Has your relationship with your body kept you from embracing all that you are capable of?
As women, we receive the message that our bodies are shameful and even dangerous at a young age. We are taught not to trust our bodies and to tame them to others’ expectations.
In today’s episode, I share with you the name I’ve created for this experience:
The Sacred Body Wound
Almost every woman carries the Sacred Body Wound, and it impacts the way we treat ourselves and interact with the world.
Do you struggle with identifying and processing emotions and feelings?
Do you feel ashamed of your body?
Do you battle with an eating disorder or otherwise self-harm?
Do you avoid exploring your sexuality, or hyper-focus on diets and weight loss?
These are examples of the Sacred Body Wound at work, and it affects each woman differently.
Regardless of how this Sacred Body Wound manifests in your life, its primary goal is to make you forget how sacred, miraculous, and wondrous your body is.
Combatting this wound plays a vital part in our paths toward embodied healing and self-liberation. And giving a name to this wound is the first step toward winning that battle.
Join me in today’s episode to learn more about The Sacred Body Wound and how to begin to heal it in your life.
Listen to episode 354 now!
In episode 354 of the Embodied Podcast we discuss:
- [2:51] How the practice of naming can empower you in your path toward embodied healing
- [6:24] Questions that can help you identify patterns and gauge your healing progress
- [9:40] How naming our wounds can help us to remove personal identification
- [10:54] What the sacred body wound is and why it’s important to combat it
- [15:49] How we begin to experience the sacred body wound even as young girls
- [17:20] What to do now that you can name the wound that separates you from fully embracing your sacred body
Resources mentioned by Elizabeth in the episode:
- Learn more about Elizabeth’s approach to embodiment with the Embodiment Bible.
- Join Elizabeth in a Mary Magdalene Feast Day Celebration.
- Email us with questions or feedback.
- Don’t miss an episode of The Embodied Podcast.
Quotes from this Week’s Episode of the Embodied Podcast
- “Being able to respect the body and being able to regard it and revere it as the sacred vessel that it is – regardless of the shape, size, form, condition, health, ability – that’s a beautiful thing to cultivate, and we do that by combating the sacred body wound.”
How was this episode for you?
Was this episode helpful for you today? I’d love to know what quote or lesson touched your soul. Let me know in the comments below OR share the episode on Instagram, tag me your stories @elizabethdialto, or send me a DM!
About the Embodied Podcast with Elizabeth DiAlto
Since 2013 I’ve been developing a body of work that helps women embody self-love, healing, and wholeness. We do this by focusing on the four levels of consciousness – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
In practical terms, this looks like exploring tools and practices to help you tune into the deep wisdom of the body and the knowing of the heart, which I believe are gateways to our souls. Then we cultivate a new relationship with our minds that allows the mind to serve this wisdom and knowledge and soul connection, rather than override it, which is what many of us were taught.
If you’ve been doing self-help or spiritual development work for a while, these are the types of foundational things that often people overlook in pursuit of fancier concepts that often aren’t practical or sustainable. Here, we will focus on building these strong foundations so you can honestly and thoroughly embody self-love. If you’re feeling it, subscribe to the show, and leave us a review wherever you listen from. You can also keep up with show updates and community discussion on Instagram here.
Transcripts for Episode 354:
What’s up, everybody. Welcome to episode number 354 of the EMBODIED Podcast. Today, I am taking a deep dive into something I started writing about last year, but then just didn’t, didn’t go deeper anywhere other than in teacher training. This is something that I introduced to my Wild Soul Movement teachers in training early on to help them understand why we even do embodiment work, why embodiment work is so important, for women, especially, and if you’ve ever read my Embodiment Bible, which if you haven’t, you could just go to untameyourselfcom/embodiment-bible. There’s no opt-in or anything, it’s just a page on the website, and you could read through more of my approach to embodiment.
In the Embodiment Bible, there’s four embodiment concepts: softening, observing, feeling, and naming, and the purpose of naming is for tracking or mapping. Naming requires that we soften, that we are able to feel, and that we are able to observe the experience that we’re having in our bodies, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
One of the things that I love about embodiment so much is if you’re really committed to healing, and growth, and transformation, it’s just one of the most efficient tools and practices you could use, because you start to notice patterns and consistencies, like when you feel a certain way around certain people or in certain environments, that’s information for you, that’s data, that lets you know whether it’s good, or bad, or confused, or stuck, or uneasy. You can start to track and notice patterns; when I go to this type of event this is how I feel, or when I hang out with this group of people, this is usually how I feel, or when I spend time with this friend, I’m usually excited beforehand, but I feel drained after. It just gives you, rather than mentally analyzing everything, just some data of the wisdom of the body, the felt experience, how are you responding to people energetically, emotionally, what’s happening in your nervous system, again, from being in certain environments or being around certain people.
And then when it comes to healing from certain and specific things, naming can really come in handy. So for example, when we are able to have terms like codependency, or healing from the mother wounds, or knowing that we need to work on boundaries, then we’re able to identify when that is what’s coming up so we can apply the appropriate tools and practices or things that we’ve learned to those things.
So something that I really wanted to put a name on for a long time is this overarching wound, really. It’s a core wound for most women that we deal with regarding our bodies, because when it comes to healing growth, and transformation, if you could get to the root of something, you’re much more likely to heal it as fully as possible, to transform it, to transmute, to grow out of it, if you know what it is, and you could also be tracking how you experience it differently as you do whatever work you’re doing on it.
So I named something the sacred body wound, and I’m going to describe that to you in a moment, but I wanted to finish just making my little stump speech about how important it is to name things sometimes. The cool thing about naming is that it doesn’t have to abide by any convention other than that you know what you mean when you name things. So naming is simply describing what you feel, where you feel it, and getting specific about the sensation, the state, and any emotional content. So for many years, with my private clients and in workshops, when someone’s connecting to something deep that needs healing, or growth, or transformation, as the discomfort arises, or just as any intensity or any real clear and specific sensations or emotions arise, I like to ask people these questions: What do you feel, and where do you feel it? Is there a texture to it, a taste, a color, or a smell? Does it remind you of anything or anyone? And is there a voice to it? So is it your voice? Is it someone else’s voice? Are there any emotions that go with it? And then, on a scale of 1 to 10, which, these scales of 1 to 10 are always arbitrary, it’s your own scale of 1 to 10, how intense is it? And one of the reasons to name the level of intensity is so you could see where you’re currently at with it, and then as you do work on or around it, and you check back into the intensity, over time, you will notice the intensity decreasing, dissipating, even disappearing eventually, and that’s one of the ways that you can know that you’ve moved either all the way through something, or peeled back a layer of the onion; this thing that used to really give me an intense reaction barely gives me any reaction at all anymore. That’s one of the ways you know that you made progress. This line of questioning helps people name their sensations, their state of being around it, and their emotions.
And then in order to soften and observe more consistently, some questions that I give people to notice the patterns are: Do they always feel that way around a certain person or in a certain situation? Do they only feel that way during a certain point in their cycle if they’re a person who menstruates? Or is there a certain time of year, or a certain month out of the year? Often, we’re being affected by anniversaries, or benchmarks, or milestones in our lives that we don’t even realize it. Some of you have heard me talk about the birthday portal. Typically, the month before your birthday, all kinds of stuff will come up so that you don’t have to bring it into the next year. A lot of people like to do New Year’s resolutions. Personally, I treat my own birthday like my personal new year, and I really pay attention, like, the month or so leading up to my birthday, what’s coming up? What’s being thrown in my face? What is life making obvious to me? Either that’s an opportunity, an area for growth, or something exciting I should be paying attention to or pursuing, or something that I really wanna clear out, something that is not serving me, that I could leave behind before I complete another solar return and have a next birthday.
So naming can be applied to things like that. It also helps develop discernment, which allows you to identify any boundaries you might need to set in your life, or relationships, or commitments, that might need adjusting. So to come back to the sacred body wounds, naming applies to a couple of different things, as you’ve already noticed, right? We wanna be naming our sensations, our emotions, the intensity, observing any patterns like who or what does this remind me of? Or how do I consistently feel around this person or in that situation? We name all of those things. But then, as well, when something is overarching, when something’s a consistent, nagging issue or something we’ve been working on for a while, to give it a name can be helpful so that when it comes up, we can remove any personal identification we have with it, and just say, oh, that’s my whatever, whatever acting up.
Let me give you an example. If someone has physical ailments or conditions, maybe someone has arthritis, when they are having a flare, they can say, “Oh, that’s my arthritis flaring up,” instead of, “Oh, that’s my body being a pain in the ass,” or, “Oh, my body hates me,” or anything like that. You know what I mean? That would be a personal identification, like, my body is doing this to me. That’s one example. So instead they could be like, “Oh, that’s my arthritis.” The arthritis is a thing, it’s a condition, it’s named, it’s identified. And then they can say, “Okay, this is what I do when I have an arthritis flare.” So when we name our wounds, and when we name our issues, it’s similar, even if it’s not a physical experience.
The sacred body wound, I want to give you my description of it. The sacred body wound is the wound that tells us our bodies and our divinity are separate. It’s the wound that teaches young girls that their bodies are objects to be pleasing and desirable to others. It’s the wound that conditions European standards of beauty on women and girls, especially in the Western world. It’s the wound that creates fat phobia and ableism, among other things. It’s the wound that keeps us from the great mysteries of womanhood. It’s the wound that would have us believe that we should be ashamed of bleeding, or feeling less than if or when we no longer bleed. It’s the wound that has women finding their value primarily in societal roles, such as wives or mothers. It’s the wound that slut shames. It’s the wound that created diet culture. It’s the wound that would have us forget how sacred, miraculous, and beautiful every woman’s body is.
Quick break in the show, because it is my favorite week of the year. Mary Magdalene Feast Day is this week. It is happening on Thursday. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a long time, you know, Mary Magdalene, that energy, her relationship with Jesus, their teachings, the way of love, is such a big, important part of my own medicine and practice, and so much of that is woven into all of the embodiment work I do, so every year, on July 22nd, for Mary Magdalene Feast Day, I like to put together some kind of special offering, special celebration. So this year, you can grab the details at untameyourself.com/722. There’s some exciting stuff going on, some Akashic records reading, some different healing sessions that I’m opening up in the fall, along with some other things. So head on over to untameyourself.com/722. The celebration will last from Thursday to Sunday, so you have some time to get into that and see what you like, see what might resonate for you, and see, perhaps, what curiosity you might have about Mary Magdalene that would behoove you to explore.
So the sacred body wound, the reason I called it that is because it has us ultimately forget that our bodies are sacred, that every function, everything that our bodies can do is an absolute miracle. It’s a blessing, it’s sacred, it’s a gift, and as well, our bodies are how we are here on earth. Our bodies are the sacred vessel through which we are here to experience heaven on earth, and obviously that’s a metaphor, but it’s also literal, because the joys, the pleasures, the delights, the beauty, the connection, the love, the compassion, the healing, the generosity, the rising from the ashes of trauma and tragedy, all these things are human experiences that also intersect with physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and energetic materials, and by being in a body, we get to experience all of that.
The body is our vessel, it’s our bridge between heaven and earth, what is seen and what is unseen, what is divine and what is fully human, and how those paradoxical things co-exist and come together. And when we’re in these states of succumbing to all the programming and conditioning, and as women, it starts at such young age, whether it starts for us in our own experiences around our own bodies, literally, or it starts by hearing the older women around us, whether it’s our mothers, our aunts, other important female figures, teachers, guardians, community members, neighbors, our friends’ parents, speak about their bodies in whatever way.
I know, personally, I grew up around women obsessing over being fat, or losing weight, or how do my arms look in this, or I need to cover this up, or my legs are ugly, just picking themselves apart. Other people grow up with different messaging around being in a body that’s a woman’s body, desiring to be in a body that’s a woman’s body. We all have to deal with the male gaze. Whether you are straight and heterosexual and are attracted to men or not, it’s something that we all deal with, because women are so heavily objectified and sexualized, again, from a young age. If you ever went to a school that had a dress code, think of this messaging that’s like, yeah, girls, you need to wear… Your thongs can’t be hanging out, your shorts can’t be too short, your tank top straps have to be this thick. And we take in that our bodies are distracting, our bodies are either shameful or dangerous to be in.
And it really creates such disconnection that so many of us deal with, that manifests in our lives in so many ways. Some people just become disconnected, and they just live totally from their head, not connected to their body, not feeling their feelings, not able to identify or process an emotion or a trigger or when something comes up. Some people end up with eating disorders, some people self-harm, some people completely disconnect, or are afraid of their sexuality. There’s just so many ways that the sacred body wound affects us.
So just like we name… For example, a popular wound that people talk about is the mother wound, or the core wound of feeling like too much or not enough. So the sacred body wound is another core wound that the majority of women walking the earth, living on the earth right now, probably experience in some way, shape, or form.
So that’s the short episode today. I wanted to talk about naming. I wanted to offer you the name of sacred body wounds to perhaps give some clarity or some context to your experience in your body that might help you… We have all these movements, right? There’s body positivity, body liberation, body neutrality. Personally, I’m about body love , body acceptance. There’s so many different ways to approach being on the same team as our bodies, being a great inhabitant of a body, a loving inhabitant of a body. And listen, you don’t even have to like your body all the time, you don’t have to love it, you don’t have to be positive about it, you don’t have to think it’s beautiful, but being able to respect it, so body respect is also a great thing to focus on, being able to respect the body, and being able to regard it and revere it as the sacred vessel that it is, regardless of the shape, size, form, condition, health, ability, that’s a beautiful thing to cultivate, and we do that by combating the sacred body wound.
So if you’re a person who likes to reflect, after these episodes, if you’re a member of the Embodied Living Center, make a post in the ELC, we love talking about this stuff. And if you’re not, maybe it’s something that you could take into your journal or a discussion with your girlfriends, or people in your life, your lovers, your partners, regardless of their gender, about what really is your experience of being in a woman’s body, and how does your sacred body wound manifest? What does it look like? How does it affect you for all the different ways that we listed it could affect somebody. So I’d love to hear from you, I’d love to know what you thought about this episode.
The show notes can be found at untameyourself.com/354, because this is episode number 354. We will link up to the Embodiment Bible and anything else I mentioned in the show here today. So as always, I hope that was useful, I hope that was helpful, illuminating, or enlightening for you in some way, shape, or form. Please share it up if it was. You can share it on social media, you can send it directly to any friends or family members that you think would get something out of it. And that’s it. We’ll see you… We’re on summer schedule now, so we’re posting episodes every other week, so I’ll see you in two weeks.