Ep #319: Getting Anchored with Dr. Ashley Albers, DO

This is Feminist Wellness, and I’m your host, Nurse Practitioner, Functional Medicine expert, and life coach Béa Victoria Albina. I’ll show you how to get unstuck, drop the anxiety, perfectionism, and codependency so you can live from your beautiful heart. Welcome, my love, let’s get started.

Hello, hello, my love. I hope this finds you doing so well. One of the things I'm really passionate about is showing all of us who feel so deeply mired in our emotional outsourcing, our codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing habits, that another way of life is possible, that it doesn't have to always feel like everything is like a full-on struggle bus, right? 

That you can live a life you love, where you know your limits and set boundaries, where you feel present in your body, where you know what you want, what you need, where you can make decisions with ease, where you don't have to consult the full peanut gallery before you do anything, where you don't ruminate constantly and chronically, where you can just be and you can be in love with you.

This is why I shared these Getting Anchored stories, these stories of people's experiences in my six-month program, Anchored, where we dive deep with coaching, breathwork, thought work, somatic practice, nervous system nerdetry, in deep, resonant, loving community for six months.

Because we need that kind of margin to do this huge life-changing work. And I'm so excited to share the stories of people who've come in to Anchored because they were at wit's end, things felt not great, or things felt like kind of okay enough, but they knew life could be way much more better. And they joined Anchored and they dove in and they let the community support them, let me support them, and their life feels so much more better on the other end.

And so it is with exactly that goal in mind that I share a beautiful conversation I had with the physician who recently went through the program. Dr. Ashley Albers is an amazing human. Her patients are so lucky. The community in Anchored is so lucky to get to know and love her and I feel so blessed and grateful to get to be her coach. 

So I hope that you can see something of yourself, your own struggle, your own goals, your own work in Dr. Albers process, where she was, what Anchored did for her and where she is now.

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Bea Albina: My darling, thank you so much for being here.

Ashley Albers: It is my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. 

Bea Albina: Will you tell the good people your name, where you live, sharing a land acknowledgement, if you know whose land you're on?

Ashley Albers: Sure. So I'm Ashley Albers. I am in Western North Carolina on Cherokee land, eastern band of the Cherokee Nation, although prior to settlers showing up, it was just the Cherokee Nation as a whole and my pronouns are she/her.

Bea Albina: What are you passionate about in this world?

Ashley Albers: Oh my gosh, so many things. I think more and more seeing people, especially people socialized as women, coming to a place of groundedness and stability within themselves and a feeling of wholeness and fulfillment and all the self-care stuff that goes into that versus every day kind of waking up and looking around going, is this it? But finding that, yeah, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm where I'm supposed to be and my feet are firmly planted. That.

Bea Albina: That. That thing. I love that. So you were recently a member of Anchoreded, my six-month coaching program. And yay, it was so fun to have you with us. I'm curious, my darling, why did you decide to join? What interested you about the program? What was going on in your life? What made you say yes?

Ashley Albers: Well, that's a big question. If we back it up, well, two and a half years, honestly, we back it up. I was that unfulfilled person. I was that looking around. I need to do something different. Didn't know what to do. We have a freaking global pandemic. 

I end up with a massive career change. Get coaching during that process. Get coaching after that process because I realized just how much work I have available and I was in somebody else's program when you showed up as a guest coach, which was fabulous. And I had never heard of Anchored.

I didn't know who you were, but I read the little bio that came out of this person's coming on Saturday. And I took one look at that and I said, I have to raise my hand. I have to work with her. And I did. And you coached me on that call and it was hard because there was a lot there.

But it was really amazing to get at it and to start to do that work in the way that you do it, because so much of what I'd had before was just all in my head, all very cerebral. And then I think I started following you on your website and learned about Anchored and did the little application thingy and we met and there I was because I realized, no, I didn't. I thought I realized how much I was missing that sort of bodily connection, all that somatic work. I had no idea, but I started to recognize that I was missing it. And there I was.

Bea Albina: Thank you for that. Yeah. I'm curious what was going on in your life that led you to want to take this leap into Anchored.

Ashley Albers: Let me, I think I was healing. I was healing from a lot of trauma related primarily to that last job and stuff that had happened with that. And in a new role that is much more balanced and satisfying and all those things. But realizing I just had parts of me that weren't connecting. I was dealing with some of the GI symptoms that you've talked about in the past that I was and still am working with a functional medicine doc and we've looked at all of that and really figuring out that, yeah, there's there was stuff that we could fix and treat.

And there was stuff going on that medicine can't. And realizing that, OK, I think I need another set of tools to help me get all of this. So all of those things kind of combined were what said, oh, and then to work with you that one day and go, oh, this is really powerful. These are some really powerful tools that I haven't really seen anywhere else.

Bea Albina: Yeah.

Ashley Albers: So, yeah.

Bea Albina: And it's particularly interesting for me. We haven't told the good people that you're a physician yet, but you're a fancy pants doctor. You know, you saying there are these things that I was recognizing through somatics at Western medicine, allopathic medicine has no tools for, might you expand upon that just a bit, my darling? Tell us more. Tell us more.

Ashley Albers: What would you like me to say? So even after Anchored, or during and after, my sort of workup with all that continued. And what we came up with is a lot of it's just stress-related, or at least that's the answer that I was sort of given. And there's an element of it's very true. I had continued working as needed.

So occasional weekends for that last job, I left that, turned in that notice in the middle of Anchored. That was exciting. And I could definitely tell how my body responded to doing that work. And I can still see how stress and stuff going on and sleep deprivation and all that plays a role. And at the same time, I don't think that's all it is.

Because when I'm finding more and you can go back and tell us which episode this is because I know you know it. I think it's also a really big sign of disembodiment. And medicine is obviously what I can speak to the most, but I think this is true of any first responders, law enforcement, teachers, long-haul truck drivers, we learn to ignore the signals that our body sends. 

Even school children, I mean, They weren't designed to sit in a classroom for seven or eight hours a day. And I think, especially in medicine, we ignore and ignore until our bodies have nothing to do but scream. And they scream with chronic pain, they scream with chronic fatigue, with IBS, with all the things. And there's a lot we can do for those things to a point. And then you have to get back into the body, at least as far as I've been able to figure out.

Bea Albina: Yeah. And so I'm curious about your experience because I know the somatics, which are body-based practices, for whom that word is no soma means body in Greek. I'd love to hear about what it was like to do our somatic practices, how that's changed your life. And then I wanna talk about how you're bringing it into your practice. But first things first, let's come home to you, yeah?

Ashley Albers: Yeah, so it was really fun to play with them, to try, because you teach over the course of the six months a variety of practices. And if I had to venture a guess, I would guess most of us pick out a few favorites. And really nice to have, for me, a few to kind of fall back on to practice for a long time on the daily, and then be able to fall back on it and say, okay, like this is my body. I can feel it. I can be present in it.

And I think even more than that to really practice and get better at responding to those internal signals. And to really get better at listening and say, okay, what is my body trying to tell me in this moment? And even the silly little things, they're not silly little things, but the seemingly silly little things like sit there at work at your desk and I'm hungry. For what? I'm not hungry. I'm not physically hungry. I'm lonely. I'm in need of comfort. I'm whatever. And okay, what would be, what would actually fill that need? And so really being able to listen to more of that.

And I think the other thing, and this actually showed up in a very strong way with one particular incident while I was in Anchored was to recognize when I am not in my body, to recognize when my sympathetic nervous system has taken over, appropriately sometimes taken over, and how long it takes to come back, which even that recognition is huge. Where am I operating from?

Bea Albina: What's different in your life with these skills and these tools, right? You've got the awareness. Cause I think this is where people, I don't want to say get stuck, but it's where there's like this internal pause where it's like, okay, awareness is cool, but wait, what do I do?

Ashley Albers: I think for me, it's really been coming back into alignment with what's actually, what are the right things for me right now? And so saying, this is a wonderful class to take, this looks amazing, this is not where I need to be right now. It's really kind of getting that sense of saying, okay, in my 24 hours a day, my 365 and a quarter days a year, where do I need to be? What path do I need to be on? Where am I going?

And really bringing in some of that awareness of what is my capacity, what is fulfilling and nourishing to me, and what's important and being able to prioritize some of what is important and let go of things that are less so, or that are nice to haves, nice to dos, but not the core thing and not where I wanna spend energy right now.

Bea Albina: I love that. I love that you're offering somatics as a beautiful tool. What I'm hearing is as a way to move through self-doubt so you can make more grounded embodied decisions.

Ashley Albers: Definitely. I think it absolutely can and does change the decision-making process.

Bea Albina: Well, I was going to say, you're a professional decision-maker, right? That's what medicine is. So you come in, is it leprosy or is it athlete's foot? We got to ask some questions and make some decisions to whittle that one down, right?

Ashley Albers: Right. Well, and I think that's really fun that you mentioned that because frankly, you're a professional decision maker too. And when we're doing our clinical work, I think a lot of times those decisions, we are so well-trained that those decisions become very, I don't want to say automatic, but we know the information so well that there's, I think often with experience, then there's less conscious thought and deliberation because we're so experienced and we are looking at our patients and we're noticing all the little things and we're paying attention to, oh, my, my hearing is telling me this and my vision is telling me this about them. 

And so we're able to incorporate that into a decision. But we so focus that outwards on other people that to then be able to say, my internal sensations are telling me this about myself. We lose that. We get that trained out of us because you know if you're scrubbed into surgery and your nose it's just too bad. And so you learn to not to ignore those sensation and this work brings you back to what your body knows.

Bea Albina: It's such a brilliant, it's such a beautiful point that you just made of how we, and this, I'm gonna loop this back around to some feminism in a hot little second, but you know I will, you know I will, doctora. So, it's just interesting this point you make that we spend all these years in school fine tuning our experience of our sensorium, of our nervous system, of our senses, right? 

That like, yeah, you can hear the difference between different kinds of coughs. You can put your hands on someone's back and like, that's not pneumonia, just as they breathe, right? You're like, diaphragmatic excursion, right? Like you come to have these keen senses and rely on our skills through cognition as well. 

You just trust, like, I'm gonna go super basic here, but like, extremely painful, one-sided, sore throat, no cough, it's strep. No, but you don't, right? So it's like this combination of being in like a default mode with your thinking and relying on your senses. But it is, it's all everyone else. And like, yeah, I mean, peeing. We don't do it. Eating. We don't do it. Right?

Ashley Albers: And if we take it outside of medicine, because I'm imagining some of who's listening is not in the medical field, think about driving on the highway. Like you're so aware of every other car and you can kind of tell that one is about to do something really stupid. 

And you don't necessarily, you can't always pinpoint how you know that, but you know that. And I think like your body's incorporating the, oh, they're driving a little bit faster then they just sped up. Like that your conscious mind doesn't know because it's happening so fast and you have that experience. And so, yeah, it's that combination autopilot plus awareness. And everybody does it. And in our modern consumer-oriented TV is always on whatever society. We're all so good at that, but we don't think to turn it inwards. 

Bea Albina: I have talked for hours and hours on this show, and I shall some more about how these somatic practices, how building that inner awareness, I'm gonna use one of my top favorite words, the sensorium.

Ashley Albers: Yes.

Bea Albina: How has that improved your life? We've talked, right? Like I've heard tale. So how's the day-to-day Ashley Albers life looking cuter because of connection with the sensorium.

Ashley Albers: Oh my gosh, it's a work in progress. And I do kind of want to pause us and say, it's a work in progress.

Bea Albina: I mean, come on now.

Ashley Albers: Lifetime work. It is more spacious. I have let some things go. And so some of that means there's less stress. Some of that means there's more sleep and better sleep because not on Zoom until whatever hour, they actually shut the electronics down.

And it's more focused in a good way. I think it's not driving toward some external goal. You know, you go into whatever your degree program is and then that's your goal and then that's your goal and then whatever. But it's a lot more, okay, let me take a step back and what do I want my life to look like by the end of the year? What do I want it to look like in five years? And really, what are the things that are filling for me and doing more of those and letting the other things go.

Bea Albina: That just hit me in the heart. What you're bringing up is nourishment, right?

Ashley Albers: I have a love-hate relationship with the word because I think it gets misused, misappropriated, but it's balanced in a different way. We give, especially in medicine and frankly, women, we give and give so much. And so it's really, it's not taking, it's not balancing that way, but it's balancing in what way can I give to the people and the things and the animals that I love, and what feeds me, and actually receiving that and getting that versus feeling like it's all giving and giving and doing? And yeah, so it's a different balance. And it lets me be more present when I am with people, which is really cool.

Bea Albina: That's one of my favorite parts too.

Ashley Albers: Yeah.

Bea Albina: Of all the somatic work. Yeah. You know, I don't have a clinical practice anymore. I closed my private practice, but I do volunteer at a free clinic because, you know, UCSF, we're always going to give back. And I can feel the difference in my body, how much more present I am in clinical interaction and as a partner and as a dog mom and as a sibling and as a best friend, right? And as a meditation facilitator. Because I'm in my body, I'm overall here so much more.

Ashley Albers: And when you're not, you can get back. Right, when you realize that you're not in your body, you actually know it and you can change the situation. You can bring yourself back in.

Bea Albina: Yeah, which is so beautiful. And it's this magical thing. It has allowed for many layers of magic. And this one I'd love to name is what my partner and I are calling loving do-over.

Ashley Albers: That sounds like fun.

Bea Albina: Yeah, it's really sweet because I’ve - we’ve both been just paying like this very gentle, keen attention to our language choices and how they feel in our bodies. And so I've been noticing this habit that I learned growing up of saying, do you wanna, instead of saying, can you please?

Ashley Albers: Yeah.

Bea Albina: Yeah, do you wanna empty the dishwasher so that I can get the chicken in the oven? Girl, that is not what I, no, absolutely not. I am not.

Ashley Albers: I mean, I personally never wanna empty the dishwasher unless I really, well, when there's a stack of dishes that I don't want to wash, then... fair enough. Okay, fair enough. I don't have the option. Like lesser of two evils, but...

Bea Albina: Seriously, seriously. And it is through somatic practice teamed with thought work that I can both see the... So thought work, right? The cognitive work allows me to see that the thought, can you blah, blah, blah, or I'm sorry, instead of can you, oh, it's even more insidious than do you want to, it's do you wanna? So there's like a little like colloquial, like, hey, just hanging out. Do you wanna?

Ashley Albers: This will be fun.

Bea Albina: No. Manipulative without noticing. Like no idea, right? Yeah, so I can do thought, like all the thought work showed me what the result was in my life of using that kind of language, right? Reinforces the neural loop in my brain that says that it's not safe to be direct, right?

It strengthens the belief that I need to people-please. It strengthens the codependent story that I can't ask for what I want and be met, right? And that was all insidious. I feel deeply safe and beloved and amazing and interdependently met in my relationship. But all these subtle things from childhood were there.

And then the somatics helps you to feel into it. So now when I say something like that, she doesn't even hear it, but I feel it. And I'm like, ooh, ooh, that like indigestion, like past the tums kind of moment where I'm just like, hey there, so I know you didn't even hear it, but I just said something that feels yucky. Can I get a do over? And it's so amazing. And it's what you're talking about is that being present has expanded my energetic peripheral vision.

Ashley Albers: Absolutely. 

Bea Albina: That's pretty dope.

Ashley Albers: It is.

Bea Albina: Yeah. That's super duper dope. Yeah. So listen, I know not to threaten you with a good time, but I said we'd talk about some.

Ashley Albers: Oh, come on. You where is your sense of adventure?

Bea Albina: Feminism. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about socialization as a woman. And then codependency, let's just start there. Codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing habits, for folks new to the show, we call that emotional outsourcing.

I want to hear from you, Doc. Talk to me about how that has been as a human socialized as a woman and just to like foreshadow or maybe dig in at the same time, being a physician, being a woman physician, right? Woman clinician, we can expand it too.

Ashley Albers: Are you sure you have time for this?

Bea Albina: So this is going to be a 670 majillion hour episode.

Ashley Albers: We might be coming back another week.

Bea Albina: We could do it. We could maybe get them the TLDR today and we'll come back.

Ashley Albers: Yeah. I mean, I think. Right. So we know that in our modern Western Americanized culture, and many others as well, there are roles that human socialized women are told to take on. Now we are expected to all the things, keep the house clean, do all the cooking, raise the kids, whatever, like all the things. And then you throw medicine in on top of that. 

Not universal to, or it's not only medicine. It's all sorts of fields, but medicine in particular, which is this weird combination of knowledge-based, the very cerebral and skill-based, and things need to be done correctly. And you need to get like people's lives literally depend on the right answers. It just, it is what it is.

And so within the entire field of healthcare, you've got to get it right. And your ability to get through school, if you're becoming a physician, to get a good residency, to get your fellowship, to get the job you want, to pass your boards, to all the things, depends on getting it right. And there's the first couple of years of medical training are all, are primarily in the classroom. And so you're trying to get the test questions right.

And after that, you're out on rotations. And so it’s, does my attending physician who's training me think I got it right? Do they think I did this right? Do they think I know enough and ask the right questions? And we don't need a whole big thing on how we evaluate residents but like does this group of humans think I'm enough? And tack on severe crippling sleep deprivation on top of that, and you completely outsource it.

And then you take these people who already want to achieve, are already driven to do that for whatever factors are either innate or socialized into them, and it's a recipe for codependence and outsourcing. And if you don't get the residency, if you fail the rotation, if you whatever, that then gets seen. 

So many people take that on as, I am a failure. I am never gonna be a good doctor. I'm never gonna be enough. I, and side note, you probably also have crippling debt, so you really don't see another pathway out, so you're kind of stuck, and then it becomes even more, I have to get the validation from whoever these people are, or I'm just screwed for the rest of my life. Like I might as well just go, whatever.

Bea Albina: It's a grim picture.

Ashley Albers: It's a horribly grim picture.

Bea Albina: And it makes sense.

Ashley Albers: It makes total sense. And I see it in other women physicians that then they're also trying to do the other, the home life things. They're trying to take care of the kids and do the house and all the things. When my niece was a little bitty and we asked her what color M&M's she wanted, of course she wanted all of them, she'd say all of them. 

And so here we are as women, we're trying to do all from the things because that's what we do. And then it gets grimmer because on top of that, and this is, I hope, trying to change, but within medicine, you have to be, like, there's an element of you feel like you have to be independent.

Often you're in the hospital at night with, yes, people by phone, people in other specialties, you have help, but you feel alone. And if you look at medical training, you move. I lived in two states for medical school, a third one for residency and came home for my fellowship. So, and proceeded to stay put, but you're potentially far away from the people who love you. You eventually know people there, but then asking for help becomes that much harder.

You have this crazy codependence, or crazy levels of codependence and emotional outsourcing, and this fierce independence that makes it really hard to go seek help, even when you know you're hurting. And then you come to Anchored and similar programs and get help and find coaches. And there is help out there and it's hard to get it sometimes.

Bea Albina: Yeah. I mean, that was a perfect segue. I could not have planned that, doc. Tell the people, thank you, you're a goddess indeed. How has Anchored changed this relationship to pleasing the people, pleasing the self, doing it right? Like, tell us all about it.

Ashley Albers: Well, once again, my disclaimer is that it's a work in progress because it's, you know, six months is hard to compare to eight plus years of training. So I think one thing that was really powerful about Anchored is that while it was all women or people socialized as women, it wasn't all medical types. And even if it was, even the others who were in medicine weren't all physicians. And so we had people from different areas struggling with a lot of the same things. 

I think it's both. I think it's really powerful to look at your population, which in my case is women physicians, and to look at a population that has more diversity within it to say, okay, it's not just me, it's also not just my field, and have people learn and grow together in some of that asking for help.

A couple of things that you had that were really cool, I think you've mentioned there's a Slack group that we're all in and you have channels in there, one for asking for help and getting it and it could be anything, whatever, but also just I just want to be seen. And I think both of those kind of together really combine well for, it's okay for people to see me struggle. You can't ask for help if it's not okay for people to see that you need it. And it is safe to ask for help.

And to do that within a smallish container with smallish things or ridiculously outlandish things so that we can get told no, and that was fun too, is a way of kind of practicing that. And then that can slip over into life a little bit. And often I think turns into, or gets a response of people saying, oh yeah, I'm happy to, like, that's easy, I can do that.

Bea Albina: Yeah, it is really nice how the community shows up for each other, right?

Ashley Albers: Yeah, it really is. 

Bea Albina: Yeah, what was your experience with the community?

Ashley Albers: It was really fun to watch it form together. I mentioned I'd been in another program and the way that one is structured at any given time, there are new people and people who've been in. And so the community is kind of already there. And so to be in Anchored with a whole bunch of people who didn't know each other at all. I don't think we had anybody who knew each other prior to.

And watch ourselves kind of grow together and start interacting a little bit more and a little bit more in Slack, a little bit more in the chats on Zoom, and just see that start to pick up and say, okay, I can be safe and home here in this container. It was really fun.

Bea Albina: It is super duper fun. One of the things people worry about is making friends and building community. How was that part for you? And getting coached in front of other people. Oh, people get so nervous, which I get, come on.

Ashley Albers: Oh, totally. I totally get. And again, I was not brand new to getting coached in front of other people, but it is. It's a vulnerable thing. And I think that's why that Slack portion of it, and we did really solid introductions at the beginning. I know these are all the people who could possibly see this. I've now met all of them. I think that was huge. But I think what's really fascinating is you can watch somebody else get coached.

You can listen to podcasts and go, oh shit, that's me too. Really fun when that happens on a podcast. But you can watch somebody see yourself in them, even if it's a different situation than what you're dealing with, and know that's happening kind of in the reverse. 

And I think that you and the other coaches that I've seen work for you both do a really good job of keeping it safe. And there's also such a strong promise of confidentiality that goes and everybody contracts for that degree of safety, that nothing goes anywhere.

And that's huge. And I think that really goes a long way. And I think Zoom changed their features and how you can do the reactions and the hearts and the smileys and stuff. And I think that helps too. You get coached and all of a sudden people are sending you hearts and it's like, oh.

Bea Albina: Yeah, that part's really sweet. It's such a silly little thing that makes my nervous system really happy, to see the little hearts on the screen. I love it.

Ashley Albers: Oh, and it's an interesting... I think it's an interesting thing because the other people on the screen, they really can't do much. They can do a lot, but they can't step in and fix it. We're not going to all come on and take turns coaching that one person. We're not going to do that.

They can offer support. Getting these witnesses of, I see you and I support you, and I see you and I would give you a hug if I could, if you wanted that, is like, that's what the hearts and stuff kind of do. And I think that's really good for people's nervous systems. And again, that bit of, okay, it's one thing for the coach to coach me and see me. Oh, other people did too and I didn't die.

Bea Albina: Oh, I love that part. Other people saw me and I didn't die. Right? Because there's that inner child, that nervous part of all of us that's like, what if I'm the only one that's this messed up or messed up in this way? And like, if I share it, will I be judged? Will I die? Like, will the earth end? I know that feeling so well.

Ashley Albers: Right. Will I get thrown out of the tribe to the lions and if the lions see me, I'm dead. You've got so much of the brain playing into that.

Bea Albina: The savannah of evolution strikes again, right? 

Ashley Albers: Right. 

Bea Albina: Yeah. And I appreciate that you noticed the in-depth introductions up front. So that is the nervous system tool of orienting, that we later then talked about in Anchored. It's when we know who's in the room, our nervous system can do like a IRL, like real time threat assessment. And I mean, threats, everyone in Anchored is like pure ravioli, right? Like it's like the tenderest little group of sweet potatoes. But whatever, you know, everyone's nervous to might not recognize that. So we get to take that moment to be like, OK.

Ashley Albers: Well, and yes, everyone is. And we don't know that. They don't help. Could we possibly know that this person who lives literally on the other side of the country that I've never met before is actually a nice person? Like I don't know that.

Bea Albina: Right, right. But you do soon enough, huh? 

Ashley Albers: But you do soon. And that orienting really helps with that.

Bea Albina: Yeah. Yeah. And I love how you spoke to this of seeing someone else getting coached and your nervous system is like, what does me or the other way around? That is so powerful to me. Because people get like, I can't make the live call. I can't be there. You don't need to be there live. You don't need to get coached every time.

Ashley Albers: No, and the way our group was set up, half the calls were while I was at work. I didn't show up half the time. More than half the time I did not show up live, I watched the replays. And yeah, those were really powerful things too. You don't have to be present. It's nice to be when you can and you don't have to be. It's okay to not.

Bea Albina: Yeah. I think it's such a huge and important point. That there are so many ways to feel a part of the family and to know that you're not alone. Cause that's the main thing, right? Our nervous systems want significance and belonging, the two parts of safety, right?

Ashley Albers: Absolutely, right.

Bea Albina: Yes, we have to practice that together. I love it. Oh, I love it. So what would you say to someone who is having some nervousness or some trepidations about joining the program, about investing in themselves, about spending six months working on their emotional outsourcing and somatics? What would you say? Give us the pep talk.

Ashley Albers: Okay, so before I found coaching, even before I knew of Anchored or had ever heard of you, there was a point in time when I don't think I could have, looking back, I don't think I could have done it. I wasn't open to it. I wasn't able to see it. I needed to start, kind of start that healing process and be able to be a little bit more open and then really dive in and do the work. And I will also say that when I was in that place, I wasn't listening to podcasts like this.

I was very stuck in a way that I wasn't going to get traction. And so I think if you're out there and you're thinking, “Hey, this is kind of tempting. I wonder if I should, I wonder if this could help me." That's probably a sign that this work could and that some part of your system is open enough and ready enough that maybe it is time. And you know finances often have a way of working themselves out.

Partners tend to get convinced of things. I know that there's a lot. I think, too, I mean, we were just talking about safety and the fears that come with coming into something like this. And a lot of that is our conditioning and our socialization and that sort of thing. But I think the other thing that's really come up for me is how much of my safety comes from within. 

I think if you're on the fence, it's worth an application. It's worth an initial phone call. You have the option of deciding that it isn't right. But if you're thinking about it, something in you thinks it is. And it's that voice, the voice inside you, that's your body saying, hey, it's time to do something.

And that's the whole point of what we're trying to get at is being able to listen to that voice in that part of our bodies.

Bea Albina: I love that. I love that your guidance is to look within once more. That is so beautiful. And as always, I appreciate - you contextualize things so beautifully. And so I really appreciate you once again being like my love, come on, I was not ready for this anchored experience at some point. And if that's you, cool. And if you keep listening to Feminist Wellness and keep hearing right, women like you changing their lives, come on now. 

Ashley Albers: Absolutely. 

Bea Albina: It has been such an honor and a delight to watch you grow and blossom. And I can think back so clearly to that the very first time I coached you in that other program.

Ashley Albers: Oh my gosh.

Bea Albina: The way you can now, after being in Anchored, identify your feelings, feel your feelings in your body.

Ashley Albers: Well, and what the good people listening don't know, and I think kind of comes to is for the majority of that call, I could not speak. I had no voice. And to be able to show up here and be at least halfway coherent is huge. I couldn't. And that, we don't have to delve into the whole history of why but that was the my body saying we are not safe.

It is not safe to speak and so I think we're right at about 13 months since you and I met the first time I went back and looked. To be sitting here recording this call like that - you want to know how it changed my life? There you go.

Bea Albina: Oh doc, That is so powerful. Yeah, I remember so clearly you and the no words. And here you are speaking not just coherently, but incredibly articulately, you goose, about the beautiful changes in your life, about that huge shift from emotional outsourcing to interdependence. Yeah. I've seen that in you, in the way you talk about your life, your relationships, your body. It's, oof, it's so beautiful.

Ashley Albers: It is. And it's like, could wax poetic for hours about the possibilities that I see in the future, like all the things that weren't there before, or that weren't there for me before. And it's, I think the other thing I would say to your listeners, it's a lot of work.

Bea Albina: Oh, yeah.

Ashley Albers: And we won't sugarcoat that. It's work. And it's worth doing. And it's a lesson, an object in motion. Once you start doing the work, it's that much easier to just keep doing it and keep going and keep connecting into the parts of yourself and all the things. And yeah, kind of snowballs on you. It's really fun.

Bea Albina: I love that. The snowball of self-discovery. We're such nerds. It's so good. It's so good.

Ashley Albers: Okay. So we got neurobiology. We got physics.

Bea Albina: We have physics.

Ashley Albers: We got feminism.

Bea Albina: I think we're doing good. I think we need a redox reaction. I think we need some chemistry, P-chem, O-chem, any chem, something. A quick math question could help us. Oh, Fibonacci sequence, anybody?

Ashley Albers: There you go.

Bea Albina: 112358, I think that's enough. 11. 19. I can Fibonacci out pretty far because my sister and I, people are like, wow, I didn't expect this deep a nerd. It was like a little contest we did to see who could Fibonacci out the farthest.

Ashley Albers: Oh, totally.

Bea Albina: What frigging nerds. I love us. I love us and our nerditude. Oh, doc, thank you so much for being here.

Ashley Albers: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Bea Albina: I'm so grateful that I got to coach you in Anchored and get to be in community with you. It is…

Ashley Albers: So fun.

Bea Albina: It's an outstanding gift and a privilege, truly. Any parting words for the good people?

Ashley Albers: I, you know, I think just being, just be willing to know that little small voice is talking to you to whatever degree you can being open to hearing it, to listening to it, to acknowledging it. And I think too, if you have symptoms that are kind of your body screaming at you. That's your body. That's like there's messages there. There's wisdom there in your body.

Bea Albina: Yeah, symptoms don't come without a message.

Ashley Albers: Right.

Bea Albina: Beautiful. Thanks again.

Ashley Albers: Thank you.

—

Thank you so much for listening, my love. What an inspiring story. Oh, it just makes my heart sing. Oh, my cheeks hurt from just how much love there is in Anchored and how much the love of the community really bolsters our ability to truly love ourselves exactly as we are. So thanks for listening.

It would be an absolute delight to have you join us in Anchored. Applications are open now. Head on over to my website, BeatrizAlbina.com/Anchored to learn more and to join us now. Oh, I can't wait to share Anchored with you. Can't even wait.

Let's do what we do. Gentle hand on your heart should you feel so moved. Then remember, you are safe, you are held, you are loved. And when one of us heals, we help heal the world. Be well, my beauty. I'll talk to you soon. Ciao!

Thank you for listening to this episode of Feminist Wellness. If you want to learn more all about somatics, what the heck that word means, and why it matters for your life, head on over to BeatrizAlbina.com/somaticswebinar for a free webinar all about it. Have a beautiful day, my darling, and I'll see you next week. Ciao.