Language Of Healing
Language Is A Portal To Embodiment.
mentioned in audio:
Free Feelings & Sensations Guide Embodied Well Memberships
I was recently talking with a client, a postmenopausal woman who’d been battling hip pain for years. The kind of pain that made her curse under her breath when getting out of bed, the kind she’d been “managing” and pushing through.
So we’re chatting after a somatic movement class, and she shared something that stopped me in my tracks.
“Buffy,” she said, “I just realized something. When you asked me to notice what felt comfortable in my hip… I had no idea. I’ve been so focused on where it hurts that I completely forgot to pay attention to what feels good.”
Then she paused, and I could see something shifting behind her eyes.
“Actually,” she continued, her voice getting quieter, “I think I do this everywhere in my life. I’m always looking for what’s wrong - in my relationships, in my body, in the world. I don’t even know how to let the good stuff in anymore.”
It’s moments like these that I live for as a practitioner.
This wasn’t just about hip pain. This was about a woman recognizing that somewhere along the way - through decades of caregiving, problem-solving, and just getting through each day - she’d trained herself to scan for problems instead of savoring what felt nourishing.
She’d forgotten how to tune into the pleasant and receive pleasure.
She’d forgotten how to let the good in.
Before I continue, I want to pause here and celebrate the profound connection this woman has made. Recognizing that we’ve been living in “problem-scanning mode” instead of “pleasure-receiving mode” is no small thing. Especially when you’ve spent decades believing that vigilance equals safety, that always being “on” means you’re being responsible.
Here’s what I know after 20+ years of this work: You are not broken. Your body is not the enemy. And that nagging pain, physical or emotional? It might just be your wisest teacher, demanding that you finally learn to listen to yourself and to allow the good in.
What this woman described next was something I see constantly with women in their pause years —what I call the “Embodied Recovery.” It’s that moment when you’re finally ready to listen to your body instead of overriding it, but you’re still speaking its old language of survival. And this is an important first step because honoring our signals for safety and survival is really the foundation for being able to grow and evolve beyond them.
Embodied Recovery:
That moment when you’re finally ready to listen to your body instead of overriding it, but you’re still speaking its old language of survival. It’s an important first step. Honoring signals for safety is the foundation for being able to grow and evolve.
What did she say?
She proceeded to catalog every position that triggered her hip pain. “When I sit like this, it hurts. When I turn this way, it flares up. When I bend forward, forget about it.” She had become an expert in her body’s complaints - which, honestly, makes perfect sense after years of trying to manage and control the pain.
So I asked her, “Does your hip always hurt?”
“Oh,” she said, genuinely surprised, “No.”
“Beautiful,” I said. “And here’s the question that’s going to change everything: What were you doing when your hip felt the most comfortable? When did your body feel most at ease?”
The silence that followed was deafening.
This scenario breaks my heart every single time. I’ve witnessed it so often that I’ve named it the “Embodied Reclamation” - that crucial moment when a woman finally stops fearing her body’s messages and starts expanding her awareness beyond just managing symptoms.
Embodied Reclamation:
that crucial moment when a woman finally stops fearing her body’s messages and starts expanding her awareness beyond just managing symptoms.
If this is where you are in your healing journey - congratulations. You’ve taken the hardest step. Now, let me help you move toward the transformation you’re craving.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: We’ve been taught that paying attention to pain keeps us safe, makes us responsible, but paying attention to pleasure makes us… what? Selfish? Indulgent? Reckless? Naive?
I call bullshit.
It’s time to reclaim your birthright to feel good in your own skin - especially during these postmenopausal years when everything feels like it’s shifting.
The Pleasure Deficit
Here’s what I see happening with so many of my clients: They can describe their discomfort in exquisite detail - every ache, every stiffness, every moment when their body “betrays” them. But ask them about those pain-free moments? Those times when movement feels fluid and easy? Suddenly they’re speechless.
Those good moments seem mysterious, accidental, completely out of their control.
Sound familiar?
When we become hyper-focused on what’s wrong, there’s this unspoken agreement to check out on what’s right. We’ve trained ourselves to be pain detectives while becoming pleasure amnesiacs.
On one hand, this makes total sense:
Pain demands attention - it’s supposed to.
Pain is your body’s emergency broadcast system saying, “Hey, something needs to change here.”
Pain has kept you safe, kept you moving, kept you ALIVE through decades of putting everyone else first.
But here’s the thing: To expand your capacity for moving through life with ease and joy, you MUST become a student of what feels good. You need to move out of a pleasure deficit and cultivate pleasure literacy — the ability to recognize, receive, and trust the goodness your body offers.
Pleasure Literacy:
the ability to recognize, receive, and trust the goodness your body offers.
You need to cultivate those moments of ease by feeding them with attention, curiosity, and, yes, language that helps you anchor these discoveries deeply in your nervous system.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not telling you to ignore your pain or pretend everything is fine when it’s not. Please gather the necessary information to communicate effectively with your healthcare providers. But for your embodied reclamation journey? For learning to trust your body again?
Please, for the love of your biology, gather as much or more data on what feels nourishing, easeful, and alive.
We need to grow the pain-free and pleasure moments by feeding them with attention, curiosity, and a refined vocabulary to help anchor our discoveries (enter the power of words).
Language As Your Portal To Embodiment
In Brené Brown’s book, Atlas of the Heart, and this quote from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein stopped me cold: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
So too might the limits of your body language be limiting your experience of embodied aliveness.
Brené goes on to say:
“Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes. When we don’t have the language to talk about what we’re experiencing, our ability to make sense of what’s happening and share it with others is severely limited.”
Read that again, slowly.
“Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness.”
Now here’s where this gets really juicy: Most of us have been operating with sensation poverty — we have maybe five words to describe how our bodies feel, and four of them are variations of “bad.”
But language doesn’t just communicate what we’re feeling - it actually shapes what we’re capable of feeling.
Think about it: If your entire vocabulary for body sensations is “tight,” “sore,” “stiff,” and “fine,” how much nuance can your nervous system actually register? How many shades of pleasure and ease are you missing because you don’t have words for them?
But when you expand your sensation vocabulary - when you can distinguish between “spacious” and “flowing,” between “warm” and “tingly,” between “grounded” and “supported” - something magical happens. Your brain begins to notice these distinctions in real time.
Your nervous system gets curious instead of just vigilant.
The Embodied Awakening
Since we’re talking about expanding awareness, I want to share something fascinating called emotional granularity - because I see this improve dramatically as women develop their pleasure literacy.
Emotional granularity is your ability to distinguish between similar emotions with precision and nuance. Instead of just feeling “bad,” you might recognize the difference between disappointed, frustrated, overwhelmed, or depleted. Instead of just “good,” you can distinguish between content, energized, peaceful, or joyful.
Research shows that people with higher emotional granularity have better mental health, stronger relationships, and more effective coping strategies. They’re living in a richer emotional universe because they have the language to navigate it.
The same principle applies to your body.
When you develop somatic granularity - the ability to distinguish between subtle physical sensations - you’re not just becoming more aware. You’re expanding your capacity to feel good, to recognize what serves you, and to trust your body’s wisdom.
Your Sensation Vocabulary Expansion Practice
So here’s where we get practical, because I’m not leaving you hanging with just theory.
The next time you’re moving - whether it’s in a Somatic Insights lesson, during your morning stretch, or just getting up from a chair - I want you to get ridiculously specific about what you notice.
But here’s the key: spend at least as much time describing what feels good as what doesn’t.
Here are some sensation words to experiment with:
Instead of “tight” try: constricted, bound, gripped, compressed, held, dense
Instead of “loose” try: spacious, flowing, expansive, fluid, free, soft
Instead of “good” try: nourishing, alive, vibrant, easeful, supported, grounded
Instead of “bad” try: depleted, agitated, scattered, dense, stuck, restless
Want More Words?
I've got a handy dandy handout for you with a robust list of feeling and sensation words now.
Why This Actually Rewires Your Brain
Every time you use specific, nuanced language to describe a pleasant sensation, you’re literally strengthening the neural pathways that recognize and seek out those experiences.
This isn’t just feel-good philosophy - this is neuroplasticity in action.
Your brain is constantly rewiring itself based on what you pay attention to. When you repeatedly notice and name pleasant sensations with rich, specific language, you’re training your nervous system to become proficient in pleasure-seeking instead of stuck problem-scanning.
Here’s what happens in your brain:
Every time you say “My back feels spacious and supported” instead of just “My back doesn’t hurt,” you’re activating different neural networks. You’re lighting up the parts of your brain associated with safety, curiosity, and wellbeing rather than just the threat-detection system.
Over time, this changes your brain’s default mode. Instead of constantly scanning for what’s wrong, your nervous system starts automatically noticing what’s right. You begin to live in a world where pleasure and ease are just as real and accessible as pain and tension.
Think about it: If you spent the next month describing one pleasant sensation in detail every single day, your brain would start looking for those sensations automatically. You’d be training yourself to be a connoisseur of your own wellbeing.
This is why women who develop their pleasure literacy often say things like “I never realized how good my body could feel” or “I’m noticing things I never paid attention to before.” They’re not imagining it - they’re expanding their capacity to receive goodness.
And here’s the kicker:
This doesn’t just change how you experience your body. It changes how you experience your entire life.
Because here’s what I’ve witnessed over and over again with my clients:
When a woman learns to recognize and receive physical pleasure - the warmth of sunlight on her skin, the satisfaction of a deep breath, the ease in her hips after gentle movement - she starts recognizing and receiving pleasure everywhere.
She notices the way her morning coffee tastes instead of just drinking it on autopilot.
She feels the actual sensation of her partner’s hand on her back instead of just registering the gesture.
She starts saying yes to invitations that genuinely excite her and no to obligations that drain her.
She begins trusting her gut feelings about people and situations because she’s connected with the intelligence of her body.
Embodied Ripple Effect: when you reclaim your birthright to inhabit yourself fully, it ripples out into every area of your life.
Your relationships get more authentic.
Your boundaries get clearer.
Your intuition gets louder.
You stop living like you’re constantly braced against the next crisis and start moving through the world like someone who belongs here, who deserves to feel good, who has the right to take up space and receive joy.
This is especially profound for women in their postmenopausal years who’ve spent decades in service to everyone else. Suddenly you remember: “Oh right, I have a body. I have preferences. I have wisdom. I have the right to feel good.”
It’s not selfish. It’s revolutionary.
Your Invitation Into Embodied Aliveness
Think about, and feel into…
What would life be like if the next chapter of your life wasn’t about managing decline, but about reclaiming pleasure?
What would your life be like if instead of just getting through your days, you started savoring them?
What would life be like if your body became your greatest teacher instead of your biggest problem?
This is the work we do together in my Embodied Well Membership - not just moving your body, but remembering how to receive the wisdom you body has to offer. Not just surviving your postmenopausal years, but thriving in them with a depth of self-trust and aliveness you may have forgotten was possible.
Because you deserve to feel at home in your own skin. You deserve to trust your body’s wisdom. You deserve to age with grace, strength, and yes - pleasure.
Your body has been waiting patiently for you to remember this truth. She’s been holding space for your return.
The question isn’t whether you’re capable of this transformation - you absolutely are.
The question is: Are you ready to begin?
If you’re nodding yes, if something in your body is saying “I want this,” then come join us. Your embodied reclamation journey is waiting.
