67: How to Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Body | Unlocking Full-Body Presence and Power

If you find yourself lying awake at 3am, replaying conversation or sitting at the table with your family but already bracing for tomorrow, you know how frustrating it is to be stuck in your head like that.

In this episode, I talk about why our nervous systems fall into overthinking and reactivity which looks like living from the head, and why embodiment is the piece that’s missing. I walk you through real examples of how your nervous system gets hijacked, and I give you practical tools to bring you back into your body so that you can feel more empowered and present to your life. 

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why the mind keeps you in loops of reaction.
• Nervous system patterns hold trauma and shape how resourced or reactive you feel.
• Embodiment is non-negotiable if you want stronger boundaries, deeper intimacy, and true self-trust.

Rise Rooted

If you’re ready to stop living only in your head and start feeling more present in your own life, join us in Rise Rooted.  It’s an eight-week journey where I’ll teach you the skills of feminine embodiment, so you can come back to your body, trust yourself more deeply, and feel resourced in the middle of everyday life. 

Find out more here https://tertiariegler.com/feminine-embodiment-group-program/

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Transcript

Tertia [00:00:00]:
Hello. Hello. I am Tertia and you are listening to the Feminine Embodiment for Sensitive Woman podcast. On the show, we explore how coming home to your body opens up new ways to feel, to create, and to expand into the fullness of you. Join me to discover how to live from your truth, feel more sensually alive and, and have a deeper connection with yourself and with life. In today's episode, we are going to dive into a topic that I am very passionate about and that is how do we get out of our heads and into our bodies? So if you are someone who spends a lot of time lost in thought, and you tend to be either very future focused, so having your attention on all of the things that might happen, or you are habitually stuck in the past, meaning that you keep on replaying things and scenarios and events, then you are going to find today's episode very, very helpful. It can be quite challenging for us to, with all of the demands that we have on our time, find that balance to, to have really full lives where we are resourced from within and where our actions and our choices come from an empowered place within us and where we are present to our own lives. And that can only happen when we come out of our heads and, and we get into our bodies. Nothing wrong with using your head and planning and being strategic. But when this is the default mode from which we operate, it leads to all kinds of unsatisfying problems and challenges in our lives. It affects our ability to be more present to our own lives, to be a more present mother, a more present partner. It makes us feel as if life is against us, that we don't have a say or any control in our own lives. Since when we live from our head, often you'll find that we are living from reaction and not a place that is sourced from our own inner power. We start becoming numb. We start losing touch with our internal state, our internal sensations and those internal sensations and the internal felt sense, that is actually a very effective guidepost. So if we are always or mostly spending a lot of our time and our energy in our head, thinking, planning, moving forward and having our awareness directed away from ourselves, what it means is that we also lose touch with our own internal guidance system. Just by virtue of being alive in the world today, and I think more now so than perhaps ever before, our nervous systems are constantly stressed out. There are so many everyday things that are heartbreaking and that is keeping us all on edge. And this means that we are really in reaction to life the whole time. This is another thing that happens when we're living from our head. We are totally in reaction. I mean, you just need to go onto social media to see how much reaction and reactivity and lashing out is happening and how divisive the world has become. And that's why I believe now more than ever it is so important for us to get out of our heads. We are bombarded with so many things, not only the external world that's busy crashing and burning, but also internally. We might be in these cycles of having habitual thoughts where we are so self critical, where we are doubting ourselves, where we are even hating ourselves or others, where we are so uncertain and afraid for, for our future and the future of our kids. And so we need to find a way to come back into ourselves, to become more resourced because this is the only way that we can start making a difference. And whether that's a difference in our own life and our own experience of life, or a difference in the life of our children or our community, it doesn't really matter. When we live mostly from our heads, when we are stuck in that habit. What also happens is we feel ungrounded, we feel unrooted and we feel unsafe. And this is a little bit of a contradiction again, because one of the reasons we go out of our bodies and spend so much time in our heads is because it doesn't feel safe to be inside our bodies. And if we are not anchored in our bodies, that also causes us to feel unsafe. We need to connect back into the wisdom of our body so that we can use that to guide our actions and to bring healing to ourselves and the world. I'll give you two more examples of how this could play out in everyday life. The one example is when you are say you're having dinner with friends or you're having dinner with your family and everyone's laughing, everyone's having a good time. But you aren't even tasting your food because your mind is already skipping ahead to the meeting that you need to attend tomorrow. And you are perhaps rehearsing what it is that you're going to say. You might predict where it's going to go wrong, the possible conflicts that's going to happen as a result, the way that you will need to define, defend yourself or stand up for yourself. And the problem that we have here is not just that you are not in the present moment. In other words, you're not actively participating in your life when this is happening. But also your brain doesn't know the difference between something that is truly happening in the moment and something which you are just imagining. So just by you rehearsing and bracing yourself and imagining how the conflict's going to happen and seeing how you need to defend yourself or stand up for yourself, your nervous system becomes activated. It's just one of those things. It's completely normal. So there's no judgment or shaming here. But if we have fallen into the habit of habitually thinking and arguing and bracing our way through the future, can you see how that then effectively trains you to be on constant high alert? Another example is when you are lying in bed at night and it's three o' clock in the morning. The room is dark, but inside your head you are wide awake because you're playing, replaying a conversation that you had earlier. You're picking apart every word that you said, what the other person said. Perhaps there was a conversation where the other person reacted in a way that upset you and you responded. And now you're wondering, did you sound too blunt? Will they think that you're careless? Will they think that you are unkind? Do you need to explain yourself more? Do they understand what it is that you actually meant? And again, what we're doing when we replay playing these things in our minds is your nervous system becomes activated. And remember, it doesn't matter whether something happens in real time or whether something that you are experiencing is happening only on the level of the mind in your thoughts. Our imaginations and our thoughts are very powerful. And what I am seeing more and more is we need to find a way to make this work in our advantage. And too often, if we are in the habit of living from our head and we are not really connected into our body, our thoughts can be in control of us. Meaning our habitual thinking patterns informs the way in which we experience our life, in which we move through the world, in how empowered we feel, in how connected to our own truth we feel, into how present we feel. And if we are in the habit of living only from the neck up, we are only living with part of ourselves online, right? We only have effectively, say, 10% of ourselves online and the 90% beneath the neck, which is our body, our personal power, our authenticity, our deep knowing of what we desire, our ability to ask for what it is that we need by using our voice, we don't have so much access to that. And that leaves us feeling disempowered. For us to have more pleasure, to have more trust in ourselves, to have to be present in our relationships, to have deeper intimacy and connection in our Relationships. We have to bring all of who we are to the party, right? We have to bring all of us online. Otherwise, it's like weightlifting, only with one arm. And you're only going to have a very incredibly beautiful biceps on your right hand, but the rest of your body is going to look a little bit puny. And I'm sure that's not what you want to have for yourself. So how can we get back into our bodies? How can we get out of our heads? I want to share with you now some practical ways of how you can get back into your body. And I spoke earlier about how being so floaty in our heads can make us feel ungrounded. And so one of the first things that we need to learn how to do is to ground ourselves. And there are a few ways in which you can do this. One way is to. Even where you're sitting right now, you can, if that's accessible to you, you can put your feet down on the ground beneath you and feel your feet on the floor, feel the weight of your body. So just bringing your awareness and your attention down into your feet and into your seat and feeling your energy coming down, you can also imagine that you have roots coming out the bottom of your feet or by your tailbone, your root chakra. And you can perhaps close your eyes. Don't do this if you're driving. But if it's possible for you to close your eyes, you can do that. And imagine how these roots that you are sending out from your tailbone and from your feet, imagine how they are going down into the earth, rooting down and anchoring you. Of course, you can also imagine that you are a tree. I love imagining that I'm a big fig tree and I can have my branches spread all the way up into the heavens. My roots are spread down deeply into Mother Earth. And when I visualize this, I also see how the wind could blow my leaves and the branches around, but I'm staying stable and rooted. So that's one of the first practices that you can do. And grounding will be very helpful for those times where you feel scattered, where you might be bumping yourself, where you literally feel unexpected, grounded. And just by bringing our energy and our awareness back to our center, where we feel rooted, it gives us a new point of presence and power to navigate the world from. Another practice that you can try is to do a body scan. And a body scan is a very effective practice to bring your awareness back into the present moment, into what is here and now. And when you scan your body and you notice the sensations in each body part. So whether it's warmth or tingling or a tightness or a numbness, what happens is you are actually building your own skill of feeling what it is that you are feeling. And as you are of course now bringing your awareness to the different body parts, it helps you bring your awareness here instead of having your mind raising someplace into the future or someplace into the past. If you are curious about body scan, if this is something that is quite new to you, then there are so many resources available online where there are guided meditations, guided body scans, and it can be really helpful to follow along on these audios. The practice that I prefer to use to get into my body is a moving meditation practice and embodiment practice. This is a practice that I teach all of my clients. It uses breath, it uses awareness, but it also uses movement and sound. And what I really love about using a feminine embodiment practice like this instead of simply only relying on grounding myself or doing a body scan, is because it rewires your nervous system. A movement practice like the one that I teach, speech, which is called deep flow, works with the natural intelligence of your body. And so if you hold any stickiness in your nervous system, whether from trauma, whether from your needs not being met, whether from you not being able to express your need, whether you have a nervous system that is more reactive, or whether it's just the perils of modern life, the that is keeping you stuck, that is keeping you playing small, that's keeping you showing up in these habitual patterns like overthinking and over delivering and overworking and over analyzing all of these overs. This movement practice helps you get into contact with what is holding the pattern in place. It helps you move that pattern through your body and from your experience. And what you will find is that you don't spend so many hours in your head anymore trying to solve problems or replaying conversations. You find that you are more present with your kids while you're cooking dinner. You actually there and able to listen to them instead of being stuck in your head and feeling irritable with all of the interruptions. Your boundaries are so much stronger and you are able to draw the line in terms of when you are available. You don't feel this inner compulsion and drive to check your emails or answer SMSs late at night. So we're creating more space inside ourselves and we are creating a greater capacity to hold the stress and the the tension that we experience in our lives because we are always going to be exposed to stress and tension. It's a part of life. We can't get away from it. But what we want to do is we want to find a way where we are most resourced, where we are most nourished, where we feel most empowered. And so many of the other practices, perhaps yoga, which is a form of embodiment or breath work, or grounding yourself, or body scan or dancing, what those things do is yes, they can bring release and relief into your nervous system, but a formal practice like the Deep Flow actually recalibrates your nervous system. And what it also does, in my experience, what it has done for me as a sensitive woman, it's also calmed my amygdala down so, so I don't get activated and triggered in the way that I used to. I'll be teaching my Deep Flow practice in my new group program that's open now we starting in mid October. So depending on when you are listening to this podcast episode, I'm going to put a link for you in the show Notes to go and check it out. But in Rise Rooted, it's an eight week journey where I'm teaching you the skills of feminine embodiment. There are seven specific skills that we are going to explore together that will help you bring your body back online. And this is for women who sense they have been, as I call it, standing with only one foot in their own lives. They've only lived with a part of themselves online, perhaps from the neck up, and they're ready to inhabit their full selves, their full body, their full voice and their full presence. It's for women who crave to have more pleasure and vitality and self trust in the middle of their work, in the middle of their parenting, in the middle of their relationships and the big dreams that they hold. And it's for women who want to let go of these old rules about who they should be and how they should show up and what they should do, and instead create beliefs that actually support them and the life that they want. You are going to discover how to make decisions with clarity and conviction because you are tapped into this internal world, your internal felt sense, the internal sensations that become your guidepost for how you navigate life. You are going to discover how to understand and channel your feelings, your emotions so that they become a source of wisdom for you instead of something that you need to manage. And you will discover how to hold all parts of yourself, whether it's the ambitious part, the sensitive part, the playful part, the sensual part. Hold all of that and move through life without having to hide any part or over managing any one of those parts again. The link will be in the show notes for you if you want to join us. I just look back at my life and I have a clear before and after my life before where I was prisoner. Let's call it to my habitual ways of thinking and my habitual ways of talking to myself. My habitual ways of doing, dealing with my triggers and being reactive and feeling disempowered. And what's interesting is it didn't matter how much mindset work I had done, there was something inside of me that prevented me from actually stepping into the fullness of who I desire to be. And now I know it's because my body was never part of the equation. And what I've learned is it doesn't matter how much you try to manifest or improve or have something different or create the life of your dreams. If you are holding trauma in your nervous system, if there are things stuck in your nervous system, and if you don't work with the intelligence of your body, that's never going to happen for you. And if it does, it's going to take a very, very, very long time. And it is not sustainable because our bodies have been designed in a way to keep us safe. And so those patterns of being and thinking and limiting beliefs are so deeply ingrained into who we are and we need to go and work with them on the level where they exist, which is in the body. And so that's what we're going to get into in Rise Rooted. So you can show up as that emotionally empowered and sensually alive woman and live and serve from that place. I hope you found this episode helpful. If you have any questions about Rise Rooted then you can send me a dm. I'm going to leave all all of the links for you in the show notes and I would be so happy to welcome you inside our eight week journey which is starting in the middle of October 2025. Thanks for tuning in and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.