speaking that message. So yeah, I haven’t looked back and I’ve really enjoyed bringing in embodiment into my coaching with my clients. And on the chocolate front, I’m totally guilty of having some m&ms yesterday, so I still do that, but for pleasure purposes this time rather than just avoidance. So yeah, really happy to be here today.
Jenna Ward (00:06:16):
Love that. And very much celebrating same action, chocolate, totally different state in the body. One of pleasure, one of shameless guilt that I’m here for Shiv. Thank you so much, Amy.
Amy Frankel (00:06:31):
Yeah, thank you so much. It’s so great to be here. Yeah. My name is Amy Frankel. I live in the Little Estates in the United States here in Rhode Island land of the Narragansett here in the section of Rhode Island. And the women that I primarily work with tend to be at midlife, like myself, midlife moms, but oftentimes they have experienced or are experiencing some form of chronic illness. And really I think for so many of us, it’s the women that we call in are the women that were like us, right? And embodiment found me. It’s totally a movie type of scene, huddled on my bathroom floor crying all night long in a state of absolute dysregulation and just overwhelmed with physical mental illness that I had been experiencing for so long. And at that point I was kind of a new mom and all of my coping mechanisms that I used to try to use no longer worked.
(00:07:37):
I wanted to be present and I wanted to be there and a patient and responsive mother. So you come from traditional therapy and things where you can intellectualize your trauma and intellectualize your experiences for so long I needed something different and everyone else had shared. I came across your podcast Jenna, and it was exactly that. All the language that I was missing just it all clicked for me very soon after that moment on my bathroom floor. So yeah, I mean it’s so tender and so meaningful. So I love bringing this work to other women. Yeah,
Jenna Ward (00:08:16):
Thank you for sharing, Amy. So happy all of our paths crossed and that we are all in the world doing our embodiment work in our own unique ways. So as we speak about this epidemic of disembodiment and how we found our way on the path, I’m really curious because I noticed that we all come from different lands, different cultures, we’re all in the soup at this time on the planet, but I’m really interested to just the observation about how despite our divergent beginnings, there was a sense of this skill of embodiment, this skill of sensitivity, this instill of really inhabiting the body in its full spectrum from vulnerability through to pleasure. And the possibilities is that of course we use that as professionals as a modality with our clients. But seems from what we’ve shared that for many of us there was a remembering, a centralizing of embodiment as something that we really value and that we want to hold and how we also live and navigate our life.
(00:09:30):
I’m just really interested about the times that we live in and how this skill of embodiment not something that makes us better than other people, but just a skill for inhabiting ourselves and our inhabiting our body with was a skill that we all needed a little upgrade with. And I put myself wholeheartedly in that category. I’m curious just to hear a little bit about the context of how you feel, whether it’s personally, culturally, or through other mechanisms that you became or you started off being somewhat deficient in that skill. So I’m just really interested to hear a little bit about the context of your evolution as either an embodied or a kind of missing the embodiment piece. For me, I feel absolutely that it was an education that I didn’t really receive. So while I had emotions and I definitely was feeling and I was vibrant and I come from a particular position, I come from a particular position in terms of my identities. I’m a white woman with a degree of privilege in how I was raised and not a lot of overt trauma in the day to day of my life. Still despite this kind of very middle class playing field in I was raised in Australia, it was just a aspect around the shying away from vulnerability. And culturally in Australia, we have a lot of she’ll be right mate, just have a beer kind of attitude and approach.
So it was definitely an education piece that I feel was missing and that I’m noticing more and more is present for younger generations. I’m curious if anyone else has some thoughts around that. Anna, did you want to kick us off in terms of the cultural implications in terms of your skill of embodiment?
Anna Rova (00:11:42):
Yeah, Jenna. I mean there’s so much to say here and not enough time. It’s so interesting that it feels like I’ve gone through this whole journey years and eons ago because I’ve now worked with so many women in that. So it’s almost hard to, I mean, of course I do remember, but it’s almost hard for me to remember how it was because it was a different life and I do not experience any more stuff that I’ve experienced in the past. It was such a long time ago, it was like a past life and now I’m seeing all these women that I’m working with go through the same thing. I mean, I guess your question is more about our personal experience with that rather than collectively and all of that. I think we’re going to get to the root causes of all that.
But for me personally, I come from Eastern Europe. (00:12:41):
I grew up in the poorest country in Europe, and my mother passed away when I was eight years old. And that trauma has, I mean, is still present in my life no matter how much therapy or whatever, or even embodiment I do around this because in different, I found that in different seasons of my life that comes in different ways, especially when I gave birth to my two children. When I thought that I’ve dealt with all of that, it comes back again in a different form and it’s just part of it. But I was just like my nervous system was all shattered because trauma after trauma followed in my teenage years and my father being emotionally unavailable and then a crazy stepmother and physical abuse, emotional abuse at the time, I didn’t even know what that was, but now I do. And so I don’t know, I was just a very dysregulated woman, a very ia type personality woman, which I still am extremely ambitious.
(00:13:50):
And that trauma and everything else that has happened together with my personality just put me in an extreme survive mode where I was just go, go, go do constantly in my masculine energy just going for it. And of course I’m going to share my story a little bit from the perspective of dating and relationships in men because that’s what I do. And I got to the top of my game in my career very young, very early, very young, and I was successful in the outside world, maybe siobhan, I feel like you work with the same types of women that I work with. And I thought I was happy and fulfilled in everything. And then one area of my life that I really couldn’t wrap my head around was dating and relationships. I was attracting these men who didn’t want a relationship with me and they were attractive men, but they weren’t ready for a relationship.
(00:14:49):
They were emotionally unavailable or I was attracting men. In fact, I was almost about to marry one, a man who I didn’t feel attracted to, who was weak, who wanted me to make all the decisions, all the money, and I didn’t understand what the hell is, what is the hell is wrong with me? I’m the full package. I’ve got an amazing life. I was an expat traveling the world. I was beautiful, young, what the hell is wrong with me? And as I started to do a lot of research into this, I discovered the idea of feminine, asking polarity in relationships, all of that. And I did attract my husband based on all of the work that I’ve done and rediscovering and reframing my limiting beliefs about men relationships myself. And after that, actually the last missing piece was feminine embodiment. When I found your coaching program jenna, and then looking back, I realized that actually without knowing, I have done quite a bit of embodiment work without using the tools.
(00:15:53):
But then when I discovered a framework of how to help others do what I’ve done and also help myself massively, this is where I started to learn and use this tools myself because there’s a personal mastery track there as well in the coaching certification that you do. So many things have changed and transformed. What I realized, I started to even ask the question, who am I behind? All of my achievements, all of my types, your certifications? I work with so many women who are doctors and lawyers and business women, and they’re constantly in their head not knowing what the hell is going on. I didn’t know that. I couldn’t feel anything. I didn’t even know what the hell was going on in my body. How do I communicate that? How do I express that and how do I get vulnerable with men? And when you think about this, it has everything to do with attracting the right partner because all of these beautiful, amazing women, they want a great relationship.
(00:16:51):
However, they’re not able to have a relationship with self first. And so with this embodiment to what happened for me deeper, and I married for six years now, we have a family, two beautiful children still. I’m doing my embodiment work every day and my work. And I think that because of that, my marriage is becoming better and better. My sex life is becoming better. I continue to be attracted to my husband as I was the day when I met him. And really, in terms of relationship, I’m living my best life. I could totally say if everything would be gone and the business and whatever, it doesn’t matter. I am deeply fulfilled in this part of my life, which is in fact for me. And well actually, I know for most people, family is the value that
is, well, not the most important, but maybe one if not one of the most important, the most important. So that was my journey. And I hope I answered your question. I mean, there’s so much to talk about here, but I’m mindful of all everyone else on the call.
Jenna Ward (00:18:01):
That was beautiful, Anna. I’m grateful to learn a little bit even more about you personally, and thank you for sharing that. And I really loved how you shared, I didn’t even know that I wasn’t feeling anything I didn’t even know was exactly how you described it. And then to explore that shift of like, well, what happens when you don’t even realize that what you’re doing is this thing called embodiment, but your body starts moving in other ways. Remembering, because I believe embodiment is not some new skill that we’re all here learning. It’s like some return to what we are already deep down, capable of, and all of the ways that deep down we really want to relate to ourselves and to others. So it doesn’t surprise me that for you and probably for a lot of us and everyone joining us on the call as well, there’s aspects of our body wanting to move us always in this direction.
(00:18:57):
Even if we don’t have the language or the frameworks or understand what the tools are, they can be really useful, almost like getting a map to this undiscovered land. But you can also go on a hike without a map. So I see how this is the missing piece for so many people, and I can appreciate in the dating space, how so many high achieving women, how they’re operating in the world and what they’re really yearning for in the domain of family are discordant, and how there’s this big missing piece. I want to circle back around soon to hear about some of the really common or frequent ways that you notice the showing up in behaviors of the women that you work with. But let’s also hear from Siobhan around the context of the skill of embodiment and how you either came to have it or didn’t come to have it in terms of your journey as a woman.
Siobhan Barnes (00:19:57):
Thanks, Jenna. I think you bring up a really good point in that this skill is something that we did have, and we’re coming back to it now because I think we’re all mothers here. We all have children. And with children you can see they are fully embodied, right? They’re angry, they express it, they want to be fed, but they’ll tell you, and there’s no hesitation to that at all. And somewhere along the way we learn what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. And I think that’s when that process of disembodiment begins and reflecting on this, I think as a child, I was always a very sensitive, more quiet, reserved child. And I remember my sensitivity being a hassle, a burden, something that kind of slowed us down. And so you said, Jenna, that attitude of your she’ll be right, mate, let’s just move on. It was very much like, oh, you’re feeling too much.
(00:20:50):
Okay, just calm down. Just put that away and let’s get on with the thing that we’ve got to get on with. And I think culturally, I grew up in Hong Kong, my mother’s Chinese, my father’s Irish, and there was always this clash of cultures within our home and quite a bit of conflict on which way was the right way and how to operate moving forward. And I think just even being in Hong Kong itself, it is a place that is hustle. How much can you get done as cheaply as possible productivity? And there’s just a really hard work ethic here in Hong Kong, and particularly on my mother’s side, she’s one of seven children. My grandfather was a mechanic and they hustled to live and to really survive. And so there was always an emphasis on achievement, good grades, doing well at school, classic kind of achievement stuff.
(00:21:44):
And I think particularly with the Asian culture, very much a focus on, they call it face like your outward appearance, how your achievements, that’s what was celebrated. So I remember going to these lunches with my aunts and uncles and they’ve got millions of cousins, and it was so much fun. And my aunt would always ask, how are you doing in school? What did you get on your last report card? And it’s like, oh God, it had to be an A or it had to be something high achieving. And so just subtly, those little cues were all about achieve. And if you feel something, we haven’t got time for that. Just keep on going. The kind of express train to achievement. So I think that’s kind of the culture that I saw growing up in Hong Kong. And I think going into the corporate world with the clients I work with, it’s still the same, right?
(00:22:31):
It’s about your productivity, it’s about your outputs, about what you can get done. And Andy, you were saying, these women that you work with, they’re high achievers, they know how to get that done. And I think in that environment, there is no time to feel. You just got to get on with things. And so that perpetuates. And for me, I think it’s so interesting. I was actually reflecting on this jenna, I remember early on when I joined the coaching certification, I think I was in a hot seat or something and there was a conversation around my guilt around going to a yoga class. It was like, I can’t go. It’s so unproductive. I mean, I look back now and I’m like, my goodness, how wound up was I that I thought going to a yoga class was unproductive and a terrible waste of time? But I think that incident, it just reflecting on it made me realize that the focus is so much on time management, how much you get done rather than your energy and what you need to do to fuel you and what feels good so that you can go through life.
And I think that’s what you put words to. For me, Jenna in the certification program was that idea of flow and your energy and feeling your body so you can come back to remember that and to feel that. And I think like what you said, Anna, we don’t even know. We’re not feeling, we know what we are living in. It’s like a soup. So analogy I often give to my clients is like as a fish, you don’t know you’re swimming in water as a monkey, climbing a tree. You don’t know. You’ve really got that skill. And I think when we are living in these pockets and these cultures which say, just focus on your mind and your intellect and how much you can achieve, we forget that we can go swimming. We can go use this other skill and chill out for a bit. So for me, I think that with my clients, what I’m seeing is in the world of context with professional women, burnout and getting to a place of burnout is where my clients start to realize, wait a minute, I think there’s something more here.
(00:24:34):
Because more doing, more productivity, more strategizing and planning is not working. And this year I really got into the studies of burnout, particularly off the back of the pandemic because so many women were leaving the workforce in droves because the emotional load of work, looking after children at home with homeschooling, I think many women reached a breaking point where they’re like, I can’t do this. I think if anybody’s listening and they’re in that phase of burning out or just constantly feeling stretched, it’s a beautiful invitation to say, hang on a minute, what’s here to feel what is not working? And it’s vulnerable to say things aren’t working, you’re kind of opening up pandora’s box, but at the end of the day, you are accessing that life’s flow. And there’s so much energy that I think we have to give. And if we can just channel it in the right way in something that’s productive to us and meaningful to us, that’s a life worth living. So embodiment I think is absolutely the path to accessing your intuition, more joy, more pleasure, more flow, and also as a parent role, modeling this to our kids is really, really important. So we’re not perpetuating the cycle of just what can you do and what can you achieve?
Jenna Ward (00:25:51):
Thank you so much, Shiv. There’s something that’s collectively definitely to say around the point that you illuminated around achievement, get your good grades. And I understand this and I think it’s really important for us to not demonize it because these things do ensure our survival and our resources in a capitalist world. So I understand the emphasis placed on whether it’s academic achievement or security, but these tendencies, again, but perhaps because we’re in a capitalist world, tend to be not only just securing your survival, but then advancing your wealth and having more and even more and having to achieve at super high levels. And again, not demonizing wealth. I don’t think it makes anyone bad to be a wealthy or rich person, although you do have responsibility to do good with all of your resources, not to demonize that. But if it’s coming at the cost of our fulfillment and our actualization of self, we do have to question is that a set of values that I want to hold at the exclusion of all others?
(00:27:07):
And it takes a lot to question and change values. It’s very vulnerable and uncomfortable as you pointed out to do that. And it’s countercultural because we might be the only one interrogating this in a soup of extended family who are not having that conversation if we draw on your example just as one possibility of what this can look like. So I’m really grateful. Thank you for all that you shared and I look forward to, we’re going to dive a little bit deeper around what’s really showing up within your clients in a moment. Amy, would you like to contribute anything around the conversation of your journey back to the path of embodiment and just what you have noticed in terms of the context for your relationship to this skill? Oh, and let’s take you off mute.
Amy Frankel (00:28:04):
Unmute myself. Yeah, thank you. And I think echoing what Siobhan and Anna had said, and you also, I mean it starts so very young, right? Where children that your emotions are too big, you have to quiet down. And I think like Anna was saying, there are points in your life, these transitional points in your life when these things start to come back up. And for me, it was certainly also motherhood as well. But something else to kind of add on top of, so you’ve got how we were, there’s sort of a common thread in how we were treated as children, you can layer on multiple layers of trauma on top of that also. And then the societal, the cultural piece coming in while you need to be successful and what all of that means. And then on top of that is this real physical disconnection to our infradian rhythms as women and as girls, when we enter into menarche, what is that even like for any of us?
(00:29:16):
We don’t learn anything about it. We have this rhythm in our bodies that we’re forced to fit into this twenty-four hour circadian rhythm and then this power of the menstrual cycle of this infradian rhythm. I mean, I’m, I’m going to hit menopause soon and I’m just now learning it. I have two girls, so they’re going to benefit from it. And the reason why I bring that up in this context is because we know collectively also, I do a lot of work in healthcare and healthcare consulting. We know so little about the female body. It’s wild to me just how little we still understand about how that infradian rhythm really impacts us on a mental, physical level. And I bring that up because it’s also another tool. I think it’s such a gateway that’s available to us to really
understand how, because embodiment can be so big and what’s going to land for one person is not going to necessarily be the same as what might land for someone else.
(00:30:29):
And that has been such a powerful tool for me to really start to understand what is going to impact me most on my journey through my cycle. And I think, yeah, just how I’ve been really been able to really bring in the work to heal my physical body. That’s been a really, really important gateway for me because the most challenging things in my life above all else has been physical illness. It started very, very young. I was in and out of the hospital for what turned out to be various autoimmune conditions. And I love that we’re using the word epidemic here too, because when you look at autoimmune conditions, especially, I mean at the very basic definition of what an autoimmune disease is, your own body doesn’t recognize your own internal organs. So your body starts to attack itself. And there are so many different forms of these autoimmune diseases.
(00:31:34):
They impact women fourfold rate than men. And when you look at things like rheumatoid arthritis, 80% of cases are women. You look at lupus, 90% of cases are women. And when you start to add in layers like women of color, they’re even at greater risk of having these types of conditions. Celiac disease was another one I had for a while. You have a twofold risk as a woman to have celiac disease. And the same thing goes for mental health conditions. Women are just, they’re at far higher rates of mental health conditions than men. And we’re seeing it in pediatric cases as well. To your point, Jen, I think you made before, but I mean it’s an epidemic, right? And you see it very young and there are these sort of manifestations of it that are right in front of us. Again, especially as women. And I can say with certainty for me that my journey in coming home to the body has absolutely transformed my relationship or my relationship to these physical illnesses.
(00:32:44):
They’re just not quite there anymore. And it’s when you have these doctors and we give our autonomy away to physicians, and I think you talked about this too, jenna as well, from your physician as a hospital pharmacist, where we will go into these relationships with physicians and with the healthcare system and okay, you tell me, I’m going to follow what you tell me to do. My voice or my understanding of my body does not have any role in this conversation. That was very, very constant in my many, many, many relationships with healthcare providers. So really being able to use the embodiment tools to really feel my physical body take up space with my physical body, let the rest come, the permission to rest, which is that gets into the capitalist patriarchal culture that we live in, which we could talk about all day, the permission to rest, but just feeling into it and being able to give my body truly what it needs from my own direction and not waiting for someone else to just give me another medication, give me something that’s not going to really, truly, truly work. So I think just, yeah, that’s the most sort of personal context for me in the work and how it has transformed my life was really just moving away from these physical illnesses that really kind of stuck me for so long. Plus all of the, I mean, the nervous system stuff, the insomnia, the stress, I mean it really, really truly just starts to ease and go away. And I tried a lot of stuff. I tried all the prescriptions, all the things, and these tools were the transformative tools for me in my life.
Jenna Ward (00:34:39):
Thank you so much for sharing, Amy, really appreciate you sharing that aspect of your story and bringing this into our conversation. And there’s definitely something to be said for accessing embodiment at different points. If we think about embodiment as just sensitivity and inhabiting self, for a lot of people that can happen at the level of noticing their physical body sensations like, am I thirsty? Do I need to pee? Am I listening to those cues? Am I listening to my body being tired and exhausted? Am I listening to my cycle? I know clinical hospital pharmacist, jenna didn’t really listen to a lot of those cues and as a result had health conditions from that gross overt cycles and needs of the physical body. And then this, it can also become more subtle, more emotional, more energetic, more spiritual in the realms that we’re tuning into with sensitivity.
(00:35:43):
So really appreciating you bringing that aspect of the depth of sensation that we’re allowing and what you shared around being an expert on your own body. One of the things that I love most about the embodied arts is that they’re really no and dogmatic in saying you are the expert on what’s right for you. What’s the right career? Who’s the right man? What’s the right approach to your healthcare? Only you are going to be able to decide that there’s no made up. We can pretend to substitute authority and use some imaginary rubric, but it’s not really what you are deciding is the absolute right and best for you. And there’s ultimate responsibility, but also ultimate permission with that view of you being the expert on you, and it requires that you know yourself really well.
(00:36:44):
So on that point, let’s dive into how we are noticing if we are speaking about this collective of disembodiment, we’ve shared beautifully around some of our own experiences and some of the bigger themes that we notice with our clients. I want to also dive into the minutia of this, of how’s it playing out. If you take a moment to reflect on where your clients are at when they’re finding you magnetized into your work, curious about coming into your world, we know that each of us as
practitioners support and take a journey with our clients on the path of embodiment to where it is they ultimately want to get to. But I’m really curious, what does it look like for your clients when they’re showing up what’s not working? How is this disembodied? If we want to, again, and I’m not wanting to demonize disembodiment, I think it’s something that most of us have as a default, lack of skillset.
(00:37:44):
And you’re not better if you are embodied or disembodied. And we all fluctuate along the spectrum at different points in our day, in our cycle, our month and our life. There are sometimes really good reasons that we are disembodied to protect ourselves or to get through today or because we have to have three jobs to put food on the table. I dunno people’s circumstances, but I know that to be disembodied doesn’t make you a deficient human. And yet having the option to have that skill and employ that skill and use it in how you navigate life is something that I hope and wish for every body on the planet. Thus this conference. So I’m really curious to hear a little bit about just what do you notice in terms of how people are showing up? What does it look like for them to be disembodied?
(00:38:32):
I’ll just share one of the things that I notice with some of my clients. It’s like one of the common things they’re noticing is that they sense there’s more for them to explore. And they know that to get to that more feeling, more sensation, more depth, they know they’re going to have to get vulnerable. And it just seems confusing and challenging how to do this vulnerability thing, how to reproducibly do it with self, with another, with a client is like a whole other kettle of fish. And it’s not that they’re not capable of it, it’s not like they’ve never been vulnerable in their life, but they know that there’s this aspect of wanting to lean into, I define vulnerability and I’m sure I’m not the only one is vulnerability being this emotional risk. So risking to feel and sense and enter more deeply into the cauldron of all of these bubbling, chaotic emotions.
(00:39:33):
And it feels risky to do it, and it’s not that they don’t know how, but that there’s so much hesitation and tentativeness in edging forward towards vulnerability. And yet by denying vulnerability, they’re denying intimacy with those aspects of themselves. And they’re denying claiming the life force and the vitality that’s bound up in all those unexamined, unexperienced aspects. It’s like that’s where the gold is. If you can allow yourself to feel into those bits of you that feel edgy and vulnerable, there is a wealth of awareness and resource that you can use to fuel what you want to do in life, but you’ve got to creep your toe over the emotional risk first. So that’s one of the big things. That’s one of the big themes that I see calls or invokes people on the path of feminine embodiment, which is where I work and how I notice it show up. And that’s been absolutely true for myself in the past and it’s still an ongoing practice for me into the future as well. Maybe we’ll start with Anna, really curious to know what’s happening in your clients’ worlds in terms of what you’re noticing is a challenge, a problem, a struggle for them on this path of embodiment and disembodiment?
Anna Rova (00:40:56):
Yeah, this is a really big question jenna, and I’m just going to, I guess piggyback on what you just said about vulnerability and taking an emotional risk. This is definitely one of the key things when it comes to relationships and dating and men. I guess how I would like to answer this question is to explain it via the three pillars that are kind of the foundations of my work, and I’ll go through them real quick. The first one is about realizing, and this is going to sound, my work is a bit controversial and not my work, but I guess in the way I speak about it, I like to speak directly so that it hits and that’s a lot of the women are attracted to my work because of that. But the first pillar of my work is what I call you are the problem, which also tells me that I always say this and then I say, and so you are the solution as well.
(00:42:01):
And this is in the realm of a belief system that we carry as women around relationships, men ourselves, and love in general. So I work with a lot of women who have done therapy for many, many years who’ve done a lot of other different modalities. They’re following dating coaches, they’re downloading texting guides. They know, know their attachment style from A to Z. They’re extremely aware of what is the problem. The problem is that I’ve had trauma in my life or this and this and that, and they know everything, but they’re not able to actually transcend and break through the patterns of attracting emotionally unavailable men or men who are weak and so on and so forth. They can’t, like when you said you are your own expert out of a hundred men that you’re going to date this month, this year, depending on how fast you go, how are you going to know which one is the right for you?
(00:43:05):
How are you going to know, distinguish between all these men that are coming in? How are you going to make sure you’re not standing in your own way? How are you going to make sure you’re not going to self-sabotage and actually out of fear, say no to this guy or whatever. So the first pillar of my work is really excavating and reframing that belief system that we hold in our bodies, not in our minds about men, about relationships, about love in general. And all of this stuff is layered and layered, starting from generational patterns of stuff that our mothers have to cut to go through and hold in their bodies,
grandmothers so on. And so that whole metrolinear line, I feel like today almost all women have to just heal and reframe. There was so much even in the last, oh my god, like a hundred plus years to a world.
(00:43:56):
I mean, I’m not even going to go there anyway. So generationally speaking, then there’s nuclear family. Did we learn about relationship models when we were growing up? What is love? What is mom? What is dad? And going forward into our own dating life, so many women have been betrayed by men, including myself, and we carry all of that in our bodies. And then of course today in this world of patriarchy and postmodern feminism and all the cultural messages we’re getting about masculinity is toxic and how men should shut up and all that. So all of that has to be felt in the body and reframed and felt differently so that we can date from a position of vulnerability and of power in a true healthy belief system about men relationships and love and move forward and create a world where it’s not like women are in charge.
(00:44:51):
It’s how do we create a world together with men because we’re attracted to men. We want to make babies with men. We’re not going anywhere without men. Surprise, surprise. So the second pillar, then it’s within that polarity. And I love that the feminine enforcement coaching is feminine enforcement coaching. So it’s how do I get out of my head and out of that masculine go? So many women I work with, they just want to freaking control the dating dynamic. They want to know when are you going to take me out? When are you going to pick me up? Where is this going? When are we going to get married? When are we going to into relationships? So there’s so much control and they bring all of that masculine go a type energy that’s so useful in the domains of work. I mean, Siobhan can probably talk about that.
(00:45:38):
How do we do that in an avoided way? But it doesn’t really help us in dating because when I ask most women how do they want to feel in a relationship, most of them say, I want to feel safe. And so how do you want to feel? So it’s all about getting out of your head and really embodying your natural feminine flavor, your unique feminine flavor. How do you show up as a woman in your relationship and in your dating life so that all lives in the body and not in the YouTube channels that tell you how to put red lipstick to be feminine and how to be your hair and how to do this and how to sit and what dresses to wear. It’s crazy how women today learn about how to be feminine in very masculine mental ways. It drives me crazy when people talk about that.
(00:46:21):
So all of that is in the body. And the third thing, well, the third thing is all about embodiment. That’s like my third pillar when I talk about my work is about women are just stuck in their head all the time. They don’t know how to feel. Some of them are not even, they don’t even know what’s going on here, neck down. And so it’s all about starting to come into this alignment and flow with who you truly are, where you are the expert, where you’re not looking to a coach, to a dating guy takes when you are on a date or in bed with a guy, what are you going to like say, excuse me one second, you’re going to run into the bathroom, check up on your Instagram saves and be like, what are those 10 signs of red flags? Or what do I say right now?
(00:47:08):
And all these women, these texting guys also drive me crazy. So it’s using these tools, learning the tools of how do I, what’s happening right now? This doesn’t feel good. Why is it not feeling good? Okay, you can sit and think of that, but the most important thing is to simply feel it, to simply give your body the time and using these tools, you can actually release express, and then your answers will come, or only after that you can use some sort of mental model to see what is this about? And how do I communicate then vulnerably from my body? So I hope I summarized it well.
Jenna Ward (00:47:44):
Oh, so genius. And it makes perfect sense because we are going to need those skills in dating and in finding, and in your world and in language and being claimed by that right partner, we’re going to need that for that scenario. We’re going to actually need this as a skill for the entire rest of the relationship as well, because rupture will happen, vulnerability will be required for repair. And if we’re wanting to have those relationships where you described it as dating from a position of vulnerability and power, it’s like that’s also I imagine the footing that a lot of people desire in terms of how they create their relationship with their partner. Vulnerability is what creates intimacy between me and my partner, but I want to feel powerful in our relationship as well. So really appreciating what you’re sharing. And I know that you work with literally hundreds of women on this topic and around this theme, so you’re certainly in an excellent position to notice a lot of the typical themes. Thank you, Anna. Siobhan, how about for you? What do you notice? It really looks like we’ve spoke about burnout already and we’ve spoke about that kind of type a energy that’s not necessarily always creating the outcome. I’m wondering if we can get a little bit more specific in terms of what are you noticing in terms of how your clients are showing up and how their relationship or skill with their body plays into that?
Siobhan Barnes (00:49:19):
Yeah, it’s a great question and I think it’s so interesting, and actually just in this conversation, like Anna hearing you talk about the relationship dynamic for these kind of similar women that we work with, it’s that I think the common theme is that need to control the outcome, wanting to know it’s going to work out to have that sense of safety. It applies to the career as well. So what I’ve started to notice with the clients that I work with is they kind of fall into three buckets. You’ve got those who are in a growth season, so they think they’re on the right path, and they very well can be, right? I don’t think ambition is a bad thing. I think it’s great we want to achieve, but maybe they’re bumping up against, they’re the only woman in the room and they’re the only one who’s got a voice and they’re a bit of a minority, and they feel that they want to lead in ways that feel authentic to them.
(00:50:10):
They don’t want to have to be the one banging their hand on their fist on the table trying to have a voice. They want to lead with the skills that they have. And I tend to particularly draw kind of the more sensitive, empathetic types of clients that feel that they can’t bring that to the workplace. And as they get higher up the ladder, the message is, you need to be more firm. We’re going to have to toughen you up a bit. So in that growth season of life, the challenge I think for them is like, well, how do I do this my way? How do I lead in a way that feels authentic to me? And I think that word authenticity gets banded about a lot and people can roll their eyes about it, but I think authenticity is really about being in integrity and showing up in a way that honors who you are and you lead in those ways.
(00:50:58):
So that’s one bucket, the growth phase. The other I’ve kind of spoken about is more kind of when people are burning out, they’re looking for a bit more work-life integration work-life balance. I’m doing air quotes. I don’t think there’s a balance, but they’re looking at ways that they can kind of get healthy and prioritize their well-being. And then the other bucket is reinvention, which I think we forget as women that when we go through our lives and we go through our careers, there are these moments, these pivots where we’re not who we were five years ago, whether that’s because we’ve gone down the motherhood track or we found a partner and we’ve gotten married and we’re thinking about us as a team as opposed to just us as individuals or moving countries. I live in Hong, Kong, very much like a transient place or changing careers.
(00:51:46):
And so there’s those three different buckets that these clients come to me in those stages. And I think at the heart of it, because they’re navigating change or they’re being called to show up in a place of vulnerability. So leading in the boardroom, stepping away from working so hard to look at their health or deciding to change career, there’s a risk involved and there’s a bit of an identity crisis going on. Who am I now? If I’m not this person and I make this choice, what does this mean about me? And they want to control that outcome knowing that whatever they pivot into is going to work out. So they’re looking like five years ahead, 20 steps ahead and trying to control that. And also similar to what you were sharing, Anna, there can be a desire to outsource that decision-making to somebody else. For me, it’s not the dating apps.
(00:52:36):
It’s like career sites and Strengthsfinder and all these different assessments you can take to figure out who you are. And yes, you can use these tools, but inherently at the end of the day, you are going to have to make that decision about your next step, that direction you are taking. And as you were saying, Jenna as well, there’s ultimate, you’re taking ultimate responsibility when you do that. And I think that’s why so many people shy away from vulnerability and embodiment because once you know something, you can’t unknow it. It’s like once you have that felt sense, you’re going to spend energy pushing it away if it’s something you don’t want to do. And I think that’s why it feels safer to stay in the neck up and the head and planning rather than taking that action. The other piece I want to share is that ultimately our behaviour, it’s driven by emotion.
(00:53:29):
I think. We think that we’re logical human beings, but at the end of the day, it’s our emotions that drive our behaviour. If you’re angry driving your car and someone cuts you off in traffic, you’re going to say something, at least I do. I say something and I’m like, oh, you can’t believe you did that, and we’re going to be driven by how we feel. So I think that embodiment is just central. That skill of being able to feel and interpret what you are sensing in your body so you can make aligned decisions, that’s a skill that translates everywhere in your work, in your relationships, how you advocate with your healthcare provider. Ultimately, you’ve got to take that responsibility. And I often quote Bronnie Ware, who wrote this book, the Top Five Regrets of the Dying, which is really morbid, but she said when she was working with clients who were at the end of life, the top regret that they had in life was, I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself. And I think the only way we can live a life true to ourselves is by actually understanding what we’re feeling and to act on what it is that we’re feeling and to have the courage to do that.
Jenna Ward (00:54:45):
Thank you so much, Siobhan. Just drop the mic there with that quote. Nothing more to add on that. That’s so genius and brilliant. And yes, Amy, what about for you? Is there anything that you wanted to add in terms of just what you notice are
some of the really common ways that women in particular as we’re speaking predominantly about women identifying folk during this conference? Anything you wanted to add about how you notice this commonality around disembodiment in addition to what you’ve already shared? And again, I’ll invite you to take yourself off mute. There
Amy Frankel (00:55:29):
We go. Sorry. Thanks. Yeah, there’s sometimes just this feeling of this. It’s just a discomfort that they can’t quite put their finger on. And again, the women that I tend to call in, they’re kind of going into menopause and they may still have young children. And I mean, there are these rites of passage in our lives that we let go without any, we don’t do the things, we don’t have the ceremony. We don’t have the, we’re just, again, we have to just keep on plugging through, whether it’s that transition into motherhood and then getting into that transition to menopause. So they come with this can’t quite, it’s like that feeling of I’ve got to shed my skin, like fuck, get it off. And they can’t figure out what it is. They can’t really quite articulate it. And what I find, and we haven’t touched upon yet, that’s a really important piece here is the allowance and the feeling of the things that we’ve been told are bad.
(00:56:36):
I find that there’s so much rage and so much kind of anger, and I’m fucking sick of it. All of this that needs to come out as a part of this transition to really make space for what’s to come on the other side. So using these embodiment tools to find just some safety and security in the expression of anger, rage, the shame, these things that have built up and being able to hold space for yourself is something that tends to come up a lot because, and you touched on this, jenna, the capacity for feeling real pleasure and vulnerability and all these things, it’s directly related to how much you can feel. All of the other things, the anger, the rage, the guilt, your capacity, just you can’t feel one without the other. It goes kind of both ways. So I find that women really need that space to feel and just feel those things and be witnessed in that rage and anger and that disappointment, and stop being the pleasey happy smile all the time, woman, just be witnessed in this angry rageful self that I am in order to shed that skin and become less reactive and more responsive, and really be able to feel that autonomy.
(00:58:15):
I mean, you have to go into that darkness, into those depths to be able to shed all of that, because there’s so many versions of us that have been abandoned along the way that we need to go back and reclaim and hold space for, in order to just make way for what is to come. So they kind of just come from that place of just stuckness. They know there’s something on the other side here. There’s something they want to transition into, but they just have all these things that are being held that they need to be witnessed in the expression of the full expression of, and we’ve all been saying, this is not a cognitive exercise. You can’t think your way through, oh, this is what my anger and rage is it, it’s about how do we actually feel expressed and move it through the body? Yeah. So it’s the darkness, I think, and the shedding of holding of the darkness that I find a lot.
Jenna Ward (00:59:15):
I so appreciate you bringing this dimension into the conversation because it is true. You can develop a structural analysis of why you are rageful, but that doesn’t necessarily actually touch or unfreeze or liberate the stored rage personally or intergenerationally in your actual body. And it’s very difficult to mobilize in a new direction if the life force bound up in that frozen rage hasn’t actually been accessed. Rage, anger, all the impolite, unacceptable, inconvenient things. Yeah, we’ve all got a lot of them in our warehouse, I feel. Oh yeah, that’s such a valuable aspect to the conversation. Thank you for bringing that, Amy. That’s great. It has been such a joy speaking with all of you from your diverse perspectives and experiences with the collective disembodiment that is present in our culture and in our world at this time. And it also hearing more about each of your clients, your work, your styles, it just creates so much hope.
(01:00:31):
And it’s so energizing to me to think about the ripples, the embodied ripples, the somatic ripples, the ripples of value that you are supporting and contributing women to find, and that they’re then taking into their relationships and the way that they parent and into their careers. And I really feel like as one body settles another body and supports the skills to develop in another body, this just keeps rippling wider and wider and wider. So thank you so much for your time today and for everyone who’s listened and joined us for this conversation, you’re able to find the work of Anna, Amy and Siobhan, their website, their social links, and how you can learn more about their world. You’ll find that with the details below this recording with the show notes for it. I encourage you to check out all of their work, and I can highly vouch for these very skilled professionals and wonderful women. Thank you so much for your time today. All that’s a wrap. Thank you, Jenna. Thank you.
