We live in a world with a long history of pathologizing women’s bodies.
And this culture offers us endless messages about what it means to be healthy and, more importantly, what our symptoms might mean about our health.
In many ways, these messages are useful in guiding us toward a greater understanding of ourselves and developing more agency over how we feel. We can learn how our hormones work, understand why certain foods leave us feeling better or worse, identify deficiencies, recognize patterns in our monthly cycles, and seek out appropriate support when something in our bodies isn’t working as it should — especially if it’s not getting better.
But at what point do the endless messages about health become an impediment to our wellbeing because they encourage us to perpetually fixate on our symptoms long after we’ve recognized how those symptoms leave us feeling?
And at what point does paying close attention to our bodies shift into perpetually monitoring them for evidence that something is wrong?
Over the course of my time working as a women’s nutrition consultant and health coach, this question has become more and more important as a feature of my own approach to health, both with clients and with myself. It’s become even more important as I’ve trained to work with complex trauma, learned to recognize the relationship between agency and healing, and better understood the helplessness many of us can get trapped in when we have symptoms that don’t go away in the timeframe we’d like.
Obviously, most of us want to live our lives in healthy bodies that work well; we want bodies that don’t react to benign triggers, shut down under relatively small amounts of stress, or disrupt our lives every day without giving us clear explanations for why.
The desire to resolve our symptoms is completely valid, and I would argue that seeking answers and taking action to improve how we feel are important expressions of agency.
However, there is a trap we can get stuck in when we struggle with our health for prolonged periods of time, don’t receive clear answers for why we’re struggling, and try a bunch of things without experiencing the improvements we’re looking for.
Over time, we can fall into states of helplessness and hypervigilance around our own health, where every little symptom becomes something we need to excavate, examine under a microscope, assign meaning to, and somehow try and control.
If this goes on long enough, we can begin to lose trust in our own bodies and their ability to repair, re-pattern, adapt, and keep us safe.
And this loss of bodily trust often doesn’t happen overnight, nor is it always obvious while we’re experiencing it. It can show up in the amount of time we dedicate to gathering more and more data, getting more labs, working with more practitioners, taking new supplements, consuming more books and podcasts, changing our diets again, and essentially creating a full-time job out of fixing our bodies.
It’s important to point out that we can truly have complex health profiles with real physiological disruptions driving this behavior while the behavior itself can still move us farther out of trust with our bodies over time.
These things aren’t mutually exclusive, and recognizing the second doesn’t require us to dismiss the first.
After spending years coaching women through their healing processes, many of whom have also spent years struggling with their health, I’ve grown to understand healing as something larger than the absence of symptoms.
Healing also includes the safety, trust, and agency we’re able to access and retain toward our bodies regardless of what our bodies are doing on any particular day.
Part of what dictates our experience of our health is simply how we feel about how we feel.
This isn’t a call to bypass real pain or slap a positive spin on something disruptive and stressful, but instead, it’s a call to pay attention to the patterns that exist beneath and around our symptoms, because those patterns influence how we experience our bodies and how we respond to them.
I believe we can have a different experience of our bodies and our health regardless of what is currently happening with them, and we can reclaim some of the trust and peace many of us once had in ourselves to care for us and to be safe in our own bodies, and to even enjoy being in our bodies!
The following three strategies are places we can begin to rebuild this self-trust and grow from the whole process.
Strategy #1: Pay Attention to Your Relationship With Your Health
The first strategy is to begin developing awareness of our relationship to our health, which is different from simply developing more awareness of our health itself.
Many of us who have struggled with symptoms for years are already incredibly aware of what’s happening in our bodies; we know what we ate yesterday, what supplements we’re taking, where we are in our cycles, how our digestion has been lately, how we slept last night, which symptoms are better, which ones are worse, and which variables might have contributed to all of it.
What we may be paying less attention to is what happens around all of this information. What are we telling ourselves about our bodies when symptoms arise? What meaning are we immediately assigning to those symptoms? What do we do next? How do we talk about our bodies, our health, our hormones, our immune system, our diets to other people? And how much of our internal attention is being allocated to our health and health issues on any given day?
For example, we might notice indigestion after a meal and immediately begin mentally reviewing everything we ate, wondering whether we’ve developed another food intolerance or whether something that had been improving is actually getting worse again.
We might experience a difficult monthly cycle and start questioning whether our hormones are getting further out of balance, or if the progress we thought we were making throughout the month was a farce because of our period pain. We might have a skin breakout after months of clearer skin and feel as though we’ve somehow done something wrong that’s led to sudden breakouts after relief from this chronic insecurity.
The symptoms themselves may be uncomfortable and worth understanding, but there is also an entire internal response happening around them that can make the experience much larger and more threatening to our nervous system over time.
This is where I think it becomes helpful to start observing our immediate reactions without necessarily trying to change them right away.
Do we contract and shut down when something feels wrong in how we feel? Do we dissociate from our bodies, use a substance to get away from the feeling, or escape into media as a distraction? Do we impulsively search for more information or reach for something that gives us a sense of control over our bodies? Do we immediately change our diet, add a supplement, cancel plans, or begin asking other people to help us figure out what’s happening?
This might seem dramatic, but these are all behavioral responses to our health challenges that I’ve witnessed countless times in clients and that personally consumed most of my twenties. If we don’t feel safe in our bodies — if we have low trust in our bodies’ ability to be well and our role in this — we can habituate all kinds of unconscious & semi-conscious reactions to how we feel that only amplify and exasperate how we feel.
In my twenties, I would stay up late “researching” all of my symptoms (we didn’t have social media in the ways we do now, so it was mainly Google), and writing desperate and inappropriately long emails to practitioners that I though might be able to save me from my symptoms.
And yes, while I suffered from a lot of imbalances, I wasn’t in chronic pain or so severley ill that I was concerned I was dying — I was in distress over the fact that I had symptoms that wouldn’t go away.
I went from naturopath to naturopath because my symptoms didn’t always go away with one clinician’s protocol, and if I didn’t feel better in the ways I thought I should in the time-frame I thought I should, I’d give up and move on to a new person, offering me fresh hope.
I also talked about my health with everyone in my life and, years later, I would run into people who knew me back then — friends of housemates, friends of boyfriends, classmates — and they would often remember me by the strange diet I was on or the green juice I was always drinking, or some other signal to my health that, essentially, became my personal brand at the time.
But all of this focus and energy and money sent in the direction of my health didn’t actually help me feel healthier.
In fact, all of this focus left me feeling broken and untrusting of my body after a while because it turns out that working overtime to be healthy, while still not feeling healthy… can lead to disappointment, despair, and inadequacy.
It was true that I had a lot of issues with my metabolic health, but what was also true was that I was lacking a solid foundation of safety, peace, and trust within my body that would make this level of focus on my symptoms more manageable. Instead, I was often left feeling helpless over how I felt much of the time.
This helplessness — the opposite of agency, mind you — would manifest as impulsive health behaviors to try and feel better on the spot, such as doing enemas, purchasing random expensive supplements, and cutting out more and more foods. And when the stress of feeling at odds with my body would become unbearable, I would escape through alcohol or cannabis.
I see these patterns in women all the time, and one of the biggest ways this shows up in my clients is in the sheer volume of information they often seek about health — whether it be their own health through chasing the perfect labs, or about health in general through consumption of social media posts, podcasts, books, and other internet sources — the information is meant to protect them from how they feel.
It’s taken me years to be able to look back and recognize how stressed I was and just how trapped I felt in how I was relating to how I felt.
We can also become curious about how we talk about our health with others.
Are we regularly enrolling other people in our diagnoses and pathologies — repeatedly reinforcing our limitations when we describe what our bodies can and cannot handle? Have our symptoms become one of the primary lenses through which we understand ourselves and our lives? Again, this isn’t about policing the way we talk or pretending we aren’t struggling — it’s about noticing the stories and identities that can gradually form around prolonged health problems.
Similar to the experiences I had of reconnecting with people who knew me in my twenties and immediately remembered me through the lens of my health issues and dietary quarks, I believe that becoming aware of our own unconscious health “branding” can help us create different and more empowered identities and personal stories that aren’t centered around around our limitations.
The only way that we’d even know if we’re teaching others to view us through the lens of our limitations and health issues is if someone points it out to us, as was the case with me, or, alternatively, we begin to pay more attention to how we interface with the world when it comes to matters of our health and wellbeing.
And finally, we can pay attention to how much time our symptoms receive each day, particularly how much internal attention they receive.
This is a bit of a trickier one because, well, it’s internal, and often happening under the surface, possibly even autonomically. This is where we often experience a higher degree of interoceptive stress, which is a stress response from the brain in reaction to our own internal signals. For instance, we may sense that our heart is beating faster, and this sends a threat signal to the brain. Or we feel some indigestion after we eat, and this sends a threat signal to the brain. If this goes on long enough, we’ll often find ourselves having outsized threat responses to any internal sensations that we find unpleasant, unfamiliar, or uncomfortable.
Behaviorally, this can show up as hyperfixation or OCD type patterns, where we give an unusual amount of focus to things related to our bodily sensations, our nutrition, or even to our symptoms over time.
There’s a difference between spending twenty minutes preparing a meal that supports our health and spending four hours mentally reviewing why we reacted to the meal we ate yesterday.
Most people will occasionally have an unpleasant and unexpected reaction to something they ate, but if we have this experience too often, we can develop an interoceptive stress pattern around eating, which can happen autonomically, without any conscious thought.
There’s also a difference between booking a needed appointment with a doctor to go over the results of our labs, and repeatedly searching for explanations on the internet because one practitioner’s protocol isn’t enough to quell our anxiety over the lab results themselves.
To use myself as an example again, since this was such a big issue for me during my earlier years of working on my health: I used to jump from one practitioner to the next so often that I actually had a functional doctor call me on it, after feeling exasperated with me during an appointment. I disrupted the protocol he put me on and visited another practitioner, who recommended I do something different, so when I returned to see him, I was doing something completely different than what we’d agreed to.
He said something like, “you cannot go from witch doctor to witch doctor, applying different and often contradictory methods, and then feel surprised when you don’t succeed in any of them or when you’re stressed and unable to track your results.”
He was completely right, of course.
He was also the same practitioner that explained to me that I wasn’t having a period because my body fat was too low, and the same practitioner who insisted I begin eating animal foods again after veganism had deteriorated my health. He had a huge impact on me in my twenties, but unfortunately he wasn’t the only practitioner who struggled to support me while my capacity to follow through on one protocol and trust any one process was so low.
The main reason my capacity was so low was because of the low trust I had in my own body to repair itself and functional optimally.
Every little symptom I had was a stressor to my brain and a reason to work harder. I didn’t know how to relax within the body that I currently had, so I kept working overtime to try to change my body and bypass relaxation altogether.
But as we get better at recognizing these patterns in ourselves, as I got better over time at recognizing mine, we gain more opportunities to make different choices.
We may still investigate the symptom, but decide that we’ve gathered enough information for today. We may acknowledge that our period is particularly difficult this month, but without immediately interpreting it as evidence that our body is failing us, or that what we’ve already been doing isn’t working.
We may notice the urge to control something we cannot immediately control and practice remaining present with the discomfort instead, knowing that we are still ok.
This is an area I spend a lot of time working with inside my coaching containers because deeply established patterns can be difficult to see when we’re living inside of them, especially for a long time.
We can look at what happens around symptoms in real time and identify the thoughts, protective responses, impulses toward control, and nervous-system patterns that are operating automatically around these symptoms. Not only is this possible, but it can change our entire experience of the symptoms themselves.
For this, I use a combination of somatic work and cognitive-based practices to help us develop more options for how we respond to how we feel.
We work with the feelings that arise in the body when we focus on our symptoms or our health, we relate to the parts that we’ve accumulated in reaction to carrying such a heavy load, often all by ourselves (taking on our own health, that is) using somatic IFS work. We process inhibited emotions of guilt, shame, and grief using AEDP principles, and we address the cognitive distortions head-on using techniques such as socratic questioning.
The bottom line is that we often don’t know what kind of world we’re creating for ourselves around our health unless we slow things down, pay attention, and begin to disrupt the patterns we’ve created around how we feel.
And when we do this, we have the power to create a new world where the symptoms can be experienced differently, they can mean different things about us, our bodies, our potential, and life, and this can change the way we live our whole lives.
The goal isn’t to become less attentive to our bodies.
The goal is to become more discerning about the kind of attention we give them, and to develop enough trust in ourselves that every uncomfortable sensation and symptom doesn’t have to become an emergency we need to solve immediately.
Strategy #2: Integrate a Pleasure Practice Into Your Daily Life
The concept of a pleasure practice doesn’t always land well when I first talk about it, for a few different reasons.
One is that the concept of pleasure itself can make women uncomfortable, and we often stop at sexual pleasure without thinking much about what else the word can include. Another is that many of us have what I think of as a pleasure cap, where our capacity to experience and remain present with pleasure can become smaller when stress, vigilance, and contraction are much more habitual and familiar states in our daily lives.
If we have histories of developmental or complex trauma or long-term chronic stress, slowing down and feeling good for its own sake may actually be confronting.
Many of us are far more familiar with analyzing, fixing, anticipating, controlling, and pushing ourselves forward than we are with simply allowing something to feel good without needing to make it productive.
Without needing an excuse for why we deserve it, pleasure can feel indulgent and… wrong.
This is also why pleasure isn’t usually what comes to mind when we think about improving our health. We might seek out a nutritionist or health coach because we want to analyze our data, dial in our nutrition, address symptoms, or improve our overall metabolic health. Intentionally integrating pleasure into our days can seem secondary to the “real” work we’re doing with everything else.
But pleasure is doing more than temporarily making us feel good, especially when we’re sourcing it from experiences that are already supportive of our wellbeing.
Stress and trauma tend to contract our experience, both physically and psycho-emotionally. When pain, stress, vigilance, or fear become the states we spend a lot of time in, our attention naturally becomes more oriented toward what’s wrong, what might go wrong, and what we need to do to prevent it, and our perception of what’s possible — in life and in our bodies — can narrow along with it.
Pleasure gives us a different experience of reality to practice.
When we regularly expose ourselves to small moments of delight, awe, connection, beauty, warmth, and enjoyment, we remind ourselves that our bodies aren’t exclusively places where discomfort and symptoms happen. Our bodies are also where we experience sunshine, delicious food, beautiful music, warm water, physical affection, mind-altering orgasms, belly laughter, the awe of nature, deep restorative rest, human connection, and all of the sensory experiences that make being alive in a body so enjoyable.
A pleasure practice doesn’t need to be elaborate, either, as it should ideally be something we integrate throughout our days in micro-doses.
It might mean lying in the grass or at the beach and actually noticing the warmth of the sun on our skin. We might eat or drink something delicious slowly enough to enjoy every bit of it instead of consuming it while distracted. We might listen to music that settles us and pulls our attention away from our thoughts, feel the breeze on our skin, have an orgasm, take a hot shower, massage scented oil into our skin, burn candles at dinner, cuddle with a partner or child, or stop to take in a beautiful panoramic view of nature.
The important part isn’t which experience we choose to induce pleasure in us; it’s whether we allow ourselves to actually be present for it.
Instead of simply checking “pleasure” off another health list, we slow down long enough to notice what feels good and let ourselves stay with the experience.
This is why I think of pleasure as a practice. When stress is familiar, feeling good can require practice too because it’s not something we’re used to, and it may trigger the feelings we’ve developed over time around what we deserve.
We may notice that slowing down makes us restless, that enjoyment brings up guilt, or that we can tolerate a pleasurable experience for about thirty seconds before our minds start searching for something productive to do or something wrong to think about. These reactions give us useful information about our current capacity for pleasure rather than evidence that we’re doing the practice incorrectly.
This is also where somatic work can become particularly useful in coaching sessions. Instead of turning pleasure into another assignment we need to perform perfectly, we can become curious about what happens in our bodies when we slow down, receive something good, or loosen our grip on control. We can gradually develop a greater capacity to stay present with these experiences rather than immediately leaving them.
When we’re already dedicating significant time and energy to improving our health, I think there is tremendous value in giving pleasure an intentional place alongside the supplements, nourishing food, exercise, sleep, medical care, etc.
We don’t need to earn the right to enjoy inhabiting our bodies by finally getting rid of every symptom first — we would never expect this of someone we love, especially not a small child, so I believe we ought to offer ourselves the same access to feeling good as children naturally gravitate to, regardless of what objective. measurements would say they deserve.
Strategy #3: Create a Life Worth Healing For
The third strategy is something I call “creating a life worth healing for,” and this one asks us to zoom out from our bodies altogether and look at the larger context that our overall health exists within.
When health has become one of the central projects of our lives, it’s easy for everything else to become secondary or for certain important aspects to get ignored entirely. We may be unconsciously telling ourselves that once our digestion improves, our hormones balance, our energy comes back, our skin clears, or we finally feel like ourselves again, then we’ll have the capacity to focus on the rest of our lives.
Sometimes this is true to a degree, because improving our physical health can absolutely free up energy and capacity for other things. But if we aren’t careful, our lives can gradually become something we’re waiting to participate in once our bodies finally cooperate and look, feel, or function better.
So, creating a life worth healing for means paying attention to everything that isn’t technically our health but feeds into our experience of health in countless meaningful ways.
This includes our finances and whether we feel financially secure, our relationships and whether we feel connected or chronically lonely, the quality of our marriages and friendships, our spiritual lives and communities, our work, our home environments, our sense of purpose, and whether the basic content of our days feels meaningful and enjoyable to us.
Obviously, none of us have perfect lives or are going to have it all dialed in — regardless what someone’s highlight reel on Instagram might convince us! But if we have entire areas of our lives where our needs aren’t being met, where we’re leaking energy, stressed out, and avoiding… this will not go away because we got our stomach acid up or improve our lab metrics!
In fact, sometimes the process of building financial security suddenly lowers our symptoms altogether! Or we start improving the quality of our relationships, and we find we care less about those pesky symptoms in the first place — both examples from my own life, btw.
But this process can incentivize us to do an inventory of our lives, looking at the things that matter most to us.
We can ask ourselves whether we have close relationships that make us feel supported and seen, or whether we’ve become increasingly isolated, lonely, and oxytocin deficient. We can look at whether our financial lives give us a basic sense of security or keep us in a constant state of stress. We can consider whether we have a spiritual framework or community that helps us navigate grief, uncertainty, mortality, aging, and the parts of life we simply cannot control or distract ourselves from.
We can look at whether we like where we live, whether we have enough agency over how we spend our days, whether our work matters to us and allows us to stay connected to our bodily signals, and whether we have goals that have absolutely nothing to do with getting healthier, but are simply about our intellectual, spiritual, and emotional wellbeing.
The relationship certainly doesn’t move in only one direction — sometimes improving our health is exactly what gives us the capacity to leave a difficult relationship, change careers, become more socially engaged, travel to a meaningful place, or pursue something that matters to us intellectually or spiritually.
But I think it’s important to remember that our health exists in service of a larger life rather than becoming the entire purpose of that life.
This is also one of the reasons having clear values, meaningful goals, relational support, and spiritual depth can be so important when our experience of our health is hard. These things give us places to direct our attention and sources of meaning that aren’t dependent on how our bodies happen to feel or look that day.
They remind us that we can have a difficult cycle, digestive symptoms, low energy, or a frustrating flare and still participate in something meaningful, connect with someone we love, make progress toward a goal, or experience something beautiful.
We still belong here and have value to add, even when we feel like shit! This can be such an important lesson in life for those of us with sensitive systems.
This broader context is something I explore with women in my coaching as well, because our health behaviors don’t happen in isolation from the rest of our lives. Sometimes nutrition needs more of our attention, and sometimes our nervous systems do. Sometimes we need to look at our relationships, boundaries, habits, work, or the amount of meaning and enjoyment that exists in our days to assess why we’re feeling bad.
Personalized coaching gives us room to look at the whole picture and determine what actually needs our attention rather than automatically assuming the next answer will come from another health protocol. This doesn’t mean I’m the best person to help a client navigate a difficult relationship or get her finances in order, but what it does mean is that we can look honestly at the areas of her life that are seeping into how she feels, and control for this as much as possible while we focus on what she hired me for.
Creating a life worth healing for doesn’t mean waiting until we’re healthier to start creating that life. It means allowing the creation of that life to become part of how we heal and, perhaps more importantly, part of how we remain connected to ourselves when our health isn’t where we want it to be. It’s an insurance policy.
“Are We Just Supposed to Think Positively and Distract Ourselves?”
At this point, you might be wondering whether I’m simply suggesting that we think positively or distract ourselves from our health issues after we’ve gone and spent years learning how to listen to our bodies in the first place!
And on one basic level, yes, I am saying that sometimes it is healthy to redirect our attention toward something positive or outside of ourselves. But there’s much more to it than that, and I’m definitely not recommending that we ignore our health, avoid facing reality, or that we stop investigating symptoms that genuinely need our attention.
We might also interpret this as an argument that we should simply accept our health exactly as it is, symptoms and all, and trust that our bodies will take care of themselves once we change our mindset. I’m not saying that either!
In fact, this is partially what I criticize about the German New Medicine view of things, where the idea is that if we can locate where a symptom began psycho-emotionally, we can eliminate it potentially without having to do anything else about it!
I see similar views being shared in some new age and manifestation circles, and I detest these views just as much because they take us beyond developing an awareness and respect for the power of our subconscious mind, and often lead women to believe that they have unlimited control over how they feel. This is simply not true.
Feeling better and resolving symptoms are completely sane and valid goals, and they’re the main reasons women hire someone like me in the first place. We should have agency in pursuing answers and making changes that support our physiology when something isn’t working, AND I also believe that we have limited control in this life… and that we suffer a lot less once we accept this.
Symptom resolution is only one part of healing, and if the only way we know how to feel safe in our bodies is for those bodies to stop producing symptoms, we can potentially spend the rest of our lives chasing symptoms every time they arise.
Human bodies get sick, depleted, stressed, injured, hormonally disrupted, and affected by circumstances we cannot always control.
Even when we take excellent care of ourselves, there will be times when our bodies don’t feel or function exactly the way we’d like them to.
The larger goal of this work is to increase our agency over how we feel about how we feel, because changing the symptoms themselves is one component we don’t always have immediate control over, at least not within the timeframe we would often prefer. We can continue working toward symptom resolution while also learning how not to be completely taken down by every symptom we experience along the way.
Imagine being able to have a skin breakout, indigestion, a low mood, or a difficult cycle and still be fundamentally okay with ourselves at the same time!
We can acknowledge that we don’t like what’s happening, investigate why it might be there, and work to address the roots contributing to it without automatically translating the symptom into a larger statement about our safety, our value, or whether our bodies have failed us.
We can simply have some symptoms and retain our intimate and loyal relationship with ourselves and our bodies anyway.
Rebuilding Trust in Our Imperfect Bodies
I believe we can have a different experience of our bodies and our health regardless of what’s currently happening with our bodies and our health.
We can reclaim some of the trust and peace we once had in ourselves to care for ourselves and to be safe in our own bodies, but doing so requires us to recognize that how we feel about how we feel can be just as important to our experience of health as the symptoms themselves.
We can begin by paying attention to our relationship with our health and recognizing the patterns that happen around our symptoms, rather than only gathering more information about the symptoms themselves. We can intentionally make room for pleasure and give our bodies regular experiences of goodness, enjoyment, connection, sensuality, and expansion alongside all of the work we’re already doing to support our physiology.
And we can continue creating lives that are worth healing for, with relationships, values, purpose, spiritual depth, security, and experiences that remind us that there is much much more to our lives than how our bodies happen to feel or even look on any given day.
When these practices become a regular part of our lives in the same way we’re making eating well, exercising, sleeping, and other forms of physical care regular practices, our experience of our bodies can begin to shift over time.
It’s completely possible to feel less helpless in the presence of symptoms and develop more agency over how we respond to them, while still taking our health seriously and working toward greater physiological resilience and robust metabolic health.
I know this to be true because I’ve experienced this myself!
The goal isn’t to finally earn the right to trust our bodies once they become symptom-free, but to build enough trust in ourselves that we know we can care for, listen to, and respond to our bodies even when they’re imperfect, because they will always be imperfect in some way. So will we, and this is what makes us beautiful.
If This Work Speaks to You
If this article spoke to you, I’d love to hear from you about what, specifically, resonated and why.
I’ve found that low body-trust and stress over how we feel can take up an enormous amount of a woman’s energy and focus as we work toward our health goals, and addressing these pieces has moved mountains in both my own healing path and the paths of so many of my clients.
And if this work speaks to you and you think having support to work through these patterns as they arise would be a helpful next step, feel free to reach out to me or look into what I offer in my coaching containers on my website.
You can set up a free chat with me here if you’d like to connect more and ask me about what coaching with me is like!
Developing awareness of our own deeply set patterns, slowing down and becoming familiar with our nervous systems, and making difficult habits stick without regular accountability can all be a lot to navigate solo. My coaching is personalized for each woman’s needs and combines somatic work with cognitive-based practices so we can work with the whole system while building greater trust and agency within ourselves over time through consistent action.
We can still work toward resolving symptoms and creating healthier, more resilient bodies, but we can also do so from a place that increasingly allows us to remain connected to ourselves and our full worth along the way.
