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Exploring Your Embodied Self

If someone had asked me about my connection to my soul ten years ago, I would have laughed. My soul? At the time, I didn’t know what or where my soul was or if it even existed, let alone how to connect with it. After spending eight years earning a doctorate in clinical psychology, I had developed a very academic, mechanistic outlook on the world. I believed that everything could and should be explained by the hard facts of science. And if science couldn’t explain it, then it wasn’t real or legitimate.

I first heard about my “soul” when I was young. Raised Catholic, I went to a parochial grade school and high school and was expected to go to Mass every Sunday, which I usually protested. At church, I learned the Christian view of the soul, which seemed supernatural or otherworldly to me—a concept I could never objectively understand. The more interested I became in science and psychology, the more the Christian concept of a soul felt illusory, even superstitious.

My perspective changed after going through the emotional crisis I now understand as my “dark night of the soul.” It began, not surprisingly, at a time when I reached the end of my lifelong list of achievements, receiving my PhD, maintaining a committed relationship, and making a stable living by opening a successful private practice. Still feeling deeply unfulfilled despite everything I had already accomplished in my life, I became more consciously aware of how disconnected and unsure I felt about myself, who I was, and what I wanted—a way that I had been feeling for years or decades, even though I struggled to admit it. I imagine some of you may feel similarly now, and although it might not seem so, these feelings are often the beginning of awakening to a more deeper understanding of yourself. Though I couldn’t see it at the time, my own awakening began after I hit an emotional rock bottom while vacationing with my partner, Lolly.

Those of you who read my first book, How to Do the Work, may remember the story: I was sitting in a rocking chair eating oatmeal and reading a book about emotionally absent mothers when I broke down and began to cry uncontrollably. Though I didn’t fully understand what was happening at the time, I had finally begun to more consciously allow myself to realize that I didn’t share an emotional connection with my family, especially with my mom. With the help of that book, I was starting to see all the ways I had compensated for that lack of connection, constantly dismissing or ignoring my own needs and desires in order to “connect” with her and those I loved most. For years, I’d drop everything to be available to nearly everyone in my life without pausing first to make sure I was also caring for myself. If a friend invited me out to the movies, to dinner, or for a hike, I’d immediately say yes, even if I didn’t have the desire or energetic resources to go. If a loved one needed emotional support, I would do anything to try to comfort them, even if that meant jeopardizing my physical or emotional well-being. I was constantly worried others might think I was selfish or be feel disappointed if I tended to my own needs before theirs.

The irony, of course, is that prioritizing others’ needs while dismissing or ignoring my own didn’t help me feel safe, valued, or loved in any of my relationships. Instead, doing so just made me feel hollow, lonely, and unfulfilled on the inside—all the feelings that hit me like a tidal wave while I was sitting in a rocking chair reading on vacation. With chronically unmet needs, my body would never feel safe enough to shift out of survival mode and give me the opportunity to explore the deeper interests and desires of my authentic Self.

In that moment, I started to open my eyes and see all the ways that I had put off dealing with those uncomfortable feelings, mostly by looking to others to take them away or make me feel better. When the efforts of my family, friends, or romantic partner failed to uplift me, I only felt emptier and sadder on the inside. Eventually, I only grew more frustrated and resentful that others couldn’t “save” me or fill the deepening hole inside my heart.

Contrary to the messages many of us received in our families or through the media (hello, Disney and rom-com movies), the perfect partner or relationship just doesn’t exist and even if they did, they couldn’t take away our pain. It is not anyone’s job to rescue or “complete” us because we are capable and whole exactly as we are. We are all human beings doing the best we can, and having romanticized ideas about relationships only sets us up for disappointment. At the same time, we need to learn how to tolerate disappointing others. Many of us were raised with certain idealized notions of morality or what makes us a “good person,” driven by familial, cultural, religious, and societal messaging that often prioritizes the comfort of others, activating internalized guilt and self-neglecting habits.

One of my clearest memories from my childhood is my mom rehearsing a list of excuses with me after I had told her that I didn’t want to go to a friend’s party. In her attempt to help me decline my friend’s invite, she coached me while we made up an excuse about why I couldn’t go, and we practiced together. Then, with fear coursing through my ten-year-old body, I made the call to my friend and recited the excuse we’d crafted. My mom, of course, had good intentions; she didn’t want me to appear rude. She had been conditioned in the same way during her own childhood. But this kind of conditioning lays the subconscious groundwork for the “good person” beliefs I know still exist inside me today, especially when I struggle to turn down an invite unless I have an “acceptable” reason, often overexplaining and overapologizing when I do. Driven to please others in order to be liked, I found myself constantly fearful of disappointing or upsetting those around me.

The reality is, the sooner we can release any illusions of perfection in ourselves or our relationships, the sooner we can begin to embrace the messy, vulnerable journey we call love. We can stop believing that others will leave us if we can’t do something or if we say no because that’s not true, even if our mind tells us it is. Truly healthy relationships require a commitment to learning through these moments of difference or disagreement using emotional regulation, active communication, conflict resolution or repair (something we’ll talk more about in later chapters), and compromise.

These realizations may sound unnerving—and they certainly were for me at the time—but the awareness I gained during my dark night of the soul was the greatest gift I ever received. That clarity led to the start of my Self Healing journey, when I started to take responsibility for myself, empowering myself to become an active participant in creating the change I so deeply needed. I applied this responsibility to my relationships with others: I was the only one who could realistically ensure all of my needs were known and met. And it would only be when my needs were met that I’d feel safe enough to share my natural gifts and talents authentically with those around me.

For the first time in my life, I began to see how the most important relationship I have is the relationship I have with myself. I started to realize that if I wasn’t able to be honest with myself about my deepest needs and desires, I would never be able to truly or authentically connect with another person. Being honest with myself was the first step in sharing myself more authentically with others. To start breaking some of my conditioned habits, every time I noticed myself thinking about what I “should” (or “shouldn’t”) do or how I “should” (or “shouldn’t”) respond, which was often, I created a new habit of pausing (using the empowerment pause exercise you’ll learn here) to check in with myself. This time gave me the opportunity to explore whether there was something else I needed or wanted to do for myself instead.

For the next several years, I concentrated on exploring my own wants and needs. As I got clearer about what was true for me, I distanced and even removed myself from certain relationships that were no longer aligned. That created the space I needed to focus on accepting and caring for all of me rather than just the parts of me that were validated by others. Identifying my authentic needs wasn’t easy; it meant peeling back years of childhood conditioning that had led me to think, feel, and act in ways that didn’t serve my best interests. The more I stripped away the deeply embedded layers of conditioning, the more clearly I was able to connect with my authentic Self, or who I am at my core. And my authentic Self wasn’t just part of me; it was all of me. I had a unique way of being in the world, an essence that made me me.

Finally, it dawned on me: this is my soul. My soul is my essence, what makes me special for being the individual I am. It is an energy that is unique to me, always swirling and shifting with the people and things around me, creating an individualized expression that no one else in the universe can possibly have.

As I continued to awaken, I started to read more about our mind-body connection, including research into the field of quantum mechanics, where I stumbled upon scientific evidence of our “soul.” Quantum mechanics is the study of our world on a subatomic level—“science’s most precise, powerful theory of reality,” as described by John Horgan in Scientific American.7 The field of quantum mechanics explains that everything in our world, including you and me, is made up of both energy and matter. Though most of us identify with the material existence of our physical body, we have an unseen energy that contributes to and animates all our physical experiences. This creates a unique vibrational energy at our core—what can be called our soul—that interacts with the world around us.

Coming to understand the concept of the soul through science was pivotal for me. At the time, I felt I needed scientific validation to recognize and accept the most vital part of my being. As soon as I had proof, though, I knew that I had to learn how to connect with this innermost part of me if I wanted to meet all my needs and heal all of me, including my connections with others.

You might not believe in the idea of a soul, as I once didn’t. Or you might believe that it exists somewhere but have no idea where to find it. Regardless of what you think or feel about your soul, this book will help you connect with who you are at your core; it’s the next step in your journey and the one that will ultimately enable you to be the love you seek.

Before you can reconnect with your soul, though, it’s important to learn how to reconnect with your physical body and explore your subconscious mind. This is how we begin to integrate our embodied Self and eventually heal all our embodied relationships with others.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR EMBODIED SELF

We are what we think. Or that’s what many of us believe, thanks in part to the famous French philosopher René Descartes, best known for the saying “I think, therefore I am.” But we’re far more complex than the thoughts that run through our mind. When we show up in our relationships, we show up as all of us: body, mind, and soul. This is why we often can’t relieve our suffering or change our relationships by changing just the thoughts in our conscious mind.

To truly heal, we need to understand our embodied Self. Our embodied Self is the interwoven expression of our physical body, our mind (both our conscious and subconscious), and our soul, or authentic Self. Our soul and authentic Self are similar entities—both represent our unique essence or who we are at our core—so you’ll see the terms used interchangeably throughout this book.

We can begin to embody our authentic Self when we make sure we’re meeting our needs. We have three different types of needs:

Making sure we’re consistently getting all these needs met enables us to feel safely grounded and intentional in our responses to the world around us. We’re able to feel safe and secure enough to be our authentic Selves within our relationships, which enables us to form authentic connections with others.

Hypothetically, we would have all learned how to meet these needs for ourselves through our interactions with our caregivers in childhood. As many of you parents are acutely aware, infants are completely dependent on their caregivers to meet all of their needs for them, all of the time. Given the reality that it’s an enormous responsibility to care for another person, never is it more important to ensure your own needs are also being cared for. As you’ll continue to learn throughout this book, it is only when our body is getting what it needs to function that we are able to navigate the multitude of stressful moments we’ll face while tending to another person. Many of you parents reading this, especially those with infants or several children, may understandably find yourselves lacking in the time, energy, or financial resources required for supportive child care. Most modern-day, parents are cut off from neighbors and local communities, preventing them from accessing the practical and emotional support still available in some village-based communities. Parents these days are often overworked and under-supported, barely meeting their own needs and, as a result, physiologically unable to meet the needs of another.

I encourage all of you parents to practice regularly extending compassion to yourself, especially if you notice feelings of shame or other uncomfortable emotions as you continue to read about and explore the impact of unmet childhood needs. In my opinion, there is no role that has a greater impact on society than parenting, and it is necessary that we continue to come together as human beings to honor, support, and prioritize parenting for being the sacred act it is.

Regularly carving out small moments for self-care practices will help you remain more calm and grounded in the face of the overwhelmingly stressful experiences of parenting. Practicing self-care can change how you show up for your children while also providing them with a healthy model of self-prioritization and self-care.

As adults, we can learn to care for our physical needs by tuning in to our physical body. We can begin to pay closer attention to our physical sensations, the real origin of our thoughts and feelings (sit tight; we’ll cover this surprising fact in just a moment). We can even become conscious or aware of our subconscious mind and the conditioned thoughts, feelings, and habits that live there, driving most of our everyday actions and reactions. And finally, we can learn how to tap into our intuition and trust our instincts so that we can each embody and express the unique essence that makes us us.

So, what does it mean to embody something? When we embody something, we step into it as all of us: body, mind, and soul. These aren’t three separate entities but one integrated self. Integration occurs when individual parts join to form a unified whole. Think of integration as a fruit salad rather than a fruit smoothie: each piece maintains its distinct qualities while all come together to form something more delicious than the individual parts.8 (Thank you, Dr. Daniel Siegel, for this analogy.)

When we integrate our embodied Self or align our desires, intentions, and actions, we’re able to show up feeling safe, secure, and whole as individuals in our relationships. When we feel safe, secure, and whole, as individuals we’re able to be curious, empathetic, and receptive to others. Only then can we create the same safety and security others need to be their authentic Self, too.

When we’re connected to our body and attuned to our own emotions, we can begin to safely and securely connect with others in a deeper, more authentic way. Sharing an authentic emotional connection with someone allows us to attune to them, or sense what they may be experiencing. We’re open and receptive, responsive to shifts in and changes in their emotional states and are able to notice and respond to others’ emotional cues, including those that are nonverbal. This doesn’t mean that we need to be perfectly attuned to others all the time; that’s not possible, even for the most well-meaning of us. For all caregivers reading this who have harshly judged some (or all) of your past misattunement, I hope you can begin to extend yourself grace and compassion for those moments of understandable disconnection or overwhelmed reactivity. All of us can benefit from beginning to congratulate ourselves every time we make the choice to return to our loved ones after moments of misattunement in order to rebuild the safety and security of those relationships.

When we share this kind of deeper and secure connection at least some of the time, we create a foundation of authentic or true emotional connection. When two people feel safe enough to be themselves, they can exist in an interdependent relationship, allowing their differences while remaining connected and working collaboratively with each other. Each individual is able to express their unique energy and gifts while allowing the other person to do the same. You can think of interdependence as the opposite of codependency, where people in a relationship are completely dependent each other to meet their needs, often at the expense of their own. This chronic self-betrayal leads individuals to adapt and modify themselves to accommodate the other. In an interdependent relationship there is a mutual meeting of needs which allows each individual to embody and celebrate true diversity by thinking, feeling, and acting differently from those around us.

When we form this dynamic, we create a bond that allows us to become more successful together than we would be on our own. We each bring our natural strengths and talents to the partnership, enabling our group to accomplish greater things (we’ll talk more about that powerful phenomenon, which is known as social coherence, in chapter 10). It’s like being on a sports team: each player may be a phenomenal athlete on their own, but when we come together and allow each to play their own position and contribute their own special talents, we become better than individual players can be; we become a winning team.

As we continue to explore the three-step process to embodying your authentic Self, the first step is the same for all of us: we begin by reconnecting with our body. Though each of us has lived through our own unique circumstances, I’ll continue to share my own story of discovering and embodying my authentic Self in the hope that it can be of service to some of you on your individual journeys.

BEGINNING TO MEET MY BODY’S NEEDS

Before my dark night of the soul, I felt more and more disconnected from those around me and, as a result, increasingly lonely. To the outsider looking in, my loneliness might have seemed paradoxical. A serial monogamist for most of my adult life, I had spent only a handful of months in total without a romantic partner. I had a lot of friends, a busy social calendar, and a family who asked, if not expected, to see me as often as possible.

Despite having all those people in my life, I felt the embodiment of the cliché “alone in a crowded room.” At my core, I didn’t feel connected, supported, or even really known by anyone around me. As a result, I often thought that my relationships were never enough. I kept expecting to form a deeper emotional connection with my loved ones, and when it didn’t happen, I would become disappointed, disillusioned, and, over time, resentful. I’d get excited about an opportunity to spend a weekend away with my partner, hoping that we’d finally connect on a more meaningful level, and when we didn’t, I’d be disappointed and would blame her. Or I’d have high hopes for a special dinner with friends, but when the night came, the love or connection I desired remained out of reach, causing me to feel hurt or unimportant and end up emotionally shutting down or checking out entirely. My resentment would build over time until I’d move on from the friendship or, in the case of my romantic relationships, we broke up.

In my twenties, I explained away my constant unhappiness by telling myself “You’re young, you live in New York City—feeling disillusioned is normal!” But after I left and moved to a new city, where I didn’t have as many friends and a steady stream of social outings to distract me, I began to feel even more dissatisfied. I started to see how many of my colleagues in my clinical training program modeled a type of behavior I hadn’t often seen in others: they were more in touch with their emotions and able to share them more easily and openly than I could.

As I started to explore my emotions and the ways in which I’d been suppressing them for years, I began to slowly see the role that I played in all my relationships. Showing up disconnected, I was creating the emptiness, loneliness, and unhappiness that I felt inside; those feelings weren’t being created or caused by anyone else. I was out of touch with myself yet still expecting those around me to intuit and relieve my emotional suffering by helping me feel differently. I continued to expect others to “know” me but didn’t know myself enough to even begin to express myself. The reality was that if I wasn’t connected with all of me—body, mind, and soul—how could I possibly feel fully connected to anyone around me?

My healing journey instinctually began with my body after I had become more aware of my chronically stressed and dysregulated physical state. I wasn’t consistently meeting my body’s needs, even though I had enough to eat and a place to sleep. I regularly consumed whatever was readily available, including chemical-laden foods, processed sugar, gluten, and alcohol, all of which inflamed my body and brain and didn’t make me feel good. My sleep was erratic: sometimes I’d go to bed early, other nights, I’d stay up late; and most mornings, I’d wake up feeling tired, even if I’d slept eight hours. My breathing reflected that chronic state of stress and was agitated and shallow, not calm, deep, and restorative. For decades, I had been experiencing persistent gut issues and brain fog so thick that I’d suddenly float into periods of mental vacancy when my mind inexplicably went completely blank.

When I started to reconnect with my body and its physical needs, I could see that I was walking around undernourished, overstressed, and continually depleted and exhausted. Over time, I could see how I regularly viewed my daily physical care as just another task or obligation that was between me and my body’s need to “relax,” when, ironically, caring for my body was the one thing I needed to start doing so that I could finally relax. In the absence of external motivation or validation, like someone else pushing me or visible changes to my physical appearance, I simply didn’t feel motivated to take care of myself. The physical dysregulation that continued as a result of my habitual daily self-neglect wasn’t just harming myself, it was also hurting how I showed up in my relationships, which were in a state reflective of my physical distress. One wrong look or word—or my misperception of either—and I’d be on edge, worrying that the other person didn’t love me or was upset with me.

Do you know how you feel when you get really hungry or have a fever and don’t have the capacity to deal with anything outside of your seemingly all-consuming physical needs? The same is true if we don’t consistently eat nutrient-dense foods, don’t sleep enough or sleep erratically, don’t move enough or move too much, or routinely face more physical or emotional stress than our body can handle. These unmet physical needs may not manifest themselves as acute symptoms, but, over time, the constant trickle of unmet needs can add up to chronic dysregulation. Our body doesn’t feel safe, and as a result, our nervous system can’t regulate itself, causing us to show up around others as angry, distracted, checked out, or on high alert.

Today, I continue to make choices every day to regulate my nervous system by consistently committing to meet my body’s needs. Though your body’s daily needs may look a bit different from mine, here are some steps I took to begin to create new habits to better meet my physical needs, which we’ll explore in more detail in chapter 5.

After several months of listening to my body and meeting my physical needs, I began to feel more rested, energetic, peaceful, and ultimately more powerfully connected to and in control of my physical vessel.

WITNESSING MY SUBCONSCIOUS

When I was starting to feel confident that I was growing better able to satisfy my physical needs, I turned my attention to my emotional needs. I started to explore my subconscious mind—that deep part of our psyche that stores all of our childhood conditioning, along with all our memories, beliefs, interests, and passions.

For most of my life, I always believed that I was aware of what I thought and how I felt. I was continually mulling over my thoughts and wallowing in my feelings. I had chosen to be a psychologist, after all! Over time, though, I began to realize that the thoughts and feelings I was aware of represented only a tiny fraction of what I was really thinking and feeling. Most of my mental world was underneath my conscious awareness and driven by my subconscious mind, which steers up to 95 percent of our habitual thoughts, emotions, reactions. To identify and understand my emotional needs, I’d have to learn to become conscious of my subconscious, which, as it turns out, is not an impossible feat.

Inspired by both my psychoanalytic training and what I was learning about the power of consciousness, I peered into my subconscious mind by witnessing the automatic, conditioned habits that originated there on a daily basis. I started to realize that there was a difference between developing consciousness, or becoming aware of my thoughts and feelings, and staying caught in an endless loop of overanalyzing, overthinking, and worrying, which I had been doing for decades. Being conscious simply means noticing or witnessing, not thinking. Through a practice of conscious self-witnessing, or being a neutral observer of my mind, I began to see myself as separate from the habitual thoughts that had consumed my being for years on end, along with all of the feelings and behaviors that often accompanied them. Quite quickly, I discovered that the way I operated in the world—my very way of being—was based largely on old childhood wounds and learned coping strategies.

After paying more conscious attention to the way I cared for my physical being, I realized that I usually ate only when it was a traditional time for breakfast, lunch, or dinner or when others around me were eating. If I was starving and it wasn’t a standard mealtime or no one around me was eating, I wouldn’t eat, even if it meant that I’d feel off balance and agitated, at times even resentful of or upset with others for not having eaten. On other occasions, I’d rush through my meal, quickly consuming something less nutritious or nourishing. That wasn’t a conscious choice, nor was it because I couldn’t cook or provide myself with food. Instead, it was a conditioned habit I had developed in childhood after seeing and experiencing the eating habits of my family, learning that I “should” only eat at certain times or when and what others were.

As more time went on, I began to see that the rigid beliefs I had regarding my personal work ethics weren’t serving my body’s interests. When I was a child, my mom paid attention to me most consistently when I was achieving—when I got all A’s in school or won a softball game as the team’s star pitcher. Given the consistent validation I received for making these achievements, I learned to be an Overachiever, one of seven inner child archetypes (which we’ll talk more about in chapter 4) you may be familiar with if you read How to Do the Work. An Overachiever learns to perform to gain attention, connection, and love, believing that they are valued or loved by others only when they’re winning, succeeding, or otherwise meeting, or surpassing, expectations.

Being an Overachiever, I struggled to allow myself to take a break or have unstructured time to play unless those around me were also taking a break or playing. It didn’t matter how long or intensely I had worked, what I had accomplished, whether I had the attentional resources to keep working, or how desperately I wanted or needed a break. When working, I rarely allowed myself to make mistakes, crossing out entries or starting new pages in my notebook or journal to avoid being reminded of my past imperfections. Now, even where I find myself today, having written three books, I continue to find myself endlessly striving for “perfection” as I catch myself critiquing and meticulously editing my work right up until my last possible deadline.

The more I witnessed my habits, the more I realized how regularly I looked outside myself and to others for answers, filtering what I thought, felt, and did through the perception of what other people might think about or want from me. That wasn’t my intent, nor was it my fault; worrying what others thought of me and putting their needs before my own were learned coping strategies that I had developed as a child to protect myself from feeling overlooked, unconsidered, and hurt by those closest to me. I started to clearly see that my conditioning wasn’t serving my best interests or helping my relationships. By basing most of my choices on what I imagined were others’ wants and impressions of me, I was not only ignoring my own needs but also not showing up in support of others as I had long believed I was doing. In reality, I was always trying to manage others’ perceptions of me. But if I didn’t feel worthy enough to take up space in the world, how could I continue to expect others to support me or my Self-expression?

As I learned to become more aware of my subconscious, I gradually changed the conditioned habits that didn’t serve my best interests. While creating new habits isn’t an easy process for anyone, I benefited from pausing several times throughout the day to consciously check in with myself and witness the different thoughts, feelings, and behaviors I could become aware of in that moment. Those check-ins didn’t take more than a minute, but they gave me the opportunity to decide whether I wanted to keep thinking, feeling, and acting in the same way—or whether I wanted to use that moment as an opportunity to create a new way of being. And if I noticed I was waiting for others to inspire me to move my body, I could make the conscious choice to listen to my own needs and do something active for myself instead. Or if I was relying on others to decide what we’d eat for a particular meal, I could check in with my body to see if there was any food that I felt would best nourish me.

RECONNECTING WITH MY SOUL

Staying committed to caring for my physical and emotional needs each day opened up a whole new world for me. Instead of looking outward to others for answers, I realized that I could look inward and trust myself more than I could any external source. I uncovered a place of intuition deep inside me—an internal compass that I could rely on to determine what served my best interests and the best interests of my relationships.

Accessing this inner guidance helped me identify what I really needed, wanted, and believed. It enabled me to reconnect with my authentic Self or soul, a part of me that didn’t just live inside me but created an outward vibrational energy that interacted with the whole world around me.

Just as we all have physical and emotional needs, our soul has spiritual needs. Our spiritual needs include:

To better meet my spiritual needs, I spent more and more time looking inward, creating moments to check in and reconnect with myself. I began to set aside moments throughout the day to sign off social media and work through the discomfort of learning how to embrace free, unstructured time to relax and be with myself without distractions. Over time, I started to spend longer periods of time with myself, taking myself on small dates and exploring different activities I liked to do just for me, like discovering new foods, exploring new destinations, and being in nature.

A ROAD MAP TO RECONNECTING WITH YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF

Your journey back to your authentic Self will look different from mine. You experienced your own unique childhood conditioning and developed specific coping strategies as a result, which have been shaped by the events and relationships you’ve had since you were young. You have your own distinct vibrational energy that interacts with the world around you, creating an essence—your soul—that is unique to you.

Though your healing journey will be one of a kind, the stops you will make on your journey will be the same as mine and those of everyone else reading this book. Because we’re all human, we all have the same basic universal needs. And we all have to meet these needs in the same order, addressing each sequentially.

  1. We can learn to listen to our body and meet our physical needs.
  2. We can learn to become consciously aware of our conditioned or habitual thoughts, emotions, and reactions so we can make new decisions that will better serve our authentic Self.
  3. Finally, we can locate and learn to trust our intuition, reconnect with our soul, and manifest our unique essence or energy in the world.

FULFILLING YOUR AUTHENTIC NEEDS

Why does the sequence of your healing journey matter so much? Because we can’t truly heal our relationships and evolve as individual beings until our body feels both physically and emotionally safe. If you’re chronically dehydrated, sleep deprived, malnourished, or have other unmet physical needs, you won’t have the energy or ability to work on yourself or your relationships. If you don’t feel safe and secure enough to express your emotions, you won’t be able to authentically connect with others. If you can’t authentically connect with others, you won’t be able to easefully be yourself, freely experience joyful play, tap into your inherent creativity, find your purpose, or feel truly fulfilled.

What I’m referring to is our hierarchy of needs, a concept first introduced in 1943 by the psychologist Dr. Abraham Maslow, which helps us understand human motivation. Though Maslow’s hierarchy included five tiers of needs—physiological (physical), safety (personal, health, job security), love and belonging (friends, family, intimacy), esteem (self-respect, status), and what he called “self-actualization” (achieving our full potential)—I’ve simplified it to three foundational layers in what I call the “authentic needs pyramid,” which you may remember if you read my workbook, How to Meet Your Self.

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