“We are creators, but we cannot be creators when we’re living in a state of survival. It’s a non-starter. So everything, every affirmation you wanna do, every manifestation program you wanna take, every energy healing thing you wanna be present for- if your inner environment is in a state of survival everything else will elude you because you cannot be the creator when you’re in survival. And the way out of survival is through regulation.” -Tracy Litt, Founder of The Litt Factor, Best Selling Author and Neuro Somatic Intelligence Certified Practitioner 

Ever wish you didn’t have a body?

Do you live mostly in your head unaware of your body?

Are you afraid that expressing your emotions will open a Pandora’s box that will never close? 

Do you know what it means to be embodied?

We are having a LITT and passionate discussion about Embodiment and Emotions with Tracey Litt on this week’s episode. This is an exhilarating conversation that will give you chills and get you fired-up to become embodied and express your emotions. 

We are sharing intimate stories of how each of us moved out of dissociation and became embodied using Neuro Somatic Intelligence tools that hopefully will inspire and encourage you. You’ll hear our different takes on the definition of embodiment and come to understand that emotional expression is “the gateway to every benefit”, as Tracy says.

When we’re stuck in complex trauma embodiment may seem out of reach, but there’s hope in neuroscience. Elisabeth explains how daily nervous system training and regulation with NSI tools helps us come out of ‘survival brain’ and into higher order thinking systems and embodiment. 

“Litt-Up” Highlights:

• Jennifer reveals the simple and powerful NSI tool she relies on daily to deepen embodiment

• Jennifer and Tracy share profound thoughts on the healing space of a bathtub

• Why slowing down is crucial to becoming embodied

• Elisabeth talks about the challenges women face in becoming embodied because of diet culture and dissociation

• Tracy reveals why there’s so much resistance and fear to emotional expression and she’ll get you pumped up to start moving those emotions through your body

• Jennifer gives a unique and valuable metaphor about emotional drainage 

• How Tracy is using NSI in her business

We can’t wait to hear what you think of this episode! 

Listen to more episodes of Trauma Rewired HERE


TRANSCRIPT

Jennifer: Embodiment is something that, until I was doing it and practicing it, wasn’t something that I really understood. I could cognitively make sense of the concept, but it didn’t really hold true as a foundational experience in my body until NSI and really being the safe container and then that safe container holding the presence of me.

Elisabeth: 100% same. I could tell you all about embodiment, which is just really funny because it was all coming from my head and not from my body. How embodied do you really feel today? And maybe let’s all just do a quick check-in and see how much do we really feel into our bodies right now going into this recording?

Maybe those of you listening check in and see- how embodied do you feel as you’re listening to this podcast?

Jennifer: So how would you rate your embodiment as an NSI practitioner?

Elisabeth: Yeah, I would say, honestly, when we first started this recording, I wasn’t there yet. And then as you started talking and we took a little pause to drop from our head down into our body, I started to feel myself being supported by my chair. I felt into my belly. I felt my breath. I still at this moment in my life have to make a conscious effort to stop and come back to my body, especially as I’m doing things like this, like a podcast recording.

Jennifer: Honestly, our connection helps draw me into this moment together, our nervous systems connecting.

Elisabeth: That’s beautiful. It makes me really happy to hear. Welcome to Trauma Rewired, you guys, the podcast that teaches you about how trauma lives in the body and what you can do to heal. I’m Elisabeth Kristof, founder of Brain-Based Wellness and the Neuro Somatic Intelligence Coaching Certification.

Jennifer: And I’m Jennifer Wallace, a Neuros Somatic Women’s Embodiment Guide. Thank you so much for joining us today. Having Neuro Somatic Intelligence means that we understand that everything we do impacts our nervous system. If we want to experience new outputs in any area of life, including emotionally, we have to know how to work with the nervous system.

Neuro Somatic Intelligence training brings together evidence-based psychology and neuroscience to objectively measure and transform the integration interpretation of sensory input that influences mood, mindset, emotions, reactivity and biases to create outputs that transform thoughts, beliefs and actions for enhanced leadership, innovation, inclusivity, health, profit, and altruism.

We’re now enrolling for the fall cohort of NSI. Please join us at neurosomaticintelligence.com to learn more and the link is in the show notes. Please enjoy this conversation with Tracy Litt of The Litt Factor. 

Elisabeth: Today we are going to be looking at embodiment through a Neuro Somatic Intelligence framework. So what does that really mean? What does it mean for the health of our nervous system? And how does the health of our nervous system impact our ability to be embodied and to stay embodied in a relational context like: when we’re around other people, when we’re experiencing intimacy, how does the health of our nervous system and training our nervous system daily make it possible to stay embodied for all of those different relational experiences?

Elisabeth: How do our relationships change through that experience? And we’re joined today with Tracy Litt, who is a bestselling author and a speaker. She is the founder of The Litt Factor, and she’s also a Neuro Somatic Intelligence Certified Practitioner who was in our ‘22 cohort of NSI and is now using Neuro Somatic tools to help her population at the Litt Factor.

She’s all kinds of amazing, doing incredible work in the world. So we’re really excited to have her here with us today. 

Tracy: Thank you, thank you, thank you. I am overjoyed to be with you.

Elisabeth: So do you guys wanna start just sharing a little bit about what embodiment means to each of us?

Tracy I love that. So embodiment, the first piece of it is to be in your body. We can’t achieve embodiment with any dissociation to our body, which we’ll come back to, cause that’s a big part of it. And it’s our ability to fully be and become the entirety of what it is that we are embodying in our actions, our behaviors, our emotional states of being, our movement. It to me is like playing a profound character in a movie and you watch someone and you’re like, wait a second- you forget everything about who they might be in real life and any other roles that they’ve played, but they are so embodied- mind, spirit, emotional behavior, action. That is who they are. And to me, that in its simplest form is what embodiment is.

Jennifer: Yeah, I definitely agree totally with exactly what Tracy just described. Then it’s this fully lived experience and the internal landscape to handle the fully lived experience as an emotional piece, as a spiritual piece- to be fully attuned into the world and really into yourself as well.

Really, it’s like the things that you’ve done every day for years, for your whole life, everything is new. It becomes a whole new experience. When you get onto the path of embodiment, it’s like, ‘oh, I’m here now and I don’t know if I really like this very much, or, wow, this is amazing and I really love this I wanna explore more’. It puts you on a new path of real discovery with yourself again when you reconnect from like you brought up dissociation, like from all that chronic dissociation now you get to be and do and radiate, pulse at a new place.

Tracy: Yeah.

Elisabeth: Yeah, absolutely. I think both of you mentioned dissociation. And I think for me, as someone who has early childhood sexual abuse, I left my body a long time ago. And that felt much, much better and really through a lot. I didn’t even want to have a body at all. Period. Full stop. It wasn’t for a long time into my neuro training that it started to become safe to feel sensations again. And when I think of not being embodied, most of my life was really spent in my head overly intellectualizing everything, relying on my intellect to get me through every situation. Knowing things, understanding them up here in my frontal lobe, but not having any felt sense or ability to really experience whatever it was that I understood intellectually. 

So I went through the world experiencing it in my head and not experiencing any of the feeling of it in my body. So embodiment for me is the opposite of that- it’s being able to start to feel what’s going on in my body and just like Jennifer says, to know so maybe I don’t like it. Maybe I don’t like what I’m experiencing, or maybe I do or whatever it is I’m able to know, I’m able to feel what it is in my body. 

Melanie Weller recently was talking about being Present is when our internal data matches up with our external data, meaning the inputs coming in from the outside world match up with the felt sense experience inside and we’re interpreting the right amount of threat or not threat, safety or connection to whatever’s actually going on around us.

And those things start to sync up and we experience the external world and the internal world simultaneously and appropriately. And that to me seems like a really strong foundation for embodiment.

Tracy: I love that because the Present moment is all we have. To connect that to embodiment is to recognize that the present moment opens up to everything else because you’re not then reliving your past and you’re not creating hypotheses about the future- all things taking you away.

And you’re in that Present moment and what you’re describing, which is so part of this new world and part of everything we’re doing, our society bets on us staying neck-uppers. That’s what we call in our world. You know it, you’re cognitively like ‘I hear you that makes sense, but I don’t feel it in my body.’

That’s such a common thing that I hear from women in our space. When they first start, they’re like ‘I know it, but I don’t know it. My body’s not congruent with what I think I understand cognitively.’ And we’re not changing anything if we’re not embodied, because it stays at the level of conscious mind, which is beautiful. It’s simply incomplete when we look at the whole system and the science of what it takes to change.

Jennifer: Tracy just said, ‘there’s no change without Presence’ and with our tools we’re creating, little by little, this practice. Then we have these measurable experiences that put us out into the world. And we start dosing ourselves- and the joy and in the comforts of life. Well that’s been my experience. Like dip a toe in, pull it back. I don’t know if this is safe. I don’t know how much joy I can tolerate now.

And it’s this understanding that my nervous system has gifted me a deep Presence within myself and in the world around me. It’s a really grounded energy. And for me, I spend a lot of time with sensory stimulus,  just basic sensory stimulus, which isn’t basic at all- actually, it’s quite powerful. 

I think sensory stimulus is such a big, important piece of coming home and being able to be in your body because over the years there’s been parts that I have denied, turned away from, been abusive to. And like Elisabeth said, she didn’t want to have a body. There were times I didn’t want to have a body and times I didn’t even know I had a body. So once I started with the sensory stimulus and touching my body, getting in touch with it, apologizing to it even sometimes. And bringing it into my grief practice, that we talk about a lot on here, then it was like, ‘Wow, okay. Here I come, like I can feel it’. Then you just get further along and further along and before you know it you’re having really embodied experiences when you know in reflection it was  a circumstance and experience that you would have normally dissociated from. 

Once again, getting back to what you said earlier, Tracy, the foundational narrative is safety. And from this place of safety, it’s incredible what I have gotten to; where I’ve gotten in life, in my personal life and my body and my home, my business and my relationships. It’s been a great change. Now through this podcast, this great change gets to move into the world.

Elisabeth: I was just gonna say, I’m so glad you brought up starting with basics, Jennifer, and that very first practice of starting to awaken through just really gentle sensory inputs that your body could handle in that minimum effective dose way.  I was gonna ask you guys, for each of you, how did you start to become embodied again? Because I think so many of our listeners are in that place where they aren’t connected and it feels scary. It feels really hard. Maybe it’s like I don’t know exactly what they’re even talking about. So what did that unfolding look like for you guys? I think it can be a blurry path to try to know how to start to get there. 

For anyone who wants to get started with some simple, basic tools just to start the process of training your nervous system and beginning to create that safety in your body, you can join Jennifer and I live on the site at rewiretrial.com. Just get a very simple morning practice to take those first little baby steps toward creating that sense of safety that all these other big things can be built on starting with that foundation of safety.

Tracy: Yeah, I think it’s a beautiful, big worthy question because, as we all know in this conversation, it’s different for each one of us because the depth of what we’ve experienced is different. We’re not all starting at the same starting point for the race, so to speak. I think it’s important that I emphasize what’s real is- we are safe.

It’s really, really important to, I believe, start with that point of decision where you recognize, like you had mentioned before Jennifer, it was something like, ‘do I wanna feel this much joy? Can I feel this?’ It’s really important to be in a higher conscious place as we’re doing this fabulous nervous system work to recognize that’s the old program that wants me to believe that.

Those are the wounds that want me to believe that that’s the trauma that wants me to believe. It’s not safe to do that. I still need to do my drills and my tools to get myself there, but it’s really important that I’m this Being that’s in charge of this whole entire system and I am the consciousness that is holding space for my body and my thoughts and my emotions and my experience and I actually do have all the power. We have to come from a place of consciousness and power when we do this. If not, the body will take over and it will take over through its conditioning of the past and the level that it was at from a nervous system imprint standpoint, as you both know. 

So for me, the first piece was recognizing how neck-upperish I was and how much I wasn’t feeling things- I was thinking I was feeling through my mind. Somebody would do something for you, let’s say, and I’d be like, ‘oh, that’s so nice’. And then I would start to notice, but I didn’t feel that in my heart, I wasn’t actually feeling the receivership of my body. It was like a nicety up in between my ears. And then that moved into me talking to my body.

That was the first thing I started to do. Breathing right away as I was breaking my addiction to making everything harder than it needed to be and hustling and things like that. For me, it was changing the rate, depth and pattern of my breath and breathing at the top of the hour, every single hour whilst talking to my body like: ‘Hi, Body. I love you, Body. Thank you, Body’. And slowly building a relationship back. That was how I started opening it.

Jennifer: Yes, me too. I think it really began with some intentional speaking to the body. Elisabeth and I often talk about a grief practice that we had in the beginning of our morning practices. We would meditate and then set up the timer for one minute in grief. I found a lot of times in that grief practice, it was really an apology to myself at some stage of life when I was so mean to my body and it was like, ‘I’m just so sorry that I spoke to you this way’. And really, I think the coming home is like you really start developing a relationship.

It’s like two things coming together until it’s one- almost, in a way. It’s like you’re in here, but there’s this sort of bit of ‘you’ve been absent for so long’ that there needs to be some conversations. So much after the tapping that we do, I will connect super deep and then I need to spend some time with myself.

I need to lay in bed, probably hold myself. Take a bath. I need to let myself know that I’m the one who’s here now to support all this big, deep healing work that we’re doing. And all the narratives from these stories that I’ve been living out for so long as they change, I’m the person I can trust.

These are beliefs that I had to rewire: I’m the person you can trust. I am worthy, I am valuable. But that was existing through so many different shades of me that it did begin with that. Then, like I said, the sensory stimulus is a huge practice for me. I might take an hour and do gua sha and I’m really visualizing my face or I might just sit out in the sun and just be like, ‘this is my left arm.’ And I might sit there with my left arm for, who knows how long. I have a daily practice of touching my body in some way.

Elisabeth: Both of you guys brought up some stuff that’s really important to me. I think as you were talking, Tracy, there was a slowing down, like the pace was going slower. And for me that was one of the things I had to do and that required some nervous system regulation- to be able to slow down and not stay in that constant going state.

But until I could start to slow down, I really couldn’t have those moments where I could just remember to breathe or feel into my body. As you were talking about too, the coming back to the breath and using the breath as an entryway to feel into the body and setting times throughout the day where I’m mindful of coming back to my breath, taking long exhales, using the sensations outside of my body first, and paying attention to how do my clothes feel on my skin? Can I feel my feet against the floor? Can I feel the chair supporting me? Then using my breath to draw me deeper in. 

Then, like Jennifer said, a lot of sensory stimulus. Sometimes for me it’s proprioceptive work like moving my joints through really specific ranges of motion, complex, non-linear movements, so that I’m remapping my body for my brain and re-educating my brain at a neuromuscular level: Where is my foot in space? Where is my hand in space? And recreating that. 

Then I spent a lot of time in the bath. I use the water and the sensation of the water to help me feel my body. There was also something really calming and soothing about that. So that was where I could begin that minimum effective dose practice of, ‘okay, I’m gonna let myself for 30 seconds drop into my body and feel my grief, or just feel the sensations for 30 seconds’. Something about being in the water made it safer for me. Then I was able to start, little by little, feeling that.

Jennifer: I have a quick little bathtub theory to share with y’all. I am someone too, that just loves the bathtub. I think the bathtub really represents the womb, honestly. That warm water, the darkness, like there’s something so healing about it because it’s like, ‘can I go back far enough to feel the comfort places?’

Elisabeth: Totally.

Tracy: Yes, we were melding because that is very similar to what I was gonna share. And adding to that, there is an innate safety that occurs that is reminiscent of the womb space. And in addition to, because I resonate with that Elisabeth, when I’m in the bath- because of the weightlessness that we’re less dense- our perception allows us to feel less dense in the bath.

And there’s that floatiness and there’s something about that that has a very positive effect on my ability to connect to my body as well. There’s something that you said that I wanna highlight because I think it deserves to be- that’s slowing down that you were speaking to, which is a requirement, party people.

You don’t speed through nervous system work. We can’t use this progressive work through the lens of everything we are trying to shift like more to-do lists and let me just execute my drills real quick and no. I wanna acknowledge that that initial step, if you will, of slowing down- it is so appropriate that it feels scary.

It’s so okay and appropriate that there’s resistance that you experience to slowing down. Because in that slowing down not only are you flying in the face of the lack and the scarcity and you know time and all that stuff, but as soon as you slow down and you start to feel your body again here comes all of the parts of yourself that you denied and all of the emotions that have been suppressed and the grief that you didn’t recognize needed to be felt.

And if I will die on the sword on anything it will be the need for us to be emotionally expressive, fully on the spectrum of emotion, from the depth of pain and rage and betrayal, and sadness to the heights of radiance and bliss and love and joy. Feeling is when we know we’re in our body.

Jennifer: The full spectrum, like you just said. And knowing that I’m here for this and I can handle it. And it is so juicy and wonderful to have a full experience and to know my boundaries change as I grow; my tolerance changes as I grow. 

To speak to the weightlessness in the bathtub. For me, when I experience that and I think about it, it has to do with body image narratives, food stuff, body image, culture. Now I’m in a body that feels very light when I’m walking around in a body that doesn’t always feel that way.

Tracy: Yeah, that definitely resonates. I’m gonna marinate with that one because that definitely resonates. I think it would resonate with most women specifically.

Jennifer: As practitioners, we know that these narratives are very layered and we want to support people coming into their body, safely, feeling their emotions safely. And supporting emotional processing that could be holding them back from being present connected in relationships and having the capacity to experience the good stuff in life. Like joy and pleasure. The next round of NSI is enrolling now at neurosomaticintelligence.com. 

Elisabeth: Yeah, I think there’s so much that happens, especially as women, to disconnect us from our bodies because not only do we have our early life experiences, whatever those may be. Then there’s also layered on top of that and for most women, at least in this particular American society, probably many other societies as well, there’s diet culture which separates you from your body hugely.

‘Don’t listen to your own internal hunger signals. Don’t think about what foods your body is actually craving. Here’s the structure that comes from outside of you that tells you what you need to eat and when and how much. And count your micros and your macros and all your things, you know?

So there’s all of that. There’s images that we’re bombarded with all the time. If we’re somebody who lives in dissociation and/or needs movement and training for self-regulation when we’re carrying all of this extra stress or we’re in a heightened sympathetic state, then it’s so easy to move into abusing our bodies with training and disconnecting from feeling our pain and just pushing beyond our limits in that way.

Then there’s all of the health consequences of constant dissociation, like Jennifer touched on, and how actually coming back into your body and being present can have real benefits for your health. As I’m working with clients and I get a lot of comments from people on social media too, that they don’t particularly want to come back into their bodies.

They don’t. It feels very scary. They feel like a lot of bad stuff is waiting there for them. Emotions feel very overwhelming and messy and not good. Tracy, I know so much of the work that you do is about the importance of emotional expression, and we talk about that in here all the time. But I’d love to hear you guys speak a little bit to why is it so important that we’re embodied? What are the upsides and why do we wanna be able to express emotions through our body?

Tracy: Wow. Okay, so can I take one step back first to address something because it’s important as you were saying that. People will post or come into your space and say, ‘but I feel afraid to do that’ or all of the reasons why you don’t want to. What I’d like to bring awareness to is: the thoughts that your mind is feeding you when you’re moving into something potentially unknown or unfamiliar are not going to ever be naturally supportive of that thing that is unknown or unfamiliar.

It’s very, very important that we take a moment to say- you are not your mind. And you must understand what that means. You are the Being that has a mind and the thoughts that your mind populates when you are not being an intentional thinker come from fear, ego, and past experience. So I wanna invite you to realize your thoughts or options and not facts, and stop believing that thinking that is interfering with your ability to come inside and do the most worthwhile work of your life.

If you continue to believe the thoughts that then thrusts you into ‘it feels not good, I don’t want to do this’, well, then we’re done. We can’t go anywhere from there. So just let’s recognize that and elevate into, ‘okay, cool, so I’m the Being with a mind and I’m gonna learn how to direct this mind to be supportive of what my potentials are.

So then going into emotional expression, emotion is energy in motion. So let’s start there, the only reason why there’s so much resistance and fear around emotional expression is because our upbringing has taught us to judge emotion. To say it is good or bad, it is right or wrong. And from that space, we will then only deem wanting to ‘feel the feelings that we perceive as feeling good’, and then we will want to suppress, repress and avoid the rest of them.

But in truth, emotion is really just energy in motion is energy, it’s energy leaving the body crying, laughing, screaming however we are letting it up and out. Allowing the energy to become energy in motion and move up and out allows for what I like to say as a clean and clear vessel. This gorgeous clean and clear vessel and the benefits of feeling your feelings and be emotionally expressive, become a stronger electromagnetic field, more potency in your frequency, your ability to actually feel- like have the felt sense when you’re laying there and you’re like, ‘I feel’. Number one- period. And I feel so good. So relaxed, so held, so spacious, so radiant. Your ability to connect to your heart, your ability to access creativity, innovation, your ability to be vulnerable and deepen the connection and your intimacy and your relationships, your intimacy with yourself.

We’re talking about more orgasms. We’re talking about being emotionally expressed allows you to have deliciously uncomfortable conversations to shift your paradigm on conflict. It’s the gateway. It’s the gateway to every benefit. It allows for any dis-ease in your body that would’ve manifested physically to dissipate and allow you to start to heal you. You literally change identities when you go from someone who is emotionally congested to someone who’s emotionally expressed.

Jennifer: You literally change your person, who you are. When we’re talking about working with the brain, we are talking about an actual literal rewiring of neural networks. You are the creator, not just of your world, but your inner world. You choose the pathways. When you can come to a place where you are regulated enough to accept that, and even back to the present moment, what can I choose right now that will shift this experience and know how much of an effect my presence has in a scene, in my environment, in a landscape? I just love what you said about emotions being the clean and clear vessel, because often when I’m working with, with clients or I’m in a consultation, I’ll say the emotional body- it’s like this drainage system in the body, and when you have all this emotional repression, it’s like you’re clogging the drains.

What’s under there? Vitality? The life that you want? The things that you dream of- the compassion, the community, the connection? Everything that you desire is underneath of this gunk that’s just been collected here for so long. We need to clear that out and to do it in a really safe way. Because I think not only have people been judged for their emotions for so long, but they’ve been shut down from them because you’re taught that maybe your emotions weren’t important or your emotions don’t matter. Then it’s just like, okay, well I’ll continue to put myself in places where my emotions don’t matter, in relationships that don’t matter. And like you said, once you start in this work and you start on this pathway, everything gets evolved into higher levels of consciousness. All your relationships, every paradigm starts to shift and you create something new for your life and your experience.

Emotional expression is so much fun. It is fun and sooo erotic in a way to feel your rage and to know that I am this, oh God, I’m this magnificent creature that handles all of this emotion. Now I’m gonna go dance and be naked and feel my body and move. And then sometimes I’m gonna lean into my grief and understand that there’s a deep well that exists within me that sometimes is going to express. And I welcome it because I know on the other side there is the purity of the joy and it’s so liberating and there’s freedom. I know that freedom now and I won’t turn away from it.

Tracy: Yes. I need to hold, love and all of that to everything you just said. Freedom. It’s so exhausting to be emotionally suppressed and repressed. It’s so draining. Like when we really look at- what are we all after? We wanna feel free, right? We deserve to feel free, be the fullest expression of who you are, be authentic, all of these things.

True, beautiful. And the way to get there is through emotional expression. And everything you were also just saying, notice what happens for you when you take judgment outta the equation. Because it’s judgment that keeps us from feeling, from diving in, from getting emotionally uncomfortable, from doing all those things.

Jennifer: From being in our bodies.

Tracy: Well, yes! It’s because judgment at its core is a self-protective mechanism. If I continue to judge myself, I’ll stay separate from myself. Therefore, everyone can stay separate from me and I’ll perceive a sense of safety. But really you’re missing out on your own life and we don’t want that for you. It’s really important to have these moments where it’s like, ‘oh’, because here’s what I have learned to be true- you can choose shallow and comfortable, or you can choose deep and uncomfortable. Whatever you want is great for you, but really understand that you’re choosing it and if you don’t decide to come down back into your body and feel and explore, etc, it will show up in something catalytic that forces you to do so. One of the requests I have to every Being in the world is- can we please just start to choose and let it be a little easier instead of waiting for that catalytic moment?

Elisabeth: Yeah, I really agree with that. These things come out one way or another. Right? And we are Beings that are meant to move emotions through our body. It’s how we are built, it’s how our bodies and our nervous system are built. The consequences can be quite detrimental. In addition to that, just like you guys were talking about, we really don’t get to live a full human experience if we don’t experience emotions. 

The interpretation part of that that you both spoke to, I think is so important to look at because one, we need to work with our nervous system on a daily basis to have the capacity to start to understand that we have a choice- if we’re driven by our survival mind, if we’re stuck in states of stress responses or trauma responses, there is no felt sense of choice. And it’s very difficult to access our higher order thinking systems that allow us to see things with altitude, to be curious and to recognize there’s some other way to go. There’s another path to take. There’s something else I could do here. So just really simple little things you can do on a regular basis to start to train your nervous system for capacity.

There’s a really important system from a Neuro Somatic perspective that allows us to have a new interpretation of our emotional experience because all emotions, they really are just sensations and we interpret what they mean. And like you were talking about Tracy, there’s so much judgment with it and we decide what emotions are bad are good.

That really lives in an area of the brain called the insular cortex. And those signals come from a part of your nervous system called your interoceptive system. And that is your vagus nerve, but there’s also some other important component parts of that, but it’s the system that brings the sensations from inside your internal felt sense of the world up into your brain then your brain interprets what it means.

That happens primarily in your insular cortex. When we are stuck in a state where we are attributing a high level of threat to those sensations, those sensations will trigger us directly into our brainstem, directly into a Fight Flight response. So I feel the sensations inside and without having a moment where that information can make it to my conscious awareness, can make it to my frontal lobe to be interpreted differently or to even become a part of my experience of reality- I immediately get thrust into a reflexive protective trauma response from feeling the sensations. 

So it’s just so, so important to start to learn some ways to work with the nervous system and to retrain that interoceptive system to interpret those signals differently and to not attribute as much threat to ‘how does it feel?’ if I feel my heart beating or the senses in my stomach or the felt sense of my hands so that we can start to take that information in and it can become a part of our reality. And we cannot be pushed into a panic, dissociative or shut down state every time we experience those sensations.

So I’d love to know, Tracy, a little bit more about your work and how you’re using the NSI tools to make that stuff possible for the people that you work with.

Tracy: So the work that we’re doing is a crossroads of neuroscience, energetics, metacognition and spirituality. So let’s just throw that all together. So it’s very much mind, body and spirit. I cannot sing the praises enough of NSI. I cannot sing the praises enough, it makes me overjoyed emotionally of each one of you as teachers inside of the program and the impact that the work is having.

So for me, my company was up and running and we were serving and things were amazing and transformations were occurring. I was working with the nervous system- not at the depths of what I then understood going through NSI, and I wanna point that out for the different levels of beautiful people that I hope come into the work.

I knew enough to be super helpful and get my clients results. What I then learned and deepened inside of NSI, opening me up to understanding the uniqueness and understanding of all of the different systems within this big, glorious system has allowed me to create, I call ’em, little prescriptions.

So if there’s 18 women in a program, right now I’m thinking of this group of women called Ascend, I can create prescriptions for each of them based on how their systems are responding and using range of motion. What it has resulted in is a faster sense of safety for them. Like really using the drills allows them, I mean for a few of them, again, depending on their imprint, like within two days they’re like, oh, oh, whoa, my ability to be visible is right there. For others, takes ’em a little bit longer, but the progress is there and their level of visibility, their level of confidence, because my population is 90% entrepreneurs, so we’re working on things like reconnecting to the body so you can become more visible, make offers, feel comfortable receiving large sums of money.

Like, that’s massive because what’s the point of getting after it and generating next level results if your nervous system cannot hold those results? So it’s kind of like the leading up to it and then once the result is attained, holding that and allowing your nervous system to feel so yummy and safe in that next level.

I look at them as rings of expansion and being able to hold that. So now you have a new homeostasis. And then you can go next- more, more, more. So, right off the bat, I mean, those have been the most incredible things. 

My husband has since been doing NSI work. He actually worked with Matt for a little while and had massive gains. He used to be, for decades of his life, super fearful of flying. I mean, we would have to be in dialogue for weeks leading up to an airplane flight. He would go to the airport and he would have cold sweats sitting at the terminal waiting to go on. The flight he just took last week- he got off the plane and called me from New Jersey and he was like, I need to tell you, I slept on the airplane. He was like, I don’t even know what’s happening to me. I was like, ‘well, you know all the things’. He is running his colored glasses and he is doing his drills and he’s present to it and he is committed. It’s committed to the work. The work doesn’t work for you. The work works when you work the work. So gains personally and professionally, it’s been amazing.

Elisabeth: That’s so incredible.

Tracy: Right.

Jennifer: Yeah. That’s really beautiful. That’s awesome. What? It’s a new life, like we just said.

Tracy: Yeah. It’s a completely new life. And you know, we deserve it. We deserve it. We deserve it. And any fears that one might be feeling- here’s what I know to be true in serving thousands of women globally. You will eventually stop crying. One of the biggest things I hear is ‘but if I start and I open Pandora’s box, like, will it ever stop?’ Oh, and this is where I need you to take you back to: you’re not your mind. ‘Oh, silly mind. I know you’re trying to protect me. You don’t want me to feel it’. I promise, I promise you at some point you will stop and then you will love it. I deserve to rage and cry and shake and feel and love, and do it with whatever intensity I desire to and to feel safe feeling my feelings until they’re done being felt. And that’s not a cognitive process. That’s a body process. And when you don’t judge it, you allow it.

Jennifer: Embodiment is truth. It is the truth of who you are. You get to be the creator of those truths, especially if you’ve been suffering from chronic dissociation for so long. Then like Elisabeth was talking about with interpreting the sensations accurately, back to that’s the truth we wanna be able to know- that we are being truthful with ourselves. When I think of my own experience in my life that was not always so truthful. Because of the dysregulation and the stories. But NSI is a total game changer- really, really is. So it was really fun to have you in that cohort.

Tracy: Thank you. Thank you. I had a blast. I wanna speak to one thing that you just said, because my body’s telling me it’s gonna resonate for anyone who is fearful or on the fence. You use the word creator, and that’s the truth of who we are. We are creators, but we cannot be creators when we’re living in a state of survival. It’s a non-starter. So everything, every affirmation you wanna do, every manifestation program you wanna take, every energy healing thing you wanna be present for- if your inner environment is in a state of survival  everything else will elude you because you cannot be the creator when you’re in survival. And the way out of survival is through regulation.

Jennifer: Mm-hmm.

Tracy: And that’s also to the point of feeling or feelings, right? Emotional expression is a natural regulator, so that’s awesome. And it’s just starting to realize too- bringing an overall elevated sense of levity to all of this is very important. It’s very important to me as a leader in consciousness. We cannot do a healing and growth journey through the lens of being fixed or broken, because it’s like trying to change while you’re in quicksand. You’re behind the eight ball.  The truth is that you’re whole, right? What the truth, with the TH, is that you are actually whole and worthy and enough simply because you’re awake, because that’s your birthright. And when you can allow yourself to come from a higher lens and say, okay, I’m choosing this beautiful journey because that’s my purpose to come within and heal what has tethered me. And look at that belief structure that is keeping me away from feeling certain feelings and reconnect to my body so that I can be alive and touch base with my life force. And feel amazing and let go of all of the conditions that I might be unaware I’m swimming in right now, because we’re all gonna get to the end. That’s the only actual right truth truth there is. And experiencing a real lived experience, not a survived experience is what you deserve. 

Elisabeth: Yeah, I think it’s a hundred percent incredibly difficult to create, at least intentionally, a life that really serves our higher purpose when we are in that survival state. 

Tracy, you just wrote a book and put it out into the world, so I’d love to know a little bit more about that too.

Tracy: Thank you. Expander for Trailblazing Women Building a New World. So it’s a small, beautiful book, 57 pages and it’s an ebook. We are disturbing it free, forever, because what’s inside is so important for all of us to awaken to and build a new world that I really just wanted it to be easy to access.

What it takes you through is understanding what a paradigm is. I break down visually and through explanation, the anatomy of a paradigm. So it really helps to understand, why do I think this way? Where did this come from and, and why do I keep subscribing to a paradigm that is detrimental for me?

So I really make that case. Then we break down seven of the most detrimental paradigms that are interfering with us taking ourselves to the next level. Not only do I shine a light on them, but I give you how to replace them. It’s important to me. If we’re not giving the how, then we’re really not helping anybody.

You can find information on Google, right? But we get to really deliver the how, which is a big part of what NSI does, which is why I’m such a believer in it. So then we introduce seven replacement paradigms that are progressive and compassionate and loving and energetically supportive. And that’s what happens in Expander.

Elisabeth: Amazing. That sounds so wonderful. I love to see all the ways that you’ve used the Neuro Somatic tools to weave the nervous system into these big, beautiful, exciting ideas. 

If you are a practitioner, therapist, a coach, and you are resonating with how impactful it can be to bring nervous system work into the work that you do with clients to create transformation at a different level, at a level of physiology from the level of the body and the nervous system then come join us. We’re enrolling now for the next cohort, you can go to neurosomaticintelligence.com, sign up for the email list, book a discovery call with me, and you can find the link to that in the show notes as well.

Tracy: I wanna just piggyback on that- Elisabeth and Jennifer don’t know that I’m gonna say this- but I cannot urge you enough to not think this went over and just jump in to the NSI certification.  I’m a licensed hypnotherapist. I am a certified professional coach. I’ve done all of the things. I was doing my work “well” and understood the nervous system, but NSI is different. It’s deeper. What you’re gonna gain- it’s a new modality, from my vantage point, inside of the conversation about the nervous system. So no matter how long you’ve been in practice, or how successful you already are, or if you’re listening to this as a beginner- this is one of those certification invitations that you don’t really contemplate.

If something resonated during the course of this conversation, or another episode you listened to- you will be doing the world and yourself a service by just simply saying yes and doing it.

Jennifer: That’s right.

Tracy: Yeah. Boom.

Jennifer: Boom.

Elisabeth: It really means the world to us and to have practitioners of your caliber in the cohorts joining us is such an honor.

Tracy: Thank you. I feel the same. We’re so lucky. We do it together. We change this world together. No one’s doing this alone.