Ep #321: What Is Embodiment?

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. I have a couple pretty exciting things to share with you. If you're not following me on the ‘gram, first of all, you're missing a good time. If you're like, "I don't do social media," then don't. I mean, overarchingly, it's not great for your health unless you're really thoughtful about how you use it. 

And I post a lot of really helpful things there. A lot of thoughts and things that come out of my coaching. You know, I coach in Anchored multiple times a week, and so there's a lot that comes up that you get to be privy to when you follow me there.

So, in order to tell you my ‘gram, I got to make sure that you heard that I'm going by my first name now, which is Beatriz. B-E-A-T-R-I-Z. So my Instagram's now my whole name, Béatriz Victoria Albina, NP. You can follow me there. Follow along. And you can call me Béa. So, we're leaving Victoria behind. I mean, it's still there, but I'm going by Béa. I love it. It just feels so right in a way Victoria never really felt me in English. I love it in Spanish. Biki, Victoria. It feels really good in Spanish, but not so good in English. So, Béa, it is. Yay!

So that was A, number one. B, number two is the really big deal thing that changed not just my life but Billey's life in a... it's changed this whole household. And that's the addition of one gorgeously chunky cat. He's all black: black nose, black lips, black beans, black fur inside his ears. His whole body is pitch black, and we're both witchy, and so he was a perfect fit. He was unhoused, and he needed where to live, and we were, "Excuse me, we would like that cat." And he is an absolute dream come true. 

I don't mean to be discriminatory to say that historically, I am more dog aligned than cat aligned. I'm more of a dog, right? There's that Golden Retriever, "Hi, how you doing? Do you want to be friends? Can I do anything for you? Can I get anything for you?" And that aloofness of cats, I don't know, I think it maybe would kick up a little insecure attachment, but where's the interdependence here? Maybe that's what I'm going to. Where's the interdependence? Whereas with dogs, it's, whoa, all interdependence. You know what I mean?

So, I've had cats before, Iggy cat, Moxy cat, some of the best cats I've ever known in my life. Such great creatures, truly love them. But dog was my ride or die. You know what I'm saying? And then I met Wade. So he comes when you call him. Our house is like a townhouse, this new apartment we're living in. 

So before we were in a ranch, which was really good for Ziggy, our Chihuahua who has crossed into... Ziggy is no longer with us. May he rest in biting. And but this is like a townhouse where it's smaller rooms and it's vertical living, which frankly is amazing for our glutes, and we get a bajillion steps just making a cup of tea. But he follows you. 

If you go from the living room or the kitchen, which are on the ground floor, to our bedroom, which is on the third floor, our offices are on the second, he follows you, like a dog. His fetch game is not his strongest point, but he doesn't not fetch. And he sleeps curled up. He slept on Billey's back all last night. All last night, curled up on her back. How dreamy is that? 

Anyway, I am deeply in love with this cat. Oh right, back to the ‘gram. If you want to see his picture, Béatriz Victoria Albina, NP. That's where you can find his photograph. I've been posting them to stories. I believe the term is obsessively, and he's in my feed too. We've been calling him Stitious because we're not superstitious, but we are a little bit stitious. My nerds. Am I right? All right. So those are the big updates. Those are the big updates.

That, and I'm going to Venice. My friend April Blake is turning 50. What's up, Dr. April Blake? And she has been a huge... Oh, God, I love that woman. And I'm going to go celebrate her because why not? I had the miles. I know, how exciting is it to fly on miles? It feels it's free. I mean, it is in a way. It's not, but it is. You know what I mean? So anyway, I'm going to go visit Dr. Blake. I've got a new cat. The sun is shining and blue. The people in Anchored blow my mind every day. I adore them in such a profound way, and that's what I've got.

Let's segue, and let's talk about something sneaky. Something that is perhaps shaping your entire experience of life. Your relationships, your emotions, your stress levels, your mood, and you might not even realize it. If it's the soup you've been swimming in, and that is disembodiment. 

Now, I know. Embodiment, the opposite, sounds like one of those stupid wellness buzzwords that gets thrown around without much weight behind it because, well, because that's what has happened. Somatics got too cool too fast. As someone who's been studying it for over 20 years, I'm like, oh, you guys, slow your roll. In reality, the absence of embodiment, the experience of being disconnected from your body, is the unseen hand steering so much of so many of our frustration, exhaustion, and overwhelm experiences.

So what is embodiment? Well, it's the experience of being fully present in your body. Of feeling your sensations, emotions, and inner cues in real time, instead of living from the neck up, disconnected from your physical self. 

It's what allows you to know, not just intellectually, but viscerally, when you need rest, when something isn't right, when a boundary's been crossed, when you're at your limit. Or when you feel truly safe. Without it, you're left operating on autopilot, stuck in old survival patterns, living from your conditioning and your socialization, the stories in your mind, reacting rather than responding.

And listen, my love. We don't lose connection with our embodiment by accident. It's a survival response. Many of us learned early on that being in our bodies wasn't safe. That feeling too much, needing too much, or expressing ourselves fully led to rejection, punishment, or overwhelm. 

Maybe you grew up in a household where emotions weren't welcomed, where being too sensitive was a liability. Maybe stress, trauma, or social conditioning taught you to prioritize logic and productivity over sensation and rest. In a world that rewards overthinking and overfunctioning, checking out of your body can feel the only way to get through. And over time, this disconnection becomes automatic, shaping the way we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world.

When you're not fully in your body, life happens to you. You react before you even know what's happening. You overthink, you take things personally, you try to control everything because deep down, your nervous system doesn't feel safe. You project your worst fears all over everyone you come across. 

You might not even realize that you're carrying the stress in your shoulders, your stomach, your jaw, but your body does. And it's trying to tell you something. So today I want to walk you through how disembodiment shows up in your everyday life, how it quietly fuels anxiety, self-doubt, exhaustion, and reactivity. And how the tiniest shifts in somatic awareness, body-based awareness, can start changing everything.

So, we'll start by talking about the hidden costs of disembodiment. And let's break this down into a few key ways that living from the neck up, detached from your body, creates struggle in ways that you might not even realize. These are the buckets of areas where not being embodied seeps in, shaping the way you move through the world without even noticing it. Because how could you notice it? You're not present in your body. The irony, right? So, let's start with automatic reactivity, the hijack effect.

Have you ever had a moment where someone says something just the wrong way? And before you even realize what's happening, you snap back or you shut down? Or you fawn and smooth things over even when you're upset? This isn't just having a short fuse or being sensitive. It's often a lack of embodiment that leads you to default to whatever your home training is, right? 

When you're disconnected from your body, you don't have that built-in pause to recognize what's happening before you react. Instead, you're running on nervous system autopilot, responding from past emotions, not present reality. Your partner asks an innocent question, but your body reacts as if they're criticizing you. Your friend cancels plans, and before you even think about it, you're spiraling into, "I must not be important to them." 

Without that deep somatic presence, you can't catch the reaction before it hijacks you. But when you start feeling your feet on the ground, notice the tension in your jaw, slowing down just enough to breathe. That's where choice comes in. That's where you get to respond rather than react.

Two: the perfectionist spiral of never enough. When you aren't connected to your body, you also aren't connected to an internal sense of enoughness. There's no signal from within saying, "This is good, this is complete, this is worthy." And so the chase begins, like a greyhound on the track. You push yourself at work, at home, in your relationships, always doing more, proving more, trying harder, spinning in circles. 

Because if you stop, if you rest, your body has no reference point for what satisfaction feels like. And without that internal anchor, perfectionism takes over. There's always another thing to fix, another way to be better, another way you're falling short. Embodiment slows this cycle down. It allows you to feel what's enough, to recognize the physical sensations of completion, of rest, of accomplishment without needing someone else's approval to validate it for you.

Three: anxiety and catastrophizing when the mind runs wild. So you know that feeling when your brain latches onto a worst-case scenario and refuses to let go? It usually likes to spin around 3 a.m. You know when your thought spirals so quickly that you start feeling a pit is opening in your stomach, your chest is tight and your breathing is shallow? That's what happens when anxiety runs unchecked without the body's grounding presence to counterbalance it. 

See, when you're not tuned into your body, your mind takes over the whole show. I mean, somebody's got to. And the mind is not always the most trustworthy narrator. It throws up every what if scenario it can think of, convincing you that you're on the verge of disaster. But when you practice somatic presence, when you drop into your breath, feel the weight of your body, sense your surroundings, your nervous system can begin to get the memo that you are, in fact, safe enough in this moment. And that can change everything.

Four: personalizing. When you aren't connected to your somatic boundaries, you feel an emotional sponge left in the sink, sopping wet. You absorb the stress, frustration, irritation of the people around you, assuming it's about you until you stink. 

Your boss is in a bad mood? Must be something you did. Your partner is quiet? Oh, they are definitely mad at you. Friend doesn't text you back fast enough? Well, listen, you must have said something wrong. When you don't have a solid, embodied sense of where you end and others begin, everything feels personal. 

But when you drop into your body, you can sense your own energy, separate from someone else's. You stop internalizing every sigh, every tone shift, every silence as something you need to fix or take responsibility for. And you don't make everything they do and say and think and feel about you because it's not.

Five: emotional outsourcing. Here's where emotional outsourcing and codependent habits creep in. When you're disconnected from your own sensations, it's easy to focus entirely on others: what they need, how they feel, whether they approve of you. If you're not somatically anchored, your sense of worth gets tied up in how well you manage other people's emotions. 

You might anticipate what someone wants before they even ask, overextend yourself to prevent their discomfort, or feel a deep unease when someone isn't responding how you hoped they would. This is the root of emotional outsourcing, believing that your safety, worth, and belonging are dependent on keeping others happy. When you rebuild your somatic presence, when you feel your own needs and boundaries in your body, you stop outsourcing your emotional stability to everyone around you.

Six: people pleasing default. How often do you say, "Yeah, sure!" to something before even checking in with yourself? How many times have you overcommitted, agreed to plans you definitely didn't actually want to do, or let your own needs take an absolute backseat because saying no felt too uncomfortable? Saying no felt like conflict. Saying no felt really scary. 

My beauty, people pleasing thrives in disembodiment. If you can't feel your own somatic no, that gut level contraction, that tightening in your chest, well, you bypass it because you didn't feel it. So why would you listen to it if you didn't hear it? But when you can feel it, when you learn to trust it, saying no stops feeling like a risk to your safety. It starts feeling self-respect.

And finally, everyday impatience. So, think about the last time you were stuck in line at the grocery store, waiting for someone to text you back, or listening to your kid ask the same question for the 10th time. Did your heart rate pick up? Did irritation creep in? Did your whole body brace against the moment? Did acceptance fly out the window and you had something to say about what everyone else was doing or wasn't doing fast enough? 

These are the moments where embodiment changes everything. Because the impatience isn't about the line, the text, the kid's question; it's about how your body's holding tension and urgency without you even realizing it. When you bring somatic awareness into these moments, feeling your breath, softening your grip, grounding your feet, it's an important and vital first step in not fighting reality. And that one shift, done over and over, changes your entire relationship to stress.

Let's talk about the everyday practice of embodiment. And this is the deep and profound work that we do in The Embodied Learning Lab, my 12-week program. So if you're enjoying this and you're, "Ooh, I want more..." head on over to my website, beatrizalbina.com/thelab, L-A-B, to learn more. 

Here's the thing. Embodiment isn't just about deep meditation or breathwork or somatic therapy. It's about how you show up in the most mundane everyday moments. It's not the cathartic; it's the quotidian. Let me say it again. It's not the cathartic; it's the quotidian. Someone put that on a t-shirt for me, please. 

It's when you take that first sip of coffee or mate in the morning and actually taste it. It's when you feel your feet on the ground before walking into a room full of people and feel your whole presence there. It's when you soften into a hug instead of rushing through it. It's when you check in with your breath before saying yes to something you don't want to do. 

These small somatic shifts retrain your nervous system. They help you build the muscle of presence so that you're no longer at the mercy of reactivity, anxiety, perfectionism, or emotional outsourcing.

But here's the key. It's not about forcing yourself to stay present all the time. That's just another form of control. It's about gradually increasing your capacity to be with yourself. To notice your body's cues without judgment. To meet discomfort with curiosity instead of avoidance. This is a process of deep repair, one that isn't about perfection but about gently reawakening a relationship with yourself that's been dormant for too long. 

And the more you practice this, the more your entire way of being starts to shift. You begin to feel at home in yourself, to trust yourself. You move through life with more ease, more confidence, more resilience. And that, my love, that is the power of embodiment. I would be thrilled, honored, and delighted to be your teacher, to help you take your embodiment practice to the next level in The Embodied Learning Lab. Come join us. It's really a blast. I'd love to see you there.

All right, my beauty, let's do what we do. Gentle hand on your heart should you feel so moved. And 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.