Feeling Good in Your Body is An Act of Resistance

There’s a particular kind of disconnection that’s so normalized most people don’t even register it as disconnection. It just feels like being a person in the world. You wake up tired with a sore throat, but you push through and go to work anyway. You feel a knot in your stomach before a conversation and tell yourself you’re being dramatic. You say yes to someone even though you’re dreading the thing you’re agreeing to, and then later wonder why you feel resentful (or angry).

Over time, this becomes a way of living: existing slightly outside of yourself, relating to your body more as an object to manage than a home to inhabit.

We’re taught this, directly and indirectly. The body is framed as something unreliable—too emotional, too needy, too much. The mind becomes the authority, the thing that is most important. You learn to override hunger, fatigue, and intuition. You learn that your internal experience is inconvenient, and that your body is something to be shaped and molded into what’s acceptable for others.

And then we wonder why so many people feel anxious, burned out, or numb.

When you’re not in relationship with your body, your decision-making shifts in ways that are often subtle but cumulative. You tolerate things that don’t actually feel good. You stay in dynamics that your body is quietly resisting. You perform versions of yourself that you think other people want, rather than what’s actually aligned.

What’s striking is how often the body does try to intervene, but because we’ve been trained to interpret those signals as problems rather than information, the response is usually to push harder, fix faster, or numb out.

At a certain point, the body stops being subtle. It escalates. What we call burnout, overwhelm, or even physical illnesses like chronic pain or heart disease can be understood, at least in part, as the body insisting on a boundary that hasn’t been respected.

The way we’re taught to relate to our bodies is not separate from the way we’re taught to relate to the world. The idea that something complex, living, and responsive can be controlled, optimized, and extracted from without consequence — that’s what we’ve done to the planet. The earth extracted for resources for centuries, more rapidly in the past few decades than ever. As a consequence, planet earth has been pushing back. Fires, floods, climate patterns shifting, and ecosystems under strain. When you draw the parallel between the Western mindset of “mind over body” and the mindset that the Earth is a resource humans can dominate, we can see how the same logic of domination produces the same outcome: bodies breaking down under chronic override, and a planet destabilizing under relentless extraction. Both systems are signaling, in increasingly urgent ways, that this way of relating is unsustainable.

What would it mean to relate to your body as something intelligent rather than something to dominate? What would it look like to treat sensation—not just pain, but also pleasure—as meaningful data?

This is where the idea that “feeling good in your body is an act of resistance” starts to make more sense. In Pleasure Activism, Adrienne Maree Brown writes, “what we pay attention to grows.” If your attention has been trained toward critique, control, and correction, then that’s the relationship that gets reinforced. If, instead, you begin to pay attention to moments of ease, aliveness, and satisfaction, you start to build a different kind of relationship with your body.

Pleasure, in this sense, isn’t a selfish, frivolous thing. It is the orienting signal that tells you something about what supports you, what feels safe, or what allows you to expand rather than contract. Over time, that information changes how you make decisions. You become less willing to override yourself, not because you’re following a rule, but because the cost of doing so becomes clearer in your body.

This is also why purely cognitive insight often isn’t enough to create lasting change. Almost every client I’ve worked with can understand their patterns intellectually, is able to articulate them and even predict them, but they still find themselves repeating them. This is why somatic therapy is so powerful. Our bodies needs a different experience, not just a different cognitive explanation. Our bodies needs to feel what it’s like to move with more space, to set a boundary and remain regulated, to be seen without immediately bracing or performing.

That kind of learning doesn’t happen through thought alone. It happens through embodiment and practice, where your body is allowed to take up space and discover that nothing bad happens when it does. This is the work I do as a somatic psychologist.

Over time, this work shifts something fundamental. You don’t have to convince yourself to be more confident or more empowered. Your body has evidence that it’s possible. And from there, the changes tend to extend outward. You make different relational choices. You tolerate less misalignment. You recognize earlier when something feels off and trust yourself enough to respond.

None of this is particularly flashy, and it’s certainly not instant. But it is meaningful. Because we live in a culture that consistently rewards disconnection, where being productive often matters more than being attuned, and where appearance is often prioritized over experience. Choosing to be in your body, and to let that inform how you live, is difficult, like swimming upstream. That’s why I’m here to help.

If you’re ready to build a different relationship with your body—one rooted in trust, power, and connection—schedule an intake call with me here: