Body-First Living 

Have you ever been told you are too much or too intense? Do you feel at the mercy of your emotions, and nothing you do seems to yield lasting results? 

Much of today’s mental health paradigm tries to pathologize and medicate away this too-much-ness. Cultural conditioning keeps us stuck by convincing us that we should be able to think our way to health, which leads to paralyzing self-judgement, shame, and blame when we aren’t able to manage or control our emotions. 

I take a different approach. I believe emotions are symptoms of a bigger issue, but we simply lack the training to decipher what they are telling us. Indeed, trying to understand cognitively only makes the problem worse.  

My mission involves teaching you to listen to the wisdom of the body first. The information we need to make decisions that honour who we are is stored in our soma, not just in our minds. Through becoming attuned to that wisdom, we can connect with and orient our lives towards meaning. 

In addition to improving our individual lives, I believe that deepening the body-mind connection is crucial to reversing the global implications of mass consumerism and overconsumption. By integrating our whole selves, we recognize we are connected to our fellow humans and all life on this planet, and can move forward as a force for restoring planetary wellness.

7 Foundational Principles of Being Well In the World

Methodology 

Though this coaching process is dynamic and does not follow a set schedule, the below concepts are foundational to our work and will be incorporated throughout our time together. 

1. Personal Values + Identity Deep Dive  – We will spend our initial meeting getting to know your values, goals, history, and self-concept. We will return to this foundation throughout our sessions to ensure your plans are aligned with the initially-established resonance.

Unless we understand what we truly value, and can connect with this experience through our whole being, we will easily be influenced by group think and ideology. As a result, we become susceptible to top down dysregulation, the sort that happens when we spend too much time doing what we are told to. A foundation of wellness is having your own fully-formed feelings about your thoughts and feelings, and we will work together to create a space for deep self-reflection so you can land in what is true for you at any given time.

2. Outsourcing vs. Resourcing – We all have needs. When people are unclear about them or try to get them met in ineffective ways, heartache and hardship result. I will teach you methods to use your body’s wisdom to get clear on your needs (and available resources) and figure out methods for determining the best method for getting them met. 

Needs are different from values. Unrecognized gifted needs add an extra layer of complication to any situation as we are more likely to deny the true need for intellectual stimulation, alone time for processing and integration, and spaces where we can run at full speed without waiting for others to catch up.

Once we have determined true needs and validated them, we will begin to be able to distinguish between those that need to be met intrapersonally, and those that need to be met interpersonally.

3. Value Neutrality – Working together, we uncover three key nervous system states – Drained, Neutral, and Over-Fueled. By acquainting you with the full range of your body’s spectrum, we will help you find your value-neutral place so you can learn to experience (and return to) the present moment.

When we can be with the experience of ourselves without judgment, without needing to assign value or meaning, and without needing to justify what we feel, we can then become more adept at being in the world without enmeshing with it. 

4. The Body Barometer/Somatic Axis & Body-First Living – Information is stored in different locations in the body. I teach you methods to release the mind’s dominance and instead slow down, listen to the body, and translate your sensations into insights.

Attending to a sensation means feeling it without needing to act on it. For a gifted person, this may mean learning to tolerate the discomfort of big ideas without needing to move through to execution, and being able to move into a space where we can exist with the ecstasy of the idea space as a perfect space in and of itself. 

5. Identifying the Dialectic – It is energetically uncomfortable to sit with more than one truth, but I will help you to tolerate the non-dualistic nature of reality and the feeling of multiple truths existing in the body simultaneously. 

How often do we feel the need to polarize strongly in a single direction in a well-meaning, but naive attempt to feel okay? Liminal spaces are the most data-rich, and where our true potential lives, and when we can’t see the value to existing within them we tend to want to rush our own processes in favour of arriving at some destination we can never actually get to. The dialectical space is your process, where you are most you, where you flow most powerfully, and where you are able to gain the most objective perspectives on yourself and the world within which you reside. 

6. Orienting Towards Pleasure and Purpose – Our over-stimulating world keeps us stuck in constant fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. Using the mind-body communion, I help you unhook from the addictive cycles of negative attention bias and learn to reorient your nervous system to a place of rest and peace. 

While most self-help gurus insist that the only way out is through, some philosophies are now coming to recognize that this approach creates an addiction to feeling miserable. If we don’t believe we can feel well without first feeling miserable, how will we ever release our attachment to misery states?

Instead, we can begin to slowly, slowly, get acclimated to feeling spontaneously well, and increase tolerance to joy feelings. Instead of shaming and blaming for not being able to be well, we work to spend a little bit less time feeling badly, and a little bit more time feeling well. As such, we eventually become able to displace the attachment to anxious, depressive, and prolonged states of dis-ease, and begin to learn to feel okay without sending the nervous system and the lizard brain into overdrive. 

7. Self-Validation – As intense beings, it is not easy to tolerate the full capacity of our wholeness, let alone revel in it. Through our sessions, you will learn techniques in self-validation, helping you to vibrate at your highest frequency and attract the right people, experiences, and situations into your life.

It is okay to be you in the world. It is okay to be well in the world. We can be in states without needing end games. Imagine moving from “I should be able to ask to be taken care of” to knowing that you are taken care of. Imagine being so solid in your right to be you that you only attract people who can be with you without needing to subjugate, possess, control, or demean you. Imagine being so sensitive to the vibrations of others that you know within seconds of meeting them if a relationship with them is worth pursuing.

All this is possible!