If you’ve spent years at war with your body; muting its signals, overriding its needs, living outside of it entirely… this conversation is for you.

There’s a moment so many women reach where they realize they’ve been living outside their body for years.

The signals get muted – hunger, pleasure, intuition, desire. We learn to override them so effectively that we forget they were ever there. And then one day we look down and realize we’ve been a stranger to ourselves for longer than we can remember.

I’ve been there.

When Your Body Carries Everyone Else

I’ve been in relationships where my body was inflamed because I was neglecting myself. Where I acted like my partner’s needs were more important than mine. Where I was in this people pleasing pattern that, when I traced it back, led straight to childhood – wanting my dad’s attention, wanting his love.

It was like I knew something was wrong.. but I wasn’t allowing myself to know.

That dissonance lives in the body. It creates inflammation. It creates weight. It creates this dense heaviness that makes it hard to move, hard to feel, hard to be free.

An Eye Opening Conversation

This week I sat down with Krista Williams – co-host of the Almost 30 Podcast and creator of the Metamorphosis program – and we went deep into the territory of body, codependency, and what it actually takes to come home to yourself.

Krista has been one of the most vulnerably honest voices I’ve followed for years. She’s shared her journey through disordered eating, leaving her marriage, healing sexual trauma, and rebuilding her relationship with her body from the ground up.

What struck me most in our conversation was how clearly she named something I think so many of us carry silently:

“I thought I was going to hate my body my whole life. I literally remember being like, I’m going to die like this – counting calories on my deathbed. And then I surrendered.”

That surrender is what changes everything.

The Weight We Carry Isn’t Always Physical

One of the things Krista spoke about that really landed for me was how codependency keeps us living outside ourselves.

She shared that when she was in her marriage, she was constantly in her ex-husband’s experience instead of her own. She wasn’t connected to her body – she was using food to ground back in, to remind herself she existed at all.

“Where I wasn’t getting sweetness and tenderness in my relationship, I was looking for it in food – stuffing down my truth, my voice, my grief.”

I felt that in my bones.

I remember my own version of this. My body holding everybody else. Deprogramming patterns of people pleasing and codependency being huge components of actually releasing the inflammation and the weight I was carrying.

It was literally everybody else living inside my body.

Feeling Your Feelings Is the Doorway

Something Krista said that I keep coming back to is this:

“Feeling your feelings is the first level of shedding your own energetic weight – because you’re finally being in authentic relationship with yourself.”

So many women are holding grief, sadness, and disappointment they’ve had to hide because they feel like no one can hold them. And the release doesn’t come from another diet or protocol. It comes from finally letting yourself feel what you’ve been stuffing down.

For Krista, that meant doing a five-day darkness retreat where she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face – and making a commitment that anytime a feeling arose, she would let it move.

For me, it meant moving to Sedona for nine months and stopping everything to work on myself. I remember watching people ecstatic dance on Cathedral Rock and crying because I couldn’t move that freely. My body was so dense.

But layer by layer, feeling by feeling, something started to shift.

What Liberation Actually Looks Like

When I asked Krista what body liberation actually means, she said something that struck a deep chord…

She said liberation isn’t about eating whatever you want or throwing out all structure. It’s about creating your own relationship with your body – beyond your mother’s beliefs, your father’s expectations, society’s programming, religion’s shame.

“This body is where I belong. This body is my vessel for divinity and how I get to experience my soul in this lifetime.”

I loved that.

Because for so long, I think many of us have been trying to earn the right to live in our bodies. Trying to make them acceptable enough, small enough, controlled enough to finally deserve peace.

But the peace comes first. The surrender comes first. And then the body follows.

The Reclamation

Talking to Krista reminded me that healing the body isn’t separate from healing the heart, the relationships, the childhood wounds, the mother stuff, the codependency patterns.

It’s all connected.

And the reclamation of autonomy – the willingness to claim what you know is right for your body without needing to justify it, without holding other people’s expectations – that’s the path.

That’s the healing.

If you’ve been at war with your body, if you’ve been living outside yourself, if you’ve been stuffing down your truth to keep the peace.. this one is for you.

Click below to listen to this powerful episode!

Xoxo, Lauren

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