Why Doesn't Self-Awareness Fix Anything? Somatic Healing for Midlife Women

She's on a virtual call with me, hand on her chest, and for about two seconds she's actually there. Then her brain grabs the wheel. "Oh, it's probably because of what my sister said this morning, that always happens when..." No. No. No. I stop her. Stay here. Stay here with me. Don't make sense of it yet.

It took two or three rounds of me saying that before she actually stayed in her body. Because every single time there's discomfort, she finds the reason for it, and the second she finds the reason, she fixes it... and then she's gone, back up in her head, three steps past the sensation she never actually let herself feel.

If you've ever known your own pattern well enough to explain it in a sentence to a stranger and still watched yourself repeat it anyway, this episode is for you.

Prefer to listen? Here's the full episode —

Knowing and shifting live in two different places

Knowing your patterns lives in the part of you that can explain yourself at brunch, that can text a friend a paragraph breaking down exactly why you reacted the way you did. Shifting those patterns lives somewhere lower - in the breath, in the shoulders, in whatever's happening in your chest right before you say the thing you didn't mean to say. You can be completely fluent in the first language and never once have set foot in the second one. You're not flawed for this. It's just two different systems, and only one of them responds to logic and explaining.

Your body doesn't wait for permission from your thinking mind. Someone tosses you something without warning and your hands are already up, already caught it, before any part of you decided to catch it. That's the same system underneath every pattern I talk about on the podcast (literally every episode) — and it means the way into this shifting of patterns isn't more insight. It's meeting the system on its own terms.

The two-minute practice

Once I finally got my client to stay - hand on her chest, not explaining, not fixing - I asked her to just find whatever was actually happening under her hand in that exact second. Tight, a solidness. I asked her not to change it yet. Just to say to it, silently: I see you. Three breaths. Nothing more than that.

Then we went one layer further. Ask that sensation one question: What do you want me to know? Does it move after that? Or holding completely still? If it's holding still, that's usually not stubbornness - that's bracing, trying to protect something. You're not answering that for it yet. You're just receiving whatever comes, the way you'd receive a text before you've decided how to respond.

Three things get in the way almost every time:

1. Impatience (deciding it "didn't work" because nothing dramatic happened),

2. The urge to fix what you found the second you notice it

3. Feeling silly. Do it anyway. The part of you that feels silly isn't the part you're trying to reach.

What this actually looks like on a Tuesday

You're making coffee. The dog's fed. One kid's yelling from the couch - mom, I'm hungry - like you haven't heard them the first four times. Your jaw's tight from clenching it in your sleep. There's a headache sitting low at the back of your head, and you're tired in a way that doesn't quite make sense. Underneath it you're genuinely grateful for your life, for what you've built - and also quietly scared it never going to change, because it's been a few years of the same thing over and over again.

And standing there, coffee percolating, the old track starts up. I'm not enough. I'm not doing enough. I'm not marketing my business well enough. I'm not working out enough. It doesn't stop on its own - it stacks, one "not enough" onto the last, until you're four thoughts deep and you missed whatever your kid actually just said.

That's the moment this has to work in. Not later, in twenty quiet minutes you don't have. Right there, jaw tight, spiral running. But instead of riding it all the way down, you pause. One hand, wherever the tightness actually lives. I see you. It's okay. We're safe here. Not "I'll deal with you later." The same line, every time, until your body starts to recognize it as true.

Why this matters more than more insight

I see this exact gap in almost everyone who comes to me - women who can recite their attachment style like a resume and still go silent the second someone disagrees with them in a meeting. None of them are missing information. What they're missing is a practiced way back into the body, live, in the moment it actually counts.

That's the real difference between reading about a two-minute practice and doing it with someone in the room who's watching for what you don't say out loud and need to actually see instead of bypass (ie. me, I do this with you either 1:1 or inside the Intuitive Circle).

If you haven't caught last week's episode, it's the natural place to start — it's where the belief-versus-pattern distinction this episode builds on first shows up.

Want this kind of work live, twice a month, with me in the room? The Intuitive Circle is exactly what today's practice was a small taste of