Naturally High

What if healing isn’t something you can think your way through, but something your body has to experience? In this episode of the AWAKEN series, Jeanne explores E for Embodied Healing and why insight and self-awareness, while essential, are not enough to create lasting transformation. We can understand our patterns, know exactly what we “should” be doing, and still find ourselves repeating the same behaviours. That’s because the gap between knowing and doing doesn’t just live in the intellect; it lives in the nervous system.

Jeanne explores the connection between physiology and psychology, including how the body can hold onto patterns of stress, threat, and past experiences long after the conscious mind understands what happened. She also looks at the heart-brain connection, the vagus nerve, nervous system regulation, and why learning to listen to the body can help expand our capacity for emotional regulation, connection, and recovery.

Through simple embodiment practices—including breathwork, humming, movement, grounding, and nervous system awareness—Jeanne shares how we can begin shifting from survival and constriction toward greater safety and regulation. Healing becomes less about collecting more information and more about creating a daily practice of noticing, feeling, and responding to what is alive within us.


Key Moments:
[00:00:06] Revisiting the AWAKEN framework and introducing E for Embodied Healing
[00:01:49] Why insight isn’t enough: understanding how our experiences live in the body
[00:03:22] The knowing-doing gap and why the nervous system doesn’t respond to logic alone
[00:04:51] Why we can’t outrun ourselves and why understanding a pattern doesn’t always change it
[00:06:33] The heart-brain connection, the vagus nerve, and bottom-up communication
[00:08:16] Somatic healing, nervous system regulation, and creating greater capacity for recovery
[00:09:45] Practical embodiment tools: breathwork, humming, singing, movement, shaking, and grounding
[00:11:34] A simple breathing practice and why extending the exhale can support regulation
[00:13:13] How old identities live in the body and using “floor practices” to support change
[00:14:40] Making embodiment part of your daily emotional and spiritual hygiene
[00:16:10] Becoming your future self through the practices you embody today


Resources discussed in this episode:
  • Somatic Experiencing
  • Safe and Sound Protocol
  • Breathwork and vagal toning practices
  • Naturally High Exercises

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Contact Jeanne Foot | The Recovery Concierge: 

Creators and Guests

Host
Jeanne Foot

What is Naturally High?

On Naturally High you’ll receive transformational tools and hear inspirational stories that will guide you into holistically healing trauma in every corner of your life. You deserve to invoke your inner healer. I'm so glad you're here!

Jeanne: [00:00:06] Welcome back to another episode of Naturally High. As always, I'm thrilled to be here with you today. And we're still on the AWAKEN series, and we've been exploring this since the beginning with a different letter, which is part of the acronym AWAKEN. And you already know we're building something together, a real roadmap, plus a board-accredited process for what it takes to heal from being human and all our messiness and humanity. So before we land on the E and E stands for embodied healing, a quick recap for those of you who are just dropping in, or for maybe those of you who are even from the beginning, just to gently refresh your memory, A is for awakening. We have to awaken to consciousness, and without consciousness there can't be any change. And then there's W for worthiness. And in worthiness is how we determine our worth is usually through our own thought and belief system, and it's about reclaiming yourself and the stories that hold us back. The second A in the acronym is for affirmation. Without affirm in our lived experience, we can't change what hasn't been acknowledged, what we haven't given life to. And that is an important part of healing is to be emotionally validated for your own lived experience, so that your nervous system can stop bracing itself for the next shoe to drop impact and begin to truly heal. Now K is for knowledge, and we discuss the knowing-doing gap, and I encourage you to go back and listen as all of these hold beautiful nuggets of wisdom that really can quantum leap your life.

Jeanne: [00:01:49] It's not that there's something so revolutionary there. There's small nuggets of wisdom that if you truly implemented what's being suggested, they can be life-altering. And so today we're going to explore how important embodied healing is and why. And so here's where I want to start. We talked a lot about in this series about awaken the mind, becoming conscious, or what are the patterns that are running us and the subconscious stories, the beliefs we choose, whether they were handed down to us or not, but how we've adapted to these beliefs. But here's the truth. I've learned in a lot of years of doing this work, both in my own recovery and sitting across from clients. You cannot think your way out of healing that lives deep inside your tissues. Your issues are in the tissues. And this is an old saying, and there's a reason they say this, the issues in the tissues is a concept based on how the body holds cellular memory of the experience that you felt. So, for example, when we have been activated or were traumatized, or a sudden grief or something important that is unsafe to us is presented. It may be activated through present-day stimuli, but the body hangs on to that cellular memory. The sensations of. And that is what dictates our behavior.

Jeanne: [00:03:22] So insight is not enough. And we know this. There's a gap between knowing and doing. There's a gap between when I always. You hear me say this I'm not short on information. None of us are. But we're short on implementing what we know. So why? Physiology is our psychology and our psychology is our physiology. And we have to start looking at this as one whole human ecosystem instead of these separate parts between mind and body. And this is something that I talk about often. So it's not new, but I want to start with a reframe that we've been taught about our physiology and our psychology. We've been taught by culture that traditional talk therapy, even well meaning recovery programs, that if we just understood ourselves better, if we had the insight, the change will follow as if it's logical. We're trying to apply logic to something that is deeply ingrained in our subconscious and emotional being, and insight matters. I'm not dismissing it at all, but I call this the knowing-doing gap, the space between knowing exactly what we should be doing and I say should lightly quote unquote, and what we are able to do. That gap doesn't live in your intellect. It lives in your nervous system, and your body doesn't respond to logic. It responds to threat state and how you feel. Until we address the state the body is in, the mind will keep looping the same stories.

Jeanne: [00:04:51] No matter how many books we read or podcasts we listen to, or courses we take, or geographical cures, or all the things that we think will give us a fresh start, make us feel better. We're going to be left with ourselves. And ourselves is we are the common denominator in our life. And that's one of my other sayings that we try to outperform ourself. Outrun ourselves. There's no way but through. And so that is being with ourselves, being able to tolerate discomfort as well. And I sat with clients who could recite every reason the addiction no longer serve them. Brilliant, insightful, self-aware people, self-actualized people, and yet still find themselves back in the same patterns not because they didn't understand, but because understanding was never going to be the thing that changed their physiology. So knowledge alone is not enough. So let's go a layer deeper into the heart brain connection, and I want to share something with you that changed how I think about the phrase follow your heart. Your heart isn't just a pump. Your heart has its own nervous system. About 40,000 neurons, sometimes called sensory neurites embedded right in the heart tissue. Scientists actually call this heart a little brain. It's a real functioning nervous system that can sense, process, and even remember independent of your brain. But here's what this little brain is doing. Every single moment, it's sensing. It's picking up all kinds of information stimuli, whether it's a stretch, pain pressure, chemical shifts, hormonal shifts, electrical activity happening inside the heart.

Jeanne: [00:06:33] It's processing locally, making real-time micro adjustments to your heart rate and rhythm without waiting for a command from your brain. And remarkably, new research just this year found that the heart has different populations of neurons for different kind of jobs, some that keep your baseline rhythm steady, others that specifically switch on to protect your heart during acute stress. When that stress protective system falters, the whole heart can struggle to function. You only have to think of real life situations like heartbreak to know how vulnerable people are at certain times. But here's a little piece that I think matters most for all of us in the work of embodied healing. Your heart just doesn't receive instructions from your brain. It talks back. A lot in fact. In fact, the vagus nerve, the great communication highway between your heart, your gut, and your brain is about 80% afferent. This means the heart is sending far more signals to the brain than the brain is sending down to the heart. So a lot of people think intelligence is top down, and we now know that the intelligence is bottom up, is embodied in the body. Then there's a sensation that often most people don't recognize. And then the thought process comes following. So when we say, listen to your heart, it's not poetry. It's not something that feels like fluff. It's Physiology. And that's why heart rate variability, vagal tone matters so much in nervous system regulation work, which, as many of you know, is deeply tied to my training in somatic experiencing.

Jeanne: [00:08:16] Somatic experience is a whole other world. It means using the body's intelligence to heal and feel. And one of the protocols I use is called the Safe and Sound Protocol. And it is one of many, many tools, but it is working directly with the vagus nerve through earphones and music, which can actually have a tremendous impact on priming your body for safety before you even start doing deeper work. So when your brain and heart access a coherent and they're in harmony, there's rhythm and regulation there, and your capacity for emotional regulation, connection and recovery has an expansion. And when it's not, you're operating from a body and in survival mode constriction, and no amount of willpower can override that. So what do you do with this information? This is where somatic and embodiment tools come in. And I want to be clear, these are not extra nice to have kind of things. They are not add ons to real recovery work. They are infrastructure. They're the scaffolding which is necessary for us to build upon emotionally. Now, a few tools I use in my own life and with my clients are breathwork specifically. There's so many types of breathwork, and breath has the power to change our physiology as well, not just our psychology, but it does change both.

Jeanne: [00:09:45] You know, I believe that's one of the reasons why smokers enjoy smoking, because smoking involves taking deep inhalation. So when somebody takes a drag or a puff of a cigarette, it used to be an Ex-smoker a hundred years ago. That's what he was doing. That's why anxious people smoke not only. But that's a good reason why. So breathwork is powerful, and it also activates the vagus nerve and shifts out any sympathetic overdrive. So when the body is dysregulated and you take that deep breath and you inhale like now and you exhale fully. Even deeper, what happens is it actually brings the system from a stressful state into a more coherent state. Now there's all sorts of vagal toning practices. One of them has been known to be very popular is humming. And we've spoken about this before, gargling, cold exposure, all simple physiological levers. Singing is another one. Shaking, walking, dancing, letting the body discharge stored activation of tension and stress that has been built up in the cellular memory. We can also look at grounding techniques and how do we orientate ourselves when we're feeling overwhelmed. How do we come back to center to come back to our center of gravity? And we can literally do that by noticing things, by smelling things, by touching things, letting your system know I'm here. I'm safe in the here and now. Now we can try to do some breathwork, but I want to mention if you're driving, obviously, please don't do this with your eyes shut.

Jeanne: [00:11:34] But what is most important about breathwork is the fact that the exhale must be longer than inhale. And I don't think most people know that you can do like four breath box breathing. And really it's in for four. Hold for four, out for four, don't breathe for four. But the real excretion of toxins and stress comes when we exhale fully. And if you think about it, it's actually harder to exhale fully than it is to inhale fully. Let's try this one for a second. I want you to breathe in to the count of six. Hold for one and exhale fully for the count of eight. I still have trouble exhaling fully sometimes, especially when I'm tired. So if you find that your exhale is not as solid as your inhale, practice that and just notice what you notice because you are your own best science experiment. You will be the beneficiary of these changes. You will see what's going on. You will be the one to witness it. Here's where this connects back to the bigger awakening framework. We've talked about worthiness and identity, and about how our old identity has to be released in order for a new one to take root. So we adopt these personas en masse from early childhood as part of our adaption, and we do outgrow them. The whole purpose is to outgrow them. If we're not outgrowing them, we're kind of stuck in a place that ultimately we don't really want to be.

Jeanne: [00:13:13] And this release doesn't happen purely in a thought process. It happens in the body. And your body is literally where old identities are stored in tension patterns, in posture, in bracing ourselves, ready for the next thing to come our way, or the next thing that we don't want to come our way and the way you carry yourself. And it's also where new identities get anchored. This ties directly to what I'm calling a floor practice. Those small, protectable, small actions that keep a recovery streak alive. So when we're practicing floor exercises, I don't mean we're literally down on the floor. I mean, we're looking at what is the minimal viable thing I can do today that keeps me in the game of what I'm trying to do. Okay. That's what we're looking to do. Because once we skip a day or two, we're out. The chances of us coming back after two days of missing something is very low. So we want to protect this. And the most powerful floors you can build is not asking yourself to believe something new, is asking you to feel something new in your body. Just like we would do a mindful meditation practice and cultivate the mind and prime the mind for the day ahead. We want to do the same with our body. We want to start to attune ourselves as what's alive for me today.

Jeanne: [00:14:40] What am I feeling? What does my body tell me is it heavy? Is it tight? Is it stressful? I don't know about you guys, but every day I wake up and it's something different. You know, whether it's tension, whether it's pain, whether it's stuckness, whatever. But, you know, that's why I do what I do. Because I do want to outperform myself in a healthy way. So here's what I want you to walk away with today. Healing is not just about something you understand. It's something you practice day in, day out, daily. It's like you floss your teeth. You brush your teeth. You wash your face. It's part of our spiritual and emotional hygiene. And that's something that we want to learn to expand on. It's not a nice to have. It's a must have. It's something that we need to do to cultivate our true essence of who we are and who we're becoming. And if you can just take one simple tool and incorporate it into your practice of your daily practice, which I hope that most people have some sort of morning ritual, whether it's a meditation, whether it's a reading, whether it's a stretch, whether it's breathwork, whatever it may be, that allows you to attune yourself and check in with yourself before the day starts. It may be simple breathwork, it may be humming. And I want you to notice what shifts, not what you think about it, but what you feel.

Jeanne: [00:16:10] And as you notice, recognize that you are the beneficiary. You are creating your new self in this very moment. Your future self. Now. Our future self doesn't arrive one day. It comes from the daily habits that we do today in our present moment. And that's how we become the new reiteration evolution of our own selves. So next time when we explore the last letter on the awakening series, we're going to move into the letter N for next level. You. And this is where we start to create the new identity of who we want to be, not who we think we're going to be, but who we really want to be, which is part of our overall lifestyle redesign. So until next time, stay embodied, stay awakened, and stay naturally high.

Jeanne: [00:17:09] Thank you for joining me for this episode of Naturally High. If this conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or reach out to me through the links in the show notes. Together, we're changing the way the world approaches mental health, addiction, and trauma. Remember to like, subscribe and leave a rating for Naturally High on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen so you never miss an episode. For more inspiration and resources, follow me on Instagram at therecovery_concierge or visit therecoveryconcierge.com. Stay in power, keep rising, and I'll see you in the next episode.