Feeling Good in a Body That Never Felt Safe
For decades my body felt unsafe and was sick all the time. Here's what an ayahuasca reckoning taught me about finally feeling good in your body again.
What Does It Mean When Physical Incarnation Has Never Felt Easy?
Something that I have been pondering recently, is that of my physical incarnation. I was born with my cord wrapped around the neck, which likely told my soul, from the very start, that being in a body wasn't safe, and that message has carried through ever since.
My mother said I was a rather sickly baby, always crying, unable to digest food, and one that didn't sleep at all as I was plagued with nightmares and night terrors.
These patterns continued throughout my childhood, where I was nauseous more often than not, and couldn't digest much of what life was throwing at me.
I've written before about what these kinds of symptoms might actually be trying to say in the following blog, Your body’s symptoms as sacred signals.
As I continued to grow, new issues layered onto the original ones. I would wake up with anxiety in the morning and go to bed with terrible existential anguish, which also prevented me from sleeping. My immune system was shot; I tended to catch every virus or lurgi in town.
My teens weren't much better: to the added anxiety and hormonal rollercoaster, I caught Mono, the kissing disease and developed terrible migraines, which I carried through to adulthood. These migraines were so violent that I would have to lie in bed in pitch black until I threw up, and then I would be out for at least 24 hours.
As a Pisces and a highly sensitive person, my tendency was to somatize immediately when my life got too emotional or turbulent. Boyfriend breakup, sick and insomnia. Beloved colleague leaving, flu. Engagement, migraine. Honeymoon, terrible virus that lasted the entire three weeks and prevented me from scuba diving.
Introduce anything new into my life and you could be sure that it would make me violently ill- even the positive stuff. My body could just not digest life and I started being constantly depressed.
This pointed to a lot of survival mechanisms and a body that felt more like an obstacle than a loving and nourishing home.
I'm far from alone in this; most adults carry at least one unresolved early experience their body is still holding.
Why Did I Get So Good at Leaving My Body?
My coping mechanism was simple. As a highly sensitive water sign, with porous boundaries, it was natural for me to just leave my body when things became too intense or difficult.
This ability for evasion into spiritual realms was a balm to my soul and a way to balance out this harsh physical experience of dis-ease.
When you never feel good in your body, life is just not fun. I envied people who could drink, eat and sleep. So leaving my body was a useful skill and intelligence that allowed me to survive and not be completely taken over by my feelings.
Leaving the body and leaving the soul aren't so different. I made a companion activation for that gap too.
What Ancestral Stigma Did I Inherit About the Body?
I was raised with a distinct distrust of the female body. The only acceptable ideal body was the pre-adolescent body, shapeless and stick-figure, Twiggy type. This wasn't just my education, it was a culture that only trusted young, shrinking, silent bodies.
Food was all about control, restraint, and diets. The messages I received about the body were to restrict, control, force, dominate, and hate when it didn't want to obey. Nowhere was food framed as nourishment, or the body as beautiful and loving. I was taught to manipulate it and force it to my will. And guess what? It rebelled. In fact, with hindsight, my body has always rebelled against my strong mind.
What gets inherited isn't just an attitude: researchers have actually traced how body image and eating patterns pass directly from mother to daughter.
What Happened During My Ayahuasca Retreat?
The year I turned 40 , I got on a plane to the Amazonian jungle for a week-long retreat to do Ayahuasca. I had never done anything remotely altering (apart from overdosing on space cakes when I was 27, out of ignorance) in my life, so this plant medicine was my first real experience. This was single-handedly the most difficult experience of my life. I still go back to it often because so much happened during that week that I still can't make sense of.
One of the things I am very clear on is that it put me in my body and forced me to stop leaving it to avoid feeling. This might feel simple in its essence, but it was a week of seismic change.
What Does the Cost of Embodiment Actually Look Like?
When you spend 40 years living out of your body, I can assure you that embodiment is not a path of fluffy pink unicorns.
I have spent the 10 years since processing 40 years of unresolved stories, emotion, pain, and trauma. And I'm still unraveling it. It's definitely not a neat and tidy process. I've had and still do have some really miserable moments, and despair has been my constant companion.
Even though I had done over 25 years of self-development, of mindset work and other spiritual practices, I had always managed to avoid the physical piece because it was the most painful for me. My body was full of shock.
Ironically, it's when we moved to Asheville, NC, that this piece finally fell into place. Asheville is known to be a powerful healing vortex that attracts people from all over the world to heal, especially the heart.
This return to the body has run alongside another return, one I channeled specifically for coming back to who I actually am.
These last 10 years have been a long process of wading and trudging through the pain body, Eckhart Tolle’s term for stored emotional pain.
I am lucky to have been supported by some amazing therapists, of course, but I still consciously choose to do the work because I want to enjoy this human incarnation. And this is not something I can force and control. My body has its own timing and agenda.
What's the Difference Between Feeling Good and Pleasure?
This month, I decided to channel a light language about safety in the body, but more importantly, feeling good in the body, for myself.
There is a big movement right now in the spiritual space around pleasure because it is key to so many things. The issue I have with it is that when you don't feel good in the body, no amount of pleasure will make a difference. It can even feel like an additional violation to a body that is stuck in a holding pattern.
My focus has been on just feeling good in my body and engaging in activities that support that feeling:
certain types of exercise (yin yoga, hiking, swimming, dancing…),
massage and touch on my terms,
acupuncture,
reading romantasy,
exploring new places,
following my curiosity.
Healing does happen with the help of amazing therapies, but it can also happen in mundane moments when your body can simply appreciate a sunset or watch a hummingbird feed.
I'm building the bridge my body has always needed, and I want to extend it to anyone whose body was never allowed to be a good place to live, especially as a woman in a lineage that taught the body was something to hate, shrink, or manipulate.
FAQs
Q: Why don't I feel good in my body even though nothing is physically wrong?
A: Chronic disconnection from the body often traces back to early nervous system patterning, not a present-day physical problem. Research on adverse childhood experiences shows the body can carry unresolved stress long after the original threat is gone.
Q: Can trauma really cause physical symptoms like nausea, insomnia, or migraines?
A: Yes. Childhood trauma has been linked to adult somatic symptoms including chronic pain and headache, since the nervous system encodes unprocessed experience directly into the body, not just the mind.
Q: Is it normal to "leave" your body as a coping mechanism?
A: Dissociation, or mentally leaving the body, is a well-documented survival response to overwhelm. It's intelligent in the moment it develops; the work later in life is learning it's now safe enough to stay.
Q: How is a light language activation different from talk therapy?
A: Light language works through frequency rather than words, so it can reach patterns stored in the body that talking alone doesn't always access. It's a companion to therapeutic work, not a replacement for it.
Q: Can ancestral or inherited body shame actually be released?
A: Studies on intergenerational transmission of body image and eating patterns show these views pass through families, which also means they can be interrupted and unlearned within a single generation.
How Can This Activation Help You Feel Good in Your Body?
The activation exists as a recalibration companion, a frequency doing what the words in this blog can't, for the parts of the body-story that feel unsafe, stuck, and unpleasant.
If you've spent your life leaving your body, feeling good in it isn't a switch you flip. It's a process, built one honest layer at a time.
This activation is that bridge in frequency form.
