Summary
In this lesson, Tara Healey — co-founder of the Art of Accomplishment and head of its teaching and coach training — walks through how to build somatic awareness, the practice of feeling what’s happening in your body. She describes growing up as a “thinker,” a straight-A brainiac who had closed her body off and lost touch with her emotions. Slowly, starting with Vipassana meditation and noticing simple sensations like tingling feet, she regained access to grief, anger, and fear she had cut off — and eventually to a deeper gut wisdom that her linear brain couldn’t name but could follow.
Tara lays out a practical, graded approach. Start simply: bring attention to your hand, feel texture and temperature through the skin. Then move inward to the gut, taking an “elevator ride” down to the belly and just sensing. Then to the chest and heart, where old heartbreak might surface as tension. She demonstrates how attending to a hard conversation lets the body take its protective shape, soften, and “sequence” the held emotion to completion in seconds — so it isn’t carried all day. The body, she explains, also points toward what we want: she felt an embodied urge to be “bigger” that turned out to be her wanting to lead larger groups, a knowing she reached through felt sense rather than logic.
She treats body awareness like going to the gym — short reps, lots of patience, made juicy and enjoyable rather than another chore. She troubleshoots the common sticking points: feeling nothing (which is itself somatic data to explore), getting flooded by the nervous system (slow down, soothe it), and getting flooded by emotion. On that last point she shares that when she first did this practice at a Vipassana retreat, she cried for ten days straight, sitting on a backlog of grief — and recommends balancing every stretch of grief with an equal stretch of self-care. Crucially, she honors choice: if you don’t like what you feel, you’re allowed to come back up to the head, and some people carry things in their shoulders their whole life and never need to process them. On the other side of staying with the discomfort, she promises, is a gold mine — peace, joy, intuition, and even bliss available in something as simple as the breath.
Key Concepts
- Somatic awareness is a key to presence and to the wisdom of emotions
- The body holds emotions whether or not you put attention on them
- Body awareness is built in short enjoyable reps, like going to the gym
- The gut points you toward what you want before the mind knows it
- Feeling nothing is itself somatic data worth exploring
- Balance time spent with grief one-to-one with self-care
Key Quotes
“The body is a beautiful hacked presence. A lot of us grew up putting all of our attention or feeling safe in our heads… but we lose tons of information in doing so about our emotional process and about the wisdom of the body.”
“The more I spent time with different parts of my body, the more access I had to my grief and my anger and my fear, all of which I’d totally cut off before.”
“It was at a Vipassana meditation and I started doing this just exploring the body through awareness and all I could do was cry. I cried for 10 days nonstop.”
“If you don’t feel anything, that’s that’s awesome. What’s it like not to feel anything?”
“If you put attention to the body and you don’t like what you feel, that’s why we have a head.”
“You are the wisdom holder of your body.”
“On the other side of being with those feelings in the body is peace and joy and bliss and wisdom and insight and intuition.”
Transcript
The body is a beautiful hacked presence. A lot of us grew up putting all of our attention or feeling safe in our heads, self included, but we lose tons of information in doing so about our emotional process and about the wisdom of the body. My name is Tara Healey. I am co-founder of AOA and my primary focus at AOA is teaching. I love teaching and working with training students working deeper in the theories of AOA and training students to be coaches. Somatic awareness which really just means how does your body feel and developing a relationship with the body and becoming aware of how your body feels at any point is a key to presence. It’s a key to more wholeness with yourself. It’s a key to better listening and to being aware of and following the wisdom of the emotions. I was raised as a thinker and you know, straight A student and little brainiac and had no relationship with my body. In fact, I’d say I um closed my body off. And in my 20s I started pursuing careers that I couldn’t do without developing a different relationship with my body and I was forced to I think cuz I wanted to start to feel emotions. I was really out of touch with my emotions. And so I very slowly started becoming aware of and I started with Vipassana meditation of like, oh, I have feet. And right now they’re tingling. Oh, I have my gut and the more I spent time with different parts of my body, the more access I had to my grief and my anger and my fear, all of which I’d totally cut off before. And as that progressed first, I just had access to simple feelings and some old feelings that started surfacing. And then the more I started listening to later in life the gut, the more I realized, oh, there’s this gut impulse that has a lot of wisdom that my linear brain can’t tell you exactly what it is, but if I listen to that gut and I spend some time with it, it’s saying, uh something’s not right here. And if I just slow down and hang out with something’s not right here, I get a sense for a different way I want to be in the world or a different way I want to be with other people or certain situations aren’t right. I don’t want to be there or uh this is all wrong. I want to get out of here now. I I started developing more and more intuition as well. Only through deeply listening to the body. So, how to build body awareness? I’d say start simply just bringing attention to your hand. You can kind of even close your hand and open your hand. What’s the sensations on the hand? Maybe you close your hand and you even feel your fingers on your palm. Like, oh, that’s somatic awareness, just listening to the sensory information of the fingers rubbing the palm and you can even um rub the fingers together and feel if you’re really like listening, putting your ears in your hand, can you feel warmth or coolness? What’s the texture? What’s the temperature? Is your skin soft or coarse? I was gardening and my hands are kind of coarse. So, um on the simplest level, it’s just developing the skill of sensing through the skin first. Even you can take it like rub your hands on your legs and just let the hand feel the texture of your pants. And from there we can take it even more internally to like our gut. Like, what do we sense right now in the gut? And dropping awareness down to the gut. So, dropping the thinking mind, you can think of it as taking like an elevator ride all the way down to around your belly button. And then using awareness to look around, so you can be looking visually how the gut feels, but also sensing. How does the gut feel? And you can use your breath here even like bringing breath to it and you might sense your belly expanding slightly. And it’s go slow. And you might feel like I feel a little like gurgle, subtle gurgle in my belly. Like, oh, digestive activity. It can be just that simple. And for some people the gut is easiest, for some people the heart. You can bring your attention to the chest. And again, the chest is an easy area to feel the breath moving through. And this is the center of our heart, the center of emotions. So, sometimes just by bringing that awareness down, we start to sense ache. Literally, if someone’s had a heartache or a heartbreak, current or in the past, they might start feeling tension or crinkles around the front of the heart. And just hanging out with that and sensing that. Like, oh, my heart my heart actually feels kind of soft and a little sleepy. And I feel a little warmth around it. Right now, in 2 hours it might feel different. That would be like next step. And then third step for me at least is thinking about like, oh, I said XYZ to so-and-so and that was a really hard conversation and I can notice like, oh, my body wants to close up as I think about that hard conversation. Like, oh, that was hard and even there’s like a a way my body’s protecting from the hard conversation. I can notice, oh, my shoulders are kind of closing in, maybe even protecting my heart. It’s like, oh, that was hard. And then I can respond to the body like, oh, that was a really hard conversation and I can let the body take that shape a little and just hang out with it. And breathe with it. And as I do that, as I let the body have that shape of responding to the hard conversation, then it actually starts to soften a little with my attention. And my breath can get a little deeper and I notice my shoulders get a little softer. >> [sighs and gasps] >> And whatever I was still holding onto around that conversation with my awareness and my breath, the body can start to sequence. And move in a way it needs to. Like, I just noticed my shoulders dropping. They’re rolling back a little. Everything’s softening. My heart’s coming on. And I can notice a tenderness for myself having that hard conversation. That was hard. And I can notice compassion and tenderness for the other person from this place, too. And then I notice, oh, yeah, and my nervous system drops down. And whatever that was feels done in my body now. Whatever I was still lingering holding onto around a hard conversation had a few seconds to sequence to finish. So, I wasn’t holding it all day. The body has this deep wisdom and it can also point us towards where we want to go. And I used to just work one-on-one with clients and I started working more with groups and I could feel this like er [groaning] wanting to move through my system. It was like, er. And as I and I didn’t know I wanted to work with groups yet, but as I listened to this er and I remember one day just being like er and it was like my hands wanted to move out I and I wanted to be bigger. My body wanted to be bigger and I just started er playing with it and like, what is that? And it was like, oh, I want to hold bigger groups. It actually was through the body and that somatic awareness, that felt sense that it really hit me that there was something bigger, a bigger thing I wanted to hold than working one-on-one. So, we can the body can guide us and actually point us towards towards something we want that we don’t even logically, intellectually know we want yet. Learning body awareness is like learning any new skill. It’s like going to the gym. Go once, do a few reps, take a break. Sometimes what people do is they come in and do it all day long. I encourage you to try it. Usually in the beginning people get really bored because we’re so used to being entertained by thoughts or we come down and the mind immediately lifts us up. So, really the first muscle to build is like, okay, thank you, mind. I usually give you all my attention. Right now, I’m going to put my attention on my core or my body and my gut. And so, just building that muscle of um oh, a head just took me to a drifting thought. I’m going to come back and what is happening there? And sitting with it in for short bites. Make it easy. Make it pleasurable. How how can it be enjoyable to take 5 minutes of your time and come down and hang out in the gut or in the feet or in the shoulders. So, I’d say take your time, have a lot of patience with yourself, and and how would you make it exciting? It’s like, “Oh, I’m going to go to Italy in my gut.” Like, how how is it exciting to be an internal explorer? How do you inspire yourself to do it? It’s not another thing I have to do cuz that’s what I always says. How do you make it juicy? And I take little baby bites. Go down, check it out. Sometimes emotions will come up, have a cry, move your fear, self-soothe, work the nervous system. Another baby bite the next day. First one is someone will say I when I do it, I don’t feel anything. And then they’ll um be start to beat themselves up or think that’s a problem. I would say if you don’t feel anything, that’s that’s awesome. What’s it like not to feel anything? And actually bring the attention to nothing and to the absence of feeling and explore that. If you think you don’t feel anything, that’s some you’re getting data somewhere that tells you you don’t feel anything. And so, you can just I like thinking of it as exploring the raw data. So, instead of letting the mind tell you I don’t feel anything, go and explore. What’s the data? What are the data points that tell you I don’t feel anything? So, you might bring your gut down like, “I don’t feel anything in my gut.” And like, “Oh, how do I know I don’t feel anything?” Cuz it’s quiet. Feels like a void. I don’t sense anything. Everything just goes quiet. Well, that’s somatic information. So, that’s awesome. So, that’s one point where I people see people get stuck. Another point is people will go down and instantly get flooded by the nervous system. Like, “Oh, I just hit anxiety.” And if that happens, that also happens. That’s awesome not to be worried about, but take care of your nervous system. You can Google nervous system exercises or um simply bring attention to breath and give yourself a few calming breaths. And oh, of course this is enervating. I’ve never done this before or it wasn’t safe to do this at some point. And so, just being really a really gentle process around how it doesn’t feel safe in the nervous system got enervated and nurture the nervous system. And go slowly. And another place where I see people um have [clears throat] issues are they go down and then they get flooded by an emotion. They go to the heart and then grief comes up. And if you’re sitting on a lot of grief, this was my experience when I started doing this. It was at a Vipassana meditation and I started doing this just exploring the body through awareness and all I could do was cry. I cried for 10 days nonstop. So, you might be sitting on a lot of grief and give yourself time and space to feel the grief. What I would also encourage is for every 10 minutes of being with grief or a hurt heart or broken heart, give yourself 10 minutes of yummy self-care. So, you’re not just diving down in grief. Like, that it’s balanced one to one with self-care. And if you put attention to the body and you don’t like what you feel, that’s why we have a head. >> [laughter] >> So, I mean, that is why so many of us I think spend so much time in our thoughts because the body doesn’t feel good. And that’s okay. You don’t have to like it. You can come down uh doesn’t I don’t like what I feel. I’m going to come up to my head. Awesome. I’d say congrat Julie yourself for trying it, sensing something didn’t feel good, and seeing that you could step away from it. And if that’s all you ever want to do, great. You get to use your wisdom here. If you sense that I don’t like it has more to do, then you can start Oh, what is it I don’t like? I’m going to take a little baby bite. And I I encourage people if there’s something you don’t like, what is it? Cuz even if we don’t go and listen to it, the body’s holding on to it. So, our shoulders then if there’s some anger that we don’t like or want to feel, our shoulders are holding on to it. So, it’s there whether we put our attention on it or not. And at that point, you’re at choice. Do you want to go and feel it or not? You really get to listen to yourself here. You are the wisdom holder of your body. If you’re thinking I don’t want to go back to that, just might not be the right time. Take a break. Go back 6 months later, 2 years later, never. Some people literally will live with it in their shoulders their whole life and never have to feel it. And I I think that’s okay. I think we know when we’re ready to process it and to feel it. I I trust each person’s wisdom. If you find that you’re interested in this, we have an audio entitled emotional inquiry or EI. And uh it’s a guided audio, like a guided visualization that will walk you through the steps of this. So, you have have a um a recording to handhold as you explore this more. You can find that on our website. Oftentimes when we first start to develop a relationship with the body, it can be uncomfortable. On the other side of being with those feelings in the body is peace and joy and bliss and wisdom and insight and intuition. So, if you can stick with the discomfort in the body, there is an amazing wealth of It’s like a gold mine of information that you’re walking around with. And I can vouch for the bliss that is in a body. Absolute bliss in the just the simplicity of our breath can become incredibly pleasurable or just sensing our toes. So, there’s joy and bliss on the other side of it.