How to Actually Get Out of Your Head (and Into Your Body)
You’ve gotten really good at living in your head.
Predicting. Planning. Ruminating. Analyzing. Even though it’s exhausting, it can feel safe, predictable and controlled. Many of these patterns begin early, shaped by our families, schools, culture and the environments we grew up in.
You got the grades, perfect attendance (omg, this was THE thing in my world), the blue ribbons and trophies. You excelled, or at least participated, in sports, extracurriculars and volunteering. You pleased the “big people.” You got the degree.
And now you have the job. You keep the household running, remember birthdays and appointments, exercise because you’re supposed to, and oblige when you really want to say no.
You have become incredibly competent at thinking, anticipating, analyzing and doing. Essentially, you’ve become a walking head, increasingly disconnected from the sensations and wisdom of your body. You keep on DOING because BEING feels unfamiliar and unpredictable.
We have oriented ourselves relative to the external world for so long that it feels natural. Comparing. Contrasting. Asking, Am I okay compared to you? Looking for external validation before making decisions, big or small. Wondering what others think. Taking things personally. Waiting until everything looks and feels a certain way before you can finally be happy or peaceful.
This way of living has gotten you this far and has served you in many ways. Your mind helps you make distinctions, set goals, solve problems, anticipate what’s coming, show up where you said you’d be and navigate the practical demands of being human. We need the mind.
The problem isn’t thinking. The problem is when thinking becomes the only way you know how to navigate your life. We’re not trying to kick the mind out of the driver’s seat only to put the body there instead. We’re expanding the team.
It may not feel good, but it feels familiar.
The nervous system and subconscious are shaped by repetition as well as high-impact experiences. You’ve been running the DOING circuitry for a long time. This isn’t a personal failure. It’s the accumulation of decades of experiences, expectations, modeling and messages from the mothers, fathers, teachers and preachers around us. And while you didn’t consciously choose all of those patterns, you now have the opportunity to become aware of them and choose to expand your operating system.
The longer you practice urgency, overthinking and people-pleasing, the more automatic those pathways can become. It may not feel good, but it feels familiar. You can consciously want something different while automatically returning to what you know. And if you’re here, perhaps you’re waking up to that and becoming curious about another way of experiencing your life.
You are deeply familiar with urgency, productivity, overthinking, anticipating, controlling and rushing. You’ve gotten really “good” at them. And now you’re curious about peace. Playfulness. Pleasure. Freedom. Spaciousness. Aliveness.
You can have both. Sometimes life calls for urgency and productivity. Other moments call for playfulness and spaciousness. This work is about building the bandwidth and discernment to have access to all of you. To have options.
We aren’t designed to be in go-mode ALL. THE. TIME. It may be familiar, but it isn’t sustainable. And there is so much more to you than one long checklist.
Wanting something different doesn’t automatically make it accessible.
You can deeply desire another way of living and still struggle to sustain it. This is where repetition matters. Small experiences, practiced again and again, can create familiarity and momentum. Sometimes it feels like nothing is happening. That’s okay.
Slow can be fast. Slow can be sustainable. You are giving yourself repeated experiences of another way of being. So, stay curious about your growth. Explore your patterns and tendencies. Journal. Move. Read. Listen. Do therapy or coaching.
It ALL serves. And eventually, the next frontier isn’t another thing to understand. It’s dropping into your body and learning to stay there for longer.
You’ve spent years leading with your mind. Now you’re expanding the team to include the wisdom, sensation and energy of your whole being.
Maybe you don’t need an entirely different life.
And sometimes you do. A relationship, job, workload or circumstance may genuinely need to change. Embodiment isn’t about convincing yourself to tolerate a life that isn’t right for you.
Also, the life you’ve built may also be beautiful and abundant in many ways. And yet, you may struggle to fully inhabit it because mentally you’re replaying yesterday, preparing for tomorrow, anticipating what could go wrong, calculating, optimizing and rushing toward the next thing.
Perhaps this isn’t about building an entirely different life. Perhaps it’s about learning how to experience yourself differently inside the life you’ve already built.
I know what you’re thinking…Okay great, I can just think my way into that! No, honey, you cannot. 😂
If thinking could have solved this problem, it would have been solved a LONG time ago because we all know how good you are at thinking. You may have already analyzed your patterns around people-pleasing, overworking and difficulty resting. You know where they came from. You recognize them while you’re doing them. And yet, some persist despite the immense work you’ve done.
Next stop? The body.
Understanding yourself intellectually is different from experiencing yourself in your body.
BodyAwake Yoga is one way into this system, moving beyond mindset work alone and into actual embodiment.
Your body is already talking to you.
Picture this: You’re having an everyday conversation with a good friend at a café when your ex walks through the door. What happens in your body? Does your heart leap out of your chest? Is there a rush of energy down your legs? A lump in your throat? A knot in your belly?
These are the “feelings” I’m talking about here. Not the emotional story but the physical sensations happening inside your body. Your body may respond before your mind has even constructed the story about what’s happening.
In BodyAwake Yoga, we become curious about these sensations rather than immediately popping into the head to analyze, explain or retell every hurt. We practice becoming more fully present on ourselves.
Through muscular engagement, specific sequences, sacred shapes, breath and loving attention, we intentionally create sensation and practice staying present with ourselves inside of it. So, when friction inevitably meets you in the external world, you have practiced another possibility besides immediately defending, protecting, over-explaining or escaping back into your head.
Healing becomes a byproduct of coming fully present on yourself.
This isn’t about bypassing the hard stuff with rose-colored glasses.The breakup. The boss. The custody battle. Financial loss. The accident or injury. The grief. These experiences are formative and significant. And we need them right up until we don’t.
The friction of life can become a powerful portal and catalyst into knowing yourself more fully. Into a version of reality where you have agency, where you know in your bones that you are the creator of your life and that all of life is here to support you, even when it looks ugly.
And this becomes possible through practice. So don’t just think about these possibilities. Notice what happens in your body as you imagine them. What would it feel like to experience:
Presence alongside productivity
Peace without needing everything to be finished first
Playfulness without earning it
Rest without guilt
Pleasure without guilt
Spaciousness even when life remains full
Aliveness in the present moment, even when your mind wants to race three steps ahead
My love, stop trying to understand embodiment. Experience it.
You’ve gotten REALLY good at thinking. Your next frontier is feeling alive and free in your own body, in your own life.
If you’re curious what that actually feels like, start with my free 3-minute BodyAwake Yoga experience.
Three minutes. No big commitment. Just an opportunity to step out of the thinking for a moment and experience yourself through your body.