Feeling unfulfilled in your relationships? Change doesn’t always start with your partner—it begins with you. Today, Kristy Scher explores how self-awareness, emotional maturity, and self-acceptance lay the foundation for deeper, more fulfilling connections.
In this podcast episode, Kristy Scher takes us through:
- Why true relationship change begins within
- The meaning of being an "adored woman" and how to embody it
- How childhood experiences shape adult relationship patterns
- The role of emotional maturity in self-regulation and connection
- Understanding attachment styles and their impact on love dynamics
- The power of self-fluency, self-nurturing, and setting personal standards
- How vulnerability and self-awareness strengthen relationships
And so much more!
Kristy Scher is the creator of The Way of the Adored Woman and founder of Relational Skillfulness Coaching. She believes that when a woman dares to love herself beyond all reason, she embodies a standard for love that transforms all her relationships.
With a mix of wisdom, warmth, wit, and precision, Kristy guides women to recreate their experience of love and intimacy by wholeheartedly embracing their emotional depth, cultivating their sensual vitality, and loving themselves to their very edges.
She is a former fourth-generation nurse now known to her clients as the 'Fairy God-Maven of Outrageously Satisfying Relationships.’ Kristy is on a mission that every woman remembers and reclaims the life-affirming power she already possesses, the greatest power for good that exists: her capacity to love.
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/kristy.scher/
Mailing List link for The Way of The Adored Woman:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd53h3oJQXfdnsmpR6f3ulbuojF1_MFWoNDaWf2MAVmFC6f9w/viewform?usp=share_link
Substack:https://substack.com/@kristyscher
Follow Aimee Takaya on:
IG: @aimeetakaya
Facebook: Aimee Takaya
Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at www.freeyoursoma.com.
LISTEN WHILE READING!
A: Hey there, listener. Have you ever felt dissatisfied in your relationship? Maybe resentful and frustrated and wondering how can I turn this around? How can I get my partner to see what needs to change and how do I get that change to occur?
I'm here today with relationship guide Kristy Scher and we are going to talk about what gets in the way of those changes in our relationship and kind of little spoiler here. It has more to do with you and your internal somatic experience than what other people are doing or not doing. So stay tuned.
A: Every day there is a forgetting and every moment there is the possibility of remembering. Remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world, to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy and here is where you free your soma. I'm your host Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power, from tension to expansion and ultimately from love. From fear to love.
A: Hi, Kristy. Good to see you finally.
K: Hi Aimee. So awesome to be here with you. Fantastic.
A: Yes. I've been really loving just like witnessing your content and what you share. You talk a lot about going from chronically dissatisfied in your relationships to how do we turn that around inside of ourselves to become and I love this phrase, this word, adored. To become an adored woman who feels that sense of being adored and appreciated and nurtured and all of those things that we want right in our relationships as women. And I love that you have a really empowering take on all of this.
So I want to open with a question to kind of get this conversation started because there's so much groundwork and cover here right? But why is it so hard for us, maybe you know in this conversation as women, to see that the change has to happen in us and that it isn't our partner that needs to do all these things. Why is that so hard to accept that it maybe it's me?
K: Yeah, I just love this question, and there's a couple of things I will say just before I answer this and just know that that is actually part of my style. I'm going to probably tell you five stories to make one point. And I want to acknowledge that it really can be for a lot of women.
It can be so hard to get this. I actually want to affirm that that is actually in my opinion part of the way. And so it's not wrong. And the more we can find our experience right, the easier it is to keep moving forward.
And I don't mean right like we attach to it but like to not find it wrong is so important. That said, the word adored or the term that I have come to use adored woman is slightly cheeky. In the sense that it sounds like it's about how other people see us. And one thing when people hang out with me they understand and get to know is that I am very irreverent.
I love contradiction. And so adored is really meant to sort of peak our desire. And usually it's that I what I hear from a lot of women is maybe they don't use the word adored. And it's not just women. I actually have heard this from a lot of men too. But that wanting something from outside to come in. I think that that is actually a really beautiful and necessary want and desire.
I think it's part of how we are made as relational beings. And there is something and you use the word empowered. There is something that's not not empowered in that stance. I think it is actually the wish of a very young part of us. It may be something that was unfulfilled or unresponded to or unresponded to enough that we brought it with us from childhood into our adulthood and still had this longing that there be something outside of us that reached towards us.
And for me the way of the adored woman really is a process of first and foremost sort of emotional maturation which sounds very dry and uninteresting. We can make it more juicy. But it is a process of really learning how to be the, you know, I call it sort of first orientation that we are the center of our relational world. How can we not be? And when we learn how to actually act in that way.
So it's not a theory. It's really about how we show up and how we move in the world when we can learn how to stay rooted in ourselves, have standards and relational non-negotiables, really self-attune, self-nurture, self-loving. Then we actually can move in a way that is empowered.
So we actually can make choices and have discernment. And though all of that piece of it's what I call, there are three pillars to the way of the adored woman. And that's really the first pillar which is self-fluency. When we have that self-fluency, it's about our relationship with ourself. That really starts to change our relational world profoundly such that we could receive someone moving toward us. I'm sure that there's a lot in that. Yes.
A: I mean, the first thing I thought was that, especially with this idea that it's a younger part of ourselves that was undernourished and that is still hungry and craving that connection and that attention that it didn't get. That actually speaks to why it's so hard is because it's exercising a part of our brain, a part of our consciousness that not that it's weak, but just it hasn't been doing what we're starting to ask it to do, which is self-regulate and self-soothe. And that is very hard when we're in the beginning of a new thing.
I love this. I don't know how much you know about the Yi Qing, but the Yi Qing number three has this principle of difficulty in the beginning. And it's just true. It's just a universal truth of anything that we do. In the beginning, there's challenge. You can think about the birthing process of coming into the world, right? But it's true of all those times when we are pivoting and switching the direction, maybe changing the neural pathway of how we've done something for so long.
This orientation you're speaking of to like, you know, going from a third person orientation of ourselves and like, you know, the world has things that we are lacking and we need to go get it from other people, right? To a first person orientation of it's actually in me and I can source my inner soul's nutrition and my love from my own beingness, right? That's not an easy thing when we've been oriented the other way our whole lives.
K: Absolutely. I mean, I don't know anything about the Yi Qing, but I love that you just mentioned the number three because I think that there is something there might be a thread that goes throughout our conversation because the, you know, I have three pillars to the way of the adored woman. That is very deliberate.
Also that in a relationship, there's you, there's me and then there's us or the we or some people call it the third. Yes. That there's a third. And that third consciousness, which is the we, you know, different people talk about it in different ways. Santa can talk about it in, you know, in terms of like the relational sort of space or being able to tend the sort of collaborative team like experience. But that third to be able to access that and really tend that we have to have ourself.
I'm going to so date myself with some of my language, but like we have to have our, you know, our relationship with ourself on fleek. We have to have it down. Like we have to be really, as you said, you know, the capacity to sort of to be regulated and, you know, I think of it as sort of grounded.
And, you know, I love the way that Julianne Shore talks about it is actually having an integrated brain, which means like I actually know the various parts of me like I understand that when I'm triggered, I am in my adaptive child. I'm in my adaptations. I'm in my strategies that I learned at a very young age to navigate a relational world that I came into.
And those, you know, Terry real, who's my teacher would say what was adaptive then becomes maladaptive leader. And so the same part of our brain that we, you know, that grew up that grew in our earliest relationship experiences is the same part of our brain that we use for our adult primary attachment relationship. So we, if we came up in a relational system like I did, that was very dysfunctional.
If it resulted in us having to contort ourselves, having to close off parts of ourselves, having to either dissociate or, you know, which I certainly did spend a lot of my childhood dissociated. If our relational system was impoverished or like characterized by scarcity. We will have an orientation to love that has some adaptation around scarcity and that might either be dependence or avoidance.
A: Right, right. Hyperindependence where we don't know how to receive and we don't know how to, you know, really give and take and that reciprocity, right? When we're hyper, I was, I speak for myself here because I thought like when I first read about like attachment theory and stuff and maybe you can weigh in on this. I thought, oh, I have an anxious attachment.
And then when I actually started looking at like some of my patterns, you know, in some of the ways that I like did things when I was younger, I'm like, oh, actually, I have a very avoidant pattern. Right. And I think that we also fluctuate and like different situations and circumstances bring out different things and have just different people bring out different parts of us.
Right. You know, like just as an example, like I looked back on one of these relationships I had in my early adult, I was like 18 and I broke up with a guy by just simply never calling him back. And I'm like, oh-
K: The things we do.
A: My God, like I looked back on that and I'm like, that is like so terrible, you know, like I can't even imagine like how that must have felt for him, you know, like what kind of mindset I must have had to be in to be doing something so heartless like that. You know what I mean.
And so sometimes I think we have a perspective that we're in ourselves about how things are and it might take, like you say, some maturing and some connecting with ourselves to actually have the perspective to go, oh, wait a minute, like I know I was all up in my, you know, story of how it is. But there was also another person who was having an independent experience of me and what I was doing and I impacted them. Right. Yeah.
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K: Yeah. I mean, I think that we can have a variety of experiences, you know, and, you know, I always say like the sort of first rule of the way of the adored woman is know thyself. So it is that sort of first orientation, the self-fluency thought because I actually was a highly anxious person. And that became clearer and clearer over my life that anxiety was a big thing.
I would have thought that I was anxious, but one of the ways that I really behaved was actually to be very walled off and shut down. And looking back, I sort of my husband, I talk about this a lot because our relationship has been so profoundly changed in the last five years.
It looks nothing like the previous 25. And both of us are like, how the hell did we get here? And like, I frequently will ask him like, what exactly, you know, like I keep asking me like what exactly happened because I love to reverse engineer things. But one of the things that I realized in retrospect is that I thought I was asking for what I needed. I thought I was asking for what I wanted. I thought I was expressing myself. I thought I was being revealed.
And that is completely not true. Like I think in a lot of ways I was very unreadable. That was actually part of my strategy. And the more I work with women and couples, it's fascinating. Like the more I've learned about how to work with women and couples and really support people to come forward through self defining, self revealing, vulnerability holding ourselves as we express our needs, wishes, wants, longings, preferences, beliefs, like to really come forward in order to be meetable, you know, seeable, feelable.
Most of the women that I work with do the same thing that I did, which is she thinks she's being revealing, but she's really not. Like she thinks she's expressing a wish and doing it vulnerably. But it's, you know, we learn a lot of ways, I think, depending on our relational world, we might learn a lot of ways to cloak to sort of tame it down, temper it, make it palatable so that it is very possible that my husband never really felt who I was and what I wanted until I really learned how to.
And I feel that stay with that inside yourself, inside myself, and express it from a place that was both self-approving and self-affirming so that I could really tolerate being fully seen. Because before that probably what I was doing, in fact, I'm certain what I was doing was actually expressing my desires as a criticism as a complaint.
A: Right. Yeah. I was thinking that as you were, you were talking, you know, I've, my husband and I have been married now. It'll be our seventh wedding anniversary in June and we've been together for eight years.
So we got married a year from the date that we started hanging out. Wow. Yeah. I mean, we technically met like in March, like it's a little random meeting, and thought we'd never see each other again and then ended up meeting each other again in June at the same coffee shop that I like never went to. And it's a very strange kind of happenstance thing, but there's been so many ups and downs for us even within the seven years that we've been together.
And I've gone through these; I guess it almost feels like these phases of like opening and then closing and like both of us opening and like finding each other and then closing off and like distance again and then like challenge and then like, you know, and so much of it comes back to what you're saying, which is how connected and you know, and I'm going to use this word, but I want it to like be taken the right way. Like, I'm not using it in a judgy way.
It's more like in a structural way that I'm talking about it, but like how much of integrity am I with my self-care with my pouring my energy into myself and same for my husband because all of those things impact us if I am not taking care of myself and he's not taking care of himself. Right. Like, I gave it an analogy like this to my son, and maybe other people can like relate or maybe a little light bulb will go off.
We looked back on some of the times early on our relationship and we would have these really dramatic blowout fights. And it was like, we were driving, you know, through like LA traffic, which is like stressful or something, right? And we like hadn't had anything to eat. So we like we're hungry.
And then we'd stop at like a cafe and we'd have like a piece of pie and coffee. So we'd get ourselves like sugared up and caffeineed up with our nervous systems already like, you know, and then we'd have some really huge blowout fight over like some misunderstanding in the conversation and it was resulted in, you know, all kinds of like drama. And we became like aware of that dynamic within ourselves.
Like after a few times of it happening and we kind of looked back and we're like, this is a pattern when we like haven't nourished like literally haven't nourished our bodies. We're putting ourselves through the stress of like being out and about for a long time. And then we don't give ourselves the things that we really need. We give ourselves like a bunch of sugar and caffeine.
And I think at one point we even had like a ridiculous rule where it was like, okay, well only one person can drink coffee while we're out together so that like there'll be one person who's like grounded while the other person's like, you know, whacked out on caffeine, you know, but this is just kind of like the funny dynamics that like we don't realize how much we're doing with our physical body and what we're doing internally with our way of being towards ourselves being towards what's happening impacts how we show up in our relationship.
K: Yeah. So I sort of imagine I envision that like these three fluencies are what I talk about in the way of the adored woman. One is self-fluency. One is relational fluency. And the third is emotional fluency and I separate that for some very specific reasons because there's so much in it. As I'm listening to you, one of the things that I was, you know, that I became aware of and, and I think some of this is just a matter of age and experience and your sort of orientation to learning from your own experiences.
But I didn't know that I was dysregulated or like that, my baseline was essentially like agitated and in my adaptations. I did not know that that was sort of my baseline. And probably about, I want to say maybe 16 years ago, I got sober, and part of what happened for me and getting sober, and I've written about this a lot.
And I think it's so important to talk about this because the journey of motherhood can be so hard for so many women. But one of the things that I realized was that I was angry all the time. And the first year that I was sober, I was angry all the time. And I was like just waking up to the fact that I was angry all the time. And it was really, really hard to see the second year sobriety. I was angry all the time. And I knew it. I could say, yep, I'm angry.
Like, I could actually identify it. And the third year that I was sober, I could see when I was angr,y and I could stop myself from acting on it. And it was in that time I was still working as a nurse.
I was a perinatal nurse and neonatal nurse, and lactation consultant for 12 years. And it was in that time that I started to notice basically when I would lose my shit. And part of my addiction or non-subriety was that I raged a lot. Like I caused a lot of harm to my kids for a period of their life. And I started to notice because I was also raising a kid who had a lot of intensity. I love both my sons. They're amazing adults. They're both single right now, by the way. Putting that out there.
I'm calling in the beautiful, wonderful women. But in raising, particularly one of my sons, he was just like an intense cat. And I mean that so lovingly because I am too. But I started to look at when would things go off the rails for me? Like when would I lose my shit?
And I remember this so vividly because I used to be the kind of woman who, like, I would come home from a 12 hour shift, which is really more like a 13-hour shift at the hospital. And I would pull in the driveway, and I'd walk in the house, and there would be one cup on the counter. And I would lose my ever-loving mind. It got to the point where, like the boys and Jason would not be anywhere near. Like they would not be in the vicinity.
They knew better than to be around when I got home. And doing that sober was pretty horrible. I think when we engage in our strategies in it, when we're sober and increasing in consciousness, I think a there's a great potential for us to change them and be there's also a great potential for us to find it profoundly painful and disappointing and experience a lot of shame around how we show up.
But one of the things that I realized was that that coming home moment was very hard for me and I didn't really know why I'd never actually put my attention on it. So I just knew in my sobriety, I was like, I'm going to do whatever I can. And you know, like if you can't see, like I'm actually gripping very tightly with both my hands, like I'm holding on because for me to lose my shit, I started to realize that there were emotional and physiological consequences.
A: Every time I got angry. Yes. And I want to actually segue there and I want to ask you a question because I feel like we're headed in this direction. Right? And I would just love to like go there. But part of what you share is the way that going through a really serious illness was part of your transformation. Kind of part of that like healing crisis. Right.
And you know, how do you think that the emotions that you were holding in and letting kind of fester in you and explode so regularly were part of that illness process?
K: Yeah. That is like such a great question. I want to speak to like two things before I answer that. One is that and this is the story I'm making up in my head so you can correct me, but like you've sort of described that there's been some cycles or some ebbs and flows in your relationship and there've been some, you know, big sensational sorts of, you know, interactions and sometimes really connected and then sometimes really sort of moving in and out of that connection.
I guess I got that right. And I think that that's really normal and natural part of just being a human and in relationship. And that sort of ebbing and flowing has a lot to do with how we relate to our own interior world and how conscious we are about what's happening inside. Like, when I would drive in the driveway, there was a point where I was not conscious that I was exhausted, that I was really, really depleted. Like it wasn't just that I was tired from a 13 hour day. It was that I was thin and like almost nothing left emotionally and physically.
I also went through a period like this was sort of an early period of the illness where I was having a migraine every single day for a year and a half. And I was working and I was running like 30 to 40 miles a week. And I was, you know, parenting to preteens and I was teaching yoga because I was a yoga teacher and have been for like 25 years. I mean, I was, my life was so overwhelming. And I did not know that I actually had a very hard time feeling.
So I would drive in the driveway and not have any conscious awareness of what my state was, how empty my tank might be. And that when I would walk in the house, it would be like the moment that I could just finally come apart. And I did not know how to come apart in a way that wasn't like an explosion.
And as I think as we know ourselves more, one of the things that we can start to see is like, oh, I call it layers of vulnerability or maybe sort of layers of liability even like some detriment. Like for me, a 13 hour day, and this is actually how I ended up leaving nursing. Ultimately, I came to realize that that's not tenable for my body period.
And there's no way I can do that and be well. For many, many years, I insisted that I could do that and run 30 to 40 miles a week and teach, you know, three to five yoga classes a week and study and do another thousand hours or 10,000 hours of like teacher trainings. I mean, I think I've done like a thousand hours of yoga teacher trainings.
So I was always, always, always doing too much. And that was purposeful. I mean, that was part of how I kept myself from feeling. It was driven by the idea that this next thing will make me feel better.
Now, that's not conscious. I don't think a lot of people are walking around saying, this next thing, I mean, sometimes like I'll be happy when, but I don't think that that was a loud thought in my conscious awareness. It was like, it was kind of like this, oh, I've got to do this thing.
A: It was like a compulsion. It was like an urge, like something driving you, not even like wanting necessarily.
K: Driven is a way that a lot of people used to describe me. Relentless is now how I describe myself, but I mean that in like the most exalted way, but like driven. And so even though so much of what I did was in the realm of feeling, you know, like yoga and Koya, which is like dance, yoga, prayer, you know, I did a lot of therapy. Eventually, I started doing women's work, even though it was so much in the realm of feeling. I really in retrospect realized that I spent much of my childhood dissociated.
A: From your body, right? And from those pathways in your body that can sense and feel, and I can completely relate to so much of what you're saying. I'm sure there's people listening who, you know, understand what you're speaking to on a very deep level, because part of the value of doing this internal sensing feeling work, right, which is somatic work ultimately, of coming home and back into ourselves and our bodies is that we build pathways to sense and feel that we didn't have before. You know, so I used to kind of look back and go like, oh, you know, why did I do all these heartless things? Why did I do all these terrible things?
You know, how could I be like teaching yoga while living in chronic pain, pretending that I had all the answers when I'm like limping up the stairs to teach class? Like I went through all that, you know? And it's like I look back and I go, I just didn't have the pathways to do something different. There wasn't a choice. It wasn't like I was choosing to, you know, break up with that poor guy that way.
You know what I mean? It's not like you were choosing to come inside and throw a fit. It wasn't a choice. It was a well-worn pathway of how things happen in my body. And until we have another pathway that gets built alongside those old ones and those old ones get pruned, we, it's kind of like a suffice to say we don't know better, but it's not know. It's we don't feel that we don't sense and feel another way to do it. Yeah.
K: And I think it's not a one and done like, oh, now I can feel. I mean, this has been a long healing away layer by layer. You know, like I think about this because I do also hear this particular thing. So if people who are listening, you know, have this thought of like, well, I've been doing this for so long.
I've been at this for so long. I just want to say like, yep, you have, and nothing has been wasted, and everything has been like purposeful, and there's no arriving. Like if you came into this life for growth, and that is absolutely what I came here for was to like explore absolute horizons. You know, the horizon, the growing edge of what is possible and what's here for us to experience.
I know I'm constantly going to be experiencing some sort of challenge, some sort of opening. So that's the prelude to this piece around being able to feel, you know, like my work with mothers and babies, like that work was so important for my own sort of emotional maturation. Because I really clearly understood that I was being drawn into a kind of work where I didn't know that I had this capacity. I didn't really know how, I don't even still have a word for it, but where I could walk into a room and I could feel everything that was happening inside of the mother's body.
I could feel everything happening inside of the baby's body. I could feel her sort of emotional world and how it was meeting her experience of becoming a mother. I could feel her mother's story and whatever was sort of populating that and my work ultimately became not just like sort of clinically administering care and my intellect really loved that part. But my work really became learning how to translate what was happening in the baby's body in language that the mother could understand emotionally so that she could attune to the baby. And to do that, I actually had to learn how to feel everything that I was feeling, and believe me, a lot of the stuff that I would feel would be like, Holy shit, this is very intense.
I mean, I've seen and experienced a lot of profoundly devastating things in my careers a nurse in patients rooms. But that ability to feel and sense, you know, he's talked about breastfeeding is like helping you and your baby just to be good mammals, like to have a body and to allow the senses, like to learn how to trust the senses.
And that breastfeeding was just a language for me to talk about attunement and being in her body as a mother as a woman, and being able to respond and sense another body that you are having a dyadic experience with. And that the sensing like that babies explore the world through their mouth. It's breastfeeding, you know, feeding itself is not just calories coming in, that it is a neurological, biochemical, psychobiological, sociological experience for a baby to use their mouth.
And when they breastfeed, they actually are engaging in a very complex relationship with their world, which is the mother for the first period of their life. And there's this really interesting sort of passage from Jamie Weal's book called Recapture the Rapture where he talks about, and I'm going to probably not get all the details right, but he talks about this thing that was developed for the Navy SEALs to be able to navigate very dark depths of water. And it's this little thing that goes on their tongue, and it basically gives them information about which way to go. And I was like, oh, that's what babies are doing.
They are using their mouth to navigate the world. And so when we really grok that we are sensate beings, meaning our senses are forms of information about our relationship and orientation to the world, to our environment, and that we could say that a feeling is a sensation, an emotion is an energy in motion in the body. And when we can really be able to experience sensation in the body, without a judgment or story attached, which is how Rachelle Sheik taught me that sensuality is feeling or sensing without a judgment or story attached.
So when a woman can feel and feel herself in the present moment through her senses, that's how we know we're right here right now. And we can experience life moving through us as various forms of information in the form of emotions or sensations and not be attached to what that might mean about us. Then we actually are in a relationship with life and our life and this vehicle that we came into in order to, you know, this sacred place where our soul meets form. And when we start to understand that that is actually a very practical thing, it sounds like very metaphysical language, but it's actually a very practical thing of like, can you feel one thing in this moment?
And stay with it. That's for me, like when I was able to start getting that as a whole piece was when I started to understand how much I had suppressed myself in my life in order to function in the relational world that I grew up in. Because my health issues were all about suppression. I had hypo everything, like low everything.
And I ended up with a mold-related illness that became a basically an autoimmune disaster. And that experience really taught me that if I wanted to be well, I would have to learn how to bring consciousness into every part of my body. And this is after like 20 years of practicing yoga already, right? Like, it's not like, I'm like, oh, and I'm going to go become a yogi. I mean, it's like, I'd already been doing this.
Yeah. And that illness actually brought me face to face with if I'm going to feel if I'm going to be capable of feeling there's certain scenarios that are way outside my capacity, like, I can't work 13-hour days and feel like the work itself, the intensity, the right, like stress of just drains you.
A: It uses all of those resources, and there's nothing left like you were saying earlier.
K: Yeah, I mean, I personally, my biology, if I'm going to be awake and feeling and in touch with myself and connected myself, I actually, it blows my circuits to sit, you know, to be somewhere where you can't pee for four or five hours because your patients are such, you know, an emergent priority.
You don't eat lunch until 530 in the afternoon. Like, I just can't live that way. And this is the big piece that I wanted to point out to around senses, emotions, feeling and our health is that I'd constructed my life on purpose, not necessarily consciously, but my life was constructed based on who I thought I had to be and who I showed up as in order to stay safe in the world. And that if I was going to heal, I actually would have to be someone else, meaning my life would have to look very different, which meant that I would have to make choices. Like I would have to leave a career. I'm a fourth-generation nurse.
So, I would have to leave something that was an identity. I was very good at what I did. It was intellectually very stimulating.
It was deeply satisfying. And if I was going to heal and actually like have a life housed inside of myself, I would actually have to be someone else and I would have to leave the life I've had. And I think that that is part of why we want the answer to be somebody else. I think it's part of why it's so hard to feel because there are certain conditions that are actually required for an animal to feel.
A: Right. And one of my mentors calls that space of being on that edge of the unknown. He calls it the zone of incomprehensibility. Like, you know, you can't comprehend. You can't expect or, you know, it's not, if you're going to become a different person and your life is going to be different than it was, you don't know what that looks like until you start along the path and just start walking into the woods and figure out where to step so that you don't get, you know, prickles on your leg, right? Like it's definitely that territory into the unknown, right?
The incomprehensible. And that, I think you hit it right on the head. Like that's why we want the answer to be somebody else has to change. Somebody else has to, you know, do what I want them to do or what I think needs to be done, right? Because it's harder to put ourselves in that vulnerable space of not knowing who we are going to be if we take a pivot and we let go, right? Because that's what you had to do. You had to let go of a whole lot.
K: Yeah. I mean, that pivot is like, that is one big fucking pivot. You know, it's like the whole like, you know, watch out for that first step. It's a doozy.
It really is. It's like, I'm, and here's the thing, I wouldn't have done what I did that ended up opening up a world in terms of love. I never even actually envisioned like extraordinary love was not something I'm, I thought, Oh, I meant for this. I did not even reach for that or a dare imagine that, you know, psychedelic pleasure in my body was not something I'm like, Oh girl, I'm so down with that.
I didn't even like aspire to that. The only way that I got there was that my life basically said, you know, wheels are coming off. Like you either stop, you know, like this, I love this quote that the goddess will, if you don't see the goddess in health, she'll see you in illness. And like, I got thumped on the head by whatever we want to call it, you know, I have my patronus goddess and relationship to her.
And I'm, I believe, she thumped me on the head, and she was like, look, I'm going to hold you down under my thumb until you relent. And that was a profound couple of years-long depression that just wiped out any aspiration, any drive, any desire to even be here on this mortal coil. It was like the darkest of dark nights that seemed to go on forever. And then within a short period of that sort of seeming to relent, a very profound illness that cleared the board in the rest of my life, like what didn't get taken out by the dark night got taken out by the illness. And I think when we strip some our life down to the studs, then we really start to meet who we actually are. And it's never who we think.
A: Yeah, wow, it's I yeah, I feel like this conversation is really taking some very like the broadness of what it really means to have a healthy mature relationship that is satisfying, right? Like I can, I'm feeling into kind of the depth of where you're coming from when you talk about these things, you know, and it isn't just going to be like some affirmations that we say or some, you know, some, some cute little like exercises that we do, it's going to be a long form transformation of the kind of core of who we have been being and unwrapping and unraveling the things that have been getting in the way.
And I think that with my modality with the specific kind of somatic work that I do, I like to describe it as an undoing, because so many things, even things that are very, very good for us are doing, you know, sitting in seated meditation, you know, maybe it's an undoing of some thoughts, if you know, you're good at that kind of awareness, right? But it's a physical doing, it's holding yourself upright in a position, you know, doing a thing. And what you've kind of described is like the way that illness undoes us.
It is forcing you to literally just lay in bed. And I've thought about that a lot with like negative thought patterns and depression and things like this. It is a very somatic experience. Numbness is a sensation, right? It's not this mental thing that we pretend that it is, it is a physical experience in our bodies that is not allowing us to get up out of bed and put clothes on and take a shower and all those things, right?
And so when we're in that level of like freeze, I've learned to first of all go with it and trust it, maybe it's just going to last the afternoon, maybe it's just going to last the day if I start resisting it and making myself wrong for it, you know, and not letting myself actually rest in it, right? Because what if all those negative thought patterns and all that despair was my body super smart, intelligent way of getting me to undo and not do anything more right now?
K: Yes. Yeah, I think that that is a move that's so hard for so many women, especially like really smart, soulful, highly competent, you know, can slay tall shit and single bound have realized a lot maybe in their external lives. That is such a painful insistence that comes from, for me, it felt like it came from somewhere outside of me, you know, like there wasn't the triggering like the sort of triggering event that sort of took me into the depression, you know, was not something I would have thought, oh, that's the match, you know, or that's the thing that sort of moved, you know, it was unaccountable at the time.
And I had a very same experience of really reckoning with like, okay, if this isn't going to move, if this if there's nothing that is going to make this different, and everybody has their own approach, I actually did go on an anti-depressant for a period of time, because I was so terrified, you know, because I was actually thinking about like, wouldn't be a problem if I just went off the road here. And so, yeah, so terrified in the physical sensation, like when you said that, I was like, I actually could I had sort of this body memory of like, oh, God, I remember what that felt like to, yeah, it was like an ache that was just so wide.
And there is something about, you know, how I describe it now is like, when you get into this place of no exit, like a doorless hallway, where all of the doors are closing, you know, there's no exit available. And there's something about just finally relenting to feel what is actually there, you know, like to actually feel the depth of my despair, to feel like, you know, sort of like inching along it, like the bottom of my heart, where there's like, no, like, it felt like there was nothing, you know, to touch, and you know, like the kind of voidness that a depression can feel like, it was such existential despair, and making the shift of like, okay, if this isn't going anywhere, could I simply feel without making it wrong?
Like you said, like, without pathologizing myself. And meanwhile, like I had a very horrible eating disorder, and like had to go through a very similar process with the eating disorder, like if I just didn't make this wrong, if I could see this as the smartest thing that my, you know, that my psyche figured out to do the eating disorder, if I could see this as the smartest thing my psyche has figured out to do, you know, the depression, the anxiety, what could I become aware of?
And it was that pivot, like with the eating disorder, because I purged, and it was pretty bad for, I mean, I had some kind of ever-morphing eating disorder for many decades, but the final years of it were sort of about the same time. And when I could finally make that pivot and say like, what if purging was the wisest thing I have somehow figured out to do? And it was that pivot that made me start to actually ask myself, okay, well, what am I actually experiencing?
And this might be hard for some people to hear. I'm not going to give great details, but like, what is it that I'm actually experiencing when I purge? And I started to kind of diagram it like there's this intense terror and fear and overwhelm. It's so loud. It's like an air siren we're going off in my head. And then afterwards, it's nothing. I just feel kind of after the storm. Well, comfortably numb, like everything is sort of obliterated.
And I was like, oh, this is going to sound so obvious. I must be in a lot of pain that I need to do this. Get to some like, release, you get relief from it. Yeah. And it occurred to me, the metaphor of like not being able to take in nourishment, not being able to hold it in my body, not being able to accept it, to self harm around my own needs. Like these are all metaphors. Yes. And I was like, hmm, there might be something going on around the vagus nerve here, because that is a lot of stimulation of the vagus nerve.
A: Yeah, that's getting you that relief or that sense of like no nothingness that you are getting from that. And I love that you are speaking to this because I think that when we realize that sometimes there's like a payoff, we can even vilify that there's a payoff like, oh, I'm getting something from this.
And we make ourselves wrong for getting something from it. Instead of going, oh, wow, I must be in so much pain that this thing that is quote unquote, harmful is providing me relief from my suffering for a moment in time. And that shows me the depth of how much suffering I'm experiencing. And then you went right there with the vagus nerve in terms of the physiological aspect of it, which is, I thought about that with like when people are yelling when they get upset, they're stimulating their vagus nerve. They're helping themselves feel better for a moment. Absolutely.
K: I mean, like earlier, I mentioned like I was a rager, I yelled, and there would be a huge consequence to that emotionally and relationally, but also physiologically, I started in my sobriety, I was like, oh, wow, this is really depleting. But there's also a payoff. There's a dopamine payoff. There is a sort of a nervous system payoff, like the something gets opened up and released.
But I think that this is a, you know, like if someone who's listening can hear this, you know, I think what you and I are pointing to is such a profound, I just think it's like a genius move, which is to really to respect our resistance, to respect our patterns, respect our adaptations. And by respect, I mean to look at them again.
Yes. To turn, you know, I was a practiced yogi. So I, you know, a practice meditator.
So I knew what it was to be like, oh, here's like, I'm sitting meditation, and there's my story, like my I'm a bad mother's story. And I would just put a little label on it and kind of float away. And I would go back to like whatever my mantra, my breath. But to be able to do that same thing in our moment to moment life of like, okay, here I am, about to do the same thing of, you know, that I've done before, can I stay conscious?
Can I stay conscious right here? And I even did something really, you know, very unconventional. And that is that, you know, at a certain point in the last couple of years of my eating disorder, I, first of all, told my husband, because ski discovered me one day standing outside of the bathroom when I opened the door. And he said, you know, are you purging? And I was terrified and humiliated and deeply ashamed. And I said, yes. And he said, you do not ever have to be ashamed with me. And that was all he said.
And I got the message clearly that he also did not want me lying to him and hiding things. So at a certain point, I said, I'm going to tell you every time I purge. And I'm just going to admit it before I do it and try to take the shame out of it.
Because I can't seem to stop doing it. No matter how I try, and my therapist was like, stop trying to stop purging. And so for a year and a half, the final year and a half of my eating disorder, I would tell him, and for part of that, it was every day.
Oh, wow. And some days he would say, I love you, don't have to do this. And some days he would say, I love you, and I'm here if you need me. And he never stopped me, which was very wise because he knows better than to fight with a very driven woman. But the thing that it helped me do was to normalize the pain that I was in.
Actually really listen to it. And that's the sort of befriending of our suffering. You know, I think part of the ticket in, you know, for this ride in a human experience, it comes with suffering. Nobody gets out of that. Right.
A: Yeah. And what you're speaking to also is just your building through the unshaming of the act, through the sharing and the connecting, you know, and letting yourself be seen in it, you're opening yourself up to a larger container for all of it to be held in, which is a container of grace, which is the container of love, right?
And that the behavior and the thing and the bad wrong thing doesn't even have to change for that grace to start becoming available and there and present alongside the habit, you know, is not sustainable. Right. I think that's like, you know, it's like a lot of times we want to just skip ahead to the part where we don't do that anymore.
K: And like, you know, if somebody can do that, like, please, like, let us know.
A: Yeah. But it's like, what we, the thing is, is when we go too fast in our transformation and we jump ahead, we have to backtrack and clean up the things that we dropped and the little cracks and the errors that we made along the way, we have to go circle back because, you know, change. And I love the timelines that you've been giving in this conversation for your process to be really clear and realistic for people that, oh, this didn't just change in three months.
This didn't just shift, you know, you just spoke to a year and a half or something like that of telling your husband that, you know, when you were purging of being in that last leg of your journey where you're bringing in that awareness and that grace and that kindness, right, even as you're not stopping, you can't stop at that point.
And I think that's, that's really important for people to hear is that, you know, to let go of a deeply held pattern that you've been, you know, and I love the word adaptation that you've been using that's been giving you something that's been helping you and supporting you even as much as it's hard for you to like maybe see that. It's not a short, quick one and done, as you said, it is a process.
And it's worth it to go through that process because on the other side of it is a whole new way of experiencing your body, your life, I'm assuming it was a whole new way now of taking a nutrition and being oriented towards, you know, not just food, but like receiving, right, receiving and allowing your body to digest life. So maybe you can say a bit about like, you know, how all of this relates to like your relationship with your husband.
K: That's such a great question because I was actually thinking about that. You know, the timeline is really interesting in that I had this really intense depression, things in my life just sort of got reordered. And when I finally admitted that I was depressed and sought some kind of, you know, movement forward, like I finally said, hey, I raised my hand, I'm like, I need help here. And that was like after two years.
One of the things that I decided was that I had to actually once and for all figure out, I didn't even think about like, he was so done with that language. But once and for all, end the disorder, eating, sort of like the end all of that stuff. And that took me a full two years. Because the eating disorder model didn't really fully work for me. The medical model didn't totally really work for me. The spiritual models really didn't work for me all that much. And the 12 step model helped some, but it didn't go the whole way.
And so I had to sort of cobble together my own process. And that took a full two years from basically completely defining for myself what the eating disorder was, all the behaviors, all of the things that I did, all the things I thought.
So beginning to end was like about two years. End meaning like I stopped purging like one day, like that was the last thing to go. Weirdly, all the other things I could do, but the purging was the last to go. And within a couple months after that, so that's like a four year period, depression, working through the eating disorder, sort of basic clawing myself back into life.
You know, like I took a very easy job where I could just get out of my own head for a year. Within a couple months, our marriage transformed. Now, I'd been doing other things and we'd been sort of walking on, you know, like walking through a process that really didn't get a lot of traction. But within a couple months of finally putting the last piece of the eating disorder away, it became really clear to me that I did not have the first fucking clue how to have intimacy. And that the eating disorder was in the words of one of my teachers, an exit. It was, you know, as Terry Real would say, a misery stabilizer.
It was one of the exits. It like allowed me to not feel the distress of living in an emotionally lifeless, zero passion, mostly roommate marriage. So when the eating disorder was sort of put to bed, then I was like, oh, now I actually know what I've been not paying attention to, including how profoundly lonely it felt for me to be with somebody who was equally sort of checked out. You know, it wasn't just me. We are always and only ever with somebody who's like meets us in terms of their consciousness.
I was very like arrogant and thought I had more consciousness. But it was like once that exit closed and so I think if we can identify the exits that we're using overwork, over functioning, eating disorders, you know, alcohol, shopping, like special relationships, mothering, you know, like whatever they are, like whatever those exits are, if we are willing to close them, because that is a requirement in order to really see what am I dealing with in my relationship, a healthy relationship that flourishes that we can actually work on requires a safe, sane environment. And that, you know, that means we close our exits.
I think that's from Harvard Hendricks is the term exit. That was really when we started cooking with gas, as they say. And it did not take long. You know, we'd done therapy a couple of times. It didn't really do a lot for us.
We'd tried a lot of different things. But I'd say it was within the year. But certainly within, I'd say six months, our marriage started to really feel look and feel very different. And within a year, we were in a profoundly different marriage. And that was like years and years of like a lead up.
A: Yeah, yeah. So then can you maybe describe a little more detail on like these transformations that you had been going through were obviously like a huge catalyst for him. You know, were you in a sense like leading this by closing your exits first? And did he follow, you know, what happened for him as he saw you going through this whole process?
Right. And what kind of dynamic did you have for his side of things? Because I think there are like probably women listening and they're thinking like, Oh, well, I know I'll do all these things, but he won't, right?
K: Like, yeah, that is a very, I think durable wish is that like, I can do these things and, you know, hopefully either hopefully he'll change or I've been doing all the work and he just won't. Right. Now, this is not a guarantee. Like when we change, there is no guarantee that other people will. But by the law of resonance, if we truly change and inhabit that change, the world around us can't not.
Yeah. Now that means he might either come further in, wake up, you know, shift, become a receptive, want to do his work, or he might move further out and actually be sort of like be moved away from your world. That is the risk. Like there is no guarantee that when, you know, a woman really honors who she is and very deliberately honors her non-negotiables, but in a relational way, there's no guarantee that he's going to be like, sign me up. However, I've known a lot of men in my life. I've had a lot of men in my life. My best friend is a man.
I have two sons who are adults. I've known my husband for 32 years and nearly every single person, man that I have, I even dated from high school. If they're still alive, I am still friends with them. So I've been very fortunate to have a lot of men in my life. And there's one thing that I do know about men is one that most men are good.
Most men are good men, well-intentioned. Just like us, they may not be fully awake. They may not be awake in certain ways. They may have their own relationship-ish. But I believe that most men, like most women, are fundamentally good. And that I think men, at least in our culture, are profoundly responsive to a woman who can hold herself with integrity, emotionally, and is deeply feeling and can do that in a relationally responsive way. And that most men are very responsive and will rise to a standard or a request that's made in a relational way.
So by that, what I mean is one of the things that I learned to do was, first of all, stop all the feminine body-ment fluffernutter and the feminine communication, which was really just like a sort of thinly veiled manipulation.
A: Sorry. I love it. I love it. That is how I feel. I agree. That's a whole podcast we could do.
K: I'm really grateful for that little bit of resonance there. And I learned to actually express something, like something that was painful, like how much absence of his presence, his emotional presence, his tuned-outness, his sort of habitual tuned-outness, how much that hurt. Whereas for most of our marriage before, all I expressed was anger and contempt and resentment, even though I thought I was doing it in, like, I feel when you language that is also, I think, just veiled criticism.
But I started to be able to say, like, it is so deeply lonely for me in our marriage. And I didn't know at the time, I mean, I've really spent the last four or five years reverse engineering what happened because I want this for every woman. I want every woman to have, like, an outrageously happy, epic love story in their relationship. And what I didn't know was that I was actually learning how to express what was true for me as an emotion or a perception from a self-responsible place.
So it was about me, not about him. I am lonely. I feel profoundly lonely when you read on some device and never reach for me.
And I'm sitting right next to you for, you know, the three hours before we go to bed or two hours before we go to bed. I feel deeply lonely. And I don't know if I can take that anymore. And there was something that happened. There was something that happened in our life. We were part of a group of couples led by some people who had been friends of ours. And it was a sort of witnessing experience. And my husband completely, to my great shock, was willing to participate in that.
He'd been very much like a no to any kind of mens work, any kind of anything. We'd tried couples therapy twice and it was just like a huge blowout. I mean, not an argument, but just like it was a wash. And we were in this couple's group. And this was the thing that really, really changed for me was, you know, we were being witnessed in a conversation about anger, I felt the hurt that I felt.
And I was trying to express it responsibly, like from my own side, not as about him, but my feelings. And the group was designed so that people would give feedback. But feedback is in like, okay, this is something that I saw. And one of the men said, and I don't really even remember the content of it, but it was actually probably the most empathically loving witnessing that I'd ever received from a man, like, basically, like, I can see how much pain you're in. And I can't really describe it.
But in that moment, I saw something that my husband had been doing in our marriage really forever, which is like, my husband's adaptation to the world that he grew up in was to be receded, like, not there, you know, like, we might call it like not present or shut down or withdrawn or sort of like, he would say, I love you. And I knew that he would believe that, but it never moved towards me. He never acted towards me.
It was never like expressed towards me. And something clicked for me when I realized, you know, my husband's mother was a profoundly unkind, highly critical, very rejecting mother. And in his childhood, he told me, I didn't know this until, you know, just a couple years ago, he used to, he was an only child. His parents had a child before him who died before my husband was born.
His brother died in childhood. And Jason told me that he would in his bedroom at night, you know, five, six, seven years old, he would have this little sort of incantation that was fearless, fearless, invisible. No, fearless, fearless, wantless. As a child, he would say this to himself, fearless, fearless, wantless, like, I don't hear anything. I don't feel anything.
I don't want anything as a child. And I realized in that moment, and I can't believe it took me this long, that in all of our marriage, my raging, my being angry, my being contemptuous, I was showing up just like his mother. Right.
A: And you were putting him into that adaptation.
K: And his adaptation to his relational trauma was to be fearless, fearless, and wantless. And here I was, enraged at him that he didn't want me. Like, I was contributing to that. And that was a profoundly painful moment to realize that I actually was feeding into something that justified his adaptation. And in that moment, I was like, I never ever ever want to show up as that person or marriage again, and really looked deeply at how I behaved, like, what was my tone of voice? How did I express things? Did I ever express gratitude?
Did I ever express appreciation? And no, I really did not. I mean, really, I was so arrogant.
I'm like, I'm a yogi, I've got perfect posture, I know all the ways to be, and like, I just just such fucking bullshit. And I really did not know how to nurture and tend and respond to a man. I did not know how to appreciate him. I did not know I wasn't actually even seeing him. Like, there's something about that experience that like a veil fell away.
And I actually started to see who this person was in front of me. And realized that if I wanted a relationship with him, and this was the same thing I realized with my kids many years earlier when they were teenagers is that if they were going to want a relationship with me, I had better figure out how to be someone that they wanted to have a relationship with. And the same thing with my husband, like, I really needed to become fit for a relationship.
And that shift, like, this was all some of the things that came up in that sort of year of transformation. And I could never have tolerated seeing my part in our marriage, if I had still been engaged in a self-harming self, you know, perpetuating self-hating behavior, like a needing disorder,
A: right, it would have been too painful, it would have been unavailable. I was thinking about that as you were speaking, you know, the, because you know, when you have those moments of going like, oh, like, oh, my God, like, I see like what I've been doing, I see like how I've been being, right.
And again, like, creating a little bit of grace for yourself in the sense of like, you were functioning at a deficit, energetically, there was like a hole inside of you, an endless pit of, you know, needing and wanting and desiring that like love and attention, you know, but like not letting yourself receive it. I mean, that kind of describes the eating disorder in a way, right. Absolutely.
So, you know, yes. And so then it's like once you as you described, like close those exits where like, that's not the thing that you're doing anymore. Now there's this renourishing of yourself. And then now you're not functioning from that place of intense deficit. There's capacity now to approach looking at yourself and looking at some of the behaviors and things, right.
And seeing them for what they are, instead of it being like, it's just going to push you beyond your capacity. It's not even going to be an option when you're still in that, like you said, the self-harm mode. Yeah.
K: Yeah. I mean, I think that having a deeply satisfying, outrageously happy relationship and marriage is totally possible. I think that we can be contented on the daily, you know, that that actually can be our baseline. But it takes capacity. Yeah. And that capacity is my responsibility.
It's, you know, and for my husband, like his part, that's his responsibility. And the thing that happened for him was that he started to feel like I took my sticky little paws off of him and like put my attention on myself and really started to ask myself, like, who would I have to be in order to know myself as a woman who was wanted by her man, not even by him per se, like the object wasn't him, but was like, could I change my attention so that I tuned in deeply to like, who would I have to be showing up as? How would I have to see myself?
How would I have to see my world? What would I have to be capable of feeling in order to be wanted by the person I was in a relationship with? So it was less about him wanting me, but more about like, who was on this side of it?
Yeah. When I started to do that and really pay attention to like, could I feel with him? Could I feel? Could I, you know, feel some part of our connection and just really deeply enjoy that for what it is, not like for what it isn't, you know, like yet more proof that he's insufficient? But could I really just relish what we had in each moment?
And then from that place, if there was something else that I wanted, ask, like, oh, it feels so good, would you, you know, like as an invitation to join me in a place that felt good as opposed to him doing something for me? And within a very short period of time, I've asked you myself that question like a month, like suddenly he's, you know, we're laughing a lot and he's calling me adorable. That's where a adored woman comes from. And I adore you, something he's never ever said in our life, starting to say things like, I feel so blessed, which was also language he's never ever used. I actually looked at him and I was like, where the fuck did you get that word?
I was like, totally shocked. You know, like, he would be like saying, you know, you're so sexy, our sex life started to like get very alive. And after about a month, there was one Saturday where I folding clothes or something doing chores. And I said, can I talk to you for a minute? And we sat down on the end of the bed. I was like, what the fuck has just happened to us? What has happened? And he said, I don't know, I could feel your heart. And I realized I could feel my own. Fantastic.
A: Yes. This is such an amazing, such an inspirational story and arc that you've been sharing with us. You know, we're going to be kind of winding our conversation down. And I actually want to ask kind of a closing question, just kind of, it gets a little more on like the technical side of some of the things that you've been talking about, which I'm guessing is part of your work with a person, right? But you've mentioned this a couple of times. What are some examples of non-negotiables?
K: Such a good question. I'll give you like one of my husband's non-negotiables is no demonstrations or communications of contempt, no eye rolling, no sarcasm, no verbal unkindness, no name calling, essentially, like a non-negotiable is really no emotional violence and sarcasm. I'm not talking about non-negotiable, it's not about being emotional violence, it's passive aggressive. So non-negotiable is really, you know, for me, they're more behavioral, you know, how someone thinks and feels.
I can't control that. Like, I can't say, yeah, my non-negotiable is that he desires me, desires so complex, so complicated, but how he shows up, yeah, like being present in our life, being willing to have conversations, you know, there's a way to kind of get more defined in those, but non-negotiables are really relational behaviors. And a lot of the non-negotiables start with no, like, no this, no that, like what I will and won't tolerate. And that no is what both, that no starts to create a space for a big old juicy yes.
A: Yeah, I love it. I love it. Yeah, that's a, that's a really great piece for people to contemplate here about the sarcasm and the eye-rolling and the passive aggressiveness as actual violence, because we tend to, we see that a lot, we see it depicted in movies, it's part of contemporary humor, all these things.
And yet at the same time, it doesn't feel good when someone is doing that to you in a conversation, where you're trying to actually communicate with each other. There's, when there's actual communication that's trying to occur and somebody's rolling their eyes at you, it sheds doors for communication and it feels horrible, right?
K: Yeah, yeah. It really undermines relationality. It eviscerates the relational space. And I mean that quite metaphorically, like it will eviscerate a relationship.
A: Yeah, thank you for saying that. Yeah. Awesome. Well, this has just been such a wonderful conversation. I feel like we could talk for like two more hours. I'm sure we would find so many fun, interesting paths to wander down and bring us back to a lot of these like very fundamental, you know, conclusions, right? If our audience is interested in knowing more about how to work with you, where to find you, can you tell us a little bit about if you have a project coming up or an offer or if there is something like, you know, yeah, what do you have going on?
K: Thank you. Yeah, I work primarily with women and couples. I work with women one-on-one and couples one-on-two, obviously, in my private coaching practice. And I have my first three-month journey, the way of the adored woman coming up. This is really the centerpiece of my work.
This, I believe, is what I was put here to do. And it's a three-month journey. It could be a three-year journey, but I thought three months was a good start. And it's for 12 women. And applications opened February 14, of course.
But it's already filling because there are a lot of women in my world, women who follow me primarily on Facebook, who are already a big yes. And we start on March 11, which is a very auspicious day, astrologically speaking, which I did not know. Somebody just told me this for this kind of work.
But March 11 is also our 30th anniversary. And so either working with me in the group, the way of the adored woman or one-on-one, and most people find me through Facebook. I do a lot of writing. You can sometimes see me do video things there. And if you friend me on Facebook and message me, I love to connect with people. That's really a great joy for me. And I have a sub-stack that is a little less populated, but I am there from time to time too. Fantastic.
A: Yes. Well, if you're listening and you've enjoyed this conversation, follow Kristi. I follow her writing. And I love that with Facebook, as opposed to Instagram, you can really do those longer form pieces of writing and really share things more in depth, right?
So give her a follow on there, connect with her, check out the way of the adored woman. And thank you so much for coming on for saying yes to this interview. It's been incredibly enriching for me on a personal level. And I'm sure for so many other people who are listening to this podcast today.
K: Thank you so much, Aimee. This was just such a pleasure. I love that it felt like we could talk forever.
A: Absolutely. All right, until next time.
K: Thanks.
A: Hey there, friends. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram, @AimeeTakaya, and send me a DM about this episode. I'd like to thank you for being part of this somatic revolution. And if you'd like to support the podcast and help more people learn about somatics, consider leaving a review or a rating.
And finally, if you'd like to have the experience of relief in your tight hips or back, and learn to understand what your body is really saying to you, visit youcanfreeyoursoma.com. I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible. Bye for now.
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