162. Body Fluency
Satisfaction, like all feelings, exists in the body.
In order to create a life that feels as lit up as a Christmas tree, you need to not just make whatever changes are necessary or hit your exciting goals.
You also need to be able to feel the bodily sensation of your emotions.
How do you do that?
Like so many things, this comes down to practice.
The more you practice noticing your own bodily experience, the better you’ll get at it, the more second nature it will be.
You may know certain elements of your life are good. You may be able to intellectually explain why your job is an excellent fit or your relationship adds value to your life.
But to feel satisfied, you need to be able to feel it all in your body.
And a lot of us (maybe you?) were never taught that skill.
Join me on this episode to learn why body fluency is the secret to feeling truly satisfied and how to begin building yours today.
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What body fluency means.
Why body fluency is a vital skill to cultivate.
What happens when you develop a sense of body fluency.
How to cultivate body fluency.
Why it’s important to approach body fluency with curiosity, compassion, and non-judgment.
What to expect when you begin practicing body fluency.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we are talking about body fluency.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday, I hope you’re having a lovely day. Over this past weekend I was in San Francisco for a really glorious LGBTQ+ country western dancing convention. And, y’all, it was so fun. I had such a blast and I got to dance with some of my favorite people. There were a lot of people from my Seattle crew there, it was really lovely. And Alex and I got to dance together too.
She went with me as well and we took a bunch of classes together. And it was really interesting because a lot of the learning that I’ve done in the space of dancing has been learning by dancing, right? So I’ve danced for years and I’ve danced with a lot of dancers who are really, really good at what they do. And throughout that, I’ve learned so much about how to two-step. Also how to west coast swing and how to line dance, but mostly how to two-step. Two-step is my main love.
And I’ve taken classes, but most of the classes I’ve taken in two-step have been basic classes, it’s been focused on the basics. And that’s great because when you want to be good at a dance, you want to be really good at the basics. But a lot of the more advanced moves I can do, I learned, again, by doing them. By being led through them by a really wonderful skilled lead.
And it was really interesting to be in a class where we were breaking down moves that I already knew. And I knew how to follow them and I’d followed them for years. But that doesn’t actually necessarily mean I know the “right” way to do it, or that I know the footwork, or that I understand the full nuance of what’s happening.
Like sometimes when you’re following and you’re dancing, things are going so fast that you’re kind of just in the momentum of the movements. And it was really neat to be in a class where things were broken down and you could kind of understand the more complex moves in this piece-by-piece way.
And it was really interesting because one of the classes we took was so hard, I actually didn’t understand a lot of what was happening for most of the class. It was like an hour class and we kept going through the move over and over again. And because it was an advanced class, it was going really quickly. And there was this one part where I knew I wasn’t getting it quite right, but I couldn’t quite figure out what I was doing wrong. And it took almost the whole class for me to figure it out. But I did figure it out and that was super satisfying.
But it was a really wonderful experience to take something that I had all of this applied knowledge in and then get some classroom learning, get some theory behind what we’re doing and really learn what the proper format of those moves is. And I don’t mean proper as in right versus wrong, but when you’re dancing there are often things that are supposed to happen in certain ways. Like you should be on this foot or you should be on that foot or you should be leading into the move at a certain time.
And I felt like it gave me a deeper fluency with dancing, which is really fun because, again, I’ve been dancing for so long that it’s been a long time since I learned as much as I did this weekend. So, deeply satisfying. And it also connects into what we’re going to talk about this week, because I want to talk about body fluency.
And by that I mean a fluency with the language of your own body. And this can happen like it did for me over the weekend with dancing and the fluency of the dance moves. But for the purposes of this podcast, what I’m really talking about is you being fluent in your bodily sensations, and specifically in the sensations of emotions of your feelings.
When we have a feeling there is like a cascade of, you know I’m not a scientist, but like chemicals or hormones or something. I don’t really know what the cascade is, I do know it exists. But there’s often sensations that you can feel. Like when I feel ashamed, I get a little nauseous. Like my stomach actually kind of hurts. Or when I get angry, I often feel physically hot. When I’m anxious it feels like my heart is beating really fast or like I have a lot of energy, but not in a way that I really know what to do with.
So there’s all these different feelings, and when you gain a fluency with them, first of all, you’re going to understand yourself better, you’re going to understand your life better. But also, it’s going to open up all this other stuff and you’re going to experience all of the fun and yummy, delicious feelings more deeply too.
There are a lot of people who are kind of living life from the neck up. People who are very intellectual, very thought oriented, very brain oriented. And listen, I love the brain as much as anyone else, but it’s not the whole picture of your experience. And being able to be intellectual about things is an incredible skill, but it’s not the only skill that exists and it’s not the only skill that’s useful for having a wildly delicious life, for achieving your goals, for being in love, for so many things that we’re trying to do.
So one of the main things I teach is about satisfaction. And specifically with satisfaction the body fluency piece is this, if you don’t have fluency with your body, if you don’t understand your emotions and how they show up in your body physically, then it’s going to be really hard to feel satisfied.
You can have the intellectual idea of satisfaction. You can say, well, I have this goal and I’ve achieved the goal. And that’s great. It’s wonderful when we achieve our goals, but what a lot of people crave, what they want when they’re going after things, whether it’s a promotion or a partner or they want to buy their first house, a lot of times what they’re really pursuing is that body sensation. That body feeling of like, “yes, this is good. I feel good. I feel sated. I feel happy.”
And this is actually really important for a lot of things. Body fluency can help us know when we’re satisfied, it can help us know when things feel really good to us. It would seem like that’s kind of obvious, like when things feel really good to us, but a lot of times we’re missing some of these messages. Especially because for so many of us there’s so much of our life that we’re forcing ourselves to do because we have to, or that’s what a good person does, or this is just the way things are.
So when you get in tune with your body fluency, first of all, you’re going to recognize whatever the emotional landscape of your life is. And sometimes it might surprise you because you might think something makes you angry, and when you get that body fluency, discover that actually it makes you sad.
You might think there’s someone in your life you feel resentment towards, and it might turn out that it’s envy. And it might turn out that part of that envy is a desire to have something like that for yourself. You might think there’s something in your life that you think you really like and enjoy, and upon closer examination you may find you don’t like it.
Actually, this happened to me several years ago. I was doing one of those things where I wasn’t drinking for a period of time. So I did 45 days without drinking. And this can be helpful because sometimes things like drinking and other psychoactive substances can mask our body fluency and our knowing. And so I did that and I realized I don’t like big parties.
I had spent years of my life thinking I liked big parties, years of my life thinking I liked being social in a certain way. And it’s possible that there had been a time when that was true. But when I did that 45 days of no drinking, it became very clear that at that point in my life, I didn’t like it anymore. And it wasn’t fun for me and the drinking had masked that.
So listen, I am a drinking person, so I still drink now. But I think when you get a good body fluency going, you can still have that body fluency and have a glass of wine too. That’s my experience now. But sometimes if I want a clearer picture on something, I may peel back some of the layers of like, oh, this thing makes this seem fun. So if I take that away, is the thing still fun?
So developing a sense of body fluency is going to give you a clearer idea of what’s actually going on for you. It’s going to give you a deeper relationship with yourself. It’s going to give you a yummier experience of when things do work and go well. It’s going to give you the ability to feel satisfied, both when you arrive at goals and also, with practice, you can feel a lot more satisfied even while you’re working on stuff. Like that can be a feeling state you can tap into and something you can create on purpose and something you can notice when it does show up.
Because if there’s anything I’ve noticed over the years of being a coach and learning coaching concepts, when I tune into myself there’s a lot more going on than I was kind of conscious of. And as an example, there have been so many times when I was having just a little flicker of enjoyment, a little flicker of pleasure, a little flicker of desire, a little flicker of gratitude. But if I didn’t slow down and make space for the noticing of that, it didn’t register in my mind. And I had to train myself how to slow down and see those things and develop that fluency.
Okay, so how do we get body fluency? Where does it come from? How do we get it? Well, you’re not going to order it on Amazon, sorry about that. We develop body fluency by practicing it. Body fluency is a habit.
I’m using the word fluency like it’s a language and I really like that frame because if you were trying to learn an actual language, the way you do that is a few ways. One way you can do it is to study it, like in a kind of academic intellectual way. Another way you can do it is immersion, you can go somewhere and immerse yourself in the language.
Another way you can do it is watching TV shows or listening to audiobooks in that language. Or specifically, actually this is also just a tip, if you ever do want to learn a foreign language, if you listen to an audiobook and read the audiobook visually, at the same time to help your brain connect the sounds with the actual letters and the words, that can be a really powerful way.
So we expose ourselves to the language. We play with the language. We try the language on. We try to say the words. We try to listen to the words and hear what they are. That’s how we learn an actual language. And I think it’s very similar with body fluency, except there’s not a land you can go to where everyone speaks it that I’m aware of. If you know of one, let me know.
So for the body, the intellectual academic way is you can do research. You can go online and Google like, what does anger feel like in the body? Now, here’s the thing, tour experience may differ but there are often kind of general ideas about how feelings feel in the body. And you can kind of read those and then look into your body and see if you can find those sensations.
Or you can kind of be studying your body throughout the day to pay attention to like, oh, I felt a little something there. What was it? Was it hot? Was it cold? What was going on there? Like, ooh, do I have any kind of emotional language content? Like little words in my head are going like, I’m really mad at her or that really sucks. Little things like that can be clues and cues as to what the feeling you’re feeling might be, as to what the body fluency might be communicating at that time.
Journaling can also be really good for this, where you journal about like, here are the sensations I feel in my body. And here’s where I feel them. And if you don’t feel feelings very strongly, you can kind of cultivate them on purpose. Like you can put on a really sad movie and then you could pause it and be like, okay, do I feel anything in my body? Where do I feel that in my body? Like? What are the feelings I feel?
Or you could put on a song that makes you feel really happy. And then you could be like, okay, where do I feel this joyfulness in my body? Like, where is that? Where is the response my body is having? Where is my body talking? What’s the communications it’s making?
And for all of these, I would just invite you to approach the body fluency with curiosity, with compassion, with non-judgment. So a lot of us, a lot of the people I meet and talk to in my life, a lot of my clients, also me a lot of the time, our brains tend to leap towards being critical and leap towards judgment and leap towards changing something and leap towards fixing and solving. And that’s all the opposite of body fluency.
That’s trying to change something versus just trying to understand what’s there, trying to be able to read what’s there, trying to be able to listen to what’s there. So if you can put on pause the judgment, if you can put on pause the desire to change things, if you can put on pause the critical voice that’s telling you why you shouldn’t be having these feelings. It doesn’t have to leave forever, but you’re like, okay, hang on, just give us a minute because I just want to see what this feeling is, right? And just be with it. Be curious about it, be compassionate towards it, and see what unfolds there.
So a few things are going to happen if you learn how to do this. One, a lot of your feelings might actually kind of peak and then mellow. When we pay attention to feelings, it’s like feelings, to me, are like often having a very urgent message. And the less we listen to our bodies and the less we listen to those body communications, kind of the more urgent they often get. Like, no one is listening, guess I’ll start shouting.
So when you start listening the intensity may tick up, but then I think it usually ticks down because the body kind of receives the message like, okay, I’m here, I’m listening. I’m here with you, I want to hear about it. But if you’ve never done this before there may be a lot of information that wants your attention now that it sees that you’re listening. But after that, it’s going to be, I think, kind of more like a back and forth communication, right?
So a metaphor you could think about is like, if you’ve been sending information to a printer for 20 years and then not going and checking, when you first go check, the printer is going to have a bunch of pages of information that you’ve been printing for 20 years. But once you clear that out of there and process and deal with it, then every time you send something to the printer it’ll only be like one thing or a few pages and that’s a lot easier to navigate in volume. That’s kind of how I like to think about it.
And if someone has been ignored for a long time, they might be kind of pissed off at you. They might not believe you when you say you’re going to start listening. They might be standoffish. But if you practice and continue to do this and show up, you will be able to build a wonderful, fluent, informative, interesting relationship between yourself and your emotions, between yourself and your body’s feelings and your body’s information, which is often really useful.
And again, if we want to have a fun, happy, satisfying life, it’s going to be happening in the body. Like that’s where the joy will be happening. That’s where the satisfaction will be happening. That’s where the pleasure, a lot of it, will be happening. So it really pays to build this connection.
And I know then you’re going to be connected to the less fun feelings, but those aren’t actually dangerous. They’re often usually really informative. Like I have that whole podcast about how anger is spicy information, all of the feelings, all of those sensations are information. And when you actually have that information, you can use it to help you move forward and help you create more of what you want in your life.
If you’ve ever heard people say feelings are for feeling, this is also related to that. Having body fluency and then showing up with compassionate, kind, loving attention for the feelings is a way of witnessing the feelings. It’s a way of processing the feelings. It’s a way of allowing the feelings to express themselves fully, which means that you can move through them and they can dissipate, right?
So if you’ve ever heard people talk about processing your emotions, this is also one of the frameworks that you can use to do that, is the witnessing and the narrating of what’s happening without judgment. And generally, also without story.
Now, there’s a lot of different kinds of explorations you can do, and it depends on like, are you trying to process this emotion all the way through? Or are you trying to get to know the emotion and allow it to unpack and tell you its whole story? That really depends on if you want to get involved with like, what are literally just the physical sensations or if you want to get involved with like, what’s the narrative about this or what information is being carried inside of this sensation? So there’s a lot in here to play with.
So a lot of the episodes of the podcast take you kind of pretty straightforwardly, I think, towards a goal or teach you a skill. And this is the same in that it’s teaching you a skill, but I realize it might not make as much sense when you first hear about it about why this is important. But I would just really invite you to try it because it can be a wonderful way to get to know and be present with yourself, which even as I say that I’m like, wow, what a coachy thing to say.
But I also think it’s incredibly useful in helping you get to wherever it is you want to get to and helping you achieve your goals. Like if you want to drink less, if you want to change your eating habits, if you want to develop a new habit, if you want to start going on dates, if you want to have a difficult conversation with your spouse, if you want to stop yelling at your kids, having body fluency is going to be useful in literally every single one of those situations and pretty much every other situation you could ever find yourself in.
It’s a superpower to understand your body and its sensations and to be able to work with it instead of trying to fight against it. If you’re a human being who’s alive, you probably have a lot of experience of trying to not feel your feelings or push them down or get rid of them. And that shit doesn’t work, so developing a fluency to be able to navigate the information is much more effective.
So give it a try. Come find me on Instagram, tell me how it goes when you give it a try, tell me what comes up. And also, oh, I just wanted to take a moment to say now that the podcast is about everything and not just about career, I would love to hear from you. If there are topics you want to hear me teach and talk about, please just send me an email at hello@korilinn.com and let me know what you want to hear me talk about.
And then also, as ever, if you enjoy the podcast, if you find it to be valuable, I would be so deeply grateful if you would follow, rate and review the show. And I would be so deeply grateful if you would share the show in conversation, on your social media, et cetera. I would love to get the Satisfied AF podcast in front of as many people as possible and I would love it if you would help me be part of that movement.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. Thank you so much. Have a lovely week, and I will talk to you next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday, I hope you’re having a lovely day. Over this past weekend I was in San Francisco for a really glorious LGBTQ+ country western dancing convention. And, y’all, it was so fun. I had such a blast and I got to dance with some of my favorite people. There were a lot of people from my Seattle crew there, it was really lovely. And Alex and I got to dance together too.
She went with me as well and we took a bunch of classes together. And it was really interesting because a lot of the learning that I’ve done in the space of dancing has been learning by dancing, right? So I’ve danced for years and I’ve danced with a lot of dancers who are really, really good at what they do. And throughout that, I’ve learned so much about how to two-step. Also how to west coast swing and how to line dance, but mostly how to two-step. Two-step is my main love.
And I’ve taken classes, but most of the classes I’ve taken in two-step have been basic classes, it’s been focused on the basics. And that’s great because when you want to be good at a dance, you want to be really good at the basics. But a lot of the more advanced moves I can do, I learned, again, by doing them. By being led through them by a really wonderful skilled lead.
And it was really interesting to be in a class where we were breaking down moves that I already knew. And I knew how to follow them and I’d followed them for years. But that doesn’t actually necessarily mean I know the “right” way to do it, or that I know the footwork, or that I understand the full nuance of what’s happening.
Like sometimes when you’re following and you’re dancing, things are going so fast that you’re kind of just in the momentum of the movements. And it was really neat to be in a class where things were broken down and you could kind of understand the more complex moves in this piece-by-piece way.
And it was really interesting because one of the classes we took was so hard, I actually didn’t understand a lot of what was happening for most of the class. It was like an hour class and we kept going through the move over and over again. And because it was an advanced class, it was going really quickly. And there was this one part where I knew I wasn’t getting it quite right, but I couldn’t quite figure out what I was doing wrong. And it took almost the whole class for me to figure it out. But I did figure it out and that was super satisfying.
But it was a really wonderful experience to take something that I had all of this applied knowledge in and then get some classroom learning, get some theory behind what we’re doing and really learn what the proper format of those moves is. And I don’t mean proper as in right versus wrong, but when you’re dancing there are often things that are supposed to happen in certain ways. Like you should be on this foot or you should be on that foot or you should be leading into the move at a certain time.
And I felt like it gave me a deeper fluency with dancing, which is really fun because, again, I’ve been dancing for so long that it’s been a long time since I learned as much as I did this weekend. So, deeply satisfying. And it also connects into what we’re going to talk about this week, because I want to talk about body fluency.
And by that I mean a fluency with the language of your own body. And this can happen like it did for me over the weekend with dancing and the fluency of the dance moves. But for the purposes of this podcast, what I’m really talking about is you being fluent in your bodily sensations, and specifically in the sensations of emotions of your feelings.
When we have a feeling there is like a cascade of, you know I’m not a scientist, but like chemicals or hormones or something. I don’t really know what the cascade is, I do know it exists. But there’s often sensations that you can feel. Like when I feel ashamed, I get a little nauseous. Like my stomach actually kind of hurts. Or when I get angry, I often feel physically hot. When I’m anxious it feels like my heart is beating really fast or like I have a lot of energy, but not in a way that I really know what to do with.
So there’s all these different feelings, and when you gain a fluency with them, first of all, you’re going to understand yourself better, you’re going to understand your life better. But also, it’s going to open up all this other stuff and you’re going to experience all of the fun and yummy, delicious feelings more deeply too.
There are a lot of people who are kind of living life from the neck up. People who are very intellectual, very thought oriented, very brain oriented. And listen, I love the brain as much as anyone else, but it’s not the whole picture of your experience. And being able to be intellectual about things is an incredible skill, but it’s not the only skill that exists and it’s not the only skill that’s useful for having a wildly delicious life, for achieving your goals, for being in love, for so many things that we’re trying to do.
So one of the main things I teach is about satisfaction. And specifically with satisfaction the body fluency piece is this, if you don’t have fluency with your body, if you don’t understand your emotions and how they show up in your body physically, then it’s going to be really hard to feel satisfied.
You can have the intellectual idea of satisfaction. You can say, well, I have this goal and I’ve achieved the goal. And that’s great. It’s wonderful when we achieve our goals, but what a lot of people crave, what they want when they’re going after things, whether it’s a promotion or a partner or they want to buy their first house, a lot of times what they’re really pursuing is that body sensation. That body feeling of like, “yes, this is good. I feel good. I feel sated. I feel happy.”
And this is actually really important for a lot of things. Body fluency can help us know when we’re satisfied, it can help us know when things feel really good to us. It would seem like that’s kind of obvious, like when things feel really good to us, but a lot of times we’re missing some of these messages. Especially because for so many of us there’s so much of our life that we’re forcing ourselves to do because we have to, or that’s what a good person does, or this is just the way things are.
So when you get in tune with your body fluency, first of all, you’re going to recognize whatever the emotional landscape of your life is. And sometimes it might surprise you because you might think something makes you angry, and when you get that body fluency, discover that actually it makes you sad.
You might think there’s someone in your life you feel resentment towards, and it might turn out that it’s envy. And it might turn out that part of that envy is a desire to have something like that for yourself. You might think there’s something in your life that you think you really like and enjoy, and upon closer examination you may find you don’t like it.
Actually, this happened to me several years ago. I was doing one of those things where I wasn’t drinking for a period of time. So I did 45 days without drinking. And this can be helpful because sometimes things like drinking and other psychoactive substances can mask our body fluency and our knowing. And so I did that and I realized I don’t like big parties.
I had spent years of my life thinking I liked big parties, years of my life thinking I liked being social in a certain way. And it’s possible that there had been a time when that was true. But when I did that 45 days of no drinking, it became very clear that at that point in my life, I didn’t like it anymore. And it wasn’t fun for me and the drinking had masked that.
So listen, I am a drinking person, so I still drink now. But I think when you get a good body fluency going, you can still have that body fluency and have a glass of wine too. That’s my experience now. But sometimes if I want a clearer picture on something, I may peel back some of the layers of like, oh, this thing makes this seem fun. So if I take that away, is the thing still fun?
So developing a sense of body fluency is going to give you a clearer idea of what’s actually going on for you. It’s going to give you a deeper relationship with yourself. It’s going to give you a yummier experience of when things do work and go well. It’s going to give you the ability to feel satisfied, both when you arrive at goals and also, with practice, you can feel a lot more satisfied even while you’re working on stuff. Like that can be a feeling state you can tap into and something you can create on purpose and something you can notice when it does show up.
Because if there’s anything I’ve noticed over the years of being a coach and learning coaching concepts, when I tune into myself there’s a lot more going on than I was kind of conscious of. And as an example, there have been so many times when I was having just a little flicker of enjoyment, a little flicker of pleasure, a little flicker of desire, a little flicker of gratitude. But if I didn’t slow down and make space for the noticing of that, it didn’t register in my mind. And I had to train myself how to slow down and see those things and develop that fluency.
Okay, so how do we get body fluency? Where does it come from? How do we get it? Well, you’re not going to order it on Amazon, sorry about that. We develop body fluency by practicing it. Body fluency is a habit.
I’m using the word fluency like it’s a language and I really like that frame because if you were trying to learn an actual language, the way you do that is a few ways. One way you can do it is to study it, like in a kind of academic intellectual way. Another way you can do it is immersion, you can go somewhere and immerse yourself in the language.
Another way you can do it is watching TV shows or listening to audiobooks in that language. Or specifically, actually this is also just a tip, if you ever do want to learn a foreign language, if you listen to an audiobook and read the audiobook visually, at the same time to help your brain connect the sounds with the actual letters and the words, that can be a really powerful way.
So we expose ourselves to the language. We play with the language. We try the language on. We try to say the words. We try to listen to the words and hear what they are. That’s how we learn an actual language. And I think it’s very similar with body fluency, except there’s not a land you can go to where everyone speaks it that I’m aware of. If you know of one, let me know.
So for the body, the intellectual academic way is you can do research. You can go online and Google like, what does anger feel like in the body? Now, here’s the thing, tour experience may differ but there are often kind of general ideas about how feelings feel in the body. And you can kind of read those and then look into your body and see if you can find those sensations.
Or you can kind of be studying your body throughout the day to pay attention to like, oh, I felt a little something there. What was it? Was it hot? Was it cold? What was going on there? Like, ooh, do I have any kind of emotional language content? Like little words in my head are going like, I’m really mad at her or that really sucks. Little things like that can be clues and cues as to what the feeling you’re feeling might be, as to what the body fluency might be communicating at that time.
Journaling can also be really good for this, where you journal about like, here are the sensations I feel in my body. And here’s where I feel them. And if you don’t feel feelings very strongly, you can kind of cultivate them on purpose. Like you can put on a really sad movie and then you could pause it and be like, okay, do I feel anything in my body? Where do I feel that in my body? Like? What are the feelings I feel?
Or you could put on a song that makes you feel really happy. And then you could be like, okay, where do I feel this joyfulness in my body? Like, where is that? Where is the response my body is having? Where is my body talking? What’s the communications it’s making?
And for all of these, I would just invite you to approach the body fluency with curiosity, with compassion, with non-judgment. So a lot of us, a lot of the people I meet and talk to in my life, a lot of my clients, also me a lot of the time, our brains tend to leap towards being critical and leap towards judgment and leap towards changing something and leap towards fixing and solving. And that’s all the opposite of body fluency.
That’s trying to change something versus just trying to understand what’s there, trying to be able to read what’s there, trying to be able to listen to what’s there. So if you can put on pause the judgment, if you can put on pause the desire to change things, if you can put on pause the critical voice that’s telling you why you shouldn’t be having these feelings. It doesn’t have to leave forever, but you’re like, okay, hang on, just give us a minute because I just want to see what this feeling is, right? And just be with it. Be curious about it, be compassionate towards it, and see what unfolds there.
So a few things are going to happen if you learn how to do this. One, a lot of your feelings might actually kind of peak and then mellow. When we pay attention to feelings, it’s like feelings, to me, are like often having a very urgent message. And the less we listen to our bodies and the less we listen to those body communications, kind of the more urgent they often get. Like, no one is listening, guess I’ll start shouting.
So when you start listening the intensity may tick up, but then I think it usually ticks down because the body kind of receives the message like, okay, I’m here, I’m listening. I’m here with you, I want to hear about it. But if you’ve never done this before there may be a lot of information that wants your attention now that it sees that you’re listening. But after that, it’s going to be, I think, kind of more like a back and forth communication, right?
So a metaphor you could think about is like, if you’ve been sending information to a printer for 20 years and then not going and checking, when you first go check, the printer is going to have a bunch of pages of information that you’ve been printing for 20 years. But once you clear that out of there and process and deal with it, then every time you send something to the printer it’ll only be like one thing or a few pages and that’s a lot easier to navigate in volume. That’s kind of how I like to think about it.
And if someone has been ignored for a long time, they might be kind of pissed off at you. They might not believe you when you say you’re going to start listening. They might be standoffish. But if you practice and continue to do this and show up, you will be able to build a wonderful, fluent, informative, interesting relationship between yourself and your emotions, between yourself and your body’s feelings and your body’s information, which is often really useful.
And again, if we want to have a fun, happy, satisfying life, it’s going to be happening in the body. Like that’s where the joy will be happening. That’s where the satisfaction will be happening. That’s where the pleasure, a lot of it, will be happening. So it really pays to build this connection.
And I know then you’re going to be connected to the less fun feelings, but those aren’t actually dangerous. They’re often usually really informative. Like I have that whole podcast about how anger is spicy information, all of the feelings, all of those sensations are information. And when you actually have that information, you can use it to help you move forward and help you create more of what you want in your life.
If you’ve ever heard people say feelings are for feeling, this is also related to that. Having body fluency and then showing up with compassionate, kind, loving attention for the feelings is a way of witnessing the feelings. It’s a way of processing the feelings. It’s a way of allowing the feelings to express themselves fully, which means that you can move through them and they can dissipate, right?
So if you’ve ever heard people talk about processing your emotions, this is also one of the frameworks that you can use to do that, is the witnessing and the narrating of what’s happening without judgment. And generally, also without story.
Now, there’s a lot of different kinds of explorations you can do, and it depends on like, are you trying to process this emotion all the way through? Or are you trying to get to know the emotion and allow it to unpack and tell you its whole story? That really depends on if you want to get involved with like, what are literally just the physical sensations or if you want to get involved with like, what’s the narrative about this or what information is being carried inside of this sensation? So there’s a lot in here to play with.
So a lot of the episodes of the podcast take you kind of pretty straightforwardly, I think, towards a goal or teach you a skill. And this is the same in that it’s teaching you a skill, but I realize it might not make as much sense when you first hear about it about why this is important. But I would just really invite you to try it because it can be a wonderful way to get to know and be present with yourself, which even as I say that I’m like, wow, what a coachy thing to say.
But I also think it’s incredibly useful in helping you get to wherever it is you want to get to and helping you achieve your goals. Like if you want to drink less, if you want to change your eating habits, if you want to develop a new habit, if you want to start going on dates, if you want to have a difficult conversation with your spouse, if you want to stop yelling at your kids, having body fluency is going to be useful in literally every single one of those situations and pretty much every other situation you could ever find yourself in.
It’s a superpower to understand your body and its sensations and to be able to work with it instead of trying to fight against it. If you’re a human being who’s alive, you probably have a lot of experience of trying to not feel your feelings or push them down or get rid of them. And that shit doesn’t work, so developing a fluency to be able to navigate the information is much more effective.
So give it a try. Come find me on Instagram, tell me how it goes when you give it a try, tell me what comes up. And also, oh, I just wanted to take a moment to say now that the podcast is about everything and not just about career, I would love to hear from you. If there are topics you want to hear me teach and talk about, please just send me an email at hello@korilinn.com and let me know what you want to hear me talk about.
And then also, as ever, if you enjoy the podcast, if you find it to be valuable, I would be so deeply grateful if you would follow, rate and review the show. And I would be so deeply grateful if you would share the show in conversation, on your social media, et cetera. I would love to get the Satisfied AF podcast in front of as many people as possible and I would love it if you would help me be part of that movement.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. Thank you so much. Have a lovely week, and I will talk to you next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
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