Reclaiming Your Body: Listening to Its Wisdom

The Journey of Listening to Our Bodies

When was the last time you truly listened to your body? Not to manage it or fix it, but to hear what it was trying to tell you?

For many of us, that question stings. It's not that we haven't been paying attention to our bodies; we've been doing that our entire lives. However, we've often treated our bodies as problems to solve rather than allies to navigate this world. Sadly, many of us aren't the ones deciding what to do with what we discover.

The Messages We Receive

From a young age, we learn how much space to take up, how much hunger is appropriate, and how we should look. We absorb messages about how to dress, how long our hair should be, and what our bodies should look like. We perform wellness, appearing to thrive while quietly overriding signals that suggest otherwise. When those signals become too loud to ignore, we often receive a referral, a chart, or a brief consultation with a doctor who spends mere minutes with us. The diagnosis usually boils down to anxiety or a little too much weight- easily fixed with birth control, an SSRI or GLP-1.

The underlying message is clear: someone else knows your body better than you do.

The Programming We Inherit

Our programming comes from various sources: mothers, fathers, sisters, boyfriends, magazines, and medical waiting rooms. We are taught, both implicitly and explicitly, that our bodies are problems to be managed rather than sources of wisdom to be trusted. The outlier data point, the symptom that doesn't fit the study, or the knowing that doesn’t match the test results is often dismissed. We learn to brush off what we know and wait for permission to trust ourselves.

By the time many of us reach midlife, we have become virtuosos of self-override.

A Personal Experience

I first noticed this during my pregnancy. I felt something was off in my body, but my doctor didn't believe me. It wasn't until she measured my belly that she realized something was indeed wrong. This led to months of bed rest and postpartum depression, which was dismissed. I had been right every time, but I needed someone else to confirm it before I allowed myself to believe it. It felt like I was weathering a storm, accumulating a thousand small adjustments that weren't mine.

This recognition didn’t come in a single moment. It arrived in pieces over time, as truth often does when you’ve been trained to look away from it.

The Body as Archive and Compass

Understanding Interoception

Interoception is the art of listening to sensations from within. It’s how our body sends signals about its internal state through sensation. Research shows that interoception plays a central role in emotional regulation, decision-making, and overall well-being.

What stopped me in my tracks was the finding that women report more attention to interoceptive signals than men, yet are less accurate at perceiving them. We’ve always been paying attention. However, a lifetime of being told our experiences require external validation has created a gap between sensing and trusting that many of us don’t even realize exists.

The Role of Science

We love science, and we should. But it’s essential to recognize that science, as it stands, was not built with women as the baseline. When your experience is an outlier, or when your body tells you something the data doesn’t account for, you’ve been conditioned to trust the data over your own experience.

The body keeps the score, yes, but it also keeps an inventory of every longing you’ve filed away, every boundary you’ve overridden, and every truth you’ve quieted because no one else could confirm it. It hasn’t forgotten. It’s been waiting for you to listen.

What Psilocybin Does to the Noise

The Impact of Psilocybin

Psilocybin temporarily reduces activity in the default mode network, the part of the brain associated with self-referential thoughts and ego processing. This area absorbs a lifetime of instructions about who you’re supposed to be, how much space you’re allowed, and whose voice counts as authority.

Women I work with often describe this experience not as a revelation but as a recognition. It’s not “I never knew this,” but rather “DAMN, I always knew this.” It’s a grief that had no name until it finally did, a decision made long before the mind was ready to admit it. It feels like putting down something you didn’t realize you were carrying. The body finally gets to speak without deferring to someone else’s interpretation.

Research Findings

Research on psilocybin treatment shows that participants often describe expanded access to self through non-verbal and somatic responses during sessions—experiences that years of talk therapy and bodywork hadn’t reached. While talk therapy has its merits (and I can personally attest to its benefits), it often operates within the same system that learned to perform, qualify, and check its own experience against external approval. The body holds what got edited out.

Repossession, Not Recovery

The Language of Healing

Here, I want to be careful with language. What psilocybin work opens up isn’t healing in the traditional sense- like closing a wound or correcting a deficit. Instead, it’s more about repossession. It’s a reclaiming of a body that has been colonized by everyone else’s instructions, including the belief that others know better.

We are not broken; we are simply exhausted from the performance. We’re tired of being outliers in our own experiences.

The Integration Process

During the integration period following a journey, the work isn’t about analysis. It’s about continuing the conversation with a body that, perhaps for the first time, got to express something true without being immediately fact-checked. Effective integration involves somatic practices and creative expression—ways to stay in contact with what emerged and translate it into daily life. This isn’t just about capturing insights; it’s about teaching the body that this time, it’s allowed to keep talking.

The map was always there. You were just taught it needed a second opinion.

In this journey of self-discovery, we can finally learn to trust our bodies again. The wisdom is there; we just need to listen.