Out of Your Head, Into Your Heart: Embodiment Practices to Heal Anxiety, Reclaim Your Relationship with Your Body and Live Out Your Highest Calling

By Paige M Pichler

Mental health speaker, Paige Pichler shares her profound wisdom in learning how to reconnect with our bodies to change our lives. Using her experience as a recovering type-A achiever, Pichler dives deep into why we desensitize from our bodies in the first place - often in order to please others rather

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paige Pichler LLC
• Release date: Aug 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781953351036

Paige M Pichler

Paige Pichler is a writer and speaker focused on helping people heal their nervous systems. She works to help college students, post grads and twentysomethings better their mental health by understanding their inherent spiritual nature. She leads courses, trainings and classes to help others find their path to true, lasting contentment by trusting their intuition rather than their judgment. Paige is also the host of the Bright Side of the Moon podcast and a student of kundalini yoga. She leads meditations and speaking events that center around loving oneself as a way to create peace in our world. She lives in Milwaukee with her family and her beloved doodle, Palmer. Connect with Paige on her website or on Instagram.

Book preview

Introduction

When I was growing up, we could never say we were tired. The company line was, If you tell yourself you’re tired, you’ll be tired. If you tell yourself that you aren’t tired, you won’t be. Taking this sentiment with me into my adult life, I didn’t realize just how tired I was until a doctor told me that the crippling back pain I had been experiencing was really my spleen hitting my spine because it was swollen. I was 23.

I had mono and was living with it for weeks. I had gotten so good at telling my body it was wrong for feeling things deemed undesirable that I missed something right in front of my face. In effect, I told my body that my brain knew better and that I was too busy doing things to please others to listen to what it was telling me. I followed my conditioning rather than relying on my own body to guide me towards what was right for my physical, mental and spiritual health.

Sadly, stories like mine are way too common today. It’s no secret that we live in a world where we’re conditioned to push and manipulate our bodies to fit into someone else’s golden standard. This phenomenon goes far beyond our bodies, however; it affects everything from the careers we pursue to the cars we drive. Many of us constantly fight the battle to look, feel or perform in a certain way. But little do we know that by doing so, we are actually desensitizing our bodies – the most intelligent, natural part of ourselves. Cutting ourselves off from our bodies’ wisdom sets us up for anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and general detachment, all of which are rampant in modern society.

Desensitizing your body means separating it from your mind and ignoring its cues as a way to conform to societal standards. It means seeing the body as a vehicle for taking you where you want to go and molding it into what you want it to look like. Rather than creating a respectful, symbiotic relationship with our bodies, we often numb them in order to meet the demands of what other people expect of us. The pleas of our bodies come second to external validation that so many of us are taught to crave.

For some people, this conditioning comes from early experiences participating in sports. There are coaches who disguise verbal abuse as motivation, laughing about making athletes run until they vomit and asserting dominance over the players who actually know what is right for their bodies – even if it means working to the point of exhaustion. Once this becomes the norm for successful exercise, many athletes carry these paradigms with them throughout their lives, seeing their bodies as separate from them. Not only does this harm their physical health, but it creates a sense of constant pushing, forcing and striving for validation. In reality, none of these things bring about true contentment – the body is just a pawn caught in the crossfire of this toxic thought pattern.

The fitness realm promotes these outdated ideologies as well. At their core, traditional fitness programs and classes are built around the premise that you need to exercise as much as possible to offset doing something as natural as eating. Unfortunately, most of these programs don’t guide you back into your feeling body but, rather, guide you further away from your body’s natural instincts.

Some of us experience body disconnection at home with our parents who still abide by a repressive paradigm around what people should look like. Even as children, our parents and authority figures tell us how much to eat, what’s right for our bodies and what constitutes enough or too much. Almost immediately, the voice inside gets trampled as authority figures tell us that they know better for our bodies, minds and spirits.

Wherever this desensitization comes from, it affects our ability to be fully present within our bodies. These external pressures program the subconscious mind to believe that our natural instincts are not to be trusted.

Even as body positivity and self-respect have gained steam in public discourse, we have a long way to go to learn how to be comfortable and fully present inside our bodies. This healing process involves much more than simply looking in the mirror and saying I love you. Not to discredit the healing abilities of that practice, but true healing involves locating and reprogramming all of the places where you ignore your body and spirit’s intuition.

Of course, moving your body feels good and helps with many aspects of health. But do you need to treat your body as an object in the process? Do